Experimenting with Failure

Abstract

In his article ‘Mindless Modernism’, published in 2013, Joshua Gang expressed his scepticism about the established narrative of modernism’s so-called inward turn. In his view, the notion that modernism was concerned with exploring the complex intricacies of human consciousness offers at best a partial view of the influence of psychology on the period’s most formally experimental literature. ‘In treating the introspective mind as a self-evident truth of modernism’, Gang warned, ‘we preclude rather than encourage new approaches to the period, particularly if those approaches are invested in the history of science, analytic philosophy, or the empirical study of mind.’1 The article was a necessary reminder that ‘psychology, and modernism’s relationship to psychology, did not end with introspection’.2 In many ways, Joshua Powell’s Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology: Perception, Attention, Imagery is the kind of scholarly work that Gang called for. Published in Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series, the book focuses on Beckett’s theatre and prose works from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Powell argues that Beckett’s works are not simply artistically radical but can also be understood as scientific experiments. The book’s aim is to outline ‘the extent to which the psychological experiment comes to inform Beckett’s own experimental methods, and ultimately what these methods can be seen to achieve’ (p. 9). There are six main chapters in the book, most of which focus on a specific work (Not I, That Time, Footfalls, and Nohow On get individual chapters), through the lens of psychological concepts such as inattention or face-reading. Powell’s approach is significant in two respects. First, he shifts the focus from Beckett’s canonical early novels towards his less famous later plays such as Not I or That Time. Second, he largely bypasses the conversation about Beckett’s relationship to psychoanalysis (which he correctly argues has long dominated critical discussions) in favour of less frequently explored commonalities between Beckett’s work and behaviourism and gestalt psychology.