Sam Beckett Background Samuel Beckett 1906 1989 Irish

Sam Beckett

Background • Samuel Beckett (1906 -1989), Irish • Ohio Impromptu (1981) • What Where (1984)

Parts of Two Works • Film (1963) • Not I (1973) • Quad (1982)

Some Generalizations • Characters: pairs, clowns, complementary figures, or lacking clear identity • Time: unmoving, past infecting the present • Tone: sinister humor • Themes: failure, boredom, inaction, passivity, vision/perception, objectification • Philosophy/style: Absurdism, minimalism, Existentialism of a certain critical kind

Minimalism • What do you think Minimalism means? • This term can be applied to literature as well as to other artistic forms like sculpture. • What does Minimalism suggest as a style or method?

Robert Morris

Ronald Bladen

Tony Smith

Rodolpho Arico

Richard Serra

Sol Lewitt

Jo Baer

Dan Flavin

Anne Truitt

John Mc. Cracken

The Human Condition • What is the human condition as a structure (rather than as a content)? • What types of questions are connected to the human condition? • What range of responses can you cite from literary examples? • What range from our dramatic examples?

Thucydides • “Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself”

Tacitus • “Primitive man had no evil desires. Being blameless and innocent, his life was free of compulsions or penalties. He also needed no rewards; for he was naturally good. Likewise, where no wrong desires existed, fear imposed no prohibitions. ”

Horace Fear created law. That’s the truth, as you must admit; just take a look at the history of all the world. Nature doesn’t know right from wrong, as it knows pleasure from pain, dangers from desirable things. And philosophy can’t prove it’s the same and equally wrong to break off young cabbages in another man’s field as to make nocturnal thefts of sacred relics. So, use a scale which assign penalties according to the crime rather than scourge someone who only needs a whipping.

Pascal • “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition. ”

Nietzsche • “In every age the wisest have passed identical judgment on life: it is worthless. ”

Orientations • Human beings are fundamentally bad. • Human beings are fundamentally good, but society corrupts them. • Human beings are fundamentally selfish, but society curbs that selfishness and improves them. • Life is empty given our separation from God. • Life itself is fundamentally absurd.

Literature of the Absurd (Abrams) • genres: drama and prose fiction • human condition: “the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd” • early representatives: Alfred Jarry, Franz Kafka • timeline: generally associated with post-WWII France

Rebellion (Abrams) • “[The] earlier tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly rational creatures who live in an at least partially intelligible universe, that they are part of an ordered social structure, and that they may be capable of heroism and dignity even in defeat. After the 1940 s, however, there was a widespread tendency, especially prominent in the existential philosophy of men of letters such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to view a human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe, to conceive the universe as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning, and to represent human life—in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the nothingness where it must end—as an existence which is both anguished and absurd. ”

Sam Beckett (1906 -1989) • Ohio Impromptu (1981) • What Where (1984)

Dramatic Works • • • Waiting for Godot Endgame Happy Days Play Krapp’s Last Tape

Novels • • • Murphy Watt Molloy Malone Dies The Unnamable

Abrams on Waiting for Godot • “Like most works in this mode, the play is absurd in the double sense that it is grotesquely comic and also irrational and nonconsequential; it is a parody not only of the traditional assumptions of Western culture, but of the conventions and generic forms of traditional drama, and even of its own inescapable participation in the dramatic medium. The lucid but eddying and pointless dialogue is often funny, and pratfalls and other modes of slapstick are used to project the alienation and tragic anguish of human existence. ”

Responding to Abrams • It’s true that Absurdism points towards meaninglessness, and in fact generally dramatizes it, but this is typically done selfconsciously, and in fact, is to some degree selfdefeating in that anyone who was a true adherent of such a philosophy likely wouldn’t write at all. • What do you make of this apparent self (or performative) contradiction?

Historical Specificity of Absurdism • Europe has undergone a number of cataclysmic events—the collapse of centralized Roman government, the Black Death, Religious Reformation, scientific secularism, political revolutions, the harsh consequences of industrialism, any number of wars, including the hugely destructive Napoleonic wars and World War I—why must we wait until the second half of the twentieth century to get a strong statement for Absurdism?

Ohio Impromptu • Why might the characters be designated by function? • Why are they as close in appearance as possible to each other? • What is the function of the book? Or, what might it mean symbolically? [Instead, for instance, of speaker and listener]

Ohio Impromptu • What is the function of repetition in the play? • What is the function or purpose of the knocks delivered by the listener?

Passage (288) • I am particularly interested in this passage: • “What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. ” • What do you make of this?

Beckett as Drama • Can we speak of conflict in Beckett? • Can we speak of action or plot? • Can we call Beckett dramatic in any sense—if so, what and if not, why? • How would you diagram this play?

Dialogue and the Divided Self • Ohio Impromptu engages in a dialogue with the past and with the self as divided into an other. • Remark on this complex thought—first understanding this idea, then applying it to yourself, and then to the play.

Plot • Does What Where have any plot or storyline? • Is there a back story which we have to reconstruct? • Do we have a context that allows us to figure out what is happening in the play?

Character • What can we say about characters (relations)? • Is the bodiless voice a character? • Are the uniformity of character and the repetitiveness of language suggesting that there is in fact only one character, that the “characters” and voice are in fact aspects of one character and that we are witnessing is a purely psychological drama?

Setting: Place • What is the setting of the play? • It seems to me that Beckett might have been unhappy with the set in the video since it certainly points towards an interpretation— what? • What does an archive suggest?

Setting: Time • Seasons are traditional metaphors. How do they function in this work? • How do they seem to function differently, if they do, from the ways you’ve seen them employed in other works?

Motivation • What is the role of agency in this play? • Who suffers? • Who employs violence (assuming that violence is being used)? • What, if we can tell, motivates violence? • How is violence sustained or justified?

Purpose • What purpose might you give to this work? • How does it resemble or depart from the dramatic genres you know?

Psychology and Epistemology • The subject “I” can be treated as a substantive referring to the ego, not as a personal pronoun. • Perception is turned outward and inward in a constant interrogation process whose object is meaning. • That meaning, however, is threatened constantly with meaninglessness.

Politics • The State is disembodied—the disembodied voice emerging from shadows of figurehead leadership. • This voice demands relentless scrutiny within a grid of control that relies upon complicity with self-destruction. • The cycle is unbroken because those who serve to perpetuate violence are, alternatively, the victim of the same violence.

Onto-epistemology • The truth of being (the what and the where— possibly an oblique reference to Dasein: “There” + “Being” = Being is there)—is not, cannot be discovered through the interrogation of beings. • How do you read: • “Make sense who may. I switch off. ”

To Think About • This play is not about oppression, violence, and despair—it is not about politics or society in any concrete, specific sense. • It is about truth and about the construction of the ego in relation to that (likewise constructed) truth.

Staging • If you were to stage this play, and to do it in a way that seems meaningful for today’s society (perhaps in Taiwan), how would you go about it? • How would your peers likely relate or react to this work if it were staged? • For instance, how would the audience react to the play if it were our so-called senior drama performance?

For Next Time • Read: Pinter, The Dumb Waiter