Equally unsurprising, the stage plays in general are better known everywhere than the rest of the Beckett oeuvre. The least surprising discovery is that Waiting for Godot is universally known and that it is in certain countries – China, for example – virtually all that is known of Beckett.
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Mary Bryden's comment that ‘Beckett has indeed cracked open any available models of literary expression’ (51) is especially apposite to this point. Wherever it came ashore, it did not fit comfortably with existing cultural assumptions and standards rather, it decisively altered later developments of the theatrical culture, in particular, of the countries into which it was received. One common thread of this volume is, to be sure, the paradox of Beckett's work being both ‘global’ and, at the same time, highly resistant to assimilation within national boundaries. These include: By whom was Beckett especially received (or resisted) within each country? What role did he play in this reception? Which of his works were especially received? When were they received? According to what critical paradigms was his work interpreted? In the overview of the specifically national responses to these questions that follows, I have adapted to my own purposes the strategy of the editors, who, in an act of pre-emptive exculpation, remind their readers of Molloy's admonition that ‘if you set out to mention everything you would never be done.’ In the course of my own reading and rereading of this wonderfully informative volume, I realised that, although it follows a country-by-country progression (fifteen chapters covering more than twenty countries) and each contributor seems to have been given a wide berth with respect to his or her particular emphases, the effect of dispersion that results (appropriately in the case of a writer whose reception, initially lukewarm in his native land, took on the character of a diaspora) is countered by a tendency to coalesce around a few central questions to which each contribution implicitly responds.
Chris Ackerley prefaces the acknowledgements to his essay on Beckett's reception in New Zealand by noting that ‘This kind of review is inevitably a Seurat-like composition of small, blurry dots, erratic recollections that might crystallize with distance into discernible images’ (126).
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