BECKETT AND AESTHETIC

Beckett and Aesthetic Narrative Silence

Beckett and Aesthetic Narrative Silence

Introduction

Samuel Barclay was a playwright, novelist, critic and an Irish poet; one of the most important representatives of experimentalism literary century within the Anglo-Saxon modernism (Pilling 1997). He was also a key figure for theater of the absurd and, as such, one of the most influential writers of his time. He wrote his books in English and French, and was an assistant and disciple of the novelist James Joyce. His best known work is the drama Waiting for Godot. Beckett's work is primarily aimed at dark and minimalism and, according to some interpretations, deeply pessimistic about the human condition. Thus, over time his books became progressively more cryptic and brief (Critchley 1998). Beckett's pessimism is however tempered by a particular sense of humor, between black and sordid (Critchley 1998). The work of this author is studied mainly from the point of view of literature and theater, but also of philosophy, the psychoanalysis, the translation studies, the music and media. In this essay, I analyze Beckett's artworks 'The Calmative' and 'Molloy', applying Beckett's theory of narrative silence.

Discussion

Beckett's plays are most commonly associated with the Theater of the Absurd, a movement in dramatic literature that emerged in Paris and became dominant after World War II (Beckett 1958). Drawing from the physical, moral, and psychological devastation of the war in Europe and from the philosophies of Sartre and Camus, absurdist dramas featured dreamlike and fantastic settings and characters groping for meaning in an environment of existential confusion. These works find their source in medieval religious dramas, particularly from the morality plays and allegorical works of Baroque Spain. Beckett's contribution to this movement cannot be overestimated. Though his literary output in drama was comparatively prolific, arguably his most important contribution to dramatic literature in the 20th c. appears in three plays: En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954), performed in 1953, Fin de partie, suivi de Acte sans paroles (1957; Endgame, Followed by Act without Words, 1958), performed in 1957, and Happy Days (1962; Oh les beaux jours, 1963), performed in 1961 (Pilling 1997).

As in "The Calmative," we are presented not with one personal territory, but with several competing ones. Against the odd but touching image of a beggar instinctively sucking a stone instead of his mother's breast, the scene juxtaposes that of an increasingly detached, cerebral stone owner trying to maximize his sucking pleasure. The same kinds of objects - for all we know, the very same objects - that he used to treat generically, are now singled out as groups, pairs, individuals. None of these arrangements of stones seems more conventional or more logical than the others (Beckett & Ricks 2009).

As our eyes wander among these different stages of Molloy's ownership, we cannot reduce them to a single, coherent territory of will. In the multiplicity of functions and kinds of importance they are given: as objects to be sucked, as parts of a group of sixteen, of eight, of ...