Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Charting the Chaos: The Content of Form in Samuel Beckett's Quad

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2017

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to look into the relation between the two terms that serve as the ‎title for the colloquium - CHAOS and FORM. In an interview with Tom Driver, which was ‎quoted on the invitation, Beckett clearly distinguishes between the two: "The form and the ‎chaos remain separate...

That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it ‎exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that ‎accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." Despite Beckett's wish to keep the ‎form separate from the content - chaos or mess - it shapes, I will show that in reality such a ‎distinction cannot be easily made, and that at least some forms generate a specific kind of ‎mess, rather than contain it.‎