Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Daniela Guardamagna
Rossana M. Sebellin
(editors)
The Tragic Comedy
of Samuel Beckett
“Beckett in Rome”
17-19 April 2008
Index
Preface IX
VI Index
Iain Bailey, Beckett, Drama, and the Writing on the Wall 143
David Addyman, Beckett and Place: The Lie of the Land 210
A. Text
Enoch Brater, The Seated Figure on Beckett’s Stage 259
B. Performances
Stanley E. Gontarski, Redirecting Beckett 327
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Index VII
Preface
Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin
Introduction
Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin*
* The first part of this Introduction, concerning the first four sections, is by
Rossana M. Sebellin; the second part, about the last three, is by Daniela Guar-
damagna. For the attribution of the entire volume, see Notes, p. 2.
1 Dirk Van Hulle, 2005, “Genetic Beckett Studies”, in Idem (editor), Beck-
ett the European, 2005, Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida),
pp. 1-9, p. 2.
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XII Introduction
Introduction XIII
nality for such texts (rather than the more frequent definition of
original and secondary version), adding this to the instances of ex-
haustion, impasse and suspicion of the truth of language. Mark
Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle present their work (in progress) on the
digitalization of Beckett’s marginalia through the excavation of the
author’s library: Beckett’s wide knowledge of European culture
and the ways in which this filters into his literary production may
be read as a form of “intertextual translation”, which Nixon and
Van Hulle explore from various perspectives.
The third section, “Beckett and the cultural context”, includes
seven contributions. Mary Bryden examines the relationship be-
tween Beckett and Hélène Cixous from the point of view of the
French writer’s attitude to her Irish-French contemporary; Bry-
den also develops an acute analysis of the elusive yet deep textu-
al correspondences and persistent Beckettian echoes in Cixous’
work, not only as textual residua, but also as a subterranean atti-
tude to the act of writing.
The following papers consider Beckett’s work in the light of the
influence of modern writers and thinkers. Heather Gardner’s con-
tribution on Company examines the influence on Beckett’s work of
the philosopher and linguist Fritz Mauthner, as well as the devel-
opment of a tendency to incorporate heterogeneous literary ele-
ments and to obliterate the thinking and narrating subject. The fol-
lowing two authors deal with different but equally unusual connec-
tions: the possible relations between Beckett and avant-garde the-
atre, and Romantic poetry. Roberta Cauchi Santoro’s paper inves-
tigates the hypothesis of a relationship between Marinetti and Beck-
ett, suggesting that the theatre of the Italian avant-garde and that of
Beckett may share a common ground. Davide Crosara examines the
influence of Milton and Romantic poetry on Beckett’s later prose
and drama: an unusual, yet convincing analysis of the author’s ca-
pacity for assimilation and incorporation of the literary tradition,
even of the writings most apparently distant from his style. Crosara
argues that the composition of the later plays and short prose has its
origins in a persistent and deep-rooted relation with the Romantic
tradition, and he thus proposes a postmodernist perspective on
such aspects of Beckett’s work.
A peculiar kind of influence is that considered by Mariacristi-
na Cavecchi, who concentrates on an ideal ‘museum’ of chairs in
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XIV Introduction
Introduction XV
XVI Introduction
Introduction XVII
XVIII Introduction
plays of the last period. She analyses the problems actors and ac-
tresses have had to cope with when acting these plays, and relates
her own experience when performing Not I and “Rockaby”.
Laura Caretti’s paper describes various Italian performances of
Happy Days, from some avant-garde ones such as Remondi and Ca-
porossi’s or that of the Teatro Studio in Scandicci, to Strehler’s stag-
ing for the Piccolo Teatro, which also entailed some modification of
Beckett’s original intentions. We could argue, as Enoch Brater did
at a lecture in Rome in April 2009, that evaluation must ultimately be
left to the performance itself: the final verdict is whether it works or
not, whether it brings something new to our understanding of Beck-
ett’s work. The last paper of the section devoted to performances is
Anastasia Deligianni’s. She describes the interesting experiment she
made in Athens when staging Waiting for Godot for an audience of
children, thereby investigating a return to virgin response which may
in turn tell us something about our adult perception of the play.
In the last section, Lino Belleggia analyses Film in the light of
Beckett’s interest in experimental cinema, from Buñuel’s Un chien
andalou to Eisenstein, whose theoretical writings greatly influenced
him. Seb Franklin analyses a kind of “post factum influence”, as
McHale puts it, of Beckett’s work on horror cinema, not of course
postulating any direct inspiration, but finding echoes of his work in
this unlikely medium (talk of science fiction and dystopia has oc-
curred elsewhere, in the case of plays and prose like The Lost Ones or
All Strange Away).
The Appendix gives information about performances and ex-
hibitions held during the Conference. Ninny Aiuto, a young writer,
presented his translation of Waiting for Godot into Sicilian, acting
some excerpts from it; a brief analysis of his work is given here. An-
tonio Borriello, whose performances are illustrated in some of the
pictures included in this volume, writes about his ideas on staging
Beckett. Bill Prosser gives us information about his work on Beck-
ettian doodles, mostly from the manuscript of Human Wishes. The
opening pages of the Appendix are devoted to the transcript of the
performance-talk given by Giulia Lazzarini, the great actress who
interpreted Strehler’s Happy Days, and though written words can-
not capture the deeply moving impact of her talk, they give us some
hint of the astounding performance of this superb Italian Winnie.
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NOTES
The sections “Beckett and Italy”, “Self-Translation, and the Genesis
of Beckett’s Writing”, “The Anxiety of Influence” and “Beckett and
Philosophers” were edited by Rossana M. Sebellin.
The sections “Beckett’s Theatre: Text and Performances”, “Beckett
and Cinema” and the “Appendix” were edited by Daniela Guarda-
magna.
Both editors are responsible for the planning and revision of the en-
tire volume.
Throughout the text, for Beckett’s works the editors have followed the
convention established among others by Ackerley and Gontarski (The
Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2004), requiring italics for texts
published individually and inverted commas for texts which first ap-
peared in collections, journals and so on.
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
APPENDIX C
Some notes on Beckett’s use of, and familiarity with, the classic
Italian writers:
Ariosto: How much of Orlando Furioso Beckett knew remains
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Others:
Carducci’s “Satan” is damned as a “pharisee poem” in the
1934 review of Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems (“Humanistic Qui-
etism”, in Cohn 1983, pp. 68-69). Beckett links Carducci to Bar-
rès in an undated letter to MacGreevy of mid-to-late July 1930.
Fracastoro’s Latin poem Sifilide is mentioned in a letter to
MacGreevy of 6 February 1936.
The “baci saporiti” of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p.
45 are almost certainly an Italianisation of Rousseau’s Julie, rather
than directly from Guarini (see my edition of the “Dream” note-
book [item 331]), even though Beckett did actually re-read Guari-
ni nearly ten years after studying him at TCD (letter to Mac-
Greevy of 26 July 1936).
The syllabus authors Fogazzaro and Sannazaro seem to have
made no impression on Beckett, assuming he even chose to read
them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Alfano, Giancarlo, and Andrea Cortellessa (a cura di), 2006, Tegole dal
cielo: la letteratura italiana nell’opera di Beckett, Antalia/Edup, Ro-
ma.
Bouchard, Norma, 2008, “Recovering Beckett’s Italian Translations”,
Journal of Beckett Studies (n.s.), XV, 1 & 2, 2008, pp. 145-159.
Burckhardt, Jacob, 1860, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The
Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, Phaidon Press, Oxford &
London 1945, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore).
Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction
and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Doran, Eva, 1981, “Au seuil de Beckett: quelques notes sur ‘Dante . . .
Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’”, in Stanford French Review, 5:1, 1981, pp.
121-127.
Engelberts, Matthijs, Everett Frost, and Jane Maxwell (editors), 2006,
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Cata-
logues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity
College Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI.
Ferrini, Jean-Pierre, 2006, “Dante, Pétrarque, Leopardi, Beckett: une
divine perspective”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, XVII,
2006, pp. 53-66.
Pilling, John, 2006, “‘For Interpolation’: Beckett and English Litera-
ture”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, XVI, 2006, pp. 203-237.
Sonzogni, Marco, 2006, “Debiti e doni della tradizione poetica: Mon-
tale tra T.S. Eliot e Beckett”, in Alfano and Cortellessa (a cura di),
2006, Tegole dal cielo cit., pp. 139-165.
Idem, 2005, “Più Joyce che Montale”, a section (pp. 189-195) of an es-
say in The Italianist, 25: 2, 2005, pp. 173-208.
Verdicchio, Massimo, 1989, “Exagmination Round the Factification of
Vico and Joyce”, in James Joyce Quarterly, 26:4, 1989, pp. 531-539.
Visconti, Laura, 1997, “The Artist and the Artisan”, in Samuel Beck-
ett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Border-
lines / L’oeuvre carrefour / L’oeuvre limite), VI, 1997, pp. 387-398.
(The Italian original, “L’artista e il traduttore”, in Archetipi becket-
tiani, Edizioni Tracce, Pescara 1990, pp. 39-58.)
Aretino, Pietro, Letters and Sonnets, Covici, Friede, New York 1928,
trans. Samuel Putnam.
Croce, Benedetto, 1920, Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille (Ariosto,
Shakespeare and Corneille, Henry Holt and Company, New York,
trans. Douglas Ainslie, 1920).
De Sanctis, Francesco, 1870-1871, Storia della letteratura italiana (His-
tory of Italian Literature, Basic Books, New York 1931, 1968, trans.
Joan Redfern).
Dublin University Calendar, 1923-1927.
Symonds, John Addington, 1914, The Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (Ital-
ian Literature I & II), John Murray, London.
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for examinations in Italian at Trinity College Dublin and that Beckett’s notes on
Carducci derive in part from it (see TCD MS 10965). Leopardi does not appear
on the Trinity exam lists during Beckett’s undergraduate years there.
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3
Samuel Beckett, TCD MS 10965, fol. 30.
4 Caselli 2005, pp. 1-9.
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5
I correct here my previous reading of the manuscript (Caselli 2005, p. 82) in
the light of Matthew Feldman’s recent reinterpretation (Feldman 2006, p. 64).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 23
Yes, said Camier [...] And yet you know our covenant: no com-
munication of dreams on any account. The same holds for quotes. No
dreams or quotes at any price. He got up. Do you feel strong enough
to move? he said.
(Mercier and Camier, pp. 61-62)
(“Are you, then, that Virgil, that fount which pours forth so broad
a stream of speech?” I answered him, my brow covered with shame.
“O glory and light of other poets, may the long study and the great love
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that have made me search your volume avail me! You are my master
and my author. You alone are he from whom I took the fair style that
has done me honor.” [emphasis mine])6
(“At this pass I concede myself defeated more than ever comic or
tragic poet was defeated by a point in his theme.”)
6
All translations used here are by Singleton 1973, 3 vols.
7 I refer to Virgil’s epic poem as “tragedy” following the Comedy, which jux-
taposes “alta tragedìa” to “bassa comedìa” (Inferno XX and XVI). For a dis-
cussion of how Dante connects “alta tragedìa” with “menzogna” (“lie”), see
Barolini 1992, pp. 59, 76, 79 and note 17, p. 293.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 26
ty. The buzzing of the words in the head seems to indicate the per-
vasive and unavoidable character of these words; like the “mur-
murs” that can be heard better in the dark, these buzzing words are
part of the character’s “skullscape”. To utter them is painful: the
lips get scalded. The memory of the source has been lost, the auc-
tor has become part of the words within the head; however, his
words still “stink” of quotation.
The English text has none of the Dante material in it, and
reads: “No dreams or quotes at any price” (Mercier and Camier,
p. 62). This sentence works as a commentary on a passage that has
been omitted, therefore alluding to how the relationship between
the two texts is under the author’s control. Camier’s words com-
ment on the absence of Dante while reinforcing the presence of
the author, who at once institutes and disobeys a prohibition. The
prohibition is phrased in terms of “price”, which can be read as a
further allusion to the notion of the alleged added value that the
presence of an auctoritas gives to the text. Dante in the English
text is, thus, present under erasure.
The Dantean allusions scattered in Mercier et / and Camier il-
luminate a barely visible substrate, partially effaced by a second
writing. However, the first layer, which seems to add value to the
journey of the two characters, is, in turn, shown to be dependent
upon a further authority, a further layer. The text creates its own
potentially endless genealogy: Dante has “taken away” his “fair
style” from Virgil, Beckett from Dante, and so on. Rather than
lending itself to a Bloomian reading, this endless genealogy ex-
poses, however, the price of quoting, foregrounds the act of
telling the story, and undermines the notion of originality.
The text sabotages strong misreadings, painstakingly argues that
it is impossible to simply report events, and regards as impossible
the existence of an upper layer, of a beautiful lie that simply acts as
surface. Mercier et / and Camier constantly fabricates ideas of depth,
strata of authority constructed by other authorities, strange im-
pressions of déjà-vu, also by having Dante migrating from one text
to the other. Sometimes allusions to Dante are repeated in Beckett’s
self-translated version; alternatively, the quotations from Dante are
erased and this erasure is commented upon; other times still, some
allusions are replaced with different ones, always from the Comedy.
These shifts contribute intratextually to the construction of the au-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 28
thor Samuel Beckett and make each of the two versions part of a
process of self-commentary, which is present also in the Nouvelles
/ Novellas (alternatively called Stories).
8 See also Ferrini 2003, pp. 201-212; Ferrini’s reading is indebted to Kelly
“hoarse”. However, this is not the case with Cary’s translation, owned by Beck-
ett, which reads: “I fell, my ken discern’d the form of one / Whose voice seem’d
faint through long disuse of speech” (Cary 1869, p. 16). The phrase “per lungo
silenzio parea fioco” follows Virgil’s allegorical description in TCD MS 10963,
fol. 2.
10
See Sermonti 1988, p. 9; Getto 1967, p. 12; Giannantonio 1986; Pasqui-
ni and Quaglio 1987.
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11 “I took it eagerly and put it in my mouth, the old gesture came back to
me” (Mercier and Camier, p. 33). In the French the word “bouche” is not re-
peated: “les enfers” “s’ouvrent”, the “bonbon” is put “dans [ma] bouche”, the
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“phrase” is “prononcée”, and the boy is “à l’orée de la vie” (“Le calmant”, pp.
53-54). For a discussion of the use of “mouth” in Beckett, with some references
to Dante’s Bocca degli Abati in Inferno XXXII, see Elam 1997, pp. 165-179.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 32
(“I had now parted from those shades and was following in the
steps of my leader, when one behind me, pointing his finger, cried,
‘See, the rays do not seem to shine on the left of him below, and he
seems to bear himself like one who is alive!’
I turned my eyes at the sound of these words, and saw them gazing
in astonishment at me alone, and the light that was broken.”)
this residual Dante, important because and not in spite of his mar-
ginality, is a Dante that demands a lot of work to be seen or heard,
and a Dante that can help us remember how “In an ‘image-ridden
culture’, in which nothing is immune from the grip of commodity
aesthetics, the critically minimal – always in danger of becoming
just another style option, a term for interior designers – must be
laboured for again and again” (Cunningham 2005, p. 116).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Alfano, Giancarlo, and Andrea Cortellessa (a cura di), 2006, Tegole dal
cielo. L’effetto Beckett nella cultura italiana, 2 vols., Edup, Roma.
Anspaugh, Kelly, 1996, “The Partially Purged: Samuel Beckett’s ‘The
Calmative’ as Anti-Comedy”, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies,
XXII, 1996, 1, pp. 30-41.
Barolini, Teodolinda, 1984, Dante’s Poets. Textuality and Truth in the
“Comedy”, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Idem, 1992, The Undivine Comedy. Detheologizing Dante, Princeton
University Press, Princeton.
Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes. Intertextuality in the Fiction
and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Cavecchi, Mariacristina, and Caroline Patey (a cura di), 2007, Tra le
lingue tra i linguaggi. Cent’anni di Samuel Beckett, Cisalpino, Mi-
lano.
Cunningham, David, “Ascetism Against Colour, or Modernism, Ab-
straction and the Lateness of Beckett”, in New Formations, 55
(Spring 2005), pp. 104-119.
Elam, Keir, 1997, “World’s End: West Brompton, Turdy and Other
Godforsaken Holes”, in Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel
Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines / L’œuvre carrefour / l’œuvre
limite), VI, 1997, pp. 165-179.
Feldman, Matthew, 2006, Beckett’s Books, Continuum, London.
Ferrini, Jean-Pierre, 2003, “À partir du désert. Dante et l’aphonie de
Virgile dans ‘Le calmant’ de Samuel Beckett”, in Samuel Beckett
Today / Aujourd’hui (Three Dialogues Revisited / Les Trois Dia-
logues revisités), XIII, 2003, pp. 201-212.
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1
Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 7 November 1962 (in Harmon 1998,
p. 131).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 40
depositato nella lingua di origine, ma alla sua poetica, che avrebbe po-
tuto dare origine (e di fatto la dà) a un altro testo che ne rappresenti la
realizzazione inedita in altra lingua.
(Eco 1996, p. XVII)
[But when the translator is the author [...] this author can translate
trying to be faithful not to text as it is fixed in the original language,
but to his/her poetics, which could have originated (and in fact origi-
nates) another text which represents its new realisation in another lan-
guage2.]
2. Creativity as translation
At this point it may be useful to quote the famous passage Beck-
ett wrote about Proust:
3. Theatre translation
Theatrical translation poses specific problems. The frequent need
to update even recent translation testifies to the rapid change lan-
guage undergoes and also to the requirement that the language
spoken on stage should not be perceived as obsolete by the audi-
ence. Agostino Lombardo, critic and translator of Shakespeare,
used to say that
context (RUL MS 1528/8, 1528/7 and 1528/11). Then the author introduces the
verb to hope (RUL MS 1528/7), which leaves a mark in the French versions
where we find s’ésperer (RUL MS 1531/2) and y compter un peu (RUL MS
1534/1); then he finally goes back to the first sentences in the respective lin-
guistic context: “Pénitence, oui, à la rigueur” (“Comédie”, p. 30) and “Peni-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 47
ing tabou only in the French manuscripts and we find taboo in the
English ones, as if the creation of a single and coherent linguistic
world were an artificial effort in Beckett, a need belonging to the
text and not to the author.
In most cases, the author’s priorities seem to involve the
preservation of a rhythmic coherence: some additions or deletions
do not appear to have any rhyme or reason other than the length
or balance of the sentences in the two languages. For example:
“M: [...] Loving her as I did, with all my heart, I could not but feel
sorry for her.” (17 words, “Play”, pp. 308-309). In French we have:
“H: [...] L’aimant comme je l’aimais, je veux dire de tout mon
coeur, je ne pouvais que la plaindre” (17 words, “Comédie”, p.
13). The introduction of the syntagma here emphasized is evi-
dently not necessary from a semantic point of view, as the sen-
tence is perfectly translated without it, but the author deems it im-
portant and I think the reason is a rhythmic one.
Another peculiar characteristic of this couple of texts is the
fact that they are mutually and reciprocally dependent: as already
mentioned, the English text is of course the base of the French
one, but it is also true that the translated text influences the orig-
inal, thus emptying both terms of their contrasting meaning6.
tence, yes, at a pinch” (“Play”, p. 316). The French expression may possibly
have appeared in “Comédie” only after it had been cancelled from “Play”. And
it may be interesting to add that Beckett had already used precisely these two
expressions as the translation the one of the other in Fin de partie / Endgame,
during Nagg’s joke about the tailor (“Bon, à la rigueur, une belle braguette, c’est
calé”, Fin de partie, p. 37; and in English “Good, at a pinch, a smart fly is a stiff
proposition”, Endgame, p. 102).
6 For example, in the final English versions we have W1 saying: “It was all
bolted and barred. All grey with frozen dew. On the way back by Ash and Snod-
land—” and in French the similar “Tout était verrouillé. Gris de givre. En ren-
trant chez moi par Sept-Sorts et Signy-Signet—”. The translation is remarkably
balanced and culturally modelled on the target language. It is interesting to com-
pare the evolution of this sentence: at the beginning in English the house is sim-
ply shut and the door is not grey, but white because of the frost (RUL MS 1528/1
and 1528/2); then the French introduces the verb verouiller, and the assonance
and partial alliteration “gris de givre”. I think that the author changes the Eng-
lish, which becomes “grey with frozen dew”, in order to be consistent with the
sentence in French. The assonance of the French, lost in that English segment
of the sentence, is changed to alliteration immediately before and the door is de-
scribed as “bolted and barred”.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 48
7 There is apparently only one exception to this rule: the sentence “she
smelled the rat” is initially translated with a French idiomatic expression such
as découvrir le pot aux roses (RUL MS 1531/2), of similar meaning. As early as
in the second manuscript, though, the author employs the expression “elle sen-
tait un rat” (“Comédie”, p. 12) which looks like a calque. In fact, this expres-
sion can be found in the Dictionnaire Littré (“Je sens un rat, je soupçonne
quelque mauvaise farce. Je sens un rat est une expression proverbiale qui veut
dire soupçonner du danger”) but is apparently neither common nor particular-
ly clear. This choice is then both a literal fidelity to the English text and a sort
of joke with the bilingual reader, who can recognize the Anglophone source of
the French text.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 49
8
For an indication of the Bibles in Beckett’s library, see, infra, Iain Bailey’s
paper, note 2, p. 147.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 52
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to
Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 55
to work on Samuel Beckett’s personal library and to pursue the book project
Beckett’s Library.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 58
a. verbal comments:
This category is quite broad and can be divided into subcate-
gories, ranging from translations of difficult words to critical re-
actions and erudite intertextual references. These gradations
more or less correspond with the chronological course of Beck-
ett’s career as a student and writer. In the 1920s, when he studied
Italian at Trinity College Dublin, he read primary texts such as La
Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso. He bought this book
in 1925, when he was 19 years old. The text is framed by numer-
ous marginal translations of individual words, by means of which
Beckett extended his vocabulary.
He also read secondary sources on Italian literature, such as the
Storia della letteratura italiana (1925), in which Francesco De Sanc-
tis notes (with regard to Dante’s Divina Commedia): “Chi non ha
la forza di uccidere la realtà non ha la forza di crearla” (“Who does
not have the strength to kill reality, does not have the strength to
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b. “non-verbal codes”:
An interesting case of history as a higher zoology is Darwin’s
theory of evolution. In Beckett’s copy of The Origin of Species, a
short passage on “Variation under Domestication” is marked and
underscored with an undulating line in grey pencil: “cats with
blue eyes are invariably deaf” (Darwin 1902, p. 11). In this case
we know quite precisely when Beckett read this passage, for in a
letter to Thomas MacGreevy dated 4 August 1932 he wrote that
he had bought The Origin of Species the day before and that he
had “never read such badly written cat lap” (Knowlson 1996, p.
161). The only thing he thought important enough to remember
was that blue-eyed cats are always deaf. As Beckett indicates in his
letter the line is taken from the passage on correlations between
variations. Darwin sums up a whole series of examples:
written, this last pencil mark in the book might create the im-
pression that he stopped reading after page 60. But the book also
contains some other marks.
c. dog-ears:
Starting on page 57, the book shows signs of remarkably large
dog-ears. They appear throughout the book, even in the last chap-
ter, and sometimes in very close succession, which suggests that they
could be interpreted, not just as markers to indicate where a read-
ing session stopped, but also as markers to indicate an interesting
page. Dog-ears are among the most enigmatic of reading traces. It
cannot be excluded that these were made by someone else, but it is
equally plausible that they were made by Beckett himself. In that
case his first reading of the book, marked by means of the pencil
marginalia, may have stopped shortly after page 60. But the dog-
ears would indicate that, later on, he did read the whole book.
An indirect indication in this respect is a reference to Darwin’s
caterpillar in Murphy, Watt (see Ackerley and Gontarski 2004,
pp. 125-126) and in the unpublished story “Echo’s Bones”. In the
latter half of this story Belacqua is talking to a character called
Doyle, who is described as a natural man of the world. After a di-
gression, Doyle reminds Belacqua that he was saying ‘but’ and did
not finish his sentence, to which Belacqua replies that he needs a
better cue than that, otherwise he will have to go back to where
he started, like the caterpillar (“Echo’s Bones”, p. 23). Beckett is
alluding to The Origin of Species (chapter VII, “Instinct”), where
Darwin mentions a caterpillar and the way it makes its hammock,
described by his colleague Pierre Huber:
d. “non-marginalia”:
With reference to Paul Celan’s poetry, Axel Gellhaus has
drawn attention to passages that are not marked in the personal
copies of the poet’s books – books that are otherwise heavily
marked (Gellhaus 2004, pp. 218-219). Despite these numerous
markings it is sometimes an unmarked passage that is plundered to
write a poem. In one of Beckett’s bibles we encounter a similar sit-
uation: the copy of The Comprehensive Teacher’s Bible shows many
markings and other reading traces, but the unmarked pages can be
equally important. For instance, Waiting for Godot mentions a map
of the Holy Land such as the one that can be found in this edition.
When Didi asks: “Do you remember the Gospels?” Gogo replies:
“I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very
pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me
thirsty” (Waiting for Godot, p. 11). Further on Gogo suggests:
“What about hanging ourselves?” (p. 16) – followed by the expla-
nation that he is lighter than Didi, so if he hangs himself first, the
bough won’t break and he will die; when Didi subsequently tries to
hang himself, he runs the risk that the bough will break and he will
be left alone. The reverse of this scene is prefigured in Jules Re-
nard’s Journal intime: “Si mignonne que si vous vouliez vous pen-
dre, vous n’auriez pas le poids” – which Beckett roughly translates
in the bottom margin to the effect that ‘She’s not heavy enough to
hang herself’. With hindsight, reading Renard after having read
Beckett, his Journal intime thus appears to already contain several
elements that are ‘Beckettian’ avant la lettre. In that sense the notes
in the margin can have an interesting retroactive effect on the cor-
responding body of the source text.
Thanks to the letters to Thomas MacGreevy we know quite
precisely that Beckett was reading Renard in February 1931 (see
Pilling 2006a, p. 30). In this period Beckett’s writing method re-
sembled that of James Joyce, who is famous for what he called
‘notesnatching’: instead of writing in the margins of books, Joyce
filled more than fifty notebooks with short jottings. Beckett ap-
plied a similar method to write his first novel, Dream of Fair to
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 63
process, and thus differs from the large corpus of thematic note-
books with notes on a variety of topics. Held at Trinity College
Dublin and the Beckett International Foundation in Reading,
these notebooks cover philosophy, psychology and psychoanaly-
sis, the visual arts, Provençal literature, the literary histories of
Germany, England and France. And there are the notes on spe-
cific authors – St. Augustine, Dante, Geulincx and Fritz Mauth-
ner. Furthermore, Beckett made lengthy excerpts from Rabelais,
Goethe’s Faust and Grillparzer. These notes, mostly transcrip-
tions or summaries devoid of commentary, are nearly exclusively
drawn from books that Beckett did not own. Indeed, a large part
of this scribal activity was undertaken in libraries. Beckett worked
in the British Museum in the Summer of 1932, then again in ear-
ly 1934 and then for example read Geulincx in Trinity College Li-
brary in 1936. Evidence of Beckett’s use of libraries is interest-
ingly contained in his copy of De Sanctis’ Storia della letteratura
italiana, which contains two National Library of Ireland slips,
both for books on Aubanel3.
In any case, Beckett understandably felt that he could organise
the sheer volume of material he was transcribing more effectively
by using notebooks rather than marking or underlining the actual
book he was studying. And of course, in the case of the Philosophy
notes, it allowed him to extract material from more than one source
yet retain a chronological approach. As we now know, most of the
philosophy notes were taken from an English edition of Windel-
band’s History of Philosophy, although Beckett did draw from oth-
er sources (see Frost and Maxwell 2006). A German edition of the
book, which Beckett bought whilst in Germany in 1936 and ap-
pears in the ‘Books sent home’ list in the Whoroscope notebook,
survives in the library. Unsurprisingly, it contains no annotations,
which further underlines the supposition that he did not own the
English edition which he worked on in 1932 and/or 1933.
The separation between Beckett as marginalist and Beckett as
extractor traced so far cannot be applied consistently. There are
Sanctis’ book before writing the essay on Proust in 1930. Beckett mentions read-
ing Aubanel in a letter of 29 January 1936 to MacGreevy, stating that he is help-
ing Ethna MacCarthy with her TCD lectures on Provençal literature.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 66
Leibniz to Locke:
“Nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intel-
lectus.”
noème, noèse
1938 appears to be confirmed by a metro ticket found in the book’s pages, dat-
ed “10 December”.
5 Watt notebook 2, 77; Harry Ransom Center, Austin.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 67
ing the Sottisier notebook in 1976, Beckett did not record any
reading notes in notebooks. These are also, so to speak, the dark
ages for marginalia, as few can be identified as being made in these
40 years. What evidence we do have of Beckett’s reading during
this period comes from his correspondence. There are two main
reasons for this absence of reading notes. First of all, the Second
World War or, to be more precise, the novel Watt marks a wa-
tershed in Beckett’s use of intertextual references. Not only are
there far fewer, but they are also not openly flaunted, buried be-
neath the textual surface. Secondly, Beckett continued to use the
notebooks he kept in the 1930s. Many of the intertextual refer-
ences that do appear in his writing after the war can be found in
these older notes; the trilogy for example draws on the Whoro-
scope notebook and uses some very obscure details found in the
German Diaries of 1936/1937 (see Nixon 2006). At times the
texts themselves even allude to the 1930s notes. Thus How It Is,
published in 1964, refers to “dear scraps recorded somewhere”
(How It Is, p. 28), and All Strange Away written the same year ex-
plicitly alludes to the philosophy notes we now know as MS10967
held at Trinity College Library in Dublin by referring to “ancient
Greek philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possible
suggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period” (All Strange
Away, p. 175).
It is only in the 1970s that Beckett returned to keeping a ded-
icated notebook for his reading notes – the small Sottisier note-
book now kept in Reading. This notebook is very much like the
earlier Whoroscope notebook, in that it contains reading notes as
well as various drafts and the mirlitonnades poems. The reading
notes are drawn from a wide variety of sources – lines from the
Bible, quotations taken from Heine, Goethe (both however ref-
erenced via their song settings by Schubert and Schumann), Pas-
cal, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Parnell, as well as an
Italian commentary on Dante, to name but these. Beckett began
to keep the notebook at a time, the late 1970s and early 1980s,
when he read more voraciously than he had done for a long time.
Indeed, more often than not he returned to reading texts that he
had read in the 1930s, and that he had loved all his life. As he told
Jocelyn Herbert in a 1975 letter, he was reading with memories of
his student days. Arguably the most important reading notes in
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 68
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to
Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.
Ferrer, Daniel, 2004, “Towards a Marginalist Economy of Textual
Genesis”, in Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo (editors), 2004,
Reading Notes, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 7-18.
Frost, Everett, 2006, “Catalogue of ‘Notes Diverse[s] Holo[graph] –
History of Western Philosophy”, in Samuel Beckett Today / Au-
jourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading
Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Sup-
porting Essays), XVI, 2006, pp. 67-90.
Gellhaus, Axel, 2004, “Marginalia: Paul Celan as Reader”, in Hulle
and Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading Notes, cit., pp. 207-219.
Gontarski, Stanley E., 1985, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s
Dramatic Texts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Hulle, Dirk Van (editor), 2004a, Beckett the European, Journal of
Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida).
Idem, 2004b, “Note on Next to Nothing: Ellipses in Samuel Beckett’s
Reading Notes”, in Hulle and Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading
Notes, cit., pp. 327-333.
Hulle, Dirk Van, and Wim Van Mierlo (editors), 2004, Reading Notes,
Rodopi, Amsterdam.
Jackson, Heather, 2001, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Yale
University Press, New Haven.
Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett,
Bloomsbury, London.
Nixon, Mark, 2006, “‘Guess Where’: From Reading to Writing in
Beckett”, in Genetic Joyce Studies, 6 (Spring 2006), at
http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/articles.htm (last
accessed May 30, 2009).
Pilling, John, 2004, “Dates and Difficulties in Beckett’s Whoroscope
notebook”, in Hulle (editor), 2004, Beckett the European, cit., pp.
39-48.
Idem, 2006a, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan,
Basingstoke (Hampshire).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 71
“Hommage furtif”:
Cixous’s Difficult Love of Beckett
Mary Bryden
ond one which would recommend itself. Yet, while any homage
Cixous has paid to Beckett has been, as my title suggests, somewhat
furtive and guarded, she has recently written an extended reflec-
tion on Beckett, published in 2007 and, at the time of writing, not
yet translated into English, which shows evidence of an evolution
in her thinking. This essay accordingly attempts to track some as-
pects of that evolution, and to pick out some of the innovative in-
sights which can be found in this very recent text, the most sus-
tained engagement which Cixous has yet undertaken on Beckett.
It is worth stating at the outset that the names of Beckett and
Cixous are not often found in apposition. The 1991 study by Mar-
tine Motard-Noar called Les Fictions d’Hélène Cixous makes no
mention of Beckett in its chapter on literary intertextuality, and a
chapter on the same theme in the more recent study by Ian Blyth
and Susan Sellers, entitled Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (Blyth and
Sellers 2004, pp. 82-98), also omits Beckett. Even though my own
research has drawn me towards Beckett and Cixous, I can under-
stand why few others have felt similarly drawn. After all, until last
year, Cixous’s published remarks on Beckett were slight in num-
ber (though not, I would argue, in significance), and Beckett has
never featured significantly on the programme of her well-known
and well-attended Séminaires in Paris.
What I want to suggest, in fact, is that Beckett has come to in-
habit an unusual space for Cixous – one which lies somewhere be-
tween her two categories of writer which I alluded to earlier. There
are many levels on which she finds Beckett rebarbative. Yet she has
found herself in recurrent negotiation with his work over a lengthy
period. The exact length of that period is difficult to determine. In
an essay on Beckett which appeared in 1976, and was included in
the Cahier de l’Herne commemoration of Beckett’s seventieth
birthday, Cixous ludically writes: “Je devais avoir dans les dix ans
quand il me prit par le Je” [I must have been around ten when he
took me by the I1] (Cixous 1976, p. 396). Subsequently, though, in
a Beckettian-style revision, she conjectures about whether, instead,
it might have been ten years ago: i.e. not when she was ten years of
1
All translations given after Cixous’s original French quotations are my
own.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 77
age but when she was in her late twenties. She settles eventually on
some time between what she calls “l’âge de raison et l’autre âge”
[the age of reason and the other age]. What she is describing, in
fact, is not when she first came across Beckett, but when he crept
up on her, and when she as it were offered him hospitality (she does
at one point use the word “logeai” [Cixous 1976, p. 397]).
There were, she makes clear, false starts, a process which she
places in the context of organic decomposition. She read him, felt
no need to detain him, moved away from him, discarded his texts.
They became detritus, what she calls “détritextes” [detritexts]
(Cixous 1976, p. 396). For Cixous, Beckett’s texts are not governed
by a command economy, or a capitalist one. Rather, they form part
of what she calls “an excrement economy”2: they have to do not with
intake and acquisition, but with evacuation and dispersal. The cast-
off material decomposes, but into a “débris vivant” [living debris]
which somehow remains available for reconstitution, forming a re-
flux rather than rotting down to nothing. This is the dual awareness
which runs through all Cixous’s writings on Beckett – her instinc-
tive repulsion against the leanings to nothingness, and yet a fascina-
tion with the failure to achieve nothingness. Citing the Textes pour
rien, she points out: “Mais qu’est-ce qu’un Rien s’il y a texte-pour?”
[What is a Nothing if there is text-for?] (Cixous 1976, p. 400).
Cixous had cited the Textes pour rien several years earlier. On
the occasion of Beckett’s award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, she
wrote a prominent article about him in the French daily newspa-
per Le Monde, under the title of “Le maître du texte pour rien”
[The master of the text for nothing]3. In it, she observes that Beck-
ett’s work incorporates, paradoxically, the happening of nothing-
ness, resulting in a landscape of inertia in which possibilities are re-
currently reduced or cancelled. Cixous does not hide her impulse
to distaste for the way in which these processes of privation are seen
to structure Beckett’s work. However, there are two factors which
in her view mitigate the vexatious and bruising impact of it, and
prevent it from being insupportable. The first of these is his re-
course to humour, which she does not underestimate. In fact, she
2
“Faire l’économie de l’excrément” (Cixous 1976, p. 399).
3 Le Monde, 24 October 1969.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 78
l’aventure?”
5 “doué de l’opiniâtre résistance irlandaise”.
6 “Comment arrive un livre? Comme une chatte à peine sevrée qui passe une
petite main de patte sous le fourneau à bois. Et quelques jours après c’est elle
qui vous explique l’humanité” (Cixous 2003, p. 103).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 79
7
Primo Levi 1958, Se questo è un uomo, Einaudi, Torino (If This Is a Man,
1960 [1987], Abacus by Sphere Books, London, trans. Stuart Woolf).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 80
8
See also, for an interesting discussion of the relation between “premiers” and
“derniers” in this closing passage, Antoinette Weber-Caflisch 1994, pp. 66-68.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:17 Pagina 81
self short. Shouts at itself. Listens to itself. Takes the mickey out of
itself] (Cixous 2007, p. 23). The author tries to train his voices, as
Chaplin would train his imaginary fleas (Cixous 2007, p. 72).
Throughout his endeavours, she maintains, the writer has his se-
cret plan: “Il rêve d’arriver où Je est Tu” [he dreams of arriving
where I is You] (Cixous 2007, p. 23). Or, perhaps, in the case of
Not I (1973), where “I” is “She”.
Not I, in fact, has a special status for Cixous. If she could re-
tain only one text of Beckett, she maintains that it would be Not
I, which she views as both a poem and a piece of non-serial music
(see Cixous 2007, pp. 61-64). If the pattern were totally aleatory,
or if it were totally correlated, it would not be music. Instead, it
is, she observes, both structured and surprising: it is sufficiently
correlated to give rise to expectation of the next note, and yet is
able constantly to take the listener aback. Not I is as close as one
can get to the “voisinage de zéro”. It dies away and resumes, be-
yond the text and in the text, gabbling on stage and off stage, be-
fore and after, in the dark, in the light. Cixous had already writ-
ten in her Le Monde article about what she deemed to be the cir-
cumstantial or mutilative shrinkage of Beckett’s people, such that
eventually one would be confronted with language alone. Those
remarks, however, were directed at Beckett’s Trilogy. Not I was
not yet written. For Cixous the playwright, the play has metathe-
atrical tentacles; she keeps returning in her imagination to the play
ending, the audience starting to leave, and the voice continuing,
in the darkness, behind the curtain. Cixous discerns a through-
line of development, in fact, from the end of the last Text for Noth-
ing to Not I. Text XIII (pp. 113-115 in Texts for Nothing, pp. 71-
115) supersedes future and past with present, and replaces end-
ing with murmuring: “when all will be ended, all said, it says, it
murmurs” (Texts for Nothing, p. 115). Since “voice” is feminine
in French, the link between the last words of the Texts and Not I
is even more suggestive in French: “quand tout sera fini, tout dit,
dit-elle, murmure-t-elle” (Nouvelles et textes pour rien, p. 206).
In this context, Cixous presents Beckett as “un balayeur” [a
sweeper]. The act of “balayer” can mean to get rid of, to sweep
away (Edith Piaf’s “balayage” of regret in the song Je ne regrette
rien, for instance). However, Cixous uses it to mean a slow brush-
ing forward of ideas across lengthy time-frames – about ten years
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 82
9
“Beckett pas philosophe, non, homme à théâtre, homme-théâtre” (Cixous
2007, p. 78).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 83
the dark: at a PhD seminar in Rome (April 2008), John Pilling related a similar
experience of groping on an unlit landing before finding himself confronted by
Samuel Beckett [Editors’ note].
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 84
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Bishop, Tom, and Raymond Federman, 1976, Samuel Beckett,
L’Herne, Paris.
Blyth, Ian, and Susan Sellers, 2004, Hélène Cixous: Live Theory, Con-
tinuum, London.
Deleuze, Gilles, 1992, L’Epuisé, in Samuel Beckett, Quad, et autres
pièces de télévision, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, pp. 55-106.
Motard-Noar, Martine, 1991, Les Fictions d’Hélène Cixous: Une autre
langue de femme, French Forum, Lexington (Kentucky).
Tajiri, Yoshiki, 2007, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body, Pal-
grave, Basingstoke.
Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette, 1994, Chacun son dépeupleur: Sur Samuel
Beckett, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris.
Company
Heather Gardner
1 See John Pilling’s definition in Pilling 1982. In his essay Pilling traces the
Los Angeles Actor’s Theatre in California, at the Royal National Theatre of Lon-
don, at the Théâtre de Rond Point in Paris and elsewhere.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 87
H. Gardner. “Company” 87
H. Gardner. “Company” 89
3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, I (A), 2779. The line drawn from
The Knight’s Tale refers to the grave after Arcite’s death (it will be reused in a
different context in The Miller’s Tale). Chaucer may have derived the line from
Dante’s Inferno, XXIII, 1: “Taciti, soli, senza compagnia”. The term ‘company’
recurs 35 times in Beckett’s narrative, without counting its derivatives (‘compa-
niable’, ‘companiably’ etc.).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 90
to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular. Mur-
muring now and then, Yes I remember.
(Company, pp. 20-21)
4 “[I]t’s the fault of the pronouns, there is no name for me, no pronoun for
me, all the trouble comes from that” (The Unnamable, p. 408).
5
Fritz Mauthner was born into an Austrian Jewish family on November 22,
1849 in Bohemia. He graduated in law at the University of Prague and worked
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 91
H. Gardner. “Company” 91
as theatre reviewer from 1875 to 1906 for the Berliner Tageblatt. Like his con-
temporary Kafka, he was brought up sharing three different cultures and lan-
guages which inclined him very early to work on linguistic usages. He also pub-
lished a Dictionary of Philosophy in two volumes (Wörterbuch der Philosophie)
that was much appreciated by Jorge Luis Borges in more recent times. He died
in 1923 in Germany.
6 See Albertazzi 1986. Albertazzi believes Mauthner had a great influence
8 The expression ‘fail better’ may also be perceived as a pun in Ireland, for
the assonance between ‘feel better’ and ‘fail better’ is stronger in the Irish pro-
nunciation of English.
9 The work, first published in Stuttgart in 1902, was translated into English
with the title The Critique of Language. In a letter dated July 28, 1978 addressed
to Richard Ellmann, Beckett corrected the account given by the biographer in
James Joyce, and stated that he took Mauthner’s volumes in 1932 on Joyce’s re-
quest but did not read them to him, as Ellmann asserted. According to James
Knowlson, Beckett read The Critique of Language a few years later, probably in
1937-1938, when he wrote the notes on the text for Joyce (see Knowlson 1996,
p. 760, n. 142). Beckett’s transcriptions of sections of Mauthner’s Beiträge in the
Whoroscope notebook plausibly date from mid-1938; Bair and Ben-Zvi claim
Beckett consulted Mauthner’s work as early as 1929, or even earlier, as Garforth
suggests, in Trinity College Dublin Library, that owned a copy of the Stuttgart
edition. For a discussion on when Beckett first read and copied passages from
Mauthner’s Beiträge see Pilling 2005 and Garforth 2005.
10 See Ben-Zvi 1984. Ben-Zvi compares Dream of Fair to Middling Women
and Company on the ground of the relevance Mauthner’s thought has in the two
works. See also Ben-Zvi 1980. In this essay Ben-Zvi examines the similarities be-
tween Beckett’s ideas and the philosopher’s assumptions, which she summaris-
es in eight points here briefly hinted at: 1) words and thoughts are one activity;
2) language and memory are synonyms; 3) language is metaphorical; 4) there are
no absolute truths; 5) the self is relative and contingent, and does not exist out-
side language; 6) human communication is impossible; 7) language should be
simple so as to reduce its ambiguities to a minimum; 8) laugh and silence are the
highest forms of criticism.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 93
H. Gardner. “Company” 93
language. After discarding past hypotheses about its origin (divine, innate, etc.),
Mauthner set the principle of linguistic development in metaphor. According to
this theory, the genesis of language corresponds with that of poetry.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 94
12 Elizabeth Bredeck claims that the dual use of the ladder metaphor, which
appears in the introductive chapter of the first volume and in the last chapter of
the third volume, was intended to illustrate knowledge based on language (see
Bredeck 1992). In her view the use of the metaphor shows the philosopher’s re-
sistance to mysticism and silence rather than his inclination towards them, as in
Gershon Weiler’s Mauthner’s Critique of Language. In the first metaphor, the
ladder of language must be destroyed and rebuilt again and again in a perenni-
al cycle; in the second one, the climbing up and down of the clown and his at-
tempt to pull the ladder up from the highest rung, far from being funny, illus-
trate man’s search for truth through language. The metaphor of the ladder re-
turns in Wittgenstein and in Beckett. Beckett, however, denied quoting
Wittgenstein as he intended to refer only to a popular Welsh jest.
13 Mauthner attributed to memory the principle of association on which
metaphors are built, which had been attributed to imagination by the 18th-cen-
tury Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 95
H. Gardner. “Company” 95
A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your moth-
er by the hand. You turn right and advance in silence southward along
the highway. After some hundred paces you head inland and broach
the long steep homeward. You make ground in silence hand in hand
through the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some
hundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up
at the blue sky and then at your mother’s face you break the silence
asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The
sky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe
your question and some hundred paces later look up at her face again
and ask her if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is.
For some reason you could never fathom this question must have an-
gered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made
you a cutting retort you have never forgotten.
(Company, pp. 12-13)
14 In his later works Beckett blurred the distinction between genres: just as
Company can be adopted for the stage, other theatrical works composed in the
same period, Footfalls (1976), “A Piece of Monologue” (1979), and “Ohio Im-
promptu” (1980) can be read as narrative prose.
15 Ben-Zvi studied the progression of the fifteen memories, giving the fol-
16 The time of birth is often associated with the time of death in Beckett. See:
“Astride of a grave and a difficult birth” in Waiting for Godot, and the begin-
ning of “A Piece of Monologue” (written and staged in 1979, published in
1982): “Birth was the death of him”.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 97
H. Gardner. “Company” 97
garden, the boy listens to his mother’s voice telling “He has been
a very naughty boy” (p. 28), while in the kitchen she is making
bread and butter, but not for him17. An old man on the road is the
next image, the shadow of his father on the right, going from point
A to point Z. Suddenly, the old man turns off his fixed course cut-
ting through the hedge, jumping over obstacles, swerving east.
In the next image the voice returns to childhood in the glow of
sunshine: the boy is seen daydreaming on the Irish coast and mis-
taking the clouds for a mountain. Unlike the young lovers in
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream who see the moun-
tains vanish into the air as clouds18, here the solidity and weight
of matter is given to what has the levity of air. The boy is punished
once more for having wandered too long and arriving home late.
The last image of childhood also marks its end. The boy is im-
mersed in the warmth of his compassion for saving a poor hedge-
hog from the cold. The horror of death will strike the child
through the senses of sight and smell, leaving a lasting memory:
“You have never forgotten what you found then. You are on your
back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found then.
The mush. The stench” (p. 41).
Then again the old man shutting the door behind him and
stepping out to take his beeline course to “the gap or ragged point
in the quickset that forms the western fringe” (p. 48). In this last
journey he does not count his steps, nor does he perceive his fa-
ther’s shadow by his side. “Unhearing, unseeing”, he stops now
and then to look down at his feet deep in the snow asking himself:
“Can they go on?... Shall they go on?” (pp. 51-52). From the hor-
izontal plane of the one lying in the dark, the old man appears sus-
17 Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, a Good Friday. The memories of
“Demetrius: These things seem small and undistinguishable, / like far off moun-
tains turned into clouds.”
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 98
speare’s Titus Andronicus, II.iv.45, and to the cruel abuse inflicted on Lavinia:
“O, had the monster seen those lily hands / Tremble like aspen leaves upon a
lute...”
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 99
H. Gardner. “Company” 99
The natural light fades away in the last three images. In the
first, the old man is seen wrapped in a long coat, on the shore,
leaning on a stick, the sound of the waves becoming weaker and
weaker behind his back. We are left in the end with the shadow
of the stick disappearing in the sand in the dark, a picture which
suggests the figure of Prospero renouncing magic and burying his
staff underground. In the second last image, the light comes from
a lamp and the movement from a mechanical clock hand. The old
man, crouched like Belacqua in Dante’s Purgatorio, measures the
passing of time obsessively by the constant variations of the shad-
ow of the hand on the face of the clock. In the last image the old
man lies (both meanings intended) in the dark on a desert ground:
“from time to time with unexpected grace you lie” (p. 87). In the
end his contour overlaps with that of the one listening to the last
fable, before remaining alone, without company:
Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every
inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable
of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling with you in the
dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as
you always were.
Alone.
(Company, pp. 88-89)
on which the one lies? Are the voices weak because they come
from far away, or because they are like that? Can anything be done
to improve the condition of the one? Like give him a past, in the
timeless dark? A name? Another posture? And which posture is
preferable in the long term? Belacqua’s crouching? Or the crawl-
ing movement of other penitent figures, including the Beckettian
characters that do so. Would it be better to leave the figure idle
in the dark, perhaps creating a little distraction like a fly to drive
off? But how can one create anything under these circumstances?
The questions from particular become general. If the dark is un-
limited, it must be absolute, then creator and creatures are in the
same place, grappling with the same problems, first of all with cre-
ation: “Can the crawling creator crawling in the same create dark
as his creature create while crawling?” (p. 73). The answer is neg-
ative: how can one reasonably be expected to create while crawl-
ing in the dark when to formulate the question stops are necessary
between crawls? When the voice finally asks: “What kind of imag-
ination reasons thus?”, the tautology of the answer, “A kind of its
own” (p. 45), confirms its imaginary nature.
Crawling and falling, wondering whether the pains of the pre-
sent and of the past are always the same, the one goes on listening
to the voices hoping to see the light that the sounds of words bring
from time to time: “What visions in the dark of light!” (p. 84). The
vision of Dante, who appealed to the power of words at the end
of his imaginary journey to grasp what would otherwise disappear
like “neve al sole”, or “le foglie levi” (Paradiso, XXXIII, 64, 65),
is evoked here. But also the dark of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Lis-
tening to Dante and to Shakespeare, Beckett perceived, in the
void, the levity with which words cross time and space (“such was
my levity”, Beckett defined his agreement with Mauthner’s
thought), and, in the dark, the pre-condition to the vision of light:
“What visions in the dark of light!”. The indirect object of place
(in the dark) precedes the genitive case (of light) in the phrase be-
cause the dark is necessary to the vision of light as much as un-
certainty is prior to the making of fables.
Fables that will always be representations, even when they are
called memories or concepts, because the creation of images is the
limit and the power of words and thoughts. What, then, is the re-
sponsibility of the author if he is a “devised deviser devising it all
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 101
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to
Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.
Albertazzi, Luciana, 1986, Fritz Mauthner: la critica della lingua, Roc-
co Carabba, Lanciano.
Bair, Deidre, 1978, A Biography: Samuel Beckett, Jonathan Cape, Lon-
don.
Beja, Morris, Stanley E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (editors), 1983,
Samuel Beckett. Humanistic Perspectives, Ohio State University
Press, Columbus (Ohio).
Ben-Zvi, Linda, 1980, “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Lim-
its of Language”, in PMLA, vol. VC, 1980, pp. 183-200.
Idem, 1984, “Fritz Mauthner for Company”, in Journal of Beckett Stud-
ies, IX, Spring 1984, pp. 65-88.
Brater, Enoch, 1983, “The Company Beckett Keeps: The Shape of
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 102
like Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Harold Pinter, and called these new plays the
Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin 1961). Beckett always rejected this label.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 104
twentieth century but that had become ever rarer at the time of
the ‘visceral avant-garde’ in general, and Beckett in particular.
Perhaps these same epistemological and axiomatic differences
coupled with the ideological drift that shifted between the theatre
of Futurism and that of Beckett explain why criticism has shied
away from acknowledging the hint of a continuum that bridges
the two. Other reasons may well stem from the fact that the Ital-
ian movement was mostly ignored, at least in Italy, until well into
the sixties. This marginalization partly springs from the distaste
for the Futurists’ alliance with Fascism in the first decades of the
twentieth century, as well as a widely held belief that it was “more
manifesto than practice, more propaganda than actual produc-
tion” (Goldberg 1979, p. 11). The latter claim is particularly un-
fair in relation to Futurist theatre, which was characterized, from
the outset, by its original theatricality.
As early as 1913 Marinetti’s Futurist theatre offered an outra-
geous alternative to the stultifying conventions of bourgeois dra-
ma that Beckett would still be reacting against in the early 1950s,
as the Futurists’ description of the theatre they banished demon-
strates: “we are deeply disgusted with the contemporary theatre
[...] because it vacillates stupidly between historical reconstruc-
tion (pastiche or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction [...]
a finicky, slow, analytic and diluted theatre worthy, all in all, of
the age of the oil lamp” (Marinetti 1913, in Taylor 1979, p. 30).
The reaction provoked by the serate futuriste already offered a
foretaste of the opposition that would meet Beckett’s first perfor-
mances of Waiting for Godot. The Futurists’ pleasure at being
booed was, nonetheless, a political stance specifically aimed at ma-
nipulating language. For the Futurists, language was a constant
projection of something other, on the ground of the dialectical re-
lationship this theatre established with extra-literary aspects of
life. In Beckett’s theatre, however, language totally severs the dis-
closures of reality from old hermeneutic schemes and presents
them in a neutral space to declare the groundlessness of all mean-
ing and being. But in spite of these underlying differences, the the-
atre of Futurism and that of Beckett have a common denomina-
tor. Both bring to the fore the sound of letters as linguistic signi-
fiers and their transposition from the page to the stage; in this way
they work to accentuate sound. As Beckett once famously wrote
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 106
2
From now on, reference to this work will be given quoting only the page
number in brackets in the text.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 107
for the Futurists and the move away from the word towards the
image is central to Beckett’s later drama.
Other characters from the Beckettian dramatic corpus per-
fectly fulfil the Futurist invocation for “powerful caricatures” (p.
31). Krapp, for example, is a mock-caricature of senility, and the
“profound analogies between humanity, the animal, vegetable,
and mechanical worlds” (p. 31) remind us of Vladimir’s and Es-
tragon’s exchanges:
But the main feature shared by the two theatres is the “ironic
decomposition of all worn out types of the Beautiful, the Grand,
the Solemn, the Religious, the Ferocious, the Seductive, and the
Terrifying” (p. 31). As Viktor Shklovsky pointed out: “when the
canonized art forms reach an impasse, the way is paved for the in-
filtration of the elements of non-canonized art, which by this time
have managed to evolve new artistic devices” (in Erlich 1965
[1981, p. 260]). Before this could take place, the serious artistic
potential of popular theatre had to be discovered, and this is the
wider cultural framework of Marinetti’s manifesto, almost forty
years before the first staging of Waiting for Godot.
Other innovations like the direct address to the audience and
the attempt to create on stage “the difficulty of setting records and
conquering resistances” (p. 32) by making such mischievous sug-
gestions as “have actors recite Hernani tied in sacks up to their
necks” (p. 34) cannot but remind us of Beckett’s characters im-
mersed up to their necks in dustbins (Endgame), urns (“Play”) or
in a mound (Happy Days). Most important of all, the Variety The-
atre was the first to destroy “all conceptions of perspective [and]
proportion” (p. 33), stripping the stage props to a minimum, as
happens with Waiting for Godot, where the stage features a mere
tree. Didi and Gogo, embracing under a full moon and recoiling
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 108
from their own foul smell, embody the Variety Theatre’s dispar-
agement of “ideal love and its romantic obsession that repeats the
nostalgic languor of passion to satiety” (p. 32). The manifesto’s
proposal to do away with psychology and to exalt body-madness
(the so-called fisicofollia) would, on the other hand, be taken up by
Antonin Artaud’s theatre. Marinetti was indeed initiating a theatre
which would eliminate cause and effect, but whose physical, sen-
sory qualities could elicit in the audience the intuition of sensation,
an important dictum that finds its source in Henri Bergson, the
deepest of common roots between the Futurists and Beckett.
The Bergsonian concept of analogy can be found in the Fu-
turist theatre, whose rejection of linear discourse in favour of si-
multaneity, ambiguity and montage is further developed by Da-
da, Surrealism, Vorticism, and is subsequently explored by Beck-
ett in a play like Not I. In Beckett and the Futurists there is a sim-
ilar attempt at reducing the linguistic sign to gestural invention.
Both emphasize the struggle to avoid the hardening of the pre-
sentation into a representation, and thus insist on the need for ‘de-
familiarization’, a concept that the Russian Formalists owe to the
Bergsonian theory of perception.
The Futurists did not simply emphasize the materiality of the
word; they also underscored the materiality of the stage props. In
this manner they heralded the mechanized theatre that offset the
process of abstracting all anthropomorphism out of the play.
Characters start to lose their personalities and become imbued
with mechanical movements, while the plot becomes shortened
and intensified into a single action. This development is also trace-
able in the trajectory that leads from Waiting for Godot to Beck-
ett’s later ‘playlets’, which, in their brevity, lack of logicality, geo-
metric quality and the asymmetrical pattern of the words in the
dramatic text resemble parole in libertà. Also of interest is the
function of dialogue in this reductive process. As it often was for
the Futurists, dialogue in Beckett is forced to operate as substi-
tute for the mise en scène and as a surrogate for the dramatic ac-
tion, even though the very foundations of dramatic language have
been reduced to minimalist assertions.
The last phase of Futurist theatrical innovation, proposed by
Enrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, was directed towards
the development of a Futurist scenography capable of celebrating
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 109
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Arndt, Michael J., 1999, “Theatre at the Centre of the Core. Technol-
ogy as a Lever in Theatre Pedagogy”, in Stephen A. Schrum (edi-
tor), 1999, Theatre in Cyberspace, Peter Lang, New York, pp. 65-
84.
Berghaus, Günter, 1998, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944, Claren-
don Press, Oxford.
Calvino, Italo, 1960, “Il mare dell’oggettività”, in Il Menabò, 2, 1960,
also in Italo Calvino, 1980, Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura
e società, Einaudi, Torino, pp. 39-45.
Idem, 1962, “La sfida al labirinto”, in Il Menabò, 5, 1962, also in Cal-
vino, 1980, Una pietra sopra cit., pp. 82-97.
Idem, 1980, Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura e società, Einaudi,
Torino.
Caws, Mary Ann (editor), 2001, Manifesto. A Century of Isms, Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London.
Dixon, Steve, Futurism-e-visited, http://art.ntu.ac.uk/dpa (last ac-
cessed May 30, 2008).
Drucker, Johanna, 1994, The Visible Word. Experimental Typography
and Modern Art 1909-1923, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Erlich, Viktor, 1965, Russian Formalism. History, Doctrine, Yale Uni-
versity Press, New Haven 1981.
Essif, Les, 1998, “The Concentrated (Empty) Image behind the Frag-
mented Story in Beckett’s Late Plays”, in Essays in Theatre, XVII
1, 1998, pp. 15-32.
Esslin, Martin, 1961, The Theatre of the Absurd, Penguin, Har-
mondsworth 1968 [revised and enlarged edition].
Fletcher, John, 1964, “Beckett’s Verse. Influences and Parallels”, in
The French Review, XXXVII 3, 1964, pp. 320-331.
Gassner, John, 1954, Theatre in Our Times, Crown Publishers, New
York.
Goldberg, RoseLee, 1979, Performance Art. From Futurism to the Pre-
sent, Thames and Hudson, London & New York.
Gorelik, Mordecai, 1962, New Theatres for Old, E. P. Dutton, New
York.
Guglielmi, Angelo, 1964, Avanguardia e sperimentalismo, Feltrinelli,
Milano.
Janus, Adrienne, 2007, “In One Ear and Out the Others. Beckett ....
Mahon . Muldoon”, in Journal of Modern Literature, XXX 2, 2007,
pp. 180-196.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 112
After the first radio plays (from All That Fall to “Words and Mu-
sic”), Beckett engages with his “mental theatre”, a play performed
in the dark, in which the mind is populated by indistinct voices. The
dialogue is reinvented in a monodramatic tone – rather in the same
way as in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) the self had fragmented into
three voices that the protagonist could barely recognize as his own.
As in Romantic monodrama, Beckett’s late plays undergo a radical
process of formal interiorization, in which the boundary between
external and internal space gradually fades, becoming indefinable.
Unlike his nineteenth century predecessors, who had been unable
to move away from traditional stage setting conventions, Beckett
discovered, through the radio, the enormous possibilities offered
by the void: “I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has
been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space”
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 114
How often I have said, in evil hours, Sing now, Winnie, sing your
song, there is nothing else for it, and did not. [Pause.] Could not.
[Pause.] No, like the thrush, or bird of dawning, with no thought of
benefit, to oneself or anyone else.
(Happy Days, p. 155)
1. Pandemonium
In the first book of Paradise Lost, Pandemonium is the majestic in-
fernal palace which emerges from the earth. Here Satan meets the
rebel angels after his eviction from Paradise (Milton, Paradise Lost,
I, vv. 710-717). In The Unnamable, the narrator identifies with Sa-
tan from the very beginning: “For I am obliged to assign a begin-
ning to my residence here, if only for the sake of clarity. Hell itself,
although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer” (p. 295). In The
Unnamable the narrator wishes to occupy the centre of both stage
and narration, though the position is irreparably lost: “I like to
think I occupy the centre, but nothing is less certain” (p. 295). He
is located away from the centre of creation, as Satan is after the de-
feat1. The days of the Promethean flight are over, the body is rei-
fied: “But the days of sticks are over, here I can count on my body
alone, my body incapable of the smallest movement and whose
very eyes can no longer close as they once could” (p. 295).
Pandemonium, in Milton, stands for a still unconquerable
kingdom, a shelter that offers an escape to the imagination. The
infernal palace of The Unnamable, on the other hand, is an en-
closed, “windowless” space:
I found myself in a kind of vast yard or campus, surrounded by high
walls, its surface an amalgam of dirt and ashes, and this seemed sweet to
me after the vast and heaving wastes I had traversed, if my information
was correct. I almost felt out of danger! At the centre of this enclosure
stood a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes.
(The Unnamable, p. 317)
1
“As far removed from God and light of heav’n / As from the centre thrice
to th’utmost pole”. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, vv. 73-74.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 116
Beckett’s narrator shares with Satan his high position and his
royal attributes: he3 owns a crown and a “stick or pole”4, he feels the
“imploring gaze” of his “delegates” (The Unnamable, p. 298) down
below. Despite these similarities the Beckettian narrator “hardly re-
calls” the Pandemonium he had left in order to challenge the cre-
ator. His visionary power resides in a collapse of vision. As a result
the tragedy of creation becomes the tragedy of an uncertain voice
and of an indefinable body (i.e. a body that can only be defined
through a negative, in absentia). On the cosmogony of The Unnam-
able Beckett superimposes that of Paradise Lost, because this allows
him to place his characters in a new dimension, a sempiternal hell il-
luminated by the grey, diminishing light of self-denial.
2 This passage from the palace to the skull anticipates Beckett’s late
“skullscapes”.
3 “He” and “his” are merely conventional here, the narrator’s gender being
indefinable.
4 Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 300. In the same passage the narrator uses the
words “javelin” and “sword”. Milton refers to Satan’s mighty “spear”. See Mil-
ton, Paradise Lost, I, vv. 292-296.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 117
identity – he is continually informing and filling some other Body – The Sun,
the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are po-
etical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no
identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures”. Keats, Let-
ter to Richard Woodhouse, 27th October 1818 (in Keats 2003, p. 547).
7 Hyperion was composed largely between the end of September and 1st De-
cember 1818, when Keats’s brother Tom died. After a few additions and ad-
justments the project was eventually abandoned in 1819. The Fall of Hyperion
was started in July 1819 on the Isle of Wight, almost completed by the end of
September 1819 (when Keats announced to Reynolds his “defeat” in the agon
with Milton), and was possibly revised in December 1819.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 118
lation, here, is his own mortality. Soon abandoning the idea of any
“progress” or progression in poetry, Keats understood, as Beck-
ett did, that suffering is an inevitable stage in the comprehension
of reality. Apollo no longer marks the advent of a new age in po-
etry: the gods are all fallen, petrified in body and sight. Keats has
lost the power to express the rebirth of poetry. Yet the vision must
be endlessly sought after, though it constantly vanishes. His an-
swer to the impasse is typically Beckettian: once the temple’s last
step is reached, the poet raises the veil, looks into the face of the
goddess and blurs the distinction between subject and object:
8 This short prose work was composed initially in French: Mal vu mal dit
came out a few months earlier, between October 1979 and January 1981. There
are significant differences between the texts, which cannot be discussed here.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 119
Ill Seen Ill Said: an eye that “breathes, devours, digests and nar-
rates” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 270), to such an extent that
the action of seeing merges with that of writing9. However, the eye-
lids of the universal eye are closed, they can only look inwards.
Beckett cites the “vile jelly” of King Lear (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 73): his
universe is performing the last metamorphosis, with the image
swallowing the imagination. Unlike the “glittering eye” of Co-
leridge, the eye of the late Beckett is a “gluttoning eye” that ulti-
mately devours itself. There had been, the narrating voice recalls,
“Things and imaginings” (p. 23); but “fancy” and “imagination”,
the old romantic couple, are an “old tandem”(p. 53) now.
In an extreme act of rarefaction, the eye reduces itself to the
whiteness of two empty orbits reflecting a starless sky; the “black-
ness” (p. 81) of sight now obtained is a mirror image of the world.
Beckett’s return to Milton no longer comes about through Par-
adise Lost, but through Samson Agonistes, Milton’s last work. The
“woman” of Ill Seen Ill Said experiences the same condition as
Samson: the loss of “inner vision”, the paradox of a “living
death”10. As prisoners of their own body, as if in a tomb, both
characters experience the “real darkness of the body”11. The Mil-
tonic hero makes the theatre of his last exhibition collapse on the
Philistines, while Beckett’s dying woman sees, in the “slumberous
collapsion” (p. 77) of her world, a “phantom hand” (her own?
The narrator’s? The reader’s maybe?), which drops the curtain:
“No but slowly dispelled a little very little like the last wisps of day
when the curtain closes. [...] Farewell to farewell” (p. 83).
Beckett urges literature towards a “vanishing point”12 which
is never fully reached. His writings acquire the void and silence as
9 See for example p. 69: “The eye has changed. And its drivelling scribe”.
10 “To live a life half dead, a living death, / And buried; but O yet more mis-
erable! / Myself, my sepulchre, a moving grave”. Milton, Samson Agonistes, vv.
100-102.
11 Milton, Samson Agonistes, v. 159. Beckett directly alludes to the last verse
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to
Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.
Brater, Enoch, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the
Theater, Oxford University Press, New York.
Hassan, Ihab, 1971, “Prelude: Lyre Without Strings”, in The Dis-
memberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, 1971,
The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1982.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 121
1
An Italian version of this essay was first published in Cavecchi and Patey
2007 (pp. 235-262). This volume collects the results of a two-month Beckett Pro-
ject concluded by a final Conference (30 November – 1 December 2006), both
organized by Caroline Patey with The Department of Modern Languages of the
University of Milan and in collaboration with the Piccolo Teatro. My essay is
therefore the result of an exchange with scholars and operators involved in the
Beckett Project. Beckett’s portrait as it appeared in my essay and in the pages of
the book is remarkably multiple and multilingual. As a matter of fact, throughout
the volume particular attention has been paid to the visual and to the complex
system of artistic references which mutely invade Beckett’s stage, texts and mean-
ing. Thus, the graphic images that precede each section have been conceived as
thresholds to the themes approached in the hope they would somehow con-
tribute their own signs to the meaning and rhythm of the written words, as evi-
dence of Samuel Beckett’s intimate knowledge of art and his personal friendship
with artists, obscure and famous, and of his lifelong passion for museums. Artists
were important to Beckett, and are crucial to the appreciation of his work because
what Bram van Velde, Richard Serra and Giuseppe Penone – among others – as-
sert forcefully in their paintings is precisely the essentiality of sign and the im-
possibility of sense, a combination dear to Samuel Beckett whose privileged in-
terlocutors they were once and remain today. For more details on the volume see
http://users.unimi.it/sidera/libraria.php (last accessed May 30, 2009).
2 Museums are intertwined with Beckett’s work in various modes. See
Cavecchi 2009.
3 Beckett’s art criticism has been successively collected in Cohn 1983.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 123
I almost felt that he did have the paintbrush out and was painting,
and, of course, what he always has in the other pocket is the rubber,
because as fast as he draws a line in, he gets out that enormous India-
rubber and rubs it all out until it is only faintly there.
(Whitelaw 1978, p. 89)
5
See also the numerous chairs in Beckett’s novels (such as the rocking chair
in Murphy, the toilet seat in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Mr Hack-
ett’s bench in Watt) and television plays: F’s “stool” in “Ghost Trio” and the
“invisible stool” in “...but the clouds...”; in Film a rocking chair plays a role of
a certain importance.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 125
bare stage, they become central to the dramatic action and hold the
spectator’s attention. They can be considered as the “remains” (see
Essif 2001) left on stage after Beckett’s “shrinking” (Proust): a
process similar to the “arte del levare” (art of removal) carried out
by a sculptor working on raw material, as performed by Michelan-
gelo, whose work Beckett knew well, but also as performed by his
friend Alberto Giacometti. Both he and Giacometti had an inter-
est in an existential void, and collaborated on Jean-Louis Barrault’s
En attendant Godot at the Odéon in 19616.
Despite being common and unpretentious items and often the
only props on the stage, Beckett’s seating devices embody a rich
syntax of intentions and strategies and are loaded with meaning
within a poetics that rejects the tyranny of words in favour of a
more visual dimension. To all these chairs Beckett paid a spas-
modic and always increasing attention, as confirmed by his stage
directions which became more and more detailed throughout his
career. Thus, if in Waiting for Godot there is just “a folding stool”
(Waiting for Godot, p. 23) without any other details, the rocking
chair of “Rockaby” has to be “pale wood highly polished to gleam
when rocking”, with “footrest. Vertical back. Rounded inward
curving arms to suggest embrace” (“Rockaby”, p. 433); the stage
direction is quite long even though the seat should be “as little vis-
ible as possible”, as in Come and Go (p. 356). As a director, Beck-
ett’s focus on properties and objects, including chairs and stools
becomes even more obsessive.
Endgame, a play where the leading character and a chair are in-
separable, provides a very clear example. Hamm’s “armchair on
castors” – or “fauteuil à roulettes” in the French version (Fin de par-
tie, p. 11) – has caused trouble not only for its blind owner (see
Endgame, pp. 96, 104, 113), but also for the various directors who
have staged the play. Hamm’s wheelchair, in fact, has varied con-
siderably from production to production. In the original Fin de par-
tie, which opened in 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre in London,
director Roger Blin played Hamm as a very authoritative and self-
ish character, who enjoys absolute power of life and death over his
parents and Clov (see Chabert 1986, pp. 164-166); Blin, who was
also the director of the play, was so interested in Hamm’s imperial
appearance (see Chabert 1986, p. 165) that he deliberately under-
lined Hamm’s similarity with King Lear and, as a matter of fact,
“whatever was regal in the text, imperious in the character, was tak-
en as Shakespearean” (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 171).
This is why he asked set designer Jacques Noël for an oval scenog-
raphy where he placed Hamm, in foul but regal dresses (a bathrobe
of crimson velvet with strips of fur) seated on a fauteuil à roulettes
“evoking a Gothic cathedral” (p. 171). According to Blin, Beckett
never opposed this scenic idea, but when the production moved to
the Studio des Champs-Elysées in Paris, the regal aspects of the set
and costumes were played down at Beckett’s suggestion and the
throne-like chair was changed to a simple wooden one on wheels
(p. 171). Moreover, when in 1967 Beckett directed Endspiel at the
Schiller Theater in Berlin, he paid even greater attention to
Hamm’s “mit Röllchen versehenen Sesse”7. According to Michael
Haerdter’s notes in his rehearsal diary notebook, the Irish play-
wright and director brought some major changes both in text and
stage action as well as in the visual realisation of Hamm’s chair.
Beckett was not at all pleased with the “quite massive effect” of Ma-
tias’ armchair8 and therefore he worked a lot with the stage de-
signer in order to create an armchair that was less “theatre-like”
and characterised by “puritanical simplicity”9.
Although it’s regained its little, noisy rollers, their solid suspension is too heavy,
for him, too theatre-like. Can’t it be simply placed under the chair-legs?”
(Haerdter 1967, p. 237).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 127
Hamm’s chairs
Each Beckettian chair, in its own way, conflates autobiographical
experiences and intellectual and artistic adventures. In this re-
spect, Hamm’s “armchair on castors” and its net of intertextual
relations seem to be particularly revealing. On the one hand, it re-
calls the various chairs in the Becketts’ house: from the wheelchair
of Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair, which is alluded to by Hamm’s
wheelchair10, to the rocking chair of “little Granny”, echoed in
“Rockaby” (Knowlson 1996, p. 662). On the other hand, it is rem-
iniscent of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jacobsz Trip – a painting Beck-
ett repeatedly admired at the National Gallery in London and
which Knowlson describes as “a pre-modernist Hamm in Beck-
ett’s Endgame” (Haynes and Knowlson 2003, p. 68), and of Al-
berto Giacometti’s studies for seated figures – his Diego seated
(1948) in particular, a painting framed by a “closed scene” which
is very similar to Endgame’s claustrophobic setting (see Worth
2001, pp. 32-42). Moreover, Hamm’s armchair resembles the
thrones belonging to Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. Accord-
ing to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who attended the London pre-
miere, Hamm is “a sightless old despot robed in scarlet” who has
“more than a passing affinity with Francis Bacon’s painting of
shrieking cardinals”11 – an opinion which might have been influ-
good friend of the Becketts’, suggested that Hamm was modelled on Beckett’s
aunt, Cissie Sinclair: “When I read Endgame I recognised Cissie in Hamm. The
play was full of allusions to things in her life, even the old telescope which Tom
Casement had given me and I had passed to her to amuse herself by watching
ships in Dublin Bay or sea-birds feeding on the sands when the tide was out” (in
Knowlson 1996, p. 407).
11 In The Observer (7 April 1957) Kenneth Tynan wrote: “I take it
Rocking time
In most of Beckett’s plays, the stage action is organised around
chairs which, in fact, are closely connected with the theme of move-
ment and immobility. Endgame is once again certainly one of the
most significant plays in this respect. It seems significant that when
attempt to dramatise the neurosis that makes men love power” (in Graver and
Federman 1979, p. 165).
12 Bacon’s exhibition in Paris took place at the Galerie Rive Droite in Feb-
ruary 1957; this was followed by another exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in
London (21 March-26 April 1957). Pope I, Pope II and Pope III had already been
exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in December 1951, while Three Studies for Fig-
ures at the Base of a Crucifixion caused an outcry when exhibited in 1945 at the
Lefèvre Gallery. See Peppiatt 2006, pp. 165, 168; Schmied 1996, p. 193.
13 On Beckett and Bacon see also Bryden 2003, pp. 38-45.
14
Beckett to Alec Reid (1971) in All I Can Manage More Than I Could, in
McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988, p. 163.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 129
15
Significantly enough, in Beckett’s plays watches and clocks are either bro-
ken or used in various ways; they are never used to measure the passing of time.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 131
16 See Beckett’s letter to Axen Kaun (9 July 1937), quoted in Serpieri 1996,
p. 760.
17 “Pozzo: I’d like very much to sit down, but I don’t quite know how to go
18 In 1905 Jack B. Yeats and John Millington Synge set out on their Man-
chester Guardian commission to write and draw something of the life of the peo-
ple in the areas of greatest hardship and distress in the West of Ireland. See
Arnold 1998, pp. 133-151.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 133
By taking care of each other, the two men feel free from the
constraints imposed by their seating devices and enjoy the free-
dom they are denied. A comfort belonging to an unspecified past
– if we are to believe them –, when they had women willing to look
after them and to offer them a safe alternative to these tyrannical
seats.
A: [...] I used to feel twilight gather and make myself ready. I put
away fiddle and bowl and had only to get to my feet, when she took
me by the hand.
B: She?
A: My woman. [Pause.] A woman. [Pause.] But now... [...]
B: [Violently.] We had our women, hadn’t we? You yours to lead
you by the hand and I mine to get me out of the chair in the evening
and back into it again in the morning and to push me as far as the cor-
ner when I went out of my mind.
(p. 228)
Knowlson 1996, pp. 107, 137. See also Albright 2003, pp. 1-27; Brater 1986, pp.
8-9; Wilson 2002, p. 331.
20
Van Gogh’s Nature morte: Bottines (Paris, 1886-87; collection Vincent W.
van Gogh, Laren) is reproduced in Leymarie 1951, plate 35.
21 Even though Giuseppina Restivo suggests a possible link between the
mad painter evoked in Endgame and Albrecht Dürer (Restivo 1991, p. 176), the
landscapes described by Hamm – “All that rising corn! And there! Look! The
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 136
sails of the herring fleet!” (Endgame, 113) – recall a lot of van Gogh’s paintings,
from La Crau: jardins de maraîchers (Arles, Juin 1888, Collection Vincent W. van
Gogh, Laren) to Barques sur la plage (Arles, Juin 1888, Collection Vincent W.
van Gogh, Laren): two paintings Beckett certainly knew, reproduced in Ley-
marie 1951, plates 65 and 60.
22 A light effect “that perhaps echo[es] the magnificent Giorgione self-por-
Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney – Blue Angel Films, RTÉ, Channel 4, Bord
Scannàn na hÉireann and Tirone Productions.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 137
An invisible bench
A last section of the gallery must be dedicated to the invisible
bench in Come and Go: as the stage directions state, it is a “nar-
row benchlike seat, without back, just long enough to accommo-
date three figures almost touching. As little visible as possible. It
should not be clear what they are sitting on” (Come and Go, p.
356). In spite of its invisibility, this seat is the beating heart of this
dramaticule, mostly made up of silence or whispering. Though
short (lasting only three minutes), the action develops around the
bench which seems to entertain a privileged relationship with
memory, since the three protagonists of “undeterminable age”,
Flo, Vi e Ru, recall their old times seated on it. The play consists
of a symmetrical plot of apparently meaningless routines of get-
ting up, leaving the stage for the darkness, returning and sitting
down again in the light. While each woman leaves the stage, the
other two disclose an appalling secret about the third and even
though the spectators cannot understand the bits of conversations
the three women keep whispering in turn, at the end of the play
they are aware of that verdict Beckett himself confided to Jacoba
van Velde: “They are ‘condemned’ all three” (in Knowlson 1996,
p. 532). In its extreme concision the play is a quintessence of per-
sonal and literary memories which seem to coagulate around this
invisible bench, which surrenders its utilitarian value for the more
strictly aesthetic value of shape (see Essif 2001, p. 69). T.S. Eliot’s
image of women coming and going talking of Michelangelo in The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), evoked by the title, antici-
pates the dynamics of returning presences and futile conversa-
tions which characterise the play’s scenic movements, while Vi’s
opening line echoing Macbeth – “When shall we three meet
again?” – emphasizes the mysterious and ghostly nature of this
bustle, somehow resembling the Shakespearean witches sabbath.
In creating this unusual stage image Beckett drew on a store of
personal anecdotes as well, and in fact, autobiographical memory
insinuates Flo’s invitation to “just sit together”, “holding hands...
that way”, as they used to “in the playground at Miss Wade’s” (p.
354). The line recalls an image of Beckett’s childhood, and the in-
visible bench somehow conflates with the stone lion in the school
playground (at Miss Wade’s) where Beckett’s cousins used to sit
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 138
Conclusion
Far from being mere theatrical props, Beckett’s chairs, stools and
benches stand at the scenic heart of many plays. They are numer-
ous and tell different stories of illness, paralysis and desperation;
they are mobile chairs endowed with a movement leading
nowhere or offering the only possible embrace – motherly, loving
or deadly, frustrating and erotic. They could be considered as a
metonymy of an uneasiness which seems to be the condition of
Beckett’s being.
Furthermore, invested by a long chain of echoes, cross-refer-
ences and intertextuality, from the most obvious to the most com-
plex and obscure, Beckett’s chairs stand as an encyclopaedic com-
pendium of images, memories, references and echoes which pop-
ulate Beckett’s bare stage in silence. Being different from one an-
other, the chairs escape verbal language and express the aporia of
a poetic refusal to rely just on words. They are undoubtedly im-
portant hieroglyphs of Beckett’s vocabulary and poetics, oscillat-
ing between showing and hiding, adding and subtracting, speak-
ing and remaining silent.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 139
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism on Beckett
Abbott, H. Porter, 1996, Beckett Writing Beckett, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca.
Acheson, James, and Kateryna Arthur (editors), 1987, Beckett’s Later
Fiction and Drama, Macmillan, London.
Albright, Daniel, 2003, Beckett & Aesthetics, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Arikha, Avigdor, 2006, “Avigdor Arikha on Beckett and Art”, in
James and Elizabeth Knowlson (editors), 2006, Beckett Remem-
bering / Remembering Beckett. Uncollected Interviews with Samuel
Beckett & Memories of Those Who Knew Him, Bloomsbury, Lon-
don, pp. 143-145.
Aslan, Odette, 1988, Roger Blin and Twentieth Century Playwrights,
Cambridge University Press, New York.
Ben-Zvi, Linda (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Perfor-
mances, and Cultural Contexts, Assaph Book Series, Tel Aviv Uni-
versity.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 140
Beckett, Drama,
and the Writing on the Wall
Iain Bailey
“transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another” (Kristeva 1984, p.
59).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 145
rial from the source text in the target. Two key principles are there-
fore at work: first, that there are grounds on which one linguistic
figure can be said to be identical to another; second, that that ma-
terial can be said to belong to the source of its original utterance.
“Mene, mene”
With these assumed principles in mind, we begin with what
would appear to be unmistakeably a biblical citation in Endgame:
Hamm: The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, me-
ne? Naked bodies?
(Endgame, pp. 97-98)
And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL,
UPHARSIN.
(Daniel, v, 25-6)
irreverent ones (see for example Zeifman 1975, p. 82; Barry 2006,
p. 128), MENE’s meaning seems at first to be completely self-con-
tained, determined directly from God and in Daniel’s exclusive
pneumatological authority:
lence of truth and falsity, presence and absence, seeing and say-
ing; and, secondly, the constant attention drawn to the scripted-
ness of the performance, and vice versa: that symbiosis and gulf.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the putative location of
Clov’s visions:
I’ll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait
for him to whistle me. [Pause.] Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I’ll
lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.
(Endgame, p. 93)
the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the polite
contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow
their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.
(“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 28)
with the nail then of the right index [...] from left to right and top to
bottom as in our civilisation I carve my Roman capitals
with the nail of the index until it falls and the worn back bleeding pas-
sim it was near the end
in great capitals [...] the great ornate letter the snakes the imps God be
praised it won’t be long
(How It Is, pp. 70-71)
Light dying. Soon none left to die [...] Eyes to the small pane gaze
at that first night. Turn from it in the end to face the darkened room.
There in the end slowly a faint hand. Holding aloft a lighted spill. In
the light of spill faintly the hand and milkwhite globe. Then second
hand. In light of spill.
(“A Piece of Monologue”, p. 427)
Conclusion
Paul Ricoeur, in the foreword to a major French study of Daniel
by Lacocque, has written that it “poses in an especially sharp way
most of the problems raised in reading the other books of the
Bible” (Lacocque 1976 [1979, p. XVII]). For Ricoeur this means
primarily the various hermeneutic layers, texts reading and inter-
preting other texts, among the scriptures themselves and for mod-
ern readers, and especially the hermeneutics that constitute gos-
pel kerygma. He writes that “the book as a whole presents itself
as a writing constructed upon other writings”; the scene at Bel-
shazzar’s feast is paradigmatic of this, with the added confusion
of voices to boot. There is no one authority in this biblical narra-
tive: in fact, at its heart is a questioning of forms of authority, di-
vine and human.
Biblical reference in Beckett is not restricted to assent or dis-
sent in response to the fixed, incontrovertible Holy Writ; the
complex textual negotiations with the Bible throughout his work
are not a case of brute force and learning manipulating this oth-
erwise immutable object to his own ends. Hermeneutical tradi-
tions that look to retrieve the ‘real’ appearance of the writing on
the wall, or for that matter what ‘really’ happened to the two Gol-
gothan thieves, may yoke the complexities into a supposedly in-
controvertible narrative. All this is ripe for lampoon in Beckett.
However, his own “writing constructed upon other writings” al-
lows the biblical to be operative in more nuanced ways, to engage
with the more searching questions about presence and materiali-
ty, and to leave his texts, especially the dramatic, flickering some-
where between power and impotence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reflecting upon the nature of such an issue, and upon the im-
portance it has for the human being, may offer valuable reading cri-
1
See “Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, in Cohn 1983, p. 146: “Gautama,
avant qu’ils vinssent à lui manquer, disait qu’on se trompe en affirmant que le
moi existe, mais qu’en affirmant qu’il n’existe pas on ne se trompe pas moins.”
Gautama is the name of Siddharta before becoming the “Buddha”, that is the
enlightened one.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 158
4
Coe seems to recognize a plain trace of this path in what Beckett writes
about Proust (see Coe 1964, p. 17).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 161
5
For an essential analysis of the influences of Buddhism and Hinduism in
T.S. Eliot’s writings see Faraone 2001.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 163
Vladimir: [...] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at Es-
tragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying,
he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. [Pause.] I can’t go
on! [Pause.] What have I said?
(Waiting for Godot, pp. 84-85)
Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is
habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the in-
dividual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of
the individual’s consciousness [...] the pact must be continually re-
newed [...]. The creation of the world did not take place once and for
all, but takes place every day.
(Proust, p. 19)
single morning of their life: they know they have to wait for
Godot, certainly out of habit. Every day they meet Pozzo and
Lucky, but do not retain precise recollection of this event. They
receive the habitual visit of a boy working for Godot, who always
brings the same disappointing news, but who every time has no
recollection of his previous visits. Habit prevents the perception
of the “ultimate reality” because it binds the individual to the
sphere of ignorance, preventing him from perceiving his own true
self, and forcing him to suffer. Once again Beckett, in Proust,
seems to point out the problem:
The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was
also an agent of security. When it ceases to perform that second func-
tion, when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to a
comfortable and familiar concept, when, in a word, it betrays its trust
as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, and
the victim, now an ex-victim, [...] is exposed to that reality [...].
(Proust, p. 21)
6
It is worth noting that not all the oriental systems of thought agree on this
issue. Some of them believe that the cycle of desire does not arise out of this ne-
cessity. For instance, in Vedanta it comes from a faulty perception of what is re-
al and what is unreal.
7 For this, as well as for other issues specific to the Zen Buddhist system of
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 166
as a final reward or as an escape from the sensorial reality, but rather as some-
thing already perennially existent in ourselves, coexistent with and inseparable
from the “death-and-life” sphere, and that has to be achieved through revela-
tion (see Stryk 1968). Nevertheless, for the purpose of this paper it is true that
suffering and desire are hindrances on the path to the nirvana of tao. Therefore,
the solution is giving up any desire (see Kundert-Gibbs 1999, p. 27).
9 A propos of the issue of repetitions, it is advisable to notice that the pas-
sages of the text are never precisely repeated in the play. In other words, the
variations sometimes consist in the order of concepts or of words; more often
what changes is the character who pronounces a certain line. This structure as
well shows the absence of ultimate elements, and points out to the relativity of
the experience: if the characters are devoid of absolute and objective points of
reference to ground their reflections and deductions, the spectator too is bound
to the sphere of appearance, by virtue of which any element of the play refers to
something already seen, heard and lived, though not precisely in the same way.
No experience perfectly overlaps another.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 167
ity between Waiting for Godot and Herrigel 1953. Kundert-Gibbs’s opinion is
that Herrigel makes use of, contests and redefines the tools of archery in the con-
text of Zen philosophy, in a way that appears to be very similar to the one by
which Waiting for Godot relates to the dramatic art. See Kundert-Gibbs 1999,
p. 56.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 168
samsara are pretty frequent in the play. The two protagonists re-
member past events when they could have put an end to their
lives, as when Vladimir had suggested jumping from the Eiffel
tower, or when Estragon really jumped into the Rhône. But, more
often, these images of suicide regard the sphere of time present,
and are all connected to hanging. In the play, suicide is often con-
templated and visualized, but never performed: though taken in-
to consideration all through Waiting for Godot, the fourth noble
truth is never achieved.
Images connected to the rope are frequently evoked in the
play, above all in the interpersonal relations: a rope is often used
as leash, reins and bond between characters. Vladimir and Es-
tragon often underline their mutual dependence and once they
meditate on their being “tied to” Godot, a hypothesis rejected,
though without conviction, by Vladimir. Moreover, the rope
physically appears in the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky,
a connection based on the contrastive and subsidiary terms of
“domination / submission” and “master / slave”: in the first act,
Pozzo holds Lucky by a long rope, which in the second becomes
sensibly shorter. The different dimensions of this rope, and its dif-
ferent use by the two characters – aspects underlined by the stage
directions of the play – show how the relation between the two
has changed: if in the first act it is Pozzo who leads Lucky, in the
second the blind master is completely at the mercy of the servant,
and in fact he confines himself to follow him, dragged by the rope
which shows his power.
More often the images of the rope are connected to the hy-
pothesis of a redeeming suicide, proposed by the two main char-
acters:
11
The essay was originally published in 1952, in French, in the Cahiers
d’Art. Documents magazine. Waiting for Godot too, though written in 1948-
1949, was originally published in French in 1952. The chronological proximity
of the two texts authorizes us to believe that, speaking of the clown and his
stooge, Beckett was actually referring to Vladimir and Estragon.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 172
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Coe, Richard N., 1964, Beckett, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh & London.
Driver, Tom, 1961, “Beckett by the Madeleine”, in Columbia Univer-
sity Forum, IV, Summer 1961, 3, pp. 21-25.
Faraone, Mario, 2001, “‘Burning, burning, burning’: Presenze indui-
ste e buddiste nell’arte di T.S. Eliot”, in Agostino Lombardo (a cu-
ra di), 2001, Presenza di T.S. Eliot, Bulzoni, Roma, pp. 47-70.
Foster, Paul, 1989, Beckett and Zen: A Study of Dilemma in the Novels
of Samuel Beckett, Wisdom, London.
Fusella, Patrizia, 1995, L’impossibilità di non essere. La negazione del-
la mimesi e del soggetto in Not I di Samuel Beckett, Istituto Uni-
versitario Orientale, Napoli.
Kundert-Gibbs, John Leeland, 1999, Nothing Is Left to Tell: Zen and
Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett, Associated
University Press, London.
Rosen, Steven J., 1976, Samuel Beckett and the Pessimistic Tradition,
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey).
Takahashi, Yasunari, 1982, “Il teatro della mente: Samuel Beckett e il
teatro N≥”, in Bertinetti, 1994, Samuel Beckett cit., pp. 728-736.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 173
The quotation in the title of this essay (“he is going ahead of him-
self / going aimlessly”), is taken from one of the mirlitonnades1 (in
Poems 1930-1989, 2002), a series of short Beckettian poems, writ-
ten between November 1976 and September 1981, and published
in different versions, with some re-editing by Beckett himself2. I
suggest taking this quotation as a representative paradigm of the
Beckettian poems at large, and in order to support this reading I
will take into consideration also some poems not included in mir-
litonnades, but incorporated in the collection Poems 1930-1989
(2002). The extended inclusions of this recent publication help
me in the outlining of a continual reflexive stance in Beckett’s po-
ems. The aim of this paper is not philological, nor “stylistic-de-
scriptive”, but, rather, philosophical and hermeneutical. I suggest
the possibility of perceiving a recurrence of motives, a homo-
geneity of perspective, the return of a specific voice, and of a spe-
cific economy of writing in the works that go from the Thirties to
the Eighties, in spite of the fragmentary nature of the single po-
ems and of the specific collections.
I locate this persistence of motives and the stability of a spe-
cific skeptical gaze, as well as a peculiar stylistic distinction, in a
Beckettian philosophical understanding, basically committed to
haunting the “something there / where / out there / out where /
outside” (mirlitonnades, p. 37).
tion of the poems, and translations into English are mine. The original Beckett
French is included in the notes.
2 For a quick chronological reconstruction of the different editions, I sug-
gest referring to the entry “mirlitonnades” in Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, pp.
373-374. See also Wheatley 1995, pp. 47-75.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 178
3
“[D]ie von grossen schwarzen Pausen” in “German Letter of 1937”, in
Cohn 1983, p. 53.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 179
4
Roland Barthes, “The Spirit of the Letter” (in L’obvie et l’obtus, 1982), in
Idem, 1985: see especially pp. 99-100.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 180
Why does the self aspire to exceed itself? Starting with Plato’s
Symposium (in Diotima’s speech), this aspiration is activated be-
cause lack (“penìa”), and subsequent need, are ineliminable com-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 181
5
Lyotard and Lingis have provided, to my knowledge, the most compelling
readings of Freud on the links between Eros and Thanatos.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 182
for, but non-realizable in its radical totality. See the following lines
in “Rue de Vaugirard”: “At mid-height / I let go of the clutch / [...]
/ then I start again fortified / by an unavoidable negative” (Poems
1930-1989, p. 57)6. And again in: “where goes the pleasure of los-
ing / with the one by a hair’s breadth inferior of winning” (p. 51)7.
Later on, in the same collection: “and to be there still there / being
there not escaping and escaping and being there” (p. 64)8. It is
worth noticing here a recurrent Beckettian original structure of
negation, which is not at all dualistic and dialectical, but is, at least,
“triadic”. In short, human life is the time of a “mid-height”, non
dualistic and not decidable, of death-in-life; it is a “living dead my
only season” (“vive morte ma seule saison”, p. 65).
This hermeneutical cycle, providing the understanding of “the
longing of the unattainable” expressed by the erasure of oppo-
sites, and by the collapse of conceptual dichotomies, also ac-
counts for the sudden changes of tone, even within the same po-
em (which often deconstruct dichotomies by way of incon-
gruities), as if to witness the ultimate ineliminable “voice coming
to one from the dark” articulated in Company, as well as the be-
ing “among the voices voiceless / that throng my hiddenness”9.
Humans hear the beckoning of a voice coming to them, and –
at best – can hear their own “voicelessness” and perceive, and
conceptualize their silence. Both these alternatives (being spoken
to, and being bound to silence) are simultaneous revelations of the
“outside” (one “outside” speaking, and one imposing silence).
I hope that my reading has also indicated that the semantic
mobility of the link between the two sentences “il se passe devant
/ allant sans but” is such that there is no chance of prioritizing one
sentence over the other. On the page, they read one before the
1989, p. 64.
9 “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” (Company, p. 7); “que ferais-
je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions / [...] / à errer et à virer loin de tou-
te vie / dans un espace pantin / sans voix parmi les voix / enfermées avec moi”,
in Poems 1930-1989, pp. 68 and 69.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 183
formed by Brian Massumi, in spite of the fact that it reduced the polyvalent am-
biguity of the French, where “la pensée du dehors” could mean both “the
thought of the outside” and “the thought from outside”. In Beckett, the
“thought from outside” could perhaps make more sense, in the context of the
lack of self, seen as necessary for “going ahead of oneself”. Also “the outside”
cannot be in Beckett an “essentialized” site.
11
I am taking the liberty of a free transaltion to preserve the homophonic
Beckettian pun: “... a place / where oblivion where oblivion weighs down /
sweetly on unnamed worlds / never mind the mind”. Samuel Beckett, “bon bon
il est un pays”, in Poems 1930-1989, p. 63. Italics added to highlight translator’s
licence.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 184
14
“Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metony-
mien, Antropomorphismen / [...] / die Warheiten sind Illusionen, von denen man
vergessen hat, das sie welche sind...” (Nietzsche 1873 [2006, p. 94]). English
translation in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 1989, p. 250.
15 “[E]ntre la scène et moi / la vitre / vide sauf elle”, Poems 1930-1989, p. 53.
16 “[L]’attente pas trop lente les regrets pas trop longs l’absence / au servi-
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to
Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York 2004.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 189
1
Excerpted from Beckett’s ‘philosophy notes’, TCD MS 10967/189. Also
in Windelband 1907, pp. 415-416.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 191
2
On this see De Lattre 1970, pp. 553-566 and De Vleeschauwer 1957, pp.
45-56.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 192
Correspondence4
The best known mention of Geulincx is the 1967 letter to the crit-
ic Sighle Kennedy, reprinted in Disjecta, where Beckett writes:
One might of course think this single letter warrant enough for
scholarly investigation, and it has indeed been used to anchor cer-
tain readings of Geulincx in Murphy. However, it appears Beck-
ett had been writing to critics and colleagues on the subject of
Geulincx, at regular intervals, over the previous thirty years.
Another letter dating from the time Beckett was engaged in the
research at TCD in 1936 is addressed to a friend and member of
the Dublin literati Arland Ussher. It speaks of Beckett’s enthusi-
asm for his discoveries:
Mark Nixon for their help with the correspondence. Due to copyright restric-
tions certain letters must unfortunately remain unpublished here: those to Mary
Hutchinson and one to George Duthuit. Hopefully these will soon see the fuller
light of day. For complete quotations and further correspondence, see my DPhil
thesis, provisionally titled “A Literary Fantasia”: Uses of Philosophy in the Fic-
tion of Samuel Beckett.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 194
5 OED cites first use of the word in 1633 by Phineas Fletcher: “He that
would learn Theologie must first study autologie. The way to God is by our
selves.”
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 195
I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left
me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along
the deck.
(Molloy, p. 51)
6 However, the sophist Protagoras and atomist Leucippus also came from
Abdera, which might complicate this complication. Beckett was certainly fa-
miliar with the former, having taken notes on his theories of perception, his life,
and his meeting with Zeno, as part of the ‘philosophy notes’. Over twenty years
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 196
later, responding to a query from Alan Schneider on 21st November 1957 about
who exactly Hamm’s “Old Greek” might be, Beckett reveals this might be Pro-
tagoras (see Harmon 1998, p. 23). This letter is also discussed in Feldman 2006,
pp. 32-33. Despite evidence suggesting Beckett was wrong about his reference
(the “Old Greek” was more likely Zeno), his pointing to Protagoras indicates
this Abderite’s presence in his thoughts (see Windelband 1907, p. 89).
7 Beckett and Hutchinson corresponded further on the subject of Geulincx.
A letter dated two weeks later from Beckett also mentions Geulincx, and the
earlier difficulties obtaining a version of Ethica from the National Library in Ire-
land, forcing the return to TCD. Significantly in this letter Beckett distances
himself from Murphy’s admiration of Geulincx’s language, but is fascinated by
its world where man is a puppet.
8 See Horace 2005, p. 113 (Epistles II, line 194).
9
The motto “Serio et Candide” appears as part of a coat of arms on the title
pages of Opera Philosophica.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 197
Murphy
Given this evidence for Beckett’s repeated referencing of
Geulincx’s concepts over a thirty-year period, and knowing that
the notes taken in TCD in 1936 remained with Beckett all his life
(along with the rest of the Notes Diverses Holo collection, in con-
trast to many other papers donated to archives at Reading or else-
where), why might we want to go back to Murphy to begin locat-
ing moments where Geulincx is important?11 There are at least
two main reasons for this. Firstly, there are the convincing argu-
ments made by Feldman about Beckett’s uses of “his contempo-
raneous reading in his writings”12. Beckett himself described the
early 1930s as being “soiled [...] with the old demon of note-
Geulincx in the original after 1936 or add to his notes. However, Uhlmann in
his introduction to Beckett’s notes on Geulincx describes how two different
typewriters were probably used to produce the two fair copies of notes, indi-
cating they might have been produced at different times. See Geulincx 2006, pp.
307-308.
12 Matthew Feldman, forthcoming in Russell Smith (editor), Beckett and
14 For a more detailed discussion of this see Geulincx 2006, pp. 225-230,
15 The picture taken from the Daily Sketch of July 1st 1936 appears on the
We have no power to affect either our own or any other body; this
is perfectly obvious from our consciousness alone, and no sane man
would deny it.
(Geulincx 2006, p. 243)
was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing [...]. It
had not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These dis-
positions [...] could sway the issue in the desired direction, but not
clinch it.
(Murphy, p. 102)
he was too busy with the novel19, and producing a completed first
draft of it only four weeks later (by 9th June).
In the way Geulincx becomes perhaps incorporated into this
one scene in particular he is shown as integral to the development
from Murphy to the major middle period works. The chess game
elaborates the theme of closed systems already in Murphy20, in this
instance given a Geulincxian impetus. Yet in its exceptionality in
the novel as a game, an enumeration of specific moves, the chess
game looks forward quite explicitly to the many troubles to which
Beckett will subject his next protagonist, Watt.
Moreover, it is the bombastic version of Watt appearing to-
wards the end of Mercier et Camier who will, as Pilling has read
it, announce Beckett’s future horizons: “It falls to Watt to predict
what Beckett will attempt in narrative terms when, as soon, Mer-
cier et Camier will be done with” (Pilling 1997, p. 209):
Il naîtra, il est né de nous, dit Watt, celui qui n’ayant rien ne vou-
dra rien, sinon qu’on lui laisse le rien qu’il a.
(Mercier et Camier, p. 198)
One shall be born, said Watt, one is born of us, who having noth-
ing will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath.
(Mercier and Camier, p. 114)
Éluard.
20 Those adumbrated by Ruby Cohn as “the park, Miss Dwyer’s figure, Mur-
phy’s mind, and the horse leech’s daughter are all closed systems” (Cohn 1962,
p. 61). It is a tightly bordered zone where any “quantum of wantum”, the
amount of desire and suffering (in a game where these equate perhaps to win-
ning and losing) is self-contained. Closed systems by definition do not leak, and
serve well as playthings of the monomaniacal, and the insane.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 206
BIBLIOGRAPHY
21
See Uhlmann 2006, pp. 78-85.
22 Beckett quoted in conversation. See Knowlson 1983, p. 16.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 207
Criticism
Ackerley, Chris, 2004, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy,
Journal of Beckett Studies Books, Tallahassee (Florida).
Casanova, Pascale, 2006, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revo-
lution, Verso, London.
Cohn, Ruby, 1962, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, New Brunswick (New Jersey).
De Lattre, Alain, 1970, Arnold Geulincx, Seghers, Paris.
De Vleeschauwer, Herman J., 1957, Three Centuries of Geulincx Re-
search: A Bibliographic Survey, Communications of the University
of South Africa, Pretoria.
Dobrez, L. A. C., 1986, The Existential and Its Exits: Literary and
Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet
and Pinter, Athlone Press, London.
Engelberts, Matthijs, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell (editors), 2006,
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Notes Diverse[s] Holo: Cata-
logues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity
College Dublin, With Supporting Essays), XVI, 2006.
Feldman, Matthew, 2004 (unpublished thesis), Sourcing “Aporetics”:
An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Development
of Samuel Beckett’s Writing, Oxford Brooks University, 2004.
Idem, 2006, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s
“interwar notes”, Continuum, New York.
Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlmann (editors), 2006, Beckett
after Beckett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served: The Corre-
spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
Harvey, Lawrence, 1970, Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic, Princeton
University Press, Princeton (New Jersey).
Kennedy, Sighle, 1971, Murphy’s Bed: A Study of Real Sources and Sur-
Real Associations in Samuel Beckett’s First Novel, Bucknell Uni-
versity Press, Lewisburg (Pennsylvania).
Knowlson, James, 1983, “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe’” in Beja, Morris,
Stanley E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (editors), Samuel Beckett:
Humanistic Perspectives, 1983, Ohio State University Press (Ohio),
pp. 16-25.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 209
First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either.
Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of
the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go.
Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again.
Where none. The place again. Where none.
(Worstward Ho, p. 8)
which nothing else can exist, while it can exist without the oth-
ers, must needs be first” (Physics, 208b-209a). According to Ed-
ward Casey (Casey 1997), the question which has concerned
philosophers from ancient times to the present day, where place
is concerned, is how body and this primary thing – place – are re-
lated. Aristotle provides the definition with which almost all sub-
sequent philosophers of place – from Descartes to Husserl, Mer-
leau-Ponty, Heidegger and even Derrida and Irigaray – explicit-
ly or implicitly engage (see Casey 1997, pp. 331-342 and passim).
In Aristotle’s thought, place is a rigid, snugly fitting container
around a contained body – a hand in a pocket, a sword in a
sheath, a round peg in a round hole. This concept of place aims
to restrict the violent eruptions of elemental qualities which char-
acterise Plato’s thought, and to impose a rational structure on
them. In the interests of rationality it also excludes from em-
placement the non-physical qualities of the emplaced body. It is
thus hard-put to deal with place as experienced by an organic and
ever-changing body such as the human subject, with its memories
and associations seeming to stretch place beyond mere physical-
ity. And in fact, Aristotle never manages to provide a convincing
answer to his own question, “what account are we to give of
‘growing’ things?” (Physics, 209a). For Aristotle, place is a static
surface at the limits of the physical body. Thus, although he is the
first philosopher to deal with place with any rigour, paradoxical-
ly he initiates a marginalisation of place which lasts until the late-
nineteenth century.
Casey argues that Aristotle’s placing of place at the limit, his
initial marginalisation, leads to a steady erosion of any interest in
place in the history of philosophy. This is exacerbated by a series
of papal condemnations issued in 1277 forbidding any doctrine
which limited the power of God (see Casey 1997, p. 107), effec-
tively ensuring in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance the
domination of philosophy by a concern with infinite space, which
was the domain of God’s omnipotence, at the expense of an in-
terest in place. In Enlightenment philosophy, the obsession with
quantification leads to a view of space as pure extension, within
which place is a mere site. Enlightenment space and place are
inane, in the sense of life-less. For Casey, what the Aristotelian,
Mediaeval and Enlightenment views of place have in common is
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that when they examine the relationship between body and place,
they all exclude certain qualities of the body. Aristotle’s defini-
tion excludes all non-physical qualities from emplacement, while
the Enlightenment conception excludes all those qualities of the
body which evade quantification in terms of distance, position
and relation.
In contrast to these exclusive views of place, in the thought of
Whitehead, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty place gains inclusiveness
(see Casey 1997, Chapter 10, pp. 331-342 and passim). Qualities
which are not physical or quantifiable are now included in the un-
derstanding of place through the emphasis in these thinkers on
the lived body, which implies an attentiveness to lived place. Any
place in which a person finds his or her body is immediately trans-
formed into, in the words of Gaston Bachelard, an “intimate im-
mensity” (Bachelard 1957 [1994, p. 183]), by dint of the memo-
ries, thoughts and associations which the subject brings to each
and every place. Each place thus contains, in Merleau-Ponty’s
thought, “as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences”
(Merleau-Ponty 1945 [2002, p. 340]), and Derrida will later
equate place (in its architectural form) with event, made tempo-
rary by the presence of multiple subjects. Once we take the hu-
man subject into account in the definition of place, then its status
as a strictly delimited container is threatened. In Heidegger’s
thought place extends into region, since in the encounter with
place the subject calls on a knowledge of a wider environing area,
while Irigaray sees no reason why we should not stretch our defi-
nition of place out to the limits of the universe. It becomes very
difficult to make any distinction between supposedly finite place
and the supposedly infinite universe. Aristotle’s container is now
a very leaky sieve, and it is this leakiness of place, and its tenden-
cy to become infinitely extended, that I want to examine in rela-
tion to Beckett’s work.
At first sight, Mr Knott’s house resembles a sealed, exclusive
place: when a new servant enters, an old one has to leave, suggest-
ing that the relationship of contained to container must remain the
same. It is a microcosm which has something of the “ingrained
wholism” of Aristotle, whose “passionate desire for perfection, es-
pecially of a teleologically ordered sort [...] ends in a cosmograph-
ic picture of a closed and finite world with no further universe
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around it” (Casey 1997, p. 81)1. Taking the house globally, or, fol-
lowing critics such as Amiran and Ackerley (see Ackerley 2005, es-
pecially p. 284, and Amiran 1993, pp. 29-32, 155), (micro-)cosmi-
cally, we could say that, as in Murphy, the quantum of substance
must remain constant (Murphy, p. 36). As Watt puts it, in a phrase
which, as Ackerley shows, could allude to the Newtonian universe
as well as the Aristotelian (see Ackerley 2005, pp. 139, 74-75), “it
is frequent, when one thing increases in one place, for another in
another to diminish” (Watt, p. 146). But for all this apparent fit-
tingness and self-containment, the house – like Aristotle’s world –
exists in a problematical relationship with the outside. There are
“little splashes on it from the outer world [...] without which it
would have been hard set to keep going” (Watt, p. 66). It relies on
the exterior world as a source of staff – Watt is the most recent
demonstration of this fact: he is referred to as one who “had come
from without and whom the without would take again” (p. 79). Ar-
sene, too, poses a threat to the self-containment of the house. His
continued presence there after Watt’s arrival would seem to upset
the quota of bodies in the house – or the quantum of substance in
the microcosm – and raises the paradox of a displaced body still in
place. Arsene in fact refers to himself as “not here any more” (p.
55), as he stands in a no-man’s-land between his old place and his
new, wherever that might be. Beckett accentuates this paradox by
making Arsene’s “short statement” (p. 37) so long.
The problem raised, then, by Watt’s coming and Arsene’s going
is one of how to contain that which “slops” over the edge of the “con-
tainer” that is Mr Knott’s house. This is significant, as Watt will be
very much concerned with slops and containers during his time in
Mr Knott’s service; his chief duties in the house concern dealing with
remains: he is entrusted with disposing of both Mr Knott’s slops and
the leftovers of his meal. Where the latter are concerned, he is ex-
pected “to witness the dog’s eating the food, until not an atom re-
mained” (p. 111, italics mine). This last phrase and variations of it
appear at a number of points in the discussion of the food and the
1 The Faber Companion argues that Beckett’s characters “often assume that
their universe is a closed system, where laws of reason and harmony pertain and
equilibrium holds sway, a notion found in Epicurus, who asserted that the sum
of things is forever the same” (Ackerley and Gontarski 2006, p. 435).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 215
provisions put in place to ensure that nothing is left over (see, for in-
stance, pp. 89, 92, 95, 111). This last stipulation indicates a concern
on Mr Knott’s part (or on the part of whomever made the orders)
with keeping the house finite and self-contained. But it is precisely
the way in which Watt takes this task of accounting for every atom
beyond the call of duty that leads him into endless permutations, and
makes Mr Knott’s house a leaky container: in the very attempt to seal
off the house and to exclude that which is not part of it, it is opened
out and comes to include more and more. In order to account for
every atom, Watt must posit first a dog, then a messenger, and then
a dog-owner to look after it (pp. 91, 92, 95). The description of the
first of these as “an ill-nourished local dog” indicates the house’s in-
terdependence with the surrounding area, as does the need for the
establishment “on some favourable site” of “a kennel or colony of
famished dogs” (pp. 91, 96, italics mine). It is the need to posit a
place for Kate, and then a place for the radically extended Lynch
family, that causes the house to unravel into numerous other places,
and forces the inclusion of those places in the (sought-after but now
severely threatened) delimitation of the house. But the establish-
ment does not merely extend into the local area; it also depends on
a space outside creation: this is apparent in the phrase, “the dog
brought into the world” (p. 114), which suggests creation ex nihilo,
and raises questions as to where this new body can come from, but
also where it was before it was brought into the world.
Accounting for every atom of Mr Knott’s food, then, forces
Watt to acknowledge that place blooms – and this is quite literal-
ly the case where Mr Knott’s slops are concerned: as with the left-
over food, Watt cannot (is both not allowed and cannot permit
himself to) simply let the slops go to waste. They must be emptied
on a specific flower bed depending on the season, “on some
young growing thirsty thing at the moment of its most need” (p.
64). In other words, in the disposal of this waste, new growth will
come about – new growth, or, to use in its strictest botanical sense
a word that appears often in Beckett’s early work, dehiscence2. But
2
In the review of Sean O’Casey’s Windfalls, Beckett praises the writer for
his “dramatic dehiscence” (Beckett in Cohn 1983, p. 82), while Dream of Fair
to Middling Women speaks of Beethoven’s “punctuation of dehiscence” (Dream
of Fair to Middling Women, p. 139). The conventional meaning of dehiscence is
the bursting forth of seeds from their pods (OED).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 216
Watt had more and more the impression, as time passed, that noth-
ing could be added to Mr Knott’s establishment, and from it nothing
taken away, but that as it was now, so it had been in the beginning, and
so it would remain to the end, in all essential respects [...]. Yes, noth-
ing changed in Mr Knott’s establishment, because nothing remained,
and nothing came or went, because all was a coming and a going.
(Watt, pp. 129-130)
The contradiction, as well as the fact that Sam calls this con-
clusion a “tenth-rate xenium”, suggests that it is not the answer
per se that need concern us here, but the attempt to ascertain what
is to be excluded from and what included in the definition of the
house. If, as Acheson argues, Watt attempts “to establish which
part of the picture should be regarded as figure and which as
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 217
Watt suggests that the answer is “we can’t know”. Try as Watt
might, he is unable to come to the end of place. And indeed, two
years after writing Watt, Beckett describes place in Mercier and
Camier as “unfinished, unfinishable” (Mercier and Camier, p. 77).
As if in recognition of this, the passages which depict place often
end arbitrarily: the description of the village in Chapter III ends
“and so on” (p. 42), while the description of the bog in Chapter
VII is cut short with “End of descriptive passage” (p. 98). So while
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 218
Watt tries to pursue place to its very end, Mercier and Camier
refuse to play this game. Watt’s topomania gives way to Mercier
and Camier’s topophobia.
If, as theorists of place hold, place and identity are inextricably
bound up, then this endless quality to place must have an effect on
person. Bachelard argues that, in order to constitute a biography
or autobiography, “we should have to undertake a topoanalysis of
all the space that has invited us to come out of ourselves”
(Bachelard 1957 [1994, p. 11]) – all the places we have ever inhab-
ited, in other words. But if place is extended indefinitely, if it is un-
finished and unfinishable, what chance of unity is there for a biog-
raphy or autobiography which is dependent on it? Beckett’s con-
cern with the dependence of autobiography on a place in which no
traces of oneself can be found is given its most extended treatment
in The Unnamable. From the first line, “Who now? Where now?
When now?” (The Unnamable, p. 293), place and person are inex-
tricably linked. A little later, the narrator says: “It would help me,
since to me too I must attribute a beginning, if I could relate it to
that of my abode” (p. 298). The problem he faces is that every word
he says adds to place, and thereby delays indefinitely the moment
when his description / experience will coincide with where he is:
there is no way to know “how to get back to me, back to where I am
waiting for me” (p. 324). Place foists an obligation to integrate,
which, being impossible to fulfil due to the disintegration of place,
can only result in the disintegration of the subject.
It is Beckett’s framing of emplacement in terms of a pensum
or penance which sets him apart from phenomenologists such as
Bachelard. But Casey also recognises the affliction of emplace-
ment, saying,
There are thus two drives pulling against each other in Beck-
ett’s (and Casey’s) thought on place: on the one hand, the “spac-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 219
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, 1965, Calder & Bo-
yars, London 1999.
Mercier and Camier, 1974, John Calder, London 1999.
Worstward Ho, 1983, John Calder, London 1999.
The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and Faber, London 1990.
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 1992, John Calder, London, 1993.
Cohn, Ruby (editor), 1983, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dra-
matic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, John Calder, London.
Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1995, Samuel Beckett. The Complete
Short Prose, 1929-1989, Grove Press, New York.
Criticism
Acheson, James, 1997, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice,
MacMillan, London.
Ackerley, C. J., Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated “Watt”,
Special Issue of Journal of Beckett Studies, XIV/1-2 (Fall 2004-
Spring 2005).
Ackerley, C. J., and Stanley E. Gontarski (editors), 2004, The Faber
Companion to Beckett, Faber and Faber, London.
Amiran, Eyal, 1993, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical
Narrative, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania.
Budgen, Frank, 1934, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”, Indi-
ana University Press, Bloomington 1960.
Casey, Edward S., 1997, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History,
University of California Press, Berkeley.
Connor, Steven, 1988, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text,
Blackwell, Oxford.
Dean, Tacita, and Jeremy Millar, 2005, Place, Thames and Hudson,
London.
Harvey, David, 1993, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflec-
tions on the Condition of Postmodernity”, in Jon Bird, Barry Cur-
tis, Tim Putman, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner (editors),
1993, Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Rout-
ledge, London, pp. 3-29.
Ingold, Tim, 2000, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Liveli-
hood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, London.
tifies this affinity as lying in the two writers’ shared figurations of death and of
nothingness as the sole repositories of hope (see Adorno 1994, pp. 113-114),
and in the paralipomena published in Ästhetische Theorie he suggests that the
affinity also lies in the “anorganic” aspect of their work, which “yearns neither
for nature nor for industry” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 219]).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 224
2 All translations from volume three of the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter are
my own.
3 For instance, in the paralipomena published in Ästhetische Theorie,
Adorno asserts that the “you must go on” of The Unnamable condenses the an-
tinomy “that externally art appears impossible while immanently it must be pur-
sued” (Adorno 1970 [1997, p. 320]).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 225
The two key points here – that the novels present us with a
paradoxical dynamic at a standstill, and that they are marked by
an impoverishment of the subject – are also made of Endgame in
the 1961 essay on that play, which is described as “the epilogue to
subjectivity” in which Walter Benjamin’s notion of “dialectics at
a standstill comes into its own” (Adorno 1961 [1991, pp. 259,
274]). Adorno returns to this question of the dynamic at a stand-
still in Ästhetische Theorie, stating that Beckett,
porary literature” (Adorno 1965 [1992, p. 4]); in the 1962 radio talk
“Engagement”, he mentions The Unnamable together with Kafka’s
prose and Beckett’s own plays (see p. 90); and the phrase “comment
c’est” (taken, of course, from Beckett’s 1961 novel) appears more
than once4; but nowhere does he address directly the question of the
difference between Beckett’s novels and his plays, and nowhere does
he offer an argument to support the claim made in his letter to Kraft
that the novels – and, above all, The Unnamable – go beyond the plays
in their meaning. Thus, if there is an argument put forward to sup-
port this evaluative distinction between the novels and the plays, then
one might reasonably assume that it has to lie, if anywhere, in the
manuscript notes on The Unnamable. As we shall see, however, while
these notes do focus specifically on the novel, they do so in a manner
that works against any sustainable generic distinction and that is thus
governed by the very principle of indifferentiation that Adorno iden-
tifies as the governing principle of Beckett’s own art. The implica-
tions of this go beyond the question of whether Beckett’s novels are
clearly distinguishable from his plays in terms of their Bedeutung to
the question of the distinction between philosophy and literature as
such in the work of both Adorno and Beckett.
The seven pages of notes in the front of Adorno’s copy of
Beckett’s novel suggest that the principal issues to be addressed
in the projected essay would have included the collapse of the
subject, the problem of time in the post-Flaubertian novel, the in-
heritance of naturalism, the applicability or otherwise of the con-
cept of the absurd, the parodic critique of Cartesian philosophy,
and the traces of an antinomian theology in Beckett. Unsurpris-
ingly for those familiar with Adorno’s published work on Beck-
ett, then, the two main areas of concern are the philosophical and
the literary affiliations and implications of Beckett’s novel, and
the relationship between them. As regards Beckett’s philosophi-
cal affiliations, while Adorno mentions Descartes and Hegel, it is
Beckett’s relation to Wittgenstein that stands out. In his 1962 let-
ter to Kraft, Adorno goes so far as to claim that Beckett is “obvi-
ously very influenced” by Wittgenstein (Adorno 1994, p. 34), and
Adorno refers to “the way things really and actually are, comment c’est, as Beck-
ett puts it” (Adorno 1998 [2000, p. 114]).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 228
Beckett (Adorno 1994, pp. 93-94), and in his notes on The Un-
namable he twice indicates that he should bring in material on ni-
hilism from other notebooks (see Adorno 1994, pp. 67, 69). Al-
though this other notebook material has to date remained uniden-
tifiable, it is nonetheless the case that, as in Negative Dialektik, so
in the notes on The Unnamable, Adorno finds Beckett raising the
question of a difference within the negative that would complicate
any nihilism within his work. Indeed, as we have seen, this question
of the non-coincidence of the nothing with itself is, for Adorno, that
around which “everything in B[eckett] revolves”, and, as I have
sought to demonstrate elsewhere (see Weller 2005, pp. 11-15), this
difference within the negative is precisely that which, for Adorno,
constitutes the resistance to nihilism in Beckett.
Adorno’s abiding concern with the particular nature of the
negative in Beckett is also apparent in a marginal note in his copy
of The Unnamable in which he claims that, for Beckett, “the pos-
itive categories, such as hope, are [...] the absolutely negative
ones” (Adorno 1994, p. 44). Five years later, however, Adorno re-
visits this question of the negative after a conversation with Beck-
ett in Berlin on 23 September 1967 during which Beckett makes
what Adorno describes in his notebook as a “highly enigmatic re-
mark” concerning “a kind of positivity that is contained within
pure negativity” (p. 24). This insistence upon a positivity within the
negative appears to contradict Adorno’s own assertion in his copy
of The Unnamable that the point of indifference (Indifferenzpunkt)
that Beckett reaches in that novel is a purely negative one. While
this question of a positivity within the negative certainly lies at the
heart of any consideration of the extent to which Adorno’s un-
derstanding of Beckett’s works corresponded to Beckett’s own –
and the latter’s objections to Adorno’s insistence in his essay on
Endgame that Hamm is a kind of degenerated or remnant Ham-
let are well known – it does not help to clarify the evaluative dis-
tinction between Beckett’s novels and his plays (and, more pre-
cisely, between The Unnamable and Endgame) upon which
Adorno insists in the letter to Kraft. With this question in mind,
we may now turn to the literary affiliations and implications that
Adorno finds in The Unnamable.
The most recurrent form of marginal annotation in Adorno’s
copy of the novel is an “F” (for forte) or an “FF” (for fortissimo)
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 230
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Live and multiple video image production of Vera Holtz as Mouth in Eu Não
(Not I), directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Brasilia, São Paulo and
Rio de Janeiro, 2004-2008. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos.
2. Versions of Breath called Respiración + e Respiración – (Breath + and Breath –),
directed by Adriano and Fernando Guimarães, Centro Cultural Banco do
Brasil, Brasilia, 2003. Courtesy of Dalton Camargos.
Beckett_mannello_Beckett_mannello 19/10/09 09:22 Pagina 2
5. Beckett’s text
materialized on the walls
for the staging of “A Piece
of Monologue”, directed
by Adriano and Fernando
Guimarães, Teatro do
Centro Cultural Banco do
Brasil, Brasilia, 2003-2004.
Courtesy of Dalton
Camargos.
6. Alessandro Brandão
in one version of
Respiración + e Respiración
– (Breath + and Breath –),
directed by Adriano and
Fernando Guimarães,
Brasilia, São Paulo and Rio
de Janeiro, 2004-2008.
Courtesy of Dalton
Camargos.
Beckett_mannello_Beckett_mannello 19/10/09 09:22 Pagina 4
7. Wendell Pierce
(left), and J. Kyle
Manzay on the set of
Waiting for Godot,
directed by
Christopher McElroen,
New York, June 2006.
Courtesy of Mike
Messer.
8. Wendell Pierce in
Waiting for Godot,
directed by
Christopher McElroen,
New York, June 2006.
Courtesy of Mike
Messer.
Beckett_mannello_Beckett_mannello 19/10/09 09:22 Pagina 5
13. Laura Adani with director Roger Blin rehearsing Giorni felici (Happy Days),
Teatro Gobetti, Turin, 1965. Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Tori-
no.
14. Laura Adani as Winnie in Giorni felici, directed by Roger Blin, Teatro Go-
betti, Turin, 1965. Courtesy of Centro Studi Teatro Stabile di Torino.
Beckett_mannello_Beckett_mannello 19/10/09 09:22 Pagina 8
21. Giancarlo
Cauteruccio
as Willie in Giorni
felici, directed by
Giancarlo
Cauteruccio, Teatro
Studio, Florence,
1997. Courtesy of
Tommaso Le Pera.
25. Giulia Lazzarini in Giorni felici, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, directed by Gior-
gio Strehler, 1982-2000. Courtesy of Luigi Ciminaghi/Piccolo Teatro di Milano.
Beckett_mannello_Beckett_mannello 19/10/09 09:22 Pagina 14
26. Antonio Borriello in L’ultimo nastro di Krapp (Krapp’s Last Tape), directed
by Antonio Borriello, September 1982. Courtesy of Aliberti-Pomposo.
27. Antonio Borriello in L’ultimo nastro di Krapp, directed by Antonio Borriel-
lo, September 1982. Courtesy of Aliberti-Pomposo.
Beckett_mannello_Beckett_mannello 19/10/09 09:22 Pagina 15
30. Drawings in ballpoint pen, taken by Bill Prosser from the Beckettian doo-
dles on the Human Wishes manuscript (MS 3458) held by the Beckett Interna-
tional Foundation at the University of Reading. Courtesy of Bill Prosser.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 239
the pain that comes with human existence. When he enters his
much wanted Limbo, he manages for a brief moment to isolate
himself in the suspension of suffering, in a state of complete in-
difference, and reconnect with the dimension of Nothingness that
precedes birth and that follows death:
1 Indeed, in 1937 he fell sick with influenza and wrote to MacGreevy: “[I]
found the only thing I could read was Schopenhauer. Everything else I tried on-
ly confirmed the feeling of sickness. It was very curious. Like suddenly a win-
dow opened on a fug. I always knew he was one of the ones that mattered most
to me, and it is a pleasure more real than any pleasure for a long time to begin
to understand now why it is so” (Samuel Beckett to Tom MacGreevy, 21st Sep-
tember 1937, quoted in Knowlson 1996, p. 268).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 241
“Weib” said Belacqua “is a fat, flabby, pasty, kind of a word, all
breasts and buttocks, bubbubbubbub, bbbacio, bbbocca, a hell of a
fine word” he sneered “look at them”. [...] “And as soon” proceeded
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 242
Belacqua “as you are aware of her as a Weib, you can throw your hat
at it. I hate the liars” he said violently “that accept the confusion, faute
de mieux, God help us, and I hate the stallions for whom there is no
confusion.”
(Dream, p. 100)
cle and this magic, divorced from her and from thought of her,
were on tap in the nearest red-lamp” (p. 41).
What is unacceptable for Belacqua is not much the debasing of
a magical and precious gift, but rather that “horrible confusion be-
tween the gift and the giver of the gift” (p. 42), the overlapping of
different levels, so that “Beatrice lurked in every brothel” (p. 41).
The gift is given only after “the garbage of the usual and the cab-
bage-stalks of sex” (p. 41), and is almost as if the ecstasy of the spir-
it retreated like the undertow on a shoreline, covering the garbage
that generated it, and becoming one thing with it. The flower be-
comes the same as cabbage stalks: the gift of spiritual love is iden-
tified with sex and erased. Belacqua must at this point keep away
from the brothel, because for him it is intolerable that the Smeral-
dina is refracted into an infinite number of reflections, just because
he is slave to “this demented hydraulic [...] beyond control”, and
has to “extract from the whore[s] that which was not whorish” (p.
41). The Smeraldina must remain invisible, or disappear, because
one individual can have one and only one identity. Belacqua had
sought “carnal frivolity” to save the “real spirit” from being de-
meaned into a slave to the senses, but it is flesh itself that begets the
“real spirit” and this is the monstrosity he tries to escape. The so-
lution Belacqua finds is to use the Smeraldina’s unreal aspect (i.e.
her carnal side) in order to grasp her real aspect (i.e. her spiritual
side), so that the gift and the giver are the same. To do so, he must
use what the narrator calls “a fraudulent system of Platonic manu-
alisation, chiroplatonism” (p. 43), that is masturbation. In this way,
Belacqua can include the false, carnal side of the Smeraldina, but
only in theory, because he is alone and has no intercourse with her.
At the same time, he can obtain that peace that follows sexual sat-
isfaction, and his “inner man” can receive the Smeraldina’s spirit.
To use the narrator’s words, “he postulated the physical encounter
and proved the spiritual intercourse” (p. 43). The narrator admits
that these are “dreadful manoeuvres” (p. 43), but adds that they are
inevitable, due to Belacqua’s young age and the nature of his feel-
ings towards the Smeraldina.
What Belacqua calls “love”, though, seems to come from a
process of abstraction, a kind of intellectual rather than spiritual
love. He tries to transform women that are extremely sensual in-
to appropriate recipients of his courtly love, forcing them to fit in-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 244
were expunged, the Limbo and the wombtomb alive with the
unanxious spirits of quiet cerebration” (p. 121). Peace is to be
found there, in that place/non-place where the conflicting oppo-
sites elide each other and one enters a state of complete stasis that
cannot be disturbed by anything. In that dimension, even self
awareness becomes blurred: “there was no conflict of flight and
flow and Eros was as null as Anteros and Night had no daughters.
He was bogged in indolence, without identity, impervious alike to
its pull and goading” (p. 121).
This fundamental dialectic is reflected in the relationships be-
tween Belacqua and his partners. Women are filled with a kind of
aggressive sexuality they want to impose on him, while he is look-
ing instead for an exclusively spiritual and intellectual love, and re-
mains passive or runs away when women take the initiative. Many
have noticed how the play on pairs of opposites is fundamental to
many of Beckett’s works2. Dream of Fair to Middling Women pro-
vides significant examples of those dynamics at work. Both the
Syra-Cusa and the Smeraldina are quite significant characters in
that respect, in that they show an exceeding sex drive, a consider-
able appetite which is both erotic and gastronomic, an exclusive
preoccupation with the material and corporeal aspects of life. Both
the narrator and Belacqua repeatedly refer to a number of differ-
ent women as slut, whore, pute, whorechen and puttanina.
The Syra-Cusa is more strongly charged with sensuality, and her
seductiveness offers a clear threat. Even before describing her, the
narrator defines her as “mean”, and adds that a paragraph will be
enough to portray her, after which “she can skip off and strangle a
bath attendant in her garters” (p. 49). It is odd that she seeks the
company of Belacqua, a weakling intellectual, while the first thing
we are told about her is that “[t]he Great Devil had her, she stood
in dire need of a heavyweight afternoon-man” (p. 50). She is a dev-
ilish, possessed woman, but above all “she was never even lassata,
let alone satiata; very uterine” (p. 50). She is compared to a series
of femmes fatales (Lucrezia Borgia, Clytemnestra, Semiramis) and
pictured in an “endless treaclemoon” with a “chesty” Valmont, the
and those of Edouard Morot-Sir and Alice and Kenneth Hamilton regarding
Manichaeism and the use of certain dichotomies in Krapp’s Last Tape.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 246
Because her body was all wrong, the peacock’s claws. Yes, even at that
early stage, definitely all wrong. Poppata, big breech, Botticelli thighs,
knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mammose, slobbery-blub-
bery, bubbub-bubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe. Then, perched
aloft on top of this porpoise prism, the loveliest little pale firm cameo of
a birdface he ever clapped his blazing blue eyes on. By God but he often
thought she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede.
(Dream, p. 15)
The narrator comments that her body is “all wrong”. This for
two reasons. Firstly, it is a completely sensual body, and that is not
what Belacqua would want in his beloved, since he desires an ex-
clusively spiritual love. Secondly, the corporeal and the spiritual
plans, that should be separate, are united in the Smeraldina: a sen-
sual body and an angelic face, a sort of philosophical transgres-
sion for Belacqua, an impossible conjunction between res extensa
and res cogitans, in Cartesian terms.
At one point, Belacqua quite explicitly tries to reduce the
Smeraldina to an angelic woman. First, he sees her sitting and
notes both her paleness and her carnality: “She was pale, pale as
Plutus, and bowed towards the earth. She sat there, huddled on
the bed, the legs broken at the knees, the bigness of thighs and
belly assuaged by the droop of the trunk, her lap full of hands”
(p. 23). At this point he tries to elide the sensual aspects of her fig-
ure, seeing her through the lens of literature. She is made into Sor-
dello da Goito, with the quotation of Dante’s verses, “Posta sola
soletta, like the leonine spirit of the troubadour of great renown,
tutta a se [sic] romita” (p. 23); then she is made into the typical
beatific, salvific figure of Stilnovistic kind: “So she had been, sad
and still, without limbs or paps in a great stillness of body, that
summer evening in the green isle when first she heaved his soul
from its hinges; as quiet as a tree, column of quiet” (p. 23). In or-
der for the Smeraldina to become a kind of Beatrice, she has to go
through a process of progressive reduction and reification. First
he erases, so to say, her limbs, then he compares her silence to that
of a tree, and then to that of a column. He elevates her further,
quoting Constantine3, and then completes the process of abstrac-
tion of her figure eliminating her body altogether, making her in-
to something that has no shadow, and then into the shadow itself:
“So he would always have her be, rapt, like the spirit of a trouba-
dour, casting no shade, herself shade” (p. 23). Once this fantasy
is complete, he is abruptly brought back to reality, to her exuber-
ance, her full breasts, and rather than a column or a shadow she
is to be compared with a horse, an animal that suggests vigour and
sensuality: “Instead of which of course it was only a question of
seconds before she would surge up at him, blithe and buxom and
young and lusty, a lascivious petulant virgin, a generous mare
neighing after a great horse, caterwauling after a great stallion,
and amorously lay open the double-jug dugs” (pp. 23-24).
The unbearable sensuality of the Smeraldina creates in him an-
noyance and torment throughout the novel. During the journey
on the train at the beginning of Dream, for example, she sits on
Belacqua’s lap and kisses him again and again, repeating that she
wants him. Belacqua eludes her kisses, and once in Vienna he is
proud of himself for having made it to the end of the trip without
yielding to such erotic temptations. As always, the Smeraldina
takes the initiative trying to seduce Belacqua, acting in a resolute
if not brutal manner. Even when she takes off her hat, for exam-
ple, she does so with a vigorous, aggressive gesture: “She snatched
off the casque, she extirpated it, it sailed in a diagonal across the
compartment” (p. 30). In the dynamics of the scene, Belacqua re-
mains passive, and his virility appears undermined if the narrator
defines his shoulder as “fairly manly” (p. 30). As the Smeraldina
sits on his lap, “moaning, pianissimissima [sic]” (p. 30), Belacqua
resists the temptation of the flesh by posing rigid rules – “‘Nicht
küssen’ he said slyly ‘bevor der Zug hält’” (p. 30), and by dis-
tracting himself looking at the fairytale-like landscape outside the
window, while the young woman “lay there inert, surely uncom-
fortable, on top of him, muttering her German lament: ‘Dich
haben! Ihn haben! Dich haben! Ihn haben!’” (p. 30).
However, Belacqua cannot always escape the Smeraldina’s in-
vasive desires, and at one point “she raped him [...] she violated
him after tea” (p. 18). Once again, the roles are clearly assigned: the
woman, threatening and determined, “[t]he implacable, the insa-
tiate, warmed up this time but her morning jerks to a sexy su-
dorem”, dangerously takes the initiative; Belacqua tries to escape
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 249
her attack, reminds her that “it was his express intention, made
clear in a hundred and one subtle and delicate ways, to keep the
whole thing pewer and above-bawd” (p. 18). In order to find a way
out of that inacceptable situation, as if in an effort to decontami-
nate himself after the physical contact, Belacqua draws on the ab-
solute purity of art, in the form of cultured quotes and reading: dis-
concerted, he stays up until late: “alla fioca lucerna leggendo
Meredith” (p. 18) suffering the pain of his own disillusion, just like
Leopardi in Le ricordanze4. Towards the middle of the novel, the
scene is evoked again, and Belacqua takes again a passive position.
He yields to the insistent avances of that “petulant, exuberant, cli-
toridian puella” (p. 111), the Smeraldina, for the love of her:
Next the stuprum and illicit defloration, the raptus, frankly, vio-
lentiæ, and the ignoble scuffling that we want the stomach to go back
on; he, still scullion to hope, putting his best... er... foot forward, be-
cause he loved her, or thought so, and thought too that in that case the
right thing to do and his bounden duty as a penny boyo and expedi-
ent and experienced and so on was to step through the ropes of the al-
cove with the powerful diva and there acquit himself to the best of his
ability.
(Dream, p. 114)
4 “[E] spesso all’ore tarde, assiso / sul conscio letto, dolorosamente / alla fio-
inn late at night. The young woman orders cookies and a hot choco-
late for herself, and a soup to revitalize Belacqua in the cold night.
He refuses to eat, and prefers to sit there and platonically contem-
plate his beloved: “‘My wonderful one, I don’t want soup, I don’t
like soup [...] I want to look at you’. He burst into more tears. ‘What
I want’ he whinged ‘is to look into your eyes, your beautiful eyes’”
(p. 106). Instead, the Smeraldina scoffs her cookies with great ap-
petite, trying in vain to behave and dissimulate her voracity:
Now she was lashing into the cookies, she was bowed over her
plate like a cat over milk, she was doing her best, the dear girl, not to
be greedy. Every now and then she would peep up at him out of her
feast of cream, just to make sure he was still there to kiss and be kissed
when her hunger would be appeased by the Schokolade and cookies.
She ate them genteelly with a fork, doing herself great violence in her
determination not to seem greedy to him[.]
(Dream, pp. 106-107)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Bair, Deirdre, 1978, Samuel Beckett. A Biography, Jonathan Cape,
London.
Ben-Zvi, Linda (editor), 1990, Women in Beckett: Performance and
Critical Perspectives, University of Chicago Press, Urbana.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 253
Beckett’s Theatre:
Text and Performances
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 256
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 257
A. Text
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 258
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 259
1
See Louis Menand, “The Aesthete”, in The New Yorker (June 4, 2007), pp.
92-94.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 261
feast. The famous ghost obliges. The large interior spaces where
characters are likely to sit in King Lear, Hamlet or King Richard
III are similarly ceremonial, just as they are when they turn legal-
istic in Othello or jury-rigged in The Merchant of Venice. Yet
Shakespeare’s hyperactive heroes rarely sit for long, reluctant as
they are to forfeit their empowering vertical positions. No direc-
tor would allow his stunned Macbeth to remain calmly seated
when a ghost materializes on stage so sensationally; nor could the
actress playing Lady Macbeth – no “little chuck” she – resist the
opportunity to assert her control over the scene by the simple act
of rising, as though the text itself were telling her what to do. “Sit,
worthy friends”, she urges Rosse and Lennox and the other no-
bles gathered at her table, “my lord is often thus” (Macbeth,
III.iv.52). Later in the same scene a newly confident Macbeth at-
tempts to reclaim his authority over his wife in much the same
way: “I am a man again. Pray you sit still” (Macbeth, III.iv.107)
(emphasis mine). All of this may be nothing, of course, compared
to King Lear, where the Duke of Cornwall demands that a chair
be brought on stage for the blinding of Gloucester. The captive
Earl, his hands bound, is in most modern productions thrown
backwards as Cornwall plugs his heels into the “vile jelly”. And
then he does it again – because, according to Regan, “one eye will
mock the other” – before this seated figure, as sightless as Milton’s
Samson Agonistes at Gaza, will be returned to his upright posi-
tion. Only then is Gloucester set free to “smell his way” to Dover.
Kings, too, may willingly and literally abandon their thrones
when the dramatic occasion encourages them to do so: think of
Claudius delivering his highly polished speech before the assem-
bled courtiers as the second scene begins in Hamlet, or Lear
pointing to the redrawn map of the peaceful kingdom he plans to
divide among three troubled sisters. And just what is Horatio sup-
posed to do with Hamlet’s body at the end of the play when, for
this protagonist at least, “the rest is silence”? Chairs, especially or-
namental ones, come in handy.
Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century for the quite
different dimensions of a box set, Ibsen had the opportunity to ex-
plore the potential of the seated figure in an entirely new perspec-
tive, one that allowed for a far more focused display of psychologi-
cal texturing. Shaw was quite right in his observation that modern
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drama began when Nora sat her husband down in the final act of A
Doll’s House to discuss the nature of their marriage (Shaw 1891
[1957]). Ibsen is terrific at this sort of thing, efficiently arranging
the scenic space to accommodate his characters’ need to commu-
nicate their innermost thoughts and emotions (it is his substitute for
the no-no of soliloquy, realism’s bête noire). Nora sits on a love-seat
with Mrs. Linde, her could-be confidante, first communicating too
little, then in a subsequent scene perhaps revealing too much. The
same tableau works for her encounter with the love-sick Dr. Rank;
she flirts, then recoils from the clumsy declaration that follows.
Movement constitutes meaning here, and how the furniture is used
speaks volumes. Nora re-establishes the boundaries of their rela-
tionship when she turns away, abandons the love-seat and stands,
rigid, elsewhere. The same blocking on the same sort of settee ac-
cumulates additional resonances when Ibsen further explores its
dynamics in Hedda Gabler. Eilert Lovborg joins Hedda on the
drawing-room sofa as she invites him to do so, on the pretense of
sharing her honeymoon photographs. The tension is palpable; in-
timate glance and innermost gaze make the most of it. Much of what
happens next lies in everything that is not said, except for Lovborg’s
trenchant murmur, “...Hedda Gabler...”, married name very con-
spicuously omitted. The predatory Judge Brack, a Hedda Gabler
in drag, insinuates his presence at her side, too, and on the same di-
van, at first appearing to have greater success in penetrating the
shell she has so elaborately constructed around herself. “I’ll never
jump out”, she confides, though she may be forced to do so, and
soon, under the threat, albeit unstated, of blackmail (Ibsen 1890
[1992, p. 252]). “Life is not tragic”, Ibsen wrote in the notebook he
kept about this play and its lead character’s motivation, “Life is ab-
surd – And that is what I cannot bear” (in Goodman 1971, p. 43).
Defeated, but also a little triumphant, this female figure removes
herself from the set and the set-up, sits down at the piano and shoots
herself. Brack, startled, thrown off-guard, even shocked into recog-
nition, falls into an armchair, prostrated, and delivers the play’s re-
frain which also serves as its bitter curtain line: “But good God!
People don’t do such things!” (Ibsen 1890 [1992, p. 304]). He’s
right: people don’t, but dramatic characters do.
Ibsen’s contemporary Chekhov seems to have been equally as-
tute in recognizing the enormous range of possibility for the seated
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figure on stage. One could even argue that sitting is what Chekhov’s
characters do best. Uncle Vanya opens on a quiet scene like so many
others in this canon: Astrov sitting and chatting with the old Nurse,
but really talking to himself. Vanya awakes from his nap and soon
joins him in the garden, as do other members of the cast. They drink
tea and in one case perhaps a drop of vodka. Yelena passes by with
the Professor, she “too indolent to move”. Scenes from a country
life – in four acts no less – indeed. Yet not every Chekhov set-to is
quite so laid back. The provincial tranquility has been deceptive.
Bedlam will erupt following a busy afternoon of revelatory tête-à-
têtes. Serebryakov, the family members gathered all around him, an-
nounces a bizarre plan to sell the estate, invest in securities and pur-
chase a small villa in Finland. Vanya, his chronic lassitude for once
upstaged, runs into the house to look for a gun. It misfires. “I
missed!” he cries out in dismay and despair (this is, among other
things, hilarious), “I missed twice!”. The curtain falls on act three
before he has a chance to sit back down.
There’s so much going on in the first act of Three Sisters –
preparations are in order for the big event marking Irina’s name
day while Olga is transfixed in monologue, remembering and in-
venting – that we sometimes forget that the third sister, Masha, is
sitting there in full view, reading, detached and bored. She whis-
tles, then gets up to leave, but not before Vershinin, recently ar-
rived from Moscow, makes a gallant entry into the Prozorov sit-
ting room. “I’ll stay... for lunch”, she says, tellingly, joining “the
lovesick major” at the table and foreshadowing everything that
will take place between them as time in this drama runs its steady
course. Another play, The Seagull, even borrows a famous the-
atrical device from Hamlet. Arkadina and Trigorin, not exactly
“guilty creatures sitting at a play” (Hamlet, II.ii.585), take their as-
signed places as part of the makeshift audience for Konstantin’s
literally dumb show, in which poor Nina is forced to play the un-
derwritten lead. “There are no real people in your work”, she tells
the crestfallen young author, who yearns so much to be the writer
he will never be. As in Shakespeare, the scene, both the play and
the play-within-the-play, devolves into chaos, with everyone soon
on their feet. Chekhov’s drama ends, by contrast, on a far more
somber note, and with a far greater density of dramatic overtones.
With characters concentrated around a card table, a fateful game
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 264
was also a license to look elsewhere for the foundation and for-
mulation of his image-making. His longtime interest in landscape
painting and the representation of interior spaces on a canvas2,
light emanating from a source outside the frame (as in Caravaggio
and Vermeer), would have enormous repercussions as he quickly
adapted such values to the demands of the stage. Yet it is perhaps
in the portrait of the seated figure in its many variations, from
Raphael to Rembrandt to Van Gogh, and to contemporary
painters like Francis Bacon and Louis LeBrocquy (or Picasso for
that matter), where Beckett finds a grammar and an idiom that he
can truly call his own. This is less a question of the one-to-one cor-
respondences of the sort we might be able to locate between a
provincial Chekhov scene and the evocative landscapes of his
good friend, the Russian painter Isaac Levitan (or between
Munch, say, and the late Ibsen), as it is an appraisal of the specif-
ic ways in which form gives latitude to meaning.
As early as those gold-leafed Madonnas in Giotto, Cimabue
and Duccio, seated as they are so serenely on their earthly or ce-
lestial thrones, we already sense the profound mystery of inward-
ness and the dislocation caused by private thought – not yet “a
voice dripping in [the head]” of the sort Beckett will pursue in
Endgame, but certainly pointing us in that direction. And such
magnificent Marias, flat and elongated though they may be (their
chairs come off a whole lot better), are already equipped with dis-
tinct personalities. In the embrace of single-point perspective that
follows, the characterological basis of such figures will be defined
even further in a steady preoccupation with three-dimensionality,
sometimes in the fullness of looking out, sometimes through the
pensive mediation of searching even deeper within. The seated
figure, painted, repainted and represented yet again, was well on
its way toward becoming the sine qua non of that endless and elu-
sive drama known as human consciousness.
Such implications were not lost by the cautious playwright
who became in the 1950s Samuel Beckett. “In a dressing gown, a
stiff toque on his head, a large blood-stained handkerchief over his
2
For Beckett’s interest in the visual arts, especially painting, see Knowlson
1996 and Oppenheim 2000.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 266
face, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees, thick
socks on his feet”, the blinded Hamm, “in an armchair on castors”
(Endgame, p. 12) – a gender-bending Madonna on wheels –
would seem to epitomize the playwright’s fascination with the
seated figure on stage. Never neglecting “the little things in life”,
Endgame presents the image in redacted form: a brief tableau
punctuates the mime Clov performs in the drama’s opening mo-
ments, while it is still “covered with an old sheet”. But it is really
in the famous earlier play, Waiting for Godot, where this styliza-
tion can be seen to be most firmly rooted. Pozzo even goes so far
as to make a fetish of this recurring motif:
But how am I to sit down now, without affectation, now that I have
risen? Without appearing to – how shall I say – without appearing to
falter.
(Waiting for Godot, p. 28)
the opening image of the play itself. As the curtain rises (the play-
wright was certainly thinking of one), we first meet Estragon “sit-
ting on a low mound” trying to take off his boot and failing to do so,
followed by the quintessential Beckett line, “Nothing to be done”.
Without calling undue attention to itself, the insistent figure of
a man sitting by himself on a stone, Gogo’s initial situation in
Waiting for Godot, has a long provenance in the Beckett reperto-
ry. As a semblance of isolation, cosmic and otherwise, it appears
not only in the short story “The Calmative”, but also in the sec-
ond movement of Stirrings Still. Beckett seems to have derived
this image from the Middle High German poet he much admired,
Walther von der Vogelweide, though this is the first time he uses
it, albeit ironized, in a play:
3
Walther von der Vogelweide, in Colvin 1938, p. 49. See also Knowlson
1996, pp. 147, 613.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 268
course, is never permitted the same luxury, even though “he car-
ries like a pig” and falls down in an ever-maddening sequence of
verticals and horizontals, culminating in a dance variously called
“The Hard Stool” and, more significantly, “the Net”. Much
comes together for Beckett, however, in the work that explores
the dark underside of Godot; and it will be Endgame, as “dark as
ink” (Beckett, in Brater 2003, p. 78), that finally allows him to
write his own signature on the seated figure stranded on a lonely
set: “Outside of here it’s death”.
4 Dylan Thomas writing about Beckett in the New English Weekly (March
Macbeth. Vi sits in the center side by side with Flo and Ru as Beck-
ett’s three female figures are stationed stage right, motionless and
very erect, facing front, hands clasped in laps. Each gets up, turn and
turn about, then returns to the place of origin, re-inscribing the ini-
tial static tableau, isolated and illuminated as it is by a single ingot
of unforgiving light. “Does she not know?” / “Does she not real-
ize?” is this text’s ominous take on the old vaudeville game of who’s-
on-first; but in this case the consequences, unstated though every-
where implied, are likely to turn lethal. Closure is achieved when the
seated figures are arranged somewhat differently, but only just so:
resuming the same positions in which they were first discovered,
they now have their hands clasped, resting on three laps to signal
end of play. Flo delivers the curtain line, “I can feel the rings”, fol-
lowed by the palpable silence that finally engulfs them all.
“Rockaby” will be similarly attuned to the mysterious, even
mystical quality of inwardness portraitists have often found so se-
ductive in the features assigned to their own seated figures. Beck-
ett recycles the rocking chair from his novel Murphy, but in the play
he elevates its status to that of a character in its own right. A “pre-
maturely old” female figure sits “subdued” in “Rockaby” on a chair
that is “controlled mechanically”, without her assistance (“Rocka-
by”, pp. 273, 274). The playwright was clear about one thing: the
Voice of memory, recorded, initiates the rock, not the other way
around, and certainly not the woman dressed in black who yearns
to hear so much “More”6. Beckett preserves the enigma as well as
the integrity of this dramatic moment by insisting on “the absolute
absence of the Absolute” (“Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, p. 22),
relying instead on the image and the modesty of its scale to insinu-
ate presence through a fusion of light, sound and movement rather
than narration. His dialogue is poetic, not surprisingly so in this
case, as it is there to complement and elevate the stage’s searing vi-
sual lyricism. Rarely has a seated figure on stage, “mother rocker”
notwithstanding, been asked to carry the weight of so many com-
peting discourses, one in which theater technology wears such a
disarming human face. La Berceuse, the title Van Gogh gives to his
well-known portrait of the seated Mme. Augustine Roulin (“Ber-
6 For the playwright’s comments on this piece, see Brater 1987, pp. 173-174.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 272
ceuse” is also the title Beckett uses for the French translation of his
play), is therefore much more than a cross-reference or a conve-
nient painterly analogue. French berceuse, moreover, means cra-
dle, lullaby and rocking chair; but it also can refer, as it does in Van
Gogh, to the seated figure herself. Beckett’s drama in performance
will be, experientially, all of these things at once.
The affective nature of such formal restraint achieves addi-
tional resonance in “Ohio Impromptu”, where the figures seated
at a plain deal table are both singular and doubled, “As alike in
appearance as possible” (“Ohio Impromptu”, p. 285). Reader and
Listener are each other’s Other; and each is each other’s “Hy-
pocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!”7. Perilously, as in
Dante, “Simile qui con simile è sepolto”, like with like is buried
here8. But are we really seeing double, or merely some liminal fan-
tasy of a replication hysteria, an uptake of the riveting stage dy-
namics called for by Goldoni in I due gemelli veneziani? Or are
Beckett’s spellbinding seated figures only two aspects of one man
for, inevitably, as you read you also in some sense profoundly lis-
ten? Stage left one figure intones the cherished lines from an old
volume, monopolizing the soundscape and complicating its
strangeness with the suggestion of narrative. Stage right the other
“other” carefully weighs every word; his “knock” is opened wide
when it signals an unexpectedly sudden interruption to the cou-
ple’s tacit interaction, only to magnify it further when L compels
R to retrace his steps. Only the re-reading counts, as Nabokov
said9. Then, when we least expect it, stage imagery is quietly re-
drawn as the seated figures achieve unprecedented momentum.
The “story”, such as it is, being done, Reader very slowly and very
deliberately closes the book on us:
Knock.
Silence. Five seconds.
Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise their heads
and look at each other. Unblinking. Expressionless.
Ten seconds.
Fade out.
(“Ohio Impromptu”, p. 288)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to
Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.
Brater, Enoch, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the
Theater, Oxford University Press, New York.
Idem, 2003, The Essential Samuel Beckett, Thames & Hudson, Lon-
don.
Caselli, Daniela, 2005, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction
and Criticism, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Frenz, Horst (editor), 1965, American Playwrights on Drama, Hill and
Wang, New York.
Garner, Stanton B. Jr., 1994, Phenomenology and Performance in Con-
temporary Drama, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman (editors), 1979, Samuel
Beckett: The Critical Heritage, Routlege & Kegan Paul, London.
Knowlson, James, 1996, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett,
Simon & Schuster, New York.
O’Neill, Eugene, 1965, “Strindberg and Our Theatre,” in Frenz (edi-
tor), 1965, American Playwrights on Drama, cit.
Oppenheim, Lois, 2000, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue
with Art, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Raynor, Alice, 1994, To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the Phe-
nomenology of Action, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Idem, 1901, Three Sisters (Tri Sestri), in The Plays of Anton Chekhov,
cit.
Idem, 1999, The Plays of Anton Chekhov, HarperCollins, New York,
trans. Paul Schmidt.
Colvin, Ian G. (editor), 1938, “I Saw the World”: Sixty Poems from
Walther von der Vogelweide, 1170-1228, Edward Arnold, London,
trans. Ian G. Colvin.
Goodman, Randolph, 1971, “Ibsen’s Notes”, in Idem (editor), From
Script to Stage: Eight Modern Plays, Rinehart Press, San Francisco.
Ibsen, Henrik, 1879, Doll’s House (Et Dukkehjem), in Ibsen: Four Ma-
jor Plays, 1992, Signet, New York, trans. Rolf Fjeld.
Idem, 1890, Hedda Gabler, in Ibsen cit.
Idem, 1992, Ibsen: Four Major Plays, Signet, New York, trans. Rolf
Fjeld.
Pinter, Harold, 1964, The Homecoming, Grove Press, New York
1967.
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet (Citations from Hamlet are from The
Arden Shakespeare edition, Harold Jenkins editor, Methuen, Lon-
don 1982).
Idem, Macbeth (Citations from Macbeth are from The Arden Shake-
speare edition, Kenneth Muir editor, Methuen, London 1959).
Idem, King Lear (Citations from King Lear are from The Arden Shake-
speare edition, R. A. Foakes editor, Methuen, London 2005).
Shaw, George Bernard, 1891, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Hill and
Wang, New York 1957.
Vogelweide, Walter von der, in Colvin (editor), 1938, “I Saw the
World” cit.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 277
There are moments in this frail world that is all temptation and
academia when we feel, in the words of Watt (who was once a uni-
versity man), that we are perhaps prostituting ourselves to some
purpose (Watt, p. 143). One such moment for me, many moons
ago, manifested itself in an examination answer on John Keats’s
Ode on a Grecian Urn (“Thou still unravished bride of quiet-
ness...”): the reason why, said my fair but middling student, the
young maiden has retained her virginity is because she was kept
in an urn. Would that Beckett’s “Proustian equation”, as pre-
sented in his early essay, Proust (p. 1), with its inviolable images
of vases and urns as emblems of memory, repositories of the past,
could be so simply resolved!
The purpose of this paper is (a) to interrogate a point made
about Beckett and memory in The Grove Companion to Samuel
Beckett (2004); (b) to consider briefly the paradox of new bottles
and old wine, that is, Beckett’s impulse when using new tech-
nologies or experimental forms to decant into them familiar
themes and images; and (c), with reference to Krapp’s Last Tape,
to bring these matters together in such a way as to illuminate the
persistence into this later work (later, that is, with respect to
Proust, to which it is considerably indebted) of an earlier and
largely rejected aesthetic, that of the “ideal real”, as Beckett called
it in that early essay (p. 56). My conclusion will be to the effect
that Krapp’s impasse, following a Proust-like experience of in-
voluntary memory, leaves him not with the sense of having tri-
umphed over time but as having encountered an aesthetic that
(unlike Marcel’s) offers dubious consolation. Krapp’s tragedy (I
argue) signals for Beckett a kind of closure to an aesthetic debate
generated by the earlier essay, and in so doing acts as a point of
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 278
reference in “Eh Joe” and That Time, which seek other modes of
moving beyond the impasse, different ways of going “on”.
Memory in the Cartesian paradigm offers an extension of the
self into the past (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 361). To elabo-
rate: Schopenhauer at the outset of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstel-
lung (The World as Will and Idea) argues that the body, for the pure
knowing subject, is an idea like any other idea, an object among ob-
jects; but at the same time it is immediately known, as will
(Schopenhauer 1844 [1896, I, p. 129]). Knowledge of the body ap-
pears to consciousness in a special manner, with an immediate re-
ality that other ideas do not possess (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004,
pp. 64-65). In the same way, it might be argued, the objects of mem-
ory possess this “special” relationship, a willed relationship most-
ly, with the perceiving self: just as the body represents an extension
of the self into space, memory represents a like extension of that
self into the past1. For the body, to continue the analogy with ref-
erence to two of Beckett’s obsessional images, that extension may
take the metaphorical form of a stick or a stone; that is, a contigu-
ous if less immediate relation, as when a stick (Molloy’s for exam-
ple) extends the reach of the body, or by disjunction, as when the
stick becomes a stone (or missile) and thereby effects a more am-
biguous relationship to the space that it occupies or through which
it moves (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 542). Voluntary mem-
ory, in terms of this analogy, entails a relationship between the pre-
sent perceiving subject and the objects of its past, two “separate
and immanent dynamisms” brought together for the nonce by
means of a constructed “system of synchronisation” (Proust, p. 7),
with the aid of what I have likened to a stick (or a crutch), but which
Beckett, in the essay, terms Habit (pp. 7-8)2.
Involuntary memory is more vivid but also more erratic, an
“accidental and fugitive salvation” (p. 22) that is later called a
“mystical experience” (p. 56), when by some “miracle of analogy”
the end of Le Temps retrouvé (Proust 1927, XV, p. 226): “Non seulement tout
le monde sent que nous occupons une place dans le Temps, mais, cette place, le
plus simple la mesure approximativement comme il mesurerait celle que nous
occupons dans l’espace.”
2
A few pages later Beckett offers the image of a clothes-line with its load of
“past dirty linen redeemed” (Proust, p. 17).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 279
theme: “Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis, / Renaîtront-ils d’un
gouffre interdit à nos sondes [...]?”
4 Proust 1927, XV, p. 15: “réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits”.
5
My erstwhile examiner, Marshall McLuhan, was wont to invoke Brown-
ing: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a metaphor?”
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 280
6 Proust 1927, XV, p. 12: “dans mille vases clos dont chacun serait rempli
8 I suspect an esoteric private jest here, one that may mock Krapp’s
9 James McCabe in Saint Augustine and His Age, a book from which Beck-
ett took some philosophical notes, characterises the Manichean sense of life as
“a stern process of redemption, an eternal struggle of the elements of light to
break free from the kingdom of darkness, and return to their source” (McCabe
1902, pp. 51-52). He later notes that Augustine condemned their wicked prac-
tices concerning the “elements of light” imprisoned in semine animalis, and re-
leased when eaten by the elect (p. 409). Bend it like Beckett, perhaps: yet an-
other curious gloss (provocative, rather than entirely serious) on the Manichean
banana.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 283
younger self and “A girl in a shabby green coat” (Krapp’s Last Tape,
p. 58); then the eyes of the young beauty, “Like ... [hesitates] ...
chrysolite!” (p. 60). The first detail is not explained, though privi-
leged auditors may hear the hint of Beckett’s first love, Peggy Sin-
clair, otherwise the Smeraldina (or “little emerald”); Krapp, how-
ever, chooses not to invoke that image any further (though he
broods). The second is both enigmatic (the “young beauty” is an
unknown) yet explicable (the allusion to Othello V.ii.146, “one en-
tire and perfect chrysolite”, likens her to Desdemona, for whom
the tragic hero would have forsaken the world of light). Krapp’s
hesitation may suggest that the memory, like the simile, is some-
what forced, and to that extent voluntary; but the touch of green in
“chrysolite” relates it to the earlier suppressed image of the shab-
by green coat (perhaps, too, the little emerald), and may intimate
(beneath the threshold of conscious awareness) a flickering of in-
voluntary recollection that violates the monochromatic pattern
(the phenomena of past hours, perhaps).
Both images cause Krapp to switch off the machine and brood;
the suggestion is that he has been “touched” by some form of in-
voluntary memory, though he elects finally not to share those ex-
periences with the audience nor record them on the present tape.
More importantly, these tiny coloured flickers (for they may be no
more than that) unwittingly prepare him for the climactic scene
with the girl in the punt – a memory, I suggest, that differs from
the others (his mother’s death, the nurse and dog, even “the vi-
sion at last”) by being truly involuntary, the past returning in a
manner that represents, tragically, not a Proustian triumph of the
past regained, but the deep and painful epiphany of a lost love
that might have redeemed the now tangible and lasting sterility of
his present existence10.
madeleines and seed-cake) had this evocative power; thank you, Dirk, but some-
times a banana is just a banana (see, again, the previous footnote). In a private
note to me (23 June 2008), Lorenzo agreed that the evocation of passionate eyes,
physical intimacy and the natural setting is sufficiently sensual (I would add to
this the scratch on the girl’s thigh and the gooseberries plucked from Effi Briest)
to generate the “immediate, total and delicious deflagration” (Proust, p. 20).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 285
11 Gontarski 2008, p. 96: “The Bergson connection to his Proust is not of-
offers a portrait of the artist as a very very deep young man, which, in my read-
ing, hovers uncertainly between affirmation and an ironic critique. The influ-
ence of Joyce (rather than Gilbert and Sullivan) partly explains this in terms of
a young writer’s attraction to an aesthetic (the Joycean epiphany, the Proustian
moment) endorsed by the two contemporary writers he most admired; my sense
is that Beckett had not yet gained the necessary detachment that within a few
years would let him critique this position more ruthlessly.
13 Those who suggest otherwise must explain away not only Beckett’s limited
competence in German until the Reisefieber of 1936 (for the Beiträge was not avail-
able in translation), but also the lack of an ironic perspective in some of the earli-
er work, and especially in Proust. This issue has been extensively discussed in var-
ious essays by first John Pilling and then Matthew Feldman, who have demolished
the widely-accepted argument for Beckett’s earlier reading of Mauthner.
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opened for him as did those of the girl on the punt for Krapp) is not
defeated by the whispered words, but rather uses them as a creative
fountainhead, finally (as his smile suggests) not only stifling them
but working them to his will. A similar process occurs in That Time,
where an obvious debt to Krapp’s Last Tape is reflected in the tri-
partite narrative voices that invoke the past in a series of memories,
both voluntary and involuntary, finally arranging those memories
in various patterns of {ACB}, until a curious order is obtained, at
which point there is a closing smile, to suggest, as in “The Image”,
“La Falaise” and “Eh Joe” that the creative act has been complet-
ed, “a consolation in art for ruin in time and the folly of existence”
(Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, p. 570). This is a consolation that
Krapp is unable to seek, let alone to find; but his tragic and pathetic
experience of involuntary memory, his inadvertent farewell to love,
marks a significant turn in Beckett’s own aesthetic from the evoca-
tion to the re-creation of the past.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, 2004, The Grove Companion to
Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.
Ben-Zvi, Linda, and Angela Moorjani (editors), 2008, Beckett at 100:
Revolving It All, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Duckworth, Colin (editor), 1966, Samuel Beckett: En attendant Godot:
Pièce en deux actes, George G. Harrap & Co., London 1970.
Gontarski, Stanley E., 2008, “Recovering Beckett’s Bergsonism”, in
Ben-Zvi and Moorjani, 2008, Beckett at 100 cit., pp. 93-106.
Knowlson, James (editor), 1992, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel
Beckett: Volume III: ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, Faber and Faber, London.
Knowlson, James, and John Pilling, 1980, Frescoes of the Skull: The
Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, New York.
McCabe, James, 1902, Saint Augustine and His Age, Duckworth &
Co., London.
Introduction
The analysis of dramatic texts from a linguistic perspective has a
long tradition in stylistic research, and interactional approaches
to dramatic texts have become an important recent development
in this area (see Herman 1995). Interactional analysis is particu-
larly useful when analysing the work of writers like Beckett and
Pinter who are both concerned with the themes of communica-
bility (i.e. with interaction itself) and whose work is characterised
by a complex or unusual interactional structure. Before embark-
ing on an analysis of the storytelling episodes in Endgame it is
important first to understand why and how an interactional ap-
proach can be helpful for explaining the complexity of Beckett’s
dialogues. This means looking at what an interactional approach
is and how it defines and analyses a storytelling episode.
Hamm to reveal his deep sense of not having been cared for [...]
but to disguise this revelation as fiction” (p. 28).
Norrick (2000), on the other hand, takes a more linguistic ap-
proach, analysing the Tailor story from the perspective of con-
versation analysis (CA) and arguing that an extension of the meth-
ods of analysis of conversational storytelling to the analysis of oral
discourse in literature can highlight important aspects of dramat-
ic interaction. He analyses the Tailor story as a form of conversa-
tional joke-telling, concluding that it has a classic “put-down
structure” and that the “careful construction and high poeticity
of the story of the tailor set it off from the surrounding more col-
loquial talk” (p. 194).
These two studies reflect the two approaches currently being
followed in narrative research (see Bamberg 2006). On the one
hand, there is a strong tradition which views spoken narratives
as cognitive structures through which we understand the world.
In this paradigm, the story is a psychological structure in which
life experiences are characterised as internally organised texts.
We are, as it were, the stories that we tell and the aim of research
from this perspective, which has been very successful in areas
such as medicine and psychotherapy, is to get people to tell their
stories so that the way they think about their lives and experi-
ences can be read and interpreted. This paradigm is in a sense a
literary one because it treats people as if they were texts and im-
plies that people can be understood in the way that we under-
stand a literary work. It is called the “big story” approach (see
Freeman 2006) because, by getting people to tell their stories, we
end up with essentially autobiographical narratives in which peo-
ple talk about themselves and their own experiences and at some
length. These autobiographical stories tend to be elicited by in-
terviews and to be produced as answers to questions in mono-
logue form. The speaker’s identity – the “me” that comes out of
these stories – is a single, monolithic kind of me. In this respect
Morrison’s approach to the Endgame narratives is a “big story”
approach.
However, this is not necessarily the way that people tell stories
in ordinary conversation. In our everyday talk, our stories tend
neither to be autobiographical nor particularly long. They tend to
be about recent local events which also happen to other people
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not just ourselves (the kind of stories that begin “do you know
what – ...?”) such as embarrassing incidents, gossip, stories, trou-
bles, dreams; or they can be stories about past events (the kind of
story that begins with “do you remember when we...”). Above all
we tend to construct stories with our listeners and in response to
our listeners in a dialogical way. We tell stories as a function of
who is listening to them and we will often tell the same story dif-
ferently to a different audience depending on how that audience
responds.
It is precisely these conversational mechanisms which the sec-
ond, more recent narrative research tradition is concerned with.
This approach is called an interactional discursive approach and
its point of departure is ordinary conversational storytelling.
Studies in this tradition look less at what stories are about (the
contents) and much more at how they are told – how they are
managed turn-by-turn in interaction and what conversational ac-
tions are accomplished in their telling (complaining, justifying,
flirting, testifying, reporting and so on). In other words it studies
what people are actually doing when they tell stories as well as
what stories are designed to do. So, according to this discursive ap-
proach, stories cannot be interpreted solely in terms of what has
been said and told. Rather they have to be analysed in the way that
they are told to and with other speakers in a particular interac-
tional moment. In this respect Norrick’s (2000) analysis is closer
to a small story approach.
The interactional approach taken here extends the “small sto-
ry” approach to the patterns of interaction of the Endgame narra-
tives. The aim is to examine the way in which particular story-
telling episodes in Endgame are locally managed from an interac-
tional point of view.
When Nagg makes an early bid to tell the Tailor story (“will I
tell you the story of the tailor?”), it is rejected by Nell (“no”). This
is exactly the same as Nell’s “no” in the Ardennes story when she
rejects Nagg’s “do you remember”. But this time Nell repairs it
with “what for?”. So the behaviour is still cooperative. From then
on, we get an argumentative but still cooperative exchange as
Nagg tries to position Nell as a listener to his Tailor story and Nell
counters with the Lake Como story:
Here the pauses are attributable to the listener (Nell) and her
non-response indicates a lack of cooperation. Nagg eventually
joins in with the Lake Como story (“we had got engaged the day
before”) and continues it with Nell’s encouragement:
By this stage the Lake Como narrative has become Nagg’s sto-
ry as well and the storytelling has become a joint effort just like
the Ardennes story was. At 016 Nagg tries to arouse Nell’s inter-
est in the Tailor story for a second time (“don’t you laugh at it
still?”) but Nell is still immersed in her Lake Como story (“it was
deep, deep...”) and does not respond to Nagg’s question. At this
point the story has turned uncooperative again. Nagg announces
the retelling of the Tailor story at 018 (“let me tell it again”) and
then tells it without permission, marking the fact that he is telling
a story by adopting a “raconteur’s voice”. The Tailor story thus
begins with the Lake Como story left incomplete and hanging in
the air and a potential audience (Nell) who has still not been po-
sitioned correctly as a listener.
It is also significant that Nagg tells the Tailor story as a mono-
logue and gets no response from Nell, who is still thinking about
Lake Como. Any kind of storytelling, but particularly joke-telling,
needs feedback from listeners and Nagg does not receive any. The
Tailor story is thus highly unsuccessful because there is no pref-
ace and no feedback from Nell either during the story or, signifi-
cantly, at the end.
So just like the Ardennes story, Lake Como and the Tailor
show alternating storytelling behaviour. We have a relatively col-
laborative Lake Como sandwiched between an uncooperative
Tailor story. This structural sandwiching of a cooperative story
within an uncooperative story coupled with the alternating lev-
els of cooperation within each story creates a highly disjointed
effect.
It is important to notice as well how this sequence compares
to storytelling in ordinary conversation. It is interesting, for ex-
ample, that it is in the short exchanges of Lake Como that we get
the successful storytelling rather than in the longer Tailor mono-
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Hamm’s chronicle
Hamm’s chronicle is an autobiographical story and perhaps the
least conversational of all the stories in Endgame, for a number of
reasons.
First it is presented at length in two different versions at two
different times so it is a story retelling. It is an atypical retelling
because speakers usually retell stories when they have a different
audience to tell them to. Hamm’s chronicle on the other hand is
by and large self-directed; Clov tells him that it is a story “you’ve
been telling yourself all your days” and, interestingly, Hamm is
only able to move the narrative along when he is alone. During the
first part of the chronicle Clov is absent and as soon as Clov re-
turns to the room the chronicle is interrupted.
Secondly it is not a spontaneous story. Hamm uses a special nar-
rative voice, which sets off the words of the story from his other
speech, another voice for the father in the story and his own “nor-
mal” voice. The contrast between narrative and normal voice turns
the storytelling episode into a very self-conscious act of narration.
Thirdly, there is almost no participation in the chronicle.
Hamm announces the start of the story (“it’s time for my story”)
but there is no actual participation in or recognition of the re-
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Conclusion
This overview of tellability suggests that two points can be made
about storytelling in Endgame. Firstly, individual episodes in-
volving two different speakers exhibit an alternating pattern of in-
teraction in which a story is moved on in one turn only to be halt-
ed in the next speaker’s turn, moved on in the next and halted in
the next. This stop-start pattern also occurs when there is a single
speaker and no collaboration from a second speaker. Here the
speaker may start a story, then stop and pick it up later on in the
same turn or after a number of intervening turns. Both these types
of alternation make the tellability of a particular story hard to
identify.
Secondly, Hamm’s chronicle stands out from the other
Endgame stories because, since it spans the entire play and is not
a “locally managed” story, its tellability is even harder to trace. In-
deed in the chronicle the whole idea of story tellability seems to
be progressively dismantled: there is no preface, no participation,
no collaboration, no reason for the story, no conclusion; there is
also constant retelling, self-directedness and a great deal of talk-
ing about the story but very little telling of it. Hamm spends much
of the play trying to locate the tellability of his own story.
In conclusion, analysis of the narrative patterning in Endgame
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stories suggests that the play shows us as much about how stories
“don’t get told”1 as about how they do. Beckett’s skill is in sub-
verting the mechanisms of ordinary storytelling behaviour to pro-
duce stories in which tellability merges into ‘untellability’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
and the Arts. Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, “James Knowlson’s new
biography brings well into light what we knew, but never knew quite so well”
(Oppenheim 1999, p. 7).
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2
On the different versions of the published text see Gontarski (1985, p.
125).
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3 The tripartite structure of the play and the three positions of the camera
and of F have attracted much attention; critics have also detected many other
trios, see: Knowlson 1986, Calder 1977, Brater 1987, Deleuze 1992.
4 From now onwards my reference to the play will be given in parenthesis,
where Roman numbers indicate its parts and Arabic numbers their respective
segments.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 308
x x
x x
x xx
x x x
x x
x x x x
x x
x x
x x x xx x xx x xx x
Beckett illustrates the set and the positions of camera and F in the
first page of the printed text:
Plays of Samuel Beckett (Fletcher, Fletcher, Smith and Bachem 1978): in spite
of its brevity and already in 1978 it analyzes each of Beckett’s musical excerpts
and draws attention to Beckett’s use of one particular motif of Beethoven’s Trio.
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6 The introduction of the second subject of the Largo in the middle of the
play “is to be explained not only by its foreshadowing function [i.e. of the final
image and excerpt of the play], but also by [...] the cantabile’s audible conden-
sation [that] corresponds to the contracted action at this moment of the play”
(Maier 2002, p. 317).
7 On this problem, raised by Beckett’s bilingualism and self-translations,
see: Friedman, Rossman and Sherzer 1987, Beer 1994, Gordon 1996 and Fusel-
la 2002.
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8 These functions of the camera have been commented upon by many critics;
see, particularly: Knowlson 1986, Brater 1987, Védrenne 2001 and Herren 2007.
The alternating general views and close-ups have been called by Jonathan Kalb
“the model of the double-take – [...] another example of Beckett incorporating the
viewer’s process of viewing into his drama” (Kalb 1994, p. 140); Peter Gidal points
out that they aim at “making difficult a ‘natural viewing’” (Gidal 1979, p. 54).
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9 In the German production, given the cut of the first two musical excerpts,
music will be heard for the first time during the sequence in which the camera
moves towards F seated on the stool (from A, via B and C, to the close-up), and
backwards (I. 31, 35).
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10 Among the critics who raise a doubt about F’s relation to music, see
Fletcher, Fletcher, Smith and Bachem 1978, Worth 1986 and 1999 [2001], and
Laws 2003. They all affirm that there is no clear indication in the text that F
“hears” the music or “listens” to it.
11 I am referring in particular to Deleuze 1968, Derrida 1967, and Steven
Connor’s excellent first chapter of his Samuel Beckett. Repetition, Theory and
Text (1988, pp. 1-14).
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12 The absence of a hierarchy is such that none of the three parts is assigned
the role of pre-existing identity. Notwithstanding the title, “Action” does not
convey the dramatic action and, although it is positioned between the other two
parts, it is not the centre of the work, it does not have a privileged function from
which to look at the other parts as marginal; on their part, the prefixes of the
other two titles do not indicate so much a preparation or a repetition of the ac-
tion, than they actually refer to the literal meaning and the Latin etymology,
mainly recalling the concepts of “in front of” and “behind/against”, rather than
those of “before/preceding” and “again”.
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What is displaced and disguised in the series [...] exists and acts as
the differenciator of difference. [...] each series is explicated and un-
folded only in implicating the others, it therefore repeats the others
and is repeated in the others, which in turn implicate it [...] with the
result that it returns to itself as many times as it returns to another.
(Deleuze 1968 [1994, pp. 299-300])
Thus, for instance, one discovers that the first two musical ex-
cerpts, previously perceived as mere incidental music, are actual-
ly tied to the fact that, in order to shoot the close-ups of the door,
the camera necessarily has to move in front of it and, therefore,
close to F who sits on his stool near the door. These new elements
– the door is close to the music source, the stool is close to the
door and F sits near it – are thus added to the only thing the spec-
tator knows before the effect of repetition and difference, i.e. that
the “indispensable door”, as Voice asserts, is “on the right” of the
familiar chamber. By playing with his few instruments and visual-
ly repeating the structure of repetition with alterations of
Beethoven’s Piano Trio Beckett reveals a ghost of dramatic action.
13
The many essays that deal with this effect rightly point out the ways in
which Beckett creates it: the directions provided in the script indicate the size
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of the rectangles (seventy centimetres wide, and either two, or one and a half
metres tall), their colour (grey), opaque glass for the window and no knobs for
the door and the window.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 317
14
Also Catharina Wulf (1994) draws on Freud for her reading of “Ghost
Trio”. She identifies the musical excerpts with Freud’s fort/da, Lacan’s object
petit a, and Winnicott’s “transitional object” in order to prove that F plays the
music “to overcome the loss of the other [the woman he is waiting for]” (Wulf
1994, p. 60), and concludes that at the end of the play F “understands that he
will stay by himself. [... He] has finally outgrown his need for the transitional
object [...and is] no longer overcome by the eternally lacking object” (p. 61).
Personally I find unconvincing all readings of “Ghost Trio” that detect a devel-
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opment in F’s situation; even F’s final smile (in the German production) is am-
biguous and does not allow for any denouement.
15 Laws detects this consolatory role of music in the essays by Anna Mc-
Mullan (1997), Phil Baker (1995-1996), Sydney Homan (1992) and Graley Her-
ren (1998 and 2001).
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Then without the solace of music the audience will finish the
Unnamable’s meditation, in silence:
Yes, perhaps I shall speak of him, for an instant, like an echo that
mocks, before being restored to him, the one they could not part me
from.
(The Unnamable, p. 324)
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...perhaps ... “...at this place, at this moment of time...” ... still ... “...per-
sonally needed”...16
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Baker, Phil, 1995, “Ghost Stories: Beckett and the Literature of In-
trojection”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, V, 1995, pp. 39-66.
Beer, Ann, 1994, “Beckett’s Bilingualism”, in John Pilling (editor),
1994, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge Universi-
ty Press, Cambridge, pp. 209-221.
Ben-Zvi, Linda (editor), 2003, Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Perfor-
mances, and Cultural Contexts, Assaph Books, Tel Aviv.
Idem, 1985, “Samuel Beckett’s Media Plays”, in Modern Drama,
XXVIII, March 1985, 1, pp. 22-37.
Brater, Enoch (editor), 1986, Beckett at 80 / Beckett in Context, Ox-
ford University Press, New York & Oxford.
Idem, 1987, Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater,
Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford.
Bryden, Mary (editor), 1998, Samuel Beckett and Music, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford.
Bryden, Mary, Julian Garforth, and Peter Mills, 1998, Beckett at Read-
ing. Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at The Univer-
sity of Reading, Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International
Foundation, Reading.
Calder, John, 1977, “Review”, in Journal of Beckett Studies, II, 1977,
pp. 117-119.
Connor, Steven, 1988, Samuel Beckett. Repetition, Theory and Text,
Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Deleuze, Gilles, 1992, “L’Épuisé”, in Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres
pièces pour la television, cit., pp. 55-106.
Fletcher, Beryl S., John Fletcher, Barry Smith, and Walter Bachem,
1978, A Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, Faber and
Faber, London & Boston.
Friedman, Alan W., Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer (editors),
1987, Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, Pennsylvania State
University Press, University Park & London.
Fusella, Patrizia, 2002, “Samuel Beckett’s Pas Moi / Not I: Pas Tra-
duction, Not Creation”, in Textus, XV, 2002, pp. 121-144.
Gidal, Peter, 1979, “Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio”, in Artforum, XVII,
1979, pp. 53-57.
Gontarski, Stanley E., 1985, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s
Dramatic Texts, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Gordon, David J., 1996, “Au Contraire: The Question of Beckett’s
Bilingual Text”, in Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (editors),
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 322
B. Performances
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TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 327
Redirecting Beckett*
Stanley E. Gontarski
This year marks the centennial of Samuel Beckett’s birth, and the
celebrations around the world have been a wonder to behold. From
Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa
(where Beckett did not permit his plays to be performed until Apartheid
was ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University in Tallahas-
see to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre in London
to the Pompidou Center in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurich
to Aix-en-Provence and Lille, from St. Petersburg to Madrid to Tel
Aviv, and of course most notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett’s
Year. Most of the festivals have included not only performances of the
plays, but lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions, and manuscript
displays. PARIS BECKETT 2006, for example, co-sponsored by the
French government and New York University’s Center for French Civ-
ilization and Culture, has featured productions of Beckett’s entire dra-
matic oeuvre, mounted in theatres large and small all over Paris, lectures
by such major figures as the novelists-theorists Philippe Sollers and
Hélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and Israel Horovitz,
and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 the
Pompidou Center will host a major exhibition of and on Beckett’s work.
[...] Who, indeed, more global an artist than Beckett?
(Perloff 2007, p. 652)
Krapp’s Last Tape. The analogue device had all the look of a clum-
sy antique, the look Egoyan was apparently striving for in his film.
As important as the film, both its materiality and the giganticized
and miniaturized images it provided, was the material editing ma-
chine itself, central to Egoyan’s vision of Krapp’s Last Tape and
the centerpiece of his installation, as the material tape recorder
had been to Beckett’s. The play Krapp’s Last Tape was thus an-
other deteriorating relic, the commercial film, something like au-
thentic Beckett, now itself a fading museum piece, Beckett frozen
in time, but folded into Egoyan’s work and so simultaneously a
stunningly fresh work of art.
When Egoyan turned his attention to Beckett again, he went a
bit more high tech with a staging of “Eh Joe”. For the centenary
year, the irrepressible Michael Colgan prevailed upon the Beckett
Estate to allow the staging of the teleplay, and Colgan in turn pre-
vailed on Canadian film director Atom Egoyan to re-direct Beck-
ett. With tour de force performances by Michael Gambon, who
had played Hamm in the Beckett on Film version of Endgame and
subsequently reprised the role on the London stage, and Pene-
lope Wilton as Voice, the production was certainly a (if not the)
high point of the Beckett centenary celebrations at Dublin’s Gate
Theatre in April of 2006. The Gate Theatre production subse-
quently moved to London’s west-end for 30 performances, from
27 June to 15 July 2006.
Egoyan’s adaptation (or transformation) was potentially bina-
ry, a hybrid production of stage and “live” video, the division of
the stage front to back rather than the usual side by side division
of other stagings of the teleplay. The media were thus less divid-
ed than layered, one superimposed on the other, creating a
palimpsest of Joes. He was from the first if unnoticeably separat-
ed from the audience by a barely perceptible scrim (itself an echo
or metaphor for the TV screen) that then bore his projected im-
age once Voice began her assault. Egoyan’s conception, with its
hybrid technology of stagecraft, television, and film, allowed for
the seamless translation of the television work to the stage. In both
of Beckett’s own productions the nine camera moves towards Joe,
the physical image of the increasing intensity of Voice’s assault
and the confirmation of the interiority of the conflict, were con-
spicuous, almost clumsy, as the camera physically advanced on
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JoAnne Akalaitis
JoAnne Akalaitis was all but banished to the deep cold for liber-
ties she took with her 1984 production of Endgame at Harvard
University’s American Repertory Theatre (ART). She seemed to
redeem herself some 24 years later with an evening of shorts, a
production bound to generate attention in New York as much for
the featured actor as either its director or playwright. Celebrated,
revered, lionized dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was featured in all
4 “shorts,” which opened in December of 2007 at the New York
Theatre Workshop. The grouping of four included the two
mimes, “Act Without Words I” and “II”, “Rough for Theatre II”,
and a staging of “Eh Joe”, a teleplay, certainly after Egoyan, now
part of the accepted stage repertory. The two “Acts Without
Words” constitute an inevitable pairing, and Akalaitis took ad-
vantage of Baryshnikov’s angelic grace, but the pairing of the sec-
ond half of the evening highlighted the fact that the interrelation-
ship of the shorts cannot or should not be arbitrary.
On stage, “Eh Joe” is one of Beckett’s short plays that quali-
fies, alone, as a full evening’s theater, as was evident in Egoyan’s
Dublin production. In Dublin nothing preceded it; nothing fol-
lowed it. Akalaitis presented her version as part of a cluster, of a
quartet, and tied them together with a consistent set, but the de-
cision to cover the stage in some six inches of sand made sense on-
ly for the first of the quartet. As New York Times theater critic
Ben Brantley noted of Baryshnikov’s performance, “for the rest of
the show you can feel good old physics tugging at feet that once
took flight like no one else’s” (19 December 2007). But more than
gravity and age were at work on Baryshnikov who was dancing on
the beach, and superb as it was for “Act Without Words I”, the
sand made stage movement all but impossible for the three sub-
sequent plays, and perhaps this was part of Akalaitis’s point. The
wheelchair of “Rough for Theatre II”, for example, was immobi-
lized and so suggested and perhaps even echoed, at least visually,
the immobility of Happy Days, and Joe could not move about his
room to shut out all prying, perceiving eyes. But Akalaitis made
something of a virtue of what appeared to be a handicap. Instead,
the physical movement of “Eh Joe” was filmed and projected as a
multiple set of images in a variety of sizes on a variety of screens.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 333
In fact, this hybrid genre, part live theatre and part “live” film, a
technique Egoyan had used for his “Eh Joe” as well, was central
to all four plays, used not only to great effect individually but to
create a continuity among the plays based on multiple projected
images and hence multiple simultaneous perspectives. The most
questionable directorial decision may have been to create a bodi-
ly presence for Joe’s voice, played by the spot-lit Karen Kandel.
That, along with the addition of music by Philip Glass (a feature
of all of Akalaitis’s Beckett work), is the sort of decision that
caused such a fuss in her 1984 Endgame. Conceptual blunders
apart, Akalaitis finally transformed an unlikely collection of shorts
into a unified, kaleidoscopic evening that overcame (for the most
part) the self imposed handicap of sand-enhanced gravity. As
Brantley perceptively noted, “This grounding of a winged dancer
poignantly captures the harsh laws of Beckett’s universe, where
Mother Earth never stops pulling people toward the grave”. But
the Akalaitis quartet of shorts were about more than Baryshnikov.
They suggested her redirecting Beckett toward the avant-garde
with production more or less traditional and yet thoroughly new.
artists of their day, again mostly all Brazilian. For Felizes para Sem-
pre (“Happily ever after” or Happy Days), for example, they
worked with plastic artist Ana Miguel, who designed costumes
and stage props, with photographer and lighting designer Dalton
Camargos, with museum curator Marília Panitz, and with guest
actresses Vera Holtz as Winnie in Felizes para Sempre and first
Nathalia Thimberg and then Vera Holtz as “Mulher,” the
“Woman in chair,” W, in Balanço (“Rockaby”). A second install-
ment of their work “We were not long [...] together,” which ran
in a variety of configurations during 2002-2003, was built around
Respiração (“Breath”) and featured four other pieces: Catástrofe
(“Catastrophe”), Ato sem Palavras II (“Act Without Words II”),
O que Onde (“What Where”), and Jogo (“Play”). The third in-
carnation of their dialogue with Beckett was built around Todos
Os Que Caem (All That Fall), again interspersed with their own
videos, photographs, objects, and performance pieces, and fea-
turing as well Balanço (“Rockaby”), Eu Não (Not I), Rascunho para
Teatro II (“Rough for Theatre II”), and Un pedaço de monólogo
(“A Piece of Monologue”). These three anthologies performed
over a six-year period constituted a multi media trilogy of specta-
cles in a variety of manifestations that connected Beckett’s theater
works to larger public spaces beyond the confines of theater. It
was thus in conception and execution the very opposite of the
Beckett on Film project taking shape at almost the exact same time
in Europe. No two manifestations of the irmãos Guimarães pro-
ject were ever the same. Actors often switched roles in different
manifestations of the play in order to prevent performances from
getting stale or automatic. Theirs is an art that resists predictabil-
ity and resists being reduced to homage, the goal of the film pro-
ject, presumably.
As art critic Vitória Daniela Bousso has written, “The transi-
tion between the visual and the theatrical constitutes a hybrid
space, a territory of complexities ruled by experimentation in the
work of Adriano and Fernando Guimarães” (Bousso 2004, p. 97).
As their work focuses on the human body, they engage directly
the cultural games of regulation and control that are played upon
it. For the Guimarães brothers, the body is less ancillary than it
might generally be in Beckett’s work, say, and instead becomes
the seat of the struggle of power relationships – a theme which, if
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 335
Along the whole length of the gallery’s entrance glass doors there
are texts by Samuel Beckett. Upon entering, the spectator finds him-
self in the first environment: an almost dark rectangular foreroom, out-
lined by glass panes, on which fragments from texts have also been
written. At each end of this room there are life-size pictures of the
character that appears throughout the exhibition. The photographs
are almost identical, but they reveal the character under the action of
two contrasting lights: one that is excessively bright and one that is too
dark. Both make its image evanescent.
(Adriano and Fernando Guimarães 2004, p. 103)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works cited
Bousso, Vitória Daniela, 2004, “Interstice Zone”, in Adriano and Fer-
nando Guimarães, 2004, “Todos Os Que Caem” / “All That Fall”,
Catalogue published by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (April
2004), pp. 97-99.
Cuthbert, David, 2007, “Godot is Great”, in Living / Lagniappe, in
The Times-Picayune, 6 November 2007.
Guimarães, Adriano and Fernando, 2001, Happily ever After / Felizes
para Sempre, Catalogue published by Centro Cultural Banco do
Brasil (January 2001).
Idem, 2004a, “Todos Os Que Caem” / “All That Fall”, Catalogue pub-
lished by Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (April 2004).
Idem, 2004b, “Double Exposure: Multimedia Installations Composed
of Four Environments”, in Guimarães, 2004, “Todos Os Que
Caem” cit., pp. 103-105.
Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 341
Cecchi’s Endgame,
and the Question of Fidelity*
Daniela Guardamagna
2 Thomas S. Eliot, 1940, East Coker, in Four Quartets, 1936-1942 (La terra
mus’s kindness, noticing that when he staged his own English ver-
sion of Godot for BBC he was forced by awe and by his fidelity to
Beckett to create a kind of repetition of Beckett’s own Godot. It
is a good production, philologically perfect, sometimes enlight-
ening. But it is not new in the sense I mentioned.
3. Cecchi’s production
Very discreetly, Cecchi strengthened the unrealistic aspects of the
play. The staging respected Beckett’s indications (the room, the
wheelchair in the centre, the stancher or stauncher, the whistle,
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 345
the dustbins, the red and white faces of the original stage direc-
tion), but the two actors who played Nell and Nagg were much
younger than Cecchi, even though made up to look old; he de-
clared this was done to add to the non-naturalistic aspect of the
play (see Cecchi in Cherchi 1995, 11th page).
Then, he heightened the metatheatrical effects. The room was
grey, and had vague shapes of traditional scenery drawn on the
walls, but there, on the wall, big wide strokes of blue paint were
to be seen – an unfinished coat of blue on grey – as if the post-
atomic bunker of the play pertained also to the character of an
half-completed rehearsal room.
The acting was subtly musical, and respected the character of
a score: a lot of work had obviously been done on the precision of
tones, on the balance of emphasis and bathos, in the repetitions
and variations of the music. Clov / Binasco’s answers were total-
ly devoid of emotion, save in the few moments when the text ex-
plicitly asks for irritation or anger, and, always in the same note,
they overlapped Hamm’s statements and questions.
3
All translations, if not otherwise stated, are mine.
4 The emphasis in these quotations is mine, and is devised to show more
clearly the transition from the original versions to Cecchi’s. The latter has not
been published, and quotations are derived from the RAI recording of the pro-
duction.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 348
There is only a slight change, but the evening instead of the day
is relevant because it implies the evening performance.
Here is another metatheatrical element from the text:
I’ll soon have finished with this story. [Pause.] Unless I bring in
other characters. [Pause.] But where would I find them? [Pause.]
Where would I look for them? (p. 37)
CECCHI: Non ne avrò più per molto, con questa storia. (Pausa).
Qua, se non si infilano altri personaggi... [...]
Clov. Aïeaïeaïe!
Hamm. Encore des complications! [...] Pourvu que ça ne rebon-
disse pas! (p. 103)
per un secondo atto, per carità! [= Let’s hope there’s no material for a
second act, for God’s sake!]
And to end up with? [Pause.] Discard. [He throws away the dog.
He tears the whistle from his neck.] With my compliments. (p. 52)
Later, in the very last monologue, the Italian had to lose an im-
portant ambiguity, having no single term that, like the French
jouer and the English to play, can indicate both the acting
(recitare) and the playing of a game (giocare). Fruttero decided to
open the metaphor in the direction of the playing of chess; Cec-
chi refused to lose either of the two meanings, and he created a
sentence which incorporated both:
Since that’s the way we’re playing it... let’s play it that way... and
speak no more about it... speak no more. (p. 52)
(Since that’s the way the play is acted, and the game is played, let’s
play it and act it like that, and speak no more about it... no more.)
Hamm: Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.
Clov: Pah! You saw your heart.
Hamm: No, it was living.
(Endgame, p. 26)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Brater, Enoch, 1975, “Brecht’s Alienated Actor in Beckett’s Theatre”,
in Comparative Drama, Fall 1975, vol. 9, n. 3, pp. 195-205.
Cherchi, Grazia, 1995, “Intervista di Carlo Cecchi con Grazia Cher-
chi”, Programme for Finale di partita, Teatro Stabile di Firenze.
Cohn, Ruby, 1980, Just Play. Beckett’s Theater, Princeton University
Press, Princeton.
Esslin, Martin, 1976, “Godot, The Authorized Version”, in Journal of
Beckett Studies, I, Winter 1976. Also in http://www.english.fsu.
edu/jobs/num01/Num1Esslin.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009).
Gontarski, Stanley E. (editor), 1992, The Theatrical Notebooks of
Samuel Beckett. Volume II. “Endgame”, Faber and Faber, London.
Kalb, Jonathan, 1989, Beckett in Performance, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge 1991.
MacMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld, 1988, Beckett in the
Theatre. The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, vol. 1,
From ‘Waiting for Godot’ to ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, John Calder, Lon-
don.
Stringent Demands:
Aspects of Beckett in Performance1
Rosemary Pountney
6
March 1976; director, Francis Warner; lighting, David Colmer.
7 Conversation with Samuel Beckett, Paris, March 1980.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 358
If they were unfamiliar with Beckett’s later plays they tended to ex-
pect such short texts to present few problems, only to find themselves
confronted by the niceties of technical synchronisation, which they
found exceptionally demanding, particularly the extent to which
their own technical input interacting with the performer constituted
the performance. In subsequent discussion it is always rewarding to
see their minds opening to the possibilities of Minimalist theatre and
their developing appreciation of Beckett’s dramatic methods.
Discussion so far has centred on the actor, audience and tech-
nical aspects of a Beckett performance, with little mention of
overall direction. This is because I have been positing a director
who would follow Beckett’s stage directions closely, in order to
bring out the nuances of performance and subtlety of suggestion
inherent in his stage notes. Today, as the legend of Beckett’s own
productions begins to dissipate through time, directors become
less likely to consult his production notebooks (Samuel Beckett
Archive, RUL; see also Knowlson et al., editors, 1992-1995) and
increasingly anxious to ‘do their own thing’ with Beckett. It is here
that a complex dilemma opens up for both current and future per-
formances of the plays and is the subject of continual debate.
It is a theatrical commonplace that without change and experi-
ment theatre becomes static and mummified. Once a play is pub-
lished it ceases to be the author’s property, in that he can no longer
exercise full control over it. Shakespeare lives today because he is
constantly re-invented. Each generation uses the plays to reflect their
own concerns and, though each new emphasis or re-shaping will
have its critics, new light is often shed on aspects of a Shakespearean
text that deepens and enriches audience experience of the plays.
Shakespeare’s five acts can accommodate such a translation in
terms, but experiment with Beckett’s plays is much more problemat-
ic. Beckett did his best in his lifetime to control productions of his
plays via his agents. Today the Beckett Estate has an invidious task in
deciding whether a performance flouting Beckett’s production in-
tentions can go ahead; the notorious removal of Deborah Warner’s
Footfalls from the London stage being a case in point10. Two ‘camps’
exist today: those who think Beckett is best served by close attention
to his stage directions and those who feel that experimenting with new
ways of performing his plays is the only way to keep them alive. Among
the latter is Jonathan Miller, who feels that the Estate’s attempts to
protect Beckett from experiment will inevitably result in ‘dead the-
atre’ – in effect charging the Estate with murdering the future of Beck-
ett production11. Clearly, attempting to replicate Beckett’s own pro-
ductions exactly is an arid enterprise, leading to stultified theatre. It is
impossible in any case, due to different personnel, theatre spaces and
the dating effects of time. Nonetheless, a production that follows
Beckett’s stage directions does not have to be a sterile parroting of the
past. Provided that the director respects the text and can pass on his
enthusiasm to the cast, the chosen play will take life as their own cre-
ation, while still keeping close to Beckett’s intentions.
In my view, while it may be possible with the longer plays to
introduce flexibility into production methods, in the short Mini-
malist plays experimentation generally proves undesirable. Beck-
ett’s concern for the human situation is so clearly apparent in the
later plays that a director determined to imprint them with his
own ‘stamp’ is likely to arrive at something much less than what
is already present in the text. In the late plays the text is narrowed
down to reflect the bleakest realities of human existence. The pro-
tagonist is presented with all choices made, no opportunity for
change and nowhere to go but on, as in the last words of the Tril-
ogy: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”. In “Quad II”,
where all colour has drained from the players’ costumes and their
brisk movement has slowed to a shuffle about the stage, Beckett
remarked: “Good. That’s a hundred thousand years later”12. The
ghostly players are still in progress, still going on.
If a director subverts the Minimalist plays (attempting a con-
temporary relevance, perhaps), this reduces their pre-existing
depth and the impact of the plays is lessened. When rehearsing
Footfalls in 1976, Beckett remarked: “It’s Chamber Theatre and
it must be perfect”13. As with Beethoven’s Late String Quartets,
the late plays are Beckett’s final contribution to the theatre, and
who would attempt to change a note of the Quartets?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-
spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
Knowlson, James, and John Pilling, 1979, Frescoes of the Skull, John
Calder, London.
Knowlson, James et al. (editors), 1992-1995, The Theatrical Notebooks
of Samuel Beckett, 4 vols., Faber and Faber, London.
del Teatro di Prosa in the Biennale of Venice, was staged again on September
29, 1963.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 365
4 See Gian Renzo Morteo, “Incontro con Roger Blin”, in I Quaderni del Tea-
tro Stabile della Città di Torino, n. 3, Edizioni Teatro Stabile di Torino, 1965, p.
106.
5 I am very grateful to Gianfranco De Bosio for his enlightening account of
this project.
6 Happy Days had been translated into Italian by Carlo Fruttero (Einaudi,
Torino 1956), but the script of this first Italian production was based on the
French version Beckett gave to Blin: Oh les beaux jours.
7
Giorni felici was staged in the Gobetti Theatre in Turin in January, 1965,
with Laura Adani as Winnie and Franco Passatore as Willie. I am very grateful
to the Director of the Centro Studi del Teatro Stabile di Torino, Franco Crivel-
laro, and to its Librarian, Anna Peyron, for their help in my research about the
performance.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 366
Would Beckett have felt too much emotion in this Italian Winnie
or would he have seen a Dantesque predicament in her tears? We on-
ly know that he did not attend the performance, sending his wife in
his stead. Suzanne’s opinion must have been positive, though, since
Beckett sent Laura Adani two of his new plays for staging.
8
Review by Sandro De Feo, “Il tempo perduto di Winnie”, in L’Espresso,
December 26, 1965. All translations, unless differently specified, are mine.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 367
9
Giorni felici, open rehearsals for a show never staged, by and with Claudio
Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, Teatro del Leopardo, 1970-1971.
10
See Sabrina Galasso, “Giorni felici: l’artista invade lo spazio scenico”, in
Il teatro di Remondi e Caporossi, Bulzoni, Roma 1998, pp. 33-43.
11
Only a handful of critics and spectators managed to see it.
12 Not so long ago, the two actors/playwrights staged another, different ver-
sion of Giorni felici (Prato, January 2005). Remondi was, as before, the only voice
of the monologue, but the words are not those of the original Winnie, they tell an-
other story, evoke ‘different happy days’. Even the setting has changed: the actor
now hangs from a steel trellis, and of the gravel-words (that we will describe in a
few lines) now only a few stones remain, mysteriously dropped from above.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 368
ing Beckett. This is evidence that even at the time, just as today,
the issue of “fidelity” to this author was already a heated one. The
living memories of the two performers and a few photographs al-
low us to get an idea of the way the show was conceived forty years
ago. Let us try to picture what an imaginary member of the audi-
ence would have seen.
Upon entering the house, his or her eyes would have been at-
tracted by a graphic rendering of several lines of the Italian version
of Happy Days. Starting in the tiny foyer, even in the toilets and in
the theatre itself our imaginary spectator would have found on the
walls, on the floor, on the ceiling odd drawings, hieroglyphs or graf-
fiti of Winnie’s words obsessively repeated in strange cobwebs of
concrete poetry (figures 16 and 17). In this open space the member
of the audience could move freely or sit in one of the chairs scat-
tered in different parts of the tiers and even on the stage. Thus the
action, which in the meantime would have started, could be seen
from several angles (figure 18). Sitting on the floor in a corner be-
neath the stage, Remondi would be reciting Winnie’s monologue,
while Caporossi, as an anonymous and mysterious stagehand,
would pour gravel through a conduit. The gravel would roll and
pelt down all over the actor, beating a tattoo that set the rhythm of
his/her speech. The action and the vocal performance followed the
tempo of Beckett’s pauses. “We had analysed the text – Caporossi
explained to me – and found there were breaks, moments of sus-
pension, like air bubbles; when those moments occurred, I would
put a shovelful of pebbles into the conduit and words would start
flowing again”. Thus Winnie was gradually covered up and when
the gravel ran out, the words ran out as well.
Thus on the Italian stage we have seen Winnie come out from
a hole dug in the concrete on an urban building site (Anna Pro-
clemer, 1990); emerge from a dustbin borrowed from Endgame
(Miriam Abutori, 1992); remain shut in a sand-glass (Adriana
Asti, 1985); be pilloried in a manhole (Lucilla Morlacchi, 2000);
be smothered by her own skirt (Anna D’Onofri, 1978) and cov-
ered by a huge white sheet (Marion D’Amburgo, 1995). I think
this last variation deserves a closer analysis because the set de-
signed by the director Giancarlo Cauteruccio conditioned and
gave meaning to the whole production.
The theatre we enter now is on the outskirts of Florence, in
Scandicci. It is a theatre workshop where since the beginning the
most advanced technological visual experiments have been tried
out, and offered their services to the art of playwrights and play-
ers alike. In the instance of this production of Giorni felici, a huge
white wing took up the whole scene forming a sort of pyramid
from whose top Winnie came out. Hanging up there, she re-
minded the audience of other images and of other characters in
Beckett’s plays (Not I, That Time) (figure 19).
The structure fit very well with the “simplicity and symmetry”
that Beckett required, but it also lent itself to many more effects and
meanings: it could quickly become a screen onto which images of
cracked earth could be projected (Burri’s Le crete di Gibellina se-
ries) or it could turn into a hospital bedsheet. At the bottom of it a
series of intra-venous vials would beat, drop after drop, Winnie’s
lifetime and the time of the show. Thus she did not appear so much
as a survivor in an apocalyptical wilderness, but as a terminal pa-
tient who could still, in the first act, rejoice for the gift of yet an-
other day with no pain and no aggravation (“– ah well – no worse
– no better, no worse – no change – no pain – hardly any –”). In this
apparently steady lull, then, everything could start in a “normal”
way: brushing her teeth and taking medication that promised to
bring “instantaneous improvement”. Daily actions, as a conse-
quence, did not look so trivial after all. It was just life going on.
While Willie kept reading his newspaper, she could cover up
the marks of time and of disease with the resources and the cos-
metics pulled out of the big bag. All she needed was some “crim-
son” on the lips and a wig to make up for the lost blonde hair her
memory keeps hauntingly recalling. In any case, there was always
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13 In comparison with the first act, conditioned by action, the second act
staged it for the first time in 198214. Beckett’s stage direction was
rewritten in the new script as: “Out of the darkness, the shrill note
of a bell fills the void louder and louder. Blinding light. A desert
beach. Sand. A still, colourless sea extends to the horizon. Black
sky”15. From the frosty whiteness of the stage Winnie emerges like
a wondrous flower, with her pink bodice and her red hat (figures
22 and 23), as lonely as possible in the cosmic vastness of a myste-
rious universe, where life is marked by orders coming out of
nowhere. Even so, the icy sea in which she is up to her neck cannot
swallow her. She is not dying, she is struggling for life. Her inner
time does not yield to the bell tallying her hours16. Her memories
resist oblivion. We are not watching her fall, but her endurance. She
endures and she blooms, in Strehler’s imagination, like Leopardi’s
whin-broom (“La ginestra”) in the ashes of Mount Vesuvius.
Through Leopardi’s magnifying lens, Strehler sees in Winnie her
will to survive to the very end (figures 24 and 25).
More than any other director we have mentioned, Strehler
tries to convey Winnie’s drama as the drama of the human condi-
tion. He leads the audience towards a shock of recognition: Win-
nie is us. Her struggle, her survival strategies, her tricks, her
fragility and her strength have all to do with us. That is why he in-
sisted to stage designer Ezio Frigerio that the stage had to extend
into the audience, well beyond the forestage arch. Winnie, emerg-
ing from the prompter hole, is thus closer to the audience and can
weave an implicit dialogue with it:
Here I am, alone, stuck in the Universe, and you are listening to
me. Listening to my neurotic repetitions, my labouring talk, talk, talk
and you understand very well I’m just hiding the void, that I’m filling
the void of the same Universe that belongs to you too. Mine is a hu-
14 Strehler’s direction was picked up again, after his death, by Carlo Battistoni
17
In a letter of May 5, 1982, that Giorgio Strehler wrote to Giulia Lazzari-
ni, published later as Giulia carissima in Strehler 2000a.
18
Giorgio Strehler, “Un modo vero di recitare la dialettica della vita”, in the
House Programme of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.
19
Giulia Lazzarini has spoken extensively about this at the Beckett in Rome
Conference. But in many occasions, I had the opportunity to talk with her about
Giorni felici, about Strehler, Beckett and many other things. These talks were
never actual interviews: I usually ask very little but I listen carefully, and I learn
to see through her eyes. For a while it is as if I could glance inside her work and
get to know her wonderful art better. How can I thank her for this and how can
I apologise with her for saving in these pages only a few fragments of what she
has shared with me?
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 373
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beckett, Samuel, 1961, Happy Days, Faber and Faber, London 1989
(Giorni felici, Einaudi, Torino 1956, trans. Carlo Fruttero).
Caretti, Laura, 1995, “Marion-Winnie, ovvero i travestimenti della fe-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 374
Friendgame
Anastasia Deligianni
1 See, for example, “La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le pantalon”:
“On lui dit: ‘Tout ce qui est bon en peinture, tout ce qui est viable, tout ce que
vous pouvez admirer sans crainte, se trouve sur une ligne qui va depuis les
grottes des Eyzies jusqu’à la Galerie de France.’ On ne précise pas si c’est une
ligne préétablie. [...] On ne lui dit jamais: [...] ‘Tout ce que vous saurez jamais
d’un tableau, c’est combien vous l’aimez [...]’” (pp. 121, 123).
2
“Il est évident que toute œuvre d’art est un rajustement de ce rapport”
(“Peintres de l’empêchement”, p. 137).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 376
3 Details about that theatrical experience, its organisation and its outcome
specting or not the author’s will when using genetic material in literary criticism
is a current subject of discussion. Another investigates the borders between
genres (novel and theatre, for instance) in different eras and contexts.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 377
5 See also Angela Moorjani’s abstract for the International Samuel Beckett
6
“L’odeur des cadavres, que je perçois nettement sous celle de l’herbe et de
l’humus, ne m’est pas désagréable. [...] combien préférable à celle des vivants,
des aisselles, des pieds, des culs, des prépuces cireux et des ovules désappoin-
tés. [...] Ils ont beau se laver, les vivants, beau se parfumer, ils puent” (Premier
amour, pp. 8-9).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 381
church and religion assertions are actually political opinions having nothing to
do with the text of the Bible itself. Thus, he undertakes the reading of the en-
tire Bible, for which he suggests a new general reading method based on the
principle of explaining the text only by the text itself, without substituting more
or less free interpretations. This means that in case of problems in understand-
ing on the part of the reader or of misunderstandings due to the text’s obscuri-
ty or to contradictions arising, we should search in the rest of the same text for
passages which are better able to clarify the problematic ones. To put it simply,
every answer can only be in the text and not in the reader’s imagination.
See also Beckett’s letter to Michel Polac, January 1952, En attendant Godot
cover, 1952, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris: “Je ne sais pas plus sur cette pièce
que celui qui arrive à la lire avec attention. [...] Tout ce que j’ai pu savoir, je l’ai
montré”.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 384
So, reading and playing Beckett again in this light, firstly shak-
ing hands with the affective half of our divided and intellectually
pretentious self, in order to teach Beckett faithfully and make his
work genuinely known, is all we are trying to suggest here: the
bare and strong friendship of a pair of skillful hands.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
8 See also Joseph S. O’Leary’s abstract for the International Samuel Beckett
Criticism
Derval, André, 2007, Dossier de presse En attendant Godot (1952-
1961), IMEC et 10/18, Paris.
Gontarski, Stanley E., and Anthony Uhlman, 2006, Beckett after Beck-
ett, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Harmon, Maurice (editor), 1998, No Author Better Served. The Corre-
spondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
Locatelli, Carla, 1990, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose
Works after the Nobel Prize, University of Pennsylvania Press,
Philadelphia.
Moorjani, Angela, 2006, “Child’s Play and the Learned Art of Unsee-
ing”, in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessed April
1, 2008).
O’Leary, Joseph S., 2006, “Beckett’s Self-Translation and Intertextu-
ality”, in http://beckettjapan.org/delegates.htm (last accessed
April 1, 2008).
Beckett looks wary, and indeed Marias describes his look as ‘hunt-
ed’. The question is, hunted, hounded by what or whom? The most
obvious answer: hounded by the photographer. Did Beckett really de-
cide of his own free will to sit in a corner, at the intersection of three
dimensional axes, gazing upward, or did the photographer persuade
him to sit there? In such a position, subjected to ten or twenty or thir-
ty flashes of the camera, with a figure crouching over you, it is hard not
to feel hunted.
(Coetzee 2007, p. 201)
published for the first time in 1967 by Faber, along with “Act With-
out Words” and the television drama “Eh Joe”. Beckett’s passion
for the Seventh art contrasted with his fear of writing on commis-
sion, a reticence heightened by a traumatic dispute over a film con-
tract which he had signed in August 1962 for a film based on Wait-
ing for Godot. James Knowlson mentions in his biography that “the
trouble surrounding this proposal helped to harden Beckett’s op-
position to any small or large screen adaptations of plays written for
the stage or radio” (Knowlson 1996 [1997, p. 505]), so much that
in 1963 he refused Ingmar Bergman permission to stage the two ra-
dio plays All That Fall and “Embers”.
In the first few lines of the screenplay “Outline” of Film, Beck-
ett specifies that the story takes place “about [in] 1929. Early sum-
mer morning” (Film, p. 164), as detailed. In 1929, Beckett was in
Paris, where, as he told Mel Gussow in 1984, “The Surrealists, An-
dré Breton, [were] laying down the law – the artistic law” (Gussow
1996 [2000, p. 47]). In 1929 Breton’s 1924 Manifeste du Surréa-
lisme was reprinted, whilst the latest poems by Tristan Tzara, Paul
Éluard, and Breton himself were published in small journals. Beck-
ett “could not feel any affinity with the surrealists mainly because
[...] they were all cold or even hostile towards Joyce’s ‘Revolution
of the Word’. On the other hand he identified with the atmosphere
of experimentation and innovation which characterised the surre-
alist movement” (p. 47). The young Beckett must have been influ-
enced by the importance placed by the surrealists on psyche and
spirituality, capable of revealing an authentic reality free from all
conditioning of reason, superior to what human beings are used to.
He must also have had an understanding of the new role of the sur-
realist director-author who didn’t attempt to please the audience
and who, on the contrary, wanted to irritate the viewers, alienating
them from the outside world, and leaving them at the mercy of the
turmoil he had provoked. “He enjoyed Marcel Duchamp, who
lived near him. I commented on Duchamp’s objects trouvés – Mel
Gussow recounts – such as the urinal he exhibited as a work of art.
Beckett laughed: ‘A writer could not do that’” (p. 47). According
to some critics, the thinking behind a drama like Endgame can be
found in the influence of Duchamp, an exceptional chess player
and author of a chess treatise, based on the notion of Zugzwang,
still considered significant today.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 391
3
There is only one ‘sound’ in Film, at the outset, during the episode of the
couple – the vocal instruction to ‘sssh!’, or be quiet.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 392
4 See Bair 1978 [1990, pp. 215-216], and Knowlson 1996 [1997, pp. 226,
521].
5 The letter is reproduced in Leyda 1985, p. 59.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 393
6 In her essay “Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot)”, Mary Bryden points out
Irish writer was, and certainly had never read any of his works.
Talking about Film, Mel Gussow recalls an interview with Beckett
in 1982: “[He] said that Buster Keaton had accepted the role sim-
ply as ‘a job’. [...] Keaton did not know Beckett’s plays. They could
only talk about silent movies. Still Beckett seemed to like him, per-
haps largely in memory of Keaton’s comedy” (Gussow 1996 [2000,
p. 41]). Alan Schneider referred to this meeting as one of those mo-
ments that seem inevitable before they happen, impossible when
they take place, and incredible afterwards. They came from two to-
tally different worlds and times, and probably they had nothing to
say to one another.
Filming was not easy, at least at the beginning, since this was
Schneider’s first movie experience. However, with the exception of
Boris Kaufman, always worried about the perfect light, everyone
was sympathetic. Once they had overcome the initial difficulties
with the outdoor shots, and started filming inside, everything was
much easier. Schneider did not always know what he was doing but
he thought things didn’t seem too bad. Keaton’s professionalism
amazed everyone; he was indefatigable, although not very talkative,
and he happily gave his full collaboration for the whole period of
filming. Afterwards, Keaton said that he had understood only after
the end of shooting that the film meant something, even if he didn’t
know what exactly and that it had, after all, been worth it7.
An initial montage took place, not without confrontations with
the film’s editor Sidney Meyers (the crucial filmmaker of the New
American Cinema who co-directed the pivotal The Savage Eye in
1960)8, in the presence of Schneider and Beckett, in order to show
the author a provisional version of the film before he left for Eu-
rope. The first cut was not, in the end, all that different from the
final one, lasting a total of 22 minutes, and the technical defects,
mostly in the outdoor section, are mainly due to Schneider’s lack
of experience.
7 The first encounter between Beckett and Keaton, as well as the whole
9
Film was awarded the Prix Filmcritica at the Venice Film Festival in 1965,
and after this, it was shown at numerous European film festivals, gaining the
critics’ praise and several official awards, for example at the London Film Fes-
tival where it was named ‘Outstanding Film of the Year’, and at the Tours Film
Festival where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize in 1966.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 396
at an angle which will not exceed 45°. When this angle is exceeded
‘O’ enters percipi, experiencing, as Beckett defined it, the “anguish
of perceivedness” (p. 163).
As the reference to George Berkeley’s philosophical theory
seems to fade away, the film theory reveals its presence in Beck-
ett’s vision of film experience. Actually the “Outline” opens with
“esse est percipi” but in the second draft Beckett seems to place
less importance on Berkeley’s ideas, making clear that “No truth
value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dra-
matic convenience” (p. 163).
The outline divides Film into three parts:
the street;
the stairs;
the room.
Instead of these three parts indicated by Beckett, Gilles Deleuze,
in his seminal essay Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze 1986
[2001]), proposes a different division according to the three types
of cinematic movement-images: the action-images (a perception of
action – medium shots), which include both the street and stairs
scenes, the perception-images (or perception of perception – long
shots), for the scene inside the room, and the affection-images (“the
perception of oneself through oneself” – close-ups), for the hidden
room and the scene when ‘O’ dozes off10. In the first and second
part, all is the perception of ‘E’, which coincides with the camera
and also with the audience’s perception, with occasional interven-
tions of the blurred and unfocussed vision of ‘O’ shown cinemato-
graphically through a lens gauze, which intensifies the mystery. In
the third part, Beckett alternates the vision ‘O’ has of the room to
the continual perception that ‘E’ has of ‘O’.
Film opens with the extreme close-up shot of a wrinkled eye
followed by the shot of the rough texture of a wall: the two con-
flicting shots create a new image, which is the feeling that a set of
eyes could suddenly appear from the wall. In his essay Film Form,
Eisenstein wrote that a new idea occurred “from the collision of
independent shots” (Eisenstein 1949, p. 49), and these new ideas
are produced in the mind of the spectators viewing a film. Ac-
The possibility of varying the range of the image and the distance
from the object thus provides the film artist with the means of split-
ting up the whole of any scene easily without interfering with reality.
Parts represent the whole, suspense may be created by leaving what is
important or remarkable out of the picture.
(Arnheim 1933 [1957, p. 81])
11
After covering both the goldfish bowl and the parrot’s cage with his over-
coat, ‘O’ opens a folder, and after having turned 90° to avoid the gaze of the eye-
lets, he takes out some photographs. In the way that Krapp relives his past with
recorded tapes, the protagonist of Film relives moments of his life by looking at
photographs which capture him at different stages of his life. He feels threat-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 398
ened by the gaze of the people who are observing him from photographs, and
his trembling hands seem to interpret his thoughts. He ends ripping up the pho-
tographs irritably.
12 In his essay “Beckett, Eisenstein and the Image: Making an Inside an Out-
Will it die out and will everything stop, even the rocking of the
rocking chair, when the double face slips into nothingness? This is
what the end suggests – death, immobility, blackness.
(Deleuze 1986 [2001, p. 68])
he refers to an evening spent with friends reading some poems: “One in which
the rime mouth-drouth occurs repeatedly is the most remarkable, like the bull
let loose among the cows in Eisenstein’s General Line, a reference which I con-
fess only occurs to me this moment, in the calm light of March winds caught up
like sleeping daffodils. I understand that one evening at the Sinclairs’ you paved
the way for one of your explosions of reality” (Beckett Archive, Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 400
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Antoine-Dunne, Jean, 2001, “Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and
Contrapuntal Montage”, in Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (ed-
itors), 2001, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (Samuel Beckett:
Endlessness in the Year 2000 / Samuel Beckett: Fin sans fin en l’an
2000), XI, pp. 315-323.
Idem, 2004, “Beckett, Eisenstein and the Image: Making an Inside an
Outside”, in Jean Antoine-Dunne and Paula Quigley (editors),
2004, The Montage Principle. Eisenstein in New Cultural and Crit-
ical Contexts, XVIII, Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York, pp. 191-
213.
Antoine-Dunne, Jean, and Paula Quigley (editors), 2004, The Montage
Principle. Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts, XVIII,
Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York.
Bair, Deirdre, 1978, Samuel Beckett. A Biography, Vintage, London
1990.
Brakhage, Stan, 1963, “Metaphors on Vision” in Film Culture, 30,
1963, pp. 12-23, reprinted with the title “Metaphors on Vision
[and] The Camera Eye”, in Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and
K. J. Shepherdson (editors), 2003, Film Theory: Critical Concepts
in Media and Cultural Studies, Routledge, London & New York,
pp. 73-80.
Bryden, Mary, 1994, “Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot)”, in Marius
Buning and Sjef Houppermans (editors), 1994, Beckett Today /
Aujourd’hui (Intertexts in Beckett’s Work: Et/ou intertextes de
l’oeuvre de Beckett), III, pp. 47-56.
Buning, Marius, and Sjef Houppermans (editors), 1994, Beckett Today
/ Aujourd’hui (Intertexts in Beckett’s Work: Et/ou intertextes de
l’oeuvre de Beckett), III.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 403
1
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs, at http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-
mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009).
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 409
Project (1999) and Beckett’s ghost story Ill Seen Ill Said. In this
case the austerity of the documentary form in Blair Witch has the
same effect as the formal simplicity of Beckett’s late prose, min-
imising ‘human’ aspects. Myrick and Sánchez’s film concerns the
disappearance of three documentary filmmakers in the process of
investigating a legendary witch in the Maryland woods, and takes
the form of supposedly ‘found’ footage, assembled, edited and re-
leased as true by some unnamed agency; at the level of story and
happening alone it belongs to the category of ‘genuine’ horror sto-
ries that are concerned with the oscillation of boundaries, the si-
multaneity of order and disorder that renders the major artwork’s
predisposition towards rendering a clear signal impossible.
In The Blair Witch Project the two opposing sides of the horror
dynamic, the motivation to make meaning and sense and the denial
of this process, are set in play and made to vibrate, forming noisy as-
semblages with fragments of rumours and stories that are either pre-
sented in the earlier parts of the film or in the body of supporting
media, or simply remembered from elsewhere. The film is entirely
free of exposition, presenting instead a perpetual grasping at mean-
ing and sense for both characters and viewer. The connection with
Ill Seen Ill Said is immediately notable here, and extends to the cen-
trality of a ‘haunted house’ as the source of disorder that nonethe-
less contains no solutions. In both, deterritorialisation appears to be
connected to the notion of ‘evil’, a term that Graham Fraser notes
is “unusually strong” (Fraser 2000, p. 773) for Beckett, but it is clear
from “the what is the wrong word the evil” (Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 9) in
Ill Seen Ill Said, that this is an insufficient, arbitrary claim, an attempt
to grasp at what defies description. It lies clearly at the heart of ghost
and horror tales, but is by no means contained to those kinds of sto-
ries. That the “what is the wrong word the evil” is shown to be leak-
ing and spreading into the environment within and the world sur-
rounding the text in both Ill Seen Ill Said and The Blair Witch Pro-
ject is central to the effectiveness of both, the book or the film itself
becoming the “inexistent centre of a formless place” (Ill Seen Ill
Said, p. 8) that renders conventional maps useless in favour of the
“invisible map” that Powell describes as leading “further off track
into a terrifying maze” (Powell 2005, p. 1).
The narrative of both Blair Witch and Ill Seen Ill Said, a search
for unambiguous information, is shown to become infected by the
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 410
How come a cabin is such a place? How came? Careful. Before re-
plying that in the far past at the time of its building there was clover
growing to its very walls. Implying further more that it the culprit. And
from it as from an evil core that the what is the wrong word the evil
spread.
(Ill Seen Ill Said, pp. 8-9)
accounts of the events surrounding the recovery of the footage make no men-
tion of the house whatsoever, despite the fact that the filming ends violently in
its basement.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 412
3
Pre-dating The Blair Witch Project by several years was the 1992 BBC tele-
vision broadcast Ghostwatch in which a number of well known television pre-
senters attempting to make a Halloween night live broadcast from a haunted
house found themselves subject to the actions of a malevolent ghost. Ghost-
watch is, like Blair Witch, entirely fictional but, despite its obvious status as such
(the use of recognisable actors, the overblown nature of the ending), still con-
tains a conspicuous power to frighten and unsettle, simply due to its juxtaposi-
tion of the supposedly secure documentary form with the irrational elements of
horror.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 413
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism
Deleuze, Gilles, 1995, “Postscript on Control Societies”, in Negotia-
tions, Columbia University Press, New York, trans. Martin Jough-
in, pp. 177-182.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, Con-
tinuum, London & New York 2007.
Idem, 1988, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Athlone Press, Lon-
don, trans. Brian Massumi.
Fisher, Mark, “Flatline Constructs”, at http://www.cinestatic.com
/trans-mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm (last accessed May 30, 2009).
Fraser, Graham, 2000, “‘No More Than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntol-
ogy and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work”, in Modern
Fiction Studies, vol. 46, n. 3, 2000, pp. 772-785.
Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker, 2007, The Exploit, Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Katz, Daniel, 1999, Saying “I” No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness
in the Prose of Samuel Beckett, North Western University Press,
Evanston.
Kittler, Friedrich, 1985, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, Stanford 1999.
McHale, Brian, 2001, “Lost in the Mall: Beckett, Federman, Space”,
in Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney (editors), 2001, En-
gagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political, SUNY Press,
Albany, pp. 112-126.
Powell, Anna, 2005, Deleuze and Horror Film, Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh.
Stamper, Chris, 1999, “Blair Witch: A Scary Home Brew”, at:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,20721-1.html?tw=wn_sto-
ry_page_next1 (last accessed May 30, 2009).
Sussman, Henry, and Christopher Devenney (editors), 2001, Engage-
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 414
ment and Indifference: Beckett and the Political, SUNY Press, Al-
bany.
Films cited
Carpenter, John, 1978, Halloween, USA.
Hitchcock, Alfred, 1960, Psycho, USA.
Myrick, Daniel, and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999, The Blair Witch Project,
USA.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 415
Appendix:
Performances and Images
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 416
When I act this play I hear Strehler’s voice telling me what to do,
and I speak as he spoke to me. I was submerged by the words the
first time I went on stage, and spoke as he did, without completely
understanding Happy Days, probably because I lacked the neces-
sary human experience, perhaps not exactly to identify, but at least
to understand everything Strehler had understood and conveyed to
me, something I only achieved later. He was like an intermediary.
The second time, in 2000, I was totally alone with all that I had
experienced and learned in those twenty years. Perhaps I only un-
derstood Happy Days then, and now I love it. It had been a kind
of torment, before: now it is something quite else, and I miss it.
I re-read it and, as I do so, I bring all the strands together again
and find new ones, and only in Happy Days, of the many plays I
have acted in, does this happen. What Beckett writes and man-
ages to say through this text is a sort of miracle, and I think it is
the same for the audience, because the text leaves marks, traces,
in people who have seen a performance, particularly this one, di-
rected by Strehler, whose interpretation of the text comes across
extremely clearly. He has brought out so many points, especially
this sense of rebellion against the human condition, which is
something positive, and acting it today, this text hits the audience,
especially the young, more violently and vitally than it did us.
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 418
Winnie’s bag
[Giulia Lazzarini has the bag with her, and takes out the various ob-
jects as she goes along, to illustrate what she says]
I thought I’d bring this bag with me; it’s travelled across Italy
and Europe as far as Russia (it’s been to Krakow, St. Petersburg,
Paris) and it never travelled with the other props: the sand and all
the rest. The stage manager looked after it so that it wouldn’t get
lost, with all the objects in it, and because I used to be rehearsing
in the rehearsal room right up to the very last day. The rest of the
equipment left earlier and I would say: “No! Leave the bag with
me”. The bag always had to be there.
In the text Winnie is asleep and she slowly wakens, and as she
looks at the holy light she says: “Another heavenly day”. But
Strehler wanted there to be a tremendous sound of bells ringing
in the darkness: DONG! DONG! DONG! and little by little the
house would go dark; I came up from beneath the stage in total
darkness and got ready against the light, behind my parasol, while
the bell tolled ominously nineteen or twenty times, after which the
lights suddenly went up and the floodlights came on and BANG!
An explosion. Winnie appeared holding the parasol in one hand,
arms outstretched, and said: “Another heavenly day!”, as if to say,
‘Here I am!’ Winnie is ready, bright and breezy, to start the day.
Strehler wanted her to be a little pink dolly, vivacious, petite and
hatless; she doesn’t put her hat on till the next scene.
The toothbrush
She begins to say a prayer; that’s the first thing. Then she begins
the day: her hand goes into the bag and brings out a toothbrush
and toothpaste and as she speaks she calls to Willie, cleans her
teeth, and not knowing where to spit the toothpaste out, she looks
round and spits it into her husband’s hole, but he doesn’t notice;
“Poor Willie–” and the tube of toothpaste “running out” corre-
sponds to poor Willie.
There are, then, three fundamental things in the opening: the
awakening, the call to Willie and the tube of toothpaste, which is
said to be “running out”. In these three things there is just about
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 419
The mirror
Then comes the mirror: Winnie looks at herself in the mirror and
then, suddenly, the first moment of anguish: “Good Lord!”
“Good God!” Oh dear, what’s happened? There’s something
wrong! Oh, my goodness, oh Lord!... And then: “Ah well–”: no,
no, no, no, it’s all right... not bad... “No better, no worse–” “No
change [...] no pain–”: nothing’s changed, nothing changes.
“Great thing that– [...] Nothing like it”. And she always says this,
over and over: “Great thing that”, something that doesn’t change,
stays put, doesn’t improve but doesn’t get any worse, the impor-
tant thing is to stay put. As she lays the mirror down she wipes the
toothbrush, and begins to notice that something is written on it,
but she can’t read it: “genuine... pure... what?” Hmm, I must see!
She’s curious, she picks up her glasses and, referring to her hus-
band: “no zest– [...] for anything– [...] no interest [...] in life”. She
puts on her glasses (“genuine... pure”) but even with them on she
can’t read; so, crossly: “Blind next–”. But she quickly recovers
herself: “Ah well– [...] Seen enough– [...] I suppose [...] by
now–”; I’ve already seen so much, I don’t mind not seeing now.
She says this because she’s struggling with God, but at the same
time is afraid of being punished, so she says: ‘No no, that’s fine...
I must obey... I can’t see, but I’ve got memory!’. So she quotes
Ophelia: “Woe woe is me– [...] to see what I see...” (i.e. nothing)
“Holy light– [...] bob up out of dark” – you see, I remember –
“blaze of hellish light”. This “hellish” makes her heart tremble, so
she turns to her husband, calling for help, her voice half strangled;
TorVergata_Beckett_XP8_TorVergata_Beckett 19/10/09 09:18 Pagina 420
script: “quegli che mai da me non fia diviso, la bocca mi baciò tut-
to tremante”. Looking at herself in the mirror, she sees Willie re-
flected in it, naked: ‘Put your pants on, dear...’.
More or less everything has been removed from the bag; only
the brush and comb are taken out later, when, at a momentary
loss, she asks: “My hair! Did I brush and comb my hair?” And
then: “Oh well, what does it matter, [...] I shall simply brush and
comb it later on, [...] I have the whole– [...] them [...] Or it? [...]
what would you say, Willie? [...] What would you say, Willie,
speaking of your hair, them or it?” And he answers “it”, and she’s
happy: “Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be
a happy day!” “That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day
goes by [...] without some blessing”.
The Browning
Then, in the bag there was a musical-box, a nail file, and the pistol,
which appears three times: when Winnie is looking for the medi-
cine and puts the pistol back, perhaps in a moment of distress when
she is looking for something to cheer herself up; and it is as if she
were thinking: ‘You again! You should be a last resort, when
there’s absolutely no other way. Why do you keep popping up like
this? Do you know what I’m going to do? I’ve had enough of you!
I’m throwing you out! There’. And she plants it in a hole and draws
a house round it in the sand: “There, that’s your little house!”. And
then, finally, when she has put everything back in the bag, the pis-
tol is the last, but she has second thoughts, points it at her temple
but just scratches herself with it, then leaves it out, laying it back on
the ground. She doesn’t want it in her bag any more. So, at the end
of the first act everything goes back into the bag ready for the next
day, except the revolver.
During the second act the pistol is always out, like the bag, but
by this time Winnie is buried up to her neck; only her head can
be seen. She can see the bag but can’t get at what’s in it, and she
sees the “Brownie”, the pistol. She tells Willie: ‘It’s there, it’s
there, don’t worry, it’s there’; but, being buried, she can’t reach
it. And in any case for Beckett there is no conclusion, what there
is, is existing, carrying on, staying there.
Help! And then: “Ah well, not long now, Winnie, can’t be long
now, until the bell for sleep. [...] Then you may close your eyes,
then you must close your eyes– and keep them closed. [...] Why
say that again? [...] I used to think... I say I used to think there was
no difference between one fraction of a second and the next. I
used to say... [...] Winnie you are changeless, there is never any
difference between one fraction of a second and the next. [...]
Why bring that up again? [...] There is so little one can bring up
one brings up all. [...] All one can. [...] My neck is hurting me. [...]
Ah that’s better. [...] I can do no more. [...] Say no more. [...] But
I must say more. [...] Oh yes, abounding mercies. [...] And now?
[...] And now, Willie?” And then that lovely image of the flute
glasses in the first act comes up. Golden hair, the toast drunk from
crystal glasses: “The pink fizz [...] The flute glasses. [...] The last
guest gone. [...] The last bumper with the bodies nearly touching.
[...] The look. [...] What day? [...] What look? [...] I hear cries”
and she sees him climbing up: ‘Willie! What a lovely surprise!
Where have you been all this time? What have you been doing
with yourself? You heard me shout for help! Were you getting
dressed?’ “Reminds me of the day you came whining for my hand.
[...] I worship you, Winnie, be mine. [...] Life a mockery without
Win. [...] Where are the flowers?” and he brings out the bunch
wrapped in the knickers. “That’s right, Willie, look at me. [...]
Feast your old eyes, Willie. [...] What ails you, Willie. I never saw
such an expression!” – because he’s crawling towards the pistol,
and of course towards her head, towards her face. So she says:
“Come on, dear, put a bit of jizz into it, I’ll cheer you on. [...] Is
it me you’re after, Willie... or something else? [...] Do you want to
touch my face ... again? [...] Is it a kiss you’re after, Willie ... or is
it something else? [...] don’t look at me like that!”: she’s begin-
ning to be frightened, ‘why are you looking at me like that?’
“Have you gone off your head, Willie?” “Win...” he says, and
ends up in his hole again. Now she feels lonely, so what she hangs
onto is this: “Win”, he called her Win, a pet name, and that means
victory. So in a tiny little voice she says: “Oh this is a happy day”
– because he has called her Win – “This will have been another
happy day!” – but she adds: “After all. [...] So far”, and she sings
their song:
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This was just to give an idea. It isn’t possible to act Happy Days
outside the context of the theatre, without the lights, getting the
build up of her rebellion right, starting from a feeling almost of
distress and loss of herself, almost a defeat. But then, with one
beat of her wings, Winnie rises again and right up to the end fights
the ineluctable.
Aspittannu a Godot
Ninny Aiuto
Looking at this title, the first question one could ask him/herself
is: why translate Waiting for Godot into Sicilian?
At the beginning of this experience, it seemed as if a pack of
cards, opened fanwise, were left on my table, containing several
questions in one: why translate / Waiting for Godot / into Sicil-
ian?
With regard to the first part of question, ‘the act’ of translat-
ing meets a basic desire of knowledge which, passing through dif-
ferent cultures, has its biggest obstacles in the transit itself: lan-
guages. The first problem a translator faces is that all texts always
tell us only a part (even if it were the majority) of a story or ‘fact’
they refer to. So a translator will most likely be in the position of
any director having to put the text, as it were, on stage or on a
movie set. Although I know the difference, this is the reason why
I have never liked distinguishing too strictly between theatrical,
poetic and narrative text as, in my opinion, we can’t exclude any
text from being theatrical. Peter Brook said: “[we] can take any
empty space and call it a bare stage”1, so can we take any word –
even only one! – and put it on “a bare stage”.
Then, proceeding to the second and third part of the main
question, in this actual case I must say they are naturally connect-
ed to each other, both of them referring to a local and a general
aspect, at the same time.
Especially if we consider that, except for 13th century Sicilian
poetry, the Sicilian language lacks a great written tradition, I must
admit that translating into this precise language might be based
1 Peter Brook, 1968, The Empty Space, Touchstone, New York 1995, p. 9.
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2
Carlo Fruttero, Introduzione to Samuel Beckett, Aspettando Godot, Ei-
naudi, Torino 1956, p. 10 (my translation).
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ian were suitable to Godot discourse. All this lasted almost three
weeks, for only about eighty lines extracted from my Sicilian
translation.
Then our day at the Beckett Conference arrived. Both of us,
and not just myself as the translator, were thrilled: at the exact
time of our entry I timidly gave Francesco one of two small
bowlers I had brought for the reading, then we silently went for-
ward into the room.
When we started reading, the audience seemed to have disap-
peared, and our gestures started matching the words, for us as we
stood by a tree in any (Sicilian) country road. We realized we had
come to the end only because of a burst of applause from the au-
dience: Francesco and I took a glance at them and in their smiles
we could read how much they had enjoyed those moments. After
one minute I turned towards him and told him half in jest: “Pen-
su chi ‘unn’avemu cchiù nenti \ii fari ccà’” (“I think we’ve noth-
ing more to do here”). Yet he replied: “‘Mancu a nautra banna’”
(“Nor anywhere else”).
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* For the images from Antonio Borriello’s productions see figures 26 to 29.
1 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett. A Biography, 1978, Vintage, London 1990.
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ett: “The best possible play is one in which there are no actors, on-
ly the text. I’m trying to find a way to write one” (p. 544). This po-
sition brings to mind Gordon Craig’s intention. Beckett achieved
what he was aiming for in “Breath” (approximately 20 seconds,
and no actors) and in Not I (only a mouth on stage).
It is not after all difficult to perform Beckett. It is, indeed, ab-
solutely simple. He is usually spoken of as a difficult author to in-
terpret or even to read. I believe that only what he says should be
considered. One does not interpret Beckett, one lives him. There
are no references or allusions to any other philosophical, theologi-
cal or literary concept. There is nothing extraordinary, just the or-
dinary. One does not betray Beckett: one obeys him respectfully, I
could even say one obeys him with conscious orthodoxy, avoiding
theatrical excesses, with the truth of life and death. I am positive
about this. For the Quaker in Beckett the Word is absolute, as are
his texts: perfect and untouchable. I may exaggerate (indeed I do)
when I see the work of this great, humble 20th century genius hark-
ing back to The Book of Wisdom: “Omnia censura et numero et
pondere disposuisti”. But I see it like this, at least in my own pro-
ductions: a geometry of action, thought and vision, “absolutely
faithful to the plays of the great Parisian Dubliner in which the re-
alism and poetic quality of present and future images suggest not
so much the projection of a world outside, but rather a world de-
sirous of identification with the mouthscene of the Beckettian self”
(Biagio Scognamiglio), as can be seen in the photographs of mo-
ments from my productions by Aliberti and Pomposo, presented
at the Conference “Beckett in Rome”.
Respect for the text is not universal. That for some time now
productions in Italy (and abroad) have not always been faithful
should hardly surprise us. In Italy the dispute over the closure, on
the insistence of the heirs the Master of the Absurd, of a produc-
tion of Waiting for Godot in which the actors were women, is well
known. The affair nearly ended up in court, even at question time
in Parliament! Nonetheless, in conjunction with SIAE (Italian As-
sociation of Authors and Publishers), the company eventually
won their urgent appeal in Rome.
Equally well known is Peter Brook’s most recent production
of Fragments (including Come and Go, “Rough for Theatre I”,
“Rockaby”, “Act Without Words II”, “neither”). I have met
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Brook, and respect him immensely. In Come and Go, though, this
marvellous producer uses two men.
I feel that the figurines in the “dramaticule” are like moerae or
parcae, mysterious, deeply poetic creatures, multicoloured gusts of
air (“dull violet (Ru), dull red (Vi), dull yellow (Flo)”, as in Come
and Go, p. 356), to be seen in the only existing colour photographs
of my productions. All the others, of moments in Waiting for
Godot, Not I, “Ohio Impromptu”, “What Where”, are black and
white. In Come and Go, as I have said, there are three women, three
delicate petals floating, coming, going: silent winged female pres-
ences. They are absolutely feminine, of no other nature. It is true
that the wide brims of their hats hide the faces of Flo, Vi and Ru,
leaving only mouth and chin barely visible in the half-darkness,
which could justify the choice of male actors. But the spirit of act-
ing, gesture, timbre of voice and above all the text require ab-
solutely what the playwright intended, word for word.
By adhering closely to this method the actor uncovers his or her
own interpretation based on technical skill and individual style and
the whole range of emotional possibilities in order to communicate
them to the audience. All redundancy must be avoided.
The actor of Beckett is at the service of the text, both script
and set.
Over the years several Italian productions have unjustifiably
altered the original texts beyond recognition. However, the mas-
terly interpretations of a wonderful Laura Adani (Happy Days), an
exceptional Glauco Mauri (Krapp’s Last Tape and “Act Without
Words”), a splendid Giulia Lazzarini (Happy Days) and other
productions by Luciano Mondolfo and Andrea Camilleri, to cite
only a few, are absolutely memorable.
In the general run of things, a personal interpretation of a play
which accounts for translation, language, culture and inter-
preters’ preferences will be satisfactory (even in the case of re-
vivals of classics such as Brecht), but in the case of Beckett the sit-
uation changes radically. Fidelity to the text, even down to the
smallest detail, should result, as it were, in successful theatrical
consubstantiation.
It comes to mind that in some cases Beckett himself did well,
extremely well, by calling a halt to productions failing to follow
his directions. Perhaps Euripides and Shakespeare, Molière, Pi-
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randello and Eduardo De Filippo staged their own work for a per-
formance both more effective and truer to their intentions.
2 A bell rings once, twice, another sounds shrilly, more shrilly, long, short,
leaves, a rough wooden table 2.40 x 1.20 metres, in Oh les beaux jours / Happy
Days, En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, “Ohio Impromptu”.
4 “Rusty black narrow trousers too short for him. Rusty black sleeveless
waistcoat, four capacious pockets. [...] Grimy white shirt open at neck, no col-
lar. Surprising pair of white boots, size ten at least, very narrow and pointed”:
Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 1986, Faber and
Faber, London 1990, p. 215.
5 “Spools”, “reel of tape”, “large banana”, Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958, in The
The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 215; “blonde for preference, [...] big bo-
som”, Happy Days, 1961, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 138; “long white
hair”, “Ohio Impromptu”, 1982, in The Complete Dramatic Works, cit., p. 445.
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minute details in the full stage directions in all his works. Direc-
tions and injunctions, where I as actor and producer am con-
cerned, are never considered to be obstacles or arid instructions,
but rather as stimuli to animate and illuminate Beckett’s theatre.
Thus nothing is improvised or random. Each word and line, each
fragment of mime and gesture is rehearsed with varying rhythm
and tension, just as space and lighting are analysed and balanced.
It is hard work indeed, but liberating and therapeutic. And when
the page of a play is transposed and assimilated mentally and
physically onto the stage, then I am ready to go on stage myself.
Now Beckett’s text becomes mine, and in the resounding silence
it is wonderful to act and give myself to the public.
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Beckett’s Doodles*
Bill Prosser
Notes on Contributors
Indexes
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“Ghost Trio”, XVI, 68, 124n, 273, 305- Murphy, XIV, 7, 11, 22-23, 61, 64, 96,
323; 124n, 190-210, 214, 244, 252, 268,
– “Geister Trio”, 310. 271, 286-288, 378.
Giorni felici, see Happy Days.
“Nacht und Träume”, 68, 273.
Happy Days, XVI, XVIII, 86n, 107, 114, “neither”, 431.
117-118, 135, 259, 270, 332-334, Not I, XII, XVIII, 41, 48-56, 81-82, 108,
336, 355, 359, 364, 365 and n, 367, 136 and n, 151, 259, 270, 334, 356,
368 and n, 374, 417-425, 432, 433n; 358-360, 369, 431-432;
– Oh les beaux jours, 40, 364-365, – Pas moi, 41, 44, 48-56, 82.
433n; Nouvelles et textes pour rien, see Texts
– Giorni felici, 364-374, 416-425. for Nothing.
“Henry Hayden, homme-peintre”, 157
and n, 171. “Ohio Impromptu”, XVI, 12, 95n, 270,
“hors crâne seul dedans”, XII. 272-273, 338, 432, 433n.
How It Is, 5, 12, 67, 149-152, 233, 280, Oh les beaux jours, see Happy Days.
289; “Old Earth”, 288-289.
– Comment c’est, 12, 151.
“Humanistic Quietism”, 17. “Papini’s Dante”, 9.
Human Wishes, XVIII, 15-16, 416, 435. Pas moi, see Not I.
“Peintres de l’empêchement”, 375n.
Ill Seen Ill Said, 91 and n, 118-119, 409- “La peinture des van Velde ou le Mon-
412; de et le pantalon”, 375n, 378.
– Mal vu mal dit, 91, 118n. “A Piece of Monologue”, 95n, 96n,
Imagination Dead Imagine, 252. 114, 152, 305, 334.
L’Innommable, see The Unnamable. “Play”, XII, 44-48, 52-56, 107, 114, 224,
“Intercessions by Denis Devlin”, 144. 269, 280, 333-334, 358-360;
– “Comédie”, 41, 44, 52-56.
Le Kid, 16. Premier amour, see First Love.
Krapp’s Last Tape, XVI, 107, 113-114, Proust, XVI, 7, 13, 41, 59, 65n, 117, 125,
171, 245n, 269, 277-291, 329-330, 160-161, 163-165, 171, 277, 291,
355, 397n, 430, 432-433. 381.
– The Fall of Hyperion, 117, 118; Leopardi, Giacomo, XII, 6, 9-10, 12-13,
– Hyperion, 115, 117; 20-21, 249 and n, 345, 371-372;
– “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”, 280; – “A se stesso”, 10, 12;
– Ode on a Grecian Urn, 277. – Canti, 6, 13;
Keller, Gottfried, 16; – “La ginestra”, 371;
– Der grüne Heinrich, 16. – Operette morali, 6;
Kennedy, Jake, 129. – Le ricordanze, 249 and n.
Kennedy, Michael, 307. Leucippus, 195.
Kennedy, Sighle, 193, 195, 197 and n. Leventhal, A. J. (known as Con), 9, 13,
Kenner, Hugh, 192. 16.
Kiberd, Declan, 132. Levi, Primo, 79 and n, 80;
Kirby, Michael, 103-104. – Se questo è un uomo, 79n.
Kittler, Friedrich, 406. Lévinas, Emmanuel, 382.
Knowlson, James, XI, 20, 50, 60, 92n, Levitan, Isaac, 265.
97n, 114, 123 and n, 127 and n, 132, Leyda, Jay, 392n.
134, 135 and n, 136n, 137-138, 191, Leymarie, Jean, 135 and n, 136n.
193n, 198, 206n, 240n, 244, 260, Lingis, Alphonso, 181 and n.
265n, 267n, 281 and n, 282, 284, Lloyd, David, 132.
305 and n, 307n, 311n, 316, 360- Locatelli, Carla, XIV, 179, 379.
361, 390, 392n. Locke, John, 66, 93.
Kraft, Werner, 224, 227, 229. Lombardo, Agostino, 43.
Kristeva, Julia, 144n, 383. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, 407.
Kroll, Jeri L., 250. Lowenfels, Walter, 240.
Kundert-Gibbs, John Leeland, 166n, Lukács, György, 228, 231.
167n. Lyotard, François, 181 and n.
– Armance, 246, 250; van Gogh, Vincent, XVI, 135 and n, 136
– Le Rouge et le Noir, 64. and n, 265, 271-272;
Stoker, Bram, 406; – Barques sur la plage, 136n;
– Dracula, 406. – La Berceuse, 135, 271-272;
Stravinsky, Igor, 231. – La Crau: jardins de maraîchers,
Strehler, Giorgio, XVIII, 370-373, 416- 136n.
425. – Gauguin’s Chair, 136;
Strindberg, August, XVI, 260; – Nature morte: Bottines, 135n;
– The Ghost Sonata (Spöksonatem), – Vincent’s Chair, 136.
XVI, 260. Vasilicò, Giuliano, 367.
Stryk, Lucien, 166n. Védrenne, Véronique, 311n, 316.
Sullivan, Arthur, 287n. Velázquez, Diego, 128;
Sussman, Henry, 413. – Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 128.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, 166n. Velde, Bram van, 122n, 194.
Symonds, John Addington, 7-9, 11. Velde, Jakoba van, 137.
Synge, John Millington, 132 and n. Venuti, Lawrence, 48.
Verdicchio, Massimo, 9.
Tagliaferri, Aldo, 14. Vermeer, Jan, 265.
Tajiri, Yoshiki, 75. Vertov, Dziga, 393.
Takahashi, Yasunari, 167. Vico, Giambattista, 9, 94n, 148;
Tal-Coat, Pierre, 159. – The New Science (La Scienza Nuo-
Tandy, Jessica, 259. va), 9.
Tannen, Deborah, 301. Vigo, Jean, 393;
Tasso, Torquato, XII, 6-7, 10, 13, 58, – L’Atalante, 393;
345; – Zéro de conduite, 393.
– L’Aminta, 7; Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 25 and
– La Gerusalemme Liberata, 6, 13, 58. n, 26-27.
Taylor, Christiana J., 105-106. Visconti, Laura, 10.
Teresi, Francesco, 416, 428-429. Vitrac, Roger, 15.
Thacker, Eugene, 406. Vleeschauwer, Herman J. De, 191n,
Thimberg, Nathalia, 334. 204.
Thomas, Dylan, 270n. Vogelweide, Walter von der, XVI, 267
Tiepolo, Giambattista, 267. and n.
Tisdall, Caroline, 103.
Tonelli, Angelo, 343. Waddington, Victor, 134.
Tophoven, Elmar, 49-50, 126n, 230. Wagner, Wilhelm Richard, 305.
Tophoven, Erika, 49. Waletsky, Joshua, 295.
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 211, 220. Warner, Deborah, 361.
Tucker, David, XIV. Warner, Francis, 357n.
Tynan, Kenneth, 127 and n. Warrilow, David, 351.
Tzara, Tristan, 390-391. Watson, David, 91n.
Watts, Alan, 163.
Uhlmann, Anthony, 192, 194-195, Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette, 80n.
197n, 200, 206. Weiler, Gershon, 94n.
Ussher, Arland, 193, 195, 197. Weller, Shane, XV, 192, 229, 234-235.
Wheatley, David, 177n.
Valéry, Paul, 232. Whitehead, Alfred North, 213.
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