Time Out from the World: Respite in Beckett’s Stage Plays

Chiang, Michelle

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91518-0_4

Michelle Chiang³

Part of the book series: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century ((NIBTFC))

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Abstract

Beckett’s storytelling characters in the stage plays are observed as actively engaging with their intuition of time by inventing stories, so as to temporarily escape an incarcerating external time continuum. As such, time is delineated by Beckett as dual in the stage plays, a seemingly manipulatable intuitive time and an interminable external ‘clock’ time. In this chapter, we look at how in the midst of attempting to make use of their intuition to pass the time, a sense of respite is produced for the characters and at the same time deprived from the audience members.

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Notes

1.
Henri Bergson , Time and Freewill : An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 3rd edn, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: G. Allen, 1913), 97.
2.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990), 30.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), vii.
5.
Kant, 30.
6.
Bergson , “The Creative Mind: Philosophical Intuition,” in Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (New York, London: Continuum, 2002), 237.
7.
Bergson, Time and Freewill, 127.
8.
Ibid., 98.
9.
Ibid., 128.
10.
Kant, 30.
11.
Ibid., 233.
12.
Samuel Beckett, Proust , in The Grove Centenary Edition: Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett Vol. 4, 1st edn, ed. Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 511–554 (513–4).
13.
Bergson , Time and Freewill, 103–4.
14.
Ruby Cohn , “1937–40: No Trifle Too Trifling,” A Beckett Canon (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 88–9.
15.
Krapp’s Last Tape , in The Complete Dramatic Works (hereafter CDW) (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 213–23 (214).
16.
Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in CDW, 7–88 (24).
17.
Ibid., 25.
18.
Ibid., 35.
19.
Ibid., 81.
20.
Ibid., 82.
21.
Ibid., 81.
22.
Ibid., 81.
23.
Ibid., 84.
24.
Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 42.
25.
Endgame, in CDW, 89–134 (94).
26.
Happy Days, in CDW, 135–68 (138).
27.
Eric P. Levy, “The Beckettian Mimesis of Time,” University of Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 89–107 (97), accessed April 23, 2013, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/utq/summary/v080/80.1.levy.html
28.
Ibid., 92.
29.
Levy posits that time is always portrayed as either a “reduction of time to one continuous moment” or “the reduction of time to the succession of identical moments” in Beckett’s oeuvre. This “either/or” statement suggests that time is always portrayed as singular in each Beckettian play. To Levy , the repetition of a routine or the reliving of a past is a “futile compulsion” that is ultimately aimed at “forgetting,” which he deems is the “fundamental repetitive act”(97). His view of time as singular and his attribution of repetition of the identical as constituent of the linear isochron are consistent with a closed-system interpretation of Beckett’s oeuvre as a project that is aimed at articulating futility. For an essay which claims to be “the first to examine the Beckettian representation of time in relation to the conceptual complexity of time itself – the cluster of concepts informing the idea of time, philosophically construed” (89), Levy’s perspective is limiting. Nonetheless, his view of this ultimately futile flow of time is helpful in our understanding of the sequential nature of the external time continuum that we are examining in this chapter.
30.
Proust, 514.
31.
Gilles Deleuze , “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 27–35 (27–8).
32.
Deleuze, “On Kant : Synthesis and Time,” in Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze, trans. Melissa McMahon (14 March 1978), accessed 3 May 2013, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=66&groupe=Kant&langue=2
33.
John McCumber, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011), 21.
34.
Kant, “Preface [Second Edition],” Critique of Pure Reason, Unified edn., trans. by Werner S. Pluhar (Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 35–6.
35.
Deleuze, “On Kant: Synthesis and Time,” 5.
36.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 125.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid., 128.
39.
Ibid., 130.
40.
Waiting for Godot, 83.
41.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 138.
42.
Ibid., 140.
43.
Ibid., 141.
44.
Ibid., 142.
45.
Relating Beckett’s drama to Bergson’s philosophy is important and necessary. Beckett scholars such as Anthony Uhlmann , S.E. Gontarski and Colin Gardner have observed that Beckett was familiar with Bergson’s ideas. To illustrate the playwright’s familiarity with Bergson’s work, specifically his work on Time, Gardner points out that the main theme of Beckett’s 1931 Trinity Dublin Lectures on André Gide and Jean Racine was Bergson’s “distinction between ‘spatial time’ and ‘duration’ .” More recently, in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, David Addyman, Paul Ardoin , and Dustin Anderson also point out Bergson’s influence on some of Beckett’s prose works. Although a consideration of Bergsonian concepts in relation to Beckett’s prose is not new in Beckett scholarship, these essays in the volume imply that Bergson’s philosophy has an important place in Beckett’s oeuvre, and I hope to extend this understanding of Bergsonian influence to Beckett’s stage plays. See Anthony Uhlmann , Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); S. E. Gontarski , “Chapter 3 Trinity College, Dublin,” in Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29–41; Colin Gardner , Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
46.
As Ian Buchanan and John Marks pointed out, Deleuze’s “interest in the ‘in-between’ seems to have been reason why Deleuze was so drawn to modernist authors like Beckett and Joyce since they were the first to explore it self-consciously.” The ‘in-between’ of Beckett’s drama in relation to external and internal time is elaborated in the next section. See Ian Buchanan and John Marks, “Introduction: Deleuze and Literature,” Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 1–13 (7).
47.
Stephen Barker , “Qu’est-ce que c’est d’aprés in Beckettian Time,” in Beckett after Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (Florida: UP, 2006), 98–115 (101).
48.
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 100.
49.
Bergson , Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1911), 5.
50.
Ronald Bogue , “Bergsonian Fabulation and the People to Come,” in Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 91 n 1.
51.
Ibid.
52.
Bergson , The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (hereafter The Two Sources), trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1935), 98, accessed Jan 14, 2014, http://www.archive.org/details/twosourcesofmora033499mbp
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid., 101.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Kant, “Preface [Second Edition],” 35.
57.
Bergson, The Two Sources, 98.
58.
Ibid., 217.
59.
Ibid., 218.
60.
Ibid., 109.
61.
Ibid., 106.
62.
Ibid., 109.
63.
Ibid., 128.
64.
Act Without Words II, in CDW, 207–11 (209).
65.
Ibid.
66.
David Addyman , “A New Landscape for Godot,” in Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, ed. Peter Fifield and David Addyman (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013), 63–84 (70).
67.
Waiting for Godot, 46.
68.
Michael David Fox, “‘There’s Our Catastrophe’: Empathy , Sacrifice, and the Staging of Suffering in Beckett’s Theatre,” New Theatre Quarterly 17, no. 4 (November 2001): 357–72 (365), accessed June 21, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00014998
69.
Ibid., 365; 363.
70.
Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (New York, Abingdon Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 126.
71.
Fox, 370.
72.
Tim Masters , “No’s Knife role will leave me shattered, says Lisa Dwan,” BBC, bbc.com (3 October 2016), accessed April 16, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-37539146
73.
Endgame, 109–10.
74.
Footfalls, in CDW, 397–403 (402).
75.
Ibid., 403.
76.
Steven Connor , “About There and Thereabouts.” (presentation, Catalysis Conference on Space and Time, Downing College, Cambridge 23 March 2013), accessed April 12, 2014, http://www.stevenconnor.com/aboutthere/aboutthere.pdf
77.
Footfalls, 401.
78.
Connor.
79.
Cohn, Just Play, p. 56.
80.
Deleuze, “Chapter 2: Repetition for Itself,” in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 70–128 (74).
81.
Ibid.
82.
Ibid.
83.
Ibid., 79; James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: a critical introduction and guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 52.
84.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 80.
85.
Williams, 57.
86.
Ibid., 62.
87.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 89.
88.
Williams, 15.
89.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 105.
90.
Ibid.
91.
Ibid., 90.
92.
Rockaby, in CDW, 431–42 (436).
93.
Ibid.
94.
Ibid., 434.
95.
Ohio Impromptu, in CDW, 443–8 (445).
96.
Ibid.
97.
Ibid., 448.
98.
Ibid.
99.
Roland Barthes , The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 6.
100.
Ibid., 7.
101.
Ibid., 6.
102.
Graham Fraser , “The Calligraphy of Desire: Barthes , Sade, and Beckett’s How It Is,” Twentieth-Century Literature 55, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 58–79 (58), accessed March 15, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40599964
103.
Ibid., 40.
104.
Ibid., 14.
105.
Ibid., 58.
106.
Ibid., 40.
107.
Ibid.
108.
Ibid., 40.
109.
Ibid.
110.
Ibid., 21.
111.
Ibid.
112.
Ibid.
113.
It is worth noting that like Levy , Gibson points out that in both That Time and Footfalls “that time” and “another time” are no different “than the units in a mathematical set” in order to suggest the singularity of time in these plays as “one time which is any time at all.” See Andrew Gibson , “The Sparkle Hid in Ashes: Beckett’s Plays,” in Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 240. As established earlier in this chapter, this is merely the feature of external time and regarding time as therefore singular in these plays is to overlook Beckett’s invocation of the internal durée for its destabilizing effect on the audience.
114.
Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 40.
115.
Ibid., 242.
116.
Ibid., 22–3.
117.
Ibid., 290.
118.
Ibid., 256.
119.
Ibid., 255. Gibson quotes from Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1956–1960, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. with notes by Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), 200.
120.
Ben Brantley , “Beaten (Down) by the Clock: Three Beckett Plays about Time at BAM,” New York Times (8 Oct 2014), accessed June 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/theater/three-beckett-plays-about-time-at-bam.html

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Michelle Chiang

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Chiang, M. (2018). Time Out from the World: Respite in Beckett’s Stage Plays. 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_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91518-0_4
Published: 17 July 2018
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