Technology and Culture

Samuel Beckett … and technology? A surprising topic for an academic conference, an even more surprising subject of a book to follow. Or so it would seem.

Samuel Beckett: Minimalism. Avant-garde. Theatre of the Absurd. Such is the terminology on which Beckett's devoted were raised. But "habit is a great deadener," as Vladimir tells us in Waiting for Godot, and, while many moved on to speak of the work of this greatest of twentieth century playwrights/novelists from other aesthetic perspectives and from intradisciplinary points of view as well—the philosophic and psychoanalytic foremost among them—it was not until relatively recently that a predominant but inauspicious dimension of Beckett's work was recognized. It was not until some scholars, Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle the leaders among them, began to investigate the significance of genetic criticism for what it offers Beckett studies that attention was paid to an entirely different facet of what makes Beckett's work Beckettian. Critic Enoch Brater, in his book Beyond Minimalism (Oxford University Press, 1987), raised our awareness of the need to dig deeper, to see how, for example, the mechanical recording of a voice (as in Beckett's plays Krapp's Last Tape and Rockaby) interacted with the image viewed on the stage, or how electronically transformed recorded sounds (as in the radio play All That Fall) allowed for the listener's perception of the actor's internal consciousness. But it was then up to others to take yet another step, and in a somewhat different direction, for the significance of technology to be understood in the creation of the experience that is ours as we read, watch, or listen to Beckett's work. Several have now done so, and it is this that has culminated in the fine collection of studies that comprise this book.

"Film is … a movie about the experience of our eyes watching other eyes watching us, the overexposure neatly accomplished by the superhuman eye of the camera," wrote Brater (p. 79). With a focus on Beckett's preoccupation with technologies of various sorts, some of the contributors to this volume [End Page 1225] demonstrate just how vision, actual or metaphorical, becomes superhuman and why. Several are interested in how this and other perceptual modalities are impacted—enforced or diminished—by modes of communication (radio, television), theatrical equipment (lighting, sound), voice recorders, and other kinds of machines. Other contributors are more attuned to the mechanization of human behavior itself or to representations of the interrelation between states of being and the technology of screen and stage. Or even transit: Feargal Whelan considers motion and inertia, with the latter more consistently depicted than the former by Beckett, in relation to train travel and railways. Adding "a temporal dimension" to poetics and hermeneutics, to the making and the interpretation of Beckett's work, Van Hulle offers a clear and concise exposition of the value of genetic criticism—an "enhanced appreciation of the production process" that includes how literary works (in this case Samuel Beckett's) come into being with all the "dead ends" and "forms of undoing that are often necessary to be able to move on" (p. 251)—as opposed to the single focus on a product such as it is, once it is.

Each of the chapters contributes in important ways to our understanding of the subject–object dichotomy with which humankind has long grappled, and to Beckett's own heretofore insufficiently recognized preoccupation with the abstraction of subjective experience. Each offers a highly intelligent and exceedingly well-written analysis of the relation between technology, craft, and Beckett's work and, in so doing, aids in our understanding, at once, of the modernist and postmodernist elements of Beckett's writings and what might oddly be thought of as their simultaneity. Each chapter aids in our understanding (in itself increasingly mechanistic) of the "unmaking of the Western humanist tradition" (p. 1). Whether through an emphasis on the "non-narrative almost...