The Gargantuan Polity: On the Individual and the Community in the French Renaissance Book

One of Casanova's missions in this book is to overturn Blanchot's critical canonizing of Becket as ontological, existentialist, and beyond aesthetics. She begins in chapter 1: Ars Combinatoria with a superb close reading of Beckett's Worstword Ho that describes in detail his aesthetic goals and techniques before concluding that "the equation stated and solved by Worstword Ho therefore provides (strict) irrefutable prof of a formidable formal ambition, without precedent in the history of literature, of a logical, combinatory option in the service of a new literary form." (26) With chapters 2 and 3 Casanova uses a historical approach to show the genesis and necessity of Beckett's approach as he endeavored to overcome--in Harold Bloom's term--his strong precursors of Yeats and Joyce. In chapter 4 Casanova expands upon her argument establishing Beckett's aesthetic revolution, stating that Beckett's goal and achievement was to do for literature what had already been done in art and music. Thus Beckett takes out all the traditional underpinnings of literature--the subject, memory, imagination, narration, character, psychology, space and time--to settle on texts that are wholly self-sufficient, referring and depending only on themselves. Casanova's book describes how and why Beckett went to that level of abstraction, which makes it an essential book to any Beckett studies.