Beckett's Writings Research Articles

Samuel Beckett and Technology ed. by Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar, and Mark Nixon

Reviewed by: Samuel Beckett and Technology ed. by Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar, and Mark Nixon Lois Oppenheim (bio) Samuel Beckett and Technology Edited by Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar, and Mark Nixon. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Pp. 269. Samuel Beckett … and technology? A surprising topic for an academic conference, an even more surprising subject of a book to follow. Or so it would seem. Samuel Beckett: Minimalism. Avant-garde. Theatre of the Absurd. Such is the terminology on which Beckett's devoted were raised. But "habit is a great deadener," as Vladimir tells us in Waiting for Godot, and, while many moved on to speak of the work of this greatest of twentieth century playwrights/novelists from other aesthetic perspectives and from intradisciplinary points of view as well—the philosophic and psychoanalytic foremost among them—it was not until relatively recently that a predominant but inauspicious dimension of Beckett's work was recognized. It was not until some scholars, Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle the leaders among them, began to investigate the significance of genetic criticism for what it offers Beckett studies that attention was paid to an entirely different facet of what makes Beckett's work Beckettian. Critic Enoch Brater, in his book Beyond Minimalism (Oxford University Press, 1987), raised our awareness of the need to dig deeper, to see how, for example, the mechanical recording of a voice (as in Beckett's plays Krapp's Last Tape and Rockaby) interacted with the image viewed on the stage, or how electronically transformed recorded sounds (as in the radio play All That Fall) allowed for the listener's perception of the actor's internal consciousness. But it was then up to others to take yet another step, and in a somewhat different direction, for the significance of technology to be understood in the creation of the experience that is ours as we read, watch, or listen to Beckett's work. Several have now done so, and it is this that has culminated in the fine collection of studies that comprise this book. "Film is … a movie about the experience of our eyes watching other eyes watching us, the overexposure neatly accomplished by the superhuman eye of the camera," wrote Brater (p. 79). With a focus on Beckett's preoccupation with technologies of various sorts, some of the contributors to this volume [End Page 1225] demonstrate just how vision, actual or metaphorical, becomes superhuman and why. Several are interested in how this and other perceptual modalities are impacted—enforced or diminished—by modes of communication (radio, television), theatrical equipment (lighting, sound), voice recorders, and other kinds of machines. Other contributors are more attuned to the mechanization of human behavior itself or to representations of the interrelation between states of being and the technology of screen and stage. Or even transit: Feargal Whelan considers motion and inertia, with the latter more consistently depicted than the former by Beckett, in relation to train travel and railways. Adding "a temporal dimension" to poetics and hermeneutics, to the making and the interpretation of Beckett's work, Van Hulle offers a clear and concise exposition of the value of genetic criticism—an "enhanced appreciation of the production process" that includes how literary works (in this case Samuel Beckett's) come into being with all the "dead ends" and "forms of undoing that are often necessary to be able to move on" (p. 251)—as opposed to the single focus on a product such as it is, once it is. Each of the chapters contributes in important ways to our understanding of the subject–object dichotomy with which humankind has long grappled, and to Beckett's own heretofore insufficiently recognized preoccupation with the abstraction of subjective experience. Each offers a highly intelligent and exceedingly well-written analysis of the relation between technology, craft, and Beckett's work and, in so doing, aids in our understanding, at once, of the modernist and postmodernist elements of Beckett's writings and what might oddly be thought of as their simultaneity. Each chapter aids in our understanding (in itself increasingly mechanistic) of the "unmaking of the Western humanist tradition" (p. 1). Whether through an emphasis on the "non-narrative almost...

Soglie di voci attorno all’increabile. Il lavoro del Negativo nella scrittura di Franz Kafka e Samuel Beckett

The paper proposes a comparative analysis of the question of limit in its connections with the work of the Negative (Le Travail du negatif, A. Green) in two great proses of the 20th Century: Samuel Beckett's Company (1980) and Franz Kafka's Der Bau (The Burrow, 1923/24). The contribution articulates in two main moments: within the specificity of a psychoanalytical approach, I reconsider the problem of the Work of the Negative in literature, discussing how, in Kafka's and Beckett's works, the Negative represents a radical alterity to a philosophical perspective. In a second moment of the paper, I analyse the complexity of the representational strategy of the limit in Kafka's and Beckett's writings, investigating thus the question of subjectivity and the relationship with an Otherness through the writing, the question of memory, its construction processes by means of writing, the work of mourning, and the development of poetics of irreducibility and unrepresentability towards an ethics of literature.

“GRÂCE AUX EXCRÉMENTS DES CITOYENS”: Beckett, Swift and the Coprophagic Economy of Ballyba

his country problem - no, do it.Beckett, Malone DiesOn 15 February 1954 editor and translator Hans Naumann wrote to Beckett expressing his admiration for (1951), before broaching a subject that has frequently provided an effective point of departure in recent re-evaluation of Beckett's writings within an Irish context: be right to try to find in your work presence of an Irish tradition [?] Beckett's response aptly illustrates his simultaneous engagement with and disengagement from this tradition. Two days later, he appeared to circumvent Naumann's enquiry, insisting On Ireland [...] is utterly impossible for me to speak with moderation, whilst concurrently invoking central image of W. B. Yeats's play At Hawk's Well (1918): I had no need to drink at magic fountain to be able to bear living outside it (2011, 465). This evasion, then, seems more paraliptic than elliptical, for although both rhetorical terms share same etymological root (Gk. leipo [to leave behind]), former sidesteps a given element, whereas latter passes by without mention.1 To sidestep an obstacle is, of course, not merely to evade it, but to acknowledge and evade it; furthermore, when Malone turns to economic deliberations of Saposcat in Malone Dies (1956), his narrative constitutes a similarly apophastic discourse, since refers to, whilst claiming not to refer to, matter in hand. Introducing Sapo's reflections on the market, Malone promises further details, but ultimately musters less than twenty words upon subject as he stammers through a series of aporetic sentences: In his country problem - no, do it. peasants. His visits to. can't (2010a, 21). French text, however, obliquely intimates that this passage represents more than just a deliberate eschewal of what, in his 1945 review of Thomas MacGreevy's monograph on Jack B. Yeats, Beckett termed local substance (1983, 97), as Malone stipulates that this national dilemma relates to le plan alimentaire (the food plan; 1951b, 35; my translation).This juxtaposition of economic and alimentary is a vestigial trace of trilogy's evolution, for gestures towards a thirteen-page scatological passage in third of four Molloy notebooks, a passage that savagely parodies economic protecttionism adopted by Fianna Fail during Anglo-Irish Economic War of 1930s. This passage might productively be read both alongside Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and against Protestant, bourgeois interpretation of economic writings of Swift and Bishop Berkeley in Ireland during 1930s, which Beckett encountered in Joseph Hone and Mario M. Rossi's Bishop Berkeley: His Life, Writings and Philosophy (1931) and Swift: or, Egotist (1934). Nevertheless, more immediate context of Beckett's depiction of prosperity of Ballyba was material deprivation of post-war France, which he described in non-fictional broadcast The Capital of Ruins (1946). Perhaps more significant than a recognition of either of these historical contexts, however, is extent to which elision of this satirical passage functions as an index of a paraliptic politics. For if, as Peter Boxall argues, Beckett's negativity is bound up with a stubbornly residual referentiality (163), a paraliptic politics would denote a compositional process governed by a play of centripetal and centrifugal forces, wherein a movement towards political induces a subsequent retreat, as inscription of an overtly political writing occasions its own effacement.Beckett, Ariosto and SwiftRead in conjunction with Beckett's critical writings, this scatological passage occupies a peculiar position, for Beckett clearly articulates an aversion to satire in a review of Jack B. Yeats's Amaranthers (1936), a review which lauds Yeats's novel for its divergence from Gulliver's Travels: There is no satire. …

Performance Set-Pieces in Joyce and Beckett's Writings

Alan W. Friedman's absorbing, entertaining, and ultimately both uplifting and heart wrenching Party Pieces: Oral Storytelling and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett examines “party pieces.” He...

Performance Set-Pieces in Joyce and Beckett's Writings

Storytelling, Self, Society ,8:52-57, 2012 Copyright©Taylor &Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1550-5340 print /1932-0280 online DOI: 10.1080/15505340.2012.635088 Routledge Taylor &Francis Croup BOOK REVIEWS Performance Set-Pieces in Joyce and Beckett's Writings Carol SimpsonStern Friedman, AlanW.Party Pieces: OralStorytelling andSocialPerformance inJoyce andBeckett. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007.$45. AlanW.Friedman's absorbing, entertaining, andultimately bothuplifting andheart wrenching Party Pieces: OralStorytelling andSocial Performance inJoyce andBeckett examines "party pieces."He defines them as an impromptu kindofperformance thatis frequent, familiar, and offered bynonprofessional performers ineveryday lifesocialsituations. Friedman's interest is inthewaythat Joyce andBeckett usetheseperformative actsintheir writings. Anafter-dinner speech,a toastat mealtime, or a disquisition in a library arebutjusta fewoftheexamples he examines; he also looksat terser forms, theshort oralanecdotes thatappearso frequently in JamesJoyce'sUlyssesand theircounterparts, evermoreabbreviated, in thewritings of Beckett. Friedman's bookopenswithan introduction totherichinherited oraltradition from which Irishparty piecesderive. Homeric epicsandancient Irishsagasaboundwith examples ofthem. He continues andbroadens thediscussion toinclude literary manifestations ofthegenre andtheir Irishpractitioners, including OscarWilde,W.B. Yeats,andLadyGregory, amongothers. His project istoidentify andreflect onthese performances orwhat hecalls"presentational enactments thatreconfigure performative genreswithin an oraltradition ofIrishself-representation ..." (xxvii-xxviii) andhowthey function inthefiction anddramaas wellas inthelivesofJames Joyce andSamuelBeckett. He writes extensively aboutscenesfamiliar to thereadersofJoyce andBeckett, focusing predominantly onJoyce's three mostwidely known books,Dubliners ,A Portrait oftheArtist as a Young Man, andUlysses , andBeckett's dramas, withspecialemphasis on Waiting forGodot , Endgame ,andHappyDaysas wellas hismoreexperimental later works. Friedman's prosestyleis disarmingly freeofcritical cant;he is unpretentious anda careful ,thoughtful, interpreter oftheseworksthathavehad suchan abundance ofcriticism piled Address correspondence toCarol Simpson Stern, Department ofPerformance Studies, Northwestern University, Annie May Swift Hall, 1920 Campus Drive, Room 210, Evanston, IL60208. E-mail: cs@northwestern.edu BOOK REVIEW 53 atopofthem. His study is intriguing, andheadvances hisfresh readings andreassessment with humility andgreat insight. Whatmakeshisbookso right forthereaders ofourjournalis that itstopicis at theheart ofourinterest. His critical lensis on theperformers in thetexts, the expectations andfearsthat drivethem, thepossibility they confer ofaltering orreshaping the performers' socialstatus andthebondorrupture they experience with thecommunal observers, participants, ornaysayers. He notesthat theperformative impulse canalso be a well-rehearsed one:itcantaketheform ofa nursery rhyme, a story, a poem,bothspoken andwritten, andits impact onitsaudience can,inturn, reshape itsmaker. Theperformative actalsodepends onits audience, anditsrole,too,is examined inthisbook.Friedman marvels atthesheernumber of occasionsinwhichsongsarealludedtoin Ulysses , some400 times;inFinnegans Wake , they exceed1,000.He discusses atlength performance andnon-performance experiences ofboth his subjects. Storytelling, skits, musicalperformance, anddanceareall examples Friedman citesofthe self-dramatizing party piecesat work.Fromthetimetheywerefirst introduced in Irelandto thepresent, party piecescelebrated hospitality, verbalandmusicalvirtuosity, andcommunal interaction, either inspiring community orhostility. Theywerealwaysa double-edged sword, holding thepossibility ofvictory orconquest andbetrayal. Friedman drawson thewritings of familiar anthropological andperformance scholars suchas Walter Ong,RoyRappaport, Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, andErvingGoffman andothers toprovide a context forhisdiscussionoforality , ritual, andperformance ineveryday life.He viewsHomer'sOdyssey tobe oneofthegreatest party piecesinWestern literature. Reflecting onhowtheseparty piecesare embedded in theculture and textsof thewriters underexamination, he drawson numerous examples. FromJoyce'scanon,he includes actsofstorytelling: Hynes'seulogyforthefallen political hero, CharlesStewart Parnell, in"IvyDay intheCommittee Room"from Dubliners ; thespeeches attheDedalusesChristmas dinner table, including Dante'sangry screams ofdenunciationofParnell inPortrait, andlaterinthesamebook,thehell-fire-and-damnation sermon heardbyStephen to be followed in thefinal chapter byStephen's erudite lecture on aesthetics givento hisfriends. Whereascustomarily we expectan atmosphere ofconviviality when welcoming andafter-dinner speeches aredelivered, inJoyce's case,Friedman explains, theoccasionsareoften fractious andtherulesrequired tofulfill socialexpectations aredisappointed or broken. Friedman draws on Ulysses , analyzing theparty pieceStephen performs whenheholdsforth onhistheory ofHamlet inthe National Library. Thisshowy, well-rehearsed display goesseriously wrong inspots.Friedman points tothenumerous theatrical features ofthescene:Stephen has carefully chosenthetime andplace,asksthat thecurtain be "lifted," tries tohumor hisaudience along, andoffers hisowninternal assessment ofhisskills inrendering a party piece.Nonetheless, hefailshisowntest andalsofailstoadvancehisartistic agenda.Inshort, heis all talkbutthere is little artistic output ofanysort. Friedman offers numerous other examples from Ulysses , all involving a speechas anactofsocialinteraction requiring a speaker andanaudience andconforming totacit rulesgoverning suchexchanges. Inhisanalysis ofUlysses andtheearlier novel, heviewsStephen as largely a failedperformer notreadytoassumetheroleofartist towhich he aspires.Throughout, Friedman is interested in exploring howtheseparty piecesfunction; howthey are"foregrounded andoften parodied" inJoyce's writings (xv) andhowthey areless obvious, more hostile incharacter, andoften subverted byBeckett, leaving onlytheir traces and vanishings andreflecting a much darker vision. 54 STERN Beckett, incontrast toJoyce, first employs party piecesas assertions uttered bycharacters in reduced ifnothopelessorabsurd environments whereself-declaration is almostfutile. Thisis inmarked contrast toJoyce whoseperformers moreoften miscarry...

Abjection and the Fear of Alterity: Matricide and the Trope of the Maternal in the Works of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Samuel Beckett

The article offers an analysis of the intrinsically ambiguous representation of the maternal figure in Carlo Emilio Gadda's and Samuel Beckett's writings (with a particular focus on La cognizione del dolore and Beckett's prose Trilogy), which is characterized both by an absolute kind of love and by aggressive desires vented against her. Adopting a Kristevan theoretical framework, a close relationship between the literary trope of matricide and the fragmented notion of the self is identified. In this context, particular emphasis is paid to the narrative imagery of abjection (prevalently in the form of defilement and obscenity) accompanying the maternal trope, a literary and cultural phenomenon which according to Kristeva disturbs identity, system, and order. The present investigation identifies the intrinsically disruptive effect of the maternal figure on both narrative linearity and on the very notion of the subject.

The Ideal Real: A Frustrated Impulse in Samuel Beckett's Writing

Samuel Beckett's attraction to mysticism is most obvious in his interest in negative theology and the ; but it first presented itself in aesthetic rather than religious terms, through Proust's concept of the “ideal real,” as reflected in involuntary memory. For a time Beckett saw this as a viable aesthetic; that conviction was short-lived, but the “ideal real” left lasting traces on his work, though subject to increasing irony and the sense of the mind “devising.” In Beckett's most deliberate account of the transcendental experience, Arsene's moment in the sun in , the reality of the event is not in doubt but any validation of its meaning is emphatically withheld.

The Calligraphy of Desire: Barthes, Sade, and Beckett’s How It Is

One is the victim of everything one writes. --Samuel Beckett (qtd. in Abbott 109) If something is 'communicated' in writing, Roland Barthes wrote, is not a reckoning, or 'reason' ... but a (Masson's Semiography 155). Throughout his late work, and especially in The Pleasure of the. Text, Barthes worked out a poetics of such desire. At first glance, the world of Samuel Beckett seems far away from that of Barthes. Little pleasure is available to the inhabitants of Beckett's texts, let alone Barthesian jouis-sauce. Nevertheless, from its earliest expression in his 1931 study of Proust to its embodiment in his 1983 novella Worstuwd Ho, Beckett's aesthetics has been fraught with questions of need and desire. But whereas Barthes presents the activities of reading and writing as a titillating striptease, for Beckett they have been sources less of inspiration than frustration, less of pleasure than suffering. Indeed, where for Barthes writing is a kind of jouissance, Beckett has remarked about his writing: I'm working with impotence (qtd. in Shenker 148). Nowhere in Beckett's writings has the dilemma of the artist's simultaneous obligation and inability to express been more elaborately, absurdly, or brutally explored than in his last major novel How It Is, a work that both anticipates Barthes's poetics of desire and radically tests--or inverts--it. How It Is comes after the period in which Beckett produced his major and best-known works, the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) and the plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame. At the end of this period (the middle 1950s), Beckett felt himself to be at a particularly daunting aesthetic impasse, and in one of his few interviews of the time, he began to reformulate his position of frustrated need and desire in terms of the physical body: there is a form, but doesn't move, stand upright, have hands. ... Being has a form. Someone will find someday. Perhaps won't but someone will. It is a form that has been abandoned, left behind, a proxy in its place. (qtd. in Harvey 249) How It Is--written in French as Comment c'est in 1961 and published in English in 1964--is Beckett's effort to break through this impasse: to explore the possibilities of form as an abandoned body. It is, all, a text of need and desire, in which the compulsions to speak and. write are manifested in the impotent, abandoned bodies of the characters; the text itself, the narrator, and the characters are all permeated with tropes of the body, but is the manual act of writing--a fascination he shares with Barthes--that Beckett explores most intently through a savagely literalized corporeal metaphor. Desire in the mud: Prior to the script How It Is is a complexly structured, black-humored exploration of Beckett's aesthetics of need. The narrator is naked, crawling on his belly in the dark through a world of mud. The framing structure and ultimate source of narrative authority are maddeningly elusive. Until the end, the narrator claims that a voice not his own is forcing itself through him, and thus that the text is one long quotation. (The refrains I say as hear it or I quote continually reassert this ventriloquy). The novel is divided into three parts, which the narrator refers to as journey, couple, and abandon. In the first, journey, the exhausted narrator crawls along by himself, experiencing dreamlike visions of a life above in the light (8), pausing occasionally to rest and eat a tin of prawns (stored in a sack he drags with him and opened with a tin opener which he puts to more sinister use later). In part two, he stumbles on another naked, crawling figure whom he names Pim and subjects to a brutal regimen of interrogation, conducted primarily by carving questions into Pim's back with his fingernails. Pim escapes the narrator in the final part of the novel, the abandon, and the narrator hypothesizes a vastly complex procession of victims and tormentors, of which he and Pim are a part. …

Omniprésence De Samuel Beckett Dans L'œuvre de Raymond Cousse / Présence de Raymond Cousse Dans œeuvre de Samuel Beckett?

A novelist and playwright of little renown, Raymond Cousse is mostly known for his play His encounter with Beckett's work and then with Beckett himself was the electric shock that pushed this autodidact into writing. Our paper tends to a double aim : we shall fIrst examine how deeply Beckett has marked Cousse's work and existence, through the study of his writings – including non published documents such as abstracts from his diary, the correspondence between the two authors and several manuscripts by Cousse. We will then proceed with the following question: is the Irish writer's all-pervasive presence in Cousse's work reciprocated, in Samuel Beckett's writings, with echoes from Cousse's own novels and plays ?

Samuel Beckett and Anthropomorphic Insolence

Samuel Beckett's writings display a contradictory attitude to Romanticism, their incipient lyricism ruthlessly constrained and the "impulse to animise" rejected in favour of a view of nature as atomistic, mineral and organic. Beckett's distrust of the dictum that "man is the measure of all things" leads in to a sustained critique of the anthropomorphic impulse and of any epistemology (including Romanticism) that thus asserts the self. I then critique, from the perspective of , two Romantic tenets: "mythical fancy" and the transcendental impulse. The essay concludes where it begins, with Beckett's ambiguous attraction to a tradition he rejected, this constituting his experience of the romantic agony.

Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett: "Cette parole nue qui vient de la souffrance"

In 1986, Charles Juliet published his , which included four interviews he had with the author. Juliet had discovered Samuel Beckett as early as 1965 by way of his writings. Reading Beckett, notably his , and , had a determinant influence on Charles Juliet's literary career. It is mostly in the company of Beckett that he finds his own voice. This article examines both the way in which Beckett's writings may have had an influence on the beginning of Charles Juliet's existential and poetic voyage, and the dialogue established between two related literary worlds.

Beckett and Aesthetics (review)

Reviewed by: Beckett and Aesthetics Linda Ben-Zvi Beckett and Aesthetics. By Daniel Albright. London: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 188. $65.00 cloth. Daniel Albright's Beckett and Aesthetics is one of those books that is so well written, so erudite—despite its brevity—so brimming with intelligent comments, interesting juxtapositions, and new points of departure, that even a reader like myself, not in agreement with some of his contentions and conclusions, can welcome it as an important addition to Beckett studies. Albright divides his discussion into three parts: "Stage: resisting furniture"; "Tape recorder, radio, film, television: resisting the human image"; and "Music: losing the will to resist." Rather than argue, as many scholars have, that Beckett was fascinated with the possibilities of new technology, Albright contends that Beckett's writings reflect the writer's conscious attempts to use technological forms "in deliberately awkward ways," the better to foreground not the potential of media but their "muteness, incompetence, non-feasance of transmission" (2). Albright ties Beckett's aesthetics directly to Surrealism. "Beckett spent his whole life under the spell of the Surrealist Exhibit," and "his instincts were Surrealist" (9), he states categorically in his introduction, "Beckett and Surrealism." He points out the family resemblances: that Beckett, like the surrealists, fractures planes and bodies, calls media used into question, and ironizes artistic struggles. Although Albright does not doggedly read Beckett through Duchamp, Breton, or other specific surrealists, as the title and assertions seem to promise or threaten, and although he says that Beckett tried to remain both "inside and outside of the Surrealism" (9), he does draw analogies between certain Beckett fictions and those executed by surrealist writers, [End Page 362] pointing out, however, that "only in Beckett's texts do the words feel like chunks of rock crumbling off friable surfaces, fragments of eroded grace" (210), an illustration of Albright's own grace with language and imagery as well as Beckett's. He also invokes the paintings of Magritte, Ernst, Tanguy, de Chiroco, and Mondrian to describe Beckett's theatre: "If a Beckett play were a painting, it would consist of Mondrian grids disfigured with splashes and spatters" (92); or "if Ghost Trio is a play at all, it is closer to Mondrian than to Strindberg, just a game with superimposed rectangles—the visual system is detaching itself from every human meaning" (136). Looking as he does at Beckett's dramas through surrealist lenses, even worn lightly on the nose, Albright tends to see structures, not people—Ghost Trio is "just a game"—and assumes that any citing of human beings in such "non-representational art" are only "flimsy, jury-rigged theatrical conveniences, all dreck and bricolage" (25). Or ooze. Albright graphically describes how everything and everyone "oozes" in Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame;the latter "burbles off into semi-narrative meta-undrama, play-ooze, before it stops dead" (65). All ooze in Beckett's world, according to Albright, but women seem to do it more and assume grotesque shapes. He sees Maddy in All That Fall, as "feeble, ignorant . . . a puddle of flab" (104); Winnie in Happy Days as a "mons-ster . . . kewpie Venus" whose sex organs are "dilated, engorged into a whole hot universe, a hideous jumble" (73); and M in Not I as a mouth whose "memories of rape are abstracted into a word-chase delivered by a clownishly isolated pair of lips" (6). Often Albright totally evacuates characters from the plays, describing Play as "a dazzling light show" (6), Footfalls as "a mode of reading" (80) foisted on the drama, and Rough for Radio II as a search for "a formula that will absorb all talk into écriture and thereby permit silence" (114). He also argues that there is no Joe in the television play Eh Joe, but rather "a technical simulacrum of a human being" (129), dissolving in the final close-up into "the flimsy pattern of dark and light dots on the screen" (129). While all Beckett's characters are fluid, mutating, and, especially in the later plays, presented as partial bodies, distorted in the manner of surrealist paintings, Albright—whose orientation is literature, music, and aesthetics, not live performance—seems...

Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts (review)

Reviewed by: Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts Natka Bianchini Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts. Edited by Linda Ben-Zvi. Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, Tel Aviv University, 2003; pp. xvi + 343. $30.00 cloth. A scholarly legend such as Martin Esslin deserves a book dedicated to his memory to be of corresponding quality. Fortunately for us, Linda Ben-Zvi's edited collection of essays does not disappoint. In scope and content, it is a fitting tribute to a man who played a shaping role in the creation of Samuel Beckett as an icon of twentieth-century drama. A majority of the book's twenty-one essays grew out of the 2002 Samuel Beckett Working Group, a forum that meets semi-annually at the conference of the International Federation of Theatre Research. That year's conference theme (Cultural Memory, and Theatre) figures prominently in many of the articles. The book is divided into two categories: Influence, Memory and Theory, and Media and Performance. This approach provides a harmonious blend of theoretical inquiry and performance-based analysis. The more theoretical first half, rather than tread well-worn paths, stretches Beckett scholarship in new directions. As Ben-Zvi notes in her introduction, after a half-century of textual analyses and focus on theoretical categories (such as gender or postcolonial studies), Beckett criticism has recently shifted "towards investigations of those sources to which Beckett was drawn" (xi), a direction suggested by Beckett scholar and biographer James Knowlson during a keynote address at the Berlin Millennial Conference, "Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000." Ben-Zvi has assembled a prominent group of international Beckett scholars who all, in different ways, give Beckett studies a healthy nudge in this new direction. One of the book's best and most exciting contributions is its first one. Mordechai Omer's "Passage of Time: Portraits of Samuel Beckett by Avigdor Arikha" is, in part, an exploration of Beckett's relationship with the artist Arikha. Their friendship, in true Beckett fashion, was longstanding (over three decades) and marked by mutual admiration for music and art. Arikha and Beckett shared similar artistic philosophies and served as each other's creative muses. Beckett dedicated several prose fragments to Arikha, while Arikha made him the subject of many sketches and paintings. Following the essay are twenty-four reprints of Arikha's work, most of them Beckett portraits that Arikha created spontaneously during evenings spent together. Omer had previously curated an exhibition of Arikha's Beckett portraits for an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of a 1976 tribute on the playwright's seventieth birthday. While some of Arikha's sketches have since been reprinted in books and playbills, it is a rare treat to have them so beautifully collected here. Arikha's drawings, like Beckett's writings, capture the essential ephemerality, the unfinished quality of life; they are simultaneously fluid and sparing, capturing the essential aspects of their subject in sparse, yet deliberate, detail. The nine essays in the volume's first half focus either on artists or ideas whose influence can be seen in Beckett's work, or on artists whose work Beckett influenced. Of particular interest are the articles that link Beckett to theatre practitioners less well known in the Western world: Mariko Hori Tanaka's essay looks at how Beckett, and specifically Waiting for Godot, has influenced three contemporary Japanese theatre artists ("The Legacy of Beckett in the Contemporary Japanese Theatre"); Shimon Levy's "Daring to Compare: Samuel Beckett and Hanoch Levin" investigates the similarities between Beckett and the playwright many Israeli scholars consider "as great as Beckett" (61). Still other essays find philosophic resonances between Beckett's work and thinkers as disparate as Diogenes, Hegel, and Alexandre Kojève (Angela Moorjani), the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (Antonia Rodríguez Gago), or even quantum physicists Bohr and Heisenberg (Irit Degani-Raz). After traversing this varied terrain, this half of the book [End Page 157] is appropriately concluded by a short Peter Gidal essay, entitled "Against Metaphor," which serves to remind the reader, as Ben-Zvi writes in her introduction, that "no two things are ever the same and the tendency to...

Introduction to "Historicising Beckett"

The essays collected here constitute a selection of the papers delivered on the subject of Historicising at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), which was held at the National University of Ireland, Galway in July 2004. We are grateful to the organisers for allowing us to participate in a highly memorable conference, and we are also grateful for an opportunity to publish a selection of the proceedings here. The overwhelming response to the initial call for papers may be taken as one indication of a growing sense of unease among scholars regarding the consensus that Beckett was a profoundly ahistorical writer. All too often, Beckett is read as an artist from nowhere, one whose imagination functioned outside history, and there is evidence of an implicit consensus that Beckett scholars would do better to focus their efforts on his complex relationship with a European philosophical and/or literary tradition. The counter-claim made here is that Beckett's writings do not function outside history, although, as S.E. Gontarski indicated many years ago, they do incorporate an intent of undoing to make them appear as though they might. Gontarski shows how Beckett painstakingly excised social and cultural determinants from successive drafts of his dramatic works in order to achieve the austere semblance of deracinated aesthetic. seems that Beckett consistently devalued content in favour of form as he revised his work, and this has meant that the social content of Beckett's writings is often viewed as an entirely ancillary concern. It is the shape that matters, as Beckett observed many times to his various directors and interpreters, so it is reasonably claimed that the various deterritorialised readings of Beckett's texts are only honouring the terms of engagement set by Beckett himself.

SEVERING CONNECTIONS WITH IRELAND: Women and the Irish Free State in Beckett's Writing

Beckett's female characterization in his early fiction is grotesque, devouring and sexually provocative. The intention of this article is to examine how such characterization is closely related to Beckett's resistance to the Irish Free State and the Celtic Revival movement by showing that the characterization can be attributed to the impulse to satirize the Celtic revivalists' portrayal of the idealized woman-as-Ireland. This article will argue that the male protagonists' attempt to achieve detachment from the possessive women in Beckett's early fiction gives expression to the author's desire for exile as well as to distance himself from the predominant literary nationalism.

'A brief glow in the dark': Samuel Beckett's Presence in Modern Irish Poetry

One definition of 'Irish' that I liked a lot was Samuel Beckett's. When he was interviewed by a French journalist, the journalist said: 'Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?'. To which Beckett replied: 'Au contraire'. (Seamus Heaney) (1) In 1982, the same year he harnessed Samuel Beckett's quip to define a notion of Irishness, Seamus Heaney protested at his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by pointing out that his passport was green. It is somewhat surprising that Heaney would invoke Beckett in a discussion of Irish national identity, as the latter's attachment to the national colour--and much else--was rather problematic. A week after the 1931 publication of Beckett's first book, Proust, in Chatto & Windus's 'Dolphin' series, the editor Charles Prentice wrote to Beckett apologizing for the fact that the front cover was brown rather than green: 'Clearly I have been trying to steal you from Ireland.' (2) Beckett's answer, that he had 'not noticed whether the Dolphin was green or brown', represents an early instance of what would become a lifelong ambivalence towards his native country. (3) This studied indifference is evident again in 1938, when Beckett describes Routledge's 'effort to make an Irishman of me' in the blurb to his novel Murphy as 'touching'. (4) Such efforts largely disappeared, however, following his permanent departure from the 'land of my unsuccessful abortion' for France, where 'the little operation is cheap, safe, legal + popular', not to mention his adoption of French as his creative medium. (5) Resurfacing only briefly during the 1956 Dublin production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett remained largely outside further developments in Irish cultural events until the early 1970s. (6) The timing of this (re)integration into collective cultural consciousness naturally owes much to the award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, but is surely also related to the eruption of the Troubles in that same year. In a climate where questions of identity, place, and displacement, and the role of the artist within society were highly charged, many Irish poets looked to Beckett's experiences when wondering, as Paul Muldoon does in '7, Middagh Street', 'Which side was I on? | Not one, or both, or none.' (7) This development is somewhat like that observable in post-war Germany, where Adorno's essay 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen' made Beckett central to socio-cultural and philosophical debates over the role, and possibility, of art in a society irredeemably altered by the Holocaust. (8) Yet in contrast to the efforts of German sociologists and philosophers to set Beckett into a more abstract and universal context, in Ireland, creative writers have entered into a more textual dialogue with Beckett's work, in an effort to investigate their own roles in the Irish community. In this undertaking, they have concentrated on Beckett's writings as creative texts, not merely as philosophical texts, whereby their religious and political aspects as well as largely ignored parts of his oeuvre have been explored. Thus the neglected field of Beckett's poetry has been discussed by Irish poets, amongst others Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and David Wheatley, often in scholarly Beckett journals. This essay will trace and explore the presence of Beckett in modern Irish poetry, particularly in that of Derek Mahon. Ruptures The Irish revival of critical interest in Beckett's work in the 1970s started a process of reappropriation, leading, for example, to John Montague's solicitation of Beckett (a few months before his death in 1989) for a contribution to The Great Book of Ireland compiled by 'Poetry Ireland'. (9) The first, most important event in the process of reintroducing Beckett into Irish cultural discussions after the Second World War was the republication of his 1934 essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' in the fourth number of The Lace Curtain in 1971 by the poets Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce. …

Out of Ireland: Revisionist Strategies in Beckett's Drama

Out ofIreland: Revisionist Strategies in Beckett's Drama LAURA BARGE Adeliberate and very public effort to situate Samuel Beckett within he Irish dramatic tradition occurred during thel991 Dublin Theatre Festivalwhen Michael Colgan,Director ofthe GateTheatre,remarked that the moment had arrived "to introduce a Dublin Audience to this greatwriterwho needs to belooked at in Ireland."1 Anyone familiarwith this writer's history understands only too well Colgan's sense ofthe necessity ofsuch an introduction. Beckett's personal, cultural, and aesthetic expatriation from Ireland is so adequately documented in the critical and biographical literature that it needs no reiteration here. Instead, we can remember that Beckett chooses early in his career not only to reject but also to insult—albeit with a humorous mockery—the Irish Celtic literary movement, that he forsakes Ireland as homeland in a biographically definitive manner, and that he deliberately adopts French as the language in which he writes. Thus Rodney Sharkey is surely on target when he claims that any effort attempting to "view Beckett in an Irish context cuts its own throat ifit chooses to ignore" that Beckett's literary careerwas definitivelyformed bythe philosophical and aesthetic culture ofEurope.2 Embracingas earlyas 1934 theaesthetic credo thatthewriter must cut all ties with familial, national, and cultural origins in order to explore the interior ofhis own unique vision,3 Beckett early stakes out his literary path and its territory and never departs from it. 175 176Comparative Drama How, then,can we account forBeckett's recitation in theyearhe died, 1989, on the occasion of the critic Hugh Kenner's final visit, of the last movement of Yeats's poem "The Tower," beginning wim the line referring to artistic self-creation, "Now shall I make my soul"?4 And how explain Beckett's literary Irishness as documented in Vivian Mercier's book The Irish Comic Tradition, in John Harrington's The Irish Beckett, in Mary Junker-Brennan's The Irish Dimension,5 and in a growing collection of scholarly articles? In particular, what should we make of the fact tiiat several of these studies connect specifically both the content and style of Beckett's drama with Irish influences, such as the plays of Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey?6 These numerous evidences ofBeckett's literary debt to the history, culture, language, persons, places, and landscapes of Ireland cannot be ignored. I think the answer to these questions lies in critically situating the Irish influences within the boundaries of Beckett's expatriation, that is, by foregrounding the revisionary nature of the majority of such influences . By following this course, we can contest Anthony Roche's misguided assumption that Beckett's quoting Yeats's "Now shall I make my soul" to Hugh Kenner indicated that Beckett had chosen Yeats rather than Joyce as a "major precursor."7 Few statements about Beckett as a writer could be more misleading. As Harrington says, "Beckett's work deconstructs a local revivalism confident ofthe sureties ofplace and collective consciousness." But Harrington is stopping short of exploring the rich Irish dimension of Beckett's writings when he argues further that because Beckett does not "consequently construct a positive" and "evident alternative" but remains in an "intractable" mode that issues merely in "an endless comedy of substitution," his writings are "unsuitable for revisionist use."8 1 think instead that Beckett moves beyond the stasis of revolt to function as an expatriate Irish writer on the literary frontiers ofthis century. As Sharkey insists,"...it is important not to view Beckett's Irishness as a type of tale ...signifying nihilism," but rather as the "condition" of"specific Irish experiences" and "understanding" out ofwhich Beckett's "extraordinary artistic vision emerged."9 A strong proof for this claim that springs immediately to mind is Beckett's incredibly innovative response to the work of James Joyce. Nothing could be more expected—and easily executed by someone of Laura Barge177 Beckett's genius—than to follow in the revolutionary/revisionary mode executed by Joyce's literary upheaval. That Beckett incorporates in his saying ofnothing the revisionarysaying ofeverythingby Joyce, and then moves beyond Joyce's amplitude ofform and content to an original impoverishment of both form and content that makes Beckett's achievement equal that...

Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. H. Porter Abbott , Beckett

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBeckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. H. Porter Abbott , BeckettJames AchesonJames Acheson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 97, Number 2Nov., 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/492860 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1999 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph

Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph

BECKETT'S TRILOGY AND THE LIMITS OF SELF-DECONSTRUCTION

Ever since the seminal works of Hugh Kenner (1962), Ruby Cohn (1964), and other critics of the first generation, we have known about the richness in philosophical topics of Beckett's works and the manifold philosophical readings his texts purportedly lend themselves to. Among those, Beckett's association with existentialist thought has been perhaps the most persistent of all (see Esslin 1965, 4-10). In any case, criticism has tended to mirror the various twists, turns and crises of literary and philosophical theories of the past decades, responding to texts which problematize the most basic concepts on which literary studies have been grounded and render them inoperative (Fitch 1992, 126). It comes as no surprise, then, that ten years ago at the conference marking his 80th birthday, a new Beckett appeared once again, thinkable only in the most recent terms (Butler 1990, X). was discovered as a poet of the poststructuralist age, as a deconstructionist avant la lettre (Butler 1990, X). Since then, his writings have been reread in the light of theories claiming textuality to supersede the subject,1 and a number of studies specifically on and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction have been published over the last years.2 Since Derrida has actually acknowledged his close affinity to Beckett's writings, nebulously finding him too close to write about (Derrida 1992, 60-62), this association seems to have somewhat ironically been granted authorization from the highest level. In short, linking to Deconstruction or Poststructuralism is not new. Well into the 1990s, moreover, Deconstruction seems on the wane, and as Steven Connor has suggested, its critical value to studies may legitimately be questioned. With its ever recurrent denunciation of presence and logocentricity (Connor 1992, 121), deconstruction has indeed tended to reproduce the same critical yield in spite of its proclaimed focus on the non-stability of textual meaning. Yet independent of the possible long-term critical sterility of Deconstruction, the affinity remains. It is between Beckett's insistence on the impossibility of a true self, in particular as formulated in his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Beckett 1979), and Derrida's critique of the notion of self-presence of the subject (e.g., Derrida 1973; 1976). This affinity, however, needs revision. I suggest exploring it in both ways, for not only does Beckett's trilogy anticipate Derrida's