Narrative and Performance

The idea of performance preoccupied Samuel Beckett well before he began to explore its potential directly in the theatre. Its roots are in the doubling if not multiplication of being or the self that is already implicit in the idea of a representation and in the quasi- Cartesian idea of the ‘pseudocouple’ that Beckett would hone into his fiction and drama alike. A character named ‘Mr Beckett’, for instance, appears as the obscure narrator in ‘TWO’ of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (the novel written between 1931–2), ‘thanks Mr Beckett’ (69), returns as a belaurelled poet at the conclusion of the short chapter called ‘Und’, ‘Oh but the bay, Mr Beckett, didn't you know, about your brow’ (141) (in 1931 laurels for the young author were, of course, very much a fiction), and reappears in ‘THREE’, ‘Behold, Mr Beckett (186)’. He is briefly reprised for a thank you in the residua of the novel in the short story ‘Draff’: ‘(Thank you Mr Beckett)’ (Beckett 1970: 175). At such points of unveiling the author no longer stands entirely outside his work and so loses his or her privilege, he or she folded instead into and so become part of the narrative, an inside and outside simultaneously, author as narrator a part of and apart from the narrative. Such fictionalising and multiplication of a self, narrated and narrator overlapping if not one, followed hard upon Beckett's one and only direct stage appearance. He was persuaded to appear as Don Diègue in three performances of Trinity College's ‘Cornelian nightmare’, Le Kid, at Dublin's Peacock Theatre between 19 and 21 February 1931 (Knowlson 1996: 126). Later in the 1930s Beckett would write a twenty-three-line poem in French, ‘Arènes de Lutèce’, in which he explored more fully the fractured, doubled or multiple self, what Lawrence Harvey referred to as the experience of dédoublement (Harvey 1970: 202–7).