Child’s Play and the Learned Art of Unseeing
Angela Moorjani
From the beginning of Beckett’s century, modernist artists were engaged in an exuberant distancing from the subject of realism. Their will to break away from received ways of seeing (and not seeing) was shared by thinkers probing the psyche’s intricate workings.  It soon became apparent to those engaged in subverting the traditional subject―both the perceiver and the perceived―that they had much to learn from child’s play and artistic activity. Children’s art is notoriously nonrealistic: it lies in the transitional space (identified by D.W. Winnicott) where the pleasures of the imagination, fantasy, and hallucination intersect with the reality principle.

At the same time, the art of children clearly confirms that the realistic tradition of western art is based on habitus and conventional rules that children haven’t acquired yet and adults must unlearn to summon up the terrors and pleasures of child’s play that derive from another way of seeing.  The interest western artists took in the art from other parts of the world, including Japan in particular, further energized their desire to undo the grip of received narratives. Visual artists, such as Paul Klee and Sergei Eisenstein, whom Beckett placed among the great of the century, excelled at this learned unlearning. Beckett was to join them in this activity with gusto.  Their aim was not only to paint or film or stage or write otherwise, but also to situate their audiences to see (and unsee) otherwise.

The child thus becomes teacher to the parent, as the poets would have it all along. Or the adult recovers the child’s art of unseeing that was repressed or discarded for adult conformity.

As he was known to do with a wide spectrum of knowledge, Beckett picked up what the artists of his time and psychoanalytic and other thinkers―Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, and Bataille--had to say about the subversive quality of child’s play and the destructive and constructive impulse of their art to shape his own thinking and writing. In his “transitional” texts, layer upon layer, he transforms this material radically, heaping irony upon irony, paradox upon paradox, thereby conceiving devices for double-distancing the subject that are as daring as any known in the art of his century. The unsettling and wily forms of “play therapy” that he invented, hovering between the pain of seeing (the real) and the nirvanalike “pleasure” of unseeing, help to explain the unending reverberations of his works within his audiences, in the east and the west.

Emerita, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1