SAMUEL BECKETT

FAILURE AND PERSISTENCE

Beckett should not be reduced to an artist “about World War II.” His place is a postwar artistic lineage: crisis of meaning → failure of language → failure of action → repetition → exhaustion → reduced body → persistence.

Nothing adequate can be said, yet speech continues. Action fails, yet the body remains.

Beckett → failure → repetition → task → duration → minimal action → presence → contemporary performance.

The relation to performance is conceptual and structural. Beckett makes persistence itself an artistic problem.