Beckett's Art Research Articles

Beckett's Art of Mismaking by Leland de la Durantaye

Reviewed by: Beckett's Art of Mismaking by Leland de la Durantaye Yael Levin De La Durantaye, Leland. Beckett's Art of Mismaking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 194. pp. $29.95 hardcover. Leland de la Durantaye's Beckett's Art of Mismaking introduces its unique idiom from the very start. Eschewing jargon and resisting the potential obfuscations of philosophical or critical discourse, Durantaye calls it like it is: "The aim of art has been fine making. And then along came an Irishman named Samuel Beckett who ended the whole thing, closed the proceedings, put art to rest, at last, for it was very tired" (2). Both familiar and tantalizingly simple, such a premise speaks for the project in its entirety. The writer's engaging, witty, and accessible style is strategic. As he will comment later on: "In the last sixty years Beckett has been the subject of a variety, intensity, and quality of critical writing without modern parallel.…What then is the result of all this indisputably excellent writing for a shared understanding of Beckett's mismade art? The answer is almost nothing" (106). Reflecting on the futility of our critical endeavor, Durantaye suggests that "[t]he symbolic surface of Beckett's mature writing is so smooth, its details so vaguened, its form so deformed, and its art so mismade, that no symbolic significance encounters enough friction to come to rest there, and so off everything attracted goes, back into the space of speculation" (107). Readers in search of conceptual anchors, theoretical paradigms, and philosophical analogues will not find them here. Instead, Durantaye offers a journey through Beckett's life and works that is both celebratory and informative. The book enlists a mixture of plot synopses, biographical anecdotes, letters, criticism, popular culture, philosophy, and a wide array of citations from unfinished scraps to the canonical works. Beckett is everywhere in this study—and the well-versed and uninitiated readers alike will conclude their reading of this book with a desire to go back to the author. To make us want to reread Beckett—this is true praise for any work of criticism. The study is divided into six chapters, each of which is loosely organized around commonplaces of Beckett scholarship. The will, nature, language, symbolism, the [End Page 284] series, and aesthetic pessimism all serve, in turn, as prompts for a consideration of what a mismade art might be, how it might be created, and, later, how it might be understood. The introduction opens with an anecdotal history of the striking differences between an art that was (Michelangelo selecting marble in Carrara) and one that is (Marcel Duchamp purchasing a urinal in a New York shop), from a conceptualization of a finely made artistic object to one that is artistically unmade. The following two chapters progress metonymically from the rejection of omniscient narration to, inter alia, the question of faith, God, man, isolation, fellowship, and storytelling. Insights along the way touch on an array of discourses—translation, art, narratology, philosophy, and history. The language is playful, performative, funny, and intensely communicative. In place of the critical practice of conceptual substitution, Durantaye maintains Beckett's idiom and traces its variations in multiple works. His analysis thus emerges as a concordance of sorts for the author's many linguistic and aphoristic topoi. Secondary sources are sampled in passing but the voice of authority is Beckett's. No conclusion or argument is provided to explain away the peculiarities of his turn of phrase. We are encouraged to experience rather than decipher its slippages. Chapter three follows the writer's first steps in the art of mismaking by attending to his manipulations of the natural order. A path is traced from Beckett's thoughts on painting through the question of the symbol to the familiar ground of nonrelation. Chapter four addresses Beckett's decision to write in French before turning to the broader question of language. Beckett's self-proclaimed distinction from Joyce is here cited in order to distinguish a language that invigorates and creates from one that mismakes. The latter neither embraces life nor communicates experience. Chapter five charts a chronological history of the disappearance of the world from Beckett's...

A Theater of the Nerves: Samuel Beckett's Non-Representational Art

What returns and recurs across Samuel Beckett's art in different media—prose, theater, television, radio, and film—is resistance to representation. Beckett's work diverges from art that points outside itself to some facet of the familiar world, but neither does it favor abstraction, which is, according to Beckett's commentary in letters and essays, too far removed, sealed against "what is." How, then, is art to relate to the perceptual and emotional material of "what is"? What techniques, what vision might ensure adequate attention to the complexity of experiential material while protecting its possibilities for remaking itself, perhaps prompted by aesthetic experience? The term Beckett chooses to describe this positioning is "non-relation," and the essays in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts suggest a Beckettian art beyond—or better, between—representation and abstraction.

Beckett's "one Evening": An Anthropomorphic Still Life

A number of critics have noted the shift in Beckett's prose writing after the trilogy. It becomes shorter, less narrative and approximates poetry. Porter Abbott has proposed that Beckett's art in Texts for Nothing and How It Is is post-narrative (106), and Ruby Cohn describes the late short prose as lyrics of (1973, 220-69). Stanley Gontarski touches on both of these suggestions in his introduction to the complete short prose:Beckett's stories have [...] often been treated as anomalous or aberrant, a species so alien to the tradition of the short fiction that critics are still struggling to assess not only what they - if indeed they mean at all - but what they are: stories or novels, prose or poetry, rejected fragments or completed tales. [...] Much of Beckett's short prose inhabits the margins between prose and poetry, between narrative and drama, and finally between completion and incompletion.(xi-xii)One Evening epitomises these classificatory struggles. It starts out as a story, but it does not develop in any narrative direction. It is written in prose, but it employs a number of features we expect to find in poetry. It is published as an autonomous, completed text, but it appears fragmentary and incomplete. The fact that it originates from a draft version of the canonised Ill Seen III Said (Krance, 200) might lead one to perceive it as a fragment, but that would be to disregard its autonomous status.1 It has very rarely been subjected to close analytical scrutiny. In fact, I have only come across a few interpretations (by Cohn 2001, 35859; Krance, xx; Santilli, 177-78; Van Hulle 2009, ix-x), all of which are little more than a page or so long. However, One Evening's intricate composition and the major themes and stylistic features of Beckett's late art that it comprises call for consideration of this prose piece in its own right. In this article, I engage in an extensive close reading of One Evening. First, it is argued that the narrative is truncated or blocked and that this shifts the focus onto the narrator's act. The stasis then gives way to a discussion of the narrator's employment of poetic features in relation to One Evening's themes and symbols. Finally, the text's dominant theme of human mortality is shown to trigger meditation on religion and nothingness and to entail a liminal existence in which the moment seems to freeze, but ending is deferred. What we are left with is a tableau vivant, as it is termed in the text (line 50), or an anthropomorphic still life.'Plot' and the Narrating ActOne Evening consists of one long paragraph of fifty-four lines (Beckett 1995, 253-54).2 As Ruby Cohn asserts, To call Un soir a short story is to highlight its slight narrative (2001, 358). Basically you can summarise the narrative content and information as follows: An old widow, straying in a field in search of yellow flowers for her deceased husband's grave, stumbles on a man lying on the ground. This singular event is told more than once, and both the extent and the order of the details provided vary. The narrative situation is a complicated one. At a basic level, the narrator is heterodiegetic (i.e., not a character in the story world), but the focalization oscillates between being internal and external. In some sections of the text, the narrator's voice predominates, leaving us without access to the woman's psychology; in other sections, however, the woman's thoughts eclipse the narrator's presence. This oscillation between the two extremes has to do with the degree of distance or contiguity between the narrative voice and the woman's obscure and unstable psychology. The single paragraph of the text can be roughly divided into the following six sequences: (1) lines 1-5 present the encounter; (2) 5-12 provide a description of the man; (3) in 12-17 the narrator describes the woman in greater detail and gives a glimpse of her inner thoughts; (4) 18-27 again freezes the moment of the encounter that opened the text; (5) in 28-47 an inner point of view of the woman is narrated, focussing on the time just before she stumbles on the body; (6) 47-54 again focuses on the frozen image of the encounter. …

L'image De La Pensée :

Once we understand the Geulincx and his interpretation of the of Descartes, it is evident that, although Beckett plays also with the system of Descartes, the Geulincx system is much nearer the image of thinking as presents it and that so the chiaro oscuro of playing with knowledge and ignorance in Beckett's art becomes much more clear.

Beckett after Beckett (review)

Reviewed by: Beckett after Beckett David Pattie S.E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, eds. Beckett after Beckett. Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 2006. Pp. 227. $59.95 (Hb). 2006, the centenary of Beckett's birth, was a busy year. The regular stream of conferences and publications devoted to his work has swelled into a flood, and the amount of material generated will no doubt keep publishers, academics, and students amply occupied for a while yet. This outpouring, however, should take no one by surprise; Beckett has always generated more than the usual amount of commentary and criticism, with no sense that his work is in any way exhausted by it. In fact, Beckett criticism is approaching an interesting developmental point: the Beckett archive is being mined, his letters are beginning to appear, and, as S.E. Gontarski notes in the introduction, all of this activity serves to create a series of afterimages through which Beckett's work is being reassessed. The period after Beckett — the turn toward biographically informed criticism, the advent of new critical schools (eco-criticism and genetic criticism are represented here), and the continuing use of Beckett's texts in contemporary French critical thought — does not tend toward the production of a final summary, either of the work itself or of the work's implications. Rather, the afterimages are multiplying, and the trace of Beckett is spreading, through philosophy, through performance, through literature, and through art. In these circumstances, a collection concerned with the afterimages produced by Beckett's writing is welcome, and especially when the collection is (by and large) as successful as this one. In Gontarski's and Uhlmann's collection, we encounter a range of the traces that Beckett has left: the first being Beckett himself, in a letter written to George Duithuit a few days before the composition of the Three Dialogues. In it, we encounter the argument laid out in the Dialogues — about an art devoid of relation — presented with more hesitancy and self-deprecation; the letter, in other words, retraces the Dialogues. And, as such, it is a useful paradigm for a collection that attempts a number of such retracings, both of Beckett's work in general and of the fine details of particular pieces of writing. Herbert Blau, for example, notes Beckett's traces in the history of American conceptual art; this trace moves across the dividing lines between modernity and post-modernity and across the lines imposed by distinct art forms — a trace of mourning discernible [End Page 290] as a ground bass beneath the practice of modern art. Bruno Clement, in "What the Philosophers Do with Samuel Beckett," discerns the retracing of Beckett's work in the writings of Deleuze, Badiou, and Anzieu, arguing (to my mind convincingly) that Beckett's work is used by all three as raw material for discussions of the nature of subjectivity, which discussions are simultaneously closely reasoned and fundamentally incompatible with one another. Other contributors write of the traces in Beckett's own work. Stephen Barker makes a strong argument for the trace of Nietzsche's conception of time in Beckett's art, and John Pilling provocatively notes the relative absence of Fritz Mauther's thought in Beckett's work — thus neatly removing a trace which Beckett scholars have been hunting down for decades. C.J. Ackerley discusses what might be called the reversed trace of Max Nordau in the evolution of the related ideas of coenaesthesis and the "Not-I" in Beckett. Anthony Uhlmann contributes a closely argued chapter on the images that Beckett borrowed from philosophy — images which, Uhlmann argues, are as central to the evolution of the Beckettian aesthetic as the artistic images already noted by Knowlson and others. A third set of contributors deals with the complex matter of the development of the Beckettian trace. S.E. Gontarski addresses the emerging "grey canon" in Beckett's work: the material, ancillary to the artworks, that necessarily transforms our ideas of the art. In particular, he deals with the weight of information now available on Beckett the director and in doing so provides more evidence for those who regard Beckett not only as a significant playwright but as a significant...

Beckett and Popper, Or, "What Stink of Artifice": Some Notes on Methodology, Falsifiability, and Criticism in Beckett Studies

The following attempts to identify an implicit theoretical divergence already existing in Beckett Studies. Contrasting methodologies, albeit oftentimes implicitly, continue to approach Beckett's writing from markedly different perspectives. One contributing factor to this dilemma is found in Beckett's art and (now archived) supporting materials, which shall also be considered. This article concludes that theorising from a position of empirical accuracy, especially in Beckett Studies, is inherently preferable in demonstrably increasing scholarly knowledge of our shared subject, Samuel Beckett.

BECKETT’S BOREDOM AND THE SPIRIT OF ADORNO

Beckett is sometimes conspicuously tedious. The conspicuousness warns against interpreting boredom as a response to a lapse on the part of the author. A change in the understanding of art is at stake, whereby the irreducibility that metaphysics since Plato attributes to art might allow reformulation and refinement as the irreducibility of the insignificance of the boring to the signification of spirit. Adorno, who speaks of the spiritualization of Beckett's art, is not insensitive to the insignificance of the boring because for him spirit is selfquestioning and not the contradictory reification of a spirit distinct from the boring.

Catastrophe, Autonomy and the Future Of Modernism: Trying to Understand Adorno's Reading of

Theodor Adorno's essay Trying to Understand never refuses the challenge to interpret but it does not for one moment pretend that theory can unlock the meanings of an aesthetic object without putting its own processes, concepts and style into question – a challenge that is posed by the aesthetic object itself. The autonomy of Beckett's art must be acknowledged yet at the same time be seen to engage in the most demanding questions of our time. How Adorno manages to keep the critical force of these axioms together is the subject of this essay. Far from being rendered irrelevant by postmodernism, I argue in the conclusion that such a critical project provokes the question of the future of modernism, not its demise.

Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words

In contrast to the many critics who consider W. B. Yeats a dominant influence on Beckett's drama, this study demonstrates that the two are almost diametrically opposed in their theater and that the real bridge to Beckett's art is to be found in the narrative and pictorial creations of the younger Yeats brother, Jack.

Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition

Samuel Beckett's work harbors an inevitable complicity with traditional modes and values. His idealist and even nihilist inclinations, for example, are closely related to the abstracting and systematizing tendencies that have predominated in Western thinking. His drama and fiction, in reproducing these tendencies, also help to reinforce and legitimate them. Beckett's work can thus be said to encourage an attitude of stoic resignation or life-denying withdrawal.Sylvie Debevec Henning's study reveals an important countertendency. In examining Beckett's art and literary criticism, his novel "Murphy," plays "Krapp's Last Tape" and "Endgame," his only film venture, and the late story "The Lost Ones," she shows that through a variety of double-voiced techniques -- irony, parody, and satire -- Beckett also brings a powerful critical light to bear upon our culture's repeated attempts to reduce or eliminate the more problematic aspects of existence and even mocks our desire to do so. His disquieting and occasionally uproarious interweaving of contradictory perspectives -- somber and carnivalized, established and contestory -- suggests that suffering and anguish are fundamental to life, while it affirms their relation to laughter and creative vigor within a richer, if less settled, cultural context.Drawing upon the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and particularly Bakhtin, Henning argues that Beckett's profound critique of Western intellectual tradition does not necessarily entail the loss of all positive values and beliefs. On the contrary, his use of carnivalesque and dialogized modes signals a revitalizing capacity that has not been fully appreciated.

Beckett's critical complicity: carnival, contestation, and tradition

Samuel Beckett's work harbors an inevitable complicity with traditional modes and values. His idealist and even nihilist inclinations, for example, are closely related to the abstracting and systematizing tendencies that have predominated in Western thinking. His drama and fiction, in reproducing these tendencies, also help to reinforce and legitimate them. Beckett's work can thus be said to encourage an attitude of stoic resignation or life-denying withdrawal.Sylvie Debevec Henning's study reveals an important countertendency. In examining Beckett's art and literary criticism, his novel Murphy, plays Krapp's Last Tape and Endgame, his only film venture, and the late story The Lost Ones, she shows that through a variety of double-voiced techniques -- irony, parody, and satire -- Beckett also brings a powerful critical light to bear upon our culture's repeated attempts to reduce or eliminate the more problematic aspects of existence and even mocks our desire to do so. His disquieting and occasionally uproarious interweaving of contradictory perspectives -- somber and carnivalized, established and contestory -- suggests that suffering and anguish are fundamental to life, while it affirms their relation to laughter and creative vigor within a richer, if less settled, cultural context.Drawing upon the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and particularly Bakhtin, Henning argues that Beckett's profound critique of Western intellectual tradition does not necessarily entail the loss of all positive values and beliefs. On the contrary, his use of carnivalesque and dialogized modes signals a revitalizing capacity that has not been fully appreciated.

Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett (review)

Reviewed by: Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett S. E. Gontarski Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer , eds. Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1987. 245 pp. $24.95. Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett promises much: a "new perspective" that will emphasize "three significant aspects of Beckett's art that have received insufficient consideration," those being "his bilinguality," his exploration of "several verbal, kinetic, and visual media," and his influence on "many other artists." As the final category suggests, the word "translation" is given very wide berth; almost any aspect of what we have traditionally called "creativity" is here called "translation," including the rendering of "not only the metaphysical but also the political world of the twentieth century into powerful tragic images." The editors announce "a new phase in Beckett scholarship," but the proclamation seems hyperbolic; the Introduction has more the ring of a publisher's proposal than an assessment of contents. And yet with twenty-two wide-ranging essays organized in five sometimes awkward categories, the volume makes good on many of its claims. Part One, "Translations French/English, English/French," aside from developing the editors' mania for dichotomies, does call attention to (even as it fails to, indeed cannot, resolve) what remains one of the most vexing problems in Beckett studies, the relation of Beckett's texts in the language of their composition to their author-translated counterparts. To call them separate texts and be done with it not only doubles the canon but begs the question. Brian T. Fitch convincingly argues that the translated text, in this case Companie, "provide[s] a kind of interpretation of Company." For Fitch the two versions remain "interdependent," and so even the best of arguments brings us back full circle. To the central question, "Which version [the French or the English, or the text in its language of composition or the translation] is the 'real' or the 'better' one?" Majorie Perloff can only note, "Obviously bom and neither." But the pleas of critics in Part One for Beckett scholars to confront the multilingual aspects of the Beckett canon are largely unheeded, even for the remainder of the volume. Linda Ben-Zvi admits, for instance, "Also, what I am saying about the sound structures in How it is will alter in the French translation Comment c'est." The point here is less the blunder (the French, of course, is not a translation) than the fact that most critics don't treat the bilingual nature of Beckett's work, even in volumes at least titularly devoted to that subject. Part Two, called "Conceptual Transmutations," is the fuzziest of the categories. It includes some fine essays, including Rosette Lamont's epiphany at the Auschwitz death camp, "that Samuel Beckett is one of the great Holocaust writers of our time." In an act of legerdemain, however, the section also includes Richard Keller Simon's attack on all those critics who have seen Beckett as a comic writer (most of whom are represented in this volume, unrepentant). In the following essay, writing on Beckett and Duchamp, Jessica Prinz (wisely) ignores (or perhaps is unaware of) Simon's argument as she notes that "humor is an essential component of their [Beckett's and Duchamp's] work." Certainly, many of the critics in the volume would have welcomed the opportunity to respond to Simon directly. Scholarly disagreements are healthy, but here they resemble an "Exquisite Corpse," as critics add to a whole without knowing what others have contributed. [End Page 722] Part Three, "Genre Transformations," seems to be a more distinct category than those preceding, because most writers discuss what H. Porter Abbott calls working "against genre," Ben-Zvi's linguistic discussion of "manipulation with phonemes" excepted: against autobiography (Abbott), against the pastoral (Smith), against the whole of drama (Zeifman), against the whole of fiction (Moorjani), and against all genres (Hayman). Part Four, "Transpositions for Stage and Screen," includes a survey of Beckett's work for television (Bishop), a detailed history of adaptations of Beckett's work by Mabou Mines (Cohn), and a look at the American playwright most influenced by Beckett, Sam Shepard (Brienza). By the fifth and final "Part" the reader may still be...