The Poetics of Jet Lag

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui: "Beginning of the Murmur": Archival Pre-Texts and Other Sources, 2015

Beckett’s four nouvelles parody Romantic affinities between human subjectivity and landscape. Settings become fragmented, de-anthropomorphized and text-like. Since it is impossible to project one’s inner states onto landscape, communication with one’s surroundings is achievable only through idiosyncrasies of habitation: for instance the odd manner in which Beckett’s narrators occupy taxicabs, rooms, sidewalks, boats, and nautical capstans. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that individuals re-appropriate socially organized spaces by “poaching” (braconnage). Such tactics are at play, too, when Beckett’s narrators transform ordinary objects, becoming “poets of their own acts” as their “errant” trajectories subversively remake social space.

Image & Narrative, 2018

In this paper I analyse and compare the motif of the rocking chair in some of Samuel Beckett's and Franz Kline's works. Rocking chairs appear in three of Beckett's main works: the novel Murphy, Film, and the short play Rockaby. Kline, in turn, painted a series of portraits of his wife sitting on a rocking chair in a pivotal moment in his life and career – as well as in the history of modern painting –, namely, in the years immediately preceding his turn to abstract painting. By comparing the uses of this apparently marginal motif I intend to show how they can mutually shed light onto each other and help address some of the major aspects of both bodies of work. In particular, I claim that the rocking chair served both authors as a sort of fetish object through which to address their views on the relation between the subject and the outer world, a major theme both in their works and lives which played a relevant role in the development of their creative process and the definition of their poetics.

ABEI Journal, 2006

Samuel Beckett has made a peculiar use of stage directions in his theatre. Since the first plays, as Waiting for Godot, they became essential tools in order to establish a precise and restricted way of staging and guaranteeing the stage physicality he must have had in mind. After the sixties Beckett started to stage his own plays and his writing became yet more centered in rigorous stage directions. This article aims to describe, through the use he makes of stage directions, his evolution from being just a dramatist, in the fifties, till becoming a complete artist of the theatre in the eighties. In doing that intends to prove the utility of looking for stage directions in drama analysis, and to show how, from this point of view, Beckett's theatre gets close of the work of artists commonly viewed as radically anti-theatrical, as is the case of Robert Wilson. Despite being a phenomenon of the forties, the theatre of Samuel Beckett reaches the end of the twentieth century still enigmatic, defying labels. Irrespective of the difficulties encountered when classifying his theatrical work, Beckett can be seen as a post-modern dramatist as already argued. (Pavis 48-74) The aim here is to investigate a specific feature of Beckett's theatricality: the role of the stage directions in the framing of his theatre. In doing that, more than attempting to reinforce Beckett's postmodernist characteristics, I intend to focus on what seems to be a key to understanding his dramaturgy not just as a literary work but as an intrinsically theatrical matter. Through an analysis and several conclusions related to stage directions, it is possible to link Beckett with artists apparently distant from him as, for example, Robert Wilson. Are stage directions relevant to theatrical analysis? Theatre researchers have raised objections to this hypothesis. My first step will be to reply to their arguments and to argue that the examination of stage directions, granting ability to inform about the intrinsic theatricality of the dramatic text, can reveal a textual model where one finds a personal style of dealing with the stage physicality. Would the assumption that the analysis of stage directions is only literary, entail the exclusion of a possible relationship between the text-which deals with either a future or a past scene-and the physical scene, that is, the actual realisation? Would it be

Textual Practice, 2024

The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by Dr Asijit Datta (SRM University-AP, India) of Prof Jonathan Boulter (Western University, Canada) for a webinar called ‘Samuel Beckett, Spectres and Posthuman Spaces’ that was held over Zoom on November 27, 2020. This interview between two Beckett scholars is an attempt to locate the positions and meanings of the aspects of home/ space/refuge for the abandoned, destitute characters in the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s homeless wanderers are in the condition of the neither, a space that is only motion without direction. Beckett’s physical reduction of his characters and their necessary expulsion from home are explored through the lens of Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’ or Geworfenheit. ‘Thrownness’ precedes the idea of homelessness and is the precondition of being. For Heidegger, in a reductive way, directionality and disseverance characterize the human, but the Beckettian moments of movement and walking, without purpose, are absent from Heidegger. Beckett tends to point towards the origin of the subject without a ground or all necessary groundedness. The colloquy concludes with a discussion concerning the condition of the posthuman in Beckett. To face the Beckettian posthuman is to confront a discursive posthumanity.

1991

Journal of Modern Literature, 2017

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.

Journal of Art Historiography, Vol. 9 (Dec. 2013), 2013