Performativity and fragmentation in Samuel Beckettʼs That Time

ABSTRACT

Samuel Beckett’s stage play That Time offers an aesthetic exploration of the paradoxical and deconstructive nature of identity and selfhood where the ability of narrative acts to express and capture a preexistent, originary identity is put into question. That Time implies that there is no such core identity and that any identity is constituted by performing and narrating one’s selfhood, thus questioning the hierarchy of the signifier and the signified. In this essay, I therefore read this play alongside Judith Butler’s notions of performativity, citationality, and subject formation in order to explore That Time’s constitution of the self and to show that Beckett’s play and its performance present a perfect instance of how narrative, to use Butler’s description, can bespeak its own impossibility, i.e., to deconstruct itself at the moment of its construction. I aim to reveal some key intersections between That Time and Butler’s thought since the former allows one to aesthetically experience her philosophical ideas and the latter aids in better articulating the complexity of the play’s performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Performativity
• fragmentation
• narrativization
• subject formation
• Samuel Beckett
• Judith Butler

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There are 12 audio fragments of each separate voice (A, B, and C).

2. Although this is a conjecture on my part, it is based on my personal experience of witnessing the three one-woman plays – Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby – in Boston at ArtsEmerson in 2016. Walter Asmus, a close friend of Beckett and his assistant at the Schiller Theatre, was the director and so this performance was realizing the staging ideas indicated in Beckett’s theatrical notebooks, including the required blackout. During the moments of complete blackout, it became hard to distinguish one’s body from other bodies – we turned into a uniform black mass, only differentiated by lonesome coughs. Somehow my body became less material and my sense of self only stabilized whenever the single beam of light would illuminate the character on the stage, actualizing me at the time of the protagonist’s materialization. Granted, these are different plays, but their visual aesthetics are almost identical and thus the aforementioned experience could be seen as valid for That Time as well.

3. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler notes the incessant need to find the correct chronology when narrating oneself as a subject: ‘Subjects who narrate ourselves in the first person encounter a common predicament. There are clearly times when I cannot tell the story in a straight line, and I lose my thread, and I start again, and I forgot something crucial, and it is too hard to think about how to weave it in. I start thinking, thinking, there must be some conceptual thread that will provide a narrative here, some lost link, some possibility for chronology, and the “I” becomes increasingly conceptual, increasingly awake, focused, determined’ (2005, 68).

4. Butler’s explanation of this complex, deconstructive relationship between the signifier and the signified that complicates their ‘chronology’ and distinct identities is quite instructive as well: ‘The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action. If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic at all. On the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative, inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and contours the body that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification’ (Butler 1993 [2011], 6).

5. One can see in this instance that C’s voice may also be citing and incorporating other voices without clearly distinguishing them from his own since ‘to hell out of it’ may be how the old man is spoken to when he is asked to leave the gallery, i.e., Beckett uses here free indirect discourse. There are more instances like this as well showing that the distinction between not only different stages of life, imaginary and real events but also between one’s own and the voices of others is hard to establish – everything merges into a constant murmur of discourse.

6. One should notice the precise phrasing as it is the words (discourse, signifiers) that keep the void out.

7. Notably, this phrase is deconstructive in itself since ‘lifelong’ implies chronology, duration, sequentiality and ‘mess’ negates any possibility thereof. Thus, this phrase ingeniously captures That Time’s narrative strategy.

8. My translation from German.

9. On a related note, Butler explains: ‘Apart from and yet related to the materiality of the signifier is the materiality of the signified as well as the referent approached through the signified, but which remains irreducible to the signified. […] Although the referent cannot be said to exist apart from the signified, it nevertheless cannot be reduced to it. […] Language and materiality are fully embedded in each other, chiasmic in their interdependency, but never fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced to one another’ (Butler 1993 [2011], 38).

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Notes on contributors

Atėnė Mendelytė

Atėnė Mendelytė (Ph.D., Lund University) is Assistant Professor at the Centre of Scandinavian Studies, Vilnius University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in film, media, and visual studies. Mendelytė has published numerous articles and anthology chapters on a variety of subjects ranging from Victorian post-mortem photography to Deleuzian film-philosophy in relation to Samuel Beckett’s television plays. Her research primarily focuses on investigating theoretical and philosophical questions in connection to various forms of art (film, photography, theatre, music, and literature). Currently (2021–2023), she is participating in MotherNet, an international research project (together with researchers from Vilnius, Uppsala and Maynooth Universities), funded by the European Commission. The objective of the project is to explore contemporary European motherhood.