Old Age and Samuel Beckett’s Late Works

Authors

  • Chris Gilleard University College London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v3i.130154

Abstract

Old age featured in Samuel Beckett’s plays and novels throughout his literary career. This paper explores the question of how—or indeed if—Beckett’s own experience of aging and old age affected the representation of age in his late works. Focusing upon his last two trilogies, the plays Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby and the novellas Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, I argue that Beckett’s late-life literary preoccupations were little affected by the corporeality of his own aging. Even in the last year of his life, he still sought to put down through dramatic images and words the ontological issues that had always concerned him. Hopes that his own old age might lead him closer to the edge—closer to what has been termed “the event horizon of the fourth age,” where subjectivity implodes—were not fulfilled, although arguably he did feel, at times, that he was getting closer to it, stylistically perhaps, if not in substance. To what extent Beckett’s later works serve as examples of a “late style” and to what extent they represent the continuing elaboration of a cultural imaginary of “old age” that he first deployed in his original trilogy, Molloy,Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, are difficult to ascertain. What is clear is that Beckett’s literary old age remained a symbolic imaginary, realized differ- ently than in his earlier work but scarcely more connected with his own later life.

Author Biography

Chris Gilleard, University College London

is a visiting research fellow in the Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London. With his colleague Paul Higgs he has written extensively on the social economic and cultural recon- figurations of later life, including such books as Cultures of Ageing (2000); Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment (2013); and Rethinking Old Age (2015). In addition, he maintains a longstanding interest in the history of aging and old age and in the work of Samuel Beckett. Readers may write to Chris Gilleard at CGilleard@aol.com.

References

Adelman, Gary. “Old Age and Beckett: A Partial Autobiography.” New England Review 26.3 (2005): 138-48.

Adorno, Theodor W. “Late Style in Beethoven.” Trans. Susan Gillespie. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.

Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett. A Biography. London: Vintage, 1986

Beckett, Samuel. “Neither.” The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1995.

---. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. New York: Grove, 1995.

---. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 2006.

---. Company/ Ill Seen, Ill Said/ Worstward Ho/ Stirrings Still. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Brater, Enoch. Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Calder, John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder, 2001.

Cohn, Ruby. Just Play. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Cohen-Shalev, Amir. “Old Age Style: Developmental Changes in Creative Production from a Life-Span Perspective.” Journal of Aging Studies 3.1 (1989): 21-37.

Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. London: Flamingo, HarperCollins, 1997. Fletcher, John. About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “Aging without Agency: Theorizing the Fourth Age.” Aging & Mental Health, 14.2 (2010): 121-28.

Hale, Jane. “Perspective in Rockaby.” “Make Sense Who May”: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works. Ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St. J. Butler. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988. 66-76.

Held, Julius S. “Commentary on Old-Age Style.” Art Journal 46.2 (Summer 1987): 127-33. Hisgen, Ruud, and Adriaan van der Weel. “Worsening in Worstward Ho: A Brief Look at the Genesis of the Text.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 6 (1997) 243-51. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. “Late Style(s): The Ageism of the Singular.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 4 (2012): 1-11. Web. http://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/OCCASION_v04_Hutcheons_ 053112_0.pdf. May 31st 2012.

Jenkins, Alan. “Statement of Silence: Rev. of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume Two: 1941–1956” Times Literary Supplement, 4 November, 2011: 3-5.

Juliet, Charles. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2009.

Kennedy, Andrew. “Mutations of the Soliloquy: Not I to Rockaby.” “Make Sense Who May”: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works”. Ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St.

J. Butler. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988. 30-35.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.

Laslett, Peter. A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.

Maude, Ulrika. Beckett, Technology and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Palileo, Ruth Pe. ““What Age am I Now? and I?”: The Science of the Aged Voice in Beckett’s Plays.” In Staging Age. The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film. Eds. Valerie Barnes Lipscomb and Leni Marshall. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010, 129-49. Pattie, David. “Space, Time, and the Self in Beckett’s Late Theatre.” Modern Drama 43.3: 2003: 393-403

Said, Edward. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Simone, R. Thomas. “Beckett’s Other Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby.” “Make Sense Who May”: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works. Ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St. J. Butler. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smyth, 1988. 56-65.

Strauss, Claudia. “The Imaginary.” Anthropological Theory 6.3 (2006): 322-44.

White, Kathryn. Beckett and Decay. London: Continuum, 2009.

Woodward, Kathleen. Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Downloads

Published

2018-01-01

How to Cite

Gilleard, C. “Old Age and Samuel Beckett’s Late Works”. Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 3, Jan. 2018, pp. 33-56, doi:10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v3i.130154.