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be an opportunity. Instead of producing a print edition, Beckett's bilingual works present an opportunity to conceptualise a digital CWE. Such a reconceptualisation necessitates a shift from a ‘grail’ paradigm (conditioned by the print medium) to a ‘quest’ paradigm (as enabled by the digital medium), which means seeing Beckett's oeuvre not so much as a grail, but a quest, both from the point of view of (a) the writer and from that of (b) the reader. Regarding (a), for Beckett, like for most authors, writing is a constant search for the right words and the right
may be said to belong to Beckett's equally distinguished line of catatonics. The most famous of these can be found in his 1938 novel, Murphy, which features Mr Endon, a catatonic schizophrenic, who inhabits a padded cell, displays a ‘charming suspension of gesture’ and whose Greek name, endon , meaning ‘within’, reinforces the reader's sense of his detachment (Beckett, 2009b , 116). The novel also features the patient Clarke, who is described as having been ‘for three weeks in a katatonic stupor’ (121), and who has been identified by J. C. C. Mays and C. J
Beckett to test the boundaries of embodiment in the theatre’ (107). I fully agree with this claim, but whereas McMullan dedicates separate insightful chapters to embodiment in theatre, mime, television, radio and film, the connections between these different genres and media are left for the reader to infer. To fully grasp the intermedial nature of Beckett's work, and understand how his theatre became remediated by radio, a more integrative approach is needed, which this chapter aims to provide. All That Fall
The apparatus of Disjecta provides a translation of the letter by Martin Esslin, which glosses ‘ausschalten’ as ‘eliminate’ (172). Viola Westbrook, in the more recent edition of Beckett's letters, translates it as ‘dismiss’ ( 2009a , 518). Helpful as they are, both renditions misdirect the reader unversed in the German tongue: ausschalten means to ‘switch off’, primarily in the electrical sense, especially when combined with the adverbial ‘all at once’ ( 1984 , 172). Thus, the idea of dissolving language into silence by somehow switching it
perceived and recoil in horror. As Beckett scholars have amply discussed, Beckett uses the device of the ‘angle of immunity’ for a playful yet serious engagement with the idealist eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley's dictum that ‘esse est percipi (aut percipere)’, that ‘to be is to be perceived (or to perceive)’. In Beckett's take on Berkeley, O is a naive, literal reader of the Irish philosopher who flees from perception in a quest for non-being only to realise the impossibility of that quest when, at the end of the film, he finds that the persistence of self
). Quadrat II confirms through exception one's sense that Quad marks Beckett's fullest emancipation from those ‘function[s] of humanity’ that operate the regime of theatrical signs. If Quad represents a determinate shift away from the qualified humanism of language, toward a radically posthumanist regime of the televisual signal, it is imperative to resist all the thematic lures that have entranced even the best of this play's readers. Be it Hans Hiebel's insistence that Quad concerns the ‘compulsive repetitions’ that fixate subjects in the orbit