Of Creativity, Depression, and Rocking Chairs. Samuel Beckett with Franz Kline

In this paper I analyse and compare the motif of the rocking chair in a selection of Samuel Beckett’s and Franz Kline’s works. Rocking chairs appear in three of Beckett’s main works: the novel Murphy, Film, and the short play Rockaby. Kline, in turn, painted a series of portraits of his wife sitting in a rocking chair at a pivotal moment in his life and career – as well as in the history of modern painting –, namely, in the years immediately preceding his turn to abstract painting. By comparing the uses of this apparently marginal motif, I intend to show how they can mutually shed light onto each other and help addressing some of the major aspects of both bodies of work. In particular, I claim that the rocking chair served both authors as a sort of fetish object through which they could address their views on the relation between the subject and the outer world, a major theme in both their works and lives which played a relevant role in the development of their creative process and the definition of their poetics.