Samuel Beckett (Literature)

Quello che è strano, via

Complesso testo di Beckett. Un uomo rinchiuso in un cubo cerca la posizione più confortevole. E senza mai trovarla prova e riprova diverse posizioni e solo nella variazione continua che alterna e muove la sofferenza da un punto all'altro del corpo trova un certo sollievo. I motivi del testo sono innumerevoli. Ne individueremo discrezionalmente tre. La luce, lo spazio, l'immaginazione.
La luce è sollievo e dannazione. si cerca la luce come si cerca l'acqua poi si cerca il buio come si cerca il riposo. La luce è vita, la luce è Dio, la luce in genere si associa al positivo. Ma qui è positivo e negativo assieme, o meglio alternativamente. Dunque anche la luce non è risolutiva. Lo spazio è il problema immediato principale, costringe ad acrobazie assurde che non lasciano riposo. Anche qui il bene è alternanza. Una posizione è bene poi diventa male e via un altra che è bene e poi diventa male a sua volta e via così. Non c'è riposo nello spazio, non c'è soluzione. Movimento sofferenza e barlumi di pace. L'immaginazione è quello che resta in assenza di realtà. E allora pensieri di pensieri di filosofi e donne forse esistite forse immaginate e sempre si torna sui pensieri pensati sulle immagini immaginate e sempre lo stesso e sempre variando e anche qui non c'è pace se non nell'alternanza dei pensieri di pensieri e di immagini uguali e diversi. Non c'è soluzione alcuna. Frammenti di pace nella sofferenza. Solo questo. Il testo termina quando termina l'immaginazione. E questa è la fine.
Interpretare questo testo non è semplice, ma ci proveremo. La chiusa contiene la chiave. L'immaginazione è morta, sembra dire Beckett. E segue il nulla. La fine. Ma si può leggere in positivo, e io tendo a farlo. L'immaginazione finisce e dopo c'è il nulla. Ma il nulla è di nuovo il cubo e la luce e lo spazio e l'immaginazione. Dunque dopo il nulla c'è di nuovo l'immagnazione e via all'infinito. E allora sopravvive la speranza di uno scarto. Una minima quantistica variazione. Il batitto d'ali e il tornado. E l'immaginazione potente vince. Il cubo va in pezzi e l'uomo esce. Libero.
Ecco, io custodirei la speranza nella vittoria di un'immaginazione senza potere.

This paper examines the embodiment of "the mother" character in Samuel Beckett’s 1976 play titled Footfalls. In the play, the mother does not physically exist on stage except in a form of ghostly voices, which intrigues a question about her embodiment and the way she is presented on stage. The metaphors of her bodiless character provide a straightforward link between the physical and the representational. In a sense, the concept of her character depends upon basic physical experience and addresses how the physical experience affects cognition and emotion of the audience. This paper further attempts to answer to the following questions: What do the mother’s ghostly and fragmented body articulate and/or represent? Is the fragmented mother a form of otherness of the daughter? To answer these questions, I employ the theory of Embodiment in Social Psychology by Brian Meier et al and the concept of the bodiless voice in the book by Steven Connor.

This book argues that the diminished role of selfhood and authorship in Modernist avant-garde aesthetics provides unique insights into the decreasing sense of agency in the algorithmic culture of the early 21st century. It considers how the destruction of the self, word, and meaning by the Dadaists set a modern precedent for the way that the shift from language (which signifies meaning) to number and code (which does not signify meaning but instead functions and operates) suggests a cultural shift from human negotiated value to inhuman processes aimed at functionality. To do so, the book looks at Dada, postmodern works of fiction that express the loss of language to code (the literature of exclusion), and works composed by artificial intelligence.

The writing of Samuel Beckett is associated with meaning in the meaninglessness and the production of what he calls 'literature of unword'. The casual escape from the world of words in the form of silences and pauses, in his play Waiting for Godot, urges to ask question of their existence and ultimately leads to investigate the theory behind their use in the play. This paper proposes that these absences (silence and pause) in Beckett's play force to think 'beyond' language. This paper asks how silence and pause in Beckett's text speak for the emergence of poststructuralist text. It aims to identify the significant features of the philosophy of deconstruction in the play of Beckett to demystify the hostile complicity between literature and philosophy. With the interpretive paradigm of poststructuralism this research focuses on the text as a research data. It attempts to delineate the relationship between poststructuralist theoretical concerns and text of Beckett. Keeping in view the theoretical concerns of Poststructuralist theorist Jacques Derrida, the main concern of the discussion is directed towards the notion of 'beyond' language into the absences that are aimed at silencing the existing discourse with the 'radical irony' of this anti-formal art that contains its own denial and thus represents the idea of ceaseless questioning and radical contradiction in art and any text. This article asks how text of Beckett vibrates with loud silence and has disrupted language to demonstrate the emptiness of words and thus exploring the limitless void of absences. Beckett's text resonates with silence and pause that is neither negation nor affirmation rather a poststructuralist's suspension of reality that is ever changing with the undecidablity of all meanings. Within the theoretical notion of Derrida's Différance this study interprets silence and pause in Beckett's art. The silence and pause behave like Derrida's Différance and have questioned their own existence in the text to deconstruct any definiteness and finality of reality to extend an undecidable threshold of poststructuralists that aims to evade the 'labyrinth of language'.

This paper focuses on the enigmatic use of pauses in Samuel Beckett"s Endgame. The frequent occurrence of pauses within the body of language challenges to ask for their existence. Based on the theoretical concerns of postmodern theorists Jacques Derrida and Ihab Hassan, the main concern of the discussion concentrates on the idea of "going beyond" language in the form of introducing "play" of pauses in Endgame with its aim to display the tendencies of postmodernism through a literary text. This article asks how pauses become significant in Beckett"s Endgame and how this literary event has invoked the urgency of postmodern threshold. It aims to reflect on the significance of pauses to articulate the postmodern voices i.e. Derrida"s "Différance" and Hassan"s "Indetermanence". To listen to these voices in the "silent mark" of Beckett"s text the methodology I seek for this research paper is Hermeneutics that helps this interpretation of pauses with the conceptual framework postmodern theory. The practice of using pauses in a literary text of Beckett is deeply concerned with the development of a notion of "silence" in postmodern perspective where it leads to an "endless play of meanings" and continuous induction of indeterminacies inherent in language and meaning and that at the end are immanently discernable through the unspoken mark "pause".

The article weaves Lacanian psychoanalysis with narratology. It explores the Beckettian logic of narrative detritus in The Trilogy by examining stories, progressively “worsened” with every act of narration. Reading these obsessive-compulsive moments of narrative as failure, it sheds light on the various techniques and implications of this experiment that range from freezing a narrative into stasis to pushing it toward the limits of speculation and from forcing the narrative to revolve around its exterior to underlining its artifice through narratorial intrusions. The article focuses on the vestigial story-function to underscore the paradoxical status of Beckett’s narrative impulse and demonstrates how the drift of these narrations relocates storytelling from the subjective pole of the “I” to the opacity of language as a field of the Other and finally into the originary and the terminal silence that conditions narrative. The article reads Beckett’s assaults on the realistic narrative logic of the novel in tandem with an aporetic narrative logic that emerges from Lacanian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the Real, as opposed to realism.

The gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett's creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett's use of the audiovisual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence, that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett's creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.

Le regard est un élément structurant de la création de Samuel Beckett. Il prend cependant la forme d'une dimension visuelle étrangement impersonnelle, qui témoigne de l'absence d'un échange de regards originel capable de fonder une identité personnelle et d'ouvrir à un monde de désir. L'effondrement de la réalité conventionnelle, et la mise en évidence d'appareils de vue révèlent l'absence d'une représentation unifiée. Alors que des masques et des lieux clos montrent le visible comme dénué d'un au-delà, lumière et obscurité, spectres font apparaître une dimension qui dépasse les confins de l'identité, et où rien n'offre une médiation avec le visible, ni le met en perspective. Enfin, l'utilisation que fait Beckett de la télévision approfondit son exploration de la part irréductiblement réelle de l'existence, qui échappe à la vision. Cette étude examine systématiquement ces aspects essentiels du visuel dans la création beckettienne. Les élaborations théoriques de Jacques Lacan offrent un cadre indispensable pour comprendre l'imaginaire non comme représentation, mais comme enraciné dans l'opacité fondamentale de l'existence.

Resumo: Este artigo discute brevemente como J.M. Coetzee em seus textos críticos lê a obra de Samuel Beckett, a fim de refletir a respeito do trânsito entre o trabalho ficcional e acadêmico desse escritor sul-africano. Ao percorrer a visão de Coetzee crítico, pretende-se situar o lugar de Beckett na trilogia coetzeeana Cenas da vida na província, principalmente para a constituição da(s) voz(es) narrativa nesse projeto autobiográfico ficcionalizado. Palavras-chave: J.M. Coetzee; Samuel Beckett; romance contemporâneo; voz narrativa; literatura comparada. Abstract: This article briefly discusses how J. Coetzee in his critical texts reads the work of Samuel Beckett in order to reflect on the relations between the fictional and academic work of this South African writer. In going through the critical vision of Coetzee, it is aimed to situate Beckett's place in Coetzeean trilogy, Scenes from Provincial Life, mainly for the constitution of the narrative voice(s) in this fictionalized autobiographical project.

This thesis seeks to understand the relationship between the Modernist writer Samuel Beckett and the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. More specifically, it asks why Beckett incorporated elements of Hölderlin's work into his novel Watt.

In arguing that Watt can be read as a reception of Hölderlin's writings, this study suggests that a more complicated relationship exists between Beckett and Romanticism than has often been assumed. By examining this relationship, it aims to shed light on a largely ignored aspect of Beckett's output, allowing new ways of reading him to emerge.

In this paper I sketch how the writings of Samuel Beckett, the twentieth-century’s greatest writer of the ungraspable, talk to our current crisis. My focus is death, and specifically a sense of death as a limit to sense, to human sense-making. In light of the current nihilism that permeates our contemporary culture, Beckett’s sense of death can be redeemed by neither an appeal to scientific materialism nor religious belief. Between the view that we are wholly determined by causes beyond our will, and the view that our consciousness transcends mere matter, Beckett figures death and dying as beyond rationalisation yet ineluctably embedded and embodied. Death defines the human being as such, orienting our meaning-making projects, our feeling of life in the world, yet this philosophical as such turns out to denote that what makes us proper is also what makes us improper, not fully human, animal, or inhuman, in Beckett’s terms. Death is a destroyer of worlds and operates by returning us to the earth, where we belong in excess of all belonging, in excess of the cognate notions of propriety and of property. This paper thus suggests, firstly, that we might rethink Beckett’s materialism in terms less related to space and the body and more in terms of time and finitude and, secondly, we might begin to rethink in this way by tracing the liminal status of death in Beckett through a global or planetary framework; a framework I will substantiate by distinguishing between earth and world. If Beckett’s inhuman sense of death helped to grasp the 20th century’s most noxious nightmares, then let us draw upon the resources of Beckett’s writing to grasp the inhuman sense of life that haunts the 21st century.

Consequent questions that arise from this paper are: How might the entropic drive towards nothingness that characterises so many of the writings yield a new nihilistic ethics for the Anthropocene? How might the Beckettian pairing of necessity and impossibility, when it comes to speaking of life and death, be repurposed in an era of ecological catastrophe? In other words, this paper posits Beckett’s ‘inhuman’ aesthetics as key to understanding the link between the all-too-human and the non-human in our contemporary reality.