Abstract
This chapter argues that the radio medium had an important influence on the development of Beckett’s ‘postcognitivist modernism’. While his first radio play, All That Fall, was still quite conventional in the way it resorts to dramatic techniques and depicts fictional minds as an interaction between inside and outside, Embers set off on a radical course leading to the later ‘bare’ soundscapes. Critics have typically defined the evolution of Beckett’s radio drama as an extreme form of the ‘inward turn’, completely obliterating the ‘outside’ world, following the trajectory of the so-called ‘trilogy’. Drawing on theories of extended cognition, we seek to nuance this position by proposing that Beckett does not exclude external reality but instead collapses the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’, so that ‘what are called outside and inside are one and the same’, as Beckett wrote about the painter Bram van Velde to Georges Duthuit in 1949.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 313609, and from the University of Antwerp TOPBOF grant for the project entitled ‘Literature and the Extended Mind: A Reassessment of Modernism’ (FFB140022).
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Notes
- 1.
Die Verinnerung des Erzählens, first published in German in 1957 and 1959, and in English in 1973.
- 2.
In an attempt to move away from Cartesian dichotomies, Herman devises his own continuum, one ‘between, at one pole, a tight coupling between an intelligent agent and that agent’s surrounding environment, and, at the other pole, a looser coupling between agent and environment’ (249).
- 3.
See letter from Samuel Beckett to Alan Simpson, dated 15 January 1958 (TCD 10731-56).
- 4.
Cf. James’s famous essay, ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’ (1904).
- 5.
- 6.
See McWhinnie (1959: 133–151).
- 7.
These production notes were made on a typescript now held at the University of Reading (UoR MS 1396-4-6), but they have never been incorporated in any printed edition of the text. Recordings of Beckett’s radio plays are available on CD from the BBC and the British Library.
- 8.
Apart from Esslin, Rosemary Pountney (1988: 114) also noted the radio play’s connection to the problem of authorship. Dirk Van Hulle (2011: 222–223; 2015: 231–232) offers a more detailed cognitive reading: he sees the four characters in Rough for Radio II as evocations of four cognitive functions in the process of creation but uses them in a slightly different context, namely to elucidate how the process of composition (or genesis) can be thematized in a narrative.
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Beloborodova, O., Verhulst, P. (2018). Broadcasting the Mind: Extended Cognition in Beckett’s Radio Plays. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_16
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