Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett
Hélène Cixous, translated by Laurent Milesi
Polity, pp85;
ISBN-13:978-0-7456-4416-5
Publication date: May 2010RRP: £12.99

Phil Sidney

Ah, Samuel Beckett- still at the crease after all these years! Along with P.G. Wodehouse (the other literary genius of the 20^th century to merit an entry in Wisden), Beckett is still basking in the sunlight of readers’ attention (Nick Clegg among them), inspiring scores of publications; yet unlike his partner’s dashing, cavalier strokeplay, Beckett is an author of the Boycott mould (Samuel Boycott?), grinding out his bleak innings and giving nothing away to the probing inquiries of critics. For an author considered so widely to be focussed on lack and nothingness, Beckett’s work has produced an astonishing amount of criticism, none of which has quite managed to catch him out: Helene Cixous is the latest to bowl.

Perhaps a quick pair of caveats before calling ‘play’, however; I count among my many sins of omission an almost complete innocence/ignorance of Cixous’ work, which may mean I am unused to, and therefore unappreciative of, her style. I have tried to make allowances for this: ‘Render unto Cixous what is Cixous’’ etc. The second quibble is that to read Zero’s Neighbour in translation is to peer through a glass darkly. Laurent Milesi’s job is a tough one (he has not only to juggle Cixous’ text, but also the liberal amounts of Beckett that she scatters in her wake), and the sense is that the translation loses something of Cixous. (His translation of en met plein la vue as ‘one in the eye for you’, for instance, clunks a bit). If I could read French (or if I were French) this review would be better-informed, and perhaps substantially different; as it is, the situation brings to mind Don Paterson’s opinion that to translate a poem is to draw a picture of a girl and call it the Mona Lisa.

But what of Cixous’ own portrait of Beckett? Less a portrait, though, and more a piece of performance art. Like many others before her, she sees the virtue of Beckett’s aesthetic of exhaustion, his pairing down of language and characters to next to nothing, the eponymous ‘zero’s neighbour’. Cixous enacts this with the use of her own brand of ‘exhausting prose’: prose that exhausts phonemic possibility in the mushrooming series of puns that sprout across the text. Her pun-gal inflection is at times exhilarating, as are Milesi’s game attempts to follow her – ‘…world, alone, bone, o [monde, onde, os, o]’ Her exhaustively punning prose can be exhausting for the reader as well. This is perhaps intentional (she mentions Beckett ‘Gruelling the reader’, envisioning the reader as Lucky), but it isn’t wildly effective; while she has the forward impetus of Beckett’s speakers, Cixous lacks the relentlessness and laser accuracy of his language, too often throwing a series of words at Beckett in the hope that one will stick. Cixous ([sic]xous?) also has a tendency to fall into the ‘if it rhymes or puns, it must be true’ trap. The aesthetic of the ‘precious little’, which Cixous lauds in Beckett, becomes in her hands a little precious. What exacerbates this is the feeling that the performance is not really for anyone; in all the net of voices that she weaves in the text (including Derrida, who makes frequent interjections), Cixous never seems to be speaking to anyone but herself.

This is a shame, because when she looks up from her intricate verbal arabesques, the book lifts; there are a number of excellent insights (on Beckett’s ‘skull, stick, sand, sky, grey, ray in the dark’ replacing Proust’s ‘cobblestone spoon plate napkin water-pipe, cup’, or on Not I as music) and one or two absolutely stunning ones (in particular Happy Days as ‘half expanse of scorched grass, half space of time held between clasped hands’). More references away from texts and texts and texts would have been welcome; Cixous’ one real gesture to the body is pretty desultory (‘Between you and me, the Earth is above all a feminine element. The earth is full and has holes. The feminine is the hole and what is full.’). The afterword, a relation of a dream of Cixous’ that sees her trapped in an act without words, unable to remove her clothes, gives a glimpse of what a full, mental emotional bodily engagement with Beckett might have been like.