Abstract
In Beckett’s last television play Nacht und Träume , a pair of hands emerges from darkness to convey a cup to a dream-figure’s lips and rest on his head for a moment. No face is revealed behind the hands; the play is concerned primarily with what is a dreamt act of touch. This is perhaps the most explicit visualization of the act of touch in Beckett’s drama, yet it occurs within a dream and within the virtual, light-signal space of television. The hands are dreamt, imagined out of darkness, thus presenting many of the tensions surrounding touch that this study explores: between presence and absence, tangibility and intangibility, the hand that touches, and the hand that withdraws. Beckett’s work is deeply concerned with these touches variously remembered, half-remembered, imagined, and, most importantly, failing to happen at all. The owner of the hands in Nacht und Träume remains outside the field of vision, existing solely in this act of touching, however incomplete and virtual that touch may be.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Margrit Shildrick, “Some Speculations on Matters of Touch,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 26.4 (2001): 402.
Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: G. Bretschneider, 1985 ), 58–59.
Quoted in Oppenheim’s introduction to Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual arts, and Non -print Media (New York: Garland, 1999), xv. This comment is from an interview with Jonathan Kalb in Beckett in Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 235.
Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith ( London: Continuum, 2002 ), 41–2.
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double , trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder, 1993 [1970]).
S. E. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11 (2000): 169–170.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta ( London: Continuum, 2005 ), 12.
Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms ( Nebraska: Nebraska University Press, 2001 ), 200.
André Lepecki and Sally Banes, The Senses in Performance ( London: Routledge, 2006 ), 1.
Maike Bleeker, “Look who’s Looking! Perspective and the Paradox of Scientific Subjectivity,” Theater Research International 29 (2004): 31–32.
Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallax 3 (1996), 4.
Derrida, On Touching, pp. 209–10 and. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus ( Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969 ), 208.
Stanton Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994 ), 31.
Ulrika Maude, “The Body of Memory: Beckett and Merleau-Ponty,” in Beckett and Philosophy, ed. Richard Lane (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002 ), 120.
Ian James, in The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), compares the language that Nancy uses to that of Merleau-Ponty, suggesting that “rather than invoking a vocabulary of ‘incarnate sense,’ of intertwining, chiasmus, and reciprocity as Merleau-Ponty does to describe the way in which the world is opened up through bodily intentionality, Nancy invokes a vocabulary of rupture and discontinuity” (132). Yet it is possible to discern a similar vocabulary of rupture running through the Merleau-Ponty text, where the completion of the perceptual circle is always imminent, never actualized.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2008 ), 17.
Anna McMullan’s Theater on Trial (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) pays particular attention to the fragmentation of the visual image that occurs in Beckett’s work, noting, e.g., in relation to Ohio Impromptu , how the “two levels of representation, the scenic and the verbal, are therefore deliberately differentiated to produce a juxtaposition of narrative and visual image” (144).
See Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body ( Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007 ).
Anna McMullan, “Performing Vision(s): Perspectives on Spectatorship in Beckett’s Theater,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. by Jennifer Jeffers (NY: Garland, 1998 ), 134.
Anna McMullan, “From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis)embodiment in Beckett’s Theater,” in Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed. Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007 ), 107.
Roger Callois (“Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia,” October 31 [1984]), writing on cross-cultural aspects of play in human behavior, suggests that the end goal of such mimicry in nature is a merging of the creature into the background of its environment (16–32). There is a relationality between the backdrops of Beckett’s dramatic spaces and the objects that fill them, and in many cases the threat of merger, coupled with a desire to merge; the absorbing darkness, cradling the figure in Rockaby is a case in point. In other cases the mimicry is of a formal nature, with camera mirroring eye and so on.
Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 ), 38.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1965 ), 62.
Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television ( Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007 )
Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009 ).
Copyright information
© 2013 Trish McTighe
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McTighe, T. (2013). Introduction Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy. In: The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44692-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27533-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)