“[D]elete the face it’s preferable”: Prosopagnosia as an Artistic Practice in Samuel Beckett’s Work

Abstract: Illegibility of face is the leitmotif of Samuel Beckett’s work from page to stage. Paring down the face to its barest minimum, divesting it of identity and expression, dislocating it from its usual carriage, and, in some instances, dismantling it altogether, Beckett’s work turns the face unrecognizable, evoking a condition experienced by people suffering from prosopagnosia, commonly known as face-blindness, which is a neurological disorder with varying specificities. The usual set of significations embodied by the face, i.e. identity, expression, sex, age, and direction of attention, is variously thwarted in Beckett to cultivate an aesthetic of inscrutability. Beckett’s experimentation with facial reduction, manifest both in the strategic obscuration of the face with layers of gauze in What Where and in the plastered faces in Play where he suggests reducing them to “grey disks” underscores the liminal status of the face between organic and inorganic, and prompts a prosopagnosic visual experience.