To be sure, the field has been heading toward a reckoning with these intersecting concerns for some time. The publication of James Knowlson’s authoritative biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1995), provided the first comprehensive account of the writer’s lifelong interest in the visual arts, which previously had only been glimpsed in his innovative set designs and his scattered writings on minor painters such as Henri Hayden and Bram Van Velde. Since then, three major studies – Lois Oppenheim’s The Painted Word: Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (2000), David Lloyd’s Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theater (2016), and Conor Carville’s Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts (2018) – have brought us closer to a full appreciation of how visual culture shaped Beckett’s literary imagination and contributed to the “painterly” qualities of his theater work. This appreciation was also enhanced by the publication of Mark Nixon’s Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries (2011), a study of six notebooks the writer kept during his 1936-37 journey through Nazi Germany, as he simultaneously witnessed the campaign against “degenerate art” and visited galleries and museums across the country, often seeking out condemned artists and artworks. Along with recent scholarship on the role of the gaze, inspection, and surveillance in Beckett’s work, these studies offer us a fuller picture of a literary artist keenly attuned to both the aesthetic and political power of the image in the twentieth century.
Now, in response to the presidential theme, our panelists will update this picture by considering not just Beckett’s various debts to the visual arts, but their implications for contemporary debates about visual media and surveillance society.
The session will begin with Gabriela Ghizzi Vescovi’s “In Front of Beckett’s Eyes of Flesh: The Art Image in his Oeuvre,” which will trace a path from Beckett’s early art connoisseurship to the images in his late oeuvre, particularly the short prose pieces of the 1960s. Known as “texts of confinement,” Beckett's writings during this period owe something to well-known paintings such as Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Rembrandt’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, and Ruysdael’s Entrance to the Forest. But, according to Vescovi, these specific paintings and Beckett’s reflections on visual culture in general also contributed to his development of a “literature of the unword”, founded on the failure of language to adequately express or communicate meaning.
Bringing these concerns to present, James Martell’s “‘It’s done I’ve done the image’: Beckett’s Experiential Thinking-Imaging” will examine Beckett’s study of the visual arts and his production of philosophical and psychoanalytic images to consider how these idiomatic visions speak to our screen and image obsessed world. If Beckett’s oeuvre demonstrates the transition from the Romantic and symbolic worldview of the late nineteenth century to the modernism and postmodernism of the twentieth century, Martell’s paper will prompt us to reflect on its constant questioning of the image/experience/thinking relation, and its consequences for the image-dominated social media age, with all its possibilities and pitfalls.
Finally, Umar Shehzad’s “Contemporary Politics of the Facial Hermeneutics in Samuel Beckett’s Film,” will investigate how the writer’s experiments with facial representation mystify the identity, blunt the expression, and frustrate the communicativeness of face. Shehzad’s presentation will focus on Film (1965) as a case in point, because Beckett’s cinematic text reimagines the panopticon of the modern state as an individual seeks to escape an almost omniscient pursuer localized and represented by the camera lens. The presentation will conclude by reading this reimagining against contemporary facial recognition technologies, pandemic-era disputes about mask mandates, and contemporary politico-religious debates around hijab, all of which insist on approaching the face as a visual text to be interpreted.
We will limit panel to just three 15-minute presentations to facilitate an extensive discussion at the end of the session. But we have been careful to select presentations that emerge from diverse scholarly perspectives, career stages, and geographical contexts – in Latin America, the United States, and Europe/South Asia. In accord with our collective priorities as scholars, we have also opted to conduct this session online to promote sustainability and to enhance access for students and scholars around the world.