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Write Cut Rewrite is curated by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon; both are experts on the telling case of Samuel Beckett, for whom “textual scars” could become desirable features. Armed with a blue pencil, for example, he did away with ten satirical pages in the typescript of Molloy concerning the curious economy of the land of Ballyba (read: Ireland). “Je vais vous le dire”, declares Moran, one of Molloy’s narrators, only to think better of it: “Non, je ne dirai rien. Rien”. It may be that his publishers deemed the extended scatological Swiftian lark that ensued to be de trop. Whatever the reason, Beckett chose to exhibit Moran changing his mind rather than omit this supposed wrong turn altogether.

Acts of epanorthosis – emphatic self-correction – also figure in Beckett’s later novels, drawing attention to “a major, but often neglected element in the way we write and think”, as Van Hulle and Nixon write in their book accompanying the exhibition (Bodleian Library Publishing, £40), “composing a sentence, reconsidering, revising it on second thought, reconsidering again, revising again. Each revision implies a form of decomposition of the previous version”. Yet this Beckettian downer – rhetorical manoeuvre as indicator of decline and fall – stands in contrast to the cutting and rewriting otherwise on display here. For this involving exhibition accentuates the obvious creative positives of both cutting and rewriting.

TLS; https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/stories-taking-shape/pugpig_index.html