Beckett, Deleuze and Performance by Daniel Koczy

Author:Daniel Koczy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319956183
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Company’s Belacquobatics and Beckett’s Blank Page

With this still developing affect theory in hand, we can return to the opening of Beckett’s Company. ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine’ (CE: 3). Nine simple words. A body begins to form in the imagination of Company’s readers. And yet, by immediately reflecting on the activity of writing itself, Beckett’s opening lines already complicate our reading by asking us to imagine the moment before words came. We sense the blank page with which the writer will commence but must destroy as soon as their words begin.

“Deviser” clarifies—‘To one on his back in the dark’ (3)—and more words blacken a once blank page. Onwards, Beckett’s “deviser” carefully instructs and directs our imaginings. Yet each clarification, even while rendering the imagination more precise, sees something of Beckett’s blank page shimmering through to the surface of his text. At each step, we sense both a need to speak with absolute precision and an echo of that silence which each utterance shatters. As noted, “deviser” offers no narration. Instead, as it lists and refuses a range of possible affects, “deviser” carefully fabricates a body while emphasising a dire need for such precision and the difficulty this ‘labour’ entails (42). Throughout, our attention is drawn to both the laborious nature of precise composition and to the blank page that each invention must be delivered from, towards that moment before words or bodies began to form. Without a doubt, for Beckett’s “one”, there is ‘no new experience’ (Levy 1982: npn). But a richly sensuous fragility haunts the rigorous particulars out of which Beckett’s body is built and held so firmly within its appointed place. Precious little can change for this body not-yet-born-yet-close-to-death. But “deviser’s” careful clarifications, its affirmations and negations, establish a kind of rhythm, like an eye opening and closing, that pulsates across the imagination as the text is read.

Sensed throughout, Beckett’s blank page drags our attention towards a world in the midst of its own emergence. Quite still, Beckett’s “one” is nevertheless strangely mobile and alive. At each moment, its body reforms through apparently autonomous affects whose force must be constantly renewed. Perhaps we will still want to understand this body by diagnosing its sicknesses. Perhaps it has suffered some kind of stroke? But this body carries the unsettling excess of a becoming that does not cease and which the organism does not itself contain. We come to sense that our imagination is fabricating a body we cannot recognise and refuses to be reduced to the norms of human sickness and health. And, in this manner, Company asks us to attempt the kind of diagnosis that our analysis has here been attempting to perform.

Indeed, at least according to how we happen to have approached this problem , we can suggest that Company offers its readers a belacquobatic display. On the one hand, Beckett’s “deviser” performs the kind of ostentatious shuttling between the poles of speech and the unspeakable that would characterise the belacquobatic Beckettian artist.

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