Analysis on Suspending Representation in Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama and Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Theatre as a Prehistory of Post-Dramatic Theatre View on Text

This research aims to read the writing of the inexpressible by looking at the works of Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. In this way, by referring to the idea of Gertrude Stein's Landscape theatre and Beckett's late works, research would study the materialization of the dramatic text. Specifically, Gertrude Stein's plays and Beckett's writings in his later works (Not I, Footfalls, That Time, Breathe, Fizzle 5) are examined. This complex and deconstructive written form, by re-identification of writing, moves towards a self-referential text to the archeology of the post-dramatic theatre. Post-dramatic text, which is self-reflective, looks for a change in perceiving the text by the other elements in the scene in coherence with the text, aims for the audience for new experiences in the common realm of senses, and reconsiders the other texts in the performing arts. To form an experience for the audience of his dramatic works, Beckett uses images that include language deconstructions and self-referencing. In this way, he deconstructs the dramatic text in the meaning of conventional representation. Gertrude Stein's idea of Landscape is based on reaching the essence of what is happening and in criticizing the conditions of the theater and the representational structures that it puts forward. Stein seeks to reveal the essence that unlocks the language of the play from happening elsewhere and rebirths it. Also, Beckett, in his later drama, removes his works from the realm of knowing and signs. He borrows words to express the inexpressible and, in this way, he re-arranges the representational form in text and performance. This research looks for the answers to the Beckettian formation of writing by interrelating absence and the object. Like Maurice Blanchot, Beckett, in his latest plays, starts from nothingness. Phenomenologically, this could be described by the concept of "lack". We may notice a disorder in the order of playwriting in Beckett's writing structure and content. Beckett uses this formation for shaping the meaning, from the representative image, like an internal move in the Derridean approach. In some of his other texts, the initial image can be referred to as an anthropological "difference". He represents the edge of war and catastrophes with so many victims. These efforts are the archeology of the de-focalization of text landscape in the post-dramatic theater. This essay aims to associate Beckett's later drama - from Krapp's Last Tape (written in 1956) to What Where (written in 1983)- with the intertextuality of Gertrude Stein’s writing. The “lack” as a Lacanian point of view is taken into consideration in this study along with the modern man landscape. Both of these sights relate to victimhood and are in the realm of representation. A path toward embodied texts could also be drawn from them, which may reflect the traumatic situation of the contemporary man on a post-sacrificial world (as Agamben mentions). Beckett and Stein express the inexpressible in their plays and theatre by starting with the void between the words. They make a self-reflective text, which words digress the meaning.