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.

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.

Sociologist Manuel Castells’s sweeping three-volume study The Information Age details the ways in which the rapid development and proliferation of information technology over the past two decades has created “a bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self”: the Net ever expanding and constantly and changing; the Self in a constant search for fixity or surety now that primary markers of identity are no longer clearly delineated or self evident. Although Beckett died in the late 1980s, just at the dawn of the period Castells surveys, his writing already reflected this bipolarity. In 1949, two years before Marshall McLuhan published his first media study, The Mechanical Bride, Lucky in Waiting for Godot illustrated the effects of informational overload: spewing out facts and regurgitating the words of others, his thinking reduced to performance-on-demand, with accompanying dance steps, ending, finally, in silence.
Beckett and Castells seem to be addressing similar situations. However, while Castells concludes that technology allows groups and individuals to develop and thrive in “the culture of real virtuality,” Beckett uses media technology to instantiate the unresolved―and for him unresolvable―bipolarity Castells describes between technology and selfhood, and the “structural schizophrenia” such struggles produce. In his twelve plays written for mechanical media, Beckett uses technology to create a “media of the unworkable,” just as he uses language to create “a literature of the unword.” These plays are among his most experimental works, avant-garde even by today’s standards, breaking the conventions of the designated medium just as his stage plays reshaped the possibilities of theatre.

My focus in this paper is Beckett’s use of the television technology. Marshall McLuhan, the famous 1960s media theoretician, pointed out Beckett’s “anti-environment” approach to modern media. In this paper, I will discuss Beckett’s television work through McLuhan, in order to illustrate how Beckett was able to practice what McLuhan preached―but for different ends. His experiments with television provide examples for video artists today who wish to use their art to confront the bipolar human condition still in place.