Beckett out of His Mind: The Theatre of the Absurd
2001; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
ResumoINTRODUCTION Playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter write in a context in which traditional narratives, or what Lyotard calls grand or metanarrative (31-35), no longer inspire confidence, leaving society with a sense of alienation and loss. These dramatists were impelled by their historical and cultural contexts to explore the mind's reality through a medium that involved the physical embodiment of characters on stage, in spite of the absence of decisive meaning. As Martin Esslin has pointed out, going from the medium of language and a reliance on meaning or conceptuality in communication toward a concern with immediate experience belongs to a long tradition in the history of Western literature involving pantomime and the carnivalesque (328-29). This tradition focuses on the individual's basic circumstances rather than on the ideological makeup of his or her social identity. As portrayed in drama by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and in fiction by James Joyce, this tradition explores the reality of the mind and its direct contact with the phenomenal world prior to the interpretive strategies of any particular narrative. In other words, it deals with the fundamental experience of what it is like to be conscious of our existence. Esslin does not seem to be referring to the objects of awareness, or intentional mind, but to consciousness itself. Each play suggests this basic phenomenon, addressing, as Esslin puts it, the question, How does this individual feel when confronted with the human condition? (405). If we assume that phenomenal consciousness is at the basis of this condition, then how does drama allow us to experience it? David Chalmers, in The Conscious Mind, explains: We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel. Similarly, a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that mental state. To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel--an associated quality of experience ... or qualia for short. The problem of explaining these phenomenal qualities is just the problem of explaining consciousness. (4) In its representation of what it is like to be someone, modern drama goes beyond qualia and approaches the foundation of human reality, the experience of consciousness as such. Chalmers in this passage does not make the distinction between mind--with its intentional content, such as qualia--and consciousness, which is devoid of content. Eastern philosophy emphasizes this distinction as well as that between higher states of awareness, such as the pure consciousness event (PCE). In this tradition, art and literature are said to have the suggestive power (dhvani) to shift awareness from the qualia, or content, of the mind toward a state of non-conceptuality--a shift much in evidence in contemporary drama. The qualia of experience are mediated by linguistic and historical factors, but out-of-the-ordinary or mystical states are beyond mediation in their lack of intentional objects. Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame, as I will demonstrate, refine the mediation of qualia to a point of abstraction at which awareness, if not altogether transcending mediation, verges on a PCE, or state of non-separateness. There are flavors of non-separateness, differences of historical residue, in non-intentional awareness, which in its purest form consists of a flavorless flavor (Franklin 234-5). The devices Beckett uses to break through temporal, discursive barriers toward a transtemporal, transverbal awareness are well known to theatre-goers, even though they may find the effects of these absurdist devices difficult to explain after the fact. By dispensing with narrative sequence, character development, and psychology in the conventional sense, Beckett portrays the process by which awareness moves from the qualia of a historically mediated experience to a state beyond linguistic and cultural boundaries. …
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