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114 pages

English

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This is the first monograph to analyse Beckett's use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. It considers how Beckett's complex and varied use of art, music, and media in a selection of his novels, radio plays, teleplays, and later short prose informs his creative process. Investigating specific instances where Beckett's writing adopts musical or visual structures, Lucy Jeffery identifies instances of Beckett's transdisciplinarity and considers how this approach to writing facilitates ways of expressing familiar Beckettian themes of abstraction, ambiguity, longing, and endlessness. With case studies spanning forty years, she evaluates Beckett's stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during which they were written. With new examples from Beckett's notebooks, critical essays, and letters, Transdisciplinary Beckett evidences how the drastic changes that took place in the visual arts and in musical composition influenced Beckett and, in turn, were influenced by him. Transdisciplinary Beckett situates Beckett as a key figure not just in the literary marketplace but also in the fields of music, art, and broadcasting.

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Publié par	ibidem
Date de parution	16 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9783838275840
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1800€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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ibidem Press, Stuttgart
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
On transdisciplinarity
Beckett and music
Beckett and the visual arts
Working with abstraction
A Romantic Modernist
Radio and television
The way ahead
Watt’s ‘wild and unintelligible’ painting
Introduction
Structure of unknowing
Watt’s ‘lived perspective’ of Erskine’s painting
Deconstructing Erskine’s painting
Visual parodies of Realism
Conclusion
Radio waves of ‘encircling gloo-oom’
Introduction
Beckett and Leibniz
Intermediality and radio
Embers
Orchestrating the sea
Music lessons and the ineffable
A broken Monadology
Words and Music
Joe and Bob’s fractious relationship
Beckett and Feldman
Musical characterisation
Fragmentation of the image
The unification of a theme
Verbal musicalisation
Cascando
Failed attempts at orchestration
A musical deconstruction of the Monadology
Atonality and the breakdown of linearity
An unresolved battle between word and note
Conclusion
Watching Beethoven and Schubert
Introduction
Intermediality and television
Ghost Trio
Tone and shape
Music-based structure
Re-orchestrating Geistertrio
The cassette as a source of protracted Sehnsucht
Musical confinement
Music, circularity, and endless longing
Nacht und Träume
Beckett and Schubert
Music, dreams, and longing
Music as source of suffering
Towards a visualisation of music
Conclusion
Paint it blue: ‘The vision at last’
Introduction
Beckett as colourist
Blue
Working with abstraction revisited
A painterly technique
Beckett and Geneviève Asse
Blue eyes in Imagination Dead Imagine and ‘Ping’
Imagination Dead Imagine
‘Ping’
Blue skies in Lessness and Company
Lessness
Company
Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
I have often felt as though I would’ve been better suited to studying either music or art history, but in 2012, when I embarked upon my studies at Swansea University, neither art nor music were on offer. It is perhaps no surprise that this book reflects the feeling I had at eighteen of being torn between the three sister arts. It is my wonderful lecturer, mentor, and friend-Glyn Pursglove-to whom I owe thanks for enabling me to experience this feeling of being torn positively through literature. Indeed, it is precisely this feeling of being ‘torn between’ that has particularly informed my understanding of Beckett’s oeuvre. And it is Beckett’s work that allowed me to see this tear as a tympanum, a vibrating threshold that offers insights into a text’s cultural contexts. This book is the culmination of my efforts to communicate these insights.
The book builds on my PhD thesis which I completed in 2017 under the supervision of Professor Anna McMullan and Dr Mark Nixon at the University of Reading. I would like to begin by thanking Anna and Mark for their guidance and support. My own understanding of Beckett has been shaped by their scholarship which has become a source of inspiration to me. On several occasions I have found my questions answered in the pages of their publications with characteristic lucidity. My work has benefited from their knowledge, which they have shared openly with me. Thank you.
My years at Reading were filled with so many exciting conversations about Beckett’s life and work with the rich academic community in the departments of English Literature and Film, Theatre & Television. In particular, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to James Knowlson, John Pilling, and Everett Frost. Thank you for sharing your stories and your invaluable insights. I have enjoyed spending time with you all immensely.
My friends and colleagues have enlightened my understanding of Beckett and have fuelled my enthusiasm for research. I have gained considerable knowledge from emails, reading groups, and conferences centred on Beckett’s work over the past few years, not least from the advice I received from Peter Boxall and Conor Carville. It has been a real pleasure to discuss work in progress with colleagues at the Samuel Beckett Research Centre. I am especially grateful to my friends, Galina Kiryushina and Einat Adar, who have helped me to clarify my ideas and to abandon those that need not be mentioned here! I often think fondly of time spent together in TCD and in Prague. John Bull, Vicky Angelaki, and Judith Roof, I also thank you for your friendship and advice. Long may it all continue.
In the last few years, I have published some essays that are related to sections within this book. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Music in Samuel Beckett’s radio play Embers : “I shouldn’t be hearing that!”’ in Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 16.2 (2018), and a part of Chapter 4 was published as ‘Samuel Beckett’s use of color in Company : Blue’ in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 20.4 (2018).
I express my thanks to Valerie Lange, Malisa Mahler, and the staff at ibidem-Verlag for their excellent editorial guidance. I also thank Paul Stewart, the series editor, for his supportive comments. I am grateful to the staff at Special Collections of the University of Reading, especially Adam Lines and Sharon Maxwell, for making the archives such a welcoming place for me. In particular, I would like to thank Joanna Marston at Rosica Colin Limited and Edward Beckett for their assistance and kind permission to quote unpublished material from the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading. I also thank James and Elizabeth Knowlson for their permission to reproduce unpublished material from the James and Elizabeth Knowlson Collection at the University of Reading.
On a more personal note, I express heartfelt thanks to my family, near and far, for their loving support and encouragement. Both the Jeffery and Váradi families have shown me such wonderful love and warmth. My brothers-Andrew, Robert, and Rowan-have helped me to understand what matters and what does not. Ágnes Léder, Ern ő Váradi, Anna (Nagyi) Váradi, and Jürgen Bauer have each, in their own ways, offered kindness, perspective, and refreshing insights. Yet, I am most indebted to my parents, Allan and Margaret Jeffery, and my partner, Anna Váradi, for their indefatigable support. You have been my stalwart supporters during the various stages of this book, thank you. Anna is my partner and co-thinker, and I am filled with excitement for a future that happily wends its way onward.
Finally, I now circle back to when I first went to Swansea University and express deepest gratitude to my mother, Margaret, for it is she who encouraged me to give it a go then and still gees me up today. It is to you I dedicate my efforts.
Introduction
Modernism’s concern with the fluidity and interchangeability of artistic media can be seen in the works of Oskar Kokoschka (a painter who wrote an opera libretto), Ezra Pound (a poet who composed music), and Arnold Schoenberg (a composer who painted). These three polymaths belonged to a wave of thought where the artist’s self-consciousness over their medium informed their creative process by encouraging experimental enjambment between the arts. For Samuel Beckett, the use of music and visual art emerged out of a dissatisfaction with language and was, broadly speaking, intended to extend the possibilities of the written word. As James Knowlson explains:
Beckett was, as his friend Barbara Bray once picturesquely put it to me, like a swan, sailing serenely along, spotting and picking up morsels from different parts of the lake, then pre-digesting them, before making them unequivocally his own. (2001, 32)
Despite telling his American publisher Barney Rosset that he was ‘absolutely opposed to any form of adaptation’ (27 August 1957; Letters III , 63), Beckett imbued his writing with images and musical excerpts, rendering them ‘unequivocally his own’. An examination of the transdisciplinary decisions Beckett took when writing unearths reasons behind this persistent recourse to art and music. For Gilles Deleuze, whose work on Beckett we shall return to shortly, ‘[t]here is no critique except comparative [. . .], because any work in a domain is itself auto-comparative’ (1998, 49). Deleuze adds, ‘[t]here is no work ( oeuvre ) which does not have its beginning and end in other arts [. . .] Any work is inserted in a system of relays’. Whilst this image of a work as belonging to a ‘system of relays’ conveys its inherent interdisciplinarity, Beckett, by taking an extra step to fashion an unequivocally new work, adopts a transdisciplinary creative process. Indeed, Beckett’s careful selection, manipulation, and repositioning of various paintings and classical compositions result in an altogether new and often unexpected work. Importantly, as the chapters that follow will show, it is the combination of different media, art, and music to produce a xenogenesis that makes Beckett’s approach transdisciplinary. As any transdisciplinary analysis entails the discussion and combination of distinct concepts, examples, and discussions, the remainder of this Introduction establishes the central ideas discussed and revisited throughout the book. These include transdisciplinarity itself, music, the visual arts, abstraction, Romanticism, Modernism, and broadcasting media. Finally, the Introduction outlines the texts discussed in the remaining chapters in a subsection entitled ‘The way ahead’.
On transdisciplinarity
In exploring the ways in which Beckett employs art and music to work with and against language in order to produce new compositional structures and provide new perspectives on so called Beckettian themes, it is necessary to follow a transdisciplinary line of enquiry. This approach moves above the level of disciplines (such as inter-, multi-, and anti-) and crosses disciplinary boundaries. To do so, the analysis examines Beckett’s inclusion of visual, aural, and medium specificity as each formal and aesthetic fac