Venue: Room 115, SEIS Building

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The visual imagery of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days suggests, at least at first, direct links between Beckett and the Surrealists.  The closing image of Surrealism’s most famous film, the Buñuel/Dali collaboration called “Un chien Andalu,” for instance, ends with a woman buried up to her waste in a scorching desert.  But Happy Days is less a celebration of Surrealist irrationality than a critique of western humanist civilisation and its consolations.  In Happy Days causality is indeed disrupted in the Surrealist manner as the reasons for Winnie’s inexplicable burial are never explained.  The play begins only after her acclimatisation, after she has settled in, that is, after her environment and predicament have become familiar: “That is what I find so wonderful . . . . The way man adapts himself . . . . To changing conditions” (35).  The play’s focus is on the protagonist’s acceptance of an apparently irrational world. Winnie adapts with the help of three habits: ritual, language, and hope.  All three protect her from self-realization and selfawareness. This talk examines the irrationality of Winnie’s condition in terms of the impact, the affect of images and through various visual presentations.

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