The Organs of Perception and Expression in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Works

• Thesis title in Czech: Orgány vnímání a vyjadřování v dramatickém díle Samuela Becketta
• Thesis title in English: The Organs of Perception and Expression in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Works
• Key words: Samuel Beckett, Dante Alighieri, divadlo, tělesnost
• English key words: Samuel Beckett, Dante Alighieri, theatre, corporeality
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2013/2014
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Ondřej Pilný, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 03.02.2014
• Date of assignment: 03.02.2014
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 10.02.2014
• Date and time of defence: 09.09.2015 09:00
• Date of electronic submission: 03.08.2015
• Date of proceeded defence: 09.09.2015
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: doc. Clare Wallace, M.A., Ph.D.

Guidelines

The objective of my final thesis is to trace the relationship which ties the human body with the faculties of expression and perception along the progression of dramatic works by Samuel Beckett.
A comparative juxtaposition of the playwright's oeuvre with Dante's Commedia, with a particular focus on the Inferno, will bring to light the kind of physical entrapment that underlies the Beckettian aesthetic and philosophical concept of failure. Stressing the painful conditions that eyes and mouth are damned to suffer in Hell, I will consider the tragic measure with which Beckett associates both the possibility and the necessity to express and perceive with the organic and articulatory functioning of these components of the human body. The dramatic language of the playwright reflects and gives shape to a problematic existential condition: to seek the unity of the self via the perceptual and expressive instruments our body is provided with. In this sense, a kind of antagonism between the different senses inhabiting the human body is conveyed, as if each of them had a will of its own, or were engaged in a mechanism of mutual exclusion. The different types of characters that we meet in Beckett's world have to struggle within a redundant and chaotic hermeneutic circle of inner identification that ultimately distorts and even suspends the contact with the environment they find themselves in. As a result, the process of linguistic and aesthetic impoverishment which marks Beckett’s plays, amounts to an inexorable movement towards a – controversially – active resignation to the very impossibility of a stable, complete recognition of what constitutes existence. The signs of such condition are of an ambivalent nature. The increasing fragmentation of and scepticism towards language results in a broadening of its layers of meaning and allusions. At the same time, the aesthetic minimalism obscuring and almost eclipsing the settings' configuration achieves an emotional and existential depth that expresses a sublime hostility of the matter to be grasped by the senses. In this light, a chronological analysis of a selection of plays will expound the figurative and expressive pathway that these complex concepts undertake.
The metaphysical and supernatural atmospheres with which Beckett works, are obtained by a kind of osmosis between the conditions of the characters on stage and the audience. In fact, the achievement of a transcendental sense is located within the very organic materiality which features human presence. The experimentalism of Beckett’s oeuvre consists in the various ways in which bodies are negated, paralyzed, mutilated and subsequently put in relation with the dramatic elements. The recurrent dichotomies and chiaroscuro of his dramatic language have to bear the complex and fluctuating equilibrium between authority and subjection that ties the positions of author, characters, actors and audience. In these terms, the study of the actual conditions of actors' performances will highlight the degree of physical empathy that the plays release, a force that invests the audience with disorientation and compassion and that is also strengthened by the metatheatrical quality of the texts.
The variety of forms and mediums with which Beckett experiments, proves the coherence and consistency of his highly radical formulation on the compulsive nature of the creative condition, namely, “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express”.[1]By the analysis and the structural comparison of the different mediums Beckett works with, I will highlight the process by which Beckett conveys forms of human presence and absence. The examination of the interplay between language and body, speech and action, will allow to consider the relationship which ties perception and expression at both textual and theatrical levels. Furthermore, it will provide a description of the Beckettian antagonistic interaction that characterizes sight and hearing. These senses are in fact the ones related to motion and to orality, processes which eyes and mouth are able to capture and release in antithetical and separated ways. It is precisely through his innovative juxtaposition of visual and auditory elements that Beckett explores unprecedented dramatic possibilities.
Moreover, I maintain that an overwhelming universality emerges from the minute attention to particularity. Evidently, such universality is by no means absolute or fixed, on the contrary, it is rooted in the intention to convey the extreme diversity of human existence together with the very unseizability of its nature. In the light of the tension between physical and psychological, external and internal human dimensions, I will consider the ways in which Beckett's works have been considered Absurd or Existentialist and describe how they actually escape a rigid inclusion within such labels.
The ultimate aim of my study is that of expressing the pioneering and affirmative value of Beckett's humanist endeavor to combine physicality and emotionality within their never-ending struggle to arrive at an existential equilibrium. Even though the atmosphere of his works becomes bleaker and bleaker, the mastery of failure that they display expresses that human creativity is a source of virtually unlimited possibilities to explore and extend the self.


[1] Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, “Three Dialogues,” Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1987) 16.

References

Preliminary Bibliography

Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski. The Groove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader's Guide to His Works, Life and Thought. New York: Groove Press, 2004.

Allbright, Daniel, and Lois Oppenheim. Samuel Beckett and The Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media. Garland Press, 1998.

Caselli, Daniela. Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in The Fiction and Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.

Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Esslin, Martin. The Field of Drama: How The Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen. London: Methuen, 1988.

Esslin, Martin. Samuel Beckett: A collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1987.

Gontarski, S. E. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.

Oppenheim, Lois. Directing Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Pilling, John. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.