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Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde. Jaargang 2005 (2005)

Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde. Jaargang 2005

(2005)– [tijdschrift] Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse taal- en letterkunde–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Genetic, Electronic, and Critical: An Edition of Beckett's Last Works
Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp

A crucial aspect of genetic editing is the distinction between compositional (or genetic) variants and transmissional variants. Crossing out a word and replacing it by another one is such a self-evident element of the writing process that we tend to overlook the complexity of this act. With hindsight, each cancelled word seems to be a road not taken. We tend to forget that there was a moment when the author did take that road, but that this road turned out to be a dead end. In many cases the author had to make a U-turn, retrace his steps, and find an alternative route. In this respect Samuel Beckett's writing practice is remarkable in that he - paradoxically - seems to have needed, and even actively looked for, dead ends in the composition process in order to go on, not only on the level of the word, but also on the level of larger textual units. Consequently, it will be important to try and find an adequate way in a genetic edition to offer users the possibility to examine these dead ends. The solutions suggested in this essay are based on the prototype of an electronic genetic edition of Beckett's penultimate work, Stirrings Still / Soubresauts.

1. Genetic and electronic

The advantage of encoding the transcriptions of the manuscrips (e.g. in XML) is the resulting flexibility of the textual material. In the case of Stirrings Still, the dozens of manuscripts can be presented in at least six different ways:

1.The documents - most of which are kept at the Beckett Archive of the University of Reading - can be studied in the order of their catalogue numbers.
2.For a chronological approach it was necessary to rearrange this numbering. This is important because one of the greatest dangers of manuscript research is the neglect of passages that did not make it into the final version.

3.The rearrangement per language is necessary since Beckett often switched between French and English during the writing process; switching to another language was one of his means to find a way out of a dead end.
4.Since Beckett sometimes switched languages, a distinction has to be made between a version that was written directly in French and a French version that was translated from an originally English version, for Beckett already made translations during the writing process.
5.According to Almuth Grésillon a genetic edition in the true sense of the word presents the complete texts of all the documents in chronological order and ‘in their entirety’ or - to use le mot juste - ‘exhaustivement’.1 But evidently a considerable problem with editing prose fiction is not to overburden the users with a mass of texts.

 

The challenge is to find an adequate way to compare a particular passage in one version with the corresponding passage in another version. The question then is: what is a passage? What is the size of the unit an average reader wishes to compare? Is that a whole chapter, or just one sentence? Or a paragraph, as in the electronic Streuvels edition by Marcel De Smedt and Edward Vanhoutte? The problem is the ‘average reader’ does not exist. Because composition histories tend to be quite complicated every user has to find her own method to deal with the material. Every reader focuses on different things. So it may be useful to allow for different sizes of textual units to compare, for instance small, medium, large and extra large, i.e. the levels of the sentence, the paragraph, the section and the whole text. This is possible by means of a numbering system in the XML encoding. If one presents the texts in chronological order - as Grésillon suggests - this only allows for comparison of successive versions. The electronic format allows the user to separate two (not necessarily successive) versions of her choice from the chronological list and view them in parallel presentation.2

 

But the deeper the user enters into the manuscript labyrinth the greater the danger of getting lost. Therefore, it is possible to consult the scheme of the genesis or ‘genetic stemma’ at all times. In the case of Stirrings Still such a survey clearly shows for instance that the first phase of the genesis was a period of hesitation: Beckett did not know whether he was going to write his

text in French or in English. After a few tentative paragraphs, he wrote four French versions of a section that eventually did not make it into the published text, and later on he elaborated another section that was eventually aborted after four versions. It is important not only to visualize these dead ends schematically, but also to make the texts of these abortive sections available.

 

6.To this end a sixth approach enables the user to study these dead ends or abortive sections. After identifying the abortive sections in the avant-texte, the last version in each dead end can serve as the starting point for a more detailed analysis of the abortive section in question. Within this text a user can choose a paragraph or a sentence s/he is interested in and analyse its chronological development, or compare two versions in parallel presentation.

2. Genetic and critical

This is already a genetic edition, which presents all the texts of all the versions in a way that is more than mere ‘versioning’ since the users can adapt the size of the unit they wish to compare and examine. But it is possible to go further and turn it into a critical genetic edition, which implies that the editor indicates the variants explicitly.

 

For the transmissional variants, we can simply use the existing systems to make an apparatus, such as the parallel segmentation method suggested by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). But for the compositional or genetic variants the situation is more complex. Pierre-Marc de Biasi argues that in the case of modern manuscripts it is difficult to speak of ‘variants’; instead he uses alternative expressions such as ‘rewritings’ or ‘genetic operations,’ arguing that it is impossible to speak of ‘variants’ if there is no ‘invariant’.3 However valuable this argument is, the notion of ‘variants’ can still be employed to conceptualize a genetic edition. From a pragmatic perspective, terminological discussions are not always particularly constructive, since they tend to be ideological and political. It is understandable that genetic criticism - especially when it still had to define itself a few decades ago - made a special effort to distinguish itself from textual criticism. Now that it has become a mature discipline in its own right, it seems a good idea to further the dialogue with textual criticism, especially since textual ciriticism is

increasingly interested in the interpretive consequences of textual research. Unless genetic critics wish to work in splendid isolation it is important that they make the textual basis of their findings available to people. That implies editing. So, for pragmatic reasons it seems useful to employ the notion of ‘variants’ as an umbrella term - with a distinction between genetic and transmissional variants (and translation variants in the case of bilingual writings). Even if one does not wish to employ the term ‘variants’ to designate ‘rewritings,’ one can only visualize them by contrasting them with another version and highlighting those instances that ‘vary’. Because in genetic criticism there is not an absolute invariant, not a fixed point against which the ‘rewritings’ can be measured, my suggestion is to use a system of relative calibration.4 If there is no invariant to compare the variants with, it is always possible to compare a variant with another variant, on condition that the editor clearly indicates which variant he uses as a ‘temporary invariant’.

 

Every literary genesis is characterized by a dialectic of copied and new elements, identity and variance, replication and modification. To visualize this dialectic it seems important to indicate not just the isolated ‘variants’ (as in a traditional apparatus variorum) but to indicate these modifications in their context, i.e. leaving the structure of the whole sentence intact. Once the user can view all the successive versions of a sentence in vertical juxtaposition, the logic of the work in progress implies a natural interest in the comparison of a version with its predecessor. After all, the modifications that come to light in this retrospective collation, reflect the reasons why the author thought it necessary to make a new version in the first place. Except in the case of the first extant version, the previous version can always serve as ‘temporary invariant’ against which the genetic variants can be measured, even if the writing was eventually aborted and never published.

 

If the work did reach the stage of publication, readers may also be interested in another kind of genetic variants: the difference between a version and the base text. This teleological perspective requires a prospective collation.

 

To visualize the oscillation between the pro- and retrospective views I have marked the rewritings in the XML encoding in two directions by giving them a ‘type’ attribute: ‘retro’ for differences vis à vis the previous version and

‘pro’ for differences vis à vis the edited reading text. The code can be visualized in different ways; for instance the retrospective variants in italics, the prospective variants in bold. For bilingual works, the same system can be applied (e.g. using a type attribute ‘trans’) to indicate variants in the autotranslation.

3. Beckett's Textual ‘Nohow’

This system of relative calibration, comparing variants with variants within the avant-texte of the same work, suggests the possibility of its counterpart: comparing invariants within two (or more) different works. In his works Beckett often refers to his previous works by means of identical phrasings. In some cases this retrospective intratextuality seems to have been a way for Beckett to move on, harking back to a previous formulation in order to find the right words for a new work - a textual form of ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’. Thus, for instance, the first words of the first manuscript refer to a passage in L'Innommable (where the unnamable in his turn refers to his predecessor Malone, the title hero of Malone meurt): ‘Malone, lui, paraît et disparaît avec une exactitude de mécanique, toujours à la même distance de moi’5 - in Beckett's own translation: ‘always at the same remove.’6

 

‘Tout toujours à la même distance’ - these are the first words of the first manuscript of Stirrings Still (preserved at the Beckett archive of Reading University, MS 2933/1), written more than thirty years after L'Innommable. From the first moment onward, Beckett took advantage of deadlocks, which have determined the dynamics of the composition history to a significant extent.

 

Immediately after the first paragraph on the first document of the avant-texte, Beckett started translating it into English: ‘All always at the same remove’ and he continued writing in English for a short while. When he was at a deadlock, he changed to French again. He wrote four versions in French, and arrived at a deadlock again. The last sentence of the last version of this abortive section is ‘le temps n'était plus à tuer’ [‘time couldn't be killed anymore’]. Beckett then cancelled this sentence. He could not go on. Since he was not able to kill time in French, he harked back to continue in English again.

Beckett not only reached several of these deadlock situations in the writing process, they even become thematic in the text. For instance in the version that ends with the words: ‘... against a wall. So far.’ (MS 2935/3/2) The protagonist arrives at a wall and he cannot go on: ‘so far’ and not further. But ‘so far’ is quite ambiguous and simulaneously emphasizes the provisional character of the situation, as in the expression ‘so far so good.’ This ambiguous situation reflects Beckett's ambiguous attitude toward Modernity in general, criticizing in particular the autokinetic movement for the sake of greater movement that characterizes Modernity. As opposed to the ‘grand narrative’ of Progress, Beckett seems to be failing deliberately. His motto was: ‘Fail better.’7

 

Flaubert tried to find ‘le mot juste’; Beckett looked for ‘the missing word,’ which is the subject of the last section of Stirrings Still. He knew that he would never find it, and yet he continued his quest. After the publication of Stirrings Still, in order to continue, he harked back again to two missing words, two words in the early versions of Stirrings Still that had not made it into the published text. The two words are: ‘comment dire’ (MS 2933/1). With these two words Beckett summarized his whole career, which can be described with Beckett's own words as an attempt to eff the ineffable,8 searching the limits of what can be said. This search becomes the theme of Beckett's last text.

 

In Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the protagonist ‘shrank always from the mot juste.’9 This first novel was written in the early 1930s. More than half a century later, in 1988, Beckett called his last text Comment dire - or in his own English translation: What Is the Word. At first sight the text seems to be a poem, opening as follows:

 
folie -
 
folie que de -
 
que de -
 
comment dire -
 
folie que de ce -
 
depuis -
 
folie depuis ce -
 
[...]10

But the text can also be read as a failed attempt to write one single sentence, a succession of variants, constantly interrupted by the words ‘what is the word’ whenever the author arrives at a dead end in the composition process. In its most completed form the sentence reads as follows: ‘folie vu tout ce ceci-ci que de vouloir croire entrevoir loin là là-bas à peine’ - in Beckett's own translation: ‘folly seeing all this this here for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there’ - and then the attempt at finishing the sentence is aborted. The poem ends with the words ‘comment dire.’ These words recur seven times thoughout the poem, not counting the title and the final repetition of the penultimate ‘comment dire’. If each moment when the phrase ‘comment dire’ recurs can be regarded as a temporary deadlock, the text (whose genesis is its subject) can be divided into seven sections. In the first section, the author is certain of only one word, ‘folie’, but he does not find the right word to express what it is that he designates as a ‘folly’.

 
1
 
folie -
 
folie que de -
 
comment dire -

In the second section the words ‘que de’ are successively replaced by the alternative variants ‘depuis,’ ‘donné,’ and finally ‘vu.’

 
2
 
folie que de ce -
 
[...]
 
folie vu ce -
 
comment dire -

The variant ‘vu’ remains relatively stable, but then the problem is: how to describe what he is seeing. In the third section this ‘ce’ is elaborated (in three steps: ‘ce ceci,’ ‘ce ceci-ci,’ ‘tout ce ceci-ci’) without becoming more specific.

 
3
 
folie vu ce ceci -
 
[...]
 
folie vu tout ce ceci-ci que de -
 
comment dire -

While ‘seeing all this this here’ remains rather vague, it is left aside and the attention is focused again on what it is that the author denotes as a folly. The

first variant ‘voir’ (‘to see’) is replaced and extended to ‘vouloir croire entrevoir’:

 
4
 
folie que de voir -
 
[...]
 
folie que de vouloir croire entrevoir quoi -
 
comment dire -

Since this ‘need to seem to glimpse’ [Beckett's own translation] is transitive, the author tries to find a direct object. Because he does not immediately find this direct object, he starts with the possibly easier question where:

 
5     et où -
 
folie que de vouloir croire entrevoir quoi où -
 
comment dire -

In the next section, the demonstrative suggestion ‘là’ (‘there’) is further elaborated, without however becoming any clearer (‘afaint afar away over there’). The elaboration has only postponed the search for the direct object:

 
6
 
folie que de vouloir croire entrevoir là -
 
[...]
 
folie que de vouloir croire entrevoir loin là là-bas à peine quoi -
 
comment dire -

In the last section the other vague description (‘seeing all this this here’) is reintroduced, further delaying the formulation of the direct object:

 
7
 
folie vu tout ce ceci-ci que de voir quoi -
 
[...]
 
folie que de vouloir croire entrevoir loin là là-bas à peine quoi -
 
folie que d'y vouloir croire entrevoir quoi -
 
comment dire -
 
 
 
comment dire

This last section is a sort of recapitulation of the writing process so far. But whereas the penultimate line ‘comment dire -’ still has the potential meaning of ‘so far so good,’ the final repetition of the phrase (the only line in the poem that is not followed by a dash) only seems to express the more despe-

rate meaning ‘so far and not further.’ The vague spatial orientation ‘afaint afar away over there’ contrasts sharply with the here and now of the premature ending, marked by the explicit mention of the date (‘29.10.88’) at the end of the text.

 

In this last text by Samuel Beckett, the product presents itself as production, showing how crucial the notion of variants can be in the interpretation of literary texts. For too many decades the notion of variants has been seen as an exclusivity of textual criticism and scholarly editing, associated with boring nitpicking about commas and full stops. No matter how one wishes to call them, the rewritings, compositional modifications or genetic variants are an integral part of the writing. Hence this plea for more cooperation between genetic criticism, humanities computing and textual scholarship, in order to find adequate solutions for the genetic, electronic, and critical representation of textual modifications in modern manuscripts.


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