The semiotics of Samuel Beckett's drama

Abstract

The semiotics of Samuel Beckett's drama presents a semiotic approach to Beckett's plays. Through this examination, the inexorable search to overcome the word leads to an admission of its ultimate triumph, despite Beckett's attempt to progressively move from dramatic genre towards theatrical realm. This statement is new in the way the self same progression towards the image is revealed to be ultimately dependent on the word. The first chapter examines a basic difference between drama and theatre which deserves clarification from the outset. Since Beckett progressively moves from drama to theatre, the latter increasingly contingent on drama, the relation between the two, as well as between dramatic and theatrical sign and dramatic and performance text, usurps most of the attention at this initial phase. A discussion of the various ways of examining the dramatic sign, and the plethora of approaches in dealing with the relationship between the two follows. At the end of chapter 1 a parallel debate concerning the dynamics entailed in reception investigates the various decoding practices at play in both the case of the reader and the spectator. In chapter two, Beckett the dramatist is presented as a world- renowned, fully fledged dramatist, forerunner of the so-called 'Theatre of the Absurd', straddling Modernism and Postmodernism. The novelty of his literature of the 'unword', producing a language which brings to the surface the inability to express through the form-content dyad and Beckett's dominant aesthetics of silence are all explored through another characteristic of the playwright- the reduction dynamic, the latter leading to Beckett's Theatre of Paintings where the semiotics of performance ostensibly takes over from the semiotics of the word. The word as semiotic, nonetheless, remains triumphant.