Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts by Carville Conor

Author:Carville, Conor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Note that Beckett does not examine a specific picture, but essays a more general description of technique: ‘the way he puts down a man’s head and a woman’s head, side by side’. Such a description suggests a signature procedure on Yeats’ part, and that seems to be Beckett’s intention – to assert a style or tactic that will form the material basis for his reading of the whole oeuvre. There is no possibility of relationship between the individuals in this generic Yeats painting; they are ‘2 entities that will never mingle’. And yet there is a very strong relationship between the viewer and the painting, one that Beckett sees created by Yeats’ distinctive formal tactic of juxtaposition. Thus Yeats depicts the ‘impassible immensity’ between his characters, but in doing so supplies what Beckett calls a ‘petrified insight into one’s own hard, irreducible singleness’. ‘Petrified insight’: this phrase is from the Sinclair letter; in the equivalent letter to MacGreevy, the word ‘petrified’ is applied not to the beholder’s insight, but only to describe the ‘stillness’ of the painting itself. Petrification occurs on both sides of the divide between painting and beholder then, and in each case seems to mean a certain kind of stillness. This stillness of the painting comes about because of the ‘impassible immensity’ between the two characters depicted, for such a breach reveals the impossibility of social exchange, of ‘the performance of love & hate, joy and pain’ between them. Yet this materialized impasse also stills the beholder, shocking them with this assertion of radical isolation. The notion of petrification has connotations of mineralization and the inorganic, of course, and there is thus a strong sense here of the painting actually freezing the viewer, rendering them dead. But most importantly, Beckett is also thinking here of Leibniz: the ‘hard, irreducible singleness’ experienced is that of the monad.

These are very radical claims to make for painting, a token of the profound respect that Beckett had for Yeats. They are part of a concerted effort to think about art in terms that do not retreat back into either a modernist rhetoric of vitalist immediacy, or a standard neo-Kantian dualistic model. And yet, as with earlier moments in Beckett’s aesthetic thought, there are traces of both these positions. His accounts of both Yeats and Watteau actively depend on the establishment of a formal distance between the beholder as subject and the painting as object. There is no fusion, no ‘pure optical experience’ ruffling the molecules of the retina or brain. What we have instead is what Beckett calls Yeats’ ‘dispassionate perception’, a disenchanted recognition of the impossibility of relation. And yet even so there is a clear emphasis on a kind of substantial immediacy between object and beholder, a common ground in the mutual petrification that takes place. It is as if the vitalist view of the world as a dance that elides the subject-object distinction is reworked as a calcification or congealing that is the real condition of all being. This is the stillness that Beckett speaks of.

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