| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,700,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥1,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Light has yet to be fully shed upon the alchemical aspects of Beckett's early writings. A careful examination of his works, however, reveals within them a number of such allusions. Although he never referred directly to either alchemy or its influence on him, the possibility of his interest in it is undeniable given the attraction of alchemy for his foregoers and contemporaries such as Dante, Girdai 10 Bruno, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Carl Gustav Jung as well as some French surrealists, and their use of it as a creative metaphor in their writings. In this study I could expose the hidden alchemical images in Beckett's writings and see how they lead us to another dimension of Beckett's world.
Beckett's writings are full of allusions to alchemy. For example, the movement in Quad can be regarded as a representation of a central idea of alchemy insofar as the four players revolving in the square reflect the four elements circulating in the alchemical process. Such alchemical images are, like anamorphoses, invisible when seen straight from the front. Once we shift our viewpoint, the hidden dimension emerges. Although we never know if Beckett consciously embedded those alcnemical images in his writings, it would seem reasonable to assume that he had a keen interest in the ideas of alchemy.
From his beginning as a writer, he suffered from the split of the self in various ways : love and fear, the light and the dark, the consciousness and the unconscious, and body and mine. The alchemical reconciliation of the contraries must have been his quest, which was to turn out only to be an impossible dream.
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