Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television / Edition 1
Author: G. Herren
Date: 2007-08-10 00:00:00+00:00
Description: This is the first book devoted Beckett's innovative work for the big- and small-screens. Herren examines each of Beckett's film and television plays in depth, emphasizing the central role that memory plays in these haunting works.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

Samuel Beckett’s Plays
on Film and Television

Samuel Beckett’s Plays
on Film and Television

Graley Herren

SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAYS ON FILM AND TELEVISION

Copyright © Graley Herren, 2007.

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7795-3

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For Cathy and Dylan

Contents

Acknowledgments
ix

Chapter 1

Beckett’s Memory Machines

1

Chapter 2

Slouching toward Television: Beckett’s

Apprenticeship in Radio and Film

27

Chapter 3

“The Best’s to Come”: Suicidal

Fantasy in Eh Joe

47

Chapter 4

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio

69

Chapter 5

Beckett’s Double-Vision of

Yeats in …but the clouds…

93

Chapter 6

Quadrat I + II: Eff It with Color

123

Chapter 7

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume

141

Chapter 8

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation

171

Works Cited

199

Index

211

Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the generous support of several people and institutions. I am grateful to Xavier University for its continuing commitment to my scholarship. The university granted me a faculty development sabbatical and two summer research fellowships over the course of my research, without which I would not have had the time and funds necessary to complete this work. I appreciate Janice Walker, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for her steadfast support, and I thank my English department colleagues, particularly my chairs, Norman Finkelstein, Tyrone Williams, and Alison Russell, for helping me to balance my teaching duties with my scholarly pursuits.

I have also been fortunate to receive a great deal of professional and personal support beyond the boundaries of my home institution. My archival research led me to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Written Archives in Reading, where I was kindly and ably assisted by Els Boonen. And of course no book on Beckett would be complete without a pilgrimage to the Beckett Archives at Reading University. I will always remember fondly the hospital-ity of James Knowlson and Mary Bryden I enjoyed years ago on my first trip to the university, and I cannot thank Julian Garforth enough for his welcoming spirit and expert assistance every time I have visited the archives. I have also benefited enormously from discussions with colleagues at other universities. On the Beckett circuit, I always look forward to comparing notes with David Hatch, Katherine Weiss, and Paul Shields. Fellow Florida State alums have shown me great kindness, in particular Julie Brannon, who so graciously hosted me for a lecture in Jacksonville, and Tammy Clewell, whose penetrating insights about mourning influenced my work at exactly the right time. I also gain sustenance every year from the Comparative Drama Conference, where my fellow board members are always welcome company. I must single out Bill Hutchings, Verna Foster, and Les Essif for thanks, not only because of their Beckettian expertise and dependable good cheer, but also because they each provided specific assistance to me at crucial junctures of my work on this book.

x Acknowledgments

Finally, there is a core group of people whose influence and encouragement has been so profound that I cannot imagine having completed this book without them. Stan Gontarski is the polestar by which I have guided my career. For me and for dozens of others who have learned our trade under his expert tutelage, he has been an inspiring teacher, an exemplary scholar, a wise mentor, and a tireless promoter of his students’ best interests, even years after we have completed our apprenticeships. His advice throughout the various stages of this study has been instrumental and transformative. If the present book is unthinkable without Stan’s intellectual contributions, then it is equally unimaginable without the emotional contributions of my family. My parents, Charles and Bonnie Herren, deserve special credit for the deep love and abiding encouragement they have showered on all of their children. I appreciate and thank them, as well as my brother and sisters, for keeping me grounded even while my head was in the clouds. My greatest gratitude is reserved for my wife, who has lived with this project just as long as I have, and who might easily have grown to resent Samuel Beckett for his recurring intrusion upon our family life. Instead, she has provided a steady anchor of support during the shifting tides of this book’s fortunes. Thank you for everything, Cathy. I truly could not have done it without you. This book is for you and for our son Dylan. May he, too, someday taste the fruits of committed labor, nurtured by love and dedicated to a worthy cause.

CHAPTER 1

Beckett’s Memory Machines

Like many of his modernist forebears, Samuel Beckett heeded Ezra Pound’s clarion call to “make it new” by “making it old anew.”

Nowhere are Beckett’s impulses to “make it old” more acutely displayed than in his encounters with the relatively new media of film and television. From his first venture behind the camera in the mid-1960s filming Film with Alan Schneider, through his last stint in the mid-1980s adapting What Where for German television, Beckett approaches the typically frenetic and forward-looking filmed media with a gaze fixed backwards and an ear attuned to echoes from the past. As C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski observe in The Grove Companion, “Writing for Beckett was always a haunting echo of memory, personal and cultural.

Learning to read Beckett, again, is to approach him as already a repetition, an echo of his reading, of his culture, and finally of himself ” (xvi).

Those echoes are especially resonant in Beckett’s teleplays, the primary focus of the present study. In the teleplays Beckett broadcasts multilay-ered, medium-specific confrontations between present and past, perception and memory, subject and object, presence and absence. Here “making it old” does not mean making it artistically stagnant and mired in nostalgia. Rather, Beckett rigorously explored the potential and exploited the limitations of mechanical media—first radio, then film, and ultimately television—to serve as memory machines: sites for recollecting and reinventing personal, philosophical, and artistic pasts.

* * *

Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television is the first full-length study devoted exclusively to Beckett’s screen work. This may come as a surprise to new scholars who find the library shelves bowing beneath the weight of so many Beckett books. The screen work accounts for a significant portion of Beckett’s later oeuvre, so why has it attracted disproportionately little attention from the Beckett industry? Speculations range from the infrequency of

2 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren screenings and rebroadcasts, to the paucity of available copies, to the suspect nature of television as a corrupt (and corrupting) medium, to the basic inscrutability of the teleplays themselves—which, like the shades that inhabit them, stubbornly resist yielding their meaning. There have been numerous articles and book chapters devoted to the teleplays, many of them excellent; my own work has benefited enormously from these predecessors, and I will acknowledge them in due course. Nonetheless, the entire teleplay corpus still awaits a “sequel” to Clas Zilliacus’s Beckett and Broadcasting. Published in 1976 by Finland’s Åbo Akademi with the subtitle “A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television,” this groundbreaking study is a model of scrupulous, comprehensive research. Through individual textual analysis, intertextual comparative analysis, and contextual sensitivity to medium-specific concerns of production and reception, Zilliacus examines all of Beckett’s radio plays and the first teleplay. He takes a narrow, underestimated body of work and establishes its ingenuity and worth. Like all subsequent scholars who have studied Beckett and broadcasting, I am indebted to Zilliacus’s example. It is sadly ironic that Beckett and Broadcasting, a book that did so much to rescue the radio plays from obscurity, has itself now lapsed largely into obscurity, a dusty collector’s item difficult to lay one’s hands on anymore. On this state of affairs I can only echo Ruby Cohn’s plea in A Beckett Canon that this unsurpassed volume is “a book that should be republished” (304).

In many ways the present book attempts to pick up where Zilliacus leaves off. He addresses only one of the teleplays, Eh Joe (composed 1965 / broadcast 1966), which was already ten years old by then. Zilliacus surely could not have suspected when he signed his preface in December 1975 that, within a year, Beckett would have tripled his televisual output, composing two new teleplays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and filming his own German versions for Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR). In fact, the ten years following the publication of Beckett and Broadcasting marked the most sustained and productive period of Beckett’s television career, yielding Ghost Trio (composed 1976 / broadcast 1977), …but the clouds… (composed 1976

/ broadcast 1977), Quadrat I + II (composed and broadcast 1982),1 Nacht und Träume (composed 1982 / broadcast 1983), and Was Wo (composed for stage 1983 / adapted 1985 / broadcast 1986).2 In short, just as Zilliacus was closing the most comprehensive study of Beckett and broadcasting to date, Beckett was just beginning to write and record his greatest contributions to the subject.

The present book looks back at Beckett’s backward-looking screen work in its entirety and in its discrete parts. It attempts to apply the same rigorous standards of textual, intertextual, and contextual analysis found in Zilliacus,

Beckett’s Memory Machines 3
but with the advantage of having the complete teleplay corpus available for dissection. Each teleplay is addressed in its own individual chapter and arranged sequentially. Each subsequent chapter addresses the unique conditions, concerns, and challenges of the individual work at hand while also considering the progressive (and regressive) trajectory of the television work on the whole. In this respect, too, my approach resembles that of Zilliacus.

“In discussing the individual radio plays of Beckett,” he writes, “I have argued that they have been conceived in terms of their designated media, and increasingly so for each successive work; this argument is central to my study”

(169). I make the same general argument for the teleplays as well. However, I also make a more specific thematic argument anticipated by my opening remarks. For all their individual idiosyncrasies, one theme dominates the teleplays more than any other: Memory. Beckett’s abiding fascination with memory is certainly not confined to his work on screen; indeed, Ackerley and Gontarski distinguish “the shaping fictive power of memory” as Beckett’s

“later great theme” in general (364). What I wish to consider for the rest of this introductory chapter, and to reconsider regularly throughout my entire study, are the medium-specific ways in which Beckett wrestles with memory throughout the teleplays.

* * *

“What can I but enumerate old themes” asks Yeats in “The Circus Animals’

Desertion” (9).3 Of the six teleplays, five explicitly enumerate Beckett’s old theme of memory: Joe hears the voice of a former lover who taunts him with a description of still another jilted lover in Eh Joe; a male figure (F) is lost in reverie, listening to Beethoven and listening for the return of an absent woman from his past in Ghost Trio; another male figure (M) recalls his many nights waiting, usually in vain, for a visitation from his dead “woman lost”

(W) in …but the clouds… ; a dreamer (A) fantasizes about (or remembers?) the solace from a mysterious pair of helping hands in Nacht und Träume; and the Voice of Bam (manifest on screen as a blurry face) orchestrates rough interrogations in the “field of memory” in Was Wo.4 Memory is in truth a vital concern in most of Beckett’s late work. Yet the treatment of the subject in the teleplays is distinct from the rest of the oeuvre because the medium is uniquely suited to serve as a vehicle for memory. Consider the contrast with theatre. In Beckett’s stage plays he frequently draws reflexive attention to the conditions of live performance. The spectacle is happening here and now—
only here and only now, living and expiring before a roomful of witnesses who gaze collectively from the darkness. The conditions for viewing a filmed or taped performance are fundamentally different. While the spectator does in a sense experience the filmed performance (at least the first time) in the here

4 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren and now, in the present, he or she by no means experiences the performance in the presence—for the actors are long gone, and the audience is dispersed among countless individual households. All we see are shades of absent figures and echoes of extinguished voices, and, according to Beckett’s ideal conditions for spectatorship, we witness it all from the privacy of an inner sanctum. As in the occult connotation of the term “medium,” Beckett exploits the television medium as a private interface between the living and dead, the present and absent, perception and memory.

The televisual spectacle is by its very nature spectral; it is an illusion of light and sound; there is no there there. In this sense it is the perfect medium for wrestling with memory, because like memory it is an illusion where absence is an irrefutable and unbridgeable given. Consider, for instance, the necessary differences between viewing the memory play Not I live in the theater, as opposed to viewing it when it aired on the BBC tele-trilogy Shades in 1977, or viewing it subsequently on videotape. If one attended a live performance of Not I, say one of Billie Whitelaw’s performances at the Royal Court Theatre in 1972, one could hypothetically have rushed up on stage during the show and rescued poor Billie from that awful contraption holding her head steady in the spotlight. No one ever did that, and I cannot imagine that either actress or audience would have appreciated the gesture. But the point is that it could happen because the performer and the audience are really there, in that theater at that moment in time. Conversely, one could not rescue Billie Whitelaw from the TV version of Not I because the spectator and performer shared neither the same space nor the same time. By the time the program first aired on April 17, 1977, the play being broadcast was already over; the spectacle was already spectral. Whitelaw had long since been freed from her contraption; in fact she memorably describes sitting uncomfortably alongside Beckett as a spectator of her own spectral broadcast.5

If I am stating some obvious truths about television, it is only because the obvious is so often overlooked. Beckett does not overlook the obvious, however; he estranges the obvious by drawing attention to the ethereal nature of television so easily buried beneath the pall of convention. Even as we watch Whitelaw’s performance on tape, we know that her here is not our here, her now is not our now. TV-Billie is not really there and never was. However, the companion to this truth is that her trace, her echo, her ghost remains in her absence. Furthermore, her ghost is only a play button away from instant reanimation, and this potential will remain even after the real Billie Whitelaw is no more. This is the spectral nature of recorded media—never truly there, yet always with us. Jacques Derrida brilliantly captured the simultaneously “live”

and dead nature of television in a 1993 filmed interview for INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), transcribed in the book Echographies of Television.

Beckett’s Memory Machines 5

Referring to the televised interview being recorded at that very moment, Derrida reflected,

Well, precisely because we know now, under the lights, in front of the camera, listening to the echo of our own voices, that this live moment will be able to be—that it is already—captured by machines that will transport and perhaps show it, God knows when and God knows where, we already know that death is here. The INA is a machine, and this machine works like a kind of undertaker, recording things and archiving moments about which we know a priori that, no matter how soon after their recording we die, and even if we were to die while recording, voilà, this will be and will remain “live,” a simulacrum of life. (39)

Television simultaneously kills and resuscitates that which it records. It turns the “live” moment into a dead artifact, yet it retains the capacity, God knows when and where, to reanimate those artifacts from the past, even after the literal deaths of those who participated in the original recorded moment.

Beckett exploits precisely this spectral dynamic. It is no accident that his teleplays are haunted by ghosts, because all televisual images are essentially traces of the “living dead.” He orients his teleplays steadfastly toward the absent past in order to foreground the medium’s propensity to recall the dead to life—to serve, that is, as memory machine.

* * *

The teleplays are also haunted by Beckett’s own rich cultural memory.

Though the pieces are all short, and though they increasingly drift away from their moorings in language, they are nevertheless remarkably allusive. Beckett

“makes it old” in the teleplays by linking his work back to dozens of predecessors, many of them premodern, and ranging across the cultural spectrum, from philosophy to psychology, to classical music and painting, through poetry and silent films, to sculpture and dance. Nevertheless, these pieces, rooted in the past, are not products of nostalgia. The teleplays simultaneously engage and estrange tradition, invoking artistic predecessors only to resist, refute, and revise them. Of course, according to T.S. Eliot, creative tension with tradition has always been a hallmark of genuine participation within tradition.6 The following study looks back at the dialectic between the each teleplay and an array of sources from Beckett’s deep reservoir of cultural memory. Such intertextuality continually forces us, as V commands in Ghost Trio, to “Look again” ( Complete Dramatic Works 409) at traditional sources from a fresh critical perspective.7

The extended project of the teleplays is to engage with memory qua memory, and with ghosts from Beckett’s own cultural memory, all the while

6 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren reflecting rigorously upon the memory-machinery of his medium. This entire process bears renewed witness to his claims on an Irish cultural inheritance.

Beckett’s status as an “Irish writer” has always been contested, not least by the author himself. In 1938 for instance, during the first decade of the Irish Free State, Beckett wrote to his nationalist friend Thomas MacGreevy, “I can’t think of Ireland the way you do,” in part because of a “chronic inability to understand as a member of any proposition a phrase like ‘the Irish people.’”8

Around this same time Beckett famously cast his lot with France at war over Ireland at peace, beginning a voluntary exile from Ireland and from

“Irishness” that would last the rest of his life. Until quite recently most critics have followed Beckett’s lead in turning their backs on his homeland. “The tendency, especially in English and French criticism, has been to depict Beckett as an ahistorical pessimist,” observes Ronan McDonald. “Beckett’s art is seen as loftily uninterested in the tawdry distractions of day-to-day life. And, or so the story goes, as history and politics are jettisoned in the interests of universal authenticity, geography and national locale are shed along with it—we are left with the characteristically rootless Beckettian landscape” (141). Since his death concerted efforts have been made to reclaim Dublin’s native son, with varying degrees of success.9 Yet anyone who has ever attempted to teach Beckett, particularly his late drama, in the context of an Irish literature course knows how awkwardly he fits with his compatriots on the syllabus.

This aberrational status may tell us more about the inadequacy of prevailing cultural stereotypes than about Beckett’s apparent “un-Irishness,” however. Though Nicholas Miller does not address Beckett per se in his book Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory, he nevertheless provides a useful paradigm for understanding Beckett in an Irish context. Miller attempts to redirect critical focus in Irish studies away from the theme of obsession with Irish history and toward a memory-centered process of selective remembering and creative forgetting. He charges, “Like all cultural generalizations, the notion that historical obsession is Ireland’s special ‘anomaly’ […] says a great deal more about the investments observers make in Irish culture than it does about that culture itself.” Miller points out the biases and shortcomings of using “historical obsession” as a litmus test for authentic “Irishness.” He argues that this culturally reductive stereotype is in fact, one of those things “We Outsiders” need “We Irish” to have—like wit or whiskey—in order to make sense of what seems otherwise a profound and confounding strangeness. Seeing the Irish as unable to look back without staring is intellectually convenient not least because it bypasses a crucial examination of what is meant by “looking back” in the first place. One way to begin to understand the presence of the past in Irish experience without

Beckett’s Memory Machines 7
resorting to cultural essentialism, then, is to examine memory itself as a cultural function. (11)

Using Miller’s criteria, the relative scarcity of overt references to Irish history, places, people, and artifacts in Beckett’s late drama is beside the point.

What is more revealing is his trademark emphasis on memory as an interface between recovering the past and refashioning the present. Ronan McDonald puts it best when he observes that “what is, perhaps, more important than Beckett’s memory of Irish geography is the Irish geography of Beckett’s memory. The overt topographical references hint, more fundamentally, at the encoding of certain paradigms and models of Irish cultural and historical experience in Beckett’s literary method” (142). McDonald focuses upon Edenic loss and tragic guilt as the shibboleths of post-Ascendency drama. I would add memory as an essential part of the paradigm, serving as the vehicle, or the “cultural function,” to use Miller’s term, whereby characters return again and again to the scenes of their crimes, relapsing into unfortunate falls.

Though Beckett’s art is overtly an “art of failure,” he has at least been credited with success in freeing that art from the nightmare of history, flying past the nets of nationality, language, and religion notoriously set to ensnare Irish writers. The current trend to rehistoricize Beckett is built upon the premise that neither the author nor his work made it past those nets unscathed. After all, Beckett’s flight to France followed a familiar migratory pattern of the Irish diaspora’s wild geese. And his subsequent themes of disorientation, deracination, and marginalization are perfectly consistent with Protestant class anxieties in the postindependent Irish Free State.10 In my own study, only the chapter on …but the clouds… explores Beckett’s work in a specifically Irish context, indebted as that play is to Yeats’s work and iconic legacy. I focus more on tracing Beckett’s lineage back to philosophy, psychology, premod-ernist art, and modernist aesthetics than back to Ireland per se. Nevertheless, if memory is a quintessentially modernist theme, it is no less Irish for that. In fact, Irish artists like W.B. and Jack B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett were instrumental in placing memory at the center of modernism. By drawing attention to Beckett’s deeply reflexive interrogation of memory in the teleplays, I hope that my work contributes implicitly (when not explicitly) to the project of excavating Beckett’s buried Irish inheritance.

* * *

While his Irish influences remain largely embedded, Beckett’s philosophical and psychological influences loom closer to the surface. In terms of intellectual history the teleplays descend from a distinct “genealogy of memory.”

Most discussions of memory in Beckett begin with his treatment of the subject

8 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren in Proust. While I, too, will make select use of this revealing monograph, I am more interested in tracing the genealogy through which Beckett inherits, and from which he adapts, his dramaturgical approaches to memory. This lineage passes most notably through Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. A complete analysis of Beckett’s debt to these imposing figures is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter, but certain key inter-sections of thought on spirits, memory, and mourning must be established at the outset because of their foundational importance to the teleplays.

With regard to memory, Schopenhauer’s most apposite influence on the teleplays comes in the relationship he draws between madness and memory.

In The World as Will and Representation,11 he identifies genius as a rare gift of deep perception and contemplation, but he also acknowledges how easily such gifts can deteriorate into madness. In an important passage from Book III, Schopenhauer diagnoses madness as essentially a failure of memory: For the most part, mad people do not generally err in the knowledge of what is immediately present; their mad talk relates always to what is absent and past. […]

Therefore it seems to me that their malady specially concerns the memory. It is not, indeed, a case of memory failing them entirely. […] Rather is it a case of the thread of memory being broken, its continuous connexion being abolished, and of the impossibility of a uniformly coherent recollection of the past. (192) This irreparable rupture between the present and the past becomes a precondition for all the protagonists in the teleplays. But for Beckett’s characters, as for Schopenhauer’s madmen, the break with the past is never complete; otherwise the sufferer could simply lose himself in amnesiac oblivion. Instead,

“Individual scenes of the past stand out correctly, just like the individual present; but there are gaps in their recollection that they fill up with fictions.

[…] In his memory the true is forever mixed up with the false. Although the immediate present is correctly known, it is falsified through its fictitious connexion with an imaginary past” (192). Not only does this passage perfectly presage the “fictive power of memory” that Ackerley and Gontarski hail as the dominant theme of Beckett’s late work, but the passage also defines a more general truth about the very nature of memory. Indeed, if forming a “fictitious connexion with an imaginary past” constitutes madness, then not only are all of the teleplay protagonists mad, but so too are most of their spectators. “We all are born mad,” as Estragon would have it; “Some remain so”

( CDW 75). In this sense Beckett departs from Schopenhauer’s language of stigma and pathology and instead addresses the general tendency of memory to manipulate a malleable past. As Beckett first observed in his monograph on Proust, “Voluntary memory (Proust repeats it ad nauseam) is of no value

Beckett’s Memory Machines 9
as an instrument of evocation, and provides an image as far removed from the real as the myth of our imagination or the caricature furnished by direct perception” (4). Rejecting both the veracity and the artistic usefulness of voluntary memory, Proust, Beckett the critic, and later Beckett the artist rely instead upon “involuntary memory” as a superior “instrument of discovery”

( Proust 17). Paul de Man’s insight in Blindness and Insight helps clarify this alternative focus even further. De Man observes, “The power of memory does not reside in its capacity to resurrect a situation or a feeling that actually existed, but is a constitutive act of the mind bound to its own present and oriented toward the future of its own elaboration. The past intervenes only as a purely formal element” (92). In de Man’s figuration, as in the teleplays, the past becomes merely incidental to the act of memory. To adapt Beckett’s own language from the notes to Film, in any present act of memory, “No truth value attaches to [the past]”; rather, the past is “regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience” (163).

While The World as Will and Representation certainly casts a long shadow over Beckett’s work, a touchstone text of even greater importance for the teleplays is Schopenhauer’s later treatise, “Essay on Spirit Seeing and everything connected therewith.” Given his willingness to categorize fictive memory as a symptom of madness in his masterwork, it is interesting to find Schopenhauer defending “spirit seeing” against charges of madness in this later essay. Instead he maps out a special category for internal perceptions (as distinct from external perceptions) and defines familiar phenomena within this category. He explains,

[T]he dream, somnambulistic perception, clairvoyance, vision, second sight, and possibly spirit seeing are closely related phenomena. Their common feature is that when we lapse into them, we obtain an intuitive perception that objectively presents itself through an organ quite different from that used in the ordinary state of wakefulness, that is to say, not through the external senses, but yet wholly and exactly as if by means thereof. I have accordingly called such an organ the dream-organ. (272)

“Dream-organ” activity is not confined exclusively, or even primarily, to perceptions made while asleep, however. Rather, Schopenhauer studies various perceptions provoked by internal stimulation (while awake or asleep) of our dream-organs, as related to, but distinct from, perceptions provoked by external stimulation of our sense organs. It is also important to note that Schopenhauer does not resort to the rhetoric of pathology in this essay; he does not privilege sense-organ perceptions over dream-organ perceptions, but simply recognizes them as two distinct categories of human cognition.

10 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren In both scope and approach, Schopenhauer’s anticipation of Freud as a cartographer of internal perceptions is especially evident here. But so, too, is his anticipation of Beckett. A great deal of effort is spent (by the protagonists and by their critics) in trying to determine whether the disembodied voices and voiceless bodies of the teleplays are “real” or merely “imagined.” In a technical sense this question is a red herring; for if by “real” one means tangibly, materially present, then nothing in television is really “real.” In a philosophical sense as well, the distinctions between “real” and “imagined” blur.

For, as Schopenhauer’s “Essay on Spirit Seeing” shows, a perception whose source is internal is no less “real” than a perception whose source is external.

Again, Beckett exploits the generic conditions of television to foreground such tensions. He exploits the public broadcast nature of the medium to deliver external stimulations to the eyes and ears of his spectators. But he also exploits the private nature of the medium, delivering absent shades and distant echoes into the private homes of spectators, where the screen becomes a shared site for perceiving dream-organ activity.

Schopenhauer distinguishes several subcategories of dream-organ perception, including hallucinations, visions, and second sight. Of these, the area of greatest relevance to the teleplays is “retrospective second sight,” a term the philosopher applies to apparitions of the dead. He accounts for such perceptions as emanating principally from internal stimulation of the dream-organ, although he also acknowledges the external stimulation often supplied by external reminders of the deceased, like proximity to familiar locales, rooms, wardrobe, and objects. With reference to a celebrated spirit-medium of his day, the clairvoyante of Prevorst, Schopenhauer addresses the imagination’s tendency to embellish these apparitions of the dead: In all probability, most of the ghosts seen by the clairvoyante of Prevorst are also to be reckoned among visions of this kind. But the conversations she carried on with them are to be regarded as the work of her own imagination that furnished the text for this dumb show from its own resources and thus supplied its explanation. […] Accordingly, without knowing it, the clairvoyante herself was the prompter of those forms that appeared to her.

Schopenhauer refers to this practice of imaginative embellishment as “the dramaturgy of the clairvoyante” (286). Such perceptions penetrate deep into Beckett country. Indeed, the virtual corpses exhumed throughout the teleplays are all reanimated using this dramaturgical process of “retrospective second sight.” Both internal and external stimuli conspire to summon the dead; but the forms assumed by those dead, as well as their subsequent actions and words, are choreographed by the mourners themselves.

Beckett’s Memory Machines 11

While Schopenhauer maintains important distinctions between internal and external perceptions, the effect of his “retrospective second sight” analysis is to breach the boundaries between the subject who recalls the dead and the object of recollection. In fact, he admits as much in the conclusion to his essay, conceding that
the perplexity attaching to the consideration of visions and spirit apparitions springs really from the fact that, with these perceptions, the boundary between subject and object, as being the first condition of all knowledge, becomes doubtful, indistinct, and indeed quite blurred. “Is that outside or inside me?” is asked by everyone—as it was by Macbeth when a dagger floated before him. (298)

According to the logic of Schopenhauer’s analysis, the answer to the question

“Is that outside or inside me?” seems to be “Both.” For his “Essay on Spirit Seeing” ultimately implies that when we see spirits of the dead, we are really seeing creatures of our own device.

* * *

The barriers between subject and object are further breached by Henri Bergson. Beckett was familiar enough with the French philosopher to include him in his Trinity lectures.12 Bergson’s theories are generally applicable to film studies (they form the bedrock of Gilles Delueze’s two books on Cinema), and they are specifically applicable to Beckett studies (as Anthony Uhlmann demonstrates admirably in the second chapter of Beckett and Poststructuralism). Bergson’s most prescient treatise with respect to the teleplays is undoubtedly Matter and Memory. As his 1908 introduction to the fifth edition announces, this study “deals with body and mind in such a way as, we hope, to lessen greatly, if not overcome, the theoretical difficulties that have always beset dualism” (vii). Bergson addresses the problem first by redefining objective matter and subjective perception: “I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body” (8). This definition establishes two key modes of thought that characterize his methodology throughout Matter and Memory. First, by defining all matter, including the body, as “the aggregate of images,” Bergson approaches reality from outside-in rather than from inside-out. That is, he posits from the outset that images exist and that the body exists as another image in the aggregate, rather than beginning with consciousness, as idealists like Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”) and Berkeley (“Being is being perceived”) do, thereby defining all matter as an ideal construct of consciousness. Second, Bergson constantly emphasizes perception’s orientation toward action—real action or potential (virtual)

12 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren action—rather than toward pure speculative knowledge. In theory, then, the process of “pure perception” involves an instantaneous apprehension of material reality and an immediate translation of perception into that action which best serves the body’s needs.

If “pure perception” were truly operative, then all meaningful distinctions between subject and object would dissolve. As Bergson puts it toward the end of Matter and Memory, “let us place ourselves face to face with immediate reality: at once we find that there is no impassable barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction even, between perception and the thing perceived”

(291). The problem is that, practically speaking, we are never “face to face with immediate reality.” What differentiates theoretical “pure perception”

from actual, concrete perception is the intrusion of memory. According to Bergson, “there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as

‘signs’ that recall to us former images” (24). Memory selects various images, those apprehended in the present and those recollected from the past, then contracts them into a singular image that passes for perception. The resulting image represents such a mélange of past and present that the two become practically indistinguishable: “any memory-image that is capable of interpreting our actual perception inserts itself so thoroughly into it that we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory” (125). He later reiterates, “There comes a moment when the recollection thus brought down is capable of blending so well with the present perception that we cannot say where perception ends and memory begins” (130).

Schopenhauer demonstrated that spirit-seeing, which seems to involve external visitation, might be better understood as internal manifestation projected outward. The slippery relationship between subjective and objective realities becomes even more destabilized by Bergson. He asserts that there are no de jure distinctions between subject and object, but that there are de facto distinctions because perception is alloyed with memory. Since memory leads the mind back to times past, and since the insertion of memory-images into the present requires some duration of thought, Bergson concludes that the nature of subject-object relations is temporal rather than spatial:

“Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time rather than of space” (77; Bergson’s emphasis). So in theory the body and other images are united because all move within the undifferentiated time of the present. In practice, however, subject and object are divided as such because of the intrusion of past memory-images into present perception. Bergson goes so far as to suggest that “the present” itself exists

Beckett’s Memory Machines 13
only in theory and not in practice. What we think of as the present has already slipped into the past even as we formulate the thought, “This is the present.”

So actual perception consists entirely in perceiving what is already past: “Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth every perception is already memory.

Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future” (194; Bergson’s emphasis).

Bergson’s theories in Matter and Memory serve in many respects as a blueprint for the perceptual labyrinths of Beckett’s teleplays. Most of the protagonists seek the ideal conditions of “pure perception” outlined by Bergson.

Beckett’s tortured subjects agonize over lost love objects from the past. They experience the alterity of the other as the sundering of a whole, and they long to restore unity by mending the rift between subject and object. They navigate the breach using memory as a bridge, attempting to lure the lost loved one back out of the past and into the present. These efforts are doomed from the start, however, for precisely those reasons outlined by Bergson. Memory can never be used to mend the rift between subject and object because it is the rift; it cannot be the bridge because it is already the chasm. There would be no division between the two in the first place if we could “place ourselves face to face with immediate reality” (291). But in fact reality is always mediated by memory. Likewise, the medium of television serves to mediate the spectator’s perceptions, and again Bergson’s model for memory is instructive. The spectral nature of television results from its facility in conjuring up absence as presence. It takes what is done and gone—dead air—and resuscitates it through broadcast and video playback. Similarly, Bergson argues that the present is always already memory, the past masquerading as the present. Thus, in exploiting television’s capacity to make the dead seem “live,” Beckett is only reiterating the function of perception itself, which always already serves as a memory machine.

In delineating how the practical work of memory gets done, Bergson distinguishes between two types of recollection: spontaneous and learnt.

Spontaneous recollection is instantaneous, exact, and unique, a perfect transcription of a past perception. This type of memory is analogous to the epiphanic “involuntary memory” that is the bedrock of Proustian revelation.

But because it is spontaneous and involuntary, it is also the most rare and least accessible form of memory. “Learnt” recollection is far more prevalent.

This kind of memory “has retained from the past only the intelligently coordinated movements that represent the accumulated efforts of the past; and it recovers those past efforts, not in the memory-images that recall them, but in the definite order and systematic character with which the actual movements take place” (93). In other words, “learnt” recollections involve “memorizing”

14 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren by rote the order and character of past images, and voluntarily rehearsing them when need arises. Of this second type of memory, Bergson comments,

“In truth, it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment” (93). He summarizes, “Of the two memories, then, that we have just distinguished, the first appears to be memory par excellence. The second, that generally studied by psychologists, is habit interpreted by memory rather than memory itself ” (95; Bergson’s emphasis). This distinction, between involuntary but genuine memory and voluntary but inauthentic habit, deeply informs Beckett’s early study of Proust, and habit continues to serve as “the great deadener” ( CDW 84) for his own later characters. Habit in the form of repetition-compulsion dictates the behavior of all the teleplays’ protagonists, and the pernicious effects of habit are largely to blame for their individual and collective misery. Indeed, what comes across as the general failure of memory in the teleplays might better be defined using Bergson’s taxonomy as the failure of second-order memory (“learnt recollection” or “habit”) to achieve the desired effects of first-order memory (“spontaneous recollection”).

One place where Beckett’s treatment of perception and memory does depart somewhat from Bergson is in the arena of action. Even as Bergson concedes that practically speaking we perceive only the past, he still insists that the aim of perception is toward present or future action. The perceiving agents within Beckett’s teleplays resist this orientation toward action, however. The more these static protagonists remember from the past, the more they forget about acting in the present or planning for the future. Bergson asserts, “[memory’s] primary function is to evoke all those past perceptions that are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and followed them, and so to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful” (303). Beckett’s characters, on the other hand, use memory as their refuge against making such decisions. They fix their gazes backwards in order to avoid deciding a future course of action. The settings for the teleplays are increasingly barren, indicating not only Beckett’s progressively severe minimalist aesthetic, but also indicating his characters’ regressive isolation from any worldly distractions. They retreat into their inner sanctums so that they might concentrate exclusively on communion with the past. Beckett’s late characters remain perpetually, stubbornly stuck in the past, abandoning this time and next time in favor of that time. These haunted figures rid themselves of extraneous Matter and are thus left alone with Memory. Well, not entirely alone—the viewer must be factored in as well, perceiving all. The spectator obviously has agency distinct from that of the specters on screen.

Nevertheless, to the extent that our perceptions are dictated by the memories

Beckett’s Memory Machines 15
on screen, and insofar as television is always spectrally oriented toward the dead and gone, we too find ourselves uprooted from the present and transported to the past via Beckett’s memory machine.

* * *

Subject-object relations, habit, and the lingering influence of the past over the present are all central concerns for Sigmund Freud as well, but he branches off significantly from Schopenhauer and Bergson on the “genealogy of memory.”

Freud shifts the emphasis from perceptions of spirits or memories of the dead to the psychological function of these spectral residua. Unlike Schopenhauer and Bergson, he is less concerned with how we perceive the dead than with why we see them, what psychological function they continue to serve for us.

The “genealogy of memory” descending from Schopenhauer and Bergson to Beckett passes through Freud, most notably through his influential essay

“Mourning and Melancholia.”

In one of the essay’s more controversial turns, Freud distinguishes between healthy, normal grieving, which he terms “mourning,” and unhealthy, abnormal grieving, which he terms “melancholia.” I will address the controversy over these distinctions later, but first it is important to understand the categories. Freud devotes most of the essay to exploring melancholia, which he distinguishes as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.” However, he adds that, “This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning. The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same” (244). So Freud’s objective in “Mourning and Melancholia” is to determine why melancholics convert the normal

“work of mourning” into a self-abusive trial. He hypothesizes that such self-recrimination is misdirected and symptomatic of a deeper conflict: If one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love. Every time one examines the facts this conjecture is confirmed. So we find the key to the clinical picture: we perceive that the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego. (248)

16 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren In other words, because the lost loved one is no longer around to be scorned, and because of sanctions against berating the dead, the melancholic instead resorts to punishing himself for the alleged crimes of the departed.

Freud goes still further to recognize the infinite complications such psychological misdirection causes in the area of subject/object relations. The bereaved melancholic ceases to be a subject jousting with an object and becomes a subject jousting with his objectified self. Freud explains: An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different. […] [T]he free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. (249) The keys to Freud’s interpretation of melancholia are revealed here as internalization and identification; these are likewise the keys to the “work of melancholy” in Beckett’s teleplays. Time and again the following cycle of internalization and identification replays itself: 1. A former object of love is now lost, voluntarily or involuntarily, through absence or death.

2. The lover left behind laments this loss but also builds resentment, “owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person.”

3. The need for renewed communication with the lost love-object becomes irresistible, so the object is internalized, absorbed into the self.

4. As part of the self, the protagonist now identifies so strongly with the lost object that he renders objective his subjective self and converts himself into his own antagonist.

In condensed form, this “flow-of-woe chart” summarizes Freud’s understanding of the pathological process of melancholia; in basic terms, it also summarizes the plot of Eh Joe, Ghost Trio,… but the clouds…, and Nacht und Träume.

This is not to suggest that the teleplays merely repeat Freud, nor that they merely repeat one another. In fact, Beckett’s departures from the Freudian paradigm are significant, and his forms of televisual expression are constantly changing shape. Nonetheless, there is no escaping the fact that the predominant theme of the teleplays is memory, specifically the melancholic memory

Beckett’s Memory Machines 17
of the dead and departed. This places the teleplays squarely within the psychological debate on mourning, a debate first defined and still largely presided over by Freud. In other words, coming to terms with the teleplays requires coming to terms with Beckett’s Freudian dialectic.

While “Mourning and Melancholia” continues to set the terms for the debate, post-Freudians have resisted a number of the essay’s assumptions.

The rhetoric of pathology found earlier in Schopenhauer still operates in Freud’s essay, where he assumes that melancholics already possess “a disposition to obsessional neurosis” (251). Later theorists, most notably Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein, counter that the very same behavior Freud labels as pathological in melancholia is in fact also evident in the normal work of mourning.13 Beckett was familiar with Melanie Klein’s work via Wilfred Bion, his analyst in the 1930s and a follower of Klein. Her greatest contribution to the subject of mourning is in suggesting that the process of identification and internalization that Freud finds in melancholia can actually be located much earlier as a stage of normal childhood development, as the child learns to distinguish, internalize and negotiate between “good” objects and

“bad” objects. Her theories thus serve as a bridge between Freud’s work of mourning and Lacan’s mirror-stage of ego formation.14 The teleplays are strongly informed by these post-Freudian conceptions of mourning as well, where loss aggravates and reiterates the ego’s lifelong conflict between subject and object.

Of course, it bears emphasizing that, even as he composed “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud’s own theories were still evolving. The essay is often viewed as a transitional piece between his early libido-centered work on the pleasure principle, and his later shift “beyond the pleasure principle” toward repetition-compulsions and the “death instinct.” His assertion that melancholics essentially internalize external agents of sanction would prove pivotal to his subsequent theories of the superego. Furthermore, his shift in emphasis away from libidinal drives toward darker motives is already anticipated in

“Mourning and Melancholia.” For instance, he argues, “The self-tormenting in melancholia, signifies […] a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject’s own self ” (251). Freud’s devotion to the pleasure principle at this stage requires him to force an interpretation of self-torment as an expression of pleasure, namely the sadistic pleasure of punishing a guilty object (albeit an internalized one). Only a willfully distorted definition of pleasure could equate it with self-torment. Freud eventually corrects this distortion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle by acknowledging the operation of nonlibidinal, even self-destructive drives. There he complicates the psychological landscape by recognizing that the compulsion to repeat—even to repeat the painful—is

18 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren more basic than the pursuit of pleasure.15 Reconsidered through Freud’s later modifications, the self-abuse of melancholia seems less like a libidinal expression of the pleasure principle and more like a compulsive expression of the

“death instinct.” This latter characterization is also more consistent with the brand of mourning one finds in the teleplays, where the protagonists experience an attraction/repulsion to their lost love-objects motivated less by pleasure than by ritualized habits of masochistic repetition.

More recent studies of mourning emphasize—and the teleplays reiterate—
that the lure of reconnecting with the dead is both irresistibly attractive and irreconcilably futile. Jacques Derrida communicates this post-Freudian stance effectively in Memoires for Paul de Man. First, he cogently summarizes the Freudian approach: “Memory and interiorization: since Freud, this is how the ‘normal’ ‘work of mourning’ is often described. It entails a movement in which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them. This mimetic interiorization […] is the origin of fiction”

(34). Derrida extrapolates from Freud a common aim for memory, mourning, and fiction—to resurrect the lost object by “devouring,” idealizing, and imitating it. But Derrida also recognizes the futility of all resurrection projects.

Death resists deconstruction, and the dead ultimately refuse our appropria-tion. Memory, mourning, and mimesis all attempt to undo loss by “rescuing”

the dead into one’s living self through internalization and identification. But no matter what the guise, the rescue mission is doomed a priori; the absent other must always remain absent, always remain other. Thus, according to Derrida the “possibility of the impossible” commands the whole rhetoric of mourning, and describes the essence of memory. Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory.

With the nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as other. (34) Only after “the nothing of this irrevocable absence” is confronted can the insurmountable alterity of the other—in life as well as in death—be comprehended.16

Beckett comprehended radical alterity from early on, and he also recognized the radical isolation that inevitably follows from this condition. “We are alone,” he observed with unflinching directness in Proust. “We cannot know and we cannot be known” (49). We should pause over this dagger-sharp aphorism and remember that it was penned by a precocious, ambitious, but as yet relatively unaccomplished 24-year-old. One must marvel that a

Beckett’s Memory Machines 19
young man with such a grim, isolationist philosophy would eventually succeed so spectacularly at “Getting known” ( CDW 222). Surely one of the consolations of his lonely outlook in Proust was the knowledge, gained by devoted study which would last a lifetime, that we are each existentially alone, but we are not intellectually alone. Previous thinkers had wrestled with similar problems. Beckett’s growing familiarity with philosophy and psychology—of which I have only scratched the surface—would help him clarify his own ideas about memory and develop those ideas artistically in the years to come. His own cultural memory in particular of Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Freud would continue to exert powerful influence over his work several decades after he first encountered their work.

Beckett’s teleplays everywhere bear witness to the competing claims and the ultimate limitations of memory. On the one hand, the teleplays freely indulge desires to resurrect lost loved ones through the imagination. Indeed, the protagonists of the teleplays are utterly devoted to their imaginative restoration projects. Yet on the other hand, though the protagonists are loath to admit it, these attempts at imaginative resurrection must always fail to achieve their desired effects. Whether the absent others refuse to leave, as in Eh Joe, or refuse to appear, as in Ghost Trio, or, once arrived, refuse to say or do what is required of them, as in …but the clouds… and Was Wo, the exchanges between the living and the dead always fall short of adequate consolation.17 In short, for all their innovative, compulsive efforts at remembering the dead, the teleplays persistently represent failed acts of memory.

The ubiquitous failure of the teleplays results not from the failed efforts of their protagonists but from the intrinsic failure of memory. Memory purports to restore communication with the past, to imbue the absent with presence once again, to reanimate the dead. The teleplays expose the impossibility of these claims. Daniel Albright’s recent comments about Beckett’s “art of impotence” are especially apropos here: “Beckett’s repeated assertions that his art is the art of impotence […] are, I believe, veiled ways of saying that the true failure lies not with Beckett the particular artist but with art itself, always at the mercy of decomposing and perverse media. Beckett saw himself as an artist who was unusually honest about art’s inability to carry out the artist’s goals”

(8). Indeed. And if this label sticks to Beckett’s work in general, it adheres with special strength to his teleplays. Under Beckett’s direction, television becomes the ideal medium for exposing false claims of presence because it is constituted entirely from absence, illusion, shadow, and echo. One of Beckett’s most important contributions to the “genealogy of memory,” then, is his exploitation of television as a “perfectly flawed” medium for reenacting the failure of memory.

20 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren

* * *

The teleplays thus constitute an important contribution to the art of memory, albeit one founded on the premise that both art and memory must inevitably fail.18 However, the teleplays are also powerfully influenced by the memory of art, particularly those artistic traditions that confront dying, death, mourning, and commemoration. Beckett’s intertextual dialectic with specific artists will be examined in future chapters, including extended discussions of his debts to Beethoven ( Ghost Trio), Yeats ( …but the clouds…), Schubert ( Nacht und Träume and Was Wo), and various “Old Master” painters ( Nacht und Träume). These eclectic sources notwithstanding, one artistic tradition above all others deserves special consideration at the outset: the elegy.

Beckett adopts the elegiac tradition and adapts it for television in crucial ways that have yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

William Watkin’s recent definition of elegy is particularly telling in the present context. In On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature, Watkin observes,

Elegy consists of making physical, material works of art out of the very event that destroys our own physicality, in other words, death. It also provides a self-consciousness about the inter-relationship between presence and absence in our lives, and the means by which the paradoxes and aporias inherent in this inter-relationship shape our subjectivity. Finally, it is both a private record of the transition from the passive state of bereavement to the personal work of grief, and a public, published performance of communal rituals of mourning. (6) Watkin makes explicit the links between psychological mourning and poetic elegy, with the latter serving as commemorative expression of the former.

Furthermore, he locates a tension between presence and absence at the heart of the elegiac tradition. A kindred tension persistently animates Beckett’s teleplays. That said, Beckett’s peculiar treatment of this tension via the television medium also departs significantly from the elegiac paradigm. Watkin notes,

“Elegy consists of making physical, material works of art out of the very event that destroys our own physicality, in other words, death” (6). This observation is certainly true of written elegy, but is it true of the teleplays? How

“physical” and “material” are they? To be sure, the scripts for each teleplay have been published, but these scripts represent little more than recipes for final products that can only be found in the broadcasts themselves. And to be sure, there are “material” artifacts of these broadcasts left behind in the form of videotapes. Yet even a videotape viewing, like the one of Billie Whitelaw discussed earlier, remains an essentially immaterial, ethereal encounter with shadows and echoes. So not only is the content of the teleplays dominated by

Beckett’s Memory Machines 21
absent others, but the form itself is fundamentally absent and other. Put another way, the teleplays are not simply haunted by an air of the dead: they are dead air. Beckett adopts the “self-consciousness about the inter-relationship between presence and absence” that Watkin rightly identifies as a traditional function of the elegy. However, he also adapts this function by developing a new form—I call it the “telegy”—which reflexively manifests the elegiac tension between presence and absence, self and other, in medium-specific ways.

While Beckett’s “telegiac” form constitutes an important innovation, his simultaneous participation within and resistance against the elegiac tradition is not itself new. In fact this practice places Beckett firmly within the established countertradition of modern elegy, or “anti-elegy.” The best analyst of this countertradition is Jahan Ramazani. In Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, he concedes the contradictory impulses inherent in modern elegy: “The apparently oxymoronic term ‘modern elegy’ suggests both the negation of received codes (‘modern’) and their perpetuation (‘elegy’)—a synthesis of modernity and inheritance.” However, he explains that “modern poets reanimate the elegy not by slavishly adopting its conventions; instead, they violate its norms and transgress its limits. They conjoin the elegiac with the anti-elegiac, at once appropriating and resisting the traditional psychology, structure, and imagery of the genre.” In terms strikingly consistent with Beckett’s method in the teleplays, Ramazani observes that modern elegists “make it new but make it old, rebel against generic norms but reclaim them through rebellion” (1–2).

What modern elegists resist is not the elegy form per se, but the misuse—
or at least the outdated use—to which that form has traditionally been put.

Traditional elegies, like Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais, or Tennyson’s In Memoriam, seek reconciliation between mourner and mourned and consolation between poet and poem. On the other hand, “the modern elegist tends not to achieve but to resist consolation, not to override but to sustain anger, not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss” (xi). Though each individual work represents a specific artistic struggle between commemorator and commemorated, the larger conflict of modern elegy is fought on the psychological terrain of mourning. Ramazani argues that
modern elegists tend to enact the work not of normative but of “melancholic”

mourning—a term I adapt from Freud to distinguish mourning that is unresolved, violent, and ambivalent. […] Unlike their literary forebears or the “normal mourner” of psychoanalysis, they attack the dead and themselves, their own work and tradition; and they refuse such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in nature, in God, or in poetry itself. (4)

22 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren In other words, the modern elegist approaches both the dead and the elegy with profound skepticism, compelled to find an artistic expression for loss, yet con-vinced from the start that the loss must remain irreparable and inconsolable.

Such an artistic enterprise, which reclaims tradition but revises it for distinctly modern use, is by no means the exclusive domain of written poetry. As Ramazani notes, “the modernist resistance to traditional elegy belongs to a broad cultural repudiation that characterizes much twentieth-century literature in many genres” (3). What I am arguing here is that the “telegies” represent just such a project of repudiation in the genre of television. Beckett’s personal memory of art is sufficiently rich to recognize that his art of memory is in many ways nothing new. When he returns again and again to the well-spring of memory, he freely acknowledges that he is dipping into the same inspirational waters as a long line of predecessors. Notice that half of the teleplays are named after other works of art— Ghost Trio after Beethoven’s Geistertrio, … but the clouds… after Yeats’s “The Tower,” and Nacht und Träume after Schubert’s lied of the same title—and all three of these teleplays incorporate direct quotations from their sources. Nowhere are Beckett’s artistic debts expressed more overtly than in the teleplays. Nevertheless, Beckett also approaches his traditional sources from a critical modern perspective; and, where he finds their examples inadequate for his purposes, he freely refutes his predecessors and revises their forms.

Beckett exploits the unique, untapped potential of the television medium to contribute to the intellectual debate on memory and to the artistic tradition of elegy. But he is like modern elegists, who proceed “not by slavishly adopting [elegy’s] conventions; instead, they violate its norms and transgress its limits” (Ramazani 1). Beckett alternately adopts and adapts inherited conventions—from philosophy, psychology, art, and television itself—to create an art of the telegy. His telegies look back for inspiration from older traditions while advancing the medium with innovative new forms. These forms, like memory, mourning, and art itself, are inevitably consigned to failure.

Nonetheless, Daniel Albright is right when he paradoxically speculates, “But if […] the road of art always leads in the direction opposite to the one the artist thinks he or she is following, then perhaps the artist who intends to fail may (uniquely?) succeed” (8). Or, as Beckett himself put it in his final novel, Worstward Ho, “All before. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (7). The following study will attempt to chart the depths of Beckett’s successful failures for television.

Notes

1. For explanation of my preference for the title Quadrat I + II over the more commonly used Quad, see chapter 6.

Beckett’s Memory Machines 23

2. Likewise, when referring specifically to the teleplay, as opposed to the stage play What Where, I opt for the 1986 German television title, Was Wo.

3. Among the several available editions of Yeats’s poems, I prefer The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, Second Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997). All subsequent references to Yeats’s poems come from this edition.

4. I intentionally omit reference to Quadrat I + II here, for in this as in many other respects, I regard it as an exception to the rule. For further discussion, see chapter 6.

5. “The TV performance of Not I was the only time I ever heard Sam say anything about my work, and that one time he didn’t say it to my face. Tristram, Sam, the cameraman and I were sitting in a dark viewing room, watching the orifice opening and shutting on the little screen. I wanted to get out of the room. All my fears while doing the piece came flooding back. Yet there was no escape from that pul-sating mouth; I knew I had to stay and not disturb anybody, so I tried not to look. I either looked down at my knees or closed my eyes altogether. I also wanted to put my fingers into my ears.”

“At the end of it all, out of the darkness, came one word, spoken with an Irish accent, a whisper that just managed to float across to me: ‘Miraculous.’” See Billie Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw … Who He? (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 132.

6. See T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 47–59.

7. This and all subsequent textual references to Beckett’s plays, unless indicated otherwise, are taken from Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). Future citations will abbreviate this source as CDW.

8. Samuel Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, February 5, 1938 [Trinity College Dublin (TCD) 10402]. For an excellent analysis of this letter and its cultural implications, see Seán Kennedy, “‘The Artist Who Stakes His Being Is from Nowhere’: Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy on the Art of Jack B. Yeats,” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 15 (2005): 61–74.

9. The most lavish reclamation project to date has been the massive Beckett Centenary Festival of 2006, including dozens of public lectures, star-studded tributes, pictorial exhibitions, film screenings, radio and television broadcasts, and tourist-centered merchandizing throughout Dublin. Efforts to re-Hibernocize Beckett had been building momentum for several years, however.

On the institutional front, consider Trinity College’s foundation of the Samuel Beckett Centre, housing the Samuel Beckett Theatre, in 1992. On the theatrical and cinematic fronts, consider the Gate Theatre’s pronounced Irish inflection for its 1991 Beckett Festival, reprised on stage in 1996 (New York) and 1999

(London), before morphing into the Beckett on Film project. On the academic front, consider John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1991); W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendency, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork UP, 1994); Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); Mary Junker, Beckett: The Irish Dimension (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1995);

24 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Ronan McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

10. For excellent examples of criticism that rehistoricizes Beckett in a southern Irish Protestant context, see Vivian Mercier, “Ireland/The World,” Beckett/Beckett (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 20–45; Seán Kennedy, “‘A Lingering Dissolution’: All That Fall and Protestant Fears of Engulfment in the Irish Free State,”

Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts. Ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2003), 247–62.

11. I cite E.F.J. Payne’s translation, The World as Will and Representation, now regarded as the standard edition. However, it may be worth noting that Beckett’s own highly influential reading of Schopenhauer’s masterwork came from the Haldane and Kemp translation, with the alternative title The World as Will and Idea.

12. Rachel Burrows, a student who attended Beckett Trinity lectures on Gide and Racine in 1931, kept notes that record several references to Bergson. The notes are housed in Trinity College, Dublin’s manuscript department (TCD 60) and are referenced in Anthony Uhlmann, “Image and Intuition in Beckett’s Film,” SubStance: A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 33.2 (2004): 94.

13. See for instance Karl Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders” and Melanie Klein,

“Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” both reprinted in Essential Papers on Object Loss, ed. Rita V. Frankiel (New York: New York UP, 1994), 72–93 and 95–122, respectively.

14. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 3–9.

15. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1974), volume 18.

16. For a much farther reaching consideration of alterity and its ethical stakes, see Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), particularly the introductory chapter (1–30).

17. In some of my previous publications on the teleplays, I promote the value of “the consolation of form.” See for instance, “Ghost Duet, or Krapp’s First Videotape,”

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 11 (2001): 159–66. However, my thoughts on this subject have since evolved. I still acknowledge the obsession with formal arrangement in the teleplays, and I continue to believe that Beckett’s characters derive some palliative value from formal play. Nonetheless, my emphasis in the present study shifts to the failure of form to supply the precise kind of consolation being sought by the teleplays’ protagonists.

18. This conviction in the inevitable failure of both art and memory—and thus in the inevitable failure of an art based upon memory—is where Beckett parts ways most crucially with Proust. Like Proust, Beckett drew inspiration from "involuntary memory" as "an instrument of discovery." However, if one accepts

Beckett’s Memory Machines 25

Beckett's interpretation in his monograph, then Proust's art of memory is far more ambitious and transcendent than Beckett's failed art of failed memory.

Beckett argues that "the Proustian solutions consists, in so far as it has been examined, in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead because Time is dead" (56). Such victories over time and death are certainly sought by Beckett's characters as they attempt to resurrect absent others. But those attempts inevitably fail in Beckett, ultimately reaffirming absence and alterity.

CHAPTER 2

Slouching toward Television: Beckett’s

Apprenticeship in Radio and Film

Gilles Deleuze’s 1992 essay, “L’Épuise” (“The Exhausted”), remains one of the few critical treatments to date that examines Beckett’s entire television corpus in a theoretically consistent way. Deleuze’s theme is “the exhaustion of the possible,” and he tracks the movement in the teleplays away from exhausted language toward the Image. Toward this end, he considers three different categories of language. He defines “language I” as

“a combinatorial imagination ‘sullied by reason,’” but he finds no example of this use in the teleplays. He defines “language II” as “imagination sullied by memory,” where “the cruelty of voices never stops piercing us with unbear-able memories, absurd stories, or undesirable company.” Clearly, Eh Joe falls into this category. Finally, he defines “language III” as “no longer a language of names or voices but a language of images.” He places all the other teleplays into this privileged final category (158–59). By Deleuze’s estimation, then, Eh Joe is something of an aberration, the sole teleplay that still clings regressively to “imagination sullied by memory.” Deleuze never dismisses the value of Eh Joe entirely, but he concedes no more than “a preparatory value that serves to introduce the works for television, rather than fully being a part of them” (166–67).

For all the value of Deleuze’s essay, he underestimates the value of Eh Joe.

Beckett’s first teleplay may indeed be an example of “imagination sullied by memory,” or perhaps of memory sullied by imagination, but this does not set it apart from the other teleplays. On the contrary, Eh Joe can be better understood as the first installment in Beckett’s miniseries on memory. This initial teleplay on memory—personal, cultural, intertextual, and reflexively televisual—
sets the tone and establishes the central concerns of the teleplays that follow.

Granted, Eh Joe makes more liberal use of language than the later work for television. (In fact, there are more words spoken in Eh Joe than in all Beckett’s

28 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren subsequent teleplays combined.) Nevertheless, the thematic focus, technical methodology, and iconographic patterns set forth in Eh Joe will ultimately comprise the distinct Beckettian signature for television. So Deleuze is right about its “preparatory value,” but I challenge his characterization that Eh Joe stands apart from the rest of the teleplays. Rather, it emerges in retrospect as the first in Beckett’s sequence of “telegies”: pieces that work within, through, and against traditional modes of mourning and commemoration to engage with problems of memory in medium-specific ways.

For all its preparatory value, however, Eh Joe is in many ways the byproduct of Beckett’s earlier preparatory work in radio and film. In The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, S.E. Gontarski speculates,

“Beckett seems to have moved into television unprodded, uncoaxed by anything save the challenges of the medium and the difficulties of subsuming yet another machine to character, as he did with the tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape and the motion-picture camera in Film” (112). I would go further to suggest that Beckett was largely prodded and coaxed to enter television precisely by his previous artistic efforts with other “machines.” Rightly or wrongly, Beckett never rated his early efforts in mechanical media very highly. His overall estimation of the radio plays was low. After All That Fall he wrote Donald McWhinnie, “My ideas about radio are not even quarter baked,”1
and he later told Martin Esslin that the radio plays “‘came too easily’” (qtd.

Zilliacus 10). Likewise, his first reaction upon screening Film was that it was an “‘interesting failure’” (Harmon 166), an opinion he never entirely disavowed. He may well have turned to television as a last mechanical resort from his various disappointments with other artistic machinery. Whatever the impetus, once he began to conceive work for television, he was drawn in by the new medium’s unique capacity for grappling with memory and for expressing failure. By the time he began work on Eh Joe, his flirtation with other mechanical media had effectively ended. In television he had finally found his memory machine par excellence.

The memory of previous artistic challenges remained fresh on Beckett’s mind in the mid-1960s when he made his first foray into television. Eh Joe was not produced in a vacuum. As much as the teleplay anticipates Beckett’s future direction, it also derives directly from his previous mechanical excur-sions. A full appreciation of Beckett’s first teleplay requires first understanding its debts to the radio plays, the tape-recorder experiment of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the cinematic innovation (and “interesting failure”) of Film. The point here is not simply to privilege the teleplays at the expense of the radio and film work. Despite my allusion in this chapter’s title to the closing lines of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” I do not mean to suggest that Beckett’s work for television already lay latent in his work for radio and film, biding

Slouching toward Television 29
its time and waiting to be born.2 There was no master plan, and his turn to television was far from inevitable. Beckett did not enter first radio and then film knowing in advance that he would eventually discard both mechanical media in favor of a third. Yet I find it revealing that, after his first taste of television production with Eh Joe in 1966, Beckett would never again compose an original work for any mechanical medium other than television.3 This fact is significant, but it should not be used as an excuse to forget the radio and film work, because Beckett certainly never did. Without that earlier work, a teleplay like Eh Joe could not have been possible. Therefore, before one can hope to understand Beckett’s work for television, one must first appreciate the vital importance of his apprenticeship in the other mechanical media. It is the aim of this second chapter to consider Beckett’s attraction to radio and film and to establish certain key lessons—and mistakes—that would profoundly impact his later work for television.

* * *

Though Beckett may not have thought very highly of his radio plays, he nevertheless thought of them often when preparing his later plays for television.

In fact, some of the teleplays are so replete with allusions to his radio plays that Beckett seems bent upon an intertextual, cross-medium dialectic with himself. The more important backward glances—particularly from Eh Joe to Embers, from …but the clouds… to Words and Music, and from Was Wo to Cascando and Rough for Radio II—will be explored in greater depth later. It is more important at this juncture to establish the larger concerns that preoccupied Beckett in radio, for his early experiments with a mechanical broadcast medium would powerfully influence his later television work.

Radio is by nature a highly restrictive medium. Clas Zilliacus defines its parameters clearly in Beckett and Broadcasting when he lists radio’s primary means of expression as “aural, temporal, nonspatial, and uncorporeal” (37).

For a playwright already famous for his striking visual imagery and remorse-less physicality, the restrictions imposed by radio were no small sacrifice.

However, these limitations also allowed unparalleled concentration on the

“soundscape” of performance. In “Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio,”

Martin Esslin pinpoints the appeal: “That radio and its techniques have a fascination for Beckett is clear. And so are the reasons for that fascination: Voices emerging from the depths, from unseen and mysterious sources, play an immense part in Beckett’s imagination” (379). Of course, Beckett’s fascination with mysterious voices appeared long before and lasted long after his brief dalliance with radio. But the exclusively aural nature of radio broadcast and reception offered him new possibilities for expressing this phenomenon.

30 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren His radiophonic experiments would continue to resonate throughout his work long after he abandoned the radio medium.

Beckett’s fascination with voice apparently sprang from personal sources so intrinsic to his art that, rather than attempt to undo or conceal these sources, he instead laid them bare. “When I once asked Beckett about his method of work,” writes Martin Esslin, “he replied that, having attained a state of concentration, he merely listened to the voice emerging from the depths, which he then tried to take down; afterward he would apply his critical and shaping intelligence to the material thus obtained” (“Art of Radio”

379–80). Outsiders to the creative process are often skeptical of such claims, insisting that authors must be the sole source of their material, not merely the stenographers for mysterious forces emanating from without or within. Yet Beckett consistently reaffirmed his own bafflement and ignorance in the face of (or in the ear of ) his sources of inspiration, which certainly seem alien, external, other, even if only as a self-deluding guise. Well before he entered radio, Beckett was already resorting to aural metaphors to capture the invasive experience of inspiration. In a memorable passage from The Unnamable, the narrator grapples to understand his relationship with voices that seem issued both to and from him. He speculates,
perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either. (383) In the radio plays Beckett once again takes up the challenge of communicating this tympanic condition, this time with the technological capacity to deliver mysterious, disembodied voices directly into the private spheres of his listeners.

As an instructive case in point, consider the radio play Cascando. In bequeathing the manuscript to Harvard, Beckett offers this unusually revealing insight in his cover letter: “‘It is an unimportant work, but the best I have to offer. It does I suppose show in a way what passes for my mind and what passes for its work’” (Zilliacus 118). Cascando dramatizes the tension between three entities: “Music”; a panting “Voice” trying to narrate the wretched story of Woburn; and an “Opener” whose ostensible task is merely to open, close, and coordinate the offerings of Music and Voice. This Opener divests himself of all authority over his material: “They say it’s in his head. / No. I open”

( CDW 299). Later he is even more insistent:

Slouching toward Television 31

What do I open?

They say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it’s in his head.

They don’t see me, they don’t see what I do, they don’t see what I have, and they say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it’s in his head.

I don’t protest any more, I don’t say any more, There is nothing in my head.

I don’t answer anymore.

I open and close. ( CDW 300)

Later still he specifies, “They said, It’s his own, it’s his voice, it’s in his head,” a charge which he emphatically denies—“No resemblance” ( CDW

302). If Cascando passes for Beckett’s mind and work, then his mind must have been as haunted by voices as his work. But I am not interested in psychoanalyzing Beckett the man4 or in offering an all-encompassing theory of inspiration for Beckett the artist. Rather, my interest lies specifically in the matrix Beckett creates between voices, creative imagination, and the act of listening. Regardless of where the voices emanate from—internal “profounds of mind”5 or an external ghostly realm—the encounter with them is depicted as an intensive exercise in listening. Beckett’s auditors are as obligated to listen as his voices are obligated to express. One may have very little control over what voices arrive, when they arrive, what they have to say, or when they leave.

But this is not to say that the encounter is entirely one-sided and passive, for the auditor’s aural disturbance leads to intense activation of the imagination.

One of Beckett’s most important innovations for radio is his recognition and exploitation of the close affinity between the author’s creative invasion by mysterious voices and the radio listener’s invasion by broadcast voices. Radio listeners are as bewildered by these uncorporeal emanations as Opener claims to be, and we have just as little control over what they express. However, as his name suggests and his weary directions confirm, Opener does exercise some degree of control: he can open and close. Similarly, Cascando’s radio audience retains the power to turn the radio on and off, adjust the sound, or switch the station. This may sound like trivial prerogatives until one considers what a superior degree of control this constitutes over the passive spectatorship of the theatrical audience.

The radio medium also invites an unprecedented degree of imaginative collaboration on the part of the audience. As counterintuitive as it may sound, radio can be a very visual medium. That is, it presents a nonspatial, uncorporeal “soundscape,” but one that routinely encourages the listener to conjure mental images of people, places, and events. In Beckett’s radio play Words and Music, for instance, a Voice-character once again works in uneasy tandem with a Music-character, this time at the direction of a third character

32 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren called “Croak.” As in Cascando, the work progresses in fits and starts, and no one seems entirely pleased with the results. Unlike Opener, however, Croak is not content merely to open and close. He urges Words (“Joe”) and Music (“Bob”) to work together for a specific purpose—to evoke a face, the image of his dearly departed “Lily.” The results of their combined efforts are dubious, but the salient point is that all of their radiophonic energies—and all of our vicarious imaginative energies—are directed toward achieving a visual goal.

In other words, the radio plays do not simply inform the listeners about the confusing and frustrating conditions of creativity, they actually replicate those conditions for listeners. We are besieged by mysterious voices and sounds, and we struggle imaginatively with these received stimuli to make sense of them and to conjure images from them. To borrow Schopenhauer’s terminology from his “Essay on Spirit Seeing,” we take external perceptions transmitted from our sense-organs (specifically our ears) and convert them into internal perceptions projected upon our dream-organs.6 Radio’s externally transmitted “soundscapes” are internalized and imaginatively transformed into shared “mindscapes.” Beckett will borrow this same blueprint to construct the television viewer’s role vis-à-vis Voice in Eh Joe.

Donald McWhinnie, the pioneering producer/director who had a hand in most of Beckett’s BBC radio and television productions, describes the “mindscape” effect in his book The Art of Radio. While directing Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall, McWhinnie encountered several passages from the character Maddy Rooney that are clearly audible and yet not necessarily spoken aloud: “But she doesn’t say it, rather she thinks it; the effect we want is of an unspoken thought, magically overheard. […] Magnified by the microphone, it draws us into the mind of the character, it is almost as though it had been spoken in our own head” (134). Mysterious voices, “magically overheard,”

that are not one’s own and yet seem to be spoken inside one’s head: this is precisely the form inspiration assumed in Beckett’s own creative process as described to Esslin. It is also the invasive experience endured by so many of Beckett’s author-figures—“the siege in the room”7 prompted by the siege in the mind. This form of verbal assault is likewise the experience of the radio listener grappling to assimilate Beckett’s radio plays; and it will later be the television viewer’s experience when she encounters Voice in Eh Joe. The experience of listening to Beckett’s voices is one where the normally rigid boundaries between author, character, and audience break down and bleed into one another. Radio allowed Beckett to refine this aural experience in unprecedented ways that would impact all of his subsequent dramatic work.

This radiophonic blurring of distinctions between internal, external, and tympanum, between self and other(s), allows Beckett to make significant strides forward in his depiction of psychic fragmentation. He had long sought

Slouching toward Television 33
ways to communicate a vision of self that was radically solitary and yet also split, fractured, multiple, and other. Toward this end his early fiction and drama frequently employ the “pseudocouple” convention, wherein pairs of characters—Mercier and Camier, Watt and Sam, Molloy and Moran, Vladimir and Estragon, Hamm and Clov—function as complementary, codependent opposites. Beckett’s pseudocouples are so fundamentally integral to one another that the boundaries between separate personalities blur.

This convention always proved more problematic for Beckett’s drama than for his fiction. For instance, he can call Molloy and Moran’s respective identities into question more readily in fiction, allowing one to morph into the other, because the characters exist only as written entities for the reader. On the other hand, drama makes such character conflation far more difficult to sustain because it deals with bodies in space as well as words. Vladimir and Estragon or Hamm and Clov may read like pseudocouples, but one glance at the playbill, the payroll, or the stage itself seems to dispel the “pseudo-” ruse: those are two separate corporeal entities up there on stage.

Beckett’s first significant breakthrough to a more viable dramatic expression of self-fragmentation comes in Krapp’s Last Tape, and it comes by way of the uncorporeal transmission of voice. In one phenomenological sense—the evidence of our eyes— Krapp’s Last Tape seems incontestably to be a one-man play. But the evidence of our ears tells us otherwise. Krapp oscillates between different times and different incarnations as he forwards and rewinds through previous tapes of his own voice on the reel-to-reel machine. The convention of tape-recording effectively disembodies Krapp’s voice, rending his psyche into multiple selves, turning his voice into an objective artifact to be manipulated, and estranging Krapp from himself and from the audience. Beckett’s breakthrough in Krapp derives directly from his experiments in radio. The 1958 stage play was composed in the midst of Beckett’s brief but fervent radio phase—he wrote six original pieces for radio and adapted another by Robert Pinget between 1957 and 1962. Martin Esslin even asserts that the original inspiration for Krapp came from Beckett’s experiences listening to reel-to-reel tapes of All That Fall sent over from the BBC (“Art of Radio”

368). Suffice it to say that from the late 1950s onward Beckett was drawn increasingly to memory machines and that his initial attraction seems to have been the superior ability of mechanical media to wrench voice from body.

Once detached from corporeality, these free-floating voices could be used to replicate the disturbing experience of creative inspiration-as-invasion, or they could be used as a new means for expressing the fragmentation of self.

One final innovation, which brings together both uses of the free-floating voice and advances another step toward self-fragmentation, can be found in Embers, the radio play most contemporary with Krapp.8 Embers gives voice to

34 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Henry, a character with no shortage of voices himself. Like many fellow protagonists before and after, Henry is a storyteller, which is no trivial pursuit in Beckett country. Henry describes the affliction thus: “Stories, stories, years and years of stories, till the need came on me, for someone, to be with me, anyone, a stranger, to talk to, imagine he hears me, years of that, and then, now, for someone who […] knew me, in the old days, anyone, to be with me, imagine he hears me, what I am, now” ( CDW 255). Beckett routinely depicts the authorial process as fraught with coercion from without and confusion from within. Yet the creative trauma can be somewhat meliorated by the common human need for company. Even Beckettian voices are not always unwelcome; sometimes they are positively hastened through the doors of perception. Stories provide a forum for the company of voices. Beckett’s authors are sometimes so eager to people their stories that they are willing to break off shards of their own identity in order to form the necessary characters, like the Old Testament God who peoples the earth with humans formed in his own image. Hamm universalizes the experience in Endgame: “Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark” ( CDW 126). Whether one is a failed Beckettian author, the Creator-God of Genesis, or a radio listener at home, the goal remains fundamentally the same: to break the silence and solitude with the company of stories. Henry searches his memory in Embers for empathetic characters and scenes that might “drown” the ever-present sound of the sea, with its reminders of his father’s (apparently suicidal) drowning. Henry’s early efforts move from third-person narration of invented characters (Bolton, Holloway) to more personalized mimicry of dialogue, as in this recreated exchange with his father: Father! [ Pause.] You wouldn’t know me now, you’d be sorry you ever had me, but you were that already, a washout, that’s the last I heard from you, a washout. [ Pause. Imitating father’s voice.] “Are you coming for a dip?” “No.”

“Come on, come on.” “No.” Glare, stump to door, turn, glare. “A washout, that’s all you are, a washout!” [ Violent slam of door. Pause.] Again! [ Slam. Pause.]

Slam life shut like that! [ Pause.] Washout. [ Pause.] Wish to Christ she had.

( CDW 256).

Henry reenacts the scene through mimesis (“Imitating father’s voice”), in addition to rehearsing the action (“Again!”) and providing sound effects (“Violent slam of door”). Other Beckett stage plays resort to similar mimetic devices (e.g., Nagg’s joke and Hamm’s story in Endgame, or Winnie’s imagined dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shower [or Cooker] in Happy Days). But

Slouching toward Television 35

Embers advances a step beyond such mimicry with the introduction of Henry’s wife, Ada.

Most of the clues that precede her arrival hint that Ada is not real but is instead a fictional construct conjured by Henry. Beckett himself noted as much in a French interview with P.L. Mignon: “‘ Cendres repose sur une ambiguïté: le personnage a-t-il une hallucination ou est-il en presence de la réalité? [ Embers rests on an ambiguity: is the character hallucinating or faced with reality?]’” (qtd. Zilliacus 83). In other words, one’s interpretation of Embers hinges on questions like, “Are Henry and Ada a real couple in real conversation? Or are they a pseudocouple in imaginary conversation?” The corporeality of stage plays tends to answer such questions before they can be asked: Winnie and Willie are real—they exist corporeally on stage—while Mr. and Mrs. Shower (or Cooker) are imaginary—they exist only through Winnie’s fictional mimicry. However, because radio voices are unfettered from corporeality, the listener has fewer assurances about Ada’s identity. As the scene between Henry and Ada unfolds, we can never be entirely sure if she has wandered late into the seascape scene proper, or if she has been, to adapt Yeats’s phrase, “called to the mind’s ear.”9 The latter interpretation seems more likely, but still the ambiguity lingers because, even if Ada exists only in Henry’s mind, our all-access pass to his mind allows us to hear her clearly all the same. This is why Beckett steadfastly resisted requests to adapt his radio plays for the stage. As he added in his French interview with Mignon, “‘La realization scénique détruirait l’ambiguïté [Theatrical realization would destroy the ambiguity]’” (qtd. Zilliacus 83).

Embers owes its rich and sustained ambiguity to Beckett’s full exploitation of the radio medium, both as an echo chamber for free-floating voices and as a visually stimulating palette for shared “mindscapes.” His experiments in acoustics and virtual visualization would prove an invaluable apprenticeship to his work for television. In Ada’s “Low remote voice throughout” ( CDW

257), one can already hear the “Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal” murmur of Voice in Eh Joe ( CDW 361–62). Beckett would bring his radio lessons with him when he moved to television, and he would extend his experiments to encompass mechanically transmitted images. However, he would first endure a brief but troubled apprenticeship in film.

* * *

Beckett’s first venture behind the camera warrants close consideration because no single work casts a longer shadow (or pall) over his first teleplay than 1964’s Film. His experiences with cinema in general are best filed under the heading of cautionary tale, though he would partially redeem himself in

36 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren 1966 with a more successful collaboration on Marin Karmitz’s film adaptation of Comédie (I will study this adaptation in depth in my final chapter).

There are certainly things to admire about Film, but ultimately Beckett’s label of “interesting failure” still sticks. Nevertheless, it would prove an instructive failure. Rather than retreat from the problems he encountered in Film, Beckett would soon renew his aesthetic assault from a new vantage point behind the television camera. But let us vanquish O before we resurrect him in Joe.

According to biographer James Knowlson, the piece that would become Film was originally conceived as a television piece (451). Given all the film’s ensuing difficulties, Beckett had just cause to regret his departure from that original plan. Nevertheless, when Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset solicited a screenplay for his Evergreen Theater film project (set to include shorts by Eugène Ionesco and Harold Pinter as well), Beckett signed on board.10 He even agreed to make his first trip to America to help director Alan Schneider shoot the film in the sweltering summer heat of New York.

Neither had ever directed a film before.11 Years later, Schneider began his account of the event, “On Directing Film,” by observing, “With every new wavelet of contemporary cinema turning directors, in effect, into authors, it took the surprising author of Film, playwright Samuel Beckett, to become, not too surprisingly, its real director” (63). This self-deferential praise may serve double duty as a disclaimer. Considering all the difficulties they encountered on Film, one wonders if Schneider’s displacement of directorial authority is motivated less by a desire to share credit and more by a desire to share blame. Schneider does accept blame where it is due. For instance, he confesses that he failed to account for the strobe effect caused by filming on wet pavement, a rookie mistake which ruined the entire first day’s shoot and required dropping most of Beckett’s planned opening sequence (73–74, 77–78). However, though Schneider never says as much, Beckett deserves his fair share of blame, too. For Film’s greatest problems result not from shooting errors but from conceptual errors for which no amount of cinematic experience could have compensated.

The action of Film can be summarized, though a summary communicates little of its strangeness. It is a silent film shot in black and white. It begins with an extreme close-up of a wrinkled eyelid, which slowly opens into a glazed, blank stare. The scene then shifts to a rubbish-filled city alley framed by a dilapidated brownstone wall. The camera fixes upon a disheveled human figure scurrying down the alley. This figure is bundled up in heavy clothing, his face concealed from sight. He is known in the script only as O (an abbreviation of “Object”). The camera, known in the script only as E (an abbrevi-ation of “Eye”), pursues O through the alley, up a stairwell, and into an

Slouching toward Television 37
apartment, recording collisions with a couple in the street and an elderly flower-peddler along the way. The dingy room that serves as O’s sanctuary contains a chair, window, mirror, and picture of a God-like figure on the wall,12 as well as a bird in a cage, a fish in a bowl, and a dog and cat in a basket. Each of these items is examined in close-up, alternately from E’s perspective and from O’s (blurry) perspective. After covering the window, mirror, cage, and bowl, removing the picture from the wall, and escorting the dog and cat out of the room, O sits in the chair and looks at a series of photographs (products of another memory machine), presumably of himself at different stages in his life. After viewing them, he methodically rips each photo into quarters and tosses the pieces to the floor. Then he sits back in his chair and dozes off to sleep. The camera takes this opportunity to slip around the chair and confront O head-on. O is startled awake and perceives E
directly for the first time. O is revealed as a pallid, old man—played by Beckett’s silent-screen idol, Buster Keaton—with a patch over one eye.13 In the reverse shot, E is revealed as the mirror image of O, an exact replica save for E’s smug expression, contrasted with O’s obvious horror. O stares forward, slowly comprehends the situation, then covers his eyes and bows his head. After a slow fade to black, Film ends on a final extreme close-up of Keaton’s wrinkled, gazing eye.

Lacking spoken language or published script, original viewers could at least have ascertained that Film’s motivating tensions are paranoia, pursuit, and the fear of detection. Critic William Martin is right, however, when he argues that “unless the spectator is actually aware that Beckett is making an ontological statement about the essence of cinema, then it is likely that the significance of the Film will be completely overlooked. The proper experience of watching Beckett (and Schneider’s) Film calls for a supplementary reading of the written notes” (533). Those written notes, first published in 1967 in Eh Joe and Other Writings, reveal that Film is grounded in perception-based philosophy, specifically Bishop Berkeley’s dictum, “Esse est percipi [Being is being perceived].” Though Beckett is quick to add the disclaimer, “No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience”

( CDW 323), the notes nevertheless make it clear that the film aims to observe esse est percipi rigorously, as if it were true. Most of Film’s novelty—and most of its faults—stem from Beckett’s self-imposed conceptual bondage to Berkeley. To appreciate the tension between the two, however, one must first appreciate Berkeley’s perception-based idealism and its peculiar relevance to the medium of film.

* * *

38 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren In The Principles of Human Knowledge, Bishop Berkeley asserts, That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. […] For as to what is said of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse [being] is percipi [being perceived], nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds of thinking things which perceive them. (42)

Yeats would later translate this argument lyrically in his poem, “Blood and the Moon”:

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream, That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme. (25–27) In other words, subjective perception dictates the objective world. That which exists does so only insofar as a thinking being perceives it into existence.

Beckett commits his protagonist wholeheartedly to an understanding of the world governed by esse est percipi. Assuming the dictum as “structural and dramatic convenience” for the film, and as an article of faith for its protagonist, Film hinges on the following complication: What if one wishes not to be? According to O’s literal-minded interpretation of Berkeley, one need not commit suicide to escape existence. After all, O covers the window in his room—he does not leap out of it. Beckett will confront the temptation to suicide more directly in Eh Joe, but here he pursues a more philosophical exit strategy. O confronts Hamlet’s suicidal question, “To be, or not to be,” and he unequivocally chooses the latter. Rather than attempt suicide, however, his strategy is to cease to be by ceasing to be perceived. Film documents O’s manic drive to exit esse by escaping percipi. He goes to absurd lengths to elude the gaze of any eye that might perceive him into existence. Not only does he flee the population of menacing onlookers in the street, he also rids himself of all the living eyes inside the apartment (dog, cat, bird, fish) that might conceivably see him. He even disposes of the inanimate eyes that stare back at him from the God-like portrait on the wall and from his own photographs. Having seemingly expelled all potential perceivers, O rests back in his chair, satisfied that he has achieved non-being. Unfortunately for him, his scheme has been flawed from the start, as he discovers in the striking conclusion of the film.

Slouching toward Television 39

From a strict Berkeleyan perspective, O’s logic is flawed because he does not take into account the perception of God. Berkeley granted that the existence of

“unthinking things” is determined by the perception of thinking beings. But he also stipulated that both unthinking things and thinking beings exist in the absence of humans to perceive them because of the all-seeing eye of God, whose perception validates all existence. Of course, God only factors into Film as an obscure photograph on the wall, eyes that are dispensed with easily enough. In fact, God’s negligible role in Film might have opened up a loophole in esse big enough for O to crawl out of, were it not for the presence of another all-seeing eye: self-perception. Beckett succinctly summarizes Film’s plot in his notes: “Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception” ( CDW 323).

Despite O’s success in shutting himself off from the outside world, he fails to take into account his perception of himself, the unblinking internal eye whose gaze cannot be avoided. E stands where the photograph of God once hung, effectively replacing Berkeley’s God as the perceiving agent who defines O’s existence. O ultimately fails to achieve nonbeing, not because of the divine perception of God, but because of the persistent, unavoidable inter-subjective gaze between self and other.

Neither O nor Berkeley factor in the “inescapability of self-perception,”

but Arthur Schopenhauer does. Though Film is ostensibly a dialectic with Berkeley, Schopenhauer’s influence over the debate is considerable. Beckett’s pivotal decision to sunder his protagonist into Object and subjective Eye (“I”?) seems grounded in Schopenhauer’s notion of the interdependence of subject and object. In The World as Will and Representation he contends, For consciousness consists in knowing, but knowing requires a knower and a known. Therefore self-consciousness could not exist if there were not in it a known opposed to the knower and different therefrom. Thus, just as there can be no object without a subject, so there can be no subject without an object, in other words, no knower without something different from this that is known. (II.202)

Schopenhauer establishes that self-perception requires both a subjective agency doing the perceiving and an objective self who is being perceived.

According to this logic, O’s “Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception” is misguided from the start, since he only seeks to eliminate himself as the object of others’ perceptions but not to eliminate himself as the knower/known of his own self-perception.

O’s predicament is made more impossible still by yet another unavoidable gaze: that of the spectator. Film ensnares O in a complex web of perception,

40 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren not only in a narrative sense but also in a metacinematic sense. After all, O is not just any being, he is specifically a being on film. Therefore, he has more to worry about than extraneous perception by other characters and self-perception by the other-Buster, he must also contend with the all-seeing eye of the audience. Just as he did in his radio work, Beckett interrogates the very conditions of the film medium, turning usually ignored conventions against his characters and implicating his spectators in the struggle as well. O’s imprisonment within his own internal gaze is reiterated by his imprisonment on screen in the spectator’s gaze. E’s perspective is the camera’s perspective, and the camera necessarily dictates the audience’s perspective. The spectator is in effect cast as E, cast as O’s unrelenting Doppelgänger. We see what E sees, we pursue where E pursues. How can we do otherwise? Unlike the free-ranging gaze of the theatrical spectator, the gaze of the cinematic spectator is determined by a single frame of perception—the camera Eye. Adopting E’s predatory perception as our own, we participate by proxy in stalking O. Not only are we implicated in the film and given an active role, we are effectively cast the antagonists of Film. Unlike Pirandello’s six characters who search for an author to complete them, O wants nothing more than to be erased, to be switched off, to go unperceived. Schopenhauer shows why this aim is foredoomed philosophically, but it is equally foredoomed cinematically. O can never cease to be so long as the audience continues perceiving him. Our perception constitutes and perpetuates his tortured existence. O is a character on film, and, to adapt Hamm’s fatal diagnosis of life on earth, “there’s no cure for that” ( CDW 118).

* * *

Insofar as it draws attention to the philosophical “inescapability of self-perception” by way of the metacinematic inescapability of audience-perception, Film deserves credit as an innovative meditation on the nature of being and on the nature of being-on-film. This is no small achievement, especially for novice filmmakers like Beckett and Schneider. But Gilles Deleuze surely goes too far when he dubs Film “The Greatest Irish Film,” an extravagantly overblown claim for a film which few (including its author) would consider great (and fewer still would consider Irish). The truth is that Beckett and Schneider grappled mightily, but at times unsuccessfully, to find appropriate concrete expressions for Film’s lofty abstractions. As Beckett saw it, the chief technical difficulty lay in the paradox that O and E both are and are not the same being. He had to rupture his protagonist in two to illustrate his self-perception corollary to Berkeley, yet he had to suture them back together as essentially the same person for his climactic revelation scene. As already demonstrated, this kind of psychic ambiguity can be sustained more readily

Slouching toward Television 41
through the aural medium of radio; film’s addition of the visual dimension introduces extra complications. How can the separateness of O and E be communicated visually throughout Film, so that the final revelation that they are the same person carries dramatic potency? Beckett acknowledges this problem in his notes:

The solution might be in a succession of images of different quality, corresponding on the one hand to E’s perception of O and on the other to O’s perception. […] The dissimilarity, however obtained, would have to be flagrant.

[…] This seems to be the chief problem of the film, though I perhaps exagger-ate its difficulty through technical ignorance. ( CDW 331) Though he freely acknowledges his “technical ignorance” in this matter, the correct diagnosis does nothing to supply a cure. None of his previous experience on page, stage, or radio prepared him for the unique cinematographic problems he encountered in the area of camera perspective.

The first solution improvised during production was to use lens gauze to blur O’s point-of-view (POV) shots, perhaps suggesting extreme myopia on his part, as opposed to E’s sharper predatory vision. While this strategy does achieve the minimal requirement of distinguishing between O and E’s perspectives, its general effect is confusing and amateurish. The second improvised solution proved even less satisfactory. Beckett decided to associate O
exclusively with camera pans, and E exclusively with camera cuts. In preproduction discussions transcribed in Gontarski’s The Intent of Undoing, Beckett suggests, “Nobody asks O to cut at any point. E’s the cutter and O’s the panner.” Later in the same discussion, he reiterates the point: “The main thing is that it has to be an absolute difference in quality [between O and E], reinforced by the fact that O pans and E cuts. Yes, O legato, E staccato. Both abnormal” (187, 191). Again, this sort of device may work in the abstract, but it is largely ineffective in practice. Simply put, there is no practical way of communicating these proposed pan vs. cut distinctions to an audience. “E
is the camera,” as Beckett unequivocally states in his notes ( CDW 323). If E is the camera, and if the spectator sees a camera-cut in the film, then of course we can associate that cut with E. But if the camera pans left or right, then why would any reasonable spectator associate that pan with O instead of with the camera (E) that did the panning?

The deeper issue here is that, in trying to solve one problem—how to distinguish between O and E’s perspectives—Beckett and company create a larger problem—namely, that E is not the only camera perspective in Film.

Whenever O is granted a POV shot, a second camera perspective is introduced into the equation. More important than the quality of O’s POV shots

42 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren (myopic, legato) is their ontological status. If E is supposed to represent the protagonist’s subject-status through camera perspective, and O is supposed to represent the protagonist’s object-status as screen-image, then where exactly do O’s POV shots fit in? They are neither E as subject nor O as object.

Beckett’s notes state unequivocally that “the protagonist is sundered into object (O) and eye (E)” ( CDW 323). But that is not all that we see in Film.

For, in granting O subjective shots that are distinct from E, Beckett—apparently unwittingly—has sundered his protagonist not into two divisions but into three: E (camera eye), O1 (object), and O2 (second camera eye). Nowhere is this “Not E” camera ever mentioned or compensated for in the notes or preproduction discussions on Film. The “Not E” factor can only be accounted as an error in Beckett’s usually meticulous artistic calculus.

Another fundamental miscalculation lies with the inclusion of brief scenes in which O does not appear on screen. Though he may not have personally endorsed Berkeley’s esse est percipi, Beckett nevertheless bound himself to esse est percipi as the foundational principle on which Film is built. In a film governed by the law “being is being perceived,” where non-being is impossible because of the “inescapability of self-perception,” why would there be any scenes that do not include O? Take for instance the opening sequence, where O scurries along a wall until he bumps into a passing couple. After the collision, the camera cuts briefly to the couple. As they readjust themselves, they suddenly make “Eye contact” with the camera. E registers their grimacing expressions, which Beckett describes in the notes as an “agony of perceivedness” ( CDW 325), before cutting back to the escaping O and resuming the chase. This little encounter, and a similar one with a woman on the stairwell, both corroborate E’s menacing character and establish a precedent for O’s

“agony of perceivedness” in the climactic revelation scene. However, these brief encounters also beg an important question: Where is O during his inter-ludes off camera? This question may seem trivial at first, but in fact it strikes at the very heart of Film’s Berkeleyan conventions. The professed point of Film is that, try as he might, O can never escape being because he can never escape being perceived, if not by extraneous-perception then by self-perception and cinematic-perception. In practice, however, there are spans when O does go unperceived by anyone for several seconds at a time. If “being is being perceived,” then there are times when O has unquestionably succeeded in achieving non-being, because he has succeeded in going unperceived.

Beckett’s art is consciously an art of failure, but it is extremely unusual to find his failure rooted in poor reasoning, inadequate planning, or unintentional mistakes. Film offers one such rare instance of a Beckettian misstep. By violating the “structural and dramatic” principle of esse est percipi, a principle which he may not have believed in but which he nevertheless bound himself

Slouching toward Television 43
to observe for this piece, Beckett undermines his own stated premises in Film.

Some readers will accuse me of hypercritical hair-splitting over seemingly minor glitches. In pointing out these imperfections, however, I do no more than hold Beckett to his own exacting standard. In the preproduction transcripts, for instance, Beckett muses over whether or not to match the street-inspection sequence with the room-inspection sequence. At first he demurs,

“No, it doesn’t matter. They [the audience] won’t remember” (191). But then he immediately reverses himself and decides that, yes, he will align the inspection sequences, even if this detail will likely go unnoticed. “I don’t think it’s going to be perfected,” he adds. Nevertheless, “It’s a kind of integrity, formal integrity” (191). Precisely. Even if one is working on a structural level that is likely to go unappreciated by the audience, and even if one’s efforts are likely to fall short of perfection, the conscientious artist is still motivated by a sense of formal integrity to try and integrate the constituent parts of his art correctly. And where he fails, according to this principle, he must not be dis-suaded but recommitted to the pursuit of formal integrity. Beckett tries to meet these challenges in Film, as in all of his work across genres, but a combination of “technical ignorance” and conceptual blindspots prevents his achieving that elusive formal integrity.

He seems to have recognized as much himself. In his long correspondence with Alan Schneider during the arduous editing process, Beckett concedes,

“The problem of the double vision for example is not really solved” (Harmon 166). He does try to console himself, his director, and his producer by offering some sweet to go with the bitter:

I described it to Barney after the first screening as an “interesting failure.” This I now see is much too severe. It does I suppose in a sense fail with reference to a purely intellectual schema, that is in a sense which only you and I and a few others can discern, but in so doing has acquired a dimension and a validity of its own that are worth far more than any merely efficient translation of intention. (166)

If that last conciliatory phrase sounds a bit forced, that’s because it was. In fact Beckett had not resigned himself to Film’s unintentional successes any more than he had given up fretting over its failures of intention. Over the next months he sent several additional corrections to Schneider, culminating in a March 1965 letter full of exasperated final recommendations. It begins, Herewith notes on your notes. Worked on film last night. Won’t do any more on it now. I didn’t feel we had gained much with latest cut, in some places perhaps even lost. After opening eye and pan of wall till we get into that room the fact is there is so much wrong with the material that no ingenuity of cutting

44 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren can redeem it. All we can aim at is to get through it with as little scathe as possible. (Harmon 187)

Beckett’s concerns over his faulty “formal integrity” obviously would not go away, and by March 1965 his reconciliation with Film’s unintentional charms had been replaced by the simple desire “to get through it with as little scathe as possible.”

Beckett ceased his complaints to Schneider about Film after this letter, not because he had reconciled himself to its failings, I suspect, but because he had found a more promising channel for redirecting his frustrations: the television channel. On April 13, 1965, his 59th birthday, Beckett began composing the work that would become Eh Joe, his first teleplay.14 Eh Joe would revisit many of the abiding concerns and technical difficulties that he encountered in his previous efforts for mechanical media and would redress them in ways specific to his new medium. Prodded by his earlier successes and failures, Beckett was prepared by his apprenticeship in radio and film to meet the audio-visual challenges of television.

Notes

1. This conviction of the inevitable failure of both art and memory, and thus of the inevitable failure of an art based upon memory, is where Beckett parts ways most crucially with Proust. Like Proust, Beckett drew inspiration from “involuntary memory” as “an instrument of discovery.” However, if one accepts Beckett’s interpretation in his monograph, then Proust’s art of memory is far more ambitious and transcendent than Beckett’s failed art of failed memory. Beckett argues that “the Proustian solution consists, in so far as it has been examined, in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead because Time is dead” (56). Such victories over time and death are certainly sought by Beckett’s characters as they attempt to resurrect absent others. But those attempts inevitably fail in Beckett, ultimately reaffirming absence and alterity.

2. See W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” (21–22).

3. Two of Beckett’s radio plays, Rough for Radio I and Rough for Radio II, were not released for publication and production until several years after their composition. Rough for Radio I (originally Esquisse radiophonique) was first published in 1973, but Beckett never permitted its production in his lifetime (an unauthorized French production was apparently broadcast in 1962, but the piece was not to my knowledge mounted again until a 1991 production from the Netherlands). Rough for Radio II (originally Pochade radiophonique) was first published in 1975 and first produced by Martin Esslin in 1976. The delayed release of the Roughs for Radio may create the false impression that they postdate

Slouching toward Television 45

Beckett’s work for television, but they do not. The pieces clearly belong to Beckett’s radio phase of the early 1960s.

4. I hold that any attempt to psychoanalyze an author posthumously through the medium of his work is as futile as it is presumptuous. Unfortunately, this principle has not been shared by all of Beckett’s critics. For a particularly egregious example, consider Antoinette Walker and Michael Fitzgerald, Unstoppable Brilliance: Irish Geniuses and Asperger’s Syndrome (Dublin: Liberties, 2006), which includes diagnoses not only for Beckett, but for Robert Emmet, Padraig Pearse, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce as well.

5. See Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, CDW 448.

6. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Essay on Spirit Seeing and everything connected therewith.” Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 272.

7. Beckett’s own description of his frenetic post-war period of writing, quoted in Dierdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 346.

8. Krapp’s Last Tape is usually dated 1958, with Embers following in 1959. However, Knowlson’s biography shows that Beckett actually began work on Embers before Krapp (400, 704n1).

9. See W.B. Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well: “I call to the eye of the mind” (1). This line is also alluded to by Winnie in Happy Days: “I call to the mind’s eye” ( CDW 164).

10. Only Beckett’s contribution was ever filmed for the big screen. In Beyond Minimalism, Enoch Brater adds, “The filming of Ionesco’s Hard-Boiled Egg was postponed indefinitely, and Pinter adapted The Compartment into a 1967 television play broadcast on the BBC as The Basement” (75).

11. Neither Beckett nor Schneider had worked directly in the cinematic medium, but both had long harbored film aspirations. As a young man Beckett unsuccessfully petitioned the pioneering Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to accept him as a trainee ( Damned 212–13). Schneider had never directed for the big screen before Film, but he had directed for television, including a 1960 TV adaptation of Waiting for Godot for New York’s WNTA, with Zero Mostel and Burgess Meredith.

12. The actual photograph used in the film, suggested by Beckett’s friend the painter Avigdor Arikha, was “a reproduction of a Sumerian head of the god Abu in the museum in Baghdad” ( Damned 465).

13. Alan Schneider reports in “On Directing Film” that other classic comedians Charlie Chaplin and Zero Mostel were also considered for the lead in Film, but were unavailable. Jack MacGowran was originally committed to play O/E before his late withdrawal opened up the part for Keaton (66).

14. In a letter to Beckett dated 27 August 1962, Schneider reports, “Barney has also spoken of a television play you have in mind” (Harmon 127). Maurice Harmon’s endnote mistakenly identifies this as a reference to Eh Joe. However, the allusion must be to Film, which was first conceived as an idea for television before Beckett adapted the piece to meet Barney Rosset’s request for a film short.

CHAPTER 3

“The Best’s to Come”: Suicidal

Fantasy in Eh Joe

In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin identifies a fundamentally new trend in modernity, away from art’s traditional “aura” of authenticity and authority and toward an infinitely reproducible art designed for mass consumption.

Benjamin places film at the forefront of this movement as “the most powerful agent” in “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage”

(221). As he sees it, film attacks art’s traditional “aura” on multiple fronts. Its infinite reproducibility undermines art’s claims on uniqueness, and its ready accessibility frees it from the exclusive domain of a privileged elite. Film also encourages a more critical stance on the part of the spectator toward the screen performer. In an observation that anticipates Beckett’s Film with uncanny prescience, Benjamin notes,
the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.

Consequently, the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. (228–29; emphasis added)

Such is precisely the relationship of cinematic spectators to the specter of O
and to the spectacle of Film. We are invited to assume a critical stance and to

“test” what we see on screen. As the previous chapter shows, however, both O
and Film fail the test in some key respects.

Benjamin’s essay establishes the preeminence of film in the age of mechanical reproduction, but his arguments go only so far to account for works of art

48 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren in the age of televisual broadcast. For all their similarities, film and television are crucially different mechanical media. Both traffic in recorded sounds and images, but their different methods for disseminating those recordings make all the difference. Film projects its larger-than-life images on a big screen and amplifies its louder-than-life sounds. Dozens or even hundreds of spectators sit together in the dark to gaze, to listen, and, as Benjamin would have it, to test the film spectacle. On the other hand, television transmits invisible signals into the private homes of its dispersed audience. These signals are channeled into boxes that decode them into small-screen images and sounds of variable volume [“Kindly tune accordingly,” as V advises in Ghost Trio ( CDW

408)]. While the size of television audiences greatly exceeds that of film, routinely numbering in the thousands or millions for a single broadcast performance, the actual viewing conditions for television are far more isolated. In terms of scale, location, and relative intimacy, television is drastically different from its sister mechanical-art.

As compelling as Benjamin’s analysis is for film, it does not always translate accurately to television, especially Beckettian television. For instance, Benjamin illustrates film’s modern relevancy by contrasting its rise with the fall of painting: “A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting.” Whereas film encourages and thrives on the simultaneous contemplation of a large public, Benjamin pointedly concludes that “Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience” (234). Anyone who has stood in line recently at the Tate Modern, only to be herded like cattle past one ill-seen masterpiece after another, will agree with Benjamin that painting suffers from modern mass-viewing conditions. However, Beckett discovered in television a medium that allowed him to reach audiences even larger than film while still preserving the private, contemplative conditions once enjoyed by viewers of paintings.

Beckett’s teleplays depict protagonists absorbed in intense concentration upon voices and images. The teleplays likewise assume an ideal spectator, one who essentially mirrors the actions of the protagonist, sitting alone in a dark room, every bit as rapt in attention as the figure on screen. In truth, the conditions of television spectatorship are rarely so ideal. Enoch Brater rightly observes in Beyond Minimalism that each teleplay “brings the strange into the comfortable room of the viewer, alongside the dirty dishes and the personal computer.” However, it may be wishful thinking to conclude as Brater does:

“Intruding its presence into the safety and security of a world we like to think we control, Beckett’s television image invades our reality and makes it part of his own” (84). Perhaps; or perhaps the dishes and computer assimilate Beckett

“The Best’s to Come” 49
into their mundane domestic reality, reducing the teleplays to flickering distractions and background noise. Yet, call it ambitious or call it naïve, Beckett never seems to have accepted these facts about the usual conditions of television spectatorship. Or, more accurately, he prefers to ignore the rules and to target the exceptions, cultivating a dedicated minority audience willing to tune out the familiar distractions and tune in to his defamiliarizing transmis-sions. The teleplays are short, but they never cater to short attention spans.

James Joyce reportedly asked nothing more from his reader than that he devote his entire life to studying his work. Beckett’s requirements are far more modest—he asks for less than half an hour’s devotion. But during that span, he expects hermetic concentration, and anything less simply will not suffice.

This study grants that degree of concentration, and it is targeted toward a like-minded audience willing to grant the same.

Beckett’s brief but rigorous demands upon the spectator constitute a highly unorthodox use of television. The medium traditionally demands no more activity from its audience than that they buy its advertised products.

Conversely, Beckett’s teleplays attempt to enforce a strict modernist sensibility upon a medium generally oriented toward mass appeal. In so doing, he essentially replicates the “originary scene of modernist art,” as defined by Martin Puchner. In his fine study, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality

& Drama, Puchner finds in modernism a program devoted to preserving the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, an autonomy that seems to be provided by the solitary artist and the isolated recipient, both utterly detached from the social reality surrounding them. And it is the insistence upon the reclusive artist and the withdrawn recipient that determines what might be called the originary scene of modernist art: artist and reader, both confined in their studies, concentrate on the complex processes of production and reception, a concentration that demands their total absorption in what they are doing without the slightest distraction or interruption. (103)

Beginning with Eh Joe, Beckett’s teleplays offer intimate, miniature reitera-tions of this originary scene, with dedicated perceivers on- and off-screen mutually engaged in concentrated efforts of reception and conception. By

“preserving the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere” and ignoring “the social reality surrounding them,” Beckett’s spectacles and spectators are clearly engaged in a critical project different from the mass movement described by Benjamin, who sees film as a revolution against “the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere” and as, in his own words, “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (221). Beckett, on the contrary, returns over and again to meditate upon “the traditional value of the cultural heritage.”

50 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren His teleplays are countertraditional in many respects, but they are not anti-traditional. That is, they engage in an ongoing dialectic with cultural memory, and in this way they participate in tradition even as they frequently refute and revise certain traditional modes.

Eh Joe establishes this countertraditional approach from the start. It is a haunted work. Joe engages, involuntarily it would seem, in a virtual séance with a dead voice, conjuring up still more ghosts from his personal past. The teleplay itself serves as a kind of virtual séance with the spectator as well, conjuring up not only ghosts of Joe’s former lovers, but of Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, even of Beckett himself. In other words, Eh Joe enumerates old themes in such a way as to invite reconsideration of their previous traditional treatments, ranging from psychological theories on mourning, to literary commemoration through elegy, to Beckett’s own earlier treatments in various media. Joe begins his teleplay by ensuring that the outside world is firmly shut out; Beckett expects the spectator to do the same. Once these her-metically sealed conditions are met, however, the teleplay opens up a complex internal meditation upon personal memory, cultural traditions, and the nature of the television medium itself.

* * *

Beckett’s first teleplay1 dramatizes an evening in the sorry life of Joe, a man in his late fifties who sits alone in his room. Joe is haunted by a mysterious murmur, known only in the script as “Voice.” This feminine Voice assumes the identity of a jilted former lover. She verbally abuses Joe for his cowardice, vanity, infidelity, and impotence. All the while, the camera incrementally closes in on Joe, culminating in a close-up so severe that Joe nearly has his nose rubbed in the camera lens just as Voice metaphorically rubs his nose in his past crimes. Joe’s capital offense is allegedly his mistreatment of another former lover, known only as “The green one.… The narrow one” ( CDW

365). According to Beckett’s directions, Joe sits “Practically motionless throughout, eyes unblinking during paragraphs, impassive except insofar as it reflects mounting tension of listening” ( CDW 362). At no point, however, do we ever see him speak. Nonetheless, veteran actor Jack MacGowran, for whom the teleplay was originally composed,2 characterized Eh Joe as “the most grueling twenty-two minutes I ever had in my life” (221).

The story, character, and setting of Eh Joe owe conspicuous debts to Film.

Both feature silent protagonists who hole up in their rooms, desperately trying to avoid contact with others. Each fashions a protective oasis from the world, designed to keep out all enemies. Both O and Joe ultimately discover, however, that their supposed shelters are really no more than prisons, where each is condemned to share a cell with his arch nemesis—himself. The

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claustrophobia and menace that pervade both of these self-prisons are expressed visually by predatory cameras. O and Joe share a common condition (Eh, JOe E, O?),3 but Beckett captures this condition far more efficiently on screen the second time around. Gone are the outdoor scenes that proved so disastrous in shooting Film. Having learned his lesson the hard way, Beckett concentrates exclusively on the inner cell and its inmate(s) in Eh Joe. In fact, Beckett would never include an outdoor shot in any of his teleplays, always preferring the optimal control of interior scenes shot in the studio. Gone, too, are the naturalistic knickknacks of O’s room, along with Keaton’s busy slapstick routine. Gilles Deleuze has observed that, “From Eh Joe to Trio, a kind of vocal and spatial purification takes place” (“Exhausted”

166). This is true, but one can already see this process of purification at work in Eh Joe, as Beckett takes “the familiar chamber”4 of Film and distills it one stage closer to its essence. The increasing severity of the close-up in Eh Joe further purifies the distillation process, gradually eliminating all extraneous details but the most essential: Joe’s image and Voice’s voice.

Before shifting the emphasis to Beckett’s innovative Voice, we need note Beckett’s subtle yet significant improvements in camera technique. Joe’s image is provided courtesy of a camera that functions very differently from the one in Film. As I previously argue, most of Beckett’s frustrations and failures in Film stem from technical ignorance and conceptual miscalculations for camera. He greatly simplifies the camerawork in Eh Joe, and the results are both more satisfactory and, ironically, more consistent with esse est percipi.

Again, Film’s stated thesis is “Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception” ( CDW 323).

Film’s fatal contravention lies in its failure to observe this thesis faithfully. O
does in fact occasionally escape perception by the camera, i.e., he escapes self-perception. Joe is not so lucky. From the moment Voice begins speaking to the end of the teleplay, there is not a single camera cut. Not once does the camera eye relent from its unblinking gaze. With no name, no lens gauze, no angles of immunity, and no explicit Berkeleyan marching orders, the camera in Eh Joe nevertheless observes purer “formal integrity” than in Film.5

The camera’s formal integration with Voice remains ambiguous, however.

One tends to assume that they are in league with one another—“vocal thuggee” and “visual thuggee”6—combining their efforts in a bilateral assault on Joe’s senses. Because Voice seems to be the agent who is “calling the shots,” one might reasonably conclude that she is also the guiding force behind the camera, using it as another weapon for stalking her prey. Yet nowhere in Beckett’s notes or script is any specific pact between the two specified. In fact, Beckett’s only specification about their relationship is a negative one: “Each [camera] move is stopped by voice resuming, never camera move

52 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren and voice together” ( CDW 361). Furthermore, Voice never issues direct orders for the camera shots—unlike most of her vocal descendents in the teleplays, including the Female Voice in Ghost Trio, the Male Voice in …but the clouds…, and the Voice of Bam in Was Wo. For that matter, neither Voice nor Joe ever directly acknowledges the camera’s presence. Unlike E in Film, the camera is not so much a character as a function designed to serve as a visual correlative to Voice’s aural assault. Its function is also to bring the spectator closer to the action, in more ways than one. The ever-increasing close-ups obviously bring us closer to the actor’s facial responses to Voice’s attack; as Zilliacus colorfully puts it, “the camera is the televoyeurs’ man on the scene”

(191). But the close-up also places the viewer in a decidedly hostile position vis-à-vis Joe. Perception in Eh Joe is highly predatory, and, as in any film or television piece, the spectator has no alternative but to identify with the camera as the only available perspective. Therefore, as in Film, we who watch Eh Joe are once again made complicit in the torture of Beckett’s protagonist. Joe cannot escape the predatory perception of Voice, but this torture is reinforced by the inescapability of perception by the camera/audience as well.

* * *

Even more ambiguous than Voice’s relationship with the camera is her relationship with Joe. Who or what is Voice? While Joe seems all too familiar with this uninvited visitor, the viewer is immediately disoriented and must struggle to decode mixed signals. Voice would have us believe that she is the ghost of one of Joe’s jilted lovers. She recalls the last time that she and Joe met: “The best’s to come, you said, that last time.… Hurrying me into my coat.… Last I was favored with from you” ( CDW 362). She also recalls happier times, “Like those summer evenings in the Green.…In the early days.…

Of our idyll.… When we sat watching the ducks.… Holding hands exchanging vows.… How you admired my elocution!… Among other charms.…

Voice like flint glass. […] You could have listened to it forever.… And now this.… Squeezed down to this” ( CDW 363–4). Now she has been demoted to uncorporeality, a disembodied voice inside Joe’s head. And apparently she is not the first: Joe has been similarly haunted in the past, first by his father, then by his mother, then by unspecified others, before finally being favored with the current Voice’s company. However, Joe always seems to get the better of these voices in the end: “On and off.… Behind the eyes.… That’s how you were able to throttle [your father] in the end.… Mental thuggee you called it” ( CDW 363). Through this process of “mental thuggee,” Joe eventually wears down his unwelcome voices, reducing them to whispers before mentally choking them into silence. “Throttling the dead in his head” is how Voice describes it. Her victimization of Joe clearly takes a heavy toll on both

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of them; whether through Joe’s efforts at “mental thuggee” or through sheer exhaustion from her efforts, Voice is already wearing down by the time we meet her. When she descends to the tell-tale pre-throttle whisper, we know that she soon will be “giving up the ghost” as well. All of these textual and aural clues seem to corroborate her story that she is the latest “spirit made sound,” to adapt Joe’s expression, recycled in “the penny farthing hell” of his mind ( CDW 362).7

At least, this is what she—and Joe—would have us think. Other clues call this story into question. Is Voice really an external agent who arrives from without, or is she in fact an internal double-agent who emanates from within?

She identifies herself as a very specific other from Joe’s past, yet she also admits that her current residence is inside Joe’s head. “What doesn’t come to me from me comes to the wrong address,” as the narrator of The Unnamable cogently puts it (350). How, then, should one conceive of an external agent who has been as thoroughly internalized as Joe’s Voice? We have arrived back at that old chestnut of the pseudocouple, a phenomenon that Beckett always struggled to express on stage. The corporeality of stage actors erects a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the pseudocouple device (nothing “pseudo”

about paired actors on stage). Beckett discovered how to clear this hurdle in his radio plays, however. Because radio is by definition an aural medium devoid of corporeal presence, it lends itself to sustained ambiguity in matters of identity. When Henry converses with the “Low remote voice” of Ada in Embers ( CDW 257), for instance, it is impossible for the listener to determine whether she is really there with Henry, or is instead mentally conjured via imaginative ventriloquism. She seemingly comes to him, from him, but in the guise of another. Her true identity—as either separate from Henry or as derived from him—remains in perpetual suspension because radio denies us any recourse to the corporeal confirmation that might resolve the question once and for all. As Ada is to Henry in Embers, so is Voice to Joe in Eh Joe.

In Film Beckett resorted to elaborate, esoteric, and ultimately unsuccessful technical gimmicks in an effort to sustain ambiguity over whether E and O are separate or the same. In Eh Joe he devises far more successful methods for communicating the ambiguity of identity, methods suggested to him by his previous successes in radio and failures in film. Gilles Deleuze makes an observation about Ghost Trio that is even more relevant to Eh Joe in the present context. He writes, “It is as if a radio play and a silent film were being played simultaneously” (167). That is an excellent way to think of Eh Joe’s technical achievement. Beckett takes visual motifs drawn from his silent film, simplifies and refines a few faulty visual elements, and then superimposes aural motifs drawn from his radio plays. The result is a televisual palimpsest whose mechanical precursors are still traceable. It is as if we are watching O

54 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren listening to a radio play, only to discover that he is the sole subject as well as his own target audience.

With his invention of Voice, Beckett takes the sexist cliché that “A woman should be seen, not heard” and turns it on its ear, providing us a female voice that is heard but not seen and a male image that is seen but not directly heard.

The teleplay erodes gender barriers even further by so entangling the identities of masculine Joe and feminine Voice that it is difficult to say where one starts and the other stops.8 Joe prefers to maintain distinct borders between himself and others, but Voice subtly breaches these boundaries. In Joe’s dark night of the soul, his precarious détente with his personal demons begins to disintegrate. Schopenhauer perfectly captures the conditions for such a crisis in his “Essay on Spirit Seeing.” In a passage so prescient that it reads like a précis for Eh Joe, Schopenhauer describes the necessary preconditions for forcing the psyche to its moment of crisis:

For darkness, silence, and solitude eliminate external impressions and allow full scope to that brain activity that starts from within. […] Midnight in noisy company with the light of many candles is not the hour for ghosts or spirits, but only the midnight of darkness, silence, and solitude, since here we are instinctively afraid of the appearance of the phenomena that manifest themselves as wholly external, although their immediate cause lies within ourselves; accordingly we are really afraid of ourselves. (274) Joe prefers to think of Voice as a ghost, “wholly external,” because admitting that her “immediate cause lies within” would require facing dangerous truths about himself and his past behavior, which he would rather repress. So instead of confronting the past directly, he confronts it indirectly through misprision. Eh Joe leaves little doubt that Voice, and all her vocal predecessors, are internal manifestations, emanating not from without but from within. Joe is the ventriloquist behind her rant, the dramaturge for his own clairvoyance. In The Intent of Undoing, S.E. Gontarski places Voice within the broader lineage of Beckett’s work: “These voices, which Beckett’s characters at times try to quell but at other times embrace, are finally the creative manifestation of the subconscious, and quieting them is Beckett’s famous pursuit of silence, of artistic suicide” (114). The struggle between Joe and Voice is only the latest battle in an ongoing struggle between imaginative creation, psychological murder (“Mental thuggee”), and suicide—artistic or otherwise. With Voice’s internal nature settled, the question of Voice’s identity shifts to the more essential question of her function. Were she merely the ghost of a jilted lover, then Eh Joe would be no more than a melodramatic little revenge play. But once Voice is understood as an emissary from the self,

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sent in disguise to torture that same self, then her agenda becomes far more complex and interesting. The viewer is led to confront questions that Joe himself is apparently reluctant to face: Why would Joe torture himself thus, even if only subconsciously, and why would the agent of self-torture assume this particular duplicitous guise?

Beckett asserts in Proust that “The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy” (48). What one finds at the core of the self ’s eddy, however, may seem utterly alien. Remember Beckett’s revelation to Martin Esslin: “When I once asked Beckett about his method of work, he replied that, having attained a state of concentration, he merely listened to the voice emerging from the depths, which he then tried to take down; afterward he would apply his critical and shaping intelligence to the material thus obtained” (379–80). Apparently, when certain creative thinkers—Proust, Beckett, Joe, even the ideal spectator—shut out extraneous distractions and dive into “the core of the eddy,” what emerge are voices that demand a hearing. The creative challenge then becomes to listen with sufficient intensity so that the “critical and shaping intelligence” can be applied to translate these voices. An accurate translation of Voice requires understanding her function as a work of memory and as a work of mourning.

In arguing that Voice is a product of Joe’s mind, I do not mean to suggest that she never existed in her own right. Eh Joe is unequivocal on this point:

“Voice” was once a living woman, but now she is only a “dead voice.” Now she can only be accessed through memory. The form her memory takes in Eh Joe is highly deceptive, but it is also highly selective. Bergson addresses psychological conditions “such as hallucination and dreams, in which images arise that resemble external perception in all their details,” and he emphasizes, “in all psychical states of this kind memory plays the chief part” (38).

The distortions that are so obvious in hallucinations and dreams are not different in kind from normal perception, only different in degree. For according to Bergson, “pure perception” is always distorted in practice by the intrusion of memory. Furthermore, those memory-images that exert influence over perception are not arbitrarily selected: “Conscious perception signifies choice, and consciousness mainly consists in this practical discernment” (46). In other words, memory-images are selected and assume such form as best meet the body’s present needs. Later in this chapter I will elaborate upon what specific needs are being served by Voice’s tirade. At the moment, however, I am more interested in why Joe’s memory assumes this particular form. For comparison’s sake, consider alternative ways that this memory might have been recollected from the past and inserted in the present. A

56 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren more straightforward approach would have been for Joe to reminisce in his own voice, using the past tense—as Krapp does, for instance, or Listener in That Time. Instead we are presented a feminine voice speaking in the present tense. While based upon an actual person from the past, the Voice we hear in Eh Joe is not that absent other, but is a wholly separate fictional entity. Her monologue represents a perfect example of what Schopenhauer termed “retrospective second sight,”9 or in this case “retrospective second sound.” Voice is based upon a real person who existed in a real past, but her present rein-carnation is entirely distinct from, and develops independent of, any past reality. Though Joe knew her in the past, his current recollection is a phenomenon that belongs entirely to the present. Indeed, Beckett makes no effort in Eh Joe to suggest that Joe is remembering a past diatribe from Voice.

Tonight’s harangue is as new to Joe as it is to the spectator. Though he recognizes this Voice from previous experience, the bill of particulars in tonight’s indictment catches him off guard. He may be the source of Voice—her opener and closer—but he appears to know no more about what she will say than we do. His surprise becomes most acute when Voice introduces the subject of the green one.

* * *

The suicide of the green one is unexcavated psychic terrain for Joe. Eh Joe dramatizes his creative attempts to deal with this trauma through strategies of internalization, identification, and imagination. To adapt Freud’s famous phrase, Eh Joe is a creative “work-in-progress of mourning.” In Freudian terminology Joe exhibits all the symptoms of melancholia. In his famous essay

“Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud observes, “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (244). According to Freud, the “normal” mourner goes through a similar process of shattering grief, but then he comes to terms with the loss, withdraws his libidinal attachment from that lost object, and in due course reattaches his libido to another object. Not so for the melancholic.

The melancholic mourner refuses to accept the loss and thus refuses to withdraw his attachment. In the absence of the love-object, the melancholic internalizes the absent other, identifies with it, and through that identification redirects his resentment over abandonment inward, thus heaping scorn upon himself. Most commentators on Eh Joe rightly interpret Voice as an internal manifestation from Joe’s fractured psyche, a self-induced parasite feeding on its host. These interpretations generally lead to the conclusion that Eh Joe is

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chiefly a teleplay about guilt and regret, a televisual Krapp’s Last Tape.

However, taking this more Freudian line, I think Joe’s self-persecution via Voice may be a smokescreen (or a “spoke-screen”?) for the true object of his scorn. Joe is not really upset at himself for saying “farewell to love,” he is upset that his love said farewell to him.

Consider what we know and do not know about the green one and her suicide. In a scene with strong echoes of her own jilting by Joe, Voice describes his final assignation with the green one: “The best’s to come, you said.… Bundling her into her Avoca sack.… Her fingers fumbling with the big horn buttons.… Ticket in your pocket for the first morning flight.…

You’ve had her, haven’t you?… You’ve laid her?… Of course he has.… She went young.… No more old lip from her” ( CDW 365). There would be “no more old lip from her” because she was silenced by death, a victim of suicide by drug overdose. This is all that we know for sure about the green one and her suicide, and, more importantly, it is all that Joe knows, too. He has no direct knowledge of the events that followed his final encounter with the green one. His only sources about her suicide are secondary, first a brief announcement in the Irish Independent, and now Voice’s narrative. Voice describes the suicide in chillingly precise detail, but this description is not only secondary but utterly speculative as well. “The Suicide of the Green One”

is an embedded fiction, a virtual play within the play. By Voice’s own admission the suicide was a private and solitary act: no witnesses, no suicide note, no more old lip from her. Vivid and compelling as the account may be, the story of the green one’s suicide must be understood as just that, an imaginative story.

As Zilliacus correctly observes, “The green girl’s suicide went unwitnessed: the way the voice tells the story of it is the way Joe himself imagines it might be told” (194). Indeed, Voice all but admits the fictional nature of her narrative when she invites Joe—and by extension the television viewer—to “Imagine”

the scene, an imperative she issues no less than six times.10

Conceding the speculative nature of the suicide story means also conceding the speculative nature of the motives attributed to that suicide. Did the green one kill herself because of Joe? Voice clearly implies so, accusing Joe of simply using the green one for sex, callously discarding her, and thus driving the poor wounded creature to her final act of despair. But is this true? Again, we simply cannot know. The more probing psychological question is not,

“Did she kill herself because of Joe?” but rather, “Why does Joe think she killed herself because of him?” or better yet, “Why does Joe feel compelled to torture himself over her death?” This latter line of questioning is where psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia are especially useful. The “self-reproaches and self-revilings” of melancholia are everywhere evident in Eh Joe, where Joe’s “delusional expectation of punishment” becomes a self-fulfilling

58 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren prophecy. According to Freud’s diagnosis, the melancholic mourner’s self-abuse is really only misdirected hostility toward the love-object who abandoned him. The subject storms the Bastille of the self only because that is where he has imprisoned his love-object.

What would motivate the psyche to so deceive itself? Freud identifies the motive as ambivalence:

The loss of a love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself effective and come into the open. Where there is a disposition to obsessional neurosis the conflict due to ambivalence gives a pathological cast to mourning and forces it to express itself in the form of self-reproaches to the effect that the mourner himself is to blame for the loss of the loved object, i.e. that he has willed it. (250–51) Joe has proven ambivalent in all of his love relationships, but the green one is a special case in several respects. She is different because she killed herself, and different because she is not manifest as a voice in her own right but instead filters her story through an intermediary.11 But the green one may be special in another important and overlooked sense. Listen again to Voice’s final description of the green one as she slips into oblivion by the water’s edge: Now imagine.… Before she goes.… Imagine.… Face in the cup.… Lips on a stone.… A stone.… Taking Joe with her.… Light gone.… ‘ Joe Joe.’… No sound.… To the stones.… The stones.… Say it you now, no one’ll hear you.…

Say ‘Joe’ it parts the lips.… The lips.… Imagine the hands.… Imagine.… The solitaire.… Against a stone.… A stone.… Imagine the eyes.… The eyes.…

Spiritlight.… Month of June.… What year of your Lord?… Breasts in the stones.… The stones.… And the hands.… Before they go.… Imagine the hands.… What are they at?… In the stones.… The stones. […] What are they fondling?… Til they go.… There’s love for you.12

The manic repetitions of vocabulary in this imaginary death scene testify to Joe’s frantic state of mind, but the repetitions also pinpoint the precise fetishistic objects of his obsession. Joe focuses in (as if in psychological close-up) on the dying woman’s face (one reference), breasts (one reference), lips (two), eyes (two), but especially upon her hands, which are referred to by name twice, but are also climactically described as fondling something before they go. What are they fondling? Perhaps she fondles the stones, which are nominally referred to a remarkable ten times in this closing passage. More likely, however, she is fondling one stone in particular, “The solitaire,” which Beckett slips in so deftly that it has eluded critical attention. We are familiar enough with hands in Beckett; it is one of his recurring fetishes. But where

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else in Beckett do we find a hand with a solitaire upon it? For all the ten references to stones in the closing passage, it is the solitaire stone in that ring that most intrigues me. While a solitaire can certainly have other connotations, its primary one is surely as an engagement ring. This connotation is reinforced by the specification a couple of lines later that these proceedings take place in June, the month most commonly associated with weddings.

These unmistakable clues point to the conclusion that Joe was engaged to marry her.13

“Do you believe in the life to come?” Clov asks in Endgame. Hamm quickly retorts, “Mine was always that” ( CDW 116). So many of Beckett’s characters find themselves near the end of life in a wretched state, with nothing but their memories, their regrets, and their imaginary creatures to keep them company. The blame for their loneliness usually rests squarely on their own shoulders. Consider Krapp, for instance, who willfully bade farewell to love in favor of the lonely life of the mind. Joe’s case seems different, however.

Perhaps he never would have been happy with married life, but his failure to achieve that goal was not for lack of trying, nor was it entirely his own fault.

The common presumption that Joe broke up with the green one, when he bustled her off with plane ticket in hand, may in fact presume too much. For all we know, that ticket included a return flight home. So when he promised

“the best’s to come,” he may have sincerely meant it. At the very least, one wonders why the green one still retains and wears her engagement ring if we are supposed to read her final encounter with Joe as a break-up. In any case, the green one put paid to any possible future between her and Joe when she killed herself. He has still not accepted this loss, yet he cannot let it go.

“There’s love for you.… Isn’t it Joe?… Wasn’t it Joe?… Eh Joe?” ( CDW 367).

Joe exhibits the symptoms of an aggravated and chronic case of melancholia. Reconsidering Eh Joe through the lens of melancholic mourning has important ramifications. It complicates an ostensibly masochistic teleplay by registering significant undertones of sadism. “The self-tormenting in melancholia,” observes Freud, signifies “a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject’s own self ” (251). Applying this principle to the teleplay means reversing Voice’s charges against Joe. It is Joe who feels abandoned by the green one, Joe who is left alone, Joe who is driven to despair by her loss. We are told that there is “no more old lip” from the green one, but in fact what we witness is that there is no more old lip from Joe. He is the one who has been throttled into silence and passivity. As Karen Laughlin astutely observes, From the standpoint of feminist film theory, we might credit Beckett [in Eh Joe] with refusing to indulge a potentially sadistic “male gaze,” in that the

60 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren female lovers are never presented for our actual viewing pleasure but always remain off screen. Instead, we scrutinize Joe himself, and his eventual immobility […] makes him at best a problematic embodiment of active masculinity. (164–65)

Granted, the scene Voice commands Joe and the spectator to imagine serves up rather traditional scopophilic fare (scantily clad woman, victim of violence, gazed upon with voyeuristic impunity). Yet what we see on screen is something very different: a fetishistic image of masculine passivity, an image completely at odds with the conventions of “the male gaze” that dominate narrative cinema and television.14 Joe is ravaged by his own self-perpetuating, self-consuming sadism.

In “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” one of her key extensions and revisions of Freud, Melanie Klein reviews the psychological fallout from unresolved object loss like that suffered by Joe. She observes,

“Depression may follow, or an increase in manic defences and more violent control of his objects, since he has failed to reconcile, restore, or improve them, and therefore feelings of being persecuted by them again have the upper hand” (102). Depression and manic defense represent opposite poles of response, yet Joe exhibits signs of both. His self-imposed solitude and lethargy point to depression, and the voice inside his head, though disguised, cannot hide his deep melancholy. Consider Julia Kristeva’s poignant description of depressive language in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia: Let us keep in mind the speech of the depressed—repetitive and monotonous.

Faced with the impossibility of concatenating, they utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill. Even phrases they cannot formulate. A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody emerge and dominate the broken logical sequences, changing them into recurring, obsessive litanies.

Finally […] the melancholy person appears to stop cognizing as well as utter-ing, sinking into the blankness of asymbolia or the excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos. (33)15

This harrowing catalogue of “dead speech,” as Kristeva calls it, works as a startlingly accurate description of Eh Joe, from Voice’s “monotonous melody”

and “obsessive litanies” to Joe’s unutterable “cognitive chaos.” Along with these textbook signs of depression, Eh Joe hints at an even more ominous capacity for violent manic defenses. Freud notes that in extreme cases of melancholia the sufferer can become suicidal. However, he stipulates, “The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if […] it can treat itself as an object—if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object” (252). Joe’s internalization and identification with

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his lost love-object has become so complete by the end of Eh Joe that he has arrived at Freud’s threshold for self-destruction.

Eh Joe is Joe’s suicidal fantasy—and not simply a fantasy about someone else’s suicide. Joe’s relentless preoccupation and identification with her suicide also raise the specter of a similar end in his near future. “The best’s to come.… You were right for once.… In the end” ( CDW 362). In fact, Voice’s opening description of the green one on the night of her suicide—“Sitting on the edge of her bed” ( CDW 365)—is no more than a thinly veiled description of Joe’s own condition, perched on the edge of his bed, and perched on the brink of an equally momentous decision. This teleplay not only looks backward at the green one’s death, it also looks forward to Joe’s death. A. Alvarez describes this Janus-faced aspect of self-destruction in his landmark study, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide: “This is the vicious circle of melancholia, in which a man may take his own life partly to atone for his fantasied guilt for the death of someone he loves, and partly because he feels the dead person lives on inside him, crying out, like Hamlet’s father, for revenge” (106).

Beckett foreshadows Joe’s imminent demise with two Biblical allusions, both referring to impending death. The first quotation, “Thou fool thy soul”

( CDW 364), refers to Luke 12:20: “But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (emphasis added).16 The unmistakable implication is that we are witnessing Joe’s Last Videotape. Yet 59-year-old Joe is ten years younger than 69-year-old Krapp, and he does not apparently share his predecessor’s drinking problem nor his intestinal troubles. In other words, the text implies that Joe’s death is imminent, but it gives us no reason to conclude that this death will be from natural causes. Rather, he is preparing himself to follow the green one’s footsteps to the Lethean water’s edge.

Clas Zilliacus notes that, “Beckett’s oeuvre is strikingly short on suicides, in view of the yearning to die common to his moribunds.” However, Zilliacus also recognizes certain exceptions to the rule, including Henry’s father in Embers. “Suicides, if they occur,” continues Zilliacus, “are not acts performed by protagonists: Henry’s father, for instance, is not a Beckett character, but rather a figure against whom a Beckett character measures himself, and finds himself wanting” (82). One could apply the same observation to Eh Joe. As in Embers, the watery suicide scene has already taken place; the protagonist is left only to revisit and reconstruct the scene of the crime. Joe seems compelled to go the next step, however, by reenacting the suicide. For the only time in all of Beckett’s teleplays, a protagonist can be seen planning for the future, if only planning to end his future. Needless to say, this virtual action is never successfully converted into real action. Joe does not kill himself at the end of the teleplay; Beckett avoids the “craze for explicitation,” as the Director

62 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren in Catastrophe puts it ( CDW 459). Indeed, Joe himself may not even recognize the suicidal drift of his stream of consciousness. As Albert Camus poignantly observes of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it” (12). Nonetheless, Joe’s morbid fixation on the act of suicide, together with his unusually intense identification with the victim, brings him as close as any Beckettian protagonist to realizing his suicidal fantasy. Short of that ultimate goal, Eh Joe dramatizes a “virtual suicide” through a sort of Ignatian exercise; Catholic Joe vicariously associates himself so closely with the contemplated object of suffering that he effectively takes up her cross and carries it as his own: “The passion of our Joe” ( CDW 364). He measures himself against the green one’s suicidal example and finds himself wanting. His fiancée’s untimely abandonment cannot be forgiven or forgot-ten, but it might be replicated. Joe’s meticulous imagination of the green one’s suicide serves as a virtual how-to-manual in killing oneself, complete with advice about method (overdose), timing (late on a moonlit night), location (in the solitude by the water’s edge). “The best’s to come” indeed.

Through a deft “sleight of mind,” Joe’s melancholic commemoration of the green one conceals his narrative’s deeper motive as self-elegy, a rehearsal for his own death and a coded suicide note from himself, to himself, and to the attentive spectator as well.

* * *

Eh Joe participates dialectically and televisually within the tradition of elegy, the poetic form devoted to meditation upon memory, mourning, and death.

The raw material from which Beckett crafts Eh Joe is as generically elegiac as it can be: a man mourns the loss of a beautiful young woman who died for love. From Petrarch and Dante, through Shakespeare and Milton, to Keats and Yeats, the death of a beautiful young woman has routinely inspired the masculine imagination. As Jahan Ramazani points out in Yeats & the Poetry of Death, these elegies typically reinforce “older male traditions that define

‘woman’ as the silent, absent referent” (18). Beckett draws obvious inspiration from this tradition in Eh Joe, but he departs from elegiac norms in some very important ways.

Though the green one remains conspicuously silent and absent, the same cannot be said for her feminine intermediary, Voice. Granted, from an interpretive standpoint Joe is surely the ventriloquist behind Voice’s eulogy for the green one. But from a phenomenological perspective, what we see is a silent and passive male figure, and what we hear is an aggressive female voice.

Beckett’s means of expression, then, mark a significant departure from the elegiac norm. Eh Joe also resists the elegy’s traditional raison d’être of consolation.

“The Best’s to Come” 63

In Poetry of Mourning Ramazani observes how “the modern elegist tends not to achieve but to resist consolation, not to override but to sustain anger, not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss” (xi). Joe’s meditation upon the green one’s suicide brings him no closer to accepting her death, as the preceding discussion should make abundantly clear. While he may ultimately find an exemplary use for her death, he still has not come to terms with her original loss. “Unlike their literary forebears or the ‘normal mourner’ of psychoanalysis,” asserts Ramazani, modern elegists “attack the dead and themselves, their own work and tradition; and they refuse such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in nature, in God, or in poetry itself ” ( Mourning 4). Joe can make the imaginative leap of conjuring up dead voices from his past, but these virtual resurrections are poor substitutes for real presence. Instead of providing consolation as normal mourning and normal elegy should, Joe’s fictive exhumations only remind him of the unbridgeable absence and alterity of his lost others—in death as well as in life.

Beckett’s characters have never been effective “bridge builders”; they struggle but inevitably fail to make meaningful connections with others.

Furthermore, memory itself is never as useful a bridge as it promises to be.

Despite the best efforts of memory and commemoration, death remains unbridgeable. The death of a loved one only emphasizes a condition of alien-ation that was in fact no less absolute when that loved one was still alive. “We are alone,” as Beckett ruthlessly observes in Proust. “We cannot know and we cannot be known” (49). Though Joe may harbor fantasies that his unhappy life would have been better had his fiancée not killed herself, there is no evidence in the whole of Beckett’s canon to support that hope. Vladimir has Estragon, Hamm has Clov, and Winnie managed to marry her beau Willie, but none of them derives lasting happiness from the union, and all remain essentially alone. Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld report that Beckett once considered writing a variation of Krapp’s Last Tape: “‘I thought of writing a play on the opposite situation with Mrs. Krapp, the girl in the punt, nagging away behind him, in which case his failure and his solitude would be exactly the same’” (288–89). In other words, the likes of Krapp and Joe were always going to remain isolated from the rest of the world, no matter how many solitaires they bestowed. “The best’s to come” is more than just Joe’s kiss-off line, it amounts to his philosophy on life, one in which happiness is always deferred to the future, while the present remains bleak and vacuous.

Joe’s father, mother, and lovers are all now absent through death and only accessible through memory and imagination—but when were they ever really present for him? For that matter, when has he ever been present for himself, living in the moment, as opposed to obsessing over the past or deferring real living to the future? By raising these questions, Eh Joe represents more

64 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren than one man’s particular obsession over one woman’s death; it is a meditation on the very nature of memory and death, absence and presence.

Such reflexive questioning lies at the heart of the anti-elegiac countertradition. R. Clifton Spargo argues in The Ethics of Mourning that the traditional elegy “must work hard to maintain a claim of intimacy, for the (sometimes fictive) remembrance of intimacy provides assurance that the other was and remains knowable” (129). He goes on to assert that, “In the history of elegy, again and again we encounter the efforts of poets to meet the demand of the lost other by exaggerating the condition of reciprocity and measuring loss as if it were characteristically a violation of a perfect reciprocity. Clearly, this distortion of relationship has a wishful etiology” (130). The anti-elegy, on the other hand, dispenses with this pipe-dream of perfect reciprocity. According to Spargo, “it is especially through anti-elegiac turns against elegiac convention that we come to recognize the extravagant claims of reciprocity that preside over the ethical relation to the other, not only after but before death”

(130). The way this works in Eh Joe is richly complex. On the one hand, Joe overtly seeks to distance himself from Voice, trying to throttle her into sub-mission like he has her predecessors. On the other hand, as the covert source of Voice, Joe is essentially responsible for generating and perpetuating her narrative. So, although his mouth says no, his mind’s eye says yes. That is, although we are told that Joe wants nothing to do with his dead voices and desires rather to be left alone, the vocal evidence testifies to the contrary. Joe is an elegist for the green one, but he is also a self-elegist. More to the point, he is a failed elegist. By drawing attention to Joe’s failures, Beckett transmits his “telegy” from a decidedly anti-elegaic point of view. Joe pursued “perfect reciprocity” with his living loved ones and failed, sowing seeds of ambivalence and bitterness instead. He has since attempted to repress memories of these past failures but fails at that too, haunted as he is by imaginary voices that are no sooner throttled than replaced. Finally, in an attempt to reconnect empathetically with his dead fiancée, he “succeeds” in conjuring up a compelling recreation of her death. But this imaginative success only points to Joe’s larger failures—failure to love her properly while alive, failure to cope with her loss since death, failure to replace her with an acceptable libidinal substitute, failure (so far) to follow her suicidal example. None of the consolations supposedly offered by proper mourning or by proper elegiac commemoration have worked for Joe. Eh Joe draws from these traditions only to undercut the falsely stable premises on which they have been built.

Joe’s failure to recuperate his losses, his failure to wrest presence from absence, is reiterated for the spectator in distinctly televisual terms. After all, the images and sounds emitted from the television set are in truth only shadows and echoes. Though any individual act of watching Eh Joe necessarily

“The Best’s to Come” 65
takes place in the present, the television spectator (unlike her counterpart in the theater) shares neither space nor time with the performers. The action unfolds for the audience in the here and now, but our here is not the actors’

here, our now is not their now: we see mere traces of past performances—
absences masquerading as presence. These fundamental truths about the nature of the television medium are highlighted by an unusual request attached to the 1966 BBC production of Eh Joe. Sîan Phillips, who played Voice, encountered difficulties during rehearsals, partly because of Beckett’s strict performance demands, but also because of her own demanding schedule, performing each evening in Shaw’s Man and Superman ( Damned 477–78). However, she (or her agent) hoped to make the most of a difficult situation by requesting a promotional insert into the televised credits. A BBC

Programme Recording Form dated March 18, 1966, requests: “Can Sian Phillips be given the following verbal credit (providing of course that this is still applicable at time of tx. [transmission]) ‘Sian Phillips is now appearing in Man and Superman at the Vaudeville Theatre, London’” (BBC WAC T5/1, 296/1).17 On the one hand, such a savvy advertising ploy is familiar enough in television: “You have enjoyed this free performance; in exchange please purchase this advertised product.” On the other hand, this simple promotion draws sharp attention to the absence at the heart of television’s illusory presence. For if you wanted to see the real Ms. Phillips, live and in person, instead of the fake Ms. Phillips whose recorded voice you’ve just been listening to, then in theory you could pay for the privilege tomorrow night at the Vaudeville. This little promotion even invites one to imagine a scenario in which Phillips’s live performance in Shaw’s play is running simultaneously with her recorded performance in Beckett’s teleplay, her material self as it were competing for an audience against her immaterial self. Such conceptual conundrums are made possible because what we see and hear on television is, in a very real sense, not really there. And yet it is precisely because of this inherent contradiction that television is the perfect medium for presenting the story of Eh Joe, because the spectator is plunged into exactly the same predicament as the protagonist: hearing phantom voices and imagining fictional scenarios, trying in vain to craft effable presence out of ineffable absence.

* * *

The word that comes up most often among critics to describe Eh Joe is

“banal,” and where the teleplay is not ignored altogether it is usually dismissed as a first-rank writer’s second-rate work for his third-best medium.

Even after delivering one of the better readings of the teleplay in The Intent of Undoing, S.E. Gontarski concedes, “Actually, all this analysis may not be

66 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren enough to rescue Eh Joe from the bottom of Beckett’s artistic heap.” He offers a number of explanations for this low estimation: Beckett’s more melodramatic works may need to be undone with a fragmented narrative line. […] In Eh Joe Beckett never manages the sort of collage or mon-tage that results from a displaced narrative. […] Consequently, the latent affective, even trite, quality that lies below the surface of much of Beckett’s art (the love triangle of Play or the mother’s death in Krapp, say) is never sufficiently undercut in Eh Joe. (120–21)

As the present chapter has attempted to demonstrate, the charges against Eh Joe for narrative banality and structural simplicity are unfounded. The teleplay displaces its narrative through so many psychological misprisions that it is difficult in the end to disentangle the mourner from the mourned.

Furthermore, the trite elegiac cliché of a man mourning the loss of his beautiful lover is undercut by an anti-elegiac sensibility that reverses traditional gender roles and resists the easy lure of consolation. Finally, Beckett’s reflexive exploitation of television’s unique broadcast, recording, and reception conditions turns Eh Joe into a complex meditation, not only on the nature of memory, imagination and mourning, but also on the nature of the medium.

Jack MacGowran once described Eh Joe to an interviewer thus: “It’s really photographing the mind. It’s the nearest perfect play for television that you could come across, because the television camera photographs the mind better than anything” (221). Presumably MacGowran is referring to the virtual photograph (and phonograph) of Joe’s mind, and he is right insofar as he goes. Beckett goes still farther, however, framing a larger snapshot of how memory works, how imagination works, how and why the mourning mind distorts what it recalls, and how the mourner and the television viewer alike try (and fail) to convert absence into presence. So when Gontarski, speaking for numerous critics before and after, says that Beckett “never manages to universalize the tale sufficiently, to lift it above confession” (120), I cannot agree. I come closer to MacGowran’s view that, for all the teleplay’s consciously sought failures, Eh Joe remains “the nearest perfect play for television that you could come across.” Beckett’s first teleplay not only records a complex portrait of its protagonist’s mind, but it also effectively offers a glimpse into the mind of the medium itself.

Notes

1. Eh Joe is not only the first play Beckett composed specifically for the television medium, it is also the first of his own plays for which he received full directorial

“The Best’s to Come” 67
credit. He Joe, directed by Beckett for SDR in March 1966, aired on his 60th birthday, April 13, 1966. Deryk Mendel played Joe, and Nancy Illig played Voice.

2. Beckett began work on Eh Joe on April 13, 1965, his 59th birthday. From the start, he envisioned his friend Jack MacGowran as the male lead. In fact, the first draft refers nominally to the protagonist as “Jack” before switching to “Joe”

[Reading University Library (RUL) 1537/1]. MacGowran went on to play Joe to Siân Phillips’s Voice in the English premiere of Eh Joe, directed by Alan Gibson, which originally aired on July 4, 1966, on BBC 2.

3. At one point in the first typescript of the play, Beckett indicates a capital O in the phrase “The passion of our JOe.” Most readers would dismiss this as a typo, but Gontarski insists, “Beckett certainly wanted a capital O in this phrase, but this change is missed in all printed versions” ( Intent 120). If Gontarski is right, then Beckett’s motive remains inscrutable. My hunch is that this eccentric typography was intended to draw a subtle connection between Joe and O from Film. This hypothesis is ultimately unconfirmable, but it seems as likely an explanation as any.

4. See Ghost Trio, CDW 408.

5. For more useful comparisons between Eh Joe and Film, see Zilliacus, 185–86.

6. Voice describes Joe’s procedure for throttling the dead voices in his head as

“Mental thuggee”( CDW 363).

7. A “penny farthing,” sometimes called a “highwheeler,” is an old-fashioned bicy-cle with a large front wheel and a small rear wheel. In other words, “the penny farthing hell” of Joe’s mind is yet another Beckettian site for “revolving it all” (see Footfalls, CDW 400, 403).

8. Though I ultimately find Freud’s theories more useful for understanding the psychological landscape of Eh Joe, Jungian psychology may be more apt for understanding the teleplay’s gender dynamics. For an insightful application of Jung’s theories on the anima, see Rosette Lamont, “Beckett’s Eh Joe: Lending an Ear to the Anima,” Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), 228–34.

9. See Arthur Schopenhauer, “Essay on Spirit Seeing and everything connected therewith,” Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E.F.J.

Payne, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 286ff. For a detailed discussion of this essay in connection with Beckett’s teleplays, refer back to chapter 1.

10. The published text records six utterances of the word “imagine” in Voice’s account of the suicide. However, Beckett’s revised shooting script adds several additional repetitions of words and phrases at the end of Voice’s narrative, bringing the total utterances of “imagine” up to actually eight in the televised version.

For a detailed account of Beckett’s various amendments to Eh Joe in production, see The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1999).

11. In the teleplay’s original conception, Voice herself was the suicide victim, returned to blame Joe for her own death. However, Beckett eventually complicated matters by having Voice report on a separate lover’s suicide. Gontarski is right to credit this revision as the principle breakthrough of Beckett’s composition, setting up “a voice within a voice within Joe, adding another box to the

68 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren regression of Chinese boxes. Beckett devised Joe, who devised Voice, who devised the green girl” ( Intent 118).

12. I quote from the shooting script here with its extra repetitions, as opposed to the version in CDW cited elsewhere.

13. Joe’s painful memory of a fiancée who went young may have its source in Beckett’s own memory of Peggy Sinclair. Beckett’s two-year affair with his first cousin is well documented in Knowlson’s biography, and in his more recent Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett he quotes Beckett as confirming that

“‘There was a sort of unofficial engagement’” with her. The engagement may have been more official than Beckett was willing to admit, however. In Knowlson’s keynote address for the “Beckett at 100” Conference (Florida State University, February 2006), he referred to a photograph of Peggy Sinclair taken during her affair with Beckett in which she appears to be wearing a solitaire engagement ring (reprinted in Knowlson and Knowlson 38).

14. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 14–28.

15. I am indebted for this quotation to William Watkin, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004), 133.

16. The other Biblical allusion in Eh Joe is “‘Mud thou art’” ( CDW 365), a reference to Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

17. The only videotape I have viewed of this production is in the Samuel Beckett Audio-Visual Archive at New York University. This tape does not include a promotion for Phillips, verbal or otherwise, so I must presume that the request was denied. However, Phillips was still performing in Man and Superman when the BBC first aired Eh Joe on July 4, 1966, though the show had moved by then to the Garrick Theatre. For some interesting anecdotes about working with Beckett, see Siân Phillips, Public Places: My Life in the Theater, with Peter O’Toole and Beyond, (New York: Faber & Faber, 2003), 190–91.

CHAPTER 4

Decomposing and Recomposing

Ghost Trio

Afull decade passed between Eh Joe and Beckett’s next original project for television, Ghost Trio.1 The interim period was one of the most productive and frenetic of his career. He resisted the potentially fos-silizing effect of winning the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, continuing to produce original fiction, resurrecting and translating previous works, and conceiving new innovations for the stage. Perhaps his most pioneering accomplishments during this period were as a director. Between his first credited production on 1966’s He Joe for SDR and his next TV credits on 1977’s Shades program for the BBC 2 series “The Lively Arts,” Beckett directed, codirected, or supervised no fewer than a dozen productions of his work.2 His post-Nobel celebrity, though unwelcome, did insure that his plays (and their playwright) were in constant demand.

During the first decade of his second career as a director, Beckett honed a distinct directorial style, one with an emphasis upon arresting visual imagery, highly stylized movement, precise repetition, and obsessive formal pattern-ing. With Faber and Faber’s publication of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, scholars can now see just how meticulously Beckett arranged every facet of performance and mise en scène. In Frescoes of the Skull, James Knowlson describes such carefully conducted productions as “visible music”

(283), and indeed Beckett’s chief directorial models seem to have been musical. As early as 1962, he complained to Charles Marowitz, Producers [of stage plays] don’t seem to have any sense of form in movement.

The kind of form one finds in music, for instance, where themes keep recurring. When, in a text, actions are repeated, they ought to be made unusual the first time, so that when they happen again—in exactly the same way—an audience will recognize them from before. (44)

70 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Note that Beckett valorizes textual repetition in tandem with gestural repetition. The function of both is the same: triggering the audience’s memory. A motif is established early on, either aurally or visually, and then is repeated precisely so that, even if only on a subliminal level, the spectator remembers having encountered it before. Memory emerges, then, as a bedrock dramaturgical principle for Beckett as both writer and director. In performance his productions gain cumulative power from the traces and echoes of what came before.

In terms of content as well as form, memory emerges as the central preoccupation of Beckett’s plays from this period. Not I, That Time, and Footfalls are all memory plays. That is, each dramatizes a central protagonist’s recurring attempts to cope with a painful past. The past comes flooding back in the form of spoken words. Mouth adopts a deflective strategy in Not I, insisting on third-person narration (“she”—“not ‘I’”) for her story about an unloved woman who experiences some unnamable trauma in a field. Listener from That Time experiences various “that times” via three variations on his own voice; he cannot erase his memories of ruin and loss, but he does seem to derive some satisfaction from rearranging his voices into different patterns.

And in Footfalls May (or is it Amy?) paces to and fro on stage, as she revolves, revises, and recasts stories from a past in which she never seems to have been fully present. Finally, these memory plays from the 1970s all bear witness to Beckett’s own rich memory of the visual arts. Beckett informed his biographer that the iconography of Not I was inspired by Caravaggio’s painting, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist ( Damned 520). Knowlson also offers Blake’s engravings or Man Ray’s photography as possible sources for That Time ( Damned 531). The National Gallery of Ireland’s magnificent exhibition, Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Painting, mounted in conjunction with the Beckett Centenary Festival of 2006, makes a strong case for Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci’s The Assumption of St. Mary Magdalene as a visual precedent for Footfalls.3 Given his acute interest in memory during this period, it should come as no surprise that Beckett’s polyvalent experiments would eventually include a return to the laboratory of television.

The impetus for his return also came in the form of memory, namely the institutional memory of the BBC. Beckett turned seventy on April 13, 1976, and the BBC decided to commemorate this milestone with a multimedia retrospective of his radio and television plays. Plans were made to rebroadcast Embers, All That Fall, and some Jack MacGowran readings on BBC
radio, while Martin Esslin prepared a new production of Rough for Radio II with Harold Pinter, Billie Whitelaw, and Patrick Magee. The television side of the house had fewer options at its disposal. Aside from Eh Joe, the only other available footage was a 1972 color version of Krapp’s Last Tape that was

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 71
deemed unacceptable. A remarkable version of Billie Whitelaw’s Not I had been filmed, shot by Tristram Powell with Mouth in shocking close-up.

Beckett readily endorsed this piece for the TV commemoration. However, according to Knowlson, the editor of BBC’s Second House was reluctant to pair Not I with another solo-performer piece, eliminating Eh Joe from consideration. When the only other available alternative, a filmed version of the Royal Court Theatre’s Play, proved undesirable because of poor technical quality,4 the planned commemoration for television was stalled at an impasse.

Beckett himself broke the stalemate when he offered to write a new teleplay if the commemoration could be postponed ( Damned 548). The BBC eagerly accepted, and Beckett went on to write not one but two new teleplays, Ghost Trio and …but the clouds…, to accompany Not I in a “tele-trilogy” titled Shades, first broadcast on April 17, 1977.5

In his extensive study of the teleplays, “The Exhausted,” Gilles Deleuze praises Ghost Trio at the expense of Eh Joe. He asserts, “From Eh Joe to Trio, a kind of vocal and spatial purification takes place, which gives the first piece a preparatory value that serves to introduce the works for television, rather than fully being a part of them” (166–67). As the previous chapter argues, such dismissals fail to appreciate the complexities of Eh Joe, a work that establishes Beckett’s standard for exploiting television as the quintessential “memory machine.” Deleuze is certainly right, however, that Ghost Trio uses very different televisual techniques than Eh Joe. Beckett’s emergent directorial style—with its emphasis on precise repetition and formal coordination of the mise en scène—led him away from psychological excavations like Eh Joe and towards plays that, to quote his famous rejoinder to Jessica Tandy, “‘work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect.’”6 Accordingly, in Ghost Trio Beckett focuses upon the juxtaposition of sound and image, the order of habitual patterns, and the stylized interplay between voice, visuals, and music. Perhaps this is what Deleuze has in mind when he refers to the “vocal and spatial purification” of Ghost Trio, though I am suspicious of his appeal to “purity.” Given his categorization of Eh Joe as “language II” (“imagination sullied by memory”) and his categorization of all Beckett’s subsequent teleplays as “language III” (“no longer a language of names or voices but a language of images”), I presume that what has been “purified” out of Ghost Trio is the sullying influence of memory. Yet memory remains as central to the second teleplay as to the first, even if Beckett’s televisual “language” has become less verbal and more visceral. As Lydia Rainford observes, “For all of Beckett’s critical declarations about the inadequacy of language, and for all his characters’ attempts to give up speaking and remembering and lapse into the void, traces of language and memory—even if they are only ruined traces—always seem to remain” (182). Rainford then wisely cautions, “If we are concerned

72 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren with the significance and specificity of Beckett’s use of visual technology, we should be careful not to override the complexity of its relation to subjective memory and language in his television plays” (183). Memory continues to serve in Ghost Trio as a field of competition between a male Figure and a female Voice. The second (and for that matter the third) teleplay also retains dramatic tension between a mourning subject and a lost love object. But here, as in all the later teleplays, psychology is ultimately subordinated to formalism.

Ghost Trio is in this sense less Freudian and more Bergsonian, concentrating less upon the specific recollections of a remembering subject and more upon the methodology whereby perception is assembled through the selective process of memory. Ghost Trio’s primary conflict arises over who will control the teleplay’s patterns of perception and whose needs will ultimately be served.

* * *

Beckett originally considered calling his second teleplay Tryst. This provisional title, not succeeded by Ghost Trio until the final drafts, introduces the teleplay’s subject of a man longing for reunion with his lost lover. A Male Figure (F) sits in a sparsely furnished and dimly lit room, hunched over on a stool. He does not speak. Instead he listens to a cassette recording of the middle movement from Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Trio in D Major (known as

“The Ghost”) and dwells upon his absent (dead?) lover. Beckett’s Trio, like Beethoven’s, is divided into three parts, labeled “Pre-action,” “Action,” and

“Re-action” ( CDW 407). In the first section, a Female Voice (V) drolly sets the scene before us. In the second section, she narrates (or directs) F’s actions.

He sometimes thinks he hears the woman from his past, but, when he checks the door and window for her, she is never there. V does not speak in the third section. Instead, F goes through his routine without comment or instruction until he hears footsteps in the corridor and a knock at the door. He opens to find a boy dressed in black, who shakes his head in the negative before receding back down the corridor. F returns to his stool, embraces his cassette player, and listens to a final selection from Beethoven. The screen finally fades to black as he looks up from his cassette and faces forward.

As in Eh Joe, the first challenge facing the viewer is to determine the source of this mysterious female voice and her relationship to the male figure on screen. Eh Joe might seem to offer an obvious precedent for solving this problem. There the critical consensus holds that Voice is the byproduct of Joe’s fragmented mind, a harbinger of psychic distress sent from himself to himself. It is by no means certain, however, that V is to F as Voice is to Joe. In fact, we cannot even be certain that F hears V. Joe is an open book on this score; we watch as he writhes and grimaces in response to Voice’s taunting. F, on the other hand, is a closed book. Even from the nearest camera position,

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 73
we see only “close-up of head, hands, cassette. Clutching hands, head bowed, face hidden” ( CDW 409). Viewers are not granted a direct view of F’s face until the final shot, and even then it is difficult to decipher what we read there.

Denied access to the actor’s most expressive tools—his voice and his face—
spectators are deprived the psychological signposts by which we customarily gauge our bearings. The precise nature of V’s relationship to F remains elusive and indeterminate. Nonetheless, subsequent technical challenges posed in Ghost Trio continually lead us back to this basic open question.

Whether or not F hears V, the television audience certainly hears her.

Indeed, all of her lines in Part I are directed not at F but at the home viewer.

From the very beginning, V seeks to control perception within the room and reception from without. She begins cordially enough: Good-evening. Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [ Pause.] Good-evening. Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [ Pause.] It will not be raised, nor lowered, whatever happens. ( CDW 408) From the beginning, V establishes a distinctly different relationship with the spectator than the one maintained by Voice in Eh Joe. Though Voice delivers her monologue simultaneously to two audiences—Joe and the television spectator—she never explicitly acknowledges the spectator’s presence. V, on the other hand, not only acknowledges the presence of an audience, but she immediately curries favor with us. She uses the “Pre-action” section to put the viewer at ease, inviting him or her to adjust the sound before the “Action”

begins. Beckett’s hunger for artistic control is sometimes cited as his chief attraction to television, but one must not forget the degree of control he also surrendered in broadcasting his teleplays. Television allowed Beckett ruthless control over every visual and aural element, yet the knobs and buttons on the television make each home viewer a de facto editor, capable of revising Beckett’s specifications willy-nilly to fulfill her own whims. V’s opening lines concede as much, inviting the spectator to do her worst before the real

“Action” gets started.

Any temporary delusions we may have about who is really in control are quickly dispelled, however. In Beyond Minimalism Enoch Brater accurately characterizes V as the “master of ceremonies” (87), and we are soon reminded how completely she determines what we see and how we see it: Look. [ Long pause.] The familiar chamber. [ Pause.] At the far end a window.

[ Pause.] On the right the indispensable door. [ Pause.] On the left, against the wall, some kind of pallet. [ Pause.] The light: faint, omnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous. No shadow. [ Pause.] No shadow.

74 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Colour: none. All grey. Shades of grey. [ Pause.] The colour grey if you wish, shades of the colour grey. [ Pause.] Forgive my stating the obvious. ( CDW 408) V’s matter-of-fact descriptions certainly do not aspire to the imaginative heights or pathological depths of Eh Joe’s Voice. V simply describes the scene set before us, “stating the obvious.” Yet her detached and slightly sardonic tone communicates something of the security of her position. She literally

“calls the shots” in Part I of Ghost Trio; whatever she calls for, the camera immediately delivers. Her authority over perception and reception is complete and unchallenged at this point. V feels no threat of “mental thuggee”

( CDW 363), so she never resorts to the venomous resentment and strangled desperation of Joe’s Voice. V is the aloof, spectral presence who presides in absentia over this chamber; she is the law. In Echographies of Television, Derrida describes the power of the specter in similar terms: The specter is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, surveyed, as if by the law: we are ‘before the law,’ without any possible symmetry, without reciprocity, insofar as the other is watching only us, concerns only us, we who are observing it (in the same way that one observes and respects the law) without even being able to meet its gaze. (120)

According to Derrida, the power of the specter is the power to gaze and to judge with impunity. This is of course the power of the spectator as well, and in this sense F’s imprisonment within the double-gaze of V and the TV
viewer replicates O’s entrapment by the double-perception of E and the Film spectator.

Beckett’s great creative leap in Film was his recognition of the dramaturgical possibilities of Berkeley’s esse est percipi. For if “being is being perceived,”

then being is essentially a performance of the self before an audience of at least one (the all-seeing eye of God for Berkeley, self-perception for Beckett).

If this philosophy is right—and Beckett declines to say that it is right, though neither does he say it is wrong—then O’s predicament over the inescapability of perception is not merely a private problem but a general condition of consciousness. To be on screen is obviously to be perceived, but Film goes further to suggest that this condition may pertain off screen as well: One is always being watched, if only by oneself. Eric Prieto views Ghost Trio in a similar light in his fine study, Listening In: Music, Mind and the Modernist Narrative.

For Prieto, V and F’s discrete personalities take a back seat to their functions as emblems of consciousness. For instance, he sees the camera’s role as “that of the self, posited as an observing eye […] watching over another incarnation

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 75
of the self, as object” (244). He further explains, “If the chamber in Ghost Trio is taken as a metaphor for the skull-like space of consciousness, then the camera seems to embody the inwardly turned gaze of self-observation, while F
stands for the subject observed” (245). If the camera is the vehicle for “self-observation,” then the spectators—both V and the home viewer—are posited as integral participants in the performance of self. Here the distinctions begin to break down between perception from without and from within. It is as if the Cartesian “ghost in the machine” has been turned inside out, with the ghost looming on the outside around the machine trapped within.

Framed another way, all perception, even self-perception, involves reflexive interplay between subject and object, viewer and viewed. As Bergson observes in Matter and Memory, “every attentive perception truly involves a reflexion, in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image” (124; emphasis original). This process of creative projection is not merely a one-way street, however, with only the subject projecting externally. Bergson argues that the object likewise projects internally; thus “reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit” (127). In Ghost Trio Beckett exploits the conditions of televisual reception by inserting the spectator into the reflexive circuitry of V and F’s (self-)consciousness.

A central thesis of Bergson’s Matter and Memory is that perception of matter is derived from the selective interpolations of memory. Ghost Trio rests upon this thesis just as firmly as Film rests upon esse est percipi. Even before F
is integrated into the “Action” of the teleplay, the “Pre-action” section dramatizes this Bergsonian process of selective memory. After all, the “familiar chamber” is “familiar” precisely because it is remembered. V has certainly witnessed this scene before, but so, too, has the audience. The room may be emblematic of consciousness, but it also evokes specific recollections of previous Beckettian settings. Ghost Trio’s “familiar chamber” is a distillation of Endgame’s shelter, Krapp’s den, Film’s apartment, Joe’s bedroom. For Beckett’s target audience, the “familiar spectator,” no introductions are necessary.

And yet V spends the entire first section of Ghost Trio giving us a “tour” of the room—not once, but twice. Her second tour of the room is not quite the same, however, and this establishes another important function of memory in the teleplay. The opening general view of the “familiar chamber” is followed by a “defamiliarizing” shot-breakdown, where V instructs the camera, and the viewer, to “look closer” ( CDW 408) at the floor, wall, door, window, and pallet. The close-up effectively removes each item from its context within the room. Isolated on screen, these familiar objects become estranged. The grey rectangles framed on screen look more like Mark Rothko

76 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren paintings than utilitarian domestic objects. If the effect of V’s opening introduction is to refamiliarize us with the Beckettian room, the effect of the close-up sequence is to defamiliarize us.

The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky defined “defamiliarization” as the principle aim of art:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (12)

Ghost Trio’s close-ups of floor, wall, door, window, pallet, and even F emphasize shape, pattern, and geometric juxtaposition. One is not accustomed to viewing a simple door or a pallet in such an aesthetically complex way. The resulting perception is akin to the “slippage” Watt experiences in perceiving a simple pot:

Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, […] it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure that, that it was not a pot at all. It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say Pot, pot, and be comforted. (81) Familiar objects in the familiar chamber become estranged. V begins Part I by invoking the audience’s memory of previous Beckettian spaces; but, when she triggers our memories by returning to the room’s familiar objects, she disappoints our expectations by deviating from the established pattern.

This simple training exercise in the “Pre-action” section establishes fundamental precedents for the “Action” and “Re-action” sections that follow. We are trained how to look at the “familiar chamber,” and then we are retrained to “look closer” in a new light, from a new perspective. V offers a basic primer in the construction of perception from malleable memory, with patterns subject to rearrangement for radically different effects. These lessons are necessary prerequisites for appreciating the central conflict that begins to take shape between V and F.

* * *

Part I ends with our first concentrated view of F. Having taught the audience to see the room from a new perspective, V exhorts the viewer to “Look again.” The camera cuts back to reveal “Sole sign of life a seated figure”

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 77

( CDW 409). The long, grey garment and off-white wig worn by F in both the BBC and SDR productions suggest his affinity with the room’s other “Shades of grey.” F also conjures up shades of previous Beckettian characters. The long white hair recalls Lucky from Waiting for Godot and Listener from That Time, as well as prefiguring Speaker from A Piece of Monologue and Reader and Listener from Ohio Impromptu. And, of course, his huddled obsession over the cassette player strongly recalls Krapp’s intimate relationship with his reel-to-reel machine. Unlike Krapp, however, F does not listen to recordings of his own voice. Instead his tape machine conjures up memories through the music of Beethoven.

Beckett’s use of Beethoven as source text for Ghost Trio is highly revealing.

All of his dramas from this period draw liberally from his cultural storehouse of memory, but the late teleplays are unusually direct in acknowledging their sources. Music was a lifelong passion for Beckett, and Beethoven was a particular favorite. He often spent evenings with friends playing Beethoven records, and he frequently played Beethoven’s chamber music on the piano, solo or with accompaniment. Morris Sinclair recalls many evenings accompanying his cousin on violin: “‘It could perhaps not be said that he had a highly developed technique as a pianist, but I remember well with what conviction and élan he would play the last movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique.

The intensity of his absorption was almost ferocious’” (Knowlson and Knowlson 38). F’s absorption is equally intense in Ghost Trio. He awaits a tryst with his lost lover by ferociously concentrating upon the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Trio in D Major (Opus 70, Number 1).7

This haunting largo, known as “The Ghost,”8 dictates the tone of the teleplay. The music seems to serve as catalyst for F’s meditations upon his absent other. In other words, F’s cassette player is another “memory machine,” just like Krapp’s tape machine, even though the “language” of evocation in this case is nonverbal.

The choice of “The Ghost” as theme is also significant because it implies from the start that F’s anticipated tryst will not take place, at least not in the material world, because his lost love has joined the spirit world of the dead.

Of course, immateriality does not equate to nonexistence. Music and voices are also immaterial, too, but they are no less real for that. As Schopenhauer painstakingly demonstrates in his “Essay on Spirit Seeing,” spirits are perceived differently than corporeal bodies are, but the one is no less “real” than the other. Schopenhauer asserts,

What a spirit seer who really knew his own mind and was able to express himself would assert is merely the presence in his intuitively perceiving intellect of a picture perfectly indistinguishable from that caused in his intellect by bodies

78 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren through the medium of light and his eyes, and yet without the actual presence of such bodies. Similarly in respect of something audibly present, noises, tones, and sounds, exactly like those produced in his ear by vibrating bodies and air, yet without the presence or movement thereof. Here lies the source of the mis-understanding which pervades all that is said for and against the reality of ghostly apparitions, namely that the spirit apparition presents itself wholly like a bodily phenomenon, yet is not and cannot be such. (227) Schopenhauer challenges the notion that because spirits can be shown not to exist bodily, it therefore follows that they do not truly exist. He counters that spiritual phenomena trigger visual and aural stimuli as surely as bodily phenomena do, but that spiritual perception is processed by the “dream-organ”

rather than the sensory-organs. This philosophical defense of immaterial reality is an argument befitting the champion of uncorporeal music as the most profound of the arts: “the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence” ( World I.257).

In the radio plays Beckett began experimenting with music as a viable vehicle for drama, just as capable of expression (or no less incapable) as his human characters. Ghost Trio extends this experiment to television, where music vies with other intangible agents—the mysterious voice, the flickering figures on screen—to express dramatic tension. Beckett could have enlisted any piece of music he liked to serve the purposes of this experiment. In the two radio plays that employ music as a character, he used original composi-tions by John Beckett for Words and Music and Marcel Mihalovici for Cascando. The choice to incorporate a preexisting score in Ghost Trio posed unique challenges, since it required adapting as musical “character” a work composed by someone else for very different purposes. Nonetheless, because of its ghostly theme and its evocative power in Beckett’s own memory, Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio proved a perfect complement—and foil—for the teleplay. He uses television as a spirit-medium for conjuring up ghosts, and then he stages a shadow-boxing match between them.

For all its thematic significance, the Beethoven piece exerts an equally powerful influence over the formal arrangement of Ghost Trio. The teleplay borrows its ternary structure from the trio, and Beethoven’s musical instruments (piano, violin, and cello) find their analogues in Beckett’s televisual instruments (voice, camera, and figure). Michael Maier goes so far as to assert that Beethoven’s music “creates the image” in Beckett’s teleplay and “determines the course of action” (319). Maier offers one of the best score analyses of Ghost Trio available, but here he overstates the case for Beckett’s faithfulness to Beethoven. Beckett never subordinates the action of his teleplay

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 79
merely to dramatize the composer’s score. On the contrary, as he adapts his source material for television, he distorts it almost beyond recognition.

Beckett’s Ghost Trio is openly indebted to Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, but it pays that debt in fitfully irregular installments. The music is inaudible for much of the teleplay, and what snatches we do hear are irreverently jumbled out of sequence. The brief musical quotations skip around from bar to bar and are routinely disrupted. If there is an organizing principle behind this rearranged sampling of “The Ghost,” it is private, inscrutable, and radically inconsistent with Beethoven’s original. In her essay, “Beethoven’s Haunting of Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” Catherine Laws astutely discerns the subversive resistance at the heart of the teleplay:

Beckett uses the expressivity and the formal symmetries of the Beethoven in the same way as he does other elements of the play, positing them provisionally only in order to undermine their stability as their constructedness is revealed.

Thus Beckett specifically draws upon the spirit of German Romanticism which infuses the music, but does so precisely in order to deconstruct these ideas and put into question the possibility of simple solace or absolute redemption. (202) This countertraditional approach is paradigmatic for all Beckett’s work on film and television. He invokes a traditional source, acknowledges his debt to that tradition, but then deconstructs the source and subverts its traditional values. As Laws observes, “the Beethoven has been subjected to a process of cutting and re-composition” so that “a kind of re-imagining is taking place”

(210). Beckett remembers Beethoven by dismembering his work, thus robbing “The Ghost” of its formal integrity and stripping away any Romantic pretense of consolation. What begins as homage ends as house arrest, with Beckett “keeping score” and submitting it to ruthless score analysis. By taking the “familiar chamber music” of Beethoven and challenging the listener to “Hear again,” Beckett provides yet another model for artistic “defamiliarization” and subversive re-imagination.

* * *

F gradually becomes animated by a similar impulse toward subversive re-imagination. At the beginning of the section, his actions are rigorously controlled by V, just as she controls every other perceptual element in the room.

By section’s end, however, F begins to assert his autonomy by subtly resisting and revising her patterns. The “Action” section finally gets underway with V’s pronouncement, “He will now think he hears her.” F responds immediately,

“raises his head sharply, turns still crouched to door, fleeting face, tense pose.”

However, after five seconds V reports, “No one,” and F resumes his concentration on the cassette ( CDW 410).

80 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Beckett spent considerable effort over the first line of “Action.” The first typescript reads, “He now thinks he hears something,” later revised to “He now thinks he hears someone,” before settling on “He will now think he hears her” (RUL 1519/1). These alterations are slight but telling. The object of the sentence (and of F’s libidinal attachment) becomes at once more specific and more teasingly ambiguous: Does “her” refer to his lost lover, or to the narrative voice? Even more provocatively, could they be one and the same? Gilles Deleuze certainly believes so: “Everything indicates that the woman who speaks from outside and the woman who could suddenly appear in this space are one and the same” (“Exhausted” 167). Perhaps, but the equation is less obvious than Deleuze suggests. If V is F’s lover and has kept her appointment after all (albeit as a ghostly voice), then why does she never confront him directly, as Voice does in Eh Joe? Why doesn’t she say, “He will now think he hears me”? And why doesn’t F ever directly acknowledge her presence? This is not to conclude that Deleuze is necessarily wrong. To be sure, Beckett’s deliberately ambiguous phrasing, “He will now think he hears her,” is designed to raise precisely those suspicions voiced by Deleuze. Furthermore, Not I and Footfalls provide contemporary precedents for Beckettian voices that adopt third-person pronouns as a deflective ruse. Still, Ghost Trio resists answering its own questions definitively. Rather, it raises provocative questions of identity only to suspend them, bracketing off definitive narrative explanations in favor of formalist tension.

The other important element of Beckett’s rephrasing is the switch in verb tense from present (“He now thinks…”) to future (“He will now think he hears her”). This adjustment could simply mean that V is so familiar with F’s routine that she already knows what will happen next. More likely, however, she knows what will happen next because she directs it to happen, calling F’s actions just as she calls the camera’s shots. Her pointed imperative, “Again,”

followed by F’s dutiful repetition ( CDW 410), confirms that V is in full control of the teleplay’s perception, reception, and action. She is also in control of the teleplay’s memory, as evidenced by the fact that F’s inspection of the room—from door, to window, to pallet—follows precisely that pattern which V established in the “Pre-action” section. Of course, F’s inspection of the

“familiar chamber” echoes an even older memory, namely Joe’s opening inspection of his bedroom. Joe’s dumb show was crucially different, however, in that it was performed at his own initiative. Voice did not begin taunting him until after he had confirmed for himself that no one was hiding in the room. On the other hand, F’s inspection is initiated and directed by V, who blocks out his movements with imperative commands: “Now to door. […]

Open. […] Now to window. […] Open. […] Now to pallet” ( CDW 410).

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 81

Whether or not he literally hears and responds to these instructions is a moot point; F’s actions are compelled, consciously or unconsciously, by an unseen and seemingly undeniable power.

V is F’s puppet-master at the beginning of Part II, and he obediently twitches every time she tugs his strings. Beckett specifically emphasized F’s marionette qualities in performance. During the BBC tapings of Ghost Trio and …but the clouds…, Beckett referred actor Ronald Pickup to the essay “On the Marionette Theater” by Beethoven’s German contemporary, Heinrich von Kleist. James Knowlson attended these tapings and reports, “There was no doubt in the mind of anyone present that Kleist’s essay also expressed memorably some of Beckett’s own deepest aesthetic aspirations” (Knowlson and Pilling 277). Knowlson emphasizes the marionette’s grace as the key to Kleist’s attraction for Beckett, but equally important with regard to Ghost Trio is the marionette’s powerlessness. A puppet cannot animate itself. While arguably more graceful than its human counterpart, a marionette possesses no freedom of movement and is totally dependent on its operator to activate its dormant grace. V functions as F’s puppet-master through the first half of the teleplay—
right up until the moment when F cuts his strings.

The turning point in the “Action” comes, fittingly enough, at the mirror.

The published script is prefaced by a diagram of the room. Included in this diagram is a mirror positioned at the head of the pallet. This mirror is yet another familiar object in the “familiar chamber”; the apartment in Film also contains a mirror, which O hastily covers in his effort to occlude all potential perceiving eyes. Apparently V is wary of unwelcome perception as well, for throughout her several guided tours of the room—inspections so thorough that she even points out the dust on the floor—she conspicuously avoids any mention of the mirror. This taboo object does not escape F’s detection, however. After inspecting the pallet as V instructs, F turns, walks toward the wall and, without direction or permission, stares into the mirror. V responds with a “[ Surprised] Ah!” ( CDW 411). This independent gesture by F has profound consequences for the dramatic conflict in Ghost Trio. V’s rigid pattern of perception, scrupulously established in the “Pre-action” and rigidly enforced heretofore in the “Action,” has finally been violated. F’s gesture is subtle but unmistakably defiant. His unrehearsed, unsolicited, unsanctioned gaze into the mirror—an object whose very function is the reflection of identity—constitutes his first independent act, his first autonomous choice.

What V had controlled up to this point were the teleplay’s patterns of perception, but another way to put this is to say that she was the teleplay’s sole agent of choice. Henri Bergson argues in Matter and Memory that “Conscious perception signifies choice, and consciousness mainly consists in this practical discernment” (46). According to Bergson, all perception is directed toward

82 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren those actions that best fulfill the body’s needs. Perception is thus the product of “practical discernment,” whereby the mind addresses the body’s needs, chooses the memory-images most conducive to realizing those needs, and then formulates practical perception that will lead to practical action. As Bergson succinctly phrases it, “consciousness means virtual action” (48). If we return now to Prieto’s model of Ghost Trio as an emblem of consciousness, and if we apply a Bergsonian understanding of consciousness, then V emerges as the mind engaged in practical discernment and converting her choices into bodily action by F. For the first half of the teleplay, she is the dominant agent of choice for this consciousness. She is the one who dictates perception, choosing what the camera sees, when and how it sees, from what perspective it sees, and in what order those perceptions are received by the viewer.

Likewise, up to the moment of F’s rebellion, she is the sole determining force behind F’s routine. She establishes a pattern in the first half of “Pre-action,”

refines it in the second half of “Pre-action,” remembers it in “Action,” and converts that memory into bodily action by F.

Her conversion process is so rigidly repetitive, however, that she becomes culpable of reducing this memory routine into dead habit. In a description remarkably relevant to Ghost Trio, Bergson compares this kind of memory to a school lesson learned through rote repetition: The memory of the lesson, which is remembered in the sense of learnt by heart, has all the marks of a habit. Like a habit, it is acquired by the repetition of the same effort. Like a habit, it demands first a decomposition and then a recomposition of the whole action. Lastly, like every habitual bodily exercise, it is stored up in a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements which succeed each other in the same order and, together, take the same length of time. (89–90, my emphasis) Bergson characterizes this kind of memory as “learnt recollection” or “habit interpreted by memory” and contrasts it with “spontaneous recollection” or

“memory par excellence.” He observes that spontaneous recollection “imagines,” whereas “learnt recollection” merely “repeats” (93). When F disrupts his routine by gazing into the mirror, he strikes a blow not only against V’s authority but also against the atrophy of habit. He thinks for himself, discerns a need distinct from V’s proscriptions, imagines a new virtual action, and converts his imagination into independent action. In so doing, he achieves a victory disproportionate to the meekness of his simple gesture.

Once F “breaks the habit” of V’s routine, she never fully regains control.

She tries to reinstate order by directing F, “Now to door.” But F once again disobeys her, going instead to the stool, where he “takes up cassette, sits,

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 83
settles into opening pose, bowed over cassette” ( CDW 411). V then momen-tarily regains some semblance of control, inspecting F again with the camera and teasing him once more with a false alarm at the door. As F settles back onto his stool, however, another unexpected thing happens. Music becomes audible for the first time from the general-view camera position, and it gradually grows louder. V interjects, “Stop,” and the music obliges ( CDW 411), but not before the damage is done. It is not clear whether F boldly turns up the volume on his cassette player, or whether music works as an independent element here and acts on its own, but either way another clear note of defiance is registered. V finds herself at the end of Part II presiding over a full-scale mutiny. The performance, which had been so carefully and completely directed by V just a few minutes earlier, has begun to spin out of her control.

For those keeping score at home, it is clear by the close of the “Action” that V
is no longer winning the dramatic conflict of this teleplay. Even the score itself rebels against her. Of course, Ghost Trio’s form of dramatic conflict is very different from we are accustomed to finding on television. The competition between V and F is no soap-opera contretemps, nor is it a psychological war of attrition like we encountered in Eh Joe. By comparison, Beckett’s second teleplay seems remarkably tranquil. Ghost Trio does feature a central conflict, however, albeit a largely formalist one. Over the course of the

“Action,” we witness a cerebral chess match between V and F, a competition for control over the perceptual pieces in play, a struggle to determine whose pattern of repeating the past will prevail. If perception and memory are both products of choice, then some agency must ultimately be in control of that selection process. By the end of Part II, F has clearly gained the upper-hand in this competition.

* * *

V’s final command in Part II—indeed, her final spoken word in Ghost Trio—is the deceptively simple instruction, “Repeat” ( CDW 411), thus introducing the teleplay’s third and final section, “Re-action.” Enoch Brater argues in Beyond Minimalism that V has no need to speak in Part III because her work is already done. He asserts that Ghost Trio’s “tripartite structure signifies a rehearsal, a dress rehearsal, and the stability of the final performance” ( Beyond 94). Like any director, V does the bulk of her work in rehearsals, preparing her actor for the performance that he must ultimately deliver on his own. Brater detects no rejection or abdication of authority in Part III. Rather, he emphasizes the continuing control exerted by V through her final command: Though in the Re-action the figure makes his moves without benefit of voice, he is, nevertheless, not acting independently this time. F is acting instead upon

84 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren his last command, “Repeat.” Scene 3 is Re-action and exactly that, a repeat of the actions of 2, not a reaction of response. (90) Beckett’s “Re-action” subtitle might initially seem to support Brater’s reading.

However, and this is crucial, Part III is not “Re-action and exactly that”; it is not rote repetition. The third section of Ghost Trio is far more remarkable for its transgressions against the first two sections than for its faithful reproduction of them. What F repeats most emphatically in the “Re-action” is his process of subversive re-imagination begun in the “Action.” V ceases to speak, not because she is confident in her instructions being followed, but because she concedes that they will not be followed, so she need not waste her breath.

Brater’s comparison to rehearsals is apt, but he fails to account for the cast’s revolt against the director during those rehearsals, eroding the last of V’s autonomy over the performance.

F emerges from this coup de scène as the new controller of perception. As visual confirmation that a different agent is now “calling the shots,” Part III begins not with a general view of the room—the camera position where V
began her pattern in Parts I and II—but instead with a near shot of F from the very center of the room. This new vantage point brings the spectator much closer to the action, establishing F’s more intimate signature style. He does not abandon V’s pattern entirely, however. He has apparently been a creature of habit too long to start over with complete ingenuity, and her original pattern is clearly the “source text” for his decomposition and recomposition. In other words, the “Re-action” section is a “Re-imagination of Action”

shot from a new perspective, much as Beckett re-imagines Beethoven through rearrangement for different effect. F’s paradigm is borrowed from V, but he makes fundamental revisions to her original patterns, essentially “re-defamiliarizing” the “familiar chamber.”

The closer visual proximity in Part III permits new doors of perception to be opened to the audience. For instance, music is audible more frequently and at higher volume than in the previous sections. We also hear sound effects for the first time: the crescendo and decrescendo creaks of door and window as F looks for “her”; the soft patter of rain at the open window; the tantalizing knock at the door; the faint sound of footsteps when the enigmatic boy messenger approaches and retreats. Most revealing of all, the

“Reaction” includes three point-of-view (POV) shots, the most intimate shots available in the lexicon of film. The inclusion of POV shots—that is, a shot understood as the subjective viewpoint from a particular character’s perspective—proves conclusively that F’s perspective is now predominant.

These shots equate the viewers’ perspective with the character’s perspective, allowing us literally to “Look again” at the “familiar chamber” through new

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 85
eyes. F’s three POV shots also give us our only glimpses outside the chamber: the first POV shot at the door reveals a long corridor outside the room; the second POV shot at the window briefly restores the natural world with its dark and rainy night; and the third POV shot focuses directly upon the boy messenger who materializes from and dematerializes back into the mysterious elsewhere off screen.

F’s subjective shots are the surest signs that he, not V, now controls the patterns of perception, but this reversal is further confirmed by the content of that perception. Remember that, according to Bergson, perception is amal-gamated from memory and is oriented toward that action which best serves the body’s needs. With F at the helm of perception, different needs are now being served. This explains the inclusion of the outer world in Part III, a reality that was carefully excluded from V’s perspective in Parts I and II. F’s POV
shots outside the room remind us that a world does exist beyond the skull, a world still capable of delivering rain and little boys—and, conceivably, his lost love. V’s detached perspective occluded any considerations of an external reality. But F maintains faith in external reality, because all of his hopes for reunion with his absent other depend upon her reemergence from that mysterious elsewhere. His motives are different than V’s, and his controlling perception within and without the “familiar chamber” reflects this fundamental difference. F’s revisions to V’s established patterns are all motivated by his need for greater intimacy: He brings the camera (and by proxy the viewer) deeper into the room; he gazes into the external world from which his lost love might reappear; and he adds another “tour stop” at the mirror, where he stares at himself and, in the process, gives us our first indirect (i.e., reflected) glimpse of his face. While F still remembers V’s earlier patterns of perception, he perceives them quite differently. He exercises his newfound powers of choice to select different memory-images. The resulting additions, alterations, and amplifications to perception follow from F’s distinctly different desires—desires for intimacy and, ultimately, for reunion with his lost love.

* * *

Unfortunately for F, in Beckett’s teleplays as in Eliot’s April, memory and desire make a cruel mixture. F checks V’s perceptual control in the second half of “Action” only to have his own alternative agenda challenged in the second half of “Re-action.” No sooner has he installed his more intimate perspective than the boy messenger arrives to disrupt his pattern. The stage directions specify,

Cut to near shot of small boy full length in corridor before open door. Dressed in black oilskin with hood glistening with rain. White face raised to invisible F.

86 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren 5 seconds. Boy shakes head faintly. Face still, raised. 5 seconds. Boy shakes head again. Face still, raised. 5 seconds. Boy turns and goes. Sound of receding steps. Register from same position his slow recession till he vanishes in dark at end of corridor. 5 seconds on empty corridor. ( CDW 413) This assuredly is not the tryst for which F has hoped and waited. Yet the boy’s arrival, while unexpected and perhaps unwelcome, is not altogether unfamiliar. One hears in his steps echoes of May’s footfalls, and one sees in his child-ish visage traces of the boys that preceded him. This strange revenant in his wet oilskin is drenched in Beckettian memory. The “familiar spectator” will recall that Clov also sees a boy approaching on the horizon toward the end of Endgame. Both Clov and F occupy skull-like shelters from which they gaze at the grey outer world through lenses (telescope and television camera, respectively). Both plays hint that the boyhood images perceived through these scopic machines are drawn from memory. Rosemary Pountney argues that in Ghost Trio, “F’s boyhood self has returned to face the man he has become”

(47). While this interpretation may initially seem far-fetched, it gains credence when compared with Beckett’s 1957 revelation to Alan Schneider that

“Clov’s ‘perception’ of boy at end to be interpreted as vision of himself on last lap to ‘shelter’” (Harmon 23). F’s boy may likewise represent a vision of his former self; note that the boy is not listed in the dramatis personae, perhaps suggesting that he is not to be regarded as a character distinct from his perceiver. This interpretation could also account for the boy’s enigmatic headshake, for what child—real or imagined—would not show dismay when faced with such a wasted image of his future self.

Of course, the boy in Ghost Trio also recalls the boy from Waiting for Godot. Not coincidentally, Beckett was rehearsing Warten auf Godot in Berlin when he originally conceived Ghost Trio.9 Both of these boys serve as messengers sent by the respective objects of the protagonists’ vigils. The boy’s message in Godot is clearly verbalized: “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow” ( CDW 49). The boy’s message in Ghost Trio is left to conjecture, but most critics have taken their cue from Godot to deduce a similar message: “She” will not be coming, at least not tonight, probably never, so F’s vigil has been in vain. A conspicuous dissenting voice comes from Gilles Deleuze. In “The Exhausted” he creatively reads the ending of the teleplay against the standard critical grain. He argues, “And when the little mute messenger suddenly appears, it is not to announce that the woman will not be coming, as if this were a piece of bad news, but to bring the long-awaited order to stop everything, everything being well and truly finished. At least the protagonist has a means of sensing that the end is at hand” (167–68). He contends that, contra Godot, the boy in Ghost Trio

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 87
comes not to prolong F’s vigil but to end it. In keeping with his “exhaustion of the possible” theme, Deleuze argues that all the permutations of patterns in Ghost Trio have finally been exhausted.

Deleuze’s interpretation is most compelling as a possible explanation for the teleplay’s enigmatic final gesture—F’s smile. At the end of Ghost Trio, after the boy has departed, F resumes his seat on the stool and clutches his cassette close to his breast. The camera moves in for a close-up as the music rises in volume. Once Beethoven’s “Ghost” finally fades to silence, the stage directions instruct, “Silence. F raises his head. Face seen clearly for the second time. 10 seconds” ( CDW 414). The camera then recedes to a general view of the room before fading to black. While the audience had been offered a view of F’s face once before, that view had only been a reflected image from the mirror. This time the view is unmediated, and what one sees in both the BBC
and SDR versions is unsettling. When Ronald Pickup and Klaus Herm respectively raise their heads and fix the camera with their stares, they do so with inscrutable smiles upon their faces. Shane Weller’s generalization about Beckettian smiles is especially apropos here: “Indeed, to describe the smiles in Beckett’s works as enigmatic would be to understate the case, for not only does the question of what a given smile might mean become very difficult to answer, but even telling whether there is a smile there to be seen can prove no minor feat” ( Beckett 128). In fact, no published script directs F to smile at the end, but the gesture is unmistakable in both of Beckett’s productions. But what could F possibly have to smile about? He is alone, bereft of all human company, and his one lingering hope for companionship has seemingly been dashed by the boy’s message. So why smile? Deleuze’s interpretation offers a possible solution to the riddle. He reads a positive message from the boy’s negative headshake, interpreting this sign as a parole of sorts. The lost lover will not be coming, so F is released from the obligation of waiting for her.

Like Vladimir and Estragon he has kept his appointment faithfully, even if the absent other has not. But unlike them, so Deleuze’s logic implies, F is ultimately freed from the bonds of waiting, from the obligation to go on. If Deleuze is right, then Ghost Trio dramatizes that rarest of achievements, definitive closure—a goal perennially pursued by Beckett’s characters but routinely disappointed. From beginning to almost-end, his characters repeat Clov’s refrain: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” ( CDW 93). According to Deleuze, F succeeds where most of his accursed progenitors failed, “everything being well and truly finished” (168).

Other supporting arguments can be marshaled to reinforce this interpretation of the smile as a sign of closure. The gesture recalls Joe’s closing smile, likewise unnoted in the script but observed in performance. Beckett explained this addition to Schneider: “I asked in London and Stuttgart for a smile at the

88 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren end (oh not a real smile). He ‘wins’ again” (Harmon 202). Joe’s “victory” presumably refers to his success in stopping Voice for the evening. However, as the quotation marks around “wins” indicates, this victory is provisional, hol-low, and short-lived, since the signs in Eh Joe point toward his imminent death (see chapter 3). Joe’s smile comes right after Voice ceases to speak, but F’s smile comes considerably later and seems more a response to the boy’s message or its aftermath. In fact, the latter smile importantly follows the longest and loudest excerpt of music, issued as F hugs the cassette player affectionately to his chest. Perhaps then this smile indicates the consolation of music: in “her” absence, F has found a virtual replacement in Beethoven’s

“Ghost,” a perfectly beautiful and faithful love object to which he has now reattached his libido.

An alternative justification for the smile is that the viewer herself has been identified as the new object of attraction. The dynamics of televisual reception are deftly manipulated throughout Ghost Trio, establishing an objective view of the “familiar chamber” in the first half and a subjective view in the second half. In the closing moments of the teleplay, these two perspectives are brought into direct confrontation, as F stares directly into the camera Eye—
and effectively into the eyes of the home viewer as well. By contrast, when O
stares straight into the camera in Film, he is terrified to discover himself staring back, and he is defeated by the knowledge that he can never escape perception. Ghost Trio directly recalls this final “investment” scene from Film only to revise it for diametrically opposite effect. F never seeks to escape perception like E. On the contrary, he desperately wants to be perceived again by his long-lost lover. The boy’s message in “Re-action” had seemingly put an end to that desire. In the end, however, F looks up and smiles (with surprise?

joy? relief? gratitude? love?) to discover that there are eyes looking back at him—the camera’s Eye, and by extension the viewer’s eyes. By waiting and watching through the end of the teleplay, the spectator has kept the vigil with F, fulfilling the “tryst” after all. But if this final “reinvestment” shot represents something like “love at first sight” for F, it surely has a different effect for the viewer. The close-up of F’s haggard smile reveals, well, a face that only an other could love. Gazing out from his lonely room and into the viewer’s own

“familiar chamber,” F is in every respect too close for comfort. The camera recoils, as if in anticipation of the viewer’s revulsion, backing away and then fading to black. F retains his smile to the end, however, and, considered in isolation, it is difficult to refute Deleuze’s conclusion that Ghost Trio is well and truly finished on that note.

* * *

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 89

“And yet I hesitate,” remarks Hamm, “I hesitate to… to end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended and yet I hesitate to—[ he yawns]—to end” ( CDW 93). To appreciate the final dimension of Ghost Trio’s decomposition and recomposition processes, one must restore the teleplay to its original context in the Shades program for which it was designed. Formal arrangement, serial sequence, and visual and aural juxtaposition are obviously fundamental considerations within Ghost Trio, but Beckett also kept such considerations in mind himself when orchestrating Ghost Trio as the first “movement” in his

“tele-trio,” with …but the clouds… as second movement and Not I as third.

It has become accepted wisdom in Yeats studies that the poet did not write poems so much as books of poetry. That is, reading a single Yeats poem out of context provides an incomplete understanding. Full appreciation requires reading it in relation to those poems against which it is juxtaposed. For instance, the notorious ambivalence of “Easter, 1916” resonates differently in counterpoint with the far less equivocal “Sixteen Dead Men” that follows it in Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Likewise, Ghost Trio accrues new levels of meaning when judged not as a one-off, stand-alone piece, but rather as the first of three installments in Shades and as a sort of “prequel” to …but the clouds…. Viewed in this restored context, the conclusion of Ghost Trio loses its sense of closure. The ending of the first teleplay merely marks the transition from one dubious strategy for invoking the muse (via Beethoven’s music) to another dubious strategy (via Yeats’s literature). For that matter, the earlier play Not I also assumes a whole new set of connotations when transplanted to the end of Shades, much as Yeats’s “All Soul’s Night” conjures up very different ghosts as the epilogue to A Vision than as the closing lyric of “The Tower.”

Having dispensed with male figures entirely (the television adaptation dismisses the stage Auditor in favor of an exclusive close-up on Mouth), TV- Not I gives the female voice (Billie Whitelaw throughout) the final word—a dazzling pianissimo movement to contrast the largo movement of Ghost Trio and the legato of …but the clouds….

Intertextual echoes and metadramatic cross-references bind the Shades plays together in dialectic tension with one another, a tension sustained beyond the duration of any single work in the series. Beckett labored quietly behind the camera in both London and Stuttgart to cultivate these interconnections. In an unusually revealing letter to Dr. Reinhart Müller-Freienfels of SDR, he explained his vital need to secure the actor Klaus Herm for both Geistertrio and …nur noch Gewölk…: “Though not expressly stated,” Beckett confided, “the man in ‘…but the clouds…’ is the same as in Ghost Trio, in another (later) situation, and it would be a great pity if we could not have the same actor for the two parts.”10 Ah! This surprising revelation identifies

…but the clouds… as a direct sequel to Ghost Trio. Beckett’s only other

90 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren acknowledged sequel for television in Quadrat I + II was conceived on the spot in the studio (see chapter 6). However, he clearly put more forethought into this earlier sequel, as evidenced by the many fundamental ways in which

…but the clouds… reiterates Ghost Trio (a man waits in his “inner sanctum”

for his lost love to return) and revises it (in the sequel the man does all the talking, inspiration comes from poetry instead of music, images are connected through dissolves rather than cuts, etc.). Reading …but the clouds… as a sequel robs Ghost Trio of its finality. The male figure’s conclusion does not constitute a final defeat because we now know that he continues his struggle to reconnect with his absent lover. But neither can the ending be read as a conclusive success, for the male figure receives no consolation—from music, from formal manipulation, from the viewer’s gaze—sufficient to make him give up his pursuit of his “woman lost.”

In other words, Ghost Trio is a teleplay that does not exhaust all of its possibilities. At every turn where it seems to have hit a dead end—exhausted all the available permutations and patterns of perception—it finds new material and methods for “re-exhausting” itself. First V’s analytical pattern “defamiliarizes” Beckett’s “familiar chamber” and Beethoven’s “familiar chamber music.” Then F subversively re-imagines V’s default pattern from a new subjective perspective. Next the boy’s arrival upsets F’s redesigns, prompting him once again to improvise alternative methods for fulfilling his desires. Finally Beckett re-opens his own conclusion, divesting his own text of its potential closure by following Ghost Trio with a sequel that ruptures anew the relationships of subject and object, perceiver and perceived, desire and memory.

Ghost Trio is ultimately a teleplay that resists the ultimatum of definitive closure. Rather, it exploits all the tools of the televisual trade to dramatize the perceptual processes of decomposition and recomposition.

Notes

1. Beckett did make two notable gestures in the direction of television during his hiatus from hands-on production work in the medium. In 1969 he was approached by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne to do a TV adaptation of Krapp’s Last Tape. Though he did not participate personally in the filming, he did compile “Suggestions for T.V. Krapp” (see Zilliacus 203–6). The production aired on October 28, 1969, though neither Zilliacus nor I have been able to confirm whether or not Beckett’s suggestions were followed. Later, around 1972, he began work on an original television piece, “Film Video-Cassette projet” or “F1
et F2,” about a woman in winter clothing who watches a videotape of herself in summer clothing. This project was abandoned, but Beckett’s notes are preserved at Reading in the notebook titled, “Fragments Prose début 68” (RUL 2928).

Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio 91

2. For a complete list of Beckett’s productions, see Ackerley and Gontarski 143–44.

Add to this list of solo directing projects Beckett’s assistance on Roger Blin’s 1970

Godot at the Théâtre Récamier in Paris, Anthony Page’s 1971 Krapp and Not I at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and Donald McWhinnie’s Ghost Trio for BBC 2 in 1976 (broadcast in 1977).

3. Beckett would have known this painting well from his frequent visits to the Dublin gallery, where it hung in the Dargan Wing. A reproduction of the painting can be found in the exhibition catalogue, Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006), 19.

4. Beckett may also have had more fundamental problems with this film of Play, though he never formally expressed them. Given his successful experience adapting Comédie with Marin Karmitz in 1966 (see chapter 8), he was doubtlessly sensitive to the inadequacy of simply filming a stage-version of Play.

5. Beckett also directed German versions of Geistertrio ( Ghost Trio) and …nur noch Gewölk… ( …but the clouds…) for SDR. This program, titled Schatten ( Shades), was originally broadcast on 1 November 1977, accompanied by Billie Whitelaw’s English performance of Not I.

6. This quotation is so ubiquitous that attribution becomes slippery. To my knowledge, the first source to cite this anecdote is Enoch Brater, “The ‘I’ in Beckett’s Not I,” Twentieth Century Literature 20.3 (1974): 200. Tandy’s instructions on this point were doubtlessly communicated through her director Alan Schneider, to whom Beckett described Not I’s Voice in an October 16, 1972, letter: “I hear it breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic, panting along, without undue concern with intelligibility. Addressed less to the understanding than to the nerves of the audience which should in a sense share her bewilderment” (Harmon 283).

7. The music used in the BBC broadcast features Pinchas Zukerman on violin, Jacqueline du Pré on cello, and Daniel Barenboim on piano (BBC WAC

T51/350/1).

8. In an interview with Tristram Powell for Shades, Martin Esslin explained the significance of the nickname “The Ghost”: “this trio has always been called the Ghost Trio, and the reason for it apparently is Beethoven had been thinking of writing an opera on Macbeth and he used sketches for the theme for the three witches, hence ghost trio” (BBC WAC T51/350/1).

9. Ruby Cohn paid Beckett a visit in Berlin at the beginning of 1975, where he was rehearsing his Schiller-Theater production of Godot. She later recounted to Knowlson, “‘I remember once he had a huge sheet of music, and he was working something out, and I said ‘What are you working out?’ And he said: ‘Oh, just playing with an idea’” ( Damned 548). Knowlson is surely right in speculating that the idea Beckett was working out here was the genesis for Ghost Trio.

10. A copy of this letter, dated December 13, 1976, is in the “Lively Arts, Shades” file (T51/350/1) at the BBC Written Archives in Reading. Beckett did succeed in securing Herm for both roles. However, he was unable to secure the same actress for both female parts. Irmgard Först played V in Geistertrio, while Kornelia Boje played W in …nur noch Gewölk….

CHAPTER 5

Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in

…but the clouds…

As a young writer struggling to carve out a niche for himself, Samuel Beckett had a special loy to grind with William Butler Yeats. And like Christy Mahon, who dealt two mighty loy blows to Old Mahon in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Beckett would learn that patriarchs are not dispensed with so easily. Fathers stubbornly refuse to stay dead. They keep returning for more praise and more abuse and must be buried anew.

Young Beckett’s attitude toward Old Yeats is best captured in “Recent Irish Poetry,” a review published in the August 1934 issue of The Bookman. The 28-year-old Beckett literally “makes a name for himself ” in this essay, adopting the pseudonym “Andrew Belis.”1 Five years earlier, an even younger Beckett had warned, “The danger is in the neatness of identifications”

(“Dante” 19). But “Andrew Belis” promptly ignores this advice, beginning

“Recent Irish Poetry” with a neat identification: “I propose, as rough principle of individuation in this essay, the degree in which the younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object,” or the “breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing—rupture of the lines of communication” (70). With recognition of this rupture as his litmus test, Beckett divides contemporary Irish poets into two groups, “antiquarians and others, the former in the majority” (70). The dismissive term “antiquarians”

is applied to those writers who have not acknowledged the breakdown of subject, object, or both. Beckett condemns as “antiquarian” poets from the Celtic Revival, those who deliver “with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods” (70). He singles out for special scorn the most “altitudinous” of all the “antiquarians,” Nobel Laureate Yeats.

Though Yeats had abandoned Thoor Ballylee in 1929, he was still closely associated with the Anglo-Norman tower. Perched metaphorically atop the

94 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren battlements, he continued to survey the Irish landscape with a hawk’s eye and to preside over an unruly rabblement of Irish poets. His latest decrees had just been issued in the form of The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), confirming that his imagination remained as “altitudinous” as ever, though hardly complacent.

“‘Recent Irish Poetry’ leaves no turn unstoned,” as John Pilling pithily puts it in Beckett before Godot (122). Beckett’s sharpest stones are hurled at Yeats in his tower. He quotes from “Vacillation”—“What, be a singer born and lack a theme?” (73)—only to accuse “antiquarian” poetry of being without theme at its shallow heart’s core. “But the circumference is an iridescence of themes” according to Beckett, “segment after segment of cut-and-dried sanctity and loveliness” (71). Throughout “Recent Irish Poetry,” he attacks the “antiquarian” assumption “that the first condition of any poem is an accredited theme, and that in self-perception there is no theme” (71). It should come as no surprise that Beckett rejects outward-looking, “altitudinous” poetry in favor of inward-looking, excavatory art. He had begun grind-ing this loy three years earlier in Proust, where he posits, “The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy” (48). It may come as some surprise, however, that he comes to identify Yeats as the antithesis of such art.

Few artists have ever engaged in more sustained, probing, excavatory soul-searching than Yeats. His winding stair spiraled down as well as up. Only a sloppy or prejudiced reading of The Winding Stair and Other Poems could lead one to dismiss it as “cut-and-dried sanctity and loveliness.” True, it does contain passages like the one Beckett riffs on from “Coole and Ballylee, 1931”: We were the last romantics—chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness;

Whatever’s written in what poets name

The book of the people; whatever most can bless The mind of man or elevate a rhyme. (41–45)

It doesn’t get much more sanctimonious than that. Yet this volume also contains the Crazy Jane poems, where fading fleshpot Jane gets the better of the pious bishop by arguing,

“But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.” (15–18)

Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in ... but the clouds... 95

Perhaps Beckett would go farther to suggest that “nothing can be sole or whole” even after it has been rent. Still, Yeats’s sensibility is much closer to Beckett’s in a poem like “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” than “Recent Irish Poetry” is willing to admit. Finally, there is no hint of acknowledgment on the young critic’s part that the elder poet was at the height of his reflective powers as an elegist. In his superb book Yeats & the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime, Jahan Ramazani observes, “Yeats’s criticism of the dead is harsher than ever before in the elegy. […] Yeats heightens the competition usually concealed within the form, manifestly battering the dead while he woos them” (16). For a developing artist like Beckett, already preoccupied with death and decrepitude, already contemplating new methods of “mental thuggee” against the dead voices, Yeats’s quarrelsome and complicated late poetry might well have served, with some qualifications, as a generally sym-pathetic model.

Instead “Andrew Belis” disclaims any such influence, renouncing his share of the Yeatsian inheritance with a mocking gibe: “His bequest in ‘The Tower’

of his pride and faith to the ‘young upstanding men’ has something almost second-best bed, as though he knew that they would be embarrassed to find an application for those dispositions” (72). This statement tells us far less about Yeats than about Beckett, revealing among other things his class anxieties as a member of the increasingly marginalized Irish Protestants who had lost pride of place after independence. By 1934, the predominantly Catholic ethos of the Irish Free State was firmly entrenched. Under such circumstances, an Anglo-Irish Protestant’s bequest of his “pride and faith” may indeed have seemed “second-best bed,” an outdated gift for unpropitious times.

Yeats did have laurels worth bestowing, however, and the embarrassment described above may in part disguise a very real sense of envy. In his picaresque memoir Dead as Doornails, about the Dublin literati that Beckett left behind, Anthony Cronin provides deep insight into the lingering impact of Yeats on the next generation. With specific reference to the talented but troubled Patrick Kavanagh, Cronin recalls,
like many Irish poets [Kavanagh] had an idea knocking round in his head that there was a sort of arch-poet position which only one man could occupy, that being of course himself. To this shadowy laureateship […] all others were pre-tenders, and it was essential that they should be destroyed. There may be something ancestral about this Irish belief in a chimerical distinction, a ghostly crown of laurel which only one man can wear. […] [T]he dominance that Yeats exercised when Paddy and his contemporaries were growing up was real and must have lent substance to the illusion that there was still a post to be occupied. (87)

96 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren The shade-besotted Yeats seemed capable of haunting Irish poets even before his death, and his “ghostly crown of laurel” continued to encircle the generation of Cronin, Kavanagh, and Beckett for years to come.

In “Recent Irish Poetry” one senses that contemporary Irish poets must still fix their courses by the polestar of Yeats, either toward him or against him.

One also senses that Beckett, if not himself applying for Yeats’s still-occupied post, is at least trying to influence the hiring standards by which the position will eventually be filled. Reviews always invite the reviewer to measure one performance against others, but the jockeying for position in “Recent Irish Poetry” is unusually fierce. An air of competition pervades the piece, not only in Beckett’s petulant readings of Yeats, but also in the sibling rivalry that prompts him to damn all his contemporaries with faint praise, save for his closest friends.2 The review begins as if it will champion the young Irish poets against the old “antiquarians,” but the reviewer ultimately has spleen enough for them all. Tellingly, the only unqualified endorsements issued in the essay are for the painter Jack B. Yeats and the Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot, neither of whom were eligible applicants for the position of Irish Bard.

The ungenerous assessment of Yeats’s work in “Recent Irish Poetry” tells us much about its young author’s tenuous position on the margins of Dublin society and the literary establishment. Beckett’s position had changed radically by the time he next engaged critically with Yeats in a public forum.

“Andrew Belis” could scarcely have predicted in 1934 that, 35 years later, Samuel Beckett would be crowned with the Nobel laurels. When Beckett began work on a teleplay to complete Shades, he was a year older than the arch-antiquarian whom he lambasted in “Recent Irish Poetry.” By the autumn of 1976, the celebrated septuagenarian who conceived …but the clouds…

clearly had more in common with Yeats than with “Andrew Belis.” Old Beckett developed a far more nuanced appreciation of Old Yeats. He judged that “‘Goethe and Yeats were old men when they produced their best work,’”

and he believed “‘You have to bring Yeats’s ‘cold eye’ to bear on anything you write’” (Knowlson and Knowlson 252). In …but the clouds… Beckett brings his cold eye to bear on a far less “cut-and-dried” Yeats. Perhaps the most important lesson he had learned in the interim was that Yeats was not always an orthodox “Yeatsian” in the caricatured “antiquarian” sense of the term.

This awareness is evinced in the remembrance of Yeats past found in …but the clouds…. Several commentaries interpret the teleplay as Beckett’s deconstruction of Yeats. I share that opinion, but would add an additional wrinkle to the argument. I contend that the teleplay illustrates how Yeats already deconstructs himself. …but the clouds… does not merely reprise the younger Beckett’s conflict with Yeats. Rather than offering a rematch—“Beckett vs.

Yeats II”—this “telegy” offers a decomposition and recomposition of “The

Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in ... but the clouds... 97

Tower,” using Yeats’s earlier play At the Hawk’s Well as the loy for attacking the poet’s own position—“Yeats vs. Yeats.” As a more seasoned artist with a colder critical eye, Beckett had learned his Yeats well enough to turn the master against himself.

* * *

James Knowlson suggests that, “The idea [for …but the clouds…] did not come to him easily” ( Damned 559). Perhaps not, but it certainly came quickly. The first manuscript version, provisionally titled “Poetry only love,”

is dated October 21, 1976 (RUL 1553/1). Less than a month later he handed in the final draft to the BBC, and by December he was already in the studio to help record …but the clouds… with the same cast and crew from Ghost Trio. Considering the speed of composition, together with the fact that only a few minor revisions were made from first to last draft, it seems that Beckett had been considering a new response to Yeats for some time. Certainly once he hit upon “The Tower” as source text, the framework for …but the clouds…

fell quickly into place. As S.E. Gontarski observes, “In structure the teleplay runs almost parallel to that of Yeats’s poem, in which Yeats reviews images from his past work, both real people from the Tower neighborhood and his own creations” ( Intent 126). Of course, Beckett also reviews images from his own past work, most notably Ghost Trio, the immediate predecessor and

“prequel” to …but the clouds… (see chapter 4). Yeats provides the content and structure for Beckett’s third teleplay, while Ghost Trio provides the model for subversive re-imagination of a familiar source text.

…but the clouds… features yet another male figure (M), but it dispenses with all other visible remnants of the “familiar chamber.” All that remains is the bowed back of M, in faint spotlight, draped in grey robe and skullcap. M
per se never rises from his crouched position throughout the teleplay.

However, we also have access to his memories, shot on a separate set, and there we can see his former self (M1) return home, “having walked the roads since break of day,” and retire in night gear to his “little sanctum” ( CDW

419). While M exists in visibly reduced circumstances, he has found his voice in …but the clouds…. He narrates his own entrances and exits on the plane of memory, as well as recalling the treasured appearances of the indispensable “she.” Whereas the lost lover in Ghost Trio made her presence (and absence) felt aurally, in …but the clouds… she assumes visual form as a woman’s face (W). M recalls several instances in which she appeared to him, sometimes lingering for a few moments, and occasionally mouthing out a few inaudible words. M must ventriloquize for W, because she never speaks for herself or looks directly at him, despite his pleas. Therefore, the final words of

…but the clouds… are spoken not in her longed-for voice but in his: “‘ …but

98 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren the clouds… of the sky… when the horizon fades… or a bird’s sleepy cry…

among the deepening shades…’” ( CDW 422).3 These are the closing lines of

“The Tower,” lines so memorable for Beckett that he echoed them in the titles of both …but the clouds… and Shades.

Beckett’s challenge in production was to make his echoes recognizable while at the same time distorting and muting them. This delicate balance is more immediately apparent in relation to Ghost Trio, so that intertextual tension is worth exploring before moving on to the Yeatsian echoes. As Beckett’s letter to Dr. Müller-Freienfels stressed, “the man in ‘…but the clouds…’ is the same as in Ghost Trio, in another (later) situation.” Nevertheless, his notes to Tristram Powell at the BBC cautioned, “Identity with figure of G.T.

not to be stressed” (BBC WAC TS51/350/1). The trick then was to suggest an affinity with the previous teleplay without simply repeating it in an obvious or redundant way. Fortunately, Beckett had already devised an excellent model for just such critical engagement in Ghost Trio. After all, F does not merely repeat V’s inherited patterns in the “Re-action” section, any more than Beckett provides a da capo restatement of Beethoven. Rather, the familiar is defamiliarized through imaginative revision. Likewise, …but the clouds… echoes a number of motifs established in Ghost Trio, but the “sequel”

also introduces some significant variations and innovations.

Both teleplays are slow paced, dimly lit, and obsessed with the revolving juxtaposition of monochromatic screen images. Both feature lonely men who crouch in their rooms, longing for some kind of reunion with their absent lovers. In each case, the woman in question is probably already dead. …but the clouds… is explicit on this point, referring to W’s “unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me” ( CDW 420). Despite the seemingly insuperable barrier of death, both protagonists manage to “channel” their lost lovers—F through Beethoven’s music, M through Yeatsian visions—though neither succeeds in recovering or controlling the absent other as fully as he desires. Finally, all of the Shades teleplays, and indeed much of late Beckett, are bound by one common phenomenological link: Billie Whitelaw. Ronald Pickup played both male parts in Shades, as did Klaus Herm in Schatten, but Whitelaw is the phenomenological glue that holds the trilogy together. She appears in all three Shades plays, and at Beckett’s request her English performance was rebroadcast by SDR to conclude the Schatten trilogy.4 Beckett called her televisual performance as Mouth “‘Miraculous’” (Whitelaw 132), and he designed Ghost Trio and …but the clouds… with the foreknowledge that they should complement the TV- Not I. Her measured voice calmly introduces the trilogy in Ghost Trio, her pallid face and blind eyes glimmer through the gloomy sequel in …but the clouds…, and her frantic logorrhea shatters all tranquility in the final installment, Not I. Bert O. States has

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suggested, “One way of approaching the phenomenology of the actor is to consider him as a kind of storyteller whose specialty is that he is the story he is telling” (22). Nowhere is such a phenomenology of the actress better illustrated than in Billie Whitelaw, who perfectly realizes on stage and screen the very works she inspired. Enoch Brater rightly observes that, “on television it was Whitelaw who made Beckett look and sound like ‘Beckett’” (“Billie”

194). In this sense she was at least as important to Beckett as Maud Gonne was for Yeats. Gonne certainly inspired more poems than Whitelaw did plays.

But only once, in Cathleen ni Houlihan, did Yeats’s muse go on to offer the definitive performance of a character she inspired; Beckett’s muse pulled off this feat over and over again.

For all their commonalities, Ghost Trio and …but the clouds… approach their shared scenarios in markedly different ways. The first notable departure in …but the clouds… is its redistribution of speaking parts, making the man the vocal agent and the woman the mute figure, and thus reversing the televisual paradigm established in Eh Joe and continued in Ghost Trio. With M as the lone speaker, he assumes many of the “master of ceremony” functions previously performed by V. He begins, “When I thought of her it was always night. I came in”—and no sooner does M say it than the camera makes it so, dissolving to the image of M1 arriving on set in his hat and greatcoat. M is dissatisfied with this introduction, however, and decides to begin again: “No, that is not right. When she appeared it was always night.” Satisfied with this new rendering, he begins M1’s actions over again ( CDW 419). V had begun by conceding control to the home viewer, only to assert her own authority through rigorous control of our perception. M takes the opposite tack, beginning with an assertion of agency (“When I thought of her”), followed immediately by a deferral of agency (“When she appeared”). He prefers to think of her as the one in control of these ghostly visitations, not him, anticipating Mouth’s denials (“… what?… who?… no!… she!…”) in the Shades finale ( CDW 377). But in correcting his slip he has already given the game away.

From the very beginning, F “calls the shots” and directs the action just as rigorously as V did at the beginning of Ghost Trio. First he establishes a set pattern—M1 arrives home, changes into his night attire, then retreats to his

“little sanctum”—and repeats that pattern to make sure he has it right (cf.

Ghost Trio’s “Pre-action”). Then he thinks he sees “her,” just as F thinks he hears “her,” initiating the dramatic “Action.” M ultimately complicates the pattern by trying to coax W into speech. This effort fails, but it does lead to a variation in the action (i.e. “Re-action”) when M fills in the missing lines from the end of “The Tower.”

Despite the role reversals, the controlling patterns in …but the clouds…

continue to bear striking affinity with those of Ghost Trio. The sequel avoids

100 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren formulaic imitation, however, with two fundamental deviations: the introduction of separate sets, and the adoption of dissolve edits between them.

Though M1 is never referred to as such verbally, the script is careful to distinguish between the old Man (M) and his memories of a younger self (M1), a self who could still walk the roads and have visions of “her.” M1 is visually distinct from M because he is shot on a separate set. Though M’s existence may at first seem gravely reduced from that of F, he does enjoy the advantage of speech and, perhaps more importantly, he has the ability to leave his confinement. M has the power to escape, not into the outer world, but into memory. He consciously leaves the present and retreats to the entirely separate plane of the past. Henri Bergson describes this leap into the past as the necessary precondition for all acts of memory. In an important passage from Matter and Memory, Bergson describes this process in language particularly apropos to …but the clouds…:

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past—a work of adjustment, something like the focus-ing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the proper attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on colour, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, when once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know it for a memory. (171; emphasis added) Gilles Deleuze makes much of this passage in Bergsonism, observing, “In the same way that we do not perceive things in ourselves, but at the place where they are, we only grasp the past at the place where it is in itself, and not in ourselves, in our present” (56). Deleuze describes this detachment from the present into the past as a “leap into ontology” (57). Beckett provides a land-ing pad for just such a leap in …but the clouds…. M controls his present perception by controlling the selection process of memory. In order to do so, he does not passively wait for the past to return to him; rather, he actively returns to the past, selecting, condensing, and redirecting his actions on the stage of memory. Furthermore, viewed anew from this Bergsonian vantage point, it is M who pays W the spectral visit, not the other way around. Only after he replaces himself in the past, among his memory-images, can M hope for W to come into view “like a condensing cloud.” Of course, finding the

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address of a memory and knocking on the door of perception are still no guarantees of admittance.

Beckett’s key technical innovation in …but the clouds… is his adoption of dissolve edits to connect fixed shots. By my count, Ghost Trio contains a total of 28 cuts and 14 camera moves. Compare that with …but the clouds…, which contains exactly zero cuts and zero camera moves. Each of the three characters occupies a distinct plane in time and space, and each is shot on that plane from precisely the same distance and angle every time. M never moves from his crouched position, and W’s face remains motionless save for the occasional inaudible murmur. M1 does move across the length and breadth of his set, using his trademark marionette movements from Ghost Trio, but the camera does not move with him, remaining fixed throughout.

Yet …but the clouds… nevertheless communicates a sense of regular movement through its editing style. The teleplay navigates between the different characters in their separate planes by dissolving back and forth. Beckett had never before experimented with this editing technique, but it ideally suited his purposes in …but the clouds…. In a dissolve, one shot slowly dematerializes on screen as the next shot simultaneously takes shape. Bergson’s retrieval process for memory-images involves detaching oneself from the past, but then it also requires reattaching oneself to the present as the virtual is made actual. The dissolves between M, M1, and W dramatize the disintegration/reintegration process right before the spectator’s eyes. This editing method also emphasizes the intimate interconnectedness of these characters; they remain distinct, and yet they constantly dissolve into and resolve out of one another. Krapp’s Last Tape used the tape player as a memory machine, conjuring up echoes of Krapp’s past to provide dramatic conflict with Krapp present. …but the clouds… accomplishes an analogous feat using the memory machinery of television. The teleplay visibly divides the self into past and present selves then seamlessly reconnects them on screen, leaping back and forth across time, space, and ontology.

Dramatic friction results when those retrieved memory-images from the past fail to meet the needs of the present. Memory is the central preoccupation of Beckett’s teleplays, as well as their primary mode of expression. This is not to say, however, that these works monumentalize the power of memory or its corollary, imagination. Teleplays like …but the clouds… dramatize the will to memory and imagination, not because of their powers, but despite their inadequacies. As Arthur Schopenhauer concedes in his “Essay on Spirit Seeing,” “Pictures of the imagination are feeble, colourless, incomplete, one-sided, and so fleeting that we are barely able to retain for more than a few seconds the picture of one who is absent” (230). The same can be said for the memory-images M retrieves, as well as for the fleeting pictures that drift on

102 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren and off the television screen. Nonetheless, he persists in the habit of seeking these images, and we persist in the habit of watching him and them.

Like Ghost Trio, …but the clouds… is deeply informed by Bergson’s theories of habit as the most familiar, but most debased, form of memory. M’s repeatedly unsuccessful conjurations of W represent the habitual shortcomings of memory. In Ghost Trio F seemingly still awaits an actual tryst with his absent lover. By the time F devolves into M, however, he knows such hope is futile. Now his hopes hinge upon recalling his lost lover’s memory-image perfectly to mind, remembering her every look, every gesture, every line of poetry that she quoted. According to Matter and Memory, memory is indeed capable of providing the precise details M seeks. Bergson distinguishes between two types of memory:

The first records, in the form of memory-images, all the events of our daily life as they occur in time; it neglects no detail; it leaves to each fact, each gesture, its place and date. […] By this memory is made possible the intelligent, or rather intellectual, recognition of a perception already experienced; in it we take refuge every time that, in the search for a particular image, we remount the slope of the past. (92)

M takes refuge in the enduring hope that he can retrieve a perfect memory-image of W. This is what motivates him, having walked the roads by day, to retreat to his “little sanctum” by night and remount the Sisyphean slopes of the past. Unfortunately, M seems instead to have mastered the second type of memory, which Bergson describes as “a series of mechanisms wound up and ready.” This second-order memory “has retained from the past only the intelligently coördinated movements that represent the accumulated efforts of the past; and it recovers those past efforts, not in the memory-images that recall them, but in the definite order and systematic character with which the actual movements take place” (92–93; emphasis added). In other words, M has memorized the map for retrieving W, but in the process he has lost the key by which he might rescue (or re-incarcerate) her image.

Consider for example M’s alleged difficulties in coaxing W to appear.

“Then crouching there, in my little sanctum, in the dark, where none could see me,” he recalls, “I began to beg, of her, to appear, to me. Such had long been my use and wont. No sound, a begging of the mind, to her, to appear, to me”

( CDW 420). On rare occasions, so we are told, his “begging of the mind”

would be rewarded. He delineates three different cases in which she appeared to him: 1) she appeared and then instantly disappeared; 2) she appeared and lingered (for five seconds); 3) she appeared and after awhile inaudibly mut-tered words from Yeats’s “The Tower.” But he also identifies a fourth case, “by

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far the commonest, in the proportion say of nine hundred and ninety-nine to one, or nine hundred ninety-eight to two, when I begged in vain, deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and ceased” ( CDW 421)—that is, when she ignored his begging and never appeared to him at all. So we are led to believe that, in the vast majority of cases, M was unable to retrieve even a glimpse of W.

The evidence of our eyes, however, tells us something quite different.

Over the span of a teleplay that lasts less than twenty minutes, we see W
summoned to screen eight times, arriving each time on cue as dictated by M’s precise choreography. Maybe the young Man (M1) was largely inept at retrieving an image of his lost Woman’s face (W), but the old Man (M) has got the routine down pat. He has in this one limited sense mastered memory.

He has learned to select key episodes, condense salient images, and contract the long periods of futile waiting into a routine that is punctual, predictable, and largely controllable. But the dependability of the retrieval routine comes at the expense of the image he retrieves, which is deaf, dumb, and blind—a travesty of the memory he is trying to recover. M is a victim of his own good memory. He has won his lost Woman through hard-earned habit, only to lose everything he once loved about her. Beckett describes just such a man in Proust: “The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything. His memory is uniform, a creature of routine, at once a condition and function of his impeccable habit, an instrument of reference instead of an instrument of discovery” (17).

Lydia Rainford has also commented upon M’s Bergsonian/Proustian bind, trapped between dependable habit and undependable epiphany. She observes, The deliberate, “knowing” memory persistently fails to recall what it seeks, and the image only comes as an involuntary or spontaneous memory, full of affect but without comprehension or true presence. “‘M’s” predicament is much like the one Beckett describes in Proust, where “Habit” destroys the “miraculous relief and clarity” of spontaneously remembered visions even as they are recalled, so that “no effort of deliberate rememoration can impart or restore”

them. Past and present, voluntary and involuntary memories are unable to coincide productively. (185)

As the saying goes, love can either burn or endure, but it cannot do both.

Apparently the same policy applies to memory; it can either be miraculous or it can be dependable, but it cannot be both. M longs to remember W with all the clarity and vitality of a Proustian “involuntary memory,” but this is not how he remembers her. Instead he has learned to voluntarily retrieve her through mechanical reproduction, through intellectual routine—through

104 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren habit. Habit allows him to summon her at will, but only in the degraded form of muted echoes and faint traces. Though inadequate as consolation, the mechanical process of habit routinely substitutes for the genuine experience of spontaneous revelation. Again, Bergson anticipates this process exactly in Matter and Memory. He might as well be describing the premise of

…but the clouds… when he observes,
the images stored up in the spontaneous memory have yet another use. No doubt they are dream-images; no doubt they usually appear and disappear independently of our will; this is why, when we really wish to know a thing, we are obliged to learn it by heart, that is to say, to substitute for the spontaneous image a motor mechanism which can serve in its stead. But there is a certain sui generis which permits us to retain the image itself, for a limited time, within the field of our consciousness; and thanks to this faculty, we have no need to await at the hands of chance the accidental repetition of the same situations, in order to organize into a habit concomitant movements; we make use of the fugitive image to construct a stable mechanism which takes its place. (98; emphasis added) M contends that he is utterly at W’s mercy, dependent on her whims, powerless to call up her image. But this is not what we witness. We see him call up her “fugitive image” at will because he has learned how “to construct a stable mechanism which takes its place.” This “learnt recollection” provides little solace, however, because it is such a poor substitute for the “spontaneous recollection” he seeks. In A Beckett Canon Ruby Cohn refers to …but the clouds… as “an unintentionally Bergsonian comedy” (343). She apparently has in mind Bergson’s more famous theories on duration, and she is right, for instance, that M1’s costume changes are impossibly fast without appeal to a Bergsonian contraction in time. I would argue, however, that Bergson’s theories on memory play too essential a role in …but the clouds… to have been unintentional, and that Beckett uses those theories to make serious observa-tions about the flawed nature of memory.

* * *

Upon this theoretical foundation based in Bergson, Beckett erects a structure inspired by Yeats. For Yeats, the issue of memory was inseparable from the issue of imagination, that alchemical process whereby the artistic mind strives to transform individual experience into something grander, communal, and longer-lasting—“a superhuman / Mirror-resembling dream” (164–65) as Yeats at his most “altitudinous” puts it in “The Tower.” Beckett obviously rated the powers of memory and imagination much lower, as attested by the puny results M receives from his prostrate “begging of the mind.” Yet, different as their sensibilities could be, Beckett came to admire and learn from

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Yeats’s poetry and plays, gradually profiting by the inheritance he renounced in his youth. The works that seem to have exerted the greatest pull were those about dying and death. Yeats returned to the elegy form throughout his career, subversively adapting the tradition for distinctly countertraditional ends, just as Beckett does in his “telegies.”

Many of Yeats’s early elegies work from the classic scenario of a man mourning the loss of his lover. This conservative conceit does not readily lend itself to transgressive treatment. As Jahan Ramazani points out, Earlier in the century, Poe had concluded that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” Much andro-centric love poetry since Petrarch and Dante presupposes this eerie view. Thus, late nineteenth-century laments for dead women belong to and intensify tendencies within older male traditions that define “woman” as the silent, absent referent. (18)

At first blush Yeats certainly seems to indulge the more misogynistic tendencies of the tradition in an early elegy like “He wishes his Beloved were Dead”: Were you but lying cold and dead,

And lights were paling out of the West,

You would come hither, and bend your head,

And I would lay my head on your breast;

And you would murmur tender words,

Forgiving me, because you were dead:

Nor would you rise and hasten away,

Though you have the will of the wild birds,

But know your hair was bound and wound

About the stars and moon and sun:

O would, beloved, that you lay

Under the dock-leaves in the ground,

While lights were paling one by one. (1–13)

There is no denying that, insofar as this poem valorizes the death of a beautiful woman and draws artistic inspiration from it, “He wishes his Beloved were Dead” shares the typical misogynistic biases of the elegiac tradition.

What partially ameliorates this charge is the poet’s “anti-elegiac” forthright-ness about his power struggle with the dead. The opening line, “Were you but cold and dead,” expresses a disturbing death-wish, but it also reveals that the elegy’s subject is not actually dead yet; the poet merely wishes she were dead.

Why? The typical motive would be punishment for some transgression, but for Yeats’s speaker the primary motive is control. If she were dead, “You

106 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren would come hither, and bend your head, / And I would lay my head on your breast; / And you would murmur tender words, / Forgiving me, because you were dead” (3–6). Apparently such a tender moment of communion is imaginable only in the afterlife, implying that in this life compassion is being mutually withheld. The poet reveals still more of his present anxieties when he adds, “Nor would you rise and hasten away, / Though you have the will of the wild birds” (7–8). Again, the aggravating factor is the uncontrollable nature of the beloved. Only when she is dead will the poet stand a chance of taming the wild spirit that flies past his nets in this life. This poem essentially lays bare the modus operandi of the elegy form: the poet exploits the death of the loved one to exert a greater degree of control in poetry than he was ever able to exert in reality.5 Furthermore, as Ramazani observes, “the poem shows us that it must ‘kill’ the beloved as natural image in order to transfigure her into a divine principle of the imagination” (23). That is, if the beloved will not oblige the poet with her actual death, then he must imaginatively kill her as a prerequisite for imaginatively resurrecting her in idealized (read “controllable”) form.

Beckett likewise foregrounds the issue of control in his “telegies.” The dramatic conflict in Ghost Trio is generated by competition between the living and the dead for control over the patterns of perception. V begins with a competitive advantage, but over the course of the teleplay she loses control to F. When we next encounter the man “in another (later) situation,” he exerts an even greater degree of control over perception. M has mastered the mechanical process of memory, allowing him to conjure on cue images of his younger self and of his dead lover. However, he still struggles to control W’s unruly “fugitive image.” He can now call her dead face to mind at will, if only fleetingly, but he cannot make her look at him or speak. Like the poet in “He wishes his Beloved were Dead,” M longs for her to “murmur tender words,”

but instead she defies him with her silence, forcing him to voice the words she refuses to say aloud. To add further insult, the only words she ever mouths out are those of another man, W.B. Yeats (old rivalries die hard!). Gontarski first noted a holograph worksheet for …but the clouds… on which “Beckett entertained the possibility of calling the work ‘Poetry only love.’ His note [on the worksheet] began, ‘Poetry was her only love,’ abbreviated to ‘W: Poetry (was my) only love’ immediately below” ( Intent 125). If poetry was her only love in life, then evidently M had to compete for W’s attention and affection even before her death. When he refers to “those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me” ( CDW 420), we may well infer that her disinterest with M in death only continues a pattern begun in life. She was too busy crouched over her Yeats to look at him, much as he was too busy crouched over his Beethoven to listen to her. First F then M long for some kind of

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idyllic reunion with the “woman lost,” despite all evidence that the relationship was far from ideal to begin with. By foregrounding competition with the dead and exposing the sham claims of perfect reciprocity as mere “wishful etiology” (Spargo 130), both Yeats’s “anti-elegies” and Beckett’s “telegies” push against the prevailing currents of elegiac tradition.

In Yeats’s late modern elegies he becomes acutely self-reflective about his relationship with the dead, now that he knows he will soon be joining them.

As Beckett himself aged and saw many of his friends die, he came to appreciate these poems more and more. Anne Atik recalls many evenings spent at home with her husband Avigdor Arikha and their friend Beckett, playing music and reciting poetry for one another. For all his artistic emphasis upon the failures of memory, Beckett himself had an amazing capacity for visual and verbal recall. He could quote long passages from memory, and Yeats was one of his favorites. According to Atik’s How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett, his most frequent and evocative recitations were from “The Tower.”

For instance, she remembers Beckett’s moving recitation of the poem’s final stanza after the funeral of his old friend Con Leventhal. She concludes, “Each time he came back to Yeats’s last poems, and each time he would urge me to read them again. A standard of comparison” (Atik 68–69).

Beckett had already composed one work strongly reflective of “The Tower”

before …but the clouds…. In his radio play Words and Music, Beckett directly addresses the central question posed in “The Tower”: “Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or a woman lost?” (113–14). For Yeats as well as for Beckett, the answer is obviously the woman lost. The character Croak from Words and Music enlists the help of both Words (a.k.a. “Joe”) and Music (a.k.a. “Bob”) to conjure up from his memory a woman lost (“Lily”).

As so often in both Yeats and Beckett, the image summoned of the woman takes the form of a haunting face.6 Croak is already distracted by this image when he enters the play. He explains, “I am late, forgive. [ Pause.] The face.

[ Pause.] On the stairs” ( CDW 287). If the reference to the winding stair were not sufficiently suggestive, then Croak soon makes the Yeatsian allusion even more explicit: “In the tower. [ Pause.] The face. [ Long pause.] Theme tonight.

… [ Pause.] Theme tonight … love” ( CDW 288). Even the play’s title is probably taken from Yeats, specifically his Crazy Jane sequence “Words for Music Perhaps” from The Winding Stair and Other Poems. At Croak’s behest, Words and Music collaborate to produce a song, less devoted to the theme of love than to the themes of old age and imagination:

Age is when to a man

Huddled o’er the ingle

Shivering for the hag

To put the pan in the bed

108 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren And bring the toddy

She comes in the ashes

Who loved could not be won

Or won not loved

Or some other trouble

Comes in the ashes

Like in that old light

The face in the ashes

That old starlight

On the earth again. ( CDW 291)

Since this is a radio play, the listener can only imagine the face along with Croak. However, the description of a huddled old man who envisions a “face in the ashes,” the face of a woman “Who loved could not be won / Or won not loved,” anticipates Beckett’s future teleplay as much as it remembers Yeats’s past poetry.

“The Tower” was so familiar to Beckett by the time he conceived …but the clouds… that he overestimated its familiarity with viewers. In what may be his only revision to a play prompted as a concession to intelligibility, Beckett expanded the quotation at the end of …nur noch Gewölk… to include the entire final stanza of the poem. In a letter to producer Tristram Powell written three months after the original broadcast of Shades, he explained his decision and suggested that future broadcasts of the BBC trilogy follow suit: Since BBC Shades I hear from all sides that …but the clouds… would be more comprehensible if, instead of the last 4 lines only of The Tower, the whole final section were quoted, beginning ‘Now shall I make my soul,’ I think 15 lines in all. We have made this change in Stuttgart. […] It appears few listeners to BBC production identified the quotation. Even Harold Pinter was at a loss.

(BBC WAC TS51/350/1)

So Beckett conceded the point, but only with trepidation, adding, “I agree the point is more clearly made if the text is given in full, but feel it is perhaps a mistake from the purely formal point of view.” Beckett’s hesitation in making this change (still unrecognized in any published script) reflects his reluctance to compromise the fragmentation and disorientation of the original ending. If even Harold Pinter was confused, then all the better; so should he have been, so should we all, just like M himself, in the face of this unfathomable phantom. The fact that Beckett was willing to sacrifice this formally calculated confusion shows just how important it was for him to make his point relatively clear with regard to Yeats. In order to understand that point, one must first return for a closer inspection of “The Tower.”

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* * *

Despite its “altitudinous” location, “The Tower” begins in the depths of depression. In the first of the poem’s three sections (yet another trio), the poet is burdened by the bodily ailments of old age. But he is even more heart-sick over the conventional wisdom that would condemn him in old age to irrelevancy:

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail? (1–4)

Yeats’s chief enemy is not old age but the caricature of “antiquarianism,” the ageist prejudice which assumes that the imagination is “no country for old men” (“Sailing to Byzantium” 1). Yeats counters that his aged mind has never been more conducive to flights of fancy:

Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible— (5–8)

And yet, public expectation would consign him to a different task, the saga-cious contemplation of philosophical thoughts, rather than the imaginative creation of poetry:

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel. (1–16)

The poet chafes against the leash of that old cliché “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Yeats still feels like a pup at heart, but the world insists upon bringing him to heel, tying all its age restrictions to his tail, and dismissing him, like “Andrew Belis” will do, as a tame old cur.

Despite the clangor of battered kettles that would chase him away, Yeats is not ready to convert his residence into a retirement home or a prison-tower.

Having laid out the problem in the “pre-action” section, the second section

110 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren takes action to address this problem. The poet paces his battlements and marshals his defenses:

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all. (20–24) As if to confirm the continuing power of his imagination, he conjures up a large cast of shades, some former inhabitants of the Ballylee region, others creatures from his own literary past. He asks them all this question: Did all old men and women, rich and poor,

Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

Whether in public or in secret rage

As I do now against old age? (97–100)

Like W in …but the clouds…, Yeats’s shades decline to speak when spoken to.

Nevertheless, their answer is clear enough: “But I have found an answer in those eyes / That are impatient to be gone” (101–2). Of course they all raged against the dying of their respective lights, and of course it did no good. The poet then detains one of his own creations, Red Hanrahan, to confirm what he already knows: “Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?” (113–14). Again the answer is unspoken, but it is as obvious as the identity of the lost woman that forever dwells in Yeats’s imagination, the un-won Maud Gonne. Stirred with regret by her memory, he concludes the second section on a somber note:

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out. (115–20) If rages against old age are unavoidable, and if the wages of the imagination are so painful, one wonders why Yeats would resist the compulsion to lay down his imaginative burden and rest in peace.

The answer comes in the reactionary final section, where Yeats rallies in defense of the imagination. In the third section he shuts out all external advis-ers, descends into the inner sanctum of his soul, and there he finds the consolation he had been searching for all along. Ignoring the public’s eulogies for his fading creativity, and ignoring the dispiriting spirits he summons from the

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past, he looks forward to his own death in a kind of “self-elegy.” Yeats is not content to leave his obituary for others to write. In “He wishes his Beloved were Dead,” he imagines his lover’s death, but in “The Tower” he imagines his own. As Ramazani puts it, “Now the imagination dwells the most not upon a woman lost but on a self lost—a self whose imagination dwelled the most upon a woman lost” (144). Yeats still has plenty of fire left in that imagination, however, and it burns brightest when turned inward.

He finds much to celebrate in the life he has led, and much to pass on to the future. Though his rivals considered hubris to be his greatest liability, Yeats lists pride as the first asset in his will. He takes particular pride in his Anglo-Irish stock:

The pride of people that were

Bound neither to Cause nor to State,

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse— (128–33)

He knows as he is fading into oblivion that a whole way of life is fading with him. There was little room in the ethos of the Irish Free State for the Protestant Ascendency or the aristocratic “big house” culture that had nurtured Yeats’s genius at Coole Park. However, rather than humbly accepting this consignment to the ashbin of Irish history, he lords it over the vanquished and the victorious alike. He also trumpets his faith, though notably not a Protestant one. Instead he triumphantly affirms, And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus’ thought

And cry in Plato’s teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul,

Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise,

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise. (145–56)

So much for the limitations of the imagination! According to Yeats, the hege-mony of the mind encompasses all life and death. He revises and extends Berkeley’s dictum, declaring that “being is being imagined,” in both this life and the next. The living perceive this world into being, and the dead dream

112 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren up “Translunar Paradise,” thus creating the afterlife as well. Having begun the poem with his imaginative capacity under siege, Yeats concludes with an allout counterattack, seizing no less than everything—life, death, and the afterlife—under the banner of Imagination.

Yeats’s pride and faith in the immortal powers allow him to deliver a death-blow to Death at the end of the poem. The final stanza constitutes his victory pronouncement:

Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird’s sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades. (181–95)

The poet finally finds compensation for all the indignities of old age—decay, delirium, decrepitude, and death—in the transcendent power of the imagination. By the end he can in effect declare “Death be not proud,” for the mind is prouder and stronger and will win out. As Yeats watches the sun set on the horizon and hears the last bird’s cry, he can wind back down the stairs of his tower in peace, consoled by the knowledge that his life has not been spent in vain and that his death still holds much in store. Yeats’s “Monuments of unageing intellect” (“Sailing to Byzantium” 8) have achieved his immortality in this world, and his dreams of a “Translunar Paradise” will constitute the life to come. Old age and death are depicted here as mere ephemera. Like clouds and sleep, old age too shall pass; and like the setting sun and the deepening shades, the dead shall rise again.

* * *

None of Yeats’s platitudes in the final section of “The Tower” are accepted by Beckett in …but the clouds…. By restoring the entire final stanza to …nur noch Gewölk… , Beckett clarifies the brilliance of Yeats’s vision only to throw his own darker sensibility into greater relief. The Stuttgart version places the camera on M during the final recitation, another variation from the London

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and published versions that place the camera on W. By dissociating the full final stanza from W and associating it instead with M, the viewer might be tempted to read M as a spokesman for Yeats himself, intoning the Master’s exact words of celebration, consolation, and redemption. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. If M is a stand-in for Yeats, then he stands (or rather crouches) as a twisted parody. M’s experience of decrepitude and death is completely different from that described by the lines he quotes. He has shared all the indignities catalogued by Yeats. However, M cannot muster up the resilience to transcend these hardships. Like Yeats, he has spent his life struggling to recapture fugitive images from the past and transform them into something lasting. But by the end he can make no “altitudinous” boasts of success. On the contrary, his constant remounting of the past’s Sisyphean slopes has brought him low. M’s relationship to the past is much closer to the one described by Beckett in Proust:

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or has been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. (2–3) M finds no basis for sharing Yeats’s professed faith in the redemptive powers of the mind. Beckett’s protagonist can only hold onto memory-images of his

“woman lost” for seconds at a time, and he can never coax a kind word or glance from her. For Yeats in “The Tower,” suffering is fleeting because imagination redeems and rejuvenates; for M in …but the clouds…, suffering is ceaseless because memory wearies and deforms. As Enoch Brater puts it, “For Beckett’s bums there will be no soaring towers and no Byzantium, only a fading horizon of memory, embers in ‘the deepening shades’” (“Intertextuality” 36).

…but the clouds… represents more than a simple rebuttal to Yeats’s great self-elegy, however. Beckett troubles the self-satisfied older Yeats by invoking a younger Yeats less palliated by the bromides of the imagination. The teleplay’s content, structure, and performance are visibly influenced by Yeats’s play At the Hawk’s Well, a work that Beckett knew intimately. He first acknowledged his admiration for this play twenty years before …but the clouds… in a cente-nary program for George Bernard Shaw: “‘I wouldn’t suggest that G.B.S. is not a great playwright, whatever that is when it’s at home. What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk’s Well [Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well], or the Saints’ [Synge’s The Well of the Saints], or a whiff of Juno [O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock], to go no further.’”7 He also has Winnie

114 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren quote the first line of the play in Happy Days. Her thoughts leading up to the quotation are worth remembering as well:

[ Pause. With a sigh. ] One loses one’s classics. [ Pause. ] Oh not all. [ Pause. ] A part.

[ Pause. ] A part remains. [ Pause. ] That is what I find so wonderful, a part remains, of one’s classics, to help one through the day. [ Pause. ] Oh yes, many mercies, many mercies. [ Pause. ] And now? [ Pause. ] And now, Willie? [ Long pause. ] I call to the eye of the mind. … ( CDW 164) Clearly a large part of Willie Yeats’s classics remained with Beckett, and At the Hawk’s Well was prominent among the remnants. As late as October 10, 1974, Anne Atik records in her journal that Beckett recited the entire first stanza of the play to her from memory. When he recalls Yeats to the mind’s eye soon thereafter in …but the clouds…, he summons not only “The Tower”

but also At the Hawk’s Well.

The play was first performed before a private audience in April 1916 (the same month as the Rising), and it was first published the following year with the subtitle, Waters of Immortality.8 As the subtitle suggests, the theme of the play, like that of “The Tower” and …but the clouds…, is the pursuit of something that will withstand the ravages of time. The play is essentially a “familiar chamber piece,” another trio, introduced and concluded by a chorus of Three Musicians, and dramatizing the tension between three characters: an Old Man, a Young Man (Cuchulain), and a mysterious woman who never speaks, the Guardian of the Well. From the very beginning, the Three Musicians establish the action to follow as a conjuration of the mind: I call to the eye of the mind

A well long choked up and dry

And boughs long stripped by the wind,

And I call to the mind’s eye

Pallor of an ivory face,

Its lofty dissolute air,

A man climbing up to a place

The salt sea wind has swept bare. (1–8)9

While these lines evoke natural imagery, no attempt is made to reproduce the scene described naturalistically on stage. Yeats’s only prop is a blue square meant to represent the well. As in …but the clouds…, the spectator is left to fill in the rest with her own imagination. The play concerns itself less with representing surface reality than with evoking an internal reality where props and characters have been reduced to a bare but evocative minimum. In fact Yeats’s basic scenario anticipates Beckett’s teleplay in several fundamental ways: A

Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in ... but the clouds... 115
scene is conjured upon an internal stage, involving the “Pallor of an ivory face”

and an Old Man who continually remounts the barren slopes of memory.

Beckett not only borrows basic narrative elements from At the Hawk’s Well, he also adopts specific Yeatsian performance techniques for presenting those elements. As the musicians sing the prologue, they simultaneously unfold a large black cloth with the image of a hawk emblazoned upon it. Yeats describes the process in the stage directions: “As they unfold the cloth, they go backward a little so that the stretched cloth and the wall make a triangle with the First Musician at the apex supporting the centre of the cloth.” The musicians then rhythmically refold the cloth before the action proper com-mences (298). This cloth is effectively used to “screen in” a triangular “stage within the stage,” a distinctly separate inner space like the one Beckett creates for his teleplay. Yeats’s triangular playing area seems to lie behind Beckett’s triangular diagram for M1’s set ( CDW 418), where the latter serves the same dramaturgical function as the former. They are both fields of memory, the retina on which “the mind’s eye” projects its memory-images.

From the moment the Old Man enters the stage, his significance as a precursor for Beckett’s Shades becomes readily apparent. The stage directions instruct,

The Old Man stands for a moment motionless by the side of the stage with bowed head. He lifts his head at the sound of a drum-tap. He goes towards the front of the stage moving to the taps of the drum. He crouches and moves his hands as if making a fire. His movements, like those of the other persons in the play, suggest a marionette. (299; emphasis added) As discussed in the previous chapter, Beckett directed the actor playing F and M1 (Ronald Pickup in London, Klaus Herm in Stuttgart) to move with the deliberately stylized grace of a marionette. Though he offered Heinrich von Kleist’s essay as a reference text for his performers, Beckett’s own theatrical introduction to the Übermarionette probably came from Gordon Craig via Yeats.10 Yeats was an early and ardent enthusiast for Craig’s dramaturgical innovations, including the use of screens and marionette-like figural movement. Craig’s screens are the inspiration behind the Three Musicians’ cloth, and his Übermarionette ideal informs the play’s figural movement. Even as Beckett treads a different path away from “The Tower,” he assumes a distinctly Yeatsian gait in perfect step with At the Hawk’s Well.

Beckett also draws deeply from the Well’s poetic imagery for much of his own iconography. “Why don’t you speak to me?” pleads the Old Man in his first line of the play, establishing the refrain that M will echo directly in

…but the clouds…. Both old M and the Old Man waste their time begging

116 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren for attention from pallid women who refuse to acknowledge them. In both cases the woman’s silence seems less a sign of disempowerment (the traditional elegiac reduction of woman to silent referent) than a sign of defiance.

Katherine Worth cites the Guardian’s silence in At the Hawk’s Well as “one of the play’s most thrilling effects. That dumb, heavy figure under the cloak is there and yet not there, the actor who can’t be made to speak” (62). Since she will not speak for herself, the Old Man is left to put words back in her mouth: Why don’t you speak to me? Why don’t you say:

“Are you not weary gathering those sticks?

Are not your fingers cold?” You have not one word, While yesterday you spoke three times. You said:

“The well is full of hazel leaves.” You said:

“The wind is from the west.” And after that:

“If there is rain it’s likely there’ll be mud.”

To-day you are as stupid as a fish,

No, worse, worse, being less lively and as dumb. (57–65) As Worth observes, “The only way he can get a dialogue going is by mimic-king the lines that she did speak, so he says, yesterday” (62). That is to say, the Old Man ventriloquizes for the Guardian of the Well much as M does for W. Whereas M swallows most of his resentment, Yeats’s curmudgeon openly vents his bitterness and hostility, trying to goad the Guardian out of her detachment:

Why do you stare like that?

You had that glassy look about the eyes

Last time it happened. Do you know anything?

It is enough to drive an old man crazy

To look all day upon these broken rocks,

And ragged thorns, and that one stupid face,

And speak and get no answer. (70–76)

Despite her aloofness, the Guardian continues to attract supplicants because the prize she protects is so precious. On rare occasions, the well fills with the waters of immortality, and he who drinks from this fountain of youth will win everlasting life. But the waters of immortality are like the epiphanies of

“involuntary memory”—spontaneous, unpredictable, elusive, and fleeting.

The Old Man was drawn to the well fifty years before, and still he has never supped the waters. Now the legend has lured a new seeker, a Young Man, the Irish hero Cuchulain. Though these two characters are phenomenologically distinct, in another sense they represent two manifestations of the same character at opposite temporal poles. When the Old Man warns the Young Man away, he is essentially issuing a Krapp-like denunciation of his own youthful folly:

Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in ... but the clouds... 117

I came like you

When young in body and in mind, and blown

By what had seemed to me a lucky sail.

The well was dry, I sat upon its edge,

I waited the miraculous flood, I waited

While the years passed and withered me away. (128–33) The life wasted in waiting for a better life to come is paradigmatic in Beckett from Waiting for Godot onward. The older characters in Beckett sometimes lament their mistakes to younger versions of themselves, but these cautionary tales are defiantly ignored, insuring the spiraling degradation of the cycle.

…but the clouds… repeats this pattern, taking advantage of television’s editing capacity to cast the same actor as both the elder self (M) and the younger self (M1). The process of deformation is even more remarkable if one takes the “prequel” status of Ghost Trio into account. Then one can trace the entire male lineage of Shades, from the young boy messenger, to the older F, through an older M1 who still retains Clov-like mobility, to the motionless hump of M, reduced to a state of immobility even more complete than Hamm. By the final segment of Shades in Not I, the male figure is eliminated entirely, retained only as a memory for those spectators who remember that a silent male Auditor once accompanied Mouth in the stage version. Beckett’s genealogy of decay in Shades emphasizes loss, indignity, and decrepitude, a Yeatsian legacy descended more directly from At the Hawk’s Well than “The Tower.”

The pursuit of immortality ultimately proves a pipe-dream in At the Hawk’s Well. When the waters of immortality briefly well up during the play, neither the Old nor the Young Man is able to drink. The Old Man has huddled up in distress and fallen asleep. Meanwhile, Cuchulain is distracted, first by the woman’s hawk-call (another “bird’s sleepy cry”), and then by her entrancing hawk’s dance.11 As Cuchulain drifts off stage, the Musicians observe, “He has lost what may not be found” (224). The Old Man wakes to find he has been duped once again:

The accursed shadows have deluded me,

The stones are dark and yet the well is empty;

The water flowed and emptied while I slept.

You have deluded me my whole life through,

Accursed dancers, you have stolen my life.

That there should be such evil in a shadow! (230–35) Young Cuchulain charges off to do battle, beginning a cursed life in which he will never again know rest or peace. The Old Man slouches off in despair, resigning himself not only to defeat and death, but also to the knowledge that his half-century struggle for immortality was lost from the start.

118 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren The final thoughts of the play are granted neither to the Old nor Young Man, but to the Musicians. They repeat the ritual of the cloth while unequivocally denouncing any life devoted to achieving immortality. The epilogue begins,

Come to me, human faces,

Familiar memories;

I have found hateful eyes

Among the desolate places,

Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes. (250–54)

The Musicians promote the real over the ideal, the mortal over the immortal.

They endorse human comfort in the here and now, and they reject the vain pursuit of imaginary perfection:

O lamentable shadows,

Obscurity of strife!

I choose a pleasant life

Among indolent meadows;

Wisdom must live a bitter life. (260–64)

The obscure strife over lamentable shadows yields only those bitter fruits har-vested by M in …but the clouds…—“Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes” in “desolate places.” No epiphanies, no Translunar Paradise, no immortal victories over death, no rationalizations for life’s hardships. As against the consolatory crescendo of “The Tower,” At the Hawk’s Well ends on a desolate note, renouncing the shadowy search for immortality that leads the seeker away from the light of mortal happiness.

* * *

In …but the clouds… Beckett recalls a double-vision of Yeats in order both to praise him and to bury him. The title and concluding lines of the teleplay send the spectator (even Harold Pinter) back to reread “The Tower.” There are several affinities between the respective protagonists of the poem and the teleplay: both find themselves dogged by the decrepitude of old age, still obsessed by a “woman lost,” searching for some imaginative solution for redeeming pain and restoring what has been lost. The essential difference is that the poet of “The Tower” claims to have found that solution, whereas Beckett’s protagonist clearly has not. Yeats claims that the mind is responsible for creating life, death, and the afterlife. Hence the mind exercises immortal sovereignty over heaven and earth. This power evidently does not render Yeats immune from the suffering of life and the inevitability of death, but it does ultimately redeem his suffering with everlasting life—not in the

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Christian sense of an eternal heavenly reward, but in the artistic sense of immortality through the death-defeating powers of the imagination.

The direct intertextual markers in …but the clouds… all point us to “The Tower,” but we will not ultimately find the analogue to M’s experience there.

M makes the same demands from his mind that Yeats does in “The Tower,”

but his mind is clearly not equal to the task. Not only does the mind prove incapable of defeating death or bridging the alterity of the other, it cannot even conjure up an image of the “woman lost” that functions properly and lingers for more than a few seconds. Contrary to “The Tower,” …but the clouds… dramatizes the failure of memory and the imagination. The mind does not defeat dying and death, it is defeated by them. The failure does not lie specifically with M, however, but with his “altitudinous” expectations.

After all, Beckett, like Yeats, had devoted his life to art. It is not that Beckett doubts the value of art, just that he insists upon an art that is honest about what it can and cannot do. As Daniel Albright rightly argues, “Beckett’s repeated assertions that his art is the art of impotence […] are, I believe, veiled ways of saying that the true failure lies not with Beckett the particular artist but with art itself, always at the mercy of decomposing and perverse media. Beckett saw himself as an artist who was unusually honest about art’s inability to carry out the artist’s goals” (8). Likewise, the blame for M’s failures lies more generally with the inherent limitations of memory and imagination. Both modes of consciousness are useful to artists and audiences alike, and indeed no one can avoid using memory and imagination, so integral are they to human perception. But they are also notoriously undependable, and they routinely disappoint by failing to do what is needed of them. The inadequacies of memory and imagination inevitably infect the art they are used to produce. Of course, art can transform painful experience into something less than painful for an audience. And art can partake in a kind of immortality insofar as audiences can continue to experience a work long after the artist who produced it is dead. But where exactly is the redemption and immortality for the artist in all this? He remains dead, having paid a painful price for someone else’s edification. Yeats’s faith in the imagination, as expressed in

“The Tower,” is so great that he believes death can be imaginatively overcome, and that pain can be imaginatively transformed into something as ephemeral as the clouds. Beckett deconstructs this omnipotence and omniscience, replacing it with impotence and ignorance. …but the clouds… recalls

“The Tower” only to recant the faith it professes.

Beckett’s chief witness against “The Tower” is none other than Yeats himself. The closest analogue to M’s experience in …but the clouds… comes not from “The Tower” but from At the Hawk’s Well, composed ten years earlier.

This play was written before Yeats bought his tower, before he married, before

120 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren the birth of his children and the birth of the Irish nation he helped midwife into existence, before the Nobel Prize and the Free State Senate and the pride and faith of a “smiling public man” (“Among School Children” 8). Lacking the domestic comforts and professional security he would enjoy a decade later, this earlier Yeats professes a much darker sensibility—a sensibility akin to Beckett’s own. At the Hawk’s Well is a testament to failure. Neither the Old Man’s persistence nor the Young Man’s vitality is sufficient to achieve immortality. The pursuit of shadows in search of permanence and perfection is exposed as a lost cause.

Beckett visually recalls this earlier play—to “the eye’s mind,” so to speak—
as a corrective against the later poem. His “telegy” for Yeats decomposes “The Tower” by recomposing it according to the model provided by At the Hawk’s Well. This process obviously involves a dimension of renunciation, but it also reveals an appreciation of complexity far more nuanced than the simple dismissive fired by “Andrew Belis” in “Recent Irish Poetry.” Yeats writes in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (8). Beckett uses At the Hawk’s Well to penetrate past the quarrelsome rhetoric of “The Tower” and to rescue its heart-breaking poetry. For all the bard’s defiant claims about redeeming pain and conquering death, the elegiac sadness of the poem’s closing imagery calls his confidence into question. Ramazani poses the challenge, “But one has to wonder why the poet would need to work up such declamatory rant if his power over death were as certain as he claims” (173). Beckett picks up on the doubt that will not remain at bay, which seeps out in those mournful concluding images. His jarringly disjointed title, …but the clouds…, restores the focus where it belongs—not on the supposed omnipotence of the mind, but on the clouds, the fading horizon, the bird’s dying mirlitonnade, the gathering darkness. Beckett troubles the neatness of Yeats’s consolation in “The Tower,” and he enlists the disconsolate At the Hawk’s Well to help him do it.

In the process he advances beyond his own quarrelsome rhetoric as a young man to appreciate Yeats’s rich poetic quarrels with himself. He uses …but the clouds… as a televisual canvas on which to cast a double-vision of Yeats: A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, revised through the colder eye and darker palette of Yeats’s own earlier sensibility.

Notes

1. All references to “Recent Irish Poetry” are taken from its reprint in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 70–76. The pseudonym “Andrew Belis” derives from a distant relative on May Roe Beckett’s side of the family ( Damned 25). The pseudonym

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may have been adopted for protective purposes, given the number of enemies he stood to earn from this wide-ranging broadside against his Irish contemporaries, most of whom were better established in the literary world than he was.

However, the pseudonym might just as well represent an effort to deflect the appearance of log-rolling; the August 1934 issue of The Bookman also contained a signed short story by Samuel Beckett, “A Case in a Thousand.”

2. Beckett does offer brief but relatively benign reviews of his friends’ poetry, including Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, and Brian Coffey.

3. In Beckett’s German version for SDR, …nur noch Gewölk…, he extended the quotation to fifteen lines, encompassing the entire final stanza of “The Tower.”

He subsequently suggested that this change be incorporated if possible into future BBC broadcasts of the teleplay (Beckett to Tristram Powell, 15 July 1977, BBC WAC TS51/350/1). No published version of …but the clouds… observes this revision, however.

4. The German female leads were dispersed between Irmgard Först (V) and Kornelia Boje (W), and Beckett apparently never even contemplated a German adaptation of Not I. In his December 1976 letter to Dr. Müller-Freienfels, he requested that SDR pursue broadcast rights so that Whitelaw’s Not I performance could be included in Schatten (BBC WAC TS51/350/1).

5. In 1948, Beckett published a poem closely modeled after Yeats’s conceit in “He wishes his Beloved were Dead.” See “je voudrais que mon amour meure” (“I would like my love to die”) in Samuel Beckett, Poems 1930–1989 (London: Calder Publications, 2002), 70–71. John Calder divulges in his note to the poem that, “The lady in question is often assumed to have been Lucia Joyce” (220). If this rumor is true, then the theme of exerting control through poetry over an uncontrollable situation in real life seems acutely relevant.

6. For a catalogue of Beckettian faces and their significance, see Ackerley and Gontarski’s entry on “faces” (190–91).

7. This contribution to the 1956 Shaw program was solicited by Cyril Cusack. My citation is taken from James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: An Exhibition (London: Turret Books, 1971), 23.

8. The play was first performed on April 2, 1916, in Lady Cunard’s drawing room in London to an elite avant-garde gathering. Two nights later, it was performed again at Lady Islington’s as a charity event under the patronage of Queen Alexandra. Ezra Pound, who attended the first performance with his new protégé T.S. Eliot, described the spectacle as “‘a theatreless stage—very noble & exclusive

[…] performed before an audience composed exclusively of crowned heads and divorcées.’” For a marvelous account of the composition and original production history of At the Hawk’s Well, see R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 34–43.

9. All references to the play are taken from The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume II: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), 297–306. Quotations from the verse dialogue are cited by line number; quotations from the prose stage directions are cited by page number.

122 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren 10. For a fuller discussion of Craig’s theories as they relate to Beckett, see Les Essif, Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001).

11. This dance was first performed not by a woman but by Michio Ito, who premiered the role of Guardian of the Well in 1916. For more on Ito’s transforma-tion from classically trained European dancer to en vogue Noh disciple, see Foster 38–39.

CHAPTER 6

Quadrat I + II: Eff It with Color

Before one writes a sentence about Beckett’s fourth teleplay, one already encounters difficulties. The first problem arises from the very decision to speak for a tele-mime that conspicuously declines to speak for itself.

Having cleared that hurdle, one then faces a rather embarrassing and irksome nominative obstacle: what is the teleplay’s name? Commentators cannot even agree on that much. Beckett’s preproduction notes used the provisional title

“Quad,” but the actual production deviated significantly from original plans, eventually including a sequel collectively broadcast by SDR on October 8, 1981 as Quadrat I + II.1 Despite Beckett’s explicit adoption of this new title, most critics persist in using the abandoned title Quad.2 Critical confusion seems appropriate, however, given the playwright’s own conflicted frustration with the piece. His first known reference to the teleplay came on January 1, 1980 in letter to Alan Schneider, where he mentioned a “crazy TV piece for Stuttgart” (Harmon 383). When he finally visited the Stuttgart studios in April 1981 for preproduction discussions of “Quad,” he was extremely discouraged by the results. He reported back to Schneider, “The few days in Stuttgart were not very satisfactory. I’m quite lost in TV technicalities & shall never write again for that medium” (Harmon 403). Of course, his previous work had displayed innovative use of “TV technicalities,” and he would in fact return to the television medium for two more projects. The frustration he vented to Schneider derived solely from the difficulties posed by this “crazy TV piece” in particular. His reservations ran so deep that he even tried to back out of the “Quad” project altogether. On April 20 he informed Ruby Cohn, “Not long back from Stuttgart. Unsatisfactory. Television is beyond me. Have written suggesting it should be taken over by my assistant” (RUL

5100).3 After a “‘kind and irresistible’” plea from Dr. Müller-Freienfels, he finally agreed to return to SDR in late May to direct the teleplay himself ( Damned 592). He clearly did not relish the work, however. He confessed to Schneider, “I have not much zest for the job” (Harmon 406), and to Cohn,

124 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren

“Have to return for my sins to Stuttgart end of this month for the impossible TV aberration” (RUL 5100).

The production that eventually evolved into Quadrat I + II is indeed an aberration in many respects. It is Beckett’s only completely wordless teleplay, the only play he ever filmed in color, his fastest-paced teleplay, and the most brightly lit. Unlike the other teleplays, Quadrat I + II also avoids all conflict.

At every turn the performers bypass clashing with one another, physically, verbally, and dramatically. Furthermore, the teleplay never instigates intertextual tension by engaging with classic precursors as do the other teleplays. Freud, Bergson, Beethoven, and Yeats provide no real help to understanding this teleplay. The piece contains no language, no conflict, and no old scores to settle with the past. For all its optical brilliance, it remains one of Beckett’s most obscure works—which is no mean boast. Though no amount of ingenuity can fully penetrate its obscurity, Quadrat I + II should not be dismissed too easily as an “impossible TV aberration.” A more productive use for the teleplay is as a case study of Beckett in extremis. Quadrat I + II is maddening to many, boring to some, oddly amusing to others, and uniquely fascinating to a few because it pushes the limits of both expression and interpretation, arguably beyond their breaking points.

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Patrice Pavis concedes in Languages of the Stage that, “To speak of mime—or, worse still, to write on mime—is to dwell awkwardly on a few moments of gesture” (53). A verbal transcription of Quadrat I + II is awkward but necessary if one intends to grapple with its nonverbal modes of expression. The first line of Beckett’s published script—really more a set of assembly instructions than a play proper—describes it as “A piece for four players, light, and percussion” ( CDW 451). The players are distinguished in the script not by names but by numbers (1,2,3,4). They are not even distinguishable by gender, since cowls cover their faces and their “Sex [is] indifferent” ( CDW 453).

However, each wears a vividly colored gown: 1 in white, 2 in yellow, 3 in blue, and 4 in red. Each also “marches to the beat of a different drum” (or more precisely, a different percussion instrument).4 The percussionists were originally supposed to be visible on the margins of the screen, but this idea was abandoned in production. The original plans to assign each player his/her own distinctly colored light and peculiar footstep were likewise

“Abandoned as impractical” ( CDW 453n2). At different times each of the four players enters, exits, and re-enters the brightly lit quadrangular playing area. Unlike the figures in Shades, the players in Quadrat I + II do not move with the stylized delicacy of marionettes. Rather, each player bisects the square with deliberate speed, head bowed, walking with a purpose (though

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who knows what that purpose might be). The only deviations from their lin-ear paths come at the center of the square, which is “supposed a danger zone”

( CDW 453n4). Whenever one of the players approaches the center, he or she deftly sidesteps this supposed “danger zone” and continues ahead. Each player enters at one corner, turning left (like Dante’s damned) at each subsequent corner, traversing the legs and hypotenuse of the prescribed route before exiting into the darkness off screen. Then he/she re-enters at the next corner and repeats the routine. Because the players enter at different times and barrel forward through the same limited space, there is always the hypothetical potential for collision. However, Beckett’s choreography is so perfectly blocked, and the performers are so agile—the script counsels “Some ballet training desirable” ( CDW 453)5—that they avoid conflict as nimbly and efficiently as they avoid the “danger zone.”

“Quad” was originally conceived in its entirety for four players, with four instruments, lights, and footsteps, hurtling through four courses apiece across a quadrangular set. In production Beckett eliminated some of his original designs, but he also made one crucial addition—albeit an addition based upon the principle of subtraction. After viewing a playback of the performance on a black-and-white monitor, he was so intrigued with the achro-matic effect that he decided to add a sequel, said to take place “‘ten thousand years later’” ( Damned 593). After about fifteen minutes of full-color, full-throttle energy, the screen fades to black and then fades back up on the routine, now drastically degraded. The new sequence removes the vibrant colors, replacing the various gowns with homogenous white. The percussion instruments are also eliminated, replaced with the droning shuffle of monotonous footsteps. The pace is drastically slowed and the duration truncated to a mere five minutes, with each player completing only one course. But one course is sufficient to demonstrate the trademark Beckettian decomposition process in this five-minute sequel. He establishes a routine and repeats it for emphasis (four times) in the “Pre-action” section, then decomposes and rearranges the default routine in the “Re-action” section. What remains conspicuously missing from Quadrat I + II is the middle section, the “Action,” the crucible of conflict where the previous teleplays developed their formal and narrative tensions.

Faint residue of conflict, or rather the erasure marks where conflict used to be, can still be detected, however, if one knows the teleplay’s conceptual derivation from “J.M. Mime.” In his groundbreaking manuscript study The Intent of Undoing, S.E. Gontarski finds the source for “Quad” in an earlier mime from 1963, conceived for Jack MacGowran (J.M.) but soon abandoned. Gontarski summarizes the premise of “J.M. Mime”: “Beckett outlined a maze of possible correct paths and errors for two players, either a son and father or a son and mother, to describe all the permutations of possible

126 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren paths along a square bisected at first from corners to corners” (159). The holograph that Gontarski reproduces as an appendix6 is even more complicated than the “Quad” script because it calculates not only all the permutations of “correct” paths for the players, but also an eye-glazing “80 possible errors” (201).7 All such errors have been eliminated in the scrupulously correct Quadrat I + II. The latter mime also dispenses with the messy remnants of characterization. The players in “J.M. Mime” are still recognizably human,

“naked under coats, (hats) boots” (201). They are also family, and thus tied together by the deepest human bonds. Finally, even if the hypothetical viewer of this aborted mime could not definitively identify the two players as parent and child, the closeness of their personal bond is obvious from the fact that

“one [is] carrying other” (201). This image of one character carrying another to and fro across the four corners of the stage is filled with human pathos.

Such complications are sanitized out of Quadrat I + II.

The author who placed “J.M. Mime” in the drawer in 1963 was working with different material than the auteur who pulled it back out in 1980.

Beckett’s “less is more” directorial principles prompted him to reanimate his aborted mime only after refining it through a rigorous process of concentration and reduction. He would extend this process to reach even more radical ends in his final novel, Worstward Ho, the work he began immediately after filming Quadrat I + II. In the novel he begins with already meager characters (a bent woman, a twain man and child, a sunken skull with inward stare) and systematically “worsens” them until they are distilled down to three pins and one pinhole. While Beckett stops short of reducing his players to pins in Quadrat I + II, they are nevertheless stripped of human agency and dramatic conflict just as ruthlessly as the objectified subjects in Worstward Ho.

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Beckett’s extreme objectification of his characters has led to charges that he likewise dehumanizes his performers, reducing them to moving (if that) props, mere instruments. Quadrat I + II is particularly vulnerable to such a charge, since it denies its actors most traditional tools of their trade. The players do not speak, they have no recourse to facial expression or physical gesture, and all their movements are preordained. Though they move with more dexterity than their marionette-like predecessors, they exercise no more human agency than puppets. Eckart Voigts-Virchow goes so far as to suggest that the teleplay abandons the concept of character altogether: “There is no need to presume that the trained dancers ‘acting’ in Quad actually perform a role” (216n2). Noel Coward reportedly expected no more from his actors than that they speak clearly and not bump into the furniture; Beckett removes even the speaking and the furniture in Quadrat I + II, asking only

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that the actors not bump into each other. Of course even this requires skills, but not the kind that many actors are trained to concentrate upon as psychologically complex interpretive artists. When Alan Schneider asked for permission to experiment with the mime in his acting class, Beckett seemed surprised by the request: “Can’t see Quad on stage. But by all means have a go” (Harmon 416). In a subsequent letter, he expressed even more misgiv-ings—“Quad can’t work on stage,” he stated flatly, adding with a wink, “But no doubt interesting for students, gymnastically” (422). There are no obvious dramaturgical reasons why the mime could not be performed as readily on a stage as in a studio. Beckett’s combination of reticence and bemusement was probably prompted less by the performance medium than by its setting. One can scarcely imagine a less hospitable venue for such a radically depersonal-ized piece than the psychologically-charged environment of an American acting class. Beckett defines Quadrat I + II as “A piece for four players, light and percussion” ( CDW 451), giving equal billing to each element, and treating no element as more important—let alone more “human”—than the other.

Though most actors would understandably bristle at the notion of sharing equal billing with a Javanese gong, some of Beckett’s most successful interpreters routinely compare themselves to musical instruments in describing their approaches to his work. The most celebrated example is Billie Whitelaw, who has routinely and unabashedly described herself as Beckett’s dramaturgical instrument. In a 1984 piece for the Village Voice, she explained, “Beckett blows the notes. I want them to come out of me and create feeling in who-ever’s sitting out front” (Edelstein 86). In an interview with Jonathan Kalb for his excellent 1989 book Beckett in Performance, she elaborated on the metaphor: “I place myself totally at his disposal, and I can be a tube of paint or a musical instrument or whatever. I won’t argue, I won’t argue, because I trust him totally, and have absolute respect for his integrity and artistic vision.

So really I just do as I’m told” (235). Whitelaw is generally acknowledged as Beckett’s supreme interpreter. Speaking as her director as well as her author, Beckett offered the actress his unequivocal stamp of approval: “She has an uncanny rapport with my theatre and sense of its requirements”

(Harmon 423). Yet many an actor who values her collaborative input into the creative process would cringe at the self-effacing price Whitelaw was willing to pay to nurture that rapport. The cynic might surmise from the above comments that the first two requirements of performing Beckett are doing what you’re told and not arguing. Whitelaw’s successes on stage and screen speak for themselves (well, W doesn’t actually “speak” in …but the clouds…, but still…). Her defenders counter that her methods require no defense if they are capable of yielding such miraculous results. Be that as it may, many

128 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren prospective performers are daunted less by her standard of excellence than by her standard of sacrifice to Beckett’s virtuosity.

The great Beckettian actor David Warrilow also spoke of his approach in musical terms, as opposed to the psychological terms preferred by many (especially American) performers when describing their craft. In Warrilow’s interview with Kalb, he admits,

I barely deal with psychological reality. I don’t have to. I mean, I can have ideas about that but it isn’t what works. What works is finding what musicians have called the “right tone.” By “right” I mean what works for me. I then have to trust that it’ll work for somebody else—that if I get it right, if I sing it “on key,”

“in tune,” it’s going to vibrate properly for somebody else. (224) Warrilow’s approach is consistent with Whitelaw’s in his emphasis upon musicality, but he departs significantly from her description insofar as he remains the controlling agent, the player of his own instrument. This understanding of the body, in particular the voice, as the instrument on which the actor plays his performance may sound to some like dehumanized rhetoric.

In fact this approach simply shifts the emphasis away from the performer’s psychology and toward his physiology. This does not preclude any psychological connection the actor might feel for his character, nor does it necessarily eliminate interiorization of the part. Warrilow “can have ideas about that but it isn’t what works” for him. His approach focuses upon external effects more than internal causes, not because one is more legitimate than the other, but because the external is all that can register directly with the audience.

Furthermore, his language implies that he is also his own first audience—if his instrument vibrates right for him, then it should subsequently vibrate right for others as well.

Pierre Chabert has extensive experience as both a director and a performer of Beckett’s plays, including performances under Beckett’s direction. His deeply reflective 1994 interview with Thomas Cousineau for the Journal of Beckett Studies acknowledges the potential for dehumanization in Beckett while still championing a musical approach to his work. He asserts, “An actor is never a puppet; if he allows himself to be turned into one, by Beckett or by anyone else, he is no longer a good actor. This is a serious problem. I do, indeed, find that Beckett, in his desire for precision and musicality, and in his resistance to sentimentality, tended to transform the actor into a machine”

(123). Chabert objects stringently to this objectifying tendency. Nevertheless, his commitment to directing and performing Beckett confirms his faith in that work’s value, not just for others but for himself. His own experience also confirms that sensitivity to the work’s musicality is essential, not simply

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because Beckett demands it, but because he has independently determined that the work is best served by this approach. He explains, In my own productions, I follow Beckett’s directions with regard to musicality, rhythm, and tempo very closely. But it is equally important that the actor be able to interiorize this system in such a way as to sublimate and transcend it.

[…] The actor must reinvent from within himself the inner necessity of this precision and this music. If he doesn’t experience this within his own depths, they become arbitrary and mechanical. (123)

One could argue that Chabert is trying to have it both ways here, asserting on one hand that the actor should freely interiorize his own system, but on the other hand that the best system to interiorize is the one already devised by an external agent, Samuel Beckett. I recognize the same potential contradiction in my own attitude toward Beckett in performance. In principle I acknowledge the legitimacy of the performer as an interpretive artist in his or her own right, one whose autonomy should never be compromised by “arbitrary and mechanical” restrictions imposed by the director or the playwright. I also unconditionally support the performer’s prerogative to approach the material as he or she sees fit, even if that approach does not conform with the one preferred by the author. And yet I find over and over that the performers that I subjectively find most successful tend to be those, like Whitelaw, Warrilow, and Chabert, who “follow Beckett’s directions with regard to musicality, rhythm, and tempo very closely.” Is this a contradiction? Am I a closeted purist after all?

Perhaps the key to reconciling this problem lies in Chabert’s perceptive phrase, “the inner necessity of this precision and this music.” He does not seem to be referring here to an “inner necessity” within the actor, but rather within the play itself. Beckett’s works are composed with such finely tuned sensitivity to “musicality, rhythm, and tempo” that any performance which is deaf to these qualities inevitably sounds muddled, it vibrates improperly as if played out of tune. Beckett scores each text so deeply with a certain rhythm, tone, and tempo that it becomes inscribed with an “inner necessity” that can only be ignored at the production’s peril. Sometimes these texts even allude to their own inscriptions as a way of enforcing observance. For instance, V
begins Ghost Trio by announcing, “Mine is a faint voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [ Pause. ] It will not be raised, nor lowered, whatever happens” ( CDW

408). Beckett had similarly described Voice in Eh Joe as “Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal”

( CDW 361–62). But there the instruction is relegated to a stage direction. In Ghost Trio, however, he actually makes the stage directions part of the spoken

130 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren text, inscribing an “inner necessity” for performing the lines in faint monotone. A renegade performer still remains free to resist Beckett’s directions and perform V a different way; but if she does, then the very lines she delivers will testify against her. Likewise, V testifies against disobedient directors when she observes, “The light: faint, omnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous. No shadow. [ Pause. ] No shadow” ( CDW 408).

Again, a director may choose to light the teleplay differently, or may lack the technical wherewithal to avoid shadows, but the text will expose the production’s failures to enact its requirements. Even a play without spoken text like Quadrat I + II comes equipped with an “inner necessity,” a steady pace dictated by the staccato rhythms of the percussion instruments. If any of the players exercise their prerogatives by marching to the beat of their own private drum, they risk turning the teleplay’s careful choreography into an embarrassing traffic accident.

All of this is not to suggest that Beckett was some insidious despot who would rather sabotage his own productions than suffer challenges to his absolute authority. Perhaps no author was more aware of the limitations on his control over his creations. He did not welcome mutiny from his actors and directors any more than from his creatures, but he knew to expect it just the same. It would also be a mistake to think that Beckett affords no creative wig-gle room in his texts, or that he discouraged collaborative input from his fellow practitioners. Responding to a question about Beckett’s directorial style, Jack MacGowran affirmed that “he allows you any amount of freedom that you want, provided he feels it doesn’t conflict with the text” (214). This is not tantamount to Beckett saying, “Do whatever you like, so long as you do it my way.” Rather, Beckett permitted and even encouraged experimentation within the confines of the text, so long as the “inner necessity” inscribed there was served. His most devoted director in America, Alan Schneider, challenged the notion that his texts and stage directions were overly confining. In his reverent but revealing essay “Working with Beckett,” Schneider insists, As to my own feelings of confinement, I have none. When I limit my imagination to the boundaries set for me by Sam, I feel with Jackie [MacGowran]

that I am not so much limiting as freeing myself, just as a sonnet writer who has something he wants to express may not be bound tighter but actually guided into greater complexity by the demands of its rhyme scheme—or any artist always is by the specific limitations of his materials. […] When I direct Beckett, I know and trust him and respond to him so directly that I can allow my own impulses and imagination to flow through his pulse beats. (251)

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Blowing the notes, singing on key, flowing through the pulse beats—musicality, rhythm, tempo. Those interpreters who have proven most consistently successful in finding the “inner necessity” in Beckett seem always to access it through music.

As has often been noted, Beckett shared Schopenhauer’s estimation of music as the greatest art. As the philosopher puts it in The World as Will and Representation, “music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence” (I.257). Beckett’s art is unmistakably made from echoes and shadows, and as such it falls inexorably short of music’s essence.

While that essence remained unattainable, it was asymptotically approach-able. Beckett experimented throughout his career with various methods for making his work more musical, “an art,” as he defines it in Proust, “that is perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable” (71). In some respects his most radical pursuit of this ideal comes in Quadrat I + II. During production he intimated to SDR cameraman Jim Lewis that he was finding it increasingly hard to write without feeling that all his words were lies (Lewis 376). The teleplay is symptomatic of that distress. Beckett avoids the mendacious gap between words and what they mean to express, bypasses Derridean différance, by abandoning words altogether in Quadrat I + II. This decision allows him to focus upon musicality, rhythm, and tempo with a new intensity and urgency, having shrugged off the distraction of language. Beckett may be accused of robbing performers and directors of many standard tools of their trades, but it should also be noted that in works like Quadrat I + II he denies himself words, the primary tool of his trade.

Jonathan Kalb makes an intriguing comparison with Marcel Duchamp in Beckett in Performance. He asserts that, Beckett’s relationship to language has always been quasi-Duchampian, if one accepts the idea that Duchamp’s greatness lies not so much in the fact that he stopped painting as in his managing to have that act recognized as significant.

You have to be quite a writer before your refusal to write can be received as a statement in itself. (160).

Quadrat I + II issues just such a disavowal. The absence of language is keenly felt, as palpable as the empty “danger zone” at the center of the square, a thing to be avoided, ignored, not talked about. Indeed, the teleplay’s most unexpected elements (I am tempted to say its most “un-Beckettian” elements)—
dynamic bodies in vivid colors, awash in light—seem designed to divert our

132 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren attention from the conspicuous absence of language. One might expect Beckett’s distinct music to prevail with new force now that the nonverbal elements are relieved of distraction or competition from words. But I find the opposite to be true; for all its ostentatious energy, Quadrat I + II has always struck me as one of Beckett’s most static plays. My nagging disaffection with the piece may be traceable to the fact that so much of the “inner necessity” of his best work is rooted in the musicality, rhythm, and tempo of his language.

Schneider records this pulse precisely in “Working with Beckett.” Every Beckett play, he observes, “possesses its own specific tonality, its special texture. That which distinguishes it from anyone else’s work. Almost any page of Beckett can be immediately identified as his.” He then elaborates upon that distinct music, which he locates in Beckett’s language: The sparseness and simplicity of his language, juxtaposed against its passages of poetic musicality. The balance and tension of its various rhythms and sounds and images. His repetition of words and phrases. The constant interplay of parallel and opposing ideas and themes: counterpoint, auditory and visual. The carefully worked-out opposition of lines and the interrelating of opposites.

And other notes of dramatic music. (248–49)

Schneider’s soaring assessment of Beckett’s verbal virtuosity doubtlessly rates the power of words much higher than the playwright himself ever would.

Nonetheless, I share Schneider’s attraction to Beckett’s special tonality and texture, I agree that this music is rooted chiefly in Beckett’s manipulation of language, and I admit that I experience the absence of that particular brand of Beckettian music as a significant loss in Quadrat I + II. In this sense my reaction mirrors Ruby Cohn’s response to Ghost Trio. She honestly admits,

“Beethoven’s Largo is all very well, but I miss Beckett’s verbal largo in Ghost Trio” (339). I do not share her low opinion of Ghost Trio, but I commiserate with her because that is exactly how I feel about Quadrat I + II. Needless to say, this does not mean that verbal art is by definition preferable to nonverbal art. Rather, my point is (I will not presume to speak for Cohn) that Beckett plays his best music with words—orchestrating their rhythms, arranging them into patterns, opposing them in counterpoint to one another, fractur-ing them with pauses and silences, juxtaposing them with the nonverbal elements of the performance. These nonverbal elements are certainly capable of intriguing effects in their own right; but without the animating tension of his inimitable language, it feels to me as if Beckett has left his best instrument in the case for Quadrat I + II.

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Since language is also the primary instrument for literary critics, one might have expected a muted critical reception to Beckett’s wordless teleplay. Not so. Quadrat I + II has attracted a remarkably heterogeneous body of commentary. Because it does not speak for itself, the tele-mime cannot contradict any interpretation from those who would speak for it. Emboldened by this impunity, we critics have reached heights of ingenuity and depths of obscurity in our attempts to fill the void at the center of Quadrat I + II. It seems that this teleplay can be made to mean almost anything.

The broadest interpretations see the frenetic piece as an allegory for the human condition. Hans Heibel intuits a critique of obsessive human behavior, arguing that Quadrat I + II “is built on the view that life consists of continuous repetitions of the same compulsive activities, and that we deceive ourselves if we believe in freedom of will, individuality, spontaneity, etc. All human beings are alike, all human activities resemble one another, everything is done ‘un-consciously’—for generations, for centuries” (341). Phyllis Carey reads the ritualistic movements around the square as a commentary on the futility of all human constructs: “Both reason and imagination create the fig-ments that in turn become controlled determiners of human behaviour. The ritual of Quad dramatizes the rational and imaginative constructs humans have projected, which, in turn, have enslaved them” (146). Other critics read the teleplay in the more specific context of contemporary thought. S.E.

Gontarski describes Quadrat I + II as “Beckett’s most vivid image of postmodern literary theory and literal decentering” ( Intent 179). Les Essif reads the teleplay “hypersubjectively,” refracting it through the lens of contemporary French theory, interpreting the players as thoughts within “the essentially unstructured extension of the mind” (87). Herta Schmid locates the piece

“not in the outer world, but in the inner mind of the spectator,” grounding her interpretations in Kandinsky’s “‘dematerialization’ of the plane” (281). In

“Quad: Dancing Genders,” Mary Bryden considers the piece in light of Cixous’s gender theories, arguing that its provocative indeterminacy qualifies as a special case of écriture féminine (113–20). Undaunted by the absence of words, critics still manage to find literary allusions in Quadrat I + II as well.

Most commentaries mention Dante’s Inferno as a source, where the damned, like Beckett’s four players, revolve ceaselessly to the left. I myself have previously asserted a Shakespearean allusion in the teleplay. In “Samuel Beckett’s Quad: Pacing to Byzantium,” I offer Macbeth’s famous soliloquy (V.v.19–28) as a verbal model for the nonverbal tele-mime, with its “petty pace,”

“recorded time,” and “lighted fools” who are “heard no more,” “Signifying nothing” (52–53). I also assert connections with Yeats’s poetry and Duchamp’s ready-mades. Not to be outdone, Minako Okamuro has written two articles, “Quad and the Jungian Mandala” and “Alchemical Dances in

134 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Beckett and Yeats,” in which she places the teleplay at the center of an intertextual web so vast and esoteric that it ensnares Jungian mandalas, Yeatsian and Joycean alchemy, and the Crane Dance of Ancient Greece. On the opposite end of the earnestness spectrum is Daniel Albright, who views the teleplay “as if Beckett wished to end by tearing down every element of theatre, until there was nothing left except a script that looks like origami instructions and a performance that looks like hopscotch” (137).

This critical cacophony ends up revealing less about Quadrat I + II than about its critics’ respective interests and methodologies. Beckett in extremis begets Beckett criticism in extremis, and it can be difficult to make much sense of either. In fact, one of the most interesting commentaries on Quadrat I + II abandons the interpretive function of literary criticism altogether.

Eckart Voigts-Virchow’s strikingly unconventional essay, “Quad I and Teletubbies, or ‘Aisthetic’ Panopticism versus Reading Beckett,” is by turns hilarious, irreverent, ingenious, and genuinely insightful. Voigts-Virchow concedes that the teleplay might be analyzed cognitively as an intellectual puzzle, but he eschews that approach in favor of an “aisthetic” approach (“Aisthesis is the Greek term for sensory perception”). “Rather than trying to make ‘sense’ of Quad,” he announces in the introduction, “I will look at the mere ‘sensation’ caused by Quad” (211). This methodology challenges bedrock assumptions about the meaning-making function of art and the meaning-gleaning function of criticism: “Used to reading works of art, critics may disregard mere sensory viewing responses which suggest that Quad does neither amuse nor entertain, neither represent nor express, that it does not aspire to beauty, understanding, or truth. Watching Quad aisthetically, you neither learn nor enjoy” (212). As a clever strategy for wrenching the reader away from his usual contextual paradigms for thinking about Beckett’s art, Voigts-Virchow launches into a comparative analysis of Quad I and Teletubbies, the colorfully mindless BBC children’s television show. This outrageous comparison yields some priceless gems, like the prognosis that, “The Quad figures are probably an image of how the Teletubbies will behave when they are close to death and their belly monitors have long gone blank and become sightless windows” (214). Observations like this animate the essay with a welcome spirit of mirth, while the unsettling number of genuine similarities between the two works save the essay from simply being an extended joke.

It is sometimes difficult to take Voigts-Virchow’s comparison seriously, or to know how serious he is in positing his analogy. But then his antiseriousness is largely the point, since seriousness is the stance one properly assumes toward works of high art. The essay attempts to rescue Beckett from his critics and from his presumed gravitas, smuggling him out of the high-art camp and into the pop-culture camp. Voigts-Virchow is forthright about his agenda:

Quadrat I + II: Eff It with Color 135

We may want to resist viewing Beckett as a cultural phenomenon and continue to construct Beckett in the category of art. In doing so, we attempt to release Quad from the ‘aisthetic’ prison of being movement on a screen. By declaring Beckett as art and the Teletubbies as mass art or non-art, we construct an allegiance, intellectually, professionally, and personally. My allegiance is to the study of the contemporary media society, and the point of coupling Quad and the Teletubbies is to show how Beckett’s work both encapsulates and resists the ontology of television rather than to establish Beckett as a TV author. (215) I appreciate Voigts-Virchow’s candor in declaring his allegiances, even as I recognize that we belong to different camps. I can declare with equal conviction my allegiance to Beckett’s work as art and my commitment to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct Beckett in that category. I still find value in the category of art, as did Beckett, and nowhere is he more explicit about his continuing entanglement in that category than in the teleplays. Beethoven, Yeats, and Schubert—to name only the most obvious examples—loom large in the teleplays, and surely no category of “art” would fail to list these imposing figures as members. Beckett’s art does not aspire to such imposing stature, and he tends to take the old masters down several pegs whenever he engages them.

But engage them he does, blatantly so, and one cannot do full justice to most of Beckett’s teleplays without recourse to the discourse of art in which they are founded. This does not preclude consideration of the “aisthetic” alongside the aesthetic; the two categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the

“aisthetic” approach—mapping sensation instead of making sense—is probably the right tool for the task of understanding the radically innovative, unconventional effects the teleplays have on their viewers. However, the teleplays also invite critics to reconsider previous artists and traditions and to make sense of these old works anew in light of Beckett’s countertraditional revisions. We can either decline this invitation, or we can invest “intellectually, professionally, and personally” in the category of art.

To give Voigts-Virchow and his camp their full due, the one teleplay for which the “aisthetic” approach might provide the better critical instrument is Quadrat I + II. Beckett does not issue any explicit aesthetic invitations in this teleplay. Frankly, the art of memory and the memory of art are not the most productive paradigms for making sense of Quadrat I + II. The Teletubbies may strike some as silly reference points for thinking about Beckett, but do the players in Quadrat I + II really bear any more resemblance to Dante’s damned? I cannot honestly say that they do. If constantly turning to the left were all it took to constitute a Dantean allusion, then the entire NASCAR circuit would qualify as one big Inferno. The Teletubbies bring one no closer, but also no farther away, from this impenetrable teleplay than do comparisons

136 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren with Kandinsky’s art, Shakespeare’s soliloquies, or the Crane Dance of Ancient Greece. All of Beckett’s other teleplays make integral use of memory—
personal, cultural, philosophical, artistic, metatelevisual. Quadrat I + II does not preclude an interpretation based in memory—it does not preclude any interpretations—but neither does it offer much tangible confirmation of this or any other “sensible” thesis. This teleplay flatly refuses to be complicit with the meaning-making enterprise. Finally, what I tend to experience as Quadrat I + II’s shortcomings might really be an exposé of the shortcomings in my own preferred interpretive paradigm.

* * *

Art Spiegelman, whose pioneering Maus series weds the seriousness of high-art subject matter (the Holocaust) with a conventionally trivial mass-art form (comics), invokes Beckett as a reference point. The protagonist Art visits his psychiatrist in Maus II, attempting to work through both his guilt and his writer’s block. In a breakthrough session, Art recalls, “Samuel Beckett once said: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’” After a moment’s thought, he adds, “On the other hand, he SAID it.”

The psychiatrist reinforces this insight by prompting, “He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book” (45).

Beckett felt the tug between these two poles—silence and speech—
throughout his career. Obviously the urge to speak, to write, and to have others speak what he had written ultimately prevailed, producing one of the major literary and dramatic canons of the twentieth century. After all, as Art observes, “he SAID it,”8 he expressed the desire for ideal wordlessness through the stained and imperfect medium of words. Still, that urge toward silence and absence never released its pull on him.9 The doubt he expressed to Jim Lewis that all of his words were lies is consistent with his characterization of words as “an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” He periodically appealed to such nihilistic aphorisms throughout his life. Well before he was fully established in his career as a writer, Beckett was already challenging the basis of the writer’s profession. In his renowned 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, he refers to language as a veil that should be torn asunder: “As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today” (171–72).

Though he later dismissed the letter to Ruby Cohn as “‘German bilge’”

( Disjecta 170), he never entirely disavowed this goal. Forty years later, in a 1977 conversation with Avigdor Arikha and Anne Atik, he was still insisting that, “‘All writing is a sin against speechlessness’” (Atik 95). Martin Esslin

Quadrat I + II: Eff It with Color 137
later connected this nagging impulse toward silence with the teleplays, particularly Quadrat I + II. In his 1987 essay, “A Poetry of Moving Images,”

Esslin recalls, “When I first met Beckett twenty-five years ago, he mentioned, half jokingly, that he was trying to become ever more concise, ever more to the point in his writing—so that perhaps at the end he would merely produce a blank page. The visual poetry of incarnated metaphors, like Quad, in some ways, it seems to me, is in fact that blank page—a poem without words” (76).

There is a persistent nihilistic strain in Beckett’s work, usually kept in check but never entirely eradicated, that seeks the blank page, stage, and screen as the apotheosis of modern art.10 Quadrat I + II indulges this impulse more freely than any other teleplay.

Yet there is also an equally persistent counterimpulse that pulls Beckett away from the abyss of silence and nothingness. Even his most radical state-ments in the 1937 letter to Kaun are followed immediately by a concession to the implausibility of a “literature of the unword”: Of course, for the time being we must be satisfied with little. At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All. (172) Here Beckett acknowledges “that final music or that silence” beneath words, the Schopenhauerean musical essence. Ideally one could access the underlying “All” directly, without mediation. Music enjoys such direct access; writing does not. For all his attraction to the former, however, Beckett already understood in 1937 that his chosen path would be the latter. His own access to the depths beneath words would require passing through words. Of course, his presumption that what “underlies All” is either music or silence meant that he would never be able to express those depths verbally. The excavatory process is doomed a priori because the medium of expression inevitably corrupts that which the artist is trying to express. But the writer, like the painter, remains compelled to express, as Beckett asserts most memorably in Three Dialogues:

“The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (139). The ineffable will always remain just that, but the artist remains obligated to eff it anyway.11

Beckett’s most fitting expression of the artist’s compulsion to express the inexpressible comes not from Three Dialogues, but from a preparatory letter to Georges Duthuit, recently reprinted in Gontarski and Uhlmann’s Beckett After Beckett. In the months prior to their published conversations for the

138 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren December 1949 issue of transition, Beckett and Duthuit exchanged a series of deeply theoretical correspondences over the nature of art and its demands upon the modern artist. In the most memorable passage from his March 9–10, 1949, letter, Beckett ejaculates, “If you ask me why the canvas doesn’t remain blank, I can only invoke this clear need, forever innocent, to fuck it with color, if need be through vomiting one’s being” (20). I cannot think of a more appropriate description for Quadrat I + II than this. Beckett treats television as a blank canvas, going so far as to reproduce a pale and empty square on screen. According to Beckett’s most radically nihilistic theories, the quadrangular canvas should remain blank, unstained by expression, purely and perfectly ineffable. But because he is an artist, Beckett cannot resist the urge to eff the canvas—with color no less. What exactly this ineffable gesture is meant to signify is unnamable by its performers and directors and unknowable by its critics (and probably by its author, too). However, even in his most extreme renunciation of expression for television, Beckett’s void is not entirely devoid. The component parts of Quadrat I + II are nonverbal but still minimally expressive, and these televisual expressions in turn provide the raw material for interpretation, the other side of the artistic transaction.

Viewers may choose to receive the teleplay “aisthetically,” as Voigts-Virchow advises, or they may choose to fill its gaps with meaning as so many erstwhile critics have done. Either way, Beckett’s minimal artistic obligation has already been discharged when he fucks Quadrat I + II with color.

Notes

1. Since this wordless teleplay required no translation, the English premiere by BBC

2 on December 16, 1982, simply rebroadcast Beckett’s German production.

2. The critical confusion over the teleplay’s nomenclature is due in large part to publisher’s confusion over its provenance. My source text in The Complete Dramatic Works retains the title Quad, even though it reports, “Quad was first transmitted in Germany by Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1982 under the title Quadrat 1 + 2” ( CDW 450). However, the videotape of that performance that I have viewed uses the title Quadrat I + II and cites 1981 as the year of production.

Beckett himself even reverted to the truncated sobriquet Quad on occasion, before and after broadcast, rather than the more cumbruous full title.

Nevertheless, my study opts for Quadrat I + II as the default title, since this is the precise credited name for the teleplay Beckett actually broadcast. I use the title

“Quad” (in quotation marks, denoting its provisional status as a work-in-progress) only when explicitly referring to Beckett’s preproduction conception, as distinct from the actual teleplay that he directed and broadcast. I only defer to Quad (italicized) when quoting others who use that title to denote the final work.

3. Beckett’s assistant on the SDR production was Bruno Voges.

Quadrat I + II: Eff It with Color 139

4. In “A Poetry of Moving Images,” Martin Esslin identifies the percussion instruments used in Quadrat I + II as a Javanese gong, an African woodblock, an African talking drum, and a wastebasket. According to Esslin, Beckett himself played the wastebasket (72). However, the closing credits of the German production list the percussionists as Gyula Racz, Hans-Jochen Rubik, Jörg Schäfer, and Albrecht Schrade.

5. The performers for Quadrat I + II were Helfrid Foron, Jürg Hummel, Claudia Knupfer, and Susanne Rehe.

6. See Appendix C of The Intent of Undoing (199–208).

7. For a thorough analysis of “J.M. Mime,” see Anna McMullan, “Samuel Beckett’s

‘J.M. Mime’: Generic Mutations of a Dramatic Fragment,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hu i 16 (2006): 333–45.

8. At least he seems to have said it, or words to a similar effect. Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography ends with this quotation attributed to Beckett: “‘I couldn’t have done it otherwise. Gone on, I mean. I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence’” (640).

9. This impulse may partially account for his preference for silent films over talkies.

His application in 1936 to work with the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was based upon his continuing faith in the already-outdated mode of silent film.

He explained in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy that “‘a backwater may be created for the two-dimensional silent film that had barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped. Then there would be two separate things and no question of a fight between them, or rather of a rout’” ( Damned 213). Beckett still had not abandoned this line of argument thirty years later, though by then it could come across as crotchety and stale. In her autobiography, Siân Phillips recalls a drunken night with Beckett and Peter O’Toole in a flat in Manchester Square: “[T]hrough a haze of tiredness and boredom I heard Mr Beckett say, [‘] Godot can never be filmed. No film with dialogue has ever succeeded. Buster Keaton is the only film actor worth considering.’” Given the fact that this sweeping dismissal was issued in the presence of O’Toole, a considerable film star and Phillips’s husband at the time, she can be forgiven her own dismissive response: “Sitting there, slightly outside the adoring throng at the great man’s feet, I thought, ‘Oh puhleez. Give me a break’” (190).

10. For the most complete analysis of the nihilist impulse running throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, see Shane Weller, A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (London: Legenda, 2005).

11. See Beckett’s Watt: “… what we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happlily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail” (62).

CHAPTER 7

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht
und Träume

Surely no passage from late Beckett is cited more frequently than the motto from Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (89).

These lines perfectly capture Beckett’s inexhaustible devotion to exhaustion, displaying his condensed late prose style while reiterating his resilience to keep going on in the face of failure. Though it is not certain that Beckett regarded the final production of Quadrat I + II as a failure, there can be no doubt that he was greatly disheartened by his efforts to make this “crazy TV piece” (Harmon 383), so much so that he threatened more than once to abandon television and directing forever. Nevertheless, he pressed on to complete production in June 1981. By May 1982, he was already writing warmly again to Dr. Müller-Freienfels at SDR: “‘I often think of you all and wish I could look forward to being with you again. But I fear there is not much invention left in me, crazy or otherwise. Though I keep trying’” ( Damned 599). Rather than resign in frustration over his difficulties with Quadrat I + II, Beckett responded as he had after his disappointing experience on Film, determined to try again and to fail better. He succeeded with Nacht und Träume.

Beckett followed the colorful frenzy, amnesia, and aphasia of Quadrat I +

II with a slow, nocturnal, meditative piece that contains few words but an astounding number of echoes and afterimages. Borrowing the concept from Bergson, Gontarski and Uhlmann identify the pervasive resonance of afterimages in late Beckett: “If the image occupies a space between subjects and objects, the afterimage occupies a space that is not only between different texts, things, and people, but also within those things, something that is there, but not fully present. It is something that lingers, haunting, no longer there but all the more there in not quite being absent” (4). Nacht und Träume is haunted by an astounding number of such afterimages. It marks a return to the art of memory and the memory of art. The piece reflexively interrogates the nexus between memory, dream, and creative imagination. It also

142 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren restores the intertextual, countertraditional tension that animated Beckett’s earlier work for television. In fact, he never flung his allusive nets wider than in his fifth teleplay, ensnaring not only Franz Schubert’s Lieder, but also Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Gospels, and traditional Christian paintings by the Old Masters. Nacht und Träume is also notable for the contemplative tone with which it engages these sacred sources. As a young critic, Beckett had compared art to the act of prayer. He begins “Humanistic Quietism,” his 1934 review of Thomas MacGreevy’s poetry, by asserting, “All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer” (68). Two years later, during his formative emersion in German art collections, he elaborated on this analogy with regard to painting: “‘The art (picture) that is a prayer sets up prayer, releases prayer in the onlooker, i.e. Priest: Lord have mercy upon us. People: Christ, have mercy upon us.’” Knowlson glosses this surprisingly pious diary entry by explaining, “This is an attitude that few readers will associate with Beckett, yet it was essential to his view of art at the time, whether this was the art of the writer, painter, or musician” ( Damned 222). It is important to note that his view of art as prayer was always applied at the time to the work of others. However, in Nacht und Träume the analogy seems equally applicable to his own work. The apparently aberrant “televangelism”

of the piece may be one reason why critics have generally shied away from it, too embarrassed to comment upon Beckett’s apparent lapse in taste. Even a dependable champion like Martin Esslin concludes that the teleplay is “for my taste, somewhat too sentimental” (“Towards” 46). Nacht und Träume does lack the ironic detachment one customarily associates with Beckett’s treatment of sacred subjects. Nevertheless, his softened tone should not be mistaken for a weakening of his religious skepticism. This teleplay is indeed the best example in the entire Beckett canon of art as prayer; yet the prayer it is modeled after most visibly is Christ’s plea for deliverance in the Garden of Gethsemane—a plea that was fatefully denied, initiating the Passion. In other words, Nacht und Träume ultimately illustrates the aesthetic principle of art as unanswered prayer.

* * *

A summary of the teleplay’s action may sound complicated, but the phenomenological effect is simple and poignant. Nacht und Träume fades up to reveal “a dark empty room lit only by evening light from a window set high in back wall” ( CDW 465).1 The sole sign of life is an obscure male figure in the lower-left quadrant of the screen. He is referred to in the script as

“Dreamer” or “A,” though his name is never spoken during the play. He sits in “Right profile, head bowed, grey hair, hands resting on table” ( CDW 465).

Slowly the sound of a male voice becomes audible, humming the last seven

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 143
bars of Schubert’s Lied, “Nacht und Träume” (“Night and Dreams”). The evening light fades out, and then A sings the final verse: “Holde Träume, kehret wieder!” (“Sweet dreams, come again!”).2 He slumps asleep on the table and begins to dream. A reverse image of Dreamer then emerges in the upper-right quadrant of the screen.3 This figure, “faintly lit by kinder light than A’s,” is designated in the script as “His dreamt self (B)” ( CDW 465). A series of gestures then follows with unmistakable sacramental significance. An androgynous hand “draped in blue” descends from the darkness above and comes to rest upon B’s head. He looks up, and another hand gives him sup from a cup and then wipes his brow gently with a cloth. According to the script, “B raises his head further to gaze up at invisible face” ( CDW 466). Then he extends his hand upward, where it is joined by the helping hand from above. He clasps the hand and rests his head upon it. The embrace is completed when the other hand descends again to rest upon B’s head. The dream fades out, the evening light fades back up, and the entire sequence is repeated again, with one important variation. In the “Re-action,” the camera moves in for a close-up of the dream. This move entails “losing A,” but in the process the spectator gains a much clearer vision of B’s mime with hands, cup, and cloth. Finally the camera withdraws, “recovering A” ( CDW 466). The dream fades out, and then A fades out as well, completing the teleplay. This miniature nocturne is as brief as it is obscure, lasting less than twelve minutes. Nevertheless, Dr. Müller-Freienfels informed Beckett in June 1983 that the original broadcast was viewed by an audience of two million ( Damned 600).

Like the previous teleplay, Nacht und Träume was derived in part from a much earlier mime. In 1954 Beckett conceived a mime called “Mime du rêveur, A” (“Dreamer’s Mime, A”).4 His original plan was to write a pair of mimes, A and B, but after heavy revisions to A, he abandoned the project before composing B. The extant mime involves a man alone in a room who busies himself with various objects related to sight: cleaning his glasses, examining a photo, peering by match-light through a magnifying glass. Apparently dissatisfied by these ineluctable modalities of external vision, he pulls out a syringe and injects himself to sleep. Though the thirty-second dream mime (B) was never written, this inner vision must have been inspirational, for immediately upon waking Dreamer (A) scribbles notes in a notebook. He then withdraws an even larger syringe and returns to sleep for sixty seconds.

After this dream, A consults a mirror (a reflexive object of vision, much like the dream itself ) before producing an even larger syringe for an even longer dream. This final dream was scheduled to play through to completion, until B (the dreamt self ) collapses, concluding the piece. Ackerley and Gontarski offer thoughtful analysis in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, suggesting that “Mime du rêveur, A,” together with its completed contemporaries

144 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Act Without Words I and II, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape, “form, if not a series, then a cluster.” After perceptively pointing out several cross-references among the cluster, they conclude, “Yet despite attempts to pattern it,

‘Dreamer’s Mime’ remains diffuse, a draft whose images never coalesce. Its chief interest is in how it anticipates the plays to come” (371–72).

Ackerley and Gontarski never mention Nacht und Träume in their entry on “Mime du rêveur, A,” but the teleplay surely deserves admission as a belated entry to the cluster. The earlier mime directly anticipates a number of the later work’s features. Obviously, the dream motif is common to both, as are the designations of A for the Dreamer and B for his Dream. The original mime does not announce B as A’s alter-ego or “dreamt self ” as explicitly as Nacht und Träume’s script. However, the fact that Mime-A administers his final (lethal?) self-injection as an immediate response to staring into the mirror suggests that, like Teleplay-A, he prefers dreams over waking life, in part because dreams provide an ideal escape from the dirty realities of the self. As with his metamorphosis of “J.M. Mime” into Quadrat I + II, Beckett dismembers a number of excess appendages before reanimating “Mime du rêveur, A” as Nacht und Träume. All the stage business with ocular props and inessential movement is refined out. The dream sequences are also distilled down from three to two. The basic premise and structure are retained, but for radically different effects. What finally permits the diffuse patterns of “Mime du rêveur, A” to coalesce into Nacht und Träume is Beckett’s resumption of intertextual engagement. This strategy of confronting a traditional source work, only to decompose and recompose it through subversive re-imagination, provided much of the animating conflict for Ghost Trio and …but the clouds… . Beckett essentially abandoned that strategy in Quadrat I + II, but he returns to it with renewed eclecticism in Nacht und Träume. When Beckett pulled the thirty year-old “Mime du rêveur, A” manuscript from his dusty shelf, he also returned to several well-thumbed works nearer to hand: his Schubert books and records, his Dante, his Bible, and his art catalogues from museums and galleries across Europe.

* * *

Those who knew Beckett best attest that Schubert was his favorite composer and that Schubert’s Lieder held an especially dear place for him. Edward Beckett recalls in the foreword to Mary Bryden’s Samuel Beckett and Music how his uncle would frequently sing Schubert songs while accompanying himself on piano (v). Anne Atik reports that most evenings she and Avigdor Arikha spent with Beckett would include listening to classical music records, and Schubert was always their friend’s composer of choice. He was particularly devoted to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s recording of Die Winterreise,

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 145
accompanied by Gerald Moore. Atik recalls one representative evening spent in the thrall of Schubert: “A. [Arikha] put on Hans Hotter singing Der Leiermann, S. [Beckett] preferred Fischer-Dieskau, ‘at the end there’s a real cry, he cries out.’ We put on Fischer-Dieskau to compare. At the end, the cry, a shudder. S. looked at me, there it was. Nodded. Too moved to talk” (102).

When Beckett was not singing Schubert or playing him, on piano or stereo, he was apparently studying him. Knowlson informs us that Beckett kept a copy of Otto Erich Deutsch’s exhaustive biography, Schubert, die Dokumente seines Lebens, in his Paris library, and Gerald Moore’s The Schubert Song Cycle and Thoughts on Performance in his Ussy cottage ( Damned 742n5). Even without this insider information, Beckett’s interest in the composer can be gleaned directly from his work. “Death and the Maiden” is incorporated prophetically into the radio play All That Fall, and the same piece was used to introduce MacGowran Speaking Beckett, with Beckett himself playing a small part in the musical performance.5

Nowhere is Beckett’s debt to Schubert more pronounced than in his 1983
teleplay. His original working title for the piece was “Nachtstück” ( Damned 599). This title may have been used generically to denote a “Night Piece” or

“Nocturne.” Alternately, the title may indicate that Beckett first planned to use a different source text from Schubert, namely the Lied “Nachtstück.”

Johann Mayrhofer’s lyric for this song is consistent in certain basic ways with

“Nacht und Träume,” the piece Beckett eventually preferred. Both are moon-bathed nocturnes punctuated by Romantic agony to escape the hardships of human life. “Nachtstück” seeks permanent escape through the final slumber of death. By the end of the song, that wish has been fulfilled: When mist spreads over the mountains
and Luna contends with the clouds,
the old man takes his harp and strides,
and into the forest sings, and low:

O holy night!

Soon shall it end.

Soon shall I sleep that long slumber
that will free me from all grief.

Then the green trees murmur:

Sleep sweetly, you good old man;
the grasses whisper, waving on:

We will cover his resting place;
and many a sweet bird calls:

O let him rest in his grassy grave!

The old man listens, and is still,

Death has bowed before him. (1–16)6

146 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren The Lied that Beckett ultimately opted for draws from the same prototypical Romantic motifs but shifts the emphasis away from easeful Death toward a different escape route—Dreams. Venerable music scholar John Reed makes the grand claim that “Nacht und Träume” is “the most Romantic song Schubert wrote.” He explains, “Here is the musical equivalent of the gibbous moons and moon-haunted landscapes that permeated the imagination of Samuel Palmer and Caspar Friedrich, the first deeply felt expression in music of that sense of mystery and the infinite which heilige Nacht [holy night] conjured up in the breast of every Romantic” (339). Beckett’s attraction to Romantic composers is beyond dispute, and for that matter, so is his attraction to Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich, whose iconography famously inspired the stage imagery for Waiting for Godot ( Damned 342).

However, without disputing Reed’s analysis, it seems that Beckett’s attraction to this particular Lied had less to do with its overt Romanticism than with the disappointed longing in its conclusion.

Paul Lawley has observed, “The structure of feeling which informs

[Schubert’s] songs is characteristic of, and even constitutive of, Romanticism—especially German Romanticism. But the sense that the comfort of company is itself the occasion for suffering is also something we recognise in Beckett” (258–59). That kindred spirit of suffering is most pronounced in Nacht und Träume, where Schubert’s Lied resists the easeful consolation often offered by Romantic escapism. Matthäus von Collin’s lyric for “Nacht und Träume” declines the neat resolution of Mayrhofer’s “Nachtstück”:

Holy night, down you sink;
down too float dreams,
as your moonlight through space,
through the silent hearts of men.

To these they hearken, joyful;
crying out, when day awakes:

Come again, holy night!

Sweet dreams, come again! (1–8)7

The relief achieved at the end of “Nachtstück” is withheld at the end of “Nacht und Träume,” as the spiritual sustenance once provided by dreams is withdrawn, leaving the woken dreamers to suffer in the cruel light of day. This harsh conclusion prefigures a distinctly post-Romantic agony, as in the quintessentially Modernist closing lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock”:

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 147

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (129–31) In Eliot’s rendering human voices break the dream’s spell, while for Collin the dreams recede of their own accord; but the effects for the woken dreamers are more similar than one might expect. Granted, Eliot’s poem suggests a broken faith with illusory dreams, whereas Collin’s lyric still openly pines for the dreams’ return. Nevertheless, both poems end with the dreams dispelled and the dreamers abandoned. Perhaps the dream will return, perhaps it will not; in either case, the hard knowledge remains that the dream’s solace can be retracted at any moment.

Admittedly, the piercing beauty of Schubert’s score works in part to miti-gate Collin’s lyrical distress. In a book Beckett surely consulted, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Schubert’s Songs: A Biographical Study, the renowned vocal-ist beams over the “unreal beauty” of “Nacht und Träume,” “until the music whispers away into nothingness. As it finishes, the singer seems to be kneel-ing down in prayerful meditation” (220). Beckett may have responded directly to Fischer-Dieskau’s prompt in his design for Nacht und Träume. He clearly shares the impression of the music and vocals as prayerful meditations, but he also recognizes that the lyrics threaten the potential tranquility of this closing supplication. Beckett’s adaptive strategies all work to exacerbate the very threat that Schubert had sought to ameliorate. As in his manipulation of Beethoven in Ghost Trio and Yeats in …but the clouds… , Beckett breaks faith with his Schubert source text, rearranging “Nacht und Träume” for an effect distinctly different from that of the original.8 First, he chooses one of the more wrenching lyrics Schubert ever set to music. Then he accentuates the lyrical anguish by removing Schubert’s uplifting score, forcing the vocal to stand without the spiritual crutch of music. Finally, he quotes only the song’s closing line, “Holde Träume, kehret wieder!” (“Sweet dreams, come again!”), thus concentrating attention upon the trauma of being abandoned by Träume.

These creative revisions all work in concert to emphasize the dream’s precarious instability and unreliability. If Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume” is a prayerful meditation, then Beckett’s Nacht und Träume is an unanswered prayer.

As a music lover, Beckett seems to have been enamored with all the various moods of Schubert, but as an artist, he was especially inspired by Schubert at his most proto-Modernist. His selection of “Nacht und Träume” is significant because, as a student of the Lieder-Master’s work, he well knew that Schubertian suffering, though unfailingly moving, was not always consonant with Beckettian suffering. Beckett certainly shares Schubert’s emphasis upon

148 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren the agonizing pain of this world, but he does not share the enduring faith, evident in much of the composer’s work, that pain will be divinely redeemed.

A good representation of Schubert’s personal religious devotion can be found in his poem “My Prayer,” which Beckett would have known from Deutsch’s biography. The imagery of the first two stanzas is particularly resonant: With a holy zeal I yearn

Life in fairer worlds to learn;

Would this gloomy earth might seem

Filled with Love’s almighty dream.

Sorrow’s child, almighty Lord,

Grant Thy bounty for reward.

For redemption from above

Send a ray of endless love. (1–8)9

Schubert’s “holy zeal” is unequivocal in this poem from his own hand, and his faith in divine consolation is equally evident from many of the poems by other authors that he selected for musical arrangements. It is particularly telling, then, that Beckett bypassed lyrics of this pious ilk in favor of “Nacht und Träume,” a song with all the Romantic hallmarks that Schubert helped define, but without the lasting release promised, and elsewhere fulfilled, by death’s heavenly reward. Mary Bryden’s wise caveat about musical quotation in Beckett is particularly apropos in this context. In Samuel Beckett and Music she cautions against “considering music as a consolatory option,” observing that most often “the identity of music in Beckett’s work—I refer here to the use of instrumental musical fragments—is that of an autonomous, mysterious presence. It is never a rapturous or transformatory force. It may even be a source of suffering or melancholia in itself, for, in its associative power, it affords a means of reliving a lost moment” (30). Just so in Nacht und Träume, where Schubert’s Lied is incorporated in such a way as to undermine its potentially redemptive qualities. Beckett’s initial artistic breakthrough in the teleplay was his decision to vivify “Mime du rêveur, A” by superimposing a Schubertian dialectic upon the existing dream-mime structure. His next advance came through his discriminating selection of “Nacht und Träume” as source text, a Lied whose lyric already invites critical meditation upon the allure of “night and dreams.” His dialectic with Schubert was then complicated further by decomposition and recomposition techniques that exploit the dream’s vulnerability for dissolution and expose the dreamer’s vulnerability for disillusion.

* * *

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Dreams feature prominently in several Beckett works, and the uncanny nature of his drama has often led to comparisons with dreams. For all that, Nacht und Träume is his only completed play that explicitly enacts a dream within the drama. Even here, however, the attribution is not as straightforward as it purports to be. Can the dream in Nacht und Träume really meant to be understood as such? The answer is not so obvious, despite the title ( Night and Dreams) and the dramatis personae (Dreamer, Dreamt Self ). For if A is in fact dreaming, then he possesses an unusual degree of conscious control over a process that is supposed to be involuntary. The whole basis for Schopenhauer’s privileging of dreams over imagination in his important

“Essay on Spirit Seeing” is their purely involuntary nature. He argues, Our graphic ability in the dream far and away surpasses our power of imagination. In the dream every object of intuitive perception has a truth, perfection, completeness, and consistent universality down to its most accidental properties, like reality itself, from which the imagination is infinitely remote. And so, if only we could select the object of our dreams, reality would furnish us with the most marvelous spectacles. (230)

Though Bergson later shifts the terms of inquiry in Matter and Memory, he retains Schopenhauer’s privileging of the involuntary (“spontaneous recollection”) over the voluntary (“learnt recollection,” or habit). Proust then transfers these principles to the aesthetic realm, finding all the marvels Schopenhauer attributed to involuntary dreams in the Bergsonian involuntary memories that inspire art. As a descendent in this genealogy of memory, Beckett follows Proust in condemning voluntary memory for its deadening habits and in lauding involuntary memory as the catalyst for true art. A useful synthesis of these various principles, which brings together dreams and art as the twin children of involuntary thought, can be found in Bert O. States’s provocative study, Seeing in the Dark: Reflections on Dreams and Storytelling.

States announces in the introduction, “I take the position that art and dreaming are, in principle, the same activity in that they involve the same or highly similar mental processes (the production of images and narratives based on human experience) and that art is no more elective, or voluntary, for the human being than dreaming” (2).

The inspirational tenor of A’s somnambulistic perceptions seems at first to affirm the privileged position of dreams as an exalted form of involuntary memory. And yet the so-called dream in Nacht und Träume also exhibits several corrupt symptoms of Habit. For example, consider the important difference in sequence between Collin’s original lyric and Beckett’s teleplay. In Collin night descends first, followed by dreams; the dreamers listen with joy

150 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren to their dreams and then cry when daylight comes, begging, “Sweet dreams, come again!” Beckett crucially reverses the order, having A sing the line

“Sweet dreams, come again!” before each appearance of the dream. This new sequence has the dream arrive “on cue” immediately after being hailed by Dreamer, suggesting that B’s mime is not an involuntary dream but rather a consciously conjured and carefully choreographed performance. In fact, one of the most distinguishing features of Nacht und Träume’s dream is the very un-dream-like control that A exercises over it. As Eric Prieto notes, “The unique feature of the musical ceremony in Nacht und Träume is that, as far as we can tell, it always works” (234). Gilles Deleuze refers even more explicitly to the voluntary constructedness of the ceremony: “[T]his dream has to be made. The dream of the exhausted, insomniac, or abulic person is not like the dream of sleep, which is fashioned all alone in the depths of the body and of desire; it is a dream of the mind that has to be made, fabricated” (“Exhausted”

171–72). Just like in …but the clouds… , the protagonist has mastered the habitual process of fabricating certain obsessive images. M has learned how to conjure faint memories of W’s face at will, and A has learned how to conjure obscure dreams of helping hands at will. Both M and A establish patterns and rehearse them multiple times. But neither can finally experience his successful fabrications as anything but failures, so far short do they fall from the consolations being sought.

Though A’s voluntary control over B’s mime means that it cannot properly be regarded as a dream in the strictest sense, it nevertheless satisfies the basic dream drives articulated by Freud. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the B
sequence is a fairly cut-and-dried wish-fulfillment fantasy. B enacts A’s fundamental desires for companionship, affection, caress, warmth, balm, and nourishment. A’s most basic wishes suggest a regression to infancy and to the ideal care of the Mother: he imagines a looming presence descending to give him drink, pat him with a cloth, and hold him until he goes to sleep. No complicated understanding of The Interpretation of Dreams is necessary to decode this performance at its most basic level, which simply expresses a primal plea for love and shelter. There is, of course, a considerable gap in Beckett between wish and fulfillment. Like all of the women who haunt the teleplays, the maternal figure in Nacht und Träume is more conspicuous for her absence than her presence. She may be conjured up through a quasi-dream process, but she remains a silent, an “invisible face” ( CDW 466) only detectable through her hands. Furthermore, she remains forever mediated by the dream, accessible only through virtual reality. The fantasized reunion always dissolves, reminding A that his fantasy is no more than that, teasing him with the prospect of reunion only to reinforce the unbridgeable chasm of alterity which separates desire from its object.

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A controls the dream’s appearance and consciously chooses to re-enact it, knowing that the fantasy is futile and that the effect must only be to remind him of his loss. In this respect Nacht und Träume dramatizes more than Bergsonian/Proustian habit, it also dramatizes Freudian habit, otherwise known as repetition compulsion. Freud famously illustrates this principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with reference to the children’s game fort-da.

Musing over the child’s attraction to games that intentionally reenact separa-tion anxieties from the mother, he suggests, “At the outset [the child] was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not” (16). This same impulse may lie behind A’s manipulation of his quasi-dream sequence.

He masters the mental process of conjuring up a ministering fantasy, a process he repeats compulsively. But the object of desire that motivates the fantasy in the first place—a true reunion with the absent Mother, helping hands and all—remains perpetually deferred, beyond his grasp.

* * *

Any analysis of the latent content of Nacht und Träume’s quasi-dream must emphasize its urge for nurture, comfort, protection, and deliverance. The manifest content is sufficiently rich, however, to accommodate diverse interpretations well beyond a simple longing for A’s biological mother. The religious overtones of the piece are unmistakable, communicated most clearly through the prayerful postures of A and B, the sacramental gestures of the hands, and the incorporation of props pregnant with Christian significance.

Beckett’s debt to Schubert is explicitly acknowledged, but most of his iconography in Nacht und Träume is drawn from other Christian sources, literary, biblical, and painterly. His greatest literary inspiration comes, unsurprisingly, from Dante. Simply put, no author meant more to Beckett than Dante, and no author exerted more direct influence over his own work. Daniela Caselli’s painstaking analysis in Beckett’s Dantes proves just how pervasive the divine Florentine’s presence is in Beckett’s fiction and criticism. Dante also exerts visible influence over the drama, particularly in the infernal routines of suffering and the purgatorial sense of punishment toward some unfathomable and infinitely remote end. Given Beckett’s darker sensibilities, he was instinctively drawn more to the two bleaker books of the Commedia, Inferno and Purgatorio. He would certainly have agreed with Schopenhauer’s assessment in The World as Will and Representation: “For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? And indeed he made a downright hell of it. On the other hand, when he came to the task

152 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren of describing heaven and its delights, he had an insuperable difficulty before him, just because our world affords absolutely no materials for anything of the kind” (I.325). Challenging as it may be to shape Paradise from the muck-heap of this world, Dante surely rose to the occasion as effectively as any poet before or since. So when faced with the insuperable difficulty of enacting a holy vision in Nacht und Träume, Beckett instinctively turned to Paradiso for his model.

The opening lines of the first canto establish a number of important motifs that will be repeated throughout the culminating book of the Commedia: His glory, by whose might all things are mov’d, Pierces the universe, and in one part

Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less. In heav’n, That largeliest of his light partakes, was I,

Witness of things, which to relate again

Surpasseth power of him who comes from thence;

For that, so near approaching its desire

Our intellect is to such depth absorb’d,

That memory cannot follow. Nathless all,

That in my thoughts I of that sacred realm

Could store, shall now be matter of my song. (I.1–11)10

Paradiso radiates with the light of God’s love. Of course, not all parts of the universe enjoy this enlightened proximity to God. Darkness is necessarily the dominant tone of Inferno, literally describing the scarcity of light in these lower realms removed from God, but also metaphorically representing the evil of the world and the ignorance of humankind. Purgatorio depicts a world tugged between darkness and light, dominated by “shades of the colour grey”

( CDW 408). Even in Heaven, according to Dante’s carefully schematized system, some circles enjoy greater light than others, depending upon their relative closeness to God. One of the dominant motifs throughout Paradiso, then, is the contrast between relative intensities of light. This technique is intensified in Nacht und Träume, particularly in the contrast between A slumped in darkness and B outstretched in “kinder light” ( CDW 465). Even at its brightest, Beckett’s palette remains much darker than the splendor described by Dante. Nevertheless, just as proximity to God in Heaven “Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less” (I.3), so too is B’s holier position denoted by his relative elevation and luminosity on screen.

Another theme established in the opening lines and reiterated throughout Paradiso is the inability of the poet to capture his experience accurately with words. Words fail Dante, but not merely because of the inadequacy of language so derided by Beckett (see chapter 6). Rather, Dante accepts most of

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 153
the responsibility for failure himself, conceding from the outset that he will fall short of communicating his inexpressible rapture, “which to relate again

/ Surpasseth power of him who comes from thence” (I.5–6). Interestingly, he blames his inadequacies chiefly upon the failure of memory, and if words fail it is only because memory failed first: “For that so near approaching its desire

/ Our intellect is to such depth absorb’d / That memory cannot follow”

(I.7–9). Near the end of Paradiso he apologizes even more fervently for his failure of memory, knowing that he has only remembered a fraction of his true bliss. In the final canto he explains this partial amnesia in terms remarkably prescient for Nacht und Träume:

Thenceforward, what I saw,

Was not for words to speak, nor memory’s self

To stand against such outrage on her skill.

As one, who from a dream awaken’d, straight, All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains Impression of the feeling of his dream; E’en such am I: for all the vision dies,

As ’t were, away; and yet the sense of sweet,

That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart. (XXXIII.52–60; emphasis added) The fundamental failure of memory is a constant theme throughout Paradiso, as well as throughout the teleplays, and it is one of the major themes of the present study. Memory lures with the promise of recovery, but it inevitably breaks that promise, either because it selects the wrong images from the past, or because it only partially recovers what is wholly required, or simply because it provides (like television itself ) a mere semblance of presence to disguise what in fact remains irretrievably absent. Beckett’s exploitation of this theme within the convention-bound medium of television is in many ways highly progressive, but passages like the one above show Dante already establishing a parent theme some six centuries before Beckett’s birth. Once again, Beckett’s radical innovation derives from “making it old anew.” The apt analogy between memory’s shortcomings and the dissolution of dreams directly prefigures his technique in Nacht und Träume. Likewise, words fail A just as they do Dante. But unlike the poet, Beckett’s Dreamer responds by nearly abandoning verbal expression altogether, allowing a snippet from Schubert to say everything about his vision. To be sure, the mood of the teleplay is less ebullient than Paradiso, and A’s torpid response to his dissipated dream hardly matches the sweetness still trickling in Dante’s heart. Nevertheless, Dante provides a welcome example whereby even a vision of Paradise can accommodate imperfection. Memory proves incapable of retrieving the past fully

154 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren and accurately, even for the greatest experiences. Though Nacht und Träume never comes close to approaching Dante’s heroic attempt to recover what is lost, the teleplay does replicate in condensed form the general principle that enfeebled memory, like a broken dream, obscures the beatitudes witnessed by the visionary.

* * *

These examples all speak to Dante’s broad conceptual influence over Nacht und Träume, but Paradiso, together with the Christian traditions from which it is so scrupulously drawn, provided very specific iconographic suggestions for Beckett as well. One such example comes from Canto XXIII, an important section for several reasons. Here Dante first gains the necessary strength to gaze directly upon the blissful face of Beatrice (the kind of revelation often sought and never found by Beckett’s ignoble characters). This canto also crucially features his first glimpses of Christ (the sight of whom makes him swoon) and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary’s exalted position in the Christian faith, particularly in Dante’s Italy, cannot be overestimated. Next to Jesus, she is the purest mortal to have walked the earth, with a soul so immaculate that God deemed her worthy to bear his divine son. She also stands as the archetypal Mother, the universal emblem for all the traditionally maternal virtues longed for by A in Nacht und Träume. From her perch in the upper echelons of Heaven, she radiates beams of love down on all humanity. She also serves as the chief intercessor for souls, protecting her Christian children by appealing on their behalf to God the Father for mercy and grace. Her brilliance is so great that Dante cannot withstand staring at her directly for more than a moment. After witnessing a dazzling crown encircle her, he joins a choir of celebrants who chant songs in her praise (“Regina coeli,” since Schubert’s setting of “Ave Maria” would have to wait another five hundred years). He also joins their gaze upward in the direction of her light, but he only catches a glimpse of her garment. His description depicts her at once as an unap-proachable queen and as an intimate mother:

The robe, that with its regal folds enwraps

The world, and with the nearer breath of God

Doth burn and quiver, held so far retir’d

Its inner hem and skirting over us,

That yet no glimmer of its majesty

Had stream’d unto me: therefore were mine eyes

Unequal to pursue the crowned flame,

That rose and sought its natal seed of fire;

And like the babe, that stretches forth its arms For very eagerness towards the breast,

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 155

After the milk is taken; so outstretch’d

Their wavy summits all the fervent band,

Through zealous love to Mary. (XXIII.110–22)

Nacht und Träume incorporates a number of features from Dante’s first brush with Mary. For one, the teleplay reiterates her elusiveness; her brilliance is too overwhelming to be viewed directly. Indeed the owner of the helping hands is never made visible to A nor to the spectator, and the “invisible face” ( CDW

466) may even remain inaccessible to B as he gazes off screen. Mary’s role as Mother is also underscored in both works through infantilization of the protagonist. In Nacht und Träume as in Paradiso, worshippers look up to Mary for warmth, protection, and nourishment, as completely dependent as suck-ling babies. Furthermore, Beckett may even have intended a subtle Marian allusion through his (admittedly indiscernible) color scheme. Even though Nacht und Träume as broadcast appears dimly in shades of grey,11 Beckett made a point of emphasizing the color blue in his few notes for the teleplay.

On the typescript he calls for a blue screen and “small table clothed in blue for props” (RUL 2465). These details might simply be justified as most conducive to a nocturnal scene. More telling, however, is his direction that,

“Figure to which hands belong draped in blue” (RUL 2465). Beckett was as familiar as Dante with the convention in Christian painting of always depicting the Virgin Mary in a deep blue robe. The poet deflects a direct vision of Mary by drawing attention away from her face to her robe. The playwright seems to reflect this same tactic in his emphasis upon ministering hands draped in blue.

Along these same lines, Dante may also help tease out another production conundrum. Beckett was inordinately concerned with the appearance of those ministering hands. He referred to them cryptically as “sexless hands” in conversation with James Knowlson. In late July 1982 he wrote Dr. Müller-Freienfels that, “‘the sex of the hands must remain uncertain. One of our numerous teasers.’” The next week he elaborated in even more puzzling terms: “‘I think no choice but female for the helping hands. Large but female. As more conceivably male than male conceivably female’” ( Damned 600). Somewhere between settling the matter in August and shooting the teleplay in October, he must have changed his mind again, for the all-male cast list confirms what a viewer could never concretely determine with the naked eye: that the invisible body beneath the indiscernibly blue robe is in fact male. Why would Beckett trouble himself so much to make the hands seem androgynous—especially since all of the overt signs suggest that they are the hands of the (Blessed Virgin) Mother? In all likelihood, he wished to keep the hermeneutic doors open to alternative identities for the possessor of

156 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren those hands. In fact, his careful delineation of the hands as separate entities—

Left (L) and Right (R)—leaves open the possibility that there are two ministers tending to B, not just one, and not necessarily same-sexed ministers at that. This confusion of identity and gender could have been suggested to Beckett by the final cantos of Paradiso, where Dante’s beloved guide Beatrice is supplanted by St. Bernard.

Having ascended to the Empyrean in the previous canto, Canto XXXI affords Dante some dazzling angelic views. Prompted as always by his curios-ity to know more, he turns to question Beatrice, only to discover that she has been replaced by a new guide, St. Bernard:

So rov’d my ken, and its general form

All Paradise survey’d: when round I turn’d

With purpose of my lady to inquire

Once more things, that held my thought suspense, But answer found from other than I ween’d;

For, Beatrice, when I thought to see,

I saw a senior, at my side,

Rob’d, as the rest, in glory. Joy benign

Glow’d in his eye, and o’er his cheek diffus’d, With gestures such as spake a father’s love. (XXXI.49–58) Dante had begun his mystical journey in Inferno with a male guide, Virgil, who was abruptly replaced in Canto XXX of Purgatorio by Beatrice. Now as he nears the completion of his journey, St. Bernard steps in as a late but telling replacement. Having spent thirty-three cantos with his spiritual bride, who introduced him to his spiritual mother Mary, Dante now prepares to meet his spiritual father God through the intercession of a guide who is himself a marriage of masculinity and femininity. Bernard is male, but he is at first confused for Beatrice, not only because he occupies her former position but also because he is robed just as she was. He is distinct from Beatrice because he is older (“a senior”) and because he is not a bride but a father-figure (“With gestures such as spake a father’s love”). However, his privileged position in Heaven is matrilineal, conferred by virtue of his renowned devotion to Mary.12 In short, Dante might be forgiven for confusing Bernard’s identity at first because he represents a synthesis of so many different semblances, both male and female. Beckett intended an analogous effect with his helping hands, implying that L and R are male and female (Bernard and Beatrice as coministers of the B-mime?), or some sort of androgynous amal-gamation of the two.

Bernard seems to have been selected for such a prominent position in the Commedia in part because of his resonant resemblances to other divine figures.

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This iconic significance is emphasized most dramatically after he reveals his identity to Dante. When his new guide announces himself as Bernard, Dante is amazed. He compares his awe to that of a pilgrim who visits Rome to view Veronica’s legendary cloth, containing the “true image” of Christ: Like a wight,

Who haply from Croatia wends to see

Our Veronica, and the while ’t is shown,

Hangs over it with never-sated gaze,

And, all that he hath heard revolving, saith

Unto himself in thought: And didst thou look

E’en thus, O Jesus, my true Lord and God?

And was this semblance thine? So gaz’d I then

Adoring. (XXXI.93–101)

Dante gazes at Bernard with the same adoration that one might gaze at the image of Christ—not Christ incarnate, but his image, once removed and mediated by Veronica’s cloth. Of all the “numerous teasers” in Nacht und Träume, the embedded reference to Veronica may be the most fascinating.

Interviewer Sandra Solov once asked SDR cameraman Jim Lewis if Beckett had elaborated upon his intentions for the helping hands. Lewis let slip the sort of allusion that one suspects Beckett often employed but rarely advertised: “At the moment when they wipe the drops of perspiration from the brow of the character, Beckett simply said that the cloth made an allusion to the veil that Veronica used to wipe the brow of Jesus on the Way of the Cross.

The imprint of Christ’s face remains on the cloth” (379). Beckett offers much more than a passing allusion to Veronica’s cloth in Nacht und Träume; he weaves her cloth into the very fabric of the teleplay, treating B’s mime as a variation on the conceit—a televisual veronica.

Though the Veronica prompt may well have come to Beckett originally via Dante, the life of the legend extends well beyond Paradiso. Tradition has it that, as Christ carried his cross up the road to Calvary, a compassionate woman stepped from the crowd and wiped the sweat and blood from his face.

When she took the cloth away, an exact image of Christ’s face remained imprinted. Presumably this miraculous gesture represented a token of gratitude for Veronica (later canonized by the Church), but it also served the more practical purpose of leaving behind evidence of the true existence of Jesus only a few hours before his death. There is no scriptural support for the Veronica legend, but belief was widespread and fervent in the early centuries of the Christian era. The cloth became one of the most treasured relics of the Church, and the Veronica story is still commemorated by Catholics today in the sixth station of the cross. The height of the relic’s popularity came during

158 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Dante’s time. Pope Boniface VIII commandeered it for St. Peter’s in 1297, where it is still housed today. As Dante chronicles in Canto XXXI of Paradiso, pilgrims came from all over to view the “true image” of their Savior. Without directly addressing the veracity of the legend, the venerable medieval scholar Giraldus Cambrensis speculated that the name “Veronica” was probably a retroactive attribution, assigned to the woman on the basis of her famous relic, a vera icon (in hybrid Latin and Greek), or “true image.” Almost immediately the veracity of the vera icon was called into question, especially with the appearance of competing versions of the cloth, so that now any supposed vera icon (cf. the Shroud of Turin) might be referred to generically as a “veronica.”13

Beckett incorporates the Veronica tradition in his signature countertraditional fashion. Within B’s mime, the allusion is fairly straightforward: the right hand wipes the brow of B as Veronica wiped the face of Christ. This simple reference is complicated, however, by the fact that B is himself a replica of A, an animated televisual veronica. For one familiar with the vera icon conceit, further complications arise from the fact that B is clearly not an exact replica of A, even though televisual technology could easily have produced such a replica had Beckett wished. Is B even played by the same actor as A? In practice the question is unanswerable. A spectator of the 1983 SDR
broadcast could certainly never tell who plays whom, not only because of the murky lighting on A, but also because A shields his face with his left hand, mischievously thwarting any attempt at verifying his identity with B. Even if A and B are taken to be the same person, their actions are certainly not mirror-images of one another, since only B enacts the routine with Veronica, Beatrice, Bernard, or whomever those androgynous hands belong to. If anything, the replicated self comes off far better in Nacht und Träume than the original, and this in itself troubles the theological waters.

The whole purpose of a vera icon is to verify authenticity. St. Augustine observed, “‘We know as little about the appearance of Christ as that of his mother, […] but the need to have authentic images is great’” (qtd.

Eberthäuser 222). In her book Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image, Ewa Kuryluk hypothesizes that revivals of interest in the vera icon, like the fervor in Dante’s time, were always linked to and exacerbated by the proliferation of competing artistic images: “As the number of figurative images of Jesus increased, so did the hunger to see him not as he might have been but as he really was” (28–29). Christian doctrine has always been profoundly conflicted on the issue of images. On the one hand, all humanity can be regarded as descendents of the first veronicas, Adam and Eve: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). On the other hand, this dangerous precedent of image-making can lead to worship of

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 159
the wrong kind, idolatry, a threat so insidious that it is explicitly banned by the second commandment: “You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; / you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God

[…]” (Exodus 20:4–5). God recognizes (belatedly) the risk posed by replicas to outshine the original. But the Christian God is an inveterate creator; he simply cannot resist making images, nor can the creatures made in his image resist following his example. Witness Christ, who applies blood and sweat to a cloth surface to produce his “self-portrait” for Veronica. This iconic gesture is notable not only as one of his last mortal acts, but also as the first work of art in an era of Christian image-making that would flourish for the next two millennia. Because of its divine authority, Veronica’s cloth is presumably exempt from the second commandment’s ban, since it is not a false image but the ultimate “true image.” Nevertheless, the adoration of the veronica described by Dante comes perilously close to idolatry, even if it is in praise of the proper God. After all, a “true image” is an oxymoron; if the true original were present, there would be no need for an image to confirm that the absent one was indeed once present. To worship the replica is to displace the original from its position of primacy.

Beckett displays his familiarity with this long Christian and artistic tradition, but he also “evinces awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again” (“Recent” 70), namely the modern crisis over authenticity. Walter Benjamin was the first to show how the development of mechanical means for perfect image reproduction did not solve the problem of authenticity, but rather invalidated the legitimacy of any work that derived its authority from such claims. In his revolutionary essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he examines the dele-terious effect of mechanical reproduction on traditional high art. Art loses its privileged claim of authenticity once exact replicas can be mass produced and consumed. Benjamin observes, “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. […] The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility.

Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis à vis technical reproduction” (220). The capacity for technical replication erodes the unique presence of the authentic original, leading Benjamin to conclude “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”

(221). The companion trend to this loss of “aura” for traditional art is the emergence of a new modern art—epitomized by film—which does not appeal to authenticity but instead accepts and embraces its own replication:

160 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren

“To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (224). Benjamin could already witness the confirmation of his thesis in film’s explosion of popularity, and his analysis anticipates future trends in the plastic arts as well, like Andy Warhol’s prints.

Benjamin evidently celebrates the emergence of “art designed for reproducibility” as an advance for the proletarian cause. He could not have anticipated the full extent of deracination eventually caused by the inundation of mechanically reproduced simulacra into every facet of contemporary reality.

Beckett had the historical (dis)advantage of seeing the larger trajectory of this authenticity crisis, from the Bible to Benjamin to Baudrillard. Nacht und Träume is informed by the full complexity of this debate. B is a vera icon of A refracted through a late twentieth-century sensibility, a mechanically reproduced simulacrum transmitted to a mass audience of millions through the quintessential postmodern medium of television. Beckett invokes the Veronica legend, but he also revokes its privileges. The veronica is supposed to be a replica that authenticates the true and unique presence of its original.

Beckett transvaluates this arrangement in Nacht und Träume, where the original is subordinated to the replica. A is in every since outshined by his own image B. And yet B, a mechanical reproduction within a mechanical reproduction, stops short of fulfilling Benjamin’s prophecies. Benjamin heralds film as “a tremendous shattering of tradition” and as “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (221). Beckett’s filmic encounter with tradition is far less recalcitrant than Benjamin’s rebellious rhetoric. B’s mime, with its religious symbolism and ascetic mood of meditation, communicates an appreciation for Christian songs, texts, and mythology inconsistent with the tenor of Benjamin’s argument. With respect to the teleplay’s internal dynamics, the original (A) has indeed lost his “aura,” but his haloed replica (B) has visibly found it, if only fleetingly. With respect to its external dynamics, the mechanically reproduced Nacht und Träume does finally reject the faith-based tenets of Schubert, Dante, and the Christian Church; but it does so in a way that affirms and models careful contemplation of those sources, rather than simply shattering and liquidating them.

* * *

Beckett once intimated to Colin Duckworth that, “‘Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar, so naturally I use it’” (18). Years later, near the end of his career, he admitted to James Knowlson, “‘The Bible was an important influence on my work, yes. I’ve always felt it’s a wonderful transcript, inaccurate but wonderful’” (Knowlson and Knowlson 17). Though Beckett turned his back on his Protestant upbringing from an early age, the Bible, Christian mythology, and mystical traditions of the Church left an

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indelible mark on him and on his work. When asked by Charles Juliet if he had freed himself from religious influence, he responded, “‘Outwardly, I suppose. … But otherwise …’” (166). His early references to religion tended to be sardonic, severe, or simply dismissive. Consider the unanswered prayer scene in Endgame, which Hamm concludes by barking, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” ( CDW 119). How different is his treatment of prayer in Nacht und Träume, where the plea for deliverance is still denied, but the supplication itself is depicted with deep solemnity. There was certainly no deathbed conversion for Beckett, but he does seem to have reached a tentative rap-prochement with Christianity. Anne Atik recalls an evening her family spent with Beckett in late 1986 that poignantly captures this softened attitude: S. [Beckett] in a very sad, low voice, “How hard to keep up. One speaks like one used to. Language gone.” I: “Not yours, not gone.” S.: “Language gone.

Heart gone.” At this the girls [Atik’s daughters] and I shout out together, “No!”

We decide therefore to read from the Psalms, show how language doesn’t go just because of age. I brought out the King James, A. [Arikha] the Hebrew Bible. “You read,” he said to me. I refused. “You read, Sam.” Almost shyly, he began, slowly, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” tears in his eyes, our eyes. A. reads the Hebrew. Unutterably moving. (122) In a telling side-note, Atik adds in her journal that the evening ended as it often did by listening to music: “Leave the table; listen to Edward [Beckett]’s tape of Telemann. Then the Doppelgänger, then the Leierman, Nacht und Träume” (122).

I dare not presume what was in Beckett’s thoughts as he read the twenty-third Psalm about divine guidance and comfort, or as he listened to Telemann and Schubert. My present interest is in how Beckett’s lingering engagement with Christianity is reflected in distinct and multifarious ways in the late television work. The clearest evidence of this enduring influence was his lifelong devotion to Christian art. Short as Nacht und Träume is in duration, and slight as its critical attention has been, it nonetheless stands out as one of the richest testimonies in the entire canon to the deep impact of Christian art on Beckett’s work. The teleplay is a virtual palimpsest of source texts, from the

“holy night” Lieder of Schubert, to Dante’s Divine Comedy, to scriptural and apocryphal episodes from Christian mythology. Of all the religious sources invoked in the teleplay, however, the nexus of references with the most visible traces is the Agony in the Garden tradition.

The late Vivian Mercier, who was raised in the same Irish Protestant milieu as Beckett, recognized with familiarity that “all Beckett’s most significant references to Christianity focus upon the Passion of Christ, the pivotal

162 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren scene of the Christian drama, where God sacrifices Himself as Man, for Man”

(368). Evidence abounds throughout the drama, from the manifold references to the crucifixion in Waiting for Godot, to the nominative hammer and nail puns in Endgame, to the “passion of our Joe” motif in Eh Joe, and culminating in the several iconographic allusions to the Passion in Nacht und Träume. Jim Lewis’s disclosure about Veronica’s cloth directly confirms one such reference, but another fundamental reference can be deduced solely from visual evidence, pointing toward Christ’s anguished prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Three of the four Gospels record that, on the eve of the crucifixion, Christ retired to the garden with a few disciples. He instructs them, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch”

(Mark 14:34). Isolated from his companions, Christ begins to pray for deliverance from the sacrifice he knows is near at hand. The specific language of his prayer is especially relevant for Nacht und Träume: “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will”

(Matthew 26:39). In both Matthew and Mark, Christ offers his prayer three times, returning each time to find the disciples sleeping through their vigil.

After the final repetition, the arresting party of Roman soldiers arrives, indicating that Christ’s prayer will not be answered—or rather that the answer is an emphatic “No”—thus setting the Passion into motion.

Of the three Gospel accounts, Nacht und Träume bears closest resemblance to Luke,14 which is worth quoting at length: And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation.

And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down and prayed,

Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.

And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.

And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

And when he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping for sorrow,

And said unto them, Why sleep ye? Rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. (Luke 22:40–46; emphasis added)

This prayer scene, appropriately memorialized as the “Agony in the Garden,”

is an excruciating reminder of Christ’s human frailty; he is afraid, he would prefer not to endure the torture that awaits him, and he pleads to his father to save him from martyrdom. Of course, that reprieve will be denied. Luke already prefigures the Passion in his account, by far the most descriptive in

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the Gospels. It seems odd that Christ would cloak his request for reprieve in metaphor, speaking of his execution as a cup from which he does not want to drink, but the conceit is clearly intended to echo the last supper [“This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:26)] and anticipate the crucifixion [“And the soldiers also mocked Him, coming and offering Him sour wine” (Luke 23:36)]. Beckett incorporates this same property, likewise overflowing with significance, as part of B’s ritualistic mime. God rejects Christ’s prayer, but he does send down a ministering angel to comfort and strengthen his suffering son. Beckett replicates this gesture through synecdoche via the mime’s helping hands. Luke makes no specific mention of a cloth, but he does look ahead to that specific juncture where Veronica will enter the lore when he observes, “His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (22:44). Beckett takes this cue to insert Veronica’s cloth into his “televangelical” version. Even Beckett’s shot sequence in Nacht und Träume might be gleaned from the Evangelist’s particular “framing” of the prayer scene: Luke begins with an “establishing shot” that includes the disciples, then “focuses in” on Christ’s prayer, eventually reaching maxi-mum “close-up” on the prayer’s repetition (“And being in an agony, He prayed more earnestly”), before pulling back to restore the sleeping disciples

“in frame.”

Beckett is by no means the first visual artist to have been inspired by the Agony in the Garden. There is in fact a long painterly tradition of depicting this scene, with its own set of recurring graphic patterns and paradigmatic expectations. As a prodigious student of European art, Beckett was well acquainted with these conventions. To be a student of the Western tradition of painting is by definition to be a student of Christian art. As Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, London, has noted, “All great collections of European painting are inevitably also great collections of Christian art. In the National Gallery, London, roughly one third of the pictures—and many of the finest—are of Christian subjects” (Finaldi 6).

Beckett knew London’s National Gallery well enough to apply for a job as assistant curator in 1933 ( Damned 167–68), and his intimate familiarity with Dublin’s National Gallery is evident from his ongoing correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy, who served as longtime Director.15 He devoted much of his seminal trip to Germany in 1936–37 to viewing dozens of art collections, and he spent the rest of his life frequenting museums and galleries throughout Europe and collecting their catalogues. Beckett’s close friend, the painter Avigdor Arikha, recalls that “Simply looking at paintings without knowing what he was looking at did not satisfy him. He had a passion for scholarly catalogues and acquired them avidly” (Knowlson and Knowlson 144).16 He eventually presented these annotated catalogues to Arikha, whose wife

164 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren describes Beckett’s mind as if it were itself a comprehensive annotated art catalogue: “His visual memory was striking; he remembered paintings of Old Masters which he’d seen in his travels through museums in Germany, France and Italy, those in Ireland and England, their composition and colour, the impact each one had made” (Atik 4).

This vast mental storehouse of artistic images left a profound impact on Beckett’s work, as Dougald McMillan first established in his groundbreaking essay, “Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory.”

And of course the importance of art to Beckett’s own aesthetic sensibility is a central theme in Knowlson’s biography, where he painstakingly inventories the museums, galleries, private collections, and individual paintings of greatest significance to the man and to the artist. The composite portrait that emerges is of an artistic savant with an extraordinary affinity for European art, particularly paintings by the so-called “Old Masters” on Christian themes. This aptitude is on full display in Nacht und Träume. Knowlson’s description of the teleplay acknowledges its debt to Christian art. He explicitly connects the helping hands with the Dürer etching of praying hands that hung in Beckett’s childhood room. He also notes the similarities with traditional artistic depictions of holy visions: “In religious paintings, a vision often appears in a top corner of the canvas—normally the Virgin Mary, Christ ascended in his glory, or a ministering angel. The chalice, cloth, and comforting hand are, similarly, images commonly found in religious paintings”

( Damned 599).

Knowlson points us down the right path, but I would follow that trail farther to its conclusion at the Agony in the Garden. Certain consistent elements can be found in almost any rendition of this particular scene. Beckett’s beloved National Gallery, London, provides a useful cross section of the tradition, housing no fewer than seven Agonies in its permanent collection.17

Each one features Christ, flanked by the sleeping disciples, gazing up in supplication at one or more angels. The angels routinely bear one or more instruments of the Passion. For instance, Giovanni Bellini’s Agony in the Garden (NG726), like Beckett’s “Agony on the Screen,” features a holy vision in the upper-right corner. There an angel appears with a chalice, signifying both the Holy Grail from the last supper and the cup of anguish from Luke’s Gethsemane account. In Andrea Mantegna’s version (NG1417), Christ stares up to the left, where he sees a whole host of angels, equipped additionally with crown of thorns, spear, cross, and cloth—the same extra-Lucan image added by Beckett. Sight lines are also conspicuously manipulated in Agony paintings, instructing the viewer how and where to look. While the sleeping disciples lie with eyes closed in one corner, Christ occupies “center stage”

with wide-eyed alertness, a model of intense concentration. Needless to say,

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he is the primary focus of the scene, yet his fixed gaze also effectively deflects the viewer’s vision upward toward the angel(s). This same technique is adapted televisually in Nacht und Träume, where the camera constantly directs and redirects the viewer’s attention. This rigorous control over vision is highlighted by the close-up repetition of B’s mime, where the camera zooms in on B as if forcibly thrusting the viewer’s face into the opposite corner of the televisual canvas.

Though certain iconographic elements seem mandatory for all renditions, the Agony tradition remains tractable enough for variation within the paradigm. For instance, lighting and color vary widely, even within the finite sam-ple held by the National Gallery, London. The radiant Agony from the studio of El Greco (NG3476) shimmers with vibrant colors, while the copy of Correggio (NG76) plunges the scene into nocturnal obscurity, spotlighting Christ’s face but shrouding the surrounding scene in darkness. Beckett’s influence from the spotlight technique of Caravaggio and Rembrandt is well documented, and in Nacht und Träume he applies that technique televisually in service of the same theme as Correggio.

Of all the paintings I have examined from the collections Beckett is known to have viewed—and doubtlessly, I have seen only a small fraction—
the Agony in the Garden that exhibits the most visual similarities with Nacht und Träume is by Jan Gossaert. This powerful canvas is currently housed in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie (551A), but Beckett would have first seen it in his several trips to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in 1936 and 1937.18 His canvas, like Beckett’s, is dominated by darkness and half-lights. Gossaert’s nocturnal scene ostensibly draws its faint light from the moon, though Christ’s face seems as much a source of light as a reflector for it. Gossaert’s unusually youthful, beardless Christ has the pallor of a corpse, and his praying hands are rendered as precisely as Beckett’s Dürer print. A close look at his face reveals numerous beads of sweat, a detail borrowed directly from Luke and alluded to in Nacht und Träume. The obligatory angel hovers above, accompanied by the comforting (but also ominously prophetic) cloth, while Christ fixes his gaze upon the requisite cup of suffering. Not only are Beckett’s lighting decisions, figural expressions, and Christian iconography perfectly consistent with Gossaert, but so, too, is his arrangement of all these elements upon the visual field. Slumped over in the lower left corner of Beckett’s screen rests A, assuming the same manner and position as a sleeping disciple in Gossaert. In the upper-right corner above A appears B, occupying the same position vis á vis A as Christ occupies vis á vis the disciple. Beckett’s B, like Gossaert’s Christ, is “faintly lit by kinder light” ( CDW 465) as he gazes upward and to the left at a heavenly vision. Gossaert reveals this vision as an angel, whereas Beckett sequesters the “invisible face” ( CDW 466) off screen, but both artists

166 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren inject the indispensable instruments of the Passion from above. Gossaert provides additional figures that Beckett does not, including angel, disciples, and arresting party. But of the elements common to both works—namely the sleeper and the suppliant, their positions with respect to one another upon the canvas-screen, the sight lines, and the primary objects of the gaze—they conform with striking fidelity.

My point here is not to advance Jan Gossaert’s painting as the one “true”

visual model for Nacht und Träume. Beckett’s “Agony on the Screen” draws upon multiple sources (to say the least!) from various artists and media.

Furthermore, as his countertraditional treatment of the vera icon implicitly reminds us, “The danger is in the neatness of identifications” (“Dante” 19).

“True images” always prove untrue, and Beckett’s polymorphous replicas in Nacht und Träume resist monogamous fidelity to any singular influence. As Knowlson rightly cautions in “Beckett’s first encounters with modern German (and Irish) art,” “with a creative mind like that of Beckett, influence is simply too straightforward and too deterministic a concept to be very helpful. Instead, recognition—of affinities and resemblances—is much more appropriate to the ambiguity, subtlety and suggestiveness of his artistic world” (70). In this spirit I offer Gossaert’s Agony as one such recognition of a whole subgenre of paintings whose visible traces remain recognizable in the palimpsest of Nacht und Träume.

Nacht und Träume highlights the impotence and failure of the original Agony in the Garden and thus subverts the tradition’s redemptive agenda.

After all, viewed from its darkest perspective, Christ’s prayer in the garden is a catastrophic failure: his plea to persuade God fails, the prayer goes unanswered, and he proves powerless to forestall his torment. Beckett replicates painterly traditions for depicting the scene by incorporating conventional iconography and arranging his graphic elements on screen after the fashion of the Old Masters. These graphic affinities are subverted, however, by his deft manipulation of the temporal dimension, a televisual tool at his disposal unavailable in the exclusively spatial medium of painting. Beckett reproduces Christ’s vision of comfort in one instance only to have this fantasy fade away in the next instance, exposing its fleeting, illusory nature. For his predecessors, the image of Christ’s prayer had a twofold purpose: to elicit empathy on the part of the viewer for Christ’s agony, and to elicit gratitude for Christ’s sacrifice which redeems all the future agonies of humankind. Beckett’s revisionist contribution certainly shares the first objective, but it lends no credence to the second. His temporal arrangement in Nacht und Träume assures that unrelieved solitude and abandonment prevail. His ultimate emphasis is not upon any future dream of redemption for suffering, but instead upon the

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 167
dissolution of such hopes, leaving the dreamer, like Beckett’s ideal spectator, alone in the darkness after the glowing spectacle fades.

As such, Nacht und Träume constitutes a late revisionist response to the Agony in the Garden tradition, as well as to Schubert, Dante, the Bible, and the Veronica legend. There is no question of choosing between sources; Beckett’s televisual palimpsest is inscribed with them all. Nacht und Träume visibly invokes various Christian sources as surely as it audibly invokes Schubert. But Beckett does not engage the “Old Masters” from the vantage point of a “New Master.” As he allegedly told Israel Shenker when asked about his literary mentor James Joyce,

The kind of work I do is one in which I am not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. His tendency is toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past. […] My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable—as something by definition incompatible with art. (3) This oft-quoted passage is usually enlisted by critics to demonstrate how different Beckett’s characters, scenarios, and literary style are from his predecessors. However, Beckett also extended his zone of impotence and failure to reconsider the work of previous Masters—in literature, music, and painting—retroactively revoking the mastery they supposedly exercised over their material. Beckett’s cultural memory is vast, but it is also shattered into fragments. Anna McMullan’s perceptive comments about postcolonial Beckett apply equally well to countertraditional Beckett.

Within both an individual and a national [read “traditional”] framework, managing memory is the key to constructing history and identity. The narratives of personal or cultural history shape the past according to the exigencies of the present. In Beckett’s work, the personal and cultural past continually returns, but as dislocated fragments, which fail to be assimilated into an “authentic”

identity, history, or language. The transmutation of pedagogic history in Beckett’s oeuvre into the “scraps, patches and rags” of memory involves a radical interrogation of the basic mechanisms whereby identity and authority are constituted. (95)

Beckett’s cultural memory asserts itself with allusive insistence in Nacht und Träume, but only in the form of “dislocated fragments,” robbed of their original authenticity, coherence, and pedagogical or evangelical logic. In this, his last play written specifically for television, Beckett returns once again to the Old Masters in multiple media and “de-masters” them, taking the shattered

168 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren fragments of cultural memory and reshaping “the past according to the exigencies of the present.”

Notes

1. All production descriptions of Nacht und Träume refer to Beckett’s production for SDR, first broadcast on May 19, 1983.

2. Though the voice is not given a separate designation in Nacht und Träume as in other plays, it does seem to operate independently from A. While the vocals are clearly associated with Dreamer (A), the actor playing A does not actually hum or sing. Beckett told Jonathan Kalb that the vocal component for his SDR version “was performed by an amateur singer who worked in the studio’s technical crew and did not want his name to appear in the credits” (254n4).

3. I am suspicious of claims made by previous commentators that Helfrid Foron played both parts in Beckett’s SDR production. In the actual teleplay broadcast, A shields his face with his left hand throughout (a gesture not noted in the published script). This gesture effectively conceals his identity from view, making it impossible to say with certainty whether or not A and B are indeed played by the same person. But the closing credits seem to answer this question, crediting three performers in the piece: Helfrid Foron, Dirk Morgner, and Stephan Pritz. I suspect that Foron plays B, Morgner plays A, and Pritz plays the hands. Beckett unequivocally confirmed to Jonathan Kalb that the man who sang the Lied went uncredited (see note 2). Therefore, the only way Foron could have played both A and B is if the two hands were played by separate actors, which seems absurd but cannot be entirely discounted, since Beckett does assign them separate designations throughout the script—“Dreamt hands R (right) and L (left)” ( CDW 465).

In an August 1982 letter to Dr. Müller-Freienfels, preparatory to the October shooting, Beckett ruminates upon casting the teleplay. Knowlson quotes from this letter, in which Beckett suggests that the piece would not “‘need an actor of

[Klaus] Herm’s importance for a part that requires no acting, but simply a minimum of controlled movement such as a trained mime seems best qualified to provide.’” Knowlson conflates the two parts, stating, “The piece was performed by a mime artist, Helfrid Foron, who had been in Quad” ( Damned 600). Foron certainly met the “trained mime” prerequisite, and there is no doubt that he appears in Nacht und Träume. Dirk Morgner also met the requirement, however, having paced alongside Foron in Quadrat I + II, and there is likewise no doubt that he appears in Nacht und Träume.

4. The entire holograph of the mime is reproduced as Appendix B in Gontarski’s The Intent of Undoing (193–98). For a thoughtful consideration of the piece, see its entry in Ackerley and Gontarski (371–72). They neglect to mention the mime as an inspiration for Nacht und Träume, however Ruby Cohn correctly makes the attribution in A Beckett Canon (374).

5. John and Edward Beckett, who played second violin and flute respectively on the recording for Claddagh Records, informed Knowlson that Beckett played “a

The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume 169
simple pedestal dinner gong, […] giving the right weight to each stroke.”

Knowlson glosses, “As far as we know, this is Beckett’s only recorded musical performance” ( Damned 479). On a separate note, Beckett also considered incorporating Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger” into Film. He ultimately decided against this idea, but David Clark does use the piece in his 1979 remake of the film.

6. These are the complete lyrics by Johann Mayrhofer as reproduced in The Fischer-Dieskau Book of Lieder (New York: Knopf, 1977), 305. Fischer-Dieskau supplies the German lyrics, and George Bird and Richard Stokes provide the English translation.

7. These are the complete lyrics by Matthäus von Collin, again supplied by Fischer-Dieskau and translated by Bird and Stokes (303).

8. Given Beckett’s fervor for Schubert, he was probably aware that the Lied “Nacht und Träume” is itself the product of creative revision on the composer’s part.

Schubert took two different lyrics by Matthäus von Collin, “Nacht und Träume”

and “Nachtfeier,” and compiled a third hybrid version of the two, which he then set to music as “Nacht und Träume.” For a comparison of the three versions and analysis of Schubert’s revisionary practices, see Susan Youens, “Schubert and His Poets: Issues and Conundrums,” The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed.

Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 112–17.

9. Beckett owned the biography in its original German, but I quote from the English translation, Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Erich Blom (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1946), 279.

10. Beckett owned several editions of the Commedia, including translations, though of course he was fluent in Italian. When referring to translations for the benefit of others, he apparently favored the H.F. Cary above all others. Anne Atik recalls,

“he always came back to and gravely commended the Cary translation to me”

(79). Accordingly, all my quotations are taken from that translation.

11. In response to Knowlson’s report that Nacht und Träume’s original broadcast attracted two million viewers, Ruby Cohn adds wryly, “I hope they could see better than I” (375).

12. See John Ciardi’s biographical note in his translation of Paradiso (New York: Mentor and Signet Classic, 1961; New American Library, 2003): “St. Bernard (1090–153), the famous Abbot of Clairvaux, a contemplative mystic and author.

Under him the Cistercian Order (a branch of the Benedictines with a stricter rule than the original order) flourished and spread. All Cistercian monasteries are especially dedicated to the Virgin, and St. Bernard is particularly identified with her worship” (875).

13. For a most useful treatment of the history and significance of the legend, see Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True”

Image (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

14. According to Atik, who sometimes read passages from the Bible with Beckett,

“Sam’s favourite Gospel was Luke” (73). It was certainly the book of most interest to Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, since Luke is the only one of the four Evangelists who claims that one of the thieves crucified beside Christ was saved ( CDW 14–15).

170 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren 15. For a handsome overview of the importance of painting to Beckett in general, and of the pervasive influence of the National Gallery of Ireland in particular, see Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006).

16. Arikha elaborates with a partial list of Beckett’s catalogues: “London, Florence, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Kassel, Leipzig, Dresden, Braunschweig, Erfurt, Vienna, Milan, Dijon, to mention but a few” (Knowlson and Knowlson 144).

17. A number of paintings to which I refer are reproduced in my previous article,

“Nacht und Träume as Beckett’s Agony in the Garden,” Journal of Beckett Studies 11.1 (2001): 60–64.

18. According to Knowlson, Beckett’s Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum catalogue from this period is among the collection he passed down to Avigdor Arikha ( Damned 666n99).

CHAPTER 8

Comédie, Was Wo, and the

Challenges of Screen Adaptation

N acht und Träume was the last play Beckett conceived originally and specifically for television. It was not his final TV project, however.

On his eightieth birthday, April 13, 1986, SDR aired Was Wo, Beckett’s reconceived adaptation of his final stage play, What Where.1 The piece dramatizes the act of remembering as a form of self-interrogation. It also foregrounds memory as a coercible narrative; if one version of events fails to yield the desired results, then one can always recast events and apply new pressures in (vain) pursuit of the right answers. Such are the revisionist tactics pursued by Voice of Bam (V) in What Where, and Beckett takes a page out of this same playbook in revising the piece from stage to screen and back to stage again. Beckett’s previous television work engages with other intertexts, invoking the likes of Beethoven, Yeats, Schubert, Dante, and the Old Masters, only to decompose their works and recompose them for distinctly different ends.

He uses the same subversive strategy in Was Wo but redirects it intratextually upon his own work.

Was Wo is sometimes relegated to a footnote in Beckett studies as the author’s only hands-on transgeneric adaptation of one of his own plays. In fact, he was also heavily involved in the earlier film Comédie, a 1966 French adaptation of Play directed primarily by Marin Karmitz. Though these two screen works are separated by twenty transformative years, they still share many of the same fundamental principles about how best to transfer a play from stage to screen, exploiting film’s technical capacity while preserving the spirit of the original. As models of conscientious adaptation, Comédie and Was Wo offer timely lessons relevant to the controversy still simmering over the Beckett on Film project. Most readers will be familiar with this ambitious project in which Michael Colgan, executive director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, assembled star-studded casts to shoot film versions of 19 Beckett stage plays. The series was released as a DVD box-set in 2001, and it has

172 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren swiftly become the primary vehicle through which thousands of viewers, especially university students, are introduced to Beckett in performance.

Beckett on Film has received a generally chilly reception from critics within the Beckett circle, but its broad “market share” of Beckett in performance continues to expand unabated. The aim of this final chapter is to analyze Beckett’s own successful methods for creative revision and collaborative adaptation in order to glean instructive paradigms, practical and critical, for thinking about transgeneric adaptation.

* * *

The playwright who burst onto the international scene in 1953 with his first produced play was no novice. Waiting for Godot was written by a veteran in his forties, the published author of several books, poems, translations, and critical essays, an artist with firm aesthetic principles already forged before a single word he had written was ever uttered on stage. Accordingly, from the very beginning of his theatrical career, Beckett had distinct opinions about how his plays should be performed. However, he was originally reluctant to interfere much with the practitioners charged with transforming his words into drama. He was content to speak with directors and actors only when consulted, and even then he was notoriously reluctant to engage in exegesis of his work.2 Some of his early aloofness from the postcomposition theatrical process might easily be taken as contempt for directors, actors, and critics for their pernicious corruption of his intentions. Yet some of his early trepidation may also have stemmed from fears that his intrusive presence would only make things worse. For instance, in a letter from December 18, 1956, Beckett expressed confusion over Donald McWhinnie’s decision to use human actors for the animal noises in All That Fall. Yet in the same letter he declines McWhinnie’s invitation to attend the radio rehearsals, explaining, “I have finally decided that I should be very definitely less a help than a hin-drance. I am very slow and go wildly and repeatedly wrong before arriving at something that resembles what I want. I’d only bother and upset you all”

(BBC WAC Beckett File I). Eventually a combination of growing confidence in his theatrical instincts, growing friendship with certain practitioners devoted to interpreting his plays as he wanted, and growing frustration with high-profile travesties of his plays would lead him to take a more active hand in production.

The turning point was Play. S.E. Gontarski argues persuasively in his introduction to Volume IV of the Theatrical Notebooks that “it was Play that was to have the most profound resonances on Beckett’s dramatic art for the next two and a half decades” (xvi). Part of Play’s innovation is unquestionably textual. Beckett’s decision to take what are essentially three monologues and

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 173
splice them together constitutes an authorial move deliberately designed to confuse, a compositional approach he would adopt on principle henceforward and would specifically duplicate a decade later in That Time. Play’s textual disorientation is exacerbated by its mystifying mise-en-scène, consisting solely of three heads atop urns (W1, M, and W2) each shrouded in darkness except when prompted to speak by the spotlight.

The most radical effects of Play are phenomenological, only to be experienced in performance. Most bewildering is its rapid-fire delivery—“spoken with the speed of a machine-gun,” as actor Michaël Lonsdale recalls (qtd.

Gontarski xxviii). While the published script does instruct “Rapid tempo throughout” ( CDW 307), this brief note communicates nothing of the sen-sorial assault experienced by the spectator. One struggles, in what feels like a foredoomed effort, to orient oneself, to understand what is being said, to

“Make sense who may,” as What Where would later put it (414). The spectator is granted (or condemned to, as it were) a second chance at making sense of the play because of another deceptively simple performance instruction.

Near the end of the published script, Beckett inserts a two-word direction that first-time readers might easily fail to register: “Repeat play” ( CDW 317).

There is no ignoring or escaping this outlandish instruction in performance.

During the repetition, as it slowly begins to dawn upon the uninitiated spectator that she has half-heard these same words before, a shudder must pass through her—either in wonder at the audacity of this device, or in annoyance at the imposition. And this realization is inevitably accompanied by a series of internal questions, running parallel to the verbal assault being remounted upon her senses: “How long will this go on? How many times will the play be repeated? Will this ever make sense? When can I escape?” To ask oneself these questions is to find oneself in precisely the purgatorial predicament of the three characters. The play that begins as an afterlife twist on the love-triangle theme gradually becomes a metatheatrical meditation upon the crisis of being stuck as a character in a play, fixed in place, repeating the same lines, activated into existence by the spotlight and de-activated out of existence by the darkness. The play on stage replicates this experience for the spectator off stage, who is likewise disoriented, transfixed in her seat, and trapped in a discomforting pattern devised by someone else and beyond her control.

That controlling presence, represented by the light, seems in one sense to be the mutual victimizer of cast and audience alike, but there is another sense in which both parties are complicit in the torture of one another. If the performers on stage would just stop talking, then the audience could be released from their uncomfortable seats. And if the spectators were not there to watch, then the performers could be released from their torturous urns and from the obligation to express. These are not cute abstractions but literal facts. What is

174 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren more, these bedrock facts are equally true for any live performance of any play by any playwright, though few bother to draw such manic attention to the facts. Thus, Play in performance is, as its title suggests, primarily about

“play,” about the ties that bind performers and spectators together as fellow hostages/torturers in the live performance of a play.

Of course, in reality the hypothetical “uninitiated spectator” of whom I speak rarely attends a Beckett play. He was long ago “damned to fame”; his work is too well known, and spoilers are too legion, for anyone to imagine that many spectators settle into their seats before Play without being fully prepared for the experience that awaits them. What a shame. This was not the case in 1964, however, and perhaps this is why Beckett was more determined than ever that the first productions get these radically innovative phenomenological effects right. Even normally dependable directors and producers balked. For the American premiere at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater, director Alan Schneider acceded to pressures from his producer and actors, slow-ing down the delivery speed and eliminating the repetition.3 For the English premiere at London’s Old Vic Theatre, director George Devine was more faithful to the author’s directions, due in no small part to Beckett’s active participation during rehearsals. Beckett had already been working closely with Jean-Marie Serreau on the Paris premiere of Comédie, and this experience apparently steeled his conviction in the rightness of his instincts about the rapid tempo and repetition. He had found an English champion in Devine, and he was now willing to assert his directions in person to ensure that his vision for Play was not compromised. However, Kenneth Tynan, the respected literary manager of the National Theatre, was appalled by what he regarded as Beckett’s sabotage of his own play’s best interests. He protested to Devine, “‘I trust the play completely, and trust your production of it—up to the advent of the author. What I don’t especially trust is Beckett as co-director’” (qtd. Gontarski xvii). Devine held his ground, however, and the production proceeded according to Beckett’s specifications.4

Beckett’s involvement in the Paris and London productions of Play would prove enormously important on several fronts. Foremost, it gave him the experience and confidence necessary to undertake his own productions in the immediate future. As James Knowlson perceptively observes, This period of intensive collaboration with directors of his plays was vital for Beckett. Above all, it made him appreciate that there were elements that he would never get right until he had staged the plays himself, and that, conse-quently, at some point in the future he needed to take sole responsibility for a production so as to identify the problem areas and ensure that at least one production conformed with his overall vision of the play. ( Damned 461)

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 175

Knowlson places his emphases in all the right places. The Play experiences did indeed lead Beckett to strike out on his own independent productions in the months and years to follow. However, these seminal theatrical experiences also taught him the value of “intensive collaboration” with like-minded directors who were willing to lend their superior directorial experience and technical expertise to help him realize his dramatic vision far more effectively than he ever could have without their assistance. Finally, the row between Devine and Tynan established a pattern of resistance that has resurfaced repeatedly ever since: namely, that Beckett’s plays are sometimes in need of rescue from the playwright. Well-meaning practitioners periodically seek to save the scripts from their author’s misguided dramaturgical impulses. Resistance to Beckett’s original instructions in an effort to “correct” or “improve” the work is especially evident in adaptations to a new genre, where the impossibility of transferring certain stage directions to the screen invites rethinking and revising all of the directions. This tendency to revise Beckett through adaptation is one of the chief charges lodged by its detractors against Beckett on Film. Yet one already finds Beckett resorting to similar revisionist tactics himself in his first transgeneric adaptation, the 1966 film version of Comédie.

* * *

Too little critical attention has been paid to this film and to Beckett’s integral role in its adaptation.5 Comédie was filmed in January 1966, an exceptionally busy time in Beckett’s burgeoning directorial career. At the time he was deeply enmeshed in rehearsals for his French premiere of Va-et-vient ( Come and Go), a reprise of his production of Robert Pinget’s L’Hypothèse (with Pierre Chabert), and a reprise of Serreau’s production of Comédie over which Beckett had assumed stewardship.6 Amid all this production work, he still found time to participate in Marin Karmitz’s film of Comédie. While there is no doubt that Karmitz served as the primary director, there also is no doubt that Beckett’s participation extended well beyond merely lending his blessing to the work. Karmitz’s extensive interview with Elisabeth Lebovici in 2001

makes it clear that the author was present throughout the shooting and that he collaborated heavily with the creative team (especially editor Jean Ravel and sound engineer Luc Perini). When asked about the subject of their initial discussions, Karmitz responded, “First, on the abandon[ment] of filmed theatre. On what cinema, image and editing could bring” (73). In other words, everyone involved, including Beckett, agreed that simply filming a straight theatrical performance of Comédie would have been a mistake. They immediately abandoned strict fidelity to the original in favor of adapting the work in ways that exploited the technical possibilities offered by the new medium.

176 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Incidentally, this same principle may lie behind Beckett’s decision a decade later not to include a filmed version of Play as part of the Shades program. He certainly admired the participants involved in the 1976 Royal Court Theatre production, including director Donald McWhinnie and actor Ronald Pickup, the same director and male lead with whom he eventually worked in Ghost Trio and …but the clouds…. The BBC had initially planned to package this filmed Play as part of the 70th-birthday retrospective, and Beckett assisted by assembling a set of written suggestions for camera use. But these suggestions were apparently not followed, if a BBC requisition form (dated June 16, 1976) is to be trusted: “This play is at present running at the Royal Court Theatre and this will be a straight film version of the theater production, approx. 20 minutes long” (BBC WAC T51/350/1). Beckett never went on record with his official reasons for vetoing Play’s inclusion in Shades—Knowlson vaguely states that he was unhappy with “the poor quality of the film” ( Damned 559)—but in the present context those reasons might be easily surmised. His work with Karmitz, Ravel, and Perini on Comédie taught him the virtues of creative adaptation. These lessons would have been reinforced by the filmed version of Not I, miraculously re-envisioned through the transformative use of camera close-up. Given these positive models for creative adaptation, a straight film of Play, even a perfectly good theatrical production with talented personnel, would have been simply too unimaginative to meet with Beckett’s approval.

The Comédie crew focused their technical innovations in the areas of light, screen image, camera perspective, and sound. The spotlight device which is so central to the stage version of the play is significantly modified for the screen. In the published script, Beckett elaborates upon his original conception: “The source of light is single and must not be situated outside the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims. […] The method consisting in assign-ing to each face a separate fixed spot is unsatisfactory in that it is less expressive of a unique inquisitor than the single mobile spot” ( CDW 318). These theatrical guidelines are abandoned for Comédie’s cinematic translation. In the film the intensity of light is increased upon the speaker, but the other two nonspeakers also remain faintly illuminated on screen most of the time. This alteration compromises the spotlight’s ontological function as singular activa-tor for being-on-stage—no small sacrifice of the play’s original conception.

Yet the filmmakers obviously concluded that such a radical compromise was acceptable because of the fundamental differences between theatrical and cinematic spectatorship. In live performance, audience and actors are always acutely aware of each other’s presence. The spectacle is taking place here and now, in the shared space of the auditorium during the shared duration of the performance. Film, on the other hand, is as dead as theater is live. The action

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 177
captured on screen has already taken place. We experience not the live presence of the actors but their absence. We witness a memento mori, an artifact of expiration. Play on film might more accurately be called Played, for it delivers “dead heads” in past tense, posthumous performances in both the narrative and metacinematic senses. Given all these markers of absence, the filmmakers of Comédie apparently felt the need to assert a counterbalance of presence, albeit illusory, by illuminating all three players on screen at the same time.

All of the players are not visible on screen all of the time, however. There are in fact several instances, especially in the “repeat” section, where only the speaker is visible, either because the other two players are unlit or because an extreme close-up fills the entire screen with the speaker’s face. With hind-sight, Beckett concluded that all three players should always be visible. He communicated this revised policy to Donald McWhinnie in 1976. While McWhinnie was preparing to shoot the Royal Court production for Shades, Beckett sent him suggestions about how best to employ the camera. In a message sent via his agent Warren Brown to producer Tristram Powell, Beckett counseled, “‘About a week ago I sent Donald, at his request, suggestions as to use of camera in PLAY. I hope he will adopt them, but he must consider himself free. I proposed brief close-ups of three faces with only necks of urns showing, but no individual close-ups. The togetherness should never be lost’” (BBC WAC

T51/350/1; emphasis added). Three things are made abundantly clear from this brief but important proviso: 1) Beckett believed that a film adaptation of Play must emphasize the players’ “togetherness” in a fashion distinct from the stage play; 2) he implicitly faults the 1966 film, which observes this “togetherness” inconsistently, when he suggests that McWhinnie enforce the principle uniformly throughout; 3) he insisted that the director must ultimately be free to take or leave the author’s advice—an affirmation of creative freedom which is one of the most important legacies of Comédie.

Another medium-specific motive for revising the function of light in Comédie is the different physical placement of the cinematic audience in relation to the light source. Again, Beckett’s original stage directions insist, “The source of light is single and must not be situated outside the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims” ( CDW 318). In the theater this means that the light source is located between the house and the stage, mediating what the audience can and cannot see. However, in the cinematic auditorium, the primary light source—the film projector—is always located behind the audience, thus placing us on the same side of the light as the spectacle we see projected before us on screen. The filmmakers’ concession to maintain some degree of illumination on W1, M, and W2 throughout seems designed in part to reflect this privileged position of the cinematic spectator.

178 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren All of these valid motives for adaptation notwithstanding, the overriding reason for revising light in Comédie must have been to facilitate the film’s startling innovations in image manipulation and camera perspective. The film begins by displaying all three heads identically on screen—same size, same lighting. However, only a few seconds in this parity is replaced by rapid image variations. Sometimes the three appear in standard medium close-up, other times in long-shot so distant that they are barely recognizable as heads, and still other times in such extreme close-up that the face fills the entire frame.

Most startling, the three faces frequently appear at varying distances all at once, so that one silent player might barely be visible in long-shot, another more discernible in medium-shot, while the speaker takes up a third of the screen in close-up. These dizzying variations of image size and camera perspective are most pronounced whenever all three players are simultaneously lit. Each illuminated face throws the other two into relief against the black background. Every few seconds (or less) these images are then reshuffled into a new juxtapositions of depth and distance. The effect on the spectator is destabilizing, like a visual shell-game that dares the viewer to follow along.

When I refer to the “depth and distance” of the screen images, what I really mean are the illusions of three-dimensional perspective on what is in effect only a two-dimensional screen. It is well established by now that Beckett approached his film and television screens like a painter approaches a canvas. The Comédie filmmakers explode the conventional illusion of three-dimensional perspective in film much like Braque and Picasso did in their Cubist paintings, showing multiple visual planes of a scene all at once. In Karmitz’s interview he describes the labor-intensive method for achieving this unusual effect: “We had another problem, which was to be able to bring the presence of the other two characters on the screen when they were not speaking. I could only manage through some technical trick, which was re-encrusting

[ réincruster] all the three characters in the same image.” When asked by the interviewer if this process amounted to collage, he responded, “Exactly” (75).

Editor Jean Ravel doubtlessly deserves the lion’s share of credit for achieving this Cubist innovation, though Beckett’s conceptual influence seems undeniable. After all, he had been working intensively for months with Pierre Chabert on Pinget’s L’Hypothèse. Pinget’s play contains a single character, Mortin. This character periodically interacts with images of himself in the form of filmed close-ups projected onto screens on stage. These close-ups multiply and appear progressively larger as the play goes along. Facial close-ups of various sizes projected on screen and juxtaposed against one another—
the iconographic affinities between L’Hypothèse and Comédie are too uncanny to be coincidental, and Beckett is obviously the common link between the two. Therefore, the circumstantial evidence points unmistakably to Beckett’s

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 179
pivotal role in adapting these visual concepts from Pinget’s stage play to Karmitz’s film. Of course, he would have had absolutely no idea about how to achieve these effects cinematographically, and here he and Karmitz relied upon the technical ingenuity of Ravel.

Beckett likewise leaned heavily upon engineer Luc Perini to achieve the sound effects he had always imagined for Comédie. He regarded rapid delivery as absolutely essential for the play’s desired effect, and, as the contretemps with Tynan illustrated, he was willing to intervene personally in order to ensure its observance. Whereas the move from stage to screen required Beckett to compromise his original intentions for light in Comédie, the transgeneric shift allowed him to accentuate his original intentions for sound. Luc Perini introduced Beckett to yet another “memory machine,” the

“phonogène,” capable of speeding up delivery to an unprecedented—and humanly unattainable—degree. Marin Karmitz elaborates on how this device worked:

Thanks to the sound-ingeneer [sic] Luc Perini […] we were lucky to find a machine called “phonogène.” From what I understand, it eventually became the basis for electronic music. It had never been used for voices at that time. I started recording each actor separately, then edited the voices one beside the other, cut to the tiniest silence, and reduced as much as possible the lapses between the voices. We introduced the whole piece in the machine and tried to speed up the rhythm without losing the tones of the voices. […] We were able, as well, to gradually reduce the speed of the voices of F1, F2, and H [W1, W2, and M in English]. During the shooting, we would play the tape and the actors would play on it, which was awfully difficult. (73) Volume was also manipulated in proportion to speed, so that, as the voices become gradually slower, they also become gradually quieter. Karmitz adds,

“I asked Beckett to intervene, since I knew he cared about this acceleration but could not achieve it normally on stage. Only the artificial process of cinema could render it” (73, my emphasis). If this artificial process sounds laborious for the crew, imagine how maddening it must have been for the performers, challenged to lip-sync to prerecordings of their own voices, speeded up at times to levels they were incapable of achieving naturally on their own. For Beckett, however, this process must have provided something of a technological epiphany, revealing film’s capacity to correct the imperfections and transcend the limitations of human performers. The filmmakers’ employment of the “phonogène” marks yet another instance where the unique capabilities of the medium were exploited to achieve a new, and to Beckett’s mind improved, realization of his “re-creative” vision—an “aural vision” in this case.

180 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Beckett’s preference for this technologically “improved” version is evident from his advice on the BBC radio adaptation of Play undertaken later that year.7 Martin Esslin chronicles the evolution of this adaptation in “Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio.” Producer Bennett Maxwell gathered a cast and crew in early 1966 to experiment with radiophonic equivalents for the spotlight effect in Play. They eventually settled upon playing a loop of the actors repeating the word “I,” interrupted each time one of the characters spoke his/her line. Esslin remembers that, “Beckett had categorically refused permission to broadcast Play, but he agreed to come and listen to a playback of this experimental production” (372). His willingness to give this new experiment a fair hearing, rather than enforcing the preexisting unconditional ban, already represents a softening attitude toward transgeneric adaptation.

Furthermore, his specific advice to Maxwell’s group shows how his significantly his hands-on production work had led him to revise his thoughts about performing Play. Esslin vividly recalls Beckett’s initial reaction: “‘I don’t like it. You got it all wrong’” (372). But rather than leave it at that, Beckett proceeded to outline how they got it wrong and to suggest how they might go about getting it right. He explained that the text was divided into three parts, Chorus, Narration, and Meditation (yet another ternary structure). Through his collaborations on the Devine and Serreau productions, he had discovered that “there must be a clear progression by which each subsec-tion is both faster and softer than the preceding one” (372).8

Beckett’s ensuing explanation of how to achieve this progression is extremely telling, for it shows how suddenly saturated his dramatic vision had become with the possibilities of performance manipulation afforded him by film. The precise technical specifications he offered Maxwell are almost entirely borrowed from his own contemporaneous sound experiments with Perini, Ravel, and Karmitz. Bennett Maxwell’s letter of September 8, 1966
confirms that Beckett had personally recommended mechanically manipulat-ing the vocal performances for radio as the Comédie crew had done for film.

Maxwell assures, “I intend recording the three actors separately, as you suggested, and have obtained access to the Zeit-Dehner Machine, so that the recording can then be speeded up for the repeat. After that, we’ll superimpose a different musical tone on each voice, cut it all up and put it in order!” (BBC

WAC Beckett File II, R Cont 12). Esslin remembers even more specific directions from Beckett about how to manipulate the sound for Play: If the speed of the first Chorus is 1 and its volume 1, then the speed of the first Narration must be 1 plus 5 percent and its volume 1 minus 5 percent. The speed of the following segment, the first Meditation, must then be (1 plus 5
percent) plus 5 percent, and its volume (1 minus 5 percent) minus 5 percent.

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 181

The implication is quite clearly that any quantity, plus or minus, still has to be a finite quantity; however soft, however fast, the same text will go on ad infini-tum, ever faster and ever softer without quite ceasing altogether. (372) These revised requirements for Play can no longer be regarded as stage directions; they are soundboard directions. They are not aimed at performers, but at engineers and editors—technicians with the capability to alter performances after the fact, refashioning them to meet predetermined specifications and refining them to perfection before broadcast.

Of course, what Beckett marked as a technological advance for his work would be considered a giant step backwards for those who bemoan his steady trajectory toward mechanization (i.e., dehumanization) as a director. Perhaps performers who resent this sort of infringement upon their creative sovereignty will feel that some measure of justice was served when these same tricks of the trade were eventually turned against Beckett himself by Beckett on Film directors, among others, who sought to “correct” the auteur’s perceived excesses and missteps. In any case, there can be little doubt that, despite its general neglect by Beckett scholars, the film adaptation of Comédie marked a watershed moment in Beckett’s development as a director and as an artist for filmed media. He learned firsthand that transgeneric adaptation could succeed so long as the production imaginatively adapts the original to account for the new medium’s unique conditions and capabilities. Just as important, he also learned that he was as yet incapable of pulling off a successful transgeneric adaptation on his own. He possessed the requisite imagination, but not the requisite technical wherewithal. However, he was at least wise enough to recognize superior technical expertise when he saw it and to leverage those skills in furtherance of his artistic vision. Even as Beckett’s technical apprenticeship progressed and his basic grasp of televisual mechanics became more secure, he always made sure to surround himself with technologically savvy and creatively invested film crews, in essence replicating the ideal collaborative conditions he originally encountered with Marin Karmitz, Jean Ravel, and Luc Perini in Comédie.

* * *

Beckett would not assume the helm of a transgeneric adaptation for another twenty years. When he finally agreed to transfer What Where from stage to screen for German television, he reentered a familiar studio environment with a core creative crew. As written, Beckett’s last stage play was already inundated with memories, both intertextual and intratextual. As reproduced for television, Was Wo bears special witness to Beckett’s recollection of the adapted Comédie. He draws broadly upon that adaptation as a model for

182 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren collaborative revision, and he draws specifically upon certain cinematographic innovations in that film to meet the transgeneric challenges posed by What Where. As Gontarski states flatly in his edition of the Notebooks, “What Where is a memory play” (452n14). Likewise, Was Wo is a memory teleplay; and among its dominant memories are Beckett’s previous attempts to adjust the “what” of a stage play to fit the new “where” of film.

As originally conceived, What Where is presided over by yet another disembodied Beckettian voice, Voice of Bam. This voice (V) is funneled into the auditorium through a faintly illuminated megaphone suspended downstage right. V directs various embodied figures—Bam, Bem, Bim, and Bom—
through their paces in the playing area (P), designated by Beckett as the

“‘field of memory’” ( Notebooks IV 415n13). As time passes, V prompts, critiques, and revises Bam’s enigmatic interrogation routines. Bam (i.e., the incarnation of V upon the “field of memory”) begins in the spring by interrogating Bom, a figure we are told who is fresh from interrogating his own suspect off stage (“Bum”?). These interrogations do not go well. Bom allegedly failed to coerce his suspect into confessing either “what” or “where.”

However, Bam challenges this claim: “It’s a lie. ( Pause. ) He said it to you.

( Pause. ) Confess he said it to you. ( Pause. ) You’ll be given the works until you confess” (411). Bim then appears to take Bom away and force a confession from him. In the summer Bim reappears, likewise unsuccessful and likewise disbelieved by Bam. The new torture assignment is handed over to Bem, who returns unsuccessfully in the autumn only to be “given the works” by Bam himself. The play ends with Bam returning alone in winter, presumably out of suspects to torture and weary of asking unanswerable questions. V narrates, I am alone.

In the present as were I still.

It is winter.

Without journey.

Time passes.

That is all.

Make sense who may.

I switch off. (414)

The lights obey V’s final directive, switching off Bam and then off the megaphone to end the play.

Despite its minimalist condensation, What Where is another remarkably allusive late play. Though the debt is embedded more deeply than in Nacht und Träume, Schubert looms large once again. What Where was originally written for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. James Knowlson points out Beckett’s Schubertian associations with Graz, where the Lieder-Master

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 183
composed part of his haunting song-cycle Die Winterreise ( The Winter Journey) ( Damned 601–2). What Where’s remorseful reflection at life’s end is consistent with the general tenor of Schubert’s cycle, and V’s closing reference to a winter “Without journey” nods directly at Die Winterreise even as it announces the journey’s cessation. Gontarski points out another musical allusion with similarly morbid connotations. In Beckett’s Stuttgart notebook, he refers to the playing area’s aura as “‘the light of other days’” ( Notebooks IV

447). Gontarski glosses this quote as a reference to “Oft, in the Stilly Night,”

a Scottish air by the Irish poet Thomas Moore. The song’s closing verse laments the death of so many friends, concluding: “‘Thus, in the stilly night,

/ Ere slumber’s chain has bound me / Sad memory brings the light / Of other days around me’” (452n14). The “light of other days” was first scheduled to be refracted into color for Was Wo, guided by still another intertextual allusion. The Stuttgart notebook shows that Beckett originally toyed with the idea of differentiating between the figures based upon color: “BAm—black /

BEm—White / BIm—Red / BOm—Blue / (cf. Rimbaud’s Sonnet)” (427).

The reference here is to Arthur Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” (“Vowels”), which describes each vowel in terms of its characteristic color and mood (449n2).

The peculiar names of What Where’s “B-ms” suggest that Beckett already had Rimbaud in mind when writing the stage play. The notebook shows how he considered asserting that previous allusion with new force in the televisual adaptation, before ultimately rejecting this colorful excess through “Process of elimination” (431).

Not all of Beckett’s allusions look externally for their sources. What Where reads at times like a career retrospective, so numerous are its intratextual references to Beckett’s own previous works. For instance, the oddly named “B-ms” trace their lineage back to the fiction. Mr. Thomas “Bim” Clinch and his twin brother “Bom” are male nurses at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat asy-lum in Murphy, and Bem and Bom (and Pim) appear in How It Is. What Where also resonates with echoes of the radio plays. Voice of Bam bears a close familial resemblance to Opener of Cascando. Both are aural entities who preside from a detached position outside the action proper. Both are clearly invested in the action and yet remain removed, opening and closing, choreographing and commenting. Note the close affinities between the two work’s respective beginnings:

Opener: [ Cold. ] It is the month of May… for me.

[ Pause. ]

Correct.

[ Pause. ]

I open.

184 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren V: [This is BAM.]9

We are the last five.

In the present as were we still.

It is spring

Time passes.

I switch on. […]

Good. (409)

In his definitive study of the radio plays, Clas Zilliacus summarizes Cascando in terms that predict its importance for What Where: “Cascando is paradigmatic insofar as the play, in model form, expresses a desire which pervades the entire Beckettian œuvre: the desire not merely to finish a story but to find that story which, when finished, and being the right one, would absolve its teller of the need to go on, and thus make peace possible” (119). Of course, even by the end of his final play, that correct combination—the definitive

“what” and “where”—remains elusive. It is important to note, however, that rather than ending with a declaration to continue going on, What Where ends more conclusively with “I switch off ” (414), as if Beckett knew his career-long pursuit of the unattainable had nowhere left to go.

As surely as the narrative framing device of What Where is borrowed from Cascando, the interrogation scenario follows precedents set by Rough for Radio II. This play was written in the early 1960s as “Pochade radiophonique,” but it remained officially unauthorized for performance until 1976. Martin Esslin directed the English premiere for BBC radio’s 70th birthday celebration, with a cast that reads like a “who’s who” of Beckett devotees: Harold Pinter as Animator, Billie Whitelaw as Stenographer, and Patrick Magee as Fox. This performance apparently made a deep and lingering impact on Beckett because he directly borrowed elements from Rough for Radio II for a number of subsequent plays. Animator’s habit of having Stenographer read back interrogation transcripts, only to interrupt her with ruler-taps to repeat significant passages, clearly prefigures Listener’s directive knuckle-raps for Reader in Ohio Impromptu. The distinctly gendered power dynamics of Rough for Radio II—where a male subject is blatantly tortured with clinical precision while the male interrogator exhibits a more insidious form of coercion by sexually harassing his female subordinate—is borrowed wholesale and transferred to a theatrical context for Catastrophe. Finally, as Ackerley and Gontarski have noted, “With ‘Rough for Radio II’ he began to explore torture as a metaphor for creativity. As such the radio play anticipates

‘What Where’” (615). Both works support Schopenhauer’s assertion in The World as Will and Representation that “The inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are one. The former errs in believing he does not share the suffering; the

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 185
latter, in believing he does not share the guilt” (IV.219). The more the interrogators torture their suspects in the two plays, the more they become personally implicated in the suffering. This process is portrayed naturalistically in Rough for Radio II, as opposed to the minimalist dramaturgy of What Where. But in both cases the supposed victimizers share a taste of victimization, and in both the interrogators and suspects remain equally oblivious to the hidden motives that bind them together. As Animator admits to his prisoner Fox, “Of course we do not know, any more than you, what exactly it is we are after, what sign or set of words. But since you have failed so far to let it escape you, it is not by harking on the same old themes that you are likely to succeed, that much would astonish me” ( CDW 282).

By incorporating all of these self-allusions, Beckett set up an intratextual dialectic in What Where, revisiting and revising his own works much as he had re-imagined his classic source texts in the previous teleplays. When he next turned his attention to transferring the play from stage to screen, he crucially extended his sphere of self-reference to include Comédie. As with his previous adaptation, Beckett had no interest in simply filming a stage performance.

The relationship of spectator to spectacle is too different in television, and the medium’s technical capacity for performance manipulation too promising, to settle for so pedestrian an alternative. Gontarski’s variorum edition of What Where lists more than a dozen revisions to the text, many of them made for the first time in Stuttgart, and some of them unique to the television production. These various amendments range from the miniscule to the drastic.

However, two changes more than any others emerge as the predominant creative challenges for the adaptation: the figural depiction of the “B-ms” in the playing area and the translation of V’s megaphone to a suitable televisual correlative. In both cases Beckett relied heavily upon the collaborative input of his veteran SDR team. And in both cases the solutions they eventually devised bear visible “recognitions” of Comédie.

One technical difficulty in the original stage version of What Where was posed by the entrances and exits of the players out of and back into the surrounding darkness. As Alan Schneider, who directed the American premiere, relayed to Beckett, “For WHAT WHERE, apart from getting what we felt was the proper tone and rhythm thruout [ sic], the main problem was lighting.

The rectangle lit dimly so that they came into it from blackness. The megaphone lit so that its shadow would not spill on to the floor or to the actors.

Eventually, I think, we were able to achieve what you set for us” (Harmon 451). Beckett had encountered precisely this same lighting challenge for Quadrat I + II, where the players similarly pace into the light out of the void, and the SDR crew had proven equal to the task of realizing this requirement.

However, for Was Wo they experimented with a much more radical solution.

186 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren As Beckett’s shorthand notes specify in the Stuttgart notebook, “Bodies & movement eliminated / Faces only. […] Exits (simul. or sequent. [i.e., simultaneous or sequential]) / expressed by fade-outs. / Entrances by fade ups”

(427). This bodily reduction to faces was accompanied by a new conception of the visual field in which the faces would operate: “Lit PA. [playing area]

eliminated. Black / ground unbroken.” Finally, he elaborates on how the effect would be practically achieved: “No visible headdress / Hair etc., eliminated by / make up & invisible / black material. Only oval of / face to be seen” (431). In other words, Beckett’s extreme “Process of elimination” led him to eliminate the bodies of the “B-ms” entirely, reducing them to lit faces surrounded by darkness. This move produced the practical benefit of bypass-ing Schneider’s difficulty; no bodies and no lit playing area meant that entrances and exits could be controlled through editing with fade-ups and fade-outs. The resulting effect is strikingly similar to the iconography of Comédie: three lit faces jockey for the viewer’s attention as they are manipulated in an optical shell-game against an unbroken black background. In the earlier film the urns themselves effectively reduced the players to faces. In Was Wo the SDR crew resorted to makeup, cardboard with oval-shaped apertures, and four frontal cameras to achieve the desired effect (Fehsenfeld 237). But the final products correspond so closely that Beckett surely must have had Comédie in mind as the model for this particular televisual adaptation.

Furthermore, he was so pleased with this new rendering of the “B-ms” that he retained it for post– Was Wo stage productions. He recommended that Pierre Chabert employ shaved heads to approximate the effect for the French premiere, and he had S.E. Gontarski frame the faces with cowls for his San Francisco production (Ackerley and Gontarski 642).

A thornier problem was posed by the transference of “Voice of Bam” from stage to screen. In the original stage version, this voice was funneled to the audience through a suspended megaphone. Obviously, this delivery system would be nullified in the switch to television, where the audience’s only true sound source would be the home viewer’s personal TV set, not a megaphone on screen. Therefore, the SDR team sought an alternative manifestation for V, one that made sense for television but that also retained the basic premise of V as a presiding entity distinct from the “B-ms.” One key adaptation to V

[or S (Stimme) as he is called in German] was applied to the vocal delivery.

Beckett writes in the Stuttgart notebook, “S’s voice prerecorded. / Bam’s, but changed / (entfernt [removed, distant])” (435). That is, Beckett once again resorted to sound manipulation, as he had in Comédie, to distort the actor’s delivery.

An even more radical distortion was employed for the visual representation of Stimme (S). Beckett decided to assign a face to the narrative voice, but

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 187
he was at pains to make that face sufficiently “entfernt” so that it would at once be identified with Bam but also separate from him—not another face of Bam, but the “Face of Voice of Bam.” With the help of his erstwhile crew, they came up with a solution referred to cryptically on set as the “death mask.”

Beckett’s abbreviated description in the notebook puts it this way: “S = mirror

/ reflection of Bam’s face, / slightly distorted, faintly / lit, enough to distinguish / closed eyes & lips in speech / 4–5 times size of PA [playing area] faces”

(431). In “‘Everything Out But the Faces’: Beckett’s Reshaping of What Where for Television,” SDR cameraman Jim Lewis elaborated on the device to Martha Fehsenfeld and explained how they achieved this unusual effect: The image of Bam in the beyond or beyond the grave or whatever you want to call it—the death-mask thing that wasn’t originally planned at all—that gave us the biggest trouble. That was the problem almost up to the end until I came up with this idea of enlarging the death mask—the face, the vision […]

by using a mirror-reflected image plus this old pane of glass I got from an old house—because this type of glass distorts slightly, not too much. With the combination of the mirror and the glass, we got this very vague sort of distorted image. […] I used diffusion too on the vision. And gauze. Sam couldn’t believe it. It looked like Frankenstein’s lab in the studio. (236) The large distorted face with the technically manipulated voice has a startling effect, especially when juxtaposed against the smaller but clearer “B-ms.”

“Their outlines were sharp, distinct, almost as if they were cut out and applied on the darkness,” observes Fehsenfeld, “in opposition to the blurred and softened outline of the Voice image, which seemed not to come out of the darkness, but to belong to it” (234). While Stimme’s disproportionate size lends him an air of authority, his blurry evanescence undercuts this aura of control, as if he is barely hanging onto his material existence. If V’s voice in Eh Joe is what a “mental thuggee” victim sounds like, then S’s face in Was Wo must be what one looks like.

Jim Lewis deserves a great deal of credit for his ingenuity in realizing S’s

“death mask” on screen—“the ghost Bam, dead Bam, distorted image of a face in a grave,” as assistant Walter Asmus described it (Fehsenfeld 238).

There can be little doubt, however, that the underlying idea for this device originated from Beckett, since it owes such visible debts to his previous film work. Lens gauze had likewise been used in Film to produce O’s peculiarly myopic POV shots. More fundamentally, the juxtaposition of large and small faces against a black ground was precisely the innovation achieved by Jean Ravel’s Cubist réincruster technique in Comédie (an effect which may itself have derived from Beckett’s production of L’Hypothèse). Finally, in a prescient anticipation of Was Wo’s “death mask,” Marin Karmitz recalls that Beckett

188 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren hatched a similar scheme for Comédie: “I couldn’t find the make-up for the characters. We had to reach a face as ashy as possible. Different steps left us unsatisfied. One night, Beckett woke me up and said: ‘I found it! We must cover them with a shroud!’ (He laughs.) I think I told him it couldn’t work with the film” (73). Though the director dismissed the idea as impractical, his collaborator clearly did not forget it. Twenty years later at the helm of Was Wo, Beckett returned to the shroud idea. Lewis reports that Beckett was intrigued early on by the shrouded statue of John Donne in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, as a possible model for Stimme’s face (Fehsenfeld 232). The “death mask” that ultimately appears in Was Wo fulfills Beckett’s lingering wish for a filmic shroud, an idea first expressed to (and laughed off by) Karmitz, but finally realized two decades later.

Credit where credit is due: regardless of whose idea it was, innovations like Ravel’s réincruster editing, Perini’s “phonogène” vocal manipulation, and Lewis’s gauze-and-glass “death mask” could not have been possible without the collaborative input of superior technicians. It also deserves emphasizing, however, that none of these achievements would have been possible without Beckett’s receptivity to—indeed, his insistence upon—
creative adaptation. Beckett did not tie himself or his collaborators with binds of absolute fidelity to the original play. As evidenced by his own work on Comédie and Was Wo, Beckett’s filmed versions of his plays began by abandoning the notion of filmed theatre. All of the technical innovations that followed flowed directly from that necessary first principle. Despite this implicit sanction, Beckett’s staunchest defenders persist in measuring subsequent transgeneric adaptations against the author’s original stage intentions, using “faithfulness” as the litmus-test for success or failure. An important bat-tleground in this ongoing war between orthodoxy and heresy is the Beckett on Film project.

* * *

Some of the controversy over Beckett on Film may be laid at the feet of its producers, not for their well-meaning desire to disseminate Beckett’s work, but for their mixed message about what exactly they were trying to accomplish with the project. Executive producer Michael Colgan was explicit from the start about the kind of film he did not want for the series. Anna McMullan cites Colgan’s colorful interdiction in her review of Beckett on Film for The Beckett Circle: “‘what we’re not doing is putting the plays on an empty stage and putting a camera in the fifth row and turning it on and going out to have a sandwich’” (4). In other words, Colgan shared Beckett’s first principle of abandoning filmed theater in favor of experimenting with film’s unique creative possibilities.

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 189

So the impetus behind the project was not the faithful replication of Beckett’s stage intentions—right? Well, apparently it depended upon which day one posed the question. When Aleks Sierz interviewed Colgan for a Channel 4 documentary (later aborted) on the making of Beckett on Film, the producer offered a very different rationale: “‘I think Beckett is the Shakespeare of the twentieth century, and I wanted to have one complete set of his plays that was going to be as faithful as possible. […] The reason for wanting them to be filmed is that I suppose there is an understanding that in twenty years’ time they are going to be filmed. And I think that when those films are going to be made they are going to be less faithful to the work’”

(140). By construing the project as an archive of authenticity—a “true image”

of Beckett’s canon—Colgan inevitably exposes Beckett on Film to accusations of heresy for being insufficiently faithful, charges that Beckett’s more orthodox champions have been only too eager to supply.

Colin Duckworth’s broadside in “Distortions of Space and Sound in Recent Beckett Productions” may be unequalled for its cantankerousness, but it is nonetheless representative of widely shared sentiments: The product in the jar should be what the label says it is. Directors who feel they have no artistic function if they do not “muck about” with a play script or defy the author’s clear and stated intentions (a sad comment on their abilities) could either go in for opera production, or write their own scripts (like many directors)—or simply and honestly change the label to match the contents: Waiting for Godot adapted from a play by Samuel Beckett. (245) The line in the sand could not be drawn more clearly: a director can either be faithful to Beckett, or he can adapt Beckett, but he cannot do both. The

“Duckworth Doctrine” requires complete allegiance to “the author’s clear and stated intentions” and explicitly prohibits any “mucking about” with the stage directions.

But isn’t every production of Waiting for Godot essentially “adapted from a play by Samuel Beckett”—including those directed by Beckett himself?

The Theatrical Notebooks certainly suggest so. Anyone who has ever suffered through a complete travesty of a Beckett play can empathize with Duckworth’s appeal that “The product in the jar should be what the label says it is.” Nonetheless, there is a fundamental disjuncture between understanding a play as a product as opposed to a process. As Beckett himself learned through his parallel careers as writer and director, the supposed fixity of the textual product is constantly coming unfixed through the discovery process of rehearsal and performance. Creative compromise is particularly vital when the play is being adapted to a new medium, toward which the author’s

190 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren original intentions were never directed and for which his initial directions may be inadequate or irrelevant. Beckett appreciated the need for adaptation far more than those who presume to protect the sanctity of his supposed intentions.

Most of the contributors to Beckett on Film faced production challenges that Beckett himself never addressed directly because he wrote those plays for a different medium. On the other hand, a few of the 19 plays were in fact works that Beckett himself had occasion to adapt previously. These productions present special comparative complications, since the author had already devised new medium-specific recalibrations in those cases, even if it seems doubtful that he expected all subsequent adaptations to replicate his own solutions. For instance, in 1969 at the request of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Cologne), Beckett compiled detailed notes for a television adaptation of Krapp’s Last Tape.10 These “Suggestions for T.V. Krapp” are available to anyone with access to Clas Zilliacus’s Beckett and Broadcasting. I do not know if Atom Egoyan was aware of these guidelines when he conceived his Krapp for Beckett on Film, but in any case he obviously did not follow Beckett’s proposed template. Everett Frost and Anna McMullan take Egoyan to task for this impertinence:

One would have thought that Beckett’s ‘Suggestions for a T.V. Krapp’ might have been of considerable interest to the project since in writing the suggestions out for WDR, Beckett engages directly the question of adaptation from theatre to television in ways immensely useful to and entirely compatible with thinking through the transposition of Krapp’s Last Tape to the big screen as well as the little one. (226–27)

Perhaps, but Frost and McMullan seem alone in thinking so. It is not even clear that the WDR production observed Beckett’s suggestions. On the other hand, it is clear that these suggestions were not observed in subsequent TV-Krapp s, including Alan Schneider’s 1971 WNET production with Jack MacGowran and Donald McWhinnie’s 1972 BBC production with Patrick Magee—hardly a lineup of renegades where respecting Beckett’s intentions were concerned. In fact, Beckett reassured Schneider, “My notes are no more than suggestions and have no pretensions to finality” (Harmon 256). Once again, Beckett accepted that the play would require adjustments in the transfer to a new medium, but he did not regard his own ideas about adaptation as sacrosanct. He freely acknowledged that he did not possess a monopoly upon original ideas for directing and adapting his plays. Unfortunately, his critics are not always as generous in granting artistic latitude.

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 191

The individual film from the series that has received the most attention is Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Play, a striking piece in its own right but also notable by comparison with Comédie. To my knowledge Minghella has made no public mention of the 1966 film, but he was probably at least aware of its existence because of his long devotion to Beckett’s work. By his own admission, as a university student he “was the worst kind of Beckett anorak.”

His unfinished doctoral thesis was on Beckett, and the first play he ever directed was Play. In his reflection for James and Elizabeth Knowlson’s cen-tenary celebration, Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett, Minghella credits Beckett for being his “lifelong compass” (280). With such reverential credentials, one might have expected an “orthodox” interpretation from the filmmaker and accompanying praise from the cognoscenti. To a certain extent those expectations have been satisfied. No one can fault his direction of Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, and Kirstin Scott Thomas, whose performances are spell-binding. The rapid-fire delivery and deadened monotone which Beckett insisted upon and which encountered so much resistance from early practitioners are observed with perfect fidelity in Minghella’s Play. So, too, are Beckett’s specifications for the urns and for the players’ faces, which so closely resemble production photos from Devine’s 1964 English premiere that one wonders if Minghella consulted this seminal production directly as his prototype.

For all his “faithfulness” to certain details, however, Minghella does conspicuously defy several of Beckett’s “clear and stated intentions” for the stage play. He also finds very different solutions for Play’s adaptation challenges than Karmitz and company devised for Comédie. Minghella’s most elaborate embellishment upon the play’s original mise-en-scène comes through his introduction of a new visual background. The film’s establishing shot reveals that the players are just three out of a multitude, scattered upon a vast, mist-shrouded plain, populated by other murmuring urns as far as the eye can see.

This visually provocative set provides a larger context for the action, implying that countless others are condemned like W1, M, and W2 to repeat the tawdry melodramas of their lives as some sort of afterlife punishment. The set suggests a marriage of Dantean symbology with Sartrean philosophy (“Hell is other people”). Apparently Minghella was also trying to duplicate something of Play’s relentless metadramatic commentary by alluding to the multitude in transports of discomfort both on screen and in the auditorium: “Time is experienced in a very specific and pungent way when you’re sitting in front of a play which repeats itself. And obviously the Dantesque idea of Beckett’s is that in purgatory we’ll be forced to revisit the same trivial episodes of our lives again and again, in some kind of ironic rehearsing of life” (Knowlson and Knowlson 281). Or, to extend the thought, in Beckett’s auditorium we are

192 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren trapped in our several seats, as the figures on screen are trapped in their several urns, repeating the same trivial but torturous episodes of their lives again and again. Needless to say, Beckett makes no mention of a field of urns in Play, or to any other contextualizing background for that matter, since both his stage and film versions cast the action against an unbroken black void.

There are, then, two significant and interconnected departures at work here in Minghella’s version. He introduces elaborate new background matter, but he also introduces a new lighting scheme which allows that background to become visible in the first place. Both decisions are defensible, but they also come with considerable consequences.

The text of Play certainly does not preclude a purgatorial reading. In fact, it positively invites that interpretation as one among several possibilities.

Ackerley and Gontarski’s entry on “purgatory” in the Grove Companion describes a condition in which “existence is perpetual expiation for the non-venial sin of being alive” (471). Surely no Beckett play is more emblematic of this condition than Play. Minghella vividly exploits this dimension, though arguably he does so at the risk of ruling out other equally viable interpretations. One recurring criticism that Frost and McMullan lodge at Beckett on Film is that its tendency toward contextualizing the plays constitutes a “craze for explicitation” ( CDW 459). They fault the series in general for “a well intentioned but doomed tendency to contextualize Beckett’s enigmatic, minimalist, abstract plays into plausible, elaborate, realistic or genre films—a tendency that, although there are exceptions, permeates the series, almost always to a reductive effect that betrays the elusive, enigmatic quality of Beckett’s delicate plays” (219). There is indeed a general inclination toward contextualization in the series, and apparently this is the result of a concerted effort. According to producer Alan Moloney, “‘In the making of a film, you need to do certain things. You need to contextualize things, and create an environment that—in its purest form—Beckett’s writing doesn’t require’” (Sierz 143). This is a highly specious argument, and critics do well to challenge it. “You need to contextualize things”? Why? What about film inherently requires the addition of a context which Moloney himself admits that “Beckett’s writing doesn’t require”? One worries that the compelling motive here is not service to the work so much as service to an agenda of increased accessibility (read “marketability”), even if this results in a disservice to the work.

I share Frost and McMullan’s suspicion of this agenda, but I stop short of concluding that all attempts at contextualization are therefore necessarily corrupt, reductive, or distorted. With specific reference to Minghella’s Play, they assert, “The Gothic visual extravagance certainly runs counter to Beckett’s vision of lessness, and the fundamental function of the Light as interrogator

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 193
and trigger for the heads’ narration, linking light with the imperatives of consciousness, is lost” (233). To be sure, Minghella’s new background is far more extravagant than Beckett’s issueless void. Before one convicts the filmmaker of heresy too hastily, however, one should pause to remember Comédie.

Remember the “visual extravagance” of the réincruster technique; remember the revised use of lighting, which breaks the direct equation between the spotlight and “the imperatives of consciousness” just as surely as Minghella’s approach does; and above all, remember that Beckett was present and active on the set, not only tolerating such fundamental violations, but positively assisting in the collaborative re-vision of his own “vision of lessness.” Frost and McMullan reluctantly concede, “Play is in many ways a virtuoso film by Anthony Minghella, and is probably the film in the project that has attracted the greatest amount of attention and critical debate.” However, they take away with one hand what they give with the other: “While it finds intriguing filmic analogues for the theatrical mechanisms of Beckett’s dramatic script, by providing what Colgan refers to as visual ‘context’ it also distorts the author’s sound-image aesthetic” (232). Their criticism stems from valid concerns, and their defense is doubtlessly born of decent intent. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to square their vindication of “the author’s sound-image aesthetic”—by which they seem to mean his aesthetic as established on stage—with Beckett’s own basic modifications to that aesthetic when he adapted Comédie for the screen.

Minghella not only alters what we see in Play, he also drastically manipulates how we see it. As realized on stage, Play assumes a stance of direct, fixed confrontation. The players are rooted in their urns just as the spectators are rooted in their seats. Both stare straight ahead at one another throughout the live spectacle, with the shifting spotlight mediating the interface between them. Minghella wanted to preserve Play’s reflexive dynamic, but he wanted to do so in a way that drew attention to the specific machinery of film as opposed to theatre. For instance, he told an interviewer for the London Observer that he wanted to make a film “where the size and shape is constantly changing, where the audience’s attention is constantly drawn to the mechanisms of film. You can hear every camera movement, every focus pull.

You are forced to feel the presence of the camera, like you would feel the stage light that shines on them when they speak in a theatrical production”

(O’Hagan 5). There is certainly no ignoring Minghella’s camera. It zooms forward and back, cants up and down, rollicks from side to side, blurs in and out of focus, and switches perspective with maniacal frequency—Aleks Sierz reports that the 20-minute film contains over 500 cuts!11 The effect on any audience would be bewildering, but this is doubly true for the usual gathering

194 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren of Beckett devotees. The initiated are inevitably startled by how different the play looks through Minghella’s lens than through Beckett’s spotlight.

For anyone familiar with Beckett’s own work for film and television, however, Minghella’s camerawork should have obvious analogues. Even so out-spoken a critic as Colin Duckworth concedes, “One could make a case for Minghella’s camera fulfilling the same role of all-seeing eye, as the camera does in Beckett’s own Film. It certainly auscults and probes, constantly changing its inquisitive and inquisitional angle” (242). One might add Eh Joe and Ghost Trio as teleplays with similar predatory cameras, and of course Comédie, with its jarring interplay of extreme long-shots and close-ups.

Though Duckworth does not mention Comédie by name, he seems to have it in mind when he ceases defending Minghella and returns to the offensive:

“but this [camera technique] would have been even more effective had concentration on each isolated face been maintained against a black void instead of a distracting field of urns” (242). Would it? Such is certainly the way Beckett staged it, and he retained at least that much of his original stage concept for Karmitz’s screen adaptation. But it simply does not follow that the only plausible or effective way to render Play on screen is by concentrating solely upon isolated faces against a black background. Is anyone really distracted by that field of urns? I doubt it. If a background really makes it impossible to concentrate upon a foreground, then one would have to fault Godot for its distracting tree or Endgame for its distracting ashbins. No, I contend that a deeper complaint looms beneath the surface of Duckworth’s censure.

Minghella’s production, and by extension all of the productions in Beckett on Film, are implicitly blamed for two unpardonable shortcomings: 1) the films are blamed for being films, as opposed to being plays, and 2) the filmmakers are blamed for not being Samuel Beckett. Beckett always altered his texts and directions when he translated his work from page to stage, and he revised even more heavily on those rare occasions when he translated his plays from stage to screen. Yet this same creative license is persistently denied other directors, who presumably cannot have an original idea about producing or adapting Beckett without besmirching the play’s purity.

Minghella’s Play is not Beckett’s Play, nor is it Karmitz’s Comédie, but it is a valid film adaptation that responds thoughtfully to the challenges posed by the original piece. In Minghella’s reflection for the Knowlsons, he asserts, “If you are making a film of Play, you have to find a cinematic correlative to the interrogative light, which the stage directions specify as prompting every speech; otherwise the only alternative is to lock off the camera and record a live performance. You can’t have a light moving and a camera moving—one has to be still” (281). All of his subsequent innovations flow from this reasonable statement of the problem. Problem #1: Should the director record a

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 195
live performance or adapt the play for film? Solution #1: Like Beckett, Minghella abandoned filmed theater in favor of adaptation. Problem #2: Since the movement of one element will not be discernible without the still-ness of the other, should light remain fixed or should camera? Solution #2: He used the camera as the “cinematic correlative” for the stage play’s spotlight, leading him conversely to use fixed and uniform lighting. Problem #3: If the camera moves, how should it move? Solution #3: He adopted the predatory camera of Beckett’s own screenwork as his model. Problem #4: If the set is uniformly lit, what heretofore unseen elements become visible? Solution

#4: Drawing upon purgatorial allusions specific to Play and prevalent throughout Beckett, he extrapolated the field of urns.

Obviously, Minghella’s creative catechism provides different responses than those offered by Comédie. It would be unfair to conclude from this fact, however, that Minghella’s production is therefore necessarily heretical, aesthetically corrupt, or comparatively inferior. As Aleks Sierz observes in his balanced assessment of Beckett on Film, “In the act of adapting Beckett for a different medium, Minghella discovers, if not exactly new truths, certainly new reverberations” (146). Minghella’s production provides an instructive model for how conscientious adaptations of Beckett’s work in the post-Beckett era should be conducted. There is no shortage of Beckett material conducive to re-imagination through adaptation, and, as Beckett on Film proves, there is no shortage of film practitioners eager to take on the creative challenge. The greatest barrier to future adaptations of Minghella’s caliber is overprotection from Beckett’s self-appointed defenders, in the form of zealous critics and litigious estate agents. As Sierz prophetically concludes, “The irony, of course, is that Beckett understood full well that you can’t simply film a stage play without altering it” (148).

* * *

The principles at stake in this debate are no less than creative freedom and the continuing vitality of Beckett’s drama. Whether produced on stage, film, or television, drama remains an essentially collaborative art. Even in a piece like Play, creative artists cannot simply be stuffed into urns and forced to repeat the exact same performance over and over. Beckett himself did not feel bound by such restrictions. He was a conscientious director and adapter, but he was also experimental and collaborative. Subsequent practitioners must be granted that same creative license, even if they exercise it differently than Beckett did or would have. James Knowlson captures this spirit best in his “General Editor’s Note” to the Theatrical Notebooks:

196 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television/Graley Herren Nothing can ever truly be said to be definitive in the theatre. A play or a role is constantly open to reinterpretation. A different directorial approach, different actors and actresses, a different stage space and the end result must inevitably differ. And Samuel Beckett’s own productions illustrated this just as clearly as do anyone else’s. It is a misconception to think that he believed he or anyone else could “fix” his plays. He stressed that other productions would have a different “music” from his own. (vii)

Knowlson’s wise words with regard to the theater apply equally well to the studio set and the editing booth. Karmitz’s Comédie, Beckett’s Was Wo, and Minghella’s Play each performs different music—different from each other and different from the original play which each adapted. They are no less

“Beckettian,” no less “authentic,” for that difference. Rather than judging screen adaptations by an exacting standard of fidelity, we scholars need to train our critical ears to appreciate this different music. Of course, some of that music is likely to be bad, and we must retain our critical license to say so.

But difference, experimentation, and adaptation must not be regarded as bad in and of themselves. Those who wish to protect the posthumous memory of Beckett’s vital work must not do so by embalming his plays.

Notes

1. Beckett radically revised What Where when he adapted it for German television as Was Wo, yet the standard editions of his plays (Faber’s Complete Dramatic Works in the United Kingdom and Grove’s Collected Shorter Plays in the United States) continue to reprint the outdated original version. The most authoritative published text appears as “Revised Text” in The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: The Shorter Plays, edited by S.E. Gontarski (London: Faber and Faber, 1999; New York: Grove Press, 1999), 407–19. Gontarski’s variorum edition collates the various additions, excisions, and amendments Beckett made to the text as he worked on it in the studio and as he continued to rework the piece for subsequent stage productions. All textual references to What Where and Was Wo are taken from this version. I also draw heavily upon Beckett’s notebook for the televisual adaptation, reproduced with notes by Gontarski (421–53).

2. The best example of Beckett’s early bafflement at how directors, actors, and critics could distort his work can be found in the justly famous “Endgame letters.”

See Harmon 17–33.

3. For a chronicle of these changes, which Schneider came to regret in retrospect as a betrayal, see Alan Schneider, “Working with Beckett,” On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 251–52.

4. The 1964 National Theatre production of Play at the Old Vic is also notable as Billie Whitelaw’s first Beckett play. She offers a wide-eyed perspective on the production and its surrounding controversy in her autobiography (76–82).

Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challenges of Screen Adaptation 197

5. The critical deficiency can be blamed in large part to inaccessibility of the primary source. After Comédie’s inauspicious debut at the 1966 Venice Biennale—

Zilliacus reports that “the film was nearly booed off the screen” (151)—the film was stored away from public sight for over three decades. It only resurfaced again in the “Voilà” exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 2000. It has since been screened at numerous international exhibitions, and it was met with a much more appreciative reception when re-entered in the 2001 Venice Biennale.

6. The triple-bill premiered on February 28, 1966, in the Petite Salle at the Odéon-Théâtre in Paris. Serreau is still credited as the director for Comédie, but Beckett’s correspondence from the period suggests that the author had assumed the practical responsibilities of direction in Serreau’s absence. The 1966 stage reprise retained Eléonore Hirt and Michaël Lonsdale from the 1964 cast, but replaced Delphine Seyrig with Danielle van Bercheyke. However, the film adaptation of Comédie retained the entire 1964 cast intact.

7. The radio adaptation of Play first aired on the BBC on October 11, 1966, featuring Pauline Jameson, Robert Stephens, and Billie Whitelaw.

8. The film version actually becomes gradually slower rather than faster. This inverse relationship notwithstanding, the patterns described for the radio Play are the same as those used in the film Comédie.

9. Beckett discovered in Stuttgart that the name Bam, though always part of the published script, was never actually spoken at any point in the dialogue.

Therefore, he added the opening line and continued to observe this revision in subsequent sanctioned productions ( Notebooks IV 415n17).

10. See Zilliacus 204–6.

11. Comédie contains significantly fewer cuts, though its editing is far from conservative. According to Karmitz, “There are 250 sequences in the movie, but they seem like one” (75).

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A˚

A˚

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to the focal chapter on the subject.

Abraham, Karl, 17, 24

Baudrillard, Jean, 160

Ackerley, C. J., 1, 3, 8, 91, 121,

Beckett, Edward, 144, 168

143–44, 168, 184, 192

Beckett, John, 78, 168

Act Without Words I (Beckett), 144

Beckett, May, 120

Act Without Words II (Beckett), 144

Beckett on Film, 23, 171–72, 175, 181,
adaptation, 1, 2, 8, 20–22, 33, 35–36,

188–95

45, 78–79, 89–91, 105, 121, 147,

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 3, 20, 22, 72,

165, 171–72, 175–82, 185–97

77–79, 81, 84, 87–89, 98, 106,

Agony in the Garden, 142, 161–68

124, 132, 135, 147, 171

Albright, Daniel, 19, 22, 119, 134

Belis, Andrew (Beckett pseudonym),

Alighieri, Dante, 62, 105, 125, 133,

93–96, 109, 120

135, 142, 144, 151–61, 166, 167,

Bellini, Giovanni, 164

171, 191

Ben-Zvi, Linda, 24, 67

“All Soul’s Night” (Yeats), 89

Benjamin, Walter, 47–49, 159–60

All That Fall (Beckett), 24, 28, 32, 33, Bercheyke, Danielle van, 197

70, 145, 172

Bergson, Henri, 8, 11–15, 19, 50, 72,
alterity, 13, 18, 24, 25, 119, 150

75, 81–82, 100–104, 124, 141,

Alvarez, A., 61

149, 151

“Among School Children” (Yeats), 120

Berkeley, George, 11, 37, 40, 42, 51,

Arikha, Avigdor, 45, 107, 136, 144–45,

161, 163, 170

74, 111
art, 1, 7, 19, 20, 22–24, 42, 47–49, 55,

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud),

62, 70, 75–76, 78, 91, 96, 107,

17, 151

119, 131, 134–38, 141–42, 144,

Bible, 34, 61, 68, 142, 158–59,

149, 159–61, 163–68, 172, 178,

161–63, 167, 169

187–88, 195–97

Bion, Wilfrid, 17

Asmus, Walter, 187

Blake, William, 70

At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats), 97, 113–22

Blin, Roger, 91

Atik, Anne, 107, 114, 136, 144–45,

“Blood and the Moon” (Yeats), 38

161, 164, 169

Boje, Kornelia, 91, 121

Augustine, Saint, 158

Braque, Georges, 178

Bair, Dierdre, 45, 139

Brater, Enoch, 45, 48, 73, 83–84, 91,

Barenboim, Daniel, 91

99, 113

212 Index

British Broadcasting Corporation

“Coole and Ballylee, 1931” (Yeats), 94

(BBC) (London), 2, 4, 33, 45, 65,

Correggio, Antonio Allegri da, 165

67–68, 70–71, 77, 81, 87, 89, 91,
countertradition, 21, 50, 64, 79, 105–7,

97–98, 108, 121, 134, 138, 172,

135, 142, 158, 166–67

176–77, 180, 184, 189–90, 197

Cousineau, Thomas, 128

Brown, Warren, 177

Coward, Noel, 126

Bryden, Mary, 133, 144, 148

Craig, Gordon, 115, 122

Burke, Edmund, 23, 111

“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”

Burrows, Rachel, 24

(Yeats), 94–95

. . .but the clouds. . . (Beckett), 2–3, 7, Cronin, Anthony, 95–96

16, 19, 20, 29, 52, 71, 81, 89–91,

Cubism, 178, 187

93–122, 127, 144, 147, 150, 176

Cusack, Cyril, 121

Calder, John, 121

“Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” (Beckett), Cambrensis, Giraldus, 158

93, 166

Camus, Albert, 62
decomposition and recomposition, 69,

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 70,

79, 82, 84, 90, 96, 120, 125, 144,

165

148, 171

Carey, Phyllis, 133
defamiliarization, 49, 76, 79, 84–85, 98

Cascando (Beckett), 29–32, 78, 183–84

Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 27–28, 40, 51, 53,

“Case in a Thousand, A” (Beckett), 121

71, 80, 86–88, 100, 150

Caselli, Daniela, 151
de Man, Paul, 9, 18

Catastrophe (Beckett), 61–62

Derrida, Jacques, 4, 18, 74, 131

Cathleen ni Houlihan (Yeats), 99

Descartes, Rene, 11, 75

Catholicism, 62, 95, 157

Deutsch, Otto Erich, 145, 148, 169

Chabert, Pierre, 128–29, 175, 178

Devine, George, 174–75, 180, 191

Chaplin, Charlie, 45

Devlin, Denis, 121

Cherry Lane Theater (New York), 174

Donne, John, 188

Christianity, 62, 119, 142, 147–48,

“Doppelgänger, Der” (Schubert), 161,

151–70

169

“Circus Animals’ Desertion, The”

dream-organ, 9–10, 32, 78

(Yeats), 3
dreams, 3, 9–10, 32, 38, 55, 64, 78,

Clark, David, 169

104, 111–12, 141–51, 153–54,

Coffey, Brian, 121

166–68

Cohn, Ruby, 2, 91, 104, 120, 123, 132,

Duchamp, Marcel, 131, 133

136, 168, 169

Duckworth, Colin, 160, 189, 194

Colgan, Michael, 171, 188–89, 193
du Pré, Jacqueline, 91
collaboration, 31, 36–45, 107, 126–31,

Dürer, Albrecht, 164, 165

171–72, 174–82, 185–88, 193,

Duthuit, Georges, 137–38

195–96

Collin, Matthäus von, 146–47, 149–50,

“Easter, 1916” (Yeats), 89

169

Egoyan, Atom, 190

Come and Go (Beckett), 175

Eh Joe (Beckett), 2–3, 16, 19, 27–29,

Comédie (Beckett), 36, 91, 171,

32, 38, 44–45, 47–68, 69–75, 80,

175–81, 185–88, 191, 193–97

99, 129, 162, 187, 194

Index 213

Eisenstein, Sergei, 45, 139

Gemäldegalerie (Berlin), 165
elegy, 20–22, 50, 62–66, 95, 105–7,

Gherarducci, Don Silvestro dei, 70

111, 113, 120

Ghost Trio (Beckett), 2–3, 5, 16, 19, 20, Eliot, T. S., 5, 23, 85, 96, 146–47

24, 48, 51–53, 67, 69–91, 97–99,

Embers (Beckett), 29, 33–35, 45, 53,

101–2, 106, 117, 129–30, 132,

61, 70

144, 147, 176, 194

Endgame (Beckett), 33, 34, 40, 59, 63,
ghosts, 5, 50, 52–54, 74–75, 77–78,

86, 87, 89, 117, 144, 161, 162,

96–96, 99, 108, 110, 187

194

Gibson, Alan, 67

“Essay on Spirit Seeing”

God, 5, 21, 34, 37–39, 74, 152, 154,

(Schopenhauer), 9–11, 32, 54, 67,

156–59, 162–63, 166

77–78, 101, 149

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 96
esse est percipi, 38–39, 42, 51, 74–75, 111

Gonne, Maud, 99, 110

Essif, Les, 122, 133

Gontarski, S. E., 1, 3, 8, 28, 41, 54,

Esslin, Martin, 29, 30, 44, 55, 70, 91,

65–68, 91, 106, 121, 125–26,

136–37, 139, 142, 180–81, 184

133, 137, 141, 143–44, 168,

“F1 et F2” (Beckett), 90

173–74, 182–86, 192, 196
failure, 7–8, 14, 19, 22, 24, 28, 36,

Gossaert, Jan, 165–66

42–44, 51, 53, 59, 63–64, 66, 87,

Grattan, Henry, 111

99, 103–4, 107, 117–20, 130,

Greco, El, 165

139, 141, 150, 152–53, 166–67,

171, 182, 185, 188
habit, 14–15, 82, 102–4, 149–51

Fehsenfeld, Martha, 63, 187

Happy Days (Beckett), 33–35, 63, 114

Film (Beckett), 1,9, 28, 35–45, 47, Harmon, Maurice, 43–45, 86, 91, 123,

50–54, 67, 74–75, 81, 88, 141,

127, 141, 190, 196

169, 194

Harrington, John, 23

Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, 144–45,

He Joe (Beckett), 67, 69

147, 169

“He Wishes his Beloved were Dead”

Fitzgerald, Michael, 45

(Yeats), 105–6, 111

Footfalls (Beckett), 67, 70, 80, 86

Heibel, Hans, 133
formalism, 24, 43–44, 51, 69, 71–72,

Herm, Klaus, 87, 89, 98, 115

76, 78–80, 83, 89–90, 108

Herren, Graley, 24, 133, 170

Foron, Helfrid, 139, 168

Hirt, Eléonore, 197

Forst, Irmgard, 91, 121

How It Is (Beckett), 183

Foster, R. F., 121–22

“Humanistic Quietism” (Beckett), 142

Freud, Sigmund, 8, 10, 15–19, 24, 50,

Hummel, Jürg, 139

56–61, 67, 72, 124, 150–51

Hypothèse, Le’ (Pinget), 175, 178, 187

Friedrich, Caspar David, 146

Frost, Everett, 190, 192–93

Illig, Nancy, 67
imagination, 8–10, 19, 27, 29, 31–32,

Garrick Theatre (London), 68

34–35, 38, 53–54, 56–67, 71, 74,

Gate Theatre (Dublin), 23, 171

79, 82–84, 90, 94, 97–98, 101,

“Geist, Der” (Beethoven), 21, 72, 77–79,

104, 107, 109–14, 118–19, 141,

87–88, 91

149–51, 181, 185, 195

Geistertrio (Beckett), 89, 91

Inferno (Dante), 133, 135, 151–52, 156

214 Index

Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA)

Kristeva, Julia, 60

(Paris), 4–5

Kuryluk, Ewa, 158, 169
intertextuality, 2, 5, 20, 27, 29, 89, 98,

113, 119, 142, 144, 171, 181, 183

Lacan, Jacques, 17, 24

Ionesco, Eugène, 36, 45

Lamont, Rosette, 67

Ireland, 6–7, 23–24, 40, 70, 91, 93–96,

Laughlin, Karen, 59–60

111, 116, 120–21, 161, 163–64,

166, 170–71, 183

Lawley, Paul, 146

Ito, Michio, 122

Laws, Catherine, 79

Lebovici, Elisabeth, 175

Jameson, Pauline, 197

“Leiermann, Der” (Schubert), 145, 161

“je voudrais que mon amour meure”

Leventhal, Con, 107

(Beckett), 121

Jesus Christ, 34, 62, 142, 154, 157–66,

Lewis, Jim, 131, 136, 157, 162, 187–88

169

Lonsdale, Michaël, 173, 197

“J. M. Mime” (Beckett), 125–26, 144

Joyce, James, 7, 45, 49, 134, 167

MacGowran, Jack, 45, 50, 66–67, 70,

Joyce, Lucia, 121

125, 130, 145, 190

Juliet, Charles, 161

MacGreevy, Thomas, 6, 23, 121, 139,

Jung, Carl, 67, 133–34

163

Junker, Mary, 23

MacGregor, Neil, 163

Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (Berlin), 165,

Magee, Patrick, 70, 184, 190

170

Maier, Michael, 78

Kalb, Jonathan, 127–28, 131, 168

Mantegna, Andrea, 164

Kandinsky, Wassily, 133, 136
marionettes, 81, 101, 115, 124

Karmitz, Marin, 36, 91, 171, 175–81,

Marowitz, Charles, 69

187–88, 191, 194, 196–97

Kaun, Axel, 136–37

Martin, William, 37

Kavanagh, Patrick, 95–96

Mary, Blessed Virgin, 154–56, 164–66,

Keaton, Buster, 37, 40, 51, 139

169

Keats, John, 62

Matter and Memory (Bergson), 11–15,

Kennedy, Seán, 23, 24

75, 81–82, 100, 102, 104, 149

Klein, Melanie, 17, 24, 60

Maxwell, Bennett, 180

Kleist, Heinrich von, 81, 115

Knowlson, Elizabeth, 68, 77, 96, 160,

Mayrhofer, Johann, 145–46, 169

163, 170, 191, 194

McCormack, W. J., 23

Knowlson, James, 36, 68, 70, 77, 81, 91,

McDonald, Ronan, 6–7, 24

96–97, 121, 142, 160, 163–64,

McGuinness, Frank, 23

168–70, 174–76, 182, 191,

McMillan, Dougald, 63, 164

195–96

McMullan, Anna, 139, 167, 188, 190,

Knupfer, Claudia, 139

Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 24, 28, 33, 192–93

45, 56, 59, 61, 63, 70, 75, 77,

McWhinnie, Donald, 28, 32, 91, 172,

90–91, 101, 116, 144, 190

176–77, 190

Index 215
memory: art of memory, 20–21, 24, 70,

Mulvey, Laura, 68

141, 163–64; cultural memory, 1,

Murphy (Beckett), 183

5–7, 19, 27, 50, 77, 167–68; fail-

Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris), 197
ure of memory, 19–20, 22, 24, 28,
music, 3, 5, 20, 22, 29–31, 69, 72,

101, 104, 107, 119, 150, 153–54;

77–79, 83–84, 87–91, 98, 106–7,
field of memory, 3, 72, 104, 115,

114–15, 117–18, 124–25, 127–32,

182, 186; genealogy of memory, 7,

137, 142–50, 154, 161, 167–69,

15, 19, 149; involuntary memory,

179–80, 182–83, 196

8–9, 13–14, 24, 44, 103, 116,

“My Prayer” (Schubert), 148

149; learnt recollection, 13–14,

82, 104, 149–50; memory-images,

Nacht und Träume (Beckett), 2–3, 16,

12–13, 55, 82, 85, 100–104, 113,

20, 141–70, 171, 182

115; memory machines, 1, 5, 13,

“Nacht und Träume” (Schubert), 22,

15, 28, 33, 37, 77, 86, 101, 179;

143, 145–50, 161, 169
memory and perception, 11–14,

“Nachtfeier” (Schubert), 169

55, 72, 75, 82–83, 101

“Nachtstück” (Schubert), 145–46

Mendel, Deryk, 67

National Education Television (WNET)

Mercier and Camier (Beckett), 33

(New York), 190

Mercier, Vivian, 24, 161

National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin),

Meredith, Burgess, 45

70, 91, 163, 170

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Yeats), National Gallery (London), 163–65

89

National Telefilm Associates (WNTA)

Mihalovici, Marcel, 78

(New York), 45

Miller, Nicholas, 6–7

National Theatre (Old Vic) (London),

Milton, John, 21, 62

174, 196
mime, 123–27, 133, 139, 143–44, 148,

Nobel Prize for Literature, 69, 93, 96,

156, 163, 168

120

“Mime du rêveur, A” (Beckett), 143–44

Not I (Beckett), 4, 23, 70, 80, 89, 91, Minghella, Anthony, 191–96

98, 117, 121, 176
minimalism, 14, 45, 48, 73, 83, 114,

. . .nur noch Gewölk. . . (Beckett), 89, 125, 136–38, 182, 185–86, 192

91, 108, 112, 121
modernism, 1, 6–7, 21–22, 47–49, 63,

74, 107, 137–38, 146–47, 178

O’Casey, Sean, 24, 113

Molloy (Beckett), 33

Odéon–Théâtre (Paris), 197

Moloney, Alan, 192

Ohio Impromptu (Beckett), 45, 77, 184

Moore, Gerald, 145

Okamuro, Minako, 133–34

Moore, Thomas, 183

O’Toole, Peter, 68, 139

Morgner, Dirk, 168

Mostel, Zero, 45

Page, Anthony, 91
mourning, 10, 15–18, 20–21, 28, 50,

Palmer, Samuel, 146

55, 56–66, 72, 148

Paradiso (Dante), 152–58, 169

“Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud),

Pearse, Padraig, 45

15–17, 56–60

Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Yeats), 120

Müller-Freienfels, Reinhart, 89, 98,

Perini, Luc, 175–76, 179–81, 188

121, 123, 141, 143, 168

Petrarch, Francesco, 62, 105

216 Index
phenomenology, 33, 62, 98–99, 116,

Rembrandt van Rijn, 165

142, 173–74
repetition compulsion, 17, 58, 69–70,

Phillips, Sîan, 65, 67–68, 139

151

Picasso, Pablo, 178
retrospective second sight, 10–11, 56

Pickup, Ronald, 81, 87, 98, 115, 176

Rickman, Alan, 191

Piece of Monologue, A (Beckett), 77

Rimbaud, Arthur, 183

Pilling, John, 81, 94

Roche, Anthony, 23

Pinget, Robert, 33, 175, 178–79

Romanticism, 79, 94, 145–48

Pinter, Harold, 36, 45, 70, 108, 118,

Rosset, Barney, 36, 43, 45

184

Rothko, Mark, 75

Pirandello, Luigi, 40

Rough for Radio I (Beckett), 44

Plato, 109, 111

Rough for Radio II (Beckett), 29, 44, 70, Play (Beckett), 56, 91, 171–81, 191–97

184–85

Plotinus, 109, 111

Royal Court Theatre (London), 4, 71,

Poe, Edgar Allen, 105

91, 176–77
postmodernism, 133, 160

Rubik, Hans-Jochen, 139

Pound, Ezra, 1, 121

Pountney, Rosemary, 86

“Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats), 109, 112

Powell, Tristram, 71, 91, 108, 121, 177

Samuel Beckett Theatre (Dublin), 23
prayer, 141–42, 147, 151, 161–66

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 191

Prieto, Eric, 74–75, 82, 150

Schäfer, Jörg, 139

Pritz, Stephan, 168

Schatten (Beckett), 91, 98, 121

Protestantism, 7, 24, 95, 111, 160–61

Schiller-Theater (Berlin), 91

Proust (Beckett), 8–9, 14, 18–19, 25,

Schmid, Herta, 133

44, 55, 63, 94, 103, 113, 131

Schneider, Alan, 1, 36–37, 40, 43–45,

Proust, Marcel, 8–9, 13, 24, 44, 103,

86, 91, 123, 127, 130, 132, 174,

149,151

185, 190, 196
pseudocouple, 33, 35, 53

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 8–12, 15, 17,

Puchner, Martin, 49

19, 24, 32, 39–40, 45, 50, 54, 56,

Purgatorio (Dante), 151–52, 156

67, 77–78, 101, 131, 137, 149,

151–52, 182–85

Quadrat I + II (Beckett), 2, 22–23, 90, Schrade, Albrecht, 139

123–39, 141, 144, 168, 185

Schubert, Franz, 20, 135, 142–48, 151,

154, 160–61, 167, 169, 171

Racz, Gyula, 139

“Second Coming, The” (Yeats), 28, 44

Rainford, Lydia, 71–72, 103

Serreau, Jean-Marie, 174–75, 180, 197

Seyrig, Delphine, 197

Ramazani, Jahan, 21–22, 62–63, 95,

Shades (Beckett), 4, 69, 71, 89, 91, 96, 105–6, 111, 120

98, 108, 115, 117, 124, 176–77

Ray, Man, 70

Shakespeare, William, 11, 38, 62, 91,

Ravel, Jean, 175–76, 178–81, 187–88

133, 136, 189

“Recent Irish Poetry” (Beckett), 93–

Shaw, George Bernard, 65, 113, 121

96, 120

Shelley, Percy, 21

Reed, John, 146

Shenker, Israel, 167

Rehe, Susanne, 139

Shklovsky, Viktor, 76

Index 217

Sierz, Aleks, 189, 192–93, 195

Voigts-Virchow, Eckart, 126, 134–35,

Sinclair, Morris, 77

138

Sinclair, Peggy, 68

“Sixteen Dead Men” (Yeats), 89

Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 8, 33, 45, Solov, Sandra, 157

63, 77, 86–88, 91, 117, 146, 162,

Spargo, R. Clifton, 64, 107

169, 172, 189, 194
spectrality, 3–5, 14–15, 64–65, 74, 100,

Walker, Antoinette, 45

176–77

Warhol, Andy, 160

Spiegelman, Art, 136

States, Bert O., 98–99, 149

Warrilow, David, 128–29

Stephens, Robert, 197

Was Wo (Beckett), 2–3, 19–20, 23, 29,

Stevenson, Juliet, 191

52, 171, 181–88, 196

Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) (Stutt-

Watkin, William, 20–21, 68
gart), 2, 67, 69, 77, 87, 89, 91, 98,

Watt (Beckett), 33, 76, 139

121, 123, 131, 138–39, 141, 158,

Weller, Shane, 24, 139

168, 171, 185–87

Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)

suicide, 34, 38, 54, 56–64, 67

(Cologne), 90, 190

Synge, John Millington, 24, 93, 113

What Where (Beckett), 1, 23, 171, 173,

Tandy, Jessica, 71, 91

181–88, 196

Tate Modern (London), 48

Whitelaw, Billie, 4, 20, 23, 70–71, 89,
telegy, 21–22, 28, 64, 96, 105–7, 120

98–99, 121, 127–29, 185, 196–97

Telemann, Georg Phillip, 161

Winding Stair and Other Poems, The

Teletubbies, 134–35

(Yeats), 94, 107

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 21

Winterreise, Die (Schubert), 144–45,

That Time (Beckett), 56, 70, 77, 173

183

Théâtre Récamier (Paris), 91

Words and Music (Beckett), 29, 31–32,

Thomas, Kirstin Scott, 191

78, 107–8

Three Dialogues (Beckett & Duthuit),

“Words for Music Perhaps” (Yeats), 107

137

“Tower, The” (Yeats), 22, 89, 96–99,

World as Will and Representation, The

102, 104, 107–13, 118–21

(Schopenhauer), 8–9, 39, 78, 131,

Trinity College (Dublin), 11, 23, 24

151–52, 184–85

Tynan, Kenneth, 174–75, 179

Worstward Ho (Beckett), 22, 126, 141

Worth, Katherine, 116

Uhlmann, Anthony, 11, 24, 137, 141

Unnamable, The, 30, 53

Yeats, Jack, 7, 23, 96

Yeats, William Butler, 3, 7, 20, 22–23,

“Vacillation” (Yeats), 94

35, 38, 44–45, 62, 89, 93–99,

Vaudeville Theatre (London), 65

104–22, 124, 134–35, 147, 171
ventriloquism, 53–54, 62, 97, 116
vera icon, 157–60, 162–63, 167, 169,

Youens, Susan, 169

189

Zilliacus, Clas, 2–3, 28–29, 35, 52, 57,

Vision, A (Yeats), 89

61, 67, 90, 185, 190, 197

Voges, Bruno, 138

Zukerman, Pinchas, 91

Document Outline

- Cover
- Half-Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Beckett’s Memory Machines

- Chapter 2 Slouching toward Television: Beckett’sApprenticeship in Radio and Film

- Chapter 3 “The Best’s to Come”: SuicidalFantasy in Eh Joe

- Chapter 4 Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio

- Chapter 5 Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in but the clouds

- Chapter 6 Quadrat I + II: Eff It with Color

- Chapter 7 The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume

- Chapter 8 Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challengesof Screen Adaptation

- Works Cited

- Index

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Half-Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Beckett’s Memory Machines

- Chapter 2 Slouching toward Television: Beckett’sApprenticeship in Radio and Film

- Chapter 3 “The Best’s to Come”: SuicidalFantasy in Eh Joe

- Chapter 4 Decomposing and Recomposing Ghost Trio

- Chapter 5 Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in but the clouds

- Chapter 6 Quadrat I + II: Eff It with Color

- Chapter 7 The Unanswered Prayers of Nacht und Träume

- Chapter 8 Comédie, Was Wo, and the Challengesof Screen Adaptation

- Works Cited

- Index