ABSTRACT
The reception of Samuel Beckett's texts has from the start been an international business. During his lifetime, Beckett's peculiar status as an Irish writer who lived most of his adult life in France, writing fiction and plays in both English and French, translated into dozens of languages, and staged in dozens of countries, marked him out as a thoroughly international writer. Georges Bataille's essay, 'Le Silence de Molloy', published in French in 1951, very shortly after Beckett's novel appeared, was translated into English only in 1979. The first of the 'two distinct historical trends' in German Beckett criticism isolated by Breuer and Huber is that the 1950s and 1960s were its liveliest years. French critical responses to Beckett might all, suggests Bruno Clement, be viewed as emerging from the 'empire mysterieux' established by those early essays by Bataille and Blanchot. Psychoanalytic studies are a strong area of Beckett criticism in France.
