Читать книгу Beckett’s Late Stage - Rhys Tranter - Страница 8

Trauma is one of the key concepts underscoring the writing and reception of Samuel Beckett’s work. This book sets out to re-read Beckett’s post-war writing as a response to, and theorisation of, traumatic experience, with a particular focus on writing and representation. Biographical readings have taken account of the role mourning has played in the writer’s prose, poetry and drama. Broader historical interpretations trace allusions to the atrocities of twentieth-century cultural memory. Intertextual research has also identified latent traumatic content via the many literary, religious and philosophical texts woven into the works. The influence of trauma is difficult to overstate in relation to Beckett’s texts, although it typically adopts an aesthetic of understatement, allusion, and ellipses. The status of trauma in Beckett’s writing appears to resist concrete or meaningful understandings. Its appearances are, by definition, peripheral and fragmentary, making it difficult to place at the centre of a research project or a sustained critical assessment. This is because, paradoxically, trauma is never fully present in Beckett’s texts, nor is it totally absent: it remains elusive, troubling the borderlines between what exists and what does not. This study will ask how cultural and historical trauma can serve to illuminate the limitations and indeed possibilities of language and representation, and how the belated deferral of written signifiers, performed rehearsals, and electronic broadcasts ask us to rethink notions of presence and agency. To put it another way, trauma manifests as the ill seen and ill said of Beckett’s oeuvre: a concept that challenges the possibilities of witnessing and recording, and, as a result, prompts a revaluation of what we mean by truth, history, and identity.