Friday, September 29, 2006
(7:16 PM) | Amish Lovelock:
Tokyo Beckett Fest: Borderless Beckett?
A three-day trilingual mega-fest of Beckettia is under way here in Tokyo. Delegates have come from Ireland, Britain, France and the US. Mary Bryden's talk on Beckett and clowning has been the most interesting so far, showing us vintage footage of Grock and Max Wall. Coming up are Evelyn Grossman, Steven Conner, Terence Brown and more. Interesting panels on Deleuze's Beckett today and with a political theme tommorow. The star speaker is none other than J.M. Coetzee who is giving an untitled rambling this evening.
I must admit I didn't really understand why Coetzee demanded such pride of place in the schedule for the event so I made an effort to go along to a panel in which one of the presenters made a (albeit in 20 minutes not really worked out) comparison between Watt and The Life and Times of Michael K. In fact there was very little actual mention of the works themselves. The presentation was really a sort of postcolonial exercise in claiming Coetzee's "appropriation of modernist universalism" from the periphery, and saying that this resembles, in some way (?), some stuff in Beckett.
The speaker was relying on Hugh Kenner's splif on modernism and talking a lot about the "defamiliarization of language." Which got me thinking, "if this is what modernism is then why talk about the appropriation of such a modernist universal by writers 'in the periphery' when it is already there?" In other words, I think you could make the argument for two kinds of modernist defamiliarization in this case. One has occured over time, the other is immediate and continual. Bourgeois Europe had to undergo the trauma of having their words no longer meaning what they used to, fine. But for a hell of a lot of other people, particularly 'in the periphery,' their own words had never meant what they ought to. This second attitude seems the more Beckettian to me; when words cannot help but not to mean. They are just things, material sound, belonging to another.
Methinks this would have been a better place to start a postcolonial reading of Beckett (oh my...) than some strange sort of account of peripheral appropriation.
