Samuel Beckett And The Posthuman Body

Samuel Beckett’s artistic vision is often interpreted as absurd,pessimistic or even nihilistic,largely due to his depictions of the inhumane conditions of human existence.In Beckett’s works,humans lose their autonomous and lively state of being,and one of the salient manifestations is that the vibrant and self-governing human bodies are gone and portrayed instead as mechanical,ghostly and disintegrated.Many Beckett scholars have observed and commented on this feature of Beckett’s works,but none has noticed how these idiosyncratic bodily images are founded fundamentally upon Beckett’s understanding of human subjectivity as merely an illusion because humans are always inherently shaped and influenced by non-human entities.This understanding is crucial because it is one of the key gateways towards Beckett’s aesthetic and ontological contemplations.The inherent integration between human and non-human is the core issue of posthumanism,a paradigm that has exerted increasing influence in literary studies and beyond during the last two decades.This dissertation adopts a transhistorical posthumanist approach,arguing that the interconnections between human and nonhuman are the inherent nature of mankind in history,not confined to the age of high tech alone.The term “posthuman body” is used to define Beckett’s characterization of the bodies that interrelate with non-human entities.In different art forms,such as theatre,media plays and prose,these posthuman bodies assume different configurations.In theatre,human bodies function like non-human machines;in media plays,including radio play,teleplay and film,human bodies and sensory organs are intervened by nonhuman media;and in prose,human bodies metamorphose into non-human matter.These three different forms of posthuman body are analyzed carefully so as to explore the human existence in Beckett’s works in terms of its embedded relation with the nonhuman and to examine how this relation directly prompts Beckett’s ontological thinking on the world and the universe.In the first chapter,the posthuman body in Beckett’s theatre is designated as the mechanical body,which is the body moving like machines.Beckett’s plays since the1960 s,particularly Happy Days,Play,Not I,Ghost Trio and Quad,feature the mechanical bodies,which act like puppets and move on stage according to strict geometric patterns.An investigation of the historical and cultural context of Beckett’s depictions of the mechanical theatrical body shows that Beckett is on the one hand following the anti-naturalist theatrical tradition encompassing the theatre art of Heinrich Von Kleist,Vsevolod Meyerhold,Edward Gordon Craig,and W.B.Yeats,and on the other drawing inspirations from the machine aesthetics of abstract art in the early twentieth-century.By presenting the theatrical bodies as machines,Beckett is not trying to reduce or confine humans to an inhuman status,but on the contrary striving to liberate through the mechanical images the forces and possibilities that connect human and non-human agents alike in reflecting the concealed nature of the world and the universe.Beckett’s conception of machine thus resonates strongly with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of abstract machine,as they all use machines to epitomize their ontologies endowed with posthumanist connotations.In the second chapter,the posthuman body in Beckett’s media plays is designated as the mediated body,which manifests mainly as the human sensory perception transformed by media,such as radio,television and film.All the media plays of Beckett,including seven radio plays,five teleplays,and one film,are studied in this chapter.In light of Friedrich Kittler’s media archeology and the paradigm of object-oriented ontology,it is argued that the medium specificities of radio,television and film are manipulated in Becket’s media plays to first expose the limit of human sensory perception of the reality and then to fracture human self-perception in order to present an alternative form of sensory perception.This alternative perception does not know the boundary between inside and outside,between reality and hallucination,but is simply immersed in a boundless universe far greater than human’s world,where time and space,life and death all disappear.Beckett’s media plays thus generate for the audience a posthuman subjectivity that replaces the autonomous,rational and masterful human subjectivity to merge itself with the unfathomable universe,and the materiality of the non-human media plays an indispensable role in delivering this vision of Beckett.In the third chapter,the posthuman body in Beckett’s prose is designated as the body-matter,because the human bodies often transform into various kinds of nonhuman matter in the natural world,such as bone,stone,mud and dust.In Beckett’s first trilogy,his late trilogy,and his two short prose collections,Texts for Nothing and Fizzles,human bodies disappear so that the posthuman subjectivity lingers on with the bodymatter in the form of a disembodied and adrift voice.This posthuman subjectivity and the body-matter constitute a unique otherworld,which is the pivotal imagery of Beckett’s prose works,representing how the world could be perceived when humans join the flows and forces of the cosmos.Beckett believes in the essence of this cosmic reality to be nothingness,which is not “nothing-ness” as negative annihilation,but “nothingness” as unrealized possibilities,and various intellectual resources have in their respective ways contributed to the formation of Beckett’s unique vision of cosmic nothingness,including Schopenhauer’s philosophy,Husserlian phenomenology,Buddhism,Daoism,pre-Socratic atomism and modern physics.However,in Beckett’s vision of cosmic reality,a tension inevitably ensues,because as long as the posthuman subjectivity and the body-matter exist,the cosmic reality could never be pure nothingness.The tension between nothingness and being,which is fundamental in Beckett’s artistic world,demonstrates the profundity and complexity of Beckett’s artistic expression and ontological thinking.For Beckett,the reality that human beings dwell in is merely a drop in the cosmic ocean.The unknown forces and possibilities hiding underneath constitute the concealed nature of the universe that determines the conditions of both human and non-human entities.So,by presenting the integration between human and the non-human rather than focusing only on the human reality,Beckett is probing into the essence of the universe.To envision this integration and this cloaked essence,Beckett conceives a posthuman subjectivity embedded in the posthuman bodies that experiences a different cosmic reality,which is ethereal and insubstantial because he believes the essence of the universe to be ungraspable nothingness.This nothingness signifies unlimited,unrealized but constitutive possibilities in the world and the universe,and it is in this approach to nothingness that Beckett engages in a minimalist aesthetics rooted in posthuman bodies.The aesthetics of Beckett’s works is based on his profound cosmic ontology that underlies both human and non-human existence.This,I think,is the core of Beckett’s art.