Time and Loss in the Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett
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Reconstituted Pathos: Time and Loss in the Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett Hui Ling Michelle Chiang Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English September 2014 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy is supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2014 The University of Leeds and Hui Ling Michelle Chiang The right of Hui Ling Michelle Chiang to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I wish to thank the School of English at the University of Leeds for the Bonamy Dobrée Scholarship that made my doctoral journey in Leeds possible. My gratitude also goes to Emeritus Professor Shirley Chew for offering me a position as the editorial assistant of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. I am particularly grateful for the financial support and job experience that this position has contributed to my postgraduate experience in Leeds. A big thank you also goes to Dr Neil Murphy, for his unwavering support, guidance and encouragement when I did not dare to dream. I am greatly indebted to Dr Mark Taylor-Batty for his patience, support and guidance throughout the writing of this thesis. I looked forward to each supervisory meeting with you because your meticulous reading of my drafts and constructive feedback assured me that I am not alone in this journey. I would also like to thank friends and colleagues both far and near for believing in me. Special mention goes to the following people who made living so many miles away from home bearable: Alejandra Ortiz, Gustavo Carvajal, Christine Chettle, Shu-shiun Ku, Hui-fang Liu, Hui-ru Kuo, Michelle Wang and Esther Wang. To my parents, Teck Fung Chiang and Gek Huay Peggy Koh, I do not think anyone in this world can love me as much as you do. Thank you for your faith in me. Finally, to my partner, Jia Haur Wong: your encouragement and understanding are my constant source of strength. Thank you for waiting. iv ABSTRACT This thesis looks at Samuel Beckett’s Film and selections of his dramatic works for radio, theatre and television to demonstrate the processes in which an intuition of loss may be invoked in the audience. More specifically, interrogating the dominant attitude in Beckett studies that Beckett's works are intellectually demanding of the audience, I maintain in the dissertation that his drama may appeal more to the audience members' intuition than their intellect. Following this trajectory, I posit that the frustration experienced by an audience member could be caused by an intuition of loss that is triggered by the plays’ reconstitution of her habitual framework of understanding. Key texts that influenced the definitions of ‘habit’, ‘intuition’, and ‘time’ in this research are Henri Bergson’s Time and Freewill and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In this dissertation, I illustrate that the radio plays thematically appropriate the regard for radio as a ‘blind’ medium to highlight the audience’s entrapment in their habitual way of knowing. Further, Film is analysed as reconstituting the audience member’s habit body to an ecstatic being that is temporarily freed from stratified limits. Whereas Beckett scholars tend to attribute static interminability to Beckettian time because of the pervasiveness of ineffectual repetition depicted in his stage plays, I argue that Beckett’s conception of time may be dual: an incarcerating habitual continuum and a potentially liberating durée. Following that, I analyse how the television plays establish the intuition of loss as seemingly subject-less because the characters and the audience’s reliance on the habitual way of knowing has rendered them amnesiacs who cannot remember what they have lost, except that they have lost. In considering the intersection of Beckett’s dramatic works with the concept of habit, this thesis maps out the process in which each medium could have been exploited by Beckett to reconstitute the audience’s habitual framework of understanding to an intuitive experience of his works. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT III ABSTRACT IV TABLE OF CONTENTS V CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 THE CONCEPT OF HABIT 6 1.2 PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT 9 1.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTEXT 13 1.4 CHAPTERS SUMMARY 16 CHAPTER 2 THE INTUITION OF LOSS IN BECKETT’S RADIO PLAYS 22 2.1 INTUITING LOSS IN THE AUDIENCE’S MIND-SPACE 24 2.2 BLIND FAITH 39 2.3 FROM THE PERIPHERY TO AN INTUITIVE CENTRE 55 CHAPTER 3 FILM AND THE SPECTATOR’S ECSTATIC BECOMING 71 3.1 THE INFLUENCE OF SERGEI EISENSTEIN 73 3.2 FROM HABIT BODY TO ECSTATIC BEING 82 3.3 TO HAVE DONE WITH THE JUDGEMENT OF ‘GOD’ 100 CHAPTER 4 TIME OUT FROM THE WORLD: RESPITE IN BECKETT’S STAGE PLAYS 123 4.1 STRATIFIED ORGANISM AND KANTIAN TIME 125 4.2 OUTSIDE OF TIME 140 4.3 RESPITE 157 CHAPTER 5 THE DISENGAGING BECKETTIAN TELEVISION AUDIENCE AND THE MONUMENT TO LOSS 173 5.1 THE DISENGAGING BECKETTIAN AUDIENCE 174 5.2 THE AESTHETIC OF LOSS AND THE AUDIENCE’S COLLECTIVE AMNESIA 197 5.3 EMPATHY 212 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 232 6.1 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS 232 6.2 LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE PLANS 236 BIBLIOGRAPHY 242 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ‘To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was.’ — Samuel Beckett, Happy Days Within the anglophone context of Samuel Beckett studies, considerations of audience reception often acknowledge mixed attitudes towards his early works but neglect to examine the fact that, despite growing appreciation for Beckett’s drama since Waiting for Godot was first performed, there will always be frustrated members of the audience who consider Beckett’s plays ‘boring, irritating and incomprehensible’.1 Such a negative perspective is likely triggered by the playwright’s deliberate frustrations of audience expectations, and could lead certain viewers to jump to the conclusion that the depiction of meaninglessness must mean that the works are meaningless. However, Simon Critchley rejects the view that Beckett’s works are meaningless because of the performance of meaninglessness. Instead, he postulates that meaninglessness ‘need[s] to be conceptually communicated’.2 As such, following Theodor Adorno’s view that Beckett’s plays ‘are absurd not because of the absence of meaning then they would be irrelevant but because they debate meaning’, Critchley emphasises Beckett’s works as intellectually demanding in their resistance to offering audiences an easily discernible or familiar narrative form, so as to articulate ‘meaninglessness as an achievement of the ordinary without the rose- tinted glasses of redemption, an acknowledgement of the finiteness of the finite and the limitedness of the human condition’.3 Similarly, in Linda Ben-Zvi’s interpretation of 1 S. E. Gontarski, ‘The Business of Being Beckett: Beckett’s Reception in the USA’, in The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, ed. by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 24-39 (p. 26). 2 Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 151. 3 Ibid., p. 180. 2 Beckett’s television plays, she asserts that Beckett foregrounded ‘the apparatus of the medium [as message] by revealing its trappings, conventions, and artifice’ in order that the viewers are shown ‘the inherent instability of all mechanical reproduction’ and ‘[forced] to confront its power and seduction’.4 By postulating that Beckett’s television drama exposes to the viewer the medium as a manipulative artifice that conceals ‘the mess’ that is the human condition, Ben-Zvi, like Critchley, emphasises that Beckettian television drama stimulates the viewers’ intellect by leading them to confront the weaknesses of the medium and their susceptibility to its manipulation. However, such emphases on the role of the viewer’s intellect to rigorously interrogate Beckett’s expression of our limited condition, often overlook the intuitive effect that Beckett’s film and plays invoke in his audiences even before an intellectually derived overall conclusion could be drawn about his drama. The sense of frustration experienced by some of his audiences is a good starting point to examine this intuitive effect. Jonathan Bignell’s Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays offers an informed report on the history of Beckett’s film and television plays’ negative reception, yet his perspective that Beckett’s works are ‘both pedagogical and paedocritic’ continues to align his analysis with the existing regard in Beckett criticism for unfavourable reception to be considered as merely a side effect of Beckett’s ‘educational’ delineation of failure and resistance.5 Although Bignell’s view follows Ben-Zvi’s perspective that Beckett’s works are trying to teach the audience how to see (and as a result overlooks the intuitive effect that the Beckettian drama could evoke in the audience members prior to their intellectual arrival at a neat and coherent conclusion about his works), I applaud the motivation of the book to introduce Beckett’s works to a broader audience and 4 Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Beckett, McLuhan, and Television: The Medium, the Message, and “the Mess”’, in Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, ed. by Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 271-84 (p. 280-1). 5 Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: