Selfhood and transcendence: the crises of representation in Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett

Abstract

Abstract Bergman’s oeuvre is replete with this archetypal image of God and the struggle of his characters for the absolute mode of being, permanence and identification. Man’s confrontation with the dead mythological in Bergman engenders an aporetic network of language, history and being. The thesis argues how Bergman’s filmmaking generates a form of claustrophobia and a reorientation of the codes of meaning-making processes. Combined with this confinement and absence of exteriors (landscapes and cities), the films also unravel a palpable disintegration of the paternal authorities (religious and familial). Bergman’s thematic movement, post the trilogy, shifts from philosophising non-action to a more direct contact with the individual grounded in real crisis. This thesis further explores the intriguing lines of convergence between Bergman and Beckett on the subject of disappearance and subjective silence. Reading the two authors alongside each other leads to indicate a joint blind spot where the subject’s concrete visibility and metaphysical diatribes recur incessantly inside circular dimensions. Bergman’s characters rarely experience the explicit aftermath of physical decay (like their Beckettian counterparts); however, what is left of them in the end is always a blank stare (often the remnant of lost transcendence) at their spectral selves. Representation of this necrosis of the self in Beckett and Bergman is sought through dead language and false fictions, away from any dependency on autonomous transcendence. The thesis finally attempts to identify the perplexing antinomies in the representation of gender in Bergman. The schizoid/sexual voice of Bergman’s women repeatedly locates itself beyond the masculine issues of Christian sin and redemption and the restricted zones cinematic apparatus. Women constitute a rebellion against the dyadic patterns of being/transcendence, quest/failure, fatherhood/emotional sterility. This conscious failure to resolve the impasse of representation within the cinematic and the textual is conspicuous and transparent in Persona and The Unnamable.