The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett s Drama [1st ed. 2013] 1349446920, 9781349446926

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The Haptic p Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama

New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century Series Editor: Jennifer M. Jeffers As the leading literary figure to emerge from post–World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully appreciated by critics and scholars. The goal of New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Centuryy is to stimulate new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers. Jennifer M. Jeffers is Professor of English and Associate Dean and Ombudsperson for the College of Graduate Studies at Cleveland State University. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, andd Powerr, Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature, Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative, e the editor of Samuel Beckett, and co-editor of Contextualizing Aesthetics: From Plato to Lyotard. d A lso in the Series: Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive edited by Seá n Kennedy and Katherine Weiss Beckett’s Masculinity by Jennifer M. Jeffers Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work by Paul Stewart Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas by Peter Fifield The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama by Trish McTighe

The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama

Trish McTighe

THE HAPTIC AESTHETIC IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S DRAMA

Copyright © Trish McTighe, 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-27698-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978-1-349-44692-6 ISBN 978-1-137-27533-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137275332 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McTighe, Trish. The haptic aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s drama / Trish McTighe. pages cm.—(New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989—Dramatic works. 2. Touch in literature. 3. Self in literature. I. Title. PR6003.E282Z778 2013 842⬘.914—dc23

2012051315

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy

1

Chapter 1

Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy

13

Chapter 2

Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes

35

Chapter 3

Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing

61

Chapter 4

Skin, Space, Place

87

Chapter 5

On the One Hand . . . (The One That Writes the Body)

113

On the Other Hand . . . (The One That Refuses to Touch)

133

Chapter 6

Conclusion Departing Bodies: Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangeree

151

Notess

155

Bibliographyy

179

Indexx

191

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Series Editor’s d Preface f

A

s the leading literary figure to emerge from post–World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacyy have yet to be fully explored by critics and scholars. The purpose off “New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” is to stimulate new approaches and fresh perspectives on Beckett’s texts and legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning Beckett’s work and/or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers. Much has been made of James Joyce’s influence on Beckett (which is limited to the early years of his career), but there has yet to be a thorough analysis of Beckett’s influence not only on writers (Vaclavv Havel, Edna O’Brien, Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, and James Kelman) but also on artists (Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, and Avigdor Arikha), musicians (Philip Glass, Heinz Holliger, and Mascual Dusapin), philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault), and cultural and theoretical critics (Felix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Maurice Blanchot). Because Beckett’s influence traverses disciplinary boundaries, scholarly possibilities are virtually without limit. This series will be a forum for new critical discourses on Beckett and his ongoing interdisciplinary legacy. “New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” invites work that reconnects Beckett with his own cultural and historical situation. The importance of archival access to unpublished Beckett material, the impact of the publication of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, and a gestational period since the official biography appeared, all lead to the next phase of Beckett Studies brimming with exciting possibilities for interpretation and evaluation. Along with recovering from its ahistorical phase, Beckett criticism is also beginning to open up new avenues of critique across the four genres in which Beckett wrote (fiction, drama, poetry, and critical essay). “New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” invites scholarly proposals that feature Beckett’s work and/or his influence or cross-discourse d u with other creative artists,, thinkers,, or movements.

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Acknowledgments k l d

I

n course of researching and writing this book, I have been privileged to have had guidance and inspiration from several scholars. I would like to thank, first and foremost, Professor Anna McMullan (University off Reading, UK) for her support, guidance, and inspiration throughout all stages of the preparation of this book. I am grateful also for the insightful commentaries on the text from Dr. Paul Murphy (Queen’s University, Northern Ireland) and Professor Mary Bryden (University of Reading, UK), and to Professor Everett Frost for all his advice. I would also like to thank series editor Professor Jennifer Jeffers for her help and encouragement with the early draft of this manuscript, and Brigitte Schull and Naomi Tarlow at Palgrave for their advice and patience. A large portion of my thanks must go too to my parents, Maura and Michael McTighe and to Evelyn McLoughlin for all their support, and to my daughter Moya for being a light in my life. I wish to thank especiallyy Dr. Kurt Taroff for his discerning eye in reading portions of the manuscript, his optimism, and his willingness to argue an academic point late into the night. This book is dedicated both to him and to my family. Parts of chapters 2 and 5 have been previously published as “Noli mee Tangeree: Haptic Certitude in Beckett’s Eh Joee and Nacht und Trräumee,” in Modern Dramaa 55.2 (2012), 215–229. This material has been reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (www.utpjournals.com ( ), © 2012 University of Toronto.

INTRODUCTION

Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy

I

n Beckett’s last television play Nacht und Trräumee, a pair of hands emerges from darkness to convey a cup to a dream-figure’s lips and rest on his head for a moment. No face is revealed behind the hands; the play is concerned primarily with what is a dreamt act of touch. This is perhaps the most explicit visualization of the act of touch in Beckett’s drama, yet it occurs within a dream and within the virtual, light-signal space of television. The hands are dreamt, imagined out of darkness, thus presenting many of the tensions surrounding touch that this study explores: between presence and absence, tangibility and intangibility, the hand that touches, and the hand that withdraws. Beckett’s work is deeply concerned with these touches variously remembered, half-remembered, imagined, and, most importantly, failing to happen at all. The owner of the hands in Nacht und Trräumee remains outside the field of vision, existing solely in this act of touching, however incomplete and virtual that touch may be. This study focuses on these fleeting, often failing moments of tactile connection in Beckett’s work, as well as the demands that the dimness of the imagery, their partialness, and invisibility place upon the sense of sight for the figure of the drama and the spectator alike. Touch is, as Margrit Shildrick puts it, “always an embodied gesture that may sustain a reciprocal sense of solicitude and intimacy that grounded in the mutual instabilities of our corporeal existence. To touch and be touched speaks to our exposure to, and immersion in, the world of others, and to the capacity to be moved beyond reason, in the space of shared vulnerabilities.”1 Paying attention to touch in Beckett’s work throws up a multiplicity of meanings and connections, from the shared vulnerabilities of intersubjective touch to the aesthetic structures that represent it. Such a focus emerges from a tradition of thinking though touch in art, its haptic qualities (from the ancient Greek áπτός

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The h Haptic Aesthetic h in Samuell Beckett’s k Drama

or apto, pertaining to touch) contained in either its depiction of touching or in its presentation of texture to the eye of the viewer. This study will situate Beckett’s work relative to discourses about tactility and art across a range off media: theater and performance, visual art, cinema and television as well as considering how such discourses intersect with issues of embodiment and technology. The Beckettian dramatic corpuss, fragmented as it is, comes to be at the limit point of the strands of aesthetics and philosophy that are most concerned with the body, and this is revealed most tellingly through a critical concern for touch. Philosophers of the body in whose work touch has figured prominently, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, are especially relevant, as is the meeting point that Jacques Derridaa establishes between these two, in relation to their use of touch.2 Important also are critics who have observed a haptic aesthetic taking shape in visual art and cinema since the nineteenth century, perceiving how such haptic aesthetic strategies may disrupt dominant aesthetic conventions, not onlyy in their rejection of the visual or the demand that the spectator relate to the artwork in a different manner, but in the way that these strategies reject coherence of time and space, the imperative of narrative arcs and aestheticc resolution. Crucially, in Nacht und Trräumee the image never reveals all its secrets; it withholds visual and narrative resolution, encouraging the viewer to think about the many meanings of the act of touch. In a world in which touchscreen technology is proliferating, bringingg the world to our fingertips quite literally—at least for those who can afford it—it would seem that we have direct tactile interaction with technologyy and therefore with the online worlds it brings. At the same time, we create virtual online personae for ourselves in the form of social networks such as Facebook. We maintain contact with people who very often live thousands of miles away, people who we may never meet, or touch in any material way. A great global distance has been shrunk through such technology, yet our haptic or material-tactile lives cannot be lived via this technology—at least for now. The next few decades may yet see massive improvements in hapticc communications—something that is urgent for those who are visually challenged and rely on haptic interfaces to use technology, but also has extensive marketing potential. What I propose here however is not some nostalgiaa for touch, for a time when humans could onlyy make face-to-face contact. Anthropology, theology, philosophy, aesthetics all can show that to some extent humans have always had a sense of the threshold between the virtual and material, because of religious belief, imagination, or both, and this is certainly the case since the dawn of the modern era of communication and the possibility of intimacy without presence. Rather I attempt to answer the question: why think about touch? What does it mean to touch? What does it

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mean to represent touch aesthetically? What new understanding of ourselves and our world can emerge when we do just that—engage the haptic. Touch has always had deep significance in human cultures—religious, ethical rules and social conventions govern what can be touched and what (and who) must never be touched. It is a vital and variable element in human interaction and intimacy, from before birth and up to death. Now, with so much of our lives lived virtually or remotely, the question of touch is more urgent than ever. I pursue Beckett’s work as operating at the nexus of aesthetics and philosophy and, via aesthetic strategies that interrupt visual and narrative logic, asking that we think through the meanings of the act of touch. Beckett’s Corpus: At the Limits of Aesthetics and Philosophy Haptic aesthetic strategies emerge in a resistance to visibility and a self-reflexive exposure of the materiality of the artwork. In their manipulation of stage and televisual space, Beckett’s dramas for stage and screen are like relief carvings into the theatrical and televisual aesthetic ground. Alois Riegl, who was among the first to use the term in art criticism, named such carvings that evoked material tactility and encouraged the eye to traverse the surface of the image, as haptic.3 While Riegl was discussing ancient Egyptian art in nineteenth-century Vienna, the application of the term remains appropriate when discussing an author-dramatist who was concerned for the sculptural quality of his dramatic images and who had, as Lois Oppenheim puts it, such a close “dialogue” with visual art.4 When performing Footfalls, s Beckett’s favored actress Billie Whitelaw felt that she “should be pacing up and down the Tate Gallery [ . . . ] because of the wayy the thing looks and the way he paints with light is just as important as what comes out of my mouth.”5 Beckett as sculptural artist carves out his figures without allowing them to be fully realized—this is particularly so in the later drama with which this study is primarily concerned. These figures, like the tattered semblance of May in Footfalls, s seem always ready to be absorbed back into their grounds, or else to disperse into a televisual broadcast signal. This study will address the haptic qualities of Beckett’s drama in terms off their attention to materiality, their disruption to the visual and to narrative logic and to the ways in which the dramas present touch itself, as ghostly or dreamlike imagining and as aesthetic figure. Haptics in contemporary thought is often a way of describing an antirealist trajectory in art in general, as well as the turn to sensation in painting. Gilles Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon is exemplary in this regard. Bacon’s work, with its meaty, material bodies in “spasm,” paints the sensations that bodies experience, evoking corporeality, tactility, and the fleshliness of matter.6

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Painting emerges from the hand as well as from the eye, and realist art forms do not seem to be enough to express what it is to have or be a body. Antonin A rtaud might have seen this as evoking cruelty; the rawness of life demanding a different aesthetic for its expression.7 And, although Beckett cannot be said to portray such fleshly bodies as Bacon has done, the roughness off sensation remains always as an underlay to the image: May’s feet in Footfalls, s for example, wearing away the carpet after years of ceaseless pacing. Within contemporary applications of the term haptic, we see not only this concern for sensation, but also methods for evoking embodiment. It is almost as if, and this is particularly pertinent to Beckett’s work, speaking or representing the body from a critical perspective or from the artist’s hand demands something that the visual often cannot provide. To really see the body, we must cover our eyes and touch, just as the doubtful Thomas must do in the Gospel of John. In this way, tactility always implies proximity and presence. This is nowhere more significant than in the theater, where Beckett, amongg other modernist playwrights, toys with the phenomenological immediacyy available through this medium. Yet, as this study will show, Beckett’s workk complicates this immediacy significantly, as S. E. Gontarski sees it, continually eroding the privileging of theatrical presence.8 If there is any possibilityy of maintaining tangibility on the stage, the idea of a tactile proximity and immediacy seems to be apparently impossible when it comes to recorded audiovisual media, yet I argue, in line with critics such as Laura Marks, that we can talk about haptics in relation to film and television (even iff that is to with a loss of touch), and address the demand that representingg embodiment places upon audiovisual media.9 This may not be actual touch, or even the potential for touch that is possible in the theater. Marks uses Riegl’s binaric classification to differentiate between the haptic and optic imagery that demands either haptic or optic visuality: “Optical visualityy depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. Itt is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze rather than to gaze.”10 For Deleuze, who draws similarly on Riegl’s work, we can talkk of haptic as “a touching which is specific to the gaze.”11 This study will therefore be concerned with the opacity and texture of imagery in Beckett’s work, seeing-touching in a somewhat synesthetic manner the “skin” of the film, as Marks puts it. This seems to imply some connection to the artworkk operating along different channels than the audiovisual, almost fulfillingg Filippo Marinetti’s proposal in “Manifesto on Tactilism”: a reeducation off the skin and touch, which is possible because perhaps “there is more thought in the fingertips [ . . . ] than in the brain that prides itself on observing this

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phenomenon.”12 Haptic art or haptic elements within art demand that we relate to the artwork in a tactile manner. Yet, this may also happen through the eye. In this regard, haptic aesthetic strategies can also function as a disruption to the structure of the artwork. For instance, an image that calls upon the eye to touch within a sequence of representative images in a film interrupts the visual flow, arresting, in a similar way to Deleuze’s time-image,13 the visual logic, and therefore the narrative logic, of the film. Laura Marks sees this in the intercultural video art that she examines, giving the example off close-up shots of silken sari folds in Shauna Beharry’s Seeing is Believingg (1991),14 which creates a visual erotics of texture. Such images interrupt the logical ordering of the visual; it ceases to become representative. Beckett’s Film provides a significant example of such a strategy of obscuring via texture and tactility: gauze is placed over the camera lens to make the image it produces blurred, grainy, and textural. Visual interruptions such as this present a challenge to dominant aesthetic conventions. Not only do theyy demand a different mode of connection from the viewer, a haptic eye, theyy also undermine the aesthetic logic of the audiovisual artwork. As previously stated, performance, with its present bodies sharing space with their audience, provides an optimal site where touch and the other senses might be brought into play. As André Lepecki and Sally Banes put it, performance practices can become the “privileged means to investigate the process where history and body create unsuspected sensorial-perceptual realms, alternative modes for life to be lived.”15 The task of analyzing the senses in performance is also to investigate what they term “critical thresholds,” points of contact where the body as corporeal subject and biological entity meets history, culture, and the imagination. However, “haptic,” when applied to performance, need not only refer to the sensory and tactile experiences the theater provides, and the concretion of its embodied presences; the term can also describe techniques that disrupt the visual and narrative logicc of a performance piece. This disrupts the “fantasy of unity and continuity,” which characterizes the Aristotelian stage, as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it in Postdramatic Theatree.16 Certainly there are significant examples in Beckett off the “postdramatic,” as Lehmann defines it, resisting as his drama does manyy of the central devices of theater such as character, narrative, and the unities of time, place, and action, so described in Aristotle’s Poeticss.17 In the shadow w of World War II and the death camps, the desolate stage images of Endgamee and Waiting for Godott are broken ones, created out of and for a broken world. If there is a “hapticity” to be discovered in theatrical performance, then it lies here, where time and perspective—literally the horizon of vision—is disrupted. For Lehmann, as Maike Bleeker points out, perspective functions as

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a metaphor.18 The vanishing point of a painting constructs a unity; the teloss implied within dramatic logic functions in a similar way to this vanishingg point. This interruption of vision, narrative, and time is exploited by Beckett throughout his oeuvre, but is most apparent in the later drama and emerges in closeness-in-separation, a generated noncoincidence, or as Deleuze puts it, an “inclusive disjunction” between the various aesthetic elements that make up the drama.19 Sound touches image but touch and the hand itself, as will be shown in this introduction, are complex figures that do not always guarantee presence and immediacy. Philosophies of Touch: Bodies There and Not There Writings in phenomenology, that branch of philosophy concerned with the study of the structures of experience and consciousness, often utilize the image of the hand to describe the experience of being. For phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), viewed as the father of this branch off philosophical thought, and later, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) the hand acts as a significant metaphor for the philosopher to describe the facticity of existence. The concreteness of my hand, touching things, confirms my existence, connects me with the world of things, phenomena. The act of touch plays a vital role in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and even more so the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–). It functions for the formerr as the sign of the moment at which bodies and world come into contact, emerging in his image of the chiasm or intertwining. It functions for the latter as a conceptual or philosophical figure through which the philosopherr can, as Derrida puts it in his commentary on Nancy, resist any “idealism or subjectivism, be it transcendental or psychoanalytical.” The insistence on touch “would drive out this whole tradition.”20 Touch, an act that verifies the materiality of our existence, appears to emphasize the phenomenological actuality of being and would seem to demonstrate the invalidity off a metaphysical worldview. Yet Derrida critiques a residual humanism in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, in spite of his claim to reject this discourse.21 It is in the use of “the example of the hand,” and the verification of presence by touch—so prevalent in phenomenological discourses—that this latent humanism emerges. On the one hand, in The Visible and the Invisiblee, Merleau-Ponty proclaims a nonhierarchical sensory engagement with the world, contained in the perceptual, intertwining “flesh.” On the other, Derrida suggests that he asserts (reasserts) the primacy of the hand, with all its associations with the human, humanism, and anthropocentric understandings off our place in the world. Because the hand is such a prevalent image in the

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phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, he suggests that perhaps this discipline may be imbued with far more metaphysical assumptions that it appears. Although dealing, prima facie, with the material body, Husserl’s philosophy may in fact be subtly infused with metaphysical and theological concerns. There is an unacknowledged anthropocentric tendency in phenomenological thinking, one that links the foundationality off the sense of touch to the hand of man and the hand of God: “A hand and especially a hand of ‘flesh,’ a hand of man, has always begun to resemble a man’s hand, and thus a fatherly hand and sometimes, more ‘originarily,’ the hand of the merciful Father, which is to say his Son—the hand that the Son is, according to the Logos or Word of Incarnation.”22 Derrida identifies the importance of “the example of the hand” in The Visible and thee Invisiblee.23 This is part of Derrida’s wider project of uncovering metaphysical assumptions regarding presence within phenomenological (and other) discourses. Yet at the same time as Derrida unearths this strand of thought in Merleau-Ponty’s writing, he also finds its counterpoint in the philosopher’s “increasing insistence on self-inadequation, dehiscence, fissions, incompletions.”24 The example of the hand in this case performs the dutyy of undermining its own philosophical significance when Merleau-Pontyy writes of the act of self-touch, one hand touching the other: My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization. “The moment perception comes my body effaces itself before it and never does the perception grasp the body in the act of perceiving [ . . . ] the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondinglyy cease touching my right hand with my left hand.”25 Always imminent, the circle is never completed (is incompletable); as Stanton Garner puts it, perceiving this idea emerging in Beckett’s work: “Beckett’s drama explores the instability between a profound material existence and a corresponding alienation, and it dramatizes the subject’s futile pursuit of any means for overcoming its own noncoincidence.”26 Like Garner, Ulrika Maude makes the case for an application of phenomenology to Beckett. She points out that Merleau-Ponty provides a useful basis for critical readings off such a body-conscious author, but notes that “where Beckett differs from Merleau-Ponty, however, is in the avidity which the latter finds in the bodyy a new locus of meaning.”27 Attending to touch in this philosopher’s workk may draw out then, following Derrida, the awareness of fragmentation that permeates Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body. Touch, an action that so often within phenomenological discourses is used as an anchor, a solid guarantee of the subject’s presence in the world and self-presence, is for Nancy always a type of failure and this is where, according to Derrida,

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Merleau-Ponty’s thought is closest to Nancy’s. Nancy’s conceptualization of touch does not appear to propose either an unproblematic unity between toucher and touched or a guarantee of presence. Touch, contact, and proximity are permeated for Nancy by distance and separation.28 He employs the image of the “syncope,” the interrupted beat, to express this paradoxical formulation of the notion of touch, as contact-in-separation. This conceptualization of touch informs Nancy’s configuration of the relationship between sense (discourse) and matter (body). For Nancy the body happens at the limit point between these two elements: “Bodies don’t take place in discourse or in matter. They don’t inhabit ‘mind’ or ‘body.’ They take place at the limit, qua limit: limit—external border, fracture and intersection of anything foreign in a continuum of sense, a continuum of matter. A n opening, discreteness.”29 He argues that touch is part of Christianity’s complex obsession with presence30: touching, ingesting the “body” off Christ, is part of the revitalizing rituals of that faith. Yet these rituals are predicated on the absence of that body, long ascended, gone. These rituals are thus failures of touch, forever incomplete; yet the Christian tradition compels its adherents to enact them. In spite of the fact that Nancy mayy be writing, as Derrida puts it, against a “haptocentric tradition,”31 it is difficult to extricate touch from its religious and metaphysical significances. In Nancy’s understanding, body is a limit point, a place, where sense and matter, word and body, touch. The subjectivity of Beckett’s figures, while taking place deep within the dim recesses of mind-spaces, is also takingg place at the edges of the body. In this way, the later plays may be said to dramatize the limit: between the internal and the external, between body and world, and between self and self. The self “takes place,” in Nancy’s terms, at the moment of contact and separation, between discourse and matter, word and body. This partialness, contingency, and disjuncture are key elements off Beckett’s work. At a formal level, the plays discussed in this study take place at the limit point between sound and image, between what is seen and what is heard.32 “Haptic,” in Beckett’s work, does not only indicate contact and connection, it also describes disruption of space, time, and bodies, imaged in the formal structures that surround them An Autopsy of the Corpus Following Nancy’s definition of the term, I have developed a corpus, s a necessarily incomplete compilation33 that avoids creating a totalizing narrative regarding Beckett’s work. For, in looking at Beckett’s corpuss, it is clear that “body” in Beckett often comes to mean a shattering, a disunity; in Nancyy terms, body is “certitude certitude shattered and blown to bits.” bits. 34 I refuse, following

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Nancy, to establish a unity among these texts but approach them as dislocated units. There is no such thing as thee body of Beckett’s work, but manyy bodies, no totality, but corpusess, in fragments. I explore the fragmented bodyy of Beckett’s work piece by piece. This study will enact a journey across the corpus, not expecting a totalizing whole, rather examining fragments and holes, sites of persistent oozing or drying tactility, where the limits of the body and world, the body and the other as shared vulnerabilities, the bodyy and the self are contested and recontested. This study of the Beckettian corpuss is something like an autopsy, an exploration of the flesh of the body, of memory, with the titles of each chapter addressing a different part of the body, a different organ of sense to be exact. This “autopsy” of the Beckettian dramatic corpuss begins with the eye or, more accurately, the failure of the eye. I examine Krapp’s Last Tapee and Film, Beckett’s sole foray into the genre that gives the work its title, both off which contain a carnal, failing eye. Krapp’s vision, both physiological and artistic, is failing him. The screen in Film is like a skin, and draws the eye toward its textured surface rather than its content. I have chosen to examine these works first because they illuminate, on the one hand, how when vision falters the sense of touch comes to the fore and, on the other hand, how the sense of touch may be evoked via technologies of mediation—the prosthetics of the tape recorder and video camera.35 “Haptic” here denotes texture, grain, and a resistance to seeing, as well as the tactile body in touch with its material surroundings and the carnality of the eye. While the remainderr of the study focuses on the later drama, I have included Krapp’s Last Tapee for its juxtaposition of mechanical voice and material body while remaining aware that the later work sees an increasingly derealized body, particularly the television plays. As well as being conscious of Deleuze’s description of this aesthetic fracture as “inclusive disjunction,”36 this commentary is informed by Anna McMullan’s observations of an increasing struggle for the body both to utter and to appear in Beckett’s later drama,37 and draws heavily on her considerations of embodiment in Beckett’s drama, as well as S. E. Gontarski’s articulation of Beckett’s “assault” on theatrical presence.38 Krapp’s Last Tapee, from my perspective, demonstrates the beginnings of this dehiscence effectively. In chapter 2, this dehiscence is mapped onto the act of listening: with the eardrum, but also with the skin. Listening is figured here as vibration; an interaction between the filmic skin and the sound that vibrates upon it. Eh Joe, e Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Trräumee, all dramatize an intensity of listening, where the skin of the image vibrates in response to the touch of music or voice. Chapter 3 considers the mouth, the carnal entity where speech and bodyy touch. Sound in A Piece of Monologuee, Not I, and That Timee is manifest as

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spoken word. This chapter explores how bodies and language touch and bring each other into being. Language is birthed in A Piece of Monologuee through the contractions of the mouth, yet it forms and reforms the subject in That Timee, as the listener of this play “makes himself up.” In the eruptive speech of Not I, language is revealed as a gesture, and an automatic one. Nott I ’s torrent of words sees an intrusion onto discourse of an abject and obscene body. Chapter 4 is concerned with skin and its multiple meanings, as a surface upon which identities are played out, as a container within which identities are preserved. The apparently flat surface of the skin is ready always to fold in on itself, a limitless invagination that opens the planar surface off the skin to depth. The tension between the two- and three-dimensionalityy of the skin is manifest in . . . but the clouds . . . as manipulation of television’s depth-depthlessness and the contrast between the infinitude of space within televisual imagery and the flatness of its screen or skin. The connection between touch, space, and gender is examined in relation to this play and those that center upon female figures. The spaces of these plays are characterized by a surrounding darkness from which voices emerge. In Rockaby, y the figure appears at once threatened with consumption or absorption backk into darkness and cradled by a maternal force. In Footfalls, s May names the voice that emerges from the darkness as “Mother.” There is an explicit association between woman, darkness, death, and generation. The plays’ aesthetic generativity relies on this productive darkness, or matrix, to use McMullan’s term.39 There is an observable “mimetic” relationship between the physical, perceptual organ and the aesthetic form that it is presented in; aesthetic forms may be seen to mirror the organs of sense in significant ways. “Mimesis,” however, Aristotle’s term for describing the type of imitation that goes on in drama, is not necessarily appropriate here. The word “mimicry” might be more so.40 As a term used in biology to describe how insects and animals mimic the physical characteristics of their environment, it implies less intentionality than the conscious mimetic actions of a performer on stage. The eye is connected with the camera in Film, the ear with the box room of the television set in Eh Joee and Ghost Trioo. The mouth is also a hole in the greater hole of the stage space, disrupting the logic of that space in Not I. The television screen is manifested as skin in . . . but the clouds . . . , and it becomes part of the dark, kinetic sculptures of Footfallss and Rockaby. y Each chapter will meditate on the meaning of the organ itself as well as its aesthetic manifestation and how these two elements connect, thus drawing together a corpuss that contains both a collection of fragmented body parts and an assemblage of fragmented texts and images with connections emerging, however partially, between these.

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The hand, finally, is the limit point between all these things; the hand connects the artist to the work. In the final two chapters of this study, I examine dramas that meditate on the role of the hand; how, by exposingg the process of creation, the plays expose also the violence and objectification that this can entail. The process of making is associated in Catastrophee and What Wheree with torture and violence and the hierarchy of power between artist and subject, as well as in the technologies of surveillance in the television versions of What Wheree (Was Woo) and Quadd. The plays addressed in the final chapter, Ohio Impromptu and Nacht und Trräumee, ask how touch is to take place in light of this potential violence of the hand, in art and in life. My discussion of these plays, informed greatly by both Graley Herren and Mary Bryden’s insightful commentaries on religion in Beckett, considers how they expose a “tactful” approach to the other, one that is mindful of the hand’s potential for violence. This tactfulness will be shown to be mimicked in the play’s aesthetic structure. Of course, the failure of each organ is evident. The eye in Beckett is often rendered “fleshly and fallible,” as Maude puts it in her commentary on the shorter prose piece The End 41; eyes are myopic and blurred in Krapp’s Lastt Tapee and Film; the ear in Eh Joe, e Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Trräumee is full of relentless echoes, “all the dead voices,” as in Waiting for Godot, t 42 of the past. The mouths of Not I and A Piece of Monologuee desperately attempt to frame a life, to tell it all, while in That Timee words and image collide and fall apart. The skin of . . . but the clouds . . . , Footfalls, s and Rockabyy is revealed as porous and brittle, ready to crack and let the world in and let the self leakk out. This failure of the organ of sense is mirrored in a failure of representation, of sense-making via art. Not only, finally, does the hand fail to touch, that touch is also a failure to represent, to create the image that will capture an elusive corporeal existence—the whole body. While the focus of this study is on Beckett’s drama, I recognize the significance of the radio work, the prose, poetry, and nonfiction. Beckett’s exploration of and interest in radio may have played a role in the creation of the rupture between voice and body that is apparent in the later work. While I have not drawn upon the poetry specifically, where necessary and appropriate I have taken examples from the prose in order to illustrate myy argument. However, the main focus is on the texts written for either live orr recorded performances, artworks that have implications for a consideration of presence and immediacy, as well as the capacity to generate disjuncture or rupture between their structural elements, in other words sound and image. Concern for space has meant that I have had to select a representative sample of the later work, while insuring that I discuss all the television plays and Film. The television plays have not received the kind of critical attention

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that have been paid to the theater works, though recent work by Herren, McMullan, and Jonathan Bignell has altered this somewhat.43 This studyy draws heavily upon their illuminating critiques. The consideration of touch in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy is highly relevant to the rupture apparent in Beckett’s drama between sound and image, voice and body. These structural idioms dramatize at a formal level the ways in which self and body, embodied self and other bodies, touch, and fail to touch. In other words, at many levels Beckett’s plays image Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, but always with the somewhat pessimistic awareness of the touching relation as permeated by incompletion and imminence, rather than completion and unity. It must be remembered that while Nacht und Trräumee may be somewhat unique among Beckett’s plays for its visualization of an act of touch, that touch happens only in a dream space; this may serve to emphasize the failure of touch, relationality, and bodilyy wholeness. Ohio Impromptu’s act of touch happens in the materiality of the stage space, yet as I discuss in this final chapter, this too reveals a ruptured structure. While the root of the word autopsy lies in eye-witnessing, this is an altogether different approach. In contrast to the autopsy, under medical lights, explorers of the Beckettian corpuss often find themselves in dark spaces; one feels one’s way across the fragmented corpuss of work. Such an exploration will not necessarily produce a diagnosis, nor will it establish a unified corpuss. It is necessary, on the contrary, to recognize its partial and temporary nature. It is a provisional corpuss, drawn together for the purpose of an investigation that is attentive to the porousness and fragility of the dramatic body: a body realized at the limits of light and sounds, text and space. And attentive too to the porousness within the body of the aesthetic itself, attuned to the mimicry and disjuncture between text and image, between body and space, and between sound and vision. This “autopsy” is not about diagnosis, about discovering what killed the Beckettian body. I am much more concerned with what keeps it moving, what animates it, especially as that animation occurs often only partially, at the limits of perception. This study is about pressing into the flesh of a corpuss, a body of work, attuning to its pathologies, its breakdowns, the dysfunctions that are a part of its somatic whole. This is the haptic engagement that Beckett’s work demands: feeling our wayy in the darkness of the Beckettian corpuss, always attuned to the chasm (chiasm) between touch and nontouch—the void at the heart of things.

CHAPTER 1

Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy

First Incision: Into the Failing Eye of Krapp’s Last Tape To embark on a study of haptics in Beckett’s work, it may be necessary to begin with the eye. Or, more accurately, the failing eye. The protagonists of the plays examined in this chapter, Film and Krapp’s Last Tapee, both suffer from myopic vision. However, dimming vision affects Beckett’s aesthetic practice more widely. Figures such as Hamm in Endgamee and A in Rough for Theater I are afflicted with visual failure; for the spectator also, the dim and shadowy stage and filmic images seem to work against vision; it is no longer privileged as an epistemological tool for either the figures of the drama or their spectators. The very notion of theater is undermined. It is not “a viewing place” as in the meaning of the original Greek word theatron, but a place where the eye begins to fail. Blindness in theater has often been represented as either punishment for a misdeed or as a sense that must be sacrificed in order for a higher insight to be gained. Insight itself can be blinding, as Oedipus puts out his eyes on learning the truth of his origins. The blind seer Tiresias, having been struck blind by the Gods for impiety, is given the gift of prophecy. Gloucester’s learning of the truth in King Learr is similarly paralleled by his loss of vision. In each case, blindness is associated with the discovery of some truth, with gaining knowledge or insight. Yet the blind bodies of Oedipus and Gloucester are both fallen bodies. Gloucester falls, literally, in his darkly comic “suicide” scene, and believes himself dead for a time.1 In Maeterlinck’s The Blindd, the blind protagonists, without the priest to “guide” them, have lost their way and cannot return to the asylum that shelters them on their bleak island.2 The blind refer repeatedly to the fact that they do not or

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cannot know where they are, to whom they are speaking, or how they are to return to their asylum. Any sense of individual identity, distance, and time become erased. Such an epistemological blind spot emerges in Waiting forr Godott too. Like Maeterlinck’s blind, Vladimir and Estragon wait, hearingg footsteps in the dead leaves, “all the dead voices,” “like leaves.”3 The situation in Waiting for Godott translates as epistemological insecurity, and the impossibility of action. Representations of blindness can take on a moral tone, associating sight with “knowing the way.” The priest of The Blindd symbolizes this; he is a guide, both literally and morally. Without him, the blind lose their way. The play expresses how humanity has become lost, cast adrift from its moorings in religious rituals and rules; thus blindness is associated with the lost, godless body. José Saramago’s parabolic novel Blindnesss4 details a plague off blindness, which cripples society, deliberately connecting ethics with vision. With all its citizens’ blinded, civilization falls in a moral as well as literal sense. It is a thought experiment that seems to echo the spirit of Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Parable of the Blindd (1568). In Brueghel’s painting, blind men are pictured toppling or about to topple in a heap as each one follows the blind man before him.5 Saramago’s dystopian vision sees newlyy blinded humanity crawling about in its own excrement and murdering each other for food. In whatever way blindness is interpreted and made culturally meaningful, it is clear that a certain denigration of the haptic sensorium occurs. Insight and reason act as compensation for the loss of the carnal and fallible eye. Blindness is associated with dirt, both moral and literal. However, enlightenment, both the epistemological tradition as well as the immediate revelation of insight, is not readily available for Beckett’s figures. The “old muckball,” to quote Krapp (Collected Shorter Plays, s 62),6 is a much more familiar terrain. When sight is diminished the haptic sensorium must take over, and it is with that thought that this study commences. In Letter on the Blindd Denis Diderot asserts the reliance that we have upon the senses for knowledge; he proposes that if the deaf and blind philosopher were to construct a man, “after the fashion of Descartes,” he would put the soul, not somewhere behind the eyes, but at the very limits of the body, at the fingertips.7 And, in the dim recesses of Krapp’s den, we proceed with an autopsy in the dark, an inquest into the death of vision. The irony here is that while in technological terminology “haptic” is used to describe a device that promotes interaction and access for the blind to technology, Krapp’s technology, his “haptic interface,” does not function as a prosthesis, but rather emphasizes its failure. The first incision into the Beckettian corpuss is through the eye, reminiscent of the famous

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eye-slitting image in Luis Bu ñuel’s Un Chien Andalou , which Beckett’s Film (discussed later) references heavily. What is revealed in such a cut is not, tellingly, the seat of the soul, but the rather the viscous and tackyy inner life of the eye. An Autopsy of a Life A Audiences meet Krapp in his “den,” a “wearish old man” (CSP P, 55), who has chosen to devote himself to a solitary life of artistic production. Krapp’s habit has been to make tape recordings on each of his birthdays, confessionals that document the year gone by. During the performance he plays, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, fragments of a tape he made aged 39, and in which he refers to an earlier recording, made 10 or 12 years prior to then. Altogether then, there are three Krapps, or more appropriately three versions of the same Krapp. The distinctions among them are made all the more poignant by the disgust that each one seems to have for his earlier incarnation. Krapp begins his current retrospective for his sixty-ninth birthday with, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that” (CSP P, 62). Alone, loveless, and unsuccessful in his attempted literary career, Krapp is, as Ruby Cohn puts it, “punished by both emotional and literary failure.”8 The aural autopsy that Krapp performs cuts and splices together three moments of his life under an excoriating eye and ear. But this process will produce no final result, no diagnosis for his current state of being. The cuts that are made into the fabric of the past—fleshly and d mechanical—do not yield a vision of the whole. Rather, it is these fissures and fragments that make up the fabric of the play itself. Squinting myopically, he reads the summary in his ledger for his thirty-ninth year: we learn that his mother has died. He has experienced a “slight improvement in bowel condition,” a “memorable equinox,” and also a “farewell to—[he turns page]—love” e (CSP P, 57). The desires and appetites of the body have plagued Krapp, and the aspirations of the youngest Krapp to quell these passions have not been carried through. Krapp at 39 speaks off his aspirations to be less subject to the whims of a libidinous body: “plans for a less [hesitates.] engrossing sexual life” (CSP P, 58). Krapp’s now decrepit body and the tapes he has made throughout the years are all that remain, and he is haunted by this memory of a sunny day on a lake with a girl, this farewell to love: I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes [. . .]

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We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem [Pausee.] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us gently, up and down and from side to side. (CSP P, 63) He winds the tape forward to listen to this scene, not bothering with the other part of that tape, which describes a moment of profound “vision,” his “memorable equinox”—a momentous occasion at the time for the earlierr Krapp, in which something he had been struggling with became clear at last: “Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening” (CSP P, 60). The image off intersubjective harmony on the lake contrast sharply with the dark energy off the “vision,” and is one of the ways in which touch emerges in this play. This haptic moment (his hand on her) contrasts with the vision on the pier and is echoed visually in the closeness of Krapp to his tape machine: “leaningg forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear toward machine, face front” t (CSP P, 57) and in certain productions, this posture results in a kind of hunched and tactile intimacy with the device. As well as this relationship between body and technology, haptics emerges in this play in the inscription of sound on the tape recorder, a tactility off speaking and listening. It also refers to Krapp’s attempt to get in touch with himself, recording himself each year with harsh criticisms of his past selves. In thinking through the “haptics” of Krapp’s Last Tapee, the following discussion moves from the simple act of touch, to the relationship between technology and body to more philosophical questions of self-presence and identity. It refers to the tissue, film, or skin that separates and connects Krapp with Krapp. This is of course Krapp’s body, but wedded here to the technologyy that Krapp employs to relive his memories. Haptics in Krapp also denotes an underlying materiality. Krapp’s Last Tapee is one of Beckett’s last works to have a fully formed and identifiably material body on stage and it will be important to recognize the ways in which the body, in all its obscenity and compulsions, intrudes onto the playing space and the subject’s consciousness. Haptic here refers to the line or limit between the continuum of sense (as in sense-making faculties) and the continuum of matter, the place where “bodies” take place in Nancy’s writing.9 Krapp is continually in touch with his body. While this may have, as is explored later, autoerotic overtones, it also reveals the material body’s invasion of consciousness and discourse. Yet what is ultimately apparent is that while Krapp denies the body and its

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desires, his corpus, the body of his work is predicated upon it. Nancy sees a such a disavowal of the body in Christianity, a tradition that has sought to purify the body, resurrect it, and make it a body of light. He argues that this tradition is entirely reliant upon the material body for the verification of its central tenets: “Only a body can be cut down or raised up, because only a body can touch or not touch. A spirit can do nothing of the sort.”10 The act of remembering in Krapp’s Last Tapee is a slow, mechanical, and laborious process in which little-used neural circuits are trod again. As Krapp tramps in and out of his cubbyhole, winds back and forward the tapes to the required places of memory, the image could be read as a metaphor for his aging neural circuits, ones that must be mechanically activated in much the same process as Henri Bergson, whom we know Beckett read11 and whose writings illuminate this, describes: “[The intentional act of remembering or learning by heart] like every habitual bodily exercise, [ . . . ] is stored up in a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements.”12 Krapp’s memory “machine” arguably images Bergson’s conceptualization of the processes of remembering. Recording upon tape is an act of inscription in itself, as magnets alter the ferrous oxide coating on the material. Thus, the tape recorder echoes or acts as a metaphor for Krapp’s memory. Furthermore, the tape machine begins to take on lifelike characteristics. Making present a past Krapp, it speaks with the voice of a past body, and, at certain key points in the play, the machine comes to stand in for the body of the girl with whom Krapp declared it was “no use going on” (CSP P, 61). The stage directions require that Krapp bend over the machine to assume the listening posture: “leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front” (CSP P, 57).13 Actor Pierre Chabert talks of the mirroring that occurs between machine and bodyy in Krapp’s Last Tapee, where the drama of listening makes of the body “a kind of sensitive receptacle upon which the voice engraves itself, a kind of human tape-recorder.”14 If for a moment we think of the imagery that Bergson uses to describe those acts of inscribing memory—as he says, to know one’s lesson by heart is to have it imprinted on one’s memory15 —then, understood in this way, the act of remembering (and indeed the erasing or unmarking, i.e., forgetting) is mirrored in the mechanics of audiovisual recording. Yet the flesh is not a reliable vessel for memory; the marks made by the world can fade with time and it is here that Krapp’s tape machine ought to compensate for his poor memory. He forgets the meaning of the word “viduity” and must look it up. He has forgotten, ironically, the “memorable equinox,” which the earlier Krapp describes. Furthermore, Krapp’s manipulation of the machine and tapes produces gaps in his narrative, holes bored into meaning. Krapp winds forward at the moment we are about to hear of his

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“vision.” This winding reduces the tape to a senseless squeal.16 This collapse of the speech on the tape represents the limits of Krapp’s and, by implication, the audience’s sensory capacity. Krapp’s joy of words, evidenced in the lingering vowel extension he gives to “spoool,” and the pleasure he takes in the erotics of the word in his mouth take precedence for that moment over the meaning of the word itself. Like the tape, Krapp is winding down. Aesthetic appreciation and production is gradually being replaced by aisthesis, sense without meaning.17 This aisthetic impulse is also played out in the tension between the two orders of perception that are demarcated in the play. McMullan links this with Krapp’s sensory conversion from sight to tactility: “The reduction of the older Krapp’s world to the space of his immediate corporeal environment is foregrounded by his ‘near-sighted’ vision, ‘laborious’ movement and the continual sounds he produces (from shufflingg to grunts).”18 The irony of Krapp’s “memorable equinox” lies not only in the fact that he appears not to remember it when he reads of it in the ledger, but also that he chooses not to relisten or relive it. Krapp’s failing memory is accompanied by a compulsion to never forget nor let go of the past; however, access to the past is never pure, it is always tainted by the present. As Beckett remarked in his early critical essay on Proust, the “aspirations of yesterdayy were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for today’s”19: vast differences are apparent between the present Krapp and his “antecedent” on the tape. He begins his retrospective for the present occasion with a curse: “[J]ust been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago” (CSP P, 62). Not onlyy does Krapp at 69 no longer share the aspirations of the earlier Krapp, he is also extremely critical of him. Indeed Krapp’s audience is invited to share in the disdain for this rather arrogant and pompous sounding individual. The self-disgust, however, does not stop him from seeking to relive certain fragments of his past, mechanically captured and reproduced. Herren argues that the protagonists of the teleplays seek out the “pure perception” so described by Bergson. They long to restore unity by mending the rift between the subject and object, and “lure the lost loved one back out of the past and into the present”: These efforts are doomed from the start, however, for precisely those reasons outlined by Bergson. Memory can never be used to mend the rift between subject and object because it is the riftt ; it cannot be the bridge because it is already the chasm. There would be no division between the two in the first place if we could “place ourselves face to face with immediate reality.”20 The fabrics of the past can never be stitched together, as Krapp’s performance reveals.

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The h Grain i off the h Performance f One of the images that I believe expresses the complexity of haptics in Krapp is that of the grain and husk. Krapp at 39 talks about his birthday: [C]elebrated 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. [. . .] The grain, now what I wonder do I mean by that, I mean . . . [hesitates] s . . . I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has—when all my dust has settled. I close my eyes and try to imagine them. (CSP P, 57–58) Rosette Lamonte points out that the name Krapp connects these disparate Krapps; the common denominator between them is fecal filth,21 so that the body, as the reference point, or connector between those disparate Krapps, is also just that, “crap,” or garbage to be cast away. When Krapp, at 39, speaks on the tape of his birthday “celebrations” of that year, in the winehouse, “separating the grain from the husks,” he immediately questions the meaning off the phrase. Not only does this inward-glancing self-examination emphasize Krapp’s narcissism, or in McMullan’s terms, his “constipated vision,”22 but his reply to his own question is telling in terms of how we are to think of his attitude to his body, his mortality. The body and all its appetites are dust, to be put to rest as in the “dust to dust” of Christian burial ceremonies. Krapp’s image of grain and husk, of settling dust, reveals the dualism of his thinking. It metaphorizes Krapp’s attempt to shear away the unnecessary, to distil some pure artistic vision from the mess of life, yet there is also perhaps, on Krapp’s part, unintended meanings. Julie Campbell examines the etymological origins of this text. Crappee in French means “siftings” and krappee in Dutch means “to pluck off.” She notes that in Middle English the word “crap” does mean “the husk of grain”; she writes that “Krapp is like an empty husk at the end of his life, and his sifting through his recorded past is at variance with the way the younger Krapp assessed the events he recorded.”23 This image of the grain resonates with Krapp’s relationship with his body. He attempts to shear away these libidinous whims (bananas, alcohol, and sex) yet instead of mastering the body, Krapp has revealed its irreducible and inescapable truth. That, although Krapp has attempted to gain control of his body, to cast all those extraneous desires aside, what remains is this meat, this heavy material body, sutured to its past by technology. In this regard the grain and husk cannot

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be separated. Grain has aural connotations also. The grain is the sound off the body speaking, as Roland Barthes puts it: “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.”24 Krapp’s “cracked voice ” with its “distinctive intonation” (CSP P, 55) reveals his age and decrepitude—the play was written with the unique voice of actor Patrickk Magee in mind. When the present Krapp speaks, we hearr his body with all of its desire and decay. So what of this body, this meat that emerges in Krapp’s performance? There are traces, however spectral, still apparent of Krapp’s bodily desires. The banana, which Krapp is compelled to eat (onstage, to comic effect) is, as Lamonte points out, an “ironic symbol of vestigial virility”: “More simian than human this old wretch has retained of the human species only his predilection for alcohol: the waltzing bananas are followed by the bottles polka.”25 Also exemplary is the prostitute’s visit, described as “better than a kick in the crutch” (CSP P, 62). The masculine vigor of the earliest Krapp, who had made plans for a “less . . . [hesitatess] . . . engrossing sexual life” (CSP P, 58), is reduced to “couldn’t do much” with the “bony old ghost of a whore” (CSP P, 62), a description that emphasizes the spectral nature of Krapp’s desire. The title of the play in French is La dernière bandee. The word bandee means tape, and is a slang word for an erection. The final tape that Krapp attempts (and fails) to finish could be viewed as the pun that the French title suggests: his last erection, and an impotent one at that. No matter how much Krapp has tried to avoid or control the sensual, he has never succeeded. His appetites have confounded his attempts at mastery of the flesh. Like an erection, these recordings, made each year on Krapp’s birthday, represent somethingg of a compulsion, a moment of bald exposure of desire. Instead of creatingg his magnum opus, Krapp has succeeded in revealing that control over the wayward libidinous flesh is not possible. It is clear that Krapp’s final erection reveals something significant about bodies. These tapes are a revelation off the “body’s thought,” where an automatic and involuntary corporeal process is revealed.26 The confessional mode places the body on the spot; the “truth” it reveals is really the “truth” of material existence: an awareness of a body that refuses to be mastered, a grain that cannot be traced. Both “The Vision” on the pier and physiological vision have failed for Krapp. Squinting at his ledger, he cuts a tragic figure as a failed artist, who is still, after all this time, “getting known” (CSP P, 62). By stressing the mechanical process of remembering and the significance of sense knowledge for that process, Beckett stresses the tactility and materiality of memory, desire, and language, while also attesting to the failure of the “machine” to maintain subjective integrity.

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Krapp’s attempt at mastery over the flesh has resulted in failure. This separation of the grain from the husk is revealed in the older Krapp as folly. Grain can also refer to pattern, the lines in wood or in meat, a pattern formed by organic growth. It is a pattern that is inseparable from the material of which it is made. Throughout the play, treads or grains are traced and retraced. Krapp moves back and forth between his desk and cubbyhole, he inscribes briefly his thoughts on the new tape, and listens to the old inscriptions made before. These grains are like the neural circuits, the well-trod or fading paths of a Bergsonian mechanics of memory: “The afferent nerves bring to the brain a disturbance, which, after having intelligentlyy chosen its path, transmits itself to motor mechanisms created by repetition. Thus is ensured the appropriate reaction, the correspondence to the environment—adaptation, in a word—which is general aim of life.”27 The circuits of memory are not permanent, but shifting, changeable, adaptable. Krapp can neither escape these treads (or threads) nor tread them fully again. The machine is replete with the ghosts of his past life and past bodies. Yasunari Takahashi’s commentary links this play to the Noh play Kinutaa by Zeami. Similarly to Krapp’s Last Tape, e Kinutaa expresses memory thus: “Memory is inscribed on the body, though time is flown and nothing remains.”28 Krapp has tried to separate the grain from the husk, only to find that the husk is all there is. The grain is in the husk. The k(c)ra(p)p that he attempts to discard is the stuff of which he is made: not made of dreams but drowned in them and “burning to be gone” (CSP P, 62). As Beckett commented to Martin Held: “The character is eaten up by dreams. But without sentimentality. There’s no resignation in him. It’s the end.”29 Tracing the Grain In spite of the fact that Krapp is among Beckett’s “meatier” theatrical bodies, as the bodies of much of the later work are radically dematerialized, there is still a question mark in this play over theatrical presence. The old theater cliché that describes acting as “treading the boards” could also describe Krapp’s motion on the stage, in and out of the backstage darkness. Habitual in its nature, Krapp’s visits to his drinking hole are ingrained. The truth of the performing body, if such can be found, the “grain” of truth perhaps, is the irreducible, tangible materiality of the body in performance. This was given stark visualization by Harold Pinter as Krapp (Royal Court Theater, London, 2006), a performance conducted entirely from his motorized wheelchair—aa dramaturgical necessity rather than a choice; one that emphasized the play’s sense of entrapment and the fragility of the mortal body.

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It seems that talking of haptics in performance returns always to this point: the body and the verifiable presence that its tangibility offers. The hand and the act of touch are intimately linked with presence, the verification of reality, the “truths” (so-called) of material existence and the performance space. Yet that philosophical assumption, a residual humanism that Derrida’s critiques in phenomenological discourses, may emerge here, in theater’s answer to “the example of the hand,” and the verification of presence by touch.30 The materiality of the body on the stage, for all its apparent tangibility, is subject also to this failure of touch. It reveals the world in all its tactility, at the same time as it demonstrates our distance from it. The tangibility of the performing body is dismantled through a performance that carves holes in the possibility of touch. Though Krapp attempts to touch himself—in all senses of that word, erotic included—and to hold the pieces of a fragmented identity together in the gaze of an excoriating internal eye, he remains the failed artist, “getting known” and reserving the harshest criticism for himself. In spite of this self-touch, he does not succeed in closingg the perceptual circle. Coincidence eclipses, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, at the moment of realization.31 Krapp’s noncoincidence reveals touch—an action that so often within phenomenological discourses is used as an anchor, a solid guarantee of the subject’s presence in the world and self-presence—as rupture and separation. The place of the tape machine in this incomplete circle of self-touch is a significant one. This putting of one in touch, of inscribing a life onto the ferrous oxide of tape material, actually reveals rupture and separation, and defies and disrupts the act of touch as a verifier of presence. In this way, Krapp’s Last Tapee dramatizes the failure of the haptic interface. Krapp’s winding forward of the tape interrupts the narrative—we never learn about the content of the vision on the pier. The recording, which would appear to promise an explanation of Krapp’s life, is continually interrupted. Instead, all we ultimately hear is of the image of the girl on the lake. Just as the pastt narratives of the multiple Krapps are inscribed on the ferrous oxide of the tape, the body of the machine is the connecting tissue onto which all the desires and failures of Krapp’s life have been written. However, this act off touch reveals a rupture and separation. In this way, Krapp’s Last Tapee dramatizes the distance between self from self; it is an interface that distances at the same time as it connects. As Yasunari Takahashi puts it: “Krapp’s failure of memory looms all the more grotesque because of the tape recorder, a modern apparatus designed to ensure memory. If he responds to what the tape narrates, he does so not with a flash of recognition but with a slowness suggestive of a veil obstructing immediacy.”32 Krapp’s existence is riven byy

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failure. Vision—both as artistic insight and as physiological ability—has faltered in the decrepit Krapp, as has control over his body. The tape recorder acts in this play as a technological mediator between the Krapp on stage and the two past Krapps. On the one hand it is a performance device that extends and complicates the dramatic monologue. On the other it is a meditation on the relationship between embodied selfhood and technology. The performance of Krapp only comes to bee at the limit point between materiality, text, and machine. Technology here is a device inserted between self and self, which in principle would seem well-placed to bringg about self-knowledge and understanding—self-touch, which would guarantee self-presence, a gathering together of the details of a life into some sort of whole. In practice, however, it acts as a materialization of the barrier that exists between self and self and also between performer and audience, as the machine interrupts the process of sense-making for the spectator. Krapp uses the tape machine to get in touch with himself and in a more carnal sense to touch himself, during this, his last “erection.” Yet this project is revealed as hopeless—he cannot restore those memories; his solipsistic, autoerotic activity reveals a gap at the heart of identity, the unclosed segment of the circle in Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual chiasm. In Krapp, the haptic is not only the technological screen that emerges within the self, it is also the line of contact between self and body. The dualism that emerges in Krapp’s Last Tapee holds little hope for transcendence of the body. Bodies, their desires and appetites, are inescapable. The grain cannot be separated from the husk, yet they do not rest comfortably together, and this simple fact makes Krapp’s relation to his body fraught and difficult. Krapp’s self-touching makes visible the divide between past and present, and between present self and present body. Beckett, during the 1977 rehearsal in Berlin with the San Quentin Dramaa Workshop, acknowledged that Krapp may not have been any happier had he chosen the girl over art,33 yet it is significant that Krapp continues to return to this passage on the tape and this image: “I lay down across her with myy face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side” (CSP P, 61). With the possibility of choosing love over poetry now longg gone, it may be that he now perceives in this image a harmony more complete than that provided in the past by the “vision.” This memory is characterized not by vision, but by touch. While Krapp initially describes asking the girl to open her eyes, the passage ends with his “face in her breasts and his hand on her.” In this memory of intersubjective harmony, the eyes are closed and buried in the body of an other, and for the aging Krapp, who stares into space as the tape runs on, the grain is the husk and only the end is in sight.

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From an embodied perspective, the act of touch is also a sundering apart: the intangibility of the lost girl on the lake, the impossibility of self-touch even with prosthetic intervention. But also importantly, in terms of aesthetics, when Krapp cuts into the past, he opens up the fabric of the performance space to fracture, dehiscence, and contradiction. Krapp’s Last Tapee complicates the idea of touch as marker of presence. To think through an aesthetics of touch in the theater and on the screen is to also attune to the dehiscence within that aesthetic. The remainder of this study, moving across the porous surfaces of Beckett’s bodies, will attempt to be so attuned. Grainy Vision: The Haptic Image of Film Film focuses on two key physical organs of sense, the eye and the hand. The film opens and closes with a close-up of an eye, belonging to its star, Busterr Keaton. Throughout the film, we see images of Buster Keaton’s hands, resting on various objects, covering his face. There are two modes of perception running throughout the work. One is clear, objective, and seeminglyy omnipotent: E, the techno-eye of the camera. The other is the limited and myopic viewpoint of O, Keaton’s character who is being relentlessly pursued by E. What comes under scrutiny in this short film, made by Beckett in collaboration with director Alan Schneider in New York (1963–1964), is vision. O interrupts the process by which visual representation orders and makes sense of the world. One of the key strategies involves the challenge laid byy O’s embodied vision to visual representation based on the conventions off perspective. In the figure of O, Beckett develops what I name a haptic aesthetic, an aesthetic that is based more upon the principles of touching than those of seeing. O flees from a pursuing camera, E.34 The three locations for this flight are street, stairwell, room. In the street, Keaton bumps into a man and woman, reading a newspaper. They look up in disgust, but the man’s reaction is hushed by his female companion—this “sshh” is to be the only sound heard in the film. In the stairwell, Keaton avoids an old woman, a flower seller. Both the couple on the street and this old woman recoil in horror when theyy come face to face with the camera/E. The old woman falls to the ground, and Keaton makes his escape to the room. Once there, O, keeping his backk to E, veils any objects or creatures that might see him; he covers the mirror, the window, the fishbowl, and birdcage and, in the only scene of the film that exploits the comic skills of this star of silent film, removes the dog and cat from the room. As long as the camera stays at a certain angle to the protagonist, he is not threatened with being seen. This “angle of immunity” is 45 degrees. Significantly, it is not possible to view one’s reflection in a mirror

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within this angle. Throughout the film, Keaton’s famous face has been kept invisible by a large hat and high coat collar. In the final scene, Keaton falls asleep in a rocking chair and E can finally view his face. Here we see Keaton’s face for the first time, one eye covered with a patch. E is revealed as Keaton, or Keaton’s double, who regards him intently until Keaton as O covers his face with his hands, signaling the end of the film. The work is considered by many, including Beckett himself, to be unsuccessful.35 Due to difficulties in filming, an introductory shot had to be abandoned: 1. The Street Dead straight. Not sidestreets or intersections. Period: about 1929. Earlyy summer morning. Small factory district. Moderate animation of workers going unhurriedly to work. All going in same direction and all in couples. No automobiles. Two bicycles ridden by men with girl passengers (on crossbar). One cab, cantering nag, driver standing brandishing whip. All persons in opening scene to be shown in some way perceiving—one another, an object, a shop window, a poster, etc. i.e. all contentedly in perciperee and percipii. (CSP P, 164) Though this scene was shot, these first takes were ruined. As Knowlson describes it, “[T]here were light problems, traffic problems, actor problems and camera problems—caused by a wobbling dolly on a rough roadbed.” The worst problem was caused by an inexperienced Schneider panningg extras up and down the street, unaware that this would cause a strobe effect in the resulting footage. On viewing the day’s takes, Beckett suggested immediately abandoning the entire first scene, as budget and time limitations would not permit refilming.36 This opening sequence would have been an extremely clear indication of the film’s location, both geographical and temporal. The film is set in 1929, the year that saw the beginnings of the depression era in America, as well as the introduction of synchronized sound into cinema. In this regard, this scene is one of the most readily locatable off Beckett’s later work. That it was never included does not repress entirely this sense of location: the period costume of the couple and the flower seller, as well as the amusingly emphasized silence of the film, all work toward this end. The emphasis on silence, as well as locating the film in a particular historical era of filmmaking, pushes viewers’ attention toward the visual. In this regard, the silence of the film facilitates the piece’s attempt to address the nature of visual perception, and visual representation. Beckett includes in the general notes of the script the maxim of the eighteenth century Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley, esse est percipi eighteenth-century percipi, i, “to be

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is to be perceived.” Beckett was familiar with the work of Berkeley from his scholarly days at Trinity College, Dublin.37 This principle forms the opening gambit in the film’s text, and sets the scene for the investigation into the relation between perceptions and ontology that is to follow. The unused opening sequence, with the couples “contentedly in perciperee and percipi,” perceiving and being perceived, contrasts with the unease that Keaton’s O displays toward perception. Keaton’s goal appears to be the suppression of all perception—particularly visual—including that of self byy self, though this proves to be the most difficult to achieve: “All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self perception maintains in being. . . . Search for non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception” (CSP P, 163). Of course, in a move that affirms his resistance to the “neatness of identifications,”38 the author immediately asserts that “no truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience” (CSP P, 163). Yet in spite of this disclaimer, ideas surrounding perception characterize this play, at the levels of both form and content. The intersubjective, intrasubjective, and embodied nature of perception is a key factor in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. In The Visible andd the Invisiblee, he articulates the notion of the chiasm or intertwining of the subject with the world. To see, for Merleau-Ponty, is to be also available to sight: “[H]he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it.”39 The viewer is never an objective observer, but is always embedded in the world of the visible. Just as there is a crossing over, a doubling back in the act of touch—to touch is also to be touched back— — the act of seeing reflects back upon the seer. Merleau-Ponty establishes the body, as an intermediary through which the intertwining of the subject and the world can take place. However, the body cannot be regarded as a mere thing, an instrument for perception: “We have to reject the age old assumption that puts the body in the world and the seer in the body or converselyy the world and the body in the seer as in a box.””40 Like the image in The Calmativee of the eyes “soon sockets, then quick into carrion,””41 we are made aware of the carnality of O’s eye. The opening shot of the film is a close-up of Keaton’s “reptilian” eyelid, opening slowly.42 It is not until the end of the film that the spectator learns that E, supposedly the disembodied camera-eye, is in fact O’s double. When O falls asleep on the rocking chair in the closing moments, E moves in and the viewer is finallyy given the countershot that the film has so far denied. We see, from O’s perspective, O’s own face, staring down at him. “E,” the camera-eye, is given a body, doubling that of O’s. If E is the manifestation of the perception of selff by self, then the spectator is inserted in this final scene into the mind-space off

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OE. However, the spectator does not see the two, O and E, framed together in a single shot. There is no disembodied, objective view to be had. The film arguably states that vision, even the prosthetic techno-vision of the camera, is always and emphatically situated relative to a viewpoint, a body. In Film, there is no beyond the body or objective viewpoint from which a voyeuristic spectator can view the scene. According to Merleau-Ponty, we must “eschew the thinking by planes and perspectives,” which delineates mind and body into two separate spheres or circles, for there is between the world and the body a “reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one with the other.””43 The idea of the objective observer, with its roots in the replacement of the fallible biological eye with the mechanical eye of the camera obscura, dissipates in Film, as the viewer is immersed in the subjective viewpoint off one figure, while the other, ostensibly objective viewpoint, is revealed as equally situated. Not only this, but the relationship is also one of intersubjectivity, reciprocity; the dominance of the rational subject who is capable of naming and ordering the world about him gives way to relation of interactivity, contingency.44 At the same time, however, self-awareness means division from self, and an inability to unite fully the perceiving self with the self perceived. While Merleau-Ponty writes that there is a circle of the visible and the seeing and the touched and the touching, self-perception has its limits. Self-touch does not produce coincidence, as Merleau-Ponty’s image of the hands always on the verge of touching, but never quite reaching coincidence.45 This gap at the heart of identity is dramatized in Film; the camera functions to reveal an inability to suture together self with self. While E may be a double of O, the two are not collapsed into sameness. The eye contact that they make separates and affirms difference, rather than producing unity and completeness. Merleau-Ponty proposes that the hiatus between the hand touched and the hand touching does not produce an “ontological void,” but rather is “spanned by the total being of my body.””46 Derrida sees this as miscarrying, and articulating a continual deferral of the welding together of the inner and outer world.47 The scene where O and E finally come face to face dramatizes this perceptual miscarriage. The separation of the two camera viewpoints realizes the internal separation of the subject, as both O and E cannot be held together in a single shot, but remain perpetually divided in the mind off the viewer, yet at the same time, in touch. From Optic to Haptic: Two Scopic Regimes To expand on the ways in which Film emphasizes the embodied nature off perception, it is necessary to turn to a more detailed examination of the

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central problem faced by Beckett during this project. It is a technical issue, and the way in which it was solved reveals much about the nature of the haptic image as it appears in Beckett’s work. The problem was how to differentiate between the vision of O and the vision of E. It was solved on set by placing gauze over the lens of the camera, which would indicate that thee camera was at that moment showing the viewpoint of O. The result is that O’s vision is blurred, making certain scenes in the film more textured and grainy. E’s “vision,” by contrast, is clear. Through his lengthy correspondence with Alan Schneider, a lifelong friend and director of many of the stage plays, it is clear that Beckett was initially disappointed with the results of the Film project. The letters about Film are not all negative however. Beckett comments that the attempt to solve some of the technical problems posed by the text produced some interesting results: “After the first [viewing] I was not too happy, after the second I felt it was really something. Not quite in the way intended but as sheer beauty, power and strangeness off image.””48 In the same letter he remarks how the attempt to solve the problem posed by the double vision, that distinction between the points of view of O and E, lends the film a “plastic value.” The value of the work was to be found “mainly on the formal and structural level.” In Film, two types of vision are available to the spectator. One, E, is associated with technology, objectivity, clarity, and a “visual appetite.” The other, O, is a situated viewpoint, revealing vision as embodied and, most significantly, fragile and failing. Not only is there a contrast engineered between the blurred vision of O and the clear vision of E, there are marked contrasts within the organization of the imagery of work. For example, the vistas that E/camera takes in are architectural. E’s camera gaze follows the lines of the cityscape’s bricks and rough mortar up and across to frame a patch of sky, then down to view w a scene with windows, half-opened, and a fire escape. Beyond the buildingg with the windows the top of a tall building is visible, and beyond that the sky. The lines here are sharp, geometric horizontals and verticals, coupled with the regular diagonals of the fire escape. This vista contrasts with the opening shot, a close-up of Keaton’s crinkled “reptilian” eye.49 In this opening sequence, the eye/camera gives us the kind of views that will reoccur in opposition throughout the work. On the one hand, there is closeness, an intimacy, as with the eye in the first scene; on the other, distance and space as the eye/camera lingers for a moment on the distant view before rolling back up and down across the surface of the wall, where it now focuses on O. O’s “flight” leads him from the roughly textured rubble of the building site to a much more orderly street. He turns a corner and, once again, we are offered a distance shot. The lines, previously rough and cluttered,

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give way to the geometric forms of windowsills and frames and verticals off streetlamps. The street, viewed by E from an angle, gives the impression off depth; the scene continues beyond the frame, into the distance. The lines of the footpath mirror those of the windowsills and frames, drawing the eye into the scene, into the street: the lines engineer an impression of depth. Once O ducks into a building off this street, he pauses in the stairwell. Here he checks his pulse for the first time. The lines and wrinkles on his hands mirror those of the eyelid in the first shot, as well as the aged face of the flower seller who descends the stairs without noticing O. Her face, her dress, and the flowers in the basket in her hands, all provide soft organic contours. E offers us a close-up of her hand, as it rests heavily on the banister duringg her descent. The creases around her mouth, on her lips, the lines beneath her eyes, even the wisps of gray hair are all clearly visible in a close-up that lends the image texture and grain. Following coming face to face with E, she collapses forward to the ground, her head resting on the flowers. E lingers for a moment, taking in the lines of the fabric of her dress, out of which her hand emerges and is splayed upon the tiles. It should be noted that this contrast between sharp geometric patterning and softer, more organic outlines of the body is one that occurs elsewhere in Beckett’s work, notably the television play Ghost Trioo. This contrast forms a disjuncture within the image itself. It is a collision of architecture and body that serves to both image the materiality of the figure and, particularly in the later Ghost Trio, with its more abstract spaces, emphasize the sparse geometry of the room in which the figure finds himself. This contrast is played out between the visions of O and E also. For O, the window in the room he enters is virtually opaque. By contrast, E’s vision of the window offers us again a distance view: he perceives the sharp geometric outlines of the windows in the building across the street. The glass is perfectly clear for him. The window that O offers us is grainy and blurred, with only the barest hint of anything beyond. He passes the window several times before becoming aware of the threat of exposure. Once he realizes the possibility of visibility through the glass he draws the tattered remnants off the blind and curtain over the glass: the blind is dark colored and ripped, the curtains are made of a gauzy material. O commits a similar act of veilingg upon the mirror. He fetches a blanket from the bed and drapes it over the frame of the object, at all times making sure to remain within the “angle off immunity,” thus never perceiving his own reflection. The contrasts in the room lie between the sharp angles of the window w frames (within and without), those of the angular objects: the mirror frame, the image of God, the lines of the birdcage all contrast with the gauzy veil of the curtains, the heavy folds of the material used to swathe the mirror,

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the pocked and crumbling plaster of the walls, and of course O’s greatcoat, which first surrounds his body and then later covers the birdcage and fishbowl. O’s activity extends, for most of the work, only as far as veiling, or making obscure. The tearing of the God-image is echoed by the destruction of the photographs. O rips each one into four pieces and throws them on the ground. This network of contrasts serves both to establish and maintain the distinction between O and E’s vision, while also asserting a distinction between the near and far levels of focus in screen imagery. There is a contrast also between the ways in which geometric patterning characterizes the far views, while texture and grain are the features of the close-up. Both views are held together in this work, juxtaposed against one another to such an extent that the film becomes a study of the possibilities of film imagery. Its title would seem to suggest its priorities lie here: it is a self-reflexive commentary on this form of media. O’s destruction of the photographs is a destruction of the past, particularly a destruction of moments of past percipii, frozen in time by the camera. The photographs show the protagonist at intervals throughout his life, and each one involves him being perceivedd. The mother, pictured in the final image, regards her young child intently, and the camera in each one has acted d as the ultimate perceiving force. This destruction points also to the fragilityy of the image. Barthes’s recognition of the ephemerality of the photograph is apt here. That the paper upon which it is printed is perishable is one thing; that the person viewing images of the dead, as Barthes does of his deceased parents, is also going to disappear is another. Both consign ultimately the photograph to disappearance and loss.50 O’s tearing of the photographs highlights the perishable nature of film—either the printed photograph or the cinematic film—becoming in these brief moments a testament to its lack off omnipotence or omniscience. The fact that the film is set in a bygone era off filmmaking, with filmic techniques, silence, blurring, and graininess, draws attention to the materiality, and indeed mortality, of the art object. Images produced by the mechanical eye are subject to failure and decay. As well as subverting vision, O’s actions also constitute an arresting off the preeminence of the medium in capturing reality. Barthes, drawing on the image of Doubting Thomas seeking to touch the resurrected Christ in order to prove that he is in fact present, suggests that a photograph signifies the desire for similar, haptic certitude. It is a desire to be able to hold in one’s hand a fragment of that which has passed. The photograph refers to something that was, and in doing so asserts itself as a kind of presence.51 For Barthes, a photograph or set of photographs fail to represent: the self never coincides with the image.52 This seems to be the direction Beckett pushes

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us toward: the filmed image’s inability to represent the material body that it pursues. Film works against the power of the camera to see and represent. At the same time, this short film attempts to convey a differing sensory schemaa from the audiovisual one conventional to cinema and photography. It is an attempt that has significance for Beckett’s aesthetic practice as a whole, as well as articulating his pessimism about representation and the act of making visible. From Far to Near: The Dissolution of Perspective O’s vision is grainy and lacking geometric depth. The Beckettian eye is here conflated, as Alan Ackerman puts it, with a flat universe, resisting both sight and subjective insight.53 It produces a haptic image, calling upon the eye to touch, while that clear, perfect vision of E is more purely optic. Working against the fulfillment of vision, the haptic imagery produced by O evokes the sense of touch. It asserts the presence of the film, screen, or skin that exists between perceiver and object. Juxtaposed in this work as they are, these two scopic systems, haptic and optic, O and E, operate in a montage-like way, but the result is less a production of some final unity in the viewer’s mind, than a continuation and perpetuation of perceptual dissonance. The haptic image does not offer its content up easily, but is often blurred, out of focus, and highly textured. The absence of visual plenitude means that the viewer is left in a position of uncertainty about both the content of the image and the nature of the narrative of which it is part. In Film, the blurred close-ups of Keaton’s hands as they rest for a moment on whatever they have been touching serve to interrupt the continuity of action and, seen as they are through the haptic gaze, call upon the spectator’s eye to touch also, along with O. The tendency within the haptic or tactile mode of perceiving in Film is to move away from distance views where the conventions of linear perspective may apply. Vision is always situated. Maude has noted a similar impulse in Beckett, which draws out the carnal embodiment of the eye: “Beckett brings vision closer to the proximity senses, firstly by stressing the material, embodied nature of sight, and secondly by emphasizing that vision mayy not, after all, constitute the space that guarantees the subject’s detachment from the world, but rather, through the chaos of sensation, makes him part of that world.”54 The employment of the haptic image does exactly this: byy imbuing vision with touch, Beckett both emphasizes vision’s embodiment and its situatedness. The rigid clarity of space constructed out of lines and angles does not adequately represent how we view the world, from within the world. As

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Martin Jay puts it, Merleau-Ponty’s main dispute with the objective perceiver in Cartesian thought regarding visuality was that it was on the world, rather than in it.55 For Merleau-Ponty the viewer is within the visible, and so available to vision. He argues that vision is not a mere window on the world; it is of a far more participatory nature. The journey of E in Film can be read as a movement away from a particular, optic mode of representation. It is one that permits the viewer to remain outside the realm of the viewed. E’s path follows the trajectory of O, who leads him away from the objective view, and toward the line and contour of the lived body, the perspectiva naturaliss and the partial, unresolved, or haptic view. As Jane Hale argues: “Beckett is, consciously or unconsciously, turning his back upon a major convention of linear perspective. Where painting and theatrical décor in perspective draw the eye to a geographical vanishing point in order to create the impression of physical distance, Beckett renounces this effect of depth in space in favour of a descent into the depths of consciousness.”56 Norma Bouchard argues that Film can be contextualized as part of the Surrealist movement’s polemic against the eye. Sight and its association with enlightenment rationality placed it in a position of epistemological dominance. A clear example of this attack on the hegemony of vision came in Luis Bu ñuel’s Un chien andalou, in which a woman’s eyeball is slit with a razor. Bouchard points out that although Beckett’s “anti-ocularcentric discourse never reaches the levels of violent denigration of Surrealist iconography,” the eye is seen as divisive, separating the self from the self; therefore the film, as Bouchard suggests, partakes in the Surrealist polemic.57 There are also certain intertextual crossovers between Film and Un chien. The former is set in the same year that the latter was filmed. The opening and closing scenes of Film contain a close-up of Keaton’s eye, reminiscent of the eye scene in Un chien. In the final scene, the pupil of the eye is bisected by the closing title. The attack on vision in Film resists an epistemology based on vision, and the convention of linear perspective. Instead, it demonstrates the coarse materiality of the eye. Haptic imagery is employed in Film to give a sense of the embodiment off vision; it is also the means by which the inner experience of embodied perception can be held together and represented aesthetically along the with the outer. The outer reality and the weighty corporeality that was such a feature of Beckett’s earlier work can be seen in this work to rest parallel to the inner reality. Film holds both the experience of the external and internal together in touch. Not harmonized, for there is always a split or gap maintained between self and self. Technology, in the guise of the camera is inserted into this gap, and becomes the means by which those inner and outer realities are maintained in parallel. Yoshiki Tajiri argues that the distinction made between O’s and E’s vision “can be interpreted with reference to the

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bifurcation of human vision into the technological and the physical.”58 The limitless techno-eye contrasts sharply with the limited subjective eye off O. Yet what is interesting about the use of technology here is its position between; that is, between self and other, viewer and viewed, and between self and self. In this way, technology becomes in Film, as it does in manyy other of Beckett’s later plays, an interface device. Thus defined, this use off technology is comparable with its use in Krapp’s Last Tapee, where the tape recorder brings Krapp’s past into the same space as his present, though, it must be noted, does not unify them. The interface functions as a way off bringing self and self into contact, viewer with viewed, perceiver with perceived. However, it remains as a film, in the sense of screen or skin: it is the way in which separation and distance between these entities is articulated. Self and self remain in touch. O and E are separated, yet inseparable. They are not unified as one, but merely in contact through the technological interface that film provides. The contact is a touching that affirms distance, a special relationship where two separate entities rest together, however uneasily. As Sylvie Debevec Henning puts it: “A film is also a haze or mist, or any translucent material like the lens gauze itself, that partiallyy veils, making a direct view or contact impossible. Confrontation between O and OE always occurs through a glass darkly, vision and knowledge are onlyy indirect and partial.”59 The film is the interface between self and self, selff and world. To be in touch with the world is to be in touch with the surface, flesh, or body that separates self from world and self from other. That this renders access to and therefore knowledge of the world, other, and even self, difficult or restricted, is a concept that Beckett’s work consistently grapples with. It is apparent also from his comments on the “deanthropomorphized” landscapes of Cézanne, where he perceived a sense of his painting’s incommensurability “with all human expressions whatsoever.”60 In Film, Beckett exploits the nature of the medium to explore the points at which subjects come into contact (or fail to come into contact) with the world, the other, and the self. The end of the film, where the identity of E is finally revealed, is also the end of that touching, as it hints at the end of perception, the end off self-awareness, in other words death. The act of veiling in which O covers his face with his hands shuts out any possible further incursions of vision and shows a final image of those hands, desperately gnarled with age, functioning to unearth the mortality of this ephemeral, filmic body. Within a couple of years of making Film, Keaton would be dead from cancer. The hands, the skin are not only the perceptual screen or film that lies between self and self, self and world, there are also, in the final moments of O, imaged as a shroud, or death mask separating life from death.

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Both Film and Krapp’s Last Tapee feature the failure of sight. Krapp squints at his spools; the point of view shot in Film reveals O’s myopic sight. Vision is associated in Film with carnality and embodiment and is therefore subject to the same decay as the rest of the body. In Film, the attempt to realize a carnal and embodied vision also realizes a haptic aesthetic. That is, imageryy that works against a visual logic and refuses to conform to certain conventions of image-making, which make objects more visible to the eye. Linear perspective is a classic example of a visual logic which, drawing as it does the eye of the viewer into the scene, simultaneously privileges the observer as an independent eye. Hale argues that instead of drawing the eye toward a vanishing point in order to “create the impression of physical distance” Beckett favors the staging of a descent into the depths of consciousness.61 In Beckett’s work, “human beings no longer occupy a stable point in space and time, from which they may visually organise, give meaning to, and institute relationships with other beings and objects.”62 Proximity, tactility, and texture are features of this aesthetic, which turns away from representational conventions such as linear perspective, which offer the viewer an epistemological standpoint based on vision. In Beckett, vision, even in the savage techno-eye of the camera, is embodied and situated, and always open to touch; thus in this work the organ of sense is mimicked by the technological apparatus that mediates it. The unity of space, a feature of the imagery produced byy perspective, which treats the canvas as window or mirror, is absent from the partial, fragmented, and dim imagery of Beckett’s later work. Nowhere, however, is the refusal of this form of visual representation more evident than in the imperfect vision of Film. Technology in Film operates in the between-space, the interface between viewer and viewed, self and self, yet is not established as an objective mediating device. It is rather a film, a screen, or skin that lies between the participants in the processes of perception, both uniting them at the same time as dividing them.

CHAPTER 2

Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes

The Beckettian Ear Music moves us, both physically and emotionally. It vibrates on the skin and the ear drum and sets off emotional resonances. Although the eyelid can close and the hand can withdraw, the body is opened and vulnerable to sound through the ear. Sound is a phenomenon that transgresses the boundary between the self and the world with ease and is intimately tied to human emotion. The subject is vulnerable to sound from without, and also hears him or herself from within. For Merleau-Ponty we are sonorous beings. Sound plays a role in that chiasmic relationship between self and self, and self and world. He writes: “[L]ike crystal, like metal, and many other substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat.”1 In a similar vein, Jean-Luc Nancy thinks of the body as a “resonance chamber.”2 He compares the listening body to an instrument, a drum: “Isn’t the space of the listening body, in turn, just such a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, but also from which the opening of a mouth can resume and revive resonance.”3 It is this self-reflexive sonority and the response of the subject through which sound passes that will set the terms for this exploration of this play. Ghost Trio is filled with resonating chambers: the chamber in which we find F, F himself, and the small cassette recorder held on his lap. All the objects, including F, emerge out of the gray background, but are gray themselves. Like sound, they do not obey the boundaries of wall, floor, body-skin, but echo each other, return and diminish in rhythmic patterns. The act of listening has major significance for the figures that populate Beckett’s novels and plays. In the television plays Eh Joe, e Ghost Trio,

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and Nacht und Trräumee, disembodied voices and brief snatches of music are heard. The presence of these sonic elements offers a window into the figures’ mind-spaces, as these moments of aural contemplation reveal a thread off emotional color against a gray backdrop. Bryden, writing on the musical sensibility that permeates Beckett’s writing, notes that “the twin functions of listening and speaking are in Beckett’s writing often given more weight as attesters of presence than is the function of seeing.” And, as she continues, while silence might threaten to come to pass, as speech becomes once and for all exhausted, the cessation of sound is never complete. The noise off life continues. Beckett’s figures are often straining to hear.4 The aural contemplation that the figures engage in reveals also the effect of sound—an effect that has physiological, psychological, and emotional aspects, converting an aural experience into a tactile one. The subject resonates, vibratingg in response to what is heard. In the tympanum image of The Unnamablee, Beckett explores the relationship between voice and body: Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.5 The tympanum provides the voice with a point of passage into the body.6 This relationship is figured, on the one hand, as sound-based, and, on the other, as tactile and vibratory. Like the narrator of The Unnamablee, the figures who inhabit Eh Joe, e Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Trräumee find themselves in an intense state of listening. The voiceover, which is heard in Ghost Trio, demands at the outset that the spectator do the same, as she asks us to “keep that sound down” (CSP P, 248). These short and minimalistic teleplays take place within the hollow columns, the places of resonance within the listener. They image the passage of sound through consciousness. The camera in Ehh Joee scrutinizes Joe’s face for the moment it is touched by sound, when the voice permeates his consciousness. The room of Ghost Trio is an echo chamber, a mind-space, where the music that is heard by the listener provokes the images produced on the screen. Music has a similar function in Nacht undd Trräumee, as the experience of listening generates the dream image. Sound penetrates the body and etches meaning onto the image. Technologyy and sound act as mediators of music and the mechanical voice—these are acoustic elements that indicate the self-awareness of the listener and inscribe

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meaning onto the image. Sounds, as with Krapp’s Last Tapee, are intimatelyy linked to memory. The act of recording sound onto tape or vinyl is an act of inscribing, just as memories are inscribed upon the mind. Each of these plays sees sound inscribed upon the image in varying ways. “Flint glass”: The Haptic Voice in Eh Joe W When the disembodied voice of this play begins her assault on Joe, reminding him of his past misdemeanors, she operates as a tactile force, an inscriptive machine. Utilizing the themes of guilt, surveillance, and punishment, Eh Joee explores how sound, manifest as voice, etches meaning onto the surface of the image, and alters the way in which the perceiver interprets that image. The two facets of the work—sound and image—are held together in tension. Beckett employs here the radiophonic voice, a device that permits voices to be detached from bodies.7 Krapp’s Last Tapee saw a radical distinction engineered between the voice that emerges from a visible body, and a disembodied, mechanical voice. Eh Joee also explores the complex relationship between voice and body, however, considered in relation to its medium of television this play also meditates on the relation between sound and image, rooted in the ideas of montage, counterpoint, and asynchronicity. Having written for radio and for stage, Beckett is now, with Eh Joee, grappling with both media forms together. As Herren points out, Deleuze’s comment about Ghost Trio, that it was as if “a radio play and silent film were played together: a new form of inclusive disjunction,”8 could apply to Eh Joee. For Herren, Beckett has combined motifs from silent film with aural motifs from the radio plays, resulting in a televisual palimpsest whose mechanical precursors are still traceable.9 Sound and image in Eh Joee have a montage-like relationship. Sergei Eisenstein defined montage as a “collision” between two images that are independent of one another: two separate entities that collide and form a whole in the mind of the perceiver.10 The structural motif of montage was significant when the advent of sound in cinema brought a new set of challenges to those filmmakers who had already accustomed themselves to the language of silent film. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov’s 1928 Statement on Soundd advocated an initially contrapuntal relationship: “Thee f irst experiments with sound must aim at a sharp discord with the visual images. Only such a ‘hammer and tongs’ approach will produce the necessary sensation that will result consequently in the creation of a new orchestral counterpointt of visual and sound images.”11 This notion of asynchronicity, of the inclusion of sound in the image that has no obvious source, and the urge forr a contrapuntal balance between sound and image may be useful in reading

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the relation between sound and image in Eh Joee. For the camera-moves in Eh Joee are emphatically separated from the voice: the two do not move as one entity, but rather collide, with sound altering the way in which the perceiver views the image. At the beginning of the play, Joe enacts a dumbshow that has much in common with O’s actions in Film. He goes to each “orifice” of the room: the window, the door, and to those spaces within the room that have hidden depths: the cupboard, under the bed. He opens, closes, and locks the window, door, and cupboard, and then draws curtains over each one. He finallyy checks under the bed, before sitting on it. He is just beginning to relax when Voice begins her assault (CSP P, 201). Just as in Film, there is a similar set off self-protective gestures: closing, locking, and veiling actions. The integrityy of Joe’s “space,” as we learn, has come under threat in the past. The voices upon which he commits “mental thuggee” are an imposition, an invasion. Voice blurs the boundaries that Joe has attempted to establish between the inner and the outer of the room and, at a metaphorical level, between the inner and outer aspects of his own self. In actuality, any narrative could be used to inscribe meaning upon the face of Joe. As film scholar Michel Chion writes: “Sound has an influence on perception: through the phenomenon of added value, it interprets the meaning of the image, and makes us see in the image what we would not otherwise see, or would see differently. And so we see that sounds are not at all invested and localised in the same way as the image.”12 Chris Marker’s experimental Letters from Siberia, in which three different voice-over commentaries are played consecutively against a single piece of footage, exemplifies this. The narrative accompanying the film paints each version in a completely different light. It directs the viewers’ gaze to particular aspects of the image, and constructs utterly different meanings out of the same set of images.13 The relationship between sound and image, between voice and body in Eh Joee is imaged in terms of its tactile force: not only is the venomous voice a forceful entity, penetrating Joe’s consciousness, sound itself is shown to influence and alter the meaning and reception of the image. “cut a long story short”: The Haptic Voice Beckett describes the voice that plagues the protagonist of Eh Joee as “very low w throughout—plenty of venom. Face just listening hard and brain agonizing. Smile at very end when voice stops (having done it again).”14 The “done it again” refers to Joe’s supposed suppression of the voice; for the majority of the play, he listens intently, while at the same time struggling to shut it out. And this is not the first voice upon which he has committed “mental mental thuggee.” thuggee.

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We learn that the voices of his father and his mother—either ghostly visitations or phantoms produced by Joe’s mind—have already been shut out. The repression of these voices is an act that the voice describes as “throttlingg the dead” in his head.15 The voice that is heard in this play reminds Joe off his philandering lifestyle, the way he treated women, both her and the other woman she refers to, known only as the “green one.” Giving the narrative a near soap-operatic tone, this girl, “spirit made light” (CSP P, 205), tragicallyy killed herself after Joe’s abandonment of her. Returning the word “passion”16 to its etymological root in suffering, this teleplay is an ironic spectacle off Joe’s passions: his one-time passion for the female body coupled with his present suffering and somewhat masochistic enjoyment of the process. Joe’s plight forms a bathetic parallel between the love that drove the green one to take her own life (her passion for Joe), and the sacrificial body of Christ, “Joe’s lord.” Voice suggests that He may be the only one left to “start in on” Joe, when she has finally faded and succumbed to his mental strangulation (CSP P, 204). This play is Beckett’s first for television and sees a curious blending off the mechanical and the biological in the figure of Voice. Siân Philips, who played Voice in the first English production at the BBC in 1965, describes “metronoming” her way through the text during rehearsal, working with the author, “like machines” to create a nearly colorless recitation.17 As Katherine Weiss has suggested, Voice also takes on the role of the film director at certain points.18 She edits her own text: “cut a long story short doesn’t work,” and “cut another long story short doesn’t work either” (CSP P, 206). “Cut” can refer to the damage inflicted by a knife and to the editing of a film. Voice’s “cut” carves meaning out of Joe’s unblinking, tense visage. Both activities govern the final interpretation of the work, and reveal the haptic force off sound on the body of the image. Voice is radiophonic and technological; apart from the image of her sitting “holding hands” with Joe, she never draws attention to herself as embodied. Joe’s aged face fills the image, while the body of the “green one,” imaged as she is through Voice’s narrative, hovers over the work. However, little in the narrative points to Voice’s own presence; she does not even have an identity outside her function: to speak. Her only references to herselff involve a description of a clichéd romantic scene, in which Joe once described her voice: “When we sat watching the ducks . . . holding hands exchangingg vows . . . how you admired my elocution! . . . among other charms . . . voice like flint glass . . . to borrow your expression . . . ” (CSP P, 203). Yet this concentration on the aural elements of her presence, coupled with the author’s stripping away of any means of identifying her, serves to focus attention onto the sound itself. The image of Joe and the verbally constructed image

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of the green one dominate the visual field, while Voice remains pure sound. The fact that Voice is defined as sound indicates the ways in which this work divides voice from body, sound from image. This radiophonic voice contrasts with that of Maddy Rooney’s in All That Falll, who manages to broadcast a sense of her weighty corporeality purely through sound. The term acousmaticc is apt here. Originally used to describe sound without a visible source in musique concrrètee, acousmatic has been applied to film byy Michel Chion, to describe sounds that “belong” to an image but have no perceivable source in that image, defining the speaker as acousmêtree: neither inside nor outside the image. It is not inside, because the image off the voice’s source—the body, the mouth—is not included. Nor is it outside, since it is not clearly positioned off-screen in an imaginary “wing,” like a master of ceremonies or a witness, and it is implicated in the action, constantly about to be a part of it.19 Chion’s acousmêtree describes sounds and voices that come from machines, or emerge from hidden places—he offers the fake Wizard of Oz, whose voice comes from behind a curtain, as an example. For Chion the acousmêtre ’s persona inhabits the image in a different way: by its nature blurs the boundaries between onscreen and off-screen.” 20 In order to achieve that colorless voice, Beckett rehearsed with Siân Philips to remove intonation, and to instill a metronomic rhythm. In the studio, the high and low frequencies of her voice were filtered out, leaving the voice insistent, toneless. It was Billie Whitelaw, however, who was to achieve the tonelessness required by the author most effectively in a 1988 version, directed by Walter Asmus.21 Her performance focuses on texture and rhythm, with all tonal color drained from it. Siân Philip’s clipped staccato is a more human voice, whereas Whitelaw manages a truly ghostly, machine-produced sound.22 Such a voice, drained off human warmth, has the capacity to cut into the flesh of Joe’s image and be an instrument of Joe’s torture. The camera in this play does not have the same invasive intent as it does in Film; the voice intrudes, and, as Clas Zilliacus observes, the camera functions to observe and record its effects upon Joe’s face.23 The camera zooms toward Joe’s face a total of nine times so that the play becomes a portrait in process: “[T]he camera is never dollied forward to the archetypal close-up: an eye orr pair of eyes [ . . . ] Eh Joee is expressly a study not merely of eyes but of a human face.”24 Because Joe does not seem to register its presence to the same extent as O, the presence of the camera here is more muted than the camera in Film. This play does not struggle to present the experience of the inner andd outer, internal subjectivity and awareness of external perception, together. With Eh

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Joee, the camera is turned inward. Beckett gave advice to Alan Schneider, who was in the process of doing his own production of Eh Joee in the United States: “He does not look directly at camera and is not aware of it. He is aware only of the voice. The eyes are turned inward, a listening look. It is however effective dramatically if at the very end, with the smile he looks full at the objective for the first time.”25 Joe’s relationship with the camera is of a far more ambiguous nature than that of O’s in Film. Yet in both works the sensation of looking at something private, intimate, prevails. Toby Zinman places Eh Joee within the tradition of peephole art, drawing a parallel between it and Duchamp’s Etants Donnéess and arguing that both use an essentiallyy visual medium and play at withholding the visible. Joe’s dumb-show not only affirms his desire to remain hidden, but also aids the spectator’s acceptance of a fundamental convention of realist theater: the invisible fourth wall. Forr Zinman this wall is perforated with a peephole, like the one that offers a fragmented view of the nude woman in the Duchamp work. This peephole is the camera lens.26 The spectator is then party to something that would otherwise remain unseen and the moment of looking becomes an act of transgression. It is interesting to note how Joe as object of the look subverts the traditional active male gaze upon the passive female object within a film. It is Joe who becomes the spectacle while that active/passive heterosexual division of laborr on screen that Laura Mulvey describes, where “the male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure,” is disrupted and undermined.27 Voice orchestrates the work, as she takes Joe point by point through the final hours of the green one’s life. Within Joe’s mental space, to which we, as peephole viewers, are party, there are several differing but equally illuminating interpretations of Voice’s function. She, in Lamonte’s Jungian analysis, acts as Joe’s anima, a Demeter figure seeking justice for the lost “Kore.”28 S. E. Gontarski reads Voice as a manifestation of Joe’s artistic drive and imagination, not only the product off his guilty conscience. Voice continually entreats Joe to exercise his imagination, and the “artful and climactic description of the lover’s suicide is devised by the voice, who in turn is devised by Joe.”29 Herren sums up the ambiguity of Voice best when he points out that although Joe “recognises this Voice from previous experience, the bill of particulars in tonight’s indictment catches him off guard. He may be the source of Voice—her opener and closer—but he appears to know no more about what she will say than we do.”30 For Herren, this production of Voice has deeper psychological implications, to the extent that it functions as a “melancholic commemoration” of a past love, motivated by the desire to narrate a self-elegy. This, in Herren’s reading, is a “coded suicide note from himself, to himself and to the attentive spectator as well.” well. 31

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These analyses seem to agree that Joe is the producer of the voice, yet its gender and mechanistic qualities emphasize its difference from its creator. Voice emerges, not only from “behind the eyes” (CSP P, 202), but also, as Weiss points out, from behind the camera eye: an “unseen machine provoking responses that the camera records.”32 That Joe imagines his torturer in technological terms fits with a Foucaultian vision of technology as an agent of surveillance and discipline, working toward the regulation of the bodyy through the mechanisms of guilt and confession. In the recording process, sound is transformed into an electromagnetic charge, which alters the ferric oxide coating on tape. In this way, the recording of sound is a process of touch of, and inscription upon, a surface. In Voice’s aural assault upon Joe, the process is repeated: she attempts to etch guilt onto his image. The camera watches this process intently, in order to document moments where Joe’s guilt may flicker across his face, as Beckett puts it: “face just listening hard and brain agonising.”33 Voice, Pain, and Torture For Foucault, public torture was part of a ritual and spectacle of punishment that necessarily marks the guilty body. Even if its function was to “purge” crime, torture does not necessarily affect this; rather the crime and criminality is inscribed upon the flesh.34 One can argue that, within Joe’s psychic space, Voice performs a similar function. The narrative that Voice inflicts on Joe forces him to imaginatively engage with the consequences of his wrongdoing. The piece as whole constitutes a confession of guilt. Not only this, but the fact that this play is written for television, a medium dedicated to spectacle, situates this confessional within the history of public spectacles of guilt and punishment. Within the spectacle of the torture session or the public punishment, pain is central. It is the moment when the body’s truth is revealed in agonized cries, and, it is supposed, that the truth of the victim’s confession is guaranteed. Elaine Scarry describes the moment of confession that arises out of physical pain as a sign of the disintegration, through pain, of the world of the victim. Scarry describes pain as “language destroying” and by implication self-destroying. The confession makes visible this loss to the torturers: To assent to words that through the thick agony of the body can be onlyy dimly heard, or to reach aimlessly for the name of a person or a place that has barely enough cohesion to hold its shape as a word and none to bond it to its worldly referent, is a way of saying, yes, all is almost gone now,

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there is almost nothing left now, even this voice, the sounds I am making, no longer form my words but the words of another.35 The voice is a vital element of the theater of torture and punishment, as accounts of torture will attest. There can be a surprising level of intimacyy in the relationship between torturer and subject of inquisition. In the recorded scripts of the Spanish inquisitors’ manuals, such as those of Gui and Eymerich, the subject could not usually see the interrogator, who stood behind him or her, as Ariel Glucklich observes. However, the voicee of the interrogator was always there, punctuated by expectant silences between commands and questions. The acousmaticc inquisitor was a purely vocal presence, divorced from, but implicated in, the mechanics of torture: “With visual feedback eliminated, voice became critical [ . . . ]. Under carefully regulated torture—pain applied when the inquisitor nodded to the torturer in response to a note of falseness or obstinacy—the patient spoke. Only words that did not produce pain were legitimated.”36 Voice and the instruments of torture formed a single machine, which produced pain and confession and instilled guilt in its subject. Pain or the threat of pain overwhelms the subject and he or she internalizes the guilt through this ritual of torture and interrogation. With torture, multiple and messy openings are made: torture marks are made on the body. Taken by Voice through the stages of his “crimes,” reminiscent of the “stages of the cross,” the Christian practice off reenacting Christ’s walk to Calgary, we can see the mechanics of Joe’s guilt and regret. Joe has created his own torture-machine, the vaguely mechanical voice, which acts as a mental self-flagellant. Yet Voice’s only tools for torture are her words. These, however, may have a visceral, physical effect. As Merleau-Ponty writes: If a word is shown to a subject for too short a time for him to be able to read it, the word “warm,” for example, induces a kind of experience off warmth [ . . . ] The word “hard” produces a sort of the stiffening of the back and neck, and only in a secondary way does it project into the visual or auditory field and assume the appearance of a sign or a word. Before becoming the indication of a concept it is first of all an eventt which gripss my body.37 In describing the impact of words in this way, Merleau-Ponty highlights the sensitivity of the body. Of course, it does not feel actual warmth, but “prepares itself for heat.”38 The image this gives is of a body that is in open anticipation of the vibrations, temperatures—sensations with which the world touches it. He says that “words have a physiognomy because we adopt

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towards them, as towards each person, a certain form of behaviour which makes its complete appearance the moment each word is given.”39 Not onlyy does the narrative to which Voice subjects Joe affect him deeply but the veryy words that Voice uses also impact upon him at a visceral and sensual level. Voice’s intention is to goad a reaction from Joe. In this sense, Voice is like an interrogator. Scarry observes that the content and context of torturer’s questions often make clear that, although the questioning implies that the answering is significant, this is not always the case. The question, the voice, in torture has an intimate connection with physical pain, and it is another instrument in the mechanics of the process. It is not the content of the answer that matters either, but the fact of answering, either with cries off pain or with pain-induced speech. All demonstrate the effectiveness of the regime and its torture methods.40 In this way the confession, as with manyy inquisitorial practices, is already written into the script of the interrogator, ready to be elicited in the course of the ritual of pain and power. As it is Joe who tortures himself, guilt is assured and internalized. Joe does not need to speak. The camera thus takes on a similar role to those members of the Inquisition who painstakingly recorded the torture process. It documents each stage of Joe’s “passion,” recording the psychological wounds inflicted by the words. The Voice demands that Joe say his own name, just as the girl supposedly did in her final moments: “Say it you now, no one’ll hear you . . . Sayy ‘Joe’ it parts the lips” (CSP P, 206). Demonstrating the physicality of speech, the production of the word alters the orifice, leaves it open and eroticallyy charged. There is an insistent repetition of the word “stone” in the final few w lines: the green one, having taken a tube of painkillers, lies down at the edge of the water and “scoops a little cup for her face in the stones” (CSP P, 206). The stones press against her body: her lips, breasts, hands and act as a cold replacement for the body she has lost. The word “stone” implies somethingg cold, unyielding, and unloving. Just as the subject to which Merleau-Pontyy refers to feels a stiffening of the spine at the mention of the word “hard,” or a sense of heat at the suggestion of the word warmth, so too must Joe’s bodyy anticipate the sensation of cold, loveless stones pressed against the body. These stones are all that the body is not. They are cold, indifferent, as perhaps Joe once was toward the women in his life. Voice artfully constructs the final moments of the girl’s life,41 beginning by establishing Joe’s physical state, the history of their relationship, Joe’s religiosity, as well as discussingg the source of Joe’s voices: “[Y]ou know that penny farthing hell you call your mind . . . that’s where you think this is coming from, don’t you?” (CSP P, 202). However, she saves the body of the green one for last: it is the most potent torture method at her disposal.

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As well as the precognitive effect of words, there is also to be found a semantic multiplicity in Voice’s descriptions. The following terms dominate the image of Voice’s “green one”: pale, young, narrow, water, child. There are also associations with the words “slip,” “strip,” “slit.” She sits on the edge of the bed on the night in question in her “lavender slip” and “gets up in the end and slips out as she is.” Following her failed attempt to slit her wrists, she “tears a strip from the slip and ties it round the scratch” (CSP P, 206), goes back to the house with her wet slip clinging to her legs. While such associations emphasize her youthfulness and fragility—she is only a slip off a girl—they also help to affirm the liminality of her presence. The girl has “pale eyes,” spirit made light, as Joe describes her. Slip, strip, and slit share etymological links, in cutting, and in the opening of a space between elements. Slip suggests both to escape from, and to cut. The green one slips out into the night, and slips both out of life and out of Joe’s grasp. All he is left with is a voice, of another, upon whom he cannot get a grip, to throttle, stifle. There is a sense of slip also as a cutting, from a stem or branch, driving the sense that the green one’s body is carved by voice. Strip describes the removal of an outer layer. The “you’ve laid her” (CSP P, 205), implies the stripping that Joe did of both the green one’s body, and the value she placed on her own life. She tears a strip from her slip to surround the slit in her wrist, attempting to heal the opening made there. As a location a “strip” is a narrow portion of a surface, bounded by two parallel lines. Her body in its final location becomes this strip, a space between sea and shore, life and death, the tangible and the intangible. Slit can be a coarse reference to female genitalia, emphasizing Joe’s relationship to her as both a physical one, he has “had” her, and a controlling, domineering one. She was open for conquest, a space to be filled, and remade according to his wishes and desires. Slit can also describe a narrow opening, suggesting the violence of a cut, between two elements, which turns us back toward strip as the intangible location that she finally inhabits, her body that is cut by voice out of the stones, the sea, is one that Joe imaginatively inhabits. However, not in the way he once did, in an act of mastery. Now his touch is a yieldingg to her: he is incapable of actually touching her—she has slipped away from him—but imaginatively touches the objects and the pieces of the world she has touched. These are, the big horn buttons, the wet silk slip, the razor with which she attempts to cut her wrists, the water on her feet, the stones on her breasts, lips, hands. Voice has control over the shaping of the narrative and the editing off film, she cutss into the skin of the image. Joe for the most part is passive. The body of the green one is carved out of words, transformed into sound. The place where the body of the green one finally lies is highly significant.

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Having taken sleeping pills, she lies face down in the path of the incomingg tide. Such a location is charged with mutability, liminality. Crossing this zone, the mediated body of the green one exists both in and out of life. Not only this, she also represents the moment of the opening of Joe’s body to the venom of voice and of the silent image to the imposition of sound. The story that Voice recounts is filled with the moments of contactt between the body surface of the green one and the world around her. Her last moments see her body pressed into stones, but even before this, the viewer/listener is taken on her journey via the edges of her body. The last time Joe saw her he was “bundling her into her Avoca sack . . . her fingers fumbling with the big horn buttons” (CSP P, 205). What is significant is that we do not touch her, rather we touch what she touches, or feel the press of what touches her. Voice fills the narrative of the green one’s final night with these sensory details. She lies with her “face in the wash,” which doesn’t work, goes back to the house and gets sleeping tablets, returns “trailing her feet in the water like a child” and having taken them all, lies down again in the tide, hands “clawing at the shingle now” (CSP P, 206). It is here that Voice drops to a whisper, as she describes the body in the stones. For Margharita Giuletti, the 1988 version of Eh Joee directed by Walter Asmus with the voice of Billie Whitelaw was one in which the power of words was given due attention. She writes that “life is given back to the words as an act of respect for their originality while they create images that strike the ear physically.””42 Yet while words have their impact on Joe, it appears that even when virtually inaudible Voice would still function as an instrument of torture. She threatens Joe with the possibility of remaining a whisper for as long as he continues to live: “You stop it in the end . . . imagine if you couldn’t . . . Ever think of that? . . . If it went on . . . The whisper in your head . . . Me whispering in your head . . . things you can’t catch . . . On and Off . . . Till you join us . . . Eh Joe?” (CSP P, 204). Were the venomous voice to fall to an eternal whisper, suppressed and strangled but not quite extinguished by Joe, he would be tormented by a sound without meaning, denied even the pleasure (however masochistic) he may take in the eroticism of the narrative. The visceral impact of the voice would remain. Televised Presence The voice inscribes meaning onto the image in Eh Joe; e sound as voice alters the way in which the image is perceived and interpreted. Imagined as a technological entity, this radiophonic presence provides Joe with a level of awareness of his own past and misdeeds, which he both seeks out and loathes. Voice permits not only Joe’s self-flagellation, she also provides him with a

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fantasy of the death of the green one, which is for Herren a rehearsal of his own death: Joe’s “meticulous imagination of the green one’s suicide serves as a virtual how-to-manual in killing oneself.””43 Voice’s venom, inscribed as it is on the screen of Joe’s mind permits an imaginative preinhabitation, thus facilitating a bodily anticipation of bodily disintegration. Joe’s religious beliefs are given a sardonic treatment by Voice—it is with irony that the voice draws a parallel between Joe’s suffering and that off Christ. Within Joe’s Catholic faith system, shared by the “green one,””44 suicides cannot enter heaven. No comfort is available to the believer in this kind of afterlife; the “green one” is doubly lost to Joe. Yet the religiosity of the playy emerges in other ways also. Throughout the play, it appears as though Joe is the one shouldering the cross. The stages of the play, marked out by cameraa zooms, remind the viewer of the stages of the cross. It is an ironic allusion off course, as Joe is anything but a shining example of a believer in the faith he supposedly follows. However, by the end of the play a new image is perhaps revealed, one that reworks in a radical way the image of the noli me tangeree scene, where Mary Magdalene sees the resurrected Christ, but is not permitted to touch his robe. For the intangible figure of the green one, standingg as she does at the limit point between life and death, body and spirit, is also deeply reminiscent of this scene. Nancy’s examination of the representations of this moment throughout the history of art leads him to the conclusion that the two bodies displayed at this instant, one of glory, the other of flesh, reveal that “the possibility of carnal decay is given there, along with the possibility of glory.””45 For Nancy this indicates the fading of the divine presence from a world that has no outside. It is the depletion of the very notion of a metaphysical realm and the notion of soul that lives beyond the body. For in Christianity, even though the body appears to be denigrated within this tradition, it is in fact its essential element: “Only a body can be cut down or raised up, because only a body can touch or be touched. A spirit can do nothing of the sort.””46 The fantasy of the girl’s death is simultaneously a fantasy of her resurrection: Voice has permitted Joe to resurrect aesthetically his lost “green one.” She is “spirit made light,” a broadcast from the void. In doing so, she stands as a limit point between life and death, realized by the cold techno-voice, and just as untouchable. It is her body, not Joe’s, that is imaged as the sacrificial one, “spirit made light,” while Joe remains bound to his “stinking old wrapper.” A body of clay and a body of light are in touch, but forever separated. He desires to touch her, but this is impossible. He is boxed in, framed by the restrictive parameters of the television screen, while she is never visualized, never made tangible. The only touch that is allowed is through narrative, through representation—of representation of which voice is the vehicle, the interface. Not

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only does sound, manifested as voice, take on a tactile force, it also unearths and resurrects the body of the lost girl, at the same time as it keeps herr beyond touch. Echo Chambers: Music in Ghost Trio and Nacht und Trräume Beckett and Music Throughout Beckett’s oeuvre music plays a significant role, whether directly, as songs sung or hummed, or indirectly, in the rhythm and tone of the actor’s body and speech. Song is a feature of the isolation of the figures: Winnie sings to stave off the silence and solitude in Happy Dayss (1960–1961). Krapp sings a few bars of an old hymn as he sits in his den, while in Nacht und Trräumee, the last three bars of Schubert’s Liedd of that name are hummed, then sung, softly. In the radio drama, music from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet is heard in All That Falll. Words and Musicc dramatizes a dialogue between voice and instrument. Beethoven is played in the television play Ghost Trioo, anotherr work to share the name of the piece of music it cites. The formal structures that Beckett applies in his work often echo those off music. Throughout his work are examples of plays structured around musical patterning. Following the impromptu tradition in theater and in music, both Ohio Impromptu and Ghost Trio exemplify this. In many other works, a musical repetition-variation structure is visible. As Schopenhauer observes, repetition signs including da capo,” [a]Attest to the richness of content and meaningfulness of the language of music; these would be intolerable in works written in the language off words, and yet these signs are entirely to the point and pleasing in music, because in order to grasp it fully, we must listen to it twice””47 Beckett regularly employs such repetition in his plays, using the music off the Romantic composers, Beethoven and Schubert in Ghost Trio (1975) and the later Nacht und Trräumee (1982), respectively. The emotive depth of the music in these plays contrasts with the gray sparseness of the visual imagery. One of the key aspects of music for Beckett seems to be its ability to maintain ambiguity, to be nonreferential. Much of the music Beckett draws upon is from the Romantic era, and David Abrams, commenting on the Romantic aesthetic, notes how during this era music came to be the art regarded as the least mimetic and also most “immediately expressive of spirit and emotion, constituting the very pulse quiddity of passion made public”

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for the German writers of the 1790s.48 Beckett, a writer who sought always to reduce the allusive and mimetic capacities of his texts and stage imagery, exploits this nonmimetic quality of music and in doing introduces a strain of emotional color into otherwise monochromatic images. However, anyy attempt to make music “explain” the content of the play in a linear and realist way is, for this reason, problematic. As Bryden comments: On the whole, Beckett leaves private and inexplicable the matter of anyy emotive relationship between music and listener. This is entirely in keeping with his conception of music, as expressed to Lawrence Shainberg, as “the highest art form,” since “it’s never condemned to explicitness”.” Byy refusing to anatomize or domesticate it, Beckett allows music to retain for the listener its full force of ambiguity.49 Music, in the context of the Romantic sensibility, had the capacity to do what rational thought systems could not do. Lydia Goehr comments that, the “purely musical” served as a general metaphor and symbolized a “repository for all that was unknowable by ordinary cognitive or logical means.”50 Thus, music is here characterized as something not only beyond words, but also beyond the understanding of the rational thought systems of the day. Goehr goes on to note that analyses like those of Schopenhauer are rooted in a metaphysical aesthetic of inexpressibility, in which the link among the church, the museum, and the concert hall—zones of “silent contemplation” far from worldly concerns—is readily perceivable.51 Music in Beckett seems to strive toward a form of communication that is beyond words. The music of Beethoven in Ghost Trio and the poetry off Yeats in . . . but the clouds . . . operate as elements that “exceed the verbal, rational and technological controls which have been set up to try to ‘know’ the available perceptual world.”52 Ludwig Tieck, one of the founding fathers of Romanticism, notes the distrust of the Romantic poets for words: “Oh lovers never forget, when you would entrust a sentiment to words, to askk yourselves: what, after all, is there that can be said in words!” Music, a stirring and mysterious force seemed alone capable of making the most direct, affective statement.53 Woven in fragments through these two texts, this emotionally charged music, while it may enrich the emotional tenor of the pieces, is not perhaps posited as uncomplicatedly transcendent. Catherine Laws observes this tension when she writes that Beckett uses the expressivity and the formal symmetries of the Beethoven in the same way as he does other elements of the play, posting them

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provisionally only in order to undermine their stability as their constructedness is revealed. Thus, Beckett specifically draws upon the spirit off German Romanticism which infuses the music, but does so precisely in order to deconstruct these ideas and put into question the possibility off simple solace or absolute redemption.54 The expectancy and quiet longing that suffuses Ghost Trio and Nacht undd Trräumee is played out relative to the music, though whether or not the musicc provides an actual source of comfort is arguable. In both plays, the moment of resolution when the play returns to its opening keynote is tempered with shadows and absence. Rather than take the approach that the music somehow illustrates the content of the drama, I think it necessary to examine how each play mimics (or deviates from) the form of the music with which it is interwoven. In doing so I focus on structure, drawing on Michael Maier’s analysis, who writes that “[t]he close relation between Beckett and Schubert does not only consist in a preference for a peculiar favourite piece of art, but in an affinityy to the processes Schubert as an artist employed to bring about his work.”55 The formal structures of both Ghost Trio and Nacht und Trräumee echo that of the music they contain. Not only this, but also evident in Ghost Trio is the affective and haptic dimension of music: it is a phenomenon that moves one, acting upon the skin and upon the nerves. Both works are expansions off an inner sonorous territory that is part memory, part imagination, through which echo the fragments of beauty, loss, and mortality, all contained in these Romantic, evocative chords. Beckett’s Resonant Beings Consciousness and the body are presented in Ghost Trio as open spaces: music and sound are phenomena that pass through them, are remembered and echo back. Music stirs tension, expectation, and anticipation of endingg or release. It puts the listener on edge. Ghost Trio can be read as a meditation on the nature of consciousness and self-reflection. It can also be read as a study of listening, of what it means for the subject to be a sonorous echoing chamber who is simultaneously producing and receiving sounds. These open spaces, or “echo chambers,” are given a visual metaphor in the cassette player that F holds upon his lap. We are never sure whether or not the sound we hear emanates from this small box, yet as a piece of technology that functions to capture and replay sound, it is an important element in the visual-aural composition of the play. It is not a simple matter of music produced by the machine and broadcast to the listener. From the increasing

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intimacy that we are allowed with F as the work progresses, it is clear that we are hearing what it is he hears; we are being allowed to access the interior of his consciousness. For Nancy, the first cry of the child is a birth in itself, the realization off reflected sound, a moment of hearing oneself. He describes it as a “sudden expansion of an echo chamber,” when a person “comes to himself by hearing himselff cry.”56 As well as the cassette recorder, the mirror, which F stares into, and even the chamber itself are all hollow columns of reflected sound and image. The mirror is a “small grey rectangle (same dimensions as cassette) against larger rectanglee (CSP P, 253).” F, his body, his consciousness, is another point of reflection and mediation. If Ghost Trio is read as monodrama, F is the chamber through which all these perceptual moments resonate. In this way, the small gray rectangles of the room mirror the small gray rectangle that sits in the corner of the viewer’s living room. The television, the medium through which we access this play, is itself another resonant chamber off echoes, and the sound vibrates across the skin of the screen. Laced through this system of sound, echo, and return is silence. It is silence that permits a momentary definition. That silence is produced by the female “presence” of the work, with the voice’s silences permitting action to take place. She does not speak in conjunction with either the cameraa movement or the movements of F. In this way, her silences leave space for action. As Deleuze writes, F’s is a body caught between silences.57 He makes reference to Beckett’s letter of 1937 to Axel Kaun:58 “All these parts plunge into the void: the door opening onto an obscure corridor, [ . . . ] the window w looking out onto a rainy night, the pallet so flat as to display its own emptiness. So that the passage and succession of one part after another only servess to connect or link up these unfathomable abysses.” s 59 Setting the Tone: Music Affecting Images In mainstream film and television, music tends to follow image, with the latter taking precedence. The role of music is usually to illustrate the action, aid in building tension in a scene or sequence of scenes, and/or enhance the ability of the actor to communicate emotion. Clearly, music’s place in Ghostt Trio and Nacht und Trräumee is by no means a decorative effect, or a pleasant add-on, which serves to underscore the semantic content of the work. Music acts as a force upon the image. It alters not only how it is perceived and interpreted but also influences the formal arrangement of the image, and how bodies and other kinetic elements will move through it. Beckett’s “musical” arrangement of the geometric figures of door, window, floor mirror that of the variations on a theme that occur in Beethoven’s music

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(and music in general). In doing this, Michael Maier writes that “Beckett is providing a late commentary on a basic aspect of his work, that is, his taste forr permutation.”60 Such deviations in musical pattern and the “surprise” on the part of the listener have a necessary function within music and are part of the affective response that a listener has to music. In Nacht und Trräumee, the repetition with variation, which is an essential element of musical form, is easilyy identifiable as the camera zooms in on the dreamt image in the second repeat. Maier, applying this argument to Nacht und Trräumee also, notes how the playy is formally constructed out of two parts with only slight differences between them. Difference is engineered by the camera: “The difference is brought about by the camera zoom that, in the seconda volta, replaces the juxtaposition of dreamer and dreamt self by the identity of the dreamer and his innerr self. This zoom is Beckett’s way of combining repetition and modification, in order to intensify the action and to diminish the distance between action and onlooker.”61 In both Nacht und Trräumee and Ghost Trio music becomes, as Eric Prieto remarks, rather than a vehicle for representation, a vital element off the representation.62 While the soundscape of Nacht und Trräumee is relatively simple—onlyy three bars of the Lied are hummed, then sung—the soundscape of Ghostt Trio is somewhat less minimal. The work is divided into three sections: Pre-action, Action, and Re-action. In the pre-action section, a disembodied, acousmaticc voice introduces us to the “familiar chamber” (CSP P, 248). She lists its attributes: window, door, pallet, floor, wall. Each of these is represented in close-up by nothing more than a gray rectangle on a grayy background. The room is lit by a faint light for which, just like Voice herself, there is “no visible source.” It leaches all color from the room; it is “all grey.” For Maier it is this grayness that provides a background for the music to emerge “all the more luminously.”63 In both pieces, music appears to breakk the frame, to spill out of the image. In Ghost Trio, at first the music seems to emerge from the tape recorder; only when the camera is near enough to “hear” it, it ultimately swells to fill the whole room with the sound. In Nacht und Trräumee the lips of the dreamer do not seem to move, the voice that hums has no perceivable origin, and the advent of the music signals the opening of a new frame, within the old. The music in these plays is not in the business of semantic enhancement, yet it is clearly a provocative phenomenon; it has emotive affects. There is an accumulating body of knowledge and ongoing research that links particular structures in music to human emotion. John Sloboda and Patrick Juslin point out that there are peaks and troughs in musical pieces, where test subjects are prone to correlative intensities of emotion. These can be regarded as objectively observable and are intrinsically related to the

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structure of music.64 Structures that deviate from the established norms off tonal music, for example, syncopation, when the emphasis or accent falls upon an unexpected beat, or appoggiatura, where a nonharmonic tone is performed on the beat before resolving back into harmony, all create what Leonard Meyer similarly describes as uncertainty in the music, and in the mood of listener. This uncertainty is resolved when the music moves backk into harmonic or rhythmic predictability. He observes that “[t]he uncertainty and lack of cognitive control created by intervening instability make the return to mentally manageable patterns satisfying. In short, it is the uncertainty-resolution process [ . . . ] not simply of melodic, rhythmic or tonal pattern, that unifies the succession of emotional states presented in a piece of music.”65 Whatever the difficulties in determining how and whyy music evokes an emotional response in the listener, it is acceptable for the protoemotions which Meyer examines to be taken as a reasonably predictable result of such musical structures, while bearing in mind the cultural specificity of both music and listener. In her exposition of all the elements that will come into play in the chamber, V does not list the mirror and, midway through the action section, when F sees his own reflection, she is surprised, or so the stage directions tell us (CSP P, 251). This suggests that F has violated the steady pattern that runs from stool to door to window to pallet to mirror and back to stool, thus deviating from the formal pattern that has been established. Such a deviation is not the first. F’s presence, as “sole sign of life,” constitutes a deviation from the stream of oblong shapes that emerge, just barely, from their grayy background. Although the gray figure is barely visible against the gray background, the close-up shots of F reveal an irregular human form, which is out of step with the abstract forms of the space. His ragged hair in particular reveals an embodied corporeality, which contrasts with the angular geometry of the room. The irregularity of this body is in itself a deviation from the formal patterning in the image. Music in Nacht und Trräumee calls up the emotional image. It is not only that the Schubert piece expresses, after the fact, the emotionality off the play—an expression of longing, loss, and the desire for the comforts of memory—but is also part of the mechanism that makes that emotion and its imaging possible. In other words the music that is called upon byy the dreamer ushers in the emotion, and creates the image. The structural consummation that occurs when a musical piece ends has already happened in Nacht und Trräumee. As Deleuze puts it, “[M]usic, the sonorous image, takes over from the visual image and opens up the emptiness or the silence of the final end.”66 This later play, written in the last decade of the author’s life, closer to life’s life s “structural structural consummation,” consummation, is a sounding out of a life’s life s

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final notes. The structural conflict, which is still being worked through in Ghost Trio, is no longer as evident here. In Ghost Trio, F listens to the largo movement from Beethoven’s piano trio, known as the “Ghost.” The music emanates from the cassette recorder on his lap. At the same time, his bodyy is tense with the anticipation for any sound of the woman he expects to approach his chamber. The work was originally entitled Trystt, a title that reveals the nature of the plot, such as it is, quite clearly—a figure waits for someone, who never arrives. The work was eventually named Ghost Trio and the promise of its “tryst” is never fulfilled.67 Nevertheless, its renaming created a greater alliance with the musical piece. Music, silence, and the tense vulnerability of the listening subject are vital elements in Ghost Trio. o The music of Nacht und Trräumee provides a frame of sorts, through which an image of comfort appears. The action is minimal: a man sits at a table, rests his head on his hands, we hear the last three bars of Schubert’s Liedd off the same name, in translation, Night and Dreamss. The “evening light” comingg from a window behind the figure fades. The figure rests his head on his hands; in the upper right-hand corner of this image we see his dreamt self appear. Disembodied hands emerge out of the surrounding darkness to convey a cup to the lips of the dreamt self, a cloth to his brow. All action is repeated with a close-up on the dreamt self. Whether the hummed melody actually calls up the vision or dream is not made clear, but the two are most definitely linked. Sound can be considered in Ghost Trio, as in Eh Joee, to be an agent off touch, provoking emotion. To listen to music is to be in a state of expectation, to be on the verge always of that consummation: actualized in the return to the dominant tonic key, a return that is built into the structure off tonal music. In Nacht und Trräumee, music precipitates a “touching image,” manifest in both the emotive content of the music and the pair of hands that tend to the dreamt self. In both of these plays, music acts as a thread of emotional color running through an otherwise sparse and monochrome environment, and reveals music’s haptic qualities. “he will now think he hears her”: Structural (Non)Consummation There are elements in these two plays that do not add up to structural consummation, however. Endings are somewhat ambivalent, for example. In Nacht und Trräumee music seems to hover at the limits between dreamer and d dreamt image, between fiction and reality, performing the role of harbingerr of the emotional event, while simultaneously resonating with that emotion. Music, in this play, seems to precipitate a liminal, even virtual experience, one that evokes also the barrier between life and death. The sense of ending,

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of ostensible resolution, is emphasized in the play by its return to its dominant key of B major. The song, expressing regret at the return of day, modulates to the key of G major, only returning to its home key at the return of night and sweet dreams. John Reed observes that the musical keys of B minor and B major play a particular role in Schubert’s oeuvre. They “stand at the ambivalent centre of Schubert’s emotional world.” Giving examples off their use in Schubert’s body of songs, he points out that they represent what may be called the passion (in every sense of that word) inherent in the human condition. Physical and mental suffering (Der Leidende, Philoktett), loneliness (Einsamkeitt), alienation, and derangement (Der Doppelggänger, Die Liebee Farbee)—these are all examples of the more commonly used minor mode. Beckett, in his use of the Liedd focuses specifically upon the final bars, where the melody has returned to its dominant key, and the comfort of night and dreams is imminent. Reed sees B major as standing for a “romantic obsession with night and with dreams, and death and transfiguration.” Schubert’s An den Todd and So last michscheinen are both examples of this. Many songs associated with the idea of death move toward a climax in B major, as in Grabliedffür die Mutter, Vormeiner Wiege, e and An die untergehendee, and although Reed does not refer specifically to Nacht und Trräumee, the same analysis could apply.68 Beckett evokes a sense of ending, death, and perhaps transfiguration, yet, as with much of Beckett’s other work repetition implies continual ending, rather than finality and death. As Laws argues, the musicc has no more stability or status than that of the figure, voice, or action.69 The process of ending in Ghost Trio is interrupted many times. For Herren, this play is permeated by fragmentation, as the boundaries between perception from within the subject and perception from without begin to break down. The camera moves from the objective point A, to the close-ups and point-of-view shots that draw the viewer into a closer alliance with the protagonist’s subjective experience.70 At the outset, the work obeys this principle: the closer the camera comes to the protagonist, the louder the music becomes. This is given its fullest effect in section III, where it is not that the music has come to dominate the soundscape, rather we, as spectators/ auditors have become more attuned to the soundscape. When F opens the window, we hear the crescendo and decrescendo creaks of the window and door being opened and closed. We are permitted not only to come into contact with the protagonist’s points of view, but also his points of audition. Herren views this process as a struggle for control of the patterns of perception. Those point-of-view shots indicate that F comes to control what is seen and heard. However, this argument is based on an assumption of conflict between Voice and F, which, as I explore here, can be seen as the conflict within musical structures, rather than dramatic tension.

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Conflict in Nacht und Trräumee, with its almost meditational and quietist tone, may be found, as will be dealt with in more detail in the final chapter, in the fissure that is created between reality and representation, between presence and absence. F in Ghostt is less a creative source than a vague responder, moved by music. Conflict in Ghost Trio comes in the form of dissonance between formal elements, rather than between dramatic characters. This dissonance is part of how sound functions in the work. Music, in both Nacht und Trräumee and Ghost Trio, is linked to absence, though in differing ways. In the former, music signals the opening of the dream image, where an unseen face and caring hands emerge from the darkness to bring comfort; in the latter, music precipitates the expectation off the arrival of the awaited woman. In fact, while in Nacht und Trräumee, the music can be seen to drive the dream-image of comfort, thus facilitatingg a reenactment of the presence of the absent one, in Ghostt the figure must divide his listening attention between the music and the expected knock off the woman. Therefore, a distinction is set up in the psychic spaces of the play between, on the one hand, the potential consolations of art, and, on the other, echoes of desire for a lost loved one. In the pre-action section, the voice commands the spectator’s attention; she asks us to “tune accordingly” (CSP P, 248), and rehearses, without anyy movement from F, the pattern that he will follow. She shows us the “familiar” objects of the chamber that F will visit: door, window, pallet, and asks us to look closely at the background out of which these objects and ultimatelyy F will emerge: floor, wall, and, of course, the “specimen of dust” (CSP P, 248– 249). When she introduces the figure seated on the stool, she also introduces us to what Sloboda would call the stability or resting point: “Most compositional systems—like the tonal system, provide a set of dimensions that establish psychological distance from a ‘home’ or ‘stability’ point. Proximityy to this point decreases tension, while departure from it increases tension.”71 F moves from here, because of what he thinks he hears, and returns to here, in order to listen to the music. For Meyer, deviation from pattern in music engineers uncertainty and ambiguity.72 However, such ambiguity can be laced, as happens in music, into the overall structure. As Meyer puts it, often in an aesthetic context regularity is devised in order that deviation might occur. In a move that surprises the dispassionate voiceover, F regards himself in the mirror for five seconds. Voice emits an “Ah!,” indicating that this action was not part of the pattern she predicted in her opening sequence. The mirror, symbolizing self-awareness predicated on vision, as in Lacan’s theory of the mirror-stage, is somehow misplaced here; subjectivity in this play appears diminished. F mostly appears to be an automaton, movingg instinctively to a predictable pattern, which corresponds to that found in

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music. The camera perceives the reflection of F in the mirror, and the voice gasps. With subjective awareness rooted in the aural rather than the visual, the moment of reflection, with F positioned between two specular instruments, jars. Following this incident, Voice predicts accurately that F will return to his opening pose. The familiarity of this pose means that the earlyy moment of uncertainty is abolished. Just as it functions in music, deviation from pattern affirms that pattern, and offers the listener the pleasure off return, resolution. The mirror is absorbed into the pattern in the re-action section. In this section, actions 24–28 see the camera include the mirror sequence. Dissonance, the slightly out-of-tune note, once repeated, becomes a part of the overall structure. In each moment immediately following his overture to the door and the window, F is “irresolute.” Structural consummation only happens when he settles back in his “opening pose,” crouched over his cassette recorder, and it is at this point that music in the piece becomes audible—four times in all. For Royal Browne, the anticipation of structural consummation in tonal music can be utilized in film to create for the viewer expectations of particular outcomes.73 In this way tonal music can manipulate the predictions made about narrative outcomes. F’s “irresolute” stance dramatizes the lackk of structural consummation, as if a dominant seventh chord, which produces in the listener the expectation of the advent of the dominant tonic chord, is held without moving to the final chord and thereby ending the phrase. The lack of structural consummation mimics the lack of romantic consummation. The woman does not arrive and the uncertainty of action is the same uncertainty that Meyer identifies. This is produced through deviation from pattern and the resultant thwarting of expectation. The patterning of expectation is most apparent in the sound of approaching feet in the re-action section: “Faint sound of steps approaching. They stop. Faint sound of knock on door. 5 seconds. Second knock, no louder. 5 seconds” (CSP P, 253). Such sounds suggest the long-awaited arrival of the woman, but hopes are again dashed as, in her place, a small boy shakes his head and returns to the darkness of the corridor. Yet this allows both the play and the music to end. The instructions for the camera are as follows: “With growingg music move in slowly to close-up of head bowed right down over cassette now w held in arms and invisible. Hold till end of Largo” (CSP P, 254). Thus the music is associated with the nonarrival and absence of the awaited woman. It cannot be assumed that music provides the protagonist of Ghost Trio with some remedial comfort. As Bryden puts it, the consolatory aspect of music is not guaranteed in Beckett’s work: “It is never a rapturous or transformatory force. It may even be a source of suffering or melancholia in itself, for, in its associative power, it affords a means of reliving a lost moment.” moment. 74

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It is, in other words, a mechanism by which memory and imagination can be activated. F’s smile at the end of the work follows the ending of the Beethoven music. In this moment the shoulders that had been crouched over the cassette recorder in that repeated pose relax, straighten. F looks at the camera and smiles. Deleuze suggests that the message from the boyy is not an announcement that the woman will not come but is the “much longed-for order to stop everything, everything being finally over.”75 In fact, the figure’s response to the nonarrival of the awaited individual is ambiguous. Perhaps he is relieved that no tryst has taken place, that the “other” is done interfering with the satisfying return to listening. The nonarrival allows F to return to the stool, to stillness, and allows the coda of the music to finish: both give way to stillness and to silence. In this way, the gaping holes of absence and silence, and the uncertainty theyy produce, are written into the fabric of the work. If consolation is available, it lies in the comfort of return, of an end to uncertainty and ambiguity, an end that is tied, both here and in Nacht und Trräumee, to the presence of music. The music that is heard in each play can be viewed as a revelation of some inner conscious experience, an exteriorization perhaps of bodily desire. It is a manifestation of the will, following Schopenhauer, who writes that “music is a direct copy of the will itself and therefore exhibits itself as the metaphysical to all that is physical in the world.”76 Christopher Janaway’s commentary on the philosopher points to the bodily desires that are manifestations of the will: “Whenever we undergo feelings of fear or desire, attraction or repulsion, whenever the body behaves according to the various unconscious functions of nourishment, reproduction or survival, Schopenhauer discerns willl manifesting itself.”77 Thus it is the body itself that is willl, more specifically, it is a manifestation of the will to life. If the content of Schubert’s song can be said to mirror in any way the content of the Beckett play, it is in the longingg that the song expresses, and which is manifested in the dream-vision of the caring hands. In neither play does the music provide an “explanation” of the content, but is fittingly suffused with longing. For Schopenhauer, music does not repeat or copy any idea of existence in the world. It is nonmimetic. Yet its effect on human consciousness is a powerful one. It is a language that for Schopenhauer expresses the will directly.78 In relation to the Schubert piece, Reed observes how the romantic preoccupation with night, the unconscious, mystery, and dreams are celebrated in Schubert’s Nacht und Trräumee: “[In the] musical equivalent of the gibbous moons and moon-haunted landscapes which permeated the imagination of Samuel Palmer and Caspar Friedrich, the first deeply felt expression in music of that sense of mystery and the infinite which heiligee Nacht conjured up in the breast of every Romantic. Romantic.”79

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There is the sense then, of unverbalized, and perhaps unverbalizable content within the work, an element of the piece that exceeds language. In both Nacht und Trräumee and Ghost Trio, the images themselves are indistinct, abstracted. As windows into the consciousness of the protagonists they fail to reveal a great deal. Regarding Nacht und Trräumee, Christinaa Adamou considers the blurring of the dreamt image in the close-up as a decomposition, something contrary to the conventional intent of the close-up in film and on television. She comments that the dream, contrary to the function of the dream in Freudian psychoanalysis, does not in fact offer a window of interpretation into the play. Instead of accessing a symbolic network by which to understand the hidden desires and anxieties of the subject, “the dream plunges us into a cycle in which, in sealing one hole another is opened.”80 For the viewer of Nacht und Trräumee, the dreamt image, which appears in the corner of the screen, does not explain the play, nor the psychology of the dreaming figure. It is not a transcendental moment in which light is shed upon the action. Rather here, music and image operate in veryy similar ways. For the dreamt image, even though it is loaded with signifiers, ones that would impel interpretations, contains no narrative content. The humming of the Liedd and the hands emerging out of the darkness—of the dreamer’s mind also—are expressions of the sentiment of longing. They do this in a “language” that is beyond words. The image, like music in general, is affective. It privileges emotion over plot development. What both Nacht und Trräumee and Ghost Trio enact is the moment at which the music is experienced by its listener. In Nacht und Trräumee this is manifest in the dreamt image, in Ghost Trio, in the automatic movements that station the figure at various points around the room. How music and consciousness come into contact and how the listener is touched both physiologically and emotionally by music is realized on the skin of the screen. The screen of the television set in these plays acts as an internal surface, where the interplay of memory and music is dramatized. Sound on the Skin of the Film Eh Joe, e Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Trräumee demonstrate the touch of sound, from the cognitive impact and representational capacity of voice with words, to the culturally coded response to music, to the visceral, affective response that sound as resonance produces. These plays image listening; they attempt to visualize the moment at which sound touches bodies. Some of these sounds can wound, bringing with them the violence of guilt and memory, others can bring comfort, at the same time as evoking the intensity of loss and absence.

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Each of these plays reveal the vibrating impact of sound as it passes through the subject’s consciousness, carrying with it memory, emotion, and loss. Dramatizing the haptic experience of listening, a phenomenology off voice and music, these plays dramatize the limit, the line where music and embodied consciousness come into contact, the place where sound is given meaning. They image also the experience of sound’s absence, in the silent figures that hover at the edges of awareness, emphatically, as in the unfulfilled tryst of Ghost Trio, never arriving, and in the voiceless, faceless hands that offer comfort in Nacht und Trräumee. In this sense, sound operates as the skin or film that lies between the self of the present and the self of the past; its touch activates memory and desire. As well as imaging the effect of sound on the embodied subject, at a formal level, these plays also dramatize the effect of sound on the skin off the screen. Stretched taut like a drum-skin, the image resonates and vibrates in response to sound: in the tense listening visage of Joe and the crouched intensity of F, wrapped bodily around his tape recorder. While in Eh Joee these vibrations etch meaning in the form of narrative onto the image, in Ghost Trio the kinesis of the image follows the structural pattern of the music. In Nacht und Trräumee the hands express something of the music itself, they touch and bring solace and comfort. In terms of this film’s “skin,” the music opens a hole in its surface, which permits the dreamt image to come to be. Read this way, music bores a hole not only in the surface of the screen, but also by implication in the surface of the mind. Collapsing the physiological and the aesthetic, the screen of the mind vibrates at the touch off sound.

CHAPTER 3

Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing

Words Making Flesh Making Words While the preceding chapter examined the importance of listening for Beckett’s figures, here the focus is on the speech act itself and the orifice that enables it. This chapter will be attuned to the limit and tension between inner and outer as imaged in the tacky, productive orifice of the mouth. Sticky, tacky contortions of this organ produce speech and speech attempts to make sense of the self, of the body, of the surrounding material world. The organs of speech are paramount in Not I: the lips, the teeth, the vibrating folds of the throat, saliva, tongue, and all the contortions, as the mouth of that play puts it, without which no speech would be possible (CSP P, 219). The hollow internal spaces of Nancy’s resonant subject1 are realized by the opening of the mouth, which “can resume and revive resonance.”2 The organs of speech—lips, teeth, tongue, and vocal folds—are tacky: red, wet, erotic, in contrast to the invisible and impalpable sonorous vibrations it produces. These vibrations, as Adriana Cavarero puts it, are “as colourless as the air, com[ing] out of a wet mouth and aris[ing] from the red of the flesh.3 Discourse meets flesh in this organ, as speech emerges from the vibrating, fluttering folds of the throat. From Barthes: “[T]he materiality of the body that springs from the throat” and “the voice, which is the bodily aspect of speaking, is situated in the articulation of the body and of discourse” at the point where they cross over.4 In the mouth, the intangible and the material are to be found contained in the same breath, as it were. The mouth is the visible site of contact between this intangible voice and material body.

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In A Piece of Monologuee the emergence of words from the mouth is figured as a “birth,” implying without visualizing the tackiness and fluidity of that organ. In the act of birthing words, the body converts, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “a certain motor essence into vocal form,”5 at the same time as revealing anxieties about such automatic and uncontrollable physical actions, or contortions. The mouth is a site of linkage between the social/cultural and the biological; the place in which we begin to articulate ourselves to ourselves and to those around us, to say “I am.” What terror it produces when this speaking, this self-articulation appears to be no longer under one’s control: Not I dramatizes this fear. In That Timee, a similarlyy bodiless head listens as voices, emerging from beyond the limits of the stage space, layer together the details of his life in a concerto of linguistically drawn images, while in A Piece of Monologuee, a figure speaks from a nearly bare set, describing actions that read as stage directions. Yet he too is motionless throughout. Nothing stirs the stage but language. Visually, kinetically, these plays are sparse, almost static. Yet each of them shares a structural dialogue between their visual and verbal elements. Exploringg how sound and image, text and performance, and language and the material body come into contact, their action occurs along the haptic interface between these elements. The figure of the mouth acts as a metaphor for this. Not I is a hole within the frame of the theatrical image; a hole within a hole, the end of vision, defying perspective. A Piece of Monologuee is concerned with lips—the edges of the mouth, the edges of the grave, and the limits of representation, and, while That Timee does not refer specificallyy to mouths or lips, it shares with the other two plays a meditation on the ekphrastic relationship between sound and image that Beckett explores in much of his work, whereby a static image is rendered fluid via words, spoken into time. As McMullan puts it, Beckett’s “increasing use of monologue in the stage drama exploits the power of textually invoked vision to displace orr destabilize the spectator’s perception of the present visual scene and material body on stage.”6 There are two threads interweaving throughout this chapter. One deals with the physiology of mouth, its carnality, and embodiment. Yet the mouth must also be seen as an aesthetic entity, a hole in the image, with lips as a frame around a productive void. Haptic becomes an issue of limits, edges, dramatized through the mouth. How does sound touch image, and vice versa? How do language and the material body come into contact? Haptic refers, in this context, to the ways in which language and the material bodyy contaminate each other, or else fail to touch at all. These plays dramatize the

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interface between body and language, revealing, via the figure of the mouth, the limits of the body (at the lips of the grave) and the limits of language (at the lips of the mouth). “ . . . into this world . . . ”: Speaking of the body in Not I In Not I, a lone and disembodied mouth situated eight feet above stage level disgorges a torrent of words while a djellaba-clad Auditor, “sex indeterminate,” listens. The only actions to accompany this listening are four gestures of “helpless compassion” (CSP P, 215). Through the fragmented narrative, which tumbles from the mouth, is revealed the story of a woman who may or may not be the owner of the babbling mouth—it never claims ownership; a life lived almost mute, on the margins of society. Not I is the mouth off the darkness itself, the mouth of the stage space. With the actor’s face completely obscured, only a small spotlight illuminates the mouth; the “godforsaken hole” of the void is given a voice. This inverts the idea of the stage as empty space, where characters’ narratives are “played out”; the space itself is speaking in this play. From “tiny little thing” to aged woman, the woman, which Mouth describes and which may or not be herself, is a waif, flotsam. Born prematurely, she is neglected by both parents: “parents unknown . . . unheard of . . . he having vanished . . . thin air . . . no sooner buttoned up his breeches . . . she similarly . . . eight months later” (CSP P, 216). The fragmented story of this woman’s life is interwoven with the mouth’s attempt to express the experience of speaking itself. “Out” is the first audible word that Mouth utters, and it expresses performatively both the birth of the waif whose life she narrates and the emergence of the word, of speech from between the lips, as Brunhilde Boyce puts it, giving birth to herself through speech.7 Any evocation of embodiment in Not I emphasizes fragmentation and disconnection. Even though it might be assumed that the body of the woman so described is the body to which Mouth belongs, Mouth still refuses to take possession of it. When interrupted by an inaudible voice, which seems to demand corrections to her narrative, she refuses to admit that it is “I” that she describes. Indeed, at the outset, she refuses even to assign a gender to the creature she describes, until this information is demanded of her: “out . . . into this world . . . this world . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time . . . in a godfor— . . . what? . . . girl?” (CSP P, 216). A question mark accompanies this admission, as if the mouth is unsure. The body of the woman is described in mechanical terms, establishing an impersonal distance between the speaker and the spoken: “likelyy

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the machine . . . so disconnected . . . never got the message . . . or powerless to respond . . . like numbed . . . couldn’t make the sound” (CSP P, 218). Bryden has noted the implications of such a disconnection between the body and the speaking subject. The body is “experienced as if automatically and inexplicably energised from a controlling source without, of inaccessible origin.”8 This disconnection reveals a tension, an anxiety about the involuntariness of certain bodily functions; the body itself poses a threat to the autonomy of its “owner.” The muscular contractions of birth are conflated with the “contortions without which . . . no speech possible” (CSP P, 219), and speech itself is associated with abject bodily fluids: excrement, menstrual blood. As well as drawing our attention to the tacky materiality of speech production, Mouth’s acts of speech are ones that articulate both the insecurity of an embodied experience, and a disownment of that problematic body. Although Not I may be read as an image of a human under the duress of torture or in the aftermath of torture,9 or having experienced some sort of physically painful or challenging ordeal, whether it be illness or attack, it is difficult to assess Mouth’s present experience in terms of such pain. She appears to be impelled to speak and compelled to correct, yet she informs us that the “she” of the narrative is not in fact suffering, “indeed could not remember . . . off-hand . . . when she had suffered less . . . ” (CSP P, 217). For it would appear that the social exclusion caused by her inability to speakk resulted in far greater suffering than the discomfort she is experiencing now. In fact, the body is presented not as a thing suffering (though such suffering is certainly implied), but rather as an experience of radical alienation. For instance, we are given an image of the woman crying: “sitting staringg at her hand . . . there in her lap . . . palm upward . . . suddenly saw it wet . . . the palm . . . tears presumably . . . hers presumably . . . no one else for miles” (CSP P, 220). The disconnection between speaking mouth and spoken body is further affirmed by the experience of speaking for the first time in her life. When words do come “she” is unsure if they are really hers, if this is really her voice. She tries to convince herself that this unfamiliar phenomenon belongs to someone else: “till she began trying to . . . delude herself . . . it was not hers at all . . . not her voice at all” (CSP P, 219). She has “no idea what she was saying . . . imagine!” (CSP P, 219). Even though the voice has a visible source, the source is still not an identifiable person or subject. The possibility of unity, of identity under the pronominal “I,” is again and again refuted by Mouth. Anxiety over reproductive processes, muscular contractions overr which no control is possible, means that Not I addresses the question off where the line is drawn between body and mind or spirit, as well as how these entities come into touch.

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“ . . . into i this hi world ld . . . ”: Bodily dil Intrusions i There is uneasiness about where the limits are to be found between the body and the world; just how much does the world imprint upon and disrupt the body-subject? Collapsed in a field on a sunny April morning, the body of the old woman is “like gone”; neither fully there nor fully gone. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is the very medium for having a world, and he speaks, in The Visible and the Invisiblee, of the impossibilityy of adequately defining the line that divides body-subject from the world. He asks, “[W]here are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh? [ . . . ] There is a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one with the other.”10 This in-touchness of the body and world is one that is revealed, in spite of the apparent lack of body, throughout Nott II. That no body is presented mimetically does not mean that the body is entirely absent, but is rather constructed discursively and it is possible to piece together the life-narrative of a woman who has lived, speechless and rejected, on the margins of society all her life. Yet the description of bodilyy experiences that Mouth is currently undergoing are focused mainly on the act of speaking: “all those contortions without which . . . no speech possible.” This is imaged as a physical process; speech contorts the muscles of the mouth, and affects all the surrounding muscle structures: “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” (CSP P, 219). Although the “whole body” is not present, it is only almost or “like gone.” On that April morning in Croker’s Acres, as darkness overtakes “her,” she finds herself “not entirely insentient.” Her present physical experiences are intense, visceral. She is in the dark but can still hear buzzing; she can see a light that ferrets around: “and a ray of light came and went . . . came and went . . . such as the moon might cast . . . drifting . . . in and out of cloud” (CSP P, 217). Yet she is distanced from the body she describes, and cannot discern what “position she was in,” whether standing, sitting, or kneeling. For Gordon Armstrong, “This steady stream of words, vowels, glottal stops, truncated phrases, and broken syntax that she tries to deny are affirmed each moment by her sense of her lips and tongue moving. Not I is a reversal of the Cartesian ethic, not cogito ergo sum but the ‘machine’: ‘I feel therefore I am.’”11 Though the body is negated in Not I, the potential that the act of negation has to engineer its opposite is exploited consistently by Beckett. Instead of aligning woman with negation or absence, Beckett, Bryden writes, “imbu[es] his textual/theatrical practice with multi-operational and multi-zonal negativity,” thus “resisting the notion of gap or nothingness.” The negation contained in the title, and the refusals and resistances that

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pepper the text, demonstrate this effectively. Negation, she writes, has a tendency to assert what it cancels.12 Mouth, contorted in the act of utterance, is a concentrated representation of the physical point at which materiality and language meet, the site of their intertwining, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term. The body of Mouth’s narrative is one that is beset by involuntary reflexes, such as the blinking of the eyelids: “the eyelids . . . presumably . . . on and off . . . shut out the light . . . reflexx they call it . . . no feeling of any kind” (CSP P, 218). Speech is described in similar terms. The words describe both the emergence of words as an event that has happened to this woman, and constitute at the same time a performance of that event with all its involuntariness and fragmentation. Aligningg words with the reflexive movement of eyelids, the eruptive, uncontrolled effusion of bodily liquids, also aligns them with the body, as she realizes that “words were coming . . . imagine! . . . words were coming . . . a voice she did not recognize at first so long since it had sounded” (CSP P, 219). Even her voice is a detached thing, something other, something alien and over which she appears to have little control. Mouth visualizes the unstable site where, as Judith Butler puts it, “the materiality of language and that of the world which it seeks to signify are perpetually negotiated.”13 There is something horrific about Mouth’s speech. Refusing as it does to obey the rules of conventional discourse, it can be viewed as a performance of something prohibited, something forbidden. It uncovers an uncomfortable alliance between speech and excretion. Mouth’s “urge to tell” and her dash to the nearest lavatory implies a slippage between the mouth and anus, voice and waste: “sudden urge to . . . tell . . . then rush out stop the first she saw . . . nearest lavatory . . . start pouring it out . . . steady stream” (CSP P, 222). Language here is not necessarily a product of rational thought and free will. Maude identifies a fascination in Beckett’s writing displays with motility, which is either forced upon the characters, as in Murphyy, or prevented through the maiming of the body, for example, in Molloyy. These involuntary movements cast doubt on philosophical premises of motilityy and intentionality, and present the body as inherently deviant, thus putting into question “notions of sovereign subjectivity.”14 Maude raises the issue of Tourette’s syndrome where, as neuroscientist David Eagleman puts it, complex and sophisticated actions can occur in the absence of any sign of free will or rational decision-making.15 The vocal tics associated with this syndrome have similarities to Mouth’s “coprolalic” discourse that are quite revealing. Howard Kushner and Kate Brown, in their work on the poetics of tourettic and involuntary language, articulate the paradox inherent in acts of coprolalia. They write that although Tourettic eruptions seem automatic, coprolalia as an example of prohibited speech retains a quality

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of discrimination or context that is not usually associated with automatic behaviors.16 The “automatic” eruptions of this nature are always appropriately inappropriate. For instance, researchers have found that coprolalia in Japanese culture takes on the form of a change in pitch and tone of voice, which is still considered as obscene and inappropriate as cursing and/or insults in other cultures. The conclusion the authors draw is that coprolaliaa exposes particular cultural norms by breaching them, suggesting that “it is as if the coprolalic is spoken by cultural prohibition.”17 Such performances of prohibitions expose the extent to which the material body is immersed in, and in touch with, its surrounding cultural worlds, as well as the ways in which emotion, cognition, and corporeal systems for motor control are intimately tied together. One of the implications of this is that it is difficult to think of a pure corporeality, beyond the reach off language—something with which Butler would concur. She writes, “It is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself, rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material.”18 The body, for Butler, is not a pure entity, beyond culture; it proves itself to have both reiterative andd disruptive capabilities. Such capabilities are perhaps visible in the eruptive narrative of Not I. That alignment of the words with bodily seepage, with all the involuntariness and inappropriateness it entails, makes Mouth’s performance an affront—to sense, convention, and taste. The opening word “out” expresses exactly that moment when volition and the will are overtaken by the demands of the body: birth, excretion, and now in the same category, speech. Haptics, Gender, and Aesthetics The speech of Mouth is spoken in such a frenzy that it operates at the veryy limits of meaningfulness, as Beckett told actress Jessica Tandy, “I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect.”19 Like the eruptive maledictions of the tourettic speaker, this speech exposes both the corporeal source of the word as well as the embeddedness of that corporeal source in discourse. The disobedient body is revealed in several ways. It is visible in both the involuntary reflexes that Mouth describes and the ways in which the body performs prohibitions. Language and materiality are thus linked in deeply complex ways. For in Judith Butler’s view of this relation we cannot talk of a “pure body,” which exists prior to language, for whenever we speak of a body we engage in further discursive formation of that body.20 The in-touchness of the body with the world and its constant reformation via language is revealed by Not I ’ss out-of-control out of control narrative.

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The body in question cannot be thought of as “pure body” nor “mute container,” but must be considered in relation to the challenge it poses to those sense-making faculties that surround it. The brain attempts to make sense, yet its efforts to piece together this scattered effusion are in vain: [A]nd the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain . . . begging the mouth to stop . . . pause a moment . . . if only for a moment . . . and no response . . . as if it hadn’t heard . . . or couldn’t . . . couldn’t pause a second . . . like maddened . . . all that together . . . straining to hear . . . piece it together . . . and the brain . . . raving away on its own . . . trying to make sense of it . . . or make it stop. (CSP P, 220) It does seem, however, somewhat contrary to a purely social constructivist position on the body that there exists in Not I a body beyond reach. A fundamental disconnection has occurred between body as matter and brain/mind as sense-making faculty, and the mouth will never be able to tell “it all.” While Butler might argue that there is no “body” outside discourse, Beckett’s work does seem to hint constantly at matter that lies beyond the reach of language and sense. This disconnection is visible in the scream Mouth emits. Face down in the grass in Croker’s Acres, Mouth “[Screamss.] . . . then listens . . . [Silencee.] . . . scream again . . . [Screamss again.] . . . then listen again . . . [Silencee.]” (CSP P, 218); each time, the sound is punctuated by a verbal description of her listening to herself. The visceral scream can also refer to that moment of sonic and resonant self-awareness, the elementary narcissism of which Mladen Dolar writes.21 Like the child’s first cry, the immediate effect of the acoustic mirror stage is the spiralingg of the self into permanent decenteredness, the state of alienation of the self, in which the self becomes the “not I.” As well as affirming the disjunction between the verbose mouth and the supposedly mute body, Mouth’s scream also brings to its apotheosis the stress that language has come under throughout the text. With parallels drawn between this scream, the birth-cry, which was “just to get her going,” and the reflexive actions such as breathing, the material source of language is asserted, while at the same time the notion off language as a product of rational, volitional thought is undermined. Pointing out the slippage between the orifices of the female—mouth, vagina, and anus—threatens to devalue femininity as “dirty,” as abject. However, Auditor, and by implication the audience, performs the role off waiting ear. Mouth’s “urge to tell” and her dash to the nearest lavatory implies a similar slippage between the listening ear and a place for riddingg oneself of waste. A parallel is drawn between the listening ear and the toilet bowl. For Mouth, the impulse to speech is also an impulse to be heard

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and any ear will do. In terms of gender dynamics, the exchange that takes place between mouth and listener can be viewed to assert the (masculine) empowerment of the watching/listening audience, as opposed to the fluttering, babbling, disempowered mouth. Kathleen O’Gorman identifies the empowered male gaze as a characteristic of both the auditor and by implication the audience: “Mouth can do nothing to disperse the gaze of Auditor/ audience fixed on her, and Auditor’s positioning, ‘intent on Mouth’ precludes any such gesture on Auditor’s part. The structures of vision in Nott I allow only for the masculine gaze; they admit of no dispersal and align themselves with power.”22 Mouth’s disempowerment is evident; however, two things are significant here. One is the tendency on the part of critics to read the auditor as masculine, thereby reiterating preconceived notions of gendered power relations.23 The other is that there is a parallel drawn in the play between the lavatory and listening ear. If those who listen are to be compared with a lavatory, the comparison is hardly complimentary. The supposedly empowered “masculine” gaze is configured as a passive, receptive orifice, as listening organ and a hole. The toilet is a container for fecal matter, a mode of sanitizing the excesses of the body, of removing dirt from within our living spaces. “[S]he’ll be purged” draws direct allusion between this process of sanitization and the language Mouth produces. Listening is as much a part of this excremental process as is speech, and could possiblyy be read as a parody of a religious rite of purification. It could also be seen as a parody of the relationship between the analyst and analysand. Before Mouth’s eruption can be perceived as some cathartic process in which linguistic constipation is now being relieved, it must be remembered that this is not a finished process. Mouth began before the curtain went up and continues after it is lowered. The production that she is engaged in is by no means finished or resolved; a fact further evinced by the inability off Mouth, in the fourth section, to find that correct or necessary story, the one that will make sense of it all. Mouth seems to defy the notion that a single story will be found to explain her past life or her present circumstances. Drawing on Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that Western culture has “inscribed woman’s corporeality as mode of seepage” and a threat to order. It is in the representations of female corporeality that such inscriptions have taken place. She suggests that while there are little differences in the solidity of bodies across the genders, women have been represented as prone to liquidity.24 The unfocused wanderings of the woman arguablyy exemplify this. This halting, uncontrolled rhythm of her body is mirrored in the fragmented rhythm of the spoken text, as she, having internalized this notion, represents her movements thus: “[A] few steps then stop . . . stare into space . . . then on . . . a few more . . . stop and stare again . . . so on . . . drifting

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around . . . day after day” (CSP P, 216). The supposedly uncontrolled liquidityy of the female body is present also in the tears she sheds, and in the words that come tumbling out of her, apparently without volition. Perhaps with Not I Beckett reasserts the association of female corporeality with seepage, and waste. Yet it is possible to discover this dissociation of the body, as something other, which happens to one, in the male figures of Beckett’s works also. In her discussion of Beckett’s fascination with the “integrity of the body thought,”25 Marina Warner quotes a letter the author wrote to Thomas MacGreevy in 1932, in which he writes of his dislike for the work of Mallarmé: “I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.”26 This fascination then with the involuntary activity of the body, operating without the intervention of rational, conscious decision-making runs right through Beckett’s work and afflicts both male and female figures. Eagleman calls these physiological and neurological subroutines, “to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance,” “zombie systems.”27 Whether instinctual or present within us out of habit, they produce in the subject a sense of estrangement from this body-beyond-consciousness. Beckett exemplifies these “zombie systems” perhaps most famously in Godott : Vladimir’s suggests that one of the benefits of he and Estragon hanging themselves would be the resulting erection.28 The male figures of the earlier works experience the disruption of the “body’s thought.” For example, Vladimir’s prostate trouble in Waiting forr Godott or Hamm’s need to urinate in Endgamee are bodily “facts” that intrude onto the playing space, emphasizing the corporealities of the figures. The “wordshit”29 that Mouth produces emphasizes both the disruptive effects the body, either male or female, can have upon discourse. Mouth demonstrates the “in-touchness” of the body with the world, here it erupts, but that eruption does not come from some prediscursive, prelinguistic site. The body is not a passive ground (and neither is the stage space)—the force of Mouth’s speech vehemently asserts this. The eruption of the body into language demonstrates both its embeddedness in that discursive order and its reiterative, but potentially generative and transformative capabilities. For Johanna Oksala, Merleau-Ponty’s lived bodyy “is not a surface or a site on which psychic meanings are played out. Neither is it a mute container of subjectivity. The body-subject is constitutive in the sense of being generative of meanings that are preconscious and preconceptual: subjectivity means embodied capacity to respond to the existingg norms.”30 The lived body then becomes a fundamentally indeterminate and incomplete entity, which continuously materializes different social norms;

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it reiterates them but always through its individual style. It is not a replicaa or a carbon copy of a preestablished normativity, but rather materializes an individual style of being.31 In spite of—or perhaps because of—its disruptive capacities there are certain forces at work, which would “make sense” of this body. The inaudible voice, which we can assume interrupts her word-stream 22 times throughout the work, appears intent on maintaining truth, exactitude, and certainty. There appears to be an imperative issuing from this inaudible voice for the life of this woman to be made meaningful—just as the time she found herself in court, when the judge demands that she “speakk up,” voice herself, explain herself. On the one hand, the performance of Nott I constitutes a reiteration of representations of femininity as seepage, irrationality, and disturbance to order. Yet, on the other hand, the very disruptiveness of the work serves as a challenge to thought systems that represent the body and particularly the female body as a natural, passive ground. Not I can be viewed to be about the impulse to make matter meaningful, and the disruptive effect of matter on meaning and language. The stage image itself defies the conventions of staging and image construction: A tiny mouth flickering in the darkness while a faintly lit Auditor listens on. The effect is dizzying—for both performer and spectator—as a tiny mouth emerges from the background, the ground of the image, and the only visualized figure on stage, the Auditor, remains silent. Hannaa Scolnicov describes it as a “radical experiment” in abolishing theatrical space; the “complete darkness of the stage stipulated by Beckett for the performance of Not I destroys any perception of space.”32 Perspective, involvingg the hierarchal ordering of perception, becomes distorted as the background of the image dominates the scenic space: it is the background that speaks, the invisible dark given a voice. Like the later Footfallss and Rockaby, y also written in the 1970s, the dark, invisible flesh becomes a speaking entity; it can bypass the so-called rational, cognitive faculties that attempt to frame it, exposing an empty “centre” where the line—the place where the bodyy meets the world—is bared. One interesting way to consider Not I is through a connection with ideas on theatrical mimesis. Elin Diamond’s commentaryy is apt here, as she thinks through theater’s dual potential for the disruption or confirmation of limiting social rules in relation to gender, desire, and otherness. Theater, she writes, can be understood as “drama’s unrulyy body, its material other, a site where the performer’s and spectator’s desire may resignify elements of a constrictive social script,” while it can also be understood as a space for confirming the normative, presenting representation as truth.33 Following Diamond’s line of argument, Not I could be connected to Luce Irigaray’s “womb-theater,” in which the feminist philosopher engages in a deconstructive reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Mouth’s

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performance, instead of shadows and lies flickering across the wall of the cave/stage is a productive, disruptive performance that, in its metatheatrical intent, defies notions of authenticity, origins, and the possibility of truth. As Diamond puts it, for Irigarary “representation itself is originary; the womb opens and delivers . . . fake offspring.”34 When at the outset of this study I discussed the applications of the term “haptic” in art and cinema, a dominant theme in many critical approaches was shown to be the way in which the figure-ground relationship is manipulated within specific artistic frameworks. For example, the inversion of the priority of figure over ground in the bas relief that Riegl describes led him to name this type of flatness in classical art as haptic, thus offering to the discipline of aesthetics a key term to describe flatness in an image.35 Lauraa Marks perceives the appropriation of flatness and texture as a political strategyy among the video artists whose work she examines.36 Not I flattens theatrical space in exactly this way, rendering it into a bas relief rather than a perspectival image. The fact that the voice in Not I is feminine is significant and points to an association between woman and ground/space that will be further elucidated in chapter four. That Beckett gives a voice to the (feminized) darkness of the stage, to the ground of the image, disrupts both the conventional organization of stage space and the gender dynamic that it stands for—at least historically. As with Film, the hierarchy implied by the rules off perspective is diminished and we are left with a curious flatness of image: a haptic aesthetic. It is possible to see how this hapticity can be utilized, on the one hand, to engage in a feminist reading of the play, and, on the other, to think through the ways in which multiple sets of binaries are held in tension: the inner and outer, the ground and the figure, word and flesh, male and female, in and through the image of the mouth of the stage. At the Lips of the Image: A Piece of Monologue Similarly to Not I, A Piece of Monologuee emphasizes the material birth off words. A speaker stands still on stage for the duration of the piece, describing actions that, for the most part, do not take place, as well as describingg the experience of speaking itself: “stands there staring beyond waiting for the first word. It gathers in his mouth. Birth” (CSP P, 268). This play, written in the 1970s, addresses the relationship between the material body and the language it produces, realized on stage through the separation and intertwining of text and performance, sound and image, voice and body, and, as in Not I, the mouth provides a metaphorical backdrop on which these relationships hinge. This play exemplifies Beckett’s exploration of the relationship between linguistic and visual representation with the mouth functioning as

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the meeting point of these two elements. But in this case it is the lips that feature most strongly. The act of speaking distorts the shape of the mouth, “Birth. Parts lips and thrusts tongue between them” (CSP P, 268), in a wayy that is reminiscent of the erotics of vocal production in Eh Joe, e where the voice suggests “say ‘Joe’ it parts the lipss . . . ” (CSP P, 206). A Piece of Monologuee addresses the ways in which language, as voice, forms and reforms image and body—literally so in those “contortions” required for speech. In other words, it explores, as Eh Joee does, the point at which representation, and specifically language, touches the material body. Replete with static images, virtually no dramatic action, with fragmented bodies and nonlinear stories, A Piecee goes to the very edge of what is possible dramatically; “reducingg theater,” as McMullan puts it, “to the point where it hardly seems to be taking place at all.”37 The visual aesthetic is sparse and monochromatic. The only visible elements—the hair, nightgown, socks, lamp—all glow faintlyy beneath the stage lights (CSP P, 265). A pallet is also visible, just barely. As in Not I, this chiaroscuro effect sees the darkness, the invisible, taking on a role in the work. Inverting the figure-ground dyad, negative space—the space off silence as much as darkness—becomes, as in a bas relief, a potent sitee out off which these details emerge. At times, the text of A Piece of Monologuee seems to be describing the stage image: “Hair white to take faint light. Foot of pallet just visible edge of frame” (CSP P, 267). However, this hint of a match-up between text and image serves ultimately to enhance the distance between them, when nothing else the speaker refers to occurs in the image and the tension of the playy lies in this mismatch.38 The speaker of A Piecee describes the wall as at one time covered with pictures of, “he all but said of loved ones. Unframed. Unglazed. Pinned to wall with drawing pins. All shapes and sizes. Down one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered. Strewn all over the floor” (CSP P, 266). The static (stage) image comes into contact with the fluidity of words. When the speaker appears to be describing the stage space, we see his descriptions convey a sense of linguistic immediacy in description; he speaks in the present tense and appearss to generate coherence between word and image: “Still as the lamp by his side. Gown and socks white to take faint light. Once white. Hair white to take faint light. Foot of pallet just visible edge of frame. Once white to take faint light. Stands there staring beyond. Nothing. Empty dark” (CSP P, 267). In stillness, words come to rest alongside the image for a few moments, but there is then a shift in the next line to give the impression that the “action” of the play repeats itselff continually: “Till first word always the same. Night after night the same. Birth. Then slow fade up of a faint form. Out of the dark” (CSP P, 267). At certain key points, words begin to deviate from the image: “Loose Loose matches

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in right-hand pocket. Strikes one on his buttock the way his father taught him. Takes off milk white globe and sets it down. Match goes out. Strikes a second as before. Takes off chimney. Smoke-clouded. Holds it in left hand” (CSP P, 266). It is immediate and in the present tense, but fails to match the stillness of the image. It injects rather a dynamism into the image, almost making it move and any dramatic tension in the play is generated by this dehiscence between image and spoken text. The “schism” that occurs in this play and in That Timee (later), between differing aspects of the self,39 is manifested on stage in the increasing and decreasing gap between sound and image, text and performance, language and body. Mouth as Frame: At the Limits of Vision A Piece of Monologuee is replete with frames of one sort or another. We learn from the stage directions that the speaker is positioned at “edge of light” (CSP P, 268, 267). He describes the scene on stage, “Foot of pallet just visible edge of frame” (CSP P, 267), and the stage imagery is framed by and through words. This scene creation, this framingg, draws the spectator’s gaze, whether that gaze is the inward gaze of the imagination or not, toward not only the image, but also the frame itself. Objects seem just about to leave its encircling aura of perceptual attention: “Dark parts. Grey light. Rain pelting. Streaming umbrellas. Ditch. Bubbling black mud. Coffin out off frame. Whose? Fade. Gone. Move on to other matters. Try to move on. To other matters” (CSP P, 268). To frame something is to create limits around an object, limits that call attention to that object as something different from the world around it. The frame, as Jacques Aumont writes, acts as an isolator.40 The effect is intensified in figurative art as the frame “becomes like an opening which gives access to the imaginary world, to the diegesis figured by the image.””41 It is through the frame that the image—in this case the painting—becomes meaningful, readable, interpretable. In this way, limits produce interpretation. The frame is responsible for generating and manipulating the perceptual encounter with the art object, as José Ortegaa y Gasset writes: In order to isolate one thing from another, a third thing is needed which must be neither like the first nor the second—a neutral object. Now, the frame is not the wall, a merely utilitarian fragment of the real world; but neither is it quite the enchanted surface of the painting. As the frontier for both regions, the frame serves to neutralize a brief strip of wall. And acting as a trampoline, it sends our attention hurtling off to the legendaryy dimension of the aesthetic island.42

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It appears that while certain events and objects in A Piecee, particularly the recurring image of the funeral, are brought to perceptual attention through framing, the speaker is also in fact alluding to their disappearance outt of the frame. Thus, he points toward what is potentially unframable, unrepresentable. This process of image-making is realized in filmic terms. The shot, as the coffin goes “on its way” is to last 30 seconds: “Coffin on its way. Loved one . . . he all but said of loved one on his way. Her way. Thirty seconds. Fade. Gone. Stands there staring beyond. Into dark whole again” (CSP P, 269). This directs the eye of the spectator’s mind to the frame as a perceptual limit, invoking the sense of a tactile enclosing darkness, where touch, rather than vision, acts as an epistemological tool. The lips of the cradle, grave, and mouth do not frame the “imaginaryy world” Aumont describes. Neither do they spring our attention toward some aesthetic object or experience, thereby neutralizing themselves in the process, disappearing the way frames ought to do. For the only thing they reveal is a dark beyond: the dark recesses of the mouth/mind from which words emerge, the earthy unknowability of the grave and the equally unfathomable female figures: “There mother. That other” (CSP P, 266). It is these frames, and the process by which they direct our attention to the unframable that are being framed. In this way, the destruction of the photographs that the speaker describes is telling: “Pictures of . . . he all but said of loved ones. Unframed. Unglazed. Pinned to wall with drawing pins. All shapes and sizes. Down one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered. Strewn all over the floor. Not at one sweep. No sudden fit of . . . no word. Ripped from the wall and torn to shreds one by one” (CSP P, 266). It is the absence of the images on the wall, and their destruction—with a precursor in Film—that is the image itself. Drawing on narrative, theatrical, and filmic conventions, the frames that are employed in both A Piecee and That Timee play with visuality. They are created for the stage, yet the action on stage is minimal, taking place mostlyy as speech, narrative. They make use of, or at least refer to, the conventions of film while making very little visible, particularly in A Piecee, where the intertwining of the scenic and verbal in this play operates in a montage-like manner. We can assume Beckett’s familiarity with this text, as a reader off transition when it was published in 1930. As both Pudovkin and Eisenstein were aware, film imagery shares some basic structures with the haiku form.43 A s Mariko Hori Tanaka writes, both are concerned with the close-up. Just as the haiku isolates a detail from its wide sweep, the filmmaker enlarges small details on his or her screen. Both are also concerned with conflict or collision of imagery, a “collision of independent shots.” She finds in Beckett’s work similarly colliding images, whose incongruity becomes united into a

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whole so that the unseen is seen or the unheard is heard.44 This makingg visible is, however, less a revealing of the hitherto unseen, than a framing of the unseeable, the invisible. Again, this leads back to that formal subversion that takes place in each of these works. Although referencing the conventions of the filmic, they fail to perform as filmic pieces; they expose only the attempt of exposure—the act of framing itself. What lies beyond the frame, the darkness of the grave, the inner recesses of the mouth and beyond that, the mind, remains unperceivable. It is rather the activity of framing that is brought into the frame. In A Piece of Monologuee there are “no other matters,” he is physicallyy alone, those “loved ones” long gone. He is also alone in metaphysical terms, in the sense that there is no metaphysical beyond: there is no matter beyond this matter, this corporeal existence. The lips, acting as a material frame for words, usher in their brief existence and are present as they fall prey to death and silence. Necessary for its production, the body is the very site off the birth of the word, through the mouth, into the world. As Merleau-Pontyy puts it, speech and communication are gestures, bringing the body into play: “Language [ . . . ]: a contraction of the throat, a sibilant emission off air between the tongue and teeth, a certain way of bringing the body into play suddenly allows it to be invested with a figurative significance which is conveyed outside us.””45 And the spoken word gives birth to the image: “Night after night the same. Birth. Then slow fade up of a faint form” (CSP P, 267), thus revealing the intertwining of the two. Both of these plays relyy upon language for the realization of their imagery, their action. The body, the flesh, is entirely dependent upon the spoken word for its realization. The voice brings subjects and images into being performatively. Language forms and reforms the image, with materiality always subject to signification.46 Language refers to the material, and matter is always subject to signification or entry into discourse. Yet A Piece of Monologuee hints at an unframed excess that perpetually falls beyond the reach of linguistic expression. While body-language and word-image are perpetually and inextricably intertwined, they are also fundamentally disconnected and mismatched. The dehiscence between sound and image, between body and word, is where the action of A Piecee takes place and there is always a remainder, elements of the material body that remain beyond the frame, that escape symbolization, as in the bodies of the “loved ones” in A Piece of Monologuee, visualized at the lips of a grave. This precipitates the question, of whether one can “get hold off a body?” Can embodied experience be captured by words? Following Nancy, this is not to suggest that the body is somehow ineffable, thereby imbuingg it with certain mystical qualities, rather this points to the way in which body and word remain in touch, while simultaneously failing to touch. The

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mouth, in this play and in Not I, operates as both a material manifestation and symbol of this. Fixity and Flow: The Ekphrastic Gesture in That Time In the plays examined in this chapter, the relationship between spoken word and image is visualized on stage and indeed, in Beckett’s drama in general; his plays often visualize a tense, inclusive disjunction between these two aesthetic elements. In my analysis up to now, the mouth has functioned as a sign of this, marking as it does the hole where words spill out onto the still frame/canvas of the stage space. While the mouth has offered a way off thinking about flows between the inner and outer of the body and frames the point at which word and body meet, some other term is perhaps necessary to think through the relationship that is established between word and image in That Timee. In this play Beckett dramatizes the ekphrastic moment, paring away extraneous detail to allow close attention on the point/limit/ threshold where language and image touch. There is shift here from thinking of how the mouth signals the meeting point of the inner and outer of the body, immaterial verbosity and the red meat of the mouth-cave, to considering this bodily organ as aesthetic entity: an image in a tense dialogue with words; this dialogue might be named usefully as ekphrastic. The term ekphrasis was used by rhetoricians of ancient Greece to denote a rhetorical strategy whereby an object was described in close enough detail as to bring it to life in the mind’s eye of the listener (from ek/ecc and phrazein meaning “to point out”). The term as it is used today refers to a specific genre of poetry, in which the poet writes in response to a piece of visual art. It has carried multiple different meanings historically however, and even contemporary commentators vary in their definitions of the term. James Heffernan offers a relatively straightforward definition, thinking in terms of the relationship that is developed in the ekphrastic gesture between art forms: the verbal representation of visual representation or, using one mode of representation to represent another.47 Murray Krieger—perhaps most relevantly to Beckett’s work—sees ekphrasis as the most “extreme and tellingg instance of the visual and spatial potential of the literary medium,” with the study of ekphrasis being the most “useful way to put into question the pictorial limits of the function of words in poetry.””48 Krieger believes that “as the Western imagination has seized upon and used the ekphrastic principle, it has sought—through the two-sidedness of language as a medium of the verbal arts—to comprehend the simultaneity, in the verbal figure, of fixity and flow, “of an image at once grasped and yet slipping away through the crevices of language.” language.”49 Ekphrasis, in Krieger’s understanding, tests the limits of

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language, its capacity to convey the complexity and richness of an image. It also attends to the way time is communicated within different art forms. Poetry is a temporal art. Its words unveil their content sequentially in time as the reader’s eye scans the page, whereas visual art is perceived to be staticc and fixed in time. The most famous example of this temporal disconnect is to be found in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in which the poet observes how the narrative that is imaged on the urn is forever frozen in time. The trees will never lose their leaves, the lovers’ kiss will remain unconsummated and the beauty of the woman will not fade:”She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” While at the same time, the extent to which language fails to convey the full vibrancy off the image is revealed. The urn is a “Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.”50 The philosophical implications of the act of ekphrasis are worth noting. This is to do with, on the one hand, what it reveals about the relationship between visual image and language and, on the other, what it reveals about temporality in art. Krieger notes that one of the impulses toward ekphrasis is “the romantic quest to realise the nostalgic dream of an original, pre-fallen language of corporeal presence, though our only means to reach it is the fallen language around us. And it would be the function of the ekphrastic poet to work the magical transformation.”51 Both That Timee and A Piecee of Monologuee set up this relation within the performance—the stage space is given over to a performance of ekphrasis and is used as a site through which fixity and flow, being and becoming are brought into touch and held together. The image—while it remains for the most part fixed—is subject to the writing and rewriting that has been examined in A Piece of Monologue, a play that maps this relationship onto the one between word and body. Ekphrasis makes us see the image anew, as Stephen Cheeke’s analysis suggests,52 so these plays dramatize the ekphrastic gesture of writing toward an image, causing word and image to collide, montage-like, in a process off making, remaking, and unmaking. Thinking of the ekphrastic in Beckett’s drama invokes the dialogue that has taken place historically between art and literature. Oppenheim foregrounds Beckett’s relationship with visual art in Thee Painted Wordd arguing that its unifying force is a preoccupation with the visual.53 Noting Billie Whitelaw’s comments during Not I rehearsals about feeling as though she were in a moving painting, being carved out of light, Oppenheim discusses the pictorial quality of Beckett’s writing: In the progression from the early to the late work, as reductionism enhances the visually evocative power of the text, Beckett’s writing not

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only becomes analogous to painting. It also brings epistemological limits of art into play that render the narrative and theatrical picture making an increasingly tangible study of plasticity. The rudimentary organisational quality of painting becomes visible, in other words, as a phenomenon apart from the painterly picture.54 She observes the presence of ekphrasis here, where allusions to visual art take on a “force far more transformative than comparative or descriptive.”55 These plays, I believe, document that dialogue happening at its most fundamental level: stillness of image meeting fluidity of words. What I wish to focus on here is how these plays reveal not only the relationship between specific works of art—a relationship that Oppenheim has captured in eloquent detail, but also as she puts it, the visibility of the “organisational quality off painting”56 in Beckett’s work. While I have already examined the way in which certain filmic qualities in A Piece of Monologuee point toward the limits and finitude of the body and the limitations of attempts to represent it, here I am concerned with developing an analysis of how two aesthetic “systems,” linguistic and visual, are brought into play. There are aspects of both A Piecee of Monologuee and That Timee where an ekphrastic gesture is revealed—when a word touches an image and vice versa. While the mouth as corporeal entityy does not play the same role in That Timee that it does in Not I and A Piecee of Monologuee, some of the same concerns for the relationship between bodyy and speech, between selfhood and language, and between word and image are apparent. Just as the speaker of A Piecee tell us that he stands “head almost touching wall” (CSP P, 269) while nothing in the image suggests this, so too do the words of That Timee “almost touch” the image without ever settlingg into an easy coherence. Poetry and Painting That Timee contains a virtually still image. All that is visible is the face of a “listenerr,” “about 10 feet above stage level midstage off centree.” This “old whitee face ” with “long hair flaring as if seen from above outspread ” (CSP P, 228) barelyy moves throughout the play. The listener’s eyes open and his breath is audible at three moments during the play. At all other times, his eyes are closed as he listens to the three fragments of narrative that emerge from “both sidess and above.” e These, we told in the stage directions, “modulate back and forth without a break in the general flow expect where silence indicated ” (CSP P, 229). It is during these silences that the listener’s actions take place. A deeplyy minimalistic piece, That Timee stretches dramatic action to its limits, as most of the “action” action in the play lies in the “continually continually shifting relationship

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between textual fragments and between text and stage.”57 The only actions, apart from the spoken word, are the miniscule movements of the face of the listener.58 There is a distinction drawn between speech/text and image, generatingg a mismatch between the content of the image and the content of the speech. Yet in spite of this mismatch, these two theatrical elements intertwine. Materiality is called into being through language, just as language is created and produced through material means. Similarly to A Piece of Monologuee, where the speaker refers only to a “him,” there is a mismatch in That Timee also in terms of identity. Although the voice-text can be identified with the figure-body, such identification is neither guaranteed nor unproblematic. The voices address the listener with the pronominal “you.” Both of these plays put the identity of the speaker into question, as neither protagonist refers to an “I.” While text and image circle around one another and intertwine, they never settle into a relationship of neat identification. Like Krapp the failing writer, the figure described by the voices of Thatt Timee holds words in high esteem. From the child in the ruins, having imaginary conversations with himself until he was hoarse, to the adult sittingg among the dusty volumes of the library, language has played a vital part in his creation of himself. Yet, like Krapp, there is anxiety that words may be faltering: (Voice C) “turning-point that was a great word with you before they dried up” (CSP P, 230). If selfhood, however fragmented, is predicated on words, then this drying up of them brings the threat of ruin and the end of selfhood. That Timee also leaves open the possibility that this “memory” is another fabrication. For as voice B tells us: “a whisper so faint she loved you hard to believe you even/you made up that bit till the time came in the end” (CSP P, 234) throws the accuracy of the whole narrative into question. The “making it all up,” which Voice A describes, foregrounds the constructed, often inaccurate practice of remembering and blurs the distinction between truth and fiction. As McMullan points out, “[T]he only access to history orr memory that Beckett’s characters have is through language [ . . . ] Yet this past can be seen simply as a function or a construct of the language system.”59 In That Timee, the focus is upon the memories and history of the subject of the narrative, who we assume to be the listener. No embodied sources are revealed for the voices to which the figure listens; they remain acousmaticc presences. With no body in sight, the spectator can assume that the voices are different aspects of the listener, describing different stages in his life. Juxtaposing images from childhood, middle age, and old age, the work is predicated on the fracture of identity, an identity that is constituted in and d through language. This production of self is not complete, however, nor is it comprehensive: “making it all up on the doorstep as you went along making

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yourself all up again for the millionth time forgetting it all where you were” (CSP P, 234). Words here are part of the attempt to write the self and the scenes of memory. Lacking any punctuation, the text of That Timee flows from one scene to the next and from voice to voice, rhythmically and without pause—though this is difficult for an actor to achieve. During rehearsal for the play in Germany, it was agreed that Klaus Herm—in pretaping for the voiceover— — would use overlapping words in the recording of section II: “Herm reads to a certain point, makes a pause, and begins again with the text a few w words before the stop, so that with the first words an acoustic balance has already been achieved.”60 In performance, the listener would be surrounded by rhythmic and poetic vocal sound. This “sound envelope”, to use Didier A nzieu’s term,61 is like the background sound of consciousness, bubblingg up and dimming away, following trains of thought and pursuing memories, until gradually an image of a life, a person, however fragmented, emerges. Voice A describes an attempted (and failed) return journey to a familiar place of childhood; voice B images two lovers on a stone slab (presumablyy one is the listener); while voice C tells a tale of vagrancy and rejection from society as the figure, whom we assume to be the listener, takes shelter from the seemingly endless rain in various public buildings—the portrait gallery, the post office, and the library. Each voice draws on different times in the life of the listener, layering together fragments of selfhood and personal history. To demonstrate this poetic quality of the writing in this play, Enoch Brater arranges the words on the page in a lyrical form as follows: . . . that time alone on your back in sand and no vows to break the peace when was that an earlier time before she came after she went or both before she came after she was gone and you back in the old scene wherever it might be.62 It is the author’s poetic language that is transforming the stage space.63 Noting the commonalities between this play and Not I, he remarks that

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each “holds in fine balance a tiny cosmos in which private emotions have apocalyptic consequences.”64 In other words, words and their meaning are what carry this play, giving it its poignancy and evocativeness: “Language in That Timee therefore offers us a new scenic space. Arranging the place of secondary scenes, it is language that “not only underlines and follows the psychological journey of the character, but also precedes and creates it through an unveiling of the body by the words.””65 What is apparent then is a meeting point in this play of poetry and of image. The words reveal something, unearth something from behind the eyes of the listener. They allow w us, in Cheeke’s words, to see the image anew—a process that is continuous as each wave of words reveals more and more, demonstrating both the power of words to make it “all” up and the density of image that remains when the words cease to be. This kinetic portrait emerges, as in A Piece of Monologuee, in the intersection between word and image. That Timee operates at the limit of two aesthetic forms: poetry and painting, specifically portrait painting. As in ekphrasis so described earlier, there is a flow between the fluidity of words, temporally unstable, moving in time, and the comparative stillness of image. There is also a demonstration of the relationship of words to space. Krieger writes that “words cannot have capacity, cannot be capacious, because they have, literally, no space.”66 Theater permits words to surpass briefly this limitation. Language, at least in That Timee, is highly spatialized. Beckett, during rehearsals for the Schiller Theater production of 1976 with Klaus Herm, defines the function of the three loudspeakers as “supposed to make the transition from one story to another clear. It is the same voice but the stories are taking place at different levels of time.”67 This effect is rendered by the fact that each voice emerges from a different part of the space surrounding the listening head, giving the sense that they emerge from within the vast spaces of the halls of memory. The pictorial consciousness of the play emerges in several ways. On the one hand there are specific reference to paintings and to the experience off being in a gallery. Voice C, taking shelter from the rain describes: “C: [ . . . ] that time in the Portrait Gallery in off the street out of the cold and rain slipped in when no one was looking and through rooms shivering and dripping till you found a seat marble slap and sat down to rest and dry off and onto hell out of there when was that” (CSP P, 228). Looking up he sees before him a vast oil painting, “C: till you hoisted your head and there before your eyes when they opened a vast oil black with age and dirt someone famous in his time some famous man or woman or even child such as a youngg prince or princess some young prince or princess of the blood black with age beyond the glass” (CSP P, 229) and describes the sense of the weightiness of time that being surrounding by such antique objects representing people

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long dead brings: “C: [ . . . ] there alone with the portraits of the dead blackk with antiquity and the dates on the frames in case you might get the century wrong” (CSP P, 231). The play self-referentially meditates on the experience of viewing the painting and the act of representing that experience. What is interesting—and I will return to this issue again later—is the lack off any identifying description he provides. For now though, it is worth notingg further instances in which the ekphrastic gesture emerge in this play. While voice C describes a near-vagrant lifestyle, finding shelter from the “endless” winter’s rain in various institutions, the portrait gallery, the post office, and library, voice B returns again and again to the same scene: “B: On the stone together in the sun on the stone at the edge of the little wood and as far as eye could see the wheat turning yellow vowing every now and then you loved each other just a murmur not touching or anything of that nature you one end of the stone she the other” (CSP P, 228). As well as the striking avoidance of touch, Voice B seems to observe/remember stillness continuously: “B: all still just the leaves and ears and you too still on the stone in a daze no sound not a word only every now and then to vow you loved each other just a murmur” (CSP P, 229). The time “on the stone” is remembered as “stockk still always stock still” (CSP P, 232). Even in the towpath scene, the driftingg motion of the dead creature (rat or bird) in the water and the water itself are the only things “stirring” (CSP P, 233). These voices play with the possibility of fixity and fluidity offered within the media of visual art and writingg when these come together in the kinetic portrait that is That Timee. The text toys continuously with animation versus fixity, as if the listener is attempting to find some decay-proof method of memorializing his life. In Voice A’s description, this is the quest to find out if a place of his childhood still exists: “A: that time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there where you hid as child when was that [eyes close.]” (CSP P, 228). The quest is a failure; he cannot access this childhood space where he spent hours “talkingg to himself who else out loud imaginary conversations there was childhood for you ten or eleven on a stone among the giant nettles making it up now w one voice now another till you were hoarse” (CSP P, 230). We do not learn iff the ruins still stand as there were “no trams” to take him there, but again there is tension between the apparent permanence and stillness of stone (the marble slab of the voice C’s portrait gallery and the stone on which the child once sat) and the fluid, provisional nature of the voice. Words make the subject up and are infinitely revisable, remaking the self again and again. But we find them pressed to their limits in the ekphrastic gesture: the stillness of stone and dynamism of words emerges as a juxtaposition between different temporalities. It is not that painting is still or that stones are permanent, but that they move more slowly than these bubbling words, so soon disappeared

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once they are out of the mouth. That stillness is equated in voice B with an absence of touch is interesting. There is no sight of the face or any other part never turned to her nor she to you always parallel like on an axle-tree never turned to each other just blurs on the fringes of the field no touching or anything of that nature always space between if only an inch no pawing in the manner of flesh and blood no better than shades no worse if it wasn’t for the vows. (CSP P, 231) While this fits with an overall project of withdrawal from the other in Beckett’s work, with a precedent in Krapp’s “farewell to love,” this unwillingness to touch has other resonances also. The two figures sit still, staringg at the wheat, not touching and murmuring to each other only now and then. They are in stillness in one another’s presence without contact. It is as if the dynamism of this act of perception (or proprioception) will disrupt the attempt to inject stillness into language, to give language, if only for a moment, a truly pictorial characteristic, so that it not only works to image, but is also, briefly, as still as that image. Yet what happens when the achievement of stillness in language takes precedence over the impulse to make an image or when the image is of nothing at all? Throughout this chapter I have discussed words touching images and bodies, reworking and remaking materiality as they do so. Part of the challenge of ekphrasis is the way in which the attempt to respond to the pictorial pushes language to its limits, testing its capacity for representation. As Oppenheim points out, “Ekphrasis in Beckett takes a distinctlyy non-mimetic turn; it dramatizes perception as it points to the unreliabilityy of representation of the (already unreliable) real.”68 As an example of this, she references the picture in Endgamee, which hangs “face to wall”69 agreeing with H. Porter Abbott’s line of thought that Beckett here has “communicated concealment.” 70 A connection might be drawn then between the framing of nothing of A Piecee and the emptying of image in That Timee. The description of the “vast oil black with age and dirt someone famous” reveals nothing about the image itself. The speaker does not tell us who is painted here nor when it was painted. If anything, this gesture is antiekphrastic. Rather than making us see the image, we see only the blackness of age and antiquity: the poetic gesture obscures rather than reveals and this play, like A Piece of Monologuee, reveals the limits of language in the face of matter. The ekphrastic gesture is part the energy of the play generated by the dehiscence between word and image; while it is a revealing gesture, making us see the image “anew,” it is also simultaneously a gesture that obscures. Again, we are drawn into the dark recesses of the image, its mouth-hole: the darkness

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of the oil painting in the narrative image, the impenetrable face of the stage image whose life and thoughts emerge only in fragments. What Lies Between Nancy talks of bodies taking place or coming to be, neither fully within discourse nor in matter. They do not inhabit “mind” or “body.” Rather theyy are to be found “at the limit” where these two elements come into contact.71 This way of thinking beyond dualistic models offers a particular perspective on the aesthetic that is at work in these plays, one that is perhaps summed up in the figure of the mouth. The radical disconnection apparent in these plays between subject and body, between image and sound, and between word and flesh is the place where the plays “take place.” There is a certain energy generated by this dehiscence and the organ of the mouth acts as sign of this. In the case of Not I, certain essentialist notions of gender can be challenged, while at the same time offering a vision of the ways in which discourse and the material body interact. In all three plays, the stage image is a material surface awaiting the constructive effects of language, with the energy of these plays deriving from their operating along the fault-line between these two aesthetic elements. It also at such an intersection that the performance of these plays lie, for the plays discussed here reveal bodies in performance as they emerge when matter and discourse, image and sound, touch. These plays reveal also that the body lies at such an intersection: at the limits of discourse and matter. Both That Timee and A Piece of Monologuee are heavily reliant on language for their realization, and operate at the very limits of what is possible in the theater. Not I sees a disruption to language. In her fragmented torrent off words, she reveals aporeticc spaces, “godforsaken holes,” where language fails to represent. Thus, these plays address the Beckettian conundrum of language: in the ekphrastic gestures of A Piecee and That Timee, it is a poor and faulty vehicle, but there are few alternatives to its use. It is in its relationship to corporeality however that language’s failure is most evident. Without anyy other tools at her disposal, Mouth speaks her body into being. Operating as they do between language and the body, sound and image, these plays demonstrate a disconnection between those two worlds, and this is the energyy that drives them. The preceding chapter was concerned with Beckett’s dramatization off the point at which sound touches bodies, and the image that is made in, for example, Ghost Trio of the moment when consciousness becomes aware of and begins to make sense of sound, as voice, music, or basic noise. The

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focus of this chapter has been on how embodied subjects are spoken into being, how language frames the material body to such an extent that it seems impossible to speak of a body that is prediscursive or prelinguistic. Yet, particularly in Not I and A Piece of Monologuee, the figure of the mouth speaking oneself and one’s body into being reveals the material foundation of language. The lips frame the word and, in line with Merleau-Ponty, the spoken word is a gesture. Corporeality and language are fundamentallyy intertwined; a nontheistic incarnation occurs, as words are made flesh, and flesh is made into words. This has a parallel in the complex relationship off word to image; they intertwine and sometimes touch, but just as often this touching fails, leaving a remainder, aspects of the embodied self that discourse cannot or will not admit.

CHAPTER 4

Skin, Space, Place

The Inner Skin A container for the body, the skin is the largest sensory organ and therefore the most open to touch. It forms a comparatively vast, haptic boundary between body and world, putting the body in touch with the world as well as putting the body in touch with itself: the skin feels and communicates pain, pleasure, itch, burn, shiver, and a plethora of other sensations. Steven Connor, drawing on Michel Serres, views skin not merely as a surface, but as a milieu: a meeting point where “world and body touch, defining their common border.”1 The skin is both physiological—a sensory apparatus— and imaginary: a containing border, which demarcates inner and outer, “I” and “you.” In this way, we have both an inner and an outer skin—an outer skin of the body and an inner one of the mind, an imaginary container for selfhood. Through the skin, the body is open to modulation, as Nancy puts it: The body-place isn’t full or empty, since it doesn’t have an outside or an inside.[ . . . ] It’s acephalic and aphallic in every sense, as it were. Yet it is a skin, variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied, invaginated, exogastrulated, orificed, evasive, invaded, stretched, relaxed, excited, distressed, tied, untied. In these and thousands of other ways, the body makes room for existence ([ . . . ] the transcendental resides in an indefinite modification and spacious modulation of skin).2 Skin has the capacity to be folded in on itself, to be both space or depth and surface at the same time. The skin, folded to create the inner recesses of the

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body, complicates the boundary between the inner and the outer. It puts us in touch not only with the world around us, but also, through its folds and its tears, with the world within us. At the same time as we are contained and bounded by this somatic envelope, which overlaps and intertwines with itself, we are also aware of the porousness of our body-selves; porousness revealed in this autopsy of Beckett’s work: eye, ear, mouth, anus, vagina; these are holes that lead to physiological inner spaces and inner skins. Skin, as boundary or milieu, always brings with it an awareness of the inner and the outer—the inner of the body, body surface, and external world. And skin exists always relative to space, and to tactility. Humans begin their existence in the encircling, cradling space of the womb and touch is a vital part of the infant’s development. Without formational, physical care from an adult, children can sufferr greatly from emotional and cognitive deficits. For Didier Anzieu, the path is laid for consciousness in the physiological skin in which, prior even to birth, perceptual systems are awakened. Tactile stimulation has a lastingg effect upon the infant. The ego, in Freud’s terms, is the mental projection of a bodily surface.3 Anzieu develops this, seeing a psychophysiological connection forged in the imaginary skin, which then operates as an interface between the psyche and the body, and between self and other. The skin, acting as a covering for the whole surface of the body and into which all the external sense organs are inserted, thus corresponds with the “containingg function of the Skin Ego.””4 The skin ego is “[a] mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early stages of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis off the experience of the surface of the body.”5 A maternal presence cradles the infant, surrounding him or her with a tactile and sound envelope. This cradling functions, for Anzieu, to provide the ground out of which the projected skin ego will form. In Anzieu’s clinical experience, the absence of this cradling ground for the infant may produce neuroses in later life. The formation of the self and the skin ego is founded upon an intimate connection, this imprinting by the body of the other, linking tactility, containment, and the formation of the subject to that presence. This formation arises out of the tactile contact between caregiver and child, but the veryy process of birth itself also seems to be formational—in a very literal way. As Steven Connor recounts: In mammals, the abrasion experienced by the skin during its passage through the birth canal in vaginal delivery stimulates the action of breathing. [ . . . ] This process may even begin before birth, since the ripplingg

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movements of the womb prior to labour known as Braxton-Hicks contractions appear to stimulate the foetus to inhale and exhale the amnioticc fluid. This uterine massage prepares the skin for the abrasions or writingg of the world which it receives upon its surface.6 Skin is revealed not just as surface but also as depth, place, and space. It is this complexity of the boundary, its readiness to become, in Nancy’s words, “invaginated, exogastrulated, orificed,” as well as function as a surface upon which identities are played out, that informs this chapter’s discussion of . . . but the clouds . . . , Rockaby, y and Footfallss. The origins of Footfalls, s discussed in the following paragraphs, lie in Beckett’s exposure to Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1930s and, through its frayed solitary figure conversing with maternal darkness, it explores this boundary or skin between mother and daughter. In 1935 Beckett attended a lecture by Jung in which was described the case of a young female patient, “who had never really been born,” as he explained during rehearsal for the 1976 Schiller Theater production.7 The bodies that carry us, as growing fetuses and as children, both cradle us and shape us in physiological and psychological ways. We begin when another body makes room for us within its skin and this experience enters into the cultural imagination. In Footfalls, s the boundary appears porous and we are left unsure of the limits between mother and daughter, just as if she was never fully born. In . . . but the clouds . . . , the potential off the skin to be both inner and outer, deeply folded and completely flat, is revealed in the medium itself, the television screen as malleable skin. The costume in Rockabyy gives that play’s woman-figure a glittering skin that is both the condition of her visibility and a sign of her containment. Skin functions as a metaphor in these plays, one that unveils our haptic relationship with space and with the other. Some commentary on gender in Beckett’s work is necessary here, as gender difference is often mapped on to the experience (and imagination) of skin and spatiality. While the gender off the person who cares for the child does not matter for the formation of the skin ego, the place of the woman’s body in this formational touch is obvious. Biologically, woman provides space for an other within herself and, arisingg from this, the cultural imagination has perceived and represented the female body as space or place.8 The association of woman with nurture (a woman’s touch), which has historically relegated women to the domestic sphere, arises from the morphology of her body; addressing space in . . . but the clouds . . . , Footfalls, s and Rockabyy demands commentary on how aesthetic space in these plays connotes the feminine, and either confirm or transcend the normative woman-space equation.

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A problem must be acknowledged here however. One must be careful not to separate out the “woman plays” from the rest of Beckett’s oeuvre as somehow only relevant as dealing with women’s issues and identity. The problem that arises is that the rest of the dramatic oeuvre (containing male figures) is suggested, implicitly or otherwise, to be addressing universal issues; it is only when a woman appears on stage that we can deal with gender structures, and the specificity of identity. I want to acknowledge the fact that many of the cultural associations that accompany femininity are at work more widely. The spaces of darkness in the plays, the inner skins, are given feminine resonances. The maternity of darkness is most explicit in Rockabyy and Footfallss but is arguably present in the television plays, whether in the feminine unconscious in Eh Joe, e the “inner sanctum” of . . . but thee clouds . . . , or the association of external spaces of the room in Ghost Trio with child and (absent) woman. It must be acknowledged also however, that gender configurations in the later work are of a much more erratic and contingent nature,9 with the notion of the stable self of realist drama “alien” to this area of Beckett’s corpus. s 10 Disempowerment or marginalization also affects the male figures of the oeuvre to an equal degree.11 Furthermore, while woman-darkness may be seen as a problematic aesthetic cliché, performance spaces in these later plays become productive sites, where the weighty corporeality of the female in Beckett’s early fiction “dissolves as she becomes the very space and ground of representation.”12 The dark invisible of the image has a speaking role; its significance is far beyond that off background. Most of all, the darkness in each of the plays functions as an almost limitless space, an ever-expanding skin “variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied” like the body Nancy describes. However, through patterns of darkness and light, vocalic presences and semitangible bodies, the plays examined here each explore the shifting boundaries of the inner and the outer in ways that are specific to their medium: television for . . . butt the clouds . . . , the stage for Rockaby, y and Footfallss. The “skin” of these can be both surface and depth. Making Space: The Skin of the TV Screen Taking as its title a line from W. B. Yeats’s “The Tower” (1928), . . . but thee clouds . . . (1976–1977) is a televisual meditation on loss and the potential failure of memory and imagination. The play echoes certain themes of the Yeats poem—an awareness of mortality and an end to creativity “the wreck of body, / slow decay of blood” and the figure of a lost woman, as well as the withdrawal into the self where Herren sees Yeats’s imagination “burn[s] brightest.”13 However, Herren points out that none of the comforts that brightest.

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the poet draws from the transcendent power of the imagination are to be found in . . . but the clouds . . . . A lone figure attempts to call up the image off a woman now lost to him, someone whom he “begged when alive to lookk at me” (CSP P, 260), but his success in this is only partial. His “séance”14 is overlaid with the possibility of artistic failure, which “troubles the neatness of consolation” in the Yeats poem.15 A flat screen with seemingly limitless depth, the static object that is the television set, oblong in the corner of one’s living space, contrasts sharplyy with the dynamism of the flickering broadcasts that shear across its surface. Television is a porous skin—capable of being both surface and depth. By the 1970s, when . . . but the clouds . . . and Ghost Trio were televised, the television set had become a highly familiar piece of domestic technology. When these television plays were aired ( . . . but the clouds . . . and Ghost Trio were televised on the British channel BBC2 in 1977), to say that they defamiliarized what had by then become a deeply familiar medium would be an understatement. Bignell observes this disconnect when he points out that Beckett’s television plays establish mirrors for domestic space, but the unfamiliarity of their territories of dim monochromatic, narrativeless imagery only serves to remind viewers of their separation and distance from that space.16 The door, window, pallet, and mirror of Ghost Trio are all familiar features of a domestic settingg for a television program, yet they provide none of the narratives of individuality, family, home, and social class with which, as Bignell says, the heritage of television is bound up.17 The spaces of . . . but the clouds . . . , familiar in themselves, are made arguably even less recognizable than in Ghost Trioo. We are told of the “little sanctum” and the closet—both familiar and domestic spaces of living—yet these are never fully visualized. We only see the figure in his sanctum dimly: “Near shot from behind of man sitting on invisible stooll bowed over invisible table. Light grey robe and skullcap. Dark ground. Samee shot throughout” t (CSP P, 257). On space in . . . but the clouds . . . , Bignell writes that the elliptical circle shown in the center of the screen (m1 shot) draws attention to three-dimensionality within the image. This is in contrast to the flat, planar surface of the television screen.18 The idea of a deliberatelyy generated contrast between surface and depth is an interesting one, for these two levels of spatiality imply the distinction between haptic and optic visuality/imagery in art. The medium of television, as Bignell rightly points out, affords Beckett the opportunity to generate tension between planar surface and three-dimensional depth, or between haptic and optic space, to applyy my terminology. There are multiple examples of invisibles, or blind spots, in this play. M is seated “on invisible stool bowed over invisible tablee,” in a “light grey robee and skullcap,” , “in in the dark, where none could see me” me (CSP P, 257 and 259).

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Neither do we see the other spaces that are made out of the dark—the closet or the external space of the roads. Instead the screened images of this playy tend to frustrate the visible, obfuscating the figure as well as frustratingg his attempts to visualize that desired other—her appearance is never guaranteed, and her gaze, when she does appear, is a literalized blind spot on the two-dimensional surface of the television screen. Visibility in this playy is compromised—paradoxically so, considering television is such a highlyy visual medium. Yet the space of the play gives way to darkness, dimness, and invisibility at every turn. The opening of the planar surface into depth mirrors the way that the seemingly coherent surface of the body, the skin, gives way to dark internal cavities, hollow columns, lined with inner skins. Skin is capable of folding itself into inner and outer, capable of resisting (as screen) and, in Nancy’s words, making room for existence, containing the subject within its limits. Space is manifest as a cradling darkness; there is a slippage between the inner and outer; the “skin of the film”19 —or more appropriatelyy the skin of the screen—is made porous, flipped inside out to form a concavity. The externally coherent surface of the screen gives way to an apparentlyy limitless depth of image, as in Deleuze’s “any-space-whatever.”20 From an aesthetic perspective, darkness can be limitlessly productive: V (voice) of . . . but the clouds . . . can find and name in it any space he chooses. Yet the phenomenological experience of darkness is very different from this, involving a disorientating close-down of perception and, therefore, of space. Merleau-Ponty writes of the night as abolishing the world off clear and articulate objects: Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses, stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal identity. [ . . . ] Even shouts or a distant light people it only vaguely, and then it comes to life in its entirety; it is pure depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distance separating it from me.21 Yet this is not the experience of M/V. The retreat to the sanctum does not appear to coincide with negative thoughts and the terror of a perceptual vacuum: within the inner skin, this space within space of the sanctum, the darkk is a welcome hideaway from percipii, “where none can see me,” and where the flickering, ghostly image of the woman can be called upon. If there is a diminishment of selfhood, it is perhaps, as with so many of Beckett’s figures, a welcome one. What might be argued is that in Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on space in the Phenomenology, Phenomenology y, he is concerned more with the visual perception of space,

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though this is not always explicit. While the commentary commences with the positionality of the body relative to space, the example he takes to explore this is the case of retinal inversion: “If the subject is made to wear glasses which correct the retinal images, the whole landscape first appears unreal and upside down.”22 Gradually, however, the subject becomes accustomed to this and the “body progressively rights itself.” The sense of touch becomes irreconcilable with the sensory input from the eyes and ultimately, the “experience of movement guided by sight [ . . . ] teaches the subject to harmonize the visual and tactile data.”23 What emerges from this commentary is the extent to which sight dominates the bodily experience of space. It is no surprise that night brings with it such a loss of orientation, as all the signs for the orientation of one’s body in space (depth, breadth, width, etc.) have, quite simply, disappeared. Yet, in much of Beckett’s work, the darkness does not seem to hold this kind of terror. This is certainly the case in . . . but the clouds . . . and arguably in Footfallss and Rockabyy. Darkness seems to hold some alternative system of coordination, a different sense of space. While space is intimatelyy linked to self-awareness, it is not dependent on vision. Examples from the prose are telling also. Orientation in darkness of the late novel Companyy (1981) is rooted in the body. He knows that he is addressing one/himselff “on his back in the dark” and can tell this by “the pressure on his hind parts” and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again.24 Space is experienced in this example, and in the plays examined in this chapter, haptically, that is, via the skin. It encloses, enwraps—to use Merleau-Ponty’s word—but rather than leaving the figures in a state of helpless anxiety, it seems to provide a necessary erasure for the Beckettian subject. Blindness, heralding a different set of sensoryy modalities, becomes the very condition for a minimum of subjectivity, and an optimum for creativity. As with many of the novels and plays . . . but the clouds . . . juxtaposes the inner and the outer, an internal space of creation as opposed to an external space of motility. This pattern will be identifiable in Rockabyy and Footfallss also (see later). M’s sanctum contrasts with the roads that he walks daily— though no such external world is visualized. The figure seems to move easilyy between these realms, traversing the spotlight between dark spaces. In a process of rehearsal and repetition, the boundaries that demarcate the spaces of . . . but the clouds . . . are carefully negotiated. The figure moves between light and darkness, naming the areas of darkness as closet, sanctum. Space in this play is divided into geographical coordinates: West, North, and East, with the camera positioned at South. While these coordinates are not visualized and remain only as set directions, the objective nature of space arranged

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in this way makes the figure seem all the more diminutive. The spaces are indicated thus in the text: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

West, roads. North, sanctum East, closet. Standing position. Camera. (CSP P, 258)

The abstract quality of this space, evident in the text, is juxtaposed with the specificity of personal space, the partly visible and vocalized sanctum. The other spaces are only indicated by the voiceover, which tells us, for example, that M1 “stood listening. [5 secondss], finally went to closet” (CSP P, 259). M1 follows these directions, entering and exiting the darkness at the appropriate places. Visually, there is only the spotlight, surrounded by formless darkness, into which he disappears and reemerges and the only way the viewerr is to know what the darkness stands for in . . . but the clouds . . . is through the voiceover. The voiceover constructs the spaces for the viewer. Indeed it is as though the voice is carving the space, in greater or lesser relief, out off television’s concavity, creating it all with the familiar tools of the Beckettian author-figure: voice, light, and darkness. His sanctum is another space within the space, a new burrowing into the darkness and a welcome one at that. The stillness, silence, dimness, and avoidance of percipii seem to be the conditions under which the generation of the image of the woman can take place, though success in this is not guaranteed. Lending the play a theatrical air, the spectator/camera is fixed and the figure emerges from the dark, “the wings” of the set. This theatricality hearkens back to the early days of television production, which involved extensive use of longs shots and studio spaces,25 while also introducing a sense of provisionality, of something coming to be before our eyes, shifting, as McMullan puts it, the viewer’s focus “from the image on screen to the condition of its emergence and perception.”26 This is evidenced by V’s revisingg of himself at the play’s outset: 1. V V: When I thought of her it was always night. I came in— [dissolve to s empty and to M in between] 7. V: No, that is not right. When she appeared it was always night. I came in—. [dissolve to s empty and emerging from west with hat and greatcoat on] (CSP P, 259)

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V is making something, carving an image for the spectator. It is a rehearsal that allows the image to come to be, requiring, as Deleuze puts it, “an obscure spiritual tension,” “a silent evocation that is also an invocation and even a convocation and revocation, since it raises the thing or the person to the indefinite state: a woman. . . . .”27 Her appearance is not guaranteed, nor is it stable. While the ground has been prepared carefully for this image to appear, she does so only rarely and briefly: V: then crouching there, in my little sanctum, in the dark, where none V could see me, I began to beg, of her, to appear, to me. Such had longg been my use and wont. No sound, a begging of the mind, to her, to appear, to me. Deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and ceased. Or of course until—(CSP P, 260) We learn of three cases in which this begging came to something, three permutations of the following varieties: one, she appeared and “in the same breath was gone” (CSP P, 260); two, she appeared and lingered; and three, she appeared and “v: after a moment—” her lips move, inaudibly (CSP P, 261). The rehearsal leads us through all the possible permutations of events until 41, at which v says: “let us now run though it again” (CSP P, 261). We see what has been rehearsed now played out without the organizing commentary. M1 enters from the west and removes his hat and greatcoat (east), then enters his sanctum (north). The camera then alternates between the shot of m and the image of w; it lingers for five seconds on the former, two on the latter, and then repeats this, before V says: “look at me” (CSP P, 261). The woman’s lips move inaudibly, mouthing the lines of the Yeats poem: “ . . . clouds . . . but the clouds . . . of the sky . . . ” (CSP P, 261). V murmurs, synchronous with the lips until they cease. In this moment, we see the image screened as M/V calls it up and there is a correspondence between image and text—the image in these three cases responds to the demands of the text. Yet this correspondence is problematized by the fact that, as the voice tells us, this visitation rarely occurs. Most often the figure calls upon the woman in vain and, in failure has to busy himself in the dead of night with “something else, more . . . rewarding, such as . . . such as . . . cube roots, for example, or with nothing, busied myself with the nothing” (CSP P, 261). W hen the woman does appear V/M has succeeded not only in creating the image, but also in rendering depth and space flat. In a maneuver that is the opposite of digging space into the screen, the flattened-out close-up of the woman’s face “reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth” (CSP P, 257) fills the television screen. Depth of space collapses into the hollow, sightless image of the woman’s face. The soundless begging of M brings the image

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onto the skin of the screen; the depth of space in the interiority of the image is diminished. It is a projection, without depth or interiority, a haptic, as opposed to optic, relief. The idea that this play is exploring depth and space on the televisual medium connects with William Gruber’s comment regarding space in Ghostt Trioo. He writes that denying space in a way that is “unprecedented” for a dramatist, Beckett is “telling us to think of drama as having the same powerr as a photograph or a painting to suspend time and narrativity” (217).28 Not only are space and depth diminished at this moment of apparition, arrested d too is the flow of time. Unlike A Piece of Monologuee, where the still image is animated by words, the dynamic flow of television’s becoming is slowed and all that moves in the image are those silent, murmuring lips, repeatingg their vocal gesture. The séance in this play, which Minako Okamuro argues “transmute[s] the everyday medium of television into another medium: a spiritual one,”29 and the image imprinted on the haptic shroud is untouchable and ungovernable, silent and sightless, like a death mask. Out of the cradling, tactile depths of the darkness, the shallow surface of the woman’s image is produced. It is a séance in which the intangible “spirit made light” of the woman is raised, as if from out of another cradling space—the grave. If A Piece of Monologuee hovered at the lips of the mouth, image, and grave, . . . but the clouds . . . enshrouds itself in that final earthy skin, where the boundaries between inner and outer, here and not here, depth and surface are forever collapsed and where the darkness, registering as feminine orr unconscious, is valorized as the site out of which the image emerges. Negotiating Space: Skin as Screen in Rockaby Maternal Space The woman in Rockabyy, known only as W, dressed in a sequined gown and seated in a rocking chair, rocks under a single spotlight to the sound of a disembodied voice. The voice, in rhythmic and terse sentences, describes the search undertaken by a “she,” who may or may not be the figure in the chair, for “an other” (CSP P, 275). The separation of voice from body problematizes identity—establishing difference between what is seen and what is heard. The elliptical and repetitive narrative reveals a gradual process of dimming, until the woman in the rocking chair is “done with that” (CSP P, 282). Asleep or dead, the final image is of her pale face dropping forward, as what little light illuminated her throughout the performance gradually fades out. The kinetic image of the play sees W having, through aural and tactile means,, re-created a lost maternal p presence,, manifest as the space p into which

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she withdraws, as maternal body and room are collapsed into each other. As McMullan writes: “The withdrawal into the room is therefore also a withdrawal into the body (finally revealed as the maternal body, the initial lost object/other which announces the exile of the subject and his/her essential incompleteness which is therefore the final resting place and object off desire.”30 Her “more” (CSP P, 275), a demand for the voice to continue speaking, is like that of a child’s desire for soothing words and the combination of the rhythmic vocals and rocking motion appear to reproduce for W what A nzieu terms the sound/tactile envelope. In performance, the figure rocks in and out of the light, giving the impression of being gradually reabsorbed into that dark space, of being born backward. W joins in with the voice at the end of each section with the lines “time she stopped” (sections one and three) and “living soul” (section two). The inner bleeds into the outer as the figure becomes at the moment of echo, a resonant echo chamber, to use Nancy’s phrase,31 a space within a space through which words flow. The body is one space, the stage is another; both of these echo each other as hollow columns. The words form a sound envelope, containing the figure in the same way that the darkness and the arms of chair do, but the echoing of the call reveals division. W has not yet collapsed into the nondifferentiation that the darkness represents. Voice is the marker of the announcement of self-awareness, of consciousness divided from itself, as Dolar puts it, “striking and elementary,” and preceding the mirror stage.32 However, the voice undergoes a gradual diminution as the play progresses. The “more” for which W calls at the beginning of each section becomes gradually hoarser and weaker, while the voice that replies softens gradually also. Alike in texture and quality but different at the same time, both voices seem to be readying for the descent into the senseless whisper that marks the closeness of the body to death and the acceptance of the arms of its encroaching darkness. While a maternal presence is constructed out of aural and kinetic envelopes, there is reference to an actual mother in the text spoken by the voice. We learn that W’s is the chair “where mother rocked/all the years/all in black,” until one day “her end came”; she was “off her head they said/gone off her head/but harmless” (CSP P, 280). Any potential threat of the mad woman is neutralized by an unnamed “they” who dismiss her as harmless; she is consigned to her room and her rocking chair. The room that contained the mother now contains the daughter—an echo of space within space and a conflation of room with womb, and is reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the chora, the place where the subject is both generated and negated, where subjective unity “succumbs before the process of charges and stases” that have produced it. The choraa for Kristeva is “analogous only to vocal and

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kinetic rhythms.”33 In developing this idea, Kristeva borrows the term from Plato’s Timaeuss, where the philosopher deems space to be the type of matter “which is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things.”34 Kristeva observes how this space is given feminine characteristics by Plato; he describes it as nourishing and maternal.35 Like the choraticc space that Kristeva describes, the dark room and rocking chair off Rockabyy have a troubling ambiguity. On the one hand, they provide maternal comfort, “those arms at last,” acting as a reminder of maternal touch and care— choraa as nourishment. On the other, it is presented as a tool of containment, those encircling arms, as well as the room itself, are a sign of the consignment of the actual mother to the periphery of social existence and the imminence of her death— choraa as negation. We learn that she passed away in the rocking chair, in a similar manner to the way in which W will end: “head fallen/and the rocker rocking/rocking away” (CSP P, 280). Yet the woman emulates the mother; her performance mirrors and reenacts her mother’s final moments, allowing W to recognize and reembodyy the mother. The first three sections of the work see the voice describe the end of each phase of questing, which the “she” of the narrative has undertaken. Each section of the play begins with a call from W for “more,” and the responding voice commences with the line “till” or “so in the end.” Section two sees the voice describe how the woman came to sit at her window. Section three, how the search at the window, her “sitting quiet at the window,” failed to produce the desired other—all other blinds being down, “hers alone up” (CSP P, 278–279). The fourth and final section describes how w she went down the “steep stair,” to sit in the old rocker. It is here that we presumably find a conjunction between W and the “she” being described. The woman present onstage mirrors this old woman and, through the interface of the rocking chair, the separation and space of loss that lies between them is narrowed. The chair becomes the tactile, physical object through which a reconnection with the lost mother is made. The final section of the play, in which its various elements—voice-image, mother-daughter, and outer and inner—begin to coalesce is also the section where the description of “eye-quest,” as Bryden calls it,36 of the first sections ends. The narrative is filled with imagery of closing and shutting, “with closed eyes/closing eyes,” and describes how she “let down the blind and stopped,” before the final lines of “stop her eyes/fuck life/stop her eyes” (CSP P, 281–282). It appears that there is an emphatic rejection of seeing in favor of an embrace of the haptic shroud of mother-voice-chair, “those arms at last,” but also a rejection of the external world. The blinds and the eyelids come down, and the darkness, ready to close in, is like a cover being drawn, a container from which no escape is possible, a return to an originary state of

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containment. The end of visibility is associated with death and the maternal, as well as an end to self-division and self-awareness. The haptic here can be registered as both the lost maternal embrace, and the moment at which the figure reaches the limits of life, visibility, and representation between the lips of an imaginary grave. Haptic Space, Skin Depth There are two contrasting types of space in Rockaby, y rendered vocally and visually. These refer to outer and inner space, respectively. The outward movement, of “to and fro” (CSP P, 276), which the Voice describes, contrasts with an inward and downward directionality. The “out” of the search, her “eye-quest,” is characterized by vision, while touch and sound are features of the “action” that takes place in the back and forth of the rocking chair. The figure moves between a dark/light, chiaroscuro patterning, between visibility and invisibility as she rocks. The coordinates of space in this play are registered vocally: high and low, in and out, and to and fro, and visually: the over and back rock of the chair, the vastness of the darkness that surrounds W. W has “famished eyes” and seeks another who is like her, in order “to see/ be seen” (CSP P, 279). She desires to be visible, to be recognized as a subject, but this recognition is not forthcoming. In the failure to become visible, to be recognized, W’s story—if it is indeed her story—mirrors that of her mother. Both W and the mother are dismissed, rendered invisible by a system thatt insists upon and perpetuates that invisibility. The move from the sensoryy modality of vision to that of touch and aurality seems to point to what sight cannot access. The gaze, the “eye-quest,” does not produce an other. It is only through a tactile epistemology that the other can be re-created. It is significant that in the fourth and final section, Voice describes how w the eyes, once “famished,” are now closed. The stage directions confirm a dimuendo movement of the eyelids: Eyes Now closed, now open in unblinking gaze. About equal proportions section 1, increasingly closed section 2 and 3, closed for good halfwayy through 4. (CSP P, 273) There is a sensory distinction then between what the voice describes and the figure presents. The two, voice and image, gradually align, however, like two lids coming together over an eye. However, the suggestion is not that a full merger into undifferentiation takes place at this point. Rather, through

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the performance these differences are brought into touch in such a way that neither achieves privilege over the other; they interact in a tense and labile manner. The woman has chosen a different path to travel. As Bryden writes, “[W]ith sight sidelined as an informational tool, the woman may travel willingly within, to more intimate zones of awareness, within the cradling, tactile embrace of “the rocker/those arms at last.”37 She does not suggest that the eye-quest is a failure, rather that the woman sets it aside in order to “embark on a new phase,” marked by the line “time she stopped.” As Bryden puts it, “[T]he credentials of sight are incrementally jettisoned en route for an interior space which is immune to the penetrative power of the gaze.”38 A s is apparent in Film, Beckett’s aesthetic practice seems always poised to interrogate vision, pointing toward its failure, and its links to Cartesian conceptions of space—geometric design, seeing, intellect, order, and division off self from self, self from other. W’s costume is yet another layer of skin in this play, one that has relevance for the way it foregrounds the performance of gender. This costume, her sequined “best black,” is the woman’s glittering exoskeleton, an extension of her skin upon which the cultural markings of gender are played out. On the one hand, this feminine costume can be read as a symbol of female narcissism—though she may be fading from the world of female desirability, she retains pride in her appearance. It is her “best black” after all, no matter the pathos of an aging woman wearing glamorous clothes that no one will see. The costume may also situate her as object and mirror of the male gaze, though the possibility of that gaze is now receding. Diamond, takingg a psychoanalytic perspective, argues that the dress positions W as mirror, a “support for representation.” She cannot represent herself as I however and “with ‘famished eyes’ the adult woman seeks to rejoin an imaginary version of herself.”39 The costume in this regard signifies her disenfranchisement and exclusion. It is a funereal skin, which, at the same time as it renders her visible, is the sign of her containment: a glittering cage. On the other hand, taking a social constructivist approach, Christine Jones suggests that Beckett’s theater exposes the fundamental construction of gender as Butler theorizes it,40 by relying on the basic principles of the nonagency of the actor, and compulsory and compulsive repetition through the body.41 Indeed the sequined costume, her “best black,” presents a hyperbolic femininity, a kind of drag performance, the costume ironically misplaced in the sparse set and the darkness of W’s “room.””42 Ironic also is the collision of grandiose clothing and the pale, prematurely aged body underneath it. The costume is both an actual, material costume, designed to evoke the fading beauty of the figure on “display.” It is also the projection of the woman’s inner psyche, her skin ego. As well as this skin as prison and cage,

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it is a condition of her existing at all, even partially. Gender identity may be only skin deep, but it is necessary, apparently, for her to be seen at all, an essential part of her eye-quest. With its excessive, hyperbolic qualities, this glittering skin is also an aesthetic surface, a limit point where the physicality of the body meets with the limits of art. Aesthetic element mirroring physiological organ, Rockaby, y in a way that is similar to Not I, displays a haptic aesthetic: a relief carvingg or portrait of surfaces. She is a glittering kinetic statue in the darkness, a figure fading in and out of ground, to and fro. Her performance carves out spaces within the chamber: the depth of the darkness, hinted at each time she rocks back into it, and the surface of skin, pale and glittering. A s in . . . but the clouds . . . we see an image of the inner psychic skin and its outer impenetrable, reflective surface, so that inner and outer, container and contained—both sides of the skin—are held together in tension. The quest for the return of the gaze, for mutual recognition is a failed one, as no other is found. No other gaze satisfies her hunger “to see/be seen.” So “in the end,” the voice tells us, she “went back in” to sit, “quiet at her window/facing other windows.” The search continues from the window but again all “other windows” but hers have their “blinds down” (CSP P, 278–279). It is through touch, not vision, that the presence of the (m) other can be recovered and the space in which she rocks is no longer the objective, geometric space of the optic. She is gradually sinking into haptic space, a tactile container shaped to the contours of the body: space mimicking skin, room mimicking womb. She, at the moment that she gives up on the eye-quest and takes her place in the rocking chair, becomes “her own other.” She sinks into its waiting arms, and waits to be enveloped byy death. There is visible here and in Footfallss a creative performance in which the mother is drawn from the surrounding darkness, given an identity beyond that of mere background. The void is given a voice and a meaning, as mother. The negative association between woman, darkness, and death persists. However, in both of these plays the darkness takes on an agency that belies the patriarchal conceptions of femininity as passive ground, reflective substance. The agency of the dark is affirmed further in fact, by the rhythmic movement of mergence and emergence, which W engages in. The surrounding darkness takes on a muscular, fleshly quality as the figure of the rocking woman seems at each moment of the performance to be absorbed a little more into its folds. Each section of this play is punctuated with the refrain “time she stopped,” a line that W joins the voice in speaking and each “time she stopped marks a new level in the spiraling dimuendo pattern at work in stopped”

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the play. In spite of the perceived failure to return the affirming gaze off the other, or to achieve a rejoining with the idealized image of the self, forever lost, this line could be argued to assert the agency of W. Instead of, as Diamond writes, fulfilling a “traditional” feminine role of affirming/ producing/nurturing/supporting life, the voice says “fuck life” and instead of “yes,” W says “no.”43 In performance, the body of the actor melds these two figures: daughter-mother. Not only is the mother reclaimed from herr zone of exclusion, where she has been dismissed as “harmless,” but also the harm that befell her is recognized, rearticulated upon the present, rocking body of W. W replaces the mother, and in doing so gives voice to that shared experience of suffering, exclusion, and loss; just as the space comes to mirror the internal flesh of the rocking figure, so too is this space realized as part of the maternal body. The final lines which the voice speaks are: “fuck life/stop her eyes/rock her off.” The play is a soft, rhythmic hymn to death. Throughout, the figure hovers at the limit point, aesthetically realized, between life and death, before the final moment prior to finally rejecting life and passing away as the light fades. “I was not there”: Footfalls and the End of Space Woman as Container W W While W of Rockabyy demonstrates the turn to a haptic modality as both ethical and emancipatory, the slightly earlier Footfallss (1975) is the playy that perhaps best exemplifies the complexities of woman’s relationship to space and tactility. In Footfallss, a ragged figure—May—paces and wheels along a narrow strip of light. Her presence is a tattered semblance, only partially visible. When asked for an explanation of May by actress Hildegard Schmal during rehearsals for the 1976 Schiller theater production of the play, Beckett’s primary explanation is that the walking up and down is the central image of the play; the text was built around this.44 Schmal however pressed for more detail and Asmus notes his reply, in what is a rare moment of explicitness about one of his figures: Only hesitantly does Beckett take up this challenge to give more detailed information about the play. In the thirties, he says, CG Jung, the psychologist once gave a lecture in London and told of a female patient who was being treated by him. Jung said he wasn’t able to help this patient and for this, according to Beckett, he gave an astonishing explanation. The girl wasn’t livingg. She existed but didn’t actually live. According to Beckett,, this storyy had impressed p him veryy much at the time.45

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And later in rehearsals Beckett remarks that the voice does not refer to May having been born because it never happened: “it began. There is a difference. She was never born.””46 Taking Anzieu’s psychological perspective, May’s current state could be put down to a lack of maternal presence. Her psychic and physical boundaries, manifest as skin ego, are malformed: her tattered skin ego is rendered visually in the costume for the 1976 premier in London. When Jocelyn Herbert created the costume, she did so by adding bits of lace curtain to an old grey dress, which she then tore rather than cut at its edges to add to its ghostliness. Fraying at the edges, both literally and psychologically, May’s mother did not provide her with the necessary ground to form fully and May failed to be born. The complexity of their relationship is played out in the spatial and vocal organization of the stage space. Space is organized in the performance by light. A narrow strip lights the path that May takes; it is “ dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on headd ” (CSP, P 239), creating the sense of May’s existence as centering around her feet and the sound they make. We learn that May has been pacing up and down this narrow strip of floor since “girlhood.” She obsessively follows a rhythmic pattern of nine steps, then wheel, nine back, and so on (CSP P, 239). The mother-figure in this play could be read negatively, as a suffocating presence surrounding May, exemplifying the overpowering “phallic” mother off Freudian theory. Indeed the darkness surrounding May, similarly to Rockabyy, appears to be already absorbing her—she is in shadows from the waist up. Such a reading would fit with Beckett’s earlier images of maternity. In the early fiction, as Bryden points out, mothers are seen as a “fearsome figures who straddle both earth and sky” and are “physical agents of life on earth,” demonstrating a power that is often more threatening than nurturing.47 In keeping with this, Diamond suggests that May’s pacing and her “inability” to be born is animage of that engulfing bond that keeps mother and daughter in paralysis, with the daughter “culturally, socially, linguistically collapsible into the maternal remains.””48 “Mother” might be seen as a dark space, which never really let its daughter go and is now slowly reclaiming her, tatter by tatter. Yet the rhythmic way in which the mother’s voice intertwines with May’s actions seems to belie this. The play, according to Beckett’s direction, required tight orchestration. According to Walter Asmus: The first “May” comes on the fourth step while May is walking from right to left, the second “May” comes on the eighth step May says her “Yes, Mother” on the fourth step when she is walking from left to right, and on the sixth step of the same stretch the Mother beings with, “Will you never have done?” done? The sentence ends immediately before the turn.49

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The elements of the play—sound, movement—are tightly woven. There is a rhythmic intertwining of mother/daughter. In the opening lines, the mother counts herself into May’s rhythm: V: [Pause. M resumes pacing. Four lengths. After first length, synchronouss V with stepss] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, wheel. [Freee] Will you not try to catch a little sleep? (CSP P, 239) The lines uttered by May and by the voice mirror each other. For McMullan, this dialogue structured on mirroring indicates the lack of mastery, authority in the work, “only the repetition of increasing cycles of loss.”50 Like the rhythm of the pacing, into which the voice slips, the dialogue creates a similar sense of balance and rhythm. May and her mother are therefore not fully defined and wholly separate entities. Indeed it is not possible to fully ascertain at all times during a performance of the play if the voices whom we hear—May’s included—are in fact the distinct and separate voices of a mother and a daughter. The text supplies us with two characters: “May” and “Woman’s voice” (CSP P, 239). The voice is taken to be that of the mother only because May calls her this. However, both the “mother” and the daughter engage in play and imitation, with “May” playing out a scene in the final section in which the daughter Amy, an anagram of May, and her mother Mrs Winter converse. With voices and bodies failing to match up, the evidence of the senses, as William Worthen puts it, is challenged by the two narratives, “which seem at once to describe and displace the evidence of the stage.”51 The fact that light barely reaches May’s face calls into question May as a source of her “own” voice, and the role-playing in which she engages further questions the ability of the viewer/listener to distinguish between the two female “presences,” and their fictional counterparts, which May creates. David Pattie notes the displacement of the originary voice in Beckett’s work: “Footfallss tells the same story three times; but with each retelling the story is distanced further and further from its original source, and its status as the unambiguous relation of direct experience is rendered increasingly problematic.”52 Not only is there is a confusion of identity and an incommensurability between what is seen and what is heard, but there is also a muddling of the distinction between fiction and truth; as McMullan puts it, the “very notion of an origin or original/authorial voice is undermined.”53 It is significant that the voice’s line “My voice is in her mind” (section II) was deleted in postproduction editions of the play,54 thereby emphasizing the erasure of origins that characterize this play. Footfallss is a “dialogue of echoes”55; May is not fully there. When rehearsing the work with Beckett in 1976, Billie Whitelaw recounts how she felt herself to be “like a moving, musical, Edvard

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Munch painting,” with Beckett having erased the lines of the image until theyy were only faintly there.56 Therefore, while May’s mother is associated with places of darkness, depth, and the unconscious, she is not perhaps an all-engulfing void. Mayy calls to her at the opening of the play: M: Mother. [Pause. No louder.] Mother. M V: Yes, May. V M: Were you asleep? M V: Deep asleep. [Pausee.] I heard you in my deep sleep. [Pausee.] There is no V sleep so deep I would not hear you there. (CSP P, 239) The roles of mother-daughter become reversed, as, in her care for herr mother, May deals with the most intimate processes of life, as a mother with a child: “Straighten your pillows? [Pausee.] Change your drawsheets? [Pausee.] Pass you the bedpan? [Pausee.] The warming pan? [Pausee.] Dress your sores? [Pause.] e Sponge you down? [Pausee.] Moisten your poor lips? [Pausee.] Prayy with you? [Pausee.] For you?” (CSP P, 240). This role reversal and the denial of an orginary voice muddles also the relationship between the contained and the container. Instead of being consumed by the mother-figure, she makes space for her, within her inner skin. She causes the darkness that surrounds her to no longer be the anonymous, unconscious other. May names it “mother,” and contains her within a space that sees the identities of both meld and intertwine. The surrounding darkness of the image defines the (albeit) tattered figure contained within it. May taps out her existence to the tune of this voice emerging from the void, just as the voice intertwines rhythmically with her movements. “I was not there”: Refusing Origins Perhaps it is that May has been trapped in a relation of care and dependence, and remains “unborn,” becausee of her ailing mother. Admittedly, May seems to be engaged, whether by choice or not, in an economy of care exchange: the mother has provided, May provides for her in return. However, the mother expresses her guilt at giving birth to May, and asks for forgiveness: “I had you late. [Pausee.] In life. [Pause.] Forgive me again.” (CSP P, 240). And it is apparent that May’s pacing, her introversion, began early on, long before herr mother’s invalidity. The voice tells us in section II that “she has not been out since girlhood.” (CSP P, 241). May rejected, in favor of her pacing, the things that “other girls of her age were out at.” The text contains a moment’s hesitation, not an outright pause before the voice cites “Lacrosse” Lacrosse as the example

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of what “other girls” do (CSP P, 241). There is an emphatic distinction made here between the places where normal girlish activities are done—“out” there—and the place where May paces—her “here”; her rejection of the space outside her strip of light is also a rejection of certain normative aspects of female life. Birth, when it comes to the female child, means a perpetuation of the cycle of reproduction where the female acts as a container for another, who in turn becomes a container. Irigaray argues, in her critique of Aristotle, that the child, the man, and the woman herself all compete to be containedd in the place that a woman will provide, with the child of course comingg foremost in importance. The containment of a man is “merely a sort off perforation aiming toward” the creation and containment of the child. The containment of the woman by herself and for herself is not permissible: “It is necessary, Freud writes, for woman to turn away from her mother in order to enter into desire of and for man. If she remains in empathy with her mother, she remains in her place. [ . . . ] She interiorises her container-mother in herself-as-container. Between the two she exists.”57 May’s activity, her refusal to be “out there,” constitutes a rejection of the terms upon which this contract(ion) takes place. For it is a contract(ion) that will expel her from her place—take her place from her and force her to become a place for an other. Their relationship is marked by an anxiety over reproduction, the becomingg of a place or container for another. In the second section of the play, May’s “history,” such as it is, is revealed by the voice. We are given a location for May; she is in the place where she “began,” with the voice notably avoiding reference to birth. A strong sense of sterility prevails, as May walks upon a floor that was once carpeted, but is now bare. Her demand for this barren hallway came while she was still a child. As the voice recounts: “No mother, the motion alone is not enough, I must hear the feet however faint they fall.” (CSP P, 241). The emergence of sensoryy assurance and its affirmation of existence are linked with May’s refusal of an external life and embrace of sterility. May’s pacing forms a protective barrier, perhaps from a threatening, engulfing mother-figure, but certainly from an even more threatening “outside.” In order to be recognized, and identifiable as a woman, she must relinquish the semblance of personhood in which she has wrapped herself and become a source. Once out, removed from her place, May would be required to be a place for another. This she refuses to do. At the beginning of the play, May asks her mother: “Would you like me to change your position again?” (CSP P, 240). The suggested position-change occurs at a discursive level later in the play, when May eventually displaces both herself and her mother-figure into a narrative about “Amy” and “Mrs Winter.” She demonstrates here a certain control over the processes of

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representation—she may have refused to become a reproductive source but, although signs of this are erased, she is the creative source of the play itself.58 She draws attention to the fictional nature of her performance, through addressing her “reader”: “Old Mrs Winter, whom the reader will remember” (CSP P, 242). She is also quite possibly the creative source of the voice, of her mother, though this, like all signs of origination in this play, is ambiguous. In this regard, she reproduces her mother; in a similar way to the exchange of care between mother and daughter, she gives her mother a place, contains her, but discursively, via narrative. The “mother-voice” in turn forms a containing envelop around May. Instead of fulfilling the Freudian prophecy off maternal repudiation, the two intertwine rhythmically. May refuses to realize herself under the terms set for her, terms that would make of her a source, a generative origin for another body, but cannot hold her own against dissolution forever. The final scene shows the empty strip of light; this self-realization, which is in reality a negation of self, is familiar in Beckett’s work; he is an author who finds the semblances of human life, operating outside the limits of norms and conventions, deeply productive and aesthetically potent. As McMullan writes: Rather than reinforcing any normative gender or cultural identity the play [Footfalls] s elicits a considerable effort to see and listen to the silences, absences, and echoes that haunt the conventional boundaries of the seeable and the sayable, and what those economies recognise as legitimate identities or bodies.59 May elides, and perhaps challenges, the categories of identity and gender that would make her “recognisable.” As she “tries to tell it how it was” (CSP P, 241), we can see in her failure an interrogation of the places she has been offered for her existence: the mother’s womb, and the “there” that she refuses to access. She erases the “L” from place, choosing to “pace” rather than “place.” Her performance constitutes this refusal; it is also a statement: I am not/was not that place. She paces herself into that discursive space off her own making—this is the inner skin in which she makes room for her “mother,” and ultimately writes herself out of. The final part of the work sees May’s manipulation of identity into Amy, an anagram of her own name, and a final denial: “I was not there.” May, Mythology, and Place Female biological reproduction is played out in mythology, particularly in creation myths, where the role of woman as container is cemented into the

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cultural psyche. May’s performance connects her with a wider framework off narratives, ones that attempt to make sense of the mysteries of the origins off life. May’s intertwining of herself with her mother, and of fiction with reality, coupled with the separation of voice from body functions to undermine the ability of the spectator/reader to “source” her identity, her narrative. Her refusal of sources can also be connected with the mythology of origins and the misogyny that often prevails within them. The link with the Christian mythoss is apparent in May’s only “out.” She recounts walking up and down the transept of the “little church,” the place where Christ’s “poor arm” would be (CSP P, 242). This link to Christ places May in the context of a greater history of suffering.60 Another link to the Christ narrative is visible in May’s poignant offer to her mother to “moisten your poor lips,” a final comfort to the dying, though in the case of Christ, it was bitter vinegar. Significantly, however, May does not walk up the aisle: she is not seeking the traces of a “normal” female existence, marriage and children. May’s offer to her mother to “change her position” resonates with that early mythological dislocation, for which woman is to blame. The sin off Eve was of course what brought about that primary displacement from the Garden of Eden. In punishment, the Genesis myth sees God give woman the role of child-bearer: “To the woman He said: ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”61 Here woman, having been construed as the reason behind the expulsion, is offered as the place for human life to emerge. May’s avoidance of the aisle could be viewed as an emphatic rejection of the terms of this arrangement. There is a link, in Freudian terms, between the veil, the hymen, marriage, and the act of weaving. Weaving is the task the woman undertakes, the creation of false skin to cover herself. She does this in order to cover up her natural “deficiencies.” Wholeness is restored to her when she wraps herself up. At the same time, this “wrapping” fetishizes her, thus overvaluing what is deficient, devalued. Commenting on Freud’s connection between woman and the act of weaving, an act that maintains the invisibility of female sexuality, Irigaray writes: “Whence the need for weaving to shield the gilded eyes from the possible incandescence of the standard [ . . . ] A protective, defensive texture. A hymen whose usefulness needs to be re-evaluated, whether as a ‘member-screen’ or as ‘marriage.’ [ . . . ] woman weaves to sustain the disavowal of her sex.”62 Marriage exposes her deficiency, while at the same time taking the remedial action of filling the feminine space, of fertilizing it. Marriage and the fulfillment of the biological imperative is exactly that route to becoming place, a route that is impossible for May, either through her refusal or her inability

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to accommodate it. May’s “skin” is a worn, grey, tattered wrap and she describes herself as a “[a] tangle of tatters. [Pause.] Watch it pass—[Pause.]— watch her pass before the candelabrum, how its flames, their light. . . . like moon through passing wrack” (CSP P, 242). If the visible “skin” in Rockabyy is a glittering, reflective carapace of a dress, May’s seems to be falling offf her in shreds, a testament to the idea of skin as container for identity. She is a “semblance,” and it is only the sound of her feet as she paces that serve to affirm her presence. Yet the wrap does not conceal either a presence, or an absence. The figure of May is, in Peter Gidal’s view, a wrap in itself.63 May does not only walk a line, but her very presence is a line, or a limit. She vibrates between fiction and reality, the visibility and invisibility, in a similar way to the speaker in The Unnameablee who “vibrates” like a tympanum: “on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.”64 Her presence is neither fully committed to light nor darkness, fiction nor reality. Rather, she is the line that vibrates between the two. In walkingg the narrow strip of light, hearing her own footfalls, she both describes and enacts this sense of her own liminality. She is skin: the boundary between inner and outer, but breaking down; not a fixed boundary, but a fragile milieu, a place where both inner and outer are held together. May has not been fully born or even borne, as in carried fully to term. She has emerged not fully formed. She exists only partially, in fluidity on the edges between these two worlds. McMullan writes that “[i]f there is no origin in Footfallss, there is likewise no ending, neither birth not death, but some in-between state, some womb/tomb space occupied by the unborn and the undead—shades caught between the definitive contours of form or identityy and the formless infinity of space.”65 The English language has no proper word for the object that is the result of either a miscarriage or abortion. By contrast, such terms exist in other languages and cultures, which do not seekk to erase the presence of such material. In Japanese, for example, the material that results from a miscarriage is known as a mizukoo, or water-child. Like May, the mizuko does not exist fully either in the inner space of the womb or in the outer of the world. May does not belong to her original territory, a place that has not carried her, nor does she belong in out there, the normative external world that would make her a vessel. As with many creation myths, such as that of ancient Mesopotamia, solidity and light are privileged over formless (often feminine) substance. According to this myth, the earth was created by Marduk, who carves it from the body of his mother, Tiamat. He not only makes the carcass off Tiamat into the earth, but also fixes a guard so that her “waters” cannot flow w forth to consume the world.66 The solid body is venerated, as is the female body given over to motherhood, providing a place for her male child. The

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child gives the formless vessel a shape, weighs it down. Formlessness, on other hand, is something to be feared, as Irigarary comments: Blood, but also milk, sperm, lymph, saliva, spit, tears, humors, gas, waves airs, fire. . . . light. . . . [ . . . ] flow out of him and into another who cannot be easily held on to. The “subject” identifies himself with/in an almost material consistency that finds everything flowing abhorrent. And even in the mother, it is the cohesion of a “body” (subject) that he seeks, solid d ground, firm foundations. Not those things in the mother that recall the woman—the flowing things.67 This construction of femininity as both fluid and dangerous—the opposite of contained—is visible in Footfalls, s and May cannot accept the role of acting as solid ground, a source and origin. It is in light of this unwillingness on the part of May to become a place that the final “dialogue” of the play can be read. Like water, May is capable of taking on and miming the shape of any vessel in which she finds herself; so while the solidity of her presence is under question, her ability to perform and play can both recover the mother as lost object,68 as well as articulate her resistance to emplacement. Rather than containing or beingg contained the two flow through one another in a way that defies the distinction between inner and outer. If Rockaby ’s haptic image sees that binaryy held in tension, the “skin” of Footfallss’s image sees that distinction begin to disappear altogether. May mimics, for her audience, her “readers,” the roles of Mrs Winter and her daughter Amy, recounting their conversation about a perceived “strange event” at Evensong. Mrs Winter asks Amy if she had “observed anythingg strange.” Amy’s reply is a denial: May: Amy: I mean, Mother, that to say I observed nothing. . . . strange is indeed to put it mildly. For I observed nothing of any kind, strange or otherwise. I saw nothing, heard nothing, of any kind. I was not there. (CSP P, 243) As May tells us, Mrs Winter is perplexed by this, being sure that she heard Amy respond and say “Amen.” Following this, May mimes Mrs Winter and repeats her mother’s earlier words. She calls Amy, and asks “will you never have done, . . . revolving it all?”, echoing the mother-voice of section I (CSP P, 240, 243). Though Mrs Winter claims: “I heard you say Amen,” the play thus far has operated on the principle of the separation of voice from body; what is heard is not necessarily connected to what is seen. Mrs

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Winter’s assumption of presence based on voice has no more weight than the ghostly presence of May herself, undone as it is by May’s constant denials. As Knowlson suggests: “We realise, perhaps only after the play has ended, thatt we may have been watching a ghost telling a tale of a ghost (herself), who fails to be observed by someone else (her fictional alter ego) because she in turn was not really there.”69 “I was not there” counts as not only a statement regarding her own absence, but also a refusal to take up a place. Through her performance, May attempts to model a way in which she might be placed, literally remaking the contract on her own terms. The physical act of speaking becomes another way of performatively unplacing herself. May’s denials of presence are systematic, culminating in this final erasure, which writes herself out of narrative, and its connections to myth, and beyond the binaryy of inner and out, container and contained. Beyond Containment May’s body provides a very succinct example of the Beckettian body in performance that this study is concerned with, and it is an image of embodiment that fits with Nancy’s conceptualization. The body exists at the limit-point, between materiality and virtuality, between biological reproduction and aesthetic production, between text and image. It is, haptically speaking, the point where these things touch: the body is skin-deep. Skin-ego is part off the way we imagine the relationship between body and world, at the same time as we experience it physically. The skin, as tactile interface, between the external and internal, is also filled with cavities, both physiological and psychic, through which subjectivity flows like all the other fluids of life. The skins of the figures in these plays reveal the paradox of embodiment, its complexity and multivalence. There are multiple skins apparent here: physiological skin, the psychological inner skin of the mind, clothing as skin, which reveals inner psychic state and also aesthetic skin, the skin of the image, the skin of the screen. In these plays, Beckett perforates the skin (off the body and of the image), ripping holes in the materiality of the surface off the image, similarly to the way he speaks of, in the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, boring holes in the “terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface.”70 This perforation of the image destabilizes the relationship between the inner and the outer. What we see is the doubleness of skin, its surface and its inner depths held together in tension, in inclusive disjuncture. These plays allow us to see both within and without at the same time. The hollow internal spaces of the body are brought to visibility—albeit briefly, and only partially. But we are also allowed to see how the inner relates to the outer and vice versa, how the subject/self comes to be in relation to his or

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her containing envelope, how he or she shapes and is in turn shaped by the spaces they occupy, imaginary or otherwise. They reveal the haptic connection we have to space—the space within us and the space that surrounds us. They reveal also how that space is weighty, from the moment of human conception it presses upon us, makes impressions upon us, makes us ready, as Connor puts it, for the world to write upon us.71 That space is also weighed down by projections and interpretations: the equation of woman or woman’s body with place and space. In these later plays in which the protagonists are female, Beckett’s work can be argued to problematize the figuration off woman as container, as skin waiting to be filled.

CHAPTER 5

On the One Hand . . . (The One That Writes the Body)

Writing for the Stage-Body The stage is an almost unique meeting point for text and matter. While textual prescriptions or proscriptions abound in human life, from religious tracts to legal pronouncements to self-help books and so on, the stage provides a unique space in which the relationship between the static, two-dimensional page and the kinetic, material world that it is created for is made visible. It is a truism to remark that barring perhaps the genre of closet drama, which, as Martin Puchner suggests, attempts to solve the “problem” of the unpredictable theater space and the living actor by writing dialogic texts for reading rather than performance,1 the play text is intended to find its completion and fulfillment in the physicality of performance. In simple terms, it governs the words spoken by the actor and offers directions for movement; in other words, it functions as an organizing entity, arranging speech, movement, and spatiality, all of which will convey emotion, narrative, and so on. While chapter 2 was concerned with the relationship between language and body and between the art image and the poetic word, this chapter will be concerned with how theater offers a meeting point between text and the materiality of the stage space. This is brought to the fore by an author such as Beckett who deliberately stages this meeting point through various strategies, such as, for example, the act of writing in Catastrophee and the act of reading in Ohio Impromptu, Quadd and What Wheree stage also the violence and restrictiveness that the text holds for the dramatic figure.

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The twentieth century has seen multiple examples of performance challenging the primacy of the text and the authority of the writer. As will be discussed in the following commentary, Beckett’s work, visualizing the moment where text and matter touch, reveals the limits and even failures off the text. From the prescriptively precise nature of the stage directions to the control Beckett exerted over his work (not to mention the control exercised by the Beckett Estate since his death), Beckett’s texts appear to function as exacting blueprints for the stage and seem to suggest that any deviation is also a deviation from authorial intention. They would seem to suggest that, as with the intention often behind closet drama, the details of the page are recreated as closely as possible in the mind of the spectator. As Kurt Tarofff puts it, these details “might not be precisely what the author had in mind, but at least [they removed] the intermediaries of the manager, designers, and actors,” thus leaving the spectator free to “stage the play without limits in his or her own mind.”2 Yet this image of Beckettian strictness elides the ways in which textual prescriptions function in tension with the performing body.3 While the stage directions may govern the stage image, the staged text often produces resistance to those prescriptions. Both Catastrophee and What Wheree demonstrate tension between recalcitrant bodies and dominant textual prescriptions. And for Quad III, the monochrome afterthought to Quad I, I no text exists at all. Beckett uses a type of literature—the play text—that is most concerned with its performative impact on material worlds and bodies and, by incorporating into performance itself the way writing touches matter, dramatizes what cannot be written, what is beyond the capacity of the text to encapsulate. This applies necessarily to all writing, though it is in theater, in the staging of the text and/or the act of writing, that these tensions can be made most visible. It could be argued that in many cases, Beckett’s dramatic texts dominate the stage, demanding an extreme form of subjugation from the actors that embody them—the images of Billie Whitelaw strapped to a chair and shrouded in black for Not I, and her descriptions of the mental and physical torture of the performance, attest to this submission.4 Certainly, it is too much of a simplification to suggest that it is the strictness of his dramatic instructions alone that makes visible the tensions between text and performance. Yet, in plays that, as Worthen suggests, incorporate or stage the text, or stage the act of writing, these tensions—the limit points between text and body—come to the fore. For Worthen the stage directions are not simplyy accessories to Beckett’s drama, but are in fact the drama itself.5 In his analysis of the presence of the text on stage in Ohio Impromptu, he argues that the

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Reader and the Listener of Ohio Impromptu, for example, “stage the friction between writing and enactment that defines modern drama.”6 There is a strong textual element apparent in other plays, notably Thatt Timee, in which, although no text is visualized, the final voice (C) describes his time in the library surrounded by dust “sitting at the big round table with a bevy of old ones poring on the page and not a sound” (CSP P, 234). Krapp’ss Last Tapee also contains an interesting relationship between text and technology. Krapp, a failed writer, must look in his ledger to access his “archive.” Books or even the idea of the book is an important element in these plays. In the case of What Wheree, the torture is verbally described rather than visualized. The torture victims are given “the works” (CSP P, 312), which could be viewed as a pun referencing the canonical texts of the English language. Beckett stages the text in order to explore its limits; that is, the limits of its imperatives, its power over the actors’ bodies, and the stage space. In this way he stages a fundamental relationship between the written word and the world it attempts to represent or organize and in doing so stages what Nancy terms “exscription.” This is an idea that will be explored in the course of the discussion in this chapter. Making art is a way of touching (or touching on) an other. The artist offers his/her readership or spectatorship a privileged glimpse into the life of someone else, yet this is a fraught process, which risks misrepresentation, the creation of a narrow view in which otherness is subsumed into the artist’s vision. For Shane Weller there is both a radical skepticism and an ethical questionability involved in permitting a reader to have the other at his or her disposal, at least in certain postmodern aesthetic practices.7 He views the Beckettian impulse toward failure, ignorance, and impotence as an ethical strategy in this regard, one in which the integrity of the other is preserved through, on the one hand, the artist’s exposure of the violence attached to the process of representation, and, on the other, through the artist’s unwillingness to touch, to manipulate art’s subjects, putting them at the disposal of art’s consumer. The violence of this process is apparent in the tensions generated in the following plays between the play text and the stage image and between the staged text and the material body on stage. What I intend to do here is not only examine references to textuality or the book or the relationship between text and image—some work has already been done in this regard in chapter 3 —but to look at how power, textuality, and the hand or the artist/author intertwine in the plays. It may be argued that the violence implied in these plays is intimately linked to their relationship with the text and the violence of the artist’s hand in the act of creation. In this, I draw on Deleuze’s commentary on the relationship between eye and hand in

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Bacon’s art. He writes that it is not enough to say that the “eye judges and the hand executes” but that there is a whole range of reversals and exchanges in this relationship leading to greater and lesser subordination of the hand to the eye, from the digitall as maximum subordination, to the haptic, c where the painter touches with his eye.8 The concern, in relation to the plays examined here, is how the hand, when in the service of systems of visual representation and objectification, may have the potential for violence and violation. The Violence of Making: Catastrophe Premiered at the Festival d’Avignon as part of “Une nuit pour Vaclav Havel” (1982) and set, significantly, in a theater, Catastrophee is a meta-theatrical meditation on the nature of power and the act of artistic creation. A director (D), with the aid of his assistant (A), arranges a figure (Protagonist or P) on a plinth into the finished image of a “catastrophe” (CSP P, 300). The figure raises his head in a gesture that addresses both the fictional audience-within-the-play and the real audience, and highlights their complicity with the events they have just witnessed. As with much of Beckett’s work, there is no reference to any specific historical or political setting; yet, as McMullan puts it, it “reveals the preoccupation with power in its relationship to representation which characterizes much of Beckett’s work, and its implications extend far beyond any specificc political context.”9 While Catastrophee was written for the political dissident and future president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, and is a statement of solidarity with a fellow left-leaning artist, it is not an attempt to dramatize, at any level, Havel’s situation; the play stages, rather, a moment of resistance against an authoritarian force that could allude to multiple situations of human dominance and oppression, as well as to a certain violence inherent in the process of perception and representation, the process of making art. Catastrophee’s “Director” remakes the image of the protagonist so that it coheres with his own vision, thus staging the violence of artistic creation, a deformation of reality that begins with the artist’s perception and is lived out in the act of creating art. Violence in the act of perception is, in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis, to do with knowledge that is produced about that other. Without intersubjective communication in the form of word and gesture, “I transform him [the other] into an object and deny him.”10 Jorella Andrews, who links this to Merleau-Ponty’s writings on art, may provide insight into this process in Catastrophe: e “For Merleau-Ponty, what these practices of committed and extended looking [in the painting practices of C ézanne, Renoir and Matisse] do not do is reduplicate already existent realities. Instead, they bring to our

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attention, with particular force, the productively violent articulations intrinsic to all engaged acts of our perceiving.”11 Cézanne attempts to paint the primordial act of perception itself, and in so doing makes visible the violence of this action. “Reality” is always deformed by perception and by the creative act. The violence of artistic creation is lived out in Catastrophee on the mute materiality of the protagonist’s body. Theater reveals how these acts of perception and creation have, on the stage, real and material effects, a problem to which Billie Whitelaw attests after performing Not I. I 12 This has further implications for the viewer of said act. As Jim Hansen comments on the power dynamic at work in Catastrophe: e One [figure] has an appropriate vision of the world’s suffering, while the other is appropriated by that vision. D is a symbol-maker who imagines himself in sympathy with P. P’s body becomes the symbol writ large on the stage and in front of an audience. Beckett invites us to ask precisely what psychic and ideological needs are met through this act off identification.13 The creation that is the making visible of P is simultaneously destructive of his autonomy and subjectivity. In the process of creating an image, “our catastrophe” (CSP P, 301), the director demands that P’s body be arranged correctly by his assistant: P must not keep his hands in his pockets, the “black dressing-gown to ankles” s (CSP P, 297) that he wears must be removed, his hands and cranium must be whitened, his toes must be visible from the front row of the stalls and his face must be lowered. These details are relayed to the assistant who either enacts them on the spot at the request off the Director, or takes out her pad and pencil to “make a note.” The process is one of objectification. Lines of power are clearly drawn as the Protagonist has no say in the process, literally so: A: Sure he won’t utter? D: Not a squeak. (CSP P, 299) At the outset, the Director contemplates the image of P, which is presented to the spectator thus: “P midstage standing on a black block 18 inches high. Black wide brimmed hat. Black dressing gown to ankles. Barefoot. Head bowed. Hands in pockets. Age and physique unimportant” t (CSP P, 297). He asks for explanations of each element from the Assistant. We learn that the “plinth” is there to “let the stalls see the feet,” according to A. The hat hides the face and the gown means that he is “all black” (CSP P, 297). The explanations that are given and the subsequent changes that the Director demands are

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all clinical decisions. As McMullan puts it, the conversion of the body into visual object is a process of subjugation, with the body in Catastrophee beingg “manipulated by the Director and consumed by the audience.”14 Perception and the act of creation in the form of writing and image creation deform the body of P, converting it to the desired spectacle. D demands also that the image be verbalized by his assistant. His inability to remember the details of the protagonist’s image (or to look for himself) force the assistant to describe them to him, with his dominance over her adding yet another example of the exercise of power in this play. When he asks what P wears underneath his gown, it is not enough that A moves to show him. He demands that she verbalize it: “Say it” he says (CSP P, 297), and she responds: A: His night attire. D: Colour? A: Ash. (CSP P, 297) Yet Y the image alone is apparently not trustworthy, and it is not enough to seee P or have his image verbalized. He must be fixed textually as well in order to create the correct effect: the catastrophe. In what amounts also to an interrogation of A, D demands a description of the hands from A: D: How are they? [[A at a loss. Irritably.] The hands, how are the hands? A: You’ve seen them. D: I forget. A: Crippled. Fibrous degeneration. D: Clawlike? A: If you like. D: Two claws? A: Unless he clench his fists. D: He mustn’t. (CSP P, 298) She then converts the changes or proscriptions into text: A: I make a note [She takes out pad, takes pencil, notes.] s Hands limp. [She puts back pad and pencil.] l (CSP P, 298) Like his crippled, claw-like hands, the figure in Catastrophee is slowly atrophied into the desired “image.” At the same time his image is being fixed

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textually. It is the Director’s vision imposed on the material stage, its body, its actors (the assistant can be included in this list also), recorded on the page and inscribed into the flesh. The assistant is harried to obey commands, as well as note down the instructions. When the Director calls for “more nudity,” she goes to “make a note” only for him to urge: “Get going! Get going!” (CSP P, 300). She bares P’s neck and rolls his trousers to uncover his knees. A final command is to whiten the flesh, which A notes down. While these interactions uncover the violence of perception and representation, they also image the theatrical moment where text touches performance. In this play, not only is the process of creating the image exposed, so too is the writing of the stage directions—this is part of the performance of the play. We are given a glimpse into the world that they emerge from and we see the hand of the artist/writer in action, with all the potential for violence—perceptual, representative, and actual—that it entails. When it comes to performance, this violence can spill over into the real, as the text impacts upon the material world of the stage and the material bodies that operate at its limits. For the most part, the Protagonist is compliant: unmoving, silent. It is only in the final moments of the play that he slowly raises his head. The “ distant storm of applause ” (CSP P, 301), which the Director predicted, falters and dies as the imagined spectators and the real spectators are brought eye to eye with the figure, a human in whose objectification they have had a hand. Exscription The image, up to the point at which the figure raises his head, makes sense. The naming of it as “catastrophe” inserts it into the history of human suffering and a semiotic mapping of such suffering is possible. The gray pajamas, the deathly whitened flesh, the ashen skull, all seem to point to the charnel houses of Auschwitz. Indeed the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, Shoahh, is often translated as “catastrophe.”15 Audiences can be clear: they are beingg invited to watch the performance of a universalized moment of human suffering. P is a synecdoche, Christ-like, for the whole array of oppression and suffering endured by humanity. The look that he delivers at the end, a lookk that causes the canned audience applause to falter, affirms his humanity, and affirms for an audience that, in spite of suffering, people still go on, still resist. Hansen argues that the play becomes a kind of fantasy projection for its audience, in which we can imagine ourselves as heroic through havingg successfully identified with the victim. This play then images not only the creative force of the artist, but also “the specular satisfaction of the audience , thus enfolding aesthetic pleasure into the dialectic of domination.16 ence”,

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By this analysis, the event of P’s returned gaze means that the comfort off “heroic” identification is withdrawn. It is essential to the director that P be fully visible, fully exposed. The plinth is there, according to A, “to let the stalls see the feet” (CSP P, 297). She makes a note to raise it when D cannot see it from the front row. D comments that the image “could do with more nudity” (CSP P, 300). The play foregrounds the process of the creation of this image and plays upon the audiences’ awareness of the body transformed into a sign, into material to be manipulated, disciplined, and shaped. The body in representation is reproduced as a conditioned image in accordance with dominant laws.17 Audience complicity also implies audience privilege. Like the voice in Ehh Joee, the gaze has tactile force, and becomes another instrument of torture— — that is, until it is returned by P at the end of the play. It is through this violence that the figure, the body around which the play circles, begins to “make sense.” There is violence too in the act of identification, a process that always runs the risk of erasing difference through misrecognition, or annihilating it through violence.18 When P raises his head, a chasm is driven between the staged text and the stage image. While the Assistant suggests toward the end: “What if he were to . . . were to . . . raise his head . . . an instant . . . show his face . . . just an instant” (CSP P, 300), the Director scoffs at her. No instructions for this act were decided upon or recorded and this is P’s only action to break through the textual web generated by the director and his assistant. As Jennifer Jeffers puts it, Beckett is not telling the story of humanity in all its pain and suffering but, “[t]he privation of colour and narrative forces us to rethinkk and reread the visibilities that Beckett presents. His strategy in the tellingg of this catastrophe of the humanist tradition is not to tell the story but to make visible the catastrophe that cannot be retold.”19 There is a connection to be made between this (staged) extratextual act and the idea of exscription, as described by Nancy. In Corpuss, Nancy interrogates the difficult relationship between writing and the body. Bodies to some extent are always in excess of signification and Beckett’s work demonstrates this time and again. Nancy characterizes the relationship between the body and writing as one of touch. As he puts it: “[T]ouching upon the body, touching the body, touching—happens g in writing all the time.”20 And he remarks on how one might think of the act of writing the body as an impossible task—the bodyy is perhaps “uninscribable.”21 Yet the Nancean view of touching is relevant here once more: the act of touch is always also a separation, or a revelation off separateness, the realization of a limit in the attempt to cross that limit. The body appears at the limits of writing “along the absolute limitt separating the sense of one from the skin and nerves of the other.” other. 22 Nancy uses the term

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“exscription” to denote this separation-in-contact of text and of the bodyy and the material world in general. Or, more appropriately, writing itself is an act of exscription. In Martta Heikkilä’s words: “Writing stands for exscription which describes the relation to exteriority, or separation which is maintained between impenetrable matter and bodily sense, and between bodilyy sense and linguistic signification.”23 The following comments elucidate further what Nancy means byy exscription: It is a word which came to me in reaction to this sudden infatuation with writing, the text, salvation through literature etc. There is a sentence from Bataille: “Language alone indicates the sovereign moment where it becomes obsolete.” It is my daily prayer. He means: There is nothing but language, but language indicates non-language, the things themselves, the moment where it is rendered obsolete. This reminds me of a meeting I had with [Paul] Ricoeur a long time ago, at his house, in Châtenay. He had read my first book on Hegel, and after opening the door to the garden, he said: “It’s very good, but where is the garden in all that?” I have never forgotten: the exscribed is the garden. The fact that writingg indicates its own outside, is decanted and shows the things.24 The act of writing continually points to what is outside of writing, “the things themselves,” as Nancy puts it here, things that writing “touches on” but from which it remains at a distance. Catastrophee stages the process by which, in a play text, the body and the material space of the stage that surrounds it are fixed into a two-dimensional form: the flat fixity of the page. In this process the stage space appears to take on the two-dimensionality of the page: space is collapsed and flattened as P is subjugated and fixed. The ephemeral quality of the theatrical image is diminished, in line with Puchner’s ideas around closet drama. Yet out of this flattened space emerges the possibility of an interruption to the dominant aesthetic ideal as the very process of making (writing, painting) points to its own limits: the point where “writing indicates its own outside.” When P finally raises his head, the fixity of the image is disrupted in a moment of animation. The objectified body on stage has refused to remain an image, a passive reflection of the Director’s instruction. The carved stone relief becomes animated and refuses to obey the confines of the aesthetic, instead breaking its frame. D’s attempt to make P two-dimensional, as both visual image and textual entity, fails and the subjugation of hand to eye falters. When Beckett stages the text, and specifically in Catastrophee stages the act of writing, he is also staging the limits of art and the violence of

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perception. P’s gesture at the end reveals the ways in which performance can uproot, contravene, or ignore its textual “master.” Catastrophee stages exscription: where writing and body touch and in that touch remain separate. What Where and the Violence of Unmaking What Wheree, Beckett’s final play, premiered in English in New York in 1983. It was later filmed in Germany with the author’s involvement and, while the final part of this chapter (later) will address the implications of the playy as “televisual,” here I am primarily concerned with the play as staged. The play follows a complex set of permutations in which the interrogators (Bom, Bim, Bem) are each interrogated after failing to produce the desired confession from the subject of their interrogation. The sequences are orchestrated by Bam, whose voice (V) we hear throughout, correcting and revisingg and demanding that each successive subject admit that his interrogatee confessed. Doubting the veracity of the results of the interrogations, Bam orders Bom to interrogate Bim, Bem to interrogate Bom, and finally Bem is interrogated by Bam. Unmentioned, and perhaps unmentionable, is Bum, whom we presume to be the initial target. The initial sequence appears as a rehearsal, giving the sense that the play is an endless repetition of these variables. Bam’s voice is heard, over the megaphone: V: We are the last five. V In the present as we were still. It is spring. Time passes. First without words. I switch on. [Light on (playing area) Bam at 3 head haught, Bom at 1 head bowed. Pausee.] Not good. I switch off. (CSP P, 310) Bam begins again. In the revised sequence, Bom is not visualized, until he is introduced by V: “In the end Bom appears” (CSP P, 311). Each figure then goes silently through the motions that the play will follow. At the outset “it is spring,” but with each successive sequence “time passes” into summer, autumn, and finally winter, when Bam/V will “switch off” for good; the seasons offering a formal, symmetrical structure and progression for the playy and driving toward the final “winter/without winter/without journey” journey (CSP P, 316).

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While there are political overtones to this play, “any parable of terrorism, Marxist or otherwise, is delivered in strictly symbolic terms” as Braterr puts it.25 The present tense immediacy of the text belies the fact that this is a memory play. While V says, “We are the last five / In the present as we are still” (CSP P, 310), the fact that the action is corrected several times offers a sense of re-presentation; the author pointed out that the action off the play had happened “long ago.”26 These figures or figments are products of a single consciousness: V: I am alone V It is Spring Time passes Now with words. (CSP P, 312) This evokes a sense of timelessness. Yet its nonspecificity means that political readings addressing the workings of power on bodies are not entirelyy irrelevant. The question of the experience of pain, and the inability to recite from the flesh the details of that pain have political implications when used by regimes. It is possible to think of What Wheree as existing somewhere between the personal (back in Krapp’s den, as Brater suggests of the staged version27), and the political, referencing the way that power operates upon the body. Nonspecificity permits both of these readings to be possible at once, with the inner (personal) and outer (sociopolitical) collapsed. “The works” and the “what” and the “where” stand in for both a personal narrative of pain and memory and a public history of human violence, howeverr internalized. Interrogation and torture are activities in which power and politics find extension in the hand of the torturer/interrogator and through this conduit meet the material body. Torture is the most intimate limit between politics and corporeality, the tactile extension of whatever regime is in power. Torture is also a deeply scripted affair; interrogator and subject perform theirr roles, though the role of the latter is hardly voluntary. For Elaine Scarry, there is an “uncreating” at the heart of this “performance.” She writes that physical pain is “language destroying” and, in the context of torture, the purpose of such pain is not merely to elicit information from the victim, but to visibly “deconstruct the prisoner’s voice.”28 The demands of the torturer are not simply that pain will produce a confession but rather, as Scarry says, they will unmake the world of the victim. In Catastrophee, we see the material effects of the artist’s vision emerging before our eyes, and the voice of Bam (v), like the figure in . . . butt the clouds . . . rehearses and enacts the performance, as if reading the play

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text aloud: “First without words,” “Time passes,” “Now with words” all offer a seemingly eternal blueprint for action. The action merges with the stage directions making the latter into, as in Worthen’s analysis, dramas in themselves. V is visible onstage as a megaphone, an almost acousmaticc presence directing the scene. With only a few bodies and no narrative, this is also, in Deleuze’s terms, exhausting the possible, creating in order that no more creation is possible. This act of creation/uncreation appears to be intimately linked to the process of pain and suffering however— — something that lends What Wheree possible political overtones. Linkingg this play with Catastrophee is this problem of the human hand: the violence of the hand as an extension of a political regime and the softer violence off the artist’s hand. The process of interrogation and senselessness in Whatt Wheree is also a step-by-step backward motion from articulacy to senseless.29 We learned that the language capacity of each victim is reduced to weeping, screaming, and begging for mercy. Although we see or hear no signs of the victims undergoing “the works,” we learn that they suffered language-destroying pain: Bam: Bim: Bam: Bim: Bam: Bim: Bam: Bim: Bam: Bim:

You gave him the works? Yes. And he didn’t say where? No. He wept? Yes. Screamed? Yes. Begged for mercy? Yes. (CSP P, 314)

Bam questions each of his assigned interrogators as to why, after the weepingg and screaming, he stopped. Each reply that their subject had “passed out.” Bam accuses each of lying: Bam: And you didn’t revive him? Bim: I tried. Bam: Well? Bim: I couldn’t. [Pausee.] Bam: It’s a lie. [Pausee.] He said where to you. [Pausee.] Confess he said where to you. [Pausee.] you’ll be given the works until you confess. (CSP CSP, P, 315)

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Neither Bom, Bim, nor Bem articulate the nature of the “what” or the “where.” These are both the goals and the limits of the interrogation. When Knowlson suggested to Beckett that the repeated “where” in the text was a misprint, the author’s response was emphatically to the contrary. Bam, he suggests, wants to know both that the interrogation was successful, that the subject confessed, and the results of the interrogation: the where or what.30 Bam himself takes the final member of the group, Bem, to undergo “the works,” though no answers are produced. In the end V is alone. The final words of the play are also the final words of Beckett’s oeuvre: “Time passes. / That is all. / Makes sense who may. / I switch off ” (CSP P, 316). The light goes out on the playing space, there is a pause and the light goes out on V (CSP P, 316). It is possible that, as with Scarry, it is the unmaking itself that is the purpose. A ruthless excoriating internal process exhausts and destroys all further possible permutations and arrangements of figures and words; the act of creation (v: “first without words,” “I start again”) is simultaneously the act of uncreation. While in Catastrophee it is the “unscripted” embodied gesture that uncovers exscription, here it is the nonspecificity of the text expressing, paradoxically, what cannot be expressed in the text. The “what” and the “where” are a way of maintaining absolute openness of interpretation and point to the limits of language, where bodies and words touch, intertwine, and fall apart, as language falls short and bodies “pass out.” The primary goal of the mechanics of torture is to “make sense.” That is, to coerce the body into a meaningful performance, one that legitimates intrusive power systems. The ending of What Wheree reveals exscription. Flesh, in each case of repeated interrogation, collapses, “passes out” of discourse. With its formal patterning of bodies, and the evident failure of “the works,” that is, the instruments of torture, including the voice of the torturer, we are left at the end with an imaginary set of senseless bodies. In this regard, as Beckett’s final play, the line “make sense who may” is telling. Metaphorically speaking, each senseless body produced by this process off torture echoes the many senseless bodies out of which Beckett as author has attempted, and failed, to wring sense. It is a summing up of a corpuss of senseless corpses, the text’s failure to capture and contain, perceive and represent the body made visible. As much as these two plays trace the workings of power on the body, theyy simultaneously track the ways in which those workings or “works” fail. The returned gaze of P at the end seems to be a prime example of the human spirit, and indeed the spirit of humanism and the tradition of enlightenment, broken but continuing in spite of all. Yet the human hand, while it may stand in for a history of human endeavor, creativity, and spirituality

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is also imaged here as capable of destruction in equal measure and often in the same gesture. In spite of the violent manual processes that seek to objectify, contain, and represent the body, in both Catastrophee and Whatt Wheree there are remainders, exscribed leftovers that fail to be fully absorbed and explained by the discourses dominating the playing space. No matter the textual coercion that takes place in these two plays, they ultimatelyy reveal the limits of the text and the ends of textual authority. In Catastrophe, e the subject looks back, out of the shadows of the dehumanizing discourses that surround and shape him. In the latter however, bodies pass out. The discourses of power fail in Catastrophee when the object refuses to remain an object. They fail in What Wheree because they come up against the limits of the flesh. All that remains is base intractable matter, resistant to the sense-making faculties of the master-discourse. “The works,” significantly, have failed, but not only is it a failure of the text to contain bodies, as examined in Catastrophee, the bodies themselves are no longer visible. What Wheree reveals exscription—the limits of the text; it also reveals the limits of the image. Visual representation of the senseless body seems impossible, and textual interrogation will be unsuccessful. These bodies have “passed out” beyond the limits of representation. Similar limits (or frames) are revealed in A Piece of Monologuee (chapter 2), where we learn of bodies passing into the darkness beyond the lips of the grave. The darkk matter that lies “outside the frame” in What Wheree is not perhaps the loamyy depths of the grave. It is rather the virtual space that lies outside the playingg space of the theater. When this play was adapted for television, with Beckett’s supervision, it became the space of the television broadcast, where any vestiges of bodily integrity disintegrated into information signal. Digital Dreams: Diagram, Image, Television Quadd was written for television, while its “sequel” Quad III (in German Quadrat I and III ) came about, in a somewhat aleatory fashion, during its filming. Four players enter the square playing space in sequence and follow a specific pattern, avoiding each other and the center. The action is accompanied by percussion instruments (CSP P, 291–292). The figures of Quadd follow w their given courses, avoiding the center and each other. Shrouded in longg hooded robes, they are differentiated only by color and by sound. Each robe is a different color (white, yellow, blue, red) and the text suggests four types of percussion (drum, gong, triangle, wood block) (CSP P, 292). Lights were intended to be matched to each figure according to the color of his or herr costume, but this proved impracticable (CSP P, 293). The figures move in a fixed pattern around a square set, its points marked as A, B, C, D with E at

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the center, as the supposed “danger zone” (CSP P, 293). The figures avoid a central area, appearing to be driven on their courses by some invisible imperative. Quad III is a monochromatic repeat of this action, at a much slower pace. Gontarski notes that as Beckett began, during the latter part of his career from the late 1960s onward, to work more and more directly on stage and to trust his direct work in theater, he did not always record his insights or revise his texts accordingly. Quad III is a striking example of this move awayy from a purely text-based mode of working and creating.31 What Wheree was remade for television as Was Wo at the Suddeutscher Rundfunk in Germanyy in 1986 with the author’s direct involvement. These plays both address the technologies of surveillance, which are associated with power and control, as well as raising the issue of textual authority. For Worthen, the Quads d are all directions, and the other plays for film and television are usuallyy preceded by diagrams specifying the camera’s perspective [ . . . ] Beckett extends the playwright’s authority from the drama to embrace these textual signs—the stage directions—and so to govern the texture off performance.32 In Catastrophee, textuality and the act of writing are features of the power structures that that play images. In What Wheree, the text and the idea off making sense through narrative are significant elements, though the association between sense-making, representation, and violence—the hand off the artist—were present in a similar way to Catastrophe. e In Quadd, power is manifest in the meeting point between the textual and visual: in the diagram. As a facet of the stage directions, the diagram provides clarification, a visual blueprint for the figures that will inhabit the playing space. The text and the diagram establish the imperative to movement and the limits off space for the actors. In Quadd, the organizing principle that is the diagram may be as much a prison-house for these bodies as the assistant’s pen is for the protagonist, a machine of abstraction. Steven Connor suggests that the figures of Quadd each perform as bothh “prisoner and jailor”; they seem to be prisoners of their movement, yet since that movement “describes the space,” they may be seen to be describing their prison from the outside.33 The diagram lays down tracks for bodies, visual pre- and proscriptions for space, which reveal power operating on bodies. Quadd, by staging the diagram, manifests the relationship between text, image, and body. The diagram functions to point out the limits of the text within the text itselff and provide a visual bridge between text and performance. It is the line that makes body and page touch. Of course touching is, following Nancy, always a separation. While it would appear that the diagram functions in a similar

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way to the camera—fixing and objectifying the figures—it may said that the diagram also reveals exscription. What Wheree dramatizes exscription byy exploring the limits of the text—those invisible bodies that pass out of discourse. Quadd, with its continual gesture to the nonspace at the center of the image, visualizes it. Yet not only does the diagram form a sort of organizingg principle for the action, it is also the point where visual communication takes over from textual. A diagram on a page reveals the limits of the text, an acknowledgment that the text is destined for performance and that that performance cannot be fully encapsulated in textual form. Something happens in performance, which cannot be expressed in the text: the performance is matter exscribed. While all dramatic texts share this to a greater or lesser extent, the inclusion of the diagram makes this point even more succinctly. In stage directions in general we find the strongest example of physical imperatives set out by text and in the diagram, especially in the case off Quadd, a prison drawn for bodies. The diagram functions like the disciplinary spaces Foucault examines in Discipline and Punish, h divided up “into as many sections as there are bodies to be distributed.”34 This disciplinaryy mechanism produces, like the process Foucault describes, “subjected and practiced bodies, “docile bodies.”35 In the directions, Beckett has suggested that while gender does not matter in the selection of actors for the roles, “some ballet training desirable” (CSP P, 293). Such well-trained bodies would fit more easily perhaps into the disciplinary mechanism of the diagrammatic space. These figures of discipline enact the diagram performatively, drawingg it with their hooded bodies, as ghostly supplements to the text that the text cannot quite contain. It is important to think of the invisible imperatives, made visible in the relation between text and image, as the points where the artist touches the object, making and unmaking, interrogating, to the limit. Exscription is not only a revelation of the limits of the text, it is also the point where text and body meet. While bodies are made intangible in the television plays, they are visualized as objects or parts of mechanisms beingg ordered by various systems of surveillance and control. The figures of Quadd enact the imperative to move and to avoid a particular area or object and describe that imperative at the same time. Therefore, this play, and arguably What Wheree, seems to be staging the distinction between performativity and performance that Butler carefully delineates in her later work. As Rebecca Schneider puts it: If performance, ritual and theatrical, is consciously embodied, performatives are discursive and somehow unconscious. They are not willed, but blindly participate in that great stream of repetition by which anyy word is both ghosted by a historicity not completely accessible to it and

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is uncertain of its future to a degree that is always in excess of any fullyy conscious manipulation.36 A n actor must be fully conscious of his or her actions in a performance, yet that performance can come to reveal performativity. Quadd seems to refer continually to the invisible imperative that forces movement from the figures. They are impelled to move and describe that impulse as theyy do it. Quadd is a play that creates an image of the workings of force and power upon bodies. With these bodies stripped of all conventional means of visual identification—they are genderless, raceless entities—an audience is similarly stripped of the systems of signs by which their actions can be interpreted. Unable to read motivation or psychological depth into the movement, we can at the very least find the tracings of a forceful imperative upon their bodies. In fact, it may be argued that these figures are simplyy partially embodied expressions of the imperative to move. Many of Beckett’s plays seem to entail this “obligation to express.” Figures, such as Mouth in Not I, appear to be impelled to speak by some invisible force; the “injunction to tell,” as Karen Laughlin puts it in her discussion of the earlier Play, y reveals the workings of power and creates the theatrical spectacle.37 This obligation is to be found also in the imperative to move, and Quadd could be viewed as both reiteration and description of those social and mental power mechanisms that organize and contain bodies, and become internalized so that bodies contain and organize themselves, collectively. Therefore, the reiterative retracing of firmly inscribed pathways in Quadd reveals a lack off autonomy and agency that may be only marginally offset by the possibilities offered by performance. Each of these plays offers a searching investigation of the limits between performance/image and text. In Quad III, the image is apparently freed altogether from the text, yet there remains a ghostly echo of the diagram, which contains within it seeds of its own invisibility. Quad III “exhausts” space and the image too, in the way that Deleuze describes: to exhaust is to “extenuate the potentialities of space” and “dissipate the power of the image.”38 This is readily apparent in the slow shuffle of the figures, drained of energy and color, and left beyond the limits of the text. Filmic Shrouds: The Ethics of Invisibility Not only does Quadd reveal the limits of the text, the material effects employed in the making of these plays help to withhold the visible and to disrupt narrative. In the filming of Was Wo, a large, distorted death mask replaces the megaphone producing Bam’s voice—a nod to faciality and visibility, which

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has much in common with the disruption of vision in Film. This “filmic shroud” is achieved in Was Wo through the use of gauze, mirror, and a pane of glass to distort the face: {V = mirror reflection off BAM’s face, slightly distorted, faintly lit, enough to distinguish closed eyes and lips in speech. Four-five times the size of P [playing area] faces. Eyes closed throughout. Motionless until head bowed beforee final fade out} t 39 The hole in the center of the diagrammatic space in Quadd is another space that marks out the limits of bodies, as is the “passing out” of the bodies recounted in What Wheree. There is the never-revealed content of the “what” and “where,” and the unambiguous refusal to “make sense” for the spectator at the end. The figures in Quadd, hidden beneath cowls and robes, are visual and identificatory blind spots in themselves. Working against visual mastery, Quadd and What Wheree do not permit the audiovisual medium to function in a normal way. Bodies in these television plays are drastically decorporealized and intangible. The bodies in Was Wo are ghostly, as Gontarski puts it: “appear[ing] as floating faces dissolving in and out.””40 The bodies in the Quadd plays are heavily shrouded, with deep hoods, showing little trace off physicality. In the black-and-white Quad III, the effect is even more pronounced, as the figures shuffle slowly around the square space. There are multiple ways then in which these plays interrupt optic space, working against visibility to create haptic imagery and to convert the body into intangible light signal. These blind spots expose a failure of the medium; the television set is a machine that lives with us, intimate in our lives, and purposes to offer intimacy with the characters it displays, yet here its supposedly all-seeing eye proves less than effective. For all the violence implied in these plays, the blind spots of Quadd and What Wheree work against such identifications, and such intimacy. Each of the plays enacts a refusal to give way to the impulse to narrative, to sense-making. Instead, in their permutations and repetitions they seem to demand, as Voigts-Virchow has said off Quadd, an aisthetic approach,41 where the meaning, if any is to be found, lies in the movement. The only revision of the visual image of What Wheree was done for the Stuttgart production at Suddeustscher Rundfunk in 1985.42 In this version, “V” is a distorted mirror reflection of Bam’s face, replacing the megaphone in the original. This, from the revised text for this production: Bodies and movement eliminated Faces only.

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Full face throughout As alike as possible. Differentiated by colour.43 This removal of bodies seems to carry on the “passing out” spoken of in the text. This version also prohibits visual perception to an even greater extent than its theatrical counterpart: “Dim light, faces blurred” (CSP P, 430). What is interesting about the televised version is that the television screen itselff is transformed into “the field of memory.” The playing area is made up off a “black ground unbroken,””44 upon which the heads of the figures alone appear. They are displayed as if in relief against this dark background. Eckart Voigts-Virchow’s comments regarding Quadd are apt here: “We can note that Beckett increasingly makes use of the options the recording camera offers to eliminate visual contexts, to disembody, disconnect, concentrate, focus. This denial of visual context is a device of universalizing abstraction.””45 As McMullan puts it, the screened work foregrounds the processes of perception46: the events occurring are occurring also on the screen of the mind. Yet perceptual capacity and cognitive analysis is severely curtailed by these plays, transforming as they do depths of space into flattened haptic images. The Beckettian impulse toward failure, ignorance, and impotence mayy indeed be viewed as an ethical strategy; the blind spots in these works reveal the politics of perception and representation. For Peggy Phelan, the recognition of the blind spot, the unrepresentable, is of ethical import, as she attempts to “revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not fullyy representable.””47 Beckett employs the tools and techniques of visualization, and especially so in the television work. He puts these tools into play and in so doing reveals blind spots, areas where knowledge and power begin to fail. The tools of visualization are here envisaged as tactile effects upon the body. They range from the hands and instruments of the torturer, to the invisible political forces that govern bodies and behaviors, all operating in the name of visibility, recognizability, and in order to make sense of otherness and d flesh. The avoidance of the center may be either creative or simply descriptive; it appears to make something out of nothing, or trace the pattern into which these figures are locked. It both constructs and describes the limits of an object or area that is abhorrent to the figures. Together with Catastrophee these plays point toward the potential the human hand has to enact violence and coercion, while articulating a perceptual ethics based on nott seeing. It is an ethics of the blind spot, underscored by an awareness of the potential violence of the hand when it is coordinated with systems of visual representation and surveillance. The act of drawing a veil across the image or uncovering the limits of the text is not sufficient

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however to understand the acts of touch that occur in the plays discussed in the final chapter. At the outset it was suggested that part of the violence off the hand in art is to do with its subordination to the image or the text. The hand, functioning as a tool for representation, is perhaps always to be tainted by this association. The act of making is also an act of unmaking, whether that making is forging the world into art or purging dissenting voices from dominant political regimes. The question remains to be answered then: how w is one to touch, if the tools of touching are so tainted? The commentaryy in this chapter has shown how Beckett’s work exposes the extent to which the material body resists these systems of surveillance and representation, exposing the limits of the text on the one hand, and the limits of vision itselff on the other. The final chapter will be concerned with how touch, neither violent nor coercive, might take place. It may be that such touch is never possible and that the only ethical touch possible lies in a tactful withdrawal of the hand.

CHAPTER 6

On the Other Hand . . . (The One That Refuses to Touch)

T

here are significant moments of physical touch presented in the two plays discussed in this final chapter. In Ohio Impromptu (1980), the listener reaches out to check the reader’s hand, influencing the course of the narrative he reads. In Nacht und Trräumee (1982), a caring touch is dreamt by a sleeping figure as the strains of Schubert’s musical piece by the same name are heard. While Ohio Impromptu’s staging of the book and the act of reading indicate that continued attention to the relationship between text and performance is necessary, the fact that an act of physical touch happens during the course of the play seems to ask the following question: under what conditions, ethical and aesthetic, can touch happen in the often sterile, lonely landscape of the Beckettian stage? The act of touch across human cultures is a carefully codified and regulated aspect of interpersonal behavior—it must be tactful, else risk offense. Touch is sanctioned in particular circumstances of course, in medical contexts, for example, but otherwise it involves a careful negotiation of the intimate limits between human bodies. As Shildrick puts it in her insightful essay on proximity and normative corporealities, through touch we come “face-to-face with the leaks and flows at the boundaries of, and the vulnerabilities within, our own embodied being.”1 The hand can be violent; it can also reveal intersubjectivity: “our [ . . . ] immersion [ . . . ] in the world of others, and [our] capacity to be moved beyond reason, in the space of shared vulnerabilities.”2 The following discussion of Ohio Impromptu and Nacht und Trräumee will be concerned with those “shared vulnerabilities” and

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the how w of touching. Addressing Ohio Impromptu, the first section will deal with tactics, examining the formal principles that drive the play and its links to formal conventions of both theater and music. This links back to the hand of the artist and its methods of representing otherness and the issue of exscription. The second section, relating to Nancy’s work, will refer to tactful touch: ethical questions around touch, in other words. While the term “tact” has its etymological roots in “tangere,” Latin for “touch,” its contemporary usage implies a careful or diplomatic touching, one that is emphatically not a coercion or assault upon the other; such a term arguablyy conveys how this play tactfully refuses to subsume otherness or difference into sameness. This play shows how tactful touch might take place. In other words, touch that is neither violent nor oppressive. The final section of the chapter will look at how such ethical touch is interwoven with religious iconography and presence in Nacht und Trräumee. Tactics: Impromptus and Disjunctures The tactics employed in Ohio Impromptu mean that a certain ethics off touching, a tactfulness, is manifest at a formal level. The play contains two figures, seated at right angles to one another at a ““plain white deal tablee.” The third figure, who haunts the play, is an absent “dear face” (CSP P, 285–286) for whose loss the Listener seeks comfort. The Listener faces the audience; the Reader sits in profile. On the center of the table lies a “black, wide brimmedd hatt ” and, before the Reader, a book, open at its final pages (CSP P, 285).3 The Listener does not speak, only knocks on the table, to demand either a continuation of the Reader’s “sad tale” (CSP P, 287), or a repeat of a particular sentence or phrase. The distinction between the read text and the embodied performance, between sound and image, and between the two figures is maintained throughout the play, and it is this maintenance of difference, the refusal to collapse elements of the play into sameness, that constitutes the tactfulness of Ohio Impromptu. They are held apart, tactfully so. Ohio Impromptu was written at S. E. Gontarski’s request for a symposium honoring Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday. It was performed in May 1981 at Ohio State University, directed by Alan Schneider. Although Beckett’s first response was to assert how unfit he was to write to request, he eventually produced this short, precise “playlet.””4 Molière’s Versailles Impromptu features a similar scenario—a “command performance.” This play is also, significantly, an address to his (Molière’s) critics. Noting the plays linkages with the theatrical tradition of Impromptus, McMullan writes that “[t]he work therefore announces itself as a play about creation and the artistic

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practice of its author [ . . . ] Beckett sets up a dialogue between the different levels or languages within the play, in particular between the scenic and the verbal, so that each comments on the other and together they constitute an ‘auto-critique’ of the author’s work.”5 Ohio Impromptu therefore raises the issue of artistic creativity—the hand of the artist and the critical response to the work. As Gontarski suggests, “[T]he play that Beckett finally wrote is not so much about solace or lost or rejected love as about origination, creativity.”6 The tradition of the impromptu addresses the nature of creativity and the difficulty of making the creative source “flow” on command. Ohio Impromptu addresses the critic, the reader. The play features a “Reader,” who’s comings and goings, and whose acts of reading, are barelyy under the control of the Listener. The Reader, interpreted as the creative voice emerging from or entering the artist’s mind, is not to be commandeered, and whose sounds are apt to, as Beckett puts it in describing his own mental weariness, become as “dry as an old herring bone.”7 The Reader symbolizes also the act of reading and interpretation; an act that the artist has even less control over. Furthermore, Gontarski notes that the Reader has been created for company, both for the Listener, and for the literaryy critics attending the Ohio symposium.8 That Beckett should choose to use the impromptu form is an ironic comment on the deeply premeditated and programmed way this work came into being. The impromptu play is often concerned with the anxieties an author may have both about access to the creative source—it is not to be commanded—as well as about the reception and interpretation of the finished artwork. It is a premeditated work, which admits the unpredictable. The impromptu presents itself as operating independent of a fixed text, unmoored from the boundaries of a script or score. Yet this is only a facade, for the impromptu is as premeditated and bounded by the text as most performances are. This is true also of Catastrophee, which stages a gesture that unsettles the text even though that “impromptu” gesture is part of the overall scheme of the text. While the act of writing in that play is associable with the hand of authority and even violence, authorship here is imaged, however ironically, as waiting in passivity for a few crumbs of inspiration. As well as to a theatrical tradition of impromptus, there are links to the tradition of the impromptu in the history of musical composition. Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt each composed a number of impromptus for solo players. W hile in contemporary use the term “impromptu” suggests an event, speech, or performance that is entirely unplanned, the aim of the impromptu in the context of musical composition was to create the illusion of spontaneity. Although the term may have originally described an improvised piece, it was

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used in the nineteenth century to denote not music that in itself is improvised, but to describe a composition’s somewhat casual origin in the composer’s mind.9 Once written down, music is of course in no way unplanned, or “rough.” As Alfred Einstein writes: “In Schubert’s Impromptu or momentt musicalee there is nothing sketchy. Each must be simple in form, yet with every detail filled in—the ‘microcosm’ is all important.”10 Impromptus attempt to give the impression that they are a “free” and unplanned performance, yet they are as bound to a text/score as any other performance. Beckett toys with this idea in his own impromptu. The apparently random knocks (on the part of the listener) and pauses (on the part of the reader) punctuate and organize the flow of the narrative. Like much of the later drama, Ohio Impromptu is a short, minimalist piece with detailed stage directions. Yet its terse formality is underpinned byy the possibility of spontaneous variation. An “unbalancing act,” as Gontarski names it, occurs in Ohio Impromptu. A feature of the later drama, this decentering is a moment in the work when a deviation occurs; text deviates from image, or vice versa. In this case, the deviation has a similar flavor to the deviation in Ghost Trio, where the figure in the room deviates brieflyy from the narrative produced by the voiceover.11 It is perhaps comparable to Catastrophee too if the protagonist’s final gesture is seen as a deviation from “the script.” Both Ohio Impromptu and Ghost Trio have musical links, and their deviations disrupt the viewer’s expectations. It is like a deliberately unfinished cadence or a deliberately discordant note: in other words, a deviation from form, yet one built into the text. The work is structured around the repetitions induced by the Listener’s knocks. There are six in all, and twenty pauses. If this piece is considered in musical terms, as Gontarski does, it is possible to observe a clear strategyy of “movements,” or expositions on a theme, interspersed with recapitulations. Although the piece could be subdivided into movements that occur between each knock and repetition sequence, for simplicity’s sake the workk can be divided into two clear sections. The first is themed around the flight and escape of the protagonist from familiar surroundings. The second is an account of the appearance of the reader in what may be an attempt at a solution to the emotional turmoil that remained unsolved by the escape.12 The introduction and ending of the piece mirror each other with the former introducing the beginning of what promises to be a sparse and minimalistic piece, where: [Reading] g Little is left to tell. In a last— [L knocks with left hand on table.] e Little is left to tell. (CSP P, 285)

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The following lines announce the beginning of the end, where words have finally begun to run dry: Nothing is left to tell. [Pause. R makes to close bookk. Knock. Book half closed.] please leave as I had it, this is how it appears in the text Nothing is left to tell. (CSP P, 288) The wordlessness of the look, when Reader and Listener meet each other’s gaze, unblinking, in silence, forms a silent coda to the work. The piece as a whole then, is a rhythmic composition. Flowing sections of text are interspersed with the Reader’s interruptions, knocks that force a repetition of the preceding phrase or section. The Listener acts like a conductor or director, demanding corrections and repetitions from the performer—at each knockk the reader must repeat the preceding sentence in full, before continuing on with the narrative. For example: I saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words, No need to go to him again, even were it in your power. So the sad— [Knockk.] Saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words. No need to go to him again, even were it in your power. [Pause. e Knockk.] So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone [ . . . ] (CSP P, 287) On the one hand, this break-repetition structure confirms the musicalityy of the piece, while on the other, it creates the sense that the piece is comingg to existence before our eyes. This echoes Molière’s Versailles Impromptu, a play about the rehearsal of a play, in which Molière himself is writer and director.13 The Listener performs a similar function to the repeat sign on a musical stave, commanding a repeat of a phrase up to a particular point. There is such rhythm and regularity engendered by the actions off the two figures that any variation in the pattern is readily apparent. The Listener’s two gestures—checking the Reader with his hand and the gaze that occurs between the two in the final moments of the piece—are both highly visible variations on the predictable action. There is a constant tension engineered between the scenic and verbal levels in the play,14 between predictability and supposed impromptu variation, between the rehearsed

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performance and the spontaneous action. This is the nature of the “form” of the impromptu: something that gives the impression of being off-hand, extemporaneous. In other words, built into the structure of the piece are elements designed to convince the viewer of its spontaneity. The Listener’s knock is itself a deviation; it diverts the narrative from its proper course and induces repetition, like the needle of a gramophone lifted and replaced a few turns earlier. Pulling an audience back into the material space of the theater, it engages with the density of the theatrical space and interferes not only with the temporal progression of the piece, but also with the spectator’s imaginative involvement in the narrative. The gestures bring us backk to the “here and now” of the stage, but the repetition they induce means that the scenic and the verbal elements of the play never come to rest in an easy identification. Exscribed matter is held in inclusive disjuncture with the text that produces it. For Worthen, this play exemplifies the tension in modern theater between text and performance, with the “Reader and the Listener merg[ing] into a single, divided image of the theater’s resistance and captivity to the text, they stage the friction between writing and enactment that defines modern drama.”15 The variability and unpredictabilityy of live performance come up against and disrupt the fixity of textual representation, even as the text operates as a dominating force over the stage space. That the play provides a self-reflexive, meta-theatrical commentary on its own creation is evident at certain key moments in the text. The repetition of certain sections of text, as demanded by the Listener, also emphasizes the extent to which the work is “self-aware” and divided from itself. When the Reader repeats the phrase “then turn and his slow steps retrace” (CSP P, 286), he is simultaneously describing the actions of the protagonist of the narrative and the act of repetition in which he is engaging. Coming after a pause, in which the Reader looks at the text more closely, the line “Yes, after so long a lapse that as if never been” (CSP P, 286) points both to the content of narrative in which the protagonist has had a recurrence of an old nervous anxiety, and to the pause itself. The “little is left to tell” and “nothing is left to tell,” which frame the work, are perhaps the clearest examples off this meta-theatricality. These are points at which narrative action and stage image hover in closest communion. The first statement points to the brevityy of the coming piece, the second announces its end. Although the scenic and verbal levels are apparently disconnected, their coalescence is hinted at in moments such as these. The Reader’s “text” describes the final night: “Till the night came at last when having closed the book and dawn at hand he did not disappear but sat on without a word” word (CSP P, 287). The narrative goes on to describe how the

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two sit, “as though turned to stone.” Finally, however, the play ends with a gaze shared between the two figures, following the Reader’s declaration that “nothing is left to tell” (CSP P, 288). The narrative here veers so close to the stage image that identification between the two becomes possible, and we are told that “with never a word exchanged” these two, “grew to be as one” (CSP P, 287). Yet the disjuncture remains. The two figures are, we are told in the stage directions, “as alike in appearance as possible ” (CSP P, 285), yet not the same. Garin Dowd critiques the Beckett on Film version of the work, starring Jeremy Irons as both Reader and Listener,16 for producing a facile identification between the two. Dowd regards the impossibility of exact identity as constitutive of the work,17 an impossibility made possible by film technology: “In the screen version the play, now deprived of its bodies plural and dispersed, is given two host bodies which inhere into one. The play is reconfigured as an allegory of the divine presence of Jeremy Irons.”18 Dowd’s criticism emphasizes the significance of the maintenance of disjuncture in this work. It is perhaps in the materiality of the knocking action that this disidentification is given its most perceivable expression. After each knock-repeat sequence, the narrative recommences, and the spectator is caught up in its imagery. There is a continual tension engineered as the perceptual and imaginative faculties of the spectator are pulled in two directions at once, and the performance of the piece occurs heree, not within the spectator’s mind’s eye, nor in the physical stage space before them. It occurs rather at the limit-edge between perception and imagination: between material surroundings and the “profounds of mind” (CSP P, 288). Such apparently impromptu deviations function to create the illusion of a performance-event spontaneously being created before an audience. This knock, as a reference to the here and now of the stage space, may be an example of what Bert States refers to as the real leaking out off the illusion.19 Here, the stage space becomes the point of intersection off discourse and materiality, text and image—the material body of the actor, an intrusive fleshly hand disruptive to narrative, enters into dialogue with the rehearsed performance of a prewritten text. In the medium of theater, where the real and the illusory intertwine with one another, the form of the impromptu becomes more than a vehicle for commentary on the creative process. Including as it does the rehearsed deviation, the pretense that whatt is constructed and performed is in fact spontaneous action, the impromptu form acts to expose this, yet another disjuncture, between the real and the imaginary. As States writes of Molière playing Molière in The Impromptu off Versailles: “The phenomenal interest lies in the distance between the two Molières and the going back and forth of the mind’s eye from one to the other.”20 other.

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Yet, however much the knocking of the Listener may return the spectator to his or her senses, to the materiality, and indeed mortality, of the stage, the knock becomes reabsorbed back into the structure of the piece. The Listener manipulates the narrative, becomes inserted bodily into its structure, yet any authority the Listener may have had over this text is undercut by the deviations such as the moment when the Reader, about to flick backk through the book to find a reference to the protagonist’s illness, “fearful symptoms described at length page forty paragraph four,” has his hand stayed by the Listener: “[Starts to turn back the pages. Checked by L’s left hand. Resumes relinquished page] ” (CSP P, 286). This, and the look that is exchanged at the end of the piece, are the only moments of tactile contact between the two figures, the points at which they come closest, and also the points att which the difference and tactful distance between them is affirmed. Touch emerges from this “deviation” from the form. Tactfulness As well as staging the relationship between text and performance, the play also points to the relationship between self and other. A disjuncture is played out also between the bodies of the actors, a contrapuntal tension reminiscent of the “inclusive disjunction” that Deleuze perceives in Ghost Trio. o The formal tactics applied in the creation of the stage imagery of the play reflect its tactful approach to difference and alterity. The formal principle of the work, the “unbalancing act,” as Gontarski calls it, that occurs in the disjuncture between text as read, and image as staged, feeds into a discussion of relationality in this piece. The scenic and verbal elements of the piece come into contact, but do not collapse into a cohesive identity. Similarly, the two figures in the image resemble each other, but in the staged version are necessarily two distinct bodies. Ohio Impromptu dramatizes the paradoxx of touch: in touching the other, we reach the limits of the other and, in doing so, realize the other’s otherness, and the impossibility of touch. The tactics at work in this play are a tactful acknowledgment of the ethics and limits of touch. For Nancy, touch implies a distance, a spacing. Touch is a “contact in separation.” In the case of the embodied subject this is a relation of sense and matter, which does not make present “a consubstantiality of spirit and body,” but is in fact “a sundering/conjoining of the two.”21 Nancy’s interests lie in the philosophical, theological, and psychoanalytical conceptualizations of the body in Western culture. For him, the dualistic binary of mind and body, or soul and body, is intimately linked with the Christian tradition of incarnation. Nancy sees this tradition as putting body and soul, matter

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and sense “in touch”; yet in the way that Western, Christianized culture establishes this relation, touch involves a separation. In discussing this, he invokes a vocabulary of rupture and discontinuity.22 Ian James’s analysis off Nancy articulates how the figure of touch enables the philosopher to thinkk beyond the material/ideal binary.23 This has relevance not only for how we understand embodiment but also for how we think through the relationship between bodies. In Nancy’s Being Singular Plurall, the figure of touch has ethical significance. Nancy attempts to imagine the possibly of community, a “we,” which departs from the same-other binary. For Nancy, being rests neither in unity (singularity), nor in fragmentation (plurality); it rests rather in the relations between individuals, between groups, and cultures. It is the relation between that is of greatest significance for Nancy who writes that “being cannot bee anything but being-with-one-another.”24 The “I” does not precede the “we,” achieving a higher importance, rather the “I” exists in relation to community.25 Moving away from the self/other binary, Nancy’s ethical relation is one of contingency and contact-in-separation, for the “law w of touching is separation.” The relation between Listener and Reader, image and text, and, reality and illusion seem to dramatize such a standpoint. The closer these elements come to each other, and the more that identification seems likely, the more distance and disidentification can be perceived between them. If Beckett’s ethics are to be uncovered at any point in his work, it is arguably in those moments, exemplified in Ohio Impromptu’s act of touch, where there is a refusal to subsume the other into sameness. The other is approached, tactfully; disjuncture takes on an ethical dimension, thus permitting difference. In the first “movement” of Ohio Impromptu, the narrative describes the daily pacing its protagonist engages in on the Isle of Swans: “At the tip he would always pause to dwell on the receding stream. How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on. Then turn and his slow steps retrace” (CSP P, 286). It is in the second “movement” of the work that the relationship of the two figures, Reader and Listener, is brought under closer scrutiny. The distance maintained between the Reader and Listener, this act of maintaining and recognizing alterity contrasts with the image of the Seine river, its two streams reunited at the tip of the Isle of Swans. For Peter Boxall separation, loss, and relationality are configured through these verbal and scenic images: As the Isle of Swans divides the Seine, so exile divides the Listener from his unnamed partner; but the words read by Reader offer an image of confluence. [ . . . ] The performance of the play itself, in its ephemeral brevity, offers a fleeting possibility of this liquid confluence, this joyously erotic

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commingling. But powerful as this collapse of difference into sameness is, the focus of the play is on the recedence of this possibility.26 What is to be found in the image of confluence is not merely contact, or commingling, but the fantasy of a place or state where no touch is possible, where the act of touch has devolved into a melding or disintegration off the subject. It may be possible to view the touch of the knock as forming a sharp contrast with the fantasy of total touch, immersion even, in the water image. The material contact between hand and table is then implicated in the vision of alterity that is played out in Ohio Impromptu. The two figures might grow “to be as one,” yet the gaze at the end, the looking, which is also a touching, affirms their difference. The image of confluence remains in the realm of fantasy; it is never manifested in the stage image. This distance is in tune with the distance from the shade: the absent, dear one described in the narrative. This shade, like many others in Beckett’s work, remains a ghostlyy presence, hovering at the edge of the narrative, emphatically untouchable. Dramatic tension arises in this play, not from the sequential events off a coherent narrative, with its representative power supported by a cohesive stage image, but rather from the ever widening and narrowing gap between the spoken text and staged image. This dissonance reaches its apex in the final moments of the play, when the two figures raise their heads to gaze at each other: “Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise theirr heads and look at each other. Unblinking. Expressionless” (CSP P, 288). A limit is realized in the last few lines of the spoken text: “What thoughts who knows. Thoughts no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told” (CSP P, 288). It is not a dramatic climax, in which a tactless revelation of identity occurs. The eyes meet, with a tactful understanding that whatever “profounds of mind” the other has been buried in are inaccessible. This is a continuing articulation of inclusive disjuncture; the tactful distance between the figures, between staged image and spoken text, and between present body and absent shade is the place where the drama occurs. In those fleeting moments of touch, the meeting of the eyes, the hand off the listener, otherness, selfhood, and difference are realized and touch is revealed as nontouch, a tactful withdrawal. Noli me Tangere and Haptic Certitude In the teleplay Nacht und Trräumee, a dreamer dreams of a pair of hands emerging from the darkness to offer him comfort, conveying a cup to the

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lips of his dreamed self and a cloth to his brow and finally allowing him to rest his head upon them. In the often stark universe of Beckett’s later work, peopled by solitary individuals haunted by memory and ghosts of the past, such an act of touch and gentleness is significant, and the playlet exposes something important about the nature of touch and its relationship to love, loss, and absence. Yet the contact only happens in a dream that is dreamed by a lonely figure and, even as they appear, the kind hands withdraw, and the dream fades. This study’s final exploration is concerned not only with the ethics of touching, but also with its meaning in culture as a verifier of presence, human or divine. Touch, while it signifies an attempt to verify presence (one thinks of Doubting Thomas) also, in Nancy’s thinking, reveals an anxiety over presence. Filmed in Germany in the 1980s, the imagery of Beckett’s last TV play, Nacht und Trräumee, provides a merging point on the TV screen for the aesthetic and the religious. Drawing on the similarities of experience that Jean Claude Bologne perceives between medieval Christian mystics and certain modern authors, Bryden suggests that Nacht und Trräumee may be Beckett’s most “mystical” play.27 This play, like the paintings of the noli me tangeree scene that Nancy describes28 is organized around a pair of hands. On the surface, Nacht und Trräumee is simple, with minimal action: a man sits at a table, rests his head on his hands, and we hear the last three bars of Schubert’s Liedd of the same name, which is, in translation, “Night and Dreams.” It is on the cue of Schubert’s music’s being hummed that the “evening light,” coming from a window behind the figure, fades, and the music sets an emotional tone of quiet contemplation for the play. The figure rests his head on his hands; in the right-hand upper corner of this image, we see his dreamed self appear. Disembodied hands emerge out of the surrounding darkness to convey a cup to the lips of the dreamed self, a cloth to his brow. All action is then repeated with a close-up on the dreamed self. Such surface simplicity belies the intricacy with which this play and other of the later works are constructed. Beckett the TV artist is, for Jonathan Kalb, a “painter off miniatures.”29 While written for an audiovisual medium this play draws back from overt visualization. Its images are dim, gray shards of the visible, and the sense that takes over in this occluded space is that of touch. Like the other television plays such as Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds . . . this playy speaks of the impulse to call up the presence of an other, the urge to touch again the body of someone now lost. They also dramatize the impossibilityy of that touch ever occurring. Bodies, though they may be the only receptacles available for subjectivity, are, in Beckett’s work, often uncomfortable, subject to decay, pain, and death. Moreover, while the body is necessary for knowledge of or

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connection to the world, this connecting perceptual “flesh of things,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term,30 is equally subject to breakdown and diminishment. A sense of pessimism regarding the place of the human in the world often pervades Beckett’s drama, and this is manifest in damaged or dysfunctional perceptual systems. As in the image in Film of the window with its tattered blind, the human perceives the world through a frayed veil. This sense off rupture, of incommensurability between the human and his/her surroundings, emerges in Beckett’s work in the breakdown and failure of both perceptual and epistemological systems. Commenting on art in a letter to lifelongg friend and poet Thomas MacGreevy written in 1934, Beckett expresses the notion that the chiastic connections between self and world and between self and self are not guaranteed. He writes, “What a relief [Cézanne’s] Mont St. Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscape—Van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruysdaels, Hobbema . . . Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever.”31 While this comment expresses a key modernist sentiment regarding the place of the human in the world, it also lends itself to an understanding of Beckett’s pessimism regarding the abilities of the human at both a physical, perceptual level and a metaphysical or spiritual one. Humanity cannot fully see, know, or touch the world orr the divine. Haptic Certitude J Jean-Luc Nancy observes an anxiety permeating Christian thought about presence and truth and, by implication, permeating the way in which Western culture imagines corporeality. It is an anxiety that is fundamentally linked to the act of touch. He describes Christianity as being obsessed with h the act of making present. Hoc est enim corpus meum (this is my body), the phrase that is recited during the Christian ritual as bread is transformed into the body of Christ, is a continued attempt to insist upon and verify flesh and blood presence.32 The Christian urge to make present, to touch the body off Christ, offers reassurance, conferring a measure of solidity upon the sensible world; yet, as Ian James puts it, Nancy contends that such reassurance is underpinned by a certain anguish, a fear that the world of appearance is a world of unsubstantial shadows and reflections.33 For Nancy, this anxietyy over presence reveals an obsession with presence: “The anxiety, the desire to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to bee that body and be nothing butt thatt, forms the principle of Western (un)reason. That’s why the body, bodily, never happens, least of all when it’s named and convoked. For us the body is always sacrificed: eucharist.” eucharist. 34 The body of the risen Jesus must depart (be

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beyond touch)—the whole edifice of Christianity rests on this principle. Absence is required in order for presence to be guaranteed; yet, paradoxically, this absence continually throws the possibility of true presence into question. Touch is an important element of religious practice, underpinningg notions of taboo and sacredness—that which cannot be touched, that which is unclean, and that which is holy. While the act of touch is a key feature off three of the gospels (Christ healing, absolving, raising from the dead), this kind of remedial touch is conspicuously absent from John’s gospel. Instead of touch associated with Christ as healer, touch in that gospel is connected with presence. There are two key moments in this text referring to touch (or the refusal of touch): one is, of course, Thomas’s hand in the wound off Christ’s resurrected body.35 The other is noli me tangere, e Christ’s command to Mary Magdalene to refrain from touching him following his resurrection.36 On the one hand, there is in this narrative an intimate contact, an intense, penetrating touch between Christ and Thomas. On the other, there is the demand for the tactful withdrawal of the noli me tangeree scene. In the Thomas scene, touch, the insertion of the finger in the wound is the absolute verifier of presence, a moment of haptic certitude. Yet, for Maryy Magdalene, touch is not permitted. Christ is leaving and must be permitted to do so. In Noli Me Tangere, e Nancy’s examination of the representations of this moment throughout the history of art leads him to the conclusion that the two bodies—of Christ and Mary—displayed at this instant, one off glory, the other of flesh, reveal that “the possibility of carnal decay is given there, along with the possibility of glory.”37 For Nancy, this signifies the reliance of the spiritual upon the material, indicating a depletion of the notion of a metaphysical realm. For in Christianity, even though the body appears to be denigrated, it is, in fact, its essential element: “only a body can be cut down or raised up, because only a body can touch or not touch. A spirit can do nothing of the sort.”38 Without the material, earthly body of Christ, there would be no possibility of resurrection. The religious signifiers that overlay Nacht und Trräumee do not refer to guilt or punishment, in the way that Eh Joee does, though the agony of the body in crucifixion is never far away. This play, like the others of Beckett’s televisual canon, circulate around an imagined sensory event; it is a quiet séance, in which the presence of a lost other, perhaps female, is sought out (Beckett suggested but did not specify gender during filming).39 The called-upon presence, as proximate as it is, can only be realized through imagined touch, sight, or audition, but specifically here it is touch. The face of the other whose hands emerge from the darkness is never visualized. The dreamer dreams and imagines hands alone bringing a cup to his lips, wiping his brow with a cloth, and finally cradling his head. Herren

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points out that the play recalls the narrative of Veronica, the woman who wiped the face of Christ as he carried his cross, and he explores how it also responds to the tradition of religious painting, specifically representations off the Agony in the Garden. The cup, which Herren links to Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane,40 may also allude to the wine of the last supper. Nacht und Trräumee is a play formed at the intersection of music and painting, religious iconography and romantic sensibility, as well as technology. As Knowlson points out, “In religious paintings, a vision often appears in a top corner of the canvas, normally the Virgin Mary, Christ ascended in his glory, or a ministering angel. The chalice, cloth and comforting hand are similarly images commonly found in religious paintings.””41 It is not merelyy the obvious religious references and iconography that are significant here but also the ways in which the play privileges touch as a mode of contact. In addition to these important indicators of a religious heritage operatingg within this play, there are two poles or signs of presence at work in these plays, echoing the differing types of presences of Christ in the Gospel off John. There is the body of clay, the one that Thomas can touch; and there is the body of light, the one that Mary Magdalene is not permitted to touch. The distinction between the material flesh and what might be termed a virtual bodyy42 is evident here. In Nacht und Trräumee, the televisual processes of the play, whereby the dreamer dreams an image of himself, undermine the materiality in which they are supposedly rooted. The act of touch can be linked to the absence-presence complex of Christian metaphysics, that paradox whereby the truth of God is only available in the retreat of his presence. There are two pulls producing this paradox: on the one hand, the desire to affirm presence (to touch); on the other, the need to fall back from presence because in being verified, it disappears. With this in mind, I turn to a consideration of Nacht und Trräumee as a play for television in which it is possible to connect these discourses of theology and phenomenology to aesthetics and technology, the body incarnate and the mediated body. It must be noted that, in relation to Beckett and God/religious belief, the fact that religious iconography is apparent in these plays—or indeed in other of Beckett’s works—does not suggest that spiritual transcendence is ever given as a possibility or that faith can offer some comfort. For, as Bryden points out, when Beckett makes use of religious material, his focus tends to be on suffering and longing rather than on redemption and resurrection. This is evident in both Eh Joee and Nacht und Trräumee. The latter does not focus upon the transcendent and redemptive facets of the crucifixion and resurrection but is more concerned with issues of presence, authenticity, originality, and doubt. The former references the crucifixion, tracing a

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bathetic parallel with Christ’s passion while also sharing similar concerns regarding presence and haptic certitude. The Vera Icon and the Concern for Presence It is significant that no face is ever revealed behind the hands in Nacht undd Trräumee. In the script, “B raises his head further to gaze up at invisible face” (CSP P, 306), the hands appear out of darkness, offer comfort, and are gone. The dream does not include the face of the other but concentrates instead on the tactile connectedness of the hands. In this way, the hands are depersonalized: intimate, yet also distant. The tension between absence and presence, between the body that Thomas is invited to touch and the body that Maryy Magdalene is not permitted to touch, is played out on the small screen in Nacht und Trräumee. For, although the play apparently shifts between the two levels, actual and produced, real and virtual, the level of the real is exposed as being as riddled with absence as is the virtual. Louis Marin writes of a trompe l’oeil effect in what is among the most sacred of painted images, those that depict the vera icon, the relic of Christ’s holy veil. He observes how representations of the vera icon in the art of the cinquecento and seicento defy a key precondition of painted representation: the hand of the artist. Thus, from the mythology that has emerged out off the Christian narrative, we understand that the image of Christ had come to be imprinted on the cloth directly (almost photographically), without the mediation of a human hand. To create this impression in painting, the vera icon appears as “pure image without background” (see, e.g., Domenico Fetti, “The Veil of Veronica” [ca. 1620] or Hans Memling, “Saint Veronica” [ca. 1470–1475]).43 This defies the materiality of the image. Not only is the presence of Christ predicated on his absence, but also this paradox finds its way into the heart of the representation of the Christ-figure in the image of the vera icon. The image is made sacred, dematerialized—a trick of the eye. Such a view of the Christ event and its representations is pertinent for an understanding of religiosity in Nacht und Trräumee and, indeed, in other off Beckett’s later work. A question mark is placed over presence, as the material body is sacrificed in Beckett’s later plays. Only vestiges of it remain in Not I and That Timee, which have bodies that are “like gone.” The body is a bare semblance coming out of the dark in Footfallss and A Piece of Monologuee and is abstracted to the point of disappearance in Quadd and Ghost Trio. o As McMullan writes, “Beckett produces imperfect, incomplete, body fragments or body shadows. He focuses on the limits and limitations of perceptual and conceptual mastery or possession enacted through technologies of the

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mediated body””44 and seems to be responding to a central question raised byy this study: how is one to touch the other, as artist, as human? In this regard, the image that is created in Nacht und Trräumee not only has readily apparent religious signifiers in its content but is also indicative of the absence that lies at the heart of representation. The history of representation, for Nancy, is torn by this fissure of absence. The Christian cross lies at the center of this: it is a “representation of the divine representative dying to the world of representation in order to give it the sense of its original presence,””45 played out also in the absent presence signified by the vera icon. The pessimism noted earlier regarding perceptual and, in this case representative, systems is not as simple here as an awareness of failure. It is also a question of how one is to approach the object, as an artist, as a perceiver, asking what the holes in the fabric of perception might reveal. As Boxall puts it so eloquently, for the later Beckett, “[t]he veil which hides, which occludes, is also the surface which offers a fleeting contact between things and nothingness, between presence and absence.””46 The image is a product of the dreamer’s mind, with his desire for comfort. Cued by Schubert’s music, a televised image produces a televised image and the process repeats in such a way as to suggest—as in many of Beckett’s dramas—that this process will continue ad infinitum. As Christinaa Adamou puts it, “[T]he dream plunges us into a cycle in which, in sealing one hole another is opened.””47 This sense of an image being created before the viewer’s eyes is a key theme of Nacht und Trräumee, one of Beckett’s plays that “increasingly reduce[s] the body to a series of semblances,” shifting “the viewer’s focus from the image on screen to the conditions of its emergence and perception.””48 Presence is exhibited in the tactile contact of the dreamed image but never made tangible. Such intangible presence recalls the biblical scene of noli me tangeree; presence is revealed, yet apart. This touching image reveals intimacy at a distance and an image without materiality. In Nachtt und Trräumee, the act of creating the image is realized as an act of recording. The artist is imaged as the solitary insomniac, tending the borders between life and death, the real and the virtual. The creation of the image is the cultivation of death. It is, at once, the raising of the body to the light (its recording, immortalization) and the acknowledgment of its fall back into materiality, as the head falls forward to rest on hands: his own, the other’s. To paraphrase Eh Joee, it is “matter made light.” Presence cannot be guaranteed; the very process by which the vera icon comes to verify presence is undermined. Such insecurity over truth leads to anxiety over presence and authenticity, and this connects back to what I term “haptic certitude”— — the assurance that touch brings and the insecurity that the need to touch reveals. The televising of the body is the transformation of flesh into light,

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material body into information signal. It is resurrection predicated on the absenting of the body. Televisual Presences Philip Auslander argues that, in contemporary mediatized culture, we can no longer think of the categories of the live and mediatized as binary opposites. Mediatization is “now explicitly and implicitly embedded within the live experience.””49 There is a sense that, through this proliferation of mediatizing, something vital has been lost from the live and from presence, “which can only be compensated for by making the perceptual experience of the live as much as possible like that of the mediatised.”50 This gives even more significance to the way in which Nacht und Trräumee meditates on embodiment and presence—especially when we consider the nature of the medium for which it was written. In Nacht und Trräumee, the materiality of the bodyy resides in its televising. The play moves beyond the binary of live/mediatized to recognize that mediatization structures our sense of the world and to reveal that the “live” is perhaps inaccessible. Yet, while it operates within the space of mediatization, it also meditates on the nature of the sacred image and the sacrificed body. How, then, is this sense of the sacred to be read in relation to the medium of television? What does it mean for this epitome off minimalism to be present on a medium that more and more has come to be associated with visual plenitude, fast editing, and consumer tastes? Manyy of Beckett’s television plays exploit the Chinese box effect, where images exist within images, and Nacht und Trräumee is a good example of this. Forr the image that is created, the window that is opened in the right-hand corner of the screen is a dream box. It is a window, albeit an opaque one, onto the desires and longings of the dreamer. It is also a self-conscious echo off the small window that sits in the corner of the domestic living room. This effect is apparent in Eh Joee also, as the close-up narrows the parameters of Joe’s space, trapping him inside the box that is the television as well as the box of his mind in a way that emphasizes the meta-filmic quality off many of Beckett’s television plays. The angularity of the settings for the other television plays reveal something similar: the space in Ghost Trio is organized into a boxed-in room, while diagrammatically organized Quadd sees the figures moving around a square, which although two-dimensional, echoes the limits of the television frame. That said, for Voigts-Virchow, the real alternative that Beckett provides to the Baudrillardian ceaseless flow off commodified, obscene images lies, not in the self-reflexiveness of his work, that self-consciousness of medium that his plays display, “but rather [in] their overall dramatization of deprivation and absence.” absence. Scopophilia, the

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desire to see, encounters, in Nacht und Trräumee, the “inscrutability of shadow w and austerity of movement” and an aesthetic of failure.51 When Joe sits alone and is visited by the voice, she brings to him a vision of a body now lost to him, long since put beyond his reach. That figure, “spirit made light,” manifests like a broadcast from the void, particulates of information registeringg on the screen of the mind. In . . . but the clouds . . . , similarly, the woman’s face appears on the screen as a spectral object who does not return the viewer’s gaze, “a face without head suspended in the void,” as Deleuze puts it,52 her existence reduced to the parameters of screen and signal. Nacht und Trräumee not only contains religious signifiers, it also references the sacred—that which is put beyond touch. Yet, in a counterpoint to this, the hands that emerge from the darkness actually touch the face of the dreamer. Such moments, when actual contact between bodies is visualized, are rare in Beckett; so their implications must be noted. This touching is neither a violence nor an imposition; rather such fragile and tactful touch dramatizes how touch might occur and how the relation with the other might take place, without violence and without isolation. Finally, and in spite off the fact that this play seems to circle around an act of touch, its mediated, dream-like setting suggests the preclusion of that touch, the impossibilityy of accessing a true origin for the image of the dreamer. It is here that the noli me tangeree scene meets most evidently with the “sacrifice” of the bodyy in Beckett’s later work. That sacrifice involves the raising of the material body to the light, which puts it beyond touch. The body becomes mediated flesh. This play demonstrates the way in which, in Beckett’s work, subjects are held together by contradictions. Approaching the play with the sense of touch in mind acknowledges its connections not only to the Christian narrative but also to the paradoxes inherent in that narrative, which Nancyy elucidates. Subjects are shown to be caught within a variety of nexuses: presence and absence, flesh and spirit, matter and culture, the body of clay and the body of light. In Beckett’s work, bodies sit (are situated), in this way, as both present and about to depart, always about to be touched, always failingg to touch.

CONCLUSION

Departing Bodies: Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangere

T

he obsession with ascertaining presence or holiness through touch is given its most graphic realization in the Doubting Thomas scene of John’s Gospel.1 Peggy Phelan’s reading of the representation of this scene in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomass points out the pornographic quality of this image. She writes that “[i]n Caravaggio’s painting and in the spectacular penetrations of the body given to us in photographic porn, we are made to see that there is an injury, a wound, a hole, that makes all we see incomplete, partial, painful.”2 Thomas cannot trust his eyes, and instead must thrust his finger into the wound in order to verify that this is in fact the risen Christ. It is a form of blindness, driving his need for haptic certitude. The insertion of the finger and the wound itself are both signs of the limits of vision. As Phelan goes on to suggest, the wound in Christ’s body opens up an interiority that painting cannot expose, thus underscoring the limit of the look.3 The skin of the body becomes the skin of the painting and the wound or tear in its surface reveals the limits of vision. This “blindness” is associated with the viscous and tacky inner space of the human body. I use the word tacky here to denote the liquid viscera that the body produces, and, at a conceptual level, the notion of touch implies an affirmation of the real, of visceral presence and immediacy—an ideology that is also a fantasy of homogeneity, of assimilation, of reduction, and which Nancy’s warns against: a touch that turns into a grip.4 Caravaggio’s representation of Christ arguably puts the “body” back into the resurrection. In the painting, no light surrounds Christ’s head, as it does, for example, in Rembrandt’s version (painted in 1634), and the bodies presented are, as is Caravaggio’s style, ordinary, with clothes torn and brows

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wrinkled in doubt or curiosity. Despite the imminence of Christ’s ascension, this body is an earthly one. The image fits with Nancy’s account, where in spite of Christianity’s disavowal of the body, it is absolutely necessary for the resurrection to take place. Only a body can be raised, just as only a body can fall, “a spirit can do nothing of the sort.”5 With their awareness of corporeality, and stark moments of sensoryy engagement, Beckett’s dramas are situated here: at the moment when doubt meets flesh. This touching of the wound discovers not the possibility of transcendence, but the verification of a fleshly body lying beneath discourse, somewhere that the gaze cannot penetrate. Beckett’s bodies are fallen ones. In this, they are like the bodies in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Parable off the Blind” (1568), which are imaged falling one by one to the ground. Such fallen bodies are graphically represented in the prose, particularly How It Iss: “on my face in the mud and the dark I see me”6 and the figure addressed in Companyy “on his back in the dark.”7 The crawling Molloyy, the inert body off Malone Dies, s the immersive tactility of The Lost Oness, where touch, as Maude notes, becomes the only mode of communication and perception in this phenomenologically reduced space,8 all reveal the fallen body of Beckett’s work. There is a tactile materiality visualized in the earlier drama and hinted at in the later plays. Bodies like that of Krapp’s in the earlier work are weighty and decrepit. In the later drama, a tension is generated between the memory off embodiment and the abstract spaces the figures inhabit. Whole bodies are “like gone,” but their vestiges remain, produced discursively. In spite of the near-absence of bodies in the later plays, there are still remnants of graphicc materiality. Mouth’s speech in Not I is a “contortion”; May of Footfallss suffers from a “shudder of the mind.” Joe’s face is tense and sweating, the cameraa zooms in on the matted, unkempt hair of F in Ghost Trio. o Like the stare of the protagonist of Catastrophee, the recalcitrance of bodies continually emerges, exceeding the representational frames that would contain them. The speakerr of A Piece of Monologuee describes where bodies meet clay in the most literal sense, at the lips of the grave. This is the blind spot of being that, in representation, tears a hole in the fabric of the visual, leaving only the touch of the coffin’s wood on skin and the darkness of the enclosing earth. While it is important to recognize the ways in which Beckett’s work sustains the visceral tackiness of bodies, as the hand in the wound, there is a simultaneous pessimism about that touch and the possibility of verifying presence. Derval Tubridy considers how this idea of “incarnation,” off word made flesh, opens a vista onto the relationship of body to language in Beckett’s work, where the continued disjuncture between the two is played out.9 Thinking of Christ as a locus, a site of the intersection of immaterial world and material body, Tubridy draws a comparison with the tymp panum image g from The Unnameable. e 10 The body is never fully incarnated

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in Beckett; word and flesh may touch, yet no more than Merleau-Ponty’s touching hands, language and body, spirit and matter never become fullyy one. The impulse to speak, to “say it,” is never satisfied and, paradoxically, the goal of speech appears to be silence.11 This is where strands of the nolii me tangeree come to the fore in Beckett’s work. In dramatizing these fallen bodies there is an acknowledgment of the connection to the other, as well as the enmired quality of embodied being. Self and self, and self and other are implicated in relation to one another, in a chiastic relation. Yet, as was noted at the outset of this study, this chiasm does not come full circle. This is what the autopsy, my own critical version of Thomas’s gesture, has shown. At the same time as touch is imaged or suggested, for example, in the erotics of Eh Joee and the “works” of What Wheree, there is simultaneously a motion toward withdrawal. The plays may present or hint at a visceral and tackyy corporeality, thus affirming Beckett’s theater as a theater of presence. Yet dramatized also is a pessimism about the possibility of “getting in touch,” either with oneself or with the other. Both Film and Krapp’s Last Tapee are realizations of the noncoincidence that lies along the course of the chiasm. The connection with one’s body and the body of the other is always imbued with the imminence of separation. As well as pessimism about the possibility of touch taking place and verifying presence, there is also the tendency toward a tactful withdrawal. The relationality of the figures in Ohio Impromptu prompts the question: Is there another way to touch? One that is less tacky, and more tactful with “no pawing in the manner of flesh and blood,” as in That Timee (CSP P, 231)? Perhaps it is that, as much as Beckett digs in the viscera and situates his dramatic images in the “hole,” he simultaneously proposes that this touch is just that: tacky, and perhaps unnecessary. It verifies little, with bodies promised to absence regardless. It may even count as violence. With profoundly nonmetaphysical resonances, the opposite of the tackiness of the material bodyy is not transcendent spirit or sanctified flesh, but the absent body. The ethics of the haptic lies in letting bodies be, letting bodies go: noli me tangere. e A discourse of haptics is capable of addressing the ways in which one encounters the senses and the problematics of embodiment in Beckett’s aesthetic, as these issues manifest in a limiting of vision within the domains off audiovisual media. Beckett’s aesthetic of impotence and ignorance invokes a tactile epistemology as an alternative to the power, mastery, and dominance associated with sight. Yet aspects of the dramas studied here may suggest that any privilege that might attach to the alternative mode of engagement between subject and object, and self and other, is continually diminished, even as it is being proposed. Rather than accept that the concept of touch is Beckett s “answer” Beckett’s answer to a perceived dominance of visuality in culture, the probprob lems of the link between the hand and the metaphysics of presence (Derrida)

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and the role of the hand in authority, power, and coercion must be taken into account. As with any “system” that one might attempt to discern in Beckett’s work, it must be recognized also that no interpretation will be without exceptions and deviations. It is this fact that makes further study of Beckett’s workk both possible and exciting. In the context of this study, the plays examined sit neither fully under the sign of touch (Thomas’s doubt) nor nontouch (nolii me tangeree), but are constantly in touch with the two. In this productive and inclusive disjunction between touch and nontouch, the visible and the invisible, and between presence and absence, bodies are always on the verge off touching, and simultaneously about to take their leave. In Western culture and its traditions of representation the act of touch has theological resonances and is central to ways in which Western civilization conceptualizes presence, divinity, and the human body. On the ceilingg of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo famously painted God and Adam. The image represents the moment before or after God has given Adam life. The fingers are not touching and the gap between the outstretched hands could represent the tantalizing distance between God and man. This gap, this near-touch, lies at the core of human endeavor and human doubt. Touch, in Nancy’s terms, reveals the Christian obsession with presence; that urge to have tangible evidence of God’s existence, evidence that would make human existence finally meaningful.12 The image of human and divine nott touching demonstrates both the imperative to touch and the epistemological doubt that it signals. Meaningfulness is permanently thrown into doubt by the intimation that touch never actually takes place. It may never have happened between the first human and the divine presence. It fails to happen between self and self—as Merleau-Ponty puts it “my left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand.”13 It never really happens also between people. In the act of touch, perhaps all one ever touches is a limit, a film, a painted surface, or a skin. Beckett’s aesthetic of failure, this imaging of the limits of the hand, may be said to express a degree of pessimism about human existence and interpersonal communication. Yet, as can be seen in the structure of the plays that have been examined here, the continued derailment of the possibility of touch is the source of the artworkk itself. Beckett’s work reveals the productivity of failure. Not only this, but the impulse to express also reveals something fundamental about humanity. Humanity continues to attempt the impossible, to touch the other, through art, through ethical practice. The continued failure of touch and doubt over its efficacy drives the impulse to reach outward, to discover and demarcate the limits of the other and the limits of the self.

Notes

Introduction

Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy

1. Margrit Shildrick, “Some Speculations on Matters of Touch,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophyy 26.4 (2001): 402. 2. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, y trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 3. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, y trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: G. Bretschneider, 1985), 58–59. 4. This is Oppenheim’s central argument in The Painted Wordd (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). She focuses upon Beckett’s “dialogue” with visual art, and argues for the importance of critical exegesis of the visual dimension of Beckett’s work, as visuality and visual perception are essential to his aesthetic. 5. Quoted in Oppenheim’s introduction to Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual arts, and Non-print Mediaa (New York: Garland, 1999), xv. This comment is from an interview with Jonathan Kalb in Beckett in Performancee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 235. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2002), 41–2. 7. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Doublee, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder, 1993 [1970]). 8. S. E. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’ huii 11 (2000): 169–170. 9. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Marks has been influenced in her thinking by a turn in film studies to phenomenology and affect. Of particular note in this regard is the work of Vivian Sobchack who sets out the case for such an approach in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experiencee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) and in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culturee (CA: University of California Press, 2004). For more on haptics and film, see Antonia Lant, “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,” Octoberr 59 (1992): 87–112; and “Haptical Cinema,” Octoberr 74 (1995): 45–73.

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10. Marks is here quoting a conversation with Mike Hoolboom, Skin of thee Film, 162. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 12. 12. Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Ismss (Nebraska: Nebraska Universityy Press, 2001), 200. 13. “What has happened is that the sensory-motor schema is no longer in operation, but at the same time it is not overtaken or overcome. It is shattered from the inside. That is perceptions and actions ceased to be linked together, and spaces are now neither coordinated nor filled” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, 39). 14. Marks, The Skin of the Film, 127 15. André Lepecki and Sally Banes, The Senses in Performancee (London: Routledge, 2006), 1. 16. Of what is understood as dramatic in Aristotelian theater, Lehmann, in Postdramatic Theaterr, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), writes: “It is essentially the unity of time that has to support the unity of this logic that is meant to manage without confusion, digression and rupture” (160). 17. On narrative, Aristotle writes that the plot of the epic “should be made dramatic, as in tragedies, dealing with a single action which is whole and complete and has beginning, middle and end,” Book XXIII, line 15, Poeticss, trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 61. 18. Maike Bleeker, “Look who’s Looking! Perspective and the Paradox of Scientificc Subjectivity,” Theater Research Internationall 29 (2004): 31–32. 19. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallaxx 3 (1996), 4. 20. Derrida, On Touching, g 46. 21. Ibid., 210. 22. Ibid., 182; emphasis in original. 23. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 209–10 and. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visiblee and the Invisiblee, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern Universityy Press, 1969), 208. 24. Derrida, On Touching, g 212. 25. Ibid., 9. 26. Stanton Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporaryy Dramaa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 31. 27. Ulrika Maude, “The Body of Memory: Beckett and Merleau-Ponty,” in Beckettt and Philosophyy, ed. Richard Lane (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 120. 28. Ian James, in The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy off Jean-Luc Nancyy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), compares the language that Nancy uses to that of Merleau-Ponty, suggesting that “ratherr than invoking a vocabulary of ‘incarnate sense,’ of intertwining, chiasmus, and reciprocity as Merleau-Ponty does to describe the way in which the world is opened up through bodily intentionality, Nancy invokes a vocabulary of rupture and discontinuity” (132). Yet it is possible to discern a similar vocabularyy

Notes

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

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of rupture running through the Merleau-Ponty text, where the completion off the perceptual circle is always imminent, never actualized. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpuss, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 17. Ibid., 5. Derrida, On Touching, g 162. Anna McMullan’s Theater on Triall (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) pays particular attention to the fragmentation of the visual image that occurs in Beckett’s work, noting, e.g., in relation to Ohio Impromptu, how the “two levels of representation, the scenic and the verbal, are therefore deliberately differentiated to produce a juxtaposition of narrative and visual image” (144). Nancy, Corpus, s 53. . Ibid., 5. See Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Bodyy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 4. Anna McMullan, “Performing Vision(s): Perspectives on Spectatorship in Beckett’s Theater,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebookk, ed. by Jennifer Jeffers (NY: Garland, 1998), 134. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater,” 172. Anna McMullan, “From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis)embodiment in Beckett’s Theater,” in Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed. Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 107. Roger Callois (“Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia,” Octoberr 31 [1984]), writing on cross-cultural aspects of play in human behavior, suggests that the end goal of such mimicry in nature is a merging of the creature into the background of its environment (16–32). There is a relationality between the backdrops of Beckett’s dramatic spaces and the objects that fill them, and in many cases the threat of merger, coupled with a desire to merge; the absorbingg darkness, cradling the figure in Rockabyy is a case in point. In other cases the mimicry is of a formal nature, with camera mirroring eye and so on. Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Bodyy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 38. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godott (London: Faber, 1965), 62. Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); and Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Playss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

1 Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy 1. William Shakespeare, King Learr (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983 [1975]), 205. 2. Maurice Maeterlinck, Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, s trans. Maya Slater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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3. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godott (London: Faber, 1965), 63. 4. José Saramago, Blindnesss, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Vintage, 2005). 5. For further analysis of this painting and the politics of vision, see David Forgacs, “Blindness and the Politics of the Gaze,” in Indeterminate Bodiess, ed. Naomi Segal, Roger Cook, and Lib Taylor (UK: Palgrave, 2003). 6. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prosee (London: Faber, 1984). Henceforth referred to in parentheses, in the text, as CSP. P 7. Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, s ed. and trans. Margaret Jourdain (New York: Lennox Hill, 1972), 87. 8. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 240. 9. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpuss, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 17. 10. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, y trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham, 2008), 48. 11. See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame:The Life of Samuel Beckettt (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 124. 12. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memoryy, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Dover, 2004), 90. 13. In the notes for the 1969 Berlin Schiller Theater production, Beckett comments on Krapp’s relationship with his machine: “tendency of a solitary person to enjoy affective relationships with objects, in particular here with tape-recorder. Smiles, looks, reproaches, caresses, taps, exclamations [ . . . ] A little throughout. Never forced,” thus emphasizing Krapp’s anthropomorphizing impulse. The machine is a companion for him. See James Knowlson, ed., The Theatricall Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Volume III: Krapp’s Last Tapee, (London: Faber, 1992), 79. 14. Pierre Chabert, “The Body in Beckett’s Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 8 (1982): 27–28. 15. Bergson, Matter and Memoryy, 89. 16. The three winds forward are two, three, and four seconds, respectively, leading up to a “crescendo of ejaculation.” See Knowlson, Theatrical Notebooks off Samuel Beckettt, 91. 17. Eckart Voigts-Virchow applies this term in his analysis of Quadd (see “Quadd I and Teletubbies: “Aisthetic” Panopticism versus Reading Beckett,” Samuell Beckett Today/Aujourd’ huii [henceforth referred to as SBTA] 11 [2000]: 211), though it has perhaps some uses in the context of Krapp’s Last Tapee. Indicatingg “sensation,” the term was appropriated and reevaluated within postmodern aesthetics in order to valorize a more sensual approach to aesthetics. See Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Aisthesiss (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990); and Wolfgang Welsch, Aisthesiss (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987). 18. “a glint of the old eye to come . . . ways of seeing in Krapp’s Last Tape ” (Annaa McMullan, Paper given at the Beckett working group of the International Federation for Theater Research annual conference, University of Maryland June 26–Julyy 1, 2005).

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19. Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, Proust and Three Dialoguess (London: Calder, 1965[1935]), 13. 20. Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 13.emphasis in original. 21. Rosette Lamonte, “Krapp: Anti-Proust,” in Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape: A Theater Workbookk, edited by James Knowlson (London: Brutus, 1980). 162. 22. McMullan, “a glint of the old eye to come . . . ways of seeing in Krapp’s Lastt Tapee.” 23. Julie Campbell, “The Semantic Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tapee,” SBTA 6 (1997): 63. 24. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Textt, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 188. 25. Lamonte, “Krapp: Anti-Proust,” 163. 26. In her discussion of the automatic or reflexive body in Beckett’s work, Marinaa Warner suggests that Beckett seeks out the integrity of the “body’s thought,” the visceral immediacy of the hanged man’s emission, or the eyelids comingg down. “Who Can Shave an Egg?: Foreign Tongues and Primal Sounds in Mallarmé and Beckett,” in Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Anna McMullan and S. E. Wilmer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 60. The context in which Beckett makes this comment is to be found in a letter to Thomas McGreevy in which Beckett suggests that Mallarmé writes‘ Jesuitical poetry’ and supposes himself a ‘dirty low church P.[Prostetant]’ ‘mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen’. This concern forr the intrusion of the body into the aesthetic frame in a way which dismantles or disrupts representation (irreducible materiality characterized by integrity orr truthfulness) was to becomes a feature of Beckett’s work. See The Letters off Samuel Beckett 1929-19400. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 134-5. This issue is dealt with in more detail in chapter 3. 27. Bergson, Matter and Memoryy, 96. 28. Yasunari Takahashi, “Memory Inscribed in the Body: Krapp’s Last Tapee and the Noh play Izutzu,” in The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage, e ed. Enoch Brater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60. This is the author’s own translation of the line. A complete translation can be found in Ezra Pound and Ernest Fennellosa, The Classic Noh Theater of Japan (New w York: New Directions, 1959). 29. Martin Held’s words, who played Krapp in Berlin in 1969, in an interview with Ronald Hayman, in Knowlson ed., Krapp’s Last Tape: A Theater Workbook, k 67. 30. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancyy, trans. Christine Irizarryy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 210. 31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisiblee, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 9. 32. Takahashi, “Memory Inscribed in the Body,” 58. 33. In 1977, Beckett aided his longtime friend Rick Cluchey in the direction of Krapp’s Last Tapee in Berlin. Cluchey recounts that, during a break in rehearsal, “Beckett depicts with a smile the image of an old Krapp who had

160

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

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made the opposite decision: surrounded by an aged wife and many, many children . . . ‘Good God!’” It is as if Krapp knows that “whichever decision he might have taken, he would have failed” (Rick Cluchey and Michael Haerdter, “Krapp’ss Last Tape : Production Report,” in Knowslon ed., Samuel Beckettt, Krapp’s Lastt Tape: A Theater Workbook, k 128). For Deleuze (Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam [London: Continuum, 1986], 60–61), quoting as it does an earlier tradition of filmmaking, Film exemplifies what he terms the “movement-image,” the camera following fluid matter in motion, and is also an “astonishing attempt” to answer the question of how we can be rid of perception—the perception off others, and the perception of self by self (69). In 1964, after the filming of Film, Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider saying that while the piece has been “troubled by a certain failure to communicate fully byy purely visual means the basic intention,” he could see it having value chiefly “on a formal and structural level” (Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneiderr [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998], 166). James Knowlson, Damned to Famee (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 523. Biographical sources confirm Beckett’s exposure to and continued interest in Berkeley. His critical interest in the philosopher was not restricted to his studies as an undergraduate in the early twenties. For example, a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, penned in 1933, recounts his reading of Berkeley’s Commonplace Bookk, written when the philosopher was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. He remarks that it is “full of profound things, and at the same time of a foul (and false) intellectual canaillerie, enough to put you against reading any more” (Martha Dow w Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–19400 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 154). This is from the first line in Beckett’s essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress, s which was to become Finnegan’s Wake. e See Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writingss and A Dramatic Fragment, t ed. by Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 19. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisiblee, 134–135. Ibid., 138. Samuel Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989 9, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New w York: Grove Press, 1995), 62–63. Ulrika Maude notes the novella’s emphasis on vision, “the eye itself is presented not as detached and disembodied, but as fleshly and vulnerable, subject to damage and decay.” By doing this, “Beckett brings vision closer to the proximity senses.” He thereby disables the eye as symbolic of detached observation. “‘Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order’: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty and Perception,” in Beckett and Phenomenologyy, ed. Ulrikaa Maude and Mathew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009), 86 and 89. This is the word Alan Schneider uses to describe the texture of Keaton’s eyelid, “On Directing Film,” SBTA 4 (1995): 37. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisiblee, 138. Ibid.

Notes 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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Ibid., 147. Ibid., 148. Derrida, On Touching, g 213. Harmon, ed., No Author Better Servedd, 166. Schneider, “On Directing Film,” 37. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucidaa (London: Vintage, 1993), 94. Ibid., 79–80. Ibid., 102–3. Alan Ackerman, “Samuel Beckett’s Spectres Du Noirr : The Being of Paintingg and the Flatness of Film,” Contemporary Literaturee 44.3 (2003): 420. Maude, “‘Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order,’” 89. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Centuryy French Thoughtt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 304. Jane Hale, The Broken Window: Beckett’s Dramatic Perspectivee (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1987), 82. Norma Bouchard, “Film in Contexts,” SBTA 7 (1998): 124. Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Bodyy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 122. Sylvie Debevec Henning, “Samuel Beckett’s Film and La Dernière Bande : Intratextual and Intertextual Doubles,” Symposium 35 (1981): 140. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, eds., Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, 0 222. Hale, The Broken Window w, 82. Ibid., 1.

2 Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thee Visible and the Invisiblee, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 144. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listeningg, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 31. 3. Ibid., 42. 4. Mary Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence,” in Samuel Beckett and Musicc, ed. Mary Bryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 25–27. 5. Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, TheUnnamablee (London: Pan Books, 1979), 352. 6. Derval Tubridy, “‘Words pronouncing me alive’: Beckett and Incarnation,” in SBTA 9 (2000): 97. 7. For further analysis of the presence of this radiophonic voice in Beckett’s work, see Everett Frost, “Mediating On: Beckett, Emberss and Radio Theory,” in Samuel Beckett and the Artss, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 311–329. 8. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” ed. and trans. Christian Kerslake in Parallaxx 3 (1996 ), 126.

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9. Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 53. 10. Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works Volume 1: Writings, 1922–34, 4 ed. and trans. Richard Taylor, 4 vols. (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 163–164. 11. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound,” in The Eisenstein Readerr, ed. Richard Taylor (UK: British Film Institute), 80–81; emphasis in original. See also Jean Antoine-Dunne’s influential article “Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and Contrapuntal Montage.” SBTA 11 (2000): 315–323. 12. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 34. 13. David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson, Film Art: An Introduction, ed. David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson (London: McGraw-Hill Hill, 2004), 348–349. 14. Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Servedd: The Correspondence off Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universityy Press, 1998), 198. 15. Zilliacus notes that “the French version reads ‘serre-kiki mental’ which unequivocally denotes strangulation.” The earlier versions of the play represent Beckett’s search for words to convey this strangulation image. Throttle, muzzle, spike, squeeze, tighten, silence, put to silence, garrotte, finish, mum, strangle, stamp out, exterminate, still, kill, quench, fix, lay, have choked are all to be found in the developing drafts of the work, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television (Abo: Abo Akademie, 1976), 188. 16. Before “passion” became associated with strong or violent emotion, it denoted suffering or enduringg (in Latin passionem). 17. Although the play was directed by Alan Gibson, Beckett was present on set and involved in the rehearsal process for the piece. Soon after, Beckett was to direct the play himself, in Germany at Süddeutscher Rundfunk, having, in Knowlson’s words, “derived enormous confidence” from his work at the BBC and on Film. See Knowlson, Damned to Famee, 538–540. 18. Katharine Weiss, “Modernism and Mechanisation: Technology in the Works of Samuel Beckett” (PhD diss., University of Reading, 2002), 187. 19. Chion, Audio-Vision, 129. 20. Ibid., 131. 21. As with several of his plays with female roles, Beckett had Whitelaw in mind when he wrote Eh Joee. She was not free to take the part at the time of the BBC production (Knowlson, Damned to Famee, 538). This 1988 version was done in association with RTE, Channel Four, and Süddeutscher Rundfunk; Klaus Herm played the part of Joe. 22. Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, g 198. 23. Ibid., 186–187. 24. Ibid., 190. 25. Harmon, ed., No Author Better Servedd, 203.

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26. Beckett himself considered the camera to function as a “peephole.” Zinman’s article expands on this idea, connecting it with a tradition of “peephole” art (““Eh Joee and the Peephole Aesthetic,” SBTA 4 [1995]: 59). 27. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminist Film Theory, y ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 58–69 (62). Originally published in Screen 16 (1975): 6–18. 28. Rosette Lamonte, “Beckett’s Eh Joe : Lending an Ear to the Anima,” in Women in Beckett: Performance and Cultural Perspectives, s ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana: Illinois, 1992), 233. 29. S. E. Gontarski, Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Textss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 118. 30. Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, 56. 31. Ibid., 62. 32. Weiss, “Modernism and Mechanisation,” 187. 33. Harmon, ed., No Author Better Servedd, 198. 34. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1999), 34–35. 35. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the Worldd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 35. 36. Ariel Glucklich, “The Tortures of the Inquisition and the Invention off Modern Guilt,” in The Book of Touchh, ed. Constance Classen (Oxford, NY: Berg, 2005), 127. 37. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smyth (London: Routledge, 2002), 235; emphasis mine. 38. Ibid., 236. 39. Ibid., 235–236. 40. Scarry, Body in Pain, 29. 41. Such an approach was enabled by Beckett’s changing, during development of the work, of Voice’s narrative from first to third person. That she describes the last moments of another woman brings a higher level of complexity to the work and is counted by Gontarski as the saving grace of a play that otherwise may have remained a “maudlin account of guilt” (Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, g 117). 42. Margharita Giuletti, “Visual and Vocal Ventures in Eh Joe ’s Telerhythms,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 13 (2003): 121–122. 43. Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, 62. 44. Voice’s reference to the announcement of the girl’s death, “in the Independent . . . ‘On Mary’s beads we plead her needs and in the Holy Mass,’” indicates her religious orientation (CSP P, 205). 45. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, y trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham, 2008), 47. 46. Ibid., 47–48. This issue is pursued in more depth in relation to presence and absence in Nacht und Trräumee in chapter 5. 47. Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, Vol. 1, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Tr übner, 1883), 292.

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48. David Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 50. 49. “Beckett and the Sound of Silence,” 30–31. 50. Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophyy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 18. 51. Ibid., 19. 52. Anna McMullan, “Versions of Embodiment/Visions of the Body in Beckett’s . . . but the clouds . . . ,” SBTA 6 (1997): 360. 53. Quoted in Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Eraa (London: Dent, 1941), 21. 54. Catherine Laws, “Beethoven’s Haunting of Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” Assaph: Studiess in the Theaterr 17–18 (2003): 202. 55. Michael Maier “Two Versions of Nacht und Trräume : What Franz Schubert Tells Us about a Favourite Song of Beckett,” SBTA 20 (2006): 98. 56. Nancy, Listeningg, 17–18, emphasis in original. 57. In addition to Bryden’s article referred to earlier, a number of other articles have dealt in depth with silence as it occurs in the fabric of Beckett’s aesthetic. Forr example, Marjorie Perloff discusses the role of silence in the radio play Emberss, in “The Silence that is not Silence: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett Emberss,” in Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media, ed. Lois Oppenheim (London: Routledge, 1999), 247–268. Helen Baldwin identifies links to mysticism within Beckett’s silences in Samuel Beckett’s Real Silencee (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1981); and Joseph Roach takes a political approach to the “liturgical silences” in Waiting for Godott, which mark the absences and silences in the tragedies of human history in “The Great Hole of History: ‘Natural’ Catastrophe and Liturgical Silences,” South Atlanticc Quarterlyy 100 (2001): 307–317. 58. This letter is published in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 170–173. 59. Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 126, emphasis in original 60. Michael Maier, “Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio (Part II),” SBTA 11 (2000): 315. 61. Maier, “Two Versions of Nacht und Trräumee,” 97. 62. Eric Prieto, “Caves: Technology and the Total Art Work in Reich’s The Cavee and Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” Mosaicc 35 (2002): 208. 63. Maier, “Geistertrio (Part II),” 318. 64. It is also important however to bear in mind that music cannot be taken out of the cultural context of its listener: “Emotional responses to music are linked to a particular sequence of events based on conventions and rules that depend not only on shared understanding and representations, but also a common background of knowledge and beliefs” (John Sloboda and Patrick Juslin, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” in Music and Emotion, ed. John Sloboda and Patrick Juslin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 91). It would appear, according to Meyer’s thinking, that it is knowing the rules

Notes

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

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of the game that permit an awareness of when those rules are broken, and this knowledge is a result of immersion in a particular culture; see Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Musicc (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 46. Leonard Meyer, “Music and Emotion: Distinctions and Uncertainties,” in Sloboda and Juslin, ed., Music and Emotion, 354. Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 130. Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, g 122. Reed, The Schubert Song Companion (Manchester: Manchester Universityy Press, 1985), 492–493. Laws, “Beethoven’s Haunting of Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” 211. Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, 84. Sloboda and Juslin, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” 92–93. Meyer, “Music and Emotion,” 358, n49–50. Royal Browne, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Musicc (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 92–93. Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence,” 30. Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 127. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea Vol 1, 340. Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauerr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 29. Ibid., 345. John Reed, The Schubert Song Companion (Manchester: Manchester Universityy Press, 1985), 339. Christina Adamou, “Screening the Unrepresentable: Samuel Beckett’s Plays forr Television” (PhD diss., University of Reading, 2003), 216.

3

Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing

1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listeningg, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 21–22. 2. Ibid., 42. 3. Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocall Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 4. 4. Roland Barthes (in collaboration with Roland Havas), “Ascolto,” in Enciclopediaa Einaudii (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 1: 237. Quoted in ibid., 15. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smyth (London: Routledge, 2002), 181. 6. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Dramaa (New w York: Routledge, 2010), 112. 7. Boyce draws on the work of J. L. Austin, whose 1960s text, How to do Thingss with Wordss, argued that speech in itself is an act that can bring about other actions and is thus described as “performative.” See “The Negative Imprint off

166

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

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the Past in Samuel Beckett’s Emberss and Not I,” in Recovering Memory: Irishh Representations of Past and Presentt, ed. Hedda Friberg et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 189. Mary Bryden, Women in Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Otherr (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 124. Kathy Smith suggests, with reference to Elaine Scarry’s work on the bodyy under torture, that Not I demonstrates the transformation of body into voice, which is also a translation by power, in the torture chamber, of language into a scream and confession (“The Body in Pain: Beckett, Orlan and the Politics of Performance,” Studies in Theater and Performancee 25 [2005]: 42). See also Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 46. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisiblee, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 138. Gordon Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images andd Wordss (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 67. In this, Bryden draws on the writings of Bertrice Bartlett (Women in Samuell Beckett’s Prose and Drama, 131). Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sexx (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 69. Ulrika Maude, “A Stirring beyond Coming and Going: Beckett and Tourette’s,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 17 (2008), 162. David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain (UK: Canongate, 2012), 163. Howard Kushner and Kate Brown, “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing,” New Literary Historyy 35 (2001): 543. Ibid., 544. Butler, Bodies that Matterr, 68. It must be noted that this argument forms part off Butler’s response to criticisms of her earlier work, Gender Troublee, which seemed to image the body as passive, blank matter onto which culture is inscribed. The more recent Bodies that Matterr addresses this by talking of the relation between body and discourse as one of negotiation. The body is here viewed as a more dynamic partner in the relationship. Quoted in Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theaterr (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 23. Butler, Bodies that Matterr, 10. Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, s ed. Renata Salecl and Slovoj Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 13. Kathleen O’Gorman, “‘but this other awful thought’: Aspects of the Female in Beckett’s Not I,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 1 (1992): 36. The origins of the figure of Auditor are reportedly a djellaba-clad woman leaning against a wall in Tunisia, where Beckett was on holiday. See James Knowlson, Damned to Famee (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 588–589. The figure was, Brater

Notes

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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writes, in a “position of intense listening,” thus the concept of Not I was initiallyy sparked by preoccupation with such an isolated listener. See “Dada, Surrealism and the Genesis of Not I,” in Modern Dramaa 18 (1975): 50. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodiess (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 203. Marina Warner, “Who Can Shave an Egg?: Foreign Tongues and Primal Sounds in Mallarmé and Beckett,” in Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Anna McMullan and S. E. Wilmer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 60. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, eds.,The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929–19400 134–135. Eagleman, Incognito, 131. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godott (London: Faber, 1965), 17. The line from text IX of Texts for Nothingg reads: “That’s right, wordshit buryy me, avalanche, and let there be no more talk of any creature, nor of a world to reach, in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures, with words, with misery, misery” (Samuel Beckett, Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, 9 ed. S. E. Gontarski [New York: Grove, 1997], 137).Jonathan Boulter notes that in Textss for Nothingg there is a transformation of discourse into excrement, its entire verbal-textual production into a kind of “(t)ex(t)crement” (“‘Wordshit buryy me’: The Waste of Narrative in Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing,” g Journal off Beckett Studiess 11 [2002]: 10). Johanna Oksala, “Female Freedom: Can the Lived Body be Emancipated?” Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Pontyy, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 224. Ibid., 225. Hanna Scolnicov, Women’s Theatrical Spacee (Cambridge: Cambridge Universityy Press, 1994), 149. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theaterr (USA and UK: Routledge, 1997), iii. Ibid., xii. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, y trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: G. Bretschneider, 1985), 58–59. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 136–143. Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Dramaa (London: Routledge, 1993), 47. Ibid., 63. As Linda Ben-Zvi suggests of A Piece of Monologue : “Beckett effectively achieves on stage what he has previously achieved in fiction; to allow the two parts off the self to exist simultaneously.” Referring to the inner and outer parts of the ego, she argues that That Timee and Not I also demonstrate an inability to merge contradictory aspects of the self (“The Schismatic Self in A Piece of Monologuee,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 7 [1982]: 11).

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40. Jacques Aumont, The Imagee, trans. Claire Pajackowska (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 189. 41. Ibid., 108. 42. Jose Ortega y Gasset, “Meditations on the Frame,” Perspectaa 26 (1990): 189. 43. Mariko Hori Tanaka, “Elements of Haiku in Beckett and Eisenstein,” SBTA 11 (2000): 325–326. 44. Ibid., 325–326. 45. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 194. 46. Butler, Bodies that Matterr, 68. 47. James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homerr to Ashburyy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3–4. 48. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 6. 49. Ibid., 11. 50. John Keats, Selected Poemss (UK: Penguin Classics, 2007), 191. 51. Krieger, Ekphrasis, s 10. 52. Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasiss (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), 35–36. 53. Lois Oppenheim, ed., The Painted Wordd (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 142. 54. Ibid., 125. 55. Ibid., 138. 56. Ibid., 125. 57. McMullan,Theatre on Triall, 59. 58. Ruby Cohn voices her doubt over the “dramatic value” of That Timee, while at the same time noting the author’s intentions regarding the work, as written in a letterr to Alan Schneider: “The delay in parting with [That Timee] is due to misgivings over disproportion between image (listening face) and speech and much time lost in trying of amplifying former. I have now come to accept its remoteness and stillness—apart from certain precise movements of, breath just audible in silences and final smile—as essential to the piece and dramatically of value” (A Beckettt Canon [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001], 334). 59. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 50. 60. Walter Asmus, “Practical Aspects of Theater, Radio and Television: Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s ‘That Time’ and ‘Footfalls’ at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin (Directed by Beckett),” trans. Helen Wantabe, Journal of Beckett Studiess 2 (1977): 94. 61. In The Skin Ego (trans. C. Turner [New Haven: Yale, 1989]), Didier Anzieu writes of how the maternal voice provides a sonic skin for the infant, a bath off sound that aids the formation of the of the skin ego, an psychic skin without which the subject is not properly formed (101). Chapter 4 of this study deals with the question of skin and the limits of subjectivity in more detail. 62. Brater, Beyond Minimalism, 42. 63. Ibid., 43.

Notes 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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169

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 41–42. Krieger, Ekphrasis, s 10. Asmus, “Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s ‘That time’ and ‘Footfalls,’” 92. Oppenheim, The Painted Wordd, 141. Samuel Beckett, Endgamee (London: Faber & Faber, 1982 [1958]), 11. The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effectt (Berkeley: University of Californiaa Press, 1993), 10. Quoted in Oppenheim, The Painted Wordd, 141. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpuss, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 17.

4

Skin, Space, Place

1. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (New York: Cornell, 2003), 28–29. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpuss, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 15. emphasis in original. 3. See Freud, The Ego and the Idd, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth, 1927). 4. Didier Anzieu, Skin Ego, trans. C. Turner (New Haven: Yale, 1989), 101, emphasis in original. 5. Ibid., 40. 6. Connor, Book of Skin, 36. 7. James Knowlson, Damned to Famee (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 616. 8. “Woman” has been frequently framed, at least until the beginnings of modern medical knowledge, as a vessel, passively providing a place/space for the child. Aristotle, in On the Generation of Animals, s wrote: “It is clear then from what has been said that, in those animals that emit seed, the seed does not come from every part; and that the female does not contribute in the same way as the male to the generation of the offspring that are constituted, but the male contributes the source of movement and the female the matter. This why the female does not generate by itself; for it needs a source and something to provide movement and definition” (J. L. Ackrill, A New Aristotle Readerr [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], 242). 9. Mary Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Otherr (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 7. 10. Ibid., 123. 11. See also Jennifer Jeffers, Beckett’s Masculinityy (New York: Palgrave, 2009). 12. Anna McMullan, “From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis) embodiment in Beckett’s Theater,” in Women in Irish Drama: A Century off Authorship and Representation, ed. Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 98. 13. Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, 111. 14. See Minako Okamuro, “ . . . but the clouds . . . and a Yeatsian Phantasmagoria,” SBTA 19 (2006).

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15. Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, 120. 16. Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Playss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 145–146. 17. Ibid., 143. 18. Ibid., 139. 19. See Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 20. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallaxx 3 (1996): 127. 21. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smyth (London: Routledge, 2002), 283. 22. Ibid., 244. 23. Ibid., 245. 24. Samuel Beckett, Companyy (London: Calder, 1984), 7. 25. Bignell, Beckett on Screen, 17. 26. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in the Work of Samuel Beckettt (New w York: Routledge, 2010), 88. 27. Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 128. 28. William Gruber, “Empire of Light: Luminosity of Space in Beckett’s Theater,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebookk, ed. Jennifer Jeffers (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 217. 29. Okamuro., “ . . . but the clouds . . . and a Yeatsian Phantasmagoria,” 261. 30. Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Dramaa (London: Routledge, 1993), 110. 31. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listeningg, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 17. 32. Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, s ed. Renata Salecl and Slovoj Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 13. 33. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Readerr, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 94–95. 34. “Timaeus,” trans. by Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archivee, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html (accessed December 2, 2012). 35. Kristeva, Kristeva Readerr, 94. 36. Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama, 189. 37. Ibid., 190. 38. Ibid., 189. 39. Elin Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” in Palgrave Advances in Beckettt Studies, ed. by Lois Oppenheim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 60. 40. Specifically, she notes the extent to which drag performances suggest a “dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance,” thus in “imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative [and therefore performative] structure of gender itself–as well as its contingency” (Judith Butler, Gender Troublee [New York and London: Routledge, 1991], 187).

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41. Christine Jones, “Bodily Functions: A Reading of Gender Performativity in Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby,” y in Samuel Beckett: A Casebookk, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers (London: Routledge, 1998), 189. 42. Ibid., 193–194. 43. Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” 62. 44. Walter Asmus, “Practical Aspects of Theater, Radio and Television: Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s ‘That Time’ and ‘Footfalls’ at the Schiller-TheaterWerkstatt, Berlin (Directed by Beckett),” 83. 45. Ibid., 83–84, emphasis in original. 46. Ibid., 85. 47. Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama, 165. 48. Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” 58–59. See also Diamond’s earlier article,“Speaking Parisian: Feminist Interpretations of Beckett.” In Women in Beckettt : Performance and Cultural Perspectives, s ed. by Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 254. 49. From Asmus, “Rehearsal Notes for the German Première of Beckett’s Thatt Timee and Footfalls,” s quoted in Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Thee Shorter Plays, s ed. S. E. Gontarski (London: Faber, 1992), 283–284. 50. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 101. 51. William Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Dramaa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 174. 52. David Pattie, “Space, Time and the Self in Beckett’s Late Theater,” Modern Dramaa 43 (2000): 400. 53. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 99. 54. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays, s 284. 55. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 99. 56. Knowlson, Damned to Famee, 624–625. 57. Luce Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, e trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (London: Athlone Press, 1993), 41–42. 58. McMullan points out that, on the one hand, Beckett transforms what Irigarayy terms the sang rougee (red blood) of the reproductive, embodied female into the sang blancc of male aesthetic reproduction. Yet, on the other hand, the playy emphasizes the “intersubjective production of self and other in which a woman (both character and actress) determines to author her vocal and embodied performance of selfhood” (“From Matron to Matrix,” 107). 59. Anna McMullan, “Samuel Beckett’s Theater: Liminal Subjects and the Politics of Perception,” Princeton University Library Chroniclee 67 (2006): 445. 60. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 94. 61. Genesis 3:16. 62. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 116. 63. Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in thee Works of Samuel Beckettt (London: Macmillan, 1986), 163, quoted in McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 101.

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Notes

64. Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamablee (London: Pan Books, 2006), 352. 65. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 102. 66. “He opened the Euphrates and the Tigris from her eyes / closed her nostrils / He piled up clear-cut mountains from her udder / Bored waterholes to drain off the catchwater / He laid her tail across / tied it fast as the cosmic bond [ . . . ] With half of her he made a roof, he fixed the earth / He [ ] the work, made the insides of Tiamat / surge” (Stephanie Dalley, trans., Myths of Mesopotamiaa [Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 257). 67. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 237. 68. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 99–100. 69. James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose andd Drama of Samuel Beckettt (London: Calder, 1979), 227. 70. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuell Beckett 1929–19400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 518. 71. Connor, The Book of Skin, 36.

5

On the One Hand . . . (The One That Writes the Body)

1. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality and Dramaa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 15. 2. Kurt Taroff, “Screens, Closets, and Echo Chambers of the Mind: The Struggle to Represent the Inner life on Stage,” Forum Modernes Theaterr 25/2 (2010): 181. 3. This image of Beckett is contradicted also, or at the very least complicated, byy several other factors. For instance, as Herren puts it, the ban on adaptation of his work from one genre to another was enforced only sporadically and selectively. He regards Beckett’s collaboration with Marin Karmitz on the adaptation off Comèdiee to film as revealing an author far more open to adaptation than some of his actions would suggest (“Different Music: Karmitz and Beckett’s Film Adaptation of Comédiee,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 18 [2009]: 10–31). While Beckett had little patience with some projects—notably JoAnne Akalaitis’s production of Endgamee (American Repertory Theater, 1984)—his attitude to others was quite flexible. For example, David Warrilow, a noted interpreter off the dramas for whom Beckett wrote A Piece of Monologuee, also adapted several prose pieces for the stage with Beckett’s approval. For further analysis off Beckett’s revising and adaptation of his own work from text to performance, see S. E. Gontarski’s “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theater,” Journal of Modern Literaturee 22 (Fall 1998): 131–155. 4. For images that demonstrate this, see Cathy Courtney, Jocelyn Herbert: A Theater Workbookk (USA: Applause, 1997), 89. 5. William Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Dramaa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160. 6. Ibid., 3.

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7. Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterityy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 22. 8. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2002), 155. 9. Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Dramaa (London: Routledge, 1993), 26. 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smyth (London: Routledge, 2002), 360–361. 11. Jorella Andrews, “Vision, Violence and the Other: A Merleau-Pontian Ethic,” in Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Pontyy, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (Pennsylvania Park: Pennsylvania University Press), 171, emphasis in original. 12. Billie Whitelaw talks of the experience as causing pain and “raging Beckettitis” in Jocelyn Herbert: A Theater Workbookk, 89. 13. Jim Hansen, “Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophee and the Theater of Pure Means,” Contemporary Literaturee 49 (2008): 666. 14. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Dramaa (New w York: Routledge, 2010), 115. 15. Notable perhaps also is the fact that the word “catastrophe,” in Arabic “nakba,” is used by Palestinians to refer to the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. The term, across languages and contexts, has multiple applications. 16. Hansen, “Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophee and the Theater of Pure Means,” 679. 17. McMullan, Theatre on Triall , 28. 18. Elin Diamond critiques the violence of such identificatory fantasies in “‘The society of my likes’: Beckett’s Political Imaginary,” SBTA 11 (2000): 382–388. 19. Jennifer Jeffers, Uncharted Space: The End of Narrativee (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 203. 20. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpuss, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11. emphasis in original. 21. Ibid., 10. 22. Ibid., 11 23. Martta Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-Presence and itss Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Philosophyy (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), 255. 24. In an interview with Jean-Baptiste Marongiu, “Le partage, l’infini et le jardin” Libération, February 17, 2000, http://www.liberation.fr/livres/0101327381-le -partage-l-infini-et-le-jardin (accessed December 1, 2012), translation by author. 25. Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theaterr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 158. 26. Quoted in ibid., 162. 27. Ibid., 158. 28. Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the Worldd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 19–20. 29. Ibid., 20.

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30. S. E. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Playss (London: Faber, 1992), 418–419. 31. Gontarski, “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theater,” Journal of Modern Literaturee 22 (Fall 1998): 142. 32. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, 159. 33. Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Textt (USA: Davies Group, 2007), 160. 34. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1999), 143. 35. Ibid., 138. 36. Rebecca Schneider, “On Taking the Blind in Hand,” in The Body in Performancee, ed. Patrick Campbell (London: Routledge, 2001), 29. 37. Karen Laughlin, “‘Dreaming of [ . . . ] Love’: The Making of the (Post)Modern Subject,” SBTA 11 (2000): 206. 38. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallaxx 3 (1996): 123. 39. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebookss, 409. 40. S. E. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theatre,” Samuel Beckettt Today/Aujourd’ huii 11 (2000): 176. 41. Eckhart Voigts-Virchow, “Quad I and Teletubbiess or ‘Aisthetic’ Panopticism versus Reading Beckett,” SBTA 11 (2000): 211. 42. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebookss, 415. 43. Ibid., 427. 44. Ibid., 431. 45. Voigts-Virchow, “Quad I and Teletubbiess,” 213. 46. Anna McMullan, “Virtual Subjects: Performance, Technology and the Body in Beckett’s Late Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 10 (2002): 168. 47. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performancee (London: Routledge, 1993), 1.

6

On the Other Hand . . . (The One That Refuses to Touch)

1. Margrit Shildrick, “Some Speculations on Matters of Touch,” The Journal off Medicine and Philosophyy 26.4 (2001): 392 2. Ibid., 402. 3. The reference to the “Latin quarter hat” and to the Isle of Swans in Paris links the play to Beckett’s relationship with Joyce. But as with much of Beckett’s work other biographical references are apparent, such as the apartment he and his wife Suzanne shared in Paris. While I recognize these potential biographical markers, which are perhaps clearer in this play than in others, no one “story” can offer definitive explanations for the play. 4. James Knowlson, Damned to Famee (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 664.

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5. Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Dramaa (London: Routledge, 1993), 113. 6. S. E. Gontarski, Thee Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Textss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 178. 7. Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckettt and Alan Schneiderr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 391. 8. Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, g 177. 9. Willi Apel, ed., Harvard Dictionary of Music, c 2nd ed. (London: Heinemann, 1970), 404. 10. Alfred Einstein, Schubertt, trans. by David Ascoli (London: Caselli, 1951), 330. 11. See Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, g 174. 12. Ibid., 175–176. 13. Jean Baptiste Poquelin-Molière, The Dramatic Works of Moliere V2: School forr Husbands; The Bores; School for Wives; School for Wives Criticized; Impromptu off Versailles; The Forcedd, trans. Henri van Laun (MO: Kessinger, 2010). 14. McMullan, Theatre on Triall, 114. 15. William Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Dramaa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3. 16. Ohio Impromptu, dir. Charles Sturridge (Dublin: RTE, 2001). 17. Garin Dowd, “Karaoke Beckett, or Jeremy Irons, Mimicry and Travesty in Ohio Impromptu on Film,” SBTA 13 (2003): 178. 18. Ibid., 176. 19. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology off Theaterr (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 31. 20. Ibid., 35. 21. Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy off Jean-Luc Nancyy (CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 138. 22. Ibid., 132. 23. For James, this entails a collapsing of the “transcendent, the spiritual, or the idea into the touch in separation of finite sense and impenetrable matter.” In doing so, “Nancy is elaborating an atheism,” but one that is deeply aware of its Christian provenance (ibid., 142). There is no metaphysical beyond of the bodyy or of the world, but only a “single body infinitely altered and exposed both in its fall as well as in its raising,” Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raisingg of the Bodyy, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New w York: Fordham, 2008), 48. 24. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, l trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3, emphasis in original. 25. See also, for further commentary, Christopher Watkin, “A Different Alterity: Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘Singular Plural,’” Paragraphh 30 (2007): 53. 26. Peter Boxall, “Beckett and Homoeroticism,” in Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies,s ed. Lois Oppenheim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 128–129.

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27. Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of Godd (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 186–187. 28. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, e 32. 29. Jonathan Kalb, “The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays and Film,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckettt, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 142. 30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisiblee, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 133. 31. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuell Beckett 1929–19400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 222. 32. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpuss, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5. 33. James, Fragmentary Demand, d 133–134. 34. Nancy, Corpuss, 5; emphases in original. 35. John 20:29. 36. John 20:17. 37. Nancy, Noli me Tangere, e 47. 38. Ibid., 48. 39. Knowlson, Damned to Famee, 682–683. 40. Graley Herren, “Nacht und Trräume : Beckett’s Agony in the Garden.” Journal off Beckett Studiess 11 (2001): 58. 41. Knowlson, Damned to Famee, 682. 42. See Anna McMullan, “Virtual Subjects: Performance, Technology and the Body in Beckett’s Late Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studiess 10 (2002), 165–172. 43. Louis Marin, On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 386. 44. McMullan, “Virtual Subjects,” 168. 45. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, e trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham, 2005), 37. 46. Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011), 60. 47. Christina Adamou, “Screening the Unrepresentable: Samuel Beckett’s Plays for Television” (PhD diss., 2003), 216. 48. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Dramaa (New w York: Routledge, 2010), 88. 49. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culturee (London: Routledge, 1999), 31. 50. Ibid., 36. 51. Eckart Voigts-Virchow, “Exhausted Cameras: Beckett in the TV Zoo,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebookk, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers (London: Routledge, 1998), 237–238. 52. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallaxx 3 (1996): 128.

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Conclusion l i Departing i Bodies: di Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangere 1. John 20: 24–29. 2. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memoriess (London: Routledge, 1997), 36. 3. Ibid., 35. 4. See Martin Crowley’s “Bataille’s Tacky Touch,” Modern Language Notess 119 (2004): 778–779. 5. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, y trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham, 2008), 48. 6. Samuel Beckett, How It Iss (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 9. 7. Samuel Beckett, Companyy (London: Calder, 1984), 7. 8. Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Bodyy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 73–74. 9. Derval Tubridy, “‘Words pronouncing me alive’: Beckett and Incarnation,” SBTA 12 (2000): 94–95. 10. Ibid., 97. 11. Ibid., 103. 12. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpuss, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3. 13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisiblee, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 147.

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Index

Abbott, H. Porter, 84 Abrams, David, 48 Ackerman, Alan, 31 Acousmatic, 40, 43, 52, 80, 124 Acousmêtre, 40 Adamou, Christina, 59, 148 Aisthesis, 130 Alexandrov, Grigori, 37 Allegory of the Cave, The, 71. See also Plato Andrews, Jorella, 116 Antoine-Dunne, Jean, 162 n10 Anthropocentrism, 6–7 Anzieu, Didier, 81, 88, 97, 103, 168 n61 Aporetic, 85 Appoggiatura, 53 Aristotle, 5, 10, 106, 156 n17, 169 n8 Armstrong, Gordon, 65 Artaud, Antonin, 4 Asmus, Walter, 40, 46, 102, 103 Aumont, Jacques, 74, 75 Auslander, Philip, 149 Austin, J. L., 165–6 n7 Bacon, Francis, 3–4 Baldwin, Helen, 164 n57 Banes, Sally, 5 Barthes, Roland, 20, 30, 61 Bataille, Georges, 121 Baudrillard, Jean, 149

Beckett, Samuel, works All that Fall, l 40, 48 . . . but the clouds . . ., 10, 11, 49, 89, 90–6, 123, 150 Calmative, The, 26 Catastrophe, 11, 113, 114, 116–22, 125, 126, 127, 131, 136, 152 Comédie, 172 n3 Company, 93, 152 Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and A Dramatic Fragment, 160 n38 Eh Joe, 9, 10, 11, 35, 36, 37–48, 54, 73, 120, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153 End, d The, 11 Endgame, 5, 13, 70, 84 Film, 9, 10, 11, 24–34, 41, 72, 75, 100, 130, 144, 160 n35 Footfalls, 4, 10, 11, 71, 89, 93, 101, 102–11, 147, 152 Ghost Trio, 9, 10, 11, 35, 36, 48–60, 85, 91, 96, 136, 140, 143, 147, 149, 152 Happy Days, 48 How It Is, 152 Krapp’s Last Tape, 9, 11, 13–24, 33, 34, 37, 48, 80, 84, 115, 152, 158 n13 n16 La dernière bande, 20. See also Krapp’s Last Tape

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Index

Beckett, Samuel, works—Continued Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, 159 n26, 160 n37 Lost Ones, The, 152 Malone Dies, 152 Molloy, 66, 152 Murphy, 66 Nacht und Träume, 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 36, 48–60, 133–4, 142–50 Not II, 9–10, 11, 61–72, 73, 77, 78, 85, 86, 114, 117, 147, 152, 166–7 n23 Ohio Impromptu, 11, 12, 48, 113, 114, 133–42 A Piece of Monologue, 9–10, 11, 62, 72–7, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 96, 126, 147, 152 Proust, 18 Quad, d 11, 113, 114, 126–32, 147, 149 Rockaby, 10, 11, 71, 89, 93, 96–102, 103, 110 Rough for Theatre II, 13 Texts for Nothing, g 167 n29 That Time, 9–10, 11, 62, 77–86, 115, 147, 153 Unnameable, The, 36, 109, 152 Waiting for Godot, 5, 11, 14, 70 What Where, 11, 113, 114, 115, 153 as theatrical text, 122–26 as television drama, 126–32 Words and Music, 48 Beckett on Film, 139 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 48, 51, 54, 58 Beharry, Shauna, 5. See also Marks, Laura Being Singular Plural, l 141 Ben-Zvi, Linda, 167 n39 Bergson, Henri, 17, 18, 21 Bignell, Jonathan, 91 Bishop Berkeley, 25, 160 n37 Bleeker, Maike, 5 Blind, The, 13–14 Blindness, 14 Body. See also Exscription

automaticity of, 10, 17, 20, 59, 62, 64, 66–7, 70, 159 n26 in Christianity, 8, 47–8, 140, 144–7, 151, 152. See also Christianity desiring, 16, 17, 19–20, 54, 58 experience. Seee Embodiment gendered, 39, 63–4, 68–72, 97, 99, 101, 107, 109–10, 112 and immateriality, 1, 9, 21, 22–4, 27, 46–7, 125, 130, 142, 144, 146–7, 148–9, 150, 152–3. See also body, materiality of and language, 9–10, 39, 62–4, 66–8, 71, 73–4, 76, 77–8, 80, 82, 84, 85–6, 152–3 lived, 32, 70–1 materiality of, 4, 7, 9, 16–17, 19, 21–2, 29, 31–2, 61–2, 66–7, 68, 73, 76–7, 80, 84–5, 110–11, 115, 117, 119, 121, 124, 132, 139–40, 141, 145–6, 148–9, 150, 152–3, 159 n26. See also body and immateriality as obscenity, 16, 66–71 performing, 5, 12, 16, 21, 71, 100–2, 111, 114–15, 127–9, 140 philosophy of the, 2, 7–8 power and the, 42–4, 66, 100, 117–18, 123, 125–6, 127, 131–2 representations of, 2, 4, 10, 29–31, 33, 54, 101, 111, 118, 120–1, 127, 147, 151–2 text and the, 114, 120–1 Bologne, Jean Claude, 143 Bouchard, Norma, 32 Boxall, Peter, 141, 148 Boyce, Brunhilde, 63 Brater, Enoch, 81–2, 123, 166–7 n23 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 38, 91, 152 n17 Brown, Kate, 66 Brown, Royal, 57 Brueghel the Elder, 14, 152

Index Bryden, Mary, 11, 36, 49, 64, 65–6, 98, 100, 103, 143, 146 Buñuel, Luis, 32 Butler, Judith, 66, 67–8, 100, 166 n18, 170 n40 Callois, Roger, 157 n40 Campbell, Julie, 19 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 151 Cartesian thought, 65, 100 Cavarero, Adriana, 61 Caws, Mary Ann, 156 n10 Cézanne, Paul, 33, 116–17, 144 Chabert, Pierre, 17 Cheeke, Stephen, 78, 82 Chiasm, 12, 23, 26, 35, 144, 153 Chion, Michel, 38, 40 Chopin, Frédéric, 135 Chora, 97–8. See also Kristeva, Julia Christianity, 6–8, 17, 19, 43, 47, 108, 119, 140, 143–8, 150, 151–2, 154, 162 n16. See also haptic certitude Closet drama, 113, 121 Cluchey, Rick, 159–60 n33 Cohn, Ruby, 15, 158 n58 Connor, Steven, 87, 88, 112, 127 Coprolalia, 66 Corpus, 12, 15, 120 Death and the Maiden, 48 Debevec Henning, Sylvie, 33 Dehiscence, 7, 9, 24, 74, 76, 84, 85. See also Inclusive disjunction Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 37, 51, 53, 58, 92, 95, 115–16, 124, 129, 150, 156 n13, 160, n34 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 6–8, 22, 27, 153 Descartes, René, 14 Diamond, Elin, 71–2, 100, 102, 103 Diderot, Denis, 14 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 128

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193

Dolar, Mladen, 68, 97 Dowd, Garin, 139 Duchamp, Marcel, 41 Eagleman, David, 66, 70 Einstein, Alfred, 136 Eisenstein, Sergei, 37, 75 Ekphrasis, 62, 77–9, 82–4, 85 Embodiment, 1–4, 6, 9, 12, 26, 63–70, 111–12, 143–4, 152. See also Body selfhood and, 12, 16, 21, 23, 86, 88–9 vision and, 11, 26–7, 31, 32, 150, 152–3 Étants donnés, 41 Exscription, 115, 119–22, 128, 138 Forgacs, David, 158 n5 Foucault, Michel, 42, 128 Freud, Sigmund, 88, 89, 106, 108 Friedrich, Caspar David, 58 Frost, Everett, 160 n7 Garner, Stanton, 7 Genesis, 108 Gender, 67, 72, 89–90, 100–1, 105–11 Gibson, Alan, 162 n17 Gidal, Peter, 109 Giuletti, Magharita, 46 Glucklich, Ariel, 43 Goehr, Lydia, 49 Gontarski, S. E., 4, 9, 41, 127, 130, 134, 135, 136, 140, 163 n41 Gospel of John, 4, 145–6, 151 Grosz, Elizabeth, 69 Gruber, William, 96 Hale, Jane, 32, 34 Hansen, Jim, 117, 119 Haptic certitude, 30, 142, 144–6, 148, 149, 151–2, 154 cinema, 4, 5, 24, 28, 155 n9

194

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Index

Haptic—Continued discourse, 153 epistemology, 32, 75, 153 image, 4, 24, 27–8, 31, 32, 71–3, 110, 130–1 interface, 2, 14, 22–3, 33–4, 62–3, 88, 98, 111 meanings of, 1–3, 8, 9 and memory, 23 in performance, 5, 22, 24, 62, 72 relief carving, 3, 72, 96, 101 sound, 16, 36, 59–60 visual art and, 3, 5, 116 and visual impairment, 2, 12, 13–15, 32, 92–3, 130, 152 visuality, 4, 91. See also Optic visuality voice, 37–9, 45–8 Haptocentrism, 6–8. See also Derrida, Jacques Havel, Vaclav, 116 Heikkilä, Martta, 121 Held, Martin, 21 Herbert, Jocelyn, 103 Herm, Klaus, 81, 82 Herren, Graley, 11, 18, 37, 41, 47, 55, 90–1, 145–6 Humanism, 6 Husserl, Edmund, 7 Inclusive disjunction, 77, 111, 138, 140, 142, 154 Incredulity of Thomas, The, 151 Intersubjectivity, 23, 27 Irigaray, Luce, 69, 71–2, 106, 108 Irons, Jeremy, 139 James, Ian, 144, 156 n28, 175 n23 Jay, Martin, 32 Jeffers, Jennifer, 120 Jones, Christine, 100 Joyce, James, 174 n3 Jung, Carl, 89, 102 Juslin, Patrick, 52, 164–5 n64

Kalb, Jonathan, 143 Kaun, Axel, 51, 111 Keaton, Buster, 24–5, 26, 28, 31, 32, 33 Keats, John, 78 King Lear, r 13 Kinuta, 21 Knowlson, James, 25, 111, 125, 146, 162 n17 n21, 166–7 n23 Krieger, Murray, 77, 78, 82 Kristeva, Julia, 97 Kushner, Howard, 66 Lacan, Jacques, 56 Lamonte, Rosette, 19, 20, 41 Lant, Antonia, 155 n9 Laughlin, Karen, 129 Laws, Catherine, 49–50, 55 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 5, 156 n16 Lepecki, André, 5 Letters from Siberia, 38 Letter on the Blind, d 14 Linear perspective, 5, 24, 31, 32, 33, 71–2 Liszt, Franz, 135 London, 103 MacGreevy, Thomas, 70, 144 Magee, Patrick, 20 Maier, Michael, 50, 52 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 70 “Manifesto on Tactilism,” 4. See also Marinetti, Filippo Marin, Louis, 147 Marinetti, Filippo, 4 Marker, Chris, 38 Marks, Laura, 4, 5, 72 Maude, Ulrika, 7, 11, 66, 152, 161 n41 Mary Magdalene, 145 McMullan, Anna, 9, 10, 18, 19, 73, 80, 94, 97, 104, 107, 109, 116, 118, 131, 134, 147, 157 n32, 170 n60 Memory, 17, 20, 21, 59–60, 80–1, 83

Index Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 6–7, 11, 23, 26, 27, 32, 35, 43, 44, 62, 65, 66, 76, 86, 92–3, 116, 144, 153, 154 Meyer, Leonard, 53, 56, 57 Michelangelo di Buonarroti, 154 Mimesis, 10, 71 Mizuko, 109 Molière, (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 134, 137, 139 Monodrama, 51 Montage, 37 Mulvey, Laura, 41 Music, 48–60 as haptic, 50, 54, 59–60, 135–7 Musique concrète, 40 Myth, 109, 172 n66 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 6–8, 11, 15, 35, 47, 51, 61, 76, 85, 87–9, 90, 92, 97, 111, 115, 120–1, 127, 140–1, 143–5, 150, 152, 154, 175 n23 Noli me tangere, 47, 145 Ode on a Grecian Urn, 78 Oedipus Rex, 13 O’Gorman, Kathleen, 69 Okamuro, Minako, 96 Oksala, Johanna, 70 Oppenheim, Lois, 3, 78, 84, 155 n4, 164 n57 Optic image, 4, 27, 31, 96 Optic visuality, 4, 91, 101 Painted Word, The, 78 Parable of the Blind, d The, 14, 152. See also Brueghel the Elder Pattie, David, 104 ‘Peephole’ art, 41 Perception, 7, 12, 18, 25, 26–7, 32, 33, 34, 38, 40, 55, 62, 71, 84, 92, 94, 116–17, 118, 119, 122, 131, 139, 148, 152, 155 n4, 156 n13, 160 n34

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195

Perloff, Marjorie, 164 n57 Phelan, Peggy, 131, 151, Phenomenology, 2, 4, 6–8, 9, 22, 26, 60 Phenomenology of Perception, The, 92. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Philips, Siân, 40 Pinter, Harold, 21 Plato, 71, 98 Poetics, 5, 156 n17. See also Aristotle Postdramatic, 5 Postdramatic Theater, r 5 Prieto, Eric, 52 Psychoanalysis, 56, 59, 68, 89, 100, 103 Puchner, Martin, 113, 121 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 37, 75 Reed, John, 55, 58 Rembrandt van Rijn, 151 Riegl, Alois, 3, 4, 72 Roach, Joseph, 164 n57 Romanticism, 48–50, 55, 58 Royal Court Theater, 21 San Quentin Drama Workshop, 23 Saramago, José, 14 Scarry, Elaine, 42, 44, 123, 125 Schmal, Hildegard, 102 Schiller Theater, Berlin, 82, 89, 102 Schneider, Alan, 24, 25, 28, 41, 134 Schneider, Rebecca, 129 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 48, 49, 58 Schubert, Franz, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 58, 133, 135, 143, 148 Scolnicov, Hanna, 71 Serres, Michel, 87 Shildrick, Margrit, 1, 133 Skin ego, 88, 100, 111, 168 n61. See also Anzieu, Didier Sloboda, John, 52, 56, 164–5 n64 Sobchack, Vivian, 155 n9 Smith, Kathy, 166 n9 States, Bert O., 139 Suddeutscher Rundfunk, Germany, 127, 130, 162 n17

196

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Index

Surrealism, 32 Syncopation, 53 Syncope, 8 Takahashi, Yasunari, 21, 22 Takiri, Yoshiki, 32 Tanaka, Mariko Hori, 75 Tandy, Jessica, 67 Taroff, Kurt, 114 Television, 9–10, 46–8, 51, 59, 91, 96, 126, 148–50 Technology, 2, 15, 23, 28, 36, 50–1 Theater, 4, 5, 21–2, 24, 71, 73, 82, 100, 114, 117, 138 Tieck, Ludwig, 49 Timeaus, 98 Tourette’s Syndrome, 66–7 Touch ethics of, 83–4, 103, 131–2, 133–4, 141–2, 151, 153 failure to, 1, 11–12, 22–4, 27, 33, 47–8, 86, 131, 142, 150, 154 violence of, 11, 45, 59, 115–17, 119, 120, 123–4, 125–6, 127, 131–2, 150

Tower, The, 90–1 Tubridy, Derval, 152 Un chien andalou, 32. See also Luis Buñuel Versailles Impromptu, 134, 139 Visible and the Invisible, The, 6–7, 65. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Visual impairment, representations of, 13–15 Voigts-Virchow, Eckart, 130, 149, 158 n17 Warner, Marina, 70, 159 n26 Weiss, Katherine, 39, 42 Whitelaw, Billie, 3, 40, 46, 78, 104, 114, 117, 162 n21 Worthen, William, 104, 124, 127, 138 Yeats, W. B., 90–1, 95 Zeami, 21 Zilliacus, Clas, 40, 162 n15 Zinman, Toby, 41, 163 n26