Samuel Beckett, 1961
(Portrait on wood panel)
BY Reginald Gray
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

In July 2006, I finally made my pilgrimage to Beckett’s grave in Montparnasse cemetery. The place had the lapidary stillness of all graveyards, despite the clamour of bronze and the many shrines to France’s artistic and intellectual dead. Picking my way through the thicket of dolorous staturary, the graves of Serge Gainsbourg (miniature bottles of vodka and teddy bears) and Baudelaire (sheet music for Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale), I managed to find Beckett’s recumbent grey slab, sober trace. Others had made it here before me — the grave was strewn with scraps of paper and metro tickets featuring misquotations of the work, more sheet music (Albinoni), coins, stones, even feathers — though the latter might have been dropped by the birds inhabiting the overhanging trees. Votive testaments to people’s impulse to touch or press, made demands of the dead, now defenceless. I too had come to pay homage to a spirit he shunned. An acacia bent over the grave, shadowy fronds dancing on the marble; a warm breeze rippled the sandy avenues between the mausoleums.

Later, walking in Montparnasse, I thought of how it must have been in the 1930s, when all of Paris packed dance-halls such as Le Select or Le Dôme to hear jazz orchestras play the latest music blown in from the Caribbean or the West Indies: the Biguine, the Rhumba, the Java. I imagined him walking on the boulevard, an insomniac in search of whiskey and talk, his voice “like a marmoset sitting on [his] shoulder, with its bushy tail, keeping [him] company” (From An Abandoned Work). A life spent trying to hear and capture the voice of writing, the dilemma of a self enclosed with a babel of voices, struggling to determine its own voice in the cacophony.

Nathalie Léger, in her book, Les Vies silencieuses de Samuel Beckett (Éditions Allia, 2006) quotes a friend who heard Beckett remark that what he liked about the radio version of Marguerite Duras’s play Le Square, was “les petits pâtés de sable des voix, des timbres, placés tantôt à terre, tantôt dans l’espace” (“the little sandcastles of voices, of timbres, sometimes placed on the ground, sometimes in space”). What Beckett was drawn to in this production was the effect of deracinated voices coming out of the dark, unencumbered by the trappings of character. This was his desire for his own theatre: that it represent the movement of voices inside and outside the skull, an indeterminate space where the spectator is never sure if she is on the inside, imagining, or on the outside, seeing and hearing. Words were, for Beckett, a necessary stain upon the silence. “I don’t find solitude agonizing,” he once said to Nancy Cunard, “holes open up in paper and take me fathoms from anywhere.” Representation of these fathoms, of the compulsion to tear open the silence, to draw the auditor/spectator into the vastness separating thought from its objects, was perhaps his primary aim for his theatre. The space between is filled with voices, particles of dust moving in air: “I am all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling” (The Unnamable). If the self exists at all, it is in the mobile processes of language that it is to be located.

Beckett’s work for the stage was a continuation of his prose project: an exploration of the mystery of the voice — it origin, its location and its nature, whether a marker of discrete essential identity or a cultural echo, the voice of the speaking subject or the point of intersection of “all the dead voices.” In the later short prose, and in the plays from Krapp’s Last Tape onwards, there is increasing dissolution of the separations and distinctions between fiction and drama, as Beckett begins to liberate the voice from the page, to stage the narrating voice. From An Abandoned Work, a piece of prose that was broadcast by BBC3 in 1957 as a radio play, inhabits the borders between narrative and theatre. The source of the voice evoking three separate days in the life of an old man is not clear, its role as a marker of being or authenticity dubious. Spatial and temporal settings are equally ambiguous. The piece is a model for all of Beckett’s later writing, in which untethered voices move in indeterminate spaces.

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.

Beckett also manipulated the languages of the stage to achieve the effect of characters so cocooned in their interior worlds that each meeting or exchange is a collision. In Play, for example, three characters encased in urns (only their head are visible) are “switched on and off” by the controlling light, their frenzied parallel monologues delivered at breakneck speed and decimated by the light as it swivels from one to the other. These characters exist only in the split-second blinking of the seeing eye of the Other:

W1: Is it something I should do with my face, other than utter? Weep? […]
Bite off my tongue and swallow it? Spit it out? Would that placate you? How the mind works still, to be sure. […]

If only I could think, There is no sense in this… either, none whatsoever. I can’t. […] And that all is falling, all fallen, from the beginning, on empty air. Nothing being asked at all. No one asking me for anything at all.

The characters in Play know that they are making the mistake of “looking for sense where possibly there is none” as they struggle to understand their compulsion — obligation — to say something, to keep talking.

I would suggest that for Beckett, writing was a permanent struggle to force language to realise the poet’s auditory imagination, to represent
a skull assailed by voices…

In both radio and stage plays, what counted above all for Beckett was the sounding of the words in the rhythmical patterns in which he set them in his writing. The proliferation of musical terminology in his stage notebooks is testament to his primary objective: that the actors respect the tempo, the rhythm of his sentences. Hundreds of accounts from actors who worked with him bear witness to his extreme rigour and meticulousness in relation to all apects to staging, but particularly in relation to the echoing and contrasting tones of voices, the pace and rhythms of the language, the duration of the many pauses and silences and the timbre of the voices — which was to be kept as flat as possible, for the most part monotone — as little “expression” as possible in the voice, to allow the musicality of the writing to sound, and not the actor’s interpretation of the narrative. Here it is clear that theatre for Beckett was the occasion for a staging of the voice of writing, the resuscitation of the traces of the self present in the original voice.

Martin Esslin asserts that Beckett strove increasingly throughout his career as a writer to fix visual images in words, noting that his move toward the mechanically recorded media — radio, television, cinema — in the later part of his career was an attempt to ensure that the images realised would be as near his own original vision as possible, and that they would be preserved in that ideal form, thus overriding the impermanence and unpredictability of the stage image. Esslin believed that, for Beckett, writing was a permanent struggle to force language to realise the poet’s visual imagination, to guarantee the realisation of that authentic vision in its integrity.^[1] While it is undeniable that part of Beckett’s project was a formalisation of the stage-space, his later plays stage bodies that resist the effort to convert them into pure sign, to be perceived as whole. I would suggest that for Beckett, writing was a permanent struggle to force language to realise the poet’s auditory imagination, to represent a skull assailed by voices, echoes sounding the movement of a self between body and language, between visual and auditory ways of being. The range of media he used enabled him to locate his liminal texts on a range of different boundary-lines, to test the limits of seeing and hearing in half-way spaces where images and sounds are unpredictable and unfixed, where there is interference and inter-penetration of sensory information. But above all, in setting the voice of writing free from the page, Beckett was capitalising on the opportunity to stage the movement of the voice of his writing, to sound his words in the auditory imaginations of others — actors, auditors, spectators — and to blur the lines between perceptual and imaginary experience. While radio offered perhaps the perfect medium for his poesis of the vocalic body, it was in the physical staging of bodies in various states of disability that he could most fully represent the ambivalent nature of a voice impelled to navigate the in-between of body and word.

And Beckett’s voice? While he seemed willing, almost happy, to be photographed, there are very few traces of his voice. France Culture recently broadcast a recording of the few words he said in acceptance of the 1959 Prix Italia for his radio play Embers — educated Dublin, slightly sibilant. In the absence of his recorded voice, his writing suggests that it is the voice that is the true marker of subjectivity, betraying as it does the hidden selves pressing for a hearing: