Beckett,
McLuhan, and Television: The Medium, the Message, and ‘the Mess’
Beckett’s oeuvre, springing as it does from the same informational century, reflects many of the struggles Castells describes which emerge from this clash between technological innovations and advancement and the concomitant destabilizing effects on identity and concepts of selfhood. In fact, two years before Marshall McLuhan wrote his first media study The Mechanical Bride (1951), Beckett had already staged the approaching confrontation. Lucky, a product of informational overload is caught in “a net” from which he seems unable to extricate himself, consigned to providing instead only creative diversions, dance steps, performances. He is perhaps the last of the “old guard” thinkers, finally rendered mute in Act II as “time passes” and technology advances.
In his later theatre work, beginning with Play, and in his forays into radio, television, and film, Beckett more directly takes up the issues McLuhan and other media and informational theorists discuss, and does so in their spirit: “explorations not explanations.” Like them he investigates the impact of media, the interface between medium and content, cyberspace, and the fault lines separating virtual reality and the real (questioning if the latter can be said to exist at all). Beckett continually has his characters fade in and out of view, their very corporeality called into question. One thinks immediately of the floating figures in Come and Go; the “disappearing act” in Footfalls; the almost indistinguishable head on arms in ...but the clouds...; the tiny mouth, appearing more virtual than actual, in the staged version of Not I; the fade in and out of the faces in the original stage version of What Where. All these images seem scrupulously devised by their deviser to blur in front of the eye, just as the simultaneous chants of the speakers in Play or the rapid ejaculations of Mouth in Not I seem to create a cacophony of nearly unintelligible sounds bombarding the ear.
Daniel Albright in his book Beckett and Aesthetics discusses Beckett’s use of media, arguing that he employs technology “in deliberately awkward ways,” the better to foreground not the potential of a medium but its paucity and “refusal to be wrenched to any good artistic purpose.” The results, Albright claims, are “allegories of artistic frustration” marked by their ultimate “muteness, incompetence, non-feasance of transmission.” In his reading, Play becomes only “a dazzling light show”; Eh Joe a progressive march to the final “flimsily pattern of dark and light dots on the screen.” Beckett’s people are dismissed by Albright as merely “flimsy, jury-rigged theatrical conveniences, all dreck and bricolage,” or “ooze.”
In my paper I will also take up the question of Beckett’s responses to and confrontations with the bipolar opposition between Net (i.e. media technology in general) and Self that Castells cites as central to the information age—and century. What I will argue is that as interesting as Albright’s study is, his evacuation of characters from Beckett’s works, in performance and on the page, and the denial of the struggles of self in the face of the onslaught of technology skews and diminishes the Beckettian project. Beckett’s work is still moving and still relevant in the twenty-first century precisely because it stages both sides of the Castellian equation: not the technological rout of the individual but the persistent presence of a self in each work, no longer unitary or clear, but still trying to “make sense who may” (the closing words in Beckett’s last play)--of flux, change, and indeterminacy. This ongoing struggle between medium and “mess-enger” is at the center of Beckett’s work, and has been from the beginning of his career, back at the start of the informational age.
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1