Beckett and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art by Colin Gardner (review)

The catalyst for this study is Deleuze and Guattari’s rereading of Kafka as ‘Minor Literature’. For Colin Gardner, the texts of Samuel Beckett can similarly be reinterpreted as ‘machinic assemblages, as nomadic rhizomes rather than hermetically enclosed symptoms of existential and psychological failure’ (p. 1). Just like Kafka, the Irishman kills off metaphor, symbolism, and signification, unleashing metamorphosis and movement for their own sake. Taking as his point of departure Deleuze’s own readings of Beckett, but also the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Gardner explores Beckett’s relatively neglected works for film and television. These works, he argues via Deleuze, derail the ‘teleological locomotive of the action-image and causal narrative’ (p. 11). Thus Film, Beckett’s experimental film starring Buster Keaton, is a seminal attempt at demolishing the self and opening a territory for non-human becoming through foregrounding the interstice as immanent plane of temporality. Subsequent works such as Comédie, with its severed talking heads and featureless backgrounds, attain a dangerous form of ‘dialoghorrea’, while elegiac teleplays like … but the clouds … reject the Name of the Father and embrace the non-Oedipal oral mother. At the end of this dense and deeply engaged study, which is as close a reading of Deleuze as it is of Beckett, the reader might wonder if this stream of schizoid ‘excretions’ is aesthetically any good. Unfortunately, when Beckett’s Shades trio was broadcast on BBC2 in April 1977 as part of the ‘Lively Arts Series’, not even Martin Esslin, an authority on twentieth-century theatre, and arts commentator Melvyn Bragg, his interviewer, could save it from atrocious viewing figures and reviews. The audience’s reaction to works that deliberately defied their desire for character development and plot was to ‘reterritorialize’ by switching to another channel.