Samuel Beckett and the Aesthetics of Silence

Jonathan Tadashi Naito

Although many of Samuel Beckett’s novels and dramatic works involve a sometimes maddening degree of verbal excess, several of his performance texts could be described as experiments with the silence of the human voice. My talk will focus on a few of Beckett’s lesser known works from the late 1950s and early 1960s—the mimes Acts Without Words I and II and his belated silent film, Film—and will address the ways in which Beckett’s investment in silence enabled and encouraged his works to blur the borders that separate one medium from another. In other words, my contention is that Samuel Beckett’s experiments with silence are a crucial factor in explaining how and why a novelist, poet, and playwright became, at a rather late stage of his career, a writer of multimedia performance texts. If silence might seem to serve as a limitation on the possibilities of narrative writing, in the context of performance Beckett’s use of silence allows his staged and filmed works to more directly approach (and disturb) the category of visual art. At the same time, I will also consider the ways in which silence is transformed in its various iterations in different media, thereby enriching the possibilities of silence itself. Finally, I will relate silence as subject and medium to Beckett’s border-crossings in another important area: language. In as much as Beckett’s initial turn from English to French seems to reflect his sensitivity to his status as an Anglo-Irish writer—in both senses: as an Irish Protestant writer and as an Irish writer who chose to write in English—Samuel Beckett’s use of silence would seem to be a further attempt to explore the possibilities of a deterritorialized aesthetic that is not simply a gesture toward cosmopolitan universalism but is abstracted from a specifically Irish context.

University of California at Los Angeles, Department of English, PhD Candidate

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