Beckett's Company: Bataille, Blanchot and Critical Transference
 Paul Gordon Sheehan
Perhaps the most prescient of Beckett’s early critics were the French writers Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, in their critical analyses of (respectively) Molloy in Critique (1951) and The Unnamable in La Nouvelle Revue française (1953). The intellectual friendship of Bataille and Blanchot was one of the great tacit ‘partnerships’ of the last century, which has yet to be fully unravelled. Nevertheless, in order to grasp properly the significance of their initial writings on Beckett, it is essential to understand the main points of contact between the two writers, and how their attitudes to Beckett relate to their theoretical writings in a broader sense. It could be argued, then, that Beckett’s novels are treated as a kind of ‘border’ across which their own ideas continue to emerge, develop and take shape, in the middle years of the ‘partnership’ that began in 1940 and came to an end with Bataille’s death in 1962.
The Beckett critiques by Bataille and Blanchot encompass the figures of incongruity, obscenity, moral indifference and shapeless struggle, not to mention the more rarefied notions of ‘neutral speech’, ‘motionless vagrancy’ and the ‘threatening experience of the work’ that involves the sacrifice of the writer, a sacrifice that could also be seen as a ‘transformation’. Furthermore, the space these figures inhabit is one where aesthetic experience is no longer applicable, demanding other, more exigent forms of experience in order to get to grips with Beckett’s writing. In this paper I will read the Bataille and Blanchot pieces anew, through these and other tropes, to demonstrate that the ways in which they approach Beckett have still, despite nearly two decades of ‘Beckett and theory’, yet to be fully explored. From this I will propose some new pathways for reading that go beyond the particularly fixed and forbidding border that has become ‘Beckett studies’.  

Research Fellow, Macquarie University, Department of English
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1