NOTHING HAPPENS

Wednesday, 3/12

SAMUEL BECKETT

“Nothing had happened, with all the clarity and solidity of something […] For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.”

From Beckett’s novelWatt (1943)

BECKET T: ON WRITING IN FRENCH

Some of his explanations for writing in French rather than

English:

It has “the right weakening effect” (to Herbert Blau, 1960)

“You couldn’t help writing poetry in [English]” (to Richard

Coe, 1960)

“I took up writing again—in French—with the desire of

impoverishing myself still further.” (to Judovic Janvier, 1968)

BECKETT AND THE ABSURD

Theater of the Absurd = a critical term invented

by the US scholar Martin Esslin in his 1961 book The

Theatre of the Absurd. “Theatre of the absurd” or

“absurdism” in theatre studies refers specifically to

post-WWII plays that exhibit the characteristics that

Esslin describes.

WHAT ESSLIN MEANT BY ABSURD

Absurd has a very specific meaning for Esslin, which

he derived from Existentialist philosophers of the

1940s and ‘50s, particularly Albert Camus.

FROM CAMUS'S THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS (1942)

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind

of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained

even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other

hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights,

man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since

he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a

promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the

actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

SOME CO MMON FEATURES OF THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

• The play world appears to be governed by rules, but the rules seem strange and arbitrary and are never fully explained (to the audience or, sometimes, to the characters).

• These ambiguous, arbitrary rules make the play world seem irrational in ways that are both humorous and unsettling. Often, they create situations in which the characters “can’t win.”

• Language does not do what characters want it to do. Either it is too “tired” or “weak” to do its job, or it is “unruly” and “untrustworthy.” Again, this is usually both funny and troubling.

• The play mixes elements reminiscent of “light” entertainment forms (vaudeville, circus, comic strips, popular films) with “heavy” philosophical themes.

• The overall aesthetic tends to be rough and poor—the stage setting is very bare or cluttered with junk, props are broken or worn-out, etc.

OTHER PLAYWRIGHTS ASSOCIATED WITH ABSURDISM

Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet (France)

Griselda Gambaro (Argentina)

Alejandro Jodorowsky (Chile)

Edward Albee (US)

Harold Pinter (UK)

Tawfiq el-Hakim (Egypt)

BECKETT AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Beckett went through two years of intensive therapy in the 1930s with the

experimental psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. He also read psychoanalytic

theory extensively. Themes in his work that may have been (partly) inspired

by psychoanalysis:• Stream-of-consciousness speech (also inspired by James Joyce and Proust).• Characters that appear to be projections of parts of other characters’

psyches.• Characters projecting personality traits or emotional impulses onto objects• Characters who seem to display symptoms of psychiatric disorders (as they

were understood in the 1940s/50s/60s), especially ones that affect perception and speech.

• The theme of traumatic repetition and “back formation” (Freud).• The theme of “birth trauma” (Otto Rank)

BECKETT AND FILM

Before becoming a novelist, Beckett made an

unsuccessful attempt to become an apprentice to the

great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. Eventually,

he made a short film, called Film (1965), starring

Buster Keaton, as well as a series of plays for radio

and television.

BECKET ON WAITING FOR GODOT

“It means what it says.”

“If by Godot I had meant God I would have said

God and not Godot.”