What Did Samuel Beckett Think About Anime
David Lloyd talks about Beckett's friendships with twentieth-century painters and his enduring interest in the visual arts
What draws you to the work of Samuel Beckett?
I've been reading Beckett's piece of work since I was a teenager and writing on him since my undergraduate days at Cambridge in the 70s. I dare say part of my initial attraction to Beckett lay in the kinds of philosophical conundra his piece of work posed, in its hilarious comedy and in its ascetic reductionism. In a letter of the alphabet to Georges Duthuit, in which he comments on his desire for "a theatre reduced to its own means", he goes on: "That is Protestantism if you like, we are what nosotros are." It may exist that there was also something almost the South Dublin Protestant groundwork that I shared with Beckett that felt like grounds for affinity: certainly there was something familiar as much in the ethos as in the local landscapes secreted in the works. But above all, it was the uncompromising aesthetic ethic, the commitment to a piece of work determined to "reduce itself to its ain means", that corresponded to the refusal of extraneous resources like the resonances of identity or signifiers of cultural belonging. That offered a quite dissimilar set of possibilities, intellectually and aesthetically, than Irish culture at the time generally made available.
What motivated you to write Beckett's Matter: Painting and Theatre?
As for many who read and write on Beckett, his writings on art were always crucial points of entry to his piece of work for me. I nonetheless think of Lawrence Harvey's beautiful study of the early writings, Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic (1970), which I read every bit an undergraduate, as one of the indispensable books on Beckett. Information technology introduced me to the fine art-critical writings and especially to the "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit." That of course led me to Bram van Velde, but it was a long time before I was able to see his piece of work "in the flesh". When I finally did, it changed the way I approached Beckett's relation to visual art, which had been largely iconographic—that is, I assumed that at that place was a relation between the images he saw in paintings and the works he wrote that incorporated similar images. His brief review of Thomas MacGreevy'south book on Jack B. Yeats had been very provocative when I was writing on the later prose: the string of images, only partly derived from Yeats's paintings—"the eyes abandoning, the man lonely trudging in sand, the human being solitary thinking (thinking!) in his box"—all seemed to suggest the images of Ping, Imagination Expressionless Imagine, or the belatedly plays. Indeed, images from Jack Yeats have been notoriously invoked every bit prompts for the scenario of Waiting for Godot. Just van Velde's work, which steadily destroys nearly every vestige of image or figure, raised a quite different set of possibilities and I began to wonder what a painting so radically reduced to and in its means could offer the author.
In what ways do you think the visual arts influenced Beckett's work for the stage?
The more I looked at paintings by the artists on whom he wrote and, for the most office, had close and extended relationships with, the more I became convinced that Beckett's engagement with painting was less—and over his writing career less and less—to do with the prompts that theatrical images found in painting and increasingly to practice with an interrogation of the image and its communicative construction. Beckett seemed more than preoccupied with what the procedures and problems of painting advise for the writer in relation to his own bug and procedures. I don't mean by that that the statements he makes about painting are actually just statements regarding his own literary aesthetic and to be translated as such. Rather, he seemed to meet in painting a prepare of aesthetic questions and responses that went to the heart of the crisis in representation that marks 20th-century art in general. It's meaning to me that he focused on painting. For instance, he knew Albert Giacometti well, but never wrote about his sculpture, though one could certainly see abundant correspondences in their work. Three-dimensional art did not seem to capture his attention. Painting held his attention, I think, because it was the medium that most persistently addressed the question of representation and what he termed in an early review of Irish poetry "the breakdown of the object".That "new state of affairs", he knew, unsaid besides the breakdown of the subject, and Western painting, which had sought since the Renaissance to capture its objects on the flat airplane of the canvas, sought no less to situate the discipline perspectivally in the position of the sovereign. Beckett's theatre very gradually absorbs the lessons of the painters whose piece of work in evolving means absorbs him for some threescore years and does and then in ways that are quite painterly in the senses that they variously offer. Like painting, theatre in its very spatial geometry, so to speak, positions the spectator before a scene where the gaze captures an object. Beckett's offset plays turn around the image: information technology's difficult non to see how powerful the images of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days are and it'southward no blow that critics have sought correlatives in painting—Yeats or Caspar David Friedrich, for example—for those images. Simply the plays do besides refuse to allow the paradigm to consolidate into a "message": the texts of the plays constantly propose symbolic meanings, through allusions, citations, images, etc—the whole gamut of modernist associations—but always take them only so far that they begin to unravel or fizzle out. Gradually, however, the image is replaced by a complete disaggregation of the spectacle into its component parts—voice, gesture, figure, light, all become split up entities dispersed on the stage, from Krapp's Last Record on. I argue that in Beckett's theatre, the man appears as a thing among the things that are its world, including the "things" that are the vox and the gaze. The later plays gradually seem to remove all depth from the theatre, get tableaus on the surface of an arcanum of intense darkness behind the lighted strip located at the front end of the stage. At that place the human thing momentarily appears and disappears. Think of Footfalls or Come up and Get. They are, of course, very painterly in this: "still" the action of a Beckett play at almost any point, and you have a marvellous painting. Just—like the paintings of Caravaggio which they seem to evoke procedurally—they do destroy the punctual sovereign gaze of the spectator: Beckett destroys theatre as Caravaggio was said to have "destroyed painting". It'southward interesting to come across how Beckett's practice as a director constantly emphasized tableau-like effects fifty-fifty in early plays like Waiting for Godot.
Could you say a little fleck about Beckett'south relationship to twentieth-century painters such as Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha?
I chose to focus on three painters with whom Beckett was personally shut and on whom he wrote critical responses of varying length. Yeats he met as a young man through MacGreevy when the painter was already quite onetime and producing his mature and virtually formally inventive work. Beckett's long correspondence with MacGreevy constantly returns to his adoration for the painter, anticipating Yeats's eventually very high reputation. I argue that Beckett sees in Yeats's late work a tension between figure and footing, grade and material, that is the formal correlative of his earlier, quasi-ethnographic depictions of Irish gaelic subalternity: both are recalcitrant to representation. Yeats'due south late paintings are notoriously difficult to read, forcing the viewer to shift constantly between the material insistence of the pigment itself and the image that emerges from it. Beckett's early on theatre will perform a respective play betwixt the images it suggests and the textual instability that undoes them.
Van Velde, the Dutch painter whom he got to know in the belatedly 30s, is the painter near whom Beckett wrote most, immediately afterward the devastating experience of the state of war. Van Velde, he says, was his "great familiar" and there was clearly a close aesthetic understanding betwixt them, van Velde remarking in the volume of Transition that independent the "Iii Dialogues", "Painting is Human being in face with his ending." I was struck that nobody seems to accept noticed that this book, Transition 49, contains reviews and reproductions of the work of the two other painters in the dialogues, Tal Coat and André Masson, both of whom Beckett knew and Duthuit championed. It seemed important to understand the "3 Dialogues" as a kind of intertext that critiques the journal's agenda, which was to restore the continuity and global prominence of French painting. Tal Coat and Masson extend the traditions, well-nigh immediately, of Cézanne and Matisse, while the anti-hero, van Velde, pulls that tradition autonomously in his paintings that allude constantly to their stylistic traits while dispersing the concluding vestiges of figure and gaze across his increasingly abstract canvases. It is, I think, in his meditations on van Velde's works that Beckett eventually understands how to atomize the image that had and then powerfully informed his early theatre.
Unlike Yeats and van Velde, Avigdor Arikha, the Romanian Jewish painter who survived the labor camps, was younger than Beckett and got to know him after a performance of Waiting for Godot in the mid-1950s. They became intimate friends for the rest of Beckett'south life and frequently met and conversed about art and literature. Arikha is singular for the sudden rupture in his work, which had begun with abstruse painting just, later on he visited a Caravaggio exhibition at the Louvre, became exclusively figurative or, equally he preferred to put it, drawing or painting "from ascertainment". His best paintings are astonishing constructions that alloy saturated washes of colour with acutely observed depictions of things: the affinity with Caravaggio is not in bailiwick affair but in the refusal of "historical" painting and in its interrogation of the gaze—traits that Beckett's brief catalogue note on Arikha captures with characteristic condensation.
To me, information technology has always been striking that these painters to whom Beckett seems to take been closest all work at the border of what is generally known equally "figurative" painting, where it verges into abstraction: even van Velde, who most approaches pure abstraction in the fourth dimension Beckett was writing about his work, always seems to get out some vestige of figure in his work, a reminder of the thing that is the gaze, then to speak.
How can Beckett'southward correspondence with the critic Georges Duthuit help us to sympathise his circuitous mental attitude towards painting?
For a reputedly solipsistic artists, Beckett was notably dialogical in practice. Duthuit, art critic and son-in-police of Matisse, befriended Beckett in the post-war period of French material and cultural reconstruction. He revived and edited Transition and gave Beckett regular translation piece of work. (In fact, there is nonetheless work to exist done to catalogue all the writers whom Beckett did translate during this period: information technology would make an interesting demography of post-war French literature too as painting). Their ongoing "dialogue" is represented in a big number of lengthy letters collected in the correspondence, which clearly formed the ground for the text Beckett eventually equanimous as the "Iii Dialogues". Beckett's closeness to Duthuit recalls his friendship with MacGreevy. But Duthuit, who wrote extensively about Byzantine art in ways that sometimes vividly recall W.B. Yeats, was an interlocutor at the fourth dimension when Beckett was most possessed past the potentialities of the image. At a certain point, he seems to lose involvement in his conversation with Duthuit but as his religion in the paradigm as a solution to literary and visual aesthetic problems was waning. You lot can run into the correspondence tail off in the 2d volume of the Letters, though they continued to collaborate together every bit champions of van Velde at to the lowest degree into the late 50s. Rémi Labrusse has studied their relationship most fully and in very compelling ways.
Why practice y'all think Beckett was sometimes drawn more to visual artists than to boyfriend writers?
I'one thousand not sure that I would put it quite that manner. Certainly, Beckett had a life-long "passion for painting", but he was also deeply engaged with writers, Joyce and Proust nigh notoriously, likewise as younger writers including Kay Boyle, Aidan Higgins and Harold Pinter. That said, I practise recollect that he was drawn not but to the silence of the canvass (and to that of the notoriously taciturn Yeats and van Velde), simply to the procedures of painting: erasure, over-painting, the emergence and waning of the paradigm, all seem correlatives of his own want, going back to the famous "German letter" written to Axel Kaun in the 1930s, to strip away the give-and-take-surface, in an endless unveiling. That'southward exactly how he writes of van Velde in "Peintres de l'empêchement" (1948): "Un dévoilement sans fin, voile derrière voile, plan sur plan de transparences imparfaites, un dévoilement vers l'indévoilable, le rien, la chose à nouveau." An impossible project, this unveiling that proceeds by accumulating veil upon veil, just even so characteristically Beckettian. In Yeats's work he saw "the issueless predicament of existence"; in van Velde this "art of incarceration"; in Arikha, "the gaze chirapsia against unseeable and unmakable". Nohow on.
Could you also say a little bit virtually the influence of Old Masters like Caravaggio on Beckett'due south piece of work?
Beckett had an apprentice's (in the best sense) deep noesis of the Erstwhile Masters, from Flemish and German painters to Italian painters of the loftier Renaissance. Much of this work he saw during his Wanderjahre in Frg, and both James Knowlson and Mark Nixon have done wonderful work on documenting all that he saw there, though of course his study began in the quite rich collection of the National Gallery in Dublin as a student. He had remarkable visual recollect: to give only one example, there is a St Sebastian past Antonello da Messina that he saw in Dresden in 1937 that he describes with astonishing accuracy and detail in a letter of the alphabet to Duthuit in 1948.
Caravaggio is an interesting question: he could scarcely have seen many actual paintings till quite tardily in his life, as for example when he saw the Beheading of St. John the Baptist in Republic of malta that became a prompt to Not I, every bit he told Arikha (Knowlson records this in Damned to Fame). It's hard to imagine he did not see the Louvre Caravaggio bear witness in 1965 that was so influential on Arikha. Once again, notwithstanding, information technology's less the images in themselves than Caravaggio's process: his notorious utilise of an overhead light that not only produced the result of chiaroscuro for which he is then famous, but besides destroyed the perspectival depths that allowed painters to represent unlike moments of action and temporality through the successive planes of the sail. Arikha writes fascinatingly about this in an extended essay on Poussin's Rape of the Sabines, where he cites Poussin's distaste for Caravaggio. Recall of how Beckett increasingly uses such effects in producing the tableaus in his belatedly plays: that seems to me far more than of import than identifying images that may or may not inspire the "picture" of the play.
What writers or thinkers most influenced the book?
There'due south such a wonderful body of scholarship on Beckett that it's hard to know where to begin, though I've mentioned already some of the people who have influenced my thinking on Beckett over the years. To those, I'd add Daniel Albright, Eyal Amiran, and Lois Overbeck, all of whom write wonderfully about Beckett'due south relation to painting. Leo Bersani and Ulisse Dutoit interestingly write nigh both Beckett and Caravaggio and I also found Louis Marin's book on Poussin and Caravaggio, To Destroy Painting, was indispensable—it's a work of art criticism that has a tremendously theatrical sense of painting. Of course, the book is called Beckett'southward Thing, a championship inspired by Beckett'southward constant recurrence to the notion of the thing. Information technology eventually struck me how closely his "thinking of the thing" paralleled that of Martin Heidegger during exactly the aforementioned period, 1936-1950, but also how much further into the apprehension of the reification of humans Beckett was willing to get. Beside him, Heidegger's eventual meditations in "The Affair" (1950) seem markedly reactionary. I'm non sure there was a direct influence, though Beckett knew several students of Heidegger, including the Irish poet/philosopher Brian Coffey, the Swiss painter Karl Ballmer (whom he met in Hamburg) and the French scholar Jean Beaufret. Probably the coincidence comes from the fact that Beckett, like Heidegger, was reading Kant in the late 30s, only Heidegger'southward sense of the "matter as resistance" was very important to my thinking-through of Beckett's sense of thingliness. Beckett as well anticipates very presciently Jacques Lacan's subsequently analysis of the thing—das Ding—and his formulation of gaze and vox as things for the subject area. But though Lacan'due south terms were helpful to me conceptually, Beckett's approach does not seem to me ever to be "psychoanalytical" in the sense that is sometimes practical to literature.
"Probably I couldn't accept done that without the help over the years of several friends who are practising artists and who have a strikingly different way of viewing painting and other artwork. So I'yard very grateful to the painters even if, as Beckett said to Duthuit, 'incomparably ane is literary all ane's life'!"
Above all, nonetheless, it has non been then much writers or thinkers who influenced me in writing this book equally painting itself. Having grown up with an amateur's interest in contemporary fine art, starting with the great Rosc exhibitions in Dublin in the 1970s, but trained every bit a literary critic, having to learn to see painting—or, in Jean-Luc Nancy's marvellous sense, to listen to painting—has been a profoundly instructive process in itself. Probably I couldn't have done that without the help over the years of several friends who are practising artists and who take a strikingly different way of viewing painting and other artwork. And then I'm very grateful to the painters even if, as Beckett said to Duthuit, "decidedly i is literary all 1'southward life"!
What'south next for y'all?
Like my previous book, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity (Cambridge, 2011), which has a final chapter on How Information technology Is, Beckett'due south Thing is part of an ongoing dispute with the Kantian/Hegelian aesthetic tradition, and with the general soapbox on representation which it founds, that has been a parallel strand in my piece of work for a very long fourth dimension. So the side by side book is a collection of essays on aesthetics, race and politics, called Under Representation, which runs from Kant and Schiller to Adorno and Benjamin. I'm very much hoping that book will see the light of solar day before too long. And my own play, The Press, is scheduled to appear in a bilingual French-English edition (The Printing/Le Placard) with Presses Universitaires du Midi in 2018. In the meantime, I'chiliad starting a new project on poetry and violence that will have essays on Yeats, Vallejo, Césaire and Celan. But that's in its early on days yet.
Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre is available from Edinburgh Academy Press.
Almost the Author
David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at U.C. Riverside and works on Irish culture and on postcolonial, cultural and aesthetic theory. His books include Irish gaelic Times: Temporalities of Irish Modernity (2008) and Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space (2011). He is also a poet and playwright: Arc & Sill: Poems 1979-2009 appeared with Shearsman Books (2012); his play, The Press, premiered at Liverpool Hope University in 2010.
Source: https://rhystranter.com/2017/03/28/samuel-beckett-and-painting/
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