Farce and the Mechanical Body in Beckett’s plays Anonymous College

Beckett is fundamentally anti-logocentric. Throughout his work, he rejects the view that there is an essential order that can be discovered through reason. This is nowhere more clear than in Three Dialogues (1949), in which he deplores centuries of artists who, whilst ‘thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience’, exhibit a foolish and mechanical ‘tropism towards the light’ (towards some imagined, rational reality). For Beckett, the relationship between the artist and his object is doubly unstable, because both parties are in a continual state of flux: the occasion is ‘an unstable term of relation’ and the artist is ‘hardly less so, thanks to his warren of modes and attitudes’. However, Beckett struggled with the ‘dilemma of expression’. How was he meant to expose the Pythagorean cover-up to his audience through the expression which he felt was so inadequate? The importance of an audience’s work is often overlooked by critics, but it is just this activity that allows Beckett to give his view, whilst avoiding expression as far as possible. He repeatedly defamiliarizes his audience through complex farcical situations and (which is entirely linked) through his conception of the mechanical body. In attending...