Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (review)

Abstract

How does one write a review about a book which asserts the will to fail as the essence of aesthetic endeavor? How does one write a review about a critical method built, in part, from an aesthetic approach found in a novelist and playwright, Beckett? Would succeeding at this endeavor to express the meaning of the book fail to adequately address the radical alternative to literary and film scholarship demonstrated by Bersani and Dutoit? What if this alternative mode of scholarship challenged critics to adopt a "participatory mobility?" How would a review of this method demonstrate and explain "a joyful self-dismissal giving birth to a new kind of power," the power of the mobile participation of readers? What is this new kind of power of participation which seeps from the failure to express? Why have admirers "universally ignored" those crucial failures? Has Bersani once again opened new ground in literary studies by noticing a startling absence in the critical work on a particular author? Are the arts of impoverishment linked to the arts of redemption or as a corrective to the earlier work on Joyce? How does Beckettian criticism mesh with Bersani's psychoanalytic studies, as exemplified in his "Is The Rectum A Grave?" in the October special issue "Aids Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism," where he writes, for example, patriarchy is "not primarily the denial of power to women, but above all the denial of powerlessness in both men and women?" [End Page 441] How could powerlessness become a foundation for literary theory and criticism? If the book builds a method of scholarship from Beckett's efforts to become inexpressive, devoid of meaning, and "to fall permanently into silence," then how can his aesthetic works offer a critical method? Is this review strangely silent when asked for an answer, a judgment, a solution to the question? Is this review, like Bersani and Dutoit's essay, more sensitive to the art of impoverishment than most critics and admirers of Beckett's work? Has this reviewer been too seduced by the logic of their argument, and attempted to respond adequately to the task rather than appropriately for the given form with "suicidal narcissism" as a critical, if also Dionysian, method?