Mid Sweden University

Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson takes a closer look at the often peculiar, sometimes incongruous physical movements and gestures that characters perform in Samuel Beckett’s drama, viz. mis-movements. Sensitivity to the embodied aspects of life is topical in Beckett’s drama, but such mis-movements underwrite the intrinsic connections between sense and sense-making to safeguard an ethics of interpretation founded on embodied cognition. Tracing Beckett’s aesthetics of gesture back to its phenomenological and embodied roots, Einarsson suggests that the use of mis-movements in Beckett’s drama is a methodological solution to the predicament of expression that exposes the injustices done by language to audiences as embodied knowers. More than interpretative dilemmas, mis-movements offer conduits for spectators to re-connect with embodied experience. Thus, they are the poetic means through which an alternative ethics of interpretation begins to emerge.

London Beckett Seminar Friday, 20th December 2024, 18.00-19.00Dr Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson (Mid Sweden University)“Considering the Role of Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s Drama”

This presentation considers the role of imagination, in the non-conventional sense put forward by Eugene Gendlin and against the backdrop of Richard Kearney’s narrative contextualisation of the term, for the purpose of making sense of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic stage images.

According to Gendlin’s essay “Nonlogical moves and nature metaphors”, “Beckett’s characters are not cases of old kinds (concepts, categories, schemes, distinctions, etc.)”: they are the first instances of something new, something “of which we are then cases” (1985, 383-84). Indeed, Gendlin explains, “[i]magination makes and then something ‘was’” (1985, 384). The way imagination works means that perceiving, understanding, discovering, discerning meaning is retrospective. It also means that using words (but also gesturing and moving in the context performance), will always generate more meanings than those frequently associated with the words or gestures used by the characters. Consequently, Gendlin maintains, Beckett’s characters do something to us as spectators rather than mean something specific.

Interestingly, Gendlin’s understanding of how imagination makes meaning stands in contrast to Kearney’s narrative account of the term, which entails conceptualising the somewhat paradoxical status of imagination in Beckett’s writing through the lenses of deconstruction and postmodernism. My discussion of imagination will therefore consider the role of imagination in Beckett’s drama through the bifocal approach of two seemingly contradictory paradigms.

However, in considering the role of imagination in Beckett’s drama I also build on the discussions offered in my recent monograph: Beckett’s Drama: Mis-Movements and the Aesthetics of Gesture (2024). In this book, I suggest that Beckett’s drama resists preconceived ideas about meaning specifically by means of the often-idiosyncratic movements and gestures that Beckett’s characters perform, i.e. “mis-movements”, which could be seen to imply new perspectives, new meanings and more holistic perspectives on interpretation to be imaginatively encountered by audiences. Yet, taking the embodied foundation for meaning-making into consideration does not abolish interpretation. It merely reconfigures it, and, in this book, I address the implications of this situation in the context of Beckett’s drama to suggest that, when interpretation is reduced to confirming preconceived ideas, it becomes an antidote to imagination.

By what means do we arrive to make claims and to what extent are the claims we make solidified by our sense of commitment to a community? Among the fascinating aspects of language is its capacity to cultivate communities of speakers who share a notion of reality on the basis of interaction. The failure to reach an agreement that could serve as the basis for a sense of belonging to such a community may even be experienced as an ‘intellectual tragedy’ (see Cavell, 1979). But who are ‘we’ in such contexts, and who is ‘the Other’? On whose authority do we make claims, and on whose authority do we deny the claims of others? This presentation considers the issue of making claims in relation to the ethics of interpretation. In so doing, it asks what is at stake in making claims. For instance, if we want to create the necessary conditions of possibility for an ethical encounter with the other, do we then have to call our own claims into question? And what counts as claims? Are merely verbal expressions claims or do we make claims also in embodied interaction? 

Palmstierna Einarsson compares two mainstay Swedish translations of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, namely, Göran O. and Lill-Inger Eriksson’s translation from 1954, and Magnus Hedlund’s re-translation from 1990. According to Palmstierna Einarsson, the differences between the two Swedish translations of Godot accentuate a number of issues pertinent to the transfer of Beckett’s iconic play to the cultural context of Sweden. Focusing on an article by Magnus Hedlund, the author argues that the process of translating Godot into a third language must negotiate the fact that there are (at least) two original texts, and that Beckett’s interventions as director into the processes of staging his work substantially altered the text, aspects which were not available to the first translators of Beckett’s work into Swedish.

Referring to a ‘singular experience’ (Attridge) of watching Footfalls, this chapter seeks to address Samuel Beckett’s theatre as world literature by looking at and analysing affect. Affect is a world-constituting force emerging on a scale of (aesthetic) experience. The structural organisation of aesthetic elements in the play, here discussed in terms of ‘amplitude’ (Hayot), therefore provides an invaluable clue to understand the relation between the spectator and the work. Past years have seen an increased interest in the way in which Beckett deploys affect as a constituting factor in the lives of his characters (Gontarski), yet the potential effect of affect on spectators has received less attention. Affect does not correspond to predetermined or even conscious meanings, nor does it depend on preconceived knowledge of historical or cultural facts. Rather, emerging on a scale of (aesthetic) experience, affect prompts spectators to reconfigure their sense of belonging to the world: an invitation to experience that also has ethical dimensions.

This article uses Beckett's directorial comments on the screened version of What Where (1982), as a point of departure for teasing out the poetic logic of Beckett's attention to the formal aspects of the stage image. By having formal aspects take precedence over linguistic expression, Beckett refuses closure on the level of language and makes more authentic acts of judgment possible. Such 'emancipatory aesthetics' promotes intellectual freedom, a liberating aspect of Beckett's work sometimes neglected.