Bridging Music and Language in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume
Keywords:
Samuel Beckett, Music and Literature, Beethoven, Schubert, Deconstructivism, Suffering, Aporia, Repetition, Nothingness, Endlessness, Ineffability, ModernismAbstract
Beckett’s use of music in his late teleplays Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume forms part of his aesthetics of failure. This paper explores Beckett’s compositional style and asks how and why his use of music complicates the overall shape of the work. Beckett at once fragments and loops extracts of Beethoven and Schubert to dictate the thoughts and movements of Figure and Dreamer, the protagonists in these plays. Music’s temporal form and spatial realisations are considered in relation to Dreamer and Figure’s memories and sense of imprisonment. Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida are employed to unpack this entropic and purposely unsettling form.
Downloads
References
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2013.
Albright, Daniel. Beckett and Aesthetics. CUP: Cambridge, 2003.
Albright, Daniel. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 2001.
Beckett, Samuel. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
---. Dream of Fair to middling Women. New York: Arcade, 2012.
---. ed. Ackerley, C. J. Watt. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
---. How It Is. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
---. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957.
---. Proust. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931.
---. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Ben-Zvi, Linda. ed. Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts, Tel Aviv: Assaph, 2003.
Bignell, Jonathan. Beckett on screen: the television plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.
Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Where now? Who now?’ in Samuel Beckett. Longman Critical Readers, ed. Jennifer Birkett and Kate Ince. London: Longman, 2000.
Brater, Enoch. 10 Ways of Thinking about Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Reason. London: Methuen Drama, 2011.
Bryden, Mary. ed. Samuel Beckett and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bucknell, Brad. Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘The Exhausted’. Trans. Anthony Uhlmann. SubStance. Vol. 24, No. 3, Issue 78 (1995), pp. 3-28.
Derrida, Jacques. Memories: for Paul de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001.
Esslin, Martin. ‘Towards the Zero of Language’ in Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. Ed. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Hermand, Jost and Gerhard Richter, eds. Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
Juliet, Charles. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde. Trans. Janey Tucker. Leiden: Academic Press Leiden, 1995.
Knowlson, James & Elizabeth. Eds. Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
Kramer, Lawrence. Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Laws, Catherine. Headaches Among the Overtones: Music in Beckett/Beckett in Music. New York: Rodopi, 2013.
Levy, Eric. ‘The Beckettian Mimesis of Time’. University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Winter, 2011), pp. 89-107.
Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Secker & Warburg, 1992.
McTighe, Trish. ‘“Noli me tangere”: Haptic Certitude in Beckett's Eh Joe and Nacht und Träume’. Modern Drama. Vol. 55, No. 2 (2012), pp. 215-229.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover, 1995.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Trans. W. F. Trotter. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. and Intro. Adam Philips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Reed, John. Schubert, the Final Years. London: Faber & Faber, 1972.
Sarah Bailes & Nicholas Till, Eds. Beckett and Musicality. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation: Volume II. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1966.
Singh, R. Raj. Schopenhauer: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum: London, 2010.
Wall, Brian. ‘…but the clouds…, Quad, Nacht und Träume: Fantasy, Death, Repetition’, JOBS, Vol. 18, Issue 1-2 (Sept., 2009), pp. 88-104.
Weagel, Deborah. Words and Music: Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
Whitelaw, Billie. Billie Whitelaw…Who He? London: Hodder and Staughton, 1995.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976.
Youens, Susan. Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song-Cycles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Authors may deposit the Submitted version; Accepted version (Author Accepted Manuscript); or Published version (Version of Record) in an institutional repository of the author's choice.