Resumen de Un-bodied Voices, the Thing Itself and Beckett’s Neural Theatre
Gilles Deleuze reminds us in his essay on Beckett’s teleplays, ‘The Exhausted’, that the image is central to Beckett’s art, neither representation nor thing but a process, a constant becoming, which is the ultimate impact of art, not only in cinema, but in other arts as well (Deleuze, 1995, 19). Such process, an emphasis on flow, becoming, and multiplicity, on mutability rather than stability, on partiality rather than wholeness, a perpetual betweenness — between text and image, between past and present, between sensation and matter, between embodiment and dis- or un-embodiment — suggests an incipient theory of theatre as well. Certainly such is the case in Beckett’s later work, particularly his late work for theatre and media in which we find a preponderance of spectral figures, ghosts, absences, what Deleuze calls the ‘ghostly dimension’ (14). What appears on stage as a something, a material entity, a body, perhaps, or body part, is not always fully present, is thus something not quite wholly material, nor quite simply immaterial or ethereal either, something in between presence and absence, matter and image, between the real and surreal or trans-real, Beckett himself an artist in between, neither wholly of his time nor wholly of ours, fully neither, even as he is always, if partly, both. This essay explores the implications of such thought about art in Beckett’s stage works, which are less simulations than events in and of themselves, and focuses attention on the voice and its untethering from body, its un-bodiness.
