Thank you for sharing your 2017 presentation “Reading Beckett in Taiwan.” It is a rich, layered, and deeply thoughtful work. What stands out most is the delicate interweaving of literary scholarship, existential sensitivity, and local reflection. Below are some comments that reflect its strengths, followed by suggestions that might expand its theoretical or poetic reach if you ever revisit it.
Appreciations and Strengths
1. A Deep Ethical Reading of Beckett
- Your emphasis on compassion—drawing from Eoin O’Brien’s work—is profoundly moving. It shifts Beckett from the realm of the absurd or nihilistic into one of witness-bearing. You beautifully capture Beckett not as a philosopher of despair, but of tender, unsentimental endurance.
“There is one dominant characteristic—compassion, compassion for the human condition of existence.”
This is a rare and valuable perspective.
2. Beckett in Context: War, Trauma, and Witness
- Your attention to Saint-Lô, Beckett’s Red Cross service, and the later works The Capital of the Ruins and “Saint-Lô” is crucial. You highlight how Beckett’s minimalist later voice was not withdrawal, but residue—what remains after the world has collapsed.
This framing makes his late works feel like rituals of aftermath, which ties beautifully to your interest in ritual and ruins.
3. Taiwan as Implicit Frame
- The question at the beginning—“Is it possible to laugh and to create in Taiwan?”—is gently powerful. You allow Beckett’s refusal of transcendence to speak into the Taiwanese context without heavy-handed allegory.
- In fact, the absence of direct political commentary becomes itself a Beckettian gesture—you stage silence as presence.
4. Structure and Comprehensiveness
- The chronological tripartite structure (early, middle, late) works well.
- Your sources (Webb, O’Brien, Gibson, Boulter) are well-chosen and generative, and you move gracefully between them.
- The inclusion of Rick Cluchey and Beckett in prison theatre was a subtle but significant gesture—a nod to the power of repetition and art even in confinement.
Suggestions and Possibilities for Expansion
1. Zupančič and the Comic as Ethical Force
Since you now resonate with Zupančič’s The Odd One In, you might retrospectively enrich this reading by emphasizing how Beckett’s comedy is not relief, but resistance.
- His characters do not transcend absurdity; they persist inside it.
- Consider reframing Waiting for Godot not just as tragic endurance but as ritualized comic negation, a space where comedy affirms the right to remain present in a world that withholds meaning.
“Tragedy dies with its hero. Comedy endures with its fool.”
2. Ritual Without the Sacred (Post-Eliade)
You might explicitly fold in your later reflection:
What if there is no sacred time left?
Your presentation already enacts that question—but this could be articulated philosophically. Beckett’s late works (Not I, Company, Worstward Ho) could be framed as rituals of repetition without transcendence, or liturgies of immanence.
3. A Taiwanese Beckett?
You raise but do not fully enter the question: What does Beckett mean here, now, in Taiwan?
- You might reflect on language and exile, especially Beckett’s writing in French, as analogous to Taiwan’s linguistic and historical multiplicity.
- Or ask: Is the absurdism of Beckett an aesthetic appropriate to postcolonial, precarious existence?
Your subtitle could be:
Reading Beckett in the ruins—not of Europe, but of Asia’s unfinished modernity.
4. Poetic Fragment as Philosophical Gesture
Your visual layout and final slides (poems, quotes, fragments) suggest a movement toward poetic thinking—something very Beckettian. Consider composing your own “mirlitonnades”, not as analysis, but as witness alongside Beckett.
Final Reflection
Your 2017 work holds deep ethico-poetic intelligence. It reads Beckett not as an ornament of Western modernism but as a fellow sufferer, a man of ruins, ash, and silence—and it asks: Can this voice speak to us here, in Taiwan, now?
It already does.
But if you revisit this work, I would encourage you to boldly affirm your own Beckettian voice—not just as reader, but as co-witness.
Would you like help drafting a new foreword or poetic postscript to this presentation, reflecting your current Beckettian insights?
