Abstract
This chapter introduces key concepts that will be employed throughout the subsequent chapters. Situated in the intersection between the concepts of habit and intuition, this monograph is divided into four sections. Section 1.1 Habit clarifies the concept of Habit in Beckett’s writings. Section 1.2 Intuition defines Intuition as we consider its opposition to the concept of Habit established in the first section. Section 1.3 Disjunction explains how a sense of disjunction in Beckett’s characters and audiences is the result of the tension between Habit and Intuition.
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Notes
- 1.
Samuel Beckett, Not I, Footfalls , Rockaby. Directed by Walter Asmus, performance by Lisa Dwan, 12 Feb. 2014. Royal Court Theatre, London.
- 2.
S. E. Gontarski, “The Business of Being Beckett: Beckett’s Reception in the USA,” in The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, edited by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009), 26.
- 3.
Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 2004), 151.
- 4.
Ibid., 180.
- 5.
Linda Ben-Zvi, “Beckett, McLuhan, and Television: The Medium, the Message, and ‘the Mess’,” in Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 280–1.
- 6.
Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 159.
- 7.
Chris Ackerley. “Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (Review).” Modern Drama 54, no. 3 (2011): 384, accessed May 15, 2014, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/455883
- 8.
Wolfgang Iser, “Do I write for an audience?” PMLA 115, no. 3 (May, 2000): 314, accessed May 20, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/463451. For more on Iser’s Reader Response Theory, please see The implied reader: patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974); The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c1978); The fictive and the imaginary: charting literary anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c1993).
- 9.
Henri Bergson, Time and Freewill: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson , 3rd edn (London: G. Allen, 1913); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990).
- 10.
Bergson , The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans . R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Macmillan and Co, 1935), 98.
- 11.
Time and Freewill, p. 127.
- 12.
Steven Connor, “Slow Going.” (presentation, Critical Beckett Conference, University of Birmingham, September 26, 1998). http://www.stevenconnor.com/slow.htm; Stephen Barker, “Qu’est-ce que c’est d’après in Beckettian time,” in Beckett after Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (Tallahassee: Florida University Press, 2006), 98–115; Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); S. E. Gontarski, “Recovering Beckett’s Bergsonism,” in Beckett at 100: Revolving it all, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93–106.
- 13.
Samuel Beckett, Proust , in The Grove Centenary Edition: Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett, ed. Paul Auster, Vol. 4, 1st ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 515.
- 14.
Ulrika Maude, “Beckett and the Laws of Habit,” Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4 (November 2011): 820, accessed July 24, 2014, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v018/18.4.maude.html
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Bergson , An Introduction to Metaphysics , trans. T. E. Hulme (London: Macmillan and Co Limited, 1913), 71.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid., 9.
- 20.
Michael R. Kelly, “Introduction: Bergson’s Phenomenological Reception: the Spirit of a Dialogue of Self-Resistance,” in Bergson and Phenomenology, ed. Michael R. Kelly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 5.
- 21.
See Manfred Milz, “Echoes of Bergsonian Vitalism in Samuel Beckett’s Early Works,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 19, no. 1 (2008): 143–54; Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Colin Gardner , Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 22.
Gontarski, 98.
- 23.
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996), 124.
- 24.
Quoted in Ibid.
- 25.
Gontarski, 104.
- 26.
Connor, “Slow going”; Kelly, 5.
- 27.
See Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Kinesthetic memory: Further critical reflections and constructive analyses” in Body, Memory, Metaphor and Movement, ed. Sabine C. Koch et al. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2012), 43- 72 (57 n 8), and Gary Gutting, “Bergson and Merleau-Ponty on Experience and Science,” in Bergson and Phenomenology, ed. Michael R. Kelly (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 63–77; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, 1912 Macmillan ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 137–8.
- 28.
See Stanton B. Garner Jr., “‘Still Living Flesh’: Beckett , Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body,” Theatre Journal 45, no.4 (December 1993): 443–60, accessed June 15, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3209015; Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Ulrika Maude, “‘Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order’: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty and Perception,” Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009); Trish McTighe, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 29.
Ian S. Miller and Kay Souter, Beckett and Bion: The (Im)Patient Voice in Psychotherapy and Literature (London: Karnac Books, 2013), 91.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
See, for example, Adam Piette, “Beckett, Early Neuropsychology and Memory Loss: Beckett’s Reading of Clarapede, Janet and Korsakoff,” in Beckett in the 1990s: 2nd International Beckett Symposium: Selected Papers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 41–8, Peter Fifield, “Beckett, Cotard’s Syndrome and the Narrative Patient,” Journal of Beckett Studies 17, no. 1–2 (2008): 169–86, accessed July 14, 2014, http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/E0309520709000120
- 32.
At this point, it is worth noting that the focus of this book is on the entrapping structure of habit instead of the complex mechanisms of habit formation that have been studied by theorists such as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and political theorist Yannis Stavrakakis. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus and Stavrakakis’s work on the relation between consumerist behavior and capitalism will be touched upon briefly in Chaps. 2 and 5, respectively.
Bibliography
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Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, 124. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Maude, Ulrika. 2011. Beckett and the Laws of Habit. Modernism/Modernity 18(4): 814–821. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v018/18.4.maude.html. Accessed 24 July 2014.
Miller, Ian S., and Kay Souter. 2013. Beckett and Bion: The (Im)Patient Voice in Psychotherapy and Literature. London: Karnac Books.
Uhlmann, Anthony. 2006. Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Chiang, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Beckett's Intuitive Spectator. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91518-0_1
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