Samuel Beckett: Joycean and Surreal?

Well, what a great way to spend the Friday afternoon before Good Friday before

Easter. Who could think of anything better than hearing Alan Friedman speak about

his recent book? Also, very glad to have the director of the HRC,

Steve Ennis here and the former chair, I believe English. Are you still chair

the English? The

Philip Levine is going to introduce our speaker. I think neither of us speakers here need

introduction in this in this room. But it’s a great pleasure to welcome back

our colleagues from the English department. It was one of the five calls me English department here. Both of these very distinguished

scholars, of course, are perhaps best known for their work on modernism and looking at the handouts.

I think that’s what we’re going to hear about today. By the looks of things, you might I could I will infer that

they they also both have a strong interest and expertise

in fashion. And the two, of course, are going to be shifting theater and modernism. But both of them have been involved in the

actress from the London stage program. That has been such a fantastic boon to the campus as well. So it’s really just

terrific to have them both here today. Welcome, Muslime. Oh,

well, first anyway. OK. Thank you, Roger.

Thank you, Phillip. Thank you to be here. So

hello, everybody, and welcome. Delighted to see you all. Samuel

Beckett was so deeply enmeshed in the James Joyce circle during his early Paris years from 1928

through 1939, that James Nelson, his authorized biographer and one of his most insightful

critics, dubbed them his Joyce years. But the surrealists

and surrealism rival Joyce for Beckett’s early and continuing attention,

if not affection. So much so that Raymond Fetterman, a much quirkier critic than Nelson

and also a highly experimentalist novelist himself, calls nineteen twenty nine to forty five

Beckett’s surrealist period. I submit that there is much truth in both

of these somewhat contradictory claims, and that there’s a further truth about the shape of Beckett’s

career. But I will consider toward the end, Beckett’s Joycie and

connections are well known and have been well explored, although critics generally consider that Joyce’s

influence waned after his death in 1941 and the end of World War

Two. A few years later, Beckett’s connections with the surrealists and their work have been much

less examined. Never much of a joiner. Beckett did not officially belong

to the surrealist group, although he was acquainted with many of the surrealists and with much of

their work. He was friends, for example, with Duchamp, Kandinsky,

Frances Kabira and Jack Amitay, with whom he collaborated on the construction of a tree

for an early Goodo production. He played chess with several of the surrealists.

He translated numerous surrealist writings and he signed one of the surrealist manifestos.

Beck could also use many of the same images, perspectives and motifs as the surrealists

representing and exploring pre-natal and dream states, body parts, the

unconscious non-sequiturs, implausibility, madness,

spontaneity, the marvelous and something analogous to what Andre Breton

called Andre put-on, who was the leader of the surrealist group called Pure Psychic

Automatism becketts Joycean and Surrealist Connections, first

converged in the March 1932 issue of Eugene. Joe lost his little magazine

Transition, which was subtitled An International Workshop for Offic

Creation on the Joycie Inside and contains an excerpt in what was called

Basic English from the and Olivia Pluribus section of Work in Progress.

As Finnegan’s Wake was then called a photograph of her manuscript page from that

work and a section called Marge to James Joyce for his 50th birthday.

The issue also includes becketts previously rejected story, the Joycie incident,

though, at Crescendo, which is extracted from his first and as yet unpublished

novel, then as yet unpublished novel Dream of fair to middling women as

well as poetry is vertical. Joe lost his manifesto on writing, apparently derived

from young withits surrealist call for the hegemony of the inner

life over the outer life. The hallucinatory eruption of images in the dream,

the invention of a hermetic language if necessary, the construction of a new mythological

reality. Marianne Kaus describes it as a widely admired manifesto,

funny and serious and optimistic all at once. In a rare instance

of his publicly expressing collectivist sympathy, Beckett, though not Joyce,

signed the manifesto. Ruby Cohn suggests that while Beckett may not have participated in

the manifesto’s composition, at least one of its rigging sentences was consonant

with his practice. The final disintegration

of the eye and the creative act is made possible by the use of a language which is a Mantach

instrument and which does not hesitate to adopt a revolutionary attitude

toward word and syntax. Going even so far as to invent hermetic

language if necessary, that Beckett may have been of two minds about his signature

is perhaps suggested by his ridiculing such French movements and documents.

In his lecture on one John de Shulz, a non-existent French

poet whom he quotes in Dream and who Beckett writes, came to a bad end.

Joyce indulges in manifesto. mocking in Finnegans Wake when he refers to Alpizar’s

letter in defense of her husband as her untitled mama festa

memorializing the most highest and her certain guest, and then has certain guests at a literary

salon come forth to contemplate in manifest and pay their

first great duties before the both of him. Beckett, in turn, has characters

in his story. Echo’s bones relaxed, quote, relaxing from time to time

to Choire their manifesto. Colan Boycott Pollsters

Measure. For all its recalling of Finnegans Wake, allusive,

obscure and thusly restless and verbally resonant language echoes bones

with its horrible and immediate switches of the focus and the wild, unfathomable energy

of the population. As Beckett’s editor Charles Prentiss wrote in, rejecting the

story he had commissioned is surreal in its undermining of narrative, causation

and reading like a dream sequence or a series of discrete vignettes.

It begins by depicting blackwall Beckett’s kind of alter ego, fictional alter ego

who is resurrected after his death in a previous story, straddling a fence

day in, day out a foot in each of two worlds

locations are dreamlike, shifting from one to another abruptly, whimsically,

a pasture paved with edible mushrooms, a Parisian room, a graveyard,

a seashore. black/white encounters a prostitute. The infertile giant

Lord goal of Wormwood Lady Gohl, whom Blackwood is called upon to impregnate

and does a cemetery in which he and a grave digger dig up his grave so that

he can prove it’s empty. And a submarine of souls on the sea, wildly

populated by various characters who, like Blackwood, died in the collection of stories

more prick’s than kics, including little Alba, waving from the conning

tower and beckoning in a most unladylike manner.

Beckett did not formally endorse surrealism any more than Joyce did, but the avant garde

like Joyce impacted his writings not only through the 1940s, but I would argue

from first to last. In turn, he did what he could to further the Surrealists

agenda, though he wouldn’t have put it that way. Just as he did Joyce’s,

especially during the years 1929 to forty five, his so-called surrealist

period. Fetterman argues that Beckett’s novels and stories of the first period

are situated in a still recognizable setting a city landscape. Dublin,

London. Streets are named. Houses are described. Even nature is

described, though, ironically, but rather than realistic descriptions. This

staging, one might say these scenes are surreal, going even further than Fetterman.

Daniel Allbright maintains that Beckett spent his whole life under the spell of the surrealist

exhibition, as he put it. Though it’s hard to know exactly how to read that last phrase,

since Beckett used it mockingly in his first completed play Hell You Thearea,

written in 1947, a likely reference to the London Surrealist Exhibition

of 1936, which the major Surrealists Breton and Poul al-Yawar,

along with Roland Penrose man Ray and George, really helped organize. The phrase

is spoken by lru theory a cynical, dying, world weary, honourary

crap as a way to characterize his wife’s partitioning of their apartment

with barbed wire. John Pilling writes that Beckett was often in contact

with the artists and writers connected with the great surrealist exhibit in 1936.

And he was one of the translators of Thorns of Thunder selected poems by the surrealist

poet Paul al-Yawar, which was published in conjunction with the exhibition

and his name, and in an accurate transcription of one of his translations, appear

on an exhibition flyer. Although hard evidence is lacking,

Lois Gordon writes that it was a show which one must assume Beckett attended

during a period when he was living in London. Beckett was also intimately

involved at the time with Peggy Guggenheim, who ran the Guggenheim Joan Gallery in London,

which exhibited surrealist and other contemporary art. Max Ernst, who had lived

in a montage a trois with L U R and his wife golla, subsequently married Guggenheim

and then the Surrealists painted painter Dorothy Tanning. So the connections proliferated.

Beckett’s monetary needs were great during the two periods when he did most of his translations of work by others.

The early 1930s and the late 40s. But Affinity may also help

to explain his being repeatedly asked and drawn to translate and therefore

interpret and promulgate the surrealists. Above all, even if he

didn’t always want that connection. Widely known, Nelson writes that Beckett

did far more translations than anyone has ever realized. For many of them peered

at his own request unsigned.

At the time, he was writing Dream A Fair to Middling Women. Becca translated At least 16

pieces. Poems and prose poems for the surrealist number of Edward

Titus’s little magazine. This quarter, September 1932, that Breteau

GUEST edited and that’s your hand out. No one.

Is the table of contents for that issue? becketts translations garnered

high praise from Titus, the Journal’s editor. Quote, We cannot refrain from singling

out Mr. Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett’s work for special acknowledgment.

His rendering of the L U R and baritone poems in particular is characterized lable

only in superlatives, meaning presumably that he had captured

the surrealist quality of the originals. And according to Allbright, Beckett’s

early translations of the surrealists were as important to his artistic development as

his critical studies of priest and Joyce. Titus demonstrated

that the praise was genuine and heartfelt when he subsequently commissioned Beckett

to translate Rambos libretto ever for which the editor happily paid Beckert,

even though this quarter folded before it was published. Ironically,

the translation was subsequently again displaced from its designated slot, this

time in contemporary poetry and prose of 1936 by a letter from Edward

from Ezra Pound inveigh against what he called the Coward Surrealists.

Beckett’s drunken boat was finally published in 1976 and then included in his

collected poems. The next year, this court is surrealist. No. Also

contains 10 pages of prose and poetry by Tristan Tzara without

a translator ascribed to them. John Pilling and Peter five-fold argue persuasively

that they were translated and left unsigned by Beckett, who had written to his friend Thomas McGreevy

about translating Caravelle and then xorra next, presumably anticipating

upcoming translations for this quarter. xorra translations

include imagery that might well be described as Piquet, Eon or surrealist.

The prose poem Like a Man, for instance, ends with chalk dust ash,

an image that resurfaces an end game, and the prose excerpt from the anti head begins

the low sadness of a desolate landscape below sadness of a few

dwellers in blackness, imagery that recurs repeatedly in Beckett’s

writings. Having played a major role in this quarter, surrealist

no, Beckett would have been familiar with breton’s comprehensive statement as guest editor

surrealism yesterday, today and tomorrow and would presumably have had a mixed

reaction to it. Lois Gordon suggests that Britain’s earliest manifestos

emphasized a number of elements that must have been of enormous interest to Beckett.

Dreams. Paradox. Chance. Coincidence. These early writings

also discussed humor as visible at life’s most tragic moments.

The intermingling of conscious and unconscious thought thought functioning would become both subject

and technique in the Beckett canon. In addition to breton’s espousal

of dreams, most congenial to Beckett would likely have been his linking of

humor and tragedy. An end game, for example, Nele comments

that nothing is funnier than unhappiness. breton’s,

I grant you that the rest of the quotation tone’s emphasis on cinematic imagery

that resembled eisenstein’s montage and Beckett was a great fan of Eisenstein. The necessity

of going onward toward Discovery, automatic writing that manifests itself as a monologue

poured out as rapidly as possible as like Lucky’s and Godot, over

which the subjects critical sense claims no share and a refusal to rein in

the imagination. Regardless of the fear of going mad,

Beckett may have undergone psychotherapy out of such concern for himself, and perhaps also

a desire to understand what was happening to Joyce’s daughter, Luchi. But he didn’t shy

from representing madness in his writings. It is as commonplace in his fiction

as it is in the work of the Surrealists. In his story thingo, for example,

blackwall points to the portrayed lunatic asylum outside of Dublin and says,

My heart’s right there. And the narrator of the story, Love and Lethe,

concurs. A mental place was the home for him. Murphy’s

quest for mental freedom leads him to an institution for the insane, which he finds an agreeable place

to work, and where he plays chess with a schizophrenic Mr. end-run, before dying

shortly thereafter. What ends up in an asylum with his narrator, Sam,

as does Malone, who boasts that I feel in extraordinary form delirium,

perhaps along with his fictional character McMann, and who

views the asylum the House of St John of God, as its called, as a little paradise.

An end game Hamm says he once knew a mad man, a painter who thought the end of the world

had come, that it was covered in ashes and that he alone had been spared,

which may well be the situation for the play’s survivors. And like any game,

much of the late fiction occurs in what the narrator of the late work Ill seen Ill said

calls a mad house of the skull and nowhere else,

a place notably occupied by Luckie and Waiting for Godot. The Unnamable

and Bli All End Game is emphasized by the skull like set that Roger Blin

created with Beckett for its initial performance in 1957,

according to the narrator of becketts, the combative. We are, needless to say, in

a skull. All the mortals I saw were alone, and as if something themselves

Stanley can task, he writes that it is a descent most often into an emblematic skull

from which Beckett’s fiction will never emerge. The image anticipates not only

the skull escapes of the trilogy, the three lay pieces that comprise nowhere

no how on, but the dehumanise dystopia tale, the lost ones

and what is generally called the Post. How it is prose late

Beckett works like lessness and worst word. Ho can sound at times like mad ramblings

or automatic writing or the workings of the unconscious behind the skull.

Worst would hope, for example, occurs in the skull. All save the skull gone.

The stare alone in the dim void alone to be seen. Dimly seen

in the skull. The skull alone to be seen. The narrator

of Beckett’s last major work stirrings still ruminates on whether he was in

his right mind. He could not, but begin to wonder if he was in his right mind.

But Beckett, over the scrupulous and self aware craftsman, consciously

produces something akin to what Proteome thought an artist could achieve only

by turning off his mind.

Beckett would also likely have found uncongenial breton’s

ex cathedra tone and pronouncements, his arrogating to himself the authority to

arraign those turncoats from serialism, his insistence that his followers

must adhere to a political and social agenda of his determining one that

he sought to organize in the four corners of the Earth less solemnly

Britan describing the automatic writing he produced. Philip Sopo the lighted in

some bits of rampant buffoonery, a very high degree of immediate absurdity, a like

a delight that Beckett likely would have shared. But Proton then denounced humor

as one of the two great riffs on which romantic art viewed as a predecessor of surrealism,

must come to grief. The other riff is what he calls servile imitation of

nature in its accidental forms. Although he edited the 1940

Anthology of Black Humor, a term he claimed to have invented invented

breton’s seems to have been conflicted about humor, viewing it as a useful weapon

in the subversives arsenal and in the form of nonsense potential potentially constructive

in restoring the child like paradise of the surreal but wary of its potential

for use against him and his movement. Beckert, a man of inordinate

national natural dignity, seems not to have shared Britain’s fear of appearing

ridiculous. Though he often made dismissive comments about his translations,

Beckett nonetheless seemed pleased with at least some of them and eager for more. And not just for

the money they might bring him. In October 1932, a month after the publication

of this quarter’s surrealist number, he wrote to his friend Thomas McGreevy that he had recently

contacted Nancy Cunard to say it was always a pleasure to translate

al-Yawar and. And again, he said, I think I’ll have real pleasure and

transposing them. He sounds more skeptical when noting that A.J. Leventhal says that

all good old men go surrealist, surrealist. Haven’t observed that in myself.

He adds, though he reiterated his price praise of surrealist work in a 1940

nine-letter after translating what he called the Picasso sequence by L. Yuor,

which I think is lovely. Still, when asked, update. has collected poems in 1961,

Beckert included only a few surrealist translations seven poems

by L. Your eight Maxime like Sebastian Schempp 4 and the pollinators

Zohn plus Rambos libretto. Shortly after Beckett completed

his work for this quarter, you know, I did indeed ask him to undertake significant translation

work for Husk for her compendium Negro Negro, an anthology

which was published 1934. Beckett ultimately translated 19 pieces for

Negro, contributing more to the volume than anyone except yu-na herself

and Ranma Ra’mon, merely her then lover and principal contributor. That.

And number three is two is the

table of contents for Negro. And three is the list of becket’s the word Beckett translated

At least six of becketts Negro translations were a surrealist works, and his views of

them were decidedly mixed. Caravelle is the negroes and the brothel

which he called miserable rubbish and took like great liberty in translating.

Despite having been enthusiastic about criminals work earlier. Ernst Mormon’s poem Lewis

Armstrong Benjamin Pirie’s Black and White in Brazil.

Rubia of Yellow’s a short history historical survey of Madagascar, which Beckett called

Bolls. George schedules Sambo without tears. A

rather curious translation of So Duvall’s title, The Negara allow you days on

full and murderous humanitarianism and attack on the church

and what he called its God of Cash, which was signed by eleven members of the so-called surrealist

group in Paris, which Beckett referred to as the whole surrealist guild.

One can see why Cunard was keen to have Beckett translate for Negro. But what was in it for him?

Her project with its anti-racist, communist and surrealist agenda seems superficially

an unlikely one for Beckett to have committed to his possible motivations for doing this work

include financial need, friendship for Cunard and gratitude to her for awarding

his poem horoscope. The prize in her contest for the best poem under one hundred lines

on the subject of time, and then publishing it at her hours press as Beckett’s

first standalone publication. Perhaps he also had an interest in

and even some sympathy for the causes that Negro espoused. The

financial explanation I find unconvincing. Nelson quotes. Beckett is expected to be paid

twenty five pounds for the translations for Negro a considerable sum. But Beckett

had spent Cuno adds ten pounds that you awarded him for horoscope on a dinner for

friends. Thus benefiting only briefly and tangentially from it.

So it’s doubtful that he would have undertaken the Negro translations for the money alone. Besides

Cunard, who had been cut off by her mother in 1932, stated from the start of the

Negro Project that she could pay none of its contributors. Jane Marcus maintains

that no one received any remuneration for the work they did for it. And Hugh Foord notes that

several potential contributors balked when they when they learned that Nancy

did not intend to pay for material. Claude McKay, the poet who had already

written and submitted his contribution for Negro, angrily withdrew. It went to

his apparent dismay and surprise. Cunard reiterated that no payment would be forthcoming.

Beckett’s friendship with Cunard, which became lifelong and deep, was in due indubitably a factor

she had before the Negro project supported him generously when she had money and he had need.

She visited him often when he was recovering in the hospital from his stabbing assault in 1938.

In the 1950s and 60s, when she was the one in financial difficulty, Beckett Center

signed copies of both horoscope for her to sell to support herself and of

Godot. Signed with love from Samuel, she sang. She thanked

him with an elegiac poem for Sam, December 15, 1963,

in which she says, You gave whether or not Beckett was paid

for his translations, and the preponderance of the evidence suggests that he was not. And whatever his

use about Negroes agenda, he undertook the task seriously, even

as he disparaged much of what he was translating during a period of personal, professional,

financial and psychological difficulty beyond his friendship for Cuno. Beckett

may have had some moral and intellectual sympathy for her impressive collectivist

project, which flaunted its political, cultural and ascetic agenda during a time

the depression when economics was the major public issue. According to michala,

the creation of Negro is an act of omarjan and recuperation for Cunard. It was

a question of erecting a monument to black culture, of denouncing fallacious arguments about the

benefits of civilization so generously brought to the book, brought to the blacks,

and assaying to the blacks themselves that they would have to find a compromise between the ancient,

almost moribund civilizations that could be regenerated and the European style of life

in Beckert, a highly individualistic and famously but not entirely

a political writer. The ironic and often despairing quality of his fiction and drama

can be read as commentary on the unimproved ability of the human condition.

While Laurence Harvey argues that Beckett is especially antagonistic to art that is so

socially ongoing, Shea Gordon maintains that Beckett had powerful convictions

regarding his moral obligations to others.

He could not accept the evil imposition of suffering on others with his arms folded.

Whatever the personal risk, while Beckett was no more comfortable aligning

himself with communism and where most of the surrealists, his large contribution to

Negro suggests a belief in cultural and individual equality and

worth. It was a belief that he demonstrated through his life, throughout his life, and his personal,

personal relationships. His wartime participation in the French Resistance.

His work helping to resuscitate the Red Cross Hospital at Sandalow in Normandy after the war.

His responding to a request to assist ADA Society for the

to assist victims of repression by writing Catastrophic

the plague catastrophic and dedicating it to the playwright Vaclav Havel, who had been imprisoned by

the Czech government and his and it and his becketts depictions which valorize

those so depicted without ennobling their suffering of the downtrodden, the infirm,

the hapless, he said. My people seemed to be falling to bits. My

characters have nothing. But remarkably, for the most part, they survive. They

persist. Given Negress promulgation of social, racial, cultural and political

justice, Beckett’s contribution seems an act of small support and commitment

not only to Kinnard, but also of her causes, including surrealism,

whose proponents largely shared her racial and political agenda.

Surrealism was marked by numerous contradictions and paradoxes. Most notable

was its advocating violence and madness as a principle while also being strongly

antipathetic toward the destruction and irrational rationality of the Great War

in which to their subsequent regret. Many surrealists had served

because the surrealists accepted Freud’s theory that we are born with aggressive instincts that must be

both satisfied and contained. If civilisation is to function.

Home, like the earlier futurists, made violence, spontaneity and irrationality

central to the movement by espousing them and surrealism as founding manifesto.

A.J. Cronin maintains that from the beginning, a cult of violence, which was more than just intellectual,

had been one of the principal weapons in the surrealist armory. The first issue of their review

had published a photograph of Charmaine Berteau, who had just murdered a prominent

right wing member of the reactionary exile in France, says defiantly surrounded

by all the members of her group. Yet, like the data ists before them,

the Surrealists also denounced what they came to view as the great wars mindless, definite

devastation, chaos and absurdity. Max Ernst, a German

national who served on both the western and eastern fronts, spoke for many of his generation

when he said of his time in the Army on the 1st of August 1914.

Max Ernst died. He was resurrected on the 11th of November 1918,

according to Tristan Tzara, who spent the war in neutral Zurich as a political protest.

Never has a Claus’s bell. I’d been more preposterous than that of World War One.

The whole European world went to hell because some down and out Serb killed a couple of rich and

powerful Austrians. These assassinations should have been treated as

a simple criminal offense, and that should have been that. Instead,

the assassin assassinations became the ultimate absurdist act, a meaningless rationale

for the most extravagant slaughter in human history. A pollinator who gave surrealism

its name in 1917 had initially Cold War a beautiful thing.

But he came to view the apocalyptic hell of the battlefield, where he was seriously wounded

as the work of a mad humanity, putting out the stars with shellfire.

And then just after the war ended, he wrote. The time has come to light the stars again,

but he died from his war wound shortly thereafter. Accepting Freud’s theory

of aggression, surrealists came to differ over whether violence should be expressed literally

as Breton insisted or metaphorically as blend well maintained, even Zorro

was not a pacifist. He joined both the Republicans and the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance

during World War Two. Bretons autobiographical novel Najia, whose narrative contemplates

such surrealist principles as violence, spontaneity and irrationality, ends with a statement.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

And as if designed to illustrate Britain’s misogyny, numerous surrealist works explicitly

represent violence against women. I’ve got some illustrations of this that I hope will

work here. Yeah, okay. So we’ve got Marguerite’s

the meanest assassin with a female body draped and exposed.

Jochum, any sculpture? 0 1.

A woman with her throat cut that you might not recognize her as such.

Marguerite’s the rape depicts a naked female torso missing ahead,

but with a prompt with prominent breasts. Navel and vagina taken

together suggest a face as much as they do a body, a face eerily and blankly

observing the observer and topped with a full head of hair. Data and surrealists

are generated aesthetic and rhetoric of body parts that became

common cultural currency after the war and that greatly impacted becketts writings

in TSAs play of the gas hawt, the characters. And this is nineteen twenty one

who were played in the first production by in Paris by major data is figures, several of whom became

surrealists or named for specific facial features. The eyebrow

of the eye, the nose, the neck, the mouth and the ear. These are the characters in the play. Acting out

his principle of violence, Breton led an assault on the costume, hampered actors.

Others responsible for the production and the theater itself that terminated the initial performance of

the guest, hit the gas hard and caused a riot that had to be also halted by police. They took their art

seriously. In those days, Britain’s action climax the split with the avant garde group

and led to dueling proclamations signed by numerous adherents on both sides as

antiauthoritarian art manifested. The bearded heart and breton’s prescriptive

surrealist manifesto. Numerous surrealist artists took their cues from TSAs

representation of body parts. John Up created detatched much mustaches

that represent the pompous bourgeois arrogance and stupidity that led to the war in which

he had refused to serve France’s Picardie as Olga.

It shows the head of a beautiful woman emerging despite being partly

obscured by several free floating eyes and an extra nose and mouth.

A precursor of Beckett’s play, Not I, which features a bright red mouth emerging from a

black curtain eight feet above the floor. John cocteau’s film, The Blood of a Poet,

has and materialize everywhere all over the screen. Starting with an artist

sketching a face whose mouth begins to move, he tries to rub it out, but the mouth

attaches itself to the palm of his hand. He then places it on a female statue,

which begins to speak, urging him to pass through a mirror into another world.

And Dorothy, tanning, surreal painting, a very happy picture. A

figure holding an umbrella over here

stands with his back to the observer while looking up at a brightly lipstick mouth.

Open the curtain there. Floating in a flowing kirtan above to lower body

torsos that are here and here, it is a painting

from which becketts auditor and mouth in night I might have emerged.

The title and the presence of an umbrella also suggest a possible source for happy days

in which he wields a parasol. It suddenly erupts into flames.

Both Ernst celebs. I’m going to talk about that figure for just

a moment. And Jackie Métis walking woman statue depicts headless

and distorted and distorted female torsos in accord with Brekke breton’s sexist

notion of women as headless muses, though the trace of a face

appears in Jack Amitay statue, if you can see it up here. Yeah.

But the reverse was at least as widespread on Ehrich, images of heads or upper torsos

were sculpted or painted by Brand Kuzey. His sleeping new series, starting

in ninety eight, did Eurico. This is supposedly Yeom

appalling error and Ernst met an Ernst

Oby Emperor tour. Jack Abedi, who is sometimes referred to

as a miserable list, as if for a month, as if he were a movement that others like Beckett might join

variously and repeatedly represents what seems to be the consequences of violence.

Body parts often heads and images of serial entrapment, for example. Disagreeable

object. A sort of phallus with spikes

that also includes a face and the surrealists table in which a partially

clog head of a long haired woman startlingly views a hand, presumably her own

across a table. Victor Browner’s Wolf Table or surrealism

the poetry of Dreams similarly depicts a fox bust, angrily

contemplating its tail across a wooden table from which it partially emerges.

Born in 1946, Becket was, of course, too young for the Great War, but he experienced its terrible

consequences, including the fragmented and disjointed imagery of modernist

art, the fragmented literature of modernism Winesburg, Ohio, Ulysses,

the Wasteland, lb’s Cantos, the run up to World War Two, and then his own wartime

experience, out of which he came to write a literature of bodily decrepitude, suffering

and endurance set in a bleak, devastated landscape like the Surrealists.

Beckett’s work is replete with body parts, often limbs represented as independent

agents. And while he did not share the Surt surrealist crude misogyny,

he did title his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women and represent

an upper bodied winny in happy days, spending her time rummaging in her capacious

handbag like Ernst. Men shall know nothing of this.

Which depicts two conjoined pairs of legs floating in the sky above two veiled and

robed figures, one of whom seems to be carrying a baby or an enlarged hand.

Take your choice. Becca deploys body parts not as symbols or even Sinek keys,

but as images of incompleteness or disconnectedness, as if birth

or life has become a piecemeal affair when it manages to happen at all.

The narrative voice in Beckett’s Prose Work Company, for example, depicts an unidentified

you awaiting an assignation. Her light step is

heard. Her face appears at the window. The height or length you have in common is the sum

of equal segments. A single leg appears seen from above.

You separate the segments and leave them side by side telephone assignation. I think

the voices in the 13 prose pieces that comprise texts from nothing. Struggle in

vain to construct or sustain a coherent identity or narrative.

The text one marriage narrator says to the body Up with you now, and I can feel it struggling.

I say to the head. Leave it alone. Stay quiet. It stops breathing. Then pants on.

Worse than ever. I should turn away from it all. Away from the body. Away from the head.

Let them work it out between them. In text 3, the voice speculates that he might sprout

ahead at last. All my very own in which to brew poisons worthy of me

and legs to kick my heels with. And perhaps two legs or one

in the middle. I’d go hopping or just the head nice and round, nice and smooth.

No need of lineaments. Text for authors ahead, strewn with arms laid down

and corpses fighting fresh and a body. I nearly forgot. While Text 8’s narrator

wonders, What’s the matter with my head? I must have left it in Ireland

in a saloon. It must be they’re still lying on the bar and text 10’s fancies

that the head has fallen behind. All the rest has gone on the head and its

anus, the mouth, or else it has gone on alone. And text eleven reduces the

narrator even further. No arms, no hands. Better by far

as old as the world, and no less hideous. Amputated on all sides. You wrecked

on my trusty stumps. Among the most startling and original images

in the theater, a Beckett’s truncated or partial figures? An end game.

Happy days. Play.

And not I. Beckert anticipated his depictions. His

depiction of happy days. Happy days when you

first stuck up to her breasts in an Act 2, up to her neck and a mound of earth in

the unnameable vision of Malone. I see him from the waist up. He stops at the waist

as far as I am concerned. The absurdity of Happy Days results not only from Winnie’s

extraordinary situation, but also from her blasé attitude about it.

She apparently accepts her imprisonment as normal, even while complaining that the earth is very

tight today. Canopy I have put on flesh. I trust not.

She recalls that things are no longer what they were when I was young

and foolish and beautiful possibly. I speak of when I was not yet caught

in this way and had my legs and heavy use of my legs. She acknowledges

that her circumstances are so real. All seemed strange, most strange, never any change,

and more and more strange when he also thinks that her situation might improve

as magically as it had worsened because she’s sorry.

Because she’s a creature of the air. Think of her as a bird with oil on her feathers.

Beckett suggests that. And because gravity no longer seems to work as it used to.

She says, I fancy that if I were not held in this way, I would simply float up into the

blue, and that perhaps someday the earth will yield and let me go. The pull

is so great. Yes. Crack all round me and let me out. Or

her circumstances could worsen. One day the earth might cover my breasts as

it doesn’t act too and in so doing, somehow expunge her, free your past.

Then I shall never have seen my breasts. No one ever seen my breasts.

Stacey’s an alternation alteration collide as she is constrained to accept a condition

to have always been what I am. And so changed from what I was evoking

a metaphor, theatrical perspective when he recalls a couple who came upon her and Willy and Willy,

her semi mobile husband, and failed to make sense of their circumstances. Standing

there, gaping at me when he recounts, what is she doing? She says. Sorry.

What is she doing? He says. What’s the idea? He says, stuck up to

her duties and the bleeding ground. What does it mean? He says, What?

What’s it meant to mean? Why doesn’t he dig her out? He says, What good is she to him like that?

What good is he to her like that? And so on. Usual Tosh, when he comments.

But the wife’s mocking response goes some way toward normalizing when you situation and

you she says this is the wife, the couple. What’s the idea of you? She says. What are you meant to mean?

Yet it’s also possible that when he only imagines the couple as a way of articulating the question,

that presumably must be uppermost in her mind. LT doesn’t really

tried to dig her out. James Nelson suggests that images of partial

internments, including these, may have surfaced from the depths of Beckett’s own imagination.

But they also came from his experience. For example, Buñuel and Dali’s and

Andalusia, losi and Dog, a film that Beckett almost certainly new employees images

of the violence and cruelty that Brett Tôn advocated enacting, beginning with an eyeball

being sliced with a razor blade and ending with a couple, perhaps representing suppressed human emotions.

Surreally sunk in the sand up to their breast bones. Ernst painting

Omarjan a W.C. Fields and his little chickadee derived from the collaboration of Fields in

Mae West. In My Little Chickadee afilm 1940 film set in the American west

of the 1880s, shortly being captured by a highwayman, Miss the Mae West character

saunters unharmed into town, and coolly explains. I was in a tight spot,

but I managed to wriggle out of it. Her pronouncement anticipates the circumstances of

many Beckett characters. Who are in tight spots but can scarcely

wiggle, let alone wriggle out, Ernes paints W like windy and happy days.

As a as a plump, big bosom bust and head wearing a clownish, ornate hat

and holding aloft an open, multicolored parasol, perhaps having just burst into

flame like he’s with the fields figure off to the side, that’s this is

the fields for you wearing a top hat and seeming like Winnie’s mound,

either to be holding her up or constraining her or both.

And while no hard evidence. Well, maybe I’ll skip this. Getting on. Let me just skip that. I was

going to give you a little bit about Angus McBean and his theater photographs

and his depiction of all sorts of women, including these two

floral robes. And I think it starts today in very

Dolly esque sectarian poses.

And then despite all of this, against all odds, continuity remains Beckett’s predominant motif.

The unnameable demands keep going, going on. Call that going. Call that on.

As this town progresses from mocking to panic to resignation to continuing. Against all

odds, as the narrator of text 10 insists, no, no souls or bodies or birth

or life or death. You’ve got to go on without any of that junk that’s all dead with words,

with the except with excess of words. Commenting on catastrophic, Nelson sums up with what he sees

as becketts mindset. Beckett is about going on persisting however much you reduce

somebody to an object, a victim. There is this resilience and persistence of the human spirit.

Despite initial appearances to the contrary, affirmation is strong, even in catastrophic.

The late play, which is often read as prophetic of Vaclav Hubbell’s, being freed

from prison and becoming president of Czechoslovakia. Perhaps unsurprisingly,

when Harvill arrived invents a PS+ square to assume the presidency, posters

proclaimed and students chanted. Coulddo is here

as if seeking to reprise the Bortoli inventory that plays out in happy days and not idea

autocratic D in Kent and catastrophist, which stands

for Director Dictator Whoknows seeks to mold and reduce in a mobilized

stage figure p. prisoner protagonist in order to effect an almost

to pop to power d dehumanizes anesthetic sizes p by

dividing him into a set of discrete body parts serial sniper keys

which he manipulates and drains of color, hands exposed joined whiteand creamy

cranium white and toes exposed head down, neck, shins, knees bared

and whitened at the end of the play. As a writer posits, the dress rehearsal

becomes the performance with a surreal intrusion of a play audience’s reaction, a

canned burst of applause. But that’s not quite the end.

T startlingly challenges and thwarts d intention when breaking the

frame, he courageously and defiantly raises his head and stares down

both the eerily summoned audience whose applause we suddenly here and the

actual audience in the theater piece gesture may seem hard to read at first,

but Beckett was clear in his own mind about it. There is no ambiguity

there at all, he said. He’s saying, you bastards. You haven’t finished with me yet.

Like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, standing up to the xenophobic citizen in Chapter 12 of Ulysses

Peace Action is, among other things, a noble and heroic act of self-assertion,

a political and theatrical resistance to the surreal violence that D has

sought to impose on him. By so doing, he reclaims

his various ports, thereby reasserting not only his figural reality and meaning,

but also his humanity and wholeness. It’s the sort of ultimate maneuver

that numerous Beckett characters make, not only the Unnamable, but also Winny

when she stares down and sings to Willie as he reaches for a gun at the end of happy days.

The figures in play when they prepare to reprise their narratives interminably

the mouth and not I when she continues her own and her unending narrative, even

as it becomes unintelligible behind the curtain. For Beckett, the world is

a cruel cosmic joke and the best one can do is to look squarely at reality

and courageously defy it. Persistence and suffering may not be much to hang one’s head on,

but it seems to have sufficed for Beckett and for many of his characters. For all of his surrealist

affinity, Beckett endows his characters with resources sufficient to endure

and transcend the limitations imposed upon them by their surreal circumstances.

Thank you.