Gontarski explores an essay by American outlier writer, Beat associate and sometime expatriate William S. Burroughs that highlights not only grand historic sweep with a focus on contemporary issues ...but a change in creative strategies, a shift in communication technologies from print to magnetic tape, a medium that hes had been experimenting with and manipulating since the 1960s, often as part of a mélange of media: recording tape, celluloid, photo-collage and print. Burroughs had thought for a time that he might become a mainstream writer. The significance of the essay in growing out of an earlier mainstream commission is also emphasized.
Censorship details of the London premiere, publication, and revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot have been much discussed in the critical discourse, but that discussion has seldom been based ...on the complete primary documents. As a result, erroneous and unverified information has been disseminated. In fact, the notes and correspondence in the Lord Chamberlain's archives, proscriptions demanded by the official protectors of British decency, tell a story richer and substantially different from the received wisdom on these issues. In the case of Godot, the tussle between Beckett and his London producer, Donald Albery, on the one hand, and on the other, three of the Lord Chamberlain's principal deputies, Sir Vincent Troubridge, Sir Norman Gwatkin, and C.D. Heriot, suggests an exchange that threatened the British production of the play. It created an atmosphere, moreover, in which English publisher Faber and Faber believed that it could offer only a sanitized version of the play in 1956.
Henri Bergson is frequently cited amongst the holy trinity of major influences on Modernism-literary and otherwise-alongside Sigmund Freud and William James. Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism has ...re-popularized Bergson for the twenty-first century, so much so that, perhaps, our Bergson is Deleuze's Bergson. Despite renewed interest in Bergson, his influence remains understudied and consequently undervalued. While books examining the impact of Freud and James on Modernism abound, Bergson's impact, though widely acknowledged, has been closely examined much more rarely. Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism remedies this deficiency in three ways. First, it offers close readings and critiques of six pivotal texts. Second, it reassesses Bergson's impact on Modernism while also tracing his continuing importance to literature, media, and philosophy throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. In its final section it provides an extended glossary of Bergsonian terms, complete with extensive examples and citations of their use across his texts. The glossary also maps the influence of Bergson's work by including entries on related writers, all of whom Bergson either corresponded with or critiqued.
Since Samuel Beckett lamented to his official biographer, James Knowlson, that his 'texts are in a terrible mess', much attention has been paid to the issues of textual accuracy and fidelity, much ...written about textual variance in the Beckett canon, and many attempts made and considerable money spent to remedy such variation and publishing inconsistencies, many the result of simultaneous but separate publishing processes and leavened by publishers' eagerness to publish Beckett's new work, especially for the theatre, even as he was still developing the piece in rehearsals. Add to such creative issues something of a general slovenliness, inattention, oversights, and blunders by everyone involved in the process of publication, and we have the current state of the Beckett texts, still apparently 'a terrible mess'. For those of us involved with such issues these past 40 (or so) years, an unacceptable level of textual variance persists even as concurrent and persistent calls for an adherence or return to the Beckettian text are sounded. This essay surveys the practical problems that exist among Beckett's texts, even in a single language, as it also cites instances where progress has been made in developing scholarly editions. The essay finally accepts the fact that uniform Beckett texts, or "the Beckett text," even if such a goal were desirable, is not only unattainable but perhaps even contrary to what we might loosely call Beckettian aesthetics.
'Creative Involution' posits something of a philosophical genealogy, a line of flight that has neither need for nor interest in the periodisation of Modernism, a line of which Beckett (even ...reluctantly) is part. Murphy, among others, is deterritorialised as much as Beckett's landscapes are, and so he/they become a 'complexification' of being that manifests itself in Beckett not as represented, representative or a representation, since so much of Beckett deals with that which cannot be uttered, known or represented, but whose image the works (and its figures) have become, a thinking through of negativity, becoming, and multiplicity through non-Newtonian motion, of being as becoming, where every movement brings something new into the world, but in something of a reverse Darwinism that moves from complex to simple organism, from Murphy to Worm, or Watt to Pim, or among the nameless figures in the short prose, a 'becoming-animal', in something not so much of a creative devolution but rather a 'neoevolution', or to adopt another term from Deleuze and Guattari, an 'involution', which 'is in no way confused with regression' (1987: 238), becomings creating nothing less than new worlds. Writing casually to his post-war confidant Georges Duthuit on 26 July 1951, Beckett noted in the midst of gardening chores, 'Never seen so many butterflies in such worm-state, this little central cylinder, the only flesh, is the worm' (2011: 271). The observation comes after the writing but before the premiere performance of
Waiting for Godot
in which Gogo tells Didi, 'You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!' (1954: 67). Such 'becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short a multiplicity' (1987: 239), Deleuze and Guattari tell us. For Beckett it defines creativity as well, only possible through such un-tethered selves or beings, amid the generation of varieties and differences, accessible through moments of deterritorialisation, characterised by, 'A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings' (240).
