Serie: Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Hulle, Dirk Van | Paperback / softback | 28-12-2017 | 9789057185373

This volume analyses the genesis of Beckett’s novel Malone meurt / Malone Dies. Written in French in 1947-1948, and translated into English by the author in 1954-1956, it is the second part of the so-called ‘Trilogy’, preceded by Molloy and followed by L’Innommable / The Unnamable.

Because Malone’s account approximates a diary, this book starts from H. Porter Abbott’s notion of ‘diary fiction’ to examine the surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and pre-book publication extracts. Even though the writing process of Malone meurt almost coincides with the progression of the narrative, illustrating what Louis Hay has called ‘écriture à processus’, Beckett made substantial changes to the text, which can be interpreted as a critique of Honoré de Balzac’s programmatic writing method. This analysis extends to the genesis of Malone Dies (Beckett’s English translation of the novel), which alludes to Balzac’s novel Louis Lambert, in order to show that self-translation is a crucial and integral part of Beckett’s bilingual autographic project.

This volume is part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), a collaboration between the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Beckett International Foundation (University of Reading) and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), with the support of the Estate of Samuel Beckett. The BDMP (www.beckettarchive.org) digitally reunites the dispersed manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s works and facilitates their examination. The project consists of two parts:

a) a digital archive of Beckett’s a manuscripts, with facsimiles and transcriptions, organized in modules;

b) a series of print volumes, analyzing the genesis of Beckett’s works.