Transcript Powerpoint Week 7 File

Samuel Beckett
Time and Figure in Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot and Not I
QUESTION: “It is self-evident that
the play Waiting for Godot is
‘about’ time?”
‘We grasp at once, as we watch them,
this major function of theatrical
representation: to show of what the
fact of being there consists. […] They
will still be there the next day, the day
after that, and so on ... tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow... from day to
day... alone on stage, standing there,
futile, without past or future,
irremediably present.’ (Robbe-Grillet,
1953 pp120-121)
‘I should say seduction rather than
illusion because the subject who looks
into [Brunelleschi’s] box, if he is not mad,
knows very well that he is not looking at
the Baptistry itself. For those who sit in
the theatre it is the same […] This
representation is not trompe l’oeil and it
is not even illusion, it is seduction in the
proper sense of the term: one is divided
from oneself, there is a scission.’
Lyotard, Des Dispositif Pulsionnels p.256
‘Difference in the temporal order can be
grasped as the non-temporality which that
order seeks to reduce […] When we say: what
happens has happened, the temporal system
authorises us to understand: there is a cause,
there is an initial trauma, there’s an effect of
recurrence of past event; - and that suffices to
repress the event, since a past event is nonevent…. But true temporal vertigo is when the
event doesn’t appear in its proper place where
everything is ready to receive it in the future.’
Lyotard Discourse/Figure pp.154-5