Dialogue and its failure underpin Samuel Beckett’s (1906–1989) oeuvre not only as a narrative or as a dramatic structure, but also as an epistemological approach. In the Irish artist’s practice, verbal dialogue is often reworked to generate non-anthropocentric interactions. Amongst the agents that are put into conversation, one can think of a number of everyday-life objects, technological devices, dust or even mud. It is in the radio plays that Beckett achieved intermedial dialogue to the most powerful effect with Words and Music (1961) and Cascando (1962). The experimenters – respectively Croak and Opener – attempt to tease out a theme or to tell a story by regulating dialogue between two media: words (in Words and Music) / voice (in Cascando) and music (in the two plays). In both cases, the result is not the one anticipated by the experimenters, whose control is challenged by the agency of the non-human characters. The dialogue orchestrated by James Little between The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas and the corresponding archival documents on the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is a well-mastered and productive one, but beware: both the book and the original manuscripts may take you off the prescribed track.

Over the past eleven years, the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) [https://www.beckettarchive.org/] — led by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon – has transformed the approach to Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre by publishing digitised facsimiles of the manuscripts that led to the publication of texts both in English and in French. The digital archive is extended by an array of features that facilitate the reading of the manuscripts and their comparison. This contribution has been so potent that it has been acknowledged as the genetic turn in Beckett studies, influencing the ways in which Beckett’s texts are received, researched and reused.[1] In 2018, the BDMP was awarded the eleventh Modern Language Association of America (MLA) Prize for a Bibliography, Archive, or Digital Project, thereby gaining formal recognition for its transformative impact beyond Beckett studies as a digital practice that: tackles the problem of accessibility to archival material, challenges the ontological status of text itself as fixed, and augments the epistemology of literary studies.

James Little’s The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas represents a landmark in the history of the BDMP, for it is their tenth genetic edition. While it follows The Making of series’ traditions, it also innovates by ambitiously reconstructing the genesis of three texts in the same volume: other series monographs focus solely on a single text, with the exception of Dirk Van Hulle’s The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and Comment dire / what is the word (2016) – which examines the genesis of Beckett’s penultimate text and his last poem – and Olga Beloborodova’s The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play / Comédie and Film (2019) – which studies the genesis of the theatre and television plays and illustrates best how Beckett had become a multimedial artist. When working with Not I (1973) and Footfalls (1976), critics and artists alike have often included Rockaby (1982) in the grouping of texts or performances. Little’s genetic edition hence reconfigures the triad by leaving out Rockaby and instead including That Time (1976). While the former association has proven useful to explore gender, embodiment and space, Little’s innovative combination spotlights Beckett’s cognition-based dramaturgy in this cluster of plays. The volume then can be read in line with Dirk Van Hulle’s The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière Bande (2017), which unveils how Beckett’s thinking of the mind informed the composition of this poignant dramatic piece staging “the [decaying] workings of a person’s mind” [Van Hulle 2015, 21].

The genesis of each text is presented in a separate section of the book, themselves divided into two sub-sections:

This review will highlight the main discoveries and achievements of each section without following their internal structure.

The general introduction locates Beckett’s artistic creation of the three plays within the scope of his life-long interest in cognition, mind theory, psychology, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Little argues that Beckett’s research into, and critical engagement with, those areas not only nourished his aesthetic, but also informed his thinking of the “breakdown between subject and object” [Little 2021, 28], as Beckett initially formulated it in the 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry.” The author therefore delineates his own intervention in Beckett Studies as bridge-building between Beckett’s early philosophical and aesthetic statement and his late dramaturgical practice in the triad Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas. A short case study of Footfalls operates as an effective demonstration of the value of genetic criticism to uncover Beckett’s staging of the “breakdown” through psychological images, such as May’s enactive mind in this case.

Drawing on past research around Beckett’s creative process and by analogy with archaeological discoveries that led to the reframing of the mind as an interactive process between the subject, their environment and objects populating it, Little simultaneously demonstrates how the study of manuscripts – and therefore of the creative process – bears witness to Beckett’s own enactive mind. In other words, Beckett’s texts must be understood as the product of a multi-layered process that is embodied and situated. This point is transformative for practice, since the performance of these texts then needs to function as a synaptic space between Beckett’s creative spaces (that of when he created the play and that for which he created the play) and the audiences’ own environments.

In a surprising move towards performance theory and theatre history, Little proceeds to argue that this effect can only be achieved in Cartesian Theatres with a proscenium arch framing the action (aesthetic object) and separating it from the observing spectator (subject), such as the Royal Court Theatre in London, where Beckett directed the three plays. This separation is challenged in performance, Little explains, by the aesthetic of the stage image that emerges out of darkness. The restrained use of light generates metaphysical uncertainty as to the material conditions of the agent onstage and consequently epistemological uncertainty for the spectator. Little contends that it is in the planned failure to seize the onstage mind that the breakdown between subject and object occurs.

As the genetic map of Not I / Pas moi clearly shows, the French and English published editions are the top layers of a stratified maturation process that compares to that of Endgame / Fin de partie, due to the nature of its avant-texte, split between texts written before Not I (which are not versions of the play, but experiments that paved the way to Not I) and those written towards Not I (as versions of play). The first English manuscript that qualifies as avant-texte towards Not I is dated from March 1972, and the last English typescript was produced in January 1973. That text was translated into French between 1973 and 1974. However, some of the dramaturgical and thematic ideas underpinning the play emerged as early as 1963 with “J. M. Mime” and the “Kilcool” drafts, and others four years later in the “Petit Odéon” fragments written between April 1967 and April 1968. Little’s narrative of the genesis of Not I / Pas moi effectively segregates the study of those abandoned works from that of the versions and drafts of Not I, highlighting their connection – particularly that of “Kilcool” – to the oeuvre as a whole rather than to Not I alone. Little’s vision, which appears as a slight stretch, still shows that those abandoned texts function as experiments both fertilised by the previous works and fertilising the ones to follow. In other words, the rhizomatic structure of Beckett’s oeuvre is dynamically mapped out by Little’s genetic criticism of “Kilcool” and the “Petit Odéon” fragments.

Conversely, Little’s analysis of the four “Kilcool” drafts and the ten “Petit Odéon” fragments sheds more light on Beckett’s composition process, informed by his readings, his other artistic activities (rehearsals, directing, translation, etc.), his creative engagement with other media and genres (mostly film, mime, and prose in those instances), his collaborations with particular theatre practitioners (such as Alan Schneider, Patrick Magee, Jocelyn Herbert, Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault amongst others) and theatre spaces (notably the Petit Odéon in Paris). The “vast stretch of time” [Beckett 2012] and colossal range of materials covered by Little in this prologue-like subsection is indicative of the depth and breadth of the volume as a whole, and the scholarship presented under the heading “Before Not I / Pas moi” creates an authoritative timeline of those abandoned works, situating them with outstanding precision as nodes on Beckett’s creative map.

The focus on the subject/object breakdown recedes in the analysis of the “Kilcool” drafts, where Little excavates as many thematic and structural connections as possible between this abandoned piece and Not I, That Time, Footfalls and beyond. Nevertheless, in this experimental series of drafts, the first one stands out, for it shows that Beckett’s idea of a lit, speaking woman’s face was always designed for the Cartesian Theatre with the frame of the proscenium arch. Little does not lose sight of his focus, and the breakdown is more prominent in the analysis of the “Petit Odéon” fragments, where he also underscores Beckett’s creative and critical use of medical history.

Little’s analysis of the geneses of Not I and Pas moi sheds light on versions and drafts of the texts as interfaces between the author’s mind, Mouth’s mind, the Auditor’s mind, Billie Whitelaw’s mind and the spectators’ minds. He seizes every opportunity to sketch out Beckett’s creative process, whether it is via the layout of text on the page, the chronology of ideas and textual edits or their interaction with his correspondence. While the playwright himself questioned his own abilities as a theatre practitioner, Little demonstrates that by the time Beckett wrote Not I, the stage image and the script were profoundly shaped by his experience of being physically in the theatre auditorium and of rehearsing with actors, as well as by his personal engagement with the visual arts. Little’s scholarship contributes to establishing the centrality of embodied cognition in Beckett’s drama and its subsequent impact on twentieth-century theatre: with Not I, the breakdown between subject and object is not to be witnessed or understood; it is to be felt.

At the beginning of the “Genesis” subsection, the image of the synopsis of Not I, taken from the eighth English typescript, illustrates the structure that Beckett had in mind for the play – so to speak – and the omnipresence of cognition at thematic and structural levels. Little adopts Beckett’s outline as a guide for his own archaeological journey through the English drafts of Not I. The strategy proves efficient to dig through most of the main furrows opened by Beckett and to unearth the underlying systems on, and against which, the cognitive environment of the play is built from Otto Rank and Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud and Max Nordeau, from Gestalt psychology and behaviourist theories to the significance of William James’ “big blooming buzzing confusion” [James, quoted in Little 2021, 168]. Navigating the digitised manuscripts with this section of the book is a rich experience, but the multiplicity of themes and the wide range of perspectives, theories, and intertextual links marshalled by Little in blocks built by Beckett for narrative and rehearsal purposes pulls the reader in many directions, which may result in temporary cognitive overload.

As oxymoronic as the proposition may be, darkness then appears as an illuminating path to follow for a steady journey through the making of Not I / Pas moi. Working from the Éditions de Minuit’s 2014 publication of Pour finir encore et autres foirades, Little aptly defines darkness as a Beckettian topos of memory and imagination, but also as a mechanistic cognitive space. He traces the creation of Mouth’s automatic mind in the darkness of the stage by contrast with the evolving role of the light as an inquisitor reminiscent of the spotlight in Play. By focusing on Beckett’s addition of the verb flash in the second English typescript onwards – to express the mode of appearance of Mouth’s thoughts – Little argues that thoughts operate as disruptions of the darkened mind space. Turning to language, sounds, rhythms and silences, he brilliantly analyses the function of the ellipses in the script and the discarding of certain words as Beckett’s boring of holes in language and therefore as the painting of epistemological darkness at a linguistic level. The analysis of the French documents moves away from darkness, but it explores related processes such as dehumanizing, vaguening, syllabic un- and re-doing and unending. Little’s genetic criticism of Not I / Pas moi will undoubtedly bear considerable influence on future performances of both Mouth and Auditor alike and on the scenography of future stagings of Not I.

Little’s study of the avant-texte of That Time / Cette fois invites the reader to follow him in a fascinating intertextual and autotextual journey. By exploring time both at thematic and structural level in this play, Beckett goes back to one of his early metaphysical interests and necessarily to some of his classics: Marcel Proust and Dante Alighieri. However, as Little demonstrates, Beckett’s focus on consciousness and memory is also informed by past readings of, or about, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rank, Lao Tzu, George Berkeley and Henri Bergson and by Beckett’s own work on those notions in pieces such as Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Comment c’est (1961), and Lessness (1970). In particular, Little’s identification and analysis of the potential intertextual links with Proust’s work and Proust’s own composition process is a tour de force that enables the reader, on the one hand, to trace the lexical, conceptual, dramaturgical and translational connections between That Time, Cette fois and À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), unlocking new potential interpretations of the nexus of memory/time in the playscript and in the stage image of the play. On the other hand, it exemplifies once more Beckett’s rhizomatic and palimpsestic creative process and his strategy of “vaguening,” supplemented with elements of serialism and imagism in the creation of That Time, which rather illustrate Beckett’s intermedial practice, as Little convincingly argues. The originality of Little’s approach also lies in his study of autotextual connections, as a means to show how the sonic quality of the text takes precedence over references in the creation process, hence reinforcing the thesis that Beckett wrote his play text for performance.

The study of the breakdown in That Time is multi-layered and goes from strength to strength: starting from processes in common with Not I, Little moves to the specificity of the breakdown in That Time that pertains to memory. It is through the intertextual link with several of Hölderlin’s texts that Little first traces how memory is enacted as a process of self-fragmentation in the play. Little supports the reader’s exploration of this argument by featuring the hyperlinks to the digitised facsimile of Beckett’s copy of Hölderlin’s Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1926) that can be consulted on the Beckett Digital Library, another section of the BDMP. Little then interprets Beckett’s division of A, B and C’s monologues (the three voices that Listener hears) into smaller units (lexia), their sequencing and their reordering during the composition of the play both as a process of entanglement of the three voices and as a thematization of the breakdown, simultaneously making it visible on the page. Additionally, the author highlights how the play articulates a breakdown between subject and object through the failure of communication. Most importantly, Little’s analysis of the lexical field of business in lexia C10 reveals that the subject-object breakdown is not purely psychological but also social. After studying the ossification of the remembered self, Little shifts his attention to the contrasting narratives of the same memory by the three voices, which buttresses the thesis according to which the subject breakdown also happens in the foregrounding of the constructiveness of memory and of the remembered self. Little’s inquiry into the subject/memory breakdown through a reworked version of Beckett’s own analytic structure is most effective to create a clear picture of the mechanisms, themes and structures of the breakdown in That Time, providing an unprecedented and near-exhaustive study of this Beckettian trope and aesthetic quest in the play under examination.

Eventually, it is worth noting that Little’s description and chronology of the documents that are part of the That Time / Cette fois module and his study of the French translation frame the genetic criticism of the play, but they also perform other fundamental roles. The description of the documents sheds light on, and pays tribute to, the work of archivists through the analysis of foliation and the cataloguing history of the two loose leaves of the manuscript UoR MS 1639. Moreover, the study of font sizes, paper quality and Sellotape marks on the typescripts informs the reader’s understanding of Beckett’s material composition process and will be of particular interest to scholars and artists investigating the materiality of manuscripts and Beckett’s extended mind. Little concludes the genetic criticism of Cette fois with a list of the orthographic, conjugational and grammatical errors that Beckett made in the process of translation. A short quantitative analysis of the errors in the first full handwritten manuscripts of Not I, Pas moi, That Time, Cette fois and Footfalls (a footnote indicates that this document is missing for Pas) reveals the discrepancy between Cette fois and other plays. Little suggests that the significantly higher number of errors in that manuscript could be another indication of Beckett’s translation struggles, but he warns the reader against the temptation of drawing any further conclusion and instead advocates for the “perform[ance of] an act of recovery by publishing Beckett’s play in a bilingual critical edition” [Little 2021, 347]. This final gesture speaks for the integrity and generosity with which Little disseminates his research, acknowledging all colleagues who helped him during the research and writing process, facilitating access to the most minute, hidden or intricate details of the documents under study and overtly sharing ideas for further research into the three texts and their translations. The book then is not only a precious resource for experts, but it is an ethical model and a source of inspiration for undergraduate and postgraduate students alike.

As one makes their way through the third section of the book (the genetic criticism of Footfalls / Pas), they encounter several salient concepts to categorise the play – a play about ageing, a play about birth, a pacing play, a painkiller play, a wintery play – thematically linking this text to other works in Beckett’s oeuvre, while singularly articulating “revolving,” the core dynamic in Footfalls. But it is perhaps the label complex play that may summarise best the composition process and the practical aspects of performance for this text, since Little emphasises the complexity of the foliation system, the play’s structure, its title, the naming of characters, the number of voices, the calculations of May’s pacing, the width of the strip, subplots, and instrumentation. Little shows that Footfalls kept evolving significantly even post-publication, and he kindly points the reader toward the “Compare Sentences” tool on the BDMP, to trace the changes in the texts and navigate the complexity of the creation process. This function enables the user to track variants across the composition process and in the various editions of the text, and in this case, it can be used not for the sole purpose of genetic criticism, but also for practitioners to understand how both pacing and voicing operate, especially since the stage directions related to pacing are more specific in the French text, being enriched by Beckett’s experience of directing the play.

While the play’s filiation with others of Beckett is highlighted through themes, Little rather suggests to view Footfalls as a “textual orphan” by comparison with William Butler Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well [Little 2021, 401]. The scholar argues that the former explores the ungraspable nature of theatre, a vision also traceable in the latter, the illusive dramaturgy of Footfalls then setting the play in sharp contrast with the clear tableaux of Not I and Footfalls. Instead of reassessing Beckett’s conflicted relationship to Yeats’ theatre, Little sticks to the compositional process: he uses this intertextual instance as a means to dig further into Beckett’s own understanding of the mechanics of writing and the role of memory in the composition and translation processes, which is further investigated in the section “The Genesis of Pas” with the analysis of Fatalement (a replacement for Inévitablement), as a potential reference to Beckett’s interest in Atropos. Such focus is an opportunity to articulate how the play intrinsically queries the relationship between textuality and performance, but Little also pays attention to the deeply collaborative nature of the creation of this play; his narrative and analysis of Beckett and Billie Whitelaw working through posture and pacing in a Parisian restaurant is one of the highlights of the book. Additionally, through the study of the initial stage direction, Little demonstrates that the composition of the play was driven by pacing, Beckett presenting text as only secondary. But as far as text is concerned, one of the main achievements of Little’s analysis of Beckett’s compositional process is to go beyond “vaguening” or “undoing” alone by suggesting that it is only possible to achieve a “vaguened” stage image with precise stage directions, and Little introduces other compositional practices, such as correction as improvisation, the presence of textual scars or weakening. Such strategies, Little contends, exemplify how Beckett’s creation process had evolved towards an approach that is both text-oriented and stage-oriented. So what steps, after all, is Beckett asking his audiences to take with this play?

As Little demonstrates, the spectator is again thrown into the pit of the subject-object breakdown, but this time through revolving. Indeed, the intertextuality with Yeats’ play is also a locus for the breakdown: Little identifies that, while Beckett was working on Footfalls, he also attempted to write the prose piece “Long Observation of the Ray,” in which Beckett referenced the eye and mind of The Hawk’s Well and explored the themes of self-observation and self-perception without a subject. In Footfalls, however, it is the clear separation between subjects that is at stake, whether it is at the plot or linguistic level. Furthermore, Little shows that Beckett edited woman’s voice’s (V) text to augment the seemingly endless revolution of May’s thoughts without locating them in the mind, as it is the case in Not I. And in so doing, Beckett extended May’s mind to her environment, hence challenging the subject-world divide. In translation, Beckett heightened the sense of breakdown with the polysemous French word pas as the title for the piece. Pas operates both as the signifier for steps and the marker of negation in French grammar. As a result, it negates subjectivity, and as Little demonstrates, it enhances the breakdown of the subject onstage, while presenting Beckett’s oeuvre as “work in regress” [Beckett, quoted in Little 2021, 462]. That entropic movement is reinforced by what Little identifies as the weakening of dialogues and stage directions, which, he argues, intensifies the breakdown of the character’s subjectivity. In short, Little’s genetic criticism of Footfalls reveals how the breakdown had become inherent to Beckett’s experimental theatre, not only as an exploration of changing modes of subjectivity and new cognitive paradigms, but also – and even more fundamentally – as a performance practice and ethics, challenging the role (and place) of spectators.

Through Little’s thorough descriptions and analyses of the archival artefacts that bear witness to the genesis of Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas and the digital access to the facsimiles, reader-users are offered a privileged vantage point on Beckett’s creative, revision, translation, and publication processes over the span of a dozen years. Little’s book represents a significant addition to the branches of Beckett studies looking at the mind and cognitive processes on their own and in/for performance, but it also operates as a fast track to research the digitised facsimile of those three plays on the BDMP. For optimal study, it is preferable to have access to both the book and the BDMP; however, the book also functions as a stand-alone piece, and it contains numerous visuals of the archival documents, which provide readers with useful insights into the manuscripts. Beyond the field, it is a key publication for interdisciplinary research that puts performance and epistemology in dialogue, and it will also be of interest to theatre historians of modernism. The spotlight that it directs at this set of plays calls for new performances of those demanding pieces and provides invaluable tools to reimagine those plays in twenty-first century ecosystems. The final product of this hybrid research therefore invites more academic and creative work on the same material, as the author clearly states in the introduction. The editors also acknowledge that manuscript edition is an open process, and readers are invited to propose alternative transcriptions by using the “Your Comments” function on the BDMP’s website: digitally-assisted dialogue goes on. All in all, Little’s monograph is yet another proof of the ground-breaking affordances of genetic criticism and digital humanities combined at the service of other disciplines and practices.

Editor's Addition: an accessibly formatted version of the activation piece in Figure 1 above.