daniela guardamagna, rossana m. sebellin (editors)-the tragic comedy of samuel beckett _...

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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 Scientificoe quindi sottoposte al giudizio di referees esterni, individuati

dal Comitato Scientifico fra i maggioriesperti internazionali,

secondo criteri di peer-review.

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Daniela GuardamagnaRossana M. Sebellin(editors)

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

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

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È vietata la riproduzione, ancheparziale, con qualsiasi mezzo

effettuata, compresa la fotocopia,anche ad uso interno o didattico.

Per la legge italiana la fotocopia èlecita 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.

Proprietà letteraria riservataUniversità degli Studi di Roma «Tor Vergata» - Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, Roma-Bari

Finito di stampare nell’ottobre 2009SEDIT - Bari (Italy)per conto dellaGius. Laterza & Figli SpaISBN 978-88-420-9070-0

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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) 5

Daniela Caselli, The Politics of Reading Dante inBeckett’s Mercier and / et Camier and “TheCalmative” / “Le calmant” 20

Self-Translation, and the Genesis of Beckett’sWriting

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 CulturalContext

Mary Bryden, “Hommage furtif”: Cixous’s Difficult Loveof Beckett 75

Heather Gardner, Company 86

Roberta Cauchi Santoro, Marinetti and Beckett: A Theatrical Continuum 103

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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 passedevant / 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’sManuscript 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

VI Index

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Index VII

Daniela Guardamagna, Cecchi’s Endgame, and theQuestion 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 CinematicEye 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 whointerprets 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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PrefaceDaniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin

The essays collected in this volume were presented at the Confer-ence “Beckett in Rome”, held at the University of Rome “Tor Ver-gata” in April 2008. Though not all the speakers decided to presenta written paper, and though one paper had to be excluded becauseit incorporated extended quotes from unpublished materials andwas therefore unacceptable to the Beckett Estate, we present here awide range of critical approaches, with contributions from the mostoutstanding Beckett scholars and many younger ones from all overthe world.

This volume collects 31 of the 41 papers presented; the appendixbears witness to some interesting performances and exhibitionshosted in the three days of the Conference.

We thank the Scientific Committee, in particular John Pillingand Chris Ackerley, whose support and invaluable advice havemade this volume possible; our colleagues at “Tor Vergata”; the or-ganizing committee, in particular Dr Lucia Nigri, Giuseppina Zan-noni, Claudia Fimiani and Pamela Parenti for their unremittinghelp in organising the Conference; PhD students of our DepartmentRachele Calisti, Daniela Coramusi, Alessandra D’Atena, ValeriaVallucci, Claudio Cadeddu, Massimiliano Catoni and AlessandroCifariello, who helped in various ways during the Conference; MrRoberto Mancini and Ms Eleonora Piacenza for their work on thewebsite and logistics of the Conference; the International RelationsOffice of “Tor Vergata”; Angela Gibbon, who helped with the revi-sion of some of the texts, and, last but by no means least, the twoindefatigable referees, who must remain anonymous, but whose dis-cerning and untiring judgement corrected many of our faults.

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IntroductionDaniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin*

In the past decade Beckett studies have responded to the recentinterest in genetic studies and have made extensive use of manu-scripts and drafts to widen and deepen the area of analysis, aprocess “precipitated by the publication of James Knowlson’sgroundbreaking biography, which drew attention to numeroushitherto barely studied manuscripts”1. The attention to variantsof composition, to the concrete stratification of handwritten ortyped texts, can be recognized as a legacy of the ‘Reading school’,where young scholars are invited to dwell on this approach. At theBeckett International Foundation in Reading, and with the en-couragement of James Knowlson and John Pilling, I, among oth-ers, began the study of self-translation from a genetic perspectiveand included manuscript analysis in my approach to the problem.

The use of unpublished documents (manuscript, letters, note-books and the holdings of Beckett’s library) was in a sense autho-rized by Beckett himself, not only for the obvious reason that hemade his materials available to scholars, but also – and especially– because of his own attention to the process of writing, so oftenincorporated in the text as an integral element, a theme, an objectof observation in itself. It comes as no surprise, then, that manypapers in the present book attribute enormous importance tomanuscripts, letters, notebooks, marginalia and the like in orderto achieve a deeper, multi-layered reading of Beckett’s work.

* The first part of this Introduction, concerning the first four sections, is byRossana M. Sebellin; the second part, about the last three, is by Daniela Guar-damagna. For the attribution of the entire volume, see Notes, p. 2.

1 Dirk Van Hulle, 2005, “Genetic Beckett Studies”, in Idem (editor), Beck-ett the European, 2005, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida),pp. 1-9, p. 2.

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This is especially true of the first four sections of this publica-tion: “Beckett and Italy”, “Self-translation and the genesis ofBeckett’s writing”, “The Anxiety of Influence: Beckett and thecultural context” and “Beckett and philosophers”. The last threesections of the publication are devoted specifically to Beckett’sperforming genres, theatre – both as text and on stage – and cin-ema: “Beckett’s theatre: text and performances”, and “Beckettand cinema”. An Appendix closes this collective effort and testi-fies to several performances which were an important part of theConference and therefore we consider appropriate for the Pro-ceedings, in spite of their non-academic character.

The first section, “Beckett and Italy”, includes the significantcontributions of John Pilling and Daniela Caselli: both are con-cerned with Beckett’s literary engagement with Italian culture. JohnPilling explores the author’s first encounters with Italian poets atTrinity College Dublin during the 1920s, and his later contacts withlesser known contemporary poets. Pilling makes use of letters, notesand annotated texts to discuss a subject which has rarely been ex-tended much beyond Dante, including not only the Italian literarycanon which Beckett studied as an undergraduate at TCD (Pe -trarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Leopardi, D’Annunzio, to name but a few),but also such contemporary and less internationally known figuresas Sbarbaro, Franchi and Comisso. Daniela Caselli, with her deepknowledge 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 oth-er figures of the Italian literary canon, such as Carducci, Leopardi,D’Annunzio, Machiavelli and Ariosto; and she poses the problemof comparativism and intertextuality as “a political exploration ofhow authority circulates” in the works that are being compared. (Animportant potential contribution by Séan Lawlor, which indicatedsome 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 materialswhich were denied authorization by the Beckett Estate.)

The second session, “Self-translation and the genesis of Beck-ett’s writing”, was opened by my paper describing the problem ofself-translation in the case study of the double versions of “Play”and Not I, and suggests envisaging the status of duplicated origi-

XII Introduction

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nality for such texts (rather than the more frequent definition oforiginal and secondary version), adding this to the instances of ex-haustion, impasse and suspicion of the truth of language. MarkNixon and Dirk Van Hulle present their work (in progress) on thedigitalization of Beckett’s marginalia through the excavation of theauthor’s library: Beckett’s wide knowledge of European cultureand the ways in which this filters into his literary production maybe read as a form of “intertextual translation”, which Nixon andVan Hulle explore from various perspectives.

The third section, “Beckett and the cultural context”, includesseven contributions. Mary Bryden examines the relationship be-tween Beckett and Hélène Cixous from the point of view of theFrench writer’s attitude to her Irish-French contemporary; Bry-den also develops an acute analysis of the elusive yet deep textu-al correspondences and persistent Beckettian echoes in Cixous’work, not only as textual residua, but also as a subterranean atti-tude to the act of writing.

The following papers consider Beckett’s work in the light of theinfluence of modern writers and thinkers. Heather Gardner’s con-tribution on Company examines the influence on Beckett’s work ofthe philosopher and linguist Fritz Mauthner, as well as the devel-opment of a tendency to incorporate heterogeneous literary ele-ments and to obliterate the thinking and narrating subject. The fol-lowing two authors deal with different but equally unusual connec-tions: the possible relations between Beckett and avant-garde the-atre, and Romantic poetry. Roberta Cauchi Santoro’s paper inves-tigates the hypothesis of a relationship between Marinetti and Beck-ett, suggesting that the theatre of the Italian avant-garde and that ofBeckett may share a common ground. Davide Crosara examines theinfluence of Milton and Romantic poetry on Beckett’s later proseand drama: an unusual, yet convincing analysis of the author’s ca-pacity for assimilation and incorporation of the literary tradition,even of the writings most apparently distant from his style. Crosaraargues that the composition of the later plays and short prose has itsorigins in a persistent and deep-rooted relation with the Romantictradition, and he thus proposes a postmodernist perspective onsuch aspects of Beckett’s work.

A peculiar kind of influence is that considered by Mariacristi-na Cavecchi, who concentrates on an ideal ‘museum’ of chairs in

Introduction XIII

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Beckett’s works. Beckett’s profound response to painting is thebasis for Cavecchi’s exploration of the bond between the visualand verbal in Beckett’s theatre: from Waiting for Godot to “Rock-aby”, she evokes a gallery of paintings and images from the Ital-ian Renaissance to contemporary painters, ranging from Antonel-lo da Messina and Michelangelo to Jack B. Yeats, Edvard Munchand Francis Bacon, looming in the background.

The starting point of the last two papers in this section is to befound in religious thought and texts. Iain Bailey again focuses onthe problem of intertextuality, in particular the presence of bibli-cal elements in Beckett. He argues that “[Beckett’s] ‘writing con-structed upon other writings’ allows the biblical to be operativein more nuanced ways, to engage with the more searching ques-tions about presence and materiality”. Mario Faraone employsZen Buddhism as a critical tool to read Beckett’s noluntas and fail-ure to act, especially in the early dramatic works.

The section on “Beckett and philosophers” reflects not onlyhow greatly Beckett was influenced by philosophers, but also thepresence of Beckett in modern thought and the way in which the‘phenomenon Beckett’ changed the approach of philosophers tothe philosophical canon, bearing in mind the fact that Beckett in-corporates philosophy, transforming it, as Adorno writes, intoresidue and detritus. Carla Locatelli opens the session with a chal-lenging essay in which she formulates the convincing hypothesis,over and above Beckett’s other stylistic developments, of a de-constructive stance present in his poetry throughout his literarycareer. Locatelli envisages a “deconstructive realism”, which de-prives “any textual utterance of cognitive and semantic stability”.

David Tucker shows the influence of the Occasionalistphilosopher Arnold Geulincx not only on Beckett’s novels Mur-phy and The Unnamable, but also as yet another intertextual pres-ence resurfacing throughout the author’s life, echoed in lettersand conversations, and reverberating in later works such as“Rockaby” and Film. In a paper on Beckett’s prose, David Addy-man posits the importance of an approach to works such as Mur-phy, The Unnamable and Watt based on space as a philosophicalconcept, following the basic Aristotelian assumption of place as a“static surface at the limits of the physical body” which “para-doxically [...] initiates a marginalisation of place”. Addyman

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claims that in “Beckett’s work, the provision of place always ex-ists in tension with its withholding”.

Shane Weller’s paper is concerned with Adorno’s critical writ-ings on Beckett and, even more interestingly, with his unwrittenessay on The Unnamable, of which various notes remain as mar-ginalia to his German translation of the work, and which Welleranalyses. Here again we are faced with the use of marginalia in aneffort to establish a deeper understanding of Adorno’s attitude toBeckett’s prose and the relation between his prose and his drama.Weller argues that “Adorno not only fails to establish a clear dis-tinction between Beckett’s novels and his plays [...] but himselfworks against the very distinction that he proposes”, thus stretch-ing the process of indifferentiation between novel and drama, nar-rative and theory, literature and philosophy. Lorenzo Orlandini’spaper deals with Beckett’s treatment of sexuality in his early fic-tion, in particular Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Beckett’searly attitude towards sex is to be compared to his more generalvision of desire as opposed to the happier condition of perfect in-difference, in a sort of “Limbo purged of desire”.

The fifth section, on Beckett’s theatre, comprises papers on thetexts themselves and on individual performances, shedding light ongeneral topics such as the dialectic of fidelity and innovation, anddescribing unusual ways of performing plays that have by now at-tained the status of classics. Many of the papers concerning Beck-ett’s drama, as text and in performance, focus on or have a back-ground concern with the relationship of Beckett with traditionalforms, concepts and structures, and the use that he makes of canon-ical solutions, often not rejecting, but incorporating them, investi-gating their limits. Enoch Brater’s essay, for instance, examines anessential feature of Beckett’s drama, the use of the sitting figure fromthe earliest works about Belacqua to the latest dramaticules, reveal-ing an attitude typical of Beckett’s dialectic with the tradition he in-herits: “celebrating” it “in the very process of transporting it”. Beck-ett studies, interiorises, excavates it, strips it of every detail and car-ries it to its utmost limit. To analyse his topic of the sitting figure indrama, Brater brings into play both his vast knowledge of Europeandrama and his consummate ability to discover surprising connec-tions. He analyses this figure in Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov,

Introduction XV

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Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Caryl Churchill, Albee, Shepardand Pinter, finding its origin for Beckett in Strindberg (Blin’s pro-duction of Ghost Sonata which he saw with Suzanne in 1949), inWalter von der Vogelweide, in the pictures he loved (from Medievaland 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, “OhioImpromptu”, “The Calmative”, “Eh Joe”, Film and other dra-maticules, showing how the stark novelty of Beckett’s solutions is infact a rethinking of the canon and its incorporation.

Chris Ackerley’s study is a fascinating exploration of voluntaryand involuntary memory in Beckett’s work. He identifies the sur-prising persistence – in later years, in different media and with newtechnological solutions – of the Proustian equation postulated byBeckett in his 1931 essay on Proust. Contrasting the monochromerationality of voluntary memory with the rich nuances of the invol-untary, Ackerley identifies the recurrence of themes in Beckett fromthe early essay on Proust to the works of the Seventies and Eighties.Krapp, he writes, works “as a template” for successive plays and nov-els; involuntary memory, shown to be much more fertile than ratio-nal voluntary memory, is however denied the cathartic value it hasin both Proust and Joyce: the experience is shared, but its tran-scendental value is denied, and the failure of the old aesthetic is acornerstone of the creation of Beckett’s aesthetic of failure.

Hugo Bowles contributes a linguistic/pragmatics based analysisof Endgame, an interactional discursive approach through which thestrategies of ordinary, non-literary conversation are generally dis-cussed. After briefly summarizing the most recent approaches of thiskind of research, Bowles concentrates on three storytelling episodesin Endgame, the more or less successful storytelling between Nell andNagg (the Ardennes story, the Lake Como and the Tailor stories) andHamm’s chronicle. He discusses the “cooperative and uncoopera-tive behaviour” of the storytellers, describes the “highly disjointed ef-fect” that results from this, and concludes that Beckett’s skill is “insubverting the mechanisms of ordinary storytelling behaviour to pro-duce stories in which tellability merges into ‘untellability’”.

Patrizia Fusella’s paper focuses on the little-analysed and possi-bly underrated relationship between Beckett’s “Ghost Trio” andBeethoven’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 areshown the interest Beckett had in a traditional form (in this case thechamber music he loved), and the way in which such a form is tak-en, modified and sometimes deconstructed for his own ends. In asituation that reminds us of other Beckettian impasses (I am think-ing especially of the first television play “Eh Joe”), the frustratedwait of the male Figure for a “she” to arrive, commented on by a fe-male Voice, is interrupted by the character listening to music. Fusel-la investigates the possibility of “solace” or “redemption” throughmusic, and shows its essential function, through the symmetricalrepetition of sound and action, in creating the structure of the play.

In the papers on performances, the key concept is the dialec-tic between fidelity and innovation. It is, of course, obvious thatwhen confronted with an author as exacting and precise as isBeckett – in his stage directions and in his requirements of bothdirectors and actors – and who in his plays tends towards the con-dition of music on one hand and the visual arts on the other, abold modification of his requirements, frequent in avant-gardeand fringe performances, risks destroying the object itself.

Stanley E. Gontarski’s paper describes various highly experi-mental productions which were staged in the United States, Cana-da and Brazil, mostly reproducing the Beckettian text as it is, withits own precise rhythms and solutions, immersed in new contexts:installations, environments, “videos, photographs, objects, andperformance pieces”, among which it is inserted, heightening thequality 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 fromthe taming which could be caused by the simple repetition of whathas already been done, and create “a Beckett for the 21st century”.

My own paper, concerned with a more orthodox kind of per-formance, also tackles the question of fidelity and the need to findnew ways of performing something which has already been per-formed to perfection, taking as an exemplary case study the high-ly stimulating production of Finale di partita (Endgame) by CarloCecchi. Rosemary Pountney also dwells on the problem of com-bining fidelity to Beckett with novelty, and due respect for the di-alogic interchange between text and stage directions, concludingthat fidelity is especially important when staging the Minimalist

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plays of the last period. She analyses the problems actors and ac-tresses have had to cope with when acting these plays, and relatesher own experience when performing Not I and “Rockaby”.

Laura Caretti’s paper describes various Italian performances ofHappy Days, from some avant-garde ones such as Remondi and Ca-porossi’s or that of the Teatro Studio in Scandicci, to Strehler’s stag-ing for the Piccolo Teatro, which also entailed some modification ofBeckett’s original intentions. We could argue, as Enoch Brater didat a lecture in Rome in April 2009, that evaluation must ultimately beleft to the performance itself: the final verdict is whether it works ornot, whether it brings something new to our understanding of Beck-ett’s work. The last paper of the section devoted to performances isAnastasia Deligianni’s. She describes the interesting experiment shemade in Athens when staging Waiting for Godot for an audience ofchildren, thereby investigating a return to virgin response which mayin turn tell us something about our adult perception of the play.

In the last section, Lino Belleggia analyses Film in the light ofBeckett’s interest in experimental cinema, from Buñuel’s Un chienandalou to Eisenstein, whose theoretical writings greatly influencedhim. Seb Franklin analyses a kind of “post factum influence”, asMcHale puts it, of Beckett’s work on horror cinema, not of coursepostulating any direct inspiration, but finding echoes of his work inthis unlikely medium (talk of science fiction and dystopia has oc-curred elsewhere, in the case of plays and prose like The Lost Ones orAll Strange Away).

The Appendix gives information about performances and ex-hibitions held during the Conference. Ninny Aiuto, a young writer,presented his translation of Waiting for Godot into Sicilian, actingsome excerpts from it; a brief analysis of his work is given here. An-tonio Borriello, whose performances are illustrated in some of thepictures included in this volume, writes about his ideas on stagingBeckett. Bill Prosser gives us information about his work on Beck-ettian doodles, mostly from the manuscript of Human Wishes. Theopening pages of the Appendix are devoted to the transcript of theperformance-talk given by Giulia Lazzarini, the great actress whointerpreted Strehler’s Happy Days, and though written words can-not capture the deeply moving impact of her talk, they give us somehint of the astounding performance of this superb Italian Winnie.

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The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett

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NOTESThe sections “Beckett and Italy”, “Self-Translation, and the Genesisof Beckett’s Writing”, “The Anxiety of Influence” and “Beckett andPhilosophers” were edited by Rossana M. Sebellin.The sections “Beckett’s Theatre: Text and Performances”, “Beckettand Cinema” and the “Appendix” were edited by Daniela Guarda -magna.Both editors are responsible for the planning and revision of the en-tire volume.

Throughout the text, for Beckett’s works the editors have followed theconvention established among others by Ackerley and Gontarski (TheGrove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2004), requiring italics for textspublished individually and inverted commas for texts which first ap-peared in collections, journals and so on.

Occasionally the following abbreviations have been employed:

RUL Reading University LibraryUoR University of ReadingHRHRC The Harry Ransom Humanities Research CenterTCD Trinity College DublinMS manuscript


Beckett and Italy


Beckett and Italian Literature (after Dante)

John Pilling

a human voice there within aninch or two my dream perhapseven a human mind if I have tolearn Italian obviously it will beless amusing

(Samuel Beckett, How It Is)

“[L]ess amusing” for the ‘narrator/narrated’ of How It Is “obvi-ously”: but perhaps only if you “have to”, in which respect it maywell resemble anything any of us have to do. But the speaker hereis putting a putative case based on his “dream” of “a human voice[...] perhaps even a human mind”, as if the learning of Italian werenaturally part and parcel of any “human”, and more specifically‘Humanist’, project. An equation of a kind looks as if it mightyield something that could be usefully put beside ‘Beckett andFrench Literature’ or ‘Beckett and German Literature’. But muchof the potential utility value is clearly bound up with ‘Beckett andDante’, a subject area which has at last received the treatment itdeserves by Daniela Caselli, and no-one has yet seen fit to takematters very much further along the line I wish to trace, which willobviously be more, or less, amusing as I trace it.

Where to start? Not, I think, nel mezzo del cammin (with HowIt 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 begin-ning, some 85 years ago. It was in the autumn of 1924 that Beck-ett first studied Italian, and Italian Literature, at – but also out-side (with ‘the Ottolenghi’) – Trinity College Dublin. It was notwith Dante that he started, Dante being too difficult, but with


something more various and less demanding: the Prose scelte ofD’Annunzio; some poems of Giosuè Carducci; the poetry ofAlessandro Manzoni; a little Boccaccio; some Tasso (the openingCantos of the Gerusalemme), and some Dialogues from Leopar-di’s Operette morali. A good spread, but nothing to leave a mark,even with Leopardi the most likely to do so. Or rather, nothingpositive. A year or so later, in the autumn of 1926, Dante havingintervened, Beckett took more specific stock, notably of Carduc-ci who, he had decided, was not a poet, though an excellent uni-versity professor. Beckett had formed this judgment by way ofreading Carducci on Tasso and Poliziano, and also by way of read-ing Benedetto Croce, another excellent university professor, onCarducci. What Beckett really objected to in Carducci was whathe saw as a desperate and effortful self-consciousness so very dif-ferent from his own. Carducci he was moved to compare to an ele-phant jumping ponderously through a hoop. Confronted with afamous figure he found not just a bad poet but an excessively badone, Beckett already knew that Dante was a very great one (seeTCD MS 10695 fol. 31) and may already have discovered thatLeopardi also was, or could be in selected Canti; Beckett couldhardly perhaps be expected to tolerate elephants jumping throughhoops.

A larger figure then than now, Carducci remained for a while auseful point of reference, a model of how not to proceed. In theshort story “Dante and the Lobster”, probably written in 1930, thecharacter Belacqua, Beckett’s alter ego, decides that “the nine-teenth century in Italy was full of old hens trying to cluck like Pin-dar” and instances Silvio Pellico, Manzoni, and, somehow in-evitably, Carducci. So much for the nineteenth century, then,Beckett having chosen to forget that Leopardi died in 1832! Butyounger hens fared no better: in a letter to MacGreevy of 7 [Au-gust] 1930 Beckett objected to the “dirty juicy squelchy mind” ofGabriele D’Annunzio, “bleeding and bursting, like his celebratedpomegranates”, “celebrated” (in the sense of ‘famous’, but notabout to be celebrated) by Beckett largely on the basis of one ofD’Annunzio’s ‘Romances of the Pomegranate’, the novel Il Fuoco.Some very old hens could also be dispensed with as his own cre-ative work gathered momentum: in a letter probably written in lateAugust 1931 Beckett told MacGreevy “I can’t write like Boccaccio

6 Beckett and Italy


and I don’t want to write like Boccaccio”. (Beckett had studiedBoccaccio very closely, as the student textbook surviving in his per-sonal library after his death indicates.)

But 1931 takes us too far: back to the autumn of 1926. It was inthat autumn that Beckett sat the Moderatorship examinations inModern Literature, from which he was to emerge First in the FirstClass, with the highest accumulated percentages of all the candi-dates. 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 Furiosoof Ariosto, perhaps also some Gozzi, some Castiglione, and someGoldoni – some twelve years later the figure behind “Cooper ex-perienced none of the famous difficulty in serving two masters” asfound in chapter 10 of Murphy. Beckett had supplemented his pre-scribed reading of Henri Hauvette’s La littérature italienne – it maystrike us now as a little odd that the TCD syllabus required its stu-dents to read a Frenchman rather than an Italian! – with FrancescoDe Sanctis’s great Storia della letteratura italiana. De Sanctis at leastleft something of a mark (Beckett quotes him in his own Proust es-say of 1930), probably because although the Storia is a nineteenthcentury work, first published in 1871, Beckett found there no traceof hens trying to cluck like Pindar, since there was almost no nine-teenth century literature in it! It also seems highly probable thatBeckett had been reading books not on the TCD syllabus, notablythe two volumes on Italian Literature by John Addington Symondswhich form part of his seven volume The Renaissance in Italy. Nodanger of hens there, or indeed elephants: just a further opportu-nity to sample, savour, digest, or spit out. Symonds possessed theinestimable advantage (for the young Beckett) that he knew whathe was talking about, was in no way in awe of reputations, andcould write on most aspects of a given subject with flair and acu-men. It was by way of Symonds that Beckett was introduced, or in-troduced himself, to Poliziano and Sannazaro, neither of them ap-parently (and predictably enough) much to his taste, and also toTasso’s L’Aminta and Guarini’s Il pastor fido, neither of them verymuch of a threat to Dante either, although I suspect Beckett foundmore in both of these writers than we might expect. (In the early1930s Beckett had more time for Pastoral, and for that matter forthe Fairy Tale, than seems consistent with our received idea of him,

J. Pilling. Beckett and Italian Literature (after Dante) 7


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] JacobBurckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilisa-tion of the Renaissance) – he would later make good. Beckett’sTCD notes from Symonds [MS 10962] stop, we cannot help butnotice, just before he would have read about Burlesque and Satirein chapter 15 of the second volume of Italian Literature; presum-ably other notes from later in Symonds were taken, and subse-quently 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 1824Andreola edition in the Biblioteca Classica Italiana series. Thesebooks he annotated rather sparsely, but with some telling mark-ings (as very helpfully listed by Jean-Pierre Ferrini in an essay inSamuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui XVII) and he kept them un-til, very late in life, he gave them to Avigdor and Anne Arikha.There is, however, no evidence that Petrarch, arguably the onlyfigure of anything like Dante’s stature that Beckett had yet en-countered, made very much of an impact on him at this time, eventhough he was to continue to browse the Rime over the next fiftyyears. In this connection, it is surely very significant that, whenBeckett was reviewing Ezra Pound’s Make It New in 1934 (see“Ex Cathezra”, in Cohn 1983, pp. 77-79), Petrarch comes out lesswell than Guido Cavalcanti. But no doubt the contest, if everthere was one, between Petrarch and Dante was more or less set-tled in favour of the latter as Beckett read further: beyond the Vi-ta Nuova and the Commedia, into the Convivio (or Convito), andat least two of Dante’s Latin works, the De Monarchia and the Devulgari eloquentia. These last two works figure so prominently inthe concluding paragraphs of Beckett’s 1929 essay “Dante . . .Bruno . Vico . . Joyce” that it is easy to forget that the section ofthe essay devoted to Dante offers only one quotation taken di-rectly from the Commedia, otherwise almost exclusively concern-ing itself with the contexts which might be applied to it. Whichquotation? Why, nel mezzo del cammin, of course! (It is no lessstriking that Beckett’s 1934 review of Giovanni Papini’s Dante Vi-vo quotes “morale negotium” from Dante’s Latin epistle to Can-

8 Beckett and Italy


grande, but contains no quotations in Italian at all: see “Papini’sDante”, in Cohn 1983, pp. 80-81).

As the eye-catching title of Beckett’s 1929 essay indicatesobliquely (and, in the event, somewhat misleadingly), he was tryingto move on from Dante, into regions richer and stranger than thosehe had yet encountered in Hauvette, Symonds and De Sanctis. Butthere were difficulties. As Beckett was later to admit, he had little,if any, direct knowledge of the actual texts of Giordano Bruno, andhe had in any case largely confined himself (as Massimo Verdicchiovery shrewdly pointed out many years ago – in 1989) to Book 2 ofVico’s La Scienza Nuova. In reading Vico, as Verdicchio also con-clusively shows, Beckett had played fast and loose with what thegreat linguistician had actually written, much as had also been thecase with Dante’s Convito. But at least Vico had interested Beckettsufficiently for him to claim, in requesting a Reader’s Ticket for theBritish Museum, that he wished to study works of Vico less readilyavailable than The New Science – he does not specify which, thoughpresumably the Autobiography was one – and, in addition to Vico,Vittorio Alfieri. Alfieri is another figure one would hardly expect toloom large in Beckett Studies, although of course it helps in thisconnection to have actually read Alfieri’s Memoirs, to see that Al-fieri’s melancholy disposition, his learning and his pessimism,would greatly have appealed. In 1933, indeed, Alfieri must havelooked a potentially useful third string to the dark side of Dante andthe very dark tones of Leopardi, although unfortunately the onlytrace of Alfieri in Beckett’s work (outside his correspondence withThomas MacGreevy) is in the unpublished short story “Echo’sBones” of late 1933. There the Italian’s disinclination to dance is,as it were, countered by putting him in tandem with the Confessionsof Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Beckett cannot have been unaware thatAlfieri was a great mind, perhaps only surpassed in learning andscholarship by Leopardi, both of them key figures in the Risorgi-mento, although what either of them might have contributed to theRisorgimento no doubt mattered much less to Beckett (as is clearfrom a 1958 letter to his close friend A. J. Leventhal on the subjectof Leopardi; HRHRC) than their demonstrations of what could bedone in the face of a profound pessimism.

After 1933 Italian Literature took a poor second, or rather apoor third, place behind French and (increasingly) German. A



poor fourth, if you count in a renewed commitment to EnglishLiterature (see my essay in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’huiXVI). It was in Germany, not Italy, that Beckett spent the sixmonths from October 1936 to March 1937. He had only visitedItaly once, in the late spring and summer of 1927, and he was on-ly to return for brief holidays in the 1960s and 1970s. He had on-ly ever attempted to translate Dante privately (in the notebookthat he kept towards the writing of his first, subsequently jetti-soned, novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women), even though insummer 1930 he had published three translations from the Italianin the special issue of the Parisian émigré magazine This Quarterat the invitation of the special Italian issue edited by Samuel Put-nam. These translations have been variously discussed by LauraVisconti (1997), Marco Sonzogni (2006) and Norma Bouchard(2008), but, of the three authors translated, two – GiovanniComisso and Raffaello Franchi – are no longer names to conjurewith, and are unlikely to excite more than a passing interest. EvenEugenio Montale (of whose poem “Delta” Beckett makes some-thing of a mess, as I hope to demonstrate elsewhere) does notseem to have survived the exercise all that well. Indeed, it comesas no real surprise to find that, in writing to Putnam (14 May1930), Beckett leaves his editor in little doubt that he has foundthe commission something of an onerous task. Perhaps the textswhich Putnam had sent left Beckett reluctant to commit, in sopublic a fashion, to translating from Italian again.

But Italian impulses were not quite dead; it was not, to quotefrom Leopardi’s “A se stesso”, quite a matter of “Posa per sem-pre”. Some three years on from Alfieri, with German Literaturehaving intervened, the early months of 1936 represent somethingof a Renaissance. It was then that Beckett read a selection of Ear-ly Lives of Dante, re-read some Tasso (“with boredom”) and someGuarini, and Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine, which (he told Mac-Greevy) he had enjoyed immensely. This was also when he read,or at least read most of, Machiavelli’s play La Mandragola – he hadseen one of the infrequent productions of it in Paris in 1929 – andhe told MacGreevy that he intended to proceed further, to theplay Clizia and beyond: to Folengo, to Berni, to La Calandria, andeven to what he called “the theatre of Bruno”, by which he mustprincipally have meant, presumably, Il Candelaio. Whether he

10 Beckett and Italy


ever proceeded so far seems, on the face of it, unlikely. But LaMandragola (or at least its preface) left something of a permanentmark. In 1936 Beckett wrote out this preface, which is frequentlyomitted from English translations of the play. It reads:

Scusatelo con questo, che s’ingegnaCon questi van pensieriFare el suo tristo tempo più suavePerch’altrove non haveDove voltare el viso:Ché gli è stato intercisoMonstrar con altre imprese altra virtueNon sendo premio alle fatiche sue.

A translation (my thanks to Daniela Caselli for her help withthis, many years ago):

Excuse him this, sinceWith these vain thoughtsHe is trying to make more pleasant his sad time,Given that he has nowhere elseTo turn his face:It having been forbidden to himTo show by other deeds another virtue,There being no prize for all his efforts.

Symonds (Italian Literature vol. II, p. 148) remarks: “Theseverses, indifferent as poetry, are poignant for their revelation of adisappointed life”, and whatever Beckett thought of them as poet-ry, he obviously found them “poignant”. In early 1936, with thenovel Murphy proving difficult to finish (and, in the event, very dif-ficult to sell to publishers), it was to Italian that Beckett had turnedto express his extreme disappointment that, thus far, there hadbeen “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 canknow nothing of. It is manifestly not what you put down in a note-book in the hope of passing an examination. So: Italian, as we mightsay, “less amusing”, but more moving, more a matter of passion andfeeling than of thinking (one reason, but not the only reason, for



leaving “Beckett and Pirandello” in an appendix). It certainly dwarfsthe so-called “profound risolino” (Ariosto by way of Francesco DeSanctis) in Beckett’s Jack Yeats review in the summer of 1936,Beckett’s bizarre attempt to ‘translate’ Ariosto into German stagedialogue in a RUL notebook, and almost everything thereafter, orat least after the war. Perhaps by then Italy, if not Italians, hadcrossed a line. Apart from re-reading (and, as Daniela Caselli hasshown, re-thinking) Dante on the road to Mercier et Camier andagain on the way to Comment c’est (How It Is), and apart from re-inforcing 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 oneof Beckett’s appointment books, his diary for 1967. The quotationis from the lead poem (“Taci, anima stanca di godere...”) in the1914 collection Pianissimo by Camillo Sbarbaro:

Perduta ha la sua vocela sirena del mondo, e il mondo è un grandedeserto.Nel desertoio guardo con asciutti occhi me stesso.

(The siren of the worldhas lost its voice, and the world is a hugedesert.In the desertI look at myself with dry eyes.)

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



Beckett was in fact never in any real danger of finding mirror-im-ages of himself in what had once (in the 1920s) been his third lan-guage, but which became, as time passed and German took over,something of an also-ran. There is a telling record of this in a letterof 17 February 1955 to Pamela Mitchell. On leaving Paris for NewYork Pamela Mitchell had given Beckett a going-away present of aZingarelli dictionary, and Beckett was writing to thank her, and toreflect ruefully that “[I] seem to have forgotten more Italian than Ithought”. Six months later, in August 1955, their affair over, he toldher that he was “recovering” his Italian by way of reading the week-ly illustrated magazine Oggi, and no doubt her present helped. Zin-garelli’s Vocabolario, published in Bologna in 1954, was still inBeckett’s personal library at the time of his death in 1989.

There were only a handful of books in Italian left in Beckett’s li-brary at the end: a Decameron; a Concordance to the Divine Come-dy; Tasso’s Gerusalemme from May 1925; Machiavelli’s Istoriefiorentine (History of Florence); Leopardi’s Canti and a selectionfrom his prose, and two comedies of Giuseppe Giacosa (nowadaysperhaps best known for his opera librettos) – many of these notmuch more than left-overs from his Senior Freshman syllabus atTCD. (There were also two volumes of Aretino, the Lettere and theRagionamenti, but in the French of Apollinaire. Beckett had firstread Aretino in the British Museum in 1932, as the poem “Sanies II”indicates.) Classics all, or almost all, but not many; and confirmationin a way of what Beckett had told his friend A. J. Leventhal in a let-ter of 21 April 1958: “Can’t conceive”, he told him, “by what stretchof ingenuity my work could be placed under [the] sign of It-al-i-an-i-tà”. At which point, however, Beckett immediately stretched him-self to quote, apparently from memory, three lines from the Purga-torio, 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 andBeckett was the latent French pun on ‘immonde’, rather than any-thing intrinsic to the Italian. So: if not exactly “less amusing” – thereis a joke of sorts to be found in it – not much more than one mighthave expected to find when one started out, but just enough for it toseem worthwhile to go ‘beyond’ Dante once in a while.



APPENDIX A

Perhaps the most interesting of Beckett’s marginal marks in thesecond volume of his Petrarch – of what only amounts to some half-dozen – occurs alongside part two of the Trionfo della Morte (Tri-umph of Death), where two tercets (lines 34-39) are underlined:

La morte è fin d’una pregione oscuraAll’anime gentili; all’altre è noiaCh’hanno posto nel fango ogni lor cura.Ed ora il morir mio, che sì t’annoiaTi farebbe allegrar se tu sentissiLa millesima parte di mia gioia.

(Death is to noble souls the end of a dark prison sentence; to oth-ers, with all their care in mud, a tedium. And if you felt the smallestpart of my joy now, my death, which you find so dire, would make youlight 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 ownview (as found in a letter of 9 February 1984 to Aldo Tagliaferri)was that he was “not conscious of any Pirandellian influence on mywork”. Anyone wishing (as it seems clear Tagliaferri was) to pur-sue a supposed Pirandellian influence on Beckett must at least takenote of this, if only ultimately to disregard it. But he or she must doso mindful that Pirandello is not to be found amongst the hundredsof names invoked by Beckett in thousands of pages of personalwriting. A more interesting question may be: “Why not?”, espe-cially when TCD possessed in Professor Walter Starkie one of thefirst figures in the English-speaking world with a serious interest inPirandello. Starkie’s book-length study of Pirandello was first pub-lished in 1935, and has often been reprinted, and Starkie had manydisciples in the Trinity of his time. (He taught Ethna MacCarthy,



Beckett’s sometime innamorata, Spanish, and Spanish literature.)But Beckett was the protégé of ‘Ruddy’, Professor Rudmose-Brown, the other ‘big fish’ in the TCD Romance Languages pool,who was well-known to be a rival of, and often hostile to, WalterStarkie. Within a year or so of finishing Dream of Fair to MiddlingWomen Beckett was writing to his friend Thomas MacGreevy re-gretting his portrayal of “Ruddy” as “the Polar Bear”, and he cer-tainly in other ways was not always respectful of his Professor. ButStarkie, we may infer, he never liked well enough to treat badly.

To this admittedly ad hominem argument can be added consid-erations intellectual rather than personal. In 1920s Dublin Piran-dello was known, as indeed he was elsewhere, principally as adramatist, a view which still remains (outside Italy, at any rate) to-day. In the 1920s Beckett’s interest in drama led to a profound ad-miration for Racine, and occasional visits to the Abbey and the Gatetheatres. But theatre did not significantly interest Beckett as an ex-pressive medium until mid-1936 (his brief attempt to ‘do’ Ariostoin German) and his aborted Human Wishes fragment of 1940, bothinteresting excursions, but neither very successful. Pirandello mayhave swum back into view in early 1947 during the writing ofEleutheria, but (as Matthijs Engelberts has shown – Engelberts,Frost and Maxwell 2006) the major influence on that play was theFrench surrealist dramatist Roger Vitrac. If Pirandello had mat-tered more, I think Beckett would have been inhibited in mountinghis own attack on conventional dramaturgy, gingerly in Eleutheria,overwhelmingly in En attendant Godot. This is in no way to promotethe idea that Beckett was “conscious of any Pirandellian influence”,rather the contrary. Indeed, in the Pirandellian connection – or, asI 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 classicItalian writers:

Ariosto: How much of Orlando Furioso Beckett knew remains



unclear. He studied a selection of Cantos for his Moderatorshipexaminations and, as I indicate, had read De Sanctis on the sub-ject. Beckett had also read Benedetto Croce’s Ariosto, Shake-speare e Corneille. His most intimate encounter with Ariosto,however, was in the summer of 1936 as part of his preparation to-wards a trip to Germany, which in the event lasted six months, al-though Beckett had hoped it would last longer. His attempt towrite a play in German using characters, dialogue and situationsadapted from early in Orlando may have been prompted by his re-cent reading of Goethe’s play Torquato Tasso (which Beckett hadnot been greatly impressed by), but the experiment fizzled out af-ter only a few pages, anticipating his failure four years later, in thespring of 1940, with Human Wishes and materials from the life ofDr Johnson.

There are a few negligible points of contact with Godot of1948-1949 in the Ariosto fragment, but nothing of any lasting sig-nificance. Apart from Le Kid (1931), however, most of whichseems to have been written by Georges Pelorson, this curious tor-so could be seen as Beckett’s first effort at writing a play. The keyAriostan notion of the “risolino” found (largely by way of DeSanctis) in the 1936 review of Jack B. Yeats’s novel The Amaran-thers is reprised in the 1952 hommage to Henri Hayden.

Petrarch: Beckett quotes the last line of sonnet 170 on a post-card to Anne Atik of 1959, the same line he had quoted in a let-ter to A. J. Leventhal in 1958. Marginalia from vol. 2 of the 1824Petrarch: 268 – notes the rhymes; 270 – “P left sad but free”; 277– line 3 – “l’alma triste (fear and pain)”; 289 – “Laura as correc-tive to desire (merde)”; 279, penultimate line – “the dry vein inmy old genius (wow!)”. For the Trionfi, see Appendix A aboveand Ferrini’s essay in the Bibliography below.

Manzoni: Il Cinque Maggio, an ode on the death of Napoleonat Saint Helena, is mentioned in the story “Dante and the Lob-ster”, probably first written in 1930 (see the Napoleon material atthe head of the “Dream” notebook), and I Promessi Sposi flickersbriefly into view at the Frica’s party in Dream, and later in “A WetNight” in More Pricks Than Kicks. Reading the first chapter ofKeller’s Der grüne Heinrich prompted Beckett to write: “Themovement reminds me of Manzoni” (as novelist presumably) inhis German Diary for 28 December 1936.



Others:Carducci’s “Satan” is damned as a “pharisee poem” in the

1934 review of Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems (“Humanistic Qui-etism”, in Cohn 1983, pp. 68-69). Beckett links Carducci to Bar-rès in an undated letter to MacGreevy of mid-to-late July 1930.

Fracastoro’s Latin poem Sifilide is mentioned in a letter toMacGreevy 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, ratherthan directly from Guarini (see my edition of the “Dream” note-book [item 331]), even though Beckett did actually re-read Guari -ni nearly ten years after studying him at TCD (letter to Mac-Greevy of 26 July 1936).

The syllabus authors Fogazzaro and Sannazaro seem to havemade no impression on Beckett, assuming he even chose to readthem.

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: Miscella-

neous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, JohnCalder, 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 Dra-matic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London.



Criticism

Alfano, Giancarlo, and Andrea Cortellessa (a cura di), 2006, Tegole dalcielo: la letteratura italiana nell’opera di Beckett, Antalia/Edup, Ro-ma.

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 (TheCivilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, Phaidon Press, Oxford &London 1945, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore).

Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fictionand 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: Cata-logues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at TrinityCollege Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI.

Ferrini, Jean-Pierre, 2006, “Dante, Pétrarque, Leopardi, Beckett: unedivine perspective”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, XVII,2006, pp. 53-66.

Pilling, John, 2006, “‘For Interpolation’: Beckett and English Litera-ture”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, XVI, 2006, pp. 203-237.

Sonzogni, Marco, 2006, “Debiti e doni della tradizione poetica: Mon-tale 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 es-say in The Italianist, 25: 2, 2005, pp. 173-208.

Verdicchio, Massimo, 1989, “Exagmination Round the Factification ofVico and Joyce”, in James Joyce Quarterly, 26:4, 1989, pp. 531-539.

Visconti, Laura, 1997, “The Artist and the Artisan”, in Samuel Beck-ett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Border-lines / L’oeuvre carrefour / L’oeuvre limite), VI, 1997, pp. 387-398.(The Italian original, “L’artista e il traduttore”, in Archetipi becket-tiani, 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. Vin-cent, Oxford University Press, London 1961).




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 (His-tory 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. (Ital-

ian 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 andGabriele D’Annunzio in 1927 while studying Modern Languages(French and Italian) at Trinity College Dublin, possibly in prepa-ration for the moderatorship exam taken in October of the sameyear (TCD MS 10965a, fol. 1; Frost 2006, p. 61)1. Beckett’s fluentItalian tells us that that D’Annunzio’s entire œuvre is marred by astrenuous and continuous attempt to dazzle which ends up beingoverwhelming for the reader, while inclining towards the classicalsense of proportions characterising Carducci’s disciplined poetry.

In this college essay healthy Carducci seems – if somehow be-grudgingly – to have the better over the revoltingly decadentD’Annunzio; Carducci’s victory will be, however, short-lived.Judging from a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett’s vehementaversion towards D’Annunzio persisted after his student years;however, in another letter to the same friend (probably written inthe summer or autumn of 1930) Beckett describes himself as thekind of person interested in Leopardi and Proust rather than inCarducci and Barrès (Frost, 2006, pp. 58 and 167; Knowlson,1996, pp. 117-118 and 721 n. 125)2. In the same notebook con-

1 Samuel Beckett, TCD MS 10965a, fol. 3. According to Everett Frost, Gio-suè Carducci, Antologia carducciana. Poesie e prose, scelte e commentate da Gui-do Mazzoni e Giuseppe Picciola, Zanichelli, Bologna 19247 and Gabriele D’An-nunzio, Prose scelte di Gabriele D’Annunzio, Fratelli Treves, Milano 1919 werelisted on the reading for that year (see Frost 2006, p. 61).

2 Frost also tells us that Hauvette’s Littérature italienne was a required textfor examinations in Italian at Trinity College Dublin and that Beckett’s notes onCarducci derive in part from it (see TCD MS 10965). Leopardi does not appearon the Trinity exam lists during Beckett’s undergraduate years there.


taining the essay, moreover, Beckett comments scathingly on Car-ducci’s assertions of being “tempted” to write another two poemson Assisi and St. Francis, seeing this as the mark of a “verse man-ufacturer” rather than a poet3. Beckett ironises upon this attitudethrough an unlikely simile with Leopardi (who for Beckett couldnever be “tempted” to write poetry) and Shelley, who could hard-ly be imagined rummaging the rag bag of his poetic memory tofind a rhyme for “Euganean” while busy writing about the Lom-bard plain (TCD MS 10965, fol. 30).

A few years later, in the This Quarter version (1932) of “Danteand the Lobster”, Carducci will be finally disposed of as an “in-tolerable old bitch” (“Dante and the Lobster”, 1932, p. 230).

By defining himself through Proust and Leopardi, and even bywriting (as he had to) college essays on Machiavelli and Ariosto(TCD, MS 10962) or Carducci and D’Annunzio, Beckett indicatesan early preoccupation with comparativism (which neverthelessnever became a purely academic interest for him). Most impor-tantly, these essays – together with his college notes and the an-thologies of Italian and French literature figuring on contemporaryreading lists – highlight how comparativism is a practice which hasbeen struggling for almost a century to establish literary parallelswithout collapsing them into mere value judgements. To keep thebalance between analysis and evaluation in comparative readingsis still a challenge today, as can be observed in the critical outputon the relationship between Dante and Beckett4. In Beckett stud-ies, Beckett is often seen as able to generate endlessly complexmeanings in opposition to a Dante still firmly set in his rigid theo-logical scaffolding. This critically condescending attitude towardshistory 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 theobject of investigation, or, to put it in a slightly less theoreticallyhygienic language, the problem for the critic is how to sustain thetension derived from leaving both œuvres potentially open to in-

D. Caselli. The Politics of Reading Dante 21

3 Samuel Beckett, TCD MS 10965, fol. 30.4 Caselli 2005, pp. 1-9.



terpretation and meaning-generating activities without falling in-to a falsely liberating faith in endless multiplicity. The secondchallenge, closely linked to the first one, is how to claim the visi-bility or invisibility of a presence (in our instance, Dante in Beck-ett). 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 attempteddemonstration of the Italians’ presence in Joyce (“Dante . . .Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 29), and in Mercier and Camier’s omi-nous sensing “vague shadowy shapes” everywhere (Mercier andCamier, p. 19). Intertextual elements alternately figure themselvesas frustratingly obvious presences and dispiritingly elusive shades.

I propose to think comparatively about Beckett and Dante byturning the question of Beckett’s retrospective fidelity – or lack of fi-delity – to Dante (or even Dante’s anticipatory fidelity to Beckett)into a political exploration of how authority circulates in the two œu-vres. By reflecting on what is critically at stake in quantifying pres-ence and retrieving authorial intentions we can finally analyse, froma critical distance that needs not prevent us from emotional engage-ment, how authority is produced and circulated in Beckett. I intendto revisit here some points made in my longer study of Dante’s pres-ence in Beckett (Caselli 2005, pp. 1-10) and to underline the core po-litical 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. tothe pseudo-couple Dante and Virgil, indicated in the manuscriptas D. and V. Section eight, in particular, establishes a most puz-zling parallel between Dante and the unnamed future novel, usu-ally identified as Murphy:

Choose “layers” carefully, on some such principle as that of V.’sdistribution of sins and punishments. But keep whole Dantesque anal-ogy out of sight. [three lines erased]5

5 I correct here my previous reading of the manuscript (Caselli 2005, p. 82) inthe light of Matthew Feldman’s recent reinterpretation (Feldman 2006, p. 64).


What does it mean to read a text that simultaneously incites usto see and not to see Dante? And what does it mean to engage witha text that provokes us through prohibition to look for Dante inanother book (a Murphy which is not yet Murphy) to which thesenotes gesture? The Whoroscope notebook provides answers inso-far as it indicates that the role of Dante in Beckett is always sus-pended between being a “vague shadowy shape” and “beingthere”, as we can observe in Mercier et / and Camier and “Le cal-mant” / “The Calmative”.

Written in French in 1946, Mercier et Camier was publishedonly in 1970, while the self-translated Mercier and Camier ap-peared in print in 1974. The opening sentence of the novel, inwhich the narrator claims that he “was with them all the time”,sets up a third party which allows the couple to exist as such; asT.S. Eliot would put it in The Waste Land, in this novel there isalways “another one walking beside you / Gliding wrapt in abrown mantle, hooded” (Eliot 1922 [2002, p. 25]). Mercier andCamier are constantly under the “strange impression” that they“are not alone” but that there is something “like the presence ofa third party [...] enveloping us”, and, as Mercier puts it, he is“anything but psychic” (Mercier and Camier, p. 100). Among thevarious strange impressions which increasingly bother the pro-tagonists are: the unnamed “gentleman wearing [...] a simplefrock-coat and top-hat” (p. 25); the “old man of weird andwretched aspect, carrying under his arm what looked like a boardfolded in two” (pp. 75-76); and the “ragged shaggy old man plod-ding along beside a donkey” (p. 77). The last two are imagesshared with the story “The End” / “La fin” (“The End”, p. 67 and58; “La fin”, pp. 112-113 and 97). Moreover, Mercier’s memoryof having seen the old man somewhere before is followed by thatof the old man himself, who “busied himself for a space with try-ing to recall in what circumstances” he had seen Mercier before(Mercier and Camier, p. 76), thus shaping a textual memory whichprevents the Beckett texts from being placed in a relation of lin-ear temporal progression. These occurrences shape a web of in-tra- and intertextual relations that constitute the Beckett œuvre asstrangely familiar. Dante is part of this negotiation of authorityand control through intra- and intertextual references, as the fol-lowing passages illustrate:



Oui, dit Camier [...]. Tu n’ignores pas cependant ce que nousavons arrêté à ce sujet: pas de récits de rêve, sous aucun prétexte. Uneconvention 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 Mer-

cier, et me brûlent les lèvres.Tu me dégoûtes, Mercier, dit Camier. Nous prenons certaines pré-

cautions afin d’être le mieux possible, le moins mal possible, et c’estexactement 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 com-munication of dreams on any account. The same holds for quotes. Nodreams or quotes at any price. He got up. Do you feel strong enoughto move? he said.

(Mercier and Camier, pp. 61-62)

The quotation in the French comes from Inferno I, 87, whenDante recognises Virgil:

“Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonteche 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 amoreche m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore,tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsilo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore.(Inferno, I, 79-87; emphasis mine)

(“Are you, then, that Virgil, that fount which pours forth so broada 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



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

Mercier and Camier are reported as discussing the “conven-tion” and the “covenant” which rules in their relationship andwhich forbids quotations and “the communication of dreams”.But in the French text, while expressing this unmotivated con-vention, they wonder about the ‘nature’ of a quotation. Can theline in Mercier’s head, which describes Dante recognising Virgilas his auctoritas, be defined as a quotation? Can this internalbuzzing, connected to the words burning Mercier’s lips, be seenas something external?

The interrogatives on the limit of what is internal and what ex-ternal to the text revolve around these lines from the Comedy. Vir-gil’s role as an auctoritas within Dante’s text fashions Dante as anauctoritas in Beckett’s text. The line refers to Dante’s “beautiful”or “fair” style, which has “honoured” him. In Inferno I, Dantecharacterises his own “beautiful style” as coming from Virgil, the“source”. The style described as “beautiful” is Dante’s style beforebecoming the author of the comedìa, his “sacrato poema” (sacredpoem). Seen from the perspective of the finished text, Dante’s at-tribution of authority to Virgil also works to distance his “poemasacro” from Virgil’s tragedy7. In Paradiso XXX, Dante “makes itclear that the usual distinctions between comedìa and tragedìa areirrelevant” (Barolini 1984, p. 272) in the following lines:

Da questo passo vinto mi concedopiù che già mai da punto di suo temasoprato fosse comico o tragedo(Paradiso, XXX, 22-24)

(“At this pass I concede myself defeated more than ever comic ortragic poet was defeated by a point in his theme.”)


6 All translations used here are by Singleton 1973, 3 vols.7 I refer to Virgil’s epic poem as “tragedy” following the Comedy, which jux-

taposes “alta tragedìa” to “bassa comedìa” (Inferno XX and XVI). For a dis-cussion of how Dante connects “alta tragedìa” with “menzogna” (“lie”), seeBarolini 1992, pp. 59, 76, 79 and note 17, p. 293.


This passage, the first line of which is (mis)quoted in Dream ofFair to Middling Women, also appears in the Dream notebook (RULMS 5000). The evocation of the distinctions between “comico” and“tragedo” underscores Dante’s belief that while other poets (eitherwriting in the comic or in the tragic genre) could not attempt sucha description, he could go beyond genres: “the paradox of themethod [...] corresponds to the paradox of the genre that surpass-es and eliminates genre: the comedìa that is higher than the highesttragedìa” (Barolini 1984, pp. 272-273). Further, the category ofbeautiful is associated with mortality, and opposed to truth, ofwhich the poet is the scribe, and therefore the ultimate guarantor.In this sense, the highest recognition of Virgil’s authority and theclearest inscription of his auctoritas in the text is also the basis ofDante’s own authority. Dante’s admission that his beautiful style,which “has done him honour”, comes from Virgil, is also a ma-noeuvre that distances it from the “true” style of the Comedy, whichwill 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 “con-vention” of not using quotations by quoting Dante in the original.While forbidding the presence of authorities, the text not only in-scribes the presence of Dante, but also that of Virgil and of that “MrBeckett”, which is encountered in Dream of Fair to MiddlingWomen with his “bay about [his] brow”. By reproducing a passagewhere Dante seems to deny his own originality in favour of his auc-toritas – but which in fact is the prelude to the birth of Dante thescribe of God, the true poet – the text constructs a very visible au-thority while denying it the status of quotation. The context createsthe maximum visibility for a quotation, given in the Italian, and bythe discussion of its status as quotation. At the same time, the char-acters deny the authority of the quotation: Camier’s remark “lo bel-lo quoi?” works as an ironic denial of Dante’s beautiful style, andMercier’s uncertainty regarding the source of “des mots qui [lui]bruissent dans la tête” works as a denial of originality while alsoquestioning the opposition between a within and without the text(made even more unstable by the lack of the Dante quotation in theEnglish text). Dante’s line is described as something that bothbuzzes in the head and burns the lips. If the first description is a de-nial of originality, it is also a further confirmation of that originali-



ty. The buzzing of the words in the head seems to indicate the per-vasive and unavoidable character of these words; like the “mur-murs” that can be heard better in the dark, these buzzing words arepart of the character’s “skullscape”. To utter them is painful: thelips get scalded. The memory of the source has been lost, the auc-tor has become part of the words within the head; however, hiswords still “stink” of quotation.

The English text has none of the Dante material in it, andreads: “No dreams or quotes at any price” (Mercier and Camier,p. 62). This sentence works as a commentary on a passage that hasbeen omitted, therefore alluding to how the relationship betweenthe two texts is under the author’s control. Camier’s words com-ment on the absence of Dante while reinforcing the presence ofthe author, who at once institutes and disobeys a prohibition. Theprohibition is phrased in terms of “price”, which can be read as afurther allusion to the notion of the alleged added value that thepresence of an auctoritas gives to the text. Dante in the Englishtext is, thus, present under erasure.

The Dantean allusions scattered in Mercier et / and Camier il-luminate a barely visible substrate, partially effaced by a secondwriting. However, the first layer, which seems to add value to thejourney of the two characters, is, in turn, shown to be dependentupon a further authority, a further layer. The text creates its ownpotentially endless genealogy: Dante has “taken away” his “fairstyle” from Virgil, Beckett from Dante, and so on. Rather thanlending itself to a Bloomian reading, this endless genealogy ex-poses, however, the price of quoting, foregrounds the act oftelling the story, and undermines the notion of originality.

The text sabotages strong misreadings, painstakingly argues thatit is impossible to simply report events, and regards as impossiblethe existence of an upper layer, of a beautiful lie that simply acts assurface. Mercier et / and Camier constantly fabricates ideas of depth,strata of authority constructed by other authorities, strange im-pressions of déjà-vu, also by having Dante migrating from one textto the other. Sometimes allusions to Dante are repeated in Beckett’sself-translated version; alternatively, the quotations from Dante areerased and this erasure is commented upon; other times still, someallusions are replaced with different ones, always from the Comedy.These shifts contribute intratextually to the construction of the au-



thor Samuel Beckett and make each of the two versions part of aprocess 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 dis-tinctions between narrator and characters are gradually collapsedby the interplay of invention and memory, which questions theconceptual possibility of opposing memory as repetition to inven-tion as originality. Dante is part of this oscillation between memo-ry and invention, invisible presence and visible absence. Dante is afragment of the unavoidable intratextual memory, which cannotbe reduced to simple and reassuringly self-identical repetition.

In “Le calmant” / “The Calmative” another kind of Danteanspeechlessness from the one seen in Mercier et / and Camier is al-luded to as a comforting memory, connected with the oscillationbetween 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 openedmy mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind ofrattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended. But itwas nothing, mere speechlessness due to long silence, as in the woodthat 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’allaisl’entendre, mais je n’entendis qu’une sorte de râle, inintelligible mêmepour moi qui connaissais mes intentions. Mais ce n’était rien, rien quel’aphonie due au long silence, comme dans le bosquet où s’ouvrent lesenfers, vous rappelez-vous, moi tout juste.

(“Le calmant”, p. 53)

This passage leads us back to Inferno, I, 61-63, in which Danteencounters Virgil for the first time:


8 See also Ferrini 2003, pp. 201-212; Ferrini’s reading is indebted to KellyAnspaugh’s view of “The Calmative” as a subversion of the Comedy (Anspaugh1996, pp. 30-41).


Mentre ch’i’ rovinava in basso loco,dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu offertochi per lungo silenzio parea fioco.

(“While I was ruining down to the depth there appeared before meone 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” inits acoustic sense9. By rendering it as “hoarse”, the ambivalent di-mension of “fioco” as both an acoustic and a visual adjective islost, and the passage indicates Virgil’s difficulties in speaking af-ter a long silence. In the critical tradition of the Comedy, “che perlungo silenzio parea fioco” is usually interpreted as an “acousticmetaphor”, as a translation of “a phonic emotion into a visualone” to indicate a blurred image, surfacing from the surroundingdarkness as if from a long absence10. The ghost-like appearanceof Virgil is translated into the image of the threshold betweenspeechlessness and voice. In “Le calmant” / “The Calmative” theallusion to the Dantean episode seems to work as the soothingpromise of repetition. The Comedy is a memory, shared by the Iand the you, able to neutralise the threat of speechlessness and es-trangement through the image of a dialogue marking the begin-ning of a story. The text foregrounds its own allusiveness throughthe narratee, a you to whom the question of memory is posed. Theremarks “do you remember, I only just”, “vous rappelez-vous,moi tout juste” blur the limit between narrator and author and be-tween narratee and reader; the English version re-creates the am-


9 A number of English translations of the Comedy render “fioco” by“hoarse”. However, this is not the case with Cary’s translation, owned by Beck-ett, which reads: “I fell, my ken discern’d the form of one / Whose voice seem’dfaint through long disuse of speech” (Cary 1869, p. 16). The phrase “per lungosilenzio 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; Pasqui-ni and Quaglio 1987.



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 theyou has an effect similar to that described in relation to Mercier et/ and Camier: it “overstep[s ...] a boundary that is precisely thenarrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontierbetween two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world ofwhich one tells” (Genette 1980, p. 236; author’s emphasis).

In the allusion the Comedy is an external, calmative text, able toconvince the ‘you’ that this silence is nothing to worry about. Thismemory is “only just” remembered, and therefore cannot be a per-fect repetition; it has lost its power of re-integrating the estrangedself. The allusion is consistent with the whole text, which is a storythat the ‘I’ tells to calm himself, to fight the estrangement felt “lis-ten[ing] to [him]self rot” (“The Calmative”, p. 27). This estrange-ment reappears in the “rattle”, which makes the subject face his ownunintelligibility. The crumbling of the “marshalled words” seems toindicate the crumbling of the subject as the product of his intentions(“even to me who knew what was intended”). The allusion works asa temporary reassurance that the discrepancy indicated by speech-lessness is “nothing”, nothing to worry about, “mere speechless-ness”, “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 ex-perience of integration for the subject: “The words were hardly outof my mouth when for shame I covered my face” (“The Calmative”,p. 34), “Cette phrase à peine prononcée, de honte je me couvris levisage” (“Le calmant”, p. 54). Even when the words do come outaccording to the intentions of the speaker, who cannot recognisehimself in them, estrangement is experienced. This is indicated al-so by the different uses of “mouth” in the English text, in which thespeechlessness of the mouth of hell is echoed in the ingestion of thesweet, in the shame caused by the words out of the I’s mouth, andin the pity he feels towards the “little unfortunate at the mouth oflife”11. The “mouth” of hell cannot guarantee the reassuring expe-

11 “I took it eagerly and put it in my mouth, the old gesture came back tome” (Mercier and Camier, p. 33). In the French the word “bouche” is not re-peated: “les enfers” “s’ouvrent”, the “bonbon” is put “dans [ma] bouche”, the


rience of the repetition of a beginning; the words uttered from themouth of the I increase, rather than soothe, his estrangement.

In this passage we can see how Dante is evoked as a calmingmemory, as repetition, predictability and progression, as commonground shared by narrator and narratee. However, the repetitioncannot be the simple reproduction of the identical: the memory isfading, and the calming power of the “mouth of hell” is contrast-ed with the estrangement of the mouth of life.

Dante’s shadowy presence can also barely be detected in thereference to the I’s shadow:

My shadow, one of my shadows, flew before me, dwindled, slid un-der my feet, trailed behind me the way shadows will. This degree ofopacity appeared to me conclusive.

(“The Calmative”, p. 39)

Mon ombre, une de mes ombres, s’élançait devant moi, se rac-courcissait, glissait sous mes pieds, prenait ma suite, à la manière desombres. Que je fusse à ce degré opaque me semblait concluant.

(“Le calmant”, p. 63)

Although neither of the versions specifies what the conclu-sions of this “conclusive” phenomenon are, the French versionrefers more clearly to the Purgatorial motif of the purging shad-ows, inferring that Dante is alive because he casts a shadow. Thereare many examples from the Purgatorio in which the shadow is aproof of Dante being alive, thus different from the purging shad-ows. In Mercier et Camier we also encounter a “sorte d’ombre deSordel, mais sans y croire, enfin sans y croire assez pour pouvoirse jeter dans ses bras” (Mercier et Camier, p. 184). In The Un-namable the ‘I’ says: “I wondered if [I] cast a shadow” (The Un-namable, p. 268), and “For sometimes I confuse myself with myshadow and sometimes don’t” (p. 312), and again “my shadow atevening will not darken the ground” (p. 317). In Dream theSmeraldina-Rima is described through a simile with Sordello, de-scribed 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 referencesto Dante’s Bocca degli Abati in Inferno XXXII, see Elam 1997, pp. 165-179.


“no shade, herself shade” (Dream, p. 23). Purgatorio, III, 88-93and Purgatorio, V, 1-9 can be helpful examples to show the rele-vance of Dante’s “opacity” in the canticle:

Come color dinanzi vider rottala 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 atmy right side, so that my shadow was from me to the cliff, they haltedand drew back somewhat; and all the other that came after did thesame, 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 lucalo 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 maravigliapur me, pur me, e ’l lume ch’era rotto.

(“I had now parted from those shades and was following in thesteps 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 heseems to bear himself like one who is alive!’

I turned my eyes at the sound of these words, and saw them gazingin astonishment at me alone, and the light that was broken.”)

Furthermore, in the first of the “Three Dante postcards” lines19-21, 26, and 37 of Purgatorio III are reproduced, preceded bythe statement: “Dante’s shadow, Virgil transparent. Seeing onlyone on ground D thinks V gone” (RUL MS 4123).

Dante’s faint voice, ruined from long silence, his barely audiblespeechlessness which is also a scarcely visible, ghostly presence inthe Beckett œuvre can alert us to the political uses of this model ofreading intertextually. I hope that these examples have shown how



this residual Dante, important because and not in spite of his mar-ginality, 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-riddenculture’, in which nothing is immune from the grip of commodityaesthetics, the critically minimal – always in danger of becomingjust another style option, a term for interior designers – must belaboured for again and again” (Cunningham 2005, p. 116).

BIBLIOGRAPHY


“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 deMinuit, Paris, pp. 77-123.

“The End”, 1954, in Stories and Texts for Nothing, 1967, Grove Wei-denfeld, 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; Ma-

lone Dies; The Unnamable, 1959, Pan Books, London 1979, 265-382.

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. 27-46.

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 Dra-

matic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.



Works by Dante Alighieri

Alighieri, Dante, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, a cura di Gior-gio Petrocchi, Mondadori, Milano 1966-1967.

Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, translated with a commentaryby Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., Princeton University Press, Prince-ton 1973.

Alighieri, Dante, The Vision. Or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, ofDante Alighieri, translated by the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, Belland 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 dalcielo. L’effetto Beckett nella cultura italiana, 2 vols., Edup, Roma.

Anspaugh, Kelly, 1996, “The Partially Purged: Samuel Beckett’s ‘TheCalmative’ 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, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton.

Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes. Intertextuality in the Fictionand Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Cavecchi, Mariacristina, and Caroline Patey (a cura di), 2007, Tra lelingue tra i linguaggi. Cent’anni di Samuel Beckett, Cisalpino, Mi-lano.

Cunningham, David, “Ascetism Against Colour, or Modernism, Ab-straction and the Lateness of Beckett”, in New Formations, 55(Spring 2005), pp. 104-119.

Elam, Keir, 1997, “World’s End: West Brompton, Turdy and OtherGodforsaken Holes”, in Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (SamuelBeckett: Crossroads and Borderlines / L’œuvre carrefour / l’œuvrelimite), 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 BeckettToday / Aujourd’hui (Three Dialogues Revisited / Les Trois Dia-logues revisités), XIII, 2003, pp. 201-212.




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 (acura 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: Cat-alogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at TrinityCollege Dublin, with Supporting Essays), XVI, 2006, pp. 19-173.

Genette, Gérard, 1972, “Discours du récit”, in Figures 3, Édition duSeuil, Paris 1972, pp. 71-273 (Narrative Discourse, Blackwell,Oxford 1980, trans. Jane E. Lewin).

Getto, Giovanni, 1967, “Inferno I”, in Lectura Dantis Scaligera. Infer-no, Le Monnier, Firenze.

Giannantonio, Pompeo, 1986, “Inferno I”, in Idem (a cura di), Lectu-ra 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 Studyof His Prose, Barnes and Noble, Totowa.

Other works cited

Carducci, Giosuè, 1907, Antologia carducciana. Poesie e prose, a curadi 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. CollectedPoems 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 margin-ally the phenomenon of self translation, preferring to keep the de-bate within the area of the more frequent case of a text beingtranslated by someone else, often a long time later. This is ofcourse necessary when establishing the areas and competence ofa relatively young discipline, as is the case with Translation Stud-ies: self-translation as a literary phenomenon is quite rare and pos-es specific problems which can seldom be generalized or appliedto the discipline in general.

In the first place there is the problem of interpretation: any actof translation, being in the beginning an act of reading, is intrin-sically linked to the process of interpretation, as the translator “is,after all, first a reader and then a writer and in the process of read-ing he or she must take a position” (Bassnett 1980, p. 81; see alsoEco 2003). Of course, in our post-modern epoch, after the theo-ries of polysystems and semiotic studies, we cannot claim that theauthor’s interpretation of his own work is the only correct, letalone the only possible one. But we generally assume that an au-thor knows what he meant when he wrote a certain sentence, andwe usually recognize that intention, even if the text is otherwiseambiguous. 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).


to be considered correct. This seems to be an obvious point, un-til one starts seeing the mistakes that invariably seep into even thebest of published translations.

A second important point is the one connected with ageing. Itis a truth universally acknowledged that a single text, in possessionof good literary fame (and translation), must be in want of an up-date. At least every few decades. In the case of theatrical texts thishappens even more often. As Susan Bassnett points out, theatricaltranslation is, quite often, an adaptation for the staging of a foreigntext; it is not meant to be divulged and has generally no literary am-bition. It is sometimes not even published, but it circulates strictlyas a script. In this last instance, we may have many translations ofthe same text, even without a wide chronological gap betweenthem. It is of course also universally acknowledged that Beckett’stexts 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 onto a topic very closely connected with this, which in fact producesthe phenomenon of ageing: it is the problem of authority. This is-sue has been long debated in the field of Translation Studies, andalso questioned over the years, especially within the specific fieldof gender and post colonial studies. In the history of translation,authorship has always been intrinsically and ontologically linkedwith authority, thus any translation derives its partial and alwayssecondary/derivative authority from the ‘original’ text, this rela-tion often seen in terms of fidelity/infidelity in a marriage metaphor(where author-text stand for the husband and translation is thewife, who can be beautiful and unfaithful or faithful but plain). Ofcourse in the case of Beckett, since he is both author and transla-tor, there is no contradiction or opposition between text and trans-lation, the fidelity being guaranteed by the author, who is – by de-finition – the sole depository of authority. Moreover, the author’sfidelity goes towards his own creative impulse, which is a complex,fluid and developing force, not simply towards his text as it is fixedon the page. In his introduction to the translation into Italian of theJoycean Anna Livia Plurabelle, Eco writes:

Ma quando il traduttore è l’autore [...] ecco che questo autore puòtradurre cercando di rimanere fedele non al suo testo così come si è

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


depositato nella lingua di origine, ma alla sua poetica, che avrebbe po-tuto dare origine (e di fatto la dà) a un altro testo che ne rappresenti larealizzazione inedita in altra lingua.

(Eco 1996, p. XVII)

[But when the translator is the author [...] this author can translatetrying 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 origi-nates) another text which represents its new realisation in another lan-guage2.]

In this sense, the author’s self-translation can be considered asa variation of the original text, its development, its update. Fromthis point of view, the translated text not only ceases to be sec-ondary or derivative, but it becomes the more authoritative as itis the most recent, the latest version. It has already been noticedthat many of Beckett’s alterations in his translations derive fromtheir 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 notbelong to this scenario since “Comédie” was written-translatedbefore “Play” was completed and the French text influenced theEnglish one. Not I, on the other hand, was translated after the pre-mière in English (November 1972, translation begun 1973, end-ed in 1974).

2. Creativity as translation

At this point it may be useful to quote the famous passage Beck-ett wrote about Proust:

Now he sees his regretted failure to observe artistically as a seriesof ‘inspired omissions’ and the work of art as neither created nor cho-sen, but discovered, uncovered, excavated, pre-existing within theartist, a law of his nature. [...] The artist has acquired his text: the ar-tisan translates it. ‘The duty and the task of a writer (not an artist, awriter) are those of a translator.’

(Proust, p. 64)

R.M. Sebellin. Bilingualism and Bi-textuality 41

2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.


As Derrida says, the so called ‘original’ text is in itself the elab-oration of an idea, therefore in itself a sort of translation. The ac-tual text is thus the translation of something more indefinite, moreelusive and deep. Differences in self-translated texts are, from thisstandpoint, not only admissible, but also necessary, as the firsttext is not the only depository of authority: each text contributesto the creation of a unit which comprises both versions in bothlanguages. As a consequence, when facing a polysemic, ambigu-ous or ‘untranslatable’ sentence (or expression) the author-trans-lator occupies a privileged position when compared to the trans-lator: he/she can in fact draw from the inner set of images whichproduced the first text, thus negotiating losses and gains, modifi-cations and cultural declinations from a unique perspective.

Self-translation produces twin texts, one the duplication of theother, neither fully independent nor secondary: any debate onwhether Beckett’s texts are or are not to be considered transla-tions becomes unnecessary. They are and they are not because theidea of translation is not wide enough to encompass the phenom-enon of self-translation which produces a double originality. AsLori Chamberlain points out:

Our institutional confusion over Beckett’s linguistic identity testifiesto our need to re-examine the critical categories we use to read both themeaning of translation and the texts themselves. Perhaps the problemlies with the very terms “original” and “secondary”, whose binary rela-tionship seems to trap us in a vicious circle. What I propose is a theoryof repetition to account both for the poetic production and for the func-tion of translation in that poetic. The advantage of such a theory is thatit can account both for the binary pair original/secondary and for theother binary oppositions which haunt our attempts to deal with transla-tion, specifically differences and similarity. In addition, such a theorycan do so without reducing the discussion to one or the other term.

(Chamberlain 1987, p. 20)

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



Thus, when English speaking and French speaking readers(who do not read the same text, but the same work) are perhaps un-knowingly faced with discrepancies, the difference “does not itselfthreaten the integrity of the work as an autonomous aesthetic enti-ty inasmuch as any truly and wholly bilingual work must, of neces-sity, be comprised of two distinct texts” (Fitch 1987, p. 34).

3. Theatre translation

Theatrical translation poses specific problems. The frequent needto update even recent translation testifies to the rapid change lan-guage undergoes and also to the requirement that the languagespoken on stage should not be perceived as obsolete by the audi-ence. Agostino Lombardo, critic and translator of Shakespeare,used to say that

mentre il testo originale è atemporale, la traduzione è sempre nel tem-po, e la sua lingua dev’essere sempre contemporanea (e in questo sen-so nessuna traduzione può veramente durare, se non come documen-to, oltre un certo numero di anni) perché deve parlare nel tempo, nel-la storia, a un dato pubblico in un dato periodo [...] e ciò è particolar-mente vero nel caso del pubblico d’un teatro[.]

(Lombardo 2002, pp. 55-56)

[while the original text is atemporal, translation is always in the flowof time, and its language must always be contemporary (and this is whyno translation can really last more than a certain number of years, ex-cept as a document) because it speaks in time, in history, and addressesa specific audience of a specific period, and this is particularly valid inthe case of a theatre audience.]

On the other hand, it should be remembered that some liter-ary theatrical translations, made to be read and not staged, haveproduced texts that are literally un-performable: repartees toolong to be spoken in one breath or too syntactically complex to beintelligible in the flow of stage action. Italian, for example, likeother neo-Latin languages, is deemed to be about 20% lengthierthan English, thus needing careful consideration of rhythm andplayability when translating from English. Such considerations



(of rhythm, not intelligibility) are apparently very much present inthe mind of Beckett as translator from English to French (alsopart of the neo-Latin linguistic group) as well as playwright.

The deictic aspect is also part of the specific characteristics ofdrama translation, as the linguistic function can change consider-ably in relation to the extra-linguistic context. The text is only apart (albeit probably the most important) in a performance and itbecomes meaningful together with the other visual and auditory el-ements and in relation to the spatial and temporal perspective. Theaspect of cultural declination also plays an important role: theamount of linguistic and cultural estrangement which can be tol-erated at the theatre is undoubtedly less than what is acceptablewhile reading. During a performance, even though intelligibilitymay not be the main concern of an author, and especially of this au-thor, it is in any case necessary to consider that a certain degree ofcommunication is desirable and a text that is too estranging doomsthe play to failure (not in the Beckettian sense). In all these in-stances (deictic, cultural, rhythmic and so on) Beckett privileges ef-fect rather than correct translation. When rare differences do oc-cur, the author-translator seems to reach back to the atmosphereand situations which triggered the first text rather than trying for afaithful translation as mentioned earlier: the text which stems fromthe 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 fin-ished it at the end of 1963. The last manuscript is marked as “étatdéfinitif”, dated April 1964, though the American première was inJanuary 1964. The translation, as is well known, was begun in ear-ly 1963, when the English version was not yet definitive.

The two texts develop in a parallel yet relatively autonomousway, thus contributing a further blow to the concept of ‘original’versus ‘copy’ or ‘derivative’. The two separate categories of ‘cre-ation’ and ‘translation’ appear even less adequate to describe thissituation, since the French text (the second one) influenced theEnglish (the first), generating in fact a single, unique bi-frontal



work clustered with intra- and inter-textual relations so deeply in-terwoven as to be almost impossible to disentangle.

My first working hypothesis deals with the treatment of the neu-tral pronoun ‘it’, which does not exist in French and imposes a choicewith both semantic and connotative consequences: Beckett oftenopts for an impersonal sentence, thus avoiding disambiguation, asfor 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 some-times the author must disambiguate the neutral, as in this examplewhere the same sentence receives different treatment: “It will come”becomes “Elleviendra”. Of course in this case, if we put the sentenceafter the preceding one by the same character, we see that this clari-fication 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. Doitvenir. Ceci est folie” (“Comédie”, p. 22). Of course, if the repartee isread as the monologue it really is, instead of in the syncopated, frag-mented mosaic it composes in the text, it becomes easier to recog-nize grammatical connections. Any bilingual reader shares with theauthor a privileged position and can resolve ambiguities, recognizealtered echoes and intra-textual relations hidden to the reader of thetext in only one language. The macroscopic deviation in the transla-tion of the last sentence, when the author translates “There is no fu-ture in this” with “Ceci est folie”, appears as an example of culturaltranslation and also of text being re-written in the second language.

The differences between the English and the French text alsostem from the use of polite expressions (“vous” vs “tu”, while theEnglish use you and must convey politeness through other means),which the characters sometimes employ while insulting each oth-er, as in the following examples, where the obscenity of the phrasemakes a sharp contrast with the formal politeness of the address:“W2: What are you talking about? I said, stitching away. Someoneyours? Give up whom? I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinksof bitch” (“Play”, p. 308), which becomes: “F2: De quoi parlez-vous? dis-je, tout en cousant de plus belle. Quelqu’un à vous? Lais-ser tomber qui? Vous l’avez empesté, hurla-t-elle, il pue la chien-




ne” (“Comédie”, p. 12). At the beginning of his literary career,Beckett seems to have found it easier to write obscenities in Frenchthan he did in English, as Ruby Cohn suggests (see Cohn 1961 andCohn 1962); probably because linguistic taboo is deposited in ear-ly childhood and therefore cannot operate in a second language(learnt as an adult, though young). But, in the case of “Play” or oth-er later dramatic texts, the difference and the strongest obscenityof the French versions can be explained by habits and cultural dif-ferences inherent in the language, rather then by the strength of alinguistic taboo that is less marked in French (see Cohn 1962, pp.260-264). In the manuscripts3 the passage from one language to theother seems to be gradual: in “Play”, the first draft is almost in-variably 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 ause of language quite independent from the context: the authoruses French expressions in the English manuscript and vice versa(for example “à la rigueur” in the English text), as if the use of cer-tain phrases were independent and the linguistic coherence ofeach texts was ‘distilled’ not during the creative burst, but at a lat-er stage, when the work polarizes into two distinct texts and lan-guages and ceases to overlap5. This mechanism happens for in-stance with the word taboo, which is written in different orthog-raphy: it was written with French spelling (tabou) in the first Eng-lish versions; after the author begins the translation, he starts us-

3 Beckett International Foundation, UoR.4 The sentence just mentioned, for example, undergoes a development im-

plying 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 andstart 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 mainsor 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’unautre côté—” (all following versions and “Comédie”, p. 22).

5 For example: we can find the expression à la rigueur initially in an Englishcontext (RUL MS 1528/8, 1528/7 and 1528/11). Then the author introduces theverb to hope (RUL MS 1528/7), which leaves a mark in the French versionswhere we find s’ésperer (RUL MS 1531/2) and y compter un peu (RUL MS1534/1); then he finally goes back to the first sentences in the respective lin-guistic context: “Pénitence, oui, à la rigueur” (“Comédie”, p. 30) and “Peni-



ing tabou only in the French manuscripts and we find taboo in theEnglish ones, as if the creation of a single and coherent linguisticworld were an artificial effort in Beckett, a need belonging to thetext and not to the author.

In most cases, the author’s priorities seem to involve thepreservation of a rhythmic coherence: some additions or deletionsdo not appear to have any rhyme or reason other than the lengthor balance of the sentences in the two languages. For example:“M: [...] Loving her as I did, with all my heart, I could not but feelsorry for her.” (17 words, “Play”, pp. 308-309). In French we have:“H: [...] L’aimant comme je l’aimais, je veux dire de tout moncoeur, je ne pouvais que la plaindre” (17 words, “Comédie”, p.13). The introduction of the syntagma here emphasized is evi-dently not necessary from a semantic point of view, as the sen-tence is perfectly translated without it, but the author deems it im-portant and I think the reason is a rhythmic one.

Another peculiar characteristic of this couple of texts is thefact that they are mutually and reciprocally dependent: as alreadymentioned, the English text is of course the base of the Frenchone, but it is also true that the translated text influences the orig-inal, thus emptying both terms of their contrasting meaning6.

tence, yes, at a pinch” (“Play”, p. 316). The French expression may possiblyhave appeared in “Comédie” only after it had been cancelled from “Play”. Andit may be interesting to add that Beckett had already used precisely these twoexpressions 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’estcalé”, Fin de partie, p. 37; and in English “Good, at a pinch, a smart fly is a stiffproposition”, Endgame, p. 102).

6 For example, in the final English versions we have W1 saying: “It was allbolted and barred. All grey with frozen dew. On the way back by Ash and Snod-land—” and in French the similar “Tout était verrouillé. Gris de givre. En ren-trant chez moi par Sept-Sorts et Signy-Signet—”. The translation is remarkablybalanced and culturally modelled on the target language. It is interesting to com-pare the evolution of this sentence: at the beginning in English the house is sim-ply shut and the door is not grey, but white because of the frost (RUL MS 1528/1and 1528/2); then the French introduces the verb verouiller, and the assonanceand partial alliteration “gris de givre”. I think that the author changes the Eng-lish, which becomes “grey with frozen dew”, in order to be consistent with thesentence in French. The assonance of the French, lost in that English segmentof the sentence, is changed to alliteration immediately before and the door is de-scribed as “bolted and barred”.


In the instance of cultural translation, the author seems to haveprivileged the domesticating method, which Venuti calls the “eth-nocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language culturalvalues, bringing the author back home” rather than the oppositeforeignizing one, the “ethnodeviant pressure on those values to reg-ister the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, send-ing the reader abroad” (Venuti 1995 [2005, p. 20]). Idiomatic ex-pressions, brand-names, festivities and toponyms are translated sothat they may not appear exotic or strange to the target culture andlanguage: “Ash and Snodland” become “Sept-Sorts et Signy-Signet”; Lipton tea becomes l’Elefant and Bonfire night (5th of No-vember) is rendered with the practice of burning dead leaves at laToussaint (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 ofthe fragmented sentences poured out in a continuum – was carriedout concentrating on the possible translation unit, the minimumsection considered from a semantic as well as rhythmic perspective.I focussed on how the author modifies these units passing fromEnglish to French. The Italian translation was also taken into con-sideration, as a consequence of the aporia provoked by Beckett’sself-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 westart from the two versions by Beckett and use them both?

As far as the rhythmic problem goes, the comparison of thetwo texts shows that the author modifies the syntagmatic transla-


7 There is apparently only one exception to this rule: the sentence “shesmelled the rat” is initially translated with a French idiomatic expression suchas découvrir le pot aux roses (RUL MS 1531/2), of similar meaning. As early asin the second manuscript, though, the author employs the expression “elle sen-tait un rat” (“Comédie”, p. 12) which looks like a calque. In fact, this expres-sion can be found in the Dictionnaire Littré (“Je sens un rat, je soupçonnequelque mauvaise farce. Je sens un rat est une expression proverbiale qui veutdire soupçonner du danger”) but is apparently neither common nor particular-ly clear. This choice is then both a literal fidelity to the English text and a sortof joke with the bilingual reader, who can recognize the Anglophone source ofthe French text.


tion units, which sometimes are combined, sometimes divided, inorder to achieve the same syncopation as the original. A few ex-amples 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 “puisallez encore quelques...” (one unit, Pas moi, p. 82). Or again:“drifting... in and out of cloud...” (two units, Not I, p. 377) be-comes “à cache-cache dans les nuages...” (one unit, Pas moi, p.83).

Division is a much more frequent case, probably becauseFrench is a longer language than English: “found herself in thedark...” (one unit, Not I, p. 377) becomes “la voilà dans le... lenoir...” (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 reproducingthe same flow faithfully is very clear: the author breaks and com-bines fragments every time a more orthodox translation risks al-tering the music of the frantic voice on stage. Instead of followingthe English text, the author literally reproduces what he hears inanother language: “I hear it breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic,panting along” (Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 16 October1972, in Harmon 1998, p. 283). The same priority was evident toElmar Tophoven when he worked on the German translation:“[i]n his own French translation of [...] Not I Beckett has tried tocompensate for the fact that a French phrase usually containsmore syllables than its English equivalent by keeping some sort ofcorrespondence in the relatively consistent length of the aggre-gates in the original” (Tophoven 1988, p. 321).

The Italian translation, for example, apparently considers NotI only, and maintains the same semantic subdivision, resulting invery long units which modify the rhythm of the speech. In the Ital-ian version it may be useful to consider the French text as well, sothat the author’s choices could validate any sort of ‘authorized de-viations’ from the text in English. As Restivo points out (see Resti-vo 1995, p. 242), for a new translation in German Beckett direct-ed the Tophovens to his own English version of Fin de partie. AndElmar Tophoven stated that “I have frequently followed Beckett’sown French or English translations. I have to deal with a kind of



‘authorized interpretation’ which he wants taken into account inthe German version” (Tophoven 1988, p. 319).

Deletions and additions are rare, and almost invariably limitedto repetitions, as in this example: “then dismissed as foolish... ohlong after... this thought dismissed... as she suddenly realized...” (p.377) becoming “puis chassée... l’idée chassée... comme bêtise... dèsqu’elle se rend compte...” (p. 83). In this case the deletion of the partin italics is balanced by the duplication shown in the previous ex-ample. Additions are usually in the form of repeated fragments, asin: “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 ex-ample where the English sentence “God is love... she’ll be purged...back in the field...” in French becomes “Dieu est amour... elle serasauvée... peine purgée... rendue à la prairie...” (p. 91). The idea ofsalvation seems inconceivable in English, but at least pronounce-able in French, possibly through the filter of estrangement.

Other lexical deviations, often not particularly meaningful, ap-pear gradually in different phases of translation: at the beginningthe author follows the original text almost calquing the French onthe 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 characterof Mouth and for the play, in French is softened, in a more gener-ic idea of inability: “at this stage... [the brain] in control... undercontrol...” (p. 378) becomes “en état... état de marche...” (p. 86).

In other cases the juxtaposition of the two texts widens themeaning or clarifies certain expressions, as in this example, wherethe infant (Mouth herself, of course) is defined as “speechless”,but in the French text Bouche becomes “sans défense”. The over-lapping of the two variants creates a surplus of meaning: the childis “sans défense” because she is “speechless”. Mouth’s logorrhoeais, then, an extreme act of defence, a sort of sound fence isolatingthe character and alienating the self.

As far as cultural declination is concerned, Beckett chooses toproduce a French text with no potentially estranging elements: thetoponym Croker’s Acres (an Irish place Beckett went to in his child-hood: see Knowlson and Pilling 1979, p. 201), is rendered as “la




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 Dieuand finally with a more suitable “mère de Dieu”.

The text is also full of repetitions of phatic expressions orclichés and so on, a typical characteristic of dementia or severeaphasia. This peculiar quality is preserved in the French text: “hehaving vanished... thin air...” (p. 376) becomes “lui filé... ni vu niconnu...” (p. 82). Bible quotations that the author knew by heartare annotated in margins and taken from a Bible in French8 as re-ferring to the Première Épître de Saint Jean, 4, 8; and also, later on,from Les Lamentations, 3, 22-23 (manuscript 1396/4/26, sheets 6and 7). The text is domesticated once again.

The chiasmus on the translation of the fragment including thelaugh, the lucid and demented derision of the idea of salvation, is di-lated 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 Godeven more so, in French we find the opposite situation, with the ideaof mercy being more laughable than the idea of the existence ofGod: “dressée qu’elle avait été à croire... [...] en un Dieu... (bref ri-re) ... misericordieux... (bon rire)” (Pas moi, pp. 83, 84).

Patrizia Fusella underlines the aspect of verbal tenses as a fun-damental characteristic of the translation of this text and the mostmacroscopic deviation in the translating process: while Mouth em-ploys mainly the past tense, emphasizing the narrative aspect,Bouche passes almost immediately to the present, making the iden-tification between character and description instantly visible. Thenarration and the stage image overlap because Bouche is “dans lenoir”, with a beam of light “tel un rayon de lune... mais sans doutepas... certainement pas... toujours même endroit... tantôt clair...tantôt voilé... mais toujours même endroit... comme jamais lune nesaurait...”, subject to a constant noise produced by herself, whichBeckett describes as “a purely buccal phenomenon without mentalcontrol or understanding, only half heard. Function running away

8 For an indication of the Bibles in Beckett’s library, see, infra, Iain Bailey’spaper, note 2, p. 147.


with organ” (Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 16 October 1972,in Harmon 1998, p. 283).

The kaleidoscopic monologue of Mouth/Bouche is built withan oxymoronic structure, a complete and utter fragmentation,and it develops through images conjured up as flashes in rapidsuccession, which overwhelm the audience/reader. But certainlythe reading of both the English and the French versions of thiswork produces a widening of possible interpretations, somehowvalidated by the author.

A double, binary text split or rather duplicated in two lan-guages is yet another form of repetition and repetition with vari-ation, the echoing, duplicating or splitting of characters Beckettemploys so widely in his art (see Chamberlain 1987, p. 20). Mouthemphasizes the aspect of narration, Bouche the descriptive andmetatheatrical one, but together they represent the full affirma-tion of the character’s double personality.

5. Bilingualism as linguistic exile

This is the condition chosen and sought by Beckett: he has perfectEnglish and French, and yet is far from both. English is his moth-er tongue, but Beckett wants to create a gap between himself andhis linguistic origin, he wants a free or freer space for his voice andhe finds it in the use of the French language. French, on the otherhand, can never fully become his native language, even thoughBeckett lived in a French speaking milieu for most of his life. It isthis permanent linguistic exile that constitutes the core of Beckett’spoetics of disinvestiture, of bareness and dryness. Consideringboth his languages from an external point of view enables the au-thor 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 eachtext is of course not visible in a single text, “and can therefore bediscussed in some larger, and extra-textual, framework that ex-amines the author or the œuvre as a whole” (Beer 1994, p. 217).Word plays, allusions, references to other texts and languages of-ten become visible only by juxtaposing the two versions of a work;in fact, from a very early stage Beckett has used double entendres



which imply the knowledge of other languages. Beer, however,urges a certain caution before any comprehensive hypothesis canbe formed, as Beckett’s bilingualism is “never static. Any gener-alization from one period can be misleading” (p. 214).

The choice of literary language is never definitive and is moresimilar to a process of constant negotiation (see Arndorfer 2002,p. 410). Beckett himself testifies to the estranging effect one’s ownlanguage can have, when it is observed (or listened to) from an ex-ternal vantage point.

Samuel Beckett m’expliquait que le choix du français [...] s’étaitimposé à lui [...] au moment où il ressentit que l’anglais [...] lui dictaiten quelque sorte la direction à suivre. “J’était parlé par cette langue, jene la contrôlait plus. [...] [L]orsque, quelques années plus tard, jem’aperçus, à l’occasion d’un voyage outre-Manche, que je ne savaisplus l’anglais qu’on y parlais désormais, je compris que je pouvais meremettre à écrire dans cette langue. Depuis, les textes me viennent tan-tôt dans une langue, tantôt dans l’autre.”

(Jackson 1995, p. 13)

Michael Edwards claims that Beckett does not simply seek aforeign language, but rather “l’étrangeté d’une langue” (Edwards1998, p. 9) which enables him to experiment very concretely withthe arbitrariness of any linguistic sign. And this not only in theseparation between word and object, but also in the departurefrom memory, as itself codified in a specific language. Remem-bering in a foreign language is less painful, as we are allowed a sortof safety distance. On the other hand, the discipline required bywriting in a foreign language saves the author from the ‘deaden-ing habit’ of linguistic familiarity, patterns or automatism:

on peut se sentir tellement chez soi dans sa langue et dans le mondeque cette langue pénètre, illumine, adoucit, qu’on oublie l’exil, etl’écrivain en particulier se doit prendre garde à la familiarité des motset de sentir parfois, ou peut-être à un moment donné, l’étrangeté de sapropre langue.

(Edwards 1998, p. 19)

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



And if bilingualism widens Beckett’s linguistic horizons, it placeshim “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 luifaut devenir faible et pauvre. [...] Le choix du français [...] [c]’est unchoix en partie pragmatique [...], mais c’est un choix surtout éthique,et même religieux. C’est le moyen le plus intime qu’on puisse imagi-ner, pour un écrivain, de se défaire d’un moi empêtré dans sa langue,de renoncer à soi-même, de s’aventurer dans une altérité indifférenteau moi, de devenir vulnérable, étranger. De toutes les raisons qu’onpeut avoir pour écrire dans une autre langue, celle-là me semble êtrela plus extraordinaire et aussi la plus émouvante.

(Edwards 1998, pp. 33-34)

Paradoxically, the same alienation appears when Beckett goesback to his language, because it has meanwhile become itself, in away, far, elusive and estranged.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 Ger-man, Spiel, trans. by Erika and Elmar Tophoven).

“Comédie”, 1964, in Comédie et actes divers, 1966, Les Éditions de Mi-nuit, 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 Édi-

tions 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 toSamuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.



Arndorfer, Martin, 2002, “Raymond Federman: (Français) Anglais etviceversa”, in Furio Brugnolo and Vincenzo Orioles (a cura di),2002, Eteroglossia e plurilinguismo letterario. II. Plurilinguismo eletteratura. Atti del XXVIII Convegno Universitario di Bressanone(6-9 luglio 2000), Il Calamo, Roma, pp. 405-413.

Bassnett, Susan, 1980, Translation Studies, Routledge, London & NewYork 2002.

Beer, Ann, “Beckett’s Bilingualism”, in John Pilling (editor), 1994,The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, New York & Melbourne, pp. 209-221.

Brugnolo, Furio, and Vincenzo Orioles (a cura di), 2002, Eteroglossiae plurilinguismo letterario. II. Plurilinguismo e letteratura. Atti delXXVIII Convegno Universitario di Bressanone (6-9 luglio 2000), IlCalamo, Roma.

Chamberlain, Lori, 1987, “‘The Same Old Stories’: Beckett’s Poeticsof Translation”, in Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossman, Di-na Sherzer (editors), 1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beck-ett, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park &London, pp. 17-24.

Cohn, Ruby, 1961, “Samuel Beckett Self-Translator”, in PMLA, Vol-ume LXXVI, December 1961, n. 5, pp. 613-621.

Idem, 1962, Samuel Beckett. The Comic Gamut, Rutgers UniversityPress, New Brunswick (New Jersey).

Dodds, John, and Ljiljana Avirovic (a cura di), 1995, La traduzione inscena: teatro e traduttori a confronto. Atti del convegno, Supple-mento al numero 547-550, La traduzione. Materiali II (settembre-dicembre 1995), Trieste 17-19 novembre 1993, Ministero per i Be-ni culturali, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Roma.

Eco, Umberto, 1996, “Ostrigotta, ora capesco”, Introduction to JamesJoyce, Anna Livia Plurabelle, Einaudi, Torino 1996, trad. it. JamesJoyce 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 Es-

pace 34, Montpellier.Fitch, Brian T., 1987, “The Relationship between Compagnie and

Company: One Work, Two Texts, Two Fictive Universes”, inFriedman, Rossman, Sherzer (editors), 1987, Beckett Translating /Translating Beckett, cit., pp. 25-35.

Friedman, Alan Warren, Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer (edi-tors), 1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, The Penn-sylvania State University Press, University Park & London.

Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-




spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Jackson, John E., 1995, “Le même et l’autre: l’écriture comme traduc-tion”, 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”, inLa grande conchiglia. Due studi su La Tempesta, 2002, Bulzoni, Pic-cola Biblioteca Shakespeariana, Roma.

McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in the The-atre, 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-translationdi Samuel Beckett”, in Dodds and Avirovic (a cura di), 1995, Latraduzione in scena cit., pp. 239-244.

Tophoven, Elmar, “Translating Beckett”, in McMillan and Fehsen-feld, 1988, Beckett in the Theatre, cit., pp. 317-324.

Venuti, Lawrence, 1995, The Translator’s Invisibility, Routledge, Lon-don & 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 Europeanculture can be regarded as a starting point of his career as a bilin-gual author. In order to study this form of intertextual translation,this essay examines the role of Beckett’s personal library and hisreading traces in the production of his texts. It is not inconceiv-able that it was largely because Beckett had read so much that heeventually decided to be more sparing of his erudition. His writ-ing method is aptly described by S. E. Gontarski as “the intent ofundoing”. This implies that there has to be something there in thefirst place, before it can be undone. Based on our research onBeckett’s personal library1, still preserved in his apartment inParis, this essay examines the difference between the marginaliain his books and his reading notes extracted into notebooks, theirintegration in the creative process at draft level, and the impact ofexternal source texts on the development of Beckett’s poetics. Inorder to study this form of intertextual translation, we will firstexamine different types of Beckett’s marginalia and subsequentlyfocus on the extracts in Beckett’s notebooks.

1. Samuel Beckett, marginalist

The president of the Dutch society for Book History – a formerantiquarian – jokingly made the rough distinction between threecategories of books: complete, incomplete, and more than com-plete books. It will be reassuring to Beckett scholars to know that

1 We would like to express our gratitude to Edward Beckett for allowing usto work on Samuel Beckett’s personal library and to pursue the book projectBeckett’s Library.


in the case of Beckett’s personal library, most books belong to thecategory ‘complete’, though there are a few interesting excep-tions. For instance, in volume 25 of Beckett’s copy of the Ency-clopedia Britannica, the entry on the Dutch painter Jan Steen is cutout with a pair of scissors. Or in volume 18, page 349 – with en-tries on artists such as the Swiss writer Konrad Ferdinand Meyerand the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer – has been torn out of thevolume. But these are exceptions. Most books are not merelycomplete, they even belong to the category ‘more than complete’.

In Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Heather Jackson ar-gues: “There is an obvious correlation between the level of inter-est and absorption in the reader and the length of the reader’snotes” (Jackson 2001, p. 30). In general, the quantity of annota-tions in Beckett’s books is not spectacular, but there are a few in-teresting exceptions. To map the physical aspects of Beckett’smarginalia we could make a rough categorization in quantitativeorder:

a. verbal comments;b. short, non-verbal codes (such as pencil marks and book-

marks);c. dog-ears; d. non-marginalia.

a. verbal comments: This category is quite broad and can be divided into subcate-

gories, ranging from translations of difficult words to critical re-actions and erudite intertextual references. These gradationsmore or less correspond with the chronological course of Beck-ett’s career as a student and writer. In the 1920s, when he studiedItalian at Trinity College Dublin, he read primary texts such as LaGerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso. He bought this bookin 1925, when he was 19 years old. The text is framed by numer-ous marginal translations of individual words, by means of whichBeckett extended his vocabulary.

He also read secondary sources on Italian literature, such as theStoria della letteratura italiana (1925), in which Francesco De Sanc-tis notes (with regard to Dante’s Divina Commedia): “Chi non hala forza di uccidere la realtà non ha la forza di crearla” (“Who doesnot have the strength to kill reality, does not have the strength to



D. Van Hulle and M. Nixon. Beckett’s Library 59

create it”2, De Sanctis 1925, vol. 1, p. 159). Beckett has underlinedthis sentence, which recurs in his essay on Proust, when he is dis-cussing 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 totranscribe the surface, the façade, behind which the Idea is prisoner.Whereas the Proustian procedure is that of Apollo flaying Marsyasand 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 themargins of his copy of À la recherche du temps perdu, preserved inReading. For instance, in what according to Beckett is “perhapsthe greatest passage that Proust ever wrote – Les Intermittences duCoeur” (Proust, p. 39), Beckett underlined a few passages (indi-cated in italics):

le monde du sommeil (sur le seuil duquel l’intelligence et la volontémomentanément paralysées ne pouvaient plus me disputer à la cruau-té de mes impressions véritables), refléta, réfracta la douloureuse syn-thèse 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), andthis interaction between reading, marking, and commenting is re-flected in the corresponding passage in his essay, where he writesand translates:

He cannot understand “this dolorous synthesis of survival and an-nihilation”. [...] But already will, the will to live, the will not to suffer,Habit, having recovered from its momentary paralysis, has laid thefoundation of its evil [.]

(Proust, p. 43; emphasis added)

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

2 Unless stated otherwise, all translations are our own.


substantially coloured by his almost simultaneous reading ofSchopenhauer. Beckett’s copy of the collected works of ArthurSchopenhauer (published in 1923) shows another form of trans-lation. In the editor’s introduction Beckett has underlined a quo-tation from Schopenhauer’s Parerga: “Man könnte die Geschich -te ansehen als eine Fortsetzung der Zoologie” (“One could seehistory as a continuation of zoology”, Frauenstädt 1923, vol. 1, p.26) – which Beckett marked in the margin to the effect that his-tory is a higher zoology. This brings us to the second category, towhat 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, ashort passage on “Variation under Domestication” is marked andunderscored with an undulating line in grey pencil: “cats withblue eyes are invariably deaf” (Darwin 1902, p. 11). In this casewe know quite precisely when Beckett read this passage, for in aletter to Thomas MacGreevy dated 4 August 1932 he wrote thathe had bought The Origin of Species the day before and that hehad “never read such badly written cat lap” (Knowlson 1996, p.161). The only thing he thought important enough to rememberwas that blue-eyed cats are always deaf. As Beckett indicates in hisletter the line is taken from the passage on correlations betweenvariations. Darwin sums up a whole series of examples:

Breeders believe that long limbs are almost always accompanied byan elongated head. Some instances of correlation are quite whimsical;thus cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf; [...] Hairless dogs have im-perfect teeth; [...] pigeons with short beaks have small feet, and thosewith long beaks large feet.

(Darwin 1859 [1902, p. 11]; emphasis added)

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



written, this last pencil mark in the book might create the im-pression that he stopped reading after page 60. But the book alsocontains 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 chap-ter, and sometimes in very close succession, which suggests that theycould be interpreted, not just as markers to indicate where a read-ing session stopped, but also as markers to indicate an interestingpage. Dog-ears are among the most enigmatic of reading traces. Itcannot be excluded that these were made by someone else, but it isequally plausible that they were made by Beckett himself. In thatcase his first reading of the book, marked by means of the pencilmarginalia, may have stopped shortly after page 60. But the dog-ears would indicate that, later on, he did read the whole book.

An indirect indication in this respect is a reference to Darwin’scaterpillar in Murphy, Watt (see Ackerley and Gontarski 2004,pp. 125-126) and in the unpublished story “Echo’s Bones”. In thelatter half of this story Belacqua is talking to a character calledDoyle, who is described as a natural man of the world. After a di-gression, Doyle reminds Belacqua that he was saying ‘but’ and didnot finish his sentence, to which Belacqua replies that he needs abetter cue than that, otherwise he will have to go back to wherehe started, like the caterpillar (“Echo’s Bones”, p. 23). Beckett isalluding to The Origin of Species (chapter VII, “Instinct”), whereDarwin 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 completedup only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed thefourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpil-lar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the thirdstage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so thatmuch of its work was already done [...], [it] seemed forced to startfrom the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to completethe already finished work.

(Darwin 1859 [1902, p. 187])



But there are no markings, not even dog-ears, on the corre-sponding page in Beckett’s copy of The Origin of Species, whichleads 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 personalcopies of the poet’s books – books that are otherwise heavilymarked (Gellhaus 2004, pp. 218-219). Despite these numerousmarkings it is sometimes an unmarked passage that is plundered towrite a poem. In one of Beckett’s bibles we encounter a similar sit-uation: the copy of The Comprehensive Teacher’s Bible shows manymarkings and other reading traces, but the unmarked pages can beequally important. For instance, Waiting for Godot mentions a mapof 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. Verypretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made methirsty” (Waiting for Godot, p. 11). Further on Gogo suggests:“What about hanging ourselves?” (p. 16) – followed by the expla-nation that he is lighter than Didi, so if he hangs himself first, thebough won’t break and he will die; when Didi subsequently tries tohang himself, he runs the risk that the bough will break and he willbe left alone. The reverse of this scene is prefigured in Jules Re-nard’s Journal intime: “Si mignonne que si vous vouliez vous pen-dre, vous n’auriez pas le poids” – which Beckett roughly translatesin the bottom margin to the effect that ‘She’s not heavy enough tohang herself’. With hindsight, reading Renard after having readBeckett, his Journal intime thus appears to already contain severalelements that are ‘Beckettian’ avant la lettre. In that sense the notesin the margin can have an interesting retroactive effect on the cor-responding body of the source text.

Thanks to the letters to Thomas MacGreevy we know quiteprecisely that Beckett was reading Renard in February 1931 (seePilling 2006a, p. 30). In this period Beckett’s writing method re-sembled that of James Joyce, who is famous for what he called‘notesnatching’: instead of writing in the margins of books, Joycefilled more than fifty notebooks with short jottings. Beckett ap-plied a similar method to write his first novel, Dream of Fair to



Middling Women – in which he thematizes this notesnatchingwhen he writes: “We stole that one. Guess where” (Dream of Fairto Middling Women, p. 191). To characterise his reading habits,it is useful to distinguish Beckett the marginalist from Beckett theextractor, according to the categorization suggested by DanielFerrer (2004, p. 7).

2. Samuel Beckett, extractor

Following the distinction of Beckett as marginalist and Beckett asextractor, this section examines the relationship between margi -nalia in books and material extracted into notebooks, and the wayhis note-taking strategy evolved in the 1930s and beyond. Let usat first stay with Renard. From the four volumes of Renard’s Jour-nal intime, Beckett snatched about thirty passages and jottedthem down in his Dream notebook. He did so without any explicitreference to Renard – thus for example the sentence ‘She’s notheavy enough to hang herself’ appears as follows:

Je suis un réaliste que gêne la réalitéSon âme prend du ventreShe’s not heavy enough to hang herself (Pilling 1999, p. 33)

Beckett has here, by transcribing his translation of the line not-ed in his volume of Renard, already primed the source for inclu-sion in the novel Dream. Indeed, in one sense this is the case withall of the Renard entries in the Dream notebook, in that Becketthas only selectively copied across the marginalia in the books.Conversely, all but the last two entries in the Dream notebook aremarked in the actual volumes. In terms of practical managementof material, this procedure makes perfect sense. The Dream note-book was specifically kept to collect material that was to be usedin a particular text, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Leavingaside the fact that Beckett in the early 1930s could not always af-ford to buy books, when it came to writing Dream Beckett musthave realised that it was easier to consult a notebook with ex-tracted material rather than scores of books with marginalia.Beckett’s reliance on his notes is expressed by Belacqua in Dream



when, struggling to remember a quote by Heine, he wonders “didI do well to leave my notes at home” (Dream, p. 72).

Now the case of Renard is somewhat unusual, in that Beckettis here working both as a marginalist, and then as an extractor. Interms of notes in the Dream notebook, the only other time he pro-ceeded like this in a substantial way is with Stendhal’s Le Rougeet le Noir (Beckett’s copy of the book is in the Beckett Archive atReading). However, we cannot discount the possibility that manyof the books Beckett once owned are no longer in the library –over the years he gave many books away – just as it is quite certainthat not all notebooks from the 1930s survive. Yet it appears thatBeckett in the late 1920s and early 1930s, up until about 1933, wasboth an extractor as well as a marginalist, and then, most proba-bly influenced by Joyce’s example and practical considerations,moved to relying on notebooks.

This brings us to the Whoroscope notebook, kept roughly be-tween 1932 and 1938. The Whoroscope notebook had a similarfunction to the Dream notebook, in that it was designed to collatematerial toward the writing of Murphy. This is most obvious in thedraft material at the front and the ‘For Interpolation section’ atthe back, the latter comprising a long list of quotations from Eng-lish literature (see Pilling 2006b). However, the Whoroscope note-book also contains a wide variety of material extracted from in-numerable sources without any distinct creative endeavour inmind. In this it resembles much of the marginalia contained inBeckett’s library, representing material that Beckett found of in-terest and wanted to preserve.

From roughly 1933 onward Beckett tended to extract materi-al from books – whether he owned them, borrowed them or con-sulted them in libraries – into the Whoroscope and other note-books rather than annotate the books themselves. Lemprière’sClassical Dictionary is an example amongst many. Beckett ac-quired the book in Dublin in February 1936, and proceeded touse it on several occasions. There is however not a single annota-tion in the book itself. Instead, Beckett extracted various entriesfrom the Dictionary into the Whoroscope notebook, such as theone on the Thebans made in 1938.

The material contained in the Whoroscope notebook takes afirst step toward incorporation in a possible compositional



process, and thus differs from the large corpus of thematic note-books with notes on a variety of topics. Held at Trinity CollegeDublin and the Beckett International Foundation in Reading,these notebooks cover philosophy, psychology and psychoanaly-sis, the visual arts, Provençal literature, the literary histories ofGermany, England and France. And there are the notes on spe-cific authors – St. Augustine, Dante, Geulincx and Fritz Mauth-ner. Furthermore, Beckett made lengthy excerpts from Rabelais,Goethe’s Faust and Grillparzer. These notes, mostly transcrip-tions or summaries devoid of commentary, are nearly exclusivelydrawn from books that Beckett did not own. Indeed, a large partof this scribal activity was undertaken in libraries. Beckett workedin the British Museum in the Summer of 1932, then again in ear-ly 1934 and then for example read Geulincx in Trinity College Li-brary in 1936. Evidence of Beckett’s use of libraries is interest-ingly contained in his copy of De Sanctis’ Storia della letteraturaitaliana, which contains two National Library of Ireland slips,both for books on Aubanel3.

In any case, Beckett understandably felt that he could organisethe sheer volume of material he was transcribing more effectivelyby using notebooks rather than marking or underlining the actualbook he was studying. And of course, in the case of the Philosophynotes, it allowed him to extract material from more than one sourceyet retain a chronological approach. As we now know, most of thephilosophy notes were taken from an English edition of Windel-band’s History of Philosophy, although Beckett did draw from oth-er sources (see Frost and Maxwell 2006). A German edition of thebook, which Beckett bought whilst in Germany in 1936 and ap-pears 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 theEnglish edition which he worked on in 1932 and/or 1933.

The separation between Beckett as marginalist and Beckett asextractor traced so far cannot be applied consistently. There are


3 As we have already seen, Beckett must have read or at least consulted DeSanctis’ book before writing the essay on Proust in 1930. Beckett mentions read-ing Aubanel in a letter of 29 January 1936 to MacGreevy, stating that he is help-ing Ethna MacCarthy with her TCD lectures on Provençal literature.


several instances which show Beckett, like in the case of Renard,annotating and transcribing, but unlike in the case of Renard, attimes the material highlighted and extracted is not the same. Agood example of this is Beckett’s use of Sartre’s L’imagination,first published in 1936. The Whoroscope notebook contains threeentries from the book, with no source given, which John Pillinghas identified:

Leibniz to Locke:“Nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intel-

lectus.”

noème, noèse

the geology of conscience – Cambrian experience, Cainozoic judg-ments, etc...

(Whoroscope notebook, 62r; Pilling 2004, p. 46)4.

These three entries, copied into the Whoroscope notebook, arenot marked in the book itself. Yet there are some marginalia inSartre’s L’imagination, such as a marginal note containing a cross-reference to Burnet’s book on Early Greek Philosophy, notesfrom which appear in Beckett’s own Philosophy notes. If we com-pare the material that Beckett marked for attention it becomes ap-parent that the marginalia relate to more abstract material, simi-lar to the kind for example noted in the Philosophy Notes. Theentries in the Whoroscope notebook, however, are characterisedby potential use in the compositional process, and indeed the lastof the three Sartre references resurfaces in the Watt draft note-books in Austin5. Beckett’s reading notes, therefore, are translat-ed and transmitted according to projected use of function.

This kind of translation or transmission of material accordingto projected use or function across different forms of note-takingalso occurs across time. However, between the last entries in theWhoroscope notebook in 1938 to the point where he started keep-


4 John Pilling’s dating of Beckett’s purchase of Sartre to late 1937 or early1938 appears to be confirmed by a metro ticket found in the book’s pages, dat-ed “10 December”.

5 Watt notebook 2, 77; Harry Ransom Center, Austin.


ing the Sottisier notebook in 1976, Beckett did not record anyreading notes in notebooks. These are also, so to speak, the darkages for marginalia, as few can be identified as being made in these40 years. What evidence we do have of Beckett’s reading duringthis period comes from his correspondence. There are two mainreasons for this absence of reading notes. First of all, the SecondWorld War or, to be more precise, the novel Watt marks a wa-tershed in Beckett’s use of intertextual references. Not only arethere far fewer, but they are also not openly flaunted, buried be-neath the textual surface. Secondly, Beckett continued to use thenotebooks he kept in the 1930s. Many of the intertextual refer-ences that do appear in his writing after the war can be found inthese older notes; the trilogy for example draws on the Whoro-scope notebook and uses some very obscure details found in theGerman Diaries of 1936/1937 (see Nixon 2006). At times thetexts 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 ex-plicitly alludes to the philosophy notes we now know as MS10967held at Trinity College Library in Dublin by referring to “ancientGreek philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possiblesuggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period” (All StrangeAway, p. 175).

It is only in the 1970s that Beckett returned to keeping a ded-icated notebook for his reading notes – the small Sottisier note-book now kept in Reading. This notebook is very much like theearlier Whoroscope notebook, in that it contains reading notes aswell as various drafts and the mirlitonnades poems. The readingnotes are drawn from a wide variety of sources – lines from theBible, quotations taken from Heine, Goethe (both however ref-erenced via their song settings by Schubert and Schumann), Pas-cal, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Parnell, as well as anItalian commentary on Dante, to name but these. Beckett beganto 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 hehad read in the 1930s, and that he had loved all his life. As he toldJocelyn Herbert in a 1975 letter, he was reading with memories ofhis student days. Arguably the most important reading notes in



the Sottisier notebook are the quotations from Shakespeare’s KingLear, which play on the distinction between worse and worst, andcan be traced across a wide range of texts, prose, theatre and po-etry, written during this time. However, once again Beckettfavoured extracting into the notebook rather than annotating thevolumes in his library, from which the quotations were mostly tak-en. This can be illustrated by way of the entries from Schopen-hauer, another example of Beckett returning to an author andtexts that had influenced his writing since the 1930s. Beckett firstread Schopenhauer in 1930, in Burdeau’s French translation. Hethen, whilst in Germany in 1937, bought a German edition in sixvolumes, which contain marginalia from his reading (probably inlate 1937). He did, however, return at a later point to highlight asentence he had originally not marked but rather extracted in theWhoroscope notebook, the sentence “Zitto! Zitto! dass nur dasPublikum nichts merke!” (“Hush! Hush! as long as the publicnotices nothing!”, Schopenhauer 1923, I.4.50). Using a differentpen than the one used for the 1930s marginalia, Beckett high-lighted the sentence in his copy, and made reference to the factthat the sentence appears in the ‘Addenda’ of Watt. When he re-turned to reading Schopenhauer in 1979, Beckett copied severalentries into the Sottisier, yet does not appear to have highlightedany passages in the volumes themselves at this time.

The reading notes, as well as the short poems in the Sottisiernotebook are closely connected to Beckett’s more sustained writ-ing from this time. The entries act in many ways as a creative nexustranslating his reading notes into his writing. That intertextualsources were very much on Beckett’s mind in the late 1970s andearly 1980s is not only evident in the pieces “Ghost Trio” or“Nacht und Träume”, but also in more marginal notes made inmanuscript material. Thus the Sottisier notebook contains entriesfrom 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 transmit-ted or translated by Beckett into his creative endeavours is obvi-ous from an annotated copy of “Eh Joe” in German given to RickCluchey in 1979. In the margin of this copy Beckett wrote “W.M.Harfenspieler”, revealing that the “Heavenly Powers” in the Eng-lish original are related to the “himmlische Mächte” in Goethe’s



poem “Harfenspieler” (Gedichte 1888 [1992, p. 263]). Onceagain, Beckett’s marginalia reveal how the traces of reading are of-ten the traces of writing.

As with most schematic scaffoldings, the division of Beckett’sreading traces into two types – marginalia and notebooks, or theactivities of a “marginalist” and those of an “extractor” – hasproved to be a useful, but merely preliminary tool to characterisethe evidence of reading. There are many ways to read this evi-dence, but from this initial exploration we can already concludethat it is often the interaction between these two modes of read-ing, rather than their separate functioning, that marks the role ofBeckett’s library in relation to his writing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 & Bo-

yars, London 1999.All Strange Away, 1976, in Stanley E. Gontarski (editor), 1995, Samuel

Beckett. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, NewYork, pp. 169-181.

Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 1992, Arcade Publishing, NewYork 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.



Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The CompleteShort Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, New York.

Pilling, John (editor), 1999, Samuel Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook,Beckett International Foundation, Reading.

Criticism


Ferrer, Daniel, 2004, “Towards a Marginalist Economy of TextualGenesis”, 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 / Au-jourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s ReadingNotes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Sup-porting Essays), XVI, 2006, pp. 67-90.

Gellhaus, Axel, 2004, “Marginalia: Paul Celan as Reader”, in Hulleand Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading Notes, cit., pp. 207-219.

Gontarski, Stanley E., 1985, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’sDramatic Texts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Hulle, Dirk Van (editor), 2004a, Beckett the European, Journal ofBeckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida).

Idem, 2004b, “Note on Next to Nothing: Ellipses in Samuel Beckett’sReading Notes”, in Hulle and Mierlo (editors), 2004, ReadingNotes, 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, YaleUniversity 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 inBeckett”, in Genetic Joyce Studies, 6 (Spring 2006), athttp://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/articles.htm (lastaccessed May 30, 2009).

Pilling, John, 2004, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscopenotebook”, in Hulle (editor), 2004, Beckett the European, cit., pp.39-48.

Idem, 2006a, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (Hampshire).




Idem, 2006b, “‘For Interpolation’: Beckett and English Literature”, inSamuel 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 Speciesby Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Racesin 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. SämmtlicheWerke, 6 Bände, Brockhaus, Leipzig.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1796, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, inErich Trunz (editor), 1968, Goethes Werke, Band 7, ChristianWegner 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 InternationalFoundation, UoR).

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1936, L’imagination, Alcan, Paris.Windelband, Wilhelm, and Heinz Heimsoeth, 1935, Lehrbuch der Ge-

schichte 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 roseaupensant” [a thinking reed] (Pascal 1670 [1962, pp. 121-122]).Fragile they might be, but at least human beings are aware of theimplications of their own fragility, according to Pascal. Whenreading Pascal, Beckett was sufficiently struck by the image tocopy it down in his Whoroscope notebook. Hélène Cixous, writ-ing about Beckett, extends the image. For her, the Beckettiancreature is not so much “un roseau pensant” as “un chapeau pen-sant” [a thinking hat] (Cixous 2007, p. 21). The model of thethinking hat yokes together, as Cixous is well aware, both the jo-cund and the profound. Surely hats adjoin the seat of thoughtrather than being the instrument for it? In Waiting for Godot,Lucky’s hat is both separate from, and coterminous with, his func-tioning. It is, to use Yoshiki Tajiri’s recent model, “prosthetic”(Tajiri 2007). For Beckett, there is, according to Cixous, “pas dedehors pur. Pas de dedans pur” [no pure outside; no pure inside](Cixous 2007, p. 21). Pozzo’s hat-stomping may be amusing, butit appears to be as invasive as a lobotomy, and it marks Lucky’slast word, the act of final censorship.

This example demonstrates, I think, the multi-tonal quality ofCixous’s response to Beckett, a response which is not easilysummed up. For those of us who have worked on intertextual is-sues in Beckett, it is not difficult to find examples of writers andartists who have suggested that their own response to Beckett wasimmediate: it was like a kind of recognition. In contrast, Cixous hasspoken of the obstacles which arise in her reading explorations,such that: “I obey the call of certain texts [...] I am rejected by oth-ers” (Cixous, in Cornell and Sellers 1993, p. 5). If Beckett had tobe allocated to either category, it would, I think, tend to be the sec-


ond one which would recommend itself. Yet, while any homageCixous has paid to Beckett has been, as my title suggests, somewhatfurtive and guarded, she has recently written an extended reflec-tion on Beckett, published in 2007 and, at the time of writing, notyet translated into English, which shows evidence of an evolutionin her thinking. This essay accordingly attempts to track some as-pects of that evolution, and to pick out some of the innovative in-sights which can be found in this very recent text, the most sus-tained engagement which Cixous has yet undertaken on Beckett.

It is worth stating at the outset that the names of Beckett andCixous are not often found in apposition. The 1991 study by Mar-tine Motard-Noar called Les Fictions d’Hélène Cixous makes nomention of Beckett in its chapter on literary intertextuality, and achapter on the same theme in the more recent study by Ian Blythand Susan Sellers, entitled Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (Blyth andSellers 2004, pp. 82-98), also omits Beckett. Even though my ownresearch has drawn me towards Beckett and Cixous, I can under-stand why few others have felt similarly drawn. After all, until lastyear, Cixous’s published remarks on Beckett were slight in num-ber (though not, I would argue, in significance), and Beckett hasnever featured significantly on the programme of her well-knownand well-attended Séminaires in Paris.

What I want to suggest, in fact, is that Beckett has come to in-habit an unusual space for Cixous – one which lies somewhere be-tween her two categories of writer which I alluded to earlier. Thereare many levels on which she finds Beckett rebarbative. Yet she hasfound herself in recurrent negotiation with his work over a lengthyperiod. The exact length of that period is difficult to determine. Inan essay on Beckett which appeared in 1976, and was included inthe Cahier de l’Herne commemoration of Beckett’s seventiethbirthday, Cixous ludically writes: “Je devais avoir dans les dix ansquand il me prit par le Je” [I must have been around ten when hetook me by the I1] (Cixous 1976, p. 396). Subsequently, though, ina Beckettian-style revision, she conjectures about whether, instead,it might have been ten years ago: i.e. not when she was ten years of

76 The Anxiety of Influence: Beckett and the Cultural Context

1 All translations given after Cixous’s original French quotations are myown.


age but when she was in her late twenties. She settles eventually onsome 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, infact, is not when she first came across Beckett, but when he creptup on her, and when she as it were offered him hospitality (she doesat one point use the word “logeai” [Cixous 1976, p. 397]).

There were, she makes clear, false starts, a process which sheplaces in the context of organic decomposition. She read him, feltno 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 governedby a command economy, or a capitalist one. Rather, they form partof what she calls “an excrement economy”2: they have to do not withintake and acquisition, but with evacuation and dispersal. The cast-off material decomposes, but into a “débris vivant” [living debris]which somehow remains available for reconstitution, forming a re-flux rather than rotting down to nothing. This is the dual awarenesswhich runs through all Cixous’s writings on Beckett – her instinc-tive repulsion against the leanings to nothingness, and yet a fascina-tion with the failure to achieve nothingness. Citing the Textes pourrien, 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. Onthe occasion of Beckett’s award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, shewrote a prominent article about him in the French daily newspa-per 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 Beck-ett’s work incorporates, paradoxically, the happening of nothing-ness, resulting in a landscape of inertia in which possibilities are re-currently reduced or cancelled. Cixous does not hide her impulseto distaste for the way in which these processes of privation are seento structure Beckett’s work. However, there are two factors whichin her view mitigate the vexatious and bruising impact of it, andprevent it from being insupportable. The first of these is his re-course to humour, which she does not underestimate. In fact, she

M. Bryden. “Hommage furtif”: Cixous’s Difficult Love of Beckett 77

2 “Faire l’économie de l’excrément” (Cixous 1976, p. 399).3 Le Monde, 24 October 1969.


employs it herself in her analysis in Le Monde, asking why, if it is al-ways the same thing, in the end, does Beckett keep rehearsing it?4

(The answer, she suggests, might be that the Beckettian voice is notso much seeking what to say as whom to tell).

The second element is what she calls Beckett’s “stubborn Irishresistance”5, which enables him to know that the Law can be par-odied, and that “l’écriture peut être le chat et la souris. Ou la mou-ette et l’immondice” [writing can be the cat and the mouse. Orthe seagull and the filth]. Writing can be bound up with both vic-tim and predator, producer and waste-product. Interestinglyenough, Cixous herself uses the cat referent from time to time inher own writing. She asserted, for example, that part of her 2003work L’amour du loup, et autres remords could be called “the im-itation of the cat”. How, she asks, is a book produced? It is pro-duced in the manner of a kitten who, scarcely weaned, happensto pass her paw under the wood-burning stove. A few days afterthe experience, she is the one who can explain humanity to you6.

That understated, rather glancing reference to the notion ofprovocative pain – pain as a kind of goad to and within writing –might be pursued at the heart of both Beckett’s and Cixous’s writ-ing projects. However, correspondences between two such dif-ferent writers are not easy of access. The same applied to theirmeetings. In 1960, Cixous began a doctoral thesis on Joyce, and,a few years later, her supervisor, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, facilitat-ed a meeting with Beckett. It was a strange and unsatisfactory en-counter, as briefly described later in this essay. As such, it was partof a more general awkwardness associated with drawing togetherthese two very different writing practices.

This uneasiness is still evident by the time of Cixous’s Le Voisinde zéro [Zero’s Neighbour]: Sam Beckett, published in 2007.Cixous begins it with a prefatory note, revealing that it was at thebehest 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 tentél’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 ellequi vous explique l’humanité” (Cixous 2003, p. 103).


she playfully puts it, “becketter l’immense Beckett” (Cixous 2007,p. 8) [the verb “becqueter”, often used of birds, means to grubaround, or peck at something]. The roots of this reluctance to peckat Beckett are not skated over within the text. How, she asks, canshe possibly develop something approaching love for this body ofwriting? As someone who, as she puts it, prefers “le bond” [theleap] (Cixous 2007, p. 11), how can she be drawn to texts whichcan 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 Beckettiangrisaille 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 whiteor a grey cruelty, but not devoid of compassion. It cannot exactlybe described as solidarity, but is, rather, a kind of ‘with-ness’, whiteor grey in quality, to match its counterpart. Amongst all this, forcompany, there is writing, writing which is ‘samblablement signéSam’ [difficult to translate except in its sibilance: similarly, “sami-larly”, signed Sam] (Cixous 2007, p. 13). In this model of similari-ty, 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 inthe mud and greyness. Cixous derives her title in fact – Le Voisinde zéro – from Beckett’s Le Dépeupleur (1970), where, in the clos-ing sequence, the last man, “si c’est un homme” [if it is a man], wan-ders through the vanquished. Picking up from the words “si c’estun homme” the optional resonance from Primo Levi7, Cixousbriefly evokes the death camps in which could be seen the spectralfaces of those who, in order to arrive there, have been “depopulat-ed”, cleared out. (Among these are implicitly included some of herown 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).


concentration camps). It is in this context that Cixous uses thewords echoed in my title: “Hommage furtif”. Contained withinthis passage, she suggests, might be found a furtive homage to Levi,or to other traumatised individuals, on the part of Beckett, “d’unépeuplé à un autre” (Cixous 2007, p. 20). The coinage “épeuplé”– [‘expeopled’ would be a possible translation] – implies one whohas uncoupled from a fixed domicile, rather than one who has im-posed it on others. It is a group of which Cixous has always declaredherself to be a part.

In Le Dépeupleur, this man finds his place as the temperaturesettles “dans le voisinage de zéro” (Le Dépeupleur, p. 55)8. Beck-ett’s English translation of the passage – “not far from freezingpoint” (The Lost Ones, p. 178) – is much more thermostatically ori-ented, but it suits Cixous to push the zero from the environmentalmore firmly into the ontological. In this context, then, the Becket-tian creature is always in the vicinity of zero. In fact, it is within thisdynamic of reduction, of decrement rather than increment, thatCixous locates Beckett’s recourse to French. As she indicates, anyowner of a bilingual Harrap’s dictionary knows that the two sec-tions are “faux jumeaux” [false twins] (Cixous 2007, p. 56). TheFrench section, like Beckett himself, is lean and athletic. Fewerwords have to work harder. In turning to French, Beckett put him-self on a diet, with the anorexic goal of becoming ever slimmer.

On these grounds also, Cixous maintains, she can admire Beck-ett, because he is able to move both innovatively and chronicallytowards zero without ever arriving at it. This is in a sense a familiarnotion, almost a commonplace, in relation to Beckett. However,Cixous deploys an original approach to it when she points out thatcontained within the word “voisinage” is the phonetic element ren-dered by “voix” [“voice”, the French pronunciation convenientlyexpressing both singular and plural, voices which suspend or de-fer the silence]. Beckett’s work is, she writes, full of voices, voicingacross and within each other: “Tout parle. La parole parle. La pa-role se coupe la parole. S’apostrophe. S’écoute. Se blague” [Every-thing 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.


self short. Shouts at itself. Listens to itself. Takes the mickey out ofitself] (Cixous 2007, p. 23). The author tries to train his voices, asChaplin would train his imaginary fleas (Cixous 2007, p. 72).Throughout his endeavours, she maintains, the writer has his se-cret plan: “Il rêve d’arriver où Je est Tu” [he dreams of arrivingwhere I is You] (Cixous 2007, p. 23). Or, perhaps, in the case ofNot I (1973), where “I” is “She”.

Not I, in fact, has a special status for Cixous. If she could re-tain only one text of Beckett, she maintains that it would be NotI, 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, itis, she observes, both structured and surprising: it is sufficientlycorrelated to give rise to expectation of the next note, and yet isable constantly to take the listener aback. Not I is as close as onecan get to the “voisinage de zéro”. It dies away and resumes, be-yond the text and in the text, gabbling on stage and off stage, be-fore and after, in the dark, in the light. Cixous had already writ-ten in her Le Monde article about what she deemed to be the cir-cumstantial or mutilative shrinkage of Beckett’s people, such thateventually one would be confronted with language alone. Thoseremarks, however, were directed at Beckett’s Trilogy. Not I wasnot yet written. For Cixous the playwright, the play has metathe-atrical tentacles; she keeps returning in her imagination to the playending, the audience starting to leave, and the voice continuing,in the darkness, behind the curtain. Cixous discerns a through-line of development, in fact, from the end of the last Text for Noth-ing to Not I. Text XIII (pp. 113-115 in Texts for Nothing, pp. 71-115) supersedes future and past with present, and replaces end-ing with murmuring: “when all will be ended, all said, it says, itmurmurs” (Texts for Nothing, p. 115). Since “voice” is femininein French, the link between the last words of the Texts and Not Iis 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” [asweeper]. The act of “balayer” can mean to get rid of, to sweepaway (Edith Piaf’s “balayage” of regret in the song Je ne regretterien, for instance). However, Cixous uses it to mean a slow brush-ing forward of ideas across lengthy time-frames – about ten years



per page, she suggests, tongue in cheek: “Beckett balayeur: il bal-aye mots de ses propres textes et il lui faut dix ans par page, pourbalayer Texte pour rien XIII jusqu’à Pas moi 1950 à 1973 vingt-troisans ” [Beckett the sweeper: he sweeps words from his own textsand he needs ten years per page, to sweep Text for Nothing XIII asfar 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 play-wright. In fact, she saves some of her most resonant closing wordsfor this aspect of Beckett’s oeuvre. The theatre, she says, was wait-ing for Beckett, like the Whale waited for Jonah. Jonah enters thetheatre of the Whale’s belly, converses with the Whale, and is thenvomited out to make theatre among the Ninevites. Cixous alignsthis with a kind of birthing process: “On sort d’un Théâtre pour setrouver dans un autre Théâtre, on est foetus dans un théâtre rosé,on naît dans un théâtre verdure, azur, mer, etc.” [You leave oneTheatre to find yourself in another Theatre, you are a foetus in apinkish theatre, and you come to birth in a theatre of greenery,azure, sea, etc.] (Cixous 2007, p. 78). This is both making and be-ing theatre, and is the product, Cixous argues, of a stage creator,not a philosopher. Beckett, she says, is a theatre man, and a man-theatre9. 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 hover-ing in the vicinity of zero, are very different from those of Cixousherself. To accompany her image of Beckett the sweeper, shecoins a neologism to match “le dépeupleur”, and that is “ledécharneur” (Cixous 2007, p. 76). “Décharner” is literally to stripthe flesh away. This, then, is Beckett the Emaciator, Beckett theauthor of skin-and-bone theatre. Yet, for Cixous, this is far frombeing impoverished theatre. Rather, it is theatre which has to keeppersisting in front of an undertaking which is simply too large.One could liken it, she suggests, to drinking the sea, and yet it isan even more vast undertaking than that. It is patiently to suck thepebbles, first on one side and then on the other, licking them, and


9 “Beckett pas philosophe, non, homme à théâtre, homme-théâtre” (Cixous2007, p. 78).


then resucking them: “toujours [...] la même mâchoire qui rongela parole un peu plus chaque jour” [always the same jaw, chewingaway at the word a little more each day] (Cixous 2007, p. 67).

Against a landscape littered with elements of potential insuper-ability, enormous energy is needed to take a small step and then toadd another to it. In this context, Cixous observes, the act of mak-ing 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, whatmatters is not the sparse content of them but “la folle énergie cap-tée prête à éclater” [the mad pent-up energy ready to burst out](Deleuze 1992, p. 76). Like Dante, Cixous asserts, Beckett is theprecursor of nanostructures. As a handler of the “dramaticule”,and the homunculus, Beckett anticipates the enormous power thatcan attach to minute structures: “Là, ici, sous le crâne, le petit estle 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, everythingdepends on ways of seeing. This is not a question of eyesight, orof perfect visual acuity. Cixous celebrates Beckett’s myopia in acontinuum to blindness which includes Milton and Joyce. It is aparade which she also can join. In her text L’amour du loup, shewrites of having been born with defective vision, and of feelingthat very little separated her from the company of the blind. Thisextends to elements in her immediate surroundings – people,books, friends – which are often ill seen and indistinct. In an odd-ly appropriate way, this was also a feature of her first meeting withBeckett, when she groped her way across a poorly-lit landing totry to locate the entrance to his flat. She refers to this experienceobliquely in Le Voisin de zéro, in one very brief parenthesis: “(Jeraconterai ma rencontre dans le noir avec Beckett, pas ici, un deces jours)” [(One of these days, not here, I will tell of my en-counter in the dark with Beckett)]10 (Cixous 2007, p. 29).


10 People encountering Beckett did indeed often find themselves literally inthe dark: at a PhD seminar in Rome (April 2008), John Pilling related a similarexperience of groping on an unlit landing before finding himself confronted bySamuel Beckett [Editors’ note].


Nevertheless, Cixous herself privileges the association of dark-ness and writing. The night, she writes in L’amour du loup, is themost prodigious half of her life. With eyes wide open at noon, sheoften fails to see. Not seeing the world, or ill seeing it, she states, isa condition of being a seer, or of seeing otherly. Persistence in theattempt to see can yield at least some awareness of seeing, andCixous can be aligned with Beckett in the attempt. For Cixous asfor Beckett, writing is indispensable. Without it, she says, the worldwould not exist for her. Like Beckett, she asserts that writing hasnothing to do with mastery. Also like Beckett, she is intensely awareof nothingness. Yet, unlike Beckett – or unlike her perception ofBeckett – she resists seeing nothingness as a horizon. For her, writ-ing is much more overtly a countervailing act of defiance, a vehicleof escape: it is “la fabrication du radeau sur le néant” [fashioning araft over the top of nothingness] (Cixous 2003, p. 97).

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 andRaymond Federman, 1976, Samuel Beckett, L’Herne, Paris, pp.396-413.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 1993, Columbia UniversityPress, 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.




Criticism

Bishop, Tom, and Raymond Federman, 1976, Samuel Beckett,L’Herne, Paris.

Blyth, Ian, and Susan Sellers, 2004, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory, Con-tinuum, London.

Deleuze, Gilles, 1992, L’Epuisé, in Samuel Beckett, Quad, et autrespièces de télévision, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, pp. 55-106.

Motard-Noar, Martine, 1991, Les Fictions d’Hélène Cixous: Une autrelangue de femme, French Forum, Lexington (Kentucky).

Tajiri, Yoshiki, 2007, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body, Pal-grave, Basingstoke.

Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette, 1994, Chacun son dépeupleur: Sur SamuelBeckett, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris.

Other works cited

Pascal, Blaise, 1670, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma, Éditions du Seuil, Pa-ris 1962.


CompanyHeather Gardner

All dark and comfortless.(William Shakespeare, KingLear)

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 mono-logue or a dialogue, depending on whether the speaking voicesare regarded as one or two. The narrative has the compression,musicality and precision of poetry. It has been defined a com-pendium of Beckettian voices1 thanks to the development ofthemes that recur in the author’s previous works, the variety of itsliterary allusions and its structure which is comparable to othergenres2. Its fifty-eight paragraphs fall into two groups accordingto tone, style, rhythm and personal pronoun use: forty-three para-graphs 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 theautobiographical references and a number of quotations from Beckett’s previ-ous works, in particular from Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, fromWatt, Texts for Nothing, That Time, “Enough”, The Lost Ones, All StrangeAway, Fizzles, From an Abandoned Work, Waiting for Godot, Endgame andHappy Days. Other references to the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton andJoyce are also mentioned. For a detailed list of the literary allusions in Compa-ny see also Brater 1983.

2 Company was adapted for the stage under license from the author at theLos Angeles Actor’s Theatre in California, at the Royal National Theatre of Lon-don, at the Théâtre de Rond Point in Paris and elsewhere.


masculine (he), while the remaining fifteen refer to images, whichare probably connected to the life of this figure, using the secondperson (you). The first person singular is not used: the indefinitesubject of the novella remains silent in the dark listening to thevoice 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 analysesevery single sentence for verification will be called the voice of rea-son or of self-consciousness, and the voice which revives the pastwithout distinguishing between fact and fiction the voice of mem-ory. The first voice is flat in tone, involved in style and reason-filledwhile the other is lyrical, varied and laden with nostalgia. The twovoices do not communicate; they remain closed off from each oth-er so that no reciprocal relationship can be established betweenspeaker and listener. This keeps the indefinite one of Companyfrom reassembling his divided self and acquiring some sort of iden-tity. If the interconnection between what the one repeatedly hears(“You are on your back in the dark”) and the fact of lying in thedark 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 lyingon his back in the dark speaking of him or of someone else? And isthe other voice addressing him or someone like him lying on hisback in the same dark or in some other dark?

For why or? Why in another dark or in the same? And whose voiceasking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His so-ever 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 thenext, waiting to learn the condition of the one as well as his posi-tion. But the voice of memory fails to come up with the adjective‘alone’ in the statement “you are on your back in the dark”, whichwould give the one the chance to refer everything to his individu-ality and extricate himself from the old dilemma about the exis-

H. Gardner. “Company” 87


tence of objective reality. A deliberate and malicious omission, thevoice of reason concludes, to stir up the uncertainty and embar-rassment that torment modern man.

“Si fallor, sum”, St. Augustine thought, but what can the oneof Company say to assert himself? Without an origin, from whichthe principle of cause and effect can be derived, what story can hetell? And if there is no story to tell, what sin can he confess? Andif there is no sin to confess, where can the moment of crisis andregeneration be placed in time to reconcile the I of the past withthat of the present, the character with the narrator, the narratorwith the author, in a lasting and stable unity? At the end of thenarrative trilogy, originally written in French in the forties, theUnnamable was left with the impulse to confess and the desire toput an end to it. Following a path of self-reflection, Beckett’s char-acters had all ended up in the blind alley where the subject pur-sued in vain the object of its conscience turned into the Other asa consequence of the separation.

After discarding the unity of subject and object as postulatedby the Romantics, Beckett also abandoned the reality of the I andof the physical world, which in Descartes’ thought were respec-tively proved by subjective consciousness and the extension of thebody in space. At the same time Beckett also dismantled the dis-cursive construction behind the literary conventions of novel-writing – from characterization to plot, from the use of time andspace to the topoi of adventure – ultimately questioning the con-trol of the narrator on narration and of the author on the narra-tor. When Beckett confronted the last bulwark of story-telling,that is the narrative voice, he gradually deprived it of all its dis-tinctive signs, leaving the reader with the indefinite one of Com-pany, silent and motionless, in an undefined time and space, likea medieval figure stripped of its vestment, of the golden back-drop, and of its vertical posture. If at the end of The Unnamablethe I is only a graphic sign indicating the speaking person, in Com-pany we do not even know who is speaking. And without a sub-ject, the function of the first person ceases to exist: “Could hespeak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. Buthe cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not” (p. 9).

With the loss of the subject, the object too is doomed. Andwith the obliteration of both subject and object, the narrative ten-



sion, in other words the dynamic element of movement responsi-ble for the change of status in stories, dies out automatically. Withno clear ideas to contemplate, nor directions to follow, the one ofCompany can do nothing but turn inward and take refuge in hissoul, having reduced its sense and intellectual functions to a min-imum, just enough for company. Company becomes the last andonly measure surviving all losses: “The test is company” (p. 35).

Company and solitude are the two existential poles in this textthat begins with the noun ‘company’ in the title and ends with theadjective ‘alone’. The two terms come and go in the novella likein a musical fugue until in the end solitude coincides with the ab-sence of company, as in Chaucer’s “Alone, withouten compag-nye”3. Beckett inverts the order of the two terms in his narrativeas if he wanted to reflect the poet’s line in a mirror, which revers-es the sides without changing the image.

The dramatic movement of the framework of The CanterburyTales is perhaps more surprising than the liveliness of the talesthemselves. Formally based on the motif of pilgrimage, the frameis in fact made up of a multiplicity of voices which gives rise to afluctuating system of relationships as they support, contradict andoppose each other. The pilgrim identified by the name of the po-et himself refers to the pleasure of devising for company. Usingthe same verb Beckett takes the devising activity a step further byinvolving the author himself in it: “Himself he devises too forcompany” (p. 34). If the game no longer ends in salvation, it stillbrings some solace.

As the words become familiar by breaking the silence fromtime to time, the solace they bring is often accompanied by thetemptation to remember:

Repeatedly with only minor variants the same bygone. As if willinghim by this dint to make it his. To confess, Yes I remember. Perhapseven to have a voice. To murmur, Yes I remember. What an addition


3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, I (A), 2779. The line drawn fromThe Knight’s Tale refers to the grave after Arcite’s death (it will be reused in adifferent context in The Miller’s Tale). Chaucer may have derived the line fromDante’s Inferno, XXIII, 1: “Taciti, soli, senza compagnia”. The term ‘company’recurs 35 times in Beckett’s narrative, without counting its derivatives (‘compa-niable’, ‘companiably’ etc.).


to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular. Mur-muring now and then, Yes I remember.


Like Hamlet, when wondering if it would be better not to be, theone of Company hesitates on the brink of being while he is carriedaway by the opposite dream as the voice of memory returns andevokes the crossing over with the same incantatory repetition. Acrossing over which would entail a fall into the emptiness of the oth-er world for Hamlet, of words for the one, that like the Unnamablelays the blame for his tragedy on the use of personal pronouns4.

To avoid the collapse of the Unnamable, the one of Companyresists the call of the voice, as Hamlet does, by dropping the firstperson: “The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I.Quick leave him” (p. 32). This ends the tragedy of the I as sufferedby the Unnamable. When the first person becomes silent, thechronic desire for identity and stability of the Beckettian characteralso ceases to be personal and the feared fragmentation and loss ofthe subject become, paradoxically, the condition that prevents theone of Company from falling into the emptiness of solipsism. Thiscondition requires a new configuration of the points of reference,which is more radical than the simple reversal of the visual anglefrom the Self to the Other. A similar approach was tried by the post-modern painters who rejected the linear one-point perspective andflattened the vertical picture space in conformity with the humanfigure like Beckett did for the one of Company lying in the dark.

In the wake of the linguistic turn philosophy took at the begin-ning of the twentieth century, when epistemological speculationson the nature of reality were replaced by questions about the rela-tionship between language, mind and the world, Beckett reformu-lates the ontology of being in grammatical terms in his use of thepersonal pronouns, thus finding the limits of knowledge in the lim-its of language. These limits were first postulated by the empiricistphilosopher Fritz Mauthner5, who developed Schopenhauer’s


4 “[I]t’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun forme, 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


thought and anticipated some of Wittgenstein’s basic concepts6.Mauthner was the first to approach epistemology through lan-guage. He aimed at replacing philosophy with psychology, or,more precisely, with a critique of language, having reached the con-clusion that no thinking activity is possible outside language, bywhich nothing can be verified. What language usages can explainare social and individual mental habits, or the logic underlying thelinguistic patterns, not the essence of things. Whether language isinadequate to describe the world or the world is illusory we do notknow, as the Unnamable maintained many years later: “I’m a bigtalking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist per-haps, impossible to know...” (The Unnamable, p. 307). Accord-ingly, the figure of Company does not find the means to establish arelationship with the world and must therefore elude himself. Thecondition that Mauthner postulated in his work is exactly the sameas 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 hu-man plight, failure is the only prospect left, as pointed out inWorstward Ho, the third novella written in the eighties: “Evertried. 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 com-parative suggesting both a minor and a major failure – is Beckett’stranslation 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 con-temporary Kafka, he was brought up sharing three different cultures and lan-guages which inclined him very early to work on linguistic usages. He also pub-lished a Dictionary of Philosophy in two volumes (Wörterbuch der Philosophie)that was much appreciated by Jorge Luis Borges in more recent times. He diedin 1923 in Germany.

6 See Albertazzi 1986. Albertazzi believes Mauthner had a great influenceon Wittgenstein, despite the disparaging words of the latter. Wittgensteinadopted 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 themetaphor of language as a ladder which must be thrown away after use. In thelast part of her work Albertazzi compares a series of quotations from the worksof the two philosophers pointing out the similarities between their philosophi-cal systems.

7 Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho are defined as three storiesof a subject that never comes real by David Watson (see Watson 1991).


same means he intended to defeat – an irony that becomes an es-sential feature of his writing whenever the sense can be completelyreversed as in this case8. Beckett read Mauthner’s monumentalwork Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache probably in the early1930s9 when he was writing his first novel, Dream of Fair to Midd -ling Women, published posthumously. From a letter Beckettwrote to Ben-Zvi in 1979, this is his brief outline of Mauthner’sthought:

For me it came down to this:Thought wordsWords inaneThought inaneSuch was my levity.10

In this equation of word and thought, the adjective ‘inane’ isapplicable to the threefold idea of void, emptiness and senseless-


8 The expression ‘fail better’ may also be perceived as a pun in Ireland, forthe assonance between ‘feel better’ and ‘fail better’ is stronger in the Irish pro-nunciation of English.

9 The work, first published in Stuttgart in 1902, was translated into Englishwith the title The Critique of Language. In a letter dated July 28, 1978 addressedto Richard Ellmann, Beckett corrected the account given by the biographer inJames Joyce, and stated that he took Mauthner’s volumes in 1932 on Joyce’s re-quest but did not read them to him, as Ellmann asserted. According to JamesKnowlson, Beckett read The Critique of Language a few years later, probably in1937-1938, 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 theWhoroscope notebook plausibly date from mid-1938; Bair and Ben-Zvi claimBeckett consulted Mauthner’s work as early as 1929, or even earlier, as Garforthsuggests, in Trinity College Dublin Library, that owned a copy of the Stuttgartedition. For a discussion on when Beckett first read and copied passages fromMauthner’s Beiträge see Pilling 2005 and Garforth 2005.

10 See Ben-Zvi 1984. Ben-Zvi compares Dream of Fair to Middling Womenand Company on the ground of the relevance Mauthner’s thought has in the twoworks. See also Ben-Zvi 1980. In this essay Ben-Zvi examines the similarities be-tween Beckett’s ideas and the philosopher’s assumptions, which she summaris-es 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 areno absolute truths; 5) the self is relative and contingent, and does not exist out-side language; 6) human communication is impossible; 7) language should besimple so as to reduce its ambiguities to a minimum; 8) laugh and silence are thehighest forms of criticism.


ness, as the noun ‘levity’ applies to lightness, inconstancy and in-substantiality.

Beckett probably learnt about the inanity of words as a studentat Trinity College reading Romance languages and literatures.Mauthner based his concept on nominalism, the most innovativedoctrine of the fourteenth century which reduced the substanceof universalia to words, that is to flatus voci. Furthermore, bothBeckett and Mauthner were illuminated by Schopenhauer’sphilosophical thought, after reading Descartes, Locke, Hume andHegel. This common ground may explain the impact theSprachkritik had on Beckett. Beckett’s commitment to Mauth -ner’s theories lasted all his life, as Company proves.

Beckett’s terse summary of Mauthner’s long and complexwork makes it clear that thinking and speaking must be regardedas a single activity, which is metaphorical in origin and nature. Itproduces visual representations – in accordance with a cognitivemodel dating back to Plato – according to which nothing can beverified, as images are the result of sensory perceptions filteredthrough an unreliable memory and organized subjectively. Theseimages communicate moods, feelings and impressions but cannotreflect the relationship between the mind and the world, let alonethe world. Because of their metaphorical nature, thoughts, likewords, are subject to a multiplicity of interpretations and to con-tinual shifts in meaning which make them ambiguous, approxi-mate and inadequate both for answering metaphysical questionsand describing phenomenal processes. In Mauthner’s philosophythe idea of a God, of the physical world and of the self must re-main within the realm of possibility until the right words arefound to prove their existence. Although it is unable to accessknowledge, language lends itself to social usages thanks to its con-ventional and figurative character, and reaches its highest powerin poetry11. In spite of these premises, Mauthner, who was moreinterested in the epistemological than in the social implications oflanguage, did not relinquish his research. The same can be said


11 In the second volume of the Sprachkritik Mauthner outlines a history oflanguage. After discarding past hypotheses about its origin (divine, innate, etc.),Mauthner set the principle of linguistic development in metaphor. According tothis theory, the genesis of language corresponds with that of poetry.


for Beckett who expressed man’s inability to assert anything andthe need to give word to this inability12.

If for Mauthner imagining is remembering, thoughts must beprocessed in the same way as language, that is through compari-son and association via memory13. Thoughts therefore are alsomemories. This brings us back to the mirage of identity evoked inCompany by the voice which asks the one to utter ‘I remember’.In Beckett this utterance replaces Descartes’ cogito, for there can-not be any identity without a continuity of the self in time, that iswithout a memory. But Beckett, as well as replacing Descartes’cogito, also does away with deductive reasoning (ergo sum), sinceremembering is not a logical, nor a reflective activity. Remember-ing, as Mauthner postulated, is thinking through images, of whichonly a small number can be verified, as the voice of reason in Com-pany says from the very beginning. What is left of Descartes’ syl-logism (cogito ergo sum) in Beckett’s work is just the yearning af-ter an identity, and the utterance ‘I remember’ that would havethe power to create an identity, if not to describe it, if only it couldbe re-enacted.

In a world of voices, the self too becomes a linguistic product,that is, a representation: “devised deviser devising it all for com-pany. In the same figment dark as his figments” (p. 64). In thisworld that is all a stage Beckett placed not only the public per-sona, as Erasmus and Shakespeare had done, but also his privateself. 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, whichappears in the introductive chapter of the first volume and in the last chapter ofthe third volume, was intended to illustrate knowledge based on language (seeBredeck 1992). In her view the use of the metaphor shows the philosopher’s re-sistance to mysticism and silence rather than his inclination towards them, as inGershon Weiler’s Mauthner’s Critique of Language. In the first metaphor, theladder of language must be destroyed and rebuilt again and again in a perenni-al cycle; in the second one, the climbing up and down of the clown and his at-tempt to pull the ladder up from the highest rung, far from being funny, illus-trate man’s search for truth through language. The metaphor of the ladder re-turns in Wittgenstein and in Beckett. Beckett, however, denied quotingWittgenstein as he intended to refer only to a popular Welsh jest.

13 Mauthner attributed to memory the principle of association on whichmetaphors are built, which had been attributed to imagination by the 18th-cen-tury Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico.


staging of Company, the most autobiographical of his narrativeprose works14.

As is well known, for Wordsworth poetry originated from emo-tions “recollected in tranquillity”. This is exactly where the imagesof Company stem from. What greater tranquillity could there bethan that of the figure of Company who limits himself to listeningand remembering, or, more precisely, to listening to remem-brances? As for memories, they all revive the pain of separation, apain that constantly returns combining past, present and future inone emotional dimension. The voice of memory recalls first the im-ages of childhood, then those of old age and only two momentsfrom 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 aquick stop in the middle, quicker than the rising or setting stages15.

If the gospel says “In the beginning was the Word”, the firstimage does not call to mind the birth of the child, but the ques-tion which cuts the tie with the mother:

A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your moth-er by the hand. You turn right and advance in silence southward alongthe highway. After some hundred paces you head inland and broachthe long steep homeward. You make ground in silence hand in handthrough the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after somehundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking upat the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silenceasking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. Thesky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframeyour question and some hundred paces later look up at her face againand 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 an-gered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and madeyou a cutting retort you have never forgotten.



14 In his later works Beckett blurred the distinction between genres: just asCompany can be adopted for the stage, other theatrical works composed in thesame period, Footfalls (1976), “A Piece of Monologue” (1979), and “Ohio Im-promptu” (1980) can be read as narrative prose.

15 Ben-Zvi studied the progression of the fifteen memories, giving the fol-lowing order: 1, 2: childhood; 3: old age; 4, 5, 6: childhood; 7: old age; 8, 9: child-hood; 10: old age; 11, 12: adulthood; 13, 14, 15: old age (see Ben-Zvi 1984).


The image of the child walking homeward hand in hand withhis mother in silence is described in realistic detail with indica-tions of time and place, of directions and destination, which is insight, though difficult to reach, as the house is at the bottom or atthe top of a steep road. In order to ask about the distance, or thecloseness, of the blue sky, first in reality, then at least in appear-ance, the boy breaks the silence putting the same question in dif-ferent ways. The ‘cutting retort’ of the mother breaks the tie be-tween the two without undoing the knot that binds reality to itsappearance. The pain and the inexplicability of this first separa-tion sets the tone for the subsequent images.

In the second remembrance the voice echoes previous Beck-ettian voices16 announcing the birth of the child together with hisdemise: “Over!” (p. 18), cries the midwife, referring obviously tothe mother’s labour, to the father who had left the house to avoidthe unpleasantness of delivery. Like the father, the voice tooshuns the event inviting the listener to imagine the thoughts of theman “as he strode through gorse and heather” (p. 17). The imageof the father returns in the third memory as a shadow beside hisaged son who is following his footsteps, with the same repetition:“So many since dawn to add to yesterday’s. To yesteryear’s. Toyesteryears’. Days other than today and so akin” (pp. 18-19).Thus, the days pass, making it necessary to start again “fromnought anew” (p. 19). The equivalence of ‘nought anew’ with‘nothing new’ allows Beckett to add Macbeth’s pessimism to thebiblical “all is vanity” in a formula; this includes his own bleakview of life with what is also a self quotation from the beginningof Murphy, which is in turn a quotation from Ecclesiastes.

Born on a Good Friday after a long labour, the voice intro-duces another autobiographical reference which ties the theme ofbirth to that of death in the fourth recollection. Then three moreimages from childhood: the falling of an old beggar woman whojumped from a window, sure that she could fly; Beckett’s divingfrom 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 begin-ning of “A Piece of Monologue” (written and staged in 1979, published in1982): “Birth was the death of him”.


garden, the boy listens to his mother’s voice telling “He has beena very naughty boy” (p. 28), while in the kitchen she is makingbread and butter, but not for him17. An old man on the road is thenext image, the shadow of his father on the right, going from pointA to point Z. Suddenly, the old man turns off his fixed course cut-ting through the hedge, jumping over obstacles, swerving east.

In the next image the voice returns to childhood in the glow ofsunshine: the boy is seen daydreaming on the Irish coast and mis-taking the clouds for a mountain. Unlike the young lovers inShakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream who see the moun-tains vanish into the air as clouds18, here the solidity and weightof matter is given to what has the levity of air. The boy is punishedonce more for having wandered too long and arriving home late.The last image of childhood also marks its end. The boy is im-mersed in the warmth of his compassion for saving a poor hedge-hog from the cold. The horror of death will strike the childthrough the senses of sight and smell, leaving a lasting memory:“You have never forgotten what you found then. You are on yourback 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 andstepping out to take his beeline course to “the gap or ragged pointin the quickset that forms the western fringe” (p. 48). In this lastjourney he does not count his steps, nor does he perceive his fa-ther’s shadow by his side. “Unhearing, unseeing”, he stops nowand 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 hor-izontal 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 ofchildhood recollected in Company correspond to known events of the author’slife, such as his father leaving home on the day of his birth for an excursion tothe beloved Wicklow mountains to learn on his return that his wife’s labour wasnot over; or his walks with his father in the country, the diving from the boardat Sandycove, Forty-Foot, the launches from the fir tree in the garden that wor-ried his mother so much, the death of the hedgehog placed by him in an old hat-box, 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 moun-tains turned into clouds.”


pended on emptiness, between the black sky and the whiteground: “The dark cope of sky. The dazzling land. You at a stand-still in the midst... Halfway across the pasture on your beeline tothe gap” (p. 52). The beeline on the snow behind his back, wherehe never cared to look before, reveals “A great swerve. Wither-shins” (p. 52)19. Was it curved by the weight of the heart, or bythat eastward leap which was left unaccounted for?

Leaving the old man above the abyss, the voice associates tworeminiscences of adulthood with the time of childhood and thetimeless dark of the present: “Bloom of adulthood. Imagine awhiff 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 colouredwindows, 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 trou-ble. A haven” (p. 54). As for the one in the dark, figures becomethe only comfort, whether they signify Pythagorean numbers orPlatonic forms is irrelevant: “Even still in the timeless dark youfind figures a comfort” (p. 55). There are no smiles and no wordswhen the woman arrives at the summerhouse. Face to face, he istoo busy measuring the segments of her body leaving her alonewith the unwanted child in her womb.

The next image goes back to the moment of love, when thewoman 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 thedead in the trembling of leaves. The tree, an aspen, contains thesound of another word, of the asp that killed Cleopatra and herdream 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 themovement of the sun, which was ominous in occult rituals. Beckett may be al-luding to Dante’s surprise when as a pilgrim in Canto IV of the Purgatorio thepoet encounters Belacqua and notices the reversed movement of celestial bod-ies at the antipodes. All Beckett’s characters turning in circles against their willmay also be a parody of Descartes’ rationalistic system; Molloy is doomed tomove 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 Shake-speare’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 alute...”


The natural light fades away in the last three images. In thefirst, the old man is seen wrapped in a long coat, on the shore,leaning on a stick, the sound of the waves becoming weaker andweaker behind his back. We are left in the end with the shadowof the stick disappearing in the sand in the dark, a picture whichsuggests the figure of Prospero renouncing magic and burying hisstaff underground. In the second last image, the light comes froma lamp and the movement from a mechanical clock hand. The oldman, crouched like Belacqua in Dante’s Purgatorio, measures thepassing of time obsessively by the constant variations of the shad-ow of the hand on the face of the clock. In the last image the oldman lies (both meanings intended) in the dark on a desert ground:“from time to time with unexpected grace you lie” (p. 87). In theend his contour overlaps with that of the one listening to the lastfable, before remaining alone, without company:

Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With everyinane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fableof one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling with you in thedark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you asyou always were.

Alone.(Company, pp. 88-89)

Beckett weaves together three Shakespearean references in theclosing sentences: to Love’s Labour’s Lost (with the loss of theword 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 ex-changed identities overflowing with feelings, to which we can givethe title we want. The allusions are linked by the thread of timewhich makes our labours inane plunging into silence the wordsdevised for company. A company made up of voices, and of theechoes of these voices, which never give way to companionship.

While the rhapsodic voice of memory revives forgotten emo-tions, the ‘cankerous’ voice of consciousness separates the mo-ments of feeling with the detachment of the omniscient narrator,the indifference of reason and the meaninglessness of questionsthat remain without an answer. Where do the voices come from?What is the form, the dimension and the composition of the place



on which the one lies? Are the voices weak because they comefrom far away, or because they are like that? Can anything be doneto improve the condition of the one? Like give him a past, in thetimeless dark? A name? Another posture? And which posture ispreferable in the long term? Belacqua’s crouching? Or the crawl-ing movement of other penitent figures, including the Beckettiancharacters that do so. Would it be better to leave the figure idlein the dark, perhaps creating a little distraction like a fly to driveoff? But how can one create anything under these circumstances?The questions from particular become general. If the dark is un-limited, it must be absolute, then creator and creatures are in thesame place, grappling with the same problems, first of all with cre-ation: “Can the crawling creator crawling in the same create darkas his creature create while crawling?” (p. 73). The answer is neg-ative: how can one reasonably be expected to create while crawl-ing in the dark when to formulate the question stops are necessarybetween crawls? When the voice finally asks: “What kind of imag-ination reasons thus?”, the tautology of the answer, “A kind of itsown” (p. 45), confirms its imaginary nature.

Crawling and falling, wondering whether the pains of the pre-sent and of the past are always the same, the one goes on listeningto the voices hoping to see the light that the sounds of words bringfrom time to time: “What visions in the dark of light!” (p. 84). Thevision of Dante, who appealed to the power of words at the endof his imaginary journey to grasp what would otherwise disappearlike “neve al sole”, or “le foglie levi” (Paradiso, XXXIII, 64, 65),is evoked here. But also the dark of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Lis-tening to Dante and to Shakespeare, Beckett perceived, in thevoid, the levity with which words cross time and space (“such wasmy levity”, Beckett defined his agreement with Mauthner’sthought), 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 be-cause the dark is necessary to the vision of light as much as un-certainty is prior to the making of fables.

Fables that will always be representations, even when they arecalled memories or concepts, because the creation of images is thelimit and the power of words and thoughts. What, then, is the re-sponsibility of the author if he is a “devised deviser devising it all



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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Samuel Beckett and Fritz Mauthner

The Unnamable, 1958, in Trilogy. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnam-able, 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


Albertazzi, Luciana, 1986, Fritz Mauthner: la critica della lingua, Roc-co Carabba, Lanciano.

Bair, Deidre, 1978, A Biography: Samuel Beckett, Jonathan Cape, Lon-don.

Beja, Morris, Stanley E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (editors), 1983,Samuel Beckett. Humanistic Perspectives, Ohio State UniversityPress, Columbus (Ohio).

Ben-Zvi, Linda, 1980, “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Lim-its of Language”, in PMLA, vol. VC, 1980, pp. 183-200.

Idem, 1984, “Fritz Mauthner for Company”, in Journal of Beckett Stud-ies, IX, Spring 1984, pp. 65-88.

Brater, Enoch, 1983, “The Company Beckett Keeps: The Shape of




Memory and One Fablist’s Decay of Lying”, in Beja, Gontarskiand Astier, 1983, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 156-171.

Bredeck, Elisabeth, 1992, Metaphors of Knowledge. Language andThought in Mauthner’s Critique, Wayne State University Press, De-troit.

Garforth, Julian A., “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Whoro-scope notebook: Beckett’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache”, inHulle (editor), 2005, Beckett the European, Journal of BeckettStudies Books, Tallahassee (Florida), pp. 49-68.

Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckettafter Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Hulle, Dirk Van (editor), 2005, Beckett the European, Journal of Beck-ett 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 Beck-ett Studies, VII, Spring, 1982, pp. 127-131.

Idem, 2005, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope note-book”, in Hulle (editor), 2005, Beckett the European, cit., pp. 39-48.

Idem, 2006, “Beckett and Mauthner Revisited”, in Gontarski andUhlmann (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, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge.


Marinetti and Beckett: A Theatrical Continuum

Roberta Cauchi Santoro

Scholars of Futurism have argued that aspects of the so called the-atre of the Absurd were anticipated by Filippo Tommaso Marinet-ti’s theatre (Tisdall and Bozzalla 1978, pp. 108-109). This is partic-ularly the case with Samuel Beckett, regardless of the fact that theIrish 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 Italyconstitute an interruption of the Futurist project such that thelegacy of Marinetti’s group remained largely lost up until the1950s. Despite the lack of any direct evidence, Beckett’s theatri-cal oeuvre does, nonetheless, seem to develop several techniquesfirst proposed by the Italian Futurists in the 1913-1915 theatremanifestos, before Futurist theatre became increasingly em-broiled with Fascism. The aim of this paper is to explore this affin-ity and to consider whether it is a case of mere coincidence or,more likely, whether echoes of the Italian historical avant-gardecould have reached Beckett through diverse osmotic routes.

One such route might well have been Beckett’s exposure toMarinetti’s contemporary Guillaume Apollinaire and the Frenchhistorical avant-garde, for whom Italian Futurism served as an im-petus. Apollinaire’s influence is clearly audible in Beckett’s freeverse (see Fletcher 1964, p. 322). The French route is especiallyplausible when viewed in the light of Michael Kirby’s contention,in Kirby 1971, that criticism of avant-garde drama and the theatreof the Absurd has consistently had a French bias. This is under-

1 As is well known, theatre critic Martin Esslin grouped together playwrightslike Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Harold Pinter, and called these new plays theTheatre of the Absurd (Esslin 1961). Beckett always rejected this label.


standable because, in the pluralist debate on modernity that ex-isted in France, Futurism could only occupy a subordinate role,so that critics have been more willing to give credit to Dada andSurrealism for contributions which in fact originated in the earli-er movement. The seeds of the Dadaist and Surrealist theatricalinnovations are already evident in the Futurist condensed theatrecalled sintesi (see Kirby 1971, p. 6).

Marinetti’s experimentation in metatheatre, something thatBeckett would deploy in his early drama, might well have been en-countered as transformed by two dramatists that Beckett definite-ly read: Antonin Artaud and Luigi Pirandello, the first in the The-atre of Cruelty, the second with respect to the rupture of fourth-wall conventions in the theatre of the Grotesque. Pirandello’s the-atre of the Grotesque, as Kirby lucidly points out, partly owes itsorigin to the Futurist Synthetic Theatre (Kirby 1971, p. 6).

Italo Calvino also understood the path of mediation that leadsfrom Italian Futurist theatre through Artaud to Beckett. In his es-say “La sfida al labirinto” Calvino conceives of movements like Fu-turism as embodying the rationalist trend of the avant-garde, whichaspires to discover redeeming aesthetic and moral qualities withinthe mechanized world. In Calvino’s view, this tendency is charac-terized by an “ottimismo storicista” (historicist optimism) (Calvi-no 1962 [1980, p. 88]) that is opposed to a far less optimistic off-shoot of the avant-garde that he terms “viscerale” (visceral) (p. 89).In this latter classification, Calvino alludes to Artaud and, in an-other essay entitled “Il mare dell’oggettività”, he places in this samecategory none other than Beckett (Calvino 1960 [1980, p. 95]).

Angelo Guglielmi opposes this argument in Avanguardia esperimentalismo, arguing that the visceral avant-garde as pro-posed by Calvino is a movement that “[si] rifiuta a esprimere unaqualsiasi idea sul mondo” (refuses to express any idea about theworld) and does not propose any method of understanding exis-tence, 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 avant-garde and, consequently, Beckett against the historical avant-garde, whose genre par excellence, the manifesto, epitomizes thelatter’s utopian progressivism, which flourished at the turn of the



twentieth century but that had become ever rarer at the time ofthe ‘visceral avant-garde’ in general, and Beckett in particular.

Perhaps these same epistemological and axiomatic differencescoupled with the ideological drift that shifted between the theatreof Futurism and that of Beckett explain why criticism has shiedaway from acknowledging the hint of a continuum that bridgesthe two. Other reasons may well stem from the fact that the Ital-ian movement was mostly ignored, at least in Italy, until well intothe sixties. This marginalization partly springs from the distastefor the Futurists’ alliance with Fascism in the first decades of thetwentieth century, as well as a widely held belief that it was “moremanifesto than practice, more propaganda than actual produc-tion” (Goldberg 1979, p. 11). The latter claim is particularly un-fair in relation to Futurist theatre, which was characterized, fromthe outset, by its original theatricality.

As early as 1913 Marinetti’s Futurist theatre offered an outra-geous alternative to the stultifying conventions of bourgeois dra-ma that Beckett would still be reacting against in the early 1950s,as the Futurists’ description of the theatre they banished demon-strates: “we are deeply disgusted with the contemporary theatre[...] because it vacillates stupidly between historical reconstruc-tion (pastiche or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction [...]a finicky, slow, analytic and diluted theatre worthy, all in all, ofthe age of the oil lamp” (Marinetti 1913, in Taylor 1979, p. 30).

The reaction provoked by the serate futuriste already offered aforetaste of the opposition that would meet Beckett’s first perfor-mances of Waiting for Godot. The Futurists’ pleasure at beingbooed was, nonetheless, a political stance specifically aimed at ma-nipulating language. For the Futurists, language was a constantprojection of something other, on the ground of the dialectical re-lationship this theatre established with extra-literary aspects oflife. In Beckett’s theatre, however, language totally severs the dis-closures of reality from old hermeneutic schemes and presentsthem in a neutral space to declare the groundlessness of all mean-ing and being. But in spite of these underlying differences, the the-atre of Futurism and that of Beckett have a common denomina-tor. Both bring to the fore the sound of letters as linguistic signi-fiers and their transposition from the page to the stage; in this waythey work to accentuate sound. As Beckett once famously wrote

R. Cauchi Santoro. Marinetti and Beckett 105


to the American director of his plays, Alan Schneider, “my workis a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as ful-ly as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else” (inHarmon 1998, p. 24).

Both theatres are characterized by a black humour that defiesthe audience’s expectations and brings the play to an abrupt end.The origins of this kind of theatre lie in Alfred Jarry, a major in-fluence not only on Marinetti but also on Beckett. Jarry’s avant-garde ante litteram Ubu plays are nothing short of the first theatreof 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 al-ready discern the outlines of Beckett’s tramp poets suspended intheir own limbo, as well as the seeds of brevity, absurdity and dis-ruption. Sound dislocates the spectator and, as Michael Northputs it, exposes “the materiality, even the gross sensuality of whatis 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 Anthro-popopometry of Essy-in-Possy” (Waiting for Godot, p. 42).

Both the sound and appearance of letters in the Futurists’ “pa-role in libertà” (words-in-freedom) gave birth to their dramaticequivalent in the 1913 manifesto entitled “Il Teatro di Varietà”(The Variety Theatre) which builds on the music-hall, cabaret andcafé concert. This manifesto lists many of what would become thesine qua non characteristics of Beckett’s theatrical oeuvre.

The Variety Theatre manifesto proposes to amuse with “comiceffects, erotic stimulation or imaginative astonishment” (Marinetti1913, in Taylor 1979, p. 30)2. The clowns of Waiting for Godot,with their sexual puns and quid-pro-quo, immediately spring tomind. The Variety Theatre manifesto also accentuates “agility,speed, force, complication” (p. 31), all of which are ubiquitous inthe pratfalls and marionette-style mechanical movement of Beck-ett’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 pagenumber in brackets in the text.


for the Futurists and the move away from the word towards theimage is central to Beckett’s later drama.

Other characters from the Beckettian dramatic corpus per-fectly 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 Es-tragon’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. An-grily]. It’s a turnip!

(Waiting for Godot, p. 21)

But the main feature shared by the two theatres is the “ironicdecomposition of all worn out types of the Beautiful, the Grand,the Solemn, the Religious, the Ferocious, the Seductive, and theTerrifying” (p. 31). As Viktor Shklovsky pointed out: “when thecanonized art forms reach an impasse, the way is paved for the in-filtration of the elements of non-canonized art, which by this timehave managed to evolve new artistic devices” (in Erlich 1965[1981, p. 260]). Before this could take place, the serious artisticpotential of popular theatre had to be discovered, and this is thewider cultural framework of Marinetti’s manifesto, almost fortyyears before the first staging of Waiting for Godot.

Other innovations like the direct address to the audience andthe attempt to create on stage “the difficulty of setting records andconquering resistances” (p. 32) by making such mischievous sug-gestions as “have actors recite Hernani tied in sacks up to theirnecks” (p. 34) cannot but remind us of Beckett’s characters im-mersed up to their necks in dustbins (Endgame), urns (“Play”) orin a mound (Happy Days). Most important of all, the Variety The-atre was the first to destroy “all conceptions of perspective [and]proportion” (p. 33), stripping the stage props to a minimum, ashappens with Waiting for Godot, where the stage features a meretree. Didi and Gogo, embracing under a full moon and recoiling



from their own foul smell, embody the Variety Theatre’s dispar-agement of “ideal love and its romantic obsession that repeats thenostalgic languor of passion to satiety” (p. 32). The manifesto’sproposal to do away with psychology and to exalt body-madness(the so-called fisicofollia) would, on the other hand, be taken up byAntonin Artaud’s theatre. Marinetti was indeed initiating a theatrewhich would eliminate cause and effect, but whose physical, sen-sory qualities could elicit in the audience the intuition of sensation,an important dictum that finds its source in Henri Bergson, thedeepest of common roots between the Futurists and Beckett.

The Bergsonian concept of analogy can be found in the Fu-turist theatre, whose rejection of linear discourse in favour of si-multaneity, ambiguity and montage is further developed by Da-da, Surrealism, Vorticism, and is subsequently explored by Beck-ett in a play like Not I. In Beckett and the Futurists there is a sim-ilar attempt at reducing the linguistic sign to gestural invention.Both emphasize the struggle to avoid the hardening of the pre-sentation into a representation, and thus insist on the need for ‘de-familiarization’, a concept that the Russian Formalists owe to theBergsonian theory of perception.

The Futurists did not simply emphasize the materiality of theword; they also underscored the materiality of the stage props. Inthis manner they heralded the mechanized theatre that offset theprocess of abstracting all anthropomorphism out of the play.Characters start to lose their personalities and become imbuedwith mechanical movements, while the plot becomes shortenedand intensified into a single action. This development is also trace-able in the trajectory that leads from Waiting for Godot to Beck-ett’s later ‘playlets’, which, in their brevity, lack of logicality, geo-metric quality and the asymmetrical pattern of the words in thedramatic text resemble parole in libertà. Also of interest is thefunction of dialogue in this reductive process. As it often was forthe Futurists, dialogue in Beckett is forced to operate as substi-tute for the mise en scène and as a surrogate for the dramatic ac-tion, even though the very foundations of dramatic language havebeen reduced to minimalist assertions.

The last phase of Futurist theatrical innovation, proposed byEnrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, was directed towardsthe development of a Futurist scenography capable of celebrating



the wonders of the technological age. In Prampolini’s manifesto(1915) the stage becomes kinetic and impersonal movement is theessence of the performance. This same kinetic quality of the stageis found in the use of offstage in Beckett’s later drama as well asin the exploitation of technological progress to render the actoralmost unnecessary. Geometrical shapes become the dominantaspect of stage design and Beckett’s later theatre suggests a debtto Prampolini’s freestanding geometric constructions, which in-voke instability, lack of equilibrium, and confusion of depthachieving a startling conflict between upstage and downstageheights of set and performer. These characteristics are especiallyevident in Beckett’s “Quad”.

“Quad”, first filmed in 1982, is one of Beckett’s very last playswritten for television. In this short ‘playlet’, which faintly echoesGiacomo Balla’s short play Sconcertazione di stati d’animo (Dis-concerted states of mind), the role played by the stage is central.The nameless characters, who are significantly numbered 1, 2, 3and 4, and whose movements are lettered like the square’s pointsA, B, C and D (together with the combination thereof), are theonly characters involved. “Quad” is impersonally described as “apiece for four players, light and percussion” (“Quad”, p. 451).The ‘playlet’ combines players 1, 2, 3 and 4’s movements in a puz-zle of letters, lights, colours and noise. The percussion sounds areinterrupted in between the combinations in order to allow the on-ly human sound in the whole play to be heard – the shuffling offootsteps. The four players each produce different footsteps. Thisdetail accentuates the exact point where Beckett significantly dif-fers from the mechanical theatre of the Italian Futurists. Eventhough Beckett seems cognizant of and intrigued by all the possi-bilities of the mechanical theatre, the geometric shapes in his later‘playlets’ never take over. The human element, in all its frail di-versity and fallibility, as opposed to the mechanized world, is al-ways present. Despite the “gowns reaching to [the] ground, cowlshiding faces [...] players as alike in build as possible [...] sex in-different” (“Quad”, p. 453), the palpable diversity of the humanelement is more audible than the uniformity of the mechanicalworld. And while the letters standing for the courses to be walkedcombine all four points of the quad, the central letter E at thepoint of intersection of the two diagonals seems unreachable –



perhaps as unfathomable as the quintessential essence that keepshumanity battling against all the odds?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, then, mechanizationin the theatre created entirely new forms of representation, appar-ently perfect in their automatism, while also bringing new cate-gories of sound, nonsense, and noise produced by mechanizedpowers that vastly exceed the human. Beckett makes use of all theabove but, unlike the Futurists, he underscores the fact that, despitehuman inability and fallibility, this same frail humanity dispels anybelief in the perfection of mechanization. In this major dichotomylies the difference between pre-WWI avant-guerre and the last out-post of post-WWII avant-garde. Marinetti’s theatre might indeedhave laid the foundations of the Beckettian theatrical aesthetic.However, while Beckett’s later drama, “Quad” in particular, seemsto point towards its possible Futurist origins, it also accentuates theunderlying epistemological gulf separating the two.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 Chris -tiana J. Taylor (editor), 1979, Futurism. Politics, Painting and Per-formance, Umi Research, Ann Arbor.

Taylor, Christiana J. (editor), 1979, Futurism. Politics, Painting andPerformance, Umi Research, Ann Arbor.



Criticism

Arndt, Michael J., 1999, “Theatre at the Centre of the Core. Technol-ogy as a Lever in Theatre Pedagogy”, in Stephen A. Schrum (edi-tor), 1999, Theatre in Cyberspace, Peter Lang, New York, pp. 65-84.

Berghaus, Günter, 1998, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944, Claren-don Press, Oxford.

Calvino, Italo, 1960, “Il mare dell’oggettività”, in Il Menabò, 2, 1960,also in Italo Calvino, 1980, Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteraturae società, Einaudi, Torino, pp. 39-45.

Idem, 1962, “La sfida al labirinto”, in Il Menabò, 5, 1962, also in Cal-vino, 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, Uni-versity of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London.

Dixon, Steve, Futurism-e-visited, http://art.ntu.ac.uk/dpa (last ac-cessed May 30, 2008).

Drucker, Johanna, 1994, The Visible Word. Experimental Typographyand Modern Art 1909-1923, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Erlich, Viktor, 1965, Russian Formalism. History, Doctrine, Yale Uni-versity Press, New Haven 1981.

Essif, Les, 1998, “The Concentrated (Empty) Image behind the Frag-mented Story in Beckett’s Late Plays”, in Essays in Theatre, XVII1, 1998, pp. 15-32.

Esslin, Martin, 1961, The Theatre of the Absurd, Penguin, Har-mondsworth 1968 [revised and enlarged edition].

Fletcher, John, 1964, “Beckett’s Verse. Influences and Parallels”, inThe French Review, XXXVII 3, 1964, pp. 320-331.

Gassner, John, 1954, Theatre in Our Times, Crown Publishers, NewYork.

Goldberg, RoseLee, 1979, Performance Art. From Futurism to the Pre-sent, Thames and Hudson, London & New York.

Gorelik, Mordecai, 1962, New Theatres for Old, E. P. Dutton, NewYork.

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.




Kirby, Michael, 1971, Futurist Performance, PAJ Publications, NewYork.

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, Avantguerre, and the Language of Rupture, The University of ChicagoPress, Chicago.

Picchione, John, 2004, The New Avant-Garde. Theoretical Debate andPoetic Practices, University of Toronto, Toronto.

Pinottini, Marzio, 1979, L’Estetica del Futurismo. Revisioni storiogra-fiche, Bulzoni, Roma.

Puchner, Martin, 2002, “Manifesto=Theatre”, in Theatre Journal, LIV3, 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 Uni-

versity Press, New York.Uhlmann, Anthony, 2006, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image,

Cambridge University Press, New York.


Breathing the VoidDavide 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 acceler-ation after his early experimentation with radio plays, whichmarks new boundaries in his universe. These pages aim at demon-strating the extent to which Beckett’s new poetic horizon, i.e. thehorizon of “dramaticules” and “short proses”, originates througha constant dialogue with the Romantic tradition. I will argue infavour of a possible postmodernist outcome in Beckett’s works, aresult of the reworking of one of the most powerful Romanticmyths, that of Prometheus.

After the first radio plays (from All That Fall to “Words and Mu-sic”), Beckett engages with his “mental theatre”, a play performedin the dark, in which the mind is populated by indistinct voices. Thedialogue is reinvented in a monodramatic tone – rather in the sameway as in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) the self had fragmented intothree voices that the protagonist could barely recognize as his own.As in Romantic monodrama, Beckett’s late plays undergo a radicalprocess of formal interiorization, in which the boundary betweenexternal and internal space gradually fades, becoming indefinable.Unlike his nineteenth century predecessors, who had been unableto move away from traditional stage setting conventions, Beckettdiscovered, through the radio, the enormous possibilities offeredby the void: “I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which hasbeen through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space”


(quoted in Knowlson 1996, p. 477). This new space acquires ex-plicit Miltonic connotations in Happy Days and in The Unnamable.In Happy Days Winnie (whose memory unreliably quotes poeticfragments as she strains to retrieve them) ironically calls on the“Holy Light”, which appears in the opening of the third canto ofParadise Lost. However, while in Milton’s poetics the eyes of a po-et could still open to the ken of vision despite the Fall, in Beckett’splay the “hellish sun” (Happy Days, p. 147) blinds Winnie, con-demning her to recalling memories. In Beckett’s new space, theboundary between light and shadow is the first to fall, with an in-version in meaning: while Krapp is worried by the darkness aroundhim, for the characters of “Play” (1963) darkness represents theonly condition of relief (see Worth 2001, pp. 42-45). Paralyzed,moulded into the earth and blinded by the light, Winnie turns tosong for relief:

How often I have said, in evil hours, Sing now, Winnie, sing yoursong, there is nothing else for it, and did not. [Pause.] Could not.[Pause.] No, like the thrush, or bird of dawning, with no thought ofbenefit, to oneself or anyone else.

(Happy Days, p. 155)

In the progressive and unstoppable obscuring of the body, thevoice survives, ensuring pathos and breaking the narrative pro-gression. At the same time it allows speech to start again. Thevoice proves in fact to be the most enigmatic and fascinating in-vention of Beckett’s theatre. It has been acknowledged as“Samuel Beckett’s most profound literary creation” (Ackerleyand Gontarski, 2004, p. 607).

In perfect continuity with the tradition of monodrama, fromHappy Days onwards the gradual establishing of immobility is ac-companied by an increasing emphasis on the lyric element: it isnot without reason that Enoch Brater uses the definitions of“Monodrama” or “Performance Poem” (Brater 1987, p. 17) re-spectively for “A Piece of Monologue” (1979) and “Rockaby”(1982). With the assistance of the Romantics, Beckett interpretsand reverses the old Miltonic opposition between the flight of themind and the reification of the body.

His paradise is in fact a perfect, symmetrical inversion of the



Promethean paradise. In order to outline its boundaries and fea-tures, 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 in-fernal palace which emerges from the earth. Here Satan meets therebel angels after his eviction from Paradise (Milton, Paradise Lost,I, vv. 710-717). In The Unnamable, the narrator identifies with Sa-tan from the very beginning: “For I am obliged to assign a begin-ning to my residence here, if only for the sake of clarity. Hell itself,although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer” (p. 295). In TheUnnamable the narrator wishes to occupy the centre of both stageand narration, though the position is irreparably lost: “I like tothink I occupy the centre, but nothing is less certain” (p. 295). Heis located away from the centre of creation, as Satan is after the de-feat1. The days of the Promethean flight are over, the body is rei-fied: “But the days of sticks are over, here I can count on my bodyalone, my body incapable of the smallest movement and whosevery eyes can no longer close as they once could” (p. 295).

Pandemonium, in Milton, stands for a still unconquerablekingdom, a shelter that offers an escape to the imagination. Theinfernal palace of The Unnamable, on the other hand, is an en-closed, “windowless” space:

I found myself in a kind of vast yard or campus, surrounded by highwalls, its surface an amalgam of dirt and ashes, and this seemed sweet tome after the vast and heaving wastes I had traversed, if my informationwas correct. I almost felt out of danger! At the centre of this enclosurestood a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes.

(The Unnamable, p. 317)

D. Crosara. Breathing the Void 115

1 “As far removed from God and light of heav’n / As from the centre thriceto th’utmost pole”. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, vv. 73-74.


Milton’s Satan is allowed to leave his kingdom and find a newinterior momentum: he can even imagine controlling Chaos. Hishuge residence metaphorically represents the flight of the mind,the search for a boundless imagination. Beckett goes in the oppo-site direction: the expansive motion of Satan becomes a contrac-tion, an inward movement centred around a fragmented self. Thatis why The Unnamable’s “rotunda” becomes a blind prison, aplace that witnesses the failure of the Promethean ascent2. Theflight around the earth’s orbit is resolved in a reflexive movementleading to the dismemberment of the body:

At the particular moment I am referring to, I mean when I took my-self 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 decaylends colour to this view, perhaps I had left my leg behind in the Pa-cific, yes, no perhaps about it, I had, somewhere off the coast of Javaand its jungles red with rafflesia stinking of carrion, no, that’s the In-dian Ocean, what a gazeteer I am, no matter, somewhere round here.


Beckett’s narrator shares with Satan his high position and hisroyal attributes: he3 owns a crown and a “stick or pole”4, he feels the“imploring gaze” of his “delegates” (The Unnamable, p. 298) downbelow. Despite these similarities the Beckettian narrator “hardly re-calls” the Pandemonium he had left in order to challenge the cre-ator. His visionary power resides in a collapse of vision. As a resultthe tragedy of creation becomes the tragedy of an uncertain voiceand of an indefinable body (i.e. a body that can only be definedthrough a negative, in absentia). On the cosmogony of The Unnam-able Beckett superimposes that of Paradise Lost, because this allowshim to place his characters in a new dimension, a sempiternal hell il-luminated 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 beingindefinable.

4 Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 300. In the same passage the narrator uses thewords “javelin” and “sword”. Milton refers to Satan’s mighty “spear”. See Mil-ton, Paradise Lost, I, vv. 292-296.


2. The Temple of Moneta

Despite his juvenile rejection of the “ineluctable gangrene of Ro-manticism” (Proust, p. 547), in his mature years Beckett shows anintense affinity with Keats’s poetics. Keats and Beckett share thesame interest in Dante’s Comedy and in Shakespeare’s King Lear.They assign a similar role to art and the artist: Beckett chooses thepath of “impotence” and “ignorance”5, while Keats considers thepoet “the most unpoetical of any thing in existence”6. In particu-lar, their confrontation with Milton leads them to take convergentpaths.

Keats tried to emulate the great Miltonic model in Hyperion andin The Fall of Hyperion7, where he sought to reproduce the lan-guage of Milton and the imagery of Paradise Lost. However, Mil-ton’s authority became suffocating, and Keats was forced to aban-don the project. Milton’s language expresses a world that can nolonger be portrayed with the same strategies. His poetry, thoughthe expression of a theocentric universe, is wholly vertical and pro-ceeds in impetus and explosions: he transcends space and time, andflies like an eagle from paradise to the abyss. On the other hand,Keats derives from his “agon” with the Miltonic “muse” an entire-ly horizontal space, made of noiseless falls, of supine figures almostfused with rocks and earth, the scenario of Happy Days and of TheUnnamable. The “rotunda” is one with the temple of Moneta.

In The Fall of Hyperion the poet painstakingly ascends thesteps that lead him to the altar of the goddess, but the only reve-


5 “I’m working with impotence, ignorance”. Beckett, interview with IsraelShenker (Shenker 1956, p. 10).

6 “A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has noidentity – 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 po-etical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; noidentity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures”. Keats, Let-ter to Richard Woodhouse, 27th October 1818 (in Keats 2003, p. 547).

7 Hyperion was composed largely between the end of September and 1st De-cember 1818, when Keats’s brother Tom died. After a few additions and ad-justments the project was eventually abandoned in 1819. The Fall of Hyperionwas started in July 1819 on the Isle of Wight, almost completed by the end ofSeptember 1819 (when Keats announced to Reynolds his “defeat” in the agonwith Milton), and was possibly revised in December 1819.


lation, here, is his own mortality. Soon abandoning the idea of any“progress” or progression in poetry, Keats understood, as Beck-ett did, that suffering is an inevitable stage in the comprehensionof reality. Apollo no longer marks the advent of a new age in po-etry: the gods are all fallen, petrified in body and sight. Keats haslost the power to express the rebirth of poetry. Yet the vision mustbe endlessly sought after, though it constantly vanishes. His an-swer to the impasse is typically Beckettian: once the temple’s laststep is reached, the poet raises the veil, looks into the face of thegoddess and blurs the distinction between subject and object:

Half closed, and visionless entire they seem’dOf 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 andnon-being. This reification, however, rather than eliminating thevision, pushes the end forward. For both Keats and Beckett stasisand indolence become a generative void, a shipwreck that opensup a relationship with the Other.

3. The “cabin”, or “eye”

In Beckett’s imaginaire Proserpina progressively replaces Prome -theus. The woman of Ill Seen Ill Said (1981)8 is perhaps the mostsignificant reincarnation of this passage. Dressed in black, withlong white hair, Proserpina moves from her “cabin” towards anarid “zone of stones” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 54). As suggested in thetitle, this short prose work focuses on the themes of perceptionand the opacity of the word. One wonders whether the itineraryis 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 SeenIll 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 ditcame out a few months earlier, between October 1979 and January 1981. Thereare significant differences between the texts, which cannot be discussed here.


Ill Seen Ill Said: an eye that “breathes, devours, digests and nar-rates” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 270), to such an extent thatthe action of seeing merges with that of writing9. However, the eye-lids 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): hisuniverse is performing the last metamorphosis, with the imageswallowing the imagination. Unlike the “glittering eye” of Co-leridge, the eye of the late Beckett is a “gluttoning eye” that ulti-mately 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 thewhiteness of two empty orbits reflecting a starless sky; the “black-ness” (p. 81) of sight now obtained is a mirror image of the world.Beckett’s return to Milton no longer comes about through Par-adise Lost, but through Samson Agonistes, Milton’s last work. The“woman” of Ill Seen Ill Said experiences the same condition asSamson: the loss of “inner vision”, the paradox of a “livingdeath”10. As prisoners of their own body, as if in a tomb, bothcharacters experience the “real darkness of the body”11. The Mil-tonic hero makes the theatre of his last exhibition collapse on thePhilistines, while Beckett’s dying woman sees, in the “slumberouscollapsion” (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 daywhen the curtain closes. [...] Farewell to farewell” (p. 83).

Beckett urges literature towards a “vanishing point”12 whichis never fully reached. His writings acquire the void and silence as


9 See for example p. 69: “The eye has changed. And its drivelling scribe”.10 “To live a life half dead, a living death, / And buried; but O yet more mis-

erable! / 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 thedeathly language of mirrors. The latter listens endlessly to a solipsist drone.Words appear in either case on the page only to declare themselves invalid. Wehave crossed some invisible line; and stringless lyres now strum for a world with-out men. Post-modern literature moves, in nihilistic play or mystic transcen-dence, toward the vanishing point” (Hassan 1971, p. 23).


fundamental ontological categories, and as such they have beeninherited by postmodernist authors, for whom, as for Beckett, itis perfectly possible to survive by breathing the void: “One mo-ment more. One last. Grace to breath that void. Know Happi-ness” (p. 83).

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 andFaber, London 1990, pp. 135-168.

Ill Seen Ill Said, 1981, in Nadia Fusini (a cura di), 1994, Mal vu mal ditdi Samuel Beckett nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett. Einaudi, Tori-no (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


Brater, Enoch, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in theTheater, Oxford University Press, New York.

Hassan, Ihab, 1971, “Prelude: Lyre Without Strings”, in The Dis-memberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, 1971,The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1982.




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 TheComplete 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 – alifelong passion which emerged “even before Beckett lived at 6Clare Street in Dublin, next door to the National Gallery of Ire-land” (Arikha 2006, p. 145)2. A friend of painters, museum direc-tors and art merchants, he collected fetishistically the art cata-logues which “accompanied him from painting to painting”(Arikha 2006, p. 144). As for his knowledge of art history, he notonly wrote important works of art criticism3, but he also gave cor-

1 An Italian version of this essay was first published in Cavecchi and Patey2007 (pp. 235-262). This volume collects the results of a two-month Beckett Pro-ject concluded by a final Conference (30 November – 1 December 2006), bothorganized by Caroline Patey with The Department of Modern Languages of theUniversity of Milan and in collaboration with the Piccolo Teatro. My essay istherefore the result of an exchange with scholars and operators involved in theBeckett Project. Beckett’s portrait as it appeared in my essay and in the pages ofthe book is remarkably multiple and multilingual. As a matter of fact, throughoutthe volume particular attention has been paid to the visual and to the complexsystem of artistic references which mutely invade Beckett’s stage, texts and mean-ing. Thus, the graphic images that precede each section have been conceived asthresholds to the themes approached in the hope they would somehow con-tribute their own signs to the meaning and rhythm of the written words, as evi-dence of Samuel Beckett’s intimate knowledge of art and his personal friendshipwith artists, obscure and famous, and of his lifelong passion for museums. Artistswere important to Beckett, and are crucial to the appreciation of his work becausewhat Bram van Velde, Richard Serra and Giuseppe Penone – among others – as-sert forcefully in their paintings is precisely the essentiality of sign and the im-possibility of sense, a combination dear to Samuel Beckett whose privileged in-terlocutors they were once and remain today. For more details on the volume seehttp://users.unimi.it/sidera/libraria.php (last accessed May 30, 2009).

2 Museums are intertwined with Beckett’s work in various modes. SeeCavecchi 2009.

3 Beckett’s art criticism has been successively collected in Cohn 1983.


rect assessment on some wrong attributions of paintings in the mu-seum he visited, as “remembered” by his friend Avigdor Arikha(Arikha 2006, p. 144). His work influenced many artists with verydifferent styles, from minimalist painters to film, video and instal-lation artists and it is so remarkable from a visual point of view thatJohn Haynes and biographer James Knowlson consider him “animportant visual artist” (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 43).

The idea of imagining a museum devoted to Beckett’s dra-matic works stems, moreover, from other considerations. On theone hand, the museum introduces one to the “theatre of memo-ry” (Rodríguez Gago 2003, p. 114) – a motif at the core of Beck-ett’s work, characterised by flickering and unreliable memoriesand almost pathological amnesia, where “forgetting is a fact of lifethat Beckett turns into a treasure hoard, connecting it by finethreads to acts of remembering” (Worth 2001, p. 98). On the oth-er hand, the idea for a museum stems from the dominance of thevisual image in his drama. It is well-known that his beloved paint-ings and sculptures had an impact on both the genesis and theform of his own theatrical imagery and influenced his relation tothe stage, too. It is common knowledge that Beckett was veryclosely involved with the staging of his plays from the very outsetof his career as a dramatist and that he acted as an advisor to sev-eral experienced English and French directors. Martin Esslin ob-serves that “his directing is a form of painting” (Esslin 1987, p.47) and actors who have been directed by him describe his con-stant preoccupation with the visual image. When interpretingMay in Footfalls, Billie Whitelaw confessed that she felt “like amoving, musical Edvard Munch painting”4 and she comparedBeckett’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,

M. Cavecchi. Samuel Beckett, Visual Artist 123

4 Billie Whitelaw interviewed in Journal of Beckett Studies, n. 3, Summer1978, p. 89. According to Knowlson, when Beckett directed Billie Whitelaw inthe role of May in Footfalls at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976 “herposture, as she paced to and fro across the stage, with her arms tightly foldedacross her body, was carefully shaped to echo that of the painting of the Virginof the Annunciation by Antonello da Messina”, which Beckett had seen in Mu-nich’s Alte Pinakotek in 1937 (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 74).


because as fast as he draws a line in, he gets out that enormous India-rubber 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 thefield of the visual arts, I wish to explore the meshing in Beckettbetween visual and verbal, with particular reference to that sec-tion 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 theother in the various texts; chairs come to overcrowd the Beckettianstage in a way reminiscent of Ionesco’s Les chaises. These chairs areat the centre of the action, as in the case of the rocking-chair in“Rockaby”, Hamm’s wheelchair in Endgame, and the wheelchairwhich B “propels by means of a pole” in “Rough for Theatre I”;they are the folding stools carried by Lucky in Waiting for Godotand by the blind beggar in “Rough for Theatre I”; at other timesthey are “as little visible as possible”, as the bench-like seat in Comeand Go. Like Ionesco’s, all these chairs are “real, mostly woodenpieces of furniture that, though unbilled, do appear memorably[...] performing with wit and precision” (Duckworth 1972, pp. 49-50). However visible or invisible, it is obviously not by chance thatchairs should appear as a recurring visual motif in several of Beck-ett’s plays5; on the contrary, Beckett’s chairs seem to play a vital andcomplex poetical function and to determine most of the play-wright’s textual and theatrical practice.

First of all, the importance of chairs is attested to by the way theyare the last objects visible on stage. Indeed, chairs, stools, arm-chairs and benches become extremely meaningful because, on a


5 See also the numerous chairs in Beckett’s novels (such as the rocking chairin Murphy, the toilet seat in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Mr Hack-ett’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 ofa certain importance.


bare stage, they become central to the dramatic action and hold thespectator’s attention. They can be considered as the “remains” (seeEssif 2001) left on stage after Beckett’s “shrinking” (Proust): aprocess similar to the “arte del levare” (art of removal) carried outby a sculptor working on raw material, as performed by Michelan-gelo, whose work Beckett knew well, but also as performed by hisfriend Alberto Giacometti. Both he and Giacometti had an inter-est in an existential void, and collaborated on Jean-Louis Barrault’sEn attendant Godot at the Odéon in 19616.

Despite being common and unpretentious items and often theonly props on the stage, Beckett’s seating devices embody a richsyntax of intentions and strategies and are loaded with meaningwithin a poetics that rejects the tyranny of words in favour of amore visual dimension. To all these chairs Beckett paid a spas-modic and always increasing attention, as confirmed by his stagedirections which became more and more detailed throughout hiscareer. Thus, if in Waiting for Godot there is just “a folding stool”(Waiting for Godot, p. 23) without any other details, the rockingchair of “Rockaby” has to be “pale wood highly polished to gleamwhen rocking”, with “footrest. Vertical back. Rounded inwardcurving arms to suggest embrace” (“Rockaby”, p. 433); the stagedirection is quite long even though the seat should be “as little vis-ible as possible”, as in Come and Go (p. 356). As a director, Beck-ett’s focus on properties and objects, including chairs and stoolsbecomes even more obsessive.

Endgame, a play where the leading character and a chair are in-separable, provides a very clear example. Hamm’s “armchair oncastors” – or “fauteuil à roulettes” in the French version (Fin de par-tie, p. 11) – has caused trouble not only for its blind owner (seeEndgame, pp. 96, 104, 113), but also for the various directors who


6 According to Jean Martin, Giacometti’s tree became a special emblem ofthe production: “This tree of Giacometti was so wonderful. It was made of plas-ter and thin wire and it was very flexible. Every night Sam and Giacometti camebefore the beginning of the play. Giacometti would change the position of a twiga little bit and then Sam would come later and he would change it. It was just asif it was the most important thing. And in fact it was a very important thing youknow” (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 80). Beckett’s work has often beencompared to Giacometti’s. See Megged 1985; Peppiatt 2001, p. 16; Coulter2006, pp. 27-29; Pinotti 2006, pp. 263-280.



have staged the play. Hamm’s wheelchair, in fact, has varied con-siderably from production to production. In the original Fin de par-tie, which opened in 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre in London,director Roger Blin played Hamm as a very authoritative and self-ish character, who enjoys absolute power of life and death over hisparents and Clov (see Chabert 1986, pp. 164-166); Blin, who wasalso the director of the play, was so interested in Hamm’s imperialappearance (see Chabert 1986, p. 165) that he deliberately under-lined Hamm’s similarity with King Lear and, as a matter of fact,“whatever was regal in the text, imperious in the character, was tak-en as Shakespearean” (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 171).This is why he asked set designer Jacques Noël for an oval scenog-raphy where he placed Hamm, in foul but regal dresses (a bathrobeof crimson velvet with strips of fur) seated on a fauteuil à roulettes“evoking a Gothic cathedral” (p. 171). According to Blin, Beckettnever opposed this scenic idea, but when the production moved tothe Studio des Champs-Elysées in Paris, the regal aspects of the setand costumes were played down at Beckett’s suggestion and thethrone-like chair was changed to a simple wooden one on wheels(p. 171). Moreover, when in 1967 Beckett directed Endspiel at theSchiller Theater in Berlin, he paid even greater attention toHamm’s “mit Röllchen versehenen Sesse”7. According to MichaelHaerdter’s notes in his rehearsal diary notebook, the Irish play-wright and director brought some major changes both in text andstage action as well as in the visual realisation of Hamm’s chair.Beckett was not at all pleased with the “quite massive effect” of Ma-tias’ armchair8 and therefore he worked a lot with the stage de-signer in order to create an armchair that was less “theatre-like”and characterised by “puritanical simplicity”9.

7 Endspiel, translated by Elmar Tophoven, was published in 1957.8 “Saturday, 2 September. Rehearsal stage. Hamm’s armchair has acquired a

wide footrest and large rollers set in their own suspension. The effect is quitemassive; 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 tobe simpler in Beckett’s opinion. As a whole, the black-brown piece is function-al 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).



In the light of the many changes it underwent in the course ofthe various performances, Hamm’s chair seems particularly fit torepresent in visual terms the instability of a text which has under-gone considerable changes in productions throughout the world.

Hamm’s chairs

Each Beckettian chair, in its own way, conflates autobiographicalexperiences and intellectual and artistic adventures. In this re-spect, Hamm’s “armchair on castors” and its net of intertextualrelations seem to be particularly revealing. On the one hand, it re-calls the various chairs in the Becketts’ house: from the wheelchairof Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair, which is alluded to by Hamm’swheelchair10, to the rocking chair of “little Granny”, echoed in“Rockaby” (Knowlson 1996, p. 662). On the other hand, it is rem-iniscent of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jacobsz Trip – a painting Beck-ett repeatedly admired at the National Gallery in London andwhich Knowlson describes as “a pre-modernist Hamm in Beck-ett’s Endgame” (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 68), and of Al-berto Giacometti’s studies for seated figures – his Diego seated(1948) in particular, a painting framed by a “closed scene” whichis very similar to Endgame’s claustrophobic setting (see Worth2001, pp. 32-42). Moreover, Hamm’s armchair resembles thethrones belonging to Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. Accord-ing to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who attended the London pre-miere, Hamm is “a sightless old despot robed in scarlet” who has“more than a passing affinity with Francis Bacon’s painting ofshrieking cardinals”11 – an opinion which might have been influ-

10 In her memories, Today We Will Only Gossip, Lady Beatrice Glenavy, agood friend of the Becketts’, suggested that Hamm was modelled on Beckett’saunt, Cissie Sinclair: “When I read Endgame I recognised Cissie in Hamm. Theplay was full of allusions to things in her life, even the old telescope which TomCasement had given me and I had passed to her to amuse herself by watchingships in Dublin Bay or sea-birds feeding on the sands when the tide was out” (inKnowlson 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 olddespot robed in scarlet, has more than a passing affinity with Francis Bacon’spaintings of shrieking cardinals. [...] The play is an allegory about authority, an



enced by the fact that Francis Bacon’s paintings were on exhibi-tion at the Hanover Gallery at the time of the Royal Court open-ing12. It might then be useful to add a short gloss to the chapterdedicated to the “elective affinities” between the two artists (Fusi-ni 1994)13. As a matter of fact, Hamm’s armchair on castors ac-quires a new meaning in the light of Bacon’s blending of thethrone in Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X with Pio XII’ssedia gestatoria in his own series of shrieking popes. Similar topope Innocent X, King Hamm has been stripped of that hierar-chical and spiritual authority the Pope embodied, and turned in-to a man living in a metaphysical void. Bacon’s image of the sediagestatoria overlaps therefore with the Beckettian image of thearmchair/throne where Hamm sits and which Clov uses to takehis blind master for “little turn[s]” around the room (Endgame,p. 104). This armchair/throne/sedia gestatoria invites us to pay at-tention to the theme of movement (or, better, of denied move-ment) at the core of Beckett’s dramaturgy, and of Waiting forGodot and Endgame in particular. As Beckett himself summed up:“in Godot, the audience wonders if Godot will ever come; inEndgame, it wonders if Clov will ever leave”14. In other wordswhether he will “come and go”.

Rocking time

In most of Beckett’s plays, the stage action is organised aroundchairs which, in fact, are closely connected with the theme of move-ment and immobility. Endgame is once again certainly one of themost significant plays in this respect. It seems significant that when

attempt to dramatise the neurosis that makes men love power” (in Graver andFederman 1979, p. 165).

12 Bacon’s exhibition in Paris took place at the Galerie Rive Droite in Feb-ruary 1957; this was followed by another exhibition at the Hanover Gallery inLondon (21 March-26 April 1957). Pope I, Pope II and Pope III had already beenexhibited at the Hanover Gallery in December 1951, while Three Studies for Fig-ures at the Base of a Crucifixion caused an outcry when exhibited in 1945 at theLefèvre 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.


Beckett directed Endspiel for the Schiller-Theater-Werkstatt, hefocused on the movement around Hamm’s chair, greatly empha-sizing Clov’s attempts to move away from Hamm and his chair andto reach the doorway (see McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, pp. 195-201). As Beckett explained during the rehearsal, Clov has only onewish: “to get back to his kitchen – that must be always evident, justlike Hamm’s constant effort to stop him. This tension is an essen-tial motif of the play” (p. 220). As a matter of fact, it is well-knownthat Hamm and Clov confront each other in an imaginary chessmatch, with king/Hamm defined by Beckett himself as “a king inthis chess match lost-from-the-start”, “a poor player [...] trying topostpone the unavoidable end” (p. 228). Thus, all the characters actmeaninglessly within a paradigm of impeded and/or limited moveswhich is also strongly characterised by a syntax of negation. Hammand Clov in particular are affected by opposite and symmetric phys-ical difficulties, since the latter “can’t sit” and the former “can’tstand” (Endgame, p. 97), while Hamm’s parents are imprisoned intheir dustbins. Besides, Endgame presents a whole catalogue of ob-jects which are no longer available and, among them, there are (itcannot be chance) bicycle wheels (p. 96). Hamm, always worriedabout his armchair’s castors, confesses his need of “a proper wheel-chair. With big wheels. Bicycles wheels!” (p. 104), while Clov re-minds 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 Beck-ett’s fiction and drama to the point that, perhaps, one could evenimagine a gallery of bicycles (see Menzies 1980; Kennedy 2006).

The imagery of the wheel plays a very important part in thescript and in the performance since it seems to combine, both vi-sually and verbally, the motif of limited movement with the oth-er recurring motif of circularity – a theme, this latter, which seemsto obsess Hamm (constantly worried about his being “right in thecentre”: Endgame, p. 104), but which also marks the dramatictext and not least its narrative structure. The motif of circularityis at the core of the play and Beckett himself explained to theGerman actors that “there are no accidents in Endgame, it is allbuilt upon analogies and repetitions” (in McMillan and Fehsen-feld 1988, p. 212). The stage imagery reinforces this idea: Clov’s



reiterated threat to leave is rejected by Hamm, and Clov’s persis-tent inclination to move towards the door is doomed to a constantreturn towards the man in the wheel-chair. As with almost every-thing else in the play, there is an attempt to reach a conclusion byundoing what has been done, “but the process of countermotionand cancellation brings no finality. At the end of this movementHamm and Clov are as they were – it is as if they had never movedat all” (p. 199).

Besides, it is no chance that Hamm’s castors offer an oppor-tunity to reflect on the passing of time. It is when Clov refuses toget the oil can for Hamm (since, as he says, he has already oiledthe wheelchair’s castors the previous day) that the two charactersstart arguing about the meaning of the word “yesterday”. AtHamm’s exasperated question (“Yesterday! What does thatmean? Yesterday!”), Clov explodes and gives a confused butmeaningful explanation which reflects how impatient he feelsabout measuring time: “That means that bloody awful day, longago, before this bloody awful day” (Endgame, p. 113) – an atti-tude he shares with Pozzo in Waiting for Godot:

Pozzo: (suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me withyour accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that notenough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, oneday I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one daywe 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 cir-cularity of Hamm’s castors recalls in visual terms that in Endgame’suniverse time is not linear and therefore measurable15, but rathercyclic and circular. The only possible way for all these characters tomeasure time is through the articulation of their memories and re -collections; it is a kind of “psychic time”, spoilt however by thecharacters’ defective memories (Elam 1996, p. 722).

Hamm’s armchair on castors, like many other Beckettian “mo-bile chairs” (including rocking chairs), amounts therefore to a


15 Significantly enough, in Beckett’s plays watches and clocks are either bro-ken or used in various ways; they are never used to measure the passing of time.


highly suggestive image which in an effective way sums up and de-picts visually the play’s various motifs. Because of their paradox-ical nature, all these chairs, which are mobile but never go any-where, well represent the characters’ existential stalemate andBeckett’s poetic paradox: the tensions between repetition and di-versity, between remembering and forgetting, between the im-possibility 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 in-troduces Endgame’s motif of the limited and difficult movementin terms of clownerie. Faced with this familiar object, Pozzo con-fesses his problems with movement and his need for help just tobe 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 butdoes not know how to, and Estragon’s offer to help17, brings tomind the comic gags in the music-hall, slapstick comedy, or circus– all forms of entertainment Beckett was very fond of. In this con-text it is important to note that it is exactly this folding stool thatinvites 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 com-mon and seem to share a similar melancholic approach to theworld of the circus, where they both underline the aspects of wait-


16 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 goabout 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).


ing and loneliness. Yeats’s interest in circus iconography and insolitary and marginalised characters, which is clearly expressed ina painting such as A Clown among the People (1932), is echoed inmany of Beckett’s plays; one of them is surely En attendant Godot,which Roger Blin would have liked to direct in a semi-circular setlike a circus ring (see Aslan 1988, p. 27; McMillan and Fehsenfeld1988, p. 68) – a suggestion Beckett rejected as too obvious (seeMcMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 68). But Didi, Gogo, Pozzoand Lucky also recall Yeats’s The Two Travellers (1942), hangingin the Tate Gallery in London, which Beckett probably saw in theartist’s studio on his return to Ireland in 1945, and Men of thePlain, which he could have seen in 1947 or 1948 (see Knowlson1996, p. 379). Thus, far from being just a mere prop for clowning,used to make the audience laugh, Lucky’s stool comes to stand forthe travellers’s folding stool, and raises the issue of Beckett’s“Irishness”. Indeed, both Beckett’s play and Yeats’s paintings un-doubtedly spring out of an Irish background and it is most likelythat Beckett shared with his friend an interest in “the Ireland ofthe dispossessed, of the landless labourers and the workers, of themarginal people, the ‘tinkers’ and tramps, the rogues and dere-licts, the ballad singers and roving musicians” (Lloyd 2006, p. 53)– precisely that Ireland that Jack B. Yeats got to know very wellwhen he travelled with Synge in Connemara and Mayo during thesummer of 190518. The folding stool turns therefore into a perfecttravelling companion for people on the road and it must surely beof some interest to an author like Beckett, unceasingly on themove from language to language. It can also be intended as a vi-sual metaphor “of the now-rootless Anglo-Irish, neither Irish, norEnglish, but caught wandering across the no-man’s-land betweenthe two cultures” (Kiberd 1995 [1996, p. 537]; see also McMul-lan 2004).

On the road where the action of “Rough for Theatre I” takesplace we find a different existential uneasiness, which once againfinds expression through trouble with movement. In this short


18 In 1905 Jack B. Yeats and John Millington Synge set out on their Man-chester Guardian commission to write and draw something of the life of the peo-ple in the areas of greatest hardship and distress in the West of Ireland. SeeArnold 1998, pp. 133-151.


piece, heralding Endgame, two chairs stand central insomuch asthe two men are condemned to sit on them by an ineluctable des-tiny: the blind beggar A’s folding-stool and the wheelchair whichthe crippled vagrant B “propels by means of a pole” (“Rough forTheatre I”, p. 227). A’s and B’s routes and lives intersect and, fora while, their loneliness seems to find some relief, since B offersto join forces “till death ensue” (p. 227), his sight complementingthe other one’s mobility:

B: Of course if you wish me to look about me I shall. And if youcare 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 theconstraints imposed by their seating devices and enjoy the free-dom they are denied. A comfort belonging to an unspecified past– if we are to believe them –, when they had women willing to lookafter them and to offer them a safe alternative to these tyrannicalseats.

A: [...] I used to feel twilight gather and make myself ready. I putaway fiddle and bowl and had only to get to my feet, when she tookme 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 eveningand back into it again in the morning and to push me as far as the cor-ner 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 – eventhough in this case, far from being despotic and predatory, theembrace seems to be motherly. Besides, in “Rockaby” too thewoman’s recorded voice evokes Beckett’s aporia by opposingideas of stoppage and resumption “in the mantra-like phrase”(Ben-Zvi 2003, p. 37) “time she stopped / time she stopped / go-ing to and fro” (“Rockaby”, pp. 435, 436, 437, 442).




Motherly embrace, deathly embrace

When Beckett conceived “Rockaby”, he was once again inspiredby one of J. B. Yeats’s paintings, Sleep (1944), even though thepainting is a portrait of Yeats’s friend Victor Waddington (seeArnold 1998, pp. 314-316, 415), and not of a woman (see Knowl-son 1996, p. 663). Nonetheless, this painting of a figure “sittingby the window, with the head drooped low onto the chest, hassomething of the ambiguity of Rockaby’s closing moments”(Knowlson 1996, p. 663). As in the picture entitled Sleep, wherethe 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-chairwhose swaying is synchronized with her recorded voice (V) tellingwhat is presumably her own story, so that “a striking visualmetaphor materializes before our very eyes as we watch a poemcome to (stage) life” (Brater 1987, p. 169). When the chair stopsand the voice becomes silent, the Woman’s head droops and, likethe mother evoked by the verses, she seems to be dead:

so in the endclose of a long daywent downlet down the blind and downright downinto the old rockerand rocked rockedsaying to herselfnodone with thatthe rockerthose arms at lastsaying to the rockerrock her offstop her eyesfuck lifestop her eyesrock her offrock her off(p. 440)


“Rockaby” casts a particularly intriguing chair and one whichplays a very active role in the play; somehow, it seems to comply withWinnie who reveals in Happy Days that “things have their life”(Happy Days, p. 162). In fact, more than fifty years had passed sinceBreton wrote about the “objects’ poetic conscience” in his 1924 sur-realist manifesto (Breton 1962)19, and yet the Beckettian rockingchair seems to share the destiny of many dada and surrealist objectsand seems to come to life. It even recalls the important role playedby inanimate objects in Maeterlinck’s symbolist theatre, whichBeckett knew very well (see Rose 1989, p. 151). “Controlled me-chanically without assistance from Woman” (“Rockaby”, p. 434),the rocking-chair seems to produce its own movement and there-fore finally assumes an independent life of its own, as indeed doesanother of Beckett’s chairs, the rocking-chair in Film, whose twoholes in the headrest started “to glare” at the actor (Schneider 1969,in Film, p. 85). Thus, according to Beckett, the rocking-chair shouldappear almost motherly, with its arms “rounded inward [...] to sug-gest embrace” (“Rockaby”, p. 433). It is noteworthy that, becauseof the roundness of its arms, Woman’s rocking chair recallsMadame Roulin’s rocking chair in Vincent van Gogh’s portrait LaBerceuse, which Knowlson quotes among the pictorial sources of“Rockaby”. Beckett was very familiar with the Dutch painter: heknew Jean Leymarie’s monograph (Leymarie 1951) and despiteNazi censorship he had admired some “wonderful” van Goghs dur-ing his trip around Germany in 1936 (see Knowlson 1996, pp. 586,750; Fischer-Seidel, Fries-Dieckmann 2005). There is no doubt thatEstragon’s boots, “heels together, toes splayed”, at the beginning ofthe second act in Waiting for Godot (p. 53) evoke van Gogh’s fa-mous boots20, and one might even venture to say that the van Goghsecluded in Saint-Rémy is evoked in the mad painter described byHamm (Endgame, p. 113)21.


19 Certainly Surrealism and Dadaism were not unknown to Beckett. SeeKnowlson 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 themad painter evoked in Endgame and Albrecht Dürer (Restivo 1991, p. 176), thelandscapes described by Hamm – “All that rising corn! And there! Look! The



The feminine, motherly aspect of Beckett’s rocking-chair shouldpersuade us to analyse the play’s connection with the Dutch artist,and above all with his famous chairs. It should not be forgotten thatthe rounding arms of Madame Roulin’s chair look very much like (ifnot the same) to those of the lavish and ornate Gauguin’s Chair (Ar-les, December 1888), and that Gauguin’s Chair is always associatedwith 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 thepainter wanted the two pictures to symbolise the two artists and toexpress the differences between their personalities (see Bataille1970). In the light of his suggestion, one can assume that in “Rock-aby” as well Woman and chair come to overlap and that “thosearms” Voice speaks about (pp. 441-442) can be interpreted both asthe chair’s wooden arms and as Woman’s human arms. As the ac-tion unfolds, Beckett’s rocking chair, in fact, comes to be totallyblended with Woman in a way that recalls van Gogh’s fusion be-tween painters and chairs. It is no surprise that Woman and chairare made to share the same lighting effects: thus, “the pale wood”of the chair must be “highly polished to gleam when rocking”, whilethe woman’s jet sequins “glitter when rocking” and her “incongru-ous flimsy head-dress set askew with extravagant trimming to catchlight when rocking” (p. 433)22. While the rest of the stage is in dark-ness, Woman and chair seem to be rescued by light from forgetful-ness and death. At the same time, Woman is hugged in an embracewhich seems to keep her there forever in an image of immobility anddeath recalling the despotic seats in “Rough for Theatre I” as wellas the electric chair – an image eventually employed by director NeilJordan, 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. vanGogh, Laren) to Barques sur la plage (Arles, Juin 1888, Collection Vincent W.van Gogh, Laren): two paintings Beckett certainly knew, reproduced in Ley-marie 1951, plates 65 and 60.

22 A light effect “that perhaps echo[es] the magnificent Giorgione self-por-trait, that so captivated Beckett in Brunswick in 1937” (Haynes and Knowlson2003, p. 69).

23 Not I is part of the project Beckett on Film. 19 films x 19 directors, byMichael Colgan and Alan Moloney – Blue Angel Films, RTÉ, Channel 4, BordScannàn na hÉireann and Tirone Productions.


An invisible bench

A last section of the gallery must be dedicated to the invisiblebench in Come and Go: as the stage directions state, it is a “nar-row benchlike seat, without back, just long enough to accommo-date three figures almost touching. As little visible as possible. Itshould 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 thisdramaticule, mostly made up of silence or whispering. Thoughshort (lasting only three minutes), the action develops around thebench which seems to entertain a privileged relationship withmemory, since the three protagonists of “undeterminable age”,Flo, Vi e Ru, recall their old times seated on it. The play consistsof a symmetrical plot of apparently meaningless routines of get-ting up, leaving the stage for the darkness, returning and sittingdown again in the light. While each woman leaves the stage, theother two disclose an appalling secret about the third and eventhough the spectators cannot understand the bits of conversationsthe three women keep whispering in turn, at the end of the playthey are aware of that verdict Beckett himself confided to Jacobavan Velde: “They are ‘condemned’ all three” (in Knowlson 1996,p. 532). In its extreme concision the play is a quintessence of per-sonal and literary memories which seem to coagulate around thisinvisible bench, which surrenders its utilitarian value for the morestrictly aesthetic value of shape (see Essif 2001, p. 69). T.S. Eliot’simage of women coming and going talking of Michelangelo in TheLove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), evoked by the title, antici-pates the dynamics of returning presences and futile conversa-tions which characterise the play’s scenic movements, while Vi’sopening line echoing Macbeth – “When shall we three meetagain?” – emphasizes the mysterious and ghostly nature of thisbustle, somehow resembling the Shakespearean witches sabbath.In creating this unusual stage image Beckett drew on a store ofpersonal anecdotes as well, and in fact, autobiographical memoryinsinuates 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 in-visible bench somehow conflates with the stone lion in the schoolplayground (at Miss Wade’s) where Beckett’s cousins used to sit



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, pastand future collide and intermingle in the same highly complicat-ed 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 aboveRu’s left arm and Flo’s right arm. The three pairs of clasped hands reston the three laps.)

(Come and Go, p. 355)

As a container and a revealer of remembrances, the bench ofCome and Go declares its nature of locus memoriae (see RodríguezGago 2003, p. 114), in the wake of a hermetic-cabalistic traditioncertainly not unknown to the Beckett who read Bruno and was afriend of Joyce.

Conclusion

Far from being mere theatrical props, Beckett’s chairs, stools andbenches stand at the scenic heart of many plays. They are numer-ous and tell different stories of illness, paralysis and desperation;they are mobile chairs endowed with a movement leadingnowhere or offering the only possible embrace – motherly, lovingor deadly, frustrating and erotic. They could be considered as ametonymy of an uneasiness which seems to be the condition ofBeckett’s being.

Furthermore, invested by a long chain of echoes, cross-refer-ences and intertextuality, from the most obvious to the most com-plex and obscure, Beckett’s chairs stand as an encyclopaedic com-pendium of images, memories, references and echoes which pop-ulate Beckett’s bare stage in silence. Being different from one an-other, the chairs escape verbal language and express the aporia ofa poetic refusal to rely just on words. They are undoubtedly im-portant hieroglyphs of Beckett’s vocabulary and poetics, oscillat-ing between showing and hiding, adding and subtracting, speak-ing and remaining silent.



BIBLIOGRAPHY


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On Directing Film by Alan Schneider, 1969, Grove Press, New York.Endgame, 1958, in Endgame. A Play in One Act Followed by Act With-

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Brater, Enoch, 1986, Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context, Oxford Uni-versity 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 Move-ment”, in Ben-Zvi, 2003, Drawing on Beckett cit., pp. 35-46.

Cavecchi, Mariacristina, 2009, “From Playwriting to Curatorship. AnInvestigation into the Status of Beckett’s Stage Objects”, in Caro-line Patey and Laura Scuriatti (editors), 2009, The Writer, the Col-lection and the Museum: the Museological Practices of Literature,Peter Lang, London.

Cavecchi, Mariacristina, and Caroline Patey (a cura di), 2007, Tra lelingue, tra i linguaggi. Cent’anni di Samuel Beckett, Cisalpino, Mi-lano.

Chabert, Pierre (préparé par), 1986, Revue d’Esthétique (Samuel Beck -ett: roman, théâtre, images, acteurs, mises en scène, voix, musiques),numéro spécial hors-série, Éditions Privat, Toulouse, revised andenlarged edition 1990.

Coulter, Riann, 2006, “Introduction to the Exhibition: part 2”, inFionnuala 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, Na-tional Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Duckworth, Colin, 1972, Angels of Darkness, George Allen & Unwin,London.

Elam, Keir, 1996, “Story-time: tempo e storia nel teatro contempora-neo”, in Franco Marenco (a cura di), 1996, Storia della civiltà let-teraria inglese, vol. III, Utet, Torino, pp. 705-732.

Essif, Les, 2001, Empty Figure on an Empty Stage. The Theatre ofSamuel Beckett and His Generation, Indiana University Press,Bloomington and Indianapolis.

Esslin, Martin, 1987, “Toward the Zero of Language”, in Acheson andArthur 1987, Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, cit., pp. 34-49.

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Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett,Bloomsbury, London.

Knowlson, James, and Elizabeth (editors), 2006, Beckett Remember-ing / Remembering Beckett. Uncollected Interviews with SamuelBeckett & Memories of Those Who Knew Him, Bloomsbury, Lon-don.

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 The-atre. The Author as Practical Playwright and Director. Volume 1:From “Waiting for Godot” to “Krapp’s Last Tape”, John Calder,London.

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Oppenheim, Lois (editor), 2004, Samuel Beckett Studies, PalgraveMacmillan, London.

Restivo, Giuseppina, 1991, Le soglie del postmoderno: “Finale di parti-ta”, Il Mulino, Bologna.

Rodríguez Gago, Antonia, 2003, “The Embodiment of Memory (andForgetting) 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 Maeter-linck and Yeats to Beckett and Pinter, Unicopli, Milano.

Serpieri, Alessandro, 1996, “Oltre il moderno: Samuel Beckett”, inFranco Marenco (a cura di), 1996, Storia della civiltà letteraria in-glese, 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, Ox-ford University Press, Oxford.




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 deVincent van Gogh, in Idem, 1970, Œuvres complètes, tome I, Gal-limard, 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 In-

troduction, Victor Waddington Publications Ltd, Dublin.Peppiatt, Michael, 2001, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, Yale

University Press in association with The Sainsbury Centre for Vi-sual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, New Haven & Lon-don.

Idem, 2006, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, Yale University Press, NewHaven & London.

Pinotti, Andrea, 2007, “Soltanto l’essenziale. Beckett e Giacometti”,in Cavecchi and Patey (a cura di), 2007, Tra le lingue, tra i linguaggicit., 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 kindof presence of the former in the latter. Yet both in theoretical dis-cussions of intertextuality, and within the fields of both Beckettand biblical scholarship, the apparent simplicity of this proposi-tion has come up against significant complications. In Beckettstudies, Caselli (2005) in particular has argued that his texts tendto resist a notion that the ‘prior’ text can be thought of as a stableobject possessing pre-set meanings to be appropriated, whetheraccurately or subversively, by the author; instead, Beckett’s textsturn this hierarchy on its head and, in her argument, persistentlyconstruct different Dantes. All this contributes to the variety ofways in which, as numerous other critics have argued, repetitions,revisions, translations, addenda, notes and the like become inte-gral to this mutable Beckett canon. In the case of the Bible, simi-larly, any simple textual stability has long been in scholarly ques-tion, 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 in-tertextuality: references to and interpretations of others which be-come the site for Scriptural (and especially prophetic) authorityto be negotiated and reproduced. It is, then, characteristic bothof the Bible and the Beckett oeuvre to disrupt a sense in which ei-ther party would be a simple object presence. This is the case notonly in the structure of these agglomerations, but within Beckettand biblical texts at the level of form and content.

The vicissitudes of presence between texts are amongst theirmost marked in Beckett’s drama. If one pervasive note in readings


of his theatre has been a supposed self-sufficiency of presence onstage (paradigmatically, Robbe-Grillet identifies Godot as an ex-pression of pure Heideggerian dasein), this has been critiqued by,amongst others, Connor (1988 [2007]) and McMullan (1993) onthe grounds that this presence is necessarily predicated on a seriesof repetitions, and on what could properly be described as the in-tertextual relation between script and performance1. Here is, as itwere, 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 impossi-ble without its “inaccessible other” (“Intercessions by Denis Dev -lin”, in Cohn 1983, p. 92). My contention here is that the biblicalnarrative of Belshazzar’s feast and the writing on the wall is mo-bilised repeatedly in Beckett to draw attention to this gulf: tomount negotiations between presence and absence, script andperformance, speech and writing. The two aspects of the narra-tive that are of particular relevance are the writing itself, and thestrange “fingers of a man’s hand” that appear to the king to write.

Such vicissitudes are as much a question within biblical schol-arship as they are in Beckett. One approach to the problem hasbeen to place it squarely on the ‘target’ text; this can be identifiedin Daniel Marguerat and Adrian Curtis’ preface to a recent collec-tion of essays on intra-biblical intertextuality. The question, forthem, is “[j]usqu’à quel point la solicitation de la mémoire peut-el-le être considérée comme légitime?” The “memory” is that of thereader-critic, and the legitimacy is to be found in material identitybetween the source and target texts. Intertextuality, then, is defi-ned as “la relation de co-présence entre deux ou plusieurs textes (parle biais de la citation, de la référence, de l’allusion ou du plagiat)”(Marguerat 2000, pp. 6-7). A note confirms Gérard Genette as theinfluential theoretical voice in this definition; the typology of ma-terial co-presences is implicitly graded, such that some can bethought of as stronger, or more present, than others. According tothese gradations, the strongest kind of intertextuality is citation,because it presents itself as an exact duplication of linguistic mate-


1 In her restatement of the theory, Kristeva describes intertextuality as“transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another” (Kristeva 1984, p.59).


rial from the source text in the target. Two key principles are there-fore at work: first, that there are grounds on which one linguisticfigure can be said to be identical to another; second, that that ma-terial can be said to belong to the source of its original utterance.

“Mene, mene”

With these assumed principles in mind, we begin with whatwould appear to be unmistakeably a biblical citation in Endgame:

Hamm: The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, me-ne? Naked bodies?

(Endgame, pp. 97-98)

“Mene, mene”, as a number of critics have noted (see, for ex-ample, Ackerley 1999, p. 75; Cohn 2001, p. 226) cites the firstwords of the writing on Belshazzar’s wall, from the narrative inthe 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 byDaniel of an otherwise illegible script on the wall of Belshazzar’spalace. A clear distinction is made between reading the writing onthe wall and interpreting it: “[the Chaldeans] could not read the writ-ing, nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof” (Daniel,v, 8). Daniel, with his unique privileging by God, is the only one ableto 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 other-wise apparently empty signifier). In a sense, then, Daniel seems to beenacting the birth of a word, both in materiality and meaning.Hamm’s mordant “[m]ene, mene”, in this case, would be as clearlyderivative of an absolute, biblical origin as could be possible, mak-ing of it a pure citation. Clov’s wall, read in this way, belongs un-equivocally to Belshazzar, the Book of Daniel, and the Bible.

Where elsewhere in Beckett biblical phrasing may run a sup-posed authoritative Scriptural meaning against more colloquial or

I. Bailey. Beckett, Drama, and the Writing on the Wall 145


irreverent ones (see for example Zeifman 1975, p. 82; Barry 2006,p. 128), MENE’s meaning seems at first to be completely self-con-tained, determined directly from God and in Daniel’s exclusivepneumatological authority:

This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE, God hath numberedthy kingdome, and finished it.

(Daniel, v, 26)

The tense of this proclamation identifies it as a version of theapocalyptic, as opposed to the strictly prophetic. Where prophecyconsists of a conditional warning – a call for decision and repen-tance – apocalyptic presents itself as interpretation of what has al-ready been revealed in cryptic form, so that the future is already pastin its propositions. The importance to Endgame of MENE’s apoca-lyptic content is clear from the outset (“Finished, it’s finished, near-ly finished, it must be nearly finished”), and in the ongoing in-evitability that “something is taking its course”. The intimations ofHamm as a ruler, his nominal identification with the cursed “fatherof Canaan” (Genesis, ix, 18-27), and the echoes of the biblical floodnarrative in the play, intensify a sense in which biblical apocalypsesor apocalyptic are recruited by the play in order to add weight (iron-ically 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 End -game, I want to return to the biblical narrative and suggest the significance in Beckett of the extraordinary peculiarities of thescene of writing itself. First, there is the profoundly uncertain ma-terial appearance of the words in the Daniel narrative. MENE, asmost English translations have it, is a transliteration into capi-talised Roman alphabet of an Aramaic word that presents itself aswritten transcription of a vocal transliteration of a script that can-not be read. There is a long and prominent line of biblical schol-arship that has conjectured as to the ‘real’ appearance of thewords written on the wall, and why Daniel alone should be ableto read them. Fundamentally, the alphabet is in doubt: one ac-count holds that the script was a kind of cuneiform; another thatit could have been a different form of hieroglyph; another that thealphabet was Aramaic, but that the words were written vertically



rather than horizontally, becoming an anagram (Gowan 2001, p.87). Complicating matters, the Septuagint version of Daniel doesnot distinguish between reading and interpretation as does itsMasoretic counterpart, seeming to imply that neither Belshazzarnor the Chaldeans have any trouble reading the writing, but can-not or will not interpret it (Meadowcroft 1995, pp. 15, 76). Thescript having finally come off the wall, further problems emergein that the Aramaic words in the Masoretic text have no vowelpointing, so that there is ambiguity both as to how they should bevocalised, and which vowels should be added in transliteration(Bevan 1892, p. 106). This is reflected in Fin de partie, whereHamm says “mané, mané”, one of several different translations ofthe word in French bibles2. A further angle of scholarship hasheld that the words as Daniel announces them are not quite soself-contained as they may have seemed. They may, for instance,derive from a play on assonances with words from his own inter-pretation: counting, weighing and dividing (Lacocque 1979, p.100). And following Charles Clermont-Ganneau’s influentialNineteenth-Century exegesis, many scholars have considered theAramaic words to signify (or at least resemble words that arethought to signify) a series of weights or coins, which allegorisethe different Babylonian rulers (Lacocque 1976 [1979, p. 102];Ford 1978, p. 129).

All of this is to suggest that the word’s conception is ratherless immaculate than was at first presumed, and its ‘presence’ asa piece of intertextual material is extremely fraught. If the weightof traditions and meanings seems too much to invest in Hamm’ssidelong “mene, mene” (which, it may be argued, is no morethan a “nod, even a wink”) it is worth recalling how fundamen-tal to the play are, first of all, Clov’s “visions” and their ambiva-


2 “Mané” is a transliteration from the Vulgate’s “mane”, and is the formused in the de Sacy Sainte Bible (first published 1696). Other translations andrevisions differ widely. Beckett’s library contained two versions of the Bible inFrench: an 1874 edition from the Société Biblique Américaine, and a 1921 edi-tion of the Louis Segond translation. The Société Biblique Américaine editionis in David Martin’s translation, which renders the word as “MÉNÉ”. The 1921edition is based on the 1910 Segond revision, and has “Compté”, which followsthe interpretation noted above. Thanks to Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle fora list of Bibles in Beckett’s library.


lence of truth and falsity, presence and absence, seeing and say-ing; and, secondly, the constant attention drawn to the scripted-ness of the performance, and vice versa: that symbiosis and gulf.Nowhere is this more apparent than in the putative location ofClov’s visions:

I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and waitfor him to whistle me. [Pause.] Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’lllean 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 direc-tion? Is Clov’s odd specificity a true description of a material off-stage space into which he steps? The kitchen, the wall, and thevisions operate in a hinterland between script and performance,visibility and invisibility, and point up precisely the kinds of non-immediacy that paradoxically inhere in material presence. Thisapparently self-sufficient, stable material to be reproduced pure-ly as citation plants an insecurity right in the materiality of itsown word surface. At the same time, it challenges the secondprinciple of citation, as a definitive origin (the possessor of theword) is persistently deferred within that unresolvable series oftranslations and transliterations. It is not that “mene, mene” can-not be related to the Bible, or called biblical. But it is to contendthat this intertextual material in Beckett cannot only be a repos-itory of ideas, whether philosophical, theological, aesthetic or bio -graphical; rather, it draws attention to its own constitution anddissolution.

Savage economy of hieroglyphics

The importance of the writing on Belshazzar’s wall is to show thatthese vagaries are not confined to the problematic presences ofbodies, kitchens and objects on stage, but to the very material sub-stance of language itself. This, it seems to me, is already implicitin the classification of language that Beckett pulls from Vico in“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”: “Hieroglyphic (sacred),Metaphorical (poetic), Philosophical (capable of abstraction andgeneralization)”. He goes on to value in Joyce



the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the politecontortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbowtheir 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 asin the biblical narrative these “sacred” hieroglyphics intrude, ap-pear and disappear. Though in Daniel the appearance and fate ofthe script is not stated, iterations of the narrative (famously inRembrandt’s depiction of the scene) have portrayed it as glowingon the wall, drawing on the narrative’s specification that the handwrote “over against the candlestick” (Daniel, v, 5). The accountof Joyce’s words here is to reinforce the argument that “[h]is writ-ing 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 (notto say slightly hallucinatory) description questions that immedia-cy, in the transience of the words, the impossible analogy with hi-eroglyphics, and the intertextual gesture.

If Work in Progress manifested a “savage economy” of a sceneof writing, Beckett ups that savagery considerably in How It Is.The novel narrates an endless digestive cycle of consumption andemission that is tied to writing or literary production, and to mem-ory. Mary Bryden has noted that in How It Is some of the biblicalreferences, characteristically for Beckett’s later prose and drama,“[concentrate] upon passages dealing with the transience of hu-man life and of the material world” (Bryden 1998, p. 102). Thistransience is mimed in the progress of the text itself. Take, for ex-ample, “I pissed and shat another image in my crib” (How It Is,p. 9). “Another image” follows suit from “life in the light first im-age” a few lines earlier, and may be read either as “I pissed andshat in my crib”, which would be “another image”, or, with equalvalidity, “and shat another image”. One suggests a fragmentary vi-sion communicated to paper, the other a quite different means ofwriting.

The scene of writing I want to focus on here, however, is inpart two, after the narrator has taught Pim how to respond to the“basic stimuli” of various violences, and resolves to “bloody himall over with Roman capitals” (How It Is, p. 62):



with the nail then of the right index [...] from left to right and top tobottom as in our civilisation I carve my Roman capitals

arduous beginnings then less he is no fool merely slow in the end heunderstands all almost all I have nothing to say almost nothing evenGod that old favourite my rain and shine brief allusions not infrequentas 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 allu-sions not infrequent [...] it’s vague” suggest a spectral intertextualpresence. Within that paragraph is found “God [...] my rain andshine”; far from citation, here, but Ackerley has pointed out thebiblical 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” hehas to say advertises a “vague” intertextual presence, and the linkto Matthew fits that bill. I want to suggest, though, that the in-scription of those “Roman capitals” is also a brief allusion, to theDaniel narrative. As noted earlier, the transliteration from Arama-ic to Roman alphabet usually figures the words in capital letters.How It Is’ narrator specifies repeatedly that his writing is in “Ro-man capitals” or “great capitals”. It also insists upon the directionof the writing “as in our civilisation”; this curious detail gestures to-wards the tradition of the ‘original’ writing on the wall being in Ara-maic written vertically rather than horizontally. Brief comments al-so intrude into the account of the writing in How It Is that recall theprophetic content of Daniel V:

with the nail of the index until it falls and the worn back bleeding pas-sim it was near the end

in great capitals [...] the great ornate letter the snakes the imps God bepraised it won’t be long

(How It Is, pp. 70-71)

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



Discussing How It Is in this context may lay itself open to thecharge of failing to engage with the immanent bodily materialityof the stage. How It Is is, of course, not a play, but the way inwhich matter, speech and writing are constituted and convulseacross its pages are extremely relevant to the question of text andperformance (or writing and speech) in Beckett’s oeuvre, as LeslieHill inversely suggests: “[readings of] the use of fragmentationand the chiastic dichotomy between performance and represen-tation in Beckett’s plays can be applied to Comment c’est” (Hill1990, 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 narrationspecifies the “nail of the index” as the writing agent, and that it“falls”. Linguistic material is disintegrating, whilst the intertextu-al references mime this disintegration, and at the same time thebody that writes is falling apart. The specificity of the writing agentagain recalls the biblical narrative, where “came forth the fingersof a man’s hand [...] and the king saw the part of the hand thatwrote” (Daniel, V, 5). One can imagine the powerful image of theghostly hand in Daniel V as a corollary to Not I’s disembodiedmouth; powerful enough, as some exegetes have it, to make Bel -shazzar losing control of his bowels (Fewell 1988, p. 120). In Rem-brandt’s painting of Belshazzar’s feast, the king starts in horror atthe ghostly but brightly lit hand, and the writing, similarly illumi-nated. His guests’ faces also betray shock, but there is ambiguity asto whether they are appalled by the hand, or by Belshazzar’s re-sponse to it. In the biblical narrative, there is nothing to imply thatanyone but Belshazzar sees the hand: “the king saw the part of thehand that wrote”. The narrative also makes a point of the hand’s il-lumination: when it appears, it “wrote over against the candle-stick” (otherwise translated as “lampstand”, or, in French, as“chandélier” or “candélabre”). The visibility of the hand, as of thewriting, is then vigorously asserted but also highly ambiguous.

Although the biblical scene does not seem to be repeated exact-ly in the Beckett oeuvre (that is, a hand in the act of writing) its pres-



ence can be discerned, separately, in the scene of writing of How ItIs, but also in the appearance of ghostly hands. In the late play “APiece of Monologue”, we find SPEAKER uttering the following:

Light dying. Soon none left to die [...] Eyes to the small pane gazeat 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. Inthe light of spill faintly the hand and milkwhite globe. Then secondhand. In light of spill.

(“A Piece of Monologue”, p. 427)

Katharine Worth has described the strange relationship be-tween what SPEAKER says, and what is seen on stage in the piece’sperformance, 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, suggestpoints of contact; the apparent location of the narrative within asingle room may permit identification with the stage space, with itsbarely-visible pallet bed and the SPEAKER’s attire spectrally signify-ing a bedroom. These identifications are in tension, however, withthe non-coincidence of what is said and what is seen in the majori-ty of the piece. The narration quoted above could not describewhat is seen on stage at any time during the play, but a “darkenedroom”, the figure himself, and also a “globe”, are, according to thestage directions, visible. An intertextual relationship between whatis heard and what is seen cannot be foreclosed, but the differencesalso 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 themeans by which the ghostly hands can be seen suggests a relation-ship with the specificity of the light-source in the biblical narrative.At the same time, the globe refers obliquely to Hamlet: in the stagedirections, the visible globe (“faintly lit”) is asked to be “skull-sized” (though not skull-shaped); via this specification, the narra-tion of a globe held in one hand during the monologue is highly sug-gestive of Shakespeare’s play. Intertextuality with the works of dif-ferent authors is woven into an extended dramatisation of the in-tertextuality between script and performance, or writing andspeech, and the refusal of their self-coincidence.



Conclusion

Paul Ricoeur, in the foreword to a major French study of Danielby Lacocque, has written that it “poses in an especially sharp waymost of the problems raised in reading the other books of theBible” (Lacocque 1976 [1979, p. XVII]). For Ricoeur this meansprimarily the various hermeneutic layers, texts reading and inter-preting other texts, among the scriptures themselves and for mod-ern readers, and especially the hermeneutics that constitute gos -pel kerygma. He writes that “the book as a whole presents itselfas a writing constructed upon other writings”; the scene at Bel -shazzar’s feast is paradigmatic of this, with the added confusionof voices to boot. There is no one authority in this biblical narra-tive: in fact, at its heart is a questioning of forms of authority, di-vine and human.

Biblical reference in Beckett is not restricted to assent or dis-sent in response to the fixed, incontrovertible Holy Writ; thecomplex textual negotiations with the Bible throughout his workare not a case of brute force and learning manipulating this oth-erwise immutable object to his own ends. Hermeneutical tradi-tions that look to retrieve the ‘real’ appearance of the writing onthe wall, or for that matter what ‘really’ happened to the two Gol-gothan thieves, may yoke the complexities into a supposedly in-controvertible narrative. All this is ripe for lampoon in Beckett.However, his own “writing constructed upon other writings” al-lows the biblical to be operative in more nuanced ways, to engagewith the more searching questions about presence and materiali-ty, and to leave his texts, especially the dramatic, flickering some-where between power and impotence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


Endgame, 1958, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber andFaber, London 1990, pp. 89-134.

How It Is, 1964, Grove Press, London.



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 Dra-

matic 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 theAutograph, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

Ackerley, Chris, 1999, “Samuel Beckett and the Bible: A Guide”, inJournal of Beckett Studies, IX, 1, 1999, pp. 53-125.

Barry, Elizabeth, 2006, Beckett and Authority. The Uses of Cliché, Pal-grave 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 Fictionand 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 Ar-bor.

Connor, Steven, 1988, Samuel Beckett. Repetition, Theory and Text,The Davies Group, Aurora 2007.

Hill, Leslie, 1990, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge.

McMullan, Anna, 1993, Theatre on Trial. Samuel Beckett’s Later Dra-ma, Routledge, London.

Worth, Katharine, 1999, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys, Ox-ford University Press, Oxford.

Zeifman, Hersh, 1975, “Religious Imagery in the Plays of SamuelBeckett”, in Ruby Cohn (editor), 1975, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 85-94.

Bevan, Anthony Ashley, 1892, A Short Commentary on the Book ofDaniel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Fewell, Danna Nolan, 1988, Circle of Sovereignty: A Story of Stories inDaniel, The Almond Press, Sheffield.

Ford, Desmond, 1978, Daniel, foreword by Frederick F. Bruce,Southern Publishing Association, Nashville.




Gowan, Donald, 2001, Daniel, Abingdon Old Testament Commen-taries, 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 Liter-ary Comparison, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield.

Other works cited

The Authorised Version of the English Bible, 1611, William AldisWright (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 ori-ginaux, 1707, [1874], Société Biblique Américaine, New York,trans. David Martin.

La Sainte Bible qui comprend l’Ancien et le Nouveau Testament, Nou-velle édition revue, 1910, [1921], [s.n.], Paris, trans. Louis Segond.

Clermont-Ganneau, Charles, 1888, Recueil d’archeologie, I, Ernest Le-roux, Paris.


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

of RopeMario Faraone

Estragon: [His mouth full,vacuously.] We’re not tied!Vladimir: I don’t hear a wordyou’re saying.Estragon: [Chews, swallows.]I’m asking you if we’re tied.Vladimir: Tied?Estragon: Ti-ed.Vladimir: How do you meantied?Estragon: Down.Vladimir: But to whom. Bywhom?Estragon: To your man.Vladimir: To Godot? Tied toGodot? What an idea! Noquestion of it. [Pause.] For themoment. (Samuel Beckett, Waiting forGodot)

1. Perceiving “the obligation to express”

The first attempts to apply Buddhist and Zen systems of thought ascritical methodologies in the examination of Beckett’s canon can betraced back to the first half of the 1960s. Richard Coe infers it withauthority, offering several relevant examples of a possible compar-ative reading (Coe 1964). Steven Rosen moves further, by analyzingBeckett’s works and stating that they present a great variety of Bud-dhist conceptual elements (Rosen 1976). Applying Buddhism as a


critical approach to Beckett’s works does not mean assuming aBeckettian in-depth knowledge of the Buddhist issue, or stating hisprecise intention to diffuse Buddhist doctrine in his own works.Nevertheless there are several instances of Beckett’s explicit state-ment of the importance of Buddhist principles. For instance, in theessay “Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, the author underlines Sid-dhartha Gautama’s declaration of the simultaneous existence andnon-existence of the “self”1. Besides the frequent appearance of im-ages and symbols in Beckett’s plays and novels – images and sym-bols that due to their polysemic nature can easily be ascribed tophilosophical, religious and psychoanalytical systems belonging tothe western tradition as well – it is important, in my opinion, to re-alize that very often Beckett’s thought covers individual paths thatare his own, though to some extent these paths are similar to thosebelonging to the Zen Buddhism tradition.

The main topic of my paper is the analysis of some fundamen-tal Buddhist concepts hosted, so to speak, in the playwright’s art,concepts that can consequently be employed as helpful tools toreach a better understanding of Beckett’s several artistic issues.For instance, two of the most frequent issues in Beckett are theexamination of the human condition and the perception of thesuffering “self” in the daily experience of living and dying, that isthe Buddhist samsara. Beckett’s claims concerning his not believ-ing in any religious confession whatsoever are well known. How-ever, a statement in a 1961 interview with Tom Driver offers asuitable starting point for my address:

Driver: “But do the plays deal with some facets of experience reli-gion 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 im-portance it has for the human being, may offer valuable reading cri-

M. Faraone. “Pity we haven’t a piece of rope” 157

1 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 lemoi 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 theenlightened one.


teria for an understanding of the entire Beckettian canon. It is ex-actly in the perception of anguish that it is possible to focus on thenature of the dilemma in Beckett and to realize how this correspondsto 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 Westerndefinition, nor a religion in the traditional sense. Rather, like Ti-betan Buddhism and Taoism from which it originates, it should beinterpreted 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 generalway, Buddhism describes the human condition through the FourNoble Truths: the primary experience of the life of the individual isto be involved in suffering (dukkha in Sanskrit). The state of suf-fering originates from living in the condition of desire, continu-ously searching for satisfaction – a search doomed to fail, whichbrings an insatiable thirst (tanha) as long as the individual remainsbound to the material and ephemeral sphere of his/her own exis-tence. These first two truths present the individual with a majordilemma: if suffering originates from desire, which diverts themind from its true and ultimate goal, what hope is there to changethis situation? The other two noble truths allow to feel hope and toreach salvation: it is possible to acquire an awareness of one’s ownindividual condition and to do something to make the sufferingcease. This escape from the state of suffering, and the consequentsolution to the dilemma in which one remains stuck, may beachieved only by giving up desire, through what Buddhism definesas the “Noble Eightfold Path”: right knowledge, right thought,right words, right works, right life, right effort, right considerationand right meditation2. Therefore, the main Buddhist aim is notspeculative but substantially practical: achieving the ethical pre-requisites and the mental and spiritual means which can free themind from the desire tying it to worldly slavery, a material and tran-sient bondage, and to come to the state of eternal perfection, theSanskrit nirvana and the Japanese satori.


2 As it often happens in the Western treatments of the Buddhist system ofthought, the terminology employed in defining the “Noble Eightfold Path”varies consistently. Those referred to in this paper come from Borges and Jura-do 1995, p. 56.


The existential anguish that runs in Beckett’s works is the sameanguish emerging from the mental and spiritual bewilderment ofthose who perceive the dilemma in which the human being livesand struggles. Beckett’s works show three different stages of thisperception: 1) the awareness of the absurdity of life in generaland, above all, of leading one’s own existence without referring toany God; 2) this is a condition of helplessness in which the humanbeing finds him/herself, realizing the impossibility to change thestate of things; 3) the need, irrational though deep, to keep on liv-ing, because there is the suspicion that death cannot bring any re-lief, and the intuition that, under specific conditions, there mustbe a way out.

Beckett sums up this situation in a famous statement quotedin his dialogue with George Duthuit on the art of the Bretonpainter Pierre Tal-Coat (published in the Three Dialogues): “Theexpression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which toexpress, nothing from which to express, no power to express, nodesire to express together with the obligation to express” (p. 103).The core of Beckettian dilemma resides in this paradoxical situa-tion: the desire “to express” opposed by the sheer impossibility todo it; the helplessness “to express” faced by the perception of thenecessity to do it. The last sentence in The Unnamable points outthis 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 ananswer to the human race’s ancestral question, to find out who thehuman being really is, therefore freeing the “subjective-self” ofthe Buddhist system of thought3.

This is what is really behind the need to wait in Waiting forGodot, or behind the stimulus to end it all which emerges fromHamm and Clov’s conversations in Endgame. In all of Beckett’sworks, this need for expression is present, and in each work it col-lides with the knowledge that the ultimate truth seems unutter-able because ineffable: Beckett’s characters bitterly recognize the


3 According to Patrizia Fusella, whom I wish to thank for an enlighteningconversation, Western thought’s resorting to Zen methodology is mainly due tothe failure of the analysis of the subject in strictly Western Cartesian terms. SeeFusella 1995.


impossibility to achieve the object of their desire, and understandthe ineluctability of their suffering. But in every work there areflashes of lightening, capable of brightening the dark panoramaof the characters’ existence. If in Waiting for Godot no apparentsolution seems possible, the hint of the possibility to achieve oneis 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 is-sues emerging from a Zen Buddhist reading of Waiting for Godot.I would like to deal specifically with three elements which repre-sent the main hindrance to the realization of the self and which tiethe human being to the sphere of desire and therefore to suffer-ing: time, habit and memory.

These are key issues to Beckett’s Weltanschauung, concerningnot only his theatrical and narrative production but his essays aswell. 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 thetime required to convert the awareness into language. Since wordsneed time to be expressed and acknowledged, they are unsuitableto express “absolute reality”, because reality is firmly linked to thepresent, which is instantaneous. According to Beckett, Proust be-lieves that human essence resides in this “absolute reality”, outsidetime and space; but the human being in the course of his/her bio-logical life is a prisoner of both time and space, and cannot achievea true awareness of the self because the knowledge the human be-ing has of him/herself is the result of past memories, which are frag-mentary, arbitrarily selected, and therefore unreliable4.

Buddhist thought states that Time, conceived as a three-part setof 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 writesabout Proust (see Coe 1964, p. 17).


formed by memories, the future by expectations; the present onlyexists as a function of both past and future. Actually, what exists ismerely an eternal and continuously flowing present, “sheer aware-ness” to refer the exact Buddhist terminology. This “eternal now” isthe aim of the disciple’s quest, who embraces Zen Buddhism to at-tain enlightenment and realize the “ultimate reality”. Time doesn’treally flow: what actually changes is the Self, who lives, at times inhappiness and at times in sorrow, the various single moments, there-fore perceiving them in different ways and with different duration.Human thought, which formulates the concepts of time, habit andmemory, consequently represents a hindrance to the attainment ofthe “ultimate reality” which, according to Zen Buddhism, is previ-ous to the formulation of human thought itself. Thought is a hin-drance because it is tied to samsara, that is the material and decep-tive human life produced by human thought. And, besides being adeceptive sequence of temporal moments which “appear” to be pastand future, samsara is also a deceptive sequence of awarenesseswhich “appear” to be distinct, but are in fact expressions of one andthe same identity, as Beckett states in Proust:

There is no escape from the hours and days. Neither from tomor-row nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday becauseyesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is ofno importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a mile-stone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of theyears, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. Weare not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, nolonger what we were before the calamity of yesterday.

(Proust, p. 13)

But it is in Waiting for Godot that Beckett provides a practicaldemonstration, right at the beginning of the first act, whenVladimir enters and finds Estragon struggling with the old bootthat 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)



The “speaking self” seems to be mysteriously aware that theperson he is referring to is the very same “he has known” for along time, an awareness his interlocutor doesn’t appear to have.In other words, Vladimir recognizes in Estragon his fellow trav-eller, his partner in thousands of adventures (or in thousands ofreincarnations and of previous lives), while Estragon seems tofind it difficult to understand that his own self who is answeringcould be the same self of the past, so he is satisfied with findingcorroboration in his friend’s words. The lack of continuity, but atthe 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 inFour Quartets by T.S. Eliot, another 20th century author greatlyinfluenced by Buddhist thought:

Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the pastInto different lives, or into any future;You are not the same people who left that stationOr who will arrive at any terminus,[...]You are not those who saw the harbourReceding, 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 today, but in fact it is the “objective-self” who, deceived by the sam-sara of suffering and desire, perceives in an erroneous way the ob-jects as belonging to what appears to be the “ultimate reality”, butwhich indeed is just the relative reality in which s/he lives. Ands/he perceives his/her own existence as a discontinuous sequenceof “selves”, belonging to previous moments. Actually, the chainof the “selves” originated by the “calamity of yesterday” is with-out any solution of continuity.

The time issue is of prime importance for a full understandingof the play, precisely because it is connected with the issue of mem-


5 For an essential analysis of the influences of Buddhism and Hinduism inT.S. Eliot’s writings see Faraone 2001.


ory. Zen Buddhism aims to achieve the individual’s liberation fromthat devastating effect of time underlined by Beckett in Proust.

It is not that satori [i.e. “enlightenment” in Japanese Zen] comesquickly or unexpectedly, all of a sudden, for mere speed has nothingto do with it. The reason is that Zen is a liberation from Time. For ifwe open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is noother time than this instant, and that the past and the future are ab-stractions without any concrete reality.

(Watts 1957, p. 218)

Beckett’s characters too live in a sort of suspended time, withoutthe chance to grasp the continuous flowing, because this flowingdoes not actually exist. In fact, Vladimir talking with Pozzo in thefirst act states that “Time has stopped” (p. 36). And Pozzo seems toreveal the “ultimate reality” hidden beneath this appearance. InProust, Beckett states that “Memory is obviously conditioned byperception” (p. 30). In this sense, since memory is a straight pro-duction of time, and time, according to Zen, is originated by the de-ception in which the “objective-self” lives, it is evident that memo-ry itself becomes a constraint which prevents us from achieving en-lightenment and from reaching a way out of Beckett’s dilemma.Memory too contributes to keeping the “objective-self” in the avid-ja, the ignorance of oneself, and to conferring the general sense ofuncertainty which dominates the entire play.

Vladimir and Estragon, who continuously look for precisebenchmarks in past actions and events in order to find a reason tocontinue their lifelong quest, are continuously doomed to fail be-cause nothing of what they believe they remember seems to havereally happened. Concerning the inefficiency of memory, Beckettin Proust is lapidary:

[The man with a good memory] cannot remember yesterday anymore than he can remember tomorrow. He can contemplate yesterdayhung out to dry with the wettest August bank holiday on record a lit-tle further down the clothes-line. Because his memory is a clothes-lineand the images of his past dirty linen redeemed and the infallibly com-placent servants of his reminiscential needs.

(Proust, p. 30)



Likewise, in the second act of Waiting for Godot, Pozzo, urgedby Vladimir to remember the meeting they had the previous day,answers: “I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday. But to-morrow I won’t remember having met anyone today. So don’tcount on me to enlighten you” (p. 82). Since Pozzo too lives in theimpermanence of samsara, he is not able to have a perfect aware-ness of his own “subjective-self”, and therefore cannot “enlight-en” Vladimir in his quest for the “ultimate reality”.

Waiting for Godot grants the spectator brief glimpses of thistrue reality which lies covered by the ephemeral and transient,sensorial world. One of these glimpses originates from a spark ofbrightness Vladimir has during his meditations. After Pozzo andLucky’s departure in the second act, Didi watches the sleepingGogo, 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 Es-tragon.] 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 goon! [Pause.] What have I said?

(Waiting for Godot, pp. 84-85)

Very similar to a Joycean epiphany, the perception lasts but abrief moment. Then it disappears. And it disappears due to habit,the third hindrance the human mind meets in its quest for en-lightenment. Defining habit, as well as memory, as attributes ofthe cancerous effect of time, Beckett enunciates in Proust both thenature and the dimensions of the problem:

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing ishabit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the in-dividual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection ofthe individual’s consciousness [...] the pact must be continually re-newed [...]. The creation of the world did not take place once and forall, 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 hap-pens to Vladimir and Estragon, who appear to start anew every




single morning of their life: they know they have to wait forGodot, certainly out of habit. Every day they meet Pozzo andLucky, but do not retain precise recollection of this event. Theyreceive the habitual visit of a boy working for Godot, who alwaysbrings the same disappointing news, but who every time has norecollection of his previous visits. Habit prevents the perceptionof the “ultimate reality” because it binds the individual to thesphere of ignorance, preventing him from perceiving his own trueself, 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 wasalso an agent of security. When it ceases to perform that second func-tion, when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to acomfortable and familiar concept, when, in a word, it betrays its trustas a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, andthe 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 thenecessity to persuade both him/herself and that same reality ofhis/her own existence. This necessity originates the cycle of de-sire6 and of waiting (both doomed to remain unsatisfied), whichheralds the karmic world of dukkha, that is suffering. Salvation,according to the fourth noble truth, consists in achieving enlight-enment by entering nirvana, or tao. It is not an easy task, becauseit 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 “every-thing”, but rather a moment of “not being” ontologically previ-ous with respect to a moment of “being”. The void is, therefore,the ultimate source of all things7. Achieving this level of enlight-

6 It is worth noting that not all the oriental systems of thought agree on thisissue. Some of them believe that the cycle of desire does not arise out of this ne-cessity. For instance, in Vedanta it comes from a faulty perception of what is re-al and what is unreal.

7 For this, as well as for other issues specific to the Zen Buddhist system of


enment (which, by definition, is co-existence and sublimation ofall the pairs of opposites, as for instance movement and steadi-ness) 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 suf-fering and desire, is the main hindrance to the achievement oftao8. In other words, in Waiting for Godot it is the necessity forsomething to happen that produces the sense of waiting, of timeand of suffering. In the play, there are several instances of this is-sue (see pp. 16-17, 33 and 35). In this sense, Estragon’s frequentproposal9 to go away and Vladimir’s enunciation of the impossi-bility to realize this action, motivated by the necessity to wait forGodot, appears very similar to a religious litany, to a meditationmantra, through which the two disciples identify a crucial pointof 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 Un-namable: the necessity for an eschatological event, continuouslyfrustrated by the realization that there is “Nothing to be done”


thought, I am referring mostly to Kundert-Gibbs 1999, a text which, besidesrepresenting an updated general survey on the Zen studies on Beckett’s art, pro-vides the scholar with a thorough bibliography of the main studies dedicated tothis issue. Kasulis 1981, and Suzuki 1933 have also turned out to be particular-ly helpful.

8 It is a much wider problem, since nirvana/satori must not be interpretedas a final reward or as an escape from the sensorial reality, but rather as some-thing already perennially existent in ourselves, coexistent with and inseparablefrom the “death-and-life” sphere, and that has to be achieved through revela-tion (see Stryk 1968). Nevertheless, for the purpose of this paper it is true thatsuffering 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 pas-sages of the text are never precisely repeated in the play. In other words, thevariations sometimes consist in the order of concepts or of words; more oftenwhat changes is the character who pronounces a certain line. This structure aswell shows the absence of ultimate elements, and points out to the relativity ofthe experience: if the characters are devoid of absolute and objective points ofreference to ground their reflections and deductions, the spectator too is boundto the sphere of appearance, by virtue of which any element of the play refers tosomething already seen, heard and lived, though not precisely in the same way.No experience perfectly overlaps another.


which recurs as a litany in the path of the two protagonists. Everysingle action is performed just to kill time: “We always find some-thing, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?” (p. 64). Ex-ploring the ineluctable necessity of waiting, and its inevitable fail-ure, Waiting for Godot leads an operation of reassessment,reusing, and redefinition of the traditional dramatic means, thatis the plot, the motivation, the usage of objects, of lights and of di-alogue, creating the foundations for a brand new one10.

Waiting means denying any other action that happens in theact of waiting itself, and it is an element which foresees a dramat-ic action that will only be performed at the end of the process ofwaiting: those who wait do so because they hope or know thatsomeone eventually will come. Waiting not for something to hap-pen but for someone to come represents the main similarity be-tween Waiting for Godot and the Japanese No theatre. In fact, ifin Western theatre dramatic action originates from somethingthat happens, in N≥ theatre the engine of action itself is the arrivalof someone. And, as has been sharply pointed out (Takahashi1982, in Bertinetti 1994), it is exactly in this issue that Beckett’swork reveals itself as the negation and refusal of both these the-atrical traditions. And Estragon explicitly states so in one of hisdesperate lines, a view on the reality of their inconsistent andempty lives: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’sawful” (Waiting for Godot, p. 41). Evening, as a meeting place be-tween the diaphanous radiance of day, which has only produced“actions/non-actions”, and the darkness of night, which promis-es salvation represented by the arrival of Godot, is a moment offertile activity. In the anguish of blindness, Pozzo asks Didi andGogo again and again, “Is it evening?”. He asks this question pre-cisely to make sure that this topical moment has arrived. Pozzoand Lucky’s arrival in the second act, an arrival misunderstood as


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


Godot’s, gives birth precisely to this hope and to Vladimir’s joy-ful elation: “We are no longer alone, waiting for the night, wait-ing for Godot, waiting for... waiting. All evening we have strug-gled, unassisted. Now it’s over. It’s already tomorrow” (p. 72).But it turns out to be an ephemeral elation, that fades precisely asevening slowly but inflexibly smears into the night, a night whichrepresents the end of hope every time it becomes evident thatonce again Godot will not come.

Beckett’s text contemplates the human condition and eluci-dates only the first three Buddhist noble truths, without going asfar as showing how to achieve the forth, enlightenment itself. Still,it offers several moments in which a sparkle of light seems possi-ble, a sense of rebirth appears to be reachable by the two protag-onists. The tree, bare in the first act, and with some leaves in thesecond, produces a moment of reflection in Didi and Gogo: “Es-tragon: Leaves? / Vladimir: In a single night. / Estragon: It mustbe spring” (p. 61). It is the spring of a probable new birth, the on-ly missing season in the list offered by Lucky in his extraordinarylogorrheic outburst. This same speech by Lucky offers the illumi-nating perception of the existence of an “ultimate reality”, thoughit is fragmented and immediately lost in the chaos of deceitful andinconsistent images: “Given the existence [...] of a personal God[...] outside time [...] who from the heights of divine apathia di-vine athambia divine aphasia [...]” (p. 42). Godhead, which in thenon-dualistic system of Buddhism is the “ultimate reality” and co-incides with the awareness of the “subjective-self”, consists in theescape from the deceptive hindrances of the sensorial universe.An escape that can be achieved via apathia, the indifference to-wards emotions and sensations, obtained by exercising one’svirtues; via aphasia, the abstention from expressing any kind ofjudgement, since reality is unknowable; via athambia, the absenceof any concern, that is the doctrine of “non-attachment” by whichthe seeker for enlightenment must undertake his activity for thesake of it, without desiring success or fearing failure.

The leap into the void that the Zen disciple must perform mustbe tantamount to physical “death”: that is, the individual mustcease to exist in relation to the transient and deceptive world – inorder to be “reborn” in the enlightenment of the primeval tao. Im-ages of suicide as a possible way out from the impasse created by



samsara are pretty frequent in the play. The two protagonists re-member past events when they could have put an end to theirlives, as when Vladimir had suggested jumping from the Eiffeltower, or when Estragon really jumped into the Rhône. But, moreoften, these images of suicide regard the sphere of time present,and are all connected to hanging. In the play, suicide is often con-templated and visualized, but never performed: though taken in-to consideration all through Waiting for Godot, the fourth nobletruth is never achieved.

Images connected to the rope are frequently evoked in theplay, above all in the interpersonal relations: a rope is often usedas leash, reins and bond between characters. Vladimir and Es-tragon often underline their mutual dependence and once theymeditate on their being “tied to” Godot, a hypothesis rejected,though without conviction, by Vladimir. Moreover, the ropephysically 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 becomessensibly shorter. The different dimensions of this rope, and its dif-ferent use by the two characters – aspects underlined by the stagedirections of the play – show how the relation between the twohas changed: if in the first act it is Pozzo who leads Lucky, in thesecond the blind master is completely at the mercy of the servant,and in fact he confines himself to follow him, dragged by the ropewhich shows his power.

More often the images of the rope are connected to the hy-pothesis of a redeeming suicide, proposed by the two main char-acters:

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 whilewaiting, more seldom as a possible way out of the futility and thesuffering of waiting itself. But Vladimir and Estragon never con-



sider suicide realistically, or even long enough to persuade them-selves to do it. Moreover, the play shows the practical impossibil-ity to realize the hypothesis of suicide and, conversely, throughthe image of the rope, it illustrates the hindrances of samsara towhich the two protagonists are tied. In fact, if in the first act Didiand Gogo speculate on the impossibility of the tree to sustainVladimir’s weight, in the second even the awareness of the exis-tence of the tree as a scenic and architectural element, suitable toperform the act, disappears: the hindrance is represented by thelack of a suitable piece of rope, awkwardly replaced by Estragon’srope belt which, when put to the test, breaks. In other words,Beckett’s text shows the two protagonists’ fundamental impossi-bility to define precisely the criterion of the problem, that is to ef-fectively perceive the essence of the reality they are examining.Vladimir and Estragon do not appear capable of having both aglobal vision and a specific perception of every single element. If,in a way, Godot represents the tao in which the quester must en-ter in order to find salvation, at the end of the path of the firstthree noble truths, the rope and the ‘regenerating’ suicide are themedium through which the said quester can be able to end hissalvific trail. But for the two questers of enlightenment, the leapin 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, acritical approach through which it is possible to analyze the artis-tic path covered by Beckett, who seems to share with Buddhismthe quest for the causes of the human being’s anguish. And it is asuitable tool to bring the human mind to an abrupt awakening, tolet him perceive his own real existence, the “subjective-self” andthe “ultimate reality”. In his dramatic works, novels and essays,




Beckett seems to seek this reality, hidden under myriads of de-ceptive and ephemeral appearances, the sources of suffering anddesire. And he seems to be aware of three out of four Buddhistnoble truths. He even seems to perceive the fourth, but is not ableto achieve it. Beckett’s characters cannot achieve it either. Atleast, it appears to be so for the protagonists of Waiting for Godot;even for Vladimir, who more often than the others perceives theexistence of the “ultimate reality”, and lives several epiphanies,but who nonetheless is unable to make the final jump into the voidand remains a prisoner of samsara. Vladimir and Estragon, as wellas Hamm and Clov, Winnie and Krapp, Watt and Mouth arriveat the boundaries of no man’s land, beyond which there is the voidof the tao, the new birth. They recognize the duality in the life ofthe human being, and they sense the true substance of life. Theyare tired of this ephemeral and deceptive physical life. But theyvacillate. They are “helpless”, the term Beckett used in Proust, be-cause of time, memory and habit.

The lack of ability to follow on their quest till the end in orderto achieve enlightenment is represented at the end of each act ofWaiting for Godot, when Vladimir and Estragon feel the need togo but, in fact, they do not move. The “objective-self” once morewins over the “subjective-self”. Beckett expresses this dichotomyin his essay on Henry Hayden, resorting to the comic couple ofFrench vaudeville and burlesque, the clown and his stooge. In thisway, the author brings once more Vladimir and Estragon to theforefront by evoking their humour and their sadness, their hopeand their anguish, their waiting and their helplessness to act: “Ellen’est pas au bout de ses beaux jours, la crise sujet-objet. Mais c’està part et au profit l’un de l’autre que nous avons l’habitude de lesvoir défaillir, ce clown et son gugusse. Alors qu’ici, confondusdans une même inconsistence, ils se désistent de concert” (“Hen-ry Hayden, homme-peintre”, in Cohn 1983, p. 146)11.

11 The essay was originally published in 1952, in French, in the Cahiersd’Art. Documents magazine. Waiting for Godot too, though written in 1948-1949, was originally published in French in 1952. The chronological proximityof the two texts authorizes us to believe that, speaking of the clown and hisstooge, Beckett was actually referring to Vladimir and Estragon.



BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 bySamuel 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, Ei-

naudi-Gallimard, Torino.Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dra-


Criticism

Coe, Richard N., 1964, Beckett, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh & London.Driver, Tom, 1961, “Beckett by the Madeleine”, in Columbia Univer-

sity Forum, IV, Summer 1961, 3, pp. 21-25.Faraone, Mario, 2001, “‘Burning, burning, burning’: Presenze indui-

ste e buddiste nell’arte di T.S. Eliot”, in Agostino Lombardo (a cu-ra di), 2001, Presenza di T.S. Eliot, Bulzoni, Roma, pp. 47-70.

Foster, Paul, 1989, Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novelsof Samuel Beckett, Wisdom, London.

Fusella, Patrizia, 1995, L’impossibilità di non essere. La negazione del-la mimesi e del soggetto in Not I di Samuel Beckett, Istituto Uni-versitario Orientale, Napoli.

Kundert-Gibbs, John Leeland, 1999, Nothing Is Left to Tell: Zen andChaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett, AssociatedUniversity 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 ilteatro N≥”, in Bertinetti, 1994, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 728-736.



Other works cited

Borges, Jorge Luis, and Alicia Jurado, 1995, Cos’è il Buddismo, a curadi Francesco Tentori Montalto, Newton Compton, Roma.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 1942, Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, London1979.

Herrigel, Eugen, 1953, Zen in the Art of Archery, Routledge & KeganPaul, London.

Kasulis, Thomas P., 1981, Zen Action / Zen Person, Hawaii UP, Hon-olulu.

Stryk, Lucien, 1968, World of the Buddha: An Introduction to the Bud-dhist 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 him-self / going aimlessly”), is taken from one of the mirlitonnades1 (inPoems 1930-1989, 2002), a series of short Beckettian poems, writ-ten between November 1976 and September 1981, and publishedin different versions, with some re-editing by Beckett himself2. Isuggest taking this quotation as a representative paradigm of theBeckettian poems at large, and in order to support this reading Iwill take into consideration also some poems not included in mir-litonnades, but incorporated in the collection Poems 1930-1989(2002). The extended inclusions of this recent publication helpme in the outlining of a continual reflexive stance in Beckett’s po-ems. The aim of this paper is not philological, nor “stylistic-de-scriptive”, but, rather, philosophical and hermeneutical. I suggestthe possibility of perceiving a recurrence of motives, a homo-geneity of perspective, the return of a specific voice, and of a spe-cific economy of writing in the works that go from the Thirties tothe Eighties, in spite of the fragmentary nature of the single po-ems and of the specific collections.

I locate this persistence of motives and the stability of a spe-cific skeptical gaze, as well as a peculiar stylistic distinction, in aBeckettian philosophical understanding, basically committed tohaunting the “something there / where / out there / out where /outside” (mirlitonnades, p. 37).

1 If not otherwise indicated, page references are to this comprehensive edi-tion of the poems, and translations into English are mine. The original BeckettFrench is included in the notes.

2 For a quick chronological reconstruction of the different editions, I sug-gest referring to the entry “mirlitonnades” in Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, pp.373-374. See also Wheatley 1995, pp. 47-75.


I would call this perseverance of perspective and voice a “de-constructive realism”, i.e., a questioning of the said as soon as it issaid, and thus depriving any textual utterance of cognitive and se-mantic stability, while pointing to a beckoning towards the “out-side”, i.e., towards an unattainable representation. In short, ahermeneutical valorisation of the Beckettian “out there / outwhere / outside” is at stake in this essay, and I take this syntagmas a cogent example of the deconstructive force inscribed in near-ly all of the Beckettian utterances.

1. “there / where / out there / out where / outside”

In Beckettian terms, the “out where” is mostly an interrogativeand methodological indication of the “outside” of subjectivityand of writing, in the sense that both are determined as a relationto their “outside”, which is their condition of possibility, not inany metaphysical or psychological sense, but in a linguistically on-tological sense. Reference to the “long black pauses” of whichBeckett speaks in his 1937 “German letter to Axel Kaun”3 pro-vides a fitting metaphor for the impossibility of stable denotation,as well as a metaphor of an invisible “ulterior” something, in-scribed in all representations.

Together with the “outside” as implied in the quotation:“something there / where / out there / out where / outside”, I amtaking the quotation in my title “il se passe devant / allant sansbut” (“he is going ahead of himself / going aimlessly”), as yet an-other provocative pattern confirming the Beckettian world, its lit-erary “chronotope”, and its dis-located voice. In the Beckett oeu-vre, I see a paradigm, structured by recurrent inscriptions of the“outside” in both beings and writing. These quotations corrobo-rate Beckett’s representation-implication of subjectivity and writ-ing as space, space possibly understood as Aîtres de la langue etdemeures de la pensée (Maldinay 1975) (“halls” and “being” oflanguage and thinking, as the homophonic reserve suggests inFrench). As I have argued elsewhere, the “sites-being” of lan-

178 Beckett and Philosophers

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


guage and thinking are the ineliminable components of a writingthat accommodates being and space, and/or even constitutes them(Locatelli 2006, pp. 3-24).

Subjectivity and space are simultaneously evoked and put for-ward in Beckett’s worldmaking. This connection of being andspace is highlighted by Barthes in “The Spirit of the Letter”,which emphasizes the irreducible duplicity of the letters of the al-phabet, that do not mean something or anything, but mean noth-ing while meaning; that do not imitate anything, but work as sym-bols (Barthes 1985, pp. 99-100)4. I would suggest, then, this du-plicity of “meaning” and “meaning-nothing” can be seen as the“outside” of the letter itself, but also, simultaneously, as the con-dition for it to be a letter. This relational quality also applies tosome reflexive signs, and to deconstructive writing. In this sense,Beckett’s chronotopes regard precisely the “outside” of writingand self, i.e., the non-totalization of denotation, self-representa-tion and self-determination.

2. Ahead of the self: transcending subjectivity

I propose to illustrate further this unrepresentable “outside” ofsubjectivity and writing, as implicated in the Beckett poems. “Ilse passe devant / allant sans but”: these two lines open up an un-settling question: ‘(How) can one “go ahead of himself, going aim-lessly”?’ Far from being a rhetorical question, I take it to be a sortof stenographic paradigm of a “longing for the outside”, inscribedin the Beckettian writing, and articulated together with the refusalof making “transcendence” an active plan, in the context of a fail-ing subjectivity and agentivity. Thus, the word “transcendence” isproblematic in itself, because in Beckett it is void of any meta-physical or teleological value, as the “aimlessness” highlighted in“going aimlessly” makes clear.

Therefore, the term “le dehors” (the “outside”) seems to me amuch better indication than “transcendence”, in order to inter-pret the non-totalization of the Beckettian subject and writing, es-

C. Locatelli. Ways of Beckett’s Poems 179

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


pecially in the context established by obvious spatial implications,alluding to both the nihilism of the sign (the “void” that consti-tutes it as a sign), and to the phenomenological implications of asubjectivity longing to exceed itself, and yet not counting on everachieving or mastering such a prospect. In fact, the use of move-ment, together with the absence of direction, purpose, and mean-ing (suggested by “going aimlessly”), seem to pre-empty the mean-ing of the “ahead,” denoted in the master sentence “he is goingahead of himself”.

A “logical” reading would make the two sentences syntagmat-ically linked in the poem (“Il se passe devant / allant sans but”) apuzzling contradiction: is he “going ahead of himself”, or is he“going aimlessly”? Can there be a connotation of progress in thecontext of lack of direction? And even: does a “going aimlessly”preserve the implication of a self who is said to go “ahead of him-self”? This double phrase, this complex syntagm, linking the twosemantic clauses (“he is going ahead of himself / going aimless-ly”), can make sense only if we interpret it as pointing to a differ-ent way of understanding both motion and space, one dealing withthe epistemological challenge of re-reading spatial designationsand metaphors, independently from subjective intention and or-dinary notions of progress, yet not totally independent of a traceof subjectivity.

This implication of space reminds me of a “Gelassenheit”, asHeidegger named it: the space of surrender in order to be faith-ful to a longing for an “outside” (for an indeterminable, tran-scendent object, Heidegger 1959). In this sense “aimlessness” (in“going aimlessly”) can be the indication of the condition ofan/other “going ahead”, and “ahead of oneself”. It would indicatethat there is no progress without giving up the self, without aban-doning it, and thus also deserting its limits. Basically, the self is ex-panded because it is exceeded by “aimlessness”, but the “self” isat the same time handed over by aimlessness; it has to be given up(it has to achieve perfect aimlessness), in order to achieve the aimof exceeding itself (of “se passer devant”).

Why does the self aspire to exceed itself? Starting with Plato’sSymposium (in Diotima’s speech), this aspiration is activated be-cause lack (“penìa”), and subsequent need, are ineliminable com-



ponents of “human nature” (Symposium). More recently, Freudhas suggested that the death-wish is inscribed, together with bio-philia, in the very structure of the self. So, the self wishes to bothpreserve itself, and go beyond itself. Furthermore, some readersof Freud have suggested that the death-wish of the self reveals theself’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 con-scious psyche by imagining a movement with no subject (possibly,a “going without purpose”). In short, if we read “il se passe de-vant / allant sans but” as a classical Freudian expression of thedeath-wish, we valorise the “going aimlessly” as a sort of fulfil-ment of the wish of mastering one’s own disappearance.

In the opening of All Strange Away (published 1976; writtencirca 1963-1964), Beckett formulated a similar wish by suggest-ing: “Imagination dead imagine. A place, that again [...] talking tohimself in the last person [...] try all” (All Strange Away, pp. 117-128, my italics). Here, again, an insistent and recurring beckoningfrom the “ahead” animates the entire work, and not in the termsof a narrative fulfilment, since the reader learns very soon thatmeasuring space in terms of progress is radically alien to thesearch for the “ahead” of a promised land (i.e., the starting pointof imagination is “imagination dead”). Further, the reader is toldthat the protagonist is “talking to himself in the last person”, whilethe longing for the “ahead” is still articulated, in terms of a “sleep-longing”, yet broken by the recurrence of (self) “waking”: “Sleep[...] faint sweet relief and the longing for it again and to be goneagain a folly to be resisted again in vain” (All Strange Away, p.127). In this case, the modal dissolution of a “going”, still movingbut “going aimlessly” would be the “master sentence”, the se-mantic hinge on which the “going ahead of oneself” makes sense(as a subordinate sentence): it is only by way of achieving aim-lessness that the self can go ahead of itself. It is, again, the case ofa “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 compellingreadings of Freud on the links between Eros and Thanatos.


for, but non-realizable in its radical totality. See the following linesin “Rue de Vaugirard”: “At mid-height / I let go of the clutch / [...]/ then I start again fortified / by an unavoidable negative” (Poems1930-1989, p. 57)6. And again in: “where goes the pleasure of los-ing / 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 / beingthere not escaping and escaping and being there” (p. 64)8. It isworth noticing here a recurrent Beckettian original structure ofnegation, which is not at all dualistic and dialectical, but is, at least,“triadic”. In short, human life is the time of a “mid-height”, nondualistic and not decidable, of death-in-life; it is a “living dead myonly season” (“vive morte ma seule saison”, p. 65).

This hermeneutical cycle, providing the understanding of “thelonging of the unattainable” expressed by the erasure of oppo-sites, and by the collapse of conceptual dichotomies, also ac-counts for the sudden changes of tone, even within the same po-em (which often deconstruct dichotomies by way of incon-gruities), as if to witness the ultimate ineliminable “voice comingto one from the dark” articulated in Company, as well as the be-ing “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, andconceptualize their silence. Both these alternatives (being spokento, 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 semanticmobility of the link between the two sentences “il se passe devant/ allant sans but” is such that there is no chance of prioritizing onesentence over the other. On the page, they read one before the


6 “à mi-hauteur / je débraye / [...] puis repars fortifié / d’un négatif irrécu-sable”, “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 1930-1989, p. 64.

9 “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” (Company, p. 7); “que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions / [...] / à errer et à virer loin de tou-te vie / dans un espace pantin / sans voix parmi les voix / enfermées avec moi”,in Poems 1930-1989, pp. 68 and 69.


other, but there is no guarantee that this spatial sequencing im-plies a semantic or connotative priority. The two clauses co-existin their apparent logical absurdity, with no chance of assimilation;they coexist also in the magnetic implication that reciprocally de-constructs one in relation to the other, an implication that doesnot let the reader decide which one is indeed the master sentence.They come together, and they come much like the “voice comingto one in the dark”.

In Beckett, the self goes ahead of itself by surrendering its self-purpose; this means that the cogito becomes “la pensée du de-hors”, as theorized by Michel Foucault in his meditation on thework of Maurice Blanchot (Foucault 1986, pp. 7-58). Foucaultdefines this “thought from the outside” as a “thought that standsoutside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, ar-ticulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in on-ly its invincible absence; and that at the same time stands at thethreshold of all positivity [...] in order to regain the space of itsunfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it isconstituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the mo-ment they are glimpsed – a thought that [...] we might call ‘thethought from the outside’”(Foucault 1987, pp. 15-16)10. In a si-milar cognitive attitude, Beckett talks of “[...] un pays / où l’ou-bli où pèse l’oubli / doucement sur les mondes innommés / là latête on la tait la tête est muette”11.

Oblivion does not eliminate the possibility of an outside, as adistance in which the thought from the outside can “regainspace”. Foucault refers to “the void serving as its site, the distance


10 I particularly appreciate the English translation of the French title per-formed by Brian Massumi, in spite of the fact that it reduced the polyvalent am-biguity of the French, where “la pensée du dehors” could mean both “thethought of the outside” and “the thought from outside”. In Beckett, the“thought from outside” could perhaps make more sense, in the context of thelack 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 homophonicBeckettian pun: “... a place / where oblivion where oblivion weighs down /sweetly on unnamed worlds / never mind the mind”. Samuel Beckett, “bon bonil est un pays”, in Poems 1930-1989, p. 63. Italics added to highlight translator’slicence.


in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certaintiesslip the moment they are glimpsed” (p. 16). In Beckett, the voidis the place in which the “never mind the mind” can both be per-formed, and make sense.

The opening line of an untitled poem from the Forties, trans-lated by Beckett into English, reads: “je suis ce cours de sable quiglisse” (“my way is in the sand flowing”), thus expressing a recur-rent Beckettian perception of a doing-undoing, construction-de-construction, 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 poemquoted above, as the movement of “a door / that opens and shuts”(“une porte / qui s’ouvre et se referme”: Poems 1930-1989). Laterdevelopments of Beckettian chronotopes indicate, I think, that theopening/shutting of the door is not to be interpreted sequentially,but simultaneously. It is thus a psychic image, linearly articulated inwriting, and yet not subject to an oppositional logic, nor to a diur-nal logic (as opposed to the polymorphic logic of dreams). Even ifit must be linearly articulated in writing, it includes the represen-tational inscription of a possible visual simultaneity and reversibil-ity. So long as the door is seen as dynamically still, half open andshut, it opens and shuts at once, as well as when it is revolving. Thisimage of the revolving door recurs in Beckett; we could say hestruggled with it representationally: at first it is illustrated only as adoor “that opens and shuts”; later it becomes more defined, as thefrantic circularity of thinking, of the “revolving it all [...] in yourpoor mind” (Footfalls, p. 403).

The abstract reversibility of movement (the door opening andshutting), and the spatial-physical metaphors of thinking (as the“revolving it all in the mind”), do not find a unified stabilized im-age; rather, they are an indication of an irresolvable longing, aswell 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, andit flows naturalistically analogical with the representation of timein an hourglass, and is endowed with a reversibility that formallycan be repeated (identical), while it indeed leaves no way of re-turn. The hourglass can be turned upside down, but the formallyachieved return to the same starting point also indicates – at the



same time – the impossibility of this sameness. In short: the hour-glass counts and signals the passing of time, with the deceiving im-age of the (formal) sameness of its reversible starting point.

Elsewhere, and again, in another early poem (Poèmes 1937-1939), we find in Beckett a provocative representation-denial ofParmenides’ principle of non-contradiction, in relation to subjec-tive perception. There is a phenomenological challenge to the non-contradictory realization of perception: “they come / different andthe same / with each it is different and the same / with each the ab-sence of love is different / with each the absence of love is the same”(Beckett’s translation; Poems 1930-1989, pp. 48-49). One can findhere both a skeptical phenomenological understanding (challeng-ing perceptive “sameness”), and a critique of concept-formation,such as the one formulated by Nietzsche in Über Wahrheit undLuge im aussermoralischen Sinne (Truth and Lying): “Every con-cept is formed by making the same that which is not the same”12.

In other words, this means that the “outside” of thinkingmakes this thinking possible, in the Nietzschean sense that “thelaw of language produces the first laws of truth”13. What is typi-cally Beckettian here is the inscription of sameness and differencein absence, rather than in presence (“the absence of love”). Thereferential value of absence in the two mutually exclusive termsevoked, “different absence / same absence”, is a co-occurrencewhich challenges reference itself, thus showing the law of lan-guage, which is responsible for “the law of truth” and of world-making, as well as for the illusion of truth. This “different-sameabsence of love”, in fact, is not “a thing in itself”, but the spacefor the deconstruction of a further referential denotation, which,in this case, is called “love”. So, by relating contradictions, Beck-ett resists “the social lying” determined by linguistic habits, andreveals the figural structure of truth. His apparent inconsistencies


12 “Jeder Begriff entsteht durch Gleichsetzen des Nicht-Gleichen”, Niet -zsche 1873 [2006, p. 90]. My translation. In English: “Every concept originatesby the equation of the dissimilar”, in “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moralSense”, in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, edited and translatedby Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair and David J. Parent, Oxford UniversityPress, New York 1989, pp. 246-257. Quotation p. 249.

13 “Die Gesetzgebung der Sprache giebt auch die ersten Gesetze der Wahr-heit” (Nietzsche 1873 [2006, p. 84]).


reveal the arbitrariness of denotations, in tune with the Niet-zschean notion of truth: “What is then truth? A mobile army ofmetaphors, metonimies, antropomorphisms, / [...] / truths are il-lusions of which one forgets that they are such”14.

All of these examples indicate that one can find in Beckett athought of difference (“autres et pareilles” in the latest quota-tion), as the indication of an “ahead” brought to almost transcen-dental overtones, were it not for the reference to specific “resid-ual” objects, such as “love”, or such as the reflections in a mirror,as evoked in another poem where, just like “love,” a “her”, is putinto play: “between the scene and me / the glass / empty exceptfor her”15. Both “love” and “her” are shown here as endowedwith an allusive referential consistency.

In the following poem of the collection (p. 50), Beckett pro-vides the psychic stenography of a further move towards the val-orization of absence, when he writes of a temporally determinedwaiting: “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”), indicateand deconstruct the conventional possibility of representing time,interpreted and determined by pre-concepts of speed and dura-tion (“slow” and “long”). What deserves special emphasis is theBeckettian epistemological turn in world-making that valorizes“absence at the service of presence”. Absence allows the Becket-tian world-making to be a reflexive world-making, constructingand deconstructing its own components, by way of the dynamicsand economies of the implied gaze determining it (“between thescene 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, Metony-mien, Antropomorphismen / [...] / die Warheiten sind Illusionen, von denen manvergessen hat, das sie welche sind...” (Nietzsche 1873 [2006, p. 94]). Englishtranslation 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 servi-

ce de la présence”, Poems 1930-1989, p. 50.


been arguing, this is Beckett’s stunning cognitive revelation, par-ticularly relevant for his definition of writing. Writing is the de-constructive “truth” produced by a “thought from the outside”, athought “taking in only its invincible absence; and that at the sametime stands at the threshold of all positivity” (Foucault, p. 15).

If we go back to the Beckettian poem de-constructing the gazein the mirror (“the scene – the glass”), as well as the subject-objectinvolved (a “her”), and the mirror itself (“the glass / empty exceptfor her”), we see that it ultimately shows an “empty glass”, resist-ing scene formation, in spite of structural and subjective traces(“between the scene and me [...] empty except for her”). A glasscannot but reflect an image (the image of a “her,” in this case), butthe 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. inits separate essence-absence of reflection (an abs-essence i.e. a lackof essence?). Likewise, the subject, still recorded as ineliminablefrom a phenomenological scene of perception, can only wish, atthat point, for the end of the perceptive dualism of self/other, andthus for the end-visibility (end and visibility) of its own silence.

Michel Foucault, again, helps us understand one of the her -meneutic possibilities of Beckett’s silence, especially in relation towriting: “Any purely reflexive discourse runs the risk of leadingthe experience of the outside back to the dimension of interiori-ty; reflection tends irresistibly to repatriate it to the side of con-sciousness and to develop it into a description of living that depictsthe ‘outside’ as the experience of the body, space, the limits of thewill, and the ineffaceable presence of the other” (Foucault 1987,p. 21, italics added). Against any assimilative oblivion, and anyeasy supremacy of interiority, Beckett insists on the simultaneousimperative of hearing voices and hearing silence as concurrentsubjective perceptions, which possibly mark the limit of self andother, and which resist the reflective-subjective tendency “torepatriate to the side of consciousness”. Writing is called upon torepresent this co-existing, albeit contradictory, need: the hearingof silence in voices, and of voices in silence, because life speaks, asmuch 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



Beckett readers becomes the search-invention of a form accom-modating the showing of “the extent to which the invisibility ofthe visible is invisible”. As I have said above, the invisibility of thevisible is represented in the self-effacement of a mirror mirroringan object; it is “life” made invisible by the infinity of its constitut-ing objects. The visible of life is often invisible (like the mirror)because it is believed to be totally visible, to be an object of rep-resentation, rather than the structure of (object) representation.This knowledge of the invisibility of the visible is what Beckett’spoems realize, consistently and surprisingly: they are the reflec-tion of a mirror that points to the mirror while moving away fromthe objects that the mirror reflects, but will eventually also moveaway from the image of the mirror itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


“German Letter of 1937”, 9th July 1937, in Ruby Cohn (editor), 1983,Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment bySamuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York, pp. 51-54.

Footfalls, 1976, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber andFaber, 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 Dra-


Criticism

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




Barthes, Roland, 1982, “The Spirit of the Letter”, in The Responsibil-ity of Forms, 1985, Hill & Wang, New York, trans. R. Howard.

Di Blasio, Francesca, and Carla Locatelli, 2006, Spazi/o. Teoria, rap-presentazione, lettura, Editrice Università degli Studi di Trento,Collana Labirinti, vol. 91, Trento.

Locatelli, Carla, 2006, “Rappresentazione, narratività e linguisticitàdello spazio”, in Di Blasio and Locatelli, 2006, Spazi/o cit., pp. 3-24.

Wheatley, David, 1995, “Beckett’s mirlitonnades: A ManuscriptStudy” 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 Fou-cault – Blanchot, Zone Books, New York, trans. Brian Massumi.

Heidegger, Martin, 1959, Gelassenheit, Verlag Gunter Neske, Pfullin-gen.

Lingis, Alphonso, 1989, Deathbound Subjectivity, Indiana UniversityPress, Bloomington.

Lyotard, François, 1973, Des dispositifs pulsionels, Union généraled’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 aussermorali-schen Sinne, Francesco Tomatis (editor), Su verità e menzogna,2006, Bompiani, Milano – Testi a Fronte (bilingual edition); “OnTruth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense”, in Sander, L. Gilman,Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (editors), 1989, FriedrichNietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, Oxford University Press, NewYork, trans. Gilman, Blair and Parent, pp. 246-257.

Plato, Symposium, University of California Press, Berkeley (bilingualedition), 1989.


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

David Tucker

With a few chapters left to write of Murphy in January 1936 Beck-ett ventured “within the abhorred gates for the first time since theescape, on a commission from Ruddy” (Letter to Thomas Mac-Greevy, 9th January 1936 in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006,p. 144) of Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD). He revisitedthe library until April, writing around 52 pages of lightly anno-tated transcriptions in the original Latin from three of the majorworks 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 hadwritten briefly on occasionalism in a lineage outlined in one of hiscompendium source books for philosophical history, WilhelmWindelband’s A History of Philosophy. From here Beckett notes:

This furthest developed in Ethics of Geulincx. Illustration of the 2Clocks which having once been synchronised by same artificer con-tinue to move in perfect harmony, “absque ulla causalitate qua alterumhoc in altero causat, sed propter meram dependentiam, qua utrumqueab eadem arte et simili industria constitutum est”.

What anthropologism!Leibniz illustrated with same analogy his doctrine of “preestab-

lished harmony”, characterised Cartesian conception by immediateand permanent interdependence of 2 clocks, and Occasionalist byconstantly renewed regulation of clocks by clock master1.

The Latin quotation from Geulincx that Windelband cites istranslated in the 2006 Ethics as part of the following passage (quo-

1 Excerpted from Beckett’s ‘philosophy notes’, TCD MS 10967/189. Alsoin Windelband 1907, pp. 415-416.


tations given in the following that are between pp. 311-353 ofGeulincx’s 2006 Ethics are from Beckett’s notes).

It is the same as if two clocks agree with each other and with thedaily course of the Sun: when one chimes and tells the hours, the oth-er also chimes and likewise indicates the hour; and all that without anycausality in the sense of one having a causal effect on the other, but ratheron account of mere dependence, inasmuch as both of them have beenconstructed with the same art and similar industry.

(Geulincx 2006, p. 332 [my italics])

This historically important passage (it is the section in Ethicsaround which debates arose in the nineteenth century disputingthe provenance of Leibniz’s clock metaphor2) was identicallytranscribed from both Windelband and then later from Geulincxin 1936. Its duplication demonstrates a line of continuance be-tween Beckett’s cribbing philosophy notes of 1932-1934 and thelater more in-depth study.

A minority of the later detailed notes from 1936 are taken fromGeulincx’s Metaphysics and Questions Concerning Disputations,while the majority, around 40 pages, are from Ethics. Publishedposthumously in 1675, Ethics was intended by Geulincx as a com-pletion of the Cartesian project in a reasoned, Christian and oftenmystical, ethical system. The maxim of this system, whichGeulincx repeatedly emphasises as “the summation” and “thesupreme principle of Ethics, from which you can easily deduceevery single one of the obligations that make up the scope ofEthics” is “ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis” [“wherein you have nopower, therein you should not will”] (Geulincx 2006, p. 316). Thephrase has also become a familiar and frequent refrain in Beckettstudies. Its first known mention by Beckett is in a letter to ThomasMacGreevy of 16th January 1936 where Beckett writes:

I suddenly see that Murphy is [a] break down between his: Ubi ni-hil vales ibi nihil velis (position) and Malraux’s Il est difficile à celuiqui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens (negation).

(Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 16th January 1936, in Knowlson1996, p. 219)

D. Tucker. Murphy, Geulincx and an Occasional(ist) Game of Chess 191

2 On this see De Lattre 1970, pp. 553-566 and De Vleeschauwer 1957, pp.45-56.



At the beginning of March in another letter to MacGreevyBeckett shows characteristic aporia regarding this research whenhe says:

I have been reading Geulincx in T.C.D., without knowing why ex-actly. Perhaps because the text is so hard to come by. But that is ra-tionalisation and my instinct is right & the work worth doing, becauseof its saturation in the conviction that the sub specie aeternitatis [fromthe perspective of eternity] vision is the only excuse for remainingalive.

(Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March 1936, in Engelberts,Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 145)

Until 2006 no English translation from the original “BeautifulBelgo-Latin” (Murphy, p. 101) of Ethics that Murphy recalls whencasting his vote for the little world had existed. Indeed the Latinedition was out of print for nearly 200 years before inclusion inJ.P.N. Land’s 3-volume complete collected edition of Geulincx’sworks (published 1891-1893) Beckett used at TCD. Perhapspracticalities such as these go some way to explaining why, despiteBeckett’s explicit references to Geulincx as being the place fromwhich a commentary of his work might start, there is not the vol-ume of scholarly work in this area one might expect. Recent andpersuasive studies by Anthony Uhlmann, Matthew Feldman,Shane Weller and Chris Ackerley have added to previous work byRupert Wood in his 1993 article for the Journal of Beckett Studies.Hugh Kenner, John Pilling, David Hesla and others have devot-ed sections to Geulincx3. Yet the studies are not exhaustive. Sowith a view to what appears currently as a strangely new and si-multaneously old area of Beckett studies, before a discussion ofsome elements of Geulincx’s occasionalist philosophy put to cre-ative use in Murphy, the text most often associated with Beckett’sinterest in Geulincx, I want to first offer some further evidence inBeckett’s correspondence for assessing the importance ofGeulincx.

3 See also Casanova 2006 and Dobrez 1986.


Correspondence4

The best known mention of Geulincx is the 1967 letter to the crit-ic Sighle Kennedy, reprinted in Disjecta, where Beckett writes:

I simply do not feel the presence in my writings as a whole of theProust & Joyce situations you evoke. If I were in the unenviable posi-tion of having to study my work my points of departure would be the“Naught is more real...” and the “Ubi nihil vales...” both already inMurphy and neither very rational.

(Kennedy 1971, p. 300)

One might of course think this single letter warrant enough forscholarly investigation, and it has indeed been used to anchor cer-tain readings of Geulincx in Murphy. However, it appears Beck-ett had been writing to critics and colleagues on the subject ofGeulincx, at regular intervals, over the previous thirty years.

Another letter dating from the time Beckett was engaged in theresearch at TCD in 1936 is addressed to a friend and member ofthe Dublin literati Arland Ussher. It speaks of Beckett’s enthusi-asm for his discoveries:

I am obliged to read in Trinity College Library, as ArnoldusGeulincx is not available elsewhere. I recommend him to you mostheartily, especially his Ethica, and above all the second section of thesecond chapter of the first tractate, where he disquires on his fourthcardinal virtue, Humility, contemptus negativus sui ipsius [to com-prise 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 presumablymisdated (in the same way one written on the same day to Mac-Greevy is misdated) the 9th January 1935[6], in which he briefly


4 I would like to express my gratitude to John Pilling, James Knowlson andMark Nixon for their help with the correspondence. Due to copyright restric-tions certain letters must unfortunately remain unpublished here: those to MaryHutchinson and one to George Duthuit. Hopefully these will soon see the fullerlight of day. For complete quotations and further correspondence, see my DPhilthesis, provisionally titled “A Literary Fantasia”: Uses of Philosophy in the Fic-tion of Samuel Beckett.


mentions his Trinity research on Geulincx. In this letter he seeksto play down the significance Brian Coffey was currently attach-ing to Beckett’s philosophical interests, perhaps based on Cof-fey’s plans to publish a series of philosophical monographs:

He [Coffey] appears to want to make the philosophical series veryserious & Fach. But my Geulincx could only be a literary fantasia.

(Letter to George Reavey, 9th January 1936, in Fehsenfeld andOverbeck, 2009, p. 295)

Two letters to George Duthuit in the late 1940s, which followaround ten years after the letters sent from Dublin while doing theresearch, refer to Geulincx. In the first of these the maxim fromEthics is again given in relation to Murphy. Beckett emphasises theall-encompassing nature of the maxim, that it underpins a con-ception of self as worth nothing, and that there is no risk of exag-gerating the scope of such a conception of self (see footnote n. 4).These assessments are some of Beckett’s most emphatic state-ments on Geulincx. In a second letter, published in 2006, Beck-ett describes Bram van Velde and an art of non-relation, using aterm gleaned from Geulincx – autology, as applied to the artistwho “indulges now and then in a small séance of autology with agreedy sucking sound” (Letter to George Duthuit, 9th March1949, in Gontarski and Uhlmann 2006, p. 19). The term autologydates from the middle seventeenth century5 and is used byGeulincx 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. First-ly, inspection of the self – inspectio sui. This is depicted as a self-analysis that leads logically to its opposite, “a carelessness and ne-glect of oneself” (Geulincx 2006, p. 326), so-called despectio sui,a turning away from self due to self-inspection’s discovery of al-most total ignorance. The realisation of such ignorance and, asGeulincx argues, concomitant incapacity to act, should engenderhumility, a specific form of humility described in systematic detailby Geulincx, and lauded by him as “the most exalted of the Car-


5 OED cites first use of the word in 1633 by Phineas Fletcher: “He thatwould learn Theologie must first study autologie. The way to God is by ourselves.”



dinal Virtues” (Geulincx 2006, p. 326). The letter to Usshershows that for Beckett this humility was of key interest.

A letter in 1954 to Doctor Erich Franzen, the German trans-lator of Molloy, is unusually expansive in its explications of allu-sion. Franzen asks about a passage in Molloy that reads:

I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who leftme free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, alongthe deck.

(Molloy, p. 51)

Beckett says in the letter this is in part a reference to an imagesuggested by Geulincx:

where he compares human freedom to that of a man, on board a boatcarrying him irresistibly westward, free to move eastward within thelimits of the boat itself, as far as the stern.

(Letter to Dr Erich Franzen, 17th February 1954, in Uhlmann2006, p. 78)

Such valiant because doomed effort is, Molloy opines, “a greatmeasure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit”(Molloy, p. 51).

Two years later, in 1956, Beckett wrote to the writer and life-long friend of T.S. Eliot, Mary Hutchinson, in a remarkably sim-ilar way to how he would eleven years later write the famous let-ter to Sighle Kennedy. He describes how he cannot bear to lookback over or into his previous work, then supposes that a com-mentary might arise based in Geulincx and the Abderites.Though Beckett decidedly does not, or indeed want to, know ifsuch is the case (see footnote n. 4).

One intriguing variant between the letters to Hutchinson andKennedy is that to Hutchinson Beckett claims Geulincx’s maximcomplicates, 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 fromAbdera, which might complicate this complication. Beckett was certainly fa-miliar 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



on its own, according to Malone, that it can “pollute the whole ofspeech” (Malone Dies, p. 193)7. Geulincx addresses Democritusexplicitly in Ethics a number of times, referring to his atomist voidas a “bottomless well” (Geulincx 2006, p. 20) that is categorical-ly “not even consistent with Reason” (Geulincx 2006, p. 90). Theguffaw 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 fromDemocritus’ contention that the body and soul, made of an infi-nite number of atoms that move eternally in a void, a void as realas the atoms therein, will more prosaically disintegrate at death.Atoms themselves are eternal, yet they comprise objects that arenot. The mythical laugh is metonymic. It is a laugh of indifferencetowards ontological impermanence, and by extension towardsany attachment in the world whatsoever. Such attachments are il-lusory as they are fleeting. It is the famous mirthless “risus purus”of Watt (p. 47).

Beckett’s contrast between the two philosophers, Geulincxand Democritus, is fantastically effective. Geulincx’s adherenceto his motto of “Serious and Candid”9 is clearly held in warm re-gard by Beckett but is significantly opposed by an antithetical guf-faw of Democritus. There is a productive argument to be had be-tween the two philosophers on the subject of nothingness, but, inorder to concentrate on Geulincx, here further discussion of itmust be forestalled.

later, responding to a query from Alan Schneider on 21st November 1957 aboutwho exactly Hamm’s “Old Greek” might be, Beckett reveals this might be Pro-tagoras (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 indicatesthis 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 theearlier difficulties obtaining a version of Ethica from the National Library in Ire-land, forcing the return to TCD. Significantly in this letter Beckett distanceshimself from Murphy’s admiration of Geulincx’s language, but is fascinated byits 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.


Over a substantial period then, some thirty years, Beckett ref-erences Geulincx or his central principles from Ethics, in corre-spondence. The 1967 letter to Sighle Kennedy is far from ananomaly and instead appears to be the last so far known of a reg-ular and remarkably consistent lineage of correspondence explic-itly pointing to the significance of Geulincx. Perhaps such evi-dence and the English translation of the Ethics which includesBeckett’s notes might contribute in the future to a more compre-hensive investigation of the indications Beckett gave to at leastseven known correspondents: MacGreevy, Ussher, Reavey,Duthuit, Franzen, Hutchinson, Kennedy, and probably alsoLawrence Harvey10.

Murphy

Given this evidence for Beckett’s repeated referencing ofGeulincx’s concepts over a thirty-year period, and knowing thatthe notes taken in TCD in 1936 remained with Beckett all his life(along with the rest of the Notes Diverses Holo collection, in con-trast to many other papers donated to archives at Reading or else-where), why might we want to go back to Murphy to begin locat-ing moments where Geulincx is important?11 There are at leasttwo main reasons for this. Firstly, there are the convincing argu-ments made by Feldman about Beckett’s uses of “his contempo-raneous reading in his writings”12. Beckett himself described theearly 1930s as being “soiled [...] with the old demon of note -


10 Harvey paraphrases a remark by Beckett that appears to repeat again thesubstance of the Hutchinson and Kennedy letters. However no citation is givenand it is unclear whether Harvey is referring to one of the interviews conduct-ed between himself and Beckett in 1962 or if he has perhaps made a mistake andmisdated the Kennedy letter by five years. See Harvey 1970, p. 267.

11 It should be noted that there is no current evidence Beckett would readGeulincx in the original after 1936 or add to his notes. However, Uhlmann inhis introduction to Beckett’s notes on Geulincx describes how two differenttypewriters were probably used to produce the two fair copies of notes, indi-cating they might have been produced at different times. See Geulincx 2006, pp.307-308.

12 Matthew Feldman, forthcoming in Russell Smith (editor), Beckett andEthics (Continuum, London 2009). I would like to express my gratitude toMatthew Feldman for permission to cite this.


snatching” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, August 1931, in En-gelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p. 21). He would find a way tomove out of the shadow of this old demon, but it was a significantshadow cast originally by the “epic, heroic” (Knowlson 1996, p.105) and encyclopaedic Joyce. Feldman adds further archival sub-stance to similar appraisals made by James Knowlson ten yearsearlier, where Knowlson writes:

Beckett’s notebooks show [...] that he too plundered the booksthat he was reading or studying for material that he could then incor-porate into his own writing. Beckett copied out striking, memorableor witty sentences or phrases into his notebooks. Such quotations ornear quotations were then woven into the dense fabric of his earlyprose. It is what could be called a “grafting” technique that runs attimes almost wild. He even ticked them in his private notebooks oncethey had been incorporated into his own work.

(Knowlson 1996, p. 106)

Secondly, there is Beckett’s own use of Murphy specifically andconsistently when referencing Geulincx in correspondence. If wetake a further small leap of faith, that Murphy was composedchronologically, we can note that when Beckett wrote on February6th 1936 that “There only remain three chapters of mechanical writ-ing” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 6th February 1936, in Acker-ley 2004, p. 13), the specific work being done on Murphy wouldhave been towards the final few chapters of the thirteen chapternovel. In chapter 9 Geulincx and his maxim from the Ethics are ex-plicitly mentioned, and a number of the studies cited above drawout elements of Murphy’s mind in chapter 6 as occasionalist13. Thesection I want to focus on is the chess game of chapter 11, to see ifit might be read in terms of Geulincx’s occasionalist philosophy offutile causation. We can thereby note not only how the game servesas a significant instantiation of Beckett’s interest in Geulincx, butalso that this interest and its application falls not far short of rescu-ing the novel being birthed with great difficulty. In the processGeulincx in Murphy serves as a connection to aspects of narrativethat would prove greatly productive for Beckett in the transition


13 See particularly Ackerley 2004 and Wood 1993.


from the more realistic framework of Murphy to the great middleperiod works via the enumerative, game-playing Watt.

Geulincx asserts that the action of the mind on the body is in-effable, a word he often uses and which recalls Arsene’s doomedattempts in Watt to “eff” (Watt, p. 61) the ineffable. When some-thing is ineffable for Geulincx this is not because

we cannot speak or think of it (for this would be nothing, nothing andunthinkable being the same), but because we cannot think about or en-compass with our reason how it is done[.]

(Geulincx 2006, p. 334)

In an example that Geulincx’ fellow occasionalist Malebran chewill also use, I may know something of the anatomy of blood flow,for example, between my arm and brain when my arm moves. Butthis does not suffice to explain what remains for Geulincx an inef-fable how14. There always remains a residue of experience not ex-hausted by knowledge of that experience. As he says: “an ineffablesomething is always missing” (Geulincx 2006, p. 334).

It follows from this that the mind cannot be said to cause anyaction in any body. For Geulincx I can only be said to perform anaction if I can also understand (“encompass with our reason”)how I do it. Lacking this knowledge I must defer with humility toa greater causal agent than myself, which for Geulincx is God. Ahuman mind is necessarily limited, and as such all a mind knowsis that it appears to itself as if it causes actions. Of the bodyGeulincx believes this irrational thing, in contrast to a rationalmind and in a familiar Cartesian binary, is nothing but brute mat-ter and therefore cannot be responsible for causing thoughts tooccur in a mind. Geulincx’s severe response to these issues is toboldly assert the metaphysical parallel of his ethical maxim in aphrase which Beckett transcribed from both Metaphysics andEthics, “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 “nomore than a consciousness and perception of the fact that motion is takingplace” (Geulincx 2006, p. 228).


tion and movement becomes, according to Geulincx, “someoneelse’s affair” (Geulincx 2006, p. 333), that someone being God.

Geulincx argues for a cogito, contra his philosophical progeni-tor Descartes, of ignorance. We should follow a programme of self-inspection, but whereas Descartes found therein ground for allpossible future knowledge to be ‘scientifically’ grounded andstructured, Geulincx finds ignorance of our place in the world andhow we might interact with that world. In basing his philosophy ongrounding principles of incapacity rather than sure knowledge,Geulincx’s cogito, as Uhlmann points out, becomes a nescio (“tonot know”, Uhlmann 2006, p. 99). Geulincx’s eyes, as Beckettwrites 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 thingsthat we do, and therefore that we cannot be said to actually do any-thing at all in the world, “He [Geulincx] does not put out his eyeson that account, as Heraclitus did & Rimbaud began to, nor likethe terrified Berkeley repudiate them. One feels them very pa-tiently turned outward” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 5th March1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell, 2006, p. 145) in humilityand in wonder (the consequent principle of despectio sui).

It is in this act of turning, the direction of looking, that Murphyfails. He looks inside himself and finds there the joyous “pleasure,such pleasure that pleasure was not the word” (Murphy, p. 6) andfinds no reason to look out again. Strapped into this closed spacehe clumsily sets light to the big world around him and he is messi-ly gone forever. For Murphy, flattered that he might appear to oth-ers as similar to the catatonic Clarke, the patients in the MagdalenMental Mercyseat are, like his own mind, a “Matrix of surds [...]missiles without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult ofnon-Newtonian motion” (p. 66). And for Murphy Mr Endon is theapotheosis of this, the point at which to End-on. Mr Endon is a par-adigmatic achievement of a self-inspection, a staring at oneself, atthe “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 suffer-ing that suffering was not the word, for he is numb, and invio-lable) from “a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Mur-




phy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain” (p. 105). How-ever, as Murphy peers with an impatient eye through the Judaswindow into the little world of Mr Endon’s cell the discrepancybetween the two becomes clear:

the sad truth was, that while Mr Endon for Murphy was no less thanbliss, Murphy for Mr Endon was no more than chess. Murphy’s eye?Say rather, the chessy eye. Mr Endon had vibrated to the chessy eyeupon him and made his preparations accordingly.

(Murphy, p. 135)

A farce as ridiculous as the monkeys playing chess Beckettwanted for a frontispiece of the novel15, the frustratedly stuck-in-the-big-world Murphy and the unwittingly stuck-in-the-little-world Mr Endon will play out through Beckett’s favourite gameof 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 theEthics during this game that is his undoing. He does not realise hehas no power, he is worth nothing, and cannot thereby influenceMr Endon, despite Mr Endon’s being, in other contexts, “voted byone and all the most biddable little gaga in the entire institution”(p. 134). Murphy tries desperately to give up his pieces throughoutthe game, hoping for reaction. He moves a knight into a losing po-sition three times, and tries valiantly with “the ingenuity of de-spair” (p. 137) at moves 27 and 41 to sacrifice his queen and stillMr Endon’s non-reaction is unshakeable. Just as Mr Endon sawnot Murphy but the chessy eye, similarly he follows the abstractrules of chess in a further abstraction. He does not follow themcompetitively, instead he adheres to them only in so far as they al-low him to re-arrange a monochrome and symmetrical visual pat-tern of his own devising.

15 The picture taken from the Daily Sketch of July 1st 1936 appears on thecover of Ackerley’s Demented Particulars. Beckett appears to have been verykeen on the picture, twice asking George Reavey about it. On the 13th January1938 he asked succinctly about apes, and four days later expressed his disap-pointment 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 betweenmind and body, rather than to mediation between good or bad moral qualities.


Mr Endon’s turns taken, the claim being that we cannot real-ly call them his responses, during Murphy’s abject begging forquittance are described as his “irresistible game” (p. 137) whenrather than taking Murphy’s queen he returns a knight to a cor-ner square, revealing his pieces in a diabolical and hugely comicstrict plan of symmetry. Murphy’s pieces are of course in utter dis-array. Murphy is by turns confused, imitative, desperate, then sui-cidal, finally giving up the ghost when forced into a winning po-sition by Mr Endon’s only possible but illegal final move into theclosest it is possible to get (conceding the irreversible forwardmovement of two pawns) to his original symmetry. It is a movethat would “indicate once and for all whether Mr Endon per-ceives him” (Ackerley 2004, p. 194).

Geulincx wrote in Ethics:

We have no power to affect either our own or any other body; thisis perfectly obvious from our consciousness alone, and no sane manwould deny it.

(Geulincx 2006, p. 243)

This Cartesian founding principle “obvious from conscious-ness alone” is Geulincx’s clear and distinct realisation of ignoranceand impotence. Murphy does not realise he has no power to af-fect Mr Endon. Instead his hubris prolongs the fruitless manoeu-vres in a game he can only lose. In his frustration we might wellhear an echo of Geulincx’s realisation that “I am a mere specta-tor 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 Geu -lincxian quietism. Such stoicism as this might enable him to beatthe catatonics at their own game. He should cast his eyes with hu-mility upon his impotence, and realise that where he cannot act,where he is worth nothing, he should not try to act. There, wherethere is truly “nothing to be done” (Waiting for Godot, p. 11), hemight stand a chance of failing better.

Though of course beating the catatonics at their own game is al-so a danger. For Murphy, seeking to avoid the perhaps occasional-ist “occasions of fiasco” (Murphy, p. 101) in his little world, it



was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing [...]. Ithad not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These dis-positions [...] could sway the issue in the desired direction, but notclinch it.

(Murphy, p. 102)

Murphy is not a humble man. “How will [a humble man] lis-ten to what Reason says if he listens only to what he himself says”(Geulincx 2006, p. 220), Geulincx asked rhetorically. Besottedwith his own company, in the words of Malraux, Murphy “seeksout his own”, listening only to himself or his vice-existers, andforcing the oblivion. Recalling Geulincx’s terminology in a waysimilar to the published letter to Duthuit cited above, Murphywas previously transfixed by a “vicarious autology he had beenenjoying [...] in little Mr Endon and all the other proxies” (Mur-phy, p. 107). However, his egotistical self-regard will get the bet-ter of him and when his own little inferno engulfs him it will bewhile he is in thrall to himself and his self-defeating attempts towill his own quietist will-lessness.

“What is more tedious to a man than living!” (TCD MS10971/6/1 in Feldman 2004, p. 35417) Beckett transcribed fromQuestions Concerning Disputations, and Murphy might concur,spurning the fanciful notion of a mystical occasionalist God whocontinually sticks his oar in, who amounts to no more than “TheChaos and Waters Facilities Act” (Murphy, p. 100) of ChapterNine. Murphy is revolted at the attribution of any talents he mighthave to anything outside himself. Farces and disasters astrologycan keep, but little successes such as those had with the patientsare hoarded for his self.

Following the collapse of the game, Murphy stares into the un-responsive cornea of Mr Endon and sees, “horribly reduced, ob-scured and distorted, his own image” (p. 140). This instant ofnon-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 ofSamuel Beckett’s writing, Oxford Brooks University, 2004. It derives from theLatin “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 Geulincxdebated in public. On these public oratories see Land, 1891, pp. 224-225.


the Proustian moment, which redeems nothing” (Ackerley 2004,p. 202). Murphy is horrifyingly still himself, unwilling to let go hisapperception of sanity. Such is a price the variously impecunioushero just cannot afford. James O’Hara describes how “this is thepose of Narcissus, bent over the stream to see himself” (O’Hara1997, p. 60). This is the point at which Murphy in his narcissisticway blooms. To pursue the analogy briefly, if Mr Endon is Mur-phy’s Echo, with his psychosis perhaps a little of Juno’s curse, thisis only after Murphy has in vain and in vanity tried to himself bethe echo of Mr Endon’s moves in the game. However, Murphywill be “melted, consumed by the fire inside him” (Ovid, Meta-morphoses, p. 116) as is the fate of Narcissus. The game has un-masked him as the selfish Narcissus, not, as he hoped, the selflessEcho. By the following day he will be dead and dust, even moreliterally “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 shouldhave been noted in the 1950s along with Pascal as a Christian Ex-istentialist. Such a valiant ambivalence fascinated Beckett, as evi-denced by his correspondence. But Murphy, unable to resignhimself to the knowledge that “whatever I do stays within me; and[...] nothing I do passes into my body, or any other body, or any-thing else” (Geulincx 2006, p. 331), persists with the misguidedbelief that there might be something to express in this game.There is not, and for Murphy as for anyone else Geulincx wouldoffer the simple restraint: “It is vain to attempt what I cannot un-dertake” (Geulincx 2006, p. 339).

Perhaps Murphy’s falling short of Geulincx’s maxims of ab-stinence finds a kind of parallel in Beckett himself not finishingEthics, as he wrote “not even in Lent” (Letter to Thomas Mac-Greevy, 9th April 1936, in Engelberts, Frost and Maxwell 2006, p.145). However, in providing a much-needed injection of ideasand energy into the completion of Murphy, Geulincx contributedto Beckett’s overcoming a severe case of writer’s frustration, if notblock. It was to finishing Murphy Beckett turned after Easter thisyear18. By the 6th of May he would be turning down other work as


18 Easter fell on 12th April in 1936.


he was too busy with the novel19, and producing a completed firstdraft of it only four weeks later (by 9th June).

In the way Geulincx becomes perhaps incorporated into thisone scene in particular he is shown as integral to the developmentfrom Murphy to the major middle period works. The chess gameelaborates the theme of closed systems already in Murphy20, in thisinstance given a Geulincxian impetus. Yet in its exceptionality inthe novel as a game, an enumeration of specific moves, the chessgame looks forward quite explicitly to the many troubles to whichBeckett will subject his next protagonist, Watt.

Moreover, it is the bombastic version of Watt appearing to-wards the end of Mercier et Camier who will, as Pilling has readit, announce Beckett’s future horizons: “It falls to Watt to predictwhat Beckett will attempt in narrative terms when, as soon, Mer -cier 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 vou-dra 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 noth-ing 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 theirnarratives will be born from the ashes of Mercier, Camier, Watt,and Murphy. We are left with interesting questions: Why isWatt’s announcement framed in the famous terms borrowedfrom Geulincx? And, more broadly, what are we to make of Beck-ett’s fixing on the single maxim in correspondence over such along 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, Mur-phy’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”, theamount of desire and suffering (in a game where these equate perhaps to win-ning and losing) is self-contained. Closed systems by definition do not leak, andserve well as playthings of the monomaniacal, and the insane.


ferent ways in the thirty years following Murphy? Geulincx re-mains with Beckett, resurfacing by name in “The End”, Molloy,and The Unnamable, and as has been discussed by Uhlmann, im-plicitly in shifting ways in later works such as “Rockaby” andFilm21. He is undoubtedly only one of Beckett’s numerous so-called intertextual “bits of pipe”22, but he is an important and in-triguing one, still yet to be fully explored.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [July 1930]. [Published inJames Knowlson, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beck-ett, 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 Di-verse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and OtherManuscripts 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, SamuelBeckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo) cit., p. 144.]

Letter to George Reavey, 9th January 1936, HRHRC. [Published inMartha D. Fehsenfeld and Lois M. Overbeck (editors), 2009, TheLetters 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 An-notated Murphy, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Florida, p. 13.]


21 See Uhlmann 2006, pp. 78-85.22 Beckett quoted in conversation. See Knowlson 1983, p. 16.


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 MatthewFeldman, 2006, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beck-ett’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 afterBeckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, p. 19.]

Letter to Dr. Erich Franzen, 17th February 1954. [Published in An-thony 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 Dra-

matic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London.Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow and Lois More Overbeck (editors), 2009,

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge.

Works by Arnold Geulincx

Metaphysica vera, 1691. [Metaphysics, Christoffel Press, Wisbech1999.]

Ruler, van Han, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson (editors),2006, Ethics – with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, Brill, Leiden.



Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaas (editor), 1891-1893, Arnoldi GeulincxOpera 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 Revo-lution, Verso, London.

Cohn, Ruby, 1962, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, Rutgers Uni-versity Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey).

De Lattre, Alain, 1970, Arnold Geulincx, Seghers, Paris.De Vleeschauwer, Herman J., 1957, Three Centuries of Geulincx Re-

search: A Bibliographic Survey, Communications of the Universityof South Africa, Pretoria.

Dobrez, L. A. C., 1986, The Existential and Its Exits: Literary andPhilosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genetand Pinter, Athlone Press, London.

Engelberts, Matthijs, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell (editors), 2006,Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Cata-logues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at TrinityCollege Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI, 2006.

Feldman, Matthew, 2004 (unpublished thesis), Sourcing “Aporetics”:An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Developmentof 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, Beckettafter Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served: The Corre-spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Harvey, Lawrence, 1970, Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton (New Jersey).

Kennedy, Sighle, 1971, Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-Real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel, Bucknell Uni-versity 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.




Idem, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Blooms-bury, 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: Struc-tural 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, Bas-ingstoke.

Uhlmann, Anthony, 2006, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image,University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge.

Idem, 2006, “Samuel Beckett and the Occluded Image”, in Gontar skiand Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett after Beckett, cit., pp. 79-97.

Idem, 2004, “‘A Fragment of a Vitagraph’: Hiding and Revealing inBeckett, Geulincx, and Descartes”, in Anthony Uhlmann, SjefHouppermans, and Bruno Clément (editors), Samuel Beckett To-day / 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 Beck-ett 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 Edi-

tion), Macmillan, London.


Beckett and Place: The Lie of the LandDavid Addyman

Place might not seem like a suitable subject of study in a writerwhose career is characterised from beginning to end by topopho-bia. Landscape, we know, was only of interest to Belacqua as longas it furnished him with a pretext for a long face (More Pricks ThanKicks, p. 31), while Murphy’s disdain for the big world needs no in-troduction. Estragon in Waiting for Godot says he has never beenanywhere but the “muckheap” which he calls “the Cackon Coun-try” (Waiting for Godot, p. 57), and Malone curses, “[t]o hell withall this fucking scenery” (Malone Dies, p. 279), echoing Hamm’soutburst, “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 ofthe 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 isnever interested in describing place. Where Joyce once famouslysaid that he wanted to give “a picture of Dublin so complete that ifthe city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could bereconstructed out of [his] book” (Joyce, in Budgen 1934 [1960, pp.67-68]), even in Beckett’s early work it is clearly impossible torecreate Dublin (or any other place) out of his books. Rather, if adescription of place is given it is more likely that it is because it al-lows a character relief from other questions: “I’ll describe theplace, that’s unimportant” (Texts for Nothing, 1, p. 100). The im-


plication here is that an account of the narrator’s location, by dintof being so trivial, could offer a relief from the deadlock of an exis-tence 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 placein Beckett’s work. In support of this are the largely reactionary as-sociations 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 viablehomeland in which meaningful roots can be established” (Harvey1993, p. 11) at precisely the period in which, in the eyes of mostcommentators, he is closest to Nazism. But we could also cite thefact that Foucault was once “firebombed” by a “Sartrean psy-chologist” who told him that space was “reactionary” (Foucault1984, p. 168). Place certainly seems to be connected with a con-servative mode of thinking in many studies. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, for example, says that “Places stay put. Their image isone 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 placeis something so omnipresent that it is impossible for an author notto mention it, and it is thus easy to confuse its mere mention witha fully-developed philosophy of place. Then there is the questionof what place actually means. Studies of place often begin by stat-ing the difficulty of defining their subject. J. E. Malpas, in Placeand Experience, points out that the OED contains five pages of de-finitions for the word “place” and only slightly fewer for the word“space” (Malpas 1999, p. 21). Others paraphrase Saint Augustineon time: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explainit to him who asks me, I do not know” (quoted in Dean and Mil-lar 2005, p. 13).

Yet place is clearly important to Beckett. When the narratorof 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 basicmetaphysical category for Malone: “I shall go on doing as I havealways done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor whereI am, nor if I am” (Malone Dies, p. 226, italics mine). In these twoaspects, Beckett echoes Aristotle, who held that “that without

D. Addyman. Beckett and Place: The Lie of the Land 211


which nothing else can exist, while it can exist without the oth-ers, must needs be first” (Physics, 208b-209a). According to Ed-ward Casey (Casey 1997), the question which has concernedphilosophers from ancient times to the present day, where placeis concerned, is how body and this primary thing – place – are re-lated. Aristotle provides the definition with which almost all sub-sequent philosophers of place – from Descartes to Husserl, Mer-leau-Ponty, Heidegger and even Derrida and Irigaray – explicit-ly or implicitly engage (see Casey 1997, pp. 331-342 and passim).In Aristotle’s thought, place is a rigid, snugly fitting containeraround a contained body – a hand in a pocket, a sword in asheath, a round peg in a round hole. This concept of place aimsto restrict the violent eruptions of elemental qualities which char-acterise Plato’s thought, and to impose a rational structure onthem. In the interests of rationality it also excludes from em-placement the non-physical qualities of the emplaced body. It isthus hard-put to deal with place as experienced by an organic andever-changing body such as the human subject, with its memoriesand associations seeming to stretch place beyond mere physical-ity. And in fact, Aristotle never manages to provide a convincinganswer to his own question, “what account are we to give of‘growing’ things?” (Physics, 209a). For Aristotle, place is a staticsurface at the limits of the physical body. Thus, although he is thefirst philosopher to deal with place with any rigour, paradoxical-ly he initiates a marginalisation of place which lasts until the late-nineteenth century.

Casey argues that Aristotle’s placing of place at the limit, hisinitial marginalisation, leads to a steady erosion of any interest inplace in the history of philosophy. This is exacerbated by a seriesof papal condemnations issued in 1277 forbidding any doctrinewhich limited the power of God (see Casey 1997, p. 107), effec-tively ensuring in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance thedomination of philosophy by a concern with infinite space, whichwas the domain of God’s omnipotence, at the expense of an in-terest in place. In Enlightenment philosophy, the obsession withquantification leads to a view of space as pure extension, withinwhich place is a mere site. Enlightenment space and place areinane, in the sense of life-less. For Casey, what the Aristotelian,Mediaeval and Enlightenment views of place have in common is



that when they examine the relationship between body and place,they all exclude certain qualities of the body. Aristotle’s defini-tion excludes all non-physical qualities from emplacement, whilethe Enlightenment conception excludes all those qualities of thebody which evade quantification in terms of distance, positionand relation.

In contrast to these exclusive views of place, in the thought ofWhitehead, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty place gains inclusiveness(see Casey 1997, Chapter 10, pp. 331-342 and passim). Qualitieswhich are not physical or quantifiable are now included in the un-derstanding of place through the emphasis in these thinkers onthe lived body, which implies an attentiveness to lived place. Anyplace in which a person finds his or her body is immediately trans-formed into, in the words of Gaston Bachelard, an “intimate im-mensity” (Bachelard 1957 [1994, p. 183]), by dint of the memo-ries, thoughts and associations which the subject brings to eachand every place. Each place thus contains, in Merleau-Ponty’sthought, “as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences”(Merleau-Ponty 1945 [2002, p. 340]), and Derrida will laterequate place (in its architectural form) with event, made tempo-rary by the presence of multiple subjects. Once we take the hu-man subject into account in the definition of place, then its statusas a strictly delimited container is threatened. In Heidegger’sthought place extends into region, since in the encounter withplace the subject calls on a knowledge of a wider environing area,while Irigaray sees no reason why we should not stretch our defi-nition of place out to the limits of the universe. It becomes verydifficult to make any distinction between supposedly finite placeand the supposedly infinite universe. Aristotle’s container is nowa very leaky sieve, and it is this leakiness of place, and its tenden-cy to become infinitely extended, that I want to examine in rela-tion to Beckett’s work.

At first sight, Mr Knott’s house resembles a sealed, exclusiveplace: when a new servant enters, an old one has to leave, suggest-ing that the relationship of contained to container must remain thesame. It is a microcosm which has something of the “ingrainedwholism” of Aristotle, whose “passionate desire for perfection, es-pecially of a teleologically ordered sort [...] ends in a cosmograph-ic picture of a closed and finite world with no further universe



around it” (Casey 1997, p. 81)1. Taking the house globally, or, fol-lowing critics such as Amiran and Ackerley (see Ackerley 2005, es-pecially p. 284, and Amiran 1993, pp. 29-32, 155), (micro-)cosmi-cally, we could say that, as in Murphy, the quantum of substancemust remain constant (Murphy, p. 36). As Watt puts it, in a phrasewhich, as Ackerley shows, could allude to the Newtonian universeas well as the Aristotelian (see Ackerley 2005, pp. 139, 74-75), “itis frequent, when one thing increases in one place, for another inanother to diminish” (Watt, p. 146). But for all this apparent fit-tingness 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 itwould have been hard set to keep going” (Watt, p. 66). It relies onthe exterior world as a source of staff – Watt is the most recentdemonstration of this fact: he is referred to as one who “had comefrom without and whom the without would take again” (p. 79). Ar-sene, too, poses a threat to the self-containment of the house. Hiscontinued presence there after Watt’s arrival would seem to upsetthe quota of bodies in the house – or the quantum of substance inthe microcosm – and raises the paradox of a displaced body still inplace. 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 hisnew, wherever that might be. Beckett accentuates this paradox bymaking Arsene’s “short statement” (p. 37) so long.

The problem raised, then, by Watt’s coming and Arsene’s goingis one of how to contain that which “slops” over the edge of the “con-tainer” that is Mr Knott’s house. This is significant, as Watt will bevery much concerned with slops and containers during his time inMr Knott’s service; his chief duties in the house concern dealing withremains: he is entrusted with disposing of both Mr Knott’s slops andthe leftovers of his meal. Where the latter are concerned, he is ex-pected “to witness the dog’s eating the food, until not an atom re-mained” (p. 111, italics mine). This last phrase and variations of itappear at a number of points in the discussion of the food and the


1 The Faber Companion argues that Beckett’s characters “often assume thattheir universe is a closed system, where laws of reason and harmony pertain andequilibrium holds sway, a notion found in Epicurus, who asserted that the sumof things is forever the same” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2006, p. 435).



provisions put in place to ensure that nothing is left over (see, for in-stance, pp. 89, 92, 95, 111). This last stipulation indicates a concernon Mr Knott’s part (or on the part of whomever made the orders)with keeping the house finite and self-contained. But it is preciselythe way in which Watt takes this task of accounting for every atombeyond the call of duty that leads him into endless permutations, andmakes Mr Knott’s house a leaky container: in the very attempt to sealoff the house and to exclude that which is not part of it, it is openedout and comes to include more and more. In order to account forevery atom, Watt must posit first a dog, then a messenger, and thena dog-owner to look after it (pp. 91, 92, 95). The description of thefirst of these as “an ill-nourished local dog” indicates the house’s in-terdependence with the surrounding area, as does the need for theestablishment “on some favourable site” of “a kennel or colony offamished dogs” (pp. 91, 96, italics mine). It is the need to posit aplace for Kate, and then a place for the radically extended Lynchfamily, that causes the house to unravel into numerous other places,and forces the inclusion of those places in the (sought-after but nowseverely threatened) delimitation of the house. But the establish-ment does not merely extend into the local area; it also depends ona space outside creation: this is apparent in the phrase, “the dogbrought into the world” (p. 114), which suggests creation ex nihilo,and raises questions as to where this new body can come from, butalso where it was before it was brought into the world.

Accounting for every atom of Mr Knott’s food, then, forcesWatt to acknowledge that place blooms – and this is quite literal-ly the case where Mr Knott’s slops are concerned: as with the left-over food, Watt cannot (is both not allowed and cannot permithimself to) simply let the slops go to waste. They must be emptiedon a specific flower bed depending on the season, “on someyoung growing thirsty thing at the moment of its most need” (p.64). In other words, in the disposal of this waste, new growth willcome about – new growth, or, to use in its strictest botanical sensea 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 forhis “dramatic dehiscence” (Beckett in Cohn 1983, p. 82), while Dream of Fairto Middling Women speaks of Beethoven’s “punctuation of dehiscence” (Dreamof Fair to Middling Women, p. 139). The conventional meaning of dehiscence isthe bursting forth of seeds from their pods (OED).


if, as the example of the ingoing and outgoing servants suggests,a constant relationship between contained and container must ex-ist in the house, this is problematised when new atoms are creat-ed: the quantum of substance has been altered. Are the plantswhich grow from Mr Knott’s slops part of the house or not? Thequestion of what to include in the definition of the house andwhat to exclude thus arises again out of the attempt to account forevery atom. This question is one that bothers Watt at variouspoints in his stay, most notably in his encounter with the paintingin Erskine’s room. Regarding it, he wonders, “Did the picture be-long to Erskine, or had it been brought and left behind by someother servant, or was it part and parcel of Mr Knott’s establish-ment?” (p. 128, italics mine). We then learn that “Prolonged andirksome meditations forced Watt to the conclusion that the pic-ture was part and parcel of Mr Knott’s establishment” (p. 128).This then becomes the answer, confusingly, no longer to the orig-inal question, but to the following: “Was the picture a fixed andstable member of the edifice, like Mr Knott’s bed, for example, orwas it simply a manner of paradigm, here today and gone tomor-row, a term in a series [...]?” (p. 128). Watt’s answer favours thesecond interpretation: “A moment’s reflexion satisfied Watt thatthe picture had not been long in the house, and that it would notremain 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 noth-ing could be added to Mr Knott’s establishment, and from it nothingtaken away, but that as it was now, so it had been in the beginning, andso it would remain to the end, in all essential respects [...]. Yes, noth-ing 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 con-clusion a “tenth-rate xenium”, suggests that it is not the answerper se that need concern us here, but the attempt to ascertain whatis to be excluded from and what included in the definition of thehouse. If, as Acheson argues, Watt attempts “to establish whichpart of the picture should be regarded as figure and which as



ground”, and if avoiding the distinction between figure andground is “out of the question” (Acheson 1997, p. 60), then thisis part of his wider (failed) attempt to separate the microcosm ofMr Knott’s house from the surrounding macrocosm – to excludewhat is not part of the house – in order to make it a self-containedplace existing exclusively of other places. The problem is that thecontainer, “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 ac-quire a new significance. The “fugitive penetration” of “the Galls,father and son” (p. 67) brings with it precisely the note of infini-tude which challenges the exclusive definition of place. This “in-cident” “was not ended, when it was past, but continued to un-fold, in Watt’s head, from beginning to end, over and over again”(p. 69). The fact that later Watt’s efforts to “exorcize” are stoppedin their tracks by a pot – another container – also seems signifi-cant 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 de-fine containers in the novel. Indeed, the collision in the last chap-ter between Watt’s head and the bucket of slops – yet anothercontainer – 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 alongpaths 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 Wattmight, he is unable to come to the end of place. And indeed, twoyears after writing Watt, Beckett describes place in Mercier andCamier as “unfinished, unfinishable” (Mercier and Camier, p. 77).As if in recognition of this, the passages which depict place oftenend arbitrarily: the description of the village in Chapter III ends“and so on” (p. 42), while the description of the bog in ChapterVII is cut short with “End of descriptive passage” (p. 98). So while



Watt tries to pursue place to its very end, Mercier and Camierrefuse to play this game. Watt’s topomania gives way to Mercierand Camier’s topophobia.

If, as theorists of place hold, place and identity are inextricablybound up, then this endless quality to place must have an effect onperson. Bachelard argues that, in order to constitute a biographyor autobiography, “we should have to undertake a topoanalysis ofall the space that has invited us to come out of ourselves”(Bachelard 1957 [1994, p. 11]) – all the places we have ever inhab-ited, in other words. But if place is extended indefinitely, if it is un-finished and unfinishable, what chance of unity is there for a biog-raphy or autobiography which is dependent on it? Beckett’s con-cern with the dependence of autobiography on a place in which notraces of oneself can be found is given its most extended treatmentin The Unnamable. From the first line, “Who now? Where now?When now?” (The Unnamable, p. 293), place and person are inex-tricably 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 tothat of my abode” (p. 298). The problem he faces is that every wordhe says adds to place, and thereby delays indefinitely the momentwhen 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 amwaiting 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 pensumor penance which sets him apart from phenomenologists such asBachelard. But Casey also recognises the affliction of emplace-ment, saying,

In invidious contrast with [the] freewheeling vista [of the Enlight-enment’s infinite space], place presents itself in its stubborn, indeed inits rebarbative, particularity. One has no choice but to deal with whatis in place, or at place: that is, what is at stake there [...] one has to copewith the exacting demands of being just there.

(Casey 1997, p. 338, italics Casey’s)

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



ing-out” drive by which place is extended infinitely such that thesubject has no recourse to it as a foundation to identity. On theother hand, the impossibility of avoiding place, “the exacting de-mands of being just there”. The “spacing-out” of place, the re-moval of the possibility of presence, which is what many of thebest theory-led discussions of Beckett’s work have stressed (see,for example, Connor 1988, chapters 6 and 7, passim), does not ab-solve the subject from the demands of emplacement. Even in theearly work, behind the screen of irony which implicitly rejects allmeans of appropriating place – whether Republican or Imperial-ist, Joycean or Proustian – place is glimpsed in its irreducible fac-ticity. This irreducibility is also noticeable in Watt: there are briefpassages in which Watt confronts Mr Knott’s house in the raw,without his “science”, as on arrival, or unexorcised by his “pillowof old words”, as on page 115 when he comes to the end of theKate, Art and Con run, but has yet to begin the Erskine run.

It is the demand that place makes to be dealt with which leadsto the Unnamable’s obsession with the void as somewhere thatplace is nullified, annihilated – voided. However, my need in thatlast sentence to refer to the void as “somewhere” is precisely theproblem which the Unnamable faces when he tries to void place.He says that “[t]he essential is never to arrive anywhere, never tobe anywhere, neither where Mahood is, nor where Worm is, norwhere I am” (The Unnamable, p. 341), but he is intermittentlyaware of the impossibility of this: “gone where,” he asks, “wheredo you go from there, you must go somewhere else” (p. 414). Ifhe could gain access to the void, he would immediately make it acontainer for a thing – himself – and he would thereby turn it in-to a place, since the condition of containing is the primary quali-ty of place for Aristotle, for whom there can be no void. Thus, theUnnamable’s predicament is that, for his wish to be realised, thevoid would have to be made to take place, and would thereforebe 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, andto possess a rudimentary kind of physical being.

(Connor 1988, p. 76, italics mine)



Worm either exists and is in place or does not exist and isnowhere. He cannot have his placial cake and eat it. The impasseat which Beckett arrives in The Unnamable is thus that, on the onehand, place is too void-like, in that by dint of its infinite extended-ness it offers no foundations and possesses no properties, and onthe other hand, the void is too place-like, impossible to posit with-out 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 ofplace is not to claim that they are place-ful, in the sense of provid-ing presence or the kind of meaningful emplacement that Tuanspeaks of – place as a “calm center of established values”. Rather,in Beckett’s work, the provision of place always exists in tensionwith its withholding. At the same time, they are not placeless – thethird dialogue with George Duthuit implies this: “There is morethan a difference of degree between being short, short of world,short of self, and being without those esteemed commodities. Theone is a predicament, the other not” (Three Dialogues, p. 122).Patently, all Beckett’s characters are in a predicament; a signifi-cant part of this seems to be due to the fact that they are not with-out world but within it – unavoidably emplaced.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 andFaber, 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].



Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Bo-yars, 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 Dra-

matic 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 2004-Spring 2005).

Ackerley, C. J., and Stanley E. Gontarski (editors), 2004, The FaberCompanion to Beckett, Faber and Faber, London.

Amiran, Eyal, 1993, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s MetaphysicalNarrative, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania.

Budgen, Frank, 1934, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”, Indi-ana 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: Reflec-tions on the Condition of Postmodernity”, in Jon Bird, Barry Cur-tis, Tim Putman, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner (editors),1993, Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Rout-ledge, London, pp. 3-29.

Ingold, Tim, 2000, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Liveli-hood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, London.

Other works cited

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




and Francis M. Cornford, Harvard University Press, Cambridge(Massachusetts) 1929, 2005.

Bachelard, Gaston, 1957, La poétique de l’espace, Presses Universi-taires de France, Paris (The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston1994, trans. Maria Jolas).

Foucault, Michel, 1984, “Space, Power and Knowledge”, interview byPaul Rabinow, in Simon During (editor), 1993, The Cultural Stud-ies 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, Gal-limard, Paris 2001 (Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, Lon-don 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’sManuscript Notes on The Unnamable

Shane Weller

Commentators on Beckett have long been familiar with TheodorAdorno’s essay on Endgame (first published in volume 2 of Notenzur Literatur – Notes to Literature – in 1961) and the scattered re-marks on Beckett’s works in Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theo-ry) (first published in 1970, a year after Adorno’s death). Ratherless well known is the fact that, just as he deliberately placed his es-say on Endgame at the end of the second volume of Noten zur Lite -ratur, so Adorno intended to write an essay on The Unnamable tobe placed at the end of a projected fourth volume. Together with aplanned essay on Paul Celan’s 1959 collection of poems, Sprachgit-ter, Adorno’s essay on The Unnamable arguably remains one of thegreat unwritten works of twentieth-century literary criticism. Hadthey been written, these two essays would not only have con-tributed substantially to the reception of Beckett and Celan indi-vidually; they would also presumably have enabled us to graspmore fully Adorno’s sense of the profound elective affinity(Wahlverwandtschaft) between Beckett’s art and Celan’s1. Thatsaid, while both essays remained unwritten, some important indi-cations of the form that Adorno’s analysis of The Unnamablewould have taken are to be found in his own copy of the 1959 Ger-man 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 iden-tifies this affinity as lying in the two writers’ shared figurations of death and ofnothingness as the sole repositories of hope (see Adorno 1994, pp. 113-114),and in the paralipomena published in Ästhetische Theorie he suggests that theaffinity also lies in the “anorganic” aspect of their work, which “yearns neitherfor nature nor for industry” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 219]).


Main) contains numerous underlinings, some marginalia, and sev-en pages of manuscript notes on the blank pages at the beginningof the volume. Not only do these underlinings, marginalia, andnotes flesh out Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett in various im-portant ways, especially the nature of the relation between thephilosophical and the literary that lies at the heart of his responseto Beckett, but they also raise important questions regarding thedistinction upon which Adorno insists in a letter of 21 May 1962 tothe poet Werner Kraft between Beckett’s plays and his novels, adistinction the status of which is problematical not only because itis 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 dis-tinction functions within Adorno’s more general theorization ofBeckett’s art as one of radical indifferentiation.

In his 28 March 1962 radio talk, “Engagement” (“Commit-ment”), Adorno refers to The Unnamable as a “genuinely colos-sal” work (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 90]), and in the May 1962 let-ter to Kraft he declares that he has just read the novel “with trulyfeverish sympathy” (Adorno 1994, p. 34)2. And yet, not only doesAdorno’s only published essay on Beckett take the play Endgameas its subject, but the majority of the comments on Beckett in Äs-thetische Theorie relate explicitly to the plays, and more preciselyto Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and “Play”. Indeed, beyond a fewkey remarks upon the general significance of the “you must goon” (“il faut continuer”) at the end of The Unnamable3, there isonly one assertion in Ästhetische Theorie that relates specificallyto Beckett’s novels – and even this does not really help to distin-guish the significance of Beckett’s novels from that of his plays forAdorno. The assertion in question is that

[Beckett’s] narratives, which he sardonically calls novels, no moreoffer objective descriptions of social reality than – as the widespread


2 All translations from volume three of the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter aremy own.

3 For instance, in the paralipomena published in Ästhetische Theorie,Adorno asserts that the “you must go on” of The Unnamable condenses the an-tinomy “that externally art appears impossible while immanently it must be pur-sued” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 320]).


misunderstanding supposes – they present the reduction of life to ba-sic human relationships, that minimum of existence that subsists in ex-tremis. These novels do, however, touch on fundamental layers of ex-perience hic et nunc, which are brought together into a paradoxical dy-namic at a standstill. The narratives are marked as much by an objec-tively motivated loss of the object as by its correlative, the impover-ishment of the subject.

(Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 30])

The two key points here – that the novels present us with aparadoxical dynamic at a standstill, and that they are marked byan impoverishment of the subject – are also made of Endgame inthe 1961 essay on that play, which is described as “the epilogue tosubjectivity” in which Walter Benjamin’s notion of “dialectics ata standstill comes into its own” (Adorno 1961 [1991, pp. 259,274]). Adorno returns to this question of the dynamic at a stand-still in Ästhetische Theorie, stating that Beckett,

indifferent to the ruling cliché of development, views his task as thatof moving in an infinitely small space toward what is effectively a di-mensionless point. This aesthetic principle of construction, as theprinciple of the Il faut continuer, goes beyond stasis; and it goes be-yond the dynamic in that it is at the same time a principle of treadingwater 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 meetingwith Beckett on 23 September 1967 makes clear, while it may beBeckett who claims that his task is that of moving in an infinitelysmall space, it is Adorno who adds the thought of this movementbeing towards a dimensionless point (see Adorno 1994, p. 24).

As in Ästhetische Theorie, so in his 1965 lecture series on meta-physics, which offers a considerably more lucid version of argu-ments made in the final model in Negative Dialektik (Negative Di-alectics) (1966), Adorno’s remarks on Beckett tend to relate eitherto the plays or to the œuvre in general. In his 20 July 1965 lecture,for instance, Adorno describes Beckett’s plays as “the only trulyrelevant metaphysical productions since the war” (Adorno 1998[2000, p. 117]). In his 22 July lecture, however, The Unnamableis mentioned together with Endgame, and in his 27 July lecture

S. Weller. The Art of Indifference: Adorno’s Manuscript Notes 225


Adorno remarks upon the question of nothingness in Beckett’sworks generally in a manner that relates directly to his earliermanuscript notes on The Unnamable. In this lecture, Adornoclaims that Beckett is a writer for whom “everything revolvesaround the question what nothingness actually contains; the ques-tion, one might almost say, of a topography of the void. This workis really an attempt so to conceive nothingness that it is, at thesame time, not merely nothingness, but to do so within completenegativity” (Adorno 1998 [2000, pp. 135-136]; Adorno’s empha-sis). A nothingness that is in some sense at odds with itself, or thatexceeds itself – it is precisely with this possibility that Adorno’smanuscript 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 wherenothing is retained. The fullness of nothingness. This is the reason forthe insistence upon the zero point.

(Adorno 1994, p. 73)

This idea of a difference at the heart of the nothing is also pre-sent in the short passage on Beckett in the section on “Nihilism”in Negative Dialektik. Here, it is in the difference between noth-ingness (das Nichts) and coming to rest (zur Ruhe Gelangten) thatAdorno locates the sole haven of hope (Zuflucht der Hoffnung) inBeckett; that is, the hope for a better world, governed not by theprinciple of identity but rather by that of reconciliation (Versöhn -ung), or the non-hostile co-presence of the non-identical (seeAdorno 1966 [1973, pp. 381, 6]). It is just such a reconciliationthat Adorno finds all “genuine” art gesturing towards, albeit inthe form of a negative image.

To summarize, then, one finds that from the 1961 essay onEndgame to the remarks on Beckett in the 1965 lectures on meta-physics and in Negative Dialektik (1966), to those in Ästhetische The-orie (1970), Adorno tends either to privilege the plays (and, above all,Endgame) or to remark upon Beckett’s works in general. In his 1962essay “Titel” (“Titles”), Adorno does emphasize the importance ofthe title The Unnamable, claiming that it “not only fits its subject mat-ter but also embodies the truth about the namelessness of contem-



porary literature” (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 4]); in the 1962 radio talk“Engagement”, he mentions The Unnamable together with Kafka’sprose and Beckett’s own plays (see p. 90); and the phrase “commentc’est” (taken, of course, from Beckett’s 1961 novel) appears morethan once4; but nowhere does he address directly the question of thedifference between Beckett’s novels and his plays, and nowhere doeshe offer an argument to support the claim made in his letter to Kraftthat the novels – and, above all, The Unnamable– go beyond the playsin their meaning. Thus, if there is an argument put forward to sup-port this evaluative distinction between the novels and the plays, thenone might reasonably assume that it has to lie, if anywhere, in themanuscript notes on The Unnamable. As we shall see, however, whilethese notes do focus specifically on the novel, they do so in a mannerthat works against any sustainable generic distinction and that is thusgoverned by the very principle of indifferentiation that Adorno iden-tifies as the governing principle of Beckett’s own art. The implica-tions of this go beyond the question of whether Beckett’s novels areclearly distinguishable from his plays in terms of their Bedeutung tothe question of the distinction between philosophy and literature assuch in the work of both Adorno and Beckett.

The seven pages of notes in the front of Adorno’s copy ofBeckett’s novel suggest that the principal issues to be addressedin the projected essay would have included the collapse of thesubject, the problem of time in the post-Flaubertian novel, the in-heritance of naturalism, the applicability or otherwise of the con-cept of the absurd, the parodic critique of Cartesian philosophy,and the traces of an antinomian theology in Beckett. Unsurpris-ingly for those familiar with Adorno’s published work on Beck-ett, then, the two main areas of concern are the philosophical andthe literary affiliations and implications of Beckett’s novel, andthe relationship between them. As regards Beckett’s philosophi-cal affiliations, while Adorno mentions Descartes and Hegel, it isBeckett’s relation to Wittgenstein that stands out. In his 1962 let-ter to Kraft, Adorno goes so far as to claim that Beckett is “obvi-ously 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 Beck-ett puts it” (Adorno 1998 [2000, p. 114]).


Wittgenstein’s name appears on several occasions in the marginsof Adorno’s copy of The Unnamable; it is written, for instance,next to the following two sentences: “I should mention before go-ing any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowingwhat it means” (The Unnamable, p. 293); and “it all boils down toa question of words” (p. 338). Whether Beckett was in fact influ-enced by Wittgenstein at the time of the writing of The Unnam-able (that is, in 1949-1950) remains open to question, however,and one would surely have to give some weight to Beckett’s ownclaim that he did not read Wittgenstein until the 1950s. Further-more, the evidence of Beckett’s reading notes from the 1930s in-dicates that it is Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik derSprache rather than Wittgenstein that contributes most to the lan-guage scepticism so evident in The Unnamable.

If we turn now to the philosophical implications of The Un-namable, we find that Adorno takes these to lie principally in theparody of Descartes, of solipsism, of idealism, or of what Adornorefers to as the philosophy of the remainder (Residualphilosophie).In his essay on Endgame, Adorno argues that in Beckett’s plays allthe dramatic categories are parodied, but that this does not meanthat they are simply “derided” (Adorno 1961 [1991, p. 259]). Thisis 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 Unnamableis thus to be understood not simply as a rejection of that philosophybut rather as the carrying of its logic to an extreme. In this way,Beckett’s novel reveals that what remains beyond all possible re-duction is not the sovereign ego as master, but rather trash or filth(Dreck). As for Beckett’s relation to nihilism – his work having beencharacterized by Georg Lukács in Wider den mißverstandenen Re-alismus (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism) (1958) as a “fullystandardized nihilistic modernism” that brings together Kafka -esque and Joycean motifs (see Lukács 1958 [1963, p. 53]) – this isaddressed explicitly by Adorno in the section on nihilism in Nega-tive Dialektik, in which he argues that the real nihilism lies not inBeckett but in those who object to his work by appealing to “moreand more faded positivities” (Adorno 1966 [1973, p. 381]). Thatsaid, in the 1968 television debate on Beckett in which Adorno par-ticipated, he does acknowledge a certain “nihilistic mysticism” in



Beckett (Adorno 1994, pp. 93-94), and in his notes on The Un-namable he twice indicates that he should bring in material on ni-hilism from other notebooks (see Adorno 1994, pp. 67, 69). Al-though this other notebook material has to date remained uniden-tifiable, it is nonetheless the case that, as in Negative Dialektik, soin the notes on The Unnamable, Adorno finds Beckett raising thequestion of a difference within the negative that would complicateany nihilism within his work. Indeed, as we have seen, this questionof the non-coincidence of the nothing with itself is, for Adorno, thataround which “everything in B[eckett] revolves”, and, as I havesought to demonstrate elsewhere (see Weller 2005, pp. 11-15), thisdifference 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 thenegative in Beckett is also apparent in a marginal note in his copyof The Unnamable in which he claims that, for Beckett, “the pos-itive categories, such as hope, are [...] the absolutely negativeones” (Adorno 1994, p. 44). Five years later, however, Adorno re-visits this question of the negative after a conversation with Beck-ett in Berlin on 23 September 1967 during which Beckett makeswhat Adorno describes in his notebook as a “highly enigmatic re-mark” concerning “a kind of positivity that is contained withinpure negativity” (p. 24). This insistence upon a positivity within thenegative appears to contradict Adorno’s own assertion in his copyof The Unnamable that the point of indifference (Indifferenz punkt)that Beckett reaches in that novel is a purely negative one. Whilethis question of a positivity within the negative certainly lies at theheart of any consideration of the extent to which Adorno’s un-derstanding of Beckett’s works corresponded to Beckett’s own –and the latter’s objections to Adorno’s insistence in his essay onEndgame that Hamm is a kind of degenerated or remnant Ham-let are well known – it does not help to clarify the evaluative dis-tinction between Beckett’s novels and his plays (and, more pre-cisely, between The Unnamable and Endgame) upon whichAdorno insists in the letter to Kraft. With this question in mind,we may now turn to the literary affiliations and implications thatAdorno finds in The Unnamable.

The most recurrent form of marginal annotation in Adorno’scopy of the novel is an “F” (for forte) or an “FF” (for fortissimo)



– flagging what Adorno sees as particularly strong lines. Unsur-prisingly, Adorno adjudges the compulsion to “go on” (continuerin the original French; weitermachen in Elmar Tophoven’s Ger-man translation) as the critical category that works against whatAdorno describes as “the deceptive nature of the question ofmeaning” (Adorno 1994, p. 56). This helps to clarify a remarkmade in Adorno’s 1963 essay on the later poetry of FriedrichHölderlin, in which he claims that Hölderlin “inaugurates theprocess that leads to Beckett’s protocol sentences, empty of mean-ing” (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 137]). In his essay on Endgame,Adorno declares that Beckett’s characters “stammer in protocolsentences – whether of the positivist or the expressionist varietyone does not know. The asymptote toward which Beckett’s dra-ma tends is silence” (Adorno 1961 [1991, p. 260]). The conceptof the protocol sentence (Protokollsatz) in the logical positivistsense is to be found particularly in the work of Rudolf Carnap,and refers to a statement that describes immediate experience orperception, and, as such, is held to be the ultimate ground forknowledge. In Beckett, such sentences may be seen as instancesof an art of correctio – or what Bruno Clément terms “epanortho-sis” (see Clément 1994, pp. 179-180) – which arguably reaches itsmost extreme form in the latter part of The Unnamable. One ex-ample among many would be the following: “I must feel some-thing, yes, I feel something, they say I feel something, [...] I don’tknow what I feel” (The Unnamable, p. 386; see Adorno 1994, p.56). Rather than isolating particular phrases or sentences, howev-er, it would be more accurate to characterize the entire novel as asequence of such protocol sentences – on the condition that,rather than these sentences being seen simply as empty of mean-ing (sinnleer) (as Adorno puts it in his essay on Hölderlin), theyare viewed as attempted evacuations of meaning. Adorno ac-knowledges as much, albeit with regard to the plays, when in Äs-thetische Theorie he argues that Günther Anders “was right to de-fend Beckett against those who make his works out to be affir-mative. Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence ofany meaning, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfoldits history” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 153]).

Much of the early part of Adorno’s 1963 essay on Hölderlin istaken up with a critique of Heidegger’s so called elucidations (Er-



läuterungen) of Hölderlin’s poetry in essays and lectures writtenduring the 1930s and 1940s. At the heart of this critique is theclaim that Heidegger completely fails to analyse poetic form, andthis is precisely what Adorno sets out to rectify in his own analy-sis of parataxis in Hölderlin’s poems of 1801-1805. AlthoughHölderlin’s name is not mentioned in the notes on The Unnam-able, the connection made between Hölderlin and Beckett by wayof the theory of the protocol sentence in the essay on Hölderlin,together with the assertion that Hölderlin’s “mature language ap-proaches madness” in that it consists of “a series of disruptive ac-tions against both the spoken language and the elevated style ofGerman classicism” (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 138]), helps to ex-plain Adorno’s attention to the syntax of the latter parts of TheUnnamable. In the upper margin of the page that in the Germanedition begins “versucht, vernünftig zu sein” (“you try to be rea-sonable”; The Unnamable, p. 385), Adorno notes: “here begins akind of grammatical paraphrase” (Adorno 1994, p. 56). With re-gard to the form of Beckett’s novel, Adorno sees it as essentiallymusical, and in this his view certainly accords with Beckett’s own.For instance, not only does Adorno write “Stravinsky” beside theline “Overcome, that goes without saying, the fatal leaning to-wards 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” (Adorno1994, pp. 67, 63).

In his notes on The Unnamable, Adorno also focuses on the re-lationship between time and the novel, and Beckett’s debt to var-ious aesthetic traditions. He begins with the general argumentthat the history of the novel as a genre is to be understood in termsof the ever greater centrality of time, and goes on to observe that,according to Lukács, meaningless time (sinnleere Zeit) first findsexpression in Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale (1869). Withthe 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 forBeckett’s place within modern literary movements, Adorno seesThe Unnamable as bringing together expressionism and natural-ism, in order to produce a work that is at once non-realist andnon-auratic.



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 connectsBeckett with a range of other writers, some of them rather moresurprising than others. These include not only Proust and Joyce(from whom Adorno marks Beckett’s difference), but also PaulValéry, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, and Gottfried Benn. Thetwo most important explicit links, however, are undoubtedly thosewith Gide and Kafka. With regard to Gide – whom Beckett him-self, in his Trinity College Dublin lectures in 1930-1931, placeswithin a tradition running from Stendhal to Dostoevsky and Proust– Adorno sees the “clownish reflections on the work itself” in TheUnnamable as recalling those of Paludes (1895) (Adorno 1994, p.65). As for Kafka, his name appears fourteen times in the notes andmarginalia, which is far more than any other. In his essay onEndgame, Adorno claims that Beckett’s play “is heir to Kafka’snovels. His relationship to Kafka is analogous to that of the serialcomposers to Schoenberg: he provides Kafka with a further self-reflection 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’snovels becomes Beckett’s subject matter. The dramatic constituentsput in a posthumous appearance” (p. 260). Of course, what thisleaves out of account is Beckett the novelist’s relation to Kafka, andwhether or not this differs from Beckett the dramatist’s relation tohim. Unsurprisingly, the passages in The Unnamable that aremarked with a “Kafka” in the margins often concern the questionof guilt; for instance: “I was given a pensum, at birth perhaps, as apunishment for having been born perhaps, or for no particular rea-son, because they dislike me, and I’ve forgotten what it is” (The Un-namable, p. 312). Adorno also draws a parallel, however, betweenthe description of Worm, whom in a marginal note he identifies asthe “id” to the “ego” that is Mahood (see Adorno 1994, p. 45), andKafka’s stories “Der Bau” (“The Burrow”) and “Odradek”. WhereBeckett would differ from Kafka is, according to Adorno, in his re-placing of the latter’s “epic language” with a language that is“shrunken” (geschrumpft) (p. 67).

Beyond such similarities and differences, however, Adornosees a fundamental coincidence between Beckett and Kafka in



their representation of a condition that is either “beyond” or “be-tween” life and death (pp. 69, 47), and that in Kafka finds its mostexplicit form in the story of the Hunter Gracchus. Indeed, forAdorno, the importance of The Unnamable lies above all in itsrepresentation of this beyond or between. As he puts it: “Simplestanswer to the question of why [The Unnamable] is so extraordi-narily significant: Because it comes closest to the representationof what it will really be like after death [...]. Neither spirit nor timenor symbol. Precisely this is the Beckettian no man’s land” (p. 69).In Negative Dialektik, this no man’s land (Niemandsland) is lo-cated by Adorno between being and nothingness (see Adorno1966 [1973, p. 381]), and, as his notes on The Unnamable makeclear, its importance lies in its disclosing “the corpse as the truthof life” and the principle of identity as the principle of deathwhereby “everything that counts – that is, difference – sinks intoirrelevance” (Adorno 1994, p. 71). It is clear, then, that for Adornothere is in Beckett’s novel an indifferentiation of a distinction sec-ond only to that between being and non-being, namely that be-tween the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. TheBeckettian clown is the figure for this indifferentiation in that heis “a living being that turns itself into an object, a football, a deadperson” (p. 73).

If the representation of a state beyond or between life anddeath, in which the very distinction between the living and deadis effaced, is what renders Beckett’s novel so significant, this iscomplemented by a formal indifferentiation between theory andnarrative. Beckett retains the term “novel” – in fact, this is the casefor the original French version of How It Is (1961) rather than forThe Unnamable – because he wishes to show “what has becomeof the novel” (Adorno 1994, p. 61). On the one hand, Beckett pro-duces instances of “episodic pseudo-narrative” (p. 41). On theother hand, just as Hegel and Marx wished to turn philosophy in-to history, so Beckett collapses the very distinction between nar-rative (Erzählung) and theory (Theorie), or between the act of nar-ration and a reflection upon that narration (see p. 61). Crucially,however, one finds Adorno repeating this indifferentiation in histurn by collapsing the distinction between philosophy as negativedialectics and Beckett’s “radically darkened art”. The negation ofthis particular difference occurs in the interests of a resistance to



nihilism that is itself determined as the reduction to nothing ofdifference. In other words, nihilism as indifferentiation – where-by “everything that counts – that is, difference – sinks into irrele-vance” (p. 71) – returns to haunt Adorno’s own discourse onBeckett precisely there where the resistance to nihilism is located.As I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere (see Weller 2008), thisreturn is the manifestation of nihilism as what Nietzsche describesas the “uncanniest of all guests” (unheimlichste aller Gäste) (Niet -zsche, 1886 [1999, p. 125]), and is far from being limited toAdorno; indeed, it is a fundamental trait of an entire tradition thatfinds its point of departure in Nietzsche and that on more thanone occasion turns to Beckett’s œuvre as a resource.

This indifferentiation spreads from Beckett’s own works to thedistinction between the novel and drama in Adorno’s analysis ofthose works, from there to the distinction between literature andphilosophy in Adorno’s thought more generally, and from thereto the distinction between Adorno and Heidegger, upon whichthe former insists so polemically in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Jar-gon of Authenticity) (1964). Adorno’s readings of Beckett makeclear that he takes art and philosophy to serve the same end: theresistance of a nihilism determined as the reduction to nothing ofdifference. Like Heidegger, Adorno takes the relation betweenDenker and Dichter to be a complementary one. As Philippe La-coue-Labarthe observes, Adorno “never calls into question theabsolutely privileged relation of (great) poetry to philosophy – arelation that, moreover, he goes out of his way to justify, over andagainst the philologists, at the beginning of his essay [on Hölder-lin]. 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 Äs-thetische Theorie that philosophy and art “converge in their truthcontent” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 130]), and that in works of artthis truth content “is not what they mean but rather what decideswhether the work in itself is true or false, and only this truth of thework in-itself is commensurable to philosophical interpretationand coincides – with regard to the idea, in any case – with the ideaof philosophical truth” (pp. 130-131).

Above all, however, the complicity between Adorno and Hei-degger lies in their shared conviction that art constitutes a privileged



form of resistance to what they both identify as “nihilism” – and inthis, Lacoue-Labarthe may in turn be aligned with them. For allthree of these thinkers, the value of Hölderlin’s late hymns lies in justsuch a resistance. For Adorno, however, what commences inHölderlin – that is, the protocol sentence – reaches its consumma-tion in Beckett. That said, Adorno is more aware than Lacoue-Labarthe is prepared to acknowledge of the risk that he runs inthinking the relation between literature and philosophy as comple-mentary in nature. This is apparent, for instance, in his characteri-zation of that relation as strictly non-appropriative. As Adornomakes clear in his 1963 essay on Hölderlin, poetry’s relation to phi-losophy has to be understood in terms of the former’s truth content(Wahrheitsgehalt), a concept that Adorno takes from Benjamin andwhich 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 em-phatic sense, needs philosophy as the medium that brings its truthcontent to light, this need is not fulfilled through recourse to a phi-losophy that in any way seizes possession of the poetry” (p. 113).Similarly, Adorno distinguishes between metaphysical and aesthet-ic meaning, arguing that Beckett’s is an art that “cull[s] aestheticmeaning from the radical negation of metaphysical meaning”(Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 271]). And yet, just as there occurs a restora-tion of metaphysical meaning through the assertion (in his essay onEndgame) that “Meaning nothing becomes the only meaning” inBeckett’s play (Adorno 1961 [1991, p. 261]), so, too, there occurs aseizing possession of the poetry in Adorno’s reading of Beckett, inthe form of an indifferentiation not just of narrative and theory, butmore generally of narrative and drama, and indeed of philosophyand literature. If, as Adorno claims in his notes on The Unnamable,Beckett’s work constitutes a critique (Kritik) of the philosophy ofthe remainder, then it is necessarily philosophical in nature. It wouldappear, then, that a principle of indifferentiation – which I have else-where sought to show is anethical in nature (see Weller 2006) – is op-erative not only, as Adorno suggests, in Beckett’s work, but also inAdorno’s commentary on that work. The consequences of this areconsiderable, not only for the concept of literature but also for thephilosophical discourse that would make use of it. That Adorno not



only fails to establish a clear distinction between Beckett’s novelsand his plays – or, more precisely, between The Unnamable andEndgame – but himself works against the very distinction that heproposes, points us towards a more general process of indifferenti-ation, the limits of which remain to be mapped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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, NewYork, 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), Colum-bia University Press, New York, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen).

Adorno, Theodor W., 1966, Negative Dialektik, Suhrkamp Verlag,Frankfurt am Main (Negative Dialectics, 1973, Routledge & KeganPaul, London, trans. E. B. Ashton).

Ästhetische Theorie, 1970, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Aes-thetic 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, Frankfurtam Main (Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, 2000, Rolf Tiede-mann (editor), Polity, Cambridge, trans. Edmund Jephcott).




Other works cited

Clément, Bruno, 1994, L’Œuvre sans qualités. Rhétorique de SamuelBeckett, Seuil, Paris.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 2002, Heidegger. La politique du poème,Galilée, Paris (Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, 2007, Universi-ty of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago, trans. Jeff Fort).

Lukács, Georg, 1958, Wider der mißverstandenen Realismus, ClaassenVerlag, Berlin (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 1963, Mer-lin, London, trans. John and Necke Mander).

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1886, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausga-be, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (editors), Band 12: Nach-laß 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, PalgraveMacmillan, Basingstoke.

Idem, 2008, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism. The Uncanniest ofGuests, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.


“A Limbo purged of desire”: Body and Sexuality in Beckett’s

Dream of Fair to Middling WomenLorenzo Orlandini

Looking at Beckett’s early fiction, one is struck by the fact thatmost of the protagonists of his short stories and novels seem tohave a rather problematic relationship with their own bodilyneeds, in particular with sex, which they constantly try to expelfrom their lives. Interestingly, sexual desire is never completely ef-faced, but remains a strong and unsettling presence. In this studyI will analyze the way sexuality is dealt with in Samuel Beckett’searliest novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Although it istrue that Beckett’s poetics obviously evolved through his half-cen-tury career, it is also the case that some of the elements that makeup the foundation of his Weltanschauung as it appears in his ear-ly works will continue to constitute the core of his poetics foryears to come.

In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Belacqua has a prob-lematic relationship with sex. Throughout the novel, and later inMore Pricks Than Kicks as well, he tries to build relationships thatare exclusively spiritual, or intellectual rather, and he refuses anysort of physical contact with his partners. In fact, he has a hardtime escaping the explicit avances of the Syra-Cusa and theSmeraldina-Rima, and is actually raped by the latter, who “violat-ed him after tea” (p. 18).

To understand Belacqua’s behaviour, it is useful to considerhis attitude towards sexual desire in comparison to his view of de-sire in a broader sense. In a crucial passage, the narrator explainsthat Belacqua only finds brief moments of relief from the suffer-ing of life in what he calls a “tunnel”, a “Limbo purged of desire”.That “tunnel”, a mental space in which the phenomenologicalworld has no importance any more, is a transitory success Belac-qua achieves in his ceaseless pursuit for a temporary relief from


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 andRio 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 doBrasil, Brasilia, 2003. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos.

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3. Alessandro Brandão in a version of Breath called Respiración + e Respiración– (Breath + and Breath –), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Cen-tro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, 2003-2004. Courtesy of Dalton Camar-gos.

4. Alessandro Brandão in an outdoor version of Respiración + e Respiración –(Breath + and Breath –), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Rio deJaneiro, 2008. Courtesy of Marsha Gontarski.


5. Beckett’s textmaterialized on the wallsfor the staging of “A Pieceof Monologue”, directedby Adriano and FernandoGuimarães, Teatro doCentro Cultural Banco doBrasil, Brasilia, 2003-2004.Courtesy of DaltonCamargos.

6. Alessandro Brandão in one version ofRespiración + e Respiración– (Breath + and Breath –),directed by Adriano andFernando Guimarães,Brasilia, São Paulo and Riode Janeiro, 2004-2008.Courtesy of DaltonCamargos.


7. Wendell Pierce(left), and J. KyleManzay on the set ofWaiting for Godot,directed byChristopher McElroen,New York, June 2006.Courtesy of MikeMesser.

8. Wendell Pierce inWaiting for Godot,directed byChristopher McElroen,New York, June 2006.Courtesy of MikeMesser.


9. Carlo Cecchi (left) andValerio Binasco, in Finaledi partita (Endgame),directed by Carlo Cecchi,Teatro Stabile di Firenze,1995. Courtesy ofMassimo Agus.

10. Carlo Cecchi (left) andValerio Binasco, Finale dipartita, directed by CarloCecchi, Teatro Stabile diFirenze, 1995. Courtesy ofMassimo Agus.


11. Valerio Binasco (left)and Carlo Cecchi, Finaledi partita, directed byCarlo Cecchi, TeatroStabile di Firenze, 1995.Courtesy of MassimoAgus.

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


13. Laura Adani with director Roger Blin rehearsing Giorni felici (Happy Days),Teatro Gobetti, Turin, 1965. Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Tori-no.

14. Laura Adani as Winnie in Giorni felici, directed by Roger Blin, Teatro Go-betti, Turin, 1965. Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Torino.


15. Laura Adani asWinnie in Giorni felici,directed by Roger Blin,Teatro Gobetti, Turin,1965. Courtesy ofCentro Studi TeatroStabile di Torino.

16. Remondi &Caporossi, Giornifelici, directed byClaudio Remondi andRiccardo Caporossi,Teatro del Leopardo,Rome, 1970-1971.Courtesy of Remondi &Caporossi.


17. Remondi &Caporossi, Giorni felici,directed by ClaudioRemondi and RiccardoCaporossi, Teatro delLeopardo, Rome, 1970-1971. Courtesy ofRemondi & Caporossi.

18. Remondi &Caporossi, Giorni felici,directed by ClaudioRemondi and RiccardoCaporossi, Teatro delLeopardo, Rome, 1970-1971. Courtesy ofRemondi & Caporossi.


19. Marion D’Amburgo asWinnie in Giorni felici,directed by GiancarloCauteruccio, Teatro Studio,Florence, 1997. Courtesy ofTommaso Le Pera.

20. Marion D’Amburgo asWinnie in Giorni felici,directed by GiancarloCauteruccio, Teatro Studio,Florence, 1997. Courtesy ofTommaso Le Pera.


22. Giulia Lazzariniin Giorni felici,Piccolo Teatro diMilano, directed byGiorgio Strehler,1982-2000. Courtesyof LuigiCiminaghi/PiccoloTeatro di Milano.

21. GiancarloCauteruccio as Willie in Giornifelici, directed byGiancarloCauteruccio, TeatroStudio, Florence,1997. Courtesy ofTommaso Le Pera.


23. Giulia Lazzarini inGiorni felici, Piccolo Teatrodi Milano, directed byGiorgio Strehler, 1982-2000. Courtesy of LuigiCiminaghi/Piccolo Teatrodi Milano.

24. Giulia Lazzarini inGiorni felici, Piccolo Teatrodi Milano, directed byGiorgio Strehler, 1982-2000. Courtesy of LuigiCiminaghi/Piccolo Teatrodi Milano.


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


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

27. Antonio Borriello in L’ultimo nastro di Krapp, directed by Antonio Borriel-lo, September 1982. Courtesy of Aliberti-Pomposo.


28. Arianna Chervino (left), Maria Paola Conato, Claudia Di Caterina, in Va evieni (Come and Go), directed by Antonio Borriello, November 2006. Courtesyof Aliberti-Pomposo.

29. Raffaele Ausiello (left) and Antonio Borriello in Improvviso dell’Ohio (“OhioImpromptu”), directed by Antonio Borriello, December 2006. Courtesy ofAliber ti-Pomposo.


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


the pain that comes with human existence. When he enters hismuch wanted Limbo, he manages for a brief moment to isolatehimself in the suspension of suffering, in a state of complete in-difference, and reconnect with the dimension of Nothingness thatprecedes birth and that follows death:

He lay lapped in a beatitude of indolence that was smoother thanoil and softer than a pumpkin, dead to the dark pangs of the sons ofAdam, asking nothing of the insubordinate mind. He moved with theshades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a Limbo purged of desire. They moved gravely, menand 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 thinborder between opposites, a neutral dimension, in which the lac-erating conflict between extremes is suspended. Belacqua findsshelter from both the suffering of his waking hours and the painof his sleep, “with its sweats and terrors” (p. 44), in a dimensionpopulated by “grey angels” that dimly illuminate the darkness:“They were dark, and they gave a dawn light to the darker placewhere they moved. They were a silent rabble [...] and they cast adark light” (p. 44). The mind is finally freed from its slavery to thebody, it is “suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the rest-less body”, but at the same time “the glare of understanding [is]switched off” in “a waking ultra-cerebral obscurity” (p. 44). ForBelacqua this is reality, while life is false: “Torture by thought andtrial by living, because it was fake thought and false living, stayedoutside the tunnel. But in the umbra, the tunnel, when the mindwent wombtomb, then it was real thought and real living, livingthought” (p. 45).

The attitude of Belacqua towards sex is to be seen from thisperspective: he strives to find relief from the suffering of life byannihilating any activity and any desire, and therefore cannotyield to the desire par excellence, that is sexual passion. However,it is important to note that in Dream of Fair to Middling Womenthere remains a form of attraction and fascination for sex, whichtakes the shape of female characters who only know the realm ofthe senses and wish to lose themselves in it; these include the

L. Orlandini. “A Limbo purged of desire”: Body and Sexuality 239


Smeraldina and the Syra-Cusa. The relationship between Belac-qua and his women reflects the dialectic that characterizes the waysex is dealt with in the novel: the pressure of sexual drive and de-sire is constantly countered by an obdurate effort to resist desireitself, and annihilate it.

Even more significantly, this passage about Belacqua’s tunnelreveals how Beckett’s approach to the theme of sexuality is remi-niscent of two philosophers the author was very fond of. Belacqua’smomentary relief is found in a state that is not just a Limbo, but a“Limbo purged of desire”. This refusal of desire reflects the influ-ence of Arthur Schopenhauer. The idea of Limbo, as it is set forthin Dream, is close to the Schopenhauerian concept of noluntas, thatsuppression of Will as a way towards deliverance from suffering.Beckett read the work of the German thinker since his youth, andDeirdre Bair describes some conversations he had with WalterLowenfels on the subject between 1928 and 1929 (see Bair 1978, p.79). In those years Beckett, tormented by the “impossibility of lan-guage and the repeated failure to communicate on any meaningfullevel”, was getting “to the Schopenhauerian conclusion that, sincethe only function of intellect is to assist man in achieving his will,the best role for himself would be the total avoidance of any formof participation in a world governed by will” (p. 79). Schopen-hauer’s ideas, and those about human suffering in particular, re-mained 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 bemoving along the lines of the Schopenhauerian concepts of nolun-tas and asceticism. Schopenhauer defines asceticism as “this inten-tional breaking of the will by the refusal of what is agreeable andthe selection of what is disagreeable, the voluntarily chosen life ofpenance and self-chastisement for the continual mortification ofthe 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 on-ly confirmed the feeling of sickness. It was very curious. Like suddenly a win-dow opened on a fug. I always knew he was one of the ones that mattered mostto me, and it is a pleasure more real than any pleasure for a long time to beginto understand now why it is so” (Samuel Beckett to Tom MacGreevy, 21st Sep-tember 1937, quoted in Knowlson 1996, p. 268).


find the way to asceticism find, he says, “a horror of the nature ofwhich [their] own phenomenal existence is an expression, the willto live, the kernel and inner nature of that world which is recog-nised as full of misery” (pp. 490-491). That of sexuality is a crucialelement in the pursuit of noluntas, because according to Schopen-hauer the sex drive is the most radical expression of the will – infact, the genitalia are the very objectification of the will to live – andas such it needs to be suppressed. Therefore, the starting point to-wards noluntas is sexual abstinence:

[The ascetic person’s] body, healthy and strong, expresses throughthe genitals the sexual impulse; but he denies the will and gives the lieto the body; he desires no sensual gratification under any condition.Voluntary and complete chastity is the first step in asceticism or thedenial of the will to live. It thereby denies the assertion of the willwhich extends beyond the individual life, and gives the assurance thatwith 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, re-vealing. He observes a sort of ‘selective’ chastity, in that he tries,often in vain, to avoid intercourse with the women with whom hehas a relationship, while he is happy to visit the brothel: in hisview, it is legitimate for him to have sex with prostitutes, becausethey are not his Beatrice. He makes a continuous effort to keepthe realm of the flesh and that of the spirit separate, and tries tobuild relationships that are exclusively platonic. Dream of Fair toMiddling Women (as well as More Pricks Than Kicks) is largely anaccount of the events that stem from the friction between his as-piration towards a courtly kind of love on one side, and the inva-sive sensuality of his women on the other. His point of view is wellexpressed in his lively discussion with the Mandarin. Belacqua be-lieves that the relationships in which one tries to match sex andspiritual love are based on a “dirty confusion” “[b]etween loveand the thalamus” (p. 100). A man cannot truly love a woman ofwhom he sees the corporal side:

“Weib” said Belacqua “is a fat, flabby, pasty, kind of a word, allbreasts and buttocks, bubbubbubbub, bbbacio, bbbocca, a hell of afine word” he sneered “look at them”. [...] “And as soon” proceeded



Belacqua “as you are aware of her as a Weib, you can throw your hatat it. I hate the liars” he said violently “that accept the confusion, fautede mieux, God help us, and I hate the stallions for whom there is noconfusion.”

(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 heras a private convenience” (p. 101) is based on a strict distinction:

“There is no such thing” said Belacqua wildly “as a simultaneity ofincoherence, there is no such thing as love in a thalamus. There is noword for such a thing, there is no such abominable thing. The notionof an unqualified present – the mere ‘I am’ – is an ideal notion. Thatof an incoherent present – ‘I am this and that’ – altogether abominable.I admit Beatrice” he said kindly “and the brothel, Beatrice after thebrothel 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 inthe brothel!”

(Dream, p. 102)

This incompatibility between carnal love and spiritual love isfurther discussed in a digression in which the narrator intends todemonstrate the paradox according to which “Love demands nar-cissism” (p. 39). The passage is long and quite complex, but clar-ifies many aspects of Belacqua’s view of sex. Belacqua assumesthat since the feelings he has for the Smeraldina impinge upon his“inner man” (p. 40), having sexual intercourse with other womendoes in no way harm the relationship or debase his love. So, he of-ten visits the whorehouse, but he soon understands that some-thing is not quite working: his “inner man”, indeed, does not re-main outside of the brothel, but rather takes part in his adven-tures. In fact, once Belacqua is done having intercourse with aprostitute, his “inner man” is always invaded by “peace and radi-ance, the banquet of music” (p. 40). This is unacceptable, since itcreates a horrible confusion. The rare miracle of fulfilment usedto be a gift provided by the Smeraldina only, and it was identifiedexclusively with her, but now it becomes associated with anotherwoman, or with a virtually infinite number of women: “this mira-



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 ofa magical and precious gift, but rather that “horrible confusion be-tween the gift and the giver of the gift” (p. 42), the overlapping ofdifferent levels, so that “Beatrice lurked in every brothel” (p. 41).The gift is given only after “the garbage of the usual and the cab-bage-stalks of sex” (p. 41), and is almost as if the ecstasy of the spir-it retreated like the undertow on a shoreline, covering the garbagethat generated it, and becoming one thing with it. The flower be-comes the same as cabbage stalks: the gift of spiritual love is iden-tified with sex and erased. Belacqua must at this point keep awayfrom the brothel, because for him it is intolerable that the Smeral-dina is refracted into an infinite number of reflections, just becausehe is slave to “this demented hydraulic [...] beyond control”, andhas to “extract from the whore[s] that which was not whorish” (p.41). The Smeraldina must remain invisible, or disappear, becauseone individual can have one and only one identity. Belacqua hadsought “carnal frivolity” to save the “real spirit” from being de-meaned 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 so-lution 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 spiritualside), so that the gift and the giver are the same. To do so, he mustuse what the narrator calls “a fraudulent system of Platonic manu-alisation, chiroplatonism” (p. 43), that is masturbation. In this way,Belacqua can include the false, carnal side of the Smeraldina, butonly in theory, because he is alone and has no intercourse with her.At the same time, he can obtain that peace that follows sexual sat-isfaction, and his “inner man” can receive the Smeraldina’s spirit.To use the narrator’s words, “he postulated the physical encounterand proved the spiritual intercourse” (p. 43). The narrator admitsthat these are “dreadful manoeuvres” (p. 43), but adds that they areinevitable, due to Belacqua’s young age and the nature of his feel-ings towards the Smeraldina.

What Belacqua calls “love”, though, seems to come from aprocess of abstraction, a kind of intellectual rather than spirituallove. He tries to transform women that are extremely sensual in-to appropriate recipients of his courtly love, forcing them to fit in-



to literary topoi. Many of the complications of his love life origi-nate exactly from his conviction that flesh and spirit – or rather,mind – are incompatible. His behaviour is based on a distinctionbetween body and mind which is reminiscent of a philosophicalsubstratum of Cartesian descent, and in particular of Descartes’ideas of res cogitans and res extensa. Beckett was very well read inDescartes. During the early 1930s he wrote Whoroscope, a poemabout the French philosopher in which the figure of Descartes isa pretext to discuss the problematic relationship between the ab-stract concepts of science and philosophy and the individual hu-man experience. This makes the poem into a reflection on thecomplex relationship between mind and body. In this idea onecan already see the main core of the dialectic that will be centralin Beckett’s work, this tension between the attempt to go beyondthe bodily dimension and the necessity to come to terms with thebody. Beckett brought the matter further into focus when hecame across the work of Arnold Geulincx, the 17th century Flem-ish occasionalist philosopher, who was an epigone of Descartesand 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 Schopenhauerianand Cartesian concepts discussed so far, one understands how theelement of sexuality fits into the larger picture of Beckett’s poet-ics. Sex is the most radical expression of the will, and must there-fore be effaced. This generates a constant tension between desireand refusal, attraction and repulsion, between the separate planesof mind and body. It is only in the ephemeral neutral space of the“Limbo purged of desire” that for a brief moment that dialecticis temporarily resolved. This makes Belacqua a “trine man”: “Athis simplest he was trine. Just think of that. A trine man! Cen-tripetal, centrifugal and... not. Phoebus chasing Daphne, Narcis-sus flying from Echo and... neither” (Dream, p. 120). SometimesBelacqua admits he confuses the two levels, fusing both Daphneand Echo in the Smeraldina, but this is his mistake, “a dirty con-fusion”. The path to follow is the third one, the “not”, the “nei-ther”, that belongs in the tunnel, in the wombtomb: “The third be-ing was a dark gulf, when the glare of the will and the hammer-strokes of the brain doomed outside to take flight from its quarry



were expunged, the Limbo and the wombtomb alive with theunanxious spirits of quiet cerebration” (p. 121). Peace is to befound there, in that place/non-place where the conflicting oppo-sites elide each other and one enters a state of complete stasis thatcannot be disturbed by anything. In that dimension, even selfawareness becomes blurred: “there was no conflict of flight andflow and Eros was as null as Anteros and Night had no daughters.He was bogged in indolence, without identity, impervious alike toits pull and goading” (p. 121).

This fundamental dialectic is reflected in the relationships be-tween Belacqua and his partners. Women are filled with a kind ofaggressive sexuality they want to impose on him, while he is look-ing instead for an exclusively spiritual and intellectual love, and re-mains passive or runs away when women take the initiative. Manyhave noticed how the play on pairs of opposites is fundamental tomany of Beckett’s works2. Dream of Fair to Middling Women pro-vides significant examples of those dynamics at work. Both theSyra-Cusa and the Smeraldina are quite significant characters inthat respect, in that they show an exceeding sex drive, a consider-able appetite which is both erotic and gastronomic, an exclusivepreoccupation with the material and corporeal aspects of life. Boththe narrator and Belacqua repeatedly refer to a number of differ-ent women as slut, whore, pute, whorechen and puttanina.

The Syra-Cusa is more strongly charged with sensuality, and herseductiveness offers a clear threat. Even before describing her, thenarrator defines her as “mean”, and adds that a paragraph will beenough to portray her, after which “she can skip off and strangle abath attendant in her garters” (p. 49). It is odd that she seeks thecompany of Belacqua, a weakling intellectual, while the first thingwe are told about her is that “[t]he Great Devil had her, she stoodin dire need of a heavyweight afternoon-man” (p. 50). She is a dev-ilish, possessed woman, but above all “she was never even lassata,let alone satiata; very uterine” (p. 50). She is compared to a seriesof femmes fatales (Lucrezia Borgia, Clytemnestra, Semiramis) andpictured 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 regardingManichaeism and the use of certain dichotomies in Krapp’s Last Tape.


libertine in Les liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.Interestingly, Belacqua is defined as more similar to Octave deMalivert (the impotent and misanthropic protagonist of Stendhal’sArmance) rather than to Valmont. The Syra-Cusa’s unstoppablelasciviousness can be seen in her eyes, that are “strong and pierc-ing”, “wanton [...], laskivious and lickerish, the brokers of her zeal,basilisk eyes” (p. 50). Her body is even more dangerous than herface: “from throat to toe she was lethal, pyrogenous” (p. 50). His-torical femmes fatales are not enough to describe her at this point,and the narrator has to compare her to Scylla and the Sphinx. Therest of the description regards her erotic attributes: “[t]he fineround firm pap she had, the little mamelons [...] and the hips, thebony basin, [...] fessades, chiappate and verberations, the hipswere a song and a very powerful battery” (p. 50). But she has noth-ing to offer beyond sensuality: she is one of the many women whoare not intellectually good enough for Belacqua, one of those whodo not understand “big words” or speculations about love: “hol-low. Nothing behind it” (p. 50). Belacqua, while drunk, tries tobring the Syra-Cusa in a field that is not hers, that of the spirit andof the intellect, and gives her his favourite book as a courtly gift.The Syra-Cusa replies that she is not interested, she thanks him butmakes 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 makeher fit into the literary stereotype of the angelic woman. The di-mension to which the Smeraldina belongs is clear from the verystart, when the reader is presented with her schoolmates: “TheDunkelbrau gals were very Evite and nudist and shocked eventhe Mödelbergers when they went in their Harlequin pantalettes,or just culotte and sweater and uncontrollable cloak, to the localKino. All very callisthenic and cerebro-hygienic and promotiveof great strength and beauty. In the summer they lay on the roofand bronzed their bottoms and impudenda” (p. 13). The Smeral-dina herself is hyperbolically sensual, the feminine characters areexaggerated in her. She is full of an uncontainable sensuality thatis reproduced through a sudden acceleration of the rhythm insyntax:



Because her body was all wrong, the peacock’s claws. Yes, even at thatearly stage, definitely all wrong. Poppata, big breech, Botticelli thighs,knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mammose, slobbery-blub-bery, bubbub-bubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe. Then, perchedaloft on top of this porpoise prism, the loveliest little pale firm cameo ofa birdface he ever clapped his blazing blue eyes on. By God but he oftenthought she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede.

(Dream, p. 15)

The narrator comments that her body is “all wrong”. This fortwo reasons. Firstly, it is a completely sensual body, and that is notwhat Belacqua would want in his beloved, since he desires an ex-clusively spiritual love. Secondly, the corporeal and the spiritualplans, that should be separate, are united in the Smeraldina: a sen-sual body and an angelic face, a sort of philosophical transgres-sion for Belacqua, an impossible conjunction between res extensaand res cogitans, in Cartesian terms.

At one point, Belacqua quite explicitly tries to reduce theSmeraldina to an angelic woman. First, he sees her sitting andnotes both her paleness and her carnality: “She was pale, pale asPlutus, and bowed towards the earth. She sat there, huddled onthe bed, the legs broken at the knees, the bigness of thighs andbelly 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 fig-ure, seeing her through the lens of literature. She is made into Sor-dello da Goito, with the quotation of Dante’s verses, “Posta solasoletta, like the leonine spirit of the troubadour of great renown,tutta a se [sic] romita” (p. 23); then she is made into the typicalbeatific, salvific figure of Stilnovistic kind: “So she had been, sadand still, without limbs or paps in a great stillness of body, thatsummer evening in the green isle when first she heaved his soulfrom its hinges; as quiet as a tree, column of quiet” (p. 23). In or-der for the Smeraldina to become a kind of Beatrice, she has to gothrough a process of progressive reduction and reification. Firsthe erases, so to say, her limbs, then he compares her silence to thatof a tree, and then to that of a column. He elevates her further,quoting Constantine3, and then completes the process of abstrac-


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


tion of her figure eliminating her body altogether, making her in-to something that has no shadow, and then into the shadow itself:“So he would always have her be, rapt, like the spirit of a trouba-dour, casting no shade, herself shade” (p. 23). Once this fantasyis complete, he is abruptly brought back to reality, to her exuber-ance, her full breasts, and rather than a column or a shadow sheis to be compared with a horse, an animal that suggests vigour andsensuality: “Instead of which of course it was only a question ofseconds before she would surge up at him, blithe and buxom andyoung and lusty, a lascivious petulant virgin, a generous mareneighing 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 an-noyance and torment throughout the novel. During the journeyon the train at the beginning of Dream, for example, she sits onBelacqua’s lap and kisses him again and again, repeating that shewants him. Belacqua eludes her kisses, and once in Vienna he isproud of himself for having made it to the end of the trip withoutyielding to such erotic temptations. As always, the Smeraldinatakes the initiative trying to seduce Belacqua, acting in a resoluteif not brutal manner. Even when she takes off her hat, for exam-ple, she does so with a vigorous, aggressive gesture: “She snatchedoff the casque, she extirpated it, it sailed in a diagonal across thecompartment” (p. 30). In the dynamics of the scene, Belacqua re-mains passive, and his virility appears undermined if the narratordefines his shoulder as “fairly manly” (p. 30). As the Smeraldinasits on his lap, “moaning, pianissimissima [sic]” (p. 30), Belacquaresists the temptation of the flesh by posing rigid rules – “‘Nichtküssen’ he said slyly ‘bevor der Zug hält’” (p. 30), and by dis-tracting himself looking at the fairytale-like landscape outside thewindow, while the young woman “lay there inert, surely uncom-fortable, on top of him, muttering her German lament: ‘Dichhaben! Ihn haben! Dich haben! Ihn haben!’” (p. 30).

However, Belacqua cannot always escape the Smeraldina’s in-vasive desires, and at one point “she raped him [...] she violatedhim after tea” (p. 18). Once again, the roles are clearly assigned: thewoman, threatening and determined, “[t]he implacable, the insa-tiate, warmed up this time but her morning jerks to a sexy su-dorem”, dangerously takes the initiative; Belacqua tries to escape



her attack, reminds her that “it was his express intention, madeclear in a hundred and one subtle and delicate ways, to keep thewhole thing pewer and above-bawd” (p. 18). In order to find a wayout of that inacceptable situation, as if in an effort to decontami-nate himself after the physical contact, Belacqua draws on the ab-solute purity of art, in the form of cultured quotes and reading: dis-concerted, he stays up until late: “alla fioca lucerna leggendoMeredith” (p. 18) suffering the pain of his own disillusion, just likeLeopardi in Le ricordanze4. Towards the middle of the novel, thescene is evoked again, and Belacqua takes again a passive position.He yields to the insistent avances of that “petulant, exuberant, cli-toridian puella” (p. 111), the Smeraldina, for the love of her:

Next the stuprum and illicit defloration, the raptus, frankly, vio-lentiæ, and the ignoble scuffling that we want the stomach to go backon; he, still scullion to hope, putting his best... er... foot forward, be-cause he loved her, or thought so, and thought too that in that case theright thing to do and his bounden duty as a penny boyo and expedi-ent and experienced and so on was to step through the ropes of the al-cove with the powerful diva and there acquit himself to the best of hisability.

(Dream, p. 114)

Not only does Belacqua remain passive when sexually pro-voked, but also he is presented by the narrator as indifferent tothe temptations of the flesh. At one point, he is defined as “blindto the charms of the mighty steaks of the Smeraldina-Rima andangered 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 tosuch superlative carnal occasions” (p. 137). Frequently, both inDream and in More Pricks Than Kicks, he is described as inca-pable of the sex act, both for immaturity and impotence. InDream, 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 fio-ca lucerna poetando, / lamentai co’ silenzi e con la notte / il fuggitivo spirto, eda me stesso / in sul languir cantai funereo canto” (Giacomo Leopardi, Le ricor-danze, vv. 113-118).


and that Beckett had learned reading Stendhal, who uses it in aletter to describe Octave, the protagonist of his novel Armance(see Kroll 1993, pp. 50-52). The emphasis is put on the impossi-bility for Belacqua to satisfy the Syra-Cusa’s desires: “The best ofthe joke was she thought she had a lech on Belacqua, she gave himto understand as much. She was as impotently besotted on Belacquababylan, fiasco incarnate, Limbese, as the moon on Endymion” (p.50). Just like Endymion in his eternal sleep, Belacqua aspires toreach the sleep of the senses, in order to stay away from the realworld, to isolate himself from others, depriving Selene/Syra-Cusaof any hope for intimacy. The Syra-Cusa does not realize that “itwas patent and increasingly so, that he was more Octave of Maliv-ert than Valmont and more of a Limbo barnacle than either, mol-lecone, as they say on the banks of the Mugnone, honing after thedark” (p. 50-51). Here the core of the matter regarding Belacqua’ssupposed impotence is revealed. As I have already pointed out, ifone had to compare him to two extremes, the impotent protago-nist of Stendhal’s Armance or Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ liber-tine, he is certainly closer to the former. But most importantly, hefinds his ideal condition in his Limbo, and his impotence, real ornot, has in fact to do with his wanting to be “Limbese”. At onepoint, Belacqua even fantasizes about castration as an appealingoption: he refers to the Medieval legend according to which thebeaver, hunted for the supposedly aphrodisiac properties of itstesticles, would bite its own genitals off to leave them to thehunter as a means for survival: “The beaver bites his off, he said,I know, that he may live”. That was, to Belacqua, “a very persua-sive charter of Natural History” (p. 63). Again, one thinks ofSchopenhauer and his idea of complete sexual abstinence as anecessary condition for spiritual elevation: the beaver has to re-nounce its own testicles to have its life spared; the ascetics denytheir own sex drive in order to live in the real world, that of will-lessness, as opposed to the fake phenomenological world.

It is interesting to note that the different attitude Belacqua andhis women have towards the body and desire is reflected not onlyin their approach to sex but also to food. The Smeraldina’s uncon-tainable sexual appetite, for example, has an equivalent in her ap-petite for food, which is equally strong. One scene that is particu-larly emblematic of this is the one in which the two lovers sit in an



inn late at night. The young woman orders cookies and a hot choco-late for herself, and a soup to revitalize Belacqua in the cold night.He refuses to eat, and prefers to sit there and platonically contem-plate his beloved: “‘My wonderful one, I don’t want soup, I don’tlike soup [...] I want to look at you’. He burst into more tears. ‘WhatI want’ he whinged ‘is to look into your eyes, your beautiful eyes’”(p. 106). Instead, the Smeraldina scoffs her cookies with great ap-petite, trying in vain to behave and dissimulate her voracity:

Now she was lashing into the cookies, she was bowed over herplate like a cat over milk, she was doing her best, the dear girl, not tobe greedy. Every now and then she would peep up at him out of herfeast of cream, just to make sure he was still there to kiss and be kissedwhen her hunger would be appeased by the Schokolade and cookies.She ate them genteelly with a fork, doing herself great violence in herdetermination not to seem greedy to him[.]

(Dream, pp. 106-107)

Belacqua’s insistence on a platonic contemplation of theSmeraldina is even more significant if one considers the fact thatright before that he has abandoned her in order to pay a quick vis-it to the brothel, in the company of her father, the Mandarin: anillustrative instance of the “selective” chastity discussed above.

In the above-quoted discussion with the Mandarin about theimpossibility of “love in the thalamus”, Belacqua explicitly associ-ates eating with sex. When the Mandarin accuses him of “hatingthe flesh [...] by definition”, Belacqua replies, quite bitterly: “I hatenothing [...] It smells. I never suffered from pica” (p. 100). Belac-qua identifies hunger and sexual appetite, and significantly does soin order to justify his refusal to yield to erotic desire. Giving in tothe temptation of the flesh, and having sex with the woman heloves, would be unnatural and illogical. It would mean to try to feedthe spirit with the flesh, and it would be just as useless and harmfulas the act of those who, suffering from pica, ingest non-nutritivesubstances. Interestingly, the Mandarin objects that the flesh can-not be so contemptible if even God incarnated Himself (“howabout our old friend the Incarnate Logos?”, p. 101). The Mandarinposes the problem in religious terms, contrasting his Catholic per-spective with Belacqua’s Protestant view, and spitefully calls him



“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 itis interesting because it stresses the fact that Belacqua is both at-tracted and repulsed by the flesh.

With this analysis of the treatment of sexuality in Dream of Fairto Middling Women, I have tried to offer a view of how this themefits into the larger framework of Beckett’s poetics. The Cartesiandistinction between res cogitans and res extensa, with its manifoldimplications, represents one of the elements that will remain con-stant in Beckett’s oeuvre. Apart from the very explicitly Cartesianand Geulincxian novel Murphy, the problematic relationship be-tween mind and body will be an important constant in all of Beck-ett’s work. Even more decisive will be the Schopenhauerian con-cept of noluntas that, explored in many different ways, will remainone of the vital aspects of Beckett’s poetics. From the paradoxi-cal erotic (mis)adventures of More Pricks Than Kicks, First Loveor “The Calmative”, to the bold aesthetic research of ImaginationDead Imagine and Worstward Ho, the dialectics between will andwill-lessness will remain a central issue in Beckett’s writing.Dream of Fair to Middling Women constitutes one of the most in-teresting starting points for the discussion of this crucial aspect ofBeckett’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 andCritical Perspectives, University of Chicago Press, Urbana.




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”, inComparative Literature, 12, 1 (Winter, 1960), pp. 93-94.

Esslin, Martin, 1990, Patterns of Love and Rejection: Sex and Love inBeckett’s Universe, in Ben-Zvi, 1990, Women in Beckett cit., pp. 61-67.

Fraser, Graham, 1995, “The Pornographic Imagination in ‘All StrangeAway’”, in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 41, 3-4 (Fall-Winter1995), pp. 515-530.

Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1993, The Beckett Studies Reader, Uni-versity Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Hamilton, Alice, and Hamilton, Kenneth, 1976, Condemned to Life:The World of Samuel Beckett, William B. Eerdmans, GrandRapids.

Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned To Fame. The Life of Samuel Beck-ett, Simon & Schuster, New York.

Kroll, Jeri L., “Belacqua as Artist and Lover: ‘What a Misfortune’”, inGontarski, 1993, The Beckett Studies Reader, cit., pp. 35-63.

Morot-Sir, Edouard, Howard Harper, and Dougald McMillan (edi-tors), 1976, Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric, North CarolinaStudies 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’sNotes, Brill, Leiden].

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1844, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (TheWorld 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 StageEnoch Brater

1. The eclectic chair

Within the vast and varied repertory of late twentieth-century Eu-ropean drama, Beckett’s work would surely be noticed for plac-ing actors in odd, eccentric and otherwise uncompromising stagepositions. And that is, as Footfalls states things, “indeed to put itmildly” (Footfalls, p. 243). Planted in urns or standing stock stillon a cold plinth, dumped summarily into trash bins or buried upto the waist, then the neck, in a mound of unforgiving earth, that“old extinguisher” (Happy Days, p. 37), the figures in Beckett’sdramaturgy are more often than not subjected to a highly abbre-viated form of physicality, one that demands the doing of moreand more with less and less – even and especially so in those placeswhere less did not seem possible before. In That Time, for exam-ple, the actor “plays” only a disembodied head; and in Not I, a re-duction ad hominem, if not ad absurdum, the lead part is a mouth(as the author said, “just a moving mouth”), “rest of face in shad-ow” (Not I, p. 216). Little wonder that Jessica Tandy, who starredin the world premiere of Not I under Alan Schneider’s disciplineddirection at Lincoln Center in New York in 1972, demurred, “I’dlike 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 ofsuch a heady theatrical mix. Yet here the pinpoint precision of hisstagecraft has been designed to precede, if not entirely over-whelm, the seductive allure of metaphor and meaning. This play-wright can surprise by revealing his formalist credentials, andmost particularly his grounding in theatrical convention, precise-ly at those moments when the work seems most suspect and most


alarmingly avant-garde. What results is a far cry from the sturdymachinery of an Ibsen or a Chekhov, but make no mistake: it isnot quite Robert Wilson or Pina Bausch either. Beckett’s scenog-raphy looks both backward and forward at the same time, cele-brating his theatrical inheritance in the very process of trans-forming it, a method that involves stripping his seemingly mini-malist sets of every extraneous detail plus one1.

Nowhere is this technique more evident than in the uncannyuse Beckett makes of the seated figure on stage. The performancehistory here is huge. Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata is only one ofmany plays that revel in the dramatic potential of restricted andlimited mobility, though in Beckett’s case this particular cross-ref-erence can be illuminating. The image of the Old Man confinedto a wheelchair had a profound effect on him when, on SuzanneDumesnil’s urging, he saw Roger Blin’s 1949 production at theGaîté Montparnasse on the left bank in Paris, an interpretationthe playwright later said was true to both “the letter and the spir-it” of the drama (Knowlson 1996, p. 348; Brater 2003, pp. 59-60);Endgame, 1957, was only eight years away. Tennessee Williamsexploits the same theatrical trope in the highly atmospheric Sud-denly Last Summer; though his female incarnation of the device,the gothic horror that is Mrs. Venable, appears on stage to inhabitthe full force of a sexually-charged drame bourgeois. Beckett, likeO’Neill before him, eschews any such holding of “the old familyKodak up to ill-nature” (O’Neill 1965, pp. 1-2) and will pursuethe seated figure for very different purposes and effects. TheWestern theatrical canon gave him a great deal to choose from.

Shakespeare’s seated figures, those that are scripted, are mostoften discovered in public surroundings: banquet scenes, thronerooms and senate chambers abound. The emphasis would appearto be on spectacle rather than intimacy. As early as Titus Andron-icus two noble families who have not previously consumed whatremains of one another are prepared to go at it again, seated asthey are, fatally, at this last of all suppers. And in a much later dra-ma the irony cuts deep: Macbeth reminds Banquo not to “fail” his

260 Beckett’s Theatre: Text and Performances

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


feast. The famous ghost obliges. The large interior spaces wherecharacters are likely to sit in King Lear, Hamlet or King RichardIII are similarly ceremonial, just as they are when they turn legal-istic in Othello or jury-rigged in The Merchant of Venice. YetShakespeare’s hyperactive heroes rarely sit for long, reluctant asthey are to forfeit their empowering vertical positions. No direc-tor would allow his stunned Macbeth to remain calmly seatedwhen a ghost materializes on stage so sensationally; nor could theactress playing Lady Macbeth – no “little chuck” she – resist theopportunity to assert her control over the scene by the simple actof rising, as though the text itself were telling her what to do. “Sit,worthy friends”, she urges Rosse and Lennox and the other no-bles gathered at her table, “my lord is often thus” (Macbeth,III.iv.52). Later in the same scene a newly confident Macbeth at-tempts to reclaim his authority over his wife in much the sameway: “I am a man again. Pray you sit still” (Macbeth, III.iv.107)(emphasis mine). All of this may be nothing, of course, comparedto King Lear, where the Duke of Cornwall demands that a chairbe brought on stage for the blinding of Gloucester. The captiveEarl, his hands bound, is in most modern productions thrownbackwards as Cornwall plugs his heels into the “vile jelly”. Andthen he does it again – because, according to Regan, “one eye willmock the other” – before this seated figure, as sightless as Milton’sSamson Agonistes at Gaza, will be returned to his upright posi-tion. Only then is Gloucester set free to “smell his way” to Dover.

Kings, too, may willingly and literally abandon their throneswhen the dramatic occasion encourages them to do so: think ofClaudius delivering his highly polished speech before the assem-bled courtiers as the second scene begins in Hamlet, or Learpointing to the redrawn map of the peaceful kingdom he plans todivide among three troubled sisters. And just what is Horatio sup-posed to do with Hamlet’s body at the end of the play when, forthis protagonist at least, “the rest is silence”? Chairs, especially or-namental ones, come in handy.

Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century for the quitedifferent dimensions of a box set, Ibsen had the opportunity to ex-plore the potential of the seated figure in an entirely new perspec-tive, one that allowed for a far more focused display of psychologi-cal texturing. Shaw was quite right in his observation that modern

E. Brater. The Seated Figure on Beckett’s Stage 261


drama began when Nora sat her husband down in the final act of ADoll’s House to discuss the nature of their marriage (Shaw 1891[1957]). Ibsen is terrific at this sort of thing, efficiently arrangingthe scenic space to accommodate his characters’ need to commu-nicate their innermost thoughts and emotions (it is his substitute forthe no-no of soliloquy, realism’s bête noire). Nora sits on a love-seatwith Mrs. Linde, her could-be confidante, first communicating toolittle, then in a subsequent scene perhaps revealing too much. Thesame 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 usedspeaks volumes. Nora re-establishes the boundaries of their rela-tionship when she turns away, abandons the love-seat and stands,rigid, elsewhere. The same blocking on the same sort of settee ac-cumulates additional resonances when Ibsen further explores itsdynamics in Hedda Gabler. Eilert Lovborg joins Hedda on thedrawing-room sofa as she invites him to do so, on the pretense ofsharing her honeymoon photographs. The tension is palpable; in-timate glance and innermost gaze make the most of it. Much of whathappens next lies in everything that is not said, except for Lovborg’strenchant murmur, “...Hedda Gabler...”, married name very con-spicuously omitted. The predatory Judge Brack, a Hedda Gablerin drag, insinuates his presence at her side, too, and on the same di-van, at first appearing to have greater success in penetrating theshell she has so elaborately constructed around herself. “I’ll neverjump out”, she confides, though she may be forced to do so, andsoon, under the threat, albeit unstated, of blackmail (Ibsen 1890[1992, p. 252]). “Life is not tragic”, Ibsen wrote in the notebook hekept about this play and its lead character’s motivation, “Life is ab-surd – And that is what I cannot bear” (in Goodman 1971, p. 43).Defeated, but also a little triumphant, this female figure removesherself from the set and the set-up, sits down at the piano and shootsherself. Brack, startled, thrown off-guard, even shocked into recog-nition, falls into an armchair, prostrated, and delivers the play’s re-frain which also serves as its bitter curtain line: “But good God!People don’t do such things!” (Ibsen 1890 [1992, p. 304]). He’sright: people don’t, but dramatic characters do.

Ibsen’s contemporary Chekhov seems to have been equally as-tute in recognizing the enormous range of possibility for the seated



figure on stage. One could even argue that sitting is what Chekhov’scharacters do best. Uncle Vanya opens on a quiet scene like so manyothers in this canon: Astrov sitting and chatting with the old Nurse,but really talking to himself. Vanya awakes from his nap and soonjoins him in the garden, as do other members of the cast. They drinktea and in one case perhaps a drop of vodka. Yelena passes by withthe Professor, she “too indolent to move”. Scenes from a countrylife – in four acts no less – indeed. Yet not every Chekhov set-to isquite so laid back. The provincial tranquility has been deceptive.Bedlam will erupt following a busy afternoon of revelatory tête-à-têtes. Serebryakov, the family members gathered all around him, an-nounces a bizarre plan to sell the estate, invest in securities and pur-chase a small villa in Finland. Vanya, his chronic lassitude for onceupstaged, runs into the house to look for a gun. It misfires. “Imissed!” he cries out in dismay and despair (this is, among otherthings, hilarious), “I missed twice!”. The curtain falls on act threebefore 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 nameday while Olga is transfixed in monologue, remembering and in-venting – that we sometimes forget that the third sister, Masha, issitting there in full view, reading, detached and bored. She whis-tles, then gets up to leave, but not before Vershinin, recently ar-rived from Moscow, makes a gallant entry into the Prozorov sit-ting room. “I’ll stay... for lunch”, she says, tellingly, joining “thelovesick major” at the table and foreshadowing everything thatwill take place between them as time in this drama runs its steadycourse. Another play, The Seagull, even borrows a famous the-atrical device from Hamlet. Arkadina and Trigorin, not exactly“guilty creatures sitting at a play” (Hamlet, II.ii.585), take their as-signed places as part of the makeshift audience for Konstantin’sliterally dumb show, in which poor Nina is forced to play the un-derwritten lead. “There are no real people in your work”, she tellsthe crestfallen young author, who yearns so much to be the writerhe will never be. As in Shakespeare, the scene, both the play andthe play-within-the-play, devolves into chaos, with everyone soonon their feet. Chekhov’s drama ends, by contrast, on a far moresomber note, and with a far greater density of dramatic overtones.With characters concentrated around a card table, a fateful game



of lotto is in full progress. But so is something else. “Get Irina outof here somehow”, Dorn tells Trigorin, leading him downstageand away from his seat at the table. “Konstantin just shot him-self”. Curtain.

Beckett is by no means the only beneficiary of such a rich andall-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 itnew” and discovering their own voices. Caryl Churchill updatesthe banquet scene in her feminist drama, Top Girls; Edward Al-bee carefully choreographs Peter and Jerry on a fateful CentralPark bench in The Zoo Story; Sam Shepard finds a surprising lo-cus for a benched father-figure in Fool for Love; and Harold Pin-ter, in a cycle of remarkable plays that runs the gamut from TheHothouse and The Birthday Party to Old Times and the “icy andcold” No Man’s Land, invests his sedentary characters with blood-curdling, almost demonic, power. “If you take the glass”, the seat-ed Ruth taunts Lenny in The Homecoming, “I’ll take you” (Pinter1964 [1967, p. 34]). Through a glass darkly indeed; passive ag-gression like this may never have been quite so dramatically po-tent before. Less successful, perhaps, is Arthur Miller’s attempt touse the image to explore the multidimensionality of paralysis,physical, psychological and political, in an ambitious work likeBroken Glass. What distinguishes Beckett from his peers, howev-er, is that his solution to the problem is not only practical from atheatrical point of view, but simultaneously analytical. It involvesnothing less than a reconsideration of how this device might beused within the entire dramatic enterprise itself.

2. The protagonist, enthroned

One of the things that makes Beckett an exceptional figure in thedevelopment of modern drama is his ability to think outside thebox – and especially outside of the box set, the theater space hewas familiar with and the one he was generally writing for. Beck-ett 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 reflect-ed, “and I found it on the stage” (in Brater 2003, p. 55). But this



was also a license to look elsewhere for the foundation and for-mulation of his image-making. His longtime interest in landscapepainting and the representation of interior spaces on a canvas2,light emanating from a source outside the frame (as in Caravaggioand Vermeer), would have enormous repercussions as he quicklyadapted such values to the demands of the stage. Yet it is perhapsin the portrait of the seated figure in its many variations, fromRaphael to Rembrandt to Van Gogh, and to contemporarypainters like Francis Bacon and Louis LeBrocquy (or Picasso forthat matter), where Beckett finds a grammar and an idiom that hecan truly call his own. This is less a question of the one-to-one cor-respondences of the sort we might be able to locate between aprovincial Chekhov scene and the evocative landscapes of hisgood friend, the Russian painter Isaac Levitan (or betweenMunch, say, and the late Ibsen), as it is an appraisal of the specif-ic ways in which form gives latitude to meaning.

As early as those gold-leafed Madonnas in Giotto, Cimabueand Duccio, seated as they are so serenely on their earthly or ce-lestial thrones, we already sense the profound mystery of inward-ness and the dislocation caused by private thought – not yet “avoice dripping in [the head]” of the sort Beckett will pursue inEndgame, but certainly pointing us in that direction. And suchmagnificent Marias, flat and elongated though they may be (theirchairs come off a whole lot better), are already equipped with dis-tinct personalities. In the embrace of single-point perspective thatfollows, the characterological basis of such figures will be definedeven further in a steady preoccupation with three-dimensionality,sometimes in the fullness of looking out, sometimes through thepensive mediation of searching even deeper within. The seatedfigure, painted, repainted and represented yet again, was well onits way toward becoming the sine qua non of that endless and elu-sive drama known as human consciousness.

Such implications were not lost by the cautious playwrightwho became in the 1950s Samuel Beckett. “In a dressing gown, astiff toque on his head, a large blood-stained handkerchief over his


2 For Beckett’s interest in the visual arts, especially painting, see Knowlson1996 and Oppenheim 2000.


face, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees, thicksocks 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 theseated figure on stage. Never neglecting “the little things in life”,Endgame presents the image in redacted form: a brief tableaupunctuates the mime Clov performs in the drama’s opening mo-ments, while it is still “covered with an old sheet”. But it is reallyin the famous earlier play, Waiting for Godot, where this styliza-tion can be seen to be most firmly rooted. Pozzo even goes so faras to make a fetish of this recurring motif:

But how am I to sit down now, without affectation, now that I haverisen? Without appearing to – how shall I say – without appearing tofalter.

(Waiting for Godot, p. 28)

Pozzo, like his author, recognizes a good thing when he has itgoing, and a few minutes later, eyeing the stool, he seizes the op-portunity to advance its richly performative momentum:

Pozzo: I’d like very much to sit down, but I don’t quite know howto 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 pneu-

monia.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 moreprimary role than this, and a far more vital one: nothing less than



the opening image of the play itself. As the curtain rises (the play-wright was certainly thinking of one), we first meet Estragon “sit-ting 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 ofa man sitting by himself on a stone, Gogo’s initial situation inWaiting for Godot, has a long provenance in the Beckett reperto-ry. As a semblance of isolation, cosmic and otherwise, it appearsnot only in the short story “The Calmative”, but also in the sec-ond movement of Stirrings Still. Beckett seems to have derivedthis image from the Middle High German poet he much admired,Walther von der Vogelweide, though this is the first time he usesit, albeit ironized, in a play:

I sat upon a stone,Leg over leg was thrown,Upon my knee an elbow restedAnd in my open hand was nestedMy 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 firstline of the medieval lyric, inspired the well-known painting of himin the Manesse manuscript; the poet is said to be buried in thecathedral at Würzburg, where Malone recalls having seen “Tiepo-lo’s ceiling”: “what I tourist I must have been, I even rememberthe diaeresis, if it is one” (Malone Dies, p. 62).

Sitting – and waiting – is Hamm’s celebrated “speciality” inEndgame, though Beckett’s bums already exploit most of the lat-ter’s potential in Godot. Thinking on his feet to pass the time thatwould have passed anyway, but “not so fast”, Vladimir in factrarely sits down, but he will do so, and poignantly, on those fewoccasions when he tenderly comforts his partner. Poor Lucky, of


3 Walther von der Vogelweide, in Colvin 1938, p. 49. See also Knowlson1996, pp. 147, 613.


course, is never permitted the same luxury, even though “he car-ries like a pig” and falls down in an ever-maddening sequence ofverticals and horizontals, culminating in a dance variously called“The Hard Stool” and, more significantly, “the Net”. Muchcomes together for Beckett, however, in the work that exploresthe dark underside of Godot; and it will be Endgame, as “dark asink” (Beckett, in Brater 2003, p. 78), that finally allows him towrite his own signature on the seated figure stranded on a lonelyset: “Outside of here it’s death”.

3. The seats that (sometimes) rock

Even as a student at Trinity, Beckett saw Belacqua, the Florentinelute maker who appears early in his fiction by way of Dante (andwho reemerges in various guises throughout the prose writings), asthe seated figure par excellence. In Purgatory his role is both tan-talizing and suggestive. Chided for his negligence, he respondswith the words Aristotle assigns to him, and which provide Beckettwith the title of a short story published in 1932: Sedendo et quie -scendo anima efficitur sapiens. The Poet’s riposte in The DivineComedy could not be more stinging: “Certainly, if to be seated iswise, then no one can be wiser than you”. In his fiction Becketttransforms such habitual laziness and such exquisite verbal spar-ring – for that is what it is – into his own version of some demateri-alized “Belacqua bliss” (Murphy, p. 111). But in theatre indolencehas to be animated; there’s sitting, and then there’s sitting, squared.

For the actor playing Hamm, planted so magisterially on hisown throne, Endgame can be daunting in just how much it asks himto act, to do and to perform (see Raynor 1994; Garner 1994). Slothdoes not enter into the equation. Clov, who has “work to do” andcannot sit down, is a whole lot more than stage manager, caretakeror mere retainer here; he is also the engineer for rapid transporta-tion as he wheels his master from place to place around the cir-cumscribed “world” of this interior set, placing him, one moretime, smack “in the centre” – or thereabouts. Hamm, too, is calledupon to play any number of roles: he is (or has been) at varioustimes a storyteller, a master jokester, a consumer of sugarplums, adispenser of biscuits and pap, a vengeful son, a drug user, a senti-



mentalist, a tyrant, a dog lover and an enviable appreciator of stageterminology. He may also be a father. Endgame requires a remark-able series of gestures from this seated figure in order to develop acomplete 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 bothmore and less. Krapp seems at first reluctant to play this part. Jan-gling keys, uncorking a bottle, or retrieving a dusty old dictionary,he shuffles back and forth into the darkness of the set before set-tling down into the dimness that reluctantly illuminates his smalltable. Preparatory rituals completed, the “play”, so to speak, isnow ready to begin for this “wearish” figure, face mostly forwardas he confronts that perilous point where time remembered be-comes the consciousness of time remaining. The past, trans-formed on tape, alternately startles and plagues him with its stead-fastness, and it is his misbegotten “vision” that even at this latedate still tampers with it. “Play” as it will be defined on this plat-form therefore involves mostly playback, this one from the re-sources of memory stored in “box three... spool five”. Reactionconstitutes the action here – so much so that the actor must care-fully calibrate his every move to accommodate the dictates ofBeckett’s multifaceted and highly literary script. Face and upperbody are of crucial importance in Krapp’s Last Tape, for, as lightfades downward, it obscures all that might otherwise be revealed.On tape the recorded voice of Krapp-at-39 says he will “feel” ablack 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, af-ter a pregnant pause, the voice from the same past comments onthe “new light” above the desk as “a great improvement”, wearyeyes grudgingly veer upward. As previously noted in the case ofMacbeth, this text, too, goes a long way in stimulating the seatedfigure’s animation. But not every suggestion of movement in thisdrama will evoke a similarly kinetic response, however discreet itmay be meant to be. Some can only be taken at face value: the im-age of the lovers together on a punt before ardor compels a muchyounger Krapp to lie “down across her”, his “face in her breasts”and his “hand on her” (pp. 60, 61, 63), or the more recent andquite different memory Krapp records in the present, that time hewent to Vespers “once”, fell asleep and rolled off a pew.



In a fourth major play, Happy Days, Beckett emerges onceagain as “a great leg-puller and an enemy of obviousness”.4 Win-nie’s physical situation, planted as she is in the earth, the play-wright’s update of some Mesolithic burial site from the BoyneValley due north of Dublin (the scale more reminiscent ofLoughcrew than Newgrange or Knowth), will be difficult to de-termine. It is hard to tell – “imagine” really, as Mouth says in NotI – “what position she is in”, “whether standing or seating orkneeling” (in production, the solution is best left to the techies).Seated behind the mound, and barely within our sightline, is theever-patient Willie – “ever”, that is, until the play’s stunningly am-biguous conclusion. And it is the blocking for this enigmatic fig-ure that will be of most interest to us here. In the first act Winnie“sits”, to speak strictly metaphorically “in the old style”, in theprivileged position; for it is she – and she alone – who can twisther neck back in order to receive a better view of this less than de-mure seated male figure. As she shifts her observational positionfor greater visibility, we must take her word for it when she re-ports that he picks his nose, looks at pornographic postcards, orspreads sunscreen over the various parts of his body best left un-mentioned. By contrast, we can just about see a snippet from thelocal newspaper when Willie turns a page to read from the obitu-aries: “His Grace and Most Reverend Father in God Dr. CarolusHunter dead in a tub” (Happy Days, p. 14). Winnie reacts to thisalarming news with an exclamatory “Charlie Hunter!” in what thescript calls a “tone of fervent reminiscence”.

Two short works first produced in 1981, “Rockaby” and “OhioImpromptu”, as well as the earlier Come and Go (written in 1965),offer us compelling variations of the same motif. These are highlycompressed dramas that start with a specific image, ignite a com-plex emotion, then open up a universe of feelings and ideas5. “Whendid 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 previ-ously assigned to one of the three “weird sisters” in Shakespeare’s


4 Dylan Thomas writing about Beckett in the New English Weekly (March17, 1938). See Graver and Federman 1979, p. 46.

5 See Holland Cotter, “Sonnets in Marble”, in The New York Times (Au-gust 10, 1977), B25, 30.


Macbeth. Vi sits in the center side by side with Flo and Ru as Beck-ett’s three female figures are stationed stage right, motionless andvery erect, facing front, hands clasped in laps. Each gets up, turn andturn about, then returns to the place of origin, re-inscribing the ini-tial static tableau, isolated and illuminated as it is by a single ingotof unforgiving light. “Does she not know?” / “Does she not real-ize?” is this text’s ominous take on the old vaudeville game of who’s-on-first; but in this case the consequences, unstated though every-where implied, are likely to turn lethal. Closure is achieved when theseated 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 signalend of play. Flo delivers the curtain line, “I can feel the rings”, fol-lowed by the palpable silence that finally engulfs them all.

“Rockaby” will be similarly attuned to the mysterious, evenmystical quality of inwardness portraitists have often found so se-ductive in the features assigned to their own seated figures. Beck-ett recycles the rocking chair from his novel Murphy, but in the playhe elevates its status to that of a character in its own right. A “pre-maturely old” female figure sits “subdued” in “Rockaby”on a chairthat is “controlled mechanically”, without her assistance (“Rocka-by”, pp. 273, 274). The playwright was clear about one thing: theVoice of memory, recorded, initiates the rock, not the other wayaround, and certainly not the woman dressed in black who yearnsto hear so much “More”6. Beckett preserves the enigma as well asthe integrity of this dramatic moment by insisting on “the absoluteabsence of the Absolute” (“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 22),relying instead on the image and the modesty of its scale to insinu-ate presence through a fusion of light, sound and movement ratherthan narration. His dialogue is poetic, not surprisingly so in thiscase, as it is there to complement and elevate the stage’s searing vi-sual lyricism. Rarely has a seated figure on stage, “mother rocker”notwithstanding, been asked to carry the weight of so many com-peting discourses, one in which theater technology wears such adisarming human face. La Berceuse, the title Van Gogh gives to hiswell-known portrait of the seated Mme. Augustine Roulin (“Ber -


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


ceuse” is also the title Beckett uses for the French translation of hisplay), is therefore much more than a cross-reference or a conve-nient painterly analogue. French berceuse, moreover, means cra-dle, lullaby and rocking chair; but it also can refer, as it does in VanGogh, to the seated figure herself. Beckett’s drama in performancewill be, experientially, all of these things at once.

The affective nature of such formal restraint achieves addi-tional resonance in “Ohio Impromptu”, where the figures seatedat a plain deal table are both singular and doubled, “As alike inappearance as possible” (“Ohio Impromptu”, p. 285). Reader andListener are each other’s Other; and each is each other’s “Hy-pocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!”7. Perilously, as inDante, “Simile qui con simile è sepolto”, like with like is buriedhere8. But are we really seeing double, or merely some liminal fan-tasy of a replication hysteria, an uptake of the riveting stage dy-namics called for by Goldoni in I due gemelli veneziani? Or areBeckett’s spellbinding seated figures only two aspects of one manfor, inevitably, as you read you also in some sense profoundly lis-ten? Stage left one figure intones the cherished lines from an oldvolume, monopolizing the soundscape and complicating itsstrangeness with the suggestion of narrative. Stage right the other“other” carefully weighs every word; his “knock” is opened widewhen it signals an unexpectedly sudden interruption to the cou-ple’s tacit interaction, only to magnify it further when L compelsR to retrace his steps. Only the re-reading counts, as Nabokovsaid9. Then, when we least expect it, stage imagery is quietly re-drawn as the seated figures achieve unprecedented momentum.The “story”, such as it is, being done, Reader very slowly and verydeliberately 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 Univer-sity 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 adetailed study of the Dante-Beckett connection, see Caselli 2005.

9 See Michael Ondaatje, 2007, Divisadero, Knopf, New York, p. 136.


Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise their headsand 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 dis-cussed in another forum, it could be argued here that his depictionof the seated figure is offered much greater amplitude and preci-sion in the plays written for television. Subject to sharp definitionby 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 pre-recorded, like fleshly eruptions in an otherwise spectral world. Butthat is their limitation as well as their considerable strength, the factthat they are frozen, so to speak, in time and on digitalized tape.The illusion of spontaneity and of spontaneous gesture, so crucialto the impact of Beckett’s seated bodies in live performance, aswhen Reader and Listener synchronize their movement at the con-clusion of “Ohio Impromptu”, or when the actress suddenly utters“Fuck life” seemingly out of nowhere just before she bows her headin “Rockaby”, empowers such figures to command the space theyinhabit with emphasis and authority. What may be lost in exacti-tude is made up for in fineness; and as the light slowly fades on theset for each play, it provides the theatre audience with another kindof permanence: a fixed after-image that lasts forever.

Beckett’s stage, as this discussion of his innovative use of theseated figure attempts to show, is always full of “high-class nuts tocrack” (The Unnamable, p. 33). But that is not to say that the solu-tions he finds so appealing are without precedent. Beckett drawsupon a rich vocabulary of theatrical convention, analyzes his in-heritance, then takes it several steps forward. The hardest nut tocrack for Beckett, as for Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov and so manyother playwrights before him, will always be found, after all, in thatdelirious and probably delusional seeing-place he knows and weknow as “theatre”. See better. Fail better. Followed in his case bythat agonizing – but also inspirational – one word, “On”.



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

BIBLIOGRAPHY


“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, 1929, in Our Exagmination RoundHis Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929, NewDirections, 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 Beck-

ett, 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.



“Nacht und Träume”, 1984, in The Collected Shorter Plays of SamuelBeckett, cit., pp. 303-306.

The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 1984, Grove Press, NewYork 1994.

Stirrings Still, 1989, John Calder, London.

Criticism


Brater, Enoch, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in theTheater, Oxford University Press, New York.

Idem, 2003, The Essential Samuel Beckett, Thames & Hudson, Lon-don.

Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fictionand Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Frenz, Horst (editor), 1965, American Playwrights on Drama, Hill andWang, New York.

Garner, Stanton B. Jr., 1994, Phenomenology and Performance in Con-temporary Drama, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman (editors), 1979, SamuelBeckett: 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 (edi-tor), 1965, American Playwrights on Drama, cit.

Oppenheim, Lois, 2000, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialoguewith Art, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Raynor, Alice, 1994, To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the Phe-nomenology of Action, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Other works cited

Alighieri, Dante, Inferno, in La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, acura di Giorgio Petrocchi, Mondadori, Milano 1966-1967 (The In-ferno 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.




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 fromWalther von der Vogelweide, 1170-1228, Edward Arnold, London,trans. Ian G. Colvin.

Goodman, Randolph, 1971, “Ibsen’s Notes”, in Idem (editor), FromScript to Stage: Eight Modern Plays, Rinehart Press, San Francisco.

Ibsen, Henrik, 1879, Doll’s House (Et Dukkehjem), in Ibsen: Four Ma-jor 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, Lon-don 1982).

Idem, Macbeth (Citations from Macbeth are from The Arden Shake-speare edition, Kenneth Muir editor, Methuen, London 1959).

Idem, King Lear (Citations from King Lear are from The Arden Shake-speare edition, R. A. Foakes editor, Methuen, London 2005).

Shaw, George Bernard, 1891, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Hill andWang, New York 1957.

Vogelweide, Walter von der, in Colvin (editor), 1938, “I Saw theWorld” cit.


“The Past in Monochrome”: (In)voluntary Memory in Samuel Beckett’s

Krapp’s Last TapeChris Ackerley

There are moments in this frail world that is all temptation andacademia when we feel, in the words of Watt (who was once a uni-versity man), that we are perhaps prostituting ourselves to somepurpose (Watt, p. 143). One such moment for me, many moonsago, manifested itself in an examination answer on John Keats’sOde on a Grecian Urn (“Thou still unravished bride of quiet-ness...”): the reason why, said my fair but middling student, theyoung maiden has retained her virginity is because she was keptin an urn. Would that Beckett’s “Proustian equation”, as pre-sented in his early essay, Proust (p. 1), with its inviolable imagesof 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 madeabout Beckett and memory in The Grove Companion to SamuelBeckett (2004); (b) to consider briefly the paradox of new bottlesand old wine, that is, Beckett’s impulse when using new tech-nologies or experimental forms to decant into them familiarthemes and images; and (c), with reference to Krapp’s Last Tape,to bring these matters together in such a way as to illuminate thepersistence into this later work (later, that is, with respect toProust, to which it is considerably indebted) of an earlier andlargely rejected aesthetic, that of the “ideal real”, as Beckett calledit in that early essay (p. 56). My conclusion will be to the effectthat Krapp’s impasse, following a Proust-like experience of in-voluntary memory, leaves him not with the sense of having tri-umphed over time but as having encountered an aesthetic that(unlike Marcel’s) offers dubious consolation. Krapp’s tragedy (Iargue) signals for Beckett a kind of closure to an aesthetic debategenerated by the earlier essay, and in so doing acts as a point of


reference in “Eh Joe” and That Time, which seek other modes ofmoving beyond the impasse, different ways of going “on”.

Memory in the Cartesian paradigm offers an extension of theself into the past (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 361). To elabo-rate: Schopenhauer at the outset of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstel-lung (The World as Will and Idea) argues that the body, for the pureknowing subject, is an idea like any other idea, an object among ob-jects; but at the same time it is immediately known, as will(Schopenhauer 1844 [1896, I, p. 129]). Knowledge of the body ap-pears to consciousness in a special manner, with an immediate re-ality that other ideas do not possess (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004,pp. 64-65). In the same way, it might be argued, the objects of mem-ory possess this “special” relationship, a willed relationship most-ly, with the perceiving self: just as the body represents an extensionof the self into space, memory represents a like extension of thatself into the past1. For the body, to continue the analogy with ref-erence to two of Beckett’s obsessional images, that extension maytake the metaphorical form of a stick or a stone; that is, a contigu-ous if less immediate relation, as when a stick (Molloy’s for exam-ple) extends the reach of the body, or by disjunction, as when thestick becomes a stone (or missile) and thereby effects a more am-biguous relationship to the space that it occupies or through whichit moves (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 542). Voluntary mem-ory, in terms of this analogy, entails a relationship between the pre-sent perceiving subject and the objects of its past, two “separateand immanent dynamisms” brought together for the nonce bymeans of a constructed “system of synchronisation” (Proust, p. 7),with the aid of what I have likened to a stick (or a crutch), but whichBeckett, 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 nearthe end of Le Temps retrouvé (Proust 1927, XV, p. 226): “Non seulement toutle monde sent que nous occupons une place dans le Temps, mais, cette place, leplus simple la mesure approximativement comme il mesurerait celle que nousoccupons 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” 279

a past sensation recurs to re-create the original experience, there-by confounding Habit and overcoming the gulf between past andpresent that is otherwise “interdit à nos sondes” (p. 18)3. This,Beckett insists, amounts to “a participation between the ideal andthe real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and sub-stance” (p. 55). Such moments, Beckett insists, still followingProust, are “real without being actual, ideal without being ab-stract” (p. 56)4. This Proustian inflection to the Cartesian para-digm of extension offers even at this early point of Beckett’s ca-reer something quite unlike the Aristotelian entelechy affirmed inUlysses by Stephen Dedalus in the National Library: “A. E. I. O.U.” (Joyce 1922 [1993, p. 182]), the perceiving self as an identityconstituted or defined by memory. In my analogy, one more ap-plicable to the later Beckett, the self is rather a missile, a monadmoving through time, disjunctive, with an uncertain relationshipto a past that is not so much immediate (in the Schopenhaureansense), as fugitive and volatile – but which it may, by accident, un-expectedly, on occasion, encounter.

One last metaphor5: in Proust, Beckett characterises the rela-tionship between the individual subject and its past in terms of “aconstant process of decantation”, from the vessel containing “thefluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome”, to that con-taining “the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by thephenomena of its hours” (Proust, pp. 4-5). Of interest here is,firstly, the description of the past as “multicoloured”, given thelater insistence on it as monochromatic; and, secondly, themetaphor of the vessel. With respect to the first, there is no realcontradiction, as Beckett, following Proust, is distinguishing in anaxiomatic way between voluntary memory that has “no interest inthe mysterious element of inattention that colours our most com-monplace experiences” and thus “presents the past in mono-chrome” (p. 19), and involuntary memory that “conjures in all therelief and colour” the “essential significance” of the past (p. 21)

3 Beckett’s allusion to Baudelaire’s “Le Balcon” accentuates his own widertheme: “Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis, / Renaîtront-ils d’ungouffre 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 Brown-

ing: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a metaphor?”


from the vessel in which the past is contained, be that Marcel’steacup, an ancient urn hoisted from the depths (p. 19), or “a vasefilled with a certain perfume and a certain colour” (p. 55)6 thatmight be opened to flood the present with the air and perfume ofthe past, so that “we breathe the true air of Paradise”7, a paradiseonce lost but now regained, the effect being the “identification ofimmediate with past experience” and the “recurrence of past ac-tion or reaction in the present” (p. 55).

The metaphor of the vessel as a repository of memory manifestsitself variously in Beckett’s oeuvre. Molloy refers to “that sealedjar” 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 nov-el, in either language, is dominated by the unforgettable image ofthe once “great traveller” (The Unnamable, p. 327) planted in hispot, 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 hermurdered lover). Nagg and Nell in Endgame are “bottled” in theirbins; and the three participants in “Play” each speak from an urn,in which their bodies and their memories are trapped. The name-less narrator of How It Is seeks to hear “an ancient voice in me notmine” (How It Is, p. 7); the voice is that (in part) of memory, ill-heard and ill-recorded, for want of ebonite cylinders (forerunnersof the long-playing record and magnetic tape), onto which the pastmight be transcribed (p. 107).

The spools of Krapp’s Last Tape are like repositories of mem-ory, but in the first instance those of voluntary memory, for theyare numbered (“Box... thrree... spool... five”), entered into aledger, and filed away, so that the appropriate recorded experi-ence can be later accessed when required. Beckett had in Proustdescribed the exercise of voluntary memory as “the application ofa 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 remplide choses d’une couleur, d’une odeur, d’une temperature absolutement diffé-rentes”.

7 Proust 1927, XV, p. 12: “les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”.


spool labelled: “Mother at rest at last” (Krapp’s Last Tape, p. 57);and although he has forgotten the “Black ball” and the “darknurse”, to say nothing of the “memorable equinox”8, and does notreact initially to the “Farewell to – [he turns the page] – love”, heis acting closely in accordance with precepts of voluntary memo-ry as outlined in the earlier essay: the “uniform memory of intel-ligence”, that can be relied on “to reproduce for our gratified in-spection those impressions of the past that were consciously andintelligently formed” (Proust, p. 19). Beckett also likens this ac-tivity to that of turning the leaves of an album of photographs(black and white, since colour photography was then not an op-tion), “a blurred and uniform projection once removed of ouranxiety and opportunism”, a plagiarism of the self (p. 20). This isthe past in monochrome.

Inevitably, then, Krapp’s “Mother at rest” memories are, withtwo significant exceptions, in black and white. He recalls living atthat time “on and off with Bianca in Kedar Street” (Krapp’s LastTape, p. 58); the word means in Hebrew “dark”, and to “dwell inthe tents of Kedar” (Psalms 120, 5) is to be cut off from the wor-ship of the true God, one of several such intimations of Krapp’sspiritual apostasy. Other monochromatic images include: theblack 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 rustyblack sleeveless waistcoat and dirty white boots (p. 55); and thephysical setting for the entire play consists of a small circle of“strong white light” within an otherwise dark stage. James Knowl-son notes that in Beckett’s Schiller production other light anddark 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’sManichean-like impulse towards sexual abstinence: compare Watt’s “biannualequinoctial nocturnal emission in vacuo” (Watt, p. 232); that is, Watt mastur-bates twice-yearly, on the nights of the equinox. More simply, one might justagree 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 sepa-ration and mingling” (Knowlson 1992, p. 20).


the central light with a light-coloured shade; a white envelope ona dark table; a black ledger but a dictionary covered in light-coloured leather (Knowlson 1992, p. XXII). The metaphysical set-ting, as Knowlson had earlier shown, intimates “a Gnostic, evena specifically Manichean tradition” (Knowlson and Pilling 1980,pp. 86-87). He mentions such strictures as: abstention from sex-ual intercourse and marriage; the rift between God and the world,the spirit and the flesh; and the vision of the universe, world andman, as divided between two opposing principles, the forces ofdarkness threatening to engulf the forces of light (to these can beadded, not entirely facetiously, the eating of bananas as an im-pulse towards not simply vegetarianism but “upwardly-striving”plants, as recommended by some early Manicheans)9. As Knowl-son argues (Knowlson 1992, p. 88), Krapp’s experience of the “vi-sion” is given in fragmentary form only, but enough is played backto suggest his thirty-nine year old’s belief that the darkness andthe light have been reconciled. This is a vision that the olderKrapp, tragically, cannot sustain, for at the age of sixty-nine hewill be reminded of an experience in his past that he had forgot-ten: something “at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evo-cation 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 andnot 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 itby accident), is anticipated, even orchestrated psychologically in adeliberately Joycean way, by means of two exceptions to the other-wise dominant black and white images. These consist of the recol -lection, on the tape, by the middle-aged Krapp, first, of his yet


9 James McCabe in Saint Augustine and His Age, a book from which Beck-ett took some philosophical notes, characterises the Manichean sense of life as“a stern process of redemption, an eternal struggle of the elements of light tobreak free from the kingdom of darkness, and return to their source” (McCabe1902, pp. 51-52). He later notes that Augustine condemned their wicked prac-tices concerning the “elements of light” imprisoned in semine animalis, and re-leased when eaten by the elect (p. 409). Bend it like Beckett, perhaps: yet an-other curious gloss (provocative, rather than entirely serious) on the Manicheanbanana.


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 privi-leged auditors may hear the hint of Beckett’s first love, Peggy Sin-clair, otherwise the Smeraldina (or “little emerald”); Krapp, how-ever, chooses not to invoke that image any further (though hebroods). The second is both enigmatic (the “young beauty” is anunknown) yet explicable (the allusion to Othello V.ii.146, “one en-tire and perfect chrysolite”, likens her to Desdemona, for whomthe tragic hero would have forsaken the world of light). Krapp’shesitation may suggest that the memory, like the simile, is some-what forced, and to that extent voluntary; but the touch of green in“chrysolite” relates it to the earlier suppressed image of the shab-by green coat (perhaps, too, the little emerald), and may intimate(beneath the threshold of conscious awareness) a flickering of in-voluntary 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 in-voluntary memory, though he elects finally not to share those ex-periences with the audience nor record them on the present tape.More importantly, these tiny coloured flickers (for they may be nomore than that) unwittingly prepare him for the climactic scenewith the girl in the punt – a memory, I suggest, that differs fromthe others (his mother’s death, the nurse and dog, even “the vi-sion at last”) by being truly involuntary, the past returning in amanner that represents, tragically, not a Proustian triumph of thepast regained, but the deep and painful epiphany of a lost lovethat might have redeemed the now tangible and lasting sterility ofhis present existence10.


10 When I argued thus at the 2008 Rome Symposium, Lorenzo Orlandinicommented perceptively that Krapp’s experience differs from that of Proust’sMarcel, or Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in the “Lestrygonians” chapter of Ulysseswhen 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 simplyremembered), because Krapp’s experience is more of the mind than of the sens-es, and so lacks a truly sensual dimension to make it as immediate as the origi-nal experience. Dirk Van Hulle, responding to this, suggested wittily but un-helpfully that my case would be stronger if I could prove that bananas (like


Knowlson describes Krapp as one who has followed theManichean tradition of recommending abstinence from sexual in-tercourse and who sees woman as appealing to the sensual side ofhis nature, distracting him from what he should be seeking toachieve in his work (Knowlson 1992, p. XXIII), a man torn be-tween conflicting forces and whose life has been ruined by thisconflict (p. XXV). Having argued that the incident that Krapp re-turns to so compulsively is not the “vision” but the scene with thegirl in the punt (p. XX), Knowlson’s analysis of that latter sceneequating woman with darkness is stunning, particularly with ref-erence to the eyes that open only after Krapp creates a “zone ofshade” (p. XXIV). However, Knowlson implies in the Forewordthen states in the Textual Notes (p. 20) that Krapp is “explicitlysearching” for the indexed “Farewell to love” entry; with this I donot agree, because the dramatic power of involuntary memoryseems (to me) crucial to the tragic effect. Although Krapp returnsto the scene several times, voluntarily, his final realization (Iwould argue) has been generated by the uncanny power of invol-untary memory, leaving him with the tragic awareness (in the old-fashioned 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 theProustian equation is accidental, less a fugitive salvation than anexemplary illustration of Beckett’s contention that involuntarymemory is “an unruly magician” that will not be importuned: “Itchooses 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 unusu-al metaphysic (the Gnostic and Manichean elements of the play),should have reverted so deliberately to an essay written more thantwenty-five years earlier, to an aesthetic (the “ideal real”) that hehad largely abandoned in that interim, and to a mode of character-


madeleines and seed-cake) had this evocative power; thank you, Dirk, but some-times a banana is just a banana (see, again, the previous footnote). In a privatenote 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 tothis 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).


ization (the Joycean orchestration of the mind and the aesthetics ofthe epiphany) that he had also rejected in his on-going denial of thestability of the “self” or character. There are two ways to look at thisapparent anomaly: firstly, to show that Beckett’s habit of returning(like a dog to its vomit?) to his previous writings is by no means con-fined to Krapp’s Last Tape; secondly, to argue that the apparentlydiscredited aesthetic (the “ideal real”) was more persistent in Beck-ett’s writings than might first appear to be the case, and that itsreappearance addresses a wider aesthetic argument.

The first argument is best made by reference to En attendantGodot, which was written in 1948-1949, Beckett told Colin Duck-worth, 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 notyet face) (Duckworth 1966, p. XLV). The paradox thus arises ofthe most influential and radical play of the twentieth century hav-ing been written as an interlude between two weighty proseworks, as curiously conservative with respect to the issues thatBeckett was then exploring in the fiction (notably, the voice), andas relying upon recycled themes and images (the two thieves, sal-vation, the pseudo-couple) that would be of limited use in thewriting to come. To be sure, it is appropriate to work the otherway round: to see in the Three Novels thematic elements (notably,the use of soliloquy) that anticipate the more radical profile of thedrama, to trace the links between Waiting for Godot and Mercierand Camier, and to affirm uncertain memory, voluntary or other-wise, as a key theme in both works; but the point still holds thatmany of the central issues of Waiting for Godot are elements fromthe past fiction, and that this play, unlike the Endgame that fol-lowed, was written with relative ease and without the complexdrafts and comprehensive agonising that attended the later play.

A similar pattern appears with respect to many of the works af-ter Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall(1956), revisits his Foxrock childhood and the world of Dream ofFair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks (notably, “AWet Night”) for its tone and tenor; and “Embers”, his second playfor radio (1957), although more venturesome in demarking the lit-toral ambiguities of hallucination and reality, relies nevertheless onthe Jungian paradoxes of multiple voices and personalities that



were a legacy of Beckett’s psychoanalytical reading of the 1930s,and which had been worked through in detail in Murphy, Watt andthe Three Novels. Beckett’s one realised venture into cinema, theeponymous Film (1964), draws heavily on the devices (rockingchair and monad) of Murphy, as well as on the Berkeleyan themesof percipi central to that novel and which, in turn, had found ex-pression in Waiting for Godot. And Krapp’s Last Tape, which re-works (as I have argued) the 1931 essay, Proust, becomes in turnthe template for “Words and Music” (1961; Croak’s epiphany andthe memory of the love that was lost), “Eh Joe” (1965; the girl inthe green coat and the agony of love forsaken), and That Time(1976; the narrator’s three voices, A, B and C, as exfoliations ofKrapp’s three selves). To acknowledge such influences and conti-nuities is not in the least to belittle the originality of the indebtedworks, but rather to make the point that their dramatic power is,to a greater extent than usually recognised in Beckett’s writing, theconsequence of an artistic imagination that continued over theyears to explore and to interrogate a handful of obsessional imagesand persistent themes.

The “ideal real” as implicit in the advent of involuntary mem-ory is one such persistent theme. As Stan Gontarski argues: “Fora time Beckett accepted this sense of involuntary memory, or purerecollection, as epiphantic” (Gontarski 2008, p. 101), even if, atthe time of writing Proust, he was attracted to it as much by theagency of the Bergsonian elements of À la recherche as by Prousthimself11. That aesthetic represented a solution to the Proustianequation, however improbable its formulation might later seem:a “mystical experience” that communicates an “extratemporalessence”, with the effect that “the communicant is for the momentan extratemporal being” (Proust, p. 56). Such a sentiment mayseem the antithesis to everything that the later Beckett represents,but despite the verbal sparkles and precious margaritas of Proustand its value as a repository of ideas and motifs that would be oflasting utility for Beckett (and Beckett scholars) for years to come,


11 Gontarski 2008, p. 96: “The Bergson connection to his Proust is not of-ten acknowledged by Beckett and so has remained underdeveloped by his crit-ics”.


there is no controlling or pervasive irony that permits the readerto distinguish Beckett’s aesthetic from that of Proust himself12.

As an aesthetic this “solution” (to mix the metaphor) soon dis-solved. Beckett found his own ironic voice in Dream of Fair to Mid -dling Women, from the calculated affront to Proust (the hawthornso dear to Marcel) on the first page to the claim (Dream, p. 132) thatthe book’s only unity is involuntary. More Pricks Than Kicks tracesa broad trajectory away from the epiphantic structure of “Danteand the Lobster” through the satire of different literary genres to aparody of “The Dead” (that ultimate epiphany) in “A Wet Night”.Beckett never lost his respect for Joyce’s artistic integrity (the fam-ily was another matter, particularly after the Lucia fiasco), but hisown aesthetic (of failure, of impotence) defined itself increasinglyagainst that of Joyce. And the viability of the “ideal real” as a seri-ous aesthetic position crumbled completely before the nominalistonslaught of Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache,which Beckett first read in 193813 and which persuaded him for alltime that words were “inane”, verba inania, never “obviating thevoid” (Ackerley and Gontarski, 2004, p. 359).

Even so... fragments of that crumbled aesthetic (some un-sprinkled with irony) appear in various works over the next thir-ty years, by no means redeeming the desolate waste time stretch-ing before and after, but constituting nevertheless not quite noth-ing. These include: the moment in Murphy that Neary’s imagina-tion, making its journey westward, conjures: “Clonmachnois onthe 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 read-ing, hovers uncertainly between affirmation and an ironic critique. The influ-ence of Joyce (rather than Gilbert and Sullivan) partly explains this in terms ofa young writer’s attraction to an aesthetic (the Joycean epiphany, the Proustianmoment) endorsed by the two contemporary writers he most admired; my senseis that Beckett had not yet gained the necessary detachment that within a fewyears would let him critique this position more ruthlessly.

13 Those who suggest otherwise must explain away not only Beckett’s limitedcompetence in German until the Reisefieber of 1936 (for the Beiträge was not avail-able in translation), but also the lack of an ironic perspective in some of the earli-er work, and especially in Proust. This issue has been extensively discussed in var-ious essays by first John Pilling and then Matthew Feldman, who have demolishedthe widely-accepted argument for Beckett’s earlier reading of Mauthner.


white, something red, the wide bright water, Connaught” (Mur-phy, p. 267); the experience in the “Rue de Vaugirard” where thepoet is caught by the moment and exposed like a photographicplate to the play of light and shadow; moments in Endgame (1957)when Nell stares (a moment of involuntary memory) right downto 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 ir-recoverable clouds of the sky (or ashes, reflecting starlight onearth again) turn suddenly to faces.

The ultimate critique of such moments is in Watt, when onesunlit 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 outsideit was not at all easy to draw” (p. 43). He does not understand inwhat 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 mysticalexperience, the equal of anything in William James’s The Varietiesof Religious Experience and as compelling as the opening move-ment of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton; but what distinguishes it fromlike moments in Proust, Joyce, James or Eliot is the refusal to val-idate it: the experience is real, but Beckett wilfully withholds anyendorsement of its transcendental significance.

Like Arsene, Krapp undergoes this kind of experience, forsomething slips (his finger on the tape recorder, perhaps) and hefinds himself confronted with the ideal reality of an experiencethat, because it is so immediate, cannot be looked at or listened todispassionately, or vicariously, then neatly put away. His experi-ence of voluntary meaning is insistent but destructive, revealingonce 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 (final-ly more quixotic than Proustian) to recover the past, ironically be-cause the “success” of that recovery has revealed to him his fail-ure. The play is, paradoxically, a triumph of an aesthetic of fail-ure: a masterpiece that reworks the no longer viable aesthetic ofthe ideal real and the outmoded structural machinery of the



Joycean epiphany to reach the end of those well-sealed roads.Beckett has created a powerful dramatic experience (for bothcharacter and audience) of the pathos of failure, but by workingdeliberately with obsolete tools to reveal their limits.

Krapp’s experience, then, represents a final failure of theProustian aesthetic, in much the way that How It Is (written onlya little later, and equally endorsing an aesthetic of failure) marksthe end of the attempt, from The Unnamable through the Textsfor Nothing, to break through the aporetic impasse (“I can’t go on,I’ll go on”). There might be the odd attempt (“Words and Mu-sic”, “Old Earth”) to look back at involuntary memory with a nos-talgia attributable to the only true paradise, the paradise that hasbeen lost; but Beckett’s return in 1958 to the aesthetic of 1931 isa kind of “goodbye to all that”, a last (and impressive) valedictionof the epiphany as a viable aesthetic mode.

Yet in that ending is the possibility of a new beginning, in thatsynthesis a new thesis, as exemplified by the way that severalworks thereafter offer a different emphasis, less that of the mindrevisiting its past than as reconstituting it, turning the experienceof perception and memory, voluntary or otherwise, into an act ofcreation. Memory is, in this context, “a joust between involuntaryand creative recollection” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 361).Examples are many: “The Image”, later part of How It Is, depict-ing the mind wrestling with circumstance until reaching conclu-sion: “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 blendsperception and imagination, until the rocky “face” assumes theproportions of a skull, before vanishing into the whiteness of non-perception (see Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 191).

“Eh Joe” (1965) and That Time (1976), as I have intimatedabove, use Krapp’s Last Tape as a template for a new creation. LikeKrapp, Joe is an incomplete creative personality, but unlike Krapphe is assailed by a Voice that is neither external, nor memory, northe subconscious (p. 164). The tale that unfolds is to some extentan imaginative construct, a fiction created by Joe. That is, insteadof surrendering himself to the past, as Krapp has done, Joe whenassailed by the involuntary memory of the girl in green (whose eyes



opened for him as did those of the girl on the punt for Krapp) is notdefeated by the whispered words, but rather uses them as a creativefountainhead, finally (as his smile suggests) not only stifling thembut 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 tri-partite narrative voices that invoke the past in a series of memories,both voluntary and involuntary, finally arranging those memoriesin various patterns of {ACB}, until a curious order is obtained, atwhich point there is a closing smile, to suggest, as in “The Image”,“La Falaise” and “Eh Joe” that the creative act has been complet-ed, “a consolation in art for ruin in time and the folly of existence”(Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 570). This is a consolation thatKrapp is unable to seek, let alone to find; but his tragic and patheticexperience of involuntary memory, his inadvertent farewell to love,marks a significant turn in Beckett’s own aesthetic from the evoca-tion to the re-creation of the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 Beck-

ett, 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.




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

Criticism


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”, inBen-Zvi and Moorjani, 2008, Beckett at 100 cit., pp. 93-106.

Knowlson, James (editor), 1992, The Theatrical Notebooks of SamuelBeckett: Volume III: ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, Faber and Faber, London.

Knowlson, James, and John Pilling, 1980, Frescoes of the Skull: TheLater 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, OxfordUniversity Press, London 1966.

Joyce, James, 1922, Ulysses, Jeri Johnson (editor), Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford 1993.

Mauthner, Fritz, 1906-1913, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3Bände, F. Meiner, Leipzig 1923.

Proust, Marcel, 1927, Le Temps retrouvé, in À la recherche du tempsperdu, 1919-1927, XIV & XV, Édition de la Nouvelle Revue Fran-çaise, Gallimard, Paris.

Shakespeare, William, Othello (citations from Othello are from TheArden Shakespeare edition, M. R. Ridley editor, Methuen, London1959).

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1844, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (TheWorld 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 EndgameHugo Bowles

Introduction

The analysis of dramatic texts from a linguistic perspective has along tradition in stylistic research, and interactional approachesto dramatic texts have become an important recent developmentin this area (see Herman 1995). Interactional analysis is particu-larly useful when analysing the work of writers like Beckett andPinter who are both concerned with the themes of communica-bility (i.e. with interaction itself) and whose work is characterisedby a complex or unusual interactional structure. Before embark-ing on an analysis of the storytelling episodes in Endgame it isimportant first to understand why and how an interactional ap-proach can be helpful for explaining the complexity of Beckett’sdialogues. This means looking at what an interactional approachis and how it defines and analyses a storytelling episode.

Analytical approaches to storytelling episodes

There have been two previous studies of the storytelling episodesin Endgame. Morrison (1983) has examined the stories from anon-linguistic perspective arguing that Hamm’s chronicle is thecrux of the play and that “the whole point of Endgame lies in theinterrelationship between this chronicle, this value-laden recordof past events, and the words and actions which make up the dra-matic present of the play” (p. 28). Her approach is therefore tolook closely at what Hamm says rather than the way that he saysit and to draw conclusions about the function of narrative in theplay in terms of characterisation, e.g. “this story has allowed


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 ap-proach, analysing the Tailor story from the perspective of con-versation analysis (CA) and arguing that an extension of the meth-ods of analysis of conversational storytelling to the analysis of oraldiscourse in literature can highlight important aspects of dramat-ic interaction. He analyses the Tailor story as a form of conversa-tional joke-telling, concluding that it has a classic “put-downstructure” and that the “careful construction and high poeticityof the story of the tailor set it off from the surrounding more col-loquial talk” (p. 194).

These two studies reflect the two approaches currently beingfollowed in narrative research (see Bamberg 2006). On the onehand, there is a strong tradition which views spoken narrativesas cognitive structures through which we understand the world.In this paradigm, the story is a psychological structure in whichlife experiences are characterised as internally organised texts.We are, as it were, the stories that we tell and the aim of researchfrom this perspective, which has been very successful in areassuch as medicine and psychotherapy, is to get people to tell theirstories so that the way they think about their lives and experi-ences can be read and interpreted. This paradigm is in a sense aliterary one because it treats people as if they were texts and im-plies that people can be understood in the way that we under-stand a literary work. It is called the “big story” approach (seeFreeman 2006) because, by getting people to tell their stories, weend up with essentially autobiographical narratives in which peo-ple talk about themselves and their own experiences and at somelength. These autobiographical stories tend to be elicited by in-terviews and to be produced as answers to questions in mono-logue form. The speaker’s identity – the “me” that comes out ofthese stories – is a single, monolithic kind of me. In this respectMorrison’s approach to the Endgame narratives is a “big story”approach.

However, this is not necessarily the way that people tell storiesin ordinary conversation. In our everyday talk, our stories tendneither to be autobiographical nor particularly long. They tend tobe about recent local events which also happen to other people

H. Bowles. The ‘Untellability’ of Stories in “Endgame” 293


not just ourselves (the kind of stories that begin “do you knowwhat – ...?”) such as embarrassing incidents, gossip, stories, trou-bles, dreams; or they can be stories about past events (the kind ofstory that begins with “do you remember when we...”). Above allwe tend to construct stories with our listeners and in response toour listeners in a dialogical way. We tell stories as a function ofwho is listening to them and we will often tell the same story dif-ferently to a different audience depending on how that audienceresponds.

It is precisely these conversational mechanisms which the sec-ond, more recent narrative research tradition is concerned with.This approach is called an interactional discursive approach andits point of departure is ordinary conversational storytelling.Studies in this tradition look less at what stories are about (thecontents) and much more at how they are told – how they aremanaged turn-by-turn in interaction and what conversational ac-tions are accomplished in their telling (complaining, justifying,flirting, testifying, reporting and so on). In other words it studieswhat people are actually doing when they tell stories as well aswhat stories are designed to do. So, according to this discursive ap-proach, stories cannot be interpreted solely in terms of what hasbeen said and told. Rather they have to be analysed in the way thatthey are told to and with other speakers in a particular interac-tional moment. In this respect Norrick’s (2000) analysis is closerto a small story approach.

The interactional approach taken here extends the “small sto-ry” approach to the patterns of interaction of the Endgame narra-tives. The aim is to examine the way in which particular story-telling episodes in Endgame are locally managed from an interac-tional point of view.

Defining a storytelling episode: narrative, story and tellability

There are numerous definitions of narrative in narrative re-search. Rudrum (2005), for example, illustrates seven differentdefinitions which have been used in recent studies. What thesedefinitions have in common is that they all involve a view of nar-rative as a “symbolic representation of a sequence of events”



(Rudrum, 2005, p. 195). The most influential linguistic researchon conversational storytelling (Labov and Waletsky, 1967) alsouses the idea of “a sequence of chronologically ordered events”as a starting point. However, these definitions of narrative do notaddress the more interactional questions of whether and how thecontext of the narrative affects the representation and how therepresentation 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 inchronological order) and is turned into a story through the in-teractional mechanisms by which speakers and listeners negoti-ate the story’s point.

The way in which a story’s point is interactionally negotiatedcan be described by tracing what is called “tellability” (Sacks1972). Tellability refers to the way in which a speaker marks upwhat for him or her are the salient features of the story and theway the speaker makes clear how he or she wishes them to be un-derstood. Tellability can be traced in stories within plays just as itcan be in ordinary conversation. For example, at the beginning ofHamlet the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells the story of how he waspoisoned by his brother. The narrative is made up of the eventsleading up to the poisoning. The tellability is marked by the waythe Ghost prepares Hamlet for vengeance by using a whole rangeof graphic narrative devices in the text to mark up the horror ofthe poisoning. The task of the analyst is thus to track the tellabil-ity of the stories using the procedures of conversation analysis toidentify the episodes and narrative devices that speakers use to“talk a narrative into being” as a story. In Hamlet, the tellabilityof the Ghost’s narrative is actually rather easy to trace in the ep -isode, but when we look at more contemporary playwrights suchas Beckett and Pinter, the tellability of their stories is much hard-er to identify.

Storytelling episodes in Endgame

Table 1 shows 13 episodes in Endgame in which a sequence ofevents is symbolically represented:



Table 1 – Narrative episodes in Endgame

Episode Speakers Story preface Story ending Conversational type

Ardennes Nagg Do you On the road Reminiscence – Nell remember...? to Sedan collaborative

Lake Como Nagg It was on You could see Reminiscence – Nell Lake Como down to the collaborative

bottom

Tailor Nagg Shall I tell you ... at my Joke-telling – the story of TROUSERS monologuethe tailor...

Heart Hamm Last night No, it was Local news – I saw living collaborative

Blind Hamm One day you’ll ... anyone left Prediction – be blind... to have pity on monologue

Old questions Hamm Do you But for Reminiscence – Clov remember Hamm... collaborative

when you no homecame here...?

Madman Hamm I once knew God be with Personal Clov a madman ... the days anecdote –

collaborative

Chronicle 1 Hamm The man came ...in defiance Personal crawling ... of my wishes anecdote –

monologue

Tiny boy Nagg Whom did I was your Personal you call only hope anecdote –

monologue

Chronicle 2 Hamm He comes That’s all. Retelling – Clov crawling on I stopped collaborative

his belly... there.

Turn Hamm Do you And then we Reminiscence – remember, in got into the monologuethe beginning... way of it

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

Mother Pegg Clov When old Yes you had Reminiscence – Mother Pegg collaborative

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



a joke-telling, a prediction) but a variety of interactional modes (so-lo monologue, joint reminiscence, story retelling). However, de-spite the realistic nature of conversational narrative types andmodes, there is also a great deal of atypical interaction in individ-ual episodes which restricts the stories’ tellability. It is argued herethat the atypicality is caused by an alternating pattern of story-telling development. Although many of the dialogues are collabo-rative, in as much as co-participants contribute to the storytelling,the collaboration is hardly ever consecutive and so stories are nev-er fully developed.

To illustrate how this alternating patterning occurs, conversa-tion analysis of a number of episodes (Ardennes, Lake Como, Tai-lor and Hamm’s chronicle) will be carried out. In the text, thenon-collaborative turns are marked in bold type.

The Ardennes story

The Ardennes story can be classified as a small story. The boldtype 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 doesnot proceed smoothly. The opening of the story is the “do you re-member –” “No” sequence. Technically this is called a non-ne-gotiated preface. Before we tell a story, we need to announce ourintention to tell it in order to gain the floor and to position our in-terlocutor as a listener. Here Nagg’s do you remember? is an open-ing gambit that is designed to do precisely this – to position Nell



as a listener by appealing to shared knowledge of a rememberedevent. The fact that the pre-announcement is truncated by Nell ata point where it is not semantically appropriate means that in con-versational terms this is a hostile interruption which in ordinaryconversation would need to be repaired. But neither Nagg norNell make any repairs at all.

Nagg continues with the story – “when we crashed on our tan-dem”. This is followed by laughter and then Nell continues thestory. This sequence from 004 to 006 is more collaborative withboth speakers joining in with the construction of the memoriesand making appreciative comments at the same time. After that,however, the story becomes untellable as the laughter becomes in-creasingly less hearty.

What is unusual about this story is the alternation of coopera-tive (normal type) and uncooperative behaviour (bold type). Weget a hostile response to the preface (001-003) followed by aglimpse of genuine cooperative storytelling (004-006), followedby inappropriate feedback (007), followed by a further attempt tostart the story (008), followed by more inappropriate feedback(009) followed by a change of topic (010). The story stops andstarts but ultimately fails to get off the ground.

The Lake Como and Tailor stories

There is another, more complex example of this alternating be-haviour in the Lake Como and Tailor stories. It is often overlookedthat the exchange about Lake Como is in fact a story. Critics havetended to focus on the Tailor story because it is longer, because itseems to have a beginning, a middle and an end and because thereseems to be more that one can say about it in terms of interpreta-tion. From an interactional point of view, however, the Lake Co-mo 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 moreprecise, the story of the time “when Nagg first told Nell the storyof the tailor”. From a structural point of view, Lake Como is ac-tually inserted into the Tailor story. What is unusual about it, aswith the Ardennes story, is the alternating levels of cooperation.Again, bold type is used to mark uncooperative behaviour:



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 Itell you the story of the tailor?”), it is rejected by Nell (“no”). Thisis exactly the same as Nell’s “no” in the Ardennes story when sherejects Nagg’s “do you remember”. But this time Nell repairs itwith “what for?”. So the behaviour is still cooperative. From thenon, we get an argumentative but still cooperative exchange asNagg tries to position Nell as a listener to his Tailor story and Nellcounters with the Lake Como story:

006 Nagg: To cheer you up.007 Nell: It’s not funny.008 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 hernon-response indicates a lack of cooperation. Nagg eventuallyjoins in with the Lake Como story (“we had got engaged the daybefore”) and continues it with Nell’s encouragement:

013 Nell: Engaged!014 Nagg: You were in such fits that we capsized. By rights we

should have been drowned.015 Nell: It was because I felt happy.016 Nagg: (Indignant.) It was not, it was not, it was my story



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 Englishman, needing a pair of striped trousers ...[story continues]

(Endgame, p. 21)

By this stage the Lake Como narrative has become Nagg’s sto-ry as well and the storytelling has become a joint effort just likethe Ardennes story was. At 016 Nagg tries to arouse Nell’s inter-est in the Tailor story for a second time (“don’t you laugh at itstill?”) but Nell is still immersed in her Lake Como story (“it wasdeep, deep...”) and does not respond to Nagg’s question. At thispoint the story has turned uncooperative again. Nagg announcesthe retelling of the Tailor story at 018 (“let me tell it again”) andthen tells it without permission, marking the fact that he is tellinga story by adopting a “raconteur’s voice”. The Tailor story thusbegins with the Lake Como story left incomplete and hanging inthe air and a potential audience (Nell) who has still not been po-sitioned correctly as a listener.

It is also significant that Nagg tells the Tailor story as a mono-logue and gets no response from Nell, who is still thinking aboutLake Como. Any kind of storytelling, but particularly joke-telling,needs feedback from listeners and Nagg does not receive any. TheTailor story is thus highly unsuccessful because there is no pref-ace and no feedback from Nell either during the story or, signifi-cantly, at the end.

So just like the Ardennes story, Lake Como and the Tailorshow alternating storytelling behaviour. We have a relatively col-laborative Lake Como sandwiched between an uncooperativeTailor story. This structural sandwiching of a cooperative storywithin an uncooperative story coupled with the alternating lev-els of cooperation within each story creates a highly disjointedeffect.

It is important to notice as well how this sequence comparesto storytelling in ordinary conversation. It is interesting, for ex-ample, that it is in the short exchanges of Lake Como that we getthe successful storytelling rather than in the longer Tailor mono-



logue. In plays, monologues tend to show the chronologically or-dered events that are important for the construction of narrativeas well as the metaphors, similes, hyperbole, direct speech andnarrative devices traditionally used for marking up tellability in astory (Tannen 2007). However, in ordinary conversation this isnot the case. Most stories in everyday talk are collaborative. Theyare jointly told and constructed through dialogue, not throughmonologue, and the success of a story depends on the listenerjoining in with feedback. When Nell says later in the play in ref-erence to storytelling “We still find it funny but we don’t laughany more” she is making precisely this point. “Being funny” is todo with interpretation whereas laughter is to do with interaction.So the Tailor may well be a joke that has been told in a skilful wayby Nagg but it is ultimately an unsuccessful one because it doesnot make anyone laugh.

Hamm’s chronicle

Hamm’s chronicle is an autobiographical story and perhaps theleast conversational of all the stories in Endgame, for a number ofreasons.

First it is presented at length in two different versions at twodifferent times so it is a story retelling. It is an atypical retellingbecause speakers usually retell stories when they have a differentaudience to tell them to. Hamm’s chronicle on the other hand isby and large self-directed; Clov tells him that it is a story “you’vebeen telling yourself all your days” and, interestingly, Hamm isonly able to move the narrative along when he is alone. During thefirst part of the chronicle Clov is absent and as soon as Clov re-turns to the room the chronicle is interrupted.

Secondly it is not a spontaneous story. Hamm uses a special nar-rative voice, which sets off the words of the story from his otherspeech, another voice for the father in the story and his own “nor-mal” voice. The contrast between narrative and normal voice turnsthe 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-



membered events by the listeners during the narration and whenClov is present he does not participate in it.

Most important of all, the tellability of the chronicle is unclearbecause we have no idea why Hamm is telling the story. In ordi-nary conversation we tell stories for any number of reasons – forentertainment, to illustrate something, to justify a claim – andthese reasons are constantly being signalled by the speaker andmonitored for by the listener during storytelling. Yet none ofthese signals occur in the chronicle. As Hamm tells and retells thestory over the course of the play, the only markers of tellability arein the way Hamm himself evaluates the story. It is only right at theend when Hamm says “reckoning closed and story ended” thatwe realise that this is a story told as a reckoning – a reflection onpast events and a way, perhaps, to account for his own life.

Conclusion

This overview of tellability suggests that two points can be madeabout storytelling in Endgame. Firstly, individual episodes in-volving two different speakers exhibit an alternating pattern of in-teraction in which a story is moved on in one turn only to be halt-ed in the next speaker’s turn, moved on in the next and halted inthe next. This stop-start pattern also occurs when there is a singlespeaker and no collaboration from a second speaker. Here thespeaker may start a story, then stop and pick it up later on in thesame turn or after a number of intervening turns. Both these typesof alternation make the tellability of a particular story hard toidentify.

Secondly, Hamm’s chronicle stands out from the otherEndgame stories because, since it spans the entire play and is nota “locally managed” story, its tellability is even harder to trace. In-deed in the chronicle the whole idea of story tellability seems tobe progressively dismantled: there is no preface, no participation,no collaboration, no reason for the story, no conclusion; there isalso constant retelling, self-directedness and a great deal of talk-ing about the story but very little telling of it. Hamm spends muchof the play trying to locate the tellability of his own story.

In conclusion, analysis of the narrative patterning in Endgame



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 sub-verting the mechanisms of ordinary storytelling behaviour to pro-duce stories in which tellability merges into ‘untellability’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Samuel Beckett, 1958, Endgame, in Endgame. A Play in One Act Fol-lowed by Act Without Words. A Mime for One Player, 1964, Faberand 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, Uni-versity of Washington Press, Seattle.

Herman, David (editor), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Narra-tive, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Herman, Vimala, 1995, Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction inPlays, Routledge, London.

Labov, William, and Joshua Waletsky, 1967, “Narrative Analysis: OralVersions of Personal Experience”, in Helm (editor), 1967, Essayson the Verbal and Visual Arts, cit., pp. 12-44.

Morrison, Kristin, 1983, Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrativein the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, University ofChicago Press, Chicago.

Norrick, Neal, 2000, Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Every-day 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 NarrativeUse: 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.



Sacks, Harvey, 1972, Lectures on Conversation, vol. II, edited by GailJefferson, 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. Ghostlight. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms.[...] Stands there staring beyondat that black veil lips quivering tohalf-heard words. Treating ofother matters. Trying to treat ofother matters. Till half hearsthere are no other matters.

(Samuel Beckett, “A Piece ofMonologue”)

Beckett and chamber music

Beckett’s love of music, his ability as a pianist, his preference forthe classics and the romantics (Beethoven and Schubert especial-ly), his aversion to opera and Wagner’s or Mahler’s works, his ap-preciation of only a few modern composers, his friendly relationswith some important musicians, and his pleasure in attendingconcerts are all documented in James Knowlson’s Damned toFame (1996 [1997]), which has significantly contributed to a newfield of investigation in Beckettian studies. Although the credit forediting the first full-length work to deal exclusively with Beckettand music goes to Mary Bryden (1998), there is no doubt aboutthe importance of Knowlson’s biography for this and other newfields of Beckettian studies1. And indeed from it we learn that

1 As H. Porter Abbott acknowledges in his contribution to Samuel Beckettand the Arts. Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, “James Knowlson’s newbiography brings well into light what we knew, but never knew quite so well”(Oppenheim 1999, p. 7).


Beckett’s interest for chamber music dates back to the difficultyears he spent in London in the Thirties, “obsessed with his men-tal and physical disarray” and yet in some way able to come toterms with it, thanks to Hester Dowden who “was partly respon-sible for the comparative richness of his musical life at this time”(p. 191). They played piano duets on her Steinway; she “was wellinformed about the concerts that were worth attending in Lon-don, and used to hold her own musical entertainments [...] forfriends and guests at her Sunday soirées” (pp. 191-192), a num-ber of which were attended by Beckett.

When, in his later career, Beckett uses music in his plays, heopts for instrumental music and a similar preference inspires hisauthorization of the musical settings for his plays or excerpts. Be-tween 1976 and 1977, the years when Beckett composes and di-rects or supervises the rehearsals of “Ghost Trio”, “at least six dif-ferent musical settings or operas were approved” (p. 655), andwhile his preference for instrumental music is often stated in hisletters, those years also indicate a period of deep involvement inmusic and its relation to his work.

In this light, the choice of Beethoven’s Piano Trio N. 5 in DMajor, op. 70 n. 1 for his second television play is not surprisingand it also seems evident that chamber music suits Beckett’s workbetter than orchestral music. “Minimalism”, his “late style in thetheatre”, to borrow the title of one of Enoch Brater’s books(1987), shares with chamber music an aesthetics which leaves outwhat is not essential and exploits the few elements left, thus lim-iting form itself on one side, and exploring the possibilities ofwhat is left on the other. The term “chamber music” originally re-ferred to music not to be performed in public places and this orig-inal reference not only seems apt to the small playhouse as the bestplace for Beckett’s late theatre in general; it also indicates, in thecase of “Ghost Trio”, the setting: the protagonist, Male Figure(F), listens to Beethoven’s music in a chamber, “the familiarchamber”, we are told by Voice (V), the only other character list-ed by Beckett at the beginning of the published text2. However,


2 On the different versions of the published text see Gontarski (1985, p.125).


P. Fusella. Chamber Music and Camera Trio 307

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 theother, orchestral and choral music”; it “includes merely instru-mental music for 2, 3, 4, or more instruments, played with a sin-gle instrument to ‘a part’, all parts being on equal terms”(Kennedy 1980, p. 124). This definition sheds light on one of themain characteristics of “Ghost Trio”: like the piano, the violinand the cello of Beethoven’s Trio, the few elements or instrumentsused by Beckett succeed in conveying a great dramatic and lyricalimpact because each of them plays its own part on equal termsand in combination with the others and none of them has a sec-ondary role or the mere function of accompanying. The Italianequivalent 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 writ-ten text, are respectively titled “I Pre-action”, “II Action” and“III Re-action”3, and are in turn divided into progressively num-bered segments, containing either directions for the camera, F’sactions, and the intervention of music and sound effects, orVoice’s lines, with related captions4. Each section exploits differ-ent types of shots and has one sequence in which the cameramoves towards F from the long distance view to the close-up andbackward; the three acoustic elements never “play” together; mu-sic enters the action nine times; sound effects are present only inthe third part; Voice is found only in the first two parts, while Fis 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 cameraand of F have attracted much attention; critics have also detected many othertrios, 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 respectivesegments.



Beckett illustrates the set and the positions of camera and F in thefirst page of the printed text:

F is in the room, seated on a stool (5), bent over an object thathe is holding in his lap; every little while he gets up to go to thewindow (2) or to the door (1) or towards the bed (4) or the mir-ror (3) and then regains his position. The object will be gradually

x xx x

x x xx xx x x x

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

x x x


revealed as a recorder, which the music – entering the action ninetimes – comes from.

Following Linda Ben-Zvi’s (1985) complaint about the criticalneglect of Samuel Beckett’s radio and television works, the secondTV play has been widely described, analyzed and interpreted; evenso, Maier (2001 and 2002) is right in pointing out that when the firstpart of his long essay was published (2001) the role of Beethoven’sTrio in the play had still not attracted sufficient attention5.

The nine musical abstracts are all taken from the second move-ment, the Largo assai ed espressivo, and it has been recently arguedthat Beckett’s tripartite structure reiterates that of Beethoven’sTrio (Herren 2001), that in the composition process and in theGerman 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 “expressiv-ity and [...] formal symmetries [...] in order to undermine theirstability as their constructedness is revealed” (Laws 2003, p. 202).

In his comprehensive discussion of the two trios, Maier pointsout that the Largo “has a clear binary form”, divided as it is “intotwo parts and a coda that is intended as the final climax” (2001,p. 268 and 2002, p. 319); he notes further that “the inner struc-ture of the [...] two main parts is also binary” (2001, p. 269), as itis composed of two musical subjects. His and Laws’ detailed ex-aminations of Beckett’s use of the Largo show that all the ab-stracts, except the last, are taken from the bars containing the firstsubject, and that the second, the cantabile, appears only in the lastexcerpt when the full coda is heard at the end of “Re-action”. Inspite of this, none of them gives this repetition the prominence itdeserves in the formal patterning of “Ghost Trio”, whereas I be-lieve that it indicates that Beckett’s main criterion for the choiceof the musical excerpts was to preserve and reproduce the repet-itive character of the second movement of Beethoven’s Trio as areflection 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 thePlays of Samuel Beckett (Fletcher, Fletcher, Smith and Bachem 1978): in spiteof its brevity and already in 1978 it analyzes each of Beckett’s musical excerptsand draws attention to Beckett’s use of one particular motif of Beethoven’s Trio.


in the composition process, and that in the German production theauthor/director opted for cutting the first two musical excerptsand using the second subject also at the end of the second part ofthe play, “Action”. Since Maier bases his analysis on the Germanproduction of “Geister Trio”, the importance he attaches to Beck-ett’s new decision is understandable and his explanation equallyplausible6. However, his reading is not applicable to the Britishversions of “Ghost Trio” – in which the cantabile appears only atthe end of “Re-action” – whereas repetition still plays a funda-mental role in the German text. Beckett does counteract the intro-duction of the second subject in the middle of “Geister Trio”, as hereinforces the repetition of the first subject in two ways: first, thenew musical excerpt is the briefest and is briefer than its corre-sponding excerpt in the BBC production; second, the length of allthe excerpts containing the first subject is significantly increased. Ishould also specify that the first two excerpts missing in theStuttgart production lasted barely one bar each in the BBC edition.

Stressing the repetitive aspect of the excerpts takes into ac-count the difficulty critics have in assigning a superior textual au-thority to any of the different versions of Beckett’s texts7. Thepreservation and reproduction of the repetition of Beethoven’sLargo is a prominent feature of “Ghost Trio”, be it the printedversion, the BBC edition or the Stuttgart production. Besides, itis matched by the repetitions of Voice. At the beginning, throughthem, the play seems to corroborate the epistemological andmetaphysical system “which makes ‘I see’ synonymous with ‘I un-derstand’. Knowledge, comprehension, reason, are establishedthrough the power of the look, through the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ of thehuman subject whose relation to objects is structured through hisfield of vision” (Jackson 2000, p. 45):


6 The introduction of the second subject of the Largo in the middle of theplay “is to be explained not only by its foreshadowing function [i.e. of the finalimage and excerpt of the play], but also by [...] the cantabile’s audible conden-sation [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 Fusel-la 2002.


Good evening. Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune accordingly.[Pause.] Good evening. Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune according-ly. [Pause.] It will not be raised, nor lowered, whatever happens.[Pause.] Look. [Long pause.] The familiar chamber. [Pause.] At the farend 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 lumi-nous. No shadow. [Pause.] No shadow. Colour: none. All grey. Shadesof grey. [Pause.] The colour grey if you wish, shades of the colour grey.[Pause.] Forgive my stating the obvious. [Pause.] Keep that sounddown. [Pause]. Now look closer. [Pause.] Floor.

(I. 2)

This last word is followed immediately by a cut and a close-upof the floor; similarly, throughout the entire duration of “Pre-ac-tion”, Voice literally guides the spectator’s gaze and comprehen-sion, as each new shot is accompanied by the announcement of theobject being shot and by the invitation to “now look closer” and“look again”. V’s lines are ambivalent and may refer both to thecamera – which alternates close-ups and general views – and to thespectator, who in turn must look “closer” and “again” at the an-nounced object; V thus describes the way the spectacle works andgives the audience an awareness of how gaze and shot coincide. Thetelevision play comments and observes itself, and calls on the spec-tator 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 win-dow” (II. 13), “Now to pallet” (II. 19), sound as predictions/descriptions of F’s actions, as stage directions guiding such ac-tions, and as guides to the spectator’s gaze8. Despite this, Voicedoes 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 theviewer’s process of viewing into his drama” (Kalb 1994, p. 140); Peter Gidal pointsout that they aim at “making difficult a ‘natural viewing’” (Gidal 1979, p. 54).


moreover, the whole epistemological notion of knowledge basedon 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 happensimmediately after the camera repeats for the second time the sameshooting of the floor (I. 9): two close-ups in succession projectidentical 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 inthe spectator’s comprehension coincides, then, with the first musi-cal excerpt and the moment in which repetition enters in the play andstarts to rule it. Beckett’s continual offering and re-offering the au-dience images, objects, shots, F’s actions, and music interventionsshows a skilful use of repetition, employing its signifying power yetshowing the limits and revealing the process of signification itself. Hethus expresses a strong sense of disorientation and uncertaintywhich makes the spectator constantly suspended between seeing asense and loosing it, even as he ensures that there is a minimal dra-matic action, without which incommunicability would take over.

The action is simple: F waits for a “she” (a woman, Death, theghost of a dead woman – we do not know) and fills the wait by lis-tening to a piece of chamber music from the recorder he has on hislap. Every little while he moves his head suddenly because, as V an-nounces, “He will now think he hears her” (II. 1). He goes to thedoor or the window to check; in one case only (III. 30-32) somesteps are heard, then a boy knocks on the door and shakes his headambiguously; F goes back to his seated position and the play ends.

There is no doubt that F is waiting for “her”, because the audi-ence is told this by Voice and because Beckett’s working title, Tryst,that was substituted at a very late stage of the composition (see Bry-den, 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 cameramoves towards F seated on the stool (from A, via B and C, to the close-up), andbackwards (I. 31, 35).


Undoubtedly, the feeling of incomprehension and the ghostly at-mosphere one experiences during the performance, or imagineswhen reading the text as a script, may result in attaching less im-portance to the dramatic action itself and in greater difficulty in re-constructing it. And interpretation may depend on the version ofthe play: those who work with the German production can easilyprove that F is listening to the music, as there F actually presses thebuttons of the recorder; others may question the relation betweenF and the music. In both videos there are shots where F placessomething on the stool as soon as he gets up, or alternatively pickssomething up from it before sitting, and as many near shots and oneclose-up of the stool. However, even if the printed text specifiesthat 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 ofthe characteristics of repetition, as theorized by philosopherssuch as Derrida and Deleuze. The turning point of their thoughtlies in the superseding of the representational system which statesthe existence of an original and a copy, the former independentof the latter and the latter dependent on the former; in such a sys-tem, repetition depends on something that already exists by defi-nition, that is autonomous and always stays the same. Instead, inthe absence of any hierarchy between original and repetition andgiven their mutual dependence, the role played by difference isgiven prominence: in order to be caught as such, repetition mustnecessarily be different, if only minimally, from what it repeats11.Deleuze emphasizes that pure or exact repetition does not existand that difference constitutes repetition:

It is always in one and the same movement that repetition includesdifference (not as an accidental and extrinsic variant but at its heart, asthe essential variant of which it is composed, the displacement and dis-


10 Among the critics who raise a doubt about F’s relation to music, seeFletcher, Fletcher, Smith and Bachem 1978, Worth 1986 and 1999 [2001], andLaws 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 StevenConnor’s excellent first chapter of his Samuel Beckett. Repetition, Theory andText (1988, pp. 1-14).


guise which constitute it as a difference that is itself divergent and dis-placed) [...].

(Deleuze 1968 [1994, p. 289])

The scenes in which music is present show how Beckett is care-ful to make the repetition and the original mutually essential, em-blematizing the absence of a hierarchy among the three parts of theplay, which in turn iterate and re-iterate their own components12.

The first two musical excerpts are heard during two close-ups ofthe door in Pre-action; the others while the protagonist is filmed sit-ting, bent over, on the stool. In the seven times in which this is re-peated, the scene is the same but what the spectator sees and hears isdifferent because Beckett uses at least three variables: 1) the cameraposition and the type of shot, 2) the volume of Music and 3) what pre-cedes the scene, for instance, if F is already sitting or sits down. In thisway he reveals the sense of F’s image on the stool, only gradually hid-ing or disclosing its aspects; although the image is always unchanged,in the repetitions it is never the same and is included in a chain ofcross-references of its repetitions and the repetitions of its compo-nents in other scenes, including those where Music is not present.

It is not possible, here, to go over this game thoroughly, butthe comparison between similarities and differences of the vari-ous repetitions allows for the following conclusion: music is nev-er present in the play when F is moving or moves his head as hethinks he hears her and is always present when he is bent over onhis stool. When the spectator of this process is able to understandthat music is only present when F is seated and does not move atall, the dramatic action can be reconstructed and the images al-ready repeated reveal elements that, without repetition, wouldnot be discovered. As Deleuze confirms:


12 The absence of a hierarchy is such that none of the three parts is assignedthe role of pre-existing identity. Notwithstanding the title, “Action” does notconvey the dramatic action and, although it is positioned between the other twoparts, it is not the centre of the work, it does not have a privileged function fromwhich to look at the other parts as marginal; on their part, the prefixes of theother two titles do not indicate so much a preparation or a repetition of the ac-tion, than they actually refer to the literal meaning and the Latin etymology,mainly recalling the concepts of “in front of” and “behind/against”, rather thanthose of “before/preceding” and “again”.



What is displaced and disguised in the series [...] exists and acts asthe differenciator of difference. [...] each series is explicated and un-folded only in implicating the others, it therefore repeats the othersand is repeated in the others, which in turn implicate it [...] with theresult 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 ex-cerpts, previously perceived as mere incidental music, are actual-ly 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 thedoor and F sits near it – are thus added to the only thing the spec-tator knows before the effect of repetition and difference, i.e. thatthe “indispensable door”, as Voice asserts, is “on the right” of thefamiliar chamber. By playing with his few instruments and visual-ly repeating the structure of repetition with alterations ofBeethoven’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 pro-duce the disorienting effect that is such a fundamental trait of thespectator’s fruition and reaction, whether or not the dramatic ac-tion is grasped. After Voice’s first long line, concomitant with thelong shot of the room from A, “Pre-action” alternates close-ups ofthe elements that compose the room with general views from A.This way, the spectator sees the “familiar chamber”, the floor, thewall, the door, the bed and the window over and over again, insidea repetitive structure in which three shots from A introduce andconclude two series of close-ups. With the succession of theseclose-ups, the spectator, called upon by Voice to look closer andmore carefully, sees ten grey rectangles which progressively re-move the filmed objects from their referents, in a growing confu-sion which makes them more and more indistinct13.

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


The repetition of these rectangles, all located inside the rec-tangular shaped room and “subsumed in the rectangle of the tele-vision screen” (Ben-Zvi 1985, p. 35), has a stunning impact on theaudience, and most critics stress that their effect is to defamiliar-ize, fragment, estrange, or explode “the familiar room” and theobjects, to give them an aesthetic quality that distances them fromtheir own common use, to exhaust the potentialities of space, andto make a ‘natural viewing’ difficult (see respectively: Herren1998, p. 78; Védrenne 2001, p. 333; Herren 2007, p. 75; Ben-Zvi1985, p. 36; Wulf 1994, p. 59; Deleuze 1992, p. 85, and Gidal1979, p. 54). These identical images appear to the spectator’s gazeas undifferentiated and undistinguishable shapes, having refer-ence only because Voice names them; this “naming”, however, re-veals its very own arbitrariness. The alternating close-ups andgeneral views, and their repetition, set the spectator before dif-ference, not ruled by pre-existing categories of representation, in-visible yet irreducible: the arbitrary character of the sign, the fun-damental 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 con-clusions. Knowlson’s reading of the sequence of the rectangles is:“There is, in other words, a deliberate play on the disparity be-tween ‘looking’ and ‘knowing’ that leaves the spectator aware ofthe strangeness and the ambiguity of what he is observing, in-trigued and disturbed rather than reassured by the speaker’s[Voice’s] words” (Knowlson 1986, p. 198). Similarly, Linda Ben-Zvi comments that “[by] revealing the conventions of sound andshape, Beckett clears the way for their use in a form that takes as itssubject the limitations of sound and sight in perceiving the world”(Ben-Zvi 1985, p. 36). Eric Prieto, who reads “Ghost Trio” withreference to Plato’s cave allegory, says: “Beckett’s genius lies in hisability to work skilfully with our yearning for meaning, always in-citing us to search further [...], but without ever allowing us tocome to a point where we feel that the work of interpretation hasbeen completed” (Prieto 2002, p. 212). Catherine Laws, whose es-


of the rectangles (seventy centimetres wide, and either two, or one and a halfmetres tall), their colour (grey), opaque glass for the window and no knobs forthe door and the window.



say explores the ways in which Beckett’s musical excerpts matchthe ambiguities of the relationship between body, voice, and view-er, concludes: “the relationship between voice and action, thetreatment of the body, the process of representation, and the use ofmusic all imply that the voiceless F is neither full selfhood nor ‘un-self’ [...], and that what we experience is a groping towards the ‘un-sayability’ of this state” (Laws 2003, p. 211).

The issues raised, then, are those of subject, interpretation,knowledge, perception, and the interrogation of their limits andambiguities; I suggest that the spectator’s disorientation in frontof the alternating rectangles and general views derives also fromfacing the touching of difference and resemblance on a borderwhere one spills over into the other, and perhaps, even more so,from regaining, if only for brief instants, flashes of her/his pre-symbolic Self. The rectangles produce an uncanny effect and re-call those indistinct and nameless shapes that objects must appearto be before our entrance into the Symbolic.

Freud explains that unheimlich has two meanings: one deriv-ing from the opposite of “familiar”, and the other from the op-posite of “secret” and “hidden”; therefore, he relates the uncan-ny to “that class of the frightening which leads back to what isknown of old and long familiar” (Freud 1919 [1955, p. 220]), butwhich “has become alienated from [the mind] through theprocess of repression” (p. 241). The uncanny effect of the rectan-gles, then, could derive from the disclosure, in flashes, of the se-cret upon which our symbolic order is built, revealing, in otherwords, our pre-symbolic relation to the world, from a time whena fluid and undifferentiated reality was familiar to us; that very re-lationship we have all had to abandon and remove in order to con-struct ourselves as subjects, and to represent the world in oureyes, in other words, to adapt to the reality principle14. Through

14 Also Catharina Wulf (1994) draws on Freud for her reading of “GhostTrio”. She identifies the musical excerpts with Freud’s fort/da, Lacan’s objectpetit a, and Winnicott’s “transitional object” in order to prove that F plays themusic “to overcome the loss of the other [the woman he is waiting for]” (Wulf1994, p. 60), and concludes that at the end of the play F “understands that hewill stay by himself. [... He] has finally outgrown his need for the transitionalobject [...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-


the intervention of the rectangles the “familiar chamber” is notonly “defamiliarized”, but it also becomes unheimlich, thus fore-shadowing the effect brought about throughout the entire play byrepetition.

Consolation and deconstruction

Suspending the audience between sense and nonsense, resem-blance and difference, recognition and misrecognition of what itsees, has seen and sees again, of what pre-exists and re-exists, rep-etition imposes a double and opposite solicitation: the effort to see,to see more and to understand, and the desire to lapse into the ab-sence of sense and into the music; then again the attempt at seeingand understanding, solicited by the interruption of the music. Theinterval between all these oscillations, through continuous repeti-tion, produces that feeling of suspension and that uncanny effectthat appear to me as the most effective elements of “Ghost Trio”.

Catherine Laws asserts that “Despite the emphasis on both thebareness of this play and its ambiguities” critics frequently identi-fy music as “an element of expressiveness or consolation” (Laws2003, p. 200)15. Given the continuous interruption, which makesthe excerpts very brief and frustrates F’s and the audience’s desirefor more music, I think she is certainly right in confuting any read-ing of “Ghost Trio” “as offering a positive assertion of the triumphof 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 inconveying the suspension effect matches her idea that music is partof the subversive resistance she detects at the heart of “GhostTrio”. She argues that Beckett deconstructs Beethoven’s expres-sivity and formal symmetries and concludes that “Beckett specifi-cally draws upon the spirit of German Romanticism which infusesthe 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 am-biguous and does not allow for any denouement.

15 Laws detects this consolatory role of music in the essays by Anna Mc-Mullan (1997), Phil Baker (1995-1996), Sydney Homan (1992) and Graley Her-ren (1998 and 2001).


and put into question the possibility of simple solace or absoluteredemption” (p. 202). However, it also seems to me that, to someextent, Laws underrates the role of music in “Ghost Trio”. Sheconcludes that “there is nothing to confirm whether or not he [F]is actually ‘listening’ to it on the cassette” (p. 208), and she does notfollow the implications of the last, uninterrupted, musical excerptfor the reaction of the audience.

I hope I have demonstrated that, on one hand, music con-tributes to the play of repetition and interruption that conveys thesuspension effect, and, on the other, that F does listen to the mu-sic from his recorder, and that Beckett opposes music to Voiceand to the binary gaze/knowledge. This opposition, while frus-trating the desire to hear more music, renovates it at intervals andis mirrored by F’s filling his wait with music and interrupting it bygoing to check if “she” is coming. On these grounds I believe thatthe play conveys also the feeling – rather than the idea – that mu-sic might bring some solace. Herren’s statement that “Beckett re-members 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 unin-terrupted till Beethoven’s Largo ends, and with the silence of thelast two shots which must take up 15 seconds and fade out, I be-lieve the audience seeks for more silence or different sounds thanthose produced by words. In these other sounds the spectator findsher/himself thinking like the character of The Unnamable:

I who am on my way, words bellying out my sails, am also that un-thinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said. But perhaps I shallspeak 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


Then without the solace of music the audience will finish theUnnamable’s meditation, in silence:

Yes, perhaps I shall speak of him, for an instant, like an echo thatmocks, before being restored to him, the one they could not part mefrom.




Beckett’s moral and intellectual integrity makes the audienceof “Ghost Trio” remember, invoke and evoke the unthinkable an-cestor and at the same time dismember him in the attempt to finda way to express him. Any language, any art form belonging to thehumanist tradition, while trying to express the unthinkable an-cestor, has contributed to postulate him; he is “unthinkable” pre-cisely because there is nothing to express. The contemporaryartist and his/her audience finally know and feel that any attemptto express him can only be an act of mimicry, one that while echo-ing him, also mocks him. Nevertheless, while denouncing that theunthinkable ancestor is yet another human construction, “GhostTrio” postulates him once again, as

...perhaps ... “...at this place, at this moment of time...” ... still ... “...per-sonally needed”...16

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 andFaber, 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.


Criticism

Baker, Phil, 1995, “Ghost Stories: Beckett and the Literature of In-trojection”, 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 Universi-ty Press, Cambridge, pp. 209-221.

Ben-Zvi, Linda (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Perfor-mances, 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, Ox-ford 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 Uni-versity Press, Oxford.

Bryden, Mary, Julian Garforth, and Peter Mills, 1998, Beckett at Read-ing. Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at The Univer-sity of Reading, Whiteknights Press and the Beckett InternationalFoundation, 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 autrespièces 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 andFaber, London & Boston.

Friedman, Alan W., Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer (editors),1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, University Park & London.

Fusella, Patrizia, 2002, “Samuel Beckett’s Pas Moi / Not I: Pas Tra-duction, 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’sDramatic Texts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Gordon, David J., 1996, “Au Contraire: The Question of Beckett’sBilingual Text”, in Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (editors),



1996, Beckett On and On..., Associated University Presses, Lon-don, pp. 164-177.

Herren, Graley, 1998, “Unfamiliar Chambers: Power and Pattern inSamuel 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 SamuelBeckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in theYear 2000), XI, 2001, pp. 159-166.

Idem, 2007, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, PalgraveMacmillan, Basingstoke.

Homan, Sidney, 1992, Filming Beckett’s TV Plays, Bucknell Universi-ty Press, Lewisburg & Philadelphia.

Jackson, Rosemary, 1981, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, Rout-ledge, London & New York 2000.

Kalb, Jonathan, 1994, “The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Tele-vision Plays, and Film”, in Pilling (editor), 1994, The CambridgeCompanion 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, Blooms-bury, London 1997.

Laws, Catherine, 2003, “Beethoven’s Haunting of Beckett’s GhostTrio”, in Ben-Zvi (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett cit., pp. 197-213.

Maier, Michael, 2001, “Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in SamuelBeckett’s Ghost Trio (Part 1)”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Au-jourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000), cit., pp.267-278.

Idem, 2002, “Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’sGhost Trio (Part 2)”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Pas-tiches, Parodies & Other Imitations), XII, 2002, pp. 313-320.

McMullan, Anna, 1997, “Versions of Embodiment / Visions of theBody in Beckett’s ...but the clouds...”, in Samuel Beckett Today /Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines / L’œuvrecarrefour / 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., NewYork & London.

Oppenheim, Lois, and Marius Buning (editors), 1996, Beckett On andOn..., Associated University Presses, London.

Pilling, John (editor), 1994, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.




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 scè-ne du corps à l’effacement du sujet dans Trio du fantôme”, in Sam -uel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in theYear 2000), cit., pp. 331-338.

Worth, Katharine, 1986, “Beckett’s Auditors: Not I to Ohio Im-promptu”, in Brater (editor), 1986, Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Con-text 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. ACritical Approach of Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays. GhostTrio, ...but the clouds...and Nacht und Träume”, in Samuel BeckettToday / Aujourd’hui (Intertexts in Beckett’s Work / Intertextes del’œuvre de Beckett), III, 1994, pp. 57-65.

Other works cited

Deleuze, Gilles, 1968, Différence et répétition, Presses Universitairesde France, Paris (Difference and Repetition, Athlone Press, Lon-don 1994, trans. Paul Patton).

Derrida, Jacques, 1967, L’Ecriture et la différence, Éditions du Seuil,Paris (Writing and Difference, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London1978, trans. Alan Bass).

Freud, Sigmund, 1919, “Das Unheimliche” [“The Uncanny”, in JamesStrachey and Anna Freud (editors), 1955, The Standard Edition ofthe 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, Ox-ford University Press, London, New York & Toronto.

Strachey, James, and Anna Freud (editors), 1955, The Standard Edi-tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.XVII, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Lon-don.


B. Performances


Redirecting Beckett*

Stanley E. Gontarski

The centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth in 2006 sparked un-precedented world-wide celebrations, particularly of Beckett’stheater, and were fully the measure of his international reputationand popularity. Witness the opening of Marjorie Perloff’s presi-dential address to the Modern Language Association in Decem-ber 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 thecelebrations around the world have been a wonder to behold. FromBuenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa(where Beckett did not permit his plays to be performed until Apartheidwas ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University in Tallahas-see to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre in Londonto the Pompidou Center in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurichto Aix-en-Provence and Lille, from St. Petersburg to Madrid to TelAviv, and of course most notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett’sYear. Most of the festivals have included not only performances of theplays, but lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions, and manuscriptdisplays. PARIS BECKETT 2006, for example, co-sponsored by theFrench government and New York University’s Center for French Civ-ilization and Culture, has featured productions of Beckett’s entire dra-matic oeuvre, mounted in theatres large and small all over Paris, lecturesby such major figures as the novelists-theorists Philippe Sollers andHélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and Israel Horovitz,and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 thePompidou 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.



Yet the amount of attention Beckett’s work received in 2006raised many, especially long-term, questions about Beckett’s artfor the 21st century. For some, such apparent adulation of an ex-perimental theatre artist suggests the blunting of Beckett’savant-garde edge, the taming, domestication, and even gentrifi-cation of his work as he is accepted and celebrated by the broadmiddle class as a “classic” playwright, studied in schools andlisted among required texts. Such acceptance raises questions,whether or not anything is lost through such popularization ofthe avant-garde, and if some essential ingredients of Beckett’sart are lost in the process of mass appeal, are they retrievable;that is, is the avant-garde edge of Beckett’s work recoverable? Inthe following argument I explore how certain artists like Brazil-ians Fernando and Adriano Guimarães, Canadian filmmakerAtom Egoyan, even one-time Beckett apostate JoAnne Akalaitis,and Christopher McElroen, who brought his Classic Theater ofHarlem’s production of Waiting for Godot to the streets of astill-devastated New Orleans 9th Ward, are redirecting Beckett’swork toward its avant-garde roots and thereby revitalizing a the-atrical tradition that might otherwise be stuck in post-WorldWar II France and Europe. It is a redirection designed to avoidproductions that might be considered Xerox copies of previousproductions, even as the latter are those most easily sanctionedby the Beckett Estate. While some might (and have) argued thatsuch recovery damages the work’s and so the author’s reputa-tion since it entails some rethinking of the Beckettian text, sucha protectionist position is rejected here. I will suggest, instead,that recovery of Beckett’s avant-gardism is not only revitalizingto a theater now more than 50 years old but such redirection to-ward the avant-garde does not necessarily conflict with the ac-ceptance of Beckett as a “classic,” or even, by now, a canonicalplaywright, and so demonstrates the contemporary vitality ofBeckett’s work. Artists like the Brazilian brothers Fernando andAdriano Guimarães, and their collaborators, JoAnne Akalaitis,and filmmaker Atom Egoyan, for instance, do not so much “di-rect” Beckett’s work as re-direct it to its imagistic roots and thusrestore its political edge. Avant-garde Beckett, I propose, is aBeckett for the 21st century.


Atom Egoyan: “Steenbeckett”

One dynamic possibility for the future of performance vitality isthat offered by Egyptian born Canadian film-maker Atom Egoy-an, who directed a traditional production of Krapp’s Last Tape,starring John Hurt, for the Beckett on Film series, the ambitiousattempt in 2000 to record the Gate Theatre’s much toured andtouted Beckett festival during which all 19 stage plays were per-formed. Egoyan subsequently used the completed film as a cen-terpiece for his own personal artwork, an installation at London’sMuseum of Mankind that folded continuous showings of the film,in altered, antithetical perspectives, into a larger, environmentalexhibit of recorded memory that Egoyan called “Steenbeckett”.Egoyan’s work – like Beckett’s – focused on memory, its preser-vation, distortion and retrieval. Participants entered the now allbut deserted Museum of Mankind, walked through a darkenedwarren of passages, up stairs, through tunnels, past discardedtypewriters, phonographs, record disks, “spoooools” of magnet-ic audio tape, heaps of deteriorating photographs, the detritus ofmemory, to a makeshift, asymmetrical screening room whereEgoyan’s commercial version of Krapp’s Last Tape was screenedfor a restricted audience, 10-12 at a time, sitting on a makeshiftbench no more than six feet from the film projected massively onthe opposite wall so that the image was grainy and fuzzy. Thefilm’s images dwarfed the spectators, who had discovered orstumbled upon what seemed another discarded cultural object.From there spectators wandered to another room, some not wait-ing for the film to end, others sitting through it more than oncewaiting for some sign to move on. In the next room the audienceentered the environment of the film itself, 2,000 feet of which, ac-cording to the program, ran continuously and noisily alongrollers, 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 itpassed through an antique Steenbeck editing table at the far endof the room, where the image was visible in miniature, an imageseen through the wrong end of a telescope, seen through the cat’scradle of noisily rolling film. Obsolete, the Steenbeck editing ma-chine was the equipment that Egoyan used to edit his film of

S.E. Gontarski. Redirecting Beckett 329


Krapp’s Last Tape. The analogue device had all the look of a clum-sy antique, the look Egoyan was apparently striving for in his film.As important as the film, both its materiality and the giganticizedand miniaturized images it provided, was the material editing ma-chine itself, central to Egoyan’s vision of Krapp’s Last Tape andthe centerpiece of his installation, as the material tape recorderhad been to Beckett’s. The play Krapp’s Last Tape was thus an-other deteriorating relic, the commercial film, something like au-thentic Beckett, now itself a fading museum piece, Beckett frozenin time, but folded into Egoyan’s work and so simultaneously astunningly fresh work of art.

When Egoyan turned his attention to Beckett again, he went abit more high tech with a staging of “Eh Joe”. For the centenaryyear, the irrepressible Michael Colgan prevailed upon the BeckettEstate to allow the staging of the teleplay, and Colgan in turn pre-vailed on Canadian film director Atom Egoyan to re-direct Beck-ett. With tour de force performances by Michael Gambon, whohad played Hamm in the Beckett on Film version of Endgame andsubsequently reprised the role on the London stage, and Pene-lope Wilton as Voice, the production was certainly a (if not the)high point of the Beckett centenary celebrations at Dublin’s GateTheatre in April of 2006. The Gate Theatre production subse-quently moved to London’s west-end for 30 performances, from27 June to 15 July 2006.

Egoyan’s adaptation (or transformation) was potentially bina-ry, a hybrid production of stage and “live” video, the division ofthe stage front to back rather than the usual side by side divisionof other stagings of the teleplay. The media were thus less divid-ed than layered, one superimposed on the other, creating apalimpsest of Joes. He was from the first if unnoticeably separat-ed from the audience by a barely perceptible scrim (itself an echoor metaphor for the TV screen) that then bore his projected im-age once Voice began her assault. Egoyan’s conception, with itshybrid technology of stagecraft, television, and film, allowed forthe seamless translation of the television work to the stage. In bothof Beckett’s own productions the nine camera moves towards Joe,the physical image of the increasing intensity of Voice’s assaultand the confirmation of the interiority of the conflict, were con-spicuous, almost clumsy, as the camera physically advanced on



Joe, but Egoyan’s use of imperceptible, computerized zoomadded dimensions of mystery to the play. Something apparitionalor ghostly was taking its course, live on stage. Camera movementwas imperceptible, but at some point audience members realizedthat they were suddenly watching a more intense close-up of Joe,they were almost inside his head; what was full-bodied Joe on hisbed, face in ¾ profile, had become just face.

One might complain that Egoyan staged his play as if Becketthad never directed (and revised) the work himself, and so Egoy-an worked with a text that Beckett himself found wanting. AsBeckett elaborated in detail and repeatedly to his American di-rector Alan Schneider on 7 April 1966, to the final hold of theimage of Joe he added a smile, thus changing not only the clos-ing visual image of the play, but its import as well: “I asked inLondon and Stuttgart for a smile at the end (oh not a real smile).He ‘wins’ again. So ignore the direction ‘Image fades, voice as be-fore.’ Face fully present till last ‘Eh Joe.’ Then smile and slowfade” (in Harmon 1998, p. 202). As a result of his stagings, Beck-ett also simplified the presentation of the ending voice-over aswell: “I decided that the underlining of certain words at the endwas very difficult for the speaker and not good. So I simplifiedsecond last paragraph” (emphasis added, p. 201). He also out-lined a change that could only grow out of the practicalities ofstaging: “In London the only sound apart from the voice was thatof curtains and opening and closing at window, door and cup-board. But in Stuttgart we added sound of steps as he movesaround and made it interesting by his having one sock half offand one sock and slipper. Sock half off because at opening he wastaking it off to go to bed when interrupted by sudden idea or sud-den feeling that he hears a sound and had better make a lastround to make sure all is well” (p. 202). For Beckett the key tothe ending, discovered and shaped in production, was Joe’s suc-cessful throttling of Voice: “Smile at very end when voice stops(having done it again)” (p. 198). Egoyan’s production was stun-ning, carried by Gambon’s magnificently aging face and his long,pianist’s fingers, but it also suggests that much is left to discoverin this new stage work. Even so, visually Egoyan’s productionsuggested something of the avant-garde power of this (and soBeckett’s) work.



JoAnne Akalaitis

JoAnne Akalaitis was all but banished to the deep cold for liber-ties she took with her 1984 production of Endgame at HarvardUniversity’s American Repertory Theatre (ART). She seemed toredeem herself some 24 years later with an evening of shorts, aproduction bound to generate attention in New York as much forthe featured actor as either its director or playwright. Celebrated,revered, lionized dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was featured in all4 “shorts,” which opened in December of 2007 at the New YorkTheatre Workshop. The grouping of four included the twomimes, “Act Without Words I” and “II”, “Rough for Theatre II”,and a staging of “Eh Joe”, a teleplay, certainly after Egoyan, nowpart of the accepted stage repertory. The two “Acts WithoutWords” constitute an inevitable pairing, and Akalaitis took ad-vantage of Baryshnikov’s angelic grace, but the pairing of the sec-ond half of the evening highlighted the fact that the interrelation-ship of the shorts cannot or should not be arbitrary.

On stage, “Eh Joe” is one of Beckett’s short plays that quali-fies, alone, as a full evening’s theater, as was evident in Egoyan’sDublin production. In Dublin nothing preceded it; nothing fol-lowed it. Akalaitis presented her version as part of a cluster, of aquartet, and tied them together with a consistent set, but the de-cision to cover the stage in some six inches of sand made sense on-ly for the first of the quartet. As New York Times theater criticBen Brantley noted of Baryshnikov’s performance, “for the rest ofthe show you can feel good old physics tugging at feet that oncetook flight like no one else’s” (19 December 2007). But more thangravity and age were at work on Baryshnikov who was dancing onthe beach, and superb as it was for “Act Without Words I”, thesand made stage movement all but impossible for the three sub-sequent plays, and perhaps this was part of Akalaitis’s point. Thewheelchair of “Rough for Theatre II”, for example, was immobi-lized and so suggested and perhaps even echoed, at least visually,the immobility of Happy Days, and Joe could not move about hisroom to shut out all prying, perceiving eyes. But Akalaitis madesomething of a virtue of what appeared to be a handicap. Instead,the physical movement of “Eh Joe” was filmed and projected as amultiple set of images in a variety of sizes on a variety of screens.



In fact, this hybrid genre, part live theatre and part “live” film, atechnique Egoyan had used for his “Eh Joe” as well, was centralto all four plays, used not only to great effect individually but tocreate a continuity among the plays based on multiple projectedimages and hence multiple simultaneous perspectives. The mostquestionable directorial decision may have been to create a bodi-ly presence for Joe’s voice, played by the spot-lit Karen Kandel.That, along with the addition of music by Philip Glass (a featureof all of Akalaitis’s Beckett work), is the sort of decision thatcaused such a fuss in her 1984 Endgame. Conceptual blundersapart, Akalaitis finally transformed an unlikely collection of shortsinto a unified, kaleidoscopic evening that overcame (for the mostpart) the self imposed handicap of sand-enhanced gravity. AsBrantley perceptively noted, “This grounding of a winged dancerpoignantly captures the harsh laws of Beckett’s universe, whereMother Earth never stops pulling people toward the grave”. Butthe Akalaitis quartet of shorts were about more than Baryshnikov.They suggested her redirecting Beckett toward the avant-gardewith 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 ob-ject, as it appears in Egoyan’s “Steenbeckett”, is central to the aes-thetics of the Guimarães brothers, visual artists based in Brasilia,Brazil and founders of Companhia Teatral Gabinete 3; they havemaintained an on-going and evolving dialogue with Beckett’swork since their first show, Felizes para Sempre (literally, “Happi-ly ever after”), which included various versions of Felizes paraSempre (Happy Days), Ir e Vir (Come and Go), Jogo (“Play”), andBalanço (“Rockaby”), and which ran, in a variety of venues, al-most all in Brazil, from 1998-2001. Each of those works was usu-ally preceded and then interspersed with works of their own,which the brothers Guimarães call performance, usually an in-stallation which embodies a variation of a theme depicted in theBeckett play. Their approach then is to combine theater, perfor-mance art, music, painting, sculpture, and literature into a hybrid,composite art form, and to collaborate with major contemporary



artists of their day, again mostly all Brazilian. For Felizes para Sem-pre (“Happily ever after” or Happy Days), for example, theyworked with plastic artist Ana Miguel, who designed costumesand stage props, with photographer and lighting designer DaltonCamargos, with museum curator Marília Panitz, and with guestactresses Vera Holtz as Winnie in Felizes para Sempre and firstNathalia Thimberg and then Vera Holtz as “Mulher,” the“Woman in chair,” W, in Balanço (“Rockaby”). A second install-ment of their work “We were not long [...] together,” which ranin a variety of configurations during 2002-2003, was built aroundRespiração (“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 in-carnation of their dialogue with Beckett was built around TodosOs Que Caem (All That Fall), again interspersed with their ownvideos, photographs, objects, and performance pieces, and fea-turing as well Balanço (“Rockaby”), Eu Não (Not I), Rascunho paraTeatro II (“Rough for Theatre II”), and Un pedaço de monólo go(“A Piece of Monologue”). These three anthologies performedover a six-year period constituted a multi media trilogy of specta-cles in a variety of manifestations that connected Beckett’s theaterworks to larger public spaces beyond the confines of theater. Itwas thus in conception and execution the very opposite of theBeckett on Film project taking shape at almost the exact same timein Europe. No two manifestations of the irmãos Guimarães pro-ject were ever the same. Actors often switched roles in differentmanifestations of the play in order to prevent performances fromgetting stale or automatic. Theirs is an art that resists predictabil-ity and resists being reduced to homage, the goal of the film pro-ject, presumably.

As art critic Vitória Daniela Bousso has written, “The transi-tion between the visual and the theatrical constitutes a hybridspace, a territory of complexities ruled by experimentation in thework of Adriano and Fernando Guimarães” (Bousso 2004, p. 97).As their work focuses on the human body, they engage directlythe cultural games of regulation and control that are played uponit. For the Guimarães brothers, the body is less ancillary than itmight generally be in Beckett’s work, say, and instead becomesthe seat of the struggle of power relationships – a theme which, if



not overtly expressed, certainly is a subtext of Beckett’s work. Ac-cording to art historian Nicholas Oliveira, “The body interpretsor plays the part of a character but simultaneously represents it-self, affirms itself as a recipient of the unconscious, in other words,the body interprets that role, in the installation, that gives accessto what is unstable and ephemeral. The body’s unpredictable ac-tion always offers a condition for rupture or destabilization in thepostmodern work” (Oliveira cited in Bousso 2004, p. 98). Here,in both the work of Beckett and that of Adriano and FernandoGuimarães, the body functions more like a machine than as theseat of sentiment, thought, or even being itself – theirs is thus inmany senses a thoughtless theatre, as is Beckett’s.

Beckett’s works are thus treated as ready-mades by theGuimarães brothers, objects to be placed within their own con-structed environments, and hence Beckett is in no need of seriousrevision or renovation in such recovery of Beckett’s avant-gardismsince they are already – preceded and followed, as they are, by im-ages of the Guimarães brothers’ re-imagining of Beckett – after-images of Beckett’s own texts. They are thus less critiques ofBeckett’s work, than specters or ghosts of it. It is wholly a redi-rection of Beckett’s work simultaneously back to its avant-garderoots and forward to a new century of performance art. What isthereby elicited from Beckett is as much the result of their in-stalled environments as it is an intrinsic part of Beckett’s work it-self, and thus Beckett’s works move, unadulterated, into a new po-etic space, become part of a new poetics. The irmãos Guimarãesthus create something like their own Beckett archive, Beckett inor as a cabinet of curiosities, a composite Beckett made up of cul-tural shards.

Their antiphonal use of Beckett’s works and words is a case inpoint. Their treatment of or variations on Respiração, the play“Breath”, for example, is presented as a conjunction with several in-stallations that they call Breath+ (Breath plus, or images after Beck-ett, or Beckett afterimages). Although performed along with other,better known plays, the lowly “Breath” here takes on the role of afeatured work, one version of which features a live, naked actor in aplexiglass box over which an actor or actress lectures on the signif-icance of respiration. The box begins to cloud with carbon dioxideas the human is reduced to the machinery of respiration, man or



woman reduced to metabolic function; the actor or actress beginsto gasp for breath and to pound on the inside of the box in desper-ation. The lecturer (Vera Holtz in the production that I saw) is thusoblivious to the human suffering as she attends solely to the job athand, her lecture – to outline the details of the process of respira-tion – and thus is “Breath” powerfully dramatized without alteringBeckett’s text at all. Corollary productions, other manifestations ofBreath+, feature an actor (or actors) submerged in water who re-spond/responds to an authoritarian and apparently arbitrary bellthat commands and controls his (or their) submersions and re-sur-facings, hence it controls his (or their) breath. In another versionof Breath+, often used as an entr’acte between the plays themselves,actors immerse their heads in buckets of water at the bell’s com-mand and are released to respire only on the command of the bell.In another manifestation, a single clothed actor is fully submergedin a massive fish tank, the duration of his submersion regulated bythe bell. In a third image, a submerged actor, again fully clothed un-derwater, is grotesquely contorted in a bathtub and viewed fromabove. In each case the actor’s breathing appears subject to or reg-ulated 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 With-out Words”, or the piercing bell in Happy Days, works which thebrothers have staged as part of their ongoing dialogue with Beck-ett. Much of their work then spills out of the theater into galleryspace (or out of the gallery back into the theater), Breath+ as dra-matic prelude, entre-acts, and postlude. The extension of the play-ing space into a gallery, courtyard, or the city street emphasizes theidea of broadly expressive space, something other than theatricalspace used as a backdrop.

Another series of performances is called Luz– (Light–, Light lessor Light minus) and Luz+. Here power (much of it in the form ofelectrical power) is transferred to a participating audience wherespectators turn light switches on and off to control the pace of ac-tion in performance, and so the body of the audience, or the audi-ence’s bodies, are folded into the performance making the audiencecomplicitous in the power struggle. The actors perform frantically,running or jumping in place often to the point of exhaustion, as longas the light is on, cease exertion when light is off, and so audiencemembers autocratically determine the duration of exertion.



Double Exposure is an installation composed of four environ-ments with the words of several of Beckett’s short plays project-ed or physically pasted onto walls, windows, and transparent box-es. Beckett’s words themselves, as material objects, are presentedwithin boxes, as cabinets of curiosities, the 18th century forerun-ner of what we today call museums:

Along the whole length of the gallery’s entrance glass doors thereare texts by Samuel Beckett. Upon entering, the spectator finds him-self in the first environment: an almost dark rectangular foreroom, out-lined by glass panes, on which fragments from texts have also beenwritten. At each end of this room there are life-size pictures of thecharacter that appears throughout the exhibition. The photographsare almost identical, but they reveal the character under the action oftwo contrasting lights: one that is excessively bright and one that is toodark. 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 Matièreet mémoire [Matter and Memory]), or afterimage, its appearance ordisappearance regulated by light which in turn is regulated by(electrical) power, which in turn is regulated (apparently) by spec-tators. It is light which makes the image possible, on stage and inthe body. If Breath+ emphasized the materiality and machinery ofthe body, Light– foregrounded its ethereality. The focus is thus onthe fact that all perception is imagistic if not imag(e)inary. The sec-ond environment is a house, a rectangular prism made of exposedbrick along which Beckett’s texts continue. Along its outer wallsspectators can look through peepholes and see real time-videos(again images) of the gallery from a variety of angles through a setof security cameras. The interior lined with dark panes is the thirdenvironment. Here the audience watches a black and white videoof a character closing windows to stop a flood of light entering thatthreatens to extinguish his own image since he is only a projectionof light. When vapor lamps are turned on in the room the charac-ter’s image disappears and the spectator encounters his or her ownreflection on the walls. They (subjects) have thus replaced what ap-peared to be the “character” (object).



The fourth environment consists of a glass scale model of thehouse sitting on a table. Projected images are then reflected on themodel’s glass and on the room’s walls. In another section of theinstallation the audience is encouraged to deposit its own objects,usually, but not exclusively, photographs, mementos of senti-mental value – but of course only to themselves. The audiencemoves through the installation, lingers, examines, reads those im-ages on the walls or Beckett’s words on or in boxes and along thewalls, words given a materiality when some whole works are writ-ten out in letters carved from wooden blocks. The installation isthus a preface or postlude to the performances of those plays thatare on display, so that the play itself, once performed is already arepetition, an echo, a double, an afterimage.

All the Beckett projects of the irmãos Guimarães came togetherwith performances in February and March of 2008 at Espaço Cul-tural Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro, their fourth major manifestationof (primarily) Beckett’s short works. The season, which marked thetenth anniversary of the irmãos Guimarães’s working with (orthrough) Beckett, was built around three sets of performances eachbuilt around and so foregrounding Beckett’s slightest play, Respi-ração (“Breath”). Over a two month period at Oi Futuro they per-formed three sets of Beckett’s works under the general umbrella ti-tle Resta Puoco a Dizer: Peças Curtas de Beckett por Adriano e Fer-nando Guimarães (Little Is Left to Tell: Beckett’s Short Pieces byAdriano and Fernando Guimarães). To their earlier works theyadded Improviso de Ohio (“Ohio Impromptu”), the opening wordsof which, “Little is left to tell”, served as their overall title with not-ed Brazilian actor and director Aderbal Freire-Filho (founder ofGrêmio Dramático Brasileiro in 1973) as Leitor (Reader) and com-pany stalwart William Ferreira as Ouvinte (Listener). (AderbalFreire-Filho was simultaneously directing Hamlet with WagnerMoura as the Danish slacker for a June opening. Excerpts and dis-cussions of his Hamlet production are available on YouTube.)

The future of Beckett performance

Amid the restrictions on performance imposed by the Beckett Es-tate, its attempts to restrain if not tame or subdue the recalcitrant



artwork by its insistence on faithful and accurate performances, afaith and accuracy no one seems able to define, a resilient andimaginative set of theatrical directors and artists continues to redi-rect Beckett by developing a third way, through radical acts of theimagination, by folding the authorized, legally owned object, likea ready-made in a gallery, into another context, like storefronts,disused or abandoned buildings, or museum installations. Theythus assert the heterogeneity of Beckettian performance withoutviolating the dictates of an Estate-issued performance contract.“Here, precisely, is the Beckett that will hold the stage in the newcentury”, argues Fintan O’Toole discussing the issue of fidelity toBeckett’s texts in another context; he notes significantly that “Themerely efficient translations of what are thought to be the greatman’s intentions will fade into dull obscurity. The productionsthat allow their audiences to feel the spirit of suffering and sur-vival in our times will enter the afterlife of endless re-imaginings”(O’Toole 2000, p. 45). Such redirection as I am suggesting is evi-dent in the all African-American cast of the Classic Theater ofHarlem’s 2007 production of Waiting for Godot, directed byChristopher McElroen, featuring New Orleans native WendellPierce and J. Kyle Manzay, first on a simulated New Orleansrooftop in their Harlem theater in 2006 and then in November2007 directly on the streets of the Lower 9th Ward of New Or-leans, the area most devastated by hurricane Katrina – free pro-ductions on November 2-3 and 9-10, although the “free” pro-duction reportedly cost some $200,000 to stage. Writing for theTimes-Picayune on 9 November 2007, David Cuthbert noted that“The time has long since passed when Godot was regarded as ‘amystery wrapped in an enigma’, as Brooks Atkinson famously de-scribed it in his 1956 New York Times review of its Broadway de-but”. Cuthbert went on to note, in lines reminiscent of the SanQuentin Godot of 1957: “Christopher McElroen’s staging is themost accessible, the funniest, the most moving and meaningfulGodot 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 nowtake on a new resonance”.

Productions like that of the Classic Theater of Harlem, theGuimarães brothers, Atom Egoyan, JoAnne Akalaitis, amongothers, offer one approach to the re-imaginings necessary to a liv-



ing art. The alternative is that Beckett’s work is often presented aswhat it may indeed have already become, a curio in a box of cu-riosities, a museum piece preserved, without deviation (exceptperhaps for deterioration), exactly as written (at least in some hy-pothesized version), but, even so, as I have been suggesting, evensuch a presentation could be re-imagined and altered radically ina new environment, an alternative space. If the Beckettian stagespace has become a battleground of political and legal contention,the squabble over property rights more than artistic integrity oraesthetic values, those directors who have taken their cue fromBeckett’s own commitment to the avant-garde, his comments ontheater, and the developing aesthetics of his late plays have foundtheir freedom of expression, a liberation of their imaginations, byabandoning or spilling out of that contested space we call theaterinto a more expressive one. They have developed a hybrid art,sweeping Beckett along with them, moving it to where he alwaysthought it belonged, among the plastic arts, and accomplishing aredirection of Beckett’s theater for a new century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works cited

Bousso, Vitória Daniela, 2004, “Interstice Zone”, in Adriano and Fer-nando Guimarães, 2004, “Todos Os Que Caem” / “All That Fall”,Catalogue published by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (April2004), pp. 97-99.

Cuthbert, David, 2007, “Godot is Great”, in Living / Lagniappe, inThe Times-Picayune, 6 November 2007.

Guimarães, Adriano and Fernando, 2001, Happily ever After / Felizespara Sempre, Catalogue published by Centro Cultural Banco doBrasil (January 2001).

Idem, 2004a, “Todos Os Que Caem” / “All That Fall”, Catalogue pub-lished by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (April 2004).

Idem, 2004b, “Double Exposure: Multimedia Installations Composedof Four Environments”, in Guimarães, 2004, “Todos Os QueCaem” cit., pp. 103-105.

Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-




spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard UP,Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Oliveira, Nicholas, 2001, “The Space of Memory: Installation Plays bythe Brothers Guimarães”, in Guimarães, 2001, Happily ever Aftercit., pp. 11-17.

O’Toole, Fintan, 2000, “Game Without End”, in The New York Re-view 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 1995by Carlo Cecchi. This was not only a memorable production in it-self, but it raised a question about fidelity to the text in theatricalrealisations, which is the main topic of this paper.

First of all, some details about the production. Cecchi himselfplayed 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 pro-duction was filmed by Mario Martone for RAI (Palcoscenico) andbroadcast on May 18, 1996.

I derive my personal poetics of musts and prohibitions aboutBeckett on stage from one of his own best productions, for me anillumination, namely the Schiller-Theater Godot that I was luckyenough to see in Dublin in 1976. Beside relying on the many crit-ical analyses on Beckett’s mises en scène (from Cohn 1980 toMcMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, Kalb 1989 [1991], and Gontarski1992), I will also bear in mind some of the materials Walter As-mus 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 fromthe Eighties (decades after the text was performed to perfectionby the first Beckett directors and in Beckett’s own productions),

* For the images relative to this essay see figures 9 to 12.1 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 asOzpetek’s Un giorno perfetto or Cristina Comencini’s La bestia nel cuore.


is the difficult balance between respect for the text – withoutwhich Beckett’s text is nullified – and the necessity of finding anew way, the director’s personal way: being free to invent some-thing is always necessary if a performance is not to be simply anillustration of what has already been found. It is true, as T.S. Eliotwrites, 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 some-how be new. Schneider stated that it is the first production of aliving author that must be thoroughly faithful (quoted in Cohn1980, p. 195); in Italy, in particular, we see the director (and thedirector sees himself) as an author, an author who must createsomething new.

Of course, as a director or co-director Beckett was faithful tothe ideas of Beckett the dramatist. But in 1976, when the curtainopened on his Godot, one immediately realized that what was onthe stage did not entirely match what was stated on the page. Forinstance, Beckett had taken advantage of the startling visual dif-ference of the two actors – very lean and tall Stefan Wigger asVladimir, plump and short Horst Bollmann as Estragon – to en-hance some of the comic elements of the text. Wigger wore shorttrousers, and his long legs and huge feet protruded from them ina farcical way, while Estragon’s sleeves were inordinately long.The symmetry between the two characters and between elementson stage was also enhanced: the tree also had a part to play, firstof all by creating a kind of progression in height from Bollmannto Wigger to the tree itself; then Wigger had been instructed byBeckett to move his bony figure from time to time in a kind of im-itation of the shape of the tree, one shoulder higher than the oth-er, creating a further symmetry that echoed the stated symmetriesof the text, but highlighting them in an unforeseen way.

Ironically, directors too much under Beckett’s shadow havebeen less adventurous. I am compelled by critical objectivity andby the aims of this paper to respond ungenerously to Walter As-

D. Guardamagna. Cecchi’s “Endgame” 343

2 Thomas S. Eliot, 1940, East Coker, in Four Quartets, 1936-1942 (La terradesolata. Quattro quartetti, bilingual edition, Feltrinelli, Milano 1995, 2006,trans. Angelo Tonelli).


mus’s kindness, noticing that when he staged his own English ver-sion of Godot for BBC he was forced by awe and by his fidelity toBeckett to create a kind of repetition of Beckett’s own Godot. Itis a good production, philologically perfect, sometimes enlight-ening. 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 inBeckett’s case is intrinsically different from, say, that of Shake-speare. In Shakespeare, stage directions are almost entirely con-fined to practical matters of staging, or are a somewhat short-handed version of an action: hautboys, exit [Antigonus] pursuedby a bear, and the like.

In Beckett, as any Beckettian knows, there is a precise dialec-tic between text and stage directions, between what is said andwhat must be seen (let me quote the most obvious example of all:“Let’s go. Yes, let’s go. They do not move.”). Therefore, thougheven Beckett texts (as Gontarski and Caretti show in this volume)can profit from a reworking that does not treat them as mummi-fied classics, if a director decided (for example) to make Didi andGogo move after this exchange a major distortion of the textwould take place.

This is only the most obvious example among the many I couldmake concerning the rhythms, the musical quality of the text, itsnecessity of being treated more like a musical score than a textproper. But, because of point 1, I think that even when staging anauthor as exacting and as precise as Beckett (in his stage direc-tions, indications of pauses, silences and so on) a director must‘create’ something, must ‘invent’ something new. I think Cecchifound the way both to be faithful to the text and to find this some-thing, which in turn adds to our understanding of the text.

3. Cecchi’s production

Very discreetly, Cecchi strengthened the unrealistic aspects of theplay. The staging respected Beckett’s indications (the room, thewheelchair in the centre, the stancher or stauncher, the whistle,



the dustbins, the red and white faces of the original stage direc-tion), but the two actors who played Nell and Nagg were muchyounger than Cecchi, even though made up to look old; he de-clared this was done to add to the non-naturalistic aspect of theplay (see Cecchi in Cherchi 1995, 11th page).

Then, he heightened the metatheatrical effects. The room wasgrey, and had vague shapes of traditional scenery drawn on thewalls, but there, on the wall, big wide strokes of blue paint wereto be seen – an unfinished coat of blue on grey – as if the pos t -atomic bunker of the play pertained also to the character of anhalf-completed rehearsal room.

The acting was subtly musical, and respected the character ofa score: a lot of work had obviously been done on the precision oftones, on the balance of emphasis and bathos, in the repetitionsand variations of the music. Clov / Binasco’s answers were total-ly devoid of emotion, save in the few moments when the text ex-plicitly 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 foreimportant 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 tele-vision script-writer, used to say that Italian is a great language, butthat as a theatrical language it is always finding its way, tentative-ly. As a theatrical language, he meant, Italian has no traditioncomparable to the language of its poetry (the splendid literary lan-guage of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Leopardi and so on), or to the lan-guage 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 di-vorced from everyday speech – I am thinking for example of Alfierior Manzoni: tragedies in highly polished and not easily playable



verse, written mostly to be read rather than heard – or dialect, toall intents and purposes a different language: the Paduan and Mi-lanese dialects from Ruzante to Dario Fo, the Venetian of Goldoni,or the Neapolitan of Eduardo De Filippo. Many contemporaryauthors (Ruccello, Erba) still rely if not on dialect then on a kindof pastiche between dialect and the standard language. And ofcourse many important novelists do the same: striking examplesare the splendid mixture of dialects and high literary language inthe novels of Carlo Emilio Gadda, or the very effective Italian-Si-cilian of the thrillers by Andrea Camilleri.

Cecchi translated Endgame into Italian with one eye on the Eng-lish version and one on the French, which in itself is highly laudable,as Rossana M. Sebellin shows in her paper about translation in thepresent volume. But to make the Italian more ‘spoken’, to give itback the vitality of a language that both in English and in Frenchcounterpoints the scarcity of scenic effects and sustains the action,Cecchi added an undertone of Neapolitan, which surprisingly didnot contrast at all with the totally indefinite nowhere of Beckett’ssetting. Cecchi was born in Florence, but lived in Rome and Naples,and he created this distinctive ‘language’ to accommodate Beckett’shighly actable speech to Italian ears. (Branciaroli, in his recent Ital-ian production of Endgame, 2007, gave a French accent to hisHamm: but in my opinion this invention remained superficial, anddid 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 illus-tration of the human impasse, but of the theatrical impasse of the20th century: as he wrote in the programme (in Cherchi 1995, 10th

page), “this play is a parody of the whole of western drama”. Hereare 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 mise -rabile, corrotto, culturalmente corrotto, ripugnante da frequentare.Finale di partita mi pareva che potesse permettermi di non fare comese non fosse così, Finale di partita sarebbe stato anche, forse soprat-tutto, questa ripugnanza non nascosta, ma agita, jouée.

(Carlo Cecchi in Cherchi 1995, 9th page).



(Over the years the organization of Italian theatre has becomemore and more miserable, a corrupted, culturally corrupted, disgust-ing business. I thought that acting Endgame I could avoid pretendingit was not so, Endgame would be to act, jouer, this disgust, instead ofhiding it3.)

Metatheatrical elements occur, as we know, throughout theplay: starting with the opening “Me to play”, including “This iswhat we call making an exit”, “An aside, ape! Did you never hearan aside before?” and Hamm’s “I’m warming up for my last so-liloquy” – to cite only a few examples. In his production Cecchicalled attention to them by means of slight changes of emphasisin the translation. The English version of Endgame is more strong-ly metatheatrical than the French, and the Italian translator Frut-tero very often followed the French version, but when metathe-atrical effects were in question Cecchi always reverted to the Eng-lish one, often pushing it more strongly towards the foreground-ing of the boredom, unpleasantness and unbearableness of thisspecific play, this specific evening.

Here are a few examples. The following extracts give first theFrench original, then the English one, then the official Italiantranslation (Carlo Fruttero’s, in Finale di partita) and lastly Cec-chi’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 arerather slow...] (Finale di partita, p. 93)

CECCHI: È una commedia lenta... [= This play is so slow...]4


3 All translations, if not otherwise stated, are mine.4 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 notbeen published, and quotations are derived from the RAI recording of the pro-duction.


Cecchi is quite faithful, but the emphasis is more strongly onthe 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 sadthis play is...]

As above, there is a stronger emphasis on the play itself. Thisis 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)



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 dayis 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.) Àmoins d’introduire d’autres personages. (Un temps.) Mais où les trou-ver? (Un temps.) Où les chercher? (pp. 74-75)

I’ll soon have finished with this story. [Pause.] Unless I bring inother 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 dovetrovarli? (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 onthis occasion are rather similar to one another), as well as of Frut-tero’s text: but the cut, and the gestures of the player to the roomwhere the action takes place, transfer the comment from Hamm’schronicle to the play itself and its unbearableness. And again:

Clov. Aïeaïeaïe!Hamm. Encore des complications! [...] Pourvu que ça ne rebon-

disse 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 svilup-

pi? [= No further developments, I hope?] (p. 127)

CECCHI: Clov: Aiaiai!Hamm: Ancora complicazioni! Speriamo che non ci sia materiale



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

Instead of a generic term that could refer to the play or to a nov-el (underplot, developments) Cecchi inserted a specific exclama-tion (“No material for a second act”) concerning the play itself, theevening 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 lesifflet.) 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 ringrazia-menti... [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 per-formance].

Later, in the very last monologue, the Italian had to lose an im-portant ambiguity, having no single term that, like the Frenchjouer and the English to play, can indicate both the acting(recitare) and the playing of a game (giocare). Fruttero decided toopen the metaphor in the direction of the playing of chess; Cec-chi refused to lose either of the two meanings, and he created asentence which incorporated both:

Puisque ça se joue comme ça... [...] jouons ça comme ça... [...] etn’en parlons plus... [...] ne parlons plus. (p. 112)

Since that’s the way we’re playing it... let’s play it that way... andspeak no more about it... speak no more. (p. 52)

FRUTTERO: Visto che si gioca così... giochiamola così... e non par-liamone più... non parliamo più. (p. 131)

CECCHI: Visto che la commedia si recita così, e che la partita si gio-ca così, giochiamola e recitiamola così, e non parliamone più... mai più.



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

Some meanings are lost here, but the important doublemetaphor, involving both acting and the chess game, is faithfullyrecovered, and the metatheatrical element is foregrounded again.

3.3. Alienation effects

As is apparent from diaries of productions and statements of ac-tors directed by Beckett (see for instance the interviews withDavid Warrilow and Billy Whitelaw in Kalb 1989 [1991, pp. 220-233, 234-242], or the interview with Ernst Schroeder’s in McMil-lan and Fehsenfeld 1988, pp. 238-240), in rehearsal the actor of-ten asked, Stanislavski-like, ‘What am I supposed to feel here?’,and Beckett most of the time refused to answer, reverting to tech-nical aspects of movement, tempo, and rhythm. He sometimes al-lowed his actors to draw him into a discussion of motivation, es-pecially for small actions: as when Clov looks inside his trousersfor the flea, so Hamm’s pee comes to his mind, and so he asks himabout it; or, when Clov asks Hamm “Have you bled”, and Beck-ett suggested that Bollmann, who played Clov in the Berlin pro-duction, should first look at Hamm’s face: “You see something inhis face, that’s why you are asking” (Beckett quoted in McMillanand Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 215). But generally Beckett denied anyspecial knowledge of his characters (see McMillan and Fehsenfeld1988, p. 240, or Gontarski 1992, p. 61) and many times answereda question about psychological motives with technical sugges-tions, 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 (programmeof Warten auf Godot, Schiller-Theater, Berlin 1975).

It thus seems obvious that the first thing an actor must learnwhen acting Beckett is to get rid of psychology, of any kind of ‘Ac-tor studio’ identification with the Character. The pattern ofsounds, as we well know, is the fundamental matter. I agree withEnoch Brater (Brater 1975) – and with some almost forgottenstatements by Martin Esslin (Esslin 1976) – and I deeply disagreewith Jonathan Kalb (Kalb 1989 [1991, pp. 44-46 and passim])about the presence or absence of some kind of Verfremdungsef-



fekt, of Brechtian alienation, in the best productions of Beckett’sdrama.

Kalb claims that Beckett’s aims and Brecht’s are different. Thisis obviously true in many important ways; but what I am dis-cussing here is a purely technical feature of the actor’s perfor-mance, that Cecchi and Binasco employed for a specific purpose:what they brought out, quite legitimately, was an alienation fromemotion. As Beckett said (quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld1988, p. 207), “pathos is the death of the play”.

In the Strassenszene essay (Brecht 1967), one of his many onepic theatre, Brecht makes clear that his actors should act as ifthey were reminding us of what had happened, with a precise dis-tancing at work: the Strassenszene narrator is the witness of a caraccident between a driver and a pedestrian, and he is supposed toshow his public what happened, excluding pathos as not relevant.Brecht gives examples: “Er ist nicht einmal in einer Gewerk-schaft, aber wenn das Unglück passiert, grosse Aufgeregtheit!‘Ich sitze zehn Stunden am Volant!’” (He isn’t even a member ofthe Trade Unions, but when something happens, there he is, a bigupheaval! ‘I have to sit at the wheel for ten hours at a time!’ –Brecht 1967, p. 552). All pathos must be absent from the sen-tence, all realistic intonation absent. The witness is quoting. He isshowing. We are not supposed to identify with any emotion. Heis not feeling emotion, but showing it.

The similarity between Beckett and Brecht here is specificallytechnical. With very different aims the two 20th century authorsequally ask their actors to show, and to perform a flight frompathos. Beckett’s characters are past emotion; more precisely, toparaphrase Adorno, we are shown emotions in the moment oftheir impossibility. In Endgame, and in Cecchi’s Endgame in par-ticular, there is an added value to this. In the three generationsthat are on stage, Beckett shows us three levels of progressive de-humanization: old Nell and Nagg – though in a Beckettian way, ofcourse – 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” (Cohn1980, p. 243), despite the fact that Beckett told the actors of hisBerlin production that “Coloration is only for their memories”(quoted in Gontarski 1992, p. 53).



Hamm does not feel emotion. This is self-evident, and onequotation 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 ofemotional 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 simplydoes not know anything about all this: he has not learned how tofeel. 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, en-hanced this. The parents in their dustbins were a little nearer a se-mi-realistic expression of feeling: some semi-naturalistic chatter,nostalgia for the Lake Como spree, Winnie-like appreciation ofold times (“Yesterday you scratched me there...” “Ah yester-day...” – p. 20). Cecchi’s Hamm showed us that the character isnot experiencing emotions, but is at best vaguely trying to re-member them, quoting them. He ‘declared’ even his laughter,when mentioning his honour. He hammed, he postured in hisrhetorical statements and his nostalgias; he added a rhetorical flairto his emotionally charged repartees; but very effectively, with theconsummate ability of the great actor he is, he put an alienatingdistance between the emphatic voice and the emotion, thorough-ly emptying his sentences of any feeling: (“Ah, le vecchie do-mande, le vecchie risposte...” “Padre!...” “Perdonami.”): emo-tions were shown, quoted, excluding any psychological participa-tion from the stated odd phenomenon.

Binasco’s did not even quote: his rhythm was a monochro-matic, monotone reproduction of answers, overlapping the ques-tions of Cecchi’s Hamm, with – as Beckett asked – exactly thesame music to his yesses and his noes. He was a machine, ametronome: humanity was very far away. The result was at oncenew and faithful to Beckett’s own sense of the play, thus showingthat originality and fidelity are not mutually exclusive.




BIBLIOGRAPHY


Fin de partie, 1957, in Fin de partie. Suivi de Acte sans Paroles, Les Édi-tions de Minuit, Paris, pp. 7-112.

Finale di partita, 1957, in Paolo Bertinetti (a cura di), 1994, SamuelBeckett. Teatro completo, Einaudi-Gallimard, Torino (trans. CarloFruttero), pp. 85-131.

Endgame, 1958, in Endgame. A Play in One Act Followed by Act With-out Words. A Mime for One Player, 1964, Faber and Faber, Lon-don, pp. 7-53.

Bertinetti, Paolo (a cura di), 1994, Samuel Beckett. Teatro completo, Ei-naudi-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 Cher-chi”, Programme for Finale di partita, Teatro Stabile di Firenze.

Cohn, Ruby, 1980, Just Play. Beckett’s Theater, Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton.

Esslin, Martin, 1976, “Godot, The Authorized Version”, in Journal ofBeckett 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 ofSamuel Beckett. Volume II. “Endgame”, Faber and Faber, London.

Kalb, Jonathan, 1989, Beckett in Performance, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge 1991.

MacMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in theTheatre. The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, vol. 1,From ‘Waiting for Godot’ to ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, John Calder, Lon-don.

Other works cited

Brecht, Bertold, “Die Strassenszene: Grundmodell einer Szene desepischen Theaters”, in Idem, Gesammelte Werke, 1967, 20 Bän-den, 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 makesexceptional demands on the actor, audience, technicians and di-rector alike. This article will discuss the stringency of Beckett’s re-quirements in these areas and consider to what extent the exact-ing nature of such demands may present problems for the con-tinuing life of the plays, both today and in the future.

To begin with, the actor. It is well known that Jack Mac-Gowran described the television camera narrowing steadily in onhis face in “Eh Joe” exposing his haunted eyes as “the most gru-elling 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 therhythm he wanted, which drove me into such a panic that I final-ly broke down”(RUL, MS 1227/1/2/14). Even Billie Whitelawdescribes losing self confidence unexpectedly when rehearsingHappy Days with Beckett and asking advice from Dame PeggyAshcroft, who said: “He’s impossible. Throw him out” (Whitelaw1995, p. 152). Dame Peggy herself appeared uncomfortable in herearly performances as Winnie (at the Old Vic in 1975) though shehad grown into the role by the time Happy Days transferred to theLyttelton 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 ofRadio Telefis Eireann’s “Thomas Davis Lectures” celebrating Beckett’s cente-nary. The lectures were published by New Island Press, Dublin, 2006, as:“SAMUEL BECKETT: 100 Years” (Christopher Murray editor). I am indebt-ed to New Island Press for permission to reprint this version.

2 Preview in celebration of Beckett’s 70th birthday, 13th April 1976; direc-tor, Peter Hall.



lacking his usual mastery of a role3. Contemplating such unchar-acteristic discomfort from both actors one wonders whether, intrying to achieve what Beckett wanted, they had found themselvesacting against their own theatrical instincts and had thus not ful-ly integrated into their roles.

Nonetheless many actors develop an extraordinary rapportwith their roles when performing Beckett, an identification at anunusually profound level, resulting in a catharsis of equal depth.The very fact that Beckett denies them so much of their normalmeans of expression in the theatre seems to act as a stimulus, achallenge to creativity. They may be restricted in movement(trapped in urns or in mid-air itself, with their voices reduced toa monotone “as low as compatible with audibility” or to speechso fast that it can hardly be registered by an audience; even to be-coming mere listeners to their own recorded voices4 or to speech-less virtual automatons, as in “Quad”); but such deprivationforces actors to dig deeper into themselves than is the norm in thetheatre. Unable to build up a character in the usual way (whenplaying an old woman, for example, part of the process would in-volve close observation of how such women move and speak) inNot I there is no movement about the stage, no opportunity forfacial expression, just the mouth pouring out words at greatspeed, preventing even much variation of pace.

The actress is thus forced to go beyond the norms of perfor-mance. Rather than a process of accretion, of building up a char-acter, she must try to strip her performance down to the innercore, creating an interior space, an emptiness, denuded of self, yetactively alert to the Beckett text. In effect she becomes a recepta-cle for the text and it is the challenge of going beyond the normalboundaries of performance that produces the depth of identifica-tion with the role that actors find so exhilarating and brings abouttheir close rapport with Beckett.

Performing the short plays is, as already indicated, hugely de-manding. Billie Whitelaw, when rehearsing Not I for the first Lon-don production5, her head enclosed in a Ku Klux Klan-type hood,

3 Royal Court Theatre, January 1973; director, Donald McWhinnie.4 E.g. That Time and “Rockaby”.5 Royal Court Theatre, January 1973.


developed such a sense of disorientation that, as described by Bri-an Miller who played the Auditor (Letter to the author, 26th Jan-uary 1973), she broke down. So a different method was devisedin which she sat, face blacked out, in a dentist’s chair, her headpositioned so that the narrow lightbeam would illuminate hermouth alone. After a time, however, it became possible for audi-ences of this production to distinguish black from black, so thatthe faint outline of a solid figure behind the mouth became ap-parent in the surrounding darkness.

In order to prevent this happening in the play’s second Eng-lish production (at Oxford Playhouse in 1976) a radical solutionwas proposed by the lighting director6. A blackout curtain was letdown upstage, covering the entire stage area. The actress wasplaced on a scaffold just behind the curtain, positioned so that hermouth was the precise eight feet above stage level prescribed byBeckett. At this point a hole was cut in the curtain at mouth lev-el, so that her mouth could protrude through the curtain. In or-der that the image should remain constant, however, and notmove in and out of the hole when taking a breath, the mostfiendish part of the procedure was devised. A piece of elasticatedmaterial with strings attached was sewn to the inside of the cur-tain, surrounding the hole. Into this the actress was tied before theperformance started. (Having been that actress I recall with feel-ing the extreme sense of isolation experienced, on hearing the as-sistant stage manager’s footsteps retreating down the scaffoldingafter tying me in.) Discussing this with Beckett some time later, hedescribed the play as “a horror” for the actress7.

Clearly the technical input is crucial when performing Beckett’sshorter roles. Much of the action is initiated by lighting and record-ed sound interacting with the performer, who therefore relies on theskills of the technical staff to a much greater extent than is usual inthe theatre. The synchronisation of light, sound and silence mustoperate in precise conjunction with the performer, which requiresgreat sensitivity of technical direction. Indeed the performance maystand or fall on the seamless integration of the technical effects.

R. Pountney. Stringent Demands: Aspects of Beckett 357

6 March 1976; director, Francis Warner; lighting, David Colmer.7 Conversation with Samuel Beckett, Paris, March 1980.


To begin with stage lighting, “Play” is an obvious example,since all utterance from the three urns is controlled by light. InNot I and That Time the protagonist is partially illuminated, sus-pended in a limbo of darkness; in Footfalls May literally walks upand down a strip of light on the stage floor that dims from sceneto 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 revolu-tionary use of the actor’s voice. It is with the use of the recordedvoice that the actor’s reliance on technical support becomes total.In “Rockaby”, for example, most of the play is spent with W lis-tening to her recorded voice, except at the end of a scene, whereshe joins in with the recording to repeat the concluding phrase. Itis in “Rockaby” also that Beckett gives an extraordinarily daringstage direction, challenging for both actor and audience, regard-ing the opening and closing of the protagonist’s eyes. Beckett hadfirst tried this out in That Time, where the brief opening of Lis-tener’s eyes between scenes registers his extreme interest in the si-lence, the cessation of the three voices that assail him in eachscene. In “Rockaby” scene one, W’s eyes are either “open in un-blinking gaze” or closed “in about equal proportions”, but be-come increasingly closed in scenes two and three until, halfwaythrough the final scene, they are (as Beckett tersely notes) “closedfor good” (“Rockaby”, p. 273).

There is of course no way of covering up a technical hitch inMinimalist drama. Performing “Rockaby” in French in Stras-bourg, for instance, the sound level of the recorded tape had beenset too high in error and there was nothing to be done but sit in therocking chair and suffer!8 Theatre conditions on tour can be par-ticularly problematic. I recall, for example, finding my mouth fullof knitting when playing Mouth in Not I at the Dublin Theatre Fes-tival in 1978. In the very limited set-up time allowed in festival con-ditions, the hole in the blackout curtain was only cut at the lastminute 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 andtacked it to the inside of the curtain. In the ensuing performance,


8 Théâtre Jeune Publique, Strasbourg, April 1996.


on inserting my mouth through the hole, tendrils of wool began todescend, tickling both mouth and nostrils, so that choking, or atleast a gigantic sneeze became genuine possibilities! Again, whenplaying W in “Rockaby” in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1990, Iwas almost thrown from the rocking chair when an assistant stagemanager suddenly became over-zealous in operating the pulleythat controlled the chair. W cannot rock the chair herself, sinceBeckett specifies that it only moves involuntarily.

Unusual problems largely peculiar to Beckett’s theatre may al-so arise. There is, for example, the difficulty of obtaining the com-plete darkness often required in the short plays. A total blackout isnaturally affected by the glow from the exit lights, which for legalreasons must be illuminated throughout a performance. Similarlya long pause in mainstream theatre is quite different from the or-der of silence that can build up in a Beckett play. When, for exam-ple, one of the late plays is working as it should, audiences becomerapt, indeed almost hypnotised, so that any extraneous noise, evenfrom outside the theatre can become audible and intrusive, in a waythat would not be noticeable on the mainstream stage.

Beckett’s short plays present particular challenges to audi-ences, not least in coming to recognise that the staging and tech-nical effects are being stretched beyond their usual function in thetheatre and are an integral part of the performance (such as theuse of mid-air as the stage space in Not I and the personificationof the light in “Play”). There was, of course, an initial lack of com-prehension from public and press alike of the “whatever next?”variety: characters in dustbins, a woman stuck in a mound ofearth, heads sprouting from urns, a mouth gabbling in mid-air –“what’s it meant to mean?” (as Beckett himself slyly asks in Hap-py Days). As soon as audiences relax, however, and allow the playsto work on them in their own terms, they find such considerationsunimportant and that the plays do communicate with them di-rectly; all the more so for making them concentrate by not dottingall the i’s and crossing all the t’s. The concentration indeed canbecome so intense that it is almost palpable, as though the audi-ence were holding its breath.

Naturally with the very short plays a programme must be de-vised to provide an evening’s theatre. At least two plays will be per-formed, and their grouping can be illuminating: staging Footfalls



and “Rockaby” together, for instance, both plays concerned withmother/daughter relationships, or combining Not I with ThatTime which Beckett called “a brother to Not I” (Knowlson andPilling, 1979, p. 206). The thirty second “Breath” has even beenperformed several times in an evening, virtually as punctuation be-tween a group of short plays. The plays work best in smaller the-atres, where such minimalist but crucial action as the opening ofListener’s eyes in That Time can be registered clearly by audiences.

Another method of devising a Beckett evening arose for my-self, following an invitation to perform a programme of shortplays during a conference of European translators of Beckett’swork at the university of East Anglia, in 19959. In that context itseemed appropriate to experiment by playing “Rockaby” in Eng-lish, followed by “Berceuse”, the French version. Having foundthat the contrasts inherent in seeing a play in two languages in-terested the audience, I devised a programme which has subse-quently toured worldwide, largely to university theatres. Thisconsists of performing the play first in English, followed (after ashort break) by the French version. There is then an interval (dur-ing which it is advisable to remove the heavy makeup) before re-turning to the stage to give those among the audience who wishto remain an opportunity to ask questions, or comment on Beck-ett’s theatrical methods. This tends to produce a very lively de-bate, in that just after the performance of unusual material provesto be an optimum time to engage audiences in discussion.

The aural contrast between the English version, followed bythe more liquid-sounding French one, also works on another lev-el. Having followed the plot of the English version, the repeat ofthe play allows even non-French speaking audiences to reflect onit; this has the effect of deepening their experience of the play,much as Beckett intended the da capo of “Play” to work on audi-ences; to let the “hooks” go in, as he wrote of a production of Finde Partie (Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 12th August 1957, inHarmon 1998, p. 15).

On tour the experience of putting on the plays often provided asteep learning curve for the university drama students who assisted.


9 December 1995; organised by W. G. Sebald.


If they were unfamiliar with Beckett’s later plays they tended to ex-pect such short texts to present few problems, only to find themselvesconfronted by the niceties of technical synchronisation, which theyfound exceptionally demanding, particularly the extent to whichtheir own technical input interacting with the performer constitutedthe performance. In subsequent discussion it is always rewarding tosee their minds opening to the possibilities of Minimalist theatre andtheir developing appreciation of Beckett’s dramatic methods.

Discussion so far has centred on the actor, audience and tech-nical aspects of a Beckett performance, with little mention ofoverall direction. This is because I have been positing a directorwho would follow Beckett’s stage directions closely, in order tobring out the nuances of performance and subtlety of suggestioninherent in his stage notes. Today, as the legend of Beckett’s ownproductions begins to dissipate through time, directors becomeless likely to consult his production notebooks (Samuel BeckettArchive, RUL; see also Knowlson et al., editors, 1992-1995) andincreasingly anxious to ‘do their own thing’ with Beckett. It is herethat a complex dilemma opens up for both current and future per-formances of the plays and is the subject of continual debate.

It is a theatrical commonplace that without change and experi-ment theatre becomes static and mummified. Once a play is pub-lished it ceases to be the author’s property, in that he can no longerexercise full control over it. Shakespeare lives today because he isconstantly re-invented. Each generation uses the plays to reflect theirown concerns and, though each new emphasis or re-shaping willhave its critics, new light is often shed on aspects of a Shakespeareantext that deepens and enriches audience experience of the plays.

Shakespeare’s five acts can accommodate such a translation interms, but experiment with Beckett’s plays is much more problemat-ic. Beckett did his best in his lifetime to control productions of hisplays via his agents. Today the Beckett Estate has an invidious task indeciding whether a performance flouting Beckett’s production in-tentions can go ahead; the notorious removal of Deborah Warner’sFootfalls 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.


to his stage directions and those who feel that experimenting with newways of performing his plays is the only way to keep them alive. Amongthe latter is Jonathan Miller, who feels that the Estate’s attempts toprotect Beckett from experiment will inevitably result in ‘dead the-atre’ – in effect charging the Estate with murdering the future of Beck-ett production11. Clearly, attempting to replicate Beckett’s own pro-ductions exactly is an arid enterprise, leading to stultified theatre. It isimpossible in any case, due to different personnel, theatre spaces andthe dating effects of time. Nonetheless, a production that followsBeckett’s stage directions does not have to be a sterile parroting of thepast. Provided that the director respects the text and can pass on hisenthusiasm to the cast, the chosen play will take life as their own cre-ation, while still keeping close to Beckett’s intentions.

In my view, while it may be possible with the longer plays tointroduce flexibility into production methods, in the short Mini-malist plays experimentation generally proves undesirable. Beck-ett’s concern for the human situation is so clearly apparent in thelater plays that a director determined to imprint them with hisown ‘stamp’ is likely to arrive at something much less than whatis already present in the text. In the late plays the text is narroweddown to reflect the bleakest realities of human existence. The pro-tagonist is presented with all choices made, no opportunity forchange and nowhere to go but on, as in the last words of the Tril-ogy: “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 theirbrisk movement has slowed to a shuffle about the stage, Beckettremarked: “Good. That’s a hundred thousand years later”12. Theghostly players are still in progress, still going on.

If a director subverts the Minimalist plays (attempting a con-temporary relevance, perhaps), this reduces their pre-existingdepth and the impact of the plays is lessened. When rehearsingFootfalls in 1976, Beckett remarked: “It’s Chamber Theatre andit must be perfect”13. As with Beethoven’s Late String Quartets,the late plays are Beckett’s final contribution to the theatre, andwho would attempt to change a note of the Quartets?


11 Conversation with Jonathan Miller, Oxford, 22nd June 2005.12 Conversation with Martin Esslin, Strasbourg, 4th April 1996.13 I am indebted to Martha Fehsenfeld for this information.



BIBLIOGRAPHY


Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Collected Shorter Plays of SamuelBeckett, 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 Corre-spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Knowlson, James, and John Pilling, 1979, Frescoes of the Skull, JohnCalder, London.

Knowlson, James et al. (editors), 1992-1995, The Theatrical Notebooksof Samuel Beckett, 4 vols., Faber and Faber, London.

Other works cited

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


Winnie’s Italian StageLaura Caretti

1. Oh les beaux jours and its Italian double

28th September, 1963 – Our journey back through the years startswith this date: the night when an Italian audience first watched aperformance of Happy Days. The stage is that of the Ridotto of LaFenice, in Venice, but the production comes from Paris. RogerBlin, who had earlier been praised in Italy for his production ofEn attendant Godot1, this time presents his staging of Oh les beauxjours as a world première (the show would open in Paris only amonth later)2.

Thus it is in Venice, during the Biennale Festival3, that theWinnie played by Madeleine Renaud not only receives for the firsttime a remarkable acclaim, but seduces and moves the audienceas had never happened before in a play by Beckett. Because of thequality of this exceptional performer, the label of ‘dark’ play-wright that had been stuck on Beckett starts to fade.

An uneasy question hovers in the reviews, the day after: does Ohles beaux jours belong to a different, more humane, less gloomyBeckett, or is it Madeleine Renaud who makes him look so? A crit-ic, who nevertheless does appreciate the show, puts forward the

1 En attendant Godot, produced by Blin, had been staged at the PiccoloTeatro in Milan in December, 1953.

2 Rehearsals were held in Paris at the Odéon and then were completed andstaged in Venice (Roger Blin interviewed by Lynda Peskine, in Revue d’Esthé-tique, numéro hors-série, 1990, p. 167).

3 The show, presented within the frame of the XXII Festival Internazionaledel Teatro di Prosa in the Biennale of Venice, was staged again on September29, 1963.


idea that Madame Renaud might infuse her character with asparkling 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 thediscovery of a Beckett who refuses to be confined in the usual for-mulas of the theatre of the absurd or even in those of an absolute,universal pessimism. Oh les beaux jours reveals such a powerfulmixture of tragic and comic strains that, according to Blin, everyword is infused with it4. Winnie’s black humour reopens in Italya debate on umorismo that had started with Pirandello.

This performance of Oh les beaux jours deserves to be remem -bered, if for nothing else, for the healthy jolt that it gave to receivedideas, but the impact it had did not stop here. Indeed, Blin’s pro-duction begot its own Italian double. It was a very unusual attemptto graft this vigorous French shoot into the not so thriving tree ofour theatre, but Gianfranco De Bosio, the director of the TeatroStabile in Turin, a disciple and a friend of Jean Louis Barrault’s andof Roger Blin’s, was the man who attempted this grafting5.

De Bosio proposed to Blin to direct an Italian version of Ohles beaux jours / Giorni felici6 with the same set that Matias haddesigned for the production in Paris, but with Italian actors7.And, for the leading part of Winnie, he chose Laura Adani, an ac-tress who specialised in comedy roles, younger than Renaud, anda perfect incarnation of the character Beckett describes (a woman“About fifty, well-preserved, blonde for preference, plump, armsand shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom”, Happy Days, p. 1) (figu -res 13 and 14).

L. Caretti. Winnie’s Italian Stage 365

4 See Gian Renzo Morteo, “Incontro con Roger Blin”, in I Quaderni del Tea-tro 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 ofthis 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 theFrench 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 gratefulto the Director of the Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile di Torino, Franco Crivel-laro, and to its Librarian, Anna Peyron, for their help in my research about theperformance.


Some people thought, at the beginning, that his was a ques-tionable choice, hardly suitable to the stiff dramatic atmospherethat was supposed to surround a Beckett character. That is whyLaura Adani was a surprise for both the audience and the critics.She displayed an unexpected ability to give voice to the shiftingmoods of the character, managing to make her Winnie very dif-ferent from Madame Renaud’s. In other words, the unusual ex-periment was quite successful.

The desert-like setting was the same, but the tender and har-rowing histoire d’amour told by Madeleine Renaud when told byLaura Adani sounded more like une histoire d’amour perdu, thestory of a slow and gradual loss of youth and love. The reviewerscompared the two actresses, focussing on their diversity. In thefirst act the Italian actress proved more sensual and seductive; inthe second part she underwent a radical transformation. She man-aged to convey the sense of an ending, the anguish of loneliness,the impossible recall of happy days, while tears kept rolling downher cheeks (figure 15).

Adani’s Giorni felici are completely different, I would say that herhappy days are more Italian, they are thicker, more solid and a bitgloomy, even though the hot sun in the desert hits hard on the womandoomed 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 herpresent misery, if we are to heed the clues provided by the dear, pettyobjects spread around her. Everything is harder, stronger, more bitter8.

Would Beckett have felt too much emotion in this Italian Winnieor would he have seen a Dantesque predicament in her tears? We on-ly know that he did not attend the performance, sending his wife inhis stead. Suzanne’s opinion must have been positive, though, sinceBeckett 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 amodel 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.


find a different stage we must abandon mainstream theatres andlook into the fringe. Beckett is one of the favourite authors ofmany avant-garde groups, even though they mean to follow theircreative imagination, which is very often unfaithful to the stage di-rections set down by the playwright. Among these groups, two ac-tors, Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, in 1969-1970tried their hands in an original experiment of mise-en-espace ofHappy Days9.

After Venice and Turin this time we move to Rome, in a pe-riod (the late Sixties) when many small theatres – set up by ac-tor-authors like Carmelo Bene, Vasilicò, Ricci and others – gethousefuls of young theatre-goers ready to share an electric inti-macy with the performers. The small venue of the Leopardo, inthe Monteverde neighbourhood, is one of such theatres. At thebeginning, Remondi and Caporossi used it as a workshop inwhich their different talents might find expression. Remondi al-ready had a solid experience as an actor and had measured him-self also against Beckett (in Aspettando Godot he had been an ef-fective Pozzo), whereas Caporossi, as a young architecture stu-dent, was more connected with the visual arts than with drama10.Their different experiences merged for the first time in the ideaof staging Giorni felici. It was an idea that marked the beginningof their artistic collaboration, but never became a full blown,public performance11.

Today they both fondly recall that project and still resent theveto that prevented them from showing their work to an audi-ence. Since they had intended to fuse the two characters, Winnieand Willie, in a single male actor12, they were accused of betray-


9 Giorni felici, open rehearsals for a show never staged, by and with ClaudioRemondi and Riccardo Caporossi, Teatro del Leopardo, 1970-1971.

10 See Sabrina Galasso, “Giorni felici: l’artista invade lo spazio scenico”, inIl 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 ver-

sion of Giorni felici (Prato, January 2005). Remondi was, as before, the only voiceof the monologue, but the words are not those of the original Winnie, they tell an-other story, evoke ‘different happy days’. Even the setting has changed: the actornow hangs from a steel trellis, and of the gravel-words (that we will describe in afew lines) now only a few stones remain, mysteriously dropped from above.


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. Theliving memories of the two performers and a few photographs al-low us to get an idea of the way the show was conceived forty yearsago. Let us try to picture what an imaginary member of the audi-ence would have seen.

Upon entering the house, his or her eyes would have been at-tracted by a graphic rendering of several lines of the Italian versionof Happy Days. Starting in the tiny foyer, even in the toilets and inthe theatre itself our imaginary spectator would have found on thewalls, on the floor, on the ceiling odd drawings, hieroglyphs or graf-fiti of Winnie’s words obsessively repeated in strange cobwebs ofconcrete poetry (figures 16 and 17). In this open space the memberof the audience could move freely or sit in one of the chairs scat-tered in different parts of the tiers and even on the stage. Thus theaction, which in the meantime would have started, could be seenfrom several angles (figure 18). Sitting on the floor in a corner be-neath 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 andpelt down all over the actor, beating a tattoo that set the rhythm ofhis/her speech. The action and the vocal performance followed thetempo of Beckett’s pauses. “We had analysed the text – Caporossiexplained to me – and found there were breaks, moments of sus-pension, like air bubbles; when those moments occurred, I wouldput a shovelful of pebbles into the conduit and words would startflowing again”. Thus Winnie was gradually covered up and whenthe 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 thesetting conceived by Beckett without being condemned for infi-delity because they basically respected the written text. This was nomean achievement, because this allowed them to visualise, accord-ing to their own creative perspective, the “expanse of scorched grassrising centre to low mound” (Happy Days, p. 1) in which Beckett’scharacter is “embedded”.



Thus on the Italian stage we have seen Winnie come out froma hole dug in the concrete on an urban building site (Anna Pro-clemer, 1990); emerge from a dustbin borrowed from Endgame(Miriam Abutori, 1992); remain shut in a sand-glass (AdrianaAsti, 1985); be pilloried in a manhole (Lucilla Morlacchi, 2000);be smothered by her own skirt (Anna D’Onofri, 1978) and cov-ered by a huge white sheet (Marion D’Amburgo, 1995). I thinkthis last variation deserves a closer analysis because the set de-signed by the director Giancarlo Cauteruccio conditioned andgave meaning to the whole production.

The theatre we enter now is on the outskirts of Florence, inScandicci. It is a theatre workshop where since the beginning themost advanced technological visual experiments have been triedout, and offered their services to the art of playwrights and play-ers alike. In the instance of this production of Giorni felici, a hugewhite wing took up the whole scene forming a sort of pyramidfrom whose top Winnie came out. Hanging up there, she re-minded the audience of other images and of other characters inBeckett’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 andmeanings: it could quickly become a screen onto which images ofcracked earth could be projected (Burri’s Le crete di Gibellina se-ries) or it could turn into a hospital bedsheet. At the bottom of it aseries of intra-venous vials would beat, drop after drop, Winnie’slifetime and the time of the show. Thus she did not appear so muchas a survivor in an apocalyptical wilderness, but as a terminal pa-tient who could still, in the first act, rejoice for the gift of yet an-other day with no pain and no aggravation (“– ah well – no worse– no better, no worse – no change – no pain – hardly any –”). In thisapparently steady lull, then, everything could start in a “normal”way: brushing her teeth and taking medication that promised tobring “instantaneous improvement”. Daily actions, as a conse-quence, did not look so trivial after all. It was just life going on.

While Willie kept reading his newspaper, she could cover upthe marks of time and of disease with the resources and the cos-metics pulled out of the big bag. All she needed was some “crim-son” on the lips and a wig to make up for the lost blonde hair hermemory keeps hauntingly recalling. In any case, there was always



the gun near at hand to ensure a quick end to a slow process ofdeath.

In the second act, this mask of deceptive happiness disap-peared altogether. Winnie’s face, deprived even of the bright redwig, rose pale from the sheet pulled up to her neck (figure 20).Her clear stream of consciousness records this sudden worseningof her condition, foreboding the complete paralysis, the loss ofwords, the final silence13. Yet a glimmer of happiness might stillbe possible. All she seems to need is some echoing memory, a bro-ken line, some unexpected gesture.

In the actual situation suggested by the direction, Winnie’s so-lo speech became more and more imbued with a tragic realism, thekind advocated by the theatre of cruelty. Consistent with this dra-matic vision, Cauteruccio gave the main role to Marion D’Ambur-go, an actress who came from the fringe theatre, and was familiarwith the theories of Artaud and of Grotowski. Her voice rang outthe deep notes in the score for voices Beckett wrote.

Next to her, Willie was played by the director himself, whogave to this character more emphasis than usual, foregroundingthe drama of his painful helplessness. Less hidden, more visible tothe audience, Willie made sure he was always there: he would bereading his newspaper, but he was also listening; his mind mightwander easily, but he would also answer her calls. Eventually, hewould rise at the foot of the bed as a lover-clown, with his wornout formal suit, holding his gloves in one hand as if they were aflower bouquet. He would attempt in vain to climb up and joinWinnie, up there by herself, alone, out of reach (figure 21). Andat the end he would slowly slide back down, as the waltz from TheMerry Widow filled the theatre.

4. Alone in a sea of sand

An expanse of white sand under a sparsely starred night sky: this isthe setting that Giorgio Strehler imagined for Giorni felici when he


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


staged it for the first time in 198214. Beckett’s stage direction wasrewritten in the new script as: “Out of the darkness, the shrill noteof a bell fills the void louder and louder. Blinding light. A desertbeach. Sand. A still, colourless sea extends to the horizon. Blacksky”15. From the frosty whiteness of the stage Winnie emerges likea wondrous flower, with her pink bodice and her red hat (figures22 and 23), as lonely as possible in the cosmic vastness of a myste-rious universe, where life is marked by orders coming out ofnowhere. Even so, the icy sea in which she is up to her neck cannotswallow her. She is not dying, she is struggling for life. Her innertime does not yield to the bell tallying her hours16. Her memoriesresist oblivion. We are not watching her fall, but her endurance. Sheendures and she blooms, in Strehler’s imagination, like Leopar di’swhin-broom (“La ginestra”) in the ashes of Mount Vesuvius.Through Leopardi’s magnifying lens, Strehler sees in Winnie herwill to survive to the very end (figures 24 and 25).

More than any other director we have mentioned, Strehlertries to convey Winnie’s drama as the drama of the human condi-tion. He leads the audience towards a shock of recognition: Win-nie is us. Her struggle, her survival strategies, her tricks, herfragility and her strength have all to do with us. That is why he in-sisted to stage designer Ezio Frigerio that the stage had to extendinto the audience, well beyond the forestage arch. Winnie, emerg-ing from the prompter hole, is thus closer to the audience and canweave an implicit dialogue with it:

Here I am, alone, stuck in the Universe, and you are listening tome. Listening to my neurotic repetitions, my labouring talk, talk, talkand you understand very well I’m just hiding the void, that I’m fillingthe 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 Batti stoniwho, 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 onthe Italian translation by Carlo Fruttero. All quotations are from Giulia Laz-zarini’s personal working script.

16 In the end, Winnie confronts the knell of the hours by dramaticallysinging louder and louder the waltz from The Merry Widow.


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 nowstuck in this “lonely desert” (Leopardi’s “solitario deserto”) andshe needs to trust again the wings of her art, “fanciful and hu-mane, lifelike and real, abstract and realistic, always soaked inlife,” as Strehler said18. From the start the director was sure of theactress’s talent, he felt that he could trust her ability to conveyboth “strength” and “tenderness”, her “truthful” way of actingout 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 im-pression that the character did not fit me. Winnie is a maturewoman, as Beckett describes her and as I had seen and appreci-ated her in Laura Adani’s performance. She seemed far away frommy 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 tosurvive, ended up looking more and more like her.

It is fascinating to listen to Giulia Lazzarini as she recalls thepast and retraces the steps that led her to a deeper understandingof this tragicomic and vital heroine19. Years later, the actressrecords her own changes of mind, relates how the role grew with-in and with her, and how her voice found a wider gamut of tones.There was a different dramatic quality, a stronger contrast oflights and shadows, more energy and even more anger. The shifts


17 In a letter of May 5, 1982, that Giorgio Strehler wrote to Giulia Lazzari-ni, published later as Giulia carissima in Strehler 2000a.

18 Giorgio Strehler, “Un modo vero di recitare la dialettica della vita”, in theHouse Programme of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

19 Giulia Lazzarini has spoken extensively about this at the Beckett in RomeConference. But in many occasions, I had the opportunity to talk with her aboutGiorni felici, about Strehler, Beckett and many other things. These talks werenever actual interviews: I usually ask very little but I listen carefully, and I learnto see through her eyes. For a while it is as if I could glance inside her work andget to know her wonderful art better. How can I thank her for this and how canI apologise with her for saving in these pages only a few fragments of what shehas shared with me?


from self-irony to hopelessness became sudden. The non stopspeed requested by Strehler was suddenly broken to let a gloomi-er anxiety surface. As Beckett insists, these are the moments of dé-faillance, when the mask drops and the moment is suspended inthe 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, thatwhich keeps Winnie from sinking and drowning in the sea ofsand. “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 en-ter your nose. You must keep talking. The rhythm cannot slowdown, it is the rhythm of someone drowning. Words are whatkeeps you afloat”. As time went by, according to the actress,words became thoughts. (“It takes time not so much to learn thewords, but to have them sediment in thoughts”.) This is what al-lowed her to speak to the audience with that “truthfulness” thatStrehler had seen in her.

We started this tour of Italian stages with the ‘double’ perfor-mance by Madeleine Renaud and Laura Adani. The setting wasthe same that the French stage designer had devised, followingBeckett’s directions, but the two actresses managed to stage quitetwo different shows. As Beckett himself demonstrates in his “Catas -trophe”, the player is the real “living variant” of the show. Thewings, the setting, the direction and all the technical apparatus ofHappy Days may stay the same through time, but the same doesnot apply to the player, who is “always soaked in life”. She is in-vested with the dynamics of the performance, with the link to thepresent, with the vital rhythm of the show, with the final ability togive 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-




licità”, an interview with Marion D’Amburgo, House ProgrammeTeatro 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 sceni-co”, in Idem, Il teatro di Remondi e Caporossi, Bulzoni, Roma.

I Quaderni del Teatro Stabile della Città di Torino, 1965, n. 3, Edizio-ni Teatro Stabile di Torino.

Peskine, Lynda, 1990, “Interview with Roger Blin”, 1990, in Revued’Esthétique, numéro hors-série, 1990, p. 167.

Strehler, Giorgio, 2000a, “Giulia carissima”, in the House Program-me for the revival of Giorni Felici, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2000.

Idem, 2000b, “Un modo vero di recitare la dialettica della vita”, in theHouse Programme of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.


FriendgameAnastasia Deligianni

Going through the recent publication of some French critical re-views of the best known performances of Waiting for Godot inFrance, between its 1953 world première and the Théâtre del’Odéon production of 1961, confirms the general impressiontrumpeted by this archival volume (Derval 2007): Samuel Beck-ett’s first play began as an avant-garde event, became a bourgeoisdrama and ended up as an officially sanctioned masterpiece, all inless than ten years.

We cannot but wonder in which kind of consciousness this isa judgment of any historical or aesthetic value. Either we aredealing here with the negative default notion of classicism in art,already dismissed by Beckett himself in his critical essays1, or itis 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 ableto give a useful answer in any related domain, we should have toresearch and redefine the famous subject-object relationship inart, but only after redistributing each of these two principal rolesto the most convenient poles2. Academia, artists, advertisers andthe general public are disputing this responsibility today andmore often than not they are playing dangerously with its neces-sary 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 quevous pouvez admirer sans crainte, se trouve sur une ligne qui va depuis lesgrottes des Eyzies jusqu’à la Galerie de France.’ On ne précise pas si c’est uneligne préétablie. [...] On ne lui dit jamais: [...] ‘Tout ce que vous saurez jamaisd’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).


Ancient dilemmas, in the heavy shadow of philosophical clas-sifications, which are also playfully present in Beckett’s work,struggle today against those omnipresent virtual surfaces of rapidelectronic communication, which Beckett’s late formal experi-ments seem to have prophesized. Thus, we may seem to be losinginterest in creating perceptions, for we are persuaded (and happyenough) to be fully perceived ourselves.

With all the above in mind, in order to examine if there is anyfuture left for the theatre and in front of whose eyes and senses,we recently took part in a significant theatrical experience inAthens, where the experiment of performing the Greek transla-tion of Waiting for Godot in its entirety, before an audience of sixyear olds, stimulated some interesting observations, from both themethodological and ideological point of view, which we shall pre-sent in this paper3.

As a consequence of the experience, a number of thoughtsarise, to begin with: how to “fail better” (Worstward Ho) and how“to end yet again” (“For to End Yet Again”). If Beckett still hasthings to tell us, it must be either thanks to the nature of thesethings or to our own nature. We must then define who we are asa public nowadays, or see, if on the contrary Beckett has nothingto tell us anymore, what has changed for us, since his texts havenot changed.

If a production of a Beckett play, realised with absolute faithto the text and the author’s stage directions but with some socialand artistic rules inverted or even broken, can still be successful,we think that this should indicate to us that a more generalisedevenly inverted passage from the stage to the page could be ofsome use against some current theoretical impasses4.

The procedure first. Since it was important that the childrenwere not conscious that they were taking part in an experiment,


3 Details about that theatrical experience, its organisation and its outcomewill be published in a web article.

4 There are debates about the limits of a given text’s interpretation. Re-specting or not the author’s will when using genetic material in literary criticismis a current subject of discussion. Another investigates the borders between genres (novel and theatre, for instance) in different eras and contexts.


we did not want to condition their responses, and so we offeredthem no guidance on how they were expected to behave as audi-ence. There was no theoretical or practical introduction to theplay itself. For some of the children, it was their first time in a the-atre. For all of them, it was, as far as we understood from theirteachers and family, their first contact with Beckett. No briefingwas provided to the children or their parents before the show.While bringing their children in, the parents did not know whatto expect. To them, it was just a planned school excursion. Theactors, technicians and director welcomed the tiny spectators andheld discussions with them after the show. Members of the ex-perimental team unobtrusively took notes during the perfor-mance and subsequent discussions. Of course, no child askedthem what they were doing there. The children took it for grant-ed. Our note-taking seemed natural and normal to them.

Our role next. We were divided between our reasons forchoosing Beckett, our expectations and our fears.

We were not only afraid that the whole procedure would ap-pear to be long, slow, boring or too difficult to follow for the chil-dren, used to video games and instant messages on mobilephones, but also that we might possibly have to deal later on withtheir overwhelming sadness. But, as we shall see, the children didnot want to move from their seats, although they were free to doso. Some demanded a third act or even more of the play, and au-tomatically proposed optimistic solutions for the protagonists’ sit-uation. The violence of the Hegelian master-slave relationshipadults often perceive in the play, or its postmodern absurdity, didnot seem at all unusual or of concern to the Lilliputians.

To those evanescent fears, we had initially been conditionedby what we perceive as narrow-minded scholarly elitism, againstwhich we were determined to fight.

In the ferocious critical process focused on Beckett, it oftencomes down to identifying his sources. So many possible namesare thrown up that it can look as if the work of Samuel Beckettwas all of literature, philosophy, theology or human sciences andtheir entire history. Unfortunately, this attitude represents a wayto approach Beckett’s work which, in our opinion, takes too muchinto consideration elements like the influence of a certain author

A. Deligianni. “Friendgame” 377


on Beckett or viceversa, instead of concentrating on more pro-found aspects of his writing.

For our unanticipated new critical approach and our un-premeditated journey along reasoning paths, prompted by a newgeneration and its unmediated reception of the play, it was Beck-ett 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 etle pantalon”: “Qu’est-ce que ça peut lui faire, que les enfants puis-sent en faire autant? Qu’ils en fassent autant. Ce sera merveilleux.Qu’est-ce qui les empêche? Leurs parents peut-être. Ou n’en au-raient-ils pas le temps?” (“La peinture des van Velde ou le Mondeet le pantalon”, p. 120). In our translation: “What does it matter ifchildren can do the same? Let them do so. That would be wonder-ful. What stops them? Their parents probably. Or haven’t they gotenough time?”. Children are often indeed left out of account be-cause 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 withold people, because they have spent all their lives without reach-ing the impossible answer, but he is expressing his admirationhere for the special interior language of children, which like thespeech patterns of old people can exteriorise quite unfamiliar andunestablished signs and codes. If Murphy, to give an examplefrom the prose texts, were a child, we would find his attitudesquite normal, or, at least, we would be patient till he grows up,thinking ‘he’ll grow out of it’. Presented as an adult, Murphy canbe taken as a mad, irrational and disturbing person. If he had thechance to grow old, he would be accepted as what we could de-


5 See also Angela Moorjani’s abstract for the International Samuel BeckettSymposium in Tokyo, 2006, September 29 – October 1, entitled “Child’s Playand the Learned Art of Unseeing”: “At the same time, the art of children clear-ly confirms that the realistic tradition of western art is based on habits and con-ventional rules that children haven’t acquired yet and adults must unlearn tosummon up the terrors and pleasures of child’s play that derive from anotherway of seeing. [...] The child thus becomes teacher to the parent, as the poetswould have it all along. Or the adult recovers the child’s art of unseeing that wasrepressed or discarded for adult conformity”: in http://beckettjapan.org/de -legates.htm (last accessed April 1, 2008).


fine as a microcosmopolitan. So, children, elders and adults whoare ‘different’ belong to the beloved little world. Because theBeckettian unwording the given world (Locatelli, 1990) is thecoming-and-going around another saying of another world, not atall unknown but simply forgotten or fallen apart in societieswhich prefer classifications with values offered as absolute. It isthe saying of the children and the elders, innocent or desenchant-ed, but pure and elementary in any case.

Just as Beckett himself would like to affect our nerves ratherthan our intellect, our interest was constantly focused on the chil-dren’s physical reactions and interactions throughout the perfor-mance and the questions they spontaneously asked, as if search-ing their way out of a day-dream.

Let us watch them closer then. Nervous but well-behaved atthe beginning, they eventually started to interfere with the plot bywholeheartedly laughing at Lucky’s dance or by replying to the re-peated phrases of Didi and Gogo, before the actual actors had thetime to speak their lines. At the interval, most of them were shout-ing to each other, betting on Godot’s coming or not, some of thembeing sure to have seen him in the toilets waiting to come out andperform, and others telling their parents, in their own words, thestory of a promise they had just been given in the auditorium.

In the second act their enthusiasm progressively gave place toa strange silence. For a moment we thought that they were simplytired, but over the six days of this experiment this change oc-curred at almost the same moment and, when we paid more at-tention to that phenomenon, we understood: the children weresimply waiting, their clever eyes wide open and moving quicklyfrom one point of the stage to another, without listening to thetext anymore and without following the action taking place, butas if they were lost in their feelings and thoughts in front of ascreen. When the actors came out for their curtain call, it was asif the children were just waking up. They seemed to feel betrayed,judging from the questions they asked each other on what had ac-tually happened. Some of them were weeping and others were ar-guing with everybody around them that since it was not over theydid not have to get up and leave the place.



Excited and confused, no child of the almost two thousandwho attended that week of performances asked anything aboutthe meaning of a particular word or gesture. The following issueswere 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 giv-en for his not coming yet was that Didi and Gogo stink, and wecannot but think here of the basic definition of living human be-ings given by Beckett6. Many were the children who asked theirparents 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. Ascould be expected, depending on the sex of the child and the in-evitable complicity between children of the same gender, four prin-cipal outlooks were quickly formed: one of boys believing thatGodot is coming because the child is a boy and so tells the truth, oneof girls believing that Godot is not coming because the child is a boyand so lies, one of boys believing that Godot is not coming becausethe child is a girl and so lies, and one of girls believing that Godot iscoming because the child is a girl and so tells the truth. There wereof course some minorities of indifferent observers as well, and onecould not but be amazed by the subjectivity and the plurality ofpoints of view, making the possibility of any consensus absurd.

3. Many children were keen to know if Vladimir and Estragonare strangers, friends or brothers, mysteriously adding to thisquestion 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 yearsold”, although there is no such description of him in the text.

5. Very often, and when no evident answer could be providedby the adults, the children did not take long to come up with an ex-planation for something that had happened on stage: “it probablywas 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 del’humus, ne m’est pas désagréable. [...] combien préférable à celle des vivants,des aisselles, des pieds, des culs, des prépuces cireux et des ovules désappoin-tés. [...] Ils ont beau se laver, les vivants, beau se parfumer, ils puent” (Premieramour, pp. 8-9).


Basic body symptoms and needs, identities which can only bespecified through relationships, an augmented sense of time, in-genious incapacity to give definite and unambiguous directions,and imaginative regeneration of the least detail, are enough hintsto characterise Beckett’s oeuvre, as well as the nature of humanbeings and the power of art, in the only way he ever sought to putthem before us.

More than once Beckett was explicit about this: “Don’t seekdeep motivation everywhere. If there is one here I’m unaware ofit. [...] Life is an asking for and a promising of what both askerand promiser know does not exist” (Samuel Beckett to AlanSchneider, 10 January 1958, in Harmon 1998, p. 29).

Because there cannot be an absolute truth, there is only theprinciple of the consciousness of existence through birth anddeath, and the infinite possible changes in-between: the so-calledlife. Literature, as life’s mise en oeuvre, remains an unfinishableaction when it is not about researching a new idea and mostlyabout the survival game. Criticism is, despite itself, a part of thisgame too. And Samuel Beckett appeared in a transitional era toprove to us that this survival game is in fact the nature of any hu-man creator, human creature or human creation and their onlypossible occupational task, although end-less, in both possiblesenses, without stop and without aim.

The comparison or distinction between forms, concept andverse, philosophy and art, is just another episode in the history ofan emotion that suddenly turns bad, and so we need to run after itand heal it with words: we do not learn how to get to feel, but welearn how to alter our feelings, by adding or erasing reasons, bymaking stories of them. We learn how to formalise our sentimentsand how to give possible shapes to chaos in order to tame the pass-ing time, but the children of our example just felt and expressedthings before having thought of them, and this is “the ideal core ofthe onion” that Beckett managed to reach, or, if you prefer, theubiquous sentimental centre of chaos with no visible formal bor-ders yet. We are more or less free to start putting these borders, tostop children from being naïve, but we should first admit that inthat case the borders will be the garments and not the bones of ourstructure, and that in that case our technique will be the exact op-posite of the excavation proposed by Beckett in his Proust.



The interchange and multiplicity of combinations and of strug-gles between form and content, art and life, constitute the literaryhabit, but the literary organism itself is independent of and unin-terested in meaning, since the originality of the object treated or ofthe subject doing the treating are not valid or credible notions. Itis precisely Beckett who managed to show all this to us, with hismeticulous experiments as the only possible thing to do in the faceof holistic criticism, and the “all sides” literary and theatrical pro-duction that preceded, succeeded and encircled him. The loneli-ness of Descartes, Pascal’s thinking reed, Nietzsche’s superman,Merleau-Ponty’s savage being, or Lévinas’s face, should not betaken as achieved thinking goals either, but rather as useful linksin the one and only continuous chain of human self-investigation.

Beckett himself was born in the criticism. After his first andlast attempt at academic suicide, he resurrected himself in the po-etry and novels in English. Artistically, he survived the SecondWorld War by writing Watt, then turned to drama and the use ofFrench. He attempted a third rebirth near his physical death, withthe gradual abandonment of any established word language andthe passage, through blind voices and dumb images, to the senti-mental formalism described below: since whatever we try to ex-press about expression itself will always need a kind of expressionso as to be expressed, the source of the universe as we know it, isthis eternal, unsolvable, ill seen ill said passage from the fugitivesensual human body to a cheating consensual language.

We do not claim here to be already able to generalise our find-ings. We hope to explore with other artists whether a more gen-eral application of this originary passage principle, beyond-any-principle, is possible in art. Concerning Beckett more precisely,we think we have discovered a way to be consistent with thedepth of his aesthetic project as he was feeling it, although hecouldn’t always be faithful to it because of the obligation to ex-press, stronger than anything (see here Gontarski’s comment onBeckett’s repeated but never achieved threat to stop directing:Gontarski 2006, p.144). We cannot be naïve anymore but weshould be honest when taking others by force in our influencegame. And this for at least three reasons, which will end this pa-per:



a. The whole influence affair is often misunderstood and re-duced in its value by the civil war inside contemporary criticism,which often scares potential actors and students before they evenget to know if they like the author’s text or not. If we quickly justput an and between two great names, because we have found oneor two notions that those names both used or because we have ahint in a diary of a possible meeting of theirs, we do not learnmuch about the particularity in the depth of either work. Namingand placing people in the same artistic movement or philosophi-cal school does not teach us anything new. On the contrary, thisneatness of identification sometimes can get even more dangerousthan Beckett himself thought, especially when we see it facilelytaught to new students. A debts and legacies approach should nottake less than a lifetime for a critic. It is way beyond the limits ofa brief article or even a lengthy book.

b. An important comment on a text by Beckett should comefrom the reading of the totality of his work, so as to feel, keep inmind and apply elsewhere its original project and not extrapolatesome spare if striking quotations. Intertextuality, for Derrida asfor Kristeva (since we are often asked to use them as references incontemporary criticism), should mean first of all (and this is ac-tually an old Spinozan concept7) to ask the same author’s wordsto explain one another through their changes over time or in theirliterary space. While one does not prefer “Beckett speaking ofBeckett”, one should not consider any specific critic’s analysis asthe Beckettian Bible either: we can illustrate Blanchot or Bataille


7 In his Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza shows how many theologicalchurch and religion assertions are actually political opinions having nothing todo with the text of the Bible itself. Thus, he undertakes the reading of the en-tire Bible, for which he suggests a new general reading method based on theprinciple of explaining the text only by the text itself, without substituting moreor less free interpretations. This means that in case of problems in understand-ing on the part of the reader or of misunderstandings due to the text’s obscuri-ty or to contradictions arising, we should search in the rest of the same text forpassages 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 Godotcover, 1952, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris: “Je ne sais pas plus sur cette pièceque celui qui arrive à la lire avec attention. [...] Tout ce que j’ai pu savoir, je l’aimontré”.


with quotations from Beckett better than Beckett with quotationsfrom Blanchot and Bataille, because it was they who tried toanalyse and understand him, and not the other way round8.

c. We cannot but recognize the historical value of eruditearchive research, but it is equally interesting to us, and more in-dicative of an authentic work of art, to record its reception byreaders or spectators, either when this reception inspires the au-thor, if he or she is still alive, or when it influences the future pre-sentation of new productions after the author’s death. What wemost miss nowadays is perhaps the opportunity to get in touchwith the text itself and ‘record the reactions’ before any critical in-terpretation conditions them. This should be a priority for an em-pirical approach.

So, reading and playing Beckett again in this light, firstly shak-ing hands with the affective half of our divided and intellectuallypretentious self, in order to teach Beckett faithfully and make hiswork genuinely known, is all we are trying to suggest here: thebare and strong friendship of a pair of skillful hands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 anda 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 BeckettSymposium in Tokyo 2006, September 29 – October 1, entitled “Beckett’s Self-Translation and Intertextuality”: “In his 1988 study of Beckett’s self-translation,Babel and Beckett (University of Toronto Press), Brian T. Fitch sets aside thequestion of how intertextual effects survive translation, and he neglects to notethat some of Beckett’s English texts have a rich intertextual resonance quite ab-sent from their French counterparts”: in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm(last accessed April 1, 2008).



“Peintres de l’empêchement”, 1948, in Cohn (editor), 1983, Disjectacit., pp. 133-137.

Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Bo-yars, 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, NewYork, pp. 243-246.

Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dra-matic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.

Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The CompleteShort Prose, 1929-1989, Grove, New York.

Criticism

Derval, André, 2007, Dossier de presse En attendant Godot (1952-1961), IMEC et 10/18, Paris.

Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlman, 2006, Beckett after Beck-ett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).

Locatelli, Carla, 1990, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s ProseWorks after the Nobel Prize, University of Pennsylvania Press,Philadelphia.

Moorjani, Angela, 2006, “Child’s Play and the Learned Art of Unsee-ing”, in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessed April1, 2008).

O’Leary, Joseph S., 2006, “Beckett’s Self-Translation and Intertextu-ality”, in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessedApril 1, 2008).

Other works cited

Spinoza, Baruch de, 1677, Tractatus theologico-politicus, in RobertHarvey 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 FilmLino Belleggia

In his Diary of a Bad Year John Maxwell Coetzee refers to a pic-ture “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 ‘hunt-ed’. The question is, hunted, hounded by what or whom? The mostobvious answer: hounded by the photographer. Did Beckett really de-cide of his own free will to sit in a corner, at the intersection of threedimensional axes, gazing upward, or did the photographer persuadehim to sit there? In such a position, subjected to ten or twenty or thir-ty flashes of the camera, with a figure crouching over you, it is hard notto feel hunted.

(Coetzee 2007, p. 201)

In this picture Beckett is hunted by an Eye, the camera eye; inFilm, Beckett’s first and only movie, written in 1963 and shot inNew York in 1964, the protagonist, Buster Keaton, is hounded bythe Eye, a movie camera eye.

Film was commissioned to Beckett by his friend Barney Ros-set1, the publisher of Grove Press, who wanted to move into filmproduction, and invited Beckett, Harold Pinter and EugèneIonesco to write three new scripts to be produced in a feature-length trilogy by the Evergreen Theater, a separate film unit ofRosset’s company. However, of the three the only one that madeit as far as production was Film by Beckett2, whose script was

1 For a brief account of Rosset’s experience in producing Film see Rosset2001.

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


published for the first time in 1967 by Faber, along with “Act With-out Words” and the television drama “Eh Joe”. Beckett’s passionfor the Seventh art contrasted with his fear of writing on commis-sion, a reticence heightened by a traumatic dispute over a film con-tract which he had signed in August 1962 for a film based on Wait-ing for Godot. James Knowlson mentions in his biography that “thetrouble surrounding this proposal helped to harden Beckett’s op-position to any small or large screen adaptations of plays written forthe stage or radio” (Knowlson 1996 [1997, p. 505]), so much thatin 1963 he refused Ingmar Bergman permission to stage the two ra-dio plays All That Fall and “Embers”.

In the first few lines of the screenplay “Outline” of Film, Beck-ett specifies that the story takes place “about [in] 1929. Early sum-mer morning” (Film, p. 164), as detailed. In 1929, Beckett was inParis, where, as he told Mel Gussow in 1984, “The Surrealists, An-dré Breton, [were] laying down the law – the artistic law” (Gussow1996 [2000, p. 47]). In 1929 Breton’s 1924 Manifeste du Surréa -lisme was reprinted, whilst the latest poems by Tristan Tzara, PaulÉluard, and Breton himself were published in small journals. Beck-ett “could not feel any affinity with the surrealists mainly because[...] they were all cold or even hostile towards Joyce’s ‘Revolutionof the Word’. On the other hand he identified with the atmosphereof experimentation and innovation which characterised the surre-alist movement” (p. 47). The young Beckett must have been influ-enced by the importance placed by the surrealists on psyche andspirituality, capable of revealing an authentic reality free from allconditioning of reason, superior to what human beings are used to.He must also have had an understanding of the new role of the sur-realist director-author who didn’t attempt to please the audienceand who, on the contrary, wanted to irritate the viewers, alienatingthem from the outside world, and leaving them at the mercy of theturmoil he had provoked. “He enjoyed Marcel Duchamp, wholived near him. I commented on Duchamp’s objects trouvés – MelGussow recounts – such as the urinal he exhibited as a work of art.Beckett laughed: ‘A writer could not do that’” (p. 47). Accordingto some critics, the thinking behind a drama like Endgame can befound in the influence of Duchamp, an exceptional chess playerand author of a chess treatise, based on the notion of Zugzwang,still considered significant today.

390 Beckett and Cinema


In April 1929 the film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì Unchien andalou was shown at the Ursulines cinema in Paris, and it wasto stay on the screen of the “Studio 26” cinema for nine months. Atthe premiere, which brought together Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier,Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Tzara and René Magritte, just to name a fewof the guests, one of the greatest scandals of the history of cinematook place, one that would eventually be part of the surrealist leg-ends. The screenplay of Un chien andalou was published in themonographic number of the journal This Quarter dedicated to Sur-realism, in 1932. In that same issue, Beckett published his transla-tions of some writings by Breton, Éluard and René Crevel.

Setting his film in 1929, when the first sound film, The JazzSinger, was shown, was for Beckett a way to support by contrasthis decision to shoot a silent movie3, and stress the pivotal role ofimages over words in his cinematic experience. However, the set-ting in 1929 is essentially a homage to Un chien andalou, and thereference to the surrealist masterpiece unveils the main characterof the film, ‘E’, the eye.

Originally the film was to be called Eye, in reference to the eyethat in close-up opens and closes Film, like that in the first sceneof Un chien andalou, which Buñuel himself, this time as the actor,cuts open horizontally with a razor blade, thereby making one ofthe most famous sequences in cinema history. The eye is dividedinto two parts to make possible the use of double vision since theeyes cannot see everything, nor can they decipher the surrealistworld of dreams: the visions and the hallucinatory distortions thatBuñuel is about to show the audience. The main character of Unchien andalou turns his eyes backwards and inside his own head,showing the white of the eyes in a desperate attempt to under-stand through introspection. According to Buñuel, it is essentialfor human beings to switch on (in their own eyes) a new visionwhich can show what is normally just background, those charac-teristics which normal vision cannot capture. The death of visiontherefore is equivalent to the denial of life as shown by bleedingeyes gouged out of the sockets of the dead and rotting cow. But,

L. Belleggia. The Indiscreet Charm of the Cinematic Eye 391

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


as in Film, when the eyes succeed in revealing the ultimate truthof perception, and therefore the impossibility to escape from theeye mastering the self, this provokes such a deep fear in thosewatching as to cause blindness. In fact the eye which opens andcloses Film is lifeless: a terrible vision has taken life away.

In 1929, while on the set next door Buñuel was filming his sec-ond film L’âge d’or at the film studio in Billancourt, Paris, SergeiM. Eisenstein worked as a consultant on a short musical film en-titled Romance sentimentale. Around 1930, the Russian directorwas already well known abroad, and in the same year he spoke atthe Sorbonne where nearly two thousand people crowded to-gether to witness a private showing of The General Line, whichthe Parisian police banned a few minutes before the scheduled be-ginning. Beckett had always been very interested in films and infilm theory and, during the difficult months between 1935 and1936, he devoured books by Vsevolod Pudovkin (a precursor offilm montage in Russian film), books on him written by the Ger-man theorist Rudolf Arnheim, and many by the director and mon-tage theorist Eisenstein4. In the summer of 1936, Beckett wrote aletter to Eisenstein5, proposing to go to Moscow, at his own ex-pense, to live there for a month as a disciple in the State Institutefor Cinematography. Unfortunately, Eisenstein never got to seethat letter, as 1936 had been a bad year for the Soviet director.Several weeks before its completion, Eisenstein was ordered tosuspend the production of his film Bezhin Meadow, attacked as‘formalistic’ because of its poetic interpretation of reality. Theproduction was stopped permanently by Stalinist officials in 1937and the film remained unfinished; the sole surviving copy was de-stroyed, supposedly in a bombing raid during World War II, butmore likely burned outright: the suppression of Bezhin Meadowwas said to be part of an ongoing campaign against the artisticavant-garde in Soviet Union during Stalin’s regime.

When it came to choosing the director of cinematography, oneof the most important roles in the making of a movie and espe-cially a black and white movie, Beckett’s passion for the experi-


4 See Bair 1978 [1990, pp. 215-216], and Knowlson 1996 [1997, pp. 226,521].

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


ments of the Soviet filmmakers deeply influenced the final deci-sion. Eventually the production called Boris Kaufman, the broth-er of the Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov, the inventor of the“Cine-Eye”, and Beckett felt very proud to have such an impor-tant technical contribution to his movie. Kaufman had worked ontwo films by Jean Vigo, Zéro de conduite (1933) and L’Atalante(1934), one of the groundbreaking masterpieces of cinema, andhad later worked for Elia Kazan in On the Waterfront, for whichhe won an Academy Award for the best cinematography in 1954.Boris Kaufman’s stylistic touch made a big contribution to the fi-nal result of Beckett’s film. His characteristic use of light tended,in exteriors, to have the effect of condensing surfaces – he was fa-mous for his fondness for filming walls and buildings in an ex-pressionistic manner, whilst in interiors he used to build the spacein a vertical and narrow way to emphasise the intensity of forceswhich work on the body in a closed space.

The decision to give the role of the protagonist to BusterKeaton, one of Beckett’s favourite movie artists, seems to be basedon the same grounds. Revered as much by Eisenstein, who consid-ered him his favourite actor, as by the Surrealists, in the mid-Six-ties Keaton was an old movie star of silent cinema, whose artisticlife had apparently stopped in 1927, when his career had begun totail off. In 1956, Keaton had turned down the part of Lucky in thefirst American production of Godot, calling the script incompre-hensible and a waste of time. Nonetheless it had been suggestedthat Waiting for Godot could have been inspired by a minor Keatonfilm, The Lovable Cheat from 1949, adapted from Le Faiseur, a playby Honoré de Balzac also known as Mercadet, in which the pro-tagonist waits impatiently for the return of his partner who is calledGodeau6. When Beckett and Keaton met at a hotel in New YorkCity 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 outthat, 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 on-ly after his completion of Godot, but [added] cannily: ‘It may seem a surprisinggap in the knowledge of a Master of Arts in French, with a wide knowledge ofFrench literature and culture. [...] It is not impossible that although Beckett’sconscious memory has released its hold on Mercadet, the subconscious still re-tained the echo of it’” (Bryden 1994, p. 50).


Irish writer was, and certainly had never read any of his works.Talking about Film, Mel Gussow recalls an interview with Beckettin 1982: “[He] said that Buster Keaton had accepted the role sim-ply as ‘a job’. [...] Keaton did not know Beckett’s plays. They couldonly talk about silent movies. Still Beckett seemed to like him, per-haps largely in memory of Keaton’s comedy” (Gussow 1996 [2000,p. 41]). Alan Schneider referred to this meeting as one of those mo-ments that seem inevitable before they happen, impossible whenthey take place, and incredible afterwards. They came from two to-tally different worlds and times, and probably they had nothing tosay to one another.

Filming was not easy, at least at the beginning, since this wasSchneider’s first movie experience. However, with the exception ofBoris Kaufman, always worried about the perfect light, everyonewas sympathetic. Once they had overcome the initial difficultieswith the outdoor shots, and started filming inside, everything wasmuch easier. Schneider did not always know what he was doing buthe thought things didn’t seem too bad. Keaton’s professionalismamazed everyone; he was indefatigable, although not very talkative,and he happily gave his full collaboration for the whole period offilming. Afterwards, Keaton said that he had understood only afterthe end of shooting that the film meant something, even if he didn’tknow what exactly and that it had, after all, been worth it7.

An initial montage took place, not without confrontations withthe film’s editor Sidney Meyers (the crucial filmmaker of the NewAmerican Cinema who co-directed the pivotal The Savage Eye in1960)8, in the presence of Schneider and Beckett, in order to showthe author a provisional version of the film before he left for Eu-rope. The first cut was not, in the end, all that different from thefinal one, lasting a total of 22 minutes, and the technical defects,mostly in the outdoor section, are mainly due to Schneider’s lackof experience.


7 The first encounter between Beckett and Keaton, as well as the wholeshooting of the movie, are extensively reported in Schneider 1969.

8 Part drama and part documentary, The Savage Eye opens by introducingthe camera lens as a character who will follow the leading lady throughout herday, along with a masculine voice assailing her with questions. Most of the char-acters are all too aware they are being photographed and thus cannot be takenas completely ‘real’.



The biggest concern for a filmmaker is the distribution of themovie, when the whole production comes into life in the darknessof movie theatres, and Film was never properly distributed eitherin the States or in Europe9. Always a complex process, distributionwas particularly difficult in the case of Film, a black and white,silent, short film, difficult to slot into one of the official Hollywoodgenres.

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 afilm that relentlessly pursues a single-minded goal: to thrill the au-dience as the plot builds towards a climax, which usually is theepilogue. The tension usually arises when the main character isplaced in a dangerous situation with no escape. In a thriller, thehero is essentially somebody ordinary whose life is threatened,usually because he is unknowingly involved in a dangerous or po-tentially deadly situation. The characters in a thriller often comeinto conflict with each other or with outside forces – the menaceis sometimes abstract or shadowy.

The protagonist of Beckett’s thriller is ‘O’, the object, houndedby a villain who, as in a typical suspense movie, presents obstaclesthat the hero must overcome. Despite the “General” indications ofthe screenplay, which relate that the same main character is divid-ed in two, ‘O’ and ‘E’, the audience of the actual movie will ac-knowledge the mystery beyond the character only at the end, as ina typical thriller. ‘E’ is a one-eyed entity with a monocular vision:in the last shots the movie camera frames Keaton for the first timewith a close-up, and the viewer discovers that the left eye of ‘O’ iscovered by a patch. The hero – the perceived – desperately tries toescape from his hunter – the perceiver. In order to hide himselffrom the extraneous gaze, ‘O’ stays within what Beckett called the“angle of immunity” (Film, p. 164). This is the reason why Beckettestablishes 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 thecritics’ praise and several official awards, for example at the London Film Fes-tival where it was named ‘Outstanding Film of the Year’, and at the Tours FilmFestival where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize in 1966.


at an angle which will not exceed 45°. When this angle is exceeded‘O’ enters percipi, experiencing, as Beckett defined it, the “anguishof perceivedness” (p. 163).

As the reference to George Berkeley’s philosophical theoryseems to fade away, the film theory reveals its presence in Beck-ett’s vision of film experience. Actually the “Outline” opens with“esse est percipi” but in the second draft Beckett seems to placeless importance on Berkeley’s ideas, making clear that “No truthvalue attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dra-matic 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 typesof cinematic movement-images: the action-images (a perception ofaction – medium shots), which include both the street and stairsscenes, the perception-images (or perception of perception – longshots), for the scene inside the room, and the affection-images (“theperception of oneself through oneself” – close-ups), for the hiddenroom and the scene when ‘O’ dozes off10. In the first and secondpart, all is the perception of ‘E’, which coincides with the cameraand also with the audience’s perception, with occasional interven-tions of the blurred and unfocussed vision of ‘O’ shown cinemato-graphically through a lens gauze, which intensifies the mystery. Inthe third part, Beckett alternates the vision ‘O’ has of the room tothe continual perception that ‘E’ has of ‘O’.

Film opens with the extreme close-up shot of a wrinkled eyefollowed by the shot of the rough texture of a wall: the two con-flicting shots create a new image, which is the feeling that a set ofeyes could suddenly appear from the wall. In his essay Film Form,Eisenstein wrote that a new idea occurred “from the collision ofindependent shots” (Eisenstein 1949, p. 49), and these new ideasare produced in the mind of the spectators viewing a film. Ac-


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


cording to the Soviet filmmaker, “the basic indication of the shotcan be taken as the final summary of its effects on the cortex ofthe brain as a whole” (Eisenstein 1949, p. 67), and in Film the ef-fect is one of indefinite suspense which builds up right from thefirst shots as soon as the chase starts in the street with the indis-creet eye of the movie camera hounding the victim.

During the first part in the streetand 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, lookingat the movie camera, ‘E’, in close-ups, have the same expression asthe florist who meets ‘O’ on the stairs. The expression reveals thesurprise mixed with horror, that Beckett defines as “an agony ofperceivedness” (p. 165). They have exactly the same facial expres-sion 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 lim-ited angle of 45°, and enlarges small details on his screen with ex-treme close-ups to make these details part of the action. Thisseems to echo the section of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art, pub-lished in 1933, dedicated to “an entirely new technique of close-ups” created by the Russian film artists:

The possibility of varying the range of the image and the distancefrom the object thus provides the film artist with the means of split-ting up the whole of any scene easily without interfering with reality.Parts represent the whole, suspense may be created by leaving what isimportant or remarkable out of the picture.

(Arnheim 1933 [1957, p. 81])

‘O’ doesn’t know from whom or what he is running, but hisdesperation grows minute by minute particularly during the firstsection of the third part, the room scene, which Deleuze called per-ception-images (or perception of perception). In this part ‘O’ triesto eliminate every possible gaze from the room, coming from ani-mals, objects, walls, photographs, holes in the window curtain11.


11 After covering both the goldfish bowl and the parrot’s cage with his over-coat, ‘O’ opens a folder, and after having turned 90° to avoid the gaze of the eye-lets, he takes out some photographs. In the way that Krapp relives his past withrecorded tapes, the protagonist of Film relives moments of his life by looking atphotographs which capture him at different stages of his life. He feels threat-


The montage of this sequence alternates the circular movement of45° of the camera with close-ups, and extreme close-ups of the in-discreet eyes of the objects. In the whole movie, Beckett used ex-treme close-ups only for the faces of the characters who perceiveto be perceived (the couple, the florist and ‘O’ in the last shot), andfor the animals and objects which give ‘O’ the perception of per-ception. In Eisenstein’s film theory, the repetition with a degree ofvariation of a fragment, especially if identified with a close-up as inthe case of Film, becomes an agent of unity, which also acts to cre-ate the rhythm of the work. In Film the use of repetition is not on-ly a basic unifying principle, but it also has the advantage and im-pact of generating echoes. And the echoing – the tool, accordingto Eisenstein, for the artistic penetration of mind and body – formsa 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 gameof chase and escape which is in a way at the heart of Beckett’s con-cern in his film experience. ‘E’ seems to chase ‘O’ as Beckett is look-ing for an art form able to represent the gap between observer andobserved, a way to project this dual and conflicting perceptionwhile trying to give form to that reality. A film’s capacity to leap be-yond the limits of its material informed Eisenstein’s writings andled to his claim – which deeply fascinated Beckett – that filmbrought to fruition all the yearnings of all other art forms. ‘O’ seemsto escape the tyrannical condition of the object as prisoner in theperception of the perceiver, and as secluded from the events tak-ing place around it. In Eisenstein, Beckett saw the possibility to freethe object from its frozen condition at the moment of expression,and to make it part of the transformations happening while the ob-ject’s relationship with the world changes. And this is the case of asequence from The General Line by Eisenstein12, released again in


ened by the gaze of the people who are observing him from photographs, andhis trembling hands seem to interpret his thoughts. He ends ripping up the pho-tographs irritably.

12 In his essay “Beckett, Eisenstein and the Image: Making an Inside an Out-side” (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


1929, in which the extreme close-ups within the pathos structure(fragmentation, reconstruction, leap, ecstasy) let the object (a milk-separator) come out of its materiality to a new dimension of mean-ing: the celebration of Stalin’s agricultural reform. As the object, orbetter an extreme close-up of a detail of the milk-separator, leapsto another dimension through deformation, the close-ups of the“curiously carved headrest” (Film, p. 167) of a rocking-chair launchthe object to a new stage and make it part of the whole action withits perceiving eyes.

The epilogue, which Deleuze defined the affection-imagespart, takes place in the room, where, taking advantage of the tor-por of ‘O’ and therefore of the extinction of subjective percep-tion, the movie camera ‘E’ manages to get in front of ‘O’, leadingthe audience to the climax, to the thrilling moment. ‘O’ is wokenup with a start by the enquiring gaze of the eye shot in a blurredclose-up, because now it is ‘O’ who perceives. The leap is accom-plished. The movie camera ‘E’ is the double of ‘O’, and the onlydifference between the two can be noted just by facial expres-sions: the expression of ‘E’ is “neither severity nor benignity, butrather acute intentness” (p. 169), and the expression of ‘O’ is oneof anguish. The unified character closes his eyes and covers hisface with his hands. The mystery is solved, but this is not the end,since we do not know, as Gilles Deleuze pointed out, what willhappen next, once the double face disappears into darkness:

Will it die out and will everything stop, even the rocking of therocking chair, when the double face slips into nothingness? This iswhat the end suggests – death, immobility, blackness.

(Deleuze 1986 [2001, p. 68])

According to Deleuze, in Film Beckett reversed the idea of anevolution of subjectivity, switching off all the possible images – ac-


he refers to an evening spent with friends reading some poems: “One in whichthe rime mouth-drouth occurs repeatedly is the most remarkable, like the bulllet loose among the cows in Eisenstein’s General Line, a reference which I con-fess only occurs to me this moment, in the calm light of March winds caught uplike sleeping daffodils. I understand that one evening at the Sinclairs’ you pavedthe way for one of your explosions of reality” (Beckett Archive, Harry RansomHumanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin).


tion-images, perception-images, and affection-images – in order toreach a primordial world before the existence of man proceedingtowards the very materiality of the cinematic process, the purityof “the mother movement-image” (Deleuze 1986 [2001, p. 68])through a symbolic system of simple codes: a road often followedby the so-called experimental cinema with much more complextechnical methods, drawing attention to the very materiality of thecinematic process. One example is the American filmmaker StanBrakhage, 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 eyeunprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respondto the name of everything but which must know each object encoun-tered in life through an adventure of perception. [...] Imagine a worldalive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endlessvariety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine aworld before the ‘beginning was the word’.

(Brakhage 1963 [2003, p. 73])

Brakhage’s investigation of the threat and inevitability ofblindness, and as a consequence of “the distinctly ecstatic plea-sures of obscurity”, is part of a long tradition of ocular aggressionin avant-garde cinema, “always implicitly aimed at the open eyesof the viewer” (Dworkin 2005, p. 137), which dates back again tothe razor scene in Un chien andalou. His films “are intimate phys-ical portraits of their viewers; they hold up a mirror [...] of theglaucous, carnal eye looking at its fragile fleshy self” (p. 139), rais-ing crucial issues about the essence of the cinematic eye and aboutthe nature of spectatorship. In his filmmaking Brakhage empha-sised “the illusion of clear vision” (p. 137) and that even “thehealthiest vision is less clearly transparent than we typically imag-ine” (p. 135), which he made clear in The Act of Seeing with One’sOwn Eyes (1971) with the empty sockets in the autopsied skull.In Film, ‘E’ and ‘O’ are discovered to be partially blind. Yet theirvisions do not add up to a whole, since each is blind in the sameeye, and this vision is partial for the spectator as well.

During the Fifties and Sixties, several directors, including Al-fred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni and Michael Powell, fo-



cussed their efforts to explore the referentiality of cinema as an artform in three differently unconventional thrillers whose protago-nists are all strictly related to the world of images. In Rear Win-dow (1954), Hitchcock conceived his groundbreaking study ofvoyeurism as the purest expression of his idea of the cinematic ex-perience, placing the protagonist, a photographer, in the same po-sition of the movie spectator, right in front of a window. In An-tonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the photographer’s impossibility ofseeing the truth in his pictures seems to suggest that for every mo-ment made visible there is another that becomes invisible, and,given the slim line between objective reality and illusion, it alsosuggests the limits of art’s power to interpret reality. In PeepingTom (1960), the story of an obsessive cameraman who murderswomen while using a portable movie camera to record their dyingexpressions of terror, Michael Powell acts out “an extreme, a per-version of the cinematic look, but it also reflects outwards, ontothe cinema’s intrinsic fascination with looking, and the ease withwhich it can make peeping toms of us all” (Mulvey 2005, p. 144).In these works, the examination of the problems of the relation-ship between the spectator/perception/reality is included withinthe structure of the film, but in Film Beckett managed to masterthe basic conventions of the movie camera while visually redefin-ing them on the screen frame in order to investigate the mediumas a possible expressive solution to some of the problems of per-ception that no other medium can resolve.

During the production of Film, Beckett was completely ab-sorbed into the medium, and despite the fact that at that time cin-ematography had made great advances both in terms of colourand sound, he decided to go back to the rudiments of silent blackand white film, to the basic essence of cinema which he made clearright from the title of his movie: a piece of celluloid on which theimages shot by the movie camera are fixed and which producesan illusion of the presence of something else. Deeply absorbed in-to the indiscreet charm of the cinematic eye, in Film Beckett scru-tinized the visual perception of the movie camera as an effectivemethod of rendering an unmediated image of one man’s percep-tion of himself, which is an image of rupture between self and oth-er, an image shot right in the filmic distance between ‘E’ and ‘O’,in the gaps where the truth is to be found.



BIBLIOGRAPHY


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, GrovePress, New York.

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Criticism

Antoine-Dunne, Jean, 2001, “Beckett and Eisenstein on Light andContrapuntal Montage”, in Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (ed-itors), 2001, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett:Endlessness in the Year 2000 / Samuel Beckett: Fin sans fin en l’an2000), XI, pp. 315-323.

Idem, 2004, “Beckett, Eisenstein and the Image: Making an Inside anOutside”, in Jean Antoine-Dunne and Paula Quigley (editors),2004, The Montage Principle. Eisenstein in New Cultural and Crit-ical Contexts, XVIII, Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York, pp. 191-213.

Antoine-Dunne, Jean, and Paula Quigley (editors), 2004, The MontagePrinciple. Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts, XVIII,Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York.

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Bryden, Mary, 1994, “Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot)”, in MariusBuning and Sjef Houppermans (editors), 1994, Beckett Today /Aujourd’hui (Intertexts in Beckett’s Work: Et/ou intertextes del’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 del’oeuvre de Beckett), III.



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 Universi-ty Press, Philadelphia, pp. 132-149.

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Mulvey, Laura, 2005, “The Light that Fails: A Commentary on Peep-ing Tom”, in Ian Christie and Andrew Moor (editors), 2005, TheCinema of Michael Powell. International Perspectives on an EnglishFilm-Maker, BFI Publishing, London, pp. 143-155.

Rosset, Barney, 2001, “On Samuel Beckett’s Film”, in House Maga-zine, II, Winter 2001, 2. Available at http://www.tinhouse.com/mag/back_issues/archive/issues/issue_6/lostnfound.html (last ac-cessed 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 In-fluence of Eisenstein and Arnheim’s Film Theories”, in Moorjaniand Veit (editors), 2001, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui cit.,pp. 324-330.

Waugh, Katherine, and Fergus Daly, 1995, “‘Film’ by Samuel Beck-ett”, FilmWest 20, 1995. A piece commemorating the 30th an-niversary of Film available at http://www.iol.ie/%7egalfilm/film -west/20beckett.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009).




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 connectionsbetween the writing of Samuel Beckett and the late-twentieth cen-tury horror genre, specifically on film and video. I am not at-tempting to make claims for a direct, causal link between the two,but instead to locate specific conceptual and formal qualities thatconnect them across registers and media. In “Lost in the Mall”Brian McHale proposes this kind of aparallel connection to Beck-ett in terms of science fiction, stating that:

I would like to propose an [...] explanation, in terms not of ge-nealogies and shared origins but of reverse chronology and post factuminfluence. In full consciousness of the paradox, I would like to proposethat Beckett’s affiliation with science fiction has come after the fact; thatBeckett’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 beenretrofitted by the horror genre. The result is a way of thinking aboutBeckett and contemporary popular genres that draws out their ab-stract qualities, creating a formal connection that demonstratespossibilities in both. These possibilities relate in particular to thefirst characteristic of minor art that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-tari outline in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, in which a minorart or idiom necessarily locates itself in the midst of a major one.The way in which the major idiom becomes increasingly formalisedand encoded by information technology, as Gilles Deleuze outlinesin his “Postscript on Control Societies” (1995), is central to the for-


mulation of a practical response, as the minor aesthetic must nec-essarily undergo changes alongside its major counterpart. Alexan-der Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007) have noted that it is the“nonhuman” character of computer code that makes it so effectiveand immutable a major language, and to this end I am interested inthe “nonhuman” elements of artworks in deriving a response tothis, primarily sequences of events or narrative as the arrangementand materialisation of concepts, and the way in which various me-dia allow them to be depicted. I am specifically interested, then, inan understanding of narrative cultural objects that relates to thedigitally defined contemporary period. Beckett’s writing functionsas a vital hinge point in working towards this artistic mode, pre-senting a mathematical minimalism and neutrality while contain-ing disordered and impenetrable points that are both stabilisedand destabilising.

Towards the end of Discourse Networks 1800/1900 FriedrichKittler presents a reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that focuseson the formal aspects of technological media and their capacityfor information storage, in defeating the novel’s central horror.

A stab to the heart turns the Undead to dust. Dracula’s salacious-ly whispering bride, the resurrected vampire Lucy, is put to death asecond time, and finally, on the threshold of his homeland, so is he. Amultimedia system, filmed over twenty times, attacks with typescriptcopies and telegrams, newspaper clippings and wax rolls (as these dif-ferent types of discourse are neatly labelled). The great bird no longerflies over Transylvania.

(Kittler 1985 [1999, p. 356])

In making this claim, Kittler is also, unwittingly, describing theconditions of the horror genre in the 20th century and thereafter.The same media that bring down the Count within the diegesis ofthe novel Dracula also serve to reproduce the central horror in theworld outside of the book, actualising the possibility of the irra-tional through multiple retellings, printing and filmings; in otherwords, the establishment of a discourse network of disorderthrough technological reproduction. It is this relationship, be-tween the nonhuman, indifferent properties of form and mediumand the presence within it of a point of stochastic disorder, which



is central to the horror genre, defining it in a way that is outsideof specific events, monstrosities or possibilities. Deleuze andGuattari reveal a hidden fondness for the horror genre through-out A Thousand Plateaus, and this comes as no surprise since thatbook is, in the terms we have just outlined, a kind of horror orghost story of theory. In Deleuze and Guattari the formal rela-tionship between horror and the minor is highlighted through theterm “outsider” in the writing of H. P. Lovecraft:

Lovecraft applies the term “Outsider” to this thing or entity, theThing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multi-ple, “teeming, seething, selling, foaming, spreading like an infectiousdisease, this nameless horror.”

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [2007, p. 270])

It is specifically this ultimate namelessness within an otherwisestructured, often mathematically constructed work, which is cen-tral to Beckett’s writing as well as the horror cinema. This can beillustrated through a comparison of the climactic images in AlfredHitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and John Carpenter’s Halloween(1978), a film that is undoubtedly influenced by Psycho, but thatformally represents a contemporary horror film where Psycho is adetective story.

In Psycho the final discovery of Mrs Bates’ corpse, immediate-ly followed by her knife-wielding son bursting into the room in hismother’s dress, introduces a continuity of exposition in the film,placing a psychologically (or psychoanalytically) derived rational-isation at the source of Norman Bates’ murders while meeting themajor cinema’s needs for both psychological determinism andspectacle. In Halloween, by contrast, the final revelation is ofnothing, an empty space where the body of the killer should lie af-ter being shot and falling from a window. It is this nothing, thedenial of exposition in the face of investigation, that both presentsa formal model of the contemporary horror genre and representsits abstract link with Beckett’s writing.

In applying this highly formal, flexible description of horrorthrough Beckett, the connections between two quotations, onefrom Anna Powell, on horror in general, and one by Daniel Katzon Beckett’s Molloy, become particularly interesting:

S. Franklin. “as from an evil core... the evil spread” 407


[In horror] our projected coherence is undermined as we slide in-to a molecular assemblage with the body of the film. Formal proper-ties like the camera-shake and blurred image [...] intensify this meld-ing. The viewer’s sensory perception intensifies by viral infection asthe 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 whowould argue that [for example] Moran is Molloy in embryo. The crit-ic who asserts that Moran is in fact and unbeknownst to himself Mol-loy has become in turn and with equal ignorance a double of Moran.

(Katz 1999, p. 73).

In these two statements the abstract association between thenucleus of the modern horror genre and the writing of SamuelBeckett begins to emerge. The second half of Molloy begins as adetective story, in contrast to the “linear yet multiple”, “teeming”and “foaming” disorder of the novel’s first half, and as such pre-sents itself as the rationality of recording and ordering that willaddress the preceding disorder. In doing this it sets up a formalrelationship between signal and noise, implying the possibility ofsolving through both contrasts and similarities to the first section.This process can only ever meet with a gaping hole, and it is thelocation of this hole within the ostensibly stable medium of thebook, and the book that is a detective story at that, which is de-finitive of the horror genre. Mark Fisher has noted that “Horrorresides not so much in the empirical encountering of ‘hideous un-holy abominations’ as in the transcendental trauma such encoun-ters produce: faced with such anomalies, it becomes impossible tohold onto any stable sense of reality”1, and it is exactly this processthat awaits the reader of Beckett who strives to effect a “stablesense of reality” within Molloy.

This formal, material connection between Beckett’s writingand the horror film is perhaps best observed in the relationshipbetween Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch


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


Project (1999) and Beckett’s ghost story Ill Seen Ill Said. In thiscase the austerity of the documentary form in Blair Witch has thesame effect as the formal simplicity of Beckett’s late prose, min-imising ‘human’ aspects. Myrick and Sánchez’s film concerns thedisappearance of three documentary filmmakers in the process ofinvestigating a legendary witch in the Maryland woods, and takesthe form of supposedly ‘found’ footage, assembled, edited and re-leased as true by some unnamed agency; at the level of story andhappening alone it belongs to the category of ‘genuine’ horror sto-ries that are concerned with the oscillation of boundaries, the si-multaneity of order and disorder that renders the major artwork’spredisposition towards rendering a clear signal impossible.

In The Blair Witch Project the two opposing sides of the horrordynamic, the motivation to make meaning and sense and the denialof this process, are set in play and made to vibrate, forming noisy as-semblages with fragments of rumours and stories that are either pre-sented in the earlier parts of the film or in the body of supportingmedia, or simply remembered from elsewhere. The film is entirelyfree of exposition, presenting instead a perpetual grasping at mean-ing and sense for both characters and viewer. The connection withIll Seen Ill Said is immediately notable here, and extends to the cen-trality of a ‘haunted house’ as the source of disorder that nonethe-less contains no solutions. In both, deterritorialisation appears to beconnected to the notion of ‘evil’, a term that Graham Fraser notesis “unusually strong” (Fraser 2000, p. 773) for Beckett, but it is clearfrom “the what is the wrong word the evil” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 9) inIll Seen Ill Said, that this is an insufficient, arbitrary claim, an attemptto grasp at what defies description. It lies clearly at the heart of ghostand horror tales, but is by no means contained to those kinds of sto-ries. That the “what is the wrong word the evil” is shown to be leak-ing and spreading into the environment within and the world sur-rounding the text in both Ill Seen Ill Said and The Blair Witch Pro-ject is central to the effectiveness of both, the book or the film itselfbecoming the “inexistent centre of a formless place” (Ill Seen IllSaid, p. 8) that renders conventional maps useless in favour of the“invisible map” that Powell describes as leading “further off trackinto a terrifying maze” (Powell 2005, p. 1).

The narrative of both Blair Witch and Ill Seen Ill Said, a searchfor unambiguous information, is shown to become infected by the



spreading force of the irrational core, effecting a movement fromattempted rational explanation to complete disorder; the narratorof Ill Seen Ill Said, as Fraser notes, becomes initially “frustratedby [...] hauntological indeterminacy” (Fraser 2000, p. 777), ex-claiming:

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. [...] Ifonly she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman.So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. [...] Coopedup there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. Howsimple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor beennor 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 imagi-nary, is constantly thwarted by her indeterminacy, sometimes vis-ible, sometimes invisible. In the same way, the edges of the framein Blair Witch constantly imply presences, possibilities that mightdetermine the threat faced by the filmmakers, while the cameramovements and cluttered scenery constantly derender them. Thefilmmakers repeatedly come across piles of stones or figures madeof bound sticks that terrify them, their similarity to the generaltexture of the woods making them both difficult to see clearly andeasy to imagine where they are not for the viewer. Equally, thesound mix, as a result of the camera-bound microphones the film-makers use, has the effect of obscuring both the testimonies of thetownspeople and the immanent sounds in the woods that terrifythe 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 pastpass on” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 31). This is mirrored in The BlairWitch Project, both in the filmmakers who, expecting to uncoverthe source of a folktale, come under attack from forces that theycannot discern as either natural (wild animals or people) or su-pernatural (the legendary witch), and in the viewer who finds theformally neutral ‘authenticity’ of the documentary form descendinto increasingly chaotic footage that encourages imagined sightsand sounds to infiltrate.



That the singular source of the horror is a desolate house orcabin is a key parallel between the pair, connecting them both toeach other and to one of the pre-eminent traditions of the horrorgenre in the shape of the haunted house. Rustin Parr’s ruinedhouse is the final collapsing point of the narrative in Blair Witch,the point where the filmmakers disappear, while the cabin thatlies at the centre of the “formless place” in Ill Seen Ill Said visiblyspreads its influence over the surrounding space and consequent-ly over the text itself:

How come a cabin is such a place? How came? Careful. Before re-plying that in the far past at the time of its building there was clovergrowing to its very walls. Implying further more that it the culprit. Andfrom it as from an evil core that the what is the wrong word the evilspread.

(Ill Seen Ill Said, pp. 8-9)

In Blair Witch, the location of the house is equally question-able, appearing only a few minutes from the filmmakers’ tent atthe beginning of ‘night eight’ despite not being visible to them asthey made camp, and implicitly disappearing just as easily in or-der that their footage be recovered2. Within the house, as in thewoods surrounding it, the organisation of space is at the mercy ofunknown forces. The filmmakers at one point in the film claim tohave been “walking south all day” only to arrive back where theystarted, and this formlessness of place is evident within the house.The same scream always comes from the opposite of whicheverend of the building the filmmakers are in, an effect that is inten-sified by the editing process that cuts rapidly between the twocameras while retaining the same sound source. Finally, the prox-imity to the core of formlessness allows the medium itself to be-come contaminated in both Blair Witch and Ill Seen Ill Said; thenarrator of the latter ends the novella infected by disorder, aban-doning 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 fictionalaccounts of the events surrounding the recovery of the footage make no men-tion of the house whatsoever, despite the fact that the filming ends violently inits basement.



No matter” (p. 40), while the filmmakers of the former continueto film even under threat in the heart of house. As the filmmakerHeather runs down the stairs into the basement, her screams ap-pear to come from a distant point due to the sound from the twocameras becoming mixed up, while the camera movement itselftakes on a smooth, weightless quality that is in marked contrast tothe almost permanent camera-shake that characterises the major-ity of the film, as even the technical aspects of filmmaking becomehaunted. The process of hauntological intrusion that is at workthroughout The Blair Witch Project and Ill Seen Ill Said finallyreaches completion when the ghosts of the text infect the medi-um of the text itself, the same process that sees the sedentary crit-ic of Molloy subject to haunting by the ‘ghosts’ that get to workon Moran. Noise overcomes signal, leaking out from the bound-aries of the story in various ways and creating symbiotic relation-ships. In The Blair Witch Project the documentary form, one thattraditionally upholds the kind of search for rational explanationthe narrator seeks in the early part of Ill Seen Ill Said to the high-est level3, is overcome by irrationality and disorder. Attempting tomake a map of the genuine horror film, as in the case of Beckett’snovels, means facing up to the simultaneous necessitation and im-possibility of mapping. The minor horror film, like the Becketttext, “not only illustrates a haunted landscape, but is a hauntedlandscape” (Fraser, p. 778).

3 Pre-dating The Blair Witch Project by several years was the 1992 BBC tele-vision broadcast Ghostwatch in which a number of well known television pre-senters attempting to make a Halloween night live broadcast from a hauntedhouse found themselves subject to the actions of a malevolent ghost. Ghost-watch 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 con-tains a conspicuous power to frighten and unsettle, simply due to its juxtaposi-tion of the supposedly secure documentary form with the irrational elements ofhorror.


BIBLIOGRAPHY


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 Negotia-tions, Columbia University Press, New York, trans. Martin Jough-in, pp. 177-182.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, Con-tinuum, London & New York 2007.

Idem, 1988, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Athlone Press, Lon-don, 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 Hauntol-ogy and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work”, in ModernFiction Studies, vol. 46, n. 3, 2000, pp. 772-785.

Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker, 2007, The Exploit, Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Katz, Daniel, 1999, Saying “I” No More: Subjectivity and Consciousnessin the Prose of Samuel Beckett, North Western University Press,Evanston.

Kittler, Friedrich, 1985, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Stanford Uni-versity Press, Stanford 1999.

McHale, Brian, 2001, “Lost in the Mall: Beckett, Federman, Space”,in Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney (editors), 2001, En-gagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political, SUNY Press,Albany, pp. 112-126.

Powell, Anna, 2005, Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh UniversityPress, Edinburgh.

Stamper, Chris, 1999, “Blair Witch: A Scary Home Brew”, at:http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,20721-1.html?tw=wn_sto-ry_page_next1 (last accessed May 30, 2009).

Sussman, Henry, and Christopher Devenney (editors), 2001, Engage-




ment and Indifference: Beckett and the Political, SUNY Press, Al-bany.

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 APPENDIXThe performances and exhibitions mentioned in the following pageswere held during the Conference.

Ninny Aiuto read some excerpts of Aspittannu a Godot, his trans-lation of the play into Sicilian, with Francesco Teresi; Antonio Bor-riello kindly lent some photographs from his Beckett productions;John Hynes also generously lent some of his photographs from Beck-ett’s own productions; Giulia Lazzarini spoke about her performancein Strehler’s Giorni felici; Rosemary Pountney read some excerptsfrom Beckett’s work (see her essay in the present volume); Bill Pross-er created a small exhibition of his renderings of Beckett’s doodles,mostly from Human Wishes.


Remembering Happy DaysGiulia Lazzarini

[As well as numerous other great interpretations (for example Arielin Strehler’s production of The Tempest) Giulia Lazzarini has beenone of the greatest Italian interpreters of Happy Days, directed byGiorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro, Milan. This production touredEurope. Produced in the Eighties, it was staged again in 2000.

In this short talk, Giulia Lazzarini speaks of the performance ofthe 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 thefirst time I went on stage, and spoke as he did, without completelyunderstanding Happy Days, probably because I lacked the neces-sary human experience, perhaps not exactly to identify, but at leastto understand everything Strehler had understood and conveyed tome, something I only achieved later. He was like an intermediary.

The second time, in 2000, I was totally alone with all that I hadexperienced and learned in those twenty years. Perhaps I only un-derstood Happy Days then, and now I love it. It had been a kindof 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 againand find new ones, and only in Happy Days, of the many plays Ihave acted in, does this happen. What Beckett writes and man-ages to say through this text is a sort of miracle, and I think it isthe same for the audience, because the text leaves marks, traces,in people who have seen a performance, particularly this one, di-rected by Strehler, whose interpretation of the text comes acrossextremely clearly. He has brought out so many points, especiallythis sense of rebellion against the human condition, which issomething positive, and acting it today, this text hits the audience,especially the young, more violently and vitally than it did us.


Winnie’s bag

[Giulia Lazzarini has the bag with her, and takes out the various ob-jects as she goes along, to illustrate what she says]

I thought I’d bring this bag with me; it’s travelled across Italyand Europe as far as Russia (it’s been to Krakow, St. Petersburg,Paris) and it never travelled with the other props: the sand and allthe rest. The stage manager looked after it so that it wouldn’t getlost, with all the objects in it, and because I used to be rehearsingin the rehearsal room right up to the very last day. The rest of theequipment left earlier and I would say: “No! Leave the bag withme”. The bag always had to be there.

In the text Winnie is asleep and she slowly wakens, and as shelooks at the holy light she says: “Another heavenly day”. ButStrehler wanted there to be a tremendous sound of bells ringingin the darkness: DONG! DONG! DONG! and little by little thehouse would go dark; I came up from beneath the stage in totaldarkness and got ready against the light, behind my parasol, whilethe bell tolled ominously nineteen or twenty times, after which thelights 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 andhatless; 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 beginsthe day: her hand goes into the bag and brings out a toothbrushand toothpaste and as she speaks she calls to Willie, cleans herteeth, and not knowing where to spit the toothpaste out, she looksround and spits it into her husband’s hole, but he doesn’t notice;“Poor Willie–” and the tube of toothpaste “running out” corre-sponds to poor Willie.

There are, then, three fundamental things in the opening: theawakening, the call to Willie and the tube of toothpaste, which issaid to be “running out”. In these three things there is just about

418 Appendix: Performances and Images


everything, and everything must be tightly bound together, givingthe idea that there is another human being with Winnie whodoesn’t answer, and whose actions are unknown. And if whilespitting in his direction Winnie says “Poor dear–”, and then “run-ning out”, of course she means the toothpaste, but also that thishuman being is dying. Then Winnie says “Ah well– [...] Can’t behelped–”: but what can’t be helped? The fact that the toothpasteis at an end or that her husband is on the brink of his end? Theyare old things about to come to an end; so there’s a double mean-ing, and the difficulty lies in interpreting this.

The mirror

Then comes the mirror: Winnie looks at herself in the mirror andthen, suddenly, the first moment of anguish: “Good Lord!”“Good God!” Oh dear, what’s happened? There’s somethingwrong! Oh, my goodness, oh Lord!... And then: “Ah well–”: no,no, no, no, it’s all right... not bad... “No better, no worse–” “Nochange [...] 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 impor-tant thing is to stay put. As she lays the mirror down she wipes thetoothbrush, 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 hus-band: “no zest– [...] for anything– [...] no interest [...] in life”. Sheputs on her glasses (“genuine... pure”) but even with them on shecan’t read; so, crossly: “Blind next–”. But she quickly recoversherself: “Ah well– [...] Seen enough– [...] I suppose [...] bynow–”; 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 sametime 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 quotesOphelia: “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, soshe turns to her husband, calling for help, her voice half strangled;

G. Lazzarini. Remembering “Happy Days” 419


but he’s asleep, he doesn’t answer. He sleeps: “marvellous gift–[...] wish I had it”. Then she takes out a handkerchief and cleansher glasses and again she tries to read, but failing to do so sheturns to God: I can’t read, but this is a gift, a blessing, because Idon’t suffer much, “no pain– [...] hardly any– [...] wonderfulthing that– [...] nothing like it– [...] slight headache sometimes–occasional mild migraine– [...] it comes– [...] then goes”... soGod’s there and has to be thought about, “prayers perhaps notfor naught–”. She puts her glasses on and tries again: “Genuine...pure...”, but can’t read (“hog’s setae”), and this is her first realmoment of discomfort: “old things”, both the toothbrush with thewriting worn away and her eyes which can no longer read.

This, then, is the first time she is really distressed, but shequickly recovers: ‘Well, what can I do... take the parasol and tor-ment him... wonderful!’; and she prods Willie, provoking himwith 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’tgot my parasol, he doesn’t answer... A moment of emptiness, thenshe turns towards Willie and sees his hand as it comes out of thehole and gives her parasol back: ‘Thank you, dear!’ Happy again,she opens the parasol, passes it from one hand to the other andthen goes back to thinking about her health; she notices that herhands are damp, that they have got no worse: “no better, no worse,no change”. She puts the parasol behind her and says to her hus-band: “Don’t go off on me again now dear will you please, I mayneed 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 arenow dry and discoloured: something’s wrong... “Just a shade offcolour just the same”. She rummages in her bag, not knowingwhat she wants. The first thing she finds is a pistol: her hands arediscoloured, but that doesn’t make it worth shooting oneself...‘you’re there, perhaps for later’, and she kisses the pistol. She picksup a bottle of medicine, reads its label, drinks it, drains it off, andnow that it is no longer any use, what does she do? She throws itdown her husband’s hole, hitting him on the head. Then she startsthinking about her appearance: she extracts her lipstick and,noticing that there is practically none left, remarks: “Runningout...”, almost used up... never mind, “can’t complain”, and sheputs some on, quoting a line or two, from Dante in the Italian



script: “quegli che mai da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi baciò tut-to tremante”. Looking at herself in the mirror, she sees Willie re-flected in it, naked: ‘Put your pants on, dear...’.

More or less everything has been removed from the bag; onlythe brush and comb are taken out later, when, at a momentaryloss, she asks: “My hair! Did I brush and comb my hair?” Andthen: “Oh well, what does it matter, [...] I shall simply brush andcomb 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’shappy: “Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to bea happy day!” “That is what I find so wonderful, that not a daygoes by [...] without some blessing”.

Flow and pause

Strehler gave this woman an infantile joie de vivre and constantcuriosity about everything. In photos I have seen of other pro-ductions, Winnie’s eyes are very sad, she is distressed, and aftereverything she does there is a pause, to reflect. But Strehler said:“No! You mustn’t have pauses: one thing flows directly into an-other”. This was something I couldn’t do at first; I just couldn’tmanage to have the next thought in my head as I finished speak-ing the first, to make one sentence follow directly on from the onebefore. This technique was extremely difficult; I managed it, butmechanically, without really thinking, unlike what happens in re-al life, when while doing one thing we’re already thinking of an-other; this was something I only achieved after twenty years, onlyby trying over and over again did I succeed in producing therhythm whereby one thought rolls after the next without a breathbetween, because if you stop you go under and you must alwaysbe cheerful. But there are the “nows”: “And now? What shall Ido 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 an-guish that there is in the second act, when Winnie is more awareand retraces her steps back into her past, her present, her non-future; but she wants there to be a future, she wants to endure.



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 medi-cine and puts the pistol back, perhaps in a moment of distress whenshe is looking for something to cheer herself up; and it is as if shewere thinking: ‘You again! You should be a last resort, whenthere’s absolutely no other way. Why do you keep popping up likethis? 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 drawsa house round it in the sand: “There, that’s your little house!”. Andthen, finally, when she has put everything back in the bag, the pis-tol is the last, but she has second thoughts, points it at her templebut just scratches herself with it, then leaves it out, laying it back onthe ground. She doesn’t want it in her bag any more. So, at the endof the first act everything goes back into the bag ready for the nextday, except the revolver.

During the second act the pistol is always out, like the bag, butby this time Winnie is buried up to her neck; only her head canbe seen. She can see the bag but can’t get at what’s in it, and shesees the “Brownie”, the pistol. She tells Willie: ‘It’s there, it’sthere, don’t worry, it’s there’; but, being buried, she can’t reachit. And in any case for Beckett there is no conclusion, what thereis, is existing, carrying on, staying there.

The last part

The end is rather disturbing. Strehler had thought that Winnieshould have a gorgeous little hat with feathers in it, and when shehad finally completely disappeared under the sand, and was nolonger visible, just the hat would remain and the feathers wouldstir. But then he decided that no, that wasn’t right. Winnie had tobe there, she couldn’t disappear: if she went under, the worldwould end, and human kind with it... but for the moment thiscouldn’t happen, it was almost the end, almost. And Winnie kepther head above ground.

So Strehler gave up the idea of this poetic image. He also likedthe idea of Willie emerging at the end like a clown with his clothesfalling off in bits. The script we worked with went like this: “as he



crawls he begins to shed bits of clothing, his trousers have comeoff, his braces have burst, one sleeve tears off, then the other, thenthe whole of his jacket, front and all. He even loses hold of his bagwhich falls apart (he has a bag too) and everything spills out...”.This is what Strehler had imagined, that Willie would climb upthe hill and become a rather surreal little clown, still in his collarand tie, without his shirt, but still in cardboard cuffs with shinybuttons, bare-headed, his hair sparse and white. Willie stops atthe top: white-gloved hand and clown’s spectacles with ping-pongballs that light up, and flick on and off; he too would like to gethold of the pistol, but is unable to reach it. In the end he slips, hecan’t manage to do it. This is how Strehler had originally thoughtof 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 addi-tion, which was typical of Strehler), he had Willie emerge in themost natural manner possible, with a bunch of flowers for Win-nie. Lacking a newspaper, he wraps them in a pair of pink knick-ers which he then throws away. Slowly, slowly, Willie stretches toget hold of the pistol. But, “Win”, he murmurs, barely audibly; hecan’t reach it, and slips back into his hole.

The last waltz

She’s left alone... And then begins the song from The Merry Wid-ow they usually sing together, very soft and sentimental at the be-ginning, but Strehler wanted it to enter into a sort of contest withthe bell, which wants to drown it and destroy what is human; Win-nie, just her little head, opposes it, but it’s too much for her. Veryslowly the lights go down, and all is darkness. And that’s the end.

This opposition derives from Winnie’s memories as well, be-cause all the memories she has can be counted, like the one of thelittle mouse; she suddenly remembers this mouse which ran upher leg, so she had been terrified, dropped her doll and begunscreaming “Aaahhh, aaahhh!”. This terrible sexual memory, of vi-olence, of a horrible sensation, has blocked her all her life and hadmade 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:



Help! And then: “Ah well, not long now, Winnie, can’t be longnow, until the bell for sleep. [...] Then you may close your eyes,then you must close your eyes– and keep them closed. [...] Whysay that again? [...] I used to think... I say I used to think there wasno difference between one fraction of a second and the next. Iused to say... [...] Winnie you are changeless, there is never anydifference between one fraction of a second and the next. [...]Why bring that up again? [...] There is so little one can bring upone brings up all. [...] All one can. [...] My neck is hurting me. [...]Ah that’s better. [...] I can do no more. [...] Say no more. [...] ButI must say more. [...] Oh yes, abounding mercies. [...] And now?[...] And now, Willie?” And then that lovely image of the fluteglasses in the first act comes up. Golden hair, the toast drunk fromcrystal glasses: “The pink fizz [...] The flute glasses. [...] The lastguest 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 doingwith yourself? You heard me shout for help! Were you gettingdressed?’ “Reminds me of the day you came whining for my hand.[...] I worship you, Winnie, be mine. [...] Life a mockery withoutWin. [...] Where are the flowers?” and he brings out the bunchwrapped in the knickers. “That’s right, Willie, look at me. [...]Feast your old eyes, Willie. [...] What ails you, Willie. I never sawsuch 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. [...] Isit me you’re after, Willie... or something else? [...] Do you want totouch my face ... again? [...] Is it a kiss you’re after, Willie ... or isit something else? [...] don’t look at me like that!”: she’s begin-ning to be frightened, ‘why are you looking at me like that?’“Have you gone off your head, Willie?” “Win...” he says, andends up in his hole again. Now she feels lonely, so what she hangsonto is this: “Win”, he called her Win, a pet name, and that meansvictory. So in a tiny little voice she says: “Oh this is a happy day”– because he has called her Win – “This will have been anotherhappy day!” – but she adds: “After all. [...] So far”, and she singstheir song:




Tace il labbro. T’amo,dice il violin.le sue note dicon tuttem’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 laLa la lalla la la la la...

This was just to give an idea. It isn’t possible to act Happy Daysoutside the context of the theatre, without the lights, getting thebuild up of her rebellion right, starting from a feeling almost ofdistress and loss of herself, almost a defeat. But then, with onebeat of her wings, Winnie rises again and right up to the end fightsthe ineluctable.

(trans. Angela Gibbon)


Aspittannu a GodotNinny Aiuto

Looking at this title, the first question one could ask him/herselfis: why translate Waiting for Godot into Sicilian?

At the beginning of this experience, it seemed as if a pack ofcards, opened fanwise, were left on my table, containing severalquestions in one: why translate / Waiting for Godot / into Sicil-ian?

With regard to the first part of question, ‘the act’ of translat-ing meets a basic desire of knowledge which, passing through dif-ferent cultures, has its biggest obstacles in the transit itself: lan-guages. The first problem a translator faces is that all texts alwaystell 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 ofany director having to put the text, as it were, on stage or on amovie set. Although I know the difference, this is the reason whyI have never liked distinguishing too strictly between theatrical,poetic and narrative text as, in my opinion, we can’t exclude anytext from being theatrical. Peter Brook said: “[we] can take anyempty 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 mainquestion, in this actual case I must say they are naturally connect-ed to each other, both of them referring to a local and a generalaspect, at the same time.

Especially if we consider that, except for 13th century Sicilianpoetry, the Sicilian language lacks a great written tradition, I mustadmit that translating into this precise language might be based

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


simply on a series of unconscious and intimate reasons, within asort of local linguistic and cultural policy, to restore and renew oldlinguistic forms or also to enjoy above-mentioned working ‘prob-lems’ to spread different and yet precious cultural elements intoSicilian, that is, with Italian, one of my two native languages.

However, the choice of Sicilian as a natural target language ofa Godot translation came to me in a more personal way and, ofcourse, in several steps.

Actually, the first time I linked Waiting for Godot to Sicilianwas in Bagheria (Sicily), when I was looking at a portrait of Beck-ett by Renato Guttuso, and the first declaration of a tired Es-tragon, “nothing to be done”, seemed to me the proper commenton the picture. Since then, other stages have revealed themselvesand, even while translating pages and pages from the originalGodot, through the whole text I could feel how the play seemedto adhere spontaneously to ‘Sicilianity’ (Sicilian character). Thisalso had a negative side; I refer to what Sicilians call “omertà”,which is not just a conspiracy of silence but even merely seemingto 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 evi-dence of a last word yet to be said and, as in Sicily, not just in aliterary 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 ifthey moved in a mess, losing and meeting each other, and finallycreating their own new one. So the subtle strategy of a dialogue

N. Aiuto. “Aspittannu a Godot” 427


which is meaningful and senseless at the same time becomes themost 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 him-self: he even gives up looking for himself [...]; behind him he hasalways ‘une vie énorme’, ‘une existence interminable’, [...] for himall actions, gestures and thoughts are of the same value, whetherit 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 Aspittan-

nu a Godot at the “Beckett in Rome” Conference. So I started talk-ing it over with Francesco Teresi, a friend of mine and an experi-enced actor. The main question promptly came out: “How will theaudience receive the Sicilian Godot? And how will we ourselves?”.

It was clear that it wouldn’t be merely a reading of Beckett’stext, but not an actual performance on that unexpected stage, ei-ther.

We already knew that only a few people, that day, would un-derstand Sicilian, and yet a translator and an actor had to test mySicilian translation, now spoken aloud in a real, quick dialogueand looking the audience in the eye, verifying once more if Sicil-


2 Carlo Fruttero, Introduzione to Samuel Beckett, Aspettando Godot, Ei-naudi, Torino 1956, p. 10 (my translation).


N. Aiuto. “Aspittannu a Godot” 429

ian were suitable to Godot discourse. All this lasted almost threeweeks, for only about eighty lines extracted from my Siciliantranslation.

Then our day at the Beckett Conference arrived. Both of us,and not just myself as the translator, were thrilled: at the exacttime of our entry I timidly gave Francesco one of two smallbowlers I had brought for the reading, then we silently went for-ward into the room.

When we started reading, the audience seemed to have disap-peared, and our gestures started matching the words, for us as westood by a tree in any (Sicilian) country road. We realized we hadcome to the end only because of a burst of applause from the au-dience: Francesco and I took a glance at them and in their smileswe could read how much they had enjoyed those moments. Afterone minute I turned towards him and told him half in jest: “Pen-su chi ‘unn’avemu cchiù nenti \ii fari ccà’” (“I think we’ve noth-ing 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 respectthe text. For my Krapp... I had to be Krapp. His thoughts and ges-tures had to be mine. His memories and actions became mine –to share, cohabit and act – scene, space, word, breath – withKrapp... creating deep empathy with the character. I rememberthe great Carmelo Bene once saying: “In order to interpret Shake-speare, one must be Shakespeare: I am Shakespeare”. In thissense, the actor should adhere closely to the author.

Approaching Krapp’s Last Tape in this manner, I analysed thecharacter with humility, living within him intensely off stage,transporting my analysis and thought of him on stage in spectac-ular fashion, face to face with body, gesture and word, as de-signed. The word became sovereign, giving access to and reach-ing beyond silence, to enter a hypnotic state of static-movement,accompanied by a state of interior excitement. In her importantstudy, Samuel Beckett. A Biography1, Deirdre Bair writes: “ForBeckett, the perfect stage vehicle is one in which there are no ac-tors or directors, only the play itself. When asked how such a the-atre could be made viable, Beckett replied that the author had theduty to search for the perfect actor, that is, one who would com-ply fully with his instructions, having the ability to annihilate him-self totally” (Bair 1978, p. 544). This physical and psychologicalstate is indispensable when interpreting Beckett on stage. Bair al-so confirms an even more extreme condition envisaged by Beck-

* For the images from Antonio Borriello’s productions see figures 26 to 29.1 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett. A Biography, 1978, Vintage, London 1990.


ett: “The best possible play is one in which there are no actors, on-ly the text. I’m trying to find a way to write one” (p. 544). This po-sition brings to mind Gordon Craig’s intention. Beckett achievedwhat 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, ab-solutely simple. He is usually spoken of as a difficult author to in-terpret or even to read. I believe that only what he says should beconsidered. One does not interpret Beckett, one lives him. Thereare no references or allusions to any other philosophical, theologi-cal or literary concept. There is nothing extraordinary, just the or-dinary. One does not betray Beckett: one obeys him respectfully, Icould even say one obeys him with conscious orthodoxy, avoidingtheatrical excesses, with the truth of life and death. I am positiveabout this. For the Quaker in Beckett the Word is absolute, as arehis texts: perfect and untouchable. I may exaggerate (indeed I do)when I see the work of this great, humble 20th century genius hark-ing back to The Book of Wisdom: “Omnia censura et numero etpondere disposuisti”. But I see it like this, at least in my own pro-ductions: a geometry of action, thought and vision, “absolutelyfaithful to the plays of the great Parisian Dubliner in which the re-alism and poetic quality of present and future images suggest notso much the projection of a world outside, but rather a world de-sirous of identification with the mouthscene of the Beckettian self”(Biagio Scognamiglio), as can be seen in the photographs of mo-ments from my productions by Aliberti and Pomposo, presentedat the Conference “Beckett in Rome”.

Respect for the text is not universal. That for some time nowproductions in Italy (and abroad) have not always been faithfulshould hardly surprise us. In Italy the dispute over the closure, onthe insistence of the heirs the Master of the Absurd, of a produc-tion of Waiting for Godot in which the actors were women, is wellknown. The affair nearly ended up in court, even at question timein Parliament! Nonetheless, in conjunction with SIAE (Italian As-sociation of Authors and Publishers), the company eventuallywon their urgent appeal in Rome.

Equally well known is Peter Brook’s most recent productionof Fragments (including Come and Go, “Rough for Theatre I”,“Rockaby”, “Act Without Words II”, “neither”). I have met

A. Borriello. Beckett the Euclidean (as is he who interprets him) 431


Brook, and respect him immensely. In Come and Go, though, thismarvellous producer uses two men.

I feel that the figurines in the “dramaticule” are like moerae orparcae, mysterious, deeply poetic creatures, multicoloured gusts ofair (“dull violet (Ru), dull red (Vi), dull yellow (Flo)”, as in Comeand Go, p. 356), to be seen in the only existing colour photographsof my productions. All the others, of moments in Waiting forGodot, Not I, “Ohio Impromptu”, “What Where”, are black andwhite. In Come and Go, as I have said, there are three women, threedelicate petals floating, coming, going: silent winged female pres-ences. They are absolutely feminine, of no other nature. It is truethat 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 act-ing, gesture, timbre of voice and above all the text require ab-solutely what the playwright intended, word for word.

By adhering closely to this method the actor uncovers his or herown interpretation based on technical skill and individual style andthe whole range of emotional possibilities in order to communicatethem to the audience. All redundancy must be avoided.

The actor of Beckett is at the service of the text, both scriptand set.

Over the years several Italian productions have unjustifiablyaltered the original texts beyond recognition. However, the mas-terly interpretations of a wonderful Laura Adani (Happy Days), anexceptional Glauco Mauri (Krapp’s Last Tape and “Act WithoutWords”), a splendid Giulia Lazzarini (Happy Days) and otherproductions by Luciano Mondolfo and Andrea Camilleri, to citeonly a few, are absolutely memorable.

In the general run of things, a personal interpretation of a playwhich accounts for translation, language, culture and inter-preters’ preferences will be satisfactory (even in the case of re-vivals of classics such as Brecht), but in the case of Beckett the sit-uation changes radically. Fidelity to the text, even down to thesmallest detail, should result, as it were, in successful theatricalconsubstantiation.

It comes to mind that in some cases Beckett himself did well,extremely well, by calling a halt to productions failing to followhis directions. Perhaps Euripides and Shakespeare, Molière, Pi-



randello and Eduardo De Filippo staged their own work for a per-formance both more effective and truer to their intentions.

Beckett’s long, detailed directions are in fact a text within thetext, or perhaps the text itself. The minutely detailed stage direc-tions in Krapp’s Last Tape are packed with spatial and temporalexplanations, as well as indications for costume, makeup, props,gesture... the fluttering of an eyelash. Everything is as precise as amusical score. This precision I have tried to reproduce in my ownproductions, as can be seen in the photographs of moments in myproductions by Aliberti and Pomposo. These photographers haveworked with me for years and are absolutely aware of the need toconcentrate on every single detail observable on stage.

My admiration for Beckett, a splendid, perfect Pythagorean(or, if preferred, Euclidean) writer is infinite. With lucid perfec-tion, Beckett the dramatist always defined every detail for his ac-tors: age, sex, body, posture, height, gait, eyes, number of steps,use of hands, gestures (number of seconds), entries and exits andmost particularly precise (indeed cast iron) directions for the pro-ducer (idea, content, thought...), for technicians of lighting (glar-ing, bright, low, dim, fading, darkness...) and sound2, scenogra-pher3, costumier4, stage manager5, makeup artist6 and other

A. Borriello. Beckett the Euclidean (as is he who interprets him) 433

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 withoutleaves, a rough wooden table 2.40 x 1.20 metres, in Oh les beaux jours / HappyDays, En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, “Ohio Impromptu”.

4 “Rusty black narrow trousers too short for him. Rusty black sleevelesswaistcoat, four capacious pockets. [...] Grimy white shirt open at neck, no col-lar. 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 andFaber, London 1990, p. 215.

5 “Spools”, “reel of tape”, “large banana”, Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in TheComplete 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 Com-plete Dramatic Works, cit., pp. 138-139.

6 “White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair”, Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, inThe Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 215; “blonde for preference, [...] big bo-som”, Happy Days, 1961, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 138; “long whitehair”, “Ohio Impromptu”, 1982, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 445.



minute details in the full stage directions in all his works. Direc-tions and injunctions, where I as actor and producer am con-cerned, 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, eachfragment of mime and gesture is rehearsed with varying rhythmand tension, just as space and lighting are analysed and balanced.It is hard work indeed, but liberating and therapeutic. And whenthe page of a play is transposed and assimilated mentally andphysically onto the stage, then I am ready to go on stage myself.Now Beckett’s text becomes mine, and in the resounding silenceit 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 in-cipient threat to text doodling is generally ignored by writers onart, not receiving the attention that its more public sibling, graffi-ti, has done. My research places Beckett’s spontaneous drawingsin their broad historical and cultural context, for just as his writ-ing evokes comparisons that span world literature – fiction, the-ology, and philosophy – so his drawings unconsciously co-opt in-fluences from both deep and shallow visual traditions.

For example, the manuscript of Beckett’s unfinished play Hu-man Wishes contains over seventy tiny drawn characters, whobear no discernible relationship to his text – a gloomy snippet onthe household of Dr. Johnson. Instead they stimulate imaginarycouplings with comics, the art of children and the insane, me-dieval bestiaries, psychic automatism, Haboku imagery, stainedglass windows, Modernist painting, and ‘The Analysis of Beauty’– as well as comparisons with the doodles of other writers such asKafka, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and Proust.

Rather than seeing doodles as tools for psychotherapeutic di-agnosis (as, for example, in the work of D. W. Winnicott), my fo-cus is on their visual playfulness and ubiquity. The relinquishingof conscious control, so admired and sought by the Surrealists, isin doodling natural to everyone. After all, the root of drawing istrahere, 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 accessedMay 30, 2009).

* For a sample of doodles see figure 30.


Notes on Contributors

Chris Ackerley Professor of English Literature at the Universi-ty of Otago, New Zealand. His recent work includes substantialannotations of Murphy and Watt, published by the Journal ofBeckett 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 amonograph on Samuel Beckett and Science.

David Addyman He completed his thesis (Beckett and Place: TheLie of the Land) in 2008 at Royal Holloway University of London,where he was supervised by Andrew Gibson. A chapter, “InaneSpace and Lively Place in Beckett’s Forties Fiction”, is about to ap-pear 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 Spanishand English and graduated in Foreign Languages and Literaturein April 2005, from Rome “La Sapienza” University with a thesison translation (from Italian to Spanish) of L’Antimonio, a shortstory by Leonardo Sciascia. He has now finished his translation ofWaiting for Godot from English into Sicilian.

Iain Bailey PhD Candidate and teacher at the University ofManchester, UK. His doctoral thesis focuses on biblical intertex-tuality in Beckett’s work; he has also produced papers on the fig-ure of the child in W. B. Yeats’ poetry, and on Mikhail Bakhtinand the Gospels.


Lino Belleggia PhD in English at “La Sapienza” University(2004). His published work includes Lettore di professione fraItalia e Stati Uniti – Saggio su Paolo Milano (2000) and a numberof essays and book-reviews on contemporary English and Amer-ican novels, as well as translations. He presently works at the Uni-versity of Rome “La Sapienza”.

Antonio Borriello A scholar and faithful interpreter of Beckett,he has published a number of studies, among which Samuel Beck-ett, Krapp’s Last Tape: dalla pagina alla messinscena (1992). Hehas taken part in a number of international conferences and or-ganised “Beckett for Sarajevo” (in aid of children from ex-Yu-goslavia) and “1906-2006 Homage to Samuel Beckett, The EarthCould Be Uninhabited”. He owns a vast collection of books byand on Beckett, some of them autographed.

Hugo Bowles Associate Professor of English Language at theUniversity of Rome “Tor Vergata”. His main interests are in con-versation, discourse and genre analysis applied to language forspecific purposes (most recent publication in this area, Conversa-tion analysis and LSP, 2007). His current research focuses on con-versation analysis applied to literary and non-literary narrativeand a monograph on storytelling in plays will be published byJohn Benjamins in 2009.

Enoch Brater Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of DramaticLiterature at the University of Michigan. An internationally knowncritic for his seminal studies of Beckett and other major modern andcontemporary playwrights, most especially Arthur Miller, his workhas been translated into several languages. His publications includeBeyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, The Dramain the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction, Why Beckett (revised and repub-lished as The Essential Samuel Beckett), and more than 50 articlesand reviews. He has lectured widely in Italy and directed his Uni-versity’s study abroad program in Sesto Fiorentino. His currentbook project is entitled The Falsetto of Reason: Ten Ways of Think-ing about Samuel Beckett, of which his essay is a small part.

Mary Bryden Professor of French Studies at the University of

438 Notes on Contributors


Reading, a former Co-Director (with John Pilling) of the BeckettInternational Foundation, and a former President of the BeckettSociety. She has published widely on Beckett and Deleuze, as wellas 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 andMusic (editor) (1998); Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Dra-ma: Her Own Other (1993). She is currently working on editingThe Beckett Bestiary.

Laura Caretti Professor of History of Theatre and the Perform-ing Arts (University of Siena), and co-director of the EuropeanSchool “Synapsis”. She is a life member of Clare Hall College(Cambridge). She has written mainly on Shakespeare in perfor-mance and on modern and contemporary theatre (Ibsen, Piran-dello, Eleonora Duse, Gordon Craig, Beckett, the Living Theatre,Stoppard), focussing on the art of actors and directors, on adap-tations, and on the interaction between theatre and cinema. Shehas written on Beckett and directed Dopo Godot: frammenti diteatro, 1993.

Daniela Caselli Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Litera-ture and Culture at the University of Manchester (UK). She is theauthor of Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Crit-icism (2005), of Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s BewilderingCorpus (2009), and of articles on Samuel Beckett, literary theory,modernism, and poetic translation. She has edited the collectionsof essays Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett(forthcoming in 2010), Other Becketts (2001, with S. Connor andL. Salisbury) and Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation: LiteraryCultures 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 ofPennsylvania, Philadelphia (USA). Since 2006, she has been lec-turer and teaching assistant in Italian at the University of WesternOntario (Canada), where she is currently reading for her PhD inComparative Literature.



Mariacristina Cavecchi Research fellow at the University of Mi-lan. She has published essays in collected volumes on Shakespeareon 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 drammaturgiascozzese (2001); Shakespeare Graffiti. Il Cigno di Avon nella cul-tura di massa (2002); EuroShakespeares. Exploring Cultural Prac-tice in an International Context (2002), and Shakespeare & Scespir(2005). She is co-editor, with Caroline Patey, of the volumeCent’anni di Samuel Beckett. Tra le lingue tra i linguaggi (2007).

Davide Crosara PhD from the University of Rome “La Sapien-za”. His doctoral thesis, Samuel Beckett e la tradizione del mono -dramma, was discussed in December 2007. He has presented pa-pers in international Conferences in England and the States. Hismain fields of interest are 20th century drama (Samuel Beckett inparticular), media studies and Romantic literature. His essay onnothingness in Samuel Beckett (“Beckett e il (non)senso dellafine”) has been published in the collection edited by Rosy Colom-bo and Giuseppe Di Giacomo, Samuel Beckett ultimo atto (2009).

Anastasia Deligianni After two degrees, in Psychology andDramatic Arts, in Greece, she obtained an MA in Editing in Parisand started there her PhD research on the notion of the unfin-ished in literature using Samuel Beckett’s example, supervised byJulia Kristeva and by Bruno Clément (University of Paris 7 and 8).She recently published an article on the Beckettian “unsaid”, inSynthèses (Thessaloniki, Greece). She shares her time betweenprofessional photography, teaching in secondary school and herlittle Greek publishing house (www.asini.gr). Waiting to get backon stage.

Mario Faraone PhD in Literatures in English (University ofRome “La Sapienza” and IUO, Naples). He has published Un uo-mo solo, a study on Christopher Isherwood’s novels. Among hisother publications are studies on Buddhist and Hindu influenceson T. S. Eliot and various European writers; Giorgio Manganel-li’s Cassio governa a Cipro; Edward Upward’s short stories, Joyce’s



Ulysses, Anthony Trollope, William Beckford and Anthony Pow-ell. He is writing on Edward Upward, and has been awarded a fel-lowship by The Huntington Foundation (California), for a re-search project on Isherwood. He works at the University of Trie -ste.

Seb Franklin Dphil Candidate at the University of Sussex,Brighton (UK). His forthcoming publications include an essay oncontemporary counter-practice in digital art (2009) and a chapteron genre and image quality in the cinema of Takashi Miike. He iscurrently completing articles on the media-theoretical implica-tions of cloud computing and the subjective point-of-view shot inBeckett, horror and videogames.

Patrizia Fusella An associate professor of English Literature,she has recently retired from the University of Naples “L’Orien-tale” where she taught for thirty-five years. She has published es-says on 20th century authors, literary theory and Shakespeare; hasco-edited Geographies of Knowledge, Universities in Transition,and Dislocated Subjects, three special issues of Anglistica. OnSamuel Beckett she has published some essays and L’impossibili -tà di non essere (1995), a study of Not I which includes the exam-ination of the manuscripts and the publication and transcriptionof the holograph headed “Analysis”.

Heather Gardner Lecturer in English Literature at the Univer-sity of Rome “Tor Vergata”. She has published a study of The Lib-ertine by Shadwell (1995) and a book on the function of dreamsin Shakespeare’s plays (Oltre la porta di corno e d’avorio, 1997).She has written more than 20 essays on many authors: Richard-son, 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 autobiogra-phies published by Franco Angeli.

Stanley E. Gontarski Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Profes-sor of English at Florida State University, where he serves as Di-rector of Graduate Studies. He edited the Journal of Beckett Stud-



ies (new series) from 1992-2008, and he is now part of an editor-ial team headed by Anthony Uhlmann that will edit the thirdphase of the Journal from 2008 onward. His most recent booksare: (with C. J. Ackerley) The Faber and the Grove Companion toSamuel 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’sGeorge Freedley Award.

Daniela Guardamagna Professor of English Literature at theUniversity of Rome “Tor Vergata”. Her main areas of research areJacobean drama, contemporary drama (Beckett in particular),utopias and dystopias. She has translated for both cinema and the-atre, and has adapted the BBC versions of Othello, Macbeth andThe Tempest for Italian television (RAI). Her publications in-clude: Il teatro giacomiano e carolino (2002), La narrativa di Al-dous Huxley (1990), Analisi dell’incubo. L’utopia negativa da Swiftalla fantascienza (1980), and several essays published in Italy andabroad, on utopias, dystopias, Beckett, and Jacobean theatre.

Dirk Van Hulle He teaches English literature at the Universityof Antwerp, where he works at the Centre for Manuscript Ge-netics. He is editor of Genetic Joyce Studies and maintains theBeckett Endpage (www.ua.ac.be/beckett). His most recent bookpublication is Manuscript Genetics, Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’sNohow (2008). He is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manu-script Project and is currently working with Mark Nixon on Beck-ett’s Library.

Giulia Lazzarini A theatre actress who worked for many yearswith director Giorgio Strehler, she has alternated stage actingwith important television productions (Les Misérables, Doll’sHouse, etc.). Masterpieces in which she has acted include: Plato -nov 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 (asAriel), Happy Days and I giganti della montagna by Pirandello.Apart from the Piccolo Teatro Company, she has worked with



Carlo Battistoni, her husband, who directed her in the productionof Buonanottemamma, in Widowers’ Houses by G. B. Shaw, Min-nie la candida by Bontempelli, Giraudoux’s Intermezzo and Greatand Small by B. Strauss. She also works with Luca Ronconi, whohas recently directed her in Il ventaglio by Goldoni.

Carla Locatelli Professor of Literary Theory and ComparativeLiterature at the University of Trento, and Adjunct Professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania (USA). Vice-Rector for InternationalRelations at Trento. Speaker in several Italian and foreign univer-sities (United States, Ireland, England, Spain, France, China,Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, etc.), Exchange Research Fellowat the University of California (Santa Cruz) and Senior FulbrightFellow at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). Among her pub-lications are 14 volumes (some as editor), and approximately 150articles and contributions to books and reference works. She haspublished widely on Beckett (Unwording the World. Beckett’sProse Works after the Nobel Prize, 1990, and some 30 articles), andon 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 ofthe Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and Reviews Editor of theJournal of Beckett Studies. He is currently working on Beckett’sLibrary with Dirk Van Hulle, and preparing a critical edition ofthe short story “Echo’s Bones” for Faber and Faber.

Lorenzo Orlandini PhD Candidate at the University of Flo-rence with a research on The Theme of Sexuality in the Work ofSamuel Beckett. He has written the bibliography and theatrogra-phy of Beckett’s works included in Giancarlo Alfano and AndreaCortellessa (editors), Tegole dal Cielo: l’effetto Beckett nella let-teratura italiana (2006). He is a member of the James Joyce ItalianFoundation.

John Pilling Emeritus Professor at the University of Reading, hecontributed to the creation of the Beckett International Founda-



tion. Among his many publications: Samuel Beckett (1976); Fres-coes of the Skull (1979, with James Knowlson); Autobiography andImagination (1981); Fifty Modern European Poets (1982); TheCambridge Companion to Beckett (editor, 1994); Beckett beforeGodot (1997); A Companion to Dream of Fair to MiddlingWomen (2004); A Samuel Beckett Chronology (2006).

Rosemary Pountney She began her career in the theatre, latertaking a doctorate on Beckett’s drama (published as Theatre ofShadows, 1989). She lectured at University College Dublin, Uni-versity of Winchester, University of Oxford and is an Hon. Fel-low of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She has written numerous ar-ticles on Beckett and reviewed widely. She was a theatre critic forThe Oxford Times throughout the 1970’s. Her performing careerincludes playing the Irish Premieres of Not I and Footfalls at theIrish Theatre Festival in Dublin in 1978 and Footfalls at OxfordPlayhouse in 1980. She has taken Footfalls and “Rockaby” ontours across Europe, the USA, Canada and New Zealand.

Bill Prosser Senior Research Fellow, University of Reading. Hehas published several articles on the subject of Beckett’s doodlesand marginalia (such as “Beckett and the Phenomenology of Doo-dles”, “Object Drawing”, “Drawing From Beckett”). He has pre-sented 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 “Car-lo Bo”, with a dissertation on Beckett’s self-translation and themanuscripts of “Play” and Not I, and their French versions. Cur-rently working as lecturer at the University of Rome “Tor Verga-ta”, she has published two volumes on Beckett: “Prior to Godot”:Eleutheria di Samuel Beckett (2006), and La doppia originalità diSamuel Beckett. Play / Comédie e Not I / Pas moi (2008), and sev-eral 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 in-clude “Posthumous Controversies. The Publications of Beckett’sDream of Fair to Middling Women and Eleutheria”, in Samuel




Beckett and Publishing, and entries in Dictionnaire Beckett, bothforthcoming in 2010.

Shane Weller Reader in Comparative Literature and Co-Direc-tor of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the Univer-sity of Kent (UK). His publications include A Taste for the Nega-tive: Beckett and Nihilism (2005); Beckett, Literature, and theEthics of Alterity (2006); The Flesh in the Text, co-edited withThomas Baldwin and James Fowler (2007), and Literature, Phi-losophy, 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 andn, 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, 265-269, 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.

Index of Works by Samuel Beckett


“Ghost Trio”, XVI, 68, 124n, 273, 305-323;

– “Geister Trio”, 310.Giorni felici, see Happy Days.

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.

Ill Seen Ill Said, 91 and n, 118-119, 409-412;

– Mal vu mal dit, 91, 118n.Imagination Dead Imagine, 252.L’Innommable, see The Unnamable.“Intercessions by Denis Devlin”, 144.

Le Kid, 16.Krapp’s Last Tape, XVI, 107, 113-114,

171, 245n, 269, 277-291, 329-330,355, 397n, 430, 432-433.

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

“MacGreevy on Yeats”, 131.Malone Dies, 86n, 196, 210-211, 267;– Malone meurt, 285. Mercier and Camier, 20-35, 205, 217-

218, 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.

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

“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.

“Papini’s Dante”, 9.Pas moi, see Not I.“Peintres de l’empêchement”, 375n.“La peinture des van Velde ou le Mon-

de 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.

“Quad”, 109-110, 356. “Quad II”, 362.

“Rockaby”, XIV, XVI, XVIII, 114, 124-125, 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.

“Sanies II”, 13.Stirrings Still, 267.

450 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, 289-

290, 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, 218-220, 223-237, 273, 280, 289, 319;

– L’Innommable, 280, 285;– Der Namenlose, 223.

Waiting for Godot, XIV, XVI, XVIII, 16, 40,

62, 75, 86n, 96n, 105-108, 124-125,128, 130, 131 and n, 135, 144, 156-173, 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, 64-

68, 75, 92n, 245n. “Words and Music”, 113, 286, 288-

289.Worstward Ho, 91 and n, 210, 252, 376.

Index of Works by Samuel Beckett 451


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, 198and 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, XIV-

XV, 223-237, 352;– Ästhetische Theorie, 223, 226, 230,

234;– Negative Dialectics (Negative Dia-

lektik), 225-226, 228-229, 233;– Notes to Literature (Noten zur Lite-

ratur), 223;– “Trying Understand Endgame”

(“Ver such Endspiel Zu verste-hen”), 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, 20-

35, 58, 65, 67, 83, 86n, 89n, 98n, 99-100, 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 Com-

media), 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 Sonet-

ti 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.

Index of Names and Works


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 mé-

moire), 337.

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 (Pre-

mière Épître de Saint Jean), 51;– Genesis, 146;– The Gospel according to Matthew,

150;– Lamentations (Les Lamentations),

51.Binasco, Valerio, 342 and n, 345, 352-

353.Bishop, Tom, 78.Blair, Carole, 185n.Blanchot, Maurice, 183, 383-384.Blin, Roger, XVI, 126, 132, 260, 364-

365.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.

454 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 Ita-

lien, 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 pro-

se, 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.

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, 78-

79, 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.



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, 58-

59, 65 and n;– Storia della letteratura italiana, 7, 58,

65.Descartes, René, 88, 93-94, 98n, 200-

202, 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 Michajlovic, 232,

435.Dowden, Hester, 306.Driver, Tom, 157.Duccio di Buoninsegna, 265.Duchamp, Marcel, 390.Duckworth, Colin, 124, 285, 393n.

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.



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.

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, 286and 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.



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, 234-

235.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.

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., 53Jackson, Rosemary, 310.James, William, 288;– The Varieties of Religious Experi-

ence, 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 Wa-

ke), 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;



– 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, 360-361, 390, 392n.

Kraft, Werner, 224, 227, 229.Kristeva, Julia, 144n, 383.Kroll, Jeri L., 250. Kundert-Gibbs, John Leeland, 166n,

167n.

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 Jean-

neret-Gris), 391.Lehar, Franz;– The Merry Widow (La Vedova alle-

gra), 370, 371n, 423, 425.Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 66, 190-

191.Lemaistre, Louis-Isaac (Lemaître de

Sacy), 147n.Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, 64.

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.

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.



Manzoni, Alessandro, 6, 16, 345;– Il Cinque Maggio, 16;– I Promessi Sposi, 16.Marguerat, Daniel, 144.Marias, Javier, 389.Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, XIII, 103-

112;– 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.

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 Sin-ne), 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.



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, 205and 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;

– 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, 278-291, 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.



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, 394and n.

Schoenberg, Arnold, 232.Schopenhauer, Arthur, 60, 67-68, 90,

93, 240-241, 244, 250, 252, 278;– Parerga (Parerga und Paralipome-

na), 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.

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 Vissarionovic Dzugasvili),

392, 399.Stanislavski, Constantin, 351.Starkie, Walter, 14-15.Steen, Jan, 58.Stein, Gertrude, 232.Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle), 64, 232,

246, 250;



– Armance, 246, 250;– Le Rouge et le Noir, 64.Stoker, Bram, 406;– Dracula, 406.Stravinsky, Igor, 231.Strehler, Giorgio, XVIII, 370-373, 416-

425. 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.

van Gogh, Vincent, XVI, 135 and n, 136and 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 Nuo-

va), 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.



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.

Woolf, Stuart, 79n.Wordsworth, William, 95.Worth, Katharine, 114, 123, 127, 152,

313n.Wulf, Catharina, 316, 317n.

Yeats, Jack Butler, XIV, 12, 16, 131, 132and 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.

