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Symbols, Signs, and Language: The Brothers Yeats and Samuel Beckett's Art of the Theater

1986; Western Michigan University; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.1986.0044

1936-1637

Gordon Armstrong,

Irish and British Studies

Symbols, Signs, and Language: The Brothers Yeats and Samuel Beckett's Art of the Theater Gordon Armstrong Recent productions of works by William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett on both sides of the Atlantic—in New York at the Public Theater and at La Mama, in London at the Yeats Theatre Company, and in Paris at the Théâtre Oblique—have spawned interest in two of this century's Irish Nobel Laureates. Among those who have commented on the work of both playwrights is Katharine Worth, who forcefully argues in The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett that W. B. Yeats "is at the centre of the modern movement in the theatre," a movement "which leads above all to Beckett."l The influence of W. B. Yeats is writ large in the Beckett canon, according to this critic, who asserts that even the late plays of Beckett, revolutionary as they are, merely bring us very close "to the 'door'," in Yeatsian phrase; "the in extremis situations of Beckett's characters in Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, and . . . but the clouds . . . are scarcely more than pale reflections of the depth of W. B. Yeats' mind."2 Nevertheless, close analysis of both playwrights' works does not support Worth's endorsement of W. B. Yeats as a progenitor of Beckett's considerable accomplishments in the theater. Indeed , it would appear that Jack Yeats, the younger brother of W. B. Yeats, had the greater influence. A comparison of the usage of sign, symbol, and language—the communicative gestures of the theater—shows that Beckett and the elder Yeats brother are almost diametrically opposed to one another in their theater practice, however close to one another their respective GORDON ARMSTRONG teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Rhode Island. 38 Gordon Armstrong39 concepts of drama of the interior may be. Jack B. Yeats, on the other hand, is (if I may borrow a phrase from Katharine Worth) "in the same line of country" as Samuel Beckett in articulating the nature of the real. Beckett himself is aware of this dichotomy in the works of the two Yeats brothers, and in late 1980 noted it in conversation in the Cafe Français in Paris: Question: I would think that Yeats was very influential in your development as a playwright? Beckett: You mean Jack Yeats? Question: And not W. B. Yeats? Beckett: No. He went after all the wrong things in Irish life.3 Even a cursory view of the writings of Jack Yeats and Samuel Beckett supports this statement; the real bridge to Beckett's less conscious art is found in the creations—narrative and pictorial —of Jack B. Yeats, the younger and less well-known brother. There is nothing novel in the notion that in about 1945 Beckett's art, formerly concerned with the struggle to find a way to represent the accommodations of art to life, changed to the mature vision of an artist struggling with only the forms of the relations themselves. Beckett is not the first writer to discover the truism that art includes not better or worse copies of nature but an aggregate of traditions, illusions, and devices representing the world's appearances. The history of modernism in the theater is the history of representations of the exploration of interiority in an era whose dominant figure is still Ibsen, in an age that has already discounted realism and modernism in favor of postmodernism —i.e., the new organicism of the eighties that is composed of elements of interiority, realism, and classicism in their Romantic transformational guise. But Beckett was among the first to declare his distinctive artistic turf in the theater. Writing in 1945-46, he spoke of the communication of the non-self as the essential communicative gesture. The goal of the exemplary artist in this process is particularly difficult and consists of attempts "to force the deep-seated invisibility of exterior things, to the point where invisibility itself becomes a thing . . . that is a labour of diabolic complexity, which requires a framework of suppleness and extreme lightness, a framework which insinuates more than it asserts."4 While Beckett's modernist context and...