The tragic comedy of Samuel Beckett : ''Beckett in Rome'' 17-19 April 2008

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Author: Daniela Guardamagna | Rossana M. Sebellin (editors)

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Università degli Studi di Roma «Tor Vergata» www.uniroma2.it Editori Laterza www.laterza.it University Press on line www.uptorvergata-laterza.it

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© 2009, Università degli Studi di Roma «Tor Vergata» - Gius. Laterza & Figli Prima edizione 2009 Questo volume è pubblicato con il contributo del Dipartimento di Studi Filologici, Linguistici e Letterari dell’Università degli Studi di Roma «Tor Vergata» Tutte le pubblicazioni «Tor Vergata» - Laterza University Press on line sono valutate dal Comitato Scientifico e quindi sottoposte al giudizio di referees esterni, individuati dal Comitato Scientifico fra i maggiori esperti internazionali, secondo criteri di peer-review.

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Daniela Guardamagna Rossana M. Sebellin (editors)

The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett “Beckett in Rome” 17-19 April 2008

Università degli Studi di Roma «Tor Vergata» • Editori Laterza

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Proprietà letteraria riservata Università degli Studi di Roma «Tor Vergata» Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, Roma-Bari Finito di stampare nell’ottobre 2009 SEDIT - Bari (Italy) per conto della Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa ISBN 978-88-420-9070-0

È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico. Per la legge italiana la fotocopia è lecita solo per uso personale purché non danneggi l’autore. Quindi ogni fotocopia che eviti l’acquisto di un libro è illecita e minaccia la sopravvivenza di un modo di trasmettere la conoscenza. Chi fotocopia un libro, chi mette a disposizione i mezzi per fotocopiare, chi comunque favorisce questa pratica commette un furto e opera ai danni della cultura.

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Index

Preface

IX

Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin: Introduction

XI

Beckett and Italy John Pilling, Beckett and Italian Literature (after Dante) Daniela Caselli, The Politics of Reading Dante in Beckett’s Mercier and / et Camier and “The Calmative” / “Le calmant”

5

20

Self-Translation, and the Genesis of Beckett’s Writing Rossana M. Sebellin, Bilingualism and Bi-textuality: Samuel Beckett’s Double Texts

39

Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Beckett’s Library – From Marginalia to Notebooks

57

The Anxiety of Influence: Beckett and the Cultural Context Mary Bryden, “Hommage furtif”: Cixous’s Difficult Love of Beckett

75

Heather Gardner, Company

86

Roberta Cauchi Santoro, Marinetti and Beckett: A Theatrical Continuum

103

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Index

VI

Davide Crosara, Breathing the Void

113

Mariacristina Cavecchi, Samuel Beckett, Visual Artist

122

Iain Bailey, Beckett, Drama, and the Writing on the Wall

143

Mario Faraone, “Pity we haven’t a piece of rope”: Beckett, Zen and the Lack of a Piece of Rope

156

Beckett and Philosophers Carla Locatelli, Ways of Beckett’s Poems: “il se passe devant / allant sans but”

177

David Tucker, Murphy, Geulincx and an Occasional(ist) Game of Chess

190

David Addyman, Beckett and Place: The Lie of the Land

210

Shane Weller, The Art of Indifference: Adorno’s Manuscript Notes on The Unnamable

223

Lorenzo Orlandini, “A Limbo purged of desire”: Body and Sexuality in Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women

238

Beckett’s Theatre: Text and Performances A. Text Enoch Brater, The Seated Figure on Beckett’s Stage

259

Chris Ackerley, “The Past in Monochrome”: (In)voluntary Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape

277

Hugo Bowles, The ‘Untellability’ of Stories in Endgame

292

Patrizia Fusella, Chamber Music and Camera Trio: Samuel Beckett’s Second Television Play

305

B. Performances Stanley E. Gontarski, Redirecting Beckett

327

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Index

VII

Daniela Guardamagna, Cecchi’s Endgame, and the Question of Fidelity

342

Rosemary Pountney, Stringent Demands: Aspects of Beckett in Performance

355

Laura Caretti, Winnie’s Italian Stage

364

Anastasia Deligianni, Friendgame

375

Beckett and Cinema Lino Belleggia, The Indiscreet Charm of the Cinematic Eye in Samuel Beckett’s Film

389

Seb Franklin, “as from an evil core... the evil spread”: Beckett and Horror Cinema

405

Appendix: Performances and Images Giulia Lazzarini, Remembering Happy Days

417

Ninny Aiuto, Aspittannu a Godot

426

Antonio Borriello, Beckett the Euclidean (as is he who interprets him)

430

Bill Prosser, Beckett’s Doodles

435

Notes on Contributors

437

Index of Works by Samuel Beckett

449

Index of Names and Works

453

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Preface Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin

The essays collected in this volume were presented at the Conference “Beckett in Rome”, held at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in April 2008. Though not all the speakers decided to present a written paper, and though one paper had to be excluded because it incorporated extended quotes from unpublished materials and was therefore unacceptable to the Beckett Estate, we present here a wide range of critical approaches, with contributions from the most outstanding Beckett scholars and many younger ones from all over the world. This volume collects 31 of the 41 papers presented; the appendix bears witness to some interesting performances and exhibitions hosted in the three days of the Conference. We thank the Scientific Committee, in particular John Pilling and Chris Ackerley, whose support and invaluable advice have made this volume possible; our colleagues at “Tor Vergata”; the organizing committee, in particular Dr Lucia Nigri, Giuseppina Zannoni, Claudia Fimiani and Pamela Parenti for their unremitting help in organising the Conference; PhD students of our Department Rachele Calisti, Daniela Coramusi, Alessandra D’Atena, Valeria Vallucci, Claudio Cadeddu, Massimiliano Catoni and Alessandro Cifariello, who helped in various ways during the Conference; Mr Roberto Mancini and Ms Eleonora Piacenza for their work on the website and logistics of the Conference; the International Relations Office of “Tor Vergata”; Angela Gibbon, who helped with the revision of some of the texts, and, last but by no means least, the two indefatigable referees, who must remain anonymous, but whose discerning and untiring judgement corrected many of our faults.

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Introduction Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin*

In the past decade Beckett studies have responded to the recent interest in genetic studies and have made extensive use of manuscripts and drafts to widen and deepen the area of analysis, a process “precipitated by the publication of James Knowlson’s groundbreaking biography, which drew attention to numerous hitherto barely studied manuscripts”1. The attention to variants of composition, to the concrete stratification of handwritten or typed texts, can be recognized as a legacy of the ‘Reading school’, where young scholars are invited to dwell on this approach. At the Beckett International Foundation in Reading, and with the encouragement of James Knowlson and John Pilling, I, among others, began the study of self-translation from a genetic perspective and included manuscript analysis in my approach to the problem. The use of unpublished documents (manuscript, letters, notebooks and the holdings of Beckett’s library) was in a sense authorized by Beckett himself, not only for the obvious reason that he made his materials available to scholars, but also – and especially – because of his own attention to the process of writing, so often incorporated in the text as an integral element, a theme, an object of observation in itself. It comes as no surprise, then, that many papers in the present book attribute enormous importance to manuscripts, letters, notebooks, marginalia and the like in order to achieve a deeper, multi-layered reading of Beckett’s work. * The first part of this Introduction, concerning the first four sections, is by Rossana M. Sebellin; the second part, about the last three, is by Daniela Guardamagna. For the attribution of the entire volume, see Notes, p. 2. 1 Dirk Van Hulle, 2005, “Genetic Beckett Studies”, in Idem (editor), Beckett the European, 2005, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida), pp. 1-9, p. 2.

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Introduction

This is especially true of the first four sections of this publication: “Beckett and Italy”, “Self-translation and the genesis of Beckett’s writing”, “The Anxiety of Influence: Beckett and the cultural context” and “Beckett and philosophers”. The last three sections of the publication are devoted specifically to Beckett’s performing genres, theatre – both as text and on stage – and cinema: “Beckett’s theatre: text and performances”, and “Beckett and cinema”. An Appendix closes this collective effort and testifies to several performances which were an important part of the Conference and therefore we consider appropriate for the Proceedings, in spite of their non-academic character. The first section, “Beckett and Italy”, includes the significant contributions of John Pilling and Daniela Caselli: both are concerned with Beckett’s literary engagement with Italian culture. John Pilling explores the author’s first encounters with Italian poets at Trinity College Dublin during the 1920s, and his later contacts with lesser known contemporary poets. Pilling makes use of letters, notes and annotated texts to discuss a subject which has rarely been extended much beyond Dante, including not only the Italian literary canon which Beckett studied as an undergraduate at TCD (Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Leopardi, D’Annunzio, to name but a few), but also such contemporary and less internationally known figures as Sbarbaro, Franchi and Comisso. Daniela Caselli, with her deep knowledge of Dante and the problem of intertextuality in Beckett, shows the subtle and at times faint traces of literary presences. Caselli extends her analysis to reveal the interest Beckett had in other figures of the Italian literary canon, such as Carducci, Leopardi, D’Annunzio, Machiavelli and Ariosto; and she poses the problem of comparativism and intertextuality as “a political exploration of how authority circulates” in the works that are being compared. (An important potential contribution by Séan Lawlor, which indicated some stimulating links between Beckett’s poems “hors crâne” and “dread nay” and Dante, unfortunately could not be published here, since it relies extensively on quotations from unpublished materials which were denied authorization by the Beckett Estate.) The second session, “Self-translation and the genesis of Beckett’s writing”, was opened by my paper describing the problem of self-translation in the case study of the double versions of “Play” and Not I, and suggests envisaging the status of duplicated origi-

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nality for such texts (rather than the more frequent definition of original and secondary version), adding this to the instances of exhaustion, impasse and suspicion of the truth of language. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle present their work (in progress) on the digitalization of Beckett’s marginalia through the excavation of the author’s library: Beckett’s wide knowledge of European culture and the ways in which this filters into his literary production may be read as a form of “intertextual translation”, which Nixon and Van Hulle explore from various perspectives. The third section, “Beckett and the cultural context”, includes seven contributions. Mary Bryden examines the relationship between Beckett and Hélène Cixous from the point of view of the French writer’s attitude to her Irish-French contemporary; Bryden also develops an acute analysis of the elusive yet deep textual correspondences and persistent Beckettian echoes in Cixous’ work, not only as textual residua, but also as a subterranean attitude to the act of writing. The following papers consider Beckett’s work in the light of the influence of modern writers and thinkers. Heather Gardner’s contribution on Company examines the influence on Beckett’s work of the philosopher and linguist Fritz Mauthner, as well as the development of a tendency to incorporate heterogeneous literary elements and to obliterate the thinking and narrating subject. The following two authors deal with different but equally unusual connections: the possible relations between Beckett and avant-garde theatre, and Romantic poetry. Roberta Cauchi Santoro’s paper investigates the hypothesis of a relationship between Marinetti and Beckett, suggesting that the theatre of the Italian avant-garde and that of Beckett may share a common ground. Davide Crosara examines the influence of Milton and Romantic poetry on Beckett’s later prose and drama: an unusual, yet convincing analysis of the author’s capacity for assimilation and incorporation of the literary tradition, even of the writings most apparently distant from his style. Crosara argues that the composition of the later plays and short prose has its origins in a persistent and deep-rooted relation with the Romantic tradition, and he thus proposes a postmodernist perspective on such aspects of Beckett’s work. A peculiar kind of influence is that considered by Mariacristina Cavecchi, who concentrates on an ideal ‘museum’ of chairs in

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Introduction

Beckett’s works. Beckett’s profound response to painting is the basis for Cavecchi’s exploration of the bond between the visual and verbal in Beckett’s theatre: from Waiting for Godot to “Rockaby”, she evokes a gallery of paintings and images from the Italian Renaissance to contemporary painters, ranging from Antonello da Messina and Michelangelo to Jack B. Yeats, Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon, looming in the background. The starting point of the last two papers in this section is to be found in religious thought and texts. Iain Bailey again focuses on the problem of intertextuality, in particular the presence of biblical elements in Beckett. He argues that “[Beckett’s] ‘writing constructed upon other writings’ allows the biblical to be operative in more nuanced ways, to engage with the more searching questions about presence and materiality”. Mario Faraone employs Zen Buddhism as a critical tool to read Beckett’s noluntas and failure to act, especially in the early dramatic works. The section on “Beckett and philosophers” reflects not only how greatly Beckett was influenced by philosophers, but also the presence of Beckett in modern thought and the way in which the ‘phenomenon Beckett’ changed the approach of philosophers to the philosophical canon, bearing in mind the fact that Beckett incorporates philosophy, transforming it, as Adorno writes, into residue and detritus. Carla Locatelli opens the session with a challenging essay in which she formulates the convincing hypothesis, over and above Beckett’s other stylistic developments, of a deconstructive stance present in his poetry throughout his literary career. Locatelli envisages a “deconstructive realism”, which deprives “any textual utterance of cognitive and semantic stability”. David Tucker shows the influence of the Occasionalist philosopher Arnold Geulincx not only on Beckett’s novels Murphy and The Unnamable, but also as yet another intertextual presence resurfacing throughout the author’s life, echoed in letters and conversations, and reverberating in later works such as “Rockaby” and Film. In a paper on Beckett’s prose, David Addyman posits the importance of an approach to works such as Murphy, The Unnamable and Watt based on space as a philosophical concept, following the basic Aristotelian assumption of place as a “static surface at the limits of the physical body” which “paradoxically [...] initiates a marginalisation of place”. Addyman

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XV

claims that in “Beckett’s work, the provision of place always exists in tension with its withholding”. Shane Weller’s paper is concerned with Adorno’s critical writings on Beckett and, even more interestingly, with his unwritten essay on The Unnamable, of which various notes remain as marginalia to his German translation of the work, and which Weller analyses. Here again we are faced with the use of marginalia in an effort to establish a deeper understanding of Adorno’s attitude to Beckett’s prose and the relation between his prose and his drama. Weller argues that “Adorno not only fails to establish a clear distinction between Beckett’s novels and his plays [...] but himself works against the very distinction that he proposes”, thus stretching the process of indifferentiation between novel and drama, narrative and theory, literature and philosophy. Lorenzo Orlandini’s paper deals with Beckett’s treatment of sexuality in his early fiction, in particular Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Beckett’s early attitude towards sex is to be compared to his more general vision of desire as opposed to the happier condition of perfect indifference, in a sort of “Limbo purged of desire”. The fifth section, on Beckett’s theatre, comprises papers on the texts themselves and on individual performances, shedding light on general topics such as the dialectic of fidelity and innovation, and describing unusual ways of performing plays that have by now attained the status of classics. Many of the papers concerning Beckett’s drama, as text and in performance, focus on or have a background concern with the relationship of Beckett with traditional forms, concepts and structures, and the use that he makes of canonical solutions, often not rejecting, but incorporating them, investigating their limits. Enoch Brater’s essay, for instance, examines an essential feature of Beckett’s drama, the use of the sitting figure from the earliest works about Belacqua to the latest dramaticules, revealing an attitude typical of Beckett’s dialectic with the tradition he inherits: “celebrating” it “in the very process of transporting it”. Beckett studies, interiorises, excavates it, strips it of every detail and carries it to its utmost limit. To analyse his topic of the sitting figure in drama, Brater brings into play both his vast knowledge of European drama and his consummate ability to discover surprising connections. He analyses this figure in Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov,

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Introduction

Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Caryl Churchill, Albee, Shepard and Pinter, finding its origin for Beckett in Strindberg (Blin’s production of Ghost Sonata which he saw with Suzanne in 1949), in Walter von der Vogelweide, in the pictures he loved (from Medieval and Renaissance Madonnas to Van Gogh, Bacon and LeBrocquy). His analysis covers most of Beckett’s plays and some of his prose: Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, “Rockaby”, Come and Go, “Ohio Impromptu”, “The Calmative”, “Eh Joe”, Film and other dramaticules, showing how the stark novelty of Beckett’s solutions is in fact a rethinking of the canon and its incorporation. Chris Ackerley’s study is a fascinating exploration of voluntary and involuntary memory in Beckett’s work. He identifies the surprising persistence – in later years, in different media and with new technological solutions – of the Proustian equation postulated by Beckett in his 1931 essay on Proust. Contrasting the monochrome rationality of voluntary memory with the rich nuances of the involuntary, Ackerley identifies the recurrence of themes in Beckett from the early essay on Proust to the works of the Seventies and Eighties. Krapp, he writes, works “as a template” for successive plays and novels; involuntary memory, shown to be much more fertile than rational voluntary memory, is however denied the cathartic value it has in both Proust and Joyce: the experience is shared, but its transcendental value is denied, and the failure of the old aesthetic is a cornerstone of the creation of Beckett’s aesthetic of failure. Hugo Bowles contributes a linguistic/pragmatics based analysis of Endgame, an interactional discursive approach through which the strategies of ordinary, non-literary conversation are generally discussed. After briefly summarizing the most recent approaches of this kind of research, Bowles concentrates on three storytelling episodes in Endgame, the more or less successful storytelling between Nell and Nagg (the Ardennes story, the Lake Como and the Tailor stories) and Hamm’s chronicle. He discusses the “cooperative and uncooperative behaviour” of the storytellers, describes the “highly disjointed effect” that results from this, and concludes that Beckett’s skill is “in subverting the mechanisms of ordinary storytelling behaviour to produce stories in which tellability merges into ‘untellability’”. Patrizia Fusella’s paper focuses on the little-analysed and possibly underrated relationship between Beckett’s “Ghost Trio” and Beethoven’s Piano Trio N. 5 in D Major, which Beckett uses in his

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second television play. As in Brater’s and Ackerley’s papers, we are shown the interest Beckett had in a traditional form (in this case the chamber music he loved), and the way in which such a form is taken, modified and sometimes deconstructed for his own ends. In a situation that reminds us of other Beckettian impasses (I am thinking especially of the first television play “Eh Joe”), the frustrated wait of the male Figure for a “she” to arrive, commented on by a female Voice, is interrupted by the character listening to music. Fusella investigates the possibility of “solace” or “redemption” through music, and shows its essential function, through the symmetrical repetition of sound and action, in creating the structure of the play. In the papers on performances, the key concept is the dialectic between fidelity and innovation. It is, of course, obvious that when confronted with an author as exacting and precise as is Beckett – in his stage directions and in his requirements of both directors and actors – and who in his plays tends towards the condition of music on one hand and the visual arts on the other, a bold modification of his requirements, frequent in avant-garde and fringe performances, risks destroying the object itself. Stanley E. Gontarski’s paper describes various highly experimental productions which were staged in the United States, Canada and Brazil, mostly reproducing the Beckettian text as it is, with its own precise rhythms and solutions, immersed in new contexts: installations, environments, “videos, photographs, objects, and performance pieces”, among which it is inserted, heightening the quality of a hybrid performance based on words and plastic art (which, on the other hand, is a characteristic of the original text). Such experiments, Gontarski argues, subtract Beckett’s work from the taming which could be caused by the simple repetition of what has already been done, and create “a Beckett for the 21st century”. My own paper, concerned with a more orthodox kind of performance, also tackles the question of fidelity and the need to find new ways of performing something which has already been performed to perfection, taking as an exemplary case study the highly stimulating production of Finale di partita (Endgame) by Carlo Cecchi. Rosemary Pountney also dwells on the problem of combining fidelity to Beckett with novelty, and due respect for the dialogic interchange between text and stage directions, concluding that fidelity is especially important when staging the Minimalist

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plays of the last period. She analyses the problems actors and actresses have had to cope with when acting these plays, and relates her own experience when performing Not I and “Rockaby”. Laura Caretti’s paper describes various Italian performances of Happy Days, from some avant-garde ones such as Remondi and Caporossi’s or that of the Teatro Studio in Scandicci, to Strehler’s staging for the Piccolo Teatro, which also entailed some modification of Beckett’s original intentions. We could argue, as Enoch Brater did at a lecture in Rome in April 2009, that evaluation must ultimately be left to the performance itself: the final verdict is whether it works or not, whether it brings something new to our understanding of Beckett’s work. The last paper of the section devoted to performances is Anastasia Deligianni’s. She describes the interesting experiment she made in Athens when staging Waiting for Godot for an audience of children, thereby investigating a return to virgin response which may in turn tell us something about our adult perception of the play. In the last section, Lino Belleggia analyses Film in the light of Beckett’s interest in experimental cinema, from Buñuel’s Un chien andalou to Eisenstein, whose theoretical writings greatly influenced him. Seb Franklin analyses a kind of “post factum influence”, as McHale puts it, of Beckett’s work on horror cinema, not of course postulating any direct inspiration, but finding echoes of his work in this unlikely medium (talk of science fiction and dystopia has occurred elsewhere, in the case of plays and prose like The Lost Ones or All Strange Away). The Appendix gives information about performances and exhibitions held during the Conference. Ninny Aiuto, a young writer, presented his translation of Waiting for Godot into Sicilian, acting some excerpts from it; a brief analysis of his work is given here. Antonio Borriello, whose performances are illustrated in some of the pictures included in this volume, writes about his ideas on staging Beckett. Bill Prosser gives us information about his work on Beckettian doodles, mostly from the manuscript of Human Wishes. The opening pages of the Appendix are devoted to the transcript of the performance-talk given by Giulia Lazzarini, the great actress who interpreted Strehler’s Happy Days, and though written words cannot capture the deeply moving impact of her talk, they give us some hint of the astounding performance of this superb Italian Winnie.

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The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett


NOTES The sections “Beckett and Italy”, “Self-Translation, and the Genesis of Beckett’s Writing”, “The Anxiety of Influence” and “Beckett and Philosophers” were edited by Rossana M. Sebellin. The sections “Beckett’s Theatre: Text and Performances”, “Beckett and Cinema” and the “Appendix” were edited by Daniela Guardamagna. Both editors are responsible for the planning and revision of the entire volume. Throughout the text, for Beckett’s works the editors have followed the convention established among others by Ackerley and Gontarski (The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2004), requiring italics for texts published individually and inverted commas for texts which first appeared in collections, journals and so on. Occasionally the following abbreviations have been employed: RUL UoR HRHRC TCD MS

Reading University Library University of Reading The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Trinity College Dublin manuscript


Beckett and Italy



Beckett and Italian Literature (after Dante) John Pilling

a human voice there within an inch or two my dream perhaps even a human mind if I have to learn Italian obviously it will be less amusing (Samuel Beckett, How It Is)

“[L]ess amusing” for the ‘narrator/narrated’ of How It Is “obviously”: but perhaps only if you “have to”, in which respect it may well resemble anything any of us have to do. But the speaker here is putting a putative case based on his “dream” of “a human voice [...] perhaps even a human mind”, as if the learning of Italian were naturally part and parcel of any “human”, and more specifically ‘Humanist’, project. An equation of a kind looks as if it might yield something that could be usefully put beside ‘Beckett and French Literature’ or ‘Beckett and German Literature’. But much of the potential utility value is clearly bound up with ‘Beckett and Dante’, a subject area which has at last received the treatment it deserves by Daniela Caselli, and no-one has yet seen fit to take matters very much further along the line I wish to trace, which will obviously be more, or less, amusing as I trace it. Where to start? Not, I think, nel mezzo del cammin (with How It Is, say, 30 years on from the beginning of a lifetime’s writing, and 30 years from its end); best, surely, to go back to the beginning, some 85 years ago. It was in the autumn of 1924 that Beckett first studied Italian, and Italian Literature, at – but also outside (with ‘the Ottolenghi’) – Trinity College Dublin. It was not with Dante that he started, Dante being too difficult, but with


6

Beckett and Italy

something more various and less demanding: the Prose scelte of D’Annunzio; some poems of Giosuè Carducci; the poetry of Alessandro Manzoni; a little Boccaccio; some Tasso (the opening Cantos of the Gerusalemme), and some Dialogues from Leopardi’s Operette morali. A good spread, but nothing to leave a mark, even with Leopardi the most likely to do so. Or rather, nothing positive. A year or so later, in the autumn of 1926, Dante having intervened, Beckett took more specific stock, notably of Carducci who, he had decided, was not a poet, though an excellent university professor. Beckett had formed this judgment by way of reading Carducci on Tasso and Poliziano, and also by way of reading Benedetto Croce, another excellent university professor, on Carducci. What Beckett really objected to in Carducci was what he saw as a desperate and effortful self-consciousness so very different from his own. Carducci he was moved to compare to an elephant jumping ponderously through a hoop. Confronted with a famous figure he found not just a bad poet but an excessively bad one, Beckett already knew that Dante was a very great one (see TCD MS 10695 fol. 31) and may already have discovered that Leopardi also was, or could be in selected Canti; Beckett could hardly perhaps be expected to tolerate elephants jumping through hoops. A larger figure then than now, Carducci remained for a while a useful point of reference, a model of how not to proceed. In the short story “Dante and the Lobster”, probably written in 1930, the character Belacqua, Beckett’s alter ego, decides that “the nineteenth century in Italy was full of old hens trying to cluck like Pindar” and instances Silvio Pellico, Manzoni, and, somehow inevitably, Carducci. So much for the nineteenth century, then, Beckett having chosen to forget that Leopardi died in 1832! But younger hens fared no better: in a letter to MacGreevy of 7 [August] 1930 Beckett objected to the “dirty juicy squelchy mind” of Gabriele D’Annunzio, “bleeding and bursting, like his celebrated pomegranates”, “celebrated” (in the sense of ‘famous’, but not about to be celebrated) by Beckett largely on the basis of one of D’Annunzio’s ‘Romances of the Pomegranate’, the novel Il Fuoco. Some very old hens could also be dispensed with as his own creative work gathered momentum: in a letter probably written in late August 1931 Beckett told MacGreevy “I can’t write like Boccaccio


J. Pilling. Beckett and Italian Literature (after Dante)

7

and I don’t want to write like Boccaccio”. (Beckett had studied Boccaccio very closely, as the student textbook surviving in his personal library after his death indicates.) But 1931 takes us too far: back to the autumn of 1926. It was in that autumn that Beckett sat the Moderatorship examinations in Modern Literature, from which he was to emerge First in the First Class, with the highest accumulated percentages of all the candidates. For these examinations Beckett had had to prepare Dante (the Vita Nuova and all three parts of the Commedia), Machiavelli (Il Principe and the Discorsi), some cantos of the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, perhaps also some Gozzi, some Castiglione, and some Goldoni – some twelve years later the figure behind “Cooper experienced none of the famous difficulty in serving two masters” as found in chapter 10 of Murphy. Beckett had supplemented his prescribed reading of Henri Hauvette’s La littérature italienne – it may strike us now as a little odd that the TCD syllabus required its students to read a Frenchman rather than an Italian! – with Francesco De Sanctis’s great Storia della letteratura italiana. De Sanctis at least left something of a mark (Beckett quotes him in his own Proust essay of 1930), probably because although the Storia is a nineteenth century work, first published in 1871, Beckett found there no trace of hens trying to cluck like Pindar, since there was almost no nineteenth century literature in it! It also seems highly probable that Beckett had been reading books not on the TCD syllabus, notably the two volumes on Italian Literature by John Addington Symonds which form part of his seven volume The Renaissance in Italy. No danger of hens there, or indeed elephants: just a further opportunity to sample, savour, digest, or spit out. Symonds possessed the inestimable advantage (for the young Beckett) that he knew what he was talking about, was in no way in awe of reputations, and could write on most aspects of a given subject with flair and acumen. It was by way of Symonds that Beckett was introduced, or introduced himself, to Poliziano and Sannazaro, neither of them apparently (and predictably enough) much to his taste, and also to Tasso’s L’Aminta and Guarini’s Il pastor fido, neither of them very much of a threat to Dante either, although I suspect Beckett found more in both of these writers than we might expect. (In the early 1930s Beckett had more time for Pastoral, and for that matter for the Fairy Tale, than seems consistent with our received idea of him,


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Beckett and Italy

partly perhaps because he had not yet encountered the Burlesque, a deficiency which – with the help of Symonds and subsequently [as obliquely indicated in the Ezra Pound review of 1934] Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilisation of the Renaissance) – he would later make good. Beckett’s TCD notes from Symonds [MS 10962] stop, we cannot help but notice, just before he would have read about Burlesque and Satire in chapter 15 of the second volume of Italian Literature; presumably other notes from later in Symonds were taken, and subsequently lost.) It was also in 1926, again for the Moderatorship examinations, that Beckett purchased the Rime of Messer Francesco Petrarca (better known to most of us as Petrarch), the two volume 1824 Andreola edition in the Biblioteca Classica Italiana series. These books he annotated rather sparsely, but with some telling markings (as very helpfully listed by Jean-Pierre Ferrini in an essay in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui XVII) and he kept them until, very late in life, he gave them to Avigdor and Anne Arikha. There is, however, no evidence that Petrarch, arguably the only figure of anything like Dante’s stature that Beckett had yet encountered, made very much of an impact on him at this time, even though he was to continue to browse the Rime over the next fifty years. In this connection, it is surely very significant that, when Beckett was reviewing Ezra Pound’s Make It New in 1934 (see “Ex Cathezra”, in Cohn 1983, pp. 77-79), Petrarch comes out less well than Guido Cavalcanti. But no doubt the contest, if ever there was one, between Petrarch and Dante was more or less settled in favour of the latter as Beckett read further: beyond the Vita Nuova and the Commedia, into the Convivio (or Convito), and at least two of Dante’s Latin works, the De Monarchia and the De vulgari eloquentia. These last two works figure so prominently in the concluding paragraphs of Beckett’s 1929 essay “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” that it is easy to forget that the section of the essay devoted to Dante offers only one quotation taken directly from the Commedia, otherwise almost exclusively concerning itself with the contexts which might be applied to it. Which quotation? Why, nel mezzo del cammin, of course! (It is no less striking that Beckett’s 1934 review of Giovanni Papini’s Dante Vivo quotes “morale negotium” from Dante’s Latin epistle to Can-



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grande, but contains no quotations in Italian at all: see “Papini’s Dante”, in Cohn 1983, pp. 80-81). As the eye-catching title of Beckett’s 1929 essay indicates obliquely (and, in the event, somewhat misleadingly), he was trying to move on from Dante, into regions richer and stranger than those he had yet encountered in Hauvette, Symonds and De Sanctis. But there were difficulties. As Beckett was later to admit, he had little, if any, direct knowledge of the actual texts of Giordano Bruno, and he had in any case largely confined himself (as Massimo Verdicchio very shrewdly pointed out many years ago – in 1989) to Book 2 of Vico’s La Scienza Nuova. In reading Vico, as Verdicchio also conclusively shows, Beckett had played fast and loose with what the great linguistician had actually written, much as had also been the case with Dante’s Convito. But at least Vico had interested Beckett sufficiently for him to claim, in requesting a Reader’s Ticket for the British Museum, that he wished to study works of Vico less readily available than The New Science – he does not specify which, though presumably the Autobiography was one – and, in addition to Vico, Vittorio Alfieri. Alfieri is another figure one would hardly expect to loom large in Beckett Studies, although of course it helps in this connection to have actually read Alfieri’s Memoirs, to see that Alfieri’s melancholy disposition, his learning and his pessimism, would greatly have appealed. In 1933, indeed, Alfieri must have looked a potentially useful third string to the dark side of Dante and the very dark tones of Leopardi, although unfortunately the only trace of Alfieri in Beckett’s work (outside his correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy) is in the unpublished short story “Echo’s Bones” of late 1933. There the Italian’s disinclination to dance is, as it were, countered by putting him in tandem with the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Beckett cannot have been unaware that Alfieri was a great mind, perhaps only surpassed in learning and scholarship by Leopardi, both of them key figures in the Risorgimento, although what either of them might have contributed to the Risorgimento no doubt mattered much less to Beckett (as is clear from a 1958 letter to his close friend A. J. Leventhal on the subject of Leopardi; HRHRC) than their demonstrations of what could be done in the face of a profound pessimism. After 1933 Italian Literature took a poor second, or rather a poor third, place behind French and (increasingly) German. A


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poor fourth, if you count in a renewed commitment to English Literature (see my essay in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui XVI). It was in Germany, not Italy, that Beckett spent the six months from October 1936 to March 1937. He had only visited Italy once, in the late spring and summer of 1927, and he was only to return for brief holidays in the 1960s and 1970s. He had only ever attempted to translate Dante privately (in the notebook that he kept towards the writing of his first, subsequently jettisoned, novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women), even though in summer 1930 he had published three translations from the Italian in the special issue of the Parisian émigré magazine This Quarter at the invitation of the special Italian issue edited by Samuel Putnam. These translations have been variously discussed by Laura Visconti (1997), Marco Sonzogni (2006) and Norma Bouchard (2008), but, of the three authors translated, two – Giovanni Comisso and Raffaello Franchi – are no longer names to conjure with, and are unlikely to excite more than a passing interest. Even Eugenio Montale (of whose poem “Delta” Beckett makes something of a mess, as I hope to demonstrate elsewhere) does not seem to have survived the exercise all that well. Indeed, it comes as no real surprise to find that, in writing to Putnam (14 May 1930), Beckett leaves his editor in little doubt that he has found the commission something of an onerous task. Perhaps the texts which Putnam had sent left Beckett reluctant to commit, in so public a fashion, to translating from Italian again. But Italian impulses were not quite dead; it was not, to quote from Leopardi’s “A se stesso”, quite a matter of “Posa per sempre”. Some three years on from Alfieri, with German Literature having intervened, the early months of 1936 represent something of a Renaissance. It was then that Beckett read a selection of Early Lives of Dante, re-read some Tasso (“with boredom”) and some Guarini, and Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine, which (he told MacGreevy) he had enjoyed immensely. This was also when he read, or at least read most of, Machiavelli’s play La Mandragola – he had seen one of the infrequent productions of it in Paris in 1929 – and he told MacGreevy that he intended to proceed further, to the play Clizia and beyond: to Folengo, to Berni, to La Calandria, and even to what he called “the theatre of Bruno”, by which he must principally have meant, presumably, Il Candelaio. Whether he



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ever proceeded so far seems, on the face of it, unlikely. But La Mandragola (or at least its preface) left something of a permanent mark. In 1936 Beckett wrote out this preface, which is frequently omitted from English translations of the play. It reads: Scusatelo con questo, che s’ingegna Con questi van pensieri Fare el suo tristo tempo più suave Perch’altrove non have Dove voltare el viso: Ché gli è stato interciso Monstrar con altre imprese altra virtue Non sendo premio alle fatiche sue.

A translation (my thanks to Daniela Caselli for her help with this, many years ago): Excuse him this, since With these vain thoughts He is trying to make more pleasant his sad time, Given that he has nowhere else To turn his face: It having been forbidden to him To show by other deeds another virtue, There being no prize for all his efforts.

Symonds (Italian Literature vol. II, p. 148) remarks: “These verses, indifferent as poetry, are poignant for their revelation of a disappointed life”, and whatever Beckett thought of them as poetry, he obviously found them “poignant”. In early 1936, with the novel Murphy proving difficult to finish (and, in the event, very difficult to sell to publishers), it was to Italian that Beckett had turned to express his extreme disappointment that, thus far, there had been “no prize for all his efforts”. Non sendo premio alle fatiche sue. With Machiavelli we have an old hen clucking, not like Pindar, but to some purpose, even though it is a purpose Machiavelli can know nothing of. It is manifestly not what you put down in a notebook in the hope of passing an examination. So: Italian, as we might say, “less amusing”, but more moving, more a matter of passion and feeling than of thinking (one reason, but not the only reason, for


Beckett and Italy

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leaving “Beckett and Pirandello” in an appendix). It certainly dwarfs the so-called “profound risolino” (Ariosto by way of Francesco De Sanctis) in Beckett’s Jack Yeats review in the summer of 1936, Beckett’s bizarre attempt to ‘translate’ Ariosto into German stage dialogue in a RUL notebook, and almost everything thereafter, or at least after the war. Perhaps by then Italy, if not Italians, had crossed a line. Apart from re-reading (and, as Daniela Caselli has shown, re-thinking) Dante on the road to Mercier et Camier and again on the way to Comment c’est (How It Is), and apart from reinforcing the ‘touchstones’ found in the Rime of Petrarca, there is “[l]ittle left to add” (“Draff”; “Ohio Impromptu”). But also quite touching, in its way, is a quotation found in one of Beckett’s appointment books, his diary for 1967. The quotation is from the lead poem (“Taci, anima stanca di godere...”) in the 1914 collection Pianissimo by Camillo Sbarbaro: Perduta ha la sua voce la sirena del mondo, e il mondo è un grande deserto. Nel deserto io guardo con asciutti occhi me stesso. (The siren of the world has lost its voice, and the world is a huge desert. In the desert I look at myself with dry eyes.)

Sbarbaro, born in Santa Margherita Ligure near Genoa (where Beckett holidayed on at least two occasions, in March 1966 and again in July 1971), died in nearby Savona on 31 October 1967, the year of Beckett’s diary. Whether Beckett knew Sbarbaro personally I have no way of knowing, but the quotation – in the poem preceded by the lines “e tutto è quello / che è, soltanto quel che è” [and everything is what it is, only what it is] – no doubt revived Beckett’s memory of Leopardi’s “A se stesso”, and – much like the Machiavelli preface of thirty years before – supplied him with a ‘self-as-other’ situation in which he could once again find himself, or lose himself, in Italian.



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Beckett was in fact never in any real danger of finding mirror-images of himself in what had once (in the 1920s) been his third language, but which became, as time passed and German took over, something of an also-ran. There is a telling record of this in a letter of 17 February 1955 to Pamela Mitchell. On leaving Paris for New York Pamela Mitchell had given Beckett a going-away present of a Zingarelli dictionary, and Beckett was writing to thank her, and to reflect ruefully that “[I] seem to have forgotten more Italian than I thought”. Six months later, in August 1955, their affair over, he told her that he was “recovering” his Italian by way of reading the weekly illustrated magazine Oggi, and no doubt her present helped. Zingarelli’s Vocabolario, published in Bologna in 1954, was still in Beckett’s personal library at the time of his death in 1989. There were only a handful of books in Italian left in Beckett’s library at the end: a Decameron; a Concordance to the Divine Comedy; Tasso’s Gerusalemme from May 1925; Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine (History of Florence); Leopardi’s Canti and a selection from his prose, and two comedies of Giuseppe Giacosa (nowadays perhaps best known for his opera librettos) – many of these not much more than left-overs from his Senior Freshman syllabus at TCD. (There were also two volumes of Aretino, the Lettere and the Ragionamenti, but in the French of Apollinaire. Beckett had first read Aretino in the British Museum in 1932, as the poem “Sanies II” indicates.) Classics all, or almost all, but not many; and confirmation in a way of what Beckett had told his friend A. J. Leventhal in a letter of 21 April 1958: “Can’t conceive”, he told him, “by what stretch of ingenuity my work could be placed under [the] sign of It-al-i-ani-tà”. At which point, however, Beckett immediately stretched himself to quote, apparently from memory, three lines from the Purgatorio, a much-cherished line from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and his (and Joyce’s) favourite tag from Leopardi – “e fango è il mondo”, which had been used as the epigraph to Proust in the late summer / early autumn of 1930. This tag must have been a particular favourite, although in fact what gave it so much flavour for both Joyce and Beckett was the latent French pun on ‘immonde’, rather than anything intrinsic to the Italian. So: if not exactly “less amusing” – there is a joke of sorts to be found in it – not much more than one might have expected to find when one started out, but just enough for it to seem worthwhile to go ‘beyond’ Dante once in a while.


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APPENDIX A Perhaps the most interesting of Beckett’s marginal marks in the second volume of his Petrarch – of what only amounts to some halfdozen – occurs alongside part two of the Trionfo della Morte (Triumph of Death), where two tercets (lines 34-39) are underlined: La morte è fin d’una pregione oscura All’anime gentili; all’altre è noia Ch’hanno posto nel fango ogni lor cura. Ed ora il morir mio, che sì t’annoia Ti farebbe allegrar se tu sentissi La millesima parte di mia gioia. (Death is to noble souls the end of a dark prison sentence; to others, with all their care in mud, a tedium. And if you felt the smallest part of my joy now, my death, which you find so dire, would make you light of heart, and happy.) [Laura in morte speaking.]

APPENDIX B A footnote on Beckett and Pirandello This is not so much an old hen as an old chestnut, but Beckett’s own view (as found in a letter of 9 February 1984 to Aldo Tagliaferri) was that he was “not conscious of any Pirandellian influence on my work”. Anyone wishing (as it seems clear Tagliaferri was) to pursue a supposed Pirandellian influence on Beckett must at least take note of this, if only ultimately to disregard it. But he or she must do so mindful that Pirandello is not to be found amongst the hundreds of names invoked by Beckett in thousands of pages of personal writing. A more interesting question may be: “Why not?”, especially when TCD possessed in Professor Walter Starkie one of the first figures in the English-speaking world with a serious interest in Pirandello. Starkie’s book-length study of Pirandello was first published in 1935, and has often been reprinted, and Starkie had many disciples in the Trinity of his time. (He taught Ethna MacCarthy,



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Beckett’s sometime innamorata, Spanish, and Spanish literature.) But Beckett was the protégé of ‘Ruddy’, Professor RudmoseBrown, the other ‘big fish’ in the TCD Romance Languages pool, who was well-known to be a rival of, and often hostile to, Walter Starkie. Within a year or so of finishing Dream of Fair to Middling Women Beckett was writing to his friend Thomas MacGreevy regretting his portrayal of “Ruddy” as “the Polar Bear”, and he certainly in other ways was not always respectful of his Professor. But Starkie, we may infer, he never liked well enough to treat badly. To this admittedly ad hominem argument can be added considerations intellectual rather than personal. In 1920s Dublin Pirandello was known, as indeed he was elsewhere, principally as a dramatist, a view which still remains (outside Italy, at any rate) today. In the 1920s Beckett’s interest in drama led to a profound admiration for Racine, and occasional visits to the Abbey and the Gate theatres. But theatre did not significantly interest Beckett as an expressive medium until mid-1936 (his brief attempt to ‘do’ Ariosto in German) and his aborted Human Wishes fragment of 1940, both interesting excursions, but neither very successful. Pirandello may have swum back into view in early 1947 during the writing of Eleutheria, but (as Matthijs Engelberts has shown – Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006) the major influence on that play was the French surrealist dramatist Roger Vitrac. If Pirandello had mattered more, I think Beckett would have been inhibited in mounting his own attack on conventional dramaturgy, gingerly in Eleutheria, overwhelmingly in En attendant Godot. This is in no way to promote the idea that Beckett was “conscious of any Pirandellian influence”, rather the contrary. Indeed, in the Pirandellian connection – or, as I see it, disconnection – I think we may pretty confidently say that, here at least, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

APPENDIX C Some notes on Beckett’s use of, and familiarity with, the classic Italian writers: Ariosto: How much of Orlando Furioso Beckett knew remains


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unclear. He studied a selection of Cantos for his Moderatorship examinations and, as I indicate, had read De Sanctis on the subject. Beckett had also read Benedetto Croce’s Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille. His most intimate encounter with Ariosto, however, was in the summer of 1936 as part of his preparation towards a trip to Germany, which in the event lasted six months, although Beckett had hoped it would last longer. His attempt to write a play in German using characters, dialogue and situations adapted from early in Orlando may have been prompted by his recent reading of Goethe’s play Torquato Tasso (which Beckett had not been greatly impressed by), but the experiment fizzled out after only a few pages, anticipating his failure four years later, in the spring of 1940, with Human Wishes and materials from the life of Dr Johnson. There are a few negligible points of contact with Godot of 1948-1949 in the Ariosto fragment, but nothing of any lasting significance. Apart from Le Kid (1931), however, most of which seems to have been written by Georges Pelorson, this curious torso could be seen as Beckett’s first effort at writing a play. The key Ariostan notion of the “risolino” found (largely by way of De Sanctis) in the 1936 review of Jack B. Yeats’s novel The Amaranthers is reprised in the 1952 hommage to Henri Hayden. Petrarch: Beckett quotes the last line of sonnet 170 on a postcard to Anne Atik of 1959, the same line he had quoted in a letter to A. J. Leventhal in 1958. Marginalia from vol. 2 of the 1824 Petrarch: 268 – notes the rhymes; 270 – “P left sad but free”; 277 – line 3 – “l’alma triste (fear and pain)”; 289 – “Laura as corrective to desire (merde)”; 279, penultimate line – “the dry vein in my old genius (wow!)”. For the Trionfi, see Appendix A above and Ferrini’s essay in the Bibliography below. Manzoni: Il Cinque Maggio, an ode on the death of Napoleon at Saint Helena, is mentioned in the story “Dante and the Lobster”, probably first written in 1930 (see the Napoleon material at the head of the “Dream” notebook), and I Promessi Sposi flickers briefly into view at the Frica’s party in Dream, and later in “A Wet Night” in More Pricks Than Kicks. Reading the first chapter of Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich prompted Beckett to write: “The movement reminds me of Manzoni” (as novelist presumably) in his German Diary for 28 December 1936.



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Others: Carducci’s “Satan” is damned as a “pharisee poem” in the 1934 review of Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems (“Humanistic Quietism”, in Cohn 1983, pp. 68-69). Beckett links Carducci to Barrès in an undated letter to MacGreevy of mid-to-late July 1930. Fracastoro’s Latin poem Sifilide is mentioned in a letter to MacGreevy of 6 February 1936. The “baci saporiti” of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 45 are almost certainly an Italianisation of Rousseau’s Julie, rather than directly from Guarini (see my edition of the “Dream” notebook [item 331]), even though Beckett did actually re-read Guarini nearly ten years after studying him at TCD (letter to MacGreevy of 26 July 1936). The syllabus authors Fogazzaro and Sannazaro seem to have made no impression on Beckett, assuming he even chose to read them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Letters to Thomas MacGreevy (TCD). Letters to A. J. Leventhal (HRHRC). German Diaries (RUL). “Ex Cathezra”, 1934, in Ruby Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London, pp. 77-79. “Humanistic Quietism”, 1934, in Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjecta cit., pp. 68-69. “Papini’s Dante”, in Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjecta cit., pp. 80-81. Murphy, 1938, John Calder, London 1963. How It Is, 1964, John Calder, London. Translations of texts by Eugenio Montale (“Delta”), Raffaello Franchi (“Landscape”) and Giovanni Comisso (“The Home-Coming”), This Quarter, II, April-May-June 1930, p. 630, p. 672, pp. 675-683. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London.


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Criticism Alfano, Giancarlo, and Andrea Cortellessa (a cura di), 2006, Tegole dal cielo: la letteratura italiana nell’opera di Beckett, Antalia/Edup, Roma. Bouchard, Norma, 2008, “Recovering Beckett’s Italian Translations”, Journal of Beckett Studies (n.s.), XV, 1 & 2, 2008, pp. 145-159. Burckhardt, Jacob, 1860, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, Phaidon Press, Oxford & London 1945, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore). Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Doran, Eva, 1981, “Au seuil de Beckett: quelques notes sur ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’”, in Stanford French Review, 5:1, 1981, pp. 121-127. Engelberts, Matthijs, Everett Frost, and Jane Maxwell (editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI. Ferrini, Jean-Pierre, 2006, “Dante, Pétrarque, Leopardi, Beckett: une divine perspective”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, XVII, 2006, pp. 53-66. Pilling, John, 2006, “‘For Interpolation’: Beckett and English Literature”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, XVI, 2006, pp. 203-237. Sonzogni, Marco, 2006, “Debiti e doni della tradizione poetica: Montale tra T.S. Eliot e Beckett”, in Alfano and Cortellessa (a cura di), 2006, Tegole dal cielo cit., pp. 139-165. Idem, 2005, “Più Joyce che Montale”, a section (pp. 189-195) of an essay in The Italianist, 25: 2, 2005, pp. 173-208. Verdicchio, Massimo, 1989, “Exagmination Round the Factification of Vico and Joyce”, in James Joyce Quarterly, 26:4, 1989, pp. 531-539. Visconti, Laura, 1997, “The Artist and the Artisan”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines / L’oeuvre carrefour / L’oeuvre limite), VI, 1997, pp. 387-398. (The Italian original, “L’artista e il traduttore”, in Archetipi beckettiani, Edizioni Tracce, Pescara 1990, pp. 39-58.)

Other works cited Alfieri, Vittorio, 1810, Vita di Vittorio Alfieri da Asti, scritta da esso (Memoirs, the anonymous translation of 1810 revised by E. R. Vincent, Oxford University Press, London 1961).



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Aretino, Pietro, Letters and Sonnets, Covici, Friede, New York 1928, trans. Samuel Putnam. Croce, Benedetto, 1920, Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille (Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille, Henry Holt and Company, New York, trans. Douglas Ainslie, 1920). De Sanctis, Francesco, 1870-1871, Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, Basic Books, New York 1931, 1968, trans. Joan Redfern). Dublin University Calendar, 1923-1927. Symonds, John Addington, 1914, The Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (Italian Literature I & II), John Murray, London.


The Politics of Reading Dante in Beckett’s Mercier and / et Camier and “The Calmative” / “Le calmant” Daniela Caselli

Samuel Barclay Beckett wrote an essay on Giosuè Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1927 while studying Modern Languages (French and Italian) at Trinity College Dublin, possibly in preparation for the moderatorship exam taken in October of the same year (TCD MS 10965a, fol. 1; Frost 2006, p. 61)1. Beckett’s fluent Italian tells us that that D’Annunzio’s entire œuvre is marred by a strenuous and continuous attempt to dazzle which ends up being overwhelming for the reader, while inclining towards the classical sense of proportions characterising Carducci’s disciplined poetry. In this college essay healthy Carducci seems – if somehow begrudgingly – to have the better over the revoltingly decadent D’Annunzio; Carducci’s victory will be, however, short-lived. Judging from a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett’s vehement aversion towards D’Annunzio persisted after his student years; however, in another letter to the same friend (probably written in the summer or autumn of 1930) Beckett describes himself as the kind of person interested in Leopardi and Proust rather than in Carducci and Barrès (Frost, 2006, pp. 58 and 167; Knowlson, 1996, pp. 117-118 and 721 n. 125)2. In the same notebook conSamuel Beckett, TCD MS 10965a, fol. 3. According to Everett Frost, Giosuè Carducci, Antologia carducciana. Poesie e prose, scelte e commentate da Guido Mazzoni e Giuseppe Picciola, Zanichelli, Bologna 19247 and Gabriele D’Annunzio, Prose scelte di Gabriele D’Annunzio, Fratelli Treves, Milano 1919 were listed on the reading for that year (see Frost 2006, p. 61). 2 Frost also tells us that Hauvette’s Littérature italienne was a required text for examinations in Italian at Trinity College Dublin and that Beckett’s notes on Carducci derive in part from it (see TCD MS 10965). Leopardi does not appear on the Trinity exam lists during Beckett’s undergraduate years there. 1


D. Caselli. The Politics of Reading Dante

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taining the essay, moreover, Beckett comments scathingly on Carducci’s assertions of being “tempted” to write another two poems on Assisi and St. Francis, seeing this as the mark of a “verse manufacturer” rather than a poet3. Beckett ironises upon this attitude through an unlikely simile with Leopardi (who for Beckett could never be “tempted” to write poetry) and Shelley, who could hardly be imagined rummaging the rag bag of his poetic memory to find a rhyme for “Euganean” while busy writing about the Lombard plain (TCD MS 10965, fol. 30). A few years later, in the This Quarter version (1932) of “Dante and the Lobster”, Carducci will be finally disposed of as an “intolerable old bitch” (“Dante and the Lobster”, 1932, p. 230). By defining himself through Proust and Leopardi, and even by writing (as he had to) college essays on Machiavelli and Ariosto (TCD, MS 10962) or Carducci and D’Annunzio, Beckett indicates an early preoccupation with comparativism (which nevertheless never became a purely academic interest for him). Most importantly, these essays – together with his college notes and the anthologies of Italian and French literature figuring on contemporary reading lists – highlight how comparativism is a practice which has been struggling for almost a century to establish literary parallels without collapsing them into mere value judgements. To keep the balance between analysis and evaluation in comparative readings is still a challenge today, as can be observed in the critical output on the relationship between Dante and Beckett4. In Beckett studies, Beckett is often seen as able to generate endlessly complex meanings in opposition to a Dante still firmly set in his rigid theological scaffolding. This critically condescending attitude towards history is frequently matched by a similar attitude in Dante studies; here, Dante’s greatness is only imperfectly reflected in Beckett’s (and others’) twentieth-century dabbling in literature. In comparativism, then, the first challenge is the stability of the object of investigation, or, to put it in a slightly less theoretically hygienic language, the problem for the critic is how to sustain the tension derived from leaving both œuvres potentially open to in3 4

Samuel Beckett, TCD MS 10965, fol. 30. Caselli 2005, pp. 1-9.


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terpretation and meaning-generating activities without falling into a falsely liberating faith in endless multiplicity. The second challenge, closely linked to the first one, is how to claim the visibility or invisibility of a presence (in our instance, Dante in Beckett). This is a problem that Beckett’s works constantly strive with, as recorded both in the impatient “Basta!” used in the 1929 essay “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” to put a stop to the attempted demonstration of the Italians’ presence in Joyce (“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 29), and in Mercier and Camier’s ominous sensing “vague shadowy shapes” everywhere (Mercier and Camier, p. 19). Intertextual elements alternately figure themselves as frustratingly obvious presences and dispiritingly elusive shades. I propose to think comparatively about Beckett and Dante by turning the question of Beckett’s retrospective fidelity – or lack of fidelity – to Dante (or even Dante’s anticipatory fidelity to Beckett) into a political exploration of how authority circulates in the two œuvres. By reflecting on what is critically at stake in quantifying presence and retrieving authorial intentions we can finally analyse, from a critical distance that needs not prevent us from emotional engagement, how authority is produced and circulated in Beckett. I intend to revisit here some points made in my longer study of Dante’s presence in Beckett (Caselli 2005, pp. 1-10) and to underline the core political dimension of my method by way of two case studies. “Sensing vague shadowy shapes” The first fifteen sections of the so-called Whoroscope notebook (RUL MS 3000) compare the two pseudo-characters H. and X. to the pseudo-couple Dante and Virgil, indicated in the manuscript as D. and V. Section eight, in particular, establishes a most puzzling parallel between Dante and the unnamed future novel, usually identified as Murphy: Choose “layers” carefully, on some such principle as that of V.’s distribution of sins and punishments. But keep whole Dantesque analogy out of sight. [three lines erased]5 5 I correct here my previous reading of the manuscript (Caselli 2005, p. 82) in the light of Matthew Feldman’s recent reinterpretation (Feldman 2006, p. 64).



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What does it mean to read a text that simultaneously incites us to see and not to see Dante? And what does it mean to engage with a text that provokes us through prohibition to look for Dante in another book (a Murphy which is not yet Murphy) to which these notes gesture? The Whoroscope notebook provides answers insofar as it indicates that the role of Dante in Beckett is always suspended between being a “vague shadowy shape” and “being there”, as we can observe in Mercier et / and Camier and “Le calmant” / “The Calmative”. Written in French in 1946, Mercier et Camier was published only in 1970, while the self-translated Mercier and Camier appeared in print in 1974. The opening sentence of the novel, in which the narrator claims that he “was with them all the time”, sets up a third party which allows the couple to exist as such; as T.S. Eliot would put it in The Waste Land, in this novel there is always “another one walking beside you / Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded” (Eliot 1922 [2002, p. 25]). Mercier and Camier are constantly under the “strange impression” that they “are not alone” but that there is something “like the presence of a third party [...] enveloping us”, and, as Mercier puts it, he is “anything but psychic” (Mercier and Camier, p. 100). Among the various strange impressions which increasingly bother the protagonists are: the unnamed “gentleman wearing [...] a simple frock-coat and top-hat” (p. 25); the “old man of weird and wretched aspect, carrying under his arm what looked like a board folded in two” (pp. 75-76); and the “ragged shaggy old man plodding along beside a donkey” (p. 77). The last two are images shared with the story “The End” / “La fin” (“The End”, p. 67 and 58; “La fin”, pp. 112-113 and 97). Moreover, Mercier’s memory of having seen the old man somewhere before is followed by that of the old man himself, who “busied himself for a space with trying to recall in what circumstances” he had seen Mercier before (Mercier and Camier, p. 76), thus shaping a textual memory which prevents the Beckett texts from being placed in a relation of linear temporal progression. These occurrences shape a web of intra- and intertextual relations that constitute the Beckett œuvre as strangely familiar. Dante is part of this negotiation of authority and control through intra- and intertextual references, as the following passages illustrate:


Beckett and Italy

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Oui, dit Camier [...]. Tu n’ignores pas cependant ce que nous avons arrêté à ce sujet: pas de récits de rêve, sous aucun prétexte. Une convention analogue nous interdit les citations. Lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore, dit Mercier, est-ce une citation? Lo bello quoi? dit Camier. Lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore, dit Mercier. Comment veux-tu que je sache? dit Camier. Ça m’en a tout l’air. Pourquoi? Ce sont des mots qui me bruissent dans la tête depuis hier, dit Mercier, et me brûlent les lèvres. Tu me dégoûtes, Mercier, dit Camier. Nous prenons certaines précautions afin d’être le mieux possible, le moins mal possible, et c’est exactement comme si on fonçait à l’aveuglette, tête baissée. Il se leva. Te sens-tu la force de bouger? dit-il. (Mercier et Camier, pp. 99-100)

The English version reads: Yes, said Camier [...] And yet you know our covenant: no communication of dreams on any account. The same holds for quotes. No dreams or quotes at any price. He got up. Do you feel strong enough to move? he said. (Mercier and Camier, pp. 61-62)

The quotation in the French comes from Inferno I, 87, when Dante recognises Virgil: “Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?”, rispuos’io lui con vergognosa fronte. “O de li altri poeti onore e lume, vagliami ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume. Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore, tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore. (Inferno, I, 79-87; emphasis mine) (“Are you, then, that Virgil, that fount which pours forth so broad a stream of speech?” I answered him, my brow covered with shame. “O glory and light of other poets, may the long study and the great love



25

that have made me search your volume avail me! You are my master and my author. You alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor.” [emphasis mine])6

Mercier and Camier are reported as discussing the “convention” and the “covenant” which rules in their relationship and which forbids quotations and “the communication of dreams”. But in the French text, while expressing this unmotivated convention, they wonder about the ‘nature’ of a quotation. Can the line in Mercier’s head, which describes Dante recognising Virgil as his auctoritas, be defined as a quotation? Can this internal buzzing, connected to the words burning Mercier’s lips, be seen as something external? The interrogatives on the limit of what is internal and what external to the text revolve around these lines from the Comedy. Virgil’s role as an auctoritas within Dante’s text fashions Dante as an auctoritas in Beckett’s text. The line refers to Dante’s “beautiful” or “fair” style, which has “honoured” him. In Inferno I, Dante characterises his own “beautiful style” as coming from Virgil, the “source”. The style described as “beautiful” is Dante’s style before becoming the author of the comedìa, his “sacrato poema” (sacred poem). Seen from the perspective of the finished text, Dante’s attribution of authority to Virgil also works to distance his “poema sacro” from Virgil’s tragedy7. In Paradiso XXX, Dante “makes it clear that the usual distinctions between comedìa and tragedìa are irrelevant” (Barolini 1984, p. 272) in the following lines: Da questo passo vinto mi concedo più che già mai da punto di suo tema soprato fosse comico o tragedo (Paradiso, XXX, 22-24) (“At this pass I concede myself defeated more than ever comic or tragic poet was defeated by a point in his theme.”) All translations used here are by Singleton 1973, 3 vols. I refer to Virgil’s epic poem as “tragedy” following the Comedy, which juxtaposes “alta tragedìa” to “bassa comedìa” (Inferno XX and XVI). For a discussion of how Dante connects “alta tragedìa” with “menzogna” (“lie”), see Barolini 1992, pp. 59, 76, 79 and note 17, p. 293. 6 7


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Beckett and Italy

This passage, the first line of which is (mis)quoted in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, also appears in the Dream notebook (RUL MS 5000). The evocation of the distinctions between “comico” and “tragedo” underscores Dante’s belief that while other poets (either writing in the comic or in the tragic genre) could not attempt such a description, he could go beyond genres: “the paradox of the method [...] corresponds to the paradox of the genre that surpasses and eliminates genre: the comedìa that is higher than the highest tragedìa” (Barolini 1984, pp. 272-273). Further, the category of beautiful is associated with mortality, and opposed to truth, of which the poet is the scribe, and therefore the ultimate guarantor. In this sense, the highest recognition of Virgil’s authority and the clearest inscription of his auctoritas in the text is also the basis of Dante’s own authority. Dante’s admission that his beautiful style, which “has done him honour”, comes from Virgil, is also a manoeuvre that distances it from the “true” style of the Comedy, which will allow the “difficult poet” to go back to Florence and get the “bay about [his] brow” (Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 141). Mercier et Camier contradicts the characters’ asserted “convention” of not using quotations by quoting Dante in the original. While forbidding the presence of authorities, the text not only inscribes the presence of Dante, but also that of Virgil and of that “Mr Beckett”, which is encountered in Dream of Fair to Middling Women with his “bay about [his] brow”. By reproducing a passage where Dante seems to deny his own originality in favour of his auctoritas – but which in fact is the prelude to the birth of Dante the scribe of God, the true poet – the text constructs a very visible authority while denying it the status of quotation. The context creates the maximum visibility for a quotation, given in the Italian, and by the discussion of its status as quotation. At the same time, the characters deny the authority of the quotation: Camier’s remark “lo bello quoi?” works as an ironic denial of Dante’s beautiful style, and Mercier’s uncertainty regarding the source of “des mots qui [lui] bruissent dans la tête” works as a denial of originality while also questioning the opposition between a within and without the text (made even more unstable by the lack of the Dante quotation in the English text). Dante’s line is described as something that both buzzes in the head and burns the lips. If the first description is a denial of originality, it is also a further confirmation of that originali-



27

ty. The buzzing of the words in the head seems to indicate the pervasive and unavoidable character of these words; like the “murmurs” that can be heard better in the dark, these buzzing words are part of the character’s “skullscape”. To utter them is painful: the lips get scalded. The memory of the source has been lost, the auctor has become part of the words within the head; however, his words still “stink” of quotation. The English text has none of the Dante material in it, and reads: “No dreams or quotes at any price” (Mercier and Camier, p. 62). This sentence works as a commentary on a passage that has been omitted, therefore alluding to how the relationship between the two texts is under the author’s control. Camier’s words comment on the absence of Dante while reinforcing the presence of the author, who at once institutes and disobeys a prohibition. The prohibition is phrased in terms of “price”, which can be read as a further allusion to the notion of the alleged added value that the presence of an auctoritas gives to the text. Dante in the English text is, thus, present under erasure. The Dantean allusions scattered in Mercier et / and Camier illuminate a barely visible substrate, partially effaced by a second writing. However, the first layer, which seems to add value to the journey of the two characters, is, in turn, shown to be dependent upon a further authority, a further layer. The text creates its own potentially endless genealogy: Dante has “taken away” his “fair style” from Virgil, Beckett from Dante, and so on. Rather than lending itself to a Bloomian reading, this endless genealogy exposes, however, the price of quoting, foregrounds the act of telling the story, and undermines the notion of originality. The text sabotages strong misreadings, painstakingly argues that it is impossible to simply report events, and regards as impossible the existence of an upper layer, of a beautiful lie that simply acts as surface. Mercier et / and Camier constantly fabricates ideas of depth, strata of authority constructed by other authorities, strange impressions of déjà-vu, also by having Dante migrating from one text to the other. Sometimes allusions to Dante are repeated in Beckett’s self-translated version; alternatively, the quotations from Dante are erased and this erasure is commented upon; other times still, some allusions are replaced with different ones, always from the Comedy. These shifts contribute intratextually to the construction of the au-


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Beckett and Italy

thor Samuel Beckett and make each of the two versions part of a process of self-commentary, which is present also in the Nouvelles / Novellas (alternatively called Stories). Faintness, hoarseness, and other Dantean complaints Especially from “Le calmant” / “The Calmative” onward, the distinctions between narrator and characters are gradually collapsed by the interplay of invention and memory, which questions the conceptual possibility of opposing memory as repetition to invention as originality. Dante is part of this oscillation between memory and invention, invisible presence and visible absence. Dante is a fragment of the unavoidable intratextual memory, which cannot be reduced to simple and reassuringly self-identical repetition. In “Le calmant” / “The Calmative” another kind of Dantean speechlessness from the one seen in Mercier et / and Camier is alluded to as a comforting memory, connected with the oscillation between silence and speech8. The only passage in “Le calmant” / “The Calmative” that explicitly refers to the Comedy reads: I resolved to speak to him. So I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended. But it was nothing, mere speechlessness due to long silence, as in the wood that darkens the mouth of hell, do you remember, I only just. (“The Calmative”, p. 33) Je préparai donc ma phrase et ouvris la bouche, croyant que j’allais l’entendre, mais je n’entendis qu’une sorte de râle, inintelligible même pour moi qui connaissais mes intentions. Mais ce n’était rien, rien que l’aphonie due au long silence, comme dans le bosquet où s’ouvrent les enfers, vous rappelez-vous, moi tout juste. (“Le calmant”, p. 53)

This passage leads us back to Inferno, I, 61-63, in which Dante encounters Virgil for the first time: 8 See also Ferrini 2003, pp. 201-212; Ferrini’s reading is indebted to Kelly Anspaugh’s view of “The Calmative” as a subversion of the Comedy (Anspaugh 1996, pp. 30-41).



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Mentre ch’i’ rovinava in basso loco, dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu offerto chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco. (“While I was ruining down to the depth there appeared before me one who seemed faint through long silence.”)

The passage is also quoted in the Whoroscope notebook: hoarse from long silence: Virgil to Dante (Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco: Inf. I)

The translation adopted in the notebook interprets “fioco” in its acoustic sense9. By rendering it as “hoarse”, the ambivalent dimension of “fioco” as both an acoustic and a visual adjective is lost, and the passage indicates Virgil’s difficulties in speaking after a long silence. In the critical tradition of the Comedy, “che per lungo silenzio parea fioco” is usually interpreted as an “acoustic metaphor”, as a translation of “a phonic emotion into a visual one” to indicate a blurred image, surfacing from the surrounding darkness as if from a long absence10. The ghost-like appearance of Virgil is translated into the image of the threshold between speechlessness and voice. In “Le calmant” / “The Calmative” the allusion to the Dantean episode seems to work as the soothing promise of repetition. The Comedy is a memory, shared by the I and the you, able to neutralise the threat of speechlessness and estrangement through the image of a dialogue marking the beginning of a story. The text foregrounds its own allusiveness through the narratee, a you to whom the question of memory is posed. The remarks “do you remember, I only just”, “vous rappelez-vous, moi tout juste” blur the limit between narrator and author and between narratee and reader; the English version re-creates the am9 A number of English translations of the Comedy render “fioco” by “hoarse”. However, this is not the case with Cary’s translation, owned by Beckett, which reads: “I fell, my ken discern’d the form of one / Whose voice seem’d faint through long disuse of speech” (Cary 1869, p. 16). The phrase “per lungo silenzio parea fioco” follows Virgil’s allegorical description in TCD MS 10963, fol. 2. 10 See Sermonti 1988, p. 9; Getto 1967, p. 12; Giannantonio 1986; Pasquini and Quaglio 1987.


30

Beckett and Italy

biguity of ‘faint’ by using ‘just’, which is not present in the French ‘juste’, playing instead on the possible association of ‘mot juste’. The reference to the Comedy as a memory shared by the I and the you has an effect similar to that described in relation to Mercier et / and Camier: it “overstep[s ...] a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (Genette 1980, p. 236; author’s emphasis). In the allusion the Comedy is an external, calmative text, able to convince the ‘you’ that this silence is nothing to worry about. This memory is “only just” remembered, and therefore cannot be a perfect repetition; it has lost its power of re-integrating the estranged self. The allusion is consistent with the whole text, which is a story that the ‘I’ tells to calm himself, to fight the estrangement felt “listen[ing] to [him]self rot” (“The Calmative”, p. 27). This estrangement reappears in the “rattle”, which makes the subject face his own unintelligibility. The crumbling of the “marshalled words” seems to indicate the crumbling of the subject as the product of his intentions (“even to me who knew what was intended”). The allusion works as a temporary reassurance that the discrepancy indicated by speechlessness is “nothing”, nothing to worry about, “mere speechlessness”, “aphonie”, similar to Virgil’s “speechlessness” / “aphonie” / “hoarseness”, which is just the prelude of a long soothing story. However, uttering the words is not the beginning of a calming experience of integration for the subject: “The words were hardly out of my mouth when for shame I covered my face” (“The Calmative”, p. 34), “Cette phrase à peine prononcée, de honte je me couvris le visage” (“Le calmant”, p. 54). Even when the words do come out according to the intentions of the speaker, who cannot recognise himself in them, estrangement is experienced. This is indicated also by the different uses of “mouth” in the English text, in which the speechlessness of the mouth of hell is echoed in the ingestion of the sweet, in the shame caused by the words out of the I’s mouth, and in the pity he feels towards the “little unfortunate at the mouth of life”11. The “mouth” of hell cannot guarantee the reassuring expe11 “I took it eagerly and put it in my mouth, the old gesture came back to me” (Mercier and Camier, p. 33). In the French the word “bouche” is not repeated: “les enfers” “s’ouvrent”, the “bonbon” is put “dans [ma] bouche”, the



31

rience of the repetition of a beginning; the words uttered from the mouth of the I increase, rather than soothe, his estrangement. In this passage we can see how Dante is evoked as a calming memory, as repetition, predictability and progression, as common ground shared by narrator and narratee. However, the repetition cannot be the simple reproduction of the identical: the memory is fading, and the calming power of the “mouth of hell” is contrasted with the estrangement of the mouth of life. Dante’s shadowy presence can also barely be detected in the reference to the I’s shadow: My shadow, one of my shadows, flew before me, dwindled, slid under my feet, trailed behind me the way shadows will. This degree of opacity appeared to me conclusive. (“The Calmative”, p. 39) Mon ombre, une de mes ombres, s’élançait devant moi, se raccourcissait, glissait sous mes pieds, prenait ma suite, à la manière des ombres. Que je fusse à ce degré opaque me semblait concluant. (“Le calmant”, p. 63)

Although neither of the versions specifies what the conclusions of this “conclusive” phenomenon are, the French version refers more clearly to the Purgatorial motif of the purging shadows, inferring that Dante is alive because he casts a shadow. There are many examples from the Purgatorio in which the shadow is a proof of Dante being alive, thus different from the purging shadows. In Mercier et Camier we also encounter a “sorte d’ombre de Sordel, mais sans y croire, enfin sans y croire assez pour pouvoir se jeter dans ses bras” (Mercier et Camier, p. 184). In The Unnamable the ‘I’ says: “I wondered if [I] cast a shadow” (The Unnamable, p. 268), and “For sometimes I confuse myself with my shadow and sometimes don’t” (p. 312), and again “my shadow at evening will not darken the ground” (p. 317). In Dream the Smeraldina-Rima is described through a simile with Sordello, described as “the troubadour of great renown”, whose spirit casts “phrase” is “prononcée”, and the boy is “à l’orée de la vie” (“Le calmant”, pp. 53-54). For a discussion of the use of “mouth” in Beckett, with some references to Dante’s Bocca degli Abati in Inferno XXXII, see Elam 1997, pp. 165-179.


Beckett and Italy

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“no shade, herself shade” (Dream, p. 23). Purgatorio, III, 88-93 and Purgatorio, V, 1-9 can be helpful examples to show the relevance of Dante’s “opacity” in the canticle: Come color dinanzi vider rotta la luce in terra dal mio destro canto, sì che l’ombra era da me a la grotta, restaro, e trasser sé in dietro alquanto, e tutti li altri che venieno appresso, non sappiendo ’l perché, fenno altrettanto. (“When those in front of me saw the light broken on the ground at my right side, so that my shadow was from me to the cliff, they halted and drew back somewhat; and all the other that came after did the same, not knowing why.”) Io era già da quell’ombre partito, e seguitava l’orme del mio duca, quando di retro a me, drizzando ’l dito, una gridò: “Ve’ che non par che luca lo raggio da sinistra a quel di sotto, e come vivo par che si conduca!” Li occhi rivolsi al suon di questo motto, e vidile guardar per maraviglia pur me, pur me, e ’l lume ch’era rotto. (“I had now parted from those shades and was following in the steps of my leader, when one behind me, pointing his finger, cried, ‘See, the rays do not seem to shine on the left of him below, and he seems to bear himself like one who is alive!’ I turned my eyes at the sound of these words, and saw them gazing in astonishment at me alone, and the light that was broken.”)

Furthermore, in the first of the “Three Dante postcards” lines 19-21, 26, and 37 of Purgatorio III are reproduced, preceded by the statement: “Dante’s shadow, Virgil transparent. Seeing only one on ground D thinks V gone” (RUL MS 4123). Dante’s faint voice, ruined from long silence, his barely audible speechlessness which is also a scarcely visible, ghostly presence in the Beckett œuvre can alert us to the political uses of this model of reading intertextually. I hope that these examples have shown how



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this residual Dante, important because and not in spite of his marginality, is a Dante that demands a lot of work to be seen or heard, and a Dante that can help us remember how “In an ‘image-ridden culture’, in which nothing is immune from the grip of commodity aesthetics, the critically minimal – always in danger of becoming just another style option, a term for interior designers – must be laboured for again and again” (Cunningham 2005, p. 116).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett “Dante and the Lobster”, 1932, in This Quarter, V, December 1932, 1-2, pp. 222-236. “La fin”, 1946, in Nouvelles et textes pour rien, 1955, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, pp. 77-123. “The End”, 1954, in Stories and Texts for Nothing, 1967, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, pp. 47-72. “Le calmant”, 1955, in Nouvelles et textes pour rien, cit., pp. 41-75. Nouvelles et textes pour rien, 1955, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. The Unnamable, 1958, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, 1959, Pan Books, London 1979, 265382. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), 1959, Pan Books, London 1979. “The Calmative”, 1967, in Stories and Texts for Nothing, cit., pp. 2746. Stories and Texts for Nothing, 1967, Grove Weidenfeld, New York. Mercier et Camier, 1970, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Mercier and Camier, 1974, Grove Weidenfeld, New York. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 1992, Arcade, New York 1993. Whoroscope notebook, RUL MS 3000. Dream notebook, RUL MS 5000. RUL MS 4123. TCD MS 10965. TCD MS 10965a. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.


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Works by Dante Alighieri Alighieri, Dante, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, a cura di Giorgio Petrocchi, Mondadori, Milano 1966-1967. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, translated with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., Princeton University Press, Princeton 1973. Alighieri, Dante, The Vision. Or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, Bell and Daldy, London 1869. Pasquini, Emilio and Antonio Quaglio (a cura di), 1987, Commedia, Garzanti, Milano. Sermonti, Vittorio, 1988, L’Inferno di Dante, Rizzoli, Milano.

Criticism Alfano, Giancarlo, and Andrea Cortellessa (a cura di), 2006, Tegole dal cielo. L’effetto Beckett nella cultura italiana, 2 vols., Edup, Roma. Anspaugh, Kelly, 1996, “The Partially Purged: Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Calmative’ as Anti-Comedy”, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, XXII, 1996, 1, pp. 30-41. Barolini, Teodolinda, 1984, Dante’s Poets. Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy”, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Idem, 1992, The Undivine Comedy. Detheologizing Dante, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes. Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Cavecchi, Mariacristina, and Caroline Patey (a cura di), 2007, Tra le lingue tra i linguaggi. Cent’anni di Samuel Beckett, Cisalpino, Milano. Cunningham, David, “Ascetism Against Colour, or Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of Beckett”, in New Formations, 55 (Spring 2005), pp. 104-119. Elam, Keir, 1997, “World’s End: West Brompton, Turdy and Other Godforsaken Holes”, in Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines / L’œuvre carrefour / l’œuvre limite), VI, 1997, pp. 165-179. Feldman, Matthew, 2006, Beckett’s Books, Continuum, London. Ferrini, Jean-Pierre, 2003, “À partir du désert. Dante et l’aphonie de Virgile dans ‘Le calmant’ de Samuel Beckett”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Three Dialogues Revisited / Les Trois Dialogues revisités), XIII, 2003, pp. 201-212.



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Frasca, Gabriele, 1985, “Dante in Beckett”, in Esperienze letterarie, X, 1985, 4, pp. 37-55 [repr. in Cascando. Tre Studi su Samuel Beckett. Liguori, Napoli 1988; revised version in Alfano and Cortellessa (a cura di), 2006, Tegole dal cielo cit., vol. 2, pp. 21-90]. Frost, Everett, 2006, “Catalogue of ‘Notes Diverse[s] Holo[graph]’”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays), XVI, 2006, pp. 19-173. Genette, Gérard, 1972, “Discours du récit”, in Figures 3, Édition du Seuil, Paris 1972, pp. 71-273 (Narrative Discourse, Blackwell, Oxford 1980, trans. Jane E. Lewin). Getto, Giovanni, 1967, “Inferno I”, in Lectura Dantis Scaligera. Inferno, Le Monnier, Firenze. Giannantonio, Pompeo, 1986, “Inferno I”, in Idem (a cura di), Lectura Dantis Neapolitana, Loffredo, Napoli. Inglese, Andrea, and Chiara Montini (a cura di), 2006, Testo a fronte. Per il centenario di Samuel Beckett, XXXV, 2006, 17. Levy, Eric P., 1980, Samuel Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of His Prose, Barnes and Noble, Totowa.

Other works cited Carducci, Giosuè, 1907, Antologia carducciana. Poesie e prose, a cura di Guido Mazzoni e Giuseppe Picciola, Zanichelli, Bologna 19247. D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 1906, Prose scelte di Gabriele D’Annunzio, Fratelli Treves Editori, Milano 1919. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 1922, The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot. Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber and Faber, London 2002.



Self-Translation, and the Genesis of Beckett’s Writing



Bilingualism and Bi-textuality: Samuel Beckett’s Double Texts Rossana M. Sebellin

A chacun son petit enfer.1

1. Translation and self-translation The field of Translation Studies has considered only very marginally the phenomenon of self translation, preferring to keep the debate within the area of the more frequent case of a text being translated by someone else, often a long time later. This is of course necessary when establishing the areas and competence of a relatively young discipline, as is the case with Translation Studies: self-translation as a literary phenomenon is quite rare and poses specific problems which can seldom be generalized or applied to the discipline in general. In the first place there is the problem of interpretation: any act of translation, being in the beginning an act of reading, is intrinsically linked to the process of interpretation, as the translator “is, after all, first a reader and then a writer and in the process of reading he or she must take a position” (Bassnett 1980, p. 81; see also Eco 2003). Of course, in our post-modern epoch, after the theories of polysystems and semiotic studies, we cannot claim that the author’s interpretation of his own work is the only correct, let alone the only possible one. But we generally assume that an author knows what he meant when he wrote a certain sentence, and we usually recognize that intention, even if the text is otherwise ambiguous. For this reason, the author’s self-translation is at least 1 Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 7 November 1962 (in Harmon 1998, p. 131).


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to be considered correct. This seems to be an obvious point, until one starts seeing the mistakes that invariably seep into even the best of published translations. A second important point is the one connected with ageing. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single text, in possession of good literary fame (and translation), must be in want of an update. At least every few decades. In the case of theatrical texts this happens even more often. As Susan Bassnett points out, theatrical translation is, quite often, an adaptation for the staging of a foreign text; it is not meant to be divulged and has generally no literary ambition. It is sometimes not even published, but it circulates strictly as a script. In this last instance, we may have many translations of the same text, even without a wide chronological gap between them. It is of course also universally acknowledged that Beckett’s texts do not need any updating as far as the literary translation goes: there is no need for a newer or better version of Waiting for Godot, nor one for Oh les beaux jours and so on. This of course leads us on to a topic very closely connected with this, which in fact produces the phenomenon of ageing: it is the problem of authority. This issue has been long debated in the field of Translation Studies, and also questioned over the years, especially within the specific field of gender and post colonial studies. In the history of translation, authorship has always been intrinsically and ontologically linked with authority, thus any translation derives its partial and always secondary/derivative authority from the ‘original’ text, this relation often seen in terms of fidelity/infidelity in a marriage metaphor (where author-text stand for the husband and translation is the wife, who can be beautiful and unfaithful or faithful but plain). Of course in the case of Beckett, since he is both author and translator, there is no contradiction or opposition between text and translation, the fidelity being guaranteed by the author, who is – by definition – the sole depository of authority. Moreover, the author’s fidelity goes towards his own creative impulse, which is a complex, fluid and developing force, not simply towards his text as it is fixed on the page. In his introduction to the translation into Italian of the Joycean Anna Livia Plurabelle, Eco writes: Ma quando il traduttore è l’autore [...] ecco che questo autore può tradurre cercando di rimanere fedele non al suo testo così come si è


R.M. Sebellin. Bilingualism and Bi-textuality

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depositato nella lingua di origine, ma alla sua poetica, che avrebbe potuto dare origine (e di fatto la dà) a un altro testo che ne rappresenti la realizzazione inedita in altra lingua. (Eco 1996, p. XVII) [But when the translator is the author [...] this author can translate trying to be faithful not to text as it is fixed in the original language, but to his/her poetics, which could have originated (and in fact originates) another text which represents its new realisation in another language2.]

In this sense, the author’s self-translation can be considered as a variation of the original text, its development, its update. From this point of view, the translated text not only ceases to be secondary or derivative, but it becomes the more authoritative as it is the most recent, the latest version. It has already been noticed that many of Beckett’s alterations in his translations derive from their impact with the stage: the second versions thus improving, often reverberating on the ‘original’ at a later date. The cases of “Play” / “Comédie” and Not I / Pas moi do not belong to this scenario since “Comédie” was written-translated before “Play” was completed and the French text influenced the English one. Not I, on the other hand, was translated after the première in English (November 1972, translation begun 1973, ended in 1974). 2. Creativity as translation At this point it may be useful to quote the famous passage Beckett wrote about Proust: Now he sees his regretted failure to observe artistically as a series of ‘inspired omissions’ and the work of art as neither created nor chosen, but discovered, uncovered, excavated, pre-existing within the artist, a law of his nature. [...] The artist has acquired his text: the artisan translates it. ‘The duty and the task of a writer (not an artist, a writer) are those of a translator.’ (Proust, p. 64) 2

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.


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As Derrida says, the so called ‘original’ text is in itself the elaboration of an idea, therefore in itself a sort of translation. The actual text is thus the translation of something more indefinite, more elusive and deep. Differences in self-translated texts are, from this standpoint, not only admissible, but also necessary, as the first text is not the only depository of authority: each text contributes to the creation of a unit which comprises both versions in both languages. As a consequence, when facing a polysemic, ambiguous or ‘untranslatable’ sentence (or expression) the author-translator occupies a privileged position when compared to the translator: he/she can in fact draw from the inner set of images which produced the first text, thus negotiating losses and gains, modifications and cultural declinations from a unique perspective. Self-translation produces twin texts, one the duplication of the other, neither fully independent nor secondary: any debate on whether Beckett’s texts are or are not to be considered translations becomes unnecessary. They are and they are not because the idea of translation is not wide enough to encompass the phenomenon of self-translation which produces a double originality. As Lori Chamberlain points out: Our institutional confusion over Beckett’s linguistic identity testifies to our need to re-examine the critical categories we use to read both the meaning of translation and the texts themselves. Perhaps the problem lies with the very terms “original” and “secondary”, whose binary relationship seems to trap us in a vicious circle. What I propose is a theory of repetition to account both for the poetic production and for the function of translation in that poetic. The advantage of such a theory is that it can account both for the binary pair original/secondary and for the other binary oppositions which haunt our attempts to deal with translation, specifically differences and similarity. In addition, such a theory can do so without reducing the discussion to one or the other term. (Chamberlain 1987, p. 20)

Any Beckettian self-translated text represents the portion of work which is accessible to the readers of a certain language, but the work of art in its integrity would be composed of both versions, never fully overlapping and bearing irreducible inconsistencies produced in re-coding the text from one language and one world into another.



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Thus, when English speaking and French speaking readers (who do not read the same text, but the same work) are perhaps unknowingly faced with discrepancies, the difference “does not itself threaten the integrity of the work as an autonomous aesthetic entity inasmuch as any truly and wholly bilingual work must, of necessity, be comprised of two distinct texts” (Fitch 1987, p. 34). 3. Theatre translation Theatrical translation poses specific problems. The frequent need to update even recent translation testifies to the rapid change language undergoes and also to the requirement that the language spoken on stage should not be perceived as obsolete by the audience. Agostino Lombardo, critic and translator of Shakespeare, used to say that mentre il testo originale è atemporale, la traduzione è sempre nel tempo, e la sua lingua dev’essere sempre contemporanea (e in questo senso nessuna traduzione può veramente durare, se non come documento, oltre un certo numero di anni) perché deve parlare nel tempo, nella storia, a un dato pubblico in un dato periodo [...] e ciò è particolarmente vero nel caso del pubblico d’un teatro[.] (Lombardo 2002, pp. 55-56) [while the original text is atemporal, translation is always in the flow of time, and its language must always be contemporary (and this is why no translation can really last more than a certain number of years, except as a document) because it speaks in time, in history, and addresses a specific audience of a specific period, and this is particularly valid in the case of a theatre audience.]

On the other hand, it should be remembered that some literary theatrical translations, made to be read and not staged, have produced texts that are literally un-performable: repartees too long to be spoken in one breath or too syntactically complex to be intelligible in the flow of stage action. Italian, for example, like other neo-Latin languages, is deemed to be about 20% lengthier than English, thus needing careful consideration of rhythm and playability when translating from English. Such considerations


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(of rhythm, not intelligibility) are apparently very much present in the mind of Beckett as translator from English to French (also part of the neo-Latin linguistic group) as well as playwright. The deictic aspect is also part of the specific characteristics of drama translation, as the linguistic function can change considerably in relation to the extra-linguistic context. The text is only a part (albeit probably the most important) in a performance and it becomes meaningful together with the other visual and auditory elements and in relation to the spatial and temporal perspective. The aspect of cultural declination also plays an important role: the amount of linguistic and cultural estrangement which can be tolerated at the theatre is undoubtedly less than what is acceptable while reading. During a performance, even though intelligibility may not be the main concern of an author, and especially of this author, it is in any case necessary to consider that a certain degree of communication is desirable and a text that is too estranging dooms the play to failure (not in the Beckettian sense). In all these instances (deictic, cultural, rhythmic and so on) Beckett privileges effect rather than correct translation. When rare differences do occur, the author-translator seems to reach back to the atmosphere and situations which triggered the first text rather than trying for a faithful translation as mentioned earlier: the text which stems from the same creative impulse is therefore equally authoritative. 4. “Play” / “Comédie” and Not I / Pas moi 4.1. “Play” / “Comédie” Beckett began the composition of the play in May 1962 and finished it at the end of 1963. The last manuscript is marked as “état définitif”, dated April 1964, though the American première was in January 1964. The translation, as is well known, was begun in early 1963, when the English version was not yet definitive. The two texts develop in a parallel yet relatively autonomous way, thus contributing a further blow to the concept of ‘original’ versus ‘copy’ or ‘derivative’. The two separate categories of ‘creation’ and ‘translation’ appear even less adequate to describe this situation, since the French text (the second one) influenced the English (the first), generating in fact a single, unique bi-frontal



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work clustered with intra- and inter-textual relations so deeply interwoven as to be almost impossible to disentangle. My first working hypothesis deals with the treatment of the neutral pronoun ‘it’, which does not exist in French and imposes a choice with both semantic and connotative consequences: Beckett often opts for an impersonal sentence, thus avoiding disambiguation, as for example in “it will come” which becomes “ça viendra”; or also: “I thought, It is done, it is said” which becomes “Je pensai, C’est fait, c’est dit” (my italics). But this is not always possible, and in fact sometimes the author must disambiguate the neutral, as in this example where the same sentence receives different treatment: “It will come” becomes “Elle viendra”. Of course in this case, if we put the sentence after the preceding one by the same character, we see that this clarification is necessary, as the full sentence goes: “Peace, yes, I suppose, a kind of peace, and all this pain as if... never been. [...] It will come. Must come. There is no future in this” (“Play”, p. 313). In the French text we have: “La paix, oui, sans doute, une manière de paix, et toute cette peine comme si... jamais été. [...] Elle viendra. Doit venir. Ceci est folie” (“Comédie”, p. 22). Of course, if the repartee is read as the monologue it really is, instead of in the syncopated, fragmented mosaic it composes in the text, it becomes easier to recognize grammatical connections. Any bilingual reader shares with the author a privileged position and can resolve ambiguities, recognize altered echoes and intra-textual relations hidden to the reader of the text in only one language. The macroscopic deviation in the translation of the last sentence, when the author translates “There is no future in this” with “Ceci est folie”, appears as an example of cultural translation and also of text being re-written in the second language. The differences between the English and the French text also stem from the use of polite expressions (“vous” vs “tu”, while the English use you and must convey politeness through other means), which the characters sometimes employ while insulting each other, as in the following examples, where the obscenity of the phrase makes a sharp contrast with the formal politeness of the address: “W2: What are you talking about? I said, stitching away. Someone yours? Give up whom? I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch” (“Play”, p. 308), which becomes: “F2: De quoi parlezvous? dis-je, tout en cousant de plus belle. Quelqu’un à vous? Laisser tomber qui? Vous l’avez empesté, hurla-t-elle, il pue la chien-



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ne” (“Comédie”, p. 12). At the beginning of his literary career, Beckett seems to have found it easier to write obscenities in French than he did in English, as Ruby Cohn suggests (see Cohn 1961 and Cohn 1962); probably because linguistic taboo is deposited in early childhood and therefore cannot operate in a second language (learnt as an adult, though young). But, in the case of “Play” or other later dramatic texts, the difference and the strongest obscenity of the French versions can be explained by habits and cultural differences inherent in the language, rather then by the strength of a linguistic taboo that is less marked in French (see Cohn 1962, pp. 260-264). In the manuscripts3 the passage from one language to the other seems to be gradual: in “Play”, the first draft is almost invariably a calque; then the author works on the French version, making it – in a way – more fully French4. Sometimes, the manuscripts of “Play” and “Comédie” show a use of language quite independent from the context: the author uses French expressions in the English manuscript and vice versa (for example “à la rigueur” in the English text), as if the use of certain phrases were independent and the linguistic coherence of each texts was ‘distilled’ not during the creative burst, but at a later stage, when the work polarizes into two distinct texts and languages and ceases to overlap5. This mechanism happens for instance with the word taboo, which is written in different orthography: it was written with French spelling (tabou) in the first English versions; after the author begins the translation, he starts usBeckett International Foundation, UoR. The sentence just mentioned, for example, undergoes a development implying other French idiomatic forms such as ne mener à rien (RUL MS 1531/2), before becoming “H: [...] Ceci est folie” (all following versions and “Comédie”, p. 22). Or, in another example: “W2: Give me up, as a bad job. Go away and start poking and pecking at someone else. On the other hand—” (“Play”, p. 312); in the first French draft we have expressions such as s’en laver les mains or the verb abandoner (RUL MS 1531/2); and then the definitive version: “F2: Me lâcheras comme peine perdue et t’en iras harceler quelqu’un d’autre. D’un autre côté—” (all following versions and “Comédie”, p. 22). 5 For example: we can find the expression à la rigueur initially in an English context (RUL MS 1528/8, 1528/7 and 1528/11). Then the author introduces the verb to hope (RUL MS 1528/7), which leaves a mark in the French versions where we find s’ésperer (RUL MS 1531/2) and y compter un peu (RUL MS 1534/1); then he finally goes back to the first sentences in the respective linguistic context: “Pénitence, oui, à la rigueur” (“Comédie”, p. 30) and “Peni3 4



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ing tabou only in the French manuscripts and we find taboo in the English ones, as if the creation of a single and coherent linguistic world were an artificial effort in Beckett, a need belonging to the text and not to the author. In most cases, the author’s priorities seem to involve the preservation of a rhythmic coherence: some additions or deletions do not appear to have any rhyme or reason other than the length or balance of the sentences in the two languages. For example: “M: [...] Loving her as I did, with all my heart, I could not but feel sorry for her.” (17 words, “Play”, pp. 308-309). In French we have: “H: [...] L’aimant comme je l’aimais, je veux dire de tout mon coeur, je ne pouvais que la plaindre” (17 words, “Comédie”, p. 13). The introduction of the syntagma here emphasized is evidently not necessary from a semantic point of view, as the sentence is perfectly translated without it, but the author deems it important and I think the reason is a rhythmic one. Another peculiar characteristic of this couple of texts is the fact that they are mutually and reciprocally dependent: as already mentioned, the English text is of course the base of the French one, but it is also true that the translated text influences the original, thus emptying both terms of their contrasting meaning6.

tence, yes, at a pinch” (“Play”, p. 316). The French expression may possibly have appeared in “Comédie” only after it had been cancelled from “Play”. And it may be interesting to add that Beckett had already used precisely these two expressions as the translation the one of the other in Fin de partie / Endgame, during Nagg’s joke about the tailor (“Bon, à la rigueur, une belle braguette, c’est calé”, Fin de partie, p. 37; and in English “Good, at a pinch, a smart fly is a stiff proposition”, Endgame, p. 102). 6 For example, in the final English versions we have W1 saying: “It was all bolted and barred. All grey with frozen dew. On the way back by Ash and Snodland—” and in French the similar “Tout était verrouillé. Gris de givre. En rentrant chez moi par Sept-Sorts et Signy-Signet—”. The translation is remarkably balanced and culturally modelled on the target language. It is interesting to compare the evolution of this sentence: at the beginning in English the house is simply shut and the door is not grey, but white because of the frost (RUL MS 1528/1 and 1528/2); then the French introduces the verb verouiller, and the assonance and partial alliteration “gris de givre”. I think that the author changes the English, which becomes “grey with frozen dew”, in order to be consistent with the sentence in French. The assonance of the French, lost in that English segment of the sentence, is changed to alliteration immediately before and the door is described as “bolted and barred”.


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In the instance of cultural translation, the author seems to have privileged the domesticating method, which Venuti calls the “ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home” rather than the opposite foreignizing one, the “ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” (Venuti 1995 [2005, p. 20]). Idiomatic expressions, brand-names, festivities and toponyms are translated so that they may not appear exotic or strange to the target culture and language: “Ash and Snodland” become “Sept-Sorts et SignySignet”; Lipton tea becomes l’Elefant and Bonfire night (5th of November) is rendered with the practice of burning dead leaves at la Toussaint (which occurs in the same season – 1st of November)7. 4.2. Not I / Pas moi The analysis of Not I / Pas moi – so difficult to handle because of the fragmented sentences poured out in a continuum – was carried out concentrating on the possible translation unit, the minimum section considered from a semantic as well as rhythmic perspective. I focussed on how the author modifies these units passing from English to French. The Italian translation was also taken into consideration, as a consequence of the aporia provoked by Beckett’s self-translation: when working on the translation into Italian, should we consider the first of the ‘original’ texts or the French one, since the two Romance languages are more similar; or should we start from the two versions by Beckett and use them both? As far as the rhythmic problem goes, the comparison of the two texts shows that the author modifies the syntagmatic transla-

7 There is apparently only one exception to this rule: the sentence “she smelled the rat” is initially translated with a French idiomatic expression such as découvrir le pot aux roses (RUL MS 1531/2), of similar meaning. As early as in the second manuscript, though, the author employs the expression “elle sentait un rat” (“Comédie”, p. 12) which looks like a calque. In fact, this expression can be found in the Dictionnaire Littré (“Je sens un rat, je soupçonne quelque mauvaise farce. Je sens un rat est une expression proverbiale qui veut dire soupçonner du danger”) but is apparently neither common nor particularly clear. This choice is then both a literal fidelity to the English text and a sort of joke with the bilingual reader, who can recognize the Anglophone source of the French text.



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tion units, which sometimes are combined, sometimes divided, in order to achieve the same syncopation as the original. A few examples to clarify. The first case is combination, and it is a relatively rare case: “then on... a few more...” (two units, Not I, p. 376) becomes “puis allez encore quelques...” (one unit, Pas moi, p. 82). Or again: “drifting... in and out of cloud...” (two units, Not I, p. 377) becomes “à cache-cache dans les nuages...” (one unit, Pas moi, p. 83). Division is a much more frequent case, probably because French is a longer language than English: “found herself in the dark...” (one unit, Not I, p. 377) becomes “la voilà dans le... le noir...” (two units, Pas moi, p. 82); “then dismissed as foolish...” (one unit, Not I, p. 377) becomes “puis chassée... l’idée chassée... comme bêtise...” (three units, Pas moi, p. 83). The effort of harmonizing the two texts and of reproducing the same flow faithfully is very clear: the author breaks and combines fragments every time a more orthodox translation risks altering the music of the frantic voice on stage. Instead of following the English text, the author literally reproduces what he hears in another language: “I hear it breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic, panting along” (Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 16 October 1972, in Harmon 1998, p. 283). The same priority was evident to Elmar Tophoven when he worked on the German translation: “[i]n his own French translation of [...] Not I Beckett has tried to compensate for the fact that a French phrase usually contains more syllables than its English equivalent by keeping some sort of correspondence in the relatively consistent length of the aggregates in the original” (Tophoven 1988, p. 321). The Italian translation, for example, apparently considers Not I only, and maintains the same semantic subdivision, resulting in very long units which modify the rhythm of the speech. In the Italian version it may be useful to consider the French text as well, so that the author’s choices could validate any sort of ‘authorized deviations’ from the text in English. As Restivo points out (see Restivo 1995, p. 242), for a new translation in German Beckett directed the Tophovens to his own English version of Fin de partie. And Elmar Tophoven stated that “I have frequently followed Beckett’s own French or English translations. I have to deal with a kind of


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‘authorized interpretation’ which he wants taken into account in the German version” (Tophoven 1988, p. 319). Deletions and additions are rare, and almost invariably limited to repetitions, as in this example: “then dismissed as foolish... oh long after... this thought dismissed... as she suddenly realized...” (p. 377) becoming “puis chassée... l’idée chassée... comme bêtise... dès qu’elle se rend compte...” (p. 83). In this case the deletion of the part in italics is balanced by the duplication shown in the previous example. Additions are usually in the form of repeated fragments, as in: “who feels them?.. opening... shutting... all that moisture...” (p. 378) becoming “qui les sent?.. s’ouvrant... se fermant... s’ouvrant... se fermant... toute cette humeur...” (p. 86). In some cases, though, the repetition is more semantically relevant, as in the following example where the English sentence “God is love... she’ll be purged... back in the field...” in French becomes “Dieu est amour... elle sera sauvée... peine purgée... rendue à la prairie...” (p. 91). The idea of salvation seems inconceivable in English, but at least pronounceable in French, possibly through the filter of estrangement. Other lexical deviations, often not particularly meaningful, appear gradually in different phases of translation: at the beginning the author follows the original text almost calquing the French on the English; then he works on the French text Frenchifying it, widening the linguistic and cultural gap between the two versions. For example, the idea of control, so important for the character of Mouth and for the play, in French is softened, in a more generic idea of inability: “at this stage... [the brain] in control... under control...” (p. 378) becomes “en état... état de marche...” (p. 86). In other cases the juxtaposition of the two texts widens the meaning or clarifies certain expressions, as in this example, where the infant (Mouth herself, of course) is defined as “speechless”, but in the French text Bouche becomes “sans défense”. The overlapping of the two variants creates a surplus of meaning: the child is “sans défense” because she is “speechless”. Mouth’s logorrhoea is, then, an extreme act of defence, a sort of sound fence isolating the character and alienating the self. As far as cultural declination is concerned, Beckett chooses to produce a French text with no potentially estranging elements: the toponym Croker’s Acres (an Irish place Beckett went to in his childhood: see Knowlson and Pilling 1979, p. 201), is rendered as “la



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vaine pâture”, and thus deprived of precise geographical meaning. Religious interjections also undergo a cultural transformation and “good God” first is rendered as grand Dieu, then as nom de Dieu and finally with a more suitable “mère de Dieu”. The text is also full of repetitions of phatic expressions or clichés and so on, a typical characteristic of dementia or severe aphasia. This peculiar quality is preserved in the French text: “he having vanished... thin air...” (p. 376) becomes “lui filé... ni vu ni connu...” (p. 82). Bible quotations that the author knew by heart are annotated in margins and taken from a Bible in French8 as referring to the Première Épître de Saint Jean, 4, 8; and also, later on, from Les Lamentations, 3, 22-23 (manuscript 1396/4/26, sheets 6 and 7). The text is domesticated once again. The chiasmus on the translation of the fragment including the laugh, the lucid and demented derision of the idea of salvation, is dilated and a surplus of meaning is added if we read it in both versions. If in English we have “brought up as she had been to believe... [...] in a merciful... [Brief laugh.] ... God ... [Good laugh.]” (Not I, p. 377), with the idea of mercy being ridiculous but the idea of a God even more so, in French we find the opposite situation, with the idea of mercy being more laughable than the idea of the existence of God: “dressée qu’elle avait été à croire... [...] en un Dieu... (bref rire) ... misericordieux... (bon rire)” (Pas moi, pp. 83, 84). Patrizia Fusella underlines the aspect of verbal tenses as a fundamental characteristic of the translation of this text and the most macroscopic deviation in the translating process: while Mouth employs mainly the past tense, emphasizing the narrative aspect, Bouche passes almost immediately to the present, making the identification between character and description instantly visible. The narration and the stage image overlap because Bouche is “dans le noir”, with a beam of light “tel un rayon de lune... mais sans doute pas... certainement pas... toujours même endroit... tantôt clair... tantôt voilé... mais toujours même endroit... comme jamais lune ne saurait...”, subject to a constant noise produced by herself, which Beckett describes as “a purely buccal phenomenon without mental control or understanding, only half heard. Function running away 8 For an indication of the Bibles in Beckett’s library, see, infra, Iain Bailey’s paper, note 2, p. 147.


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with organ” (Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 16 October 1972, in Harmon 1998, p. 283). The kaleidoscopic monologue of Mouth/Bouche is built with an oxymoronic structure, a complete and utter fragmentation, and it develops through images conjured up as flashes in rapid succession, which overwhelm the audience/reader. But certainly the reading of both the English and the French versions of this work produces a widening of possible interpretations, somehow validated by the author. A double, binary text split or rather duplicated in two languages is yet another form of repetition and repetition with variation, the echoing, duplicating or splitting of characters Beckett employs so widely in his art (see Chamberlain 1987, p. 20). Mouth emphasizes the aspect of narration, Bouche the descriptive and metatheatrical one, but together they represent the full affirmation of the character’s double personality. 5. Bilingualism as linguistic exile This is the condition chosen and sought by Beckett: he has perfect English and French, and yet is far from both. English is his mother tongue, but Beckett wants to create a gap between himself and his linguistic origin, he wants a free or freer space for his voice and he finds it in the use of the French language. French, on the other hand, can never fully become his native language, even though Beckett lived in a French speaking milieu for most of his life. It is this permanent linguistic exile that constitutes the core of Beckett’s poetics of disinvestiture, of bareness and dryness. Considering both his languages from an external point of view enables the author to distil words out of a disciplined and self-suspicious world, distrusting any semantic automatism or semantic truth. Ann Beer points out how the double linguistic identity of each text is of course not visible in a single text, “and can therefore be discussed in some larger, and extra-textual, framework that examines the author or the œuvre as a whole” (Beer 1994, p. 217). Word plays, allusions, references to other texts and languages often become visible only by juxtaposing the two versions of a work; in fact, from a very early stage Beckett has used double entendres



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which imply the knowledge of other languages. Beer, however, urges a certain caution before any comprehensive hypothesis can be formed, as Beckett’s bilingualism is “never static. Any generalization from one period can be misleading” (p. 214). The choice of literary language is never definitive and is more similar to a process of constant negotiation (see Arndorfer 2002, p. 410). Beckett himself testifies to the estranging effect one’s own language can have, when it is observed (or listened to) from an external vantage point. Samuel Beckett m’expliquait que le choix du français [...] s’était imposé à lui [...] au moment où il ressentit que l’anglais [...] lui dictait en quelque sorte la direction à suivre. “J’était parlé par cette langue, je ne la contrôlait plus. [...] [L]orsque, quelques années plus tard, je m’aperçus, à l’occasion d’un voyage outre-Manche, que je ne savais plus l’anglais qu’on y parlais désormais, je compris que je pouvais me remettre à écrire dans cette langue. Depuis, les textes me viennent tantôt dans une langue, tantôt dans l’autre.” (Jackson 1995, p. 13)

Michael Edwards claims that Beckett does not simply seek a foreign language, but rather “l’étrangeté d’une langue” (Edwards 1998, p. 9) which enables him to experiment very concretely with the arbitrariness of any linguistic sign. And this not only in the separation between word and object, but also in the departure from memory, as itself codified in a specific language. Remembering in a foreign language is less painful, as we are allowed a sort of safety distance. On the other hand, the discipline required by writing in a foreign language saves the author from the ‘deadening habit’ of linguistic familiarity, patterns or automatism: on peut se sentir tellement chez soi dans sa langue et dans le monde que cette langue pénètre, illumine, adoucit, qu’on oublie l’exil, et l’écrivain en particulier se doit prendre garde à la familiarité des mots et de sentir parfois, ou peut-être à un moment donné, l’étrangeté de sa propre langue. (Edwards 1998, p. 19)

This is then an ethical choice: by renouncing linguistic easiness Beckett obtains a painful but neater and more limpid result.


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And if bilingualism widens Beckett’s linguistic horizons, it places him “outside the security of a unified single viewpoint” (Beer 1994, p. 209), in a solitary and somehow impoverished condition. Pour ce faire [abolir le moi actuel et son babil intarissable], il lui faut devenir faible et pauvre. [...] Le choix du français [...] [c]’est un choix en partie pragmatique [...], mais c’est un choix surtout éthique, et même religieux. C’est le moyen le plus intime qu’on puisse imaginer, pour un écrivain, de se défaire d’un moi empêtré dans sa langue, de renoncer à soi-même, de s’aventurer dans une altérité indifférente au moi, de devenir vulnérable, étranger. De toutes les raisons qu’on peut avoir pour écrire dans une autre langue, celle-là me semble être la plus extraordinaire et aussi la plus émouvante. (Edwards 1998, pp. 33-34)

Paradoxically, the same alienation appears when Beckett goes back to his language, because it has meanwhile become itself, in a way, far, elusive and estranged.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, Grove Press, New York, n.d. [1957]. “Play”, 1964, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990, pp. 305-320 (first published in 1963 in German, Spiel, trans. by Erika and Elmar Tophoven). “Comédie”, 1964, in Comédie et actes divers, 1966, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris 1972, pp. 7-35. Not I, 1973, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 373-383. Pas moi, 1974, in Oh les beaux jours suivi de Pas moi, 1974, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, pp. 79-95. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990.

Criticism Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.



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Arndorfer, Martin, 2002, “Raymond Federman: (Français) Anglais et viceversa”, in Furio Brugnolo and Vincenzo Orioles (a cura di), 2002, Eteroglossia e plurilinguismo letterario. II. Plurilinguismo e letteratura. Atti del XXVIII Convegno Universitario di Bressanone (6-9 luglio 2000), Il Calamo, Roma, pp. 405-413. Bassnett, Susan, 1980, Translation Studies, Routledge, London & New York 2002. Beer, Ann, “Beckett’s Bilingualism”, in John Pilling (editor), 1994, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York & Melbourne, pp. 209-221. Brugnolo, Furio, and Vincenzo Orioles (a cura di), 2002, Eteroglossia e plurilinguismo letterario. II. Plurilinguismo e letteratura. Atti del XXVIII Convegno Universitario di Bressanone (6-9 luglio 2000), Il Calamo, Roma. Chamberlain, Lori, 1987, “‘The Same Old Stories’: Beckett’s Poetics of Translation”, in Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossman, Dina Sherzer (editors), 1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park & London, pp. 17-24. Cohn, Ruby, 1961, “Samuel Beckett Self-Translator”, in PMLA, Volume LXXVI, December 1961, n. 5, pp. 613-621. Idem, 1962, Samuel Beckett. The Comic Gamut, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey). Dodds, John, and Ljiljana Avirovicˇ (a cura di), 1995, La traduzione in scena: teatro e traduttori a confronto. Atti del convegno, Supplemento al numero 547-550, La traduzione. Materiali II (settembredicembre 1995), Trieste 17-19 novembre 1993, Ministero per i Beni culturali, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Roma. Eco, Umberto, 1996, “Ostrigotta, ora capesco”, Introduction to James Joyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Einaudi, Torino 1996, trad. it. James Joyce e Nino Frank, pp. V-XXIX. Idem, 2003, Dire quasi la stessa cosa, Bompiani, Milano. Edwards, Michael, 1998, Beckett ou le don des langues, Éditions Espace 34, Montpellier. Fitch, Brian T., 1987, “The Relationship between Compagnie and Company: One Work, Two Texts, Two Fictive Universes”, in Friedman, Rossman, Sherzer (editors), 1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, cit., pp. 25-35. Friedman, Alan Warren, Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer (editors), 1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park & London. Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-


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spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts). Jackson, John E., 1995, “Le même et l’autre: l’écriture comme traduction”, in Revue de Littérature Comparée, 69 (1), 1995, pp. 13-18. Janvier, Ludovic, 1969, Samuel Beckett par lui-même, Seuil, Paris. Janvier, Ludovic, and Agnès Vanquin-Janvier, 1990, “Traduire avec Beckett: Watt”, in Revue d’Esthétique, Numéro hors-série, 1990, pp. 57-64. Lombardo, Agostino, 2002, “Tradurre La Tempesta per il teatro”, in La grande conchiglia. Due studi su La Tempesta, 2002, Bulzoni, Piccola Biblioteca Shakespeariana, Roma. McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in the Theatre, John Calder and Riverrun Press, London & New York. Pilling, John (editor), 1994, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York & Melbourne. Restivo, Giuseppina, 1995, “Nota a margine: la doppia self-translation di Samuel Beckett”, in Dodds and Avirovicˇ (a cura di), 1995, La traduzione in scena cit., pp. 239-244. Tophoven, Elmar, “Translating Beckett”, in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in the Theatre, cit., pp. 317-324. Venuti, Lawrence, 1995, The Translator’s Invisibility, Routledge, London & New York, 2005.


Beckett’s Library – From Marginalia to Notebooks Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon

Samuel Beckett’s efforts to translate diverse aspects of European culture can be regarded as a starting point of his career as a bilingual author. In order to study this form of intertextual translation, this essay examines the role of Beckett’s personal library and his reading traces in the production of his texts. It is not inconceivable that it was largely because Beckett had read so much that he eventually decided to be more sparing of his erudition. His writing method is aptly described by S. E. Gontarski as “the intent of undoing”. This implies that there has to be something there in the first place, before it can be undone. Based on our research on Beckett’s personal library1, still preserved in his apartment in Paris, this essay examines the difference between the marginalia in his books and his reading notes extracted into notebooks, their integration in the creative process at draft level, and the impact of external source texts on the development of Beckett’s poetics. In order to study this form of intertextual translation, we will first examine different types of Beckett’s marginalia and subsequently focus on the extracts in Beckett’s notebooks. 1. Samuel Beckett, marginalist The president of the Dutch society for Book History – a former antiquarian – jokingly made the rough distinction between three categories of books: complete, incomplete, and more than complete books. It will be reassuring to Beckett scholars to know that 1 We would like to express our gratitude to Edward Beckett for allowing us to work on Samuel Beckett’s personal library and to pursue the book project Beckett’s Library.


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in the case of Beckett’s personal library, most books belong to the category ‘complete’, though there are a few interesting exceptions. For instance, in volume 25 of Beckett’s copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the entry on the Dutch painter Jan Steen is cut out with a pair of scissors. Or in volume 18, page 349 – with entries on artists such as the Swiss writer Konrad Ferdinand Meyer and the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer – has been torn out of the volume. But these are exceptions. Most books are not merely complete, they even belong to the category ‘more than complete’. In Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Heather Jackson argues: “There is an obvious correlation between the level of interest and absorption in the reader and the length of the reader’s notes” (Jackson 2001, p. 30). In general, the quantity of annotations in Beckett’s books is not spectacular, but there are a few interesting exceptions. To map the physical aspects of Beckett’s marginalia we could make a rough categorization in quantitative order: a. verbal comments; b. short, non-verbal codes (such as pencil marks and bookmarks); c. dog-ears; d. non-marginalia. a. verbal comments: This category is quite broad and can be divided into subcategories, ranging from translations of difficult words to critical reactions and erudite intertextual references. These gradations more or less correspond with the chronological course of Beckett’s career as a student and writer. In the 1920s, when he studied Italian at Trinity College Dublin, he read primary texts such as La Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso. He bought this book in 1925, when he was 19 years old. The text is framed by numerous marginal translations of individual words, by means of which Beckett extended his vocabulary. He also read secondary sources on Italian literature, such as the Storia della letteratura italiana (1925), in which Francesco De Sanctis notes (with regard to Dante’s Divina Commedia): “Chi non ha la forza di uccidere la realtà non ha la forza di crearla” (“Who does not have the strength to kill reality, does not have the strength to


D. Van Hulle and M. Nixon. Beckett’s Library

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create it”2, De Sanctis 1925, vol. 1, p. 159). Beckett has underlined this sentence, which recurs in his essay on Proust, when he is discussing Proust’s contempt for literature that merely “describes”, for the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience, prostrate before the epidermis and the swift epilepsy, and content to transcribe the surface, the façade, behind which the Idea is prisoner. Whereas the Proustian procedure is that of Apollo flaying Marsyas and capturing without sentiment the essence, the Phrygian waters. ‘Chi non ha la forza di uccidere la realtà non ha la forza di crearla.’ (Proust, pp. 78-79)

Beckett’s essay on Proust, in its turn, is already prepared in the margins of his copy of À la recherche du temps perdu, preserved in Reading. For instance, in what according to Beckett is “perhaps the greatest passage that Proust ever wrote – Les Intermittences du Coeur” (Proust, p. 39), Beckett underlined a few passages (indicated in italics): le monde du sommeil (sur le seuil duquel l’intelligence et la volonté momentanément paralysées ne pouvaient plus me disputer à la cruauté de mes impressions véritables), refléta, réfracta la douloureuse synthèse de la survivance et du néant[.] (Proust 1919-27, vol. 8, p. 183)

In the right margin he referred to the German notion of “Wille” or the “will to live” (Proust 1919-27, vol. 8, p. 183), and this interaction between reading, marking, and commenting is reflected in the corresponding passage in his essay, where he writes and translates: He cannot understand “this dolorous synthesis of survival and annihilation”. [...] But already will, the will to live, the will not to suffer, Habit, having recovered from its momentary paralysis, has laid the foundation of its evil [.] (Proust, p. 43; emphasis added)

Of course the nothing new on which this watery sun is shining is the long-established observation that his reading of Proust was 2

Unless stated otherwise, all translations are our own.


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substantially coloured by his almost simultaneous reading of Schopenhauer. Beckett’s copy of the collected works of Arthur Schopenhauer (published in 1923) shows another form of translation. In the editor’s introduction Beckett has underlined a quotation from Schopenhauer’s Parerga: “Man könnte die Geschichte ansehen als eine Fortsetzung der Zoologie” (“One could see history as a continuation of zoology”, Frauenstädt 1923, vol. 1, p. 26) – which Beckett marked in the margin to the effect that history is a higher zoology. This brings us to the second category, to what Heather Jackson calls b. “non-verbal codes”: An interesting case of history as a higher zoology is Darwin’s theory of evolution. In Beckett’s copy of The Origin of Species, a short passage on “Variation under Domestication” is marked and underscored with an undulating line in grey pencil: “cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf” (Darwin 1902, p. 11). In this case we know quite precisely when Beckett read this passage, for in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy dated 4 August 1932 he wrote that he had bought The Origin of Species the day before and that he had “never read such badly written cat lap” (Knowlson 1996, p. 161). The only thing he thought important enough to remember was that blue-eyed cats are always deaf. As Beckett indicates in his letter the line is taken from the passage on correlations between variations. Darwin sums up a whole series of examples: Breeders believe that long limbs are almost always accompanied by an elongated head. Some instances of correlation are quite whimsical; thus cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf; [...] Hairless dogs have imperfect teeth; [...] pigeons with short beaks have small feet, and those with long beaks large feet. (Darwin 1859 [1902, p. 11]; emphasis added)

When Beckett marked this passage, he does not seem to have been terribly interested in the more theoretical point about the side effects of breeding Darwin tries to make; instead, he concentrated on a concrete example. The only other pencil mark in the book also corresponds with a concrete example (Darwin 1859 [1902, p. 60]). Since, according to Beckett, The Origin was badly



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written, this last pencil mark in the book might create the impression that he stopped reading after page 60. But the book also contains some other marks. c. dog-ears: Starting on page 57, the book shows signs of remarkably large dog-ears. They appear throughout the book, even in the last chapter, and sometimes in very close succession, which suggests that they could be interpreted, not just as markers to indicate where a reading session stopped, but also as markers to indicate an interesting page. Dog-ears are among the most enigmatic of reading traces. It cannot be excluded that these were made by someone else, but it is equally plausible that they were made by Beckett himself. In that case his first reading of the book, marked by means of the pencil marginalia, may have stopped shortly after page 60. But the dogears would indicate that, later on, he did read the whole book. An indirect indication in this respect is a reference to Darwin’s caterpillar in Murphy, Watt (see Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, pp. 125-126) and in the unpublished story “Echo’s Bones”. In the latter half of this story Belacqua is talking to a character called Doyle, who is described as a natural man of the world. After a digression, Doyle reminds Belacqua that he was saying ‘but’ and did not finish his sentence, to which Belacqua replies that he needs a better cue than that, otherwise he will have to go back to where he started, like the caterpillar (“Echo’s Bones”, p. 23). Beckett is alluding to The Origin of Species (chapter VII, “Instinct”), where Darwin mentions a caterpillar and the way it makes its hammock, described by his colleague Pierre Huber: if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done [...], [it] seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work. (Darwin 1859 [1902, p. 187])


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But there are no markings, not even dog-ears, on the corresponding page in Beckett’s copy of The Origin of Species, which leads us to the category of d. “non-marginalia”: With reference to Paul Celan’s poetry, Axel Gellhaus has drawn attention to passages that are not marked in the personal copies of the poet’s books – books that are otherwise heavily marked (Gellhaus 2004, pp. 218-219). Despite these numerous markings it is sometimes an unmarked passage that is plundered to write a poem. In one of Beckett’s bibles we encounter a similar situation: the copy of The Comprehensive Teacher’s Bible shows many markings and other reading traces, but the unmarked pages can be equally important. For instance, Waiting for Godot mentions a map of the Holy Land such as the one that can be found in this edition. When Didi asks: “Do you remember the Gospels?” Gogo replies: “I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty” (Waiting for Godot, p. 11). Further on Gogo suggests: “What about hanging ourselves?” (p. 16) – followed by the explanation that he is lighter than Didi, so if he hangs himself first, the bough won’t break and he will die; when Didi subsequently tries to hang himself, he runs the risk that the bough will break and he will be left alone. The reverse of this scene is prefigured in Jules Renard’s Journal intime: “Si mignonne que si vous vouliez vous pendre, vous n’auriez pas le poids” – which Beckett roughly translates in the bottom margin to the effect that ‘She’s not heavy enough to hang herself’. With hindsight, reading Renard after having read Beckett, his Journal intime thus appears to already contain several elements that are ‘Beckettian’ avant la lettre. In that sense the notes in the margin can have an interesting retroactive effect on the corresponding body of the source text. Thanks to the letters to Thomas MacGreevy we know quite precisely that Beckett was reading Renard in February 1931 (see Pilling 2006a, p. 30). In this period Beckett’s writing method resembled that of James Joyce, who is famous for what he called ‘notesnatching’: instead of writing in the margins of books, Joyce filled more than fifty notebooks with short jottings. Beckett applied a similar method to write his first novel, Dream of Fair to



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Middling Women – in which he thematizes this notesnatching when he writes: “We stole that one. Guess where” (Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 191). To characterise his reading habits, it is useful to distinguish Beckett the marginalist from Beckett the extractor, according to the categorization suggested by Daniel Ferrer (2004, p. 7). 2. Samuel Beckett, extractor Following the distinction of Beckett as marginalist and Beckett as extractor, this section examines the relationship between marginalia in books and material extracted into notebooks, and the way his note-taking strategy evolved in the 1930s and beyond. Let us at first stay with Renard. From the four volumes of Renard’s Journal intime, Beckett snatched about thirty passages and jotted them down in his Dream notebook. He did so without any explicit reference to Renard – thus for example the sentence ‘She’s not heavy enough to hang herself’ appears as follows: Je suis un réaliste que gêne la réalité Son âme prend du ventre She’s not heavy enough to hang herself (Pilling 1999, p. 33)

Beckett has here, by transcribing his translation of the line noted in his volume of Renard, already primed the source for inclusion in the novel Dream. Indeed, in one sense this is the case with all of the Renard entries in the Dream notebook, in that Beckett has only selectively copied across the marginalia in the books. Conversely, all but the last two entries in the Dream notebook are marked in the actual volumes. In terms of practical management of material, this procedure makes perfect sense. The Dream notebook was specifically kept to collect material that was to be used in a particular text, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Leaving aside the fact that Beckett in the early 1930s could not always afford to buy books, when it came to writing Dream Beckett must have realised that it was easier to consult a notebook with extracted material rather than scores of books with marginalia. Beckett’s reliance on his notes is expressed by Belacqua in Dream


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when, struggling to remember a quote by Heine, he wonders “did I do well to leave my notes at home” (Dream, p. 72). Now the case of Renard is somewhat unusual, in that Beckett is here working both as a marginalist, and then as an extractor. In terms of notes in the Dream notebook, the only other time he proceeded like this in a substantial way is with Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (Beckett’s copy of the book is in the Beckett Archive at Reading). However, we cannot discount the possibility that many of the books Beckett once owned are no longer in the library – over the years he gave many books away – just as it is quite certain that not all notebooks from the 1930s survive. Yet it appears that Beckett in the late 1920s and early 1930s, up until about 1933, was both an extractor as well as a marginalist, and then, most probably influenced by Joyce’s example and practical considerations, moved to relying on notebooks. This brings us to the Whoroscope notebook, kept roughly between 1932 and 1938. The Whoroscope notebook had a similar function to the Dream notebook, in that it was designed to collate material toward the writing of Murphy. This is most obvious in the draft material at the front and the ‘For Interpolation section’ at the back, the latter comprising a long list of quotations from English literature (see Pilling 2006b). However, the Whoroscope notebook also contains a wide variety of material extracted from innumerable sources without any distinct creative endeavour in mind. In this it resembles much of the marginalia contained in Beckett’s library, representing material that Beckett found of interest and wanted to preserve. From roughly 1933 onward Beckett tended to extract material from books – whether he owned them, borrowed them or consulted them in libraries – into the Whoroscope and other notebooks rather than annotate the books themselves. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary is an example amongst many. Beckett acquired the book in Dublin in February 1936, and proceeded to use it on several occasions. There is however not a single annotation in the book itself. Instead, Beckett extracted various entries from the Dictionary into the Whoroscope notebook, such as the one on the Thebans made in 1938. The material contained in the Whoroscope notebook takes a first step toward incorporation in a possible compositional



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process, and thus differs from the large corpus of thematic notebooks with notes on a variety of topics. Held at Trinity College Dublin and the Beckett International Foundation in Reading, these notebooks cover philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, the visual arts, Provençal literature, the literary histories of Germany, England and France. And there are the notes on specific authors – St. Augustine, Dante, Geulincx and Fritz Mauthner. Furthermore, Beckett made lengthy excerpts from Rabelais, Goethe’s Faust and Grillparzer. These notes, mostly transcriptions or summaries devoid of commentary, are nearly exclusively drawn from books that Beckett did not own. Indeed, a large part of this scribal activity was undertaken in libraries. Beckett worked in the British Museum in the Summer of 1932, then again in early 1934 and then for example read Geulincx in Trinity College Library in 1936. Evidence of Beckett’s use of libraries is interestingly contained in his copy of De Sanctis’ Storia della letteratura italiana, which contains two National Library of Ireland slips, both for books on Aubanel3. In any case, Beckett understandably felt that he could organise the sheer volume of material he was transcribing more effectively by using notebooks rather than marking or underlining the actual book he was studying. And of course, in the case of the Philosophy notes, it allowed him to extract material from more than one source yet retain a chronological approach. As we now know, most of the philosophy notes were taken from an English edition of Windelband’s History of Philosophy, although Beckett did draw from other sources (see Frost and Maxwell 2006). A German edition of the book, which Beckett bought whilst in Germany in 1936 and appears in the ‘Books sent home’ list in the Whoroscope notebook, survives in the library. Unsurprisingly, it contains no annotations, which further underlines the supposition that he did not own the English edition which he worked on in 1932 and/or 1933. The separation between Beckett as marginalist and Beckett as extractor traced so far cannot be applied consistently. There are 3 As we have already seen, Beckett must have read or at least consulted De Sanctis’ book before writing the essay on Proust in 1930. Beckett mentions reading Aubanel in a letter of 29 January 1936 to MacGreevy, stating that he is helping Ethna MacCarthy with her TCD lectures on Provençal literature.



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several instances which show Beckett, like in the case of Renard, annotating and transcribing, but unlike in the case of Renard, at times the material highlighted and extracted is not the same. A good example of this is Beckett’s use of Sartre’s L’imagination, first published in 1936. The Whoroscope notebook contains three entries from the book, with no source given, which John Pilling has identified: Leibniz to Locke: “Nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus.” noème, noèse the geology of conscience – Cambrian experience, Cainozoic judgments, etc... (Whoroscope notebook, 62r; Pilling 2004, p. 46)4.

These three entries, copied into the Whoroscope notebook, are not marked in the book itself. Yet there are some marginalia in Sartre’s L’imagination, such as a marginal note containing a crossreference to Burnet’s book on Early Greek Philosophy, notes from which appear in Beckett’s own Philosophy notes. If we compare the material that Beckett marked for attention it becomes apparent that the marginalia relate to more abstract material, similar to the kind for example noted in the Philosophy Notes. The entries in the Whoroscope notebook, however, are characterised by potential use in the compositional process, and indeed the last of the three Sartre references resurfaces in the Watt draft notebooks in Austin5. Beckett’s reading notes, therefore, are translated and transmitted according to projected use of function. This kind of translation or transmission of material according to projected use or function across different forms of note-taking also occurs across time. However, between the last entries in the Whoroscope notebook in 1938 to the point where he started keep4 John Pilling’s dating of Beckett’s purchase of Sartre to late 1937 or early 1938 appears to be confirmed by a metro ticket found in the book’s pages, dated “10 December”. 5 Watt notebook 2, 77; Harry Ransom Center, Austin.



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ing the Sottisier notebook in 1976, Beckett did not record any reading notes in notebooks. These are also, so to speak, the dark ages for marginalia, as few can be identified as being made in these 40 years. What evidence we do have of Beckett’s reading during this period comes from his correspondence. There are two main reasons for this absence of reading notes. First of all, the Second World War or, to be more precise, the novel Watt marks a watershed in Beckett’s use of intertextual references. Not only are there far fewer, but they are also not openly flaunted, buried beneath the textual surface. Secondly, Beckett continued to use the notebooks he kept in the 1930s. Many of the intertextual references that do appear in his writing after the war can be found in these older notes; the trilogy for example draws on the Whoroscope notebook and uses some very obscure details found in the German Diaries of 1936/1937 (see Nixon 2006). At times the texts themselves even allude to the 1930s notes. Thus How It Is, published in 1964, refers to “dear scraps recorded somewhere” (How It Is, p. 28), and All Strange Away written the same year explicitly alludes to the philosophy notes we now know as MS10967 held at Trinity College Library in Dublin by referring to “ancient Greek philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possible suggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period” (All Strange Away, p. 175). It is only in the 1970s that Beckett returned to keeping a dedicated notebook for his reading notes – the small Sottisier notebook now kept in Reading. This notebook is very much like the earlier Whoroscope notebook, in that it contains reading notes as well as various drafts and the mirlitonnades poems. The reading notes are drawn from a wide variety of sources – lines from the Bible, quotations taken from Heine, Goethe (both however referenced via their song settings by Schubert and Schumann), Pascal, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Parnell, as well as an Italian commentary on Dante, to name but these. Beckett began to keep the notebook at a time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he read more voraciously than he had done for a long time. Indeed, more often than not he returned to reading texts that he had read in the 1930s, and that he had loved all his life. As he told Jocelyn Herbert in a 1975 letter, he was reading with memories of his student days. Arguably the most important reading notes in


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the Sottisier notebook are the quotations from Shakespeare’s King Lear, which play on the distinction between worse and worst, and can be traced across a wide range of texts, prose, theatre and poetry, written during this time. However, once again Beckett favoured extracting into the notebook rather than annotating the volumes in his library, from which the quotations were mostly taken. This can be illustrated by way of the entries from Schopenhauer, another example of Beckett returning to an author and texts that had influenced his writing since the 1930s. Beckett first read Schopenhauer in 1930, in Burdeau’s French translation. He then, whilst in Germany in 1937, bought a German edition in six volumes, which contain marginalia from his reading (probably in late 1937). He did, however, return at a later point to highlight a sentence he had originally not marked but rather extracted in the Whoroscope notebook, the sentence “Zitto! Zitto! dass nur das Publikum nichts merke!” (“Hush! Hush! as long as the public notices nothing!”, Schopenhauer 1923, I.4.50). Using a different pen than the one used for the 1930s marginalia, Beckett highlighted the sentence in his copy, and made reference to the fact that the sentence appears in the ‘Addenda’ of Watt. When he returned to reading Schopenhauer in 1979, Beckett copied several entries into the Sottisier, yet does not appear to have highlighted any passages in the volumes themselves at this time. The reading notes, as well as the short poems in the Sottisier notebook are closely connected to Beckett’s more sustained writing from this time. The entries act in many ways as a creative nexus translating his reading notes into his writing. That intertextual sources were very much on Beckett’s mind in the late 1970s and early 1980s is not only evident in the pieces “Ghost Trio” or “Nacht und Träume”, but also in more marginal notes made in manuscript material. Thus the Sottisier notebook contains entries from Goethe’s ‘Mignon’s Song’ from Wilhelm Meister (Book 2, Chapter 13), an old favourite (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1796 [1968, p. 136]). The way that these reading notes were transmitted or translated by Beckett into his creative endeavours is obvious from an annotated copy of “Eh Joe” in German given to Rick Cluchey in 1979. In the margin of this copy Beckett wrote “W.M. Harfenspieler”, revealing that the “Heavenly Powers” in the English original are related to the “himmlische Mächte” in Goethe’s



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poem “Harfenspieler” (Gedichte 1888 [1992, p. 263]). Once again, Beckett’s marginalia reveal how the traces of reading are often the traces of writing. As with most schematic scaffoldings, the division of Beckett’s reading traces into two types – marginalia and notebooks, or the activities of a “marginalist” and those of an “extractor” – has proved to be a useful, but merely preliminary tool to characterise the evidence of reading. There are many ways to read this evidence, but from this initial exploration we can already conclude that it is often the interaction between these two modes of reading, rather than their separate functioning, that marks the role of Beckett’s library in relation to his writing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Boyars, London 1999, pp. 7-93. “Echo’s Bones”, 1933, Typescript, Dartmouth College Library, Hanover (New Hampshire). How It Is, 1964, John Calder, London. Three Dialogues, 1965, in Proust and Three Dialogues cit., pp. 95-126. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Boyars, London 1999. All Strange Away, 1976, in Stanley E. Gontarski (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, New York, pp. 169-181. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 1992, Arcade Publishing, New York 1993. Sottisier notebook, Beckett International Foundation, UoR MS 2901. Watt notebooks, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Whoroscope notebook, Beckett International Foundation, UoR MS 3000. McMillan, Dougald, and James Knowlson (editors), 1993, Waiting for Godot: The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, revised text, Grove Press, New York.


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Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, New York. Pilling, John (editor), 1999, Samuel Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook, Beckett International Foundation, Reading.

Criticism Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York. Ferrer, Daniel, 2004, “Towards a Marginalist Economy of Textual Genesis”, in Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading Notes, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 7-18. Frost, Everett, 2006, “Catalogue of ‘Notes Diverse[s] Holo[graph] – History of Western Philosophy”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays), XVI, 2006, pp. 67-90. Gellhaus, Axel, 2004, “Marginalia: Paul Celan as Reader”, in Hulle and Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading Notes, cit., pp. 207-219. Gontarski, Stanley E., 1985, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Hulle, Dirk Van (editor), 2004a, Beckett the European, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida). Idem, 2004b, “Note on Next to Nothing: Ellipses in Samuel Beckett’s Reading Notes”, in Hulle and Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading Notes, cit., pp. 327-333. Hulle, Dirk Van, and Wim Van Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading Notes, Rodopi, Amsterdam. Jackson, Heather, 2001, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Yale University Press, New Haven. Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London. Nixon, Mark, 2006, “‘Guess Where’: From Reading to Writing in Beckett”, in Genetic Joyce Studies, 6 (Spring 2006), at http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/articles.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009). Pilling, John, 2004, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope notebook”, in Hulle (editor), 2004, Beckett the European, cit., pp. 39-48. Idem, 2006a, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (Hampshire).



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Idem, 2006b, “‘For Interpolation’: Beckett and English Literature”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo cit., pp. 203-235.

Other works cited Darwin, Charles, 1859, The Origin of Species (On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life), Grant Richards, London 1902. De Sanctis, Francesco, 1924, Storia della letteratura italiana, 2 vols., new ed. a cura di Benedetto Croce, Gius. Laterza & Figli, Bari. Frauenstädt, Julius (editor), 1923, Arthur Schopenhauer. Sämmtliche Werke, 6 Bände, Brockhaus, Leipzig. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1796, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in Erich Trunz (editor), 1968, Goethes Werke, Band 7, Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg. Idem, 1888, Gedichte, Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1992. Holy Bible: The Comprehensive Teacher’s Bible, S. Bagster and Sons, London, n.d. Proust, Marcel, 1919-1927, À la recherche du temps perdu, 16 vols., Gallimard, Paris (annotated copy at The Beckett International Foundation, UoR). Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1936, L’imagination, Alcan, Paris. Windelband, Wilhelm, and Heinz Heimsoeth, 1935, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen.



The Anxiety of Influence: Beckett and the Cultural Context



“Hommage furtif”: Cixous’s Difficult Love of Beckett Mary Bryden

In the well-known Pascalian formulation, mankind is “un roseau pensant” [a thinking reed] (Pascal 1670 [1962, pp. 121-122]). Fragile they might be, but at least human beings are aware of the implications of their own fragility, according to Pascal. When reading Pascal, Beckett was sufficiently struck by the image to copy it down in his Whoroscope notebook. Hélène Cixous, writing about Beckett, extends the image. For her, the Beckettian creature is not so much “un roseau pensant” as “un chapeau pensant” [a thinking hat] (Cixous 2007, p. 21). The model of the thinking hat yokes together, as Cixous is well aware, both the jocund and the profound. Surely hats adjoin the seat of thought rather than being the instrument for it? In Waiting for Godot, Lucky’s hat is both separate from, and coterminous with, his functioning. It is, to use Yoshiki Tajiri’s recent model, “prosthetic” (Tajiri 2007). For Beckett, there is, according to Cixous, “pas de dehors pur. Pas de dedans pur” [no pure outside; no pure inside] (Cixous 2007, p. 21). Pozzo’s hat-stomping may be amusing, but it appears to be as invasive as a lobotomy, and it marks Lucky’s last word, the act of final censorship. This example demonstrates, I think, the multi-tonal quality of Cixous’s response to Beckett, a response which is not easily summed up. For those of us who have worked on intertextual issues in Beckett, it is not difficult to find examples of writers and artists who have suggested that their own response to Beckett was immediate: it was like a kind of recognition. In contrast, Cixous has spoken of the obstacles which arise in her reading explorations, such that: “I obey the call of certain texts [...] I am rejected by others” (Cixous, in Cornell and Sellers 1993, p. 5). If Beckett had to be allocated to either category, it would, I think, tend to be the sec-



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ond one which would recommend itself. Yet, while any homage Cixous has paid to Beckett has been, as my title suggests, somewhat furtive and guarded, she has recently written an extended reflection on Beckett, published in 2007 and, at the time of writing, not yet translated into English, which shows evidence of an evolution in her thinking. This essay accordingly attempts to track some aspects of that evolution, and to pick out some of the innovative insights which can be found in this very recent text, the most sustained engagement which Cixous has yet undertaken on Beckett. It is worth stating at the outset that the names of Beckett and Cixous are not often found in apposition. The 1991 study by Martine Motard-Noar called Les Fictions d’Hélène Cixous makes no mention of Beckett in its chapter on literary intertextuality, and a chapter on the same theme in the more recent study by Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers, entitled Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (Blyth and Sellers 2004, pp. 82-98), also omits Beckett. Even though my own research has drawn me towards Beckett and Cixous, I can understand why few others have felt similarly drawn. After all, until last year, Cixous’s published remarks on Beckett were slight in number (though not, I would argue, in significance), and Beckett has never featured significantly on the programme of her well-known and well-attended Séminaires in Paris. What I want to suggest, in fact, is that Beckett has come to inhabit an unusual space for Cixous – one which lies somewhere between her two categories of writer which I alluded to earlier. There are many levels on which she finds Beckett rebarbative. Yet she has found herself in recurrent negotiation with his work over a lengthy period. The exact length of that period is difficult to determine. In an essay on Beckett which appeared in 1976, and was included in the Cahier de l’Herne commemoration of Beckett’s seventieth birthday, Cixous ludically writes: “Je devais avoir dans les dix ans quand il me prit par le Je” [I must have been around ten when he took me by the I1] (Cixous 1976, p. 396). Subsequently, though, in a Beckettian-style revision, she conjectures about whether, instead, it might have been ten years ago: i.e. not when she was ten years of 1

own.

All translations given after Cixous’s original French quotations are my


M. Bryden. “Hommage furtif”: Cixous’s Difficult Love of Beckett

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age but when she was in her late twenties. She settles eventually on some time between what she calls “l’âge de raison et l’autre âge” [the age of reason and the other age]. What she is describing, in fact, is not when she first came across Beckett, but when he crept up on her, and when she as it were offered him hospitality (she does at one point use the word “logeai” [Cixous 1976, p. 397]). There were, she makes clear, false starts, a process which she places in the context of organic decomposition. She read him, felt no need to detain him, moved away from him, discarded his texts. They became detritus, what she calls “détritextes” [detritexts] (Cixous 1976, p. 396). For Cixous, Beckett’s texts are not governed by a command economy, or a capitalist one. Rather, they form part of what she calls “an excrement economy”2: they have to do not with intake and acquisition, but with evacuation and dispersal. The castoff material decomposes, but into a “débris vivant” [living debris] which somehow remains available for reconstitution, forming a reflux rather than rotting down to nothing. This is the dual awareness which runs through all Cixous’s writings on Beckett – her instinctive repulsion against the leanings to nothingness, and yet a fascination with the failure to achieve nothingness. Citing the Textes pour rien, she points out: “Mais qu’est-ce qu’un Rien s’il y a texte-pour?” [What is a Nothing if there is text-for?] (Cixous 1976, p. 400). Cixous had cited the Textes pour rien several years earlier. On the occasion of Beckett’s award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, she wrote a prominent article about him in the French daily newspaper Le Monde, under the title of “Le maître du texte pour rien” [The master of the text for nothing]3. In it, she observes that Beckett’s work incorporates, paradoxically, the happening of nothingness, resulting in a landscape of inertia in which possibilities are recurrently reduced or cancelled. Cixous does not hide her impulse to distaste for the way in which these processes of privation are seen to structure Beckett’s work. However, there are two factors which in her view mitigate the vexatious and bruising impact of it, and prevent it from being insupportable. The first of these is his recourse to humour, which she does not underestimate. In fact, she 2 3

“Faire l’économie de l’excrément” (Cixous 1976, p. 399). Le Monde, 24 October 1969.


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employs it herself in her analysis in Le Monde, asking why, if it is always the same thing, in the end, does Beckett keep rehearsing it?4 (The answer, she suggests, might be that the Beckettian voice is not so much seeking what to say as whom to tell). The second element is what she calls Beckett’s “stubborn Irish resistance”5, which enables him to know that the Law can be parodied, and that “l’écriture peut être le chat et la souris. Ou la mouette et l’immondice” [writing can be the cat and the mouse. Or the seagull and the filth]. Writing can be bound up with both victim and predator, producer and waste-product. Interestingly enough, Cixous herself uses the cat referent from time to time in her own writing. She asserted, for example, that part of her 2003 work L’amour du loup, et autres remords could be called “the imitation of the cat”. How, she asks, is a book produced? It is produced in the manner of a kitten who, scarcely weaned, happens to pass her paw under the wood-burning stove. A few days after the experience, she is the one who can explain humanity to you6. That understated, rather glancing reference to the notion of provocative pain – pain as a kind of goad to and within writing – might be pursued at the heart of both Beckett’s and Cixous’s writing projects. However, correspondences between two such different writers are not easy of access. The same applied to their meetings. In 1960, Cixous began a doctoral thesis on Joyce, and, a few years later, her supervisor, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, facilitated a meeting with Beckett. It was a strange and unsatisfactory encounter, as briefly described later in this essay. As such, it was part of a more general awkwardness associated with drawing together these two very different writing practices. This uneasiness is still evident by the time of Cixous’s Le Voisin de zéro [Zero’s Neighbour]: Sam Beckett, published in 2007. Cixous begins it with a prefatory note, revealing that it was at the behest of Tom Bishop that she had overcome her reluctance to, as

4 “Pourquoi, si c’est toujours la même chose, à la fin, avoir si souvent tenté l’aventure?” 5 “doué de l’opiniâtre résistance irlandaise”. 6 “Comment arrive un livre? Comme une chatte à peine sevrée qui passe une petite main de patte sous le fourneau à bois. Et quelques jours après c’est elle qui vous explique l’humanité” (Cixous 2003, p. 103).



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she playfully puts it, “becketter l’immense Beckett” (Cixous 2007, p. 8) [the verb “becqueter”, often used of birds, means to grub around, or peck at something]. The roots of this reluctance to peck at Beckett are not skated over within the text. How, she asks, can she possibly develop something approaching love for this body of writing? As someone who, as she puts it, prefers “le bond” [the leap] (Cixous 2007, p. 11), how can she be drawn to texts which can seem to her locked in paralysis or issueless spirals? She is not, she emphasises, “du côté du noir gris” [on the side of grey-black], preferring more spontaneous spurts of movement or colour. Yet the Cixous who claims to have no affinity with Beckettian grisaille responds powerfully to Beckett’s purgatorial landscapes, in which she sees parallel operations of cruelty and compassion. The cruelty, she writes, is bloodless. It is natural, structural, a white or a grey cruelty, but not devoid of compassion. It cannot exactly be described as solidarity, but is, rather, a kind of ‘with-ness’, white or grey in quality, to match its counterpart. Amongst all this, for company, there is writing, writing which is ‘samblablement signé Sam’ [difficult to translate except in its sibilance: similarly, “samilarly”, signed Sam] (Cixous 2007, p. 13). In this model of similarity, the first words are already the last words – they are semblables; they are of a kind – and for this, Cixous says, she admires him. First words, then, shade into last words, or womb into tomb. Cixous uses a telling homophonic wordplay to encapsulate this: “Néant? Né en 1906” [Nothingness? Born in 1906] (Cixous 2007, p. 17). Between the two nothingnesses are millions of minutes in the mud and greyness. Cixous derives her title in fact – Le Voisin de zéro – from Beckett’s Le Dépeupleur (1970), where, in the closing sequence, the last man, “si c’est un homme” [if it is a man], wanders through the vanquished. Picking up from the words “si c’est un homme” the optional resonance from Primo Levi7, Cixous briefly evokes the death camps in which could be seen the spectral faces of those who, in order to arrive there, have been “depopulated”, cleared out. (Among these are implicitly included some of her own relatives on her German-speaking mother’s side who died in

7 Primo Levi 1958, Se questo è un uomo, Einaudi, Torino (If This Is a Man, 1960 [1987], Abacus by Sphere Books, London, trans. Stuart Woolf).


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concentration camps). It is in this context that Cixous uses the words echoed in my title: “Hommage furtif”. Contained within this passage, she suggests, might be found a furtive homage to Levi, or to other traumatised individuals, on the part of Beckett, “d’un épeuplé à un autre” (Cixous 2007, p. 20). The coinage “épeuplé” – [‘expeopled’ would be a possible translation] – implies one who has uncoupled from a fixed domicile, rather than one who has imposed it on others. It is a group of which Cixous has always declared herself to be a part. In Le Dépeupleur, this man finds his place as the temperature settles “dans le voisinage de zéro” (Le Dépeupleur, p. 55)8. Beckett’s English translation of the passage – “not far from freezing point” (The Lost Ones, p. 178) – is much more thermostatically oriented, but it suits Cixous to push the zero from the environmental more firmly into the ontological. In this context, then, the Beckettian creature is always in the vicinity of zero. In fact, it is within this dynamic of reduction, of decrement rather than increment, that Cixous locates Beckett’s recourse to French. As she indicates, any owner of a bilingual Harrap’s dictionary knows that the two sections are “faux jumeaux” [false twins] (Cixous 2007, p. 56). The French section, like Beckett himself, is lean and athletic. Fewer words have to work harder. In turning to French, Beckett put himself on a diet, with the anorexic goal of becoming ever slimmer. On these grounds also, Cixous maintains, she can admire Beckett, because he is able to move both innovatively and chronically towards zero without ever arriving at it. This is in a sense a familiar notion, almost a commonplace, in relation to Beckett. However, Cixous deploys an original approach to it when she points out that contained within the word “voisinage” is the phonetic element rendered by “voix” [“voice”, the French pronunciation conveniently expressing both singular and plural, voices which suspend or defer the silence]. Beckett’s work is, she writes, full of voices, voicing across and within each other: “Tout parle. La parole parle. La parole se coupe la parole. S’apostrophe. S’écoute. Se blague” [Everything speaks. The spoken word speaks. The spoken word cuts it-

8 See also, for an interesting discussion of the relation between “premiers” and “derniers” in this closing passage, Antoinette Weber-Caflisch 1994, pp. 66-68.



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self short. Shouts at itself. Listens to itself. Takes the mickey out of itself] (Cixous 2007, p. 23). The author tries to train his voices, as Chaplin would train his imaginary fleas (Cixous 2007, p. 72). Throughout his endeavours, she maintains, the writer has his secret plan: “Il rêve d’arriver où Je est Tu” [he dreams of arriving where I is You] (Cixous 2007, p. 23). Or, perhaps, in the case of Not I (1973), where “I” is “She”. Not I, in fact, has a special status for Cixous. If she could retain only one text of Beckett, she maintains that it would be Not I, which she views as both a poem and a piece of non-serial music (see Cixous 2007, pp. 61-64). If the pattern were totally aleatory, or if it were totally correlated, it would not be music. Instead, it is, she observes, both structured and surprising: it is sufficiently correlated to give rise to expectation of the next note, and yet is able constantly to take the listener aback. Not I is as close as one can get to the “voisinage de zéro”. It dies away and resumes, beyond the text and in the text, gabbling on stage and off stage, before and after, in the dark, in the light. Cixous had already written in her Le Monde article about what she deemed to be the circumstantial or mutilative shrinkage of Beckett’s people, such that eventually one would be confronted with language alone. Those remarks, however, were directed at Beckett’s Trilogy. Not I was not yet written. For Cixous the playwright, the play has metatheatrical tentacles; she keeps returning in her imagination to the play ending, the audience starting to leave, and the voice continuing, in the darkness, behind the curtain. Cixous discerns a throughline of development, in fact, from the end of the last Text for Nothing to Not I. Text XIII (pp. 113-115 in Texts for Nothing, pp. 71115) supersedes future and past with present, and replaces ending with murmuring: “when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs” (Texts for Nothing, p. 115). Since “voice” is feminine in French, the link between the last words of the Texts and Not I is even more suggestive in French: “quand tout sera fini, tout dit, dit-elle, murmure-t-elle” (Nouvelles et textes pour rien, p. 206). In this context, Cixous presents Beckett as “un balayeur” [a sweeper]. The act of “balayer” can mean to get rid of, to sweep away (Edith Piaf’s “balayage” of regret in the song Je ne regrette rien, for instance). However, Cixous uses it to mean a slow brushing forward of ideas across lengthy time-frames – about ten years


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per page, she suggests, tongue in cheek: “Beckett balayeur: il balaye mots de ses propres textes et il lui faut dix ans par page, pour balayer Texte pour rien XIII jusqu’à Pas moi 1950 à 1973 vingt-trois ans ” [Beckett the sweeper: he sweeps words from his own texts and he needs ten years per page, to sweep Text for Nothing XIII as far as Not I 1950 to 1973 twenty-three years] (Cixous 2007, p. 76). Of course, Beckett is also brushing his words across genres, but, for Cixous, Beckett’s overwhelming achievement is as a playwright. In fact, she saves some of her most resonant closing words for this aspect of Beckett’s oeuvre. The theatre, she says, was waiting for Beckett, like the Whale waited for Jonah. Jonah enters the theatre of the Whale’s belly, converses with the Whale, and is then vomited out to make theatre among the Ninevites. Cixous aligns this with a kind of birthing process: “On sort d’un Théâtre pour se trouver dans un autre Théâtre, on est foetus dans un théâtre rosé, on naît dans un théâtre verdure, azur, mer, etc.” [You leave one Theatre to find yourself in another Theatre, you are a foetus in a pinkish theatre, and you come to birth in a theatre of greenery, azure, sea, etc.] (Cixous 2007, p. 78). This is both making and being theatre, and is the product, Cixous argues, of a stage creator, not a philosopher. Beckett, she says, is a theatre man, and a mantheatre9. As such, his role is to “faire scène, pas sens” (Cixous 2007, p. 78) which might be translated as “to scene, not to mean”. Nevertheless, Beckett’s stages, which are presented as hovering in the vicinity of zero, are very different from those of Cixous herself. To accompany her image of Beckett the sweeper, she coins a neologism to match “le dépeupleur”, and that is “le décharneur” (Cixous 2007, p. 76). “Décharner” is literally to strip the flesh away. This, then, is Beckett the Emaciator, Beckett the author of skin-and-bone theatre. Yet, for Cixous, this is far from being impoverished theatre. Rather, it is theatre which has to keep persisting in front of an undertaking which is simply too large. One could liken it, she suggests, to drinking the sea, and yet it is an even more vast undertaking than that. It is patiently to suck the pebbles, first on one side and then on the other, licking them, and 9 “Beckett pas philosophe, non, homme à théâtre, homme-théâtre” (Cixous 2007, p. 78).



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then resucking them: “toujours [...] la même mâchoire qui ronge la parole un peu plus chaque jour” [always the same jaw, chewing away at the word a little more each day] (Cixous 2007, p. 67). Against a landscape littered with elements of potential insuperability, enormous energy is needed to take a small step and then to add another to it. In this context, Cixous observes, the act of making an image, a satisfactory image – or something approaching it – requires nuclear energy. Cixous’s old colleague, Gilles Deleuze, wrote something similar in his analysis of Beckett’s television plays, where he describes how, with regard to Beckett’s images, what matters is not the sparse content of them but “la folle énergie captée prête à éclater” [the mad pent-up energy ready to burst out] (Deleuze 1992, p. 76). Like Dante, Cixous asserts, Beckett is the precursor of nanostructures. As a handler of the “dramaticule”, and the homunculus, Beckett anticipates the enormous power that can attach to minute structures: “Là, ici, sous le crâne, le petit est le grand, question de coup d’oeil” [There, here, under the skull, small is big, it’s how you direct your glance] (Cixous 2007, p. 29). In the kind of glance which Cixous is indicating, everything depends on ways of seeing. This is not a question of eyesight, or of perfect visual acuity. Cixous celebrates Beckett’s myopia in a continuum to blindness which includes Milton and Joyce. It is a parade which she also can join. In her text L’amour du loup, she writes of having been born with defective vision, and of feeling that very little separated her from the company of the blind. This extends to elements in her immediate surroundings – people, books, friends – which are often ill seen and indistinct. In an oddly appropriate way, this was also a feature of her first meeting with Beckett, when she groped her way across a poorly-lit landing to try to locate the entrance to his flat. She refers to this experience obliquely in Le Voisin de zéro, in one very brief parenthesis: “(Je raconterai ma rencontre dans le noir avec Beckett, pas ici, un de ces jours)” [(One of these days, not here, I will tell of my encounter in the dark with Beckett)]10 (Cixous 2007, p. 29). 10 People encountering Beckett did indeed often find themselves literally in the dark: at a PhD seminar in Rome (April 2008), John Pilling related a similar experience of groping on an unlit landing before finding himself confronted by Samuel Beckett [Editors’ note].


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Nevertheless, Cixous herself privileges the association of darkness and writing. The night, she writes in L’amour du loup, is the most prodigious half of her life. With eyes wide open at noon, she often fails to see. Not seeing the world, or ill seeing it, she states, is a condition of being a seer, or of seeing otherly. Persistence in the attempt to see can yield at least some awareness of seeing, and Cixous can be aligned with Beckett in the attempt. For Cixous as for Beckett, writing is indispensable. Without it, she says, the world would not exist for her. Like Beckett, she asserts that writing has nothing to do with mastery. Also like Beckett, she is intensely aware of nothingness. Yet, unlike Beckett – or unlike her perception of Beckett – she resists seeing nothingness as a horizon. For her, writing is much more overtly a countervailing act of defiance, a vehicle of escape: it is “la fabrication du radeau sur le néant” [fashioning a raft over the top of nothingness] (Cixous 2003, p. 97).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Nouvelles et textes pour rien, 1955, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris 1958. Texts for Nothing, 1967, in Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980, John Calder, London 1986, pp. 71-115. Le Dépeupleur, 1970, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. The Lost Ones, 1972, in Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980, cit., pp. 159-178. Not I, 1973, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, Faber and Faber, London 1984, pp. 213-223.

Works by Hélène Cixous “Une Passion: l’un peu moins que rien”, 1976, in Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman, 1976, Samuel Beckett, L’Herne, Paris, pp. 396-413. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 1993, Columbia University Press, New York, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. L’amour du loup, et autres remords, 2003, Galilée, Paris. Le Voisin de zéro: Sam Beckett, 2007, Galilée, Paris.



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Criticism Bishop, Tom, and Raymond Federman, 1976, Samuel Beckett, L’Herne, Paris. Blyth, Ian, and Susan Sellers, 2004, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory, Continuum, London. Deleuze, Gilles, 1992, L’Epuisé, in Samuel Beckett, Quad, et autres pièces de télévision, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, pp. 55-106. Motard-Noar, Martine, 1991, Les Fictions d’Hélène Cixous: Une autre langue de femme, French Forum, Lexington (Kentucky). Tajiri, Yoshiki, 2007, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body, Palgrave, Basingstoke. Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette, 1994, Chacun son dépeupleur: Sur Samuel Beckett, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris.

Other works cited Pascal, Blaise, 1670, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1962.


Company Heather Gardner

All dark and comfortless. (William Shakespeare, King Lear) Dark lightens while it sounds. (Samuel Beckett, Company)

Company is a novella written in English between 1977 and 1979, and published in French in 1980, in the form of either a monologue or a dialogue, depending on whether the speaking voices are regarded as one or two. The narrative has the compression, musicality and precision of poetry. It has been defined a compendium of Beckettian voices1 thanks to the development of themes that recur in the author’s previous works, the variety of its literary allusions and its structure which is comparable to other genres2. Its fifty-eight paragraphs fall into two groups according to tone, style, rhythm and personal pronoun use: forty-three paragraphs describe a figure lying in the dark, using the third person 1 See John Pilling’s definition in Pilling 1982. In his essay Pilling traces the autobiographical references and a number of quotations from Beckett’s previous works, in particular from Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, from Watt, Texts for Nothing, That Time, “Enough”, The Lost Ones, All Strange Away, Fizzles, From an Abandoned Work, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days. Other references to the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and Joyce are also mentioned. For a detailed list of the literary allusions in Company see also Brater 1983. 2 Company was adapted for the stage under license from the author at the Los Angeles Actor’s Theatre in California, at the Royal National Theatre of London, at the Théâtre de Rond Point in Paris and elsewhere.


H. Gardner. “Company”

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masculine (he), while the remaining fifteen refer to images, which are probably connected to the life of this figure, using the second person (you). The first person singular is not used: the indefinite subject of the novella remains silent in the dark listening to the voice as described in the opening: A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine. To one on his back in the dark. (Company, p. 7)

For the sake of simplicity, the descriptive voice which analyses every single sentence for verification will be called the voice of reason or of self-consciousness, and the voice which revives the past without distinguishing between fact and fiction the voice of memory. The first voice is flat in tone, involved in style and reason-filled while the other is lyrical, varied and laden with nostalgia. The two voices do not communicate; they remain closed off from each other so that no reciprocal relationship can be established between speaker and listener. This keeps the indefinite one of Company from reassembling his divided self and acquiring some sort of identity. If the interconnection between what the one repeatedly hears (“You are on your back in the dark”) and the fact of lying in the dark is evident, it does not in fact clarify how the two voices relate, nor does it reveal their origin: is the voice describing the one lying on his back in the dark speaking of him or of someone else? And is the other voice addressing him or someone like him lying on his back in the same dark or in some other dark? For why or? Why in another dark or in the same? And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. In the same dark as his creature or in another. For company. Who asks in the end, Who asks? (Company, pp. 31-32)

Thus the voice of reason proceeds from one question to the next, waiting to learn the condition of the one as well as his position. But the voice of memory fails to come up with the adjective ‘alone’ in the statement “you are on your back in the dark”, which would give the one the chance to refer everything to his individuality and extricate himself from the old dilemma about the exis-


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tence of objective reality. A deliberate and malicious omission, the voice of reason concludes, to stir up the uncertainty and embarrassment that torment modern man. “Si fallor, sum”, St. Augustine thought, but what can the one of Company say to assert himself? Without an origin, from which the principle of cause and effect can be derived, what story can he tell? And if there is no story to tell, what sin can he confess? And if there is no sin to confess, where can the moment of crisis and regeneration be placed in time to reconcile the I of the past with that of the present, the character with the narrator, the narrator with the author, in a lasting and stable unity? At the end of the narrative trilogy, originally written in French in the forties, the Unnamable was left with the impulse to confess and the desire to put an end to it. Following a path of self-reflection, Beckett’s characters had all ended up in the blind alley where the subject pursued in vain the object of its conscience turned into the Other as a consequence of the separation. After discarding the unity of subject and object as postulated by the Romantics, Beckett also abandoned the reality of the I and of the physical world, which in Descartes’ thought were respectively proved by subjective consciousness and the extension of the body in space. At the same time Beckett also dismantled the discursive construction behind the literary conventions of novelwriting – from characterization to plot, from the use of time and space to the topoi of adventure – ultimately questioning the control of the narrator on narration and of the author on the narrator. When Beckett confronted the last bulwark of story-telling, that is the narrative voice, he gradually deprived it of all its distinctive signs, leaving the reader with the indefinite one of Company, silent and motionless, in an undefined time and space, like a medieval figure stripped of its vestment, of the golden backdrop, and of its vertical posture. If at the end of The Unnamable the I is only a graphic sign indicating the speaking person, in Company we do not even know who is speaking. And without a subject, the function of the first person ceases to exist: “Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not” (p. 9). With the loss of the subject, the object too is doomed. And with the obliteration of both subject and object, the narrative ten-



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sion, in other words the dynamic element of movement responsible for the change of status in stories, dies out automatically. With no clear ideas to contemplate, nor directions to follow, the one of Company can do nothing but turn inward and take refuge in his soul, having reduced its sense and intellectual functions to a minimum, just enough for company. Company becomes the last and only measure surviving all losses: “The test is company” (p. 35). Company and solitude are the two existential poles in this text that begins with the noun ‘company’ in the title and ends with the adjective ‘alone’. The two terms come and go in the novella like in a musical fugue until in the end solitude coincides with the absence of company, as in Chaucer’s “Alone, withouten compagnye”3. Beckett inverts the order of the two terms in his narrative as if he wanted to reflect the poet’s line in a mirror, which reverses the sides without changing the image. The dramatic movement of the framework of The Canterbury Tales is perhaps more surprising than the liveliness of the tales themselves. Formally based on the motif of pilgrimage, the frame is in fact made up of a multiplicity of voices which gives rise to a fluctuating system of relationships as they support, contradict and oppose each other. The pilgrim identified by the name of the poet himself refers to the pleasure of devising for company. Using the same verb Beckett takes the devising activity a step further by involving the author himself in it: “Himself he devises too for company” (p. 34). If the game no longer ends in salvation, it still brings some solace. As the words become familiar by breaking the silence from time to time, the solace they bring is often accompanied by the temptation to remember: Repeatedly with only minor variants the same bygone. As if willing him by this dint to make it his. To confess, Yes I remember. Perhaps even to have a voice. To murmur, Yes I remember. What an addition 3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, I (A), 2779. The line drawn from The Knight’s Tale refers to the grave after Arcite’s death (it will be reused in a different context in The Miller’s Tale). Chaucer may have derived the line from Dante’s Inferno, XXIII, 1: “Taciti, soli, senza compagnia”. The term ‘company’ recurs 35 times in Beckett’s narrative, without counting its derivatives (‘companiable’, ‘companiably’ etc.).


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to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular. Murmuring now and then, Yes I remember. (Company, pp. 20-21)

Like Hamlet, when wondering if it would be better not to be, the one of Company hesitates on the brink of being while he is carried away by the opposite dream as the voice of memory returns and evokes the crossing over with the same incantatory repetition. A crossing over which would entail a fall into the emptiness of the other world for Hamlet, of words for the one, that like the Unnamable lays the blame for his tragedy on the use of personal pronouns4. To avoid the collapse of the Unnamable, the one of Company resists the call of the voice, as Hamlet does, by dropping the first person: “The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I. Quick leave him” (p. 32). This ends the tragedy of the I as suffered by the Unnamable. When the first person becomes silent, the chronic desire for identity and stability of the Beckettian character also ceases to be personal and the feared fragmentation and loss of the subject become, paradoxically, the condition that prevents the one of Company from falling into the emptiness of solipsism. This condition requires a new configuration of the points of reference, which is more radical than the simple reversal of the visual angle from the Self to the Other. A similar approach was tried by the postmodern painters who rejected the linear one-point perspective and flattened the vertical picture space in conformity with the human figure like Beckett did for the one of Company lying in the dark. In the wake of the linguistic turn philosophy took at the beginning of the twentieth century, when epistemological speculations on the nature of reality were replaced by questions about the relationship between language, mind and the world, Beckett reformulates the ontology of being in grammatical terms in his use of the personal pronouns, thus finding the limits of knowledge in the limits of language. These limits were first postulated by the empiricist philosopher Fritz Mauthner5, who developed Schopenhauer’s

4 “[I]t’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that” (The Unnamable, p. 408). 5 Fritz Mauthner was born into an Austrian Jewish family on November 22, 1849 in Bohemia. He graduated in law at the University of Prague and worked



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thought and anticipated some of Wittgenstein’s basic concepts6. Mauthner was the first to approach epistemology through language. He aimed at replacing philosophy with psychology, or, more precisely, with a critique of language, having reached the conclusion that no thinking activity is possible outside language, by which nothing can be verified. What language usages can explain are social and individual mental habits, or the logic underlying the linguistic patterns, not the essence of things. Whether language is inadequate to describe the world or the world is illusory we do not know, as the Unnamable maintained many years later: “I’m a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist perhaps, impossible to know...” (The Unnamable, p. 307). Accordingly, the figure of Company does not find the means to establish a relationship with the world and must therefore elude himself. The condition that Mauthner postulated in his work is exactly the same as the one described by Beckett in Company and in Mal vu mal dit (Ill Seen Ill Said), written immediately after. And if this is the human plight, failure is the only prospect left, as pointed out in Worstward Ho, the third novella written in the eighties: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Worstward Ho, p. 7)7. The pursuit of a better failure – with the ambiguity of the comparative suggesting both a minor and a major failure – is Beckett’s translation into literature of Mauthner’s gnoseological scepticism, to which the author added the irony of fighting a battle with the as theatre reviewer from 1875 to 1906 for the Berliner Tageblatt. Like his contemporary Kafka, he was brought up sharing three different cultures and languages which inclined him very early to work on linguistic usages. He also published a Dictionary of Philosophy in two volumes (Wörterbuch der Philosophie) that was much appreciated by Jorge Luis Borges in more recent times. He died in 1923 in Germany. 6 See Albertazzi 1986. Albertazzi believes Mauthner had a great influence on Wittgenstein, despite the disparaging words of the latter. Wittgenstein adopted from Mauthner the definition of philosophy as a critique of language, the concept of the rules of language games, the idea of linguistic usage and the metaphor of language as a ladder which must be thrown away after use. In the last part of her work Albertazzi compares a series of quotations from the works of the two philosophers pointing out the similarities between their philosophical systems. 7 Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho are defined as three stories of a subject that never comes real by David Watson (see Watson 1991).


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same means he intended to defeat – an irony that becomes an essential feature of his writing whenever the sense can be completely reversed as in this case8. Beckett read Mauthner’s monumental work Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache probably in the early 1930s9 when he was writing his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, published posthumously. From a letter Beckett wrote to Ben-Zvi in 1979, this is his brief outline of Mauthner’s thought: For me it came down to this: Thought words Words inane Thought inane Such was my levity.10

In this equation of word and thought, the adjective ‘inane’ is applicable to the threefold idea of void, emptiness and senseless8 The expression ‘fail better’ may also be perceived as a pun in Ireland, for the assonance between ‘feel better’ and ‘fail better’ is stronger in the Irish pronunciation of English. 9 The work, first published in Stuttgart in 1902, was translated into English with the title The Critique of Language. In a letter dated July 28, 1978 addressed to Richard Ellmann, Beckett corrected the account given by the biographer in James Joyce, and stated that he took Mauthner’s volumes in 1932 on Joyce’s request but did not read them to him, as Ellmann asserted. According to James Knowlson, Beckett read The Critique of Language a few years later, probably in 1937-1938, when he wrote the notes on the text for Joyce (see Knowlson 1996, p. 760, n. 142). Beckett’s transcriptions of sections of Mauthner’s Beiträge in the Whoroscope notebook plausibly date from mid-1938; Bair and Ben-Zvi claim Beckett consulted Mauthner’s work as early as 1929, or even earlier, as Garforth suggests, in Trinity College Dublin Library, that owned a copy of the Stuttgart edition. For a discussion on when Beckett first read and copied passages from Mauthner’s Beiträge see Pilling 2005 and Garforth 2005. 10 See Ben-Zvi 1984. Ben-Zvi compares Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Company on the ground of the relevance Mauthner’s thought has in the two works. See also Ben-Zvi 1980. In this essay Ben-Zvi examines the similarities between Beckett’s ideas and the philosopher’s assumptions, which she summarises in eight points here briefly hinted at: 1) words and thoughts are one activity; 2) language and memory are synonyms; 3) language is metaphorical; 4) there are no absolute truths; 5) the self is relative and contingent, and does not exist outside language; 6) human communication is impossible; 7) language should be simple so as to reduce its ambiguities to a minimum; 8) laugh and silence are the highest forms of criticism.



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ness, as the noun ‘levity’ applies to lightness, inconstancy and insubstantiality. Beckett probably learnt about the inanity of words as a student at Trinity College reading Romance languages and literatures. Mauthner based his concept on nominalism, the most innovative doctrine of the fourteenth century which reduced the substance of universalia to words, that is to flatus voci. Furthermore, both Beckett and Mauthner were illuminated by Schopenhauer’s philosophical thought, after reading Descartes, Locke, Hume and Hegel. This common ground may explain the impact the Sprachkritik had on Beckett. Beckett’s commitment to Mauthner’s theories lasted all his life, as Company proves. Beckett’s terse summary of Mauthner’s long and complex work makes it clear that thinking and speaking must be regarded as a single activity, which is metaphorical in origin and nature. It produces visual representations – in accordance with a cognitive model dating back to Plato – according to which nothing can be verified, as images are the result of sensory perceptions filtered through an unreliable memory and organized subjectively. These images communicate moods, feelings and impressions but cannot reflect the relationship between the mind and the world, let alone the world. Because of their metaphorical nature, thoughts, like words, are subject to a multiplicity of interpretations and to continual shifts in meaning which make them ambiguous, approximate and inadequate both for answering metaphysical questions and describing phenomenal processes. In Mauthner’s philosophy the idea of a God, of the physical world and of the self must remain within the realm of possibility until the right words are found to prove their existence. Although it is unable to access knowledge, language lends itself to social usages thanks to its conventional and figurative character, and reaches its highest power in poetry11. In spite of these premises, Mauthner, who was more interested in the epistemological than in the social implications of language, did not relinquish his research. The same can be said 11 In the second volume of the Sprachkritik Mauthner outlines a history of language. After discarding past hypotheses about its origin (divine, innate, etc.), Mauthner set the principle of linguistic development in metaphor. According to this theory, the genesis of language corresponds with that of poetry.


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for Beckett who expressed man’s inability to assert anything and the need to give word to this inability12. If for Mauthner imagining is remembering, thoughts must be processed in the same way as language, that is through comparison and association via memory13. Thoughts therefore are also memories. This brings us back to the mirage of identity evoked in Company by the voice which asks the one to utter ‘I remember’. In Beckett this utterance replaces Descartes’ cogito, for there cannot be any identity without a continuity of the self in time, that is without a memory. But Beckett, as well as replacing Descartes’ cogito, also does away with deductive reasoning (ergo sum), since remembering is not a logical, nor a reflective activity. Remembering, as Mauthner postulated, is thinking through images, of which only a small number can be verified, as the voice of reason in Company says from the very beginning. What is left of Descartes’ syllogism (cogito ergo sum) in Beckett’s work is just the yearning after an identity, and the utterance ‘I remember’ that would have the power to create an identity, if not to describe it, if only it could be re-enacted. In a world of voices, the self too becomes a linguistic product, that is, a representation: “devised deviser devising it all for company. In the same figment dark as his figments” (p. 64). In this world that is all a stage Beckett placed not only the public persona, as Erasmus and Shakespeare had done, but also his private self. This could be one of the reasons why the author agreed to the

12 Elizabeth Bredeck claims that the dual use of the ladder metaphor, which appears in the introductive chapter of the first volume and in the last chapter of the third volume, was intended to illustrate knowledge based on language (see Bredeck 1992). In her view the use of the metaphor shows the philosopher’s resistance to mysticism and silence rather than his inclination towards them, as in Gershon Weiler’s Mauthner’s Critique of Language. In the first metaphor, the ladder of language must be destroyed and rebuilt again and again in a perennial cycle; in the second one, the climbing up and down of the clown and his attempt to pull the ladder up from the highest rung, far from being funny, illustrate man’s search for truth through language. The metaphor of the ladder returns in Wittgenstein and in Beckett. Beckett, however, denied quoting Wittgenstein as he intended to refer only to a popular Welsh jest. 13 Mauthner attributed to memory the principle of association on which metaphors are built, which had been attributed to imagination by the 18th-century Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico.



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staging of Company, the most autobiographical of his narrative prose works14. As is well known, for Wordsworth poetry originated from emotions “recollected in tranquillity”. This is exactly where the images of Company stem from. What greater tranquillity could there be than that of the figure of Company who limits himself to listening and remembering, or, more precisely, to listening to remembrances? As for memories, they all revive the pain of separation, a pain that constantly returns combining past, present and future in one emotional dimension. The voice of memory recalls first the images of childhood, then those of old age and only two moments from adulthood. It follows the natural course of the sun and of life, from east to west, from light to dark, from birth to death, with a quick stop in the middle, quicker than the rising or setting stages15. If the gospel says “In the beginning was the Word”, the first image does not call to mind the birth of the child, but the question which cuts the tie with the mother: A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your mother by the hand. You turn right and advance in silence southward along the highway. After some hundred paces you head inland and broach the long steep homeward. You make ground in silence hand in hand through the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some hundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and some hundred paces later look up at her face again and ask her if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is. For some reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten. (Company, pp. 12-13) 14 In his later works Beckett blurred the distinction between genres: just as Company can be adopted for the stage, other theatrical works composed in the same period, Footfalls (1976), “A Piece of Monologue” (1979), and “Ohio Impromptu” (1980) can be read as narrative prose. 15 Ben-Zvi studied the progression of the fifteen memories, giving the following order: 1, 2: childhood; 3: old age; 4, 5, 6: childhood; 7: old age; 8, 9: childhood; 10: old age; 11, 12: adulthood; 13, 14, 15: old age (see Ben-Zvi 1984).


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The image of the child walking homeward hand in hand with his mother in silence is described in realistic detail with indications of time and place, of directions and destination, which is in sight, though difficult to reach, as the house is at the bottom or at the top of a steep road. In order to ask about the distance, or the closeness, of the blue sky, first in reality, then at least in appearance, the boy breaks the silence putting the same question in different ways. The ‘cutting retort’ of the mother breaks the tie between the two without undoing the knot that binds reality to its appearance. The pain and the inexplicability of this first separation sets the tone for the subsequent images. In the second remembrance the voice echoes previous Beckettian voices16 announcing the birth of the child together with his demise: “Over!” (p. 18), cries the midwife, referring obviously to the mother’s labour, to the father who had left the house to avoid the unpleasantness of delivery. Like the father, the voice too shuns the event inviting the listener to imagine the thoughts of the man “as he strode through gorse and heather” (p. 17). The image of the father returns in the third memory as a shadow beside his aged son who is following his footsteps, with the same repetition: “So many since dawn to add to yesterday’s. To yesteryear’s. To yesteryears’. Days other than today and so akin” (pp. 18-19). Thus, the days pass, making it necessary to start again “from nought anew” (p. 19). The equivalence of ‘nought anew’ with ‘nothing new’ allows Beckett to add Macbeth’s pessimism to the biblical “all is vanity” in a formula; this includes his own bleak view of life with what is also a self quotation from the beginning of Murphy, which is in turn a quotation from Ecclesiastes. Born on a Good Friday after a long labour, the voice introduces another autobiographical reference which ties the theme of birth to that of death in the fourth recollection. Then three more images from childhood: the falling of an old beggar woman who jumped from a window, sure that she could fly; Beckett’s diving from a board as a boy and throwing himself off a tree: alone in the 16 The time of birth is often associated with the time of death in Beckett. See: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth” in Waiting for Godot, and the beginning of “A Piece of Monologue” (written and staged in 1979, published in 1982): “Birth was the death of him”.



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garden, the boy listens to his mother’s voice telling “He has been a very naughty boy” (p. 28), while in the kitchen she is making bread and butter, but not for him17. An old man on the road is the next image, the shadow of his father on the right, going from point A to point Z. Suddenly, the old man turns off his fixed course cutting through the hedge, jumping over obstacles, swerving east. In the next image the voice returns to childhood in the glow of sunshine: the boy is seen daydreaming on the Irish coast and mistaking the clouds for a mountain. Unlike the young lovers in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream who see the mountains vanish into the air as clouds18, here the solidity and weight of matter is given to what has the levity of air. The boy is punished once more for having wandered too long and arriving home late. The last image of childhood also marks its end. The boy is immersed in the warmth of his compassion for saving a poor hedgehog from the cold. The horror of death will strike the child through the senses of sight and smell, leaving a lasting memory: “You have never forgotten what you found then. You are on your back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found then. The mush. The stench” (p. 41). Then again the old man shutting the door behind him and stepping out to take his beeline course to “the gap or ragged point in the quickset that forms the western fringe” (p. 48). In this last journey he does not count his steps, nor does he perceive his father’s shadow by his side. “Unhearing, unseeing”, he stops now and then to look down at his feet deep in the snow asking himself: “Can they go on?... Shall they go on?” (pp. 51-52). From the horizontal plane of the one lying in the dark, the old man appears sus-

17 Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, a Good Friday. The memories of childhood recollected in Company correspond to known events of the author’s life, such as his father leaving home on the day of his birth for an excursion to the beloved Wicklow mountains to learn on his return that his wife’s labour was not over; or his walks with his father in the country, the diving from the board at Sandycove, Forty-Foot, the launches from the fir tree in the garden that worried his mother so much, the death of the hedgehog placed by him in an old hatbox, his mother’s punishments. See Bair 1978, and Knowlson 1996. 18 See William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV.i.186-7: “Demetrius: These things seem small and undistinguishable, / like far off mountains turned into clouds.”


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pended on emptiness, between the black sky and the white ground: “The dark cope of sky. The dazzling land. You at a standstill in the midst... Halfway across the pasture on your beeline to the gap” (p. 52). The beeline on the snow behind his back, where he never cared to look before, reveals “A great swerve. Withershins” (p. 52)19. Was it curved by the weight of the heart, or by that eastward leap which was left unaccounted for? Leaving the old man above the abyss, the voice associates two reminiscences of adulthood with the time of childhood and the timeless dark of the present: “Bloom of adulthood. Imagine a whiff of that” (p. 53). The adult takes refuge in the summer house, where as a boy he used to see a rosy world through its coloured windows, to count the beats of his heart in a day, a month, a year, till the last thump: “Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble. A haven” (p. 54). As for the one in the dark, figures become the only comfort, whether they signify Pythagorean numbers or Platonic forms is irrelevant: “Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort” (p. 55). There are no smiles and no words when the woman arrives at the summerhouse. Face to face, he is too busy measuring the segments of her body leaving her alone with the unwanted child in her womb. The next image goes back to the moment of love, when the woman murmured to him under the trembling shade of a tree, “listen to the leaves”, like a Sybil scattering her words to the wind, or like Vladimir and Estragon, who heard the murmurs of the dead in the trembling of leaves. The tree, an aspen, contains the sound of another word, of the asp that killed Cleopatra and her dream of love, and of the hissing that seduced Eve20. 19 The obsolete adverb ‘withershins’ comes from Middle High German (wither = counter + genitive of sin = sun). It indicates a direction contrary to the movement of the sun, which was ominous in occult rituals. Beckett may be alluding to Dante’s surprise when as a pilgrim in Canto IV of the Purgatorio the poet encounters Belacqua and notices the reversed movement of celestial bodies at the antipodes. All Beckett’s characters turning in circles against their will may also be a parody of Descartes’ rationalistic system; Molloy is doomed to move in circles in the dark wood like Dante’s sinners in the Inferno. 20 The trembling of the ‘aspen leaves’ could also be a reference to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, II.iv.45, and to the cruel abuse inflicted on Lavinia: “O, had the monster seen those lily hands / Tremble like aspen leaves upon a lute...”



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The natural light fades away in the last three images. In the first, the old man is seen wrapped in a long coat, on the shore, leaning on a stick, the sound of the waves becoming weaker and weaker behind his back. We are left in the end with the shadow of the stick disappearing in the sand in the dark, a picture which suggests the figure of Prospero renouncing magic and burying his staff underground. In the second last image, the light comes from a lamp and the movement from a mechanical clock hand. The old man, crouched like Belacqua in Dante’s Purgatorio, measures the passing of time obsessively by the constant variations of the shadow of the hand on the face of the clock. In the last image the old man lies (both meanings intended) in the dark on a desert ground: “from time to time with unexpected grace you lie” (p. 87). In the end his contour overlaps with that of the one listening to the last fable, before remaining alone, without company: Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were. Alone. (Company, pp. 88-89)

Beckett weaves together three Shakespearean references in the closing sentences: to Love’s Labour’s Lost (with the loss of the word love in the rewriting), to the silence of Hamlet’s last word, and to the indefinite you of As You Like It, a comedy of exchanged identities overflowing with feelings, to which we can give the title we want. The allusions are linked by the thread of time which makes our labours inane plunging into silence the words devised for company. A company made up of voices, and of the echoes of these voices, which never give way to companionship. While the rhapsodic voice of memory revives forgotten emotions, the ‘cankerous’ voice of consciousness separates the moments of feeling with the detachment of the omniscient narrator, the indifference of reason and the meaninglessness of questions that remain without an answer. Where do the voices come from? What is the form, the dimension and the composition of the place


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on which the one lies? Are the voices weak because they come from far away, or because they are like that? Can anything be done to improve the condition of the one? Like give him a past, in the timeless dark? A name? Another posture? And which posture is preferable in the long term? Belacqua’s crouching? Or the crawling movement of other penitent figures, including the Beckettian characters that do so. Would it be better to leave the figure idle in the dark, perhaps creating a little distraction like a fly to drive off? But how can one create anything under these circumstances? The questions from particular become general. If the dark is unlimited, it must be absolute, then creator and creatures are in the same place, grappling with the same problems, first of all with creation: “Can the crawling creator crawling in the same create dark as his creature create while crawling?” (p. 73). The answer is negative: how can one reasonably be expected to create while crawling in the dark when to formulate the question stops are necessary between crawls? When the voice finally asks: “What kind of imagination reasons thus?”, the tautology of the answer, “A kind of its own” (p. 45), confirms its imaginary nature. Crawling and falling, wondering whether the pains of the present and of the past are always the same, the one goes on listening to the voices hoping to see the light that the sounds of words bring from time to time: “What visions in the dark of light!” (p. 84). The vision of Dante, who appealed to the power of words at the end of his imaginary journey to grasp what would otherwise disappear like “neve al sole”, or “le foglie levi” (Paradiso, XXXIII, 64, 65), is evoked here. But also the dark of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Listening to Dante and to Shakespeare, Beckett perceived, in the void, the levity with which words cross time and space (“such was my levity”, Beckett defined his agreement with Mauthner’s thought), and, in the dark, the pre-condition to the vision of light: “What visions in the dark of light!”. The indirect object of place (in the dark) precedes the genitive case (of light) in the phrase because the dark is necessary to the vision of light as much as uncertainty is prior to the making of fables. Fables that will always be representations, even when they are called memories or concepts, because the creation of images is the limit and the power of words and thoughts. What, then, is the responsibility of the author if he is a “devised deviser devising it all



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for company”, a linguistic product which is imagined to create other linguistic products? The question is never answered, but, like the figure he imagined, Beckett kept himself company listening to the voices that were familiar to him, of his parents, of ancient and modern poets, of his own words in other works, voices which in Company intertwine subjects and objects, fables and memories, dark and light.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett and Fritz Mauthner The Unnamable, 1958, in Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, John Calder, London 1959 [2003], pp. 291-418. Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), John Calder, London 1959 [2003]. Company, 1980, John Calder, London 1996. Worstward Ho, 1983, John Calder, London. Mauthner, Fritz, 1901-1902, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, F. Meiner, Leipzig 1923.

Criticism Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York. Albertazzi, Luciana, 1986, Fritz Mauthner: la critica della lingua, Rocco Carabba, Lanciano. Bair, Deidre, 1978, A Biography: Samuel Beckett, Jonathan Cape, London. Beja, Morris, Stanley E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (editors), 1983, Samuel Beckett. Humanistic Perspectives, Ohio State University Press, Columbus (Ohio). Ben-Zvi, Linda, 1980, “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Limits of Language”, in PMLA, vol. VC, 1980, pp. 183-200. Idem, 1984, “Fritz Mauthner for Company”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, IX, Spring 1984, pp. 65-88. Brater, Enoch, 1983, “The Company Beckett Keeps: The Shape of


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Memory and One Fablist’s Decay of Lying”, in Beja, Gontarski and Astier, 1983, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 156-171. Bredeck, Elisabeth, 1992, Metaphors of Knowledge. Language and Thought in Mauthner’s Critique, Wayne State University Press, Detroit. Garforth, Julian A., “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Whoroscope notebook: Beckett’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache”, in Hulle (editor), 2005, Beckett the European, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida), pp. 49-68. Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett after Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Hulle, Dirk Van (editor), 2005, Beckett the European, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida). Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London. Pilling, John, 1982, “Company of Samuel Beckett”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, VII, Spring, 1982, pp. 127-131. Idem, 2005, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope notebook”, in Hulle (editor), 2005, Beckett the European, cit., pp. 3948. Idem, 2006, “Beckett and Mauthner Revisited”, in Gontarski and Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett after Beckett cit., pp. 158-166. Watson, David, 1991, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction, MacMillan, London. Weiler, Gershon, 1970, Mauthner’s Critique of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.


Marinetti and Beckett: A Theatrical Continuum Roberta Cauchi Santoro

Scholars of Futurism have argued that aspects of the so called theatre of the Absurd were anticipated by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s theatre (Tisdall and Bozzalla 1978, pp. 108-109). This is particularly the case with Samuel Beckett, regardless of the fact that the Irish dramatist always resisted the Absurdist label1. Indeed Beckett acknowledges no debt to Marinetti’s theatre, and, in addition, critics seem to agree that the fascist years in Italy constitute an interruption of the Futurist project such that the legacy of Marinetti’s group remained largely lost up until the 1950s. Despite the lack of any direct evidence, Beckett’s theatrical oeuvre does, nonetheless, seem to develop several techniques first proposed by the Italian Futurists in the 1913-1915 theatre manifestos, before Futurist theatre became increasingly embroiled with Fascism. The aim of this paper is to explore this affinity and to consider whether it is a case of mere coincidence or, more likely, whether echoes of the Italian historical avant-garde could have reached Beckett through diverse osmotic routes. One such route might well have been Beckett’s exposure to Marinetti’s contemporary Guillaume Apollinaire and the French historical avant-garde, for whom Italian Futurism served as an impetus. Apollinaire’s influence is clearly audible in Beckett’s free verse (see Fletcher 1964, p. 322). The French route is especially plausible when viewed in the light of Michael Kirby’s contention, in Kirby 1971, that criticism of avant-garde drama and the theatre of the Absurd has consistently had a French bias. This is under1 As is well known, theatre critic Martin Esslin grouped together playwrights like Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Harold Pinter, and called these new plays the Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin 1961). Beckett always rejected this label.


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standable because, in the pluralist debate on modernity that existed in France, Futurism could only occupy a subordinate role, so that critics have been more willing to give credit to Dada and Surrealism for contributions which in fact originated in the earlier movement. The seeds of the Dadaist and Surrealist theatrical innovations are already evident in the Futurist condensed theatre called sintesi (see Kirby 1971, p. 6). Marinetti’s experimentation in metatheatre, something that Beckett would deploy in his early drama, might well have been encountered as transformed by two dramatists that Beckett definitely read: Antonin Artaud and Luigi Pirandello, the first in the Theatre of Cruelty, the second with respect to the rupture of fourthwall conventions in the theatre of the Grotesque. Pirandello’s theatre of the Grotesque, as Kirby lucidly points out, partly owes its origin to the Futurist Synthetic Theatre (Kirby 1971, p. 6). Italo Calvino also understood the path of mediation that leads from Italian Futurist theatre through Artaud to Beckett. In his essay “La sfida al labirinto” Calvino conceives of movements like Futurism as embodying the rationalist trend of the avant-garde, which aspires to discover redeeming aesthetic and moral qualities within the mechanized world. In Calvino’s view, this tendency is characterized by an “ottimismo storicista” (historicist optimism) (Calvino 1962 [1980, p. 88]) that is opposed to a far less optimistic offshoot of the avant-garde that he terms “viscerale” (visceral) (p. 89). In this latter classification, Calvino alludes to Artaud and, in another essay entitled “Il mare dell’oggettività”, he places in this same category none other than Beckett (Calvino 1960 [1980, p. 95]). Angelo Guglielmi opposes this argument in Avanguardia e sperimentalismo, arguing that the visceral avant-garde as proposed by Calvino is a movement that “[si] rifiuta a esprimere una qualsiasi idea sul mondo” (refuses to express any idea about the world) and does not propose any method of understanding existence, perceiving the world as a “centro invincibile di disordine” (an invincible centre of disorder), totally governed by chaos (Guglielmi 1964, p. 67). This statement pits the visceral avantgarde and, consequently, Beckett against the historical avantgarde, whose genre par excellence, the manifesto, epitomizes the latter’s utopian progressivism, which flourished at the turn of the


R. Cauchi Santoro. Marinetti and Beckett

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twentieth century but that had become ever rarer at the time of the ‘visceral avant-garde’ in general, and Beckett in particular. Perhaps these same epistemological and axiomatic differences coupled with the ideological drift that shifted between the theatre of Futurism and that of Beckett explain why criticism has shied away from acknowledging the hint of a continuum that bridges the two. Other reasons may well stem from the fact that the Italian movement was mostly ignored, at least in Italy, until well into the sixties. This marginalization partly springs from the distaste for the Futurists’ alliance with Fascism in the first decades of the twentieth century, as well as a widely held belief that it was “more manifesto than practice, more propaganda than actual production” (Goldberg 1979, p. 11). The latter claim is particularly unfair in relation to Futurist theatre, which was characterized, from the outset, by its original theatricality. As early as 1913 Marinetti’s Futurist theatre offered an outrageous alternative to the stultifying conventions of bourgeois drama that Beckett would still be reacting against in the early 1950s, as the Futurists’ description of the theatre they banished demonstrates: “we are deeply disgusted with the contemporary theatre [...] because it vacillates stupidly between historical reconstruction (pastiche or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction [...] a finicky, slow, analytic and diluted theatre worthy, all in all, of the age of the oil lamp” (Marinetti 1913, in Taylor 1979, p. 30). The reaction provoked by the serate futuriste already offered a foretaste of the opposition that would meet Beckett’s first performances of Waiting for Godot. The Futurists’ pleasure at being booed was, nonetheless, a political stance specifically aimed at manipulating language. For the Futurists, language was a constant projection of something other, on the ground of the dialectical relationship this theatre established with extra-literary aspects of life. In Beckett’s theatre, however, language totally severs the disclosures of reality from old hermeneutic schemes and presents them in a neutral space to declare the groundlessness of all meaning and being. But in spite of these underlying differences, the theatre of Futurism and that of Beckett have a common denominator. Both bring to the fore the sound of letters as linguistic signifiers and their transposition from the page to the stage; in this way they work to accentuate sound. As Beckett once famously wrote


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to the American director of his plays, Alan Schneider, “my work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else” (in Harmon 1998, p. 24). Both theatres are characterized by a black humour that defies the audience’s expectations and brings the play to an abrupt end. The origins of this kind of theatre lie in Alfred Jarry, a major influence not only on Marinetti but also on Beckett. Jarry’s avantgarde ante litteram Ubu plays are nothing short of the first theatre of the absurd, before Martin Esslin coined the term. Marinetti’s first play Roi Bombance echoes Jarry’s Ubu Roi. The hero of Roi Bombance is an Idiot poet, in whom one can already discern the outlines of Beckett’s tramp poets suspended in their own limbo, as well as the seeds of brevity, absurdity and disruption. Sound dislocates the spectator and, as Michael North puts it, exposes “the materiality, even the gross sensuality of what is supposed to be a transparent signifying medium” (North 2002, p. 217). The use of sound in Roi Bombance is echoed by Lucky, when, for example, he speaks of “Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy” (Waiting for Godot, p. 42). Both the sound and appearance of letters in the Futurists’ “parole in libertà” (words-in-freedom) gave birth to their dramatic equivalent in the 1913 manifesto entitled “Il Teatro di Varietà” (The Variety Theatre) which builds on the music-hall, cabaret and café concert. This manifesto lists many of what would become the sine qua non characteristics of Beckett’s theatrical oeuvre. The Variety Theatre manifesto proposes to amuse with “comic effects, erotic stimulation or imaginative astonishment” (Marinetti 1913, in Taylor 1979, p. 30)2. The clowns of Waiting for Godot, with their sexual puns and quid-pro-quo, immediately spring to mind. The Variety Theatre manifesto also accentuates “agility, speed, force, complication” (p. 31), all of which are ubiquitous in the pratfalls and marionette-style mechanical movement of Beckett’s stage characters. Cinema in the theatre is also a prerogative

2 From now on, reference to this work will be given quoting only the page number in brackets in the text.



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for the Futurists and the move away from the word towards the image is central to Beckett’s later drama. Other characters from the Beckettian dramatic corpus perfectly fulfil the Futurist invocation for “powerful caricatures” (p. 31). Krapp, for example, is a mock-caricature of senility, and the “profound analogies between humanity, the animal, vegetable, and mechanical worlds” (p. 31) remind us of Vladimir’s and Estragon’s exchanges: Vladimir: Do you want a carrot? Estragon: Is that all there is? Vladimir: I might have some turnips. Estragon: Give me a carrot [Vladimir rummages in his pockets, takes out a turnip and gives it to Estragon who takes a bite out of it. Angrily]. It’s a turnip! (Waiting for Godot, p. 21)

But the main feature shared by the two theatres is the “ironic decomposition of all worn out types of the Beautiful, the Grand, the Solemn, the Religious, the Ferocious, the Seductive, and the Terrifying” (p. 31). As Viktor Shklovsky pointed out: “when the canonized art forms reach an impasse, the way is paved for the infiltration of the elements of non-canonized art, which by this time have managed to evolve new artistic devices” (in Erlich 1965 [1981, p. 260]). Before this could take place, the serious artistic potential of popular theatre had to be discovered, and this is the wider cultural framework of Marinetti’s manifesto, almost forty years before the first staging of Waiting for Godot. Other innovations like the direct address to the audience and the attempt to create on stage “the difficulty of setting records and conquering resistances” (p. 32) by making such mischievous suggestions as “have actors recite Hernani tied in sacks up to their necks” (p. 34) cannot but remind us of Beckett’s characters immersed up to their necks in dustbins (Endgame), urns (“Play”) or in a mound (Happy Days). Most important of all, the Variety Theatre was the first to destroy “all conceptions of perspective [and] proportion” (p. 33), stripping the stage props to a minimum, as happens with Waiting for Godot, where the stage features a mere tree. Didi and Gogo, embracing under a full moon and recoiling


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from their own foul smell, embody the Variety Theatre’s disparagement of “ideal love and its romantic obsession that repeats the nostalgic languor of passion to satiety” (p. 32). The manifesto’s proposal to do away with psychology and to exalt body-madness (the so-called fisicofollia) would, on the other hand, be taken up by Antonin Artaud’s theatre. Marinetti was indeed initiating a theatre which would eliminate cause and effect, but whose physical, sensory qualities could elicit in the audience the intuition of sensation, an important dictum that finds its source in Henri Bergson, the deepest of common roots between the Futurists and Beckett. The Bergsonian concept of analogy can be found in the Futurist theatre, whose rejection of linear discourse in favour of simultaneity, ambiguity and montage is further developed by Dada, Surrealism, Vorticism, and is subsequently explored by Beckett in a play like Not I. In Beckett and the Futurists there is a similar attempt at reducing the linguistic sign to gestural invention. Both emphasize the struggle to avoid the hardening of the presentation into a representation, and thus insist on the need for ‘defamiliarization’, a concept that the Russian Formalists owe to the Bergsonian theory of perception. The Futurists did not simply emphasize the materiality of the word; they also underscored the materiality of the stage props. In this manner they heralded the mechanized theatre that offset the process of abstracting all anthropomorphism out of the play. Characters start to lose their personalities and become imbued with mechanical movements, while the plot becomes shortened and intensified into a single action. This development is also traceable in the trajectory that leads from Waiting for Godot to Beckett’s later ‘playlets’, which, in their brevity, lack of logicality, geometric quality and the asymmetrical pattern of the words in the dramatic text resemble parole in libertà. Also of interest is the function of dialogue in this reductive process. As it often was for the Futurists, dialogue in Beckett is forced to operate as substitute for the mise en scène and as a surrogate for the dramatic action, even though the very foundations of dramatic language have been reduced to minimalist assertions. The last phase of Futurist theatrical innovation, proposed by Enrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, was directed towards the development of a Futurist scenography capable of celebrating



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the wonders of the technological age. In Prampolini’s manifesto (1915) the stage becomes kinetic and impersonal movement is the essence of the performance. This same kinetic quality of the stage is found in the use of offstage in Beckett’s later drama as well as in the exploitation of technological progress to render the actor almost unnecessary. Geometrical shapes become the dominant aspect of stage design and Beckett’s later theatre suggests a debt to Prampolini’s freestanding geometric constructions, which invoke instability, lack of equilibrium, and confusion of depth achieving a startling conflict between upstage and downstage heights of set and performer. These characteristics are especially evident in Beckett’s “Quad”. “Quad”, first filmed in 1982, is one of Beckett’s very last plays written for television. In this short ‘playlet’, which faintly echoes Giacomo Balla’s short play Sconcertazione di stati d’animo (Disconcerted states of mind), the role played by the stage is central. The nameless characters, who are significantly numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4, and whose movements are lettered like the square’s points A, B, C and D (together with the combination thereof), are the only characters involved. “Quad” is impersonally described as “a piece for four players, light and percussion” (“Quad”, p. 451). The ‘playlet’ combines players 1, 2, 3 and 4’s movements in a puzzle of letters, lights, colours and noise. The percussion sounds are interrupted in between the combinations in order to allow the only human sound in the whole play to be heard – the shuffling of footsteps. The four players each produce different footsteps. This detail accentuates the exact point where Beckett significantly differs from the mechanical theatre of the Italian Futurists. Even though Beckett seems cognizant of and intrigued by all the possibilities of the mechanical theatre, the geometric shapes in his later ‘playlets’ never take over. The human element, in all its frail diversity and fallibility, as opposed to the mechanized world, is always present. Despite the “gowns reaching to [the] ground, cowls hiding faces [...] players as alike in build as possible [...] sex indifferent” (“Quad”, p. 453), the palpable diversity of the human element is more audible than the uniformity of the mechanical world. And while the letters standing for the courses to be walked combine all four points of the quad, the central letter E at the point of intersection of the two diagonals seems unreachable –


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perhaps as unfathomable as the quintessential essence that keeps humanity battling against all the odds? At the beginning of the twentieth century, then, mechanization in the theatre created entirely new forms of representation, apparently perfect in their automatism, while also bringing new categories of sound, nonsense, and noise produced by mechanized powers that vastly exceed the human. Beckett makes use of all the above but, unlike the Futurists, he underscores the fact that, despite human inability and fallibility, this same frail humanity dispels any belief in the perfection of mechanization. In this major dichotomy lies the difference between pre-WWI avant-guerre and the last outpost of post-WWII avant-garde. Marinetti’s theatre might indeed have laid the foundations of the Beckettian theatrical aesthetic. However, while Beckett’s later drama, “Quad” in particular, seems to point towards its possible Futurist origins, it also accentuates the underlying epistemological gulf separating the two.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot, 1954, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 7-88. “Quad”, 1984, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 449-454. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London. Cohn, Ruby, 1983, Samuel Beckett. Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writing and a Dramatic Fragment, John Calder, London.

Works by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 1913, “Il Teatro di Varietà”, in Christiana J. Taylor (editor), 1979, Futurism. Politics, Painting and Performance, Umi Research, Ann Arbor. Taylor, Christiana J. (editor), 1979, Futurism. Politics, Painting and Performance, Umi Research, Ann Arbor.



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Criticism Arndt, Michael J., 1999, “Theatre at the Centre of the Core. Technology as a Lever in Theatre Pedagogy”, in Stephen A. Schrum (editor), 1999, Theatre in Cyberspace, Peter Lang, New York, pp. 6584. Berghaus, Günter, 1998, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Calvino, Italo, 1960, “Il mare dell’oggettività”, in Il Menabò, 2, 1960, also in Italo Calvino, 1980, Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura e società, Einaudi, Torino, pp. 39-45. Idem, 1962, “La sfida al labirinto”, in Il Menabò, 5, 1962, also in Calvino, 1980, Una pietra sopra cit., pp. 82-97. Idem, 1980, Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura e società, Einaudi, Torino. Caws, Mary Ann (editor), 2001, Manifesto. A Century of Isms, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London. Dixon, Steve, Futurism-e-visited, http://art.ntu.ac.uk/dpa (last accessed May 30, 2008). Drucker, Johanna, 1994, The Visible Word. Experimental Typography and Modern Art 1909-1923, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Erlich, Viktor, 1965, Russian Formalism. History, Doctrine, Yale University Press, New Haven 1981. Essif, Les, 1998, “The Concentrated (Empty) Image behind the Fragmented Story in Beckett’s Late Plays”, in Essays in Theatre, XVII 1, 1998, pp. 15-32. Esslin, Martin, 1961, The Theatre of the Absurd, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1968 [revised and enlarged edition]. Fletcher, John, 1964, “Beckett’s Verse. Influences and Parallels”, in The French Review, XXXVII 3, 1964, pp. 320-331. Gassner, John, 1954, Theatre in Our Times, Crown Publishers, New York. Goldberg, RoseLee, 1979, Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present, Thames and Hudson, London & New York. Gorelik, Mordecai, 1962, New Theatres for Old, E. P. Dutton, New York. Guglielmi, Angelo, 1964, Avanguardia e sperimentalismo, Feltrinelli, Milano. Janus, Adrienne, 2007, “In One Ear and Out the Others. Beckett .... Mahon . Muldoon”, in Journal of Modern Literature, XXX 2, 2007, pp. 180-196.


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Kirby, Michael, 1971, Futurist Performance, PAJ Publications, New York. Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Simon and Schuster, New York 1997. Lista, Giovanni, 2001, Futurism, Finest SA/ Éditions Pierre Terrail, Paris. North, Michael, 2002, “Words in Motion. The Movies, the Readies, and the Revolution of the Word’’, in Modernism/Modernity, IX 2, 2002, pp. 205-223. Perloff, Marjorie, 1986, The Futurist Moment. Avant-garde, Avant guerre, and the Language of Rupture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Picchione, John, 2004, The New Avant-Garde. Theoretical Debate and Poetic Practices, University of Toronto, Toronto. Pinottini, Marzio, 1979, L’Estetica del Futurismo. Revisioni storiografiche, Bulzoni, Roma. Puchner, Martin, 2002, “Manifesto=Theatre”, in Theatre Journal, LIV 3, 2002, pp. 449-465. Rye, Jane, 1972, Futurism, E.P. Dutton, New York. Schrum, Stephen A. (editor), 1999, Theatre in Cyberspace, Peter Lang, New York. Shklovsky, Viktor, 1923, Literatura i kinematograf, in Erlich, 1965, Russian Formalism cit., pp. 251-271. Tisdall, Caroline, and Angelo Bozzalla, 1978, Futurism, Oxford University Press, New York. Uhlmann, Anthony, 2006, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image, Cambridge University Press, New York.


Breathing the Void Davide Crosara

Listen to the light now. (Samuel Beckett, “Embers”)

In Endgame Beckett reproduced the undoing of world and word, a reversed creation that engulfs all objects and names into silence. His strategy of language rarefaction underwent a sudden acceleration after his early experimentation with radio plays, which marks new boundaries in his universe. These pages aim at demonstrating the extent to which Beckett’s new poetic horizon, i.e. the horizon of “dramaticules” and “short proses”, originates through a constant dialogue with the Romantic tradition. I will argue in favour of a possible postmodernist outcome in Beckett’s works, a result of the reworking of one of the most powerful Romantic myths, that of Prometheus. After the first radio plays (from All That Fall to “Words and Music”), Beckett engages with his “mental theatre”, a play performed in the dark, in which the mind is populated by indistinct voices. The dialogue is reinvented in a monodramatic tone – rather in the same way as in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) the self had fragmented into three voices that the protagonist could barely recognize as his own. As in Romantic monodrama, Beckett’s late plays undergo a radical process of formal interiorization, in which the boundary between external and internal space gradually fades, becoming indefinable. Unlike his nineteenth century predecessors, who had been unable to move away from traditional stage setting conventions, Beckett discovered, through the radio, the enormous possibilities offered by the void: “I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space”


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(quoted in Knowlson 1996, p. 477). This new space acquires explicit Miltonic connotations in Happy Days and in The Unnamable. In Happy Days Winnie (whose memory unreliably quotes poetic fragments as she strains to retrieve them) ironically calls on the “Holy Light”, which appears in the opening of the third canto of Paradise Lost. However, while in Milton’s poetics the eyes of a poet could still open to the ken of vision despite the Fall, in Beckett’s play the “hellish sun” (Happy Days, p. 147) blinds Winnie, condemning her to recalling memories. In Beckett’s new space, the boundary between light and shadow is the first to fall, with an inversion in meaning: while Krapp is worried by the darkness around him, for the characters of “Play” (1963) darkness represents the only condition of relief (see Worth 2001, pp. 42-45). Paralyzed, moulded into the earth and blinded by the light, Winnie turns to song for relief: How often I have said, in evil hours, Sing now, Winnie, sing your song, there is nothing else for it, and did not. [Pause.] Could not. [Pause.] No, like the thrush, or bird of dawning, with no thought of benefit, to oneself or anyone else. (Happy Days, p. 155)

In the progressive and unstoppable obscuring of the body, the voice survives, ensuring pathos and breaking the narrative progression. At the same time it allows speech to start again. The voice proves in fact to be the most enigmatic and fascinating invention of Beckett’s theatre. It has been acknowledged as “Samuel Beckett’s most profound literary creation” (Ackerley and Gontarski, 2004, p. 607). In perfect continuity with the tradition of monodrama, from Happy Days onwards the gradual establishing of immobility is accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the lyric element: it is not without reason that Enoch Brater uses the definitions of “Monodrama” or “Performance Poem” (Brater 1987, p. 17) respectively for “A Piece of Monologue” (1979) and “Rockaby” (1982). With the assistance of the Romantics, Beckett interprets and reverses the old Miltonic opposition between the flight of the mind and the reification of the body. His paradise is in fact a perfect, symmetrical inversion of the


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Promethean paradise. In order to outline its boundaries and features, I intend to focus on three images: 1. Milton’s Pandemonium 2. Keats’ Temple of Moneta in Hyperion 3. Beckett’s “cabin” or “eye”

1. Pandemonium In the first book of Paradise Lost, Pandemonium is the majestic infernal palace which emerges from the earth. Here Satan meets the rebel angels after his eviction from Paradise (Milton, Paradise Lost, I, vv. 710-717). In The Unnamable, the narrator identifies with Satan from the very beginning: “For I am obliged to assign a beginning to my residence here, if only for the sake of clarity. Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer” (p. 295). In The Unnamable the narrator wishes to occupy the centre of both stage and narration, though the position is irreparably lost: “I like to think I occupy the centre, but nothing is less certain” (p. 295). He is located away from the centre of creation, as Satan is after the defeat1. The days of the Promethean flight are over, the body is reified: “But the days of sticks are over, here I can count on my body alone, my body incapable of the smallest movement and whose very eyes can no longer close as they once could” (p. 295). Pandemonium, in Milton, stands for a still unconquerable kingdom, a shelter that offers an escape to the imagination. The infernal palace of The Unnamable, on the other hand, is an enclosed, “windowless” space: I found myself in a kind of vast yard or campus, surrounded by high walls, its surface an amalgam of dirt and ashes, and this seemed sweet to me after the vast and heaving wastes I had traversed, if my information was correct. I almost felt out of danger! At the centre of this enclosure stood a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes. (The Unnamable, p. 317) 1 “As far removed from God and light of heav’n / As from the centre thrice to th’utmost pole”. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, vv. 73-74.


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Milton’s Satan is allowed to leave his kingdom and find a new interior momentum: he can even imagine controlling Chaos. His huge residence metaphorically represents the flight of the mind, the search for a boundless imagination. Beckett goes in the opposite direction: the expansive motion of Satan becomes a contraction, an inward movement centred around a fragmented self. That is why The Unnamable’s “rotunda” becomes a blind prison, a place that witnesses the failure of the Promethean ascent2. The flight around the earth’s orbit is resolved in a reflexive movement leading to the dismemberment of the body: At the particular moment I am referring to, I mean when I took myself for Mahood, I must have been coming to the end of a world tour, perhaps not more than two or three centuries to go. My state of decay lends colour to this view, perhaps I had left my leg behind in the Pacific, yes, no perhaps about it, I had, somewhere off the coast of Java and its jungles red with rafflesia stinking of carrion, no, that’s the Indian Ocean, what a gazeteer I am, no matter, somewhere round here. (The Unnamable, p. 317)

Beckett’s narrator shares with Satan his high position and his royal attributes: he3 owns a crown and a “stick or pole”4, he feels the “imploring gaze” of his “delegates” (The Unnamable, p. 298) down below. Despite these similarities the Beckettian narrator “hardly recalls” the Pandemonium he had left in order to challenge the creator. His visionary power resides in a collapse of vision. As a result the tragedy of creation becomes the tragedy of an uncertain voice and of an indefinable body (i.e. a body that can only be defined through a negative, in absentia). On the cosmogony of The Unnamable Beckett superimposes that of Paradise Lost, because this allows him to place his characters in a new dimension, a sempiternal hell illuminated by the grey, diminishing light of self-denial.

2 This passage from the palace to the skull anticipates Beckett’s late “skullscapes”. 3 “He” and “his” are merely conventional here, the narrator’s gender being indefinable. 4 Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 300. In the same passage the narrator uses the words “javelin” and “sword”. Milton refers to Satan’s mighty “spear”. See Milton, Paradise Lost, I, vv. 292-296.



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2. The Temple of Moneta Despite his juvenile rejection of the “ineluctable gangrene of Romanticism” (Proust, p. 547), in his mature years Beckett shows an intense affinity with Keats’s poetics. Keats and Beckett share the same interest in Dante’s Comedy and in Shakespeare’s King Lear. They assign a similar role to art and the artist: Beckett chooses the path of “impotence” and “ignorance”5, while Keats considers the poet “the most unpoetical of any thing in existence”6. In particular, their confrontation with Milton leads them to take convergent paths. Keats tried to emulate the great Miltonic model in Hyperion and in The Fall of Hyperion7, where he sought to reproduce the language of Milton and the imagery of Paradise Lost. However, Milton’s authority became suffocating, and Keats was forced to abandon the project. Milton’s language expresses a world that can no longer be portrayed with the same strategies. His poetry, though the expression of a theocentric universe, is wholly vertical and proceeds in impetus and explosions: he transcends space and time, and flies like an eagle from paradise to the abyss. On the other hand, Keats derives from his “agon” with the Miltonic “muse” an entirely horizontal space, made of noiseless falls, of supine figures almost fused with rocks and earth, the scenario of Happy Days and of The Unnamable. The “rotunda” is one with the temple of Moneta. In The Fall of Hyperion the poet painstakingly ascends the steps that lead him to the altar of the goddess, but the only reve-

5 “I’m working with impotence, ignorance”. Beckett, interview with Israel Shenker (Shenker 1956, p. 10). 6 “A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no identity – he is continually informing and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures”. Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27th October 1818 (in Keats 2003, p. 547). 7 Hyperion was composed largely between the end of September and 1st December 1818, when Keats’s brother Tom died. After a few additions and adjustments the project was eventually abandoned in 1819. The Fall of Hyperion was started in July 1819 on the Isle of Wight, almost completed by the end of September 1819 (when Keats announced to Reynolds his “defeat” in the agon with Milton), and was possibly revised in December 1819.


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lation, here, is his own mortality. Soon abandoning the idea of any “progress” or progression in poetry, Keats understood, as Beckett did, that suffering is an inevitable stage in the comprehension of reality. Apollo no longer marks the advent of a new age in poetry: the gods are all fallen, petrified in body and sight. Keats has lost the power to express the rebirth of poetry. Yet the vision must be endlessly sought after, though it constantly vanishes. His answer to the impasse is typically Beckettian: once the temple’s last step is reached, the poet raises the veil, looks into the face of the goddess and blurs the distinction between subject and object: Half closed, and visionless entire they seem’d Of all external things – they saw me not... (Keats, The Fall of Hyperion, vv. 267-268, p. 442)

Keats sets the self in a purgatorial space, between being and non-being. This reification, however, rather than eliminating the vision, pushes the end forward. For both Keats and Beckett stasis and indolence become a generative void, a shipwreck that opens up a relationship with the Other. 3. The “cabin”, or “eye” In Beckett’s imaginaire Proserpina progressively replaces Prometheus. The woman of Ill Seen Ill Said (1981)8 is perhaps the most significant reincarnation of this passage. Dressed in black, with long white hair, Proserpina moves from her “cabin” towards an arid “zone of stones” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 54). As suggested in the title, this short prose work focuses on the themes of perception and the opacity of the word. One wonders whether the itinerary is only in her mind. The ambiguity of the route, the use of objects of the “cabin”, and the contrast between light and shadow invite us to read Ill Seen Ill Said as the completion of the process started with Happy Days. Winnie is swallowed into the eye, which is the true protagonist of 8 This short prose work was composed initially in French: Mal vu mal dit came out a few months earlier, between October 1979 and January 1981. There are significant differences between the texts, which cannot be discussed here.



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Ill Seen Ill Said: an eye that “breathes, devours, digests and narrates” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 270), to such an extent that the action of seeing merges with that of writing9. However, the eyelids of the universal eye are closed, they can only look inwards. Beckett cites the “vile jelly” of King Lear (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 73): his universe is performing the last metamorphosis, with the image swallowing the imagination. Unlike the “glittering eye” of Coleridge, the eye of the late Beckett is a “gluttoning eye” that ultimately devours itself. There had been, the narrating voice recalls, “Things and imaginings” (p. 23); but “fancy” and “imagination”, the old romantic couple, are an “old tandem”(p. 53) now. In an extreme act of rarefaction, the eye reduces itself to the whiteness of two empty orbits reflecting a starless sky; the “blackness” (p. 81) of sight now obtained is a mirror image of the world. Beckett’s return to Milton no longer comes about through Paradise Lost, but through Samson Agonistes, Milton’s last work. The “woman” of Ill Seen Ill Said experiences the same condition as Samson: the loss of “inner vision”, the paradox of a “living death”10. As prisoners of their own body, as if in a tomb, both characters experience the “real darkness of the body”11. The Miltonic hero makes the theatre of his last exhibition collapse on the Philistines, while Beckett’s dying woman sees, in the “slumberous collapsion” (p. 77) of her world, a “phantom hand” (her own? The narrator’s? The reader’s maybe?), which drops the curtain: “No but slowly dispelled a little very little like the last wisps of day when the curtain closes. [...] Farewell to farewell” (p. 83). Beckett urges literature towards a “vanishing point”12 which is never fully reached. His writings acquire the void and silence as See for example p. 69: “The eye has changed. And its drivelling scribe”. “To live a life half dead, a living death, / And buried; but O yet more miserable! / Myself, my sepulchre, a moving grave”. Milton, Samson Agonistes, vv. 100-102. 11 Milton, Samson Agonistes, v. 159. Beckett directly alludes to the last verse (“all passion spent”) of Milton’s work. See p. 77 (“All curiosity spent”). 12 “Genet and Beckett go farther still. The former reveals reality in the deathly language of mirrors. The latter listens endlessly to a solipsist drone. Words appear in either case on the page only to declare themselves invalid. We have crossed some invisible line; and stringless lyres now strum for a world without men. Post-modern literature moves, in nihilistic play or mystic transcendence, toward the vanishing point” (Hassan 1971, p. 23). 9

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fundamental ontological categories, and as such they have been inherited by postmodernist authors, for whom, as for Beckett, it is perfectly possible to survive by breathing the void: “One moment more. One last. Grace to breath that void. Know Happiness” (p. 83).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, in The Grove Centenary Edition. Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, 2006, Grove Press, New York, pp. 511-554. The Unnamable, 1958, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), Grove Press, New York 1959 [2005], pp. 294-317. Happy Days, 1961, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990, pp. 135-168. Ill Seen Ill Said, 1981, in Nadia Fusini (a cura di), 1994, Mal vu mal dit di Samuel Beckett nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett. Einaudi, Torino (trilingual edition, Italian trans. by Renzo Guidieri). The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), Grove Press, New York 1959 [2005]. The Grove Centenary Edition. Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, 2006, vol. IV, Grove Press, New York. Fusini, Nadia (a cura di), 1994, Mal vu mal dit di Samuel Beckett nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett, Einaudi, Torino (trilingual edition, Italian trans. by Renzo Guidieri).

Criticism Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York. Brater, Enoch, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, New York. Hassan, Ihab, 1971, “Prelude: Lyre Without Strings”, in The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, 1971, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1982.



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Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London 1997. Shenker, Israel, 1956, “Moody Man of Letters”, in New York Times, 6 May 1956. Worth, Katharine, 2001, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Other works cited Keats, John, 1820, Hyperion, in The Complete Poems, 2003, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Idem, 1856, The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream, in The Complete Poems, cit., pp. 435-449. Idem, 1818, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27th October 1818, in The Complete Poems, cit., pp. 547-548. Idem, 2003, The Complete Poems, 2003, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Milton, John, 1667, Paradise Lost, in The Major Works, 2003, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York. Idem, 1671, Samson Agonistes, in The Major Works, cit., pp. 671-715. Idem, 2003, The Major Works, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York.


Samuel Beckett, Visual Artist1 Mariacristina Cavecchi

Beckett’s passion for museums and art galleries is well-known – a lifelong passion which emerged “even before Beckett lived at 6 Clare Street in Dublin, next door to the National Gallery of Ireland” (Arikha 2006, p. 145)2. A friend of painters, museum directors and art merchants, he collected fetishistically the art catalogues which “accompanied him from painting to painting” (Arikha 2006, p. 144). As for his knowledge of art history, he not only wrote important works of art criticism3, but he also gave cor1 An Italian version of this essay was first published in Cavecchi and Patey 2007 (pp. 235-262). This volume collects the results of a two-month Beckett Project concluded by a final Conference (30 November – 1 December 2006), both organized by Caroline Patey with The Department of Modern Languages of the University of Milan and in collaboration with the Piccolo Teatro. My essay is therefore the result of an exchange with scholars and operators involved in the Beckett Project. Beckett’s portrait as it appeared in my essay and in the pages of the book is remarkably multiple and multilingual. As a matter of fact, throughout the volume particular attention has been paid to the visual and to the complex system of artistic references which mutely invade Beckett’s stage, texts and meaning. Thus, the graphic images that precede each section have been conceived as thresholds to the themes approached in the hope they would somehow contribute their own signs to the meaning and rhythm of the written words, as evidence of Samuel Beckett’s intimate knowledge of art and his personal friendship with artists, obscure and famous, and of his lifelong passion for museums. Artists were important to Beckett, and are crucial to the appreciation of his work because what Bram van Velde, Richard Serra and Giuseppe Penone – among others – assert forcefully in their paintings is precisely the essentiality of sign and the impossibility of sense, a combination dear to Samuel Beckett whose privileged interlocutors they were once and remain today. For more details on the volume see http://users.unimi.it/sidera/libraria.php (last accessed May 30, 2009). 2 Museums are intertwined with Beckett’s work in various modes. See Cavecchi 2009. 3 Beckett’s art criticism has been successively collected in Cohn 1983.


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rect assessment on some wrong attributions of paintings in the museum he visited, as “remembered” by his friend Avigdor Arikha (Arikha 2006, p. 144). His work influenced many artists with very different styles, from minimalist painters to film, video and installation artists and it is so remarkable from a visual point of view that John Haynes and biographer James Knowlson consider him “an important visual artist” (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 43). The idea of imagining a museum devoted to Beckett’s dramatic works stems, moreover, from other considerations. On the one hand, the museum introduces one to the “theatre of memory” (Rodríguez Gago 2003, p. 114) – a motif at the core of Beckett’s work, characterised by flickering and unreliable memories and almost pathological amnesia, where “forgetting is a fact of life that Beckett turns into a treasure hoard, connecting it by fine threads to acts of remembering” (Worth 2001, p. 98). On the other hand, the idea for a museum stems from the dominance of the visual image in his drama. It is well-known that his beloved paintings and sculptures had an impact on both the genesis and the form of his own theatrical imagery and influenced his relation to the stage, too. It is common knowledge that Beckett was very closely involved with the staging of his plays from the very outset of his career as a dramatist and that he acted as an advisor to several experienced English and French directors. Martin Esslin observes that “his directing is a form of painting” (Esslin 1987, p. 47) and actors who have been directed by him describe his constant preoccupation with the visual image. When interpreting May in Footfalls, Billie Whitelaw confessed that she felt “like a moving, musical Edvard Munch painting”4 and she compared Beckett’s directing to painting: I almost felt that he did have the paintbrush out and was painting, and, of course, what he always has in the other pocket is the rubber, 4 Billie Whitelaw interviewed in Journal of Beckett Studies, n. 3, Summer 1978, p. 89. According to Knowlson, when Beckett directed Billie Whitelaw in the role of May in Footfalls at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976 “her posture, as she paced to and fro across the stage, with her arms tightly folded across her body, was carefully shaped to echo that of the painting of the Virgin of the Annunciation by Antonello da Messina”, which Beckett had seen in Munich’s Alte Pinakotek in 1937 (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 74).


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because as fast as he draws a line in, he gets out that enormous Indiarubber and rubs it all out until it is only faintly there. (Whitelaw 1978, p. 89)

In the light of Beckett’s passion for and his competence in the field of the visual arts, I wish to explore the meshing in Beckett between visual and verbal, with particular reference to that section of what I have imagined as the Irish playwright’s ‘museum’ in which we find chairs and other seating devices on display. The gallery of chairs At the core of Beckett’s visual imagination there are several chairs, all very different from one another and introduced one after the other in the various texts; chairs come to overcrowd the Beckettian stage in a way reminiscent of Ionesco’s Les chaises. These chairs are at the centre of the action, as in the case of the rocking-chair in “Rockaby”, Hamm’s wheelchair in Endgame, and the wheelchair which B “propels by means of a pole” in “Rough for Theatre I”; they are the folding stools carried by Lucky in Waiting for Godot and by the blind beggar in “Rough for Theatre I”; at other times they are “as little visible as possible”, as the bench-like seat in Come and Go. Like Ionesco’s, all these chairs are “real, mostly wooden pieces of furniture that, though unbilled, do appear memorably [...] performing with wit and precision” (Duckworth 1972, pp. 4950). However visible or invisible, it is obviously not by chance that chairs should appear as a recurring visual motif in several of Beckett’s plays5; on the contrary, Beckett’s chairs seem to play a vital and complex poetical function and to determine most of the playwright’s textual and theatrical practice. First of all, the importance of chairs is attested to by the way they are the last objects visible on stage. Indeed, chairs, stools, armchairs and benches become extremely meaningful because, on a 5 See also the numerous chairs in Beckett’s novels (such as the rocking chair in Murphy, the toilet seat in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Mr Hackett’s bench in Watt) and television plays: F’s “stool” in “Ghost Trio” and the “invisible stool” in “...but the clouds...”; in Film a rocking chair plays a role of a certain importance.



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bare stage, they become central to the dramatic action and hold the spectator’s attention. They can be considered as the “remains” (see Essif 2001) left on stage after Beckett’s “shrinking” (Proust): a process similar to the “arte del levare” (art of removal) carried out by a sculptor working on raw material, as performed by Michelangelo, whose work Beckett knew well, but also as performed by his friend Alberto Giacometti. Both he and Giacometti had an interest in an existential void, and collaborated on Jean-Louis Barrault’s En attendant Godot at the Odéon in 19616. Despite being common and unpretentious items and often the only props on the stage, Beckett’s seating devices embody a rich syntax of intentions and strategies and are loaded with meaning within a poetics that rejects the tyranny of words in favour of a more visual dimension. To all these chairs Beckett paid a spasmodic and always increasing attention, as confirmed by his stage directions which became more and more detailed throughout his career. Thus, if in Waiting for Godot there is just “a folding stool” (Waiting for Godot, p. 23) without any other details, the rocking chair of “Rockaby” has to be “pale wood highly polished to gleam when rocking”, with “footrest. Vertical back. Rounded inward curving arms to suggest embrace” (“Rockaby”, p. 433); the stage direction is quite long even though the seat should be “as little visible as possible”, as in Come and Go (p. 356). As a director, Beckett’s focus on properties and objects, including chairs and stools becomes even more obsessive. Endgame, a play where the leading character and a chair are inseparable, provides a very clear example. Hamm’s “armchair on castors” – or “fauteuil à roulettes” in the French version (Fin de partie, p. 11) – has caused trouble not only for its blind owner (see Endgame, pp. 96, 104, 113), but also for the various directors who According to Jean Martin, Giacometti’s tree became a special emblem of the production: “This tree of Giacometti was so wonderful. It was made of plaster and thin wire and it was very flexible. Every night Sam and Giacometti came before the beginning of the play. Giacometti would change the position of a twig a little bit and then Sam would come later and he would change it. It was just as if it was the most important thing. And in fact it was a very important thing you know” (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 80). Beckett’s work has often been compared to Giacometti’s. See Megged 1985; Peppiatt 2001, p. 16; Coulter 2006, pp. 27-29; Pinotti 2006, pp. 263-280. 6


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have staged the play. Hamm’s wheelchair, in fact, has varied considerably from production to production. In the original Fin de partie, which opened in 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, director Roger Blin played Hamm as a very authoritative and selfish character, who enjoys absolute power of life and death over his parents and Clov (see Chabert 1986, pp. 164-166); Blin, who was also the director of the play, was so interested in Hamm’s imperial appearance (see Chabert 1986, p. 165) that he deliberately underlined Hamm’s similarity with King Lear and, as a matter of fact, “whatever was regal in the text, imperious in the character, was taken as Shakespearean” (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 171). This is why he asked set designer Jacques Noël for an oval scenography where he placed Hamm, in foul but regal dresses (a bathrobe of crimson velvet with strips of fur) seated on a fauteuil à roulettes “evoking a Gothic cathedral” (p. 171). According to Blin, Beckett never opposed this scenic idea, but when the production moved to the Studio des Champs-Elysées in Paris, the regal aspects of the set and costumes were played down at Beckett’s suggestion and the throne-like chair was changed to a simple wooden one on wheels (p. 171). Moreover, when in 1967 Beckett directed Endspiel at the Schiller Theater in Berlin, he paid even greater attention to Hamm’s “mit Röllchen versehenen Sesse”7. According to Michael Haerdter’s notes in his rehearsal diary notebook, the Irish playwright and director brought some major changes both in text and stage action as well as in the visual realisation of Hamm’s chair. Beckett was not at all pleased with the “quite massive effect” of Matias’ armchair8 and therefore he worked a lot with the stage designer in order to create an armchair that was less “theatre-like” and characterised by “puritanical simplicity”9. Endspiel, translated by Elmar Tophoven, was published in 1957. “Saturday, 2 September. Rehearsal stage. Hamm’s armchair has acquired a wide footrest and large rollers set in their own suspension. The effect is quite massive; but above all it’s now too mobile, it reacts to every motion, every push. The little, squeaky castors will have to go back on. The foot-rest, too, ought to be simpler in Beckett’s opinion. As a whole, the black-brown piece is functional and has a puritanical simplicity” (Haerdter 1967, p. 221). 9 “Tuesday, 19 September. [...] Beckett is still not pleased with the armchair. Although it’s regained its little, noisy rollers, their solid suspension is too heavy, for him, too theatre-like. Can’t it be simply placed under the chair-legs?” (Haerdter 1967, p. 237). 7 8



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In the light of the many changes it underwent in the course of the various performances, Hamm’s chair seems particularly fit to represent in visual terms the instability of a text which has undergone considerable changes in productions throughout the world. Hamm’s chairs Each Beckettian chair, in its own way, conflates autobiographical experiences and intellectual and artistic adventures. In this respect, Hamm’s “armchair on castors” and its net of intertextual relations seem to be particularly revealing. On the one hand, it recalls the various chairs in the Becketts’ house: from the wheelchair of Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair, which is alluded to by Hamm’s wheelchair10, to the rocking chair of “little Granny”, echoed in “Rockaby” (Knowlson 1996, p. 662). On the other hand, it is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jacobsz Trip – a painting Beckett repeatedly admired at the National Gallery in London and which Knowlson describes as “a pre-modernist Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame” (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 68), and of Alberto Giacometti’s studies for seated figures – his Diego seated (1948) in particular, a painting framed by a “closed scene” which is very similar to Endgame’s claustrophobic setting (see Worth 2001, pp. 32-42). Moreover, Hamm’s armchair resembles the thrones belonging to Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who attended the London premiere, Hamm is “a sightless old despot robed in scarlet” who has “more than a passing affinity with Francis Bacon’s painting of shrieking cardinals”11 – an opinion which might have been influ-

10 In her memories, Today We Will Only Gossip, Lady Beatrice Glenavy, a good friend of the Becketts’, suggested that Hamm was modelled on Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair: “When I read Endgame I recognised Cissie in Hamm. The play was full of allusions to things in her life, even the old telescope which Tom Casement had given me and I had passed to her to amuse herself by watching ships in Dublin Bay or sea-birds feeding on the sands when the tide was out” (in Knowlson 1996, p. 407). 11 In The Observer (7 April 1957) Kenneth Tynan wrote: “I take it [Endgame] to be an analysis of the power-complex. The hero, a sightless old despot robed in scarlet, has more than a passing affinity with Francis Bacon’s paintings of shrieking cardinals. [...] The play is an allegory about authority, an


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enced by the fact that Francis Bacon’s paintings were on exhibition at the Hanover Gallery at the time of the Royal Court opening12. It might then be useful to add a short gloss to the chapter dedicated to the “elective affinities” between the two artists (Fusini 1994)13. As a matter of fact, Hamm’s armchair on castors acquires a new meaning in the light of Bacon’s blending of the throne in Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X with Pio XII’s sedia gestatoria in his own series of shrieking popes. Similar to pope Innocent X, King Hamm has been stripped of that hierarchical and spiritual authority the Pope embodied, and turned into a man living in a metaphysical void. Bacon’s image of the sedia gestatoria overlaps therefore with the Beckettian image of the armchair/throne where Hamm sits and which Clov uses to take his blind master for “little turn[s]” around the room (Endgame, p. 104). This armchair/throne/sedia gestatoria invites us to pay attention to the theme of movement (or, better, of denied movement) at the core of Beckett’s dramaturgy, and of Waiting for Godot and Endgame in particular. As Beckett himself summed up: “in Godot, the audience wonders if Godot will ever come; in Endgame, it wonders if Clov will ever leave”14. In other words whether he will “come and go”. Rocking time In most of Beckett’s plays, the stage action is organised around chairs which, in fact, are closely connected with the theme of movement and immobility. Endgame is once again certainly one of the most significant plays in this respect. It seems significant that when

attempt to dramatise the neurosis that makes men love power” (in Graver and Federman 1979, p. 165). 12 Bacon’s exhibition in Paris took place at the Galerie Rive Droite in February 1957; this was followed by another exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London (21 March-26 April 1957). Pope I, Pope II and Pope III had already been exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in December 1951, while Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion caused an outcry when exhibited in 1945 at the Lefèvre Gallery. See Peppiatt 2006, pp. 165, 168; Schmied 1996, p. 193. 13 On Beckett and Bacon see also Bryden 2003, pp. 38-45. 14 Beckett to Alec Reid (1971) in All I Can Manage More Than I Could, in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 163.



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Beckett directed Endspiel for the Schiller-Theater-Werkstatt, he focused on the movement around Hamm’s chair, greatly emphasizing Clov’s attempts to move away from Hamm and his chair and to reach the doorway (see McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, pp. 195201). As Beckett explained during the rehearsal, Clov has only one wish: “to get back to his kitchen – that must be always evident, just like Hamm’s constant effort to stop him. This tension is an essential motif of the play” (p. 220). As a matter of fact, it is well-known that Hamm and Clov confront each other in an imaginary chess match, with king/Hamm defined by Beckett himself as “a king in this chess match lost-from-the-start”, “a poor player [...] trying to postpone the unavoidable end” (p. 228). Thus, all the characters act meaninglessly within a paradigm of impeded and/or limited moves which is also strongly characterised by a syntax of negation. Hamm and Clov in particular are affected by opposite and symmetric physical difficulties, since the latter “can’t sit” and the former “can’t stand” (Endgame, p. 97), while Hamm’s parents are imprisoned in their dustbins. Besides, Endgame presents a whole catalogue of objects which are no longer available and, among them, there are (it cannot be chance) bicycle wheels (p. 96). Hamm, always worried about his armchair’s castors, confesses his need of “a proper wheelchair. With big wheels. Bicycles wheels!” (p. 104), while Clov reminds him that when there were still bicycles he wept to have one (p. 96). It is likewise important to note that Nagg and Nell lost their “shanks” in an accident with their tandem (p. 100). Like chairs, though to a different extent, bicycles seem to be relevant in Beckett’s fiction and drama to the point that, perhaps, one could even imagine a gallery of bicycles (see Menzies 1980; Kennedy 2006). The imagery of the wheel plays a very important part in the script and in the performance since it seems to combine, both visually and verbally, the motif of limited movement with the other recurring motif of circularity – a theme, this latter, which seems to obsess Hamm (constantly worried about his being “right in the centre”: Endgame, p. 104), but which also marks the dramatic text and not least its narrative structure. The motif of circularity is at the core of the play and Beckett himself explained to the German actors that “there are no accidents in Endgame, it is all built upon analogies and repetitions” (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 212). The stage imagery reinforces this idea: Clov’s


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reiterated threat to leave is rejected by Hamm, and Clov’s persistent inclination to move towards the door is doomed to a constant return towards the man in the wheel-chair. As with almost everything else in the play, there is an attempt to reach a conclusion by undoing what has been done, “but the process of countermotion and cancellation brings no finality. At the end of this movement Hamm and Clov are as they were – it is as if they had never moved at all” (p. 199). Besides, it is no chance that Hamm’s castors offer an opportunity to reflect on the passing of time. It is when Clov refuses to get the oil can for Hamm (since, as he says, he has already oiled the wheelchair’s castors the previous day) that the two characters start arguing about the meaning of the word “yesterday”. At Hamm’s exasperated question (“Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!”), Clov explodes and gives a confused but meaningful explanation which reflects how impatient he feels about measuring time: “That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day” (Endgame, p. 113) – an attitude he shares with Pozzo in Waiting for Godot: Pozzo: (suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Waiting for Godot, p. 83).

In a play where everything is repetition and recurrence, the circularity of Hamm’s castors recalls in visual terms that in Endgame’s universe time is not linear and therefore measurable15, but rather cyclic and circular. The only possible way for all these characters to measure time is through the articulation of their memories and recollections; it is a kind of “psychic time”, spoilt however by the characters’ defective memories (Elam 1996, p. 722). Hamm’s armchair on castors, like many other Beckettian “mobile chairs” (including rocking chairs), amounts therefore to a 15 Significantly enough, in Beckett’s plays watches and clocks are either broken or used in various ways; they are never used to measure the passing of time.



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highly suggestive image which in an effective way sums up and depicts visually the play’s various motifs. Because of their paradoxical nature, all these chairs, which are mobile but never go anywhere, well represent the characters’ existential stalemate and Beckett’s poetic paradox: the tensions between repetition and diversity, between remembering and forgetting, between the impossibility of writing and the unavoidable need to write16. Stool of clowns, beggars and tramps The folding stool carried by Lucky in the first act of the play introduces Endgame’s motif of the limited and difficult movement in terms of clownerie. Faced with this familiar object, Pozzo confesses his problems with movement and his need for help just to be able to sit down or to stand up (Waiting for Godot, pp. 28-29, 36, 37). The dialogue between Pozzo, who wishes to sit down but does not know how to, and Estragon’s offer to help17, brings to mind the comic gags in the music-hall, slapstick comedy, or circus – all forms of entertainment Beckett was very fond of. In this context it is important to note that it is exactly this folding stool that invites us to focus on Beckett’s friendship with Jack Butler Yeats, an Irish painter he greatly admired (see “MacGreevy on Yeats”, in Cohn 1983, p. 97). Painter and playwright have much in common and seem to share a similar melancholic approach to the world of the circus, where they both underline the aspects of wait16 See Beckett’s letter to Axen Kaun (9 July 1937), quoted in Serpieri 1996, p. 760. 17 “Pozzo: I’d like very much to sit down, but I don’t quite know how to go about it. [...] Estragon: Could I be of any help? [...] Pozzo: If you asked me to sit down. Estragon: Would that be a help? Pozzo: I fancy so. Estragon: Here we go. Be seated, sir, I beg of you. Pozzo: No, no, I wouldn’t think of it! (Pause. Aside.) Ask me again. Estragon: Come come, take a seat, I beseech you, you’ll get pneumonia. Pozzo: You really think so? Estragon: Why it’s absolutely certain. Pozzo: No doubt you are right. (He sits down.) Done it again! (Pause.) Thank you, dear fellow” (Waiting for Godot, p. 36).


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ing and loneliness. Yeats’s interest in circus iconography and in solitary and marginalised characters, which is clearly expressed in a painting such as A Clown among the People (1932), is echoed in many of Beckett’s plays; one of them is surely En attendant Godot, which Roger Blin would have liked to direct in a semi-circular set like a circus ring (see Aslan 1988, p. 27; McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 68) – a suggestion Beckett rejected as too obvious (see McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 68). But Didi, Gogo, Pozzo and Lucky also recall Yeats’s The Two Travellers (1942), hanging in the Tate Gallery in London, which Beckett probably saw in the artist’s studio on his return to Ireland in 1945, and Men of the Plain, which he could have seen in 1947 or 1948 (see Knowlson 1996, p. 379). Thus, far from being just a mere prop for clowning, used to make the audience laugh, Lucky’s stool comes to stand for the travellers’s folding stool, and raises the issue of Beckett’s “Irishness”. Indeed, both Beckett’s play and Yeats’s paintings undoubtedly spring out of an Irish background and it is most likely that Beckett shared with his friend an interest in “the Ireland of the dispossessed, of the landless labourers and the workers, of the marginal people, the ‘tinkers’ and tramps, the rogues and derelicts, the ballad singers and roving musicians” (Lloyd 2006, p. 53) – precisely that Ireland that Jack B. Yeats got to know very well when he travelled with Synge in Connemara and Mayo during the summer of 190518. The folding stool turns therefore into a perfect travelling companion for people on the road and it must surely be of some interest to an author like Beckett, unceasingly on the move from language to language. It can also be intended as a visual metaphor “of the now-rootless Anglo-Irish, neither Irish, nor English, but caught wandering across the no-man’s-land between the two cultures” (Kiberd 1995 [1996, p. 537]; see also McMullan 2004). On the road where the action of “Rough for Theatre I” takes place we find a different existential uneasiness, which once again finds expression through trouble with movement. In this short 18 In 1905 Jack B. Yeats and John Millington Synge set out on their Manchester Guardian commission to write and draw something of the life of the people in the areas of greatest hardship and distress in the West of Ireland. See Arnold 1998, pp. 133-151.



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piece, heralding Endgame, two chairs stand central insomuch as the two men are condemned to sit on them by an ineluctable destiny: the blind beggar A’s folding-stool and the wheelchair which the crippled vagrant B “propels by means of a pole” (“Rough for Theatre I”, p. 227). A’s and B’s routes and lives intersect and, for a while, their loneliness seems to find some relief, since B offers to join forces “till death ensue” (p. 227), his sight complementing the other one’s mobility: B: Of course if you wish me to look about me I shall. And if you care to push me about I shall try to describe the scene, as we go along. (“Rough for Theatre I”, p. 230)

By taking care of each other, the two men feel free from the constraints imposed by their seating devices and enjoy the freedom they are denied. A comfort belonging to an unspecified past – if we are to believe them –, when they had women willing to look after them and to offer them a safe alternative to these tyrannical seats. A: [...] I used to feel twilight gather and make myself ready. I put away fiddle and bowl and had only to get to my feet, when she took me by the hand. B: She? A: My woman. [Pause.] A woman. [Pause.] But now... [...] B: [Violently.] We had our women, hadn’t we? You yours to lead you by the hand and I mine to get me out of the chair in the evening and back into it again in the morning and to push me as far as the corner when I went out of my mind. (p. 228)

Within our imaginary gallery, the rocking chair in “Rockaby” could be placed next to the two seats in “Rough for Theatre I”, given its similar capacity to offer the only possible embrace – even though in this case, far from being despotic and predatory, the embrace seems to be motherly. Besides, in “Rockaby” too the woman’s recorded voice evokes Beckett’s aporia by opposing ideas of stoppage and resumption “in the mantra-like phrase” (Ben-Zvi 2003, p. 37) “time she stopped / time she stopped / going to and fro” (“Rockaby”, pp. 435, 436, 437, 442).


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Motherly embrace, deathly embrace When Beckett conceived “Rockaby”, he was once again inspired by one of J. B. Yeats’s paintings, Sleep (1944), even though the painting is a portrait of Yeats’s friend Victor Waddington (see Arnold 1998, pp. 314-316, 415), and not of a woman (see Knowlson 1996, p. 663). Nonetheless, this painting of a figure “sitting by the window, with the head drooped low onto the chest, has something of the ambiguity of Rockaby’s closing moments” (Knowlson 1996, p. 663). As in the picture entitled Sleep, where the figure “could be asleep for ever” (Knowlson 1996, p. 663), in “Rockaby” a woman “is rocked from cradle to grave” (p. 663). The play’s protagonist, Woman (W), is rocked in a rocking-chair whose swaying is synchronized with her recorded voice (V) telling what is presumably her own story, so that “a striking visual metaphor materializes before our very eyes as we watch a poem come to (stage) life” (Brater 1987, p. 169). When the chair stops and the voice becomes silent, the Woman’s head droops and, like the mother evoked by the verses, she seems to be dead: so in the end close of a long day went down let down the blind and down right down into the old rocker and rocked rocked saying to herself no done with that the rocker those arms at last saying to the rocker rock her off stop her eyes fuck life stop her eyes rock her off rock her off (p. 440)



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“Rockaby” casts a particularly intriguing chair and one which plays a very active role in the play; somehow, it seems to comply with Winnie who reveals in Happy Days that “things have their life” (Happy Days, p. 162). In fact, more than fifty years had passed since Breton wrote about the “objects’ poetic conscience” in his 1924 surrealist manifesto (Breton 1962)19, and yet the Beckettian rocking chair seems to share the destiny of many dada and surrealist objects and seems to come to life. It even recalls the important role played by inanimate objects in Maeterlinck’s symbolist theatre, which Beckett knew very well (see Rose 1989, p. 151). “Controlled mechanically without assistance from Woman” (“Rockaby”, p. 434), the rocking-chair seems to produce its own movement and therefore finally assumes an independent life of its own, as indeed does another of Beckett’s chairs, the rocking-chair in Film, whose two holes in the headrest started “to glare” at the actor (Schneider 1969, in Film, p. 85). Thus, according to Beckett, the rocking-chair should appear almost motherly, with its arms “rounded inward [...] to suggest embrace” (“Rockaby”, p. 433). It is noteworthy that, because of the roundness of its arms, Woman’s rocking chair recalls Madame Roulin’s rocking chair in Vincent van Gogh’s portrait La Berceuse, which Knowlson quotes among the pictorial sources of “Rockaby”. Beckett was very familiar with the Dutch painter: he knew Jean Leymarie’s monograph (Leymarie 1951) and despite Nazi censorship he had admired some “wonderful” van Goghs during his trip around Germany in 1936 (see Knowlson 1996, pp. 586, 750; Fischer-Seidel, Fries-Dieckmann 2005). There is no doubt that Estragon’s boots, “heels together, toes splayed”, at the beginning of the second act in Waiting for Godot (p. 53) evoke van Gogh’s famous boots20, and one might even venture to say that the van Gogh secluded in Saint-Rémy is evoked in the mad painter described by Hamm (Endgame, p. 113)21. 19 Certainly Surrealism and Dadaism were not unknown to Beckett. See Knowlson 1996, pp. 107, 137. See also Albright 2003, pp. 1-27; Brater 1986, pp. 8-9; Wilson 2002, p. 331. 20 Van Gogh’s Nature morte: Bottines (Paris, 1886-87; collection Vincent W. van Gogh, Laren) is reproduced in Leymarie 1951, plate 35. 21 Even though Giuseppina Restivo suggests a possible link between the mad painter evoked in Endgame and Albrecht Dürer (Restivo 1991, p. 176), the landscapes described by Hamm – “All that rising corn! And there! Look! The


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The feminine, motherly aspect of Beckett’s rocking-chair should persuade us to analyse the play’s connection with the Dutch artist, and above all with his famous chairs. It should not be forgotten that the rounding arms of Madame Roulin’s chair look very much like (if not the same) to those of the lavish and ornate Gauguin’s Chair (Arles, December 1888), and that Gauguin’s Chair is always associated with the other famous Vincent’s Chair (Arles, December 1888), which Beckett probably saw at the London National Gallery. Georges Bataille, among other critics, asserts that it is clear that the painter wanted the two pictures to symbolise the two artists and to express the differences between their personalities (see Bataille 1970). In the light of his suggestion, one can assume that in “Rockaby” as well Woman and chair come to overlap and that “those arms” Voice speaks about (pp. 441-442) can be interpreted both as the chair’s wooden arms and as Woman’s human arms. As the action unfolds, Beckett’s rocking chair, in fact, comes to be totally blended with Woman in a way that recalls van Gogh’s fusion between painters and chairs. It is no surprise that Woman and chair are made to share the same lighting effects: thus, “the pale wood” of the chair must be “highly polished to gleam when rocking”, while the woman’s jet sequins “glitter when rocking” and her “incongruous flimsy head-dress set askew with extravagant trimming to catch light when rocking” (p. 433)22. While the rest of the stage is in darkness, Woman and chair seem to be rescued by light from forgetfulness and death. At the same time, Woman is hugged in an embrace which seems to keep her there forever in an image of immobility and death recalling the despotic seats in “Rough for Theatre I” as well as the electric chair – an image eventually employed by director Neil Jordan, who uses it for his cinema version of Not I (2000)23. sails of the herring fleet!” (Endgame, 113) – recall a lot of van Gogh’s paintings, from La Crau: jardins de maraîchers (Arles, Juin 1888, Collection Vincent W. van Gogh, Laren) to Barques sur la plage (Arles, Juin 1888, Collection Vincent W. van Gogh, Laren): two paintings Beckett certainly knew, reproduced in Leymarie 1951, plates 65 and 60. 22 A light effect “that perhaps echo[es] the magnificent Giorgione self-portrait, that so captivated Beckett in Brunswick in 1937” (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 69). 23 Not I is part of the project Beckett on Film. 19 films x 19 directors, by Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney – Blue Angel Films, RTÉ, Channel 4, Bord Scannàn na hÉireann and Tirone Productions.



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An invisible bench A last section of the gallery must be dedicated to the invisible bench in Come and Go: as the stage directions state, it is a “narrow benchlike seat, without back, just long enough to accommodate three figures almost touching. As little visible as possible. It should not be clear what they are sitting on” (Come and Go, p. 356). In spite of its invisibility, this seat is the beating heart of this dramaticule, mostly made up of silence or whispering. Though short (lasting only three minutes), the action develops around the bench which seems to entertain a privileged relationship with memory, since the three protagonists of “undeterminable age”, Flo, Vi e Ru, recall their old times seated on it. The play consists of a symmetrical plot of apparently meaningless routines of getting up, leaving the stage for the darkness, returning and sitting down again in the light. While each woman leaves the stage, the other two disclose an appalling secret about the third and even though the spectators cannot understand the bits of conversations the three women keep whispering in turn, at the end of the play they are aware of that verdict Beckett himself confided to Jacoba van Velde: “They are ‘condemned’ all three” (in Knowlson 1996, p. 532). In its extreme concision the play is a quintessence of personal and literary memories which seem to coagulate around this invisible bench, which surrenders its utilitarian value for the more strictly aesthetic value of shape (see Essif 2001, p. 69). T.S. Eliot’s image of women coming and going talking of Michelangelo in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), evoked by the title, anticipates the dynamics of returning presences and futile conversations which characterise the play’s scenic movements, while Vi’s opening line echoing Macbeth – “When shall we three meet again?” – emphasizes the mysterious and ghostly nature of this bustle, somehow resembling the Shakespearean witches sabbath. In creating this unusual stage image Beckett drew on a store of personal anecdotes as well, and in fact, autobiographical memory insinuates Flo’s invitation to “just sit together”, “holding hands... that way”, as they used to “in the playground at Miss Wade’s” (p. 354). The line recalls an image of Beckett’s childhood, and the invisible bench somehow conflates with the stone lion in the school playground (at Miss Wade’s) where Beckett’s cousins used to sit


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and about whom Beckett wrote in a letter to his Dutch translator (see Knowlson 1996, pp. 532-533). On the narrow benchlike seat of Come and Go, present, past and future collide and intermingle in the same highly complicated way the three women hold their hands at the end of the play: Vi: Shall we hold hands in the old way? ([...] Vi’s right hand with Ru’s right hand. Vi’s left hand with Flo’s left hand, Flo’s right hand with Ru’s left hand, Vi’s arms being above Ru’s left arm and Flo’s right arm. The three pairs of clasped hands rest on the three laps.) (Come and Go, p. 355)

As a container and a revealer of remembrances, the bench of Come and Go declares its nature of locus memoriae (see Rodríguez Gago 2003, p. 114), in the wake of a hermetic-cabalistic tradition certainly not unknown to the Beckett who read Bruno and was a friend of Joyce. Conclusion Far from being mere theatrical props, Beckett’s chairs, stools and benches stand at the scenic heart of many plays. They are numerous and tell different stories of illness, paralysis and desperation; they are mobile chairs endowed with a movement leading nowhere or offering the only possible embrace – motherly, loving or deadly, frustrating and erotic. They could be considered as a metonymy of an uneasiness which seems to be the condition of Beckett’s being. Furthermore, invested by a long chain of echoes, cross-references and intertextuality, from the most obvious to the most complex and obscure, Beckett’s chairs stand as an encyclopaedic compendium of images, memories, references and echoes which populate Beckett’s bare stage in silence. Being different from one another, the chairs escape verbal language and express the aporia of a poetic refusal to rely just on words. They are undoubtedly important hieroglyphs of Beckett’s vocabulary and poetics, oscillating between showing and hiding, adding and subtracting, speaking and remaining silent.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, Chatto & Windus, London. Fin de partie, 1957, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Endspiel, 1957, Suhrkampf Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. (trans. Elmar Tophoven). Film. Complete Scenario/Illustrations/Production Shots. With an essay On Directing Film by Alan Schneider, 1969, Grove Press, New York. Endgame, 1958, in Endgame. A Play in One Act Followed by Act Without Words. A Mime for One Player, 1964, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 7-53. Come and Go, 1967, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990, pp. 351-357. “Rough for Theatre I”, 1976, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 225-233. “Rockaby”, 1981, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 431-442. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990. Bertinetti, Paolo (a cura di), 1994, Samuel Beckett. Teatro completo, Einaudi-Gallimard, Torino. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London.

Criticism on Beckett Abbott, H. Porter, 1996, Beckett Writing Beckett, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Acheson, James, and Kateryna Arthur (editors), 1987, Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, Macmillan, London. Albright, Daniel, 2003, Beckett & Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Arikha, Avigdor, 2006, “Avigdor Arikha on Beckett and Art”, in James and Elizabeth Knowlson (editors), 2006, Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett. Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett & Memories of Those Who Knew Him, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 143-145. Aslan, Odette, 1988, Roger Blin and Twentieth Century Playwrights, Cambridge University Press, New York. Ben-Zvi, Linda (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts, Assaph Book Series, Tel Aviv University.


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Brater, Enoch, 1986, Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context, Oxford University Press, New York. Idem, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bryden, Mary, 2003, “Nomads and Statues: Beckett’s Staged Movement”, in Ben-Zvi, 2003, Drawing on Beckett cit., pp. 35-46. Cavecchi, Mariacristina, 2009, “From Playwriting to Curatorship. An Investigation into the Status of Beckett’s Stage Objects”, in Caroline Patey and Laura Scuriatti (editors), 2009, The Writer, the Collection and the Museum: the Museological Practices of Literature, Peter Lang, London. Cavecchi, Mariacristina, and Caroline Patey (a cura di), 2007, Tra le lingue, tra i linguaggi. Cent’anni di Samuel Beckett, Cisalpino, Milano. Chabert, Pierre (préparé par), 1986, Revue d’Esthétique (Samuel Beckett: roman, théâtre, images, acteurs, mises en scène, voix, musiques), numéro spécial hors-série, Éditions Privat, Toulouse, revised and enlarged edition 1990. Coulter, Riann, 2006, “Introduction to the Exhibition: part 2”, in Fionnuala Croke, 2006, Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, pp. 22-33. Croke, Fionnuala, 2006, Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Duckworth, Colin, 1972, Angels of Darkness, George Allen & Unwin, London. Elam, Keir, 1996, “Story-time: tempo e storia nel teatro contemporaneo”, in Franco Marenco (a cura di), 1996, Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, vol. III, Utet, Torino, pp. 705-732. Essif, Les, 2001, Empty Figure on an Empty Stage. The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis. Esslin, Martin, 1987, “Toward the Zero of Language”, in Acheson and Arthur 1987, Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, cit., pp. 34-49. Fischer-Seidel, Therese, and Marion Fries-Dieckmann (hrsg. von), 2005, Der unbekannte Beckett, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. Fusini, Nadia, 1994, B&B. Beckett & Bacon, Garzanti, Milano. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman (editors), 1979, Samuel Beckett. The Critical Heritage, Routledge, London. Haerdter, Michael, 1967, “A Rehearsal Diary”, in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in the Theatre. The Author as Practical Playwright and Director. Volume 1: From “Waiting for Godot” to “Krapp’s Last Tape”, John Calder, London, pp. 204-238.



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Haynes, John, and James Knowlson, 2003, Images of Beckett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kennedy, Jake, 2006, “Modernist (Im)mobilities: Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and the Avant-Garde Bike”, in Tout-Fait. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, 2006. http://www. toutfait.com/online_journal_details.php?postid=4331&keyword (last accessed May 30, 2009). Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London. Knowlson, James, and Elizabeth (editors), 2006, Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett. Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett & Memories of Those Who Knew Him, Bloomsbury, London. Lloyd, David, 2006, “Republics of Difference: Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett”, in Croke, 2006, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 52-59. McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in the Theatre. The Author as Practical Playwright and Director. Volume 1: From “Waiting for Godot” to “Krapp’s Last Tape”, John Calder, London. McMullan, Anna, 2004, “Irish/Postcolonial Beckett”, in Lois Oppenheim (editor), 2004, Samuel Beckett Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 89-109. Megged, Matti, 1985, Dialogue in the Void. Beckett & Giacometti, Lumen Books, Santa Fe. Menzies, Janet, “Beckett’s Bicycles”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, VI, Autumn, 1980, pp. 97-105. Oppenheim, Lois (editor), 2004, Samuel Beckett Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Restivo, Giuseppina, 1991, Le soglie del postmoderno: “Finale di partita”, Il Mulino, Bologna. Rodríguez Gago, Antonia, 2003, “The Embodiment of Memory (and Forgetting) in Beckett’s Late Women’s Plays”, in Ben-Zvi (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett cit., pp. 113-126. Rose, Margaret, 1989, The Symbolist Theatre Tradition from Maeterlinck and Yeats to Beckett and Pinter, Unicopli, Milano. Serpieri, Alessandro, 1996, “Oltre il moderno: Samuel Beckett”, in Franco Marenco (a cura di), 1996, Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, vol. III, Utet, Torino, pp. 733-763. Whitelaw, Billie, 1978, interviewed in Journal of Beckett Studies, III, Summer, 1978, p. 89. Worth, Katharine, 2001, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre. Life Journeys, Oxford University Press, Oxford.


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Criticism on art and other works cited Arnold, Bruce, 1998, Jack Yeats, Yale University Press, New Haven & London. Bataille, Georges, 1970, La mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent van Gogh, in Idem, 1970, Œuvres complètes, tome I, Gallimard, Paris. Breton, André, 1962, Manifestes du Surréalisme, J.-J. Pauvert, Paris. Kiberd, Declan, 1995, Inventing Ireland. The Literature of the Modern Nation, Jonathan Cape, London. Leymarie, Jean, 1951, Van Gogh, Éditions Pierre Tisne, Paris. MacGreevy, Thomas, 1945, Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Introduction, Victor Waddington Publications Ltd, Dublin. Peppiatt, Michael, 2001, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, Yale University Press in association with The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, New Haven & London. Idem, 2006, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, Yale University Press, New Haven & London. Pinotti, Andrea, 2007, “Soltanto l’essenziale. Beckett e Giacometti”, in Cavecchi and Patey (a cura di), 2007, Tra le lingue, tra i linguaggi cit., pp. 263-280. Schmied, Wieland, 1996, Francis Bacon. Commitment and Conflict, Prestel-Verlag, Munich & New York. Wilson, Sarah, 2002, Paris Capital of the Arts, Royal Academy of Arts, London.


Beckett, Drama, and the Writing on the Wall Iain Bailey

Citation, stage and presence To read for the Bible in Beckett is evidently to imply some kind of presence of the former in the latter. Yet both in theoretical discussions of intertextuality, and within the fields of both Beckett and biblical scholarship, the apparent simplicity of this proposition has come up against significant complications. In Beckett studies, Caselli (2005) in particular has argued that his texts tend to resist a notion that the ‘prior’ text can be thought of as a stable object possessing pre-set meanings to be appropriated, whether accurately or subversively, by the author; instead, Beckett’s texts turn this hierarchy on its head and, in her argument, persistently construct different Dantes. All this contributes to the variety of ways in which, as numerous other critics have argued, repetitions, revisions, translations, addenda, notes and the like become integral to this mutable Beckett canon. In the case of the Bible, similarly, any simple textual stability has long been in scholarly question, amongst all the books, letters, manuscripts, translations, transliterations and canonical variations that fall under that name. Moreover, these biblical texts are shot through with their own intertextuality: references to and interpretations of others which become the site for Scriptural (and especially prophetic) authority to be negotiated and reproduced. It is, then, characteristic both of the Bible and the Beckett oeuvre to disrupt a sense in which either party would be a simple object presence. This is the case not only in the structure of these agglomerations, but within Beckett and biblical texts at the level of form and content. The vicissitudes of presence between texts are amongst their most marked in Beckett’s drama. If one pervasive note in readings


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of his theatre has been a supposed self-sufficiency of presence on stage (paradigmatically, Robbe-Grillet identifies Godot as an expression of pure Heideggerian dasein), this has been critiqued by, amongst others, Connor (1988 [2007]) and McMullan (1993) on the grounds that this presence is necessarily predicated on a series of repetitions, and on what could properly be described as the intertextual relation between script and performance1. Here is, as it were, another version of Beckett’s “Lazarus-Dives symbiosis”: here writing, stage directions, etc., there speech, movement, etc., but both here and there gulf; the materiality of either is impossible without its “inaccessible other” (“Intercessions by Denis Devlin”, in Cohn 1983, p. 92). My contention here is that the biblical narrative of Belshazzar’s feast and the writing on the wall is mobilised repeatedly in Beckett to draw attention to this gulf: to mount negotiations between presence and absence, script and performance, speech and writing. The two aspects of the narrative that are of particular relevance are the writing itself, and the strange “fingers of a man’s hand” that appear to the king to write. Such vicissitudes are as much a question within biblical scholarship as they are in Beckett. One approach to the problem has been to place it squarely on the ‘target’ text; this can be identified in Daniel Marguerat and Adrian Curtis’ preface to a recent collection of essays on intra-biblical intertextuality. The question, for them, is “[j]usqu’à quel point la solicitation de la mémoire peut-elle être considérée comme légitime?” The “memory” is that of the reader-critic, and the legitimacy is to be found in material identity between the source and target texts. Intertextuality, then, is defined as “la relation de co-présence entre deux ou plusieurs textes (par le biais de la citation, de la référence, de l’allusion ou du plagiat)” (Marguerat 2000, pp. 6-7). A note confirms Gérard Genette as the influential theoretical voice in this definition; the typology of material co-presences is implicitly graded, such that some can be thought of as stronger, or more present, than others. According to these gradations, the strongest kind of intertextuality is citation, because it presents itself as an exact duplication of linguistic mate1 In her restatement of the theory, Kristeva describes intertextuality as “transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another” (Kristeva 1984, p. 59).


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rial from the source text in the target. Two key principles are therefore at work: first, that there are grounds on which one linguistic figure can be said to be identical to another; second, that that material can be said to belong to the source of its original utterance. “Mene, mene” With these assumed principles in mind, we begin with what would appear to be unmistakeably a biblical citation in Endgame: Hamm: The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies? (Endgame, pp. 97-98)

“Mene, mene”, as a number of critics have noted (see, for example, Ackerley 1999, p. 75; Cohn 2001, p. 226) cites the first words of the writing on Belshazzar’s wall, from the narrative in the Book of Daniel: And this is the writing that was written,

MENE, MENE, TEKEL,

UPHARSIN.

(Daniel, v, 25-6)

In the biblical text, MENE is presented as a transliteration by Daniel of an otherwise illegible script on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. A clear distinction is made between reading the writing on the wall and interpreting it: “[the Chaldeans] could not read the writing, nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof” (Daniel, v, 8). Daniel, with his unique privileging by God, is the only one able to read the figures in the first place (that is, to identify MENE as MENE), and then to interpret them (that is, to offer a signified for this otherwise apparently empty signifier). In a sense, then, Daniel seems to be enacting the birth of a word, both in materiality and meaning. Hamm’s mordant “[m]ene, mene”, in this case, would be as clearly derivative of an absolute, biblical origin as could be possible, making of it a pure citation. Clov’s wall, read in this way, belongs unequivocally to Belshazzar, the Book of Daniel, and the Bible. Where elsewhere in Beckett biblical phrasing may run a supposed authoritative Scriptural meaning against more colloquial or


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irreverent ones (see for example Zeifman 1975, p. 82; Barry 2006, p. 128), MENE’s meaning seems at first to be completely self-contained, determined directly from God and in Daniel’s exclusive pneumatological authority: This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE, God hath numbered thy kingdome, and finished it. (Daniel, v, 26)

The tense of this proclamation identifies it as a version of the apocalyptic, as opposed to the strictly prophetic. Where prophecy consists of a conditional warning – a call for decision and repentance – apocalyptic presents itself as interpretation of what has already been revealed in cryptic form, so that the future is already past in its propositions. The importance to Endgame of MENE’s apocalyptic content is clear from the outset (“Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”), and in the ongoing inevitability that “something is taking its course”. The intimations of Hamm as a ruler, his nominal identification with the cursed “father of Canaan” (Genesis, ix, 18-27), and the echoes of the biblical flood narrative in the play, intensify a sense in which biblical apocalypses or apocalyptic are recruited by the play in order to add weight (ironically or otherwise) to the play’s own stilted end-times. Rather than pursuing the apocalyptic overtones, however, which have already been well documented in criticism of Endgame, I want to return to the biblical narrative and suggest the significance in Beckett of the extraordinary peculiarities of the scene of writing itself. First, there is the profoundly uncertain material appearance of the words in the Daniel narrative. MENE, as most English translations have it, is a transliteration into capitalised Roman alphabet of an Aramaic word that presents itself as written transcription of a vocal transliteration of a script that cannot be read. There is a long and prominent line of biblical scholarship that has conjectured as to the ‘real’ appearance of the words written on the wall, and why Daniel alone should be able to read them. Fundamentally, the alphabet is in doubt: one account holds that the script was a kind of cuneiform; another that it could have been a different form of hieroglyph; another that the alphabet was Aramaic, but that the words were written vertically



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rather than horizontally, becoming an anagram (Gowan 2001, p. 87). Complicating matters, the Septuagint version of Daniel does not distinguish between reading and interpretation as does its Masoretic counterpart, seeming to imply that neither Belshazzar nor the Chaldeans have any trouble reading the writing, but cannot or will not interpret it (Meadowcroft 1995, pp. 15, 76). The script having finally come off the wall, further problems emerge in that the Aramaic words in the Masoretic text have no vowel pointing, so that there is ambiguity both as to how they should be vocalised, and which vowels should be added in transliteration (Bevan 1892, p. 106). This is reflected in Fin de partie, where Hamm says “mané, mané”, one of several different translations of the word in French bibles2. A further angle of scholarship has held that the words as Daniel announces them are not quite so self-contained as they may have seemed. They may, for instance, derive from a play on assonances with words from his own interpretation: counting, weighing and dividing (Lacocque 1979, p. 100). And following Charles Clermont-Ganneau’s influential Nineteenth-Century exegesis, many scholars have considered the Aramaic words to signify (or at least resemble words that are thought to signify) a series of weights or coins, which allegorise the different Babylonian rulers (Lacocque 1976 [1979, p. 102]; Ford 1978, p. 129). All of this is to suggest that the word’s conception is rather less immaculate than was at first presumed, and its ‘presence’ as a piece of intertextual material is extremely fraught. If the weight of traditions and meanings seems too much to invest in Hamm’s sidelong “mene, mene” (which, it may be argued, is no more than a “nod, even a wink”) it is worth recalling how fundamental to the play are, first of all, Clov’s “visions” and their ambiva“Mané” is a transliteration from the Vulgate’s “mane”, and is the form used in the de Sacy Sainte Bible (first published 1696). Other translations and revisions differ widely. Beckett’s library contained two versions of the Bible in French: an 1874 edition from the Société Biblique Américaine, and a 1921 edition of the Louis Segond translation. The Société Biblique Américaine edition is in David Martin’s translation, which renders the word as “MÉNÉ”. The 1921 edition is based on the 1910 Segond revision, and has “Compté”, which follows the interpretation noted above. Thanks to Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle for a list of Bibles in Beckett’s library. 2


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lence of truth and falsity, presence and absence, seeing and saying; and, secondly, the constant attention drawn to the scriptedness of the performance, and vice versa: that symbiosis and gulf. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the putative location of Clov’s visions: I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. [Pause.] Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’ll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me. (Endgame, p. 93)

Are these “[n]ice dimensions” to be taken as a stage direction? Is Clov’s odd specificity a true description of a material offstage space into which he steps? The kitchen, the wall, and the visions operate in a hinterland between script and performance, visibility and invisibility, and point up precisely the kinds of nonimmediacy that paradoxically inhere in material presence. This apparently self-sufficient, stable material to be reproduced purely as citation plants an insecurity right in the materiality of its own word surface. At the same time, it challenges the second principle of citation, as a definitive origin (the possessor of the word) is persistently deferred within that unresolvable series of translations and transliterations. It is not that “mene, mene” cannot be related to the Bible, or called biblical. But it is to contend that this intertextual material in Beckett cannot only be a repository of ideas, whether philosophical, theological, aesthetic or biographical; rather, it draws attention to its own constitution and dissolution. Savage economy of hieroglyphics The importance of the writing on Belshazzar’s wall is to show that these vagaries are not confined to the problematic presences of bodies, kitchens and objects on stage, but to the very material substance of language itself. This, it seems to me, is already implicit in the classification of language that Beckett pulls from Vico in “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”: “Hieroglyphic (sacred), Metaphorical (poetic), Philosophical (capable of abstraction and generalization)”. He goes on to value in Joyce



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the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear. (“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 28)

There is no specific reference to Belshazzar’s wall here, but as in the biblical narrative these “sacred” hieroglyphics intrude, appear and disappear. Though in Daniel the appearance and fate of the script is not stated, iterations of the narrative (famously in Rembrandt’s depiction of the scene) have portrayed it as glowing on the wall, drawing on the narrative’s specification that the hand wrote “over against the candlestick” (Daniel, v, 5). The account of Joyce’s words here is to reinforce the argument that “[h]is writing is not about something; it is that something itself” (“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 27). The focus falls on the “sensuous” immediacy of the words; yet in the same move this hyperbolic (not to say slightly hallucinatory) description questions that immediacy, in the transience of the words, the impossible analogy with hieroglyphics, and the intertextual gesture. If Work in Progress manifested a “savage economy” of a scene of writing, Beckett ups that savagery considerably in How It Is. The novel narrates an endless digestive cycle of consumption and emission that is tied to writing or literary production, and to memory. Mary Bryden has noted that in How It Is some of the biblical references, characteristically for Beckett’s later prose and drama, “[concentrate] upon passages dealing with the transience of human life and of the material world” (Bryden 1998, p. 102). This transience is mimed in the progress of the text itself. Take, for example, “I pissed and shat another image in my crib” (How It Is, p. 9). “Another image” follows suit from “life in the light first image” a few lines earlier, and may be read either as “I pissed and shat in my crib”, which would be “another image”, or, with equal validity, “and shat another image”. One suggests a fragmentary vision communicated to paper, the other a quite different means of writing. The scene of writing I want to focus on here, however, is in part two, after the narrator has taught Pim how to respond to the “basic stimuli” of various violences, and resolves to “bloody him all over with Roman capitals” (How It Is, p. 62):


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with the nail then of the right index [...] from left to right and top to bottom as in our civilisation I carve my Roman capitals arduous beginnings then less he is no fool merely slow in the end he understands all almost all I have nothing to say almost nothing even God that old favourite my rain and shine brief allusions not infrequent as in the tender years it’s vague he almost understands (How It Is, p. 70)

The dissolution of intertextual material continues and is in fact (almost) asserted in the second part of this passage. “[B]rief allusions not infrequent [...] it’s vague” suggest a spectral intertextual presence. Within that paragraph is found “God [...] my rain and shine”; far from citation, here, but Ackerley has pointed out the biblical link: “he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew, v, 45). The narrator’s comment on “allusions” as the “almost nothing” he has to say advertises a “vague” intertextual presence, and the link to Matthew fits that bill. I want to suggest, though, that the inscription of those “Roman capitals” is also a brief allusion, to the Daniel narrative. As noted earlier, the transliteration from Aramaic to Roman alphabet usually figures the words in capital letters. How It Is’ narrator specifies repeatedly that his writing is in “Roman capitals” or “great capitals”. It also insists upon the direction of the writing “as in our civilisation”; this curious detail gestures towards the tradition of the ‘original’ writing on the wall being in Aramaic written vertically rather than horizontally. Brief comments also intrude into the account of the writing in How It Is that recall the prophetic content of Daniel V: with the nail of the index until it falls and the worn back bleeding passim it was near the end in great capitals [...] the great ornate letter the snakes the imps God be praised it won’t be long (How It Is, pp. 70-71)

Bodily and textual materiality are again conflated (“bleeding passim”), God is invoked, and the days of the narrator’s kingdom are, as it were, numbered (“near the end [...] won’t be long”).



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Discussing How It Is in this context may lay itself open to the charge of failing to engage with the immanent bodily materiality of the stage. How It Is is, of course, not a play, but the way in which matter, speech and writing are constituted and convulse across its pages are extremely relevant to the question of text and performance (or writing and speech) in Beckett’s oeuvre, as Leslie Hill inversely suggests: “[readings of] the use of fragmentation and the chiastic dichotomy between performance and representation in Beckett’s plays can be applied to Comment c’est” (Hill 1990, p. 133). The part of the hand that wrote The script on Belshazzar’s wall, then, continues to emerge; here, however, the scene of writing is also represented. The narration specifies the “nail of the index” as the writing agent, and that it “falls”. Linguistic material is disintegrating, whilst the intertextual references mime this disintegration, and at the same time the body that writes is falling apart. The specificity of the writing agent again recalls the biblical narrative, where “came forth the fingers of a man’s hand [...] and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote” (Daniel, V, 5). One can imagine the powerful image of the ghostly hand in Daniel V as a corollary to Not I’s disembodied mouth; powerful enough, as some exegetes have it, to make Belshazzar losing control of his bowels (Fewell 1988, p. 120). In Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazzar’s feast, the king starts in horror at the ghostly but brightly lit hand, and the writing, similarly illuminated. His guests’ faces also betray shock, but there is ambiguity as to whether they are appalled by the hand, or by Belshazzar’s response to it. In the biblical narrative, there is nothing to imply that anyone but Belshazzar sees the hand: “the king saw the part of the hand that wrote”. The narrative also makes a point of the hand’s illumination: when it appears, it “wrote over against the candlestick” (otherwise translated as “lampstand”, or, in French, as “chandélier” or “candélabre”). The visibility of the hand, as of the writing, is then vigorously asserted but also highly ambiguous. Although the biblical scene does not seem to be repeated exactly in the Beckett oeuvre (that is, a hand in the act of writing) its pres-


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ence can be discerned, separately, in the scene of writing of How It Is, but also in the appearance of ghostly hands. In the late play “A Piece of Monologue”, we find SPEAKER uttering the following: Light dying. Soon none left to die [...] Eyes to the small pane gaze at that first night. Turn from it in the end to face the darkened room. There in the end slowly a faint hand. Holding aloft a lighted spill. In the light of spill faintly the hand and milkwhite globe. Then second hand. In light of spill. (“A Piece of Monologue”, p. 427)

Katharine Worth has described the strange relationship between what SPEAKER says, and what is seen on stage in the piece’s performance, as an “insidious, ghostly parallel” (Worth 1993, p. 38). Certainly, moments such as the concurrence of his uttered “light going now” with the light on stage being dimmed, suggest points of contact; the apparent location of the narrative within a single room may permit identification with the stage space, with its barely-visible pallet bed and the SPEAKER’s attire spectrally signifying a bedroom. These identifications are in tension, however, with the non-coincidence of what is said and what is seen in the majority of the piece. The narration quoted above could not describe what is seen on stage at any time during the play, but a “darkened room”, the figure himself, and also a “globe”, are, according to the stage directions, visible. An intertextual relationship between what is heard and what is seen cannot be foreclosed, but the differences also advertise and dramatise the distance between script and stage. The disembodied hand, lit by a spill, is not seen by the audience, but is narrated as being seen. The repetition of “light of spill” as the means by which the ghostly hands can be seen suggests a relationship with the specificity of the light-source in the biblical narrative. At the same time, the globe refers obliquely to Hamlet: in the stage directions, the visible globe (“faintly lit”) is asked to be “skullsized” (though not skull-shaped); via this specification, the narration of a globe held in one hand during the monologue is highly suggestive of Shakespeare’s play. Intertextuality with the works of different authors is woven into an extended dramatisation of the intertextuality between script and performance, or writing and speech, and the refusal of their self-coincidence.



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Conclusion Paul Ricoeur, in the foreword to a major French study of Daniel by Lacocque, has written that it “poses in an especially sharp way most of the problems raised in reading the other books of the Bible” (Lacocque 1976 [1979, p. XVII]). For Ricoeur this means primarily the various hermeneutic layers, texts reading and interpreting other texts, among the scriptures themselves and for modern readers, and especially the hermeneutics that constitute gospel kerygma. He writes that “the book as a whole presents itself as a writing constructed upon other writings”; the scene at Belshazzar’s feast is paradigmatic of this, with the added confusion of voices to boot. There is no one authority in this biblical narrative: in fact, at its heart is a questioning of forms of authority, divine and human. Biblical reference in Beckett is not restricted to assent or dissent in response to the fixed, incontrovertible Holy Writ; the complex textual negotiations with the Bible throughout his work are not a case of brute force and learning manipulating this otherwise immutable object to his own ends. Hermeneutical traditions that look to retrieve the ‘real’ appearance of the writing on the wall, or for that matter what ‘really’ happened to the two Golgothan thieves, may yoke the complexities into a supposedly incontrovertible narrative. All this is ripe for lampoon in Beckett. However, his own “writing constructed upon other writings” allows the biblical to be operative in more nuanced ways, to engage with the more searching questions about presence and materiality, and to leave his texts, especially the dramatic, flickering somewhere between power and impotence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Endgame, 1958, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990, pp. 89-134. How It Is, 1964, Grove Press, London.


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Not I, 1973, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 373-383. “A Piece of Monologue”, 1979, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 423-429. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London.

Criticism on Beckett, The Bible and The Book of Daniel Abbott, H. Porter, 1996, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Ackerley, Chris, 1999, “Samuel Beckett and the Bible: A Guide”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, IX, 1, 1999, pp. 53-125. Barry, Elizabeth, 2006, Beckett and Authority. The Uses of Cliché, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke & New York. Bryden, Mary, 1998, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, McMillan, Basingstoke & London. Caselli, Daniela, 2006, Beckett’s Dantes. Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1975, Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism, McGraw Hill, New York. Idem, 2001, A Beckett Canon, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Connor, Steven, 1988, Samuel Beckett. Repetition, Theory and Text, The Davies Group, Aurora 2007. Hill, Leslie, 1990, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. McMullan, Anna, 1993, Theatre on Trial. Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama, Routledge, London. Worth, Katharine, 1999, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Zeifman, Hersh, 1975, “Religious Imagery in the Plays of Samuel Beckett”, in Ruby Cohn (editor), 1975, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 8594. Bevan, Anthony Ashley, 1892, A Short Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fewell, Danna Nolan, 1988, Circle of Sovereignty: A Story of Stories in Daniel, The Almond Press, Sheffield. Ford, Desmond, 1978, Daniel, foreword by Frederick F. Bruce, Southern Publishing Association, Nashville.



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Gowan, Donald, 2001, Daniel, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries, Abingdon Press, Nashville. Lacocque, André, 1976, Le Livre de Daniel, Delachaux & Niestlé, Neuchatel-Paris, foreword by Paul Ricoeur (The Book of Daniel, SPCK, London 1979, trans. David Pellauer). Marguerat, Daniel, and Adrian Curtis (editors), 2000, Intertextualités: La Bible en échos, Éditions Labor et Fides, Geneva. Meadowcroft, Tim, 1995, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel. A Literary Comparison, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield.

Other works cited The Authorised Version of the English Bible, 1611, William Aldis Wright (editor), 1909, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. La Sainte Bible, 1696, L’Abbé Jacquet (editor), 1875, Garnier Frères, Paris, trans. Lemaistre de Sacy. La Sainte Bible, Le Vieux et Le Nouveau Testament, Revue sur les originaux, 1707, [1874], Société Biblique Américaine, New York, trans. David Martin. La Sainte Bible qui comprend l’Ancien et le Nouveau Testament, Nouvelle édition revue, 1910, [1921], [s.n.], Paris, trans. Louis Segond. Clermont-Ganneau, Charles, 1888, Recueil d’archeologie, I, Ernest Leroux, Paris.


“Pity we haven’t a piece of rope”: Beckett, Zen and the Lack of a Piece of Rope Mario Faraone

Estragon: [His mouth full, vacuously.] We’re not tied! Vladimir: I don’t hear a word you’re saying. Estragon: [Chews, swallows.] I’m asking you if we’re tied. Vladimir: Tied? Estragon: Ti-ed. Vladimir: How do you mean tied? Estragon: Down. Vladimir: But to whom. By whom? Estragon: To your man. Vladimir: To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea! No question of it. [Pause.] For the moment. (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

1. Perceiving “the obligation to express” The first attempts to apply Buddhist and Zen systems of thought as critical methodologies in the examination of Beckett’s canon can be traced back to the first half of the 1960s. Richard Coe infers it with authority, offering several relevant examples of a possible comparative reading (Coe 1964). Steven Rosen moves further, by analyzing Beckett’s works and stating that they present a great variety of Buddhist conceptual elements (Rosen 1976). Applying Buddhism as a


M. Faraone. “Pity we haven’t a piece of rope”

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critical approach to Beckett’s works does not mean assuming a Beckettian in-depth knowledge of the Buddhist issue, or stating his precise intention to diffuse Buddhist doctrine in his own works. Nevertheless there are several instances of Beckett’s explicit statement of the importance of Buddhist principles. For instance, in the essay “Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, the author underlines Siddhartha Gautama’s declaration of the simultaneous existence and non-existence of the “self”1. Besides the frequent appearance of images and symbols in Beckett’s plays and novels – images and symbols that due to their polysemic nature can easily be ascribed to philosophical, religious and psychoanalytical systems belonging to the western tradition as well – it is important, in my opinion, to realize that very often Beckett’s thought covers individual paths that are his own, though to some extent these paths are similar to those belonging to the Zen Buddhism tradition. The main topic of my paper is the analysis of some fundamental Buddhist concepts hosted, so to speak, in the playwright’s art, concepts that can consequently be employed as helpful tools to reach a better understanding of Beckett’s several artistic issues. For instance, two of the most frequent issues in Beckett are the examination of the human condition and the perception of the suffering “self” in the daily experience of living and dying, that is the Buddhist samsara. Beckett’s claims concerning his not believing in any religious confession whatsoever are well known. However, a statement in a 1961 interview with Tom Driver offers a suitable starting point for my address: Driver: “But do the plays deal with some facets of experience religion must also deal with?” Beckett: “Yes, for they deal with distress.” (Driver 1961, p. 23)

Reflecting upon the nature of such an issue, and upon the importance it has for the human being, may offer valuable reading cri1 See “Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, in Cohn 1983, p. 146: “Gautama, avant qu’ils vinssent à lui manquer, disait qu’on se trompe en affirmant que le moi existe, mais qu’en affirmant qu’il n’existe pas on ne se trompe pas moins.” Gautama is the name of Siddharta before becoming the “Buddha”, that is the enlightened one.


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teria for an understanding of the entire Beckettian canon. It is exactly in the perception of anguish that it is possible to focus on the nature of the dilemma in Beckett and to realize how this corresponds to the central target in Zen Buddhism, that is the release of the “self” from the fetters hindering the achievement of enlightenment. Zen Buddhism is not considered a philosophy in the Western definition, nor a religion in the traditional sense. Rather, like Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism from which it originates, it should be interpreted as a path leading to the liberation of the individual self; as a means to reach a goal in the spiritual sphere. In a very general way, Buddhism describes the human condition through the Four Noble Truths: the primary experience of the life of the individual is to be involved in suffering (dukkha in Sanskrit). The state of suffering originates from living in the condition of desire, continuously searching for satisfaction – a search doomed to fail, which brings an insatiable thirst (tanha) as long as the individual remains bound to the material and ephemeral sphere of his/her own existence. These first two truths present the individual with a major dilemma: if suffering originates from desire, which diverts the mind from its true and ultimate goal, what hope is there to change this situation? The other two noble truths allow to feel hope and to reach salvation: it is possible to acquire an awareness of one’s own individual condition and to do something to make the suffering cease. This escape from the state of suffering, and the consequent solution to the dilemma in which one remains stuck, may be achieved only by giving up desire, through what Buddhism defines as the “Noble Eightfold Path”: right knowledge, right thought, right words, right works, right life, right effort, right consideration and right meditation2. Therefore, the main Buddhist aim is not speculative but substantially practical: achieving the ethical prerequisites and the mental and spiritual means which can free the mind from the desire tying it to worldly slavery, a material and transient bondage, and to come to the state of eternal perfection, the Sanskrit nirvana and the Japanese satori. 2 As it often happens in the Western treatments of the Buddhist system of thought, the terminology employed in defining the “Noble Eightfold Path” varies consistently. Those referred to in this paper come from Borges and Jurado 1995, p. 56.



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The existential anguish that runs in Beckett’s works is the same anguish emerging from the mental and spiritual bewilderment of those who perceive the dilemma in which the human being lives and struggles. Beckett’s works show three different stages of this perception: 1) the awareness of the absurdity of life in general and, above all, of leading one’s own existence without referring to any God; 2) this is a condition of helplessness in which the human being finds him/herself, realizing the impossibility to change the state of things; 3) the need, irrational though deep, to keep on living, because there is the suspicion that death cannot bring any relief, and the intuition that, under specific conditions, there must be a way out. Beckett sums up this situation in a famous statement quoted in his dialogue with George Duthuit on the art of the Breton painter Pierre Tal-Coat (published in the Three Dialogues): “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express together with the obligation to express” (p. 103). The core of Beckettian dilemma resides in this paradoxical situation: the desire “to express” opposed by the sheer impossibility to do it; the helplessness “to express” faced by the perception of the necessity to do it. The last sentence in The Unnamable points out this traumatic stalemate by which the human being struggles: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”(The Unnamable, p. 176). Beckett’s “obligation to express” is the impulse to offer an answer to the human race’s ancestral question, to find out who the human being really is, therefore freeing the “subjective-self” of the Buddhist system of thought3. This is what is really behind the need to wait in Waiting for Godot, or behind the stimulus to end it all which emerges from Hamm and Clov’s conversations in Endgame. In all of Beckett’s works, this need for expression is present, and in each work it collides with the knowledge that the ultimate truth seems unutterable because ineffable: Beckett’s characters bitterly recognize the 3 According to Patrizia Fusella, whom I wish to thank for an enlightening conversation, Western thought’s resorting to Zen methodology is mainly due to the failure of the analysis of the subject in strictly Western Cartesian terms. See Fusella 1995.


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impossibility to achieve the object of their desire, and understand the ineluctability of their suffering. But in every work there are flashes of lightening, capable of brightening the dark panorama of the characters’ existence. If in Waiting for Godot no apparent solution seems possible, the hint of the possibility to achieve one is constantly present: Estragon: I can’t go on like this. Vladimir: That’s what you think. (Waiting for Godot, pp. 87-88)

2. Escaping “the calamity of yesterday” The present essay limits the analysis to just a few of the several issues emerging from a Zen Buddhist reading of Waiting for Godot. I would like to deal specifically with three elements which represent the main hindrance to the realization of the self and which tie the human being to the sphere of desire and therefore to suffering: time, habit and memory. These are key issues to Beckett’s Weltanschauung, concerning not only his theatrical and narrative production but his essays as well. For instance, they are vital elements in Proust. In this essay, Beckett’s main interest lies in the clash between the notion of “awareness”, which is instantaneous, and the linear extension of the time required to convert the awareness into language. Since words need time to be expressed and acknowledged, they are unsuitable to express “absolute reality”, because reality is firmly linked to the present, which is instantaneous. According to Beckett, Proust believes that human essence resides in this “absolute reality”, outside time and space; but the human being in the course of his/her biological life is a prisoner of both time and space, and cannot achieve a true awareness of the self because the knowledge the human being has of him/herself is the result of past memories, which are fragmentary, arbitrarily selected, and therefore unreliable4. Buddhist thought states that Time, conceived as a three-part set of past, present, and future, actually does not exist. The past is 4 Coe seems to recognize a plain trace of this path in what Beckett writes about Proust (see Coe 1964, p. 17).



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formed by memories, the future by expectations; the present only exists as a function of both past and future. Actually, what exists is merely an eternal and continuously flowing present, “sheer awareness” to refer the exact Buddhist terminology. This “eternal now” is the aim of the disciple’s quest, who embraces Zen Buddhism to attain enlightenment and realize the “ultimate reality”. Time doesn’t really flow: what actually changes is the Self, who lives, at times in happiness and at times in sorrow, the various single moments, therefore perceiving them in different ways and with different duration. Human thought, which formulates the concepts of time, habit and memory, consequently represents a hindrance to the attainment of the “ultimate reality” which, according to Zen Buddhism, is previous to the formulation of human thought itself. Thought is a hindrance because it is tied to samsara, that is the material and deceptive human life produced by human thought. And, besides being a deceptive sequence of temporal moments which “appear” to be past and future, samsara is also a deceptive sequence of awarenesses which “appear” to be distinct, but are in fact expressions of one and the same identity, as Beckett states in Proust: There is no escape from the hours and days. Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. (Proust, p. 13)

But it is in Waiting for Godot that Beckett provides a practical demonstration, right at the beginning of the first act, when Vladimir enters and finds Estragon struggling with the old boot that resists being worn: Vladimir: So there you are again. Estragon: Am I? Vladimir: I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone for ever. Estragon: Me too. (Waiting for Godot, p. 11)


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The “speaking self” seems to be mysteriously aware that the person he is referring to is the very same “he has known” for a long time, an awareness his interlocutor doesn’t appear to have. In other words, Vladimir recognizes in Estragon his fellow traveller, his partner in thousands of adventures (or in thousands of reincarnations and of previous lives), while Estragon seems to find it difficult to understand that his own self who is answering could be the same self of the past, so he is satisfied with finding corroboration in his friend’s words. The lack of continuity, but at the same time the substantial oneness amongst the various “selves” generated by the ravaging activity of the “yesterdays” gathered in the course of one’s biological life, is also described in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, another 20th century author greatly influenced by Buddhist thought: Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus, [...] You are not those who saw the harbour Receding, or those who will disembark. (Eliot 1942 [1979, III, 137-140; 150-151])5

We are neither those we were when we started our journey, nor those who will complete it. We steadily change from day to day, but in fact it is the “objective-self” who, deceived by the samsara of suffering and desire, perceives in an erroneous way the objects as belonging to what appears to be the “ultimate reality”, but which indeed is just the relative reality in which s/he lives. And s/he perceives his/her own existence as a discontinuous sequence of “selves”, belonging to previous moments. Actually, the chain of the “selves” originated by the “calamity of yesterday” is without any solution of continuity. The time issue is of prime importance for a full understanding of the play, precisely because it is connected with the issue of mem5 For an essential analysis of the influences of Buddhism and Hinduism in T.S. Eliot’s writings see Faraone 2001.



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ory. Zen Buddhism aims to achieve the individual’s liberation from that devastating effect of time underlined by Beckett in Proust. It is not that satori [i.e. “enlightenment” in Japanese Zen] comes quickly or unexpectedly, all of a sudden, for mere speed has nothing to do with it. The reason is that Zen is a liberation from Time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. (Watts 1957, p. 218)

Beckett’s characters too live in a sort of suspended time, without the chance to grasp the continuous flowing, because this flowing does not actually exist. In fact, Vladimir talking with Pozzo in the first act states that “Time has stopped” (p. 36). And Pozzo seems to reveal the “ultimate reality” hidden beneath this appearance. In Proust, Beckett states that “Memory is obviously conditioned by perception” (p. 30). In this sense, since memory is a straight production of time, and time, according to Zen, is originated by the deception in which the “objective-self” lives, it is evident that memory itself becomes a constraint which prevents us from achieving enlightenment and from reaching a way out of Beckett’s dilemma. Memory too contributes to keeping the “objective-self” in the avidja, the ignorance of oneself, and to conferring the general sense of uncertainty which dominates the entire play. Vladimir and Estragon, who continuously look for precise benchmarks in past actions and events in order to find a reason to continue their lifelong quest, are continuously doomed to fail because nothing of what they believe they remember seems to have really happened. Concerning the inefficiency of memory, Beckett in Proust is lapidary: [The man with a good memory] cannot remember yesterday any more than he can remember tomorrow. He can contemplate yesterday hung out to dry with the wettest August bank holiday on record a little further down the clothes-line. Because his memory is a clothes-line and the images of his past dirty linen redeemed and the infallibly complacent servants of his reminiscential needs. (Proust, p. 30)


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Likewise, in the second act of Waiting for Godot, Pozzo, urged by Vladimir to remember the meeting they had the previous day, answers: “I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won’t remember having met anyone today. So don’t count on me to enlighten you” (p. 82). Since Pozzo too lives in the impermanence of samsara, he is not able to have a perfect awareness of his own “subjective-self”, and therefore cannot “enlighten” Vladimir in his quest for the “ultimate reality”. Waiting for Godot grants the spectator brief glimpses of this true reality which lies covered by the ephemeral and transient, sensorial world. One of these glimpses originates from a spark of brightness Vladimir has during his meditations. After Pozzo and Lucky’s departure in the second act, Didi watches the sleeping Gogo, and for a brief moment he perceives the “ultimate reality”, the existence of the “subjective-self”: Vladimir: [...] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at Estragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. [Pause.] I can’t go on! [Pause.] What have I said? (Waiting for Godot, pp. 84-85)

Very similar to a Joycean epiphany, the perception lasts but a brief moment. Then it disappears. And it disappears due to habit, the third hindrance the human mind meets in its quest for enlightenment. Defining habit, as well as memory, as attributes of the cancerous effect of time, Beckett enunciates in Proust both the nature and the dimensions of the problem: Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness [...] the pact must be continually renewed [...]. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all, but takes place every day. (Proust, p. 19)

Habit is our false personality and false vision of the world, built anew every single time we awake in the morning. This happens to Vladimir and Estragon, who appear to start anew every



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single morning of their life: they know they have to wait for Godot, certainly out of habit. Every day they meet Pozzo and Lucky, but do not retain precise recollection of this event. They receive the habitual visit of a boy working for Godot, who always brings the same disappointing news, but who every time has no recollection of his previous visits. Habit prevents the perception of the “ultimate reality” because it binds the individual to the sphere of ignorance, preventing him from perceiving his own true self, and forcing him to suffer. Once again Beckett, in Proust, seems to point out the problem: The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was also an agent of security. When it ceases to perform that second function, when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to a comfortable and familiar concept, when, in a word, it betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, and the victim, now an ex-victim, [...] is exposed to that reality [...]. (Proust, p. 21)

3. Avoiding “the great deadener” The self who thinks and examines the surrounding reality feels the necessity to persuade both him/herself and that same reality of his/her own existence. This necessity originates the cycle of desire6 and of waiting (both doomed to remain unsatisfied), which heralds the karmic world of dukkha, that is suffering. Salvation, according to the fourth noble truth, consists in achieving enlightenment by entering nirvana, or tao. It is not an easy task, because it means a leap into the void. It is better to clarify the concept of “void”, that is the tao in Zen Buddhism: it is neither “emptiness” as opposed to “fullness”; nor “nothing” as opposed to “everything”, but rather a moment of “not being” ontologically previous with respect to a moment of “being”. The void is, therefore, the ultimate source of all things7. Achieving this level of enlight6 It is worth noting that not all the oriental systems of thought agree on this issue. Some of them believe that the cycle of desire does not arise out of this necessity. For instance, in Vedanta it comes from a faulty perception of what is real and what is unreal. 7 For this, as well as for other issues specific to the Zen Buddhist system of


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enment (which, by definition, is co-existence and sublimation of all the pairs of opposites, as for instance movement and steadiness) means perceiving the reality of “being” (and of “not being”) in its primeval stage. The world dominated by dukkha and by tanha, that is by suffering and desire, is the main hindrance to the achievement of tao8. In other words, in Waiting for Godot it is the necessity for something to happen that produces the sense of waiting, of time and of suffering. In the play, there are several instances of this issue (see pp. 16-17, 33 and 35). In this sense, Estragon’s frequent proposal9 to go away and Vladimir’s enunciation of the impossibility to realize this action, motivated by the necessity to wait for Godot, appears very similar to a religious litany, to a meditation mantra, through which the two disciples identify a crucial point of their existence which enables them to go on living and hoping. Something has to happen, because we cannot go on like this, Estragon repeats again and again. It is that same “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” that will be expressed by the protagonist of The Unnamable: the necessity for an eschatological event, continuously frustrated by the realization that there is “Nothing to be done” thought, I am referring mostly to Kundert-Gibbs 1999, a text which, besides representing an updated general survey on the Zen studies on Beckett’s art, provides the scholar with a thorough bibliography of the main studies dedicated to this issue. Kasulis 1981, and Suzuki 1933 have also turned out to be particularly helpful. 8 It is a much wider problem, since nirvana/satori must not be interpreted as a final reward or as an escape from the sensorial reality, but rather as something already perennially existent in ourselves, coexistent with and inseparable from the “death-and-life” sphere, and that has to be achieved through revelation (see Stryk 1968). Nevertheless, for the purpose of this paper it is true that suffering and desire are hindrances on the path to the nirvana of tao. Therefore, the solution is giving up any desire (see Kundert-Gibbs 1999, p. 27). 9 A propos of the issue of repetitions, it is advisable to notice that the passages of the text are never precisely repeated in the play. In other words, the variations sometimes consist in the order of concepts or of words; more often what changes is the character who pronounces a certain line. This structure as well shows the absence of ultimate elements, and points out to the relativity of the experience: if the characters are devoid of absolute and objective points of reference to ground their reflections and deductions, the spectator too is bound to the sphere of appearance, by virtue of which any element of the play refers to something already seen, heard and lived, though not precisely in the same way. No experience perfectly overlaps another.



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which recurs as a litany in the path of the two protagonists. Every single action is performed just to kill time: “We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?” (p. 64). Exploring the ineluctable necessity of waiting, and its inevitable failure, Waiting for Godot leads an operation of reassessment, reusing, and redefinition of the traditional dramatic means, that is the plot, the motivation, the usage of objects, of lights and of dialogue, creating the foundations for a brand new one10. Waiting means denying any other action that happens in the act of waiting itself, and it is an element which foresees a dramatic action that will only be performed at the end of the process of waiting: those who wait do so because they hope or know that someone eventually will come. Waiting not for something to happen but for someone to come represents the main similarity between Waiting for Godot and the Japanese No¯ theatre. In fact, if in Western theatre dramatic action originates from something that happens, in N≥ theatre the engine of action itself is the arrival of someone. And, as has been sharply pointed out (Takahashi 1982, in Bertinetti 1994), it is exactly in this issue that Beckett’s work reveals itself as the negation and refusal of both these theatrical traditions. And Estragon explicitly states so in one of his desperate lines, a view on the reality of their inconsistent and empty lives: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful” (Waiting for Godot, p. 41). Evening, as a meeting place between the diaphanous radiance of day, which has only produced “actions/non-actions”, and the darkness of night, which promises salvation represented by the arrival of Godot, is a moment of fertile activity. In the anguish of blindness, Pozzo asks Didi and Gogo again and again, “Is it evening?”. He asks this question precisely to make sure that this topical moment has arrived. Pozzo and Lucky’s arrival in the second act, an arrival misunderstood as

10 Considering the issue of dramaturgy, Kundert-Gibbs underlies the affinity between Waiting for Godot and Herrigel 1953. Kundert-Gibbs’s opinion is that Herrigel makes use of, contests and redefines the tools of archery in the context of Zen philosophy, in a way that appears to be very similar to the one by which Waiting for Godot relates to the dramatic art. See Kundert-Gibbs 1999, p. 56.


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Godot’s, gives birth precisely to this hope and to Vladimir’s joyful elation: “We are no longer alone, waiting for the night, waiting for Godot, waiting for... waiting. All evening we have struggled, unassisted. Now it’s over. It’s already tomorrow” (p. 72). But it turns out to be an ephemeral elation, that fades precisely as evening slowly but inflexibly smears into the night, a night which represents the end of hope every time it becomes evident that once again Godot will not come. Beckett’s text contemplates the human condition and elucidates only the first three Buddhist noble truths, without going as far as showing how to achieve the forth, enlightenment itself. Still, it offers several moments in which a sparkle of light seems possible, a sense of rebirth appears to be reachable by the two protagonists. The tree, bare in the first act, and with some leaves in the second, produces a moment of reflection in Didi and Gogo: “Estragon: Leaves? / Vladimir: In a single night. / Estragon: It must be spring” (p. 61). It is the spring of a probable new birth, the only missing season in the list offered by Lucky in his extraordinary logorrheic outburst. This same speech by Lucky offers the illuminating perception of the existence of an “ultimate reality”, though it is fragmented and immediately lost in the chaos of deceitful and inconsistent images: “Given the existence [...] of a personal God [...] outside time [...] who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia [...]” (p. 42). Godhead, which in the non-dualistic system of Buddhism is the “ultimate reality” and coincides with the awareness of the “subjective-self”, consists in the escape from the deceptive hindrances of the sensorial universe. An escape that can be achieved via apathia, the indifference towards emotions and sensations, obtained by exercising one’s virtues; via aphasia, the abstention from expressing any kind of judgement, since reality is unknowable; via athambia, the absence of any concern, that is the doctrine of “non-attachment” by which the seeker for enlightenment must undertake his activity for the sake of it, without desiring success or fearing failure. The leap into the void that the Zen disciple must perform must be tantamount to physical “death”: that is, the individual must cease to exist in relation to the transient and deceptive world – in order to be “reborn” in the enlightenment of the primeval tao. Images of suicide as a possible way out from the impasse created by



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samsara are pretty frequent in the play. The two protagonists remember past events when they could have put an end to their lives, as when Vladimir had suggested jumping from the Eiffel tower, or when Estragon really jumped into the Rhône. But, more often, these images of suicide regard the sphere of time present, and are all connected to hanging. In the play, suicide is often contemplated and visualized, but never performed: though taken into consideration all through Waiting for Godot, the fourth noble truth is never achieved. Images connected to the rope are frequently evoked in the play, above all in the interpersonal relations: a rope is often used as leash, reins and bond between characters. Vladimir and Estragon often underline their mutual dependence and once they meditate on their being “tied to” Godot, a hypothesis rejected, though without conviction, by Vladimir. Moreover, the rope physically appears in the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky, a connection based on the contrastive and subsidiary terms of “domination / submission” and “master / slave”: in the first act, Pozzo holds Lucky by a long rope, which in the second becomes sensibly shorter. The different dimensions of this rope, and its different use by the two characters – aspects underlined by the stage directions of the play – show how the relation between the two has changed: if in the first act it is Pozzo who leads Lucky, in the second the blind master is completely at the mercy of the servant, and in fact he confines himself to follow him, dragged by the rope which shows his power. More often the images of the rope are connected to the hypothesis of a redeeming suicide, proposed by the two main characters: Vladimir: [...] What do we do now? Estragon: Wait. Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting. Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? (Waiting for Godot, p. 18)

Suicide is sometimes seen as a diversion to kill the time while waiting, more seldom as a possible way out of the futility and the suffering of waiting itself. But Vladimir and Estragon never con-


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sider suicide realistically, or even long enough to persuade themselves to do it. Moreover, the play shows the practical impossibility to realize the hypothesis of suicide and, conversely, through the image of the rope, it illustrates the hindrances of samsara to which the two protagonists are tied. In fact, if in the first act Didi and Gogo speculate on the impossibility of the tree to sustain Vladimir’s weight, in the second even the awareness of the existence of the tree as a scenic and architectural element, suitable to perform the act, disappears: the hindrance is represented by the lack of a suitable piece of rope, awkwardly replaced by Estragon’s rope belt which, when put to the test, breaks. In other words, Beckett’s text shows the two protagonists’ fundamental impossibility to define precisely the criterion of the problem, that is to effectively perceive the essence of the reality they are examining. Vladimir and Estragon do not appear capable of having both a global vision and a specific perception of every single element. If, in a way, Godot represents the tao in which the quester must enter in order to find salvation, at the end of the path of the first three noble truths, the rope and the ‘regenerating’ suicide are the medium through which the said quester can be able to end his salvific trail. But for the two questers of enlightenment, the leap in the void does not seem possible: Estragon: Why don’t we hang ourselves? Vladimir: With what? Estragon: You haven’t got a bit of rope? Vladimir: No. Estragon: Then we can’t. (Waiting for Godot, p. 87)

4. Finding “a bit of rope” As I have already stated, Zen Buddhism is just a working tool, a critical approach through which it is possible to analyze the artistic path covered by Beckett, who seems to share with Buddhism the quest for the causes of the human being’s anguish. And it is a suitable tool to bring the human mind to an abrupt awakening, to let him perceive his own real existence, the “subjective-self” and the “ultimate reality”. In his dramatic works, novels and essays,



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Beckett seems to seek this reality, hidden under myriads of deceptive and ephemeral appearances, the sources of suffering and desire. And he seems to be aware of three out of four Buddhist noble truths. He even seems to perceive the fourth, but is not able to achieve it. Beckett’s characters cannot achieve it either. At least, it appears to be so for the protagonists of Waiting for Godot; even for Vladimir, who more often than the others perceives the existence of the “ultimate reality”, and lives several epiphanies, but who nonetheless is unable to make the final jump into the void and remains a prisoner of samsara. Vladimir and Estragon, as well as Hamm and Clov, Winnie and Krapp, Watt and Mouth arrive at the boundaries of no man’s land, beyond which there is the void of the tao, the new birth. They recognize the duality in the life of the human being, and they sense the true substance of life. They are tired of this ephemeral and deceptive physical life. But they vacillate. They are “helpless”, the term Beckett used in Proust, because of time, memory and habit. The lack of ability to follow on their quest till the end in order to achieve enlightenment is represented at the end of each act of Waiting for Godot, when Vladimir and Estragon feel the need to go but, in fact, they do not move. The “objective-self” once more wins over the “subjective-self”. Beckett expresses this dichotomy in his essay on Henry Hayden, resorting to the comic couple of French vaudeville and burlesque, the clown and his stooge. In this way, the author brings once more Vladimir and Estragon to the forefront by evoking their humour and their sadness, their hope and their anguish, their waiting and their helplessness to act: “Elle n’est pas au bout de ses beaux jours, la crise sujet-objet. Mais c’est à part et au profit l’un de l’autre que nous avons l’habitude de les voir défaillir, ce clown et son gugusse. Alors qu’ici, confondus dans une même inconsistence, ils se désistent de concert” (“Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, in Cohn 1983, p. 146)11.

11 The essay was originally published in 1952, in French, in the Cahiers d’Art. Documents magazine. Waiting for Godot too, though written in 19481949, was originally published in French in 1952. The chronological proximity of the two texts authorizes us to believe that, speaking of the clown and his stooge, Beckett was actually referring to Vladimir and Estragon.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, in Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, John Calder, London 1999, pp. 7-93. “Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, 1952, in Ruby Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York, pp. 146-147. Waiting For Godot, 1956, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 7-88. The Unnamable, 1958, Grove Press, New York. Three Dialogues, 1965, in Proust and Three Dialogues cit., pp. 95-126. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London. Bertinetti, Paolo (a cura di), 1994, Samuel Beckett. Teatro completo, Einaudi-Gallimard, Torino. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.

Criticism Coe, Richard N., 1964, Beckett, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh & London. Driver, Tom, 1961, “Beckett by the Madeleine”, in Columbia University Forum, IV, Summer 1961, 3, pp. 21-25. Faraone, Mario, 2001, “‘Burning, burning, burning’: Presenze induiste e buddiste nell’arte di T.S. Eliot”, in Agostino Lombardo (a cura di), 2001, Presenza di T.S. Eliot, Bulzoni, Roma, pp. 47-70. Foster, Paul, 1989, Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, Wisdom, London. Fusella, Patrizia, 1995, L’impossibilità di non essere. La negazione della mimesi e del soggetto in Not I di Samuel Beckett, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli. Kundert-Gibbs, John Leeland, 1999, Nothing Is Left to Tell: Zen and Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett, Associated University Press, London. Rosen, Steven J., 1976, Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey). Takahashi, Yasunari, 1982, “Il teatro della mente: Samuel Beckett e il teatro N≥”, in Bertinetti, 1994, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 728-736.



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Other works cited Borges, Jorge Luis, and Alicia Jurado, 1995, Cos’è il Buddismo, a cura di Francesco Tentori Montalto, Newton Compton, Roma. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 1942, Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, London 1979. Herrigel, Eugen, 1953, Zen in the Art of Archery, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Kasulis, Thomas P., 1981, Zen Action / Zen Person, Hawaii UP, Honolulu. Stryk, Lucien, 1968, World of the Buddha: An Introduction to the Buddhist Literature, Doubleday, London. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, 1933, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series, Eastern Buddhist Society, Kyoto. Watts, Alan, 1957, The Way of Zen, Thames & Hudson, London.



Beckett and Philosophers



Ways of Beckett’s Poems: “il se passe devant / allant sans but” Carla Locatelli

The quotation in the title of this essay (“he is going ahead of himself / going aimlessly”), is taken from one of the mirlitonnades1 (in Poems 1930-1989, 2002), a series of short Beckettian poems, written between November 1976 and September 1981, and published in different versions, with some re-editing by Beckett himself2. I suggest taking this quotation as a representative paradigm of the Beckettian poems at large, and in order to support this reading I will take into consideration also some poems not included in mirlitonnades, but incorporated in the collection Poems 1930-1989 (2002). The extended inclusions of this recent publication help me in the outlining of a continual reflexive stance in Beckett’s poems. The aim of this paper is not philological, nor “stylistic-descriptive”, but, rather, philosophical and hermeneutical. I suggest the possibility of perceiving a recurrence of motives, a homogeneity of perspective, the return of a specific voice, and of a specific economy of writing in the works that go from the Thirties to the Eighties, in spite of the fragmentary nature of the single poems and of the specific collections. I locate this persistence of motives and the stability of a specific skeptical gaze, as well as a peculiar stylistic distinction, in a Beckettian philosophical understanding, basically committed to haunting the “something there / where / out there / out where / outside” (mirlitonnades, p. 37). 1 If not otherwise indicated, page references are to this comprehensive edition of the poems, and translations into English are mine. The original Beckett French is included in the notes. 2 For a quick chronological reconstruction of the different editions, I suggest referring to the entry “mirlitonnades” in Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, pp. 373-374. See also Wheatley 1995, pp. 47-75.


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I would call this perseverance of perspective and voice a “deconstructive realism”, i.e., a questioning of the said as soon as it is said, and thus depriving any textual utterance of cognitive and semantic stability, while pointing to a beckoning towards the “outside”, i.e., towards an unattainable representation. In short, a hermeneutical valorisation of the Beckettian “out there / out where / outside” is at stake in this essay, and I take this syntagm as a cogent example of the deconstructive force inscribed in nearly all of the Beckettian utterances. 1. “there / where / out there / out where / outside” In Beckettian terms, the “out where” is mostly an interrogative and methodological indication of the “outside” of subjectivity and of writing, in the sense that both are determined as a relation to their “outside”, which is their condition of possibility, not in any metaphysical or psychological sense, but in a linguistically ontological sense. Reference to the “long black pauses” of which Beckett speaks in his 1937 “German letter to Axel Kaun”3 provides a fitting metaphor for the impossibility of stable denotation, as well as a metaphor of an invisible “ulterior” something, inscribed in all representations. Together with the “outside” as implied in the quotation: “something there / where / out there / out where / outside”, I am taking the quotation in my title “il se passe devant / allant sans but” (“he is going ahead of himself / going aimlessly”), as yet another provocative pattern confirming the Beckettian world, its literary “chronotope”, and its dis-located voice. In the Beckett oeuvre, I see a paradigm, structured by recurrent inscriptions of the “outside” in both beings and writing. These quotations corroborate Beckett’s representation-implication of subjectivity and writing as space, space possibly understood as Aîtres de la langue et demeures de la pensée (Maldinay 1975) (“halls” and “being” of language and thinking, as the homophonic reserve suggests in French). As I have argued elsewhere, the “sites-being” of lan-

3 “[D]ie von grossen schwarzen Pausen” in “German Letter of 1937”, in Cohn 1983, p. 53.


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guage and thinking are the ineliminable components of a writing that accommodates being and space, and/or even constitutes them (Locatelli 2006, pp. 3-24). Subjectivity and space are simultaneously evoked and put forward in Beckett’s worldmaking. This connection of being and space is highlighted by Barthes in “The Spirit of the Letter”, which emphasizes the irreducible duplicity of the letters of the alphabet, that do not mean something or anything, but mean nothing while meaning; that do not imitate anything, but work as symbols (Barthes 1985, pp. 99-100)4. I would suggest, then, this duplicity of “meaning” and “meaning-nothing” can be seen as the “outside” of the letter itself, but also, simultaneously, as the condition for it to be a letter. This relational quality also applies to some reflexive signs, and to deconstructive writing. In this sense, Beckett’s chronotopes regard precisely the “outside” of writing and self, i.e., the non-totalization of denotation, self-representation and self-determination. 2. Ahead of the self: transcending subjectivity I propose to illustrate further this unrepresentable “outside” of subjectivity and writing, as implicated in the Beckett poems. “Il se passe devant / allant sans but”: these two lines open up an unsettling question: ‘(How) can one “go ahead of himself, going aimlessly”?’ Far from being a rhetorical question, I take it to be a sort of stenographic paradigm of a “longing for the outside”, inscribed in the Beckettian writing, and articulated together with the refusal of making “transcendence” an active plan, in the context of a failing subjectivity and agentivity. Thus, the word “transcendence” is problematic in itself, because in Beckett it is void of any metaphysical or teleological value, as the “aimlessness” highlighted in “going aimlessly” makes clear. Therefore, the term “le dehors” (the “outside”) seems to me a much better indication than “transcendence”, in order to interpret the non-totalization of the Beckettian subject and writing, es-

4 Roland Barthes, “The Spirit of the Letter” (in L’obvie et l’obtus, 1982), in Idem, 1985: see especially pp. 99-100.


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pecially in the context established by obvious spatial implications, alluding to both the nihilism of the sign (the “void” that constitutes it as a sign), and to the phenomenological implications of a subjectivity longing to exceed itself, and yet not counting on ever achieving or mastering such a prospect. In fact, the use of movement, together with the absence of direction, purpose, and meaning (suggested by “going aimlessly”), seem to pre-empty the meaning of the “ahead,” denoted in the master sentence “he is going ahead of himself”. A “logical” reading would make the two sentences syntagmatically linked in the poem (“Il se passe devant / allant sans but”) a puzzling contradiction: is he “going ahead of himself”, or is he “going aimlessly”? Can there be a connotation of progress in the context of lack of direction? And even: does a “going aimlessly” preserve the implication of a self who is said to go “ahead of himself”? This double phrase, this complex syntagm, linking the two semantic clauses (“he is going ahead of himself / going aimlessly”), can make sense only if we interpret it as pointing to a different way of understanding both motion and space, one dealing with the epistemological challenge of re-reading spatial designations and metaphors, independently from subjective intention and ordinary notions of progress, yet not totally independent of a trace of subjectivity. This implication of space reminds me of a “Gelassenheit”, as Heidegger named it: the space of surrender in order to be faithful to a longing for an “outside” (for an indeterminable, transcendent object, Heidegger 1959). In this sense “aimlessness” (in “going aimlessly”) can be the indication of the condition of an/other “going ahead”, and “ahead of oneself”. It would indicate that there is no progress without giving up the self, without abandoning it, and thus also deserting its limits. Basically, the self is expanded because it is exceeded by “aimlessness”, but the “self” is at the same time handed over by aimlessness; it has to be given up (it has to achieve perfect aimlessness), in order to achieve the aim of exceeding itself (of “se passer devant”). Why does the self aspire to exceed itself? Starting with Plato’s Symposium (in Diotima’s speech), this aspiration is activated because lack (“penìa”), and subsequent need, are ineliminable com-



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ponents of “human nature” (Symposium). More recently, Freud has suggested that the death-wish is inscribed, together with biophilia, in the very structure of the self. So, the self wishes to both preserve itself, and go beyond itself. Furthermore, some readers of Freud have suggested that the death-wish of the self reveals the self’s desire to be the master of its own death (Lyotard 1973, Lingis 1989)5. I think that this death-limit is accessible to the conscious psyche by imagining a movement with no subject (possibly, a “going without purpose”). In short, if we read “il se passe devant / allant sans but” as a classical Freudian expression of the death-wish, we valorise the “going aimlessly” as a sort of fulfilment of the wish of mastering one’s own disappearance. In the opening of All Strange Away (published 1976; written circa 1963-1964), Beckett formulated a similar wish by suggesting: “Imagination dead imagine. A place, that again [...] talking to himself in the last person [...] try all” (All Strange Away, pp. 117128, my italics). Here, again, an insistent and recurring beckoning from the “ahead” animates the entire work, and not in the terms of a narrative fulfilment, since the reader learns very soon that measuring space in terms of progress is radically alien to the search for the “ahead” of a promised land (i.e., the starting point of imagination is “imagination dead”). Further, the reader is told that the protagonist is “talking to himself in the last person”, while the longing for the “ahead” is still articulated, in terms of a “sleeplonging”, yet broken by the recurrence of (self) “waking”: “Sleep [...] faint sweet relief and the longing for it again and to be gone again a folly to be resisted again in vain” (All Strange Away, p. 127). In this case, the modal dissolution of a “going”, still moving but “going aimlessly” would be the “master sentence”, the semantic hinge on which the “going ahead of oneself” makes sense (as a subordinate sentence): it is only by way of achieving aimlessness that the self can go ahead of itself. It is, again, the case of a “resistance, in vain” as formulated in All Strange Away. Many are the poems (as well as nearly all of Beckett’s works) which insist on the option of self-effacement, strenuously longed

5 Lyotard and Lingis have provided, to my knowledge, the most compelling readings of Freud on the links between Eros and Thanatos.


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for, but non-realizable in its radical totality. See the following lines in “Rue de Vaugirard”: “At mid-height / I let go of the clutch / [...] / then I start again fortified / by an unavoidable negative” (Poems 1930-1989, p. 57)6. And again in: “where goes the pleasure of losing / with the one by a hair’s breadth inferior of winning” (p. 51)7. Later on, in the same collection: “and to be there still there / being there not escaping and escaping and being there” (p. 64)8. It is worth noticing here a recurrent Beckettian original structure of negation, which is not at all dualistic and dialectical, but is, at least, “triadic”. In short, human life is the time of a “mid-height”, non dualistic and not decidable, of death-in-life; it is a “living dead my only season” (“vive morte ma seule saison”, p. 65). This hermeneutical cycle, providing the understanding of “the longing of the unattainable” expressed by the erasure of opposites, and by the collapse of conceptual dichotomies, also accounts for the sudden changes of tone, even within the same poem (which often deconstruct dichotomies by way of incongruities), as if to witness the ultimate ineliminable “voice coming to one from the dark” articulated in Company, as well as the being “among the voices voiceless / that throng my hiddenness”9. Humans hear the beckoning of a voice coming to them, and – at best – can hear their own “voicelessness” and perceive, and conceptualize their silence. Both these alternatives (being spoken to, and being bound to silence) are simultaneous revelations of the “outside” (one “outside” speaking, and one imposing silence). I hope that my reading has also indicated that the semantic mobility of the link between the two sentences “il se passe devant / allant sans but” is such that there is no chance of prioritizing one sentence over the other. On the page, they read one before the

6 “à mi-hauteur / je débraye / [...] puis repars fortifié / d’un négatif irrécusable”, “Rue de Vaugirard”, Poems 1930-1989, p. 57. 7 “où s’en va le plaisir de perdre / avec celui à peine inférieur / de gagner”, Poems 1930-1989, p. 51. 8 “et là être là encore là / à être là à ne pas fuir et fuir et être là”, Poems 19301989, p. 64. 9 “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” (Company, p. 7); “que feraisje sans ce monde sans visage sans questions / [...] / à errer et à virer loin de toute vie / dans un espace pantin / sans voix parmi les voix / enfermées avec moi”, in Poems 1930-1989, pp. 68 and 69.



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other, but there is no guarantee that this spatial sequencing implies a semantic or connotative priority. The two clauses co-exist in their apparent logical absurdity, with no chance of assimilation; they coexist also in the magnetic implication that reciprocally deconstructs one in relation to the other, an implication that does not let the reader decide which one is indeed the master sentence. They come together, and they come much like the “voice coming to one in the dark”. In Beckett, the self goes ahead of itself by surrendering its selfpurpose; this means that the cogito becomes “la pensée du dehors”, as theorized by Michel Foucault in his meditation on the work of Maurice Blanchot (Foucault 1986, pp. 7-58). Foucault defines this “thought from the outside” as a “thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence; and that at the same time stands at the threshold of all positivity [...] in order to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the moment they are glimpsed – a thought that [...] we might call ‘the thought from the outside’”(Foucault 1987, pp. 15-16)10. In a similar cognitive attitude, Beckett talks of “[...] un pays / où l’oubli où pèse l’oubli / doucement sur les mondes innommés / là la tête on la tait la tête est muette”11. Oblivion does not eliminate the possibility of an outside, as a distance in which the thought from the outside can “regain space”. Foucault refers to “the void serving as its site, the distance 10 I particularly appreciate the English translation of the French title performed by Brian Massumi, in spite of the fact that it reduced the polyvalent ambiguity of the French, where “la pensée du dehors” could mean both “the thought of the outside” and “the thought from outside”. In Beckett, the “thought from outside” could perhaps make more sense, in the context of the lack of self, seen as necessary for “going ahead of oneself”. Also “the outside” cannot be in Beckett an “essentialized” site. 11 I am taking the liberty of a free transaltion to preserve the homophonic Beckettian pun: “... a place / where oblivion where oblivion weighs down / sweetly on unnamed worlds / never mind the mind”. Samuel Beckett, “bon bon il est un pays”, in Poems 1930-1989, p. 63. Italics added to highlight translator’s licence.


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in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the moment they are glimpsed” (p. 16). In Beckett, the void is the place in which the “never mind the mind” can both be performed, and make sense. The opening line of an untitled poem from the Forties, translated by Beckett into English, reads: “je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse” (“my way is in the sand flowing”), thus expressing a recurrent Beckettian perception of a doing-undoing, construction-deconstruction, of a movement of self-effacing, which, in later works, becomes a “re-volving” in the mind of memories and thoughts, greatly echoed in Footfalls (circa 1975), and illustrated in the poem quoted above, as the movement of “a door / that opens and shuts” (“une porte / qui s’ouvre et se referme”: Poems 1930-1989). Later developments of Beckettian chronotopes indicate, I think, that the opening/shutting of the door is not to be interpreted sequentially, but simultaneously. It is thus a psychic image, linearly articulated in writing, and yet not subject to an oppositional logic, nor to a diurnal logic (as opposed to the polymorphic logic of dreams). Even if it must be linearly articulated in writing, it includes the representational inscription of a possible visual simultaneity and reversibility. So long as the door is seen as dynamically still, half open and shut, it opens and shuts at once, as well as when it is revolving. This image of the revolving door recurs in Beckett; we could say he struggled with it representationally: at first it is illustrated only as a door “that opens and shuts”; later it becomes more defined, as the frantic circularity of thinking, of the “revolving it all [...] in your poor mind” (Footfalls, p. 403). The abstract reversibility of movement (the door opening and shutting), and the spatial-physical metaphors of thinking (as the “revolving it all in the mind”), do not find a unified stabilized image; rather, they are an indication of an irresolvable longing, as well as a cognitive map resisting a bipolar conceptual definition (one inscribed in the dichotomy of “open/shut”). The self “flows”, like sand, tells the untitled poem from the Thirties, and it flows naturalistically analogical with the representation of time in an hourglass, and is endowed with a reversibility that formally can be repeated (identical), while it indeed leaves no way of return. The hourglass can be turned upside down, but the formally achieved return to the same starting point also indicates – at the



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same time – the impossibility of this sameness. In short: the hourglass counts and signals the passing of time, with the deceiving image of the (formal) sameness of its reversible starting point. Elsewhere, and again, in another early poem (Poèmes 19371939), we find in Beckett a provocative representation-denial of Parmenides’ principle of non-contradiction, in relation to subjective perception. There is a phenomenological challenge to the noncontradictory realization of perception: “they come / different and the same / with each it is different and the same / with each the absence of love is different / with each the absence of love is the same” (Beckett’s translation; Poems 1930-1989, pp. 48-49). One can find here both a skeptical phenomenological understanding (challenging perceptive “sameness”), and a critique of concept-formation, such as the one formulated by Nietzsche in Über Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne (Truth and Lying): “Every concept is formed by making the same that which is not the same”12. In other words, this means that the “outside” of thinking makes this thinking possible, in the Nietzschean sense that “the law of language produces the first laws of truth”13. What is typically Beckettian here is the inscription of sameness and difference in absence, rather than in presence (“the absence of love”). The referential value of absence in the two mutually exclusive terms evoked, “different absence / same absence”, is a co-occurrence which challenges reference itself, thus showing the law of language, which is responsible for “the law of truth” and of worldmaking, as well as for the illusion of truth. This “different-same absence of love”, in fact, is not “a thing in itself”, but the space for the deconstruction of a further referential denotation, which, in this case, is called “love”. So, by relating contradictions, Beckett resists “the social lying” determined by linguistic habits, and reveals the figural structure of truth. His apparent inconsistencies 12 “Jeder Begriff entsteht durch Gleichsetzen des Nicht-Gleichen”, Nietzsche 1873 [2006, p. 90]. My translation. In English: “Every concept originates by the equation of the dissimilar”, in “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense”, in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, edited and translated by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair and David J. Parent, Oxford University Press, New York 1989, pp. 246-257. Quotation p. 249. 13 “Die Gesetzgebung der Sprache giebt auch die ersten Gesetze der Wahrheit” (Nietzsche 1873 [2006, p. 84]).


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reveal the arbitrariness of denotations, in tune with the Nietzschean notion of truth: “What is then truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonimies, antropomorphisms, / [...] / truths are illusions of which one forgets that they are such”14. All of these examples indicate that one can find in Beckett a thought of difference (“autres et pareilles” in the latest quotation), as the indication of an “ahead” brought to almost transcendental overtones, were it not for the reference to specific “residual” objects, such as “love”, or such as the reflections in a mirror, as evoked in another poem where, just like “love,” a “her”, is put into play: “between the scene and me / the glass / empty except for her”15. Both “love” and “her” are shown here as endowed with an allusive referential consistency. In the following poem of the collection (p. 50), Beckett provides the psychic stenography of a further move towards the valorization of absence, when he writes of a temporally determined waiting: “the waiting not too slow regrets not too long absence / at the service of presence”16. The expressions “pas trop lente” (“not too slow”), and “pas trop longs” (“not too long”), indicate and deconstruct the conventional possibility of representing time, interpreted and determined by pre-concepts of speed and duration (“slow” and “long”). What deserves special emphasis is the Beckettian epistemological turn in world-making that valorizes “absence at the service of presence”. Absence allows the Beckettian world-making to be a reflexive world-making, constructing and deconstructing its own components, by way of the dynamics and economies of the implied gaze determining it (“between the scene and me [...] empty except for her”). Absence works at the service of presence in any representation. Beckett’s representations keep showing this. Repeatedly. As I have

14 “Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Antropomorphismen / [...] / die Warheiten sind Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, das sie welche sind...” (Nietzsche 1873 [2006, p. 94]). English translation in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 1989, p. 250. 15 “[E]ntre la scène et moi / la vitre / vide sauf elle”, Poems 1930-1989, p. 53. 16 “[L]’attente pas trop lente les regrets pas trop longs l’absence / au service de la présence”, Poems 1930-1989, p. 50.



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been arguing, this is Beckett’s stunning cognitive revelation, particularly relevant for his definition of writing. Writing is the deconstructive “truth” produced by a “thought from the outside”, a thought “taking in only its invincible absence; and that at the same time stands at the threshold of all positivity” (Foucault, p. 15). If we go back to the Beckettian poem de-constructing the gaze in the mirror (“the scene – the glass”), as well as the subject-object involved (a “her”), and the mirror itself (“the glass / empty except for her”), we see that it ultimately shows an “empty glass”, resisting scene formation, in spite of structural and subjective traces (“between the scene and me [...] empty except for her”). A glass cannot but reflect an image (the image of a “her,” in this case), but the glass has to be “empty-ed” in order to show itself as a glass (i.e., as an image separate from the reflected image). The mirror is thus, purely and simply, figuring as a mirror in its exclusive purity, i.e. in its separate essence-absence of reflection (an abs-essence i.e. a lack of essence?). Likewise, the subject, still recorded as ineliminable from a phenomenological scene of perception, can only wish, at that point, for the end of the perceptive dualism of self/other, and thus for the end-visibility (end and visibility) of its own silence. Michel Foucault, again, helps us understand one of the hermeneutic possibilities of Beckett’s silence, especially in relation to writing: “Any purely reflexive discourse runs the risk of leading the experience of the outside back to the dimension of interiority; reflection tends irresistibly to repatriate it to the side of consciousness and to develop it into a description of living that depicts the ‘outside’ as the experience of the body, space, the limits of the will, and the ineffaceable presence of the other” (Foucault 1987, p. 21, italics added). Against any assimilative oblivion, and any easy supremacy of interiority, Beckett insists on the simultaneous imperative of hearing voices and hearing silence as concurrent subjective perceptions, which possibly mark the limit of self and other, and which resist the reflective-subjective tendency “to repatriate to the side of consciousness”. Writing is called upon to represent this co-existing, albeit contradictory, need: the hearing of silence in voices, and of voices in silence, because life speaks, as much as it is not representable. Beckett’s writing goal as failure is the demonstration of the (im)possibility of “a description of living”. Thus, the task of the



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Beckett readers becomes the search-invention of a form accommodating the showing of “the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible”. As I have said above, the invisibility of the visible is represented in the self-effacement of a mirror mirroring an object; it is “life” made invisible by the infinity of its constituting objects. The visible of life is often invisible (like the mirror) because it is believed to be totally visible, to be an object of representation, rather than the structure of (object) representation. This knowledge of the invisibility of the visible is what Beckett’s poems realize, consistently and surprisingly: they are the reflection of a mirror that points to the mirror while moving away from the objects that the mirror reflects, but will eventually also move away from the image of the mirror itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett “German Letter of 1937”, 9th July 1937, in Ruby Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York, pp. 51-54. Footfalls, 1976, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London & Boston, pp. 237-243. All Strange Away, 1976, in Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980, 1984, John Calder, London, pp. 117-128. Company, 1980, John Calder, London. Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980, 1984, John Calder, London. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London & Boston. Poems 1930-1989, 2002, John Calder, London. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.

Criticism Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York 2004.



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Barthes, Roland, 1982, “The Spirit of the Letter”, in The Responsibility of Forms, 1985, Hill & Wang, New York, trans. R. Howard. Di Blasio, Francesca, and Carla Locatelli, 2006, Spazi/o. Teoria, rappresentazione, lettura, Editrice Università degli Studi di Trento, Collana Labirinti, vol. 91, Trento. Locatelli, Carla, 2006, “Rappresentazione, narratività e linguisticità dello spazio”, in Di Blasio and Locatelli, 2006, Spazi/o cit., pp. 3-24. Wheatley, David, 1995, “Beckett’s mirlitonnades: A Manuscript Study” in Journal of Beckett Studies, IV, 2, 1995, pp. 47-75.

Other works cited Foucault, Michel, 1986, La pensée du dehors, Éditions Fata Morgana, Paris. Idem, 1987, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside”, in Foucault – Blanchot, Zone Books, New York, trans. Brian Massumi. Heidegger, Martin, 1959, Gelassenheit, Verlag Gunter Neske, Pfullingen. Lingis, Alphonso, 1989, Deathbound Subjectivity, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Lyotard, François, 1973, Des dispositifs pulsionels, Union générale d’éditions, Paris. Maldinay, Henry, 1975, Aîtres de la langue et demeures de la pensée, L’age de l’homme, Lausanne. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1873, Über Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne, Francesco Tomatis (editor), Su verità e menzogna, 2006, Bompiani, Milano – Testi a Fronte (bilingual edition); “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense”, in Sander, L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (editors), 1989, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, Oxford University Press, New York, trans. Gilman, Blair and Parent, pp. 246-257. Plato, Symposium, University of California Press, Berkeley (bilingual edition), 1989.


Murphy, Geulincx and an Occasional(ist) Game of Chess David Tucker

With a few chapters left to write of Murphy in January 1936 Beckett ventured “within the abhorred gates for the first time since the escape, on a commission from Ruddy” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 9th January 1936 in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 144) of Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD). He revisited the library until April, writing around 52 pages of lightly annotated transcriptions in the original Latin from three of the major works of occasionalist philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669). Beckett had encountered the obscure philosopher prior to this. In 1932-1934 as part of the 267 pages of ‘philosophy notes’ he had written briefly on occasionalism in a lineage outlined in one of his compendium source books for philosophical history, Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy. From here Beckett notes: This furthest developed in Ethics of Geulincx. Illustration of the 2 Clocks which having once been synchronised by same artificer continue to move in perfect harmony, “absque ulla causalitate qua alterum hoc in altero causat, sed propter meram dependentiam, qua utrumque ab eadem arte et simili industria constitutum est”. What anthropologism! Leibniz illustrated with same analogy his doctrine of “preestablished harmony”, characterised Cartesian conception by immediate and permanent interdependence of 2 clocks, and Occasionalist by constantly renewed regulation of clocks by clock master1.

The Latin quotation from Geulincx that Windelband cites is translated in the 2006 Ethics as part of the following passage (quo1 Excerpted from Beckett’s ‘philosophy notes’, TCD MS 10967/189. Also in Windelband 1907, pp. 415-416.


D. Tucker. Murphy, Geulincx and an Occasional(ist) Game of Chess

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tations given in the following that are between pp. 311-353 of Geulincx’s 2006 Ethics are from Beckett’s notes). It is the same as if two clocks agree with each other and with the daily course of the Sun: when one chimes and tells the hours, the other also chimes and likewise indicates the hour; and all that without any causality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other, but rather on account of mere dependence, inasmuch as both of them have been constructed with the same art and similar industry. (Geulincx 2006, p. 332 [my italics])

This historically important passage (it is the section in Ethics around which debates arose in the nineteenth century disputing the provenance of Leibniz’s clock metaphor2) was identically transcribed from both Windelband and then later from Geulincx in 1936. Its duplication demonstrates a line of continuance between Beckett’s cribbing philosophy notes of 1932-1934 and the later more in-depth study. A minority of the later detailed notes from 1936 are taken from Geulincx’s Metaphysics and Questions Concerning Disputations, while the majority, around 40 pages, are from Ethics. Published posthumously in 1675, Ethics was intended by Geulincx as a completion of the Cartesian project in a reasoned, Christian and often mystical, ethical system. The maxim of this system, which Geulincx repeatedly emphasises as “the summation” and “the supreme principle of Ethics, from which you can easily deduce every single one of the obligations that make up the scope of Ethics” is “ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis” [“wherein you have no power, therein you should not will”] (Geulincx 2006, p. 316). The phrase has also become a familiar and frequent refrain in Beckett studies. Its first known mention by Beckett is in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 16th January 1936 where Beckett writes: I suddenly see that Murphy is [a] break down between his: Ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis (position) and Malraux’s Il est difficile à celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens (negation). (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 16th January 1936, in Knowlson 1996, p. 219) 2 On this see De Lattre 1970, pp. 553-566 and De Vleeschauwer 1957, pp. 45-56.



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At the beginning of March in another letter to MacGreevy Beckett shows characteristic aporia regarding this research when he says: I have been reading Geulincx in T.C.D., without knowing why exactly. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is rationalisation and my instinct is right & the work worth doing, because of its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie aeternitatis [from the perspective of eternity] vision is the only excuse for remaining alive. (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 145)

Until 2006 no English translation from the original “Beautiful Belgo-Latin” (Murphy, p. 101) of Ethics that Murphy recalls when casting his vote for the little world had existed. Indeed the Latin edition was out of print for nearly 200 years before inclusion in J.P.N. Land’s 3-volume complete collected edition of Geulincx’s works (published 1891-1893) Beckett used at TCD. Perhaps practicalities such as these go some way to explaining why, despite Beckett’s explicit references to Geulincx as being the place from which a commentary of his work might start, there is not the volume of scholarly work in this area one might expect. Recent and persuasive studies by Anthony Uhlmann, Matthew Feldman, Shane Weller and Chris Ackerley have added to previous work by Rupert Wood in his 1993 article for the Journal of Beckett Studies. Hugh Kenner, John Pilling, David Hesla and others have devoted sections to Geulincx3. Yet the studies are not exhaustive. So with a view to what appears currently as a strangely new and simultaneously old area of Beckett studies, before a discussion of some elements of Geulincx’s occasionalist philosophy put to creative use in Murphy, the text most often associated with Beckett’s interest in Geulincx, I want to first offer some further evidence in Beckett’s correspondence for assessing the importance of Geulincx.

3

See also Casanova 2006 and Dobrez 1986.



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Correspondence4 The best known mention of Geulincx is the 1967 letter to the critic Sighle Kennedy, reprinted in Disjecta, where Beckett writes: I simply do not feel the presence in my writings as a whole of the Proust & Joyce situations you evoke. If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the “Naught is more real...” and the “Ubi nihil vales...” both already in Murphy and neither very rational. (Kennedy 1971, p. 300)

One might of course think this single letter warrant enough for scholarly investigation, and it has indeed been used to anchor certain readings of Geulincx in Murphy. However, it appears Beckett had been writing to critics and colleagues on the subject of Geulincx, at regular intervals, over the previous thirty years. Another letter dating from the time Beckett was engaged in the research at TCD in 1936 is addressed to a friend and member of the Dublin literati Arland Ussher. It speaks of Beckett’s enthusiasm for his discoveries: I am obliged to read in Trinity College Library, as Arnoldus Geulincx is not available elsewhere. I recommend him to you most heartily, especially his Ethica, and above all the second section of the second chapter of the first tractate, where he disquires on his fourth cardinal virtue, Humility, contemptus negativus sui ipsius [to comprise its own contemptible negation]. (Letter to Arland Ussher, 25th March 1936, in Feldman 2006, p. 132)

Beckett also wrote to George Reavey on what is presumably misdated (in the same way one written on the same day to MacGreevy is misdated) the 9th January 1935[6], in which he briefly 4 I would like to express my gratitude to John Pilling, James Knowlson and Mark Nixon for their help with the correspondence. Due to copyright restrictions certain letters must unfortunately remain unpublished here: those to Mary Hutchinson and one to George Duthuit. Hopefully these will soon see the fuller light of day. For complete quotations and further correspondence, see my DPhil thesis, provisionally titled “A Literary Fantasia”: Uses of Philosophy in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett.


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mentions his Trinity research on Geulincx. In this letter he seeks to play down the significance Brian Coffey was currently attaching to Beckett’s philosophical interests, perhaps based on Coffey’s plans to publish a series of philosophical monographs: He [Coffey] appears to want to make the philosophical series very serious & Fach. But my Geulincx could only be a literary fantasia. (Letter to George Reavey, 9th January 1936, in Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, 2009, p. 295)

Two letters to George Duthuit in the late 1940s, which follow around ten years after the letters sent from Dublin while doing the research, refer to Geulincx. In the first of these the maxim from Ethics is again given in relation to Murphy. Beckett emphasises the all-encompassing nature of the maxim, that it underpins a conception of self as worth nothing, and that there is no risk of exaggerating the scope of such a conception of self (see footnote n. 4). These assessments are some of Beckett’s most emphatic statements on Geulincx. In a second letter, published in 2006, Beckett describes Bram van Velde and an art of non-relation, using a term gleaned from Geulincx – autology, as applied to the artist who “indulges now and then in a small séance of autology with a greedy sucking sound” (Letter to George Duthuit, 9th March 1949, in Gontarski and Uhlmann 2006, p. 19). The term autology dates from the middle seventeenth century5 and is used by Geulincx in Metaphysics to refer to a process of self-examination. Autology “involves a shutting-out of all extraneous perception” (Uhlmann 2006, p. 83), followed by a two-part manoeuvre. Firstly, inspection of the self – inspectio sui. This is depicted as a selfanalysis that leads logically to its opposite, “a carelessness and neglect of oneself” (Geulincx 2006, p. 326), so-called despectio sui, a turning away from self due to self-inspection’s discovery of almost total ignorance. The realisation of such ignorance and, as Geulincx argues, concomitant incapacity to act, should engender humility, a specific form of humility described in systematic detail by Geulincx, and lauded by him as “the most exalted of the Car5 OED cites first use of the word in 1633 by Phineas Fletcher: “He that would learn Theologie must first study autologie. The way to God is by our selves.”



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dinal Virtues” (Geulincx 2006, p. 326). The letter to Ussher shows that for Beckett this humility was of key interest. A letter in 1954 to Doctor Erich Franzen, the German translator of Molloy, is unusually expansive in its explications of allusion. Franzen asks about a passage in Molloy that reads: I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. (Molloy, p. 51)

Beckett says in the letter this is in part a reference to an image suggested by Geulincx: where he compares human freedom to that of a man, on board a boat carrying him irresistibly westward, free to move eastward within the limits of the boat itself, as far as the stern. (Letter to Dr Erich Franzen, 17th February 1954, in Uhlmann 2006, p. 78)

Such valiant because doomed effort is, Molloy opines, “a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit” (Molloy, p. 51). Two years later, in 1956, Beckett wrote to the writer and lifelong friend of T.S. Eliot, Mary Hutchinson, in a remarkably similar way to how he would eleven years later write the famous letter to Sighle Kennedy. He describes how he cannot bear to look back over or into his previous work, then supposes that a commentary might arise based in Geulincx and the Abderites. Though Beckett decidedly does not, or indeed want to, know if such is the case (see footnote n. 4). One intriguing variant between the letters to Hutchinson and Kennedy is that to Hutchinson Beckett claims Geulincx’s maxim complicates, rather than compliments Democritus’ ancient phrase “Naught is more real than nothing”6, the phrase powerful enough 6 However, the sophist Protagoras and atomist Leucippus also came from Abdera, which might complicate this complication. Beckett was certainly familiar with the former, having taken notes on his theories of perception, his life, and his meeting with Zeno, as part of the ‘philosophy notes’. Over twenty years


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on its own, according to Malone, that it can “pollute the whole of speech” (Malone Dies, p. 193)7. Geulincx addresses Democritus explicitly in Ethics a number of times, referring to his atomist void as a “bottomless well” (Geulincx 2006, p. 20) that is categorically “not even consistent with Reason” (Geulincx 2006, p. 90). The guffaw of Democritus from Abdera, the so-called (by Horace8) laughing philosopher, is a well-known sound in Beckett’s work. Purportedly directed at pretensions to immortality it arises from Democritus’ contention that the body and soul, made of an infinite number of atoms that move eternally in a void, a void as real as the atoms therein, will more prosaically disintegrate at death. Atoms themselves are eternal, yet they comprise objects that are not. The mythical laugh is metonymic. It is a laugh of indifference towards ontological impermanence, and by extension towards any attachment in the world whatsoever. Such attachments are illusory as they are fleeting. It is the famous mirthless “risus purus” of Watt (p. 47). Beckett’s contrast between the two philosophers, Geulincx and Democritus, is fantastically effective. Geulincx’s adherence to his motto of “Serious and Candid”9 is clearly held in warm regard by Beckett but is significantly opposed by an antithetical guffaw of Democritus. There is a productive argument to be had between the two philosophers on the subject of nothingness, but, in order to concentrate on Geulincx, here further discussion of it must be forestalled.

later, responding to a query from Alan Schneider on 21st November 1957 about who exactly Hamm’s “Old Greek” might be, Beckett reveals this might be Protagoras (see Harmon 1998, p. 23). This letter is also discussed in Feldman 2006, pp. 32-33. Despite evidence suggesting Beckett was wrong about his reference (the “Old Greek” was more likely Zeno), his pointing to Protagoras indicates this Abderite’s presence in his thoughts (see Windelband 1907, p. 89). 7 Beckett and Hutchinson corresponded further on the subject of Geulincx. A letter dated two weeks later from Beckett also mentions Geulincx, and the earlier difficulties obtaining a version of Ethica from the National Library in Ireland, forcing the return to TCD. Significantly in this letter Beckett distances himself from Murphy’s admiration of Geulincx’s language, but is fascinated by its world where man is a puppet. 8 See Horace 2005, p. 113 (Epistles II, line 194). 9 The motto “Serio et Candide” appears as part of a coat of arms on the title pages of Opera Philosophica.



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Over a substantial period then, some thirty years, Beckett references Geulincx or his central principles from Ethics, in correspondence. The 1967 letter to Sighle Kennedy is far from an anomaly and instead appears to be the last so far known of a regular and remarkably consistent lineage of correspondence explicitly pointing to the significance of Geulincx. Perhaps such evidence and the English translation of the Ethics which includes Beckett’s notes might contribute in the future to a more comprehensive investigation of the indications Beckett gave to at least seven known correspondents: MacGreevy, Ussher, Reavey, Duthuit, Franzen, Hutchinson, Kennedy, and probably also Lawrence Harvey10. Murphy Given this evidence for Beckett’s repeated referencing of Geulincx’s concepts over a thirty-year period, and knowing that the notes taken in TCD in 1936 remained with Beckett all his life (along with the rest of the Notes Diverses Holo collection, in contrast to many other papers donated to archives at Reading or elsewhere), why might we want to go back to Murphy to begin locating moments where Geulincx is important?11 There are at least two main reasons for this. Firstly, there are the convincing arguments made by Feldman about Beckett’s uses of “his contemporaneous reading in his writings”12. Beckett himself described the early 1930s as being “soiled [...] with the old demon of note10 Harvey paraphrases a remark by Beckett that appears to repeat again the substance of the Hutchinson and Kennedy letters. However no citation is given and it is unclear whether Harvey is referring to one of the interviews conducted between himself and Beckett in 1962 or if he has perhaps made a mistake and misdated the Kennedy letter by five years. See Harvey 1970, p. 267. 11 It should be noted that there is no current evidence Beckett would read Geulincx in the original after 1936 or add to his notes. However, Uhlmann in his introduction to Beckett’s notes on Geulincx describes how two different typewriters were probably used to produce the two fair copies of notes, indicating they might have been produced at different times. See Geulincx 2006, pp. 307-308. 12 Matthew Feldman, forthcoming in Russell Smith (editor), Beckett and Ethics (Continuum, London 2009). I would like to express my gratitude to Matthew Feldman for permission to cite this.


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snatching” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, August 1931, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 21). He would find a way to move out of the shadow of this old demon, but it was a significant shadow cast originally by the “epic, heroic” (Knowlson 1996, p. 105) and encyclopaedic Joyce. Feldman adds further archival substance to similar appraisals made by James Knowlson ten years earlier, where Knowlson writes: Beckett’s notebooks show [...] that he too plundered the books that he was reading or studying for material that he could then incorporate into his own writing. Beckett copied out striking, memorable or witty sentences or phrases into his notebooks. Such quotations or near quotations were then woven into the dense fabric of his early prose. It is what could be called a “grafting” technique that runs at times almost wild. He even ticked them in his private notebooks once they had been incorporated into his own work. (Knowlson 1996, p. 106)

Secondly, there is Beckett’s own use of Murphy specifically and consistently when referencing Geulincx in correspondence. If we take a further small leap of faith, that Murphy was composed chronologically, we can note that when Beckett wrote on February 6th 1936 that “There only remain three chapters of mechanical writing” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 6th February 1936, in Ackerley 2004, p. 13), the specific work being done on Murphy would have been towards the final few chapters of the thirteen chapter novel. In chapter 9 Geulincx and his maxim from the Ethics are explicitly mentioned, and a number of the studies cited above draw out elements of Murphy’s mind in chapter 6 as occasionalist13. The section I want to focus on is the chess game of chapter 11, to see if it might be read in terms of Geulincx’s occasionalist philosophy of futile causation. We can thereby note not only how the game serves as a significant instantiation of Beckett’s interest in Geulincx, but also that this interest and its application falls not far short of rescuing the novel being birthed with great difficulty. In the process Geulincx in Murphy serves as a connection to aspects of narrative that would prove greatly productive for Beckett in the transition 13

See particularly Ackerley 2004 and Wood 1993.



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from the more realistic framework of Murphy to the great middle period works via the enumerative, game-playing Watt. Geulincx asserts that the action of the mind on the body is ineffable, a word he often uses and which recalls Arsene’s doomed attempts in Watt to “eff” (Watt, p. 61) the ineffable. When something is ineffable for Geulincx this is not because we cannot speak or think of it (for this would be nothing, nothing and unthinkable being the same), but because we cannot think about or encompass with our reason how it is done[.] (Geulincx 2006, p. 334)

In an example that Geulincx’ fellow occasionalist Malebranche will also use, I may know something of the anatomy of blood flow, for example, between my arm and brain when my arm moves. But this does not suffice to explain what remains for Geulincx an ineffable how14. There always remains a residue of experience not exhausted by knowledge of that experience. As he says: “an ineffable something is always missing” (Geulincx 2006, p. 334). It follows from this that the mind cannot be said to cause any action in any body. For Geulincx I can only be said to perform an action if I can also understand (“encompass with our reason”) how I do it. Lacking this knowledge I must defer with humility to a greater causal agent than myself, which for Geulincx is God. A human mind is necessarily limited, and as such all a mind knows is that it appears to itself as if it causes actions. Of the body Geulincx believes this irrational thing, in contrast to a rational mind and in a familiar Cartesian binary, is nothing but brute matter and therefore cannot be responsible for causing thoughts to occur in a mind. Geulincx’s severe response to these issues is to boldly assert the metaphysical parallel of his ethical maxim in a phrase which Beckett transcribed from both Metaphysics and Ethics, “what you do not know how to do is not your action” (Geulincx 1999, p. 95, and 2006, p. 330). All responsibility for ac-

14 For a more detailed discussion of this see Geulincx 2006, pp. 225-230, where Geulincx describes such scientific knowledge as a posteriori, so it is “no more than a consciousness and perception of the fact that motion is taking place” (Geulincx 2006, p. 228).


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tion and movement becomes, according to Geulincx, “someone else’s affair” (Geulincx 2006, p. 333), that someone being God. Geulincx argues for a cogito, contra his philosophical progenitor Descartes, of ignorance. We should follow a programme of selfinspection, but whereas Descartes found therein ground for all possible future knowledge to be ‘scientifically’ grounded and structured, Geulincx finds ignorance of our place in the world and how we might interact with that world. In basing his philosophy on grounding principles of incapacity rather than sure knowledge, Geulincx’s cogito, as Uhlmann points out, becomes a nescio (“to not know”, Uhlmann 2006, p. 99). Geulincx’s eyes, as Beckett writes in March 1936, are “without Schwämerei turned inward” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell, 2006, p. 145) (his principle of inspectio sui). However, finding that we do not know anything about the things that we do, and therefore that we cannot be said to actually do anything at all in the world, “He [Geulincx] does not put out his eyes on that account, as Heraclitus did & Rimbaud began to, nor like the terrified Berkeley repudiate them. One feels them very patiently turned outward” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell, 2006, p. 145) in humility and in wonder (the consequent principle of despectio sui). It is in this act of turning, the direction of looking, that Murphy fails. He looks inside himself and finds there the joyous “pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word” (Murphy, p. 6) and finds no reason to look out again. Strapped into this closed space he clumsily sets light to the big world around him and he is messily gone forever. For Murphy, flattered that he might appear to others as similar to the catatonic Clarke, the patients in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat are, like his own mind, a “Matrix of surds [...] missiles without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion” (p. 66). And for Murphy Mr Endon is the apotheosis of this, the point at which to End-on. Mr Endon is a paradigmatic achievement of a self-inspection, a staring at oneself, at the “within” (as is often pointed out in regard to Mr Endon’s name, the Greek preposition endon means “within”). Mr Endon apparently suffers (though this may be such suffering that suffering was not the word, for he is numb, and inviolable) from “a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Mur-



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phy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain” (p. 105). However, as Murphy peers with an impatient eye through the Judas window into the little world of Mr Endon’s cell the discrepancy between the two becomes clear: the sad truth was, that while Mr Endon for Murphy was no less than bliss, Murphy for Mr Endon was no more than chess. Murphy’s eye? Say rather, the chessy eye. Mr Endon had vibrated to the chessy eye upon him and made his preparations accordingly. (Murphy, p. 135)

A farce as ridiculous as the monkeys playing chess Beckett wanted for a frontispiece of the novel15, the frustratedly stuck-inthe-big-world Murphy and the unwittingly stuck-in-the-littleworld Mr Endon will play out through Beckett’s favourite game of abstraction a Geulincxian lack of causality, the “ethical yoyo” (p. 64)16 between themselves. It is precisely Murphy’s failure to heed the maxim from the Ethics during this game that is his undoing. He does not realise he has no power, he is worth nothing, and cannot thereby influence Mr Endon, despite Mr Endon’s being, in other contexts, “voted by one and all the most biddable little gaga in the entire institution” (p. 134). Murphy tries desperately to give up his pieces throughout the game, hoping for reaction. He moves a knight into a losing position three times, and tries valiantly with “the ingenuity of despair” (p. 137) at moves 27 and 41 to sacrifice his queen and still Mr Endon’s non-reaction is unshakeable. Just as Mr Endon saw not Murphy but the chessy eye, similarly he follows the abstract rules of chess in a further abstraction. He does not follow them competitively, instead he adheres to them only in so far as they allow him to re-arrange a monochrome and symmetrical visual pattern of his own devising. 15 The picture taken from the Daily Sketch of July 1st 1936 appears on the cover of Ackerley’s Demented Particulars. Beckett appears to have been very keen on the picture, twice asking George Reavey about it. On the 13th January 1938 he asked succinctly about apes, and four days later expressed his disappointment that their possibility had faded (see footnote n. 4). 16 Described in Ackerley 2004 (p. 120) as a reference to Geulincx’s Ethics, specifically to the Cartesian problem addressed therein of the interaction between mind and body, rather than to mediation between good or bad moral qualities.


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Mr Endon’s turns taken, the claim being that we cannot really call them his responses, during Murphy’s abject begging for quittance are described as his “irresistible game” (p. 137) when rather than taking Murphy’s queen he returns a knight to a corner square, revealing his pieces in a diabolical and hugely comic strict plan of symmetry. Murphy’s pieces are of course in utter disarray. Murphy is by turns confused, imitative, desperate, then suicidal, finally giving up the ghost when forced into a winning position by Mr Endon’s only possible but illegal final move into the closest it is possible to get (conceding the irreversible forward movement of two pawns) to his original symmetry. It is a move that would “indicate once and for all whether Mr Endon perceives him” (Ackerley 2004, p. 194). Geulincx wrote in Ethics: We have no power to affect either our own or any other body; this is perfectly obvious from our consciousness alone, and no sane man would deny it. (Geulincx 2006, p. 243)

This Cartesian founding principle “obvious from consciousness alone” is Geulincx’s clear and distinct realisation of ignorance and impotence. Murphy does not realise he has no power to affect Mr Endon. Instead his hubris prolongs the fruitless manoeuvres in a game he can only lose. In his frustration we might well hear an echo of Geulincx’s realisation that “I am a mere spectator of a machine whose workings I can neither adjust nor readjust. I neither construct nor demolish anything here” (Geulincx 2006, p. 333). If only Murphy would try the alternative approach of Geulincxian quietism. Such stoicism as this might enable him to beat the catatonics at their own game. He should cast his eyes with humility upon his impotence, and realise that where he cannot act, where he is worth nothing, he should not try to act. There, where there is truly “nothing to be done” (Waiting for Godot, p. 11), he might stand a chance of failing better. Though of course beating the catatonics at their own game is also a danger. For Murphy, seeking to avoid the perhaps occasionalist “occasions of fiasco” (Murphy, p. 101) in his little world, it



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was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing [...]. It had not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These dispositions [...] could sway the issue in the desired direction, but not clinch it. (Murphy, p. 102)

Murphy is not a humble man. “How will [a humble man] listen to what Reason says if he listens only to what he himself says” (Geulincx 2006, p. 220), Geulincx asked rhetorically. Besotted with his own company, in the words of Malraux, Murphy “seeks out his own”, listening only to himself or his vice-existers, and forcing the oblivion. Recalling Geulincx’s terminology in a way similar to the published letter to Duthuit cited above, Murphy was previously transfixed by a “vicarious autology he had been enjoying [...] in little Mr Endon and all the other proxies” (Murphy, p. 107). However, his egotistical self-regard will get the better of him and when his own little inferno engulfs him it will be while he is in thrall to himself and his self-defeating attempts to will his own quietist will-lessness. “What is more tedious to a man than living!” (TCD MS 10971/6/1 in Feldman 2004, p. 35417) Beckett transcribed from Questions Concerning Disputations, and Murphy might concur, spurning the fanciful notion of a mystical occasionalist God who continually sticks his oar in, who amounts to no more than “The Chaos and Waters Facilities Act” (Murphy, p. 100) of Chapter Nine. Murphy is revolted at the attribution of any talents he might have to anything outside himself. Farces and disasters astrology can keep, but little successes such as those had with the patients are hoarded for his self. Following the collapse of the game, Murphy stares into the unresponsive cornea of Mr Endon and sees, “horribly reduced, obscured and distorted, his own image” (p. 140). This instant of non-perception has been described as a “Geulincxian critique of 17 This is a translation made for Feldman’s unpublished thesis Sourcing “Aporetics”: An empirical study on philosophical influences in the development of Samuel Beckett’s writing, Oxford Brooks University, 2004. It derives from the Latin “An levando vitae taedio, vario magis quam stabilis vitae ratio conducat?” in Geulincx, 1891-1893, p. 118. The question is one of a number that Geulincx debated in public. On these public oratories see Land, 1891, pp. 224-225.



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the Proustian moment, which redeems nothing” (Ackerley 2004, p. 202). Murphy is horrifyingly still himself, unwilling to let go his apperception of sanity. Such is a price the variously impecunious hero just cannot afford. James O’Hara describes how “this is the pose of Narcissus, bent over the stream to see himself” (O’Hara 1997, p. 60). This is the point at which Murphy in his narcissistic way blooms. To pursue the analogy briefly, if Mr Endon is Murphy’s Echo, with his psychosis perhaps a little of Juno’s curse, this is only after Murphy has in vain and in vanity tried to himself be the echo of Mr Endon’s moves in the game. However, Murphy will be “melted, consumed by the fire inside him” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 116) as is the fate of Narcissus. The game has unmasked him as the selfish Narcissus, not, as he hoped, the selfless Echo. By the following day he will be dead and dust, even more literally “a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen” (Murphy, p. 140). The documenter of Three Centuries of Geulincx Research, H.J. de Vleeschauwer, claims that Geulincx’s rightful place should have been noted in the 1950s along with Pascal as a Christian Existentialist. Such a valiant ambivalence fascinated Beckett, as evidenced by his correspondence. But Murphy, unable to resign himself to the knowledge that “whatever I do stays within me; and [...] nothing I do passes into my body, or any other body, or anything else” (Geulincx 2006, p. 331), persists with the misguided belief that there might be something to express in this game. There is not, and for Murphy as for anyone else Geulincx would offer the simple restraint: “It is vain to attempt what I cannot undertake” (Geulincx 2006, p. 339). Perhaps Murphy’s falling short of Geulincx’s maxims of abstinence finds a kind of parallel in Beckett himself not finishing Ethics, as he wrote “not even in Lent” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 9th April 1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 145). However, in providing a much-needed injection of ideas and energy into the completion of Murphy, Geulincx contributed to Beckett’s overcoming a severe case of writer’s frustration, if not block. It was to finishing Murphy Beckett turned after Easter this year18. By the 6th of May he would be turning down other work as 18

Easter fell on 12th April in 1936.



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he was too busy with the novel19, and producing a completed first draft of it only four weeks later (by 9th June). In the way Geulincx becomes perhaps incorporated into this one scene in particular he is shown as integral to the development from Murphy to the major middle period works. The chess game elaborates the theme of closed systems already in Murphy20, in this instance given a Geulincxian impetus. Yet in its exceptionality in the novel as a game, an enumeration of specific moves, the chess game looks forward quite explicitly to the many troubles to which Beckett will subject his next protagonist, Watt. Moreover, it is the bombastic version of Watt appearing towards the end of Mercier et Camier who will, as Pilling has read it, announce Beckett’s future horizons: “It falls to Watt to predict what Beckett will attempt in narrative terms when, as soon, Mercier et Camier will be done with” (Pilling 1997, p. 209): Il naîtra, il est né de nous, dit Watt, celui qui n’ayant rien ne voudra rien, sinon qu’on lui laisse le rien qu’il a. (Mercier et Camier, p. 198) One shall be born, said Watt, one is born of us, who having nothing will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath. (Mercier and Camier, p. 114)

The masterworks of voice, the first-person narrators and their narratives will be born from the ashes of Mercier, Camier, Watt, and Murphy. We are left with interesting questions: Why is Watt’s announcement framed in the famous terms borrowed from Geulincx? And, more broadly, what are we to make of Beckett’s fixing on the single maxim in correspondence over such a long period of time, given that his works develop in so many dif-

19 See Pilling 2006, p. 57. Beckett refused further translation work of Éluard. 20 Those adumbrated by Ruby Cohn as “the park, Miss Dwyer’s figure, Murphy’s mind, and the horse leech’s daughter are all closed systems” (Cohn 1962, p. 61). It is a tightly bordered zone where any “quantum of wantum”, the amount of desire and suffering (in a game where these equate perhaps to winning and losing) is self-contained. Closed systems by definition do not leak, and serve well as playthings of the monomaniacal, and the insane.



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ferent ways in the thirty years following Murphy? Geulincx remains with Beckett, resurfacing by name in “The End”, Molloy, and The Unnamable, and as has been discussed by Uhlmann, implicitly in shifting ways in later works such as “Rockaby” and Film21. He is undoubtedly only one of Beckett’s numerous socalled intertextual “bits of pipe”22, but he is an important and intriguing one, still yet to be fully explored.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [July 1930]. [Published in James Knowlson, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London, p. 118.] Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, August 1931, TCD MS 10402/24. [Published in Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell (editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI, p. 21.] Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 9th January 1936, TCD MS 10402/85. [Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p. 144.] Letter to George Reavey, 9th January 1936, HRHRC. [Published in Martha D. Fehsenfeld and Lois M. Overbeck (editors), 2009, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 295.] Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 16th January 1936, TCD MS 10402/86. [Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p. 144, and in Knowlson, 1996, Damned to Fame cit., p. 219.] Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, February 6th 1936, TCD MS 10402. [Published in Chris Ackerley, 2004, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Florida, p. 13.]

21 22

See Uhlmann 2006, pp. 78-85. Beckett quoted in conversation. See Knowlson 1983, p. 16.



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Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, TCD MS 10402/91. [Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p. 145.] Letter to Arland Ussher, 25th March 1936. [Published in Matthew Feldman, 2006, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “interwar notes”, Continuum, New York, p. 132.] Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 9th April 1936, TCD MS 10402/93. [Published in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell (editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p. 145.] Murphy, 1938, John Calder, London 1963. Letter to George Duthuit, 9th March 1949. [Published in Stanley E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett after Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, p. 19.] Letter to Dr. Erich Franzen, 17th February 1954. [Published in Anthony Uhlmann, 2006, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 78.] Molloy, 1955, in Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), John Calder, London 1959 [2003], pp. 5-176. Malone Dies, 1956, in Trilogy cit., pp. 177-289. Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), John Calder, London 1959 [2003]. Watt, 1953, John Calder, London 1963. Mercier et Camier, 1970, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Mercier and Camier, 1974, Calder and Boyars, London. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London [1990]. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London. Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow and Lois More Overbeck (editors), 2009, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Works by Arnold Geulincx Metaphysica vera, 1691. [Metaphysics, Christoffel Press, Wisbech 1999.] Ruler, van Han, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson (editors), 2006, Ethics – with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, Brill, Leiden.


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Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaas (editor), 1891-1893, Arnoldi Geulincx Opera Philosophica, Apud Nijhoff, Hagae Comitum.

Criticism Ackerley, Chris, 2004, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida). Casanova, Pascale, 2006, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, Verso, London. Cohn, Ruby, 1962, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey). De Lattre, Alain, 1970, Arnold Geulincx, Seghers, Paris. De Vleeschauwer, Herman J., 1957, Three Centuries of Geulincx Research: A Bibliographic Survey, Communications of the University of South Africa, Pretoria. Dobrez, L. A. C., 1986, The Existential and Its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Pinter, Athlone Press, London. Engelberts, Matthijs, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell (editors), 2006, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI, 2006. Feldman, Matthew, 2004 (unpublished thesis), Sourcing “Aporetics”: An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Development of Samuel Beckett’s Writing, Oxford Brooks University, 2004. Idem, 2006, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “interwar notes”, Continuum, New York. Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett after Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts). Harvey, Lawrence, 1970, Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic, Princeton University Press, Princeton (New Jersey). Kennedy, Sighle, 1971, Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and SurReal Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg (Pennsylvania). Knowlson, James, 1983, “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe’” in Beja, Morris, Stanley E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (editors), Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, 1983, Ohio State University Press (Ohio), pp. 16-25.



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Idem, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London. Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaas, 1891, “Arnold Geulincx and His Works”, in Mind, vol. 16, n. 62, April 1891, pp. 223-242. O’Hara, James Donald, 1997, Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology, University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Pilling, John, 1997, Beckett before Godot, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Idem, 2006, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Uhlmann, Anthony, 2006, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image, University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge. Idem, 2006, “Samuel Beckett and the Occluded Image”, in Gontarski and Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett after Beckett, cit., pp. 79-97. Idem, 2004, “‘A Fragment of a Vitagraph’: Hiding and Revealing in Beckett, Geulincx, and Descartes”, in Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans, and Bruno Clément (editors), Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (After Beckett / D’Après Beckett), XIV, 2004, pp. 341-356. Weller, Shane, 2005, A Taste for The Negative: Beckett and Nihilism, Legenda, London. Wood, Rupert, “Murphy, Beckett; Geulincx, God” in Journal of Beckett Studies, II, 2, 1993, pp. 27-51.

Other works cited Horace, The Satires of Horace and Persius, Penguin, London 2005. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Penguin, London 2004. Windelband, Wilhelm, 1907, A History of Philosophy (Second Edition), Macmillan, London.


Beckett and Place: The Lie of the Land David Addyman

Place might not seem like a suitable subject of study in a writer whose career is characterised from beginning to end by topophobia. Landscape, we know, was only of interest to Belacqua as long as it furnished him with a pretext for a long face (More Pricks Than Kicks, p. 31), while Murphy’s disdain for the big world needs no introduction. Estragon in Waiting for Godot says he has never been anywhere but the “muckheap” which he calls “the Cackon Country” (Waiting for Godot, p. 57), and Malone curses, “[t]o hell with all this fucking scenery” (Malone Dies, p. 279), echoing Hamm’s outburst, “To hell with the universe! [Pause.]” (Endgame, p. 114). The topophobia persists right through to the late prose: First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. (Worstward Ho, p. 8)

Apart from one or two instances in the early work, Beckett is never interested in describing place. Where Joyce once famously said that he wanted to give “a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of [his] book” (Joyce, in Budgen 1934 [1960, pp. 67-68]), even in Beckett’s early work it is clearly impossible to recreate Dublin (or any other place) out of his books. Rather, if a description of place is given it is more likely that it is because it allows a character relief from other questions: “I’ll describe the place, that’s unimportant” (Texts for Nothing, 1, p. 100). The im-


D. Addyman. Beckett and Place: The Lie of the Land

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plication here is that an account of the narrator’s location, by dint of being so trivial, could offer a relief from the deadlock of an existence in which “[he] couldn’t stay there and [he] couldn’t go on” (p. 100). There appears, then, to be a strong case against studying place in Beckett’s work. In support of this are the largely reactionary associations of the subject – foundationalism, stability, nationalism – with none of which we would expect Beckett to have any truck. One only needs to think of Heidegger’s desire to recover “a viable homeland in which meaningful roots can be established” (Harvey 1993, p. 11) at precisely the period in which, in the eyes of most commentators, he is closest to Nazism. But we could also cite the fact that Foucault was once “firebombed” by a “Sartrean psychologist” who told him that space was “reactionary” (Foucault 1984, p. 168). Place certainly seems to be connected with a conservative mode of thinking in many studies. The geographer YiFu Tuan, for example, says that “Places stay put. Their image is one of stability and permanence” (Tuan 1977, p. 29); for him, “place is a calm center of established values” (p. 54). Added to these discouragements is the contention that place is something so omnipresent that it is impossible for an author not to mention it, and it is thus easy to confuse its mere mention with a fully-developed philosophy of place. Then there is the question of what place actually means. Studies of place often begin by stating the difficulty of defining their subject. J. E. Malpas, in Place and Experience, points out that the OED contains five pages of definitions for the word “place” and only slightly fewer for the word “space” (Malpas 1999, p. 21). Others paraphrase Saint Augustine on time: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know” (quoted in Dean and Millar 2005, p. 13). Yet place is clearly important to Beckett. When the narrator of All Strange Away complains of having to speak of “[a] place, that again. Never another question” (All Strange Away, p. 169), he seems to accord primacy to it. And place seems to be a basic metaphysical category for Malone: “I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am” (Malone Dies, p. 226, italics mine). In these two aspects, Beckett echoes Aristotle, who held that “that without


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which nothing else can exist, while it can exist without the others, must needs be first” (Physics, 208b-209a). According to Edward Casey (Casey 1997), the question which has concerned philosophers from ancient times to the present day, where place is concerned, is how body and this primary thing – place – are related. Aristotle provides the definition with which almost all subsequent philosophers of place – from Descartes to Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and even Derrida and Irigaray – explicitly or implicitly engage (see Casey 1997, pp. 331-342 and passim). In Aristotle’s thought, place is a rigid, snugly fitting container around a contained body – a hand in a pocket, a sword in a sheath, a round peg in a round hole. This concept of place aims to restrict the violent eruptions of elemental qualities which characterise Plato’s thought, and to impose a rational structure on them. In the interests of rationality it also excludes from emplacement the non-physical qualities of the emplaced body. It is thus hard-put to deal with place as experienced by an organic and ever-changing body such as the human subject, with its memories and associations seeming to stretch place beyond mere physicality. And in fact, Aristotle never manages to provide a convincing answer to his own question, “what account are we to give of ‘growing’ things?” (Physics, 209a). For Aristotle, place is a static surface at the limits of the physical body. Thus, although he is the first philosopher to deal with place with any rigour, paradoxically he initiates a marginalisation of place which lasts until the latenineteenth century. Casey argues that Aristotle’s placing of place at the limit, his initial marginalisation, leads to a steady erosion of any interest in place in the history of philosophy. This is exacerbated by a series of papal condemnations issued in 1277 forbidding any doctrine which limited the power of God (see Casey 1997, p. 107), effectively ensuring in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance the domination of philosophy by a concern with infinite space, which was the domain of God’s omnipotence, at the expense of an interest in place. In Enlightenment philosophy, the obsession with quantification leads to a view of space as pure extension, within which place is a mere site. Enlightenment space and place are inane, in the sense of life-less. For Casey, what the Aristotelian, Mediaeval and Enlightenment views of place have in common is



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that when they examine the relationship between body and place, they all exclude certain qualities of the body. Aristotle’s definition excludes all non-physical qualities from emplacement, while the Enlightenment conception excludes all those qualities of the body which evade quantification in terms of distance, position and relation. In contrast to these exclusive views of place, in the thought of Whitehead, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty place gains inclusiveness (see Casey 1997, Chapter 10, pp. 331-342 and passim). Qualities which are not physical or quantifiable are now included in the understanding of place through the emphasis in these thinkers on the lived body, which implies an attentiveness to lived place. Any place in which a person finds his or her body is immediately transformed into, in the words of Gaston Bachelard, an “intimate immensity” (Bachelard 1957 [1994, p. 183]), by dint of the memories, thoughts and associations which the subject brings to each and every place. Each place thus contains, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, “as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences” (Merleau-Ponty 1945 [2002, p. 340]), and Derrida will later equate place (in its architectural form) with event, made temporary by the presence of multiple subjects. Once we take the human subject into account in the definition of place, then its status as a strictly delimited container is threatened. In Heidegger’s thought place extends into region, since in the encounter with place the subject calls on a knowledge of a wider environing area, while Irigaray sees no reason why we should not stretch our definition of place out to the limits of the universe. It becomes very difficult to make any distinction between supposedly finite place and the supposedly infinite universe. Aristotle’s container is now a very leaky sieve, and it is this leakiness of place, and its tendency to become infinitely extended, that I want to examine in relation to Beckett’s work. At first sight, Mr Knott’s house resembles a sealed, exclusive place: when a new servant enters, an old one has to leave, suggesting that the relationship of contained to container must remain the same. It is a microcosm which has something of the “ingrained wholism” of Aristotle, whose “passionate desire for perfection, especially of a teleologically ordered sort [...] ends in a cosmographic picture of a closed and finite world with no further universe


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around it” (Casey 1997, p. 81)1. Taking the house globally, or, following critics such as Amiran and Ackerley (see Ackerley 2005, especially p. 284, and Amiran 1993, pp. 29-32, 155), (micro-)cosmically, we could say that, as in Murphy, the quantum of substance must remain constant (Murphy, p. 36). As Watt puts it, in a phrase which, as Ackerley shows, could allude to the Newtonian universe as well as the Aristotelian (see Ackerley 2005, pp. 139, 74-75), “it is frequent, when one thing increases in one place, for another in another to diminish” (Watt, p. 146). But for all this apparent fittingness and self-containment, the house – like Aristotle’s world – exists in a problematical relationship with the outside. There are “little splashes on it from the outer world [...] without which it would have been hard set to keep going” (Watt, p. 66). It relies on the exterior world as a source of staff – Watt is the most recent demonstration of this fact: he is referred to as one who “had come from without and whom the without would take again” (p. 79). Arsene, too, poses a threat to the self-containment of the house. His continued presence there after Watt’s arrival would seem to upset the quota of bodies in the house – or the quantum of substance in the microcosm – and raises the paradox of a displaced body still in place. Arsene in fact refers to himself as “not here any more” (p. 55), as he stands in a no-man’s-land between his old place and his new, wherever that might be. Beckett accentuates this paradox by making Arsene’s “short statement” (p. 37) so long. The problem raised, then, by Watt’s coming and Arsene’s going is one of how to contain that which “slops” over the edge of the “container” that is Mr Knott’s house. This is significant, as Watt will be very much concerned with slops and containers during his time in Mr Knott’s service; his chief duties in the house concern dealing with remains: he is entrusted with disposing of both Mr Knott’s slops and the leftovers of his meal. Where the latter are concerned, he is expected “to witness the dog’s eating the food, until not an atom remained” (p. 111, italics mine). This last phrase and variations of it appear at a number of points in the discussion of the food and the 1 The Faber Companion argues that Beckett’s characters “often assume that their universe is a closed system, where laws of reason and harmony pertain and equilibrium holds sway, a notion found in Epicurus, who asserted that the sum of things is forever the same” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2006, p. 435).



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provisions put in place to ensure that nothing is left over (see, for instance, pp. 89, 92, 95, 111). This last stipulation indicates a concern on Mr Knott’s part (or on the part of whomever made the orders) with keeping the house finite and self-contained. But it is precisely the way in which Watt takes this task of accounting for every atom beyond the call of duty that leads him into endless permutations, and makes Mr Knott’s house a leaky container: in the very attempt to seal off the house and to exclude that which is not part of it, it is opened out and comes to include more and more. In order to account for every atom, Watt must posit first a dog, then a messenger, and then a dog-owner to look after it (pp. 91, 92, 95). The description of the first of these as “an ill-nourished local dog” indicates the house’s interdependence with the surrounding area, as does the need for the establishment “on some favourable site” of “a kennel or colony of famished dogs” (pp. 91, 96, italics mine). It is the need to posit a place for Kate, and then a place for the radically extended Lynch family, that causes the house to unravel into numerous other places, and forces the inclusion of those places in the (sought-after but now severely threatened) delimitation of the house. But the establishment does not merely extend into the local area; it also depends on a space outside creation: this is apparent in the phrase, “the dog brought into the world” (p. 114), which suggests creation ex nihilo, and raises questions as to where this new body can come from, but also where it was before it was brought into the world. Accounting for every atom of Mr Knott’s food, then, forces Watt to acknowledge that place blooms – and this is quite literally the case where Mr Knott’s slops are concerned: as with the leftover food, Watt cannot (is both not allowed and cannot permit himself to) simply let the slops go to waste. They must be emptied on a specific flower bed depending on the season, “on some young growing thirsty thing at the moment of its most need” (p. 64). In other words, in the disposal of this waste, new growth will come about – new growth, or, to use in its strictest botanical sense a word that appears often in Beckett’s early work, dehiscence2. But 2 In the review of Sean O’Casey’s Windfalls, Beckett praises the writer for his “dramatic dehiscence” (Beckett in Cohn 1983, p. 82), while Dream of Fair to Middling Women speaks of Beethoven’s “punctuation of dehiscence” (Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 139). The conventional meaning of dehiscence is the bursting forth of seeds from their pods (OED).


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if, as the example of the ingoing and outgoing servants suggests, a constant relationship between contained and container must exist in the house, this is problematised when new atoms are created: the quantum of substance has been altered. Are the plants which grow from Mr Knott’s slops part of the house or not? The question of what to include in the definition of the house and what to exclude thus arises again out of the attempt to account for every atom. This question is one that bothers Watt at various points in his stay, most notably in his encounter with the painting in Erskine’s room. Regarding it, he wonders, “Did the picture belong to Erskine, or had it been brought and left behind by some other servant, or was it part and parcel of Mr Knott’s establishment?” (p. 128, italics mine). We then learn that “Prolonged and irksome meditations forced Watt to the conclusion that the picture was part and parcel of Mr Knott’s establishment” (p. 128). This then becomes the answer, confusingly, no longer to the original question, but to the following: “Was the picture a fixed and stable member of the edifice, like Mr Knott’s bed, for example, or was it simply a manner of paradigm, here today and gone tomorrow, a term in a series [...]?” (p. 128). Watt’s answer favours the second interpretation: “A moment’s reflexion satisfied Watt that the picture had not been long in the house, and that it would not remain long in the house, and that it was one of a series” (p. 129). This is then contradicted almost immediately: Watt had more and more the impression, as time passed, that nothing could be added to Mr Knott’s establishment, and from it nothing taken away, but that as it was now, so it had been in the beginning, and so it would remain to the end, in all essential respects [...]. Yes, nothing changed in Mr Knott’s establishment, because nothing remained, and nothing came or went, because all was a coming and a going. (Watt, pp. 129-130)

The contradiction, as well as the fact that Sam calls this conclusion a “tenth-rate xenium”, suggests that it is not the answer per se that need concern us here, but the attempt to ascertain what is to be excluded from and what included in the definition of the house. If, as Acheson argues, Watt attempts “to establish which part of the picture should be regarded as figure and which as



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ground”, and if avoiding the distinction between figure and ground is “out of the question” (Acheson 1997, p. 60), then this is part of his wider (failed) attempt to separate the microcosm of Mr Knott’s house from the surrounding macrocosm – to exclude what is not part of the house – in order to make it a self-contained place existing exclusively of other places. The problem is that the container, “the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds” (Physics, 212a) in Aristotle’s model of place, cannot itself be fixed. In the light of this, the two most famous incidents in Watt acquire a new significance. The “fugitive penetration” of “the Galls, father and son” (p. 67) brings with it precisely the note of infinitude which challenges the exclusive definition of place. This “incident” “was not ended, when it was past, but continued to unfold, in Watt’s head, from beginning to end, over and over again” (p. 69). The fact that later Watt’s efforts to “exorcize” are stopped in their tracks by a pot – another container – also seems significant in a novel so concerned with containers and containment. The inability of the word “pot” to define or contain the thing “pot” (p. 78) is redolent of the larger unsuitability of words to define containers in the novel. Indeed, the collision in the last chapter between Watt’s head and the bucket of slops – yet another container – in which the head comes off worse (pp. 239-241) could thus be seen as the type-experience of the novel. The anthropologist Tim Ingold asks if the features of [an] environment are revealed as one travels along paths of view [...], where do these paths begin, and where do they end? And if we see not at this moment in time, but over a certain period, how long is this period? (Ingold 2000, p. 226)

Watt suggests that the answer is “we can’t know”. Try as Watt might, he is unable to come to the end of place. And indeed, two years after writing Watt, Beckett describes place in Mercier and Camier as “unfinished, unfinishable” (Mercier and Camier, p. 77). As if in recognition of this, the passages which depict place often end arbitrarily: the description of the village in Chapter III ends “and so on” (p. 42), while the description of the bog in Chapter VII is cut short with “End of descriptive passage” (p. 98). So while


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Watt tries to pursue place to its very end, Mercier and Camier refuse to play this game. Watt’s topomania gives way to Mercier and Camier’s topophobia. If, as theorists of place hold, place and identity are inextricably bound up, then this endless quality to place must have an effect on person. Bachelard argues that, in order to constitute a biography or autobiography, “we should have to undertake a topoanalysis of all the space that has invited us to come out of ourselves” (Bachelard 1957 [1994, p. 11]) – all the places we have ever inhabited, in other words. But if place is extended indefinitely, if it is unfinished and unfinishable, what chance of unity is there for a biography or autobiography which is dependent on it? Beckett’s concern with the dependence of autobiography on a place in which no traces of oneself can be found is given its most extended treatment in The Unnamable. From the first line, “Who now? Where now? When now?” (The Unnamable, p. 293), place and person are inextricably linked. A little later, the narrator says: “It would help me, since to me too I must attribute a beginning, if I could relate it to that of my abode” (p. 298). The problem he faces is that every word he says adds to place, and thereby delays indefinitely the moment when his description / experience will coincide with where he is: there is no way to know “how to get back to me, back to where I am waiting for me” (p. 324). Place foists an obligation to integrate, which, being impossible to fulfil due to the disintegration of place, can only result in the disintegration of the subject. It is Beckett’s framing of emplacement in terms of a pensum or penance which sets him apart from phenomenologists such as Bachelard. But Casey also recognises the affliction of emplacement, saying, In invidious contrast with [the] freewheeling vista [of the Enlightenment’s infinite space], place presents itself in its stubborn, indeed in its rebarbative, particularity. One has no choice but to deal with what is in place, or at place: that is, what is at stake there [...] one has to cope with the exacting demands of being just there. (Casey 1997, p. 338, italics Casey’s)

There are thus two drives pulling against each other in Beckett’s (and Casey’s) thought on place: on the one hand, the “spac-



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ing-out” drive by which place is extended infinitely such that the subject has no recourse to it as a foundation to identity. On the other hand, the impossibility of avoiding place, “the exacting demands of being just there”. The “spacing-out” of place, the removal of the possibility of presence, which is what many of the best theory-led discussions of Beckett’s work have stressed (see, for example, Connor 1988, chapters 6 and 7, passim), does not absolve the subject from the demands of emplacement. Even in the early work, behind the screen of irony which implicitly rejects all means of appropriating place – whether Republican or Imperialist, Joycean or Proustian – place is glimpsed in its irreducible facticity. This irreducibility is also noticeable in Watt: there are brief passages in which Watt confronts Mr Knott’s house in the raw, without his “science”, as on arrival, or unexorcised by his “pillow of old words”, as on page 115 when he comes to the end of the Kate, Art and Con run, but has yet to begin the Erskine run. It is the demand that place makes to be dealt with which leads to the Unnamable’s obsession with the void as somewhere that place is nullified, annihilated – voided. However, my need in that last sentence to refer to the void as “somewhere” is precisely the problem which the Unnamable faces when he tries to void place. He says that “[t]he essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere, neither where Mahood is, nor where Worm is, nor where I am” (The Unnamable, p. 341), but he is intermittently aware of the impossibility of this: “gone where,” he asks, “where do you go from there, you must go somewhere else” (p. 414). If he could gain access to the void, he would immediately make it a container for a thing – himself – and he would thereby turn it into a place, since the condition of containing is the primary quality of place for Aristotle, for whom there can be no void. Thus, the Unnamable’s predicament is that, for his wish to be realised, the void would have to be made to take place, and would therefore be replaced by place. The same problem attaches to his surrogate, Worm. Steven Connor is cogent when he points out that the very action of imagining Worm, even as negation, makes him [Worm] a kind of positive, as he comes to occupy a physical space, and to possess a rudimentary kind of physical being. (Connor 1988, p. 76, italics mine)



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Worm either exists and is in place or does not exist and is nowhere. He cannot have his placial cake and eat it. The impasse at which Beckett arrives in The Unnamable is thus that, on the one hand, place is too void-like, in that by dint of its infinite extendedness it offers no foundations and possesses no properties, and on the other hand, the void is too place-like, impossible to posit without making it take place. The Unnamable’s void is devoid of void. It should be clear that to argue that Beckett’s texts are full of place is not to claim that they are place-ful, in the sense of providing presence or the kind of meaningful emplacement that Tuan speaks of – place as a “calm center of established values”. Rather, in Beckett’s work, the provision of place always exists in tension with its withholding. At the same time, they are not placeless – the third dialogue with George Duthuit implies this: “There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of world, short of self, and being without those esteemed commodities. The one is a predicament, the other not” (Three Dialogues, p. 122). Patently, all Beckett’s characters are in a predicament; a significant part of this seems to be due to the fact that they are not without world but within it – unavoidably emplaced.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, in Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Boyars, London 1999, pp. 7-93. More Pricks Than Kicks, 1934, John Calder, London 1998. Murphy, 1938, John Calder, London 2003. Watt, 1953, John Calder, London 1998. Malone Dies, 1956, in Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), John Calder, London 1959 [2003], pp. 177-289. Endgame, 1958, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990, pp. 89-134. The Unnamable, 1958, in Trilogy cit., pp. 291-418. Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), John Calder, London 1959 [2003].



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Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Boyars, London 1999. Mercier and Camier, 1974, John Calder, London 1999. Worstward Ho, 1983, John Calder, London 1999. The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 1992, John Calder, London, 1993. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London. Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, New York.

Criticism Acheson, James, 1997, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice, MacMillan, London. Ackerley, C. J., Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated “Watt”, Special Issue of Journal of Beckett Studies, XIV/1-2 (Fall 2004Spring 2005). Ackerley, C. J., and Stanley E. Gontarski (editors), 2004, The Faber Companion to Beckett, Faber and Faber, London. Amiran, Eyal, 1993, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania. Budgen, Frank, 1934, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1960. Casey, Edward S., 1997, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History, University of California Press, Berkeley. Connor, Steven, 1988, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, Blackwell, Oxford. Dean, Tacita, and Jeremy Millar, 2005, Place, Thames and Hudson, London. Harvey, David, 1993, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity”, in Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putman, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner (editors), 1993, Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Routledge, London, pp. 3-29. Ingold, Tim, 2000, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, London.

Other works cited Aristotle, Physics: Books I-IV, trans. and notes by Philip H. Wicksteed


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and Francis M. Cornford, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1929, 2005. Bachelard, Gaston, 1957, La poétique de l’espace, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris (The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston 1994, trans. Maria Jolas). Foucault, Michel, 1984, “Space, Power and Knowledge”, interview by Paul Rabinow, in Simon During (editor), 1993, The Cultural Studies Reader, Routledge, London, pp. 161-169. Malpas, J. E., 1999, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1945, Phénoménologie de la perception, Gallimard, Paris 2001 (Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London 2002, trans. Colin Smith). Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1977, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.


The Art of Indifference: Adorno’s Manuscript Notes on The Unnamable Shane Weller

Commentators on Beckett have long been familiar with Theodor Adorno’s essay on Endgame (first published in volume 2 of Noten zur Literatur – Notes to Literature – in 1961) and the scattered remarks on Beckett’s works in Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory) (first published in 1970, a year after Adorno’s death). Rather less well known is the fact that, just as he deliberately placed his essay on Endgame at the end of the second volume of Noten zur Literatur, so Adorno intended to write an essay on The Unnamable to be placed at the end of a projected fourth volume. Together with a planned essay on Paul Celan’s 1959 collection of poems, Sprachgitter, Adorno’s essay on The Unnamable arguably remains one of the great unwritten works of twentieth-century literary criticism. Had they been written, these two essays would not only have contributed substantially to the reception of Beckett and Celan individually; they would also presumably have enabled us to grasp more fully Adorno’s sense of the profound elective affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft) between Beckett’s art and Celan’s1. That said, while both essays remained unwritten, some important indications of the form that Adorno’s analysis of The Unnamable would have taken are to be found in his own copy of the 1959 German translation of Beckett’s novel (under the title Der Namenlose). This copy (now housed in the Adorno Archive in Frankfurt am

1 In a January 1968 German television discussion on Beckett, Adorno identifies this affinity as lying in the two writers’ shared figurations of death and of nothingness as the sole repositories of hope (see Adorno 1994, pp. 113-114), and in the paralipomena published in Ästhetische Theorie he suggests that the affinity also lies in the “anorganic” aspect of their work, which “yearns neither for nature nor for industry” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 219]).


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Main) contains numerous underlinings, some marginalia, and seven pages of manuscript notes on the blank pages at the beginning of the volume. Not only do these underlinings, marginalia, and notes flesh out Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett in various important ways, especially the nature of the relation between the philosophical and the literary that lies at the heart of his response to Beckett, but they also raise important questions regarding the distinction upon which Adorno insists in a letter of 21 May 1962 to the poet Werner Kraft between Beckett’s plays and his novels, a distinction the status of which is problematical not only because it is an evaluative one – Adorno considering Beckett’s novels (and, above all, The Unnamable) to go beyond his plays in their meaning (Bedeutung) (see Adorno 1994, p. 34) – but also because this distinction functions within Adorno’s more general theorization of Beckett’s art as one of radical indifferentiation. In his 28 March 1962 radio talk, “Engagement” (“Commitment”), Adorno refers to The Unnamable as a “genuinely colossal” work (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 90]), and in the May 1962 letter to Kraft he declares that he has just read the novel “with truly feverish sympathy” (Adorno 1994, p. 34)2. And yet, not only does Adorno’s only published essay on Beckett take the play Endgame as its subject, but the majority of the comments on Beckett in Ästhetische Theorie relate explicitly to the plays, and more precisely to Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and “Play”. Indeed, beyond a few key remarks upon the general significance of the “you must go on” (“il faut continuer”) at the end of The Unnamable3, there is only one assertion in Ästhetische Theorie that relates specifically to Beckett’s novels – and even this does not really help to distinguish the significance of Beckett’s novels from that of his plays for Adorno. The assertion in question is that [Beckett’s] narratives, which he sardonically calls novels, no more offer objective descriptions of social reality than – as the widespread 2 All translations from volume three of the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter are my own. 3 For instance, in the paralipomena published in Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno asserts that the “you must go on” of The Unnamable condenses the antinomy “that externally art appears impossible while immanently it must be pursued” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 320]).


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misunderstanding supposes – they present the reduction of life to basic human relationships, that minimum of existence that subsists in extremis. These novels do, however, touch on fundamental layers of experience hic et nunc, which are brought together into a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill. The narratives are marked as much by an objectively motivated loss of the object as by its correlative, the impoverishment of the subject. (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 30])

The two key points here – that the novels present us with a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill, and that they are marked by an impoverishment of the subject – are also made of Endgame in the 1961 essay on that play, which is described as “the epilogue to subjectivity” in which Walter Benjamin’s notion of “dialectics at a standstill comes into its own” (Adorno 1961 [1991, pp. 259, 274]). Adorno returns to this question of the dynamic at a standstill in Ästhetische Theorie, stating that Beckett, indifferent to the ruling cliché of development, views his task as that of moving in an infinitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless point. This aesthetic principle of construction, as the principle of the Il faut continuer, goes beyond stasis; and it goes beyond the dynamic in that it is at the same time a principle of treading water and, as such, a confession of the uselessness of the dynamic. (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 224])

However, as one of Adorno’s notebook entries after a meeting with Beckett on 23 September 1967 makes clear, while it may be Beckett who claims that his task is that of moving in an infinitely small space, it is Adorno who adds the thought of this movement being towards a dimensionless point (see Adorno 1994, p. 24). As in Ästhetische Theorie, so in his 1965 lecture series on metaphysics, which offers a considerably more lucid version of arguments made in the final model in Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics) (1966), Adorno’s remarks on Beckett tend to relate either to the plays or to the œuvre in general. In his 20 July 1965 lecture, for instance, Adorno describes Beckett’s plays as “the only truly relevant metaphysical productions since the war” (Adorno 1998 [2000, p. 117]). In his 22 July lecture, however, The Unnamable is mentioned together with Endgame, and in his 27 July lecture


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Adorno remarks upon the question of nothingness in Beckett’s works generally in a manner that relates directly to his earlier manuscript notes on The Unnamable. In this lecture, Adorno claims that Beckett is a writer for whom “everything revolves around the question what nothingness actually contains; the question, one might almost say, of a topography of the void. This work is really an attempt so to conceive nothingness that it is, at the same time, not merely nothingness, but to do so within complete negativity” (Adorno 1998 [2000, pp. 135-136]; Adorno’s emphasis). A nothingness that is in some sense at odds with itself, or that exceeds itself – it is precisely with this possibility that Adorno’s manuscript notes on The Unnamable end: Is nothingness the same as nothing? [Ist das Nichts gleich nichts?] That is the question around which everything in B[eckett] revolves. Absolutely everything is discarded, because there is hope only where nothing is retained. The fullness of nothingness. This is the reason for the insistence upon the zero point. (Adorno 1994, p. 73)

This idea of a difference at the heart of the nothing is also present in the short passage on Beckett in the section on “Nihilism” in Negative Dialektik. Here, it is in the difference between nothingness (das Nichts) and coming to rest (zur Ruhe Gelangten) that Adorno locates the sole haven of hope (Zuflucht der Hoffnung) in Beckett; that is, the hope for a better world, governed not by the principle of identity but rather by that of reconciliation (Versöhnung), or the non-hostile co-presence of the non-identical (see Adorno 1966 [1973, pp. 381, 6]). It is just such a reconciliation that Adorno finds all “genuine” art gesturing towards, albeit in the form of a negative image. To summarize, then, one finds that from the 1961 essay on Endgame to the remarks on Beckett in the 1965 lectures on metaphysics and in Negative Dialektik (1966), to those in Ästhetische Theorie (1970), Adorno tends either to privilege the plays (and, above all, Endgame) or to remark upon Beckett’s works in general. In his 1962 essay “Titel” (“Titles”), Adorno does emphasize the importance of the title The Unnamable, claiming that it “not only fits its subject matter but also embodies the truth about the namelessness of contem-



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porary literature” (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 4]); in the 1962 radio talk “Engagement”, he mentions The Unnamable together with Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s own plays (see p. 90); and the phrase “comment c’est” (taken, of course, from Beckett’s 1961 novel) appears more than once4; but nowhere does he address directly the question of the difference between Beckett’s novels and his plays, and nowhere does he offer an argument to support the claim made in his letter to Kraft that the novels – and, above all, The Unnamable – go beyond the plays in their meaning. Thus, if there is an argument put forward to support this evaluative distinction between the novels and the plays, then one might reasonably assume that it has to lie, if anywhere, in the manuscript notes on The Unnamable. As we shall see, however, while these notes do focus specifically on the novel, they do so in a manner that works against any sustainable generic distinction and that is thus governed by the very principle of indifferentiation that Adorno identifies as the governing principle of Beckett’s own art. The implications of this go beyond the question of whether Beckett’s novels are clearly distinguishable from his plays in terms of their Bedeutung to the question of the distinction between philosophy and literature as such in the work of both Adorno and Beckett. The seven pages of notes in the front of Adorno’s copy of Beckett’s novel suggest that the principal issues to be addressed in the projected essay would have included the collapse of the subject, the problem of time in the post-Flaubertian novel, the inheritance of naturalism, the applicability or otherwise of the concept of the absurd, the parodic critique of Cartesian philosophy, and the traces of an antinomian theology in Beckett. Unsurprisingly for those familiar with Adorno’s published work on Beckett, then, the two main areas of concern are the philosophical and the literary affiliations and implications of Beckett’s novel, and the relationship between them. As regards Beckett’s philosophical affiliations, while Adorno mentions Descartes and Hegel, it is Beckett’s relation to Wittgenstein that stands out. In his 1962 letter to Kraft, Adorno goes so far as to claim that Beckett is “obviously very influenced” by Wittgenstein (Adorno 1994, p. 34), and 4 In his 20 July 1965 lecture in the series on metaphysics, for instance, Adorno refers to “the way things really and actually are, comment c’est, as Beckett puts it” (Adorno 1998 [2000, p. 114]).


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Wittgenstein’s name appears on several occasions in the margins of Adorno’s copy of The Unnamable; it is written, for instance, next to the following two sentences: “I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means” (The Unnamable, p. 293); and “it all boils down to a question of words” (p. 338). Whether Beckett was in fact influenced by Wittgenstein at the time of the writing of The Unnamable (that is, in 1949-1950) remains open to question, however, and one would surely have to give some weight to Beckett’s own claim that he did not read Wittgenstein until the 1950s. Furthermore, the evidence of Beckett’s reading notes from the 1930s indicates that it is Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache rather than Wittgenstein that contributes most to the language scepticism so evident in The Unnamable. If we turn now to the philosophical implications of The Unnamable, we find that Adorno takes these to lie principally in the parody of Descartes, of solipsism, of idealism, or of what Adorno refers to as the philosophy of the remainder (Residualphilosophie). In his essay on Endgame, Adorno argues that in Beckett’s plays all the dramatic categories are parodied, but that this does not mean that they are simply “derided” (Adorno 1961 [1991, p. 259]). This is because parody, in what Adorno terms its “emphatic sense”, means “the use of forms in the era of their impossibility” (p. 259). The parody of the philosophy of the remainder in The Unnamable is thus to be understood not simply as a rejection of that philosophy but rather as the carrying of its logic to an extreme. In this way, Beckett’s novel reveals that what remains beyond all possible reduction is not the sovereign ego as master, but rather trash or filth (Dreck). As for Beckett’s relation to nihilism – his work having been characterized by Georg Lukács in Wider den mißverstandenen Realismus (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism) (1958) as a “fully standardized nihilistic modernism” that brings together Kafkaesque and Joycean motifs (see Lukács 1958 [1963, p. 53]) – this is addressed explicitly by Adorno in the section on nihilism in Negative Dialektik, in which he argues that the real nihilism lies not in Beckett but in those who object to his work by appealing to “more and more faded positivities” (Adorno 1966 [1973, p. 381]). That said, in the 1968 television debate on Beckett in which Adorno participated, he does acknowledge a certain “nihilistic mysticism” in



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Beckett (Adorno 1994, pp. 93-94), and in his notes on The Unnamable he twice indicates that he should bring in material on nihilism from other notebooks (see Adorno 1994, pp. 67, 69). Although this other notebook material has to date remained unidentifiable, it is nonetheless the case that, as in Negative Dialektik, so in the notes on The Unnamable, Adorno finds Beckett raising the question of a difference within the negative that would complicate any nihilism within his work. Indeed, as we have seen, this question of the non-coincidence of the nothing with itself is, for Adorno, that around which “everything in B[eckett] revolves”, and, as I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere (see Weller 2005, pp. 11-15), this difference within the negative is precisely that which, for Adorno, constitutes the resistance to nihilism in Beckett. Adorno’s abiding concern with the particular nature of the negative in Beckett is also apparent in a marginal note in his copy of The Unnamable in which he claims that, for Beckett, “the positive categories, such as hope, are [...] the absolutely negative ones” (Adorno 1994, p. 44). Five years later, however, Adorno revisits this question of the negative after a conversation with Beckett in Berlin on 23 September 1967 during which Beckett makes what Adorno describes in his notebook as a “highly enigmatic remark” concerning “a kind of positivity that is contained within pure negativity” (p. 24). This insistence upon a positivity within the negative appears to contradict Adorno’s own assertion in his copy of The Unnamable that the point of indifference (Indifferenzpunkt) that Beckett reaches in that novel is a purely negative one. While this question of a positivity within the negative certainly lies at the heart of any consideration of the extent to which Adorno’s understanding of Beckett’s works corresponded to Beckett’s own – and the latter’s objections to Adorno’s insistence in his essay on Endgame that Hamm is a kind of degenerated or remnant Hamlet are well known – it does not help to clarify the evaluative distinction between Beckett’s novels and his plays (and, more precisely, between The Unnamable and Endgame) upon which Adorno insists in the letter to Kraft. With this question in mind, we may now turn to the literary affiliations and implications that Adorno finds in The Unnamable. The most recurrent form of marginal annotation in Adorno’s copy of the novel is an “F” (for forte) or an “FF” (for fortissimo)


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– flagging what Adorno sees as particularly strong lines. Unsurprisingly, Adorno adjudges the compulsion to “go on” (continuer in the original French; weitermachen in Elmar Tophoven’s German translation) as the critical category that works against what Adorno describes as “the deceptive nature of the question of meaning” (Adorno 1994, p. 56). This helps to clarify a remark made in Adorno’s 1963 essay on the later poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, in which he claims that Hölderlin “inaugurates the process that leads to Beckett’s protocol sentences, empty of meaning” (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 137]). In his essay on Endgame, Adorno declares that Beckett’s characters “stammer in protocol sentences – whether of the positivist or the expressionist variety one does not know. The asymptote toward which Beckett’s drama tends is silence” (Adorno 1961 [1991, p. 260]). The concept of the protocol sentence (Protokollsatz) in the logical positivist sense is to be found particularly in the work of Rudolf Carnap, and refers to a statement that describes immediate experience or perception, and, as such, is held to be the ultimate ground for knowledge. In Beckett, such sentences may be seen as instances of an art of correctio – or what Bruno Clément terms “epanorthosis” (see Clément 1994, pp. 179-180) – which arguably reaches its most extreme form in the latter part of The Unnamable. One example among many would be the following: “I must feel something, yes, I feel something, they say I feel something, [...] I don’t know what I feel” (The Unnamable, p. 386; see Adorno 1994, p. 56). Rather than isolating particular phrases or sentences, however, it would be more accurate to characterize the entire novel as a sequence of such protocol sentences – on the condition that, rather than these sentences being seen simply as empty of meaning (sinnleer) (as Adorno puts it in his essay on Hölderlin), they are viewed as attempted evacuations of meaning. Adorno acknowledges as much, albeit with regard to the plays, when in Ästhetische Theorie he argues that Günther Anders “was right to defend Beckett against those who make his works out to be affirmative. Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 153]). Much of the early part of Adorno’s 1963 essay on Hölderlin is taken up with a critique of Heidegger’s so called elucidations (Er-



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läuterungen) of Hölderlin’s poetry in essays and lectures written during the 1930s and 1940s. At the heart of this critique is the claim that Heidegger completely fails to analyse poetic form, and this is precisely what Adorno sets out to rectify in his own analysis of parataxis in Hölderlin’s poems of 1801-1805. Although Hölderlin’s name is not mentioned in the notes on The Unnamable, the connection made between Hölderlin and Beckett by way of the theory of the protocol sentence in the essay on Hölderlin, together with the assertion that Hölderlin’s “mature language approaches madness” in that it consists of “a series of disruptive actions against both the spoken language and the elevated style of German classicism” (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 138]), helps to explain Adorno’s attention to the syntax of the latter parts of The Unnamable. In the upper margin of the page that in the German edition begins “versucht, vernünftig zu sein” (“you try to be reasonable”; The Unnamable, p. 385), Adorno notes: “here begins a kind of grammatical paraphrase” (Adorno 1994, p. 56). With regard to the form of Beckett’s novel, Adorno sees it as essentially musical, and in this his view certainly accords with Beckett’s own. For instance, not only does Adorno write “Stravinsky” beside the line “Overcome, that goes without saying, the fatal leaning towards expressiveness” (Adorno 1994, p. 58; The Unnamable, p. 394), but he also remarks upon Beckett’s “art of counterpoint” more generally and his “profound affinity with music” (Adorno 1994, pp. 67, 63). In his notes on The Unnamable, Adorno also focuses on the relationship between time and the novel, and Beckett’s debt to various aesthetic traditions. He begins with the general argument that the history of the novel as a genre is to be understood in terms of the ever greater centrality of time, and goes on to observe that, according to Lukács, meaningless time (sinnleere Zeit) first finds expression in Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale (1869). With the advent of interior monologue in the late nineteenth century, time frees itself from beings altogether, and, in Beckett’s novel, time as Bergsonian durée finally becomes time as espace. As for Beckett’s place within modern literary movements, Adorno sees The Unnamable as bringing together expressionism and naturalism, in order to produce a work that is at once non-realist and non-auratic.


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Aside from such general reflections on Beckett’s place within – or, more precisely, at the end of – the history of the novel as a genre, in both his marginalia and his manuscript notes Adorno connects Beckett with a range of other writers, some of them rather more surprising than others. These include not only Proust and Joyce (from whom Adorno marks Beckett’s difference), but also Paul Valéry, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, and Gottfried Benn. The two most important explicit links, however, are undoubtedly those with Gide and Kafka. With regard to Gide – whom Beckett himself, in his Trinity College Dublin lectures in 1930-1931, places within a tradition running from Stendhal to Dostoevsky and Proust – Adorno sees the “clownish reflections on the work itself” in The Unnamable as recalling those of Paludes (1895) (Adorno 1994, p. 65). As for Kafka, his name appears fourteen times in the notes and marginalia, which is far more than any other. In his essay on Endgame, Adorno claims that Beckett’s play “is heir to Kafka’s novels. His relationship to Kafka is analogous to that of the serial composers to Schoenberg: he provides Kafka with a further selfreflection and turns him upside down by totalizing his principle” (Adorno 1961 [1991, p. 259]). Adorno then proceeds to argue that “The same thing that militates against the dramatization of Kafka’s novels becomes Beckett’s subject matter. The dramatic constituents put in a posthumous appearance” (p. 260). Of course, what this leaves out of account is Beckett the novelist’s relation to Kafka, and whether or not this differs from Beckett the dramatist’s relation to him. Unsurprisingly, the passages in The Unnamable that are marked with a “Kafka” in the margins often concern the question of guilt; for instance: “I was given a pensum, at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born perhaps, or for no particular reason, because they dislike me, and I’ve forgotten what it is” (The Unnamable, p. 312). Adorno also draws a parallel, however, between the description of Worm, whom in a marginal note he identifies as the “id” to the “ego” that is Mahood (see Adorno 1994, p. 45), and Kafka’s stories “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”) and “Odradek”. Where Beckett would differ from Kafka is, according to Adorno, in his replacing of the latter’s “epic language” with a language that is “shrunken” (geschrumpft) (p. 67). Beyond such similarities and differences, however, Adorno sees a fundamental coincidence between Beckett and Kafka in



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their representation of a condition that is either “beyond” or “between” life and death (pp. 69, 47), and that in Kafka finds its most explicit form in the story of the Hunter Gracchus. Indeed, for Adorno, the importance of The Unnamable lies above all in its representation of this beyond or between. As he puts it: “Simplest answer to the question of why [The Unnamable] is so extraordinarily significant: Because it comes closest to the representation of what it will really be like after death [...]. Neither spirit nor time nor symbol. Precisely this is the Beckettian no man’s land” (p. 69). In Negative Dialektik, this no man’s land (Niemandsland) is located by Adorno between being and nothingness (see Adorno 1966 [1973, p. 381]), and, as his notes on The Unnamable make clear, its importance lies in its disclosing “the corpse as the truth of life” and the principle of identity as the principle of death whereby “everything that counts – that is, difference – sinks into irrelevance” (Adorno 1994, p. 71). It is clear, then, that for Adorno there is in Beckett’s novel an indifferentiation of a distinction second only to that between being and non-being, namely that between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. The Beckettian clown is the figure for this indifferentiation in that he is “a living being that turns itself into an object, a football, a dead person” (p. 73). If the representation of a state beyond or between life and death, in which the very distinction between the living and dead is effaced, is what renders Beckett’s novel so significant, this is complemented by a formal indifferentiation between theory and narrative. Beckett retains the term “novel” – in fact, this is the case for the original French version of How It Is (1961) rather than for The Unnamable – because he wishes to show “what has become of the novel” (Adorno 1994, p. 61). On the one hand, Beckett produces instances of “episodic pseudo-narrative” (p. 41). On the other hand, just as Hegel and Marx wished to turn philosophy into history, so Beckett collapses the very distinction between narrative (Erzählung) and theory (Theorie), or between the act of narration and a reflection upon that narration (see p. 61). Crucially, however, one finds Adorno repeating this indifferentiation in his turn by collapsing the distinction between philosophy as negative dialectics and Beckett’s “radically darkened art”. The negation of this particular difference occurs in the interests of a resistance to


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nihilism that is itself determined as the reduction to nothing of difference. In other words, nihilism as indifferentiation – whereby “everything that counts – that is, difference – sinks into irrelevance” (p. 71) – returns to haunt Adorno’s own discourse on Beckett precisely there where the resistance to nihilism is located. As I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere (see Weller 2008), this return is the manifestation of nihilism as what Nietzsche describes as the “uncanniest of all guests” (unheimlichste aller Gäste) (Nietzsche, 1886 [1999, p. 125]), and is far from being limited to Adorno; indeed, it is a fundamental trait of an entire tradition that finds its point of departure in Nietzsche and that on more than one occasion turns to Beckett’s œuvre as a resource. This indifferentiation spreads from Beckett’s own works to the distinction between the novel and drama in Adorno’s analysis of those works, from there to the distinction between literature and philosophy in Adorno’s thought more generally, and from there to the distinction between Adorno and Heidegger, upon which the former insists so polemically in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Jargon of Authenticity) (1964). Adorno’s readings of Beckett make clear that he takes art and philosophy to serve the same end: the resistance of a nihilism determined as the reduction to nothing of difference. Like Heidegger, Adorno takes the relation between Denker and Dichter to be a complementary one. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe observes, Adorno “never calls into question the absolutely privileged relation of (great) poetry to philosophy – a relation that, moreover, he goes out of his way to justify, over and against the philologists, at the beginning of his essay [on Hölderlin]. Thus, in a most paradoxical manner, a strange complicity [with Heidegger] is established” (Lacoue-Labarthe 2002 [2007, pp. 46-47]). This complicity is evident in the claim made in Ästhetische Theorie that philosophy and art “converge in their truth content” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 130]), and that in works of art this truth content “is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and only this truth of the work in-itself is commensurable to philosophical interpretation and coincides – with regard to the idea, in any case – with the idea of philosophical truth” (pp. 130-131). Above all, however, the complicity between Adorno and Heidegger lies in their shared conviction that art constitutes a privileged



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form of resistance to what they both identify as “nihilism” – and in this, Lacoue-Labarthe may in turn be aligned with them. For all three of these thinkers, the value of Hölderlin’s late hymns lies in just such a resistance. For Adorno, however, what commences in Hölderlin – that is, the protocol sentence – reaches its consummation in Beckett. That said, Adorno is more aware than LacoueLabarthe is prepared to acknowledge of the risk that he runs in thinking the relation between literature and philosophy as complementary in nature. This is apparent, for instance, in his characterization of that relation as strictly non-appropriative. As Adorno makes clear in his 1963 essay on Hölderlin, poetry’s relation to philosophy has to be understood in terms of the former’s truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt), a concept that Adorno takes from Benjamin and which is to be clearly distinguished from the content (Inhalt) as “what is said directly” by the work (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 115]). Of philosophy’s relation to this truth content, Adorno states: “While Hölderlin’s poetry, like everything that is poetry in the emphatic sense, needs philosophy as the medium that brings its truth content to light, this need is not fulfilled through recourse to a philosophy that in any way seizes possession of the poetry” (p. 113). Similarly, Adorno distinguishes between metaphysical and aesthetic meaning, arguing that Beckett’s is an art that “cull[s] aesthetic meaning from the radical negation of metaphysical meaning” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 271]). And yet, just as there occurs a restoration of metaphysical meaning through the assertion (in his essay on Endgame) that “Meaning nothing becomes the only meaning” in Beckett’s play (Adorno 1961 [1991, p. 261]), so, too, there occurs a seizing possession of the poetry in Adorno’s reading of Beckett, in the form of an indifferentiation not just of narrative and theory, but more generally of narrative and drama, and indeed of philosophy and literature. If, as Adorno claims in his notes on The Unnamable, Beckett’s work constitutes a critique (Kritik) of the philosophy of the remainder, then it is necessarily philosophical in nature. It would appear, then, that a principle of indifferentiation – which I have elsewhere sought to show is anethical in nature (see Weller 2006) – is operative not only, as Adorno suggests, in Beckett’s work, but also in Adorno’s commentary on that work. The consequences of this are considerable, not only for the concept of literature but also for the philosophical discourse that would make use of it. That Adorno not



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only fails to establish a clear distinction between Beckett’s novels and his plays – or, more precisely, between The Unnamable and Endgame – but himself works against the very distinction that he proposes, points us towards a more general process of indifferentiation, the limits of which remain to be mapped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Molloy, 1951, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Malone meurt, 1951, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. L’Innommable, 1953, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. The Unnamable, 1958, in Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, John Calder, London 1959, pp. 291-418. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), John Calder, London 1959.

Works by Theodor W. Adorno “Versuch Endspiel zu verstehen”, 1961, in Noten zur Literatur II, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Notes to Literature, 1991, vol. 1, Rolf Tiedemann (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, pp. 241-275). Noten zur Literatur III, 1965, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Notes to Literature, 1992, vol. 2, Rolf Tiedemann (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen). Adorno, Theodor W., 1966, Negative Dialektik, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Negative Dialectics, 1973, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, trans. E. B. Ashton). Ästhetische Theorie, 1970, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (editors), Athlone, London 1997, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor). Frankfurter Adorno Blätter III, 1994, Theodor W. Adorno Archive (editor), edition text + kritik, Munich. Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme, 1998, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, 2000, Rolf Tiedemann (editor), Polity, Cambridge, trans. Edmund Jephcott).



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Other works cited Clément, Bruno, 1994, L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett, Seuil, Paris. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 2002, Heidegger. La politique du poème, Galilée, Paris (Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 2007, University of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago, trans. Jeff Fort). Lukács, Georg, 1958, Wider der mißverstandenen Realismus, Claassen Verlag, Berlin (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 1963, Merlin, London, trans. John and Necke Mander). Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1886, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (editors), Band 12: Nachlaß 1885-1887, de Gruyter, Berlin 1999. Weller, Shane, 2005, A Taste for the Negative. Beckett and Nihilism, Legenda, Oxford. Idem, 2006, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Idem, 2008, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism. The Uncanniest of Guests, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.


“A Limbo purged of desire”: Body and Sexuality in Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women Lorenzo Orlandini

Looking at Beckett’s early fiction, one is struck by the fact that most of the protagonists of his short stories and novels seem to have a rather problematic relationship with their own bodily needs, in particular with sex, which they constantly try to expel from their lives. Interestingly, sexual desire is never completely effaced, but remains a strong and unsettling presence. In this study I will analyze the way sexuality is dealt with in Samuel Beckett’s earliest novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Although it is true that Beckett’s poetics obviously evolved through his half-century career, it is also the case that some of the elements that make up the foundation of his Weltanschauung as it appears in his early works will continue to constitute the core of his poetics for years to come. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Belacqua has a problematic relationship with sex. Throughout the novel, and later in More Pricks Than Kicks as well, he tries to build relationships that are exclusively spiritual, or intellectual rather, and he refuses any sort of physical contact with his partners. In fact, he has a hard time escaping the explicit avances of the Syra-Cusa and the Smeraldina-Rima, and is actually raped by the latter, who “violated him after tea” (p. 18). To understand Belacqua’s behaviour, it is useful to consider his attitude towards sexual desire in comparison to his view of desire in a broader sense. In a crucial passage, the narrator explains that Belacqua only finds brief moments of relief from the suffering of life in what he calls a “tunnel”, a “Limbo purged of desire”. That “tunnel”, a mental space in which the phenomenological world has no importance any more, is a transitory success Belacqua achieves in his ceaseless pursuit for a temporary relief from

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1. Live and multiple video image production of Vera Holtz as Mouth in Eu Não (Not I), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Brasilia, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 2004-2008. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos. 2. Versions of Breath called Respiración + e Respiración – (Breath + and Breath –), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, 2003. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos.


3. Alessandro Brandão in a version of Breath called Respiración + e Respiración – (Breath + and Breath –), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, 2003-2004. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos. 4. Alessandro Brandão in an outdoor version of Respiración + e Respiración – (Breath + and Breath –), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Rio de Janeiro, 2008. Courtesy of Marsha Gontarski.


5. Beckett’s text materialized on the walls for the staging of “A Piece of Monologue”, directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Teatro do Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, 2003-2004. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos.

6. Alessandro Brandão in one version of Respiración + e Respiración – (Breath + and Breath –), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Brasilia, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 2004-2008. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos.


7. Wendell Pierce (left), and J. Kyle Manzay on the set of Waiting for Godot, directed by Christopher McElroen, New York, June 2006. Courtesy of Mike Messer.

8. Wendell Pierce in Waiting for Godot, directed by Christopher McElroen, New York, June 2006. Courtesy of Mike Messer.


9. Carlo Cecchi (left) and Valerio Binasco, in Finale di partita (Endgame), directed by Carlo Cecchi, Teatro Stabile di Firenze, 1995. Courtesy of Massimo Agus.

10. Carlo Cecchi (left) and Valerio Binasco, Finale di partita, directed by Carlo Cecchi, Teatro Stabile di Firenze, 1995. Courtesy of Massimo Agus.


11. Valerio Binasco (left) and Carlo Cecchi, Finale di partita, directed by Carlo Cecchi, Teatro Stabile di Firenze, 1995. Courtesy of Massimo Agus.

12. Daniela Piperno (left), Arturo Cirillo and Carlo Cecchi, Finale di partita, directed by Carlo Cecchi, Teatro Stabile di Firenze, 1995. Courtesy of Massimo Agus.


13. Laura Adani with director Roger Blin rehearsing Giorni felici (Happy Days), Teatro Gobetti, Turin, 1965. Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Torino. 14. Laura Adani as Winnie in Giorni felici, directed by Roger Blin, Teatro Gobetti, Turin, 1965. Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Torino.


15. Laura Adani as Winnie in Giorni felici, directed by Roger Blin, Teatro Gobetti, Turin, 1965. Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Torino.

16. Remondi & Caporossi, Giorni felici, directed by Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, Teatro del Leopardo, Rome, 1970-1971. Courtesy of Remondi & Caporossi.


17. Remondi & Caporossi, Giorni felici, directed by Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, Teatro del Leopardo, Rome, 19701971. Courtesy of Remondi & Caporossi.

18. Remondi & Caporossi, Giorni felici, directed by Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, Teatro del Leopardo, Rome, 19701971. Courtesy of Remondi & Caporossi.


19. Marion D’Amburgo as Winnie in Giorni felici, directed by Giancarlo Cauteruccio, Teatro Studio, Florence, 1997. Courtesy of Tommaso Le Pera.

20. Marion D’Amburgo as Winnie in Giorni felici, directed by Giancarlo Cauteruccio, Teatro Studio, Florence, 1997. Courtesy of Tommaso Le Pera.


21. Giancarlo Cauteruccio as Willie in Giorni felici, directed by Giancarlo Cauteruccio, Teatro Studio, Florence, 1997. Courtesy of Tommaso Le Pera.

22. Giulia Lazzarini in Giorni felici, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, directed by Giorgio Strehler, 1982-2000. Courtesy of Luigi Ciminaghi/Piccolo Teatro di Milano.


23. Giulia Lazzarini in Giorni felici, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, directed by Giorgio Strehler, 19822000. Courtesy of Luigi Ciminaghi/Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

24. Giulia Lazzarini in Giorni felici, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, directed by Giorgio Strehler, 19822000. Courtesy of Luigi Ciminaghi/Piccolo Teatro di Milano.


25. Giulia Lazzarini in Giorni felici, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, directed by Giorgio Strehler, 1982-2000. Courtesy of Luigi Ciminaghi/Piccolo Teatro di Milano.


26. Antonio Borriello in L’ultimo nastro di Krapp (Krapp’s Last Tape), directed by Antonio Borriello, September 1982. Courtesy of Aliberti-Pomposo. 27. Antonio Borriello in L’ultimo nastro di Krapp, directed by Antonio Borriello, September 1982. Courtesy of Aliberti-Pomposo.


28. Arianna Chervino (left), Maria Paola Conato, Claudia Di Caterina, in Va e vieni (Come and Go), directed by Antonio Borriello, November 2006. Courtesy of Aliberti-Pomposo. 29. Raffaele Ausiello (left) and Antonio Borriello in Improvviso dell’Ohio (“Ohio Impromptu”), directed by Antonio Borriello, December 2006. Courtesy of Aliberti-Pomposo.


30. Drawings in ballpoint pen, taken by Bill Prosser from the Beckettian doodles on the Human Wishes manuscript (MS 3458) held by the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. Courtesy of Bill Prosser.


L. Orlandini. “A Limbo purged of desire”: Body and Sexuality

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the pain that comes with human existence. When he enters his much wanted Limbo, he manages for a brief moment to isolate himself in the suspension of suffering, in a state of complete indifference, and reconnect with the dimension of Nothingness that precedes birth and that follows death: He lay lapped in a beatitude of indolence that was smoother than oil and softer than a pumpkin, dead to the dark pangs of the sons of Adam, asking nothing of the insubordinate mind. He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the neverto-be-born, in a Limbo purged of desire. They moved gravely, men and women and children, neither sad nor joyful. (Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 44)

This Limbo is a mental space in delicate balance on the thin border between opposites, a neutral dimension, in which the lacerating conflict between extremes is suspended. Belacqua finds shelter from both the suffering of his waking hours and the pain of his sleep, “with its sweats and terrors” (p. 44), in a dimension populated by “grey angels” that dimly illuminate the darkness: “They were dark, and they gave a dawn light to the darker place where they moved. They were a silent rabble [...] and they cast a dark light” (p. 44). The mind is finally freed from its slavery to the body, it is “suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body”, but at the same time “the glare of understanding [is] switched off” in “a waking ultra-cerebral obscurity” (p. 44). For Belacqua this is reality, while life is false: “Torture by thought and trial by living, because it was fake thought and false living, stayed outside the tunnel. But in the umbra, the tunnel, when the mind went wombtomb, then it was real thought and real living, living thought” (p. 45). The attitude of Belacqua towards sex is to be seen from this perspective: he strives to find relief from the suffering of life by annihilating any activity and any desire, and therefore cannot yield to the desire par excellence, that is sexual passion. However, it is important to note that in Dream of Fair to Middling Women there remains a form of attraction and fascination for sex, which takes the shape of female characters who only know the realm of the senses and wish to lose themselves in it; these include the


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Smeraldina and the Syra-Cusa. The relationship between Belacqua and his women reflects the dialectic that characterizes the way sex is dealt with in the novel: the pressure of sexual drive and desire is constantly countered by an obdurate effort to resist desire itself, and annihilate it. Even more significantly, this passage about Belacqua’s tunnel reveals how Beckett’s approach to the theme of sexuality is reminiscent of two philosophers the author was very fond of. Belacqua’s momentary relief is found in a state that is not just a Limbo, but a “Limbo purged of desire”. This refusal of desire reflects the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer. The idea of Limbo, as it is set forth in Dream, is close to the Schopenhauerian concept of noluntas, that suppression of Will as a way towards deliverance from suffering. Beckett read the work of the German thinker since his youth, and Deirdre Bair describes some conversations he had with Walter Lowenfels on the subject between 1928 and 1929 (see Bair 1978, p. 79). In those years Beckett, tormented by the “impossibility of language and the repeated failure to communicate on any meaningful level”, was getting “to the Schopenhauerian conclusion that, since the only function of intellect is to assist man in achieving his will, the best role for himself would be the total avoidance of any form of participation in a world governed by will” (p. 79). Schopenhauer’s ideas, and those about human suffering in particular, remained for Beckett a subject of great interest throughout the years, and were also a peculiar source of consolation1. In his problematic relationship with sex, Belacqua seems to be moving along the lines of the Schopenhauerian concepts of noluntas and asceticism. Schopenhauer defines asceticism as “this intentional breaking of the will by the refusal of what is agreeable and the selection of what is disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen life of penance and self-chastisement for the continual mortification of the will” (Schopenhauer 1818 [1909, vol. 1, p. 506]). Those who 1 Indeed, in 1937 he fell sick with influenza and wrote to MacGreevy: “[I] found the only thing I could read was Schopenhauer. Everything else I tried only confirmed the feeling of sickness. It was very curious. Like suddenly a window opened on a fug. I always knew he was one of the ones that mattered most to me, and it is a pleasure more real than any pleasure for a long time to begin to understand now why it is so” (Samuel Beckett to Tom MacGreevy, 21st September 1937, quoted in Knowlson 1996, p. 268).



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find the way to asceticism find, he says, “a horror of the nature of which [their] own phenomenal existence is an expression, the will to live, the kernel and inner nature of that world which is recognised as full of misery” (pp. 490-491). That of sexuality is a crucial element in the pursuit of noluntas, because according to Schopenhauer the sex drive is the most radical expression of the will – in fact, the genitalia are the very objectification of the will to live – and as such it needs to be suppressed. Therefore, the starting point towards noluntas is sexual abstinence: [The ascetic person’s] body, healthy and strong, expresses through the genitals the sexual impulse; but he denies the will and gives the lie to the body; he desires no sensual gratification under any condition. Voluntary and complete chastity is the first step in asceticism or the denial of the will to live. It thereby denies the assertion of the will which extends beyond the individual life, and gives the assurance that with the life of this body, the will, whose manifestation it is, ceases. (Schopenhauer 1818 [1909, vol. 1, p. 491])

Belacqua’s attitude towards sexual abstinence is, again, revealing. He observes a sort of ‘selective’ chastity, in that he tries, often in vain, to avoid intercourse with the women with whom he has a relationship, while he is happy to visit the brothel: in his view, it is legitimate for him to have sex with prostitutes, because they are not his Beatrice. He makes a continuous effort to keep the realm of the flesh and that of the spirit separate, and tries to build relationships that are exclusively platonic. Dream of Fair to Middling Women (as well as More Pricks Than Kicks) is largely an account of the events that stem from the friction between his aspiration towards a courtly kind of love on one side, and the invasive sensuality of his women on the other. His point of view is well expressed in his lively discussion with the Mandarin. Belacqua believes that the relationships in which one tries to match sex and spiritual love are based on a “dirty confusion” “[b]etween love and the thalamus” (p. 100). A man cannot truly love a woman of whom he sees the corporal side: “Weib” said Belacqua “is a fat, flabby, pasty, kind of a word, all breasts and buttocks, bubbubbubbub, bbbacio, bbbocca, a hell of a fine word” he sneered “look at them”. [...] “And as soon” proceeded


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Belacqua “as you are aware of her as a Weib, you can throw your hat at it. I hate the liars” he said violently “that accept the confusion, faute de mieux, God help us, and I hate the stallions for whom there is no confusion.” (Dream, p. 100)

The acrid invective about the “dirty erotic manoeuvres” (p. 102) of those who believe “that you can love a woman and use her as a private convenience” (p. 101) is based on a strict distinction: “There is no such thing” said Belacqua wildly “as a simultaneity of incoherence, there is no such thing as love in a thalamus. There is no word for such a thing, there is no such abominable thing. The notion of an unqualified present – the mere ‘I am’ – is an ideal notion. That of an incoherent present – ‘I am this and that’ – altogether abominable. I admit Beatrice” he said kindly “and the brothel, Beatrice after the brothel or the brothel after Beatrice, but not Beatrice in the brothel, or rather, not Beatrice and me in bed in the brothel. Do you get that” cried Belacqua “you old dirt, do you? not Beatrice and me in bed in the brothel!” (Dream, p. 102)

This incompatibility between carnal love and spiritual love is further discussed in a digression in which the narrator intends to demonstrate the paradox according to which “Love demands narcissism” (p. 39). The passage is long and quite complex, but clarifies many aspects of Belacqua’s view of sex. Belacqua assumes that since the feelings he has for the Smeraldina impinge upon his “inner man” (p. 40), having sexual intercourse with other women does in no way harm the relationship or debase his love. So, he often visits the whorehouse, but he soon understands that something is not quite working: his “inner man”, indeed, does not remain outside of the brothel, but rather takes part in his adventures. In fact, once Belacqua is done having intercourse with a prostitute, his “inner man” is always invaded by “peace and radiance, the banquet of music” (p. 40). This is unacceptable, since it creates a horrible confusion. The rare miracle of fulfilment used to be a gift provided by the Smeraldina only, and it was identified exclusively with her, but now it becomes associated with another woman, or with a virtually infinite number of women: “this mira-



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cle and this magic, divorced from her and from thought of her, were on tap in the nearest red-lamp” (p. 41). What is unacceptable for Belacqua is not much the debasing of a magical and precious gift, but rather that “horrible confusion between the gift and the giver of the gift” (p. 42), the overlapping of different levels, so that “Beatrice lurked in every brothel” (p. 41). The gift is given only after “the garbage of the usual and the cabbage-stalks of sex” (p. 41), and is almost as if the ecstasy of the spirit retreated like the undertow on a shoreline, covering the garbage that generated it, and becoming one thing with it. The flower becomes the same as cabbage stalks: the gift of spiritual love is identified with sex and erased. Belacqua must at this point keep away from the brothel, because for him it is intolerable that the Smeraldina is refracted into an infinite number of reflections, just because he is slave to “this demented hydraulic [...] beyond control”, and has to “extract from the whore[s] that which was not whorish” (p. 41). The Smeraldina must remain invisible, or disappear, because one individual can have one and only one identity. Belacqua had sought “carnal frivolity” to save the “real spirit” from being demeaned into a slave to the senses, but it is flesh itself that begets the “real spirit” and this is the monstrosity he tries to escape. The solution Belacqua finds is to use the Smeraldina’s unreal aspect (i.e. her carnal side) in order to grasp her real aspect (i.e. her spiritual side), so that the gift and the giver are the same. To do so, he must use what the narrator calls “a fraudulent system of Platonic manualisation, chiroplatonism” (p. 43), that is masturbation. In this way, Belacqua can include the false, carnal side of the Smeraldina, but only in theory, because he is alone and has no intercourse with her. At the same time, he can obtain that peace that follows sexual satisfaction, and his “inner man” can receive the Smeraldina’s spirit. To use the narrator’s words, “he postulated the physical encounter and proved the spiritual intercourse” (p. 43). The narrator admits that these are “dreadful manoeuvres” (p. 43), but adds that they are inevitable, due to Belacqua’s young age and the nature of his feelings towards the Smeraldina. What Belacqua calls “love”, though, seems to come from a process of abstraction, a kind of intellectual rather than spiritual love. He tries to transform women that are extremely sensual into appropriate recipients of his courtly love, forcing them to fit in-


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to literary topoi. Many of the complications of his love life originate exactly from his conviction that flesh and spirit – or rather, mind – are incompatible. His behaviour is based on a distinction between body and mind which is reminiscent of a philosophical substratum of Cartesian descent, and in particular of Descartes’ ideas of res cogitans and res extensa. Beckett was very well read in Descartes. During the early 1930s he wrote Whoroscope, a poem about the French philosopher in which the figure of Descartes is a pretext to discuss the problematic relationship between the abstract concepts of science and philosophy and the individual human experience. This makes the poem into a reflection on the complex relationship between mind and body. In this idea one can already see the main core of the dialectic that will be central in Beckett’s work, this tension between the attempt to go beyond the bodily dimension and the necessity to come to terms with the body. Beckett brought the matter further into focus when he came across the work of Arnold Geulincx, the 17th century Flemish occasionalist philosopher, who was an epigone of Descartes and whose thought had, as Beckett admitted (Knowlson 1996, p. 207), a particular influence on the composition of Murphy. If one puts Belacqua’s behaviour against the Schopenhauerian and Cartesian concepts discussed so far, one understands how the element of sexuality fits into the larger picture of Beckett’s poetics. Sex is the most radical expression of the will, and must therefore be effaced. This generates a constant tension between desire and refusal, attraction and repulsion, between the separate planes of mind and body. It is only in the ephemeral neutral space of the “Limbo purged of desire” that for a brief moment that dialectic is temporarily resolved. This makes Belacqua a “trine man”: “At his simplest he was trine. Just think of that. A trine man! Centripetal, centrifugal and... not. Phoebus chasing Daphne, Narcissus flying from Echo and... neither” (Dream, p. 120). Sometimes Belacqua admits he confuses the two levels, fusing both Daphne and Echo in the Smeraldina, but this is his mistake, “a dirty confusion”. The path to follow is the third one, the “not”, the “neither”, that belongs in the tunnel, in the wombtomb: “The third being was a dark gulf, when the glare of the will and the hammerstrokes of the brain doomed outside to take flight from its quarry



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were expunged, the Limbo and the wombtomb alive with the unanxious spirits of quiet cerebration” (p. 121). Peace is to be found there, in that place/non-place where the conflicting opposites elide each other and one enters a state of complete stasis that cannot be disturbed by anything. In that dimension, even self awareness becomes blurred: “there was no conflict of flight and flow and Eros was as null as Anteros and Night had no daughters. He was bogged in indolence, without identity, impervious alike to its pull and goading” (p. 121). This fundamental dialectic is reflected in the relationships between Belacqua and his partners. Women are filled with a kind of aggressive sexuality they want to impose on him, while he is looking instead for an exclusively spiritual and intellectual love, and remains passive or runs away when women take the initiative. Many have noticed how the play on pairs of opposites is fundamental to many of Beckett’s works2. Dream of Fair to Middling Women provides significant examples of those dynamics at work. Both the Syra-Cusa and the Smeraldina are quite significant characters in that respect, in that they show an exceeding sex drive, a considerable appetite which is both erotic and gastronomic, an exclusive preoccupation with the material and corporeal aspects of life. Both the narrator and Belacqua repeatedly refer to a number of different women as slut, whore, pute, whorechen and puttanina. The Syra-Cusa is more strongly charged with sensuality, and her seductiveness offers a clear threat. Even before describing her, the narrator defines her as “mean”, and adds that a paragraph will be enough to portray her, after which “she can skip off and strangle a bath attendant in her garters” (p. 49). It is odd that she seeks the company of Belacqua, a weakling intellectual, while the first thing we are told about her is that “[t]he Great Devil had her, she stood in dire need of a heavyweight afternoon-man” (p. 50). She is a devilish, possessed woman, but above all “she was never even lassata, let alone satiata; very uterine” (p. 50). She is compared to a series of femmes fatales (Lucrezia Borgia, Clytemnestra, Semiramis) and pictured in an “endless treaclemoon” with a “chesty” Valmont, the 2 I am thinking of Mary Bryden’s observations on the Whoroscope notebook, and those of Edouard Morot-Sir and Alice and Kenneth Hamilton regarding Manichaeism and the use of certain dichotomies in Krapp’s Last Tape.


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libertine in Les liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Interestingly, Belacqua is defined as more similar to Octave de Malivert (the impotent and misanthropic protagonist of Stendhal’s Armance) rather than to Valmont. The Syra-Cusa’s unstoppable lasciviousness can be seen in her eyes, that are “strong and piercing”, “wanton [...], laskivious and lickerish, the brokers of her zeal, basilisk eyes” (p. 50). Her body is even more dangerous than her face: “from throat to toe she was lethal, pyrogenous” (p. 50). Historical femmes fatales are not enough to describe her at this point, and the narrator has to compare her to Scylla and the Sphinx. The rest of the description regards her erotic attributes: “[t]he fine round firm pap she had, the little mamelons [...] and the hips, the bony basin, [...] fessades, chiappate and verberations, the hips were a song and a very powerful battery” (p. 50). But she has nothing to offer beyond sensuality: she is one of the many women who are not intellectually good enough for Belacqua, one of those who do not understand “big words” or speculations about love: “hollow. Nothing behind it” (p. 50). Belacqua, while drunk, tries to bring the Syra-Cusa in a field that is not hers, that of the spirit and of the intellect, and gives her his favourite book as a courtly gift. The Syra-Cusa replies that she is not interested, she thanks him but makes it clear that she will not read it, “it was no good to her” (p. 51). She accepts it only to make Belacqua stop talking. The Smeraldina is a similar character to the Syra-Cusa. Yet, with her Belacqua will be even more stubborn in trying to make her fit into the literary stereotype of the angelic woman. The dimension to which the Smeraldina belongs is clear from the very start, when the reader is presented with her schoolmates: “The Dunkelbrau gals were very Evite and nudist and shocked even the Mödelbergers when they went in their Harlequin pantalettes, or just culotte and sweater and uncontrollable cloak, to the local Kino. All very callisthenic and cerebro-hygienic and promotive of great strength and beauty. In the summer they lay on the roof and bronzed their bottoms and impudenda” (p. 13). The Smeraldina herself is hyperbolically sensual, the feminine characters are exaggerated in her. She is full of an uncontainable sensuality that is reproduced through a sudden acceleration of the rhythm in syntax:



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Because her body was all wrong, the peacock’s claws. Yes, even at that early stage, definitely all wrong. Poppata, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mammose, slobbery-blubbery, bubbub-bubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe. Then, perched aloft on top of this porpoise prism, the loveliest little pale firm cameo of a birdface he ever clapped his blazing blue eyes on. By God but he often thought she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede. (Dream, p. 15)

The narrator comments that her body is “all wrong”. This for two reasons. Firstly, it is a completely sensual body, and that is not what Belacqua would want in his beloved, since he desires an exclusively spiritual love. Secondly, the corporeal and the spiritual plans, that should be separate, are united in the Smeraldina: a sensual body and an angelic face, a sort of philosophical transgression for Belacqua, an impossible conjunction between res extensa and res cogitans, in Cartesian terms. At one point, Belacqua quite explicitly tries to reduce the Smeraldina to an angelic woman. First, he sees her sitting and notes both her paleness and her carnality: “She was pale, pale as Plutus, and bowed towards the earth. She sat there, huddled on the bed, the legs broken at the knees, the bigness of thighs and belly assuaged by the droop of the trunk, her lap full of hands” (p. 23). At this point he tries to elide the sensual aspects of her figure, seeing her through the lens of literature. She is made into Sordello da Goito, with the quotation of Dante’s verses, “Posta sola soletta, like the leonine spirit of the troubadour of great renown, tutta a se [sic] romita” (p. 23); then she is made into the typical beatific, salvific figure of Stilnovistic kind: “So she had been, sad and still, without limbs or paps in a great stillness of body, that summer evening in the green isle when first she heaved his soul from its hinges; as quiet as a tree, column of quiet” (p. 23). In order for the Smeraldina to become a kind of Beatrice, she has to go through a process of progressive reduction and reification. First he erases, so to say, her limbs, then he compares her silence to that of a tree, and then to that of a column. He elevates her further, quoting Constantine3, and then completes the process of abstrac3

“Pinus puella quondam fuit. Alas fuit!” (p. 23).


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tion of her figure eliminating her body altogether, making her into something that has no shadow, and then into the shadow itself: “So he would always have her be, rapt, like the spirit of a troubadour, casting no shade, herself shade” (p. 23). Once this fantasy is complete, he is abruptly brought back to reality, to her exuberance, her full breasts, and rather than a column or a shadow she is to be compared with a horse, an animal that suggests vigour and sensuality: “Instead of which of course it was only a question of seconds before she would surge up at him, blithe and buxom and young and lusty, a lascivious petulant virgin, a generous mare neighing after a great horse, caterwauling after a great stallion, and amorously lay open the double-jug dugs” (pp. 23-24). The unbearable sensuality of the Smeraldina creates in him annoyance and torment throughout the novel. During the journey on the train at the beginning of Dream, for example, she sits on Belacqua’s lap and kisses him again and again, repeating that she wants him. Belacqua eludes her kisses, and once in Vienna he is proud of himself for having made it to the end of the trip without yielding to such erotic temptations. As always, the Smeraldina takes the initiative trying to seduce Belacqua, acting in a resolute if not brutal manner. Even when she takes off her hat, for example, she does so with a vigorous, aggressive gesture: “She snatched off the casque, she extirpated it, it sailed in a diagonal across the compartment” (p. 30). In the dynamics of the scene, Belacqua remains passive, and his virility appears undermined if the narrator defines his shoulder as “fairly manly” (p. 30). As the Smeraldina sits on his lap, “moaning, pianissimissima [sic]” (p. 30), Belacqua resists the temptation of the flesh by posing rigid rules – “‘Nicht küssen’ he said slyly ‘bevor der Zug hält’” (p. 30), and by distracting himself looking at the fairytale-like landscape outside the window, while the young woman “lay there inert, surely uncomfortable, on top of him, muttering her German lament: ‘Dich haben! Ihn haben! Dich haben! Ihn haben!’” (p. 30). However, Belacqua cannot always escape the Smeraldina’s invasive desires, and at one point “she raped him [...] she violated him after tea” (p. 18). Once again, the roles are clearly assigned: the woman, threatening and determined, “[t]he implacable, the insatiate, warmed up this time but her morning jerks to a sexy sudorem”, dangerously takes the initiative; Belacqua tries to escape



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her attack, reminds her that “it was his express intention, made clear in a hundred and one subtle and delicate ways, to keep the whole thing pewer and above-bawd” (p. 18). In order to find a way out of that inacceptable situation, as if in an effort to decontaminate himself after the physical contact, Belacqua draws on the absolute purity of art, in the form of cultured quotes and reading: disconcerted, he stays up until late: “alla fioca lucerna leggendo Meredith” (p. 18) suffering the pain of his own disillusion, just like Leopardi in Le ricordanze4. Towards the middle of the novel, the scene is evoked again, and Belacqua takes again a passive position. He yields to the insistent avances of that “petulant, exuberant, clitoridian puella” (p. 111), the Smeraldina, for the love of her: Next the stuprum and illicit defloration, the raptus, frankly, violentiæ, and the ignoble scuffling that we want the stomach to go back on; he, still scullion to hope, putting his best... er... foot forward, because he loved her, or thought so, and thought too that in that case the right thing to do and his bounden duty as a penny boyo and expedient and experienced and so on was to step through the ropes of the alcove with the powerful diva and there acquit himself to the best of his ability. (Dream, p. 114)

Not only does Belacqua remain passive when sexually provoked, but also he is presented by the narrator as indifferent to the temptations of the flesh. At one point, he is defined as “blind to the charms of the mighty steaks of the Smeraldina-Rima and angered by the Priapean whirlijiggery-pokery of the Syra-Cusa” (pp. 136-137). The reason he gives for that is basically impotence: “in both cases he was disarmed, he was really unable to rise to such superlative carnal occasions” (p. 137). Frequently, both in Dream and in More Pricks Than Kicks, he is described as incapable of the sex act, both for immaturity and impotence. In Dream, Belacqua is defined as “a juvenile man, scarcely pubic”, and as a “babylan” – the latter is a word that means “impotent” 4 “[E] spesso all’ore tarde, assiso / sul conscio letto, dolorosamente / alla fioca lucerna poetando, / lamentai co’ silenzi e con la notte / il fuggitivo spirto, ed a me stesso / in sul languir cantai funereo canto” (Giacomo Leopardi, Le ricordanze, vv. 113-118).


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and that Beckett had learned reading Stendhal, who uses it in a letter to describe Octave, the protagonist of his novel Armance (see Kroll 1993, pp. 50-52). The emphasis is put on the impossibility for Belacqua to satisfy the Syra-Cusa’s desires: “The best of the joke was she thought she had a lech on Belacqua, she gave him to understand as much. She was as impotently besotted on Belacqua babylan, fiasco incarnate, Limbese, as the moon on Endymion” (p. 50). Just like Endymion in his eternal sleep, Belacqua aspires to reach the sleep of the senses, in order to stay away from the real world, to isolate himself from others, depriving Selene/Syra-Cusa of any hope for intimacy. The Syra-Cusa does not realize that “it was patent and increasingly so, that he was more Octave of Malivert than Valmont and more of a Limbo barnacle than either, mollecone, as they say on the banks of the Mugnone, honing after the dark” (p. 50-51). Here the core of the matter regarding Belacqua’s supposed impotence is revealed. As I have already pointed out, if one had to compare him to two extremes, the impotent protagonist of Stendhal’s Armance or Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ libertine, he is certainly closer to the former. But most importantly, he finds his ideal condition in his Limbo, and his impotence, real or not, has in fact to do with his wanting to be “Limbese”. At one point, Belacqua even fantasizes about castration as an appealing option: he refers to the Medieval legend according to which the beaver, hunted for the supposedly aphrodisiac properties of its testicles, would bite its own genitals off to leave them to the hunter as a means for survival: “The beaver bites his off, he said, I know, that he may live”. That was, to Belacqua, “a very persuasive charter of Natural History” (p. 63). Again, one thinks of Schopenhauer and his idea of complete sexual abstinence as a necessary condition for spiritual elevation: the beaver has to renounce its own testicles to have its life spared; the ascetics deny their own sex drive in order to live in the real world, that of willlessness, as opposed to the fake phenomenological world. It is interesting to note that the different attitude Belacqua and his women have towards the body and desire is reflected not only in their approach to sex but also to food. The Smeraldina’s uncontainable sexual appetite, for example, has an equivalent in her appetite for food, which is equally strong. One scene that is particularly emblematic of this is the one in which the two lovers sit in an



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inn late at night. The young woman orders cookies and a hot chocolate for herself, and a soup to revitalize Belacqua in the cold night. He refuses to eat, and prefers to sit there and platonically contemplate his beloved: “‘My wonderful one, I don’t want soup, I don’t like soup [...] I want to look at you’. He burst into more tears. ‘What I want’ he whinged ‘is to look into your eyes, your beautiful eyes’” (p. 106). Instead, the Smeraldina scoffs her cookies with great appetite, trying in vain to behave and dissimulate her voracity: Now she was lashing into the cookies, she was bowed over her plate like a cat over milk, she was doing her best, the dear girl, not to be greedy. Every now and then she would peep up at him out of her feast of cream, just to make sure he was still there to kiss and be kissed when her hunger would be appeased by the Schokolade and cookies. She ate them genteelly with a fork, doing herself great violence in her determination not to seem greedy to him[.] (Dream, pp. 106-107)

Belacqua’s insistence on a platonic contemplation of the Smeraldina is even more significant if one considers the fact that right before that he has abandoned her in order to pay a quick visit to the brothel, in the company of her father, the Mandarin: an illustrative instance of the “selective” chastity discussed above. In the above-quoted discussion with the Mandarin about the impossibility of “love in the thalamus”, Belacqua explicitly associates eating with sex. When the Mandarin accuses him of “hating the flesh [...] by definition”, Belacqua replies, quite bitterly: “I hate nothing [...] It smells. I never suffered from pica” (p. 100). Belacqua identifies hunger and sexual appetite, and significantly does so in order to justify his refusal to yield to erotic desire. Giving in to the temptation of the flesh, and having sex with the woman he loves, would be unnatural and illogical. It would mean to try to feed the spirit with the flesh, and it would be just as useless and harmful as the act of those who, suffering from pica, ingest non-nutritive substances. Interestingly, the Mandarin objects that the flesh cannot be so contemptible if even God incarnated Himself (“how about our old friend the Incarnate Logos?”, p. 101). The Mandarin poses the problem in religious terms, contrasting his Catholic perspective with Belacqua’s Protestant view, and spitefully calls him



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“a penny maneen of a low-down low-church Protestant high-brow, cocking up your old testament snout at what you can’t have” (p. 100). The Mandarin’s accusation may be open to discussion, but it is interesting because it stresses the fact that Belacqua is both attracted and repulsed by the flesh. With this analysis of the treatment of sexuality in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, I have tried to offer a view of how this theme fits into the larger framework of Beckett’s poetics. The Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, with its manifold implications, represents one of the elements that will remain constant in Beckett’s oeuvre. Apart from the very explicitly Cartesian and Geulincxian novel Murphy, the problematic relationship between mind and body will be an important constant in all of Beckett’s work. Even more decisive will be the Schopenhauerian concept of noluntas that, explored in many different ways, will remain one of the vital aspects of Beckett’s poetics. From the paradoxical erotic (mis)adventures of More Pricks Than Kicks, First Love or “The Calmative”, to the bold aesthetic research of Imagination Dead Imagine and Worstward Ho, the dialectics between will and will-lessness will remain a central issue in Beckett’s writing. Dream of Fair to Middling Women constitutes one of the most interesting starting points for the discussion of this crucial aspect of Beckett’s Weltanschauung.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Samuel Beckett, 1992, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Arcade, New York 2006.

Criticism Bair, Deirdre, 1978, Samuel Beckett. A Biography, Jonathan Cape, London. Ben-Zvi, Linda (editor), 1990, Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, University of Chicago Press, Urbana.



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Bryden, Mary, 1993, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other, Macmillan, Basingstoke & London. Cohn, Ruby, 1960, “A Note on Beckett, Dante, and Geulincx”, in Comparative Literature, 12, 1 (Winter, 1960), pp. 93-94. Esslin, Martin, 1990, Patterns of Love and Rejection: Sex and Love in Beckett’s Universe, in Ben-Zvi, 1990, Women in Beckett cit., pp. 6167. Fraser, Graham, 1995, “The Pornographic Imagination in ‘All Strange Away’”, in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 41, 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1995), pp. 515-530. Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1993, The Beckett Studies Reader, University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Hamilton, Alice, and Hamilton, Kenneth, 1976, Condemned to Life: The World of Samuel Beckett, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned To Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Simon & Schuster, New York. Kroll, Jeri L., “Belacqua as Artist and Lover: ‘What a Misfortune’”, in Gontarski, 1993, The Beckett Studies Reader, cit., pp. 35-63. Morot-Sir, Edouard, Howard Harper, and Dougald McMillan (editors), 1976, Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, Symposia 5, University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, Chapel Hill.

Other works cited Geulincx, Arnold, 1669, Ethica [Han van Ruler, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson (editors), 2006, Ethics - with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, Brill, Leiden]. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1844, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., London 1909, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp).



Beckett’s Theatre: Text and Performances



A. Text



The Seated Figure on Beckett’s Stage Enoch Brater

1. The eclectic chair Within the vast and varied repertory of late twentieth-century European drama, Beckett’s work would surely be noticed for placing actors in odd, eccentric and otherwise uncompromising stage positions. And that is, as Footfalls states things, “indeed to put it mildly” (Footfalls, p. 243). Planted in urns or standing stock still on a cold plinth, dumped summarily into trash bins or buried up to the waist, then the neck, in a mound of unforgiving earth, that “old extinguisher” (Happy Days, p. 37), the figures in Beckett’s dramaturgy are more often than not subjected to a highly abbreviated form of physicality, one that demands the doing of more and more with less and less – even and especially so in those places where less did not seem possible before. In That Time, for example, the actor “plays” only a disembodied head; and in Not I, a reduction ad hominem, if not ad absurdum, the lead part is a mouth (as the author said, “just a moving mouth”), “rest of face in shadow” (Not I, p. 216). Little wonder that Jessica Tandy, who starred in the world premiere of Not I under Alan Schneider’s disciplined direction at Lincoln Center in New York in 1972, demurred, “I’d like to do a musical next” (in Brater 1987, p. 4). Beckett is of course much more than a mere provocateur, though his role as such should not be discounted in the making of such a heady theatrical mix. Yet here the pinpoint precision of his stagecraft has been designed to precede, if not entirely overwhelm, the seductive allure of metaphor and meaning. This playwright can surprise by revealing his formalist credentials, and most particularly his grounding in theatrical convention, precisely at those moments when the work seems most suspect and most


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alarmingly avant-garde. What results is a far cry from the sturdy machinery of an Ibsen or a Chekhov, but make no mistake: it is not quite Robert Wilson or Pina Bausch either. Beckett’s scenography looks both backward and forward at the same time, celebrating his theatrical inheritance in the very process of transforming it, a method that involves stripping his seemingly minimalist sets of every extraneous detail plus one1. Nowhere is this technique more evident than in the uncanny use Beckett makes of the seated figure on stage. The performance history here is huge. Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata is only one of many plays that revel in the dramatic potential of restricted and limited mobility, though in Beckett’s case this particular cross-reference can be illuminating. The image of the Old Man confined to a wheelchair had a profound effect on him when, on Suzanne Dumesnil’s urging, he saw Roger Blin’s 1949 production at the Gaîté Montparnasse on the left bank in Paris, an interpretation the playwright later said was true to both “the letter and the spirit” of the drama (Knowlson 1996, p. 348; Brater 2003, pp. 59-60); Endgame, 1957, was only eight years away. Tennessee Williams exploits the same theatrical trope in the highly atmospheric Suddenly Last Summer; though his female incarnation of the device, the gothic horror that is Mrs. Venable, appears on stage to inhabit the full force of a sexually-charged drame bourgeois. Beckett, like O’Neill before him, eschews any such holding of “the old family Kodak up to ill-nature” (O’Neill 1965, pp. 1-2) and will pursue the seated figure for very different purposes and effects. The Western theatrical canon gave him a great deal to choose from. Shakespeare’s seated figures, those that are scripted, are most often discovered in public surroundings: banquet scenes, throne rooms and senate chambers abound. The emphasis would appear to be on spectacle rather than intimacy. As early as Titus Andronicus two noble families who have not previously consumed what remains of one another are prepared to go at it again, seated as they are, fatally, at this last of all suppers. And in a much later drama the irony cuts deep: Macbeth reminds Banquo not to “fail” his

1 See Louis Menand, “The Aesthete”, in The New Yorker (June 4, 2007), pp. 92-94.


E. Brater. The Seated Figure on Beckett’s Stage

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feast. The famous ghost obliges. The large interior spaces where characters are likely to sit in King Lear, Hamlet or King Richard III are similarly ceremonial, just as they are when they turn legalistic in Othello or jury-rigged in The Merchant of Venice. Yet Shakespeare’s hyperactive heroes rarely sit for long, reluctant as they are to forfeit their empowering vertical positions. No director would allow his stunned Macbeth to remain calmly seated when a ghost materializes on stage so sensationally; nor could the actress playing Lady Macbeth – no “little chuck” she – resist the opportunity to assert her control over the scene by the simple act of rising, as though the text itself were telling her what to do. “Sit, worthy friends”, she urges Rosse and Lennox and the other nobles gathered at her table, “my lord is often thus” (Macbeth, III.iv.52). Later in the same scene a newly confident Macbeth attempts to reclaim his authority over his wife in much the same way: “I am a man again. Pray you sit still” (Macbeth, III.iv.107) (emphasis mine). All of this may be nothing, of course, compared to King Lear, where the Duke of Cornwall demands that a chair be brought on stage for the blinding of Gloucester. The captive Earl, his hands bound, is in most modern productions thrown backwards as Cornwall plugs his heels into the “vile jelly”. And then he does it again – because, according to Regan, “one eye will mock the other” – before this seated figure, as sightless as Milton’s Samson Agonistes at Gaza, will be returned to his upright position. Only then is Gloucester set free to “smell his way” to Dover. Kings, too, may willingly and literally abandon their thrones when the dramatic occasion encourages them to do so: think of Claudius delivering his highly polished speech before the assembled courtiers as the second scene begins in Hamlet, or Lear pointing to the redrawn map of the peaceful kingdom he plans to divide among three troubled sisters. And just what is Horatio supposed to do with Hamlet’s body at the end of the play when, for this protagonist at least, “the rest is silence”? Chairs, especially ornamental ones, come in handy. Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century for the quite different dimensions of a box set, Ibsen had the opportunity to explore the potential of the seated figure in an entirely new perspective, one that allowed for a far more focused display of psychological texturing. Shaw was quite right in his observation that modern


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drama began when Nora sat her husband down in the final act of A Doll’s House to discuss the nature of their marriage (Shaw 1891 [1957]). Ibsen is terrific at this sort of thing, efficiently arranging the scenic space to accommodate his characters’ need to communicate their innermost thoughts and emotions (it is his substitute for the no-no of soliloquy, realism’s bête noire). Nora sits on a love-seat with Mrs. Linde, her could-be confidante, first communicating too little, then in a subsequent scene perhaps revealing too much. The same tableau works for her encounter with the love-sick Dr. Rank; she flirts, then recoils from the clumsy declaration that follows. Movement constitutes meaning here, and how the furniture is used speaks volumes. Nora re-establishes the boundaries of their relationship when she turns away, abandons the love-seat and stands, rigid, elsewhere. The same blocking on the same sort of settee accumulates additional resonances when Ibsen further explores its dynamics in Hedda Gabler. Eilert Lovborg joins Hedda on the drawing-room sofa as she invites him to do so, on the pretense of sharing her honeymoon photographs. The tension is palpable; intimate glance and innermost gaze make the most of it. Much of what happens next lies in everything that is not said, except for Lovborg’s trenchant murmur, “...Hedda Gabler...”, married name very conspicuously omitted. The predatory Judge Brack, a Hedda Gabler in drag, insinuates his presence at her side, too, and on the same divan, at first appearing to have greater success in penetrating the shell she has so elaborately constructed around herself. “I’ll never jump out”, she confides, though she may be forced to do so, and soon, under the threat, albeit unstated, of blackmail (Ibsen 1890 [1992, p. 252]). “Life is not tragic”, Ibsen wrote in the notebook he kept about this play and its lead character’s motivation, “Life is absurd – And that is what I cannot bear” (in Goodman 1971, p. 43). Defeated, but also a little triumphant, this female figure removes herself from the set and the set-up, sits down at the piano and shoots herself. Brack, startled, thrown off-guard, even shocked into recognition, falls into an armchair, prostrated, and delivers the play’s refrain which also serves as its bitter curtain line: “But good God! People don’t do such things!” (Ibsen 1890 [1992, p. 304]). He’s right: people don’t, but dramatic characters do. Ibsen’s contemporary Chekhov seems to have been equally astute in recognizing the enormous range of possibility for the seated



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figure on stage. One could even argue that sitting is what Chekhov’s characters do best. Uncle Vanya opens on a quiet scene like so many others in this canon: Astrov sitting and chatting with the old Nurse, but really talking to himself. Vanya awakes from his nap and soon joins him in the garden, as do other members of the cast. They drink tea and in one case perhaps a drop of vodka. Yelena passes by with the Professor, she “too indolent to move”. Scenes from a country life – in four acts no less – indeed. Yet not every Chekhov set-to is quite so laid back. The provincial tranquility has been deceptive. Bedlam will erupt following a busy afternoon of revelatory tête-àtêtes. Serebryakov, the family members gathered all around him, announces a bizarre plan to sell the estate, invest in securities and purchase a small villa in Finland. Vanya, his chronic lassitude for once upstaged, runs into the house to look for a gun. It misfires. “I missed!” he cries out in dismay and despair (this is, among other things, hilarious), “I missed twice!”. The curtain falls on act three before he has a chance to sit back down. There’s so much going on in the first act of Three Sisters – preparations are in order for the big event marking Irina’s name day while Olga is transfixed in monologue, remembering and inventing – that we sometimes forget that the third sister, Masha, is sitting there in full view, reading, detached and bored. She whistles, then gets up to leave, but not before Vershinin, recently arrived from Moscow, makes a gallant entry into the Prozorov sitting room. “I’ll stay... for lunch”, she says, tellingly, joining “the lovesick major” at the table and foreshadowing everything that will take place between them as time in this drama runs its steady course. Another play, The Seagull, even borrows a famous theatrical device from Hamlet. Arkadina and Trigorin, not exactly “guilty creatures sitting at a play” (Hamlet, II.ii.585), take their assigned places as part of the makeshift audience for Konstantin’s literally dumb show, in which poor Nina is forced to play the underwritten lead. “There are no real people in your work”, she tells the crestfallen young author, who yearns so much to be the writer he will never be. As in Shakespeare, the scene, both the play and the play-within-the-play, devolves into chaos, with everyone soon on their feet. Chekhov’s drama ends, by contrast, on a far more somber note, and with a far greater density of dramatic overtones. With characters concentrated around a card table, a fateful game


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of lotto is in full progress. But so is something else. “Get Irina out of here somehow”, Dorn tells Trigorin, leading him downstage and away from his seat at the table. “Konstantin just shot himself”. Curtain. Beckett is by no means the only beneficiary of such a rich and all-inclusive theatrical vocabulary. Playwrights of his generation, as well as those before and after, have embraced the same legacy, retooling and refining it in a series of strategies for “making it new” and discovering their own voices. Caryl Churchill updates the banquet scene in her feminist drama, Top Girls; Edward Albee carefully choreographs Peter and Jerry on a fateful Central Park bench in The Zoo Story; Sam Shepard finds a surprising locus for a benched father-figure in Fool for Love; and Harold Pinter, in a cycle of remarkable plays that runs the gamut from The Hothouse and The Birthday Party to Old Times and the “icy and cold” No Man’s Land, invests his sedentary characters with bloodcurdling, almost demonic, power. “If you take the glass”, the seated Ruth taunts Lenny in The Homecoming, “I’ll take you” (Pinter 1964 [1967, p. 34]). Through a glass darkly indeed; passive aggression like this may never have been quite so dramatically potent before. Less successful, perhaps, is Arthur Miller’s attempt to use the image to explore the multidimensionality of paralysis, physical, psychological and political, in an ambitious work like Broken Glass. What distinguishes Beckett from his peers, however, is that his solution to the problem is not only practical from a theatrical point of view, but simultaneously analytical. It involves nothing less than a reconsideration of how this device might be used within the entire dramatic enterprise itself. 2. The protagonist, enthroned One of the things that makes Beckett an exceptional figure in the development of modern drama is his ability to think outside the box – and especially outside of the box set, the theater space he was familiar with and the one he was generally writing for. Beckett said he turned to the stage as an escape from the “awful prose” he was writing at the time. “I needed a habital space”, he reflected, “and I found it on the stage” (in Brater 2003, p. 55). But this



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was also a license to look elsewhere for the foundation and formulation of his image-making. His longtime interest in landscape painting and the representation of interior spaces on a canvas2, light emanating from a source outside the frame (as in Caravaggio and Vermeer), would have enormous repercussions as he quickly adapted such values to the demands of the stage. Yet it is perhaps in the portrait of the seated figure in its many variations, from Raphael to Rembrandt to Van Gogh, and to contemporary painters like Francis Bacon and Louis LeBrocquy (or Picasso for that matter), where Beckett finds a grammar and an idiom that he can truly call his own. This is less a question of the one-to-one correspondences of the sort we might be able to locate between a provincial Chekhov scene and the evocative landscapes of his good friend, the Russian painter Isaac Levitan (or between Munch, say, and the late Ibsen), as it is an appraisal of the specific ways in which form gives latitude to meaning. As early as those gold-leafed Madonnas in Giotto, Cimabue and Duccio, seated as they are so serenely on their earthly or celestial thrones, we already sense the profound mystery of inwardness and the dislocation caused by private thought – not yet “a voice dripping in [the head]” of the sort Beckett will pursue in Endgame, but certainly pointing us in that direction. And such magnificent Marias, flat and elongated though they may be (their chairs come off a whole lot better), are already equipped with distinct personalities. In the embrace of single-point perspective that follows, the characterological basis of such figures will be defined even further in a steady preoccupation with three-dimensionality, sometimes in the fullness of looking out, sometimes through the pensive mediation of searching even deeper within. The seated figure, painted, repainted and represented yet again, was well on its way toward becoming the sine qua non of that endless and elusive drama known as human consciousness. Such implications were not lost by the cautious playwright who became in the 1950s Samuel Beckett. “In a dressing gown, a stiff toque on his head, a large blood-stained handkerchief over his

2 For Beckett’s interest in the visual arts, especially painting, see Knowlson 1996 and Oppenheim 2000.


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face, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees, thick socks on his feet”, the blinded Hamm, “in an armchair on castors” (Endgame, p. 12) – a gender-bending Madonna on wheels – would seem to epitomize the playwright’s fascination with the seated figure on stage. Never neglecting “the little things in life”, Endgame presents the image in redacted form: a brief tableau punctuates the mime Clov performs in the drama’s opening moments, while it is still “covered with an old sheet”. But it is really in the famous earlier play, Waiting for Godot, where this stylization can be seen to be most firmly rooted. Pozzo even goes so far as to make a fetish of this recurring motif: But how am I to sit down now, without affectation, now that I have risen? Without appearing to – how shall I say – without appearing to falter. (Waiting for Godot, p. 28)

Pozzo, like his author, recognizes a good thing when he has it going, and a few minutes later, eyeing the stool, he seizes the opportunity to advance its richly performative momentum: Pozzo: I’d like very much to sit down, but I don’t quite know how to go about it. Estragon: Could I be of any help? Pozzo: If you asked me perhaps. Estragon: What? Pozzo: If you asked me to sit down. Estragon: Would that be a help? Pozzo: I fancy so. Estragon: Here we go. Be seated, Sir, I beg of you. Pozzo: No, no, I wouldn’t think of it! (Pause. Aside.) Ask me again. Estragon: Come come, take a seat, I beseech you, you’ll get pneumonia. Pozzo: You really think so? Estragon: Why it’s absolutely certain. Pozzo: No doubt you are right. (He sits down.) Done it again! (Pause.) Thank you, dear fellow. (Waiting for Godot, p. 36)

In Godot, however, the seated figure is assigned a much more primary role than this, and a far more vital one: nothing less than



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the opening image of the play itself. As the curtain rises (the playwright was certainly thinking of one), we first meet Estragon “sitting on a low mound” trying to take off his boot and failing to do so, followed by the quintessential Beckett line, “Nothing to be done”. Without calling undue attention to itself, the insistent figure of a man sitting by himself on a stone, Gogo’s initial situation in Waiting for Godot, has a long provenance in the Beckett repertory. As a semblance of isolation, cosmic and otherwise, it appears not only in the short story “The Calmative”, but also in the second movement of Stirrings Still. Beckett seems to have derived this image from the Middle High German poet he much admired, Walther von der Vogelweide, though this is the first time he uses it, albeit ironized, in a play: I sat upon a stone, Leg over leg was thrown, Upon my knee an elbow rested And in my open hand was nested My chin and half my cheek. My thoughts were dark and bleak: I wondered how a man should live, To this no answer could I give3.

“Ich saz uf eime steine”, Walther’s self-description in the first line of the medieval lyric, inspired the well-known painting of him in the Manesse manuscript; the poet is said to be buried in the cathedral at Würzburg, where Malone recalls having seen “Tiepolo’s ceiling”: “what I tourist I must have been, I even remember the diaeresis, if it is one” (Malone Dies, p. 62). Sitting – and waiting – is Hamm’s celebrated “speciality” in Endgame, though Beckett’s bums already exploit most of the latter’s potential in Godot. Thinking on his feet to pass the time that would have passed anyway, but “not so fast”, Vladimir in fact rarely sits down, but he will do so, and poignantly, on those few occasions when he tenderly comforts his partner. Poor Lucky, of 3 Walther von der Vogelweide, in Colvin 1938, p. 49. See also Knowlson 1996, pp. 147, 613.


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course, is never permitted the same luxury, even though “he carries like a pig” and falls down in an ever-maddening sequence of verticals and horizontals, culminating in a dance variously called “The Hard Stool” and, more significantly, “the Net”. Much comes together for Beckett, however, in the work that explores the dark underside of Godot; and it will be Endgame, as “dark as ink” (Beckett, in Brater 2003, p. 78), that finally allows him to write his own signature on the seated figure stranded on a lonely set: “Outside of here it’s death”. 3. The seats that (sometimes) rock Even as a student at Trinity, Beckett saw Belacqua, the Florentine lute maker who appears early in his fiction by way of Dante (and who reemerges in various guises throughout the prose writings), as the seated figure par excellence. In Purgatory his role is both tantalizing and suggestive. Chided for his negligence, he responds with the words Aristotle assigns to him, and which provide Beckett with the title of a short story published in 1932: Sedendo et quiescendo anima efficitur sapiens. The Poet’s riposte in The Divine Comedy could not be more stinging: “Certainly, if to be seated is wise, then no one can be wiser than you”. In his fiction Beckett transforms such habitual laziness and such exquisite verbal sparring – for that is what it is – into his own version of some dematerialized “Belacqua bliss” (Murphy, p. 111). But in theatre indolence has to be animated; there’s sitting, and then there’s sitting, squared. For the actor playing Hamm, planted so magisterially on his own throne, Endgame can be daunting in just how much it asks him to act, to do and to perform (see Raynor 1994; Garner 1994). Sloth does not enter into the equation. Clov, who has “work to do” and cannot sit down, is a whole lot more than stage manager, caretaker or mere retainer here; he is also the engineer for rapid transportation as he wheels his master from place to place around the circumscribed “world” of this interior set, placing him, one more time, smack “in the centre” – or thereabouts. Hamm, too, is called upon to play any number of roles: he is (or has been) at various times a storyteller, a master jokester, a consumer of sugarplums, a dispenser of biscuits and pap, a vengeful son, a drug user, a senti-



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mentalist, a tyrant, a dog lover and an enviable appreciator of stage terminology. He may also be a father. Endgame requires a remarkable series of gestures from this seated figure in order to develop a complete character and take full charge of the stage. Oddly enough, Krapp’s Last Tape, a work for only one player, presents a view of the seated figure that offers the audience both more and less. Krapp seems at first reluctant to play this part. Jangling keys, uncorking a bottle, or retrieving a dusty old dictionary, he shuffles back and forth into the darkness of the set before settling down into the dimness that reluctantly illuminates his small table. Preparatory rituals completed, the “play”, so to speak, is now ready to begin for this “wearish” figure, face mostly forward as he confronts that perilous point where time remembered becomes the consciousness of time remaining. The past, transformed on tape, alternately startles and plagues him with its steadfastness, and it is his misbegotten “vision” that even at this late date still tampers with it. “Play” as it will be defined on this platform therefore involves mostly playback, this one from the resources of memory stored in “box three... spool five”. Reaction constitutes the action here – so much so that the actor must carefully calibrate his every move to accommodate the dictates of Beckett’s multifaceted and highly literary script. Face and upper body are of crucial importance in Krapp’s Last Tape, for, as light fades downward, it obscures all that might otherwise be revealed. On tape the recorded voice of Krapp-at-39 says he will “feel” a black ball in his grip until his “dying day” (Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 60), a cue for the most nuanced of hand gestures. And when, after a pregnant pause, the voice from the same past comments on the “new light” above the desk as “a great improvement”, weary eyes grudgingly veer upward. As previously noted in the case of Macbeth, this text, too, goes a long way in stimulating the seated figure’s animation. But not every suggestion of movement in this drama will evoke a similarly kinetic response, however discreet it may be meant to be. Some can only be taken at face value: the image of the lovers together on a punt before ardor compels a much younger Krapp to lie “down across her”, his “face in her breasts” and his “hand on her” (pp. 60, 61, 63), or the more recent and quite different memory Krapp records in the present, that time he went to Vespers “once”, fell asleep and rolled off a pew.


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In a fourth major play, Happy Days, Beckett emerges once again as “a great leg-puller and an enemy of obviousness”.4 Winnie’s physical situation, planted as she is in the earth, the playwright’s update of some Mesolithic burial site from the Boyne Valley due north of Dublin (the scale more reminiscent of Loughcrew than Newgrange or Knowth), will be difficult to determine. It is hard to tell – “imagine” really, as Mouth says in Not I – “what position she is in”, “whether standing or seating or kneeling” (in production, the solution is best left to the techies). Seated behind the mound, and barely within our sightline, is the ever-patient Willie – “ever”, that is, until the play’s stunningly ambiguous conclusion. And it is the blocking for this enigmatic figure that will be of most interest to us here. In the first act Winnie “sits”, to speak strictly metaphorically “in the old style”, in the privileged position; for it is she – and she alone – who can twist her neck back in order to receive a better view of this less than demure seated male figure. As she shifts her observational position for greater visibility, we must take her word for it when she reports that he picks his nose, looks at pornographic postcards, or spreads sunscreen over the various parts of his body best left unmentioned. By contrast, we can just about see a snippet from the local newspaper when Willie turns a page to read from the obituaries: “His Grace and Most Reverend Father in God Dr. Carolus Hunter dead in a tub” (Happy Days, p. 14). Winnie reacts to this alarming news with an exclamatory “Charlie Hunter!” in what the script calls a “tone of fervent reminiscence”. Two short works first produced in 1981, “Rockaby” and “Ohio Impromptu”, as well as the earlier Come and Go (written in 1965), offer us compelling variations of the same motif. These are highly compressed dramas that start with a specific image, ignite a complex emotion, then open up a universe of feelings and ideas5. “When did we three last meet?”, Vi recites at the opening of Come and Go, inverting a line of inquiry we may well recall as having been previously assigned to one of the three “weird sisters” in Shakespeare’s 4 Dylan Thomas writing about Beckett in the New English Weekly (March 17, 1938). See Graver and Federman 1979, p. 46. 5 See Holland Cotter, “Sonnets in Marble”, in The New York Times (August 10, 1977), B25, 30.



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Macbeth. Vi sits in the center side by side with Flo and Ru as Beckett’s three female figures are stationed stage right, motionless and very erect, facing front, hands clasped in laps. Each gets up, turn and turn about, then returns to the place of origin, re-inscribing the initial static tableau, isolated and illuminated as it is by a single ingot of unforgiving light. “Does she not know?” / “Does she not realize?” is this text’s ominous take on the old vaudeville game of who’son-first; but in this case the consequences, unstated though everywhere implied, are likely to turn lethal. Closure is achieved when the seated figures are arranged somewhat differently, but only just so: resuming the same positions in which they were first discovered, they now have their hands clasped, resting on three laps to signal end of play. Flo delivers the curtain line, “I can feel the rings”, followed by the palpable silence that finally engulfs them all. “Rockaby” will be similarly attuned to the mysterious, even mystical quality of inwardness portraitists have often found so seductive in the features assigned to their own seated figures. Beckett recycles the rocking chair from his novel Murphy, but in the play he elevates its status to that of a character in its own right. A “prematurely old” female figure sits “subdued” in “Rockaby” on a chair that is “controlled mechanically”, without her assistance (“Rockaby”, pp. 273, 274). The playwright was clear about one thing: the Voice of memory, recorded, initiates the rock, not the other way around, and certainly not the woman dressed in black who yearns to hear so much “More”6. Beckett preserves the enigma as well as the integrity of this dramatic moment by insisting on “the absolute absence of the Absolute” (“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 22), relying instead on the image and the modesty of its scale to insinuate presence through a fusion of light, sound and movement rather than narration. His dialogue is poetic, not surprisingly so in this case, as it is there to complement and elevate the stage’s searing visual lyricism. Rarely has a seated figure on stage, “mother rocker” notwithstanding, been asked to carry the weight of so many competing discourses, one in which theater technology wears such a disarming human face. La Berceuse, the title Van Gogh gives to his well-known portrait of the seated Mme. Augustine Roulin (“Ber6

For the playwright’s comments on this piece, see Brater 1987, pp. 173-174.


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ceuse” is also the title Beckett uses for the French translation of his play), is therefore much more than a cross-reference or a convenient painterly analogue. French berceuse, moreover, means cradle, lullaby and rocking chair; but it also can refer, as it does in Van Gogh, to the seated figure herself. Beckett’s drama in performance will be, experientially, all of these things at once. The affective nature of such formal restraint achieves additional resonance in “Ohio Impromptu”, where the figures seated at a plain deal table are both singular and doubled, “As alike in appearance as possible” (“Ohio Impromptu”, p. 285). Reader and Listener are each other’s Other; and each is each other’s “Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!”7. Perilously, as in Dante, “Simile qui con simile è sepolto”, like with like is buried here8. But are we really seeing double, or merely some liminal fantasy of a replication hysteria, an uptake of the riveting stage dynamics called for by Goldoni in I due gemelli veneziani? Or are Beckett’s spellbinding seated figures only two aspects of one man for, inevitably, as you read you also in some sense profoundly listen? Stage left one figure intones the cherished lines from an old volume, monopolizing the soundscape and complicating its strangeness with the suggestion of narrative. Stage right the other “other” carefully weighs every word; his “knock” is opened wide when it signals an unexpectedly sudden interruption to the couple’s tacit interaction, only to magnify it further when L compels R to retrace his steps. Only the re-reading counts, as Nabokov said9. Then, when we least expect it, stage imagery is quietly redrawn as the seated figures achieve unprecedented momentum. The “story”, such as it is, being done, Reader very slowly and very deliberately closes the book on us: Knock. Silence. Five seconds. 7 Charles Baudelaire, 1857, “Au Lecteur”, Les Fleurs du Mal, in Maurice Z. Shroder (editor), 1964, Poètes français du dix-neuvième siècle, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), p. 92. 8 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, IX, 1, 130 (The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, 1932, J. M. Dent, London, trans. J. A. Carlyle, rev. by H. Oelsner, pp. 98-99). For a detailed study of the Dante-Beckett connection, see Caselli 2005. 9 See Michael Ondaatje, 2007, Divisadero, Knopf, New York, p. 136.



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Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise their heads and look at each other. Unblinking. Expressionless. Ten seconds. Fade out. (“Ohio Impromptu”, p. 288)

4. Sitting, waiting and recuperating While Beckett’s work for the mechanical media might be best discussed in another forum, it could be argued here that his depiction of the seated figure is offered much greater amplitude and precision in the plays written for television. Subject to sharp definition by the camera lens, the images delineated in complex pieces like “Eh Joe”, “Ghost Trio”, and “Nacht und Träume”, as in Beckett’s “comic and unreal” Film, come both scrupulously edited and prerecorded, like fleshly eruptions in an otherwise spectral world. But that is their limitation as well as their considerable strength, the fact that they are frozen, so to speak, in time and on digitalized tape. The illusion of spontaneity and of spontaneous gesture, so crucial to the impact of Beckett’s seated bodies in live performance, as when Reader and Listener synchronize their movement at the conclusion of “Ohio Impromptu”, or when the actress suddenly utters “Fuck life” seemingly out of nowhere just before she bows her head in “Rockaby”, empowers such figures to command the space they inhabit with emphasis and authority. What may be lost in exactitude is made up for in fineness; and as the light slowly fades on the set for each play, it provides the theatre audience with another kind of permanence: a fixed after-image that lasts forever. Beckett’s stage, as this discussion of his innovative use of the seated figure attempts to show, is always full of “high-class nuts to crack” (The Unnamable, p. 33). But that is not to say that the solutions he finds so appealing are without precedent. Beckett draws upon a rich vocabulary of theatrical convention, analyzes his inheritance, then takes it several steps forward. The hardest nut to crack for Beckett, as for Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov and so many other playwrights before him, will always be found, after all, in that delirious and probably delusional seeing-place he knows and we know as “theatre”. See better. Fail better. Followed in his case by that agonizing – but also inspirational – one word, “On”.


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What Beckett so impressively adds to this ongoing discussion of the seated figure on stage is how he seems to know from the start that in theater, as in life, you are sometimes a lot better off “on your arse than on your feet”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, 1929, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929, New Directions, New York 1972 (by Samuel Beckett et al.). Murphy, 1938, Grove Press, New York 1957. Waiting for Godot, 1954, Grove Press, New York. Malone Dies, 1956, Grove Press, New York. The Unnamable, 1958, Grove Press, New York. Endgame, 1958, Grove Press, New York. Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Grove Press, New York 1994, pp. 53-63. Happy Days, 1961, Grove Press, New York. Come and Go, 1967, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 191-197. “Eh Joe”, 1967, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 199-207. Film, 1967, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 161-174. “The Calmative”, 1967, in Stories and Texts for Nothing, 1967, Grove Press, New York, pp. 61-77. Stories and Texts for Nothing, 1967, Grove Press, New York. Not I, 1973, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 213-223. Footfalls, 1976, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 237-243. “Ghost Trio”, 1976, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 245-254. “Ohio Impromptu”, 1982, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 283-288. “Rockaby”, 1982, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 271-282.



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“Nacht und Träume”, 1984, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 303-306. The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Grove Press, New York 1994. Stirrings Still, 1989, John Calder, London.

Criticism Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York. Brater, Enoch, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, New York. Idem, 2003, The Essential Samuel Beckett, Thames & Hudson, London. Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Frenz, Horst (editor), 1965, American Playwrights on Drama, Hill and Wang, New York. Garner, Stanton B. Jr., 1994, Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman (editors), 1979, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, Routlege & Kegan Paul, London. Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Simon & Schuster, New York. O’Neill, Eugene, 1965, “Strindberg and Our Theatre,” in Frenz (editor), 1965, American Playwrights on Drama, cit. Oppenheim, Lois, 2000, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Raynor, Alice, 1994, To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Other works cited Alighieri, Dante, Inferno, in La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, a cura di Giorgio Petrocchi, Mondadori, Milano 1966-1967 (The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, 1932, J. M. Dent, London, trans. J. A. Carlyle, rev. by Hermann Oelsner). Idem, Purgatorio, in La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, cit. Chekhov, Anton, 1895, The Seagull (Chayka), in The Plays of Anton Chekhov, 1999, HarperCollins, New York, trans. Paul Schmidt. Idem, 1899, Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya), in The Plays of Anton Chekhov, cit.


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Idem, 1901, Three Sisters (Tri Sestri), in The Plays of Anton Chekhov, cit. Idem, 1999, The Plays of Anton Chekhov, HarperCollins, New York, trans. Paul Schmidt. Colvin, Ian G. (editor), 1938, “I Saw the World”: Sixty Poems from Walther von der Vogelweide, 1170-1228, Edward Arnold, London, trans. Ian G. Colvin. Goodman, Randolph, 1971, “Ibsen’s Notes”, in Idem (editor), From Script to Stage: Eight Modern Plays, Rinehart Press, San Francisco. Ibsen, Henrik, 1879, Doll’s House (Et Dukkehjem), in Ibsen: Four Major Plays, 1992, Signet, New York, trans. Rolf Fjeld. Idem, 1890, Hedda Gabler, in Ibsen cit. Idem, 1992, Ibsen: Four Major Plays, Signet, New York, trans. Rolf Fjeld. Pinter, Harold, 1964, The Homecoming, Grove Press, New York 1967. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet (Citations from Hamlet are from The Arden Shakespeare edition, Harold Jenkins editor, Methuen, London 1982). Idem, Macbeth (Citations from Macbeth are from The Arden Shakespeare edition, Kenneth Muir editor, Methuen, London 1959). Idem, King Lear (Citations from King Lear are from The Arden Shakespeare edition, R. A. Foakes editor, Methuen, London 2005). Shaw, George Bernard, 1891, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Hill and Wang, New York 1957. Vogelweide, Walter von der, in Colvin (editor), 1938, “I Saw the World” cit.


“The Past in Monochrome”: (In)voluntary Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape Chris Ackerley

There are moments in this frail world that is all temptation and academia when we feel, in the words of Watt (who was once a university man), that we are perhaps prostituting ourselves to some purpose (Watt, p. 143). One such moment for me, many moons ago, manifested itself in an examination answer on John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn (“Thou still unravished bride of quietness...”): the reason why, said my fair but middling student, the young maiden has retained her virginity is because she was kept in an urn. Would that Beckett’s “Proustian equation”, as presented in his early essay, Proust (p. 1), with its inviolable images of vases and urns as emblems of memory, repositories of the past, could be so simply resolved! The purpose of this paper is (a) to interrogate a point made about Beckett and memory in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004); (b) to consider briefly the paradox of new bottles and old wine, that is, Beckett’s impulse when using new technologies or experimental forms to decant into them familiar themes and images; and (c), with reference to Krapp’s Last Tape, to bring these matters together in such a way as to illuminate the persistence into this later work (later, that is, with respect to Proust, to which it is considerably indebted) of an earlier and largely rejected aesthetic, that of the “ideal real”, as Beckett called it in that early essay (p. 56). My conclusion will be to the effect that Krapp’s impasse, following a Proust-like experience of involuntary memory, leaves him not with the sense of having triumphed over time but as having encountered an aesthetic that (unlike Marcel’s) offers dubious consolation. Krapp’s tragedy (I argue) signals for Beckett a kind of closure to an aesthetic debate generated by the earlier essay, and in so doing acts as a point of


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reference in “Eh Joe” and That Time, which seek other modes of moving beyond the impasse, different ways of going “on”. Memory in the Cartesian paradigm offers an extension of the self into the past (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 361). To elaborate: Schopenhauer at the outset of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea) argues that the body, for the pure knowing subject, is an idea like any other idea, an object among objects; but at the same time it is immediately known, as will (Schopenhauer 1844 [1896, I, p. 129]). Knowledge of the body appears to consciousness in a special manner, with an immediate reality that other ideas do not possess (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, pp. 64-65). In the same way, it might be argued, the objects of memory possess this “special” relationship, a willed relationship mostly, with the perceiving self: just as the body represents an extension of the self into space, memory represents a like extension of that self into the past1. For the body, to continue the analogy with reference to two of Beckett’s obsessional images, that extension may take the metaphorical form of a stick or a stone; that is, a contiguous if less immediate relation, as when a stick (Molloy’s for example) extends the reach of the body, or by disjunction, as when the stick becomes a stone (or missile) and thereby effects a more ambiguous relationship to the space that it occupies or through which it moves (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 542). Voluntary memory, in terms of this analogy, entails a relationship between the present perceiving subject and the objects of its past, two “separate and immanent dynamisms” brought together for the nonce by means of a constructed “system of synchronisation” (Proust, p. 7), with the aid of what I have likened to a stick (or a crutch), but which Beckett, in the essay, terms Habit (pp. 7-8)2. Involuntary memory is more vivid but also more erratic, an “accidental and fugitive salvation” (p. 22) that is later called a “mystical experience” (p. 56), when by some “miracle of analogy” 1 In partial justification of this analogy, compare this comment from near the end of Le Temps retrouvé (Proust 1927, XV, p. 226): “Non seulement tout le monde sent que nous occupons une place dans le Temps, mais, cette place, le plus simple la mesure approximativement comme il mesurerait celle que nous occupons dans l’espace.” 2 A few pages later Beckett offers the image of a clothes-line with its load of “past dirty linen redeemed” (Proust, p. 17).


C. Ackerley. “The Past in Monochrome”

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a past sensation recurs to re-create the original experience, thereby confounding Habit and overcoming the gulf between past and present that is otherwise “interdit à nos sondes” (p. 18)3. This, Beckett insists, amounts to “a participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance” (p. 55). Such moments, Beckett insists, still following Proust, are “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” (p. 56)4. This Proustian inflection to the Cartesian paradigm of extension offers even at this early point of Beckett’s career something quite unlike the Aristotelian entelechy affirmed in Ulysses by Stephen Dedalus in the National Library: “A. E. I. O. U.” (Joyce 1922 [1993, p. 182]), the perceiving self as an identity constituted or defined by memory. In my analogy, one more applicable to the later Beckett, the self is rather a missile, a monad moving through time, disjunctive, with an uncertain relationship to a past that is not so much immediate (in the Schopenhaurean sense), as fugitive and volatile – but which it may, by accident, unexpectedly, on occasion, encounter. One last metaphor5: in Proust, Beckett characterises the relationship between the individual subject and its past in terms of “a constant process of decantation”, from the vessel containing “the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome”, to that containing “the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours” (Proust, pp. 4-5). Of interest here is, firstly, the description of the past as “multicoloured”, given the later insistence on it as monochromatic; and, secondly, the metaphor of the vessel. With respect to the first, there is no real contradiction, as Beckett, following Proust, is distinguishing in an axiomatic way between voluntary memory that has “no interest in the mysterious element of inattention that colours our most commonplace experiences” and thus “presents the past in monochrome” (p. 19), and involuntary memory that “conjures in all the relief and colour” the “essential significance” of the past (p. 21) 3 Beckett’s allusion to Baudelaire’s “Le Balcon” accentuates his own wider theme: “Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis, / Renaîtront-ils d’un gouffre interdit à nos sondes [...]?” 4 Proust 1927, XV, p. 15: “réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits”. 5 My erstwhile examiner, Marshall McLuhan, was wont to invoke Browning: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a metaphor?”


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from the vessel in which the past is contained, be that Marcel’s teacup, an ancient urn hoisted from the depths (p. 19), or “a vase filled with a certain perfume and a certain colour” (p. 55)6 that might be opened to flood the present with the air and perfume of the past, so that “we breathe the true air of Paradise”7, a paradise once lost but now regained, the effect being the “identification of immediate with past experience” and the “recurrence of past action or reaction in the present” (p. 55). The metaphor of the vessel as a repository of memory manifests itself variously in Beckett’s oeuvre. Molloy refers to “that sealed jar” to which he owes his being so well preserved (Molloy, p. 49); the Unnamable, in the French original, equally imagines himself as “entouré, dans un capharnaüm” (L’Innommable, p. 9). That novel, in either language, is dominated by the unforgettable image of the once “great traveller” (The Unnamable, p. 327) planted in his pot, outside the horsemeat restaurant (his partial identity as “Basil” hints at Keats’s poem, “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”, in which a pot, watered by Isabella’s tears, breaks open to reveal the head of her murdered lover). Nagg and Nell in Endgame are “bottled” in their bins; and the three participants in “Play” each speak from an urn, in which their bodies and their memories are trapped. The nameless narrator of How It Is seeks to hear “an ancient voice in me not mine” (How It Is, p. 7); the voice is that (in part) of memory, illheard and ill-recorded, for want of ebonite cylinders (forerunners of the long-playing record and magnetic tape), onto which the past might be transcribed (p. 107). The spools of Krapp’s Last Tape are like repositories of memory, but in the first instance those of voluntary memory, for they are numbered (“Box... thrree... spool... five”), entered into a ledger, and filed away, so that the appropriate recorded experience can be later accessed when required. Beckett had in Proust described the exercise of voluntary memory as “the application of a concordance to the Old Testament of the individual” (Proust, p. 19); in effect, this is what Krapp is trying to do. He is seeking the 6 Proust 1927, XV, p. 12: “dans mille vases clos dont chacun serait rempli de choses d’une couleur, d’une odeur, d’une temperature absolutement différentes”. 7 Proust 1927, XV, p. 12: “les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”.



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spool labelled: “Mother at rest at last” (Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 57); and although he has forgotten the “Black ball” and the “dark nurse”, to say nothing of the “memorable equinox”8, and does not react initially to the “Farewell to – [he turns the page] – love”, he is acting closely in accordance with precepts of voluntary memory as outlined in the earlier essay: the “uniform memory of intelligence”, that can be relied on “to reproduce for our gratified inspection those impressions of the past that were consciously and intelligently formed” (Proust, p. 19). Beckett also likens this activity to that of turning the leaves of an album of photographs (black and white, since colour photography was then not an option), “a blurred and uniform projection once removed of our anxiety and opportunism”, a plagiarism of the self (p. 20). This is the past in monochrome. Inevitably, then, Krapp’s “Mother at rest” memories are, with two significant exceptions, in black and white. He recalls living at that time “on and off with Bianca in Kedar Street” (Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 58); the word means in Hebrew “dark”, and to “dwell in the tents of Kedar” (Psalms 120, 5) is to be cut off from the worship of the true God, one of several such intimations of Krapp’s spiritual apostasy. Other monochromatic images include: the black plumage of the male vidua-bird (Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 59); the young beauty, “all white and starch, incomparable bosom, with a big black hooded perambulator, most funereal thing” (p. 59); and the “little white dog” to which he gave the “small, old, black, hard, solid rubber ball” (p. 60). Krapp is dressed in a rusty black sleeveless waistcoat and dirty white boots (p. 55); and the physical setting for the entire play consists of a small circle of “strong white light” within an otherwise dark stage. James Knowlson notes that in Beckett’s Schiller production other light and dark elements were added: a “cagibi” or cubby-hole at the back, lit by white light but separated from the stage by a black curtain; 8 I suspect an esoteric private jest here, one that may mock Krapp’s Manichean-like impulse towards sexual abstinence: compare Watt’s “biannual equinoctial nocturnal emission in vacuo” (Watt, p. 232); that is, Watt masturbates twice-yearly, on the nights of the equinox. More simply, one might just agree with James Knowlson that the equinox (when night and day are equal) should be seen “in terms of the light and dark emblems and the theme of separation and mingling” (Knowlson 1992, p. 20).


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the central light with a light-coloured shade; a white envelope on a dark table; a black ledger but a dictionary covered in lightcoloured leather (Knowlson 1992, p. XXII). The metaphysical setting, as Knowlson had earlier shown, intimates “a Gnostic, even a specifically Manichean tradition” (Knowlson and Pilling 1980, pp. 86-87). He mentions such strictures as: abstention from sexual intercourse and marriage; the rift between God and the world, the spirit and the flesh; and the vision of the universe, world and man, as divided between two opposing principles, the forces of darkness threatening to engulf the forces of light (to these can be added, not entirely facetiously, the eating of bananas as an impulse towards not simply vegetarianism but “upwardly-striving” plants, as recommended by some early Manicheans)9. As Knowlson argues (Knowlson 1992, p. 88), Krapp’s experience of the “vision” is given in fragmentary form only, but enough is played back to suggest his thirty-nine year old’s belief that the darkness and the light have been reconciled. This is a vision that the older Krapp, tragically, cannot sustain, for at the age of sixty-nine he will be reminded of an experience in his past that he had forgotten: something “at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal” (Proust, p. 56); in short, an unattended and not altogether welcome experience of involuntary memory. This experience, the unexpected memory of the girl on the punt (for Krapp is not looking for this on the tape, but rather hits on it by accident), is anticipated, even orchestrated psychologically in a deliberately Joycean way, by means of two exceptions to the otherwise dominant black and white images. These consist of the recollection, on the tape, by the middle-aged Krapp, first, of his yet James McCabe in Saint Augustine and His Age, a book from which Beckett took some philosophical notes, characterises the Manichean sense of life as “a stern process of redemption, an eternal struggle of the elements of light to break free from the kingdom of darkness, and return to their source” (McCabe 1902, pp. 51-52). He later notes that Augustine condemned their wicked practices concerning the “elements of light” imprisoned in semine animalis, and released when eaten by the elect (p. 409). Bend it like Beckett, perhaps: yet another curious gloss (provocative, rather than entirely serious) on the Manichean banana. 9



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younger self and “A girl in a shabby green coat” (Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 58); then the eyes of the young beauty, “Like ... [hesitates] ... chrysolite!” (p. 60). The first detail is not explained, though privileged auditors may hear the hint of Beckett’s first love, Peggy Sinclair, otherwise the Smeraldina (or “little emerald”); Krapp, however, chooses not to invoke that image any further (though he broods). The second is both enigmatic (the “young beauty” is an unknown) yet explicable (the allusion to Othello V.ii.146, “one entire and perfect chrysolite”, likens her to Desdemona, for whom the tragic hero would have forsaken the world of light). Krapp’s hesitation may suggest that the memory, like the simile, is somewhat forced, and to that extent voluntary; but the touch of green in “chrysolite” relates it to the earlier suppressed image of the shabby green coat (perhaps, too, the little emerald), and may intimate (beneath the threshold of conscious awareness) a flickering of involuntary recollection that violates the monochromatic pattern (the phenomena of past hours, perhaps). Both images cause Krapp to switch off the machine and brood; the suggestion is that he has been “touched” by some form of involuntary memory, though he elects finally not to share those experiences with the audience nor record them on the present tape. More importantly, these tiny coloured flickers (for they may be no more than that) unwittingly prepare him for the climactic scene with the girl in the punt – a memory, I suggest, that differs from the others (his mother’s death, the nurse and dog, even “the vision at last”) by being truly involuntary, the past returning in a manner that represents, tragically, not a Proustian triumph of the past regained, but the deep and painful epiphany of a lost love that might have redeemed the now tangible and lasting sterility of his present existence10. When I argued thus at the 2008 Rome Symposium, Lorenzo Orlandini commented perceptively that Krapp’s experience differs from that of Proust’s Marcel, or Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in the “Lestrygonians” chapter of Ulysses when he is “assailed” by the memory of sharing his seed-cake (see, fortuitously, the previous footnote) with Molly (moments that are re-lived rather than simply remembered), because Krapp’s experience is more of the mind than of the senses, and so lacks a truly sensual dimension to make it as immediate as the original experience. Dirk Van Hulle, responding to this, suggested wittily but unhelpfully that my case would be stronger if I could prove that bananas (like 10


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Knowlson describes Krapp as one who has followed the Manichean tradition of recommending abstinence from sexual intercourse and who sees woman as appealing to the sensual side of his nature, distracting him from what he should be seeking to achieve in his work (Knowlson 1992, p. XXIII), a man torn between conflicting forces and whose life has been ruined by this conflict (p. XXV). Having argued that the incident that Krapp returns to so compulsively is not the “vision” but the scene with the girl in the punt (p. XX), Knowlson’s analysis of that latter scene equating woman with darkness is stunning, particularly with reference to the eyes that open only after Krapp creates a “zone of shade” (p. XXIV). However, Knowlson implies in the Foreword then states in the Textual Notes (p. 20) that Krapp is “explicitly searching” for the indexed “Farewell to love” entry; with this I do not agree, because the dramatic power of involuntary memory seems (to me) crucial to the tragic effect. Although Krapp returns to the scene several times, voluntarily, his final realization (I would argue) has been generated by the uncanny power of involuntary memory, leaving him with the tragic awareness (in the oldfashioned Aristotelian and cathartic sense of the word “tragic”) that now, more than ever, his best years are gone. In this reading, then, Krapp’s painful and ironic solution to the Proustian equation is accidental, less a fugitive salvation than an exemplary illustration of Beckett’s contention that involuntary memory is “an unruly magician” that will not be importuned: “It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle” (Proust, pp. 20-21). Even so, it is curious that Beckett in 1958, working with a new technology (the tape recorder) and an unusual metaphysic (the Gnostic and Manichean elements of the play), should have reverted so deliberately to an essay written more than twenty-five years earlier, to an aesthetic (the “ideal real”) that he had largely abandoned in that interim, and to a mode of charactermadeleines and seed-cake) had this evocative power; thank you, Dirk, but sometimes a banana is just a banana (see, again, the previous footnote). In a private note to me (23 June 2008), Lorenzo agreed that the evocation of passionate eyes, physical intimacy and the natural setting is sufficiently sensual (I would add to this the scratch on the girl’s thigh and the gooseberries plucked from Effi Briest) to generate the “immediate, total and delicious deflagration” (Proust, p. 20).



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ization (the Joycean orchestration of the mind and the aesthetics of the epiphany) that he had also rejected in his on-going denial of the stability of the “self” or character. There are two ways to look at this apparent anomaly: firstly, to show that Beckett’s habit of returning (like a dog to its vomit?) to his previous writings is by no means confined to Krapp’s Last Tape; secondly, to argue that the apparently discredited aesthetic (the “ideal real”) was more persistent in Beckett’s writings than might first appear to be the case, and that its reappearance addresses a wider aesthetic argument. The first argument is best made by reference to En attendant Godot, which was written in 1948-1949, Beckett told Colin Duckworth, as a “relaxation”, and to get away from the “awful prose” that he was writing at the time (that is, Molloy and Malone meurt, though not yet L’Innommable, the intensity of which he could not yet face) (Duckworth 1966, p. XLV). The paradox thus arises of the most influential and radical play of the twentieth century having been written as an interlude between two weighty prose works, as curiously conservative with respect to the issues that Beckett was then exploring in the fiction (notably, the voice), and as relying upon recycled themes and images (the two thieves, salvation, the pseudo-couple) that would be of limited use in the writing to come. To be sure, it is appropriate to work the other way round: to see in the Three Novels thematic elements (notably, the use of soliloquy) that anticipate the more radical profile of the drama, to trace the links between Waiting for Godot and Mercier and Camier, and to affirm uncertain memory, voluntary or otherwise, as a key theme in both works; but the point still holds that many of the central issues of Waiting for Godot are elements from the past fiction, and that this play, unlike the Endgame that followed, was written with relative ease and without the complex drafts and comprehensive agonising that attended the later play. A similar pattern appears with respect to many of the works after Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall (1956), revisits his Foxrock childhood and the world of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks (notably, “A Wet Night”) for its tone and tenor; and “Embers”, his second play for radio (1957), although more venturesome in demarking the littoral ambiguities of hallucination and reality, relies nevertheless on the Jungian paradoxes of multiple voices and personalities that


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were a legacy of Beckett’s psychoanalytical reading of the 1930s, and which had been worked through in detail in Murphy, Watt and the Three Novels. Beckett’s one realised venture into cinema, the eponymous Film (1964), draws heavily on the devices (rocking chair and monad) of Murphy, as well as on the Berkeleyan themes of percipi central to that novel and which, in turn, had found expression in Waiting for Godot. And Krapp’s Last Tape, which reworks (as I have argued) the 1931 essay, Proust, becomes in turn the template for “Words and Music” (1961; Croak’s epiphany and the memory of the love that was lost), “Eh Joe” (1965; the girl in the green coat and the agony of love forsaken), and That Time (1976; the narrator’s three voices, A, B and C, as exfoliations of Krapp’s three selves). To acknowledge such influences and continuities is not in the least to belittle the originality of the indebted works, but rather to make the point that their dramatic power is, to a greater extent than usually recognised in Beckett’s writing, the consequence of an artistic imagination that continued over the years to explore and to interrogate a handful of obsessional images and persistent themes. The “ideal real” as implicit in the advent of involuntary memory is one such persistent theme. As Stan Gontarski argues: “For a time Beckett accepted this sense of involuntary memory, or pure recollection, as epiphantic” (Gontarski 2008, p. 101), even if, at the time of writing Proust, he was attracted to it as much by the agency of the Bergsonian elements of À la recherche as by Proust himself11. That aesthetic represented a solution to the Proustian equation, however improbable its formulation might later seem: a “mystical experience” that communicates an “extratemporal essence”, with the effect that “the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being” (Proust, p. 56). Such a sentiment may seem the antithesis to everything that the later Beckett represents, but despite the verbal sparkles and precious margaritas of Proust and its value as a repository of ideas and motifs that would be of lasting utility for Beckett (and Beckett scholars) for years to come,

11 Gontarski 2008, p. 96: “The Bergson connection to his Proust is not often acknowledged by Beckett and so has remained underdeveloped by his critics”.



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there is no controlling or pervasive irony that permits the reader to distinguish Beckett’s aesthetic from that of Proust himself12. As an aesthetic this “solution” (to mix the metaphor) soon dissolved. Beckett found his own ironic voice in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, from the calculated affront to Proust (the hawthorn so dear to Marcel) on the first page to the claim (Dream, p. 132) that the book’s only unity is involuntary. More Pricks Than Kicks traces a broad trajectory away from the epiphantic structure of “Dante and the Lobster” through the satire of different literary genres to a parody of “The Dead” (that ultimate epiphany) in “A Wet Night”. Beckett never lost his respect for Joyce’s artistic integrity (the family was another matter, particularly after the Lucia fiasco), but his own aesthetic (of failure, of impotence) defined itself increasingly against that of Joyce. And the viability of the “ideal real” as a serious aesthetic position crumbled completely before the nominalist onslaught of Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, which Beckett first read in 193813 and which persuaded him for all time that words were “inane”, verba inania, never “obviating the void” (Ackerley and Gontarski, 2004, p. 359). Even so... fragments of that crumbled aesthetic (some unsprinkled with irony) appear in various works over the next thirty years, by no means redeeming the desolate waste time stretching before and after, but constituting nevertheless not quite nothing. These include: the moment in Murphy that Neary’s imagination, making its journey westward, conjures: “Clonmachnois on the slab, the castle of the O’Melaghlins, meadow, esker, thatch on 12 I maintain this even though “Assumption”, written a little earlier (1929), offers a portrait of the artist as a very very deep young man, which, in my reading, hovers uncertainly between affirmation and an ironic critique. The influence of Joyce (rather than Gilbert and Sullivan) partly explains this in terms of a young writer’s attraction to an aesthetic (the Joycean epiphany, the Proustian moment) endorsed by the two contemporary writers he most admired; my sense is that Beckett had not yet gained the necessary detachment that within a few years would let him critique this position more ruthlessly. 13 Those who suggest otherwise must explain away not only Beckett’s limited competence in German until the Reisefieber of 1936 (for the Beiträge was not available in translation), but also the lack of an ironic perspective in some of the earlier work, and especially in Proust. This issue has been extensively discussed in various essays by first John Pilling and then Matthew Feldman, who have demolished the widely-accepted argument for Beckett’s earlier reading of Mauthner.


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white, something red, the wide bright water, Connaught” (Murphy, p. 267); the experience in the “Rue de Vaugirard” where the poet is caught by the moment and exposed like a photographic plate to the play of light and shadow; moments in Endgame (1957) when Nell stares (a moment of involuntary memory) right down to the bottom of Lake Como: “So white. So clean” (Beckett 1957 [1958b, p. 21]); and various texts from “Enueg II” (1931) to “Words and Music” (1961) and “Old Earth” (1974), where the irrecoverable clouds of the sky (or ashes, reflecting starlight on earth again) turn suddenly to faces. The ultimate critique of such moments is in Watt, when one sunlit moment, on a Tuesday, in the yard, “Something slipped” (Watt, p. 42). Arsene felt his “personal system” distended, so that “the distinction between what was inside it and what was outside it was not at all easy to draw” (p. 43). He does not understand in what the change consists, nor what was changed, nor how (p. 44); and though in his opinion it was not an illusion, he is “buggered” if he can understand how it could have been anything else (p. 45). Other than this conclusion, his is a classic description of mystical experience, the equal of anything in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and as compelling as the opening movement of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton; but what distinguishes it from like moments in Proust, Joyce, James or Eliot is the refusal to validate it: the experience is real, but Beckett wilfully withholds any endorsement of its transcendental significance. Like Arsene, Krapp undergoes this kind of experience, for something slips (his finger on the tape recorder, perhaps) and he finds himself confronted with the ideal reality of an experience that, because it is so immediate, cannot be looked at or listened to dispassionately, or vicariously, then neatly put away. His experience of voluntary meaning is insistent but destructive, revealing once and for all the futility of his attempts to dispel the darkness; he is at the end as he was in the beginning, a “wearish old man” (Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 55) who has failed in his endeavour (finally more quixotic than Proustian) to recover the past, ironically because the “success” of that recovery has revealed to him his failure. The play is, paradoxically, a triumph of an aesthetic of failure: a masterpiece that reworks the no longer viable aesthetic of the ideal real and the outmoded structural machinery of the



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Joycean epiphany to reach the end of those well-sealed roads. Beckett has created a powerful dramatic experience (for both character and audience) of the pathos of failure, but by working deliberately with obsolete tools to reveal their limits. Krapp’s experience, then, represents a final failure of the Proustian aesthetic, in much the way that How It Is (written only a little later, and equally endorsing an aesthetic of failure) marks the end of the attempt, from The Unnamable through the Texts for Nothing, to break through the aporetic impasse (“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”). There might be the odd attempt (“Words and Music”, “Old Earth”) to look back at involuntary memory with a nostalgia attributable to the only true paradise, the paradise that has been lost; but Beckett’s return in 1958 to the aesthetic of 1931 is a kind of “goodbye to all that”, a last (and impressive) valediction of the epiphany as a viable aesthetic mode. Yet in that ending is the possibility of a new beginning, in that synthesis a new thesis, as exemplified by the way that several works thereafter offer a different emphasis, less that of the mind revisiting its past than as reconstituting it, turning the experience of perception and memory, voluntary or otherwise, into an act of creation. Memory is, in this context, “a joust between involuntary and creative recollection” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 361). Examples are many: “The Image”, later part of How It Is, depicting the mind wrestling with circumstance until reaching conclusion: “it’s over its done I’ve had the image” (How It Is, p. 31); Company, with the narrator “lying” in the dark, and “devising” his past not as autobiography but as re-creation; or “La Falaise”, where the observing eye views the cliff in a process that blends perception and imagination, until the rocky “face” assumes the proportions of a skull, before vanishing into the whiteness of nonperception (see Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 191). “Eh Joe” (1965) and That Time (1976), as I have intimated above, use Krapp’s Last Tape as a template for a new creation. Like Krapp, Joe is an incomplete creative personality, but unlike Krapp he is assailed by a Voice that is neither external, nor memory, nor the subconscious (p. 164). The tale that unfolds is to some extent an imaginative construct, a fiction created by Joe. That is, instead of surrendering himself to the past, as Krapp has done, Joe when assailed by the involuntary memory of the girl in green (whose eyes


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opened for him as did those of the girl on the punt for Krapp) is not defeated by the whispered words, but rather uses them as a creative fountainhead, finally (as his smile suggests) not only stifling them but working them to his will. A similar process occurs in That Time, where an obvious debt to Krapp’s Last Tape is reflected in the tripartite narrative voices that invoke the past in a series of memories, both voluntary and involuntary, finally arranging those memories in various patterns of {ACB}, until a curious order is obtained, at which point there is a closing smile, to suggest, as in “The Image”, “La Falaise” and “Eh Joe” that the creative act has been completed, “a consolation in art for ruin in time and the folly of existence” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 570). This is a consolation that Krapp is unable to seek, let alone to find; but his tragic and pathetic experience of involuntary memory, his inadvertent farewell to love, marks a significant turn in Beckett’s own aesthetic from the evocation to the re-creation of the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, Grove Press, New York, n.d. [1957]. Murphy, 1938, Grove Press, New York 1958. L’Innommable, 1953, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Watt, 1953, Grove Press, New York 1959. Molloy, 1955, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, Grove Press, New York 1959, pp. 7-176. The Unnamable, 1958, in Three Novels cit., pp. 289-414. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), Grove Press, New York 1959. Endgame, 1958, in Endgame, A Play in One Act, followed by Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player, Grove Press, New York, pp. 1-84. Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Grove Press, New York, pp. 53-63. How It Is, 1964, Grove Press, New York. “Eh Joe”, 1966, in The Collected Shorter Plays, cit., pp. 199-207. That Time, 1976, in The Collected Shorter Plays, cit., pp. 225-235. The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Grove Press, New York.



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Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 1992, Eoin O’Brien, and Edith Fournier (editors), Black Cat Press, Dublin.

Criticism Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York. Ben-Zvi, Linda, and Angela Moorjani (editors), 2008, Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Duckworth, Colin (editor), 1966, Samuel Beckett: En attendant Godot: Pièce en deux actes, George G. Harrap & Co., London 1970. Gontarski, Stanley E., 2008, “Recovering Beckett’s Bergsonism”, in Ben-Zvi and Moorjani, 2008, Beckett at 100 cit., pp. 93-106. Knowlson, James (editor), 1992, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Volume III: ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, Faber and Faber, London. Knowlson, James, and John Pilling, 1980, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York. McCabe, James, 1902, Saint Augustine and His Age, Duckworth & Co., London.

Other works cited Baudelaire, Charles, 1857, Les Fleurs du mal, edited by Antoine Adam, Éditions Garnier Frères, Paris 1961. Garrod, Heathcote William (editor), Keats’s Poetical Works, Oxford University Press, London 1966. Joyce, James, 1922, Ulysses, Jeri Johnson (editor), Oxford University Press, Oxford 1993. Mauthner, Fritz, 1906-1913, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 Bände, F. Meiner, Leipzig 1923. Proust, Marcel, 1927, Le Temps retrouvé, in À la recherche du temps perdu, 1919-1927, XIV & XV, Édition de la Nouvelle Revue Française, Gallimard, Paris. Shakespeare, William, Othello (citations from Othello are from The Arden Shakespeare edition, M. R. Ridley editor, Methuen, London 1959). Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1844, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea, 3 volumes, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 1896).


The ‘Untellability’ of Stories in Endgame Hugo Bowles

Introduction The analysis of dramatic texts from a linguistic perspective has a long tradition in stylistic research, and interactional approaches to dramatic texts have become an important recent development in this area (see Herman 1995). Interactional analysis is particularly useful when analysing the work of writers like Beckett and Pinter who are both concerned with the themes of communicability (i.e. with interaction itself) and whose work is characterised by a complex or unusual interactional structure. Before embarking on an analysis of the storytelling episodes in Endgame it is important first to understand why and how an interactional approach can be helpful for explaining the complexity of Beckett’s dialogues. This means looking at what an interactional approach is and how it defines and analyses a storytelling episode. Analytical approaches to storytelling episodes There have been two previous studies of the storytelling episodes in Endgame. Morrison (1983) has examined the stories from a non-linguistic perspective arguing that Hamm’s chronicle is the crux of the play and that “the whole point of Endgame lies in the interrelationship between this chronicle, this value-laden record of past events, and the words and actions which make up the dramatic present of the play” (p. 28). Her approach is therefore to look closely at what Hamm says rather than the way that he says it and to draw conclusions about the function of narrative in the play in terms of characterisation, e.g. “this story has allowed


H. Bowles. The ‘Untellability’ of Stories in “Endgame”

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Hamm to reveal his deep sense of not having been cared for [...] but to disguise this revelation as fiction” (p. 28). Norrick (2000), on the other hand, takes a more linguistic approach, analysing the Tailor story from the perspective of conversation analysis (CA) and arguing that an extension of the methods of analysis of conversational storytelling to the analysis of oral discourse in literature can highlight important aspects of dramatic interaction. He analyses the Tailor story as a form of conversational joke-telling, concluding that it has a classic “put-down structure” and that the “careful construction and high poeticity of the story of the tailor set it off from the surrounding more colloquial talk” (p. 194). These two studies reflect the two approaches currently being followed in narrative research (see Bamberg 2006). On the one hand, there is a strong tradition which views spoken narratives as cognitive structures through which we understand the world. In this paradigm, the story is a psychological structure in which life experiences are characterised as internally organised texts. We are, as it were, the stories that we tell and the aim of research from this perspective, which has been very successful in areas such as medicine and psychotherapy, is to get people to tell their stories so that the way they think about their lives and experiences can be read and interpreted. This paradigm is in a sense a literary one because it treats people as if they were texts and implies that people can be understood in the way that we understand a literary work. It is called the “big story” approach (see Freeman 2006) because, by getting people to tell their stories, we end up with essentially autobiographical narratives in which people talk about themselves and their own experiences and at some length. These autobiographical stories tend to be elicited by interviews and to be produced as answers to questions in monologue form. The speaker’s identity – the “me” that comes out of these stories – is a single, monolithic kind of me. In this respect Morrison’s approach to the Endgame narratives is a “big story” approach. However, this is not necessarily the way that people tell stories in ordinary conversation. In our everyday talk, our stories tend neither to be autobiographical nor particularly long. They tend to be about recent local events which also happen to other people


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not just ourselves (the kind of stories that begin “do you know what – ...?”) such as embarrassing incidents, gossip, stories, troubles, dreams; or they can be stories about past events (the kind of story that begins with “do you remember when we...”). Above all we tend to construct stories with our listeners and in response to our listeners in a dialogical way. We tell stories as a function of who is listening to them and we will often tell the same story differently to a different audience depending on how that audience responds. It is precisely these conversational mechanisms which the second, more recent narrative research tradition is concerned with. This approach is called an interactional discursive approach and its point of departure is ordinary conversational storytelling. Studies in this tradition look less at what stories are about (the contents) and much more at how they are told – how they are managed turn-by-turn in interaction and what conversational actions are accomplished in their telling (complaining, justifying, flirting, testifying, reporting and so on). In other words it studies what people are actually doing when they tell stories as well as what stories are designed to do. So, according to this discursive approach, stories cannot be interpreted solely in terms of what has been said and told. Rather they have to be analysed in the way that they are told to and with other speakers in a particular interactional moment. In this respect Norrick’s (2000) analysis is closer to a small story approach. The interactional approach taken here extends the “small story” approach to the patterns of interaction of the Endgame narratives. The aim is to examine the way in which particular storytelling episodes in Endgame are locally managed from an interactional point of view. Defining a storytelling episode: narrative, story and tellability There are numerous definitions of narrative in narrative research. Rudrum (2005), for example, illustrates seven different definitions which have been used in recent studies. What these definitions have in common is that they all involve a view of narrative as a “symbolic representation of a sequence of events”



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(Rudrum, 2005, p. 195). The most influential linguistic research on conversational storytelling (Labov and Waletsky, 1967) also uses the idea of “a sequence of chronologically ordered events” as a starting point. However, these definitions of narrative do not address the more interactional questions of whether and how the context of the narrative affects the representation and how the representation comes into being. In this respect Norrick’s (2007) definition of a story as “a narrative with a point in context” (p. 128) makes a useful distinction between “narrative” and “story”: a narrative is the skeleton of a story (i.e. the main events in chronological order) and is turned into a story through the interactional mechanisms by which speakers and listeners negotiate the story’s point. The way in which a story’s point is interactionally negotiated can be described by tracing what is called “tellability” (Sacks 1972). Tellability refers to the way in which a speaker marks up what for him or her are the salient features of the story and the way the speaker makes clear how he or she wishes them to be understood. Tellability can be traced in stories within plays just as it can be in ordinary conversation. For example, at the beginning of Hamlet the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells the story of how he was poisoned by his brother. The narrative is made up of the events leading up to the poisoning. The tellability is marked by the way the Ghost prepares Hamlet for vengeance by using a whole range of graphic narrative devices in the text to mark up the horror of the poisoning. The task of the analyst is thus to track the tellability of the stories using the procedures of conversation analysis to identify the episodes and narrative devices that speakers use to “talk a narrative into being” as a story. In Hamlet, the tellability of the Ghost’s narrative is actually rather easy to trace in the episode, but when we look at more contemporary playwrights such as Beckett and Pinter, the tellability of their stories is much harder to identify. Storytelling episodes in Endgame Table 1 shows 13 episodes in Endgame in which a sequence of events is symbolically represented:



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Table 1 – Narrative episodes in Endgame Episode

Speakers

Story preface

Story ending

Conversational type

Ardennes

Nagg Nell

Do you remember...?

On the road to Sedan

Reminiscence – collaborative

Lake Como

Nagg Nell

It was on Lake Como

You could see down to the bottom


Tailor

Nagg

Shall I tell you the story of the tailor...

... at my TROUSERS

Joke-telling – monologue

Heart

Hamm

Last night I saw

No, it was living

Local news – collaborative

Blind

Hamm

One day you’ll be blind...

... anyone left Prediction – to have pity on monologue

Old questions Hamm Clov

Do you remember when you came here...?

But for Hamm... no home


Madman

Hamm Clov

I once knew a madman ...

God be with the days

Personal anecdote – collaborative

Chronicle 1

Hamm

The man came crawling ...

...in defiance of my wishes

Personal anecdote – monologue

Tiny boy

Nagg

Whom did you call

I was your only hope

Personal anecdote – monologue

Chronicle 2

Hamm Clov

He comes crawling on his belly...

That’s all. I stopped there.

Retelling – collaborative

Turn

Hamm

Do you And then we remember, in got into the the beginning... way of it

Never there

Hamm

I was never there It all happened Reminiscence – without me collaborative

Mother Pegg

Clov

When old Mother Pegg

Yes you had

Reminiscence – monologue


These 13 episodes not only exhibit the full range of conversational types (reminiscences, anecdotes, a prediction, recent news,



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a joke-telling, a prediction) but a variety of interactional modes (solo monologue, joint reminiscence, story retelling). However, despite the realistic nature of conversational narrative types and modes, there is also a great deal of atypical interaction in individual episodes which restricts the stories’ tellability. It is argued here that the atypicality is caused by an alternating pattern of storytelling development. Although many of the dialogues are collaborative, in as much as co-participants contribute to the storytelling, the collaboration is hardly ever consecutive and so stories are never fully developed. To illustrate how this alternating patterning occurs, conversation analysis of a number of episodes (Ardennes, Lake Como, Tailor and Hamm’s chronicle) will be carried out. In the text, the non-collaborative turns are marked in bold type. The Ardennes story The Ardennes story can be classified as a small story. The bold type in the text indicates non-cooperative behaviour: 001 Nell: No. (Pause.) Have you anything to say to me? 002 Nagg: Do you remember – ? 003 Nell: No. 004 Nagg: When we crashed on our tandem and lost our shanks. 005 (They laugh heartily.) 006 Nell: It was in the Ardennes. 007 (They laugh less heartily.) 008 Nagg: On the road to Sedan. 009 (They laugh still less heartily.) 010 Are you cold? (Endgame, pp. 18-19)

From an interactional point of view the Ardennes story does not proceed smoothly. The opening of the story is the “do you remember –” “No” sequence. Technically this is called a non-negotiated preface. Before we tell a story, we need to announce our intention to tell it in order to gain the floor and to position our interlocutor as a listener. Here Nagg’s do you remember? is an opening gambit that is designed to do precisely this – to position Nell


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as a listener by appealing to shared knowledge of a remembered event. The fact that the pre-announcement is truncated by Nell at a point where it is not semantically appropriate means that in conversational terms this is a hostile interruption which in ordinary conversation would need to be repaired. But neither Nagg nor Nell make any repairs at all. Nagg continues with the story – “when we crashed on our tandem”. This is followed by laughter and then Nell continues the story. This sequence from 004 to 006 is more collaborative with both speakers joining in with the construction of the memories and making appreciative comments at the same time. After that, however, the story becomes untellable as the laughter becomes increasingly less hearty. What is unusual about this story is the alternation of cooperative (normal type) and uncooperative behaviour (bold type). We get a hostile response to the preface (001-003) followed by a glimpse of genuine cooperative storytelling (004-006), followed by inappropriate feedback (007), followed by a further attempt to start the story (008), followed by more inappropriate feedback (009) followed by a change of topic (010). The story stops and starts but ultimately fails to get off the ground. The Lake Como and Tailor stories There is another, more complex example of this alternating behaviour in the Lake Como and Tailor stories. It is often overlooked that the exchange about Lake Como is in fact a story. Critics have tended to focus on the Tailor story because it is longer, because it seems to have a beginning, a middle and an end and because there seems to be more that one can say about it in terms of interpretation. From an interactional point of view, however, the Lake Como story is just as significant as the Tailor story if not more so. The Lake Como episode is a story about a story or, to be more precise, the story of the time “when Nagg first told Nell the story of the tailor”. From a structural point of view, Lake Como is actually inserted into the Tailor story. What is unusual about it, as with the Ardennes story, is the alternating levels of cooperation. Again, bold type is used to mark uncooperative behaviour:



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001

Hamm: Perhaps it’s a little vein. (Pause.) 002 Nagg: What was that he said? 003 Nell: Perhaps it’s a little vein. 004 Nagg: What does that mean? (Pause.) That means nothing. (Pause.) Will I tell you the story of the tailor? 005 Nell: No. (Pause.) What for? (Endgame, pp. 20-21)

When Nagg makes an early bid to tell the Tailor story (“will I tell you the story of the tailor?”), it is rejected by Nell (“no”). This is exactly the same as Nell’s “no” in the Ardennes story when she rejects Nagg’s “do you remember”. But this time Nell repairs it with “what for?”. So the behaviour is still cooperative. From then on, we get an argumentative but still cooperative exchange as Nagg tries to position Nell as a listener to his Tailor story and Nell counters with the Lake Como story: 006 007 008

Nagg: To cheer you up. Nell: It’s not funny. Nagg: It always made you laugh. (Pause.) The first time I thought you’d die. 009 Nell: It was on Lake Como. (Pause.) One April afternoon. (Pause.) Can you believe it? 010 Nagg: What? 011 Nell: That we once went out rowing on Lake Como. (Pause.) One April afternoon. 012 Nagg: We had got engaged the day before. (Endgame, p. 21)

Here the pauses are attributable to the listener (Nell) and her non-response indicates a lack of cooperation. Nagg eventually joins in with the Lake Como story (“we had got engaged the day before”) and continues it with Nell’s encouragement: 013 014 015 016

Nell: Engaged! Nagg: You were in such fits that we capsized. By rights we should have been drowned. Nell: It was because I felt happy. Nagg: (Indignant.) It was not, it was not, it was my story


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and nothing else. Happy! Don’t you laugh at it still? Every time I tell it. Happy! 017 Nell: It was deep, deep. And you could see down to the bottom. So white. So clean. 018 Nagg: Let me tell it again. (Raconteur’s voice.) An English man, needing a pair of striped trousers ...[story continues] (Endgame, p. 21)

By this stage the Lake Como narrative has become Nagg’s story as well and the storytelling has become a joint effort just like the Ardennes story was. At 016 Nagg tries to arouse Nell’s interest in the Tailor story for a second time (“don’t you laugh at it still?”) but Nell is still immersed in her Lake Como story (“it was deep, deep...”) and does not respond to Nagg’s question. At this point the story has turned uncooperative again. Nagg announces the retelling of the Tailor story at 018 (“let me tell it again”) and then tells it without permission, marking the fact that he is telling a story by adopting a “raconteur’s voice”. The Tailor story thus begins with the Lake Como story left incomplete and hanging in the air and a potential audience (Nell) who has still not been positioned correctly as a listener. It is also significant that Nagg tells the Tailor story as a monologue and gets no response from Nell, who is still thinking about Lake Como. Any kind of storytelling, but particularly joke-telling, needs feedback from listeners and Nagg does not receive any. The Tailor story is thus highly unsuccessful because there is no preface and no feedback from Nell either during the story or, significantly, at the end. So just like the Ardennes story, Lake Como and the Tailor show alternating storytelling behaviour. We have a relatively collaborative Lake Como sandwiched between an uncooperative Tailor story. This structural sandwiching of a cooperative story within an uncooperative story coupled with the alternating levels of cooperation within each story creates a highly disjointed effect. It is important to notice as well how this sequence compares to storytelling in ordinary conversation. It is interesting, for example, that it is in the short exchanges of Lake Como that we get the successful storytelling rather than in the longer Tailor mono-



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logue. In plays, monologues tend to show the chronologically ordered events that are important for the construction of narrative as well as the metaphors, similes, hyperbole, direct speech and narrative devices traditionally used for marking up tellability in a story (Tannen 2007). However, in ordinary conversation this is not the case. Most stories in everyday talk are collaborative. They are jointly told and constructed through dialogue, not through monologue, and the success of a story depends on the listener joining in with feedback. When Nell says later in the play in reference to storytelling “We still find it funny but we don’t laugh any more” she is making precisely this point. “Being funny” is to do with interpretation whereas laughter is to do with interaction. So the Tailor may well be a joke that has been told in a skilful way by Nagg but it is ultimately an unsuccessful one because it does not make anyone laugh. Hamm’s chronicle Hamm’s chronicle is an autobiographical story and perhaps the least conversational of all the stories in Endgame, for a number of reasons. First it is presented at length in two different versions at two different times so it is a story retelling. It is an atypical retelling because speakers usually retell stories when they have a different audience to tell them to. Hamm’s chronicle on the other hand is by and large self-directed; Clov tells him that it is a story “you’ve been telling yourself all your days” and, interestingly, Hamm is only able to move the narrative along when he is alone. During the first part of the chronicle Clov is absent and as soon as Clov returns to the room the chronicle is interrupted. Secondly it is not a spontaneous story. Hamm uses a special narrative voice, which sets off the words of the story from his other speech, another voice for the father in the story and his own “normal” voice. The contrast between narrative and normal voice turns the storytelling episode into a very self-conscious act of narration. Thirdly, there is almost no participation in the chronicle. Hamm announces the start of the story (“it’s time for my story”) but there is no actual participation in or recognition of the re-


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membered events by the listeners during the narration and when Clov is present he does not participate in it. Most important of all, the tellability of the chronicle is unclear because we have no idea why Hamm is telling the story. In ordinary conversation we tell stories for any number of reasons – for entertainment, to illustrate something, to justify a claim – and these reasons are constantly being signalled by the speaker and monitored for by the listener during storytelling. Yet none of these signals occur in the chronicle. As Hamm tells and retells the story over the course of the play, the only markers of tellability are in the way Hamm himself evaluates the story. It is only right at the end when Hamm says “reckoning closed and story ended” that we realise that this is a story told as a reckoning – a reflection on past events and a way, perhaps, to account for his own life. Conclusion This overview of tellability suggests that two points can be made about storytelling in Endgame. Firstly, individual episodes involving two different speakers exhibit an alternating pattern of interaction in which a story is moved on in one turn only to be halted in the next speaker’s turn, moved on in the next and halted in the next. This stop-start pattern also occurs when there is a single speaker and no collaboration from a second speaker. Here the speaker may start a story, then stop and pick it up later on in the same turn or after a number of intervening turns. Both these types of alternation make the tellability of a particular story hard to identify. Secondly, Hamm’s chronicle stands out from the other Endgame stories because, since it spans the entire play and is not a “locally managed” story, its tellability is even harder to trace. Indeed in the chronicle the whole idea of story tellability seems to be progressively dismantled: there is no preface, no participation, no collaboration, no reason for the story, no conclusion; there is also constant retelling, self-directedness and a great deal of talking about the story but very little telling of it. Hamm spends much of the play trying to locate the tellability of his own story. In conclusion, analysis of the narrative patterning in Endgame



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stories suggests that the play shows us as much about how stories “don’t get told”1 as about how they do. Beckett’s skill is in subverting the mechanisms of ordinary storytelling behaviour to produce stories in which tellability merges into ‘untellability’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Samuel Beckett, 1958, Endgame, in Endgame. A Play in One Act Followed by Act Without Words. A Mime for One Player, 1964, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 7-53.

Other works cited Bamberg, Michael, 2006, “Stories – Big or Small. Why Do We Care?”, in Narrative Inquiry, 16:1, 2006, pp. 139-147. Freeman, Mark, 2006, “Life ‘on Holiday’? In Defense of Big Stories”, in Narrative Inquiry, 16:1, 2006, pp. 131-138. Helm, June (editor), 1967, Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, University of Washington Press, Seattle. Herman, David (editor), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Herman, Vimala, 1995, Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays, Routledge, London. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletsky, 1967, “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience”, in Helm (editor), 1967, Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, cit., pp. 12-44. Morrison, Kristin, 1983, Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Norrick, Neal, 2000, Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Idem, 2007, “Conversational Storytelling”, in Herman (editor), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, cit., pp. 127-141. Rudrum, David, 2005, “From Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition”, in Narrative, vol. 13, n. 2, 2005, pp. 195-204. 1

I am grateful to John Pilling (personal communication) for this phrase.


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Sacks, Harvey, 1972, Lectures on Conversation, vol. II, edited by Gail Jefferson, Blackwell, Oxford. Tannen, Deborah, 1989, Talking Voices, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007.


Chamber Music and Camera Trio: Samuel Beckett’s Second Television Play Patrizia Fusella

Beyond that black beyond. Ghost light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. [...] Stands there staring beyond at that black veil lips quivering to half-heard words. Treating of other matters. Trying to treat of other matters. Till half hears there are no other matters. (Samuel Beckett, “A Piece of Monologue”)

Beckett and chamber music Beckett’s love of music, his ability as a pianist, his preference for the classics and the romantics (Beethoven and Schubert especially), his aversion to opera and Wagner’s or Mahler’s works, his appreciation of only a few modern composers, his friendly relations with some important musicians, and his pleasure in attending concerts are all documented in James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame (1996 [1997]), which has significantly contributed to a new field of investigation in Beckettian studies. Although the credit for editing the first full-length work to deal exclusively with Beckett and music goes to Mary Bryden (1998), there is no doubt about the importance of Knowlson’s biography for this and other new fields of Beckettian studies1. And indeed from it we learn that 1 As H. Porter Abbott acknowledges in his contribution to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, “James Knowlson’s new biography brings well into light what we knew, but never knew quite so well” (Oppenheim 1999, p. 7).


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Beckett’s interest for chamber music dates back to the difficult years he spent in London in the Thirties, “obsessed with his mental and physical disarray” and yet in some way able to come to terms with it, thanks to Hester Dowden who “was partly responsible for the comparative richness of his musical life at this time” (p. 191). They played piano duets on her Steinway; she “was well informed about the concerts that were worth attending in London, and used to hold her own musical entertainments [...] for friends and guests at her Sunday soirées” (pp. 191-192), a number of which were attended by Beckett. When, in his later career, Beckett uses music in his plays, he opts for instrumental music and a similar preference inspires his authorization of the musical settings for his plays or excerpts. Between 1976 and 1977, the years when Beckett composes and directs or supervises the rehearsals of “Ghost Trio”, “at least six different musical settings or operas were approved” (p. 655), and while his preference for instrumental music is often stated in his letters, those years also indicate a period of deep involvement in music and its relation to his work. In this light, the choice of Beethoven’s Piano Trio N. 5 in D Major, op. 70 n. 1 for his second television play is not surprising and it also seems evident that chamber music suits Beckett’s work better than orchestral music. “Minimalism”, his “late style in the theatre”, to borrow the title of one of Enoch Brater’s books (1987), shares with chamber music an aesthetics which leaves out what is not essential and exploits the few elements left, thus limiting form itself on one side, and exploring the possibilities of what is left on the other. The term “chamber music” originally referred to music not to be performed in public places and this original reference not only seems apt to the small playhouse as the best place for Beckett’s late theatre in general; it also indicates, in the case of “Ghost Trio”, the setting: the protagonist, Male Figure (F), listens to Beethoven’s music in a chamber, “the familiar chamber”, we are told by Voice (V), the only other character listed by Beckett at the beginning of the published text2. However, 2

125).

On the different versions of the published text see Gontarski (1985, p.


P. Fusella. Chamber Music and Camera Trio

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having lost this original reference, the term nowadays “excludes, on the one side, solo vocal music and music for a single instrument (or for a solo instrument accompanied by another) and, on the other, orchestral and choral music”; it “includes merely instrumental music for 2, 3, 4, or more instruments, played with a single instrument to ‘a part’, all parts being on equal terms” (Kennedy 1980, p. 124). This definition sheds light on one of the main characteristics of “Ghost Trio”: like the piano, the violin and the cello of Beethoven’s Trio, the few elements or instruments used by Beckett succeed in conveying a great dramatic and lyrical impact because each of them plays its own part on equal terms and in combination with the others and none of them has a secondary role or the mere function of accompanying. The Italian equivalent of “chamber music” is musica da camera; accordingly, “Ghost Trio” can be called a “camera play”. Beckett’s and Beethoven’s Trios Beckett’s Trio is divided into three parts which, solely in the written text, are respectively titled “I Pre-action”, “II Action” and “III Re-action”3, and are in turn divided into progressively numbered segments, containing either directions for the camera, F’s actions, and the intervention of music and sound effects, or Voice’s lines, with related captions4. Each section exploits different types of shots and has one sequence in which the camera moves towards F from the long distance view to the close-up and backward; the three acoustic elements never “play” together; music enters the action nine times; sound effects are present only in the third part; Voice is found only in the first two parts, while F is always on stage, has no lines and does not move in Pre-action.

3 The tripartite structure of the play and the three positions of the camera and of F have attracted much attention; critics have also detected many other trios, see: Knowlson 1986, Calder 1977, Brater 1987, Deleuze 1992. 4 From now onwards my reference to the play will be given in parenthesis, where Roman numbers indicate its parts and Arabic numbers their respective segments.



308 x x

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x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x xx x xx x xx x

Beckett illustrates the set and the positions of camera and F in the first page of the printed text: F is in the room, seated on a stool (5), bent over an object that he is holding in his lap; every little while he gets up to go to the window (2) or to the door (1) or towards the bed (4) or the mirror (3) and then regains his position. The object will be gradually



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revealed as a recorder, which the music – entering the action nine times – comes from. Following Linda Ben-Zvi’s (1985) complaint about the critical neglect of Samuel Beckett’s radio and television works, the second TV play has been widely described, analyzed and interpreted; even so, Maier (2001 and 2002) is right in pointing out that when the first part of his long essay was published (2001) the role of Beethoven’s Trio in the play had still not attracted sufficient attention5. The nine musical abstracts are all taken from the second movement, the Largo assai ed espressivo, and it has been recently argued that Beckett’s tripartite structure reiterates that of Beethoven’s Trio (Herren 2001), that in the composition process and in the German production the author/director “endeavoured to make [the] intensifying structure [of the Largo] effective in his play” (Maier 2001, p. 276), and that he “uses” Beethoven’s “expressivity and [...] formal symmetries [...] in order to undermine their stability as their constructedness is revealed” (Laws 2003, p. 202). In his comprehensive discussion of the two trios, Maier points out that the Largo “has a clear binary form”, divided as it is “into two parts and a coda that is intended as the final climax” (2001, p. 268 and 2002, p. 319); he notes further that “the inner structure of the [...] two main parts is also binary” (2001, p. 269), as it is composed of two musical subjects. His and Laws’ detailed examinations of Beckett’s use of the Largo show that all the abstracts, except the last, are taken from the bars containing the first subject, and that the second, the cantabile, appears only in the last excerpt when the full coda is heard at the end of “Re-action”. In spite of this, none of them gives this repetition the prominence it deserves in the formal patterning of “Ghost Trio”, whereas I believe that it indicates that Beckett’s main criterion for the choice of the musical excerpts was to preserve and reproduce the repetitive character of the second movement of Beethoven’s Trio as a reflection of how repetition rules in his own Trio. Maier proves that Beckett decided to include the coda very late 5 One exception is the chapter on “Ghost Trio” in A Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (Fletcher, Fletcher, Smith and Bachem 1978): in spite of its brevity and already in 1978 it analyzes each of Beckett’s musical excerpts and draws attention to Beckett’s use of one particular motif of Beethoven’s Trio.


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in the composition process, and that in the German production the author/director opted for cutting the first two musical excerpts and using the second subject also at the end of the second part of the play, “Action”. Since Maier bases his analysis on the German production of “Geister Trio”, the importance he attaches to Beckett’s new decision is understandable and his explanation equally plausible6. However, his reading is not applicable to the British versions of “Ghost Trio” – in which the cantabile appears only at the end of “Re-action” – whereas repetition still plays a fundamental role in the German text. Beckett does counteract the introduction of the second subject in the middle of “Geister Trio”, as he reinforces the repetition of the first subject in two ways: first, the new musical excerpt is the briefest and is briefer than its corresponding excerpt in the BBC production; second, the length of all the excerpts containing the first subject is significantly increased. I should also specify that the first two excerpts missing in the Stuttgart production lasted barely one bar each in the BBC edition. Stressing the repetitive aspect of the excerpts takes into account the difficulty critics have in assigning a superior textual authority to any of the different versions of Beckett’s texts7. The preservation and reproduction of the repetition of Beethoven’s Largo is a prominent feature of “Ghost Trio”, be it the printed version, the BBC edition or the Stuttgart production. Besides, it is matched by the repetitions of Voice. At the beginning, through them, the play seems to corroborate the epistemological and metaphysical system “which makes ‘I see’ synonymous with ‘I understand’. Knowledge, comprehension, reason, are established through the power of the look, through the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ of the human subject whose relation to objects is structured through his field of vision” (Jackson 2000, p. 45): 6 The introduction of the second subject of the Largo in the middle of the play “is to be explained not only by its foreshadowing function [i.e. of the final image and excerpt of the play], but also by [...] the cantabile’s audible condensation [that] corresponds to the contracted action at this moment of the play” (Maier 2002, p. 317). 7 On this problem, raised by Beckett’s bilingualism and self-translations, see: Friedman, Rossman and Sherzer 1987, Beer 1994, Gordon 1996 and Fusella 2002.



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Good evening. Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [Pause.] Good evening. Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [Pause.] It will not be raised, nor lowered, whatever happens. [Pause.] Look. [Long pause.] The familiar chamber. [Pause.] At the far end a window. [Pause.] On the right the indispensable door. [Pause.] On the left, against the wall, some kind of pallet. [Pause.] The light: faint, omnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous. No shadow. [Pause.] No shadow. Colour: none. All grey. Shades of grey. [Pause.] The colour grey if you wish, shades of the colour grey. [Pause.] Forgive my stating the obvious. [Pause.] Keep that sound down. [Pause]. Now look closer. [Pause.] Floor. (I. 2)

This last word is followed immediately by a cut and a close-up of the floor; similarly, throughout the entire duration of “Pre-action”, Voice literally guides the spectator’s gaze and comprehension, as each new shot is accompanied by the announcement of the object being shot and by the invitation to “now look closer” and “look again”. V’s lines are ambivalent and may refer both to the camera – which alternates close-ups and general views – and to the spectator, who in turn must look “closer” and “again” at the announced object; V thus describes the way the spectacle works and gives the audience an awareness of how gaze and shot coincide. The television play comments and observes itself, and calls on the spectator to think about the intrinsic illusion of the form itself. A similar ambivalence and function can be found in “Action”, in which the voice seems to foresee the actions of the character. The various phrases, “Now to door” (II. 7 and 24), “Now to window” (II. 13), “Now to pallet” (II. 19), sound as predictions/ descriptions of F’s actions, as stage directions guiding such actions, and as guides to the spectator’s gaze8. Despite this, Voice does not assume any guiding function in relation to the music;

8 These functions of the camera have been commented upon by many critics; see, particularly: Knowlson 1986, Brater 1987, Védrenne 2001 and Herren 2007. The alternating general views and close-ups have been called by Jonathan Kalb “the model of the double-take – [...] another example of Beckett incorporating the viewer’s process of viewing into his drama” (Kalb 1994, p. 140); Peter Gidal points out that they aim at “making difficult a ‘natural viewing’” (Gidal 1979, p. 54).


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moreover, the whole epistemological notion of knowledge based on the centrality of the Subject and gaze begins to fall into crisis, when music enters the play for the first time (I. 13)9. This happens immediately after the camera repeats for the second time the same shooting of the floor (I. 9): two close-ups in succession project identical images, but Voice identifies them as the “wall” (I. 6) and “floor” (I. 8) of the familiar chamber. Camera Trio: F, camera and music The reduction of the role of V as facilitator in the visual field and in the spectator’s comprehension coincides, then, with the first musical excerpt and the moment in which repetition enters in the play and starts to rule it. Beckett’s continual offering and re-offering the audience images, objects, shots, F’s actions, and music interventions shows a skilful use of repetition, employing its signifying power yet showing the limits and revealing the process of signification itself. He thus expresses a strong sense of disorientation and uncertainty which makes the spectator constantly suspended between seeing a sense and loosing it, even as he ensures that there is a minimal dramatic action, without which incommunicability would take over. The action is simple: F waits for a “she” (a woman, Death, the ghost of a dead woman – we do not know) and fills the wait by listening to a piece of chamber music from the recorder he has on his lap. Every little while he moves his head suddenly because, as V announces, “He will now think he hears her” (II. 1). He goes to the door or the window to check; in one case only (III. 30-32) some steps are heard, then a boy knocks on the door and shakes his head ambiguously; F goes back to his seated position and the play ends. There is no doubt that F is waiting for “her”, because the audience is told this by Voice and because Beckett’s working title, Tryst, that was substituted at a very late stage of the composition (see Bryden, Garforth and Mills 1998, pp. 44-46), confirms this. However, no general agreement has been reached on the rest of the action. 9 In the German production, given the cut of the first two musical excerpts, music will be heard for the first time during the sequence in which the camera moves towards F seated on the stool (from A, via B and C, to the close-up), and backwards (I. 31, 35).



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Undoubtedly, the feeling of incomprehension and the ghostly atmosphere one experiences during the performance, or imagines when reading the text as a script, may result in attaching less importance to the dramatic action itself and in greater difficulty in reconstructing it. And interpretation may depend on the version of the play: those who work with the German production can easily prove that F is listening to the music, as there F actually presses the buttons of the recorder; others may question the relation between F and the music. In both videos there are shots where F places something on the stool as soon as he gets up, or alternatively picks something up from it before sitting, and as many near shots and one close-up of the stool. However, even if the printed text specifies that this “something” is the recorder, these shots are not sufficient, on their own, unequivocally to explain the action10. I suggest that the effect depends on Beckett’s exploitation of the characteristics of repetition, as theorized by philosophers such as Derrida and Deleuze. The turning point of their thought lies in the superseding of the representational system which states the existence of an original and a copy, the former independent of the latter and the latter dependent on the former; in such a system, repetition depends on something that already exists by definition, that is autonomous and always stays the same. Instead, in the absence of any hierarchy between original and repetition and given their mutual dependence, the role played by difference is given prominence: in order to be caught as such, repetition must necessarily be different, if only minimally, from what it repeats11. Deleuze emphasizes that pure or exact repetition does not exist and that difference constitutes repetition: It is always in one and the same movement that repetition includes difference (not as an accidental and extrinsic variant but at its heart, as the essential variant of which it is composed, the displacement and dis10 Among the critics who raise a doubt about F’s relation to music, see Fletcher, Fletcher, Smith and Bachem 1978, Worth 1986 and 1999 [2001], and Laws 2003. They all affirm that there is no clear indication in the text that F “hears” the music or “listens” to it. 11 I am referring in particular to Deleuze 1968, Derrida 1967, and Steven Connor’s excellent first chapter of his Samuel Beckett. Repetition, Theory and Text (1988, pp. 1-14).


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guise which constitute it as a difference that is itself divergent and displaced) [...]. (Deleuze 1968 [1994, p. 289])

The scenes in which music is present show how Beckett is careful to make the repetition and the original mutually essential, emblematizing the absence of a hierarchy among the three parts of the play, which in turn iterate and re-iterate their own components12. The first two musical excerpts are heard during two close-ups of the door in Pre-action; the others while the protagonist is filmed sitting, bent over, on the stool. In the seven times in which this is repeated, the scene is the same but what the spectator sees and hears is different because Beckett uses at least three variables: 1) the camera position and the type of shot, 2) the volume of Music and 3) what precedes the scene, for instance, if F is already sitting or sits down. In this way he reveals the sense of F’s image on the stool, only gradually hiding or disclosing its aspects; although the image is always unchanged, in the repetitions it is never the same and is included in a chain of cross-references of its repetitions and the repetitions of its components in other scenes, including those where Music is not present. It is not possible, here, to go over this game thoroughly, but the comparison between similarities and differences of the various repetitions allows for the following conclusion: music is never present in the play when F is moving or moves his head as he thinks he hears her and is always present when he is bent over on his stool. When the spectator of this process is able to understand that music is only present when F is seated and does not move at all, the dramatic action can be reconstructed and the images already repeated reveal elements that, without repetition, would not be discovered. As Deleuze confirms: The absence of a hierarchy is such that none of the three parts is assigned the role of pre-existing identity. Notwithstanding the title, “Action” does not convey the dramatic action and, although it is positioned between the other two parts, it is not the centre of the work, it does not have a privileged function from which to look at the other parts as marginal; on their part, the prefixes of the other two titles do not indicate so much a preparation or a repetition of the action, than they actually refer to the literal meaning and the Latin etymology, mainly recalling the concepts of “in front of” and “behind/against”, rather than those of “before/preceding” and “again”. 12



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What is displaced and disguised in the series [...] exists and acts as the differenciator of difference. [...] each series is explicated and unfolded only in implicating the others, it therefore repeats the others and is repeated in the others, which in turn implicate it [...] with the result that it returns to itself as many times as it returns to another. (Deleuze 1968 [1994, pp. 299-300])

Thus, for instance, one discovers that the first two musical excerpts, previously perceived as mere incidental music, are actually tied to the fact that, in order to shoot the close-ups of the door, the camera necessarily has to move in front of it and, therefore, close to F who sits on his stool near the door. These new elements – the door is close to the music source, the stool is close to the door and F sits near it – are thus added to the only thing the spectator knows before the effect of repetition and difference, i.e. that the “indispensable door”, as Voice asserts, is “on the right” of the familiar chamber. By playing with his few instruments and visually repeating the structure of repetition with alterations of Beethoven’s Piano Trio Beckett reveals a ghost of dramatic action. Defamiliarization and unheimlich The use Beckett makes of repetition is also the main device to produce the disorienting effect that is such a fundamental trait of the spectator’s fruition and reaction, whether or not the dramatic action is grasped. After Voice’s first long line, concomitant with the long shot of the room from A, “Pre-action” alternates close-ups of the elements that compose the room with general views from A. This way, the spectator sees the “familiar chamber”, the floor, the wall, the door, the bed and the window over and over again, inside a repetitive structure in which three shots from A introduce and conclude two series of close-ups. With the succession of these close-ups, the spectator, called upon by Voice to look closer and more carefully, sees ten grey rectangles which progressively remove the filmed objects from their referents, in a growing confusion which makes them more and more indistinct13.

13 The many essays that deal with this effect rightly point out the ways in which Beckett creates it: the directions provided in the script indicate the size


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The repetition of these rectangles, all located inside the rectangular shaped room and “subsumed in the rectangle of the television screen” (Ben-Zvi 1985, p. 35), has a stunning impact on the audience, and most critics stress that their effect is to defamiliarize, fragment, estrange, or explode “the familiar room” and the objects, to give them an aesthetic quality that distances them from their own common use, to exhaust the potentialities of space, and to make a ‘natural viewing’ difficult (see respectively: Herren 1998, p. 78; Védrenne 2001, p. 333; Herren 2007, p. 75; Ben-Zvi 1985, p. 36; Wulf 1994, p. 59; Deleuze 1992, p. 85, and Gidal 1979, p. 54). These identical images appear to the spectator’s gaze as undifferentiated and undistinguishable shapes, having reference only because Voice names them; this “naming”, however, reveals its very own arbitrariness. The alternating close-ups and general views, and their repetition, set the spectator before difference, not ruled by pre-existing categories of representation, invisible yet irreducible: the arbitrary character of the sign, the fundamental element of representation, comes thus to the fore. Linda Ben-Zvi, Catherine Laws, James Knowlson, Eric Prieto, to quote only some, have read the play and come to similar conclusions. Knowlson’s reading of the sequence of the rectangles is: “There is, in other words, a deliberate play on the disparity between ‘looking’ and ‘knowing’ that leaves the spectator aware of the strangeness and the ambiguity of what he is observing, intrigued and disturbed rather than reassured by the speaker’s [Voice’s] words” (Knowlson 1986, p. 198). Similarly, Linda BenZvi comments that “[by] revealing the conventions of sound and shape, Beckett clears the way for their use in a form that takes as its subject the limitations of sound and sight in perceiving the world” (Ben-Zvi 1985, p. 36). Eric Prieto, who reads “Ghost Trio” with reference to Plato’s cave allegory, says: “Beckett’s genius lies in his ability to work skilfully with our yearning for meaning, always inciting us to search further [...], but without ever allowing us to come to a point where we feel that the work of interpretation has been completed” (Prieto 2002, p. 212). Catherine Laws, whose esof the rectangles (seventy centimetres wide, and either two, or one and a half metres tall), their colour (grey), opaque glass for the window and no knobs for the door and the window.



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say explores the ways in which Beckett’s musical excerpts match the ambiguities of the relationship between body, voice, and viewer, concludes: “the relationship between voice and action, the treatment of the body, the process of representation, and the use of music all imply that the voiceless F is neither full selfhood nor ‘unself’ [...], and that what we experience is a groping towards the ‘unsayability’ of this state” (Laws 2003, p. 211). The issues raised, then, are those of subject, interpretation, knowledge, perception, and the interrogation of their limits and ambiguities; I suggest that the spectator’s disorientation in front of the alternating rectangles and general views derives also from facing the touching of difference and resemblance on a border where one spills over into the other, and perhaps, even more so, from regaining, if only for brief instants, flashes of her/his presymbolic Self. The rectangles produce an uncanny effect and recall those indistinct and nameless shapes that objects must appear to be before our entrance into the Symbolic. Freud explains that unheimlich has two meanings: one deriving from the opposite of “familiar”, and the other from the opposite of “secret” and “hidden”; therefore, he relates the uncanny to “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 1919 [1955, p. 220]), but which “has become alienated from [the mind] through the process of repression” (p. 241). The uncanny effect of the rectangles, then, could derive from the disclosure, in flashes, of the secret upon which our symbolic order is built, revealing, in other words, our pre-symbolic relation to the world, from a time when a fluid and undifferentiated reality was familiar to us; that very relationship we have all had to abandon and remove in order to construct ourselves as subjects, and to represent the world in our eyes, in other words, to adapt to the reality principle14. Through 14 Also Catharina Wulf (1994) draws on Freud for her reading of “Ghost Trio”. She identifies the musical excerpts with Freud’s fort/da, Lacan’s object petit a, and Winnicott’s “transitional object” in order to prove that F plays the music “to overcome the loss of the other [the woman he is waiting for]” (Wulf 1994, p. 60), and concludes that at the end of the play F “understands that he will stay by himself. [... He] has finally outgrown his need for the transitional object [...and is] no longer overcome by the eternally lacking object” (p. 61). Personally I find unconvincing all readings of “Ghost Trio” that detect a devel-


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the intervention of the rectangles the “familiar chamber” is not only “defamiliarized”, but it also becomes unheimlich, thus foreshadowing the effect brought about throughout the entire play by repetition. Consolation and deconstruction Suspending the audience between sense and nonsense, resemblance and difference, recognition and misrecognition of what it sees, has seen and sees again, of what pre-exists and re-exists, repetition imposes a double and opposite solicitation: the effort to see, to see more and to understand, and the desire to lapse into the absence of sense and into the music; then again the attempt at seeing and understanding, solicited by the interruption of the music. The interval between all these oscillations, through continuous repetition, produces that feeling of suspension and that uncanny effect that appear to me as the most effective elements of “Ghost Trio”. Catherine Laws asserts that “Despite the emphasis on both the bareness of this play and its ambiguities” critics frequently identify music as “an element of expressiveness or consolation” (Laws 2003, p. 200)15. Given the continuous interruption, which makes the excerpts very brief and frustrates F’s and the audience’s desire for more music, I think she is certainly right in confuting any reading of “Ghost Trio” “as offering a positive assertion of the triumph of humanity through the spirit of the music” (p. 211). Furthermore, it seems to me that the emphasis I have put on the role of music in conveying the suspension effect matches her idea that music is part of the subversive resistance she detects at the heart of “Ghost Trio”. She argues that Beckett deconstructs Beethoven’s expressivity and formal symmetries and concludes that “Beckett specifically draws upon the spirit of German Romanticism which infuses the music, but does so precisely in order to deconstruct these ideas

opment in F’s situation; even F’s final smile (in the German production) is ambiguous and does not allow for any denouement. 15 Laws detects this consolatory role of music in the essays by Anna McMullan (1997), Phil Baker (1995-1996), Sydney Homan (1992) and Graley Herren (1998 and 2001).



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and put into question the possibility of simple solace or absolute redemption” (p. 202). However, it also seems to me that, to some extent, Laws underrates the role of music in “Ghost Trio”. She concludes that “there is nothing to confirm whether or not he [F] is actually ‘listening’ to it on the cassette” (p. 208), and she does not follow the implications of the last, uninterrupted, musical excerpt for the reaction of the audience. I hope I have demonstrated that, on one hand, music contributes to the play of repetition and interruption that conveys the suspension effect, and, on the other, that F does listen to the music from his recorder, and that Beckett opposes music to Voice and to the binary gaze/knowledge. This opposition, while frustrating the desire to hear more music, renovates it at intervals and is mirrored by F’s filling his wait with music and interrupting it by going to check if “she” is coming. On these grounds I believe that the play conveys also the feeling – rather than the idea – that music might bring some solace. Herren’s statement that “Beckett remembers Beethoven by dismembering his work” (Herren 2007, p. 79) is apposite to what I believe is the audience’s final reaction. With the last musical excerpt, the only one that is played uninterrupted till Beethoven’s Largo ends, and with the silence of the last two shots which must take up 15 seconds and fade out, I believe the audience seeks for more silence or different sounds than those produced by words. In these other sounds the spectator finds her/himself thinking like the character of The Unnamable: I who am on my way, words bellying out my sails, am also that unthinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said. But perhaps I shall speak of him some day, and of the impenetrable age when I was he, some day when they fall silent, convinced at last I shall never get born, having failed to be conceived (The Unnamable, p. 324)

Then without the solace of music the audience will finish the Unnamable’s meditation, in silence: Yes, perhaps I shall speak of him, for an instant, like an echo that mocks, before being restored to him, the one they could not part me from. (The Unnamable, p. 324)



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Beckett’s moral and intellectual integrity makes the audience of “Ghost Trio” remember, invoke and evoke the unthinkable ancestor and at the same time dismember him in the attempt to find a way to express him. Any language, any art form belonging to the humanist tradition, while trying to express the unthinkable ancestor, has contributed to postulate him; he is “unthinkable” precisely because there is nothing to express. The contemporary artist and his/her audience finally know and feel that any attempt to express him can only be an act of mimicry, one that while echoing him, also mocks him. Nevertheless, while denouncing that the unthinkable ancestor is yet another human construction, “Ghost Trio” postulates him once again, as ...perhaps ... “...at this place, at this moment of time...” ... still ... “...personally needed”...16

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett L’Innommable, 1952, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. En attendant Godot, 1952, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Waiting for Godot, 1956, Faber and Faber, London 1967. The Unnamable, 1958, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, 1959, Pan Books, London 1979, pp. 265-382. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), 1959, Pan Books, London 1979. “Ghost Trio”, 1976, in The Collected Shorter Plays, 1984, Faber and Faber, London & Boston, pp. 405-414. Quad et autres pièces pour la television, 1992, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, trans. Edith Fournier. The Collected Shorter Plays, 1984, Faber and Faber, London & Boston. 16

Waiting for Godot, p. 79.



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Criticism Baker, Phil, 1995, “Ghost Stories: Beckett and the Literature of Introjection”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, V, 1995, pp. 39-66. Beer, Ann, 1994, “Beckett’s Bilingualism”, in John Pilling (editor), 1994, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 209-221. Ben-Zvi, Linda (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts, Assaph Books, Tel Aviv. Idem, 1985, “Samuel Beckett’s Media Plays”, in Modern Drama, XXVIII, March 1985, 1, pp. 22-37. Brater, Enoch (editor), 1986, Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford. Idem, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford. Bryden, Mary (editor), 1998, Samuel Beckett and Music, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bryden, Mary, Julian Garforth, and Peter Mills, 1998, Beckett at Reading. Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at The University of Reading, Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International Foundation, Reading. Calder, John, 1977, “Review”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, II, 1977, pp. 117-119. Connor, Steven, 1988, Samuel Beckett. Repetition, Theory and Text, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Deleuze, Gilles, 1992, “L’Épuisé”, in Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres pièces pour la television, cit., pp. 55-106. Fletcher, Beryl S., John Fletcher, Barry Smith, and Walter Bachem, 1978, A Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, Faber and Faber, London & Boston. Friedman, Alan W., Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer (editors), 1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park & London. Fusella, Patrizia, 2002, “Samuel Beckett’s Pas Moi / Not I: Pas Traduction, Not Creation”, in Textus, XV, 2002, pp. 121-144. Gidal, Peter, 1979, “Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio”, in Artforum, XVII, 1979, pp. 53-57. Gontarski, Stanley E., 1985, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Gordon, David J., 1996, “Au Contraire: The Question of Beckett’s Bilingual Text”, in Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (editors),


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1996, Beckett On and On..., Associated University Presses, London, pp. 164-177. Herren, Graley, 1998, “Unfamiliar Chambers: Power and Pattern in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, VIII, 1998, 1, pp. 73-100. Idem, 2001, “Ghost Duet, or Krapp’s First Videotape”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000), XI, 2001, pp. 159-166. Idem, 2007, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Homan, Sidney, 1992, Filming Beckett’s TV Plays, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg & Philadelphia. Jackson, Rosemary, 1981, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, London & New York 2000. Kalb, Jonathan, 1994, “The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays, and Film”, in Pilling (editor), 1994, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, cit., pp. 124-144. Knowlson, James, 1986, “Ghost Trio / Geister Trio”, in Brater (editor), 1986, Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context cit., pp. 193-207. Idem, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London 1997. Laws, Catherine, 2003, “Beethoven’s Haunting of Beckett’s Ghost Trio”, in Ben-Zvi (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett cit., pp. 197213. Maier, Michael, 2001, “Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio (Part 1)”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000), cit., pp. 267-278. Idem, 2002, “Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio (Part 2)”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Pastiches, Parodies & Other Imitations), XII, 2002, pp. 313-320. McMullan, Anna, 1997, “Versions of Embodiment / Visions of the Body in Beckett’s ...but the clouds...”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines / L’œuvre carrefour / L’œuvre limite), VI, 1997, pp. 353-364. Oppenheim, Lois (editor), 1999, Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York & London. Oppenheim, Lois, and Marius Buning (editors), 1996, Beckett On and On..., Associated University Presses, London. Pilling, John (editor), 1994, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.



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Prieto, Eric, 2002, “Caves: Technology and the Total Artwork in Reich’s The Cave and Beckett’s Ghost Trio”, in Mosaic, XXXV, March 2002, 1, pp. 197-213. Védrenne, Véronique, 2001, “Images beckettiennes: de la mise en scène du corps à l’effacement du sujet dans Trio du fantôme”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000), cit., pp. 331-338. Worth, Katharine, 1986, “Beckett’s Auditors: Not I to Ohio Impromptu”, in Brater (editor), 1986, Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context cit., pp. 168-192. Idem, 1999, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre. Life Journeys, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2001. Wulf, Catharina, 1994, “At the Crossroads of Desire and Creativity. A Critical Approach of Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays. Ghost Trio, ...but the clouds...and Nacht und Träume”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Intertexts in Beckett’s Work / Intertextes de l’œuvre de Beckett), III, 1994, pp. 57-65.

Other works cited Deleuze, Gilles, 1968, Différence et répétition, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris (Difference and Repetition, Athlone Press, London 1994, trans. Paul Patton). Derrida, Jacques, 1967, L’Ecriture et la différence, Éditions du Seuil, Paris (Writing and Difference, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1978, trans. Alan Bass). Freud, Sigmund, 1919, “Das Unheimliche” [“The Uncanny”, in James Strachey and Anna Freud (editors), 1955, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, pp. 219-252]. Kennedy, Michael, 1980, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, Oxford University Press, London, New York & Toronto. Strachey, James, and Anna Freud (editors), 1955, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London.



B. Performances



Redirecting Beckett* Stanley E. Gontarski

The centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth in 2006 sparked unprecedented world-wide celebrations, particularly of Beckett’s theater, and were fully the measure of his international reputation and popularity. Witness the opening of Marjorie Perloff’s presidential address to the Modern Language Association in December of 2006, a year that has come to be called the year of Beckett: This year marks the centennial of Samuel Beckett’s birth, and the celebrations around the world have been a wonder to behold. From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa (where Beckett did not permit his plays to be performed until Apartheid was ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University in Tallahassee to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre in London to the Pompidou Center in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurich to Aix-en-Provence and Lille, from St. Petersburg to Madrid to Tel Aviv, and of course most notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett’s Year. Most of the festivals have included not only performances of the plays, but lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions, and manuscript displays. PARIS BECKETT 2006, for example, co-sponsored by the French government and New York University’s Center for French Civilization and Culture, has featured productions of Beckett’s entire dramatic oeuvre, mounted in theatres large and small all over Paris, lectures by such major figures as the novelists-theorists Philippe Sollers and Hélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and Israel Horovitz, and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 the Pompidou Center will host a major exhibition of and on Beckett’s work. [...] Who, indeed, more global an artist than Beckett? (Perloff 2007, p. 652) *

For the images relative to this essay see figures 1 to 8.


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Yet the amount of attention Beckett’s work received in 2006 raised many, especially long-term, questions about Beckett’s art for the 21st century. For some, such apparent adulation of an experimental theatre artist suggests the blunting of Beckett’s avant-garde edge, the taming, domestication, and even gentrification of his work as he is accepted and celebrated by the broad middle class as a “classic” playwright, studied in schools and listed among required texts. Such acceptance raises questions, whether or not anything is lost through such popularization of the avant-garde, and if some essential ingredients of Beckett’s art are lost in the process of mass appeal, are they retrievable; that is, is the avant-garde edge of Beckett’s work recoverable? In the following argument I explore how certain artists like Brazilians Fernando and Adriano Guimarães, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, even one-time Beckett apostate JoAnne Akalaitis, and Christopher McElroen, who brought his Classic Theater of Harlem’s production of Waiting for Godot to the streets of a still-devastated New Orleans 9th Ward, are redirecting Beckett’s work toward its avant-garde roots and thereby revitalizing a theatrical tradition that might otherwise be stuck in post-World War II France and Europe. It is a redirection designed to avoid productions that might be considered Xerox copies of previous productions, even as the latter are those most easily sanctioned by the Beckett Estate. While some might (and have) argued that such recovery damages the work’s and so the author’s reputation since it entails some rethinking of the Beckettian text, such a protectionist position is rejected here. I will suggest, instead, that recovery of Beckett’s avant-gardism is not only revitalizing to a theater now more than 50 years old but such redirection toward the avant-garde does not necessarily conflict with the acceptance of Beckett as a “classic,” or even, by now, a canonical playwright, and so demonstrates the contemporary vitality of Beckett’s work. Artists like the Brazilian brothers Fernando and Adriano Guimarães, and their collaborators, JoAnne Akalaitis, and filmmaker Atom Egoyan, for instance, do not so much “direct” Beckett’s work as re-direct it to its imagistic roots and thus restore its political edge. Avant-garde Beckett, I propose, is a Beckett for the 21st century.


S.E. Gontarski. Redirecting Beckett

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Atom Egoyan: “Steenbeckett” One dynamic possibility for the future of performance vitality is that offered by Egyptian born Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan, who directed a traditional production of Krapp’s Last Tape, starring John Hurt, for the Beckett on Film series, the ambitious attempt in 2000 to record the Gate Theatre’s much toured and touted Beckett festival during which all 19 stage plays were performed. Egoyan subsequently used the completed film as a centerpiece for his own personal artwork, an installation at London’s Museum of Mankind that folded continuous showings of the film, in altered, antithetical perspectives, into a larger, environmental exhibit of recorded memory that Egoyan called “Steenbeckett”. Egoyan’s work – like Beckett’s – focused on memory, its preservation, distortion and retrieval. Participants entered the now all but deserted Museum of Mankind, walked through a darkened warren of passages, up stairs, through tunnels, past discarded typewriters, phonographs, record disks, “spoooools” of magnetic audio tape, heaps of deteriorating photographs, the detritus of memory, to a makeshift, asymmetrical screening room where Egoyan’s commercial version of Krapp’s Last Tape was screened for a restricted audience, 10-12 at a time, sitting on a makeshift bench no more than six feet from the film projected massively on the opposite wall so that the image was grainy and fuzzy. The film’s images dwarfed the spectators, who had discovered or stumbled upon what seemed another discarded cultural object. From there spectators wandered to another room, some not waiting for the film to end, others sitting through it more than once waiting for some sign to move on. In the next room the audience entered the environment of the film itself, 2,000 feet of which, according to the program, ran continuously and noisily along rollers, up and down, back and forth, in and around the room, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, over and over again, surrounding, embracing, engulfing, overwhelming the spectator, and finally it passed through an antique Steenbeck editing table at the far end of the room, where the image was visible in miniature, an image seen through the wrong end of a telescope, seen through the cat’s cradle of noisily rolling film. Obsolete, the Steenbeck editing machine was the equipment that Egoyan used to edit his film of


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Krapp’s Last Tape. The analogue device had all the look of a clumsy antique, the look Egoyan was apparently striving for in his film. As important as the film, both its materiality and the giganticized and miniaturized images it provided, was the material editing machine itself, central to Egoyan’s vision of Krapp’s Last Tape and the centerpiece of his installation, as the material tape recorder had been to Beckett’s. The play Krapp’s Last Tape was thus another deteriorating relic, the commercial film, something like authentic Beckett, now itself a fading museum piece, Beckett frozen in time, but folded into Egoyan’s work and so simultaneously a stunningly fresh work of art. When Egoyan turned his attention to Beckett again, he went a bit more high tech with a staging of “Eh Joe”. For the centenary year, the irrepressible Michael Colgan prevailed upon the Beckett Estate to allow the staging of the teleplay, and Colgan in turn prevailed on Canadian film director Atom Egoyan to re-direct Beckett. With tour de force performances by Michael Gambon, who had played Hamm in the Beckett on Film version of Endgame and subsequently reprised the role on the London stage, and Penelope Wilton as Voice, the production was certainly a (if not the) high point of the Beckett centenary celebrations at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in April of 2006. The Gate Theatre production subsequently moved to London’s west-end for 30 performances, from 27 June to 15 July 2006. Egoyan’s adaptation (or transformation) was potentially binary, a hybrid production of stage and “live” video, the division of the stage front to back rather than the usual side by side division of other stagings of the teleplay. The media were thus less divided than layered, one superimposed on the other, creating a palimpsest of Joes. He was from the first if unnoticeably separated from the audience by a barely perceptible scrim (itself an echo or metaphor for the TV screen) that then bore his projected image once Voice began her assault. Egoyan’s conception, with its hybrid technology of stagecraft, television, and film, allowed for the seamless translation of the television work to the stage. In both of Beckett’s own productions the nine camera moves towards Joe, the physical image of the increasing intensity of Voice’s assault and the confirmation of the interiority of the conflict, were conspicuous, almost clumsy, as the camera physically advanced on



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Joe, but Egoyan’s use of imperceptible, computerized zoom added dimensions of mystery to the play. Something apparitional or ghostly was taking its course, live on stage. Camera movement was imperceptible, but at some point audience members realized that they were suddenly watching a more intense close-up of Joe, they were almost inside his head; what was full-bodied Joe on his bed, face in ¾ profile, had become just face. One might complain that Egoyan staged his play as if Beckett had never directed (and revised) the work himself, and so Egoyan worked with a text that Beckett himself found wanting. As Beckett elaborated in detail and repeatedly to his American director Alan Schneider on 7 April 1966, to the final hold of the image of Joe he added a smile, thus changing not only the closing visual image of the play, but its import as well: “I asked in London and Stuttgart for a smile at the end (oh not a real smile). He ‘wins’ again. So ignore the direction ‘Image fades, voice as before.’ Face fully present till last ‘Eh Joe.’ Then smile and slow fade” (in Harmon 1998, p. 202). As a result of his stagings, Beckett also simplified the presentation of the ending voice-over as well: “I decided that the underlining of certain words at the end was very difficult for the speaker and not good. So I simplified second last paragraph” (emphasis added, p. 201). He also outlined a change that could only grow out of the practicalities of staging: “In London the only sound apart from the voice was that of curtains and opening and closing at window, door and cupboard. But in Stuttgart we added sound of steps as he moves around and made it interesting by his having one sock half off and one sock and slipper. Sock half off because at opening he was taking it off to go to bed when interrupted by sudden idea or sudden feeling that he hears a sound and had better make a last round to make sure all is well” (p. 202). For Beckett the key to the ending, discovered and shaped in production, was Joe’s successful throttling of Voice: “Smile at very end when voice stops (having done it again)” (p. 198). Egoyan’s production was stunning, carried by Gambon’s magnificently aging face and his long, pianist’s fingers, but it also suggests that much is left to discover in this new stage work. Even so, visually Egoyan’s production suggested something of the avant-garde power of this (and so Beckett’s) work.


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JoAnne Akalaitis JoAnne Akalaitis was all but banished to the deep cold for liberties she took with her 1984 production of Endgame at Harvard University’s American Repertory Theatre (ART). She seemed to redeem herself some 24 years later with an evening of shorts, a production bound to generate attention in New York as much for the featured actor as either its director or playwright. Celebrated, revered, lionized dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was featured in all 4 “shorts,” which opened in December of 2007 at the New York Theatre Workshop. The grouping of four included the two mimes, “Act Without Words I” and “II”, “Rough for Theatre II”, and a staging of “Eh Joe”, a teleplay, certainly after Egoyan, now part of the accepted stage repertory. The two “Acts Without Words” constitute an inevitable pairing, and Akalaitis took advantage of Baryshnikov’s angelic grace, but the pairing of the second half of the evening highlighted the fact that the interrelationship of the shorts cannot or should not be arbitrary. On stage, “Eh Joe” is one of Beckett’s short plays that qualifies, alone, as a full evening’s theater, as was evident in Egoyan’s Dublin production. In Dublin nothing preceded it; nothing followed it. Akalaitis presented her version as part of a cluster, of a quartet, and tied them together with a consistent set, but the decision to cover the stage in some six inches of sand made sense only for the first of the quartet. As New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley noted of Baryshnikov’s performance, “for the rest of the show you can feel good old physics tugging at feet that once took flight like no one else’s” (19 December 2007). But more than gravity and age were at work on Baryshnikov who was dancing on the beach, and superb as it was for “Act Without Words I”, the sand made stage movement all but impossible for the three subsequent plays, and perhaps this was part of Akalaitis’s point. The wheelchair of “Rough for Theatre II”, for example, was immobilized and so suggested and perhaps even echoed, at least visually, the immobility of Happy Days, and Joe could not move about his room to shut out all prying, perceiving eyes. But Akalaitis made something of a virtue of what appeared to be a handicap. Instead, the physical movement of “Eh Joe” was filmed and projected as a multiple set of images in a variety of sizes on a variety of screens.



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In fact, this hybrid genre, part live theatre and part “live” film, a technique Egoyan had used for his “Eh Joe” as well, was central to all four plays, used not only to great effect individually but to create a continuity among the plays based on multiple projected images and hence multiple simultaneous perspectives. The most questionable directorial decision may have been to create a bodily presence for Joe’s voice, played by the spot-lit Karen Kandel. That, along with the addition of music by Philip Glass (a feature of all of Akalaitis’s Beckett work), is the sort of decision that caused such a fuss in her 1984 Endgame. Conceptual blunders apart, Akalaitis finally transformed an unlikely collection of shorts into a unified, kaleidoscopic evening that overcame (for the most part) the self imposed handicap of sand-enhanced gravity. As Brantley perceptively noted, “This grounding of a winged dancer poignantly captures the harsh laws of Beckett’s universe, where Mother Earth never stops pulling people toward the grave”. But the Akalaitis quartet of shorts were about more than Baryshnikov. They suggested her redirecting Beckett toward the avant-garde with production more or less traditional and yet thoroughly new. Adriano and Fernando Guimarães The treatment of Beckett’s text or a performance as a found object, as it appears in Egoyan’s “Steenbeckett”, is central to the aesthetics of the Guimarães brothers, visual artists based in Brasilia, Brazil and founders of Companhia Teatral Gabinete 3; they have maintained an on-going and evolving dialogue with Beckett’s work since their first show, Felizes para Sempre (literally, “Happily ever after”), which included various versions of Felizes para Sempre (Happy Days), Ir e Vir (Come and Go), Jogo (“Play”), and Balanço (“Rockaby”), and which ran, in a variety of venues, almost all in Brazil, from 1998-2001. Each of those works was usually preceded and then interspersed with works of their own, which the brothers Guimarães call performance, usually an installation which embodies a variation of a theme depicted in the Beckett play. Their approach then is to combine theater, performance art, music, painting, sculpture, and literature into a hybrid, composite art form, and to collaborate with major contemporary


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artists of their day, again mostly all Brazilian. For Felizes para Sempre (“Happily ever after” or Happy Days), for example, they worked with plastic artist Ana Miguel, who designed costumes and stage props, with photographer and lighting designer Dalton Camargos, with museum curator Marília Panitz, and with guest actresses Vera Holtz as Winnie in Felizes para Sempre and first Nathalia Thimberg and then Vera Holtz as “Mulher,” the “Woman in chair,” W, in Balanço (“Rockaby”). A second installment of their work “We were not long [...] together,” which ran in a variety of configurations during 2002-2003, was built around Respiração (“Breath”) and featured four other pieces: Catástrofe (“Catastrophe”), Ato sem Palavras II (“Act Without Words II”), O que Onde (“What Where”), and Jogo (“Play”). The third incarnation of their dialogue with Beckett was built around Todos Os Que Caem (All That Fall), again interspersed with their own videos, photographs, objects, and performance pieces, and featuring as well Balanço (“Rockaby”), Eu Não (Not I), Rascunho para Teatro II (“Rough for Theatre II”), and Un pedaço de monólogo (“A Piece of Monologue”). These three anthologies performed over a six-year period constituted a multi media trilogy of spectacles in a variety of manifestations that connected Beckett’s theater works to larger public spaces beyond the confines of theater. It was thus in conception and execution the very opposite of the Beckett on Film project taking shape at almost the exact same time in Europe. No two manifestations of the irmãos Guimarães project were ever the same. Actors often switched roles in different manifestations of the play in order to prevent performances from getting stale or automatic. Theirs is an art that resists predictability and resists being reduced to homage, the goal of the film project, presumably. As art critic Vitória Daniela Bousso has written, “The transition between the visual and the theatrical constitutes a hybrid space, a territory of complexities ruled by experimentation in the work of Adriano and Fernando Guimarães” (Bousso 2004, p. 97). As their work focuses on the human body, they engage directly the cultural games of regulation and control that are played upon it. For the Guimarães brothers, the body is less ancillary than it might generally be in Beckett’s work, say, and instead becomes the seat of the struggle of power relationships – a theme which, if



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not overtly expressed, certainly is a subtext of Beckett’s work. According to art historian Nicholas Oliveira, “The body interprets or plays the part of a character but simultaneously represents itself, affirms itself as a recipient of the unconscious, in other words, the body interprets that role, in the installation, that gives access to what is unstable and ephemeral. The body’s unpredictable action always offers a condition for rupture or destabilization in the postmodern work” (Oliveira cited in Bousso 2004, p. 98). Here, in both the work of Beckett and that of Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, the body functions more like a machine than as the seat of sentiment, thought, or even being itself – theirs is thus in many senses a thoughtless theatre, as is Beckett’s. Beckett’s works are thus treated as ready-mades by the Guimarães brothers, objects to be placed within their own constructed environments, and hence Beckett is in no need of serious revision or renovation in such recovery of Beckett’s avant-gardism since they are already – preceded and followed, as they are, by images of the Guimarães brothers’ re-imagining of Beckett – afterimages of Beckett’s own texts. They are thus less critiques of Beckett’s work, than specters or ghosts of it. It is wholly a redirection of Beckett’s work simultaneously back to its avant-garde roots and forward to a new century of performance art. What is thereby elicited from Beckett is as much the result of their installed environments as it is an intrinsic part of Beckett’s work itself, and thus Beckett’s works move, unadulterated, into a new poetic space, become part of a new poetics. The irmãos Guimarães thus create something like their own Beckett archive, Beckett in or as a cabinet of curiosities, a composite Beckett made up of cultural shards. Their antiphonal use of Beckett’s works and words is a case in point. Their treatment of or variations on Respiração, the play “Breath”, for example, is presented as a conjunction with several installations that they call Breath+ (Breath plus, or images after Beckett, or Beckett afterimages). Although performed along with other, better known plays, the lowly “Breath” here takes on the role of a featured work, one version of which features a live, naked actor in a plexiglass box over which an actor or actress lectures on the significance of respiration. The box begins to cloud with carbon dioxide as the human is reduced to the machinery of respiration, man or


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woman reduced to metabolic function; the actor or actress begins to gasp for breath and to pound on the inside of the box in desperation. The lecturer (Vera Holtz in the production that I saw) is thus oblivious to the human suffering as she attends solely to the job at hand, her lecture – to outline the details of the process of respiration – and thus is “Breath” powerfully dramatized without altering Beckett’s text at all. Corollary productions, other manifestations of Breath+, feature an actor (or actors) submerged in water who respond/responds to an authoritarian and apparently arbitrary bell that commands and controls his (or their) submersions and re-surfacings, hence it controls his (or their) breath. In another version of Breath+, often used as an entr’acte between the plays themselves, actors immerse their heads in buckets of water at the bell’s command and are released to respire only on the command of the bell. In another manifestation, a single clothed actor is fully submerged in a massive fish tank, the duration of his submersion regulated by the bell. In a third image, a submerged actor, again fully clothed underwater, is grotesquely contorted in a bathtub and viewed from above. In each case the actor’s breathing appears subject to or regulated by an arbitrary, external force, in this case a bell or buzzer, but it might as well be the whistle or prod in the two “Acts Without Words”, or the piercing bell in Happy Days, works which the brothers have staged as part of their ongoing dialogue with Beckett. Much of their work then spills out of the theater into gallery space (or out of the gallery back into the theater), Breath+ as dramatic prelude, entre-acts, and postlude. The extension of the playing space into a gallery, courtyard, or the city street emphasizes the idea of broadly expressive space, something other than theatrical space used as a backdrop. Another series of performances is called Luz– (Light–, Light less or Light minus) and Luz+. Here power (much of it in the form of electrical power) is transferred to a participating audience where spectators turn light switches on and off to control the pace of action in performance, and so the body of the audience, or the audience’s bodies, are folded into the performance making the audience complicitous in the power struggle. The actors perform frantically, running or jumping in place often to the point of exhaustion, as long as the light is on, cease exertion when light is off, and so audience members autocratically determine the duration of exertion.



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Double Exposure is an installation composed of four environments with the words of several of Beckett’s short plays projected or physically pasted onto walls, windows, and transparent boxes. Beckett’s words themselves, as material objects, are presented within boxes, as cabinets of curiosities, the 18th century forerunner of what we today call museums: Along the whole length of the gallery’s entrance glass doors there are texts by Samuel Beckett. Upon entering, the spectator finds himself in the first environment: an almost dark rectangular foreroom, outlined by glass panes, on which fragments from texts have also been written. At each end of this room there are life-size pictures of the character that appears throughout the exhibition. The photographs are almost identical, but they reveal the character under the action of two contrasting lights: one that is excessively bright and one that is too dark. Both make its image evanescent. (Adriano and Fernando Guimarães 2004, p. 103)

That is, what we see apparently life-like is decidedly an image (as Henri Bergson has been reminding us at least since his Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory]), or afterimage, its appearance or disappearance regulated by light which in turn is regulated by (electrical) power, which in turn is regulated (apparently) by spectators. It is light which makes the image possible, on stage and in the body. If Breath+ emphasized the materiality and machinery of the body, Light– foregrounded its ethereality. The focus is thus on the fact that all perception is imagistic if not imag(e)inary. The second environment is a house, a rectangular prism made of exposed brick along which Beckett’s texts continue. Along its outer walls spectators can look through peepholes and see real time-videos (again images) of the gallery from a variety of angles through a set of security cameras. The interior lined with dark panes is the third environment. Here the audience watches a black and white video of a character closing windows to stop a flood of light entering that threatens to extinguish his own image since he is only a projection of light. When vapor lamps are turned on in the room the character’s image disappears and the spectator encounters his or her own reflection on the walls. They (subjects) have thus replaced what appeared to be the “character” (object).


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The fourth environment consists of a glass scale model of the house sitting on a table. Projected images are then reflected on the model’s glass and on the room’s walls. In another section of the installation the audience is encouraged to deposit its own objects, usually, but not exclusively, photographs, mementos of sentimental value – but of course only to themselves. The audience moves through the installation, lingers, examines, reads those images on the walls or Beckett’s words on or in boxes and along the walls, words given a materiality when some whole works are written out in letters carved from wooden blocks. The installation is thus a preface or postlude to the performances of those plays that are on display, so that the play itself, once performed is already a repetition, an echo, a double, an afterimage. All the Beckett projects of the irmãos Guimarães came together with performances in February and March of 2008 at Espaço Cultural Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro, their fourth major manifestation of (primarily) Beckett’s short works. The season, which marked the tenth anniversary of the irmãos Guimarães’s working with (or through) Beckett, was built around three sets of performances each built around and so foregrounding Beckett’s slightest play, Respiração (“Breath”). Over a two month period at Oi Futuro they performed three sets of Beckett’s works under the general umbrella title Resta Puoco a Dizer: Peças Curtas de Beckett por Adriano e Fernando Guimarães (Little Is Left to Tell: Beckett’s Short Pieces by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães). To their earlier works they added Improviso de Ohio (“Ohio Impromptu”), the opening words of which, “Little is left to tell”, served as their overall title with noted Brazilian actor and director Aderbal Freire-Filho (founder of Grêmio Dramático Brasileiro in 1973) as Leitor (Reader) and company stalwart William Ferreira as Ouvinte (Listener). (Aderbal Freire-Filho was simultaneously directing Hamlet with Wagner Moura as the Danish slacker for a June opening. Excerpts and discussions of his Hamlet production are available on YouTube.) The future of Beckett performance Amid the restrictions on performance imposed by the Beckett Estate, its attempts to restrain if not tame or subdue the recalcitrant



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artwork by its insistence on faithful and accurate performances, a faith and accuracy no one seems able to define, a resilient and imaginative set of theatrical directors and artists continues to redirect Beckett by developing a third way, through radical acts of the imagination, by folding the authorized, legally owned object, like a ready-made in a gallery, into another context, like storefronts, disused or abandoned buildings, or museum installations. They thus assert the heterogeneity of Beckettian performance without violating the dictates of an Estate-issued performance contract. “Here, precisely, is the Beckett that will hold the stage in the new century”, argues Fintan O’Toole discussing the issue of fidelity to Beckett’s texts in another context; he notes significantly that “The merely efficient translations of what are thought to be the great man’s intentions will fade into dull obscurity. The productions that allow their audiences to feel the spirit of suffering and survival in our times will enter the afterlife of endless re-imaginings” (O’Toole 2000, p. 45). Such redirection as I am suggesting is evident in the all African-American cast of the Classic Theater of Harlem’s 2007 production of Waiting for Godot, directed by Christopher McElroen, featuring New Orleans native Wendell Pierce and J. Kyle Manzay, first on a simulated New Orleans rooftop in their Harlem theater in 2006 and then in November 2007 directly on the streets of the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, the area most devastated by hurricane Katrina – free productions on November 2-3 and 9-10, although the “free” production reportedly cost some $200,000 to stage. Writing for the Times-Picayune on 9 November 2007, David Cuthbert noted that “The time has long since passed when Godot was regarded as ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’, as Brooks Atkinson famously described it in his 1956 New York Times review of its Broadway debut”. Cuthbert went on to note, in lines reminiscent of the San Quentin Godot of 1957: “Christopher McElroen’s staging is the most accessible, the funniest, the most moving and meaningful Godot we are ever likely to see. It is ours, it speaks directly to us, in lines and situations that have always been there, but which now take on a new resonance”. Productions like that of the Classic Theater of Harlem, the Guimarães brothers, Atom Egoyan, JoAnne Akalaitis, among others, offer one approach to the re-imaginings necessary to a liv-


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ing art. The alternative is that Beckett’s work is often presented as what it may indeed have already become, a curio in a box of curiosities, a museum piece preserved, without deviation (except perhaps for deterioration), exactly as written (at least in some hypothesized version), but, even so, as I have been suggesting, even such a presentation could be re-imagined and altered radically in a new environment, an alternative space. If the Beckettian stage space has become a battleground of political and legal contention, the squabble over property rights more than artistic integrity or aesthetic values, those directors who have taken their cue from Beckett’s own commitment to the avant-garde, his comments on theater, and the developing aesthetics of his late plays have found their freedom of expression, a liberation of their imaginations, by abandoning or spilling out of that contested space we call theater into a more expressive one. They have developed a hybrid art, sweeping Beckett along with them, moving it to where he always thought it belonged, among the plastic arts, and accomplishing a redirection of Beckett’s theater for a new century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works cited Bousso, Vitória Daniela, 2004, “Interstice Zone”, in Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, 2004, “Todos Os Que Caem” / “All That Fall”, Catalogue published by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (April 2004), pp. 97-99. Cuthbert, David, 2007, “Godot is Great”, in Living / Lagniappe, in The Times-Picayune, 6 November 2007. Guimarães, Adriano and Fernando, 2001, Happily ever After / Felizes para Sempre, Catalogue published by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (January 2001). Idem, 2004a, “Todos Os Que Caem” / “All That Fall”, Catalogue published by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (April 2004). Idem, 2004b, “Double Exposure: Multimedia Installations Composed of Four Environments”, in Guimarães, 2004, “Todos Os Que Caem” cit., pp. 103-105. Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-



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spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard UP, Cambridge (Massachusetts). Oliveira, Nicholas, 2001, “The Space of Memory: Installation Plays by the Brothers Guimarães”, in Guimarães, 2001, Happily ever After cit., pp. 11-17. O’Toole, Fintan, 2000, “Game Without End”, in The New York Review of Books, 20 January 2000, pp. 43-45. Perloff, Marjorie, 2007, “Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change”, in PMLA, 122:3 (2007), pp. 652-662.


Cecchi’s Endgame, and the Question of Fidelity* Daniela Guardamagna

My subject is the Italian production of Endgame directed in 1995 by Carlo Cecchi. This was not only a memorable production in itself, but it raised a question about fidelity to the text in theatrical realisations, which is the main topic of this paper. First of all, some details about the production. Cecchi himself played Hamm; Valerio Binasco1 was Clov; two young actors, Daniela Piperno and Arturo Cirillo, played Nell and Nagg. Scenery and costumes were designed by Tina Maselli. The production was filmed by Mario Martone for RAI (Palcoscenico) and broadcast on May 18, 1996. I derive my personal poetics of musts and prohibitions about Beckett on stage from one of his own best productions, for me an illumination, namely the Schiller-Theater Godot that I was lucky enough to see in Dublin in 1976. Beside relying on the many critical analyses on Beckett’s mises en scène (from Cohn 1980 to McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, Kalb 1989 [1991], and Gontarski 1992), I will also bear in mind some of the materials Walter Asmus was so kind as to let me have in the Eighties. 1. The director as author The problem of a director staging Beckett today, and already from the Eighties (decades after the text was performed to perfection by the first Beckett directors and in Beckett’s own productions), For the images relative to this essay see figures 9 to 12. Binasco is still working with Cecchi (interpreting Tartuffe in 2008-2009), but also as a director; he has recently acted in some important films, such as Ozpetek’s Un giorno perfetto or Cristina Comencini’s La bestia nel cuore. *

1


D. Guardamagna. Cecchi’s “Endgame”

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is the difficult balance between respect for the text – without which Beckett’s text is nullified – and the necessity of finding a new way, the director’s personal way: being free to invent something is always necessary if a performance is not to be simply an illustration of what has already been found. It is true, as T.S. Eliot writes, that “[t]here is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again” (East Coker, V.186-1872); but all contemporary directors feel their production must somehow be new. Schneider stated that it is the first production of a living author that must be thoroughly faithful (quoted in Cohn 1980, p. 195); in Italy, in particular, we see the director (and the director sees himself) as an author, an author who must create something new. Of course, as a director or co-director Beckett was faithful to the ideas of Beckett the dramatist. But in 1976, when the curtain opened on his Godot, one immediately realized that what was on the stage did not entirely match what was stated on the page. For instance, Beckett had taken advantage of the startling visual difference of the two actors – very lean and tall Stefan Wigger as Vladimir, plump and short Horst Bollmann as Estragon – to enhance some of the comic elements of the text. Wigger wore short trousers, and his long legs and huge feet protruded from them in a farcical way, while Estragon’s sleeves were inordinately long. The symmetry between the two characters and between elements on stage was also enhanced: the tree also had a part to play, first of all by creating a kind of progression in height from Bollmann to Wigger to the tree itself; then Wigger had been instructed by Beckett to move his bony figure from time to time in a kind of imitation of the shape of the tree, one shoulder higher than the other, creating a further symmetry that echoed the stated symmetries of the text, but highlighting them in an unforeseen way. Ironically, directors too much under Beckett’s shadow have been less adventurous. I am compelled by critical objectivity and by the aims of this paper to respond ungenerously to Walter As2 Thomas S. Eliot, 1940, East Coker, in Four Quartets, 1936-1942 (La terra desolata. Quattro quartetti, bilingual edition, Feltrinelli, Milano 1995, 2006, trans. Angelo Tonelli).


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mus’s kindness, noticing that when he staged his own English version of Godot for BBC he was forced by awe and by his fidelity to Beckett to create a kind of repetition of Beckett’s own Godot. It is a good production, philologically perfect, sometimes enlightening. But it is not new in the sense I mentioned. 2. Fidelity to Beckett’s text It is probably worth mentioning that the question of fidelity in Beckett’s case is intrinsically different from, say, that of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, stage directions are almost entirely confined to practical matters of staging, or are a somewhat shorthanded version of an action: hautboys, exit [Antigonus] pursued by a bear, and the like. In Beckett, as any Beckettian knows, there is a precise dialectic between text and stage directions, between what is said and what must be seen (let me quote the most obvious example of all: “Let’s go. Yes, let’s go. They do not move.”). Therefore, though even Beckett texts (as Gontarski and Caretti show in this volume) can profit from a reworking that does not treat them as mummified classics, if a director decided (for example) to make Didi and Gogo move after this exchange a major distortion of the text would take place. This is only the most obvious example among the many I could make concerning the rhythms, the musical quality of the text, its necessity of being treated more like a musical score than a text proper. But, because of point 1, I think that even when staging an author as exacting and as precise as Beckett (in his stage directions, indications of pauses, silences and so on) a director must ‘create’ something, must ‘invent’ something new. I think Cecchi found the way both to be faithful to the text and to find this something, which in turn adds to our understanding of the text. 3. Cecchi’s production Very discreetly, Cecchi strengthened the unrealistic aspects of the play. The staging respected Beckett’s indications (the room, the wheelchair in the centre, the stancher or stauncher, the whistle,



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the dustbins, the red and white faces of the original stage direction), but the two actors who played Nell and Nagg were much younger than Cecchi, even though made up to look old; he declared this was done to add to the non-naturalistic aspect of the play (see Cecchi in Cherchi 1995, 11th page). Then, he heightened the metatheatrical effects. The room was grey, and had vague shapes of traditional scenery drawn on the walls, but there, on the wall, big wide strokes of blue paint were to be seen – an unfinished coat of blue on grey – as if the postatomic bunker of the play pertained also to the character of an half-completed rehearsal room. The acting was subtly musical, and respected the character of a score: a lot of work had obviously been done on the precision of tones, on the balance of emphasis and bathos, in the repetitions and variations of the music. Clov / Binasco’s answers were totally devoid of emotion, save in the few moments when the text explicitly asks for irritation or anger, and, always in the same note, they overlapped Hamm’s statements and questions. Three aspects of the production were particularly noteworthy: 3.1. the use of an undertone of Neapolitan accent in Cecchi’s acting; 3.2. the emphasis on metatheatrical elements; 3.3. the use of various alienation effects in Cecchi’s acting, and the one he asked especially of Binasco / Clov, bringing to the fore important elements of meaning of the play. 3.1. The use of the Neapolitan undertone in Cecchi’s acting My father, Dante Guardamagna, who was a playwright and a television script-writer, used to say that Italian is a great language, but that as a theatrical language it is always finding its way, tentatively. As a theatrical language, he meant, Italian has no tradition comparable to the language of its poetry (the splendid literary language of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Leopardi and so on), or to the language which has evolved in other European theatrical traditions: with few exceptions – mainly modern ones, such as Pirandello – Italian playwrights have cultivated either a high verbal register divorced from everyday speech – I am thinking for example of Alfieri or Manzoni: tragedies in highly polished and not easily playable


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verse, written mostly to be read rather than heard – or dialect, to all intents and purposes a different language: the Paduan and Milanese dialects from Ruzante to Dario Fo, the Venetian of Goldoni, or the Neapolitan of Eduardo De Filippo. Many contemporary authors (Ruccello, Erba) still rely if not on dialect then on a kind of pastiche between dialect and the standard language. And of course many important novelists do the same: striking examples are the splendid mixture of dialects and high literary language in the novels of Carlo Emilio Gadda, or the very effective Italian-Sicilian of the thrillers by Andrea Camilleri. Cecchi translated Endgame into Italian with one eye on the English version and one on the French, which in itself is highly laudable, as Rossana M. Sebellin shows in her paper about translation in the present volume. But to make the Italian more ‘spoken’, to give it back the vitality of a language that both in English and in French counterpoints the scarcity of scenic effects and sustains the action, Cecchi added an undertone of Neapolitan, which surprisingly did not contrast at all with the totally indefinite nowhere of Beckett’s setting. Cecchi was born in Florence, but lived in Rome and Naples, and he created this distinctive ‘language’ to accommodate Beckett’s highly actable speech to Italian ears. (Branciaroli, in his recent Italian production of Endgame, 2007, gave a French accent to his Hamm: but in my opinion this invention remained superficial, and did not enhance the ‘playability’ of the Italian text.) 3.2. The emphasis on metatheatrical elements Cecchi, a man of the theatre, found in Endgame not only an illustration of the human impasse, but of the theatrical impasse of the 20th century: as he wrote in the programme (in Cherchi 1995, 10th page), “this play is a parody of the whole of western drama”. Here are Cecchi’s words in detail: Il teatro italiano, e qui alludo all’organizzazione del teatro italiano, è diventato, attraverso un progress negli anni, un work sempre più miserabile, corrotto, culturalmente corrotto, ripugnante da frequentare. Finale di partita mi pareva che potesse permettermi di non fare come se non fosse così, Finale di partita sarebbe stato anche, forse soprattutto, questa ripugnanza non nascosta, ma agita, jouée. (Carlo Cecchi in Cherchi 1995, 9th page).



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(Over the years the organization of Italian theatre has become more and more miserable, a corrupted, culturally corrupted, disgusting business. I thought that acting Endgame I could avoid pretending it was not so, Endgame would be to act, jouer, this disgust, instead of hiding it3.)

Metatheatrical elements occur, as we know, throughout the play: starting with the opening “Me to play”, including “This is what we call making an exit”, “An aside, ape! Did you never hear an aside before?” and Hamm’s “I’m warming up for my last soliloquy” – to cite only a few examples. In his production Cecchi called attention to them by means of slight changes of emphasis in the translation. The English version of Endgame is more strongly metatheatrical than the French, and the Italian translator Fruttero very often followed the French version, but when metatheatrical effects were in question Cecchi always reverted to the English one, often pushing it more strongly towards the foregrounding of the boredom, unpleasantness and unbearableness of this specific play, this specific evening. Here are a few examples. The following extracts give first the French original, then the English one, then the official Italian translation (Carlo Fruttero’s, in Finale di partita) and lastly Cecchi’s slight changes: Ça ne va pas vite. (Un temps.) Ce n’est pas l’heure de mon calmant? (Fin de partie, p. 26) This is slow work... [Pause.] Is it not time for my painkiller? (Endgame, p. 16) FRUTTERO: Le cose non vanno molto in fretta. [...] [= Things are rather slow...] (Finale di partita, p. 93) CECCHI: È una commedia lenta... [= This play is so slow...]4

All translations, if not otherwise stated, are mine. The emphasis in these quotations is mine, and is devised to show more clearly the transition from the original versions to Cecchi’s. The latter has not been published, and quotations are derived from the RAI recording of the production. 3 4


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Cecchi is quite faithful, but the emphasis is more strongly on the play itself. The same is true in the following: Hamm (avec violence). Mais tu as la lunette! Clov (s’arrêtant, avec violence). Mais non, je n’ai pas la lunette! Il sort. Hamm. C’est d’un triste. (p. 45) Hamm: [Violently.] But you have the glass! Clov: [Halting, violently.] No I haven’t the glass! [Exit Clov.] Hamm: This is deadly. (p. 25) FRUTTERO: Hamm: (con violenza) Ma ce l’hai, il cannocchiale! Clov: (fermandosi, con violenza) Ma no, non ce l’ho il cannocchiale! Esce. Hamm: È di un triste... (p. 102) [= This is so sad...] CECCHI: [...] Hamm: Com’è triste questa commedia! [= How sad this play is...]

As above, there is a stronger emphasis on the play itself. This is again true here: Hamm. Tu ne penses pas que ça a assez duré? Clov. Si. (Un temps.) Quoi? Hamm. Ce... cette... chose. Clov. Je l’ai toujours pensé. (Un temps.) Pas toi? Hamm (morne). Alors c’est une journée comme les autres. (pp. 63-64) Hamm: Do you not think this has gone on long enough? Clov: Yes! [Pause.] What? Hamm: This... this.. thing. Clov: I’ve always thought so. [Pause.] You not? Hamm: [gloomily] Then it’s a day like any other day. (p. 33) FRUTTERO: Hamm: Non pensi che sia durato abbastanza? Clov: Certo! (Pausa) Che cosa? Hamm: Questo... questa... cosa. Clov: L’ho sempre pensato. (Pausa) Tu no? Hamm: (spento) Allora è un giorno come gli altri. (p. 110)



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CECCHI: [...] Hamm: Allora è una sera come tutte le altre. [= Then it’s an evening like any other]

There is only a slight change, but the evening instead of the day is relevant because it implies the evening performance. Here is another metatheatrical element from the text: Je n’en ai plus pour longtemps avec cette histoire. (Un temps.) À moins d’introduire d’autres personages. (Un temps.) Mais où les trouver? (Un temps.) Où les chercher? (pp. 74-75) I’ll soon have finished with this story. [Pause.] Unless I bring in other characters. [Pause.] But where would I find them? [Pause.] Where would I look for them? (p. 37) FRUTTERO: Non ne avrò più per molto, con questa storia. (Pausa). A meno d’introdurre degli altri personaggi. (Pausa). Ma dove trovarli? (Pausa). Dove cercarli? (p. 115) CECCHI: Non ne avrò più per molto, con questa storia. (Pausa). Qua, se non si infilano altri personaggi... [...]

Cecchi’s is a fairly literal version of both originals (which on this occasion are rather similar to one another), as well as of Fruttero’s text: but the cut, and the gestures of the player to the room where the action takes place, transfer the comment from Hamm’s chronicle to the play itself and its unbearableness. And again: Clov. Aïeaïeaïe! Hamm. Encore des complications! [...] Pourvu que ça ne rebondisse pas! (p. 103) Clov: Bad luck to it! Hamm: More complications! [...] Not an underplot, I trust? (p. 49) FRUTTERO: Clov: Aiaiai! Hamm: Ancora complicazioni! [...] Non avremo mica degli sviluppi? [= No further developments, I hope?] (p. 127) CECCHI: Clov: Aiaiai! Hamm: Ancora complicazioni! Speriamo che non ci sia materiale


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per un secondo atto, per carità! [= Let’s hope there’s no material for a second act, for God’s sake!]

Instead of a generic term that could refer to the play or to a novel (underplot, developments) Cecchi inserted a specific exclamation (“No material for a second act”) concerning the play itself, the evening itself, with the usual addition of a very Beckettian anguish (“for God’s sake!”) at the unendurableness of the whole occasion. Et pour terminer? (Un temps.) Jeter. (Il jette le chien. Il arrache le sifflet.) Tenez! (p. 112) And to end up with? [Pause.] Discard. [He throws away the dog. He tears the whistle from his neck.] With my compliments. (p. 52) FRUTTERO: E per finire? (Pausa). Gettare. (Pausa). Ecco! (p. 131) CECCHI: E per finire? Gettare. Con i miei più sentiti ringraziamenti... [with my most heartfelt thanks: he is taking a half bow, and “ringraziamenti” is the word for the curtain calls at the end of a performance].

Later, in the very last monologue, the Italian had to lose an important ambiguity, having no single term that, like the French jouer and the English to play, can indicate both the acting (recitare) and the playing of a game (giocare). Fruttero decided to open the metaphor in the direction of the playing of chess; Cecchi refused to lose either of the two meanings, and he created a sentence which incorporated both: Puisque ça se joue comme ça... [...] jouons ça comme ça... [...] et n’en parlons plus... [...] ne parlons plus. (p. 112) Since that’s the way we’re playing it... let’s play it that way... and speak no more about it... speak no more. (p. 52) FRUTTERO: Visto che si gioca così... giochiamola così... e non parliamone più... non parliamo più. (p. 131) CECCHI: Visto che la commedia si recita così, e che la partita si gioca così, giochiamola e recitiamola così, e non parliamone più... mai più.



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(Since that’s the way the play is acted, and the game is played, let’s play it and act it like that, and speak no more about it... no more.)

Some meanings are lost here, but the important double metaphor, involving both acting and the chess game, is faithfully recovered, and the metatheatrical element is foregrounded again. 3.3. Alienation effects As is apparent from diaries of productions and statements of actors directed by Beckett (see for instance the interviews with David Warrilow and Billy Whitelaw in Kalb 1989 [1991, pp. 220233, 234-242], or the interview with Ernst Schroeder’s in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, pp. 238-240), in rehearsal the actor often asked, Stanislavski-like, ‘What am I supposed to feel here?’, and Beckett most of the time refused to answer, reverting to technical aspects of movement, tempo, and rhythm. He sometimes allowed his actors to draw him into a discussion of motivation, especially for small actions: as when Clov looks inside his trousers for the flea, so Hamm’s pee comes to his mind, and so he asks him about it; or, when Clov asks Hamm “Have you bled”, and Beckett suggested that Bollmann, who played Clov in the Berlin production, should first look at Hamm’s face: “You see something in his face, that’s why you are asking” (Beckett quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 215). But generally Beckett denied any special knowledge of his characters (see McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 240, or Gontarski 1992, p. 61) and many times answered a question about psychological motives with technical suggestions, especially with advice about tones and rapidity of delivery: what McMillan and Fehsenfeld describe as “Musical directing” (pp. 225, 229) and Asmus called “balletic” moments (programme of Warten auf Godot, Schiller-Theater, Berlin 1975). It thus seems obvious that the first thing an actor must learn when acting Beckett is to get rid of psychology, of any kind of ‘Actor studio’ identification with the Character. The pattern of sounds, as we well know, is the fundamental matter. I agree with Enoch Brater (Brater 1975) – and with some almost forgotten statements by Martin Esslin (Esslin 1976) – and I deeply disagree with Jonathan Kalb (Kalb 1989 [1991, pp. 44-46 and passim]) about the presence or absence of some kind of Verfremdungsef-


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fekt, of Brechtian alienation, in the best productions of Beckett’s drama. Kalb claims that Beckett’s aims and Brecht’s are different. This is obviously true in many important ways; but what I am discussing here is a purely technical feature of the actor’s performance, that Cecchi and Binasco employed for a specific purpose: what they brought out, quite legitimately, was an alienation from emotion. As Beckett said (quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 207), “pathos is the death of the play”. In the Strassenszene essay (Brecht 1967), one of his many on epic theatre, Brecht makes clear that his actors should act as if they were reminding us of what had happened, with a precise distancing at work: the Strassenszene narrator is the witness of a car accident between a driver and a pedestrian, and he is supposed to show his public what happened, excluding pathos as not relevant. Brecht gives examples: “Er ist nicht einmal in einer Gewerkschaft, aber wenn das Unglück passiert, grosse Aufgeregtheit! ‘Ich sitze zehn Stunden am Volant!’” (He isn’t even a member of the Trade Unions, but when something happens, there he is, a big upheaval! ‘I have to sit at the wheel for ten hours at a time!’ – Brecht 1967, p. 552). All pathos must be absent from the sentence, all realistic intonation absent. The witness is quoting. He is showing. We are not supposed to identify with any emotion. He is not feeling emotion, but showing it. The similarity between Beckett and Brecht here is specifically technical. With very different aims the two 20th century authors equally ask their actors to show, and to perform a flight from pathos. Beckett’s characters are past emotion; more precisely, to paraphrase Adorno, we are shown emotions in the moment of their impossibility. In Endgame, and in Cecchi’s Endgame in particular, there is an added value to this. In the three generations that are on stage, Beckett shows us three levels of progressive dehumanization: old Nell and Nagg – though in a Beckettian way, of course – still hanker after affection: Nagg keeps a biscuit for Nell, she remembers having been happy, they want to kiss, and so on. They have even being defined as “comically romantic” (Cohn 1980, p. 243), despite the fact that Beckett told the actors of his Berlin production that “Coloration is only for their memories” (quoted in Gontarski 1992, p. 53).



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Hamm does not feel emotion. This is self-evident, and one quotation will be enough: Hamm: Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore. Clov: Pah! You saw your heart. Hamm: No, it was living. (Endgame, p. 26)

He does not feel, but plays – musician-like – on the keyboard of emotional effects: nostalgia (“Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” – p. 29), the rhetoric of filial affection (“Father!”), repentance (“Forgive me”) and so on. Clov simply does not know anything about all this: he has not learned how to feel. Caliban-like, he has learned the use of words from Hamm; but, in the world of Endgame, there was no way to learn emotion. Cecchi’s production, respecting Beckett’s indications, enhanced this. The parents in their dustbins were a little nearer a semi-realistic expression of feeling: some semi-naturalistic chatter, nostalgia for the Lake Como spree, Winnie-like appreciation of old times (“Yesterday you scratched me there...” “Ah yesterday...” – p. 20). Cecchi’s Hamm showed us that the character is not experiencing emotions, but is at best vaguely trying to remember them, quoting them. He ‘declared’ even his laughter, when mentioning his honour. He hammed, he postured in his rhetorical statements and his nostalgias; he added a rhetorical flair to his emotionally charged repartees; but very effectively, with the consummate ability of the great actor he is, he put an alienating distance between the emphatic voice and the emotion, thoroughly emptying his sentences of any feeling: (“Ah, le vecchie domande, le vecchie risposte...” “Padre!...” “Perdonami.”): emotions were shown, quoted, excluding any psychological participation from the stated odd phenomenon. Binasco’s did not even quote: his rhythm was a monochromatic, monotone reproduction of answers, overlapping the questions of Cecchi’s Hamm, with – as Beckett asked – exactly the same music to his yesses and his noes. He was a machine, a metronome: humanity was very far away. The result was at once new and faithful to Beckett’s own sense of the play, thus showing that originality and fidelity are not mutually exclusive.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Fin de partie, 1957, in Fin de partie. Suivi de Acte sans Paroles, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, pp. 7-112. Finale di partita, 1957, in Paolo Bertinetti (a cura di), 1994, Samuel Beckett. Teatro completo, Einaudi-Gallimard, Torino (trans. Carlo Fruttero), pp. 85-131. Endgame, 1958, in Endgame. A Play in One Act Followed by Act Without Words. A Mime for One Player, 1964, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 7-53. Bertinetti, Paolo (a cura di), 1994, Samuel Beckett. Teatro completo, Einaudi-Gallimard, Torino.

Criticism Brater, Enoch, 1975, “Brecht’s Alienated Actor in Beckett’s Theatre”, in Comparative Drama, Fall 1975, vol. 9, n. 3, pp. 195-205. Cherchi, Grazia, 1995, “Intervista di Carlo Cecchi con Grazia Cherchi”, Programme for Finale di partita, Teatro Stabile di Firenze. Cohn, Ruby, 1980, Just Play. Beckett’s Theater, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Esslin, Martin, 1976, “Godot, The Authorized Version”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, I, Winter 1976. Also in http://www.english.fsu. edu/jobs/num01/Num1Esslin.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009). Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1992, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Volume II. “Endgame”, Faber and Faber, London. Kalb, Jonathan, 1989, Beckett in Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991. MacMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in the Theatre. The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, vol. 1, From ‘Waiting for Godot’ to ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, John Calder, London.

Other works cited Brecht, Bertold, “Die Strassenszene: Grundmodell einer Szene des epischen Theaters”, in Idem, Gesammelte Werke, 1967, 20 Bänden, Band 16, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.


Stringent Demands: Aspects of Beckett in Performance1 Rosemary Pountney

The performance of Beckett’s shorter plays for the theatre makes exceptional demands on the actor, audience, technicians and director alike. This article will discuss the stringency of Beckett’s requirements in these areas and consider to what extent the exacting nature of such demands may present problems for the continuing life of the plays, both today and in the future. To begin with, the actor. It is well known that Jack MacGowran described the television camera narrowing steadily in on his face in “Eh Joe” exposing his haunted eyes as “the most gruelling 22 minutes I have ever had in my life” (Theatre Quarterly, vol. 111, n. 2, London, 1973, p. 20) and Brenda Bruce described “Beckett placing a metronome on the floor to keep me on the rhythm he wanted, which drove me into such a panic that I finally broke down”(RUL, MS 1227/1/2/14). Even Billie Whitelaw describes losing self confidence unexpectedly when rehearsing Happy Days with Beckett and asking advice from Dame Peggy Ashcroft, who said: “He’s impossible. Throw him out” (Whitelaw 1995, p. 152). Dame Peggy herself appeared uncomfortable in her early performances as Winnie (at the Old Vic in 1975) though she had grown into the role by the time Happy Days transferred to the Lyttelton in 1976, as the National Theatre’s opening production2. Albert Finney too appeared uneasy in Krapp’s Last Tape in 1973, 1 A slightly different version of this article was broadcast in 2006 as one of Radio Telefis Eireann’s “Thomas Davis Lectures” celebrating Beckett’s centenary. The lectures were published by New Island Press, Dublin, 2006, as: “SAMUEL BECKETT: 100 Years” (Christopher Murray editor). I am indebted to New Island Press for permission to reprint this version. 2 Preview in celebration of Beckett’s 70th birthday, 13th April 1976; director, Peter Hall.


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lacking his usual mastery of a role3. Contemplating such uncharacteristic discomfort from both actors one wonders whether, in trying to achieve what Beckett wanted, they had found themselves acting against their own theatrical instincts and had thus not fully integrated into their roles. Nonetheless many actors develop an extraordinary rapport with their roles when performing Beckett, an identification at an unusually profound level, resulting in a catharsis of equal depth. The very fact that Beckett denies them so much of their normal means of expression in the theatre seems to act as a stimulus, a challenge to creativity. They may be restricted in movement (trapped in urns or in mid-air itself, with their voices reduced to a monotone “as low as compatible with audibility” or to speech so fast that it can hardly be registered by an audience; even to becoming mere listeners to their own recorded voices4 or to speechless virtual automatons, as in “Quad”); but such deprivation forces actors to dig deeper into themselves than is the norm in the theatre. Unable to build up a character in the usual way (when playing an old woman, for example, part of the process would involve close observation of how such women move and speak) in Not I there is no movement about the stage, no opportunity for facial expression, just the mouth pouring out words at great speed, preventing even much variation of pace. The actress is thus forced to go beyond the norms of performance. Rather than a process of accretion, of building up a character, she must try to strip her performance down to the inner core, creating an interior space, an emptiness, denuded of self, yet actively alert to the Beckett text. In effect she becomes a receptacle for the text and it is the challenge of going beyond the normal boundaries of performance that produces the depth of identification with the role that actors find so exhilarating and brings about their close rapport with Beckett. Performing the short plays is, as already indicated, hugely demanding. Billie Whitelaw, when rehearsing Not I for the first London production5, her head enclosed in a Ku Klux Klan-type hood, Royal Court Theatre, January 1973; director, Donald McWhinnie. E.g. That Time and “Rockaby”. 5 Royal Court Theatre, January 1973. 3 4


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developed such a sense of disorientation that, as described by Brian Miller who played the Auditor (Letter to the author, 26th January 1973), she broke down. So a different method was devised in which she sat, face blacked out, in a dentist’s chair, her head positioned so that the narrow lightbeam would illuminate her mouth alone. After a time, however, it became possible for audiences of this production to distinguish black from black, so that the faint outline of a solid figure behind the mouth became apparent in the surrounding darkness. In order to prevent this happening in the play’s second English production (at Oxford Playhouse in 1976) a radical solution was proposed by the lighting director6. A blackout curtain was let down upstage, covering the entire stage area. The actress was placed on a scaffold just behind the curtain, positioned so that her mouth was the precise eight feet above stage level prescribed by Beckett. At this point a hole was cut in the curtain at mouth level, so that her mouth could protrude through the curtain. In order that the image should remain constant, however, and not move in and out of the hole when taking a breath, the most fiendish part of the procedure was devised. A piece of elasticated material with strings attached was sewn to the inside of the curtain, surrounding the hole. Into this the actress was tied before the performance started. (Having been that actress I recall with feeling the extreme sense of isolation experienced, on hearing the assistant stage manager’s footsteps retreating down the scaffolding after tying me in.) Discussing this with Beckett some time later, he described the play as “a horror” for the actress7. Clearly the technical input is crucial when performing Beckett’s shorter roles. Much of the action is initiated by lighting and recorded sound interacting with the performer, who therefore relies on the skills of the technical staff to a much greater extent than is usual in the theatre. The synchronisation of light, sound and silence must operate in precise conjunction with the performer, which requires great sensitivity of technical direction. Indeed the performance may stand or fall on the seamless integration of the technical effects. 6 7

March 1976; director, Francis Warner; lighting, David Colmer. Conversation with Samuel Beckett, Paris, March 1980.


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To begin with stage lighting, “Play” is an obvious example, since all utterance from the three urns is controlled by light. In Not I and That Time the protagonist is partially illuminated, suspended in a limbo of darkness; in Footfalls May literally walks up and down a strip of light on the stage floor that dims from scene to scene, but remains vestigially present at the end of the play, thus registering her absence. In terms of sound I have already mentioned Beckett’s revolutionary use of the actor’s voice. It is with the use of the recorded voice that the actor’s reliance on technical support becomes total. In “Rockaby”, for example, most of the play is spent with W listening to her recorded voice, except at the end of a scene, where she joins in with the recording to repeat the concluding phrase. It is in “Rockaby” also that Beckett gives an extraordinarily daring stage direction, challenging for both actor and audience, regarding the opening and closing of the protagonist’s eyes. Beckett had first tried this out in That Time, where the brief opening of Listener’s eyes between scenes registers his extreme interest in the silence, the cessation of the three voices that assail him in each scene. In “Rockaby” scene one, W’s eyes are either “open in unblinking gaze” or closed “in about equal proportions”, but become increasingly closed in scenes two and three until, halfway through the final scene, they are (as Beckett tersely notes) “closed for good” (“Rockaby”, p. 273). There is of course no way of covering up a technical hitch in Minimalist drama. Performing “Rockaby” in French in Strasbourg, for instance, the sound level of the recorded tape had been set too high in error and there was nothing to be done but sit in the rocking chair and suffer!8 Theatre conditions on tour can be particularly problematic. I recall, for example, finding my mouth full of knitting when playing Mouth in Not I at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1978. In the very limited set-up time allowed in festival conditions, the hole in the blackout curtain was only cut at the last minute and, there being no suitable material at hand for the mask, the stage manager cut a sleeve from his jersey, made a hole in it and tacked it to the inside of the curtain. In the ensuing performance, 8

Théâtre Jeune Publique, Strasbourg, April 1996.



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on inserting my mouth through the hole, tendrils of wool began to descend, tickling both mouth and nostrils, so that choking, or at least a gigantic sneeze became genuine possibilities! Again, when playing W in “Rockaby” in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1990, I was almost thrown from the rocking chair when an assistant stage manager suddenly became over-zealous in operating the pulley that controlled the chair. W cannot rock the chair herself, since Beckett specifies that it only moves involuntarily. Unusual problems largely peculiar to Beckett’s theatre may also arise. There is, for example, the difficulty of obtaining the complete darkness often required in the short plays. A total blackout is naturally affected by the glow from the exit lights, which for legal reasons must be illuminated throughout a performance. Similarly a long pause in mainstream theatre is quite different from the order of silence that can build up in a Beckett play. When, for example, one of the late plays is working as it should, audiences become rapt, indeed almost hypnotised, so that any extraneous noise, even from outside the theatre can become audible and intrusive, in a way that would not be noticeable on the mainstream stage. Beckett’s short plays present particular challenges to audiences, not least in coming to recognise that the staging and technical effects are being stretched beyond their usual function in the theatre and are an integral part of the performance (such as the use of mid-air as the stage space in Not I and the personification of the light in “Play”). There was, of course, an initial lack of comprehension from public and press alike of the “whatever next?” variety: characters in dustbins, a woman stuck in a mound of earth, heads sprouting from urns, a mouth gabbling in mid-air – “what’s it meant to mean?” (as Beckett himself slyly asks in Happy Days). As soon as audiences relax, however, and allow the plays to work on them in their own terms, they find such considerations unimportant and that the plays do communicate with them directly; all the more so for making them concentrate by not dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. The concentration indeed can become so intense that it is almost palpable, as though the audience were holding its breath. Naturally with the very short plays a programme must be devised to provide an evening’s theatre. At least two plays will be performed, and their grouping can be illuminating: staging Footfalls


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and “Rockaby” together, for instance, both plays concerned with mother/daughter relationships, or combining Not I with That Time which Beckett called “a brother to Not I” (Knowlson and Pilling, 1979, p. 206). The thirty second “Breath” has even been performed several times in an evening, virtually as punctuation between a group of short plays. The plays work best in smaller theatres, where such minimalist but crucial action as the opening of Listener’s eyes in That Time can be registered clearly by audiences. Another method of devising a Beckett evening arose for myself, following an invitation to perform a programme of short plays during a conference of European translators of Beckett’s work at the university of East Anglia, in 19959. In that context it seemed appropriate to experiment by playing “Rockaby” in English, followed by “Berceuse”, the French version. Having found that the contrasts inherent in seeing a play in two languages interested the audience, I devised a programme which has subsequently toured worldwide, largely to university theatres. This consists of performing the play first in English, followed (after a short break) by the French version. There is then an interval (during which it is advisable to remove the heavy makeup) before returning to the stage to give those among the audience who wish to remain an opportunity to ask questions, or comment on Beckett’s theatrical methods. This tends to produce a very lively debate, in that just after the performance of unusual material proves to be an optimum time to engage audiences in discussion. The aural contrast between the English version, followed by the more liquid-sounding French one, also works on another level. Having followed the plot of the English version, the repeat of the play allows even non-French speaking audiences to reflect on it; this has the effect of deepening their experience of the play, much as Beckett intended the da capo of “Play” to work on audiences; to let the “hooks” go in, as he wrote of a production of Fin de Partie (Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 12th August 1957, in Harmon 1998, p. 15). On tour the experience of putting on the plays often provided a steep learning curve for the university drama students who assisted. 9

December 1995; organised by W. G. Sebald.



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If they were unfamiliar with Beckett’s later plays they tended to expect such short texts to present few problems, only to find themselves confronted by the niceties of technical synchronisation, which they found exceptionally demanding, particularly the extent to which their own technical input interacting with the performer constituted the performance. In subsequent discussion it is always rewarding to see their minds opening to the possibilities of Minimalist theatre and their developing appreciation of Beckett’s dramatic methods. Discussion so far has centred on the actor, audience and technical aspects of a Beckett performance, with little mention of overall direction. This is because I have been positing a director who would follow Beckett’s stage directions closely, in order to bring out the nuances of performance and subtlety of suggestion inherent in his stage notes. Today, as the legend of Beckett’s own productions begins to dissipate through time, directors become less likely to consult his production notebooks (Samuel Beckett Archive, RUL; see also Knowlson et al., editors, 1992-1995) and increasingly anxious to ‘do their own thing’ with Beckett. It is here that a complex dilemma opens up for both current and future performances of the plays and is the subject of continual debate. It is a theatrical commonplace that without change and experiment theatre becomes static and mummified. Once a play is published it ceases to be the author’s property, in that he can no longer exercise full control over it. Shakespeare lives today because he is constantly re-invented. Each generation uses the plays to reflect their own concerns and, though each new emphasis or re-shaping will have its critics, new light is often shed on aspects of a Shakespearean text that deepens and enriches audience experience of the plays. Shakespeare’s five acts can accommodate such a translation in terms, but experiment with Beckett’s plays is much more problematic. Beckett did his best in his lifetime to control productions of his plays via his agents. Today the Beckett Estate has an invidious task in deciding whether a performance flouting Beckett’s production intentions can go ahead; the notorious removal of Deborah Warner’s Footfalls from the London stage being a case in point10. Two ‘camps’ exist today: those who think Beckett is best served by close attention 10

Garrick Theatre, London, 14-19th March 1994.


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to his stage directions and those who feel that experimenting with new ways of performing his plays is the only way to keep them alive. Among the latter is Jonathan Miller, who feels that the Estate’s attempts to protect Beckett from experiment will inevitably result in ‘dead theatre’ – in effect charging the Estate with murdering the future of Beckett production11. Clearly, attempting to replicate Beckett’s own productions exactly is an arid enterprise, leading to stultified theatre. It is impossible in any case, due to different personnel, theatre spaces and the dating effects of time. Nonetheless, a production that follows Beckett’s stage directions does not have to be a sterile parroting of the past. Provided that the director respects the text and can pass on his enthusiasm to the cast, the chosen play will take life as their own creation, while still keeping close to Beckett’s intentions. In my view, while it may be possible with the longer plays to introduce flexibility into production methods, in the short Minimalist plays experimentation generally proves undesirable. Beckett’s concern for the human situation is so clearly apparent in the later plays that a director determined to imprint them with his own ‘stamp’ is likely to arrive at something much less than what is already present in the text. In the late plays the text is narrowed down to reflect the bleakest realities of human existence. The protagonist is presented with all choices made, no opportunity for change and nowhere to go but on, as in the last words of the Trilogy: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”. In “Quad II”, where all colour has drained from the players’ costumes and their brisk movement has slowed to a shuffle about the stage, Beckett remarked: “Good. That’s a hundred thousand years later”12. The ghostly players are still in progress, still going on. If a director subverts the Minimalist plays (attempting a contemporary relevance, perhaps), this reduces their pre-existing depth and the impact of the plays is lessened. When rehearsing Footfalls in 1976, Beckett remarked: “It’s Chamber Theatre and it must be perfect”13. As with Beethoven’s Late String Quartets, the late plays are Beckett’s final contribution to the theatre, and who would attempt to change a note of the Quartets? Conversation with Jonathan Miller, Oxford, 22nd June 2005. Conversation with Martin Esslin, Strasbourg, 4th April 1996. 13 I am indebted to Martha Fehsenfeld for this information. 11 12



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 53-63. Happy Days, 1961, Faber and Faber, London 1989. “Play”, 1964, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 145-160. “Eh Joe”, 1966, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 199-207. “Breath”, 1969, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 209-211. Not I, 1973, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 213-223. That Time, 1976, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 225-235. Footfalls, 1976, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 237-243. “Rockaby”, 1982, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 271-282. “Quad”, 1984, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, cit., pp. 289-294. The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Faber and Faber, London.

Criticism Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts). Knowlson, James, and John Pilling, 1979, Frescoes of the Skull, John Calder, London. Knowlson, James et al. (editors), 1992-1995, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, 4 vols., Faber and Faber, London.

Other works cited Whitelaw, Billie, 1995, Who He? An Autobiography, Hodder & Stoughton, London.


Winnie’s Italian Stage Laura Caretti

1. Oh les beaux jours and its Italian double 28th September, 1963 – Our journey back through the years starts with this date: the night when an Italian audience first watched a performance of Happy Days. The stage is that of the Ridotto of La Fenice, in Venice, but the production comes from Paris. Roger Blin, who had earlier been praised in Italy for his production of En attendant Godot1, this time presents his staging of Oh les beaux jours as a world première (the show would open in Paris only a month later)2. Thus it is in Venice, during the Biennale Festival3, that the Winnie played by Madeleine Renaud not only receives for the first time a remarkable acclaim, but seduces and moves the audience as had never happened before in a play by Beckett. Because of the quality of this exceptional performer, the label of ‘dark’ playwright that had been stuck on Beckett starts to fade. An uneasy question hovers in the reviews, the day after: does Oh les beaux jours belong to a different, more humane, less gloomy Beckett, or is it Madeleine Renaud who makes him look so? A critic, who nevertheless does appreciate the show, puts forward the 1 En attendant Godot, produced by Blin, had been staged at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan in December, 1953. 2 Rehearsals were held in Paris at the Odéon and then were completed and staged in Venice (Roger Blin interviewed by Lynda Peskine, in Revue d’Esthétique, numéro hors-série, 1990, p. 167). 3 The show, presented within the frame of the XXII Festival Internazionale del Teatro di Prosa in the Biennale of Venice, was staged again on September 29, 1963.


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idea that Madame Renaud might infuse her character with a sparkling vitality that is alien to what the author supposedly meant; that indeed this Winnie is more a French than a Beckettian creature. What matters is that the play presented in Venice marks the discovery of a Beckett who refuses to be confined in the usual formulas of the theatre of the absurd or even in those of an absolute, universal pessimism. Oh les beaux jours reveals such a powerful mixture of tragic and comic strains that, according to Blin, every word is infused with it4. Winnie’s black humour reopens in Italy a debate on umorismo that had started with Pirandello. This performance of Oh les beaux jours deserves to be remembered, if for nothing else, for the healthy jolt that it gave to received ideas, but the impact it had did not stop here. Indeed, Blin’s production begot its own Italian double. It was a very unusual attempt to graft this vigorous French shoot into the not so thriving tree of our theatre, but Gianfranco De Bosio, the director of the Teatro Stabile in Turin, a disciple and a friend of Jean Louis Barrault’s and of Roger Blin’s, was the man who attempted this grafting5. De Bosio proposed to Blin to direct an Italian version of Oh les beaux jours / Giorni felici6 with the same set that Matias had designed for the production in Paris, but with Italian actors7. And, for the leading part of Winnie, he chose Laura Adani, an actress who specialised in comedy roles, younger than Renaud, and a perfect incarnation of the character Beckett describes (a woman “About fifty, well-preserved, blonde for preference, plump, arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom”, Happy Days, p. 1) (figures 13 and 14). 4 See Gian Renzo Morteo, “Incontro con Roger Blin”, in I Quaderni del Teatro Stabile della Città di Torino, n. 3, Edizioni Teatro Stabile di Torino, 1965, p. 106. 5 I am very grateful to Gianfranco De Bosio for his enlightening account of this project. 6 Happy Days had been translated into Italian by Carlo Fruttero (Einaudi, Torino 1956), but the script of this first Italian production was based on the French version Beckett gave to Blin: Oh les beaux jours. 7 Giorni felici was staged in the Gobetti Theatre in Turin in January, 1965, with Laura Adani as Winnie and Franco Passatore as Willie. I am very grateful to the Director of the Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile di Torino, Franco Crivellaro, and to its Librarian, Anna Peyron, for their help in my research about the performance.


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Some people thought, at the beginning, that his was a questionable choice, hardly suitable to the stiff dramatic atmosphere that was supposed to surround a Beckett character. That is why Laura Adani was a surprise for both the audience and the critics. She displayed an unexpected ability to give voice to the shifting moods of the character, managing to make her Winnie very different from Madame Renaud’s. In other words, the unusual experiment was quite successful. The desert-like setting was the same, but the tender and harrowing histoire d’amour told by Madeleine Renaud when told by Laura Adani sounded more like une histoire d’amour perdu, the story of a slow and gradual loss of youth and love. The reviewers compared the two actresses, focussing on their diversity. In the first act the Italian actress proved more sensual and seductive; in the second part she underwent a radical transformation. She managed to convey the sense of an ending, the anguish of loneliness, the impossible recall of happy days, while tears kept rolling down her cheeks (figure 15). Adani’s Giorni felici are completely different, I would say that her happy days are more Italian, they are thicker, more solid and a bit gloomy, even though the hot sun in the desert hits hard on the woman doomed to sun herself on the sand for ever as in a Dantesque Inferno. Just like in Dante, she is sentenced to remember her happy days in her present misery, if we are to heed the clues provided by the dear, petty objects spread around her. Everything is harder, stronger, more bitter8.

Would Beckett have felt too much emotion in this Italian Winnie or would he have seen a Dantesque predicament in her tears? We only know that he did not attend the performance, sending his wife in his stead. Suzanne’s opinion must have been positive, though, since Beckett sent Laura Adani two of his new plays for staging. 2. Words made out of gravel In the years following this production, Laura Adani remained a model other Italian actresses had to measure up to. In order to 8 Review by Sandro De Feo, “Il tempo perduto di Winnie”, in L’Espresso, December 26, 1965. All translations, unless differently specified, are mine.



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find a different stage we must abandon mainstream theatres and look into the fringe. Beckett is one of the favourite authors of many avant-garde groups, even though they mean to follow their creative imagination, which is very often unfaithful to the stage directions set down by the playwright. Among these groups, two actors, Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, in 1969-1970 tried their hands in an original experiment of mise-en-espace of Happy Days9. After Venice and Turin this time we move to Rome, in a period (the late Sixties) when many small theatres – set up by actor-authors like Carmelo Bene, Vasilicò, Ricci and others – get housefuls of young theatre-goers ready to share an electric intimacy with the performers. The small venue of the Leopardo, in the Monteverde neighbourhood, is one of such theatres. At the beginning, Remondi and Caporossi used it as a workshop in which their different talents might find expression. Remondi already had a solid experience as an actor and had measured himself also against Beckett (in Aspettando Godot he had been an effective Pozzo), whereas Caporossi, as a young architecture student, was more connected with the visual arts than with drama10. Their different experiences merged for the first time in the idea of staging Giorni felici. It was an idea that marked the beginning of their artistic collaboration, but never became a full blown, public performance11. Today they both fondly recall that project and still resent the veto that prevented them from showing their work to an audience. Since they had intended to fuse the two characters, Winnie and Willie, in a single male actor12, they were accused of betray-

9 Giorni felici, open rehearsals for a show never staged, by and with Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, Teatro del Leopardo, 1970-1971. 10 See Sabrina Galasso, “Giorni felici: l’artista invade lo spazio scenico”, in Il teatro di Remondi e Caporossi, Bulzoni, Roma 1998, pp. 33-43. 11 Only a handful of critics and spectators managed to see it. 12 Not so long ago, the two actors/playwrights staged another, different version of Giorni felici (Prato, January 2005). Remondi was, as before, the only voice of the monologue, but the words are not those of the original Winnie, they tell another story, evoke ‘different happy days’. Even the setting has changed: the actor now hangs from a steel trellis, and of the gravel-words (that we will describe in a few lines) now only a few stones remain, mysteriously dropped from above.


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ing Beckett. This is evidence that even at the time, just as today, the issue of “fidelity” to this author was already a heated one. The living memories of the two performers and a few photographs allow us to get an idea of the way the show was conceived forty years ago. Let us try to picture what an imaginary member of the audience would have seen. Upon entering the house, his or her eyes would have been attracted by a graphic rendering of several lines of the Italian version of Happy Days. Starting in the tiny foyer, even in the toilets and in the theatre itself our imaginary spectator would have found on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling odd drawings, hieroglyphs or graffiti of Winnie’s words obsessively repeated in strange cobwebs of concrete poetry (figures 16 and 17). In this open space the member of the audience could move freely or sit in one of the chairs scattered in different parts of the tiers and even on the stage. Thus the action, which in the meantime would have started, could be seen from several angles (figure 18). Sitting on the floor in a corner beneath the stage, Remondi would be reciting Winnie’s monologue, while Caporossi, as an anonymous and mysterious stagehand, would pour gravel through a conduit. The gravel would roll and pelt down all over the actor, beating a tattoo that set the rhythm of his/her speech. The action and the vocal performance followed the tempo of Beckett’s pauses. “We had analysed the text – Caporossi explained to me – and found there were breaks, moments of suspension, like air bubbles; when those moments occurred, I would put a shovelful of pebbles into the conduit and words would start flowing again”. Thus Winnie was gradually covered up and when the gravel ran out, the words ran out as well. 3. A vertical bed for a stage In the following decades, more companies managed to reinvent the setting conceived by Beckett without being condemned for infidelity because they basically respected the written text. This was no mean achievement, because this allowed them to visualise, according to their own creative perspective, the “expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound” (Happy Days, p. 1) in which Beckett’s character is “embedded”.



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Thus on the Italian stage we have seen Winnie come out from a hole dug in the concrete on an urban building site (Anna Proclemer, 1990); emerge from a dustbin borrowed from Endgame (Miriam Abutori, 1992); remain shut in a sand-glass (Adriana Asti, 1985); be pilloried in a manhole (Lucilla Morlacchi, 2000); be smothered by her own skirt (Anna D’Onofri, 1978) and covered by a huge white sheet (Marion D’Amburgo, 1995). I think this last variation deserves a closer analysis because the set designed by the director Giancarlo Cauteruccio conditioned and gave meaning to the whole production. The theatre we enter now is on the outskirts of Florence, in Scandicci. It is a theatre workshop where since the beginning the most advanced technological visual experiments have been tried out, and offered their services to the art of playwrights and players alike. In the instance of this production of Giorni felici, a huge white wing took up the whole scene forming a sort of pyramid from whose top Winnie came out. Hanging up there, she reminded the audience of other images and of other characters in Beckett’s plays (Not I, That Time) (figure 19). The structure fit very well with the “simplicity and symmetry” that Beckett required, but it also lent itself to many more effects and meanings: it could quickly become a screen onto which images of cracked earth could be projected (Burri’s Le crete di Gibellina series) or it could turn into a hospital bedsheet. At the bottom of it a series of intra-venous vials would beat, drop after drop, Winnie’s lifetime and the time of the show. Thus she did not appear so much as a survivor in an apocalyptical wilderness, but as a terminal patient who could still, in the first act, rejoice for the gift of yet another day with no pain and no aggravation (“– ah well – no worse – no better, no worse – no change – no pain – hardly any –”). In this apparently steady lull, then, everything could start in a “normal” way: brushing her teeth and taking medication that promised to bring “instantaneous improvement”. Daily actions, as a consequence, did not look so trivial after all. It was just life going on. While Willie kept reading his newspaper, she could cover up the marks of time and of disease with the resources and the cosmetics pulled out of the big bag. All she needed was some “crimson” on the lips and a wig to make up for the lost blonde hair her memory keeps hauntingly recalling. In any case, there was always


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the gun near at hand to ensure a quick end to a slow process of death. In the second act, this mask of deceptive happiness disappeared altogether. Winnie’s face, deprived even of the bright red wig, rose pale from the sheet pulled up to her neck (figure 20). Her clear stream of consciousness records this sudden worsening of her condition, foreboding the complete paralysis, the loss of words, the final silence13. Yet a glimmer of happiness might still be possible. All she seems to need is some echoing memory, a broken line, some unexpected gesture. In the actual situation suggested by the direction, Winnie’s solo speech became more and more imbued with a tragic realism, the kind advocated by the theatre of cruelty. Consistent with this dramatic vision, Cauteruccio gave the main role to Marion D’Amburgo, an actress who came from the fringe theatre, and was familiar with the theories of Artaud and of Grotowski. Her voice rang out the deep notes in the score for voices Beckett wrote. Next to her, Willie was played by the director himself, who gave to this character more emphasis than usual, foregrounding the drama of his painful helplessness. Less hidden, more visible to the audience, Willie made sure he was always there: he would be reading his newspaper, but he was also listening; his mind might wander easily, but he would also answer her calls. Eventually, he would rise at the foot of the bed as a lover-clown, with his worn out formal suit, holding his gloves in one hand as if they were a flower bouquet. He would attempt in vain to climb up and join Winnie, up there by herself, alone, out of reach (figure 21). And at the end he would slowly slide back down, as the waltz from The Merry Widow filled the theatre. 4. Alone in a sea of sand An expanse of white sand under a sparsely starred night sky: this is the setting that Giorgio Strehler imagined for Giorni felici when he

13 In comparison with the first act, conditioned by action, the second act gives the actress, according to the performer herself, an extraordinary “freedom” of expression (Marion-Winnie, ovvero i travestimenti della felicità, an interview with Laura Caretti, House programme, January 1997, p. 10).



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staged it for the first time in 198214. Beckett’s stage direction was rewritten in the new script as: “Out of the darkness, the shrill note of a bell fills the void louder and louder. Blinding light. A desert beach. Sand. A still, colourless sea extends to the horizon. Black sky”15. From the frosty whiteness of the stage Winnie emerges like a wondrous flower, with her pink bodice and her red hat (figures 22 and 23), as lonely as possible in the cosmic vastness of a mysterious universe, where life is marked by orders coming out of nowhere. Even so, the icy sea in which she is up to her neck cannot swallow her. She is not dying, she is struggling for life. Her inner time does not yield to the bell tallying her hours16. Her memories resist oblivion. We are not watching her fall, but her endurance. She endures and she blooms, in Strehler’s imagination, like Leopardi’s whin-broom (“La ginestra”) in the ashes of Mount Vesuvius. Through Leopardi’s magnifying lens, Strehler sees in Winnie her will to survive to the very end (figures 24 and 25). More than any other director we have mentioned, Strehler tries to convey Winnie’s drama as the drama of the human condition. He leads the audience towards a shock of recognition: Winnie is us. Her struggle, her survival strategies, her tricks, her fragility and her strength have all to do with us. That is why he insisted to stage designer Ezio Frigerio that the stage had to extend into the audience, well beyond the forestage arch. Winnie, emerging from the prompter hole, is thus closer to the audience and can weave an implicit dialogue with it: Here I am, alone, stuck in the Universe, and you are listening to me. Listening to my neurotic repetitions, my labouring talk, talk, talk and you understand very well I’m just hiding the void, that I’m filling the void of the same Universe that belongs to you too. Mine is a hu-

14 Strehler’s direction was picked up again, after his death, by Carlo Battistoni who, in 2000, managed to re-create it working along with Giulia Lazzarini. 15 At the last minute Strehler added a few stars. Strehler’s script is based on the Italian translation by Carlo Fruttero. All quotations are from Giulia Lazzarini’s personal working script. 16 In the end, Winnie confronts the knell of the hours by dramatically singing louder and louder the waltz from The Merry Widow.


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man predicament that is yours as well. And it would be even funny, were it not so awfully tragic!17

For Winnie’s role Strehler chose Giulia Lazzarini. The actress, who once flew as Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is now stuck in this “lonely desert” (Leopardi’s “solitario deserto”) and she needs to trust again the wings of her art, “fanciful and humane, lifelike and real, abstract and realistic, always soaked in life,” as Strehler said18. From the start the director was sure of the actress’s talent, he felt that he could trust her ability to convey both “strength” and “tenderness”, her “truthful” way of acting out life’s dialectics. On the other hand, the actress was frightened, she did not understand how the director had thought about her. “At first I felt miscast,” – she recalls years later – “I had the impression that the character did not fit me. Winnie is a mature woman, as Beckett describes her and as I had seen and appreciated her in Laura Adani’s performance. She seemed far away from my experience as a woman and as an actress”. But then, as usual, she let herself be directed and her ‘different’ Winnie, lighter, more abstract and more childlike, more stubborn in her will to survive, ended up looking more and more like her. It is fascinating to listen to Giulia Lazzarini as she recalls the past and retraces the steps that led her to a deeper understanding of this tragicomic and vital heroine19. Years later, the actress records her own changes of mind, relates how the role grew within and with her, and how her voice found a wider gamut of tones. There was a different dramatic quality, a stronger contrast of lights and shadows, more energy and even more anger. The shifts 17 In a letter of May 5, 1982, that Giorgio Strehler wrote to Giulia Lazzarini, published later as Giulia carissima in Strehler 2000a. 18 Giorgio Strehler, “Un modo vero di recitare la dialettica della vita”, in the House Programme of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. 19 Giulia Lazzarini has spoken extensively about this at the Beckett in Rome Conference. But in many occasions, I had the opportunity to talk with her about Giorni felici, about Strehler, Beckett and many other things. These talks were never actual interviews: I usually ask very little but I listen carefully, and I learn to see through her eyes. For a while it is as if I could glance inside her work and get to know her wonderful art better. How can I thank her for this and how can I apologise with her for saving in these pages only a few fragments of what she has shared with me?



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from self-irony to hopelessness became sudden. The non stop speed requested by Strehler was suddenly broken to let a gloomier anxiety surface. As Beckett insists, these are the moments of défaillance, when the mask drops and the moment is suspended in the void before the rhythm starts again. Words are not pebbles, as in the stoning of Winnie staged by Remondi and Caporossi. Quite to the contrary, here they represent a sustaining force, that which keeps Winnie from sinking and drowning in the sea of sand. “If you take a break, you go under – Strehler would tell her – you are already with the sand up to your lips, then it would enter your nose. You must keep talking. The rhythm cannot slow down, it is the rhythm of someone drowning. Words are what keeps you afloat”. As time went by, according to the actress, words became thoughts. (“It takes time not so much to learn the words, but to have them sediment in thoughts”.) This is what allowed her to speak to the audience with that “truthfulness” that Strehler had seen in her. We started this tour of Italian stages with the ‘double’ performance by Madeleine Renaud and Laura Adani. The setting was the same that the French stage designer had devised, following Beckett’s directions, but the two actresses managed to stage quite two different shows. As Beckett himself demonstrates in his “Catastrophe”, the player is the real “living variant” of the show. The wings, the setting, the direction and all the technical apparatus of Happy Days may stay the same through time, but the same does not apply to the player, who is “always soaked in life”. She is invested with the dynamics of the performance, with the link to the present, with the vital rhythm of the show, with the final ability to give life each time to a Winnie who is our contemporary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckett, Samuel, 1961, Happy Days, Faber and Faber, London 1989 (Giorni felici, Einaudi, Torino 1956, trans. Carlo Fruttero). Caretti, Laura, 1995, “Marion-Winnie, ovvero i travestimenti della fe-


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licità”, an interview with Marion D’Amburgo, House Programme Teatro Studio, Firenze, Scandicci, January 1995, p. 10. De Feo, Sandro, 1965, “Il tempo perduto di Winnie”, in L’Espresso, December 26, 1965. Galasso, Sabrina, 1998, “Giorni felici: l’artista invade lo spazio scenico”, in Idem, Il teatro di Remondi e Caporossi, Bulzoni, Roma. I Quaderni del Teatro Stabile della Città di Torino, 1965, n. 3, Edizioni Teatro Stabile di Torino. Peskine, Lynda, 1990, “Interview with Roger Blin”, 1990, in Revue d’Esthétique, numéro hors-série, 1990, p. 167. Strehler, Giorgio, 2000a, “Giulia carissima”, in the House Programme for the revival of Giorni Felici, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2000. Idem, 2000b, “Un modo vero di recitare la dialettica della vita”, in the House Programme of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.


Friendgame Anastasia Deligianni

Going through the recent publication of some French critical reviews of the best known performances of Waiting for Godot in France, between its 1953 world première and the Théâtre de l’Odéon production of 1961, confirms the general impression trumpeted by this archival volume (Derval 2007): Samuel Beckett’s first play began as an avant-garde event, became a bourgeois drama and ended up as an officially sanctioned masterpiece, all in less than ten years. We cannot but wonder in which kind of consciousness this is a judgment of any historical or aesthetic value. Either we are dealing here with the negative default notion of classicism in art, already dismissed by Beckett himself in his critical essays1, or it is rather that positive aspect of classicism we have to do with, i.e. the artwork that is worthwhile in all times and places; to be able to give a useful answer in any related domain, we should have to research and redefine the famous subject-object relationship in art, but only after redistributing each of these two principal roles to the most convenient poles2. Academia, artists, advertisers and the general public are disputing this responsibility today and more often than not they are playing dangerously with its necessary criteria. 1 See, for example, “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le pantalon”: “On lui dit: ‘Tout ce qui est bon en peinture, tout ce qui est viable, tout ce que vous pouvez admirer sans crainte, se trouve sur une ligne qui va depuis les grottes des Eyzies jusqu’à la Galerie de France.’ On ne précise pas si c’est une ligne préétablie. [...] On ne lui dit jamais: [...] ‘Tout ce que vous saurez jamais d’un tableau, c’est combien vous l’aimez [...]’” (pp. 121, 123). 2 “Il est évident que toute œuvre d’art est un rajustement de ce rapport” (“Peintres de l’empêchement”, p. 137).


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Ancient dilemmas, in the heavy shadow of philosophical classifications, which are also playfully present in Beckett’s work, struggle today against those omnipresent virtual surfaces of rapid electronic communication, which Beckett’s late formal experiments seem to have prophesized. Thus, we may seem to be losing interest in creating perceptions, for we are persuaded (and happy enough) to be fully perceived ourselves. With all the above in mind, in order to examine if there is any future left for the theatre and in front of whose eyes and senses, we recently took part in a significant theatrical experience in Athens, where the experiment of performing the Greek translation of Waiting for Godot in its entirety, before an audience of six year olds, stimulated some interesting observations, from both the methodological and ideological point of view, which we shall present in this paper3. As a consequence of the experience, a number of thoughts arise, to begin with: how to “fail better” (Worstward Ho) and how “to end yet again” (“For to End Yet Again”). If Beckett still has things to tell us, it must be either thanks to the nature of these things or to our own nature. We must then define who we are as a public nowadays, or see, if on the contrary Beckett has nothing to tell us anymore, what has changed for us, since his texts have not changed. If a production of a Beckett play, realised with absolute faith to the text and the author’s stage directions but with some social and artistic rules inverted or even broken, can still be successful, we think that this should indicate to us that a more generalised evenly inverted passage from the stage to the page could be of some use against some current theoretical impasses4. The procedure first. Since it was important that the children were not conscious that they were taking part in an experiment, 3 Details about that theatrical experience, its organisation and its outcome will be published in a web article. 4 There are debates about the limits of a given text’s interpretation. Respecting or not the author’s will when using genetic material in literary criticism is a current subject of discussion. Another investigates the borders between genres (novel and theatre, for instance) in different eras and contexts.


A. Deligianni. “Friendgame”

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we did not want to condition their responses, and so we offered them no guidance on how they were expected to behave as audience. There was no theoretical or practical introduction to the play itself. For some of the children, it was their first time in a theatre. For all of them, it was, as far as we understood from their teachers and family, their first contact with Beckett. No briefing was provided to the children or their parents before the show. While bringing their children in, the parents did not know what to expect. To them, it was just a planned school excursion. The actors, technicians and director welcomed the tiny spectators and held discussions with them after the show. Members of the experimental team unobtrusively took notes during the performance and subsequent discussions. Of course, no child asked them what they were doing there. The children took it for granted. Our note-taking seemed natural and normal to them. Our role next. We were divided between our reasons for choosing Beckett, our expectations and our fears. We were not only afraid that the whole procedure would appear to be long, slow, boring or too difficult to follow for the children, used to video games and instant messages on mobile phones, but also that we might possibly have to deal later on with their overwhelming sadness. But, as we shall see, the children did not want to move from their seats, although they were free to do so. Some demanded a third act or even more of the play, and automatically proposed optimistic solutions for the protagonists’ situation. The violence of the Hegelian master-slave relationship adults often perceive in the play, or its postmodern absurdity, did not seem at all unusual or of concern to the Lilliputians. To those evanescent fears, we had initially been conditioned by what we perceive as narrow-minded scholarly elitism, against which we were determined to fight. In the ferocious critical process focused on Beckett, it often comes down to identifying his sources. So many possible names are thrown up that it can look as if the work of Samuel Beckett was all of literature, philosophy, theology or human sciences and their entire history. Unfortunately, this attitude represents a way to approach Beckett’s work which, in our opinion, takes too much into consideration elements like the influence of a certain author


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on Beckett or viceversa, instead of concentrating on more profound aspects of his writing. For our unanticipated new critical approach and our unpremeditated journey along reasoning paths, prompted by a new generation and its unmediated reception of the play, it was Beckett himself who served as our guide. One of the rarest moments of positive Beckettian exclamation, and a highlight in his aesthetic manifesto, occurs in “Le monde et le pantalon”: “Qu’est-ce que ça peut lui faire, que les enfants puissent en faire autant? Qu’ils en fassent autant. Ce sera merveilleux. Qu’est-ce qui les empêche? Leurs parents peut-être. Ou n’en auraient-ils pas le temps?” (“La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le pantalon”, p. 120). In our translation: “What does it matter if children can do the same? Let them do so. That would be wonderful. What stops them? Their parents probably. Or haven’t they got enough time?”. Children are often indeed left out of account because transparency and spontaneity cannot be measured5. Beckett was not merely feeling sorry for children, in general, because they have been born, any more than he sympathises with old people, because they have spent all their lives without reaching the impossible answer, but he is expressing his admiration here for the special interior language of children, which like the speech patterns of old people can exteriorise quite unfamiliar and unestablished signs and codes. If Murphy, to give an example from the prose texts, were a child, we would find his attitudes quite normal, or, at least, we would be patient till he grows up, thinking ‘he’ll grow out of it’. Presented as an adult, Murphy can be taken as a mad, irrational and disturbing person. If he had the chance to grow old, he would be accepted as what we could de5 See also Angela Moorjani’s abstract for the International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo, 2006, September 29 – October 1, entitled “Child’s Play and the Learned Art of Unseeing”: “At the same time, the art of children clearly confirms that the realistic tradition of western art is based on habits and conventional rules that children haven’t acquired yet and adults must unlearn to summon up the terrors and pleasures of child’s play that derive from another way of seeing. [...] The child thus becomes teacher to the parent, as the poets would have it all along. Or the adult recovers the child’s art of unseeing that was repressed or discarded for adult conformity”: in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessed April 1, 2008).



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fine as a microcosmopolitan. So, children, elders and adults who are ‘different’ belong to the beloved little world. Because the Beckettian unwording the given world (Locatelli, 1990) is the coming-and-going around another saying of another world, not at all unknown but simply forgotten or fallen apart in societies which prefer classifications with values offered as absolute. It is the saying of the children and the elders, innocent or desenchanted, but pure and elementary in any case. Just as Beckett himself would like to affect our nerves rather than our intellect, our interest was constantly focused on the children’s physical reactions and interactions throughout the performance and the questions they spontaneously asked, as if searching their way out of a day-dream. Let us watch them closer then. Nervous but well-behaved at the beginning, they eventually started to interfere with the plot by wholeheartedly laughing at Lucky’s dance or by replying to the repeated phrases of Didi and Gogo, before the actual actors had the time to speak their lines. At the interval, most of them were shouting to each other, betting on Godot’s coming or not, some of them being sure to have seen him in the toilets waiting to come out and perform, and others telling their parents, in their own words, the story of a promise they had just been given in the auditorium. In the second act their enthusiasm progressively gave place to a strange silence. For a moment we thought that they were simply tired, but over the six days of this experiment this change occurred at almost the same moment and, when we paid more attention to that phenomenon, we understood: the children were simply waiting, their clever eyes wide open and moving quickly from one point of the stage to another, without listening to the text anymore and without following the action taking place, but as if they were lost in their feelings and thoughts in front of a screen. When the actors came out for their curtain call, it was as if the children were just waking up. They seemed to feel betrayed, judging from the questions they asked each other on what had actually happened. Some of them were weeping and others were arguing with everybody around them that since it was not over they did not have to get up and leave the place.


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Excited and confused, no child of the almost two thousand who attended that week of performances asked anything about the meaning of a particular word or gesture. The following issues were of real interest to them: 1. They did not care about “who is Godot?”, but whether “that Godot is a good or a bad guy”. The most popular reason given for his not coming yet was that Didi and Gogo stink, and we cannot but think here of the basic definition of living human beings given by Beckett6. Many were the children who asked their parents to feed the two actors or take them home for a while. 2. They wanted to know if the messenger is a boy or a girl. As could be expected, depending on the sex of the child and the inevitable complicity between children of the same gender, four principal outlooks were quickly formed: one of boys believing that Godot is coming because the child is a boy and so tells the truth, one of girls believing that Godot is not coming because the child is a boy and so lies, one of boys believing that Godot is not coming because the child is a girl and so lies, and one of girls believing that Godot is coming because the child is a girl and so tells the truth. There were of course some minorities of indifferent observers as well, and one could not but be amazed by the subjectivity and the plurality of points of view, making the possibility of any consensus absurd. 3. Many children were keen to know if Vladimir and Estragon are strangers, friends or brothers, mysteriously adding to this question the sentence: “this would change everything”. 4. In their effort to describe the protagonists to their parents, many children called Lucky “the one who is a thousand years old”, although there is no such description of him in the text. 5. Very often, and when no evident answer could be provided by the adults, the children did not take long to come up with an explanation for something that had happened on stage: “it probably was like that, back in those years, you know”, as if to say “that’s all”.

6 “L’odeur des cadavres, que je perçois nettement sous celle de l’herbe et de l’humus, ne m’est pas désagréable. [...] combien préférable à celle des vivants, des aisselles, des pieds, des culs, des prépuces cireux et des ovules désappointés. [...] Ils ont beau se laver, les vivants, beau se parfumer, ils puent” (Premier amour, pp. 8-9).



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Basic body symptoms and needs, identities which can only be specified through relationships, an augmented sense of time, ingenious incapacity to give definite and unambiguous directions, and imaginative regeneration of the least detail, are enough hints to characterise Beckett’s oeuvre, as well as the nature of human beings and the power of art, in the only way he ever sought to put them before us. More than once Beckett was explicit about this: “Don’t seek deep motivation everywhere. If there is one here I’m unaware of it. [...] Life is an asking for and a promising of what both asker and promiser know does not exist” (Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 10 January 1958, in Harmon 1998, p. 29). Because there cannot be an absolute truth, there is only the principle of the consciousness of existence through birth and death, and the infinite possible changes in-between: the so-called life. Literature, as life’s mise en oeuvre, remains an unfinishable action when it is not about researching a new idea and mostly about the survival game. Criticism is, despite itself, a part of this game too. And Samuel Beckett appeared in a transitional era to prove to us that this survival game is in fact the nature of any human creator, human creature or human creation and their only possible occupational task, although end-less, in both possible senses, without stop and without aim. The comparison or distinction between forms, concept and verse, philosophy and art, is just another episode in the history of an emotion that suddenly turns bad, and so we need to run after it and heal it with words: we do not learn how to get to feel, but we learn how to alter our feelings, by adding or erasing reasons, by making stories of them. We learn how to formalise our sentiments and how to give possible shapes to chaos in order to tame the passing time, but the children of our example just felt and expressed things before having thought of them, and this is “the ideal core of the onion” that Beckett managed to reach, or, if you prefer, the ubiquous sentimental centre of chaos with no visible formal borders yet. We are more or less free to start putting these borders, to stop children from being naïve, but we should first admit that in that case the borders will be the garments and not the bones of our structure, and that in that case our technique will be the exact opposite of the excavation proposed by Beckett in his Proust.


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The interchange and multiplicity of combinations and of struggles between form and content, art and life, constitute the literary habit, but the literary organism itself is independent of and uninterested in meaning, since the originality of the object treated or of the subject doing the treating are not valid or credible notions. It is precisely Beckett who managed to show all this to us, with his meticulous experiments as the only possible thing to do in the face of holistic criticism, and the “all sides” literary and theatrical production that preceded, succeeded and encircled him. The loneliness of Descartes, Pascal’s thinking reed, Nietzsche’s superman, Merleau-Ponty’s savage being, or Lévinas’s face, should not be taken as achieved thinking goals either, but rather as useful links in the one and only continuous chain of human self-investigation. Beckett himself was born in the criticism. After his first and last attempt at academic suicide, he resurrected himself in the poetry and novels in English. Artistically, he survived the Second World War by writing Watt, then turned to drama and the use of French. He attempted a third rebirth near his physical death, with the gradual abandonment of any established word language and the passage, through blind voices and dumb images, to the sentimental formalism described below: since whatever we try to express about expression itself will always need a kind of expression so as to be expressed, the source of the universe as we know it, is this eternal, unsolvable, ill seen ill said passage from the fugitive sensual human body to a cheating consensual language. We do not claim here to be already able to generalise our findings. We hope to explore with other artists whether a more general application of this originary passage principle, beyond-anyprinciple, is possible in art. Concerning Beckett more precisely, we think we have discovered a way to be consistent with the depth of his aesthetic project as he was feeling it, although he couldn’t always be faithful to it because of the obligation to express, stronger than anything (see here Gontarski’s comment on Beckett’s repeated but never achieved threat to stop directing: Gontarski 2006, p.144). We cannot be naïve anymore but we should be honest when taking others by force in our influence game. And this for at least three reasons, which will end this paper:



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a. The whole influence affair is often misunderstood and reduced in its value by the civil war inside contemporary criticism, which often scares potential actors and students before they even get to know if they like the author’s text or not. If we quickly just put an and between two great names, because we have found one or two notions that those names both used or because we have a hint in a diary of a possible meeting of theirs, we do not learn much about the particularity in the depth of either work. Naming and placing people in the same artistic movement or philosophical school does not teach us anything new. On the contrary, this neatness of identification sometimes can get even more dangerous than Beckett himself thought, especially when we see it facilely taught to new students. A debts and legacies approach should not take less than a lifetime for a critic. It is way beyond the limits of a brief article or even a lengthy book. b. An important comment on a text by Beckett should come from the reading of the totality of his work, so as to feel, keep in mind and apply elsewhere its original project and not extrapolate some spare if striking quotations. Intertextuality, for Derrida as for Kristeva (since we are often asked to use them as references in contemporary criticism), should mean first of all (and this is actually an old Spinozan concept7) to ask the same author’s words to explain one another through their changes over time or in their literary space. While one does not prefer “Beckett speaking of Beckett”, one should not consider any specific critic’s analysis as the Beckettian Bible either: we can illustrate Blanchot or Bataille 7 In his Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza shows how many theological church and religion assertions are actually political opinions having nothing to do with the text of the Bible itself. Thus, he undertakes the reading of the entire Bible, for which he suggests a new general reading method based on the principle of explaining the text only by the text itself, without substituting more or less free interpretations. This means that in case of problems in understanding on the part of the reader or of misunderstandings due to the text’s obscurity or to contradictions arising, we should search in the rest of the same text for passages which are better able to clarify the problematic ones. To put it simply, every answer can only be in the text and not in the reader’s imagination. See also Beckett’s letter to Michel Polac, January 1952, En attendant Godot cover, 1952, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris: “Je ne sais pas plus sur cette pièce que celui qui arrive à la lire avec attention. [...] Tout ce que j’ai pu savoir, je l’ai montré”.


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with quotations from Beckett better than Beckett with quotations from Blanchot and Bataille, because it was they who tried to analyse and understand him, and not the other way round8. c. We cannot but recognize the historical value of erudite archive research, but it is equally interesting to us, and more indicative of an authentic work of art, to record its reception by readers or spectators, either when this reception inspires the author, if he or she is still alive, or when it influences the future presentation of new productions after the author’s death. What we most miss nowadays is perhaps the opportunity to get in touch with the text itself and ‘record the reactions’ before any critical interpretation conditions them. This should be a priority for an empirical approach. So, reading and playing Beckett again in this light, firstly shaking hands with the affective half of our divided and intellectually pretentious self, in order to teach Beckett faithfully and make his work genuinely known, is all we are trying to suggest here: the bare and strong friendship of a pair of skillful hands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Proust, 1931, in Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Boyars, London 1999, pp. 7-93. “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le pantalon”, 1945-1946, in Ruby Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York, pp. 118-132. 8 See also Joseph S. O’Leary’s abstract for the International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006, September 29 – October 1, entitled “Beckett’s SelfTranslation and Intertextuality”: “In his 1988 study of Beckett’s self-translation, Babel and Beckett (University of Toronto Press), Brian T. Fitch sets aside the question of how intertextual effects survive translation, and he neglects to note that some of Beckett’s English texts have a rich intertextual resonance quite absent from their French counterparts”: in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessed April 1, 2008).



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“Peintres de l’empêchement”, 1948, in Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjecta cit., pp. 133-137. Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Boyars, London 1999. Premier amour, 1970, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Worstward Ho, 1983, in Nohow On, 1996, John Calder, London, pp. 87-116. Nohow On, 1996, John Calder, London. “For to End Yet Again”, 1976, in Stanley E. Gontarski (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove, New York, pp. 243-246. Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York. Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove, New York.

Criticism Derval, André, 2007, Dossier de presse En attendant Godot (19521961), IMEC et 10/18, Paris. Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlman, 2006, Beckett after Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts). Locatelli, Carla, 1990, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Moorjani, Angela, 2006, “Child’s Play and the Learned Art of Unseeing”, in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessed April 1, 2008). O’Leary, Joseph S., 2006, “Beckett’s Self-Translation and Intertextuality”, in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessed April 1, 2008).

Other works cited Spinoza, Baruch de, 1677, Tractatus theologico-politicus, in Robert Harvey M. Elwes (editor), 2004, A Theologico-political Treatise; and, A Political Treatise, Dover Publications, Mineola (New York).



Beckett and Cinema



The Indiscreet Charm of the Cinematic Eye in Samuel Beckett’s Film Lino Belleggia

In his Diary of a Bad Year John Maxwell Coetzee refers to a picture “of Samuel Beckett sitting in the corner of a bare room”, published in Javier Marias’ book Written Lives, as follows: Beckett looks wary, and indeed Marias describes his look as ‘hunted’. The question is, hunted, hounded by what or whom? The most obvious answer: hounded by the photographer. Did Beckett really decide of his own free will to sit in a corner, at the intersection of three dimensional axes, gazing upward, or did the photographer persuade him to sit there? In such a position, subjected to ten or twenty or thirty flashes of the camera, with a figure crouching over you, it is hard not to feel hunted. (Coetzee 2007, p. 201)

In this picture Beckett is hunted by an Eye, the camera eye; in Film, Beckett’s first and only movie, written in 1963 and shot in New York in 1964, the protagonist, Buster Keaton, is hounded by the Eye, a movie camera eye. Film was commissioned to Beckett by his friend Barney Rosset1, the publisher of Grove Press, who wanted to move into film production, and invited Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco to write three new scripts to be produced in a featurelength trilogy by the Evergreen Theater, a separate film unit of Rosset’s company. However, of the three the only one that made it as far as production was Film by Beckett2, whose script was 1

For a brief account of Rosset’s experience in producing Film see Rosset

2001. 2 Harold Pinter’s screenplay (The Compartment) was adapted for a 1967 BBC TV production with the title of The Basement.


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published for the first time in 1967 by Faber, along with “Act Without Words” and the television drama “Eh Joe”. Beckett’s passion for the Seventh art contrasted with his fear of writing on commission, a reticence heightened by a traumatic dispute over a film contract which he had signed in August 1962 for a film based on Waiting for Godot. James Knowlson mentions in his biography that “the trouble surrounding this proposal helped to harden Beckett’s opposition to any small or large screen adaptations of plays written for the stage or radio” (Knowlson 1996 [1997, p. 505]), so much that in 1963 he refused Ingmar Bergman permission to stage the two radio plays All That Fall and “Embers”. In the first few lines of the screenplay “Outline” of Film, Beckett specifies that the story takes place “about [in] 1929. Early summer morning” (Film, p. 164), as detailed. In 1929, Beckett was in Paris, where, as he told Mel Gussow in 1984, “The Surrealists, André Breton, [were] laying down the law – the artistic law” (Gussow 1996 [2000, p. 47]). In 1929 Breton’s 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme was reprinted, whilst the latest poems by Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, and Breton himself were published in small journals. Beckett “could not feel any affinity with the surrealists mainly because [...] they were all cold or even hostile towards Joyce’s ‘Revolution of the Word’. On the other hand he identified with the atmosphere of experimentation and innovation which characterised the surrealist movement” (p. 47). The young Beckett must have been influenced by the importance placed by the surrealists on psyche and spirituality, capable of revealing an authentic reality free from all conditioning of reason, superior to what human beings are used to. He must also have had an understanding of the new role of the surrealist director-author who didn’t attempt to please the audience and who, on the contrary, wanted to irritate the viewers, alienating them from the outside world, and leaving them at the mercy of the turmoil he had provoked. “He enjoyed Marcel Duchamp, who lived near him. I commented on Duchamp’s objects trouvés – Mel Gussow recounts – such as the urinal he exhibited as a work of art. Beckett laughed: ‘A writer could not do that’” (p. 47). According to some critics, the thinking behind a drama like Endgame can be found in the influence of Duchamp, an exceptional chess player and author of a chess treatise, based on the notion of Zugzwang, still considered significant today.


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In April 1929 the film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì Un chien andalou was shown at the Ursulines cinema in Paris, and it was to stay on the screen of the “Studio 26” cinema for nine months. At the premiere, which brought together Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Tzara and René Magritte, just to name a few of the guests, one of the greatest scandals of the history of cinema took place, one that would eventually be part of the surrealist legends. The screenplay of Un chien andalou was published in the monographic number of the journal This Quarter dedicated to Surrealism, in 1932. In that same issue, Beckett published his translations of some writings by Breton, Éluard and René Crevel. Setting his film in 1929, when the first sound film, The Jazz Singer, was shown, was for Beckett a way to support by contrast his decision to shoot a silent movie3, and stress the pivotal role of images over words in his cinematic experience. However, the setting in 1929 is essentially a homage to Un chien andalou, and the reference to the surrealist masterpiece unveils the main character of the film, ‘E’, the eye. Originally the film was to be called Eye, in reference to the eye that in close-up opens and closes Film, like that in the first scene of Un chien andalou, which Buñuel himself, this time as the actor, cuts open horizontally with a razor blade, thereby making one of the most famous sequences in cinema history. The eye is divided into two parts to make possible the use of double vision since the eyes cannot see everything, nor can they decipher the surrealist world of dreams: the visions and the hallucinatory distortions that Buñuel is about to show the audience. The main character of Un chien andalou turns his eyes backwards and inside his own head, showing the white of the eyes in a desperate attempt to understand through introspection. According to Buñuel, it is essential for human beings to switch on (in their own eyes) a new vision which can show what is normally just background, those characteristics which normal vision cannot capture. The death of vision therefore is equivalent to the denial of life as shown by bleeding eyes gouged out of the sockets of the dead and rotting cow. But,

3 There is only one ‘sound’ in Film, at the outset, during the episode of the couple – the vocal instruction to ‘sssh!’, or be quiet.


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as in Film, when the eyes succeed in revealing the ultimate truth of perception, and therefore the impossibility to escape from the eye mastering the self, this provokes such a deep fear in those watching as to cause blindness. In fact the eye which opens and closes Film is lifeless: a terrible vision has taken life away. In 1929, while on the set next door Buñuel was filming his second film L’âge d’or at the film studio in Billancourt, Paris, Sergei M. Eisenstein worked as a consultant on a short musical film entitled Romance sentimentale. Around 1930, the Russian director was already well known abroad, and in the same year he spoke at the Sorbonne where nearly two thousand people crowded together to witness a private showing of The General Line, which the Parisian police banned a few minutes before the scheduled beginning. Beckett had always been very interested in films and in film theory and, during the difficult months between 1935 and 1936, he devoured books by Vsevolod Pudovkin (a precursor of film montage in Russian film), books on him written by the German theorist Rudolf Arnheim, and many by the director and montage theorist Eisenstein4. In the summer of 1936, Beckett wrote a letter to Eisenstein5, proposing to go to Moscow, at his own expense, to live there for a month as a disciple in the State Institute for Cinematography. Unfortunately, Eisenstein never got to see that letter, as 1936 had been a bad year for the Soviet director. Several weeks before its completion, Eisenstein was ordered to suspend the production of his film Bezhin Meadow, attacked as ‘formalistic’ because of its poetic interpretation of reality. The production was stopped permanently by Stalinist officials in 1937 and the film remained unfinished; the sole surviving copy was destroyed, supposedly in a bombing raid during World War II, but more likely burned outright: the suppression of Bezhin Meadow was said to be part of an ongoing campaign against the artistic avant-garde in Soviet Union during Stalin’s regime. When it came to choosing the director of cinematography, one of the most important roles in the making of a movie and especially a black and white movie, Beckett’s passion for the experi4

See Bair 1978 [1990, pp. 215-216], and Knowlson 1996 [1997, pp. 226,

521]. 5

The letter is reproduced in Leyda 1985, p. 59.



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ments of the Soviet filmmakers deeply influenced the final decision. Eventually the production called Boris Kaufman, the brother of the Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov, the inventor of the “Cine-Eye”, and Beckett felt very proud to have such an important technical contribution to his movie. Kaufman had worked on two films by Jean Vigo, Zéro de conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934), one of the groundbreaking masterpieces of cinema, and had later worked for Elia Kazan in On the Waterfront, for which he won an Academy Award for the best cinematography in 1954. Boris Kaufman’s stylistic touch made a big contribution to the final result of Beckett’s film. His characteristic use of light tended, in exteriors, to have the effect of condensing surfaces – he was famous for his fondness for filming walls and buildings in an expressionistic manner, whilst in interiors he used to build the space in a vertical and narrow way to emphasise the intensity of forces which work on the body in a closed space. The decision to give the role of the protagonist to Buster Keaton, one of Beckett’s favourite movie artists, seems to be based on the same grounds. Revered as much by Eisenstein, who considered him his favourite actor, as by the Surrealists, in the mid-Sixties Keaton was an old movie star of silent cinema, whose artistic life had apparently stopped in 1927, when his career had begun to tail off. In 1956, Keaton had turned down the part of Lucky in the first American production of Godot, calling the script incomprehensible and a waste of time. Nonetheless it had been suggested that Waiting for Godot could have been inspired by a minor Keaton film, The Lovable Cheat from 1949, adapted from Le Faiseur, a play by Honoré de Balzac also known as Mercadet, in which the protagonist waits impatiently for the return of his partner who is called Godeau6. When Beckett and Keaton met at a hotel in New York City in 1964, the actor was only vaguely aware of how famous the 6 In her essay “Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot)”, Mary Bryden points out that, in his 1966 edition of En attendant Godot, Colin Duckworth reported “Beckett’s assurance to him that he had become familiar with Balzac’s play only after his completion of Godot, but [added] cannily: ‘It may seem a surprising gap in the knowledge of a Master of Arts in French, with a wide knowledge of French literature and culture. [...] It is not impossible that although Beckett’s conscious memory has released its hold on Mercadet, the subconscious still retained the echo of it’” (Bryden 1994, p. 50).


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Irish writer was, and certainly had never read any of his works. Talking about Film, Mel Gussow recalls an interview with Beckett in 1982: “[He] said that Buster Keaton had accepted the role simply as ‘a job’. [...] Keaton did not know Beckett’s plays. They could only talk about silent movies. Still Beckett seemed to like him, perhaps largely in memory of Keaton’s comedy” (Gussow 1996 [2000, p. 41]). Alan Schneider referred to this meeting as one of those moments that seem inevitable before they happen, impossible when they take place, and incredible afterwards. They came from two totally different worlds and times, and probably they had nothing to say to one another. Filming was not easy, at least at the beginning, since this was Schneider’s first movie experience. However, with the exception of Boris Kaufman, always worried about the perfect light, everyone was sympathetic. Once they had overcome the initial difficulties with the outdoor shots, and started filming inside, everything was much easier. Schneider did not always know what he was doing but he thought things didn’t seem too bad. Keaton’s professionalism amazed everyone; he was indefatigable, although not very talkative, and he happily gave his full collaboration for the whole period of filming. Afterwards, Keaton said that he had understood only after the end of shooting that the film meant something, even if he didn’t know what exactly and that it had, after all, been worth it7. An initial montage took place, not without confrontations with the film’s editor Sidney Meyers (the crucial filmmaker of the New American Cinema who co-directed the pivotal The Savage Eye in 1960)8, in the presence of Schneider and Beckett, in order to show the author a provisional version of the film before he left for Europe. The first cut was not, in the end, all that different from the final one, lasting a total of 22 minutes, and the technical defects, mostly in the outdoor section, are mainly due to Schneider’s lack of experience. 7 The first encounter between Beckett and Keaton, as well as the whole shooting of the movie, are extensively reported in Schneider 1969. 8 Part drama and part documentary, The Savage Eye opens by introducing the camera lens as a character who will follow the leading lady throughout her day, along with a masculine voice assailing her with questions. Most of the characters are all too aware they are being photographed and thus cannot be taken as completely ‘real’.



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The biggest concern for a filmmaker is the distribution of the movie, when the whole production comes into life in the darkness of movie theatres, and Film was never properly distributed either in the States or in Europe9. Always a complex process, distribution was particularly difficult in the case of Film, a black and white, silent, short film, difficult to slot into one of the official Hollywood genres. A typical film guide would possibly classify Film as a thriller, and Film does indeed seem to follow the aesthetics of the genre: a silent suspense movie in black and white. A genuine thriller is a film that relentlessly pursues a single-minded goal: to thrill the audience as the plot builds towards a climax, which usually is the epilogue. The tension usually arises when the main character is placed in a dangerous situation with no escape. In a thriller, the hero is essentially somebody ordinary whose life is threatened, usually because he is unknowingly involved in a dangerous or potentially deadly situation. The characters in a thriller often come into conflict with each other or with outside forces – the menace is sometimes abstract or shadowy. The protagonist of Beckett’s thriller is ‘O’, the object, hounded by a villain who, as in a typical suspense movie, presents obstacles that the hero must overcome. Despite the “General” indications of the screenplay, which relate that the same main character is divided in two, ‘O’ and ‘E’, the audience of the actual movie will acknowledge the mystery beyond the character only at the end, as in a typical thriller. ‘E’ is a one-eyed entity with a monocular vision: in the last shots the movie camera frames Keaton for the first time with a close-up, and the viewer discovers that the left eye of ‘O’ is covered by a patch. The hero – the perceived – desperately tries to escape from his hunter – the perceiver. In order to hide himself from the extraneous gaze, ‘O’ stays within what Beckett called the “angle of immunity” (Film, p. 164). This is the reason why Beckett establishes that the movie camera will chase ‘O’ only from behind, 9 Film was awarded the Prix Filmcritica at the Venice Film Festival in 1965, and after this, it was shown at numerous European film festivals, gaining the critics’ praise and several official awards, for example at the London Film Festival where it was named ‘Outstanding Film of the Year’, and at the Tours Film Festival where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize in 1966.


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at an angle which will not exceed 45°. When this angle is exceeded ‘O’ enters percipi, experiencing, as Beckett defined it, the “anguish of perceivedness” (p. 163). As the reference to George Berkeley’s philosophical theory seems to fade away, the film theory reveals its presence in Beckett’s vision of film experience. Actually the “Outline” opens with “esse est percipi” but in the second draft Beckett seems to place less importance on Berkeley’s ideas, making clear that “No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience” (p. 163). The outline divides Film into three parts: the street; the stairs; the room. Instead of these three parts indicated by Beckett, Gilles Deleuze, in his seminal essay Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze 1986 [2001]), proposes a different division according to the three types of cinematic movement-images: the action-images (a perception of action – medium shots), which include both the street and stairs scenes, the perception-images (or perception of perception – long shots), for the scene inside the room, and the affection-images (“the perception of oneself through oneself” – close-ups), for the hidden room and the scene when ‘O’ dozes off10. In the first and second part, all is the perception of ‘E’, which coincides with the camera and also with the audience’s perception, with occasional interventions of the blurred and unfocussed vision of ‘O’ shown cinematographically through a lens gauze, which intensifies the mystery. In the third part, Beckett alternates the vision ‘O’ has of the room to the continual perception that ‘E’ has of ‘O’. Film opens with the extreme close-up shot of a wrinkled eye followed by the shot of the rough texture of a wall: the two conflicting shots create a new image, which is the feeling that a set of eyes could suddenly appear from the wall. In his essay Film Form, Eisenstein wrote that a new idea occurred “from the collision of independent shots” (Eisenstein 1949, p. 49), and these new ideas are produced in the mind of the spectators viewing a film. Ac-

10

See Deleuze 1986 [2001, pp. 67-68].



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cording to the Soviet filmmaker, “the basic indication of the shot can be taken as the final summary of its effects on the cortex of the brain as a whole” (Eisenstein 1949, p. 67), and in Film the effect is one of indefinite suspense which builds up right from the first shots as soon as the chase starts in the street with the indiscreet eye of the movie camera hounding the victim. During the first part in the street and the second one on the stairs, Beckett gives the audience an important clue about the mystery: while running, ‘O’ bangs clumsily into an old couple, who, looking at the movie camera, ‘E’, in close-ups, have the same expression as the florist who meets ‘O’ on the stairs. The expression reveals the surprise mixed with horror, that Beckett defines as “an agony of perceivedness” (p. 165). They have exactly the same facial expression as ‘O’ in the room, during the third and last part of the film. Beckett leaves out of the frame part of the action using the limited angle of 45°, and enlarges small details on his screen with extreme close-ups to make these details part of the action. This seems to echo the section of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art, published in 1933, dedicated to “an entirely new technique of closeups” created by the Russian film artists: The possibility of varying the range of the image and the distance from the object thus provides the film artist with the means of splitting up the whole of any scene easily without interfering with reality. Parts represent the whole, suspense may be created by leaving what is important or remarkable out of the picture. (Arnheim 1933 [1957, p. 81])

‘O’ doesn’t know from whom or what he is running, but his desperation grows minute by minute particularly during the first section of the third part, the room scene, which Deleuze called perception-images (or perception of perception). In this part ‘O’ tries to eliminate every possible gaze from the room, coming from animals, objects, walls, photographs, holes in the window curtain11. 11 After covering both the goldfish bowl and the parrot’s cage with his overcoat, ‘O’ opens a folder, and after having turned 90° to avoid the gaze of the eyelets, he takes out some photographs. In the way that Krapp relives his past with recorded tapes, the protagonist of Film relives moments of his life by looking at photographs which capture him at different stages of his life. He feels threat-


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The montage of this sequence alternates the circular movement of 45° of the camera with close-ups, and extreme close-ups of the indiscreet eyes of the objects. In the whole movie, Beckett used extreme close-ups only for the faces of the characters who perceive to be perceived (the couple, the florist and ‘O’ in the last shot), and for the animals and objects which give ‘O’ the perception of perception. In Eisenstein’s film theory, the repetition with a degree of variation of a fragment, especially if identified with a close-up as in the case of Film, becomes an agent of unity, which also acts to create the rhythm of the work. In Film the use of repetition is not only a basic unifying principle, but it also has the advantage and impact of generating echoes. And the echoing – the tool, according to Eisenstein, for the artistic penetration of mind and body – forms a link throughout the film, a bridge between the rest of the shots, and a semblance of resonance or depth in the whole film. The seemingly two characters are involved in a dramatic game of chase and escape which is in a way at the heart of Beckett’s concern in his film experience. ‘E’ seems to chase ‘O’ as Beckett is looking for an art form able to represent the gap between observer and observed, a way to project this dual and conflicting perception while trying to give form to that reality. A film’s capacity to leap beyond the limits of its material informed Eisenstein’s writings and led to his claim – which deeply fascinated Beckett – that film brought to fruition all the yearnings of all other art forms. ‘O’ seems to escape the tyrannical condition of the object as prisoner in the perception of the perceiver, and as secluded from the events taking place around it. In Eisenstein, Beckett saw the possibility to free the object from its frozen condition at the moment of expression, and to make it part of the transformations happening while the object’s relationship with the world changes. And this is the case of a sequence from The General Line by Eisenstein12, released again in ened by the gaze of the people who are observing him from photographs, and his trembling hands seem to interpret his thoughts. He ends ripping up the photographs irritably. 12 In his essay “Beckett, Eisenstein and the Image: Making an Inside an Outside” (Antoine-Dunne 2004), Jean Antoine-Dunne reports of a letter dated 25th March 1936, where Beckett quotes a specific sequence from The General Line, defining his deep understanding of Eisenstein’s pathos structure. In the letter



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1929, in which the extreme close-ups within the pathos structure (fragmentation, reconstruction, leap, ecstasy) let the object (a milkseparator) come out of its materiality to a new dimension of meaning: the celebration of Stalin’s agricultural reform. As the object, or better an extreme close-up of a detail of the milk-separator, leaps to another dimension through deformation, the close-ups of the “curiously carved headrest” (Film, p. 167) of a rocking-chair launch the object to a new stage and make it part of the whole action with its perceiving eyes. The epilogue, which Deleuze defined the affection-images part, takes place in the room, where, taking advantage of the torpor of ‘O’ and therefore of the extinction of subjective perception, the movie camera ‘E’ manages to get in front of ‘O’, leading the audience to the climax, to the thrilling moment. ‘O’ is woken up with a start by the enquiring gaze of the eye shot in a blurred close-up, because now it is ‘O’ who perceives. The leap is accomplished. The movie camera ‘E’ is the double of ‘O’, and the only difference between the two can be noted just by facial expressions: the expression of ‘E’ is “neither severity nor benignity, but rather acute intentness” (p. 169), and the expression of ‘O’ is one of anguish. The unified character closes his eyes and covers his face with his hands. The mystery is solved, but this is not the end, since we do not know, as Gilles Deleuze pointed out, what will happen next, once the double face disappears into darkness: Will it die out and will everything stop, even the rocking of the rocking chair, when the double face slips into nothingness? This is what the end suggests – death, immobility, blackness. (Deleuze 1986 [2001, p. 68])

According to Deleuze, in Film Beckett reversed the idea of an evolution of subjectivity, switching off all the possible images – ache refers to an evening spent with friends reading some poems: “One in which the rime mouth-drouth occurs repeatedly is the most remarkable, like the bull let loose among the cows in Eisenstein’s General Line, a reference which I confess only occurs to me this moment, in the calm light of March winds caught up like sleeping daffodils. I understand that one evening at the Sinclairs’ you paved the way for one of your explosions of reality” (Beckett Archive, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin).


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tion-images, perception-images, and affection-images – in order to reach a primordial world before the existence of man proceeding towards the very materiality of the cinematic process, the purity of “the mother movement-image” (Deleuze 1986 [2001, p. 68]) through a symbolic system of simple codes: a road often followed by the so-called experimental cinema with much more complex technical methods, drawing attention to the very materiality of the cinematic process. One example is the American filmmaker Stan Brakhage, author of a seminal essay entitled Metaphors on Vision, published in 1963, whose incipit opens as follows: Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. [...] Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word’. (Brakhage 1963 [2003, p. 73])

Brakhage’s investigation of the threat and inevitability of blindness, and as a consequence of “the distinctly ecstatic pleasures of obscurity”, is part of a long tradition of ocular aggression in avant-garde cinema, “always implicitly aimed at the open eyes of the viewer” (Dworkin 2005, p. 137), which dates back again to the razor scene in Un chien andalou. His films “are intimate physical portraits of their viewers; they hold up a mirror [...] of the glaucous, carnal eye looking at its fragile fleshy self” (p. 139), raising crucial issues about the essence of the cinematic eye and about the nature of spectatorship. In his filmmaking Brakhage emphasised “the illusion of clear vision” (p. 137) and that even “the healthiest vision is less clearly transparent than we typically imagine” (p. 135), which he made clear in The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971) with the empty sockets in the autopsied skull. In Film, ‘E’ and ‘O’ are discovered to be partially blind. Yet their visions do not add up to a whole, since each is blind in the same eye, and this vision is partial for the spectator as well. During the Fifties and Sixties, several directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni and Michael Powell, fo-



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cussed their efforts to explore the referentiality of cinema as an art form in three differently unconventional thrillers whose protagonists are all strictly related to the world of images. In Rear Window (1954), Hitchcock conceived his groundbreaking study of voyeurism as the purest expression of his idea of the cinematic experience, placing the protagonist, a photographer, in the same position of the movie spectator, right in front of a window. In Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the photographer’s impossibility of seeing the truth in his pictures seems to suggest that for every moment made visible there is another that becomes invisible, and, given the slim line between objective reality and illusion, it also suggests the limits of art’s power to interpret reality. In Peeping Tom (1960), the story of an obsessive cameraman who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror, Michael Powell acts out “an extreme, a perversion of the cinematic look, but it also reflects outwards, onto the cinema’s intrinsic fascination with looking, and the ease with which it can make peeping toms of us all” (Mulvey 2005, p. 144). In these works, the examination of the problems of the relationship between the spectator/perception/reality is included within the structure of the film, but in Film Beckett managed to master the basic conventions of the movie camera while visually redefining them on the screen frame in order to investigate the medium as a possible expressive solution to some of the problems of perception that no other medium can resolve. During the production of Film, Beckett was completely absorbed into the medium, and despite the fact that at that time cinematography had made great advances both in terms of colour and sound, he decided to go back to the rudiments of silent black and white film, to the basic essence of cinema which he made clear right from the title of his movie: a piece of celluloid on which the images shot by the movie camera are fixed and which produces an illusion of the presence of something else. Deeply absorbed into the indiscreet charm of the cinematic eye, in Film Beckett scrutinized the visual perception of the movie camera as an effective method of rendering an unmediated image of one man’s perception of himself, which is an image of rupture between self and other, an image shot right in the filmic distance between ‘E’ and ‘O’, in the gaps where the truth is to be found.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Film, 1967, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Grove Press, New York, pp. 161-174. Film. With an essay on directing ‘Film’ by Alan Schneider, 1969, Grove Press, New York. The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Grove Press, New York.

Criticism Antoine-Dunne, Jean, 2001, “Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and Contrapuntal Montage”, in Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (editors), 2001, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 / Samuel Beckett: Fin sans fin en l’an 2000), XI, pp. 315-323. Idem, 2004, “Beckett, Eisenstein and the Image: Making an Inside an Outside”, in Jean Antoine-Dunne and Paula Quigley (editors), 2004, The Montage Principle. Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts, XVIII, Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York, pp. 191213. Antoine-Dunne, Jean, and Paula Quigley (editors), 2004, The Montage Principle. Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts, XVIII, Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York. Bair, Deirdre, 1978, Samuel Beckett. A Biography, Vintage, London 1990. Brakhage, Stan, 1963, “Metaphors on Vision” in Film Culture, 30, 1963, pp. 12-23, reprinted with the title “Metaphors on Vision [and] The Camera Eye”, in Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson (editors), 2003, Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Routledge, London & New York, pp. 73-80. Bryden, Mary, 1994, “Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot)”, in Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans (editors), 1994, Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Intertexts in Beckett’s Work: Et/ou intertextes de l’oeuvre de Beckett), III, pp. 47-56. Buning, Marius, and Sjef Houppermans (editors), 1994, Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Intertexts in Beckett’s Work: Et/ou intertextes de l’oeuvre de Beckett), III.



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Deleuze, Gilles, 1986, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Continuum, London & New York 2001. Dworkin, Craig, 2005, “Stan Brakhage, Agrimoniac”, in David E. James (editor), 2005, Stan Brakhage Filmmaker, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, pp. 132-149. Gussow, Mel, 1996, Conversations with (and about) Beckett, Nick Hern Books, London 2000. Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury, London 1997. Leyda, Jay, 1985, Eisenstein 2: A Premature Celebration of Eisenstein’s Centenary, Seagull Press, Calcutta. Marias, Javier, 2006, Written Lives, New Directions, New York. Mellor, David Alan, 2007, “‘Fragments of an Unknowable Whole’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966”, in Visual Culture in Britain, VIII, 2007, 2, pp. 45-61. Moorjani, Angela, and Carola Veit (editors), 2001, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 / Samuel Beckett: Fin sans fin en l’an 2000), XI. Mulvey, Laura, 2005, “The Light that Fails: A Commentary on Peeping Tom”, in Ian Christie and Andrew Moor (editors), 2005, The Cinema of Michael Powell. International Perspectives on an English Film-Maker, BFI Publishing, London, pp. 143-155. Rosset, Barney, 2001, “On Samuel Beckett’s Film”, in House Magazine, II, Winter 2001, 2. Available at http://www.tinhouse.com/ mag/back_issues/archive/issues/issue_6/lostnfound.html (last accessed May 30, 2009). Schneider, Alan, 1969, “On Directing Film”, in Beckett, 1969, Film. With an essay on directing ‘Film’ by Alan Schneider cit., pp. 63-94. Available at http://www.ubu.com/papers/beckett_schneider.html (last accessed May 30, 2009). Simpson, Philip, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson (editors), 2003, Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Routledge, London & New York. Tanaka, Mariko Hori, 2001, “Elements of Haiku in Beckett: The Influence of Eisenstein and Arnheim’s Film Theories”, in Moorjani and Veit (editors), 2001, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui cit., pp. 324-330. Waugh, Katherine, and Fergus Daly, 1995, “‘Film’ by Samuel Beckett”, FilmWest 20, 1995. A piece commemorating the 30th anniversary of Film available at http://www.iol.ie/%7egalfilm/filmwest/20beckett.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009).


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Other works cited Arnheim, Rudolf, 1933, Film as Art, University of California Press, Berkeley 1957. Coetzee, John Maxwell, 2007, Diary of a Bad Year, Harvill Secker, London. Eisenstein, Sergei, 1949, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York.


“as from an evil core... the evil spread”: Beckett and Horror Cinema Seb Franklin

This paper is focussed, as the title states, on certain connections between the writing of Samuel Beckett and the late-twentieth century horror genre, specifically on film and video. I am not attempting to make claims for a direct, causal link between the two, but instead to locate specific conceptual and formal qualities that connect them across registers and media. In “Lost in the Mall” Brian McHale proposes this kind of aparallel connection to Beckett in terms of science fiction, stating that: I would like to propose an [...] explanation, in terms not of genealogies and shared origins but of reverse chronology and post factum influence. In full consciousness of the paradox, I would like to propose that Beckett’s affiliation with science fiction has come after the fact; that Beckett’s writing never had any connection with science fiction before (before, say, 1982), but that it has one now. I’m proposing that Beckett [...] has been “retrofitted”, in effect, as a science fiction [writer]. (McHale 2001, p. 115)

In a similar way, I will argue that Beckett’s writing has been retrofitted by the horror genre. The result is a way of thinking about Beckett and contemporary popular genres that draws out their abstract qualities, creating a formal connection that demonstrates possibilities in both. These possibilities relate in particular to the first characteristic of minor art that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari outline in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, in which a minor art or idiom necessarily locates itself in the midst of a major one. The way in which the major idiom becomes increasingly formalised and encoded by information technology, as Gilles Deleuze outlines in his “Postscript on Control Societies” (1995), is central to the for-


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mulation of a practical response, as the minor aesthetic must necessarily undergo changes alongside its major counterpart. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007) have noted that it is the “nonhuman” character of computer code that makes it so effective and immutable a major language, and to this end I am interested in the “nonhuman” elements of artworks in deriving a response to this, primarily sequences of events or narrative as the arrangement and materialisation of concepts, and the way in which various media allow them to be depicted. I am specifically interested, then, in an understanding of narrative cultural objects that relates to the digitally defined contemporary period. Beckett’s writing functions as a vital hinge point in working towards this artistic mode, presenting a mathematical minimalism and neutrality while containing disordered and impenetrable points that are both stabilised and destabilising. Towards the end of Discourse Networks 1800/1900 Friedrich Kittler presents a reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that focuses on the formal aspects of technological media and their capacity for information storage, in defeating the novel’s central horror. A stab to the heart turns the Undead to dust. Dracula’s salaciously whispering bride, the resurrected vampire Lucy, is put to death a second time, and finally, on the threshold of his homeland, so is he. A multimedia system, filmed over twenty times, attacks with typescript copies and telegrams, newspaper clippings and wax rolls (as these different types of discourse are neatly labelled). The great bird no longer flies over Transylvania. (Kittler 1985 [1999, p. 356])

In making this claim, Kittler is also, unwittingly, describing the conditions of the horror genre in the 20th century and thereafter. The same media that bring down the Count within the diegesis of the novel Dracula also serve to reproduce the central horror in the world outside of the book, actualising the possibility of the irrational through multiple retellings, printing and filmings; in other words, the establishment of a discourse network of disorder through technological reproduction. It is this relationship, between the nonhuman, indifferent properties of form and medium and the presence within it of a point of stochastic disorder, which


S. Franklin. “as from an evil core... the evil spread”

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is central to the horror genre, defining it in a way that is outside of specific events, monstrosities or possibilities. Deleuze and Guattari reveal a hidden fondness for the horror genre throughout A Thousand Plateaus, and this comes as no surprise since that book is, in the terms we have just outlined, a kind of horror or ghost story of theory. In Deleuze and Guattari the formal relationship between horror and the minor is highlighted through the term “outsider” in the writing of H. P. Lovecraft: Lovecraft applies the term “Outsider” to this thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multiple, “teeming, seething, selling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [2007, p. 270])

It is specifically this ultimate namelessness within an otherwise structured, often mathematically constructed work, which is central to Beckett’s writing as well as the horror cinema. This can be illustrated through a comparison of the climactic images in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), a film that is undoubtedly influenced by Psycho, but that formally represents a contemporary horror film where Psycho is a detective story. In Psycho the final discovery of Mrs Bates’ corpse, immediately followed by her knife-wielding son bursting into the room in his mother’s dress, introduces a continuity of exposition in the film, placing a psychologically (or psychoanalytically) derived rationalisation at the source of Norman Bates’ murders while meeting the major cinema’s needs for both psychological determinism and spectacle. In Halloween, by contrast, the final revelation is of nothing, an empty space where the body of the killer should lie after being shot and falling from a window. It is this nothing, the denial of exposition in the face of investigation, that both presents a formal model of the contemporary horror genre and represents its abstract link with Beckett’s writing. In applying this highly formal, flexible description of horror through Beckett, the connections between two quotations, one from Anna Powell, on horror in general, and one by Daniel Katz on Beckett’s Molloy, become particularly interesting:


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[In horror] our projected coherence is undermined as we slide into a molecular assemblage with the body of the film. Formal properties like the camera-shake and blurred image [...] intensify this melding. The viewer’s sensory perception intensifies by viral infection as the film literally gets inside us and sets up home there. (Powell 2005, p. 5). Moran is himself a detective of some sort, one whose task it is to “find” Molloy – a task identical to that taken up by the critic who would argue that [for example] Moran is Molloy in embryo. The critic who asserts that Moran is in fact and unbeknownst to himself Molloy has become in turn and with equal ignorance a double of Moran. (Katz 1999, p. 73).

In these two statements the abstract association between the nucleus of the modern horror genre and the writing of Samuel Beckett begins to emerge. The second half of Molloy begins as a detective story, in contrast to the “linear yet multiple”, “teeming” and “foaming” disorder of the novel’s first half, and as such presents itself as the rationality of recording and ordering that will address the preceding disorder. In doing this it sets up a formal relationship between signal and noise, implying the possibility of solving through both contrasts and similarities to the first section. This process can only ever meet with a gaping hole, and it is the location of this hole within the ostensibly stable medium of the book, and the book that is a detective story at that, which is definitive of the horror genre. Mark Fisher has noted that “Horror resides not so much in the empirical encountering of ‘hideous unholy abominations’ as in the transcendental trauma such encounters produce: faced with such anomalies, it becomes impossible to hold onto any stable sense of reality”1, and it is exactly this process that awaits the reader of Beckett who strives to effect a “stable sense of reality” within Molloy. This formal, material connection between Beckett’s writing and the horror film is perhaps best observed in the relationship between Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch

1 Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs, at http://www.cinestatic.com/transmat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009).



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Project (1999) and Beckett’s ghost story Ill Seen Ill Said. In this case the austerity of the documentary form in Blair Witch has the same effect as the formal simplicity of Beckett’s late prose, minimising ‘human’ aspects. Myrick and Sánchez’s film concerns the disappearance of three documentary filmmakers in the process of investigating a legendary witch in the Maryland woods, and takes the form of supposedly ‘found’ footage, assembled, edited and released as true by some unnamed agency; at the level of story and happening alone it belongs to the category of ‘genuine’ horror stories that are concerned with the oscillation of boundaries, the simultaneity of order and disorder that renders the major artwork’s predisposition towards rendering a clear signal impossible. In The Blair Witch Project the two opposing sides of the horror dynamic, the motivation to make meaning and sense and the denial of this process, are set in play and made to vibrate, forming noisy assemblages with fragments of rumours and stories that are either presented in the earlier parts of the film or in the body of supporting media, or simply remembered from elsewhere. The film is entirely free of exposition, presenting instead a perpetual grasping at meaning and sense for both characters and viewer. The connection with Ill Seen Ill Said is immediately notable here, and extends to the centrality of a ‘haunted house’ as the source of disorder that nonetheless contains no solutions. In both, deterritorialisation appears to be connected to the notion of ‘evil’, a term that Graham Fraser notes is “unusually strong” (Fraser 2000, p. 773) for Beckett, but it is clear from “the what is the wrong word the evil” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 9) in Ill Seen Ill Said, that this is an insufficient, arbitrary claim, an attempt to grasp at what defies description. It lies clearly at the heart of ghost and horror tales, but is by no means contained to those kinds of stories. That the “what is the wrong word the evil” is shown to be leaking and spreading into the environment within and the world surrounding the text in both Ill Seen Ill Said and The Blair Witch Project is central to the effectiveness of both, the book or the film itself becoming the “inexistent centre of a formless place” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 8) that renders conventional maps useless in favour of the “invisible map” that Powell describes as leading “further off track into a terrifying maze” (Powell 2005, p. 1). The narrative of both Blair Witch and Ill Seen Ill Said, a search for unambiguous information, is shown to become infected by the


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spreading force of the irrational core, effecting a movement from attempted rational explanation to complete disorder; the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said, as Fraser notes, becomes initially “frustrated by [...] hauntological indeterminacy” (Fraser 2000, p. 777), exclaiming: Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. [...] If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. [...] Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 20)

This desire to seek a psychologically determined explanation, that the old woman at the centre of the desolate space is imaginary, is constantly thwarted by her indeterminacy, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. In the same way, the edges of the frame in Blair Witch constantly imply presences, possibilities that might determine the threat faced by the filmmakers, while the camera movements and cluttered scenery constantly derender them. The filmmakers repeatedly come across piles of stones or figures made of bound sticks that terrify them, their similarity to the general texture of the woods making them both difficult to see clearly and easy to imagine where they are not for the viewer. Equally, the sound mix, as a result of the camera-bound microphones the filmmakers use, has the effect of obscuring both the testimonies of the townspeople and the immanent sounds in the woods that terrify the filmmakers. The eventual results of “confusion”, “things” and “imaginings” in both book and film are episodes of blind panic, the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said claiming “dread of black, of white, of void. Let her vanish” before collecting himself with “panic past pass on” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 31). This is mirrored in The Blair Witch Project, both in the filmmakers who, expecting to uncover the source of a folktale, come under attack from forces that they cannot discern as either natural (wild animals or people) or supernatural (the legendary witch), and in the viewer who finds the formally neutral ‘authenticity’ of the documentary form descend into increasingly chaotic footage that encourages imagined sights and sounds to infiltrate.



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That the singular source of the horror is a desolate house or cabin is a key parallel between the pair, connecting them both to each other and to one of the pre-eminent traditions of the horror genre in the shape of the haunted house. Rustin Parr’s ruined house is the final collapsing point of the narrative in Blair Witch, the point where the filmmakers disappear, while the cabin that lies at the centre of the “formless place” in Ill Seen Ill Said visibly spreads its influence over the surrounding space and consequently over the text itself: How come a cabin is such a place? How came? Careful. Before replying that in the far past at the time of its building there was clover growing to its very walls. Implying further more that it the culprit. And from it as from an evil core that the what is the wrong word the evil spread. (Ill Seen Ill Said, pp. 8-9)

In Blair Witch, the location of the house is equally questionable, appearing only a few minutes from the filmmakers’ tent at the beginning of ‘night eight’ despite not being visible to them as they made camp, and implicitly disappearing just as easily in order that their footage be recovered2. Within the house, as in the woods surrounding it, the organisation of space is at the mercy of unknown forces. The filmmakers at one point in the film claim to have been “walking south all day” only to arrive back where they started, and this formlessness of place is evident within the house. The same scream always comes from the opposite of whichever end of the building the filmmakers are in, an effect that is intensified by the editing process that cuts rapidly between the two cameras while retaining the same sound source. Finally, the proximity to the core of formlessness allows the medium itself to become contaminated in both Blair Witch and Ill Seen Ill Said; the narrator of the latter ends the novella infected by disorder, abandoning the will to rationally define in the claim “no matter now. Such the confusion now between real and-how say it’s contrary? 2 This is an implication borne out in the supporting material. The fictional accounts of the events surrounding the recovery of the footage make no mention of the house whatsoever, despite the fact that the filming ends violently in its basement.


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No matter” (p. 40), while the filmmakers of the former continue to film even under threat in the heart of house. As the filmmaker Heather runs down the stairs into the basement, her screams appear to come from a distant point due to the sound from the two cameras becoming mixed up, while the camera movement itself takes on a smooth, weightless quality that is in marked contrast to the almost permanent camera-shake that characterises the majority of the film, as even the technical aspects of filmmaking become haunted. The process of hauntological intrusion that is at work throughout The Blair Witch Project and Ill Seen Ill Said finally reaches completion when the ghosts of the text infect the medium of the text itself, the same process that sees the sedentary critic of Molloy subject to haunting by the ‘ghosts’ that get to work on Moran. Noise overcomes signal, leaking out from the boundaries of the story in various ways and creating symbiotic relationships. In The Blair Witch Project the documentary form, one that traditionally upholds the kind of search for rational explanation the narrator seeks in the early part of Ill Seen Ill Said to the highest level3, is overcome by irrationality and disorder. Attempting to make a map of the genuine horror film, as in the case of Beckett’s novels, means facing up to the simultaneous necessitation and impossibility of mapping. The minor horror film, like the Beckett text, “not only illustrates a haunted landscape, but is a haunted landscape” (Fraser, p. 778). 3 Pre-dating The Blair Witch Project by several years was the 1992 BBC television broadcast Ghostwatch in which a number of well known television presenters attempting to make a Halloween night live broadcast from a haunted house found themselves subject to the actions of a malevolent ghost. Ghostwatch is, like Blair Witch, entirely fictional but, despite its obvious status as such (the use of recognisable actors, the overblown nature of the ending), still contains a conspicuous power to frighten and unsettle, simply due to its juxtaposition of the supposedly secure documentary form with the irrational elements of horror.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Samuel Beckett Molloy, 1955, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, 1959, Grove Press, New York, pp. 7-176. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1955, 1956 and 1958), Grove Press, New York 1959. Ill Seen Ill Said, 1981, John Calder, London 1997.

Criticism Deleuze, Gilles, 1995, “Postscript on Control Societies”, in Negotiations, Columbia University Press, New York, trans. Martin Joughin, pp. 177-182. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, London & New York 2007. Idem, 1988, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Athlone Press, London, trans. Brian Massumi. Fisher, Mark, “Flatline Constructs”, at http://www.cinestatic.com /trans-mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009). Fraser, Graham, 2000, “‘No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work”, in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 46, n. 3, 2000, pp. 772-785. Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker, 2007, The Exploit, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Katz, Daniel, 1999, Saying “I” No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett, North Western University Press, Evanston. Kittler, Friedrich, 1985, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1999. McHale, Brian, 2001, “Lost in the Mall: Beckett, Federman, Space”, in Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney (editors), 2001, Engagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political, SUNY Press, Albany, pp. 112-126. Powell, Anna, 2005, Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Stamper, Chris, 1999, “Blair Witch: A Scary Home Brew”, at: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,20721-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1 (last accessed May 30, 2009). Sussman, Henry, and Christopher Devenney (editors), 2001, Engage-


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ment and Indifference: Beckett and the Political, SUNY Press, Albany.

Films cited Carpenter, John, 1978, Halloween, USA. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1960, Psycho, USA. Myrick, Daniel, and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999, The Blair Witch Project, USA.


Appendix: Performances and Images


NOTE TO THE APPENDIX The performances and exhibitions mentioned in the following pages were held during the Conference. Ninny Aiuto read some excerpts of Aspittannu a Godot, his translation of the play into Sicilian, with Francesco Teresi; Antonio Borriello kindly lent some photographs from his Beckett productions; John Hynes also generously lent some of his photographs from Beckett’s own productions; Giulia Lazzarini spoke about her performance in Strehler’s Giorni felici; Rosemary Pountney read some excerpts from Beckett’s work (see her essay in the present volume); Bill Prosser created a small exhibition of his renderings of Beckett’s doodles, mostly from Human Wishes.


Remembering Happy Days Giulia Lazzarini

[As well as numerous other great interpretations (for example Ariel in Strehler’s production of The Tempest) Giulia Lazzarini has been one of the greatest Italian interpreters of Happy Days, directed by Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro, Milan. This production toured Europe. Produced in the Eighties, it was staged again in 2000. In this short talk, Giulia Lazzarini speaks of the performance of the play, and re-enacts a few brief passages.] When I act this play I hear Strehler’s voice telling me what to do, and I speak as he spoke to me. I was submerged by the words the first time I went on stage, and spoke as he did, without completely understanding Happy Days, probably because I lacked the necessary human experience, perhaps not exactly to identify, but at least to understand everything Strehler had understood and conveyed to me, something I only achieved later. He was like an intermediary. The second time, in 2000, I was totally alone with all that I had experienced and learned in those twenty years. Perhaps I only understood Happy Days then, and now I love it. It had been a kind of torment, before: now it is something quite else, and I miss it. I re-read it and, as I do so, I bring all the strands together again and find new ones, and only in Happy Days, of the many plays I have acted in, does this happen. What Beckett writes and manages to say through this text is a sort of miracle, and I think it is the same for the audience, because the text leaves marks, traces, in people who have seen a performance, particularly this one, directed by Strehler, whose interpretation of the text comes across extremely clearly. He has brought out so many points, especially this sense of rebellion against the human condition, which is something positive, and acting it today, this text hits the audience, especially the young, more violently and vitally than it did us.


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Winnie’s bag [Giulia Lazzarini has the bag with her, and takes out the various objects as she goes along, to illustrate what she says] I thought I’d bring this bag with me; it’s travelled across Italy and Europe as far as Russia (it’s been to Krakow, St. Petersburg, Paris) and it never travelled with the other props: the sand and all the rest. The stage manager looked after it so that it wouldn’t get lost, with all the objects in it, and because I used to be rehearsing in the rehearsal room right up to the very last day. The rest of the equipment left earlier and I would say: “No! Leave the bag with me”. The bag always had to be there. In the text Winnie is asleep and she slowly wakens, and as she looks at the holy light she says: “Another heavenly day”. But Strehler wanted there to be a tremendous sound of bells ringing in the darkness: DONG! DONG! DONG! and little by little the house would go dark; I came up from beneath the stage in total darkness and got ready against the light, behind my parasol, while the bell tolled ominously nineteen or twenty times, after which the lights suddenly went up and the floodlights came on and BANG! An explosion. Winnie appeared holding the parasol in one hand, arms outstretched, and said: “Another heavenly day!”, as if to say, ‘Here I am!’ Winnie is ready, bright and breezy, to start the day. Strehler wanted her to be a little pink dolly, vivacious, petite and hatless; she doesn’t put her hat on till the next scene. The toothbrush She begins to say a prayer; that’s the first thing. Then she begins the day: her hand goes into the bag and brings out a toothbrush and toothpaste and as she speaks she calls to Willie, cleans her teeth, and not knowing where to spit the toothpaste out, she looks round and spits it into her husband’s hole, but he doesn’t notice; “Poor Willie–” and the tube of toothpaste “running out” corresponds to poor Willie. There are, then, three fundamental things in the opening: the awakening, the call to Willie and the tube of toothpaste, which is said to be “running out”. In these three things there is just about


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everything, and everything must be tightly bound together, giving the idea that there is another human being with Winnie who doesn’t answer, and whose actions are unknown. And if while spitting in his direction Winnie says “Poor dear–”, and then “running out”, of course she means the toothpaste, but also that this human being is dying. Then Winnie says “Ah well– [...] Can’t be helped–”: but what can’t be helped? The fact that the toothpaste is at an end or that her husband is on the brink of his end? They are old things about to come to an end; so there’s a double meaning, and the difficulty lies in interpreting this. The mirror Then comes the mirror: Winnie looks at herself in the mirror and then, suddenly, the first moment of anguish: “Good Lord!” “Good God!” Oh dear, what’s happened? There’s something wrong! Oh, my goodness, oh Lord!... And then: “Ah well–”: no, no, no, no, it’s all right... not bad... “No better, no worse–” “No change [...] no pain–”: nothing’s changed, nothing changes. “Great thing that– [...] Nothing like it”. And she always says this, over and over: “Great thing that”, something that doesn’t change, stays put, doesn’t improve but doesn’t get any worse, the important thing is to stay put. As she lays the mirror down she wipes the toothbrush, and begins to notice that something is written on it, but she can’t read it: “genuine... pure... what?” Hmm, I must see! She’s curious, she picks up her glasses and, referring to her husband: “no zest– [...] for anything– [...] no interest [...] in life”. She puts on her glasses (“genuine... pure”) but even with them on she can’t read; so, crossly: “Blind next–”. But she quickly recovers herself: “Ah well– [...] Seen enough– [...] I suppose [...] by now–”; I’ve already seen so much, I don’t mind not seeing now. She says this because she’s struggling with God, but at the same time is afraid of being punished, so she says: ‘No no, that’s fine... I must obey... I can’t see, but I’ve got memory!’. So she quotes Ophelia: “Woe woe is me– [...] to see what I see...” (i.e. nothing) “Holy light– [...] bob up out of dark” – you see, I remember – “blaze of hellish light”. This “hellish” makes her heart tremble, so she turns to her husband, calling for help, her voice half strangled;


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but he’s asleep, he doesn’t answer. He sleeps: “marvellous gift– [...] wish I had it”. Then she takes out a handkerchief and cleans her glasses and again she tries to read, but failing to do so she turns to God: I can’t read, but this is a gift, a blessing, because I don’t suffer much, “no pain– [...] hardly any– [...] wonderful thing that– [...] nothing like it– [...] slight headache sometimes– occasional mild migraine– [...] it comes– [...] then goes”... so God’s there and has to be thought about, “prayers perhaps not for naught–”. She puts her glasses on and tries again: “Genuine... pure...”, but can’t read (“hog’s setae”), and this is her first real moment of discomfort: “old things”, both the toothbrush with the writing worn away and her eyes which can no longer read. This, then, is the first time she is really distressed, but she quickly recovers: ‘Well, what can I do... take the parasol and torment him... wonderful!’; and she prods Willie, provoking him with the tip, but then the parasol falls into his hole: “And now?” The parasol as well... Alone, I can’t read any more, now I haven’t got my parasol, he doesn’t answer... A moment of emptiness, then she turns towards Willie and sees his hand as it comes out of the hole and gives her parasol back: ‘Thank you, dear!’ Happy again, she opens the parasol, passes it from one hand to the other and then goes back to thinking about her health; she notices that her hands are damp, that they have got no worse: “no better, no worse, no change”. She puts the parasol behind her and says to her husband: “Don’t go off on me again now dear will you please, I may need you. [...] No hurry, no hurry, just don’t curl up on me again”, and as she gestures she notices her hands again, and that they are now dry and discoloured: something’s wrong... “Just a shade off colour just the same”. She rummages in her bag, not knowing what she wants. The first thing she finds is a pistol: her hands are discoloured, but that doesn’t make it worth shooting oneself... ‘you’re there, perhaps for later’, and she kisses the pistol. She picks up a bottle of medicine, reads its label, drinks it, drains it off, and now that it is no longer any use, what does she do? She throws it down her husband’s hole, hitting him on the head. Then she starts thinking about her appearance: she extracts her lipstick and, noticing that there is practically none left, remarks: “Running out...”, almost used up... never mind, “can’t complain”, and she puts some on, quoting a line or two, from Dante in the Italian



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script: “quegli che mai da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante”. Looking at herself in the mirror, she sees Willie reflected in it, naked: ‘Put your pants on, dear...’. More or less everything has been removed from the bag; only the brush and comb are taken out later, when, at a momentary loss, she asks: “My hair! Did I brush and comb my hair?” And then: “Oh well, what does it matter, [...] I shall simply brush and comb it later on, [...] I have the whole– [...] them [...] Or it? [...] what would you say, Willie? [...] What would you say, Willie, speaking of your hair, them or it?” And he answers “it”, and she’s happy: “Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day!” “That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by [...] without some blessing”. Flow and pause Strehler gave this woman an infantile joie de vivre and constant curiosity about everything. In photos I have seen of other productions, Winnie’s eyes are very sad, she is distressed, and after everything she does there is a pause, to reflect. But Strehler said: “No! You mustn’t have pauses: one thing flows directly into another”. This was something I couldn’t do at first; I just couldn’t manage to have the next thought in my head as I finished speaking the first, to make one sentence follow directly on from the one before. This technique was extremely difficult; I managed it, but mechanically, without really thinking, unlike what happens in real life, when while doing one thing we’re already thinking of another; this was something I only achieved after twenty years, only by trying over and over again did I succeed in producing the rhythm whereby one thought rolls after the next without a breath between, because if you stop you go under and you must always be cheerful. But there are the “nows”: “And now? What shall I do now?” But only for a second, then Winnie cheers up again: ‘Now I could do this...’. These “nows” last a fraction of a second, but they are there, and in that fraction there must be all the anguish that there is in the second act, when Winnie is more aware and retraces her steps back into her past, her present, her nonfuture; but she wants there to be a future, she wants to endure.


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The Browning Then, in the bag there was a musical-box, a nail file, and the pistol, which appears three times: when Winnie is looking for the medicine and puts the pistol back, perhaps in a moment of distress when she is looking for something to cheer herself up; and it is as if she were thinking: ‘You again! You should be a last resort, when there’s absolutely no other way. Why do you keep popping up like this? Do you know what I’m going to do? I’ve had enough of you! I’m throwing you out! There’. And she plants it in a hole and draws a house round it in the sand: “There, that’s your little house!”. And then, finally, when she has put everything back in the bag, the pistol is the last, but she has second thoughts, points it at her temple but just scratches herself with it, then leaves it out, laying it back on the ground. She doesn’t want it in her bag any more. So, at the end of the first act everything goes back into the bag ready for the next day, except the revolver. During the second act the pistol is always out, like the bag, but by this time Winnie is buried up to her neck; only her head can be seen. She can see the bag but can’t get at what’s in it, and she sees the “Brownie”, the pistol. She tells Willie: ‘It’s there, it’s there, don’t worry, it’s there’; but, being buried, she can’t reach it. And in any case for Beckett there is no conclusion, what there is, is existing, carrying on, staying there. The last part The end is rather disturbing. Strehler had thought that Winnie should have a gorgeous little hat with feathers in it, and when she had finally completely disappeared under the sand, and was no longer visible, just the hat would remain and the feathers would stir. But then he decided that no, that wasn’t right. Winnie had to be there, she couldn’t disappear: if she went under, the world would end, and human kind with it... but for the moment this couldn’t happen, it was almost the end, almost. And Winnie kept her head above ground. So Strehler gave up the idea of this poetic image. He also liked the idea of Willie emerging at the end like a clown with his clothes falling off in bits. The script we worked with went like this: “as he



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crawls he begins to shed bits of clothing, his trousers have come off, his braces have burst, one sleeve tears off, then the other, then the whole of his jacket, front and all. He even loses hold of his bag which falls apart (he has a bag too) and everything spills out...”. This is what Strehler had imagined, that Willie would climb up the hill and become a rather surreal little clown, still in his collar and tie, without his shirt, but still in cardboard cuffs with shiny buttons, bare-headed, his hair sparse and white. Willie stops at the top: white-gloved hand and clown’s spectacles with ping-pong balls that light up, and flick on and off; he too would like to get hold of the pistol, but is unable to reach it. In the end he slips, he can’t manage to do it. This is how Strehler had originally thought of the scene, recorded in the script. But later, when he tried it out, he didn’t like it, and by a process of elimination (never by addition, which was typical of Strehler), he had Willie emerge in the most natural manner possible, with a bunch of flowers for Winnie. Lacking a newspaper, he wraps them in a pair of pink knickers which he then throws away. Slowly, slowly, Willie stretches to get hold of the pistol. But, “Win”, he murmurs, barely audibly; he can’t reach it, and slips back into his hole. The last waltz She’s left alone... And then begins the song from The Merry Widow they usually sing together, very soft and sentimental at the beginning, but Strehler wanted it to enter into a sort of contest with the bell, which wants to drown it and destroy what is human; Winnie, just her little head, opposes it, but it’s too much for her. Very slowly the lights go down, and all is darkness. And that’s the end. This opposition derives from Winnie’s memories as well, because all the memories she has can be counted, like the one of the little mouse; she suddenly remembers this mouse which ran up her leg, so she had been terrified, dropped her doll and begun screaming “Aaahhh, aaahhh!”. This terrible sexual memory, of violence, of a horrible sensation, has blocked her all her life and had made her scream “till all came running, in their night attire, papa, mamma, Bibby and... old Annie, to see what was the matter [...] too late”. They got there too late to help her, so she turns to Willie:


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Help! And then: “Ah well, not long now, Winnie, can’t be long now, until the bell for sleep. [...] Then you may close your eyes, then you must close your eyes– and keep them closed. [...] Why say that again? [...] I used to think... I say I used to think there was no difference between one fraction of a second and the next. I used to say... [...] Winnie you are changeless, there is never any difference between one fraction of a second and the next. [...] Why bring that up again? [...] There is so little one can bring up one brings up all. [...] All one can. [...] My neck is hurting me. [...] Ah that’s better. [...] I can do no more. [...] Say no more. [...] But I must say more. [...] Oh yes, abounding mercies. [...] And now? [...] And now, Willie?” And then that lovely image of the flute glasses in the first act comes up. Golden hair, the toast drunk from crystal glasses: “The pink fizz [...] The flute glasses. [...] The last guest gone. [...] The last bumper with the bodies nearly touching. [...] The look. [...] What day? [...] What look? [...] I hear cries” and she sees him climbing up: ‘Willie! What a lovely surprise! Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing with yourself? You heard me shout for help! Were you getting dressed?’ “Reminds me of the day you came whining for my hand. [...] I worship you, Winnie, be mine. [...] Life a mockery without Win. [...] Where are the flowers?” and he brings out the bunch wrapped in the knickers. “That’s right, Willie, look at me. [...] Feast your old eyes, Willie. [...] What ails you, Willie. I never saw such an expression!” – because he’s crawling towards the pistol, and of course towards her head, towards her face. So she says: “Come on, dear, put a bit of jizz into it, I’ll cheer you on. [...] Is it me you’re after, Willie... or something else? [...] Do you want to touch my face ... again? [...] Is it a kiss you’re after, Willie ... or is it something else? [...] don’t look at me like that!”: she’s beginning to be frightened, ‘why are you looking at me like that?’ “Have you gone off your head, Willie?” “Win...” he says, and ends up in his hole again. Now she feels lonely, so what she hangs onto is this: “Win”, he called her Win, a pet name, and that means victory. So in a tiny little voice she says: “Oh this is a happy day” – because he has called her Win – “This will have been another happy day!” – but she adds: “After all. [...] So far”, and she sings their song:



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Tace il labbro. T’amo, dice il violin. le sue note dicon tutte m’hai d’amar! (and the deafening bell begins to toll) della man la stretta chiaro dice a me, Sì, è ver tu m’ami! Sì, tu m’ami è ver! La la la la la lalla la la la la La la lalla la la la la...

This was just to give an idea. It isn’t possible to act Happy Days outside the context of the theatre, without the lights, getting the build up of her rebellion right, starting from a feeling almost of distress and loss of herself, almost a defeat. But then, with one beat of her wings, Winnie rises again and right up to the end fights the ineluctable. (trans. Angela Gibbon)


Aspittannu a Godot Ninny Aiuto

Looking at this title, the first question one could ask him/herself is: why translate Waiting for Godot into Sicilian? At the beginning of this experience, it seemed as if a pack of cards, opened fanwise, were left on my table, containing several questions in one: why translate / Waiting for Godot / into Sicilian? With regard to the first part of question, ‘the act’ of translating meets a basic desire of knowledge which, passing through different cultures, has its biggest obstacles in the transit itself: languages. The first problem a translator faces is that all texts always tell us only a part (even if it were the majority) of a story or ‘fact’ they refer to. So a translator will most likely be in the position of any director having to put the text, as it were, on stage or on a movie set. Although I know the difference, this is the reason why I have never liked distinguishing too strictly between theatrical, poetic and narrative text as, in my opinion, we can’t exclude any text from being theatrical. Peter Brook said: “[we] can take any empty space and call it a bare stage”1, so can we take any word – even only one! – and put it on “a bare stage”. Then, proceeding to the second and third part of the main question, in this actual case I must say they are naturally connected to each other, both of them referring to a local and a general aspect, at the same time. Especially if we consider that, except for 13th century Sicilian poetry, the Sicilian language lacks a great written tradition, I must admit that translating into this precise language might be based 1

Peter Brook, 1968, The Empty Space, Touchstone, New York 1995, p. 9.


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simply on a series of unconscious and intimate reasons, within a sort of local linguistic and cultural policy, to restore and renew old linguistic forms or also to enjoy above-mentioned working ‘problems’ to spread different and yet precious cultural elements into Sicilian, that is, with Italian, one of my two native languages. However, the choice of Sicilian as a natural target language of a Godot translation came to me in a more personal way and, of course, in several steps. Actually, the first time I linked Waiting for Godot to Sicilian was in Bagheria (Sicily), when I was looking at a portrait of Beckett by Renato Guttuso, and the first declaration of a tired Estragon, “nothing to be done”, seemed to me the proper comment on the picture. Since then, other stages have revealed themselves and, even while translating pages and pages from the original Godot, through the whole text I could feel how the play seemed to adhere spontaneously to ‘Sicilianity’ (Sicilian character). This also had a negative side; I refer to what Sicilians call “omertà”, which is not just a conspiracy of silence but even merely seeming to be aware of other people’s business: Estragon: I dreamt that — Vladimir: DON’T TELL ME! [...] Let them remain private... Estragoni: Mi sunnai chi... Vladimiru: ‘UN M’U CUNTARI! Tenitilli pi tìa...

Even pauses, silences and inaction become the unsaid evidence of a last word yet to be said and, as in Sicily, not just in a literary sense, but as a matter of life or death: Estragon: I tell you I wasn’t doing anything. Vladimir: Perhaps you weren’t. But it’s the way of doing it that counts, the way of doing it, if you want to go on living... Estragoni: Ti \issi chi ‘un stava facennu nenti. Vladimiru: Po’ essiri. Ma è comu u fai o ‘unn’u fai chi cunta, chissu! Si voi campari...

In both realities – the play and my land – words sounded as if they moved in a mess, losing and meeting each other, and finally creating their own new one. So the subtle strategy of a dialogue


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which is meaningful and senseless at the same time becomes the most powerful tool in the governance of endemic stillness: Estragon: If it hangs you it’ll hang anything. Vladimir: But am I heavier than you? Estragon: So you tell me. I don’t know. There’s an even chance. Or nearly. Vladimir: Well? What do we do? Estragon: Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer. Estragoni: Si teni a tìa, teni qualsiasi cosa. Vladimiru: Picchì, eu pisu chiossai chi tu? Estragoni: Tu u \icisti. Eu chi ni sacciu? C’è ‘na probabilità na dui. O quasi. Vladimiru: I allura? Chi facemu? Estragoni: ‘Un facemu nenti. È cchiù sicuru.

Besides, Carlo Fruttero (the first Italian translator of this play) had said that in Godot “not only can Beckett’s man not find himself: he even gives up looking for himself [...]; behind him he has always ‘une vie énorme’, ‘une existence interminable’, [...] for him all actions, gestures and thoughts are of the same value, whether it is a question of killing an old man or riding a bicycle”2. What more suitable for the infelix condition of our native Sicily? However, now I had the chance to read a piece of my Aspittannu a Godot at the “Beckett in Rome” Conference. So I started talking it over with Francesco Teresi, a friend of mine and an experienced actor. The main question promptly came out: “How will the audience receive the Sicilian Godot? And how will we ourselves?”. It was clear that it wouldn’t be merely a reading of Beckett’s text, but not an actual performance on that unexpected stage, either. We already knew that only a few people, that day, would understand Sicilian, and yet a translator and an actor had to test my Sicilian translation, now spoken aloud in a real, quick dialogue and looking the audience in the eye, verifying once more if Sicil2 Carlo Fruttero, Introduzione to Samuel Beckett, Aspettando Godot, Einaudi, Torino 1956, p. 10 (my translation).


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ian were suitable to Godot discourse. All this lasted almost three weeks, for only about eighty lines extracted from my Sicilian translation. Then our day at the Beckett Conference arrived. Both of us, and not just myself as the translator, were thrilled: at the exact time of our entry I timidly gave Francesco one of two small bowlers I had brought for the reading, then we silently went forward into the room. When we started reading, the audience seemed to have disappeared, and our gestures started matching the words, for us as we stood by a tree in any (Sicilian) country road. We realized we had come to the end only because of a burst of applause from the audience: Francesco and I took a glance at them and in their smiles we could read how much they had enjoyed those moments. After one minute I turned towards him and told him half in jest: “Pensu chi ‘unn’avemu cchiù nenti \ii fari ccà’” (“I think we’ve nothing more to do here”). Yet he replied: “‘Mancu a nautra banna’” (“Nor anywhere else”).


Beckett the Euclidean (as is he who interprets him)* Antonio Borriello

In a production of Samuel Beckett’s work the actor must respect the text. For my Krapp... I had to be Krapp. His thoughts and gestures had to be mine. His memories and actions became mine – to share, cohabit and act – scene, space, word, breath – with Krapp... creating deep empathy with the character. I remember the great Carmelo Bene once saying: “In order to interpret Shakespeare, one must be Shakespeare: I am Shakespeare”. In this sense, the actor should adhere closely to the author. Approaching Krapp’s Last Tape in this manner, I analysed the character with humility, living within him intensely off stage, transporting my analysis and thought of him on stage in spectacular fashion, face to face with body, gesture and word, as designed. The word became sovereign, giving access to and reaching beyond silence, to enter a hypnotic state of static-movement, accompanied by a state of interior excitement. In her important study, Samuel Beckett. A Biography1, Deirdre Bair writes: “For Beckett, the perfect stage vehicle is one in which there are no actors or directors, only the play itself. When asked how such a theatre could be made viable, Beckett replied that the author had the duty to search for the perfect actor, that is, one who would comply fully with his instructions, having the ability to annihilate himself totally” (Bair 1978, p. 544). This physical and psychological state is indispensable when interpreting Beckett on stage. Bair also confirms an even more extreme condition envisaged by Beck* For the images from Antonio Borriello’s productions see figures 26 to 29. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett. A Biography, 1978, Vintage, London 1990.

1


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ett: “The best possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the text. I’m trying to find a way to write one” (p. 544). This position brings to mind Gordon Craig’s intention. Beckett achieved what he was aiming for in “Breath” (approximately 20 seconds, and no actors) and in Not I (only a mouth on stage). It is not after all difficult to perform Beckett. It is, indeed, absolutely simple. He is usually spoken of as a difficult author to interpret or even to read. I believe that only what he says should be considered. One does not interpret Beckett, one lives him. There are no references or allusions to any other philosophical, theological or literary concept. There is nothing extraordinary, just the ordinary. One does not betray Beckett: one obeys him respectfully, I could even say one obeys him with conscious orthodoxy, avoiding theatrical excesses, with the truth of life and death. I am positive about this. For the Quaker in Beckett the Word is absolute, as are his texts: perfect and untouchable. I may exaggerate (indeed I do) when I see the work of this great, humble 20th century genius harking back to The Book of Wisdom: “Omnia censura et numero et pondere disposuisti”. But I see it like this, at least in my own productions: a geometry of action, thought and vision, “absolutely faithful to the plays of the great Parisian Dubliner in which the realism and poetic quality of present and future images suggest not so much the projection of a world outside, but rather a world desirous of identification with the mouthscene of the Beckettian self” (Biagio Scognamiglio), as can be seen in the photographs of moments from my productions by Aliberti and Pomposo, presented at the Conference “Beckett in Rome”. Respect for the text is not universal. That for some time now productions in Italy (and abroad) have not always been faithful should hardly surprise us. In Italy the dispute over the closure, on the insistence of the heirs the Master of the Absurd, of a production of Waiting for Godot in which the actors were women, is well known. The affair nearly ended up in court, even at question time in Parliament! Nonetheless, in conjunction with SIAE (Italian Association of Authors and Publishers), the company eventually won their urgent appeal in Rome. Equally well known is Peter Brook’s most recent production of Fragments (including Come and Go, “Rough for Theatre I”, “Rockaby”, “Act Without Words II”, “neither”). I have met


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Brook, and respect him immensely. In Come and Go, though, this marvellous producer uses two men. I feel that the figurines in the “dramaticule” are like moerae or parcae, mysterious, deeply poetic creatures, multicoloured gusts of air (“dull violet (Ru), dull red (Vi), dull yellow (Flo)”, as in Come and Go, p. 356), to be seen in the only existing colour photographs of my productions. All the others, of moments in Waiting for Godot, Not I, “Ohio Impromptu”, “What Where”, are black and white. In Come and Go, as I have said, there are three women, three delicate petals floating, coming, going: silent winged female presences. They are absolutely feminine, of no other nature. It is true that the wide brims of their hats hide the faces of Flo, Vi and Ru, leaving only mouth and chin barely visible in the half-darkness, which could justify the choice of male actors. But the spirit of acting, gesture, timbre of voice and above all the text require absolutely what the playwright intended, word for word. By adhering closely to this method the actor uncovers his or her own interpretation based on technical skill and individual style and the whole range of emotional possibilities in order to communicate them to the audience. All redundancy must be avoided. The actor of Beckett is at the service of the text, both script and set. Over the years several Italian productions have unjustifiably altered the original texts beyond recognition. However, the masterly interpretations of a wonderful Laura Adani (Happy Days), an exceptional Glauco Mauri (Krapp’s Last Tape and “Act Without Words”), a splendid Giulia Lazzarini (Happy Days) and other productions by Luciano Mondolfo and Andrea Camilleri, to cite only a few, are absolutely memorable. In the general run of things, a personal interpretation of a play which accounts for translation, language, culture and interpreters’ preferences will be satisfactory (even in the case of revivals of classics such as Brecht), but in the case of Beckett the situation changes radically. Fidelity to the text, even down to the smallest detail, should result, as it were, in successful theatrical consubstantiation. It comes to mind that in some cases Beckett himself did well, extremely well, by calling a halt to productions failing to follow his directions. Perhaps Euripides and Shakespeare, Molière, Pi-


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randello and Eduardo De Filippo staged their own work for a performance both more effective and truer to their intentions. Beckett’s long, detailed directions are in fact a text within the text, or perhaps the text itself. The minutely detailed stage directions in Krapp’s Last Tape are packed with spatial and temporal explanations, as well as indications for costume, makeup, props, gesture... the fluttering of an eyelash. Everything is as precise as a musical score. This precision I have tried to reproduce in my own productions, as can be seen in the photographs of moments in my productions by Aliberti and Pomposo. These photographers have worked with me for years and are absolutely aware of the need to concentrate on every single detail observable on stage. My admiration for Beckett, a splendid, perfect Pythagorean (or, if preferred, Euclidean) writer is infinite. With lucid perfection, Beckett the dramatist always defined every detail for his actors: age, sex, body, posture, height, gait, eyes, number of steps, use of hands, gestures (number of seconds), entries and exits and most particularly precise (indeed cast iron) directions for the producer (idea, content, thought...), for technicians of lighting (glaring, bright, low, dim, fading, darkness...) and sound2, scenographer3, costumier4, stage manager5, makeup artist6 and other 2 A bell rings once, twice, another sounds shrilly, more shrilly, long, short, noises off... – Footfalls, Happy Days. 3 Space, trompe-l’oeil backdrop, colour, a stain, a tree with or without leaves, a rough wooden table 2.40 x 1.20 metres, in Oh les beaux jours / Happy Days, En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, “Ohio Impromptu”. 4 “Rusty black narrow trousers too short for him. Rusty black sleeveless waistcoat, four capacious pockets. [...] Grimy white shirt open at neck, no collar. Surprising pair of white boots, size ten at least, very narrow and pointed”: Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990, p. 215. 5 “Spools”, “reel of tape”, “large banana”, Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 215; “pipe”, “stool”, “piece of chicken”; Waiting for Godot, 1954, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 23-27; “pearl necklace” and a “flat tube of toothpaste”, Happy Days, 1961, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 138-139. 6 “White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair”, Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 215; “blonde for preference, [...] big bosom”, Happy Days, 1961, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 138; “long white hair”, “Ohio Impromptu”, 1982, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 445.


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minute details in the full stage directions in all his works. Directions and injunctions, where I as actor and producer am concerned, are never considered to be obstacles or arid instructions, but rather as stimuli to animate and illuminate Beckett’s theatre. Thus nothing is improvised or random. Each word and line, each fragment of mime and gesture is rehearsed with varying rhythm and tension, just as space and lighting are analysed and balanced. It is hard work indeed, but liberating and therapeutic. And when the page of a play is transposed and assimilated mentally and physically onto the stage, then I am ready to go on stage myself. Now Beckett’s text becomes mine, and in the resounding silence it is wonderful to act and give myself to the public.


Beckett’s Doodles* Bill Prosser

Beckett was a compulsive doodler, but perhaps because of its incipient threat to text doodling is generally ignored by writers on art, not receiving the attention that its more public sibling, graffiti, has done. My research places Beckett’s spontaneous drawings in their broad historical and cultural context, for just as his writing evokes comparisons that span world literature – fiction, theology, and philosophy – so his drawings unconsciously co-opt influences from both deep and shallow visual traditions. For example, the manuscript of Beckett’s unfinished play Human Wishes contains over seventy tiny drawn characters, who bear no discernible relationship to his text – a gloomy snippet on the household of Dr. Johnson. Instead they stimulate imaginary couplings with comics, the art of children and the insane, medieval bestiaries, psychic automatism, Haboku imagery, stained glass windows, Modernist painting, and ‘The Analysis of Beauty’ – as well as comparisons with the doodles of other writers such as Kafka, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Rather than seeing doodles as tools for psychotherapeutic diagnosis (as, for example, in the work of D. W. Winnicott), my focus is on their visual playfulness and ubiquity. The relinquishing of conscious control, so admired and sought by the Surrealists, is in doodling natural to everyone. After all, the root of drawing is trahere, to drag, and when time does we cannot help ourselves. For more information about Beckett’s doodles, see www. reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-beckettdoodles.asp (last accessed May 30, 2009). * For a sample of doodles see figure 30.




Chris Ackerley Professor of English Literature at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His recent work includes substantial annotations of Murphy and Watt, published by the Journal of Beckett Studies Books (2004 & 2005); and (with S. E. Gontarski) the Grove and Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004 & 2006). Current projects include a scholarly edition of Watt and a monograph on Samuel Beckett and Science. David Addyman He completed his thesis (Beckett and Place: The Lie of the Land) in 2008 at Royal Holloway University of London, where he was supervised by Andrew Gibson. A chapter, “Inane Space and Lively Place in Beckett’s Forties Fiction”, is about to appear in Steven Barfield, Matt Feldman and Philip Tew (editors), Beckett and Death (2009). He is currently working on a monograph. Ninny Aiuto Sicilian writer and translator. He studied Spanish and English and graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature in April 2005, from Rome “La Sapienza” University with a thesis on translation (from Italian to Spanish) of L’Antimonio, a short story by Leonardo Sciascia. He has now finished his translation of Waiting for Godot from English into Sicilian. Iain Bailey PhD Candidate and teacher at the University of Manchester, UK. His doctoral thesis focuses on biblical intertextuality in Beckett’s work; he has also produced papers on the figure of the child in W. B. Yeats’ poetry, and on Mikhail Bakhtin and the Gospels.


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Lino Belleggia PhD in English at “La Sapienza” University (2004). His published work includes Lettore di professione fra Italia e Stati Uniti – Saggio su Paolo Milano (2000) and a number of essays and book-reviews on contemporary English and American novels, as well as translations. He presently works at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Antonio Borriello A scholar and faithful interpreter of Beckett, he has published a number of studies, among which Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape: dalla pagina alla messinscena (1992). He has taken part in a number of international conferences and organised “Beckett for Sarajevo” (in aid of children from ex-Yugoslavia) and “1906-2006 Homage to Samuel Beckett, The Earth Could Be Uninhabited”. He owns a vast collection of books by and on Beckett, some of them autographed. Hugo Bowles Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. His main interests are in conversation, discourse and genre analysis applied to language for specific purposes (most recent publication in this area, Conversation analysis and LSP, 2007). His current research focuses on conversation analysis applied to literary and non-literary narrative and a monograph on storytelling in plays will be published by John Benjamins in 2009. Enoch Brater Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature at the University of Michigan. An internationally known critic for his seminal studies of Beckett and other major modern and contemporary playwrights, most especially Arthur Miller, his work has been translated into several languages. His publications include Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction, Why Beckett (revised and republished as The Essential Samuel Beckett), and more than 50 articles and reviews. He has lectured widely in Italy and directed his University’s study abroad program in Sesto Fiorentino. His current book project is entitled The Falsetto of Reason: Ten Ways of Thinking about Samuel Beckett, of which his essay is a small part. Mary Bryden Professor of French Studies at the University of



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Reading, a former Co-Director (with John Pilling) of the Beckett International Foundation, and a former President of the Beckett Society. She has published widely on Beckett and Deleuze, as well as on other French writers, and her books include: Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature (2007); Deleuze and Religion (editor) (2001); Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (1998); Samuel Beckett and Music (editor) (1998); Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other (1993). She is currently working on editing The Beckett Bestiary. Laura Caretti Professor of History of Theatre and the Performing Arts (University of Siena), and co-director of the European School “Synapsis”. She is a life member of Clare Hall College (Cambridge). She has written mainly on Shakespeare in performance and on modern and contemporary theatre (Ibsen, Pirandello, Eleonora Duse, Gordon Craig, Beckett, the Living Theatre, Stoppard), focussing on the art of actors and directors, on adaptations, and on the interaction between theatre and cinema. She has written on Beckett and directed Dopo Godot: frammenti di teatro, 1993. Daniela Caselli Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester (UK). She is the author of Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (2005), of Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (2009), and of articles on Samuel Beckett, literary theory, modernism, and poetic translation. She has edited the collections of essays Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (forthcoming in 2010), Other Becketts (2001, with S. Connor and L. Salisbury) and Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation: Literary Cultures in Italian and English (2008, with Daniela La Penna). Roberta Cauchi Santoro Graduated at the University of Malta, in 2004 she was Visiting Graduate Student at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (USA). Since 2006, she has been lecturer and teaching assistant in Italian at the University of Western Ontario (Canada), where she is currently reading for her PhD in Comparative Literature.


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Mariacristina Cavecchi Research fellow at the University of Milan. She has published essays in collected volumes on Shakespeare on screen, is the author of Shakespeare mostro contemporaneo. Macbeth nelle riscritture di Marowitz, Stoppard e Brenton (1998), and has co-edited Caledonia Dreaming. La nuova drammaturgia scozzese (2001); Shakespeare Graffiti. Il Cigno di Avon nella cultura di massa (2002); EuroShakespeares. Exploring Cultural Practice in an International Context (2002), and Shakespeare & Scespir (2005). She is co-editor, with Caroline Patey, of the volume Cent’anni di Samuel Beckett. Tra le lingue tra i linguaggi (2007). Davide Crosara PhD from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. His doctoral thesis, Samuel Beckett e la tradizione del monodramma, was discussed in December 2007. He has presented papers in international Conferences in England and the States. His main fields of interest are 20th century drama (Samuel Beckett in particular), media studies and Romantic literature. His essay on nothingness in Samuel Beckett (“Beckett e il (non)senso della fine”) has been published in the collection edited by Rosy Colombo and Giuseppe Di Giacomo, Samuel Beckett ultimo atto (2009). Anastasia Deligianni After two degrees, in Psychology and Dramatic Arts, in Greece, she obtained an MA in Editing in Paris and started there her PhD research on the notion of the unfinished in literature using Samuel Beckett’s example, supervised by Julia Kristeva and by Bruno Clément (University of Paris 7 and 8). She recently published an article on the Beckettian “unsaid”, in Synthèses (Thessaloniki, Greece). She shares her time between professional photography, teaching in secondary school and her little Greek publishing house (www.asini.gr). Waiting to get back on stage. Mario Faraone PhD in Literatures in English (University of Rome “La Sapienza” and IUO, Naples). He has published Un uomo solo, a study on Christopher Isherwood’s novels. Among his other publications are studies on Buddhist and Hindu influences on T. S. Eliot and various European writers; Giorgio Manganelli’s Cassio governa a Cipro; Edward Upward’s short stories, Joyce’s



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Ulysses, Anthony Trollope, William Beckford and Anthony Powell. He is writing on Edward Upward, and has been awarded a fellowship by The Huntington Foundation (California), for a research project on Isherwood. He works at the University of Trieste. Seb Franklin Dphil Candidate at the University of Sussex, Brighton (UK). His forthcoming publications include an essay on contemporary counter-practice in digital art (2009) and a chapter on genre and image quality in the cinema of Takashi Miike. He is currently completing articles on the media-theoretical implications of cloud computing and the subjective point-of-view shot in Beckett, horror and videogames. Patrizia Fusella An associate professor of English Literature, she has recently retired from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” where she taught for thirty-five years. She has published essays on 20th century authors, literary theory and Shakespeare; has co-edited Geographies of Knowledge, Universities in Transition, and Dislocated Subjects, three special issues of Anglistica. On Samuel Beckett she has published some essays and L’impossibilità di non essere (1995), a study of Not I which includes the examination of the manuscripts and the publication and transcription of the holograph headed “Analysis”. Heather Gardner Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. She has published a study of The Libertine by Shadwell (1995) and a book on the function of dreams in Shakespeare’s plays (Oltre la porta di corno e d’avorio, 1997). She has written more than 20 essays on many authors: Richardson, Byron, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Thackeray, T. S. Eliot, Orson Welles, and several Asian British and American writers. Her recent work includes two studies on women’s autobiographies published by Franco Angeli. Stanley E. Gontarski Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, where he serves as Director of Graduate Studies. He edited the Journal of Beckett Stud-


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ies (new series) from 1992-2008, and he is now part of an editorial team headed by Anthony Uhlmann that will edit the third phase of the Journal from 2008 onward. His most recent books are: (with C. J. Ackerley) The Faber and the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (2004, 2006) and (with Anthony Uhlmann) Beckett after Beckett (2006), the latter a finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Award. Daniela Guardamagna Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. Her main areas of research are Jacobean drama, contemporary drama (Beckett in particular), utopias and dystopias. She has translated for both cinema and theatre, and has adapted the BBC versions of Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest for Italian television (RAI). Her publications include: Il teatro giacomiano e carolino (2002), La narrativa di Aldous Huxley (1990), Analisi dell’incubo. L’utopia negativa da Swift alla fantascienza (1980), and several essays published in Italy and abroad, on utopias, dystopias, Beckett, and Jacobean theatre. Dirk Van Hulle He teaches English literature at the University of Antwerp, where he works at the Centre for Manuscript Genetics. He is editor of Genetic Joyce Studies and maintains the Beckett Endpage (www.ua.ac.be/beckett). His most recent book publication is Manuscript Genetics, Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow (2008). He is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and is currently working with Mark Nixon on Beckett’s Library. Giulia Lazzarini A theatre actress who worked for many years with director Giorgio Strehler, she has alternated stage acting with important television productions (Les Misérables, Doll’s House, etc.). Masterpieces in which she has acted include: Platonov and The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov; L’egoista by Bertolazzi; Brecht’s Galileo and The Threepenny Opera; Le balcon by Genet; Faust, frammenti prima parte (as Margherita), The Tempest (as Ariel), Happy Days and I giganti della montagna by Pirandello. Apart from the Piccolo Teatro Company, she has worked with



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Carlo Battistoni, her husband, who directed her in the production of Buonanottemamma, in Widowers’ Houses by G. B. Shaw, Minnie la candida by Bontempelli, Giraudoux’s Intermezzo and Great and Small by B. Strauss. She also works with Luca Ronconi, who has recently directed her in Il ventaglio by Goldoni. Carla Locatelli Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Trento, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). Vice-Rector for International Relations at Trento. Speaker in several Italian and foreign universities (United States, Ireland, England, Spain, France, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, etc.), Exchange Research Fellow at the University of California (Santa Cruz) and Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). Among her publications are 14 volumes (some as editor), and approximately 150 articles and contributions to books and reference works. She has published widely on Beckett (Unwording the World. Beckett’s Prose Works after the Nobel Prize, 1990, and some 30 articles), and on literary theory. Mark Nixon Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. He is the Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation, and has published widely on Beckett’s work. He is Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and Reviews Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He is currently working on Beckett’s Library with Dirk Van Hulle, and preparing a critical edition of the short story “Echo’s Bones” for Faber and Faber. Lorenzo Orlandini PhD Candidate at the University of Florence with a research on The Theme of Sexuality in the Work of Samuel Beckett. He has written the bibliography and theatrography of Beckett’s works included in Giancarlo Alfano and Andrea Cortellessa (editors), Tegole dal Cielo: l’effetto Beckett nella letteratura italiana (2006). He is a member of the James Joyce Italian Foundation. John Pilling Emeritus Professor at the University of Reading, he contributed to the creation of the Beckett International Founda-


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tion. Among his many publications: Samuel Beckett (1976); Frescoes of the Skull (1979, with James Knowlson); Autobiography and Imagination (1981); Fifty Modern European Poets (1982); The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (editor, 1994); Beckett before Godot (1997); A Companion to Dream of Fair to Middling Women (2004); A Samuel Beckett Chronology (2006). Rosemary Pountney She began her career in the theatre, later taking a doctorate on Beckett’s drama (published as Theatre of Shadows, 1989). She lectured at University College Dublin, University of Winchester, University of Oxford and is an Hon. Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She has written numerous articles on Beckett and reviewed widely. She was a theatre critic for The Oxford Times throughout the 1970’s. Her performing career includes playing the Irish Premieres of Not I and Footfalls at the Irish Theatre Festival in Dublin in 1978 and Footfalls at Oxford Playhouse in 1980. She has taken Footfalls and “Rockaby” on tours across Europe, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. Bill Prosser Senior Research Fellow, University of Reading. He has published several articles on the subject of Beckett’s doodles and marginalia (such as “Beckett and the Phenomenology of Doodles”, “Object Drawing”, “Drawing From Beckett”). He has presented his work on this subject at various exhibitions in Belfast, Oxford, HRHRC (Texas), Paris, and so on. Rossana M. Sebellin PhD from the University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”, with a dissertation on Beckett’s self-translation and the manuscripts of “Play” and Not I, and their French versions. Currently working as lecturer at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, she has published two volumes on Beckett: “Prior to Godot”: Eleutheria di Samuel Beckett (2006), and La doppia originalità di Samuel Beckett. Play / Comédie e Not I / Pas moi (2008), and several articles on Beckett, Modernism and contemporary authors. David Tucker PhD candidate at the University of Sussex (UK) with a dissertation on Beckett and Geulincx. His publications include “Posthumous Controversies. The Publications of Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Eleutheria”, in Samuel



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Beckett and Publishing, and entries in Dictionnaire Beckett, both forthcoming in 2010. Shane Weller Reader in Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent (UK). His publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005); Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006); The Flesh in the Text, co-edited with Thomas Baldwin and James Fowler (2007), and Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (2008).



Indexes




“Act Without Words I”, 332, 336, 390, 432. “Act Without Words II”, 332, 334, 336, 431. All Strange Away, XVIII, 67, 86n, 181, 211. All That Fall, 113, 285, 334, 390. “Assumption”, 287n. “Berceuse”, see “Rockaby”. “bon bon il est un pays”, 183n. “Breath”, 334-336, 338, 360, 431. “...but the clouds...”, 124n. “The Calmative”, XVI, 20-35, 252, 267; – “Le calmant”, 20-35. “Catastrophe”, 334, 373. Come and Go, XVI, 124-125, 137-138, 270, 333, 431-432. “Comédie”, see “Play”. Comment c’est, see How It Is. Company, XIII, 86-102, 182 and n, 289. “Dante and the Lobster”, 6, 16, 21, 287. “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, 8, 22, 148-149, 271. Le Dépeupleur, see The Lost Ones. “Draff”, 12. “dread nay”, XII. Dream notebook, 16-17, 26, 63-64. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, XV, 10, 15, 17, 26, 31-32, 62-64, 92 and n, 124n, 215n, 238-253, 285, 287. “Echo’s Bones”, 9, 61. “Eh Joe”, XVI-XVII, 68, 273, 278, 286, 289-290, 330-333, 355, 390.

Eleutheria, 15. “Embers”, 113, 285, 390. En attendant Godot, see Waiting for Godot. “The End”, 23, 206; – “La fin”, 23. Endgame, XVI-XVII, 47n, 86n, 107, 113, 124-125, 127-131, 133, 135 and n, 136n, 143-145, 159, 210, 223-226, 228-230, 232, 235-236, 260, 265269, 280, 285, 288, 292-304, 330, 332-333, 342-354, 369, 390; – Fin de partie, 47n, 49, 125-126, 147, 342-354, 360; – Endspiel, 126 and n, 129; – Finale di partita, XVII, 342-354. “Enough”, 86n. “Enueg II”, 288. “Ex Cathezra”, 8. “La Falaise”, 289-290. Film, XIV, XVI, XVIII, 124n, 135-136, 206, 273, 286, 389-404. “La fin”, see “The End”. Finale di partita, see Endgame. Fin de partie, see Endgame. First Love, 252; – Premier amour, 380n. Fizzles, 86n. Footfalls, 95n, 123 and n, 184, 259, 358-359, 362, 433n. “For to End Yet Again”, 376. From an Abandoned Work, 86n. German Diaries, 67. “German Letter of 1937”, 178 and n.


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“Ghost Trio”, XVI, 68, 124n, 273, 305323; – “Geister Trio”, 310. Giorni felici, see Happy Days.

Murphy, XIV, 7, 11, 22-23, 61, 64, 96, 124n, 190-210, 214, 244, 252, 268, 271, 286-288, 378.

Happy Days, XVI, XVIII, 86n, 107, 114, 117-118, 135, 259, 270, 332-334, 336, 355, 359, 364, 365 and n, 367, 368 and n, 374, 417-425, 432, 433n; – Oh les beaux jours, 40, 364-365, 433n; – Giorni felici, 364-374, 416-425. “Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, 157 and n, 171. “hors crâne seul dedans”, XII. How It Is, 5, 12, 67, 149-152, 233, 280, 289; – Comment c’est, 12, 151. “Humanistic Quietism”, 17. Human Wishes, XVIII, 15-16, 416, 435.

“Nacht und Träume”, 68, 273. “neither”, 431. Not I, XII, XVIII, 41, 48-56, 81-82, 108, 136 and n, 151, 259, 270, 334, 356, 358-360, 369, 431-432; – Pas moi, 41, 44, 48-56, 82. Nouvelles et textes pour rien, see Texts for Nothing. “Ohio Impromptu”, XVI, 12, 95n, 270, 272-273, 338, 432, 433n. Oh les beaux jours, see Happy Days. “Old Earth”, 288-289.

Le Kid, 16. Krapp’s Last Tape, XVI, 107, 113-114, 171, 245n, 269, 277-291, 329-330, 355, 397n, 430, 432-433.

“Papini’s Dante”, 9. Pas moi, see Not I. “Peintres de l’empêchement”, 375n. “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le pantalon”, 375n, 378. “A Piece of Monologue”, 95n, 96n, 114, 152, 305, 334. “Play”, XII, 44-48, 52-56, 107, 114, 224, 269, 280, 333-334, 358-360; – “Comédie”, 41, 44, 52-56. Premier amour, see First Love. Proust, XVI, 7, 13, 41, 59, 65n, 117, 125, 160-161, 163-165, 171, 277, 291, 381.

The Lost Ones, XVIII, 80, 86n; – Le Dépeupleur, 79-80.

“Quad”, 109-110, 356. “Quad II”, 362.

“MacGreevy on Yeats”, 131. Malone Dies, 86n, 196, 210-211, 267; – Malone meurt, 285. Mercier and Camier, 20-35, 205, 217218, 285; – Mercier et Camier, 12, 20-35, 205. mirlitonnades, 177-189. Molloy, 86n, 98n, 195, 206, 278, 280, 285, 407-408, 412. More Pricks Than Kicks, 16, 210, 238, 241, 249, 252, 285, 287.

“Rockaby”, XIV, XVI, XVIII, 114, 124125, 127, 133-136, 206, 270-271, 273, 333-334, 356n, 358-360, 431; – “Berceuse”, 271-272, 360. “Rough for Theatre I”, 124, 132-133, 136, 431. “Rough for Theatre II”, 332, 334. “Rue de Vaugirard”, 182 and n, 288.

Ill Seen Ill Said, 91 and n, 118-119, 409412; – Mal vu mal dit, 91, 118n. Imagination Dead Imagine, 252. L’Innommable, see The Unnamable. “Intercessions by Denis Devlin”, 144.

“Sanies II”, 13. Stirrings Still, 267.


Index of Works by Samuel Beckett Sottisier notebook, 67-68. Stories and Texts for Nothing, see Texts for Nothing. Texts for Nothing, 81-82, 86n, 210, 289; – Textes pour rien (Nouvelles et textes pour rien), 77, 81-82. That Time, 86n, 259, 278, 286, 289290, 356n, 358, 360, 369. “Three Dante postcards”, 32. Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 159, 220. Three Novels, 285-286. Trilogy, 81, 362. The Unnamable, XIV-XV, 31, 86n, 88, 90-91, 114-117, 159, 166, 206, 218220, 223-237, 273, 280, 289, 319; – L’Innommable, 280, 285; – Der Namenlose, 223. Waiting for Godot, XIV, XVI, XVIII, 16, 40,

451 62, 75, 86n, 96n, 105-108, 124-125, 128, 130, 131 and n, 135, 144, 156173, 202, 210, 224, 266-268, 285-286, 320n, 328, 339, 342-344, 375-385, 390, 393, 426-429, 431-433; – En attendant Godot, 15, 125, 132, 285, 364 and n, 383n, 393n, 433n; – Warten auf Godot, 342-343, 351. – Aspettando Godot, 367, 428n; – Aspittannu a Godot, 416, 426-429. Watt, XIV, 61, 66-68, 86n, 124n, 171, 196, 199, 205, 214-219, 277, 281n, 286, 288, 382. Watt notebook, 66n. “A Wet Night”, 16, 285, 287. “What Where”, 334, 432. Whoroscope, 244. Whoroscope notebook, 22-23, 29, 6468, 75, 92n, 245n. “Words and Music”, 113, 286, 288289. Worstward Ho, 91 and n, 210, 252, 376.




Abbott, H. Porter, 305n. Abutori, Miriam, 369. Acheson, James, 216-217. Ackerley, Chris J., IX, XVI-XVII, 2, 61, 114, 119, 145, 150, 177n, 192, 198 and n, 201n, 202, 204, 214 and n, 278, 287, 289-290. Adani, Laura, 365 and n, 366, 373, 432. Addyman, David, XIV. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, XIVXV, 223-237, 352; – Ästhetische Theorie, 223, 226, 230, 234; – Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialektik), 225-226, 228-229, 233; – Notes to Literature (Noten zur Literatur), 223; – “Trying Understand Endgame” (“Versuch Endspiel Zu verstehen”), 223-226, 228-230, 232, 235. Aiuto, Ninny, XVIII, 416. Akalaitis, JoAnne, 328, 332-333, 339. Albee, Edward, XVI, 264; – The Zoo Story, 264. Albertazzi, Luciana, 91n. Albright, Daniel, 135n. Alfieri, Vittorio, 9-10, 345; – Memoirs (Vita di Vittorio Alfieri da Asti, scritta da esso), 9. Aliberti, Vincenzo, 431, 433. Alighieri, Dante, XII, 5-10, 12-13, 2035, 58, 65, 67, 83, 86n, 89n, 98n, 99100, 117, 143, 247, 268, 272 and n, 345, 366, 420; – Convivio (Convito), 8-9; – De Monarchia, 8;

– De vulgari eloquentia, 8; – The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), 7-8, 13, 20-35, 58, 117, 268; – Inferno, 24-25, 28, 31n, 89n, 98n, 272n, 366; – Paradiso, 25, 100; – Purgatorio, 13, 31-32, 98n, 99; – Vita Nuova, 7-8. Amiran, Eyal, 214. Anders, Günther, 230. Anspaugh, Kelly, 28n. Antoine-Dunne, Jean, 398n. Antonello da Messina, XIV, 123n. Antonioni, Michelangelo, 400-401; – Blow-Up, 401. Apollinaire, Guillame, 13, 103. Aretino, Pietro, 13; – Letters and Sonnets (Lettere e Sonetti lussuriosi), 13; – Ragionamenti, 13. Arikha, Anne, 8. Arikha, Avigdor, 8, 122-123. Ariosto, Ludovico, XII, 7, 12, 15-16, 21, 345; – Orlando Furioso, 7, 15-16. Aristotle, XIV, 211-214, 217, 219, 268, 279, 284. Arndorfer, Martin, 53. Arnheim, Rudolf, 392, 397. Arnold, Bruce, 132n, 134. Arrabal, Fernando, 327. Artaud, Antonin, 104, 108, 370. Ashcroft, Peggy, 355. Aslan, Odette, 132. Asmus, Walter, 342, 351. Asti, Adriana, 369.


454 Atik, Anne, 16. Atkinson, Brooks, 339. Aubanel, Théodore, 65 and n. St. Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis), 65, 88, 211, 282n. Bachelard, Gaston, 213, 218. Bachem, Walter, 309n, 313n. Bacon, Francis (1909-1992), XIV, XVI, 127 and n, 128 and n, 265. Badiou, Alain, 327. Bailey, Iain, XIV, 51n. Bair, Deirdre, 92n, 97n, 240, 392n, 430 and n. Baker, Phil, 318n. Balla, Giacomo, 109. Balzac, Honoré de, 393 and n; – Le Faiseur (Mercadet), 393. Bamberg, Michael, 293. Barolini, Teodolinda, 25 and n, 26. Barrault, Jean-Louis, 125, 365. Barrès, Maurice, 17, 20. Barry, Elizabeth, 146. Barthes, Roland, 179 and n. Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 332-333. Bassnett, Susan, 39-40. Bataille, Georges, 136, 383-384. Battistoni, Carlo, 371n. Baudelaire, Charles, 272n, 279n; – “Au Lecteur”, 272n; – “Le Balcon”, 279n; – Les Fleurs du Mal, 272n. Bausch, Pina, 260. Beckett, Edward, 57n. Beer, Ann, 52-54, 310n. Beethoven, Ludwig van, XVI, 215n, 305-323, 362. Belleggia, Lino, XVIII. Bene, Carmelo, 367, 430. Benjamin, Walter, 225, 235. Benn, Gottfried, 232. Ben-Zvi, Linda, 92 and n, 95n, 133, 309, 316. Bergman, Ingmar, 390. Bergson, Henri, 108, 231, 286 and n, 337; – Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire), 337.

Index of Names and Works Berkeley, George, 200, 286, 396. Berni, Francesco, 10. Bertinetti, Paolo, 167. Bevan, Anthony Ashley, 147. Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da, 10; – La Calandria, 10. Bible, XIV, 51 and n, 62, 67, 86n, 96, 143-155, 383 and n; – The Book of Daniel, 143-155; – The Book of Psalms, 150, 281; – The Book of Wisdom, 431; – Ecclesiastes, 96; – The First Letter of Saint John (Première Épître de Saint Jean), 51; – Genesis, 146; – The Gospel according to Matthew, 150; – Lamentations (Les Lamentations), 51. Binasco, Valerio, 342 and n, 345, 352353. Bishop, Tom, 78. Blair, Carole, 185n. Blanchot, Maurice, 183, 383-384. Blin, Roger, XVI, 126, 132, 260, 364365. Bloom, Harold, 27. Blyth, Ian, 76. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 6-7; – Decameron, 13. Bollmann, Horst, 343, 351. Borges, Jorge Luis, 91n, 158n. Borriello, Antonio, XVIII, 416, 430n. Bouchard, Norma, 10. Bousso, Vitória Daniela, 334-335. Bowles, Hugo, XVI. Bozzalla, Angelo, 103. Brakhage, Stan, 400. Branciaroli, Franco, 346. Brantley, Ben, 332-333. Brater, Enoch, XV, XVII-XVIII, 86n, 114, 134, 135n, 259-260, 264, 268, 271n, 306, 307n, 311n, 351. Brecht, Bertolt, 232, 351-352, 432. Bredeck, Elisabeth, 94n. Breton, André, 135, 159, 390-391; – Manifeste du Surréalisme, 390. Brook, Peter, 426 and n, 431.


Index of Names and Works Browning, Robert, 279n. Bruce, Brenda, 355. Bruno, Giordano, 9-10, 138; – Il Candelaio, 10. Bryden, Mary, XIII, 128n, 149, 245n, 305, 312, 393n. Budgen, Frank, 210. Buñuel, Luis, XVIII, 391-392; – L’âge d’or, 392; – Un chien andalou, XVIII, 391, 400. Burckhardt, Jacob, 8; – Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 8. Burdeau, Auguste, 68. Burnet, Thomas, 66. Burri, Alberto, 369. Calder, John, 307n. Calvino, Italo, 104. Camargos, Dalton, 334. Camilleri, Andrea, 346, 432. Cangrande della Scala, 8-9. Caporossi, Riccardo, XVIII, 367-368, 373. Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 265. Carducci, Giosuè, XII, 6, 17, 20-21; – Antologia carducciana. Poesie e prose, 20n; – “Satan” (“A Satana”), 17. Caretti, Laura, XVIII, 344, 370n. Carlyle, J. A., 272n. Carnap, Rudolf, 230. Carpenter, John, 407; – Halloween, 407. Cary, Henry Francis, 29n. Casanova, Pascale, 192n. Caselli, Daniela, XII, 5, 11-12, 21n, 22 and n, 143, 272n. Casement, Tom, 127n. Casey, Edward S., 212-214, 218. Castiglione, Baldassarre, 7. Cauchi Santoro, Roberta, XIII. Cauteruccio, Giancarlo, 369-370. Cavalcanti, Guido, 8. Cavecchi, Mariacristina, XIII-XIV, 122n. Cecchi, Carlo, XVII, 342-354.

455 Celan, Paul, 62, 223; – Sprachgitter, 223. Chabert, Pierre, 126. Chamberlain, Lori, 42, 52. Chaucer, Geoffrey, 67, 89 and n; – The Canterbury Tales, 89n. Chekhov, Anton, XV, 260, 262-263, 265, 273; – The Seagull (Chayka), 263; – Three Sisters (Tri Sestri), 263; – Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya), 263. Cherchi, Grazia, 345-346. Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre, 246, 250; – Les liaisons dangereuses, 246. Churchill, Caryl, XVI, 264; – Top Girls, 264. Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo), 265. Cirillo, Arturo, 342. Cixous, Hélène, XIII, 75-85, 327; – L’amour du loup, et autres remords, 78, 83-84; – Le Voisin de zéro: Sam Beckett, 7879, 83. Clément, Bruno, 230. Clermont-Ganneau, Charles, 147. Cluchey, Rick, 68. Cocteau, Jean, 391. Coe, Richard N., 156, 160n. Coetzee, John Maxwell, 389; – Diary of a Bad Year, 389. Coffey, Brian, 194. Cohn, Ruby, 8-9, 17, 46, 122n, 131, 144-145, 157n, 171, 178n, 205n, 215n, 342-343, 352. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 119. Colgan, Michael, 136n, 330. Colmer, David, 357n. Colvin, Ian G., 267n. Comencini, Cristina, 342. Comisso, Giovanni, XII, 10. Connor, Steven, 144, 219, 313n. Cornell, Sarah, 75. Cotter, Holland, 270n. Coulter, Riann, 125n. Craig, Gordon, 431. Crevel, René, 391. Crivellaro, Franco, 365n.


456 Croce, Benedetto, 6, 16; – Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille, 16. Crosara, Davide, XIII. Cunningham, David, 33. Curtis, Adrian, 144. Cuthbert, David, 339. Dalì, Salvador, 391. D’Amburgo, Marion, 369-370. D’Annunzio, Gabriele, XII, 6, 20-21; – Il Fuoco, 6; – Prose scelte, 6, 20n. Darwin, Charles, 60-61; – The Origin of Species, 60-62. Dean, Tacita, 211. De Bosio, Gianfranco, 365 and n. De Feo, Sandro, 366n. De Filippo, Eduardo, 346, 433. De Lattre, Alain, 191n. Deleuze, Gilles, 83, 307n, 313 and n, 314-316, 396 and n, 397, 399-400, 405, 407. Deligianni, Anastasia, XVIII. Democritus, 195-196. Depero, Fortunato, 108. Derrida, Jacques, 42, 212-213, 313 and n, 383. Derval, André, 375. De Sanctis, Francesco, 7, 9, 12, 16, 5859, 65 and n; – Storia della letteratura italiana, 7, 58, 65. Descartes, René, 88, 93-94, 98n, 200202, 212, 227-228, 244, 247, 252, 278-279, 382. Deschevaux-Dumesnil, Suzanne, XVI, 260, 366. Di Blasio, Francesca, 189. Dobrez, L. A. C., 192n. D’Onofri, Anna, 369. Dostoevsky, Fëdor Michajlovicˇ, 232, 435. Dowden, Hester, 306. Driver, Tom, 157. Duccio di Buoninsegna, 265. Duchamp, Marcel, 390. Duckworth, Colin, 124, 285, 393n.

Index of Names and Works Dürer, Albrecht, 135n. Duthuit, George, 159, 193n, 194, 197, 203, 220. Dworkin, Craig, 400. Eco, Umberto, 39-41. Edwards, Michael, 53-54. Egoyan, Atom, 328-333, 339. Eisenstein, Sergei M., XVIII, 392-393, 396-398, 399n; – Bezhin Meadow, 392; – The General Line, 392, 398-399. Elam, Keir, 31n, 130. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 23, 137, 162 and n, 195, 288, 343 and n; – Burnt Norton, 288; – East Coker, 343 and n; – Four Quartets, 162, 343n; – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 137; – The Waste Land, 23. Ellmann, Richard, 92n. Éluard, Paul, 205n, 390-391. Engelberts, Matthijs, 15, 190, 192, 198, 200, 204. Epicurus, 214n. Erasmus, Desiderius, 94. Erba, Edoardo, 346. Erlich, Viktor, 107. Essif, Les, 125, 137. Esslin, Martin, 103n, 106, 123, 351, 362n. Euclid, 429, 433. Euripides, 432. Faraone, Mario, XIV, 162n. Federman, Raymond, 128n, 270n. Fehsenfeld, Martha, 125n, 126, 128n, 129, 132, 194, 342, 351-352, 362n. Feldman, Matthew, 22n, 192-193, 196n, 197n, 198, 203 and n, 287n. Ferreira, William, 338. Ferrer, Daniel, 63. Ferrini, Jean-Pierre, 8, 16, 28n. Fewell, Danna Nolan, 151. Finney, Albert, 355. Fischer-Seidel, Therese, 135.


Index of Names and Works Fisher, Mark, 408 and n. Fitch, Brian T., 43, 384n. Flaubert, Gustave, 227, 231; – L’éducation sentimentale, 231. Fletcher, Beryl, 309n, 313n. Fletcher, John, 103, 309n, 313n. Fletcher, Phineas, 194n. Fo, Dario, 346. Fogazzaro, Antonio, 17. Folengo, Teofilo, 10. Fontane, Theodore: – Effi Briest, 284n. Ford, Desmond, 147. Foucault, Michel, 183, 187, 211. Fracastoro, Girolamo, 17. Franchi, Raffaello, XII, 10. St. Francis of Assisi (Giovanni di Pietro Bernardone), 21. Franklin, Seb, XVIII. Franzen, Erich, 195, 197. Fraser, Graham, 409-410, 412. Frauenstädt, Julius, 60. Freeman, Mark, 293. Freire-Filho, Aderbal, 338. Freud, Sigmund, 181 and n, 317 and n. Friedman, Alan Warren, 310n. Fries-Dieckmann, Marion, 135. Frigerio, Ezio, 371. Frost, Everett, 15, 20 and n, 65, 190, 192, 198, 200, 204. Fruttero, Carlo, 347-350, 365n, 371n, 428 and n. Fusella, Patrizia, XVI-XVII, 51, 159n, 310n. Fusini, Nadia, 128. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 346. Galasso, Sabrina, 367n. Galloway, Alexander R., 406. Gambon, Michael, 330-331. Gardner, Heather, XIII. Garforth, Julian, 92n, 312. Garner, Stanton B. Jr., 268. Gellhaus, Axel, 62. Genet, Jean, 119. Genette, Gérard, 30, 144. Getto, Giovanni, 29n.

457 Geulincx, Arnold, XIV, 65, 190-209, 244, 252; – Ethics (Ethica), 190-204; – Metaphysics (Metaphysica vera), 191, 194, 199; – Opera Philosophica, 196n; – Questions Concerning Disputations, 191, 203. Giacometti, Alberto, 125 and n, 127. Giacosa, Giuseppe, 13. Giannantonio, Pompeo, 29n. Gidal, Peter, 311n, 316. Gide, André, 232; – Paludes, 232. Gilbert, William Schwenck, 287n. Gilman, Sander L., 185n. Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco), 136n. Giotto (di Bondone), 265. Glass, Philip, 333. Glenavy, Beatrice, 127n. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 16, 65, 67-68; – Faust, 65; – Gedichte, 69; – “Harfenspieler”, 68-69; – Torquato Tasso, 16; – Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 68. Goldberg, RoseLee, 105. Goldoni, Carlo, 7, 272, 346; – I due gemelli veneziani, 272. Gontarski, Stanley E., XVII, 2, 57, 61, 114, 119, 177n, 194, 214n, 278, 286 and n, 287, 289-290, 306n, 342, 344, 351-352, 382. Goodman, Randolph, 262. Gordon, David J., 310n. Gowan, Donald, 147. Gozzi, Carlo, 7. Graver, Lawrence, 128n, 270n. Grillparzer, Franz, 65. Grotowski, Jerzy, 370. Guardamagna, Daniela, XIn. Guardamagna, Dante, 345. Guarini, Giovan Battista, 7, 10, 17; – Il pastor fido, 7. Guattari, Felix, 405, 407.


458 Guglielmi, Angelo, 104. Guimarães, Adriano, 328, 333-339. Guimarães, Fernando, 328, 333-339. Gussow, Mel, 390, 394. Guttuso, Renato, 427. Haerdter, Michael, 126 and n. Hall, Peter, 355n. Hamilton, Alice, 245n. Hamilton, Kenneth, 245n. Harmon, Maurice, 39n, 49, 52, 106, 196n, 331, 360, 381. Harper, Howard, 253. Harvey, David, 211. Harvey, Lawrence, 197 and n. Hassan, Ihab, 119n. Hauvette, Henri, 7, 9, 20n. Hayden, Henri, 16, 171. Haynes, John, 123 and n, 127, 136n. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 93, 227, 233, 377. Heidegger, Martin, 144, 180, 211-213, 230-231, 234. Heine, Heinrich, 64, 67. Heraclitus, 200. Herbert, Jocelyn, 67. Herman, Vimala, 292. Herren, Graley, 309, 311n, 316, 318n, 319. Herrigel, Eugen, 167n. Hesla, David, 192. Hill, Leslie, 151. Hitchcock, Alfred, 400-401, 407; – Psycho, 407; – Rear Window, 401. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 230-231, 234235. Holtz, Vera, 334, 336. Homan, Sidney, 318n. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 196 and n. Horovitz, Israel, 327. Huber, Pierre, 61. Hugo, Victor-Marie, 435; – Hernani, 107. Hulle, Dirk Van, XIn, XIII, 147n, 283n. Hume, David, 93.

Index of Names and Works Hurt, John, 329. Husserl, Edmund, 212-213. Hutchinson, Mary, 193n, 195, 196n, 197 and n. Ibsen, Henrik, XV, 260-262, 265, 273; – A Doll’s House (Et Dukkehjem), 262; – Hedda Gabler, 262. Ingold, Tim, 217. Ionesco, Eugène, 103n, 124, 389; – Les chaises, 124. Irigaray, Luce, 212-213. Jackson, Heather, 58, 60. Jackson, John E., 53 Jackson, Rosemary, 310. James, William, 288; – The Varieties of Religious Experience, 288. Jarry, Alfred, 106; – Ubu Roi, 106. Johnson, Samuel, 16, 435. Jordan, Neil, 136. Joyce, James, XVI, 13, 22, 40, 62, 64, 78, 83, 86n, 92n, 138, 148-149, 164, 193, 198, 210, 219, 228, 232, 283n, 285, 287 and n, 288-289, 390; – Anna Livia Plurabelle, 40; – “The Dead”, 279, 287; – Ulysses, 283n; – Work in Progress (Finnegans Wake), 149. Joyce, Lucia, 287. Jurado, Alicia, 158n. Kafka, Franz, 91n, 227-228, 232-233, 435. Kalb, Jonathan, 311n, 342, 351-352. Kandel, Karen, 333. Kasulis, Thomas P., 166n. Katz, Daniel, 407-408. Kaufman, Boris, 393-394. Kaun, Axel, 131n, 178. Kazan, Elia, 393; – On the Waterfront, 393. Keaton, Buster, 389, 393, 395. Keats, John, 115, 117-118, 277, 280;



459

– The Fall of Hyperion, 117, 118; – Hyperion, 115, 117; – “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”, 280; – Ode on a Grecian Urn, 277. Keller, Gottfried, 16; – Der grüne Heinrich, 16. Kennedy, Jake, 129. Kennedy, Michael, 307. Kennedy, Sighle, 193, 195, 197 and n. Kenner, Hugh, 192. Kiberd, Declan, 132. Kirby, Michael, 103-104. Kittler, Friedrich, 406. Knowlson, James, XI, 20, 50, 60, 92n, 97n, 114, 123 and n, 127 and n, 132, 134, 135 and n, 136n, 137-138, 191, 193n, 198, 206n, 240n, 244, 260, 265n, 267n, 281 and n, 282, 284, 305 and n, 307n, 311n, 316, 360361, 390, 392n. Kraft, Werner, 224, 227, 229. Kristeva, Julia, 144n, 383. Kroll, Jeri L., 250. Kundert-Gibbs, John Leeland, 166n, 167n.

Leopardi, Giacomo, XII, 6, 9-10, 12-13, 20-21, 249 and n, 345, 371-372; – “A se stesso”, 10, 12; – Canti, 6, 13; – “La ginestra”, 371; – Operette morali, 6; – Le ricordanze, 249 and n. Leucippus, 195. Leventhal, A. J. (known as Con), 9, 13, 16. Levi, Primo, 79 and n, 80; – Se questo è un uomo, 79n. Lévinas, Emmanuel, 382. Levitan, Isaac, 265. Leyda, Jay, 392n. Leymarie, Jean, 135 and n, 136n. Lingis, Alphonso, 181 and n. Lloyd, David, 132. Locatelli, Carla, XIV, 179, 379. Locke, John, 66, 93. Lombardo, Agostino, 43. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, 407. Lowenfels, Walter, 240. Lukács, György, 228, 231. Lyotard, François, 181 and n.

Labov, William, 295. Lacan, Jacques, 317n. Lacocque, André, 147, 153. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 234-235. Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaas, 192, 203n. Lawlor, Séan, XII. Laws, Catherine, 309, 313n, 316-317, 318 and n, 319. Lazzarini, Giulia, XVIII, 371n, 372 and n, 416-418, 432. LeBrocquy, Louis, XVI, 265. Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), 391. Lehar, Franz; – The Merry Widow (La Vedova allegra), 370, 371n, 423, 425. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 66, 190191. Lemaistre, Louis-Isaac (Lemaître de Sacy), 147n. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, 64.

MacCarthy, Ethna, 14, 65n. MacGowran, Jack, 355. MacGreevy, Thomas, 6, 9-10, 15, 17, 20, 60, 62, 65n, 190-193, 197-198, 200, 204, 240n; – Poems, 17. Machiavelli, Niccolò, XII, 7, 10-13, 21; – Clizia, 10; – Discorsi, 7; – Istorie fiorentine, 10, 13; – La Mandragola, 10-11; – Il Principe, 7. Maeterlinck, Maurice, 135. Magritte, René, 391. Mahler, Gustav, 305. Maier, Michael, 309, 310 and n. Maldinay, Henry, 178. Malebranche, Nicolas, 199. Malpas, Jeff E., 211. Malraux, André, 191, 203. Manzay, J. Kyle, 339.


460 Manzoni, Alessandro, 6, 16, 345; – Il Cinque Maggio, 16; – I Promessi Sposi, 16. Marguerat, Daniel, 144. Marias, Javier, 389. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, XIII, 103112; – Roi Bombance, 106; – “Il Teatro di Varietà”, 106. Martin, David, 147n. Martin, Jean, 125n. Martone, Mario, 342. Marx, Karl, 233. Maselli, Tina, 342. Massumi, Brian, 183n. Matias, 126, 365. Mauri, Glauco, 432. Mauthner, Fritz, XIII, 65, 86-102, 228, 287; – Beitràge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Sprachkritic), 92-93, 228, 287 and n. Maxwell, Jane, 15, 65, 190, 192, 198, 200, 204. Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 78. Mazzoni, Guido, 20n. McCabe, James, 282n. McElroen, Christopher, 328, 339. McHale, Brian, XVIII, 405. McLuhan, Marshall, 279n. McMillan, Dougald, 125n, 126, 128n, 129, 132, 342, 351-352. McMullan, Anna, 132, 144. McWhinnie, Donald, 356n. Meadowcroft, Tim, 147. Megged, Matti, 125n. Menzies, Janet, 129. Meredith, George, 249. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 212-213, 382. Meyer, Konrad Ferdinand, 58. Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 58. Meyers, Sidney, 394 and n; – The Savage Eye, 394. Michelangelo (Buonarroti), XIV, 125, 137. Miguel, Ana, 334. Millar, Jeremy, 211.

Index of Names and Works Miller, Arthur, 264; – Broken Glass, 264. Miller, Brian, 357. Miller, Jonathan, 362 and n. Mills, Peter, 312. Milton, John, XIII, 83, 86n, 113-121, 261; – Paradise Lost, 114, 117, 119; – Samson Agonistes, 119 and n, 261. Mitchell, Pamela, 13. Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 432; – Tartuffe, 342n. Moloney, Alan, 136n. Mondolfo, Luciano, 432. Montale, Eugenio, 10; – “Delta”, 10. Moorjani, Angela, 378n. Morlacchi, Lucilla, 369. Morot-Sir, Edouard, 245n. Morrison, Kristin, 292-293. Morteo, Gian Renzo, 365n. Motard-Noar, Martine, 76. Moura, Wagner, 338. Mulvey, Laura, 401. Munch, Edvard, XIV, 123, 265. Murray, Christopher, 355n. Myrick, Daniel, 408-409; – The Blair Witch Project, 408-412. Nabokov, Vladimir, 272. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 185-186, 234, 382; – Truth and Lying (Über Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne), 185. Nixon, Mark, XIII, 67, 147n, 193n. Noël, Jacques, 126. Norrick, Neal, 293-295. North, Michael, 106. O’Casey, Sean, 215n; – Windfalls, 215n. Oelsner, Hermann, 272n. O’Hara, James Donald, 204. O’Leary, Joseph S., 384n. Oliveira, Nicholas, 335. Ondaatje, Michael, 272n; – Divisadero, 272n.


Index of Names and Works O’Neill, Eugene, 260. Oppenheim, Lois, 265n, 305n. Orlandini, Lorenzo, XV, 283n. O’Toole, Fintan, 339. Overbeck, Lois More, 194. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 204; – Metamorphoses (Metamorphoseon, Libri XV), 204. Ozpetek, Ferzan, 342n. Panitz, Marília, 334. Papini, Giovanni, 8. Parent, David J., 185n. Parmenides, 185. Parnell, Charles Stewart, 67. Pascal, Blaise, 67, 75, 204, 382. Pasquini, Emilio, 29n. Passatore, Franco, 365n. Patey, Caroline, 122n. Pellico, Silvio, 6. Pelorson, Georges, 16. Penone, Giuseppe, 122n. Peppiatt, Michael, 125n, 128n. Perloff, Marjorie, 327. Peskine, Lynda, 364n. Petrarca (Petrarch), Francesco, XII, 8, 12-14, 16; – Canzoniere, 13; – Rime, 8, 12; – Trionfi, 16; – Trionfo della Morte, 14. Peyron, Anna, 365n. Piaf, Edith, 81. Picasso, Pablo, 265, 391. Picciola, Giuseppe, 20n. Pierce, Wendell, 339. Pilling, John, IX, XI-XII, 50, 62-64, 66 and n, 83n, 86n, 92n, 192, 193n, 205 and n, 282, 287n, 303n, 360. Pindar (Pindarus), 6-7, 11. Pinotti, Andrea, 125n. Pinter, Harold, XVI, 103n, 264, 292, 295, 389 and n; – The Basement, 389n; – The Birthday Party, 264; – The Compartment, 389n; – The Homecoming, 264;

461 – The Hothouse, 264; – No Man’s Land, 264; – Old Times, 264; Piperno, Daniela, 342. Pirandello, Luigi, 12, 14-15, 104, 345, 365, 432-433. Plato, 93, 98, 180, 212, 243, 316; – Symposium, 180-181. Polac, Michel, 383n. Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini), 6-7. Pomposo, Rosario, 431, 433. Pound, Ezra, 8; – Make It New, 8. Pountney, Rosemary, XVII, 416. Powell, Anna, 407-409. Powell, Michael, 400-401; – Peeping Tom, 401. Prampolini, Enrico, 108-109. Prieto, Eric, 316. Proclemer, Anna, 369. Prosser, Bill, XVIII, 416. Protagoras, 195n, 196n. Proust, Marcel, XVI, 20-21, 41, 59, 160 and n, 193, 204, 219, 232, 277, 278291, 435; – À la recherche du temps perdu, 59, 286; – Le Temps retrouvé, 278n. Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 392. Putnam, Samuel, 10. Pythagoras, 98, 433. Quaglio, Antonio, 29n. Rabelais, François, 65. Racine, Jean, 15. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 265. Ray, Man, 391. Raynor, Alice, 268. Reavey, George, 193-194, 197, 201n. Reid, Alec, 128n. Rembrandt, Harmenszoon Van Rijn, 127, 149, 151, 265; – Portrait of Jacobsz Trip, 127. Remondi, Claudio, XVIII, 367-368, 373. Renard, Jules, 62-64, 66; – Journal intime, 62-63.


462 Renaud, Madeleine, 364-366, 373. Restivo, Giuseppina, 49, 135n. Reynolds, John Hamilton, 117n. Ricci, Mario, 367. Ricoeur, Paul, 153. Rimbaud, Arthur, 200. Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 144. Rodríguez Gago, Antonia, 123, 138. Rose, Margaret, 135. Rosen, Steven J., 156. Rosset, Barney, 389 and n. Rossman, Charles, 310n. Roulin, Augustine, 271. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9, 17; – Confessions (Les Confessions), 9; – Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse), 17. Ruccello, Annibale, 346. Rudmose-Brown, Thomas, 15. Rudrum, David, 294-295. Ruzante (Angelo Beolco), 346. Sacks, Harvey, 295. Sánchez, Eduardo, 408-409; – The Blair Witch Project, 408-412. Sannazaro, Jacopo, 7, 17. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 66 and n, 211; – L’imagination, 66. Sbarbaro, Camillo, XII, 12; – Pianissimo, 12. Schmied, Wieland, 128n. Schneider, Alan, 39n, 49, 52, 106, 135, 196n, 259, 331, 343, 360, 381, 394 and n. Schoenberg, Arnold, 232. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 60, 67-68, 90, 93, 240-241, 244, 250, 252, 278; – Parerga (Parerga und Paralipomena), 60; – The World as Will and Idea (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), 278. Schroeder, Ernst, 351. Schubert, Franz, 67, 305. Schumann, Robert, 67. Scognamiglio, Biagio, 431. Sebald, Winfried Georg, 360n. Sebellin, Rossana M., XIn, 2, 346.

Index of Names and Works Segond, Louis, 147n. Sellers, Susan, 75-76. Sermonti, Vittorio, 29n. Serpieri, Alessandro, 131n. Serra, Richard, 122n. Shakespeare, William, XV, 43, 67-68, 86 and n, 94, 97 and n, 98n, 99-100, 117, 126, 137, 152, 260-261, 263, 270, 273, 344, 361, 372, 430, 432; – As You Like It, 99; – Hamlet, 90, 99, 152, 229, 261, 263, 295, 338; – King Lear, 68, 86, 117, 119, 126, 261; – Love’s Labour’s Lost, 99; – Macbeth, 96, 137, 260-261, 269, 271; – The Merchant of Venice, 261; – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 97 and n; – Othello, 261, 283; – Richard III, 261; – The Tempest, 372, 417; – Titus Andronicus, 98n, 260. Shaw, George Bernard, 261-262. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 21. Shenker, Israel, 117n. Shepard, Sam, XVI, 264; – Fool for Love, 264. Sherzer, Dina, 310n. Shklovsky, Viktor, 107. Shroder, Maurice Z., 272n. Sinclair, Cissie, 127 and n, 399. Sinclair, Peggy, 283, 399. Singleton, Charles S., 25n. Smith, Barry, 309n, 313n. Smith, Russel, 197n. Sollers, Philippe, 327. Sonzogni, Marco, 10. Spinoza, Baruch de, 383n; – Tractatus theologico-politicus, 383n. Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovicˇ Dzˇugasˇvili), 392, 399. Stanislavski, Constantin, 351. Starkie, Walter, 14-15. Steen, Jan, 58. Stein, Gertrude, 232. Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle), 64, 232, 246, 250;


Index of Names and Works – Armance, 246, 250; – Le Rouge et le Noir, 64. Stoker, Bram, 406; – Dracula, 406. Stravinsky, Igor, 231. Strehler, Giorgio, XVIII, 370-373, 416425. Strindberg, August, XVI, 260; – The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonatem), XVI, 260. Stryk, Lucien, 166n. Sullivan, Arthur, 287n. Sussman, Henry, 413. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, 166n. Symonds, John Addington, 7-9, 11. Synge, John Millington, 132 and n. Tagliaferri, Aldo, 14. Tajiri, Yoshiki, 75. Takahashi, Yasunari, 167. Tal-Coat, Pierre, 159. Tandy, Jessica, 259. Tannen, Deborah, 301. Tasso, Torquato, XII, 6-7, 10, 13, 58, 345; – L’Aminta, 7; – La Gerusalemme Liberata, 6, 13, 58. Taylor, Christiana J., 105-106. Teresi, Francesco, 416, 428-429. Thacker, Eugene, 406. Thimberg, Nathalia, 334. Thomas, Dylan, 270n. Tiepolo, Giambattista, 267. Tisdall, Caroline, 103. Tonelli, Angelo, 343. Tophoven, Elmar, 49-50, 126n, 230. Tophoven, Erika, 49. Tuan, Yi-Fu, 211, 220. Tucker, David, XIV. Tynan, Kenneth, 127 and n. Tzara, Tristan, 390-391. Uhlmann, Anthony, 192, 194-195, 197n, 200, 206. Ussher, Arland, 193, 195, 197. Valéry, Paul, 232.

463 van Gogh, Vincent, XVI, 135 and n, 136 and n, 265, 271-272; – Barques sur la plage, 136n; – La Berceuse, 135, 271-272; – La Crau: jardins de maraîchers, 136n. – Gauguin’s Chair, 136; – Nature morte: Bottines, 135n; – Vincent’s Chair, 136. Vasilicò, Giuliano, 367. Védrenne, Véronique, 311n, 316. Velázquez, Diego, 128; – Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 128. Velde, Bram van, 122n, 194. Velde, Jakoba van, 137. Venuti, Lawrence, 48. Verdicchio, Massimo, 9. Vermeer, Jan, 265. Vertov, Dziga, 393. Vico, Giambattista, 9, 94n, 148; – The New Science (La Scienza Nuova), 9. Vigo, Jean, 393; – L’Atalante, 393; – Zéro de conduite, 393. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 25 and n, 26-27. Visconti, Laura, 10. Vitrac, Roger, 15. Vleeschauwer, Herman J. De, 191n, 204. Vogelweide, Walter von der, XVI, 267 and n. Waddington, Victor, 134. Wagner, Wilhelm Richard, 305. Waletsky, Joshua, 295. Warner, Deborah, 361. Warner, Francis, 357n. Warrilow, David, 351. Watson, David, 91n. Watts, Alan, 163. Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette, 80n. Weiler, Gershon, 94n. Weller, Shane, XV, 192, 229, 234-235. Wheatley, David, 177n. Whitehead, Alfred North, 213.


464 Whitelaw, Billie, 123 and n, 124, 351, 355-356. Wigger, Stefan, 343. Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams), XVI, 260; – Suddenly Last Summer, 260. Wilson, Robert, 260. Wilson, Sarah, 135n. Wilton, Penelope, 330. Windelband, Wilhelm, 65, 190-191, 196n. Winnicott, Donald W., 317n, 435. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 91 and n, 94n, 227-228. Wood, Rupert, 192, 198n. Woodhouse, Richard, 117n.

Index of Names and Works Woolf, Stuart, 79n. Wordsworth, William, 95. Worth, Katharine, 114, 123, 127, 152, 313n. Wulf, Catharina, 316, 317n. Yeats, Jack Butler, XIV, 12, 16, 131, 132 and n, 134; – The Amaranthers, 16; – A Clown among the People, 132; – Men of the Plain, 132; – Sleep, 134; – The Two Travellers, 132. Zeifman, Hersh, 146. Zeno, 195n, 196n.

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