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.
2024.
Samuel Beckett, drama, imagination, stage directions, mis-movements, phenomenology, Eugene Gendlin, Richard Kearney