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BECKETT AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM. By Anthony Uhlmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999- PP. x + 202. $59.95.
Samuel Beckett introduces his essay, "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico ... Joyce," with a "handful of abstractions" which he intends to deploy in the course of discussion. Similarly, Uhlmann, in his study of Beckett, relies on an inventory of intellectual constructs-in this case, concepts derived primarily from Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Levinas, and Bergson-"to show ... that literature might include philosophy within it" (p. 24). His project entails "gathering a number of philosophical concepts around the question of the being of order and disorder" (p. 73). But whereas Beckett's reference to philosophy illumined the literary text be treated, Uhlmann's philosophical sallies tend instead to induce a simulacrum of Watt's celebrated perplexity: "Then Watt did not know what to think." At one extreme, analysis is frequently overwhelmed by imported intellectual constructs which allow Uhlmann to belabour the obvious ("Given that I have taken so long to come this far" [p. 38]), and to rehearse plot summary. At the other extreme, analysis descends into obtuseness, spread by cumbersome jargon and funny philosophy. Here, Stephen Dedalus's observation in the "Nestor" chapter of Ulysses is painfully apt: "I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy." Indeed, Uhlmann acknowledges the problem through such phrases as this one: "as will hopefully become clear" (p. 12).
Perhaps the recourse to funny philosophy is a good place to start. Uhlmann invokes the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, two philosophers whose often "fuzzy and generalized" (p. 37) ideas sometimes recall the "characteristic reconditeness and obscurity" of the fictional philosopher, De Selby, in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. For example, according to Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? (as Uhlmann recapitulates it), "Chaos [elsewhere equated with `the univocity of Being'] is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes.... Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance" (p. 2 i). Here, in a coincidence of contraries more bizarre than any in Beckett's account of Bruno, everything is and is not simultaneously: to be is not to be. This nonsensical explanation of reality-which Uhlmann attempts, with a straight face, to apply...