From Dada to Didi
Enoch Brater
Within most critical circles Samuel Beckett makes his mark as a major representative artist of the second half of the twentieth century.  Set within a secure European context, his writing, especially for the stage, displays a wide range of connections to groundbreaking work in other arts, most particularly in music, painting and sculpture.  And some of the most fruitful responses to his work trace the long thread of connections linking him to artists working in many other fields, including dance, performance art, installation art, and work in the mechanical media.  Still missing among these discussions is a comprehensive analysis of what makes Beckett a major voice of his time and place: how he is both a product of his time and place, and how he helped create and foster the very zeitgeist in which he plays such a conspicuous part.  As his American director Alan Schneider rightly observed, “Godot is no longer merely a play.  It has become a state of mind.”   

This discussion aims to look at Beckett as both a primary inheritor and innovator of the art of his own century.  What lies behind the tantalizing impulse to situate Beckett by comparing and contrasting his work so deliberately against the artistic motivations of the twentieth century?  His fellow Nobel playwright Harold Pinter noticed early on that “Beckett’s works stay in the bones”; this discussion hopes to illuminate why and how and when they do so.  Beginning with Beckett’s formative years in the Paris of the 1930s, including his contact with the climate of spontaneity evoked by the surrealists, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake as a work-in-progress, and his long association with a circle of artists associated with Peggy Guggenheim, this project takes a step back from one-to-one correspondences in order to localize the many ways in which an exciting cultural and historical matrix gives rise to a compatibility of aesthetic concerns.  Beckett makes art new, but his art is also constructed as new, nourished and reinvented again and again, by the ongoing resonances it uncovers in the artistic exploration so characteristic of his own moment in history. 

University of Michigan
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1