Beckett’s Not I as a Dramatic Rendition of Kristeva’s Notion of the Semiotic Chora

Abstract

Samuel Beckett as a dramatist is well-known with his contributions to the landscape of British theatre. His plays reverberate with voices of traumatized, marginalized and war-stricken characters, which function as an implicit criticism of the turbulent atmosphere of the 1900s. When Beckett addresses the problems of his time in a covert way, the playwright deconstructs conventional elements of drama by specifying no plot, no setting or no theme. This Beckettian style also becomes manifest in his use of language which is characterized by the presence of segmented structures, pauses, ellipses and even silence. Considering these tenets of Beckettian drama, the thematic concerns of his theatrical productions are assumed to primarily revolve around the issues of nihilism, language, and ontology. Therefore, Beckett’s plays are thought to be read through the lenses of distinguished theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. From among these theorists, the concepts of the semiotic, the symbolic and the semiotic chora of Julia Kristeva as a poststructuralist thinker provide a fertile ground for a theoretical reading of Beckett’s play Not I (1972). Relevantly, this paper principally examines the applicability of Kristeva’s “semiotic chora” into Beckett’s Not I in all aspects.