Samuel Beckett (original) (raw)
CFP 2020 Sex and Gender in Samuel Beckett’s Work
2019
The titles of Samuel Beckett's two early novels show a taste for salaciousness and provocation that did not disappear in later years, and led to his being expelled from the family home and censored in Ireland. If obscenity became more subdued afterwards, and if sexuality tended to disappear from an increasingly abstract universe, sex, of an often crude kind, is a recurring feature of the Beckettian text. As for sexuality, in its normative version, it is systematically thwarted by the powerlessness and horror of procreation displayed by Beckett's male characters, whose sexual behaviour "deviates" from the heterosexual paradigm (anality, onanism). Sex questions the relationship to the other, as a sexual partner and in its gendered dimension. But this relationship is not a straightforward one in Beckett. Before the trilogy, female characters are essentially derealized (either through idealization or belittling, see Mercier, Bryden, Ben-Zvi, McMullan), while male characters are devirilized (Bjørnerud). Moreover, the question of connection and autonomy, central to the fiction and even more to the theatre, is experienced in sexual encounters with particular acuteness. The promise of a union, or even of fusion with the other, stumbles against an impossibility that feeds the melancholy of many characters. Considering that the sexual act is both material and spiritual, it can be traumatic but is also a source of humour and comedy. Finally, there are many passages in Beckett's writing that play on the denial of sexual difference. Indeed the boundaries between men and women, homosexuality and heterosexuality are often porous (Roof) and this calls into question any notion of identity built on sexual orientation (Stewart). The original forms taken by the social and interpersonal relationships of the Beckettian characters, from the 1940s to the rotundal fictions of the 60s and 70s with the flow of desire that runs through them (Fraser), are thus echoed in many queer but also trans theories (Crawford). Beckett's writing seems to resist "the regime of the normal" when queerness shakes social bonds (Bersani) as well as narrative logic and identity (Calvin). With this in mind, we would like to take stock of the contributions of gender, queer, trans and sexuality studies in the field of Beckettian studies. What do they reveal about Beckettian aesthetics and ethics? Which textual politics are revealed? How are gender and sexuality problematized today on the world stage when Beckett texts are adapted?
2018
The writing of Samuel Beckett is associated with meaning in the meaninglessness and the production of what he calls 'literature of unword'. The casual escape from the world of words in the form of silences and pauses, in his play Waiting for Godot, urges to ask question of their existence and ultimately leads to investigate the theory behind their use in the play. This paper proposes that these absences (silence and pause) in Beckett's play force to think 'beyond' language. This paper asks how silence and pause in Beckett's text speak for the emergence of poststructuralist text. It aims to identify the significant features of the philosophy of deconstruction in the play of Beckett to demystify the hostile complicity between literature and philosophy. With the interpretive paradigm of poststructuralism this research focuses on the text as a research data. It attempts to delineate the relationship between poststructuralist theoretical concerns and text of Beckett. Keeping in view the theoretical concerns of Poststructuralist theorist Jacques Derrida, the main concern of the discussion is directed towards the notion of 'beyond' language into the absences that are aimed at silencing the existing discourse with the 'radical irony' of this anti-formal art that contains its own denial and thus represents the idea of ceaseless questioning and radical contradiction in art and any text. This article asks how text of Beckett vibrates with loud silence and has disrupted language to demonstrate the emptiness of words and thus exploring the limitless void of absences. Beckett's text resonates with silence and pause that is neither negation nor affirmation rather a poststructuralist's suspension of reality that is ever changing with the undecidablity of all meanings. Within the theoretical notion of Derrida's Différance this study interprets silence and pause in Beckett's art. The silence and pause behave like Derrida's Différance and have questioned their own existence in the text to deconstruct any definiteness and finality of reality to extend an undecidable threshold of poststructuralists that aims to evade the 'labyrinth of language'.