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Introduction 1 . Beckett's Short Text “La Falaise” Is Included Without Title

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Introduction 1 . Beckett's Short Text “La Falaise” Is Included Without Title Notes Introduction 1. Beckett’s short text “La Falaise” is included without title, while Levinas contributed “Nom d’un chien ou le droit naturel” to the 1975 volume. The genre of Levinas’s text is difficult to establish, because it draws on biblical commentary, memoir, parable, philosophy, and short story. It meditates on Exodus 22:31 and on Levinas’s experiences as a prisoner of war, when only the joy of a stray dog—referred to as Bobby—who “would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned [from work], jumping up and down and barking in delight” (Difficult Freedom 153) spoke of a recognition of the Jewish prisoners’ humanity. For Bobby “there was no doubt that we were men” (153), and so he is designated “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to univer- salize maxims and drives” (153). There is an uncomfortable humor to this that is not alien to the temper of Beckett’s work, although its rela- tion to van Velde is almost as oblique as that of Beckett’s piece. Other contributors to the book include Pierre Alechinsky, Maurice Blanchot, Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Butor, Edmond Jab è s, Charles Juliet, and Jean Starobinski. Juliet’s “Retour” sees him describe van Velde as “ Frè re de Beckett, de Molloy ” (93) (“brother of Beckett, of Molloy”). 2 . Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow” in The Levinas Reader , edited by Se á n Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 130. Hereafter all essays from this volume are cited parenthetically in the body of the text as LR . 3 . There are non-Levinasian alternatives that nonetheless take part in this ethical turn, particularly J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading . Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature is clearly shaped by Levinas’s writing but develops an idea of responsibility for one’s reading that is at an important remove from Levinasian ethics, not least in its emphasis of the text’s singularity, which is a counterpoint to the singularity of Levinas’s human other. 168 ● Notes 4 . Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 ), 30. 5 . R i c h a r d R o r t y , Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982 ), 217. 6. Caroline Van Eck, James McAllister, and Ren é e Van De Vall (eds.), The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ), 1. 7 . Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990 ), 12. 8 . Ibid., 13. 9 . Ibid., 18. 10 . This would, I think, be disputed by numerous readers of Levinas. Not least among these, I suspect, would be Michael Morgan, whose revela- tory Discovering Levinas poses extensive dialogues with contemporary analytic philosophers as well as the more usual continental field. While instructive, the expatriation of Levinas to the rhetorical climes inhab- ited by Davidson, McDowell, Taylor, and others, loses, for this reader, an essential quality of Levinas’s thought. 11 . Inaccurately but with great panache she calls Blanchot’s “the sole autho- rized commentary” on Beckett in France. Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, translated by Gregory Elliot, introduced by Terry Eagleton (London: Verso, 2006 ), 11. 1 2 . C a r l a L o c a t e l l i , Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990 ), 230. 13 . Ewa Plonoswska Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction or Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1996 ), 179. 1 4 . L a u r a S a l i s b u r y , Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012 ), 34. 15 . Ibid., 3. For instance, Salisbury’s descriptions of a “modality of the tremor” (151), an involuntary shake that spreads uncertainty in Beckett’s later works, appear close to the structures of palinodic writing that I outline in The Unnamable and Footfalls . 16 . One need only consider Levinas’s literary tastes to see that earnestness is the rule and humor the exception. What he enjoys and finds of merit in Proust, Celan, Dostoyevsky, Blanchot, is always serious. 17 . Levinas was certainly not without a sense of humor, however. In addi- tion to the various charming photographs showing the philosopher laughing, Simon Critchley in his On Humour ( 2002 ) relates several of his jokes, including a play on words when offered a second cup of tea. Levinas refused on religious grounds: “Je suis mono-thé -iste ” (Critchley Notes ● 169 On Humour 107). This should make clear that Levinas’s value lies in the theory rather than the practice of comedy. 18 . See, in particular, Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 ); Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas ( 1992 ); Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996 ); Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 ); Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997 ), and Andrew Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (London: Routledge, 1999 ). 1 9 . Q u o t e d i n T y r u s M i l l e r , Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 ), 10–11. An interesting parallel can be made to Theodor Adorno who, in his essay on Beckett, writes that “parody means the use of forms in the era of their impossibility” (278). Adorno formulation would thus compress postmodernism, with its characteristic love of parody, into late modernism, quite contrary to Charles Jencks’s pic- ture of late modernism and postmodernism as parallel responses to high modernism. 2 0 . I b i d . , 1 0 . 2 1 . I b i d . , 8 . 22 . Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986 ), 16. 2 3 . E d m u n d H u s s e r l , M é ditations Carté siennes. Introduction à la phenom- enologie, translated by Emmanuel Levinas and Gabrielle Pfeiffer (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931 ). The invaluable Levinas Online Bibliography explains that Levinas translated the last 80 pages of the (136 page) book, “most notably the fourth and fifth meditation[s].” 2 4 . S e e Levinas Online Bibliography for further details. 25 . Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman (eds.), Beckett and Phenomenology (London: Continuum, 2009 ), 49. 2 6 . E m m a n u e l L e v i n a s , Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 140. 2 7 . S a m u e l B e c k e t t , The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume I: 1929–1940 , edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Subsequent references are cited par- enthetically in the body of the text as Letters I . 28. There is no mention of reading Husserl in the letters from the early 1930s, and Matthew Feldman’s survey of Beckett’s dealings with phe- nomenology quotes notes taken on secondary sources only (Maude and Feldman 21–2). 170 ● Notes 29 . James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996 ), 152. 3 0 . I b i d . , 1 5 3 . 3 1 . I b i d . , 1 5 3 . 3 2 . S a l o m o n M a l k a , Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy, Foreword by Phillipe Nemo, Translated by Michael Kigel and Sonja M. Embree (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 2006 ), 179. 3 3 . D e r r i d a ’ s e s s a y i s t r a n s l a t e d a s “Ousia and Gramm ē : A Note on a Note from Being and Time ,” which is included in Margins of Philosophy. 34 . Malka, 180. The original reads “Pour Emmanuel Levinas, avec qui, depuis quarante ans, je suis li é d’une amiti é qui m’est plus proche que moi-m ê me : en rapport d’invisibilit é avec le juda ï sme” (Char 103). 3 5 . M a l k a , 1 7 9 . 36 . Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996 ), 87. 37 . Quoted in Malka, 40. 3 8 . J a c q u e s D e r r i d a , Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas , Translated by Pascale- Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 ), 3, 5. 3 9 . S i m o n C r i t c h l e y , The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas , 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999 ), 3. 4 0 . Q u o t e d i n L a w r e n c e E . H a r v e y , Samuel Beckett Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970 ), 76. 4 1 . K n o w l s o n , 2 4 4 . 42 . Maude and Feldman, 56. 4 3 . I b i d . , 5 6 . 1 Writing against Art 1 . There are numerous accounts of the impact of conquest and liberation on the arts in France. Two recent volumes that address a range of disci- plines are Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) and Alan Riding, And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2001 ).
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