Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation, and: A Beckett Canon (review)

In a number of recent studies, scholars have sought to offer fresh readings and evaluations of Samuel Beckett's oeuvre. Often by way of post-structuralist methodologies, outstanding works such as "Stories for Nothing": Samuel Beckett's Narrative Poetics (2002) by Paul B. Kelley and Sjef Houp-permans, and Beckett and Philosophy (2002), an anthology edited by Richard J. Lane, involve nuanced and thought-provoking theses and, therefore, stand as the avant garde of Beckett studies. While many of these sort of works are useful, they are also quite often conceptually sophisticated, and thus primarily serve a small community of scholars and artists who are not only thoroughly familiar with the primary texts authored by Beckett, but also the extensive corpus of scholarship generated to elucidate those primary texts. In the end, the best of these studies, though requiring considerable effort from the reader, can nonetheless lead to a renewed respect for the work of Beckett, as well as a heightened perception of how and what his texts mean both on the page and on the stage. Such is the case with Les Essif's remarkable Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation.

Working from the thesis that "Samuel Beckett . . . devoted the later part of his artistic career to exploring and refining the material meaningfulness of the [solitary] human figure set in emptiness" (1), Essif offers new readings of dramatic texts associated with the "nouveau théâtre"—"an umbrella term for the avant-garde theatre movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in France" (3, 198). Focusing specifically on those dramatists who grappled with "hypersubjectivity"—"a figural, meta-dramatic subjectivity, a subjectivity created out of spatial construction and spatial consciousness" (7)—and citing the theatrical texts of Beckett as his paradigmatic examples, Essif contends that study of this movement is too often focused on the written text, with scholars paying "vastly more attention to the 'new' language," and all but foregoing "its formal presentation as corporeal spectacle" (3, emphasis in original). In light of this perceived analytical oversight, Essif holds that any examination of the hypersubjective nouveau théâtre must necessarily involve a "focused study" (3) of two things: first, the structuring of the material image on stage, specifically the methods employed by dramatists to create an impression of an empty human icon set within a non-referential, empty space; second, the metaphysical and phenomenological dimensions current in the postwar Franco-phone world underpinning those methods. Thus, through a performative reading of the texts of Beckett and other notable dramatists, Essif seeks to trace the development of a "poetics of empty space" in French language theatre in the decades immediately following World War II, wherein the "visible empty stage" was held in suspension with, and seen as a bridge to, the "invisible empty space of the mind" (7). Central to his study is theatre phenomenology of Bert O. States and Stanton B. Garner, and, hence, a discussion of how "emptiness signifies in its own right on the theatrical stage" (9).

In the first six chapters, Essif offers an overview of the evolution of "nothingness" and "emptiness" in Western philosophy and, by extension, a reading of the early twentieth century theatrical endeavors and visionaries such as Chekhov, Jarry, Maeterlinck, Craig, and Copeau, whose works were initial attempts to perceive "material space as an independent special field (20), and thus were contributive to the trend in Western theatre to explore the "empty container of human existence" (34). With chapter 2, Essif considers the shift from symbolism to surrealism as reflective of the trend in the Western theatre to "deliberately . . . turn inward" (36). This "metadramatic union of empty space and...