Abstract
This section presents extensive evidence that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has been consistently successful with general (non-academic) audiences despite its intellectual sophistication and that some of the specifics of its reception indicate that it can mobilize action-oriented and solidarity-based affects and cognitive processes in interpreters even in the most unpropitious conditions (prisons, disaster areas, conflict-torn regions, etc.). It explains this process by proposing that Beckett’s paradox-based discursive operations constitute compelling means of translating, for interpreters, class/ gender/ other forms of subordination and repression into processes rather than data of experience—processes that can be sustained or, conversely, suspended. The section also explains the rationale of focusing exclusively on some of Beckett’s postwar works, presents the chapter-by-chapter content, and situates the book in relation to a number of (relatively) recent studies that resonate with some of its core arguments.
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Notes
- 1.
Beckett had systematically rejected requests to allow his plays to be staged there, in protestation against apartheid.
- 2.
Interpretations of Beckett’s works such as Esslin’s or Blocker’s are typical of earlier critical assumptions that the Theatre of the Absurd gives artistic expression to existentialist philosophy, and that Beckett is an existentialist writer. For some recent contributions to the discussion of potential connections between Beckett’s works and the thinking of Camus and Sartre, see Bennett and Connor (Beckett, Modernism).
- 3.
In Adorno’s view, “Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings. When, however, committed works of art present decisions to be made and make those decisions their criteria, the choices become interchangeable” (“Commitment,” Notes 2: 79)—that is, the same discourse and methods can be used by otherwise mortal enemies in pursuit of their (supposedly opposing) goals: “Many of [Sartre’s] phrases could be echoed by his mortal enemies. The idea that it is a matter of choice in and of itself would even coincide with the Nazi slogan, ‘Only sacrifice makes us free’; in Fascist Italy, absolute dynamism made similar philosophical pronouncements” (81). One example provided by Adorno is the persecution of anti-representational artists both in Nazi Germany, where their work was condemned as “cultural bolshevism,” and in Stalinist Russia, where it was deemed “reactionary” or “decadent” (78).
- 4.
For a discussion of the paradox and the abstract machine more focused on the specificity and more faithful to the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari’s works, see Ionica, “Halting the Production of Repression: Paradox-Based Humour, or, Deleuze, Guattari, Beckett, and the Schizo’s Stick.”
- 5.
Beckett also did not translate into French his early works Dream of Fair to Middling Women (originally written in English in 1932 but first published posthumously) and More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). Of his works originally written in French that he did not translate into English himself, the most substantial is the play Eleutheria, completed in 1947 but never published or performed during his lifetime.
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Ionica, C. (2020). Introduction to Beckett’s “Absurdist” Excess. In: The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama and Fiction. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34902-8_1
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