베케트의 『행복한 나날들』

Serial Expression of 'Strangeness' in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days

This paper analyzes Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in an attempt to find the serial features in its aesthetic composition which are able to be associated with the musical serialism practiced by various European composers from the 1920s onward. Both of them share in common the essentially mathematical and 'machinic' structural principles according to which a recurring series of ordered elements (a set, a row) are used with equal chance, so the lack of a musical or dramatic subject and a privileged moment gives a piece a radically different sort of unity from that of their artistic precedents. Since the notes or expressive dramatic elements belonging to a set are related only to one another, both of musical serialism and Beckett's theatrical serial technique may also be considered in terms of a philosophy of life which, in the words of Stockhausen, is "a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world," that might be associated with the Deleuzean philosophy of immanence. Beckett's serialism is able to be read as an artistic choice for the transformation of the 'strangeness' that he sensed in the post war European world around him into an artistic form. It was a strange world in which the capability of "affect and being affected" had been drastically diminished by the prevalent commercialism and the habitual false conscious. In Happy Days that sense of strangeness is conveyed through a constant rhythm of interruption between the serial elements of various sets he predetermined. The rhythm of interruption is nothing less than the relations of movement and rest that expresses "the fluid structures that are transformed and deformed at variable speeds" as Deleuze puts it. It is a geometrical and universal structure or rhythm of life formed and deformed by all possible bodies of the world enveloping all the possible relations of movement and rest.