aesthesis

Samuel Beckett and the First Cause

What is a Beckett play? The question seems simple enough. A definition should be easy to come up with.

Samuel Beckett professed to believe in authorial intent. That is, Becket believed that his plays ought to be performed exactly as he wrote them with no alterations by actors or directors. In addition to the dialogue ...

(or lack thereof) Beckett wrote stage directions, specific movements, and notes about costumes in his plays.

Beckett was not the first playwright to rely on authorial notes to control the way a play was staged. Eugene O’Neil and George Bernard Shaw did the same. Shaw, for instance, wrote long essays to accompany the text of his plays sometimes explaining an ambiguous point in the text. Beckett however tries to control every nuance of a production – every intonation of every vowel and consonant spoken.

Beckett was concerned that meaning or non-meaning that he as the author had programmed into the script would not be lost or adulterated by overly creative actors and directors. His extreme views on this resulted in several humorous theatrical anecdotes. Several of these are recorded here by Fintan O’Toole in a review of the print release of some of Beckett’s production notebooks.

”In 1988, he and his publisher Jerome Lindon forced the Comédie Francaise in Paris to withdraw certain alterations of, and additions to, the prescribed setting and costumes from a production of Fin de partie by Gildas Bourdet, leading to Bourdet's own decision to take his name off the credits. In the same year, through the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Francais, Beckett took legal action to prevent a Dutch company, De Haarlemse Toneelschuur, from staging an all-woman Waiting for Godot. When he lost the case, he banned all productions of his plays in Holland.”

The problem in defining a Beckett play is that Beckett contradicts himself between notes and texts and even between different texts of the same play.

O’Toole questions whether Beckett’s notes about his plays should necessarily be considered authoritative on production values. He points out that Beckett created paradoxes between what he wrote and what he expected on the stage. It is unclear whether these puzzles were intentional or not.

Those who choose to consider themselves Christian’s don’t really suffer from the same dilemma. They, for the most part, accept the primacy of the Bible as a source of truth. They accept this on faith. It cannot be proven logically.

Additionally, Christianity assumes that whatever God comments on in his word can be considered authoritative. Beckett may have used his creatorial control over his work to muddy the waters of meaning. Beckett’s devotee’s rave about the wonderfully misleading works but Christian’s generally assume that God wants us to understand what he is saying.

Christianity assumes that God is the source of everything, the First Cause Wikipedia defines First cause in this way.

First Cause is used alternately to refer to the Cosmological argument for the existence of God, or as an alternate noun for God itself among individuals uncomfortable with the historical and religious meanings associated with the term. Using "First cause" in replacement of "God" may also indicate that the writer has a different concepetion of God than what the popular definition entails.

Christians also assume that the Bible is God’s written communication to man. They assume that if God is trustworthy, then his word is equally trustworthy.

There are two ways to develop a definition of art from the Christian viewpoint. You can either draw your definition from the macrocosm as God’s physical creation or you can cultivate a definition based on the Bible.

Any definition of art based on the physical creation has two major drawbacks. First, creation on its own is so complex that it may be impossible for men to encapsulate it into any useful verbal terms. It is difficult for men who are par of creation to get an objective view of it.

Second, if God’s word is to be taken as accurate, then the macrocosm has been tainted by sin. If it were in it prelapsarian state we could be more confident of any conclusions we raw from observation. Instead, to draw conclusions about God’s view of art based on the created world is like drawing conclusions about a painter’s views based on a painting coated with mud. We might get a few glimpses of the work beneath the mud but we couldn’t be certain whether what we saw was based on the artist’s work or the mud.

The world around us, filtered through the philosophical lens of God’s word can serve as a wonderful illustration of God’s art but it cannot stand alone.

The Bible is a more sure way to find out what God has to say about art. This must be accepted by faith. There is not an objective way to prove the reliability of the Bible. (The Bible does stand up to scrutiny that would discredit many other documents.)

O’Toole points out that even though Beckett held productions to the strict authority of his texts, he himself questioned what he had written as he worked on a production. So, while scholars wrangle over whether Becket’s notes or his published plays ought to be taken as the final received text, we can trust in the reliability of God’s word and start to develop an artistic definition based on the First Cause.

Posted by jwaggone at April 26, 2004 08:00 AM