Introduction

INTRODUCTION When deciding on the theme of “Beckett Between” in September 2009 for the Beckett International Conference to be held at the École Nor- male Supérieure (ENS), Paris, I hoped I had found, as Beckett puts it in The Unnamable, “a principle of change pregnant with possibilities” (334), one that would attract a range of Anglophone and Francophone scholars researching in different domains, at different stages in their careers. ‘Between’ suggests change, a transition between forms, lan- guages, media and countries. It recalls Beckett’s move from Dublin to Paris, to work as lecteur at the ENS, the time spent in the courtyard of the Irish College (site of the present Centre Culturel Irlandais), and his later more permanent transition to France and into the French language. ‘Between’ is not intended to be read as a binary, but rather as motion, a flash of illumination, a momentary state of grace. Yet it can also connote stasis, a kind of limbo where the body hovers between states, frozen by crippling possibilities. ‘Between’ is the space created by the almost imperceptible pause at the edge of an indrawn breath, as in Footfalls, or a trio of suspension points which lead to a “sudden flash” in Not I (381). ‘Between,’ as the range of articles in this journal testifies, represents a pregnancy of possibilities. Flashes of light and moments of illumination were a running theme over the weekend of the conference. The windows in the Salle Beckett at the ENS are high, with panes that rattle in their wooden frames, and there is something in the quality of the light that makes teaching there a pleasure. In the next room, during the Beckett Be- tween International Conference from 20-21 February 2010, we were delighted to welcome the Irish Ambassador to Paris, Mr. Paul Kavanagh, who gave an opening welcome before the keynote speech by Dr. Phyllis Gaffney on “Poétique de l’entre-deux/entre deux poé- tiques: Mercier et/and Camier.” The four sessions that followed cov- ered topics including hunger, home, and the architectural ‘between,’ including a paper by Rodney Sharkey which helped to explain the pe- culiarly Beckettian logistics of finding the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin. Apparently one should ideally be lost to find it, thanks to a one-way traffic system left will eventually take you right, and the best approach to take is “try again, fail better.” Choral readings of Beckett’s text, falling between spoken language and music, were 236 Introduction given, and genetic readings of Beckett’s texts from Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle revealed textual scars beneath the Beckettian skin. Light can be dying or even lost in Beckett, as in the near- perpetual twilight of Footfalls, or the blindness of Hamm in Fin de partie. Light was lost in the most practical sense after the evening production of First Love by the Gare Saint Lazare Players. Having been generously lent projectors by the Centre Culturel Irlandais with my as-yet-unborn first born as collateral, one of the lights went miss- ing. As I ran through the darkened hallways of the ENS, panic speed- ing my pulse and the metallic edge of fear on my tongue, I should perhaps have contemplated the very Beckettian nature of my predica- ment, before an angelic voice from below called up that the light had been found. A suffusion of light, set off by the proportions of the surrounding buildings and the warm tones of the white walls and worn grey stone, is one of the first things the visitor remarks on when entering the courtyard of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. We were fortunate not only to be given the opportunity to contemplate this light, but to hold our Sunday morning sessions there, with discussions on the Van Velde brothers, intermedial strategies and Beckett in Buenos Aires. We also inaugurated the first Beckett Brunch (it turns out that the only thing better than Beckett on a Sunday morning is Beckett and vien- noiserie on a Sunday morning). The paintings of Bram Van Velde, with their ghostly grey doors ajar, became a recurrent theme of the morning. The brunch discussion, led by John Wall and illustrated through the structural properties of a croissant, flowed in a series of tangents and eddies through the scholarly and the commonplace, in doors and out of windows, from light to architecture to the fundamen- tal notion of ‘ajar.’ There was something in the free exchange of ideas, without concern for intellectual copyright, which reminded me of the phrase le courant qui passe, a series of electrical impulses passing between scholars and lovers of Beckett, uniting them temporarily. The disparate articles featured in this journal offer another kind of temporary unity, then. James William’s paper on punctuation gives physical presence, breath and feet to these textual marks and absences on the page, arguing that ‘between’ can be seen as movement around these unconsidered spaces. Alys Moody’s article reminds us that while it can be tempting to uncover the bare bones of Beckett’s literary con- structions by attributing tropes such as hunger to a particular historical context, ‘between’ can also be a suspension between countries, or an abstraction of being. In his genetic analysis of the manuscript versions .

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