Iconic Spaces: The Dark Theology of Samuel Beckett's Drama

Chapter 2. Visuality and Iconicity in Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe

19 C h a p t e r 2 Visuality and Iconicity in Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe Counter to Beckett’s usual practice when dedicating a work to an individual , Catastrophe is dedicated to someone whom Beckett did not know personally, but who was both an eminent political figure and a fellow artist. Vaclav Havel’s imprisonment in “socialist” Czechoslovakia for “subversive” political activities had prompted the work’s composition, and its dedication to him is a significant and unusual gesture. Catastrophe is most frequently read in a political context. It speaks out against the exploitation of human beings by their fellow humans in institutionalized contexts that disguise and legitimize exploitation—and by so doing it defends human rights with silent eloquence in Beckett’s trademark minimalist style. In a single, condensed theatrical image at the end of the play, when the Protagonist raises his head and stares back at the audience , Beckett points toward everyone’s complicity with such exploitative structures more effectively and memorably than the evanescent nature of wordy eloquence would have been able to: cruelty does not call 20 Iconic Spaces for words but for action.1 Typically, he also thereby avoids the platitudes of polemics that political causes so often generate. This is precisely the point: how does a deeply philosophical man who does not believe in the unmotivated singularity of horrific events react to the immediacy of a political cause? Bert States points to the first sentence of Murphy: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new” (M 1), a sentence that in many ways summarizes Beckett’s artistic sensibility. It echoes, of course, Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” Beckett tends to look for the existence of underlying unchanging structures that prompt atrocities in shifting manifestations throughout the history of humankind (a “human condition ,” as it were, a term so often used and abused in Beckett criticism). As expected, Catastrophe is not a “topical play,” analogous to the “topical song”—that is, churned out specifically in response to a particular political event and inevitably losing its bite and becoming unintelligible as soon as the circumstantial data have passed into oblivion. Even at the level of title (Play and Film illustrate the pattern) Beckett has a distinct tendency to turn his artistic statements into analyses of constitutive root problems: they transcend the specific and seek the universal. In the same way in which Film is a genre-exploration of film, seeking to uncover the visual mechanisms and philosophical assumptions at work in filmmaking and watching, and by extension in Western epistemology in general, Catastrophe is about social and perceptual practices that underlie the perpetration of violence. Catastrophe “sees” at the base of the violence and humiliation to which the Protagonist is subjected structures of vision and visuality deeply engrained in Western culture, which enable and perpetuate dualistic thought (that is, thought functioning by a logic of noncontradiction). (It is useful to remember that “catastrophe” means “overturning”—maybe of a paradigm or an epistemology.) This is not to suggest that visual structures are by nature exploitative ; Beckett with his great love for the visual arts would be the last to agree with such a proposition. He often traveled great distances, in fact planned trips through entire continents, to stand in front of the paintings he loved and wished to see again. He was a staunch believer in the power of the visual image. To him the image has the advantage of immediacy over words and is therefore more readily able to overwhelm conceptual thought and leave the viewer speechless. In his homage to painter and friend Jack Yeats, Beckett remarks, “In images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no occasion, no time given, no room left, for the lenitive of comment” (D 149). In this chapter, I want to suggest that Catastrophe criticizes dualistic practices of visuality as they occur predominantly in Western culture, perpetuated by the dominant Western philosophical and theological tradition. Catastrophe can then be read to hint at nondual ways of approaching the images shared by Christian and Buddhist negative theologies. I weave my argument through the more widespread political readings of Catastrophe to show how such readings link up with a more general critique of representation. Then I look at the power and...