- Home (Essays upon S. Beckett's theatre)
- Beckett's theatre : the character as a philosopheme
- Did Samuel Beckett find the inspiration of Happy days in Un Carnet de bal by Julien Duvivier ?
- How and why Samuel Beckett deceived the critics of Waiting for Godot
- Samuel Beckett stripped bare by his authors, even
- Samuel Beckett's Endgame : against Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind
- The end of Art and the Advent of a money-governed world in Waiting for Godot
- "Life : a game that always gets lost." For Endgame, Samuel Beckett got the idea from the French critic Sainte-Beuve.
- Endgame: Beckett and Aristotle
- Evil in Beckett's theatre
- Master and disciple in Beckett's theatre
- Waiting for Godot: Beckett and Proust
- Wainting for Godot and The Temptation of Saint Antony (Flaubert)
- Beckett's Miscellanies
"Samuel Beckett stripped bare by his authors, even"
An essay upon Samuel Beckett's theatre
Gérard Piacentini, éd. Librairie Nizet, 37510 Saint-Genouph, 2006, 158 pp..
New Zealand journal of French studies N°2, 2006 :
(John Dunmore)
Beckett, Ionesco and Adamov were welcomed as innovative dramatists heralding the use of a new form of theatre, the Absurd, puzzling but appealing to post-war audiences as the Surrealists had been to a previous generations. To some extent, they lagged behind the poets and painters of the 1920s and 1930s, a delay one might well put down to the higher cost of theatrical, productions compared with painting and printing. Gérard Piacentini regards this more as a phenomenon that followed the collapse of a more settled and relatively recently industrialised world, with the devastations and genocides of the second world war coming so soon after the human losses and the destruction caused by the first one.
The characters survive - they have long since stopped struggling - in "un monde qui agonise". One could go on to argue that the waning popularity of dramatic absurdism reflects the greater optimism of the present generation. Piacentini might agree with this view, in that this is a consumer society and art for art's sake has given way to art for investment, where shock is used to create publicity as part of this middle-class commercial attitude. "Marcel Duchamp tourne en ridicule la conception bourgeoise de l'art ... en présentant un urinoir en guise de sculpture moderne". He might have been interested to know of New Zealand's funding of the exhibition of a toilet al the Venice Biennale!
Interesting in this study is the section in which the author shows the characters can be said to represent leading philosophers. Thus Vladimir embodies cartesianism, Estragon leibnitzism, Nagg and Willie represent epicurianism, Pozzo stoicism. Beckett's likely literary sources, from Flaubert to Proust, provide another interesting section. [...]
This is a stimulating study, written in a semi-impressionistic, even pointillistic style, with some paragraphs not exceeding four words, which in a way highlights some of the author's arguments.
It is a challenging addition to the literature of modern French drama.