Oxford University Press has launched the first batch of a new series of critical commentaries under the title “My Reading.” This installment includes Rosemarie Bodenheimer on Samuel Beckett and Philip Davis on William James.1 “My Reading” seems a strange label: what is a critic’s reading if not personal? This review, after all, is “my reading” of the two books just mentioned. Yet a reading also aspires to be more than merely personal: to command, if not total agreement, at least a measure of assent, striking a balance between the subjective and the objective. In the present instance, the subjects undeniably matter to the authors, who write—Philip Davis especially—with a sense of almost missionary engagement, not as though fulfilling a routine publishing commission.
Beckett has been the victim of countless readings in the critical sense of the word (often the uncritical too), but William James is hardly a household name. His Principles of Psychology (1890) was once a standard textbook; otherwise, he is remembered chiefly for The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)—which Wittgenstein admired, saying it showed that James was “a real human being”—and Pragmatism (1907). He also coined the phrase “stream of consciousness,” which may be to his credit, or not, according to your opinion of the novels written to that prescription.
There is great tenderness in Beckett, as well as wild comedy.
Bodenheimer, aware of the extant commentary on Beckett, has made the rare, and rather brave, decision to ignore it, aiming “to
