( PDF ) Amongst shadows and labyrinths a visual poetics for samuel becketts ohio impromptu

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UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL

INSTITUTO DE LETRAS

PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO

LITERATURAS ESTRANGEIRAS MODERNAS

LITERATURAS DE LINGUA INGLESA

ANA LÚCIA MONTANO BOESSIO

AMONGST SHADOWS AND LABYRINTHS

A VISUAL POETICS FOR SAMUEL BECKETT’S OHIO IMPROMPTU

Tese de Doutorado em Literaturas de Língua

Inglesa

Para a obtenção do título de Doutor em Letras

Ubiratan Paiva de Oliveira

Orientador

Porto Alegre

2010

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To my mother,

the “dear name” who taught me

to get through the shadows

and labyrinths

of my life

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply thankful to:

My advisor, Prof. Ubiratan Paiva de Oliveira, who first believed in this project, and

whose competence and knowledge supported me until the end;

My daughter, Isabela Montano Boessio, for her love and help as a graphic designer;

To my teachers and friends who shared their knowledge, experience, and books with

me.

“… to darkness,

to nothingness,

to earnestness,

to home…”

- Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)

RESUMO

O objeto de estudo desta tese é a composição pictórica de Ohio Impromptu, de

Samuel Beckett. Sendo assim, apresenta uma poética visual como estratégia interdisciplinar

de análise da obra, incluindo a sua versão em filme. A partir de sua contextualização

histórico-social na pós-modernidade, tendo por base autores como Zygmunt Bauman e David

Harvey, juntamente com a definição, delimitação e contextualização das referências artísticas

presentes na peça e no filme, é analisado o modo como as escolhas pictóricas feitas pelo autor

interferem no conceito de espaço e suas relações com o tempo, assim como o espaço do livro

enquanto elemento de conexão entre espaço e tempo em relação ao espectador-leitor,

Listener, Reader e autor. O espaço é analisado por dois ângulos: o pictórico, ou seja, de que

modo o espaço é trabalhado e tratado na obra de arte contemporânea, especialmente no que se

refere à ruptura do espaço do quadro e o derretimento das fronteiras da obra enquanto

categoria; o literário, a partir do que Gaston Bachelard propõe como poética do espaço – uma

topoanálise da obra enquanto espaço de síntese do imemorial com a memória, um estudo

psicológico sistemático dos locais da nossa vida privada. Nesse teatro do passado, que é a

nossa memória, às vezes acreditamos nos conhecer no tempo; no entanto, o que realmente

conhecemos é apenas uma série de fixações nos espaços de estabilidade de seres que não

querem seguir adiante no tempo, que no seu próprio passado, quando vão à procura do tempo

perdido, querem suspender a passagem do mesmo. A poética do espaço lida com o espaço da

nossa solidão e, ali, espaço é tudo, já que o tempo não anima a memória. As metáforas

apresentadas por Gaston Bachelard podem ser facilmente relacionadas com o universo de

Ohio Impromptu, não somente porque Listener e Reader estão colocados em uma sala, ao

redor de uma mesa, mas principalmente porque o texto está imerso no espaço do devaneio que

é, de acordo com o autor, a casa das memórias. Ohio Impromptu é uma casa com sótãos e

porões, cantos e corredores cheios de memórias não reveladas, palavras não ditas, sentimentos

e faces inesquecíveis – uma síntese perfeita do imemorial com a memória. Através de uma

poética visual, somada a uma topoanálise, chegamos à presença velada do autor e sua própria

história permeando o espaço da obra, e a um conceito de tempo como antítese do tempo pós-

moderno; um tempo que persiste pela repetição, que resiste ao apagamento; o tempo do mito.

Através destes procedimentos de análise, chegamos a uma noção de tempo em Beckett

enquanto kairos.

Palavras-chave: literatura inglesa – Samuel Beckett – arte e literatura.

ABSTRACT

The object of study of this dissertation is the pictorial composition of Ohio

Impromptu, by Samuel Beckett. Therefore, it presents a visual poetics as an

interdisciplinary strategy of analysis of the work, including its film version. From its social-

historical contextualization within postmodernity, based on authors such as Zygmunt

Bauman and David Harvey, altogether with the definition, delimitation and

contextualization of the artistic references present in the play and in the film, it is analyzed

the way the pictorial choices made by the author interfere in the concept of space and its

relations with time, as much as the space of the book as an element of connection between

space and time in regard to the reader-spectator, Listener, Reader, and author. The space is

analyzed from two perspectives: the pictorial one, that is, the way the space is constructed

and treated in contemporary artwork, especially in regard to the rupture of the space of the

painting and the melting of the frontiers of the work as category; the literary one, from what

Gaston Bachelard proposes as a poetics of the space – a topoanalysis of the work as a space

of synthesis of the immemorial with memory, a systematic psychological study of the

locals of our private life. In this theater of the past, which is our memory, sometimes we

believe to know ourselves in time; instead, what we really know is just a series of fixations

in the spaces of stability of human beings who do not want to move on in time, who in their

own past, when they go in search of the lost time, want to suspend the passage of time.

Space retains the compressed time. The poetics of space deals with the space of our

loneliness. Here, space is everything, for time does not animate memory. The metaphors

presented by Gaston Bachelard can be easily related to the universe of Ohio Impromptu,

not only because Listener and Reader are set in a room, around a table, but especially

because the text is immersed in the space of reverie which is, according to the author, the

house of memories. Ohio Impromptu is a house of attics and basements, corners and

corridors full of unrevealed memories, unspoken words, unforgettable feelings and faces –

a perfect synthesis of the immemorial with memory. Through a visual poetics, added to a

topoanalysis, we reach the veiled presence of the author and his own story permeating the

space of the work, and a concept of time as an antithesis of the postmodern time; a time that

persists through repetition, a time that resists erasure; the time of myth. Through these

procedures of analysis, we reach a concept of time in Beckett as kairos.

Keywords: English literature – Samuel Beckett – art and literature.

SUMMARY

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………… 14

1 THE POSTMODERN CONDITION …………………………............................. 24

1.1 The postmodern treatment of space vs. time…..................................... 49

1.2 The postmodern space in art .................................................................. 71

2 OHIO IMPROMPTU, by Samuel Beckett………………………………………… 102

2.1 The “tragic” postmodern time in Ohio Impromptu……………………. 104

2.2 The liquid modernity in Ohio Impromptu………………………………. 127

2.3 The pictorial space in Ohio Impromptu…………………………………. 148

2.3.1 Minimalism and chiaroscuro – the shades in Ohio Impromptu…. 163

3 THE BOOK, READER, THE READER-SPECTATOR…………………………. 212

CONCLUSION................................................................................................................ 237

BIBLIOGRAPHY...........……………………………………………………………….. 254

ANNEX DOCUMENTS.............................................................................................. 263

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. PERSIMMON – Robert Rauschenberg ……………………………………………….. 46

2. PIAZZA D’ITALIA – Charles Moore …....................................................................... 55

3. A MODEL HOUSE – Adolf Loos ................................................................................. 65

4. FARNSWORTH HOUSE - Mies Van der Rohe ............................................................ 65

5. LE JUGEMENT DERNIER – Wassily Kandinsky ....................................................... 65

6. IMPRESSION III (CONCERT) –Wassily Kandinsky ................................................... 65

7. CANVAS – Jasper Johns ................................................................................................ 73

8. FIZZLES/FOIRADES – Jasper Johns ........................................................................... 73

9. UNTITLED – Jasper Johns ............................................................................................ 73

10. LES USINES DE RIO TINTO À L’ESTAQUE – Georges Braque ................................ 75

11. GUITAR – Pablo Picasso .............................................................................................. 75

12. FOOL’S HOUSE – Jasper Johns …………………………………………………….... 76

13. NEXOS – Manuel da Costa ........................................................................................... 78

14. TILTED ARC – Richard Serra ………………………………………………………… 78

15. IKB 191 – Yves Klein ……………………………………………………………… 80

16. THE GATES – Christo and Jeanne-Claude ……………………………....................... 80

17. BICYCLE WHEEL – Marcel Duchamp …………………………………………… 83

18. THE SCREAM – Edvard Munch ……………………………………………………… 91

19. MEN READING – Francisco Goya …………………………………………………… 91

20. CLEOPATRA AND THE PEASANT – Eugene Delacroix ………………………….. 91

21. TAHITIAN WOMEN – Paul Gauguin ………………………………………………. 93

22. MADEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON – Pablo Picasso …………………………………… 93

23. N° 18 – Jackson Pollock ………………………………………………………………. 93

24. MAO N° 2 – Pop Art ………………………………………………………………….. 95

25. ISLE OF SWANS ……………………………………………………………………… 144

26. LEGIBLE CITY – Jeffrey Shaw ………………………………………………………. 161

27. GOOD LUCK STONE (or ALTAR OF AGATHE TYCHE) – Goethe ………………… 164

28. UNTITLED – Dan Flavin ...…………………………………………………………… 166

29. COPPER, MAGNESIUM PLAIN – Carl Andre ……………………………………… 166

30. UNTITLED – Donald Judd …………………………………………………………… 166

31. VACANT APARTMENT – Ursula Sokolowska ………………………………………. 168

32. GIRL WITH HAIR RIBBON – Roy Lichtenstein .………………………………......... 168

33. Land Art – Andy Goldsworthy ……………………………………………………… 168

34. OHIO IMPROMPTU ………………………………………………………………… 170

35. OHIO IMPROMPTU ………………………………………………………………… 170

36. OHIO IMPROMPTU ………………………………………………………………… 170

37. OHIO IMPROMPTU ………………………………………………………………… 170

38. ST. JOHN THE BAPTISTE – Michelangelo Caravaggio ..................................... 180

38. THE SUPPER IN EMMAUS – Michelangelo Caravaggio …………………...… 180

39. JEWISH SCHOLAR – Rembrandt van Rijn .......................................................... 181

40. THE MADONNA OF THE CARNATION – Leonardo Da Vinci …......................... 181

41. OHIO IMPROMPTU ......................................................................................... 181

42. OHIO IMPROMPTU......................................................................................... 183

43. UNTITLED FILM STILLS – Cindy Sherman........................................................ 184

44. ERROSE SÉLAVY – Man Ray …………………………………………………… 187

45. Belle da Costa Greene (Photo) ………………………………………………………. 187

46. COMPOSITION – Pierre Soulages ………………………………………………….. 193

47. PAINTING – Pierre Soulages ………………………………………………………… 193

48. AUTHORIZATION – Michael Snow ………………………………….………… 203

49. FRANCESCA DA RIMINI – William Dyce …………………………………………. 223

50. LIBRARY – Marina Camargo .................................................................................. 226

51. KAIROS – Francesco Salviati ..................................................................................... 252

PREAMBLE

Although Samuel Beckett has often been considered apolitical, the fact is that he was

deeply committed to human rights as a whole, firmly opposing to apartheid and any form of

racism, and involved in a number of specific political cases, even in France, where he lived

for many years and was aware of the risk of having his residential permit withdrawn.

Therefore, thinking and writing about Samuel Beckett, and especially Ohio Impromptu (from

here onwards this work will be referred to through the abbreviation OI), inevitably leads us to

dive into the core of our historical moment and its main issues, such as globalization

contrasting to fragmentation at all levels – social, cultural, spatial, temporal - besides ethnical

and religious conflicts; that is, the core of our crisis. Consequently, in order to fully read the

literary text, we ought to make use of a transdisciplinary approach, which can range from

classical references such as Aristotle to contemporary views such as Edgar Morin’s.

In fact, the latter, in an interview for Zero Hora on April 15

2008, drawing a

panorama of contemporary historical events, states that the paradox is that, at the same time

the world is unifying, it is getting fragmented too. Morin highlighted that the world lived with

the idea that progress was a historical law, with “the idea that tomorrow would be better than

today”. From the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he adds, it seems that progress is not so certain

anymore, once technology itself produces its weapons of mass destruction and religious wars,

and what seemed to be something overcome returns to our reality. And even though

presenting an optimistic approach about our crisis, the philosopher defines the 1990s as the

moment when it becomes more accentuated; the moment when we start to delineate the

tragedy of our time, what he calls “humanity’s loss of future”: “The loss of future is very

serious. When we lose hope, what remains is the attachment to the past”. Stating that although

our crisis can lead to disintegrations or regressions, it can also bring up new solutions; like a

maggot that turns into a butterfly, the metamorphosis can equally end up positive for

humankind.

On the same streamline, about a year before, Domenico De Masi, a sociologist from

the University “La Sapienza”, in Rome – Italy, in an interview to the Brazilian magazine

Época on September 13, 2007, stated that the psychological common denominator that

characterizes our contemporary society is “disorientation”, originated from the rapidity and

multiplicity of changes. Quoting Heraclitus, who said that “it is through change that things

settle down”, the author questions whether we could say the same today, for all the changes

occurred in the Twentieth century happened in a much slower rhythm. Today things are

different; after a few decades we moved from an industrial economy, based on automobile

and housing appliances, to a postmodern economy based on services, information, symbols,

values, and aesthetics, and this transformation was fast and global, as if all of a sudden an

immense avalanche, an enormous mass of water, a volcano eruption and an earthquake had

fallen all at once over a quiet region, terrifying its inhabitants. Like them, we are all

disoriented, says De Masi; and the problem about feeling disoriented is that we go through a

deep feeling of crisis, and those who feel in crisis stop planning the future; and if we stop

doing it, someone else will do it for us, and it will not be for altruistic kindness, but for their

own good. De Masi’s standpoint will lead us to understand how we reached the point of

“unfamiliarity”, of “in-between communities” mentioned by authors such as David Harvey

and Zygmunt Bauman, which will be explored later on in this dissertation and which, besides

being constant elements in Beckett’s work, they have effects also in the literary field as a

whole; and more specifically, in literary criticism.

Actually, when analyzing the role of criticism from Antiquity to our days, André

Richard, in A Crítica de Arte (1989), points out the crisis in critics as part of a civilization

crisis. According to Richard, in opposition to other times when the critics unscrupulously

made use of a canonic judgment, nowadays the historians of art and literature experiment the

need to confess their intentions, to specify the nature and the value of their criteria. However,

we notice that, despite the changes that have occurred since the nineteenth century in the field

of literary criticism, it is only at the end of the twentieth century that we can identify a

reconfiguration of the concept of intertextuality, which acquires an effect of resonance,

reaching the inter-discursive and identifying elements from other fields.

In this regard, quoting St. Beuve, Bella Jozef (2006) states that literature is a matter of

language; and language is the subject, which is the “bottom” of the work, i.e., an absence: any

metaphor is a sign with no bottom; the critic can follow the metaphors in the work but not

reduce them. Today the critic’s task is not just didactically organize information for another

reader anymore, but materialize transparencies, aggregate forms, memories, knowledge that is

apparently invisible. Of course, in order to do so, a new order will have to rise in new spaces,

or better, trans-historicized spaces. It is this movement that leads to the replacement of the

notion of “comparative fact” for the one of “strategy”, which relates texts apparently non-

comparable; that is, the comparison happens through difference. Now, although comparative

literature does not ignore the author’s work, the focus is on the passage, transgression, the

surpassing of limits, in the elimination of borders – to be able to aggregate, that is the strategy

of the form. The frontiers have become haunted houses, labyrinths, attics – in Gaston

Bachelard’s words, “spaces of reverie”. Finding these spaces, the voices and monsters that

inhabit them, building bridges for a deeper reading, capable of dissolving frontiers apparently

as solid as Beckett’s absent words, became the greatest challenge, which is actually the aim of

this dissertation: through a visual poetics, and understanding the critic as a co-writer and

therefore someone who is expected to build bridges where there was no communication,

create spaces of transparencies through which the spectator can encounter memories and the

knowledge, or part of it, that supported the construction of forms in OI; through relating texts

and visual references apparently so distant from each other, such as OI and Dante Alighieri’s

The Divine Comedy dated from 1300, or the pictorial construction of OI and the artwork by

painters such as Caravaggio, Leonardo Da Vinci, or Jasper Johns.

INTRODUCTION

Although in Beckett’s work form and content are totally tied up, the formal

sophistication of OI justifies my interest in drawing a visual poetics for it, which would

signify taking the opposite way that most analysts have taken: instead of going from content

to form, I first intend to analyze the pictorial and visual elements in the play and examine its

content only later.

In addition and closely connected with this project, there is the contemporary concept

of “researcher-artist”, which, according to Silvio Zamboni (1998), presents various

difficulties in order to manage and define rules for researches related to artistic creation due

to its interdisciplinarity and the constant changes which the object of study undergoes each

time the artist intervenes. Therefore, a research in the field of the visual arts requires a

differentiated methodology since the researchers produce their object of study at the same

time that they develop the theoretical research. The concepts originate from the technique,

from the procedures, from their way of working, and from the process of instauration of the

artwork. In the academic context, a research in the field of visual poetics involves three

methodological instances:

1) Methodology of working in a studio – the artwork as a progressive process of

meaning;

2) Methodology of theoretical research – searching the reasons for doing the work

allows the researcher to establish connections with art history and the contemporary

production, making use of varied sources: texts, interviews with artists; questioning

what is affirmed and what breaks down tradition; operating concepts, which is a process

that necessarily goes through language which, although it will never completely

translate the work, is indissociable from it;

3) Methodology with students – by proposing questions, the students are expected to

find answers for them, having as a departing point their own artwork, which will

facilitate the occurrence of contributions to the research in general.

According to René Passeron (SOUSA et al. [org.], 2001, p. 9), what the painter

sees, what he dreams and thinks while he paints is rooted in the humus of the ghosts, and it

is through their insistence that they deviate the forms and push the artist to repetition. “This

‘long patience’ provokes ab-reaction, which is not only a brusque event of memory but a

liberating repetition of the old traumatic act…”

The author continues by saying that the

ab-reaction stimulates a passion for confessing, it is a sort of awakening of the true

memory, and that the memorial conscience embroiders over the past, it even invents false

remembrances. Art, according to Passeron, is a practice of the emptiness nurse; the canvas,

as a symbol of the birth memorial emptiness, does not cease invading with its fluid

“Esta ‘longa paciência’ chama à ab-reação / que não é somente um brusco acontecimento da memória / mas

uma repetição liberadora do ato traumático antigo...” (SOUSA, 2001). In order to better support the ideas

presented, all the quotations, which were not in English were translated by me, and followed by the original text

in a footnote.

whiteness the pictorial bandage – “Making the work be born obliterates the primal oblivion.

Screaming-creating is an act of antibirth, so of antideath. Being able to make the work

scream is having created it against the death that screams in it”

. And when it comes to

Samuel Beckett, we find a very concrete reference to this state of birth since he used to

claim that he had clear prenatal memories of life within his mother’s womb which, despite

being commonly thought as a space where the fetus is protected from harm, for him those

memories were more often associated with feelings of being trapped and unable to escape,

imprisoned in pain; a state that will repeatedly appear in his writings (KNOWLSON, 1996,

p. 23). Furthermore, the fight against the death of memory, and especially the death of

childhood memories, has clearly become a fearful ghost constantly haunting Beckett’s

writings. As Knowlson states, references to Beckett’s childhood appear in many of his

works; the larches growing in the garden, for example, which evoke the season when

Beckett was born and also the garden of his house when he was a child, figure prominently

in his poetry, prose, and drama: “Born dead of night. Sun long sunk behind the larches.

New needles turning green.” (BECKETT, 1984, p. 265). We can even find the space of the

empty nurse, as Passeron states, in his writings, such as in Winnie’s story of Milly and the

mouse in Happy Days, and Texts for Nothing III (BECKETT, 1995, p. 110), where the

narrator actually refers to Beckett’s nurse, Bridget Bray, who took care of him and his

brother for twelve years and whose nickname was “Bibby”, a name that figures in many of

his writings, and where the author recreates her baby talk: “She’ll say to me, Come, doty,

it’s time for bye-bye. I’ll have no responsibility, she’ll have all the responsibility, her name

will be Bibby, I’ll call her Bibby, if only it could be like that. Come, ducky, it’s time for

yum-yum.” Even the prayer they used to recite every night is reproduced almost verbatim

“Fazer nascer a obra, oblitera o esquecimento primal. Gritar-criar é um ato de antinascimento, então de

antimorte. Chegar a fazer gritar a obra, é tê-la criado contra a morte que grita nela.” (SOUSA ET al. (org.), 2001,

p. 12)

in Dream of fair to middling women: “God bless dear Daddy, he prayed vaguely that night

for no particular reason before getting into bed, Mummy Johnny Bibby (quondam Nanny,

now mother of thousands by a gardener) and all that I love and make me good boy for

Jesus Christ sake Armen.” (BECKETT, 1993, p. 8). And so we can move on, endlessly,

through Beckett’s writings, digging fragments of his past from the walls of his literary

production, meeting with his old fears, which appear to remain in the attics and basements

of his creative mind. “Balf”, the road repairman who used to terrify him just by starring at,

making him tremble, also figures in many of Beckett’s writings, such as From an

abandoned work (KNOWLSON, 1996), but also in a more disguised way, as we can see in

Endgame, in the fear of going out, and also in OI, in the fear of sleeping, and of darkness –

details of his childhood, when he had trouble to sleep and needed his teddy-bear and a

night-light, and which also appear in Endgame, in the figure of the stuffed dog with three

legs, as well as in Molloy; not to mention his passion for chess started in his teenagehood,

which is also reproduced in the very title of Endgame.

In regard to artistic creation, Edith Derdyk (SOUSA et al., 2001) states that

thinking about creation is a departing and also an arrival point, for much more than

thinking and writing about creation it generates a demand of time in order to reconstitute

the thoughts and sensations that the creative act generates for itself. The creative act is a

camp force converging towards the construction of an inaugural form, for it causes the

melting of singular experience and cultural conjunctions, activating repertoires pertinent to

the visible, the memory and the imaginary. The act of creation, says Derdyk, creates a “cut”

in time and space, resignifying experiences, bringing up a feeling of eternal continuum

within the here and now, as if the poetic ambition of the creative act resided in the

immersion of our subjectivity within matter wishing to be language. In fact, as Bran Van

Velde pointed out, Beckett “never wrote anything that he had not lived”, meaning by this

that he would take his own experience to a deep level, far beyond life-work equivalences,

as James Knowlson states (1996, p. 21).

In this way, taking into account the peculiarities of each artistic field, what I intend

to do is apply as much as possible to the literary text the method used by artists in their

poiesis, a task which reveals itself as a challenge. Therefore, the object of study of this

project is the pictorial composition of OI, and the way it relates to art movements, such as

Minimalism, Conceptual Art, etc., altering the relation time-space in the play. Is it possible

to construct a visual poetics in relation to a literary work? In case it is, what are the

consequences to the reading process? Is it possible to view a literary work as a visual

artwork? Were the author’s visual choices based on rational thinking? How do literary and

visual concepts interchange? How do the pictorial choices interfere with the concept of

space? How is space treated in the play? How do spatial choices interfere with the concept

of time? Do they liquefy the time/space relation? These are the questions which orient this

dissertation, based especially on the theories of phenomenology by Gaston Bachelard, and

having as my principal focus the treatment of space in OI. Consequently, I intend to:

 Contextualize the historical, social, and cultural moment in which the play was

written, outlining the changes that simultaneously occurred concerning the concept

of time-space;

 Identify the pictorial elements presented in both the play and film, and relate them

to the respective visual techniques and/or art movements;

 Characterize the way these visual elements interfere and define the concept of

time-space and its relation with the postmodern concept of “liquidity”;

 Contrast the concept of visual recognition stated by Jacques Aumont with the way

it is used in both versions of the work;

 Analyze the role of the book that is read in the play/film in relation to the

spectator, to the characters – Listener and Reader, and to the author.

In order to achieve such goals, in chapter 1, I situate the Theater of the Absurd, and

specifically Samuel Beckett’s work, within the scope of postmodernity, relating it to the

concept of “liquidity” given by Zygmunt Bauman, and its consequences on the social,

cultural and artistic fields. What the author calls “negative globalization” has a strong

impact on the concept of postmodern “openness”, arising a “culture of fear”, putting

progress, change, and dissolution of borders into a totally different perspective; and the

fields of architecture and visual arts are the spaces where those changes have become

evident, expressing new dimensions of time and space, as well as new interrelations

between them. Separation, lack of communication, unfamiliarity, and fear all come up in art

and architecture as a mashed up collage, which goes beyond aesthetic elements; it brings

out all the unprocessed changes – and that means also losses – that have not been absorbed

yet by the postmodern man.

In chapter 2, I apply the previous concepts to OI by using three different approaches:

the literary, where I analyze the return of the “tragic”, a moment of “synergy of archaism

and technological development”, as Michel Maffesoli states, and specifically the “tragic” in

the postmodern time of the play. A tragic sensitivity that immobilizes time, provoking a

passage from a monochromatic, linear, safe time (the time of history) to a polychromatic,

presentist time (the “spiral of destiny”); a feeling that recognizes and privileges a logic of

conjunction (and… and) over a logic of disjunction (or… or) and moves towards the

dissolution of the lonely identities – a time of gigantic festivals, parades, or even strikes.

The tragic here is understood as intensity, multiplicity, as all sorts of trembling; the feeling

of tragic-ludicrous as collective unconscious strongly returns in ordinary life, leaving us

with the impression of inanity of a life that consumes itself in the act of its own creation.

The time of myth returns to us from the conjunction of the fairytale knight and laser – in

the contemporary tragic, the culture of pleasure flows with the tragic consciousness of

destiny; in postmodern times, there is a co-presence in the alterity, accentuating the “puppet

condition” of the contemporary man or, at best, their condition of mere companions of the

forces that overcome them and to which they must adapt. Contemporary human temporality

merges with space, dislocating it to an un-localized space, for it does not belong to any

specific time, as Maffesoli, states, and consequently it does not belong anywhere. This

awareness is expressed through the contemporary nostalgia – the desire for something that

has never existed but yet is present in the social imaginary – which forces us to constantly

dislocate space through time, and brings out sadness and a feeling of abandonment but, at

the same time, the ability to collectively resist through irony and mockery.

Secondly, I relate the sociological approach of liquidity applied to the urban space

with the space in the play – a sort of OI’s architecture of the city that unveils the

unfamiliarity and discontinuity of the drama. All the spatial references bring to light the

discontinuity, the absence of a common history, revealing that what we are facing is not a

real space but the one perceived by imagination with all its partialities. What we see in OI

is a game between outer and inner space; and these spaces are analyzed through the

metaphor of the house, a topoanalysis based on Gaston Bachelard’s phonomenology: the

house, says the author, will allow us to evoke fleeting lights of reverie that enlighten the

synthesis of the immemorial with remembrance – there is a union between memory and

image, between memory and imagination. And so moves the OI’s character, through

shadows of memory and imagination in a perfect synthesis between reality and virtuality,

dialectically looking for shelter, knowing that, if there is a possibility of comfort, it will

only come from unfamiliarity. At the same time, through keeping fixations from the past,

fragments of memory, the characters fight against time, as an attempt to suspend it into

space.

Thirdly, I analyze the pictorial space in OI

by identifying biographical spatial

references in the play, as well as pictorial references, such as the use of Leonardo Da

Vinci’s pyramidal perspective, the chiaroscuro technique developed by Caravaggio, and

visual and literary Minimalism, to further relate them with the treatment of time and space

– one of the most significant issues that our society faces in the modern era: the relation of

its body with time and space. According to Lois Oppenheim, the unifying force of all

Beckett’s work is a preoccupation with the visual as a primary paradigmatic force which

configures in words, time, space, and the self’s dwelling therein; and painting sanctioned

that preoccupation. The changeable time-space relation is the attribute that pervades OI

from the first line; through showing spatial change, it shows a change not only in

chronological time but in the time of experience in a multidirectional way: “Out to where

nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever shared”. It is through the pictorial and

spatial aspects that the “literature of the unword” (Oppenheim) gains form, and through

them the struggle of the contemporary man unfolds, forced that he is to face a time and a

space that do not stop melting, unfolds – and the result is another equation: the desire to

“remain”, to resist struggling against fear, loneliness, and alterity.

In order to do so, I make use of the film version from the “Beckett on Film Project” – director: Charles

Sturridge; producers: Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney; actor: Jeremy Irons; UK/Ireland; Blue Angels Films;

12 min., 2000. In the same way, all the photos of the play appearing in this dissertation were taken from the same

film version.

In chapter 3, I analyze the role of the spectator in relation to the concept of “pleasure

of recognition” presented by Jacques Aumont, and the way it is distorted into derangement,

unfamiliarity, discomfort. I also analyze the role of the book, identifying biographical and

historical references, besides its relation with Reader, Listener, reading and reader-

spectator, as the simple fact of reading out loud has had throughout history different

meanings and importance. And in this case, the materiality of the book becomes equally

important once it represents processes of producing meaning, which comes also from the

orality of the text, from Reader or perhaps from Listener in the role of mediator, someone

who occupies the in-between, unworded spaces left by the author and to be occupied by our

images, imagination, and abyssal memories.

In the conclusion, I sum up the topics presented above pointing out the way they

construct and knit time and space in OI, which is a collage of art history and literary

references. By means of a logic of conjunction, Beckett creates a process of “unwording”

his own text, making possible the representation of the “unrepresentable”, as Lyotard

would call it, creating spaces of “nothingness”, which end up being the spaces of the

reader-spectator’s participation in the play. The time and space of Beckett’s characters are

the time and space of alterity – multiple “transworlds” where it is always possible to add

another collage of the various human dimensions, memories, desires, and reveries. And life

in its banality, the everyday life, is the scenario where Beckett’s characters play with the

impossible conjunction of past, present, and future, bringing about the aesthetics of

alienation of the Self, which we see in OI: obsessive repetition of facts, memories and

ideas, which leads us back to the time of the myth, through which we escape from a

temporality extremely marked by utility and linearity. The world in OI is a space that turns

out to be a labyrinth where people lose their North and, yet, keep resisting through moving

nowhere, masquerading nothingness with banal repetitions and fake conversations. The

consequence is fear and loneliness; a man deprived of the comfort of tradition and,

therefore, deprived of the pleasure of recognizing their own time and space. Emptiness will

also expose the literary sophistication of Beckett’s work. The sophisticated collage in OI

merges the socio-cultural reality with fictional and pictorial spaces – a fragmented tissue, a

multiplied structure ad infinitum. It actually expresses the long process of changes in the

space relations within the painting, especially through the rupture with the concept of

perspective, and brings up a new concept of spaciousness, as we can see in the work of

Jasper Johns’s, who breaks down the concept of inner and outer space within the artwork,

and who also investigated Beckett’s texts as the focus of a process of “verbal figuration”.

Emptiness also brings voluminosity to the pictorial as much as to the literary space; like in

modern art, it acquires an operational value in the plastic language of OI, since the entire

play operates in the empty spaces – spaces of pregnancy for uniqueness, discontinuities and

intervals; spaces for an excavatory work by the reader-spectator to question their own

condition. In this way, the role of the spectator becomes crucial for the very existence of

the artwork as they become part of its “total vision”. Through a visual poetics, we not only

visualize OI’s various layers of space but also the contrast between chronos and kairos,

and in the in-between spaces and times we encounter the hidden presence of the author.

1. THE POSTMODERN CONDITION

Written in 1980, upon Stan Gontarski’s request for a dramatic play, and first

performed in 1981 at an academic symposium at Ohio State University, in Columbus, in

honor of Beckett’s 75

birthday, Samuel Beckett’s OI stands in the core of the postmodern

era, although it is not our aim to join the apparent endless discussion whether Beckett would

be a modernist or a postmodernist. Actually, the fact is that OI seems to sum up the clash of a

modernist process of shocking structures into the so-called postmodernism, which, even if it

did not represent a global change of paradigm in the cultural, social and economic orders, led

to a deep change in what the editors of the architecture magazine PRECIS 6 called the

“structure of feeling”, a change in sensibility, in the practice and development of a discourse

distinct from the previous period (HARVEY, 2004, p.44). And this might also serve as

another but equally proper definition for the Theater of the Absurd: a change in the structure

of feeling, showing what had remained of the dreams and beliefs held by the modernist

society. In fact, if we consider it as a reflection of Nietzsche’s Zaratustra, the Theater of the

Absurd carries the burden of a group of cultural and social events which culminated with the

two World Wars. As a consequence, it became a way of expressing a desperate pursuit of a

world different than the one they were facing – a world that had lost its meaning, any

possibility of absolute certainty, a universe deprived of dignity, of an ordering principle and a

vital objective. In fact, indeterminacy is the only concept that pervades the various definitions

of postmodernity; and that is the word used by Marjorie Perloff to define Samuel Beckett’s

work, along with “decreation”, by Ruby Cohn, “a literature of the unword” and

“interrogatory” (by Samuel Beckett himself), which express his concern with identity and the

self, with the struggle between consciousness and its dissolution through the dissolution of the

ego (OPPENHEIM, 2003). Actually, differently from his early works, which still present a

naturalistic influence, despite his antipathy toward naturalism, in the works produced after

World War II, Beckett seeks to explore the nature of being and is less concerned with the

superficial and the transitory, escaping from any direct depiction of life by writing himself out

of the text, which did not prevent life material from remaining “located at several removes

below the surface” (KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 21). In fact, this ground-breaking “unwording”

process reaches its peak in the 1980s, with Beckett’s Quad, which totally abdicates of

articulated words – all we can hear are steps – and which, according to Martin Esslin (1986, p.

401), is an “authentic visual poem”.

Although the postmodern label is totally rejected by Lois Oppenheim (2003), who

claims that Beckett’s visual paradigm itself precludes it, since his visual process surpasses the

subject/object dichotomy that is the very point of departure of that polemic, the fact is that OI

was written in postmodern times and expresses not only discontinuity, deformation through a

growing minimalist process, but the collapse of genre and therefore of “tradition” – a clashing

process so typical of the so-called ‘liquid modernity”. As Célia Berrettini (2004) states,

Beckett does not believe in the inviolability of linguistic or artistic frontiers, associating music

to words or even suppressing them, sometimes, in favor of the visual. Consequently, even not

being our intention to historically label Beckett, it justifies the need to locate the play within

such critical period as part of this project. And although dates and terminology may vary from

one author to another (some will call it postmodernism, others second modernity; some will

say it started in the nineteen sixties, others, in the seventies, or even in the eighties), it is clear

that many changes have taken place ever since and are about to occur in a very seminal and

interconnected way. These changes, according to Zygmunt Bauman (2007), reflect the

passage from what he calls “solid” to “liquid” modernity, a period when the social

organizations cannot hold their structures anymore and therefore there is no institution able to

frame the individual’s choices or assure the repetition of those patterns that establish social

behavior. The fact is that, by the end of the 1970s, something had radically changed in our

society, making it evident that somehow whatever we had learned had become useless,

turning that decade into the scenario where all those post-war years of efforts towards an

international reconstruction and development were collapsing, extinguishing frontiers and

opening new ones. The “existential wisdom”, as Bauman would call it, seemed to have lost

its way in the world, which claimed for a deep revision of all our values and social practices.

That has been our time – the moment of melting structures; a time marked by diversity, just

like Beckett’s creation. Nevertheless, this melting process does not promote unity, it just

keeps offering the actors of the social arena the spectacle of fading life strategies, structures

once believed solid and permanent. And now, after the boom of globalization, with our view

broadened to a planetary level, where all connections seem to be possible, we are left with

what Bauman defines as “negative globalization”: an open society in regard to territorial

sovereignty and to the respect to (or lack of) any frontier between States. Yet, this openness

does not include an equal and free commerce or capital distribution, access to information, or

the control of violence and terrorism.

Despite the original meaning of “openness” given by Karl Popper, which referred to a

society that frankly admitted its incompleteness, in Bauman’s words, “openness” today is

associated with an irresistible fate, with the non-planned and unpredictable effects of the

“negative globalization” (2007, p.13) mentioned above. Now, with no boundaries left to

protect us (be them physical, political, or social), we face this terrifying feeling of

vulnerability in which safety, peace, and justice have become impossible no matter where we

are. Consequently, we were left with what Bauman calls “the culture of fear”, not only of

what already exists but of anything that we can imagine might exist, and in such dark

environment, progress turned into a ghost that escapes from the labyrinth of our social

basement and haunts us like long, endless nightmares in which time consumes us, space

melts, and we are thrown into nothingness. Fear is what has been left as the great source of

power in our postmodern society, and along with fear come individualism and loneliness. The

lack of a strong emotional link between people may give them the illusion of freedom and joy,

but never of hope. The benefit that solidarity can bring to those individuals can no longer be

felt or understood. As we lack the appropriate tools to rebuild our social structure, the demon

of fear will continue haunting us, our time and our space; and in this self-consuming process

we have been forced to face a new sort of residue – the human trash, that increasing group of

“unfitted” people who can no longer find a social spot where they can be recognized as

socially, or even professionally useful individuals. The fact is that, at the same time that we

discuss and highlight the respect for cultural diversity, the space where this diversity can exist

has become increasingly smaller and is sharply represented in Beckett’s metaphorical spaces,

such as the deserted vastitude of Waiting for Godot, or the suffocating bunker-space of

Endgame, or the small room with a single window in OI, where the character has moved to

hoping to find relief from unfamiliarity. The more space we have in Beckett’s plays, the more

we feel its borders and the invisible walls locking us in. As Clifford Geertz (2000, p. 68-88)

observed, the social and cultural frontiers coincide less and less, and with such disjunction

postmodernity will have to deal with that amount of “human excess” – be it in the figure of a

refugee, be it in the figure of a socially, culturally disadvantaged person who claims for a real

space where they can in fact exist. This human excess has reached a totally and so far

unthinkable condition of helplessness, which goes beyond philosophical aspects, reaching the

extremes of not just hunger but absence of protective laws that would guarantee their material

existence, especially in the case of the refugees, for whom what seemed to be a temporary

condition has become a long term if not permanent state of legal inexistence “nowhere” –

what Foucault would call “a place with no place” (FOUCAULT apud BAUMAN, 1986, p.

51). In a metaphorical way, Bauman draws a picture of this condition when he states that the

roads that may take us back to the lost domestic paradise were practically closed, and all the

exits from purgatory lead to hell (2007, p. 44). In the imaginary communities of the

contemporary world, these individuals have become the “un-imaginary” ones, stratifying their

condition of “permanently transitory”, just like the two clown-figures in Waiting for Godot.

In an article written for the Guardian, Naomi Klein (2003) mentions the “fortress

continents”, a group of nations that unite forces to take commercial advantages from other

countries and at the same time guard their borders to avoid the entrance of the people from

whom they take advantage. At a certain point, Klein asks how it would be possible to stay

open to business and closed to people, and the author herself gives the answer: first you

expand the perimeter, and then you lock the door. Somehow, postmodernity seems to have

created an “in-between space”, not just for the refugees, as Klein pointed out, but for

everyone who might feel unfitted or unwanted in a social universe with such unclear scope

and such strong “pitch” of insecurity making human vulnerability always more evident. In

Bauman’s opinion, a new fear has aroused – the fear of inadequacy, an almost universal

disease, fear of being socially excluded. The omnipresence of fear compels people to build

higher and stronger walls around houses, neighborhoods, cities, even countries, and in this

process of building protection, we have reached the point in which the way out has been

somehow lost and the reference of who is locked in and who is locked out has also become

unclear. Therefore, the importance of studying and understanding the postmodern space in all

its dimensions became crucial to understand our condition as social beings.

Even though it is not our purpose in this work to analyze postmodernism from the

socialist point of view, it is worth mentioning the relationship established by some authors

between postmodernism and Marxism, as the latter is in the core of the whole process of

modernization. According to David Harvey, Marx not only is one of the first modernist

writers but he also offers one of the first and most complete interpretations of the capitalist

modernization.

All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and

venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones

become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all

that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober

senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (MARX &

ENGELS apud HARVEY, 2004, p. 97)

Actually, this quotation could certainly be used in any writing on postmodernism, and

is related to the questions posed by Harvey – whether postmodernism represents a

reinterpretation or a reinforcement of the role of money itself as the object of desire, which

originates what Marx calls the “merchandise fetishism”. The author believed that money and

market trade masked the social relations between things, dissolved boundaries and relations

that compound the traditional communities; therefore, money would establish the real

community, the supreme representation of social power in the capitalist society.

It is also worth mentioning some of the main reasons that, according to Stuart Hall,

caused the dislocation of the modern Subject: Marxist thought, which puts social relations in

the center of its theoretical system, instead of an abstract notion of man; Freud’s discovery of

the Unconscious, which destroys the concept of the cognoscenti and rational Subject endowed

with a fixed and unified identity; Structural Linguistics, which states that we are not the

authors of our own language but that language, instead, is a social and not an individual

system; the works by Michel Foucault on a genealogy of the modern Subject in which he

highlights another type of power – the disciplinary power – focused, firstly, on regulation, on

the government of the human species, and secondly on the individual – based on the power of

administrative regimens, professional expertise, and the disciplines of Social Science, and

aiming at producing a human being who can be treated as an obedient corpus (DREYFUS and

RABINOW apud BAUMAN, 2001). At last, another dislocation mentioned by Hall is the

impact caused by Feminism, one of many movements raised in the sixties, which questioned

the classic distinction between inner and outer, private and public and, as a consequence,

politicized subjectivity, identity and the process of identification.

Summing up, according to some theoreticians, these movements can be seen as key

elements which transformed the Subject, as it was understood in the Enlightenment era, with a

fixed and stable identity, into a dislocated, open, contradictory, unfinished, and fragmented

postmodern Subject. And in order to alleviate this condition, although global mobility made it

impossible to consider a nation as a unified cultural identity, national cultures with emphasis

on tradition and continuity come at hand to support this idea, even if they mostly exist, as

Homi Bhabha would say, only in the individual’s imagination (BHABHA, 1990), for, no

matter how different the members of a nation are, or how violently forced this process might

be, those representations can give them the feeling of being unified into one cultural identity.

The fact is that, at the same time globalization, which for some is the worst monster

postmodernity has created, pasteurizes the modus vivendi and creates a social aura of equality,

it also makes more evident the differences and the struggles inside the social corpus to

preserve ethnical identities – at the same time that there is the desire for universal

assimilation, there is also the willingness to keep the private, the local. As Hall states (2006),

the discourse of national culture constructs identities which are ambiguously placed between

past and future, and globalization is the main element causing the dislocation of national

cultural identities, as it connects communities and organizations through new fragmented

combinations of space-time, compressing distances, time scales, and identities. As a result,

the struggles between national and local caused by globalization are originating another type

of national identity – the hybrid one – with emphasis on impermanence, difference, and

cultural plurality.

In this way, Tradition, the main source of our cultural comfort, has been challenged by

the need of constantly reinterpreting itself, contrasting at the same time with another concept

focused not on permanence and continuity but on impermanence and difference – the concept

of “Translation”, presented by Bhabha (1990). This concept describes those identities formed

through spatial, historical and cultural intersections and compounded by people who were

dispersed from their homeland and forced to negotiate with the new culture without being

totally absorbed or having totally lost their old identities. Actually, this is a conflict closely

experienced by Beckett, who lived almost his entire life outside his country, having moved to

Paris in 1928, at the age of 22, to London in 1934 and returning to Paris in 1937, besides stays

in other countries and his early times back in Ireland. This borderless experience led him to

his relationship with James Joyce and many other artists who played important roles in his

personal and artistic life and especially in his relationship with space – geographic, cultural,

artistic, and linguistic as well, since many times he wrote in different languages; for example,

in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, which is a collection of

previously uncollected writings that appear in their original language of composition (French,

German, English), as stipulated by Beckett because the volume “is intended for scholars who

should be able to read several languages” (COHN, 1984). Among those writings, we can find

his essay “Recent Irish Poetry”, published in London in 1934 under a pseudonym, as he was

afraid of any possibility of a nationalistic reaction, and where he expressed his opinion on

Irish literature as obscurantist and retrograde, drawing a line between the Dublin litterati and

the moderns, like him, who were aware that either the breakdown of the object or the

breakdown of the subject would lead to the same thing – rupture of the lines of

communication, turning the space a “no man’s land”. In Beckett, there is a breakdown not

only at the creative level, but also at the personal level where past and present, origin, beliefs

and expectations never really match; words and things always fail to coincide. The Dubliner

does not agree with the modern man and writer that he had become; as much as it is not

possible to reach a linguistic identity, since when he seemed to have chosen French as his

literary language, he goes back to English and vice-versa, or to another language. Actually, he

goes even further, joining the criticism of James Joyce who, in an article written in Trieste,

Italy, expresses his dissatisfaction with Ireland, stating that a person who has self-respect will

not want to stay in Ireland, but run to anywhere far away, as if running from a country that

had been visited by a furious Jehovah (JOYCE apud BERRETTINI, p. xvi). Beckett, in his

craving for independence, follows Joyce’s words and moves away; but in his itinerant self-

imposed exile, he remains divided, dissatisfied, excluded, with an almost constant need to

search, evade, and occult himself, even in the literary aspect – what we see in Beckett is a

man constantly trying to translate himself and the world surrounding him, as if attempting to

find a space where he can exist, belong, perhaps a space of comfortable familiarity where past

can peacefully merge with present and future, truly believing in the violability of borders, be

them geographical, linguistic, or aesthetic, something that is clearly expressed in his works,

which always lack geographical references. In fact, Beckett’s spaces are always versions of

“no-man’s land”.

Like in Beckett’s world, cultural unification in this new world has lost its meaning, for

these individuals will irrevocably be the product of diversity, forever inhabiting at least two

cultures, having two identities, never unified, being forever what Salman Rushdie calls

“translated men” (1991), children of a compressed time and space, existing in an “in-

between” time line, between past and future which, however, is not the present – a sort of an

“in-between” postmodern identity, like the characters existing between Listener and Reader –

the “dear name”, the man that comes at night carrying a book. Actually they are all in-

between characters living in in-between times and spaces, tied together by the tenuous string

of words that do not reveal, by the power of the book.

On the same track, Anthony Giddens (1990, p. 18) contrasts modernity, that

increasingly separates space from place, once it reinforces relationships between others who

are absent, distant from any sort of face-to-face interaction, with the pre-modern societies, in

which space and place were broadly coincident. Now we are facing what Harvey calls “the

destruction of space through time” (HARVEY, 1989, p. 205), which highlights the difference

between space and place: at the same time places give us roots, as they remain fixed, space

can be quickly crossed by, for the social structure is atomized by flexible nets of language that

allow the individual to access different groups of codes according to the social role they are

playing at the moment (political, cultural, religious, etc.). In this way, if there are many

different games being played at the same time, according to Jean F. Lyotard (1984), the

consequence which we can expect is the birth of broken institutions, what the author calls

“local determinisms”, understood as interpretative communities formed by specific

knowledge “producers-consumers” that act in specific cultural contexts (academic, religious,

political, communitarian, etc).

The importance of this variety of language networks acting at the same time comes

from the fact that it makes evident one of the strongest aspects of postmodernism: alterity, the

idea that each group is capable and has the right to speak by itself and be respected and

accepted as a legitimate voice, which for Andreas Huyssens (HUYSSENS apud HARVEY,

2004, p. 52) carries a liberating potential to a variety of social movements. Postmodernism

made us aware of the pluralism of worlds, and this effect can be felt not only in a sociological

standpoint, but in all forms of expressions – in the technological world, as much as in the

academic and artistic universes, especially in literary fiction. Actually, this is what Foucault

would call “heterotopy”, the coexistence of a large number of fragmented possible worlds in

an “impossible space”; places that have the curious property of being in relation with all the

other places, but in such a way that they suspend, neutralize or invert the ensemble of

relations that are designated, mirrored, or reflected by them. And amongst utopias and

heterotopias, Foucault believed that there was a kind of mixed, joint experience, which would

be the mirror – at the same time a utopia and a heterotopy, for the mirror is a place without

place; in the mirror I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up

behind the surface, a sort of shadow that enables me to see myself where I am absent; a

heterotopy, for it exists in reality, exerting a sort of counteraction on the position I occupy –

from the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am, once I see

myself over there, and somehow I am led to turn my eyes toward myself and reconstitute

myself there where I am. The mirror, when it reflects our image, makes the space reflected

absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, for in

order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

Mais ce qui m'intéresse, ce sont, parmi tous ces emplacements, certains d'entre qui ont la curieuse propriété

d'être en rapport avec tous les autres emplacements, mais sur un mode tel qu'ils suspendent, neutralisent ou

inversent l'ensemble des rapports qui se trouvent, par eux, désignés, reflétés ou réfléchis. Ces espaces, en

quelque sorte, qui sont en liaison avec tous les autres, qui contredisent pourtant tous les autres emplacements,

sont de deux grands types.

HETEROTOPIAS

Il y a d'abord les utopies. Les utopies, ce sont les emplacements sans lieu réel. Ce sont les emplacements qui

entretiennent avec 1'espace réel de la société un rapport général d'analogie directe ou inversée. C'est la société

elle-même perfectionnée ou c'est l'envers de la société, mais, de toute façon, ces utopies sont des espaces qui

sont fondamentalement essentiellement irréels. Il y a également, et ceci probablement dans toute culture, dans

toute civilisation, des lieux réels, des lieux effectifs, des lieux qui ont dessinés dans l'institution même de la

société, et qui sont des sortes de contre-emplacements, sortes d'utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les

emplacements réels, tous les autres emplacements réels que l'on peut trouver à l'intérieur de la culture sont à la

These immeasurable superposed spaces create for the postmodern character different new

enigmas to be solved: “What world is this? What am I supposed to do here? Which persona

am I supposed to use?” These are some of the questions posed by Harvey to understand the

new dilemmas faced by the postmodern character, and which could perfectly be posed by

Beckett’s characters in OI, since we are presented with this mirror-figure characters Reader

and Listener carrying the dichotomy of presence-absence, and posing to the spectator the

enigma of an abyssal space: which space they really occupy in regard to the play and to their

own life.

As a matter of fact, according to David Harvey (2004), we cannot consider

postmodernity without looking backwards to the conflicts and contradictions within

modernism, especially if we take into account the definition of modernity given by

Baudelaire: in The painter of modern life, published in 1863, he defines it as “the transient,

the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the

immovable”. And this conflict between ephemeral and eternal seems to permeate what

fois représentés, contestés et inversés, des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous les lieux, bien que pourtant ils

soient effectivement localisables. Ces lieux, parce qu'ils sont absolument autres que tous les emplacements qu'ils

reflètent et dont ils parlent, je les appellerai, par opposition aux utopies, les hétérotopies ; et je crois qu'entre les

utopies et ces emplacements absolument autres, ces hétérotopies, il y aurait sans doute une sorte d'expérience

mixte, mitoyenne, qui serait le miroir. Le miroir, après tout, c'est une utopie, puisque c'est un lieu sans lieu. Dans

le miroir, je me vois là où je ne suis pas, dans un espace irréel qui s'ouvre virtuellement derrière la surface, je

suis là-bas, là où je ne suis pas, une sorte d'ombre qui me donne à moi-même ma propre visibilité, qui me permet

de me regarder là où je suis absent - utopie du miroir. Mais c'est également une hétérotopie, dans la mesure où le

miroir existe réellement, et où il a, sur la place que j'occupe, une sorte d'effet en retour ; c'est à partir du miroir

que je me découvre absent à la place où je suis puisque je me vois là-bas. À partir de ce regard qui en quelque

sorte se porte sur moi, du fond de cet espace virtuel qui est de l'autre côté de la glace, je reviens vers moi et je

recommence à porter mes yeux vers moi-même et à me reconstituer là où je suis; le miroir fonctionne comme

une hétérotopie en ce sens qu'il rend cette place que j'occupe au moment où je me regarde dans la glace, à la fois

absolument réelle, en liaison avec tout l'espace qui l'entoure, et absolument irréelle, puisqu'elle est obligée, pour

être perçue, de passer par ce point virtuel qui est là-bas. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1984, Des espaces autres

(conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales, 14 mars 1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5,

octobre 1984, pp. 46-49. Available at: http://www.foucault.info/documents/heterotopia. Site visited on January

, 2009.

Marshall Berman calls a modality of vital experience, an experience of space and time for the

individual and for the others, an experience of possibilities and dangers of life, as if there

were a constant struggle between a world of adventure, power, joy and achievement, and the

threat of total destruction, provoked by the melting of geographic, cultural, ideological, and

religious borders, which does not bring but a paradoxical unity – a unity of disunity. In

Berman’s opinion, modernity throws us into a turmoil of perpetual disintegration and renewal,

of fight and contradiction, of ambiguity and anxiety, which leads us to believe that for most

modern writers – and Beckett includes himself in this category – the only thing which they

could be sure of in modernity was its insecurity and even its tendency to “totalizing chaos”

(BERMAN apud HARVEY, 2004, p.21).

Therefore, the so-called postmodernism emerged from an anti-modern spectrum to

stand as a cultural aesthetics; an aesthetics of a new order of space and, as a consequence, of a

new order of time. And so emerged the Theater of the Absurd, carrying in its womb the

burden of being at the same time transient and eternal, struggling with the desire of unity and

the awareness of disunity, for the apparent unity brought up by globalization caused an

immense dark hole in social life, where new struggles took place among individuals. And this

is what Jonathan Raban states in his book Soft city, published in 1974, presenting an urban

space characterized by its disseminated individualism and entrepreneurism, where social

distinction was broadly lent by possessions and appearance. In Raban’s point of view the city

looked more like a theater, a series of stages where the individuals could operate their

distinctive magic while playing a variety of roles. The city became a labyrinth where too

many people would lose their North, where it was extremely easy to lose each other or

ourselves. If, on one hand, this variety of roles could bring us freedom, there was the

inexplicable menacing presence of urban violence followed by the tendency of a total

dissolution of social life. Just like in the theater, the urban space also offered its inhabitants

the possibility of playing both the villain and the fool.

According to Terry Eagleton (1987), the postmodern relation with cultural tradition

stands as pastiche, intentionally lacking depth, making use of a brutal aesthetics of sordidness

and shock. Once more, like in the theater, the mask plays a main role, for it embodies the

fleeting aspect of postmodernism. Therefore, we might even quote Baudelaire again when he

referred to “the indefinable something we may be allowed to call ‘modernity’” (1863),

whereas the editors of PRECIS 6 (1987, 7-24), the architecture magazine, define

postmodernism as a legitimate reaction to monotony, for it values heterogeneity and

difference as liberating forces in the redefinition of the cultural discourse – fragmentation,

indetermination and intense distrust regarding all universal discourses became the trademark

of the postmodern thought. New approaches to old and new concepts rise in all areas, be

them humanistic or scientific, especially Foucault’s emphasis on discontinuity and difference

in history, corroborating the end of “meta-narratives”, as a legitimating tool for the illusion of

a “universal” human history. According to Harvey (2004), modernity does not involve only

an implacable rupture with any preview historical condition but it is also characterized by an

endless process of internal ruptures and fragmentations, and although it has always been

focused on the discovery of the “essential character of the accidental”, as Paul Klee used to

say, it now needed to do it on a field of continuously changing senses which frequently

seemed to “contradict yesterday’s rational experience” – what Habermas (1983) called

“project of modernity”. This project, started in the eighteenth century, consisted of an

extraordinary effort made by the illuminist thinkers to develop objective science, morality and

universal laws, and autonomous art as well, aiming to achieve human emancipation and daily

life improvement, as the scientific control of nature would release humankind from famine

and natural disasters. Whereas modernism embraced tradition, the illuminist thought

embraced progress and the whirl of change, so the transient, the fleeting and the fragmentary

became the necessary condition for the fulfillment of the illuminist project. However, as

Harvey (2004) points out, the twentieth century, with its extermination camps, its militarism,

the two world wars and the devastating possibility of total destruction, put down this

optimism and led the illuminist project towards self-destruction, as it ended up transforming

the pursuit of human emancipation into a system of universal oppression on behalf of human

liberation. At least, that was the thesis presented by Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in The

dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), in which they claimed that the logic behind the illuminist

rationality was the logic of domination and oppression. On the other hand, Harvey presents

Nietzsche as “the other half” mentioned by Baudelaire to show that the modern was nothing

else than a vital energy, a will of living and power swimming in a sea of disorder, anarchy,

destruction, individual alienation and despair. Therefore, the illuminist concepts were

worthless; the eternal and immutable essence of humanity was perfectly represented by the

mythical image of Dionysius’s “creative destruction”. Consequently, what we have is once

more the opposition between ephemeral and eternal. As Harvey states, if the modernist has to

destroy in order to create, the only way to represent eternal truth is through a process of

destruction which in the end will be able to destroy its own truth. Nietzsche placed the idea of

aesthetics above science, rationality and politics – the exploration of the aesthetic experience

beyond “good and evil” opened space for the creation of a new mythology regarding the

meaning of eternal and immutable in the fleeting and fragmented chaos of modern life. And in

this new modernist project, a special role in the definition of the essence of humanity was

given to artists, writers, architects, composers, poets, and philosophers: the artist, according to

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest modernist architects, must not only understand the

spirit of their time but start its process of change, as well. Consequently, the definition of a

modernist aesthetics crucially depended on the artist’s approach to these processes of change,

fragmentation, and ephemerality; no matter what position they took, they were going to

interfere with the way that cultural producers considered the flow and change. The painter, the

architect, the writer, artists in general were expected to find a way of representing this eternal

and immutable condition, and they found it through the strategy of shocking and violating the

expected continuity. James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Stéphane Mallarmé and Louis Aragon,

Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Jackson Pollock are examples of this strategy in action.

And Beckett, specifically in Dante… Bruno, Vico… Joyce (COHN, 1984), when analyzing

the revolutionary role of Joyce’s writing, in a literary and political approach, defends his

autonomous linguistic choices, establishing a relationship with Dante, who chose various

Italian dialects over Latin and without prioritizing or privileging his own – Tuscan – as a

statement in defense of literary autonomy and against literary nationalism subjection.

Actually, comparing himself to Joyce, in regard to their creative process and how innovative

and revolutionary his (Beckett’s) role was, he states:

The difference in regard to Joyce is that Joyce was a magnificent

manipulator of matter, maybe the greatest. He would make the words give their

maximum; there is no extra syllable. The gender of work that I do is a work in which

I am not the owner of my matter […]. Joyce tends toward omniscience and

omnipotence as an artist. I work with impotence, with ignorance.

[…] I do not believe that impotence has been explored in the past. It seems

that there is a sort of aesthetic axiom that says that the expression is an

accomplishment (success), it must be a success. To me, what I try hard to do explore

is all that range of the human being that has always been neglected by the artists as

something useless or by definition incompatible with art.

I believe that today any person who pays the slightest attention to their own

experience will realize that it is the experience of someone who does not know

someone who cannot (BECKETT apud MALÉSÈ apud BERRETTINI, 2004, p. xx).

A diferença em relação a Joyce é que Joyce era um magnífico manipulador de matéria, talvez o maior. Fazia

com que as palavras rendessem o máximo; não há sequer uma sílaba a mais. O gênero de trabalho que faço é um

trabalho no qual não sou o senhor de minha matéria [...] Joyce tende para a onisciência e a onipotência

enquanto artista. Eu trabalho com impotência, com ignorância.

[...] não creio que a impotência tenha sido explorada no passado. Parece que há uma espécie de axioma estético

que diz que a expressão é uma realização (êxito), deve ser um êxito. Para mim, o que me esforço por explorar é

toda essa gama do ser que foi sempre negligenciada pelos artistas como alguma coisa de inutilizável ou por

definição incompatível com a arte.

In regard to one of Beckett’s references, Mies van der Rohe wrote in the 1920s that

architecture was the “willingness of a time conceived in special terms”. Exploring

simultaneity, “the modernists were taking the ephemeral and transient as the locus of their

art”; therefore, it became what Walter Benjamin called an “auric art”, for the artist had to

assume an aura of creativity and dedication to art for the art’s sake in order to produce an

original and unique cultural object, so it could be easily sold for a monopoly price. At the

same time it attempted to affect the aesthetics of daily life, modernism also internalized its

own whirl of contradictions and ambiguities, an extraordinary combination between futurism

and nihilism, revolutionary and conservative, naturalist and symbolist, romantic and classic;

the celebration of a technological era and its condemnation; an excited acceptance of the end

of the old culture regimens and a deep despair towards it (BRADBURY and MCFARLANE

apud HARVEY, 2004, p. 32). Furthermore, after 1848, it broadly became an urban

phenomenon, with an explosive growth of cities due to migration, industrialization,

mechanization, the massive reorganization of the cities and political urban movements. In

fact, the growing need of facing the psychological, sociological, technical, organizational and

political problems of massive urbanization became the basis where modernist movements

blossomed. The city, observes Michel de Certeau (1984, p. 95), is “simultaneously the

machinery and the hero of modernity”. This craving for experimentation resulted in a

qualitative transformation in the nature of modernism sometime between the years 1910 and

1915, affecting all sorts of scientific and artistic expressions, including music – Igor

Stravinsky provoked a revolution in 1913 with his “The Rite of Spring”, as much as the atonal

music by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Bela Bartók, and others –, and also Ferdinand de

Saussure’s structuralism, conceived in 1911, in which the meaning of words is firstly

Creio que hoje qualquer pessoa que preste a mais leve atenção à sua própria experiência se dá conta de que é a

experiência de alguém que não sabe, de alguém que não pode.

determined by their relation to other words than to their reference to objects. “Out to where

nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever shared” (OI, p. 13).

In the 1920s, many cultural producers, especially the ones involved with the Bauhaus

movement, followed Mies van der Rohe’s statement that “truth is the significance of the fact”,

and dedicated themselves to establish a rational order (“rational” meaning technological

efficiency and production via machinery) to achieve goals which were socially meaningful

(human emancipation, proletariat emancipation, etc). “Through order, promote freedom” was

one of Le Corbusier slogans, thus aiming to emphasize that freedom and liberation in the

contemporary metropolis vitally depended on the imposition of rational order.

The Italian futurists, on the other hand, so fascinated by velocity and power, with

World Wars I and II, as Fascism and Nazism gained space, lost interest in modernist

experimentation, because it had been absorbed by the violent militarism even in architecture

as, for example, Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, who despite having attacked some

modernist’s aesthetic principles, made use of many of their techniques, combining scientific

knowledge with the myth of racial superiority in all areas of creativity. Giorgio De Chirico,

for example, turned to commercial art with roots in the classic beauty, combining it with

vigorous horses and narcissistic drawings of himself dressed in historical clothes. The strong

tension between different political movements forced people, and artists in special to make a

stand, and they made it clear in the urban space, affecting the features of the modernist city,

with the construction of a series of buildings by socialists, such as the famous Karl Marx-Hof

building in Vienna, planned not only to shelter workers but also to serve as headquarters of

military defense against any conservative rural attack to a socialist city. Fascism, on the other

hand, rejoiced in classic references, not only in architecture but in politics and history as well,

following the Greeks, who were aware of the national aspect of their mythology. As Harvey

points out, the aestheticization of politics, through the production of these wide-range myths

(and Nazism is just one example), was the tragic side of the modernist project, which became

more and more evident, as the “heroic era” reached its end with World War II. Actually, even

before World War II, many avant-garde artists, such as Pablo Picasso and T.S. Eliot, tried to

resist this direct social reference and made use of more universal mythological affirmations.

Eliot, in The Waste Land, for example, made use of images and languages from all sides of

the world, and Picasso turned himself to primitive art, as a desperate attempt to find a

mythology that could somehow enlighten that dark world between wars, bringing some kind

of hope and comfort to compensate for the terror and destruction of that historical moment, as

he faced the impossibility of indifference.

According to Stuart Hall (2006, pp. 8-13), the concept of identity is extremely

complex and still little understood in contemporary Social Science. The fact is that the

structural changes going on since the end of the twentieth century, which include the

treatment of space in all levels of social life, are fragmenting and transforming our personal

identities, for they have been through constant dislocations or decentralizations. Those

dislocations affected the idea of us as integrated Subjects which we used to have since the

Enlightenment, and later as sociological subjects: self-sufficient, formed and transformed

through a continuous dialogue with the external worlds and the identities which they offer.

The problem is that this process has become increasingly more temporary, variable, and

complex. The beginning of the twentieth century, with the aesthetic changes brought up by

the Modernist Movement, showed us a much more disturbed and disturbing individual –

dislocated, exiled, alienated, forced to create some kind of collage of their own history, in

order to get a sense of identity in an uncomfortable society marked by difference, plurality

and impersonality. “In a last attempt to obtain relief he moved from where they had been so

long together to a single room on the far bank” (OI, p. 12).

As it was said before, post-modernity became the era of collage, of superposed

experiences, times, languages, texts intersecting with others and producing more texts, a fact

which emphasizes the problem of communication that we are facing: each intersection of texts

will necessarily generate a new group of possible meanings, despite what the author intended

to give. As a matter of fact, the concept of collage is the basis of Derrida’s deconstructivism

and is presented as the foundation of the postmodern discourse. It is important to consider,

though, that the postmodern condition has its roots settled much earlier than the cultural

revolution of the 1960s. Actually, it has accompanied in parallel the whole process of

capitalism and its relationship with the market, its constant pursuit of new ways of producing

and trading, following not only economic but social and cultural tendencies as well, including

all sorts of artistic expressions, which culminated with the development of the art market in

the 1960s. Following the same line as Baudrillard, who describes the postmodern culture as

the “culture of excrement”, idea which inevitably reminds us that money equals excrement

also for Freud and Marx, Harvey even poses another question: does postmodernism signal a

reinterpretation or reinforcement of the role of money as the object of desire itself?

The postmodern concerns about the significant and not the signified,

with the means (Money) and not with the message (social work), with

emphasis on fiction and not function, on the signs instead of the things, on

the aesthetics over the ethics, suggest reinforcement, and not a

transformation, of the role of Money described by Marx. (HARVEY, 2004, p.

99)

As preocupações pós-modernas com o significante e não com o significado, com o meio (dinheiro) e não com a

mensagem (o trabalho social), com a ênfase na ficção e não na função, nos signos em vez das coisas, antes na

estética do que na ética, sugerem um reforço, e não uma transformação, do papel do dinheiro descrito por Marx.

As a social power that can be controlled by individuals, money forms the basis of a

very broad individual freedom that can be used for our own development with no references

to others. In Harvey’s opinion, money unifies through the ability to accommodate

individualism, alterity and an extraordinary social fragmentation; and the result is a

derangement of the product of our own experience, a fragmentation of social tasks.

“Capitalism did not invent the ‘other’ but sure did make use of it and promoted it under

highly structured forms” and is at the root of modern insecurity, given that the geographic

movement of capital and work periodically revolutionizes the territorial and international

division of work, giving to insecurity a vital geographic dimension (HARVEY, 2004, p. 101).

The transformation of the experience of space and place which results from those movements

is followed by other revolutions in the dimension of time, once capitalists aim to reduce the

circulation time of their capital to a “blink”; in this way, capitalism is itself a permanently

revolutionary and disruptive force, therefore a permanent source of insecurity. In fact, authors

such as B. Ollman (1971), B. Taylor (1987) and Walter Benjamin, analyzing capitalism, try to

capture the way politics, economy and culture relate in a multifaceted and fragmented system

in which some of the terms used by Marx such as “value”, “work”, and “capital” are

constantly separating and reuniting in new combinations as an opposition to the totalizing

practices of capitalism. Therefore, it is not possible to expect a unified representation of the

world for, according to Harvey, it would be repressive and delusional.

Frederick Jameson (1984), in this regard, establishes a relationship between Lacan’s

concept of schizophrenia, not in clinical terms but as a linguistic disorder, with a sociological

and cultural impossibility to unify past, present and future of our own biographical or

psychological experience. In this case, it would represent a disruptive process compound by

distinct signifying elements that do not relate among themselves in a time line as it would

happen in a normal mind, and so are incapable of unifying past, present and future. As a

consequence, the effect would be the collapse of temporal horizons and the reduction of our

experience to a series of non-related pure present times. Jameson believes that this intense

fragmented experience focused exclusively on the present time, as it is devastatingly vivid

and material, dislocates the Subject and activates the alienation of the Self in the postmodern

aesthetics (JAMESON, 1984, p. 63-120). The contemporary cultural production, rooted on

ordinary life experience, ended up joining the frantic capitalist process of merchandise

production which, especially after the 1960s, was forced to produce not only goods but also

desires, the need for more, for something different. In Harvey’s opinion, this process can be

easily identified in the postmodern aesthetics, focused on temporary, unfinished art objects,

such as performances and happenings, besides the already mentioned collage, where any sort

of confiscation, quotation, accumulation and repetition of already existing images is allowed,

as we can see, for example, in the artwork by Robert Rauschenberg (Plate 1), considered one

of the pioneers of postmodernism. Such practices, based on instantaneity and exploring the

media resources, approximate popular culture and cultural production, reinforcing the

transitory aspects of contemporary life, at the same time that it raises another important issue

in the postmodern movement, which is the way these two cultural expressions relate. The

instant images brought by television and all other media have a direct consequence on the

concept and understanding of contemporary space, which even in architecture disregards

depth.

Therefore, whether we believe it or not that the descriptions given by Marx of the

social processes, generating individualism, alienation, fragmentation, unpredictable changes

in methods and as a consequence in the experience of time and space, are the foundation of

modern and postmodern thinking; whether we believe it represents or not continuity or

rupture in social conditions, the fact is that postmodernism recognizes, as Anthony Huyssens

states (1984), the multiple forms of alterity regarding all differences (gender, class, race, time,

space, etc). Actually, what we see nowadays is an aesthetic intervention even in politics and

economy, rather than just in social, cultural life – as Harvey points out, a conjugation between

mimesis and aesthetic intervention, an emphasis on the ephemerality of juissance, an

insistence on the impenetrability of the “other”, a tendency towards deconstruction close to

nihilism; therefore, a preference for aesthetics rather than ethics. Postmodernism claims the

need to accept and give in to the fragmentations and cacophonies of voices through which the

contemporary dilemmas are understood, to the celebration of masquerade, simulation and all

sorts of fetishisms. It also denies any kind of meta-theory capable of apprehending the

political and economical processes. As a consequence, at the same time it opens to a variety

of voices, it prevents them from having access to more universal sources of power, creating an

opaque ghetto of alterity, depriving those voices of power. In this way, in Harvey’s point of

view, there is more continuity than difference between the long history of modernism and the

so-called postmodernism, which seems to be more like a crisis that emphasizes the

fragmented, ephemeral and chaotic aspects of modernism. Harvey goes even further and

states that the superposition of different worlds in so many postmodern novels, in which an

incommunicative alterity in a space of coexistence prevails, can be read as a metaphorical

transversal cut of the social landscapes in a process of fragmentation, of subcultures and local

ways of communication, for they have a relation with the disempowerment of the minorities

in the big centers, which will inevitably lead to identity issues. Within this social frame,

speaking and writing about loneliness becomes a cultural claim, a recurrent theme, which was

not new when Beckett joined the literary panorama; classical and also authors who were close

in time or contemporary to Beckett made use of it. Yet, as Célia Berrettini (2004) states, until

Beckett, loneliness would bring to the characters an aura of greatness and exceptionality,

whereas in Beckett loneliness equals a disease that can affect anybody, indistinctly, and is

expressed with or without words through scenic materialization – deserted, non-referential

places, isolated from the external world, which is reinforced by Chiaroscuro effects. Like in

Waiting for Godot, Beckett’s lonely characters wonder around, with no family, no name, no

actual place to go, just using their resilient ability to speak, no matter how used, impoverished

and meaningless the words might have become; they simply continue using them – an effort

that renders even more evident the impossibility to overcome loneliness; a refuge against

nothingness. There, tragic and derisory unite in aggressive, cynical, even bitter ways, to paint

the absurd of the human condition, attacking the primary human values, such as religion and

love, by playing with clichés and common-sense – a great metaphysical farce, as Célia

Berrettini states (2004, p. 19). In Beckett, the fragmentation of the postmodern

communication reveals itself to be beyond repair; it is not possible any real approximation

and, at the same time, it is not possible to get away from it, so the only thing to do is to

continue talking, even if just to fulfill emptiness. Anyway, the figure of the “story-teller”

remains in most of Beckett’s works, such as in Molloy, the Unnamable, or Endgame, in which

Hamm’s fragmented painful life is masqueraded by multiplying the existence of imaginary

lives, attributing to him a sort of power to create lives – the author’s creative power. The

various stories told by Hamm, momentarily deviates from him the awareness of the inevitable

mobility of the world and, therefore, find “relief from unfamiliarity”, since these lives are

constructed at the spur of the moment, in the presence of a constricted listener. Story-telling in

Beckett is but a failed attempt to abstract from suffering and to break the theatrical illusion by

showing the spectator that its universe is totally fictional, unreliable; life is simply a derisory

game – in the end, what remains is pain and loneliness. Actually, in his essay Proust, referring

to incommunicability, Beckett states that the temptation to communicate, when

communication is not possible at all, does not represent but a simian vulgarity, a horrible

farce, similar to a sweet madness that makes you talk to the furniture: the tragedy of all

human relationship is a predetermined failure. “Use your head, can’t you, use your head,

you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” (Hamm – Endgame, p. 53).There is a fundamental

alienation of the being, typical of the human condition, and this alienation is visually

expressed through self-incarceration, even in an open space, as we can see in Waiting for

Godot. The late works by Samuel Beckett, which mostly present lonely old men, carry the

image of the inevitable human solitude, multiplied, as we can see in OI, by failed existences,

tiredness, and disillusion, hopelessly locked in an in-between time and space, somewhere

between past, present and future, not to mention the biographical similarities to their creator

who, for some time in his life, was subjected to depressive crises and psychosomatic

disorders. “Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday! […] The end is in the beginning and

yet you go on” (Hamm – Endgame, p. 43, 69).

1.1. THE POSTMODERN TREATMENT OF SPACE VS. TIME

“Lack of planned depth”, this is how Jameson (1984) defines the postmodern

architectural approach to space; and in this regard, Harvey (2004, p. 60) states that

postmodernity, impotent towards this fragmentation and lack of depth, refuses to answer the

question about how to construct the surface of urban life and understand its needs and

meanings in a fragmented social tissue, once its aesthetics of fragmentation is just a logical

extension of the power of market to all sorts of cultural production. Postmodernism is here

seen as nothing but the cultural logic of the advanced capitalism; consequently, understanding

and creating a concept for the urban tissue became an important issue, which goes beyond the

architectural field; it actually reflects the contemporary dilemma faced by a liquid world in

relation to the time-space compression.

If we accept the concept presented by Roland Barthes (1975, p. 92) that the city is a

discourse, and this discourse is a language; if we accept architecture as communication, then

we must look at the urban net with more careful eyes, in order to be able to read and

understand its message: rich in plastic qualities, the liberating space of appearance and

disguise that the new city offered to human identity became especially vulnerable to any sort

of psychosis and totalitarian systems. And architecture became the great stage where this new

situation became reality. For example, the modernist architecture, like the “Dream for Paris”,

by Le Corbusier, in the 1920s, brought us the concept of molding structures and, as a

consequence, a range of changes in life-style and in the meaning of quality, affecting and

creating new paradigms also for the art market, especially after 1970, when new intellectual

trends appeared, causing also ups-and-downs in the art market, from which the concept of

“postmodern” comes. Moreover, still according to Harvey (2004), if the concept of

modernism is highly confusing, the reaction or derangement known as “postmodernism” is

even more, once it reacts to the austere autonomy of high modernism to embrace the language

of commerce and merchandising. This leading language poses an important challenge, for it

creates new compressions of time-space, which function more like “black holes” in the

psychological, cultural and social structures, preventing their actors from building bridges of

communication, and this fact can be especially reflected in the urban net.

Today, the urban strategy of separation no longer offers ways to identify the enemy’s

side, unlike the old medieval city where the enemy was kept outside. The city, and especially

the neighborhood, carries within its walls the threat of new dangerous social classes – the

mysterious foreigners and their diversities, transforming the principle of “keeping distance”

incapable of containing the supposed invasion. Disconnection has become inevitable, and

constant movement seems to be the only possible choice, originating the so-called “ghost

neighborhoods” – areas which were totally abandoned once the community recognized their

incapability to restrain the modern ghosts. Belonging to a place has become a utopian

expectation, for upper as much as lower classes seem to have lost their ability to identify

themselves in their supposed territory. Apparently, the concept of “separated community”

has brought up more serious consequences to social life, as the interdicted spaces created by

those communities end up originating new forms of social exclusion and consequently

violence, which reinforces fear and the feeling of not belonging – a vicious circle of

derangement. As Bauman states (2007, p.87), the contemporary cities became battle-fields

where global power and local identities meet, confront themselves and try to reach some kind

of, at least tolerable, agreement – an attempt of lasting peace, which today is known to be just

a temporary break in order to rebuild defenses. And that is the dynamics of the “modern liquid

city”, spaces where strangers stay and circulate in extreme mutual proximity, an irregular and

inconstant life where relief and hope can only be temporary.

In opposition to the modernist idea of urban layers in large scale, postmodernism

considers the concept of the urban tissue as something fragmented – in Harvey’s opinion, a

“palimpsest” of superposed past forms, or in a more contemporary word, a collage of

architectonic styles. Space became something independent and autonomous to be molded

according to aesthetic principles and goals that are not necessarily related to any social

objective. What matters is creating what a postmodern architect, Leon Krier, calls a “good

city”, an urban form that carries within the totality of urban functions in a distance

comfortably covered on foot. This urban concept, as a consequence, can only be

accomplished if we understand space not in width and height but as a multiplied structure

formed by complete, self-sufficient and independent blocks and groups of blocks inside a

bigger block – the city. Yet, we can still find today representations of a modernist practice

that uses architecture as a way of publicly expressing the corporative power: constructions

like the Rockefeller Center, or the Trump Tower in New York stand as symbols of the

celebration of this power – architecture seems to sum up the collage not only of styles but of

values too, i.e., it is a concrete example of the postmodern aesthetics of diversity.

Locked up within the walls of unfamiliar communities, the individuals react to

diversity creating bubbles of similarity, what Richard Sennett would call the “feeling of Us”

as if, in this way, they would be able to avoid the ultimate confrontation with themselves. At

the same time that there is the innate process of creating a coherent image of the community,

there is also the desire of avoiding real participation, the fear of being truly connected to each

other (SENNETT apud BAUMAN, 2007). As a result, spatial segregation reduces tolerance in

relation to social diversity and increases urban fear, transforming the dream of a perfect social

community into something always more distant. As this dream cannot be accomplished with

the construction of walls, like in the Middle Ages, once the core of contemporary fear is

mostly the existential uncertainty, the disconnection from the Self can constantly disguise

itself, as long as it assures that Identity will never be truly unfolded. Individuality in modern

society can exist as long as it is apparent, unfamiliar, unknown. This impersonal equality

allows a superficial and tranquil social life and seems to solve the fear of facing different

universes of meaning; on the other hand, from Bauman’s point of view, it is possible that this

uniform way of living risks to make people lose their ability to negotiate meanings and

therefore tolerate diversity, as it is unlikely that mixphobia will disappear from the liquid

world. The possibility of being (or pretending to be) someone else, so common on the internet

relationships, has become a key element in this changeable society, like in a masquerade,

where the participants are allowed to impersonate any and as many characters as they want, as

long as their real faces do not appear.

In regard to the aesthetics of diversity, Jane Jacobs, in The death and life of great

American cities, published in 1961 (JACOBS apud HARVEY, 2004, p. 73-74), examining the

urban scene rebuilt after 1945, criticizes the modernist project, stating that it did not fulfill the

needs of any of the social classes: the projects for low income communities became centers of

delinquency, while the ones for the middle and upper classes were deprived of vitality and

usefulness, as much as the cultural and civic centers. According to Jacobs, these projects were

the result of a misconception of what the cities are and demonstrate the need to understand

that it is on the social processes of interaction that we should focus our attention. “Healthy”

urban environments hold an organized intricate system that depends mostly on diversity,

complexity, and the ability of dealing with the unexpected in a controlled but creative way. Of

course, postmodernism has an advantage if we compare it with modernism: the technological

resources available today favor diversity, for it is possible to offer any sort of product (even

architectonic) making use of the industrial mass production system but still in a very

personalized way. As Harvey states, the postmodern architect can, consequently, more easily

accept the challenge of communicating with different groups, functions, and tastes. Surely, we

cannot forget that it also brings about a very capitalistic, “market oriented” conception of

architecture, which not necessarily focuses on social interests in a fair manner, leaving the

“disadvantaged” still unprotected, unfitted and in some way unwanted too. Postmodernism

brought up what Bourdieu (1984) calls “symbolic capital” repressed by Modernism, and

transformed architecture into a complex and personalized linguistic system: a “festival” of

styles, colors, a multivalent schizophrenia, as Charles Jencks (1984) would say. In fact,

“schizophrenic” is how many authors define postmodernism as a whole.

Even though the urban dynamics of destruction and demolition, characteristic of the

modernist project, is not a new practice – the Roman Empire did it many times for different

reasons – the fact is that postmodernism in some way was forced to face what some authors

consider a tragic inheritance, alleviated by the presence of fixed points of reference – the

remained monuments, which carry some sense of collective memory. The collage that

Postmodernism expresses is actually this effort to accumulate these past references, for,

according to Robert Hewison:

The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve

the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is difficult to know where

we are going. The past is the foundation of individual and collective identity;

objects from the past are the source of significance as cultural symbols.

(HEWISON, 1987, p. 45)

What the contemporary urban scene reveals is a high level of eclecticism and, as a

consequence, a strong tendency to masquerade social and cultural behaviors, which reflects

not only in the architect’s concept of surfaces and their lack of depth but also in art in general,

bringing to it a sense of theatricality. Technology gives a big hand to this, making easier any

sort of collage and expropriation, borrowing styles, historical references, even entire images,

and this process ends up reinforcing the sense of dislocation and theatricality, which will

necessarily force us, when facing an “object”, to pose another question: is this an artwork or

an architectonic work? Is this a monument or a sculpture? Is this a happening or a theatrical

performance? And so on. The architects, as they are responsible for threading the urban area,

struggle with this schizophrenic eclecticism on a deeper level, for it is their task to create a

space that can hold all sorts of diversities, all sorts of communication systems. An example

given by Harvey is the Piazza d’Italia, in New Orleans (USA), by Charles Moore, considered

one of the classic works of the postmodern architecture (Plate 2) – a mixture of fragmented

historical and cultural references put together, an example of visual and cultural collage.

Plate 2 -

As we can see from what was exposed so far, space has been a key issue in all aspects

of modern and postmodern society, and contemporary art has been the arena where all the

changes in concepts, values and objectives have found ways of expression. Organizing space

has been the main focus of all social and cultural practices, whether we think of capitalism,

whether we think of architecture, social or ethnical differences and adjustments. In fact,

Marshall Berman (BERMAN apud HARVEY, 2004) states that, in the second half of the

twentieth century, space organization became the primary aesthetic problem of culture, as

much as time was the problem in the first half of the century for Henri Bergson, Marcel

Proust, and James Joyce. Some authors even claim that the postmodern changes are actually

related to a crisis in our experience with time and space – the latter somehow dominates time

in such a way that we cannot keep up with.

As Harvey states, in modern society many different concepts of time constantly

interchange; the ordinary activities of everyday life, such as taking a shower or having

breakfast in a usual hour, contrast with the perpetual movement towards the unknown and the

unlimited, provoked by progress, wars and social chaos. The demands of the “industrial time”

and technological changes, locating and relocating workforce, interests, real and imaginary

needs, accelerate and increase insecurity, anxiety, and desperation. Therefore, if time is

managed, stretched or shortened according to the economic, social or cultural moment, space

necessarily will have to be understood and lived in a different way. The difference is that

space presents more complex aspects, as it involves not only direction but area, shape, pattern,

and volume. Nevertheless, both time and space still suffer the subjective, and consequently

distinctive, interpretation and apprehension, turning categories such as “objective-subjective”

more complex, if not totally blurred, for we must recognize the multiplicity of objective

qualities that space and time may express and the role of human practices in their

construction.

Although it is not our intention to deeply analyze either the industrial or technological

processes, it is worth mentioning that some authors believe it is necessary to investigate them

in order to really understand the meaning and the actual result of time-space compression,

once the objectivity of time and space comes from the material practices of social

reproduction. As far as they can geographically and historically vary, we can verify that social

time and social space are constructed differently. That is, each distinct way of production or

social formation incorporates a particular group of practices and concepts of time and space

(HARVEY, 2004, p. 189). In fact, in social theory, progress implies the conquest of space, the

fall of all spatial barriers and the ultimate elimination of space through time. However, as it is

not just a matter of creating new concepts of time-space but also appropriating and/or

reinterpreting old ones, we are immersed in a territory of ambiguity, conflicts and

contradictions. Recalling the poetics of space by Bachelard, the postmodern house was built

on top of an immense and labyrinthian dark basement; our cities are nothing but gigantic

collages of old and new histories, for, in this context, economic and political choices will

inevitably demand an “appropriate” aesthetics which, on the other hand, will affect the social

practices (for example, the urban plan for Paris idealized by Haussmann, or the various

buildings planned by Le Corbusier).

Actually, the philosopher Karsten Harries (1982, p. 59-69) states that architecture is

not only the domestication of space, struggling and molding an inhabitable place in space; it is

also a strong defense against the “terror of time”. Futurism, for example, aimed at molding

space to represent its most important concepts – velocity and movement, while Dadaism

considered art as ephemeral and consequently renounced to any permanent treatment of space,

pursuing eternity through giving to their events a revolutionary character. In the same way,

the theory of aesthetics, aiming at establishing the rules that will make it possible to express

the eternal and immutable truth in the midst of a turmoil of changes, inevitably puts space and

time under different perspective: space becomes the tool to somehow stop time, freeze the

experience, a reaction to the terrors of change that time may bring. And, like the architect who

tries to communicate values through the construction of a spatial form, poets, and artists in

general, will communicate and fix their cultural experiences through words (BOURDIEU

apud HARVEY, 2004, p. 191). Certainly, this is not a new postmodern understanding; what is

really new, if we may say so, is the awareness of this paradox: as the spatialized frozen

written word became the main instrument of learning and constructing concepts, how can it be

considered appropriate if it must face the turmoil of the social processes, especially when

space and time became forces in constant antagonism? And this paradox becomes clearer

when we see the difference of treatment that the social theory gives to space and time.

According to Michel Foucault (1984, p. 70), space has been treated as dead, fixed,

non-dialectical, whereas time, on the contrary, represents richness, fecundity, life, and

dialectics. This paradox is actually what made Walter Pater (PATER apud HARVEY, 2004,

p. 191-192) affirm that “all art aspires at the condition of music”, for its aesthetic effect comes

precisely through its temporal movement. Somehow, this is what Harvey claims too when

referring to De Certeau, when the latter states that spaces can be more easily “liberated” than

Foucault imagined, exactly because the social practices spatialize instead of locating

themselves in a repressive net of social control. What De Certeau sees is a daily substitution

of “the technological system of a coherent and totalizing space” for a “pedestrian rhetoric” of

trajectories that have a “mythical structure”, understood as an allusive and fragmented history

whose gaps muddle up with the social practices it symbolizes. Yet, what we can see is that,

although the common sense that “there is a time and a place for everything” is still used to

achieve some specific conquest of power, according to Harvey it is difficult to find a stable

mythology in contemporary life, and it is this change in our experience of time and space

what basically provoked what we call postmodernism (DE CERTEAU apud HARVEY, 2004,

p. 197-200).

As we have already mentioned, the progressive monetization of social relations has

transformed the qualities of time and space and made more evident how much subjected to

constant change they are. Consequently, the acceleration of the rhythm of the economic

processes affects the entire social experience, forcing the production, re-structuralization, and

growth of the organization of space in order to reduce spatial barriers; this is why the ways of

representation of space are so important to understand the postmodern phenomenon.

Globalization, the antagonist process of territorialization and deterritorialization , the social,

cultural, as much as artistic collages and all sorts of ephemeral expressions are never neutral

but all different reflections of the same conflict – the attempt of space to contain time.

Acceleration leads to time-space compression, which radically changes the objective qualities

of our time and space, forcing us to alter the way we represent the world to ourselves. And in

this contradictory process, the postmodern alterity and resistance may apparently blossom

anywhere, but usually are subjected to the power which capitalism has over the coordination

of the fragmented universal space and the march of the global historical time of capitalism.

This assumption brings down the old belief that “there is a time and space for everything”

and, as there is no right time nor space anymore, we are thrown into insecurity, especially

during the periods of maximum changes, when the spatial and temporal foundations of the

reproduction of social order are subjected to a more severe disruption, as we face now in our

liquid times. In this compressive process, space shrinks into Marshall McLuhan’s concept of

“global village”; our time line is reduced to a schizophrenic time – the present – and we are

left with the devastating spectacle of two worlds, that is, two dimensions of ourselves,

colliding.

In this regard, the thesis presented by Harvey (2004) is that the 1847-48 crisis in

England created also a crisis of representation as a consequence of a radical readjustment of

the sense of time and space in the economic, political and cultural life, and the question “in

what time are we?” popped in the philosophical agenda. The nature of space and the meaning

of money became important issues, for they no longer held the certainty that the Illuminist

world carried. All the dimensions of human life were forced to give in to internationalisms

and synchronicity; the truth of the experience did not coincide with the place it occurred,

highlighting the insecurity brought up by intemporality.

Literature, visual arts, music did nothing but express this new concept of

synchronicity, the deconstruction of the traditional visual and cultural space, as we can see in

the Impressionist paintings, exploring fragmentation of space, light, and color, as much as

new framings; or in literary works like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where heterogeneity,

simultaneity and synchronicity become key elements to express the still new questions about

time-space in a world in rapid change and mostly affected by the homogenizing power of

money and a generalized sense of trade. The characters do not have one specific stage of

action: social classes, moral values, cultural roles constantly permeate, exchange places, and

times juxtapose – past, present and future offer no certainties, no comfort; there are always

doubts on what had been done or could have been done. And this was just the beginning of a

much more radical process of changes; we would still have two world wars and others to face,

which were going to affect and compress even more our relation with time and space. Not

only the wars, but the process of globalization as a whole, the disappearance of frontiers and

the upcoming of new ones along with the “human trash” have not only compressed time and

space but also consolidated the privilege of time over space in the social theory. Great

international events involving architecture and art reinforced what Walter Benjamin (1969, p.

140) called the “phantasmagoria” of the world of merchandise, an effective way of re-

territorializing the world according to economic interests. History, tradition, time, all could be

replaced and re-signified through space. Of course, technological innovation played a special

role in this process – telephone, wireless telegraph, bicycle, X-ray, cinema, automobile,

airplane promoted new ways of thinking and feeling time and space, making public time

increasingly more homogeneous and universal in space, which had also a direct effect on the

visual arts and literature. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, for example, started their quest in

search of the sense of simultaneity in space and time, insisting on the present as the only real

place of the experience, making their actions run in a plurality of spaces; stream of

consciousness through parallel universes stepped into past and future, totally free from any

containment. The experience happens in a time between past, present and future; and at the

same time it reaches an extremely individualistic status; it also becomes universal through the

power of the press and mechanisms of social communication. Another example that is worth

pointing out is the film Stranger than fiction, released in 2006, directed by Mark Forster,

where the only way to solve the dilemma lived by author and character cannot be found in

science but in literary theory: the author’s imaginative space and the character’s life melting

with reality dissolve the space-time frontiers between them, making unbearable for all of them

to face the “end”. Like in Beckett’s process of self-erasure, a process of reducing himself to

absence, the author fights against her presence in the text, trying to deny the autobiographical

elements in the character, an attempt to die within the novel, which reaches a concrete

dimension in the film: the author tries several times to kill herself, ending up requiring the

intervention of a professional writing assistant – someone who is literally distant from the text

and the character and, therefore, capable of remaining conscious throughout the process and

not being seduced by the character/author. “Little did he know…” – these are the words used

by the narrator and which the character heard in his mind; as if not knowing would reduce the

struggle between continuing to live and not being allowed to live, and as the narrator depends

on the character’s actions to write, it is up to him to perpetuate the story by not knowing, not

doing, not acting. Once again, it is up to the literary theoretician to say to the character that he

does not control his fate – it is the nature of all tragedies: the hero dies but the story lives on

forever. When finally author and character meet and he asks her not to kill him, she

desperately claims that she herself does not know the rules either; she is just trying to write a

book, which within this symbiotic time-space relationship will only be concluded after the

character’s acceptance of his fate, which will lead to other different routes, new times and

new spaces for both of them.

The beginning of the twentieth century brought us the celebration of the annihilation

of space by time; the place became unreal in a fragmented relative space. Cohesion was to

happen in a global space through mechanisms of communication and social intervention

(HARVEY, 2004, p. 245). What we can notice is that architecture, urban space in general,

became the arena where all the changes that the twentieth century brought up would be

expressed – the space of the body and the psyche revealed by the scientific, philosophical, and

psychological discoveries had to be released through a rational organization of space. These

new dimensions of space led to a new sense of relativism applied also in the production of

space and organization of time in all cultural expressions – architecture, music, literature, and

visual arts were all concerned with the purity of their language, affected by the sense of

fragmentation caused by the awareness of the rapidity of life. Therefore, it was necessary to

conceive a fragmented, faster art in order to describe the dynamics of life. Gertrude Stein, for

instance, interpreted cultural events such as Cubism as a response to the space-time

compression; and architecture responds with a unified, highly ordinated and rationalized

space, as proposed by Le Corbusier.

However, despite all the ruptures that modernism brought, there was still the need to

locate itself in geographical and historical terms, and in order to do so, architects looked for

new styles to satisfy the new functional needs and also to celebrate the distinctive qualities of

the places, reaffirming the local identity. Therefore, what postmodernism articulates is what

modernism had already started, that is, a tendency to privilege the spatialization of time

(Being) in detriment of the annihilation of space through time (Becoming). In practical terms,

what we have is a struggle between universalism and privatism; between rationalism and

expressionism, functionalism and aesthetics, etc.; as Harvey defines it, a crisis in the

bourgeois culture, imprisoned in its own rigidity and at the same time facing radical changes

in the experience of spaces and time. And if time is changing, space must adjust to it through

simplification; as Adolf Loos (Plate 3) would state in his essay Ornament and Crime

<RINEHART, D. R., 2007> “the development of culture is synonymous with the removal of

ornamentation from objects of everyday use”, for ornament would make objects “dated” and

consequently causing them to go out of style, becoming obsolete. He would even go further

saying that ornament was “immoral”, “degenerate”, and that its suppression was necessary to

regulate modern society. On the same path, Mies Van der Rohe (Plate 4), making use of

simple rectilinear and planer forms, clean lines, pure use of color, and the extension of space

around and beyond interiors, called his buildings “skin and bones” architecture, stating that

“less is more” and that God was in the details. Both architects believed in the “nobility of

anonymity”.

As it has already been mentioned, architecture and the urban projects clearly expressed

this struggle, making evident the consequences of World War I and its effects on the

perceptions of time and space, for it abruptly broke the historical tissue, separating people

from their past – as an example, David Harvey (2004, p. 250) points Camillo Sitte, who

understood the city as also an aesthetic issue, in opposition to Otto Wagner in fin-de-siècle

Vienna. Whereas Sitte, horrified with the strict and technical functionalism attached to the

capitalist pursuit of profit, aimed to construct spaces that made people feel safe and happy,

Wagner, a pioneer of the “heroic” forms of modernism, which were a hit in the 1920s with Le

Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe, etc., believed that “need was the art’s only

sovereign”; for them, space should be fixed in a historical process with high degree of

dynamism. Interpreted as an obstinate combat between the universalist and localist

sensibilities in the arena of cultural production, the “heroic” modernism post-1920 originated

from the intellectual and artistic attempt to reach an agreement with the crisis of the

experience of time and space, raised before World War I. The “heroic” modernist aimed at

showing that the accelerations, fragmentations and the implosive centralization (especially of

urban life) could be represented and, therefore, contained in a singular image. They wanted to

show that localism and nationalism could be overcome and that some idea of a global project

for the improvement of general well being could be restored. The crisis in space exacerbated

by the war ended up expressed in art tendencies like that proposed by the Bauhaus, as much

as in the artwork of artists such as Pablo Picasso, who drastically changed the treatment of

space in his canvases, abandoning the linear perspective; and Wassily Kandinsky, who

studied the psychological effect of space, line and color on the spectator (Plate 5, 6). Ortega y

Gasset, in 1910, claimed that “there were as many spaces in reality as perspectives about it”

and that “there were as many realities as points of view” (ORTEGA Y GASSER apud

HARVEY, 2004, p. 245).

Notwithstanding the fact that the modernist treatment of space transmitted a

permanent sense of human values supposedly universal, and consequently a mythical

dimension, the fact is that, those art-space concepts were not used as a coherent representation

of what they aimed to express. As Harvey (2004) points out, Le Corbusier’s ideas were

evoked by Fascism; the Bauhaus concepts were used in concentration camps; Oscar Niemeyer

planned Brasília for a populist president but continued to build it for generals, and these

differences in the history of modernism in political terms reflect, in Harvey’s opinion, the

tension between the sense of time and the focus of space. The mutant sense of time and space

forged by capitalism forced perpetual re-evaluations of the representations of the world in

cultural life. From 1960, and more strongly from 1970 on, there is a revival of the interest in

geopolitical theory, the return of the aesthetics of the place and a tendency to open the

problem of spatiality to a general reconsideration. Volatility and ephemerality are accentuated

and society is permeated by the feeling that “everything that is solid melts in the air”, and we

are immersed in the dynamics of the “disposal society”, which does not relate only to trash

but also clothing and life styles, relationships and values. Even the urban net is laid according

to this concept of instant obsolescence, and the effect is not felt only on a psychological but

on a public level as well, creating a context open to diversity and social fragmentation,

exacerbated by the excess of sensorial stimuli and the manipulation of desires, needs and

tastes. In this context, the image becomes the key element of power, and as ours is an instant

world where we can accumulate numberless past, present and future images in a very eclectic

way and not necessarily following a time line – images that can be altered, transformed in

front of our eyes on a television or a computer screen – “simulacrum” starts to play an

important role in postmodern life. Here, “simulacrum” is used to designate a state of replica

so perfectly close to the original that it becomes impossible (or almost) to establish which is

real and which is fake. Actually, even in the art market, the power of instantaneity and

simulacrum has become evident, for it is built over images (personal, professional, cultural)

that can be altered overnight, destroying reputations and transferring capital, erasing any

sense of future, and consequently setting the “schizophrenic dimension” of post-modernity.

However, in a world with crumbling barriers, contrasts constantly come up, and in a society

of “temporary contracts”, as Lyotard states (1984) in a clear reaction to the ephemeral, there is

the return of the interest in basic institutions (family, community, etc.) and the search for

historical roots as a way of finding more secure habits and lasting values, which will be

reflected in all aspects of life – from the way we live and dress to the way we build and

decorate our houses. Simulacrum permeates all aspects of our life and melts the geographical

and cultural barriers even more, giving us a panoply of memories from trips which we

actually made and from the ones we dreamed of or imagined through magazines, movies, and

all sorts of cultural products, even the international food that we eat at the corner of our street.

Plurality of experiences and tastes, of sounds and spaces, of images and times; the

eclectic postmodernity with its mixture of collages gives us the feeling of the “already seen

and heard”; it brings us the comfort of recognition given by an “imaginary, symbolic

museum”, rich in accidental alterity, a variety of worlds of blurred locations. The fact that you

are in New Orleans does not prevent you from feeling “close” to your original or former

hometown, as we can see in the architectural work by Charles Moore, the “Piazza d’Italia”

(Plate 2), already cited. In an area in need of redevelopment and inhabited by an Italian

population, Charles Moore built a combination of Roman temple and modern architecture, a

collage of cultural and aesthetic references planted in the middle of their downtown area to

approximate, to bring back the echoes of a distant tradition, to calm down the feeling of not

belonging, of being in fact a live example of human collage. The same eclecticism that leads

postmodernism to proclaim the death of the author makes us believe in the power of our own

private museum and pay millions of dollars for a cookie jar that belonged to a famous artist

(as it, in fact, happened some years ago when Andy Warhol’s cookie-jar collection was

auctioned) and turn our houses into a protected area against the rage of time-space

compression. The concern and interest in possessing the artist’s signature expresses a way of

storing value, tradition, and building a personal or collective identity, an attempt to find

secure social behaviors in a changing world. In this case, where history is treated and traded

as merchandise, according to Harvey, the historical tradition is reorganized as a culture of

museum, made of local history, in the way things were once made, sold, used and integrated

in an everyday life for a long time lost and frequently romanticized – through the presentation

of a partially delusional past, it becomes possible to give some meaning to the local identity,

and perhaps with some profit.

Music and literature follow this same principle, presenting characters wandering

through places and universes with which they cannot really identify or where they do not fit

in, as we can see in Samuel Beckett’s characters, whose lack of location becomes the great

metaphor for the lack of understanding of who we are, in which space and time we are, and

what we are supposed to do there, how we are supposed to live – which mask are we

supposed to wear; which collage best represents us at that moment?

Still according to Harvey, in periods of confusion and uncertainty, the turn towards the

aesthetics becomes more prominent; and, as phases of time-space compression are disruptive,

we can expect that the turning towards the aesthetics and the forces of culture will be

particularly acute. After the 1970s, the experience of time and space changed, the faith in

moral and scientific judgments was ruined, and the aesthetics triumphed over the ethics as a

primary focus of intellectual and social concern; the images dominated the narratives,

ephemeral and fragmentation prevailed over previously supposed eternal truths and unified

politics. In this context, problems such as poverty and immigration lose their space and force

as social issues to become merely aesthetic issues. Whereas the power of money prevails as a

way of domination, the need to mobilize cultural creativity and aesthetic inventiveness rises,

not only in the production of a cultural artifact but also in its promotion, packing and

transformation into some successful spectacle. A process carried by what is known as cultural

mass – another social extract added to the middle class, and who have become the big

consumers of the postmodern society, as they build their postmodern sense of identity from

the acquisition of all sorts of cultural products whose famous labels will offer them an idea of

tradition which they may call theirs – in this process we can include fashion, nostalgia,

pastiche, and even kitsch.

Super-accumulation; excess of complexity, but also simplification; information and

visual stimuli; plurality of worlds, blurriness of frontiers between nations, cultures, languages;

individualization, even when we talk about communities; schizophrenic flows: all these are

expressions that may define postmodernism. However, there is also another approach to it –

what Harvey calls “the progressivistic angle” of postmodernism. This approach accentuates

the local and regional resistances, the social movements and respect for alterity as an attempt

to extract at least an apprehensible world from the infinity of possible worlds daily shown to

us on television. Actually, Raymond Williams understood postmodernism as a mask of deeper

transformations of the culture of capitalism; transformations that had been occurring for a

while in the political economy, in the nature of the functions held by the State, in cultural

practices, and in the dimension of time-space in which the social relations had to be evaluated

(HARVEY, 2004, p. 320).

Regarding the postmodern space, F. Jameson (JAMESON apud HARVEY, 2004, p.

56v) expresses the symptoms of a new and historically original dilemma brought up by the

so-called death of the Subject, i.e., by his schizophrenic fragmented dislocations. This

dilemma is directly related to the new and complex space of international politics and

economy, and it reflects the postmodern oscillation toward the meaning of space in cultural

and political life. In this way, the postmodern space reveals itself to be not only a complex

factor in the contemporary scenario but also a key element if we are to study any type of art

expression. Through space, the labyrinth of dark corridors where our memory and

imagination refuge will finally unfold the “immemorial memory”, as Gaston Bachelard would

say; and in doing so, maybe a new, deeper and more complex exit will rise and give us access

to the author’s immaterial universe – the actual aim of our research. Consequently, whether

we follow a Marxist or any other sociological approach; whether we follow a literary, a

philosophical or cultural approach, what we are going to face in analyzing postmodernity is in

fact a not subtle process of cultural, political and economic collision which will create new

dimensions of space, including the “in-between space” of locality, of the word, and even of

time, as we will see in Beckett’s work. According to Stuart Hall, we can see new space-time

relations being defined in events as different as Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Cubist

paintings by Picasso and Braque, the Surrealist and Dadaist artwork, and even in the

experiments with time and narrative in Marcel Proust’s and James Joyce’s works. As Harvey

states, we can regard postmodernism as some kind of answer to a new ensemble of

experiences of time and space, a new round of “time-space compression”.

1.2. THE POSTMODERN SPACE IN ART

In O Espaço Moderno, Alberto Tassinari (2001) brings an important contribution to

the understanding of the transformations suffered by postmodern art and its relation with

modern art. In doing so, the author emphasizes the contemporary spaciousness as a way to

understand the passage from one artistic period to another, especially the arousal of modernist

art, as an anti-perspective and anti-spatial movement, from the opposition to Naturalism.

According to Tassinari, opposing to the Renaissance concept of “reconstructing, not

destroying”, the main task of modernism was to destroy the naturalist spaciousness, and this

process is directly connected to the concept of historical time, strongly vivid in modernism –

modern turns into an adjective that means not only current but pregnant of future. Modernism

aimed above all to anticipate a future not yet dominated – revolutionize, construct through

destruction became the main characteristic of modern art and the consequence was an

explosion of works and movements, marked by a long process of changes in the space

relations within the painting, especially through the rupture with the concept of perspective,

leading to what we see today as art. The contemporary artist works in a field full of

possibilities, and it is through space that, despite keeping their peculiarities, reality and art

permeate each other. Consequently, it makes the affirmation of a new concept of spaciousness

possible which opposes Renaissance art, where a painting presents its forms as if it were from

a transparent glass or a window, offering a perspective or retaining it, in the case of the glass.

This new concept is symbolized by the 1956 artwork Canvas (Plate 7), by Jasper Johns who,

according to Lois Oppenheim, amongst other artists, has investigated Beckett’s texts as the

focus of a process of “verbal figuration whose paradigm is, precisely, visualization – both to

give form and texture to and celebrate an otherwise in-visible substance” (OPPENHEIM,

2003, p. 9). Actually, the relationship between Johns and Beckett goes beyond theory; he

illustrated Foirades/Fizzles (Plate 8), which consists of five prose fragments [”Foirades”]

written by Samuel Beckett in French in 1972, selected from his Pour finir encore et autre

foirades, and rendered in English in 1974 to be illustrated by Johns – 57 pages [on double

leaves] 13” x 10” of original thirty-three etchings which, except from the numerals that

precede each of the five sections, were all reworked from the imagery already used in his

previous painting Untitled (Plate 9), from 1972, which consists of four unrelated panels

forming a sort of modular whole, with no organic principle to order it, and open to any

arrangement.

In these works, Johns turns the Beckettian fragmented voices into concrete

images of syntactic and semantic fragmentation through the repetition of images and motifs in

parallel to the repetition present in the texts, besides using numbers to delude a sense of

numerical sequence.

Although Johns originally thought that he would incorporate Beckett’s texts

within his images, he ultimately decided to position the etchings to the left of, and

sometimes above, Beckett’s writings and to uniformly separate the French and

English versions by double-page etchings. […] the obsessive repetition and

interruptions that define the book’s overall design undo any sense of linear

continuity. John’s decision to include both the French and English versions of the

text, though not favored by Beckett (“I do not much like the bilingual setup, but

would not oppose it if it pleases you”), creates a kind of theme and variations

sequence (OPPENHEIM, 2003, 177).

According to Oppenheim (2003), Johns dismantles the objective world to reveal

the struggle for individuation that defines both his own and Beckett’s ontology, which at the

same time reveals their remarkable likeness in aesthetic sensibility, since they still present a

strong congruence of form and content, although the order of the etchings was mostly

predetermined by Johns’ earlier painting and not by the written texts. Yet, the iconography is

twenty-six lift ground aquatints (most with etching, soft ground etching, drypoint, screenprint and/or

photogravure); five etchings (some with soft ground etching and/or drypoint); one soft ground etching and one

aquatint; color lithographs for endpapers and box lining on Richard de Bas Auvergne paper; text pages hand

printed, on handmade Richard de Bas Auvergne paper watermarked with the initials of Beckett and the signature

of Johns, in a beige linen-covered solander box, with purple silk tassle, an internal case lining of color

lithographs by Jasper Johns, with original interleaving tissues (PETERSBURG Press S.A.: London, 1976).

Available at: <http://www.joshuahellerrarebooks.com/catalogues/32/9.html>. Site visited on March 13

2009.

clear: its dialectical form comes from repetition and distortion, echoes of previous texts and

paintings, structuring the play on anonymity and individuation (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 180).

Actually, Johns’ disruptive spatial process started much earlier. When he painted

Canvas, a new way of seeing space in modern art arose, and since then it is not the frame

what determines the relations between the space of the work and the outside anymore. The

new space, however, was not configured alongside a theory as it had happened in the

Renaissance space; it just constantly invents itself, and its only reference is the opposition to

tradition. According to Tassinari, the passage from modernism to postmodernism happens

through a complete opacity of the painting’s surface, and this process can be clearly identified

in the 1911 Cubism, with works such as Céret [et Paris], autumne 1911, by Georges Braque

(Plate 10) which, although it is still a space at whose inside we look, it shows this openness

and integration between form and its surroundings, a process of melting structures where what

is solid seems to melt into space and what is open space seems to solidify – according to

Argan (ARGAN, 1971, p. 514), a process of structural assimilation of thing and space. And it

is this interruption in the contour of the object that allows the emergence to another spatial

layer, another rupture in the delimitation of the artwork and its spaces: the collage. As it was

previously mentioned, this seems to be the artifice that best represents postmodernism as a

whole; not only in art, but in architecture, literature, and even sociologically and culturally

speaking, if we accept the concept of liquidity brought by Zygmunt Bauman, and whose

direct consequence is inevitably a collage of cultural, social and historical experiences, in

order to create another paradigm for a world incapable of retaining its traditions. And this

process of relocating space, started with Pablo Picasso’s 1913 Guitar (Plate 11), has not

stopped, as we can see in Jasper Johns’ 1962 Fool’s House (Plate 12), in which the collage

does not only create new spaces, it also opens the painting to the outside by creating layers

that stand out of the canvas. This process of relocation, transfiguration, of mirror image, of

dismantling the image, leads not much to the perception of a form, but to its imagination, as

Tassinari states; a literal imagination in process that allows the spectator to enter the artist’s

space of imagination, as if the artwork were being created in front of them. Therefore, the

space of the collage becomes a space where some artistic processes can be visualized by the

spectator at the moment they are looking at the artwork, like in Fool’s House, where it is

possible to identify at least five actions by the artist: hanging, gluing, writing, indicating, and

brushing; or in a more contemporary example, such as the artwork Nexos (2000) (Plate 13),

by Manuel da Costa, a series of abstract collages turned into photography, where it is possible

to identify not only some of his actions, such as composing and gluing, but also imagine other

steps of the poetic process, such as the artist walking at a local park and collecting objects that

can even have belonged to us. Therefore, just like it has happened on a social and cultural

level, also in the artistic field the collage has become the element that reflected and allowed

the rupture of other levels of space in art, as much as it created a bridge between painting and

sculpture which have had their contours re-delimited not by an object specifically but by its

environment, which has become its complement. An example given by Tassinari is Tilted Arc

(Plate 14), by Richard Serra, 1981, which allows different configurations of the “work-plaza”

space, according to the angle it is observed – an artwork that represents a process, or we may

say an evolution from a modern art concept defined by the author as the “manipulative space

of art”, a territory of making, a permanent work in progress, a “working-space”, as Frank

Stella would call it in his homonymous book of 1984 and which, despite not being in most

cases incomplete, unfinished, is something that can be seen as still in process of becoming

(TASSINARI, 2001, p.48). We can also think of other earlier examples of spatial rupture in

contemporary art, such as the happening by Yves Klein at the Iris Clert's Gallery, (April

1958), titled La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité

picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into

Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void). He removed everything in the gallery space except

a large cabinet, all its surface painted white, and then staged an elaborate entrance procedure

for the opening night. The gallery's window was painted blue, and a blue curtain was hung in

the entrance lobby, accompanied by republican guards and blue cocktails. It is said that

people would urinate a blue liquid, Yves Klein’s monochrome IKB (International Klein Blue

– Plate 15). Actually, in the documentary Yves Klein The Blue Revolution, the artist states that

he had been mocked, treated like a lunatic instead of an artist; that people would not believe

that he was able to think with his paintbrush – a perfect example of what is still happening in

the space of contemporary art. The limits between types of art have been constantly over-

crossed, and with the addition of technology we can have video dance concerts and festivals,

in which a new choreography and storyline is created in studio via computer, producing a

totally different result. We can also think of artists such as Laurie Anderson, for whom even

the open label “performer” would be limiting, due to the variety of artistic tools and

techniques of which she makes use, including poetry, graphic design, and many others.

Consequently, even today, it is still not uncommon for us, spectators, to be faced with

artworks that are visibly “in process of becoming” and, consequently, in process of being read

and understood; not mentioning land art, which literally uses common urban spaces as its

support, making it difficult to identify the space of artwork from the world’s ordinary spaces.

As an example, we think of one of Christo’s latest performances, The Gates (Plate 16), in

Central Park, New York: 7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels, lining

twenty-three miles of pedestrian paths from February 12

to 27

2005, a project which had

been rejected in 1981 for being considered a gross intrusion into the city’s most important

green space. Although dates had been informed through the media, the fact is that waking up

early in the morning, going to the park for their usual jogging and finding it covered with

fabric panels caused all sorts of reactions in the regular users of Central Park.

Plate 15: IKB 191 – Yves Klein, 1959

Plate 16: The Gates – Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005

The modern culture is a secular culture, and it is only within it that the

artistic dimension gains autonomy. Autonomy which, however, is at risk when the

space of a painting or sculpture – we can think of Fool’s House or Tilted Arc – does

not clearly separate from the ordinary world. (TASSINARI, 2001, p. 55)

Therefore, the contemporary need to conceptualize space comes from this lack of

distinction between the artwork and the other things within a common space, which are its

surroundings. What differentiates the ‘working space”, according to the author, is actually the

idea of imitation – a “working space” imitates the process of making the artwork, becoming

the imitating space, whereas the actual making of the work becomes the imitated one, and

what is exposed in the artwork are the similarities that articulate them in signals, peculiar to

the process of construction of the “working space”, a process that can be linguistic or not –

this is what we see in Fool’s House, by Johns. The limitations of what can be or not present in

a “working space” depend only on the ability of expressing the signals of their making in that

space. A “working space” is an exterior inside an exterior, says Tassinari; consequently, the

spaciousness of the artwork gets an aspect of a practical space, a space of chores; what we see

in the contemporary space is the art of its execution, like a speaker in process of learning a

new language. “Within a space under work a unique way of making art is imitated, in which

some specific work exposes itself as if in process while it imitates its own making” (2001, p.

61).

In fact, these modern theories of the artistic creation base the artisticity of the works on

their process of construction, instead of in the work itself. As it is stated by Tassinari, the

communication promoted by a “working space” between the world space and the space of the

artwork is something entirely new in the history of western art. The space of the common

world starts to take over functions which were previously limited to the space of the artwork

A cultura moderna é uma cultura secular, e é só no interior desta que a dimensão artística ganha autonomia.

Autonomia, entretanto, que está em risco quando o espaço de uma pintura ou uma escultura – pense-se em

Fool’s House ou em Arco Inclinado – não se separa com nitidez do espaço do mundo em comum.

“Num espaço em obra fica imitado um modo singular de se fazer arte, no qual determinada obra expõe-se como

em se fazendo na medida em que imita o seu fazer” (2001, p. 61).

(2001, p. 75). However, contemporary artwork does not transform the world into art but, on

the contrary, requires the participation of space of the common world to configure itself in

order to emerge as art, making possible that an ordinary object awakes aesthetic experiences –

Duchamp’s readymade (Plate 17) brings examples of this process of space integration, which

ends up bringing to the artwork new meanings, for the work’s spatial frame does not separate

it from the ordinary world anymore. For Duchamp, “the distinction between the work of art

and an ordinary thing of the world is not one of aperception. The difference cannot be

apprehended visually (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 91)”, an idea that is shared by Beckett, who

stated that art is “uniquely self-pervaded” and “not to be clarified in any other light” but its

own (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 91).

Of course a painting exists only in the eye of the beholder; but Duchamp

wanted his creations to exist without any help whatsoever; he began by making

copies in marble of sugar cubes… then it was enough to buy plates and glasses and

sign them. Finally he had no other choice but to fold his hands in his lap

(GIACOMETTI apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 155).

“There is no solution because there is no problem” (DUCHAMP apud OPPENHEIM,

2003, p. 93). “There is no key or problem. I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels

if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms” (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM,

2003, p. 96). What we are facing is poetics of the world in common, which favors the arousal

of procedures that admit a large variety of what may, many times, be shocking visual

appearances, such as the use of unusual materials mixed with traditional ones or unusual

supports, as much as a blur among the territorial limits of the artistic genders; and we may

add, a change in the relationship between the spectator and the artwork.

If the experience is intense or, in this case, aesthetic, the spectator feels

themselves sharing with the work an intersubjective space in which their eye and

their self do not control the situation – they are set by the work at the same time that

they lean over it. What the work communicates, then, happens in an intersubjective

space. (TASSINARI, 2001, p.145)

It is in this direction that this proposal moves, through the construction of and

reflection about a type of space that in postmodernity has been filled and emptied in

innumerous ways, as if in a mere exercise of investigation about the limits of its own

freedom. Modern space rises as a territory of “making” – we might even say of “making

itself”. In Johns’ Canvas, the frame reveals itself defeated, subjected to a space that defines

itself as included: now, the external space is inside and its limits will depend on other

variants. In Canvas, the dimensions still follow a conventional pattern (76x63cm), which

reinforces the rupture even more. But, what if that frame, traditionally limiting, fixing, works

just as a border inside which space is not fixed anymore, but on the contrary, it constantly

transforms itself by the intervention of the spectator? If we accept the concept of

contemporary art as a space of “making”, we cannot ignore the role of the spectator to answer

such questions, keeping in mind that this role transcends the space of art, as we can see from

the concept of “Tranformational Object” suggested by the American psychoanalyst

Christopher Bollas. For the author this Object has its matrix in early childhood, due to the

prematurity of human birth, as the mother serves as a supplementary ego for the infant,

altering and facilitating the environment in order to guarantee the baby’s survival and full

development. Consequently, the mother will also transmit to the infant, through her own

particular idiom of mothering, an aesthetic of being that becomes a feature of the infant’s self.

Se a experiência é intensa, ou, no caso, estética, o espectador se sente compartilhando com a obra um espaço

intersubjetivo em que seu olhar e seu eu não são senhores da situação – são postos pela obra ao mesmo tempo

que sobre ela se debruçam. O que a obra então comunica acontece num espaço intersubjetivo.

The mother's way of holding the infant, of responding, of selecting objects, of

perceiving the infant's internal needs, constitutes the 'culture' she creates for herself

and her infant, a private culture that can only be inhabited by the two—mother and

child—composed of a language of highly idiomatic syntaxes of gestures, sound,

pattern and mood that insures its privacy, and emphasizes the sequestered ambience

of this first relation (BOLLAS,1979). The Transformational Object. Int. J. Psycho-Anal.,

60:97-107>.

Throughout our lives, we will search for new Transformational Objects, which may be

inside or outside us, or in intermediary spaces. And, José Outeiral (2002, Apresentação) states

that many of these Objects that become part of our lives will be found in artistic

manifestations; they will surround us in the form of music, painting, poetry, sculpture,

architecture, and literature, or in any other phenomenon by which we feel touched and

understood by someone whom we do not even know. In the same line, Donald Meltzer

(MELTZER apud OUTEIRAL, 2002, Apresentação) says that the aesthetic impact refers to a

pre-verbal communication in which there is a massive affective content, common to our most

precocious experiences. And it is in such experiences that we encounter beauty as newborns,

when we first open our eyes and gaze at our mother’s face and body – for many, an invasive,

overwhelming sight that evokes powerful impulses. The appreciation of an artwork, in fact,

opens in us a straight channel of communication with those experiences, awakening in us a

feeling of “familiarity”, restoring in us the certainty of “being home”, despite all the

strangeness we might face in the world (OUTEIRAL, 2002, Apresentação).

According to Jacques Aumont (1999, p. 81), the role of the spectator is extremely

active; they are the ones who “make” the image, for they can even totally or partially invent

the artwork – the image is directly related to imagination, which, on the other hand, is related

to the perceptive schemata that are similar to bone-structures, a structural knowledge that we

have of the object designed. In reality, the perceptive schemata form an instrument of

remembrance that carries a cognitive and didactic aspect; it is not absolute, it evolves and

sometimes even disappears. And, if we speak about remembrance, we also have to speak

about recognition and the pleasure that results from the fact of “meeting again” a visual

experience in an image in a repetitive, condensed and controllable way. To recognize

something in an image means identifying something in it that we see or can see in real life.

There is no fortuitous looking; visual perception is a process that implies a system of

expectations and, consequently, of hypotheses, verification or annihilation of some former

schemata. “Seeing can only mean to compare what we expect to the message that our sight

receives (GOMBRICH apud AUMONT, 1999, p. 86)”.

Aumont says that, once they make their previous knowledge intervene, the spectators

of the image supply the non-represented, turning their action projective – we tend to identify

things in an image as long as there is a form that slightly looks like something we already

have in our schemata. These schemata give us what Gombrich calls “perceptive constancy”,

which is the foundation of our visual apprehension of the world, since they hold the totality of

the stabilizing tendencies that prevent us from getting dizzy in a world of floating

appearances. The work of recognition, says Aumont, activates not only the elementary

properties of the visual system, but also codification abilities rather abstract – it is not a matter

of identifying an image point by point, but finding visual invariants already structured, like in

the case of a caricature where what is represented is precisely this group of invariant visual

characteristics that will function as index of recognition. Therefore, the spectator constructs

the image as much as the image constructs the spectator, turning them into an emotional and

cognitive “active” partner of the image. That is the reason, according to the author, for the

development and permanence of representative art, naturalistic or not: the psychological

satisfaction originated from “meeting again” a visual experience in an image, in a repetitive,

Ver só pode ser comparar o que esperamos à mensagem que o nosso aparelho visual recebe.

condensed and controllable way. The recognition which the artistic image offers encounters

also the spectator’s expectations, which can transform them or generate other expectations;

recognition, says Aumont, is connected to remembrance, and once the spectator makes their

previous knowledge intervene upon the image, they supply the non-represented. This

projective participation of the spectator occurs in all sorts of images, be it a realistic scene, or

a black-and-white image, or even an abstract artwork, in order to fulfill the missing or hidden

parts of the represented objects. For example, when we look at a real scene or an artwork

painted in perspective, the latter is in fact in our vision, which overcomes its ambiguities by

activating previous indexes, especially previous schemata. Consequently, the image is, from

the standpoint of its author and its spectator as well, a phenomenon linked also to

imagination; actually, the spectator can even invent the painting totally or partially.

As Adauto Novaes stated in the colloquium “The Invisible and the Body”, held in

Porto Alegre in 2001, the invisible is the condition for the creation of the artwork and the

works of thought; the invisible is the other side of a presence, a condition to visibility. And

Beckett, especially in his late works, virtuosistically plays with these concepts, twisting them

until absolute strangeness encounters the spectator – sounds contradicting images; images

opposing visual schemata; an inconsistency that continually undermines the possibility of

figurative coherence, despite all the artistic references that populate the play’s surface.

Objects and subjects in Beckett function in gestalt; everything is seen as a whole, there is no

separateness among them, and the world becomes a unity of the space where his characters

can be whole and nothing, everyone and no one. In this regard, Oppenheim (2003, p. 130)

observes: “Recognition of self and others, and all the object paraphernalia that Beckett brings

into play in this regard […] place significant stress on figuration as the giving of determinate

form.”

The subject-object/ego-world relation is an entrapment in Beckett’s

‘theater-real’ and ‘prose-real’ world. And art, as imaged in the text, is a metaphor

both of that confinement and the effort to escape (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 164).

And Beckett himself, in the “observer’s equation of the verbs to know and to say”

states that “All needed to be known for say is known. There is nothing but what is said.

Beyond what is said there is nothing” (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 165). As

Oppenheim (2003, p. 165) points out, “Beckett verbalizes typography in ‘dark and bright’, the

‘almost touching’ black letters on the white page where ‘no two ever meet’. In the text, in

sum, there is no more than literally meets the eye”.

Actually, this process of interaction involving author, image, and spectator is not

recent, and can be seen especially in Impressionism, which, besides being considered the first

interactive art (the work completes itself in the spectator’s retina), when of its emergence, was

also considered by many – laymen and art critics – the first landmark of the “end of art”. In

this regard, we follow the same streamline as Lois Oppenheim (2003, p. 45), for whom the

“end” represents, as stated by Hegel and Danto, a perpetuation of the making of art beyond

the completion of art’s history, which means that there is a post-historical production of art,

not that there are no more artworks. “The ‘end’ represents the kind of work that took place in

response to its own self-consciousness”, and in order to understand the process which led us

into the depth of the shock that we still experiment in relation to contemporary art, and

especially the lack of delimitation of its space, it is necessary to trace back some concepts

present in the art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In the Middle Ages, it was considered art what presented technical quality, although

still lacking the status of artwork, once it was made by craftsmen who worked for the State

and with no freedom to create. In the Renaissance, art and science united, and the first artists

consecrated as intellectuals arose – among others, the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci. Art

started being understood as an intellectual production whose theme also became important; it

is the moment when Neo-Platonism rose, carrying within the concept of art as knowledge.

When we reached the 16

century, the critics began to care more about the creative

idea; manner, taste, style became important and individualized elements, leading Mannerism

and Baroque to release art from mimesis – it was the moment when art dissociated from

science and, consequently, there was a separation between art and nature (science’s object of

knowledge). This rupture in fact represented a preparation for the technical art of the 19

century, with the advent of photography and cinema, besides all the isms, such as:

Impressionism, as it was mentioned above; Expressionism, which aimed to express the

psyche’s subjective reality (e.g., The Scream, by Edvard Munch – Plate 18); Surrealism,

which criticized the so-called objective reality, denying any logics or rationality and making

evident an omnirical and unreal view of the world; Minimalism and Concrete Art, which

researched the systematic and planned relation of the composition. In fact, the 19

century

revealed itself as the great crucible where old and new languages mixed, many times crashed,

causing a serious rupture in the concept of art. The Renaissance concept was altered by

Romanticism, which embodied the expression of feelings, including nationalist ones, besides

the search for gestuality (e.g., Goya, Delacroix – Plates 19 and 20), and this emphasis on a

sentimental interpretation ended up causing a pictorial rupture and generating the upcoming

of the smudge. A poetics of evasion started then, also as a consequence of the political-

cultural situation of that time, and it frequently turned into practice of evasion. Becoming wild

was a way to evade from a bourgeois world for which many intellectuals did not see a way

out. Gauguin’s Post-Impressionism, with the series Tahitians (Plate 21), launched the basis

that opened the aesthetics of the 20

century – it raised here a political aspect through a new

pictorial approach: colorism.

In the midst of the shock produced by the encounter of those various concepts, some

nostalgia, and some willingness to preserve the old canons, we were thrown into a century

signed by the desire for evasion and by ruptures. The twentieth century, initially with Marcel

Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, carries the concept of art as experimentation. Actually, Pablo

Picasso’s artwork Mademoiselles d’Avignon (Plate 22) is considered the first artistic

document that totally breaks with the Renaissance tradition, besides representing the opening

factor of the Cubist movement, proposing a deeper thinking about the destructuralization of

the artistic making, in which color becomes the representation of the human condition (e.g.,

blue = pain, misery).

Especially after World War II, the avant-garde becomes official; visual art starts to be

seen as a market system, incorporated by media and mass communication; it starts to be seen

as an aesthetic adaptation. It is the moment of the individual mythologies – the artistic action

is disconnected from groups and ideologies – and a lack of strong criteria to define what art is

starts to be felt. Memory becomes one of the most contradictory issues in art. The times also

bring a shift of the center of the art market from Paris to New York, where artistic marketing

in grand scale is used for the first time– Life magazine presents Jackson Pollock as the great

American painter (Plate 23). Later on, the 1970s will bring the dematerialization of the

artwork, with the refusal of traditional supports, making use of ephemeral and uncommon

supports; it is the time of the emergence of performances, installations, happenings,

ephemeral art, land art, arte povera, etc. Furthermore, there is also a dematerialization of

utopias and ideologies, with the appropriation and vulgarization of cultural facts and images

(e.g., Stalin and Mao Tse Tung’s portraits on clothes – Plate 24). Therefore, modernity’s

political dematerialization of history and social movements happens through art. The Biennale

of art and the museum become shopping malls of sorts and the artwork carries the traits of its

time: permanent update, fixation in the present and the dematerialization of any effort for

preservation and memory.

This process of transformation that started in the Renaissance and had its milestone in

the nineteenth century is what we still face today with much broader effects in all sorts of

visual expressions, not only in painting but in architecture, literature and theater as well. We

still feel the shock between the concept of beauty and art, still attached to the Renaissance

canons, against a process of dematerialization and derangement, and although over a century

since its beginning has elapsed, it still finds resistance, difficulties of understanding and

acceptance from an audience that, in an attempt to interpret, makes use of concepts that do not

find significance in the postmodern work. And, as it could be expected within the

contemporary scenario, the theater becomes the space that materializes this crisis, this blur

between artistic territories, as we can see in the play Museum, by Tina Howe (1979): through

the contrast of art concepts and styles and varied spectators, Tina Howe presents a panorama

of contemporary art and the crisis lived by the spectator when facing what nowadays has been

conventionally called artwork. Having as its scenery a big American museum, which holds in

its many rooms different artistic tendencies, through the many visitors that pass by we are

invited to live the experience of a contemporary art exhibition, characterized by all sorts of

surprises and/or contradictions: the museum space, which had previously been a temple of

silent and lonely contemplation, receives an exhibition entitled The Broken Silence, which

even in its last day still provokes all sorts of noises and reactions not only from the public but

from the guards responsible for the museum. The Broken Silence becomes the great space of

unveiling, questioning and, many times, criticizing through satire an art concept that actually,

as it was mentioned above, had its first milestone in the 19

century.

Contextualized in the 1980s, Museum throws us into the same state of derangement,

inadequacy not only in regard to the contemporary artwork but also in regard to the museum

space. In front of us parade characters defined as serious museum goers, laughing adolescents,

indifferent tourists who prefer the souvenir shop, the artist’s friends, people searching for

objects to decorate their houses, people who reveal some discomfort, some nervousness just

for being in a museum. And since the first pages we have a meaningful reference: by the

author’s suggestion, the audience should be encouraged to walk through the exhibition before

the play starts. The silence must be broken, in the first place, by the audience, a fact which

puts us in the presence of an art concept that for many people is the cause of discomfort and

embarrassment still today: interactivity. Soon after, a voice which shall be a mix between

journalistic and divine announces a violent attack to Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus,

followed by the declaration of the Galleria degli Uffizi’s director stating that it had been the

most violent attack ever occurred against Renaissance art, and that restoration would be

impossible. This is how we are introduced to the universe of another supposed temple – the

contemporary museum – which, for our surprise, has as its guardian someone as inappropriate

and incomprehensible in his attitudes as the artworks he is supposed to protect: at the same

time that he asks the visitors to be silent, sometimes yelling at them, suddenly he starts

dancing, tap-dancing, singing. Every visitor that enters the gallery represents some kind of

rupture, and situations, apparently trite, end up provoking a variety of ruptures in the aura of

the museum: besides being an excuse to bring about references (or criticism) to contemporary

art, especially in the 1980s, with its installations and performances: “The Guard: I`ve caught

men exposing their genitals in this room! Certain shows… inspire that!” (HOWE, p. 15). This

may be a reference to Francis Picabia’s Nature Morte, an artwork consisting of a monkey-doll

masturbating. It is this process of transformation that Tina Howe presents through the

fictitious work by Steve Williams, whose installation ends totally destroyed by the public;

through the four gigantic and totally identical white canvases by Zachery Moe, a reference to

Henri Matisse; and also through Agnes Vaag’s installation, defined by the guard as “heard

music”. Moreover, Chloe Trapp, the exhibition’s curator who elaborates a visual poetics, that

is, a rational reflection on the artistic process so that a bridge can be built between artwork

and spectator, states that the work by Zachery Moe is what there is of most meaningful since

Henri Matisse

. The work by Agnes Vaag, on the other hand, brings clear references to

ephemeral art: on page 46, Chloe Trapp once more explains that all the material used by the

artist had been found; on the same page, another character, Tink Solheim, a friend of the

artist’s, says that her Studio is always full of exotic things – fish skeletons, animal beaks and

paws, etc. – an explicit reference to arte povera

In this regard, Arlindo Machado (MACHADO, 1993) states that it is impossible to

judge or classify contemporary art with concepts such as “emotion” and “inspiration”, which

were created to explain modernity. They must be replaced by “configuration” and “structure”,

for postmodernity means interactions of languages, multitextuality, which approximates the

artistic fields in such way that sometimes it becomes impossible to know whether we are

It is also possible to identify a reference to White Square, by Malevich, as much as an indirect reference to the

technique used by Jackson Pollock: “dripping”.

Although it became more frequent in the 1980s, in the first years of the 20th century there were already

manifestations of this kind of art: in the 1920s, for example, Max Jacob made children’s paintings with

physiological matter to sell to tourists (DE MICHELI, 1991, p. 58).

facing a painting or a sculpture, or even if we are facing an artwork at all. In this process, the

bridges that make the communication between work and spectator possible disappear and the

only way to rescue them seems to be through the construction of a theoretical discourse

capable of explaining the artistic procedures, making them comprehensible to the audience.

According to Cristina Costa (COSTA, 1998, p. 53), these are the characteristics of

postmodernity: rupture of the integration between idea and realization; that is, the authorship

becomes an issue in contemporary art and the artist misappropriates themselves from the

materiality of their own work – once the work exists, it does not belong exclusively to its

author anymore; this is what happens with all sorts of appropriations/re-readings made

possible through the internet. The investigation of new languages also generates a great

change, which will cause the desecration of art, since it starts to incorporate materials and

concepts that were not considered artistic before, as for example, the use of scrap, garbage,

physiological material, etc, as we can see in artworks by Jasper Johns, who put an old broom

on canvas, creating the concept of combination between bi and tridimensional; or Andy

Warhol who, in the 1980s, created an abstract series made of aluminum plates on top of which

he urinated. Experimental art becomes more concerned with the process than the result and,

consequently, poetics becomes more important than poetry; the pleasure, which used to come

from the contemplation of beauty, now is more connected to the textual comprehension of the

work: reading about the artwork brings more pleasure than the work itself; that is, the

discourse is worthier than the artwork. Today, the concepts are forged, the artist throws the

responsibility of poetry over the observer; and then, it is up to the historian to take the task to

explain, unveil the artwork, re-approximating the spectator. This role is taken by the curators

when they elaborate a visual poetics for the artwork – the bridge between the space of

contemporary art and a spectator who still today sees the object of art with unfamiliarity.

Ambiguity has become a permanent presence in contemporary art, and challenges perception

in a process of veiling-unveiling the multiple layers of the artwork. As Beckett states about

the brothers van Velde: “An endless unveiling, veil under veil, level upon level of imperfect

transparencies, an unveiling towards the non-unveilable?” He goes further saying that

To force the fundamental invisibility of exterior things till the very

invisibility becomes itself a thing, not just awareness of limits, but a thing that can

be seen and make seen […] on the canvas, this is a work of diabolical complexity

and which requires a skill of extreme versatility and levity, a skill which insinuates

more than it affirms, which is positive only with the transient and incidental proof of

the great positive, the only positive, time that carts away (BECKETT apud

OPPENHEIM, 2003, p.105).

“In his dreams he had been warned against this change” (OI). What we have in

contemporary art is also what we see in Beckett’s work: subordination to the senses, and more

specifically to the eye, which is the way of communication between the character/spectator’s

inner and outer worlds; modes of perception and their changeability; a “painterly” use of the

word (the expression is Oppenheim’s); direct and indirect or superposed references to art:

these constitute the ground zero, the transforming space on which our experience as reader-

spectators will be built. And in this regard, Merleau-Ponty (1961) observes that contemporary

space is a space whose degree zero of spatiality starts from the observer’s body. To

understand this process “we must go back to the working, actual body – not the body as a

chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and

movement.” In this way, following the same line as Merleau-Ponty, Oppenheim states that the

artwork does not exist as object but “agent” of both artist and spectator’s seeing. The body

itself is seen as a work of art, a “nexus of lived meanings” (MERLEAU-PONTY apud

OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 106). Meanings that will be touchable, altered by other things and

their own expressions through a changeable “agent”, intertwined with silence or invisibility,

and in this way this work of art will inevitably fail to represent its own full history. Beckett

himself in Three Dialogues refers to the history of painting as the history of its own attempts

to escape from this sense of failure toward completeness, despite the endless possibilities of

expression that the postmodern space offers to the artists and the artwork. “[…] my shade will

comfort you” (OI). Transparency seems to be the weapon to resist failure that silence and

invisibility turn evident, since it is the hole through which the eye can perceive and apprehend

a fragment of reality. Yet, like in OI, vision, seeing the already known, does not bring

comfort; it will come from unfamiliarity; it is the unfamiliar scene that will carry the hope of

an un-failed completeness – completeness of the self, of expressing oneself and even of

silencing oneself.

I think I perhaps have freed myself from certain formal concepts. Perhaps

like the composer Schoenberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have turned toward an

abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have tried not to concretize the

abstraction – not to give it yet another formal context (BECKETT apud

OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 126).

As Fabio de Souza Andrade states, in Beckett’s work there is an absolute refusal of the

concept of novel as movement, action that feeds itself from characters struggling against

external adverse circumstances. Beckett’s fiction institutes a new order of realism that

reconstructs through language the failure of the bourgeois subject, the dissolution of the

individuals as the source of reflection, lost in a “mattered” world. The peculiarities of

Beckett’s syntax and style sum up to this paradox: in a world deprived of immanent meaning,

departing from a subject who is emptied of reflective ability, it is necessary to elaborate

significative forms, which are at the same time denouncement and copy of this state

(ANDRADE, 2001, p. 31).

To bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it – be it

something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a

writer today (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, 2001, p. 113).

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Through not concretizing the abstraction, as Beckett states in a letter to Axel Kaun in

1937, he ends up creating a multilayer collage of all sources of references – not only pictorial

but literary as well – that will be peeled off by the observer who, by taking off layer by layer,

“decreates” the author’s “decreative” process, leaving the word with its nudity and

strangeness uncovered.

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2. OHIO IMPROMPTU, BY SAMUEL BECKETT

L = Listener

R = Reader

Light on table midstage. Rest of stage in darkness. Plain white deal table, say 8’ x 4’. Two plain armless

white deal chairs.

L seated at table facing front towards end of long side audience right. Bowed head propped on right hand.

Face hidden. Left hand on table. Long black coat. Long white hair.

R seated at table in profile centre of short side audience right. Bowed head propped on the right hand. Left

hand on table. Book on table before him open at last pages. Long black coat. Long white hair.

Black wide-brimmed hat at centre of table.

Fade up.

Ten seconds.

R turns page.

Pause.

R (reading): Little is left to tell. In a last –

L knocks with left hand on table.

Little is left to tell.

Pause. Knock.

In a last attempt to obtain relief he moved from where they had been so long together to a single room on the

far bank. From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans.

Pause.

Relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity. Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar scene. Out to where

nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever shared. From this he had once half hoped some measure of

relief might flow.

Pause.

Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the islet. Hour after hour. In his long black coat no matter

what the weather and old world Latin Quarter hat. At the tip he would always pause to dwell on the receding

stream. How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on. Then turn and his slow steps

retrace.

Pause.

In his dreams –

Knock.

Then turn and his slow steps retrace.

Pause. Knock.

In his dreams he had been warned against this change. Seen the dear face and heard the unspoken words.

Stay where we were so long alone together, my shade will comfort you.

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Pause.

Could he not –

Knock.

Seen the dear face and heard the unspoken words. Stay where we were so long alone together, my shade will

comfort you.

Pause. Knock.

Could he not now turn back? Acknowledge his error and return to where they were once so long alone

together. Alone together so much shared. No. What he had done alone could not be undone. Nothing he had

ever done alone could ever be undone. By him alone.

Pause.

In this extremity his old terror of night laid hold on him again. After so long a lapse that as if never been.

(Pause. Looks closer) Yes, after so long a lapse that as if never been. Now with redoubled force the fearful

symptoms described at length page forty paragraph four. (Starts to turn back the pages. Checked by L’sleft

hand. Resumes relinquished page.) white nights now again his portion. As when his heart was young. No

sleep no braving sleep till – (turns page) – dawn of day.

Pause.

Little is left to tell. One night –

Knock.

Little is left to tell.

Pause. Knock.

One night as he sat trembling head in hands from head to foot a man appeared to him and said, I have been

sent by – and here he named the dear name – to comfort you. Then drawing a worn volume from the pocket

of his long black coat he sat and read till dawn. Then disappeared without a word.

Pause.

Some time later he appeared again at the same hour with the same volume and this time without preamble

sat and read it through again the long night through. Then disappeared without a word.

Pause.

So from time to time unheralded he would appear to read the sad tale through again and the long night away.

Then disappear without a word.

Pause.

With never a word exchanged they grew to be as one.

Pause.

Till the night came at last when having closed the book and dawn at hand he did not disappear but sat on

without a word.

Pause.

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Finally he said, I have had word from – and here he named the dear name – that I shall not come again. I

saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words, No need to go to him again, even were it in your power.

Pause.

So the sad –

Knock.

Saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words, No need to go to him again, even were it in your power.

Pause.

So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone. Through the single window dawn shed

no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. Or was it that buried in who knows what thoughts they

paid no heed? To light of day. To sound of reawakening. What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, no, not

thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no

light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told.

Pause.

Nothing is left to tell.

Pause. R makes to close book.

Knock. Book half-closed.

Nothing is left to tell.

Pause. R closes book.

Knock.

Silence. Five seconds.

Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise their heads and look at each other. Unblinking.

Expressionless.

Ten seconds.

Fade out.

2.1. THE “TRAGIC” POSTMODERN TIME-SPACE IN OHIO IMPROMPTU

“Synergy of archaism and technological development”, this is to Michel Maffesoli

(2003, p.10) the only temporary definition capable of giving account of postmodernity and all

the musical, linguistic, corporeal, religious, medical and other phenomena that once again

dedicate a special attention to nature, to the primitive, to the barbarian. The author states that

hard rock, in all its versions, the decadent style in painting or dressing, or the present

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nomadism translate the return of the barbaric to our walls, which means the fragmentation of

the policed universe, patiently ordered by three centuries of modernity. The “tragic feeling of

life” is back in the postmodern society – a “deafening non-said”; something that is empirically

experienced in everyday life. According to the author, with the tragic sensibility, time

immobilizes or at least gets slower, and whereas speed had been the mark of modern drama,

today we see the dawn of an elegy to slowness, including idling – a passage from a

monochromatic, linear, safe time (the time of history) to a polychromatic, essentially tragic,

presenteist time (the “spiral of destiny”). In Maffesoli’s opinion, the most significant change

of paradigm is precisely the change from an “ego centered” to a “locus centered” conception

of the world. In the postmodern tragic, there is a concern with “interity”, which induces to the

loss of the small Self into a vaster Self – the essential mark of this tragic feeling of life is

actually the recognition of a logic of conjunction (and…and), as presented by Winnicott, more

than a logic of disjunction (or…or), what the author calls an “omnipresent viscosity” that

contaminates everyone and every situation. The spirit of time pushes the others towards those

who until then were closed in the distant loneliness of their identities; in the “and…and”

logic, there is always a festival, a parade, or even a strike of gigantic proportions in which our

lonely identity can melt. He even points out the possibility that, instead of work, with its

crucifying aspect, the ludicrousness with its creative dimension may be the new cultural

paradigm. The tragic is here understood as intensity, as multiple effervescence, as all sorts of

trembling, unnamable anomies, and different nomadisms; the feeling of tragic-ludicrous, as

collective unconscious, strongly returns in ordinary life which regains force and vigor – a new

youth of the eternal child. And, as we do not have a project anymore, for true life has no

project, we remain with the impression of inanity of a life that consumes itself in the act of its

own creation. For Maffesoli, we are once more entering the time of myth; and the re-

enchantment of the world comes from the conjunction of the fairytale knight and laser. This

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conjunction leads us to see a hedonic aspect of the contemporary tragic – the culture of

pleasure flows with the tragic consciousness of destiny. According to the author, even the

ordinary theatricality, the search for the superfluous and frivolous, the body worship, are but

the expression of such tragic consciousness – the tragic forces us to think of the paradox that

life might not be worthy but also that nothing is worthier than life. Maffesoli states that the

culture of pleasure, the feeling of tragic, the confrontation of destiny, are all cause and effect

of an “ethics of the instant”, situations that exhaust themselves in the act itself which cannot

be projected into a predictable future nor can be controlled by will. This is the ethics of the

instant that we find in OI, the simple reference to the story, its remembrance is enough to

exhaust its existence in time and space; the story cannot be told, the dear name cannot be said.

Words must be kept unspoken in order to keep their existence, for they cannot be controlled

by will, and the characters are aware of that impossibility to avoid change, as much as we,

spectators, are constantly warned about it. The future, or a possibility of it, can be just

foreseen as a game of shadows within which we can easily, if not only, get lost – that is the

confrontation which we must face in the Beckettian time, in the paused unrevealing reading

time of OI. As Fabio de Souza Andrade (2001) points out, the complicating element in

Beckett’s narrative is precisely the confession of insufficiency, the feeling of failure that

accompanies the endless series of reflections by the Beckettian characters.

Opposing modernity and postmodernity, Maffesoli (2003, p. 26-33) sums up saying

that, in modernity, history unfolds, whereas in postmodernity the event happens, intrudes,

forces, violates. However, although the event is singular, it is rooted in an a-temporal archaic

subtract, a peculiar characteristic of postmodernity – a “co-presence” in the alterity, which

accentuates the fact that the individual is, at worst, just a puppet, and, at best, a companion of

the forces that overcome him and to which he must adapt. “Could he not now turn back?

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Acknowledge his error and return to where they were once so long alone together. Alone

together so much shared. No. Nothing he had done alone could ever be undone” (OI, p. 14).

Like the character in Reader’s story, the postmodern man cannot turn back, acknowledge his

error and return to where once he was the actor of his own history; now he is just a “co-

presence” in the alterity that is his own story, a mere reader who does not have the power to

alter his future, or, even less, an anonymous listener who has lost, or has been deprived of the

power of his own words, deprived of the power over his own story. Now, Listener does not

exist without Reader anymore, he has become the other’s shadow which will obey the strings

of the narrator and be altered if, by any chance, there is a change in the narration because,

now, he is the one who holds Listener’s identity in its plurality. That is, we do not exist but

because of the other, our companion, or the Other – the social – that gives us existence: I am

who I am because the other recognizes me as such. Consequently, once I am facing another

“other”, there is the possibility of living a plural identity, or overcoming the “I” in a vaster

entity – that is what the cyclical conception is about. The spirit of time is in the melancholy,

in the nostalgia of a quite indistinct place, hardly found in time and space. The cyclical

temporality offers the occasion to change everything and each of us, and the media, allowing

us to communion with a variety of anonymous destinies, play an important role in this

process, for they awake in us the desire for an intense destiny, and the consequence is the

arousal of the need for Shadow, the desire for the “damned part” that modernity believed had

been expelled.

Maffesoli refers to the “calm anger towards the present”; the desire for living without

worrying much about the future is certainly the contemporary modulation of this

anthropological constant which is the tragic. This state is expressed in the artistic creation,

when it crystallizes in one single moment of full existence, in one single instant of perfect

beauty that crystallizes eternity. “After so long a lapse that as if never been. […] White nights

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now again his portion. As when his heart was young. No sleep no braving sleep till […]

dawn of day” (OI, p.15). Through an incorporated, non-conscious knowledge, we know that

what is proper to each one and each thing is “becoming” and perishing, which would explain

the desire of practicing suspension, of detaining the time running, so that we can better and at

the maximum enjoy right here, right now. Actually, Merleau-Ponty (1968, p.113) questions

why not “instead of saying that I am in time and in space, or that I am nowhere, why not

rather say that I am everywhere, always, by being at this moment and at this place?”

Suspension through memory; retention of memory through hiding its lapses by not

revealing, not telling the story: “Little is left to tell. One night – Little is left to tell” (OI, p.

15). In this process, “becoming” remains a possibility, whilst perishing can be postponed once

more through repetition; in this case, repetition of sentences – “little is left to tell” – and of

procedures, such as the reading pauses and Listener’s knocks on the table. “Multiple

repetitions that suspend the linear time, that signal the return of the myth and the tragic, […]

recall the order of synchronicity, where past, present, and future are lived in some kind of

circulation” (MAFFESOLI, 2003, p. 50)

. And this is how we live time in Beckett’s play:

circulating through past, present and future, we remain locked within an endless spiral of

untold facts, unspoken words, of parallel universes that we can never clearly identify whether

it is the actual story, the actual character or some sort of suspension of his, some dimension of

the Other he has become, or whether we are circulating through some of the many layers of

the universe of reverie – the character’s, the author’s, or the spectator’s as well.

Ohio Impromptu, perhaps one of the most Proustian of Beckett’s works,

again posits discourse, written and read, as access to and means of sanctioning the

past. This self-reflexive parody of the Book as vehicle of memory and purveyor of

Repetições múltiplas, que suspendem o tempo linear, que assinalam, portanto, o retorno do mito e do trágico.

[...] remete à ordem da sincronicidade, onde o passado, o presente e o futuro são vividos em uma espécie de

circulação [...].

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truth, however, is distinctly cathectic, an affective valorization of the word: as an

“old terror of night” returns to take hold of Listener who sits “trembling head in

hands from head to foot,” Reader is sent to comfort him. Making use, once more, of

the mise en abyme, Beckett relates how, through repeated readings of the tale of a

life, Listener’s own (Reader’s too, for he and Listener grow to be one), the sufferer

of “fearful symptoms” is consoled (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 144).

The large scope of a dateless past opens up to reverie, leaving the imagination free to

walk through the crypts of memory, and encountering again the “dreaming life lived in the

minuscule, almost animal, home of dreams” (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 150). And through

dreams the postmodern spectator encounters again the Aristotelian principle of pleasure,

which will bring improvement and peace to his heart by provoking pity and terror: by making

the spectator feel pity for the suffering spectacle that another man experiments without

deserving it; by causing terror on the spectator to the idea that he could be living the same

calamity. “We assume that, for the finest form of Tragedy, the Plot must be not simple but

complex; and further, that it must imitate actions arousing fear and pity…” (ARISTOTLE,

1954, p. 238).

In OI, identification comes from the “unword”, from the empty spaces in the play,

from what is not told in the story –we can identify ourselves with the character because that

anonymous loneliness, that pain, that heart that excruciatingly misses the “dear name” can be

anyone’s, even ours. By creating an aesthetic distance with the stage set, lighting, and the

masqueraded characters, Beckett turns alive the paradox of idealization and a sort of catharsis

by approximating the spectator to the humanity of that unreal personage, once they can purge

their own emotions through plastic representation. And, as we are living liquid times, when

the worst fear is forgetfulness and disappearance, the lack of resolution in the drama ends up

being object of pleasure and, therefore, catharsis for the contemporary human anxiety. The

circular time in OI makes the time of the story become any time, so it can fit into anyone’s

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time – the time of a painful past experience, or the time of reverie, of the dark basements of

our soul. Fragmentation here brings identification, despite the dismantling of the narrative

grammar and the grammar itself, since there is no subject, no verb. In this regard, Fabio

Andrade de Souza (2001, p. 37) points out that in Beckett subjectivity, which was expelled

through the window, returns via the back door: what seems to be a neutral topographic

description of a fictional community of almost inhuman beings locked within an infernal

routine in a very limited space and in a series of normatized and stereotyped behaviors, ends

up liberating the mold. The narrator, surprised, is forced to expose the ecclosion, a truly

relapse, of new old situations, recognizable reactions exaggeratingly human, apparently out of

context – a threat of change, capable of not letting the torture/consolation of hope die

completely.

Although Beckett’s struggle with tense is more evident in the first drafts of OI, the

final version still presents this fragmentation of the character’s identity through time and

space; what Adam Seelig calls a “mythological present” moving from first to third person

“he” and then to “they”.

Beckett draws an interesting correlation between time and space in

reworking a particular passage: “This means that he is gone. From himself. Or to.

For a time space. (Long Pause. Head & spots up.) This that he is back. To himself.

Or from. For a space.” […] Within this space/time framework a voice speaks in the

third person, searching for the identity of this ghost-character from without. Yet,

unwilling to correlate time and space directly, Beckett deletes “time,” revealing his

skepticism toward the representation of temporality in his work. In the first half of

MS 2930/3 (ANNEX 1), practically all references to time are under erasure, but

toward the conclusion of this dramatic fragment time tends toward more of a

“mythological present” that distinguishes much of Beckett’s writing: “For this

needle were it now to drop, as it has >done< so often in the past, and will [ ] do often

more & more in what I hope little time remains.” The event is recurrent and will

continue to occur in the future, thereby establishing an all-encompassing temporality

at the conclusion of the monologue. Because of this split in the voice between

external and internal knowledge of the figure on stage, it seems to be a clumsy

hybrid of author and character. Perhaps, then, as opposed to thinking of an authorial

interjection as a digression from the character’s voice, it is more precise to consider

the character’s voice a digression from the author’s, intended to derange Beckett’s

personal words. This fragmentation occurs in three basic steps, converting the

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heavily autobiographical monologue of (1) “I” into a monologue about (2) “he,” and

finally evolving into a story about (3) “they. [..] In the final text, Reader reads from

an autobiography in the third person. From this vantage point, Reader is the (1) “I”

who reads about a (2) “he,” who simultaneously resembles himself and Listener, or

(3) “they.” Reader himself causes the erasure of his own “I” in the narrative when he

repeats a phrase for Listener. <SEELIG, Adam>

“So from time to time unheralded he would appear to read the sad tale through again

and the long night away. Then disappear without a word” (OI, p. 16).The tragic of the instant,

states Maffesoli (2003), is nothing but a succession of actualizations: passions, thoughts,

creations that exhaust in the act itself, that do not save themselves but wear out at the instant.

We remember the duration of these moments more than their historical relation – life in its

banality, a mixture of light and shadow, as much as in its cruelty, scares the ones who took

the task of telling it. As Célia Berrettini states (2004, p. 26), vertigos from emptiness, from

nothing, from pauses of the non-existence – it is the dead time of Godot’s waiting that will not

come; it is as if in the pauses Beckett were making the silent breath of death to be heard. In

OI, the task of telling the story becomes so heavy that it is necessary the presence of a second

Reader, we may say Reader’s Other shadow who, from time to time, would appear to read the

sad tale through again, until the night came when “having closed the book and dawn at hand

he did not disappear but sat on without a word” (OI, p.17). This presence is not required, is

not announced, it appears one night showing only the badge of consciousness – he was sent

by the dear name, and he named the dear name – it is an omnipotent presence, it comes

hidden in the shadows of the night and, without a word, disappears at dawn; he does not need

identification, his presence seems to be expected although not awaited; he does not need

words – “With never a word exchanged they grew to be as one” (OI, p. 17). Through the long

nights, he reads, he reveals, and in his comings and goings, his presence is never questioned,

A note on the transcriptions: a blank space within square brackets (i.e., [ ]) indicates an indecipherable word,

whereas the same thing crossed out (i.e., [ ] ) indicates an indecipherable deletion; words between wedges

indicate an insertion (e.g., This >insertion< makes a difference) (SEELIG, Adam, Note 9. Available at:

<http://samuel-beckett.net/reamains3.html>).

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and neither are his words, they are simply accepted, believed – he is the one, the only one,

who has had word from the dear name, who saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words,

he is the one who carries the light through the shadows of the future and brings directions; he

is the one who reads the “written word”: “… I shall not come again. I saw the dear face and

heard the unspoken words, No need to go to him again, even were it in your power” (OI, p.

17). And here light plays a fundamental role in the joint of the body which, according to

Berrettini (2004, p. 26), may evoke a heroic-comic representation of decomposition with an

exorcizing value: the light carves, cuts, and decomposes bodies, she says, and under the effect

of light the text becomes painting – text-painting in movement, not immobile image. “There

are no other issues but death” (BECKETT apud BERRETTINI, 2004, p. 27). The Beckettian

character, she states, – man in his mortal condition – never stops living coherently with death,

never stops walking, sleeping with his death, carrying it within throughout time. Or, as

Beckett says referring to Proust’s creatures, they are victims and prisoners of this

preponderant circumstance, which is time, for we do not escape from the hours nor from the

days.

Derangement in Beckett does not happen only in the level of the character and his

identity – as Seelig states, the deranging presence is more than just an unreliable narrator – it

estranges the text from both author and reader – language estranges itself from the narration to

the point that the character can finally hear “unspoken words”. Through language, we are

taken away from reality and, therefore, free from its moderation, we can imagine, cradled by

fear and curiosity, as Bachelard would say (2003, p. 122-23), and through the erasure of

words we reach the most decisive of all aggressivenesses, “the procrastinated aggressiveness,

the aggressiveness that waits – the wolves closed in shells, states the author, are more cruel

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than the wandering wolves”.

Beckett’s deranging process becomes an invitation to us to

read/watch his pieces like phenomenologists who carry the ambition to live in the same way

the great dreamers of images lived: we become the subject who dreams the reverie. The

dreamer is invaded by convictions of refuge, where life concentrates, prepares itself, and

transforms. Beckett’s house and landscape are like the house of the phenomenologist; it turns

into an underground cave and labyrinth, full of dark corners – spaces of reflections, where we

can retreat, hide and deny life, places of immobility, spaces that end up being dark corners of

solitude too.

So the sad tale last time told they sat on as though turned to stone. Through

the single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. Or

was it that buried in who knows what thoughts they paid no heed? To light of day.

To sound of reawakening. What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, no, not thoughts.

Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness.

Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad

tale a last time told. (OI, p. 18)

Ordinary life is the place of the tragic par excellence – there is a poetics of banality,

which hides an amount of intensity. In this way, according to Maffesoli (2003), the

contemporary attitude comes close to the attitude of a tragic hero, who does not demand

explanations to destiny, but finds his pride accepting its decrees. In fact, tragic is the

acceptance of destiny, the recognition of existence for what it is: precarious, finite, always

submitted to the inexorable law of everything and everybody’s death – the acceptance of the

present is nothing but another way of expressing the acceptance of death, which is at the heart

of numerous contemporary phenomena.

“[...] chegaremos à mais decisiva das agressividades, à agressividade protelada, à agressividade que espera. Os

lobos fechados em conchas são mais cruéis que os lobos errantes” (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 123).

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Says Maffesoli (2003) that what happens in the dreams of the mass, crossed by

archetypical images, is the same that happens in the individual’s dreams: in their dreams the

images penetrate the individual unconscious, forcing the individual to escape from the linear,

rational temporality characteristic of the daily activities. The poets, artists, and thinkers find

their inspiration in this interaction, more precisely in the one expressed by the union of past,

present, and future. In the plurality of the being, everyday life becomes some kind of niche, a

refuge to where we return when life hurts us, or when the political, economic, professional

pressures become too strong. We can always go back to the book and, in the roads of reverie,

read the untold story which can be anyone’s, remember whatever we choose; we can dream

about the dear face – the one that is dear to our memory – and trace back the “slow steps” or

go back to that single room, unfamiliar room. The everyday ritual tastes like tragic: an eternal

restart of the same doing or being. For the author, the postmodern is an “imagistic” world, a

world where the image is the key element of social linkage. The image, says Walter

Benjamin, is sedimentation of history; it is the vector of an “ethics of instant” or an “ethics of

aesthetics” – the image causes a short-circuit in history or in the finalized time of the project.

The present is privileged as an expression of the presence of life, an “eternal instant” where

time suspension and reduction of the speed of existence favor intensity and quality, it deepens

social relations and the appreciation of the world as it is.

As Beatriz Sarlo states (2007), the past is always a conflictive struggle between history

and memory, since not always history is able to rely on memory; and memory, on the other

hand, distrusts a reconstitution that does not hold in its core the rights to remembrance (rights

of life, justice, subjectivity). Even the return of the past becomes an advent of the present, and

hardly ever a liberating moment of remembrance. Just as we see in OI, there is something

unapproachable in the past, and at the same time, it cannot be repressed, unless through a

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pathological process of psychological, intellectual or moral denial; the past simply continues

there, both far and near. Remembrance insists because in some way it is sovereign and

incontrollable; the empire of the past has not become weaker compared to the postmodern

“instant”, it is just disguised in museumfication, historical theme-parks, and best-sellers and

films that constantly reprocess the contents of the past – an era of auto-archaeologization, as

Charles Maier calls it (MAIER apud SARLO, 2005), a moment of “excavatory” procedures

that do make space into the present through literature and the space it offers to any

pathological resource – the merging of times, spaces and places, of facts and desires, of reality

and reverie. What we have is “visions of the past”, and as the past time cannot be eliminated –

it is a persecutor that enslaves or releases – its irruption into the present is understandable

since it is organized through narrative procedures and an ideology that makes evident a

significant and interpretable continuum of the time. Hence, no matter what strategy the

literary writer chooses, the past will remain there, inaccessible, as it is in Beckett’s plays,

despite all the attempts to reach it, despite the endless repetitions and denials. Based on

Michel de Certeau’s social ethnography, which merges with the ideology of “new subjects”

emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, Sarlo states that the subjective change, that ideological and

conceptual rearrangement of the society of the past and its characters, coincides with a similar

renovation in the sociology of culture and in the cultural studies, in which the identity of the

subjects once again took the place occupied in the 1960s by structures. What we have here is

the restoration of the subject’s reasoning, which had been for decades a mere “false

conscience”, a kind of dark hole that would hide a variety of impulses or mandates that were

necessarily ignored by the subject; consequently, the oral history and testimony brought back

the trust on the subject who narrates their lives (private, public, affective, political) to retain

memory or to repair a wounded identity (SARLO, 2007, p. 19). In fact, we can speak of

“wounded identities” in Beckett’s OI, and probably in almost all his other characters; and

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maybe this is why OI starts as a first person narrative, as we can see on the manuscripts,

moving then to a safer third person. In the backward-forward time line presented, there is an

exercise of not only retaining the past, dear memories, but also of unveiling identity wounds –

in OI, the subject keeps seeking comfort, but it will come from unfamiliarity, from a place or

dimension where identity cannot be restored; on the contrary, relief will come from

anonymity. Therefore, we do not need to know his sad tale to become aware that the subject is

wounded; his “acts of memory” reveal how conflictive the field of memory is. Its movement

backward and forward in time constantly conflicts with the idea of “never again”: at the same

time the story is going to be told again, the “dear name” cannot be spoken again, and the tale

will not be told again. According to Sarlo, “never again” is not a conclusion which leaves the

past behind, but a decision to avoid repetition through remembrance. In fact, in OI, “never

again” turns to be a strategy that will not let the past rest, but contrarily to what Sarlo says,

through obsessively using repetition, what Beckett does is keep remembrance, which

transforms the field of memory into that haunted space, a labyrinthic basement full of dark

corners made of reverie, desire and fear, as Bachelard would call. In Beckett, actually, there is

not real remembrance, but thoughts of it – there are the book and Reader; there are a narrator

and Listener, but the story is never really told and, consequently, memory is never really

restored, which leads us to think Beckett’s strategy much more towards what Susan Sontag

wrote: “Maybe it has been attributed too much value to memory and too little to thought; it is

more important understanding than remembering, although, in order to understand, it is also

necessary to remember” (SONTAG apud SARLO, 2007, p. 21). Maybe, this is what Beckett

aims at: to provoke thoughts rather than memories, which ends up being a leitmotif to force us

to stop functioning in an “automatic pattern” and move into a reflexive pattern through his

characters and all their multi-dimensionalities; that is, take us off our laziness – once again,

we are trapped in Beckett’s game.

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From the moment when the spirit of time in general, and of the individuals in

particular, have no more the ambition to dominate the social and natural surroundings, a more

ludicrous concept emerges: the game of the world, or the world as a game, which leads to the

logic of “living more”. According to this logic everybody is somehow possessed, and this

possession is a characteristic of the tragic; it invalidates or at least relativizes the modern

pretension to dominate everything (nature, history, society, ourselves). Yet, the tragic also

favors some kind of “quietist” mentality, made of indifference and non-activity, and which

reflects an evidence of decadence. “Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the islet.

Hour after hour. In his long black coat no matter what the weather…” (OI, p. 13): that is the

atmosphere in which the unnamed character circulates in his time spiral, a tone of quiet

decadence, of a resigned contemplative indifference, as if deep down in his heart he knew it

was an endless game and he was locked up in that time-space, in that drama, in a mix of

nostalgia and fatalism. The actual atmosphere tends toward the “contemplation of the world”,

a mixture of acceptance and joy: “giving space to the demoniac joy of living”; “turn your life

into an artwork” – that is the lesson which the tragic offers. What we call “crisis” is, in

Maffesoli’s opinion, just the fact that an entire society ceases to have conscience of the values

that constituted it and, therefore, has no confidence in them anymore. Among these values,

there is this constant dissatisfaction of hoping for a better society, the myth of heaven, of all

lands free from evil; the desire for somewhere else.

The dreamer in his corner has erased the world in a detailed reverie that

destroys one by one all the objects of the world. The corner becomes a cabinet of

memories. Having crossed the thousand little gates of the disorder of the things in

the dust, the object-memories put the past in order. (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 151).

“O sonhador em seu canto riscou o mundo num devaneio minucioso que destrói um a um todos os objetos do

mundo. O canto torna-se um armário de lembranças. Tendo transposto os mil pequenos umbrais da desordem das

coisas na poeira, os objetos-lembranças põem em ordem o passado”.

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The contemporary nostalgia brings out sadness, a feeling of abandonment, but at the

same time, the ability of a collective resistance through irony and mockery – what Maffesoli

calls the “organic cement”, originated from the Baroque, and whose force lies on the fusion of

the elements that compose it. Irision, sadness, elegiac feeling are but the translation of the

nostalgia of the “true” country which does not belong to any specific time but to the

“atemporal” that flows from the synergy of the varied human temporality. “In his last attempt

to obtain relief he moved from where they had been so long together to a single room on the

far bank. From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the isle of Swans”

(OI, p. 12). Contemporary human temporality melts with space, dislocating it to an almost

ethereal condition, to an un-localized space, for it does not belong to any specific time, as

Maffesoli states, and consequently it does not belong anywhere. Therefore, like Beckett’s

character, we keep moving space through time seeking relief until the “true country” becomes

a single window through which we can see the past, or anything we want to believe is part of

it. Nostalgia, through its many expressions (irony, humor, mockery, etc.), is then the

conservatory that makes possible living here wishing for another surreal, mythical place,

made of dreams, symbols, projections. The nostalgia of what Maffesoli calls the “country of

immobile time” translates the desire for something that has never existed, something that is

present in the social imaginary with unsuspected pregnancy. The myth of paradise, says the

author, is a recurrent theme; all the Atlantis are non-places, dream lands that appear in the

confluence of those human parameters, which are precisely the omniric, ludicrous, and the

imaginary reality. It is some kind of experience beyond or beneath time, an ephemeral eternity

in which time as linearity is replaced by the relativity of duration. And this is the drama lived

by almost all Beckett’s characters, but especially in OI by this man who keeps moving in the

hope that relief would flow from unfamiliarity, who keeps circulating around a time and space

that do not have a definite location – they constantly move from reality to memory, then to

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reverie, and vice versa. The only concrete material we have is the poetic imagination, and in

this regard, Gaston Bachelard (2003, introdução) states that the cultural past does not count –

so, there is nothing to be told – what is necessary is to be in the present, present to the image

at the minute of the image: the poetic image is the sudden highlight of the psyche, he says, it

has its own being, its own dynamics, and its power lies on its ability to impact us, our own

existence, inviting us to dig deeper into it. According to Bachelard, the repercussion of one

single poetic image can provoke a true awakening of the poetic creation in the reader’s soul,

and, in OI, the power of Beckett’s poetic images reaches us through the indefiniteness of time

and space, which does not only allow us to locate ourselves into them, but also gives us a

sense of timing – in this case, a lack of it, a sense of distorted timing that shows us that Time

is a separated identity, running apart from the events of life, apart from us. The time image

used by Beckett impacts his readers, no matter how much lazy or limited they are, and it is

constructed through space, through the lack of its delimitation, which becomes even stronger

with the fragmented information we receive throughout the text – the downstream of the Isle

of Swans, the room, the window, the islet that he paced day after day. “The image of the river

(the Seine)”, points out Knowlson,

with its two arms flowing into one another after they have divided to flow around

the island (the Allée des Cignes or Isle of Swans, where Beckett and Joyce used to

walk together) is a clue to the meaning of the play. For at its emotional center lie

sadness, loss, and solitude, contrasted with a memory of togetherness.

This feeling of loss suggests that the figure in the narrative who has been left to live

alone is deeply rooted in Beckett’s personal and imaginative life (KNOWLSON,

1996, p. 585).

Knowlson also refers to a dinner conversation he had with Beckett in 1981 about OI,

which caused surprise to many of his friends who saw him and his wife, Suzanne, in the last

ten years of their lives, when they were often irritable with each other. Despite the difficult

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times between them, they stayed married for over forty years, and there was never any

question of his leaving her, although Suzanne had commented to a friend that their marriage

was a marriage of bachelors. Actually, all this time together, including the good times and

those when he wished he was alone, according to Knowlson, appear to be evoked in OI:

“Could he not now turn back? Acknowledge his error and return to where they were so long

alone together. Alone together so much shared. No. What he had done alone could not be

undone. Nothing he had ever done alone could ever be undone. By him alone” (OI, p. 14).

We spoke first of the link with Joyce: “Of course,” he commented of the hat

and the Isle of Swans. I then told him that I had heard the “dear face” who is evoked

by the Reader referred to as if it were the face of Joyce. “It is a woman, isn’t it?” I

asked. “It’s Suzanne,” he replied. “I’ve imagined her dead so many times. I’ve even

imagined myself trudging out to her grave.” (KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 585)

In spite of the biographical reference, this location in space is constantly faded by a

following information: the room is unfamiliar, the scene is unfamiliar: “Out to where nothing

ever shared. Back to where nothing ever shared”. […] “Then turn and his slow steps retrace.

In his dreams” (OI, p. 13). Of course, we must remember Bachelard when he states that

“every reader who re-reads a work that they love knows that the beloved pages concern

them”.

Therefore, we do not intend to ignore the personal amount of impact we suffer into

our own souls every time we read OI, but as Bachelard also says, a little impulse of

admiration is necessary in order to obtain the phenomenological benefice of a poetic image

which, the minimal it becomes, the more powerful it will be. The “literary miniature”, that is

the literary image that remarks on the inversions in the perspective of greatness, activate deep

values (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 159): values engulf in the miniature, which makes us dream;

“... todo leitor que relê uma obra que ama sabe que as páginas amadas lhe dizem respeito” (BACHELARD,

2003, p. 10).

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therefore, the “minuscule opens a world” – the miniature worlds, states the author, are

dominated worlds, and they bring comfort.

Quoting Baltasar Gracián, who says that “what is not seen is as if it did not exist”, the

feeling of tragic typical of any theatricalized existence comes from the idea that something

cannot be true unless it has a closure, a realization and, consequently, is finite. This is,

according to Maffesoli, a paradox that makes the work of understanding the social world

difficult – the essential values are the most visible and, at the same time, the less localizable.

The specificity of the tragic, says Maffesoli, is in considering the existence in its totality: light

needs shadow, good is not possible unless it allows its contrary its relative space; what

matters is the situation in which the contraries mix up. Life cannot be divided; it includes

shadows and lights, generosity and baseness, the coincidence between death and life, body

and spirit, nature, and culture. The barbarian does not oppose the civilized anymore; on the

contrary, it is one of its components – this conjunction is definitely the essential characteristic

of postmodernity and of the tragic as well. They accumulate, imply, complexify the simple

mechanics that modernity made so specific. In this regard, Roger Bastide proposes a

“mythology of the masks”, which would express the “ensemble of reflections” that constitute

the whole – the mask as a speaker of a discourse that overruns the individual who expresses it.

That is why in Greek tragedy the masks and their big open mouths represent the “voice of

destiny”. Although we cannot talk about a “voice of destiny” in OI – at least not in the Greek

way – unless we are talking about a disguising voice, the white faces and their ghostly aspect

play the role of masks, not to bring enlightenment to the characters’ destiny but, besides

introducing a morbid quality, to reinforce the mirror image on a visual level as much as on the

linguistic level with the fragmentation in the narrative from “I” to “he”, and to “they” at the

end.

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With all of these contrasts, it is appropriate that the same typescript describes

a situation in which the character suffers from “the mirror image of his present

predicament” and that Reader and Listener in the final play mirror one another as

doubles, or, alternatively, together constitute the right and left aspects of a single

persona. “He said” prefaces the statement related by “I” because over the course of

the narrative “he” supersedes “I” and contributes to the erasure of the first person.

The subsequent jump from “he” to “they” does not require much linguistic artifice,

since the two characters mirror one another onstage, a visual doppelgänger that

elegantly dissolves the difference between singular and plural identities.

Within the first three complete sentences of Ohio Impromptu this fragmentation of

“I” into “they” takes place:

R: [Reading.] Little is left to tell. In a last –

[L knocks with left hand on table.]

Little is left to tell.

[Pause. Knock.]

In a last attempt to obtain relief he moved from where they had been so long

together to a single room on the far bank. From its single window he could see the

downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans. (OI, p. 12) <SEELIG, A., p. 9>

Moreover, we can also consider the mask as a pictorial disguise for the author’s

editorializing voice, which is a procedure that can be identified in most of Beckett’s late

plays, such as Not I, (1972), That Time (1976), Footfalls (1976), and Catastrophe (1982). As

David Pattie states in Space, Time, and the Self in Beckett’s Late Theatre, published in

Modern Drama, Volume 43, number 3, similarly to OI, the late plays employ the idea of the

editor still working on the text, and the idea of a voice whose relation to the image is unfixed.

Actually, Beckett made a number of false starts, while staying in Ussy in 1980, from where he

wrote to Gontarski saying that he thought he was on to something, but it had petered out and

he was going to try again. One of the fragments focused “on a ghost returning from the

underworld to speak at such a conference, the other on a figure trying and failing to thread a

needle – were drily witty, teasing, and whimsical. But both were abandoned, perhaps because

the first piece seemed too trite and the second too personal” (KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 585). In

OI, the process becomes more sophisticated; we do not simply have a voice in the backstage

informing the audience about the character’s identity or destiny, we have Reader reading to a

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Listener who just knocks on the table, which leads Reader to repeat the sentence, as if that

listener were the one editing the story at the moment it was being read, and we, the audience,

are there as witnesses of the poetic process. At this point, the mask gains importance in the

mirroring strategy, for it brings uncertainty to the play and its narrator/author – could it be

Reader the editor instead? It also brings a “spatiotemporal displacement of the story”

(PATTIE). It seems, at first, that we are listening to the “memoirs” of a single subject that

happened at some moment in the past; yet, when we add the editor figure, everything is

displaced differently and we are presented with the possibility of a fake subject and his fake

memoirs. Therefore, time and space once more relocate all the elements of the play, including

the spectator who had been thrown into the dark time-space of the man and his suffering past

and quickly pulled back to the reality of fiction; and then we realize that we entered a

masquerade ball and Beckett is its master of ceremony.

Actually, in Anatomie d’André Gide, Roger Bastide (1972) proposes a “mythology of

the masks”, which would express the “ensemble of reflections” that constitute the whole; the

mask as “speakers” of a discourse that over crosses the individual who pronounces it. The

modern individual, states Maffesoli (2003), is but an atom of a mechanism and therefore is

tied to one specific “function” for his entire life, and this function requires a “costume” which

is also merely functional, in order to avoid any fantasy – like the watch-point in a factory, the

costume and the individual who wears it repeat forever the monotony of existence. Frivolity is

left to the poet, the outsider, or the woman. Our century, says the author, is a century of an

“extreme sociability”, the self loses itself in the other; the community prevails over the

individual. The contemporary mask became a neutral, non-personalized uniform, hiding the

individual’s identity, which gets lost within the concept of community, fragmented in

anonymity, like Listener and Reader, whose identities are lost behind the form.

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Like the contemporary world full of opacity, in Beckett, what we see is the opacity of

art, that is, it can reveal only its own revelatory process and not a reality beyond it, which is

expressed by the excavatory work of emptying meaning from words, for language in Beckett

represents a barrier to art, and creates a state of chaos, of inexplicability of the world. As

Beckett explains to Tom Driver in 1961, “The confusion is not my invention…. It is all

around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our

eyes and see the mess (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 67)”. And, if we think of

literature as language producing the union between imaginary and reason; if we think of man

as language, we see that he and his cultural productions are authentic real masks, like a

multilayer mask, whose true face is, according to Bella Jozef (2006) also a mask. In the game

of significance, states the author, the word is a mask that covers the lack of meaning, reflected

in the absence of a story or of an essential time. As literature does not reveal reality, the

discourse does not extinguish itself in the representation, and its similitude with the referent is

a simulation that appears as mask in a process of concealment that unfolds endlessly. It

possesses in itself a dissimilitude that provokes perversion (JOZEF, 2006, p. 47).

The mythology of the masks, or the game of appearances, is regularly expressed in

human stories when death makes itself omnipresent; actually, after 1968, with all the political

and cultural changes affecting also the field of the arts, the role and space of the mask also

had its limits revisited and, from a facial hiding artifice, it invaded the whole body, it became

the character itself – the actor looks at the mask, feels it and embodies it. According to

Salvatore Sartori (interview in the program Starte, on Globo News Channel, on August 13,

2008), the mask became a figure which represents the masquerading game of revealing-

veiling of the contemporary world. The brightness of appearance has no other function than

remind finitude, impermanence, which today can be seen in contemporary happenings, body

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art, or even in music. Appearance is built under and for the other’s attention; the Self loses

itself in the “Other”; the community prevails over the individual. The tragic is simply the

expression of these antinomies; the more imperfect, the more fertile; when there is friction,

opposition, contestation, disorder, there is vitality. Perfection, says Maffesoli, is a sign of

death; this is why cultural and scientific works are usually created in situations dominated by

disorder and insanity. The postmodern holism is marked by an excessive participation that

provokes a multiplicity of communions around various totems – it is the time of “small gods”.

Therefore the importance of rituals, of signs of recognition, of specific linguistic practices, for

they function as a new ethics, as the cement of social ties; and contemporary art plays this

role, since it leads those who contemplate it to a fusion with the great Whole; as it is itself the

whole, it can lead to fusion, and to the confusion which is the aesthetic environment. In

contemplation, there is some kind of death, the ‘little death’ from ecstasy. An artwork,

passing through death, allows the transcendence of death and the participation in the

rejuvenescence of the world (MAFFESOLI, 2003, p.185).

In regard to the twentieth century art, Theodor Adorno, in Teoria Estética, considers

its situation as aporetic, due to its progressive integration to the culture of the bourgeoisie

through the popularization of the mass media and the consequent loss of value, despite its

basis on suffering and absurdity (ADORNO apud RICHARD, 1989, p.106). And this is how

the Theater of the Absurd views the postmodern world and society. Apparently, this is what

we see also in the work of Samuel Beckett: an immense disillusion, a total disbelief in the

possibility of human integrity and happiness – only apparently, though. Truly, instead of

being called the master of the Absurd, Beckett could be called the master of resilience, that

psychological skill which gives the human being the strength to rebuild themselves, to rescue

their integrity, even in moments of extreme pain and difficulty. This is what we see in Ham

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and Clov’s persistence in Endgame; this is what we see in OI, in the exercise of

reading/remembering more than once a never truly told story, as if this impossibility of

unveiling it assured its retention in space and continuity in time. “In his dreams he had been

warned against this change. Seen the dear face and heard the unspoken words, Stay where we

were so long alone together, my shade will comfort you” (OI, p. 14). Here, the tragic

consciousness of destiny and the role that shadow plays in our lives become evident – it helps

carry the desire for suspension, for detaining the time running, as if it were still possible to

“become” despite knowing that we are perishing. Although reinforcing melancholy, the

nostalgia of that indistinct place hardly found in time and space, the shadow became another

co-presence in alterity, another voice playing within our consciousness as it reinforces the

belief that somewhere our mythical Paradise will not be consumed in the act by which it is

created, envisioned by our desire. And the only way of holding it is through unfamiliarity,

through going “back to where nothing ever shared”, through “so long a lapse that as if never

been”, through the unspoken word, for “with never a word exchanged they grew to be as

one”. It is the shadows of unfamiliarity that keep the “instant” suspended, that prevent time

from consuming life itself, that makes evident that also for Beckett’s characters life, the

world, existence might not be worthy but there is nothing worthier than life, as Maffesoli

stated. In this alterity, man becomes a puppet, and the forces that overcome him and to which

he must adapt are his companions, the generators of his multiple identity. This is what

justifies Reader going back and reading the same page one more time; this is what justifies

Listener’s silence as if in a mutual non-verbal agreement that, once the story was kept on

hold, it would still be possible to return to that unfamiliar room which would feed them with

the necessary un-melting reference from reality – the downstream extremity of the Isle of

Swans. Therefore, Atlantis can continue to exist.

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2.2. THE LIQUID MODERNITY IN OHIO IMPROMPTU

When analyzing the contemporary urban space, Zygmunt Bauman refers to the

concept of city presented by Richard Sennett, which consists of a human settlement where

strangers can meet. These encounters, though, do not dissolve the initial condition of

unfamiliarity that these people presented before. In this way, according to Bauman, the

encounter of strangers is marked by a total discontinuity, as no possibilities of recapturing the

dialogue are offered, and this is no common history – it is an event without past and many

times without future, one single story with the duration of the instantaneity of its act. Now,

what we have is an “ethics of the instant”, situations that exhaust themselves in the act itself

which cannot be projected into a predictable future nor can be controlled by will. However,

we must remember: we are walking through works of poetic imagination and, within them, as

Bachelard states, facts do not explain values, the latter have such a sign of novelty that

everything which derives from the past is inert in relation to them; the whole memory needs

to be re-imagined. Therefore, the poet’s universe will always be a world of unfamiliarity; “he

has led us into a position limit, a limit that we are afraid of crossing, between insanity and

reason, between those alive and the dead one” (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 181).

It is this urban concept of unfamiliarity and discontinuity that permeates Beckett’s

work and creates its aura; and the architecture of the city in OI is precisely what unveils this

element in the drama. Like a rhizome in OI’s net – the dear places, the single room with one

single window, the Isle of Swans, the path many times retraced – all these spatial references,

actually, bring to light the discontinuity, the absence of a common history. What we see in

OI, is the space perceived by imagination, a “lived space”, as Bachelard would say, with all

the partialities of imagination, a space that almost always attracts, concentrates the being

within the limits it protects, as if in a Renaissance painting. The difference is in the relations

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between outer and inner space, but, as Bachelard would also say: “In the kingdom of images,

the game between the exterior and intimacy is not a balanced game”.

It is not about

examining men but images, and in the topography of the house proposed by the author, as the

topography of our inner self, images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are

in them, and, in this process of inhabiting, in which belonging means necessarily to shrink,

another dialectics rises – the dialectics of the small and the big, in all its relativism

(BACHELARD, 2003, p. 20). In the topoanalysis of the house, it is easy to identify this dual

movement, which is present in the pursuit of protection and, at the same time, of freedom; the

problem is that to feel protected we must find illusions of comfort, which we will find in the

smallest shelter, where imagination builds “walls” with untouchable shadows. On the other

hand, these walls can also make us tremble and doubt its limits, and in this process we make

the space of the house, the space of our imagination, alive in its reality and virtuality as well,

changeable through thoughts and dreams. The house, says Bachelard, like fire and water, will

allow us to evoke fleeting lights of reverie that enlighten the synthesis of the immemorial with

remembrance – there is a union between memory and image, between memory and

imagination. And so moves the OI’s character from the large house full of past experiences to

a single room with its single window (the smallest shelter), as much as his story told by

Reader: through shadows of memory and imagination in a perfect synthesis between reality

and virtuality, dialectically looking for shelter, knowing that, if there is a possibility of

comfort, it will only come from unfamiliarity. Beckett’s character lives from his fixations of

happiness, a state that is only real in the past and whose comfort will come from

remembering, from reviving those memories of protection – the desire that nothing would

ever change, “From this he had once half hoped some measure of relief might flow” (OI, p.

13). And, in order to reach comfort, the character’s space must be reduced to a single room, a

“No reino das imagens, o jogo entre o exterior e a intimidade não é um jogo equilibrado”. (BACHELARD,

2003, p. 19)

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single window – there, in the smallest shelter, in the house, is where the reverie lies. The

house, says Bachelard (2003, p. 26-29), shelters the reverie, protects the dreamer, it makes

possible to dream in peace, to feel comfort – that is the benefice of the house. The house holds

the power of integrating man’s thoughts, memories and dreams through reverie, but it is

necessary for the one who found shelter in the smallest place to feel the experience of being

thrown away, expelled from the house, and feel the hostility from men and from the universe.

This is how the metaphysics of consciousness is activated: the struggle between small and

big, between known and unknown, comfort and discomfort. That is the struggle that the OI’s

character fights– he has been thrown out of his shelter, exposed to the hostility of men and of

the universe; the only thing that holds him is the memory, or the image of the “dear name”,

the remembrance or the reverie of a time and space “where they had been so long together”

(OI, p. 12). According to Bachelard, space rises for the poet as the subject of the verb “to

unfold”, of the verb “to grow”; “when a space is a value – and will there be greater value than

intimacy? – it grows”.

The topoanalysis would then be the systematic psychological study of

the locals of our inner life.

In this theater of the past, which is the memory, the scenery keeps the

characters in their dominant role. At times, we believe we know ourselves in time,

whilst what is known is only a series of fixations in the spaces of stabilities of being,

of a being who does not want to pass in time; who in their own past, when in search

of the lost time, wants to “suspend” the flight of time. In its thousand alveoli, space

retains the compressed time. That is the role of space.

“Quando um espaço é um valor – e haverá maior valor que a intimidade? – ele cresce”. (BACHELARD, 2003,

p. 206)

“Nesse teatro do passado que é a memória, o cenário mantém os personagens em seu papel dominante. Por

vezes, acreditamos conhecer-nos no tempo, ao passo que se conhece apenas uma série de fixações nos espaços

da estabilidade do ser, de um ser que não quer passar no tempo; que no próprio passado, quando sai em busca do

tempo perdido, quer ‘suspender” o vôo do tempo. Em seus mil alvéolos, o espaço retém o tempo comprimido. É

essa a função do espaço” (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 28).

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In a sort of tacit agreement, the characters, Reader, and Listener fight against time,

through keeping the fixations from the past, their spaces of stabilities; and every time they go

back in time, it is not to reveal the past – it cannot be revealed because they do not really

know themselves, they can only hold fixations, fragments of memory immersed in reverie – it

is just an attempt to suspend time into space, and consequently provoke new fragmentations

on the character’s identity, as we can see more clearly in one of the unsequenced drafts of MS

2930 series:

…the fragmentation of character occurs more explicitly in the form of a division

between Voice and Actor (V & A), which reflects the split between author and

character in the typescript. V, like the author, dictates the proceedings on stage. He

begins by calling out stage directions, first asking for the curtain to rise and then for

an adjustment of the actor’s spotlight. Once the stage is set properly, V proceeds to

narrate the “needle and thread” monologue in the third person while A enacts the

words. However, at the beginning of the monologue A makes a mistake and is

promptly reprimanded by V: “V: In his right hand – (A raises L.H. into light.) The

other, fool.” Here V and A are fragmented enough to cause a breakdown in simple

communication; for, as the author is connected to his characters, V and A are closely

related but estranged from each other. This separation and consequent differentiation

of V and A marks a significant step in the derangement of a single consciousness,

which will evolve into two separate characters (i.e., Reader and Listener) by the

final play. <SEELIG, p. 7>

The simpler the house remained, the more it works its inhabitants’ imagination, says

Bachelard, it is not just a “representation”: its lines are “fortresses”. “[The shelter] wants to be

simply inhabited, with the great safety that simplicity brings”.

This is why amongst so many

shadows, we are presented with few concrete, localized references, e.g., the Isle of Swans, the

far banks, the view from the window – they help fix time, they bring stability to a scarily

changing world, haunting us with the possibility of fading away, of disappearing. And, facing

this dilemma of solitude, states Bachelard, the topoanalyst argues: Was the room big? Was the

attic cluttered with things? Was the corner warm? Where did the light come from? How, in

“[O abrigo] quer ser habitado simplesmente, com a grande segurança que a simplicidade proporciona”

(BACHELARD, 2003, p. 66).

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these spaces, the being got in touch with silence? How did such special silences of the various

shelters of lonely reverie taste? Too many questions for “lazy readers”, as Beckett defined us;

but, if we make an effort, we can see that the more the author reduces the characters’ spaces,

the more we foresee the attic and how cluttered it is – it is full of our own material images,

beautiful fossils, sedimented by long permanencies, full of fixative shadows; and if we do not

know how to get in touch with silence, the author helps us giving us time, pauses throughout

the text to help digest the spaces of solitude, which are ours too. It is from silence that

listening is born, says the poet and philosopher Ruben Alves

: we listen only if our inner

noise is silenced; we can only listen to the other’s truth if we stop chattering – the poets, these

creatures of minimal speech, know it; they speak, but to hear the voices of silence, like in the

poem Cessa teu canto!, by Fernando Pessoa, directed to a poet:

Cessa o teu canto! Cessa, que, enquanto O ouvi, ouvia Uma outra voz Com que

vindo Nos interstícios Do brando encanto Com que o teu canto Vinha até nós.

Ouvi-te e ouvi-a No mesmo tempo E diferentes Juntas cantar. E a melodia Que não

havia. Se agora a lembro, Faz-me chorar.

The magic of the poem, continues Rubem Alves, is not in the words of the poet; it is

in the silent interstices between their words; it is in that silence that we can hear the melody

which was not there before –the magic, then, happens: the melody makes us cry. The spaces

of solitude carry the human dilemma, for the space that makes us suffer is also the one that

brings us comfort, the joy that we wish for, and although it is written that comfort would

come from unfamiliarity, repetition in OI makes it evident that it comes from re-visiting those

spaces that do not aim to be extended but, above all, wish to be possessed once more. The

Extract from Bons Fluidos magazine, number 73, 2008, p. 38.

Extract from O Cancioneiro, by Fernando Pessoa. Available at <www.ciberfil literature digital>, site visited

on February 10

2009.

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character, as much as Listener, does not long for an extension but for possessing and being

possessed by those spaces of fixations in time – comfort comes from the possibility of this

dual movement of possessing and being possessed.

“Samuel Beckett’s new plays tantalize the mind as well as the eye…. We are

transfixed by the intensity of the artistic vision”.

“Poets and painters are born

phenomenologists”, writes J. H. Van den Berg (J. H. VAN DEN BERG apud BACHELARD,

2003, p. 12), and Gaston Bachelard states that the poetic consciousness is so totally absorbed

by the image which appears in language, it speaks with the poetic image such new language,

that we cannot productively consider correlations with past and present anymore. Therefore,

whenever we are exposed to a poetic image, we face something new, fresh, even when we

face aesthetic echoes from the past in a contemporary composition, such as in Beckett’s play.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s concept in OI is not the Renaissance concept anymore, it is something

totally new, re-imagined, reprocessed into something else: a melting postmodern, and we

might add “absurd”, visual poetic image especially brought up by Samuel Beckett, who seems

to have been able to accomplish something that Bachelard considers a difficult act: the act of

overcoming knowledge, for knowledge ought to be followed by an equal forgetfulness of

knowledge – “non-knowledge is not ignorance, but a difficult act of going beyond

knowledge”.

Beckett majestically overcomes knowledge; he does not quote, he processes

old references into a new poetic image; like a painter who collects old objects and transforms

them into a new genuine artwork, he collects references from his personal story, from his

visits to museums, from his cultural experience to transform them into his own art. Art, states

Bachelard (2003, p. 17), is a reduplication of life, a sort of emulation into the surprises that

This is how Mel Gussow described the three plays, Catastrophe, What Where, and Ohio Impromptu, in The

New York Times, when the plays opened on June 15, 1983.

“...é preciso que o saber seja acompanhado de um igual esquecimento do saber. O não-saber não é uma

ignorância, mas um ato difícil de superação do conhecimento”. (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 16)

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excite our consciousness and prevent it from falling asleep, and the contemporary artist does

not consider the image as a simple substitute of a sensible reality; what they do is bring to life

a new variety of that previous image. The pyramidal perspective in OI, for instance, is not Da

Vinci’s anymore, but a new variety of pyramidal perspective that comes, as Bachelard would

say, to “enhance the family” of perspectives, or artistic concepts – what we have in Beckett’s

play is a game with “images of intimacy” – a “poetics of the house”. Therefore, many

questions are raised:

…how do secret rooms, disappeared rooms, turn into homes for an unforgettable

past? Where and how does relief find privileged situations? How do ephemeral

refuges and occasional shelters receive, at times, from our intimate reveries, values

that have no objective basis? With the image of the house, we have a true principle

of psychological integration. Descriptive psychology, psychology of the depths,

[…], it seems that the image of the house becomes the topography of our inner

being. (BACHELARD, 2003, p.20)

The house, in Bachelard’s topology, is the place that holds our childhood immobile;

consequently, omnirically inhabiting it is more than inhabiting it through memory; it means

living in the missing house just as the way we dreamed it was once, with its corridors, attics,

and basements. In the same way we move from one room to another, from the basement to the

attic, and vice versa, we move from the concrete world to the dreamed one and, then, what is

real and what is dream become one. In the attic, the daily experience may dissipate the fears

of the night; in the basement, however, there is darkness night-and-day, “even with a candle

in his hand, man sees the shadows dancing on the black wall of the basement”.

Like the

poet and Beckett himself who suffered from insomnia, followed by dreadful nights and

feelings of panic (KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 77), Beckett’s character is aware of that and, in his

“[...] como é que aposentos secretos, aposentos desaparecidos, transformam-se em moradas para um passado

inolvidável? Onde e como o repouso encontra situações privilegiadas? Como os refúgios efêmeros e os abrigos

ocasionais recebem por vezes, de nossos devaneios íntimos, valores que não tem a menor base objetiva? Com a

imagem da casa, temos um verdadeiro principio de integração psicológica. Psicologia descritiva, psicologia das

profundidades, [...], parece que a imagem da casa se torna a topografia do nosso ser íntimo.”

“Mesmo com uma vela na mão, o homem vê as sombras dançarem na muralha negra do porão”

(BACHELARD, 2003, p. 38).

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despair, he struggles to stay awake, to fight the shadows of his own night and the terror they

bring; daylight, like youth, brings the hope to keep reverie and fears under control – the

postmodern terror of fading away, of having never existed. The dawn of day is the window

through which the postmodern man can see possibilities of continuity in time, of existing no

matter where, no matter how; as long as he continues awake and telling/reading his story; like

in Endgame, like in Waiting for Godot, he is alive, there is still time to wait a little longer. In

OI, the window is the image that brings light to the character’s life, especially in the film,

where the director shows it in the scene and adds color through it – the image-symbol which,

despite bringing hope, symbolizes also solitude, the dark loneliness lived by the character. In

the kingdom of imagination, the house and the universe mutually throw themselves in

opposite reveries; it seems that, says Bachelard (2003, p. 50), by inhabiting stabilizing

images, we would start another life, a life that would be ours, in the depths of our being. “In

this extremity his old terror of night laid hold on him again. […] White nights now again his

portion. As when his heart was young. No sleep no braving sleep till […] dawn of day” (OI,

p. 15). The night is typically the time and space for dreaming, and dreams do not only allow

us to use our imagination and escape from reality, adjusting it according to our wishes;

according to Bachelard, sometimes, they go so deeply down into an undefined past, into a past

that is so unleashed from its dates, that the clear memories of our home seem to unleash

themselves from us. These dreams surprise our reverie, and we even doubt having lived where

we lived (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 71). Therefore, Beckett’s character must struggle to stay

awake; no sleeping because he might risk to lose the only memories that support his identity,

his existence as individual; he must wait for dawn and resist like “when his heart was young”.

Here, we have another reference to time given by the author – the character is not young

anymore, time has passed, life has passed; again, we seem to be receiving an encoded

message: your past, your story, is the only thing that can assure your continuity in time, the

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fossils that can guarantee you that you really existed in some moment in life’s timeline; so,

guard it with as many symbols you can retain as possible and trust that white nights will come

again and enlighten your soul with new possibilities of not falling into nothingness. Beckett’s

character goes through the same struggle: self-effacement, just like the author’s process of

writing. In Beckett, states Adam Seelig,

the process pervades the text – the process of being reduced to absence, the process

of dying – so that over the course of composition the process gradually becomes the

work. The way in which Beckett produces meaninglessness is that meaninglessness

itself. The process is the message – the method, the madness. <SEELIG, p. 3>

The facts, says Bachelard, have the value that memory gives them; the distant memory

does not remember them unless it attributes value to them, an aura of happiness. Maybe that is

the reason why the dear name cannot be spoken, the dear face cannot be seen, the story cannot

be told; if they were, they might erase that aura of happiness mentioned by Bachelard and

force to ask whether what happened did really happen in the way we cherish them through

memory and reverie. On the other hand, the author states that it is necessary that all values

tremble– a value that does not tremble is a dead value, and Beckett seems to follow the same

belief: more than being an apologist of history, what he proposes, not only in OI, is that we

question our values. Even more, he makes those values tremble in front of us, values such as

the power of words and communication, as we can see in Godot; the power of history and

tradition, as we can see in Endgame in the figures of Clov’s parents putrefying in a dustbin

and eating dog food as they unsuccessfully try to remember past historical events; the power

of memory, as we can see in OI, especially in the figure of Listener who, by knocking on the

table, demands the story to be read again, as if it needed to be checked, as if Reader were not

trustworthy anymore; or would it be the story? Or was Listener trying to reconstitute the “tone

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of the voices, the inflexion of the dear voices that silenced” and, with them, the resonance of

all the rooms of the “sound house”, as Bachelard would say? In fact, darkness and silence are

full of sounds in OI, the pauses are spaces for our echoes to come out of their little rooms and

walk around the attic, with no need of words, no compromising “insignificant confidences”

until light arrives from reality and wakes us up. Actually, throughout times, the act of being

alone, states Julio Conte (SOUSA, 2001), exposed to silence and to the infinite space, has

been invested with the power of creativity; isolation forces us to “think our own thoughts”,

and that means coping with their absence until something comes out. Handling the absence of

thoughts means listening to our deepest and noisiest silence, and somehow touching our

insanity; it is the moment of encountering our truth, which is the truth of our unconscious.

Loneliness, according to Conte, means being alone with someone or something that belongs

to the order of the omnirical and transitory; as Luigi Pirandello states, being alone means

“being without myself; therefore, with a stranger nearby” (PIRANDELLO, 2001).

In fact, the mise-en-scène of a play is the realization of a process constructed in the

solitude of an office, a great example of which is the work by Constantin Stanislavsky who

innovated the theatrical language in 1898 when he directed The Seagull, by Anton Chekcov,

which required from him more than a month in total isolation, in order to decode Chekcov’s

work – a play that was considered inefficient by the critics, due to its monotony, lack of color

in the description of a mediocre reality of the character’s everyday life. The difficulties in

adjusting to a non-orthodox play, added to the silence involving the artist’s process, put him

in touch with his “other side”, a stranger that made him start to question not only the play but

also his work as an artist, bringing about a state of crisis, feelings of abandonment and chaos.

In one of his letters to his wife during this period, he wrote:

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All this is not serious. It is, certainly, a useless devotion a person devotes

themselves to this kind of life. Wouldn’t I be doing the same? These thoughts worry

me very much. I used to think that theater was a serious and respectful occupation,

but nothing seems to make sense. I am starting to doubt not only my life, but those

of many people are being waisted. Again, I cannot avoid thinking that I must do

something different to live (SOUSA ET al., org., p. 151).

Stanislavsky’s process makes evident not only the effect of loneliness in the director’s

work but also the effect of the play itself over the audience, showing how much he was

affected by the play’s mood, by the world’s lack of sense, and by the urgent need of social

transformation that the text announces. Diving into the crisis, says Conte, Stanislavsky burned

out in the absurd, bedeviled by uncontrollable unrecognizable thoughts, and that seems to be

Beckett’s process as well: the same feelings that characterize the Theater of the Absurd as a

whole permeate the author’s/director’s constructive process, throwing him and his audience

into the core of a crisis that goes beyond a personal level. This crisis becomes evident through

the silencing process of construction that we can identify through the manuscripts and through

the silence and emptiness that permeate the characters’ communication, which reflects the

same emotional state that we see in Stanislavsky’s letter – worrying thoughts. The doubts

mentioned by the Russian director are also present in OI and that is that is something which

we can be certain of: through the doubts that involve the character, we are immersed in a

universe of doubts about our own existence and its meaning; we are left in a state of isolation

which, according to Conte, is a “splendid” condition, for it forces us to think of our own

thoughts, and that means bearing their absence until something new rises, coping with the

unknown, aware that, even when facing chaos and complete lack of meaning, life will still

Tudo isso não é sério. É, com certeza, uma devoção inútil uma pessoa se dedicar a este tipo de vida. Será que

não estou fazendo o mesmo? Estes pensamentos me preocupam muito. Pensava que o palco era uma ocupação

séria e digna, mas nada parece fazer sentido. Estou começando a duvidar não só da minha vida, mas a de muita

gente está sendo desperdiçada. De novo, não posso evitar de pensar que devo fazer algo diferente para viver

(SOUSA ET all., org., p. 151).

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insist on pursuing meaning. On a certain level, this condition evokes the psychoanalytic

approach on literary theory by Marcelin Pleynet, whose thesis was based on the idea that,

from the moment that religion does not represent human’s psychological repressions

anymore, man starts to accumulate them. According to the author, this religious impossibility

generated a cultural and psychic trauma that turned modern art into the stage of its compulsive

repetition, once this trauma is never clarified because it is never treated; modern art was seen

as an ensemble of symptoms of that psychological repression, and only through language, that

is literature, it would be genealogically clarified, moving towards consciousness and,

therefore, being able to release the stage of compulsive repetition of that original trauma and

inaugurate a new history (PLEYNET, 1977, p. 33-35). Although this fundamentalist Freudian

approach goes back to the 1960-1970s, a time when psychoanalysis represented the

mainstream in literary and art criticism, which according to Stéphane Huchet (SOUZA et al.,

2001) has already been subverted especially by the works of authors who are more strongly

connected to the visual arts, and here we can include Samuel Beckett for his interest in and

deep knowledge of art, the fact is that we can identify this repetitive “trauma” mentioned by

Pleynet in most of Beckett’s works, and especially in OI. Repetition of visual elements

(characters), repetition of movements, facts and words, they all bring to surface the

impossibility of “treating”, as Pleynet would say, an original repression which, as it is never

really faced, cannot release the past and inaugurate a new story. We have then Clov and Ham

constantly going back to some past story never really finished; we have Reader and Listener

repeatedly going back to the never told story; in OI, even the unspoken words, the silence are

repetitive and visibly pregnant of trauma. With no words, there is no need for the poet (the

playwright) to overcome his fears, his lack of courage, and compromise himself, for,

according to Bachelard, great simple images reveal a state of the soul, and OI is pregnant of

them – the poet lives a reverie that veils; his dreams live in a “safe”, like all unforgettable

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things, where past, present, and future condense. The safe, states Bachelard, is the memory of

the immemorial, the dimension of intimacy.

Every man carries a secret; many of them die without having discovered it,

and will not discover it because, dead, the secret does not exist anymore, neither

them. I died and resurrected with the key of gemstones from his last spiritual urn. It

is up to me now open it away from any impression borrowed; and its mystery ought

to emanate into an extremely beautiful sky. (MALLARMÉ apud BACHELARD,

2003, p. 97)

The poetic reverie, the creator of symbols, states Bachelard, gives to our intimacy a

poli-symbolic activity because the phenomenology necessarily is sensitive to the

differentiation of the symbols. The image is the work of absolute imagination; the images of

our reveries, if we sincerely lived these perceptions of intimacy, would unveil a myriad of

values, of shelters set within each other. We may think of the weather in OI: it might change,

as much as time and space, but the character will always be seen in his long black coat and

hat, from which we can infer that his psychological “weather”, his inner state, remains the

same – the image of a cold, dark, and lonely winter. We may agree with Gaston Bachelard

when he states that, among all seasons, winter is the oldest; it ages memories, evokes a

faraway past, and Beckett’s meteorology prepares the spectator for long dark nights, and

throws us into silence to give us the dimension of time in the unlimited space – the great

space: man’s friend. Nevertheless, the character continues his pursuit of comfort and

intimacy, the return to the primitivity of the refuge, which causes in him a feeling of closure

into himself and retreat, shrink, hide (2003, p. 104). Repetition in OI comes from revival,

which evokes the image of refuge; there, the character meets again his beloved attic full of

“Todo homem tem consigo um segredo; muitos morrem sem havê-lo descoberto, e não o descobrirão porque,

mortos, o segredo não existe mais, nem eles. Morri e ressuscitei com a chave de pedrarias do meu último

escrínio espiritual. Cabe-me agora abri-lo longe de qualquer impressão tomada de empréstimo; e seu mistério há

de emanar-se num céu extremamente belo.” (Letter from Mallarmé to Aubanel, from 16 July, 1866)

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memories, even if only in the fleeting moments when the man comes to visit him and bring

news from the “dear name” in the darkness of the night. Repetition of facts, of words, of

images: all together they bring back the image of a nest which, although a failure image,

represents a tender sweet home, like it is for the birds, “a house full of life” (BACHELARD,

2003, p. 105), which continues to involve the bird that broke the egg. The nest, he continues,

like any image of rest and tranquility, is immediately associated to the image of a simple

house, but simplicity brings forgetfulness and gratitude for the poet who finds in a rare

impetus the talent to renew it. The house-nest is never new – we return to it, we dream of

going back to it, just like the bird returns to its nest. “I dreamed of a nest where the trees

drove death off. […] I dreamed of a nest where the ages slept no more”.

Yet, the author

poses a question: “But, in order to compare so tenderly the house and the nest, won’t it be

necessary to have lost the house of happiness?”

Isn’t this the image that we get from OI’s

character pacing up and down the islet – the image of a bird that does not have its nest to go

back to, and, consequently, keeps retracing its steps once again? Isn’t this the “compulsive

repetitive trauma” that Marcelin Pleynet explained? The circularity in which Beckett’s

characters live brings to surface his presence in the play and his awareness that language is

not enough – it failed in its task of providing communication between human beings –

therefore, there is a constant threat of, author and characters, being overlapped by the

possibility of an “end”. Circularity that we see in the formation of a shell which, according to

Bachelard (2003, p. 118), is similar to life: life starts less by launching itself towards than

turning around itself; a “vital impulse that spins”. Then, the author proposes a

phenomenology of the shell, which is also present in OI – the empty shell, like the empty

nest, suggests reveries of refuge; everything is dialectics in the man who leaves a shell and, as

“Sonhei com um ninho em que as árvores repeliam a morte. [...] Sonhei com um ninho em que os tempos não

dormiam mais.” (SHEDROW, A. apud BACHELARD, G., 2003, p. 115).

“Mas, para comparar tão ternamente a casa e o ninho, não será necessário ter perdido a casa da felicidade?”

(BACHELARD, 2003, p. 112).

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he does not entirely leave it, what comes out contradicts what stays locked inside. The

phenomenology of the shell makes imagination go beyond the dialectics of the small and the

big; it provokes also the dialectics of the free man vs. chained man. And the author adds:

“how much do not the ripples of fear and curiosity increase when reality is not present to

moderate them, when we imagine!”

“In this extremity his old terror of night laid hold on

him again. […] Now with redoubled force the fearful symptoms described at length…” (OI,

p.15). In OI, we do not see the shell, there is no feeling of refuge in the visual emptiness

surrounding Listener and Reader; on the contrary, there is the craving for it, the image of an

incomplete man who seeks for it, and that is expressed in the narration’s circularity, in the

visual repetition of Listener and Reader. In OI, we are offered the refuge of emptiness so we

can fulfill it with our imagination, our own fears and symbols, despite the biographic elements

present in the text, such as when Reader is searching for “page forty paragraph four” and then

reads “White nights” which, according to Seelig <SEELIG>, is a pun on “Whiteknights,” the

location of Beckett’s manuscripts at the Reading University Library – “requested by the

academic world, Ohio Impromptu in many ways grew to be about it”. Another biographic

reference is the fact that, in the 1980s, Beckett suffered from a hand disorder, called

Dupuytren’s contracture, which leads to fixed flexion of the fingers and, according to Seelig

can be identified in some of OI’s manuscripts:

In the second group of drafts, the figure of a man tenuously gripping a

needle and thread shows that Dupuytren’s contracture was also on Beckett’s mind

during the writing of Ohio Impromptu. The presence of Dupuytren’s in these early

drafts leads to speculation about certain aspects of Listener and Reader in the final

play; Listener’s hand might be limited to knocking because it is permanently

clenched, or Reader’s function could exclude writing because he is unable to grip a

pencil. As a result of his contracture, Beckett’s arms had thinned out considerably,

which could explain the metaphorical and actual references to arms in the final play.

Another autobiographical element that Beckett incorporated in his early drafts of

Ohio Impromptu was his failing vision, which continued to trouble him throughout

“Como aumentam as ondulações de medo e curiosidade quando a realidade não está presente para moderá-las,

quando se imagina!” (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 123).

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his later years, especially after he underwent cataract surgery in both eyes in the

early 1970s. The sole typescript of the MS 2930 series offers the clearest exposition

of the motifs Beckett was shaping at the time. Here is the opening block paragraph

of the monologue:

{in hand} White face

Black eyelids

(Raises shaky R.H.) In his right hand, for he is – (Lowers RH.) Too loud. (Raises

RH. Equally loud.) In his right hand for he is – . (Lowers RH.) Good. Now he may

seem to be communing. With himself. (Raises RH.) In his right hand, for he is left-

handed, he grasps the needle. (Raises shaky LH.) In his left the thread. (Pause.)

Between forefingers and thumbs, mercifully spared by his contracture. Till now.

(Pause.) Next he brings them propinquous >close<. Thus. (Does so.) Before his one

good eye, the right – no, wrong, the left, against whatever light there may happen to

be, at the time, and steadies himself for the attempt. (Pause.) Could he now close his

right eye matters would be improved. But he cannot. For if he did, the left would

close too. Thus (Moves hands apart.) Thus. <SEELIG>

Besides the fact that both Joyce and Beckett developed ocular problems in their old

age, which supports the idea that Listener could not read for visual problems, we can also

recall other biographic aspects, as James Knowlson points out, referring to the close

resemblance between Listener/Reader and Joyce/Beckett, for Joyce became a sort of “hero-

figure”, in many ways imitated by the young Beckett: by “wearing shoes that were too narrow

for him, drinking white wines, and holding his cigarette in a certain way” (KNOWLSON,

1996, p. 108). Especially by tracing back the first drafts of OI, Beckett’s work of self-erasure

from his text becomes more apparent, creating bigger gaps of information and words and,

consequently, opening more and deeper “poetic spaces”, spaces of imagination and reverie, as

Bachelard would call them.

Gone is Beckett’s “I,” which appeared in the earliest drafts of Ohio

Impromptu; yet, while his creative process has undone many personal details, the

final play contains no less of the author. Derangement does not elicit a chain of

infinite regression that obscures the work’s original source. Quite the opposite: it is

precisely Beckett’s insistence on removing himself from his texts that provides an

indication of the author’s personality, for the residual signs of his working method

reveal how, rather than who, he is. <SEELIG, p. 9>

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Heterotopologically, using Foucault’s expression, what we see in OI’s space is a

juxtaposition of a single real place and several spaces that somehow are incompatible, linked

to slices of time that lead to a sort of absolute break with man’s traditional time –

heterochronies. Here we must recall Beckett’s biography, since

“Joyce’s apartment lay only five hundred meters away from the Seine, and

a favorite Sunday morning walk for Beckett and Joyce was to saunter together west

along the quai de Branly and the quai de Grenelle as far as Bir-Hakeim, then stroll

along the narrow, tree-lined Allée des Cignes (or Isle of Swans), which extends in

midstream near the pont de Grenelle” (KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 107).

Footsteps whose echo can be retraced in OI: “From its single window he could see the

downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans. … Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing

the islet. Hour after hour” (OI, p.13).

Besides the biographic references it contains, the Isle of Swans is a perfect example,

for in its history it carries multiple layers of time and space, for it is known that the actual isle

is an artificially-created island formed in 1827 and which does not correspond to the former

Isle of Swans attached to Champs de Mars in the late 18

century. Moreover, the island holds

a notable feature, a small-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, which after some changes now

faces west in the direction of its larger sibling in New York. Culturally, it carries more layers

too: this statue was given by the French community living in the United States to

commemorate the centennial of the French revolution; its base carries a commemorative plate,

and the booklet it holds in its left hand carries the inscription “IV Juillet 1776 = XIV Juillet

1789”, recognizing both the American Independence Day and Bastille Day. Therefore, which

site does the author refer to? Which time? The Isle of Swans, the room, the scene are but

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heterotopias that create a space of illusion which turns every real space in human life even

more illusory – some kind of fulfilled utopias, condensed real spaces, somehow inverted,

places without places. From the beginning, we are aware that the room is unfamiliar, the

scene is unfamiliar, and even the Isle of Swans that really exists in Paris, located between the

fifteenth and sixteenth arrondissement (Plate 25), gives us a sense of unfamiliarity, as if it

belonged to another space or time, an aura of haunted space, of time outside time. Actually, in

his third principle

, Foucault relates the theater, cinema, garden, and even carpets and rugs to

what he calls “sacred space”, a sacred rectangle that, like the Persian rugs that always

represented gardens, is supposed to bring together within it four parts representing the four

parts of the world. According to Foucault, the garden is a rug onto which the whole world

comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across

space, like the Isle of Swans that had its site changed, like its replica of the Statue of Liberty

that had its position altered and its cultural reference crossed over, superposed. The urban

space of the sad tale reveals itself empty, not the expectation of an encounter, but the desire to

believe in that possibility, the longing for a name, a dear face. “Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar

scene. Out to where nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever shared. From this he had

once half hoped some measure of relief might flow” (OI, p. 12). A sacred rectangle, like the

Troisième principe. L'hétérotopie a le pouvoir de juxtaposer en un seul lieu réel plusieurs espaces, plusieurs

emplacements qui sont en eux-mêmes incompatibles. C'est ainsi que le théâtre fait succéder sur le rectangle de la

scène toute une série de lieux qui sont étrangers les uns aux autres; c'est ainsi que le cinéma est une très curieuse

salle rectangulaire, au fond de laquelle, sur un écran à deux dimensions, on voit se projeter un espace à trois

dimensions; mais peut-être est-ce que l'exemple le plus ancien de ces hétérotopies, en forme d'emplacements

contradictoires, l'exemple le plus ancien, c'est peut-être le jardin. Il ne faut oublier que le jardin, étonnante

création maintenant millénaire, avait en Orient des significations très profondes et comme superposées. Le jardin

traditionnel des persans était un espace sacré qui devait réunir à l'intérieur de son rectangle quatre parties

représentant les quatre parties du monde, avec un espace plus sacré encore que les autres qui était comme

l'ombilic, le nombril du monde en son milieu, (c'est là qu'étaient la vasque et le jet d'eau); et toute la végétation

du jardin devait se répartir dans cet espace, dans cette sorte de microcosme. Quant aux tapis, ils étaient, à

l'origine, des reproductions de jardins. Le jardin, c'est un tapis où le monde tout entier vient accomplir sa

perfection symbolique, et le tapis, c'est une sorte de jardin mobile à travers l'espace. Le jardin, c'est la plus petite

parcelle du monde et puis c'est la totalité du monde. Le jardin, c'est, depuis le fond de l'Antiquité, une sorte

d'hétérotopie heureuse et universalisante (de là nos jardins zoologiques).

Available at : http://www.foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/; site visited on January 5

2009.

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Plate 25: Isle Swans - Paris

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table in OI that is the base of Listener’s and Reader’s encounter with the past through

reading, except for the fact that this rectangle is plain white, it does not carry any reference

that might recall a perfect representation of the world, as it would for the Persians. On the

contrary, its whiteness asks for fulfillment, for a new story to be written or told. At the same

time, a physical space that affirms the existence of a common story and the possibility of

resuming a dialogue is presented to the spectator-reader, the text dissolves the urban space

when it shows the absence of familiarity of the place, the scene, there, where nothing was ever

truly shared, back to where nothing was ever shared. In this contrappunto between the

outlined space and the text, the Reader-narrator still adds that in that come-and-go movement

to that unshared place there was a half hope of some sort of relief. In this game of contrasts,

through resisting, Beckett seems to recognize the inevitable – in his world, there is nothing to

be recognized, nothing to be truly shared.

Could he not turn back? Acknowledge his error and return to where they were once

so long alone together. Alone together so much shared. No. what he had done alone

could not be undone. Nothing he had ever done alone could ever be undone. By him

alone. (OI , p. 12)

“Everybody was ‘Mister’. There were no Christian names, no first names. The nearest

you would get to a friendly name was to drop the ‘Mister’. I was never Sam. I was always

‘Beckett’ at the best.”

The postmodern man moves alone towards his encounters with pairs

that never stop being strangers; and in Beckett’s universe of half-hopes, he keeps returning to

these encounters, day after day, hour after hour – “in his dreams” (OI, p. 13). That man,

aware of the surrounding darkness, aware of the liquidity of the space that sustains him, does

not sleep: “as when his heart was young. No sleep no braving sleep till – (turns page) – dawn

This is how Beckett described the way Joyce related to his friends, saying that despite liking each other there

was not much conversation between them, and that he felt very flattered when Joyce dropped the “Mister”

(KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 108).

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of day” (OI, p. 15). The desire to resist is always stronger than everything else – than the

darkness that surrounds him, than the insignificance and the absence of dialogue with his pair.

Unfamiliarity can persist, but the Beckettian man resists even more; the game will always be

resumed; no matter how sad the story is, it will always be told once more, but always in the

“in between-space”, in the “in-between-room” of a shadowy house, marked by a labyrinthian

time, the time and the space of nostalgia and reverie mentioned by Gaston Bachelard. The

awareness of the melting structure, characteristic of the 1980s which Bauman refers to,

permeates Beckett’s space, but the keyword remains “resist”, never sleep until a new day rises

in the horizon of a humanity who, despite not knowing the paths that lead to encounter, know

that nothing that has been done in the isolation of the “I” can be undone by the “I” alone.

Maybe this is why Beckett moved from “I” in his first drafts of OI to “he” and after to

“them”: he was aware of the impotence of “I”.

The Beckettian space is like the “non-places” mentioned by Bauman – spaces that

discourage the idea of “settling down”, that accept the inevitability of a postponed passage of

strangers, and do whatever they can to make that presence preferably unnoticed from the

absence, to cancel, level or zero down, empty the idiosyncratic subjectivities of its ‘passersby’

(BAUMAN, 2001, p. 119). Reader and Listener are leveled in their mirroring and in their

subjectivities and, consequently, become strange passersby, independently of how many times

Reader refers to the “dear name”, for it will never be unveiled; independently of how many

times he mentions the shared spaces, for they will always be “non-places” situated in the in-

between spaces of memory and nostalgia, of past and present. And the space of the spectator-

reader does not seem to be different: interacting with Beckett’s work means interacting with a

non-presence, with a non-place; it is seeing a melted time passing by, with no frontiers

between past, present and future. Studying the space in OI will always be like digging in the

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depths of our own mind, which reminds us of Caravaggio’s words about his own painting in

the movie Caravaggio, directed by Derek Jarman in 1996: “my painting is a wreck”.

2.3. THE PICTORIAL SPACE IN OHIO IMPROMPTU (OI)

Having been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969, Samuel Beckett stands as one of the

founders of the “Theater of the Absurd”, as well as the most important representative of the

“literature of desperation”. In fact, much has been said about his work in general and

especially about Waiting for Godot, which is considered a turning point in modern drama, a

revolutionary work in all aspects: setting, characters, language. The search for identity, the

impossibility of communication, the disbelief in the power of language to express this state of

desperation in a meaningless world, constitute the main aspects of Beckett’s plays, and have

been the focus of most theoretical works about the author.

Yet, in spite of being merely one of his short plays, also OI rises in importance for

various reasons. Firstly, for its biographical elements, which have already been stressed by

some authors, including references to his friendship with James Joyce, which are pointed out

by Adam Seelig on his article “Beckett’s dying remains: The Process of Playwriting in the

Ohio Impromptu Manuscripts”

The details of Beckett’s relationship with Joyce are the most heavily

autobiographical elements of the final text. The wide-brimmed black hat, described

in Reader’s book as “an old world Latin Quarter hat” […], is reminiscent of the hat

that Joyce used to wear on the left bank in Paris (and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses).

Many of the real geographical sites of Paris where Joyce and Beckett spent time

together take on a more abstract form in the imaginative landscape in Reader’s book.

For instance, the two river arms in the book that “conflowed and flowed united on”

[…] near the Isle of Swans recall the two arms of the Seine merging after flowing

around the Allée de Cygnes, where Beckett and Joyce used to take long walks

together (Knowlson 107). The position of Reader and Listener, both hunched over

an old volume, each with a hand on his forehead in deep meditation, is perhaps the

Published in Modern Drama, Volume 43, Number 3. Available at: http://samuel-beckett.net/remains3.html.

Site visited on January 5

, 2009.

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strongest clue that the play draws on the relationship between Beckett and Joyce,

suggesting the days when Beckett served as Joyce’s amanuensis in the early 1920s.

At that time Joyce was nearly blind, and he occasionally dictated passages of his

Work in Progress to Beckett, who would then read the words back to him. Richard

Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, relates a humorous anecdote about a dictation session

that could very well have influenced the staging of Ohio Impromptu:

[I]n the middle of one such session there was a knock at the door which Beckett

didn’t hear. Joyce said, “Come in,” and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read

back what he had written and Joyce said, “What’s that ‘Come in’?” “Yes, you said

that,” said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, “Let it stand.” He was

quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator. Beckett was fascinated and

thwarted by Joyce’s singular method.

Actually, none of Beckett’s work evokes so much of his biography as OI: his passion

for reading long hours alone – whether in the house or in the garden; he would “wander much

farther afield to read, losing all sense of time as he devoured his stories”, says Knowlson

(1996, p. 44), which can be felt in the timeless environment presented in the reading pauses

given; his states of mind as a teenager, considered moody, withdrawn, introspective, which

can be seen in the figure of the two black-and-white characters equally introspective and

withdrawn; his interest in music and in verse, which can be found in OI from the title

(Impromptu) until the last sentence through their poetic rhythm; his literary taste and his

interest in the Surrealist writers like Paul Élouard and André Breton whose works he

translated, and his passion for Italian literature, specifically Dante whose work he studied with

his dear teacher Bianca Esposito, besides practicing conversation, and who can also be seen in

the figure of Reader/Listener, as much as in the image of the book and its power to “convey”

truth. Although Beckett always saw himself as belonging to and drawing from a wide

European literary tradition, which would include authors such as Balzac, Racine, Diderot,

Stendhal, Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, Sterne, besides Joyce, Dante was his greatest love among

Italian writers along with Leopardi, poet of pessimism (KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 70). Other

than that, we can identify Beckett’s interest in the power of gesture, the importance of

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“muscular dialogue generated by gesture” (KNOWLSON, p. 71), even when reduced to a few

essential, repeated movements, as we can see in OI.

Secondly, OI is one of the first plays released as part of the “Beckett on Film Project”,

a unique project which has filmed all the nineteen of Samuel Beckett’s stage plays, bringing

together some of the world’s most talented directors and actors. In 2001, that project received

the “Best TV Drama” Award at the Sixth South Bank Show Awards ceremony in London,

which is regarded as a celebration of artistic achievement on the highest level. The inclusion

of the short OI in a project of such magnitude reinforces the importance of the pictorial

aspects of the play, especially because the director Charles Sturridge, responsible for the

movie version of the work, faithfully follows Beckett’s recommendations. As Lois

Oppenheim (2003) points out, not only do the Beckettian themes appear modeled on the

sensory perspective of the eye but, for Beckett, painting is materialized as emblematic of the

creative process itself; depiction is intimately related to, if not ultimately thwarted by, the

primordial Being-in-the-world. The unifying force of all Beckett’s work, says the author, is a

preoccupation with the visual as a primary paradigmatic force which configures, in words,

time, space, and the self’s dwelling therein; and painting sanctioned that preoccupation.

Beckett’s art, states Oppenheim, is a process of materialization, for it “concretizes in allusions

to painting the referentiality of language, figure both in metaphor and theme the empirical

boundaries of seeing, and realizes in visible form the indeterminacy of the invisible”

(OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 45).

In the era of transdisciplinarity, OI is an outstanding example of transdisciplinary

work, an authentic bridge connecting various visual languages such as photography, cinema,

painting, performance, and theater. Therefore, drawing a visual poetics for this play means

going beyond the words, through a careful analysis of its pictorial aspects (space

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arrangements, the contrast of shade-light, setting, color, etc.), including the film version, and

investigating the layers that are kept imprisoned in the apparent non-sense

monologue/dialogue, in the silence between words. A visual poetics is a contemporary way of

unfolding the totality of the play through the observation and analysis of its formal

construction, making different views of the text possible, regarding it not only as literary or

theatrical, but also as a visual artwork. The more we investigate, the more the twelve-minute

OI reveals itself to be a multifaceted work. The more Beckett reduces all the elements, be it

linguistically, be it visually, the more intense, more complex it becomes, more strongly it

reveals what or how much the audience is not aware of and is not allowed to be. The stronger

the visual is, the more it reveals its impotence to “tell”, the resistance of the real to

representation, which generates a sort of obsessive circle that endlessly and impossibly seeks

expression; and this process is the force that keeps Beckett’s plays on. Beckett’s art, visually

and linguistically, in its self-reflexivity, is the expression of this obsession with continuance,

at the same time that the stories reflect their own incompletion. Therefore, if there is a way to

unfold the text, including the reader/audience, it is through visual poetics, so every detail can

be captured, every grade of light intensity or darkness in the play can be translated, or at least

be considered as an important element to its interpretation. Consequently, every visual

element during or between an attempt of communication, of movement, or of a moment of

steadiness, can be taken into account for the understanding of the play, and function as

elements of revelation for the reader/audience. Through the visual it is possible to understand

Beckett’s creative process – his awareness of the impossibility to communicate through

language, the interference which words actually cause in their own saying, as he states in

Three Dialogues; then the self-awareness of his art and its provisional “end”, i.e., not the end

of writing but the ultimate awareness of its failure, its own limitations as a creative tool. “To

be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail” (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, p. 46).

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Drawing a visual poetics for OI goes beyond the analysis of pictorial aspects such as

photography, lighting, etc.; it leads to the disclosure of a stream of reasoning about one of the

most significant issues that our society faces in the modern era: the relation of its body

(social, cultural, and political structures) with time and space. As it was previously

mentioned, sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman have already outlined many of the changes

provoked by this relation, pointing out fluidity as the main metaphor for the present moment,

in many ways new, in the history of the modern era. Modernity, since the beginning, has been

presented as a process of liquefaction, having as its main purpose profaning the sacred,

repudiating the past and claiming for the destruction of beliefs and loyalties, going beyond all

tradition that represented an armour against the damaging process of constant changes.

Following the same stream as Ulrich Beck who, in the 1990’s, created the term

“second modernity” to connote the phase when modernity started having its social structures

melted, Zygmunt Bauman (2001, p. 13) clarifies that, in the beginning of modernity, no mold

was broken without being replaced by another; that people were freed only to be admonished

and censured in case they were not able to relocate themselves in the right new niche.

Modernity’s “power of melting”, as Beck states, affects the institutions, the frames that define

the limits of possible “actions-choices” in all levels of social life – familiar, professional,

educational, and even religious institutions. Nowadays, the patterns and configurations are not

“given” anymore, even less self-evident; they are many and are constantly shocking and

contradicting each other, and this constant and conflictive movement deprives them of good

part of their coercive power of compelling and restraining. The human condition has been

deeply affected by the fact that the possibility of having a systemic structure to hold their

values, beliefs and traditions is becoming increasingly remote. The actual social scenario is

immersed in a fluid, non-structured state, requiring an effort to rethink all these living-dead

concepts, and one of the crucial attributes that characterizes modernity – or post-modernity, as

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some would name it – is the changeable time-space relation. And that is the attribute that

pervades OI from the first line, which already expresses that changeability in the time-space

relation: the introduction informs the reader-spectator that there is “little left to tell”. The play

moves on bringing the idea of moving away in order to find relief from unfamiliarity, and

here the narrator defines it – “unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar scene” – showing through spatial

change a change not only in chronological time but in the time of experience in a

multidirectional way: “Out to where nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever shared”.

If possible, relief will not come from the power of “telling” the story, but from silence, from

the empty spaces of unfamiliarity, where words cannot communicate because the experience

cannot be narrated, for it remains locked between spaces, within pauses. Failure of

representation, failure of expression, whether verbal or not, of the objective in art is what,

according to Lois Oppenheim (2003), led to Beckett’s conceiving of a “literature of the

unword”, which can be clearly described in his letter to Axel Kaun in which he asks,

Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface

should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by

enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, so that through whole pages

we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking

unfathomable abysses of silence? (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 47)

From Bauman’s point of view, modernity starts when space and time are separated

from the practice of life and from each other; therefore, they can be theorized as distinct

categories, mutually independent. In this aspect, speed has played a main role in the time-

space relation. Its mold is not the human leg, or the animal paw anymore, but it is totally

dependent on technology and its development. Consequently, it becomes a fluid concept too,

which inevitably leads us to another important contemporary process: McLuhan’s philosophy

of media.

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In his book Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan proposes a new

approach to the aesthetic form, relating it to the media and stating that new forms of media

change the perceptions of societies, and that there are, in regard to the degree of the user’s

participation, two fundamental ways for perception: a homogeneous one, simple, lineal,

visual, hierarchical, explosive, strictly related to alphabetical writing: the press, photography,

radio, cinema, and automobile; the other way is pluricentric, participative, tactile,

instantaneous, and implosive, which corresponds to electricity, telegraph, telephone,

television, and computer. The homogeneous form, the so-called hot medium, takes a single

meaning, the sight, to a high definition, which requires low participation from users, since

they foster detachment. Conversely, cool media are those that require strong user

participation, since they urge users to engage themselves completely in their use. Radio, for

example, is defined as a hot medium, since listening does not require complete involvement

from the user. In contrast, television is a cool medium, for it requires more user participation

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media>. The experience of a time, states

McLuhan, is conditioned by the medium, which is an extension of us, of our senses and

perceptive faculties; it technologically reproduces processes that belong to man, though

turning them unrecognizable for him. Each medium produces either "amputations” or

“extensions" to our senses and bodies, shaping them in a new technical form through adding

themselves on to what we already are. As appealing as this remaking of ourselves may seem,

it really puts us in a "narcissistic hypnosis" that prevents us from seeing the real nature of the

media. Each extension means sleepiness, narcosis, and amputation: it is not I who feels

something, but a technological extension of my senses that feel instead of me. The media have

a much faster and surprising dynamics than the traditional aesthetic forms; for instance, the

movie, speeding up the mechanical (a sequence of frames), carried us from the world of

sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. Hence, on an

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aesthetic level, we are also dealing with time-space changeability, visually expressed through

sophisticated technology – the movie industry. Then, the message of the movie medium is

that of transition from lineal connections to configurations. And what do we see in Beckett’s

OI? In spite of making use of Pop Art’s most characteristic tool, which is resistance to

narrativity through repetition, what we see is a mediatic dynamics carrying us away from a

sequential world into a creative configuration of different times – present, past and future

constantly interchanging – and spaces that go beyond local references, merging with the

spaces of memory, desire and reverie. Although not making use of any technological effect in

his plays, what Beckett proposes in OI is the time-space lived in the cinema.

Regarding the media dynamics, in his last book, Laws of media (1988), McLuhan

divides it into four phases: growth, which is the intensification of any aspect of a situation in

which a sight is enlarged; obsolescence, when the past situation has become impotent due to

its removal; recovery, when something that was previously obsolete is put again into action;

and inversion, which creates a new configuration with characteristics that are simultaneously

similar and opposite to the departing point. Establishing a relationship between McLuhan’s

theory and Beckett’s aesthetics in OI, it is possible to identify these four phases: we can relate

the first phase to the intensification of the characters’ mirror image, besides the intensification

of contemplation time given to the spectator; obsolescence can be seen on a literary level

through the removal of the story from the story itself, since it is never really told; recovery,

through literary repetition and through the arrival of another character, a “man” who had been

sent by the dear name carrying a book to be read until dawn, bringing about a new

fragmentation of the already fragmented subject, and superposition of spaces as much as of

levels of discourse; finally, we can see inversion, new configurations all over the play through

moving forward and backward not only in time but by constantly reediting the narration by

un-wording his words. As Lois Oppenheim states,

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in Beckett it is precisely the resurrection, alteration, and elaboration of a

previous text within a subsequent one that not only defies any possible fixity of art

but also renders both works-in-progress, each as temporally resistant to

objectification as the pour-soi itself (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 21).

A postmodern process, which is described by Lyotard as a procedure in ‘ana-‘: a

procedure of analysis, anamnesis, anagogy, and anamorphosis that elaborates an ‘initial

forgetting’, a method of “distorted self-recollection” which is auto-analytic, an autotextual

elaboration of “an ‘initial forgetting,’” (LYOTARD apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 21).

According to McLuhan’s theory, the interaction of all senses would create a unifying

involvement of the experience, and despite not making use of any electronic medium, Beckett

seems to follow the same concept by provoking that unifying involvement in the theatrical

experience through breaking its traditional narrative and playing with time and space as if it

were in the cinema. From the point of view of the aesthetic of form, the importance of this

theory lies on the fact that it highlights once more the nexus between form and transcendence;

forms are not closed within themselves but constantly moved by a movement that exceeds

them. That is why all the pictorial references present in OI are new, reconfigured, since new

layers of references were added to them – the Renaissance perspective, the chiaroscuro, even

the references to contemporary art, became all amputations and extensions to our bodies and

senses, to our cultural and social identity. Beckett turned the stage into a cool medium, a

pluricentric, implosive experience that requires full participation from its users. The dialogue

perpetuated by the autotext, as Lois Oppenheim defines it, a dialogue of Beckett with himself,

is as much deformative or detotalizing as constitutive, "for it amounts to endless undoing of

every work posited as referent” (2003, p. 19).

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Jean-François Lyotard, on the other hand, attributes to the avant-garde art the

paradoxical task of manifesting the immateriality of the sublime through matter; therefore,

this materiality cannot be but minimal. The mystery of the sublime lies effectively in

distinguishing through the sensible anything that the sensible cannot present under the aspect

of form. Analyzing both theories, Perniola (1998) states that a new chapter has been opened in

the aesthetics of the form, referring to the aesthetics of feeling. In an era when the concept of

parallel universes is considered as a true possibility as much as many other technologies to

which we have become used through science-fiction movies, such as robots, force fields, as

presented by physicist Michio Kako in his book Physics of the Impossible, we are even

deprived of the belief that the sky is the limit, and being forced to re-define the concept of

universal. Thanks to this new achieved flexibility, the modern time became mostly the

weapon in the conquest of space, liquefying one of the most solid, because impassive and

inert, concepts forged by the human being – their relation with space. Bauman states that the

speed of movement and the access to faster ways of mobility became, in the modern times,

the most important tools of power and domination. Space does not represent limitation for

power anymore; concepts such as distant or near are bound to disappear, and with this, many

other changes are bound to occur – more liquefaction of the social frames that used to define

and help the human condition.

OI definitely brings to life a portrait of such situation: a struggle between memory

and desire against change and, no matter how much effort had been made to keep

remembrances alive, to keep the presence of the “dear one”, everything has changed – the

dear name cannot be said anymore, the facts cannot be unfolded, the story has reached its

end – “nothing is left to tell”. Nevertheless, we are still presented with two figures – the two

characters (Reader and Listener) – frozen in their appearance, alike in every detail as if this

visual procedure, the unfolding of the characters that leads to the fragmentation of the

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Subject, would be able to stop the struggle, as if it would avoid the damage caused by the

changes brought by time. Here, the visual aspects of the text – the similarity between the

two actors, the black-and-white, the chiaroscuro, the Renaissance composition in a

minimalist setting – are the elements which contribute to potentiate the drama lived by

Reader/Listener, bringing to it a sociological dimension and revealing the cultural drama

faced by contemporary society; like the fragmented, non-localized Subject, the reader-

spectator remains in suspense, loose within an unfamiliar space, an uncomfortable time. Our

cultural and emotional space has moved so much and so many times that we are not able to

tell our history anymore; there is no time for us to recognize or hold our identity as a

cultural, social body anymore. Consequently, at the same time their mirror effect brings

about the fragmentation of their identity, Reader and Listener could also symbolize an

attempt to create the armour mentioned by Bauman against the destruction caused by

changes.

In fact, it is possible to say that OI stands as an antithesis of the liquid modernity; it

seems that every visual element in the play is liable to restrain, even the audience’s breath –

we are put on hold, not only uselessly waiting for the story that will not be told, but also the

reading time is slower and permeated with pauses. Reader’s face being kept almost all the

time hidden, the stage darkness contrasted with strong lighting, and of course the two

identical characters are details which contribute to hold our attention, our expectation, our

desire to be included, introduced into the story. Through Beckett’s effort to keep the play on

hold, we are, in reality, confronted with Bauman’s theories about the contemporary liquidity

and dragged to a level of shocking, desperate awareness of the impossibility to hold no

matter what aspect of human life. OI is the literary sum of all these meltings and the

desperate struggle to resist them; time and space are constantly liquefied under the power

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which the author majestically exerts from the beginning to the end of the play. And it is

through the pictorial choices that this struggle becomes evident. Therefore, its

transdisciplinary tenor, due to the variety of visual elements directly related to many art

movements, justifies the importance of drawing a visual poetics for OI, as a way to unfold

the various levels of reading which the play can afford to offer to a careful reader. OI offers

us a contemporary space, like a computer-generated image that can be compounded and re-

compounded ad infinitum, a virtual image because there is no space in the contemporary

world – virtual because the world virtualized by the media has become image

(BARDONNÈCHE apud DOMINGUES [org.], 1997, p. 198).

Contrarily to the traditional artist who would take his images from the real world,

now it is the machine that proposes him a world on which he bases himself and inserts his

imaginary; the open space of imagination in the play allows the reader-spectator to

transform the image, completing it with their own repertoire. The space of the image, says

Bardonnèche, does not unfold in correlation with form and matter anymore; it exists only

because there is something else: it is a dimension that contains time – the time within the

immobile, stagnated image. Yet, this time, states the author, turns into something else: the

space of laziness, which is the space of the game, the space of desire, the space of god; like

the empty space of the game, its time is a “time in parenthesis” – it is the ludicrous universe

that makes us forget time, and where the activity is allowed in a sort of appropriation of an

abandoned time (DOMINGUES, 1997, p.199). The space in Beckett is also the space of the

game with its time in parenthesis, the space of laziness for “lazy spectators”, a ludicrous

universe whose simple “costumes” masquerade a variety of pieces in the game of desire and

imagination. The contemporary space is the scenario for an art that is required to constantly

break with tradition, permanently innovating, and it is this call for an eternal genius what

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causes a de-synchronization and rupture always more evident between art, its avant-gardes,

and the public. In order to minimize this effect, the second half of the twentieth century

witnessed an approach to art that aimed at establishing a more immediate relation between

art and its public, through making them participate in the elaboration of the artwork and,

consequently, sharing the time of creation. The simplest form of participation, according to

Edmond Couchot (DOMINGUES, 1997) was the installation: installing the spectator in the

center of the artwork, the artist was inviting the spectator to adopt a different attitude

towards it. This process was used also in conceptual art and Land Art, where the entire body

of the observer, not only his eyes, is inscribed in the artwork; more drastically, we have the

kinetic art, which approximates even more the spectator through retroactions: the artwork is

sensible to different solicitations, manipulations, operations, triggered by the displacements

of the observer, their contact, the sound of their voice, their presence, warmth, their

heartbeat, etc. In the kinetic art, the spectator has a real participation in the artwork, not only

mental (COUCHOT apud DOMINGUES, 1997). As Frank Popper states, in the aesthetics of

participation, “the essential is not the object itself anymore, but the dramatic confrontation

of the spectator with a perceptive situation”

; in this form of artwork, the existence and

significance of the artwork depend on the intervention of the spectator. Moreover, the

contemporary spectator is invited to move one step forward to the interactive art, through

open (online) and/or closed (offline) devices. An example of offline device is the work of

Jeffrey Shaw (Plate 26), which invites us to visit a city whose constructions are letters that

compound a text, by pedaling a real bicycle; he makes us see with our feet and our legs as

much as with our eyes. An artistic open device, on the other hand, is an interconnected

network: many people can enter together the game of interactivity and the spectator

participates through gestures, texts, images, sometimes sounds, which are inscribed in the

“O essencial não é mais o objeto em si, mas a confrontação dramática do espectador a uma situação

perceptiva” (POPPER apud DOMINGUES, 1997, p. 137).

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memory of the work whose identity constantly changes and evolves around a nucleus

preconceived by the author, who assures its continuity and coherence.

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The first experiments took place in the 1980s, and so far these works have presented a

strong trans-cultural vocation, but there are also those works that aim at some sort of mono-

cultural re-territorialization, that is, actions that require, for example, the use of one specific

language and culture. For this kind of work, the material used by the artist is not of a

physical or energetic order, but symbolic: they are abstract materials, highly formalized,

constituted by computer programs. The work is not fruit of the authority of the artist only; it

produces itself throughout an almost instantaneous dialogue (in real time) with the spectator,

who is not reduced to just looking at anymore; he has the possibility to act over the work

and modify it, therefore becoming its co-author.

Although Beckett does not make use of any technological device in his plays, any

computer generated image, the fact is that the empty space that permeates the play – the

stage and pictorial spaces, and also the narrative space, the silent space between words and

the fragmented subjects – constitute the abstract, and, in OI’s case specifically, highly

formalized material that enables the reader-spectator to establish a dialogue with the play

and its characters, filling in the blanks with their own material, their own memories.

Solipsism becomes the fertile space where the spectator can work, mold, and even alter the

contents of the play according to their own material, which is not only made of history and

experiences, but also of shadows, ghosts, and haunting spaces of the past. In this territory,

where the real resists expression, the reader-spectator becomes also the play’s co-author.

The more Beckett works to erase himself from the play; the more the space of his presence

becomes uncertain, undefined, the wider and deeper becomes the space of the spectator in

his plays.

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2.3.1. Minimalism and chiaroscuro – the shades in Ohio Impromptu

“It is without a doubt only the artist who ends up seeing” (BECKETT apud

OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 77). Among all the pictorial elements possibly identified in OI,

Minimalism and the Chiaroscuro technique are the ones that first catch the audience’s eye

and it is worth mentioning that, although it emerged as a strong movement only in the 1950’s,

there are examples of Minimalism being exercised in art-work as early as the eighteenth

century, when Goethe constructed the Altar of Good Fortune by simply combining a sphere

and cube, both made of stone (Plate 27).

Actually, in the twentieth century we can find important examples of this movement

since the 1920s, when artists such as Malevich and Marcel Duchamp produced art-works in

the minimalist vein. When, in 1913, Malevich painted a black square on a white canvas,

affirming that art would not serve the State or religion anymore and that it could exist by itself

and for itself without things, he launched the foundations for a secular art, says Suzi Gablik

(STANGOS, 2000), disconnected from utilitarian purposes and the ideological duty of

representation. In this case, the square represented the basic Supremacist element which will

never be found in nature, the representation of an art born in Russia that celebrated

rationalism and a mathematical way of thinking and whose aesthetical approach was that the

construction of an object would lead to a readable and immediate geometry (KRAUSS, 1977,

p. 57). Besides, the minimalists, states Gablik, shared with Mondrian the belief that an

artwork must be completely conceived by the mind before being executed; that art was a force

through which the mind could impose its rational order to things. Consequently, the

minimalists introduced an epistemological cube, symbolizing a commitment with clarity,

conceptual strictness, literality, and simplicity, bringing up an idea of perfect balance, and

producing a visual symmetry that never deviates from its space rigidly planned.

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Despite the Russian influence, the movement became famous mainly with its

American exponents, such as Dan Flavin (Plate 28), Carl Andre (Plate 29), and Donald Judd

(Plate 30), who reacted in their canvases, sculptures, and installations against Abstract

Expressionism, which basically aimed to express emotions through color. No emotional

appeal, no concern with feelings, no subjectivity, no attempt to represent or symbolize any

other object or experience; what we have in Minimalism is purely the study of formal

concepts, shades versus light, geometry, and space arrangements, forms predominantly

rectangular and cubic, repetition and neutral surfaces free from any metaphor or meaning. In

fact, their main goal was to create works in which the whole would be more important than

the parts, and in which the relational composition would be suppressed in favor of a simple

ordination, all of this added by the minimalization of the artist’s “handwork”, which shifted

the aesthetic value to a simple mental choice, like in Duchamp’s ready-mades.

As it still happens today, strong voices rose against considering the minimalist work as

art for its lack of creativity, inflexibility, mechanicism, nihilism, among other reasons.

CarlAndre, for example, aimed at horizontality; he wished that his sculptures kissed the

ground and in an interview he states that, in the beginning, he was cutting the wood to make

something and then he realized that what he was cutting was indeed the cut itself; therefore,

instead of cutting the material, he decided to use it as a cut in space (BOURDON, 1966, p.

15). On the same stream, Donald Judd states that it is not necessary for a work to have a

bunch of things to be looked at, to be compared, to be analyzed one by one, to be

contemplated; the thing as a whole, its qualities as a whole, that is what is interesting

(STANGOS, 2000, p. 219), which, according to Gablik, replaces the cubist concept of

simultaneity for a gestalt concept of instantaneity; composition becomes less important than

scale, light, color, surface or format. In a minimalist work, the environment frequently turns

into the pictorial space itself, like in Flavin’s neon sculptures which reflect over the

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surrounding walls. Modulation becomes a key element to understand the minimalist work,

which will be expressed also in music, dance and theater, for it carries the idea of endless

continuation, of future – as Carl Andre states, he produced a group of works that tend to

generate their own future: “that is the definition of having a style, when the work we make

becomes an objective condition for the work that will be made”.

For Andre, Flavin and

Judd, the future gradually reveals, in suspension, a whole past of growing density, like a

cryptogram (STANGOS, 2000, p. 220).

Minimalism is also related to a number of other movements, such as: Conceptual art

(Plate 31), in which the finished work exists merely to convey a theory; Pop art (Plate 32),

that brings to the prosaic products of the industrialist culture the status of art-work, like

Campbell soup cans, sharing with Minimalism also the fascination with the impersonal; and

Land Art (Plate 33), in the way both movements focus on the construction of simple shapes

and on the interference of the space in the art work. As a result, when we refer to Minimalism

in the visual arts, we refer to reducing all the elements at the maximum, be it in content, be it

in form, reaching a state of simplicity, clarity, formal purity, seeking to remove any sign of

personal expressiveness and avoiding any distraction, so that the viewer can experience the

work more intensely.

What is impressive in Beckett’s play is that it holds a little of each of these

movements. In OI, we have this formal reduction, this formal purity. The form wrapping the

text becomes as important as the content, and it is carefully drawn in the minimum details.

Everything is immersed in black and white, minimal in characters, stage set, and lighting: on

stage, we have a plain white deal table (the minimalist basic element, the rectangle in its

purity, occupies its fundamental space as the basis that will visually support the whole), two

Esta é a definição de ter um estilo, quando o trabalho que se faz torna-se uma condição objetiva para o

trabalho que será feito.

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plain armless white deal chairs (again, the epistemological minimalist cube that could be

reproduced ad infinitum), a black wide-brimmed hat at the center of the table, and two

characters, whose performers, according to the author’s instructions, must be as alike in

appearance as possible (Plate 34,35,36,37). Just like in a minimalist artwork, in OI, the

ensemble simply exists – an object alive by itself, symmetrical, modular, clearly planned,

created with simple geometrical forms, neutral industrial materials, and unitary independent

forms. Like in Flavin’s artwork, OI’s environment – the backstage – becomes also the

pictorial space in which the ensemble spreads, diffuses itself through the play of light and

shadows, and all the elements become even in importance so it is not possible to separate

them anymore. Rectangle (table), cubes (chairs), triangles (characters), (half) sphere (hat):

pictorially all these elements weigh as much as the open space backstage, and in a mix

between dance, happening, and theatrical performance, the characters slowly and repeatedly

perform their banal series of small movements (one turns the page of a book, the other

synchronically knocks on the table; one raises his head, the other lowers it) – the

“fundamental movement”, as the minimalist choreographer Yvonne Rainer would call. And

like in a minimalist musical composition, the one note unfolds itself through the long

repetitive silent pauses; but here the impromptu visibly lacks the improvisation that the term

suggests; on the contrary, it reflects the minimalist belief of art as a force capable of imposing

itself over things – the power of mental choice. “All art aspires to the condition of music”,

states Walter Pater. Like in a Philip Glass’s composition, the single musical phrase, which

could be the silence, Beckett’s silent music, as much as the rhythmical reading by Reader,

modularly fulfils the space of the play by bringing density through repetition, but not exactly

the ordering principle, as it would be expected from a minimalist artwork. As Celso Loureiro

Chaves states in his column in Zero Hora newspaper, from February 14

, 2009, “music is the

best measure of the plasticity of time”, and the false impromptu, which OI in fact is, its

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linguistic modulation

, together with its visual modulation, is like a contemporary minimalist

symphony, full of pauses and unexpected elements. Modulation in OI brings depth and

labyrinth; and although it might lead to continuation as in a minimalist painting, here it

disguises emotional/psychological chaos, struggle between memory and reverie, between

presence and absence, a constant struggle against time. The black-and-white does not bring

sharpness, clarity to the whole but creates sfumato, a myriad of in-between spaces occupied

by the character’s lack of identity, by the silence that permeates the play and by the shadowy

openness that surrounds the visual composition.

According to Tassinari, it is the artistry of an artwork what promotes an aesthetic

experience, as much as its power of inter-subjectivation, of pulling the spectator into an

intersubjective net. The work by Donald Judd, for example, presents a horizontal movement,

expansion and contraction through repetition, but it does not facilitate an aesthetic experience

– austere, dull, it does not possess any strong emotional appeal, and consequently it stays

under the suspicion whether it is or not art. In the same way, over Beckett’s work lies the “is

this…?” question: is this a play? Is this a poem? Is this a short prose? Like in Judd’s work, the

intersubjective net will not come out through the work itself because its simplicity of order

and repetition turns it banal, which is a contradiction for, in reality, its artistry, its singularity

comes from banality; in other words, by transfiguring the banal into the unexpected. At the

same time it is a technical series; it can be sensed as a poetics of serial production, of a

As Adam Seelig questions, if we compare the reading rhythm of the following lines in OI, what is more

logical: “he moved from where they had been so long together | to a single room,” or is it “he moved from where

they had been so long | together to a single room”? According to the author, the former is more logical; however,

the rhythmic alliteration of “together to” invites the pairing of these words. “Moreover, the lyrical rhythm of the

phrase suggests ending with the four even, iambic feet of the latter, invoking the sound of four feet, Beckett’s

and Joyce’s, walking in harmony. This volatile relationship between “he” and “they” sets up the synecdoche for

the remainder of the play, as “he” is the central part of “t-he-y” and, appropriately, stands in the collective’s

stead. The interchangeability of these pronouns is reinforced by the visual nature of the play, in that the two

characters, although human in form, are hardly more animated than the words they study. Indeed, they are little

more than an embodiment of these pronouns in the text. Subjected by the text, or, perhaps more precisely,

objectified by it, Reader and Listener possess the dynamism of these dead nouns, ‘as though turned to stone’.”

<SEELIG, p. 9>

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technological production. Judd’s sculpture, says Tassinari, detached from any use, reveals an

artistry of technical basis: mirrored in one another, each unity has its position and, in the

others, slight variations that reveal themselves according to the spectator’s position. In OI as

well, singularity comes from simplicity, from the banality of forms, of setting, and it is

repetition that transfigures the banal into the unexpected, giving the spectator a special

position – physically, for the perspective will be altered according to the point of view where

the spectator stands, and metaphorically – which will alter each unity and their effect on one

another; be it in regard to the characters, be it in regard to the visual elements. The

intersubjective net has been set; the spectator has been pulled into it by simplicity and, as in

Judd’s artwork, can experience through its volumes as well as through the emptiness

delimited by them a sort of aesthetic translation of a yes/no logic that, according to Tassinari,

defines most of the contemporary industry. Here, the institutionalization of art comes

conveniently in favor of the aesthetic experience, since it is the museum space that gives the

necessary conditions for the artistic fruition – the museum is the space par excellence of an

artwork; what is there is with no doubt an artwork and therefore will not be unnoticed, while,

on the other hand, that same object might be totally ignored in the space of the ordinary

world. And so is the stage compared to the play: it turns the white table and the black hat into

something totally new, as well as the old men become figures deranged from each other, and

even from the play itself and the audience. In this regard, Tassinari states that sharing its

space with the ordinary space of the world is for the contemporary artwork at the same time a

threat and an asset; in Judd’s case, the museum protects it from being mistaken for an

ordinary serial arrangement and, as a consequence, not awakening anything special in the

spectator. In the same way, two men seated at a table would probably not provoke anything in

the passersby if they were seated on a sidewalk or at a park. However, the lack of visual

contextualization in OI’s scene is what awakens, disturbs the spectator – those men are seated

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nowhere, with no time reference either, and that activates the contemporary presupposition of

an intersubjective mutual living that can be or not replaced and renewed by art itself, creating

also in the spectator an intersubjective net which will allow them to communicate with other

dimensions of their own lives. The imitation of the making and technology of the work have

turned the concept of art extremely vast, unlimited, transforming it into what it was in the

beginning: the product of any human activity (TASSINARI, 2001, p. 134).

Reading or watching Beckett’s play is similar to crossing a canal full of shades,

darkness, and doubts. The minimalist visual concept is perfectly applied, surprisingly

respecting the most famous canon of the Renascence art taught by Leonardo Da Vinci – the

pyramidal perspective – one of the rules that represented a radical rupture from the medieval

artistic and architectonic practices, and determined the way we saw things for four centuries,

until the beginning of the twentieth century. With those rules, a new concept of infinite space

arose, which brought up the idea and vision of the planet as finite but, at the same time,

separated from religious concepts such as God’s infinite wisdom; consequently, space and

time turned into two independent identities, with two different approaches – scientific and

religious.

Renascence, breaking with this sacred vision of an immaterial and

immutable divine order, starts a reflection about the world and about man. From that

moment on, the world is considered as Nature, not a reflection of God’s thought

anymore. It is not about representing the outer world anymore, but the world. The

divine laws are replaced by the laws of an autonomous world and the Middle Ages’

aggregating space gives place to an exact construction, to a systematic space, a

rational, infinite, continuous, and homogeneous space (BARDONNÈCHE,

Dominique de).

“A Renascença, rompendo com esta visão sagrada de uma ordem divina imaterial e imutável, entabula uma

reflexão sobre o mundo e sobre o homem. A partir de então, o mundo é considerado como Natureza, não mais

reflexo do pensamento de Deus. Não se trata mais de representar o além, mas o mundo. As leis divinas são

substituídas pelas leis de um mundo autônomo e o espaço agregativo da Idade Média dá lugar a uma construção

exata, a um espaço sistemático, um espaço racional, infinito, contínuo e homogêneo” ( BARDONNÈCHE, D.

apud DOMINGUES, D., 1997, p. 197).

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According to Dominique de Bardonnèche, the first important rupture in the

Renaissance system happens with Impressionism, which brings into question the

scenographic space, breaking the single viewpoint that is switched for a multiple and

approximated vision. The space of perspective, she adds, questioned by Impressionism, is

mathematical, a constructed space that supposes a single and immutable eye which abstracts

from reality. “Space is what makes the eye stop” (PEREC, G. apud BARDONNÈCHE, D.,

1997), wherefrom we can see Beckett’s concern about space in OI, which is reinforced by the

silent time and lack of movement that permeate the play, and which offers the spectator a

large canvas where they can lie their eyes for a long time. Actually, according to Oppenheim

(2003, p. 123), “the unifying force of Beckett’s work lies in a visual as opposed to conceptual

thinking”; he restricts space so that also the spectator’s vision can be controlled like the lens

of a camera; in this way, as the author states, “Beckett played painter on the stage” to the

point of defining even the angle of the artist’s head (p. 125). Beckett forces us to stop and

wait to be able to see in a world of numerical interactivity, where waiting has become

unbearable for citizens of a society divided between the time of History – a time that refers to

its time – and the real time, impatient and feverish, of interactive exchanges; a society divided

between reflection and reflex, between sign and signal that lives according to an unreasonable

logic of permanent innovation. In order to survive, says Couchot, art will have to find its own

means to compound, with necessity and chance, the real time (COUCHOT apud

DOMINGUES, p. 143). And as Oppenheim (2003, p. 128) states, one of Beckett’s targets was

precisely the “crystallized associations” which were also the Dadaist’s and Surrealist’s

primary goal: the “destabilization of cultural habits of sign production”.

On the other hand, David Harvey (2004) establishes a strong connection between

perspectivism and individualism, for it gives the material foundation for the Cartesian

principles of rationality integrated to the Illuminist project. As a result, space, although

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infinite, seemed to be conquerable and containable for means of human occupation and

action, and in art, once it fixes a viewpoint, perspective fixes a vision that differs from the

natural one in many aspects – one of them is precisely the movement of the eye through the

space of the painting with no movement of the space viewed; perspective makes possible that

the eye visit the interior of the painting without the need of changing the viewpoint. As, in the

Renaissance, the study of nature becomes the artist’s main objective, it leads to the discovery

of the exterior world, and it is through the methods used in art, such as mathematics and

geometry, that science and art approximate. The treaties by Leon Battista Alberti and Da

Vinci are examples of this approximation, for they present their knowledge in mathematics,

physics, mechanics, hydraulics, military engineering, etc. – art, says Lionello Venturi (1998),

is a way of knowing; the painter executes by hand after having first mentally understood.

Actually, Leonardo considers drawing not only a science but also something that has a divine

character; the painter’s knowledge is a first truth that the philosopher must further elaborate.

For Alberti and Leonardo, the artist does not dissolve himself in God, but almost turns into a

god himself and, instead of imitating nature, they “know” it according to principles created by

the human mind. In Leonardo’s opinion, in order to be worthy to originate all art and all

science, the artist must be universal; the knowledge of the human form is not enough, the

painter must know and represent all aspects of nature: dusk, rain, dust, smog, the transparency

of the water and the stars in the sky (VENTURI, 1998, p. 94). In his studies, Leonardo

discovered the color’s degree of luminosity, what the Greeks called tonon, and states that the

shadow is the element which unites Man and the surrounding nature, as much as it should

fulfill the perspective emptiness and involve the image.

Four are the principal parts that must be considered in painting, to be

known: quality, quantity, position and figure; for quality it is understood the shadow

and what part of this shadow that is more or less dark; quantity, that is: what is the

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extension of a certain shadow in relation to the neighboring ones; position, that is: in

what way they must be situated and on what part of the members they must lean;

figure, that is: what is the shape of a certain shadow, i.e., whether it is triangular or

belongs to a circle or a square. (LEONARDO apud VENTURI, 1998, p. 95)

Reducing all the elements to shadow, Leonardo poetically describes beauty as a

gradation of shadow, and states that the contour shall have a mathematical nature, that is, it

must be unreal and invisible: figure-ground must melt in their limits, with no contrast;

however, to obtain a plastic form, it is necessary to circumscribe it within a precise contour.

Consequently, the painter shall first draw a draft of the full figure, which expresses the effects

of the shadows, and then complete its various parts. With this concept, a new relationship

between form and its atmosphere is established by Leonardo, creating with dusk a principle of

color without colors. Based on the same principle, he believed that the smallest thing could

lead our spirit to various inventions; it was a matter of seeing through shadows created by

spots.

“Stay where we were so long alone together, my shade will comfort you” (OI, p.14);

beauty will (might) go there, bringing new contours to the sad tale of the lonely man. Wait!

The “painter of words” is working on its luminosity, so Man and Nature can be united on his

canvas and then fulfill your emptiness, bringing color to where no color exists. Through OI’

manuscripts, the author’s labor to create his figures without rigid lines becomes more evident;

their plastic form rises from unreal and invisible contours, like in Da Vinci’s sfumato

Quatro são as partes principais que se devem considerar na pintura, a saber: qualidade, quantidade, posição e

figura; por qualidade entende-se a sombra e qual parte dessa sombra que é mais ou menos escura; quantidade,

isto é: qual a extensão de determinada sombra em relação às sombras vizinhas; posição, isto é: de que modo se

devem situar e em que parte dos membros se devem apoiar; figura, isto é: qual é a forma de uma certa sombra,

quer dizer, se é triangular ou faz parte de um círculo ou de um quadrado.

Sfumato is another technique developed by Leonardo Da Vinci, which consists of attenuating the contour

sharpness of the figures through the use of chiaroscuro. A great example of the use of sfumato is the famous

painting Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. Figuratively, it means something vague, not well defined, as

memories, feelings, etc.

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melting their limits with their figure-ground, which goes beyond the dark empty backstage –

it reaches the interactive spectator, who becomes an active part of it, altering it according to

their own History. In OI, acting must not materialize; it cannot interfere in the poetic

communion, in the irradiation of the word into the spectator’s reverial imagination. The stage

must only offer some elements discretely just as references to each one’s creative reverie. The

supreme value remains in the word; in Beckett’s case, in the dark spaces of the unword.

Later on, in the seventeenth century, the Baroque explored the use of the chiaroscuro, a

technique which consisted of modeling and defining forms through contrasts of light and

shadow while color contrast is used sparingly. It was created by Leonardo Da Vinci and

stressed by Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573-1610) (Plate 38) and became a way to express

artistic ideas and feelings, as a rebellion against the mannerist tradition, and expressing the

absence of faith in the scientific truth. Retreating in passion, emotions, sensations, and turning

completely towards nature, for these artists, color became the visual symbol of passion, and it

was taken as a sensible guide in antithesis to the abstract plastic form considered as a rational

guide. Some art historians attribute the change in Caravaggio’s painting style to a dark and

dramatic chiaroscuro to his desperate state of mind, and then connecting this technique to the

feeling of night or darkness. Actually, Baroque was pejoratively defined as the commitment

of those artists to the mannerist doctrines added by passionate elements, meaning a corrupt

and confused taste. In reality, it was a new principle of taste of sensual and passionate origin,

which opposed to the Renaissance, moved by the research on the unusual and exceptional.

Baroque constituted an attempt to move forward beyond form: it signals the dissolution of the

form, accomplished with total consciousness. According to Mario Perniola, the aesthetic

baroque experience is an excitement that subverts the singular identity and throws whoever

experiments it into an abyss, where any singular life is suppressed (PERNIOLA, M., 1997, p.

52). Formally, it is expressed through covering, occulting parts that are essential to what is

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intended to be shown: what is underneath the forms, or even what is outside them, which

excites the fantasy and introduces it into wonderful, inaccessible worlds. The baroque is the

transcendence of all form, which constantly overcomes itself, surprising us, bringing to light

what was intangible before – for example, the representation of the crowd, a beggar’s dragged

cape, or the wrinkled face of an old man. In architecture, mass lacks articulation and intends

to elong without any solution of continuity to whatever is nearby; where the singular element

cannot be agglutinated in the mass, it arises multiplied in identical copies, multiples that

dissolve its identity. In the theater, the exaggerated and emphatic aspect of the Baroque would

be a consequence of an impetuous effort, indispensable for those who do not want to succumb

to a total wanness and degradation. Consequently, even being considered one of the few

religious painters among the Italian artists in the 17

century, Caravaggio was many times

refused by the churches for being considered novel, which meant suspect of heresy, for his

works tended to represent the suffering of the martyrs of faith in such way that incited a sort

of voluptuosity also called pleasure, a mix between pain and joy. The artwork, says

Bachelard, arises always from whom has faced the danger and went to the extreme of an

experience, until the point where no human being can cross over.

Baroque is the style of roots, says Maffesoli (2003), it is the expression of Pan, god of

the fields and nature, it accentuates the pathetic as common passions, and Michelangelo

majestically expresses this baroque in everyday life, which so well characterizes the

experiences of postmodern life – expression of life and knowledge of the world that are not

abstract, for they present the ordinary in its interity, including evil, suffering, i.e., the shadow

that penetrates in each of us and in the social net as well. At the same time, in the Baroque

painting it is easier to see that the world of the artwork is spatially different, not to be

confused with the common world, states Tassinari (2001): the painting also calls the spectator

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into the space of the artwork (Plate 39), but it does not mean that the Baroque pictorial space

be the same where we live.

Later, Rembrandt (1606-1669) would also become a master of light and shadow,

famous for his portraits characterized by strong lighting effects (Plate 40). And this is

something that we see in OI, strong lighting effects setting the mood of the play. Initially,

despite the free space around the characters, the audience is taken by a sense of confinement

due to the stage darkness. Everything contrasts: the black hat against the white table, the white

hair against the black coat, the light on the table against the darkness of the backstage, the

book against the unspoken words. Light drives away darkness, and shades play an important

role: as Da Vinci pointed out, shade is the obstruction of light; without it, solid and opaque

bodies are barely defined and what is contained in its contours and the contours themselves

would not remain clearly understood (Da Vinci, p.115-17, 2004). Therefore, shades would

create the right contrast to clarify everything, revealing the characters and the story. Instead,

the contrast that chiaroscuro creates in OI seems to provoke more darkness and a sense of

sfumato (Plate 41), concealing, like a baroque painting, denying the audience the information,

the revelation for which they are waiting; therefore, leading the spectator to an intangible

world. “Could he not now turn back? Acknowledge his error and return to where they were

once so long alone together” (OI , p.14). In the film the image constantly moves in a circle, as

to force us to change our point of view regarding the characters, and we get to the end of the

play moving from one to the other, trying to understand, hoping something is going to be

unfolded. This is when we are given another moment of contemplation: Listener and Reader

once more stare at each other for ten seconds, unblinking, expressionless. In the film, this is

the only scene featured differently from the text; Sturridge adds color to the end and makes

Reader vanish into light and color (Plate 42), exactly as the chiaroscuro canon proposes –

little color against strong shades. If we follow this line of interpretation, the cinematic

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resolution would somehow limit the play by giving a clearer possibility of a spiritual presence

being released because the sad tale had been told for the last time. Beckett, instead, creates a

stronger and enigmatic ending, making Listener and Reader face each other as a mirror

reflection (Plate 43), for the mirror symbolically reflects the truth, honesty, the contents of the

heart and conscience, and those two faces mirroring each other are there to reflect the contents

of their hearts. We are not allowed to directly participate in it though, only look at the

reflections and contemplate the emptiness of the surroundings – the dark space of the untold

sad tale. Excess of space, states Bachelard, suffocates much more than the lack of it, and that

is exactly how the space in OI can be considered: excessive.

As it was said before, it is the unfolding of the characters, the mirror technique, that

leads to the fragmentation of the Subject, and it is the juxtaposition that they provoke what

breaks the perspective, altering the space of the scene – unlike in the portraits and mainly the

self-portraits by Rembrandt, whose self-referentiality for four centuries represented the

idealization of the Subject and kept the Renaissance perspective and space, here the repetition

and juxtaposition of the characters’ space breaks that pattern and launches the space of the

play into postmodernity. Like Cindy Sherman’s conceptual art, Untitled Film Stills (Plate 44),

where the artist directs the work and makes herself be photographed in a series of roles, in

different places, as an unnamed actress in shots that evoke old Hollywood pictures, B-movies

and film noir, whose first six shots presented grainy and slightly out of focus images

apparently played by the same blonde actress. The multiple disguise, as well as the multiple

roles played by the artist herself in the work and the blurriness of the pictures, bring about this

fragmentation of the subject, the many selves that are constituted from the imaginary. In the

same way, the characters in OI express that rupture, not by embodying different visual

references, like in Cindy Sherman’s work; on the contrary, by also playing different roles

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(Reader and Listener) through the same image, leads the spectator to use their own imaginary

to constitute or re-constitute those subjects.

David Rokeby (1997), writing about interactive art and technology, states that we

discover our many “I”s in the universe’s mirror, like in the myth of “Eco and Narcisse” told

by Ovid in Metamorphosis, which represents two types of reflection: the perfect mirrored

reflection synchronic with Narcisse’s reflection on the lake, and the delayed, distorted

reflections from Eco’s words. The reflections transformed are a dialogue between the “I” and

the world, whereas the non-mediated feedback of the exact mirroring produces the closed

system of self-absorption; the eco operates as a conscience’s inconstant loop through which

the image of somebody’s self and their relation with the world can be examined, questioned

and transformed.

Would that collage of Renaissance principles and Minimalism be a deviation, a

wrong detour contradicting the author’s minimal intentions? Definitely, no. The use of the

pyramid gives such power to the text as much as to the stage photography. Da Vinci

concluded, from his studies in optics, that the triangular composition, that is the linear

perspective, would give to the viewer a visual result similar to the way the eye apprehends the

image, with depth, considering an ideal spectator standing in front and at the center of the

picture. He believed that vision was the most important of our senses. He states, “The soul

accepts to be imprisoned in the human body because, thanks to our eyes, we can see things,

for through the eyes all the various things in nature are represented to the soul”.

Due to the

pyramidal composition, once we look at the painting, our attention is drawn to the interior of

the picture, forcing us to look at it in a deeper and steady way. And this optical effect is

present in the scene construction of OI as well: the linear perspective brings authenticity – we

“A alma aceita ficar aprisionada no corpo humano porque, graças aos nossos olhos, podemos ver as coisas,

pois através dos olhos todas as várias coisas da natureza são representadas à alma” (Da Vinci, 2004, p.102).

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see the scene the same way that our eyes see the world; so what we see is “real” and we are

kept within that view through an optical process. On the other hand, contrarily to a

Renaissance painting, which is closed within the frame, the outer space becomes part of the

composition and, like in a minimalist work, as important as the inner space, creating struggle

where only focus and visual and psychological harmony would be found before.

In fact, in a play that starts with a character telling his identical partner a story

beginning by its end, what would be more appropriate to capture the spectator’s attention than

a black-and-white pyramidal cinematography giving depth to the scene, carefully set with

minimum elements and carefully controlled lighting? Moreover, the audience receives a

differentiated visual treatment. We are introduced to the film via an abstract canvas, though

lacking the most important element in abstract expressionism – the color. Second and more

important, as if we were at a museum admiring a painting, the author gives us time, we have

ten seconds to look, observe, analyze the picture before the first words are said. Perfect

timing! When questions are about to form in our mind, words break the silence and start affect

us, causing a deep feeling of derangement, for we are faced with an identity enigma

concerning the characters and their ultimate condition, as well as the story, place, and

especially the psychological level on which the play is set. Assimilar derangement we can

find in Man Ray’s work Rrose Sélavy (Plate 45), a series of photographs of Duchamp dressed

as a woman, from 1921, which holds also an identity enigma – like in Cindy Sherman’s

photographs, like in OI’s photography, the model/artist/character’s fragmentation is wrapped

up in disguise, requiring a second deeper look so that the viewer can “peel off” the various

layers of the image, enabling its complexity to surface. The role played by the artist, his

identity, since he occupies both sides of the process – he is the creator and also the model in

Sherman’s case – remains secured behind the mask, just like the persona in the theater; on the

other hand, there are gaps that lead the viewer to track back the materiality of the work as

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much as the artist’s presence, even if in a multifaceted way. The title itself, suggesting a

person’s name is a pun, or paronomasia, which in French sounds like “eros, c’est la vie”, was

later used by Duchamp as a pseudonym on written material. He signed several creations with

it, such as sculptures (Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? – an assemblage consisting of an oral

thermometer and small cubes of marble resembling sugar cubes inside a birdcage), and a film,

Anemic Cinema, from 1926). It is worth mentioning that also the inspiration for the title-name

represents a cultural assemblage, for Rrose has been viewed to be a real social figure, Belle da

Costa Greene (1883-1950, Plate 46), a librarian of the Morgan Library & Museum, who was

famous for her extravagant life and dressing style and whose position placed her at the center

of the art trade. Appropriation not only of the visual aspects, for Duchamp visibly reproduces

one of her paintings, but of sexual gender and identity, besides rescuing the idealized self-

referent subject from Rembrandt’s portraits and self-portraits.

Beckett’s mirroring portraits, however, erase the traits of the assemblage, it is not

possible for the spectator to see what is behind the mask, to peel off the characters, for they

would risk to be thrown into the void, into nothingness, self-referentiality itself becomes an

enigma for it is not possible to know whose referentiality we are talking about – who refers to

whom? Whose double are we facing – Reader’s or Listener’s? Is this something the author is

concerned with? The concern that we can identify is in erasing any traits of identity; like the

postmodern melted social subject, the characters lack identity, their history can never be told,

it is tied up in some dark corridor of the past that, once enlightened by the present time, might

fade away because there is no time consistent enough to hold the past. Like with the

postmodern man, fear of disappearing becomes one of the greatest ghosts with which our

society struggles, and Reader and Listener sum it up through lack of identity, or maybe

should we say through a melted identity, and through the fear of failure via communication –

as words may not be enough, it is better to rely on the visual and even here in a disruptive

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way, breaking with verisimilitude, melting references to different periods of art and,

consequently, leaving the characters, and spectators, even more alone in their self-reflective

inner universes. In the same way that Duchamp, through the readymade, established a game

involving sight, language, and what was conventionally considered artwork, as an attempt to

undo the hegemony of sight, especially if we think of the words or sentences he usually

inscribed on the Readymade which, instead of describing the object, would lead the spectator

to make other associations, so does Beckett with his deconstructive process, provoking a

shock between visual and verbal. Like Duchamp, Beckett decontextualizes language, and

generates a distrust of the word, showing its insufficiency. We shall also remember that many

of the artistic influences found in Beckett’s work refer not only to artists with whom he had a

personal relationship – Duchamp, for example, who Beckett met in 1937 and with whom he

used to play chess; or Kandinsky, who he met in 1939, and whom Beckett described as a

“sympathetic old Siberian”; or Alberto Giacometti, who would design with him the set for the

Odéon Theater’s revival of Waiting for Godot in 1961 (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 73), but

especially to his strong and serious interest in art. According to Lois Oppeinheim (2003),

these friendships followed years of visits to galleries, museums, and private collections,

besides consistent readings on art history; he even applied for a post as assistant curator at the

National Gallery in London in 1933. “He could spend as much as an hour in front of a single

painting, looking at it with intense concentration, savoring its forms and its colors, reading it,

absorbing its minutest details” (KNOWLSON, 1996, p. 186). Those references to art, which

are of two types – those that are specific references to art works or artists, such as the ones

previously mentioned here, and those that allude to imaginary art – have a great influence on

Beckett’s writing also as a valorization of art as a prototype.

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The ever increasing minimalism that characterizes the evolution of Beckett’s fictive

and dramatic style is a paradoxal result of his preoccupation with the visual as

prototype. The specular model, in other words, while allowing his art to be, is

precisely what subverts it, causing ‘failure’ […] to be more than a persistent threat.

In this sense Beckett’s reductionism confirms the conjecture – derived from Hegel

and demonstrable, via Duchamp and Warhol – that art has reached an ‘end’

OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 29).

The artistic references in Beckett, be it as a material object, be it as a fictive image,

states the author, are the ground where his entire investigation of language is modeled,

whether as on epistemological or communicative tool, , for consciousness in both, inner and

outer levels, and its articulation are fundamentally related to visualization. It is through the

visual that Beckett’s characters seek their identities, and once they face their lack of it, they

realize that they are left with nothing but a sort of collage of it: in the Unnamable, for

example, the character has only a photograph to rely on; in OI, Reader/Listener have only

their mirror-image to rely on, as the words, the ones that could reveal them their past and their

identity, awakening in them internal and external parameters to bring self-awareness, cannot

help, for the story cannot be told, even the “dear name” cannot be said. Consequently, the

dramatic tension remains. The allusions to art, says Oppenheim (2003, p. 33), demonstrate the

dependence of meaning on specular associations; it is the visual art what offers Beckett a

means of exploring language as the appropriation of imagistic representation. On the other

hand, in his first published work in French, La Peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le

Pantalon, published just after World War II in Cahiers d’art, Beckett attacks the insincerity

of some artists and critics, at the same time that he applauds others, such as Kandinsky and

Yeats, making clear his an-aesthetic position: “There is no painting. There are only paintings.

[…] These not being sausages, are neither good nor bad. […] The work considered as pure

creation, and whose function ends with its genesis, is doomed to nothingness”. Further on, he

makes clear his understanding of perception as a requirement to bring the artwork to life;

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consequently showing the dependence of art on the viewer. He states: “As it is still only a

painting, it lives only a life of lines and colors, offering itself only to its author. Take note of

its situation. It awaits removal from there. It awaits eyes” (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM,

2003, p. 74).

“Little is left to tell”, says the minimalist master. This is how we enter the play

universe, by the end, vitrified by the stage scene and with no distractions, aware that there is a

past minimally told, clearly painful, seeking relief from an impossible unfamiliarity.

Formally, as it was mentioned before, we have repetition of elements - words, knocks, form-

figures, just as two triangles would relate to a cube in a geometrical composition, or notes in a

musical arrangement. But the simplicity of forms, unlike a visual minimalist artwork, does

not bring clarity to the reader/audience, it does not make the story simpler, and it does not

remove the author’s personal signs, as it would do in a painting or sculpture. This is because

every minimalist element which we find in the visual composition of OI is there to disguise,

to delude the spectator with simplicity.

João A. Frayze-Pereira (SOUSA [org.], 2001), analyzing the relationship between

plastic object and spectator refers to the concept of “intermediary zone of experience”,

brought up by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, which basically means that an artwork,

through what can be seen, creates an imaginary passage between the “I/spectator” and another

one that becomes present in the plastic space, creating an imaginary alterity, a “non-I”. This

means that the artwork creates a multiple area of experience which articulates the

psychological Self and the world; therefore, the visual experience evolves within the element

originated from belief and illusion (here understood not as a deceiving appearance but as a

necessary condition for a creative articulation between objective and desired realities).

Materiality is what unveils the alterity in the artwork, like in Pierre Soulages’s minimalist

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paintings in which the movement of the brush is apparent, showing the passages from one

layer to another and leaving clear to the viewer the route taken by the artist (Plate 47).

His giant canvases, often presented as polyptychs, show nothing that may be

exterior to them nor do they refer to anything other than themselves. Before them,

the viewer is confronted head-on, encompassed within the space they secrete, struck

by the intensity of their presence; a physical, tactile, sensual presence that gives off a

powerful suppressed energy; but metaphysical too, which compels internalization

and meditation.

A painting of muffled and violent materiality, yet at the same time, a changing and

vibrant "immaterial" which is constantly transformed depending on the angle from

which it is approached. The art of Soulages is part of a direct act which seeks itself

in the process of creation. But in the last analysis, he observes, "The work lives

through the way one looks at it. It limits itself neither to what it is nor to the person

who produces it, but is also made by the person looking at it. My painting is a space

for questioning and meditation where the meaning one gives it may come and go".

(JAUNIN, François. Pierre Soulages: light “beyond black”. Available at:

http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/pierre-soulages-light-beyond-black_4767.html. Site

visited on January 24, 2009)

Known as the “painter of black” (JAUNIN, 2009), Soulages constructs light through

black strokes on the white canvas with brushes especially made (Plate 48), in order to leave

behind his steps, to build transparency. According to Donald Kuspit (2009), Soulages uses

blackness in a dramatized and at the same time transparent way, infused with light, which

brings more isolation to his blackness, re-radicalizing the abstract painting and bringing up

loneliness even more evidently, “overexposed and assaultive, violent and stubborn” –

blackness in his paintings “has the force of irreconcilability: the transcendence of negation”.

Contrarily to decorative painting, what we see in Soulages’s work is a radical abstract

painting, and like the most radical ones, it remains indigestible, peculiarly “out of sight,

useable, ironically invisible. It is too hard for ordinary perception, which seeks comfort before

insight, to swallow”, as much as it is for Beckett’s audience who also lack comfort before

insight. The discomfort does not come only because of the mirror effect caused by the

characters but also because of the blackness surrounding them, contrasted with white’s

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simplicity, stoniness, which does not bring an insightful clarity. Beckett uses color, or

increasingly lack of it, to heighten mood with a unique chromatic intensity, such as in

Murphy, whose protagonist’s lucky color is “vivid lemon”; in Watt, a red floor, red hat, blue

days, blue flowers, etc. In The Unnamable, the eyes are “as red as live coals”, the grey “shot

with rose, like the plumage of certain birds”; in Not I, we have Mouth’s red lips. Nevertheless,

color, states Oppenheim (2003, p. 41), “does not offset the intended austerity – achieved by

the interplay of light and dark, an often discreet half-lighting, and the striking contrast of

white and black – of the late plays. Black and white, she continues, and the grays between

them, suffice to render the nonvisible visible, touching the reader or spectator more deeply

than might the whole spectrum of primary colors. Actually, it is their absence what

“spatializes the existential dimension of Beckett’s solipsistic world. Giving form to thought,

structure to being, and rendering consciousness inhabitable, color succeeds by virtue of its

lack, in arranging zones of visibility” (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 42). Yet, in OI, the

transparency brought by white against black turns to be as violent and stubborn as in

Soulages’s paintings – a pictorial metaphor for what seems to be an eternal binomial social

struggle: who is inside, who is outside the social net? Who belongs, who is the unfitted one?

Who is inside the plot – Listener or Reader? Whose story is that? When color threatens in

Beckett, states Stanton B. Garner (1994, p. 71), “it is carefully muted, its singularity of hue

strictly minimized”.

It is through blackness that Soulages's abstract paintings articulate the social truth of

their outsiderness, their nonidentity in a society that posits its own mythical self-

identity--also symbolized by the uniformity of the decorative. Soulages's abstract

black paintings do something more: they reveal negation inherent in the forced

social march to self-identity, a negation articulating the truth that abstraction informs

all real relations among men, as Adorno said. It is this ironical revelation of the

ambiguity of abstraction--the fact that it is as much an instrument of conformity as

of uniqueness, that it establishes the compact majority as well as the difference of

the outsider individual--that makes Soulages's abstract black paintings truly radical.

(KUSPIT, 1996)

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The disguise, or shall we say delusion, brought up by the apparent simplicity of OI,

reinforces the contemporary challenge to “see” in a world blurred by an excess of images.

Seeing in Beckett is a thematic figuration constructed through recurring images of closing and

opening (of eyes, windows) and of refuge, like in Endgame which, according to Oppenheim,

reveal the rupture that separates inner and outer domains, “the quintessential I from the

nonessential not I, while the motif of ‘looking’ (‘looking at’ and, by extension, ‘looking for’)

marks the quest for a unity between them” (2003, p. 37). The eye, she says, indicates both the

separation of inner and outer worlds and the potential for their integration. That is explicit in

OI: Reader, as if looking for approval or recognition, recurrently looks at and for Listener’s

eyes, which remain down, hidden until almost the end of the play; when the book is closed,

they finally stare at each other, as if seeking for understanding, for what Carla Locatelli calls

“the issue of translatability of the said into the seen, and vice versa” (LOCATELLI apud

OPPEINHEIM, p. 39). Can Listener understand Reader? Can he “translate” Reader’s

reading? Is it possible to unify their worlds through repeated readings and knocks on the

table? Can they access each other’s soul? Still according to Locatelli, “the complexity of

seeing is literally portrayed as the modeling of the world, and the actual seeing, inextricably

linked to saying, is shown to be the only means apt to establish a world, even when the

borders and structure of seeing are problematic” (ib., p. 40).

Says Jean Starobinski (1961) that, among all senses, sight is the one that is more

easily taken by impatience, and Frayze-Pereira states that what the act of seeing naïvely aims

at is seeing all at once; and it is this process of hurry what makes us, spectators, see ordinary

objects as unusual ones once they are presented as pictorial objects, for we are forced to look

at them, to “see” them as if for the first time. The pictorial composition in Beckett forces us –

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spectators in a hurry – to do the same: we are led to stop our attention, not just by the

appearance of the characters, but also by the struggle between inner and outer space, by the

frozen images, and even by the hat which, pictorially speaking, seems to have no other role in

the play besides creating an area of contrast between volumes, like in a minimalist painting or

sculpture. And if we think of the two characters, specifically, static, looking at each other,

alike in every aspect, we can also establish a relationship with what Bazin (1983) calls “the

mummy complex” – the act of embalming as an attempt to exorcise time, to resist the

annihilation of time and cultural changes through form. A sort of black mirror which, like in

Soulages’s paintings, reveals what Kuspit (1996) would call “annihilating reality”:

"Annihilating reality" is revealed in all its self- annihilation, which does not mean

the subject has the power to undo the annihilating effect of abstract reality on it--the

feeling that it is unreal--but does give it the courage to recognize itself in the black

mirror of its emaciation, to face the fact that continuous abstract relations have

reduced it to a shadow of itself. But recognition of the fact that in everyday

collective existence one has become an abstract, inwardly lifeless shadow of oneself,

is to begin to recognize one's true self, for it is ironically mirrored by--hidden in--

one's shadow. Such ironical recognition of one's shadowy reality gives one the

courage to survive and feel real and emotionally full, rather than unreal and

emotionally emaciated. (KUSPIT, 1996)

In the same way that Soulages architecturally constructs his identity, or a concept of

it, through strokes and blackness, as Kuspit would say, an architecture that is always on the

verge to collapse, for it changes once it stabilizes into self-identity, which means maintaining

“the proportions of the interior” and at the same time becoming an exterior, in OI Listener

and Reader’s identity is also on the verge to fall into nothingness, a slippery architecture of

self-identity that has its basis altered every time there is an attempt to awaken time and reveal

the story and, therefore, reveal those layers hidden behind discomfort, behind un-recognition.

It seems that also for Beckett time and space are there to prevent one from earning their own

identity; as if self-absence were the real living condition of any human being.

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What we have in OI is a visual collage made of many layers taken from different and

distant times in art history, as if in a non-verbal statement of commitment to the past, or

perhaps an exercise to experiment that creative intermediary zone mentioned by Winnicott,

where illusion, past experiences, and reality, melt to create a “transitional object” – our

pictorial timeless experience. Contrarily to what Andre, Flavin and Judd believed, here we do

not know whether what is being gradually revealed in suspension is a whole past of growing

density like a cryptogram, or actually the belief in some sort of future; we do not know

whether those past references are there to tell us a story, or to create more shadows among the

layers of the play, so it becomes impossible for us (at least for the lazy spectators, as Beckett

would define) to know which story is supposed to be told, in which level of the play we are

thrown – in the time of memory, or in the time of wishes? Or maybe the time of reverie? In

fact, the struggle comes from the pictorial evenness, which creates among the visual elements

of the play a relationship in which what matters is not identifying which layer comes first or

second in the collage but the conjunction “and” – outer “and” inner space, black “and” white,

Reader “and” Listener. The presence of “and” in OI becomes a key element.

According to Deleuze (2004), the conjunction “and” penetrates all things, is

everywhere, it drags all relationships, it is the creative stuttering, the diversity, multiplicity,

the destruction of identities, for there are as many relationships, as many frontiers as “ands”,

and the more the frontiers, the less visible they become. The more contrast we identify in OI,

the less clear becomes the amount of visual and metaphorical layers within the play – what we

face as spectators is the impossibility of seeing the frontiers, of identifying what is presence

and what is absence, what is the actual play and what is reverie within it. The game between

actual and virtual images creates a Time-image, emptying the space, disconnected from

movement and so establishes a relationship with a mental or mirror-image. With the

suspension of all movement, there is a crystallization of the image and, consequently, of

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signs, and what we first see is Time; it is the time of memory that determines the movement

of the pages which Reader is reading, or the knock on the table by Listener; time does not

result from movement anymore but, on the contrary, determines it. Moreover, the lack of

movement dissolves the concept of spatial verticality even more, which concept is one of the

strongest characteristics of modern painting, bringing up the predominance of horizontality,

the abandonment of the Renaissance “window” in favor of an opaque plane on which data are

inscribed, like in a diagram, says Deleuze (2004, p. 71) – actually, that is Beckett’s formula: it

is better to be seated than standing, lying than seated.

By playing with pictorial timing, Beckett ends up expanding the spectator’s perception;

therefore, empowering their eyesight and, further on, activating their ability to question their

visual experience in all its complexity, all its shadows; and quoting J. Tanizaki, Frayze-

Pereira states that playing with shades, the subtle manipulation of chiaroscuro, is what

unveils beauty, and when an object is shaped by shadow, our eye is captured by a vertiginous

emptiness dug between the object and ourselves. The eye, according to Deleuze, is already in

everything, is part of the image, its visibility, it is not the camera but the “black screen” that

holds the image, that prevents it from moving and propagating the light in all directions – a

light which would never be revealed if constantly propagating itself. According to Starobinski

(1961), the “occult fascinates” because, in dissimulation and in absence, there is a strange

force which constrains the spirit to turn towards the inaccessible, and in this process we

become what F.-Pereira calls “patient-spectators” – through time, we think; and through

thinking, Eros triumphs over death; that is the “maintained illusion”. And he questions:

wouldn’t the realization of this triumph be the main goal in Art? In Beckett, if this triumph

happens it is through the spectator’s eye as opposed to the usual blindness of his characters;

although in OI they are not really blind, they seem not to be able to see through the shadows

of memory, of the story for the last time told, they seem not to be able to know whether they

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are still within the limits of the tale or whether they have already crossed its borders into the

territory of reverie. Like the synthetic image computer-generated, the time of the image in OI

is not only that of memory, but also the time needed so that the reconstruction process of

image-imagination of what is seen can be fulfilled by those who see it – the spectators.

Through the synthesis of these two processes, purely mental, the actual image is modified and

the various consciences bring new and personal approaches to what has been shown; then, an

emotional vision, an aesthetic pleasure is created; in Beckett’s case, we may say an aesthetic

discomfort. Similarly to a multimedia artwork, the spectator is invited to penetrate not the

technically “virtual” universe but the imaginary ones and interact with them according to a

non-linear route still conceived by the author; we are invited to follow the unfamiliar steps

proposed by Reader: “Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the islet. Hour after hour.

In his long black coat no matter what the weather…” (OI, p. 13). In fact, all the visual

elements, as much as the lack of movement, potentiate every word that has not been

pronounced, all the details of that sad story that have been kept away from the audience, the

unspoken words, the unnamed “dear name”, the unrevealed shared moments, the relationship

between Reader and Listener, who “grew to be as one with never a word exchanged.” What

we have is an extremely minimalist play full of abstract expressiveness, reinforced also by the

use of mirror image. In this regard, Da Vinci states:

…it is clearly proved that everything transmits its image to wherever it is

visible and, inversely, this thing is capable of receiving all the images of the things

that are in front of it. …the visible powers of the image in the eyes can project

themselves to the object, as do the images from the object to the eyes. (2004,

p.102)

...fica claramente provado que cada coisa transmite sua imagem a todos os lugares onde ela for visível e,

inversamente, esta coisa é capaz de receber todas as imagens das coisas que estão em frente a ela. .... os poderes

visíveis da imagem nos olhos podem se projetar para o objeto, como fazem as imagens do objeto para os olhos.

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As it was mentioned before, it is known that, symbolically, the mirror is the instrument

that reflects the truth, the contents of the heart and conscience. Once more, the visual solution

comes against its regular meaning by veiling instead of revealing the truth, twisting the

audience’s expectations. The extreme visual simplicity of Reader and Listener, alike in every

detail, fits into the minimalist concept and into the author’s intention to tell a story from an

impersonal, unfamiliar point of view, to incorporate the multiple layers of conscience into a

heterogeneous narrative without reducing them to a single voice: Reader and Listener may be

the same individual in different psychological levels; Reader may be a real person who was

sent by “the dear name” to warn Listener about the changes that would follow; Listener may

be the desperate spirit who comes to listen to his own memories once more, or vice-versa. In

short, Beckett’s minimalist geniality enabled the existence of a number of characters in one,

an aspect which was well explored by Sturridge by choosing the same actor, creating the

mirror image mentioned before. The identity of Listener and Reader loses importance; the

pain emerging from each minimal word, from each knock on the table, from the Listener’s

hidden face, from the need to forget, to erase each sweet memory is enough to make the

audience submerge into that unfamiliar cave, sympathizing with such desperation, such need

of hiding away. Beckett’s “deranging” presence is more than just an unreliable narrator – it

estranges the text from both author and reader – the author seems to know as much as the

reader/spectator. And, definitely, it does not matter anymore if Listener is the Id or Alter ego,

if he is alive or dead, or if Reader is just the result of Listener’s emotional reflections; the

photography reveals all we need to know to reach a state of fruition and catharsis.

As Susan Sontag states (1981), photography does not apparently constitute proof of the

world, but only of a fragment of it, a miniature of a reality which we all can build or acquire.

Holding a camera turns us into an active person, a voyeur, and this is what we become when

facing the static OI: some sort of amateur photographers with a camera in front of our eyes

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who, perplexed, believe (or are led to) that we can interfere with the scene. In this game of

spaces, the repeated pauses in OI seem to express the author’s desperate scream so that we,

passive spectators, as supposed photographers of a drama unfolding in front of our eyes, make

use of the “ubiquity” mentioned by Sontag and continue there, willing to hear one more time

and, consequently, supporting that dear past, which is submitted to the menace of the

contemporary inevitable monster – disappearance.

Moreover, it is worth to remember the presupposition of veracity given to

photography, and this provokes in us, spectators-photographers, the illusion of being in fact

able to interfere in the plot. For Susan Sontag, through photography, each individual, each

family construct a chronicle – a picture of themselves – a portable collection of images that

testify their cohesion. The pauses in Beckett bring cohesion not only to Reader and Listener,

but also to the relationship of the play with the spectator and, at the same time that the identity

of the “dear name” and the knowledge of his/her past are denied to us, we are integrated to the

drama, to the struggle to “retain” these fragments of the chronicle through the immobility of

the characters and the frequent pauses offered by the author.

Susan Sontag also affirms that photographing people means to violate them and see

them in a way that they can never see themselves, allowing the photographer to know them as

they will never know themselves; it is like transforming them into objects whose possession

we symbolically hold. In OI, this process might represent a frontier whose task of melting

Beckett perceptively throws over the spectator, taking them out of their condition of

anonymous passivity and forcing them to act, to look into the characters’ “depths of mind” the

untold story, the unspoken words, the revelation of a drama that, in the anonymousness of the

characters, can be of anyone, including ours. However, also this appeal is but a trompe l’oeil –

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we are called, seduced by a narrator-Reader, we are touched by the pain hidden in the face of

Listener and, in a fraction of a second, we believe that the space of that pain and that time is

ours too and we can and shall in fact keep it as a treasure. The same way as in the photograph,

the pictorial pause in OI becomes a small portion of space and of time as well; actually, that is

what can be retained from the past.

Analyzing Michael Snow’s Authorization (1969 – Plate 49), Philippe Dubois affirms

that, with photography, it is no longer possible for us to think about the image isolated from

the act that makes it exist (DUBOIS, 1998, p. 15) – an image in process, an “image-act”,

which necessarily implies the issue of the “subject in process”. In Snow’s case, through a

game of repetitions, mirror-images, and framing, each photo recapturing the previous, the

consequence is an effect of abyss until there is a total fulfillment of the field of vision.

According to Dubois,

It is clear what is at stake in this dispositive: a problem of time and

inscription, a problem of subject and mask, a problem of death and dissolution.

There are two images and two temporalities. There is the mirror, which offers an

always direct representation, which always remits only to the present here-and-now,

to the singular present of who is looking at themselves (seeing themselves and being

seen). There is the photo, always postponed which always remits to an anteriority

which was retained, frozen in time and its place. (DUBOIS, 1998, p. 17)

As in Authorization, also in OI there is a problem (or enigma) of time and inscription,

of subject and mask. The difference is that, in Beckett’s work, the mirror-image is symbolic,

but it equally reflects and even potentiates the problem of death and dissolution – the two

images equally reflect two temporalities, for, as it was mentioned before, the space of the

Vê-se bem o que está em jogo nesse dispositivo: um problema de tempo e inscrição, um problema de sujeito e

de máscara, um problema de morte e de dissolução. Há duas imagens e duas temporalidades. Há o espelho, que

oferece uma representação sempre direta, que sempre remete unicamente ao aqui-agora em curso, ao presente

singular de quem está se olhando (se vendo e sendo visto). Há a foto, sempre adiada que remete sempre a uma

anterioridade, a qual foi detida, congelada em tempo e seu lugar.

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characters is in fact an in-between space; we do not know precisely who truly exists, Reader

or Listener, whether one of them results from the other’s imagination. The representation of

this mirror created by Beckett, in opposition to the mirror in general, dissolves the concept of

“here-and-now”; however, the pauses to which the spectator is forced creates the

photographic space, and that space, like in Snow’s work, also remits to an anteriority which

was detained, not by a pictorial element, but by the absence of word; and the consequence is

that the “sad tale” ends up frozen in its time and space, even when Reader affirms that it is for

the last time told. Beckett seems to incorporate to his work the vision of his century about

photography which, according to Philippe Dubois, insists more on the idea of transformation

of the real through photograph than on the discourse of similitude predominant in the

nineteenth century. Photography starts to be considered as eminently codified in all aspects,

and this codification dislocates the notion of realism from its empirical fixation to what Diane

Arbus calls the principle of “inner truth” (DUBOIS, 1998, p. 37). What for the critics of the

nineteenth century was considered a failure of photography in its pretentiously perfect

representation of the real world –the limits of the palette in color and shade – make

photography the ideal instrument to represent the spaces of the human soul in Beckett’s work.

What in a real photograph would be represented in a rough way, or would not be represented

– the half-tones around the objects, the nuances of depth, the plan illumination that only the

human eye is capable of capturing and representing – turns into abyssal labyrinths for the

reader-spectator who, for not having a real camera in front of them, can freely forage for the

other dimensions of space, reflecting their story, their own soul on them.

Once more, in OI, the game of photographic space, that has its principles in the

Renaissance perspective, creates zones of friction and what should be static acquires the

unlimited spaces of the postmodern artwork. We can think of the treatment given by Beckett

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to space in OI as the treatment given to a contemporary artwork, following the

presuppositions of what should be an intervention in a public space. An example of this is the

work developed by a group of Argentinean artists, La Baulera, as part of an annual event

organized by the Sub-secretariat of the Patrimony and the City of Buenos Aires, which

consists of the rotating revalorization of different “Porteño” neighborhoods through various

artistic exhibitions. One of them seems to especially evoke the same game of derangement, of

out-of-place so typical in Beckett’s work: the series Las barricadas invisibles, held on

November, 29 2004, at the Congress Library. The action consisted of eight people who would

enter the library at the same time. Each one would take a book and sit down to read it.

Suddenly, one by one, they would make a ping-pong ball bounce so quickly under the tables

at which they were sitting that the authorities in the room would not be able to identify their

origin, but one thing would be clear to all the people present – that “sound” did not belong in

that place. Before they were identified, the eight artists would get up, return their books and

silently leave the library.

What can be identified in this happening, as well as in Beckett’s work, is that the

awareness of something that does not belong, which is out-of-place, comes accompanied by a

load of discomfort, but in OI there is also the possibility of abyss, as in Snow’s work – the

surrounding darkness functions as a “dark hole”, creating a sort of suction area where the

spectator feels abandoned. In fact, this game of spaces and times, together with the

impossibility of verification of a possible reality has been considered the essence of Beckett’s

originality as playwright. According to Charles Lyons (KALB, 1989), many of the moments

we witness at the theater carry two different significances: they represent a specific moment

in time and, simultaneously, function as representations of typical moments in the characters’

lives as a whole. That is, both work as full or self-sufficient representations of a temporal

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unity and as metonymy of a major temporal unity (an illusory totality that cannot be

represented). However, according to Lyons, its originality lies not in the use of temporal

fragments but in the fact of leaving this relation between micro and macro unity without any

possibility of verification and, therefore, misunderstood, be it by the characters or by the

spectator. Beckett makes us exercise our tendency to construct a complete narrative from the

fragments presented and, at the same time, recognize that the story created is a product of our

imagination and, therefore, ephemeral and non-verifiable. In this way, our effort to handle the

intangibility of the experience offered by Beckett raises the conflict of his characters as they

fight their images from the past in the deceptive contexts of the present (KALB, 1989, p.

306). It is enough thinking of the ubiquitous figures of OI as examples of Doppelgänger,

which in some traditions represents bad luck, sickness or danger, a death omen. A

Doppelgänger is always a sinister form of ubiquity and OI is the first play by Beckett to

present this figure, inaugurating a period of phantasmagoria in his work, where ghosts who

echo the haunting side of memory and nostalgia mix up and are presented on stage.

We have simplicity of colors – black and white are enough to tell the story, and

paradoxically it is exactly the greatest representative of abstract expressionism, Wassily

Kandinsky, who comes to elucidate this aspect. The author states that color provokes a

psychical vibration and one of the greatest color contrasts in a composition consists of the

difference between black and white – white produces a movement approaching the spectator

to the picture and provokes a reaction in our soul similar to that caused by absolute silence,

which is not dead, but bursts in live possibilities; black, instead, distances the spectator, it is

like “nothingness” with no possibilities, a dead “nothingness”. And he adds:

Like a “nothing” with no possibilities, like a “nothing” dead after the sun’s

death, like an eternal silence, without future, without even the hope of a future, the

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Black resounds internally. What in music corresponds to it is the pause that marks a

complete ending, which maybe will be followed by something else – the birth of

another world. For all that is suspended by this silence is finished forever: the circle

is closed. Black is like an extinct bonfire, consumed, which stopped burning,

immovable and insensitive like a dead body over which everything slips and nothing

else affects. It is like the silence in which the body enters in after death, when life

has been consumed till the end (KANDINSKY, 1996, p.96).

According to Kuspit (1996), in the history of modernist painting, blackness has two

faces, a split identity: it serves symbolism – emotional realism; on the other side, black is the

color with the least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minimal

shade of the other colors stands clearly forward.

Kandinsky also states that in art what is veiled is stronger, and combining it with

what can be unveiled will lead to the discovery of a new leitmotiv for a composition of forms;

and this is what the play unfolds through its shades – new possibilities, a new leitmotiv. All

levels of the play are immersed in darkness, from the characters to the story. Who is Listener?

Better, “what” is he? What did really happen to him and to the “dear name”? Is it about a

woman who abandoned him, or maybe died? Who is or “what” is Reader? Are the “dear

name” and the Parisian landscape a reference to Beckett’s relationship with Joyce, as some

writers have already pointed out? Or, would Reader be just an imaginative trick caused by

Listener’s desperation and need for revisiting his own past? To which level of conscience do

they belong? We do not know, and this is why it is so easy to connect with that sorrow, that

darkness, that feeling of “nothingness” with no possibilities of having the shared moments

back, or forgetting them. We are locked in the shades of OI, not only the stage shades but the

black coat, the hat, the white table, the book pages we are invited to read as if everything were

Como um “nada” sem possibilidades, como um “nada” morto após a morte do sol, como um silêncio eterno,

sem futuro, sem a esperança sequer de um futuro, ressoa interiormente o preto. O que na música a ele

corresponde é a pausa que marca um fim completo, que será seguida, talvez, de outra coisa – o nascimento de

outro mundo. Pois tudo o que é suspenso por esse silêncio está acabado para sempre: o círculo está fechado. O

preto é como uma fogueira extinta, consumida, que deixou de arder, imóvel e insensível como um cadáver sobre

o qual tudo resvala e que mais nada afeta. É como o silêncio no qual o corpo entra após a morte, quando a vida

consumiu-se até o fim.

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simply about a story tale. If we look at the symbolic meaning of the hat, for example, it is also

related to power, the crown that reassures sovereignty to the one who wears it, but it also

symbolizes the head, thought and identification. However, in the play, the hat is just laid on

the table like a quiet spectator, nobody wears it, which leads us to believe that the one who

thinks and holds the power is not there anymore; would this be the “dear name”, Reader, or

Listener himself, who gave up his power, his will? Who does the hat belong/relate to?

Everything is obscure and, yet, still carries transparencies that can lead us somewhere – we

cannot forget that the hat is the main icon of Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot,

with its two clown-like\pantomimic figures who wander around attached to the rest of their

belongings, and which leads us to identify a self-quote, another layer in the play, for we must

remember, as it has already been mentioned, that OI evokes a series of biographical elements

related to Beckett’s relationship with James Joyce. Consequently, another door is opened to

another abyss of interpretation, a story within a story, perhaps a play within a play. This self-

quote turns out to be the unveiling element that makes the issue of identity in the play even

more slippery if we go back to Godot and the so long waited absence, in which context the hat

represents the element that opposes the feeling of real and concrete with the psychic

discomfort of an unreal abstract world – somehow, hope, the possibility to survive lies on the

symbolic hat.

On the other hand, the table, or white rectangle, also called sun-square in Freemasonry

Society, which may have been known by Beckett since his father was a free mason, was used

for evocations, symbolizing the perfect relation between earth and heaven, and the desire of

the society members to participate in that perfection. Consequently, the white rectangle plays

an important role in the set, it has the function to be the sacred ground where the evocations of

Listener’s past will be disclosed; it is around the table that Reader and Listener gather, and it

is there that the mystique takes place, where the various layers of drama unfold and allow us

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to take a minimalist part in it. This sacred ground must be white because white is the sum of

all colors, the symbol of purity, and carries the absolute silence, the eternal resistance, so as to

make the communication between Listener and Reader possible, and also to allow a little

although strong approximation of the play’s universe to the audience, giving them a tragic, or

maybe sacred, dimension of the drama presented. Pictorially, the table stands as the basis of

the pyramidal perspective, which means it is the element that holds the scene construction and

the viewer’s attention within the artwork frame. However, the mirror procedure used with the

characters and the juxtaposition it creates provokes a breakage in the structure of the

perspective, altering the space of the scene and opening it, like a spiral, to new dimensions –

the dimensions of the unlimited modern space in art. Beckett’s special brushes have left their

track uncovered, so that we, the lazy spectators, can find his presence throughout the text, just

like in Pierre Soulages’s paintings.

Beckett is well known for his effort of self-erasure from his texts, and it is also a well

known fact that the four-page OI has over twenty pages of drafts, contrasting with the title

chosen. “Impromptu” means something done extemporaneously, improvised, a musical

composition or a “jam session”, more precisely, when musicians get together to make music

through improvisation, for example. Instead, what we have is a careful work of peeling any

residue of subjectivity, as to attempt effacing any autobiographical “fossil” in this process.

The “I” does not speak; he only knocks, in a minimal gesture to relate to a third person,

Reader, whose only response to it is repeating the last sentence or word. Minimal

communication so as not to risk the author’s intrusion, and the film director made good use of

the cinematic possibilities exploring this derangement by not only using the same actor for

both roles, but also by showing us the actual text of the book, precisely the letters on the page,

and by Reader mentioning paragraph four, page forty (BECKETT, 1984, p.15). Well, in the

Islamic culture, numbers represent letters, which contain a creative force – the force to prove

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the truth. Once more, we receive a little piece of information, apparently with no importance,

but then looking at the symbolism of numbers, we realize that the number four means

something solid, tangible, while number forty is the number of the wait, the preparation,

probation, or punishment. Consequently, what seemed to be an element to clarify the text,

disguises it, and creates another shade – the truth is not there, there is no page forty to reveal

anything at length. Thanks to this detail of pagination, we can understand the shock between

full spaces, that is, the information given about the story and the setting, and empty spaces,

i.e., all that is not said or shown, which consequently gives place to subjectivity. The piece of

information that the spectator receives, as on page 14, seems to come to lighten the way, but,

in fact, reveals the author’s deranging presence through Reader, unfolding the complex

composition of planes, the levels of communication and existence in the play. And Reader

explains, “In his dreams he had been warned against this change”.

Minimalism, linear perspective, chiaroscuro, and sfumato, these are some of the various

components of a play that extricates itself from any attempt to be framed, closed in a single

reading. The more we read OI, the more difficult it becomes to be embraced, enclosed by one

single interpretation. The more we read Beckett’s play, the more we immerse ourselves in its

mourning, its darkness, in the depths of those minds, the more we want that sad tale not to be

for the last time told. And it seems that Beckett predicted our response to his play by offering

us a contemplation time at both its beginning and at its end, the wonderful ten seconds, for us

to stay a little longer “buried in who knows what thoughts they paid no heed.” We want to pay

heed to those depths of mind. We want to dawn the “light through that single window.” We

want to understand that sad tale and be part of it. Beckett believed it was the artist’s duty to

express the totality and complexity of his experience regardless of the public’s lazy demand

for easy comprehensibility; he would even state that if they did not understand the work it was

because they were too decadent to receive it, for they were not able to comprehend unless

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form and content were totally separated. The chiaroscuro, the minimal stage-set are there to

accomplish Beckett’s goal of reawaking our sorrows, the depths of our minds or at least our

decadence, and we will not have our comfort back, even it were it in our power. “No need to

go to him again, even were it in your power. So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as

though turned to stone” (OI, 1984, p.18).

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3. THE BOOK, READER, AND THE READER-SPECTATOR

In the midst of postmodernity, or as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman states, in the

midst of the “liquid modernity”, when all traditions that were capable of holding, retaining the

past in a linear time sequence are melting, and consequently dissolving the frontiers of space

and time; in a moment when quantic physics refers to parallel universes, Beckett makes use of

memory fragments as a symbol of resistance to forgetfulness, to the total melting of belief in

the human being. Similarly to Leonardo Da Vinci, playing with his power to reconfigure

space while remembering another one, he organizes and at the same time dismantles his

successive impressions. The difference is that Beckett seems to play with the ignorance and

impotence of the reader/spectator, once he makes clear that his power as author is made of his

own visions, for we are told a story which we will not have access to, unless we are able to

decode some elements carefully hidden beneath the lines – in the haunting spaces of the

drama. At the same time, in each pause, in each recapture of a story never totally told, the

author of the absurd fights, resists; “little is left to tell”, he keeps repeating as if he were

warning us that it is not the “end” yet, and tirelessly Reader continues his reading. At each

pause, like in a photograph (in some moments, Beckett specifies the time of ten seconds), the

spectator/reader is pulled into the drama of the anonymous narrator, as much as of

Reader/Listener. Words in Beckett, and especially in OI, as he defines, are his way to “this

literature of the unword, which is so desirable to me…” (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM,

2003, p. 47).

“All needed to be known for say is known. There is nothing but what is said. Beyond

what is said there is nothing. What goes on in the arena is not said. Did it need to be known it

would be. No interest. Not for imagining” (BECKETT, 1995, p. 236). Aware that there is no

equivalence between the right to remember and the affirmation of some truth from the

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memory, through reading out loud, Reader masquerades the manufacturing of Beckett’s

visions, the codification of an experience, the creation of an artifact that results from the

action of giving form to matter according to a specific intention. And if we think of the strict

meaning of manufacturing, according to Rafael Cardoso (CARDOSO, 2007, Introdução),

etymologically, the word corresponds to in + formation (literally, the process of giving form

to something); in a broader meaning, manufacturing equals informing. Therefore, it can be

understood that reading in OI, which corresponds to its intentional manufacturing, is the tool

chosen by the author to unveil his process of creating form and specific meaning to his own

writing – in OI, meaning comes from giving form to words, their shape, size, even repetition,

through the rhythm of reading. Actually, it is interesting to remember that, throughout the

different periods of history, reading out loud has gained a different meaning and importance,

especially after the Middle Ages, when the increase in the number of readers and reading

rooms favored the popularization of silent reading. The new paradigm has led to the

contemporary concept of “illiteracy” as the inability to read silently and understand what was

read. In spite of that, we must remember that what gives existence to the book is its

materiality, which is not only the book properly but also a way of representing the text on

stage, of any form of transmission linked to the practices of orality, such as reciting a text or

simply reading it out loud – all of them, processes of producing meaning. Therefore, meaning

comes also from the orality of the text; and in this case, would Reader be the element who

tries to produce meaning, or would he be unable to understand and therefore in need of

someone else to interpret for him, unable to apprehend the “sanctuaries of the secret”, as

Bachelard would call them? Would repetition here represent that inability to understand and,

consequently, it became necessary a third element – Listener – between him and the book, to

play the role of tutoring?

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Certainly, this manufacturing process is not present only in Beckett’s writings; the

need of a reflexive rupture with the immediacy of the perceptions and experiences so that they

can be represented, can be found also in Bertolt Brecht and the Russian formalists, who

believed that art is capable of enlightening what surrounds us in a more immediate way as

long as a cut, a rupture is made, through a distancing that provokes a deviation of perception

from its usual path, forcing the observer/reader/spectator to question the usual. Beckett seems

to follow Hannah Arendt’s concept of “thinking with an open mind” in order to train

imagination so that it can come and visit us – in this case, the writer as well as the

reader/spectator. He who tells a story, states Beatriz Sarlo (2007), faces in the first place a

matter that has become by its familiarity incomprehensible or banal, even when what is told is

a personal experience. When imagination comes to visit, it breaks with the familiarity of the

facts and, through distancing, captures the difference that allows the exploration of unknown

possibilities, and from these new possibilities arises a new sense and meaning for the

experience told, making it disorganized, contradictory, resilient. In order to know, says Sarlo,

imagination needs this trajectory that leads it outward and turns it reflexive; in this journey, it

learns that the story can never be totally told and will never have an ending because not all the

positions can be covered, and its accumulation will not result in totality either. In this way,

Beckett becomes not the master of the absurd, but, on the contrary, the master of awareness:

he is not only aware of his limitations as a playwright, or the limitations of language, but also

of the role of imagination as key factor for liberating the story from banality and giving its

permanence as a meaningful and constantly renewed experience. Even more, as Oppenheim

states (2003), there is in the unwording of Beckett’s literature, a loosening of the boundaries

between art and the outside world. The space of the “unword” is the space of imagination, the

in-between space, the space of an eternally pursued and lost memory.

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The space of imagination rises from the anachronism of testimony, which is comprised

of anything that the subject allows himself to remember or might remember, anything that he

forgets, intentionally silences, modifies, invents, transfers from one gender or tune to another,

from all the experiences he knows, which confound themselves after some time with their

own experiences. Anachronism here understood as “trivial”, as Didi-Huberman calls it

(HUBERMAN apud SARLO, 2007, p. 59), something that does not enlighten the past, but

shows the limits that distance imposes to our understanding of that past. The space of

imagination is the space of Bachelard’s basements, attics, and dark corridors – this is where

our imagination as spectators is activated, making each word of the play become an entire

world for the reader-spectator. Yet, in the midst of shadows and labyrinths, the duty of

memory remains, inducing an affective, moral relationship with the past: Reader will continue

reading, whereas Listener will continue knocking on the table because of the story, the pain

and torment of that unnamed man who, day after day, would pace the islet, hoping that relief

would come from unfamiliarity. The duty of memory keeps functioning in all characters, in

all levels of narration, within all the dimensions of the Book, and the more space it opens for

imagination, the more we remain trapped in that labyrinthic world full of abyssal unfaithful

voices. In fact, when it comes to explain memory in OI, we can evoke what James Young

calls “memory in abyss”: I remember what my father remembered, and so on; a memory with

a vicarious nature; what Marianne Hirsh calls “post-memory”, i.e., what comes after the

memory of those who lived the facts and which, once it establishes a relationship with them,

also presents conflicts and contradictions (YOUNG apud SARLO, 2007, p. 90).

In OI, the abyssal memory acquires a very material aspect, if we think of the image of

the book within the book within the book. Literary pages are like immense houses full of

labyrinthic corridors, roundabouts, and chapels filled with heavy air and an omnirically

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complex basement; and, although they may easily get lost, it is the reader’s duty to explore

them with dreams that refer sometimes to the suffering of the corridors, sometimes to the

amazement of the underground palaces. A complex geometry which, states Bachelard (2003),

might be difficult for the reader to understand, but here is where the phenomenology comes to

hand revealing its efficacy: it asks us to establish within ourselves a reading pride that will

give us the illusion of participating in the author’s work. However, such attitude cannot be

easily taken in the first reading, since it is made with excessive passivity – the reader, says the

author, is still a little infantile, and reading distracts them. The first reading, states Bachelard,

is just a draft; it must be followed by a second, a third reading, etc. (the book within the book

within the book) so that we can know the author’s “problem”. Each reading will teach us the

solution of that problem and little by little, insensibly, we nourish the illusion that the problem

and the solution are in our hands. And so we move on in our reading through OI, with the

belief that the problem and the solution for the “sad tale” are in our hands, the reader-

spectators, who have just been told that little is left to tell – this is the space mentioned by

Bachelard, which we are supposed as attentive phenomenologist readers to fulfill with dreams

that can take into account the empty labyrinths and chapels, the dark basement of never told

memories. In OI, we are invited for a reading “in suspension”, the in-between spaces among

the words where the values of intimacy are un-wordly located, waiting to be fulfilled by our

omnirical presence. This is the moment when the reader’s eyes get away from the book, or in

the silence between words in the play, when the author’s “room” (or closet, or basement),

phenomenologically speaking, may become a threshold full of omnirism for somebody else –

that is, us, the reader-spectators. We are invited to inhabit the author’s disappeared home, not

as remembrance, but as one day, while we were reading, we had dreamed of it; now it is our

power of reverie what will fulfill the spaces of the house. According to Adorno, Beckett’s

work is at the same time about a reflection – reproduction of the petty and mutilated world on

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a second level, the imaginary one – and its re-elaboration in the form attributed to the

(in)significant, denouncing the subject’s and reality’s lack of meaning (ADORNO apud

ANDRADE, 2001, p. 30). The spaces of the story will receive the forms of our dreams – they

will run through the corridors and labyrinths, and the air will become as heavy as our inner

rooms and basement. Like in an electronic text, Beckett’s reader-spectator can interfere in the

content of the book, and not only in the empty spaces left by the typographic composition;

they dislocate, cut, extend, re-compound the textual unities. As well as in an e-book, in OI,

the observer is not reduced anymore to simply look; he acquires the possibility of acting over

the work and modify it, “enlarge” it and become its co-author, since the primary meaning of

the word author (augere) is “enlarge” – in the case of an electronic text, within the limits of

the program; in the case of a play such as OI, the only limit is that of our imagination, or

reverie. The author delegates to the co-author part of his responsibility, his authority, his

capability of making the work grow (COUCHOT apud DOMINGUES org., 1997, p. 140-

141). Like in the multimedia work, in the dialogical interactive OI there is a change in the

relationship between work, author, and spectator; quoting the metaphor used by Couchot, the

triangle tends to become a circle – the dialogical, states the author, allows the hybridization of

the universe of numbers and the expressive gesture, emotion, ambiguity, of hesitation between

signifying and enjoying, which is typical of any gesture. Over this mobile circle, the work, the

author, and the spectator do not occupy strictly defined and rigid positions anymore; on the

contrary, they constantly exchange them, over cross them, confound themselves or oppose to

each other, contaminate themselves (ibid, p. 141).

Yet, unlikely the electronic text, in Beckett’s work, the author does not disappear, he

continues there, silently; and the more he gives space and freedom for the reader to participate

in his text, the more his presence becomes evident, stronger, and omnipotent. Here we can

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recall Roger Chartier (2003, p. 24) when he states that the writing itself pursues the possibility

of freedom; it pursues a possibility to escape from the patriarchal, matrimonial or familiar

order. In Beckett’s OI, the text reveals itself as a space where the author, as much as the

reader-spectator, can exercise the possibility of freedom, in some way exorcizing the fear that

the text might be corrupted. Actually, we may say that OI is “corruption proof”, since it is

open to the reader’s participation in the author’s work and, therefore, any interference will be

considered the reader’s intervention within the space of imagination. Here, Beckett makes

evident his poetics of indigence and his theories on the death of the subject, dissolving the

figures of the narrator in first and third person, giving power to an imperative and impersonal

voice, following an approach that is actually contemporary to the play – the so-called

subjective swerve, a sort of democratization of the actors of the story, which gives voice to

the excluded ones, to the untitled, to the voiceless ones. In OI, they can be the characters as

well as the readers of any of the books within the book. As Jorge Luis Borges stated in a

conference in 1978, a book only acquires existence when it has a reader who reads it, and its

meanings change according to their readings.

What are the words written on a book? What are those dead symbols?

Nothing, absolutely. What is a book if we dot open it? It is just a cube of paper and

leather, with sheets; but if we read it, something strange happens; I believe it

changes every time we do it. Heraclitus said (I have repeated too many times) that

nobody bathes twice in the same river. Nobody bathes twice in the same river

because the waters change, but what is the most terrible is that we are not less fluid

than the river. Each time we read a book, the book has changed, the connotation of

the words is another one (BORGES apud CHARTIER, 2003, p. XI).

“O que são as palavras postas em um livro? O que são esses símbolos mortos? Nada absolutamente. O que é

um livro se não o abrimos? É simplesmente um cubo de papel e couro, com folhas; mas se o lemos acontece algo

estranho, creio que muda a cada vez. Heráclito disse (o repeti demasiadas vezes) que ninguém se banha duas

vezes no mesmo rio. Ninguém se banha duas vezes no mesmo rio porque as águas mudam, mas o mais terrível é

que nós não somos menos fluidos que o rio. Cada vez que lemos um livro, o livro mudou, a conotação das

palavras é outra (BORGES apud CHARTIER, 2003, p. XI).

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We must remember also that when reading a story, the material presence of the book is

like a historical reference to which we can always return, a window through which we can

always look and try to understand the significances and the effects of the ruptures that the use

of the book itself might have caused. The book, with its long history, is one of the strongest

metaphors that humans have created; it has resisted all sorts of new technologies, living

together with them and still retaining alive its first expressions as manuscripts, which were

forged by the scribes of Pergamon, now called Bergama, in Western Turkey, and whose

origin goes back to 280 BC. Its king, Attalus, and later on his son Eumenes, started to build

the greatest library in the world to outdo the famous library in Alexandria, and as Egypt

stopped supplying papyrus to Pergamon, and as they had a rich wool industry, plenty of

sheep, they started writing more on sheepskin, or vellum – what they called Charta

Pergamene, which meant paper of Pergamon. The words Charta Pergamene mutated into

parchment. Yet, as it is harder to roll parchment into a scroll than it is papyrus, someone

thought of folding parchment into rectangular pages and sewing those gatherings together;

and so the modern book was invented. The library grew to 200,000 volumes, and ended up

belonging to Egypt again, as a present from Anthony to Cleopatra, after the Romans took

control of it and accidentally burned part of Alexandria's library. So we remember Alexandria

and forget Pergamon, but their brief competition changed human history. According to John

H. Lienhard, in his article Metaphor of the Book, Pergamon had given us the most efficient

information storage technology ever known, and this was one of the few times a new user

interface was good enough to change the technological metaphor. […] “the book – the codex

– became metaphor unto itself. It well may be the most powerful technological metaphor of

them all.” Although the system has drastically changed after Gutenberg, who made print look

just like the work of scribes, counterfeiting manuscript books, which often take a trained eye

to tell an early printed book from a manuscript book, books today still keep most of those

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features; as Lienhard states, we readers still receive information the same way they did in

Pergamon, 2000 years ago <LIENHARD, 1996>.

We can think of the film The Pillow Book, by Peter Greenaway, where the book

support becomes the human body ever since the young girl, Nagiko, receives a blessing from

her father on her birthday, written on her skin while her aunt reads a “pillow book” by Sei

Shonagon, a book written almost a thousand years before. From that moment on, the ritual

will be repeated every year until her father’s death. After that day, Nagiko will obsessively

use her body as parchment on which enigmas will be written also as a way of sexual trade in a

game of seduction, disguise, and power. The more she has her skin written on, the more she

will be gasping for it, until she finally meets Jerome, an English translator who is capable of

decoding the body manuscripts and unfolding the drama behind the book – her father’s

history, and her relationship with him. The book, the fragments written on her body, becomes

the only path to unfold Nagiko’s sad tale, and, like the anonymous character in OI who keeps

retracing his steps, she keeps going back to it, seeking relief from the familiarity that

repetition might bring. And it is not an accident that the only person able to really bring her

relief is a translator: like Beckett-translator, he is the attentive reader, the initiated who knows

how to “decode” the story from its fragments, avoiding distractions. As in Beckett’s book,

also in The Pillow Book it is necessary a reader-spectator who does not feel satisfied with the

first reading, but continues like Nagiko exhaustively seeking understanding. Besides, we can

see in the film a similar process of disintegration of the subject voices: Nagiko is not simply

the main character; she is also the material support where the story is written, erased, and

written again, although never the same. Her voice as a subject is as broken, dislocated, as the

characters’ in Beckett – the story that she keeps retracing is not really hers; the text written on

her skin does not belong to her either, it does not have the authorial voice, it actually

resembles the enigmatic and unreachable figure of the dear name in OI, which is always

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there, constantly mentioned but never really visible. The book carries the struggle between

past, present, and future; it does not represent the reality of the world; it does not tell a story,

it just reveals the internal conflicts within itself and its characters, who remain immobilized in

their restless movements – a sort of “fable of the tired man”, like in El libro de arena, by

Jorge Luis Borges, where the author comments in the Epilogue that the fable of the tired man

is the “most honest and melancholic piece of the series”.

In regard to this melancholic state, Chartier points out that it is so perhaps because

everything that in the classic utopias seem to promise a better future – with no war, no

poverty or wealth, no government or politics – leads to the loss of what defines human beings

in their humanity: their name, memory, differences (CHARTIER, 2002, p. 15). In OI,

memory is but a fragment; there is no identity, and the difference is lost through

masquerading the characters; therefore, can we say that Beckett’s characters are in fact in a

process of losing their humanity? Maybe; however, we must also remember that Beckett’s

characters resist, endlessly fight against disappearance, and their most effective weapon is

Time: through holding it by never telling the story they are about to tell, they remain in time

itself and in space, since it is also kept on hold, for it is never really located, and consequently

may be everywhere, anywhere, even the spaces of our reverie. Moreover, the postmodern

world of the book, be it in the traditional form or the electronic one, is a world of textual super

abundance and whose offer surpasses the reader’s capacity of appropriation. Once again, the

dialogue between Eudoro Acevedo and the man with no name, in El libro de arena

(BORGES, 1977, p. 96-106), comes in handy: “… what matters is not reading, but reading

again”. Consequently, this is what Beckett’s characters do, they keep reading again and again,

starting from the end and never really getting through the story because this is how they will

hold time and avoid total forgetfulness – that is what matters.

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As it is well known, the image of the book in OI is not a random choice. Besides many

artistic references that can be found, authors such as Hugh Kenner and Ruby Cohn have

pointed out approximations between Beckett and Dante Alighieri, especially if we think of the

Canto V in Dante’s Inferno, which refers to the sin of luxury, adultery – the case of Francesca

da Rimini e Paolo (Plate 50), a love story whose prohibition was ignored and, as a

consequence, punished with eternity in hell. The reason Francesca gives for their weakness is

what matters to us here: it consists in the act of reading a book out loud to each other. They

would get together in the garden to read about Lancelot’s love story with Guinevere, by

Galiotto who, actually, was the friend who encouraged Lancelot to kiss King Arthur’s wife.

This episode seems to have made a strong impression on Dante’s imagination, since he

introduces it again in Paradise, Canto xvi. The power of the book and of knowing its story

arises: the image of that loving smile between two lovers was so deeply involving that they

were taken by it, forced by the power of words to give in to their own prohibited love.

Francesca and Paolo, like the character in OI, had a story that should remain untold; not only

their adultery, but what lies behind it – they had loved each other since childhood, and when

the time for marriage came her father gave her to Paolo’s brother.

From whence our love gat being, I will do

As one, who we

eps and tells his tale.

One day,

For our delight we read of Lancelot,

How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no

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Suspicion near us. Oft

times by that reading

Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue

Fled from our alter’d cheek.

But

at one point

Alone we fell. When of that smile we read,

The wished smile so raptorously kiss’d

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By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er

Francesca, the daughter of Guido da Polenta, Lord of Ravenna, was given by her father in marriage to

Gianciotto, son of Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, a man of extraordinary courage, but deformed in his person. His

brother Paolo, who unhappily possessed those graces which the husband of Francesca wanted, engaged her

affections; and being taken in adultery, they were both put to death by the enraged Gianciotto (The Harvard

Classics. 1909–14). Available at < http://bartelby.org/20/105.html >, site visited on Aug. 23, 2009.

223

224

From me shall separate, at once my lips

All trembling kiss’d. The book and writer both

Were love’s purveyors. In its leaves that day

We read no more.” While thus one spirit spake,

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The other wail’d so sorel

y, that heart

struck

I, through compassion fainting, seem’d not far

From death, and like a corse fell to the ground.

(ALIGHIERI, Dante. Divine Comedy. Inferno, Canto V)

Francesca is the only woman who is given voice in the Inferno,

and the only one in the

entire Divine Comedy, besides Beatrice. She is the only character who in her desperation

has

the power to make Dante stop and listen to her story;

and this fact provokes on him a strong

reaction – he becomes so involved and disturbed by that sad tale that, at

that moment, his

beliefs tremble, making necessary the interference of his guide, the poet Virgil.

Like in

Beckett’s play, the night is endless for Dante’s characters; there is no hope for the

m, except that

fleeting moment when the poet stops to listen to her – and she believes that

hope would come

from unfamiliarity, from the pity her story might have provoked

on the pilgrim; but just for a

fleeting moment, until Virgil’s wisdom brought Dante back to light.

“I saw the dear face and

heard the unspoken words, No need to go to him again, even were it in your power” (OI, p. 17)

At that moment, like Reader and Listener, Dante remains trapped

in the infernal circular timing

of the unfinished story. As

it cannot be finished, the pain cannot be released, and the poet

cannot go back there, as much as Francesca cannot acknowledge her error “

and return to where

they were once so long together. Alone together so much shared. No.” (OI, p. 14). Like in

OI,

the book becomes the string pulled by the puppet master and which keeps the puppets together

– Francesca and Paolo, Francesca and Dante, Reader and Listener,

the unnamed character, the

“dear name” and his/her messenger, as well as the reader-spectator. In

this process, the

materiality of the book is what keeps alive the belief in the possibility of change, just as

Francesca and Paolo believed in the power of Galiotto

’s story, and all the layers of characters

in OI continue believing that something or somebody will come and bring

relief, like Clov and

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Ham in Endgame, and many other puppet-characters by Beckett.

Like Gutenberg counterfeiting

manuscript, Beckett counterfeits the metaphor of the book itself, making the location of the real

source impossible. Lik

e in a parallel universe, meaning and form circulate freely through

different levels of reading and visual understanding. OI’s book is like a library within

one

single book, a house of fun where one image generates and is generated by others – a

game of

mirroring visual layers that makes

impossible for the spectator identify and truly reach the

primary image. Like the artwork by the Brazilian artist Marina Camargo, entitled

Library

(Plate 51), in which she presents photographs of the very library of the spa

ce where she was

exhibiting her work, Centro Cultural São Paulo, and where reading, reaching the book,

becomes impossible, blocked by its own image.

Here, meaning comes from the image of the

book and not from its real content that will be forever frozen within the picture of the library

itself, which is already unreachable by the glass window from where the photo was taken

but,

at the same time, forever protected from changes, annihilation that time might bring, once it is

frozen in time and space by the technological power of photography.

In this artwork, the

struggle with control and excess of information is solved: the entire library can be “read” at one

glance; the lazy reader-spectator is safe.

According to Vilém Flusser (FLUSSER apud CARDOSO, 2007, p. 19), the basis of

all culture is the attempt to deceive nature and fight against entropy, against the

disaggregation of meaning and form, to overcome human physical limitations through

technology, and that includes words, images and artifacts used by the human society to create

a highly complex world whose logic remains occult to most of its inhabitants. The paradox is

that all this excess of manipulated information leads to the disintegration of meaning and

accumulation of trash, be it material or virtual. The human, states Cardoso (2007, p. 16),

becomes slave of the forces of another “nature” artificially created with their help and which,

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in thesis, aimed to bring well-being to them; but the future is uncertain, since the machines,

more efficient and intelligent, started to develop the ability to dispense with us and, as a

result, complexity has grown in geometrical scale. Therefore, it is not possible to know

whether we are moving toward a greater integration or disintegration, for they can be easily

mistaken; what is known is just that the new frontier, from now on, is that of our own

awareness of the system constructed, which has on us a paradoxical effect: at the same time it

gives us the pleasure of any sort of comfort, it also takes control over us. And that is not

related only to the industry of goods; we still have to learn how to deal with another type of

industry which, as it happens with the other technologies in the overall system, offers us a

series of facilities and comfort, at the same time it haunts us with its power to control us: the

industry of information. However, we must remember as well that the printed book has

represented since its first editions a resistance to the fear of loss, which justified, in the

sixteenth century, the manuscripts to be recollected and multiplied into printed versions in

order to fix them and rescue them from forgetfulness. On one hand, there is the fear of excess

of a society completely invaded by its written patrimony and by the impossibility of each

individual to manipulate and domesticate this textual abundance. On the other hand,

according to Roger Chartier (2001), it is very strong the contradiction between the obsession

of loss, which requires accumulation, and the concern with excess, which requires selecting

and choosing – that is what was called for the first time in France, in 1890, the “crisis of the

book”, which is not related to other media but to the lag between an insufficient market and

the increasing capacity of producing new books. On top of that, we must also think of another

fear that has accompanied the book press from the beginning: the fear of text corruption,

which already in the Middle Ages led authors such as Petrarch to create the “authorial

publication” that put in circulation manuscripts copied and corrected by the authors

themselves. This fear was reinforced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the deep and

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unfortunate awareness of the corruptions introduced by the press. The latter was frequently

seen as triply corrupting: it deformed the letter of the texts, altered by the mistakes made by

unable typographers; it destroyed the uninterested ethics of the text’s Republic by giving them

to dishonest bookers; it obliterated the true significance of the works by offering them to

ignorant readers, incapable of understanding them properly. From this comes the mistrust

toward the printed book and the preference for manuscript publications, which allowed a

better control of the text, its circulation, and interpretation (CHARTIER, 2002, p.85).

Anyway, what we see through the quarrels about the book throughout history is in fact the

pursuit of a utopia – an obsessive attempt to reconstitute the past. Of course, literature does

not have this duty of being faithful to history, to the experience lived by its narrator or any

other person; it does not have to rescue the real past or past injustices. As Beatriz Sarlos states

(2003, p. 119), in literature a narrator always thinks from outside the experience, as if human

beings could appropriate themselves of the nightmare, and not only suffer it. The road is long

and open to interferences according to the reader’s background, intensity, and freedom of

imagination. In fact, we do not have manuscripts easily available to guarantee that the word

read will be in fact the author’s; then, wouldn’t Beckett’s preference for writing in a foreign

language, his concern with self-erasure and the concealing of the word itself be an expression

of this old fear of the printed text, a desire to preserve his own text, as if he knew that once it

was published its truth might have got forever lost, since he knew that his book would fall in

the hands of “ignorant readers” and he had no ways to control that? Fear, we definitely can

identify throughout OI, as well as how much the author cares for the words used beyond their

meaning: they are carefully chosen also for their size and shape, their musicality, and even

their power to hide meaning itself and metaphors.

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Also according to Beatriz Sarlo (2007, p. 24), there is no experience without narration:

it is the language that frees the mute aspect of the experience, redeeming it from its

immediacy or its forgetfulness and transforming it into something communicable, that is,

common. Narration, she adds, inscribes the experience in a temporality that is not of the event

itself (threatened, from the start, by the passage of time and by the unrepeatable) but of its

remembrance; it also inaugurates a temporality that at each repetition, at each variant, updates

itself once again. And once again we fall into Beckett’s repetition, the “abyssal memory”,

which happens in two different levels of the text: the repetitive reading of parts of the book by

Reader, and repetition in the narration itself (day after day, night after night…). The narration

in Beckett reflects how weakened the transcendent reasons behind the experience and its

narration have become for the modern man, especially after the deep shock of World War II,

leading to a process of muteness. Consequently, if the experience has become disconnected so

has its discourse, for there is a rupture between the narration and the body, separating then the

experience from its meaning – the shock dissolves experience; what we are facing is an

“objective rest of inert temporality and subjectivity” (SARLO, 2007, p. 28). As it is stated by

the author, this aporia does not find a closure because the conditions of redemption of a past

experience are crumbling. The acceleration of time turned impossible the intercommunication

between experiences and, therefore, turned them immeasurable; and that process of

derangement is identified in Beckett’s work, especially in OI, through the rupture in the

narrative structure within its various levels: the story line is constantly interrupted by time

swaps, not only from present to past but through past, present, and future, in different orders;

the presence of three different narrators, or layers of narration – the narrator, properly; a

second narrator, characterized in the figure of the man who comes at night bringing news

from the dear name and carrying a book which will be read until dawn; and a third narrator,

Reader, who is actually the only one to unveil the story to Listener-spectator. Aporetically,

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Beckett’s subject is dismantled, kept alive only through fragments of memory and mostly

through artifices such as the pictorial references, especially the book, which in the film is

offered to the audience as a proof of its existence, the written word, as if we were presented a

biography – the illusion of a life as reference and, consequently, the illusion that there is a

subject unified in time. Maybe this is why Beckett erased the first person from his first drafts,

keeping the third person in his final text: to avoid autobiography, which is but a spectral

structure in which someone who calls themselves “I” presents themselves as object.

According to Sarlo (2007), this means that this textual subject takes into the scene an absent

“I” and covers their face with a mask. And here we are presented with another contradiction:

Beckett takes off the first person from his narration but keeps the spectral structure, including

the mask – a concept that in the film reaches its extreme with the use of the same actor for

both roles. The “I” in OI is covered with a multilayer mask; Beckett only pretends to escape

from prosopopoeia – the trope that grants the word to a dead or absent person – when in

reality this is what he does. He presents us an experience within a report, where little is left of

authenticity, since prosopopoeia is a rhetorical artifice, inscribed in the order of procedures

and forms of the discourse, and in which the masqueraded voice can play any role, without

guaranteeing the identity between the subject and the trope, totally free from any pact of

referentiality. Therefore, the masqueraded voice speaks but cannot be evaluated in regard to

the authenticity of his speech, it cannot be judged according to his sincerity, for we cannot

judge the actor but his performance of a state of “sincerity”; there is no truth, just a mask that

affirms to be saying his truth. Also in this regard the author, as much as the film director, was

careful with his choices: the book within the book brings the idea of authenticity, and the

choice of an actor such as Jeremy Irons for the role of Reader-Listener guarantees the

“sincerity” of the performance, but, in any case, the unified subject remains distant, lost or

hidden between the textual layers. In this way, superposition has become a key word to

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understand not only Beckett’s literary process but the postmodern novel that constantly

superposes different worlds among which prevails an “incommunicative alterity”, as David

Harvey would call it; in a space of coexistence, an emphasis on the ephemerid of juissance, an

insistence on the impenetrability of the Other, a focus on the text better than on the work, a

tendency towards deconstruction which nears nihilism, a preference for aesthetics over ethics.

It is not difficult to read a postmodern novel like a metaphorical transversal cut of the social

landscapes in fragmentation, of subcultures and local practices (HARVEY, 2004, p.109-112).

Beckett, in his “digging work”, as he defines it, seems to search for the ideal

reader/spectator that by any chance still exists in the depths of our mind, but this also only

apparently – at the same time there is an appeal so we can be thrown into the drama and even

into the book, we are blocked by a paradox that, in Gontarski’s words, became a sort of

Beckett’s literary signature: by starting the text informing the spectator that “little is left to

tell”. At this moment, we realize that our space is not the space of the book, the space of

listeners around the table. For us, spectators, there is just one space, the space of darkness that

surrounds the scene, the space outside the painting, the space of modern artwork; as if it were

some sort of punishment for the fact that we cannot hold the melting, as we have no

competence to find the ways to enter the space of the work. Then, let us be exposed to the

discomfort of the game of forces present in there, the game of parallel universes among the

subjects of the work – between the space of Reader and Listener, between the inclusive space

of the spotlights and the exclusive space of shadows; between reality and reverie; between

work and spectator; between characters and narrator. Anyway, in OI, the reader-spectator

becomes aware that their expectations cannot be toward the world represented by Beckett, but

toward the world of the game, of substitutions of signs within language. As Bella Jozef states

(2006), the game brings freedom, and the narrative hides/unveils the game of sign. Therefore,

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the literary art turns to be the privileged space to donate meaning through the interrelationship

of all the elements of the text, once reading is not redoing passively the writing’s path;

meaning is not beginning or origin; it is product. It does not exist to be discovered or restored,

but to be produced by new combinations. Writing, then, and especially in OI, becomes the

contradictory process of revealing-occulting. In this way, Beckett lets the work speak so that

the text can exist from its reader-spectator, as long as they are able to donate meaning through

their own combinations.

Beckett’s experimentation with form, states Lois Oppenheim (2003, p. 16), revealed

an opposition to the rules of narrativity that resulted in a crisis of genre unparalleled in literary

history. Contrarily to the traditional novel of the twentieth century, which made use of the

hiatus between narrative voice and character consciousness, Beckett, increasingly faithful to

Adolf Loos’s principle “less is more”, dissolves their identity, merging them and,

consequently, disrupting coherence through fragmentation in both levels – content and form –

a fragmentation that, instead of separating the parts of the play, actually fuses them, making

impossible to individualize them. As the author states, “if anything, postmodernism is a

symptomatic move away from homogeneity and the threat of absolute presence”

(OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 19); therefore, decomposition seems to be the only way out for the

playwright and it is mainly done through language, a language that is constantly “unworded”

by an untold story, an unseen character, an unspoken “dear name”. In this diffracted process,

we are presented with a large door that will lead us to the haunting poetic spaces mentioned

by Gaston Bachelard, the spaces of reverie that are but labyrinths full of shadows and where

the story reveals itself to be another one, and another, and another. The narrator is diffracted

into Reader, who is diffracted into Listener, and vice versa; the story is diffracted into the two

narrative levels – the book that is being read and the story that cannot be told but can be

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inferred; and so we can go on reading in an attempt to finally reach the real story. But Beckett

continues his work of “unmaking” to make sure to the spectator, or maybe himself, that the

narrator’s absolute presence will never be more than a haunting presence, and in order to

assure that, he goes even further: he dissolves the boundaries between novel and theater,

between prose and poetry. That is what we see in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, in which

the act of waiting is the actual theatrical experience; that is what we see even more strongly in

OI, through the reading, its pauses and repetitions. OI’s prose merges with a poetic reading,

and the poetic word, says Bachelard, is the phenomenological material par excellence. Words

in OI do not simply reveal – actually, they never reveal – they embroider and paint ideas in a

Gestalt process.

According to Rudolf Arnheim, the sensible form carries within itself aspects that

make it participant in the most abstract and elevated mental and spiritual activities; each

external vision is already an inner vision, it transcends the configuration of an image and

becomes form of a particular content. Only with form, he states, we enter the scope of true art;

the specificity of art is exactly the invention not of a subject and even less of a configuration,

but of a form, whose faculty is imagination, defined by Arnheim as the activity that makes it

possible to translate things into images. He goes even further and states that all thought is

fundamentally of a visual nature (ARNHEIM apud PERNIOLA, 1998). Visuality that in

Beckett emerges also from the construct of word form, through self-erasure and through

playing, in most of his plays, with the form of both French and English words in a work of

self-translation, as it is well known, which creates gaps between the original and final work.

Like in a Gestalt process, these gaps carry a sort of “inner visions” where new forms will

emerge; in this case, a new text for, in Beckett, dealing with a foreign language gives him

more freedom to play with it. This is a process that can be identified also in OI: originally

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written in English, it has gone through a similar process of cleansing, of self-erasure through

literally the erasure of words and ideas, which here is more radical than a translation itself. He

even adds: “I have the consolation […] of sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language, as I

should love to do with full knowledge and intent against my own – as I shall do – Deo

juvante” (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 22). Once more, we are trapped in

Beckett’s words, full of apparent indifference towards his own writing, as if he were merely

led by a random stream of ideas and limitations, with no conscious or controlled participation

in his own work: whether desired or not, with “God’s help”, there he goes playing with

language, playing with words in his digging process of writing, which ends up being more

like a process of un-writing, since the twenty-five pages of draft resulted in less than five –

“art loves leaps” (“ l’art adore les sautés”), he wrote in La Peinture des van Velde ou le

Monde et le Pantalon (BECKETT apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 24), and in a letter to Axel

Kaun (BECKETT apud ANDRADE, 2001, Anexos, p. 169) he states that his own language

appeared to him “like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the

Nothingness) behind it”. Grammar and style, he continues, have become as irrelevant as a

Victorian swimming suit: a mask. Language in Beckett is not simply the vehicle of

storytelling but the pictorial, or shall we say sculptural, construct of the visual (OPPENHEIM,

2003); words became pieces, fragments of a visual artwork. As Enoch Brater states:

The theater event [in Beckett] is reduced to a piece of monologue and the

play is on the verge of becoming something else, something that looks suspiciously

like a performance poem. All the while a story is being told, a fiction closely

approximating the dramatic situation the audience encounters in the theater. It is no

longer possible to separate the dancer from the dance. (BRATER apud

OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 17).

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“Full object, complete with parts missing, instead of partial object”: this is how

Beckett, in a letter to Duthuit from 1949, defines Pierre Tal Coat’s painting; and this is how

we can define OI, as well; “a movement towards a more adequate expression of the natural

experience” – natural here understood as a combination between the one who perceives and

what is perceived; an experience. This is Beckett’s way of defining the artistic process, an art

that, disgusted, turns its back to the feasible plan, tired of its explorations, of pretending to be

capable, of doing a little better the same old thing, and choosing instead the expression that

there is nothing to express, nothing to express with, nothing from which to express, no

possibility to express, no desire to express, allied to the obligation of expressing (BECKETT

apud ANDRADE, Anexos, p. 174-75).

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Closed place.

All needed to be known for say is known.

There is nothing but what is said.

Beyond what is said there is nothing.

What goes in the arena is not said.

Did it need to be known it would be.

No interest. Not for imagining.

Samuel Beckett (Fizzle 5)

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CONCLUSION

As it was stated above, it was not the aim of this dissertation to label Beckett’s work as

modernist or post-modernist. Yet, the fact is that, if we follow the postmodern logics of

“and…and”, OI perfectly represents our postmodern time and space, especially if the focus is

on the pictorial aspects of the work: its unique aesthetic singularity, which sums up a variety

of visual references in a perfect collage of art history, besides a variety of literary references

that range from Dante to twentieth century writers; the sophistication of his work of

“unwording language” (OPPENHEIM) to which he aspired and appeared to him, as he said in

a letter to Axel Kaun (Disjecta, 171) “like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the

things (or the Nothingness) behind it”, bears the mark of a time that can only be understood

and described within a postmodern logics of conjunction. Beckett’s postmodern work,

actually, fits into the concept of representation of the unrepresentable, defined by Lyotard:

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the

unrepresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good

forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively

the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in

order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable

(LYOTARD apud OPPEINHEIM, 2003, p. 27).

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What would be then the best tool to represent the unrepresentable if not a process of

unwording? Through emptying words from their usual meaning, new empty spaces arise –

spaces of nothingness which carry within feelings of fear, individualism, loneliness, and

inadequacy, of belonging nowhere – all of them well known by the contemporary man. The

in-between spaces created by Beckett open the doors for an in-between time, the time of

reverie, which are the haunting spaces of our imagination mashed up with fragments of our

already faded memory. Beckett’s characters live in the time and space of alterity, which is

indeed the mark of postmodernism – cultural unification in the “new world”, as Harvey

(HARVEY, 2004, p. 19) would call it, is the product of diversity. We, postmodern human

beings, live in a state of fragmentation, indeterminacy, inhabiting at least two cultures and,

consequently, two spaces and different times, a state of intense distrust in regard to universal

discourses. As Michel Maffesoli (2003, p. 135-136) states, Western tradition has been

characterized by multiple “transworlds” – through an incorporated knowledge, we know that

life cannot be split; it includes shadows and lights, generosity and ruthlessness; and life, in its

banality, as much as in its cruelty, scares those who have, or took, the task to tell it. OI’s

characters hold that contemporary attitude which, according to Maffesoli (2003, p. 58), nears

that of a tragic hero, who does not demand anything from destiny; there is an acceptance of

their destiny, the recognition of existence for what it is: precarious, finite, always submitted to

the inexorable law of death of everything and everybody. Indeed, according to the author, it is

said that the whole existence is nothing but a long learning process of “regression into the

womb of the running time”

. It regards what Jungian thinkers call régrédience, which is a

march that does not happen towards one single direction, but following the multiple paths of

“[...] a existência inteira não é mais que uma longa aprendizagem da ‘regressão ao seio do tempo em marcha’

(MAFFESOLI, 2003, p. 62).

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human nature. Regression, states Maffesoli (2003, p. 63), indicates what is at stake in the

integration of the various dimensions of human life at an individual and social level – their

shadowy side, their imaginative, passionate, or emotional dimensions. This plurality of

movements expressed through regression, takes place in the everyday, banal life, which ends

up becoming a niche, a refuge where we return when life hurts us, or when the political,

economic, professional pressures become too strong. However, it is a founding, or at least

comforting regression, since it allows recognition and new departure.

Notwithstanding, there is an impossibility to unify past, present, and future, and that

will lead to the aesthetic alienation of the Self that we see in OI’s characters, as a

consequence of the dislocation of the contemporary Subject. They are thrown into the eye of a

time eddy where it is never possible to find a comfort zone – the space of belonging; on the

contrary, there is always this feeling of exhaustion and darkness that must be fought, and their

strategy is moving backward-forward “out to where nothing ever shared. Back to where

nothing ever shared” (OI, p. 13) without realizing that this movement in time is actually what

destroys space. We are back to the mystical time of repetition: in the image of the resurgent

myths, says Maffesoli (2003, p. 15), it is necessary to find the repetition of obsessive ideas,

and to be able to repeat those same facts in a no less obsessive way. The ritualistic repetition,

the everyday routine are identical ways of expressing and living the return of the myth and,

therefore, escaping from a temporality extremely marked by utility and linearity. In each of

these cases, there is absorption of the individual, of history, and functionality through a sort of

eternity lived in the everyday life; the everyday rite leads then to a non-time, the time of the

community (MAFFESOLI, 2003, p. 65). And this is the world in OI, a space that turns out to

be a labyrinth where people lose their North and, yet, keep moving nowhere, masquerading

nothingness with banality – empty conversations, deprived of meaning, at least for the reader-

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spectator; repetitive movements of coming and going, or actions such as repetitively reading

the same book or the same page, or even the same paragraph. In fact, Beckett makes evident

this human condition of being thrown into Nothingness, and the consequence is fear,

individuation, and loneliness, for we are left with no possibility of the comfort that we used to

get from tradition; therefore, we are deprived of the pleasure of recognizing our time and

space, our own world.

Literarily, it is in the emptiness that Beckett’s sophistication lies; the space of ab-

reaction, as Passeron calls it, of liberating repetition of the old traumatic act, which stimulates

a passion for confession, the memorial conscience that embroiders over the past and even

invents false remembrances: does the “dear name” exist? And how about the “single room on

the far bank”, is it a reliable memory? Does Listener exist? And how about Reader, can we be

certain of his existence? Do the story and the book really exist, or existed? Actually, none of

these questions really matters; in Beckett they are just a leitmotif, a trap for the “lazy readers”,

as he would refer to us, his spectators. “Avec les mots on ne fait que se raconter” (with words,

we do no more than tell of ourselves) wrote Beckett in his essay from 1945, related to

stopping writing about Bram van Velde, with whom he considered having a lot in common. In

the same way, words in OI are not there to tell a story; they are carefully located in the space

of the story so that the author, intertwined with the characters and their masks, can tell of

himself, and through emptiness, pauses, and silences, also give space for his reader-spectators

to delineate their own story, as well. And that is the real story behind the story: our human

condition of dislocated Subjects, alienated from our own Self and, consequently, lost,

inadequate, totally unprotected, with no walls capable of holding us as individuals, as

identities. We, as much as Beckett’s characters, are buried in the time-space labyrinth of

postmodernity, and he who buries a treasure, says Bachelard (2003, p. 100), buries himself

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with it; the secret is a tomb, and it is not for granted that the discrete man gloats for being a

tomb of secrets. All intimacy hides itself, he continues, quoting Joë Bousquet: “Nobody sees

me change. But who sees me? I am “my own hiding-place”

(BOUSQUET apud

BACHELARD, 2003, p. 100).

In Beckett, man equals language; therefore, following Bella Jozef’s concept, he and

his production are real masks, since the word functions as a mask that covers the lack of

meaning, reflected in the absence of a story or of an essential time – and this is what we see in

OI. In reality, we enter not the space of the story or of a real past, but the space of reverie, the

space of the dream of belonging. In OI, we enter the universe of a literary house, home of

immensity in which the walls went on vacation, as Bachelard would say, and sometimes it is

healthy to inhabit them because in such houses we heal our claustrophobia (BACHELARD,

2003, p. 67).

Then, an immense cosmic house exists potentially in every dream of a house.

From its core irradiate the winds and the seagulls run out the windows. Such a

dynamic house allows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or, in other words, the

universe comes to inhabit his house (BACHELARD, 2003, p. 67).

Well, claustrophobia is something of which the reader-spectator of OI should not be

afraid; on the contrary, we are much more like astronauts thrown in the outer space, held to

the spaceship only by a fragile cable, feeling their vulnerability in contrast to the dark and

empty immensity of the universe. There, if there is fear, it is not of suffocation but of

abandonment, of not being able to come back to whatever we might consider familiar – a dear

“Ninguém me vê mudar. Mas quem me vê? Eu sou o meu esconderijo.”

“Assim, uma imensa casa cósmica existe potencialmente em todo sonho de casa. De seu centro irradiam-se os

ventos e as gaivotas saem pelas janelas. Uma casa tão dinâmica permite ao poeta habitar o universo. Ou, noutras

palavras, o universo vem habitar sua casa.”

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room, a dear face, a “dear name”. Beckett, the poet, creates a space not only for his own

hiding-place, or maybe we should say his tomb of secrets, but also a space big and dynamic

enough so that the universe can fit into his and our house, our spaces of reverie, where we

become much more than meaningless and hopeless clown-figures. In this house, we can also

dream of happiness, completeness; we can even dream of a different future not only for

ourselves as individuals, but also for us as society – all we have to do is fulfill the dark, empty

spaces left by the poet with our own memories and desires. In this regard, instead of

disillusion, if we dig deep inside Beckett’s universe, what we will find is humanity with all its

weakness, fragility, but also a moving ability to endlessly overcome its own limitations. As

Sidney Feshbach states,

No matter how reduced Beckett’s characters become over the years, no

matter how much the self is dissolved into, say, objects or words, there always

remains a human factor and warmth; accounting for that quality […] is the primary

task for Beckett criticism (FESHBACH apud OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 188).

When it comes to the fictional space in OI, whether of the house (the “room on the far

bank”) or the pictorial one, we can see that it is through it that reality and art merge, creating a

new concept of spaciousness characteristic of the contemporaneity. Indeed, what we call art

today is the result of a long process of changes in the space relation within the painting,

especially through the rupture with the concept of perspective. Art, like architecture, and like

the space in OI, has become a fragmented tissue, a multiplied structure ad infinitum that will

result in a gigantic collage, turning our spaces, at all levels, into an immense masquerade.

That leads us back to the concept of mask: as it allows us to be or pretend to be whoever we

decide, we can also see the image and feed it according to our own “visions”, our previous

visual experiences. Our instant world offers us the possibility to accumulate numberless past,

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present, and future images with one click on our television set or computer in a very eclectic

way, and in no time line. The contemporary time-space collage, present in OI through the

variety of pictorial references, makes possible a state-of-the-art level of simulacrum – a state

of replica so close to the original that we cannot separate the real image from the fake, as it

happens with Listener and Reader. Therefore, space is not an ideal category of understanding

anymore; modern painting, and we may say art in general, “confuses all our categories”

(MERLEAU-PONTY, 1964, p. 35).

As Osvaldo Fontes Filho states <2008, p. 3>, space must return to its condition of a

non-perceived background of our sensorial experiences. The intentionality of the space in

contemporary art, unwary of a measurable depth, according to Merleau-Ponty (1964), evolves

within what the author calls “voluminosity”, a primary dimension where things mold

themselves in instability, free from their canonic limitations. This is why an abstract

background, as much as a pyramidal perspective, fits perfectly into a minimalist play such as

OI. Chiaroscuro and pop art, modulation and fragmentation are all possible conjunctions in

Beckett’s pictorial universe; categories that are set together to confuse, to cause discomfort

but most of all to break the limits between fields, to melt untouchable edges and make

possible connections that could not be imagined before. Renaissance and minimalism are

there to create “volume” for a new story that rooted in another one previously told. Like the

unconcluded stories in Endgame, in OI form and meaning come from the “voluminosity”

born from the melting collages of pictorial and literary references, giving space for a poem-

play-happening, for OI could comfortably fit in any of these categories at the same time due

to the rhythm and modulation of the words, its dramatic dimension, its length (12 minutes),

and lack of movement. In modern painting, the line becomes a “certain constituent emptiness”

where matter vibrates; through this emptiness, any visible form starts to carry the elision of a

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figure or of a sense, as we see in OI: the materiality of Reader and Listener vibrates in the

emptiness of the backstage and actions, in the contrasting voluminosity of the almost empty

white table. Free from contours, in the modulation of the colors and forms that it proposes, the

line in contemporary art sketches an elopement from sense, as if the trace made evident that

from that moment on sense would constitute itself on the background of absence. Painting is

considered a “spectacle of nothingness” <MERLEAU-PONTY apud FONTES, 2008, p. 2>;

however, there is a way to present that visible “that is always farther away”: it stops being

inaccessible if it is conceived, not by approximation, but by “lateral investment”

<MERLEAU-PONTY apud FONTES, 2008, p. 3>. In Beckett and in OI specifically, this

“lateral investment” is his own intangible and at the same time unveiling presence in the text

through his personal background – his art and literary expertise, and all his personal

experiences, his relationships, especially with his mother, his nanny, his wife, James Joyce,

and even his country. Well, if the visible is a “momentary crystallization of visibility”, then

any crystallization is “illusory under any aspect”, since “vision is the crystallization of the

impossible”, for “the pretentious positivity of the sensible world […] occurs exactly as

something intangible” (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1964a, p.327 e 267-8). With this statement,

according to Osvaldo Fontes <2008, p. 6-8>, it becomes clear that the distortion of

appearance represents an impossibility of absolute veiling of the inside by the outside, and

vice-versa. Merleau-Ponty’s “nothingness” is that zone of emptiness and invisibility in which

any visible manifestation fills in; it is not frontal denial of the full and solid being – actually,

it is a condition for the possibility of the arousal of the Being. In this way, we may see Reader

and Listener as an impossibility of veiling the different dimensions of the Self, the voice

which, no matter how much deprived of words, still carries sense and resists to a complete

annulment. Emptiness gains a value of operationality in the plastic language of modern art,

says Fontes, just as we see in OI: the entire play is built – or we might say, operated – on the

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empty spaces; visually and linguistically, it is through the in-between spaces, that is,

emptiness, that the unveiling presence of the author reveals itself, through the distortions in

time, space, language, and icons. In time, when creating a circular movement between past,

present, future, and times between them (“Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the

islet. Hour after hour. […] Then turn and his slow steps retrace. […] In his dreams” – OI, p.

13) – the times of reverie that allow us, reader-spectators, to fill in those time-spaces with our

own crystallizations, our intangible visions. With space (“Relief he had hoped would flow

from unfamiliarity. Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar scene. Out to where nothing ever shared.

Back to where nothing ever shared” – OI, p. 13), Beckett prevents closure and creates spaces

of pregnancies in the emptiness of his pauses and in the black-and-white of his stage-canvas.

In this regard, José Gil states that:

the relation emptiness-form from now on is part of the painter’s language: the

variations in this relation will create other languages, other painters within a painter,

“heteronymous”. What makes it possible to pass from one heteronymous to another,

from one period to another, is not the similitude of forms, but what stresses the

unique and single difference that crosses the painting of one author, their way of

constructing discontinuities and intervals: such is their style, the difference that

supports the relationship between the visible forms (GIL, 1996, p. 166).

OI’s pictorial sophistication turns space into a painting whose uniqueness comes from

the way Beckett constructs discontinuities and intervals to support the relationship between

the visible forms. Therefore, Da Vinci’s perspective, Caravaggio’s Chiaroscuro, Duchamp’s

ready-made, or Johns’s spatial transparencies and ruptures are but the Beckett-painter within

other painters that inhabit him. Here, in his process of appropriation of a range of references,

“a relação vazio-forma faz doravante parte da linguagem do pintor: as variações nesta relação criarão outras

linguagens, outros pintores no interior de um pintor, "heterônimos". O que permite passar de um heterônimo a

outro, de um período a outro, não é a semelhança das formas, mas o que marca a diferença única e singular que

atravessa a pintura de um autor, a sua maneira de produzir descontinuidades e intervalos: tal é o seu estilo, a

diferença que sustenta o parentesco entre as formas visíveis” (Gil, 1996, p.166).

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processing them in his unique way, Beckett’s presence unveils itself in the text, since

according to Oppenheim,

it was primarily the many hours spent before the paintings themselves and his

extraordinary memory of what he had seen that were the source of this extensive

knowledge. […] the allusions in his fiction also allow us to trace his path through

the galleries and museums of much of Western Europe (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 31).

Moreover, the entire pictorial references that we identify matter also because they

represent lateral entrances to the text and its many layers. Actually, in regard to this visual

derangement, Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 63) admits that any iconic mode can count for an

emblem of a “mutation in the relations of the man with the Self”, and this is an aspect in

which Beckett is an expert: expressing the various mutations that occur in our relationship

with our Self through visual discontinuities. After all, what concerns Beckett has never been

telling stories but thinking and questioning our very ability to exist despite all the odds against

it. And the author himself is able to clarify this process: “So you can’t talk art with me; all I

risk expressing when I speak about it are my own obsessions” (BECKETT, letter to Duthuit in

1954).

Speaking of discontinuity, José Gil refers to the change which occurs especially in

Conceptual Art, from the evidence of sense of figuration to an “essential emptiness”,

not only in this evidence, but in the very core of the painting, as if the latter could

not be self-sufficient anymore. Modern painting will feed itself from the tension [...]

between completeness and incompleteness, between finished work and fragment.

Inducing an unceasing movement of invention of forms, the work of the void

produces multiplicities. It is a disseminated and ubiquitous void which is found, for

example, in decontextualization, in exile, and in the antifunctional position of the

readymade […]. A restless void that agitates the forms and the look, which prevents

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adherences, accelerates velocities, always searching for a new plan of expression

<GIL apud FONTES, 2008, p. 9>.

This condition of the painting – of not being self-sufficient – is not an uncommon

feeling for the contemporary spectator who more and more needs the help of a visual poetics

as a bridge to communicate with the artwork. Through its “translation” into words, or through

the unfolding of the process, showing it step-by-step, art communicates with its spectator; and

in OI the Beckett-painter unfolds his work to us through the pictorial references – there, we

will find the keys to find resilience instead of despair, warmth beneath bitterness in the

Beckettian human figures; we will meet his own obsessions. And it seems that this is what he

expects from his spectators, an excavatory process of thinking and questioning their own

condition: “The work removed from the judgment of men ends up dying, in dreadful agony”

(BECKETT, La Peinture des Van Veldes). Therefore, his deaf scream through his artwork is

not only of disillusion with the human condition but a way of preventing us from the dreadful

agony of abandonment and consequently forgetfulness – in Beckett, we see the “primacy of

art as metaphor”, a metaphor of being in the world.

“His most consistent metaphorical referent is a visual gestalt, a seeing of

everything, for all eternity, whole. What he claimed to have found most worthwhile

in the Belgian Cartesian philosopher Arnold Geulincx, in fact, was the very

conviction that the sub specie aeternitatis vision is the only excuse for remaining

alive (OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 37).

não só nesta evidência, mas no próprio ser da pintura, como se esta última doravante nunca mais pudesse

bastar-se a si própria. A pintura moderna vai alimentar-se da tensão [...] entre completude e inacabamento, entre

obra acabada e fragmento. Induzindo um movimento incessante de invenção de formas, o trabalho do vazio

produz multiplicidades. É um vazio disseminado e ubíquo, que se encontra, por exemplo, na

descontextualização, no exílio e na posição antifuncional do readymade [...]. Vazio inquieto que agita as formas

e o olhar, que impede as aderências, que acelera as velocidades sempre em busca de um novo plano de expressão

(Gil, 1996, p.166).

248

In Beckett, thought and language evolve through superpositions in a reciprocal and

interactive relation, causing a movement that is not linear but integrative of the various layers

and depths of the text. In this regard, José Gil (1996, p. 305) states that in modern painting the

eye stops being fixed on the body because the spaces of the painting have become spaces of

vision; the eye is full vision in them, it does not rest in one or another point; this plan which

unites eye and painting has become a body where seer and seen belong to one single and

multiple vision. There is no point-of-view anymore because there is not a body anymore. We

do not see the painting anymore, we participate in the “total vision”, as Merleau-Ponty would

say, that the body-plan offers. There is not point-of-view anymore because we become color,

form and movement of the forms and colors; we do not see them, we become their very

visibility. Actually, in regard to color, Sturridge, by adding color to the final image of the

play, seems to have followed the same line as Oppenheim, who states that color

in the late plays does not offset the intended austerity – achieved by the interplay of

light and dark, an often discreet half-lighting, and the striking contrast of white and

black – of the late plays. But they do serve as a reminder of a better place, a

colourful world that once was, recalling vitality where debility has become the norm

(OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 41).

In this way, the role of the spectator becomes crucial for the very existence of the

artwork as they become part of its “total vision”, even when it comes to color. Like the

literary critic who does not simply identify and list characteristics of the texts but relate them

and create transparencies between them, the art spectator dialogues with the artwork,

embodies it and becomes himself an element that creates other transparencies for the work. As

Beckett states in a 1936 review of Yeats’s The Amaranthers, when it comes to images “there

is no symbol, but stages of an image”, so they will come to light according to the spectator’s

ability. He goes even further in a 1938 Benis Devlin review, stating that “art is but an

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‘approximately adequate and absolutely non-final formulation’” (BECKETT apud

OPPENHEIM, 2003, p. 31). And it is so because of the vital role that the spectator takes in

Beckett’s play as a key element that will assure its continuity and avoid “agony”; and then we

must ask: whose agony, the spectator’s? Or perhaps the very author’s who could not erase

himself completely from the text and ended up talking about his own obsessions? Beckett’s

spectator is the postmodern spectator who cannot stay in that old comfortable position of

anonymity and indifference; their participation is mandatory, even if they remain quietly

seated. They will have to fulfill the in-between spaces of the play, that is, between the broken

dialogues, the semi-told story, between the Listener-Reader image construction and

Caravaggio, they will have to add their own story, their own knowledge. It is so because, as

Fontes Filho <2009, p. 15> states, what is lived by the Other escapes our eye, it is debris in

the fulfillment of our intentionality, they are differentiations of a single dimension, moments

of a single openness to the world, referred in their own singularity to other possible gestures.

Therefore, the visible that we see and talk about is the same that Plato and Aristotle saw, for

behind each landscape that my eye captures there are hidden the landscapes captured by all

the other men that existed, will exist, and all those men who could have been or could be

undivided between these landscapes and us, like the object that we hold between our right and

left hand. The artwork is like a case that holds a peculiar emptiness, since it is more than

absence of matter: it is life lived somewhere else, in simultaneity with mine, in hiatus with it.

“Once it is there, where the Other is sheltered, it is from there that they speak to me”

<FONTES FILHO, 2009, p. 13>. And Merleau-Ponty explains, drawing an analogy with the

artwork, that what we must understand are not “people” but “existentials” that constitute the

(replaceable) meaning of what we say and listen; they are accordingly to what we understand

they are, and which represent the established meaning of all our voluntary and involuntary

experiences. Actually, the author says where the Other is in the body that I see: he is

250

immanent to the body and, yet, he is more than the sum of the signs or significations that are

transmitted \veiculados by it. He is the partial and non-exhaustive images that the

significations represent, and which proves to be fully in each of them – an unfinished

incarnation always ongoing (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1964, p. 263).

They are the armor of this “invisible world” which, with the speech, starts to

impregnate all the things that we see, - like the ‘other’ space for the schizophrenics

appropriates itself of the sensorial and visible space – Not that, in its turn, it may be

it: there is never in the visible but ruins of the spirit, the world will always look like

the Forum, at least to the eyes of the philosopher, who does not live in it entirely.

In conclusion, surely there are other ways of reading and capturing Samuel Beckett’s

work, which happens to occupy the center of our study. However, it was by drawing a visual

poetics for OI that I could identify Caravaggio and Leonardo Da Vinci in the Reader-Listener

composition, Kandinsky’s abstractionism in its opening image, Johns’s contemporary outer

space of the painting, and many others, in its backstage. And by doing this, not only new

biographical elements arose but also literary influences such as Dante’s through the image of

the book and, most of all, the author’s own vision of the contemporary human space. A

fragmented space in which OI was conceived and built, a collage of spaces, experiences,

fragments of memories and identities overlaid, and whose transparencies stay there as a hint

to its spectators so we can find a way to the core of the text and even to the disguised presence

of its author. OI’s multilayer space also leads us to identify the author’s resistance to self-

erasure, and to total forgetfulness and disbelief in the human condition, showing that time

São eles a armadura deste "mundo invisível" que, com a fala, começa a impregnar todas as coisas que vemos,

- como o "outro" espaço nos esquizofrênicos toma posse do espaço sensorial e visível - Não que, por sua vez, ele

o venha a ser: nunca há no visível senão ruínas do espírito, o mundo sempre se assemelhará ao Fórum, pelo

menos aos olhos do filósofo, que não mora nele inteiramente. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.233-4)

251

melts, memories become intangible but, like in OI, as Reader continues reading and Listener

remains listening, we too will continue, not in linear time. Chronos, the chronological,

sequential time of the ordinary man does not exist in Beckett’s play, and if it does it is only to

disguise the author’s hidden intentions. Through a visual poetics, we find Beckett’s time:

kairos (καιρός – Plate 52), an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment

(the supreme moment), “a time in between, a moment of undetermined period of time in

which something special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the

word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.” In Rhetoric, kairos is "a

passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success

is to be achieved." In the New Testament kairos means "the appointed time in the purpose of

God", the time when God acts (e.g. Mark 1.15, the kairos is fulfilled)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos>.

Kairos was central to the Sophists, who stressed the rhetor's ability to adapt to and

take advantage of changing, contingent circumstances. In Panathenaicus, Isocrates

writes that educated people are those “who manage well the circumstances which

they encounter day by day, and who possess a judgment which is accurate in

meeting occasions as they arise and rarely misses the expedient course of action”.

Kairos is also very important in Aristotle's scheme of rhetoric. Kairos is, for

Aristotle, the time and space context in which the proof will be delivered. Kairos

stands alongside other contextual elements of rhetoric: The Audience, which is the

psychological and emotional makeup of those who will receive the proof; and To

Prepon, which is the style with which the orator clothes their proof.

Καιρος - kairos […] means weather in both ancient and modern Greek. In plural it is

καιροι -kairoi (keri) and it means "the times" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos>.

We may say that, in his play, Beckett is that man who manages properly the

circumstances that he encounters day by day because this is the main environment of

Beckett’s characters – their everyday life and their living day by day, “night after night”,

looking for the right time, the “supreme time” when something special will happen, even if

252

253

only in their dreams, even if only to hear that man who “appeared to him and said. I have been

sent by – and here he named the dear name – to comfort you” (OI, p. 16). We may also follow

a theological approach in which kairos expresses God’s time to act, as we can see in the

Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches: before the Divine Liturgy begins, the

Deacon exclaims to the Priest, "Kairos tou poiesai to Kyrio" ("It is time [kairos] for the Lord

to act"), indicating that “the time of the Liturgy is an intersection with Eternity”. Actually,

In The Interpretation of History, neo-orthodox Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich

made prominent use of the term. For him, the kairoi are those crises in history (see

Christian existentialism) which create an

opportun

ity for, and indeed demand, an existential decision by the human subject - the

coming of Christ being the prime example (compare Barth's use of geschichte as

opposed to historie). In the Kairos Document, an example of liberation theology in

South Africa under Apartheid, the term kairos is used to denote "the appointed

time", "the crucial time" into which the document or text is spoken.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos>

254

“In this extremity hid old terror of night laid hold on him again. After so long a lapse

that as if never been. […] Now with a redoubled force the fearful symptoms described at

length page forty paragraph four” (OI, p. 15). Whether we see them from a rhetorical or

theological perspective, times in Beckett are crucial, always eternal in the instantaneity and

immensity of each moment. And the moment in OI is the supreme one, the time in-between

that creates holes in time itself, the kairos openings, and entering them, or trying to, means

falling into a dark labyrinth, spaces of reverie, in-between time-spaces of crisis at a personal

and historical dimension. Through a visual poetics, in Beckett we can find how time and

space melt into a single entity. A visual poetics for OI led me to Beckett’s kairos.

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ANNEX DOCUMENTS

The following manuscripts (MS) were extracted from Adam Seelig’s article:

The Samuel Beckett Collection holds over twenty pages of Beckett’s early drafts of

Ohio Impromptu, which are filed in two groups. The first group is MS 2930, titled

“false starts,” which includes nine holographs and one typescript, all written on

264

nondescript white paper, except for one passage written on half a sheet of grid-

paper. Six of these manuscripts are ordered (2930/1–6) and four are left unordered,

although Reading’s sequencing cannot be taken for gospel. The second group, listed

as MS 2259, consists of one holograph (MS 2259/1) and three typescripts (MS

2259/2–4). (All four are published in Beja, Gontarski, and Astier.) From these two

groups emerge three distinct groups of monologues: (1) “I am out on leave” includes

MS 2930/1, MS 2930/2, and the verso of leaf one of MS 2259/1. MS 2930/1 is little

different from the holograph on verso of leaf 1 of MS 2259/1. MS 2930/2, on the

other hand, incorporates some variations on and digressions from the same themes,

with generally more deletions. (2) “Needle and Thread” consists of MS 2930/3–6

and the four unordered manuscripts of the same series. (3) “Last drafts” includes MS

2259/1 (excluding the verso of leaf one) through MS 2259/4, which resemble the

final text of Ohio Impromptu but differ considerably from groups 1 and 2.

(MS 2259/1, holograph on verso of leaf 1)

I am out on leave. Thrown out on leave.

Back to time, they said, for 24 hours.

Oh my God, I said, not that.

Slip into on this shroud, they said, lest you catch your death

of cold again.

Certainly not, I said.

This cap, they said, for your deaths head skull.

Definitely not, I said.

The New World outlet, they said, in the state of Ohio. We

cannot be more precise. Pause.

Proceed straight to Lima the nearest campus, they said, and

address them.

Address whom? I said.

The students, they said, and professors.

Oh my God, I said, not that.

Do not overstay your leave, they said, if you do not wish it to

be extended.

Pause.

What am I to say? I said.

Be yourself, they said, you’re [ ] say8 yourself.

Myself? I said. What are you insinuating?

Yourself before, they said.

Pause.

And after.

Pause.

Not during? I said.

(MS 2259/2)

“Little remains to be told tell”

(MS 2259/3).

“Little remains is left to tell”

MS 2930

(Opening block paragraph of the monologue)

{in hand} White face

Black eyelids

265