It would not seem to be too much of a betrayal of Beckett’s writing project to say that for him, voice crystallized the gap to be traversed between materiality and representation, between body and word. In exploring the limits of the self, he was also prospecting the borders and margins of the genres available to him. He tried them all — narrative fiction, theatre, mime, radio, television, film. And he invented some new ones — his “fizzles,” “residua,” “texts for nothing”; his “dramaticules” and “precipitates”; his “sketches” and “roughs” for radio, forms designed to represent half-forms, impulses fizzling out as soon as felt, fragments and “abandoned works” that nonetheless made it into print. The series of miniature forms perform the theatre of texts struggling to be born, never managing wholeness.

…for him, voice crystallized the gap to be traversed between materiality and representation, between body and word. In exploring the limits of the self, he was also prospecting the borders and margins of the genres available to him.

In each case he manipulates the medium to maximum effect, bending its languages to fit his project. When Beckett said that his work in the theatre was partly a “search for speech specifically dramatic,” I take him to mean that he was attempting to capitalise on the physicality and immediacy of the visual and aural occasion of theatre to give expression to the voice’s wanderings in the in-between of the perceptual and the imaginary. Radio provided him with the perfect medium for representing the self’s struggle as that of a voice emerging from the darkness, the vocal struggle of frail voices trying to make faint sounds; in the dimming light, they grope for a subject for speech. Here the playwright is truly free to create worlds that are exclusively verbal and vocal. All of his plays reflect actively on the nature of the medium, but none more so than the radio plays, where images of amorphousness and nebulosity recur. The characters of the three plays — All That Fall, Embers and Cascando — are at pains to stress that they are not concrete entities, they are at the mercy of the machine transmitting their voices:

They exist only in the space of air-time allotted, in the voicing of the words, in the enmeshing of voices in air-waves. Blurring the boundaries of perception and imagination, Beckett uses the medium to explore the indeterminate, processual nature of the self, which may — or may not — be located in the babble of voices in the skull, in the movement between internal and external worlds. In the stage play Footfalls, he comes closest to representing the thought-tormented body that “is not there,” that exists only in the embedded narratives of the play, constructed by the interplay of bodiless voices. The audience sees May, but the play, with its successive diminishing of the strip of light throughout its four movements, and the final movement featuring only the strip of light on bare boards, May having “disappeared,” suggests that May was always “not there,” or only there as a trace, a voice in her mother’s — or in the spectator’s — head. The nature of the body’s “presence” is always in doubt in Beckett’s theatre, which is entirely orchestrated to represent a voice’s struggle with the nets of representation – the written page, the stage, the radio, the television screen. The voices in the skull, crossing between interior and exterior worlds throughout the life of the subject, pass into writing and then back into voice in the drama, which stages precisely this movement of the voice in the in-between of sensory perception and sensory imagination.

This movement between the sounds of the world, reverberating in the skull, and sounds heard in the auditory imagination, is captured to comic effect in the radio plays, where characters seem isolated in their interior worlds, where the noises of the world are received as intrusions, and always come as a shock to the system. For example, in All That Fall, the sound of Mr. Tyler rattling up the road on his bicycle is greatly exaggerated by sound effects, but Mrs. Rooney says “Oh, Mr. Tyler, you startled the life out of me stealing up behind me like that like a deer-stalker!” In this play, to be is to be heard: “There was a moment there, I remember now, I was so plunged in sorrow I wouldn’t have heard a steam-roller go over me.” The effort of stopping and starting, imposed by the fragmentary nature of the writing is felt by all of Beckett’s characters, but most keenly by the radio characters, where each pause assumes the aspect of an ending, and each sentence following the pause requires all the effort of starting all over again. Characters in this medium create themselves instant by instant and vanish when they fall silent. In this sense, radio provides the perfect metaphor for the voice itself.