Beckett's Intuitive Spectator

Me to Play

Michelle Chiang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319915180
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beckett's Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play investigates how audience discomfort, instead of a side effect of a Beckett pedagogy, is a key spectatorial experience which arises from an everyman intuition of loss. With reference to selected works by Henri Bergson, Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, this book charts the processes of how an audience member's habitual way of understanding could be frustrated by Beckett's film, radio, stage and television plays. Michelle Chiang explores the ways in which Beckett exploited these mediums to reconstitute an audience response derived from intuition.

© The Author(s) 2018

Michelle ChiangBeckett's Intuitive SpectatorNew Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91518-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Michelle Chiang¹

(1)

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

Michelle Chiang

End Abstract

The trilogy of plays Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby directed by Walter Asmus at the Royal Court Theatre was quite an experience.¹ But contrary to rave reviews that described riveted silence and great pitch-black conditions, I encountered an auditorium that was intermittently intruded by sounds of people shifting in their seats and cell phone lights speckling here and there. The speed at which these lights came and went suggested spectators were impatiently checking time. When the bell chimed a second time and the scene faded out then faded in again in Footfalls, one could hear and see the restlessness of the audience spike. I have yet to find a review that reported a similar experience, and I often wonder if this has a large part to do with the back row upper circle seat I bought on a modest student allowance. The seat gave me a fascinating vantage point of not only the plays (from where I was sitting, Mouth was the size of a pea embedded in darkness, and the effect was hypnotic) but also the vicissitudes of audience reaction to the plays. It took me a few more years and a few more plays to finally find the words to describe the effect Beckett’s drama has on the spectator—it was an intuition of loss, where ‘loss’ is twofold in terms of ‘the loss of meaning’ and ‘being at a loss.’

Within the Anglophone context of Samuel Beckett studies, considerations of audience reception often acknowledge mixed attitudes toward 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 his plays “boring, irritating and incomprehensible.”² 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. One way this view has been rejected is to postulate, like Simon Critchley did, that Beckett’s works open up meaninglessness as something that needs to be conceptually communicated.³

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 emphasizes Beckett’s works as intellectually demanding since they resist offering audiences a discernible or familiar narrative form.⁴ Similarly, in Linda Ben-Zvi’s interpretation of Beckett’s television plays, she asserts that Beckett’s television drama exposes to the viewer the medium as a manipulative artifice that conceals “the mess” that is the human condition.⁵ She observes that Beckettian teleplays stimulate 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. This intuitive effect may or may not lead to an intellectual inquiry, but as a precursor to intellectual engagement, it is audience reception at its rawest and deserves our attention.

In Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays, Jonathan Bignell’s perspective that Beckett’s works are both paedocratic and pedagogical continues to align his analysis with the existing regard for unfavorable reception as a mere side effect of Beckett’s “educational” delineation of failure and resistance.⁶ This is in line with Ben-Zvi’s perspective that Beckett’s works are trying to teach the audience how to see. However, what sets Bignell’s work apart is his informed report on the history of Beckett’s film and television plays’ negative reception, as well as the motivation of his book to introduce Beckett’s works to a broader audience and readership. Chris Ackerley takes issue with this, arguing that Bignell’s attempt to “invigorate the study of Beckett’s television plays and introduce them to a broader audience and readership […] seems an improbable outcome; more realistic perhaps, is the hope that the small following Beckett’s television drama currently commands will be invigorated by his findings.”⁷ Tellingly, Ackerley seems to imply that Beckett studies should be content with our ‘small following’ and fails to appreciate Bignell’s attempt to bring to light the possibility that Beckett’s venture into other media might have been motivated by an artistic obligation to articulate an everyman experience to an everyman audience, instead of merely appealing to intellectuals. Beckett’s Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play maintains that not only might Beckett’s drama have been thus motivated but that they also possess the capacity to invoke this everyman experience as an intuition of loss. In “Do I write for an audience?” Wolfgang Iser asserts that art expands an individual’s experience beyond the limitations imposed by a structured reality, and literature offers “a panorama of what is possible because it is not hedged in by the limitations or the considerations that determine the institutionalized organizations within which human life takes its course.”⁸ The audience’s intuition is a grasping of the fictional and non-fictional realities in its panoramic multiplicity. It plays a large part in the experience of Beckett drama, yet as a precursor to intellectual inquiry, it suffers from having been buried under the many sophisticated interpretations of his dramatic oeuvre.

As such, the main subject of Beckett’s Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play is the audience’s intuitive experience of Beckett drama. Whereas the intuition of loss is often a quiet internal struggle, it is at times visible in the form of audience discomfort. Frustration with Beckett’s film and plays could be an indication of an intuition of loss that is triggered by the reminder of the audience’s fragmentary condition. At times brewing under a calm exterior, at times expressed with gestures denoting boredom or frustration (e.g. clicking one’s tongue, or checking time to see when a play would end), the intuition of loss is not immediately effable as we wrestle with it. This is because our condition of intrinsic fragmentation has been concealed and forgotten under the layers upon layers of habits that society has constructed and piled upon us in order that we may go on assuming that an organized and coherent narrative of life is the only reality of life. Beckett drama is an aberrance, and the audiences intuit that. Habitual ways of thinking are formed in Time, and the shedding of these habits while experiencing a Beckettian play entails an intuition of loss, which may be the root of the audience’s frustration.

Two key writings that will inform our understanding of a temporally organized lived reality are Henri Bergson’s Time and Freewill and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.⁹ The tension between the two philosophers’ conceptions of Time is of particular significance to the understanding that human intuition is veiled under the veneer of habitual systems. Bergson intimated that if not for habits, humans will be consumed by the intellect’s desire to self-destruct.¹⁰ Thus, habits are formed according to a spurious but necessary concept of successive time that is evenly divided into hours, m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Intuition of Loss in Beckett’s Radio Plays
• 3. Film and the Ecstatic Spectator
• 4. Time Out from the World: Respite in Beckett’s Stage Plays
• 5. The Disengaging Beckettian Television Audience and the Monument to Loss
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter