Universität Paderborn
Proseminar: Post-1970 Beckett
WS 1999/2000

Beckett′s Catastrophe - 
a Play about Power and Impotency

by

Daniela Esser

12. Semester 

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3 - 4

2. Beckett′s Catastrophe - a play about power and impotency
2.1 A close reading of Catastrophe 4 - 8
2.2 Catastrophe as a "parable of Man and Satan" 8 - 11
2.3 The political dimension of Catastrophe 11 - 13
2.4 Beckett′s "Theatre of Power" and the Foucauldian "Gaze of Surveillance" 13 - 16

3. Conclusion 16 - 18

Bibliography 18

[...] die Hölle, das sind die andern.¹

1 Introduction

Early in 1982, Samuel Beckett was one of the first writers to respond to an invitation from the Association Internationale de Défense des Artistes (AIDA) for contributions of works to show support for Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who was serving a prison sentence for his dissident activities. In 1979 Havel had been sentenced by the Czechoslovak communist regime to four and a half years imprisonment for subversion. He was co-founder and spokesman of the Charter 77 initiative as well as a member of the Czech Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS). Shocked to hear that Havel had been forbidden to write, which must have "seemed the ultimate oppression"², Beckett wrote Catastrophe³ and dedicated the play to Havel. It was first performed as part of `Une nuit pour Václav Havel′ at the Avignon Theatre Festival in July 1982.⁴

Knowlson, referring to Beckett′s refusal to employ didactic impulses in his writing, mentions that Beckett sometimes regretted his incapability "to write anything that dealt overtly with politics"⁵, but the biographer also asserts that Beckett utterly rejected political implications in his writing.⁶ However, with the invitation of AIDA, he could show his solidarity with a "victimized, imprisoned fellow writer"⁷ who took a courageous stand against abuses of human rights.

Nonetheless, a political reading of Catastrophe is grounded on the victimization of the Protagonist by the dictatorial Director. The play has also been identified as a "parable of Man and Satan" (see 2.2). In his biography Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Knowlson argues that the play has also been related to Beckett′s "own horror of self-exposure, and linked to the essentially exhibitionistic nature of theatre."⁸ However, on the whole, Catastrophe exemplifies the workings of power upon the individual. The concept of power and disempowerment adds a perspective to the play that is inherent in all the interpretations of Catastrophe. Thus there is a crucial affinity between Foucault′s philosophy and Beckett′s work. Similarly to Foucault′s notion that the self is not given to us, and that therefore "we have to create ourselves as a work of art"⁹, Beckett′s act of writing is also an act of self-creation and implies "a site of resistance against whatever it is that imposes the failure and impotence to which he habitually refers."¹⁰

2 Beckett′s Catastrophe - a play about power and impotency

2.1 A close reading of Catastrophe

Catastrophe is a play about the staging of a play and therefore its compositional principle is, like in the novel-within-the-novel, the `Chinese-box-structure′.<sup>11</sup> It is a play about a dress rehearsal for the final scene of a drama. Therefore Libera, amongst other critics,<sup>12</sup> has indicated that `catastrophe′ is used in its more technical, theatrical sense as the word retains its original ancient Greek meaning (kata=down; strophien=turn), namely "the final event of a dramatic action, especially of a tragedy."¹³ The catastrophe completes the unraveling of the plot in a play and as such offers a solution to or conclusion of the conflictus.¹⁴ Thus, because `catastrophe′ is the title of Beckett′s short play, it alludes to the symbolic implications of a catastrophe as well as it is itself a catastrophe in the Greek sense as a synonym for dénouement and, thus, the downward shift of the protagonist′s fortunes.

[...]

1 Sartre, Jean-Paul: Geschlossene Gesellschaft. (Orig. Huis clos). Trans. Traugott König. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991, p. 59.

2 Knowlson, James: Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996, p. 678.

3 Beckett, Samuel: Catastrophe. In: Collected shorter plays, London: Faber and Faber, 1984, pp. . 295-301. Hereafter cited as Catastrophe.

4 See Knowlson, James: Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996, p. 677.

5 Ibid., p. 678.

6 Cf. ibid., p. 678.

7 Ibid., p. 678.

8 Ibid., p. 679.

9 Quoted in: Guest, Michael: "Beckett and Foucault: Some Affinities." In: Central Japan English Studies Vol. 15 (1996), p. 66.

10 Guest, Michael: "Beckett and Foucault: Some Affinities." In: Central Japan English Studies Vol. 15 (1996), p. 66.

11 See e.g. Imhof, Rüdiger: Contemporary Metafiction. A Poetological Study of Metafiction in English since 1939. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1986. Pp. 225f.

12 See e.g. Knowlson, James: Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996, p. 826, footnote no. 106.

13 Libera, Antoni: "Beckett′s Catastrophe." In: Modern Drama, September 1985, p. 341.

14 Cf. Britannica online. Vers. 1999-2001. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 14^th May 2001 http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=137133&tocid=0