The
stage-picture of Play treats
the human body with a violence that is unusual even in Beckett:
Front centre, touching one another, three identical
grey urns about one yard high. From each a head protrudes, the neck held fast
in the urn’s mouth. The heads are those, from left to right as seen from the
auditorium, of W2, M and W1. They face undeviatingly front throughout the Play. Faces so lost to age and aspect as
to seem almost part of urns. But no masks.
Their speech is provoked by a spotlight projected on
faces alone.1
‘The
source of light is single’ and ‘at the centre of the footlights, the faces
being thus lit at close quarters and from below’; ‘a single mobile spot should
be used, swivelling at maximum speed from one face to another as required’, ‘expressive
of a unique inquisitor’ (p. 23). ‘The transfer of light from one face to
another is immediate’. ‘Faces impassive throughout. Voices toneless except
where an expression is indicated. Rapid tempo throughout’ (p. 9). The first
section of the text, after an opening ‘chorus’, consists of the interlaced
narration of a sordid story of an adulterous affair and (more particularly) its
aftermath from the points of view of the husband (M), the wife (W1) and the ‘other
woman’ (W2). The story begins with the confrontation by the wife of the other
woman, continues with the man’s attempt to return to the bond of marriage and
ends, inconclusively, with the unexplained disappearance of the other woman and
a hint of the husband’s having committed suicide (‘finally it was all too much.
I simply could no longer - ‘, p. 14). They speak out of - the stage-picture
‘represents’ - not so much a place as a state (‘Beckett’s ultimate
version of the Protestant Hell’, Hugh Kenner has suggested2). The
second section of the text is made up of the three heads’ own speculations
about the reason for this apparently meaningless inquisition by the light and
how it might be terminated. What does the ‘unique inquisitor’ require? A story
which focuses on the Eternal Triangle will also focus on some kind of truth-telling,
so it seems inevitable that the light should be asked (by W1): ‘Is it that I do
not tell the truth, is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at
last and then no more light at last, for the truth’. (p. 16) Is this a moral
truth? Does the ‘Play’ consist of the
atonement for the sin of adultery? W1 declares: ‘penitence, yes, at a pinch,
atonement, one was resigned, but no, that does not seem to be the point either’
(p. 20). At-one-ment (‘one was resigned . . .’) with what? The ‘inquisitor’
is apparently not listening, cannot listen, it is ‘mere eye. No mind. Opening
and shutting. . .’ (p. 21). ‘Am I as much as . . . being seen?’ (p. 22) asks M.
Again it is W1 who confronts the situation: ‘If only I could think. There is no
sense in this . . . either, none whatsoever. I can’t.... And that all is
falling, all fallen, from the beginning, on empty air. Nothing being asked at
all. No one asking me for anything at all’ (p. 18).
The
unique feature of Play is, of course,
its da capo structure: ‘Repeat play’.
It is here that the analogy with music is unavoidable. We know that when
producing his Plays in the theatre
Beckett is apt to talk about their structures in musical terms,3 so
it is not surprising that Play, with
its ‘toneless’ voices, the ‘rapid tempo throughout’, the ‘trio’ which opens the
‘action’ (in a note Beckett even ‘scores’ this section) and its final da
capo instruction, should seem at times less a dramatic text than a musical
score. The musical characteristics of the Play’s
structure have the effect of pushing the language to the borders of
abstraction. On the first run-through the heads’ speculations about the
nature and meaning of their present state do seem, despite the specified
tonelessness of delivery and uniform tempo, evidence of ‘how the mind works
still to be sure!’ (p. 18), but in the repeat our sense of this diminishes
drastically: everything now seems fixed, absolutely cyclic, and our already considerable
awareness of words as opaque blocks or aural artillery is made even more acute
than it was during the initial run-through. What we are witnessing is not
a quest for ‘truth’ (of whatever kind) but a frantic struggle for survival
against the light. Yet although for the heads the words they speak are stone-dead,
entirely without semantic ‘charge’ (the toneless delivery seems to confirm
this), for the audience the words can never empty themselves entirely of
meaning - even second time round. The Play
tends towards the condition of music but, as far as we are concerned, can never
get there. For the heads communication is never a concern, since each is
apparently oblivious of the presence of the others. ‘They face undeviatingly
front throughout the Play’ towards a ‘mere
eye’, which does not hear them, and never address each other directly. It is
the same hell, but each is in it alone. For us, however, there are ‘connections’
which serve to charge and vitalise the words. Indeed, the further structure and
stage-picture press towards abstraction the more surely do they endow the
text with a capacity for a strange life of its own. This life is a counterpoint-life.
The
counterpoint in Play is of two kinds.
Firstly, the interlacing of three independent narrative voices, each. one of
which is unaware of the other two, provides the opportunity for a witty Play of phrase between voices of the
kind exemplified in the opening moments:
M : So I told her I did not know what she was
talking about.
Spot from M to W2.
W2 : What are you talking about? I said, stitching
away .... I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch.
Spot from W2 to W1.
W1 : Though I had him dogged for months by a first
rate man, no shadow of proof was forthcoming . . . (pp. 10- 11, my
emphases). The
‘shadow of proof’ casts us back to the first words of W2 in the opening trio: ‘a
shade gone, just a shade, in the head’ (pp. 9-10). Both of these phrases
also register in the terms of the other, more important, kind of counterpoint
in Play: that between text and stage-picture.
Too much in the light as they are, these figures need any shade or shadow they
can get - above all, the shade of words, the only means they have to keep
themselves out of the light. And the effect of ‘just a shade, in the head’
coming from the mouth of a body with only its head visible is as bizarre as it
is hard to explain. This
last example is typical in the way the stage-text counterpoint
revitalizes a cliché which involves the body. For the body, by its very absence
from the stage-picture, is the Play’s
most potent presence. Having presented the audience with a visual image of
extreme physical constriction - ‘the neck held fast in the urn’s mouth(!)’
so that only mouth and eyes can actually move - Beckett proceeds to draw extensively
on the rich vein of body-clich6s to grotesque and occasionally poignant
effect. Sometimes this is a matter of the cruel, simple contrast between the
extravagance of the actions described and the constriction we see in front of
us: Give up that whore, she said, or I’ll cut my throat - One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open
window [itself a counterpoint to the light] she burst in and flew at me. (Both
p. 10) So I took her in my arms and swore I could not live
without her .... She did not repulse me. Judge then of my astoundment when one fine morning,
as I was sitting stricken [a glance back at W2’s ‘sitting stitching’] in the
morning room, he slunk in, fell on his knees before me, buried his face in my
lap and . . . confessed (Both p. 11) I suggested a little jaunt to celebrate, to the
Riviera or our darling Grand Canary. (p. 14) Clichés
which involve physical actions or anatomical details issue from the mouths of ‘characters’
who cannot hold, offer, show, stoop or run (any more than they can burst, fly
or slink) and who have no perceptible breasts, stomachs or hearts: I swore by all I held most sacred - Seeing her now for the first time full length in the
flesh .... (Both p. 10) Fearing she was about to offer me violence I rang
for Erskine and had her shown out. (p. 11) Then I forgave him. To what will love not stoop! (p.
12) Then I got frightened and made a clean breast of it
. . . . I had no silly threats to offer - but
not much stomach for her leavings either. (Both p. 13) At home all heart to heart, new leaf and bygones
bygones. I ran into your ex-doxy, she said one night .... (p. 14) The
irony sometimes consists in a more general, though hardly less cruel, contrast
between what we hear about and how we hear about it: She put a bloodhound on me, but I had a little chat
with him. (p. 12) So he was mine again. All mine. I was happy again. I
went about singing [Cf. ‘our darling Grand Canary’?] (p. 14) Meet, and sit, now in the one dear old place, now in
the other, and sorrow together, and compare - (hiccup) pardon -
happy memories. (p. 18) In
almost all the examples I have listed the counterpoint is created by the
implicit contrast of stage-situation and textual detail. The
resulting irony would seem to be entirely at the expense of the um-bound ‘characters’.
The implications of this are important, for if this were true of all the Play’s ironies, we could legitimately
consider Beckett’s intentions - and his achievement - to be
satirical. To do this would be, in effect, to identify the Playwright with his ‘unique inquisitor’, the light: he places them
in a hell from which they cannot escape and torments them by obliging them to
speak. This
view of Play is uncomfortable if only
because one does not necessarily have to accept it unreservedly to feel that
there is something disturbing in the way Beckett treats the beings he has
created. It is also uncomfortable because it alerts us to the way the
theatrical experience itself tends to identify the spectator with the light: we
expect them to speak, to ‘make a Play’,
and our expectation amounts, under the sanction of theatrical convention, to an
obligation upon the heads. They are indeed, to answer M’s question, being seen.
We may feel ourselves to be conspiring with the author and his agent of
interrogation the light. This is an unavoidable truth because it is a truth of
the medium made manifest - Play,
any play, is theatre. But it is
not the whole truth. Play is no more
a satire on (presumably) bourgeois sexual morality, a piece in which the author
invites the complicity of the audience in ridiculing his victims, than Happy
days is a satire on optimism. However, the need to explain why it is not
provides a convenient standpoint from which to conduct the enquiry into what it
is. And returns us to counterpoint. If
bitterly ironic humour is the result of counterpoint in which the element of
contrast - what might be termed difference-in-likeness -
is dominant, the effect of counterpoint in which parallelism -likeness-indifference
- is uppermost is in general more sober and less apparently satirical. We
see the heads locked away from each other, each in a private hell, and we hear:
‘there is obviously nothing between you any more. Or is there?’ (p. 12) We see
the light tormenting them and hear: ‘I know what torture you must be going
through she said, and I have dropped in to say I bear you no ill-feeling’
(p. 13). ‘Dropped in’ indeed. Other examples need only to be listed (emphases
are mine): What have you to complain of? I said. Have I been
neglecting you? How could we be together in the way we are if there were
someone else? Loving her as I did, with all my heart, I could not but feel
sorry for her. (p. 11) He was looking pale. Peaked. But this [‘a little
jaunt to celebrate’] was not possible just then. Professional commitments. (p.
12) She was looking more and more desperate. I felt like death. Some fool was cutting grass. A little rush, then
another. (All p. 13) In the meantime we were to carry on as before. By
that he meant as best we could. Then I drove over to her place. It was all bolted
and barred. All grey with frozen dew. On the way back by Ash [are these
funerary urns?] and Snodland. (Both p. 14) I made a bundle of his things and burnt them. It was
November and the bonfire was going. All night I smelt them smouldering.
(p. 15) There is no future in this. (p. 16) . . . not even a squeeze of lemon. (p. 17) Perhaps she has taken him away to live . . .
somewhere in the sun. (p. 19) Penitence, yes, at a pinch . . . Gazing down out over the olives, then the sea,
wondering what can be keeping him, growing cold. Shadow stealing over
everything. Creeping. Yes. To think we were never together. (All p. 20) The
last line of the play must be
one of the most terrible of all curtain lines, spoken as it is out of a state
which is at once an eternal togetherness and an eternal separateness:4
‘We were not long together - ‘ (p. 22; the words are, of course, literally
true of the brief theatrical event, but only in such a way as to make us
conscious of the difference between ourselves and the heads - the sense
in which the audience is excluded from the ‘we’). Almost
without exception these passages have a poignancy which is lacking in the
earlier examples. This is because they rely less ostentatiously upon the
revitalization of cliche and because they give a greater sense of the heads as victims
of the light - they dispose us to sympathize in a way the earlier instances
do not. There is also present something which is complementary to our sense of
the heads as victims: our sense of their awareness of their situation. Most of
my examples, especially the earlier ones, have been drawn from the actual
account of the incidents surrounding the adultery - what Beckett himself
calls tile ‘Narration’5 but, as we have already noted, this section takes up
only the first half of the text (to the top of page 15). Up to that point we
may feel that the cruel irony which is a product of the text-stage
counterpoint exists largely at the expense of the heads, and that they merit
little more than our contempt. But the second half of the text - called ‘Meditation’
by Beckett himself - sheds a subtle new light on the first. In the Meditation
each of the heads casts about for the sense of its situation, considers the
nature of the light, probes for certainties amid the darkness and then makes
an attempt to imagine what has happened to the other two corners of this
particular Eternal Triangle (another clichd Play
prods to life). That these imaginings are not without malice makes little
difference to the change in our attitude. We can now see that the heads are not
chained exclusively to their ‘past’, their narration(s): they are victims
of the light, certainly, but not only victims, for they can recognize
themselves as such and can speak of the light when forced to speak by the
light. The light obliges them to speak but it does not necessarily determine what
they speak - yet we only realize this in the Meditation section of the
text. If the Play consisted only of
the Narration it would be as though the light were obliging them not only to
speak, but to speak only of these events, to tell only this story. The
da capo instruction would appear to undermine my suggestion that the
contrast between the Narration and Meditation sections of Play implies a kind of freedom for the heads from the light. In the
repetition, as we have noted, we are made fully aware that their speech,
prompted by the light as it is, involves no creative faculty or deployment of
words as anything other than abstract blocks; the humour and ‘the inconsequential
details of gossip that were savoured the moment before become stale and turn
sour’.6 But why is this? Because the light determines what is
said? Not necessarily. In the words of W2, speaking about her affair in
poignant counterpoint with the stage-situation, ‘in the meantime we were
to cant’ on as before. By that he meant as best we could’. Mechanical
repetition can be regarded as a strategy for survival: they carry on as best
they can, and their best is a particular text. But why this particular text,
the adultery-story? ‘In
Play’, writes Hugh Kenner, ‘everyone
is trapped in a condemnation to repeat, repeat, versions of what happened
elsewhere, long ago, not to their credit’.7 ‘What happened’ is the
adultery and this, for Kenner, is the sin for which the heads are being
punished in ‘Beckett’s ultimate version of the Protestant Hell’. Commenting on
M’s question ‘When will all this have been . . . just Play?’ (p. 17), he writes: ‘For he can suppose that Hell itself
will turn out to be a game, just such a game as he Played, without scruple, with hearts’.8 The women are similarly
contemptible. For Kenner, the ‘truth’ W1 guesses might be the key to her
release is emphatically a moral truth. He quotes the lines in question and
asserts: ‘But the truth is not in her. She cannot forego, each time round, the
old postures, the old jealous contempt, or savouring the day she went round to
"have a gloat" . . . Her version, she is impregnably sure is the
version. (. . .) No she does not really tell the truth, though doubtless she tells
the facts’.9 Plainly the ‘truth’ Kenner demands - and sees the
light as demanding -- is self-knowledge and consequent
contrition. In such a reading the light needs to be considered a moral agent,
yet nowhere does Kenner suggest that its ‘behaviour’ might be anything other
than sense-less and mind-less. And if this is true of the light, why
should moral truth, which cannot be apprehended by the light anyway, be as
valuable as Kenner implies it to be? Just
as he takes W1’s speculations about what the light wants at face value, Kenner
accepts without question the heads’ version of the sequence of events: ‘It is
all very banal, drawing-room melodrama, cheapened and accelerated. And
then something happened’.10 In Kenner’s view, the ultimate
Protestant Hell happened. But is Play
quite as straightforward as this? The idea that what the light is after is in
fact moral truth is complementary to the assumption that they have died and are
in Hell. But need we accept the heads’ own account as literally as Kenner does?
Even if we do, it should give us pause that only a few moments after asking if ‘truth’
is what is required W1 declares that neither penitence nor atonement seems ‘to
be the point’. The
‘point’ may not be fully ascertainable. At any rate, to be as settled in one’s
assumptions as Kenner seems to be makes of Play
a lesser work than it is. Beckett locates his Plays in ‘places’ which may strike us as being most adequately
described as ‘Hell’, ‘Limbo’ or ‘Purgatory’- and the parallels with Dante
are always tempting - but to infer that any one of them is therefore
about moral retribution being exacted in an afterworld seems to me seriously
limiting. At one time it was frequently claimed that Beckett was writing about
the ‘human condition’. In criticism of the more journalistic kind one felt that
this cliché-assertion was too often made to stand reassuringly in the
stead of concrete demonstration rather than to follow naturally from it. Yet
for all its shortcomings, such an approach to Beckett’s work does at least
imply a conviction that the Plays and
novels, narrow in focus though they may sometimes be, are concerned with
matters central to the experience of being human, an experience of this world,
rather than with the rich variety of imaginable punishments to which moral
transgressors could be subjected in ghastly afterworlds.
Let
us ask again why the heads tell this particular story. In Kenner’s
reading they do so because they are-obliged to recount their sin (of
adultery) in perpetuity as punishment: ‘. . . what happened elsewhere, long
ago, not to their credit’. But did it happen elsewhere and long ago? We have
been considering the incidence and character of counterpoint in the Play, and I have felt it necessary to
list instances in order to suggest the pervasiveness, the omnipresence even, of
this feature. As we have seen, almost all the counterpoint is between the `past’
as told in the Narration and the `present’ as seen in the stage-picture.
Yet the very omnipresence of the counterpoint mechanism should make us hesitate
to adopt, as Kenner does, a simple diachronic perspective with a settled
past/present dualism.
By
its very nature counterpoint enforces a synchronic perspective: it functions
only by our simultaneous perception of likeness and difference-in-likeness.
In other words it is as though the adultery-story were a version
of what we are seeing in front of us, and vice-versa. Consider one
recurrent detail of counterpoint - the duality coming/going with the
related in/out:
. . . she burst in and flew at me. (p. 10)
. . . if he is still living, and has not forgotten,
coming and going on the earth,11 letting people in, showing people
out .
. . . he slunk in . . . (Both p. 11)
I can’t have her crashing in here, she said . . .
She came in. Just strolled in. (Both p. 12)
And I have dropped in to say I bear you no ill-feeling.
(p. 13)
. . . you’re well out of that.
When he stopped coming I was prepared. (Both p. 14)
In
all these instances the ins and outs and comings and goings are those of the
characters in the Narration. But the same terms are used in the Meditation,
this time in speaking of the light, for if the adultery-story is one of
comings and goings and ins and outs, so too is the stage ‘story’:
When you go out - and I go out. Some day you
will tire of me and go out . . . for good. (p. 16)
What do you do when you go out? Sift?
Have I lost . . . the thing you want? Why go out?
(Both p. 19)
What
the common terminology reveals is not just the accumulation of more
counterpoint (accumulation is what we have been concerned with up to now) but a
true counterpoint-structure which subsumes the accumulated detail.
The central structural pivot of Play
is the counterpoint between, not just textual detail and stage-picture,
but the adultery-story and the dramatic mechanism of the work, the operation
of the light:
W1 : When I was satisfied it was all over I went to
have a gloat. Just a common tart. What he could have found in her when he had
me -
Spot from W 1 to W2.
W2 : When he came again we had it out. I felt like
death. He went on about why he had to tell her. Too risky and so on. That meant
he had gone back to
her. Back to that!
Spot from W2 to W1.
W1 : Pudding face, puffy, spots, blubber mouth,
jowls, no neck, dugs you could -
Spot from W 1 to W2.
W2 : He went on and on . . . (p. 13)
The
effect of particular details (W1’s insult-description, for example) is typical,
but the important moments are those at which the ‘spot’ shifts. These moments
register synchronically (that is, in terms of the stage-situation) as well as
diachronically (in terms of the narration) so that, for an instant, the ‘he’
becomes for us the light, going ‘on and on’, coming ‘back’ to ‘have’ each of
the women in turn. Of course, this is not to identify the light with M. Though
potent, the effect is verbal and momentary. All three are victims. The first
thing we hear after the opening chorus is W1’s ‘I said to him, Give her up’. W2
remembers: ‘Give him up, she screamed, he’s mine’; and M: ‘Give up that whore,
she said . . .’ These might almost be - they register momentarily as -appeals
to the light and its urns (‘Give up . . .’). It is also plain that the
counterpoint-structure is not just a matter of dramatic technique, a
convenient scaffolding, for if sex is central to the adultery-story it is
also insidiously present in the ‘relation’ of the light to its victims: ‘Some
day you will tire of me and go out . . . for good . . . Give me up, as a bad
job. Go away and start poking and pecking at someone else’. (p. 16) The
inquisitor is a lucent incubus: ‘Weary of playing with me. Get off me’. (p. 21) It seems that the
obligation to speak which is visited on the heads by the light is conceived of
as a sexual violation. Play is, among
other things, a gross parody of love-play.
Having
explored the nature and effects of counterpoint-structure in Play we are now in a position to
consider its meaning. Let us begin by examining implications of the
synchronic perspective prompted by counterpoint. The diachronic approach to Play, exemplified by Hugh Kenner’s
reading, accepts the duality, proposed by the heads themselves, of narrative-past
and stage-present - in a present reality they recall a past
reality. The synchronic reading must be seen as compromising the reality of
the past (though without, it must be emphasised, denying it altogether) by
suggesting that the narrative is less memory then fiction - a story
originally invented to counterpoint the light-torture. But it cannot do
this without similarly compromising the present-ness and reality of the ‘present
reality’, the stage-situation, for if we reject dualities we must
eliminate not only past/present but also fact/fiction. This is perhaps to state
the case too baldly; nonetheless we must ask in what sense the figures we see
on stage, jammed up to their necks in urns and visible only when their heads
are spotlit, their ‘faces so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part’ of
the urns, are present. The answer is, surely, that they are both less
and more present to us than ‘ordinary’ human beings: the urns, the light, the
aspect and the toneless delivery of the text remove them from the sphere of the
recognizably human, but this very dehumanization constitutes a brutalization
into
another, stranger and more terrible state. The figures are emphatically present precisely because their situation dehumanizes them. Indeed theirs could be thought of as a parody of presence.
It
is the inquisitor-light which confirms and reveals, indeed in a sense creates,
this parody of presence, so that release from the light would mean release from
this state: ‘When you go out - and I go out. Some day you will tire of me
and go out . . . for good’. W1 reasons that, since she can only use language,
it can only be something in language which is required by the light: ‘I can do
nothing . . . for anybody . . . any more . . . thank God. So it must be
something I have to say’. ‘But’, she continues, ‘I have said all I can. All
you let me’ (p. 17). Their capacity for inventing is exhausted and now, in
order to survive, they say the same things over and over. They are imprisoned
within language as they are imprisoned within the parody of presence; as we
watch the Play we realize that the
one kind of imprisonment determines the other. The desiderated ‘truth’ is not a
moral truth the opposite of which is a lie (the word is significantly absent
from the Play) but an ontological
truth, a ‘truth’ of being the opposite of which is the parody of being we are
witnessing. This, it seems to me, is why the narrative is about the events
surrounding an adulterous affair. Such a narrative cannot help but be concerned
with concealment, deceit and pretence, with, in a word, playing. And the language of concealment,
deceit and pretence, the language of Play,
is cliché: ‘At home all heart to heart, new leaf and bygones bygones. I ran
into your ex-doxy, she said one night, on the pillow, you’re well out of
that. Rather uncalled for, I thought. I am indeed, sweetheart, I said, I am
indeed. God what vermin women. Thanks to you, angel, I said’. (p. 14) In the
essentially moral terms of the narrative M could have told the truth instead of
‘Playing’. But in the ontological
terms of the stage-situation the truth is not possible because it is not
something language itself can attain to. ‘I have said all I can’ declares W1,
but even if she were to say everything anyone could say she would not be any
closer to release, for it is the very nature of language, the only means
they have to maintain what being they have, which imprisons the figures in this
parody of being. By endowing dead metaphors with a strange life Beckett, as in
all his best writing, makes us intensely aware of the metaphorical nature of
language as a whole. Every metaphor, every part of language, we are made to
realize, is potentially a cliché. The mode of signification re-presents
rather than presents (makes present), and this re-presentation is felt in
Play as a parody of presentation.
The
ultimate purpose of the adultery-story, then, is to counterpoint the
image of adulterated being which confronts us on the stage, an image which the Play’s dramatic mechanism contrives to
present as determined by the nature of language. But how can we justify
speaking as we have done of the ‘life’ in the language of Play if human language is seen by the work itself as being
essentially ‘dead’? Just as dramatic counterpoint depends upon our
simultaneous perception of likeness and difference-in-likeness, the
special effect made by the cliches in Play,
whether they be thematic (the Eternal Triangle) or verbal, depends upon our
simultaneous perception of a metaphor’s death and its life-in-death.
It is apt and perhaps even inevitable that the Plays which come after this one, the ‘dramaticule’ Come and go, the
miniature works Not I, That time and Footfalls, and the television pieces Ghost
trio and . . . but the clouds . . . , are dominated by ghostly figures. Beckett
has never let the ‘dead’ language rest: his supreme achievement is to realize
its ghostly life.
In
section 54 of Beyond good and evil (1886) Nietzsche asks what ‘the whole of
modern [post-Cartesian] philosophy’ is ‘doing at bottom’:
. . . formerly, one believed in ‘the soul’ as one
believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, ‘I’ is the
condition, ‘think’ is the predicate and conditioned - thinking is an
activity to which thought must supply a subject as cause. Then one tried with
admirable perseverance and cunning to get out of this net - and asked
whether the opposite might not be the case: ‘think’ the condition, ‘I’ the
conditioned; ‘I’ in that case only a synthesis which is made by thinking. At
bottom, Kant wanted to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could
not be proved - nor could the object: the possibility of a merely
apparent existence of the subject, ‘the soul’ in other words, may not always
have remained strange to him ...’12
Nietzsche’s
relish at the dissolution of what he regards as ‘the basic presupposition of
the Christian doctrine’13 should not distract us from the identity
of ‘the soul’ and the lamentably absent ‘truth’ of Play. The idea of ‘truth’, as entertained by the heads, implies a
whole ontological structure in which the ‘present’ state is seen as an infernal
exile from the state of true identity. As represented here, existence constitutes
only a parody of ‘truth’ in which the imperfect consciousness is obliged to
maintain itself by speaking, thus keeping at bay the void of non-being.
Yet language serves only to recreate and sustain the parody, for its own life
is ghostly, a life in death: it is at once (to alter the metaphor) refuge and
prison-house (functions which are of course made explicit in the stage-picture
of Endgame). This is, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘a merely apparent
existence’, one determined by an obligation to speak.
The
obligation is represented, it seems, by the light, a mysterious
impersonalization of the consciousness of imperfect identity. Yet what has been
impersonalized must once have been personal. Beckett himself seems to conceive
of a reciprocal relationship between the light and its victims in which
the light itself is also a victim. In his recent account of the Play James Knowlson describes several
minor changes which were made in the repeat of the text (including a fragment
of a second repeat) to the strength and quality of the voices and the order of
the speeches when Beckett was supervising (though not actually directing) the
earliest performances. The most important of these changes is ‘a slight
weakening of both the light and the voices in the first Repeat and even more so
in the fragment of the second Repeat’. Knowison quotes a letter in which the
author suggested to his director George Devine that ‘the inquirer (light)
begins to emerge as no less a victim of his inquiry than they and as needing to
be free, within narrow limits, literally to act the part i.e. to vary if only
slightly his speeds and intensities’. 14 Beckett’s stated intention
aligns Play with those dramas in
which the agent of creative coercion is revealed as being itself coerced. This
is the major preoccupation of the radio pieces of the early 1960’s. In Words
and music Croak forces Joe (Words) and Bob (Music) to sound, in Cascando an
‘Opener’ prompts the ‘Voice’ to speak and in the sketch broadcast (though only
in 1976) as Rough for radio an ‘Animator’ coerces ‘Fox’ (Vox?) in the
most brutal manner (hence ‘Rough’); yet all three Plays gravitate towards the point at which the Master is seen to be
subject to the obligation to create no less than his Slave(s), and to be
therefore slavishly dependent upon the slave - for only the slave can
create. This creative predicament is prefigured in the relationship between
Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot: the master beats his porter
brutally and orders him to think, but during the ‘think’ he is first ‘dejected
and disgusted’, then his ‘sufferings increase’ and he becomes ‘more and more
agitated and groaning’ (p. 42). Throughout the Play we are conscious that the relationship is not what it seems.
Pozzo and Lucky are no less a ‘pseudo-couple’ than Vladimir and Estragon.
Play may be seen as an extreme
transformation of the ‘pseudo-couple’ idea: light and characters are
antagonistic yet complementary; like Pozzo and Lucky, Vladimir and Estragon,
Hamm and Clov, they cannot do with each other, yet they cannot do without each
other either. Each element depends for its existence, parodic though that may
be, upon the existence of the other. Thus, finally, the light cannot be seen as
the ultimate obligation, since it too is obliged (fulfilling its obligation
through the heads) to ‘create’. This ultimate obligation is the vacuum of
identity which would engulf both light and heads if they were to cease
maintaining each other in their state of imperfect being. The characteristic
Beckett counterpoint-structure is the dramatic realization of this
creative-ontological predicament.
Play presents us not with an
Inferno but with existence in this world seen as infernal - human
existence as-we-know-it, or rather, as we rarely can
know it (‘habit is a great deadener’). We began by rejecting the idea that
Beckett’s attitude towards his creations is simply one of detached satirical
disdain, in which the complicity of the audience is invited by way of the
theatrical experience itself. We may now be more likely to identify the author
with the victims and to confirm John Pilling’s reaction to the repeat: ‘one
feels that the light should have been able to unscramble the essentials more
successfully the second time around. We are as much passive sufferers of the
light as the heads are.’15 But I think this needs to be qualified.
It may be that to create such images is to liberate oneself, if only
temporarily, from the state they represent. For us, to experience them with
understanding involves not just being (‘as much passive sufferers of the
light as the heads are’) but realizing (most probably, as Pilling’s
remarks suggest, in the repeat of the text) the truth of this circumstances. It
is this realization which will be the agent of momentary liberation. The
strangeness of Play is its essential
quality. In affirming that the work is about this life and not an after-life
we are defining Beckett’s method as a making strange of the familiar which
depends for its final effect upon the liberating realization that what seemed
so distant and alien at first - the parody of presence we glimpse before
us - is in fact the essence of how and what we live day in day out. We
have seen how in Play both language
and the theatrical medium are made strange: the cliches of both, like the `plot’
cliche of the Eternal Triangle, are given a new, ghostly life. This is done in
the interests of an ostensibly negative vision. The paradox - in the form
of a question - cannot help but propose itself: can that be merely
negative which prompts so liberating a realization?
1 Play: and two short pieces for radio, London, Faber and Faber,
1964, p. 9. Further references are included in text.
2 A reader’s guide to Samuel
Beckett, London, Thames and Hudson, 1973, p. 153.
3 See, for example, Ruby Cohn’s
account of his 1967 Berlin production of Endspiel in Back to Beckett,
Princeton, N.J., Princeton Univ. Press, 1973, p. 153.
4 After discussion with
Beckett about an experimental radio adaptation of Play Martin Esslin confirmed that ‘however soft, however fast, the
same text will go on ad infinitum, ever faster and ever softer without quite
ceasing altogether’. Quoted in Beryl S. Fletcher, John Fletcher, Barry Smith,
Walter Bachem, A student’s guide to the Plays
of Samuel Beckett, London, Faber and Faber, 1978, p. 173.
5 See Esslin’s account of
Beckett’s explanation, ibid., pp. 172-3
6 Ibid., p. 179. 7 Reader’s
guide, p. 153. 8 Ibid., pp. 156-7.
7 Reader’s guide,
p.153
8 Ibid., pp.156-157
9 Ibid., p. 156.
10 Ibid., p. 155.
11 There is an allusion here
to Satan in The Book of Job, I, vii: ‘And the Lord said unto Saton, whence
comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in
the earth, and from walking up and down in it’. The modification in the text of
Play from ‘walking up and down’ to ‘letting
people in, showing people out’ suggests that the light, whose process and
function is counterpointed ;n these words about M, is seen by Beckett as satanic
in its ‘actions’.
12 Basic writings of
Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Random House, 1968, p.
257.
13 Ibid., p. 256.
14 James Knowlson and John
Pilling, Frescoes of the skull : the later prose and drama of Samuel Beckett,
London, John Calder, 1979, p. 113.
15
Samuel
Beckett, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, p. 90.