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1In Beckett’s Thing: Theatre and Painting (2016), David Lloyd sheds new light on Samuel Beckett’s aesthetic ties to painting, which the writer himself describes in his essays about art, reconsidering the relationship between the subject behind representation and the object of representation. Starting from the premise that the object won’t be laid bare as long as the subject’s possessive gaze and instrumental way to represent it prevails, Lloyd does away with the consensual and somewhat simplistic view according to which Beckett rejects any form of mannerism for the sake of minimalism, so as to thoroughly explore and articulate the complex aesthetic connections that form the matrix of the latter’s work. As a result, Beckett’s Thing largely relies on the epistemological perspective aesthetics offers, which is achieved through philosophy, while setting a dialectic so as to show how aesthetics, politics and ethics overlap through the dismissal and dismantling of the regime of representation.

2If Lloyd gives pride of place to visual arts, he avoids the pitfalls into which criticism has fallen so far: Beckett’s Thing does not merely take into consideration Beckett’s observations about modern painting from which analogies and comparisons are usually drawn in relation to his own work but tries to determine the literary aesthetic procedures the writer puts at the heart of his craft. In this way Lloyd thinks anew Beckett’s reflection on the human condition, as free from regulative forms of representation, whether they are formal, conceptual or even historical. The book is divided into three chapters. Each of them reassesses Beckett’s friendship with a famous painter—Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde and Avigdor Arikha—, yet without resorting to any sort of biographical bias or yielding to formalism.

3The first chapter draws the readers back to Ireland by focusing on Beckett’s appreciation of Jack B. Yeats’s artwork. Lloyd puts new material under scrutiny by favouring Thomas MacGreevy’s essays about Yeats over those of Beckett. In this way Lloyd establishes a link between an aesthetic of representation and a mode of political domination. Indeed, Yeats’s early paintings are a perfect example since they can be described, in MacGreevy’s words, as ‘the “expression of the spirit of [the] nation”’ (31). The artist’s work embodies the future of the nation as a republic, victorious against British imperialist forces, but the building-up of the nation would come together with a levelling down of its social disparities, here represented by tramps or derelicts. If Lloyd partly acknowledges this view by showing how deeply politics is involved in the regulation of aesthetic forms without which the people’s overall adhesion would be made difficult, he opposes the idea of Yeats being an Irish national painter. According to Lloyd, Yeats stands against this very role by resisting the congealing of his aesthetics into a canonical tradition, which would explain his interest in misfits similar to that of Beckett. Lloyd uses key notions such as that of Philip Pettit’s ‘deontological republicanism’ (68) to prove his point and exemplify Yeats’s and Beckett’s common principle of ‘non-domination’ (38) in the very act of representation where they give space to derelicts. This argument enables Lloyd to open up his next chapter onto an aesthetic principle determined by the laws of perspective that have defined the artists’ sovereign vision over the object of representation in Western art since the Renaissance.

4The second chapter mainly relies on Beckett’s essays about Bram van Velde in which the writer coins the phrase ‘le deuil de l’objet’ (126). Lloyd remarks how ambiguous the phrase is insofar as it implies the mourning of the object as well as the mourning of the subject for the object. In either case, Beckett’s well-known phrase exemplifies the breakdown of the subject/ object relationship in art history, a relationship that hinges on the visual mastery of space through the performance of the subject’s sovereign gaze in order to capture the object thanks to the practice of perspective and within the limits of the visible. According to Lloyd, this crisis similarly fuels Beckett’s search for the ‘pure object’ (120), an object that resists appropriation by the subject in the act of representation. Lloyd draws on this crisis to explain Beckett’s terminology and the distinction he inadvertently makes between the word ‘object’ and the word ‘thing’ in his essay about van Velde. In this way, Lloyd boldly and convincingly brings Beckett and Heidegger’s critique of representation together by foregrounding the notion of “thing-in-itself” (130) or ‘thingliness’ (122), i.e. specific to the thing, and independently from the existence of the subject to whom it is revealed. As a result and by setting itself free from any possessive gesture, the thing can ‘stand forth’ (123) for itself unlike the object. Though Lloyd supports his reasoning by identifying recurrent plastic forms—such as the mask and the figure in van Velde’s painting, which prompts his reflection about the displacement of the gaze in the history of painting—, it is in the last chapter of his work that his argument becomes fully convincing when he establishes aesthetic convergences between Beckett’s painted-like stage and Arikha’s artwork.

5By focusing on Beckett and Arikha’s shared aesthetics at the end of his demonstration, Lloyd unveils a side aspect which guided his train of thoughts. Indeed, if Beckett was first influenced by Yeats’s and van Velde’s aesthetics, which served as an aesthetic prism to the writer’s literary project in his early career, things appear to have changed with Beckett’s close friendship with Arikha: the writer’s work had now reached its full maturity and represented a powerful source of inspiration for many artists like Arikha. According to Lloyd, the painter’s artwork seems to provide some sort of catalyst to the visual experience of Beckett, previously based on Yeats’s portrayal of the human condition and van Velde’s troubled gaze. In fact, by means of the reorganisation of space Arikha causes the subject’s sovereign gaze to lose its bearings, creating some sort of aesthetic suspension—a fleeting moment during which ‘the unself-conscious looking’ (157) can be caught unawares. Lloyd then links Arikha’s look to the ethical Lacanian gaze as he goes on with his reflection about Heidegger’s thing. Lloyd is also very much interested in Arikha’s technique of painting, which the artist calls ‘depiction’ (164), as a token of his break from abstraction. Neither figurative nor abstract, Arikha’s work eventually leads Lloyd to question Beckett’s engagement with the visible and what lies beyond it, a ‘surplus’ (212) that cannot be represented but where the existence of man may paradoxically be reconceptualised, ‘into that uncanny space where the human takes its place again as a thing among other things’ (212).

6Though Lloyd’s analysis of Beckett’s plays comes a bit late in the book (mainly in the third chapter and the conclusion), the reader appreciates the substantial and valuable material the scholar revisits: Beckett’s essays about art, his letters to his friend, the art historian Georges Duthuit, or his thoughtful visual analyses of the works of the two painters, J.B. Yeats and van Velde. Lloyd’s book also thrives on an impressive theoretical and philosophical background where Kant, Heidegger, Lacan and Levinas feature, while encouraging the reader to think outside this epistemological framework by comparing in its very concluding words Beckett’s anti-spectacular theatre to Guy Debord’s criticism of modern society. Lyotard’s concept of the figural along with Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime in opposition to the mimetic one, may also underlie Beckett’s Thing.