Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 English dept., Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Shahid Beheshti University
2 MA English Literature, Shahid Beheshti University
Abstract
This essay examines the sound as an originary object in Samuel Beckett’s play Nacht und Träume the presence or absence of which entails an aesthetic experience. The essay argues that the play’s minimalistic soundscape emerges as a dramatic plane that utilizes sound as an object whose engagement with the scene is broken, self-contained and never fully accessible. By drawing on Object Oriented philosophy, especially that of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant, the essay explores the binary of sound and silence as extreme poles of such dramatic sonicity whereby through absence, presence, and repetition meaning, be it musical or non-verbal, is formed and then projected through character B as the phantom of the memory. Through an intermittent engagement with sound, music and silence, Beckett refutes the need for a linguistic dominance, and instead presents a non-verbal, sonic system to convey meaning, memories, and even characters. Such a system is irreducibly other when cast across language as the dominant system of signification. The new Beckettian communication system, however, exists within an alien phenomenological void that is independent of linguistic phonicity, where ideation, remembrance and even communication can take place through non-verbal structures of sound and music. The essay concludes by highlighting the strangeness of such sonic reality reserved for non-human.
Keywords
Main Subjects
)