Abstract
To embark on a study of haptics in Beckett’s work, it may be necessary to begin with the eye. Or, more accurately, the failing eye. The protagonists of the plays examined in this chapter, Film and Krapp’s Last Tape , both suffer from myopic vision. However, dimming vision affects Beckett’s aesthetic practice more widely. Figures such as Hamm in Endgame and A in Rough for Theater I are afflicted with visual failure; for the spectator also, the dim and shadowy stage and filmic images seem to work against vision; it is no longer privileged as an epistemological tool for either the figures of the drama or their spectators. The very notion of theater is undermined. It is not “a viewing place” as in the meaning of the original Greek word theatron , but a place where the eye begins to fail.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
William Shakespeare, King Lear (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983 [1975]), 205.
Maurice Maeterlinck, Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, trans. Maya Slater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1965 ), 63.
José Saramago, Blindness, trans. Giovanni Pontiero ( London: Vintage, 2005 ).
For further analysis of this painting and the politics of vision, see David Forgacs, “Blindness and the Politics of the Gaze,” in Indeterminate Bodies, ed. Naomi Segal, Roger Cook, and Lib Taylor (UK: Palgrave, 2003 ).
Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prose (London: Faber, 1984 ). Henceforth referred to in parentheses, in the text, as CSP.
Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, ed. and trans. Margaret Jourdain ( New York: Lennox Hill, 1972 ), 87.
Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon ( Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2001 ), 240.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2008 ), 17.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas ( New York: Fordham, 2008 ), 48.
See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame:The Life of Samuel Beckett ( London: Bloomsbury, 1996 ), p. 124.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer ( New York: Dover, 2004 ), 90.
In the notes for the 1969 Berlin Schiller Theater production, Beckett comments on Krapp’s relationship with his machine: “tendency of a solitary person to enjoy affective relationships with objects, in particular here with tape-recorder. Smiles, looks, reproaches, caresses, taps, exclamations […] A little throughout. Never forced,” thus emphasizing Krapp’s anthropomorphizing impulse. The machine is a companion for him. See James Knowlson, ed., The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Volume III: Krapp’s Last Tape, (London: Faber, 1992 ), 79.
Pierre Chabert, “The Body in Beckett’s Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (1982): 27–28.
Eckart Voigts-Virchow applies this term in his analysis of Quad (see “ Quad I and Teletubbies : “Aisthetic” Panopticism versus Reading Beckett,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui [henceforth referred to as SBTA] 11 [2000]: 211), though it has perhaps some uses in the context of Krapp’s Last Tape. Indicating “sensation,” the term was appropriated and reevaluated within postmodern aesthetics in order to valorize a more sensual approach to aesthetics. See Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Aisthesis (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990)
Wolfgang Welsch, Aisthesis ( Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987 ).
Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: Calder, 1965[1935]), 13.
Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 13. emphasis in original.
Rosette Lamonte, “Krapp: Anti-Proust,” in Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape: A Theater Workbook, edited by James Knowlson ( London: Brutus, 1980 ). 162.
Julie Campbell, “The Semantic Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape,” SBTA 6 (1997): 63.
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath ( London: Fontana, 1977 ), 188.
Yasunari Takahashi, “Memory Inscribed in the Body: Krapp’s Last Tape and the Noh play Izutzu ,” in The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage, ed. Enoch Brater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60. This is the author’s own translation of the line. A complete translation can be found in
Ezra Pound and Ernest Fennellosa, The Classic Noh Theater of Japan ( New York: New Directions, 1959 ).
Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005 ), 210.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969 ), 9.
In 1964, after the filming of Film , Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider saying that while the piece has been “troubled by a certain failure to communicate fully by purely visual means the basic intention,” he could see it having value chiefly “on a formal and structural level” (Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998], 166).
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame ( London: Bloomsbury, 1996 ), 523.
Biographical sources confirm Beckett’s exposure to and continued interest in Berkeley. His critical interest in the philosopher was not restricted to his studies as an undergraduate in the early twenties. For example, a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, penned in 1933, recounts his reading of Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, written when the philosopher was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. He remarks that it is “full of profound things, and at the same time of a foul (and false) intellectual canaillerie, enough to put you against reading any more” (Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 154).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida ( London: Vintage, 1993 ), 94.
Alan Ackerman, “Samuel Beckett’s Spectres Du Noir : The Being of Painting and the Flatness of Film,” Contemporary Literature 44.3 (2003): 420.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993 ), 304.
Jane Hale, The Broken Window: Beckett’s Dramatic Perspective ( Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1987 ), 82.
Norma Bouchard, “Film in Contexts,” SBTA 7 (1998): 124.
Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body ( Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007 ), 122.
Sylvie Debevec Henning, “Samuel Beckett’s Film and La Derni è re Bande: Intratextual and Intertextual Doubles,” Symposium 35 (1981): 140.
Copyright information
© 2013 Trish McTighe
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McTighe, T. (2013). Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy. In: The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44692-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27533-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)