beckett and performance

Abstract

The idea of performance preoccupied Samuel Beckett well before he began to explore its potential directly in the theater. Its roots are in the doubling of the self that is already implicit in the idea of representation and the quasi-Cartesian idea of the ‘pseudocouple’ that Beckett would hone into in his fiction and drama alike. A character named ‘Mr. Beckett,’ for instance, appears in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written between 1931–2) as a belaurelled poet at the conclusion of the short chapter called ‘Und’: ‘Oh but the bay, Mr Beckett, didn’t you know, about your brow’ (141). (In 1931 laurels for the young author were, of course, very much a fiction.) At that point the author no longer stood entirely outside his work, but inside and outside simultaneously, a part of and apart from the narrative. Such fictionalizing of the self, narrated and narrator overlapping, followed hard upon Beckett’s one and only direct stage appearance; he was persuaded to appear as Don Diègue in three performances of Trinity College’s ‘Cornelian nightmare,’ Le Kid, at Dublin’s Peacock Theatre between 19–21 February 1931 (Knowlson 126). Later in the 1930s Beckett would write a 23-line poem in French, ‘Arènes de Lutèce,’ in which he explored more fully the fractured or doubled self, what Lawrence Harvey referred to as the experience of dédoublement (202–07).