Being and Perception: Beckett's Film

Being and Perception: Beckett's Film VINCENT 1. MURPHY .' IN SPITE OF THE FACT that Beckett's Film has been published in book form for several years and condenses in it some of the most consistent and recurrent themes in the Beckett canon, little work has been done on it by otherwise active Beckett scholars.1 The early critical opinion that the film was "too simple, too obvious in its symbolism"2 may now be accepted as axiomatic by Beckett observers who should by hard experience know otherwise. Film is based on the Berkeleian dictum Esse est percipi (''To be is to be perceived"). However, Beckett's use of this dictum as the structural principle for his own work is a highly personalized one. The adaptation of Berkeleian philosophy in Film develops a conception of the self, of being, of perception and of the artistic process which is central to an understanding of much of Beckett's earlier work. The opening statements in the general notes to the script give the two parameters within which the action of the film is realized: "All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search ofnon-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability ofself-perception."3 The movement of Buster Keaton as 0 from the street (where passersby are all "contentedly in percipere and percipi") and the subsequent comic evasion of all perceivers (the dog and cat, the parrot, the goldfish, the face ofGod the Father etc.) represent the attempt to suppress all "extraneous perception." The actiol) of the film involves the working out and ultimate frustration of this attempted escape from perceivedness and therefore from being. The attempt is frustrated because ultimately "self-perception maintains in being." That is, the perception of the self 43 44 VINCENT J. MURPHY is the only form of perception which is not extraneous, which is not escapable. The pursuit of the self by the self and the flight of the selffrom the selfis made dramatically possible by the sundering ofthe protagonist into the object (0) and the eye (E). The former is in flight, the latter in pursuit. The perspective of eye (E) becomes identified in the beginning with the eye of the camera and this is the reason that it is not clear until the end ofthe film "that pursuing perceiver is not extraneous, but self."4 In effect, Keaton plays two roles in the film: that part of the self which pursues as well as that part of the self which flees. The flight from extraneous perception comes to an end with the destruction, by 0, ofseven photographs which represent the history ofthe lifetime of the protagonist. Each one of the photographs, except the seventh one, shows the same male subject contentedly in percipi and percipere with other individuals at various points in his life. Their destruction must be seen as a continuation of the flight from percipi - the flight towards non-being - which has been carried on by 0 throughout the film to this point. Percipi, perceivedness, is not only, after all, one of the recurring themes of the photographs with 0 usually the object of perception. It is, in addition, an aspect of the form of the photographs which fix 0 in perpetual potential perceivedness. As such, the photographs, though moving closer to the self than other external phenomena, qualify as "extraneous perception" and their destruction is a necessary prelude to the final section of the film; that section, namely, involving "investment proper" of 0 by E and thereby, the affirmation of the "inescapability of self-perception." It should be evident from this cursory glance at the "plot" of Film that any facile application of Berkeleian epistemology to the work would obscure the individuality and originality of the uses which Beckett makes of that philosophical position. Beckett does not simply dramatize a ready-made set of ideas. Rather, the Berkeleian maxim seems to operate as a stimulus around which or from which Beckett's imagination flows. I have already quoted the two statements which follow the Esse est percipi in the general introduction to the scenario. The third statement is no less important and reads as...