In this third class of nouns, verbs and one adjective are the names in
Come and Go. Unusually for Beckett, this is a limpidly symbolist play,
in which — as is the way with symbolists — women come as an undividuated
plurality, often, as here, threesome. Beckett’s feminine trio
bears names that are all homophones of both common nouns and
verbs: Vi, Ru, and Flo. Suggestively, these names appear to be expressing
themselves through their biological hosts, using the women’s
relationships for that purpose.
VI < VIOLET
Violet n. plant and flower of viola genus; bluish-purple colour;
feminine proper name.
adj. of the colour of a violet, bluish-purple.
vb. to gather violets, to colour violet .
vie vb. to contend or compete with
n. a challenge
RU < RUBY
Ruby n. precious stone of crimson-red colour; feminine proper
name.
adj. of the colour of a ruby
vb. to dye to the colour ruby
rue vb. to regret or repent of
n. shrub of ruta genus; sorrow, regret, compassion.
FLO
Florence n. a coin, a type of fabric; a wench; English name for the
city of Firenze, Italy; feminine proper name.
Flow n. movement or rate of current or stream; outpouring; incoming
tide; a quicksand.
vb. to glide along, run smoothly like a river; to come or go in
a stream (of people etc.)
The icing on the nominal cake is a similar, though less rich, word play
— on “vie”, “flot”, “rue” (and “ruer”) — in the French version, Va-etvient
(1967). It suggests a fundamental phenomenon of linguistic
commonality for the author to draw on and also, perhaps, bilingual
premeditation on Beckett’s part.
Beckett’s bilinguality — and his audiences’ awareness of it — is a facet
of linguistic estrangement in his work that appears to have become
more evident and formative with time. It has lately been complicated
by vigorous efforts to recuperate for Beckett an Irish Protestant identity
that he took into a supposed self-exile and which he revealed in
his Hiberno-English idioms, his topographical allusions, and even the
theme of life-denial stemming from his historical membership in a
community and class doomed to extinction by the emergence of an
independent, Catholic, Irish state.
The misapprehension that Beckett’s (Hiberno-) English and his
French are in some way aligned with Irish selfhood and Gallic otherness
may be further fostered by the recent publication of Godot in a
bilingual edition. It is not the first such edition of a Beckett work but
it is the most accessible. The editor of this bilingual Godot strenuously
resists the assertion that the play is “unmistakedly [sic] Irish”, and his
rather indignant response to this claim voices a main motive for the
edition. “Viewed in its full multiplicity”, he says, the play “becomes at
least as unmistakedly [sic] French” (Beckett, 2006, p. vi). If this dispute
over the Beckett legacy approximates the ever-more-pervasive genre
of cultural farce, it also attests to an effect of Beckettian bilinguality,
putting the audience on the linguistic “qui vive”.
Beckett’s bilinguality is by no means a clear-cut phenomenon, not
even in outline; nor can it be the same one viewed from French, Irish
and English angles of vision. Beckett himself gave several reasons for
his switch into French, including: the elimination of style; an escape
from linguistic habit; and a discipline of linguistic impoverishment.
The fact that Becket also retained English as a language of composition
has aroused less curiosity, as though that were the natural thing to
do. It was not merely a reversion: a reversal made to re-access style; to
revert to comfortable habits of tongue; to switch back from linguistic
impoverishment to linguistic enrichment — though he did at one time
fear that he was losing his aptitude in English. Nor, indeed, can it
quite be said that after a French linguistic purgation Beckett reverted
to English, as a playwright, though most of the plays which appeared
after Fin de partie were, in fact, first written in English, and a half a
dozen of these were not translated by Beckett himself.
At the moment, my concern is not so much the linguistic processes of
bilingual creation and self-translation, fascinating though these are, but
with the ways in which the fact of bilinguality affects the reception of
Beckett’s work, as it seems to do more and more. We habitually look
for the convergence of origin and utterance in a unitary self-identity
— especially in the theatre — and one of the means that Beckett used
to make such a convergence elusive was bilinguality.
A passage in the late play Ohio Impromptu to illustrate the elusiveness. It goes:
In a last attempt to obtain relief he moved from where they had been so
long together to a single room on the far bank. From its single window he
could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans.
Pause.
Relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity. Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar
scene. Out to where nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever
shared. From this he had once half hoped some measure of relief might flow.
Pause.
Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the islet. Hour after hour. In
his long black coat no matter what the weather and an old world Latin
Quarter hat. 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 (Beckett, 1984b, p. 12-13).
What is the original language of this passage? “Obtain relief” verges
on translatorese. But that might well be an attribute of the text from
which the Reader is reading aloud to the unspeaking Listener. The
phrase “nothing ever shared” is unidiomatic enough to require reflection
about whether “shared” is in the passive voice (a participle
lacking its auxiliary verb) and meaning “nothing strong was ever shared” or
the grammatically sufficient use of the active voice, since things, as
well as a persons, may be said to “share”: meaning “nothing ever
shared” anything with anything else. Unambiguously, the French text
uses a participle here, “où jamais rien partagé” (Beckett, 1982, p. 61),
and is therefore in the passive voice without the auxiliary verb; and so
we may assume that the passive voice is intended in English also, despite
the incomplete grammar. That is, “nothing was ever shared.”
The word “Islet” is decidedly literary but again this may be attributed
to the style of the book being read. It refers to the “Isle of Swans”,
earlier mentioned, and therefore conjures up Paris, though without
declaring an originary language. It will also call Joyce and young
Beckett to the minds of those who know something of Beckett’s
quite-well-known life; how, when the two of them walked together,
the Allée des Cygnes was their favourite haunt.
Notice: in the Essay trere are a picture of a big hat with the descriptions of the parts, ejem:"Latin Quarter hat", "un Grand chapeau de rapin,etc...
“Latin Quarter hat” surely sounds like a phrase originating in English;
one that would not, perhaps, translate readily into French. It will certainly
sound English to the quite numerous listeners who recall it from
Joyce’s Ulysses as Buck Mulligan’s designation of the headgear that
Stephen Dedalus (for whom it is his “Hamlet hat”) wears around
Dublin, to show off (Joyce, 1961, p. 17, 47). Beckett’s French version
of the hat is more resonantly “un grand chapeau de rapin” (Beckett,
1984b, p. 61). And this, as it happens, also contrasts with the more
direct equivalent to “Latin Quarter hat” that we find in a Joycesupervised
translation of Ulysses, in which it becomes the comically
simple “couvre-chef du quartier latin” (Joyce, 1968, p. 18). And then
again, Beckett’s stage directions, in two languages, which place the hat
prominently on the table, do so in the even plainer language of “un
grand feutre noir aux larges bords” (Beckett, 1982, p. 60) and a “Black
wide-brimmed hat” (Beckett, 1984b, p. 11).
In summary — and to have done with hattery — whether or not the verbal
hats in Ohio Impromptu be versions of one and the same material object, the
four prose inscriptions of it (or them) — two in each language — refer to
it (or them) quite diversely. This leaves a sense of linguistic strangeness,
which begins with the quest for unfamiliarity undertaken by the unknown
person who wrote the book now being read aloud.
Is this a Parisian scene, perceived through the prism of English; or is it
recalled in the linguistic genius of the place and later subjected to
translation; or is it, after all, Gallo-Irish subjectivity haunted by Joycean
times past? These issues would be more approachable if the
words heard could be attributed to a speaker, but we have no such
figure, merely the one who listens and his likeness who reads. Their
relation with each other is as indeterminate as their relation with that
absent other who sought relief in unfamiliarity and wrote about it.
Turning now from devices of linguistic estrangement, which disrupt
the age-old theatrical association of speech and speakers, voice and
body, I take up, finally and briefly, those having to do with human
figures on Beckett’s stages.
Bodies
In Breath, as has been mentioned, Beckett not only got rid of speakers but
also of words, and not just speakers and words but also of human bodies,
that is to say he got rid of most of what theatre has been — at least, he
thought he’d got rid of human bodies until he learned that, in Breath’s first
staging, Kenneth Tynan had littered the stage with naked actors. Beckett
eventually put an end to the travesty (Knowlson, 1996, p. 566).
In all Beckett’s other stage plays, actors are, by some theatrical means,
constrained, immobilized or — as in Not I and That Time — reduced
to a body fragment — sometimes at the cost of almost intolerable
discomfort for the actor. With these devices he followed in the wake
of a line of playwrights and directors, mostly symbolists of some kind
— Maeterlinck, Craig, Yeats, Meyerhold — who sought to limit or
control the infiltration of nature into the theatrical artwork in the person
of the actor. W.B.Yeats, Beckett’s direct precursor in this respect,
reports one of his fantasies about the training of actors:
I had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in barrels that
they might forget gesture and have their minds free to think of speech for a
while. The barrels, I thought, might be on castors, so that I could shove them
about with a pole when the action required it (Yeats, 1962, p. 86-87).
The pole used to propel the wheelchair in Rough for Theatre I, the castors
on Hamm’s armchair in Endgame, the ashbins in which Hamm’s
parents reside, and the funereal urns in Play, are all fulfillments, of a
sort, of Yeats’s yearnings; and these immobilizations do indeed throw
emphasis on speech, though with effects roughly opposite to those
that Yeats had in mind.
The ashbins that accommodate Nagg and Nell in Endgame evolved
from an on-stage coffin (Gontarski, 1985, p. 50). Perhaps Beckett
found this old Irish trope of the corpse waking up to take part in the
wake (as in Happy as Larry, Donagh MacDonagh’s verse play of 1946)
too hackneyed. He certainly found the coffin distracting, especially
when its denizen was inactive. The ashbins, however, proved convenient
means of bringing a pair of lesser characters on and off stage —
so convenient so that they have inspired additions to the basic scenographic
resources of such theatricalist practitioners as Théâtre de
Complicité. They enable cuing from on-stage, immediate appearances
and extremely quick exits when the lids are raised or lowered; and this
without the nuisance of fictional motivation for their comings and
goings. The dead parents can appear when wanted and disappear
when not. The scenographic convenience of the ashbins derives partly
from their status as scenic objects unencumbered by supernatural baggage.
Nagg and Nell are not real ghosts — which are notoriously
difficult to stage — but stagey embodiments of mental objects.
The really ghostly presences of the later plays are purely or partly mental
figures, called to the mind’s eye by words, as in Ohio Impromptu. In
Play, however, the dead are both physically-embodied and really dead,
reduced to faces, the faces further reduced by their decayed features.
But these descendants of Yorick have nobody to say a kind word
about them: they must speak for themselves. In theatrical effect, these
faces surmounting the urns have little in common with the pop-up
heads of Endgame. The resemblance between ashbins and urns —
which, as Gontarski reports (Gontarski, 1985, p. 92), replaced the
white boxes of an early draft of the play) is superficial.
In Play, the spatial rhythms of the shapes, volumes and placement of
the urns were as key to the work as the orchestration of the voices, the
two coming together in a purgatorial image of acoustic fixity and visual
fixity that nevertheless — and appallingly — has duration; in
which the whole content of the endless present is an episode from the
past. Beckett considered and re-considered the urns and faces from
production to production, trying to get them just right, moving them
closer, tightening the necks. They were not to be jolly and comfortable
but slim and only one metre tall, which meant using traps or having
the actors kneel. Allowing the actors to sit was out of the question.
And the faces, for all their decay, must be faces, says Beckett — not
masks. The actors, that is to say, are subjected to considerable discomforts
in the interests of the reduction and encapsulation of their bodies
and the creation of the theatrical image. Importantly, the spectators
can hardly be unaware of these discomforts and this consciousness is
more than incidental to the reception of the work: it contributes to the
ritualistic effect.
The third means of holding in check the natural body — that chimera
of selfhood — is its immobilization, and this, again, is differently done
in the earlier and later stage plays. The earlier ones impose physical
restraints — Lucky’s rope, Hamm’s armchair, the wheelchair in Rough
for Theatre I. In Happy Days immobilization took what was later seen to
be a form intermediate between confinement and fragmentation:
Winny’s body appeared distinctly unwhole at its first appearance but,
in retrospect, so much of her torso is usable that it belongs with the
physically-constrained category rather than with the corporeal fragments
of Not I or That Time.
In Footfalls, the physical constraint is psychosomatic — or perhaps
theatrically arbitrary: the pacing figure actually mobile but within a
severely limited and repetitive range. In Rough for Theatre II, the potential
suicide is totally immobile, as well as silent; and in Catastrophe,
Protagonist, as the figure is called, is in almost the same condition.
Why do these figures remain transfixed? What constrains them? In
Catastrophe — an extraordinarily political play for Beckett and unusual
in other ways — a kind of answer is given; one that will also serve, I
think, for the questions posed earlier about the origins of light and
sound . It is my final example.
Catastrophe is presented as a rehearsal for the final tableau of a play
about a catastrophe. In the envisaged performance, the play is to leave
the spectators with the affecting image of Protagonist, clad in his torn,
greyish night attire. To achieve this effect, his robe is removed in the
course of this “rehearsal”. This costume adjustment brings the Director
closer to the desired visual image, though it leaves Protagonist
shivering. Further adjustments are made to expose more of Protagonist’s
flesh, sharpening the pathos. In the envisaged performance,
Protagonist will stand on a pedestal which will be high enough —
according to the note dictated by the Director — to make the toes
visible. Protagonist’s flesh and cranium will be whitened, in accordance
with another note taken; and the hands will be as set-up in this
rehearsal, crippled, claw-like and limp. The head will be — as adjusted
in this rehearsal — held low enough to obscure the face but not so
low as to overstate the abjection. At the very end, there is to be a tremendous
lighting effect: a fade-out on Protagonist, a pause, and then a
fade-up that lights the head alone, the bowed head. The Director is
well pleased with his modelling of Protagonist, “He’ll leave them on
their feet”, he says, “I can hear it from here.” (Beckett, 1984b, p. 36)
Protagonist’s body is immobile in the rehearsal, except for the adjustments
made to it by the Assistant — and the shivering, of course —
but at the very end of Catastrophe, the scene shifts to envision, proleptically,
the forthcoming performance. At first, the applause is indeed
enthusiastic, as the Director had foretold, but it falters and dies as
Protagonist “raises his head and fixes the audience”. Beckett’s stage
direction endows Protagonist with a momentary autonomy that fixes
the spectators who are more than spectators for they are participating
in this ritual we call “theatre”. Whatever its claims to noncomplicitous
representation, this ritual is not exempt from the general
catastrophe of human existence. Like every other part of human exis
tence theatre cannot do other than enact that catastrophe.
The figure of the Director in Catastrophe cannot be altogether remote
from self-critique of the meticulous Beckett who made such rigorous
demands on his actors in pursuit of new resources of theatrical — that
is to say human — expression. This immanence of theatre made at
some human cost, may be a reason — though not always sufficient
reason — for Beckett’s attempts (and those of his executors) to retain
control over productions done in his name. His plays are not museum
installations, but the prescribed details of their material presentation
are as fundamental as they are to other plastic arts or, for that matter,
to ritual that encompassed even Modernism.
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