The Question of Beckett’s Context

The Question of Beckett's Context Jonathan Kalb When critics speak of Samuel Beckett's cultural context they usually mean his place in literary history, the great museum of classic authors T.S. Eliot called "tradition." In the mountain of commentary discussing Beckett's indebtedness to Descartes, Proust, Joyce, his affinities with Sartre, Kafka, Camus, and his stylistic influence on Pinter, Albee, Handke and countless other younger authors, we find little that clearly distinguishes theatre from drama, or drama from literature in general, and still less that situates him specifically in theatrical history. After all, one of the main preoccupations of theatre in this century has been the gradual displacement of the Author, so how can we insure his canonical position without considering him as a purely literary figure? The fact is, though, that Beckett's playwriting distinguishes itself from most other dramatic literature to a large extent because of its effects in production, its demands on those acting, directing, and watching it. Though his directing has had almost no influence, his drama, far from subsisting chiefly on library shelves, has continued to influence new ideas about performance and has in fact insinuated itself into the best work of the contemporary avant-garde-a process sufficiently advanced for Herbert Blau to suggest in Blooded Thought that Beckett is the logical starting point for historical discussion of any significant new work, "the locus classicus of the problematic of the future." 25 But the question of Beckett's context is complicated for other reasons than this literary/theatrical question. First, his presence has created no end of confusion on both sides of the profit/non-profit dividing line. On the one hand, many commercial producers have stayed away from him, terrified of what is not immediately assimilable in familiar terms (though this situation shows signs of changing in American regional theatres, particularly with the early plays), and on the other hand many avant-gardists, with important exceptions such as Mabou Mines, also distrust him because of his ties to conventional drama and his reputation as one of the great moderns. Beckett is avant-garde to the conventional and conventional to the avantgarde ; he straddles two milieus in a way that would seem like equivocation if he had consciously sought the position. Second, his longevity presents a related problem, for we must recognize progress in his career. Beckett is Artaud's junior by little more than a decade, Brecht's by only eight years, which means that he can be both precursor and contemporary to Handke and MUller. Thematically, temperamentally, his work has remained fairly uniform over time, but stylistically it has undergone considerable change, which is only to be expected in any other author but what is unusual is that his oeuvre encompasses what some critics claim to be a revolutionary cultural shift. After earning a reputation as the only significant heir to the Joycean tradition, the brand of aesthetic Faustianism that manifests itself in a will to style, Beckett seems to have broken faith with spoken language toward the end of his life, and he thus figures frequently in the popular debate of modernism versus postmodernism. I shall have more to say presently about this specious debate and its relevance to Beckett. Beckett and the Actor When we speak of Beckett pejoratively as an old-style German Regisseur in the tradition of Saxe-Meiningen, we do well to remember that the most prominent avatar of that tradition, Max Reinhardt, was also often confronted with the criticism that he treated actors like puppets and denied them any significant creative influence on productions. Reinhardt's actors-such as Max Pallenberg, Werner Kraus, and Emil Jannings-were eventually extolled as among the greatest of our era, which to an extent retroactively vindicated the director's methods, one of which was preparation of detailed Regiebucher for all productions like those Beckett writes when he directs. In a sense, Beckett has found his Reinhardt actors in performers such as Jack MacGowran, Patrick Magee, and Billie Whitelaw, who prefer not to perform his plays without his guidance, who will not question his restrictions but who nevertheless can bring about a kind of transcendence of his texts in...