Simply Beckett E-Book

Katherine Weiss

• Herausgeber: Simply Charly
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Great Lives
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 206

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

“Katherine Weiss’ Simply Beckett is a beautifully written book, one brimming with fresh critical insights. What is obvious is her utter command of her material. As part of the Simply Charly series, the book is designed for university students and theatergoers, but, in fact, it also appeals to scholars long familiar with Beckett’s work. Drawing on history, politics, trauma, and memory, Weiss leads the reader through Beckett’s plays in clear, engaging prose. In sum, Weiss’ book has the reach and depth to make it one of the more important coordinates in Beckett scholarship.”
—Matthew Roudané, Regents’ Professor of English and Theater, Georgia State University

Born in Dublin on Good Friday, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) attended Trinity College and taught briefly in Belfast before moving to Paris, where he lived for most of his adult life. Deeply influenced by James Joyce, who became a close friend and mentor, he published poetry, novels, essays, and reviews before stunning Paris, and eventually the rest of the world, with his play Waiting for Godot in 1953. Famously described by one critic as “a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats,” Godot redefined dramatic structure and showcased Beckett’s commitment to an art based on the ideas of “non-knowing” and powerlessness.

In Simply Beckett, professor Katherine Weiss provides a highly accessible and insightful introduction to the award-winning author and his paradoxical works, with a particular focus on Beckett’s theater activities, both as a writer and director. Through discussion of the written texts, significant productions of the plays, and audience and critical reactions to Beckett’s work, Weiss helps the reader understand the groundbreaking nature of his achievements and points the way toward a greater appreciation of his oeuvre.

Combining admirable erudition with reader-friendly style, Simply Beckett is a fascinating journey into the world of an author whose work went to the heart of the human condition.

Leseprobe

Simply Beckett

Katherine Weiss

Copyright © 2020 by Katherine Weiss

Cover Illustration by José RamosCover Design by Scarlett Rugers

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-1-943657-79-7

Contents

Praise for Simply BeckettOther Great LivesSeries Editor's ForewordPrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth”: Samuel Beckett’s beginning 1. Le Kid, Human Wishes, Eleuthéria: “we might well ring down the curtain.” 2. Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Place and History on the Absurdist Stage 3. Krapp’s Last Tape, That Time, Ohio Impromptu: Remembering That Time, That Place 4. All That Fall, Happy Days, Footfalls, Not I: “Spared Love”: The Trauma of Being Seen; the Trauma of Being Unseen 5. Acts without words: Avoiding the danger zone in Beckett’s Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Film, Quad, and What Where 6. Beckett’s LegacyEndnotesSourcesSuggested ReadingAbout the AuthorA Word from the Publisher

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Praise for Simply Beckett

“Simply Beckett is simply wonderful.​ ​Katherine Weiss distills down Beckett’s life and work into a knowledgeable, compelling, and compact book which is well researched while remaining thoroughly accessible. Sip from Simply Beckett in stages or down it in one dose. Then use it as a gateway for your return visit or for your first trip into Beckett’s potent work.”

—Graley Herren, Professor of English, Xavier University

“Simply Beckett lucidly places all of Beckett’s work for the theater in its historical and cultural contexts, with special attention to Beckett’s Irish roots. The story Simply Beckett tells is thereby a compelling drama in itself informed by cutting-edge work on Beckett and history. This wonderful book tells the powerful story of how trauma, memory, place, and the experience of exile were woven by Beckett into uncompromising and moving works of theatrical art.”

—Robert Reginio, Professor of English, Alfred University and editor of Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art

“In this engaging new study, Katherine Weiss traces Beckett’s artistic sensibility and complex brand of ‘simplicity’ through his Irish heritage, as she explores his work in dialogue with biography and history as ironic sites of personal, historical, and political failure.”

—Annette J. Saddik, Professor of Theatre and Literature, City University of New York

“Katherine Weiss’s vivid new book brings together reflections on Beckett’s life with close attention to his revolutionary theatre practice. The result is a fresh take on both sets of materials that acts as a compelling introduction to an author of enduring significance.”

—Laura Salisbury, Professor in Medicine & English Literature, University of Exeter

“Katherine Weiss’ Simply Beckett is a beautifully written book, one brimming with fresh critical insights. What is obvious is her utter command of her material. As part of the Simply Charly series, the book is designed for university students and theatergoers, but, in fact, it also appeals to scholars long familiar with Beckett’s work. Drawing on history, politics, trauma, and memory, Weiss leads the reader through Beckett’s plays in clear, engaging prose. In sum, Weiss’ book has the reach and depth to make it one of the more important coordinates in Beckett scholarship.”

—Matthew Roudané, Regents’ Professor of English and Theater, Georgia State University

“Three cheers for Simply Beckett, a welcome addition to the field of Beckett Studies, and a wonderful introduction to Beckett’s theatrical work. In clear, accessible prose, Katherine Weiss takes the reader through Beckett’s entire dramatic oeuvre in five brisk chapters. Weiss’s lucid writing and meticulous research transforms these texts, sometimes labeled ‘impenetrable’, into fascinating, thought-provoking revelations on the singular genius of Beckett’s theatre. Simply Beckett is required reading for anyone who expresses even a passing curiosity about this literary titan.”

—Natka Bianchini, author of Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America and Professor of Theatre, Loyola University

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Other Great Lives

Simply Austenby Joan Klingel RaySimply Beethoven by Leon PlantingaSimply Chekhov by Carol ApollonioSimply Chomskyby Raphael SalkieSimply Chopinby William SmialekSimply Darwinby Michael RuseSimply Descartesby Kurt SmithSimply Dickensby Paul SchlickeSimply Diracby Helge KraghSimply Einsteinby Jimena CanalesSimply Eliot by Joseph MaddreySimply Euler by Robert E. BradleySimply Faulkner by Philip WeinsteinSimply Fitzgerald by Kim MorelandSimply Freud by Stephen FroshSimply Gödel by Richard TieszenSimply Hegel by Robert L. WicksSimply Hitchcock by David SterrittSimply Joyce by Margot NorrisSimply Machiavelli by Robert FredonaSimply Napoleonby J. David Markham & Matthew ZarzecznySimply Nietzsche by Peter KailSimply Proust by Jack JordanSimply Riemann by Jeremy GraySimply Sartre by David DetmerSimply Tolstoy by Donna Tussing OrwinSimply Stravinsky by Pieter van den ToornSimply Turing by Michael OlinickSimply Wagner by Thomas S. GreySimply Wittgenstein

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Series Editor's Foreword

Simply Charly’s “Great Lives” series offers brief but authoritative introductions to the world’s most influential people—scientists, artists, writers, economists, and other historical figures whose contributions have had a meaningful and enduring impact on our society.

Each book provides an illuminating look at the works, ideas, personal lives, and the legacies these individuals left behind, also shedding light on the thought processes, specific events, and experiences that led these remarkable people to their groundbreaking discoveries or other achievements. Additionally, every volume explores various challenges they had to face and overcome to make history in their respective fields, as well as the little-known character traits, quirks, strengths, and frailties, myths, and controversies that sometimes surrounded these personalities.

Our authors are prominent scholars and other top experts who have dedicated their careers to exploring each facet of their subjects’ work and personal lives.

Unlike many other works that are merely descriptions of the major milestones in a person’s life, the “Great Lives” series goes above and beyond the standard format and content. It brings substance, depth, and clarity to the sometimes-complex lives and works of history’s most powerful and influential people.

We hope that by exploring this series, readers will not only gain new knowledge and understanding of what drove these geniuses, but also find inspiration for their own lives. Isn’t this what a great book is supposed to do?

Charles Carlini, Simply Charly New York City

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Preface

When asked recently by a Medievalist scholar what my research was on, I said, “Samuel Beckett.” She paused before responding with “now, he was a terrifying genius!” A genius, indeed, with a stern face whose wrinkles spoke of the intensity of his thoughts and work, even though he rarely spoke of his work. A brilliant Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theater director, and poet who wrote in nearly all creative media and who was a professional, directing his plays for stage and television. Simply Beckett, however, aims to dispel the “terrifying” image associated with this literary genius—the view that Beckett is too difficult, too theoretical, and too philosophical for the non-academic reader and viewing audience.

As is evidenced in his letters to actors and directors, Beckett (April 13, 1906–December 22, 1989) wished for his work to speak to audiences emotionally rather than intellectually. He hoped his plays, particularly, struck a nerve, making us cringe as well as laugh, disturbing our content lives. Despite this, audiences and readers cannot separate their emotional responses from questions about what they have witnessed. We want to know the who, where, what, and why. We want to make sense of what we see and what we feel. Simply Beckett offers a way into Beckett’s plays, beginning with biographical and historical material to make theoretical questions about history, memory, and trauma accessible to all readers.

Beckett’s complete body of work is too vast to address in a slim volume such as SimplyBeckett. What I offer instead is a focus on Beckett’s plays, grouping them in terms of themes that Beckett kept returning to throughout his career. It is also through his first staged play, Waiting for Godot, that most of us come to know Beckett. Even those who have never seen the play have certainly come across the memes depicting two shabbily dressed men waiting by a tree—an image that comes straight from the play itself. Simply Beckett hopes to help its readers discover Beckett the playwright through his plays.

The introduction to Simply Beckett, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth”: Samuel Beckett’s beginning,” provides a brief look into the early years that shaped his adulthood and key moments of his life. Its purpose is not to delve into the plays, but rather to outline Beckett’s life. Despite the luxury and privilege in which Beckett grew up, he felt misunderstood and like an outcast from the start. His awareness that birth begins the crawl towards death is not just applicable to the human body. The Ireland of his youth—a dying nation which experienced a rebirth in the 1920s—was a place that became impotent and ignorant in its conservatism. While avoiding political commentary in his works, Beckett was very much aware of the new political starts in the first half of the 20th century—new beginnings that led to fresh graves. For Beckett, World War II was a turning point, a catastrophe that haunted his works. Essentially, Beckett’s disgust with birth and conception, which humorously made its way into his prose, shades each work throughout Beckett’s seven-decade writing career.

Chapter 1: Le Kid, Human Wishes, Eleuthéria: “…we might well ring down the curtain,” explores Beckett’s three abandoned adventures with the theater, aborted attempts prior to his major play, Waiting for Godot. During Beckett’s brief teaching career at Trinity College Dublin, he went to the Abbey Theatre to see plays by his fellow Irish authors. The works of J.M. Synge and Sean O’Casey particularly caught his eye. Perhaps the hours he spent at the theater sparked his interest in playwriting. However, Beckett soon lost interest in Le Kid (1931), which he and fellow lecturers at Trinity College Dublin adapted from Pierre Corneille’s 17th-century play titled Le Cid. Corneille’s tragedy turned into a burlesque and was renamed after Charlie Chaplin’s silent film, The Kid. Five years later, Beckett found himself at a standstill with a one-act Human Wishes; and although he completed Eleuthéria (1947), he decided against having it staged or published during his lifetime. What these early and aborted starts gave Beckett, however, was the momentum to continue and the ability to recognize what worked on stage.

The chapters that follow explore place and history in various ways to paint a compelling portrait of Beckett. Early scholars needlessly obscured his work by insisting that the plays occur outside of any recognizable space or time. This line of thought is debunked in the second chapter, Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Place and History on the Absurdist Stage. The chapter takes readers through the specific references to places in both plays, showing how references to the Eiffel Tower, Lake Como, and the Ardennes, for example, suggest that these plays are not without historical markers. These mentions of real places reveal that Beckett’s plays are post-World War II texts in which the once-recognizable landscapes have become wastelands. What remains are the fragmented memories of the injured and traumatized characters on stage. Waiting for Godot and Endgame start the exploration of history, memory, and trauma.

In Krapp’s Last Tape, That Time, Ohio Impromptu: Remembering That Time, That Place, the importance of place linked with memories is continued. By including three plays that span from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, I hope readers will see that Beckett’s work is not moving towards a resolution. Like his plays which defy linear structures, his body of work explores themes rather than moves to understand them. The nearly silent men in the plays discussed in Chapter 3 are all storytellers who seek to remember defining moments in their lives. Each is a failure: Krapp is a failed lover and writer, and the Listeners in the two later works are elderly, lonely, silent men. In That Time, the Listener is a vagrant. In Ohio Impromptu, the Listener is an exile. Each of these men have run out of stories to tell. In these works, Beckett aligned storytelling and writing about the past and trauma with impotence and isolation.

While Beckett’s body of work is sometimes thought of as male-centered, his oeuvre contains several plays specifically about women and written for actresses, as will be explored in Chapter 4. All That Fall, Happy Days, Footfalls, Not I: “Spared Love”: The Trauma of Being Seen and Being Overlooked explores four of these plays spanning nearly two decades and set in Ireland.  Moreover, these works recall the Irish tradition of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the embodiment of Irish nationalism who transforms from an aged woman into a young beauty when men dedicate themselves to renewing the struggle for independence. Believing that the Republic of Ireland had become a place where intellectual thought was throttled or left to rot, Beckett created plays in which the women are old hags and frail ghosts—no longer able to bear children. He carried the traces of Cathleen ni Houlihan with him, but the female characters he created were traumatized. Each has a story that hints at sexual violation while still calling out for love.

Simply Beckett moves from biography (the time, events, and places that Beckett experienced) to questions about how historical events such as World War II and the Holocaust produced trauma that impacted memory. Chapter 5: Acts without words: Avoiding the danger zone in Beckett’s Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Film, Nacht und Träume, Quad, and What Where goes even further, noting that trauma may exist without enough traces to identify what caused it in the first place. Beckett’s mimes are examples of characters who have been set in motion by something, possibly some traumatic—though unknown—event that still haunts them. Instead, like the characters in What Where, the audience is left asking what happened and where.

In a sense, Beckett’s plays are nostalgic. Although they are visually and structurally daring, they are essentially concerned with the past—how it shapes us and how it assaults us. Fittingly, Simply Beckett concludes with a review of the legacy this great writer left behind. He inspired works of scholarship, providing academic and literary critics with complex works to puzzle over. Beckett’s work, too, has inspired writers, musicians, and artists, all attempting to learn from him and incorporate some of his experimentation in their own work. However, most importantly, Beckett’s work speaks to readers and audiences; the student who emails me asking to know more, or the audience member contemplating with furrowed brow the emotional experience she has just had. Beckett’s plays inspire the utterance of unknowing and the continued struggle to learn, even if that struggle ends in failure.

Katherine Weiss Johnson City, Tennessee

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Charles Carlini for including my work in the Simply … series, a collection of books that have been widely successful and enjoyable to read.

I am grateful to East Tennessee State University, especially to my students, colleagues, and Dean Gordon Anderson, for their support and intellectual rigor both of which helped in the research and writing of this book. The funding and time allotted to me to do this research and the university’s library resources have been invaluable.

With sincere gratitude to Elizabeth Weiss and Nick Pope for being willing to proofread Simply Beckett.

Special thanks go to Jutta Brederhoff and Joachim Leisegang for their support and mentorship, to Erika Nolan for her friendship and to Nina for putting a spell on me.

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Introduction: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth”: Samuel Beckett’s beginning

In the Irish village of Foxrock in 1903, William “Bill” Beckett, of the successful quantity surveying company Beckett & Metcalf, had a house built for his bride Maria “May” Roe Beckett on the corner of Brighton Road and Terrymount Avenue. The couple had been married for two years and Frank, their firstborn, was one year old when the family moved from Pembroke Road into the three-story Tudor-style home they called “Cooldrinagh,” which had a veranda, croquet lawn, large garden, and tennis court. It is in this fine house that Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on April 13, 1906. His childhood in Cooldrinagh would be filled with comfort and luxury, a place where a boy could play with his brother and three cousins who would join the family in 1914. Deirdre Bair, author of Samuel Beckett: A Biography, recalled that Beckett had said that his childhood was “uneventful,” adding that he “had little talent for happiness” (14).

Both Bill and May came from affluent families. Bill’s father William and his uncle James were master builders who constructed important civic buildings, such as Ireland’s National Library and National Museum. Bill was a good-natured man who had a firm hand on the business world. The Becketts descended from the French Protestant Huguenots. The Roes, according to Beckett, had come from a Quaker background. His mother was the daughter of a grain business owner. Biographers James Knowlson and Deirdre Bair disagree as to why May began working as a nurse. She was educated and brought up in social standing that would normally warrant only volunteerism, but May took up work as a nurse at the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin. Bair argues that May’s “high spirits and penchant for the unusual made her a constant discipline problem” at Moravian Mission School, causing her to “put her skills to more formal use and set off for Dublin where she shocked everyone by taking a job and getting a salary” (8). Knowlson, on the other hand, revealed in Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett that the decision was driven by the death of May’s father. Knowlson discovered that the family grain business “took a serious downward turn in the early 1880s” and the death of Samuel Roe left the family with his debts to pay (25). The decision to become a nurse changed May’s life: she met her future husband at the hospital where she worked in 1901. Bill was recovering there from an unknown illness which is believed to have been influenza or pneumonia.

April 13, 1906, the day of Samuel Barclay Beckett’s birth, was Good Friday and Friday the 13th, meshing the crucifixion of Christ with the day believed by some to bring bad luck in the western world.1 Religion and superstition were merged into one for the author; throughout his life, he was plagued by the awareness of having been born on such an unfortunate day. This sense of dread and failure from the first breath is repeatedly present in Beckett’s prose and plays. In his fiction, conception and birth are often recollected with disparaging remarks and macabre humor. In the opening of “First Love,” his short story of 1946 which depicts a homeless man who believes he finds love and moves in with a young woman he first calls Lulu and then renames as Anna, the narrator expresses this displeasure with birth: “For the date of my own birth, I repeat, my own birth, I have never forgotten, I never had to note it down, it remains graven in my memory, the year at least, in figures that life will not easily erase” (25). Here, the phrase “will not easily erase” reveals that the narrator wishes he could wipe out that day. And, in the word “graven” Beckett aligned birth with death. Birth, for Beckett, marks the moment when we begin our descent into the grave. Despite the grimness of the narrator’s statement, humor is present when he claims to never forget the date. But he is quick to correct himself, as he has forgotten all but the year of his birth.

Beckett again injected humor into his prose when he had the narrator recall learning that his partner, Lulu (who he also calls Anna), is pregnant:

She offered me a side view of her belly. She even undressed, no doubt to prove she wasn’t hiding a cushion under her skirt, and then of course for the pure pleasure of undressing. Perhaps it’s just wind, I said, by way of consolation. She gazed at me with her big eyes whose colour I forget, with one big eye rather, for the other seemed riveted on the remains of the hyacinth. The more naked she was the more cross-eyed. Look, she said, stooping over her breasts, the haloes are darkening already. I summoned up my remaining strength and said, Abort, abort, and they’ll blush like new. (44)

The narrator’s suggestion that Lulu’s expanded belly is just intestinal gas and his disgust and attempts at fleeing his responsibility by encouraging her to seek an abortion so that her darkening nipples will return to their youthful blush, reveal Beckett’s own anxiety over conception and birth. Beckett claimed to have remembered being trapped in his mother’s womb, as told in James and Elizabeth Knowlson’s Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration. This, along with the poverty later in life and political upheaval he witnessed as an adult, led to his decision not to father any children of his own. While the tone in his short story “First Love” is one of dark humor, in his drama there is little laughter when characters reflect on birth. For example, as early as in Waiting for Godot, a play about two tramps who wait endlessly for a Mr. Godot, a man they have never met, and who are visited by two other tramps, birth is aligned with an image of death. Pozzo, the bourgeois tyrant who has lost his sight, responds out of frustration with the word “when,” to the tramps, Didi and Gogo: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” (83). Moments later, Didi ruminates to himself: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingering lay, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries” (84). Still preoccupied with birth and death years later, Beckett opened his 1979 work, A Piece of Monologue, with “Birth was the death of him” (425). The character standing alone on stage in this short play continues to recollect the horror of youth: “Ghastly grinning ever since. Up at the lid to come. In cradle and crib. At suck first fiasco. With the first totters. From mammy to nanny and back. All the way. Bandied back and forth. So ghastly grinning on” (425). In this one-man show, the images of an eerily grinning child and the description of his first failure—the act of feeding at the mother’s breast—are haunting images that collapse birth into death in ways that are reminiscent of W. B. Yeats’s troubling images of the soul being “fastened to a dying animal” in the poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The human body for Yeats, another Irish author who won Nobel Prize for literature, is a “paltry thing,” “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Familiar with his countryman’s poetry, and the paintings of W. B.’s brother, Jack B. Yeats, Beckett carried forth a tradition of Irish arts, a tradition consumed with images of poverty, acts of violence, and the birth of a nation. Yet, despite the similarities, none of Yeats’s mysticism or nationalism makes its way into the works of Samuel Beckett.

For Beckett, being born and living was a struggle, but not one marked with spiritual turmoil as it was for Yeats, financial hardship as it was for Tennessee Williams’s family,2 or with violence as it was for the American playwright Sam Shepard. Beckett’s view appears to be inherently Irish. Like James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, he was troubled by a sense of body and place, and haunted by Foxrock, the Dublin suburb he left behind. Ireland, as Seán Kennedy reveals in “Does Beckett Studies Require a Subject? Mourning Ireland in the Texts for Nothing,” resurfaces as a site of trauma in Beckett’s work. For Joyce, the human body and Ireland became a place to defy the conservative Catholic space and provincialism of nation and family. He celebrated sexuality in the Penelope chapter in Ulysses