Beckett and the ‘State[s]’ of Ireland

Adam Winstanley

Beckett and the ‘State[s]’ of Ireland
University College Dublin
12-14 July 2012

While Samuel Beckett’s work had traditionally been thought to mark the furthest limits of an ahistorical and deracinated European modernism, recent years have seen the publication of a series of monographs, articles and an edited collection devoted to the re-appraisal of Beckett’s vexed relationship with Ireland. Held at the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland over three balmy days in July 2012, the second conference on ‘Beckett and the “State” of Ireland’ brought together an invigorating mix of established Beckettians and younger scholars, in the hope of further developing this debate. There were, in all, twenty-six papers organised into ten panels, with an opening reception by Eoin O’Brien which coincided with an exhibition at Ardmore House of photographs and materials from The Beckett Country (1986) and a keynote address delivered by Professor Andrew Gibson on the Franco-Irish post-war contexts informing Mercier et Camier.

Feargal Whelan presenting 'The Beckett Country: Beginnings and reflections 25 years on'
Photo: UCD State of Ireland Conference

On Thursday afternoon, the conference began with a panel on artistic and theatrical conceptions of trauma and torture. In his opening paper, Rodney Sharkey sought to differentiate between the treatment of trauma in Beckett’s early prose and his late theatrical works, arguing that while the former occasionally ‘bears the mark of trauma’, the latter displays a wider recognition of what Sharkey termed ‘traumatic institutions’. Beginning with a brief comparison of Garret Phelan’s video installation Racer Recaptured (2003) and the short story ‘Fingal’, Sharkey undertook a Foucauldian reading of Not I and Catastrophe, wherein both texts were deemed to underwrite and undermine the authority inherent within authorship and the theatre as a form. In the second paper of this panel, Christina Grammatikopolou examined Beckett’s influence upon depictions of the body in contemporary art, in a thought-provoking discussion that would prove to be one of the highlights of the conference. Whilst scholars have frequently acknowledged Beckett’s influence in the work of artists like Bruce Naumann, Stan Douglas and Barbara Knezevic, Grammatikopolou drew attention to adaptations of Beckett’s terse dramaticule Breath by Damien Hirst, Niko Navridis and Adriano and Fernando Guimarãres. The majority of the audience was, of course, familiar with Hirst’s Breath (2000) from the Beckett On Film collection, but less so with the violent interrogation of the Guimarãres Brothers’ Respiração + (2007), where two actors are submerged in tanks of water and recite portions of text upon their emergence, or with Navridis’s installation First Love, a song and the yogi (2007), which juxtaposes the breathing of a reading from ‘First Love’ with those of a performance by the singer/songwriter Eleftheria Arvanitaki and a yoga master as he purifies his body through respiratory exercises.

The second panel of the afternoon brought together three papers from Gerry Dukes, Siobhán Purcell and Rina Kim under the topic of ‘writing Ireland’. Dukes regaled the audience with stories of his own acquaintance with Beckett, but his discussion was, in all honesty, more memorable for a passing allusion to Éamon de Valera as a ‘creeping Jesus’ than for any sustained engagement with Beckett’s work. In contrast, Siobhán Purcell’s paper on Molloy and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman was a rich and thought-provoking affair, which read their shared preoccupation with impairment and prosthetics alongside a twentieth-century discourse of degeneration and eugenics. Finally, Rina Kim built upon her recent monograph to discuss the portrayal of women and Ireland in ‘First Love’ in relation to the Kristevean concept of abjection, whilst, at the same time, augmenting her argument with some nicely chosen passages from Beckett’s own readings in psychology and psychoanalysis. As the afternoon drew to a close, the conference relocated to Ardmore House to visit the exhibition and hear an evocative, albeit overtly sentimental, talk by Eoin O’Brien on the extent to which the apparently surrealistic nature of Beckett’s writings is often tied to his Dublin roots. O’Brien’s repeated assertion that Beckett’s work is marked by a ‘tremendous compassion’ was, however, met with bewilderment by some of the delegates, particularly since this account failed to acknowledge the random acts of cruelty, misogyny and misopaedia strewn throughout Beckett’s oeuvre.

The Beckett Country: An exhibition of photographs and materials at Ardmore House
Photo: UCD State of Ireland Conference

Friday’s schedule consisted of four panels, covering the topics of ‘Beckett and Irish Film’, ‘Beckett and the Revival’, ‘State and Stateless Beckett’ and ‘Beckett and Yeats’. With a touch of wry humour, David Clare started the day with a compelling examination of the intertextual echoes between All That Fall and Martin McDonagh’s short film Six Shooter (2005), before speculating that McDonagh’s repeated invocation of Beckett in works like Skull in Connemara (1997) and In Bruges (2008) may, in fact, lead to his undoing. In the second paper, Julie Bates read the physical suffering and indigence of Mark O’Halloran’s Adam & Paul (2004) alongside Beckett’s Rough for Theatre I, arguing that both offer a sobering vision of the human as vulnerable and infirm. After a short break, events resumed with a panel on ‘Beckett and the Revival’, where Kristin Jones discussed Beckett’s subtractive aesthetic by reading Come & Go as a revision of the abandoned play ‘Human Wishes’ and Srinivas Venkata read Watt as a rejoinder to the cultural theocracy of de Valera’s Free State. In the final paper of this panel, Robert Kiely gave a fascinating account of Beckett’s ambiguous response to mysticism and theosophy in Murphy, arguing that the novel simultaneously adopts and parodies elements of the mystical and the occult. In doing so, Kiely sought to tease out the links between mysticism and more widely acknowledged Beckettian concerns, reading the novel’s Paracelsian reference to the ‘archaeus’ alongside Schopenhauer’s ‘will-to-live’, before contrasting the ‘dud mysticism’ of Dream of Fair to Middling Women with Eugene Jolas’s 1932 manifesto ‘Poetry is Vertical’.

Roughly half-way through the conference, then, it was becoming clear that the myriad discussions and reconfigurations of an Irish Beckett on display were less a question of ‘Beckett and the “state” of Ireland’, than of ‘Beckett and the “state[s]” of Ireland’. Seeking to complicate this debate further, Azadeh Radbooei turned to Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘The Exhausted’ to examine the treatment of space in Ghost Trio, arguing that the audience encounters a space of possibility and potential in this late television play, where space and location are no longer quantifiable but intensive and participatory. In the next paper, Paul Stewart discussed the affinities between the shared experience of privilege in the work of Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, challenging a number of underlying assumptions of Coetzee scholarship to examine the manner in which both authors inscribe notions of power and authority into their work. In the final paper of this panel, Hui Ling Michelle Chang described All That Fall as a play in which Beckett persistently seeks recourse to a ‘storehouse’ of Irish memories radiating around the notion of loss, before reading it alongside the Derridean concept of supplementation, wherein the trace can never fully be represented. The final panel of the day focused upon ‘Beckett and Yeats’, where Amy Bauer contrasted the imposing gyres of subjectivity and objectivity in Yeats’s ‘A Vision’ with …but the clouds and Ghost Trio; whereas Seán Kennedy’s provocative paper read the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ as a ‘proleptic critique’ of Yeats’s Purgatory. Paying close attention to the pan-European eugenic discourses informing the story’s depiction of impotence and entailment, Kennedy compellingly read Lord Gall as a ‘demented mouthpiece’ for the ‘demented politics’ of the 1930s.

On the final day, there were four panels which fell into three distinct categories, namely, that of ‘Beckett and Nation,’ ‘Beckett and Place’ and ‘Beckett and Alterity.’ To start proceedings, Brian MacAllister began with one of my favourite papers of the entire weekend; a captivating account of the manner in which bureaucratic space is formally enacted in Imagination Dead Imagine. In a theoretically alert paper, MacAllister analysed the extent to which a bureaucratic narrative of compartmentalisation and over-systematisation stands in productive tension with a disruptive process of fragmentation in this later prose piece, which stages and undermines the logic of the bureaucratic nation state. Turning to Not I, Anna Sigg read Mouth’s ‘dull war in the skull’ as a traumatised response to Beckett’s own experiences in the French resistance, wherein the subject simultaneously refuses to acknowledge this trauma, whilst unconsciously producing a counter-melody that speaks back to the site of trauma. Finally, Benjamin Keatinge gave a compelling discussion of Beckett’s relationship with Brian Coffey, which acknowledged their irreconcilable philosophical differences whilst, at the same time, arguing that these same differences provided both authors with a profound creative stimulus, before tracing the influence of Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates and Murphy on Coffey’s second volume of poetry, Third Person. The second panel of the morning focused upon questions of place and location, wherein Garin Dowd interrogated the notion that Beckett’s work might be tied to a specific location by turning to the cultural anthropologist Edward Hall’s theory of proxemics to evaluate the socio-spatial relations of ‘The Expelled’, with the protagonist moving from dwelling to exposure, from place to non-place. Julien Carriere, on the other hand, discussed the bilingual nature of Beckett’s oeuvre and the difficulties inherent with the project of mapping a literary cartography from the etiolated spaces of his dramatic pieces.

The Beckett Country: An exhibition of photographs and materials at Ardmore House
Photo: UCD State of Ireland Conference

After lunch, the discussion of Beckett and place continued with a rich and stimulating paper by Yoshiki Inoue on the mathematical conception of space in The Lost Ones. On the one hand, Inoue tied this to Beckett’s interest in the visual arts whilst, on the other, locating it alongside William Petty’s mathematisation of the human in The Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691), which is famously parodied in Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729). Pavneet Kaur Munjal was unfortunately unable to attend the conference in person, but after some technical difficulties, one of the conference organisers, Feargal Whelan, stepped in to give a lively performance of Munjal’s paper on Beckett, Schopenhauer and Buddhism. In the final panel of the conference, Mark Nixon drew upon a range of unpublished materials to analyse Beckett’s engagement with Irish cultural institutions, providing a timely reminder of Beckett’s resistance to the efforts of his alma mater, Trinity College, to co-opt and institutionalise his work during the late 1950s. The next paper by Joseph Long returned to the subject of the bilingual nature of Beckett’s oeuvre, in order to examine the use of the Anglo-Irish idiom in All That Fall, whilst Patrick Bixby turned to Beckett’s encounter with the eroticism of Roger Casement’s Black Diaries (1959) to analyse the brutal sadism of How It Is, whilst linking this to Alain Badiou’s notion of an ethical recognition of sameness. Following a lively introduction by Seán Kennedy, Andrew Gibson’s keynote address examined the differences between the French and English versions of Mercier et Camier and Mercier and Camier, arguing that these differences shed an interesting light on the novel’s post-war French context. In particular, Gibson linked the French text to the atmosphere of unofficial, extrajudicial vigilantism that dominated the early stages of the Fourth Republic, before arguing that Beckett’s critique of post-war humanism provided a rejoinder to the prevalent philosophical ideologies of post-war Ireland and France.

‘Beckett and the “State’ of Ireland” was, in all, a successful and well organised conference, which suggested that the recent historical tendencies of Beckett studies need not be as rigid and restrictive as they may first appear. Overall, there was a sense that much remains to be done before Beckett studies might move ‘beyond historicism’, yet, at the same time, many of the contributors sought to challenge any model of a historicist Beckett that would preclude theoretical approaches. A closing word of thanks should be offered, then, to Alan Graham, Scott Hamilton and Feargal Whelan, the triumvirate of conference organisers who fostered a relaxed and convivial atmosphere which helped to invigorate many of the discussions between delegates over the weekend.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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Samuel Beckett Working Group in Southampton

Julie Campbell (Convenor)

Mouth on Fire perform A Piece of Monologue

Samuel Beckett Working Group
7-9 September 2012
University of Southampton

This year’s Samuel Beckett Working Group, held at the University of Southampton, comprised an international group with 17 presenters and 5 auditors. The way that the Working Group is set up helps to make it a really worthwhile experience. The papers, which are works in progress, are sent to all participants in advance, giving everyone a chance to read them carefully, make notes and prepare questions and comments. Each presenter has forty-five minutes and spends a short while introducing their subject, highlighting areas that they would like the debate to focus on.

In the first panel Cathal Quinn (Artistic Director of Mouth on Fire Theatre Company, Ireland) presented a stimulating paper, ‘Product Placement in Beckett’s Plays’, which was concerned with the brand names Beckett included in some of his plays and his prose works. He questioned the reason for their presence, as they introduce very specific items from the real world into texts that otherwise tend to studiously avoid direct references to identifiable times and places. This was followed by Melissa Nolan (Co-Founder of Mouth on Fire Theatre Company, Ireland), whose paper concerned ‘Beckett in Performance.’ This was a fascinating exploration of the actor’s body in relation to theatrical space in performances of Beckett’s work. Nolan discussed her own wide experience of performing Beckett: May in Footfalls, Mouth in Not I, Stenographer in Rough for Radio II, the Assistant in Catastrophe, Vi in Come and Go, W1 in Play and the woman in Rockaby. Next was Kumiko Kiuchi (Konan Women’s University, Japan) whose paper ‘What is “that” in That Time/Cette fois?’ focused on the complex relationship between text and performance in That Time and its cross-generic status. Her analysis focused on the use of the second-person pronoun and the context-dependent adjectives and adverbs, and demonstrated the ways in which the text destabilizes the relationship between the ‘Listener’ and the voices heard.

In the second panel Irit Degani-Raz (Tel Aviv University, Israel) summarized her paper, ‘“Language as Calculus” in Beckett's Writing: A New Perspective on Beckett's Conception of Language’. She used an explanatory framework borrowed from logical semantics called ‘Possible Worlds’ to elucidate the elaborate strategies Beckett used to escape the ‘trap’ of language, and change the representational relationships between language and reality. Yoshiko Takebe (Shujitsu University, Japan) then presented her paper, ‘Formal Experimentation: Silence and Mime in Act Without Words and Rockaby’. She examined the creative use of silence and mime by considering their effectiveness when the plays have been translated and presented on stage in the form of Japanese theatrical traditions, Kyogen and Noh. In an absorbing and interesting presentation she explained the stylized patterns of acting of the two traditions, and discussed specific Japanese versions of Beckett’s plays. Mariko Hori Tanaka’s (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan) paper, ‘Beckett’s Struggle with his Traumatic Memories’, explored traumas in Beckett’s life that have appeared as fragmented episodes in his work, such as the Forty Foot diving incident when he was a child which features in a nightmare experienced by Victor Krap in Eleuthéria. This introduced some fascinating and complex issues, which motivated an interesting group discussion.

On Friday evening there was a Workshop led by Cathal Quinn, with the help of Melissa Nolan, P. J. Brady and Marcus Lamb (Mouth on Fire actors). Quinn guided the delegates through a number of performance techniques applicable to Beckett’s work, such as standing very still and staring with ‘famished eyes’, how to read Beckett scripts out loud and so become alert to the importance of the pauses, and, in pairs, delegates practised rocking to the rhythm of the voice in Rockaby.

Saturday began with Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading, UK), who introduced his paper, ‘Authorship and Adaptation: Beckett’s Theatre Plays on Television’ by comparing adaptations of Beckett’s work with those of other playwrights televised during the same period, such as George Bernard Shaw, and showed how in many ways the adaptations of Beckett’s work were out of sync with contemporary production practices and how the adaptations moved away from theatrical staging into flat compositions that work against three-dimensionality. Elena Dotsenko (Ural State Pedagogical University, Russia) then presented her paper, ‘Aleksey Balabanov’s film Happy Days as a St Petersburg text’. She explained how, at the time of making the film, Balabanov had little knowledge of Beckett’s work, as there were only a few translations available in Russian and so the film references only a small number of Beckett pieces. The film is set in St Petersburg and Dotsenko explored the ways in which this mysterious city created a fitting atmosphere for Beckett’s work. Arka Chattopadhyay’s (Jadavpur University, India) paper, ‘The Rings made Open: Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go and its Cinematic Reconstruction in Ashish Avikunthak’s Endnote’, discussed Avikunthak’s film as a deconstruction followed by a reconstruction of Come and Go. Of particular interest was the way in which the final ringing gesture of the hands is disrupted in the film as Aditi’s (Ru) right and Kuheli’s (Flo) left hands are left unconnected.

In the next panel Fernando De Toro (University of Manitoba, Canada) examined ‘Beckett and Modernity’. He spent time clearly situating his own reading position with respect to Beckett texts. His interest, he explained, is framed by a larger investigation that is strongly focused on the end of modernity and how Beckett can be placed within this closure. A very lively discussion followed his summary, with a wide range of views put forward. Arthur Rose’s (University of Leeds, UK) paper, ‘A Creamy Work: Beckett and Schiller in ’37, ’61 and ’65,’ stimulated the group into a fascinating discussion about ‘creaminess’. An entry in Beckett’s German Diaries following his reading of Maria Stuart and seeing a performance at the Schauspielhaus describes the play as ‘[a]ltogether a very creamy work’ (8/01/1937). The group came up with some very good ideas, and the discussion was extremely interesting and Rose’s comments very thought-provoking. Llewellyn Brown’s (independent scholar, France) paper, ‘Voice and Technology’, explored Beckett’s use of technology and the ways in which the various media allowed him to give even greater force to creations based on a subject’s relation to language. He aligned the Beckettian figure experiencing verbal hallucinations with the spectator/auditor, as the voice, in both cases, is objectivized. On Saturday evening the group watched the performances of Beckett works by Mouth on Fire.

The penultimate panel on Sunday morning was particularly stimulating and thought-provoking. Carla Taban (University of Toronto, Canada) presented her paper ‘Beckett and/in Contemporary Art: Joseph Kosuth’s series of installations-exhibitions Samuel Beckett, in play (2010-2011)’, She showed us images from the installations, and explained how they succeeded in casting new light on dimensions of Beckett’s oeuvre that are fundamental to it and could otherwise remain unnoticed. For example, Taban spoke of how one of the quotations at the Milan installation, ‘Emptiness, silence, heat, whiteness, wait, the light goes down, all grows dark together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, the light goes out, all vanishes’ from Imagination Dead Imagine, created an ‘echoing’ effect, ‘because its rather inconspicuous (reader? narrator? character?) address—‘wait’—both anticipates and directly connects to the over-quoted ‘Wait!’s from Waiting for Godot. Taban’s expertise made the presentation and the discussion that followed a really valuable experience, and the group learned a great deal about Beckett’s relevance to Kosuth, and vice versa. Katharina Knüppel (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany) was next, introducing her paper ‘Samuel Beckett’s Legacies: The Influence of Beckett’s Intermedia experiments on the Contemporary Arts’. She pointed to the way so much of Beckett’s work is characterized by a transmedia tendency towards visualization. She discussed transpositions and transformation of his work by others, in installation and video work. It was a detailed, informative and intelligent presentation that stimulated a lively and thoughtful debate. Adam Winstanley (University of York, UK), used a series of slides to introduce his paper, ‘“A whispered disfazione”: The Presence of Leonardo de Vinci in Samuel Beckett’s Three Dialogues’. The quotations on the slides were illuminating, showing clearly that the artistic debate that was taking place in France in the early 1940s had a strong influence on Beckett’s Three Dialogues, especially in relation to specific work by Jean de Boschère and Maurice Blanchot. It was thoroughly convincing, very well researched and presented.

In the final panel Catherine Laws (University of York, UK) introduced her paper ‘Music in Beckett’s Nacht und Träume: Vocality and Imagination’. Laws’s discussions of Beckett and music are always such a pleasure to read or listen to. She has real expertise and yet is also very aware of how to present her ideas to those outside the cognoscenti, making it accessible and relevant. Her paper focused on the way Schubert’s music is used in Nacht und Träume: the humming and the singing that has no perceptible source. This was a detailed and thoroughly researched piece of work, communicating fascinating insights into Beckett’s use of Schubert in this specific play. The final paper was Matthias Korn’s (University of Potsdam, Germany), ‘“Birth was the death of him”: Samuel Beckett’s Quadrat I + II as a Dance of Death.’ Korn’s research focused on Quadrat I + II, and he took us through a range of robed figures that can be related to the figures in the play: Dante illustrated by Botticelli, Blake and Dore among others; fifteenth- and sixteenth-century images of Dances of Death; and also John Donne’s statue in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. It was well-researched and stimulated a very interesting debate. The group closed with a discussion of the Beckett performances by the Mouth on Fire Theatre Company the night before. It was an excellent weekend, with impressive papers that stimulated some very useful and lively discussions.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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Sam’s Schooling

Georgina Nugent-Folan

Beckett Summer School
Trinity College Dublin.
15-20 July

The Second Annual Samuel Beckett Summer School at Trinity College Dublin opened with a joint Sunday lecture shared with University College Dublin’s ‘Beckett and the “State” of Ireland’ conference (reviewed in this issue by Adam Winstanley), to mark both the beginning of the Summer School, and the end of the ‘State of Ireland’ conference. Rodney Sharkey’s jovial ‘“Local” Anaesthetic for a “Public” Birth: Beckett, Parturition and the Porter Period’ was followed, fittingly, with a wine reception in Trinity and drinks in Davy Byrne’s Pub.

Running from 15-20 July, the week’s events comprised nine lectures, three seminars that ran daily, together with evening performances and events. The lectures began on Monday morning with Declan Kiberd’s ‘Samuel Beckett: Mystic?’ and Seán Kennedy’s informed and engaging lecture on ‘Beckett, Yeats, and the Big House, 1933’ from his ongoing work on that theme. This was followed by lunch and the first raft of seminars. Kennedy facilitated the ‘Beckett and Irish Culture, 1929-1949’ seminar in the lush surroundings of the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, where he led a week-long investigation into Beckett’s complex relationship with Irish culture, focusing predominantly on the post-war works so as to examine the enduring relevance of Irish culture to Beckett’s mature writing. Participants spoke warmly throughout the week of his eagerness to engage with students, and of his approachability and generosity as a seminar leader. With roughly seven or eight participants per seminar, students worked closely throughout the week with the facilitators. For younger scholars and Beckett enthusiasts from non-academic backgrounds, this was an unrivalled opportunity to get to know established voices in Beckett studies, both academically through engaging with them in their respective areas of expertise, and informally through the many coffee and lunch breaks where students and participants from backgrounds as varied as psychoanalysis, surgery, and real estate mixed in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. By Wednesday and Thursday many of the seminar groups had decamped to nearby pubs for Guinness and hot whiskeys as Dublin’s inconsistent ‘summer’ had resulted in many head colds.

On Tuesday Andrew Gibson spoke on the ‘Misanthropic tradition in How It Is’. Throughout his discussion of the history of Irish misanthropy, Gibson was deftly aided in the pronunciation of an extensive list of Gaelic names and titles by Feargal Whelan (UCD). This was followed by a screening of Seán Ó Mórdha’s documentary Silence to Silence (1984), introduced by Declan Kiberd (who also wrote the script for the film). Beckett cooperated with RTÉ in the making of this now regrettably hard-to-find documentary. It features appearances by Billie Whitelaw, Patrick Magee and Jack McGowran, along with previously unseen visual material at the time of its first screening. This screening was also the first of a number of Summer School events open to the public, and many were excited about watching the documentary for the first time.

Many of the evening events were also open to the public, notably Pan Pan Theatre’s ‘Behind All That Fall’. Director Gavin Quinn and sound designer Jimmy Eadie lead an extensive discussion on the technicalities of their recent production of All That Fall, displaying an acute awareness of the production history of the play. Eadie in particular spoke engagingly on the creation of a chamber within his recording studio that adequately produced the sound quality required for the production, and he made clear the company’s commitment to rigorous attention to detail in relation to sound production. Eadie drew attention to the central role of the technician in Beckett productions, reflecting Beckett’s own interest in the technological aspect of his works for radio and film. Credit is due to the directors of the Summer School for co-ordinating this unique event.

On Wednesday, deputy-director of the Summer School Nick Johnson delivered Enoch Brater’s ‘Beckett’s Dramatic Forms, Considered and Reconsidered’ in his absence. This was followed by an impromptu discussion with Johnson on the ethics of directing, specifically in relation to the extreme physical and mental demands certain Beckett plays make on actors. Again, the responsibility of directors and the role of the technician in Beckett was highlighted; thus continuing a conversation initiated during Pan Pan’s ‘Behind All That Fall’ and one that was to reemerge throughout the week. Barry McGovern’s lunchtime reading of a selection of Beckett’s poetry and prose was a highly anticipated and well-attended public event. Wednesday afternoon’s ‘No lack of void’—an aptly named afternoon of free time to explore Dublin—provided a welcome break for participants in what was an otherwise busy schedule. The Summer School offered a further public event on Wednesday evening with Anthony Cronin in conversation with Terence Brown. With frequent, often humorous, segues into Brown’s experience of researching and writing his biography of Yeats, the conversation provided insights not just into the mind of Beckett, but the mind of the biographer and the genesis of Cronin’s biography.

Thursday morning saw Ulrika Maude and Emilie Morin present well-received papers on ‘Convulsive Aesthetics: Beckett, Chaplin and Charcot’ and ‘Beckett and Radiophonic Sound’, respectively. Morin’s rigorously researched lecture was particularly engaging as she sought to challenge the perceived singularity of Beckett's work with sound by drawing attention to Beckett's close proximity to artistic practices important within the BBC and consonants between Beckett’s utilisation of disembodied voices and musique concrète composer Schaeffer’s acousmatics. Along with Tuesday’s ‘Behind All That Fall’, it added to the sense that, while this year’s Summer School was theme-less (unlike last year’s, which took Deleuze as its guiding force), the radio plays were prominent in the programme of events.

A highlight of the week was Thursday evening’s performance of Rockaby/ Berceuse and Footfalls by Rosemary Pountney. The incorporation of the final section of Berceuse into the performance of Rockaby provided a welcome change of tongue in a programme of events that was otherwise exclusively Anglophonic. Pountney was largely absent from the stage throughout the performance of Footfalls. With the exception of scene three, which Pountney performed on stage, the footfalls were otherwise indicated by the movement of a spotlight along a narrow strip of lighted stage. Pountney’s absence from the stage throughout the first two acts was left unexplained until the subsequent Q&A, moderated with sensitivity and genuine warmth by Jonathan Heron. However, by this stage the audience had largely figured this out for themselves as, midway through the second act, what had begun as a collective confusion (where is May?!) gave way to an understanding that seemed to ripple through the theatre that Pountney herself was unable (due to osteoporosis) to follow May’s movement’s the first two acts. Therein lay the emotional force of her performance in act three, the audience were riveted and many were visibly moved. Technicians Marc Atkinson and Jennifer Schnarr deserve mention here, as they operated the spotlight and sound during the performance; again, highlighting the key role of the technician in Beckett productions. Given the tendency for contemporary Beckett theatre practitioners to stage alternative productions of Beckett for experimental reasons, Pountney’s modification of the play—one that was enacted out of physical necessity as opposed to a desire to be experimental or avant-garde—was refreshing. This was a powerful and deeply moving performance; one that will stay firmly in the minds of the audience; indeed, many could be heard commenting afterwards that they had undoubtedly witnessed something very special. The modification of the first two acts, coupled with Pountney’s presence onstage during the third act, testify to her profound engagement with a character whose footfalls Beckett himself originally demonstrated to her in a Paris café.

Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle returned this year to facilitate the Manuscripts seminar. The seminar was well attended and students spoke with much enthusiasm of the organised manner in which it was presented, and the eagerness of both facilitators to engage with participants and introduce them to genetic criticism and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Whereas last year’s seminar focused on the manuscript of the Not I forerunner Kilcool, this year saw the introduction of a more explicitly digital approach; with students actively engaging with the BDMP software to transcribe and encode text from a draft of the short prose text Ceiling. Not only does this seminar offer participants the opportunity to work closely with Van Hulle and Nixon, participants acquire valuable and transferable skills in orthography, which no doubt explains the high level of students in the early stages of doctoral research on Beckett (and Joyce) who signed up to this particular seminar; eager, no doubt, for a crash course in the transcription of tricky orthography. The seminar enabled participants to debate the positive and negative aspects of the archival turn in Beckett studies, together with the pros and cons of digitizing Beckett’s manuscripts. This year, unfortunately, TCD did not make manuscripts available to participants in the seminar and participants lamented the lack of physical contact with manuscripts with many expressing regret that their sole contact with the manuscripts had been through plated glass at the exhibition organised to coincide with Monday’s official opening. Despite this setback, Van Hulle and Nixon utilised their own digitised scans to excellent effect, and by the end of the week students were not only transcribing extended sections of text, but also actively formulating arguments relating to the genesis of the draft in question. Much like last year’s exploration of Not I through the Kilcool manuscript, the text of Ceiling was opened up and made more accessible to scholars. Working with the Ceiling draft was also a practical and effective method for making comprehensible the theories of genetic criticism Van Hulle introduced to the students early in the week. For many participants this seminar is their first extended contact with Beckett’s manuscripts, and so the value of this week-long induction cannot be overemphasised. The excitement such contact with manuscripts generates in these enthusiastic scholars demonstrates a positive aspect of encouraging the use of digital technologies on Beckett’s work and its potential to inspire younger scholars. Over the past two years this seminar has introduced a number of students to the BDMP; a strong indication of the success of the seminar.

On Friday morning Terence Brown delivered his enthusiastic, semi-autobiographical lecture ‘Beckett: Memories and Sounds’. Brown spoke on his relationship with Alec Reid, founder of the TCD student literary magazine Icarus, and author of All I can manage, more than I could: an approach to the plays of Samuel Beckett (1969). Drawn from Reid’s notes on Beckett, bequeathed to Brown in Reid’s will, the lecture moved seamlessly from an intimate portrait of Reid and his relationship with Beckett, to a rigorous discussion on the proliferation of stage directions relating to the tonality of the human voice in Waiting for Godot. This was followed by Heron who spoke, among other things, on the contentious space between performance rights and performance territory and on Beckett’s employment of the rehearsal space as a performance laboratory. Heron’s lecture served as a fitting introduction to the Friday evening showcase by his Performance Workshop. During the week, Heron facilitated a workshop that focused on the body and encouraged participation from performers of all ages, experience, and physical ability. Their performance during Friday’s showcase was a testament to how actively they responded to Heron’s guidance throughout the week.

The Summer School offered a sensitively designed, busy programme with many complementary strains. Participants demonstrated an eagerness to continue conversations begun elsewhere, and made frequent references back to earlier lectures, performances, and to events in UCD. This greatly added to the atmosphere of the Summer School where, unlike a conference or symposium, the emphasis was on praxis—from Heron’s practice based learning, to the development of technical skills for transcribing in the manuscripts seminar. The directors of the Summer School and the ‘“State” of Ireland’ conference should also be particularly commended for bringing the two events together, as they did on Sunday, and for encouraging an active dialogue throughout the week, both during the daily lectures and seminars and in the optional evening dinners, allowing participants the opportunity to continue conversation well into the night and, often, the early morning. By the end of the week, somewhere between exhaustion and elation, Friday’s banquet provided an enjoyable and very tasty end to the week’s activities. This year’s Summer School is a testament to the many die-hard Beckett enthusiasts who eagerly participated in what was a marathon week in Dublin.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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An experience to be renewed: confronting French and Anglo-Saxon perspectives on Samuel Beckett

Matthieu Protin

Beckett au miroir des interpretations/Interpreting Beckett
Sorbonne Nouvelle University
7-8 June 2012.

On the 7 and 8 of June an international colloquium entitled ‘Beckett au miroir des interprétations/Interpreting Beckett’ was held in Paris, with speakers representing both French and Anglo-Saxon sides of Beckett studies speaking. It was organized by Catherine Naugrette, Carle Bonafous-Murat and Jeanyves Guérin, and Matthieu Protin was in charge of academic coordination.

The first day was divided into two sessions: ‘Unclassifiable Beckett’ and ‘Back to Beckett’s sources: manuscripts, letters and metamorphosis’. The first session opened with Carle Bonafous-Murat (Sorbonne Nouvelle), whose paper, ‘A case study: from Samuel Johnson to Samuel Beckett’, presented Human Wishes as a dramatic fragment which pointed out the importance of Samuel Johnson for Samuel Beckett. Beginning by analyzing Beckett’s ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Bonafous-Murat then proposed to see Beckett’s interest for Dr Johnson in relationship with the somewhat ambivalent position that Beckett took towards Irish writers in the 1930s. Dr Johnson constituted for Beckett simultaneously the object of a case analysis and a political figure, a double approach which clearly appeared in the notes taken by Beckett on Johnson and which must be analyzed by taking into account the context of the 1930s. Those aspects—political, clinical and poetical—were then studied by Carle Bonafous-Murat in the very text of Human Wishes.

Shane Weller’s (University of Kent, Canterbury) paper, ‘“Au Contraire”: Beckett, World literature and the art of unbelonging’, was inspired by the famous answer made by Beckett to a French journalist’s suggestion: ‘Vous êtes anglais, Monsieur Beckett?’: ‘Au contraire’. Weller considered what it might mean for Beckett’s works to be ‘contrary’ in its national-linguistic affiliations. Focusing on L’Innommable (1953) / The Unnamable (1958), he argued that Beckett’s works were in fact shaped by an art of ‘unbelonging’, which made them an ideal object for the discipline of Comparative Literature. Through a close scrutiny of the evolution of the proper names in the various states of L’Innommable and The Unnamable’s manuscripts, Weller demonstrated that textual genetics is particularly helpful for casting light on the mechanisms that rendered Beckett’s work so ‘contrary’, not only towards various national-linguistic traditions but also towards world literature.

Bruno Clément‘s (Paris 8 University) spoke on ‘Heirs, publishers, rights holders: translators, directors and critics’ obstacle course’, describing how publishers and rights holders entitled themselves with a very important role in the managing of Beckett’s works. Trying to show how a kind of Beckettian Vulgate developed itself, he studied their (mostly bad) influence on the interpreters’ work. Evoking the difficult position in which translators and directors find themselves and how this position contrasts somewhat with the relative freedom given to critics, he then tackled the delicate topic of a bilingual edition of Beckett’s works, permission for which has been repeatedly refused. He argued that it would not only be a valuable resource for critical readers, but would demonstrate a respect for the very nature of Beckett’s bilingual works and, offer to other translators a more comprehensive source text.

The afternoon session opened with Dirk van Hulle’s (Antwerp University) ‘Manuscripts and the mind: the genesis and narrative of Beckett’s L’Innommable’. Grounding his communication in the post-Cartesian or ‘enactive’ models of the mind, which suggest that cognitive processes do not exclusively take place ‘in’ the head, but in constant interaction with an external environment, he examined how genetic criticism could be made operational for narrative analysis against the background of this post-Cartesian cognitive paradigm. The transcription of the early manuscripts for the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project’s second module—a genetic edition of L’Innommable/The Unnamable—served as the research corpus. Examining the interpretive potential of genetic criticism he used these manuscripts as a test case to show how Beckett gradually moved away from a Cartesian model of the mind and how the multiple drafts are a part and parcel of his alternative model, thus prefiguring a post-Cartesian approach to narrative and mind.

Dan Gunn (American University of Paris) evoked Beckett’s correspondence from 1957 to 1967. He sought to indicate some of what is new in these letters, and did so through a selection of letters that highlighted Beckett’s shifting relation to French and Anglophone culture. He insisted on the specificity of this time period, when the public scrutiny of his work required Beckett to elaborate a new series of mechanisms designed to protect his privacy while promoting his writing. Gunn particularly stressed how Ussy-sur-Marne worked as a kind of ‘self banishment’ and functioned in direct opposition to Parisian life. He also analyzed Beckett’s relationship with Robert Pinget, a case that epitomized how Beckett developed an increased sense of responsibility towards fellow writers. But those years were also decisive for Beckett’s own poetics, and his letters reveal that Beckett wrote about his work with greater directness during this period.

In ‘A different Canon: the German Beckett’, Mark Nixon (University of Reading) investigated the way in which Beckett criticism has evolved in Germany within the last twenty years. In particular, he examined the way it had positioned itself against and in dialogue with the predominant Anglo-American and French traditions within Beckett studies. Generally ignored by critical trends working in other linguistic traditions, German Beckett studies has built upon Beckett’s own distinct relationship with German culture. Nixon proposed a close scrutiny of Beckett’s attitude toward German scholarship and theatrical practice, and of the role played by Suhrkamp Verlag, Beckett’s German publishers. He then pointed out the importance of biographical and manuscript studies, and insisted on the fact that Beckett’s German Diaries offer German historians a precious insight into Germany at the end of the 1930s, and that the study of Samuel Beckett therefore reaches a larger field of research: political History.

Lea Sinoimeri’s (Havre University) paper ‘Theatre, radio, archives: Beckett’s voices of memory’ proposed a study of the radio plays. Setting her analysis against common assumptions held about radio theatre, she showed that body plays a very important part. She then described the influence of Cascando on Not I and That Time, where the voice is thought of as belonging to the exteriority and not as something which was embodied: a scission directly experimented with by Beckett when working on radio plays. She then argued that this technology’s influence could be considered as a change of focus from split interiority to the exteriority of the technological support and the materializing qualities of the recorded voice. She proposed to see this influence as decisive in the shift made by Beckett from an interest in schizophrenia to ‘schizophonia’; a concept coined by Murray Schafer to denote the split between the sound and its source.

The morning session of the second day was entitled ‘Beckett’s theatres’ and the afternoon session ‘Beckett on stage: traditions, innovations, transgressions’.

The day opened with Jeanyves Guérin’s (Sorbonne Nouvelle) paper ‘En attendant Godot’s political readings’. He presented the evolution of the political readings of this play, starting with its specific reception within the French literary field of the 1950s. He insisted on the discrepancy between the reserved reception of some famous critics towards this play, such as Sartre, Lukács or more generally the French review Théâtre Public, on the grounds that it was an apolitical and metaphysical theatre, and therefore ‘bourgeois’, and the fact that the text itself pointed out to a political reading. Guérin established a link between French Holocaust literature and En attendant Godot, and reviewed the various political connotations given to this play throughout stagings from Blin’s to Jouanneau’s, and he stressed the fertile ground that political readings have found in Eastern Europe.

Marie-Claude Hubert (Aix-Marseille University) presented research on ‘Space’s representations in Beckett’s drama’. She showed how the representation of scenic and off-stage spaces evolved throughout Beckett’s dramatic works. She defined three turning points in this evolution from abstraction to geometry: in Waiting for Godot, space is an abstract notion; with Play, it becomes non-referential; and, eventually, in Beckett’s last works, space becomes purely geometrical. This evolution was studied in two perspectives: one where she considered this evolution as responding to an inner logic in Beckett’s theatrical works, while with the second viewpoint she linked the various spaces to other plays by other playwrights or to other theatrical traditions. For instance, she established a parallel between Come and Go and its three protagonists and the archetypal form of the theatre in Aeschylus’ tragedies, and deciphered the influence of Pirandello’s La Jarre on Play.

Stanley Gontarski’s (Florida State University) address, ‘A Tale of Two Becketts: Samuel Beckett in His Time/Samuel Beckett in Our Time’, presented an extensive review of the various transformations undergone by Beckett’s plays throughout time and assessed what was gained and what was lost in the transition. Analyzing the most recent staging of Waiting for Godot on Broadway, he showed that what could be seen as a global triumph of the avant-garde could also be perceived as its reduction to nostalgia or its assimilation into commerce. But he also demonstrated through several examples that the initial strength of Beckett’s plays was still present. He analyzed and presented the work of a Harlem based company ‘The Classic Theater of Harlem’ and also defended the artistic dialogue with Beckett’s works maintained by a pair of visual artists based in Brazil, Adriano and Fernando Guimarães.

The last session opened with Jean-Pierre Ryngaert (Sorbonne Nouvelle). In ‘Samuel Beckett and the institution of a “French” way of acting’ he proposed to tackle Bernard Dort’s query, ‘is there a Beckettian way of acting?’ from a new viewpoint, by studying French actors, Lucien Raimbourg and Madeleine Renaud. He examined their careers, their roles, on stage and on screen, before and after they played in Beckett’s works. Analyzing photographs and audio and video excerpts from the shows, he insisted on the main characteristic for each actor: a popular tone of voice and a bad boy dimension for Raimbourg, and the importance of her career as ‘jeune première’ in the case of Madeleine Renaud. He then showed that both actors were distorting this image when performing in Beckett’s plays, as if the Beckettian stage was a means for them of deconstructing their previous roles.

Matthieu Protin, (Sorbonne Nouvelle) in his ‘Beckett, stage and national traditions’ showed how the changes undergone in the production of Beckett’s plays can be read as the result of an interaction between their specific cultural references and the national traditions of their performers. He analyzed productions made in France, in England, in the USA and in Germany. For instance, he showed how the very organization of the theatre in North America and the importance of the star in order to be economically viable had a direct influence on the American creation of Waiting for Godot. He also dwelt on the specific affinities that existed between Germany and Beckett. The importance of German State Theatre, a tradition that reaches back to Goethe and Schiller, built an artistic context which favoured scenic experimentation. Then, in a third part, he turned to the contemporaneous stagings of Beckett in which national traditions are also to be seen.

Catherine Naugrette’s (Sorbonne Nouvelle) ‘The puppet’s figure’, began with an analysis of ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ by Heinrich von Kleist. She then studied the puppet as an important figure in Beckett’s works. For instance, Pozzo can be seen as a puppeteer to Lucky’s puppet, and a similar relationship is to be found between Hamm and Clov. But puppet also defines a theatrical aesthetics, offering a model or a temptation: a play without actors, developing itself in a poetic way, without the body’s limitations. This temptation was particularly evident in Beckett’s last plays, where the character is reduced to a mouth in Pas Moi, or to a face in Cette fois. She argued that the fact that many puppeteers worked on Beckett’s plays is quite revealing of this affinity and ended by studying two productions: Beckett and Bacon by Dino Arru and Acte Sans Paroles I by François Lazaro and Aurelia Ivan.

This colloquium ended with a roundtable with François Lazaro from the Clastic Theatre Company and Aurelia Ivan from the Tsar Company. Those two directors offered a very rich insight on what working on Beckett means from a practical viewpoint. This interview marked the culmination of a colloquium that began with an unclassifiable Beckett and an abandoned dramatic text, and concluded with the posterity of Beckett’s theatrical works which still question theatrical practitioners nowadays.

Published in The Beckett Circle, Autumn 2012.

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