Beckett’s intertexts

There is a good deal of evidence of Samuel Beckett’s engagement with other texts, other writers, artists and philosophers, and with whole intellectual traditions such as philosophy, psychology, or mathematics (see Uhlmann 2013). Indeed, the nature of these relations, their extent and significance, has been the major area of critical engagement with Beckett’s works since the turn of the century. This upsurge in interest is not accidental, and has been the consequence of the fact that a large amount of primary source archival material related to Beckett has become available to scholars in this period. Various kinds of critical responses have been mobilized to begin to digest these new sources, which have offered genuinely new evidence as to what Beckett read and elements of his response to what he read. We find this in the ‘Philosophy notes’ and ‘Psychology notes’ for example (Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006) as well as in the annotations to his extant library (Van Hulle and Nixon 2013) and in the newly published correspondence (LSB I; LSB II), as well as what he saw in the visual arts and other forms, as detailed in the biographies (Bair 1990; Cronin 1996; Knowlson 1996), and the German diaries (Nixon 2011). So too, over an even longer period work has been and continues to be done on Beckett’s manuscripts, with a series of bilingual genetic editions begun by Charles Krance and being continued by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon in digital form, adding significantly to our knowledge of the genetic development of many of Beckett’s works, for example, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and How It Is (Beckett 2001; BDMP). It is very clear, then, that Beckett engages with a vast array of other texts within his own, yet many questions remain as to how Beckett uses these other texts. In this essay I touch upon some of these questions in considering aspects of the nature of Beckett’s intertextual method.