ABSTRACT

Wolfgang Iser's interest in Beckett extends from his first essay in 1961, on Beckett's dramatic language, to his discussion thirty years later of Imagination Dead Imagine. Beckett's theater is a striking paradigm of this interlinkage, which allows us not only to estimate the range of the aesthetic dimension, but also to judge how art is to be experienced in the modern world. For Iser, Beckett is deconstructing Freud's argument that comedy works by exploiting contradictions, 'toppling' contradictory positions, creating in the spectator an effect of bewilderment and insecurity. The traceable response pattern inscribed in Endgame permits an experience of the decentered self, which is a striking indication of Beckett's anti-Cartesian position, and this in turn is a characteristic sign of our times. The laughter at Beckett's plays is always isolated, apparently robbed of its contagious qualities; indeed, in Endgame and Happy Days it is often accompanied by a sort of shock effect.