The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Becketts Drama [Paperback]

Samuel Beckett's work is deeply concerned with physical contact - remembered, half-remembered, or imagined. Applying the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that feature sensation, this study examines how Beckett's later work dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other.Introduction: Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy 1. Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy 2. Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes 3. Mouth: Trying to Tell it All, Failing 4. Skin, Space, Place 5. On the One Hand . . . (The One that Writes the Body) 6. On the Other Hand . . . (The One that Refuses to Touch) Conclusion: Departing Bodies, Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangere ?

McTighe, in an elegantly written, wide-ranging study of Beckett's dramas, focusing mainly on the late plays but relevant to his entire corpus, provides an original and much-needed way of approaching the complex issues related to Beckett's depiction of bodies - at once material yet intangible, solid yet fragmented, there yet not there - and the equally complex issues arising from such tensions and contradictions. Building on theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, McTighe argues for the importance of the haptic or tactile in approaching not only the physical but also the philosophical, religious, ethical, artistic, and performative forms and failures of contacts and connections through touch in Beckett's works. In carefully-argued close readings of selected plays, divided into chapters according to a particular sensory organ of touch - eye, ear, mouth, skin, hand - she illustrates how Beckett creates bodies as material presences which deny the possibilities of their own materiality, as delineations which ultimately point to the impossibility of delineation of somatic experience in art and life. - Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor Emerita, Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel

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