A Theater of the Nerves: Samuel Beckett's Non-Representational Art

What returns and recurs across Samuel Beckett's art in different media—prose, theater, television, radio, and film—is resistance to representation. Beckett's work diverges from art that points outside itself to some facet of the familiar world, but neither does it favor abstraction, which is, according to Beckett's commentary in letters and essays, too far removed, sealed against "what is." How, then, is art to relate to the perceptual and emotional material of "what is"? What techniques, what vision might ensure adequate attention to the complexity of experiential material while protecting its possibilities for remaking itself, perhaps prompted by aesthetic experience? The term Beckett chooses to describe this positioning is "non-relation," and the essays in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts suggest a Beckettian art beyond—or better, between—representation and abstraction.