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Download Thesis This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The body in parts rethinking agency in Samuel Beckett’s theatre Guthrie, Corinna Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 Corinna Guthrie The Body in Parts: Rethinking Agency in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD at King’s College London, April 2020 1 Abstract It is a paradox noted by S. E. Gontarski among others, that Beckett on the one hand revels in the materiality, the ‘concreteness’ of the body in performance, whilst at the same time continually working to undermine and subvert it.1 In doing so, as Gontarski implies, Beckett problematises traditional notions of the autonomous ‘individual’ as the seat of subjectivity, of the actor’s body as the centre of theatrical representation, and of character as a unifying principle within a narrative which exists in an analogous relation to reality. I examine these tendencies in terms of what I call 'the body in parts', in relation to a range of theoretical reference points including the aesthetics of puppetry (with reference to Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ among other sources) and the post-phenomenological philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. My analysis is divided into four chapters, each of which takes a specific body part, eye, hand, ear, and mouth, as a point of entry, drawing on Beckett’s own critical and theoretical writings in order to re-think the question of subjectivity in his work, and re-position agency beyond the boundaries of the integrated, self-present human body. 1 S. E. Gontarski, ‘The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theatre’, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, Vol. 11, 2000, pp. 169-177, p.p. 169-170. 2 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................. 4 INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING AGENCY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE............... 5 INTRODUCTION: PART 2 .......................................................................................................... 36 THE PUPPET PERSPECTIVE: A PRELIMINARY READING OF WAITING FOR GODOT AND ENDGAME ............................................................................................................................ 36 WAITING FOR GODOT (1952) ......................................................................................................... 37 ENDGAME (1957).......................................................................................................................... 53 CHAPTER ONE: EYE .................................................................................................................. 64 TECHNÉ, SPACING, AND THE BODY AS IMAGE IN PLAY, FILM AND CATASTROPHE .. 64 PLAY (1962) ................................................................................................................................. 70 FILM (1965) ................................................................................................................................. 89 CATASTROPHE (1982) ................................................................................................................. 104 CHAPTER TWO: HAND ............................................................................................................ 118 GESTURE, ECONOMY AND MOVEMENT TECHNIQUE IN OHIO IMPROMPTU, QUAD AND WHAT WHERE ................................................................................................................... 118 OHIO IMPROMPTU (1981) ............................................................................................................ 122 QUAD I (1982)............................................................................................................................ 139 WHAT WHERE (1983) .................................................................................................................. 151 CHAPTER THREE: EAR ........................................................................................................... 167 ‘REVOLVING IT ALL’: SENSE AS RESONANCE IN GHOST TRIO, FOOTFALLS AND ROCKABY .................................................................................................................................... 167 GHOST TRIO (1975) .................................................................................................................... 176 FOOTFALLS (1975)...................................................................................................................... 196 ROCKABY (1980)......................................................................................................................... 211 CHAPTER FOUR: MOUTH ....................................................................................................... 225 ‘…PRACTICALLY SPEECHLESS…’ VOICE AND SPOKEN TEXT IN NOT I, THAT TIME AND A PIECE OF MONOLOGUE .............................................................................................. 225 NOT I (1972) .............................................................................................................................. 234 THAT TIME (1975) ...................................................................................................................... 248 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 279 AGENCY, THE PUPPET AND THE ‘BODY IN PARTS’ ......................................................... 279 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 283 PRIMARY WORKS ..................................................................................................................... 283 SECONDARY WORKS ................................................................................................................. 283 3 Acknowledgements Much of the research for this thesis was undertaken in various university libraries, including Cambridge, Reading, London and Bremen. I especially thank the staff at the Beckett Archive, University of Reading for their friendly and efficient enquiry service. Special thanks also to Karin and Uwe Hollweg of the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung, Bremen, for allowing me access to their Collection. My interest in Beckett was sparked as an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, where I was imbued with a sense of the importance of theatre as a space of meaning making, a space for thinking through issues and debates that have an impact in our contemporary world. Two lecturers who profoundly shaped my approach at this stage were Dr Sara Jane Bailes and Dr Ben O’Donohoe, both of whom were influential in my ambition to pursue further study. I owe special thanks to the Departments of French and Theatre and Performance at King’s College London, notably to my MA supervisor, Dr Kélina Gotman who guided me through the early stages of postgraduate research. I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Professor Patrick ffrench, for his guidance, encouragement, understanding and insight. My secondary supervisor, Dr Johanna Malt also provided generous and helpful comments as a reader. Finally, I would like to thank my family, in particular my parents, Dr John Guthrie and Ulrike Horstmann-Guthrie, for their unlimited patience, interest and enthusiasm, Jan for his good-humoured imagination, and James for his faith and companionship. 4 Introduction: Rethinking Agency in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre This thesis examines the status of the body in Samuel Beckett’s theatre, spanning from the 1950s to the early 1980s. It offers a distinctive reading of these works via the notion of the ‘body in parts’, which draws on a range of theoretical reference points including the aesthetics of puppetry, and the post-phenomenological philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. The vocabulary of rupture and discontinuity which Nancy’s philosophy of the body puts into play, disclosing existence in a very specific kind of interrelation between discourse and matter, facilitates a new approach to Beckett’s works, addressing the disruption of presence and of identity as well as the autonomy of the theatrical or filmic event from an alternative perspective. Both Heinrich von Kleist’s essay ‘Über das Marionettentheater’
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