Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301004
M. Byron
Beckett’s late prose texts Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho perform a radical process of literary reimagination late in a long writing career: they reconfigure how biography relates to narrative, and they rethink the dimensionality and mobility of character. In their negotiations with literary history and etymology these texts replenish the stocks of language across the deep time of its evolution and its accrual of semantic and associative richness. In their rich geological and archaeological dispositions, the three texts of Nohow On demonstrate how deep time intersects with the narrative present in images of the earth, providing a locus for life and afterlife: both in the sense of the posthumous condition and in offering belated aesthetic possibilities.
贝克特晚期的散文作品《Company》、《Ill Seen Ill Said》和《Worstward Ho》在他漫长的写作生涯后期进行了一次激进的文学再想象:它们重新配置了传记与叙事的关系，并重新思考了人物的维度和流动性。在与文学史和词源学的谈判中，这些文本在其演变的漫长时间里补充了语言的储备，并积累了丰富的语义和联想。在丰富的地质和考古倾向中，《不眠不休》的三个文本展示了时间与地球图像中呈现的叙事有多么深刻的交叉，为生命和来世提供了一个场所:无论是在死后的状态上，还是在提供迟到的美学可能性上。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301011
P. Sheehan
In an era when the possibility of species extinction is more importunate than ever, Beckett’s 1958 play, Endgame, carries a profound sense of immediacy. This article considers the ‘afterlife’ subtended by the play in terms of its post-apocalyptic premise—traditionally, the provenance of the science fiction genre. Using Adorno’s 1961 reading of Endgame, which brushes aside any filiations with “childish science fiction,” the argument pivots on the ‘paring-down’ operations that deprive the drama of most of its resources. Since the latter includes the archivising operations of memory, their breakdown makes the play’s insistent SF allusions both inescapable and radically untenable.
{"title":"Archive Trouble","authors":"P. Sheehan","doi":"10.1163/18757405-03301011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03301011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In an era when the possibility of species extinction is more importunate than ever, Beckett’s 1958 play, Endgame, carries a profound sense of immediacy. This article considers the ‘afterlife’ subtended by the play in terms of its post-apocalyptic premise—traditionally, the provenance of the science fiction genre. Using Adorno’s 1961 reading of Endgame, which brushes aside any filiations with “childish science fiction,” the argument pivots on the ‘paring-down’ operations that deprive the drama of most of its resources. Since the latter includes the archivising operations of memory, their breakdown makes the play’s insistent SF allusions both inescapable and radically untenable.","PeriodicalId":53231,"journal":{"name":"Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd''hui","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80713262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301002
Christine Ackerley
One of the thieves was saved .… If, as Vladimir concludes at the outset of Waiting for Godot, “It’s a reasonable percentage,” then why not accept Pascal’s celebrated exhortation to believe, rather than to risk in the afterlife the terrors of the abyss or the inferno? This essay traces Beckett’s use of the motif of the two thieves with respect to the truism of Credo quia absurdum est, as manifest in the calculus that underlies the Monadology of Leibniz and informs Beckett’s writing from Murphy to How It Is, and his sense of the self as something that is/was neither One nor Zero.
一个小偷得救了....如果，就像弗拉基米尔在《等待戈多》开头总结的那样，“这是一个合理的比例”，那么为什么不接受帕斯卡著名的劝诫去相信，而不是冒险在来世经历深渊或地狱的恐怖呢?这篇文章追溯了贝克特对两个小偷主题的运用，与“荒谬的信条”(Credo quia absurdum est)的真理有关，这一点在莱布尼茨的一元论基础上的微积分中得到了体现，并在贝克特从《墨菲》到《How It Is》的写作中得到了体现，他对自我的感觉既不是1也不是0。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301005
J. Goodall
Given that the condition of ‘mortal liveness’ was a greater cause for perplexity in Beckett’s writing than the notion of an afterlife, this essay considers evocations of a post-mortal state in The Unnamable and the three works of the later trilogy, Nohow On, as a continuum from the pre-natal state he claims to recall. The paintings of Jack B. Yeats, an acknowledged influence on Beckett, exhibit significant parallels in the evocation of figures whose tenuous presence in the landscape erases the boundary between shades and mortal beings.
鉴于在贝克特的作品中，“凡人的生活”比“来世”的概念更让人困惑，本文认为，《不可名状》和后来三部曲的三部作品《Nohow On》中对死后状态的唤起，是他声称回忆的产前状态的连续体。公认对贝克特有影响的叶芝(Jack B. Yeats)的画作，在唤起人物形象方面表现出了显著的相似之处，这些人物在风景中脆弱的存在抹去了阴影与凡人之间的界限。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301007
A. Cordingley
Relationships of political domination in Beckett’s Comment c’ est (1961)/How It Is (1964) are typically read through a specific historical moment (the Holocaust, the Algerian War) or literary representation (Dante, Sade). This article reveals spectres in the text from the long history of the colonisation of Ireland to the legacy of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism; it explores Beckett’s sense of complicity in the Anglo-Irish Ascendency.
贝克特的评论c ' est (1961)/How It Is(1964)中的政治统治关系通常通过特定的历史时刻(大屠杀，阿尔及利亚战争)或文学代表(但丁，萨德)来阅读。本文揭示了文本中的幽灵，从爱尔兰漫长的殖民历史到文艺复兴和启蒙人文主义的遗产;它探讨了贝克特对盎格鲁-爱尔兰统治的共谋感。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301008
C. Conti
This paper revisits the interpretations of Endgame by Theodor Adorno and Stanley Cavell via an unusual route: Samuel Scheffler’s afterlife conjecture. Scheffler’s thought experiment—based on a doomsday scenario that Beckett’s characters already appear to inhabit—seeks the achievement of the ordinary in an age of climate change by disclosing our evaluative dependence on future generations. I suggest that the paradigm shift to a global subject lies not in the dystopian fiction Scheffler looks to, however, but the “shudder” of the ‘I’ in aesthetic experience, the model for which is Beckett’s Endgame.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301010
N. Camerlynck
Raymond Federman (1928–2009), known as a Beckett scholar, postmodern theorist and avant-garde novelist, was singularly devoted to the one he called Sam. Having escaped death, deportation in the Holocaust, his fiction recounts his experiences from the day of his “birth into death,” the 16th of July 1942. Writing what he called surfiction, fiction which exposes the fictionality of reality, Federman fashioned himself as a Beckett creature. This article outlines aspects of his devotion and its links to death and dying, starting with how he used Beckett’s words to confront his terminal illness.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301003
Russell Smith
This essay examines the concepts of life and afterlife as they appear across Beckett’s trilogy, through focussing on representations of the act of burial, an act which draws attention to a caesura between biotic and abiotic conceptions of both life and afterlife. As the worlds of the trilogy become progressively less biotic, The Unnamable might be thought of as a laboratory in which the ‘lives’ of its characters are subjected to various biological experiments, experiments which suggest that narrative fiction, like the act of burial, is a kind of prophylactic against the fundamental processual nature of biotic life.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301006
A. Uhlmann
This essay will consider the idea of the creation of the feeling of the ‘eternal’ in Samuel Beckett through a strange identification of temporalities that involve the immediate sensation of direct perception in the present, and idealised feelings from the past. It begins by unpacking Beckett’s comment in a letter to Thomas McGreevy of 5 March 1936 that affirms the importance of the ‘sub specie aeternitatis [from the perspective of eternity] vision’ (2009b, 318–321; Knowlson, 219). It considers Spinoza’s definitions of the ‘eternal’ and draws upon Beckett’s early essay Proust in developing readings of Beckett’s late prose works Ceiling (1981) and Stirrings Still (1989). It does this not to attempt to demonstrate Beckett’s debt to Spinoza, which remains open to question, but rather to underline how Beckett’s works, in dialogue with those of Spinoza, allow us to glimpse what is at stake in a particular idea of the eternal.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.1163/18757405-03301009
Cecily Niumeitolu
This article teases out intertextual threads from the visual arts and image-lore that join Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Ill Seen Ill Said. It explores how Beckett’s treatment of gender and sexual desire are deeply informed by Western art history’s specific gender dyad. It argues that Beckett harnesses and agitates this dyad to provoke new understandings of sexuality, sight and sense. By engaging key events in Dream and Ill Seen it unfolds an erotics of nonrelation: the sexual dimension of Beckett’s work that admits the dead and inorganic encrypted and insisting within the all too human.
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