Theatre History Studies

The works of Samuel Beckett are quite well-studied within the dramatic canon. And yet, it seems that these writings never cease to offer exciting revelations for those who choose to analyze them. The collection Beckett Beyond the Normal, edited by Seán Kennedy, approaches Beckett's work from new angles: queer theory, disability theory, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics. The volume is a fascinating look at aspects of Beckett's written works not fully theorized elsewhere, pushing the discussion of Beckett into heretofore unexplored terrain. Kennedy's claim of Beckett's writing is one of redemption, though he continues, "Beckett did not hope to redeem the world" but rather "he did hope to redeem himself: from his morbidity, from its symptoms, from the 'pain and monstrosity and incapacitation' it caused him" (4). This is the anchoring concept for the essays collected within the volume. This book is dense and perhaps not a starter text on Beckett. Rather, it is a valuable volume for those already familiar with Beckett's contributions and hoping for a new perspective. The explorations presented here do consider elements such as historical context or narrative structure, but they do so through compelling lenses that offer fascinating approaches to Beckett's writings.

Each of the chapters within the volume considers a different work within Beckett's oeuvre, with all three of his major plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days) covered. The individual essays read like close textual analyses of the works through a very particular theoretical lens, meant to elucidate an unexplored aspect of a character's disability, psyche, or desire, as well as to put the work in conversation with new aspects of historical context related to that characterization. Many of the chapters engage an already theorized position on the Beckett work at hand but reconsider it by bringing to light new evidence and/or applying a new theoretical framework. Thus, the volume offers profound moments of pause when considering the accepted interpretations of Beckett's plays already in circulation.

For example, Hannah Simpson's remarks on Waiting for Godot, which claim it as a play about suffering, may not be new, but the ways in which the author implicates the audience as "unsympathetic" to the character's pain (80), along with the revelation of "the play's vision of human nature as, at best, only precariously compassionate" (88), open up the work as not only an esoteric study of the abstract concept of the existential crisis but also an exploration of the degree to which we are each to blame for one another's isolation within a cruel world, to riff on Martin Esslin. The studies of Beckett's other two major plays are similarly [End Page 169] eye-opening: James Brophy uses a queer lens to problematize the representation of love in Endgame "as a force that persists parallel to its own languor," "driv[ing] neurotic impulses in both the play's central characters" (92), while Nic Barilar uses the concept of "queer time" to reconsider Winnie's situation in Happy Days: a futile attempt to take control over the passage of time through her daily activities. Some analysis is familiar, but the framework is original.

The chapters on Beckett's narrative works also reconsider our preconceived notions about his characters and their meanings. Joseph Valente's article on Murphy considers the "absence" of autism within the work, as a challenge to Ato Quayson's study of the novel as presenting an "'autistic dynamic'" (18), while William Davies expands our understanding of Watt as a novel meant to encapsulate Beckett's experiences during World War II while simultaneously "enacting a critique of realist narrative fiction developed at Trinity College over a decade earlier" (34). In his analysis of The Unnamable, Byron Heffer "argue[s] that his incorporation of deformity contests the biopolitical paradigm in which aesthetic form gives value to life" as a counterpoint to the Nazi emphasis on "classical form" in order to perfect the Aryan race (47...