‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

‘Of her tenacious trace’: Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art

This chapter explores how three contemporary artists, Claire-Lise Holy, Dorothy Cross and Arlene Shechet, have been inspired by Samuel Beckett's prose and drama, works that foreground the need and agony for being perceived and the desire to be still and silent. Holy, Cross and Shechet take up Beckett's themes of gaze and petrification, particularly as seen in Beckett's works for women. For these contemporary artists, distilling the female form on paper, canvas, stone, or video is an act of creating a trace, inviting the viewer to participate, looking upon their women with empathy. Holy, whose drawings of antiquated women resemble those of Beckett's late plays, shares with Beckett the need for us to see these women. Cross, too, draws on the importance of seeing and remaining, inviting us to act our part in recognising that we are only a moment in ancient history. Her female forms, inspired by Footfalls, recede, and as they do so, we are tempted to follow. Drawn to Happy Days, Shechet asks that we look forward beginning conversations about the here, now, and the future. She asks that in the process, creatures like Winnie who cry out, are not forgotten. For this to happen, our gaze must go beyond objectifying Winnie. These artists, like Beckett, challenge us to see differently – a empathic gaze that never forgets.

The Death of Moran's Bees: Beckett and Adorno on the Dialectic of Subject and Object

In this article I argue that Adorno's dialectical principle that reason and nature co-constitute each other is evidenced in Beckett's novel Molloy. Adorno argues that reason regresses to myth – that is, it becomes irrational and reified – in modernity; and that, conversely, myth shows itself to be rational – that is, myth reveals that it has already inhabited enlightenment. In Molloy, Moran relies on dubious positive metaphysical principles in an attempt to spiritualise his bees; however, such spiritualisation leads directly to their death, because his experience of the bees is undialectical and static. Thus instead of the uncritical reproduction of conventional metaphysical principles, metaphysics must show itself to be damaged by historical events.