Samuel Beckett and Technology [1 ed.] 1474463282, 9781474463287

Citation preview

Samuel Beckett and Technology

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Figure 1 Samuel Beckett in the studio of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart during the production of He Joe in 1966. Photographer: Wilhelm Pabst. © Kreisarchiv Göppingen.

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Samuel Beckett and Technology

Edited by Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon, 2021 © the chapters their several authors, 2021 Cover image: Samuel Beckett working on the Süddeutscher Rundfunk production of He Joe in 1966. Kreisarchiv Göppingen S 29 Fotonachlass Wilhelm Pabst. Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Bembo by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 6328 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6330 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6331 7 (epub)

The right of Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Preface Clas Zilliacus Introduction: ‘Up to the neck in technical muck’: The Enduring Success of Beckett’s Technological Failures Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon

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Part I: Mechanical and Electrical Technologies 1. The Unmaking of Homo Faber: Beckett and the Exhaustion of Technē Shane Weller 2. The Permanent Way: Movement and Stasis in Beckett’s Railways Feargal Whelan

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3. ‘with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar’: The Strangeness of Technology in Beckett Dúnlaith Bird

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4. Beckett and La Mettrie: From Man a Machine to Techno-Human Being Céline Thobois

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5. Monadic Clocks in Samuel Beckett’s Quad: Decomposing the ‘dramatized taboo’ Naoya Mori

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Part II: Media Technologies and Intermediality 6. Beckett’s Technography: Traces of Radio in the Later Prose Pim Verhulst

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7. Beckett’s Words and Music, ‘or some other trouble’: Vagenuing on the Airwaves Lucy Jeffery

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8. ‘a medium for fleas’: Beckett, Mitrani and 1950s–1960s French Television Drama Galina Kiryushina

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9. Beckett’s Multimedial Authorship: Language of Technology in the Genesis of Play and Film Olga Beloborodova

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10. Beckett and Television: Anachronism as Innovation Jonathan Bignell

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11. Making and Remaking Samuel Beckett’s What Where Walter Asmus

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Part III: Ideas of Technology 12. Portals of Invention: A ‘techno-logical’ Reading of the Prometheus Figure in Beckett’s The Unnamable Thomas Thoelen

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13. Technology and the Naive Artist: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape Michael D’Arcy

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14. Beckett’s Invisible Matter: Echo, Technology and Posthuman Affect Ruben Borg

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15. Digital Poetics and Digital Hermeneutics in Beckett Studies: Toward a Manuscript Chronology Dirk Van Hulle Coda: Viral Beckett Nicholas Johnson Index

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank, first and foremost, Ondřej Pilný, Head of the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University Prague, for his encouragement and help with the organisation of the ‘Samuel Beckett and Technology’ conference (13–15 September 2018), which sparked the idea for the present publication. Both the conference and the work on this volume were supported by the European Regional Development Fund – Project ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (Reg. no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors, not only for their excellent work, but also for their patient and constructive cooperation when dealing with editorial queries and revisions. We have received a lot of help in obtaining the images used on the front cover and in the pages of this volume, which were taken by Wilhelm Pabst during the 1966 production of Beckett’s He Joe at the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart. We thank Nicole Schmid (Foto-Museum Uhingen) and Reiner Wieland (Schriftgutarchiv Ostwürttemberg) for steering us in the right direction. For locating the images and giving us permission to use them we are very grateful to Dr Stefan Lang, and for transferring them from the original negatives to Torben Singer (Kreisarchiv Göppingen). Finally, we would also like to thank Jackie Jones, our editor at Edinburgh University Press, for supporting this project since its inception, and Ersev Ersoy and Fiona Conn for guiding the book to publication.

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Notes on Contributors

Einat Adar is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. She was awarded a PhD from Charles University Prague in 2017 for a thesis examining Beckett’s lifelong engagement with Berkeley’s philosophy and its influence on his literary production in prose, theatre and film. Her work explores the interface between philosophy and Irish modernism, and has been published in the essay collections Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour and Tradition and Modernity: New Essays in Irish Studies, which she also co-edited, as well as in the journals Partial Answers and Estudios Irlandeses. Walter Asmus is a German theatre director. He assisted Samuel Beckett in the renowned production of Waiting for Godot at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin in 1975, and continued his collaboration with him on stage and TV plays until the author’s death. He directed all but two of Samuel Beckett’s plays internationally. He is Professor Emeritus of the Drama Department at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and lives in Berlin. Olga Beloborodova is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp, currently working at its Centre for Manuscript Genetics. She has published articles on the subjects of Beckett, cognition and genetic criticism in the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. Together with Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst, she co-edited Beckett and Modernism, published by Palgrave in 2018. She is also assistant editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies and a member of the editorial board of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Her monograph The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play/Film was published with University Press of Antwerp/Bloomsbury in 2019. Her second monograph, Postcognitivist Beckett, came out in 2020 as part of the new ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’ series (Cambridge University Press).

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Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading. His work on Beckett includes the monograph Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (2009) and several articles in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the Journal of Beckett Studies. Jonathan has published chapters on Beckett’s screen drama in the collections Writing and Cinema (1999), which he also edited; Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts (ed. Linda BenZvi, 2003); Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (ed. Daniela Caselli, 2010); and Pop Beckett: Intersections with Popular Culture (eds Paul Stewart and David Pattie, 2019). He is a trustee of the Beckett International Foundation and a member of the Samuel Beckett Centre at the University of Reading. Dúnlaith Bird is Senior Lecturer in English at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. She co-edited and contributed to the ‘Beckett Between’ issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and has a chapter in the forthcoming Beckett’s Afterlives (2021). She is a theatre reviewer for The Beckett Circle and the founder of the Beckett Brunch, the fourth iteration of which took place in Paris and Dublin in 2021. Ruben Borg is Associate Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Poetics Today and numerous other journals devoted to twentieth-century literature and film. He has also contributed chapters to collaborative volumes on Deleuze, Beckett and posthumanism. Ruben is the author of The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida (2007) and Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite (2019), and co-editor of three books on Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014), Problems with Authority (2017) and Gallows Humour (2020). His current project is a book on Joyce and emotion. Michael D’Arcy is Associate Professor of English Literature at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia. He is the co-editor (with Mathias Nilges) of The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture (Routledge, 2016) and the author of numerous articles on modernism, visual culture and twentieth-century philosophy. His writing on Beckett has appeared in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and Samuel Beckett in Context (ed. Anthony Uhlmann, Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is currently completing a monograph titled Modernist Naiveté. Lucy Jeffery is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Nottingham and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading’s Samuel Beckett

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Research Centre. She has published chapters in edited collections and articles on the work of Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ezra Pound, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process, is forthcoming with ibidem-Verlag. Nicholas Johnson is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, where he co-founded the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies and convenes the Creative Arts Practice research theme. With Jonathan Heron, he co-authored Experimental Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2020), co-edited the Journal of Beckett Studies special issues on pedagogy (29:1, 2020) and performance (23:1, 2014), and founded the Samuel Beckett Laboratory in 2013. With David Shepherd, he co-authored Bertolt Brecht’s David Fragments (1919–1921): An Interdisciplinary Study (Bloomsbury, 2020). Directing credits include Virtual Play (first prize, New European Media Awards). He works as a dramaturg for Pan Pan and Dead Centre, and has held visiting research positions at Freie Universität Berlin and Yale University. Galina Kiryushina is a doctoral candidate and researcher at the Centre for Irish Studies, Charles University Prague. Her current research focuses on intermediality in the work of Samuel Beckett, in particular on the transitions between the media of film and television and Beckett’s late prose. Her essays on Beckett and cinema have appeared as journal articles and book chapters, most recently in Beckett and Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (32:1, 2020). Naoya Mori is Professor of English at Kobe Women’s University, Japan, and a co-translator of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett into Japanese (Hakusuisha, 2003). He has published numerous papers on Beckett in Japanese as well as in English, including ‘Beckett’s Windows and “the windowless self”’ in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui: After Beckett/ D’après Beckett (14, 2004); ‘“No body is at rest”: The Legacy of Leibniz’s Force in Beckett’s Oeuvre’ in Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (Oxford University Press, 2008); ‘An Animal Inside: Beckett/Leibniz’s Stone, Animal, Human and the Unborn’ in Beckett and Animals, edited by Mary Bryden (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Mark Nixon is Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading, where he is also co-director of the Beckett International Foundation. With Dirk Van Hulle, he is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies, codirector of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and series editor of ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’ (Cambridge University Press). He is also a former president

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of the Samuel Beckett Society. He has authored or edited more than ten books on Beckett’s work; recent publications include Samuel Beckett’s Library (with Dirk Van Hulle; Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the critical edition of Beckett’s short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ (Faber, 2014). He is currently preparing a critical edition of Beckett’s ‘German Diaries’ (with Oliver Lubrich; Suhrkamp, 2022). Céline Thobois is a PhD student at the Drama Department in Trinity College Dublin. Her current research looks at the relationship between the human, technology and the environment in Samuel Beckett’s drama through the prisms of behaviourism and neuroscience. She has contributed to Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and The Beckett Circle and has worked as a translator and assistant dramaturg for Dead Centre’s Beckett’s Room (Gate Theatre, 2019). Céline is a co-organiser of ‘Beckett and the Anthropocene’ (2020) and co-convener of the Samuel Beckett Reading Group, both at the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. Thomas Thoelen completed his PhD on the subject of technics/technology in Samuel Beckett’s prose fiction at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), research for which was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). He recently co-edited the special issue ‘Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman’ for Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (32:2, 2020). Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp. With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), series editor of the Cambridge University Press series ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’ and editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies. His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015), James Joyce’s Work in Progress (2016), the Beckett Digital Library and a number of volumes in the ‘Making of’ series (Bloomsbury) and genetic editions in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which won the 2019 Prize for a Bibliography, Archive or Digital Project of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Pim Verhulst is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp. His research combines genetic criticism, audionarratology, media and radio theory to study the work of (late) modernist and post-war authors from the British Isles, with a focus on the intermedial exchanges between traditional art forms and new technologies. He has published articles, chapters, essay collections and books on radio, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard,

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Caryl Churchill, Dylan Thomas and Harold Pinter. His monograph The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project series, of which he is an editorial board member. Shane Weller is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006), Modernism and Nihilism (2010), Language and Negativity in European Modernism (2019), The Idea of Europe: A Critical History (2021), and Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism (2021). Feargal Whelan is a post-doctoral research associate at the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, Trinity College Dublin. He has published and presented widely on Beckett and on twentieth-century Irish drama. He is a co-director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School at Trinity College Dublin and is a regular collaborator with Mouth on Fire theatre company on its annual Beckett in Foxrock performances. Book chapters are included in Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2016), Beckett and Modernism (Palgrave, 2018), The Gate Theatre Dublin: Inspiration and Craft (Peter Lang, 2018) and Beckett and Politics (Palgrave, 2020), and articles in Estudios Irlandeses (2018, 2019) and Journal of Beckett Studies (Spring 2020). His monograph Beckett and the Irish Protestant Imagination is forthcoming with ibidem-Verlag. He is the editor of The Beckett Circle. Clas Zilliacus is Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature at Åbo Akademi University, the Swedish-language university of Finland. His PhD (Åbo Akademi University, 1976) discusses Beckett and broadcast media. He has served on the advisory editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies and on the board of the Samuel Beckett Society. Other research interests include the modes and rhetoric of documentary prose and drama, and the history of Swedophone literature in Finland. He has also been engaged in radio and television work, in criticism and columns, and dabbled as a translator (e.g. Shakespeare, Luigi Malerba, Finnish poets).

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Preface Clas Zilliacus

Broadcast art was not much of a topic in the early years of the Beckett industry, the interest in technology came later. The very first entrant was what Hugh Kenner called the ‘Cartesian centaur’. Kenner found Beckett’s ubiquitous bicyclist to be a paradigm of body and soul, man and machine in one saddle. By and large, the subjects of research long remained as lofty as the nostalgie de la boue exuded by Beckett’s writings would allow. And the physical means of access to them was provided by page and stage. I was to access Beckett from the air. Viewed from the Finland of my youth most parts of the world seemed far away, indeed inaccessible. This made me an ardent shortwave radio listener, or DXer, already in my mid-teens; D stands for ‘distance’ and X for ‘unknown’. Remoteness was the name of the game. DXing also landed me my first paid job, with the Finnish Section of the BBC at Bush House in London. I had acquired the habit of tuning in to the ‘Beeb’, and then applied and was hired as a summer substitute dictation typist. I ended up reading the news on a mike, quivering with pride. To me the BBC was the paragon of broadcasting. This was in 1962; I was nineteen at the time. I spent the autumn at Trinity College Dublin as an exchange student from my own institution, Åbo Akademi University (Finland). Most literature courses offered at Trinity, I found, were securely fastened in the pre-war canon, but transient passengers like myself were allowed a looser rein. The tutor picked out for me by the TCD bureau for foreign students was an affable man, and when in conversation with him I enthused over my summer with the BBC, he switched to recent subjects with remarkable swiftness. There is this Irish writer, he let me know, who shook up the BBC Third Programme with his first radio play five years ago. So why don’t you read All That Fall by Samuel Beckett, he said, it can be had at the price of 5s net.

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My tutor was Con Leventhal, a lifelong close friend of Beckett’s who was serving his final year as Lecturer in Modern Languages at Trinity. Of this bigger picture I had no idea, but I did heed my tutor’s advice. I read the play and it stuck firmly. Later we both found ourselves on the first advisory editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies. I felt like the odd man out, a distinctly junior member, but I certainly embraced the company. A few years after Trinity I had grown serious about Beckett and radio, and spent another summer in London doing research on the subject. Martin Esslin, head of BBC radio drama since 1963, cleared the way for me into archives and listening cubicles, as far as his venerable institution would permit. In 1976 he came over to Åbo to serve as ‘faculty opponent’ at my doctoral defence. He had an unruffled way with the settled procedures of academe. Examiners usually come armed with a long script to intimidate their victim. The Esslin approach was a tiny slip of paper, which helped him to hours of cordial inquisitiveness. The object at issue was my thesis, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1976). It deals with the radio plays and the one TV play (Eh Joe) known at the time, but it also addresses the BBC context, media aesthetics and adaptations, and questions of manuscript filiation. It is rather a mixed bag. Tottering into antiquity this book has, of course, been nibbled at if not devoured by more recent research, by tapping sources not available at the time, by better analyses and by the more considered judgements that time allows and engenders. Mine was an interim assessment. In hindsight, I think today I would defend a somewhat different thesis. I would certainly continue to insist on the specific qualities and quiddities of radiogenic art. I would also take on the new works for TV. But I would now also zoom in on the potential of broadcast media for safeguarding an artist’s vision: they have an array of means, including repeat and retake and the editing into shape, which minimise the part played by chance. Beckett’s ambitions with regard to scripted control were first highlighted in the pause notation he devised for his plays. The new media enabled him to extend the control further, into the production process. There is another aspect common to the dramatic works by Beckett which were premiered after my thesis was written. In this phase Beckett was busy investigating the minima of both televisual expression and of brief stage texts. Irrespective of their medium these have striking affinities: they are nonnarrative, almost nonrepresentational. They convey images, rhythmic visuals shorn of anecdotal content. They were new in kind, which means they launched a new convention. Thus Beckett needed to find protective measures – binding constraints – for their adequate presentation.

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There is also in this development a marked element of art as craft, of tekhnē. To ground my claim a detour into Beckett’s biography is necessary. I take my cue from what we now know about Beckett’s formative years as an artist, facts that came to the fore in the late nineties through James Knowlson’s biography and more fully in the first volume of Beckett’s letters (2009). I am referring to his grand tour of Germany in the 1930s, a Bildungsreise devoted to music and, above all, to pictorial arts seen in museums and galleries. On his trip Beckett scrutinised a vast number of paintings: how they were proportioned, pigmented, executed, hung, surrounded, lit – in short, presented. This tour has gone on record as an art connoisseur’s apprenticeship. It may have been more than that: indelible exposure to art in its final, realised, fixed state, art after the varnishing. Good, bad or indifferent, the end result had been cleared by its originator. The German tour may have served Beckett in matters of artistic command, and with the hope that this could be attempted in verbal art as well – and in the art of drama in particular, however stubbornly theatre seems to defy exhaustive encoding. We are familiar with Beckett’s unease, voiced in 1937 in a letter, over literature being left so far behind painting and music. Painters provided Beckett as a dramatist with some of his most striking images: Caspar David Friedrich (Waiting for Godot) and Caravaggio (Not I) are cases in point. They are literally arresting. Beckett’s theatre abounds in frozen moments, in tableaux devised for the proscenium stage, or for film and TV, two heirs to the box stage. All three formats come close to the art of painting. Beckett knew that the way he envisioned his playscripts could not be fully scored. Even so, he wanted as much control as possible of the semiotic aggregate he had written into them. Safeguarding the execution in mise-en-scène was an integral part of this vision. A merely competent transferral from page to stage, or tape or disc or film, cannot be trusted to convey a vision unimpaired, for this vision is something heretofore unseen. ‘The remains of some convention seem to lie between us,’ Beckett once wrote with gentle despair to Alan Schneider, one of his most devoted directors. Conventional wisdom in the theatre takes things for granted. Unconventional wisdom – or nonrepresentational convention – has no previous knowledge to fall back on and has to fight for what it knows. Its meek ambition is to fail better. Thus a role is just ‘a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text’ (Beckett on Not I ). I suggest Beckett approached broadcasting as one step in his pursuit of control. There was the original vision at the outset. Farthest downstream, in the best of worlds, this vision would come to haven unscathed. The first step was the stage dramatist’s pursuit of precise notation for pause and silence. When at the second step he ventured into broadcast art, he was also looking for the

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means provided by technology to hone and edit the productions into the shape he had envisioned. At step three he went into directing, radically challenging drama’s old privilege of print over performance. Radio and TV were intermediate steps in his search for control, by way of blueprint to finished shape. Beckett probably never really saw himself as a director, hardly in the theatre and certainly not in broadcasting studios. Travelling to Stuttgart in 1966 to record a German Eh Joe, he refused a fee: ‘My only concern is with helping to have the work presented as I see it.’ It was the shape that mattered.

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Introduction ‘Up to the neck in technical muck’: The Enduring Success of Beckett’s Technological Failures Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon

On Christmas Eve 1906, voice and music are said to have been transmitted on radio waves for the first time in history when the Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden attempted an experimental mixed broadcast of Handel’s Largo from Xerxes played from an Edison phonograph recording, a live violin solo, verses from the Gospel of Luke and wishes for a merry Christmas to the listeners. Samuel Beckett had been born on 13 April, the Good Friday of the same year, and his life spanned most of the twentieth century with its numerous technological inventions and innovations prior to his death shortly before Christmas of 1989, on 22 December. In the eighty-three years of his life, the tempo of technological progress heralded by the earlier Industrial Revolution and major nineteenth-century scientific breakthroughs accelerated with an unprecedented rapidity that was equally compelling and distressing. The first half of Beckett’s century was defined by a growing awareness among modernists of the effects that advanced technologies had on society and the individuals within it; the near-utopian enthusiasm for technological progress clashed with the mourning of the loss of authenticity as well as of innumerable lives claimed by warfare technologies in and beyond the two global military conflicts. The second half witnessed major transformations in communication technologies among other areas, with devices such as portable radios, television sets, audio and video recorders and personal computers widening the perimeters of the gradually more and more interconnected ‘global village’ (McLuhan, 1962). While Beckett’s writing, especially of the earlier period, often disturbs and problematises the purported efficacy of modern technology that was increasingly infiltrating quotidian life, the latter part of the century saw him actively and extensively engaging with technologies both established and emerging, at times ‘Up to the neck in technical muck’ (Beckett, 2016, 95).

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galina kiryushina, einat adar and mark nixon

The dividing line between Beckett’s ‘early’ and ‘late’ work roughly converges with L’Innommable (1953) and the characterisation of his own expressive technique in the 1956 interview with Israel Shenker as one of ‘impotence [and] ignorance’, an art turning away from ‘expression [as] achievement’ and embracing failure as its central premise (qtd in Shenker, 1979, 148). In his later work, Beckett’s commitment to the exploration – or indeed exhaustion – of the concept of failure left very few technological stones unturned as he absorbed himself in the investigations of the ‘Radio play technique’ (Beckett, 2011, 631), ‘film technique’ (qtd in Thompson, 1964, 26) and ‘découpage [editing] technique’ (Beckett, 2014, 610), as well as ‘image technique’ and ‘spot technique’ in the theatre (2016, 46, 326).1 Often, if not always, the notion of ‘technique’ implied the inextricability of the theoretical how-to from the technical know-how of the respective technologies and instruments. If, in Beckett’s understanding, ‘to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail’ in the attempt to express the inexpressible with no tools available for expression (1965, 125), then new tools must constantly be tried and new ways of failing considered in order to successfully ‘fail better’ each time (Beckett, 2009a, 81). Technology provided Beckett with one such way. Coincidentally, sound radio, with which Beckett shared infancy, became the first of the media technologies to be explored in his work. His first play for the air, All That Fall (1957), famously gave birth to the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop and likely inspired the annual birthday musings with a tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). The investment in innovation of existing artistic forms marked the entirety of Beckett’s career, earning him the much-feared Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, by which time his oeuvre had expanded to include a film and a television play. Beckett’s failed ambition to learn the art of cinematography directly from the Soviet avant-gardists, whose theoretical texts he perused in the 1930s, was partly fulfilled in the writing, shooting and editing of Film (1965), itself ‘an “interesting failure”’ (Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 166). This openness to experimentation with the wireless, film and later also with the technologies of television and video recording has nurtured sustained scholarly attention to his media works for many decades now, from Clas Zilliacus’s 1976 Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television to a recent collection of essays devoted entirely and more broadly to Beckett and Media (Rapcsak, Nixon and Schweighauser, 2022). In the Preface to this volume, by looking back at his doctoral-thesisqua-seminal-publication with the hindsight of several decades, Zilliacus posits Beckett’s use of media as a technological heir to the traditional pictorial and musical arts as well as a durable safeguard to his innermost artistic

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visions. While allowing a degree of control over their execution, Beckett’s active involvement in the productions of his work inevitably brought about collaborations with technical crews whose unrelenting assistance helped refine not only Beckett’s ideas on paper, but also his very understanding of the technologies at hand. Numerous testimonies by practitioners who worked with Beckett have been published, revealing the many complexities that surrounded the making of his plays and providing a different perspective to that of purely academic investigations into his work (see, for instance, Asmus, 1977; Lewis, 1990; Körte, 2016). Though often confusing and frustrating, the ‘technical muck’ in which Beckett every so often found himself engulfed, like Winnie in Happy Days, signals his treatment of technology as technē – the skilled craftsmanship that was inseparable from his art, whatever the medium. In the words of Wolfgang Schadewaldt, ‘Téchnē is that knowledge and ability which is directed to producing and constructing, and thus occupies a sort of intermediate place between mere experience or know-how, emperiría, and theoretical knowledge, epistēme’ (2014, 29). As with other aspects of Beckett’s artistic praxis, his engagement with technology is respectful of its theoretical rootedness, the philosophical discourse and scientific knowledge behind its systematic uses. Indeed, advancements in technology and science beyond those motivating purely artistic applications, such as fin-de-siècle imaging and medical technologies, have been carefully considered in Beckett criticism in relation to the changing views on the human body and sensorium in modernity in his work for different media (Tajiri, 2007; Maude, 2009). The technological enhancements integral to Beckett’s stage drama of the second half of the twentieth century – such as invisible speakers and microphones, reproduced sound and voice, a mechanically controlled rocking chair and seemingly autonomously (mis)functioning light sources – are all a testimony to his technological imagination in the theatre. Merging his interest in the history of Western culture with the modernist ethos of innovation, his work epitomises a nexus between fidelity to classical thought and an unrelenting dedication to the crafting of new aesthetic experience. In the second half of Beckett’s career, as his practice of writing for various technologies coalesced with writing through or with them, the boundaries between genres and media of expression also became more porous, whereby the ancient art and craft of writing fused with more modern forms of technē. Recent years in particular have seen an amplified critical attention to intermedial aspects of Beckett’s writing (McTighe, Morin and Nixon, 2020) and the significance of the non-human in his work, which to an extent encompassed the use of technology (see, for example, Dennis et al., 2020). Challenging questions have

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also been raised of how to read, view or stage his works in an era defined by the internet, emerging digital and virtual media, and new technological affordances in the theatre (see Johnson and Heron, 2020) and marked with the impact of the accumulated ‘technical muck’ in the age of the Anthropocene (McMullan, 2021). Looking forward rather than backward, Nicholas Johnson’s Coda – written at a time when communication technologies have become the most essential, if not the sole, facilitator of human contact – ponders the lasting, ‘viral’ force of Beckett’s legacy in the changed and ever-changing world of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays feeds into all these recent developments within Beckett criticism. It reflects the complexity of the relationship between Beckett and technology, or technology and Beckett, using a variety of novel approaches which, taken together, chart a new understanding of Beckett’s ‘technological aesthetics’ and its growing relevance today.

* The simultaneously enabling and inhibiting effects of technology inform both content and form of Beckett’s work, which nevertheless foregrounds ‘impotence [and] ignorance’ in the face of the seeming ‘omniscience and omnipotence’ (qtd in Shenker, 1979, 148) offered by scientific advancements and modern devices. As Shane Weller argues in the opening essay of this volume, Beckett’s position towards technological progress is on neither side of the positive/negative polarity that divided the modernists, but is rather one that pursues, through the exhaustion of technology (and technē) in his work, the unmaking of the Western humanist tradition. As both Weller and Feargal Whelan remind us, the early twentieth-century Futurist movement extolled various new industrial, transportation and warfare technologies, their power and speed, glorifying the machine aesthetics that transcends human limitations. However, as Whelan demonstrates in his sociohistorical reading focused on trains in particular, this triumphant nineteenth-century symbol of modern invention fails invariably in Beckett’s writing and becomes a powerful vehicle for the expression of his scepticism towards technological idealism: his trains are late, delayed, or never arrive. The fact that machines constantly fail, frustrate or even threaten their users is further illustrated by Dúnlaith Bird, who explores how Beckett’s difficulties in understanding the workings of the tape recorder while writing Krapp’s Last Tape are reflected in the strangeness of the technology on stage. Bird also charts this ‘mechanics of failure’ in Rough for Theatre II, highlighting how the malfunctioning desk lamps hint at a pervasive short-circuit within humanity’s interaction with electricity, technological objects and, indeed, with itself. If Beckett questions or even exhausts the possibilities of technology, then we may

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recast, as Weller suggests, homo faber as homo labefactus, unmaking the dominant conception of the human within Western thought. For Beckett, working with technologies was also an opportunity to broach the age-old questions of humanity’s place in the world and the precariousness of existence. His approach to technology was Janus-faced in that he embraced the technical possibilities offered by new devices and media that would shape the future, while at the same time creating images that equally draw on, and relate to, past traditions. Beckett’s work is thus informed, for example, by his readings in philosophy, especially from the Enlightenment period, when thinkers often turned to mechanical metaphors such as clocks, optical lenses, or automatons to convey their ideas. Frequently, Beckett’s characters behave in a mechanised manner, which brings his work close to materialist philosophers such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie, whose writing, as Céline Thobois suggests, can be put into context with Beckett’s thinking about the body and the mind as an autopoietic apparatus. In this reading, Krapp becomes an eatingdrinking-narrating machine liable to the same malfunctions as those explored in Bird’s essay, whereby the distinction between his live embodiment and the avatars of his past selves created by the tape recorder is blurred. The result is a strange proximity, a symbiosis, or, rather, an interoperability between human and machine. This tendency continues in Beckett’s subsequent work, with the anthropomorphised technology of stage lighting in Play, for instance, becoming an ‘inquisitor’ (Beckett, 1986, 318), and the camera in Film an ‘eye [. . .] in pursuit’; both to an extent a technological reworking of Bishop Berkeley’s dictum esse est percipi (323). In a similar way to Thobois, Naoya Mori’s essay explores the way in which Beckett’s use of technology (in the form of lighting, sound recording and so forth) in the minimalist teleplay Quad draws on his philosophical readings. Here, Mori sets the mathematical ‘clockwork’ movement of the figures within the context of the ontological anxiety elicited by the Berkeleyan camera eye. Furthermore, the theoretical and practical ramifications of the ‘dramatized taboo’, the centre of the quad, are examined through the mechanical and metaphysical importance of clocks as depicted by Dante, Geulincx and Leibniz. This in turn evokes questions of destiny and choice, articulating a complex machinery related to Beckett’s use (both in Quad and in his first published novel, Murphy) of the Pythagorean mystical view of the incommensurability of side and diagonal, an outrageous disruption of cosmic order. What emerges from this essay is once again Beckett’s difficulty in finding technological solutions for the expression of philosophical concepts in his work. While exasperating to Beckett, various technological failings and failures came to serve as a power source for inspiration. Handled imaginatively, they

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fed into the current of his art of ‘impotence’, which found its direct outlets not only in the media plays, but also in the composition of his prose. As both Lucy Jeffery and Pim Verhulst show, Beckett’s experience of analogue radio broadcasting and the many deficiencies in its reception are echoed in the formal structure of his works from the mid-1950s onwards, which themselves relay lack, volatility, interference and distortion. Jeffery’s essay explores how the meta-medial play for the air, Words and Music, makes use of the disturbances in radio transmission, in tandem with the equally ‘unsound’ narrative and score, in order to evoke mental images that are incomplete and incompletable. The channelling of radiophonic conditions across media into prose fiction is indicative of Beckett’s ‘technographic’ writing, as Verhulst explains, a method that was subsequently enriched by his growing practical knowledge of film and television technologies. That these means of expression – together with their technological shortfalls and the collaborative efforts they required – had a profound influence on the development of Beckett’s multimedial aesthetics is documented in Olga Beloborodova’s essay, which traces the intersecting textual geneses of Play and Film. As is the case with the later prose, the importance of image in his dramatic and media works gradually outweighs that of word, which, according to Beloborodova, results from Beckett’s adoption of a ‘new language of technology’ used to paint the image with minute exactitude. Paradoxically, however, more textual detail is necessarily generated in the attempt to pin down the most minimalistic of images. Following the constructive challenges posed by the auditory ambiguities of radio and those encountered in his failed endeavour to revive the communicative purity of the moving image in his soundless film of 1965, Beckett shifted his attention to television. Not yet ‘properly born’ (Beckett, 2009b, 217) at the time, the televisual medium relied on a fundamentally different expressive ‘language’, one that it was only beginning to articulate. As Galina Kiryushina’s essay suggests, the distinct and often overlooked context of French television drama of the 1950s and 1960s, and Michel Mitrani’s experimental work in particular, resonate with Beckett’s own televisual aesthetics that foregrounds the plays’ ‘liveness’ and confining intimacy. But, as Jonathan Bignell argues, echoing Zilliacus’s Preface, Beckett’s teleplays do not simply mimic and assimilate the history of their own medium. They build innovatively upon a much richer, transmedial cultural heritage, thereby re-imagining the medium’s expressive abilities. Walter Asmus, revisiting his diary entries from 1985, details the intensive collaboration between himself, Beckett and the Süddeutscher Rundfunk technical crew on an explorative televisual rendering of the theatre play What Where (1983), which in itself is inherently transmedial. Asmus then fast-forwards to his directing of the play’s digital version in 2015, when he

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partook in another ‘[team]work in progress’ involving similarly unfamiliar – yet very different – technology as that used in the original production forty years earlier. The mass media in which Beckett nourished and exercised his technological imagination mostly affect the reach of human senses, extending what can be seen and heard, as well as where and when. The second half of the twentieth century also witnessed the rise of a new set of technologies in the area of computation and digital media that open possibilities which may be more closely equated with the functions of the human brain. Computers can store and retrieve information better than human memory, whose failings Beckett often explored, and their ability to process information at varying levels of sophistication lends new urgency to questions concerning the limits of the subject and the exceptionality of the human mind. While there is no consensus on a single definition of ‘the posthuman condition’, the term designates a new set of concerns in the humanities around an understanding of human beings as embedded in information networks, rather than independent agents whose minds work in isolation. If modernists were concerned about the loss of authenticity and subjective truth in a world of mass-produced, identical objects, then posthuman thought challenges the very distinction between the human mind, the environment it inhabits and the material means it uses for expression. As Thomas Thoelen explains, for posthuman thinkers humankind did not precede, but rather co-evolved with, the tools and technologies at its disposal. This is reflected in the origin myth of Prometheus, who initiates humankind into the world by providing them with artificial means of survival – fire and the secrets of technē. Making the essence of humanity dependent on external mechanisms for survival, the Promethean myth encodes a techno-logic that also characterises Beckett’s approach to fiction. The Unnamable, a figure contingent on denying its own existence, is exemplary of a self-aware technē that invents its own origin. Once again, it is Beckett’s interest in ancient philosophy and myth that makes his work amenable to readings that are informed by contemporary approaches to technology. What is new about contemporary technologies, or rather highlighted by them, is their potential to create affect without implying an interiority, a premise that Beckett also exploits in his stage images. Both Michael D’Arcy and Ruben Borg attempt to account for this strange mechanisation of emotion, which challenges the opposition between human affect and technological alienation that is often assumed in posthumanist readings. D’Arcy studies Krapp’s Last Tape in order to show how technology becomes complicit in creating a narrative that is naive in the Nietzschean sense, a way of responding to suffering and hardship by escaping to a fictional world, even if this aspiration is

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never fulfilled and Krapp’s narrative remains fragmented and unfinished. Borg also reflects on the connection between human affect and technology, examining the mechanisation of emotion from a phenomenological perspective. With regard to Not I, he suggests that the machine is a model for the constitution of self in the strange interplay between the strong affect expressed by Mouth’s monologue and its mechanical expression as compulsory speech. The inseparability of body and machine not only anchors the mechanised affect in the material world, but also changes the perception of the detached body part. If some posthumanist thinkers dream of a world where abstracted human minds roam digital spaces free of pain and suffering, then Beckett’s work challenges the facile distinction between mind and body and insists on the concrete experience of human beings in their immersion in technology, and – no less importantly – on their inherent vulnerability. The essays collected in this volume cover a wide range of technologies understood in the broadest sense of the term as the means of shaping and controlling the environment, from fire and geometry to mechanical and electrical devices. In Beckett’s work, however, they are all bound up with the ancient technology of writing – using tools to trace or (im)print signs that carry a coded semantic content. The volume’s final chapter by Dirk Van Hulle suggests the different ways in which digital technologies allow researchers to explore Beckett’s use of this enduring technology to develop his artistic vision and the traces it left in the form of manuscripts, typescripts and other documents. Van Hulle argues that digital tools, such as those used in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), enable readers and researchers to add a temporal dimension to Beckett’s writing and explore the development of his texts over time in a way that would be difficult and unwieldy with traditional media, which results in a uniquely digital poetics. The growing field of digital humanities reminds us that the revelatory potential of technology can never be fully exhausted, as new technologies reconfigure the field in which older technologies were used and studied. Beckett’s attempt, according to Weller, to exhaust the possibilities of technē was therefore doomed to failure from the beginning. And yet, despite the innumerable faux départs, textual ‘abortions’ (Beckett, 2016, 520), insurmountable technical drawbacks and technological failures encountered by Beckett on his journey ‘on’, his work still speaks powerfully to readers, practitioners and audiences worldwide. Famously, this ever-renewed labour of rediscovery is captured by the narrator of Worstward Ho: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett, 2009a, 81). This line, now widely used outside of its context as a motivational slogan, speaks not only to the need for an endless repetition of the same effort but also to the lack of control over the result – to fail, after

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all, is to achieve something other than what one sets out to do. Beckett’s process of creation searches for the fault lines, for the vulnerabilities and failings of technology as a spur to discovery through writing. We can glimpse the value of technical tools and their inseparability from the writer’s creative process in a typically Beckettian phrasing in a 1981 letter to the artist Andra Samelson, who presented him with a Sailor fountain pen he had previously admired: ‘If with it I fail to fail better worse I only deserve to succeed’ (Beckett, 2016, 563).

Note 1. Beckett does not use the word ‘technology’ in his work or correspondence. ‘Technique’, ‘technical’ and ‘technically’ are employed in reference to what is broadly understood as ‘technology’ and ‘technologies’ today, in addition to ‘the formal or practical aspects of any art, occupation, or field’ (OED, ‘technique’, n.).

Works Cited Asmus, Walter D. (1977), ‘Practical aspects of theatre, radio and television: Rehearsal notes for the German premiere of Beckett’s “That time” and “Footfalls” at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin’, trans. Helen Watanabe, Journal of Beckett Studies, 2, pp. 82–95. Beckett, Samuel (1965), Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: John Calder. Beckett, Samuel (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009a), Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009b), Watt, ed. Chris Ackerley, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2011), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2016), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel and Alan Schneider (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Dennis, Amanda, Thomas Thoelen, Douglas Atkinson and Sjef Houppermans, eds (2020), ‘Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman/Samuel Beckett et le nonhumain’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 32:2, Leiden: Brill. Johnson, Nicholas E. and Jonathan Heron (2020), Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Körte, Konrad (2016), ‘Beckett Listens: Sound Production for the 1977 Geistertrio’, trans. Angela Moorjani, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 28:1, Leiden: Brill, pp. 107–15. Lewis, Jim (1990), ‘Beckett et la caméra’, Revue d’esthétique, pp. 371–9. Maude, Ulrika (2009), Beckett, Technology and the Body, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLuhan, Marshall (1962), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McMullan, Anna (2021), Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems: Closed Space Environments across the Stage, Prose and Media Works, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McTighe, Trish, Emilie Morin and Mark Nixon, eds (2020), ‘Beckett and Intermediality/Beckett, artiste intermédial’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 32:1, Leiden: Brill. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘technique, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. Rapcsak, Balazs, Mark Nixon and Philipp Schweighauser, eds (2022), Beckett and Media, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang [1979] (2014), ‘The Greek Concepts of “Nature” and “Technique”’, in Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (eds), Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, pp. 25–32. Shenker, Israel [1956] (1979), ‘An Interview with Beckett’, in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 146–9. Tajiri, Yoshiki (2007), Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, Howard (1964), ‘Buster Keaton in Beckett’s First Film’, The New York Times, 21 July, p. 26. Zilliacus, Clas (1976), Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Åbo: Åbo Akademi.

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Part I Mechanical and Electrical Technologies

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Chapter 1 The Unmaking of Homo Faber: Beckett and the Exhaustion of Technē Shane Weller

The early decades of the twentieth century saw an explosion of new technologies, particularly in the fields of communication, transportation, and armaments. One need only think of the telephone, radio, film, motor car, aircraft, and tank to have a sense of just how revolutionary these technological developments were. Unsurprisingly, the impact of these new technologies was soon being registered in literature, the visual arts, and philosophy. Indeed, in the case of the visual arts, with film they brought a completely new art form into being. As for the ways in which this technological revolution was addressed in literature and philosophy, one finds two diametrically opposed attitudes being adopted at the extremes of what was clearly a spectrum of views. At one extreme, there was an unreserved celebration of various technological advances, these being seen not only as embodying the essence of modernity but also as transforming the very nature of human experience in an entirely positive manner. At the other extreme, these same technological innovations were seen as posing a threat not only to European culture, but also to humanity as such. With the long eye of history, following two world wars, the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, the ongoing devastation of the environment, as well as further developments in communication, transportation, and medical science in the post-war period, it is possible to see truth in both positions. In the early years of the twentieth century, the celebration of new technologies was most evident among the avant-garde, and, above all, in Italian Futurism. Indeed, the enthusiasm for certain forms of new technology in the first Futurist manifesto, published in the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, is unqualified: ‘We believe’, the manifesto declares, ‘that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty

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of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath . . . a roaring motor car, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace’ (Marinetti, 2011, 5). The manifesto goes on to praise arsenals, shipyards, railway stations, locomotives, bridges, steamships, and aeroplanes. What is most striking in this hymn to modern technology, and in particular to new modes of transportation, is not only that the emphasis is placed on speed, reflecting a sense of modernity more generally, but also that it is a celebration of warfare as the natural place in which these new technologies can be put most fully to work. The Futurist manifesto identifies war as the ‘sole cleanser of the world’, and through its imagery seeks to evoke in celebratory mode the unprecedented destructive power of modern technology. Motor cars race ‘like machine-gun fire’; bridges flash in the sunlight ‘like gleaming knives’ (5). A decade later, the movement’s founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), would co-author another, related text: the Manifesto of the Italian Fasci of Combat (1919), also know as the Fascist Manifesto, for the political movement founded by Benito Mussolini in the same year. The continuity between these two manifestos is clear: for all its reactivation of myth, as well as its political and aesthetic turn back towards imperial Rome, Italian Fascism, like German Nazism a decade later, celebrated new technologies as enabling a new kind of human mobilisation. This championing of new technologies was far from being limited to the political Right, however. Indeed, one of the greatest advocates of technology’s political power in the first half of the twentieth century came from the Left. In his now celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin argues that the various forms of mechanical reproduction, above all film, have the power to transform the nature of the visual arts. According to Benjamin – in an argument that his friend Theodor Adorno found far from satisfactory, on account of its not being sufficiently dialectical – mechanical reproduction frees the work of art (above all, the work of visual art) from its dependence upon ritual, destroying the ‘aura’ that attaches to the work as something original or unique, an aura that holds the work of art at a distance from the viewer. For Benjamin, rather than being tied to ritual, the mechanically reproducible work of art ‘begins to be based on another practice – politics’ (1992, 218). The clear implication of this argument is that the introduction of mechanical reproduction into the aesthetic sphere is the most decisive event in the history of the arts, since it brings to an end the ‘cultic’ nature of the aesthetic object, extending all the way back to the origins of art in ritual. With regard to the new art of film, Benjamin contrasts the camera operator with the painter, arguing that while the painter ‘maintains

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in his work a natural distance from reality’, the camera operator ‘penetrates deeply into its web’ (227). The picture of reality that emerges from these two approaches could not be more different. Whereas the painter’s picture of reality is ‘total’, the camera operator’s consists of ‘multiple fragments’. Given the deep penetration of reality by technology in the modern period, and the consequent fact that reality is now experienced as fragmentary, it is film as a fully technologised mode of artistic production that grants a true image of modern experience. As Benjamin puts it: ‘for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter’ (227). The revelatory power of the film camera is such that it ‘introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’ (230). In short, this new technology enables the perception of a modern reality that had hitherto remained hidden from art. While championing this new technology for its power to disclose a reality to which contemporary human beings would otherwise have remained blind, Benjamin seeks in the epilogue to his 1936 essay to avoid the kind of essentialism or formalism that would identify the nature and function of technology outside of any historico-political context. He argues that, in a capitalist system, the mobilisation of the full range of modern technologies can occur only in war, a point already made by Marinetti. Indeed, in support of this argument, Benjamin cites Marinetti’s aestheticisation of war in relation to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–6: ‘War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallisation of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns’ (Marinetti qtd in Benjamin, 1992, 234). Although Benjamin does not refer to it in his 1936 essay, another important celebration of newly technologised warfare in the interwar period was to be found in Ernst Jünger’s First World War memoir Storm of Steel (1920), where the horrors of trench warfare, including poison gas, machine guns, and tanks, are presented in a manner that renders the experience not only heroic but also transformative of human experience. Jünger would later develop this argument in his essay ‘Total Mobilization’ (1930), where he argues that the total mobilisation of the national population is necessary if a nation is to win the next great war, and that this mobilisation ‘expresses the secret and inexorable claim to which our life in the age of masses and machines subjects us’ (Jünger, 1998, 128). Benjamin seeks to distance his own celebration of the power of new technologies from Marinetti’s (and thus also from Jünger’s) by insisting that while, like the various forms of artistic mechanical reproduction,

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the use of poison gas also abolishes the aura, it does so in a manner that is not politically liberating. However, the precise distinction between these two technological modes of destroying the aura – namely, film and poison gas – is far from worked through by Benjamin, and he resorts to the rhetorically striking but theoretically (and historically) questionable assertion that while Fascism aestheticises politics, Communism politicises art. Ultimately, then, with regard to the thinking of technology, Benjamin’s intervention champions the film camera for its power to disclose a human reality to which we would otherwise remain blind. It is this technology’s revelatory power that warrants attention, a point that, as we shall see, proves central to Samuel Beckett’s engagement with modern technologies. For Benjamin, it is precisely in the alienating effect of new technologies that their value – that is, their shock value – lies. Film technology’s power to shock is, according to Benjamin, considerably greater than that of the other arts. As he puts it: ‘By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect’ (Benjamin, 1992, 232). Unsurprisingly, the alienating effects of modern technology also gave rise to arguments that were considerably less celebratory than either Marinetti’s or Benjamin’s. Fears regarding the destructive power of modern technologies were already apparent in the interwar years, and only intensified in the post-Second World War, post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki era. One of the most influential approaches to the nature of technology in that later period – and one that, at first sight, certainly appears to be located at the opposite end of the spectrum from those of Marinetti and Benjamin – is that of Martin Heidegger. In his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (first delivered as a lecture under the title ‘Enframing’ in 1949, and then in expanded form, and with the revised title, in 1955), Heidegger declares that ‘Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it’ (Heidegger, 1977, 4). For Heidegger, modern technology, which is a particular form of a more general technē, is to be understood not in instrumental terms but rather, ontologically, as a mode of ‘revealing’ (alētheuein; Entbergen); more precisely, a mode of revealing the Being (Sein) of beings. The manner in which modern technology reveals Being is what Heidegger terms ‘Enframing’ (Ge-stell). Crucially, for Heidegger, modern technology as Enframing stands in stark contrast to the mode of revealing that is poetry (poiēsis; Dichtung). Unlike poetry, which, Heidegger argues, is also a form of technē, modern technology ‘banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering’, making of Being what he terms a ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand), a resource to be exploited and used up (Heidegger, 1977, 27). For Heidegger, technology as Enframing is

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a threat not just to human beings but also to the very history of Being as such, since it ‘blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth’ (28). According to Heidegger, the danger posed by modern technology to the Being of the human cannot be overstated, and it can only be overcome if modern technology’s particular way of revealing Being is brought to light through a contrastive comparison with art as poiēsis. While the understanding of the essence of technology is crucial, that understanding does not in itself offer the revealing experience of Being that is granted by poetry, and above all by Heidegger’s poet of poets, Friedrich Hölderlin. Whereas both Marinetti and Benjamin in their different ways bring art and technology together, Heidegger contrasts modern technology with poetry, with each being a distinct mode of a more fundamental technē, understood as the revealing of Being. The history of the twentieth century, with its two world wars and the enduring threat of nuclear and now also ecological Armageddon, would seem to suggest that Heidegger was considerably closer to the truth of modern technology than was either Marinetti or Benjamin. Within the field of twentieth-century European literature, one also finds writers occupying positions across a spectrum that extends from the unqualified championing of technology to the damning of all things technological. Within this diverse field, Beckett’s work is particularly notable because it engages with both the theme of technology and the practice of various modern technologies (radio, film, television), not in order either to champion or to condemn them, but rather to enact their exhaustion. The manner in which that exhaustion is enacted reveals Beckett taking account of precisely those ideas of technology articulated by Marinetti and Benjamin, albeit in a way that subordinates them to a more fundamental conception of technē. In his essay ‘The Exhausted’ (1992), Gilles Deleuze argues that the exhaustion to be found in Beckett’s oeuvre is not the wearing out of this or that, but rather the exhaustion of possibility as such. Whereas the tired person ‘has merely exhausted the realization’, the exhausted person ‘exhausts the whole of the possible’ (Deleuze, 1998, 152). In Beckett’s work, this exhaustion of the possible is achieved, according to Deleuze, in three ways: first, through a combinatorial language of names, most notably in the novel Watt (completed in 1945); secondly, through a language of voices, most fully in The Unnamable (completed in 1949); and thirdly, through a language of images and spaces, above all in the later television plays written in the 1970s and early 1980s.1 It is, of course, in the television plays that Beckett engages directly with modern technology in the making of the work, as he had already done in the radio plays, beginning with All That Fall in the late 1950s, and then with Film, in the mid-1960s. In his analysis of exhaustion in Beckett’s oeuvre, however, Deleuze does not address

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the precise manner in which Beckett exhausts technology; rather, he champions the technology that is television as the means by which Beckett carries the aim of exhausting the possible to its limit, since it is a medium that is not restricted to the verbal. In television, Deleuze writes, ‘there is always something other than words, music or vision, that makes them loosen their grip, separates them, or even opens them up completely’ (Deleuze, 1998, 173; emphasis in original). How, then, does Beckett exhaust technology? To address this question, it is necessary to chart his engagement with the nature of technology in his earliest work – at the thematic level, in the early 1930s – through to his employment of various forms of modern technology from the 1950s to the 1980s. As we shall see, Beckett’s exhaustion of technology passes by way of a deployment of the idea of modern technology as a mode of revealing a deeper reality that is shared by Benjamin and Heidegger, and that also stands in stark contradiction of Marinetti’s celebration of speed as the essence of a fully technologised modernity.

* Modes of technological communication serve repeatedly in literary texts of the first half of the twentieth century to suggest alienation, distance, or, paradoxically, a failure of communication. Among the most striking examples of a particular technology serving this purpose is Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice (La Voix humaine), written in 1928 and first performed in Paris in 1930. In Cocteau’s one-act play, a young woman, alone on stage, is speaking on the phone to the male lover who is abandoning her for another woman, the audience only hearing the woman’s side of the conversation, which thus takes the form of a fragmented monologue. The breakdown in the lovers’ relationship, and the woman’s consequent isolation, are evoked through the technological device itself: the communicative tool here representing distance, absence, a sundering of human relations. The technology itself proves to be faulty, the conversation being repeatedly interrupted by other voices and by disconnections. The woman’s anxiety at this technological breakdown in the communicative link is captured by lines such as the following: ‘Hello, is that you, dear? . . . . . . is it you? . . . . . . Yes . . . . it’s very difficult to hear . . . . you sound ever such a long way off’ (Cocteau, 1979, 21); ‘You think you’re dead. You can hear but you can’t make yourself heard’ (30); ‘there’s a buzzing at your end of the line’ (30); ‘Hello, Exchange, we’ve been cut off’ (31). By the end of the short play, having referred to her recent failed suicide attempt, the woman declares her love for the man who is abandoning her, refusing to blame him for abandoning her. Her isolation is complete, and her future captured visually by

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the image of the falling telephone receiver: ‘Be quick. Break off. Break. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (The telephone receiver falls to the floor.)’ (48). A similar use of the telephone to evoke the profound isolation of the individual, and an apparent breakdown in relations, occurs in a work published almost a decade before Cocteau’s play: Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way (1920–1). Staying with his friend Robert de Saint-Loup in Doncières, in north-eastern France, Proust’s narrator takes advantage of the recently installed telephone to speak with his grandmother in Paris. As the Proust scholar Adam Watt observes, the technological instrument isolates the grandmother’s voice ‘from the visual support that usually accompanies it; as a result, rather than being comforted, the Narrator detects a sadness and fragility he had never previously discerned in her voice’ (Watt, 2011, 64). The passage in question reads: suddenly I heard that voice which I mistakenly thought I knew so well; for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the first time. [. . .] this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, for the first time separated from me. [. . .] ‘Granny!’ I cried to her, ‘Granny!’ and I longed to kiss her, but I had beside me only the voice, a phantom as impalpable as the one that would perhaps come back to visit me when my grandmother was dead. (Proust, 1981, 135–7) This scene struck the young Beckett as particularly important, not simply because it registered the alienating effects of a particular modern technology, but because that technology had a revelatory function. In loosely Heideggerian terms, the technological device here reveals the grandmother’s true being, hitherto obscured by the veil of habitual perception. In Proust, his 1931 monograph on In Search of Lost Time, Beckett comments at some length on the passage. As so often in Proust, Beckett takes up parts of Proust’s text, translating and then blending them with his own analysis. On the above passage, for instance, he remarks that Proust’s narrator hears his grandmother’s voice [on the telephone], or what he assumes to be her voice, because he hears it now for the first time, in all its purity and reality, so different from the voice that he had been accustomed to follow on the open score of her face that he does not recognize it as hers. It is a grievous voice, its fragility unmitigated and undisguised by the carefully

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arranged mask of her features, and this strange real voice is the measure of its owner’s suffering. He hears it also as the symbol of her isolation, of their separation, as impalpable as a voice from the dead. (Beckett, 1965, 26–7) It is because the telephone serves a double purpose here – both to alienate and to reveal, or to reveal precisely by way of alienation – that Beckett considers Proust’s text to be infinitely superior to Cocteau’s The Human Voice. In Cocteau’s play, which Beckett dismisses as an ‘unnecessary banality’, the telephone serves simply as a symbol of the breakdown in relations between the two lovers. In Proust’s novel, however, as Beckett reads it, the technological device is a mode of revelation, a means by which the veil of habit is rent asunder and the ‘strange real voice’ of the narrator’s grandmother is heard. Here, the modern technology serves to disclose the reality beneath all appearance. The (natural) voice is estranged by the technology, which enables the hearer for the first time to apprehend the voice as it really is, stripped of the context of the human face. What is heard by way of this technology is ‘unmitigated’ and ‘undisguised’, these two ‘unwords’ indicating the negativity that, for Beckett, is required to reach the essential.2 Later in his book on Proust, Beckett attempts a first articulation of the negative aesthetic that will shape his oeuvre over the next sixty years: ‘The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy’ (Beckett, 1965, 65–6). That negative activity is precisely what is achieved, according to Beckett, by the technological device of the telephone in Proust’s novel. In his analysis of the scene, then, Beckett anticipates Walter Benjamin’s conception of the film camera only a few years later. Given the attention that he devotes to the Proustian telephone as a revelatory technology, it is unsurprising that Beckett should introduce a telephone scene into the opening chapter of his first published novel, Murphy, written only a few years later, in 1934–6, and published in 1938. In that novel, the telephone in question has served as a prostitute’s means of communication with her potential customers. Just as he later mechanises Proustian involuntary memory in Krapp’s Last Tape, thereby demeaning it, so in Murphy Beckett reimagines the Proustian telephone call between grandson and beloved grandmother as that between an ageing prostitute and her clients. In Murphy, then, this modern technology is associated with the theme of human ageing, and the increased dependence upon technological devices that comes with that decline in physical powers, a theme to which Beckett returns in later works, most notably Endgame (1957). In Murphy, Beckett writes of the prostitute: ‘The telephone that she had found useful in her prime, in her decline she found indispensable. For the only money she made was when a client from

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the old days rang her up’ (Beckett, 2009e, 6). When Murphy’s girlfriend, Celia, calls him on this telephone, the device disturbs his withdrawal from the ‘outer world’. The telephone’s ring is violently disruptive: it ‘burst into its rail’; its ‘loud calm crake [. . .] mocked him’. Rather than disclosing the real, then, the telephone in Beckett’s novel is the means by which the ‘outer world’, from which Murphy wishes to escape, drags him out of himself and back into relations with others. When the telephone call has ended, Murphy listens to the ‘dead line’, before dropping the receiver to the floor (Beckett, 2009e, 6–8). Abandoning the telephone here signifies withdrawal from the social world. Beckett’s remarks on the ‘strange real voice’ that is heard when the human voice is ‘unmitigated’ and ‘undisguised’, as a result of a particular modern technology, point beyond his use of the telephone in Murphy to his later attempts to strip the voice of its natural context – the ‘open score of the face’, as he, following Proust, puts it. In each case, a modern technology is required: in Not I, it is the spotlight on the mouth, with the rest of the face occluded, as well as the adaptation for television of the original stage play. And in his other television plays, Beckett on more than one occasion has a voice for which there is no corresponding face: the voices in Eh Joe and Ghost Trio are examples of this alienation of the voice by technological means. Returning to Beckett’s reflections on modern technologies in Proust: immediately after his analysis of the telephonic effect in The Guermantes Way, Beckett follows Proust by referring to the camera as another modern technology with a revelatory function. Like the telephone, the camera discloses the reality beneath the veil of habit. When, having returned anxiously to Paris to see his grandmother, Proust’s narrator encounters her in person, he sees her in a new way: The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. [. . .] I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know. (Proust, 1981, 141–3) Of this scene, Beckett observes that Proust’s narrator’s eye: functions with the cruel precision of a camera; it photographs the reality of his grandmother. And he realises with horror that his grandmother is dead, long since and many times, that the cherished familiar of his mind, mercifully composed all along the years by the solicitude of habitual memory,

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exists no longer, that this mad old woman, drowsing over her book overburdened with years, flushed and coarse and vulgar, is a stranger whom he has never seen. (Beckett, 1965, 27–8) On the basis of these two examples, one might reasonably anticipate that Beckett would go on to become one of the great champions of modern technology on account of its revelatory power. And, indeed, if one considers his wish to study cinematography with the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein in the mid-1930s, and the fact that, in a letter to Eisenstein dated 2 March 1936, he identifies himself as a ‘serious cinéaste’,3 his use of the reel-to-reel tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape, which is set ‘in the future’ precisely so that the technological device can be used (Beckett, 2009c, 3), as well as his readiness to write for radio, cinema, and television, there certainly seems to be considerable evidence to support this interpretation of his engagement with technology as a means to disclose the reality beneath the veil of appearances spun by habitual modes of perception. Beckett’s post-war engagement with radio, film, and television undoubtedly testifies to his willingness to embrace modern technologies in order to find new ways of exploring his vision of what, in his unbroadcast text for radio ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ (written in 1946), he terms ‘humanity in ruins’ (Beckett, 1995, 278). The nature of Beckett’s engagement with technology is, however, more complicated than that, and the clue as to why it would be wrong to see Beckett as one of modern technology’s unambiguous champions is also to be found in his book on Proust, in the passage following the comparison that he makes between the narrator’s eye and a camera. In the two examples of modern technology on which Beckett dwells there – the telephone and the camera – he insists on both occasions that what is revealed is death: the voice on the telephone is ‘as impalpable as a voice from the dead’, and, of the face when it is seen, Proust’s narrator ‘realises with horror that his grandmother is dead’. This connection between modern technology and death, which he takes from his reading of Proust, is subsequently made in Beckett’s own work, in various ways. In the radio play All That Fall, for instance, a child dies as a result of having fallen – or perhaps having been pushed – under the wheels of a train: ‘It was a little child fell out of the carriage, Ma’am. [Pause.] On to the line, Ma’am. [Pause.] Under the wheels, Ma’am’ (Beckett, 2009a, 31–2). A more personal association between the same modern technology and death occurs in a postcard sent by Beckett in the summer of 1950 from Ireland, where his mother was dying: ‘My mother’s life continues its sad decline. It is like the decrescendos of a train I used to listen to in the night at Ussy, interminable, starting up again just when one thinks it is over and silence restored for ever’

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(Beckett to Henri Hayden, 31 July 1950; qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 382; translated by Knowlson). This relation between technology and death can also be inverted, as it is in Film, where the camera pursues O and prevents him from achieving the desired state of ‘non-being’ (Beckett, 2009a, 97). In his first play for television, Eh Joe, Beckett again refers to the camera’s ‘pursuit’ of a character (113). The use of the modifier ‘cruel’ in his remarks on the camera in Proust sets the mood for his later engagements with technology. If, for Beckett, there is indeed an essential relation between technology and death, then that relation takes two principal forms. First, as we have seen, technology’s power to reveal appears to be a revelation not of life but of death: it discloses the ostensibly living as the already dead. This is what might be termed its ruthless proleptic power: the technological device anticipates the death that is to come. One of the most influential analyses of this relation between a specific technology and death is Roland Barthes’s book on photography, Camera Lucida (1980), published shortly before its author’s own death and the argument of which is shaped to the core by Barthes’s grief following the death of his mother. For Barthes, the art of photography (and herein his proximity to both Proust and Beckett is absolute) is an art of death. The photographic image is that of a being who no longer is – the moment it records is gone. As Barthes puts it: By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (Barthes, 1993, 96; emphasis in original) For Barthes, like Proust and Beckett before him, a modern technological device reveals the catastrophe of death in advance. It makes death present before the fact. It destroys time; more precisely, it destroys the lifetime, and drags us into the time of death – the time of the so-called future perfect. There is, however, a second relation between technology and death to which Beckett first refers us in Proust. For, if technology is in some sense fatal, it is itself also profoundly mortal. As Beckett insists in the paragraph following the one in which he compares the eye of the narrator to a camera, the habitdestroying power of technology is strictly time-bound. As he puts it: ‘The respite is brief.’ For habit reasserts itself, and the glimpsed reality is lost. Habit effects, he argues, ‘a perpetual adjustment and readjustment of our organic sensibility to the conditions of its worlds’ (Beckett, 1965, 28). In other words, the

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revelatory power of technology is fleeting. It cannot be relied upon to provide us with any enduring experience of the real. Here, derived in no small part from his reading of Schopenhauer at the time he was working on his book on In Search of Lost Time, Beckett’s deeply avant-garde approach not just to art but also to perception and cognition becomes clear. The artist whose aim is to penetrate to what Beckett terms the ‘core of the eddy’ cannot rely enduringly on a particular mode or manner, or indeed on a particular technology. The nature of perception, and, more generally, of human being-in-the-world, is such that the artist has constantly to seek new means; not just new stylistic devices, but new technological ones. For, as Heidegger observes, poiēsis is itself a form of technē, if the latter is understood as a ‘revealing’ (Entbergen). Any strict opposition between technē and poiēsis breaks down here, and one has to recognise that both modern art and modern technology belong to technē in this broader sense as modes of disclosure. This helps to explain why it is that Beckett should have constantly sought out new technological devices, and was ready to explore the possibilities first of radio, then of film, and lastly of television. To rest content with any one technology would have been inevitably to fall victim to habituation. The veil would soon obstruct the cognitive-perceptual apparatus. So it is that, for Beckett, the revelatory potential of modern technologies is necessarily exhausted. His work stands as testimony to that principle of exhaustion. Beckett’s sense that any particular technology (conceived as a mode of revealing) is necessarily time-bound is, however, only one aspect of his exhaustion of technē. For the exhaustion of the revelatory power of a particular technology can, of course, be overcome by the invention of a new technology, and Beckett’s engagement with the exhaustion of technology is ultimately more fundamental than that, becoming nothing less than an exhaustion of technē as such. Significantly, this dimension to Beckett’s work emerges in the post-war period, following his own experience of the ruination wrought by certain modern technologies during his time working at the Irish Red Cross Hospital at Saint-Lô in Normandy, where he witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by aerial bombardment. In Beckett’s post-war work, rather than simply proving destructive, technological devices repeatedly fail or break or are discarded. This failure and/or discarding of technologies is particularly intensive in Endgame. The alarm clock, the telescope, and the gaff are all discarded in the course of the play, leaving Hamm stuck in a wheelchair that he cannot move. It is hard to think of another work of twentieth-century literature that stands in starker antithesis to the celebration of the ‘beauty of speed’ in the first Futurist manifesto. From Marinetti’s ‘roaring racing car’ on an Earth that is ‘hurtling at breakneck speed along the racetrack of its orbit’, to the

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static wheelchair in Endgame’s final tableau, following the discarding of various technological means for achieving movement (the gaff), the mechanical recording of time (the clock), and the shortening of distances (the telescope): Beckett’s play enacts not just the exhaustion of one or more technologies, but the exhaustion of technology as such. This exhaustion of technology is an integral part of Beckett’s sceptical approach to the European Enlightenment idea of progress. At the heart of Enlightenment thinking is the belief in the possibility, and, for some, even the inevitability, of social, political, and scientific progress. Hegel’s philosophy of spirit (Geist) is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical version of this progressivist model, although it owes as much to Christian theology as it does to the Goddess of Reason. Unlike his French contemporaries Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, both of whom championed his post-war work and with whom he is often compared, Beckett showed not the slightest interest in Hegel’s philosophy. Rather than to Hegel, it was to the German Idealist’s great opponent, Arthur Schopenhauer, that Beckett was drawn, and thus to a philosopher who considered the notion of progress to be an illusion. Beckett’s work clearly belongs to the sceptical tradition that sees in human history evidence not of any socio-political progress, but rather of circularity (as proposed by Giambattista Vico) or even of sheer chaos. In his 1929 essay on James Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’, Beckett refers to Vico’s ‘exposition of the ineluctable circular progression of Society’, arguing that it is one important source for the kind of purgatorial experience that is enacted in Joyce’s work. According to Beckett, there are two forms of Purgatory. In the Dantean form, ‘movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a net advance’; in the Joycean form, ‘movement is non-directional – or multi-directional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back’ (Beckett, 1983, 20, 33). It is this latter form that is adopted by Beckett throughout his oeuvre. As Adorno was among the first to recognise, if there is a dialectic in Beckett’s work, then it is at a standstill. The Beckettian ‘on’ takes us nowhere. The horrors of twentieth-century history would certainly appear to support this sceptical view of human history. And yet, that scepticism rarely extends to the history of technology. Indeed, those same horrors – from the two world wars to Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were only possible as a result of technological progress, albeit one that did not map onto any form of socio-political progress. Even those who are highly sceptical about the possibility of socio-political progress are often ready to concede that technology is the one realm in which progress has been, and will continue to be, made, notwithstanding the fact that those advances may prove to be as deleterious as they are beneficial to human life. Beckett’s work, however, cannot be co-opted to such a position, for it

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includes technology within a more general disintegration or running down that is enacted so compellingly in a work such as Endgame. There, technology is also caught within a cycle of failure. Beckett certainly never abandons technology; indeed, he engages with new technologies in an almost systematic fashion from the 1950s to the 1980s. However, his work enacts the exhaustion of technology as a process that is interminable, since that exhaustion results in no liberation from technology, any more than there is in his work any sense of a liberation through technology. In his post-war work, then, Beckett charts and indeed enacts the exhaustion not just of technologies but of technē as such. We witness the recurrent failure of all manner of technological forms, a (repeated) failure that discloses an image of the human not as homo faber but rather as what might be termed homo labefactus, for whom all making entails a labefaction; that is, a weakening or unmaking – not least, of the very conception of the human that underlies so many Western philosophies and anthropologies. The vision of ‘humanity in ruins’ to which Beckett refers at the end of ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ is, in part, a vision of this homo labefactus. This exhaustion of technē in Beckett’s oeuvre is far from being limited to modern technologies of the kind to which Marinetti refers. For, as Heidegger observes, poiēsis is, like modern scientific technologies, itself a technē in the more fundamental sense of the term. The exhaustion of technē that characterises Beckett’s post-war work extends beyond the failure or discarding of what are usually thought of as technologies to the technē that is poiēsis. Beckett’s last work, ‘what is the word’, is perhaps his most fully realised exhaustion of poiēsis as a form of technē. For in that work, the ‘revealing’ – the Entbergen, to use Heidegger’s term – that is the essence of technology, fails to take place. That which is to be named in the poem remains unnamed, leaving only the decidedly mechanical repetition: ‘what is the word – // what is the word’ (Beckett, 2009b, 135). That is what remains for Beckett’s homo labefactus: the mechanical repetition of the unfound word at the end of a tottering text.

Notes 1. Deleuze asserts that ‘No doubt this language [of images and spaces] is born in the novels and the novellas, and passes through the theatre, but it is in television that it accomplishes its own mission, distinct from the first two [languages]’ (162). 2. On Beckett’s deployment of ‘unwords’ more generally, see Weller (2019, ch. 4).

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3. In his letter to Eisenstein, Beckett stated: ‘It is because I realise that the script is [a] function of its means of realisation that I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of these, and beg you to consider me a serious cinéaste worthy of admission to your school’ (Beckett, 2009d, 317).

Works Cited Barthes, Roland (1993), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage. Beckett, Samuel (1965), Proust, in Proust and Three Dialogues, London: Calder & Boyars, pp. 7–93. Beckett, Samuel (1983), ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder, pp. 19–33. Beckett, Samuel (1995), ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press, pp. 275–8. Beckett, Samuel (2009a), All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen, preface and notes by Everett Frost, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009b), Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009c), Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Plays, preface by S. E. Gontarski, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009d), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2009e), Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays, London: Faber and Faber. Benjamin, Walter (1992), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana Press, pp. 211–44. Cocteau, Jean (1979), The Human Voice, trans. Carl Wildman, in The Eagle Has Two Heads/The Human Voice, London: Vision, pp. 1–87. Deleuze, Gilles (1998), ‘The Exhausted’, in Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London and New York: Verso, pp. 152–74. Heidegger, Martin (1977), ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, pp. 3–35. Jünger, Ernst (1998), ‘Total Mobilization’, trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 119–39.

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Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Marinetti, F. T. (2011), ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909)’, in Alex Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos, London: Penguin, pp. 1–8. Proust, Marcel (1981), The Guermantes Way, in Remembrance of Things Past, Volume Two: The Guermantes Way/Cities of the Plain, New York: Random House, pp. 1–620. Watt, Adam (2011), The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weller, Shane (2019), Language and Negativity in European Modernism: Toward a Literature of the Unword, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Chapter 2 The Permanent Way: Movement and Stasis in Beckett’s Railways Feargal Whelan

At the very beginning of the diary he kept throughout his extended trip to Germany in 1936–7, Beckett records a moment which almost finished the voyage before it had begun: ‘From Waterford to Cork – got out for a piss at Mallow & nearly missed train’ (qtd in Alphant and Léger, 2007, 92). The moment reflects many of the journeys taken throughout his writing in which movement from one point to another is frequently interrupted, and the interaction between the individual and the technology of transport is often risky. In this chapter, I argue that in his frequent depictions of railways and train travel, Beckett consistently represents modes of inertia and decline rather than methods of movement and progress, in contrast to many contemporary modern artistic depictions. Further, I contend that this impulse was heavily inflected by the unique lived experience of suburban Dublin’s middle-class Protestant community as it coped with the unfolding environment of the newly-formed Irish Free State, and in particular the erosion of the lifestyle and status its members enjoyed as bourgeois railway commuters.

The Railway, the Modern and the Dublin Suburb The desire to read the revolution of steam locomotion as a metaphor for the impulse to change and modernise is visible from its earliest appearance. In 1822, Thomas Gray was championing the case for mechanisation as an improvement on nature because ‘mechanic power is uniform and regular, whilst horse-power, as we all know very well, is quite the reverse’ (qtd in Schivelbusch, 1986, 11). At the beginning of the twentieth century, for the Italian Futurists and in particular their founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the representation of the machine in motion, the motor car as well as the train, was a manifestation of their belief, as

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Robert Hughes puts it, that ‘machinery was power; it was a freedom from historical restraint’ (1991, 43). Thus, Marinetti declared in the Futurist manifesto of 1909 that what was required was a celebration of the machine, as a living form: we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smokeplumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. (Marinetti, 1909, 3) Here, Marinetti captures the belief in the power of the machine not just to transform society in general, but to transform humanity itself as the machine, with the train foregrounded, metamorphosing from sterile object to a participating social animal. The adoption of the train as a symbol of modernism, and in particular as a metaphor for the dynamism of the modern and the breaking down of lines of demarcation between the human and the machine, is exemplified visually in the train paintings of Umberto Boccioni and more broadly in those of Max Weber, as Dominic Ricciotti notes (1984, 47). As proposed in the movement’s ‘Manifesto of Futurist Painters’, the train expressed not just the ‘universal dynamism’ of movement and the modern, but the act of its representation and the making of the art would become ‘the dynamic sensation itself ’ (Apollonio, 1973, 24). Social anxiety at the development of the railway was equally apparent. In 1844, the English painter J. M. W. Turner challenged the myth of the train as Prometheus bringing the modern to the primitive population when he unveiled his Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, in which a malevolent, black steam-engine seems to chase down a hare while inexorably gaining on the viewer, creating a sensation of both dread and awe, rather than the wholly positive sense presented by the Italian Futurists over sixty years later. In essence, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out, the early nineteenth-century characterisation of the effect of railroad travel was the ‘annihilation of space and time’, and the reaction to this concept created as much anxiety as it did excitement (1986, 33). Yet when trains appear in Beckett they have the opposite effect, being late or halted (All That Fall), making the passenger wait a lengthy period for their arrival (Watt and Texts for Nothing) or having ceased to run at all (That Time). Effectively, Beckett presents the

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train and the railway system as a mode of slowness rather than of speed, and later as a declining technology rather than as a harbinger of modernity. For Beckett, the train conjures an entity that is inert, at its best, and deadly, at worst. For example, when Mercier and Camier fancy taking ‘an express’ to the South, they inadvertently catch the commuter train, which because of its sloth Mercier calls a ‘hearse’ (Beckett, 2010a, 32), reinforcing the information gleaned from his fellow passenger Mr Madden, whose parents have been killed ‘in a providential railway smash’ (29). Beckett’s scepticism about the possibilities which rail transport offered are most likely drawn from his experiences as a child growing up in a suburb which owed its very existence to the presence of the railway. As part of the expansion of Dublin city and the relocation of the professional and middle classes from the middle of the nineteenth century, a scheme was devised to create a new suburb in Foxrock, on the south side of Dublin, availing of the presence of a railway line which linked the metropolis to the town of Kingstown (later Dún Laoghaire) and thence to Bray and the southern coastal towns down to Wexford (see Daly, 1984, 200–1). The line ran through the more adjacent and wellestablished suburbs of Ranelagh, Rathhmines, Pembroke and Taney, which had grown rapidly in the 1840s as a result of the exodus from the city centre brought about by deteriorating living conditions and massive overcrowding around the catastrophic years of the Great Famine (152–3). The creation of Foxrock was begun in 1859 with the lease of a large estate of lands by a private developer intent on continuing the reach of suburban expansion by replicating the existing model of administratively independent townships with direct railway access to the city centre. To this end, Foxrock railway station was built in 1861 to facilitate prospective commuters and to serve the existing racecourse at nearby Leopardstown (Shepherd and Beesley, 1998, 18). But the project failed to take off substantially, it seems, because it was felt the location was too far from the city and the commute too long. By the time Beckett’s father built his home there in 1900, the community was effectively a failed one, too small to benefit from the shared advantages of the suburban townland and too densely organised to give the appearance and atmosphere of rus in urbe (Daly, 1984, 201). Fundamentally, Foxrock as a township rather than as a collection of unrelated houses owed its whole existence to the railway station, and for those who lived there it came to be as central to their lives as the parish church. While his father had a keen interest in cars and even possessed a motorcycle and sidecar from before the birth of his sons, Beckett’s young daily life mirrored that of his fellow railway commuters, following his entry to the preparatory school on Earlsfort Place close to the Harcourt Street station, with a daily term-time journey which continued throughout his university

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career (Knowlson, 1996, 9, 30). Equally, the holiday leisure time of the Beckett family was defined by the train, as they availed of summer houses in both Greystones and Kilcoole, both of which developed as seaside resorts based on their proximity to the Dublin to Wexford railway line (O’Brien, 1986, 98, 106). As resorts, the towns of Bray and Greystones in particular, as well as the smaller resorts in between, depended largely on the patronage of the affluent suburban and professional classes and might therefore be regarded as a recreational extension of the pattern of suburban development. For the middle-class suburban communities of Dublin, railways were not merely a means of transport, they were also an effective method of reinforcing the class system and avoiding the Catholic majority. Brian Inglis describes the environment in Malahide, the north Dublin suburb which so resembled that of Beckett’s Foxrock: The houses were conventional and undistinguished [. . .]. The owners, also conventional and undistinguished, were most of them business men, or in the professions [. . .] loyal to their season tickets (Second Class: First was for the Gentry and Third for their servants). (1962, 11) This inherent social stability, perceived by the denizens of Foxrock and the surrounding area, whether merited or not, was dealt a severe blow by the prosecution of the Civil War which followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, lasting until early 1923. The shock which the rail system suffered through systematic attacks on its infrastructure not alone shook the belief in the reliability of the technology, but must also have been perceived by the mainly Protestant bourgeois suburbanites as an implicit attack on their community by a new order of Nationalism. The atavistic violence which was visible on the urban streets of Dublin was brought to their own secure locales at an anxious time in which the community displayed what Seán Kennedy has called ‘fears of engulfment’ (2003, 247). In effect, whatever unease might have been felt by the Protestant minority in the aftermath of independence was hugely exacerbated by the relentless attack on ‘their’ means of locomotion, whether that was the intention of the rebel Republicans or not, as well as exposing the severe limitations of the efficiency of heavy rail in times of adversity. In order to maximise their effectiveness, given their hugely inferior numbers, a tactical decision was made by the anti-Treaty forces during the short civil war to disrupt the state’s infrastructure by targeting the railway network (Hopkinson, 2004, 197). On the whole, the approach was successful in forcing the state army to ship supplies and men around the country by sea because of

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the constant disruption of attacks on the infrastructure. In one internal communication the Republican director of engineering outlined the centrality of the tactic as he emphasised the need to bring ‘the Railways to a standstill, as on this to a great extent depends the success of our campaign’ (qtd in Hopkinson, 2004, 201). On the state’s side, an official army communiqué of January 1923 outlines the genuine concern that the tactic appeared to be achieving success: The closing of the railways out of Cork to the west and north of the area is responsible for a very serious economic position. The people are almost entirely dependent on road transport (qtd in Hopkinson, 2004, 200) What might be interpreted as mere Luddism by the Republican forces during the Civil War in effect exposes an underlying inadequacy at the heart of modern Ireland. The railway, which had for so long been the driver (the sole driver in many instances) of the modernisation of Ireland, was exposed as the Achilles heel of the system, an Achilles heel that was too simple to rupture, a system too easy to disrupt. The damage was experienced on railway lines in all parts of the country, including those in the Dublin suburban network. On the Dublin & South Eastern line alone, which served Foxrock, fourteen locomotives, twenty-nine carriages and a large number of goods vehicles were destroyed (see Bairstow, 2007, 18). On 22 November 1922, a train was hijacked at gunpoint at Stillorgan, driven to Foxrock and uncoupled, and the engine ordered to back up and drive full speed at the wagons (‘Attempt to wreck a train’; Anon., 1922b). Three days later, a group of three Civic Guards who were on duty on the platform were accosted by an armed group of attackers and one of the Guards was shot and injured (‘Civic Guard shot at Foxrock’; Anon., 1922c). On 10 February 1923, a train was hijacked at Stillorgan, the passengers ordered out and the whole was set alight. As it sped through Foxrock Station it ignited the signal box, destroying it in the subsequent blaze (‘Armed men burned carriages at Foxrock’; Anon., 1922a). As the suburbs of Dublin had remained remarkably immune to acts of violence throughout the years of rebellion stretching back continuously to 1916, the shock to the inhabitants of Foxrock being brought among them must have been enormous. The fact that the violence was perpetrated on the railway and was focused on their local railway station must have had an even greater bearing on their anxiety about their safety within the new state, but also drawn attention to the railway as a site of disorder and chaos rather than order and stability. By the early 1920s, not alone was the train becoming an unreliable means of transport, it was becoming downright dangerous for those who used it.

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A Lingering Dissolution When Beckett came to write All That Fall in 1956 (first broadcast by the BBC in 1957) it was perhaps unsurprising that the train should play such a central role, as the whole play was saturated with realistic representations of his childhood and his neighbourhood environment. In a contemporary letter to Aidan Higgins he described the scene as he imagined it: ‘feet dragging and breath short and cart wheels and imprecations from the Brighton Road to Foxrock Station and back [. . .] boyhood memories’ (Beckett, 2011, 633). Beckett asserts the railway’s importance by portraying the station as the focus for the principal figures and provides the locus for the greatest amount of community interaction. The train connects the outside world to the community by bringing both commuters and racegoers to the racecourse, the other focal point of interest for the community of Boghill, a thinly camouflaged Foxrock. The play describes in a melancholy elegy the fate of a community withering on the vine, whose protagonists are haunted by age and sterility. The sense that an inevitable decline underpins Boghill’s inhabitants is articulated in Maddy Rooney’s fatalistic observation that while ‘It is suicide to be abroad’, staying at home merely offers the grim alternative of ‘A lingering dissolution’ (Beckett, 1986, 175). This decay is also visible in the railway at the heart of Boghill as all ‘traffic is retarded’, causing anxiety among the public who need an explanation, ‘if only to set our minds at rest’ (187). Beckett’s imagining the decline of the railway, coincidentally, mirrored the actuality at the time as the economic viability of the train to Foxrock was under active consideration. In 1956, Dr James Beddy was tasked with chairing a committee of inquiry which would suggest an overhaul of the railway system throughout the country (Ó Riain, 1995, 101–25). This report prefigures the more widely known Beeching Report on the railway system of Great Britain, published in 1963, which resulted in the closure of many branch lines. Beddy’s report was delivered in May 1957 and recommended the closing of almost half of the country’s rail infrastructure. Following an assessment of the political and social implications of such cuts, however, the decision was made not to implement the plan in full but rather to make selective closures of less contentious parts of the network (162). One closure which was implemented, in spite of the conservatism of the revised plan, was that of the Harcourt Street line, including Foxrock Station, which went ahead despite the arguments that it was suitable for development and could be useful in any future expansion of suburban Dublin. The decision was taken personally by C. S. Andrews, an ex-IRA man who cultivated the image of a man of action cutting a swathe through the public service, and who had become chairman of the nationalised rail company Córas Iompair

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Éireann (CIÉ). In a telling interview in the 1970s, Andrews was asked why he had gone ahead so forcefully with the closure of the Bray to Harcourt Street line. He answered, ‘I got fed up [. . .] watching those Freemasons going into Trinity from Foxrock to their meetings at the taxpayers’ expense’ (qtd in Fanning and Garvin, 2014, 217). This reasoning behind the decision to close the line can only have reinforced the anxiety which the local community had felt since the violent interventions of 1922–3, and it also bears testimony to the irrational perception of the railway as a signifier of Protestant bourgeois privilege. Andrews could not have been more naked in his linking of the perceived authority of the Protestant community to their ‘ownership’ of the means of transport, while it did not seem to matter to him that, by this stage, the brotherhood of Masons were more likely to drive cars. Perhaps unwittingly, Andrews’s words seem to single out the Beckett family in particular as they lived in Foxrock; Beckett’s father and brother were both masons, and he had frequented Trinity College (Cronin, 1996, 9). This may have been entirely coincidental but it is worth bearing in mind that what the Becketts symbolised to an unreconstructed bigot like Andrews was the archetypal ‘well-off’ Protestant, and that the heaviest symbolic blow he could land on that community was the destruction of their particular railway, which was to his mind the demonstration of their power and the manifestation of their control. Notwithstanding the existential dangers to its real-life counterpart, in All That Fall Beckett details a rail service which is a performance of interruption and disarray. Maddy Rooney upbraids Mr Barrell, the station master, for the delay in the train which is to bring her husband, Dan, home, but in doing so she draws attention to the fact that the trains are frequently late despite the route being relatively short (Foxrock to Harcourt Street was a mere six miles; Shepherd and Beesley, 1998, 155): MRS ROONEY: [. . .]. Even the slowest train on this brief line is not ten minutes and more behind its scheduled time without good cause, one imagines. [Pause.] We all know your station is the best kept of the entire network, but there are times when it is not enough [. . .]. [. . .] MR BARRELL: I know nothing. All I know is there has been a hitch. All traffic is retarded. (Beckett, 1986, 186–7) Retardation and delay are the result of the unexplained ‘hitch’ for those waiting in Boghill, but for those on the train, as Dan later relates, the results are complete stagnation and stasis. He states that he became aware that the train was ‘at a standstill’ when it shouldn’t have been as it had ‘not entered a station’

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(194–5). Dan’s anxiety is greater than those on the station platform and induces a physical response: Then gradually a – how shall I say – a growing desire to – er – you know – welled up within me. Nervous probably. [. . .]. You know, the feeling of being confined. [. . .] I got up and paced to and fro between the seats, like a caged beast. (195) Here, Beckett depicts a complete failure of the train’s function as it degenerates from merely being late, and not as fast as it should be, to being inert and acting as a means of entrapping its users rather than transporting them. The freedom promised by the acceleration of the machine becomes inverted, caging them in a stasis, which Dan likens to a demonic intervention: ‘All this stopping and starting again is devilish, devilish’ (191). Dan’s description of his journey seems to reflect the social decline at the community’s heart as it describes an initial unexplained inertia followed by an uncomprehending and disorienting passage of unproductive time. However, it is at disembarkation that the parallels become more apparent. Like his community in the new Ireland, he grows anxious and disoriented as we are told that the surroundings of the station have been changed and are now entirely foreign to him. The men’s toilet is no longer ‘the men’s’ but has become ‘the Fir’, having been translated into Irish, a foreign language which he does not understand. This trope of disorientation through the Irish forms of signage in public following independence is frequently raised in Beckett and, as Kennedy argues, should be read as a representation of broader cultural disorientation suffered by those Protestants who felt alienated by the new official language which they had normally avoided (2010, 96–7). The alteration of the railway station signage to include the Irish versions of the names and services was given further resonance, if not wholly politicised, by the decision to rename all the terminal stations after the leaders of the 1916 Rising, so that Amiens Street became Connolly Station and Westland Row became Pearse Station, thereby theoretically deepening the cultural anxieties of the suburban Protestant passengers. The politicisation of the space of the railway station serves to add deeper meaning to what is an already ambiguous space. As Schivelbusch points out, the railway terminus serves a dual purpose of being both a meeting point for passengers in a city while also serving as the start and end point of the mechanical rail network, so that the space is both social and public, but also mechanical and functional: ‘One part of it, the neo-classical stone building, belonged to the city; the other part, the steel and glass construct, was a pure function of the

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railway side’ (Schivelbusch, 1986, 174) with the stone facades serving to act as ‘a kind of stimulus shield’ (175), which ultimately disoriented the passenger. In Watt, Beckett exploits this ambiguity in his descriptions of Watt’s arrival and attempted departure from Mr Knott’s local station. Watt arrives at his destination, which clearly resembles Foxrock as it is situated by the racecourse ‘with its beautiful white railing [. . .] the stands, the grand, the members’, the people’s’ (Beckett, 2009, 23), before finding his way to Mr Knott’s nearby house, where he will spend his time in service. Towards the end of the narrative, when he leaves Mr Knott’s employ, Watt returns to the station but finds great difficulty in gaining access to it and, ultimately, in getting away. As it is late at night the station is closed and there is no railway traffic, so that the paradox of the building’s function is most apparent: what should be a point of departure, a point of escape from servitude for Watt, offers nothing but immobility and, eventually, incarceration. He is kept out of the station by the perimeter ‘wicket’ fence, which he scales to gain access, but through the bars of which he is obliged to survey the scene both inside and out. The effect of his accessing the station transforms him not into a passenger but into a prisoner: He waited and waited, his hands curled round the bars, of the wicket, so that his nails pricked his palms, his bags at his feet, staring through the bars (Beckett, 2009, 196) As he waits in the station for the first train of the morning to come, he is further locked in an interior station room by the night signalman Mr Case, who is himself confined to his signal box and is as ‘encased’ as his name suggests. Watt’s confinement is in the ‘waiting room’, which draws attention to the fundamental paradox of the railway, whereby the passenger must spend a lengthy period of stasis, in waiting, before the actual moment of movement arrives. In this case, however, Watt never actually achieves his goal of getting a train at all, and therefore never escapes, because the apparatus of the railway administration blocks him from doing so. Upon the station being opened, Watt encounters additional obstacles to leaving. Having no specific destination in mind he asks for a ticket ‘to the end of the line’, but is answered with the unhelpful query, ‘The round end or the square end?’, before being eventually sold a ‘a third single to —’ (Beckett, 2009, 212). The inability to identify a named destination by the railway’s employees, and the erasure of a named destination by the narrator, implies a caveat to Watt’s hope that catching a train might free him from his servitude, hinting that he is merely about to embark on a journey aboard a vehicle operating in a closed system, abstracted from an

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identifiable geography. As if to reinforce the point of Watt’s stasis, as the narrative closes, the train has yet to arrive. The appearance of the train station in Watt challenges the status of the railways in the community they have been built to serve. When Watt arrives he is conscious that he must be prepared to exit rapidly in order not to miss his stop and be carried on to the next, as had happened before, as the narrator tells us, because ‘at this hour [. . .] the train would hardly draw up, when it would be off again, like a bouncing ball’ (23). In this case, the train is a fickle, if not dangerous, means of transport which operates to satisfy the network and itself rather than the community that uses it. When Watt attempts to leave he is thwarted at first by the inaccessible nature of the building and then by the administration, which is seemingly designed to make gaining access to the train as difficult as possible. Beckett amplifies the contradictory nature of the railway station in That Time, so that when he evokes Harcourt Street terminus it has ceased to act as a site of locomotion altogether and instead has become a decaying endpoint abandoned by its trains. The returned exile A attempts to go back to a childhood hiding place, but finds his journey thwarted by the change in general environment and the decay of the transport system: that way all closed down and boarded up Doric terminus of the Great Southern and Eastern all closed down and the colonnade crumbling away (Beckett, 1986, 391) A similar sense is evoked in ‘Text for Nothing VII’, as a childhood memory of the station waiting room is recalled. The narrative at the heart of this text is essentially static but constantly expresses the desire to move. The central image described by the narrator is of his younger self, who, we are told, is ironically ‘endowed with movement’, considering that if all this time I had not stirred hand or foot from the third class waitingroom of the South-Eastern Railway Terminus [. . .] and were still there waiting to leave [. . .]. The last train went at twenty-three thirty, then they closed the station for the night. (Beckett, 2010b, 30) Appropriately set in a waiting room, suggestive of both movement and stasis, the piece develops as a meditation on the nature of time itself, and inter alia on the idea of waiting, rather than moving, and of transience rather than permanence. Fancying that he might be mistaken by the identity of the figure in the narrative, the narrator is confronted by the impermanence of the building he imagines:

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it should follow, but does not, that the third class waiting-room must be struck from the list of places to visit [. . .] that this lump is no longer me and that search should be made elsewhere [. . .]. But not so fast, all cities are not eternal, that of this pensum is perhaps among the dead, and the station in ruins where I sit waiting (Beckett, 2010a, 31) Appropriately enough, the image of the degeneration of the solid mass of this particular train station reflected its contemporary decline. When Beckett composed this piece in 1954, the station and the line were still functioning, though ailing, as he was to describe in All That Fall. He could not have foreseen that within such a short period what he imagined would become real as the building was boarded up and began to decay within a couple of years, having been closed in December 1958 and auctioned off less than a month later (Mac Aongusa, 2003, 82). When he wrote That Time years later, the premonition had come to pass, and the railway, the station, even the tramlines had departed, forcing him to confront the actuality of a significant loss from his own experience. In the opening piece of monologue, A confronts the memory of a trip he took but finds the recall of events interrupted by misremembered details: grey day took the eleven to the end of the line and on from there no no trams then all gone long ago that time you went back to look [. . .] not a tram left in the place only the old rails [. . .] not a wire to be seen only the old rails all rust (Beckett, 1986, 388–9) Here, Beckett revisits the rupture in transport which he represented in All That Fall, but instead of painting a picture of mere decline he draws attention to the actual replacement of the tram service by a bus service from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, with the remnants of the infrastructure providing a powerful metaphor of disuse and decay (see Ó Riain, 1995, 106). When A seeks an alternative means of transport, he specifically evokes the now defunct railway of Beckett’s youth: so foot it up in the end to the station bowed half double get out to it that way all closed down and boarded up Doric terminus of the Great Southern and Eastern all closed down and the colonnade crumbling away. (Beckett, 1986, 391) The description of the station, and the fact that it is precisely identified, seems to fulfil the implied prediction of termination inherent in All That Fall. The

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grandiosity of the now-crumbling mock-classical façade suggests Beckett’s agreement with Schivelbusch’s assessment that the terminus station in general has an inherent absurdity because of its dual function, but it also suggests Beckett arguing a certain unsustainable hubris in its design resulting in its now taking the appearance of a modern statue of Ozymandias. Either way, while the railway was a declining entity in All That Fall, in the current world of That Time it is wholly redundant.

Conclusion It would be disingenuous to claim that any association of disorder and slowness with the railway system, in contrast to the vision of progress conferred on trains by the Futurists, among others, is unique to Ireland, or indeed to Beckett. However, it is clear that the frequency with which he returns to the trope in his oeuvre owes much to the central role which the railway played in the existence and survival of the suburban Protestant community of his boyhood. Coupled with the early exposure to the fragility of the technology in light of the Irish Civil War experience, the inherent paradoxes of movement and inertia, and speed and sloth, were made more acute to him. For Beckett, the railway technology, which had always been so easily disparaged by the community it served, became associated with slowness rather than speed. In fact, the local railway line of the South and Eastern, the ‘S and E’, became known colloquially as ‘the Slow and Easy’ and even the logo of the amalgamated railways later became known as ‘the flying snail’ (Ó Riain, 1995, 40). When Beckett came to write about the community therefore, from a distance of space and time, the tropes of decline and sterility had become intertwined with each other, with the physically degenerating station becoming more a site of confinement and an actual terminus rather than a site of departure and movement. Similarly, for Beckett, railways and their infrastructure usually become sites of interrupted movement and inertia. The unnamed station in Watt and Boghill in All That Fall represent Beckett’s local station of Foxrock, the driving force, literally, of his suburban boyhood. The endpoint of his regular journey, the terminus at Harcourt Street Station becomes a specific, named locus of stasis and inertia. The inherent paradox that the railway cannot deliver the movement and freedom it promises seems to be summed up in the term ‘the permanent way’, which Watt ‘admired’ from inside his bars on the station platform (Beckett, 2009, 193). The term describing the area which encompasses the route of the track implies a long history, though the route is comparatively recent, and also implies a longevity, or permanence,

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which is belied by its transience. The permanent way near Beckett’s childhood house is now an overgrown pathway. It is perhaps a great paradox that the coming of the train as a rapid means of movement also made more common the experience of waiting as part of journeying. The modernisation of transport, through the railway system, with its imposition of timetables on travel, formalised the experience of waiting before going, of stasis before movement, most visible in the invention of the highly ambiguous space of the formal waiting room in a building devoted to rapid movement. While Beckett’s representation of the train as a failed engine of progress necessarily includes a critique of European movements such as Italian futurism, there is a distinctly local imagery in his narratives. The sense of power instilled by the railway system in the latter half of the nineteenth century complements the economically powerful classes which it served in Ireland at the time. Consequently, the decline of the power of the train, through destruction in political violence and through the decimation by political opposition, resonates as a unique metaphor, and one which Beckett develops on a recurring basis, as the terminus at Harcourt Street station became an actual dead end. Schivelbusch suggests that the same process of disruption of the ‘aura’ of a work of art, argued by Benjamin, through the removal of its context in space and time can also be applied to the intrusion of the railway on the consciousness of the nineteenth-century inhabitants as it unsettled the remoteness of communities through a speeding up of the communication between them (Schivelbusch, 1986, 41). What Beckett seems to suggest is that, by the early to mid-twentieth century, the specific intention of challenging the remoteness of place through linking the rural to the city in the process of suburbanisation is in actuality failing miserably and leading to a remote dislocation of places such as Foxrock. In effect, the train, which caused the foundation of Foxrock, is inadequate to sustain the artificial zones it has created. For Beckett, the train does not represent the unbounded progress of modern living, it becomes a system defined by its limitations rather than its potential. It is a closed system of termini (a favourite term) rather than starting points, and of slowness rather than speed, representing the failure to fulfil a set timetable rather than to properly service its boundaries.

Works Cited Alphant, Marianne and Nathalie Léger, eds (2007), Objet Beckett: ouvrage réalisé à l’occasion de l’exposition ‘Samuel Beckett’ présentée au Centre Pompidou, Paris: Centre Pompidou: IMEC. Anonymous (1922a), ‘Armed men burned carriages at Foxrock’, The Irish Times (28 February), p. 2.

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Anonymous (1922b), ‘Attempt to wreck a train’, The Irish Times (22 November), p. 6. Anonymous (1922c), ‘Civic Guard shot at Foxrock Station’, The Irish Times (2 December), p. 2. Apollonio, Umbro, ed. (1973), The Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos, trans. R. Brain, R. W. Flint, J. C. Higgitt and Caroline Tisdall, New York: Viking Press. Bairstow, Martin (2007), Railways in Ireland (Part Two), Halifax: Martin Bairstow. Beckett, Samuel (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009), Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2010a), Mercier and Camier, ed. Seán Kennedy, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2010b), Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2011), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cronin, Anthony (1996), Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, London: Harper Collins. Daly, Mary E. (1984), Dublin: The Deposed Capital, Cork: Cork University Press. Fanning, Bryan and Tom Garvin (2014), The Books That Define Ireland, Dublin: Merrion Press. Hopkinson, Michael (2004), Green against Green: The Irish Civil War, Dublin: Gill Books. Hughes, Robert (1991), The Shock of The New, London: Thames & Hudson. Inglis, Brian (1962), West Briton, London: Faber and Faber. Kennedy, Seán (2003), ‘“A Lingering Dissolution”: All That Fall and Protestant Fears of Engulfment in the Irish Free State’, in Linda Ben-Zvi (ed.), Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts, Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, pp. 247–62. Kennedy, Seán (2010), ‘“In the street I was lost”: Cultural dislocation in Samuel Beckett’s “The End”’, in Seán Kennedy (ed.), Beckett and Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–113. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Mac Aongusa, Brian (2003), The Harcourt Street Line: Back on Track, Dublin: Currach Press. Marinetti, F. T. (1909), The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, trans. R. W. Flint, (accessed 3 February 2021).

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O’Brien, Eoin (1986), The Beckett Country, Dublin: The Black Cat Press and Faber and Faber. Ó Riain, Mícheál (1995), On the Move: Córas Iompar Éireann 1945–1995, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Ricciotti, Dominic (1984), ‘The Revolution in Urban Transport: Max Weber and Italian Futurism’, The American Art Journal, 16:1, pp. 46–64. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (1986), The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press. Shepherd, Ernie and Gerry Beesley (1998), Dublin & South Eastern Railway, Leicester: Midland Publishing.

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Chapter 3 ‘with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar’: The Strangeness of Technology in Beckett Dúnlaith Bird

In a letter to Donald McWhinnie dated 7 March 1958, Samuel Beckett mentions that the new monologue written for Patrick Magee ‘involves a taperecorder with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar. I can’t release it until I check up on some points. I have asked John B[eckett] to send me a book of the words (instructions for use)’ (2014, 115). Beckett’s inability to fully understand the ‘mechanics’ of the tape recorder leads to a potential failure to ‘release’. Yet as this chapter will argue, the writer’s technological investigations for what would become Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) help him to elaborate a ‘mechanics of failure’, whereby the breakdown or malfunctioning of machines and appliances, either due to human error or electronic fault, leads to the potential breakdown of understanding, characters, or even of form. This ‘mechanics of failure’ sparks fresh connections and avenues for reflection. In Rough for Theatre II (1976), two bureaucrats’ classification of a third man’s life and worth is disrupted by their malfunctioning desk lamps, shortcircuiting their business-like summation and allowing new patterns of light to emerge. In both plays, technological and electronic objects take centre stage, the tape recorder and the lamps blurring the line between object and character, mechanic and organic, sentience and insentience. As the ‘working parts’ of the play break down, new mechanics, strange new ‘motion and forces producing motion’ are discovered (Lexico, ‘Mechanics, n.’). In the case of the monologue for Magee, a breakdown in the interface between human and machine in turn encourages further research, precision, and adaptation through the use of the instruction manual, the ‘book of the words’ (Beckett, 2014, 115). Beckett’s switch from dramaturgy to technical manual does not appear to rectify the problem, however. In a subsequent letter to Barney Rosset on 1 April 1958, the writer expresses apprehension

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about allowing the work to be seen by a wider public, not least because ‘The magnetophonics too are difficult and will want great care and precision’ (123). Beckett’s research exposes further problems, and yet the ‘difficulty’ of the magnetophonics again generates further conditions for creation; in this case ‘care and precision’ in the performance. In ‘Thing Theory’, Bill Brown argues that ‘We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily’ (2001, 4). The tape recorder, with its contingent difficulties, has become a ‘thing’ for Beckett. In his letters, Beckett appears by turns fascinated and frustrated by this technology and its technicalities, wishing to make the conflicting currents visible on stage; in his letter to McWhinnie he notes parenthetically that the play is ‘definitely non-radio’ (2014, 115). Just as Krapp’s past is rendered distant and strange to him through the medium of the tapes, so the audience seeing the unfamiliar tape recorder is alienated from the outset, palliating Beckett’s worries that the ‘monologue is rather a s[e]ntimental affair’ (115). The unfamiliar technology helps Beckett to translate uncanniness onto the stage, to reduce humanity from homo-technē into a spooling, drooling monkey, slipping on banana skins and lingering on lost fire. The audience in turn relates to this trajectory, increasingly identifying with Krapp and his struggles to interact satisfactorily with the tape recorder. The characters Bertrand (A) and Morvan (B) in Rough for Theatre II are perhaps harder to relate to initially, as they sit at their identical desks to review the depositions from friends and family regarding the uselessness of Croker (C)’s existence. Yet as the desk lamps flicker out, the towering ‘cathedral’ (Beckett, 1990, 238) of evidence against Croker collapses, leaving both them and the audience in the dark, huddling together for a modicum of ‘animal warmth’ (244). In both plays, Beckett uses technology to examine what humanity becomes when the light goes out, and the Promethean fire burns low. The machines in Beckett’s work are strange, or work strangely, serving to further estrange the characters from themselves, and to disconcert and intrigue the audience. Excitingly, this sapping of human assurance and mastery incited and exacerbated by faulty technology may offer another vision, ‘perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’ (Beckett, 1995, 278). Exploring first the uncanny role of instruction manuals in Krapp’s Last Tape, and then the unsettling presence of electronics on stage, this chapter will finally examine the ‘mechanics of failure’ wired into the electrical systems of Rough for Theatre II, suggesting not only that Beckett’s dramatic works are constructed for fruitful technological and mechanical failures, but that these failures can be seen as creative generators for future work.

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‘a book of the words’: The Untranslatable Object The history of magnetophonics is particularly pertinent to Beckett’s work: John Fletcher reflects on ‘the timely mechanical invention, the magnetic tape recorder’ which ‘made possible the frame that keeps painful real-life experience at the necessary emotional distance’ (2006, 16). As Masanori Kimizuka of the Centre of the History of Japanese Industrial Technology writes in ‘Historical Development of Magnetic Recording and Tape Recorder’, magnetic recording technology was initially theorised by American engineer Oberlin Smith in 1888 (2012, 185). The technology was greatly developed in Germany prior to World War Two, and the post-war Allied investigation into German advances in this area led to their widespread use in the ‘development of tape recorders in the United States’, particularly by Ampex (193). The technology was initially unwieldy; the Marconi-Stille steel ribbon recorder used by the BBC in the 1930s ‘weighed one tonne and could record for 30 minutes on a steel ribbon that was 3mm wide, 80ɥm thick and 3,000m long’ (192). The difficulties of using such a machine were not to be underestimated: ‘if the wire came unwound it was extremely difficult to put it back; if it broke, it had to be welded back together’ (192). By 1934, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) had completed ‘the forerunner to the modern tape recorder – the “Magnetophon”’ (192). After World War Two this Magnetophon was adapted and improved by John Mullin, who had first encountered the machine in Germany as a member of the US Army Signal Corps. He worked to develop the technology, particularly the playback head, in cooperation with Ampex, and the 1948 Ampex 200 model was popularised for commercial use in radio stations by staff of the Bing Crosby Show (197). On the European side, development lagged in comparison: ‘In 1954, nine years after the war, the freshly-outfitted Magnetophon M5 was finally released by Telefunken, a subsidiary of AEG, for semi-professional use, followed by a model for home use in 1958’ (199), the year of Krapp’s Last Tape’s writing and first performance. Beckett’s technical ignorance regarding this relatively new device is therefore unfeigned. The syntax in his initial letter to McWhinnie mirrors this technological strangeness, ‘with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar’ (Beckett, 2014, 115). Yet on closer examination this is the most logical syntactic construction to avoid a hanging preposition. Strangeness and precision, then, are woven together in Beckett’s initial linguistic interactions with this technology. Similarly, the phrase Beckett uses to describe the instructions for the tape recorder, ‘a book of the words’, is particularly evocative, recalling the religious enlightenment offered by a book of hours.1 Beckett seeks technological enlightenment, wishing to understand the mechanics better so that he can elucidate them for the performer and the audience.

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Yet I would argue that the writer’s purpose in exploring the ‘book of the words’ is also to obfuscate, to render the technology more mysterious, disconcerting, and incomprehensible. The inherent strangeness of user guides themselves is underlined in Martin Love’s description of the famous Haynes car manuals: ‘like a travel guide to a foreign land – it makes the unfamiliar manageable’ (qtd in Schumacher, 2018). For Love, manuals are only ever imperfect, tentative translations between the human and the foreign country inhabited by the machine. The technological object can never be entirely familiar; ‘manageable’ rather than mastered. Instruction manuals play into Emily Apter’s theorisation of translation as disruption in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). She argues that ‘Translation failure’, as much as translation itself, is ‘a significant medium of subject reformation and political change’ which, even as it ‘demarcates intersubjective limits’, draws us out of our comfort zone and into a space of equivalencies and unfamiliar concepts framed in a familiar tongue (Apter, 2006, 6). Manuals purport to translate machine language into human languages, making the object more familiar. Yet through their alien precision, their technical terms, these manuals may disrupt one’s ‘domestic arrangements’, rendering strange the object (or tape recorder) in one’s living room, forcing us to reconsider our relation to it (6). This raises interesting issues with regards to Krapp’s Last Tape: the tape recorder would have been, for the original 1950s audience, an unfamiliar object, particularly in a domestic setting. For modern audiences the same object has again become an incongruous technological relic. I would argue that the recorder is an incarnation of the uncanny, its strange presence in a familiar setting generating a sense of unease. The mechanical object is always temporally disjointed, ahead of its time and behind the times, locked with Krapp in a symbiotic, cybernetic bubble into which the audience is always drawn. In part by ‘checking up’ on the user manual, rendering himself familiar with the language of the machine, its ‘words’, Beckett is able to translate a sense of familiarity to Krapp’s handling of the recorder while preserving the recorder’s persistent strangeness for successive audiences. In ‘Inside the World of Instruction Manuals’, Helene Schumacher (2018) explores the instruction manual as a universal and historical artefact. She cites Paul Ballard, head of a technical writing company, who claims that instruction manuals must follow three basic principles: ‘making it easy for people to find the information they need’, ‘making the instructions easy to understand’, and finally delivering autonomy to the user, ‘making sure people know what to do next when their particular need has been met’ (Schumacher, 2018). For Ballard, then, ‘instruction manuals face an “existential crisis”: “The whole point is the product, not the manual; the more you’re spending time looking at the manual,

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the less you’re getting out of the product”’. However, it seems that Beckett gets a lot out of ‘looking at the manual’, despite the fact that he was familiar with similar recording devices from his work on All That Fall. Beckett’s letter to Donald McWhinnie, with whom he had collaborated on the radio play, suggests that he is seeking to understand the workings of a specific model to which he may not have current access: ‘a tape recorder with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar’ (Beckett, 2014, 115). In this light, the manual becomes an imperfect substitute for the machine, as the absence of the mechanical object is compensated for by the ‘book of the words’. The manual holds the key to finishing Krapp’s Last Tape, and perhaps also provides a pretext for continuing to work on it, allowing Beckett to further explore the zone of interaction between human and machine: ‘I can’t release it until I check up on some points’ (115). This question of human-mechanical interface as mediated by the instruction manual is rendered even more interesting by the linguistic particularities of instruction manuals, traditionally written in formal, technical language. Roger Bridgman, former curator at the London Science Museum, claims that ‘instructions are there to compensate for the inabilities of machines by employing the abilities of users, and therefore tell you something about the state of both at the time when they were produced’ (qtd in Schumacher, 2018). In a user manual for a contemporaneous reel-to-reel tape recorder, the Norelco Transistorized Tape Recorder (1963), the explanation for how the device works would lose the average user, and may have been intended to appeal to the potential client through scientific means: ‘The sound vibrations which the microphone converts into electrical voltage variations reach the recording head through transistorized amplifier circuits’ (Norelco, 1963). The existence of these user guides points to a failure to connect between human and machine: lack of knowledge or expertise on one side, lack of ergonomy on the other, for which the manual must compensate. As Ballard contends, there is a ‘gap’ between user expectations and the machine, ‘and the gap will get filled somehow’ (qtd in Schumacher, 2018), either through repeated consultation with the ‘book of the words’, or through habit and repeated use, just as Krapp consults his ledger and his dictionary, and seems relatively used to working the recorder. As Miki Iwata notes in ‘Records and Recollections in Krapp’s Last Tape’, Beckett had ‘developed a detailed knowledge about how to manipulate the technology’ during the course of his collaboration with McWhinnie on All That Fall (2008, 35). The word ‘manipulate’ is key. The tape recorder is the means by which an ostensibly objective truth is conveyed: Krapp’s painstakingly recorded past confronting his present. Yet Beckett’s desire to get his hands dirty, using the instruction manual to delve into the machine, suggests that his objective is not just to comprehend but also to ‘manipulate the technology’ and

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particularly to take advantage of the audience’s unfamiliarity with it. The persistent tendency to imbue the tape recorder with a kind of impersonal objectivity is textually undercut, as Iwata notes, by the apposite interjections of Krapp’s younger self (36). Beckett manipulates the technology in order to better control both the structure of the play and the audience. The nature of the instruction manual, at once facilitating and delaying or even frustrating use, complements Beckett’s practical familiarity with the technology gained during the production of All That Fall as he learns both how to skilfully handle the reels and to reel the audience in. In what ways does the play resemble instruction manuals, both in structure and in syntax? According to Araceli Cristobalena Frutos’s article ‘A Corpus-based Genre Study of Instruction Manuals for Household Appliances’, instruction manuals can be seen to constitute a specific genre with identifiable characteristics: ‘Every user’s manual has in common its instructional function’, whereby an expert teaches us ‘how to use properly the appliance’ (2015, 104). Could Beckett’s text be read as an instruction manual, or a ‘How-not-to’ guide to living, designed to allow even monolingual spectators to follow the play, structured as it is around long stretches of silence and slapstick routines? Not only is Krapp’s Last Tape informed by and indebted to the instruction manual, but its structure also resembles one. Instruction manuals, particularly for technological goods, may leave out key information, assuming greater expertise on the part of the customer, or ergonomics on the part of the operating system. Rather than appearing in linear form, as in a narrative text, there can be strange jumps in the operating sequence reflecting the thought process of the compiler. This non-linearity is compounded, as Ballard notes, by the requirements of the user, just as Krapp jumps forward and backward on the tape, mercilessly pausing it at the climactic moment with no regard for the audience’s desire for closure. Manuals, like Krapp’s Last Tape, can be opened in medias res, and the guide may be unreliable, created by an expert with no patience for the uninitiated. User guides also often refer the reader to different sections in order to learn about basic or advanced procedures, or for related functions, which could be compared to Krapp’s use of the ledger in the play: ‘[He bends over ledger, turns the pages, finds the entry he wants, reads.]’ (Beckett, 1990, 216). There is an increasing tendency in manuals towards modularity, a series of independent units which can be combined in a number of ways, thus facilitating the user’s desire to flip back and forth to find the information they are looking for (Schumacher, 2018), just as Krapp spools back and forth through his life. A system of modular categorisation, like the numbered tape boxes in the play, should lead to greater ease of use. Instead this fungibility leads to greater confusion, disorder, and entropy, as Krapp knocks the boxes over in a

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moment of frustration: ‘curses, switches off, sweeps boxes and ledger violently to the ground’ (Beckett, 1990, 217). This tendency towards modularisation in the play can prove even more systemic and destructive in nature. As Ulrika Maude notes in Beckett, Technology and the Body, ‘the maiming and fragmentation of the body’ is intensified in Beckett’s work by textual effects including ‘broken syntax and rhythm’ (2009, 1). Krapp’s body and syntax are broken in multiple ways: not only does old age impede his movement and impinge upon his hearing, not only are his recorded soliloquies interrupted repeatedly at climactic points by the press of a button, but these recordings, the body of his work, are systematically divided between boxes and later scattered on the floor. This inclination towards division, classification, and even fragmentation helps to counterbalance what Beckett terms ‘a s[e]ntimental affair’, allowing him to distance the audience from Krapp’s suffering and interrupt the connection that threatens to develop between the protagonist and the spectators (Beckett, 2014, 115). Krapp’s lifework is technological in nature: his recorded magnum opus constituted by the tapes is a systematic and methodical reworking of the protagonist’s life in words. His craft is one of spinning and fabrication (technē). In pursuit of this art, Krapp instigates multiple subsystems and routines; the consumption of bananas, the examination of his watch, the repetition of the word ‘spool’ with the round ‘o’ of his mouth recalling the slowly circling tapes, are all integrated into the overall function of recording a life. However, as the slips in the banana gag suggest, the integration of these systems is imperfect. If the play were viewed as a more rhisomatic ‘actor-network’ (Latour, 2005), involving multiple systems and technologies both organic and non-organic, then Miki Iwata’s assertion that the voices in the play ‘struggle to conflate themselves and to create a sense of unity’ is intriguing (2008, 34). A company struggling with multiple systems which fail to communicate or communicate imperfectly with each other must either integrate (bridge the sub-systems, customising them ‘to interface with each other’) or conflate (construct a new overarching system which renders the old sub-systems obsolete) (Awad, 2010). Krapp singularly, desperately, deliberately fails in his attempt to do either, and the concept of a linear, ‘whole’ life story is broken down into imperfect modularity. There is another aspect of the genre of instruction manuals which renders it pertinent to the play. Apter speaks of the ‘hegemony of global English as the lingua franca of technocracy’ (2006, 3). An instruction manual in certain respects breaks this hegemony. It exists already in a permanent state of translation, as different iterations of itself. Indeed, in many user manuals, as in the ones Frutos analyses, it is difficult to know which is the source language and which the target languages, all being equally idiomatic (or unidiomatic) (2015, 106). In her work,

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Apter recasts translation as ‘an act of love, and as an act of disruption, [becoming] a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalising citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pregiven domestic arrangements’ (2006, 6). Beckett’s tape recorder, and the ‘book of the words’ he consults to both palliate and accentuate its difficulties, are used to ‘reposition’ both Krapp and the audience in relation to their world and their history, rendering them ‘foreign to themselves’, as Apter suggests.

Materialising Technology: The Thing on Stage What weight does the tape recorder, the ‘thing’ on the stage, have in productions of Krapp’s Last Tape? Paul Lawley, for example, refers to Beckett’s attention to ‘the gross materiality of the recorder and the tapes’, describing them as ‘recalcitrant objects the editor must manipulate’ (1994, 90–1). The relative novelty of reel-to-reel recording technology in the 1950s, particularly in the private home, would have accentuated the contemporary audience’s sense of the uncanny on seeing the device illuminated in ‘strong white light’ (Beckett, 1990, 215). Adding to this pervading strangeness is Beckett’s repeated insistence on the difficulties of the technology. In his letter to Alan Schneider in 1960, Beckett again references ‘the technical problems raised by the machine’ (2014, 277). The object is given a disproportionate importance on stage, in part through this focus on its ‘problems’; as Brown notes in ‘Thing Theory’, we ‘begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us’ (2001, 4). The recorder on the table is, as Beckett states in his letter to George Devine, ‘a dummy’ (2014, 124), the real recording displaced offstage for reasons of practicality, and occasionally at the demand of the actor. As David Warrilow says of his 1989 performance of Krapp, ‘I didn’t want real control. I didn’t want to have to deal with a machine to that degree. It’s not worth it. The risks are absolutely appalling’ (qtd in Fletcher, 2006, 199). Patrick Magee had expressed the same fear in an interview with James Knowlson, explaining why he had been happy to have a technician work the master tape: ‘I had enough terror, anyway, of the tape jumping off, or blowing up. Anything can go wrong’ (qtd in Fletcher, 2006, 188). The unfamiliarity of the technology, combined with its proximity to the actor, generates unease and even ‘terror’. Initiated by Beckett’s repeated insistence on its ‘difficulty’ and strangeness, the ‘recalcitrant’ technological object on the stage acquires meaning and moment, becoming a thing in its own right. Brown examines ‘thingness’ as potentially ‘what is excessive in objects [. . .] their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence’ (2001, 5).

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The biomechanical, almost cybernetic bond between performer and machine in Krapp’s Last Tape is also highly sensuous in nature, not just Self/Other but Self/Beloved. In the BBC production of Krapp’s Last Tape recorded in November 1972, Magee cradles the recorder in his arm, caressing the metal case as he listens to his young self recount his lost love. The slow movements of his thumb, almost but not quite touching the screws in an extreme closeup, is counterpointed by the blurred vulnerability of his head and incipient bald patch, a man ‘drowned in dreams and burning to be gone’ (Beckett, 1990, 222). Reinforcing the semantic palette of the play, the reflection of the light off the back of the actor’s hand contrasts with the dark shadows cast by his crooked fingers on the case, a chiaroscuro cyborg. A process of translation and of transference is enacted, from absent lover to present machine, the physical, material object, like the ‘new light above my table’, transformed into a technological companion, a new means of feeling ‘less alone’ (217).

The Mechanics of Failure: Electrical Currents in Rough for Theatre II Where in Krapp’s Last Tape the anthropomorphised tape recorder remains passive, in Rough for Theatre II, first written in French in the late 1950s, the technology is not only seemingly sentient, but also malevolent. A and B enter a room containing a table, chair, and ‘extinguished reading-lamp’, on either side of the room, forming two points of a triangle (Beckett, 1990, 237). Their stated purpose is to give an audit of the life and imminent suicide of the third, silent character, Croker (C), who waits on a window ledge for the entirety of the play. Contained in their briefcases are all of the papers that ‘sum up’ Croker’s life, recalling the boxes of tapes that document Krapp’s life (237). Croker, unlike Krapp, is entirely silent throughout the play, unable or unwilling to intervene as A and B rapidly dissect his life, reducing it to a series of cameos and ciphers: ‘so many disasters’ (238). Yet the apparent mastery of A and B, and the authority of their findings, ‘checked and verified’ (238), are undermined by a series of mechanical failures. Their reading lights, intended to facilitate their work, instead switch on and off seemingly at random. Gradually A and B’s bureaucratic imperturbability cracks, their syntax and self-control breaking down as they attempt to continue at the mercy of the electric currents. In examining technology in this play, I would like to question how the ‘poetics of failure’, theorised by Sara Jane Bailes in Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2011), is facilitated by and predicated upon mechanical failures, acting as counter-narratives to the prevailing contemporary conception

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of electrification as progress. As Bailes states in the introduction to her book, failure works, particularly in performance, and Beckett’s technology works best when it malfunctions, as demonstrated both in Krapp’s Last Tape and in the later Rough for Theatre II (xx). Despite A and B’s briefcases ‘crammed with documents’ (Beckett, 1990, 237), it seems they have not read the instruction manual for the play, as indicated by the set design in the shape of a three-prong plug. If A and B at their desks constitute the live and neutral pins, then Croker, preparing to jump, is almost certainly earthed. Bertrand (A) and Morvan (B) are connected by the electrical current indicated in the stage directions, a fact Beckett underlines by introducing them through a routine with the reading lamps: A switches on and then switches off his desk lamp on entering the room, before instructing B to do the same: ‘Hsst! Switch off’ (Beckett, 1990, 237). A and B are dependent on the light from their desk lamps, not just to read the files but to shed light on the world around them. It is unfortunate for them, then, that the breaks in electrical current become so frequent. Roughly halfway through the play, the lights that have obeyed a strict choreography of ‘Switch on’ and ‘Switch off’ begin to malfunction: ‘Well! The bulb has blown! [The lamp goes on again.] No, it hasn’t! Must be a faulty connection’ (242). Both characters initially respond with practical solutions to the problem. The stage directions for Morvan (B) read: ‘[Examines lamp, straightens flex.] The flex was twisted, now all is well’ (242). When the current again cuts out, it is Bertrand’s turn to intervene: ‘Try giving her a shake. [B shakes the lamp. It goes on again.] See! I picked up that wrinkle in the Band of Hope’ (243). In the absence of any manual or external aid from an expert, faced with the arbitrary nature of technology, the humans are eventually left with only tricks and ‘wrinkles’. These continuing technological malfunctions are accompanied in the play by increasing tension between A and B. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan states that ‘electricity is organic in character and confirms the organic social bond by its technological use in telegraph and telephone, radio, and other forms. The simultaneity of electric communication, also characteristic of our nervous system, makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world’ (248). Yet Beckett’s contemporaneous piece uses a series of ‘faulty connections’, both literal and figurative, to stage not ‘the organic social bond’ but rather people’s reluctance or inability to connect. The characters are reduced to desperation as the lights continue to flicker, so that Morvan moves over to Bertrand’s side of the room for ‘animal warmth’ (Beckett, 1990, 244). They may be ‘present and accessible’ to each other, but Bertrand rapidly rejects such physical familiarity in favour of estrangement: le courant ne passe décidemment pas.2

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B’s light appears to have a mind of its own, reacting to his lines with an almost malicious sentience: ‘[Reading.] “. . . morbidly sensitive−” [The lamp goes out.] Bugger and shit!’ (Beckett, 1990, 242). As the breaks in current accelerate, so too does Morvan’s incipient breakdown. He begins to rush his reading in order to finish before the next blackout, leading to a partial breakdown in communications between the pair. The flow of words becomes so rapid that he loses the main verb, and is forced to go back and look for it: ‘Hold on till I find the verb and to hell with all this drivel in the middle’ (243). His previously easy flow becomes choppy, broken by ellipses and ejaculations: ‘“. . . were I but . . . could I but . . .” – Jesus! – “. . . though it be . . . be it but . . .” – Christ!’ (243). Finally, Morvan summons the benevolence of an absent god: ‘I’ll take the lamp. [He draws it towards him.] Please God it holds out’ (Beckett, 1990, 244). Of course the light does not ‘hold out’, and the mischievous nature of the supposedly inanimate object becomes fully evident in what Beckett refers to in a letter to Robert Pinget as the ‘gag des lampes. Envie de le pousser jusqu’à la frénésie. Mais je n’en ferai rien’ [the lamp gag. Feel like pushing it all the way to frenzy. But I’ll do no such thing] (Beckett, 2014, 166–7). Despite Beckett’s claim, the gag nevertheless pushes the characters, the performers, and even the audience to their limits. B’s lamp goes on on the other side of the room, unnoticed until A tells him to switch off A’s, at which point they realise B must cross the room to switch off his own before asking A to switch on his again so that he can cross back. The flow of their dialogue has been rendered spasmodic by the ‘faulty connections’, while their movement on the stage now resembles an organic schematic of alternating current, rapidly and repeatedly reversing direction without any control from the protagonists. B eventually voices what the audience is thinking: ‘This gag has gone on long enough for me’ (Beckett, 1990, 244). Despite the fact that after this little ‘gag’ the lamps function perfectly for the rest of the play, a sense of mistrust lingers. Nothing is certain, even electrical flows are arbitrary, and the treacherous current can cut out at any time.

Conclusion: Mysterious Mechanics Written almost twenty years apart, the English-language versions of Krapp’s Last Tape and Rough for Theatre II demonstrate the consonances and divergences in Beckett’s evolving use of technology, and of the ‘mechanics of failure’. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the protagonist’s mastery over an unfamiliar technology is arresting, and the ‘unfamiliar mechanics’ mentioned by Beckett in his letter to McWhinnie (Beckett, 2014, 115) mesmerise the audience. Yet the recorder

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does not function as Krapp wishes, and instead the unexpected and occasionally unintended juxtapositions of past and present voices reveal the organic breakdown of Krapp’s lifework from magnum opus to ‘drivel’ (Beckett, 1990, 222). Krapp’s mastery of the recorder, like his absolute authority over his narrative, is revealed as an illusion, an endless series of attempts to make sense of the human condition. The gleaming recorder haloed in the bright white light of the new lamp reflects human life through a technological lens, exposing Krapp’s onanistic loneliness and crystallising the tension in the play between his impotence and his authority. The audience, unsettled by the unfamiliar technology on stage, increasingly identifies with Krapp’s breakdown into ‘The sour cud and the iron stool’ (222), helping to establish the strange balance of distance and complicity essential to the play. In Rough for Theatre II, a different process of complicity is generated by technology. If Krapp’s tape recorder was largely unfamiliar to audiences in 1958, as it was to the playwright, then the choice of technology in Rough for Theatre II is deliberately banal, a commonplace object for the spectators. The initial humour of the mechanical failure derives in part from the almost invisible nature of the reading lamps, used to see other items and rarely seen themselves. Like the tape recorder, however, the lamps become ‘things’ when they no longer fulfil their intended function. As the reading lamps repeatedly switch on and off, the spectators begin to empathise to an extent with the frustration and fears of Bertrand and Morvan: A, B, and the audience all find themselves ‘in the dark’, just like Croker (Beckett, 1990, 244). Beyond the illusion of technological control lies the fruitful terrain of mechanical failure: the malfunctioning of the electric lights means other networks of light become apparent, casting a different, more organic light on Croker’s life, the value of which may not be uniquely found in ledgers. At the very beginning of the play Bertrand muses on their role in the drama: ‘I still don’t understand. [Pause.] Why he needs our services. [Pause.] A man like him. [Pause.] And why we give them free. [Pause.] Men like us. [Pause.] Mystery. [Pause.] Ah well . . . [Pause. He switches on.]’ (Beckett, 1990, 237). When Morvan’s lamp first begins to malfunction Bertrand remarks, ‘Mysterious affair, electricity’ (243). The fact that the idea of ‘mystery’ is evoked twice, by the same character, is significant. The highly popular mystery plays of medieval Europe were renditions of biblical stories, including the Last Judgement, and featured antiphonal song, a form of responsary music in which two choirs reflect back each other’s call. Yet in Beckett’s play, rather than the biblical Day of Judgement, we have a furtive nighttime meeting between two bureaucrats who cannot wait to wash their hands of the whole affair and go home, and rather than a sacred, psalmodic

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call and response from two choirs, we have typical Beckettian rapid-fire repartee: A: We attend B: Let him jump A: When? B: Now A: From where? B: From here will do. (Beckett, 1990, 238) The power of these seemingly omniscient judges is revealed to be uncertain. Although they sit in judgement over Croker, their inability to master their desk lamps, a resounding failure to consistently effect the fiat lux, casts doubt on their role as arbiters of existence. Despite their godlike status, theirs is a decidedly less than divine justice, as their messing around with flexes and electrical flows suggests. Rough for Theatre II is, in some respects, a modern mystery play. Rather than religious illumination the play offers only doubt and uncertainty from a different source of light. As B switches on and off his desk lamp one last time, A is prompted to ask, as all Beckett characters from Clov to Krapp must do, ‘How end?’ (Beckett, 1990, 249). He finally does so by lighting a match and examining C’s face, and is sufficiently shocked that when the match burns out he strikes a second one: ‘Well I’ll be . . . !’ (249). Although the play ends on an ellipsis, A’s words dammed up, there is a sense that damnation is not certain. The modern mystery play, rhythmed by uncanny technology and mysterious electrical currents that flicker in and out, could become a miracle play, where the ineffable and the inexplicable are restored, where the familiar once again becomes strange, where, as Apter says, ‘an act of disruption becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history’ (2006, 6). It may be, as B notes earlier, that Croker, sentenced to death by his very name, has ‘a spark left in him’ (Beckett, 1990, 241), the fire in him not now quite burned out, just as Beckett finds in the mechanics of technological failure new sources of productive frustration. Croker, like Krapp, is part of these hybrid systems of light of varying intensity; the lamps, the matches, and the stars.

Notes 1. A book of hours was a popular devotional book of the Middle Ages, often illuminated and intended for individual use by lay people. See also Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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2. The French phrase le courant qui passe can mean both the electrical current passing, and the chemistry between two people. As the electrical current fails in Rough for Theatre II, so the chemistry between A and B becomes increasingly antagonistic.

Works Cited Apter, Emily (2006), The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Awad, Yousef (2010), ‘Multiple Systems: Consolidate or Integrate?’, (accessed 27 October 2019). Bailes, Sara Jane (2011), Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, London: Routledge. Beckett, Samuel (1990), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (1995), The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Bill (2001), ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28:1, pp. 1–22. Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Book of hours’, (accessed 10 October 2018). Fletcher, John (2006), About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work, London: Faber and Faber. Frutos, Araceli Cristobalena (2015), ‘A Corpus-based Genre Study of Instruction Manuals for Household Appliances’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 198, pp. 103–11. Iwata, Miki (2008), ‘Records and Recollections in Krapp’s Last Tape’, Journal of Irish Studies, 23, pp. 34–43. Kimizuka, Masanori (2012), ‘Historical Development of Magnetic Recording and Tape Recorder’, Survey Reports on the Systemization of Technologies, 17, pp. 185–275. Latour, Bruno (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawley, Paul (1994), ‘Stages of Identity’, in John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 88–105. Lexico Online Dictionary, ‘Mechanics, n.’, (accessed 17 January 2020).

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Maude, Ulrika (2009), Beckett, Technology and the Body, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Norelco (1963), ‘Norelco Transistorized Tape Recorder’. Schumacher, Helene (2018), ‘Inside the world of instruction manuals’, (accessed 6 October 2018).

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Chapter 4 Beckett and La Mettrie: From Man a Machine to Techno-Human Being Céline Thobois

In Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) stands out as the first theatrical play to feature a technological apparatus as a central agent of the performance. The initial stage direction specifies that the tape recorder is located on a table in the lit area at the front centre stage, which is an aesthetic statement on the key part given to the machine. Indeed, the recording it plays appears in the playscript as ‘TAPE’, which places the mechanically reproduced voice on the same level as the human protagonist ‘KRAPP’. Significantly, Krapp’s Last Tape is viewed as ‘one of the most remarkable attempts to evoke and even “stage” the workings of a person’s mind’ (Van Hulle, 2015, 21). In this play, Beckett proposes not only to explore the mind in relation to the body, but also to reconsider this dichotomy in comparison to, and in connection with, the machine. Beckett’s attention to the interaction between the body and the mind has been broadly analysed through the prism of metaphysics and tied to his interest in René Descartes. Scholars have also studied his engagement with other Western philosophers, such as Arnold Geulincx, who provided him with more perspectives from which to tackle the Cartesian split (see Feldman, 2006, 41–57, 131–7; Tucker, 2012). However, critics have also shown that depictions of psychophysiological processes in Beckett’s oeuvre derive from scientific and medical studies of the body, often paired with a focus on technology. Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s materialist and mechanistic theories, radically articulated in his most famous work Man a Machine (1747), are interestingly located at the meeting point between these disciplines. La Mettrie’s work, which Beckett will have briefly encountered during his reading of Wilhelm Windelband’s History of Philosophy (1893), has contributed to the development of a posthuman articulation of humans and machines.

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Indeed, the theories that La Mettrie elaborated in Man a Machine in the eighteenth century are striking for contemporary readers, as they clearly anticipate the posthuman direction that the humanities have taken in response to the massive ecological and technological changes that we are facing (and creating). Rosi Braidotti, via her reading of Sam Whimster’s ‘The Human Sciences’, acknowledges the fundamental role that La Mettrie played in building ‘post-anthropocentric Humanities’ (2013, 146). She notes that ‘La Mettrie’s theory of the inherently “mechanical” or self-organizing structure of the human is path-breaking and highly relevant for our own situation’ (146). In addition, La Mettrie’s oeuvre, and particularly Man a Machine, has recently sparked off new interest in the fields of neurology and cognitive science. The hybridity of the text – a fusion of medical treatise and philosophical manifesto – creates a discourse ahead of its time as far as the understanding of the body and the mind is concerned. As such, it shapes a ground-breaking ‘philosophical anthropology’ as well as early forms of ‘neurophysiology’ and ‘neuropsychology’ (Smith, 2002, 115). This chapter focuses on neurophysiology in relation to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in order to reflect on the evolving understanding of the connections between the human and the technological. It seeks to show how both La Mettrie and Beckett open up unexpected avenues for thinking about what it means to be human in the face of new paradigms of humanness created in the cybernetic era.

L’Homme-Machine: An Epistemological Pathway to Body-Mind Interactions Since its publication, Man a Machine has been considered and treated as a radical and provocative text. La Mettrie aims to transcend the religious and moral limits plaguing the scientific discourse and philosophical debates of the Enlightenment, advocating an epistemological stance based solely on experience and observation. The event that seems to have sparked La Mettrie’s radical materialism was the siege of Freiburg, which took place in 1744.1 At that time, he was the personal physician of the Duc de Gammont and served as the military physician of the duke’s troops for three years. During the siege, La Mettrie endured a burning fever, and claimed to have experienced the unity of body and mind for the first time, as the fever shaking his body equally shook his mind. According to the account of that event by Frederick II of Prussia in his ‘Eulogy on Julien Offray de La Mettrie’ (1751), La Mettrie came to the realisation that thoughts are no more than the continuity of the body’s machinic organisation. La Mettrie first worked out this observation and its metaphysical implications in Histoire naturelle de l’âme (Natural History of the Soul ) before radically elaborating

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his materialist and mechanistic philosophy in L’Homme-Machine (Man a Machine). This text marks a turning point in La Mettrie’s life and works, which thereafter became mostly philosophical. Following the publication of Man a Machine, La Mettrie lost his qualification and right to work as a doctor. The book was condemned to be burnt and its author had to take refuge at the Sans Souci palace. The original title of his main publication was planned to be Essais sur l’homme (Essays on Man). However, in what appears to be a provocative change, it was published anonymously in French as L’Homme-Machine in 1747, although 1748 is the date of publication given in the first edition. It was translated anonymously into English and published as early as 1749 under the title Man a Machine, as the book is still referred to today.2 The text opens with the statement that ‘For a wise man, it is not enough to study nature and the truth; he must dare to proclaim it for the benefit of the small number of those who are willing and able to think’ (La Mettrie, 1996, 3). La Mettrie’s statement turns L’Homme-Machine into an uncompromising epistemological manifesto promoting materialist and mechanistic theories, and attacking those he considered cowards for not daring to speak about the subversive implications of their work. This provocation partly explains why La Mettrie and his oeuvre were marginalised in the eighteenth century and why L’Homme-Machine remains his most famous work. Ironically, ‘M. Machine’ – the nickname he invented for himself and which was adopted by his contemporaries – died of indigestion in November 1751, aged forty-eight. His short life and scandalous work were eclipsed by the publication of Denis Diderot’s and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s monumental Encyclopédie in the year of his death, and he soon fell into oblivion. In A History of Philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband corrects this historiographic oversight, stating that ‘Lamettrie spoke out with coquettish recklessness what many others did not dare to confess themselves, to say nothing of confessing or defending it openly’ (1901, 479). Windelband emphasises the turning point that La Mettrie’s theories represent in the articulation of the body and the mind: After materialism had shown so illustrious a metaphysical pedigree, others employed for its advantage the anthropological mode of argument which had been in use in French literature since Lamettrie, and which seemed to become still stronger through the progress of physiology. (641) The transition from metaphysics to anthropological philosophy foregrounds the centrality of the body in cognitive processes and human interactions, which is key to the interrogation of continuities and discontinuities between humans and machines, as is also evident in Krapp’s Last Tape.

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In the section on ‘Innate Ideas’ of A History of Philosophy, which deals with the epistemology of the Enlightenment, Windelband highlights how philosophy, psychology, and physiology interact. La Mettrie appears as one of the thinkers in the field of physiological psychology who helped bring about a radical shift towards a materialist understanding of thought processes. His theories are depicted as an aftermath of the philosophical works of Baruch de Spinoza and René Descartes, as well as the scientific works of Herman Boerhaave, Pancratius Wolff, and David Hartley. Windelband presents La Mettrie as the most radical thinker of this lineage: ‘Anthropological materialism was worked out in its baldest form by the Frenchman, Lamettrie’ (455). Beckett’s reading notes show that, rather than coming across a new idea, he seems to have found a new thinker, since he slightly modified the structure of the sentence to foreground the name of the philosopher rather than the radicality of the idea: ‘Lamettrie worked out anthropological materialism in its baldest form’ (TCD MS 10967, 203v; Beckett, 2020, 352). Beckett also sums up La Mettrie’s legacy within the field in one sentence: ‘Cartesian zoological mechanism valid also for humans’ (203v; 352). This crisp summary may attest to the fact that La Mettrie’s materialism appeared to Beckett as an alternative to the Cartesian mind-body divide, and definitely as an extension of the Cartesian concept of the animal machine. While there is no evidence that Beckett read La Mettrie directly, the philosopher’s comparison between human and machine is reminiscent of the scenographic juxtaposition of the live Krapp and his tape recorder, and of the contrast created by the live and recorded voices in the play. The following discussion focuses on La Mettrie’s deconsecration of the mind through the anatomical study of humans, drawing an analogy with animals and machines. It proposes a parallel reading of passages from Man a Machine, where La Mettrie’s early form of neuroscience emerges, with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in order to explore how the play creates an aesthetic space to consider the human as an autopoietic machine and the co-evolution of humans and machines.

Krapp a Machine La Mettrie shapes his materialist and mechanistic theory of the living around two notions: continuity and organisation. This is illustrated by a metaphor of dough, which also serves as an attack on the biblical story of Genesis: ‘Man is not moulded from a more precious clay; nature has only used one and the same dough, merely changing the yeast’ (La Mettrie, 1996, 20). Continuity is the first ruling principle in nature, according to La Mettrie: everything is

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matter, shaped and organised differently, and the soul obeys this law. For this reason, he discards the distinction between body and mind and undertakes to undo the Cartesian divide, defending instead the idea that what has been called ‘the soul’ is in fact produced by the activity of the brain and the nerves. Simultaneously, he rejects the Leibnizian monad as a misunderstanding of bodily mechanics, since it consists in ‘spiritualis[ing] matter rather than materialising the soul’ (3). This thesis is grounded in the observation of the visible and the material, which La Mettrie puts in opposition to the imagination of the invisible and the immaterial. Man a Machine makes a powerful plea for experience and observation as the only acceptable methodologies for gaining knowledge. This empirical stance, which is the starting point for his move away from Descartes, can be used to explain Krapp’s consumption of bananas and alcohol. Following many examples that La Mettrie draws from his observations of the functioning of human bodies, he concludes that: The human body is a machine which winds itself up, a living picture of perpetual motion. Food maintains what is aroused by fever. Without it, the soul languishes, becomes furious and dies dejected. [. . .] But if you feed the body, pour into its pipes vigorous sugars and strong liquors, then the soul becomes as generous as they are and arms itself with proud courage, and the soldier who would have fled if given water becomes ferocious and gaily runs to his death to the sound of drums. (La Mettrie, 1996, 7)3 This materialist and mechanistic theory of the human as an autopoietic monad is illustrated by Krapp’s live embodiment. Feeding appears as a repetitive action that characterises Krapp’s solitary, monotonous life. But it also plays a key part in the play, as feeding the body feeds the narration. At the start of the play, the audience witnesses a dysfunctional Krapp. The sequence of actions that precedes the consumption of the first banana does not build up towards a particular goal. Krapp simply seems to be dealing with the objects in his surroundings – a watch, a set of keys, drawers, and tapes – which are only used if they serve an immediate purpose. In contrast to other objects manipulated by Krapp at the start of the play, the banana appears as a stimulant in various ways – nutritive, excremental, and erotic. Starting with the nutritive quality, Krapp is only ‘staring vacuously before him’ before eating the first banana, whereas when he starts eating it, his body is immediately set into motion. The stage direction specifies that he is ‘pacing to and fro at edge of stage, in the light, [. . .] meditatively eating banana’ (Beckett, 2006, 216). The act of eating as the audience encounters it in the play – or to phrase it in a Lamettrian fashion,

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the act of ‘maintaining the machine’ – is synchronised with the activation of a thought process. Before putting the second banana in his mouth, Krapp is again described as ‘staring vacuously before him’, but having already consumed the first banana, ‘Finally he has an idea’ and ‘puts the banana in his waistcoat pocket’ (216). His food intake and the ensuing digestion seem to generate thoughts. However, when food is not enough to go on, Krapp, just like La Mettrie’s soldier, ‘pour[s] into [his body-machine’s] pipes vigorous sugars and strong liquors, [and his] soul [. . .] arms itself with proud courage’ (La Mettrie, 1996, 7). The ‘Loud pop of cork’ signals to the audience that Krapp is arming himself with courage in the dark, which allows him to ‘com[e] back into light carrying an old ledger’ (Beckett, 2006, 216). The effect of alcohol on his body is clearly indicated by the stage direction stating that Krapp acts ‘Briskly’ (216). Drinking intensifies in the course of the play. When the story becomes psychologically too hard for him to bear, ‘KRAPP switches off, broods, looks at his watch, gets up, goes backstage into darkness. Ten seconds. Pop of cork. Ten seconds. Second cork. Ten seconds. Third cork. Ten seconds. Brief burst of quavering song’ (219). That the physical act of drinking has taken place is made apparent by Krapp ‘wip[ing] his mouth’ before he ‘switches on, resumes his listening posture’ (219). The continuity between body and mind, as postulated by La Mettrie, is thus illustrated by Krapp’s excessive consumption of alcohol. In supplying his body-machine with alcohol, he alters his attitude and behaviour. As Krapp disappears into darkness a third time after having switched off the recorder, the audience can hear the ‘Sound of bottle against glass, then brief siphon. Ten seconds. Bottle against glass alone’. His final reappearance is marked by unsteadiness: ‘He comes back a little unsteadily into light’ (221). The physical effect of alcohol, observable in his lack of balance, is mirrored by the unsteadiness of his thought process and ultimately by the failure to complete the recording. While alcohol gives Krapp courage, it also weakens his creative capacities – already deteriorated by ageing – as he fails to organise his thoughts. He finally urges himself to continue his inebriation to the point that he can put an end to the recording and fall asleep: ‘Ah finish your booze now and get to your bed. Go on with this drivel in the morning. Or leave it at that’ (223). Alcohol is a motor of the narration and an important part of Krapp’s narrative, but while it initially fuels Krapp and his story, it also participates in the deterioration of both. Krapp’s inseparable physical and mental decay is respectively rendered in his increasingly decomposing narration and narrative. The performance of the failing creative process supports a material and a mechanical understanding of human cognitive processes.

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Having reconfigured Krapp as a physiological machine which functions as an eater-drinker-author, the play invites the study of the organisation of the machine. The next section will offer a parallel reading of Krapp’s Last Tape with La Mettrie’s early neuroscientific model that posits a mechanised body and desacralises human intellect in favour of the human propensity for pleasure.

Krapp’s Neurophysiology Neurophysiology is an interdisciplinary field which studies the nervous system, both central and peripheral, from a physiological perspective. In so doing, the field posits the mechanical understanding of the human that La Mettrie had sketched out: the soul is only a principle of motion or a tangible material part of the brain that we can, without fear of error, consider as a mainspring of the whole machine, which exercises a visible influence on all the others and even seems to have been made first. (La Mettrie, 1996, 31) In the human machine, La Mettrie identifies the brain as the ‘mainspring’ or the main organ: the one made for thinking. What is special about the brain is that it is the seat of what he calls ‘the imagination’, referring to the physiological capacity of the brain to receive data provided by the senses, which is the root process of the psychic activity studied by neuropsychology: I always use the word ‘imagine’ because I believe that everything is imagined and that all the parts of the soul can be properly reduced to imagination alone, which forms them all, and thus that judgement, reason and memory are only parts of the soul which are in no way absolute but are veritable modifications of that sort of medullary screen on which the objects painted in the eye are projected as in a magic lantern. (La Mettrie, 1996, 14–15) In Krapp’s Last Tape, the word ‘spool’ clearly shows the relation between the sensory organs, the brain, the object and the arbitrary sign, but it also complicates it. Krapp sees the word ‘spool’; he associates the letters with the sound corresponding to this particular grouping of letters and pronounces it. The repetition of the word in performance reveals the workings of Krapp’s ‘imagination’ as he associates signs with things: he manipulates a physical spool. However, he also plays with the pronunciation of the word ‘spool’ by elongating it. In so doing, Krapp turns ‘spool’ into a new word-object, one

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in which he can ‘reve[l]’ (Beckett, 2006, 222). The vocal elongation of the word modifies its shape, its sound, its substance and its texture. The extended food metaphor reaches its apex in the French version ‘Dégusté le mot bobine’ (Beckett, 1959, 30). The etymology of the verb déguster, to taste and to savour in English, captures the neurophysiological dimensions of the dégustation: goût in French originates from the Latin gustatus, which designates the sense of taste, the palate, the flavour of food, the act of tasting, and the feeling generated by the experience. The mouth, as an organic space where both feeding and speaking take place, becomes a place of fulfilment for Krapp’s needs and, as such, is presented as an organ of pleasure. After playing one more time with the word ‘spooool’, Krapp declares: ‘Happiest moment of the past half million’ (Beckett, 2006, 222). What makes him happy is the ability to use language in a creative process unleashed by alcohol. His constipated imagination is able to defecate a word-object of his own creation. Krapp’s thought process, mediated by spoken language, is depicted as a sequence of perception-associationcreation involving vision, hearing, touch, and even taste. Andrew Head notes that ‘in Beckett’s 1977 production of Krapp’s Last Tape with Rick Cluchey in the role, Beckett’s injunction [was] that the part be played with a close attention to the musical qualities of the verbal and visual dimensions of the text’ (2016, 110). The sensorial and synesthetic understanding of language and speech thus seems to be confirmed by Beckett’s directorial choices. Head interprets Beckett’s direction as ‘a growing need to turn away from psychological portrayal and veer towards formalist image-making’ (110). Instead of separating psychology from aesthetics, reading Krapp’s Last Tape through Man a Machine provides a conciliatory approach. In Man a Machine, the neurophysiological foregrounding of pleasure is elaborated through the comparative anatomical study of human beings and animals, mainly the ape: what is more, the similarity of the ape’s structure and functions is such that I hardly doubt at all that if this animal were perfectly trained, we would succeed in teaching him to utter sounds and consequently to learn a language. Then he would no longer be a wild man, nor an imperfect man, but a perfect man, a little man of town, with as much substance or muscle for thinking and taking advantage of his education as we have. (La Mettrie, 1996, 12) ‘[T]he close analogy between ape and man’ (12) that La Mettrie weaves throughout Man a Machine is echoed in Beckett’s play through Krapp’s ‘wild’ appearance, the indication that he lives in a den, and his banana-based diet; but it is simultaneously parodied through the same monotrophic diet. While the

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live Krapp keeps playing with his bananas, the tape-recorded Krapp declares: ‘Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with great difficulty refrained from a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition’ (Beckett, 2006, 217). Bananas in Krapp’s Last Tape are also associated with the male sexual organ. Van Hulle’s genetic study shows that in the opening scene, the stage direction ‘strokes banana’ appeared earlier as ‘“caresses banana” (ET3, 1r)’ (Van Hulle, 2015, 185), clearly exposing the double entendre. In the aforementioned recorded passage, Krapp declares: ‘Plans for a less . . . [hesitates] . . . engrossing sexual life. Last illness of his father. Flagging pursuit of happiness’ (Beckett, 2006, 218). Happiness, La Mettrie argues, lies in the good functioning of the machine and its physical pleasure. Krapp’s constipation and his problematic sexual life point to mechanical reasons for his unhappiness. This is primarily carried out by the name of the character, suggesting that Krapp is a digestive machine, but a ‘crappy’ one. His poor digestive system is therefore a cause of his growing sadness. In addition, the pun contained in the French title of the play, La dernière bande, also points towards a mechanistic understanding of the driving force of human beings as machines that work to please themselves. Steven Connor notes that bander is French slang for having an erection (2014, 94). As the live Krapp cannot finish recording his last tape or his ‘dernière bande’, his final renunciation of happiness can therefore be explained by mechanical failures. Van Hulle also notes that ‘during the rehearsals of his production of the play at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin (October 1969), he [Beckett] described the tape recorder as an “Agent masturbateur” in his production notebook (TN3 179)’, and indicates that this note appears ‘under the heading “Psychologique”’ (2015, 185). Krapp’s relationship with his tapes and tape recorder further reveals the structure of his organism with the brain as the seat of imagination, and reason located much lower. The organic body then draws a line between the human and the technological; it sets a limit to the humanisation of machines. Living machines, such as animals and humans, have bodily needs, unlike technological machines. According to La Mettrie, what separates the living from machines is sensuality, not the intellect. However, the staging of Krapp’s Last Tape reveals how radical materialism, such as that of La Mettrie, unintentionally paves the way for technological forms of intelligence, which complicates the distinction between humans and machines based on the notion of selfhood.

The Tape Recorder: A Human Machine? La Mettrie’s early form of neurophysiology explains how the sensory organs mediate between the individual and the environment. In addition to environmental

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factors, La Mettrie acknowledges the influence that other people have on cognitive processes, arguing that: we take everything – gestures, accents, etc. – from those we live with, in the same way as the eyelid blinks under the threat of a blow that is foreseen, or as the body of a spectator imitates mechanically, and despite himself, all the movements of a good mime. What I have just said proves that the best company for a thinking man is his own, if he cannot find anything like himself. (La Mettrie, 1996, 9) In Krapp’s Last Tape, such learning mechanisms are exemplified by the word ‘viduity’ (Beckett, 2006, 219), as the live Krapp learns the word anew after he hears it from his technologically mediated younger self. This interaction also exposes the decay of memory that accompanies his physical ageing. La Mettrie predicted in 1747 that it would be possible to craft speaking machines: If it took more instruments, more cogs, more springs to show the movement of the planets than to show or tell the time, if it took Vaucanson more artistry to make his flautist than his duck, he would have needed even more to make a speaking machine, which can no longer be considered impossible, particularly at the hands of a new Prometheus. (La Mettrie, 1996, 34) This enthusiastic prediction may be read as anticipating the sophisticated interactive speaking machines of the present. Although La Mettrie, writing in the eighteenth century, could not have envisioned the effects of such devices, machines able to mechanically reproduce voices and articulate speech – such as Krapp’s tape recorder – raised questions about the clear delineation between the categories of the ‘human’ and the ‘technological’ in Beckett’s own time, questions which have taken centre stage in the twenty-first century, particularly in the field of posthuman studies. Indeed, in Krapp’s Last Tape the voice appears as a powerful vector of both otherness and humanness. The relationship between the tape-recorded Krapp and the live Krapp exposes the aporias of La Mettrie’s radical mechanistic theories and the ontological and phenomenological changes brought about by speaking machines. Krapp, the ‘thinking man’, said ‘Farewell to [. . .] love’ (Beckett, 2006, 217) and vainly isolated himself for the benefit of his creativity. The thirtynine-year-old Krapp deems his intellectual capacities to be ‘at the [. . .] crest of the wave – or thereabouts’ (217). His repeated concern for the passing of time, which always puts more constraints on his physical and mental capacities, seems to be what motivates him to externalise his memories: ‘The vision at last.

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This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that . . .’ (220). In the French translation of the play, published in 1959, the main reason for safely preserving memories is rather ‘en prévision du jour où mon labeur sera . . . (il hésite) . . . éteint et où je n’aurai peut-être plus aucun souvenir, ni bon ni mauvais, du miracle qui . . .’ [in anticipation of the day when my toil will be . . . [hesitates] . . . extinguished and when I will perhaps have no more memories, neither good nor bad, of the miracle which . . .] (Beckett, 1959, 25; my translation). If the English original registers the limits of cognition in general, the French version insists on its decay with time. In both instances, the externalisation of memory appears as a creative process which allows Krapp to transcend such human limits. The memories that Krapp selects to listen to concern his past love/sexual life, foregrounding sensuous pleasure once more, and expressing the failure and the misery of his ascetic life. To fight the suffering caused by solitude, the young and narcissistic Krapp describes his life as a perpetual motion away from, and back to, himself: The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. [Pause.] In a way. [Pause.] I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . [hesitates] . . . me. [Pause.] Krapp. (Beckett, 2006, 217) The table, located at the centre of the stage, is the focal point of the stage image, and physically supports the whole technological apparatus: ‘On the table a tape-recorder with microphone and a number of cardboard boxes containing reels of recorded tapes’ (215). It is meaningful then that Krapp describes his return to the table as a return to his self: he is able to retrieve past selves and find companionship in this technological apparatus, which complicates the concept of selfhood. We learn about Krapp’s memory-recording habit at the start of the first listening scene: ‘Jotted down a few notes, on the back of an envelope’ (217). Krapp regularly manipulates envelopes in the play, and finally, before recording his last tape, ‘takes envelope from his pocket, consults back of it, lays it on table, switches on, clears his throat and begins to record’ (221). Both the thirty-nine-year-old and the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp initially use envelopes as mnemonic prostheses for storing and retrieving memories. Memory is therefore constructed as a creative process that challenges interiority and exteriority. Van Hulle, in his study of modern manuscripts, has shown that ‘cognitive processes do not exclusively take place “in” the head, but in constant interaction with an external environment’ (2014, 1). In Krapp’s Last Tape, memory is recomposed as an exchange

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between the human and the technological, a concept which La Mettrie does not seriously consider in Man a Machine, mentioning only in passing that memory is a part of what he calls ‘imagination’ and is therefore solely located in the brain. In the play, the passage from the written form (envelopes) to the auditory version (tapes) does not only serve a mnemonic role. It also seems to be motivated by the sense of vitality that the machine offers, allowing Krapp to revive livelier avatars of himself and reconnect with his sensuous experiences. Indeed, having no other ‘like himself’ (La Mettrie, 1996, 9), Krapp encounters otherness through the different voices on tape. Krapp’s live voice is ‘Cracked’ (Beckett, 2006, 215), whereas his thirty-nine-year-old voice is ‘Strong’ (217). In the process of recording, Krapp creates a machine-other from his own self. In turn, this technological self fragments the selfhood of the live Krapp, which gives rise to a sort of ‘schizophrenic disjunction’ (Goodman and Parisi, 2010, 343). It manifests itself in the recorded ‘Brief laugh[s] in which [the onstage] Krapp joins’ (Beckett, 2006, 218) – suggesting a unity between the two – followed later by the insult ‘stupid bastard’ and the live Krapp’s comment, ‘hard to believe I was ever as bad as that’ (222), which disrupts the sense of unity. Sarah West argues that ‘the voice is abstracted from the body, and their separateness is evident in the way in which Beckett rehearses each in turn, as though they represented different instruments’ (2010, 53). The voice in Krapp’s Last Tape further puts selfhood to the test in a posthumanist fashion; from a past voice that is technologically revitalised, another self reappears. The juxtaposition of the live Krapp who is short of words and the technological, lyrical Krapp exposes the vitality of the machine, and also identifies the voice as a central element in its humanisation. The tape recorder sounds human and, to some extent, anatomically resembles the human brain. Connor, analysing William Burroughs’s use of the tape recorder, notes that the two spools of the tape recorder look like the two hemispheres of the brain, and contrasts the brain metaphor used by Burroughs with the onanistic metaphor in Krapp’s Last Tape (2014, 92). However, La Mettrie’s materialist and mechanistic theories allow us to consider both metaphors in a non-exclusive dynamic: Why does the sight, or the mere idea, of a beautiful woman cause singular movements and desires in us? Does what happens then in certain organs come from the very nature of those organs? Not at all, but from the intercourse and sort of sympathy of those muscles with the imagination. (La Mettrie, 1996, 29) The Lamettrian concepts of continuity and organisation connect the mind and the body through the stimulation of the machine-other. The technologically

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mediated retrieval of memories that necessitates tactile manipulation of the recorder activates Krapp’s imagination located, according to La Mettrie, in the brain, which in turn reconnects Krapp with his past sensual experience mentioned on the tape. This is suggested in the mise-en-scène by Beckett’s ‘particular attention to the work of hands and fingers in manipulating the tape and the tape recorder’ (Connor, 2014, 93). In the 1972 televised version directed by Donald McWhinnie, Patrick Magee, playing Krapp, starts bending forward when the tape says ‘I bent over her’ (Beckett, 2006, 221) and embraces the tape recorder. The close-up on his hand when the taped Krapp recounts ‘I lay down across her with my face in her breast and my hand on her’ (221) emphasises the parallel between the story and the stage image. Ulrika Maude observes that the ‘technological and scientific discoveries of the [modern] period seemed to point to and draw on analogies rather than discrepancies between the human organism and technology’ (2015, 33–4). In other words, Maude shows that modern technological devices imitated the workings of the human body, and sought to extend the senses as well as cognitive capacities. These inventions are inspired and reinforced by ‘a biomechanical conception of the self’ (47), which led to a reassessment of human singularity. The blurring of the border between the technological and the human being is revealed in Krapp’s behaviour. West indeed argues that the ‘tape recorder could substitute a person and Krapp treats it as such. He interrupts it, instructs it to go back, to go on, to pause, he curses it, speaks to it, listens to it, touches it, and even caresses it’ (2010, 47). Beckett himself recounted to Alan Schneider that he was surprised to see the intimacy between Krapp and the tape recorder: ‘The most interesting discovery was the kind of personal relationship that developed between Krapp and the machine. This arose quite naturally and was extraordinarily effective’ (Beckett, 2014, 178n1). Technological devices become a form of companionship, and if in the modern period ‘These innovations raised anxieties about the limits of the human and paved the way to a posthumanist conception of the self’ (Maude, 2015, 34), it seems that today cybernetics urgently requires us to recognise the techno-human condition of the self and to question whether selfhood is intrinsically human. As Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz argue in The Techno-Human Condition: The point is not that any particular technology may affect a particular human; the point is that we cannot understand what humans are unless we also understand the meaning of the technological systems that we make, and which in turn re-make us. For as individuals, as members of communities and larger societies, and as members of the dominant species of this

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planet, the state of technological play is bound up with what it means for us to be human. (Allenby and Sarewitz, 2011, 83) In our world where technology is omnipresent, where human/technology relationships are intensified and where human/human relationships are increasingly mediated by technology, Krapp’s Last Tape reminds us to assess and reassess the boundary between the human and the non-human, as technologies have become the companions of our daily lives and participate in our cognitive processes just as much as in the construction of our selfhood.

Towards Techno-Human Krapps The techno-human narrative of Krapp’s Last Tape – intertwining past and present moments, human and technological components, Krapp’s present subjectivity and another subjectivity – is constructed through Krapp’s live embodiment in combination with a virtual Krapp, which nevertheless has an uncanny resemblance to the human character. The materialist and mechanistic reading of Krapp’s Last Tape through Man a Machine shows how both works are relevant to discourses on embodiment and disembodiment and how they feed the debates around the co-evolution of the human and the technological in the twenty-first century. The play reactivates the question of what it means to be human in a posthuman context. In the present day, neuroscience is a flourishing discipline that allows a better understanding of the complexity of the brain, engineers are able to build neural networks, and humanity has started to become increasingly reliant and dependent on artificial intelligence. As Krapp’s Last Tape is set in ‘A late evening in the future’ (Beckett, 2006, 215), one can rightly wonder how present and future stagings of the play can be adapted to the ever-evolving techno-human condition and how the play will speak to its audiences when machines are able to function in a manner similar to human beings.

Notes 1. The biographical and contextual information given here is drawn from Assoun (1981) and Smith (2002). Dates vary due to inconsistencies in the biographical material from La Mettrie’s time. 2. The translation by Ann Thomson used throughout this chapter is titled Machine Man, which she argues ‘corresponds most closely to La Mettrie’s provocative title’ (Thomson, 1996, vii). However, this chapter continues to use the traditional title.

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3. The use of ‘sugars’ to translate ‘sucs’ in the original French text is debatable. ‘Sucs’ in French designates saps and organic fluids, as distinguished from ‘sucre’, the French for ‘sugar’. La Mettrie insists on the concentration and power of those juices, rather than the qualities and effects of carbohydrates.

Works Cited Allenby, Braden R. and Daniel Sarewitz (2011), The Techno-Human Condition, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Assoun, Paul-Laurent (1981), ‘Lire La Mettrie’, in Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, L’Homme-Machine, ed. Paul-Laurent Assoun, Paris: Denoël Gonthier, pp. 7–127. Beckett, Samuel (c. 1930), ‘Philosophy Notes’, TCD MS 10967, Trinity College Dublin. Beckett, Samuel (1959), La dernière bande, Paris: Editions de Minuit. Beckett, Samuel (2006), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2020), Samuel Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’, ed. Steven Matthews and Matthew Feldman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braidotti, Rosi (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Connor, Steven (2014), Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feldman, Matthew (2006), Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’, London and New York: Continuum. Goodman, Steve and Luciana Parisi (2010), ‘Machines of Memory’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 343–59. Head, Andrew (2016), ‘Krapp’s Last Tape in Great Britain: Production History amid Changing Practice’, in David Tucker and Trish McTighe (eds), Staging Beckett in Great Britain, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 107–22. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de [1747] (1981), L’Homme-Machine, ed. Paul-Laurent Assoun, Paris: Denoël Gonthier. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de [1747] (1996), Man Machine and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Ann Thomson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maude, Ulrika (2015), ‘Science, Technology, and the Body’, in Celia Marshik (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 33–49.

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Smith, C. U. M. (2002), ‘Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–1751)’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 11:2, pp. 110–24. Thomson, Ann (1996), ‘Introduction’, in Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man Machine and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Ann Thomson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. ix–xxvi. Tucker, David (2012), Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing ‘A Literary Fantasia’, London: Bloomsbury. Van Hulle, Dirk (2014), Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond, London: Bloomsbury. Van Hulle, Dirk (2015), The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape/La Dernière Bande, London: Bloomsbury. West, Sarah (2010), Say It: The Performative Voice in the Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett, Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Windelband, Wilhelm [1893] (1901), A History of Philosophy, New York: The Macmillan Company.

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Chapter 5 Monadic Clocks in Samuel Beckett’s Quad: Decomposing the ‘dramatized taboo’ Naoya Mori

No other play by Beckett is more mathematically and geometrically ordered than his mime for four figures, Quad, filmed in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1981 and broadcast under the German title Quadrat I and II by Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1982.1 Tracing the side and diagonal of a quadrangle, the four clockwork figures – each in a loosely hooded cloak of a different colour and accompanied by distinctive percussion – endlessly unfold strictly prescribed movements. Beckett’s first outline for Quad reads simply ‘A piece for four players, light and percussion’ (1986, 451). Quad, however, is ‘a sinister piece’ (Gontarski, 1984, 138) because, like the damned in Dante’s Inferno, the figures always turn left at the corners; at the centre E they jerk left as well – not to avoid collision, but to avoid the ‘danger zone’ (Beckett, 1986, 453). What is the danger zone? What makes them move? Are they moving on their own, or are they being forced? Far from elucidating this ‘danger zone’, Beckett makes it more enigmatic in the handwritten notes for the SDR TV production of Quad (housed at the University of Reading) by calling it a ‘dramatized taboo’ (UoR MS 2100, 5r; qtd in Bryden, 1995, 111). This chapter explores what the term ‘dramatized taboo’ means for Beckett, with reference to an ancient mathematical taboo that appears in his early novel Murphy. Although Beckett’s first novel, published in 1938, and his television piece from 1982 appear to have nothing in common, they share the theme of incommensurability, not only of side and diagonal, but also of the metaphysical implications of the finite and the infinite. Despite Beckett’s firm statement ‘I am not a philosopher’ (Beckett qtd in Driver, 1979, 241), I shall explore the philosophy of technology that lurks in what Beckett calls the ‘danger zone’ of Quad. In order to do so, I will draw on both Beckett’s directions concerning lighting in his production notes from the 1980s and the ‘Philosophy Notes’ he

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took in the early 1930s, which contain extracts from John Burnet’s study of Greek philosophy and Wilhelm Windelband’s history of philosophy.

‘Television is beyond me’ The four hooded figures in Quad walk along the sides and diagonals of a quadrangle with mathematical precision: one, two, three, and four at a time, then from four to three, two, and back to one. The aforementioned notes toward the TV production of Quad indicate that Beckett insisted on highly technical requirements for lighting, sound, and movement. Regarding ‘Light’, instead of ‘Constant neutral light throughout’, as in the published version of Quad, Beckett gave a dynamic change of lighting to each player for even the shortest journey from A to halfway to C. As such, he stipulated that either a soft white light should fade up rapidly as the first figure moved from A, reaching full light at midway to C, or that there should be instantaneous light as the first figure started from A (UoR MS 2100, 5r). In the second section dedicated to ‘Light’, Beckett makes a telling but cryptic admission: ‘An eye suddenly opens, suddenly shuts (can’t bear any more)’ (8r; qtd in Bryden, 109). As a whole, Beckett’s drafts seem to emphasise the danger of E, as he tries to introduce a ‘brief halt’ and ‘standstill’ for percussion and movement just before and after each figure veers to the left (5r). To Beckett’s disappointment, all of these schemes were abandoned, probably because of technical and practical difficulties for both pacers and percussionists; nonetheless, they are manifest in his original plan. In fact, Beckett was dissatisfied with how the filming of the play was unfolding. His first response, after directing the filming in Stuttgart from 12 to 17 April in 1981, was pessimistic. As he wrote to Reinhart Müller-Freienfels on 19 April: I left Stuttgart uneasy in my mind and remain so. It is clear from last week’s experiments and discussions that this piece as conceived and proposed cannot be realized. My parting suggestion (wind, greys, tatters) involves difficulties I had not foreseen and could not cope with. I accept this transformation but do not feel qualified to direct it. I propose therefore that the project be either abandoned or pursued in its modified form under the direction of my most competent assistant. (Beckett, 2016, 547) Beckett could not accept the modified Quad as his work of art. On the next day, 20 April, he wrote to Ruby Cohn: ‘Unsatisfactory. Television is beyond me’ (Beckett, 2016, 549). Then to Alan Schneider: ‘I’m quite lost in TV

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technicalities & shall never write again for that medium’ (22 April 1981; 550). Beckett’s original scheme of frequent change from fade-up to fade-out, from light to darkness and vice versa – which, as we shall see later, was to play an essential part in Quad – had to be abandoned due to the technical complexities of lighting. Still, he pursued another possibility of lighting by assigning four distinctively coloured lights (white, blue, red, and yellow) to the four dancers. Again, the coloured lights posed technical challenges, as Beckett told James Knowlson: ‘Stuttgart did not go well. Technical difficulties (light). On my return to Paris I wrote suggesting we drop it’ (20 May 1981; 552). Similarly, the ideas of ‘brief halt’ and ‘standstill’ were rejected. Beckett did return to Stuttgart to supervise the production of Quad as scheduled, on 31 May, and even though by that point the idea of the coloured lighting had been abandoned, a mention of it survives in the published text: ‘Abandoned as impracticable. Constant neutral light throughout’ (Beckett, 1986, 453). In a conversation with Martha Fehsenfeld, Jim Lewis, Beckett’s cameraman, describes the actual technical problems that Beckett’s original ideas created: We couldn’t use the colored lights. First the combination of white plus blue plus red plus yellow produced an effect of an indefinite shade of orange. I worked on it and got a closer delineation but then the frequency of light going on and off with the entrance and exit of each player proved too distracting and had to be abandoned. (Lewis qtd in Fehsenfeld, 1982, 360) What made Beckett pursue the idea of blinking and coloured lights so tenaciously? The arresting sentence – ‘An eye suddenly opens, suddenly shuts (can’t bear any more)’ – may have something to do with this. Although Beckett was critical of anthropomorphism in his discussion of Cézanne (8 September 1934; Beckett, 2009, 223), he might have given a kind of personification to each light – as he did with the light beam in Play, or with the camera in Film – so that the ceaseless alterations between light and darkness would express the world observed by each blinking eye. Similarly, the four coloured lights might stand for the personified views. Both may be regarded as forms of self-perception, as was the case in Film, where O (object) attempts to escape from E (eye = camera) – that is, self-perception (1986, 323). The relation between O and E, I presume, is what Beckett wanted to express with his original plan for Quad, the world seen through the eyes of each figure, as well as the transcendental eye of the camera fixed above the quad. The camera observes all that takes place in the square and may remind us of a Foucauldian panopticon, but Beckett could also have had the following limerick in mind: ‘There was a young man who said, “God/Must think it exceedingly odd/If he finds that this tree/Continues

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to be/When there’s no one about in the Quad”’ (Reed, 1974, 44). This limerick appears next to the famous skit on determinism in The Complete Limerick Book that Beckett recited to Lawrence Harvey (Harvey, 1970, 242). Echoing Berkeley’s axiom esse est percipi, this limerick foregrounds the existential anxiety that might resonate: ‘An eye suddenly opens, suddenly shuts (can’t bear any more)’. To our surprise, an anonymous poet, or would-be God, replies in kind to this limerick: ‘Your astonishment’s odd:/I am always about in the Quad./ And that’s why the tree/Will continue to be./Since observed by/Yours faithfully, God’ (qtd in Urmson, 1982, 40). Although the second limerick might answer the question as Berkeley would have done, Beckett does not necessarily follow the philosopher’s reasoning. As he writes in his script for Film, ‘No truth value attaches’ to ‘esse est percipi’, and it should be ‘regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience’ (1986, 323). Moreover, in Murphy, through the words of Neary, Beckett underscores the existential anxiety of Berkeley, who denies the real existence of the material world: ‘He had no alternative. A defence mechanism. Immaterialise or bust’ (2006a, 38). That Beckett undermines Berkeley’s axiom by the ceaseless change of lighting is undeniable. In other words, Beckett’s engagement with the lighting is conceived as a means of giving shape to Berkeley’s ontological anxiety. Although the lighting technology in those days would not make it possible in production, Beckett did not give up on his original idea.

‘dramatized taboo’ We can seek the source of Beckett’s struggles and enigmas in his notes for the SDR TV production: Should solo player avoid E? Yes if centre dramatized taboo & this rather than avoidance of collision the motive when two or more. Consider brief halt in all cases at point of deviation & simultaneous suspension of percussion, not to resume till manoeuvre completed & direct course resumed. Sudden silence & standstill. Brief halt again when diagonal rejoined? Sudden simultaneous resumption of sound & motion. (UoR MS 2100, 5r; qtd in Renton, 1990, 24; emphasis added) Although it seems strange that even a solo player should avoid E, Beckett makes it clear that the purpose of circumventing E is not to avoid collision, but to avoid the centre E. Intriguingly, both S. E. Gontarski and James Knowlson point out that the source of Quad can be found in the

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aborted ‘J. M. Mime’, written around 1963. According to Knowlson, this non-verbal piece for four dancers on the square stage – written for Jack MacGowran, but never completed – ‘developed naturally out of Beckett’s interest in choreographing movement and from his radical mistrust of language’ (1996, 416). Gontarski writes that in the piece, two pairs – son and father and son and mother (Beckett even entertained the possibility of ‘one carrying the other’) – try to describe the greatest number of paths along quarters of a square to arrive back at the centre, O: ‘Starting from O return to O by greatest number of paths’ (Beckett qtd in Gontarski, 1984, 138). As Gontarski argues, in Quad ‘the theme is reversed as the center is avoided not sought’ (138). It follows from this that, despite their geometrical and mathematical similarity, the centre of ‘J. M. Mime’ is not much help in attempting to decipher the ‘dramatized taboo’ in Quad. On the first page of his production notes, Beckett envisioned a danger zone E for Quad and indicated how the four figures should avoid it. He then added two key notes for the players’ movements: they should alternate between sides and diagonals, and always move in a counter-clockwise direction (UoR MS 2100, 2r). Beckett’s obsession with counter-clockwise movement evokes, as has been mentioned, Dante’s damned in the Inferno, whereas his preoccupation with ‘the sides & diagonals’ harks back to Murphy and the ‘incommensurability of sides and diagonals’ (2006a, 32). In Murphy we find a legend of Hippasos, who divulged a Pythagorean secret and was killed: ‘But betray me’, said Neary ‘and you go the way of Hippasos. [. . .] ‘Drowned in a puddle’, said Neary, ‘for having divulged the incommensurability of side and diagonal’. ‘So perish all babblers’, said Wylie. ‘And the construction of the regular dodeca – hic – dodecahedron’, said Neary. (Beckett, 2006a, 32) Beckett’s source for this passage is John Burnet’s chapter on Pythagoras in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (1950, 55–6). As Chris Ackerley’s Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy and Matthew Feldman’s Beckett’s Books have closely analysed, Beckett read Burnet and copied the following passage (almost verbatim) in his ‘Philosophy Notes’ in 1932–4: Tradition represents Hippasos as divulger of Pythagorean secret, and he is said to have been drowned at sea for revealing incommensurability of side and diagonal, or for publishing construction of regular dodecahedron. (TCD MS 10967/22v; Beckett, 2020, 38)

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For the Pythagoreans, the regular dodecahedron was of interest as each of its faces forms the most important figure in their system: the pentagon. As the ratio of the pentagon’s side and its diagonal cannot be expressed by a ratio between natural numbers, like that of the sides and diagonal of the square, it was cloaked in another taboo. Burnet explained how the secrets of Pythagoras were born: It is probable that his proof was arithmetical rather than geometrical; and as he [Pythagoras] was acquainted with the 3 : 4 : 5 triangle, which is always the right-angled triangle, he may have started from the fact that 32 + 42= 52. He must, however, have discovered also that this proof broke down in the case of the most perfect triangle of all, the isosceles right-angled triangle, seeing that the relation between its hypotenuse and its sides cannot be expressed by any numerical ratio. The side of the square is incommensurable with the diagonal. (Burnet, 1950, 54) If the doctrine of Pythagoras is that all things are (natural) numbers, then ‘the incommensurability of side and diagonal’ disproves the doctrine. Now I hypothesise that, while composing Quad, Beckett had Pythagoras’s taboo in mind, dramatising the stage as a square so that the incommensurability of the sides and diagonal is visualised. As such the figures in the square avoid the irrational centre, thereby implying the ‘dramatized taboo’.

Incommensurability: Cézanne, Leibniz, and Cusanus Yet even if my hypothesis is correct, we still scarcely understand anything about Quad unless we comprehend what incommensurability meant for Beckett; otherwise, this chapter would decompose Beckett’s ‘dramatized taboo’ only to replace it with another enigma. Beckett certainly draws on the Pythagorean taboo, but what he conceals in the danger zone remains obscure. Before writing Murphy, Beckett had encountered the concept of incommensurability in Burnet (54 and passim) and Windelband (347, 399, 419), and he subsequently used the word in his comments on Cézanne’s painting in his letters to Thomas MacGreevy: ‘Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever’ (8 September 1934; Beckett, 2009, 222). Mark Nixon aptly points out the significance of incommensurability for Beckett, observing the similarity between Cézanne’s landscape and Karl Ballmer’s Head in Red (c. 1930–1): ‘Similar to the “incommensurability” between landscape and subject located in Cézanne, Beckett found a lack of communication in Ballmer’s painting that resembled the

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isolated nature of the monad’ (Nixon, 2011, 154–7). Nixon sees the monad in Ballmer’s painting, for Beckett himself links Head in Red with Leibniz’s Monadology: ‘Wonderful red Frauenkopf [woman’s head], skull earth sea and sky, I think of Monadologie [of Leibniz] and my Vulture’ (‘German Diaries’, 26 November 1936; qtd in Nixon, 2011, 156). Deviating from the proposition that ‘the side of the square is incommensurable with the diagonal’, Beckett has thus adapted the term ‘incommensurability’ for his own purposes, using an analogy to express hiatus not only between landscape and subject in Cézanne’s paintings, but also between the windowless monads, especially between the finite and the infinite. When Beckett first read Leibniz’s Monadology in December 1933, he wrote to MacGreevy with a mixed feeling of irony and admiration: ‘Leibniz a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures’ (6 [sic] December 1933; Beckett, 2009, 172). However, even before reading the Monadology, Beckett had been fascinated by the ‘splendid little pictures’; in 1932, quoting Archibald Alexander’s Short History of Philosophy, he wrote in his posthumously published novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women: ‘“A passage in Leibnitz” he [Lucien] said “where he compares matter to a garden of flowers or a pool of fish, and every flower another garden of flowers and every corpuscle of every fish another pool of fish”’ (Beckett, 1992, 47).2 Henceforth, the little worlds of the monads, or worlds within worlds, played a significant role in Beckett’s work. The monad, Leibniz asserts, is a simple substance with no parts – neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility – while being indestructible; its essence is force: ‘And so monads are the true atoms of nature; in a word, the elements of things’ (1998, 268; see also 1875–90, VI: 607). Although ‘monads have no windows, through which anything might come in or go out’ (268), ‘each monad is nevertheless [. . .] a “mirror of the world”; it contains the whole universe as a representation within itself; in this consists the living unity of all things’ (Windelband, 1901, 423). It is now clear why Beckett associated the Monadology with Ballmer’s Head in Red: it represents ‘earth sea and sky’ in the woman’s skull as well as in the scenery, with the echo of worlds within worlds as we have seen in the passage of ‘a garden of flowers or a pool of fish’. Wilhelm Windelband gives Leibniz a central place in the history of metaphysics, stating that ‘in Leibniz all threads of the old and the new metaphysics run together’ (425). Among Beckett’s many references to Leibniz in his ‘Philosophy Notes’, one denotes the self-contained and self-determined monads: Nothing comes into soul from without; that which it consciously represents has been already unconsciously present. On the other hand, the soul cannot bring forth anything in its conscious ideas which has not been in

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it from the beginning. Thus, in one sense, (unconsciously) all ideas are innate; and in another (consciously) none are innate. This relation he calls virtual innateness of ideas. (chapter ‘Metaphysics of the Irrational’, TCD MS10967/205v; Beckett, 2020, 356) Although Beckett begins chapter six of Murphy with a parody of the fifth part of Spinoza’s Ethics, Amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat (‘The intellectual love with which Murphy loves himself’; Beckett, 2006a, 67), he contrives to include Leibniz’s ‘virtual innateness of ideas’ in the composition of Murphy’s mental chamber: Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it. (Beckett, 2006a, 67) When he added a new passage to the translation of Murphy into French, Beckett disclosed the significance of the German philosopher’s house and full name: ‘Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ (see Dowd, 2007, 129; Mori, 2008, 108). Intriguingly, the ‘small frosted skylight’ of Murphy’s garret becomes ‘the prototype of Beckett’s [monadic] windows because of its closedness, its viewlessness’ (Mori, 2004, 360–1). Beckett’s last window – exemplified in ‘the one high window’ in the chamber of a dying old man in Stirrings Still that ‘was not made to open’ (Beckett, 2006c, 487) – has its roots in the ‘small frosted skylight’ in Murphy’s garret. As such the windowless windows can be seen as configurations of what Beckett described, in his letter to MacGreevy dated 10 March 1935, as ‘baroque solipsism’ (Beckett, 2009, 258). The ‘Philosophy Notes’ indicate that Beckett encountered ‘incommensurability’ from one additional source other than Pythagoras and Leibniz. The term reminded Beckett of the Renaissance philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa, 1401–64), ‘cardinal, mathematician, scholar, experimental scientist, and influential philosopher who stressed the incomplete nature of man’s knowledge of God and of the universe’ (entry for ‘Nicholas of Cusa’, Encyclopædia Britannica). Cusanus was the first philosopher to employ the related concepts of the infinite and the finite systematically. His crucial words are: ‘There is no proportion between the infinite and the finite; even the endless series of the finite remains incommensurable with the truly infinite’ (qtd in Windelband, 1901, 347). While writing Quad, Beckett could have been

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inspired by this passage as the endless series of movement by the four dancers in Quad would denote the centre E as an unfathomable abyss that the finite cannot approach. It is this abyss, waiting for the four dancers at the centre, that is the key to decoding Quad. With Cusanus’s formula of the lack of proportion between the finite and the infinite in mind, the centre E might be assumed as ‘Nothing’ or ‘the deity’. Vital to our quest for the meaning of the danger zone of Quad is Cusanus’s idea that the absolute truth is beyond the reach of humans (Cusanus, 2007, 12). Windelband writes: ‘as the deity is “Nothing”, so it is in this knowledge that is a not-knowing – docta ignorantia, it was later called by Nicolaus; and as that “Nothing” is the original ground of all reality’ (337). In the following quotation, Beckett’s concern with Cusanus’s idea of the limit of the endless series is linked with both Pythagoras and Leibniz as well as with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who coined the word noumenon, or the thing-in-itself, to signify unknowable reality, as opposed to phenomenon, or what appears to an observer: Consciousness can be thought as diminishing through an infinite number of intermediate stages down to nothing, and the idea of the limit of this infinite series (comparable to the √2) is that of the merely-given, the thingin-itself. Things-in-themselves are, therefore, as [Salomon] Maimon says with direct reference to Leibniz – petites perceptions; cf. p. 424 – differentials of consciousness. The thing-in-itself is the limiting conception for the infinite decreasing series from complete consciousness down – an irrational quantity. (Windelband, 1901, 578; see also Beckett, TCD MS10967, 241r, and Beckett, 2020, 424; emphasis in original) Now we understand Windelband’s statement that ‘in Leibniz all threads of the old and the new metaphysics run together’ (425). For this is also the thread of the metaphysics of the irrational that penetrates into the composition of Quad: Pythagoras’s square root of two, the value of which cannot be represented numerically by any finite series of numbers; Cusanus’s unfathomable abyss that even the endless series by the finite cannot approach; Leibniz’s petites perceptions or differentials of consciousness, as in the case of surd ratios, which involve an infinite process; and Kant’s unknowable the thing-in-itself.

Analogy of Clocks: From Dante, Geulincx, and Leibniz to Beckett Put in the context of the history of philosophy, Beckett’s engagement with technology in Quad can be evaluated as a fusion, or a confrontation between

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mechanism and theology. The mechanistic view of the universe is reflected in the mathematical, geometrical, and programmed “clockwork” movement in Quad whereas, by contrast, the camera eye expresses the ontological anxiety, as examined in the case of Berkeley, standing for a theological argument. Interestingly, the mechanical clock metaphor also finds an earlier reference in Dante. Indeed, Otto Mayr asserts that ‘Some of the earlier clock metaphors come from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)’ (1986, 30). Mayr points out two significant passages in the Paradiso in which the image of the clock appears. In the first, guided by Beatrice, Dante enters the fourth heaven, the heaven of the Sun, where they are encompassed by a wreath of blessed spirits – twelve in number – who are the souls of the twelve principal teachers, including Thomas Aquinas. In bright light, they dance and then stop, when an image of a mechanical clock appears: ‘as a horologe [clock][. . .]/which pulls one part and thrusts another,/sounding “tin, tin” with such sweet notes’ (Paradiso, X, 139–43; Mayr, 1986, 31). This religious ecstasy recurs when Dante and Beatrice are encircled again, just before advancing to the highest heaven, by the blessed spirits who dance the complex but coordinated movements of a clock’s gear: ‘as wheels in clocks turn,/so that to someone looking/one appears still, while another flies,/so those lights, dancing/at varying speeds, slow and fast,/made me judge of their riches’ (Paradiso, XXIV, 13–18; Mayr, 1986, 31). It was not the water clock, according to Mayr, but the mechanical clock that Dante had in mind, for the poet wrote the Paradiso in the last years of his life – three or four decades after the invention of the mechanical clock. Moreover, Dante is known to have stayed in Milan after the clock of San Eustorgio was installed there in 1307. The mechanical clock in action urges Dante to imagine the dances of the blessed spirits in paradise, signifying, as Mayr concludes, the powerful endorsement for the new machine. While Dante’s image of the mechanical clock and his religious view of the universe are in perfect harmony, Beckett’s images of the clock expressed in his novels and plays are not in any harmony with the world. For example, in Murphy, the cuckoo-clock whose stroke ‘between twenty and thirty’ echoes a street-cry, changing itself into the capitalistic endorsement ‘Quid pro quo!’, and hampers Murphy’s seclusion into ‘the little world’ reachable through his rocking chair (Beckett, 2006a, 3). In Waiting for Godot Pozzo, losing his belongings one after another, loses his pocket-watch, and in the end curses time in his blindness: ‘Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time!’ (1986, 45, 83). The piercing sound of the alarm clock never fails to disturb Winnie’s sleep in Happy Days, while Clov’s alarm clock in Endgame reveals the tension between him and Hamm, as Clov sets it so that the bell can indicate his absence or his death (138 and passim, 115). In Beckett’s late prose text

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Ill Seen Ill Said, Beckett introduces the Sun, Venus, and an old woman, the protagonist – to borrow Ruby Cohn’s phrase – ‘in a mystic dimension’ (Cohn, 2001, 365), with her cabin ‘At the inexistent centre of a formless place’ and with her eye that has ‘no need of light to see’ (Beckett, 2006c, 451, 457). Then, in the winter evening, she is encircled in the pastures by ‘the twelve’: ‘Always afar. Still or receding. She never once saw one come towards her’ (452). In contrast to the harmonious clock-like dance by the twelve spirits in the Paradiso, Beckett’s twelve produce not harmony, but fissures between themselves and the old woman. Time and again, they start falling one by one (461), as it were, corresponding to the broken clock on the wall of her cabin whose close-up of a dial shows no figure, no tick, but ‘sixty black dots’ and ‘one hand only’ (465). Symbolically, Beckett’s metaphysical/mechanical device of the twelve and the broken clock leave the old woman isolated in a timeless limbo: ‘Whole nights may pass as may but a fraction of a second or any intermediate lapse of time soever before it flings itself from one degree to the next’ (465). Again, Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ outline how both Geulincx (1624–69) and Leibniz (1646–1716) used the analogy of two clocks, the former for his Occasionalism and the latter for his doctrine of the pre-established harmony: The ultimate ‘cause’ for causal connection between stimuli & sensations, purpose & action, is God. This is Occasionalism. This further developed in Ethics of Geulincx. Illustration of the 2 Clocks which having once been synchronised by same artificer continue to move in perfect harmony [. . .]. What anthropologism! Leibniz illustrated with same analogy his doctrine of ‘preestablished harmony’, & characterised Cartesian conception by immediate & permanent interdependence of 2 clocks, & Occasionalist by constantly renewed regulation of clocks by clock-maker. (TCD MS 10967/189r–189v; Beckett, 2020, 321–3) On the one hand, windowless monads act as if they communicate with each other through a program devised by the hand of the Supreme Watchmaker, or God. On the other hand, Leibniz, drawing on the famous Scholastic saying in section 43 of Theodicy, ‘Astra inclinant, non necessitant’ [‘Stars incline, not necessitate’], asserts: ‘I am of opinion that the will is always more inclined towards the course it adopts, but that it is never bound by the necessity to adopt it’ (2007, 150; 1875–90, VI: 126). Leibniz’s proposition of ‘incliner sans nécessiter’ [(God may) ‘incline without necessitating’] makes tantalising room for each monad in the pre-established harmony, which Leibniz himself calls the labyrinth of freedom of the will: ‘There are two labyrinths of the human mind:

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one concerns the composition of the continuum, and the other the nature of freedom, and both spring from the same source – the infinite’ (Leibniz qtd in Arthur, 2018, 1n1; see also Leibniz, 2007, 55; 1875–90, VI: 29). It follows that, whenever we ask if the four figures in Quad are walking of or against their own will, we are caught in Leibniz’s labyrinth of freedom. Moving like the clocks created by the Supreme Watchmaker, they are unable to stop, rest, or communicate in their closed system – perpetuating an indestructible force without end. Here, the metaphor of the watchmaker in Molloy may be helpful to understand the pains and inner conflict of the four dancers in Quad: ‘Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms’ (Beckett, 2006b, 31). The word ‘horologe’ in the French version – ‘Horologe qu’ayant remontée l’horloger enterre, avant de mourir, et dont les rouages tordus parleront un jour de Dieu, aux vers’ (Beckett, 1982, 47) – may associate the ring of Dante’s mechanical clock with harmony, but Beckett pours cold water on Leibniz’s metaphor of God as the Supreme Watchmaker with a sneer of Voltairean mockery.

Murphy and Quad Chris Ackerley argues that Murphy was ‘the matrix in which many later works were formed [. . .] and to which he returned in his later writings’ (2004, 10). Quad is no exception. Beyond the inherent differences between a novel and a piece broadcast on TV, Beckett’s main theme is the struggle of free will against determinism. Murphy is governed by destiny, or by the horoscope. In Beckett’s well-known response to Sighle Kennedy’s enquiry about the approach one should take to understand Murphy, he suggested two propositions – Democritus’ ‘Naught is more real . . .’ and Geulincx’s ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’ [Wherein you deserve nothing, therein you should not will] – as points of departure (Kennedy, 1971, 300). These two propositions for reading Murphy also apply to Quad, as the play has ‘Nothing’ at its centre as the ‘danger zone’, and what matters is total submission to the Infinite (God or Nothing), the renunciation of free will. The four figures of Quad might well be muttering, ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis’. Ethically, Beckett prefers Geulincx to Leibniz, and he refers to the former repeatedly in his works. Especially in his novel Molloy, Beckett illustrates the protagonist’s affinity with Geulincx’s metaphysics with regard to limited freedom: ‘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’ (Beckett, 2006b, 46). The image of crawling eastward on a ship sailing westward is an analogy, as Ackerley and Gontarski note, of ‘circumscribed freedom (God moves the

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boat, but on it our deliberation is free)’ (Ackerley and Gontarski, 2006, 385). A similar situation takes place in the case of the four dancers’ prescribed movements in the square, as God may move their bodies, but offers freedom in their minds no matter how scarce it may be. In terms of whether they have any will at all, Beckett leaves no clue in the published text. Yet the cryptic admission (‘can’t bear any more’) in the notes toward the SDR production suggests that they have at least some emotion and will. Although Beckett started the composition of what he later called Murphy with Leibniz as its dominant mover, which is evident from the notes in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (UoR MS 3000, 1–2), he completed the novel, as David Tucker points out, with the growing importance of Geulincx (2012, 1). This is an intricate but important issue to be analysed in our understanding of Quad, for both Leibniz’s free will in the pre-established harmony and Geulincx’s axiom of the total submission to God may be ringing in the minds of the dancers. More importantly, we cannot ignore the impression that the four figures in Quad, in total isolation and without communication, continue pacing according to the prescribed turns and courses. ‘It is not difficult’, as Tonning points out, ‘here to adduce Leibnizian association. The pacers are clearly part of a “pre-established harmony”, perfectly coordinated without actually interacting, in perpetual motion around un undefinable centre’ (2007, 241). Besides, Leibniz says, ‘The difference between necessary and contingent truths is indeed the same as that between commensurable and incommensurable numbers’ (Leibniz qtd in Russell, 1992, 71; see also Leibniz, 1875–90, VII: 200), and compares the former to ‘rational numbers’ and the latter to ‘surds’ (Leibniz qtd in Russell, 1992, 71; see also Leibniz, 1875–90, VII: 309). Beckett is conscious of this, because Murphy is mocked by a chandler in the town as ‘Thou surd!’ (Beckett, 2006a, 49), and he also calls the third and deepest zone of Murphy’s mind a ‘Matrix of surds’: ‘The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms’ (70). All things considered, the motif of the Pythagorean taboo was not contingent, but necessarily resides in the deepest core of Murphy’s mind, resonating with the incommensurability of the sides and diagonal of the square under the shadow of Leibniz’s Monadology.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to unravel the cryptic ‘dramatized taboo’ that Beckett mentions in the production notes of Quad. The numerous extracts from Burnet and Windelband that Beckett copied into his ‘Philosophy Notes’

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provide a valuable guide in our quest of the wake of Beckett’s philosophical journey into the background of Quad. In terms of Beckett and technology, Beckett’s obsession with lighting and the description of the blinking eye in the production notes implied that it was an expression of Berkeley’s ontological anxiety. Similarly, when considering Beckett’s representations of clocks from Murphy to his later works, it turns out that the counter-clockwise movement of Quad also has its place in the mechanical and metaphysical genealogy of clocks depicted by Dante, Geulincx, and Leibniz. In his oeuvre, Beckett shows a consistent criticism of the idea of a pre-established harmony created by God. In terms of Beckett and philosophy, I have focused on Beckett’s special interest in the metaphysics of the irrational shared by Pythagoras, Cusanus, Leibniz, and Kant. The enigmatic ‘dramatized taboo’ discloses itself in this genealogy, by which Beckett meant the dramatisation of the Pythagorean taboo he had used in his novel Murphy. Quad then emerges as the visualisation and dramatisation of the incommensurability of the sides and diagonals on the square stage, while the centre E stands as the danger zone that cannot be approached. It is precisely this centre of the ‘danger zone’ into which the threads of the old and new metaphysics run together, unfolding the inner conflict of the dancers, or the monadic clocks oscillating between Geulincx’s subordination to God and Leibniz’s free will in the pre-established harmony.

Notes 1. The University of Reading holds three important manuscripts for Quad: 1) original untitled manuscript of Quad, 3 leaves (UoR MS 2198); 2) typescripts with manuscript corrections and additions, 9 leaves (UoR MS 2199); and 3) original manuscript notes toward television production of Quad for Süddeutscher Rundfunk, entitled Quadrat I and II, dated April 1981, 9 leaves (UoR MS 2100). This essay focuses upon UoR MS 2100, which preserves Beckett’s various schemes (implemented and abandoned) on lighting, colours, percussions, and footfalls. 2. Beckett draws on Alexander’s description of Monadology as unlike Windelband, he uses the spelling ‘Leibnitz’ for Leibniz. The corresponding passage in Leibniz’s Monadology is section 67: ‘Every portion of matter can be thought of as a garden full of plants, or as a pond full of fish. But every branch of the plant, every part of the animal, and every drop of its vital fluids, is another such garden, or another such pond’ (Leibniz, 1998, 277; see also 1875–90, VI: 618).

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Works Cited Ackerley, Chris (2004), Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski (2006), The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, London: Faber and Faber. Alexander, Archibald B. D. [1908] (1922), A Short History of Philosophy, Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson and Co. Arthur, Richard T. W. (2018), Monads, Composition, and Force: Ariadnean Threads through Leibniz’s Labyrinth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beckett, Samuel, ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, UoR MS 3000, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. Beckett, Samuel, ‘Philosophy Notes’, TCD MS 10967, Trinity College Dublin. Beckett, Samuel, Quad, notes toward SDR production, UoR MS 2100, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. Beckett, Samuel (1965), Murphy, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Beckett, Samuel [1951] (1982), Molloy, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Beckett, Samuel (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (1992), Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Dublin: The Black Cat Press. Beckett, Samuel (2006a), The Grove Centenary Edition: Novels I, ed. Paul Auster, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (2006b), The Grove Centenary Edition: Novels II, ed. Paul Auster, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (2006c), The Grove Centenary Edition: Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism, ed. Paul Auster, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (2009), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–40, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2016), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–89, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2020), Samuel Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’, ed. Steven Matthews and Matthew Feldman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bryden, Mary (1995), ‘QUAD: Dancing Genders’, in Catharina Wulf (ed.), ‘The Savage Eye/L’Oeil Fauve’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 4, pp. 109–22. Burnet, John [1914] (1950), Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato, London: Macmillan Co. Limited. Cohn, Ruby (2001), A Beckett Canon, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cusanus, Nicholas [1954] (2007), Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Germain Heron, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.

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Russell, Bertrand [1900] (1992), A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, London: Routledge. Tonning, Erik (2007), Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen, 1962–1985, Oxford: Peter Lang. Tucker, David (2012), Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing ‘A Literary Fantasia’, London: Bloomsbury. Urmson, J. O. (1982), Berkeley, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Windelband, Wilhelm [1892] (1901), A History of Philosophy: With Especial Reference to the Formation and Development of Its Problems and Conceptions, trans. James H. Tufts, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan and Co.

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Part II Media Technologies and Intermediality

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Chapter 6 Beckett’s Technography: Traces of Radio in the Later Prose Pim Verhulst

Introduction: Distinguishing Technography from Intermediality For decades, critics have tended to treat the various genres that Beckett practised and the media for which he wrote in isolation, at best grouping his technological work under the category of ‘media plays’ (Ben-Zvi, 1985), as if to set it apart from more traditional forms instead of in relation to them. While Beckett has always been recognised as a ‘multimedial’ author in the sense that he worked in poetry, prose and theatre alongside film, television and radio, often in dialogue with painting and music, the creative cross-polination that took place between these various forms of artistic expression has only started to receive the attention it merits, in particular with regard to technology. Following a dominant trend in academia at large, most emphasis has been placed on the influence of visual media technologies like film on Beckett’s work. With regard to the prose, Anthony Paraskeva has looked at cinematic procedures in general (2017), whereas Deirdre Flynn (2016) and Galina Kiryushina (2018) have more specifically studied Beckett’s use of Eisenstein’s montage techniques in Company and Ill Seen Ill Said, respectively. An acoustic medium such as radio, by contrast, remains underrepresented. Anna McMullan’s Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (2010) goes some way to remedy this blind spot, fascinatingly tracing interactions between radio, television and stage plays, but Beckett’s prose has hardly been explored from this angle. One of the terms that McMullan uses to characterise this relationship between works in different genres and technologies is ‘intermediality’. Although its precise meaning varies from one scholar to another, more than setting off on a long definitional excursion, I would prefer to paraphrase this term and relate it to ‘technography’, which I find more useful in the present

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context. In most cases, ‘intermediality’ is defined broadly on the level of media as an exchange of characteristics in a potentially reciprocal relationship that may involve more than a single source as well as target, and fundamentally changes one or more of them in their expressive and communicative affordances. Depending on how one defines a ‘medium’, this may include theatre and prose, so that the exchange can be non-technological in kind. For the sake of this chapter, however, I will narrow down the scope of ‘intermediality’ to the level of the work or the text, instead of the medium, and I will impose the additional limitation that at least one of the two or more works/texts that interact must be of a technological nature (say, a radio play and a novel). The term ‘technograpy’, by contrast, does not operate on the level of specific media or works, but takes as its object an author’s engagement with technology in a general sense, both directly and indirectly. Originally used by anthropologists to study the use of skills, tools, knowledge and technique in everyday life, Sean Pryor and David Trotter (2016) have recently applied the term to literature. Of course realising that, compared to the oral tradition of storytelling, writing itself always implies technological mediation, whether it is in the form of a quill, a pencil, a pen or some other implement, Pryor and Trotter focus on what they call ‘modern technographies’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly but not exclusively those of telecommunication. In its narrowed-down definition, ‘intermediality’ is closer in principle to ‘intra-’ and ‘intertextuality’, while ‘technography’ is a cultural force operating on a higher level, sometimes unconsciously impacting writers and their poetics – even generations of writers, for all modern literature is potentially ‘technographic’. From this it also follows that every case of ‘intermediality’ is ‘technographic’, but not all instances of ‘technography’ are ‘intermedial’, at least in my understanding of the terms for this chapter. In what follows, I will further illustrate this difference by examining two later prose texts, namely How It Is and Company. The two main goals are: first, to show that radio had a profound and lasting effect on the development of Beckett’s prose writing beyond the mid-1950s; and second, to argue that ‘technography’ is a constant in his work, increasingly taking the form of ‘intermediality’ and evolving into ‘medial confluence’ during the later phase.

How It Is and Radiophonic Intermediality In How It Is there is a strong connection between the acts of speaking and listening, captured in the narrator’s mantra ‘I say it as I hear it’, which is repeated no less than twenty-four times in the text. This emphasis on listening has long been recognised in the criticism on How It Is, and sometimes it has

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been interpreted as an effect of radio technology and Beckett’s direct experience with the medium in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the period during which he was writing and translating How It Is (Albright, 2003; Sinoimeri, 2012; Baroghel, 2017). However, listening was already at the forefront of Beckett’s previous longer work in prose, L’Innommable/The Unnamable. Its narrator, too, claims to be repeating exactly the words it hears being spoken by a voice. So, in itself, the importance of listening in How It Is does not particularly signal any radiophonic influence, as it was already central to a prose text written much before the radio plays of the 1950s and 1960s. How both works assimilate and inscribe the act of listening into their written form is significantly different, however, with How It Is perhaps offering a closer approximation of radio broadcasting than The Unnamable. In both works, the voice that the narrator echoes is said to be faint and hard to hear, yet The Unnamable is shaped like a constant verbal stream which seemingly contradicts the failing nature of the voice on which it relies – conveyed as it is in a hurried, uninterrupted form of writing. Such stylistic dissonance does not occur in How It Is, which is formally broken up, faltering, eaten into by white spaces and, as a consequence, punctured but unpunctuated. Or, in the words of the text: ‘ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured’ (Beckett, 2009b, 3). Since the narrator claims to speak the words as he hears them, they are inevitably ‘ill-said’ because ‘ill-heard’, and therefore also ‘ill-transcribed’ or ‘ill-written’. A crucial difference in their scriptural forms is that The Unnamable stresses the act of speaking whereas How It Is shifts the emphasis away to listening or, more precisely, achieves a tighter formal coupling between listening and speaking. Hence the narrator’s ‘I say it as I hear it’, with the writing style reflecting the ‘ill-ness’ of both acts. Research on the genesis of How It Is has revealed that Beckett did not start fragmenting the more conventional prose of the early versions until the writing was well under way (O’Reilly, 2001, xiv–xv), but the origin of this formal transformation has mostly been explained a as desire for stylistic weakening to move Beckett’s prose beyond L’Innommable/The Unnamable. My suggestion is that radio had a significant part in this process, largely overlooked. Chronologically, Comment c’est/How It Is was written and translated in the middle of Beckett’s radio period, intersecting with All That Fall, Embers and Rough for Radio II, on the one hand, and Words and Music, Rough for Radio I and Cascando on the other. In addition to these radio plays, Beckett also allowed his prose to be adapted for the BBC Third Programme, in particular Molloy, From an Abandoned Work, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, for which he selected extracts and discussed approaches with the producer, Donald McWhinnie, as well as his cousin John, who wrote the music for the broadcasts (see Feldman, 2014). These productions not only gave Beckett a chance to reflect on his

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prose in relation to the medium, but also to hear his own work broadcast and experience its effect as a listener. It is important to understand that Beckett’s reception of these radio transmissions in Paris, broadcast from London by the BBC, was troubled by technological difficulties. On 14 January 1957, he complained to Donald McWhinnie that the signal of All That Fall was ‘very poor’, wishing he ‘had lost less of the detail’ to atmospheric ‘distortion’ (Beckett, 2014, 12). Arrangements were made for the second All That Fall broadcast of 19 January to be relayed by the French radio RTF to the BBC’s Paris studio, where Beckett could come in and listen to it, but the result was no better, as he told McWhinnie on 29 January: ‘I “heard” the second transmission in the Avenue Hoche studio [. . .]. It was clear for five minutes or so, then got worse and worse and was soon practically inaudible. Exasperating experience’ (qtd in Bloom, 2016, 139). The only way to avoid the problem was to send tapes of the recordings to the BBC’s Paris office and play them back on-site. This became the standard practice, and Beckett also received a few phonograph records, but he could not help tuning in to the broadcasts every now and then, anxious to hear what they sounded like ‘live’. This was particularly the case when fragments of his prose were aired by the BBC, for example Molloy on 10 December 1957. When Beckett wrote to McWhinnie the next day, he called the reception ‘execrable’. In an attempt to hear it ‘properly, with the detail’, he would use a ‘more powerful’ radio set kept in his country home for the second transmission of Molloy on 13 December, as well as for the first broadcast of From an Abandoned Work on the following day, which he anticipated ‘with acute curiosity’ (Beckett, 2014, 77–8). ‘Alas no clearer than in Paris’, Beckett reported to McWhinnie on 23 December. There was ‘[m]ore volume’ but also ‘more interference’, which took the form of ‘distortion and fading and encroachments’ (78). While these productions aired almost a year before Beckett started work on How It Is, in December 1958, further broadcasts were transmitted around and after this date, of Malone Dies on 15 June, 19 June and 15 October 1958, and The Unnamable on 19 January and 10 February 1959. By this time, Beckett had well advanced on How It Is. As a letter to Barney Rosset of 5 May confirms, it was also around this period that he decided to fragment its form, about halfway into the work and uncertain to what extent it signified a continuation of his prose beyond The Unnamable or just another cul de sac: ‘I rely a lot on demolishing process to come later and content myself more or less with getting down elements and rhythms to be knocked hell out of when I’m ready. [. . .] All a problem of rhythm and syntax and weakening of form, nothing more difficult’ (230). During this process, the phrase ‘je le dis comme je l’entends’ [I say it as I hear it] was also incorporated more structurally into the discourse (O’Reilly, 2001, 206), which links the acts of ill-speaking and ill-hearing in the novel closely

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to that of textual decomposition. It is therefore possible that faintly hearing his prose distorted on the radio through static interference partly inspired the tattered syntax of How It Is, which is ill-written, because it was ill-said and ill-heard. In this respect, it may seem puzzling that he told his American publisher on 5 May 1959 that How It Is had ‘nothing to do with theatre or radio’, although he did add: ‘I hear their siren voices and tell them to stick it up’ (Beckett, 2014, 229–30). Rather than a complete denial of radio’s influence, perhaps this comment signifies an avowal that, even though How It Is was not intended for broadcast, it resonates in the text, so that Beckett is writing through the medium, which clearly still fascinated him at the time. This debt to radio is also suggested by another comment that Beckett made, to the actor Patrick Magee, for whom he translated into English an early passage from the ‘work-in-progress’ version of Comment c’est, to be read at the Royal Festival Hall in April 1960. In his cover letter with the extract, dated 26 February, Beckett advised Magee: ‘It is I think a microphone text, to be murmured, and if you agree with me I hope it will be possible for you to use one, notwithstanding the liveness of the occasion’ (306). At first sight, the comment is contradictory, because microphones convert sound waves into electrical energy variations which can then be amplified for transmission, recording and broadcast, whereas Beckett desired a weakened or lifeless effect. However, murmuring or whispering into a microphone, accompanied by heavy breathing, distorts the quality of the voice with an effect similar to static interference in radio transmissions. In making this suggestion to Magee, Beckett may have been anticipating a problem inherent in all performances or public readings of How It Is. When the text is transferred from the written page to an o/aural context, it forces a particular syntax and rhythm upon the words that is only suggested in print and effectuated or o/auralised by the readers, who also become speaker-listeners in that they must vocalise the text and look for meaningful speech patterns on their own, without the aid of punctuation (see Cordingley, 2006). From Beckett’s written instructions to Magee, it transpires that he favoured ‘monotony’ and ‘misunderstanding’ to ‘clarity’ in the performance: What will meet your disgusted eye is a series of short paragraphs (average of 4 or 5 lines) separated by pauses during which panting cordially invited and without as much punctuation as a comma to break the monotony or promote the understanding. [. . .] I have made the writing as clear as such dreadful circumstances permit, but I intend also to have the goodness to point the copy I shall be sending you in a fortnight or three weeks from now. (Beckett, 2014, 306)

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Beckett’s ‘pointing’ would have been helpful to understand the effect he envisioned, but the copy he gave to Magee has not been retrieved, only the manuscript of his translation (Breon Mitchell papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University), and its pre-book publication in Evergreen Review as ‘From an Unabandoned Work’ (see O’Reilly, 2003). A comparison of the early English version with the published text and the French original shows an interesting variant. When the narrator talks about life and remarks that it has been ‘recueillie quand même’, Beckett changes it to ‘registered none the less’ in the manuscript (O’Reilly, 2001, 2, 604), and finally to: ‘recorded none the less somewhere as it stands as it comes my moments not the millionth all lost nearly all someone listening someone noting or the same’ (2009b, 3; emphasis added). Unlike ‘recueillir’ and ‘register’, the verb ‘to record’ can also be interpreted in the context of audio technology, much like the French verb ‘enregistrer’, which encapsulates both meanings, but the narrator points to the ‘noted’ state of the text in the same breath. This co-existence of o/aurality and inscription would then perfectly encapsulate the formal essence of How It Is, namely a written record masquerading as a live recording. As Elsa Baroghel is right to point out, even though How It Is appears ‘phonogenic’ or ‘audiogenic’ on the surface, and partly functions as ‘written’ or ‘printed sound’, it ‘should not be mistaken for a radio script proper’ (2017, 199). Despite its being informed by the medium, it cannot simply be converted back into it. The voice being ‘ill-murmured, ill-heard, ill-recorded’ (Beckett, 2009b, 117), it should be ill-performed when transported from the page to the stage, through some form of distortion, be it vocal or sonic, to counteract the disambiguating effect of an o/aural performance.11 How It Is thus offers a fitting illustration of how ‘technography’ continues to operate as ‘intermediality’ in Beckett’s work from the 1950s onwards, in this particular case radio broadcasts of his work shaping new writing in prose.

Company and Radiophonic Technography Beckett started having ideas towards Company in early 1977, but did not finish it until 1979 and saw it published a year later. Even though he stopped writing for radio directly in the early 1960s, we should bear in mind that he had been involved in several radio adaptations of his plays and prose around that time. He had also tried – but failed – to complete Rough for Radio I in 1973, before allowing the BBC to record Rough for Radio II in 1976, for which he gave instructions by letter. It is thus safe to conclude that the wireless had never quite left Beckett in the decades leading up to Company. The title may even go back to his decision in 1958 to give a portable transistor radio to his old

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Dublin friend Ethna McCarthy, to keep her company in the final days of her terminal illness, realising just how isolating it could be and perhaps to remind her of the Irish saying that ‘radio is good company’.2 What is more, during a meeting with Richard Seaver in 1953 to revise their English translation of the story ‘La fin’ (‘The End’), Beckett told him the following about his country retreat in Ussy: He had also indulged himself, he admitted almost sheepishly one afternoon between paragraphs, in a slightly used radio, apparently to keep himself company in that solitary setting but also, he further admitted, to follow crucial rugby matches involving Ireland, and important boxing matches as well. [. . .] And yes, listen to music, which was vital to him. The radio of course: it wasn’t wholly for sports. (Seaver, 2012, 208–9) Ludovic Janvier, the co-translator on the French versions of From an Abandoned Work and Watt who sometimes visited Beckett at his apartment, states that he did not watch television or listen to the radio all that much (‘il regardait peu et il écoutait aussi peu la radio’; 2018). Then again, solitude was a rare commodity to be had in busy Paris, so understandably the need for radiophonic company would not be as strong as in the countryside – or abroad. It is perhaps no coincidence that, when Beckett started working on Company in earnest, he was also spending time away from the buzzing French metropolis, in Tangier and Stuttgart, where again he sought the company of a radio set that seems to have spurred on his writing. A new prose text had been in the works since January 1977, starting with scattered notes in the ‘Sottisier’ notebook (UoR MS 2901) headed ‘VERBATIM’ (Knowlson, 1996, 651).3 These notes already thematise ‘hearing’, the first one reading ‘No hearing anywhere – deaf speaker’, who is further characterised as a ‘Deaf lunatic’ (Krance, 1993a, 194). It seems that Beckett had a change of mind with regard to the speaker’s deafness, since the first note on the next page says the following about his ‘Tone’: ‘Speech by A overheard by B described to C, i.e. recta converted to obliqua. A, B, C, one and the same’ (194). These notes were then developed on ‘seven unnumbered recto sheets’ (UoR MS 2910) with ‘verso notes or variants on each sheet except last’ dated ‘Paris, January 1977’ (Krance, 1993a, 189). The abandoned fragment, entitled ‘The Voice VERBATIM’, shows the same preoccupation with ‘hearing’, but now expanded with related notions such as an ‘ear or ears’, ‘recorded’, ‘voice’, ‘phone’, ‘sounds’, ‘listens’, ‘Fading out-in’ (189–93). As with The Unnamable and How It Is, hearing or listening in themselves are not radiophonic traits per se, but their textual representation, along with the metaphorical occurrence of audio and telecommunication terminology,

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could be seen as markers of ‘technography’. When compared to the published version of Company, another notable feature of ‘The Voice VERBATIM’ is that it rather reads like an elaborate summary or a paraphrase of the narrative situation than a textual enactment of it, even though the plan was already sketched out in the notes. It seems that Beckett struggled with finding an adequate form to put his conceptual ideas into practice, the radio medium again acting as a kind of catalyst for the creative process. It is unclear when exactly Beckett aborted the early prose fragment, but by 24 April 1977 he had travelled to Algeria, from where he wrote to Bray: ‘Reduced for French news to Figaro & France Soir, equally revolting. Better get a good transistor’ (2016, 456). Ten days later, on 3 May, he reported to Ruby Cohn: ‘Tried to get going again in English to see me through, say for company, but broke down. But must somehow’ (457). As the naming of the title in this letter already hints, the first date recorded in the Company manuscript (UoR MS 1822) is 5 May, two days later, so interacting with a wireless set may have partly prompted Beckett to write a prose text exploring the very idea of ‘company’ in depth. Interestingly, the word does not occur a single time in either ‘The Voice VERBATIM’ notes or the fragment, so it signifies one of the main differences in content with the published text and may have been prompted by that intervention of the radio medium. If Beckett had found his conceptual framework, further stumbling blocks would still be up ahead. On 21 May, now writing from Stuttgart, where he was assisting with the German production of his television play Ghost Trio (Geistertrio) for Süddeutscher Rundfunk, he informed Bray: ‘In for a tedious time, in spite of interest of work. Only hope, get on with the writing begun in Tangier’ (Beckett, 2016, 461). Beckett managed to do so, as appears from another letter to Bray dated two days later: ‘Wrote a bit – désespoir de cause [for want of something better]. “Company”. Probable title. Seems it might last – le temps qu’il faut [as long as is needed]’ (462). Work on the text was troublesome and proceeded at a snail’s pace, Beckett writing to Cohn on 26 December: ‘Company proving the worst possible. Shall end up by preferring my own’ (476). As appears from his letter to Bray of 12 February 1978, back in Tangier, he sought out the company of the wireless again: ‘Can just get France Inter on the little Telefunken. Otherwise reduced to the Figaro’ (481). Over the next year, Company would continue to develop, alternating between Algeria and Stuttgart, but always in conjunction with radio. ‘Haven’t looked at Co’ (482), Beckett told Bray on 16 February, but things had seemingly changed by 20 March, when from Paris he sent a few fragments of the text to Herbert Myron, among them the opening line: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Develop’ (483). As this variant (not yet ‘Imagine’) shows, Beckett would follow up his own advice and continue to develop the draft, though

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not until he was back in Germany. As in Tangier, he was attempting to tune in again, telling Bray on 13 January 1979: ‘Have not succeeded so far in getting [the BBC] world [service] or radio 4. But Europe 1 quite clearly’ (497). Not only was Beckett listening to the wireless, atmospheric disturbance and static were once again interfering with his reception, as they had done in the context of How It Is and the prose fragments broadcast by the BBC in the late 1950s. Similar to then, Beckett’s experience may have found reflection in both the form and content of Company, also having a beneficial effect on the progress of its genesis. From this point on, the first draft was finished rather swiftly by the end of July 1979 (Pilling, 2006, 22), soon followed by a typescript.4 In mid-August, Beckett was already ‘half way through’ the French translation, as he wrote to Bray from Tangier, still listening in: ‘Get France Inter evenings & World News’ (Beckett, 2016, 510). As these examples confirm, the company of radio was a near constant during the genesis of Company/Compagnie, very possibly leaving a mark on the text. In addition to the man on his back in the dark, there is a second one situated ‘in another dark or in the same’, who is ‘devising it all for company’ (Beckett, 2009a, 3). Temporally, the text distinguishes between a past and a present, very consistently confining ‘listening’ to the remembered scenes (8, 13, 31), using the verb just four times in total, whereas ‘hearing’ is much more prevalent in the narrative – some fifty instances – and marks the present. Even the protagonist is referred to as ‘hearer’, not ‘listener’, the narrator pointing out: ‘Let the hearer be named H. Aspirate. Haitch’ (20). While ‘to listen’ is the idiomatic verb to use in the context of radio, it represents a more active condition than the passive ‘hearing’. As we have learned from Beckett’s correspondence, the latter is actually a closer approximation of broadcasting. Listeners are virtually powerless to restore a distorted signal, and static causes them to overhear other programmes that encroach on the broadcast they are tuning in to. The scenes from the past were still embedded into the continuous narrative of ‘The Voice VERBATIM’, whereas now they are set apart from the rest of the discourse by means of white spaces, a device first used in How It Is. The syntax of Company is not as fragmented and distorted, but the white spacing does create an effect that is similar to switching between radio channels and picking up other voices. This is something Beckett must have been doing in Tangier and Stuttgart, with static interference only heightening the confusion as to where the voices originate from, to whom they are addressed and who is speaking at great remove on the other end. All these elements feature prominently in Company, so it seems that radio broadcasting may once again have provided Beckett with a framework of metaphors to use in his prose. Yet, despite Company’s potential indebtedness to atmospheric disturbance, at the same time it evinces remarkable vocal control,

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greater perhaps than Beckett had ever managed to achieve in his plays written originally for the medium. According to the narrator: ‘The voice comes to him now from one quarter and now from another. Now faint from afar and now a murmur in his ear. In the course of a single sentence it may change place and tone’ (9). The effect is similar, though more elaborately executed, to the ‘threefold source’ of the voice in the play That Time, written shortly before Company, which ‘should be assisted mechanically (e.g. threefold pitch)’ if too difficult to execute live (Beckett, 2009c, 97). Even though Beckett would again resort to pre-recorded voices to facilitate later stage performances like Rockaby and What Where, in the context of radio, at least, it seems that technology more often proved to be an impediment than an aid, Beckett apparently finding it easier to manipulate real-life actors into producing the desired effect. Similarly, efforts to differentiate vocal tones and pitch through technological means for the radio adaptations of Play (1966) and Lessness (1971) were instructive but ultimately unsatisfactory (Zilliacus, 1976, 151–3; Esslin, 1980, 138–41). A radio play like Embers does show great variety in its use of voice, with Jack MacGowran as Henry assuming different narrative tones and playing multiple characters, but Beckett was not very confident about the possibilities that the medium had to offer in this area. In a letter of 13 June 1957 to Ethna McCarthy, written a few months prior to embarking on Embers, he already expressed his firm hope that the BBC would someday ‘evolve the radio voice’ (Beckett, 2014, 53). The exact meaning of Beckett’s enigmatic comment is unclear, but the narrator of Company asks himself a strikingly similar question: ‘Might not the voice be improved?’ (2009a, 21). By this he means less mobility. Less variety of faintness. As if seeking optimum position. From which to discharge with greatest effect. The ideal amplitude for effortless audition. Neither offending the ear with loudness nor through converse excess constraining it to strain. How far more companionable such an organ than it initially in haste imagined. (21–2). What the narrator describes here resembles the optimal circumstances for radio broadcasting, which might have come straight out of an ad, but which Beckett rarely experienced in real life. Eventually, he exchanged the company of the wireless set and its technological flaws – while exploiting them creatively – for the company of his own inner voice and the text he was writing at the time. Company shows a remarkable versatility combined with a level of control that was simply unmatched by both theatre and radio at the time. In prose, listening conditions could be modulated at will, independent of

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mechanical, meteorological or human factors, by relying entirely on that nontechnological resource as old as mankind itself, the ‘imagination’, another key term in Company, occurring some thirty times.

Conclusion: Media Confluence in Beckett’s Late Work Of course it would be misguided to reduce Company to a radiophonic text, entirely defined by that acoustic medium. As the narrator admits, ‘the voice alone is company but not enough. Its effect on the hearer is a necessary complement’ (Beckett, 2009a, 5). ‘For’, it goes on to reason, ‘were he merely to hear the voice and it to have no more effect on him than speech in Bantu or Erse then might it not as well cease?’ (5) In order to safeguard the permanence of ‘company’, the narrator also devises a visual dimension next to a sonic one, not just in the form of the man lying on his back but also through the voice, from which ‘a faint light is shed’ that ‘lightens while it sounds’ and ‘Deepens when it ebbs’ (11). The two components actively work in tandem, for example when the narrator ponders: ‘What if not sound could set his mind in motion? Sight?’ (33) This binary of sight and sound in the text of Company might be related to Beckett’s concurrent work on the production of Ghost Trio for German television, which is of course a medium that combines the visual and the acoustic. Indeed, one of the problems that he was trying to fix in the SDR studios entailed the synchronisation and editing of the ‘recorded tape of the voice and the videotape of the image’ (Beckett, 2016, 465n3). However, this moment of ‘intermedial’ exchange with Ghost Trio is only one aspect of Company’s ‘technographic’ history. As Deirdre Flynn points out, ‘Company is unique [. . .] because [. . .] it invites readers to inter-be as they bring together transmedial textual fragments’ (2016, 189). These include ‘radiophonic sequences’ or ‘registers’, which are distinguished from the ‘cinematic’ ones that are the focus of her argument (192–3, 195, 199). In view of her ‘transmedial’ observations, it is surprising and unfortunate that Flynn borrows a rather exclusive term from Agnès Varda to label the phenomenon cinécriture, i.e. ‘dialectical collisions of images and sounds assembled according to principles of montage’ (189). The term ‘technography’ is much more inclusive, for it subsumes ‘intermediality’ and also encompasses the ‘cinematic’ or the ‘televisual’ in addition to the ‘radiophonic’, but it is perhaps not precise enough to do Beckett’s late works the justice they deserve. Building on Krance’s concept of ‘transtextual confluence’ (1993a, xix; 1993b, 134), which designates the interaction of a text and its translation, as in the cases of Company/Compagnie and A Piece of Monologue/Solo, ‘medial confluence’ would be more adequate. In this final phase of Beckett’s writing, the experience he

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had accumulated in audiovisual media over the preceding decades flowed back into his prose, the genre which started it all. As Pilling noted in his review of the novel upon its publication, it is ‘not so much a company as a compendium’ (1982, 129), and forty years later we can extend that metaphor to include its various media influences. Matthijs Engelberts (2001) has previously drawn attention to the growing tendency in Beckett’s later works to blur genre boundaries, specifically focusing on prose and theatre, to conclude that they do not altogether dissolve. The same is true from the perspective of media, in so far as works of prose like How It Is and Company, despite having a potential origin in radio, cannot be seamlessly converted back into it without adaptation. However, this enduring generic specificity of Beckett’s late work should not make us blind to the media confluence that it harbours and which helped stretch, renegotiate as well as ultimately redefine the more established genres of prose and theatre. When in 1957 Beckett impressed on his American publisher that his radio play All That Fall was intended for ‘voices’, not ‘bodies’, and that its effect depended entirely on ‘the whole thing’s coming out of the dark’, he could not possibly foresee the ironic connotation that his subsequent remark would take on some twenty years later: ‘If we can’t keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lay down’ (Beckett, 2014, 63–4). That these two images, a voice coming out of the dark and a man lying down, originating in a letter that vigorously condemned the mixing of genres and media, are later repurposed for a prose text that combines theatrical elements with radio, film and television, illustrates just how much Beckett’s ‘technographic’ poetics had evolved over the intervening years.

Notes 1. For example, in Gare St Lazare’s recent stage adaptations of How It Is (Part I and Part II), Mel Mercier experiments with a range of distorting effects in his soundscape design. 2. The unpublished letters to Leslie Daiken in which Beckett discusses this idea are kept at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRHRC) in Austin, Texas. The information about the Dublin expression I have on the good authority of Feargal Whelan. 3. The notes are in fact dated ‘16.1.76’, but all surrounding evidence suggests that Beckett made a mistake and confused the year with 1977, as sometimes happens at the start of a new one (Knowlson, 1996, 821n64). With thanks to my Antwerp colleague Ellen Vanderstraeten.

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4. I am indebted to Georgina Nugent-Folan for her expert advice on the precise dating of Company’s genesis.

Works Cited Albright, Daniel (2003), Beckett and Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baroghel, Elsa (2017), ‘“My God to Have to Murmur That”: Comment c’est/ How It Is and the Issue of Performance’, in David Addyman, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning (eds), Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185–209. Beckett, Samuel (2009a), Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009b), How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009c), Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays, pref. S. E. Gontarski, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2016), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ben-Zvi, Linda (1985), ‘Samuel Beckett’s Media Plays’, Modern Drama, 28:1, pp. 22–37. Bloom, Emily C. (2016), The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cordingley, Anthony (2006), ‘The Reading Eye from Scriptura Continua to Modernism: Orality and Punctuation between Beckett’s L’image and Comment c’est/How It Is’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 47, pp. 1–12, (accessed 3 February 2021). Engelberts, Matthijs (2001), Défis du récit scénique. Formes et enjeux du mode narratif dans le théâtre de Beckett et de Duras, Genève: Librairie Droz. Esslin, Martin (1980), Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media, London: Eyre Methuen. Feldman, Matthew (2016), ‘Beckett’s Trilogy on the Third Programme’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 26, pp. 41–62. Flynn, Deirdre (2016), ‘The Form and Function of Dialectical Cinécriture in Beckett’s Company’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 25:2, pp. 188–205.

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Janvier, Ludovic (2018), ‘Beckett était obsédé par la voix’, Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire, 6 June, (accessed 3 February 2021). Kiryushina, Galina (2018), ‘“Execrations on another plane”: Film Theory in Close Up and Beckett’s Late Prose’, in Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst (eds), Beckett and Modernism, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 207–22. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Krance, Charles (1993a), Samuel Beckett’s Company/Compagnie and A Piece of Monologue/Solo: A Bilingual Variorum Edition, New York and London: Garland Publishing. Krance, Charles (1993b), ‘Traces of Transtextual Confluence and Bilingual Genesis: A Piece of Monologue and Solo for Openers’, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, 2, pp. 133–8. McMullan, Anna (2010), Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama, London: Routledge. O’Reilly, Édouard Magessa (2001), Samuel Beckett’s Comment c’est/How It Is and/et L’Image: A Critical-Genetic Edition/Une édition critico-génétique, New York and London: Routledge. O’Reilly, Édouard Magessa (2003), ‘Beckett’s “From an Unabandoned Work”: On the Way to Comment c’est’, Translation and Literature, 12:1, pp. 144–54. Paraskeva, Anthony (2017), Samuel Beckett and Cinema, London: Bloomsbury. Pilling, John (1982), ‘“Company” by Samuel Beckett’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 7, pp. 127–31. Pilling, John (2006), A Samuel Beckett Chronology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pryor, Sean and David Trotter (2016), ‘Introduction’, in Sean Pryor and David Trotter (eds), Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies, London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 7–17. Seaver, Richard (2012), The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age, ed. Jeannette Seaver, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sinoimeri, Lea (2012), ‘“Ill-Told Ill-Heard”: Aurality and Reading in Comment c’est/How It Is’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 24, pp. 321–33. Zilliacus, Clas (1976), Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Åbo: Åbo Akademi.

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Chapter 7 Beckett’s Words and Music ‘or some other trouble’: Vaguening on the Airwaves Lucy Jeffery

Beckett’s decision to experiment with radio drama occurred during a decade that not only brought us the first credit card, Velcro, and the hula hoop, but also introduced the first commercially sold transistor radio, the Regency TR-1 1954. In 1960, Sony released the TR620, the first pocket portable transistor radio, known as the ‘tranny’. Its sleek design, carrying case, polishing cloth, and choice of colour scheme (coral red and white, black and white, or blue and white) made the Sony TR620 an emblem of style that rivalled the monolithic television sets that were beginning to dominate living rooms. By the end of the 1960s, Britain had twenty VHF (FM) transmitting stations in operation, covering 97 per cent of the population (Street, 2005, 105). This meant that one in five households owned a radio set with the ability to pick up this higherquality signal (105–6). With such significant inroads being made in broadcasting technology, as well as with the growing popularity of the BBC’s ‘plays for voices’, such as Louis MacNeice’s The Dark Tower (1946), David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1946), Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (1954), and David Gascoyne’s Night Thoughts (1955), Beckett’s radio drama responds to the widespread technological developments of the time. This chapter therefore reads Beckett’s radio dramas not purely according to their own narrative or aesthetic terms but alongside his creative interest in radio technology and broadcasting. It suggests that Beckett’s investigation, from the mid-1950s onwards, into how silence and distortion (through elision, omission, and unutterability) shapes the conditions of a sentence’s own possibility, requires a line of enquiry that considers his creative process as one that responds to contemporaneous technological advancements. What distinguishes Beckett’s work for radio from that which came before is his increasing use of music as an agent for storytelling, or, more precisely,

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for questioning the methods of traditional word-based storytelling. Beckett’s engagement with this new medium and conversations with broadcasters instead of publishers may have been, in part, an attempt to get past the feeling of being a ‘dried up’ author whose ‘writing days are over’ (Beckett, 2011, 497). James Knowlson describes Beckett’s decision to write for radio as an ‘escape route’ (1996, 431) from the writer’s block he had been suffering since completing The Trilogy. This understanding of Beckett’s introduction to writing for radio, however, risks denigrating his radio drama as experiments merely intended to get his creative juices flowing and ignores the extent to which working with the possibilities and limitations specific to radio was part of a wide-ranging technological enquiry that would extend to film and televison.1 This chapter sees Beckett’s later radio plays written in the 1960s as examples of his experimentation with musical, collaborative, and technological creative processes. It suggests that Beckett’s radio dramas exploit the sound distortion capabilities of radio to retain an obfuscating ambiguity over the teleological and ontological status of the plays’ dramatis personae. More specifically, the chapter reconsiders Ruby Cohn’s description of Words and Music (1962) as a ‘composition about composition’ (2001, 268) to argue that radio is both the vehicle of production and the source of inspiration. Words and Music is read in light of the impact that the imperfections of radio technology had on the creation of this metamedial work that both exposes and explores the failings of the medium as well as Beckett’s own interest in failure. One example of a radio play that is explicitly for and about radio is Rough for Radio I, written in French (Esquisse radiophonique) in 1961 and first published in English in 1976. In this radio play, a man (He) invites a woman (She) to listen to the radio with him in the dark. After the woman arrives, we listen to her turn on the radio set (‘Just push?’), find the correct frequency (‘you must twist’), and listen to the words and music that go on ‘Without cease’ (Beckett, 2006, 267–8). This engagement with the medium mirrors our own, whilst the woman’s questions – ‘May one see them?’ (267) and ‘Is it live?’ (268) – point to the ontological questions with which the play itself engages. Beckett explores this question of being unable to ‘see’ radio voices in a letter to Barney Rosset dated 27 August 1953, when he describes All That Fall as a ‘radio text, for voices, not bodies’ (Beckett, 2014, 63; emphasis added). The bodilessness of radio becomes a vital limitation in Beckett’s work as he uses the medium’s ‘blind spots’ to destabilise the liveness or livingness of characters whose existence falters beneath unintelligible, inchoate radio sounds or auditory ‘pixellations’. The listener’s difficulty to understand these unclear sounds produced by radio and consciously evoked in Beckett’s text (the sound of the sea as white noise in Embers, for example) mirrors the narrator’s difficulty to articulate with sharpness

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and exactitude. Beckett’s inclusion of inaudible and ephemeral characters, such as Henry’s wife Ada in Embers, or, as discussed later, Croak’s departure at the end of Words and Music, turn the state of liveness or existing ‘on air’ into one of paradoxically living in ‘dead air’. The term commonly used to refer to words and sounds that die away on radio leaving a broadcast silence, ‘dead air’ conveys this dual sense of being there but not quite there that Beckett’s bodiless, radiophonic voices create (see Connor, 2014, 73).

Beckett and the BBC Third In the 1931 BBC Year Book, director Tyrone Guthrie claims that instead of merely giving listeners ‘a series of mind pictures’, radio drama needs to ‘explore the purely symphonic possibilities of the medium; to make more use of rhythm in the writing and speaking; more deliberate use of contrasting vocal colour, changing tempo, varying pitch’ (qtd in Rodger, 1982, 22). The BBC Year Book (latterly known as the BBC Handbook) also states: ‘An imaginative writer can build up a scene by subtle and ingenious word pictures, and for an imaginative listener, he will create illusions infinitely more romantic than the tawdry grottos of the stage’ (23). At this point, radio drama was being defined in relation to theatre and was yet to acquire artistic status on its own terms. In 1958, when Beckett had begun writing for the medium, the BBC, via its Handbook, started to define radio as an independent medium, extolling radio’s ‘unique flexibility, intimacy, and capacity for imaginative and evocative storytelling’ (BBC, 1958, 78).2 This shift towards an increasingly experimental approach to recording voice was only possible after the Second World War when the BBC created a three-network structure that determined the Home and Light services should cater for the general public, giving a degree of poetic license to the Third Programme. By the time Martin Esslin succeeded his more conservative predecessor, Val Gielgud, as Director of Drama in 1963, the BBC Third became the vanguard of experimental radio drama. As Beckett described the BBC’s arts network in a letter to Mary Hutchinson on 22 February 1962, ‘The Third Programme people are good with young writers and open to them’ (2014, 468). On 13 November of the same year, Beckett’s most experimental radio drama to date, Words and Music, would be broadcast on the BBC Third. Though Beckett had already written a text he intended to be broadcast on Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) entitled ‘The Capital of the Ruins’ (June 1946), it was not until the summer of 1956 that he ‘thought about Radio play technique’ and ‘in the dead of t’other night’ had an idea ‘which may or may not lead to something’ (Beckett qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 385). This idea did in fact

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lead to his first play for radio and acquiescence to the BBC’s persistent commissions for a new radio play. Beckett’s initial attitude towards writing for radio combined hesitancy (he had been keeping the BBC waiting for their script) and intrigue in writing for a new technological medium. In a letter dated 4 July 1956, Beckett responded to Cecilia Reeves’s invitation to write for the BBC Third by stating that he was ‘very doubtful of [his] ability to work in this medium’ (2011, 632n5). Then, in a letter of 23 November 1958, Beckett told Barney Rosset of his attempts ‘to write for the radio medium, rather than simply exploit the medium’s technical possibilities’ (2014, 181). The piece Beckett was referring to was All That Fall, his first play for radio, produced by Donald McWhinnie and broadcast on 2 May 1957. When working on its production in February, Beckett told McWhinnie that radio had ‘captured his imagination’ (qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 431) and described All That Fall to Rosset as ‘coming out of the dark’ (Beckett, 2014, 63); a comment that recognises radio’s absolute reliance on hearing, the impossibility of wholeness, and suggests an experience of enlightenment. Increasingly, Beckett’s concern when devising his radio plays was to embed the process of writing ‘for the radio medium’ into the drama. This can be seen in the instances when radio affects the subjects’ attempts to tell their story. With wry meta-medial undertones, Mrs Rooney in All That Fall says, ‘I sometimes find my way of speaking very . . . bizarre’ (Beckett, 2006, 173). For Steven Connor, this meta-narration is the most important feature of Beckett’s radio plays; as he says of All That Fall, ‘it can also be thought of as a kind of work on radio, a working through of the grounds of possibility for radio, and what radio itself makes possible’ (2014, 70). In line with Connor, Daniel Albright suggests that Beckett’s work is ‘a calling-into-question of the medium in which the work appears’ (5). This consciousness of radio’s auditory functionality is driven by Beckett’s use of music as a device that deconstructs narrative clarity. In Words and Music, a play about the impossibility of reaching true artistic expression, both language and music are doomed to fail. Beckett’s sound experimentation began with the use of sound effects (created by Desmond Briscoe) to render sounds, such as the animal voices, more ambiguous in All That Fall. The critic Philip Hope Wallace praised this aspect of the play, describing it as ‘a miraculous web of sound effects’ (qtd in Niebur, 2010, 24). In The Observer, Paul Ferris commented that the play ‘used sound effects in a most painstaking and brilliant fashion’ (qtd in Niebur, 2010, 24). This experimentation with the technological capabilities of recording equipment led to the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on 1 April 1958. For Beckett, it led to further use of echo and distortion effects in his second play for radio, Embers (broadcast on 24 June 1959), and to the

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increasing predominance of music in Words and Music in comparison to the short excerpt of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden heard at the beginning and end of All That Fall. When writing for radio, Beckett was immediately aware of the expressive potential of sound and each play’s soundscape. On 5 July 1956, Beckett told Nancy Cunard that he was now thinking about ‘Radio play technique’ and listed the sounds that will constitute All That Fall: ‘cartwheels’, ‘dragging feet’, ‘puffing and panting’ (qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 428). Everett Frost alludes to this medium specificity when he claims that ‘prior to Beckett no radio drama had used the unseen medium’s unique ability to represent music itself, or words themselves’ (2009, xi). The very fact that radio, with its white noise and electromagnetic interference, can defamiliarise and obscure language in order to convey how the mind struggles to imagine or remember an image or a person would have appealed to Beckett. As John Drakakis remarks, ‘what the medium could do best was to represent the psychological processes of the human mind’ (1981, 24). With radio technology, Beckett could push his exploration of words as words further, and through the Dramatic Control Panel – a device used by radio drama producers to fragment space and time by fading or cutting between studios, mixing voice, sound, and music – he could give words special significance as sound-form.3 These technological developments of the studio, coupled with radio’s solely auditory functionality, led to the fragmented narratives and images in Words and Music. More specifically, the imperfectness of pre-digital radio, evident in the white noise that creates auditory ambiguity, gave Beckett another way to convey the failure of communication. In addition to fragmentation, which suggests a breaking-off of coherence, white noise, which casts an obfuscating cloud over communication, doubly destabilises clarity of expression. Steven Connor suggests that auditory technologies such as the telephone and radio could ‘disintegrate and reconfigure space’ so that the ‘singular, perspectival gives way to plural, permeated space’ where the self is imagined as a ‘membrane’ rather than a ‘point’ (1997, 206–7). When listening to Beckett’s radio drama it becomes clear that these plays occupy a ‘plural, permeated space’ as they form a new circuit of communication between sound (voice and music), silence, and radio technology. Martin Esslin described Words and Music as ‘so totally radiogenic’ that ‘the printed page cannot represent it . . . the third character, Music, in every way of equal importance with the other two, is of necessity absent on the printed page’ (qtd in Worth, 1981, 194). From Esslin’s remark it is clear that the technological capabilities of radio have influenced Beckett’s sense of narrative, characterisation, and voice. Perhaps this is what Beckett was aiming for when he told Barney Rosset that he intended to write ‘for the radio medium’ (2014, 181; emphasis in original). Moreover, the mere fact that his work for this medium required technical and musical expertise points to a new way of working. The necessary involvement

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of broadcasters, directors, and composers led Beckett towards a creative process that was intrinsically collaborative. Words and Music itself is about this collaboration as Croak implores his pawns, Words and Music, to evoke as close a likeness of Lily, their subject, as possible.

Words and Music: Beckett and Feldman Words and Music is the first of Beckett’s ‘text-music tandem’ (Beckett qtd in Zilliacus, 1976, 99). Rough for Radio I and Cascando (originally Cascando: Invention radiophonique pour musique et voix) were also written in 1961 but broadcast after Words and Music’s first airing on 13 November 1962. Words and Music was originally broadcast for the BBC’s fortieth anniversary jubilee with music by the author’s cousin, John Beckett, who withdrew his score soon after this original production was first aired. On 12 December 1973, Katharine Worth produced, and David Clark directed, a version of Words and Music with music composed by Humphrey Searle. This chapter uses Voices International’s Beckett Festival of Radio Plays (BFRP) production, which was broadcast on America’s National Public Radio (NPR) station to celebrate Beckett’s birthday on 13 April 1986. For this production, directed and produced by Everett Frost, the music was composed by Morton Feldman.4 The radio play has three characters: Words (David Warrilow), also called Joe, Music, also called Bob, and Croak (Alvin Epstein), who is an old castellan living in a tower and commanding Joe and Bob, who initially refer to him as ‘My Lord’ (Beckett, 2006, 287). Throughout the play, Croak invokes Words and Music, whom he calls ‘My comforts’ (288), to perform the themes of love, age and the face for him. In his invitations for Words and Music to speak or sound separately and together, Croak partakes in the process of artistic creation in order to get at the ‘wellhead’ or font of inspiration (Zilliacus, 1976, 95). Croak hopes for therapeutic and redeeming effects from this artistic journey as he seeks solace and company in the sounds created by Words and Music. Croak’s groans and interruptions, however, are more suggestive of distress than contentment about his situation. This discomfort is exaggerated when Words speaks of Croak’s past with Lily. From Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and . . . but the clouds . . . (1977), one could infer that Lily is Croak’s lost love, whose image he is trying to recall with Words and Music. Beckett and Feldman met in Berlin on 20 September 1976. In a letter written to John Beckett on 18 October, Beckett describes the meeting: Met a very interesting American composer in Berlin, Morton Feldman, N. Y. Jew teaching at Buffalo. He asked me for a short text and I’ve contrived one

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[neither]. Heard his music for the first time in London, quite by chance, following a Magee reading on 3rd programme – an orchestral piece played I think by Scottish Symphony Orchestra – and liked it extremely. (Beckett, 2016, 437)5 About the same meeting, Feldman said: ‘I spent one afternoon with Beckett; it will be with me forever. Not his work; not his commitment; not his marvellous face, but his attitude’ (2006, 94). In an interview with the English composer Howard Skempton, Feldman recalled bonding with Beckett over a shared hatred for opera: ‘He was very embarrassed – he said to me, after a while: “Mr. Feldman, I don’t like opera.” I said to him, “I don’t blame you!”’ (qtd in Skempton, 1977, 5).6 This distaste for dramatic opposites that seek resolution, as found in opera, is evident in the relationship between Words and Music. There is no simple opposition or harmonisation here, but a more nuanced, even fractious interplay between the artistic modes of expression is at work. The fact that Feldman’s score never quite reaches the warmth and sentimentality it journeys towards suits Beckett’s attempt to express his failed efforts at achieving artistic harmonisation between words and music.7 Beckett’s words and Feldman’s notes contain traces of inexpressible thought whose realisation remains out of sight and out of reach. As a result, the inability to express is at the core of both the note-based and word-based strands of this play and, as this chapter will now show, is central to Beckett’s decision to work with radio. For Ulrika Maude, Beckett’s interest in failure and its extension into his use of different media reflects how ‘new technologies change the way in which we see, hear, and more generally perceive the world’ (2009, 8). In Words and Music, radio is both an enabler and disabler as it produces sound and, due to the intangibility of the subjects, removes clarity of expression and intent. The play uses radio’s limitations to generate a greater sense of the ambiguity and uncertainty Beckett was striving to create, making it possible to think of Words and Music as a work whose ‘form is content, content is form’ (Beckett, 1983, 27).8 As a result of Beckett’s collaborative process, language is no longer the prime mover, but a cog in the wheel of a more complex and holistic means of expression that is concerned ‘with sounds’ (Beckett qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 328). This is not to say that Beckett’s work for radio, with its combination of music, voice, and performance, approaches a Gesamtkunstwerk.9 By using technology to permeate his writing with music, Beckett was not seeking to create a Wagnerian total artwork that is complete in its own terms, but to emphasise its ambiguity and problematise its status as literature, or, to put it more positively, to enhance the possibilities of literature by exploring the problems of language through experimentation with technology. The whole point of

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Words and Music is that the very act of the word-based and note-based sounds coming together constitutes the fraught pursuit of expression that lies in the core of a work about the impossibility of a unified whole, or Gesamtkunstwerk. This sense of disconnect was also achieved musically in John Beckett’s original score. The composer wrote ‘a tortured melody played on a cello, accompanied by the vibraphone’ (Gannon, 2016, 143) when Words tries to sing with Music, suggestive of the core of unfulfillment at the heart of the play.10 Unlike in Wagner’s grand operas, in Beckett’s radio drama it is the failure to get a ‘glimpse/Of that wellhead’ (Beckett, 2006, 294), or font of creativity, that, rather than satisfying his listener with a series of answers to the creative struggle, prompts the most intriguing questions into the creative process. As Beckett wrote in ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’ (1929), ‘the danger’ lies not in the unanswered or ambiguous, but in the ‘neatness of identifications’ that leads to ‘a carefully folded ham sandwich’ (Beckett, 1983, 19).

Active Listening: ‘It is the shape that matters’11 In The Art of Radio (1959), the BBC’s Producer of Drama, Donald McWhinnie, wrote about his approach to radio drama, stressing its technological newness and potential to inspire new work: The radio performance works on the mind in the same way that poetry does; it liberates and evokes [. . .]. It makes possible a universe of shape, detail, emotion and idea, which is bound by no inhibiting limitations of space or capacity. (McWhinnie, 1959, 37) On the one hand this reads as a rose-tinted view of the medium’s technical capacity. Yet, on the other hand, the medium did allow avant-garde writers to delve deeper into forms of stream-of-consciousness, non-linear narratives, and psychological states. In Words and Music, the ‘universe of shape’ that McWhinnie describes takes an indefinite form that is, in part, formed by the listener. Tim Crook explains how radio involves the listener in the process of making: Radio’s imaginative spectacle presents a powerful dynamic which is rarely prioritised by alternative electronic media. By giving the listener the opportunity to create an individual filmic narrative and experience through the imaginative spectacle the listener becomes an active participant and ‘dramaturgist’ in the process of communication and listening. This participation is physical, intellectual and emotional. (Crook, 1999, 66)

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For Crook, this visual aspect of radio, its ‘imaginative spectacle’, is an integral element of the listening experience. What Crook defines as the ‘fifth dimension’ of radio is an image that leads to clarity of expression. In Words and Music, this fifth dimension is anything but clear. As listeners, we join Croak in his attempt to find a distinct, unified image of Lily, and are thereby implicated in the process of making. We also join Croak in his attempt to guide Words and Music towards the ‘wellhead’. Like the image of Lily, however, this pursuit is never achieved – ‘All dark no begging/No giving no words/No sense no need’ (Beckett, 2006, 293) – and, with Croak, the listener proceeds towards creative failure. Musically, this section builds on its earlier fragments by repeating the prominent descending three-note theme and rising and falling sevenths. This familiarity as well as chromatic scalic patterns combine tonal with atonal structures, conveying a sense of incompletion and resisting gratification. An agitated mood is then achieved by the doubling of flute and piccolo and use of chromaticism (all notes are played except F and F#). Feldman’s use of a 5/8 time signature as well as numerous groupings of five also reflects the fraught dialogue and fragmentation of Lily’s face. It is as if Feldman himself is trying to reconcile Words and Music by producing sounds evocative of the pursuit of coherence and structure, but only manages to create a quasi-melodic theme. As a result, any correlating ‘filmic narrative’ in the imagination of the listener would be incomplete, contain jarring incongruities, and could potentially be misleading. Like Words and Music, Beckett’s listener struggles to give shape to the idea. Elissa Guralnick describes how the visual spatialisation in radio drama is central to the gap between the representation and the thing itself as follows: On film or on stage, we know what we see, even when the spectacle is called into question. On radio, conversely, we know only what we know, because what constitutes spectacle is purely imaginary. As a consequence, radio inclines us to favour the action of the mind above the actuality of matter. This, without denying that the mind has its limits, insofar as the world may refuse to conform to the mind’s impression of it. Merely thinking does not make things so [. . .]. Nonetheless, by a paradox central to cognition, things can only be as thinking makes them – a fact that the radio is peculiarly suited to demonstrate. (Guralnick, 1996, 100) In Words and Music, the listener’s imaginary incarnation of Lily parallels Croak’s own attempts to realise her in his mind through his artistic direction of (possibly imaginary) agents, Words and Music. Crook states that radio’s auditory codes ‘exist physically as speech, music, sounds and silence which

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are framed by time, so the experience is ephemeral’ (1999, 64). Since radio is a time-based medium, the listener’s involvement in the creative process is necessary in order to create an image from auditory signifiers. By focusing on the image of the face – the primary source of inspiration in the visual arts – Beckett provides the coordinates to the shape but, through auditory omission and extensive ellipsis, leaves the space within undefined. As the section below outlines, through radio’s technological ability to evoke uncertainty, Beckett’s work ‘vaguens’ as his figures gradually bear less and less resemblance to any recognisable line or shape as they reside in the ether between inchoate sounds and silence.12

Auditory Pixelisation: A Technological Vaguening As this is a play for a purely auditory medium, it is through sound that Beckett and Feldman create an indistinguishable image. Radio is therefore central to Beckett’s aesthetic enquiry into imperfection, ambiguity, and creative struggle. Contrary to technology’s pursuit of clarity and perfection, here it becomes an agent that retracts from and resists elucidation and clarification in order for the ‘universe of shape’ (McWhinnie, 1959, 37) to mirror the inchoate and uncertain nature of the artistic process. This is symbolised through Words and Music’s attempt to realise an image of Lily. With her flare of black disordered hair, knitted brows, little pinched nose, and tight lips that reveal a gleam of tooth (Beckett, 2006, 292), Lily appears incomplete, fractured, and in visual terms, pixelated. During its original broadcast in 1962, the listener would have experienced the sound itself as ‘pixelated’ due to radio technology’s insufficient clarity caused by interference and white noise. Yet, if we consider the play’s story – Croak’s struggle to connect elements of his memories of a lost love – the inherent technological failure seems intentional in its evocativeness of Croak’s failings as narrator and, by extension, Beckett’s own struggle to express. After Words and Music perform the aria of Lily’s face, Croak takes a turn for the worse. From this point on, as if in a state of shock, disbelief, or feeling overwhelmed, evident in his repetition of ‘The face’ (Beckett, 2006, 291) six times, he loses his agency. When Words and Music clash, he simply implores: ‘My comforts! Be friends!’ (291). Croak, no longer the commanding old castellan, cannot suggest creative themes or chastise Words and Music by calling them ‘Dogs!’ (290), he simply ‘Groans’ (292). Croak’s final word, spoken in an ‘Anguished’ tone, is ‘No!’ (293). Defeated and overruled, Croak fades out into the darkness of radio silence as Words and Music perform together again in an attempt to reach the creative font or ‘wellhead’ (294).

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Radio enables Beckett to make a figure disappear through silence and make this disappearance seem gradual and ungratifyingly uncertain. After all, it is equally possible that Croak never leaves but simply remains silent. Hence, at the end of the radio play, as the sounds of Croak’s shuffling steps ‘die away’ (294), his existence remains uncertain. Such uncertainty over Croak’s physical existence is heightened on radio as the listener is unaware of the direction ‘die away’. Similarly, the listener will never know if Words’s final ‘Deep sigh’ (294) signifies exhaustion or death. The fact that Croak and Words cannot be seen makes the listener even more dependent upon their sense of hearing. That the sounds we rely upon are often obscured by technological imperfections suggests that Beckett’s work for radio makes use of this sensory deprivation as a tool to reinforce his inherently ambiguous narratives and ephemeral characters. Central to this vaguening is the notion that radio drama is ‘for voices, not bodies’ (Beckett, 2014, 63). In Music Quickens Time (2007), Daniel Barenboim’s description of his understanding of the matter of sound relates to Beckett’s experimentation with radio’s ability to capture the ephemerality of sound and, by extension, the ephemerality of our existence: Sound is a physical reality that can and should be observed objectively. When doing so, we notice that it disappears as it stops; it is ephemeral. It is not an object, such as a chair, which you can leave in an empty room and return later to find it still there, just as you left it. Sound does not remain in this world; it evaporates into silence. (Barenboim, 2007, 7) In his deliberate use of radio’s invisibility to make the listener question the existence of Croak, or even that of Words and Music, for they may only exist in Croak’s imagination, Beckett creates a moment where both sound and figure ‘evaporate into silence’. By permeating the space with omission, Beckett vaguens Croak and his recollection of Lily. Olga Beloborodova and Pim Verhulst chart the increasing ambiguity of Beckett’s radio plays from a postcognitive perspective, stating that they ‘show a transition from a more traditional representational model of the Cartesian mind towards evocations of cognitive processes themselves, in an environment increasingly stripped of any distinctive features’ (2018, 248). As Clas Zilliacus also remarked in his early study of Beckett’s work for radio and television, in Words and Music ‘a mental process unfolds’ (1976, 105), albeit one filled with conflicted messages, uncertainty, and lack of clarity. Hence, with Words and Music Beckett takes a step further in his removal of a narrative anchored in the mind of an ontologically assured figure, undermining any Cartesian dualism.

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In her exploration of how Beckett’s engagement with technology informs issues of agency and authority in his drama, Anna McMullan begins by stating that in his late work, ‘Beckett increasingly explored the borderlines between the human subject and its technological mediations, through sound and image’ (2000, 165). As Croak is neither there (we do not see him) nor not there (his physical existence is suggested when we hear his voice), he resides on the threshold between ‘human subject and its technological mediations’. McMullan adds: On the one hand, Beckett’s figures often seem to be trapped in a system that, following Foucault, subjects the body to increasing technologies of control and information; on the other hand, many of his characters assert some imaginative agency, however limited, through the production of and identification with virtual bodies. (167) In his production of an incomplete, imperfect image of Lily and his vaguening depiction of Croak, Beckett uses technology to limit both the ontological certainty of his figures and overarching clarity of the work itself. In ‘On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise)’, Vilém Flusser sees our engagement with technology to solicit the past as a process that reveals the indeterminacy of our memories and of our being. Flusser writes: We are but knots within a universal network of information flux that receive, process and transmit information. Our praxis with electronic memories forces us to admit that what each of us calls ‘I’ is a knot of relations that, when unravelled, reveals itself to have no hook on which those relations may hang (like the proverbial onion). (Flusser, 1990, 399) In Words and Music, Croak’s determination to see Lily – which, through his use of radio technology, Beckett renders impossible – results in his unravelling. Even Music, from whom Croak continually seeks reassurance and connection, resists concretisation as Feldman’s score dwells on an oscillating minor seventh. As a result of Beckett’s vaguening through the limiting of information, Croak becomes partghost part-machine who, ‘when unravelled, reveals [him]self to have no hook’, existing between technology and reality, therein becoming what McMullan calls a ‘virtual body’. This contributes to Words and Music’s status as a play that functions within a network of flux that ‘receive[s], process[es] and transmit[s] information’ without necessarily grounding this information in a fixed reality. Thus by trying ‘not to concretise the abstraction – not to give it yet another formal context’, Beckett uses radio technology to turn ‘toward an abstract language’ and free himself from formal concepts (Beckett qtd in Gruen, 1969, 210).

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Notes 1. Olga Beloborodova and Pim Verhulst argue that Beckett’s creative engagement with radio differs from that of other modernists who generally ‘perceived broadcasting first and foremost as an additional outlet for their poetry, prose, and criticism, not as a form of creative expression in its own right’ (2018, 241). 2. For an in-depth account of Beckett’s work for the BBC, see Addyman, Feldman and Tonning (2017). 3. Donald McWhinnie deliberately distorted the sound effects in All That Fall to suggest that they are filtered to the listener through Mrs Rooney’s mind (McWhinnie, 1959, 133–51). 4. The conductor of the Bowery Ensemble was Nils Vigeland. Musicians included: Rachel Rudich (flute), Barbara Held (flute), Bunita Marcus (piano), Laura Seaton (violin), Tina Pelikan (violin), Sarah Carter (cello), Michael Pugliese (percussion). Sound effects were created by Laura Belsey (thumps) and Charles Potter. Henry Strozier was the host for the production. 5. The piece Beckett refers to is Feldman’s Orchestra (1976), conducted by Elgar Howarth. 6. This mutual distaste for opera resulted in Feldman and Beckett’s 1977 antiopera neither. It must be noted, however, that Beckett enjoyed Mozart and da Ponte’s opera Le nozze di Figaro (1786). His fondness for Cherubino’s aria from Act 1 and canzone from Act 2 is evident in the ‘Whoroscope’ notebook (UoR MS 3000) wherein Beckett neatly copied out these sections from the score. He also saw Karl Böhm conduct Figaro in Dresden and said to MacGreevy on 16 February 1937 that it was ‘the first opera that I was sorry to have over’ (Beckett qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 253). 7. Like Beckett, Feldman’s music was concerned with the aesthetic of failure. In The Anxiety of Art (1965), Feldman wrote that ‘For art to succeed, its creator must fail’ (qtd in DeLio, 1996, 209). 8. This meta-narration is suggested by Netia Jones in her staging of the play for the 2015 Happy Days Festival in Enniskillen as Ian McElhinney sits at a desk with a script and large recording microphone lit by a table-top lamp. 9. In the early 1950s, Beckett said to Georges Duthuit: ‘C’est du wagnérisme. Moi je ne crois pas à la collaboration des artes’ [That’s Wagnerism. I don’t believe in the synthesis of the arts] (qtd in Labrusse, 1990, 676; my translation). 10. I am grateful to Galina Kiryushina for drawing my attention to Gannon’s comments on John Beckett’s score. 11. Beckett qtd in Hobson (1956, 153). 12. The term ‘vaguen’ appears in the marginalia of a typescript for Happy Days, which Beckett was also working on around 1960 (see Pountney, 1988, 149).

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Beckett’s continued aim to vaguen can also be seen at the head of a series of notes he prepared for Donald McWhinnie’s 1976 Royal Court production of That Time. Beckett wrote: ‘To the objection visual component too small, out of all proportion with aural, answer: make smaller on the principle that less is more’ (Beckett qtd in Gontarski, 1999, 437).

Works Cited Addyman, David, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, eds (2017), Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Albright, Daniel (2003), Beckett and Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barenboim, Daniel (2007), Music Quickens Time, London, New York: Verso Books. Beckett, Samuel (1983), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder. Beckett, Samuel (2006), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2011), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2016). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beloborodova, Olga and Pim Verhulst (2018), ‘Broadcasting the Mind: Extended Cognition in Beckett’s Radio Plays’, in Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle, and Pim Verhulst (eds), Beckett and Modernism, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 239–57. British Broadcasting Corporation (1958), BBC Handbook 1958, London: Broadcasting House. Cohn, Ruby (2001), A Beckett Canon, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Connor, Steven (1997), ‘The Modern Auditory I’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, New York: Routledge, pp. 203–23. Connor, Steven (2014), Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Crook, Tim (1999), Radio Drama: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. DeLio, Thomas, ed. (1996), The Music of Morton Feldman, New York: Excelsior Music Publishing Company. Drakakis, John (1981), ‘Introduction’, in John Drakakis (ed.), British Radio Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36. Feldman, Morton (2006), Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–1987, ed. Chris Villars, Oxford: Hyphen Press. Flusser, Vilém (1990), ‘On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise)’, Leonardo, 23:4, pp. 397–9. Frost, Everett (2009), ‘Preface and Note on the Text’, in Samuel Beckett, All That Fall and other Plays for Radio and Screen, London: Faber and Faber, pp. vii–xxvii. Gannon, Charles (2016), John S. Beckett: The Man and the Music, Dublin: The Lilliput Press. Gontarski, S. E. (1999), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays, Vol. 4, New York: Grove Press. Gruen, John (1969), ‘Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett’, Vogue (December), p. 210. Guralnick, Elissa (1996), Sight Unseen: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio, Athens: Ohio University Press. Hobson, Harold (1956), ‘Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year’, International Theatre Annual, 1, pp. 153–5. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Labrusse, Rémi (1990), ‘Beckett et la peinture’, Critique, 46:519–20, pp. 670–80. Maude, Ulrika (2009), Beckett, Technology and the Body, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMullan, Anna (2000), ‘Virtual Subjects: Performance, Technology, and the Body in Beckett’s Late Theatre’, in Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor and Laura Salisbury (eds), Other Becketts, Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, pp. 165–73. McWhinnie, Donald (1959), The Art of Radio, London: Faber and Faber. Niebur, Louis (2010), Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pountney, Rosemary (1988), Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–76 From All That Fall to Footfalls with Commentaries on the Latest Plays, Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd. Rodger, Ian (1982), Radio Drama, London: Macmillan. Skempton, Howard (1977), ‘Beckett as Librettist’, Music and Musicians, 25:9, pp. 5–6.

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Street, Seán (2005), A Concise History of British Radio 1922–2002, Devon: Kelly Publications. Worth, Katharine (1981), ‘Beckett and the radio medium’, in John Drakakis (ed.), British Radio Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 191–218. Zilliacus, Clas (1976), Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Åbo: Åbo Akademi.

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Chapter 8 ‘a medium for fleas’: Beckett, Mitrani and 1950s–1960s French Television Drama Galina Kiryushina

In the 1930s, Rudolf Arnheim, a German perceptual psychologist, early media theorist and author of Film and Radio, referred to the emerging medium of television as ‘Radio Film’ (1933, 294), a ‘medium of dissemination’ rather than of creative expression, born of ‘a marriage between wireless and film’ (1936, 276, 286).1 Given his scepticism towards encroaching technological developments that threatened the still faltering radio and (silent) film art with aesthetic decay, it is unsurprising that in the hybrid nature of television he sensed a new enemy to both the purely auditory and purely visual modes of expression. Having read Arnheim’s treatise on film in 1936, Beckett was aware and approving of his negative stance on such advancements as synchronised sound, naturalistic colour and stereoscopy in cinema (see Engelberts, 2008), and could have also related to the book’s final section that pondered the adverse cultural effects of true-to-life broadcasts intended for domestic mass consumption (Arnheim, 1933, 294–6). He possibly also shared Arnheim’s view that radio’s ‘blind broadcasting, built upon word and music – that is on abstract and non-figurative medium – is above all directed towards thought and feeling’ and would result in a passive, unimaginative enterprise were the visuals to be supplied as well, as in television (1936, 277–8). When Beckett wrote his first radio play, All That Fall (1957), he famously stressed that it was intended ‘for voices, not bodies’ and giving it even the slightest ‘visual dimension’ in performance meant destroying its artistic quality, which ‘depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark’ (Beckett to Barney Rosset, 27 August 1957; Beckett, 2014, 63). To use his phrasing from a later letter to Alan Schneider, he had ‘a bee in the bonnet about mixing media’ (14 September 1974; Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 319–20) already in the 1950s, when television seemed to be a technologically imperfect, incomprehensible medley not only of radio

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and film, but also of stage drama. And so, rather than coming out of the dark, it was outright out of the blue that All That Fall was adapted for French television in 1963 with Beckett’s permission. Taking Michel Mitrani’s Tous ceux qui tombent as a starting point, this chapter outlines Beckett’s changing relationship towards and with the televisual medium in the often-overlooked context of French TV drama and the significant transformations it was undergoing in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

L’oeil impitoyable Mitrani’s adaptation was produced by the RTF (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) and broadcast on the then sole operating French channel on 25 January 1963 as the second play of the ‘Nouveau Théâtre’ series, following the earlier television premiere of Eugène Ionesco’s Chairs (Siclier, 1963). Télé 7 Jours, a radio and television weekly, introduced the piece on a two-page spread as follows: Alain Resnais (‘Hiroshima mon amour’, ‘L’Anné dernière à Marienbad’) wanted to make a film of [All That Fall]; he even had already picked the exteriors; but when he abandoned the project, Alice Sapritch [playing Mrs Rooney] and Michel Mitrani decided to take their chances on TV. (Perrin, 1963, 44; my translation)2 Despite his opposition to any attempts at the play’s visualisation, Beckett had met with Resnais in May 1958 to discuss the film-maker’s idea of converting the play into cinematic format (Beckett to Barbara Bray, 3 May 1958; TCD MS 10948/1/006). Little is known of this meeting as well as of the circumstances that eventually led to the plan’s abandonment, or indeed the circumstances under which Mitrani, a television director in his early thirties, was granted permission to adapt the play for the small screen a few years later. What is known, however, is that Georges Belmont – French writer, translator and Beckett’s old friend – introduced the idea in mid-1961, and that Beckett saw both Sapritch and Mitrani several times to share his thoughts on the adaptation while essentially leaving the director’s hands free (Beckett to Jérôme Lindon, 12 July 1962; IMEC/Fonds Samuel Beckett, Boîte 6, Tous ceux qui tombent). The drama’s Friday evening broadcast was also officially presented by Belmont, whose words moved Beckett deeply (Beckett to Belmont, 6 February 1963).3 In a review of the adaptation, a reporter from Le Provençal Marseille noted the ‘oeil impitoyable’ [pitiless/savage eye]4 that Belmont had attributed to Beckett in his introduction, and concluded that ‘if [Beckett] followed his play

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on his receiver, the pitiless eye would have certainly registered, with complete satisfaction, Michel Mitrani’s masterly production’ (Rouvier, 1963).5 To be sure, Beckett’s eye was pitiless and his disapproval of Mitrani’s production evident. Two weeks after the broadcast, on 6 February 1963, he only briefly evaluated it in a letter to Alan Schneider: ‘All That Fall was done on French TV. Badly I thought – but well received’ (Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 135). Writing to John Barber of Curtis Brown four months later, he was more explicit: ‘In a weak moment I let French TV do All That Fall, with disastrous results’ (2 June 1963; qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 799n133). From its inception, Beckett suspected that his radio piece was untranslatable into any other medium and Mitrani’s ‘disastrous’ rendition only affirmed him in his attitude towards ‘mixing media’. Ever since then, though not without exceptions, potential disasters of the sort were to be avoided by simply ‘leav[ing] [the plays] where [they] belong[ed]’, that is, within the media for which they were written (Beckett to Schneider, 1 September 1974; Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 319; see also Zilliacus, 1976, 182n37). Beckett himself had no experience with television work until 1965 and so his mistrust of the medium’s artistic applications at the time was perhaps justifiable. It could have been conditioned by the poor-quality television drama with which he was familiar, or, as in Mitrani’s case, by unsatisfactory adaptations of his own work.6 In fact, seeing, in 1961, the BBC production of Waiting for Godot on the small screen had not filled him with much hope for television either: ‘Saw Godot on TV and that cured me – of my bright idea. Hilton Edwards – directing Irish TV drama wrote asking for a script. It’s a medium for fleas’ (Beckett to Elliseva Sayers, 30 July 1961; Beckett, 2014, 423n1). Although he had rejected Edwards’s proposition on the grounds of being ‘very unfamiliar with TV and its possibilities’ (Beckett to Edwards, 27 July 1961; 423), he was nevertheless willing to consider a similar proposal from his American publisher Barney Rosset. At the invitation of Four Star Television, the ‘leading supplier of original productions (“telefilms”) for the growing networks’, Rosset commissioned television scripts largely from Grove Press authors, Beckett among them (Halter, 2018, 13). The idea behind the offer, as Richard Seaver recalls in his memoir, was to get ‘four of our [Grove’s] wonderful authors to write TV screenplays’, the production of which would be financed by Four Star (2012, 318). While Seaver situates the events in 1963, Rosset himself remembers them differently: Four Star Television [. . .] came to us. [. . .] This was in the early Sixties. Then [one of the owners Dick] Powell died [in January 1963] and they put an eccentric Irishman, whom we met, in charge of the company. [. . .] He financed our Beckett film, but soon thereafter we never saw him again. And Four Star disappeared, went out of business. (Rosset, 2017, 250)

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The fact that the company approached Rosset before 1963 – the year when Beckett’s sole cinematic project, Film, was written – elucidates Schneider’s letter of August 1962, mentioning that ‘Barney has also spoken of a television play you have in mind’ (Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 127). It indeed appears that Beckett, far from being cured of the ‘bright idea’ to write specifically for television, had seriously entertained the invitation before his black-and-white silent film was even on the cards. In February 1963, a month after Tous ceux qui tombent was broadcast, Beckett accepted Rosset’s modified commission for a half-hour-long film with the provision that he is given ‘enough time’ (qtd in Beloborodova, 2019, 282). On 27 February he wrote to A. J. Leventhal explaining that he was contemplating ‘doing something for French TV’ as ‘the American TV idea [had fallen] through, and the waiting man detail I told you about doesn’t seem to me possible [on] the big screen’ (282). By this point, it seems, Beckett had deliberated the conventions of both film and television, as well as their distinctive effects on viewers, and conceived of his screen works with their specific medium in mind. As Olga Beloborodova has observed, ‘the image of “the waiting man” does not echo Film’s dynamic “flight from perception”’, which indeed suggests two different projects and supports the claim that ‘Beckett was already considering television as yet another medium to explore in the early 1960s’ (282). Also, on the formal level, Beckett’s cinema script does not entirely answer to the demands of the lowdefinition audio-visual medium confined to a small box, calling as it does for silence and a visual distinction between two different perceptions, both indicating that it was tailored for a much larger screen. In the film’s manuscript Beckett also noted down colour as a means that would facilitate the differentiation between his doppelgänger protagonists during their final confrontation (UoR MS 1227/6/1, 8v), which again gestures towards cinema rather than television. While habitually used in film since the 1930s, colour on television was certainly not the norm either in the United States, where less than 10 per cent of all sets were colour in 1965 (Murray, 2018, 183), or in France and Great Britain, where colour broadcasting was only introduced in 1967 (Rozat, 2010; Cooke, 2013, 61). Beckett’s attention to the disparate expressive properties of the two media also transpires in his letter to Barbara Bray of 11 April 1963. In the midst of working on the draft film script for Rosset, he told Bray of a recent phone call with Mitrani, who was asking for permission to screen Tous ceux qui tombent in arthouse cinemas (TCD MS 10948/1/226). As the letter suggests, Beckett imagined that the ‘disastrous’ television adaptation would make an even more disastrous film, predicting that its blown-up images would look even worse in a film theatre. Yet, rather remarkably and despite his criticism of the production from the very beginning, Beckett once again gave his

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consent. It is clear that his ‘pitiless eye’ was not as much opposed to what it was seeing during the broadcast of Tous ceux qui tombent as to the fact that it was seeing at all: his play had indeed been written ‘for the dark, that is to say for the radio’, as Mitrani later remembered Beckett explaining his discontent (Bureau, 1968). While it is intriguing that Beckett was considering the RTF as a possible creative outlet for his writing in 1963 – especially as none of his subsequent television pieces were originally presented to the French broadcaster – it is not altogether unanticipated, given his connections and the key technological and conceptual changes that French television drama was undergoing at the time.

Dramatiques, Téléastes, Téléfilms It is important to note that television in France did not expand as rapidly as it did in Great Britain or the United States, and in 1963 it was still a very young industry evolving in an atmosphere of competition with French cinema.7 For instance, in 1950, when the overall number of television receivers in Britain was nearing the one million benchmark, France counted fewer than 4,000 and operated a single, state-run channel (Rozat, 2010). In the course of the decade the count grew dramatically, reaching one million in 1960 – still only a tenth of the overall number of sets in Britain and about 55 times less than in the United States in the same year. A true television ‘boom’ followed in the 1960s. By the end of 1962, around the time Tous ceux qui tombent was broadcast, French television relayed to 3,500,000 receivers on its territory, serving 12 million spectators (Anon., 1962). In 1964, the second public channel was introduced and colour broadcasting became available on this ‘deuxième chaîne’ three years later (Rozat, 2010). Paralleling the development of television drama elsewhere, a large part of RTF’s early dramatic programming relied on classical theatre pieces for a certain quality standard and due to technical restrictions associated with studio work. At first transmitted live from Parisian theatres and then directly from the studio – with theatrical texts increasingly adjusted to fit the new medium – French televised drama only started to include creative adaptations of prose fiction and original TV pieces in the second half of the 1950s (Sicard, 1999, 69). A new, specifically televisual genre of dramatique begun to develop, posing exigent questions as to its expressive principles and techniques. The hybrid nature of live studio drama – dramatiques en direct – merged the liveness and potential fallibility of stage performance with the possibility of camera framing as well as editing, however limited, facilitated by switching between multiple television cameras in the control room. In many ways, as the germinating genre

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was caught in a struggle to find its own expressive form, it came to embody Arnheim’s prophecy from the 1930s: [television] will be able to transmit films for us, and then film aesthetics will apply to its presentations; it will give us theatre pieces and then the dramaturgy of the theatre will apply to it; and, by giving both, it will make even more distinct the impure mixture of the two forms of art in the talking films of to-day. (Arnheim, 1936, 277) While Arnheim’s main concern was still with the ‘impurity’ of talkies and the poor-quality mass-entertainment cinema it generated, early broadcast drama was facing a similar unease regarding its aesthetics, which was soon complicated even further by the newly available recording possibilities. In France, most of these innovations appeared in the mid-1950s and came into common use in the course of the following decade. From 1954, the 16mm kinescope (or telerecording) started to be implemented for capturing electronic images on film, which allowed for deferred broadcasting, storage and re-broadcasting of television programmes (Sicard, 1999, 72). In 1956, when the RTF drama department was relocated to the new studios at Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, the writing of original television pieces began to be actively encouraged and the ‘laws’ of true televisual expression explored with greater intensity (Delavaud, 2005, 64–5). In the same year, the first video recorders also opened the possibility of postproduction, but it took several years before they became commonly used (Sicard, 1999, 72). At the beginning of the 1960s, the much more costly production of téléfilms was endorsed by the RTF using professional 16mm film cameras that allowed shooting outside of the studio, which prompted fundamental debates surrounding the identity of televised drama (72). If the originality of live televised theatre was at first largely attributed to its intermediary and reconciliatory position between stage drama and film (Delavaud, 2005, 58–9), the more mature television drama was essentially neither, and amidst the mid-century technological innovations it stood in need of its own distinctive dramaturgy more than ever before. Due to their heavy reliance on literary heritage and studio production mainly for technical and financial reasons, the téléastes (TV directors) of the ‘School of Buttes-Chaumont’ were often associated with the same ‘academism’ for which François Truffaut had famously criticised the ‘Tradition of Quality’ in French cinema, the tradition against which the Nouvelle Vague film-makers positioned themselves so forcibly (77–8).8 Yet, as Gilles Delavaud argues, while the rather poorly financed and underequipped French television of the 1950s and 1960s was not as successful as its British counterpart in commissioning and producing original works for the small screen, its policy of recreating great works of literature did

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not automatically equal lack of invention (88). André Bazin, the renowned film theorist and one of the co-founders of the influential magazine Cahiers du cinéma, noted in 1957: The techniques of directing for [French] TV have been gradually developed by young men who no doubt had a bit of experience (often as assistants) in theater or cinema, but whose principal asset lay in the talent and the budgets they were given. They have learned their new craft practically by inventing it. Perish the thought of criticizing this method, the advantages of which are quite evident. (Bazin, 2014, 157–8) If television was to be considered a means of expression and not merely a means of transmission, adaptations of theatre plays and prose fiction required creative adherence to the technological and psychological nature of the medium just as much as a newly conceived piece would (Delavaud, 2005, 89). Delavaud therefore sees television directors as ‘creators’ as long as they endow the adapted works with their own vision and foster the logic of transmission that is unique to the medium, be it by probing into its inherent ‘liveness’, its use of the studio space or by reappropriating technical means borrowed from the cinema (214). If silent (and later also sound) film had to assert its artistic value by distinguishing itself from stage drama, television drama in France spent its first fifteen years in a struggle to distance itself from both theatre and cinema, and from the late 1950s onwards, ‘it is mainly through the solutions it finds to the problems of mise-en-scène that it asserts its specificity’ (214–15). Mitrani’s Tous ceux qui tombent was in this sense symptomatic and emblematic of the developments within French television on its way to qualify as an independent means of artistic expression. This was testified by numerous reviews of the production, which were almost unanimously positive, as Beckett himself had to admit. In Le Figaro Littéraire, François Mauriac described the telefilm as ‘admirable’, ‘astonishing’ and ‘new’ in that it was ‘neither cinema nor theatre’ (2 February 1963). Jacques Siclier, television columnist for Le Monde Littéraire, called Mitrani a ‘meticulous technician and perfect master of his instrument’ for whom ‘television is a language’, and so his ‘visual translation’ of Beckett’s radio piece is ‘more of a form of writing than merely a technical solution to the problem of adaptation’ (26 January 1963).

In the Language of Television As Arnheim argued in 1933, ‘With television wireless becomes documentary’, allowing us to ‘participate in distant events at the moment of their happening’

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(1936, 278, 279). It is precisely this participatory nature, the positioning of the telespectator as a witness to a live event, that characterised the medium most distinctly in its early days and left a mark on its ontology. As Marie-Noële Sicard points out, live transmission (‘le direct’) ‘restores the event in its process and this notion of continuity is central to television’ (1999, 77–8). Yet, as Bazin stressed long before recording became a common practice, ‘it is possible on television, as on the radio, for certain types of prerecorded programs to retain the characteristics of live shooting while eliminating its disadvantages’ (2014, 173), as long as the viewers ‘have the feeling of living with the image, of discovering it at its birth’ (101). According to Sicard, the low definition of the transmitted image, which is born out of a ‘grid or mosaic of luminous points’ on the analogue screen, ‘reinforces its polysemy and compels the spectator[s] to partake in its decoding’, thus involving them in a ‘logic of circulation’ of images rather than their ‘creation’ (Sicard, 1999, 78). Because the dimensions, poor clarity and low contrast of the early small screen render the details of objects difficult to discern, the image reconstructed in this (tele)communication becomes a ‘sign image, that is, the support of a mental representation’ (82). It is therefore the specific psychological conditions of the TV spectacle’s reception that account for the originality of the medium, according to the RTF’s programme director of 1949–51, Jean Luc (Delavaud, 2005, 44). Television is able to liberate itself at once from theatre and cinema by drawing precisely on the acute sense of intimacy produced in such an exchange, ‘and only inasmuch as the feeling of intimacy in dramatic broadcasts is reinforced by the immediacy of live transmission can it be considered as essential component of the art of television’ (44). How precisely, then, did Mitrani achieve the translation of Beckett’s radio play into televisual ‘language’, making Tous ceux qui tombent a work of television art? Mitrani’s telefilm, or dramatique filmée, consisted of two distinct parts: a single-take ‘objective reportage’ (Siclier, 1963) showing Mrs Rooney’s spedup journey to the train station from bird’s eye perspective, and the film proper, which was shot on location with synchronised dialogue and using predominantly close-up and extreme close-up shots. To document the unusual enterprise, the RTF produced a half-hour ‘making-of’ reportage comprising interviews with the cast and crew, and exposing the many technical challenges the production team were facing during the month-long filming process.9 In it, Mitrani explained that the purpose of the opening tracking shot, which was filmed from a helicopter and overlaid with an explanatory voice-over in postproduction, was to ‘tell the story in an objective fashion, provide a sort of synoptic commentary’ before reconstructing it ‘through detail only’ (Copeau and Blanchard, 1962). The ostensibly ‘live’ coverage thus creates an atmosphere of immediacy familiar to television viewers and anticipates the

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reception of the second part by evoking the sort of realism that is central to the genre of reportage. But this ‘realism’ is subtly destabilised by the use of an eerie, artificial background sound that underlies the voice-over, at once signalling the strangeness of the spectacle to follow and echoing the ‘stylized realism’ of Beckett’s radio piece (Esslin, 1982, 129). The second part is visually composed of faces and fragments of faces, a mosaic of body parts isolated by camera framing and objects emphasised in close-up. As such, it attempts to mimic the intimacy induced by Beckett’s radio play and engages the viewer in precisely the sort of imaginative, circular communication on which the televisual medium is based. Long focal lengths isolate the characters from the surrounding world and the close-ups fragment their faces and bodies in order to limit the field of vision to the extreme, which results, in Mitrani’s words, in an effect akin to looking through a keyhole (1968, 64). While naturally complying with the practical demands of the medium, such framing is above all a technical means for closing the characters off, surrounding and trapping them in their private, isolated microcosm into which the television viewers are allowed access (108). In Pierre Mélèse’s words, ‘thanks to these close-up shots, the analysis of the characters’ behaviour comes to the fore, transforming the realism of the [recorded] sounds and images into a slightly artificial and subjective framework’, similar to that produced by the act of radio listening (qtd in Zilliacus, 1976, 181; my translation). The forged immediacy of the second part is then achieved partly by using long takes and, more importantly, by recording sound on location. Mitrani’s commendable decision to film in ‘direct sound [son direct]’, according to André S. Labarthe’s commentary in Cahiers du cinéma, allowed him to ‘seize the speech at the precise moment of its flowing, upon leaving that strange hole called a mouth’ (1963, 63). The technique of live reporting, as well as the sense of isolation and entrapment instigated by the camera in Tous ceux qui tombent, was further explored in Mitrani’s 1965 televisual rendition of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis clos), which was broadcast with the director’s subtitle ‘A reportage on Sartre’s hell’ (Siclier and Mitrani, 1965). The play was adapted under a ‘whole new concept for the small screen’, in Siclier’s words, consisting in videotaping the entire performance with a single electronic handheld camera, which at the time was used exclusively for reporting on events such as the Tour de France (Siclier and Mitrani, 1965).10 The effect was that of a live coverage, with Mitrani’s tracking shots encircling the characters and placing the viewer in a proximity that was at once fascinating and distressing (Delavaud, 2005, 149). As Mitrani puts it, the camera in Huis clos ‘pursues the actors locked up in their universe, like a tailor-made garment’ that ‘infiltrates’ the fully enclosed studio space furnished

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with little more than three couches (Siclier and Mitrani, 1965). With such an unprecedented employment of the newly available technology, Mitrani’s teleplay achieves the desired balance between a semblance of live transmission that defined televised theatre in its infancy and the possibility of recording that enabled the genre of dramatique to evolve artistically.

The Pitiless (Camera) Eye As noted previously, when it came to adaptations of his own works, Beckett was unrelenting and hardly ever satisfied. Commenting on McWhinnie’s 1961 BBC Godot – the adaptation that only temporarily ‘cured’ his enthusiasm for the medium – he explained to the director that My play [. . .] wasn’t written for this box. My play was written for small men locked in a big place. Here you’re all too big for the place. [. . .] You see, you could write a very good play for television about a woman knitting. You’d go from the face to the knitting, from the knitting to the face. (qtd in Knowlson, 1996, 488) Instead of keeping to the knitting idea, however, it was rather the notion of confinement – a human figure trapped, followed or interrogated by technical devices – that Beckett explored in his first works for film and television. The camera eye in Film stalks the main character, played by the silent-era film comedian Buster Keaton, who rushes through a street to isolate himself in a scarcely furnished room which Beckett imagined as ‘a trap’: ‘There is nothing in this place, this room, that is not prepared to trap him’ (qtd in Gontarski, 1985, 190). When inside, the camera pans around and encircles Keaton to establish a sense of enclosure, which culminates in ‘the final investment of O by E’ (Beckett, 1986, 327), a military term for surrounding an object by a hostile force (OED, ‘investment, n.’; also noted in Beloborodova, 2019, 291). However, Beckett’s intention on the big screen, unlike in his first television play, Eh Joe (written in 1965), is not to make his spectators unseen witnesses of an intimate event. Rather, it is to cast the camera in a genuine role of a pursuer, occasioning the viewer’s identification with the concept of inescapable self-perception. In the television play, Joe first moves around a minimalist room and ensures his privacy by checking the window, door and cupboard so that ‘No one can see [him] now. . . . No one can get at [him] now’ (Beckett, 1986, 362). The play’s short opening sequence, according to Beckett, should evoke ‘The feeling [. . .] of camera sneaking behind him hugging walls’ as it follows him in its semi-circular trajectory (2016, 22). After this initial ‘pursuit’ (1986, 361), it starts closing in on Joe in an invasive, step-by-step dolly-in, which permits

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careful inspection of the actor’s face and his reaction to an accusing voiceover narrative, presumably a voice in his head. The whole play consists of one uninterrupted camera take, and its longer, ‘second’ part requires the viewer’s participation not only in the decoding of the expressions on Joe’s ‘practically motionless’ and ‘impassive’ face (362), but also in reconstructing the ultimately intimate, elliptical narrative stemming from the depths of his conscience. In many ways, Eh Joe parallels Mitrani’s view on the camera’s role in television drama and the impression of instantaneity it can induce by mimicking the televisual genres of reportage and interview. In Cahiers du cinéma, Mitrani described the technique used in Huis clos as an ‘indiscreet camera’, with the indiscretion resulting at once from its voyeuristic invasion of the characters’ privacy and from the intrusion into the privacy of the spectators’ own home (1968, 65). In Mitrani’s teleplays, as he emphasised in a 1964 interview for Le Monde, the objective was to produce ‘une télévision du trouble’ (Siclier and Mitrani, 1964) – a television of disturbance and unease that was aimed at destabilising the cosy friendliness of the domestic medium, playing on the intimate relationship with its viewer. A very similar summary can be made of the camera work in Beckett’s television play, a single-take ‘reportage’ on the ‘penny farthing hell’ (Beckett, 1986, 362) of Joe’s mind: disturbing in its intimacy and closeness, Eh Joe is, as Clas Zilliacus puts it, ‘a keyhole peep; the camera is the televoyeurs’ man on the scene’ (1976, 191). While Eh Joe is already a rather well-informed television script in terms of its medium, Beckett’s growing attention to how his works were produced was a reason for his personal involvement in their rehearsals and recording. Having proposed Eh Joe to the BBC in May 1965, he went on to assist Alan Gibson during its filming in London in January 1966, and only two months later he directed the German Süddeutscher Rundfunk version himself. What seems to be an unknown collaboration followed shortly afterwards: upon his return to Paris, Beckett assisted during the French production of the play, directed by Mitrani, between 15–27 April (Beckett to Bray, 30 March 1966; Beckett, 2016, 21). Mitrani’s Dis Joe was not broadcast until two years later when it was shown, together with Film, on the second French channel as part of Soirée Beckett, an evening programme dedicated to him. In an accompanying interview about the play, Mitrani explained that the offer, following from his work on Tous ceux qui tombent, came from Beckett himself (Bureau, 1968). Describing the situation within French television drama, he further noted that At the time of Tous ceux qui tombent, I really wished [. . .] that Beckett would write a text for television. Because [. . .] television can only move forward if authors [des auteurs] write for it. And I found that there was a

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kind of extraordinary correspondence between this medium and the work of the author. And I also thought that, this means of expression that is television, despite everything [. . .] could advance or at least give a writer new possibilities: this is what happened with Samuel Beckett in Dis Joe. (Bureau, 1968) For Mitrani, Eh Joe was a continuation of his own Huis clos from a strictly technical and formal perspective as the purpose of the camera, ‘inscribed’ in Beckett’s script ‘like in a musical score’, was likewise to ‘entrap the actor’ (Mitrani, 1968, 65). In his view, Beckett’s treatment of technology in the play indicated the extent of his comprehension of the medium, whereby it truly became ‘an instrument of creation and not anymore only of information’ (64; see also Zilliacus, 1976, 200). Regardless of (or perhaps because of) how unsatisfactory he had found Mitrani’s Tous ceux qui tombent three years earlier, Beckett’s involvement in the production starring Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault11 was rather intensive. According to James Knowlson, Beckett’s appointment diaries for this period feature multiple entries related to the production with specified dates, places, studio numbers and times.12 He helped rehearse both actors’ roles and visited several times the Buttes-Chaumont television studios for further rehearsals and recordings. He also had a separate meeting with Mitrani at the Closerie des Lilas on 18 April 1966 and was present during the final, several-hour-long shooting of the play on the last day of their collaboration.13 This is even more intriguing given the fact that Mitrani’s production diverged greatly from both the BBC and the SDR versions: like Huis clos, it was shot using a single handheld camera which slowly panned from side to side during its gradual approach of Joe’s face. As Jonathan Kalb has observed, Mitrani’s ‘camera is terribly clever, as if it wants to be something of an artiste, like Voice, and not merely an interrogator/torturer that may be subordinate to her’ (1991, 113; emphasis in original). Given Mitrani’s position within French television drama of the 1960s as a television auteur, as opposed to simply an adaptor or director (réalisateur), Kalb’s remark about the added creative signature does not surprise. Unsurprising, also, is the fact that after this production Beckett went on to direct all four of his subsequent original teleplays himself, working closely with the BBC and the SDR technical teams and claiming his own auteurist status. Jonathan Bignell has recently argued in relation to Eh Joe that ‘The past to which the play gestures is a time when television relied on theatre for its dramatic content, and when techniques of presentation had yet to assert the independence of the medium [. . .]. Eh Joe looks like television that was made before television had found its own identity’ (2020, 44). As Bignell details in this volume, in the cultural and economic context of British television at the time

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of their production, Beckett’s plays stood out as ‘innovative’ and experimental due to the ‘anachronistic’ methods they employed – the recreation, in recording, of the effect of live transmission, the absence of colour, and the exclusive use of studio space, for instance. Yet, at the same time, the formal characteristics especially of his first television plays echo the aesthetic currents of the 1950s and 1960s French television drama and Mitrani’s conception of the medium in a remarkably close way. The reasons why Beckett turned to the BBC for his first work despite considering a collaboration with the RTF in 1963 can only be guessed at, but what seems to be apparent is that Mitrani’s initial ‘disaster’, together with the specifics of TV production in mid-twentieth-century France, left their mark on his view of television and its aesthetics, and prompted him to reconsider this ‘medium for fleas’ as one worthy of serious artistic attention.

Notes 1. This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund – Project ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (Reg. no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). 2. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French are my own. 3. Lake Collection, HRC, Box 17, Folder 15. It appears that Belmont’s introduction has not been preserved, presumably because it was transmitted live rather than recorded as part of the surviving adaptation. This would also support the supposition suggested by Beckett’s correspondence that he watched the piece on the day of its broadcast. 4. It is not clear what exactly Belmont meant by the term. But, curiously, the notion of ‘the savage eye’ or ‘l’oeil impitoyable, l’oeil fauve’ constituting the essence of television remained with Beckett as late as the 1980s, as his Stuttgart cameraman Jim Lewis notes (1990, 371). The two possible translations into French were suggested by Beckett to Pierre Chabert (379). 5. I am very grateful to Pim Verhulst and Elsa Baroghel for their kind help in tracing the details concerning the broadcast. I would also like to thank Irène Lindon for permission to reference the correspondence between Jérôme Lindon and Beckett, and Anne Pavis of the InaTHÉQUE for her help in accessing some of the material discussed in this chapter. 6. On 8 October 1962, while in London, Beckett wrote to Barbara Bray of Brenda Bruce, who was to play Winnie in the 1962 British premiere of Happy Days: ‘I saw her last night in a bad [BBC] TV play (The Stepfather) & realized she might have the needful’ (Beckett, 2014, 505). A day later he reported on another play starring Bruce, ITV’s A Lily in Little India, which he also found of poor quality (TCD MS 10448/1/201).

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7. As Gilles Delavaud details in his study, in 1947–9 more than half of the RTF’s programming consisted of cinematic works, before a lasting hostility between the two media emerged in 1949 over the cinema industry’s unwillingness to supply French television with films for financial reasons (2005, 20). See also André Bazin’s 1953 article ‘Is Television a Degradation for Filmmakers?’ (2014, 157–9). 8. It is notable that Truffaut hired Marcel Moussy, a young screenwriter and television director, to write the dialogue for his first film, Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows; 1959), which was inspired by the socially oriented television series created by Moussy and Marcel Bluwal, Si c’était vous (If This Were You; 1957) (Truffaut qtd in Gillain, 2017, 65). For more information on the influence of television on cinema around the 1960s, see Delavaud (2001). 9. It is unclear whether and when the reportage was subsequently broadcast. 10. In Mitrani’s words, the camera was a smaller, ‘electronic equivalent to the Coutant camera used by the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers’ (Siclier and Mitrani, 1965). 11. The couple’s theatre company, Companie Renaud-Barrault, produced multiple television adaptations in 1954–64 (Sicard, 1999, 66). Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, which Barrault established in cooperation with André Frank, the RTF’s head of drama in the years 1959–64, was the first French journal to engage in the relations between theatre and television (65). See also the 1964 special issue entirely devoted to television, ‘Télévision: Dramaturgie nouvelle’. 12. I am grateful to James Knowlson for sharing this information with me. 13. While Jonathan Kalb, who writes about the production in great detail (1990, 112–14), suggests that Beckett was not involved in its making, it appears from the diaries and from the unpublished letters to Jocelyn Herbert and Ruby Cohn of 22 April 1966 that he not only took part in the rehearsals, but was also present during the actual filming of the piece (see UoR MS 5200/011 and UoR MS 5100/017).

Works Cited Anonymous (1962), ‘Une revue consacrée à la télévision’, Le Monde, 28 December, (accessed 5 May 2020). Arnheim, Rudolf [1932] (1933), Film, trans. L. M. Sieveking and Ian F. D. Morrow, London: Faber and Faber. Arnheim, Rudolf [1933] (1936), Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read, London: Faber and Faber.

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Bazin, André (2014), André Bazin’s New Media, ed. and trans. Andrew Dudley, Oakland: University of California Press. Beckett, Samuel, correspondence with Georges Belmont, Box 17, Folder 15, Lake Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin. Beckett, Samuel, correspondence with Barbara Bray, TCD MS 10948/1, Trinity College Dublin. Beckett, Samuel, correspondence with Ruby Cohn, UoR MS 5100, Beckett International Foundation, The University of Reading. Beckett, Samuel, correspondence with Jocelyn Herbert, UoR MS 5200, Beckett International Foundation, The University of Reading. Beckett, Samuel, correspondence with Jérôme Lindon, IMEC, Fonds Samuel Beckett, Boîte 6, Tous ceux qui tombent. Beckett, Samuel (1963), manuscript of Film, UoR MS 1227/6/1, Beckett International Foundation, The University of Reading. Beckett, Samuel (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2016), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel and Alan Schneider (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beloborodova, Olga (2019), The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play/Comédie and Film, Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Academic. Bignell, Jonathan (2020), ‘Specially for Television? Eh Joe, Intermediality and Beckett’s Drama’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 32:1, pp. 41–54. Bureau, Pierre (dir.) (1968), Soirée Beckett, ORTF, 55 min. Cooke, Lez (2013), Style in British Television Drama, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Copeau, Pascal and René Blanchard (1962), ‘Romilly sur Andelle: tournage de “Tous ceux qui tombent”’, RTF, 32 min. Delavaud, Gilles (2001), ‘L’influence de la télévision sur le cinéma autour de 1960’, in Gilles Mouëllic and Jean Cleder (eds), Nouvelle Vague, nouveaux rivages: Permanences du récit au cinéma, 1950–1970, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 145–57. Delavaud, Gilles (2005), L’art de la télévision: Histoire et esthétique de la dramatique télévisée (1950–1965), Brussels: De Boeck.

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Engelberts, Matthijs (2008), ‘Film and Film: Beckett and Early Film Theory‘, in Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (eds), Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 152–65. Esslin, Martin (1982), ‘Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting’, in Meditations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media, New York: Grove Press, pp. 125–54. Gillain, Anne, ed. (2017), Truffaut on Cinema, trans. Alistair Fox, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gontarski, S. E. (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Halter, Ed (2018), ‘Introduction’, in Ed Halter and Barney Rosset, From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader, New York: Seven Stories, pp. 9–29. Kalb, Jonathan (1991), Beckett in Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Labarthe, André S. (1963), ‘Tous ceux qui tombent’, Cahiers du cinéma, 142, p. 63. Lewis, Jim (1990), ‘Beckett et la caméra’, Revue d’esthétique, pp. 371–9. Mauriac, François (1963), ‘“Tous ceux qui tombent”, de Samuel Beckett’, Le Figaro littéraire, 2 February, np. Mitrani, Michel (1968), ‘Le Cahier de la télévision’, Cahiers du cinéma, 198, pp. 63–5. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘investment, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press. Murray, Susan (2018), Bright Signals: A History of Color Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perrin, Michel (1963), ‘Tous ceux qui tombent de Samuel Beckett’, Télé 7 Jours, 148, pp. 44–5. Rosset, Barney (2017), Dear Mr. Beckett: The Samuel Beckett File; Correspondence, Interviews, Photos, ed. Lois Oppenheim, Tuxedo Park, NY: Opus. Rouvier, Camille (1963), ‘Televu – Du grand Beckett’, Le Provençal Marseille, 26 January, np. Rozat, Pascal (2010), ‘Histoire de la télévision: une exception française?’, (accessed 18 April 2020). Seaver, Richard (2012), The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age, ed. Jeannette Seaver, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sicard, Marie-Noële (1999), ‘L’invention d’une esthétique: Le théâtre à la télévision’, in Marie-Françoise Lévy (ed.), La Télévision dans la République: Les années 50, Brussels: Éditions Complexe, pp. 64–88.

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Siclier, Jacques (1963), ‘“Tous ceux qui tombent” de Beckett’, Le Monde, 26 January, (accessed 18 April 2020). Siclier, Jacques and Michel Mitrani (1964), ‘Entretien avec Michel Mitrani qui a adapté une nouvelle de Sartre, Le Monde, 15 December, (accessed 5 May 2020). Siclier, Jacques and Michel Mitrani (1965), ‘Entretien avec Michel Mitrani qui presente “Huis clos” mardi sûr la première chaîne’, Le Monde, 12 October, (accessed 5 May 2020). Zilliacus, Clas (1976), Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Åbo: Åbo Akademi.

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Chapter 9 Beckett’s Multimedial Authorship: Language of Technology in the Genesis of Play and Film Olga Beloborodova

Introduction One of the reasons why Samuel Beckett belongs to the modernist canon, despite having outlived the classical modernist period by several decades, is his incessant quest for new forms of expression.1 This quest was grounded in Beckett’s fundamental and deep-rooted mistrust of language, the mistrust that germinated in his formative years as a writer and only grew in strength as his writing career matured. Some of the milestones in his struggle with the (written) word included a switch to a different language (from his native English to foreign French), followed by a switch to a different genre (from prose fiction to drama).2 The aspiration was to produce a ‘literature of the non-word’ (‘Literatur des Unworts’, as stated in the ‘German’ letter of 1937; Beckett, 2009, 520, 515), reformulated as a poetics of ignorance, of impoverishment and impotence in the mid-1940s and reflected in the Nouvelles and The Trilogy. Still, neither the switch to French nor Beckett’s work for the stage yielded the envisaged result, at least not to the extent that he would have considered satisfactory, which subsequently led Beckett to turn to other media in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During that time, within a period of just a few years, Beckett produced several stage and radio plays, two mimes, one film, and started writing for television – the medium that, along with theatre, was to remain his aesthetic playground until the end of his career. A direct consequence of Beckett’s multimedial turn is the unprecedented role technology came to play in his dramatic works. Beginning with Krapp’s tape recorder in 1958 and continuing with sound effects and music in the radio plays, Beckett moved further and further away from the purely textual element of speech that so characterised Godot and Endgame. This move manifested itself most

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clearly in the growing emphasis on the visual in the long and painstaking shaping of Play (1964) and ostensibly culminated in the entirely silent Film (1965). It was indeed technology, more specifically the lighting, that ensured the perfectly regulated and continuous juxtaposition of images and sounds in Play by wielding the spot, the mute and ‘quite unintelligent’ actor whose actions nonetheless structure the whole play.3 Perhaps paradoxically, the spot’s muteness and the play’s ever-increasing focus on the visual entailed adding rather than removing text in the later stage of its genesis: in order to make clear his authorial intention, Beckett had to resort to writing explanatory notes for the members of the play’s production teams, for the first time in his playwriting career. In other words, his move away from text ended up generating more text, albeit of a different kind. My suggestion is that the idea for such explanatory notes was at least partly inspired by the way he went about writing the script for Film. Unfamiliar with cinematic technology despite being a film lover, Beckett interspersed his script with a large number of notes, sometimes explaining his authorial decisions and sometimes posing questions to himself and suggesting (technical) solutions. The fact that the genesis of Play and Film largely coincided in time only adds credibility to this argument.4 The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the two works in order to flesh out this tension between the focus on the visual, achieved by technological means at the expense of text, and the need to add more text in the form of explanatory notes as a consequence of deploying those technological means. The first part, devoted to Play, first highlights the technological elements in its genesis and then examines the emergence and status of the explanatory notes. The second part discusses a slightly different role the notes play in the genesis of Film, the entirely speechless work in the genesis of which they first appeared5 and that influenced the evolution of Play in more ways than one. In both cases, the status of the explanatory notes will be considered by invoking their publication and translation history.

The Genesis of Play The influence of Film on Play’s genesis does not limit itself to the emergence of explanatory notes. In fact, the evolution of Play towards a technologydriven and highly visual stage experiment, in which the verbal component is reduced to a secondary, auxiliary role, has a number of cinematic elements to it. One could say that the final rendition of the speeches, with a high degree of fragmentation and an extremely high speed of delivery, serves more as a soundscape to a kaleidoscope of faces onstage than as an intelligible text for the audience to follow. As Anthony Paraskeva notes,

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the speech patterns in Play [. . .] are intercut in a manner which suggests an application of visual editing techniques to verbal material. In the stage version, the Light effectively cuts each of the three monologues into fragments, as well as intercutting those fragments with the choral sections where the three speak in unison. Phrases repeat and modify in a complex montage of voices: it was this montage-like technique which guided Beckett, during the several early drafts, towards the playscript’s final form. (Paraskeva, 2017, 70) Add to this the great speed at which the light beam picks out the urned figures’ faces, and the result is a strikingly cinematic ‘montage’, betraying the increasingly intermedial nature of Beckett’s work at the time. The unique feature of the play is the apparent contrast between the banality of its plot and the radicality of its formal innovation. Beckett’s insistence on maintaining the clichéd, melodramatic storyline of a love triangle is indeed striking: despite the long and tedious composition process that marks the play’s genesis, the plot barely changed from the play’s conception in 1962 till its publication in 1964. In fact, the only substantial change occurred in the very beginning of the genesis (the so-called ‘Before Play’ typescript, written sometime before April 1962), when Beckett changed the original constellation of one woman and two men into the two-women-one-man setup.6 Though labelled ‘Before Play’ by Beckett himself, as his handwritten note on the typescript’s first page indicates, this (aborted) Ur-text already has a number of formal elements that will eventually constitute the end result. The most obvious one is the opening tableau: Whole stage in shadow. Extreme front, centre, touching one another, just visible, three white boxes, one yard high, from which three heads protrude through holes close fitting to the necks. They are those, from left to right, as seen from auditorium, of SYKE, NICKIE and CONK, and face undeviatingly front throughout act. Ten seconds. Strong spot (all spots on faces alone) on SYKE. [. . .] Spot off Syke and on Conk. [. . .] Five seconds. Spot off CONK and on NICKIE. Five seconds. [. . .] Spot off NICKIE and spots on all three. Ten seconds. (BDMP8, 146–7; ET1, 1r)7

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In this very early version, the spot has already been assigned a foundational role in the play’s formal structure, even though the tempo is still rather slow. From the second typescript onwards, the speeches are being increasingly fragmented and transposed, sometimes with drastic changes to the numbers of speeches in neighbouring versions, as in the following example of three partial typescripts containing the second part of the play: Version

Typescript

Number of Speeches

7

ET2b

28

8

ET4b

52

9

ET7b

78

(BDMP8, 182)

Throughout the genesis, the speeches also get shorter in order to enhance the staccato effect of the resulting collage (BDMP8, 183). A good example is W1’s speech added manually to the sixth typescript (representing the sixth version of the play) during Beckett’s revision frenzy in the Austrian Alps in August 1962: W1: Well . . . one cannot have lived as long as I have, here I mean, telling the same old disaster, day after day, in the only way one knows, the old earthy way, and not sometimes wonder if it is not all falling, if it has not all fallen, from the beginning, on empty air. (-) Something is being asked, that seems clear, speech is all one has to give, so one speaks. (-) So one reasons, when one reasons, in the old earthy way. (-) But is something being asked. (-) Perhaps nothing is being asked. (-) Yes, one cannot have lived here as long as I have, giving in vain the only thing to give, and not say sometimes to oneself, Perhaps no one is asking me for anything at all. (-) Yes. (127 words; BDMP8, 173; ET6, 8v)8 Only a few weeks and two versions later, all that remained of W1’s speech was this: W1: Think that all is falling, all has fallen, from the beginning, on empty air. Nothing being asked at all. No one asking me for anything at all. (27 words; BDMP8, 183; ET4b, 11r) The progressive elimination of coherent speech from Play was accompanied by an increasingly pivotal role the light beam began to play in the genesis, and this is reflected in Beckett’s correspondence about the evolution of the play. When he sent one of the early drafts to Barbara Bray, Beckett drew her

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attention to the spot in his accompanying letter: ‘Try and take it at it’s [sic] word and see the jumping light’ (Beckett, 2014, 500). In a letter that followed Bray’s comments on that draft, Beckett arrived at the idea that would further cement the spot as the central agent in the play: ‘I think of spots as three grouped in a single source, so that each can be xxx 3 at once and for all. Perhaps the word “transfer” is misleading’ (TCD MS10948/1/197; qtd in BDMP8, 185). He implemented this plan after attending the Ulm rehearsals in late May–early June 1963, as the following changes to the stage head note indicate:9 Their speech, throughout act, will be provoked throughout by spotlights a spotlight directed projected on faces alone (see note p. ) [sic] . (BDMP8, 194; ET11, 3r) Beckett’s fascination with and attention to the spotlight’s function in the play went far beyond the genesis of the published text and still preoccupied him during the rehearsals for the Paris premiere of Comédie in the spring of 1964, the performance he was very much involved with due to the chronic absences of the director Jean-Marie Serreau. As he wrote to Alan Schneider, part of his preparation for the rehearsals entailed ‘a very illuminating session with some spot experts’ (Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 150). Apart from the ‘jumping light’, the cinematic montage effect was boosted by the changes to the play’s tempo, with pauses being increasingly eliminated: first the five-second pauses between the speeches, introduced in the third typescript, were cancelled manually in the sixth, and then all the pauses in the speeches were deleted in the seventh. The longer pauses between the play’s three parts (Narration, Meditation, and Chorus), initially set at ten seconds, were likewise revised to five seconds in the seventh typescript, and even to three seconds already in the typed layer of the penultimate version of the play (ET15), revised in the aftermath of the play’s Berlin reprise in November 1963. That decision was later partially reversed in the last revised version (ET16), in which a number of three-second pauses was manually emended back to fivesecond ones, probably for reasons of feasibility of executing them onstage. The reduction of the pauses further reinforced the high speech delivery speed, demanded by Beckett from the actors in his stage head note. Together with the increasing fragmentation of the speeches, the acceleration of the tempo produced the desired cinematic montage effect, but at the same time was bound to leave the audience bewildered and confused. The assumption that the audience would struggle to cope with the machine-gun speech tempo may have been one of the reasons why Beckett decided to introduce the da capo element midway through the genesis just before the Ulm premiere, although

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he does not elaborate on this drastic intervention in any of his letters known to us. The first mention of the repeat is an addition ‘Repeat play’ (in Elmar Tophoven’s hand) to the bottom of page 15r of ET9’, a typescript recently discovered in Tophoven’s private archive in Germany. In one of the following versions (ET13), the instruction is refined to ‘Repeat play exactly’ in the typed layer but immediately revised by manually cancelling the word ‘exactly’ (13r). Despite this rather hesitant revision (also noted as such in Pountney, 1988, 265) the formulation ‘Repeat play exactly’ endured in the subsequent versions and all the way to the first edition (Faber and Faber, 1964). Beckett’s insistence on the exact repetition of the text invokes the notion of rewinding, or Krapp’s manipulation of his tape recorder – another play (Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958) that hinges on technology and for which Beckett took the trouble to study the recording mechanism. The cinematic nature of Play manifests itself especially clearly in its film adaptation by Marin Karmitz, the production Beckett was closely involved with (Comédie, 1966). Once again, technology played a crucial role in the success of this transmedial endeavour: in order to avoid ‘filmed theatre’ (Karmitz qtd in Bourgeois, 2001, 73) and to maximise the affordances of the cinematic medium, the role of the spotlight was taken over by camera close-ups, and the speed of speech delivery was manipulated by means of a phonogene – a sampling machine later used widely in electronic music. As Karmitz recalls, they used the phonogene ‘to speed up the rhythm without losing the tones of the voices. [. . .] Only the artificial process of cinema could render it’ (qtd in Bourgeois, 2001, 73–4). It could be argued that the cinematic nature of Play fully comes to the fore in Karmitz’s adaptation, as the film medium provides better technical solutions for Beckett’s aesthetic objectives for Play as a stage play – the ‘undoing’ of the textual and the foregrounding of the visual by means of the cinematic montage technique. Be that as it may, Play remains a stage play, which means that, however cinematic, the montage technique that underlies its structure had to be realised onstage time and again for each performance in the theatre. The increasing reliance on technological rather than textual means that such a realisation entails presented Beckett with an unexpected problem. Notorious for his aversion to explaining the reasons behind his aesthetic choices, Beckett found himself in a situation that necessitated such explanations more than ever before. As Gontarski observes, ‘Play triggered an increase in Beckett’s direct involvement in the theatre, since it demanded a level of technical sophistication and precision unknown in his earlier work’ (1999, 443). The problem was naturally that Beckett’s ‘direct involvement’ was not always feasible – for instance, he left the American production entirely in the hands of Alan Schneider. In this connection, the play’s

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German premiere in Ulm (14 June 1963) served as a trigger for Beckett to change his ways. Because he attended the Ulm rehearsals (with Alan Schneider) at the end of May 1963, Beckett had a perfect opportunity to clarify his artistic ideas, but characteristically failed to use it. As the play’s director Deryk Mendel recalls, Beckett and I never exchanged one word about Play – what it intends to ‘say’ and what it means. And when he was here, he didn’t explain or elucidate anything about the piece. Big explanations are simply not his thing. The work had detached itself from him, he said all he wanted in it, and clearly enough, I believe. (Mendel, 1963, 9; my translation) However, in this particular case the work that ‘had detached itself from him’ was on the one hand cryptic and abstracted both in terms of speeches and stage directions, and on the other hand highly technological in nature, and it is precisely the combination of these two factors that compelled Beckett to reconsider his position after Play’s German premiere. He was clearly dissatisfied with the performance, which he did not see but of which Siegfried Unseld from Suhrkamp Verlag duly informed him. In particular, there were issues with excessive characterisation, the lighting and the shape of the urns (for details, see BDMP8, 192–3). Beckett rectified the characterisation problem by making his stage directions to that effect more explicit (BDMP8, 193), but felt that he needed to do more than that for the lighting and the urns and produced two after-text notes to clarify what he had in mind. The ‘Note on light’ first appeared in the typescript that followed the Ulm premiere (ET13), accompanied by ‘Rhythm of chorus’, another note in which the chorus was written out in tabular form. The wording of the note on the light catches the eye: in particular, Beckett insists that ‘The source of light is single and must not be situated outside the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims’ and that ‘a single mobile spot should be used, swivelling at maximum speed from one face to another as required’, because ‘The method consisting in assigning to each face a separate fixed spot is unsatisfactory in that it is less expressive than the single mobile pivoting spot of a unique inquisitor’ (BDMP8, 197; ET13, 13r; emphasis added). The metaphorical use of words like ‘victims’ for the characters and ‘inquisitor’ for the spot elevates the otherwise technical note from the somewhat inferior status that would typically be bestowed on it. That said, the note on the urns that was added to ET15 contains purely technical information on their position and shape, in order to preclude the Ulm scenario. The next and last note Beckett wrote for Play is an epigenetic addition made after the London premiere in April 1964.10 Compared to its predecessors,

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the ‘Note on Repeat’ has much more far-reaching implications for the play, as it revises the idea of an identical da capo (i.e. ‘Repeat play exactly’ of the first edition) and gives the freedom to individual directors to change the order of speeches in the repeat. The original concept of the play being ‘rewound’ as it were and replayed from start to finish did not go down well with a number of theatre managers and was even dropped altogether for the American premiere in January 1964. The revision of the identical da capo in the note happens on the levels of technology and content, and for both levels the lighting plays a crucial part. For the former, Beckett suggests a ‘schema’ in which ‘the light [is] less strong [. . .] and voices correspondingly lower’ in the repeat (BDMP8, ET14, 15r). For the latter, the note suggests a variation in the order of speeches ‘so far as it is compatible with unchanged continuity for actors’ (15r). The variation had invested the spotlight (and the technician operating it) with an even greater responsibility, as Beckett himself recognised in his letter to Bray: ‘Decided to improve things further by changing order of répliques in repeat. Won’t matter to [the actors] as they are not cueing one another, but will to poor Spot’ (Beckett, 2014, 596). In theory, this seemingly trivial epigenetic intervention means that Play could be reconceived and restructured every time it is performed, even though the range of permutations is obviously not infinite. The importance of after-text notes in the genesis and performances of Play raises the question of their status as an inherent part of the playtext, the question to which the play’s publication and translation history may help provide the answer. If anything, Play’s publication history demonstrates that Beckett’s own attitude to the status of after-text notes was far from equivocal. Three editions of the play’s English text came out in 1964: the first Faber and Faber edition, the Suhrkamp trilingual edition (Dramatische Dichtungen II) and the first American publication in Grove Press’s Evergreen Review. Despite their close temporal proximity, each edition is different in terms of explanatory notes. The Faber edition (released in March) contains the notes on the light and the urns, but not the note on the repeat, simply because it was not yet written at the time of publication. However, for the next edition – the Suhrkamp trilingual one appearing in November – Beckett decided against the inclusion of the notes, as the following letter to Barbara Bray of 27 April 1964 attests: ‘Finished revisions for Suhrkamp. All notes to be removed from edited Play text and relegated to an aide-mémoire à l’usage des théâtres’ (BDMP8, 110; MS TCD 10948/1/272). Remarkably, just a month after the release of the ‘stripped’ Suhrkamp text, Grove Press published the play in extenso in Evergreen Review, adding the note on the repeat to the other two extant notes. In

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preparation for the American publication, Beckett sent the Grove Press editor Fred Jordan his corrections to the Faber text, in which he left the notes untouched. He also attached the note on the repeat, leaving the choice to the editor whether to include it or not: ‘Dear Fred Jordan, herewith corrections to Faber text of PLAY. Also a note on Repeat which you may use or not as you wish’ (BDMP8, 98; SU, Grove Press Records, Box 857). Jordan decided to include the note in his edition, and all subsequent editions, whether British or American, have followed his example. The inconsistency that marks Beckett’s attitude to the place of the notes in the play’s editions manifests itself in Beckett’s translation of the notes into French. While he did take the trouble to translate the note on the light and to type up the block chorus in the second French typescript, he never bothered to complete the translation of the note on the urns, of which only an aborted handwritten attempt survives, scribbled in the bottom margin of the last page of the fifteenth English typescript. The third and fourth French typescripts both omit all after-text notes, and the only French edition that does include them is the bilingual Aubier Flammarion edition, in which they are translated by its editor Jean-Jacques Mayoux (see BDMP8, 107–8). Beckett did translate the ‘Note on Repeat’ (as ‘Reprise’), and it was included in the 1966 Minuit edition – unlike the note on light, which he had nonetheless also translated. The haphazard editorial and translation history of Play’s explanatory notes indicates Beckett’s hesitation about their textual status. The untranslated note on the urns seemed somehow less important, while the notes on the light and on the repeat were deemed worthy of translation, if not publication. The fact that two of the three editions of Play that came out in 1964 did include all the explanatory notes shows that Beckett was inclined to consider the notes to be an inherent part of the published text, despite his initial qualms about doing so.

The Genesis of Film As the parallel genesis of the two works reveals, the pressing need to explain Beckett’s authorial intention in the form of explanatory notes first manifested itself in Film. Though he did love cinema and took a keen interest in both early and contemporary films, making his own film was quite a different story, as Beckett was confronted with a highly technological medium entirely unfamiliar to him as a practitioner. What further complicated this cinematic debut is Beckett’s decision to eliminate speech from the film – the one thing he was able to produce on his own. With the textual element obliterated, Beckett – much more so than in Play – was left at the mercy of cinematic technology in order to achieve his aesthetic objectives.

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A sign of things to come is the first draft of the script, called by Beckett ‘PERCIPI Notes’ (BDMP8, 275; EN, 2r). In the second draft, the notes follow the script text and then spill over to the verso pages. The fourteen notes – a large number considering the brevity of the actual script – range from diagrams to detailed descriptions of E’s and O’s perspectives and the equally detailed sketch of the cat/dog sequence. Besides their sheer number, the nature of the notes themselves is remarkable, as they often transcend the mostly technical information for the production teams that Play’s notes were originally conceived to provide. Precisely because he deprived the O/E ‘pseudocouple’ from any textual means of expression in the script from the outset, Beckett must have felt that the explanatory notes had to contain at least some clues as to what is going on. In other words, the compensatory strategy deployed in Play is even more valid for Film, due to the latter’s greater level of abstraction, not to say obscurity. A good illustration of this compensatory strategy is note number 9, which deals with the room O ends up in. Already early on in the first draft, so before the notes were added, Beckett jots down the following question regarding the ownership of the room: ‘His room or one he does not know?’ (BDMP8, 307; EN, 2r). The question is immediately resolved, without any obvious signs of hesitation, as the text continues in the same writing tool: ‘His mother’s room’ (2r). On the diagram of the room that Beckett drew on one of the verso pages shortly afterwards (4v), an arrow is pointing to the following addition: ‘Recent large scowling photo of himself inscribed “To my mother, without rancour, Xmas 1929”’. The addition is subsequently deleted, and the photograph is later replaced in the same draft by ‘print on the wall before him of the face of God the Father, the eyes staring at him severely’ (7r). At the same time, a curious thing happens: instead of forgetting all about the mother (having thus eradicated her from the script), Beckett still maintains the reference to the room as O’s mother’s throughout the genesis of the script. In the notes that follow the script in the second version, note 9 contains the room sketch and the inscription ‘Suggestion for room’ (BDMP8, 255; EN, 21r), from which an arrow points to the following note on the facing verso page: ‘Obviously this can’t be O’s room. It may be supposed it is his mother’s room, which he has not visited for many years and is to occupy momentarily, to look after the pets, until she comes out of hospital’ (20v). In the next draft, the first English typescript, this note is augmented by a qualifying statement that ‘This has no bearing on the film and need not be elucidated’ (BDMP8, 314; ET1, 9r). Despite this qualification, Beckett somehow still felt the need to ‘elucidate’ this point during the pre-production meeting

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he had with the team at Barney Rosset’s house days before the shoot. After Schneider suggested that anyone who read the script would be inclined to believe that the room belonged to O, Beckett said: ‘One might suppose that his mother has gone to hospital. It can’t be his room, because he wouldn’t have a room of this kind. I mean, there wouldn’t, he wouldn’t have a room full of eyes with a window’ (qtd in Ardoin, 2014, 192; partially qtd in Gontarski, 1985, 190). As Paul Ardoin notes, ‘conflicting messages exist here’ (192). On the one hand, Beckett eliminates the only obvious evidence of the room belonging to the mother by removing O’s picture with the inscription from the wall; on the other hand, he feels the necessity to add the explanation in the notes that the room ‘may be supposed’ to be his mother’s. Furthermore, he undercuts that explanation immediately by adding that this information is of no relevance to the film. Nonetheless, the need to ‘explain’ the room persists all the way up to the shooting, and the note is also included – along with all the others – in the published script. It is unclear what Beckett’s reasons were for maintaining the realistic detail regarding the ownership of the room, particularly if we recall that his objective was to create ‘absolute interior. Abstract almost’, as he said in the pre-production meeting (qtd in Gontarski, 1985, 190). It seems that despite the aspiration for abstraction, he still wanted to be able to see the story behind it and to be able to somehow justify O’s actions: if this cannot be O’s room, then there must be a reason for O to be in that room, even if that reason is not explicit in the film. When Beckett came to New York to oversee the shooting of Film in July 1964, he brought with him a second set of notes, called ‘Further notes to Beckett’s Film’. Unlike the original notes, which developed organically together with the script itself, the new set contained mostly lists of sequences for ‘perceptual patterns’ by O in the room and in the street, in order to achieve an analogy, as Beckett himself put it, between O’s inspection of the room and his inspection of the street (qtd in Gontarski, 1985, 191). Comprising four typed pages, the notes are divided into ‘Similarities’ and ‘Differences’, and the similarities are meticulously numbered in such a way that a perfect equilibrium is achieved between the exterior and the interior of the film (BDMP8, 318). It is interesting that Beckett felt the need to elucidate his quest for symmetry (or ‘formal integrity’, as he referred to it, qtd in Gontarski, 1985, 191) so late into the film’s genesis and after the work on the actual script was already over. The different status of the second set of notes as compared to the first (original) set is reflected in Film’s publication and translation history, which is far more straightforward than that of Play. While the second set was never translated at all, only one of the original notes was omitted from the translation,

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made as late as 1971 at Jérôme Lindon’s request and with the benefit of hindsight. Similarly, while the original fourteen notes were made an integral part of the English published text from the first edition onwards, the second set has never made it to print. Unlike in the case of Play, Beckett never explicitly discussed this decision, but one may assume that the second set of notes was too technical and became superfluous once the end product was frozen on film. On top of that, these additional notes had no interpretative value whatsoever for the general reader. Compared to Film, whose fixed form did not necessitate adding extra notes to clarify its formal properties, the fleeting nature of Play’s performance called for a different editorial strategy. The inclusion of all aftertext notes in the published text does full justice to Beckett’s own conclusion that he could not finalise Play’s text – or any drama text – without first seeing it performed in the theatre, the conclusion that had a major effect on his subsequent creative career as a playwright.11

Conclusion Beckett’s increasing reliance on technological rather than textual means to convey his message in Play and Film has called for a different composition strategy as compared to his earlier works for stage. In Play, the ‘cinematic’ montage technology progressively and deliberately subverts the speeches’ coherence and assigns a key role to the spotlight that acts as a ‘unique inquisitor’. In Film, completely bereft of speech from the outset, the camera is the only guide for the audience to make sense of what they see on the screen. As a result, this new language of technology has led to a change in Beckett’s poetics as far as his dramatic oeuvre is concerned: the reduction of text in favour of image has necessitated more text to explain (the making of) that image. Seen this way, Beckett’s technological turn casts a different light on the entrenched notions of ‘undoing’ (Gontarski, 1985) and ‘vaguening’ (Pountney, 1988), the two tendencies that apparently pervade the genesis of Beckett’s drama texts. Although they still largely apply to the speeches and characterisation in the genesis of Play, and can be discerned in Beckett’s struggle for greater abstraction in Film, these notions are somewhat qualified by the emergence of a relatively large number of explanatory notes in both works. Moreover, this minor but not insignificant innovation in Beckett’s poetics has endured beyond the two texts discussed in this chapter: a number of Beckett’s dramatic works after Play and Film contain explanatory notes, though in most cases they convey purely technical information.12 Despite their limited hermeneutic potential, these notes are typically published as an inherent part of the work they pertain to (and not, for

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instance, as footnotes), which elevates them beyond paratextual status and makes them part and parcel of Beckett’s late drama texts.

Notes 1. Parts of this essay have appeared in the book The Making of Play/Comédie and Film (Olga Beloborodova, Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, Vol. 8, 2019), henceforth abbreviated as BDMP8. 2. He did of course have a go at the genre earlier with ‘Mittelalterliches Dreieck’ (see Van Hulle and Verhulst, 2018, 330–8) and Human Wishes, a play about Samuel Johnson he started writing in 1940 but later abandoned. 3. ‘Quite unintelligent’ is the characteristic that M gives the light beam in the first version of his closing speech (‘Mere eye. No mind. [. . .] Am I as much as . . . being seen’), added manually by Beckett to the sixth and most heavily revised English typescript (for details, see BDMP8, 170–7). 4. While the genesis of Play stretched over roughly two years (from April 1962 till April 1964), Film was written largely in April and May 1963, during a lull in Play’s composition process. 5. Although Rosemary Pountney notes that Play was Beckett’s first work for the stage in which explanatory notes appeared (1988, 170), she is talking about the play’s published text (1964), which indeed preceded that of Film (1967). From the genetic perspective, the notes first emerged in the composition process of the film’s script (April-May 1963). 6. For more on this change, see McDonald (2007). 7. The notation ‘ET1’ refers to the first English typescript of Play/Comédie, and so on, available on the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP8, www.beckettarchive.org, edited by Vincent Neyt and Olga Beloborodova). Similarly, the notations EN (English Notebook), FM (French Manuscript), and FT (French Typescript), accompanied by their number in the genetic dossier and used throughout this chapter for Play/Comédie and Film, are the ones used in the print and online versions of BDMP8. 8. The sentences in bold are the only ones that survived the extensive cutting of W1’s speech and were retained (with some minor alterations) in the later versions. 9. Beckett also discusses the idea in a letter to Siegfried Unseld, written after the Ulm premiere: ‘Desirable too, instead of three fixed spots, one single mobile spot. I hoped that they would manage this in Ulm, but in the end they didn’t. See later the instructions about this which will appear in the English and French editions’ (Beckett, 2014, 560). Here Beckett is already hinting at the after-text ‘Note on Light’, which will be discussed below.

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10. Beckett was writing the note in March 1964, while he was heavily involved in the Paris rehearsals, as his letters to George Devine (9 March) and Barbara Bray (17 March) testify (see Beckett, 2014, 594–6). 11. Beckett expressed this sentiment on more than one occasion. For instance, in a letter to Unseld of 19 March 1964, written at the time of Play’s rehearsals in London and Paris, Beckett imparted the following: ‘I shall never give another theatre text, if there ever is another, to be published until I have worked on it in the theatre’ (Beckett, 2014, 597–8). 12. Come and Go (1965); Breath (1969); Not I (1972); That Time (1974–75); Rockaby (1981); What Where (1983–84).

Works Cited Ardoin, Paul (2014), Product and Process: Making and Unmaking Films with Beckett and Burroughs, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Antwerp. Beckett, Samuel (1964a), Play and Two Short Pieces for Radio, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (1964b), ‘Play’, Evergreen Review, 34, pp. 43–7; 92. Beckett, Samuel (1966), Comédie et Actes Divers, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Beckett, Samuel (1967), Eh Joe and Other Writings, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (1969), Film by Samuel Beckett: Complete Scenario, Illustrations, Production Shoots, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (2009), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel and Alan Schneider (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beloborodova, Olga (2019), The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play/Comédie and Film, Brussels and London: University Press Antwerp and Bloomsbury. Beloborodova, Olga and Pim Verhulst (2019), ‘Human Machines Petrified: Play’s Mineral Mechanics and Les statues meurent aussi’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 28:2, pp. 179–96. Blackman, Maurice (1985), ‘The Shaping of a Beckett Text: Play’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 10, pp. 87–107. Bourgeois, Caroline, ed. (2001), Comédie/Marin Karmitz/Samuel Beckett, Paris: Éditions du Regard.

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Gontarski, S. E. (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gontarski, S. E. (1999), ‘Beckett’s Play, in extenso’, Modern Drama, 42:3, pp. 442–55. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. McDonald, Rónán (2007), ‘“What a male!” Triangularity, Desire and Precedence in “Before Play” and “Play”’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 18, pp. 213–25. Mendel, Deryk (1963), Interview on Spiel, Theater Heute, 4:7, pp. 9–10. Paraskeva, Anthony (2017), Samuel Beckett and Cinema, London: Bloomsbury. Pountney, Rosemary (1998), Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956–1976, Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe. Van Hulle, Dirk (2015), The Making of Krapp’s Last Tape/La Dernière Bande, Brussels and London: University Press of Antwerp and Bloomsbury. Van Hulle, Dirk and Pim Verhulst (2018), The Making of En attendant Godot/ Waiting for Godot, Brussels and London: University Press of Antwerp and Bloomsbury.

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Chapter 10 Beckett and Television: Anachronism as Innovation Jonathan Bignell

Samuel Beckett’s dramas written for television, beginning with Eh Joe in 1966 until Nacht und Träume in 1983, work as meta-analyses of television’s uneasy role as an ‘old’ and also a ‘new’ medium, and their reflexive and experimental qualities need to be understood in a broader television context. The history of television can be written by describing processes of co-option of aesthetic features and processes deriving from ‘old’ media, like theatre and figurative painting, and these are visible in Beckett’s staging of dramatic action and television image composition, for example. But television also developed by differentiation from antecedent or competing media, repudiating features associated with its competitors, and making itself new by diversifying into a wide range of genres, modes and forms (Bignell, 2019). A distinguishing feature of Beckett’s television plays, and also of Film (1964) and the filmed adaptation of Play, Comédie (1966), which he was working on at the same time as first writing for television, is their inclusion of a combination of forms deriving from different genres and modes of television, theatre, radio, painting and film. These aspects are visible in the ways in which Beckett’s television dramas manipulate or refuse conventions of characterisation, narrative, visual pleasure or entertainment, for example. This chapter proposes a series of ways in which Beckett’s television dramas cite past forms anachronistically, and, paradoxically, innovate the television medium by re-using them. For example, their temporality of apparent liveness links Beckett’s dramas to technologies for relaying live theatre, but none of them was shot live. Beckett’s interest in the professional practices of film-making and television production can be seen in the ways in which his television work foregrounds the conventions of framing and point of view, but his television work also disrespects some of the conventions of screen storytelling, such as the mutually reinforcing relationship of sound

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and image, thus troubling the experience of spectatorship. By analysing the aesthetic implementation of television and related technologies in Beckett’s screen dramas, the chapter will argue that the dramas innovate by processes of repudiation and displacement, incorporating what they might seem to reject. Key scholarship on Beckett’s television dramas has mainly been interested in how his work can be addressed by theoretical traditions that are concerned with the plays’ conceptualisation of television’s visual space, sound, voice and the performer’s body. But such an enterprise is undercut by the slipperiness of its object of analysis, because television is not a single technology, and is instead a gathering together of different technologies for image capture, storage, transmission and reception, sound recording and reproduction. These technologies sit within a whole range of institutional and aesthetic structures, including physical facilities for production, and realising the plays requires the contributions made by the individual expertise of personnel operating the different specialist technological apparatuses. Each of these technologies, places and people comes with aims and expectations, ideologies and hierarchies that mesh unevenly together and change over time. There is now a range of research that has framed Beckett’s screen work in the contexts of artistic histories and movements, including my own historical and contextual study (Bignell, 2009), and by drawing on some of this work from a new angle this chapter will assess how the plays can be both innovative and anachronistic, and both radical and deeply dependent on the artistic and theoretical currents of previous times and parallel histories. When traces of previous forms remain in Beckett’s television plays and film productions, the dramas bear witness to how innovation implies the past from which it breaks away. The interior, restricted space of the TV studio, for example, resembles a theatre stage, but in Beckett’s work, mobile cameras enter the playing area and close-ups, cuts and changes in camera position emphasise that this is television rather than theatre. In that regard, the dramas can be situated within a twentieth-century media space where television was associated with some specific technologies, aesthetic forms and expectations about its social function. There is a question about whether television feels as if it is where the dramas belong, sitting squarely on the ‘horizontal’ axis of comparative media identities in a conceptual space that is bordered by, and different from, radio or cinema, for example. This is why some writing about Beckett’s television work has focused on questions of medium specificity and aesthetic purity. However, although it is indeed medium-specific and reflexive in important ways, this is an aspect of television drama’s ongoing struggle to assimilate to or differentiate itself from other media and to develop new rhetorical strategies and new production techniques proper to itself. Innovation

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within a medium is comparative and relational. As Laura Mulvey has noted, the term ‘experimental’ is imprecise and is ‘necessarily an evocative rather than a definitive term in the context of television aesthetics, but it enables the designation of ways in which practitioners have pushed at the medium’s conventions and boundaries, expanding its vocabulary and investigating its specificity’ (2007, 1). The discussion of the aesthetic significance of interior studio production and the plays’ uses of video and film recording technology can be evaluated through this paradox of simultaneous anachronism and innovation.

Innovation and Teleology Television was always already a supplement to media that preceded it, especially radio broadcasting and the cinema, and each of Beckett’s media dramas foregrounds aspects of the prehistory of the medium in which they were made. The persistent motif of repetition in Beckett’s television plays has the effect of questioning temporal progression and ideas of teleological refinement, because technologies are defined in part by their institutional status as commodity products that are frequently updated, extended, or in some other way ‘improved’. Beckett’s screen plays produced in his lifetime were made in the analogue era, characterised by the scarcity of opportunities to see them broadcast and the recordings’ relative vulnerability to decay. It is still very difficult to see the TV plays unless one has access to a broadcasting company’s private archive or to an academic collection of Beckett’s audio-visual work. The original copies of the plays, though made on the relatively durable medium of celluloid film, have mainly been collected and archived in the medium of videotape, which is prone to loss of the electro-magnetic integrity of the recording surface, degradation due to repeat copying from one generation of tapes to another, and physical damage to the tape transport mechanism. So, although the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argues that television puts an end to the here and now, in the sense that electronic media are able to reconstitute, reproduce and repeat the encounter with an object of perception (1991, 49–50), the materiality of Beckett’s television work is actually closely bound to analogue materiality. Indeed, there is a resonance between the plays’ themes of memory, repetition and reconstitution of past experience and the sensory reality of the often fuzzy, indistinct images of the surviving videotape record of the original broadcasts, and the degraded, hissy sound of the plays that is made all the more perceptible by the long passages of silence they contain. Viewing these products of the analogue era can feel like travelling back into the past.

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Although histories of technology seem linear in hindsight (radio leads to television which leads to online video, for example), this is an illusory coherence. The discipline of media archaeology has established itself through the excavation of both the histories of surviving technologies like radio, television and cinema but also through the rediscovery of technologies that were either never fully actualised or that had a short life. The ability to experience performance remotely through the mediation of a technology was an impulse that led to numerous devices, and technologies could have turned out very differently. For example, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Electrophone was a service for hearing live theatre and music performances on telephone receivers by subscribing to a cable network, through which a relay of an actual public performance was made available in the homes of relatively wealthy Londoners (Parsons, 1982, 794–6). Multiple earpieces meant that family members and guests could take part in social listening as a salon entertainment, prefiguring how radio would mediate voice and performance and set the pattern for mass broadcasting to collective audiences listening together at home. The concept of broadcasting that underlay television provision had evolved from the technologies of the telegraph (instantaneous transmission), the telephone (voice reproduction), and communication from ships at sea (over the airwaves rather than cables). Literally, ‘to broadcast’ meant the farmer’s technique for sowing grain by throwing it over the ground, with seeds falling randomly across a wide area, and the idea of broadcast media was that they would disseminate many different kinds of content across a wide geographical territory. In radio, and then television, the technology granted access to sights and sounds that viewers dispersed around the country would otherwise be unable to experience, and reshaped the idea of public, national culture (Scannell, 1996; Douglas, 1987 and 2004; Hilmes, 1997). As an extension of radio broadcasting, television could do similar things by being a ‘window onto the world’, offering new kinds of mediated participation in public affairs or kinds of entertainment formerly available to limited audiences in specific venues. Television inherited broadcast radio’s offer of immediacy, of being present, virtually, at events and performances happening elsewhere, and alongside this it offered an expectation of simultaneity as an experience unfolded in real time. A spiritual, religious or supernatural vocabulary was used to describe the new broadcast technologies (Peters, 1999), and Beckett’s broadcast television plays’ repeated invocation of ghosts, the return of beloved but absent others, and the fading of figures into and out of the darkness seems calculated to signal an awareness of this fascination with time and the experience of mediated presence and absence (Bignell, 2010).

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In Film, a lengthy sequence in the protagonist O’s room features the photographic medium from which film technology developed. Throughout the preceding chase of O by the pursuing camera E, O has been hiding an envelope of photographs under his coat and he then examines them closely. The photographs are of O’s different life stages (childhood, college education and military service, for example) and recall the medium’s role as a mechanism for remembering lived identity, guaranteeing subjectivity across time and seeming to authenticate the being of the individual subject. Beckett, like Walter Benjamin, wrote in Proust about the act of narrative as a fragmenting process that is similar to the decomposition of the object by photography (Weiss, 2012). While the medium had become, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, a technology of stabilisation of identity, Beckett and others were interested in renewing its potential to decentre conventional ways of seeing. Television drama’s conventions of framing and editing derive largely from cinema, notably in the close-up, which works especially well because the usual size of the television screen means faces can easily become life-size, encouraging a mirroring relationship of alignment between viewers and characters. Closeups on faces had been developed in film by directors such as D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Dreyer and Alfred Hitchcock (Paraskeva, 2017, 74), and the television adoption of this shot type, very noticeably in Eh Joe, for example, harks back to that past. Sound counterpointed image rather than supporting it, following Sergei Eisenstein’s and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s theories of montage (Antoine-Dunne, 2001). Both Beckett and the avant-garde director Luis Buñuel contributed to a special number of the periodical This Quarter of September 1932 in which the filmscript of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou was published, along with Beckett’s translations of works by surrealists René Crevel, Paul Eluard and André Breton. In the same modernist line, Weiss (2012) traces numerous biographical and thematic links between Beckett, James Joyce and Eisenstein in the inter-war period. These figures were from an earlier time, but their radicalism and their modernist experimental work associate them with innovation. Innovation in cinematic language and film narrative conventions was also very contemporary, seen in French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague with which Beckett was familiar. By building dramatic situations around the question of seeing and its relation to knowing another person, space or experience, Beckett’s screen work positions itself as a meta-commentary on spectatorship and point of view. These questions of point of view are the primary problem that Beckett explores in Film, casting the ageing Buster Keaton as O, the object pursued across New York backstreets by the camera. Keaton was sufficiently recognisable to the film’s first audiences in 1965 to trigger expectations about the (almost entirely) silent Film based on his historic role in silent comedies, yet Film’s different

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performance style, use of point of view and mise-en-scène separated the 1960s Keaton from the former Keaton who was being canonised at the time (Bishop, 1958; Lebel, 1967). The critic Andrew Sarris complained: ‘Keaton’s metaphorical eye patch and fuzzy vision, his ostentatious awkwardness is a travesty of the alertness and agility that characterized Keaton in his classic period’ (1969, 43). Keaton was a trace of his own former self, a kind of revenant or ghost. Film is anachronistic but not an imitation of films made before synchronous sound was introduced in 1926, since films were not silent. There was the noise of the projector, sometimes a spoken commentary, and often phonograph music, sound effects, a pit orchestra or piano accompaniment. Film alludes to a cinematic past by looking something like a Keaton comedy short, but as Sarris and its first audiences discovered, it is disconcertingly different from a 1920s silent comedy. As its director Alan Schneider recounts, viewers felt ‘bored, annoyed, baffled, and cheated’ because the film did not derive from, or recreate, the cinematic history they thought they knew (1969, 93). To destabilise the spectator’s position in this way parallels the questioning of point of view in the film’s structural conventions. Theories of cinema spectatorship have argued that looking implies dominance and a claim to be able to access an Other subjectivity and spatial reality (see for example Baudry, 1980, 34). In contrast, Beckett’s work undercuts that assumption of mastery, and shows looking to be an agency that puts self and Other into question. Beckett develops this idea throughout his television plays, for example when M1 repeatedly replays his past experiences of imagining the presence of his absent lover, W, in . . . but the clouds . . ., trying and failing to visualise and thus to master them.

Studios and Experimentation Television drama simulated the experience of liveness, as experienced in theatre, by its broadcast of plays performed for the camera in real time from the start of television in 1936 until well into the 1960s. In contrast, any fictional drama that had been pre-recorded was referred to as ‘a film’ in television’s early years, belonging to another medium. Drama was live because it was expected that television’s role was to make public the kinds of dramatic repertoire available to a metropolitan middle-class audience, by adapting the experience of live theatre into a specifically television form (Barr, 1997). Television drama was ‘Armchair Theatre’, as the title of the British ITV channel’s popular Sunday night series of one-off plays (1956–74) indicated. BBC and ITV showed a repertoire of plays premiered in London’s West End, Shakespeare, comedies and contemporary dramas of suburban family life. Technological facilities, personnel and a supply of dramatic writing were established to fulfil

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this staple ingredient in the mixed schedule of programmes aimed at all kinds of viewers and addressed to the whole nation. Among the theatrical forms on which television could draw was the still relatively new ‘empty space’ (Brook, 1968) aesthetic of the workshop theatre, a black box in which space and place are established by lighting and scenic composition rather than by stage sets or detailed props and costumes. When Beckett started writing plays this strippeddown form was still unusual, and its transfer from theatre into television was an aspect of innovative strands of screen dramas featuring work by the playwrights Eugene Ionesco or Jean-Paul Sartre, for example. The directors of Beckett’s television plays, such as Anthony Page and Donald McWhinnie, came from the theatre and had moved into television work (often via radio) because of their skill at realising adaptations of new theatre work for the BBC. They were practiced at working with established professional actors from the theatre (like Siân Phillips or Ronald Pickup) and with playwrights like Beckett, with whose work they were familiar and with whom they had some personal connection. While theatre might seem anachronistic for the young television medium, television found innovative ways of adapting theatre for the screen and bringing theatre personnel into television production culture. Beckett’s studio-based television plays stood out against the background of the naturalistic dramas that surrounded them in the television schedules. As the critic W. Stephen Gilbert summarised, BBC studio drama was ‘entrenched in the tradition of naturalism and all the political implications of how naturalism works as a broadcast code’ (1980, 43). But rather than working at the main studios in Television Centre in central London, Beckett’s television plays of the 1970s were made at the BBC’s Ealing studio in the city’s western suburbs, which was equipped with soundstages where film cameras could be used in large enclosed sets. The Ealing studio made plays using vision and sound technologies deriving from cinema, with a theatrical aesthetic that enabled choices about scenic design which were opened up by the almost infinite possibilities of the studio space. The studio is a special kind of interior space whose lighting, arrangement of props, figures and objects do not need to realistically represent the space beyond them. The TV studio is designed to be completely controllable, unlike a location, and thus is a space that is open to experimentation. It lacks a live audience, which further emphasises the plays’ technological production and their distance from the bodily and material qualities of performance and reception. But, in contrast to this, the apparatus with which the plays are made is wholly oriented towards constructing a performance rather than, for example, introducing the viewer to the specificity of a real location or landscape. The studio is a technological ensemble, requiring skilled technicians to operate its apparatus, that generates new kinds of performance different from either theatre or cinema.

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The studio was the production site for the film version of Comédie (Play), made for showing in the French pavilion at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Beckett collaborated with the young film-maker Marin Karmitz, using the spatial and technological resources of the studio in innovative ways. As in cinema filmmaking, sound recording could be separated from shooting visual images during the production process, and voice, music and sound effects were integrated afterwards in post-production. As Paraskeva explains in detail, Beckett and Karmitz did not want to make a film of the 1964 Paris stage production from which the actors, props and make-up derived, and they looked for techniques to make the drama work with its new medium (2017, 69). The three figures’ voices were electronically sped up or slowed down by a machine, the ‘phonogène’, which precisely removed soundless moments between words and thus compressed the actors’ speeches into a shorter duration. To finish the film and match the manipulated sound to the images, Beckett sat alongside its editor, Jean Ravel, who a few years before had edited Chris Marker’s experimental film La Jetée (1962) in which spoken soundtrack runs over still images. Comédie had a modernist, and specifically cubist, editing technique of disjuncture between images, a kind of visual collage of different shots that is experienced as an innovative ‘application of visual editing techniques to verbal material’ (Paraskeva, 2017, 76). Instead of the light on stage that compels each figure to speak from his or her urn, the film Comédie puts the agency of its editing in that position, since the edits control the resulting montage of shots. The sequences jump from extreme close-ups with brightly lit speakers to medium shots when the figures are silent and dimly lit, to extreme long shots where the figures can hardly be seen. In production, the single camera was pushed on its dolly towards the actors for the close-ups, then further back for the medium and long shots, and subsequent editing splices these different shot types together abruptly. By editing manually on a Moviola editing table and overlaying two strips of film in order to superimpose elements of one onto the other, camera shots at one distance from the actors could be combined with shots from a closer or further distance. Large, close-up faces could be combined in the same shot as smaller, distant faces, or as Karmitz put it in non-technical language, ‘I could only manage through some technical trick, which was re-encrusting all the three characters in the same image’ (qtd in Paraskeva, 2017, 155). This technology was not innovative in the context of film production, but it is innovative when used in what could otherwise be a studio recording of a live theatre performance. The context, aim and aesthetic conventions of Beckett’s use of technology are what determines the technology’s relationships with experimentation or anachronism. The introduction of lightweight 16mm film cameras (as opposed to the bulky 35mm cameras used to film Beckett’s television work after Eh Joe) into

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television drama, deriving from documentary and news, reinforced the sense that exterior shooting on film, ‘documenting’ a realistic social environment, was the cutting edge of television fiction. Filmed television drama such as Up the Junction (1965), about a group of young working-class women living in inner London, and Cathy Come Home (1966), about a young mother’s descent into homelessness, made by the director/producer team of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett, had formal and thematic similarities with realist New Wave cinema in Britain and the neo-realist cinema movement in continental Europe. These television dramas about real and urgent social problems, often cast with non-professional actors and shot in real locations, also shared creative personnel with British theatre (the young writer of Up the Junction, Nell Dunn, was a playwright), and television and film documentary (the writer of Cathy Come Home was a journalist, Jeremy Sandford). The authorship of Beckett and the production technologies used to make Beckett’s work partially determined its cultural significance by separating it from this emergent realist nexus and associating it with an avant-garde tradition in television and a history of ‘literary’ or ‘theatrical’ television and radio drama. The use of black and white film for the plays added to the anachronism of Beckett’s television dramas and complicated their reception by viewers, because of BBC television producers’ largely correct assumption that audiences would demand colour programmes once colour receivers became generally available. While US television had been broadcasting in colour since 1954, and the three major networks there moved to colour for most new programmes in the mid-1960s, British television lagged somewhat behind (Panos, 2015, 102). The BBC was keen to maintain its reputation for engineering innovation and had been evaluating and developing colour for decades, while the commercial ITV channel wanted colour to enhance the appeal of the advertisements that funded its programmes. Government permission was finally granted for the minority channel BBC2 to broadcast colour from 1967, with the mass audience channels BBC1 and ITV following in 1969. Because of the high price of colour TV sets, many viewers watched black and white into the 1970s, but broadcasters identified and promoted the colour programmes in their schedules, seeking to drive the take-up of the new technology. Beckett’s work for the BBC was screened on BBC2, just as colour was introduced, but to make Beckett’s visually sparse plays at all, and especially if they were in monochrome, was hardly likely to encourage audiences to watch them for their visual pleasure. Eh Joe was made in 1966, while the BBC was preparing for its first colour serial, a sumptuous and colourful adaptation of the Victorian novel Vanity Fair (1967). The Lively Arts broadcast of Beckett’s Ghost Trio, Not I and . . . but the clouds . . . on BBC2 under the title ‘Shades’ in 1977 used

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colour film for its discussion feature enfolding the plays but monochrome film for the plays themselves. Even in 1982, the broadcast of the two-part short drama Quad for BBC2’s Arena arts series began with colour in the first part but moved to monochrome for the second part. Beckett’s plays looked innovative inasmuch as they were abstract and formally experimental, and at the same time anachronistic because they appeared not to engage with contemporary social life or prominent aesthetic trends in television. In some ways Beckett’s dramas did use cutting-edge technology. All of his television plays were premiered on the BBC2 channel, which had launched in 1964 only just before Eh Joe. Its programmes were broadcast in highdefinition, 625-line transmission (in preparation for the start of colour), using a German PAL (Phased Alternate Line) system. Although a minority of viewers in 1966 had TV sets that could receive 625-line signals and instead watched in lower definition, there were some for whom the images of Eh Joe were much sharper than the 405-line images on the established BBC1 and ITV channels of the time. As the years went by, all British viewers transferred to 625-line sets, but initially Eh Joe was in the vanguard of television reception technology. This indication of innovation, however, was present in a drama that had a slow pace and a theatrical, non-realistic setting, with very little visual detail of props or costume that 625-line images could present to advantage. The play’s long take (shot in a single long-duration recording), made with a camera that is often static as it stops moving while Voice is speaking, makes it look exceptional in its own time because it seems anachronistic, not innovative. It harks back to a prehistory when there was sparing use of editing or cutting between camera positions, with a rhythm that feels connected with much earlier drama broadcasts. Eh Joe self-consciously mimics an earlier period in the history of television drama, when the new medium was negotiating whether its role was to adapt theatre plays and disseminate canonical works for a mass audience, or to find a new aesthetic and new work specific to the live, multi-camera studio environment. Eh Joe undercuts the implicit teleology that distinguishes old from new. These divergent possibilities place Beckett’s work within 1950s and 1960s television drama’s uncertain role in assimilating and differentiating itself from its antecedents.

Bodies and Technologies In the television plays that followed the moment of Film, Comédie and Eh Joe in the mid-1960s, the use of close-up, high key lighting to create contrast, and the separation of the body from its surroundings, tends to reduce the anthropomorphic and realist aspects of Beckett’s television work. For Marcel

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Proust, Walter Benjamin and Beckett, the mechanisation implied in habitual behaviour enables subjectivity across temporal extension by creating the persistence of subjectivity, but it also dulls and routinises subjectivity. Katherine Weiss (2012) argues that the inevitable running down of a mechanism, or the breaking down of a technology, are parallel to the fading and minimisation of both language and the human body in Beckett’s work. Continual and complementary processes of decomposition and recomposition of identities underpin the narratives of Beckett’s television plays, with the verbal assault on Joe’s identity in Eh Joe, M1’s repeated attempts to retell his past experiences in . . . but the clouds . . ., and the separation of the dreamer and his dreamt self in Nacht und Träume, for example. Repeating a process of identity construction produces the potential for new narratives but at the same time prohibits their proper resolution; the story (inasmuch as there is one) is always nearly at the end, but it does not end and could be repeated again. Leslie Hill suggests that: ‘Increasingly, Beckett’s later plays, when they experiment with theatrical and other forms, are seeking to redefine performance in non-anthropomorphic terms’ (1996, 25), and Beckett uses technological mediation to explore these concerns with temporality, embodiment and identity. Media technologies are not neutral channels through which content is transmitted, but rather they give shape to something that is now absent through their specific technologies and aesthetic conventions. The work of doing this depends on professional expertise and familiarity with aesthetic norms on the part of a camera operator, editor or sound recordist, for example, and human skill in using specialised equipment. The technology’s capabilities and limitations need to be understood as processes of configuring the relationships between people, between people and things, and between absent pasts and evanescent presents, implemented through material and sensory means. As Beckett argued in his discussion of the work of the painter Bram van Velde, art and aesthetic experimentation cannot go on without the materiality of a medium (1965, 124). In the past, this has meant that specific kinds of highly valued cultural activities in artistic practice have relied on physical skills and embodied relationships with materials (in oil painting, for example), but in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century expansion of mechanical and technological media, direct connection with the technologies of making has been relatively devalued. In television, for example, the hands-on roles of camera operator, vision mixer or sound technician have had lower status than the hands-off creative roles of director, screenwriter or producer. A methodology for media archaeology that is currently being developed (Hall and Ellis, 2019) foregrounds the importance of the relationship between processes of making and how they shape both maker and product. Throughout Beckett’s career

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he developed a close and reflective relationship between cerebral, artistic and intellectual activity and the means by which it may be carried out. In relation to the electronic media (as in theatre), Beckett took a particular interest in how things were done. This went back to his interest in cinema editing in his youth, and extended to his detailed diagrams for the staging of his plays. In the electronic media it included his interest in cameras, electronic video recording, methods of sound recording for radio, and the possibilities offered by the invention of new media storage technologies like the reel-to-reel tape recorder and the video cassette machine (Nixon, 2009). These interests may be extensions of his well-documented and difficult relationship with the physical task of writing, and related material activities of inscription such as doodling. Writing is, in this sense, a technology, as Marshall McLuhan (1964, 81–9) has argued. McLuhan’s argument was that a technology is an extension of a human capacity, in which each becomes adapted to the other. For Beckett’s characters and for viewers of his television dramas, technologies are entangled with living bodies. Work by Weiss (2009) and Yoshiki Tajiri (2007) has explored this in Beckett’s texts, focusing, for example, on how Krapp’s hands dextrously thread tape from the spools of his reel-to-reel tape recorder through its magnetic heads and guidewheels in Krapp’s Last Tape so that body and machine work together to ‘author’ a text or performance. In Ghost Trio, tiny movements by the lone figure on the set seem to trigger the sound of music from the cassette player that he holds on his lap, generating emotion and physical action associated with an absent lover. Technologies are designed for an operator, accommodating a normative (male) body of a certain level of dexterity and a usual number of fingers, for example. Just as technologies extend the capacities of the body, they also constrain the kinds of bodies that can use them and the ways in which the technology can be used. The harmony or disharmony of operator and machine was sometimes significant to the realisation of Beckett’s work, for example when the mishandling of film stock made the opening section of Film unusable, or when Beckett praised the effectiveness of the television studio technicians at SDR over the staff at the BBC (Knowlson, 1996, 632). In common with almost all screen dramas, the bodily labour of realisation through the operation of cameras, lighting, editing and sound recording is not exposed in Beckett’s plays. But as many analyses of the textuality of Beckett’s television and film work have shown, formal strategies like the separation of voice from body, simplified and abstracted movement, and repetition of action draw the viewer’s attention to the audio-visual text as a product of textual, technological and aesthetic conventions. As far as the situation of television viewing is concerned, television screens are designed to be seen in a domestic space and within a normative range of

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distances between viewer and screen. There are standard settings for brightness and colour, the softness or sharpness of image definition, and in the loudspeaker setup an orientation of sounds towards the spectator. The television set and its spectator mutually organise their positional relationships and modes of address towards each other. Television is seeing at a distance, and what is in the frame is the result of a series of choices made by a producer, and those choices already imagine spectatorship of a particular and historically contingent kind, built on existing technological apparatuses that include photography, theatre, radio broadcasting and cinema. Because Beckett’s television plays push at the boundaries of what television might be, they necessarily establish relationships with other kinds of performance in vision and sound. Anachronism is thus a critical and reflexive strategy about remembering how media work, which matches the plays’ thematic concerns with memory, repetition and the slow pacing of action in screen time. This chapter has focused mainly on the temporal axis in which Beckett’s plays reach out innovatively to a future and also refer back to a past, and raised questions of development, progress and teleology that are implied by this temporal progression. But this approach, which questions linearity and directionality, is also illuminating at the syntagmatic, spatial or ‘horizontal’ level of mediations between media, and this chapter has suggested the ways that such a critique might work. Invoking these televisual and extra-televisual frameworks makes the plays an important contribution to theoretical work on the conceptualisation of television’s audio-visual space and the relationships of television with other media technologies. The formal minimalism that increasingly marks Beckett’s theatre, prose and media works from the 1960s onwards, and his interest in trying out unfamiliar technologies and media forms, seem to have been ways of evaluating their essential features. Beckett’s work explored the spatial and abstract qualities of the television image and how image and sound could be manipulated in plastic ways by techniques such as superimposition, the paring down or subtraction of colour, exact repetition of action by repeating a performance or editing into a montage, and the separation of image from sound. But what seems like a quest for purity is in fact constituted by allusion, adaptation and reworking of themes, forms and motifs from technologies, conventions and other texts from outside of television. Close-up derives from cinema, framing conventions derive from photography (and before that from painting) and the non-realist studio is a development of the theatrical studio designed for flexible uses in performance, for example. Beckett’s dramas are intermedial (Bignell, 2020), incorporating features from one medium in another, such as the passage of still images in Ghost Trio when Voice demands that the viewer analytically decompose the visual space in which Figure sits.

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The paradoxical allusion to and incorporation of antecedent media in order to refine medial expressivity in a new way is a key characteristic of how Beckett’s screen dramas work.

Works Cited Antoine-Dunne, Jean M. B. (2001), ‘Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and Contrapuntal Montage’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 11, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 315–23. Armstrong, Tim (1998), Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barr, Charles (1997), ‘“They Think It’s All Over”: The Dramatic Legacy of Live Television’, in John Hill and Martin McLoone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: Relations Between Film and Television, Luton: John Libbey, pp. 47–55. Baudry, Jean-Louis (1980), ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematic apparatus’, in T. Hak Kyung Cha (ed.), Apparatus, New York: Tanam Press, pp. 25–40. Beckett, Samuel (1959), Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (1965), Proust and Three Dialogues, London: John Calder. Bignell, Jonathan (2009), Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bignell, Jonathan (2010), ‘Into the Void: Beckett’s Television Plays and the Idea of Broadcasting’, in Daniela Caselli (ed.), Beckett and Nothing, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 125–42. Bignell, Jonathan (2019), ‘Performing the Identity of the Medium: Adaptation and Television Historiography’, Adaptation, 12:2, pp. 149–64. Bignell, Jonathan (2020), ‘Specially for Television? Eh Joe, Intermediality and Beckett’s Drama’, in Trish McTighe, Emilie Morin and Mark Nixon (eds), ‘Beckett and Intermediality/Beckett, artiste intermédial’, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, 32:1, pp. 41–54. Bishop, Christopher (1958), ‘The Great Stone Face’ and ‘An Interview with Buster Keaton’, Film Quarterly, 12, pp. 10–15; 15–22. Brater, Enoch (1975), ‘The Thinking Eye in Beckett’s Film’, Modern Language Quarterly, 36:2, pp. 169–71. Brook, Peter (1968), The Empty Space, London: Atheneum. Douglas, Susan J. (1987), Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Douglas, Susan J. (2004), Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilbert, W. Stephen (1980), ‘The Television Play: Outside the Consensus’, Screen Education, 35, pp. 35–44.

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Hall, Nicholas and John Ellis, eds (2019), Hands On Media History: A New Methodology in the Humanities and Social Sciences, London: Routledge. Hill, Leslie (1996), ‘“Fuck life”: Rockaby, Sex, and the Body’, in Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (eds), Beckett On and On . . ., Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson, pp. 19–26. Hilmes, Michele (1997), Radio Voice: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Lebel, Jean-Patrick (1967), Buster Keaton, trans. P. D. Stovin, London: Zwemmer & Barnes. Lyotard, Jean-François (1991), The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity. McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mulvey, Laura (2007), ‘Introduction: Experimental British Television’, in Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton (eds), Experimental British Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–16. Nixon, Mark (2009), ‘Samuel Beckett’s “Film Vidéo-Cassette projet”’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 18:1–2, pp. 32–43. Panos, Leah (2015), ‘The Arrival of Colour in BBC Drama and Rudolph Cartier’s Colour Productions’, Critical Studies in Television, 10:3, pp. 101–20. Paraskeva, Anthony (2017), Samuel Beckett and Cinema, London: Bloomsbury. Parsons, Denys (1982), ‘Cable Radio – Victorian Style’, New Scientist (23 December), pp. 794–6. Peters, John Durham (1999), Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sarris, Andrew (1969), ‘Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett’, Columbia Forum, 12:4, p. 43. Scannell, Paddy (1996), Radio, Television & Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach, Oxford: Blackwell. Schneider, Alan (1969), ‘On Directing Film’, in Samuel Beckett, Film, New York: Grove, pp. 63–94. Tajiri, Yoshiki (2007), Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weiss, Katherine (2009), ‘“. . . Humanity in Ruins . . .”: The Historical Body in Beckett’s Fiction’, in Séan Kennedy and Katherine Weiss (eds), Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 151–68. Weiss, Katherine (2012), ‘James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein: Haunting Samuel Beckett’s Film’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 21:2, pp. 181–92.

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Chapter 11 Making and Remaking Samuel Beckett’s What Where Walter Asmus

Prelude On 23 November 1983 I went to see Samuel Beckett in Paris as I normally did before embarking on a production of one of his plays.1 This time I wanted to talk with him about What Where – I was preparing the first German performance at the Staatstheater Karlsruhe. Beckett had written the piece earlier in the year, as he told Kay Boyle: ‘Just finished a short piece – theatre – for the Graz autumn Festival to my dissatisfaction’ (20 March 1983; Beckett, 2016, 606). Alan Schneider directed the first production, which premiered in New York on 11 June 1983, and the first German-language performance took place on 23 September 1983 in Graz. Beckett knew that I knew the play well and went straight to medias res: V, a voice originating from a loudspeaker, was a big problem. One could imagine that it came from the beyond. The voice was trying to reconstruct how and what ‘it’ had been. And where the way ‘out’ was. Without further explanation he refers to his prose text The Lost Ones, written in French between 1965 and 1970. It describes the torment of roughly 200 bodies, crowded inside a cylinder ‘fifty metres round and sixteen high’ (Beckett, 2010, 101). Some of them are looking for a way out through a system of niches, others are grouped into those who sometimes stop, those whose need to search has died but occasionally give in to the impulse to become searchers again, and, finally, the non-searchers who sit against the wall in the posture ‘which wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles’ (103). With time, the number of hopeful searchers inevitably decreases. This narrative of extensive pictoriality, visual complexity and obsession with detail shares a basic Beckettian motif with the minimalist late dramatic work What Where: hopelessness and hope in tension with each other.

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Concerning What Where, Beckett tormented himself with rather sparse statements. Not surprisingly, everything was ‘grey’. ‘It is winter. Without journey’ (Beckett, 1986, 476) at the end of the piece refers to Schubert, who spent a year in Graz and then returned to Vienna, where he completed the song cycle Die Winterreise. The four seasons play a role, as well as three of the four points of the compass – West, North and East. ‘South is not elaborated,’ he added mischievously. In the course of our conversation in Paris, Beckett mentioned that Dr Müller-Freienfels, the head of the television drama department at SDR (Süddeutscher Rundfunk) in Stuttgart, was retiring and had asked him if he had something in his drawer for a farewell production. It was on MüllerFreienfels’s initiative that Beckett recorded his first television play, Eh Joe, in Stuttgart in 1966. He had been given working conditions that motivated him to continue writing and/or directing television plays for, or in cooperation with, the SDR at irregular intervals: Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . ., Quadrat I+II, Nacht und Träume. Television plays that radically elevated the medium to an artistic discipline. I asked what it looked like in his drawer. ‘No, no, nothing’. ‘What about What Where?’ Beckett raised his head to a doubtfully hopeful ‘Do you think so?’, and then added, with an enquiring look, ‘That might be an idea. I will think about it.’ On 17 December 1983, Beckett mentioned in a letter to Avigdor Arikha that he was ‘Thinking of proposing What Where to Süddeutscher Rundfunk. For once a stage play that invites TV – as I feel it now. With mimes’ (Beckett, 2016, 624). Another letter, sent to Ruby Cohn on Christmas Eve of 1983, reads: ‘Have offered – no doubt ill-advisedly – What Where to Süddeutscher Rundfunk. Just to be with them all once more. Müller-Freienfels’ last season’ (626). Beckett’s epistolary statements – ‘To my dissatisfaction’ in the Boyle letter and ‘For once a stage play that invites TV’ in the Arikha letter – reveal his motivation to have another go at What Where, though his letter to Ruby Cohn represents a charming volte-face.

Creative Mind at Work In a letter of 1 January 1984, Beckett thanks Müller-Freienfels for his positive reaction to his idea of staging a TV adaptation of What Where and makes first concrete suggestions regarding cast and production:

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As performers I would again suggest mimes. All four to be made as alike as possible by means of costume and make-up however excessive. Attitudes and movements strictly identical. Speech mechanical and colourless. Marionettes. No ‘interpretation’. A balletistic approach. Bodily control the most important requirement as in Quad and Nacht u. Träume. In a word a discipline and selflessness hardly to be expected of ‘seasoned’ actors and indeed too much – or too little – to be asked of them. (Beckett, 2016, 631–2) In this statement, Beckett formulates the basic paradigms which had in one way or another always been significant for his work on stage as well as in television, the core of his aesthetic cosmos – colourless speech, marionettes, no interpretation, balletistic, bodily control. In many ways they have been equally significant for myself, ever since I met and assisted him when he directed Waiting for Godot in 1975 in Berlin, where, for example, one of his instructions was surprisingly to play a scene in a ‘balletisch’ [balletistic] way. Yet, beyond all this, Beckett added in the letter, the chief problem would be the functions of the camera, to which effect he suggested a meeting in Paris with Jim Lewis, his cameraman since Eh Joe, before starting the production. In a further letter, Beckett also suggested Helfried Foron, a mime with whom he had worked in Quadrat I+II and Nacht und Träume, to play Bom/Bem as a ‘physical model for the other 2’, explaining that ‘His the only frontal “head haught”, all others in obscurable profile’ (Beckett, 2016, 633). This first consideration of a realisation intended to have the full physical presence of the characters on the screen as they had appeared on the stage. He again emphasised: ‘Megaphone & camera chief problems’ (633). The megaphone had been a sort of crutch in the stage play because V as Bam’s voice – the remembering narrator, the director of the play, as it were, or the self which, in Kierkegaard’s sense, relates to itself – and Bam as the actor are one figure, but for obvious reasons they cannot appear onstage at the same time. He was one step further in his reflections when he wrote to Jim Lewis after a meeting with him on 24 January 1984 in Paris: ‘Suggestion for V [. . .]. A face of which only to be seen the eyes, closed throughout for inward look, & mouth which would articulate V text. Placed centrally above playing area. Unchanging image, i.e. unaffected by camera recession’ (8 February 1984; Beckett, 2016, 635). In a letter to Müller-Freienfels of 5 March 1984, Beckett mentions his ‘suggestion’ to Lewis concerning V. He talks of a ‘vestigial’ face and continues: Perhaps the clue to the whole affair is its ghostliness. The 4 are indistinguishable, visually & vocally, as ghosts are indistinguishable. Ghostly garments,

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ghostly speech. This should be supplied by a single & invisible speaker, either live in conjunction with the ‘action’, or for post-synchronisation. Bam’s voice from beyond to be distinguished from the others by some form of microphonic distortion. The players would speak their words, but inaudibly. All very tricky technically. Think it over. Perhaps we’ll come up with something more simple when we meet. (Beckett, 2016, 637–8) In April 1984 the originally envisaged dates of production, 14 to 25 May, had to be cancelled because Beckett fell ill. In early 1985, Müller-Freienfels called and asked me if I would be willing to step in. I wrote to Beckett wishing him a speedy recovery and hoping that he would be back on his feet very soon, and assuring him that I would be happy to be there when the time came. On 2 February his reply arrived: ‘Thanks for your card & assurance of help with What Where. I begin to see it and need now to talk it over with you & Jim.’ On 10 March 1985 I met with Beckett in Paris. In the meantime, the ‘mimes’ had been forgotten and I had suggested four actors from Karlsruhe to the casting office of the station. I showed him photos. Without commenting on them Beckett explained: one should only see the faces, not the whole figures. The faces could be faded in and out – in analogy to the way the figures appear and disappear on the dimly lit playing field of the stage. This was the solution suitable for television. The four figures could wear headgear, perhaps in the form of a fez. When you think of the situation in Turkey. . . This realistic association struck me at the time. I had stopped reflecting on concrete socio-political concepts of reality (torture, oppression) in conversations about his plays with him, especially after he once said to me in a defensive manner during an attempt to do so, ‘It’s all poetic, Walter, all poetic.’ I had learned not to think beyond the text, avoiding any interpretations. However, he immediately countered his statement and added a poetic context. The headdresses were to have different colours, which were assigned to the vowels of the characters’ names. Black for Bam, white for Bem, red for Bim, blue for Bom – a reference to a sonnet by Rimbaud entitled ‘Voyelles’, James Joyce’s favourite poem (!). Another suggestion by Beckett: the fading in and out of the faces should be underlined by five drum beats at different pitches.

* In my theatrical realisation of What Where in Karlsruhe, I succeeded in creating a tormenting monotony of loneliness by using V as an atmospheric memory

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sound; however, the demand to make the actors as alike as possible had been largely neglected due to their different body sizes and physiognomies, despite elaborate long grey wigs and equally grey robes. To solve this problem, I suggested finding out if it was technically feasible to have all four figures played by the same actor. Beckett remained reserved, skeptical. After my return from Paris, I received a confirmation from Stuttgart that it was possible to cast What Where with only one actor for all roles. I informed Beckett of this in a letter and his immediate answer was: ‘One actor only will confuse. “Wir sind nur noch fünf ” [We are the last five]. Resemblance, not identity is what we need. Unless the one can be made up as four.’ Checkmate!

Adventurous Journey 18 June 1985 Start of shooting in Stuttgart. At 10 a.m., Beckett meets the familiar crew: Jim Lewis (camera), Wolfgang Wahl (set design and costumes) Frank Lerbs (sound) and, for the first time, Werner Sommer, Reinhart Müller-Freienfels’s successor. After a short welcome, he gets down to business as usual. The intended colours of the headdresses should be dropped. They should be uniformly black. There is also no more talk of a ‘fez’. Wolfgang Wahl says that he has traced all forms of headwear back ‘to before the birth of Christ’, he is desperate, he does not know what they should look like. Studio 4 is equipped in an enterprising way: Four swivel chairs – or torture chairs, as it soon turned out – with headrests like hairdresser’s chairs, above each of them a Styrofoam canopy, which is illuminated from below, spotlights from the back above and from the front below, and in front of each unit at some distance – a monster of a camera. All meticulously prepared by the cameraman Jim Lewis. In a separate booth equipped with a table, several chairs and endlessly flickering monitors, Friedhelm Becker, the actor playing Bam/V, and Beckett sit opposite each other for the first reading rehearsal. Becker offers a brief staccato of the text: ‘We are the last five. In the present as were we still. It is spring.’ Beckett introduces the actor to the text in his own way, by line reading. Quietly and monotonously, yet with feeling, exhaling on each sentence, exhausted, resigned, almost sighing. While Becker keeps trying and trying to hit the Beckett tone, Beckett patiently speaks the lines of the other characters. At noon, in the concert hall of the SDR Orchestra, a member of the orchestra prepares a selection of drums. Beckett puts down his green shoulder bag, wordlessly takes a drumstick and tries out different drums, from small to

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large, high-pitched to low, to accompany the appearance and disappearance of the four faces. Concentrating entirely on the struck notes, calm and composed, he captivates the few people present in the spacious hall and finally decides on four instruments, one for each of the figures. During lunch break on the terrace of the canteen, friendly silence, gentle talking. After Beckett has finished his beer, he gets up for a walk, a ritual familiar to everyone present: familiar rounds through the park, familiar repetitions. In the afternoon the first recordings of Voice (V) take place in the recording studio. The sound engineer offers a version with reduced speed and correspondingly lower pitch, which is not convincing. I suggest a whisper as a new attempt. A recording – whispering, searching – may be an alternative for now.

19 June 1985 Rehearsal of the dialogues between Bam (Friedhelm Becker), Bom (Edwin Dorner), Bim (Walter Laugwitz) and Bem (Alfred Querbach). Beckett joins in with line readings every now and again, his only comment reduced to ‘Always quite exhausted. You come from death and return to death,’ accompanied by an apologetic laugh. The expression should always be the same, especially when the respective figure returns with his head bowed as a sign of defeat. Beckett conducts in his typical concentrated posture, cigarillo between index and middle finger of his right hand. After repeating the text four times, the recorded voice V is added from tape for a run-through of the entire dialogue sequence. Afterwards Becker repeatedly delivers the words of V. Slowly, concentrating on exhaling, significantly burdened to ‘represent’ exhaustion, he tries to fulfil Beckett’s demands. In the afternoon, first attempts with the four cameras in front of the ‘hairdresser’s chairs’. We sit in the booth and watch on a monitor. Jim Lewis has set up the light for V in such a way that the camera records the face reflected from an aluminium foil, creating a slight distortion. In this first attempt, the screen is divided vertically into a black left third, in which Bam’s face can appear quite large in the upper part as V, in relation to the small faces displayed against a grey playing surface at the bottom right. In a second attempt, the playing area is reduced to a small grey rectangle in the lower right half of the black screen. In another attempt, it is reduced to a narrow strip melting into black. For the first time, the motto finally becomes: leave out everything superfluous. The playing area as indicated above is eliminated. The faces will appear and disappear in the black of the screen.

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During further attempts and interruptions, the actors sit motionless in their ‘hairdresser’s chairs’. To avoid any bounce light, they are wearing black coats. Their hair is covered with special black felt head coverings. Beckett gives the instruction to ‘Get rid of the hats’. The light illuminating the heads from above is eliminated. Only the faces are visible, cut out of the darkness. Beckett’s halfaudible comment: ‘Looks marvellous.’ By means of individually cut out cardboard masks positioned in front of the cameras, the sizes of the faces are unified to create the greatest possible similarity. In addition, the distances between the individual faces as well as the head positions must be exactly the same, without the slightest sideways tilt, and their gaze must be focused on the camera. The fade-ins and fade-outs turn out to be a great difficulty. If the appearances and disappearances are to take place as they did on the theatre stage, the figures have to change their positions. In TV, this can only be done by panning the camera, a tricky procedure because the angle of the shot changes. Preparations, setup and testing require an incalculable amount of time. We are sitting in the booth; again and again we have to abort – frustrating waiting! The rehearsal is finished. The actors have to be on stage in Karlsruhe in the evening, to which Beckett notes: ‘What a profession!’ During a dinner conversation later that day, Jim Lewis comes back to the problem of the visual representation of the voice, which he finds unsolved. He thinks it lacks mystery. He is still very dissatisfied. Perhaps one should only be able to see the mouth. Beckett repeatedly lowers his head to imagine the picture. When we later say goodbye in the elevator he says: ‘Think about the mouth.’ ‘I am skeptical,’ I say. ‘So am I,’ he replies.

20 June 1985 In the studio, the actors are back in their ‘torture chairs’ with their black capes and head coverings. Hours will pass. First, the fade-in and fade-out is tried, then Beckett goes from chair to chair and sets the tempo and rhythm for the dialogues, correcting the timing for cues. The actors do not yet pick up cues from each other and do not find a common inner situation. The whole sequence is recorded on VHS video so that it can be watched together later. The problem with the camera pans is obvious. The level of the heads differs when panning. The pans are therefore dropped. Entrances and exits will be controlled by the image editor. The subsequent image does not appear in the position of the previous character but in its own. This means that after Bim and Bom are faded out and Bim returns from the interrogation, he does not appear in Bom’s place next to Bam, but in his own place.

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Beckett tries out the drum beats that are supposed to accompany the fadeins and fade-outs, one at a time, with a 5″ echo on each. He finally ends the experiment with ‘Sorry to make all this fuss.’ The first magnetic recording with numerous restarts. The image editor has to get a feeling for the fade-ins and fade-outs in the mute prelude. The stopwatch tells me that the agreed length of 5″ each works well. The actors cannot see the red light of their cameras indicating their cues, so hand signals must be agreed. The position of the heads must be corrected. Talking with the head lowered proves to be difficult. As a result, a whole series of time-consuming interruptions ensues, which require patience and discipline and quickly justify the seemingly long production time of nine days. One senses tension in the studio; one also feels it in Beckett. Shooting ends at 4 p.m. In the evening the actors have another performance in Karlsruhe, Nathan the Wise, with Friedhelm Becker in the title role. What a profession! Jim Lewis asks for the rehearsal to start at 12:30 the next day because he wants to adjust the light more precisely. He also wants to try out a mouth-blown glass plate placed in front of the camera lens for the image of V (see also Fehsenfeld, 1986).

21 June 1985 Rehearsal with Becker in the recording studio. He goes through the text once. Beckett reminds him that the tone is ‘always breathless and exhausted’, every sentence is a problem for Bam/V. From ‘It’s winter’ on, the tempo should be slowed down, i.e. the pauses between the sentences should be longer. Becker keeps on trying, underlining the breathlessness with his hands. Finally he says ‘this is too realistic’, he has not yet found the right way of speaking his lines. Beckett is noticeably relieved about Becker’s willingness to cooperate; his eyes are shining. While Becker gets ready in the sound booth, Beckett turns to me. Perhaps one should use different forms of expression for the four seasons. He speaks softly: delicate spring, warm summer, grey and resigned autumn and almost soundless winter. After a few false starts, for the first time a recording is successful. Before the second recording, Beckett once again points out the breathlessness and exhaustion. The last three sentences – ‘That is all. Make sense who may. I switch off ’ – should be ‘a little quieter, more private. Voice like an old statue, eaten up by the weather, blurred.’ Both versions are played on one machine each. We listen to them alternately, sequence by sequence. Beckett: ‘I don’t know, I can’t decide.’ The sound engineer finds the second recording too elegiac. Beckett does not respond.

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The first one seems more correct to me, too. Beckett remains reserved, he thinks both are okay. One senses, however, that neither of them is as he ‘hears’ it. He suggests making another one next week. He leaves the room. Jim Lewis, the sound engineer and I remain behind, embarrassed. Finally I follow him, he has picked up his bag from the booth in the studio. I feel how vulnerable and uneasy he is. I say cautiously that the second version runs the risk of being sentimental, pitying. The inner tension is released and, abruptly, it breaks out of him: ‘I made a mistake by driving Becker there, it was my mistake. The ending must be very simple, not too slow, no pauses.’

24 June 1985 In the studio Beckett spontaneously approaches Becker. He has to apologise, for he has steered him in the wrong direction, they should make another recording right away. It becomes the last, the final one. Becker is entirely composed and immerses himself completely in the text. An indefinably ghostly voice, as if it had risen from a vault, with unrelenting, controlled toughness and at the same time emotional authority progressing in never-ending, lonely, tender monotony. The imitated expression of exhaustion has given way to something quite different. Something true, not to say beautiful. After a short text rehearsal in the booth, all four actors are back in their chairs in the afternoon. Due to the large cameras placed on their trolleys and the tripods of different sizes with technical equipment on them, they sit relatively far apart and it is difficult for them to listen and react to each other. Interruptions again: heads are not parallel to each other, signs for cues must be corrected. Fade-ins and fade-outs are of different lengths. Suddenly Beckett: ‘Jim, one thing just occurs to me, when Bom speaks with bowed head, do we see his lips moving? Ask him to ar-tic-u-late – yes, beautiful, beautiful.’ The more often the dialogue part is rehearsed, the clearer it becomes that the monotony of V’s voice allows for a softer and more real dialogue. Becker as Bam leads the interrogations in a controlled, tense manner and determines the timing, while the other three increasingly find each other and follow Beckett’s call for exhaustion to such an extent that even he now and then suggests a more concrete tone: ‘We have adopted the colour. The questions can be a little stronger . . .’. By lowering the heads a common image plane is disrupted, the respective bowed head becomes larger than the others because it gets closer to the camera, so that it seems to be falling out of the picture. Beckett suggests that they should refrain from bowing altogether, only Bam, when he is alone at the very

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end, should lower his head. I suggest that, instead of having heads lowered, they could appear with eyes closed as a sign of their failure. This is tried out and agreed upon. Suddenly, Beckett calls out, excited: ‘Jim, I think we need the playing area. When all are gone there is only black.’ ‘But we have the face of the voice all the time, Sam.’ ‘Ah, of course, I had forgotten, how stupid. I am sorry.’ The confusion arises because the playing area had been eliminated, and above all because the rehearsal with the four actors takes place with the recorded voice of V but without the image of his face. In the elevator on the way to the cafeteria a quiet reverberation: ‘Closed eyes like death masks.’ After the lunch break four more magnetic recordings are made, but they have to be interrupted because of small irregularities. A test of patience not only for the actors in their ‘torture chairs’.

25 June 1985 Beckett’s first question in the morning is ‘When do we do the face?’ ‘First, let’s finish the dialogue,’ answers Jim. ‘I have thought about it,’ Beckett continues. ‘Bam as face/V should speak with open eyes. Every time he finishes, he closes his eyes and bows his head slightly. That fits the bowed head at the end.’ The similarity of the three figures still leaves much to be desired. Extremely thin rubber head coverings, which are pulled over their hair and ears, have replaced the felt ones. The transitions from forehead to cap are sprayed on using a fine black mist, so that the faces seamlessly emerge from or disappear into the black of the screen. Fading the faces in and out in the silent sequence proves to be an exciting process. When do we see the faces, when do they disappear? They mysteriously and imperceptibly approach the viewer and in the same way they elude us. We sit spellbound in the control booth. The image editor is a magician. We witness a musical process without sound. We breathe with the monitor as an audience at best breathes with the actors on stage. The 5″ rhythm seems to be just right: 5″ fade-in, 5″ fade-out. ‘Nice figure,’ Beckett notes, ‘bit on the slow side now.’ Boom! During the lunch break, he returns to the silent sequence. Whether or not one should leave it out. I refer to similar anticipatory sequences in his other TV plays, Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds . . . . The obvious experimental arrangement creates distance and apparent objectivity. The more painful it would be to be drawn into the plight of the characters and their hopelessness

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in the following ‘live’ part. ‘I didn’t think in any special way about it,’ Beckett comments evasively. Should one let it end with a final laugh, when V’s face fades out, in the blackness? He laughs sarcastically, in an inimitably authentic way like with his line readings, as if he wanted to laugh away ‘all that’. His eyes are shining. Jim Lewis and I join in involuntarily. Beckett points enthusiastically at us as if he wanted to say ‘yes, like this, just like that’. This laughter can only be adequately produced by one person, I say. ‘Who?’ comes out like a gunshot. Before we can say anything, he understands and waves, ‘Oh, no. . .’ In the afternoon Becker sits as Bam/V in his place in front of the camera. In front of his face a mouth-blown glass pane is set up, irregularly distorted in its structure. The light source is set up in a way that the left half of the face and the left eye remain in near darkness. In front of the glass a frame with a gauze veil is placed. The face is reflected into the camera by using a mirror, so on the monitor it appears slightly distorted in the upper left-hand corner, hovering in a ghostly manner and yet very real, like a weathered sculpture. ‘Make it smaller, Jim.’ ‘I wouldn’t make it smaller.’ ‘Oh, it’s your invention, Jim.’ The first attempts are made to fade the other figures in to the image of V. The silent sequence becomes a test case. With his great musical sensitivity, Beckett reacts to the smallest irregularity. The better the process succeeds, the greater the desire for perfection. The image editor masters the fades like a musical instrument.

26 June 1985 Eight magnetic recordings of the dialogue part in the morning before the final version is completed. Either a camera jerks, a headrest has loosened, one of the actors opens or closes his eyes at the wrong moment, another holds his head crooked because fatigue creeps in and the permanent concentration decreases . . . A change: Bam should appear with closed eyes at the end and not lower his head. And another one, he should wait for the answers to his questions with his mouth open in an expression of suspense. Meanwhile, Beckett wanders around the studio along the outermost walls, takes the longest way he can walk unhindered, now and again disappearing behind a black curtain. With controlled but audible steps, as if to demonstrate how enervating it all is. Or maybe he wants to walk it off to avoid exploding. In the afternoon, further experiments with the image of V. The sound is played and Becker is in playback mode. To emphasise the right eye, Jim has

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placed a long tube in front of a small spotlight, which narrows to the size of a penny, so that the light only hits the eye. The eyes are supposed to stay open when speaking and are closed when visualising the past during the dialogue scenes. The image becomes brighter when the actor is speaking with open eyes and darker when remembering with eyes closed. Before I’m able to pass this on to Becker down in the studio, we hear from the conference circuit: ‘Keep your eyes open the whole time, only the picture gets brighter and darker.’ The pulsating alternation of light and darkness mutates at times into a pictorial work of art. During one of the rehearsals Beckett remarks: ‘It’s like the moon in Godot. Do you remember?’ ‘Is the picture not too dark,’ asks someone from the technical department, ‘it goes to the limit of what is visible to the viewer.’ ‘It’s we who want to see it – not them,’ is the short answer. The change of light at the limit of the visible turns out to become a mini-drama in itself. The rehearsal ends at 5:30 p.m. Becker/V has gone through several twelveminute repetitions in an hour-long lighting rehearsal without blinking once, without grumbling and without leaving his chair. At the very end, just before he closes his eyes, a tear flashes.

27 June 1985 The exciting tension between light and dark, the fading in when the eyes are open and fading out when the eyes are closed, does not succeed at first go. Beckett suggests to eliminate it, to leave the picture at one light level. The image editor is surprised and believes it is because of her. ‘It’s a pity I think,’ I say, and a scornful ‘pity!’ echoes back. ‘Let’s try once more,’ and in the same breath, ‘No, without fading. We have been striving for simplicity for the last ten days . . .’ The determination with which he makes the decision has nothing to do with the inadequacy of the execution of the process but is directed against any form of theatricality. A new proposal: ‘Only the eyes, if we see only the eyes it might be quite moving.’ Jim tries to find the right brightness level. When Beckett gives his OK, Jim argues once again that the monitor’s display is brighter than the screens of the viewers at home. ‘It’s not for them, it’s for us to be satisfied,’ Beckett repeats excitedly and triumphantly. The text of V is mixed in; Becker, with eyes open, in playback mode. The magnetic recording of the dialogue is played. At the end of the twelve minutes, another tear flashes. Beckett: ‘Should try with closed eyes.’ Jim: ‘I liked the eyes.’

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Beckett: ‘All the gadgets.’ Beckett and Jim laugh when I ask what the word ‘gadgets’ means. ‘Gimmicks,’ says Jim. Bam’s face/V with closed eyes, his lips moving almost imperceptibly, the mercilessly monotonous sound – the nonplus ultra of ‘from the beyond’. A mind, a head, a never-ending ratio, searching for the impossible redemption from existential hopelessness until final exhaustion and beyond.

* The Lost Ones, an enigmatically wonderful narrative, which Beckett never mentioned again after our initial meeting in Paris, and What Where, a brittle play, are transposed in a minimalistic way into another medium after countless hours of a lonely mind at work, one can assume, and after nine days of tense but exciting work in progress. Two genres, completely different in their aesthetic form, could merge as they metamorphose because they have the same themes at their core: hope and hopelessness meeting in symbiotic togetherness, and the vain search for redemption. It is impossible to imagine Samuel Beckett’s work without these. The overused, though still valid, term ‘reduction’ has become obvious here as seldom before. Aesthetic forms and existential content coincide in the scarcest possible representation. The cumbrous implementation of a universal theme in a theatre play, despite the relatively simple narrative, has been transformed on the screen into a musico-poetic intensity, which, if the audience gets involved, has a hypnotic effect on them: a triumph of poetic condensation and simplicity. The magnetic recording of the face/V, which is fed into the magnetic recording of the dialogue part, succeeds at first go. The intended dubbing of the drums to accompany the fade-ins and fade-outs of the faces is eventually omitted. ‘Another gadget’ is Beckett’s contemptuous commentary, as if he were speaking to himself. ‘What a pity,’ says Becker, ‘I liked the fade-ins and fade-outs, of course, because they were theatrical.’ A comment that at this moment sounds as if it came from a distant time and is kindly passed over. A noticeable ‘exhaustion’ (sic) spreads and mixes with a euphoric feeling of satisfaction and liberation. In the ten years of our collaboration (or perhaps ever), Beckett had not subjected himself to a ‘work in progress’ mode in either theatre or television. At the beginning of the rehearsals of Waiting for Godot, when I saw his detailed director’s book, he said that he was not a director and therefore had to overcompensate. For television, he always delivered carefully outlined scripts. This time he had come with great confidence in his ‘crew’,

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especially Jim Lewis, and because of his friendship with Reinhart MüllerFreienfels, ‘Just to be with them all once more’, as he had said in the most beautiful understatement in his letter to Ruby Cohn. I remember him once saying to me that his dream in earlier years had been to develop plays together with others at rehearsal. This experience had a touch of it, if not more. Beyond his participation in the creative process, this work was gratifying because Beckett was vulnerable, downright sociable, and particularly devoted in his helplessness.

* Tired with a beer in the canteen. ‘Speechless,’ Beckett says into the silence as if he could not bear it himself after the tension. ‘All gimmicks gone!’ I say after a while. ‘All? You can’t tell!’ ‘Then maybe: All gimmicks gone?’ ‘Yes, that’s good.’ In the evening, a farewell dinner at the Parkhotel. Jim Lewis asks him if he has an idea for next year, as it will have been the twentieth anniversary of their collaboration. Beckett quotes in German one of Joachim Ringelnatz’s poems, which he refused to translate into English in the 1930s: In Hamburg there lived two ants, Who wanted to travel to Australia. In Altona on the Chaussee Their legs started hurting, So wisely there they gave up The last part of the journey. This poem is complete only with the last two lines, which Beckett either did not remember or kept to himself: Thus one wants often and yet cannot and then does quite gladly renounce.

The Remaking When, in 2006, Anthony Uhlmann asked me to direct What Where with the Australian actor Larry Held, I spontaneously agreed. His arguments were that

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there was no English-language version of Beckett’s original production and that this could be the prelude to producing all the television plays because they were difficult to access, especially in English, and not least because the production costs would be considerably reduced by the possibilities of a digital conversion compared to those at the time of their first productions, thus offering a good chance of realising this idea. I knew Larry Held through our joint work on Waiting for Godot in Chicago in 1983, and with Samuel Beckett at Riverside Studios in London in 1984 and again in Paris in 1988. By 2006, I had also worked with him on a stage version of the short story ‘First Love’, made in co-production with the Writers’ Festival in Sydney. It took six years to raise money and solve contractual issues before the production of What Where was scheduled for 29 October–23 November 2012. I had based my demand for this long period on the experience with the Stuttgart production. Also, it had to be cast during this time, and all other preparations remained to be made. A casting took place on 31 October. Six applicants were invited. Larry Held, who would play Bam, made himself available so that we could try out specific two-part scenes. My main concern was to find among the applicants those with whom it would be possible to evoke a spontaneous involvement and understanding of the text and the situation, and to implement it as immediately as possible, without overacting and pseudo-professional design. As simple as this sounds, it turned out to be difficult. At 4:30 p.m., I decided on three actors without committing myself to assigning a particular character to them. I met with Larry Held every day from the day after my arrival to rehearse Bam/V in my hotel. On 2 November, all involved came together for a first meeting and reading rehearsal at the Western Sydney University campus in Bankstown, where the filming was to take place in a small studio. For two days the dialogues were rehearsed like theatre scenes. Three days of shooting followed. Being used to Stuttgart conditions, it seemed frighteningly short for me. It had a lot to do with the costs of borrowing the equipment, i.e. four standard Canon digital cameras, as I eventually found out. The dialogue part was divided into ‘takes’, according to the interrogation sequences between Bam and Bom/Bim/Bem. The actors could adjust to a manageable, complete scene and immerse themselves in the textual interaction. This was important to me and the reason why I did not follow the cameraman’s suggestion to split the dialogues and piece them together in postproduction, thus making full use of the digital possibilities. If he had had his way, he would have recorded the texts of each actor consecutively without a partner and then pieced them together to form a continuous dialogue.

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That would have saved a considerable amount of time and money, but it was completely foreign to me as a theatre director and I could not bring myself to agree to it. I insisted on four cameras, like in Stuttgart, in order to be able to control the process as best as possible. The ‘takes’ could be repeated without much effort and loss of time. I had the possibility to see the respective scenes on a monitor during the takes, but not – as in Stuttgart – the original sequence including the fade-ins and fade-outs, since these had to be added in postproduction. The brevity of these ‘takes’ and their repeatability generated a very effective working process. Sometimes I had the feeling that there was a lack of creative input on my part. But the memory of the elaborate processes of trials and errors that time in Stuttgart, including the moments of happiness, stood in my way. The speed of the digital work process irritated me. Bam/V was recorded in a number of live sound and camera takes, so that we could fall back on material for postproduction where necessary. Two weeks passed and in the remaining two weeks I met with Benjamin Denham, the cameraman, at his home for postproduction. In the editing programme in his computer, we selected the best takes and made the first corrections. We made appointments from one meeting to the next and then often sat for hours and hours, and still did not manage to finish before I left. I was impressed by the possibilities offered by the computer programme, and I began to like the precision with which the fade-ins and fade-outs, the image of Bam/V, or the timing of the sound, to give some examples, could be achieved. Between February 2013 and the end of July we continued the postproduction process via email from continent to continent. In what seemed like an endless array of emails, I asked Benjamin to make adjustments to the recordings with the precision down to seconds, to eliminate visual ‘imperfections’ like shiny teeth or fluttering of eyelids, to make the voice V more relentless, harder and monotonous, and the faces appear and reappear a fraction earlier or later. Some lines had to be delayed and retimed, some were digitally corrected and substituted by versions from other takes. Sometimes, the recorded image also had to be altered digitally, to ensure that it matched the sound perfectly. Ironically, in one of his emails, Benjamin pointed out to me that the problem of brightness that Beckett had had with the technicians in Stuttgart did not go away completely with the new technology. The image of Bam/V eventually had to be made brighter than I originally intended, in order to allow for the piece to be viewed outside professional settings like the cinema. He nevertheless assured me that the brightness levels we were after could be achieved under

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certain conditions, when the piece was screened using professional cinema projectors, for instance. Indeed, the site of viewing the piece has changed over the years as it migrated from television sets to computer screens. After hundreds of little corrections and changes and amendments sent to and fro, and numerous Skype sessions, we finally wrapped it. The sometimes agonizing process between decision and delusion, decision made one day and the feeling of delusion the next, was over. The temptation to continue striving for ultimate perfection remained but, at the same time, it was illusionary if not undesirable. In my statement in the documentary about the Sydney production, I tried to point to the positive aspects of the fact that the Stuttgart version was so diffuse because the quality of the image was not so good due to technical inadequacies at the time. Benjamin Denham commented on that: ‘While the original is still compelling, because of the low-fi video, cameras have come a long way since 1985. This is the first version of Samuel Beckett’s What Where in HD. The extra resolution had its pluses and minuses. Walter was ambivalent about having the extra detail. I tried to bring back some of the analogue charm by adding a significant amount of noise to the image’ (Uhlmann, 2016). As the cameraman and editor pointed out, ‘There are subtleties and dimensions to the work that were not achievable with the technology that was available when What Where was first adapted for the screen’ (Uhlmann, 2016). By balancing the technical dimension with the ‘analogue charm’, I tried to delve as deep as possible into the condensed universality of this little piece, while remaining as true as possible to Beckett’s ambiguous poetry. Compared to the creation of the original, the human interaction in Stuttgart at every stage, the work in Sydney was a professional process with actors who had not experienced the fascination of the encounter with the author and who, except Larry Held, saw their task as doing an acting job, without me really being able to convey to them what kind of preciousness they were dealing with. And yet, hopefully, it had its values: at its best, it may have generated, if not the same, then a twenty-seven-year-younger – and thereby perhaps a crisper – result. Like a photo taken at a later date may come across with an unconsciously updated spirit in comparison to a photo of the same motif taken twenty-seven years earlier. Unless it is the other way round . . . The achievements of digital technology seemed to me like very helpful and exciting toys at the time. Beckett, always at the forefront of his time, if not ahead of it, having gone from radio to film and to television, from film to magnetic recording, would have certainly taken to them and turned them into useful tools for creating his poetic world.

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Note 1. Parts of this essay are based on notes published by the author with the title ‘All Gimmicks Gone? Notate von Walter D. Asmus’ in the journal Theater Heute in April 1986.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2010), The Lost Ones, in Texts for Nothing and other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 99–120. Beckett, Samuel (2016), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. IV: 1966–1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fehsenfeld, Martha (1986), ‘“Everything Out but the Faces”: Beckett’s Reshaping of What Where for Television’, Modern Drama, 29:2 (June), pp. 229–40. Uhlmann, Anthony (2016), What Where Film by Samuel Beckett – Film (dir. Walter Asmus) and Documentary (dir. Ben Dunham), film, (accessed 3 February 2021).

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Part III Ideas of Technology

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Chapter 12 Portals of Invention: A ‘techno-logical’ Reading of the Prometheus Figure in Beckett’s The Unnamable Thomas Thoelen

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. James Joyce, Ulysses

In Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1958), translated by the author himself from the French L’Innommable (1953), the novel’s narrator proclaims, seemingly haphazardly: ‘The fact that Prometheus was delivered twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy years after having purged his offence leaves me naturally as cold as camphor’ (Beckett, 2004, 13). The reason for the narrator’s indifference to Prometheus is, supposedly, the absence of a connection: ‘For between me and that miscreant who mocked the gods, invented fire, denatured clay and domesticated the horse, in a word obliged humanity, I trust there is nothing in common. But the thing is worth mentioning’ (13–14). Among the things summed up here, Prometheus is arguably best known for having stolen fire from the gods and presented it to humanity, an offence for which Zeus had the offender fastened to a rock on a desolate mountaintop in the Caucasus, where his endlessly regenerative liver was being torn apart by an eagle during the day, only for it to grow back by night. Nevertheless, in their genetic study of Beckett’s novel, Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller postulate that ‘The Prometheus in whom Beckett is mainly interested is the so-called Prometheus plasticator. Beckett had learned by heart Goethe’s poem Prometheus, which focuses less on the gift of light (Prometheus pyrphoros) than on the Ovidian version of the myth, in which Prometheus moulds human beings from clay’ (113). Without in any way downplaying the ample genetic evidence linking Beckett and his work to the Roman(tic) Prometheus plasticator figure(s) of Ovid (and/or Goethe),1 it is my contention in the present chapter,

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however, that Beckett’s narrator is at least as much interested in the Prometheus pyrphoros figure that is developed in the earlier, Greek versions of the myth – most notably by Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Plato. I will refer to the former two versions in passing and focus mainly on the latter, while paying special attention to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s reading of the myth in his Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998). Within this framework, the opposed figures of Prometheus plasticator and Prometheus pyrphoros shall instead be viewed as the twin faces of a single dynamic, one that – not unlike the dynamic of denaturing clay by moulding it first and heating it with fire after – corrupts all forms of human creation by the matrix of techno-logical invention. This interpretation may serve to illuminate various images from The Unnamable that cast doubt on humanity. For example, when the narrator contemplates the origins of a ‘feeble cry’ he sometimes hears in his otherwise empty and silent surroundings: ‘What kind of creature uttered it and, if it is the same, still does, from time to time? Impossible to say. Not a human one in any case, there are no human creatures here, or if there are they have done with crying’ (Beckett, 2010, 6). Indeed, it would also be in line with what Beckett in a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy from 1937 identified as the ‘idea of “inorganic juxtaposition” and “non-anthropomorphised” humanity’ (2009, 598). Before I turn to the Promethean images in The Unnamable, however, I will explore the philosophical problem at hand.

Delay In Plato’s dialogue ‘Protagoras’ (380 bce), the sophist Protagoras narrates to the philosopher Socrates the following version of the Prometheus myth: after the gods had moulded the living creatures on this earth ‘by blending together earth and fire’ (1997, 756), Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus were tasked with equipping the moulded beings with an essential power. Epimetheus, however, took the assignment wholly upon himself, and though he distributed dutifully the different powers among the animals, endowing the smaller ones with speed and the larger ones with strength, to give but a couple of examples, he overlooked the humans. Having realised only too late that he had used up all of the essential powers on the animals, Epimetheus was thus forced to leave the humans essentially powerless. It was in order to make up for this mistake, and to compensate for his brother’s lack of foresight (Epimetheus literally means the after-thinker), that fore-thinking Prometheus ‘stole from Hephaestus and Athena wisdom in the practical arts together with fire (without which this kind of wisdom is effectively useless) and gave them outright to the human race. The wisdom it acquired was for staying alive’ (757).

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But Prometheus did not so much make up for his brother’s mistake as add another to it, or so Bernard Stiegler argues. If, because of Epimetheus’ neglect, humanity did not possess an essential power or defining quality, the gift of fire, instead of filling the lack, so to speak, merely held out the false promise that humanity could still find such a quality outside itself. ‘[M]an arrives’, Stiegler writes, ‘because of something forgotten by Epimetheus, who had distributed “all the qualities,” leaving man naked, in a default of being, having yet to begin being: his condition will be to supplement this default of origin by procuring for himself prostheses, instruments’ (Stiegler, 1998, 114). Neither, however, did humanity begin to be when it thus started supplementing itself by inventing prostheses: ‘A “prosthesis” does not supplement something, does not replace what would have been there before it and would have been lost: it is added’ (152). This interpretation, it is worth noting, remains faithful to the Greek origins of the word ‘prosthesis’ as meaning ‘placed in addition’. Fire itself is, unsurprisingly, a good example. No matter how much of an integral part of human life it has become ever since it was ‘added’ by Prometheus, its qualities – as an instrument of light and heat – still and always will belong more to the fire itself, to its technicity, than to whatever is understood under the heading of so-called humanity: ‘Humanity [. . .] must invent, realize, produce qualities, and nothing indicates that, once produced, these qualities will bring about humanity, that they will become its qualities; for they may rather become those of technics’ (Stiegler, 1998, 193–4; emphasis in original). Translated from the French noun ‘la technique’, technics refers to all technical objects and practices by which human life is said to extend out into the material world, ranging from the most basic and primitive of tools and techniques, through prostheses and instruments, to the most highly advanced technologies of today: ‘Life is the conquest of mobility. As a “process of exteriorization,” technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life’ (17). The problem, then, is when – if ever – does this pursuit come to an end? The problem of the end persists throughout Beckett’s oeuvre. In a letter to the American theatre director Alan Schneider, dated 21 November 1957, Beckett offers a number of classical Greek sources as possible frameworks for making sense of the image of the ‘old Greek’ in his play Fin de partie/Endgame (1957), for the English premiere of which Schneider was rehearsing with his actors at the time: Old Greek: I can’t find my notes on the pre-Socratics. The arguments of the Heap and the Bald Head (which hair falling produces baldness) were all used by all the Sophists and I think have been variously attributed to one or the other. They disprove the reality of mass in the same way and by

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means of the same fallacy as the arguments of the Arrow and Achilles and the Tortoise, invented a century earlier by Zeno the Eleatic, disprove the reality of movement. The leading Sophist, against whom Plato wrote his Dialogue, was Protagoras and he is probably the ‘old Greek’ whose name Hamm can’t remember. One purpose of the image throughout the play is to suggest the impossibility logically, i.e. eristically, of the ‘thing’ ever coming to an end. ‘The end is in the beginning and yet we go on.’ In other words the impossibility of catastrophe. Ended at its inception, and at every subsequent instant, it continues, ergo can never end. Don’t mention any of this to your actors! (Beckett, 2014, 73) Unable to find his notes on the pre-Socratics, it may very well be the case that Beckett mistook Protagoras for Eubulides of Miletus, who is the inventor of the arguments of the heap and the bald head (see Beckett, 1992, 46–8; Feldman, 2006, 32–8; Marshall, 2012). That said, whether by accident or not, Beckett links Protagoras to the same problem as Stiegler does in his reading of the dialogue that Plato wrote against the ‘leading Sophist’: the problem that ‘there is neither middle, nor end, nor simple beginning’ (Stiegler, 1998, 264). To be sure, Stiegler does not refer to Zeno’s paradoxes of motion when suggesting the impossibility of the ‘thing’ ever coming to an end for the humans. Nevertheless, taking my cue from the juxtaposition Zeno–Protagoras–Plato in Beckett’s letter to Schneider, I would like to consider Zeno’s paradoxes in this context, pointing, as they primarily do, to the limitations of language and logic to account for movement in time. I will focus on the argument of the foot race between Achilles and the tortoise as a prime example. Predicating his reasoning on the logic of infinite divisibility, Zeno maintains that Achilles would never be able to overtake the tortoise if the latter were to get a head start for being a much slower runner: at each instant in the race when Achilles would reach the point from which the tortoise is supposed to have taken off in the previous instant, the tortoise will have had time (no matter how little) to move on to a more distant point (however close). Given, then, that every finite distance can be infinitely divided into smaller finite distances, it logically follows that the race could go on forever without Achilles ever catching up with the tortoise, the lead of the latter over the former only ever becoming infinitesimally small. Moreover, according to Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, typically regarded as a simple variation on the foregoing argument, the race could in fact not even begin: before Achilles would reach the point from where the tortoise initially took off, he would first have to reach the halfway point, and before that the halfway point to the halfway point, and so on, ad infinitum.

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There is then no first distance to be covered, which, logically speaking, is the necessary condition for the possibility of the pursuit ever beginning. Of course, one could simply value the empirical evidence of the reality of movement in the material world over the logical proof of its impossibility in the abstract world, which is what Diogenes is said to have done by standing up and leaving upon hearing Zeno’s argument, thus proving the reality of movement while also missing the point. For, by proving the logical impossibility of movement, Zeno’s paradoxes of motion do not so much disprove the reality of movement as point out the incongruence between the abstract world of language and logic, where arrows remain motionless and footraces can neither begin nor end, and the reality of movement in the material world, where arrows do or at least can hit their targets and slow runners are sooner or later overtaken by faster runners. This paradox chimes with Stiegler’s argument that humanity never truly began yet continues, ergo never ends, which he articulates not only with reference to ‘Protagoras’ but also to the paradox of writing as formulated by Maurice Blanchot. ‘The writer only finds himself’, Blanchot writes, ‘only realizes himself, through his work; before his work exists, not only does he not know who he is, but he is nothing. He only exists as a function of the work; but then how can the work exist?’ (qtd in Stiegler, 1998, 264). Just as Blanchot posits of the writer that he or she – or, better, ‘it’ – exists only as a function of the writing, so does Stiegler argue of humanity that it exists only as a function of technics, as its ‘inventor’: ‘What is true of the person who writes is true of humanity in general qua an organism that invents and produces’ (264–5; emphasis in original). The etymology of the verb ‘to invent’ offers one way of understanding this argument. Derived from the Latin verb ‘invenire’, meaning ‘to come upon, discover, find out, devise’ (OED, ‘invent, v.’), the meaning of invention is not to be confused with that of creation, which is derived from the Latin ‘creare’, meaning ‘to procreate, (of males) to beget, (of females) to give birth, (of God, Nature, etc.) to bring into being, to produce, to bring about’ (OED, ‘create, v.’). The concept of creation presupposes that the inside, the creator, exists (or is) before bringing the outside into being, before begetting or giving birth to a creation. The concept of invention, on the contrary, presupposes that the outside, the object of invention, is always already there before the inside, before the inventor comes into being. Unlike the logic of creation, which is the logic of the creator, ‘the logic of invention is not that of the inventor. One must speak of a techno-logic, of a logic literally driving technics itself’ (Stiegler, 1998, 36). Fire is once again the perfect example, having been out there in the world long before the human, so that the latter could only find it, discover its technologic – or, in the symbolic context of the myth, receive it as a gift: ‘A prosthesis

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is what is proposed, placed in front, in advance; technics is what is placed before us [la technique est ce qui nous est pro-posé] (in an originary knowledge, a mathēsis that “pro-poses” us things)’ (Stiegler, 1998, 235; emphasis in original). It is then by stumbling upon the techno-logic of fire, by finding out about its possible propositions as an instrument of light and heat (as well as a tool for making other instruments), that Stiegler believes humanity to have invented itself: ‘the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool – by becoming exteriorized techno-logically’ (141–2). Paradoxically, the inside only finds itself, only realises itself – as the inside, as the inventor – by losing itself in the outside. It is at this point that Zeno’s paradoxes become particularly relevant. Instead of, say, closing this book, standing up, and leaving the room in a Diogenes-like manner upon learning the paradoxical logic behind Stiegler’s argument – thus proving the reality of movement from inside to outside – let us pay close attention to how Stiegler formulates this argument: The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in exteriorization. [. . .] However, this double constitution is also that of an opposition between the interior and the exterior – or one that produces an illusion of succession. Where does this illusion come from? [. . .] let us say that it comes from an originary forgetting, ēpimētheia as delay, the fault of Epimetheus. This becomes meaningful only in the melancholy of Prometheus, as anticipation of death. (141–2; emphases added) Logically speaking, it is either the inside that constitutes the outside or the outside that constitutes the inside. For Stiegler, this amounts to a false dilemma, an illusion, resulting exactly from speaking logically. Techno-logically speaking, it is not at all paradoxical to say that invention moves in two opposite directions at once: ‘The interior should precede the exterior, but in fact it is constituted by the latter, which therefore precedes it. Unless they are said to precede each other, to be the same thing considered from two different but already derived points of view. We are left then with the question of movement’ (176; emphasis added). Accordingly, it is significant that Plato wrote ‘Protagoras’ in a dialogical mode, which, more explicitly than other modes of writing, is predicated on the techno-logic of writing as a medium for representing speech. If, as Stiegler posits, the idea of succession is but an illusion introduced by the double fault of Epimetheus and Prometheus, of respectively afterthought (ēpimētheia) and forethought (promētheia), delay and advance, this also implicates of course the succession in which the faults themselves are placed by Protagoras in Plato’s

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dialogue. Although narrated in logical succession, the events making up the double fault of Epimetheus and Prometheus are to be thought of as having happened ‘in a single stroke’ before the beginning of humanity, the not unimportant nuance being that this ‘stroke’ is then to be thought of as still happening, still advancing towards the beginning of humanity, and thus also as still delaying this beginning – ‘in a single movement’ (Stiegler, 1998, 152). Evidently, this line of thinking puts into techno-logical perspective also the seemingly logical idea that Protagoras orally narrated the story to Socrates before Plato wrote it down. Here, a reference must be made to Stiegler’s mentor, Jacques Derrida, for whom writing is a ‘supplement’ to human speech insofar as ‘the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void’ (Derrida, 1997, 145; emphasis in original). Note here the use of the conditional tense. To fill a void is, in short, to fill it without filling it, to keep filling it, without end, thus raising the question of when one actually begins to fill it, if ever. Note also the likeness with Eubulides of Miletus’ arguments of the heap and the bald head: when does a collection of grains become a heap, when it contains two, three, five, ten, a hundred, a thousand grains? Likewise, when is a head considered to be bald, when there are only a million hairs left, a thousand, a hundred, and so on? Nevertheless, at some point, the collection of grains becomes a heap of grains, just like the hairs falling from the head sooner or later produce a bald head. If, then, writing can be said to supplement human speech, as if it were filling a void, one could similarly ask the question: where does writing (the sign, the prosthesis) end and human speech (the thing to which the sign refers, that is being supplemented by the prosthesis) begin? ‘The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body’, Stiegler says, ‘it is the constitution of this body qua “human” (the quotation marks belong to the constitution). It is not a “means” for the human but its end, and we know the essential equivocity of this expression: “the end of the human”’ (1998, 152–3). As for Derrida, ‘There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]’ (1997, 158; emphasis in original). Beckett was also occupied with the problematic of inside and outside (the text) during the composition of L’Innommable, as genetic evidence shows (see Van Hulle and Weller, 2014, 91–4). On 9 March 1949, a good month after he had begun work on L’Innommable, Beckett wrote a letter to his friend Georges Duthuit about the work of the Dutch painter (and mutual friend) Bram van Velde, which can be read as a commentary about Beckett’s own work, as Beckett himself suggests: ‘And I shall tend irresistibly to pull Bram’s case over towards my own, since that is the condition of being in it and talking about it, and then for other reasons less easy to admit’ (2011, 139). In what follows,

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I shall argue that this condition of being in it and talking about it is the prosthetic condition, the condition of the inside finding itself only by losing itself in the outside: ‘We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough’, Beckett goes on to say about van Velde in his letter to Duthuit, ‘to grasp that the break with the outside world entails a break with the inside world, [. . .] that what are called outside and inside are one and the same’ (140).

Advance As pointed out by C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, it can be safely assumed that Beckett modelled the Prometheus passage in L’Innommable/The Unnamable on the information he encountered in the entry under ‘Prometheus’ in John Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, where a number of different versions of the myth by various authors (both Greek and Roman) are abridged into one overarching story.2 Ackerley and Gontarski’s claim is, among other things, supported by the parallel between the order in which Beckett’s narrator sums up the exploits of ‘that miscreant who mocked the gods, invented fire, denatured clay and domesticated the horse’ (2004, 13), and the succession of the different Prometheus narratives in Lemprière’s synopsis: ‘PROMETHEUS [. . .] ridiculed the gods, [. . .] stole fire from the chariot of the sun, [. . .] made the first man and woman that were ever upon the earth, with clay, [. . .] and from him they received the knowledge of taming horses’ (1842, 563–4). For the Prometheus plasticator narrative, for instance, Lemprière lists the Greek Apollodorus as his source, ‘According to [whom] Prometheus made the first man and woman that were ever upon the earth, with clay, which he animated by means of the fire which he had stolen from heaven’ (564). Lemprière also credits Aeschylus, Hesiod, Hyginus, Ovid, Horacio, Seneca, and Virgil as sources for his synopsis of the myth. In short, the rejection of Prometheus in The Unnamable refers to no Prometheus figure in particular but to an amalgam of various different Prometheus figures from different texts by different authors. As such, the reference could be seen as a prime example of what Anthony Uhlmann has called the ‘occluding image’ in Beckett’s work: ‘When an occluding image is again associated with a source, however, the link which is made, in itself, is not of primary importance. What is of primary importance is the doubling of the problem’ (2009, 68). Likewise, while Lemprière’s dictionary can be specified as the definitive source text for the image of Prometheus that is being invoked by the rejection of Prometheus in The Unnamable, the problem of a plural Prometheus figure remains.3 The ‘problem’ is further compounded when considering the following excerpt from Lemprière’s dictionary, which mainly draws from Hesiod’s poem ‘Theogony’ (c. 700 bce) and Aeschylus’ tragedy play ‘Prometheus Bound’

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(c. 460 bce), albeit in a Roman context, referring to Jupiter, Mercury, Vulcan, and Hercules, where Hesiod and Aeschylus respectively refer to Zeus, Hermes, Hephaestus, and Heracles instead: the god [Jupiter], now more irritated, ordered Mercury, or Vulcan, according to Aeschylus, to carry this artful mortal [Prometheus] to mount Caucasus, and there tie him to a rock, where for 30,000 years, a vulture was to feed upon his liver, which was never diminished, though continually devoured. He was delivered from this painful confinement about thirty years afterwards by Hercules, who killed the bird of prey (Lemprière, 1842, 564) Thus, going from Lemprière’s account, Prometheus was delivered 29,970 years before having served his full sentence of 30,000 years – not after, as is claimed in The Unnamable: ‘The fact that Prometheus was delivered twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy years after having purged his offence naturally leaves me as cold as camphor’ (Beckett, 2010, 13). Remarkably, however, the narrator of the original French text, L’Innommable, does get his facts straight – yet, interestingly, does not identify them as such: ‘Que Prométhée fût délivré vingt-neuf mille neuf cent soixante-dix ans avant d’avoir purgé sa peine, cela ne me fait bien sûr ni froid ni chaud’ (2004, 27; emphasis added). Rather than Beckett having miscalculated the numbers in Lemprière’s dictionary, therefore, the incorrect statement about Prometheus’ deliverance in the English text of The Unnamable points to an error after the information in question had already been filtered through the intermediate French text of L’Innommable. Bearing in mind that the self-translated English text highlights the presumed mistake by including the word ‘fact’ next to it, and taking furthermore into account, as documented in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, that both changes were already made in the first draft (meaning they were not undone in the subsequent versions), the possibility cannot be excluded that the false information in The Unnamable was not a mistake but the result of a deliberate mistranslation.4 But what is one then to make of the decision to mistranslate the French ‘avant’ into its English opposite ‘after’? One could perhaps go so far as to postulate that, together, the mistranslation and subsequent prolonging of Prometheus’ sufferings can be read as a self-reflexive commentary on the act of translation itself, whereby the text ‘after’ the act owns up to the offence it inevitably commits against the text ‘avant [before]’ translation. Indeed, Beckett knew all too well that, in a sense, translation is mistranslation, in that no translated text is ever wholly faithful to its source but always already a violation thereof, a compromise. For someone as notoriously unwilling to compromise as Beckett, this amounted to ‘Torture – and nothing can come of it’, or so he described the

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labour of translating L’Innommable into The Unnamable in a 1956 letter to Jacoba van Velde (2011, 658n3). Beckett worked on the first draft of The Unnamable for just short of two years – between 27 February 1956 and 23 February 1958, to be precise – which is noteworthy given that the first draft of L’Innommable took him only nine months to write, having started the process on 29 March 1949 before finishing it in January 1950. Another interpretation, therefore, could be that the mistranslation and the prolonging of Prometheus’ sufferings in the translated English text work to relate the Promethean themes of torture and suffering not only to the transgressive act of translation in general, but also to the duration of the translation process that preceded The Unnamable in particular: ‘Have started the impossible job of translating L’Innommable and gave it up the other day in loathing’, Beckett wrote to Pamela Mitchell on 12 March 1956, ‘Better stop before I start’ (2011, 606). Months later, but still more than a year before the impossible job was to reach a (first) conclusion, on 15 November 1956, Beckett similarly wrote to Jacoba van Velde: ‘J’essaie de traduire L’Innommable. Effroyablement difficile, je n’y arriverai jamais’ [I’m trying to translate L’Innommable. Horrifyingly difficult. I’ll never manage it] (2011, 684 [686]; emphasis added). In their study The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable (2014), Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller report that ‘(in the original manuscript [of L’Innommable]) the end of the novel coincides with the final page of the notebook in which the first version was written’ (28–9). Of interest here, however, is less the problem of where and when the novel ends, namely ‘did Beckett terminate the text where he did because he had come to the end of the notebook?’ (29). Rather, it is the manner in which the novel ends there and then, at the end of the notebook, the final two phrases reading: ‘il faut continuer, je vais continuer’ (qtd in Van Hulle and Weller, 2014, 176). In the published text of L’Innommable, this becomes: ‘il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer’ (Beckett, 2004, 211), but only after Beckett had finished translating the novel into English, the final phrases in The Unnamable being: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (2010, 134). In Van Hulle and Weller’s reading, the added phrase has the effect of ‘darkening the mood’ and ‘might even be seen as a sign of the travails of translation through which Beckett had passed’ (2014, 179). But why, then, add the phrase also retroactively to L’Innommable? It is intriguing to think that it inscribes the problem of the end in a most techno-logical manner: although the end of L’Innommable should precede that of The Unnamable, it is instead constituted by the latter, which thus precedes it. This, as we know, is the paradoxical movement of invention, of an advance that is also a delay, and vice versa: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.

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Returning to the mistranslation of the Prometheus passage between L’Innommable and The Unnamable, let us ponder the following for a moment: if, in both texts, the narrator trusts to have nothing in common with Prometheus, can the reader of the (mis)translated English text profess the same faith in the narrator’s statement about Prometheus as the reader of the French source text? Can one take the narrator of The Unnamable at his word when, clearly, his words are not as reliable as they are made to appear, dressed up as fact? To be clear, this is not to say that the rejection of Prometheus in L’Innommable does not raise the suspicion of the narrator’s unreliability. That said, this suspicion is arguably also nothing more than a suspicion, based among other things on the repeated suggestion that the narrator invented his story, in the sense of having fabricated it, made it up, filled it with lies: ‘Et Basile et consorts? Inexistants, inventés pour expliquer je ne sais plus quoi. Ah oui. Mensonges que tout ça’ [And Basil and his gang? Inexistent, invented to explain I forget what. Ah yes, all lies] (2004, 28; 2010, 14). Following the logic of the famous Epimenides paradox, which maintains that ‘all Cretans are liars’, the narrator’s proposition that everything in his story is false – from Basil to Mahood to Worm and beyond: ‘all lies from beginning to end’ (2010, 22) – identifies exactly one lie: the proposition itself. In The Unnamable, on the other hand, the unreliability of the narrator’s statement about Prometheus is less a suspicion than a reality confirmed by the only veritable fact (according to genetic evidence) that Prometheus was delivered thousands of years before he would have purged his offence. But perhaps it is better to refrain from using words as ‘fact’, ‘evidence’, and ‘reality’, seeing how at least one effect of the mistranslation is to undermine the logic of such words. I will therefore limit myself to the following hypothesis: that yet another effect of the mistranslation is that of putting the narrator in such a position that, on the surface level, his words announce the absence of a connection to Prometheus, while, on another level, these same words ‘invent’ the connection by raising the question of premeditated transgression, of the narrator having been deliberately wrong about his connection to that miscreant who mocked the gods: ‘I knew, I knew when I transgressed nor will deny it,’ Prometheus confesses after having been nailed onto the rock in Aeschylus’ tragedy ‘Prometheus Bound’ (1959, 321). ‘What discourse could avoid naming fiction as an origin or speaking of the origin in terms of fiction (if not in a fictive way)?’, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe asks in his seminal essay ‘Typography’. ‘How would it be possible for the figure of engenderment to have not always figured the engenderment of the figure? Or vice versa?’ (1998, 128). For Lacoue-Labarthe, this is the problem of mimesis (from mimeisthai, to imitate), which ‘is not, as is repeated endlessly [in Plato’s Republic],

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principally a problematic of the lie, but instead a problematic of the subject (one can scarcely see what other word to use), and of the subject in its relation to language’ (125; emphasis in original). Throughout the second part of this chapter, I have tried to show how the figure of Prometheus in L’Innommable/The Unnamable suggests the logic of mimesis, of art imitating nature (and vice versa), and of Beckett’s narrator trusting to have nothing in common with that (other) wilful wrongdoer, to be inseparable from the techno-logic of invention, a matter of truth, of scientific discovery, as much as it is of the lie, of fiction. If nothing else, Lacoue-Labarthe would appear to agree: ‘And if, as we see, the problematic of the lie is indeed subordinated to the question of fictioning and fiction (all fiction is at bottom a “lie” – even true fiction), it is because mimesis actually begins effectively to be at play in the very production of fiction’ (131; emphasis in original). As he writes elsewhere: ‘imitation is one of the earliest inventions, as old as nature itself’ (1990, 83).

‘like a kindling fire, a dying fire’ ‘Beckett’s texts invent their own precursors’, Daniela Caselli writes (2005, 4). If this chapter has succeeded in its purpose, arrived at its end, so to speak, it should be possible to count Prometheus pyrphoros among those precursors. It should also be understood why Caselli did not write that Beckett invented his precursors, but instead that Beckett’s texts do, that is, invent their own precursors: as we saw via Stiegler (and Blanchot), the logic of invention is not (only) that of the inventor, of the writer; one must (also) speak of a techno-logic, of a logic driving the writing itself, as it were. I have tried to demonstrate in my reading of the Prometheus passage in L’Innommable/The Unnamable that there is something to be gained from recognising this techno-logic so as to allow for the techno-logical voice of the writing to ‘go on’ inventing where, logically speaking, the writer cannot: ‘Perhaps I’ll even end up, before regaining my coma, by thinking of myself as living, technically speaking’ (Beckett, 2010, 63). Van Hulle and Weller’s focus on the figure of Prometheus plasticator does not prevent them from acknowledging the techno-logic of the narrator’s rejection of Prometheus in L’Innommable/The Unnamable: ‘The reference to Prometheus first suggests a correspondence with the “I”, which is then emphatically denied, but, of course, once the connection is suggested it cannot simply be erased’ (2014, 113). On the basis of a crossed-out sentence in one of the manuscripts of L’Innommable, Van Hulle and Weller furthermore postulate that ‘the narrator is fully aware of this movement’, which they believe ‘is evidenced by the – perhaps appropriately erased – sentence “Mais je le mentionne

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quand-même”’ (113). As interesting as the erased sentence is in its own right, however, it should not be considered separately from the sentence that did make it into the published text(s): ‘Mais la chose est à signaler’ [But the thing is worth mentioning] (Beckett, 2004, 27; 2010, 14). Unlike the crossed-out sentence, which suggests the narrator to have mentioned Prometheus in spite of knowing that the possibility of a connection cannot be undone once the name Prometheus is incorporated into the body of the text, the new sentence suggests that the narrator decided to do so precisely because of the multitude of associations and correlations the name Prometheus would inevitably bring about, even if there is no connection as such. And sure enough, the narrator keeps setting up other (false) leads to that miscreant who kept on mocking the gods long after having been nailed to a rock on some desolate mountaintop in the Caucasus, waiting for the bird of prey to arrive, all the while ‘looking out on the silence, straight out, why not, all this time on the brink of silence, I knew it, on a rock, lashed to a rock, in the midst of silence, its great swell rears towards me, I’m streaming with it, it’s an image, those are words’ (Beckett, 2010, 129–30).

Notes Research for this essay was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). I would like to thank Christophe Collard and Douglas Atkinson for providing guidance on previous versions of this work. 1. For a study of the Romantic Prometheus figures in Beckett’s work, see Van Hulle (2007). 2. Ackerley and Gontarski write of the Prometheus passage in L’Innommable/ The Unnamable that ‘SB took these details from Lemprière. The English translation reads (oddly) “after having purged his offence,” whereas the French says “avant d’avoir purgé sa peine”; SB’s marginal calculation arrives at 29,970 years. SB admired Goethe’s “Prometheus” and the figure of one who, punished for having revolted against the Gods, will not cease from cursing them’ (2004, 457). 3. It is interesting to note the similarities to the figure of Sisyphus in Beckett’s work. According to Pim Verhulst, this figure was also (partly) modelled on the information in Lemprière’s dictionary, which Beckett ‘distorts a little’ when taking notes, among other things by ‘slightly exaggerating Lemprière’s words’, thus leading Verhulst to conclude that Beckett ‘was more interested in the image of Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill than in the exact details of the circumstances’ (2009, 117–18).

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4. That the mistranslation of the Prometheus passage was left uncorrected between the multiple drafts of the self-translated text of The Unnamable is even more remarkable when considering that, as documented by the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, a number of revisions were made to other parts of the passage.

Works Cited Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press. Aeschylus (1959), ‘Prometheus Bound’, in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (eds), The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 311–51. Beckett, Samuel (1992), The Theatrical Notes of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: Endgame, ed. S. E. Gontarski, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2004), L’Innommable, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Beckett, Samuel (2009), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2010), The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2011), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckett, Samuel (2013), ‘L’Innommable/The Unnamable: A Digital Genetic Edition’, The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project: Module 2, ed. Dirk Van Hulle, Shane Weller and Vincent Neyt, Brussels: University Press Antwerp (ASP/ UPA), (accessed 21 August 2019). Beckett, Samuel (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957–1967, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caselli, Daniela (2005), Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. ‘create, v.’ (2019), Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (accessed 22 May 2019). Derrida, Jacques (1997), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feldman, Matthew (2006), Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’, New York: Continuum.

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‘invent, v.’ (2019), Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (accessed 22 May 2019). Joyce, James (1986), Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, New York: Vintage Books. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1990), Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1998), ‘Typography’, in Christopher Frynsk (ed.), Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 43–138. Lemprière, John (1842), ‘Prometheus’, in Classical Dictionary, London: T. Allman, pp. 563–4. Marshall, Richard (2012), ‘Reloading Beckett’s Philosophical Libraries’, 3:AM Magazine, (accessed 15 September 2019). Plato (1997), ‘Protagoras’, in John M. Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works, trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, London: Hackett, pp. 746–90. Stiegler, Bernard (1998), Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Uhlmann, Anthony (2009), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Hulle, Dirk (2007), ‘“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 18, pp. 15–29. Van Hulle, Dirk and Shane Weller (2014), The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Verhulst, Pim (2019), ‘“A thing I carry about with me”: The Myth(s) of Sisyphus in Beckett’s Radio Play All That Fall’, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, 31, pp. 114–29.

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Chapter 13 Technology and the Naive Artist: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape Michael D’Arcy

In his seminal 1985 book Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler makes the following claim about phonograph recording of the human voice: As a photograph of the soul, the talking machine put an end to the innocent doctrine of innocence. Circa 1800 innocence was a historical-philosophical limit concept; it referred to a region it itself made impassible. [. . .] Although this loss of the soul’s identity with itself had been attributed to the progress of the human race or to the division of labor, it resulted, in the final analysis, simply from the technological impossibility of storing the newly discovered voice in any form except that of writing. [. . .] Circa 1900, by contrast, the builders of automatons had carried the day. There was no longer any innocence below the recording threshold [. . .]. But the innocence that comes into being where bodies and media technologies come into contact is called flight of ideas. (Kittler, 1990, 238) The 1880 notion of innocence, or naiveté, develops in conjunction with a media system, or what Kittler calls a ‘discourse network’ (Aufschreibesystem), predicted on hermeneutics, the book, and literacy. This version of naiveté, elaborated most famously by Friedrich Schiller in ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ (1795), is characterised by the absence of reflection and self-consciousness, by simplicity, naturalness, directness, and is exemplified in Homer’s epic poetry. In contrast to this notion of naiveté, Kittler has in mind a displacement of the human subject that occurs with a mutation in the media network on or about 1900 – a posthermeneutic Aufschreibesystem that develops with emerging technological media (such as the gramophone and film). Encapsulating the post-humanist impulse of this account, Kittler writes in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, ‘so called man

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becomes physiology on the one hand and information technology on the other’ (1999, 46). Basic outlines of this scenario are visible in many critical accounts of Samuel Beckett’s reflections on technology and media. Readings of Beckett’s most explicit address to media technology, his 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape, have echoed Kittler’s work in their sense that Beckett’s play stages a displacement of the human subject that occurs with the intervention of the technology of the tape recorder (see Lloyd, 2016, 133–6, for a relatively recent reading that proceeds along these lines). The account of Wolfgang Ernst presents perhaps the starkest post-humanist, post-Kittlerian version of this play. Ernst recruits Beckett’s play in support of his thesis that the twentieth century witnesses a replacement of the time of human culture (narrative time, historical chronology) by the time of technological media, which introduces new modes of measuring and recording time, obviating the centrality of the human subject. In Krapp’s Last Tape we witness ‘a fundamentally new chronopoetics’: ‘The previously common cultural triad of past, present, and future has been’ superseded by ‘a new temporal reality (Zeitreal) based on the microtemporal logic of electronic circuits’ (Ernst, 2016, 114). The media theory referenced above has come under critical scrutiny in various ways – for its isolation of technology from its socio-economic context, its assumption that technologies are stable entities rather than varying according to specific historical situations, and for its lack of attention to the role of human subjectivity in determining the significance of technologies (see Gitelman, 2006, 8–11; Hayles, 2005, 33–6). My interest in what follows is to develop a reading of Krapp’s Last Tape that responds to some of these problems that have been raised in the wake of post-humanist media theory. More specifically, and to return to my point of departure, I will argue that what Kittler dismisses as obsolete in the opening citation – the notion of innocence that circulates circa 1800 – provides a path to consider how Beckett’s play develops a mode of autonomy that intervenes in a particular historical situation. But the notion of artistic naiveté of concern here departs in important respects from Schiller’s conception. My interest then is to track a revised understanding of artistic naiveté, an understanding that emerges in the modernist period, broadly considered (from the late nineteenth century). This modernist naiveté provides a crucial framework to understand what is at stake in Beckett’s meditation on technology. In the intellectual cohort treated here (Nietzsche, Horkheimer, and Adorno), reflection on the category of artistic naiveté involves thinking about epic narrative, which follows from Schiller’s conception of Homer as the paradigmatic naive artist. In view of this connection between narrative and modernist naiveté, my discussion will initially proceed by examining

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how Beckett’s reflections on technology in Krapp’s Last Tape are intimately involved with this play’s thinking about inherited narrative forms.

‘Separating the grain from the husks’ Critical discussions of Krapp’s Last Tape have typically linked the technologically assisted memory in this play to a disruption of temporal or narrative continuity. Narrative continuity and the associated sequential temporality are either explicitly seen as obsolete, as in the account of Ernst, or implicitly considered as irrelevant to the play, given its focus on technology’s capacity to transport the subject between disparate temporal locations (see Maude, 2009, 60–9 for an example of this second critical tendency). But, especially if we consider the resonances between Krapp’s Last Tape and Beckett’s French fiction written in the 1940s, it is striking how reflection on forms of narrative continuity remain central to the play. Narrative, its status and particular manifestation at mid-century, is a preoccupation of Krapp’s Last Tape. This reflection on narrative form is carried out principally through the portrayal of Krapp’s travails as a writer. His work of narrative is first indicated in the tape recording made by the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp. In this recording (which the audience and the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp listen to), the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp describes celebrating his birthday: Celebrated the awful occasion, as in recent years, quietly at the Winehouse. Not a soul. Sat before the fire with closed eyes, separating the grain from the husks. Jotted down a few notes, on the back of an envelope. [. . .] The grain, now what I wonder do I mean by that, I mean . . . [hesitates] . . . I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has – when all my dust has settled. (Beckett, 2006, 217; emphasis in original) The thirty-nine-year-old Krapp goes on to speak of embarking on a new ‘retrospect’, and this recording is apparently one such project. Krapp’s recorded voice characterises what he is doing as looking ‘back on the year that is gone’ (219). This quiet scene of narration is in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s famous conception of poetry as taking ‘its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (Wordsworth, 1992, 756), a conception that Beckett alludes to at several points in his oeuvre.1 Molloy, for example, also indicates this fusion of the ‘tranquillity’ of writing with retrospective autobiographical narration. The narrator of the first section of the novel states, ‘It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and

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with no less impertinence’ (Beckett, 1958, 25). These passages from Molloy and Krapp’s Last Tape both turn on, and are linked by, a series of associations – retrospective autobiographical narration is associated with tranquillity and an incomplete distancing from past emotion; the standpoint of retrospective narration is associated with a partial or anticipated death of the narrating subject; the writer is compared to God, and through this comparison Beckett frames the ex post facto adjudication of significance that has been seen as a hallmark of narration. In his 1936 essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’, Georg Lukács states that narration involves a retrospective perspective that ‘permits the selection of the essential after the action’ (2005, 129). Involved here then is a secure distinction between the standpoint of narration and the action recounted in the narration, a distinction Lukács describes as a ‘necessary distance in narration’ (129). Such retrospective adjudication of significance is clearly one thing that Beckett is getting at in his evocation of Krapp’s writing. Beckett’s play suggests at once the ongoing relevance of this particular narrative project and its tenuousness or imminent extinction. Krapp’s compositional method, as indicated in the recording made by the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp, is to listen to recordings of ‘retrospects’ he made in the past, as a preparation for the production of a new narrative: ‘Just been listening to an old year, passages at random. [. . .] These old P.M.s are gruesome, but I often find them – [KRAPP switches off, broods, switches on.] – a help before embarking on a new . . . [hesitates] . . . retrospect’ (Beckett, 2006, 218). The secure distance between the scene of narration and the narrated past, which Lukács sees as a sine qua non of narration, is evoked in these recorded comments spoken by the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp (‘thanks to God that it’s over’) and in the comments of the sixty-nine-year-old version of this character we see on the stage (‘Thank God that’s all done with anyway’) (218, 222). But Beckett’s play asserts this distance, between the present of narration and the narrated past, only to undermine it, principally through the operations of a technologically assisted memory. By the end of the play, Krapp’s compositional method has apparently backfired, at least for the purposes of the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp’s narrative project. He interrupts the production of his current narrative to re-listen to the ‘retrospect’ he recorded thirty years ago. The play leaves him entranced and passive in the face of the memory provided by the ‘gruesome’ technologically assisted ‘P.M.’, unable to complete his ‘retrospect’. Krapp’s production of narrative has apparently come to an end, or become a thing of the past. Seen in these terms, Krapp’s Last Tape appears as an end-of-art narrative, a distant echo of Hegel’s canonical version of such narrative or, more recently, that provided by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

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Beckett’s play recalls the latter intervention specifically insofar as the scenario of the end of art involves a descent of subjectivity into a passivity and distraction associated with emerging (twentieth-century) media technologies involving electronic transmission and mechanical reproduction. In fact, though, the play leaves in suspension the fate of Krapp’s narrative art. Within the diegetic world of the play, Krapp may or may not go on to produce more narrative ‘retrospects’. What Adorno says about the ending of Endgame is applicable, mutatis mutandis, to the conclusion of Krapp’s Last Tape: ‘No spectator, and no philosopher, would be capable of saying for sure whether or not the play is starting all over again’ (1991, 269). The very title of the later drama plays on this ambiguity – as ‘last tape’ can be taken to refer to either the latest or the final narrative recording produced by Krapp. Whether or not Krapp’s narrative production is at an end, whether or not the play presents the definitive ending of such production or merely its latest version, we are confronted with the question of the relationship between this narrative and the media technology of concern to the play. On one reading, as discussed above, Krapp’s Last Tape portrays a replacement of narrative and its temporality with the time of electronic media. The time of human culture is replaced by the time of technology. But the structuring opposition in this reading, between forms of narrative continuity and technologies of electronic transmission, does not do justice to the complexity of Beckett’s reflections. To make a somewhat obvious point, narrative and the operations of electronic recording technology are not simply opposed in this play, given that tape recording is a principal medium for Krapp’s narrative ‘retrospects’. As Beckett’s play makes clear, Krapp’s narrative, his retrospective ordering of his experience, can occur in various media – for example, inscribed on envelopes or recorded on a tape. Given this aspect of the play, electronic recording technology appears as a neutral element in the contest between narrative continuity and its interruption. This is not to say that this play’s reflections on media technology are irrelevant to its thinking about narrative forms. But what is needed is a framework to consider how literary forms are penetrated by the technological conditions of their historical situation, considered as intrinsically involved with the specific socio-economic relations of this situation. These claims take their bearings from Adorno’s influential theorisation of the logic whereby modern art both absorbs and resists the forms of rationality of its historical context, but in the following reading of Krapp’s Last Tape I want to do something different than just produce another Adornian reading of Beckett. My purpose, rather, is to develop a framework to explain how Beckett and Adorno come to similar conceptions of narrative, with the proviso that this thinking about narration is a linchpin for the development of modes of thought that respond to the historical conditions of

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mid-twentieth-century capitalism, including the current state of technological evolution. And the category of the naive artist, somewhat counter-intuitively, will emerge as central to late modernism’s elaboration of forms of thought that may both integrate and transcend their historical conditions.

‘Slow killings’ To develop these arguments, I want to attend initially to an aspect of Beckett’s work that has intrigued and puzzled commentators – an investment in the denial of painful psychic material (see Barry, 2006, 65–92). This is a scenario that goes back to Beckett’s early critical writing on Proust, where Proustian involuntary memory is cast as an intrusion of an intolerable and painful reality. Implicitly aligning involuntary memory with suffering, Beckett writes of Proust’s novel, the pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering – that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of artistic experience, and Boredom [. . .] that must be considered the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils. (Beckett, 1970, 16) What Beckett calls the ‘intolerable brightness’ of involuntary memory (52) is thus a sine qua non of artistic experience, with the complication that voluntary memory (which Beckett aligns with boredom and habit) appears preferable to the revelation of involuntary memory. That which restricts access to reality – voluntary memory, boredom, habit – attains a certain privilege. Krapp’s Last Tape revisits this conception, with some alterations. Krapp’s ‘gruesome’ technologically assisted memory, conceived as an aid to narrative composition, recalls Beckett’s scenario of suffering as a basis of artistic experience. But Beckett’s play also indicates revisions to this understanding of artistic experience. Krapp’s ‘gruesome’ memories are not fully involuntary, given that he seeks out and cultivates such memory through his listening sessions and choice of recordings. The aleatory nature of involuntary memory has been dissipated, or at least reduced, by the time we come to Krapp’s Last Tape. Memory has been brought under the aegis of artistic intentionality. At the same time, as indicated above, the play’s conclusion presents an opposition between Krapp’s narrative production and his affectively charged memories. In Krapp’s Last Tape, that which frustrates or opposes narrative form is conceived of as psychic material, but if we widen our lens here to chart the development of this conception in Beckett’s work, other dimensions of this opposition come into view. In ‘The Calmative’, narrative appears as a defence against a scenario of physical disintegration and violence:

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I’m too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart, the tearings at the caecal walls, and for the slow killings to finish in my skull, the assaults on unshakable pillars, the fornications with corpses. So I’ll tell myself a story, I’ll try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself. (Beckett, 1995, 61) The elaboration of this scene of writing furthers this opposition between violence and the defensive operation of narrative: ‘I’m no longer with these assassins, in this bed of terror, but in my distant refuge’ (62). The ‘distant refuge’ of the narrator of ‘The Calmative’, which appears as the setting for the calmative of his narration, looks forward to the refuges that serve as the setting of Krapp’s ‘retrospects’ – his den or the quiet Winehouse. These portraits of narration are also linked by their repetitive, habitual nature, which – to frame this in Proustian terms – aligns them with voluntary memory, rather than the revelation of involuntary memory. Krapp’s retrospective narrations are repeated annually on the same day (his birthday) and follow the same procedure – he makes notes on envelopes and listens to recordings he made in the past as a preparation for his recorded ‘retrospects’. This habitual dimension of narrative is also anticipated in ‘The Calmative’ as the story’s narrator describes how his father would calm him by reading the same story ‘evening after evening’ (Beckett, 1995, 64). In this passage from ‘The Calmative’, that which narrative resists or defends against is conceived of in terms of unwanted physical deterioration and psychic material. At the same time, the language here is incongruous, given that it is more appropriate to the history of war, displacement, and genocide that Beckett had lived through just before composing this story. There is here apparently a transposition between inner and outer violence and devastation. This fluidity between psychic and historical experience is also suggested if we consider aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, a body of thought that Beckett explicitly appeals to in his book on Proust and which has been recognised as orientational for Beckett’s work.2 According to Schopenhauer’s conception, we become aware of the inner nature of the world, conceived of as a blind, unconscious force (that is, will), by interpretation of nature such as it is experienced within us, in our bodies (Schopenhauer, 1969, 2:191–200). Beckett’s Proust indicates his engagement with Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as will, conceived of as an absence of reason or consciousness (Beckett, 1970, 68–9). This account of Proust’s work evokes a reduction of human beings to physical processes and self-preservation, a reduction echoed in the above-cited passage from ‘The Calmative’. A number of questions are raised by this connection between Beckett’s conceptions and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, complications that cannot be

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addressed here. But the takeaway of the preceding discussion is just that Krapp’s ‘gruesome’ memory, that which frustrates and interrupts narrative form in this play, cannot be confined to the register of psychological interiority. Connecting this play’s treatment of memory and narrative to what we see elsewhere in Beckett’s work suggests that a history of violence is indexed by Krapp’s ‘gruesome’ psychic materials. If we consider how Schopenhauer has been taken up in theoretical accounts of instrumental reason, we can reframe this history in different terms, which will return us to the question of technology. Both Horkheimer and Adorno have connected Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of the will to the tendency to domination of capitalist society, which these authors see as especially manifest in the postliberal capitalism of the twentieth century. In his 1967 essay ‘Schopenhauer Today’, Horkheimer writes: ‘What Schopenhauer declared about individuals – that they are an expression of the blind will to existence and well-being – is at present becoming apparent with regard to social, political and racial groups in the whole world’ (1974, 83; see also Adorno, 1993, 82). Schopenhauer’s view of reason and the intellect – ‘the intellect is a function of the struggle for existence in individuals and in the species’ (Horkheimer, 1974, 74) – is harnessed by Horkheimer to frame the tendency to domination inherent in the instrumental reason of capitalist society, that is, in the reduction of reason to serving the interest of utility and self-preservation. It is here that we come back to the question of technology, given that at points Horkheimer and Adorno virtually equate instrumental reason with technology. Describing the convergence between domination and rationality intrinsic to instrumental reason, Horkheimer and Adorno write in Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. [. . .] Technology is the essence of this knowledge’ (2002, 2). Adorno would clarify this line of thought, the apparent equation between technology and the domination of instrumental reason, in a 1968 talk, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’: ‘It is not technology that is the catastrophe but its imbrication with the social relations that embrace it. We should merely remind ourselves that it is the concern for profit and domination that has canalized technological development’ (2003, 118). While Adorno is commonly associated with a dismissal of mass culture and the technological apparatuses that are central to it (especially film), it is clear that particular technologies per se are not the target of his criticism, even if he saw film as presenting particular challenges for the possibility of aesthetic rationality. Rather, the ‘catastrophe’ is the appropriation of technology for purposes of social domination, control, and manipulation. That Adorno saw technology as amenable to other forms of reason (besides the dominating form of rationality of instrumental reason) is indicated by his attempts to

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articulate a mode of aesthetic rationality for the cinema, and more broadly his insistence that artistic forms absorb the socio-economic conditions of their historical context, including the current state of technological innovation in the extra-aesthetic sphere (1997, 34). This excursus through Critical Theory allows us to frame a social and historical context that is implicit in the reflections of Krapp’s Last Tape and in Beckett’s French fiction that preceded it. Following from the above discussion, there are two different versions of technology that could be gleaned from Beckett’s play. If technology is equated with instrumental reason (reason in the service of Schopenhauer’s blind will to self-preservation and domination), then technology lines up with the irrational (inner or outer) ‘real’ (to use Beckett’s term from Proust) – for example, with Krapp’s ‘gruesome’ memory that disables narrative production, or with the ‘slow killings’ referred to in ‘The Calmative’. Clearly, however, to leave things at that is not any more acceptable for Beckett than it was for Adorno. As we have seen, for Beckett, emerging media technology may very well align with an irrational ‘real’ that disables narrative continuity. Such technology may also, however, become a medium for the persistence of narrative continuity. The opposition between narrative and technology, which structures some analyses of Krapp’s Last Tape, has been replaced by an opposition between narrative continuity and its disruption by an irrational ‘real’, conceived of in psychic or social terms. While this might seem like a loss of specificity, the above discussion provides a framework to understand how Krapp’s Last Tape is penetrated by the technological conditions of its moment, understanding these conditions as inseparable from a context of instrumental rationality. But the lingering question here is how, if at all, Beckett’s work also resists this context of his art.

The Naive Artist According to the model framed above, narrative form in Beckett’s work functions as a fragile defence against the intrusions of an irrational and painful ‘real’. While this operation appears delusional or doomed to failure, it could also be seen as a mechanism of resistance to integration into the irrationality that threatens Beckett’s narrative form. This dynamic in Beckett’s work becomes more visible if we connect this conception of narrative to Schopenhauer’s aesthetic thought. Schopenhauer casts aesthetic contemplation as delivering a temporary respite from the strivings of the will and the attendant suffering that characterise existence. The artist’s contemplation is not able to abolish the will but only provides a temporary consolation or forgetting of ‘the cares of life’ (1969, 1:267). This temporary deliverance from life anticipates and, given

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Beckett’s assiduous reading of Schopenhauer, most likely inspires Beckett’s vision of narrative form as a calmative or provisional shield against an inner or outer reality of suffering and violence. This vision of aesthetic distancing might seem like an aestheticist disavowal of art’s involvement with its social and political context, but Schopenhauer’s notion of aesthetic contemplation is amenable to another understanding. In his Aesthetic Theory (1970) Adorno enlists Schopenhauer’s conception in support of his understanding of the modern artwork as involving the interpenetration of autonomy and heteronymy, of distance from and dependence on a world that is repudiated (1997, 137–8). The narrative operations traced above in Beckett’s work function similarly insofar as they cannot be reduced to a denial of reality. In addition to this function of denial, Beckett’s narrative also admits the irrationality and violence indexed by Krapp’s ‘gruesome’ memories. This double movement is suggested by Krapp’s compositional method – his deliberate cultivation of exposure to the painful psychic material provided by his listening sessions, and his attempt to narratively distance himself from this material.3 This internally conflicted model of narration may appear characteristic of Beckett, but it is also visible in other late modernist reflections on narrative, notably in Horkheimer and Adorno’s recourse to thinking about epic and novelistic language as a way of imagining a way forward for genuine enlightenment. In the Odysseus Excursus of Dialectic of Enlightenment such language is privileged as a means of escape from the entrapment of mythic enlightenment, one version of which is the reduction of enlightenment to instrumental reason and corresponding modes of technological control. Epic and novelistic narrative, which are effectively identified here, become a haven of ‘hope’, a venue for the fleeting appearance of a ‘semblance of freedom’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, 61–2). But this critical resistance provided by epic and novelistic language, or what Horkheimer and Adorno call ‘epic naiveté’, is inseparable from its exposure to the irrationality involved in the reduction of enlightenment to mean-ends rationality and the accompanying tendency to domination. In a short commentary, ‘On Epic Naiveté’, composed in 1943 as part of the preparation of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno see this exposure of ‘epic naiveté’ in terms of a ‘manic obsession’ that looks ‘into the abyss’ (Adorno, 1991, 27).4 As in Beckett’s conception, narrative thus at once incorporates and resists a regressive form of rationality involving blind (non-rational) self-preservation and domination. But Horkheimer and Adorno add a twist here. Homer’s narrative language undoes a bad version of enlightenment, but this language also replicates the dynamics of this dominating form of reason, and in particular the abstraction and ‘coldness’ of instrumental rationality (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, 61). Narrative art’s incorporation of its irrational context extends to the language of

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such art, and literary forms are thus conceived as intrinsically unstable, mutable, and perishable. But involved here is not simply an equation between literary forms and a regressive form of enlightenment. Homer’s language, like Adorno’s artwork more generally, mimics the dominating mode of enlightenment rationality, thus introducing a critical perspective on this mode, and it is according to this logic that narrative language can be conceived of as mounting a critical resistance to its social context. This aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno’s narrative theory makes explicit a dimension of Beckett’s reflections on narrative and technology. Beckett’s scenario of narrative neutralisation of negative affect, which is coterminous in Krapp’s Last Tape with a failing project to bring narrative closure to his experience, involves imposing rational organisation and control on this experience. In this regard, Krapp’s narrative production partakes of the dominating form of reason described by Horkheimer and Adorno. Considered in these terms, Beckett’s vision of the end of art, such as it is presented in Krapp’s Last Tape, is not best conceived of in terms of an extraneous threat to literary forms posed by socio-economic processes, extra-aesthetic forms of rationality, or technological changes. Rather, Krapp’s narrative art undoes itself, given its constitutive involvement with such social forces, possibly bringing itself to the point of extinction. In the space that remains I want to elaborate a framework to account for the commonality in the two conceptions of narrative under consideration here. Horkheimer and Adorno start their reading of Homer in Dialectic of Enlightenment with a short discussion of Nietzsche’s version of Homer (2002, 36–7) and this puts us on the track of an intellectual background that also informs Beckett’s thinking about narrative – a line of thought that proceeds through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s adaptation of Schopenhauer in his account of the quintessential naive artist, Homer. Tracking these connections explains why the category of artistic naiveté, a revised, twentieth-century version of such naiveté, becomes orientational for late modernism and its engagement with technology. To substantiate these claims it is necessary to linger briefly with Nietzsche’s understanding of artistic naiveté. Developing Schiller’s conception, Nietzsche deploys the notion of naive art as part of his criticism of the artificiality, fragmentation, and excessive rationalism of European culture since Socrates. Nietzsche sees the alternative to this artificiality in the natural expression of artistic genius, which he understands as a species of naiveté: genius, Nietzsche writes in his essay ‘David Krauss, the Confessor and the Writer’, ‘possesses the privilege of expressing itself simply, naturally and with naivety’ (2016, 46). Nietzsche does not restrict artistic naiveté to a pre-modern (Ancient Greek) past; rather, naiveté, as a defining characteristic of artistic genius, is a perpetual possibility. Nietzsche appeals explicitly to Schiller in his account of artistic naiveté in The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1999, 24), but

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a series of distinctions enters the discussion of artistic naiveté with Nietzsche, distinctions which recommend this version of naiveté as a prototype for midtwentieth-century conceptions of aesthetic autonomy and cognition. Contrary to Schiller’s formulation, Nietzsche does not see naiveté simply as a given state of idealised (moral) nature. Rather, Nietzsche casts artistic naiveté as an achievement of culture, a product of effort and struggle. On this account, artistic naiveté, exemplified by Homer, is situated on the side of Apolline illusion, seen as ‘employing powerful delusions’ in order to overcome pessimism (Nietzsche, 1999, 24). If naive art is an achievement of culture, then Nietzsche moves the category of naiveté beyond Schiller’s understanding of the naive artist as receptive and objective, as the antithesis of the productive and autonomous subject of modernity. This move anticipates Horkheimer and Adorno’s reconfiguration of Homer’s epic naiveté as a mode of enlightenment. The point here is not just that the category of naive art is shifted to the side of modern autonomy and productivity, given that Horkheimer and Adorno see naive artistic form as a mode of cognition permeated by the irrationality of its historical context, including the appropriation of technology for purposes of domination, and thus as congenitally exposed to the loss of autonomy characteristic of mid-twentieth-century capitalist society. At issue here is a tenuous and compromised version of artistic autonomy and in this regard Nietzsche’s naive artist again appears as a crucial precursor. Nietzsche’s conception of the naive artist balances a dimension of individuation and the cancellation of individual will. On the one hand, the Homeric naive artist is aligned with individuation and self-control, in keeping with its status as exemplary of Apolline culture. On the other hand, Nietzsche argues that all art, including the naive, involves a release from subjectivity, ‘the falling silent of all individual willing and desiring’ (1999, 29). Nietzsche describes the naive artist as ‘lost in contemplation’ of the redemptive appearance, linking this particular aesthetic contemplation to a reduction of consciousness, conceived of in terms of dreaming and forgetting (25–6). This version of the naive artist thus involves a complicated negotiation of productivity and passivity, of assertion and selfrelinquishment. Nietzsche’s account raises the possibility of seeing the naive not simply as an absence of freedom, as the antithesis of the subject of modernity. The ambiguous balancing of assertion and self-relinquishment operative in Nietzsche’s conception anticipates late modernist attempts to frame modes of aesthetic autonomy in the historical conditions of mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Nietzsche’s understanding of artistic naiveté is fused with late modernism by a shared sense of the irrational context for art. The complicated assertion-self-relinquishment of Nietzsche’s naive artist anticipates the oxymoronic intentional relinquishment of control, the

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ambiguous descent into passivity, that characterises Krapp’s encounter with technology. These conceptions, moreover, share an intellectual background, given that they are both revising Schopenhauer’s model of aesthetic contemplation as providing a temporary release from the irrationality and suffering of existence. Krapp’s technologically assisted (and threatened) narrative forms can thus be read as analogous to Nietzsche’s naive deluding image. Both procedures are working out a function of artistic form as distinct from an irrational reality. At the same time, just as Beckett’s narrative form is constitutively exposed to and involved with an irrational ‘real’ of suffering and violence, a similar dynamic informs Nietzsche’s understanding of the naive Apolline artist: ‘he was bound to feel [. . .] his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden ground of suffering and knowledge’ (1999, 27). Nietzsche’s naive art is at once based on this ‘ground of suffering’, a version of Schopenhauer’s world as will, and predicated on the overcoming or denial of this ground, and this version of naive art is thus intrinsically unstable and threatened (28). In this regard, Nietzsche’s naive art also anticipates central dynamics of Krapp’s narrative art, namely its congenital tenuousness and the ongoing undecidability about its extinction. The fragile formal (narrative) resistance I have been tracking under the category of modernist naiveté may be considered as a response to the mass cultural environment of late modernist art, and in particular the dynamics of cinematic spectatorship and its technologically enabled structures of manipulation and control. This chapter, however, has attempted to broaden the purchase of late modernist naive form, seeing it as a tenuous mode of aesthetic autonomy that both integrates and resists a particular kind of rationality that has been seen as ascendant in this period, rationality yoked to the imperatives of utility, self-preservation, and domination. To claim this level of generality for Beckett’s critical intervention would seem to fly in the face of the particularity in which Krapp’s Last Tape is apparently invested – whether this is seen as the particularity of a personal experience or of reflection on specific narrative forms and technologies. But one could also see this gravitation to particularity, and the accompanying eschewal of theoretical generality, as intrinsic to a naive artistic procedure. Naive art, after all, has been conceived of as running contrary to the abstraction of European culture, whether on the accounts of Schiller, Nietzsche, or Horkheimer and Adorno. That Beckett shared this defining orientation of naive art is indicated by his critical comments on abstract modes of language and thought, dating from his early writing on Joyce. Moreover, if modernist artistic naiveté, as characterised in this chapter, appears as a minimal and fragile mode of critical resistance to

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an irrational historical context, this is congruent both with Beckett’s sense of engagement with his historical moment and with the specific and limited nature of his political interventions.5 Beckett’s 1961 comment to Gabriel d’Aubarède, ‘I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling,’ may be considered, as Emilie Morin has argued, as a counter to Sartre’s conception of the engaged public intellectual (Morin, 2018, 19). But this comment is also redolent of the modern discourse of artistic naiveté inaugurated by Schiller, and to situate Beckett’s work as a particular late modernist version of artistic naiveté, as I have done here, indicates that such naiveté is intrinsically an operation of critical intervention.

Notes 1. Wordsworth’s autobiographical poetry has been linked with eighteenthand nineteenth-century paradigms of narrative development, such as the Bildungsroman. See, for example, Abrams (1971, 73–80, 225–37). 2. Beckett’s enthusiastic reading of Schopenhauer, and the importance of the German philosopher for his work, has been well documented in the critical literature. For an overview of Beckett’s engagement with Schopenhauer, see Van Hulle and Nixon (2013, 143–51). 3. This paradoxical procedure appears elsewhere in Beckett’s work, especially in his early French fiction (see ‘The Expelled’, in Beckett, 1995, 46–7). 4. This account of narrative language, and its relationship to the forms of reason of its social context, is an early formulation of a central dynamic of Adorno’s conception of the artwork that is elaborated most fully in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. 5. On Beckett’s political engagement and the nature of his interventions, see Morin (2018, 22–3).

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. (1971), Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, New York: Norton. Adorno, Theodor [1958] (1991), Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, Theodor [1963] (1993), Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor [1970] (1997), Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Adorno, Theodor [1969] (2003), ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society’, in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 111–25. Barry, Elizabeth (2006), Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beckett, Samuel (1958), Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel [1931] (1970), Proust, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (1995), The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel [1986] (2006), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Ernst, Wolfgang [2012] (2016), Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media, trans. Anthony Enns, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Gitelman, Lisa (2006), Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (2005), My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horkheimer, Max [1967] (1974), ‘Schopenhauer Today’, in Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lectures and Essays Since the End of WW II, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al., New York: Seabury Press. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno [1944] (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich [1985] (1990), Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich [1986] (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wurtz, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lloyd, David (2016), Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lukács, Georg [1936] (2005), ‘Narrate or Describe?’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn, London: Merlin Press, pp. 110–48. Maude, Ulrika (2009), Beckett, Technology, and the Body, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morin, Emilie (2018), Beckett’s Political Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich [1872] (1999), The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich [1873–6] (2016), Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiller, Friedrich [1795] (1985), ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, in H. B. Nisbet (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winkelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 180–232. Schopenhauer, Arthur [1819, 1844] (1969), The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover Publications. Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon (2013), Samuel Beckett’s Library, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wordsworth, William [1798] (1992), Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Chapter 14 Beckett’s Invisible Matter: Echo, Technology and Posthuman Affect Ruben Borg

A peculiar affect attaches to the theme of technology in Beckett. Alongside the familiar investment in aboulic characters, in minimal stirrings of life drained of will and desire, we recognise in his writing a signature indulgence in excessive emotion. Its main signposts: a play on invisible matter, a dramatic configuration of body, voice and machine, and a preoccupation, sustained throughout his work, with the myth of Echo. The pathos poured into Krapp’s tape recordings is perhaps the most striking example of this thematic knot. But subtler and more revealing expressions of the connection between affectivity, technology and the Echo myth are found elsewhere – for instance in the impersonal rhythms of Rockaby, in the choreography of Footfalls, or in the near impossible staging of Not I. In all three texts, technology is part of the formal construction without being represented or thematised directly, a prominent but unseen feature of Beckett’s work. Not I dresses Mouth with an ‘Invisible microphone’ (Beckett, 2006, 376); in Footfalls, May’s pacing routine is famously set to the tick-tock of a ‘metronome’ (Asmus, 1977, 85); and Rockaby requires the rocking of the chair to be ‘Controlled mechanically without assistance from W’ (Beckett, 2006, 434). More than a prop, technology in these works is kneaded into the subject’s environment. It connects visible and invisible realities, inner motion and material change. Time and again we recognise its ghostlike presence in subtle manipulations of space; in mechanical rhythms that encroach on the body and determine its movement; or in a reversal of the values of firstness and secondariness that traditionally attach to the relation between original speech and its technical reproduction, as in Rockaby, where W echoes her own recorded voice. On this last point – indeed on all three points – it is Not I that provides the most interesting case study. I should like to begin my discussion of the play by

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focusing on the image of the ‘Invisible microphone’, at once a marginal detail in Beckett’s original stage script and, incidentally, a figure for the pairing of voice and technology on the Beckettian stage. It straddles the boundary between theatrical prop and stage direction. It begins life as an unseen object, but quickly transforms into an abstraction, a cypher for the impossible coordination of voice, body and stage space. It projects a voice that is simultaneously amplified and hushed, pathetic and colourless, frantic and dying, intensely physical yet disembodied. And in a sense it is also a metonym of Mouth herself: Mouth as character and mouth as body part.

‘Invisible microphone’ In her autobiography, Billie Whitelaw offered an invaluable backstage record of the experience of performing Not I, documenting the extraordinary physical and psychological toll taken on her by the role: I didn’t realise until much later that with the two seasons of Not I, I had inflamed an already damaged spine and neck. Performing in that play, all the tension that went to the back of my neck also aggravated the vertigo and nausea I’d had in my early twenties. I’d come to terms with this: the damage is something I’m stuck with. In fact, every play I did with Beckett left a little legacy behind in my state of ill-health, a price I have most willingly paid. (Whitelaw, 1995, 131) This testimony has been echoed by Lisa Dwan in numerous public lectures, newspaper interviews and articles.1 A list of injuries sustained during the run includes pulled muscles, cuts to the face and ears, scabs, migraines, temporary loss of vision, serious damage to the neck, and a hernia caused by the requirement to push out air violently while firing words at the audience at unsustainable speed.2 Dwan singles out two elements of the production as particularly punishing: the first is Beckett’s instruction that the monologue be delivered ‘at the speed of thought’ (2013b), while the second, a part of the set design, is best described as a stocks-like contraption, effectively a harness to which the actor must remain strapped for the duration of the performance in order to keep her head suspended in complete immobility. Both the harness and the instruction to speak at the speed of thought plug into a broader discussion of staple Beckettian themes. Far from being incidental elements of Dwan’s staging and performance, they fix the spatial and temporal coordinates of the play and give concrete expression to its treatment of voice in relation to materiality. Like the harness, the conceit of an impossibly

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accelerated, strangely amplified voice contributes to a radical misshaping of the body. No longer a shared matrix of human experience, the body is torn up, pushed against extreme spatial and temporal limits, its rhythms and geometries bent into less than organic form. In order to unpack this image, it is necessary first to consider the strange pairing of speed and immobility as it relates not only to key elements of the play’s performance text – the choreography, the rhythms and the interaction between body parts on and off stage – but also to the pathos invested in Mouth’s monologue, the network of themes and allusions, and what we might still call the referential action. Several commentators have drawn attention to the meta-theatrical implications of Beckett’s treatment of space and time in the play. Beckett’s turn to dramatic form in the late 1940s is often identified with a progressive retreat from representation and a movement towards an increasingly material, non-referential art of space and body. Steven Connor, for one, discusses Beckett’s use of stage space as a rejection of the metaphysical distinction between concrete and abstract reality, an attempt as it were to grapple with the immediate physicality and the irreducible thereness of the theatrical event. Beckett’s theatre, Connor argues, ‘eschews the ambition of representing anything but itself’, and appears to seek the ‘convergence of the space that the plays represent with the actual theatre space in which they are performed’ (1998, 142). Yet that same drive towards unmediated physical presence is somehow countered by the insistence of a technologically mediated moment. This is especially evident in Beckett’s writing for TV, which consistently ‘refuses or complicates the sense of the physical as natural or given’ (160). But it is also true, in a more general sense, of his manipulation of theatrical space.3 In line with this reading is the stage direction that has Mouth suspended ‘about 8 feet above stage level’ (Beckett, 2006, 376). As several critics have noted, this detail ensures that the scene is not easily recuperated to the more familiar representation of a fully embodied speaking subject. In Derval Tubridy’s words, the ‘speaking mouth has no body, at least none which the audience can discern since the location of the mouth [. . .] in no way approximates the location of the mouth of any speaking body on stage’ (2018, 88). Similarly, for Dirk Van Hulle Not I ‘presents Mouth as a body part that is a prosthesis in and of itself. By separating the Mouth from the rest of the body the TV version even intensifies the idea of this body part acting as the voice’s instrumental mouthpiece’ (2009, 50). The salient point here is that Beckett’s stagecraft offers a check to the anthropomorphic imagination. But in doing so it also invites a reflection on the relation between the body as an organic whole, and the body as a disorganised collection of parts. Even as the lighting and staging props present a mouth suspended in mid-air, detached from the rest of the face, the harness

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speaks to a state of inescapable embodiment and to an experience of the body as an unsurpassable limit. In this connection, we must consider the actor’s immobility in Not I as an overdetermined feature of the play’s treatment of space. First, it re-inscribes the pathos of confinement and inescapable physicality within a scene that appears, at face value, to foreground lightness and disembodiment. Secondly, it stands in dramatic contrast to the frenzied activity of the mouth, an obscene spectacle onstage. Complicit with the lighting cue that makes everything around the mouth invisible, immobility helps establish the detachment of the part from the whole. From this perspective, it obeys the same logic and fulfils the same function as the invisible microphone. As the latter amplifies the voice, immobility brings the lips, teeth and tongue into stark relief. Finally, it lends itself to an allegorical reading, wherein we recognise in the extreme passivity of the actor’s frame an original and irreducible condition, a more general passivity that sets up Mouth’s relation to the rest of the face, and to the rest of the body. This is a passivity inherent in all figuration, predicated of all things that fall into the background, predicated of the background itself. It is the very ability to be affected, an elemental disposition by which we are first given to enter into relation with the phenomenal world. Speed is the easier element to unpack, relating as it does to the activity of the mouth onstage. It concerns the movement of the lips and the quality of the voice. But speed is also a significant detail of the story of Not I. It gestures beyond the time and space of performance to a time and space encoded in the monologue’s network of references. The drama of Not I is that of a voice that surprises the ear, of a speech that stirs suddenly, and of a monologue delivered in extremis: when suddenly she realized . . . words were- . . . what? . . who? . . no! . . she! . . [Pause and movement 2.] . . . realized . . . words were coming . . . imagine! . . words were coming . . . a voice she did not recognize . . . at first . . . so long since it had sounded . . . then finally had to admit . . . could be none other . . . than her own (Beckett, 2006, 379) Here the speed Beckett required of Whitelaw’s delivery is more than a test of the actor’s breathing, and more than an assault on the spectator’s nerves. Mouth’s speech is not simply fast; it is hurried. Its desperate pace inscribes within the action of the play a sense of impending mortality. We learn that Mouth has awakened to a ‘stream of words’ (380) sometime around her seventieth year, having been ‘speechless all her days’ (381). The speech is compulsive, but also terminal, delivered as if to make up for lost time. Central to this thematic score are two intertextual figures. The phrase ‘so long since it had sounded’ (379), combined with the staging of a ‘faintly lit’

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form (376), and the premise of a voice brought back to life after a long silence, recall Virgil’s first appearance to Dante in Inferno I, an allusion that recurs across Beckett’s body of work: Mentre ch’i’ rovinava in basso loco, dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu offerto chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco. [While I was falling down into a low place, before my eyes one had offered himself to me who through long silence seemed hoarse.] (Alighieri, 1996, 28–9)4 Daniela Caselli comments on the significance of this tercet for Beckett, dwelling in particular on the semantic complexity of the last line with its puzzling conflation of visual and acoustic detail. Robert Durling translates ‘fioco’ as ‘hoarse’ (Alighieri, 1996, 29), but the more accurate gloss would be ‘faint’ or ‘feeble’: In the critical tradition of the Comedy, ‘che per lungo silenzio parea fioco’ is usually interpreted as an ‘acoustic metaphor’, as a translation of ‘a phonic emotion into a visual one’ to indicate a blurred image surfacing from the surrounding darkness as if from a long absence. (Caselli, 2005, 124) The ambiguity, as Caselli notes, befits Virgil’s status as a shade, his being not of this world. Dante’s initial difficulty in perceiving the faint image is as much an indication of the state of his soul, an allegory of his remoteness from the poetic and spiritual ideal represented by the classical poet, as a reflection of the latter’s liminal existence, his ‘ghost-like appearance [. . .] translated into the image of the threshold between speechlessness and voice’ (124). The allusion expands the restricted world of Not I, gesturing beyond the stage space and the time of performance, and complicating the semiotics of a text that, by all accounts and in every other aspect of its construction, calls for minimal colour, minimal connotation and minimal expression. ‘Less colour’, as Billie Whitelaw recalls (qtd in Gussow, 1996, 84), was Beckett’s frequent recommendation to his actors when aiming for a more restrained emotional tone. In the case of Not I, the use of that expression to mean a quality of voice resounds ironically with the lines from Canto I, reminding us that the very same compression of visual and phonic data admired in Dante’s tercet was central to Beckett’s conception of the play. The ‘faintly lit’ mouth (Beckett, 2006, 376), the breathless delivery, the pathos of a speech produced with great difficulty after a prolonged silence – all reverberate with the memory of that famous

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literary precedent. Even the description of Mouth’s monologue as a ‘stream of words’ (380) echoes Dante’s apostrophe of Virgil as the wellspring of ‘a river of speech’ [‘Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte/che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?’] (Alighieri, 1996, 30–1). But if Dante’s metaphor is meant to convey the expansive character of Virgil’s rhetoric after the first weakness is overcome, Beckett’s phrase points ironically to a compulsive, unstoppable logorrhoea. The second key intertext I wish to draw attention to here is the story of Echo. For the time being, it will suffice to say that allusions to Echo and Virgil in the play are entirely complicit – that they form a kind of palimpsest. Both figures stress the disconnection between voice and body; both render the voice as weakened or weakening, and imagine an unsubstantial self, suspended between presence and absence. Less obviously, and perhaps more importantly for my argument, both Virgil and Echo are associated with the theme of love, but a pathetic love, experienced as loss or longing. In Virgil’s case, it is the knowledge of being banished from God’s grace, a dignified despair he shares with other souls in limbo. In Echo’s story, it is a hopeless, unrequited desire. Beckett invokes these associations as cues to the thematic and the affective content of the play. We hear them ironised first in Mouth’s own repeated professions of the absence of love in her life, a condition she happily accepts, even welcomes, as a small mercy: ‘so no love . . . spared that . . . no love such as normally vented on the . . . speechless infant . . . in the home . . . no . . . nor indeed for that matter any of any kind . . . no love of any kind . . . at any subsequent stage’ (Beckett, 2006, 376). In Beckett this theme is almost always bound up with the question of God’s mercy: that notion of punishment . . . which had first occurred to her . . . brought up as she had been to believe . . . with the other waifs . . . in a merciful . . . [Brief laugh.] . . . God . . . [Good laugh.] . . . first occurred to her . . . then dismissed . . . as foolish . . . was perhaps not so foolish . . . (Beckett, 2006, 377) This is to say that the solace Mouth finds in the absence of love corresponds to the small measure of comfort that comes of evading an all-seeing, allsustaining, ultimately judgemental gaze: ‘God is love . . . she’ll be purged . . .’; and again a few lines down, ‘God is love . . . tender mercies’ (381). And yet this acceptance of the comforts of lovelessness and invisibility strains against the urgency signalled by the compulsive character of Mouth’s speech, and by the intense physicality of her situation. We are tempted to hear, in the breathless delivery, an appeal for community, for attention, for ‘a gesture of helpless compassion’ (375). Perhaps the play’s sharpest irony rests in the way it dramatises this double bind in Mouth’s impossible relation to her own speech.

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Mouth experiences her words at a remove, yet the sentiment that animates them could not be more real, nor the physical presence behind them more immediate. The allusion to Echo – and the use of intertextuality more generally – amplifies this paradox, redoubles it at the level of staging and story. Simultaneously apposite and tonally incongruous, the effect is of a borrowed emotion added to the already heightened emotional intensity of a bruisingly physical performance.

Mind, Matter and Affect The idea that Beckett’s writing is characterised by a mechanical or machine-like emotion is not new. Over the last ten years, the critical conversation around this theme has been shaped by a series of responses to Martha Nussbaum’s claim that Beckett’s work is permeated by feelings of disgust and guilt at the realities of the flesh. Nussbaum speaks, to be precise, of ‘a peculiar movement in Beckett’s talk of emotions [. . .] from a perception of human limits to a loathing of the limited, from grief to disgust and hatred, from the tragedy and comedy of the body to rage at the body, seen as covered in excrement’ (Nussbaum, 1988, 251). Rightly or wrongly, she associates this indulgence in negative affect with a certain moral and psychological hollowness that attaches to character motivation and agency in the writer’s fiction: Beckett’s people are heirs of a legacy of feeling that shapes them inexorably. They cannot help being shaped in this way, and they feel like ‘contrivances’, like machines programmed entirely from without. (250) Arguments against this interpretation gathered momentum in Beckett scholarship with the publication in 2011 of two seminal articles, by Linda Ben-Zvi and Jean-Michel Rabaté, both delivered earlier that year as keynote lectures at the Out of the Archive international conference in York. Nussbaum’s main fault, according to her critics, is a failure to attend to the rhetorical complexities of Beckett’s writing, those elements of literary form (rhythm, cadence, alliteration, intertextuality, irony, humour) that cannot be reduced to a univocal philosophical statement. As Ben-Zvi observes, Nussbaum may be correct in emphasising disgust as the dominant affect in Beckett, but in ignoring the subtle modulations of his use of language, especially his humour, she remains tone-deaf to the redemptive, even joyous vein that runs through his engagement with abject matter (see Ben-Zvi, 2011, 684). Rabaté’s commentary is even more trenchant, billing Nussbaum’s focus on Beckett’s religious sensibility as a case of ‘bad literary criticism. We are given either reductive or unfounded religious readings or

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simplistic psychoanalytic readings rehashing platitudes about the mother, the father, and the debasement of libido’ (Rabaté, 2011, 704). Many scholars have taken this critique on board. Yet, over the last ten years, the discussion of Beckettian affect has continued to hew close to the lines set by Nussbaum’s analysis. In particular, her suggestion that Beckett’s characters ‘feel like [. . .] machines programmed entirely from without’ (1988, 250) still orients posthumanist approaches to his work.5 I should like to fill in the critical background to the argument I develop here by distinguishing three complementary perspectives: 1) A techno-historicist angle, highlighting the influence of late industrial mechanics and second-order cybernetics on modernist thought, and drawing out their resonance in Beckett’s work; 2) An exploration of the significance of mechanical processes and machine imagery in Beckett’s representations of mind and matter; and, by extension, a look at the impact of technology on his engagement with questions of imagination, sense-perception and embodied experience; and 3) A study of the textual-materialist dimension of Beckett’s art – rhythm, repetition, genetic materials – to emphasise the correspondences between mechanised inspiration and human compositional process. A key figure, for all three strands, is Katherine Hayles, whose pioneering work invites us to think of the posthuman turn historically, as an event precipitated by advances in late twentieth-century cybernetics, but also philosophically as a critical engagement with questions of embodiment, cognition and virtual experience in the digital age. Hayles takes issue with a fantasy of digital immortality, which transhumanist mythologies were far too quick to embrace: the idea that it should be possible in some near future, as human environments become increasingly cybernetic and empirical reality is reduced to information, to dematerialise the self altogether, to digitise consciousness and remove it from the inconveniences of embodied experience. The critique is, at heart, anti-Cartesian, and feeds into a broader discussion of the relation between virtual bodies and artificial intelligence. In Hayles’s own words, the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. [. . .] When Moravec imagines ‘you’ choosing to download yourself into a computer, thereby obtaining through technological mastery the ultimate privilege of immortality, he is not abandoning the autonomous liberal subject but is expanding its prerogatives. (Hayles, 1999, 286)

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The argument offers up the posthuman as a fitting historical context to Beckett’s experiments with passivity and diminished agency. Indeed I would argue that any discussion of the commonalities between Beckett and posthuman theory must engage with these quintessentially Beckettian themes – must consider the extent to which the progressive encroachment of technology on human environments informs modernist discourses on the exhaustion of the individual will and illuminates narratives about the limits of spiritual and physical ability. Building on this approach, but extending the field of inquiry beyond the cybernetic and digital ontologies explored in Hayles’s book, Andrew Gaedtke offers a compelling account of the impact of communication technologies on the treatment of mental illness in late modernist fiction. His reading of Beckett centres in particular on the writer’s interest in schizophrenia, and on his turn to radio, ‘a medium heavily entangled in modernist experiences of radical mental illness’ (Gaedtke, 2017, 154) and a uniquely apt platform from which to explore the symptoms that characterise schizophrenic delusion – not only a figure but a technological instantiation of a psychic space traversed by voices, a mind so far extended into the world as to have lost its mooring in any sense of inner self. Radio, Gaedtke observes, ‘became a means by which schizophrenic experiences of auditory hallucination, depersonalization, and a loss of ego boundaries could be narrated and rationalized’ (175).6 My own contributions to the debate (Borg, 2012 and 2019) have focused on the phenomenological paradoxes encoded in Beckett’s figurations of posthumous life.7 Beckett’s fictions, I suggest, adopt and radicalise a typically modernist reflection on the status of technology as a condition of historical change. This is to say, first, that the insistence on mechanised movement in his work puts pressure on protocols of representation that still rely on a dialectical distribution of reality between the spiritual and the material order. (Viewed as a meta-historical force, technology is precisely what occupies the middle ground between nature and culture.) And, secondly, that it complicates the entire system of values that equates freedom with interiority – and interiority with moral agency and a talent for self-determination. Within this interpretive framework we must consider the machinic affect Nussbaum associates with Beckett’s characters not as the symptom of a diminished humanity, but as the mark of a structural change in the history of subjectivity – and more precisely, a change in the historical articulation of those existential grammars one associates with post-Enlightenment models of being in the world. Alys Moody speaks similarly of ‘an affect that neither emanates from nor belongs to a subject – an inhuman affect’ (2017, 93). Focusing on a series of textual and rhythmic effects in Ping, she points to the way in which Beckett’s

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writing systematically overturns humanist expectations regarding the status of emotions as a shared dimension of human experience. Beckett’s text, Moody argues, ‘stages affect neither as an irreducibly personal response, nor a quintessentially human one, but instead as the point at which human and machine, feeling and meaning, logical and aesthetic form blur into indistinction’ (95). The experiment hinges on a ‘disconnection of affective surface from sensemaking’ (91), and disables the very idea of emotion as positive narrative content, as something to be represented and signified. All three approaches outlined above lend themselves to a broader critical and methodological application, aligning the study of affect with textual (or indeed medial) materiality and with what remains unrepresentable in a literary work. Notably, Beckett’s attention to rhythm as a privileged dimension of rhetorical performance dovetails with his depiction of the body as a broken down, dis-organised unit. In addition to locating the production of affect in the realm of the unsignifiable and the unrepresentable, rhythm plays precisely on the conjunction of the impersonal and the bodily. It fills a space between bodies, unfolds compulsively, drives movement and alters moods. It speaks to the unity of sense experience when it accompanies choreographed gestures, but wanes mechanical as it breaks down into simple, punctuated segments. We recognise this dynamic across Beckett’s work, as a characteristic feature of his engagement with that radical ontology that comes under the heading of a posthuman turn in modernism. Indeed, to the extent that it disassembles bodies and disables the distinction between organic and inorganic forms, the foregrounding of a technologically determined environment in Not I finds a thematic anchoring in the overdetermined status of Mouth as character, as body part and as obscene prosthesis. It is not enough, then, to say that Beckett’s attention to machine life goes hand in hand with the supersession of Enlightenment definitions of the human; or even that a posthuman-modernist ontology underpins the exploration of a machinic affect in his work. Rather, we must look at how Beckett’s treatment of affect is bound up with his figural strategies and with an exploration of the material-andspiritual processes that condition those strategies; how it is also always a redrawing of the human body, an interrogation of its ability to interact with its surroundings, to shape space, to process manifold sense perceptions into unified experience, and ultimately to constitute itself as the ground of such a process.

‘The Whole Machine’ The critical conversation sketched out above highlights the difficulties of a precise techno-historical reconstruction of the continuities between modernism and

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posthuman thought. If Hayles’s narrative rightly points to late twentieth-century cybernetics as a paradigm-shifting event in the emergence of the posthuman subject, Gaedtke’s discussion of Beckett’s turn to radio at once complicates that periodisation and raises the philosophical stakes: from a history of Mind that comes into its own with the promise of artificial intelligence and distributed cognition, to a discourse on mental illness wherein modernity confronts its own limit in the form of an increasingly porous subjectivity.8 Beckett’s use of the Echo/Virgil palimpsest in Not I – and more generally, the recurrence of the Echo myth across his entire body of work – plainly reinforces this point. It condenses many of the themes associated with a modernist prefiguring of posthuman ideas: it combines the motif of a disembodied voice compelled to interminable speech with an image of hollowed-out interiority, and it cues the narratives of ‘thought broadcasting’ that critics identify with Beckett’s use of radio. But, more than anything else, it is the heightened affectivity signalled by the myth that defines the technological situation of Not I, and that, notwithstanding a date of composition squarely coinciding with the cybernetic turn, aligns it with an earlier modernist ontology. Two details in Mouth’s monologue seem directly to indicate her awareness of the technological environment surrounding her, namely a repeated reference to a buzzing sound ‘in the ears’ or ‘in the skull’ (Beckett, 2006, 378), and mention of a ‘machine’ (378, 380) that seems to stand for the apparatus of the face as a whole. It is important to note that both details come into relief when the text approaches the possibility of Mouth’s proprioception, or when it touches on what little relation to self she is able to afford: gradually she felt . . . her lips moving . . . imagine! . . her lips moving! . . as of course till then she had not . . . and not alone the lips . . . the cheeks . . . the jaws . . . the whole face . . . all those- . . . what? . . the tongue? . . yes . . . the tongue in the mouth . . . all those contortions without which . . . no speech possible . . . and yet in the ordinary way . . . not felt at all . . . so intent one is . . . on what one is saying . . . the whole being . . . (Beckett, 2006, 379) The references to a ‘whole face’ and a ‘whole being’ strike a jarring note here, especially when viewed in connection with the strategies of self-effacement, fragmentation and avoidance of any sense of plenitude that govern Mouth’s rhetoric. Yet the continuation of the passage clarifies that the feeling of wholeness, like love, is one Mouth can only contemplate through its absence. The point is pressed further when the attribute is metonymically transferred from the order of organic life (being, face) to that of a machine:

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but this other awful thought . . . oh long after . . . sudden flash . . . even more awful if possible . . . that feeling was coming back . . . imagine! . . feeling coming back! . . starting at the top . . . then working down . . . the whole machine . . . but no . . . spared that . . . the mouth alone (Beckett, 2006, 379–80) The phrase ‘the mouth alone’ redoubles the visual impact of the mise en scène and tempts us, for a moment, to close the gap between the figure on stage and the object of her recollection. But it is the metaphor of the machine that organises the figural and logical relations internal to the text. The weight of the passage hangs precisely on the tension between whole and part, between an intuition of the Self as unitary being, and an experience of the face reduced to bits of disassembled machinery: tongue, lips, jaws, cheeks – and elsewhere, ears, eyelids and skull. This dynamic aligns with Van Hulle’s description of Mouth as a ‘prosthesis’ or an ‘instrumental mouthpiece’ (2009, 50). Beckett himself famously characterised Mouth’s speech as ‘a purely buccal phenomenon without mental control or understanding, only half heard. Function running away with organ’ (Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 283). The image of the face as a disassembled machine lends evidence to these views. More importantly, it speaks to the connection between Beckett’s figural strategies, his treatment of the body, and the ontological underpinnings of his work. That is to say, it indicates a peculiar understanding of the immanence of the body within the phenomenological field. Key to both a modernist and a posthuman imaginary, the paradox of a mouth that experiences its face as a machine presses the question of how the body constitutes itself – of how it builds itself from multiple parts, from part to whole, as the ground of perception. The challenge, in thinking through this strange pairing of affectivity and mechanical existence, is precisely to reimagine the machine as a model for the self-constitution and self-organisation of matter. I am reminded, in this connection, of the use of close-up in Fernand Léger’s 1924 film Ballet Mécanique, a striking illustration of a certain high modernist investment in the body as a collection of parts. In Léger’s visual language, rhythm is deployed as pure machinic affect, a reduction of material reality to its primary, self-organising procedures. The purpose is to emphasise the objectal character of body parts, to abstract the fragment to the order of pure form, and place the hand, the legs and the face on a single ontological plane as a clock, or a piston ring, or a cylinder.9 Beckett’s machine aesthetic is different: not nearly so exuberant about the possibilities of merging the mechanical and the organic, nor so obviously enamoured with the association of technology and modernity. In Not I, the disassembled body never ceases to be flesh.10

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Ultimately, what best defines the technological environment explored in the play is the intuition that the mechanisation of affect inherent to the modernist experience, does not abstract the body but penetrates the phenomenological field, alters it, at the hyletic and formal level simultaneously. As mentioned, the metaphor of the machine concerns not only the relation of whole to part and of part to whole, but also the status of the body part as detached fragment or self-organising matter. It is fitting, too, that the reference to a proprioceptive faculty, including the description of the return of feeling, follows a measured, gradual process, an awareness of movement first, ‘gradually she felt . . . her lips moving’ (Beckett, 2006, 380), a faint stirring, then the urge to imagine, and finally the dreaded sensation of being given to thought: ‘that feeling was coming back . . . imagine! . . feeling coming back!’ (380). In describing Mouth as ‘a purely buccal phenomenon’ (Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 283), Beckett meant primarily to emphasise the identity of image and voice, and to sever the runaway organ from any semblance of interiority or self-relation. But the metaphorics of the machine in Not I bring a different aspect of that same expression into relief: Beckett’s interest in the phenomenality of the disassembled body, that is to say, of matter captured in the moment of its emergence to view, and of the image in the process of its materialisation.

Notes 1. In the same vein, Dwan likens her meeting with Billie Whitelaw, in 2006, to an encounter between ‘two shell-shocked war veterans’ (2013b). 2. The experience is recorded by Dwan in two articles written for the Guardian (2013a and 2014), and again in interviews with Tim Masters for the BBC (2013b), with Sarah Hemming, published in the Financial Times (2015), and with Eben Shapiro for the Wall Street Journal (2016). Note, in particular, Dwan’s account of Whitelaw’s recollection: ‘When I met Billie in 2006, we bonded immediately [. . .] She recalled what Beckett had told her: “You can’t go fast enough for me”’ (2013a). 3. On the nuances of reading Not I as a remediated text – between literary script, theatrical performance and TV – see Dirk Van Hulle (2009). 4. This is a notoriously difficult tercet to translate. Robert Durling’s version, cited here, has the merit of being faithful to the original almost word for word; but it sacrifices rhythm and poetic effect. I offer Robert Hollander’s more elegant variant for comparison: ‘While I was fleeing to a lower place,/Before my eyes a figure showed, faint, in the wide silence’ (Alighieri, 2002, 7).

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5. See, in particular, Borg (2012) and Moody (2017). And for a posthumanist reading that develops Ben-Zvi’s and Rabaté’s critiques see Walsh (2015). 6. Steven Connor comes to this theme from an overtly materialist perspective, noting that Beckett’s references to radio in fact tend to problematise the traditional conception of radio space as an analogue of psychic space: ‘Beckett’s radio worlds are indeed highly interior, and many critics have been tempted to see the principal use of the sensory deprivation or sensory concentration of radio as affording Beckett an opportunity to focus undistractedly on the interior workings of the mind’ (2014, 66). Yet, Connor argues, Beckett seems far more interested in that aspect of radio that seems to unmoor utterance from origin: ‘the emphasis is not upon the space which radio occupies or constitutes, but rather on its emergence from nothing and nowhere. It is in radio that Beckett seems to have found the possibility of writing without ground’ (67). 7. See, in particular, my reading of ‘Echo’s Bones’ in Chapter 4 of Borg (2019). 8. It is worth stressing that the engagement with psychological disorders described here also entails a complication of Cartesian ontologies – precisely, an interrogation of the pre-eminence of reason in modern thought, a refusal of the body/mind distinction, and a modernist discourse on Mind that incorporates, and is unbalanced by, its own material and conceptual limitations. 9. Léger elaborates on his project in a brief essay published shortly after completing the film: ‘consider, if you please: a pipe – a chair – a hand – an eye – a typewriter – a hat – a foot, etc., etc. [. . .] In this enumeration I have purposely included parts of the human body in order to emphasize the fact that in the new realism the human being, the personality, is interesting only in these fragments and that these fragments should not be considered of any more importance than any of the other objects listed. The technique emphasized is to isolate the object or the fragment of an object and to present it on the screen in close-ups of the largest possible scale. Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before and in this way it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power. I maintain that before the invention of the moving picture no one knew the possibilities latent in a foot – a hand – a hat’ (1926, 7–8). 10. Indeed, as Jonathan Boulter observes, ‘Beckett’s characters may be posthuman but they are not fully postcorporeal [. . .] there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only understand herself and her world through the medium of a decaying, painful, body’ (2008, 15; emphasis in original).

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Works Cited Alighieri, Dante (1996), Inferno, trans. Robert Durling, New York: Oxford University Press. Alighieri, Dante (2002), Inferno, trans. Robert Hollander, New York: Anchor Books. Asmus, Walter D. (1977), ‘Practical aspects of theatre, radio and television: Rehearsal notes for the German premiere of Beckett’s “That time” and “Footfalls” at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin’, trans. Helen Watanabe, Journal of Beckett Studies, 2, pp. 82–95. Beckett, Samuel [1986] (2006), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel and Alan Schneider (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ben-Zvi, Linda (2011), ‘Beckett and Disgust: The Body as “Laughing Matter”’, Modernism/modernity, 18:4, pp. 681–98. Borg, Ruben (2012), ‘Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity’, Journal of Modern Literature, 35:4, pp. 163–80. Borg, Ruben (2019), Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite, Leiden: Brill. Boulter, Jonathan (2008), Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Continuum. Caselli, Daniela (2005), Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Connor, Steven (1998), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text, Oxford: Blackwell. Connor, Steven (2014), Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dwan, Lisa (2013a), ‘Beckett’s Not I: How I Became the Ultimate Motormouth’, The Guardian (8 May), (accessed 1 December 2019). Dwan, Lisa (2013b), ‘Not I: Lisa Dwan’s Record Speed Beckett’, interview by Tim Masters, BBC News (12 May), (accessed 1 February 2020). Dwan, Lisa (2014), ‘“She taught me that truth has a sound”: Lisa Dwan on Billie Whitelaw’, The Guardian (22 December 2014), (accessed 1 December 2019).

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Dwan, Lisa (2015), ‘Interview: Lisa Dwan’, interview by Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times (15 May), (accessed 1 December 2019). Dwan, Lisa (2016), ‘Actress Lisa Dwan Retires a Bruising Beckett Role’, interview by Sarah Hemming, The Wall Street Journal (22 March), (accessed 1 December 2019). Gaedtke, Andrew (2017), Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gussow, Mel, (ed.) (1996), Conversations With and About Beckett, New York: Grove Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Léger, Fernand (1924), Ballet Mécanique, Paris: Synchro-Ciné. Léger, Fernand (1926), ‘A New Realism – The Object’, The Little Review, 11:2, pp. 7–8. Moody, Alys (2017), ‘A Machine for Feeling: Ping’s Posthuman Affect’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 26:1, pp. 87–102. Nussbaum, Martha (1988), ‘Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love’, Ethics, 98:2, pp. 225–54. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (2011), ‘Beckett’s Three Critiques: Kant’s Bathos and the Irish Chandos’, Modernism/modernity, 18:4, pp. 699–719. Tubridy, Derval (2018), Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Hulle, Dirk (2009), ‘The Urge to Tell: Samuel Beckett’s Not I as a Texte Brisé for Television’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 18:1–2, pp. 44–56. Walsh, Kelly S. (2015), ‘Revising the Human in Samuel Beckett’s Aesthetic Education’, Trans-Humanities Journal, 8:1, pp. 47–72. Whitelaw, Billie (1995), Billie Whitelaw . . . Who He? An Autobiography, London: Hodder and Stoughton.

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Chapter 15 Digital Poetics and Digital Hermeneutics in Beckett Studies: Toward a Manuscript Chronology Dirk Van Hulle

The main question this chapter addresses is: How can digital tools – such as a digital edition – be usefully deployed in Beckett Studies, notably in terms of poetics and hermeneutics? From a structuralist point of view, Jonathan Culler defined these terms as follows: ‘Poetics starts with attested meanings or effects and asks how they are achieved. [. . .] Hermeneutics, on the other hand, starts with texts and asks what they mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations’ (2009, 84). As for ‘poetics’, its etymology derives from the Greek verb poiein, ‘to make’. Genetic criticism, the study of written invention and creative processes, starts from the basic assumption that knowing how something was made can help us understand how it works. In this sense of the word ‘poetics’ the digital medium can be of great help. In terms of ‘digital hermeneutics’, the chapter explores new interpretative strategies, making use of the technology of digital tools, such as the ones provided by the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), including automatic collation, intertextual and intratextual searches. Culler’s structuralist approach focuses on the finished product (the text as it was published). Genetic criticism, however, adds a temporal dimension to poetics and hermeneutics. It answers to Culler’s questions about new or attested meanings and ‘how they are achieved’, but from a diachronic perspective, involving traces of the creative process (such as notes, drafts and other manuscripts). My focus, therefore, will be on chronology as the backbone of digital poetics and hermeneutics.

Digital Poetics Examining the way in which a literary work was made and doing so by means of digital tools is a form of ‘digital poetics’. As indicated above, this implies adding

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a diachronical dimension to Culler’s structuralist definition of ‘poetics’. Translated into digital technology, this has a few implications for the development of the digital architecture of an edition. To fully understand the dynamics of the writing process, it is useful to model a scholarly edition with a view to building a digital infrastructure that organises an author’s works not only according to the canon, in a teleological way, but also in a non-teleological way: 1. The teleological approach organises the genetic edition according to the logic of the author’s canon and its avant-texte, treating the works as separate entities. Some of the digital tools that support this approach are (a) a synoptic sentence viewer; (b) a collation engine; and (c) a set of statistics applied to information in the encoding of the transcriptions in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) according to the guidelines of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), enabling distant genetic reading. 2. The non-teleological approach organises the genetic edition according to the logic of the continuous process of writing, regarding the work as travail – the hard work that goes into writing, that does not always necessarily make it into publication and that proceeds without necessarily having a clear goal. Some of the digital tools that support this approach are (a) the organisation of the genetic edition using the notebook as pivot; (b) the search engine, which searches across works and across versions, not only for text, but also for visual elements such as doodles; (c) Beckett’s digitised library; (d) three levels of chronology. 1. A teleological approach (a) The digital infrastructure can be organised in such a way that, wherever the user happens to be in the edition, they can always choose any sentence and compare it to all the other extant versions of that sentence in a synoptic sentence view. This option arranges the multiple versions in chronological order and enables the user to compare the versions (‘versioning’). For instance, in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, there is a moment which, in a cinematic context, would be called a ‘continuity error’. In all the Faber and Faber editions, Krapp listens to an old tape about his mother, ‘a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity’ (BDMP3, MS-HRC-SB-4-2-5, f. 04r; emphasis added); he winds back the tape, and then hears ‘a-dying, after her long viduity’ (without ‘in the late autumn’), which is clearly a continuity error. The synoptic sentence view enables readers to compare all the extant versions in both the English texts and in Beckett’s own French translation. (b) In addition to this form of translingual ‘versioning’, the infrastructure enables users to collate sentences in either French or English manuscripts and editions, by activating the collation engine, an automatic collation tool, which compares the sentences and highlights all the variants between them. In the case of the continuity error mentioned above, the digital collation clearly

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shows the moment in the genesis where the error occurred. Spotting differences between versions of a text seems like a job a computer should be able to do quite easily, and computer-assisted collation has a relatively long tradition in digital humanities, going back at least to the use of TUSTEP by Hans Walter Gabler and his team for the production of their edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In practice, however, in most cases an apparatus created automatically by the collation software currently available (such as CollateX, Juxta, Multi Version Documents and the TEI-Comparator) does not yet match up to a critical apparatus created by hand by an editor. This is especially the case with modern manuscripts as they contain in-text variation (such as additions and open variants). There are conflicting opinions on how best to encode these texts with a view to collation (Bordalejo, 2010; Robinson, 2012; Schmidt and Colomb, 2009; Schmidt, 2010), as well as on the scholarly validity of automatic collation output. So far, collation tools have always been used as tools for the editor, in order to produce a critical apparatus. The innovative feature of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is that it offers automatic collation as a tool for the user to highlight variants. We might call it a ‘collation engine’, by analogy with a ‘search engine’. The collation engine takes the digital transcriptions as input and performs a service for the user, who can leave certain witnesses out of the collation if they so choose. In this way, instead of turning the critical apparatus into the most tedious part of a critical edition, the digital genetic edition can offer automatic collation as an alternative tool to help users discover complex and therefore interesting textual instances in the manuscripts and other textual versions. The integration of CollateX (Haentjens Dekker et al., 2015) or its newer version HyperCollate (developed by the Huygens Institute, Amsterdam) as a collation engine in the BDMP has the advantage for genetic critics that it can collate manuscript versions: deletions and additions can be recognised and presented as such in the collation output. The rationale behind offering this tool to the reader rather than only to the editor is that the collation of different versions is an active form of reading across versions, which is neither a privilege nor a chore that is exclusively reserved for textual scholars. At this moment collation tools may not yet produce results that are 100 per cent reliable (i.e. not as reliable as a critical apparatus), but the same goes for other everyday tools such as search engines, which also produce results that have to be filtered by the reader. While scholars and IT experts continue to collaborate to make the collation algorithm smarter, reading across versions with a collation engine does not require more ingenuity from readers than a search engine does. The advantage is that textual variants do not need to be relegated to, or buried in, a critical apparatus’s so-called

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Variantenfriedhof or cemetery of variants, but that readers can actively engage with the differences between versions, in a way that allows them to zoom in and out and thus move freely on the continuum between close reading and more distant reading. (c) A modest form of distant genetic reading can already be practised by making use of the XML encoding of manuscript transcriptions. The and tags in the XML encoding can be usefully deployed to calculate the percentage of words that remained ‘stable’ across versions, how many were cut and how many added (see Van Hulle, 2019). To make this kind of research fully operational, however, it is necessary to present readers with the entirety of the author’s oeuvre and sous-œuvre (the marginalised parts of a work that are traditionally eclipsed; Connolly, 2018, 2). 2. A Non-Teleological Approach (a) Following the teleological method described above, sentences that did not make it into the published text are numbered with reference to the closest preceding sentence that did make it to the ‘telos’. But we also need to retrace the creative process from a non-teleological perspective, without the benefit of hindsight, taking the perspective of the author at the moment he was writing and did not necessarily have a clear idea yet what the final result would be. This non-teleological approach requires that the infrastructure and architecture of the digital edition is not dictated solely by the logic of the published text but also takes the logic of the notebook into account. For instance, Beckett wrote En attendant Godot in a notebook that he did not wish to part with until the end of his life. The text is written mainly on the right-hand pages until he reached the end of the notebook, after which he started filling the blank verso pages, rather than continuing the text in a new notebook. This suggests that the notebook as a physically confined unit plays a role in the dynamics of the writing process. At the same time, it is possible and useful to confront this logic of the notebook with the logic of the published works (as ‘telos’) to see how one document may contain more than one version of more than one work. Thus, for instance, the ‘Eté 56’ notebook contains drafts for at least five works, including Fin de partie, Krapp’s Last Tape and Comment c’est. By treating the notebook as a pivot between exogenesis (the use of external source texts), endogenesis (the writing of the drafts) and epigenesis (the continuation of the genesis after publication), it is taken out of the shadow and receives the prominence it deserves as the place where the author creates a mental space to develop ideas and extract elements from other sources, creatively undoing the original context, and appropriating or processing the notes in a new composition. (b) The advantage of being able to search through several avant-textes adds an extra dimension compared to traditional editions. It allows readers to follow

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the chronological development of a particular concept throughout an author’s oeuvre, but also its development throughout the writing process of each work, thus creating a double temporal axis to search across works and across versions. Not only textual units, also visual aspects of the manuscripts can be searched, such as stage drawings, diagrams and doodles. The doodles can be categorised according to a typology, divided into four main categories: objects, organisms, shapes and symbols. The encoding also facilitates other searches such as the systematic search for dates, gaps (blank spaces in manuscripts), calculations and intertextual references. The latter category partially links up with the author’s personal library. (c) Since notebooks with reading notes function as a pivot between exogenesis, endogenesis and epigenesis, it may be useful to include the writer’s library in a genetic edition if it is still extant, and – to the extent that it is no longer extant – to reconstruct a virtual library. For the reconstruction of the virtual library, text re-use software such as Tracer can be deployed to trace source texts. In the analysis of intertextual relations, a writer’s notebooks and drafts can play a pivotal role. The emphasis in this kind of analysis is on the transformative operation, the processing of intertexts or the intertextual in operation (‘le fonctionnement intertextuel’) (Ferrer, 2007, 206). (d) Building on Paolo D’Iorio’s five components of a digital genetic edition (1. genetic dossier; 2. digital facsimiles; 3. transcriptions; 4. classification; and 5. presentation of genetic processes; D’Iorio, 2010), I suggest a model that further develops components 4 and 5 (‘classification’ and ‘presentation’) by working on at least three levels of chronology, ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’, as it were: (S) Genetic paths and collation, following relatively small textual units (such as words, sentences or paragraphs) across all the versions, including source texts in the writer’s (extant or virtual) library; (M) Genetic maps on the level of the individual works, charting all the versions, i.e. all the successive stages of the writing process; (L) A Manuscript Chronology on the level of the oeuvre as a whole. Its chronological structure is the backbone of the edition and takes its cue from a suggestion by Roland Barthes: ‘what needs to be done is to trace not the biography of a writer, but rather what might be called the writing of his work, a sort of ergography’ (qtd in Fordham, 2010, 24). Very often, Beckett worked on several projects at the same time (writing a new work, directing his own plays, translating, etc.). The aim of the Chronology is mainly to show how closely interconnected Beckett’s works are, often simply because he was working on them simultaneously. To illustrate how this coincidence of geneses often has a mutual impact, it suffices to zoom in on just one month in his career, from 20 January to 20 February 1958. In December and January, Beckett had interrupted his work

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on the translation of L’Innommable into English to try and write a new radio play, Embers. But after a few versions, he (temporarily) gave up. On 20 January, Beckett admitted his failure at writing Embers to Con Leventhal and added: ‘So back glumly to the grim labour of translating L’Innommable’ (qtd in Van Hulle, 2015, 145). The next day he mentioned to Mary Hutchinson what he called the ‘failure to write another radio text’ (145), which – he said – had the advantage that he could concentrate on the translation of L’Innommable. In his manuscript of The Unnamable, Beckett actually marked this ‘failure’ on page 23v of the second notebook: ‘Reprise 21.1.58 après échec de Henry et Ada’ (Van Hulle and Weller, 2014, 40). Beckett then continued his translation of L’Innommable. In the meantime, the BBC objected to the phrase ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist’ in Endgame (BDMP7, ET1, 28r). Possibly by way of compensation, the Third Programme picked up on the idea, suggested earlier by Beckett, to broadcast passages from Malone Dies. In other words, Beckett is translating L’Innommable, has just tried to write Embers, is preoccupied with Endgame, rereads Malone Dies, and at that moment – possibly because of the simultaneity of these events – he comes up with the idea for a new work: Krapp’s Last Tape. On 20 February 1958, Beckett wrote to Mary Hutchinson mentioning the BBC’s plans ‘to do a reading from Malone, by Magee’. In the same letter he told her: ‘I have an exciting idea for a short stage monologue for Magee (George’s suggestion), but shall probably break down on the writing of it’ (qtd in Van Hulle, 2015, 149–50). The date of this letter is the same as the date of the first draft of Krapp’s Last Tape. The coincidence of this re-involvement with Malone Dies with the first draft of Krapp’s Last Tape goes a long way in explaining some of the correspondences between the novel and the play. H. Porter Abbott suggests Krapp’s Last Tape is one of the only instances of the genre of the ‘dramatic diary’ and discusses Malone Dies as an instance of ‘diary fiction’ (Abbott, 1984, 208). The main tendency in this kind of fiction is what the subtitle of Abbott’s book summarises as ‘Writing as Action’. In Malone’s case, there is nothing that he can call ‘his’, except his exercise book. What is characteristic of this diary fiction is ‘the tendency to close the gap between the time of the narrating and the time of the narrated, between discourse and story’ (189). Or, from the reader’s perspective: ‘as we read, we are made simultaneously aware of two events, the event recorded and the event of recording’ (29). In these terms (‘recording’) the link with Krapp’s Last Tape is evident. On the same 20th of February, Beckett also told Barney Rosset that he was ‘rather excited’ by an idea for a stage monologue for Magee (qtd in Van Hulle, 2015, 150). While he was writing the first drafts of the ‘Magee Monologue’ in the ‘Eté 56’ Notebook, he continued translating L’Innommable. Three days into the writing process of Krapp’s Last Tape, on 23 February 1958, Beckett finished the translation. In

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other words, the first draft of Krapp’s Last Tape coincided with the translation of the last pages of L’Innommable and with Beckett’s rereading of Malone Dies to select passages to be broadcast. The digital visualisation of this coincidence can help us understand the poetics of Beckett’s writing. In that sense the Manuscript Chronology is a form of digital poetics. The Chronology is designed to convey a sense of the bigger picture and guide readers as a sort of GPS, indicating routes through the labyrinth of the oeuvre and sous-œuvre. In ‘Drowning by Versions’, Mats Dahlström notes: ‘Where printed Scholarly Editions tend to bury rival versions deep down in the variant apparatuses, the document architecture of extreme hypertext Scholarly Editions [. . .] threatens to bury the user deep among the mass of potential virtuality. A solution to this problem might be the formulation by the editor(s) of several distinct Ariadne threads through the textual labyrinths’ (2000, paragraph 4; emphasis added). The Manuscript Chronology provides readers with such Ariadne threads, which serve as suggested paths through the labyrinth of archival material. It is possible that experienced readers or researchers find more and new connections between the documents in the edition. The digital edition can therefore provide them with a ‘pathmaker’, a tool with which readers can make and store their own connections to complement the Manuscript Chronology.

Digital Hermeneutics According to the definition of Rafael Capurro, ‘Digital hermeneutics is concerned with how the digital code is being interpreted and implemented (or not) in the globalized societies of the twenty-first century’ (2010, 35). I would like to explore and propose a different kind of digital hermeneutics, by which I simply mean a form of interpretation that is enabled and significantly facilitated, but also complicated or sophisticated by digital tools. In what follows, I will illustrate this by means of three examples, focusing respectively on (a) endogenetic, (b) epigenetic and (c) exogenetic hermeneutics. (a) An example of a facilitating digital tool for endogenetic hermeneutics is the synoptic sentence view in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and the option to apply automatic collation with CollateX. The digital infrastructure that enables this kind of sentence comparison is based on a simple numbering of sentences, linked to the first edition as anchor text,1 as illustrated by this passage from Malone meurt/Malone Dies: Après l’échec, la consolation, le repos, je recommençais, à vouloir vivre, faire vivre, être autrui, en moi, en autrui. Que tout ça est faux. (Beckett, 1951, 37)

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After the fiasco, the solace, the repose, I began again, to try and live, cause to live, be another, in myself, in another. How false all this is. (Beckett, 1956, 19) In the manuscript, it is followed by this sentence: ‘Cependant je n’ai jamais rencontré de frère’ [Yet I never met a brother] (BDMP5, FN1, f. 75r; emphasis added). In isolation, the word ‘frère’ in this sentence can hardly be read as an intertextual allusion. It is only when read in conjunction with the next version – ‘Je n’ai jamais rencontré de semblable’ (Beckett, 1951, 37) – that the allusion emerges, referring as it does to Baudelaire’s ‘Au lecteur’, the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal, which ends with the line: ‘— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!’ (emphasis added).2 Although this reference to Baudelaire has an exogenetic dimension, the example is also a form of endogenetic hermeneutics, because it works across versions. The dialectic between ‘avant-texte’ and ‘text’ produces a form of intertextuality across versions that is hard to uncover without a digital genetic edition that provides readers with a synoptic sentence view, a collation engine and a digital library (which in Beckett’s case contains a copy of Les Fleurs du mal) to make the connection between Beckett’s reading and his writing. This is a form of digital hermeneutics, not in the sense of Capurro, but in the sense that the digital tools enable or at least facilitate a form of genetic interpretative research that was either impossible or much more difficult in an analogue setting. (b) This intertextual dimension has intratextual consequences – in Martel’s definition of intratextuality as links established by a reader between various works by the same author (Martel, 2005, 93). Once an intertext has become apparent, it becomes more readily noticeable in other works by Beckett. The intertext thus reveals itself intratextually, and not just in the endogenesis, but also in the epigenesis – the continuation of the genesis after publication. As soon as the notion of the ‘semblable’ is signalled or identified as a reference to Baudelaire, genetically informed readers are alerted to the potential allusion. For instance, the first line of the script of Beckett’s Film reads as follows in the English original: ‘All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being’ (Beckett, 1967, 31). Beckett’s first attempt to translate it reads as follows: ‘Perçu de soi subsiste l’être que nul ne perçoit, ni semblable, ni animal, ni Dieu’ (BDMP8, MS-WU-MSS008-2-32-1, f. 01r, emphasis added; see Beloborodova, 2019, 327). Apart from the interesting reversal of the order (from animal – human – divine to human – animal – divine), the translation of ‘human’ as ‘semblable’ catches the eye. The use of the word ‘semblable’ could be read as an intertextual reference to the same poem by Baudelaire, ‘Au lecteur’. The sentence, however, is immediately crossed out, and the revised version is much closer to the English original: ‘Perçu de soi

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subsiste l’être soustrait à la perception d’autrui, humaine, animale, divine’ (01r; emphasis added). One could argue that this kind of intertextuality is of no consequence, since it did not survive in the published text. But it did act upon the text’s genesis. This kind of ‘invisible intertextuality’ is characteristic of Beckett’s oeuvre, in which external source texts often act upon the genesis of a text, but remain out of sight in the published version, thus creating an exogenetic, intratextual ‘underground’ network in Beckett’s sous-œuvre, connecting his individual works below the surface of the published text. Since self-translation is part of the continuation of the genesis after publication, this is an example of epigenetic hermeneutics, facilitated by means of the BDMP’s search engine. (c) In addition to endo- and epigenesis, the third angle is exogenetic hermeneutics, most prominently represented in the online edition by means of the ‘Notebooks’ section and the Beckett Digital Library. This part of the digital edition further enables reading strategies that uncover the kind of invisible intertextuality described above. Still, the presence of around 750 books in Beckett’s extant library evidently does not imply that this is all that Beckett ever read. This is an instance where literary interpretation is not just enabled but also sophisticated by digital tools. Although the digitised personal library may give the misleading positivistic impression that it will turn exogenetic research into a hard science, reading the library actually requires its own forms of hermeneutics to interpret the many lacunae. An example of such a lacuna is Voltaire, who is not represented with any of his works in Beckett’s extant library. But his presence is implied by several other books. One of these is Der Pessimismus by Olga Plümacher. To explain the notion of pessimism, Plümacher refers to Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. With regard to this Enlightenment debate, Beckett was definitely on the side of Voltaire. Beckett had read Candide, ou l’Optimisme and here, in this philosophical book on pessimism, the debate seems to have caught his attention again. Plümacher notes that even the most resolute optimists no longer deny the reality of pain, which is why she suggests the static superlative optimism should be replaced by the more dynamic comparative meliorism (1888, 2), the philosophy holding that, by interfering in natural processes, human beings can bring about progress and improvements over the natural state of things. Next to this line, Beckett wrote the neologism ‘Pejorismus’,3 which would be the opposite philosophy, holding that humanity is nothing to be boasting about since human interference can bring about serious regress vis-à-vis the natural processes. The hypothesis that our world might be the worst rather than the best of all possible worlds may lead to a static pessimism. But Beckett’s ‘pejorism’ is more dynamic. It does not imply progress, nor necessarily regress. He preferred the word ‘gress’ or ‘mere gress’, because of its ‘purity from destination and hence from schedule’ (Beckett, 2009, 186).

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In addition to the marginalia, Beckett also jotted down the terms ‘pejorism/ meliorism’ in his ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (UoR MS 3000, 45v). He did not use them as such in any of his works, but that does not mean they are not important. They are actually crucial in his developing poetics, which clearly bear a Voltairian mark. But, as indicated above, Voltaire himself is strangely absent from the extant library. Nonetheless, his presence is noticeable, ironically by means of one of the several Bibles in the library, notably Beckett’s Italian Bible (dating from the period when he studied Italian and French literature at Trinity College, Dublin). In this Italian Bible there are some interesting marked passages, where Beckett seems to be translating the Italian into French. For instance, in the margin next to Ezekiel 23: ‘Elle a recherché ceux qui ont le membre, d’un âne, et déchargent comme des chevaux. (L. d’Am.)’ [For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. (L. d’Am.)].4 Between brackets Beckett writes a cryptic reference, which becomes more explicit in other, similar marginal translations, such as the one next to Ezekiel 16: ‘Tu as ouvert tes cuisses à tous les passants’ [Thou hast opened thy feet to everyone that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms] followed by ‘(Lettres d’Amabed)’ between brackets. Beckett apparently read this work by Voltaire, notably the footnotes to the Troisième lettre du journal d’Amabed, which offers the key to the reading pattern. In Voltaire’s text, the non-Christian narrator expresses his amazement at the content of the Old Testament. The god of these people, he says, makes one of the prophets butter his bread with cow’s dung and another sleep with prostitutes. Voltaire then enumerates an impressive list of the many instances of dubious behaviour mentioned in the Bible, including the sexual appetite of two sisters, Oholla and Oholiba, or in French ‘Oolla’ and ‘Ooliba’: ‘Il y a bien pis. Ce savant homme nous a fait remarquer deux sœurs, Oolla et Ooliba’ [And it gets worse. This wise man has drawn our attention to two sisters, Oholla and Oholiba] followed by a reference to a footnote.5 Beckett has read this passage very carefully, including the footnotes in which Voltaire describes their behaviour, corresponding to the two passages that Beckett copies out in the margin of his Bible. At first sight, Beckett did not do anything with these notes, but it is clear that his very specific reading of Voltaire played a decisive role in his developing poetics and in his decision to distance himself from the kind of Christianity he had been raised with. Moreover, I suggest that – given the striking suffix ‘-liba’ – this passage in Voltaire may have indirectly contributed to Beckett’s description of the ‘Molloy country’ and his decision to call it ‘Ballyba’, the region around the market-town of ‘Bally’ in Molloy. In L’Innommable it is suggested that Bally is the place where life had been imposed upon the Unnamable

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(Beckett, 1953, 21) and in the French manuscript, this place is called ‘Baile atha Cliath’, the Irish name for Dublin, followed by the parenthetical disclaimer: ‘(je ne garantis pas l’orthographe)’ (BDMP2, FN1, f. 05v). The Italian Bible and the indirect link with Voltaire add some interesting dimensions to Bally and Ballyba: they are certainly inspired by Dublin, but possibly also by Oolla and Ooliba. In Ezekiel 23, God’s word is said to have come unto the prophet, speaking of these two sisters who prostitute themselves to the Egyptians, Assyrians and Chaldeans. God is not particularly subtle in his development of the metaphor. At some point he clearly wants to get his message across and hammers his point home by explicitly giving away the key to the metaphor or the allegory: ‘Oolla, c’est Samarie ; Ooliba, c’est Jérusalem.’/‘Oholah is Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem’ (Ezekiel 23:4). So, Oolla stands for the capital of Israel and Ooliba for the capital of Judah. In Hebrew, Oolla means ‘her own tent’, Ooliba ‘my tent is in her’ (God’s house being in Jerusalem). In Beckett’s Molloy, the allegorical nature of Bally and Ballyba is similar, albeit with a twist. In Ezekiel’s recount, God’s description of Oolla and Ooliba’s enormous libido and their so-called ‘whoredoms’ is hyperbolic; so is Beckett’s description of Bally and Ballyba in Moran’s recount, especially his description of Ballyba’s economy, based on its citizens’ excrements, and governed by someone who lives and is dressed in white clothes like the Pope, and who is called ‘Obidil’ (anagram of ‘libido’). This may be a tiny detail only Beckettians get excited about (if at all), but the point is that the library keeps enriching our interpretations of the works. Obviously, the library (and genetic criticism in general) may serve as a constraining strategy: trying to limit one’s interpretations to what can be falsified, to what gives other scholars the opportunity to falsify one’s interpretation, but this does not necessarily reduce or restrict interpretation. The library is not a database with bare facts; it requires its own hermeneutic reading strategy. In the case of the example above, the new exogenetic information turns Bally into more than just a reference to Dublin and by extension to Beckett’s home country; it now also acquires a religious dimension. And since Molloy was written in Voltaire’s language, there is also a linguistic dimension. We thus have three elements which, as a triplet, suggest a Joycean intertextual dimension, as these are the three elements Stephen Dedalus tries to escape in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’ (Joyce, 1992, 220). ‘The danger’, however, ‘is in the neatness of identifications’ (Beckett, 1983, 19), and Beckett is evidently not Joyce. After the typescript stage, Beckett removed the description of Ballyba’s faecal economy, albeit not without leaving a textual scar. When Moran is on the verge of telling his story about Ballyba’s economy, he

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suddenly changes his mind and says, ‘Non, je ne vous dirai rien.’/‘No, I’ll tell you nothing.’ (BDMP4, MS-HRC-SB-17-6, f. 214r). This ‘taking away’ became a distinctive feature of Beckett’s writing, marked by invisible intertextuality. Whereas, in Ezekiel 23, God hammered his point home by making it as explicit as possible, Beckett’s art of erosion allows his texts to become increasingly implicit.

Conclusion As indicated in the introduction, genetic criticism answers to Culler’s questions about new or attested meanings and ‘how they are achieved’, but from a diachronic perspective, which implies readers who are genetically informed. In order to be able to take this approach, readers therefore need easy access to the manuscripts. This is where the digital medium can be of help. As the manuscripts of several authors are becoming available to a large audience, literature is taking on a new form in which the genesis of texts becomes more accessible. Increasingly, students’ encounters with literature are already taking place online, not only through texts but also through images, such as digital facsimiles of manuscripts, notes and marginalia. This constitutes a challenge for digital scholarly editing to prepare and enable this new generation of students and scholars, providing them with the skills and tools for hermeneutic and poetical analysis across versions. The focus on the creative process of written invention taps into a societal fascination with learning how certain expressions of culture are made, the best examples of which are the hugely popular ‘making of’ and ‘deleted scenes’ documentaries about films and series, as well as documentaries on the composition of masterpieces from painting and music. Approaching literature through this genetic ‘making of’ process, especially from a digital perspective, enables new generations of students and scholars to engage with literature in a different way by exploring it as a quest through an author’s oeuvre and sous-œuvre. Digital poetics and hermeneutics thus contribute to a broader societal change of mindset: from a focus on finished products (in this case the canon of finished works) to an enhanced appreciation of the production process, including a revaluation of dead ends, temporary failure, trial and error, hesitation and forms of undoing that are often necessary to be able to move on.

Notes 1. If a user chooses a sentence that was cut during the process of revision, this sentence receives the sentence number of the previous sentence (e.g. ) that did make it into the published version, followed by

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2.

3. 4. 5.

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an extra number (e.g.