CFP: Greying the Carnival – Samuel Beckett Inverting/Inverting Samuel Beckett
Call for Papers for the Samuel Beckett Working Group at IFTR
Cologne, Germany, 9th–13th June 2024
Samuel Beckett’s drama may not be yet mapped as a site of carnival; nevertheless, the Beckettian dramatic ecosystem is open to a sense of the carnivalesque. In Europe and the northern Americas, the carnival tends to be understood as a secularised Christian tradition, the religious roots of which are enshrined in the epistemology of the word. Originating from the Latin carnem levāre – the removal of the flesh (OED) – the carnival used to be a festive threshold leading into the frugality and modesty of Lent. Yet, such grassroots street performances have thrived beyond this limited cultural, historical and geographical frame. We notably think about the African and Indigenous carnivals, such as Canboulay, which operated as spiritual, political and cultural performances of resistance and rebellion against domination and exploitation (Browne, 2018). It is therefore necessary to first decentre the event of “the carnival” in order to zoom in on “the carnivalesque” as a complex phenomenon.
The carnivalesque has been providing historians, ethnographers and anthropologists with “a tool for broader historical analysis of non-carnival festivities bearing carnival characteristics” (Testa, 2021) and literary critics with a lens through which to analyse the aestheticization of “a carnival sense of the world” (Bakhtin, 1984a). Combining both approaches, theatre and performance scholars may find in the carnivalesque a concept through which to identify and examine cultural manifestations of the phenomenon beyond the performances of carnival, tracing its evolution and hybridisation across various real and fictional milieux. We propose to begin our investigation into the topic of the conference with a provisional definition of the carnivalesque that owes a debt to Mikhail Bakhtin’s study, but attempts to be inclusive of contexts other than the popular culture he scrutinized: a reflective, subversive and playful politics and aesthetic of illusion, relying on symbols that blur dualisms to express a desire for freedom, while limning its limits. By dualisms, we think in particular of the real/the ideal, life/death, doom/hope, continuity/rupture, centre/margin, top/bottom, male/female, human/animal, order/anarchy and revolution/entertainment, but this list is not exhaustive and deserves to be expanded, to adapt to the complex and shapeshifting manifestations of the phenomenon.
The carnivalesque seeps into Beckett’s oeuvre, mostly in an embodied fashion, but not only in this manner: obvious occurrences can be identified in the onomastics of the Kraps and the Piouks; Vladimir’s and Estragon’s commedia dell’ arte inspired lazzi (Kern, 1966); the excess of Lucky’s logorrhea; Hamm’s need to keep playing; Krapp’s boozing as well as his clownish makeup and costume; Winnie’s ritualistic attention to costume and props; and the staging of the grotesque body with the laughter and hiccups in Play or the character of Mouth. However, Beckett’s plays do not “digest” those carnivalesque elements easily, rather putting them to the test of what we could refer to as the anti-carnival of a (post-)catastrophic everyday. If the carnival is characterised by the gathering of masses, feasting and abundance, Beckett’s plays perform the opposite with masses disappearing, food and other vital resources depleting. Yet, both operate as a suspension: a point of convergence and departure. The carnival may be understood as a “temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank” (Bakhtin, 1984b, 10) – a pause in the course of the everyday. Beckett’s oeuvre is ruled by the imperative to “go on” in the anachromism of “grey time,” “where there is neither simply action nor its opposite, but a call to keep paying attention to the intensity of time that resists the black and white of a crisis” (Salisbury, 2024). As is so often the case with Beckett, we are left with scales of grey: an ode to the complex and the paradoxical. At a time when contradiction and debate have become difficult, when freedom of speech keeps oscillating, we propose to revisit Beckett’s plays as sanctuaries of the uncertain, the contradictory, the paradoxical – a grey carnival.
In practice, the tension between tradition and innovation is always at the core of production and often yields questions about the possibility to invert or subvert Beckett’s legacy and artistic paradigms. This battle has often been fought on the grounds of gender, whereby queering Beckett appears as a magnifier of gender topics and issues already at play in the work, as well as new epistemological ways of unearthing systems of power, domination and exploitation. Cross-casting and drag remain a vexed issue in the performance history of Beckett’s work both in his lifetime and afterwards. On the one hand, the Beckett Estate – in its mission of “protection” and “preservation” – tends to impose a strict adherence to what is thereby construed as a gender politics, often applying a binary approach, which is not directly traceable in the texts. On the other hands, queer performances of Beckett not only bring to the surface the queerness of the texts, but they can also provide a path to explore the “masquerade” of femininity (Butler, 2015), the identity of characters beyond the binary, and some plays like Happy Days even become vehicles for performing what it is to be “stuck in [one’s] body” (Nando Messias, qtd. in Heron, 2022). Furthermore, as the Beckettian oeuvre is being remediated, further troubling the border between the real and the virtual, and presence and absence, we are compelled to investigate how new creative technologies are themselves political and aesthetic tools that both (re-)produce an already existing Beckettian carnivalesque, while also complexifying, hybridizing or inverting it (Johnson and Heron, 2020). In the geographical Beckettian “centres”, this prolific creative engagement with the work is often made accessible to the public as part of festivals, drawing masses in a carnivalesque celebration of Beckett and his work (McTighe, 2023), which disrupts not only social time (a break from quotidian life) and phenomenological time (the effect of Beckett’s slowed-down dramaturgies on audience members), but also the temporality of theatre-making (a shift in the somatic approach to rehearsing those slow-paced pieces) and marketing (programming short plays in neo-liberal contexts). In other words, as Trish McTighe eloquently puts it, “Each festival constructs ‘Beckett-time’ out of the normative fabric of cultural time” (McTighe, 2023). The carnivalesque durée as / of / in / against Beckettian festivals thus calls for a broader reassessment of our collective consumption of art, as well as our modes of celebration of bodies of work and artists.
All papers related to Beckett’s drama or Beckett in performance are welcome. We also encourage proposals in English and in French pertaining, but not limited, to the following topics:
⁃ Beckett and the carnivalesque
⁃ Beckett as anti-carnival
⁃ Beckett’s clowns, fools and jesters ⁃ Beckett and the grotesque
⁃ Beckett and commedia dell’arte
⁃ Beckett and costumes and props
⁃ Beckett and festivals
⁃ Beckett and technologies of hybridization
⁃ Queering, inverting, subverting Beckett
⁃ The carnival of Beckett’s doodles
The Samuel Beckett Working Group is an evolving international community of researchers, which seeks to support the development of excellent research on Beckett’s drama and Beckett in performance. We welcome postgraduate and early-career researchers, as well as faculty, independent researchers and artists. We value the participation of Beckett and non-Beckett experts alike, as both categories partake in the maintenance of a healthy interdisciplinary ecosystem. The submission of work at various levels of development is encouraged from early ideas on a project to work in progress to nearly finished papers. This community strives to offer rigorous and constructive feedback through respectful engagement with each other’s work. Our core values are inclusivity, diversity and care.
Abstracts can be submitted via the IFTR Cambridge Core portal. Please note that you must renew your membership or become a member in order to submit:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/iftr.
The deadline for abstracts for working group papers is 15 January 2025.
Papers of up to 3,000 words in length are to be distributed by 9 May 2025.
For information about the general conference, please check the IFTR website. Please also check for updates on the Samuel Beckett Working Group page at https://www.iftr.org/working-groups/samuel-beckett.
If you have questions about the group or about attending please contact the working group convenors, Céline Thobois-Gupta, cthobois@tcd.ie, and Trish McTighe, t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk.
Please note that papers to be presented at the Working Group are distributed and read by all the participants ahead of the meeting. At the Working Group sessions presenters give short résumés of their work, followed by a lengthy discussion period (each presenter has 30 to 45 minutes in all, depending on the number of presenters). This is an extremely effective method, which allows ideas to be discussed, debated and evaluated, with participants suggesting directions for the presenters’ work-in-progress. There is limited space for presenters; there will also be a limited space for auditors, who may also be sent the papers to and be encouraged to engage in the discussions during the sessions.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, 1984a.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984b.
Browne, Kevin Adonis. High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2015.
Johnson, Nicholas E., and Jonathan Heron. Experimental Beckett. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Heron, Jonathan. “‘Restriction Gives Freedom:’ A Dialogue between Jonathan Heron and Nando Messias.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 34, no. 1 (2022): 79–91.
Kern, Elizabeth. “Beckett and the Spirit of the Commedia Dell’Arte.” Modern Drama 9, no.3 (1966): 260–7.
McTighe, Trish. Carnivals of Ruin. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Oxford English Dictionary, under “carnival.”
Salisbury, Laura. “Waiting with Beckett in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Beckett Studies 33, no.1 (2024): 14–40.
Testa, Alessandro. Rituality and Social (Dis)Order: The History of Popular Carnival in Europe. Routledge, 2021.