ABSTRACT
In David Lodge’s Small World, that ‘Pooh Perplex’ of postmodernist critical theory, Professor Arthur Kingfisher is revitalized by Persse’s question, ‘What do you do if everybody agrees with you?’ Professor Kingfisher, adept in these matters, proceeds to an authoritative gloss: ‘You imply, of course, that what matters in the field of critical practice is not truth but difference.’ Beckett studies, despite the phenomenal growth over the last quarter century or so, have only just begun to articulate clearly and fully the fundamental ‘differences’ with which they are engaged. During this period of great controversy in literary theorizing, Beckett is, strangely enough, not at the centre of any methodological debates. Instead the corpus of Beckett criticism shows Beckett, all too often in predictable and rather pedestrian ways, being assimilated to the fashionable terminology of the postmodernist critical vocabulary. This has, undeniably, resulted in some major achievements, but nearly all of these studies have dealt with only one aspect of Beckett’s writing, that which is congruent with the prevalent modes and techniques of postmodernism, all of which share, in varying degrees, an aestheticism that tends to be depoliticized and divorced from referential values. Carla Locatelli’s Unwording the World is a revolutionary and seminal contribution to Beckett criticism, arguing in a rigorously philosophical and methodological manner how ‘Beckett’s unwording probes into issues of the cultural encoding of meaning, not only to denounce the conventions of literary discourse, but to reveal the epistemological function of linguistic representation, and the intrinsic hermeneutic quality of our being’ (p. x). Locatelli thus focuses upon the ‘successful realization’ of the constructive aspects of the Beckettian enterprise, those aspects which markedly cut against the grain of the negatives of postmodernist theorizing which have constituted the orthodox rhetoric of Beckett criticism.
