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Samuel Beckett. Company / Compagnie: A Digital Genetic Edition. Ed. Georgina Nugent-Folan and Vincent Neyt; and Georgina Nugent-Folan. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Company / Compagnie

Catherine Fahy
p. 211-216
Bibliographical reference

Samuel Beckett. Company / Compagnie: A Digital Genetic Edition. Ed. Georgina Nugent-Folan and Vincent Neyt. Bruxelles: University Press Antwerp (ASP/UPA), forthcoming, <http://www.beckettarchive.org>. [Accessed 30 October 2025].

Georgina Nugent-Folan. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Company / Compagnie. Bruxelles: University Press Antwerp; London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 432 pp. ISBNs: 978–94–6117–029–3 (ASP/UPA); 978–1–350–21443–9 (Bloomsbury).

Abstract

Part 2 in a review cluster of Samuel Beckett. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Instalments 8, 9 and 10 (digital modules and accompanying printed volumes). Directed by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon. Technical realization by Vincent Neyt. Bruxelles: University Press Antwerp (ASP/UPA); London: Bloomsbury, 2019–22.

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Instalment 9: Company / Compagnie

1Georgina Nugent-Folan’s analysis of Company / Compagnie — a “prose-poem” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, 106) exploring the relationship between the process of narration and the constitution of the self — follows the structure of the entire BDMP — Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, aiming to provide facsimiles and transcriptions of the work’s avant-texte in a forthcoming digital module and examining its overall genesis in a published printed volume, according to the guidelines clarified by the co-directors in their “Series Preface” (10).

2The first part of Nugent-Folan’s study begins with a comprehensive survey of the documents pertinent to the genesis of Company / Compagnie. It thereby presents the extant physical record of English and French texts and is organized according to document type. Nugent-Folan ensures that her survey of the avant-texte includes the very first traces of the work’s inception, beginning with an early handwritten conceptual sketch in Beckett’s “Sottisier” notebook dated “16.1.76”, which almost certainly stands for 16 January 1977 (40–41; see also Knowlson 1996, 821 n. 64), and progressing through to the autograph “The Voice / Verbatim”, written in English on seven loose leaves and dated January 1977 (42). These precursors, examined in the “Before Company” section, are presented by way of their catalogue descriptions, highlighting certain ingrained assertions regarding the relationship between notes, manuscripts and the published text that Nugent-Folan wishes to revise through the course of her analysis. The descriptive survey of the avant-texte focuses specifically on the “Olympic” notebook, which contains the autographs of Company and Compagnie. Beckett repeatedly dated his English manuscript and specified the location of each writing session, allowing Nugent-Folan to establish a chronology of composition. This allows her to offer a descriptive breakdown of this portion of the notebook, which details the supra-linear, infra-linear, marginal and facing leaf additions, the frequency of Beckett’s deletions as well as his doodles. This process sheds light on the difficulties which may have been faced in each period of writing. Dated sessions of extensive revision are often followed by longer intervals before writing recommences, indicating a more labour-intensive session for Beckett. In addition to this, what Gontarski has termed “the grey canon” (2006), which includes Beckett’s correspondence, is drawn upon, along with meticulous analysis of Beckett’s use of specific writing tools, to infer when additional undated writing sessions may have occurred beyond the sixteen dated by Beckett. Following a similar survey of the French portion of the “Olympic” notebook, the extant English and French typescripts are also considered, in order to continue with pre-book publications, page proofs and finally a section dedicated to the French, American and English editions.

3The second part of Nugent-Folan’s study comprises an interpretation of the genetic dossier surveyed in the first part. In section 2.1.4 specifically, Nugent-Folan conducts a paragraph-by-paragraph textual analysis: a procedure which is at least partially dictated by the structure of the prose piece and its meticulous construction method. As Nugent-Folan explains, the text is divided into fifty-nine paragraphs and exemplifies what Louis Hay calls “l’écriture à programme” (31–32 and 187–88; see also Hay 1986–87). The manuscript of Company is underpinned structurally by a schemata plotted out in the “Olympic” notebook. Each paragraph is assigned to at least one of four possible categories: “A” the “Hearer-Creature”, “B” the “devised-deviser”, “V” the voice, or the “Scenes from Past” (189). The “Scenes from Past” focus on recollected memories which are devised by the “devised-deviser”, recounted by the voice and heard by the “Hearer-Creature”. In planning out the text, Beckett also drew up short overviews of each paragraph, each of which is reproduced in the printed volume to preface Nugent-Folan’s analysis of the corresponding paragraph. These summaries were so rigorously adhered to throughout the writing process that the paragraphs themselves read as only slightly more comprehensive versions of the summaries (31). Accordingly, Nugent-Folan’s analysis demonstrates how, through his strict adherence to the methodology of “écriture à programme”, Beckett generated a type of company through the text of Company. The schemata “A”/“B”/“V”/“Scenes from Past” is not only a structuring principle but a formula that ensures the production of a text, which served a companion function for Beckett (22–23 and 280).

4Indeed, the interpretative dimension of the study draws on the notions of autograph and autography. While the former refers to a document which has been handwritten by the author (Kline 1998, 271), the latter refers to self-writing (Abbott 1996, x). In this, Nugent-Folan draws out the meta-textual quality of the relationship between text, author and writing process. By detecting areas in Beckett’s correspondence where he associated the continuation of his own life with the ongoing composition of the text, Nugent-Folan draws attention to the mutual dependence of author and autograph (133). As many have noted, Company is infused with autobiographical elements based on real-life events (chiefly delivered by in the “Scenes from Past” paragraphs) (24; see also Knowlson 1996, 651). However, by working with the notion of self-writing, Nugent-Folan also demonstrates that there are many intriguing “autographic correlations” (24). A good example is the moment when, working on a paragraph of the manuscript of Company that intends to describe a “speechlessness”, Beckett was similarly rendered silent, as indicated by a small gap that is left in the manuscript (59–60). Nugent-Folan is guided by H. Porter Abbott’s contention that autography is more applicable to Beckett’s work than autobiography, since Beckett always problematized the notion of a self (32–33; see also Abbott 1996, ix). As such, she attends to the numerous writing layers to illustrate the ways in which Beckett de-authorized autobiographical traces, particularly those carrying an emotional charge, through a process of de-personalization and simplification (199 and 235–36), thereby both inviting the reader to establish a link between author and text, and simultaneously problematizing this connection (404).

5Nugent-Folan seeks to analyse the composition of Company / Compagnie in relation to Beckett’s works for stage, radio and television. Beginning with a thorough chronological overview of his work schedule at the time — a period which James Knowlson described as one of “intense theatrical activity” (1996, 656; qtd. 21), due to Beckett’s role as director and supervisor during rehearsals — Nugent-Folan helps the reader to establish a sense of Beckett’s other engagements during the genesis of Company. Accordingly, her reading of Beckett’s work, which involves careful consideration of contextual crossovers, demonstrates how this extended prose piece bears the traces of cross-pollination between genres. For instance, drawing on Beckett’s doodles, Nugent-Folan discerns textual dramatization from spacial configuration as though space is often seen from above, much like a stage drawing, thus posing similarities with sketches in works such as Krapp’s Last Tape, That Time and Footfalls (146).

6The influence of music on the structure of Company / Compagnie is particularly important, since the work is based on the intertwining and interweaving of voice(s). Drawing on the context of Beckett’s activities and work schedule previously established, Nugent-Folan observes that Beckett was becoming increasingly open to cross-genre adaptations of his work, at the time. This might have influenced his terminology, drawn from music, when he referred to the voice in the notes and texts prior to Company. In Beckett’s “VERBATIM” notes in the “Sottisier” notebook, the words “Variations & theme” appear in a short exposition aiming to sum up the structure of the work, which indicates that Beckett envisaged a piece based on a fugue-like interaction between the components of his heavily dissociated character (41, 148 and 163–64). Beckett devised a three-part notation when he wrote “Speech by A [is] overheard By B & described to C […] A, B, C, [are] one & the same” (403; see also 162, 189 and 303). As Nugent-Folan explains, these notes bear a close resemblance to That Time, which was set to music by Wolfgang Fortner in December 1976, following a meeting with Beckett on 30 August of the same year (148; see also Pilling 2006, 205). Therefore, as she notes, “it is not surprising that, with Beckett now also thinking of That Time not only as a piece of theatre, but as one intended to be set to music, he adopts the musical vocabulary of the fugue to convey his conception of the piece” (148). As Catherine Laws has argued, the notion that Beckett’s work is “peculiarly musical” is prevalent and significant (Laws 2013, 18). However, evidence confirming how this musical quality is created and sustained has remained quite elusive. What Dirk Van Hulle, drawing on de Biasi (2004) and Jonathan Culler (2009), refers to as the reverse-engineering approach of genetic criticism, adding a “temporal dimension to both poetics and hermeneutics” (2022, 75), in this instance exposes the inception and development of the music-like construction underlying Company / Compagnie. It also demonstrates how Beckett’s engagement with music informs a structure sustaining the impression of a dissociated self.

7As such, this part of Nugent-Folan’s approach to the genesis of Company supports Van Hulle’s use of the “creative ecology” metaphor to describe a model of genetic criticism (2022, 76; see also 2021). Drawing on the notion of ecology as “the interactions among organisms and their environment”, Van Hulle imagines the “creative ecology” as “a continuous interplay between the author as an intelligent agent and various other agents, objects, and cultural phenomena in their environment” (2022, 77; see also 2021). In identifying Beckett’s engagement with composers and musical adaptations of his work, as well as the cross-genre influences which his works exerted on each other, Nugent-Folan is thus sensitive not only to the “sociology of writing” (2022, 91; see also 2021), but to the phenomenon of “creative concurrence” in particular (2022, 112; see also 2021). This serves as a reminder that the more public aspects of texts often precede the bon à tirer [pass for press] moment, which was recognized by Pierre-Marc de Biasi (1996) as the point when a text’s genesis pivots from the private to the public sphere. Nugent-Folan’s approach and observations challenge this rather unnuanced dichotomy between private and public along the genesis of texts.

8The final part of the study analyses the evolution of Beckett’s French translation, Compagnie. Interestingly, as Nugent-Folan observes, not only was the translation published before the original English text, but the genesis of the two texts also overlapped. The French translation did not begin after the completion of the English version, but while the English typescripts of Company Reviews were still being composed (353–54). As such, the French text exerted influence over the English from the second English typescript onwards. Consequently, as Nugent-Folan remarks, Company and Compagnie present an interesting challenge to the conventional order of “original” and “translation” categories (405). Throughout the analysis of the genesis of Compagnie, the French term remémoration (drawn from Beckett’s own translation of the English “recall”) is used to articulate Beckett’s approach to translation (361), thereby revising previous interpretations of his translation approach as “unwording” (Van Hulle and Weller 2014, 195). Remémoration permits a much greater degree of creativity and artistic freedom in modifying the recollected memories and thereby feeds Nugent-Folan’s broader exploration of “the implicit hierarchies in the relationship between original and translation, source and citation, real-life and memory, memory of fiction, fiction and autobiography, autobiography and invention, author and authored text” (29).

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Bibliography

Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski. 2004. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. New York, Ny.: Grove Press.

Culler, Jonathan. 2009. Literary Theory: A Brief Insight. New York, Ny., London: Sterling Publishing. de Biasi, Pierre-Marc. 1996. “What is a Literary Draft? Toward a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation.” Translated by Ingrid Wassenaar. Yale French Studies 89:26–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/2930337.

Culler, Jonathan. 2004. “Toward a Science of Literature: Manuscript Analysis

and the Genesis of the Work.” In Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes, edited by Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, 36–68. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gontarski, S. E. 2006. “Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance.” In Beckett after Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Ullmann, 141–57. Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida.

Hay, Louis. 1986–87. “Nouvelles notes de critique génétique: la troisième dimension de la littérature.” Texte 5–6:313–28.

Kline, Mary-Jo. 1998. A Guide to Documentary Editing. 2nd ed. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury.

Laws, Catherine. 2013. Headaches Among the Overtones. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Pilling, John. 2006. A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Van Hulle, Dirk. 2021. “Creative Concurrence. Gearing Genetic Criticism for the Sociology of Writing.” In Textual Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Wout Dillen, Elli Bleeker, Laura Esteban-Segura, and Stefano Rosignoli, 45–62. Special issue of Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, 15–16, https://doi.org/10.4000/variants.1405.

Van Hulle, Dirk. 2022. Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van Hulle, Dirk, and Shane Weller. 2014. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable / The Unnamable. Bruxelles: University Press Antwerp (ASP/UPA); London: Bloomsbury.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Catherine Fahy, Samuel Beckett. Company / Compagnie: A Digital Genetic Edition. Ed. Georgina Nugent-Folan and Vincent Neyt; and Georgina Nugent-Folan. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Company / CompagnieVariants, 19 | 2025, 211-216.

Electronic reference

Catherine Fahy, Samuel Beckett. Company / Compagnie: A Digital Genetic Edition. Ed. Georgina Nugent-Folan and Vincent Neyt; and Georgina Nugent-Folan. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Company / CompagnieVariants [Online], 19 | 2025, Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 13 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/2260; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15dok

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About the author

Catherine Fahy

Catherine Fahy completed her PhD in 2023 in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York, UK. Catherine’s PhD thesis, Music, Mood and Attunement in the Early Novels of Samuel Beckett, was supervised by Professor Catherine Laws and examines the relationship between music and melancholia in Beckett’s work. In 2023, Catherine was a volunteer on the Gladstone’s Writing Project at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, North Wales. She currently works as a Library and Academic Skills Advisor at Coleg Cambria in North Wales and has Research Affiliate status at the University of York.

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Copyright

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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