Samuel Beckett's attitude to his native rock was at best ambivalent, yet, like the Unnamable, in an important sense he never left the island: its hills and quags define the Molloy country and shape Waiting for Godot; he never surrendered his Irish passport, citizenship, or accent, nor did he lose his love of Trinity College, Dublin, the one academy from which he accepted an honorary degree, and which, in the theater named for him, staged a Centenary Symposium in his honor (4–6 April 2006). Beckett would have hated the fuss: too big, too noisy, too much explicitation; the City of the Plain welcoming back its prodigal son whose image (banners, pictures, books) was everywhere, threatening even to outdo the local Joyce industry. There were stagings of the shorter works, readings, musical occasions, and a superb roundtable in the National Gallery on Beckett and art, anticipating the opening in June (nimis sero, alas, for this reviewer) of what was reportedly a stunning exhibition of artworks related to Beckett's writing.

The symposium compounded the clichéd and the occasional: some excellent papers and sessions, others more dubious, splendid pubs and conversation, delightful company—but a disgraceful set of plenaries, wherein superannuants with nothing to express and limited powers of expression rehashed tired ideas (Beckett's intrinsic Irishness, the dead hand of the Estate, etc.). Terry Eagleton entertained, yet the jokes were all recycled; but Paul Muldoon's “Watt Ho” was an infantile response to this uniquely Irish novel. Two honorable exceptions were Walter Asmus and Pierre Chabert, but even they tended to repeat things for which they are (rightly) respected, rather than offer anything new.

I mention this “tumulus” (as a happy misprint in Watt has it) because, even though many of the essays were first presented at the Trinity Symposium, in the workshops run by Linda Ben Zvi, the etiology of Beckett at 100 is obscure. The book is a handsome production, nicely set out, good to hold, yet from a British press, edited by Israeli and American scholars, and dedicated to another American (Ruby Cohn, to whom all honor), with only one of its twenty-three contributors based in Ireland (well, Belfast). No plenary presentation is included (perhaps as well, given their abysmal games), nor, despite a post hoc argument to the contrary, is there a truly unifying theme. The charitable might celebrate instead the international timbre of the offerings, despite the hint of an inner circle of contributors, not all of whom were in Dublin, or participated in the Workshops there. Despite many Good Things, both rich and varied, the book is deracinated from its occasion and (to mix the metaphor) falls between three stools: the Dublin conference, a tribute to Ruby Cohn, and the academic impulse to give it a name. The essays, then, rise or fall by their own virtú. And that quality, too, is mixed.

The subtitle, “Revolving It All,” unwittingly invites trouble, given recent correspondence (2008) in New Scientist about how much research published in respectable scientific journals can truly claim to be “original,” the consensual figure (after due allowance for the ambiguity of the term) being between 25 percent and 30 percent, the rest not so much deliberate plagiarism or misrepresentation as recycling of self (we’ve all been there), inexcusable ignorance of the work of others, or inadequate acknowledgment of their insights (partial citation and paraphrase). The figure for the arts is unlikely to be any better; as for cultural studies, one shudders to think.

This cynical meditation arises because one essay in the book, by Herbert Blau (not to my knowledge at Dublin), is a virtual reprint of a distinguished lecture given in Toronto about that time and quickly published in Modern Drama (Winter 2006). I cannot explain this wholesale recycling of what is, finally, a set of Dick and Jane reminiscences rather than a critical essay, but it problematizes the integrity of the collection. This is a pity, as the more appropriate critique of the unoriginality that I have noted is not to list the curious celluloid stills, alchemical images, or refigurements of stage bodies that have appeared elsewhere, but rather to initiate a dialogue for Beckett's second century, in terms (perhaps) of Ezra Pound's dictum, to “Make It New.” In this sense, despite the predictability of some essays and the lack of clear focus to the collection as a whole, there are many delights and provocations, from which I can (given the usual exigencies of space and time) select but a few.

From the field of twenty-three (this is written at the time of the Beijing Olympics), I award the gold medal to Stan Gontarski's “Recovering Beckett's Bergsonism” on the grounds that it forces a revaluation of Beckett's early work on Proust in terms of his reading of another philosopher for whom he had mixed feelings (the élan vital, the narrator of How It Is later observes, is a pain in the arse) but from whom he borrowed much without adequate acknowledgment (a familiar theme). The silver goes to Matthijs Engelberts not only for his valuable archival discoveries but equally for the use to which he puts them (an excellent exposition of Beckett's cinematic sensibility), and the bronze to Catherine Laws for her intricate account of the artistic interface between Beckett, Morton Feldman, and Jasper Johns.

Other endeavors fall slightly short of medal contention: James Knowlson writes with his usual authority of Beckett's love of the Old Masters, here with reference to his visit in February 1937 to Bamberg and Würtzberg, but links to the creative works are a tad perfunctory; Naoya Mori's petites perceptions of the legacy of Leibniz, potentially excellent, fail sufficiently to take into account previous work (Garin Dowd, yours truly) on this theme; and Angela Moorjani invokes in her discussion of Play too many simultaneities (Dante's fourfold method [Beckett was deeply suspicious of allegory]; Egyptian funerary urns [those of Proust are more pertinent]) before she gets to Adam Elsheimer and shows how The Flight into Egypt resonated in Beckett's imagination. Other essays could be discussed in similar terms: isolated insights (precious margaritas) too often set against the foil of the already familiar or the ingeniously inappropriate, with the consequence that they do not shine to full advantage. This is what has made this volume so frustrating to review: not that the essays are bad, for with rare exceptions they are not; but rather that they are almost very good, but not quite. For better or worse that may be a commentary on the full volume, this review, and the entire critical endeavor.