Sean Redmond and Matt Wagner

Am I as much – Am I as much as…being seen?
Samuel Beckett, Play (1963, p. 157) [1]

In this article, we take up M’s closing question from Play, arguing that it is the central phenomenological conundrum in much of Beckett’s stage and screen work. The question we bring to Beckett’s oeuvre is: what is the relationship between perception and presence, consciousness and corporeality? To answer ‘yes’ to M’s question – to be is as much as being seen – is to render the body not utterly useless, but periphery, or secondary, merely the flesh of perception. Beckett famously remarked that, in his increasing sense of minimalism, in his desire to ‘say the least necessary’, his final work would be a blank piece of paper.[2] In Beckett, does the body suffer the same fate as language?

Am I as much as being seen? If so, I need to present you (someone) with something to be seen – skin, torso, muscle, a ‘boundaried’ mass of flesh. So, yes; the body is required – but, perhaps not as much as the perception of the seer. And if a disconnection between seer and seen is possible – and there is no doubt, at least in a Beckettian world, that it is not only possible, but is the hallmark of the human condition – and the presence of the seen is dependant on the seer, then we have no choice but to be suspicious, or questioning of our very existence. Am I as much as being seen? Yes, and so, I disappear when you don’t see me. But, I cannot not be seen, particularly in a world where vision is everywhere, not least because the ‘I’ is always simultaneously an embodied seer. It is this circular phenomenon, this duality of absence and presence – that works itself out in corporeal terms in different but closely related ways on stage and on screen – which we explore here.

This essay is an attempt to trace and, in some ways, explain this phenomenon of duality, this paradox between being there and not being there. In the first section, we trace the role of different bodies in Beckett’s stage work, arguing that these bodies, especially as mediated by a fractured and incoherent sense of Time, actively present an absence (and, inevitably, absent a presence). In the second section, we argue that in Beckett’s Film(1965), the dilemma of embodied consciousness and what is an anguished flight from being seen and seeing oneself is played out in terms of the complex star/celebrity signification of both Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. In the end, we argue that the unique duality of presence and absence that is produced through the human body in Beckett’s stage works finds a corollary, and perhaps purer, realisation in the body of Film.

The Body of Theatre

You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and
tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!
Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952, p. 59)

The corporeal paradox of presence/absence in theatrical terms resides in the tension between the indispensability of the body in theatrical practice and the (at least potential) dispensability of the body in Beckettian dramaturgy. Peter Brook’s famous edict concerning what it takes to make theatre is a good starting point:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. (Brook, p. 9)

At the heart of theatre is the conjunction of the corporeality of the actor(s) and that of the audience – not just the body, or a body, but bodies sharing time and space, experiencing a certain ‘sameness’ of time and space.

Certainly, to be didactic on this point would be to invite charges of essentialism (heresy in this postmodern world), as well as offers of a myriad of ways in which the body is not essential to the theatre.[3]  And yet, in live theatrical performance the body is essentially inescapable, and we will proceed here, essentialist as it may seem, with that assumption as a given.

Beyond the necessity of the human body, however, there lies the inherent (and age-old) paradox of acting that contributes to the present/absent nature of the theatrical corpus – where, when we look at the person on stage, did the actor go? And from where did the character come? Are both ‘present’, and if so in what degrees, and in what ways, is that possible? And – most germane to this discussion – what is the relationship of either actor or character to the body we see in front of us?

The traditional way out of this paradox, at least so far as modern theatre goes, is to simply ignore it via any number of permutations of willingly suspending our disbelief. Sitting in the audience, we know, for example, that which Bottom and company feel compelled to explain: it is only Bottom that the audience is seeing, and not Pyramus, and he’s not ‘really’ falling on his sword (Shakespeare, p. 831). Cognition – and an understanding of sequential time – helps us as audience members to resolve the paradox. An hour ago, the actor was in his dressing-room, and an hour from now, he’ll be there again, and in the meantime – while he’s here – we are meant to perceive him as something else. The character replaces the actor, more or less; the presence of the one necessitates the absence of the other. It is “play[ing] at being someone else, in front of a whole concourse of people who pretend to take him for someone else,” as Borges puts it.[4]

Phenomenologically, though, this is cheating. In examples less extreme than falling on swords, we still perceive as we look at the stage a body doing things. And no matter what we think we know about the division of actor and character, in the moment of that perception – the moment of the “poetic act itself, the sudden image, the flare-up of being in the imagination,” as Gaston Bachelard puts it – we are encountering and processing the face-value of that which is right there, phenomenally and perceptually directly in front of us (G. Bachelard, p. xiv). After all, as Hippolyta notes when watching Bottom/Pyramus fall on his sword, “beshrew my heart, but I pity the man” (Shakespeare, p. 857) – against our will(ling suspension), whatever is happening on stage is, in fact, happening.

It is this corporeal phenomenon that Beckett’s theatre trades upon, and it is from such phenomena that the richness of that particularly Beckettian present/absent duality arises. Beckett’s theatre denies us the ‘cheat’ – there is no hope of willingly suspending our disbelief, in the body, in the scenario or plot, or in anything else. Beckett, the perennial minimalist, is also the perennial literalist. Everything is what it is – most famously, of course, Godot is Godot, and not god.

It is a short step from acknowledging such literalism to understanding that in Beckett, the body is the body – it is not explicable by understanding it to be an actor’s body rather than a character’s. Such immediacy, of course, inevitably connotes presence – lived presence, theatrical presence, the two become indistinguishable at this point. But herein lies the rub – in Beckett’s world, literalism notwithstanding, that immediacy also enacts absence and disappearance. Far from being a standard proof of presence, in Beckett’s theatre, the fact that bodies are what they are, ‘here and now,’ arouses only skepticism and doubt about their presence; bodies, in fact, in Beckett’s theatre, do something very particular – they ‘presence’ their own absence.

They do this in two key ways. First, the dependence of corporeal presence on a cohesive temporal scheme – linear time, as it were – is underscored and then cast into serious doubt. In other words, as Beckettian Time disintegrates, so to does the Beckettian body. Second, the bodies present themselves as fragments; thus, as with time (and language), the coherence of corporeality is broken, and with it, the coherence of presence. In both cases, as Bert States puts it, ‘nothing is, in fact, but what is not’ (States, p. 82). Brought to bear on our topic here, ‘presence’ is what it is not: namely, absence.

Accursed Time

Returning to Brook, the Beckettian body is present because it is sharing the same time and space with other bodies, and most significantly, with the audience. Live theatre is equated here with bodily presence; presence is equated to a sameness of temporal and spatial phenomena.

This takes us along the well-worn path of assessing time and duration in Beckett’s work; to retrace the body of criticism that treats Beckett’s sense and dramaturgical manipulation of Time would take, well, far too much time.[5] It is perhaps enough to cite Ackerly and Gontarski’s entry on the body in Beckett here: ‘the problem of being might be rephrased as that of spatio-temporal integration’ (Ackerly and Gontarski, p. 64). Or, to borrow from Godot, we can return to Didi’s cry: ‘You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!’ (Beckett: 1954, p. 59).

It is a cry worth repeating, and setting apart; it is an almost perfect example of the corporeal-temporal phenomenon that interests us here. At the heart of his cry is precisely that anxiety over presence: am I here, or am I not here? Am I present, and is that presence the same as your (or any ‘other’) presence? It is this sameness, which is a temporal sameness, that turns the key here. Contained in Didi’s evoking of ‘tomorrow’ – which is by definition not present – is the suspicion that his presence now is somehow hopelessly and completely disconnected from his presence tomorrow: a disconnection that carries with it not only the threat, but in many very real ways, the fact, of oblivion. Approached from a different angle, the phenomenological argument we are making about corporeal presence in Time has a structuralist logic – nothing exists in isolation, only in relation. Today is nothing without tomorrow. But in Beckett’s theatre, tomorrow is isolated from today – the Boy will come tomorrow (as, surely, will Godot), and he will say that he never saw Didi. Or, to borrow from Endgame, ‘yesterday’ means ‘that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day’ (Beckett: 1958, pp. 43-44).

As Didi’s anguish demonstrates, Beckett’s stage bodies – the corporeal characters – deny and are denied cohesive, linear time. This is Pozzo’s ‘accursed’ Time – ‘one day we are born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second …’ (Beckett: 1954, p. 58). Time is ‘accursed’ because it will not cohere. It is the opposite of absolute or linear; and (like the theatre itself, according to Herbert Blau), Time is deeply untrustworthy (Blau, p. ix).

The notion that Beckettian Time is fragmented, untrustworthy, ‘accursed’ is not new, and one does not need to dig deeply into the plays – especially Godot – to find further examples of this phenomenon at work. What we are pointing to here is the relationship between Time and the body. As above, bodily presence is threatened and even denied by this fracturing of Time. For instance, framing Didi’s outburst – which results immediately in the Boy disappearing into that utterly absent world of offstage – is a conflation and confusion of absence and presence, centred on the body, and wrought through the mechanisms and movements of Time: first Didi asks ‘was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?’ (Beckett: 1954, p. 58). And after the Boy has departed, Gogo wakes – he is present again, though never having left. He removes his boots, returning us yet again to the immediacy of the body, the aching feet, the inescapable corpus, and shortly announces to Didi that he is going. ‘So am I,’ replies Didi (Beckett: 1954, p. 59). And of course, they don’t. They remain, prophesying their return: here and not here, unable to leave, ready to reappear.

Theatrically, Didi and Gogo are eminently present – they rarely leave the stage, the actors’ physical bodies are almost always there before us. But because the temporal scheme in which those bodies move – and indeed, which they themselves help to establish – is broken and fragmented, their presence is also broken. And onto the stage, from the fissures in this break, floods a corporeal absence.

Legs, Arms, Balls, etc.

A more straightforward approach to the paradoxical presence of the Beckettian body is afforded by considering the corporeal nature of Beckett’s characters in more superficial terms. These bodies, like the Time they create and inhabit, are themselves fractured, without cohesion.

Beckett once said that he owed “no particular debt of gratitude” to his body, stating that all he was risking by remaining in France during the Occupation was “legs, arms, balls, etc.” [6] In a similar vein, we see the bodies that people his worlds itemizing, with a pronounced absence of cohesion, their various parts. On the level of character study, this trend is clearest: Hamm is blind and unable to stand, Clov limps and cannot sit; Krapp is hard of hearing, Gogo’s feet hurt, Didi’s groin hurts. Beyond these character notes, though, we see throughout Beckett’s theatrical canon a more literal segmenting of bodies: Pozzo loses his sight, Lucky his speech; May disappears one chime at a time in Footfalls; Happy Days’ Winnie is buried in sand; the three lovers in Play are trapped in urns, as are those accursed progenitors of Endgame, Nagg and Nell; Mouth is, most famously, only a mouth – the body completely severed from the primary means of communication.

Here we see a different, if complementary, process of the present body absenting itself. The theatre inflicts the body upon the audience in a way that screen media does not. The body is there, is present, must be present, because it is the theatre. And yet, by so persistently and ruthlessly segmenting the body, fracturing it, offering us in the theatrical experience only parts of bodies, Beckett’s theatre denies that presence. Even further, as has often been noted in Beckett criticism [7] , the plays offer extraordinarily powerful presences of bodies that are distinctly absent. The most notable instance is of course Godot, but to his absent presence we can add the mother in Footfalls, the ‘agent’ in Act Without Words I, the boy – not to mention the rat – in Endgame, and so forth.

In between these two poles of corporeality – the physically present but fractured bodies that absent themselves, and the physically absent but potent bodies that present themselves – we can locate any number of spectral and ‘ghostly’ bodies: the Boy’s brother, in Godot, who might actually be the Boy; the Auditor in Not I; the spotlight/interrogator in Play (transformed into a camera/interrogator in Anthony Minghella’s film of Play(2000). All along the spectrum (to return again to States), what is, is what is not – the present body is more or less absent, the absent body is less or more present. And it is not only Beckett’s dramaturgical interests, his trends of thematic concerns about the body that produce this absent/present duality; it is the particular nature and the heightened corporeal presence of the theatrical body that those interests and concerns act upon. Theatrical bodies force themselves, necessarily, upon an audience; but they deny themselves their own corporeality in the worlds Beckett creates.

The Eye of the Present

Esse est percipi – to be is to be perceived.
George Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) [8]

To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body. Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. (Merleau-Ponty, p. 241)

To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body. Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. (Merleau-Ponty, p. 241).

In Beckett’s Film the question of what it means to exist is addressed through what might be termed a particular type of phenomenological eye or embodied vision. In fact, according to its screenplay, Film sets out to explore Berkeley’s aphorism that one only exists and knows that one exists in the world through perceiving and being perceived. However, in Film the central character O (played by Buster Keaton) is ‘in search of non-being, in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in the inescapability of self-perception’ (Beckett: 1984, p. 163). Film is seemingly about O’s anguished desire to not be seen or to not see, and the impossibility of not-being given the omnipotence and omnipresence of an embodied self that can only be a living thing through the thickness of perception.

Film’s phenomenological absent/present paradox may also be profitably read in terms of star and author personae. It is pertinent that it is an aged, out-of-work, silenced/silent move star that is fleeing from E, or the various, multiple vision regimes which constitute the ‘looking’ devices in the film. One can profitably read E as the eye of (self) perception; the eye of the everyday stranger that one meets in the public space; the camera-eye; the eye of the spectator watching the film; and the oscillating past/present eye of the fan, the journalist, the studio head, and the publicity intermediaries, all of whom made ‘Buster Keaton’ visible, meaningful, a living star-being in the first place, but whom now, we would like to argue, sight/site/cite him more critically.

The E that ‘returns’ to look for ‘Buster Keaton’ in the film is one that finds its objectified star muted (and not just in terms of the ironic silence that runs through the film but in the way his comedic body and face is denied its usual slap-stick, melancholic star signification). O/Keaton can be read as a damaged star, caught in a fame-inflected ‘anguish of perceivedness’ (Beckett: 1984, p. 163), and desperate, therefore, to run away from the critical, disbelieving eyes of star gazers who find him so dishevelled. Keaton wants to be just O (Ordinary) in the world. Of course, paradoxically, and to reverse the relations of looking and psychic investment so far described, such a removal would confirm his status as a non-being, as an ordinary mortal rather than an extraordinary (E) star. O, then, also desperately wants to be the film star Keaton, needs to be Buster Keaton if he is to exist at all. Of course, the idealised ‘Keaton’ he anguishes for no longer exists (the time of his fame has passed; flesh rots). O/Keaton is caught in a ghostly absent/present paradox which haunts the looking structures in the film. On the two occasions that O/Keaton meets someone in the film (first, with the flower seller, and then the old couple on the stairs); they recoil in horror, misrecognising the fallen star – an old man with a patch over one eye – before them. The E that spies on O, revealed by film’s end to be Keaton staring back at Keaton, is the look that splits and yet conjoins the star self with the ordinary self, the extraordinarily famous with the no-longer-famous, the here-now and the there-then, and the living and the dead. The choice of end shot, the iconic close up, is provocatively suggestive: deliberately denied to Keaton throughout the 22 minute film (Beckett in Brownlow interview), the shot that is so often used to confirm the iconic beauty or cinematic ‘worth’ of the star here confirms Keaton’s star-self annihilation. His face is funny no more. Keaton ceases to exist.

The historical context for this is important. Film was made at the primal scene (the early 1960s) of hyper-media star and celebrity surveillance. In Film, at least in metaphoric terms, the public and private domains of being-famous-in-the-world are brought into symbolic view: one cannot – one shouldn’t really want to – escape the glare of publicity because to be on-screen and in public counts as the affirmation of the self (Couldry). Fame, stardom, celebrity, or ‘minor’ moments of media personalization, ‘promises acceptability, even if one commits the most heinous crime, because thereby people will finally know who you are, and you will be saved from the living death of being unknown’ (Braudy, p. 562).

Beckett’s authorship and relationship with Keaton extends the complexity of this absent/present star paradox. One can make a strong case for arguing that Beckett is implicated in the looking relations between E and O in the film. On one level, Beckett is E in the film: a desiring and disappointed ‘fan’ chasing his favourite screen star into phenomenological existence/oblivion. Beckett had made special effort to court Buster Keaton, going to his hotel room in New York to discuss the film and his role in it, and in attending the shoot in sweltering hot conditions (Brownlow). However, Beckett found that Keaton had ‘a poker mind as well as a poker face’, although ‘his movement was excellent – covering up the mirror, putting out the animals – all that was very well done’ (Brownlow). Beckett, then, perceives Keaton in much the same way as the flower seller, the old people on the stairs, and as ‘Keaton’ does: an ordinary/extraordinary paradox; a fictional/factual convergence, an embodied, deferred illustration of perception in the age of celebrity culture.

On another level, however, Beckett can be considered to be O, the exact mirror of the Keaton he meets in New York (poker faced, craggy, monosyllabic), and of his constructed star-author self chased by fans and hacks. The perceptual anguish and the overriding melancholy in the film is as much Beckett’s own, personified, as he struggles to come to terms with his increasing but unwanted celebrity status. At the end of Film, when O systematically attempts to turn over, put out, cover up, all the seeing and perceptual objects and animals in his room, his desire to escape being seen is an impossible one. Spied on in the street (the public space); recognised on the internal stairs of his apartment block (the transitory space); and captured, in close up, by his own star image in his room (the private or domestic space), O/Keaton/Beckett, symbolically aligned at this moment, witness the panopticon of fame as it takes a visual hold on every spatial aspect of their daily lives.

Nonetheless, there is a sweet and intimate sadness to this shared nausea of vision. Keaton is past tense, a star of the silent screen, silenced by the talkies, technicolour, widescreen, and shifting audience tastes; silenced by Film, in fact. Beckett is future tense: a star becoming something iconic in the literary and cultural world. The illusionary filmic present finds them wanting to turn the clock back but for different reasons. In Film, the imaginary looks they exchange and share; the ‘flight’ from E that they both take together; the horror they witness and produce in those that see them, and the horror they see when perceiving each other, can be understood as an all-consuming despairing search for mutual non-being, a search for an existence that is to be lived out of sight and out of time.

The impossibility of holding time down, or of accepting its supposedly sequential order as ‘real’ time, is thus examined in Film, as it is in a great deal of Beckett’s theatrical work. Beckett, ‘systematically makes the world of time and space subservient to the world of his imagination. Indeed, these works reverse the formula for verisimilitude: for now it is the time-space world which slavishly must follow the whim of the imaginary world’. [9] The phenomenon of stardom is distinctly temporally driven and therefore perfect for Beckett’s critical obsession with the (ir)rational clock of modernity. According to the wider discourse that surrounds them, stars rise and fall or fall and rise in a ‘linear’ trajectory; and they age, decline, or they move-with-the-times. Paradoxically, stars also have the ability to stop, extend or slow down time. At a personal level, they exist in the intimate moment at both a textual and extra-textual level, promising the fan the seduction of the here-and-now-with-you, or the always-will-be-with-you. Stars make it seem like the intimate moment they project from screen to fan will last forever. Stars are continually re-experienced by fans as timeless subjectivities; they are made personal and cultural sense of by continual, simultaneous reference to their past and present representations, and future possibilities, so that their meanings in effect emerge out of this symbiotic union. Metaphorically speaking, then, stars come-into-being in the imaginary no-time world that Beckett so applauds but struggles to comprehend (like the manifestation of his own literary stardom).

Finally, Beckett may well be both the O and the E, or the uncredited co-star of the film, but in complex articulations. Beckett is the eye that watches O. His look is both desiring or invasive, and disapproving. Keaton is also the eye that watches O. O is Keaton and he is Beckett. The 45° angle of immunity used to shoot O in the film (supposedly the angle one needs to stand at to avoid seeing one’s reflection in a mirror) may well be a way of metaphysically framing these two star personas as doppelgangers: O is spied on by E; Beckett is looking at himself looking at Keaton; Keaton is looking at Keaton looking at Beckett and they are both looking at the world looking at them, through a filter darkly.

Nonetheless, Film’s complicated vision regime is compelling for another reason: the way it simultaneously situates the body and the face at the locus of perception, although one finds this to be a recurring theme, as we have already argued, in all of Beckett’s work. On one level, the casting of Buster Keaton firmly places the body at the centre of the film. As a silent comedian, he is a star of, or rather through, the comedic body, a generic form of shape-shifting corporeality that makes people laugh out loud. The comedic body is a plural phenomenon: elastic, athletic, clumsy, skilful, unlucky, impossible, irrational, calculated, precise, soft and hard, masculine and feminine. In short, it is often a body that floats in, between and across a number of liminal, transitory states, and, as a consequence, always finds itself in perceptual-comedic trouble. Film foregrounds the Keaton comedy body in the final scene of the film. In the interior space of his dingy apartment, Keaton repeatedly puts out his sneaky cat, which by sketch end transmutes into a dog, and he takes off his oversized coat to reveal a similar sized coat underneath. The elements of repetition, Keaton’s ignorance of the farce that confronts him, the absurdity of the premise, and the ‘stupid’, undersized body that struggles to overcome the mundane and the everyday, combine to create a classic silent comedy routine.

However, Keaton is of course a star also of the comedic face: a face whose contradictory psychic signifiers – wide-eyed, boyish, innocent, lost, bewildered, melancholic, tragic and loveable – seal the embodied trajectory of the gag or routine. On another level, then, Keaton’s face is or should be pivotal to the comedic value of the film. In Film, though, when Keaton’s face is seen by the other characters, and/or by the imagined spectators in the audience, it produces a blind horror response rather than the belly-ache laugh expected if comedy-star conventions were being followed. Keaton’s aged, one-eyed, ghost-like pallor ‘forces’ the onlooker to recoil, to turn away, to shut off or shut out the macabre vision before them. At the end of Film, in a profoundly perplexing moment of alignment, Keaton is horrified at his own reflection, and arguably dies as its terrifying orbit comes into view. [10]

Given that horror is also a genre that places the body and sight/the eye at the core of its textual operations, Beckett’s Film can be read as an anguished mediation on the relationship between perception and the body. The body in the film is made from perception but all that perception is, is ‘embodied consciousness’, to evoke Merleau-Ponty’s conception of being-in-the-world. Consequently, Beckett’s Film should be considered alongside his theatrical work give their concern with flesh, vision and consciousness. As Pierre Chabert suggests:

(O) ne must understand (Beckett’s theatre) as a deliberate and intense effort to make the body come to light, to give the body its full weight, dimension, and its physical presence… to construct a physical and sensory space, filled with the presence of the body, to affirm… a space invested by the body. [11]

Beckett’s Film is a living body, to borrow Vivian Sobchack’s formulation (Sobchack, pp. 1-26). Film – its technology, its subjective-objective, inter-subjective eye pieces, its ‘living/live’ fictional centre – is as much an absent/present paradox, or a perceiving body, as the ‘living/live’, fragmented bodies found performing in it. Beckett’s desire or hunger to explore living and being finds its purest environment in a medium where technology, performance, corporeality and perception align, collide and disintegrate. Film is no more.

And so we return to the question that M asks: am I as much as being seen? M, and those he shares the stage/screen with, are trapped, their ‘necks held fast in the urn[s’] mouth[s] […] they face undeviatingly front’ (Beckett: 1884, p. 147). The body is perceptually absent, imaginatively present. But in whose imagination, and through whose perception? Before asking ‘am I as much as being seen’, the speaker, M, addresses the unknown interrogator of the play:

And now that you are…mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On and off. […] Looking for something. In my face. Some truth. In my eyes. Not even. […] Mere eye. No mind. Opening and shutting on me. (Beckett: 1984, p. 157)

Now? Now that ‘you’ are ‘mere eye?’ If ever there was a Time when the you of this address was not ‘mere eye,’ that was also the Time when distinction, individuation, between perceiver and perceived was possible. But that Time is past; it is, in fact, broken – the body is both here and not here, the perceiver is eternal and eternally damned to perceive. What we are left with, to borrow another phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is the primacy of perception – at the cost of the body, be that body theatrical or film(ic). ‘In the present as were I still’, Beckett’s bodies disappear as and to the degree that they appear. [12] We cease to exist.

Works Cited

C. J. Ackerly and S. E. Gontarski, eds., The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press: New York, 2004.
G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press: Boston, 1964.
S. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Grove Press: New York, 1954.
S. Beckett, Endgame, Grove Press: New York, 1958.
S. Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, Grove Press: New York, 1984.
H. Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point, University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1982.
L. Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1986.
P. Brook, The Empty Space, Atheneum: New York, 1968.
K. Brownlow, ‘Brownlow on Beckett (on Keaton)’, Film West no. 22, 1986.
N. Couldry, The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age, Routledge: London, 2000.
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, Routledge: London, 1962 [1945].
W. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in S. Greenblatt et al, eds., The Norton Shakespeare, W. W. Norton: New York, 1997.
V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1991.
B. O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1985.

Endnotes

[1] Collected Shorter Plays, Grove Press, New York, 1984, p. 157.
[2]  Waiting for Beckett, prod. and dir. J. Reilly, dvd, 86 min, Global Village, 1994.
[3] Recent work, both critical and performative, in ‘liveness’, virtual theatres, and digital performativity would challenge this claim. For examples, see P. Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Routledge, London, 1999; G. Giannachi, Virtual Theatres: An Introduction, Routledge, New York, 2004; and G. Berghaus, Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2005.
[4] J. L. Borges, ‘Everything and Nothing’ in A. Kerrigan (ed.), A Personal Anthology, Grove Press, New York: 1967, p. 115.
[5] On Beckett and time, see B. O. States, The Shape of Paradox, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978.
[6] Waiting for Beckett, prod. and dir. J. Reilly, dvd, op. cit.
[7] For a good survey, see Ackerly and Gontarski, op. cit, pp 64-68.
[8] Used by Beckett as the epigraph to Film, in Collected Shorter Plays, Grove Press, New York, 1984, p. 163.
[9] R. Rabinovitz, ‘Time, Space, and Verisimilitude in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction’, Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 2, 1977 (accessed 21 March 2007).
[10] For further discussion of Keaton’s acting style, see N. Carroll, ‘Keaton: Film Acting As Action’, in Interpreting the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 35-63.
[11]  Quoted in S. B. Garner Jr., ‘Still Living Flesh: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body’, Theatre Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 1993, p. 443.
[12] S. Beckett, What Where, in Collected Shorter Plays, Grove Press, New York, Grove Press, 1984, p. 316.

Created on: Tuesday, 19 June 2007