Domain analysis: from art form to engineering discipline

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.

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Beckett's Watt and Monastic Tradition

Journal of Beckett Studies ◽

10.3366/jobs.2016.0158 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 96-109

Author(s):

Kristen Marangoni

Keyword(s):

Boarding School ◽

Illuminated Manuscripts ◽

Concentration Camp ◽

The Novel ◽

Geometric Shapes ◽

Art Form ◽

Book Of Kells ◽

The Face ◽

Choral Arrangements ◽

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

The enigmatic setting of Beckett's novel Watt has been compared to places as diverse as an insane asylum, a boarding school, a womb, and a concentration camp. Watt's experience at Knott's house does seem suggestive of all of these, and yet it may more readily conform to the setting of a monastery. The novel is filled with chants, meditations, choral arrangements, hierarchical classifications, and even silence, all highly evocative of a monastic lifestyle. Some of Watt's dialogue (such as his requests for forgiveness or reflections on the nature of mankind) further echoes various Catholic liturgies. Watt finds little solace in these activities, however. He feels that they are largely rote and purposeless as they are focused on Knott, a figure who in many ways defies linguistic description and physical know-ability. Watt's meditations and rituals become, then, empty catechisms without answers, something that is reflected in the extreme difficulty that Watt has communicating. In the face of linguistic and liturgical instability, the Watt notebooks present a counter reading that can be found in the thousand plus doodles that line its pages. The drawings reinforce as well as subvert their textual counterpart, and they function in many ways as the images in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The doodles in Watt often take the form of decorative letters, elaborate marginal drawings, and depictions of a variety of people and animals, and many of its doodles offer uncanny resemblances in form or theme to those in illuminated manuscripts like The Book of Kells. Doodles of saints, monks, crosses, and scribes even give an occasional pictorial nod to the monastic setting in which illuminated manuscripts were usually produced (and remind us of the monastic conditions in which Beckett found himself writing much of Watt). Beckett's doodles not only channel this medium of illuminated manuscripts, they also modernize its application. Instead of neat geometric shapes extending down the page, his geometric doodle sequences are often abstracted, fragmented, and nonlinear. Beckett also occasionally modernized the content of illuminated manuscripts: instead of the traditional sacramental communion table filled with candles, bread and wine, Beckett doodles a science lab table where Bunsen burners replaces candles and wine glasses function as beakers. It is through these modernized images that Watt attempts to draw contemporary relevance from a classic art form and to restore (at least partial) meaning to rote traditions.

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