The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art

The Painted Word examines Samuel Beckett’s relationship with the visual arts, in an effort to shed new light on the author’s work and on his thinking on aesthetics. Lois Oppenheim argues that Beckett was a profoundly visual artist whose work reflects a preoccupation with the visual as a paradigm of creativity. She presents the three principal forms taken by Samuel Beckett’s dialogue with art, and more precisely, painting: his critical writing on art, the function of art in his narrative and theatrical writing, and his indirect collaborations with painters.

The volume’s starting point is the current debate over Beckett’s place with regard to modernism and postmodernism. Contextualizing his practice of art with his thinking on art, Oppenheim resituates the debate in conjunction with philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s writings on painting and reveals the unifying force of all Beckett’s work that resides in a play of visbility. Beckett’s thinking on art had everything to do with his aims as a creative writer. Oppenheim shows that the classic Beckettian themes-language (its expressivity or lack thereof), identity (its, at best, tenuous link to a fragmented self), and the subject-object dichotomy-are all modeled on the sensory perspective of the eye. And that it is the verbal figuration of reality as vision that constitutes, whatever the genre, the Beckettian drama.

The volume includes several reproductions of artists’ renderings of Beckett’s texts and works by Giacometti and Bram Van Velde, two of which were owned by Beckett. Broadly interdisciplinary, The Painted Word will appeal to those interested in aesthetics and the philosophy of art as well in Beckett’s work.