Se refiere a mi libro sobre Beckett José Francisco Fernández en una de sus reseñas sobre literatura irlandesa en Irish Studies in Spain 2007— en concreto a cuenta del libro Tentativas sobre Beckett editado por Julián Jiménez Heffernan. Unos párrafos:
Julián Jiménez Heffernan writes what I consider to be the best chapter of the book. He posits the thesis that if Beckett, as is commonly asserted, dismantled the Western tradition of narrative, he must have known it well in the first place. In any case for Jiménez Heffernan the novel as a literary genre was doomed to obliterate itself from the very beginning, it was destined to meet the end of the God-like author, a state of things that Beckett’s writing perfectly symbolizes and which is widely accepted today.
Jiménez Heffernan claims that Beckett did not destroy anything and advances powerful reasons: he wrote novels (not anti-novels, Jiménez Heffernan stresses); there is plenty of evidence in the form of echoes and allusions to show that his novels are deeply embedded in the long history of novel writing (Jiménez Heffernan speaks of Beckett’s seven novels. I would say there are eight of them as Dream of Fair to Middling Women is not a mere draft but a fully completed work); this same tradition has always shown a great capacity to reshape itself and to give birth to new forms which have renewed the genre. Beckett would belong to this category of alternative writing as old as the novel itself.
This appreciation is not completely new. José Ángel García Landa in Samuel Beckett y la Narración Reflexiva (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias, 1992) also placed Beckett’s prose fiction in the tradition of the novel. In his study on Beckett’s trilogy, García Landa claimed that Beckett’s subversion of the novelistic genre implied in fact the conquering of new territories for this fictional form. It must also be said, however, that the concept of anti-novel does not necessary cancel any kinship with a previous tradition. In his A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Gerald Prince defines antinarrative merely as “A (verbal or nonverbal) text adopting the trappings of narrative but systematically calling narrative logic and narrative conventions into question”, and he mentions Molloy as an example of antinarrative.
Jiménez Heffernan claims that Beckett did not destroy anything and advances powerful reasons: he wrote novels (not anti-novels, Jiménez Heffernan stresses); there is plenty of evidence in the form of echoes and allusions to show that his novels are deeply embedded in the long history of novel writing (Jiménez Heffernan speaks of Beckett’s seven novels. I would say there are eight of them as Dream of Fair to Middling Women is not a mere draft but a fully completed work); this same tradition has always shown a great capacity to reshape itself and to give birth to new forms which have renewed the genre. Beckett would belong to this category of alternative writing as old as the novel itself.
This appreciation is not completely new. José Ángel García Landa in Samuel Beckett y la Narración Reflexiva (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias, 1992) also placed Beckett’s prose fiction in the tradition of the novel. In his study on Beckett’s trilogy, García Landa claimed that Beckett’s subversion of the novelistic genre implied in fact the conquering of new territories for this fictional form. It must also be said, however, that the concept of anti-novel does not necessary cancel any kinship with a previous tradition. In his A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) Gerald Prince defines antinarrative merely as “A (verbal or nonverbal) text adopting the trappings of narrative but systematically calling narrative logic and narrative conventions into question”, and he mentions Molloy as an example of antinarrative.
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