Yeats, Beckett and the Ghosts in the Machines

Terence Brown
This lecture considers how it it was only in the late 19th and 20th centuries that technology allowed us to see and hear the dead as moving visual and as aural presences. The technological developments of recording, radio, television etc. have been accompanied by a sense of the human self as fissile and in constant dispersal as the concept of the unified human subject has been widely undermined.
     In the lecture Yeatsian spiritualism is seen as an attempt to prove the existence of a human subjectivity that survives death itself. Beckett's work, wonderfully alert to to various media is read, by contrast, as an exploration of the ways in which electronic devices are seen to disperse human subjectivity by aligning it with machines or by casting it into spectral zones, that seem to deny human life real substance. However, the lecture concludes by arguing that late Beckett offers moments when something irreducible in human existence seems to be granted spiritual valency.
Trinity College, Dublin
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1