Transmedia Beckett: Come and Go and the Social Media Archive

Becketts late works for film, theatre, and television approach the condition of installation pieces, minimalistic and iterative texts that resemble instruction manuals more than theatre. At the same time, these works are preoccupied with archival themes: personal and public memory, history, documents and their technical media. While his works interrogate the condition of archives, Becketts own archive is characterized by the increasing visibility in Becketts later texts of elaborate instructions, maps, and charts, as in the diagrams that fill the text of Quad. Yet, Becketts authorial control over his works became known for its insistence on media specificity, the reluctance to translate a work from one medium to another. Becketts extraliterary texts (as Gontarski and Chris Ackerly have described them) strive to become their own archive, not as a definitive version recorded in film or technical media, but as sets of instructions to be repeated, and thus capable of producing their own series of iterations. These iterations, in fact, characterize contemporary media archives, as they become organized according to the modular logic of a database over and against the temporal logic of the traditional archive. This essay conceptualizes the archive of Becketts works in a transmedia context in which concepts of work and author no longer function to authorize discrete versions of Becketts extraliterary texts.