diss reading notes, the boring kind
I hope this is a worthy adversary, and not just a waste of time. Some Anglophone Beckett criticism of late announces a new departure, and they all reference Bruno Clement's rhetorical reading of Beckett. Though mainly they reference a single page from the end of the book, not this one I quote from below, the page where he says the rhetorical figure that explains everything about Beckett is epanorthosis. The Anglophones explain that "ortho" means correction, the figure is a statement followed by its correction(s), and this is what the Clement followers focus on, the proposition and its negation: "J’ai l’air de parler, ce n’est pas moi, de moi, ce n’est pas de moi."
I think I will mainly tangle with them, the English critics, rather than Clement. But this is Clement:
Qui prétend commenter cette œuvre [la Trilogie de Samuel Beckett] court le risque, auquel il a peu de chance d'échapper, de prendre, à son insu, la suite de la parole qui, à la fin de chaque livre, se résout en elle-même et cesse. Il fait sien, malgré lui, le désir forcené du narrateur qu'il connait depuis si longtemps de ne pas se taire; il cède sans y prendre garde à la tentation de dire d'une mille et second manière ce qui l'a été déjà de mille et une, précisant bien, en toute humilité (mais sans doute avec l'orgueil secret d'avoir à tenir le même propos que le texte qu'il aime), qu'il ne peut qu'échouer là où le sujet qu'il relaie prétend n'avoir pas réussi. Les quelque “pantins” que le narrateur de L'Innommable se propose de forger [… shoot, can’t find the verb here to properly cut this…] une autre voix dont il a doué un personnage nouveau, tout aussi imaginaire que les autres, et qu'il manouvre avec autant de facilite: le critique.
-Bruno Clément, L’Œuvre sans qualités, Rhetorique de Samuel Beckett.
I don’t like this at all. He seems like a jerk. But it's the same argument Viart made about Volodine--that the autotheorizing text is a trap for the critic--and I might want to return to this problem. Because I do run into this, esp commenting on Volodine, and I had to admit it in the recent book review. Especially that there “orgueil secret d'avoir à tenir le même propos que le texte qu'il aime.” Although that is the rub, I do love it. It's the difference between whether you view the "rhapsodic" as Kant did--the "random" in our sense of the word, that which is not deduced from a table of categories--or as one spoke of the rhapsode, who repeats/recites/quotes the song. "The critic says the same thing as Beckett/Volodine!" Clement and Viart & the rest say. But that's just it, how one repeats.
*
eh. I'm really just looking for a puppet of my own, a critic who will put too much weight on reflection, mirrors, metafiction, mise en abyme.
*
"or stay here with me, he* might do that, and so be a like for me [ça me ferait un semblable: that would make a like for me, that would make a like of me], that would be lovely, my first like, that would be epoch-making, to know I had a like [me savoir un semblable: “to know myself a semblable”], a congener, he wouldn’t have to be like me, he couldn’t but be like me [il n’aurait pas besoin de me ressembler, il me ressembler, forcément]"
*"he" is the representative the "they" might send to roust the narrator out.
"he’d disappear [the semblable, the like], he’d know nothing either, there we’d be the two of us [having disappeared, they would both be there], unbeknown to ourselves, unbeknown to each other [chacun à son insu, à l’insu l’un de l’autre]"