세계의 그림자 더블유(W)

'W' As a Shadow of the World: Becoming M/other in Rockaby

This paper analyzes Samuel Beckett's late stage drama Rockaby exploring the intertextual area between the literature of Beckett and the philosophy of Leibniz and Deleuze. Beckett's interest in Leibniz is a well established fact and in his letter to his friend he even describes his brand of solipsism as "baroque." In this paper I try first to prove the proximity of W and V, the lone figure on stage and her incorporeal voice, to Murphy, the famous Beckettian monadic character par excellence in his early novel Murphy. Then, I discuss that the post-subjective theme and rhetoric-aesthetics of deterritorialization working in Rockaby are the result or the effects of Leibniz-Deleuzean theory of monadology turned into nomadology. I find the parallel concepts of various stage elements such as the 'dark background' and the objet-like still figure(monad) in Leibniz's monadology. Thanks to the rare clarification made by Beckett as to the source of the force initiating the to and fro movement of the rocking chair, I could prove that it is the impersonal memory of the world, the common horizon of all monads, that V narrates from in the space of windowless monad. Seen in this light, it is natural that W fails to find 'another like herself' in the outer world, since, in terms of monadology, "I can constitute an objective Nature to which the other in me belongs. W becomes her (m)other in the mother rocker only to become the world. Last of all, I discuss the aesthetic quality of Beckett's drama applying Deleuze's concepts of deterritorialization and exhausting the possible. The painted objet quality of the figure, the indefinite space and the in-between time of the stage, together with the sonorous music composed through 'boring holes' on the surface of language as well as familiar conventions of the dramatic genre, all of these, stripped of subjectivity and departing from the powerful territorial music of the mother, elevate the drama to the state of the Song of the Earth, a Dionysian ritornello.