London Beckett Seminar: Patrick Bixby, 23 February 2024

The next session of the London Beckett Seminar sees Society president, Prof Patrick Bixby (Arizona State University), deliver a paper titled Beckett, Lefebvre and the Everyday. This online session will take place at 18:00 GMT on Friday 23 February and is provided free of charge but registration is essential through this link.

The abstract which accompanies the announcement promises a stimulating session of scholarship:
“In this play”, Beckett once said of Happy Days (1961), “you have a combination of the strange
and the practical, the mysterious and the factual”, identifying a theatrical admixture that
highlights the elusive quality of the everyday. Staged in an unusual and unsettling environment,
the play is nonetheless concerned with daily rituals, idle chatter and habits of consumption,
which make the quotidian vivid in a way that direct perception seldom, if ever, does. It is in this
regard that Beckett can be considered as a writer of the quotidian. Henri Lefebvre, undoubtedly
the most influential theorist of everyday life in the last century, identifies the quotidian as a
largely marginalised and misconstrued facet of modernity, due both to its elusiveness and its
pervasiveness. In his massive three-volume Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947, 1961, 1981), he
attempts to come to terms with this pervasiveness not by reducing it to a particular set of privateor public practices, but by registering the repetitive daily rhythms that generally escape ourattention and by charting the spaces in which our fragmented daily activities take place. Although it has escaped critical attention, Lefebvre’s persistent Marxist materialism and Beckett’s
provisional Schopenhauerian idealism travel different paths through a remarkably similar terrain,
as they reflect on the significance of habitual behaviour and its role in the constitution of both
subject and object. The common ground of their thought is Proust’s oeuvre, which helped each
writer to shape his understanding of time, one based on repetition and recollection, the
reiteration of quotidian tasks as well as the routinisation of compensatory pleasures that make up everyday experience. In dialogue with Lefebvre’s work (and derived from my book-in-progress, Quotidian Beckett), this presentation will trace Beckett’s concern with the quotidian from his study of Proust, through his early fiction and into his mature drama, concluding with an extended reflection on the everyday “terrorisms” on display in Happy Days.