1It was in 2006, at the academic conference “Beckett at Reading”, that Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon announced their ongoing ambitious undertaking to digitize Beckett’s manuscripts. A culmination of the endeavour to preserve Beckett’s manuscripts in institutional libraries and make them available to the scholarly community, initiated in Europe by the University of Reading in 1971 and about a decade earlier by the Harry Ransom Center (Nixon 2011, 823), the success of the BDMP — Beckett Digital Manuscript Project has been acknowledged by a number of awards as well, such as a funding grant from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2021, for a three-year research project titled “Editing Beckett: Towards a Bilingual Digital Genetic Edition of Samuel Beckett’s Works” (2022–25).
2As readers of this journal will already know from reviews published in past issues (Bailey 2013; McMullan 2019; Rosignoli 2021), the BDMP consists of two parts: a series of printed volumes describing and interpreting the genesis of individual works, or groups of works, authored by Samuel Beckett and a series of related digital modules offering, besides facsimiles and transcriptions of the documents constituting the avant-texte, a set of multi-functional tools for textual bilingual and genetic comparison, allowing users to visualize cancellations, additions and Beckett’s different writing tools among other things.
3The tenth volume analyzes the three theatrical works which Beckett composed and first published between March 1972 and April/May 1976, following the standard format of the series — an introduction, a detailed description of the extant record summed up in a “Genetic Map”, an interpretation of the genesis of each work and a conclusion — but the structure of the volume is more complex than usual, since the documentary and interpretative sections are repeated three times: once for each play examined.
4James Little’s work is organized around the unifying theme of the “subject-object breakdown” — the topic of his second doctoral thesis, discussed at the University of Antwerp — which he understands under three different aspects: as “the breakdown of relations between viewing subject and aesthetic object” (35; see also Beckett 2009–16, Vol. 2: 140), between the artist and “the world of objects” (Beckett 2001, 70; qtd. 28) and, finally, between the mind and its environment. For this last broken relationship, Little draws on post-cognitivist theories of the mind, according to which this “is constituted by its interactions with the material world in which it operates” (32), and argues that “the spaces for which these performance texts were composed, and in which their author directed his work, were a crucial part of his materially constituted cognitive system” (33). Thus, he discusses the role of the stage, as an “environment”, both in the genesis of the plays and in the audience’s fruition of them.
5Beckett’s notes on psychology and psychoanalysis, taken by the author in 1933–35 and presented by his heirs to Trinity College Dublin in 1997 (30 n. 3; see also Engelberts, Frost, and Maxwell 2006, 19 and 158), play a central role in Little’s research, since he aims to demonstrate “Beckett’s creative (re-)use” of them (39) in the three plays under scrutiny, where the psychological ideas drawn from Beckett’s readings were converted into “psychological images” (30) using the proscenium to create theatrical effects dwelling in the first instance on darkness. Beckett used “the darkened proscenium stage as interpretive catalyst” (37), producing “epistemological uncertainty” (38) and “enacting the mind” (32), both in the sense of the workings of the characters’ minds on the stage and of the audience’s interacting with the proscenium. According to Little, “In Beckett’s staging of the mind, the lack of clarity, or ‘shading’ of which Freud speaks, would become an aesthetic instrument, key to staging the breakdown between subject and object” (477). Therefore, as Little announces in his introductory notes, his main focus is on “the genetic changes which highlight Beckett’s staging of the subject-object breakdown” (39): a task which he carries out by referring to a wealth of studies in many different fields as well as to Beckett’s oeuvre as a whole, examining documents that range from endogenetic to exogenetic and epigenetic — the latter a particularly useful class, as far as Beckett’s works written for stage and self-translated are concerned.
6Little’s valuable insights into the author’s creative process will undoubtedly “encourage future work on these manuscripts” (39), as he hopes it will. Among them, the undated manuscript of Not I identified by Little as EM2, consisting of “an ‘Analysis’ of what was already written” (61), may be taken as an example of a possible subject of further enquiry. Little casts doubt on Stanley Gontarski’s view that it was “evidently written after the completion of TS2” (1985, 144), or ET2 in Little’s own list, which is to say of the second typed version of the play. Instead, according to Little, “the Analysis was written after ET2 was typed up, but not after it was edited by hand” (63). I personally tried to date this document years ago, in my L’impossibilità di non essere [The Impossibility of not Being], and my conclusion was closer to Gontarski’s, albeit with some further clarifications (1995, 10–19). EM2 is also the manuscript which grounded my interpretation of the variants, which allowed me to discover that Beckett had some difficulties in identifying the dramatic action of the play. At a certain stage of composition, he became aware that the text was incoherent, so that from then onwards he worked to eliminate the incoherence and enhance the dramatic quality of his work.
7My overtly diachronic reading of the variants, which examines only the endogenesis of the play and privileges the published text as a point of view from which to conduct the analysis, is not in line with the rationale behind the BDMP, which is to say “to present the genesis not so much as a linear development […], but as a spectrum of genetic actions, an interconnected structure” where “exogenetic material colours the endo- or the epigenesis” (Van Hulle, Neyt, and Dillen 2021). However, this diversity of approach, together with the different emphasis which Little and I lay on form and content, text and intertext, diachrony and synchrony, context and text, is paradigmatic of that complementarity which is the main value of literary studies. It could, and in my view should, also reinforce Little’s invitation to scrutinize the manuscripts in order to explore Beckett’s creative process more in depth. This task is made easier by accessing the related digital module co-edited by Vincent Neyt: a very stimulating pursuit, accompanied by “flashes from all over”, as Mouth puts it (Beckett 1990, 380), as we trace and recognize the myriad references provided by Little.