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Synaesthesia, the cross-connection of the different senses like colour hearing, was an important element in Western art and literature around the beginning of the twentieth century. The delirium of the senses that Rimbaud's sonnet "Vowels" explored appealed to many innovative artists of the day. And it was inseparable from the tendency in symbolism and modernism to blur genre distinctions. Beckett was one of the many modernists in whose work synaesthetic sensibility is inscribed. This paper first outlines synaesthesia in symbolism and modernism, referring to new media and technology. It then considers how Beckett (especially in his early writings) can be situated in the trend.

J.M. Coetzee's work is characterised by profound meditations on the question of being, though this aspect tends to be obscured by his ethical and political concerns. The characters of his novels are often faced with the fundamental question of why they (have to) exist in the way they do. Typically, Elizabeth Costello wonders, ‘Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations?’ This sense of the contingency of being human – the feeling that one could have been non-human – underlies Elizabeth Costello's (and Coetzee's) deep commitment to the lives of animals. This essay aims to illuminate such an ontological theme in Coetzee's work by offering a revaluation of In the Heart of the Country, in which it first substantially emerges, and then by outlining its developments in the recent works such as Elizabeth Costello, the 2006 lecture ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, Here and Now and The Childho...

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri offers a new reading of the relation between K and his mother in J. M. Coetzee’s fourth novel Life & Times of Michael K (1983), by focusing on the desire to return to the womb. Closely analysing the novel in this light, Tajiri argues that a particular kind of ambiguity concerning K’s relationship with his mother is created by the coexistence of his conscious identification with mother earth and his unconscious desire to be back to the conditions of the foetus that is completely protected by the mother from the world. In the process, he also highlights the relevance of Samuel Beckett’s fixation on the womb and Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth.

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.

Beckett has been one of the most important authors for J. M. Coetzee and his influence is clearly felt in Coetzee's novels. In this paper, I aim to reconsider the relation between modernism and postcolonialism by examining how Beckett's (modernist) legacy is inherited by Coetzee's (postcolonial) novels.

This paper wants to situate Beckett's work within the cultural context of the beginning of the twentieth century when acoustic technology was strongly linked to the art of the avant-garde. I am going to analyze the 'voice of the telephone' in and I shall accentuate the pertinence of the idea of "the discourse network of 1900" (Friedrich Kittler) regarding Beckett's work. Finally I want to show how acoustic technology appears in and in In these processes the figure of Echo has been mechanized and materialized by Beckett in our view.

Acknowledgements Introduction Pain as a Creative Force Mark Nixon: "Happily melancholy": Pleasure and Pain in Early Beckett Graley Herren: Mourning Becomes Electric: Mediating Loss in Eh Joe Garin Dowd: Beckettian Pain, In the Flesh: Singularity, Community and "the Work" Mariko Hori Tanaka: The Body in Pain and Freedom of the Mind: Performing Beckett and Noh Pain in the Age of Uncertainty Peter Fifield: "Frankly now, is there pain?": Beckett, Medicine and the Composition of Pain David Houston Jones: "Strange Pain": Archive, Trauma and Testimony in Samuel Beckett and Christian Boltanski Yoshiki Tajiri: Everyday Life and the Pain of Existence in Happy Days Pain at the Limit of the Human Jonathan Boulter: "We have our being in justice": Samuel Beckett's How It Is Mary Bryden: "That or Groan": Paining and De-paining in Beckett Michiko Tsushima: The Appearance of the Human at the Limit of Representation: Beckett and Pain in the Experience of Language Contributors Index

With the idea of ‘language III’, which opens up language to the dimensions of seeing and hearing or painting and music, Deleuze points to an important aspect of Beckett’s work in his own manner based on unique philosophical intuitions. Adopting a more cultural-historical approach, this chapter discusses the same subject under the rubric of synaesthesia, or cross-connections of the senses. Throughout his oeuvre, Beckett showed a keen interest in coordinating visual and acoustic senses with pictorial and musical effects in mind. Yet, Beckett was far from alone in being drawn to synaesthesia, as it was conspicuous in cultural discourse and artistic practice from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. I will argue that the interest in synaesthesia was closely related to the permeation of society by media technologies invented in the late nineteenth century. I will also examine how technologies worked to divide the senses, while at the same time producing anarchic confusion of them.

This chapter discusses the prosthetic body in Beckett in relation to the question of the body’s boundaries. From the outset my definition of the prosthetic body stresses the significance of the interaction between the inside and the outside, which necessarily highlights boundaries. The previous chapter touched upon the boundaries of the body and the flows across them. In this chapter, however, I will examine more directly and closely how the boundaries of the body are problematised in Beckett’s work. In the process, the prosthetic body as the locus for the negotiation of boundaries will be foregrounded.

In the early twentieth century, when modernism flourished, the newly invented media technologies were permeating human life. The senses were more and more mediated by these technologies, and what I call the ‘prosthetic senses’ emerged. The senses were not simply technologically heightened but profoundly transformed in quality. Vision was no doubt heightened by photography, film and X-ray, but at the same time, the quality of human vision changed significantly. This chapter aims to situate Beckett’s art in the broad cultural context in which such a change in human vision occurred. Beckett was certainly one of the most important modernists who explored the new possibilities opened up by the camera eye. The camera eye is so representative of prosthesis for vision that it can almost be considered synonymous with prosthetic vision. I am going to examine how the camera eye as prosthesis is incorporated into Beckett’s work. In the process, a new type of interplay between the inside and the outside will come in sight as an aspect of the prosthetic body.

This chapter considers the voice in Beckett’s work in terms of the concept of prosthesis. In Beckett’s case, the inner eye discussed in the previous chapter is inseparable from the inner ear, as suggested in Texts for Nothing: ‘the eye staring behind the lids, the ears straining for a voice not from without’ (CSP 85). But whereas the correlation between the technological and the physical is significant in Beckett’s prosthetic vision, it does not seem to be so in his engagement with sound technologies. In other words, a notion such as the physiological ear or the ‘ear of flesh’ does not appear to be important. This is because the ear as an organ is not highlighted as often as the eye. Instead of the ear itself, the voice is the chief component in Beckett’s concern with the auditory sense.