Beckett's Thing
Painting and Theatre
Explores Samuel Beckett’s relation to painting and the visual imagination that informs his theatrical work
- Read an interview with David Lloyd
- Discusses Beckett’s relationship with three painters crucial to his life-long dialogue with the visual arts
- The first book to examine the paintings that Beckett would have known and on which he based his critical remarks
- Accounts for the increasing visuality of Beckett’s theatre in relation to his evolving appreciation of painting and the formal questions posed by that medium
- Explores Beckett’s anticipation of European phenomenology and psychoanalysis in relation to Heidegger and Lacan
Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings. He explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work.
1. Republics of Difference: Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett
2. Beckett's Thing: Bram Van Velde and the Gaze
3. “Siege laid again”: Arikha’s Gaze, Beckett’s Painted Stage
Conclusion: The Play’s the Thing
Bibliography.
Lloyd’s study of Aeikha is of a very high order, penetratingly rich in its detailed readings of paintings and drawings…this review fails to capture what cannot be summarized: the rich close readings of superb paintings that demonstrate by their performance both the power of aesthetic experience and what it is to see.
refreshing, compelling, and contagious... Beckett’s Thing is not a survey of dozens of texts, nor is it an homage, nor does it dwell in biography. Rather, it traces one theme and tackles it so deeply and thoroughly as to make usthink about Beckett anew.
This highly original constellation of critical dialogues will galvanise Beckett Studies. David Lloyd both disturbs and enhances emerging debates in and among philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political discourses, as they respond to pressures arising from neo-liberalization on understandings of human subjectivity and its representability. This book reconfigures how Samuel Beckett’s work will be seen and read across a range of fields of enquiry.
