Beckett And Expressionism

IT IS AMONG NORTHERN PEOPLES that imaginative creation has most often taken the Expressionist path, first in the plastic arts, and then in literature. A certain amount of light seems to impose the conviction that the exterior world exists and that bodies are bodies. In contrast, the Irish philosopher, Berkeley, elegantly formulated the theory of the absence of the perceived world .... For the Northerners, the physical corporeal objects in the work of art are not reflections of the same kind of reality; nor are they manifestations of a spiritual reality, a corresponding Idea; instead, they emanate by projection from the artist's feelings. In literature, from Romanticism on, one can trace the transition of many kinds of realism (including Impressionism) toward what one might call meaningful hallucination, by the end of this systematic deformation. Faust or Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony herald an Expressionism which will explode differently in and outside of Germany— Strindberg and ]arry, for example. First and foremost, there must be affective surexpression, and true Expressionism emerges when that surexpression moves from the feeling subject to the objects which are evoked by strong and disturbed feelings. Thus, Jarry's burlesque Expressionism of King Ubu, with its phantasms of conflict and destruction, is parallelled by the non-burlesque Expressionism of Nights and Days, with its essential characteristic of this mode: like wishes in fairy tales, these fears, desires, and hatreds take form and become "reality," but a different kind of reality, in which every form is dedicated to deforming itself in the sense of the emotion it expresses.