The Drama in the Text: Beckett's Late Fiction

The Drama in the Text

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The Drama in the Text Beckett's Late Fiction

ENOCH BRATER

New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1994

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1994 by Enoch Brater Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brater, Enoch. The drama in the text : Beckett's late fiction / Enoch Brater. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-19-508892-1 (cloth) 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989—Fictional works. 2. Oral interpretation. I. Title. PR6003.E282Z57674 1994 843'.914—dc20 93-30405

Since the copyright page cannot accommodate all the credit lines, the following page serves as an extension of the copyright page.

987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Material from Collected Shorter Plays by Samuel Beckett. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. "Morte de A.D." from Collected Poems, 1930-1978. Copyright © Samuel Beckett 1959, 1961, 1962, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1984. From Collected Shorter Prose, 1945-1980, copyright © 1984 by Samuel Beckett, the following: "Enough," translated by Samuel Beckett, copyright © Samuel Beckett 1967, 1975; "Lessness," translated by Samuel Beckett, copyright © Samuel Beckett 1969, 1970; "All Strange Away," copyright © Samuel Beckett 1978, 1979; "Imagination Dead Imagine," translated by Samuel Beckett, copyright © Samuel Beckett 1965, 1966; "Ping," translated by Samuel Beckett, copyright © Samuel Beckett 1966, 1967, 1975; "The Lost Ones," translated by Samuel Beckett, copyright © Samuel Beckett 1970, 1972; "Still," copyright © Samuel Beckett 1975, 1976; "From an Abandoned Work," copyright © Samuel Beckett 1958 The author and publisher are grateful to the Samuel Beckett Estate and to The Calder Educational Trust, London, for permission to quote from the following texts: Molloy by Samuel Beckett, translated by Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles. Copyright © Samuel Beckett 1950 and copyright the translation © Samuel Beckett 1955, 1959, 1966, 1971, 1976; Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett, translated by Samuel Beckett. Copyright text and translation © Samuel Beckett 1951, 1958, 1975; The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, translated by Samuel Beckett. Copyright text and translation © Samuel Beckett 1952, 1958, 1975; How It Is by Samuel Beckett, translated by Samuel Beckett. Copyright text and translation © Samuel Beckett 1964; Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © Samuel Beckett 1983; /// Seen III Said by Samuel Beckett, translated by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © Samuel Beckett 1981, 1982; Company by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © Samuel Beckett 1979, 1980. From the book "Cascando" and Other Short Dramatic Pieces', "Krapp's Last Tape" and Other Dramatic Pieces, Copyright © 1963 by Samuel Beckett, copyright © renewed 1991 Edward Beckett ("Cascando" and Other Short Dramatic Pieces) and 1988 Samuel Beckett ("Krapp's Last Tape" and Other Dramatic Pieces). Used with the permission of Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press. The author and publisher are grateful to the Macmillan Publishing Company (New York) for permission to quote from The Poems ofW. B. Yeats: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran, and especially from "The Apparitions." Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Earlier versions of short sections in the present study have appeared in Contemporary Literature', the Journal of Modern Literature', and in two collections: Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morrris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), and Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, ed. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (London: Macmillan, 1986). The author is grateful to the editors and publishers of these volumes for permission to reprint the material in a revised form.

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For my son, Jonathan, my best piece of poetry

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Preface

The Drama in the Text is a book about the principal role of sound in Beckett's late fiction. In completing this study I have become increasingly aware of the subjective nature of the enterprise. In spite of this—and perhaps because of it—I have decided to forge ahead, inspired, no doubt, by the same author's "No try no fail." Difficult to read in any conventional sense of the term, Beckett's post-trilogy fiction becomes, for this reader at least, surprisingly accessible when recited aloud. That virtue of the stubborn and enigmatic text that lies before us as if etched in stone has been a continual temptation to a growing number of theater practitioners who have transformed these hard and precise pieces into the more flexible reality of a live stage presentation. I say "text" here with some trepidation, for the more accurate term in the case of Beckett's writing is likely to be "script." The former sounds ominously monumental, even finished, while the latter makes its appeal to a theatrical sense of potential, something imminent, performable, something always on the verge of becoming each time we take words—Beckett's words—in hand. "On." "Nohow on." Anyhow, on. This study represents an attempt to clarify the chameleonlike quality of Beckett's strange journey from the body of words to a voice's embodiment in words. Reader now turns Listener as the tension between text and script, the vocable and the verbal, is always in the process of writing itself down. Beckett's fascination with the art of radio serves as a remarkable gateway to his fictional exploration of the question of voice, sound and, above all, tonality. In this mechanical medium, dedicated to the art of embodying rather than analyzing, the musicality that has always been inherent in his "text" achieves a rare spontaneity in what he once called the "rhythm of a labouring heart." Such evocative acts of enunciation transcribe words from page to electronic recording tape, then back from tape to page again, constructing a complete inventory of aural effects that

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achieve their full maturity in the late work written in what looks like prose but sounds like . . . something else again. Beckett has always been one step ahead of his critics. "This craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death!" Poststructural theorists have fared no better (and certainly no worse) than their predecessors, for, as I argue here, the Beckett script outlasts every attempt to pin "it" down: despite fashions to the contrary, this author is no deader than the spontaneity he brings to every "text." That is, in fact, the real-life drama to be staged and encountered here. I have been thinking and writing about Beckett for some time now and I still find the same repertory "inexhaustible." For just what are those "wonderful lines"? In my various attempts to come to grips with this question—not the least of which is the present task of bringing this project to (temporary) closure—I have been vastly enriched by the fine work of an international community of Beckett scholars. For their generous support (richly documented along the way) I wish to express my heartfelt thanks. Foremost among them is that Beckett legend Ruby Cohn, who read the manuscript for this book scrupulously, always urging me to get "it," "this this—," and "this this here—" more or less right. My thanks, too, to three strong editors: Bill Sisler (now at Harvard University Press), Susan Chang (now at Cambridge University Press), and Liz Maguire, still holding up the fort for me at Oxford University Press. For the rest I would suggest, like the compelling drama I still find in these texts, "not guilty." Ann Arbor, Mich. September 1993

E. B.

Contents 1. Still Beckett, 3 2. Acts of Enunciation, 14 3. The Play of Language, 58 4. The Performative Voice, 90 5. Trios and Trilogies Voice Verbatim, 106 A Site and a Scene for the Said, 122 Saying "Nohow on", 135

6. Posthumous Voices and More Stirrings Still, 145 7. Dire Comments on comment dire, 164 NOTES, 175 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, 209 INDEX, 219

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The Drama in the Text

"More..." —Rockabv

1 Still Beckett

Let us begin not with a recently published Beckett work, or even with what has been elsewhere explored in the later Beckett oeuvre, but rather with the sound of that vintage Beckett of the much-traveled "Molloy country":1

She had a somewhat hairy face, or am I imagining it, in the interests of the narrative? The poor woman, I saw her so little, so little looked at her. And was not her voice suspiciously deep? So she appears to me today. Don't be tormenting yourself, Molloy, man or woman, what does it matter? But I cannot help asking myself the following question. Could a woman have stopped me as I swept towards mother? Probably. Better still, was such an encounter possible, I mean between me and a woman? Now men, I have rubbed up against a few men in my time, but women? Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against one. I don't mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her. And if you don't mind we'll leave my mother out of all this. But another who might have been my mother, and even I think my grandmother, if chance had not willed otherwise. Listen to him now talking about chance. It was she made me acquainted with love. She went by the peaceful name of Ruth I think, but I can't say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn't tell you. But is it true love, in the 3

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rectum? That's what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all? (Molloy, pp. 75-76)

But by the late forties and early fifties Beckett had abandoned the upper-class Dublin syntax of his native Irish-English and was writing in French, as he said at the time, "pour faire remarquer moi."2 In December 1957 he wrote, "there is something in my English writing that infuriates me and I can't get rid of it. A kind of lack of brakes.'' Nine years earlier, on December 15, 1946, he announced to his friend George Reavey, "I do not think I shall write very much in English in the future"—a statement that Time, "that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation," proved to be false.3 "Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want, perhaps only the French can do it," remarks Belacqua's friend, Lucien, in the "virgin chronicle" called Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Later in the same early novel "Bel" will himself be forced to concede, "In French I can write a fine stinger, but in English I overdo

it."4 To Herbert Blau Beckett confided that French "had the right weakening effect"; to Richard Coe he said that he was afraid of English "because you couldn't help writing poetry in it"; to Nicklaus Gessner he admitted that in French it was easier to write "sans style." He told Israel Shenker of the New York Times that he switched to French because he just felt like it; it was a different experience from writing in English: "It was more exciting for me—writing in French."5 The change in language, however, also marked an important change in artistic direction, one that achieved its most eloquent expression in the English/French prose writings undertaken by fits and starts in the seventies and eighties. Let me return to my long citation from Molloy, "Englished" by Beckett himself with the not always welcome assistance of a young novelist living in Paris named Patrick Bowles. ("I felt bad," he admitted later, "having to change what someone else had translated.")6 What is so remarkable about this passage, qua passage? Molloy is full of such exquisite verbal arpeggios: "The room smelt of ammonia, oh not merely of ammonia, but of ammonia, ammonia. She knew it was me, by my smell. Her shrunken hairy old face lit up, she was happy to smell me."7 I would like to suggest that those moments we remember from Molloy, like those other purple passages we recall from the rest of the trilogy, are remembered precisely because they are so wonderfully speakable: they are written for the performative voice, a resonant human voice, and they attain their full spontaneity only when spoken aloud. Sound literally makes sense here. The room smelt of ammonia, oh not merely of ammonia, but of ammonia,

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ammonia. How else are we to understand the limits and possibilities of such an outrageous line of supposedly narrative discourse? Beckett's real energy as a writer of prose is based on a single assertion: the line is written primarily for recitation, not recounting. What should concern us here is diction rather than syntax. If a story emerges—and sometimes it will despite Beckett's stubborn insistence that there is nothing to communicate and no vehicle for communication—it will be more celebrated for its telling rather than for anything that might get itself told along the way. Each of Beckett's encounters with the mechanisms of prose shares the same dubious fate as the one he doles out to his intrepid walktalker in From an Abandoned Work: "I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way."8 The human voice—rather than what is being voiced—is, miraculously, the vehicle of communication here. To be is to be heard. In Derridian terms Beckett therefore privileges speech over writing, to use that overused nonverb that in some critical circles still resists being a verb.9 Or, rather, in this instance writing—inscription—is conceived as a form of heightened speech: a "script" for that absent voice—mirabile and very much dictu—that once was in your mouth. Beckett's terms are far more compelling—and far more to the point. "You complain," he wrote in defense of James Joyce in 1929, "that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to."10 Beckett's agenda as a writer of prose is to take the Joyce of Finnegans Wake quite literally at his own word. Embracing language as his one true persona, Beckett turns his "wordy-gurdy'''' into a dynamic force that everywhere insinuates itself per sona, through sound. Beckett did not come upon this solution easily. The fiction he composed in English up until the end of the Second World War—that is to say through the completion of his novel Watt, which was written in Roussillon, in the south of France, during the years he was hiding from the Nazis12— can't quite figure out what it wants to be. For example, an anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement found More Pricks Than Kicks "uneven. . . . [T]here is a definite, fresh talent at work in it, though it is a talent not yet quite sure of itself.'' Edwin Muir, writing in The Listener, was much more to the point. Noting that the vitality of the story "is in the presentation, which is witty, extravagant and excessive," Muir emphasized Beckett's ability to reduce everything to intellectual fantasy, to "extremely good and calculated and quite impossible talk" (emphasis mine). The reviews of Murphy were only slightly more upbeat. Dylan Thomas, reviewing it for the New English Weekly, observed that its author

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was "a great legpuller andl an enemy of obviousness." But Thomas was troubled by the novel's inability to establish and sustain a consistent new voice of its own: "[T]he story never quite knows whether it is being told objectively from the inside of its characters or subjectively from the outside. "13 D. Powell, writing in the Sunday Times in March 1938, concluded: "The book may be sterile, but it is not negligible."14 Academic and in some places downright clumsy, Beckett's mannerist style of this period— as he recognized a decade later when he was working on Molloy—threatens to be undone by the pervasive influence of someone else's prose: I who had loved the image of old Geulinx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom to him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck. (Molloy, p. 68)

"Joyce had a profound effect upon me," Beckett once acknowledged. "He made me realize artistic integrity." He told John Montague, "He might surprise you when the light is fading." 15 Beckett's sudden and quite unpredictable turn to French offered him a rendezvous with language that no one had ever had before, not even his fellow speaker of Irish-English, James Joyce. ("I vow I'll get over J.J. ere I die," he wrote to Samuel Putnam as early as June 28, 1932.16) By the time Beckett returned to his small Paris apartment at number 6, rue des Favorites, in 1946, after working nearly six months at the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-L6, Normandy, he had been living in France for nearly a decade. Those first French lessons—begun under the watchful eye of Monsieur Alfred Le Peton at the Earlsfort House School in Dublin and continued (when Beckett was not out on the cricket field) at the Portora Royal School in Ulster—had borne considerable fruit. French had become something rather different from the very literary medium he had studied at Trinity with Thomas Rudmose-Brown: it had become his daily language. The sound of French was now Beckett's link to the outside world, langue transformed into parole.17 I want to emphasize here the sound of French, how an English speaker—in this particular case, an Irish-English speaker—first encounters a new language before making it his own. Beckett's adoption of French as his literary metier is, in the broadest sense, a rediscovery of the aural possibilities of language for the instants of communion they offer. "Mo-

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merits. Her moments, my moments. . .. The dog's moments," as Beckett will much later make his language—English, this time around—sound in Krapp's Last Tape.18 Such moments, chiseled into the event of words, this writer's words, need to be looked at and listened to, as Dina Sherzer has reminded us concerning The Unnamable.19 Sound precedes sense. Stories were spoken before anyone ever thought of writing them down. "Saying,'' as Beckett has stated first in French and then in English, "is inventing."20 Beckett, of course, had read the symboliste poets, as even the most casual reader of Beckett's work and criticism about it can see at first hand. Allusions to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Verlaine are by this time part of the familiar tapestry, providing his writing with a network of allusion that has kept several belle-lettrists busy, especially those with a taste for intertextuality. Mallarme's idea behind "Herodiade," which he described in a letter written to his friend Henri Cazalis, seems to inspire much of what happens in Beckett's investigation of prose: "I'm inventing a language which must of necessity burst forth from a very new poetics, which I could define in these few words: paint, not the object, but the effect it produces."21 And yet the sound-sense relations for which the Symbolist poets are famous, creating a realm in which moods and ideas are suggested but never made explicit, reflect the dimensions of their own language—French—from within. Beckett's particular framework, "which insinuates more than it asserts,"22 is the anomaly. He remains, in this regard, the perennial outsider; in French his word of Mouth, so to speak, is always at one step removed. The sound-sense relations his language fosters forever cast him in the unenviable role of L'Absent, the working title for the story that eventually became Malone Dies.23 Mediated by his own Irishness, as Mary Lydon has ably argued,24 Beckett's shift from English to French turns him into his own (Jacques) Moran, with the accent on the first syllable. Beckett's exile, unlike Joyce's, is strictly in the forced march of words. What is at stake here, especially when Beckett returns to English, is nothing less than an encounter with language that insists on being heard new: the sound of words, which has always constituted its appeal to "literary folk," as well as its primary site of power. What is at stake, too, is the crucial link between Beckett's work in fiction and drama.25 Writing for the voice is what makes dialogue possible in the theater. Seen in this light, fiction and drama—at least Beckett's fiction and drama—turn out to be, to quote Shakespeare's Troilus, "a thing inseparate."26 The word wasn't a word until it was made flesh, that is, until a voice said "it." "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine."27 In Molloy Beckett's attempt to write for the performative voice is still

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tentative, though he was certainly aware, as he said at the time, that his monologuist's love scenes there "might arouse some response."28 Despite its verbal histrionics, like the passage with which this chapter opens, the text of Beckett's novel keeps wanting to remind us that it is, in actuality, something written down—something, in fact, not unlike "a disquieting sound, that of soliloquy, under dictation" we may have read about earlier in Watt.29 And Beckett is quick to remind us in the very first paragraph of his novel that Molloy is, after all, writing a report. That is where he leaves Moran, too, as this two-part invention concludes: "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."30 As a reward for staying with him for the rest of the trilogy, Beckett lets us hear the many ways in which the cluttered mechanisms of his previously baroque fiction begin to break down. This is work-in-regress, "progress" having been given a peculiar new twist by the steady laundering of language to "First dirty, then make clean."31 Malone makes quite a "mess" of his decease, and the unnamable finally settles down in search of that fragile, elusive, but seemingly authentic voice that will allow him to say "me," "it," "on," or anything else that comes to mind—can openers up the arse notwithstanding. "I say it as I hear it," about which we will soon hear much more in How It Is,32 Paring down his fictional enterprise to what a story has always been—a voice speaking aloud—Beckett has in The Unnamable reached the point where his real energy as a writer of prose is about to begin. Much has been said by Beckett and about Beckett concerning the impasse that followed hard upon his completion of the trilogy. The work, he wrote, "finished me or expressed my finishedness." He began to talk at the time of having no "nominative," no "accusative," and no "verb"; no "I," no "have" and, above all, no "being." He was, he observed, "not so much bogged down as fogged out." He did not, however, stop writing. He composed En attendant Godot between October 1948 and January 1949 as a form of "relaxation" between Malone Dies and The Unnamable, mostly to get away, as he told Colin Duckworth, from the "awful prose" he said he was writing at the time. "It wrote itself," he told Peter Lennon, "with very few corrections, in four months." Asked why he chose to work on a play in the midst of working on fiction, Beckett replied: "I didn't choose to write a play. It just happened like that." He was, he said, "in search of respite from the wasteland of prose."33 And yet the "wasteland of prose" continued, even after he reached the "threshold" of his story in The Unnamable. In French he labeled as nouvelles the stories we know in English as The End, The Calmative, and The

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Expelled, borrowing his title for this minor trilogy collectively titled Textes pour rien (Texts for Nothing) from "mesure pour rien," a musical term signifying a bar's rest.34 These works, he said, were nothing more than "the grisly afterbirth of L'Innomable." "Short abortive texts," they "express the failure to implement the last words" of The Unnamable.35 How they fail to do this Beckett would not say, referring us instead to the stunning conclusion of his novel: "I can't go on, I'll go on." By the end of The Unnamable Beckett, who easily fits Georges Duthuit's description of Sam Francis as an "animator of silence,"36 had written everything out of his prose fiction with the exception of a voice. His problem now was to figure out just what to do with it. How does a writer make prose simply "say it, not knowing what"? Less is more, as I have argued elsewhere with regard to Beckett's dramatic repertory since Not I, but only if that less is in the right place.37 How It Is is, in this respect, a rather ambitious attempt on Beckett's part to make his Reader, now turned Listener, hear a voice that murmurs in the "so-called mud." "I say it," we remember, "as I hear it": "tohu-bohu," "quaqua," "Pirn Pim," "Bom Bern," "PimBim," "Pim Bem me Bern," "SkomSkum," "B B to C," "1 to 3 four," "subject object subject object," "drivel drivel," "777777." Oh Lucky, where are you now that we need you most? In the same play Gogo had complained about "no laces"; here there are "no commas." And yet the "essential would seem to be lacking," especially in English, which misses the bold power of the pun heard whenever one utters the French title: Comment c'est, literally "how it is," is also commencer, "to begin." How It Is (there's English for you) is "illinspired," but it is also—and fatally—"ill-told," "ill-spoken," "illmurmured," "ill-heard," ill-seen, and ill-said. Something wrong there. Beckett's experiments in shorter fiction—including such transitional works as Enough, Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping, All Strange Away, and Lessness—reflect his pursuit of seemingly contradictory voices, moving freely from this style to that, as critics like John Pilling, Susan Brienza, Steven Connor, Carla Locatelli, P. J. Murphy, and Leslie Hill have persuasively shown.38 In these minute but precise pieces Beckett surprises us by pursuing "the point where invisibility itself becomes a thing." Such excavations in prose offer us, as he said in a 1936 review of Jack Yeats' novel The Amaranthers for Dublin Magazine, "no symbol," "no allegory ,'' only '' stages of an image."39 Full of intentional disjunctions, spatial inconsistencies, and flourishes that may be downright meaningless, these "lyrics of fiction," to borrow Ruby Cohn's telling phrase,40 also contain passages of unmistakable eloquence: "Figment dawn dispeller of figments and the other called dusk."41 As the voice speaks on, now in one register,

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now in another, vivid patterns and fortuitous images emerge: "Now I'll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers. Enough my old breasts feel his old hand." 42 This is Beckett's "blue celeste" of poetry.43 Subtler, humbler, and more poignant than How It Is, these short works revere no single perspective, make no claim to being authoritative, and reflect in their insistent diversity the texture and textuality of some chaotic real world. The longest prose work of this period, The Lost Ones, creates a seemingly omniscient voice that deconstructs myth in the process of positing an exacting geometric landscape. Here Beckett's chilling sensibility is highly analytic: the suspect dimensions of a flattened cylinder, "fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony,"44 expose us to our spiritual pretensions as well as our own intellectual fantasies, fetishes, and limitations. But in Beckett's hands such fiction, whose most characteristic sound will be that of "syntaxes upended in opposite corners,"45 soon "fizzles" out. The voice "still" wants to be a text: its rich, melodious texture keeps calling attention to the writer's "art and craft" which sets "it all" in motion, "for to end" we are tempted to scan "yet again."46 Beckett's voice ultimately will not be liberated from such sentimental attachments until the composition of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, three works of the late seventies and eighties in which verse, the kind of "crafted" verse we typically associate with Beckett's liminal prose poems, has been convincingly upstaged by the performative voice. In Company, first written in English but originally published in French, Beckett's prose assumes the recitational force that has been struggling for so long to break free from the tyranny of the "script" we hold in our hands. "A voice comes to one in the dark." Hearing is believing: ' 'Imagine.'' According to his German translator, the late Elmar Tophoven, Beckett had been thinking of Jeremiah.47 The tone of this jeremiad, however, is surprisingly somber, the shape dialogic. "The novel as a whole," writes Bakhtin, "is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice."48 Company, however, whose working title, according to Charles Krance, was once "The Voice VERBATIM," demonstrates its theory by its very existence: Beckett's recit now gives rapid tempo to the voice of memory, halting rhythm to the voice of reason, then lets them play off one another in vigorous counterpoint. In an outline for the project, the author characterized the piece as "Speech by A overheard by B described by C . . . A, B, C [being] one and the same. ... A describes A (to A) / A misrepresents A (to A)."49 Here conflict is realized as language conceived as speech. The drama is in the text.

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This "play" of language continues in Mal vu mal dit and even more so in Beckett's English translation /// Seen Ill Said. Marjorie Perloff, citing a pattern of allusions that spans King Lear, "Ode to a Nightingale," Swinburne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, has rightly directed our attention to the literary legacy informing the meaning of Beckett's English text. Monique Nagem has located additional echoes, especially those that derive from a late-nineteenth-century French poetic canon.50 And yet the language we hear in /// Seen Ill Said may be just as rich in the use it makes of a specifically theatrical vocabulary. This may be prose, but it has the life of the theater in it. The mysterious tale of a woman who abandons her cabin to seek precarious shelter in a "zone of stones" depends for its life on "rafters," "boards," and a single "trapdoor" ("Promising this flagrant concern with camouflage''). And the "vile jelly'' is only the most notorious reference to dialogue previously written for a mise-en-scene by that master stage craftsman William Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night''s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and (by way of Michelangelo) the "regicide" Brutus from Julius Caesar are there, too, as is a frail reference to John Milton's closet drama Samson Agonistes, one more exercise in a specifically theatrical blindman's buff. 5l The "curtain closes" on this fable, however, with a nod to the "Know wisdom" ofEcclesiastes: in this case Beckett transforms "wisdom" into "happiness." But closure in this instance depends on an act of enunciation heard at the same moment it is said: "Know happiness" is a pun that can only take place as an act of heightened speech, like Hamlet's "Not so, my lord; I am too much i' th' sun."52 There can be "no happiness" in this "zone of stones" when a voice sets our sight on Golgotha, "the place of the skull," where, as we recall from Waiting for Godot, "they crucified quick."53 Worstward Ho, which Beckett did not translate into French (that task has been left to other hands, in this case Edith Fournier for Cap au pire),54 confronts us with a language that may very well be unreadable, though it is not therefore unsayable—even when that saying requires of us considerable linguistic acrobatics: To last unlessenable least how loath to leasten. For then in utmost dim to unutter leastmost all.55

Language has its own internal fury; but even in its most abstracted form it also has firm textual detail. Here the range of sound can be thrilling, even, one might say, encyclopedic. This is indeed a discourse that must be looked at and listened to. Saying is inventing, "ununsaid," even when the "so-said" is the "missaid," "Said nohow on." Strange English, this.

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It is in fact not really English, at least not English as we are used to hearing it "said" and performed. Everything oozes: "Inletting all. Outletting all." "Beyondless," "thenceless," and "thitherless," the sound here is not, strictly speaking, the King's English, and certainly not French, nor even the Irish-English melody with which this writer's "better than nothing" began.56 Written for recitation, not recounting, Worstward Ho reconstructs English only to make it sound new. "The worst is not," Edgar says in an aside from King Lear that Beckett singled out in a notebook entry for 1930, "So long as we can say, 'This is the worst.' "57 Such the sound of Shakespeare; such the sound of Beckett. No wonder so many theater practitioners have been tempted to adapt Beckett's late prose for the stage. There is indeed a drama to these little texts, one that looks, at first "apergu,"58 very much like the Beckett we recognize in the theater. Fiction and drama, theatricality and textuality, seem to come together here. When he wrote A Piece of Monologue, for example, the playwright told the actor David Warrilow that he wasn't even sure if he had written a play or a piece of prose. Earlier he had characterized That Time as something that existed only at the very edge of what might be possible in the theater.59 And yet the drama written into prose, based so securely on the sound of the human voice, is not necessarily performable in the technical stage sense. For as it materializes in sound, Beckett's voice is a mise en abime without the accompanying mise en scene. Such prose is, in fact, a discourse in sound: no theater image takes center stage. "A voice comes to one in the dark," and though that is where theater takes place, in the dark—as the director Frederick Newmann reminded Beckett when he set about adapting Company for his company, Mabou Mines— the darkness is in this case more strictly imagined.60 Sound makes all the sense there is. "A pox on void."61 When I asked Beckett if Company, Ill Seen III Said, and Worstward Ho constituted a trilogy, he replied, "I hadn't thought of it as such, but I suppose so—more so than the other works called the Trilogy."62 The connection between three works is now distinctly and, one is almost tempted to say, exclusively formal; no more journeys in forests or in flattened cylinders, in textbook images or in text-bound words. The "scene" is now the said. There is, then, something stirring in Beckett's late prose. In a work written in July 1986, yet another trilogy first called "Fragments," then "Wholes," then "Still Stirrings," and finally Stirrings Still, Beckett continues to keep company with a voice that cries out for theatrical communion. "Who knows?" was Beckett's response, as late as 1987, concerning the status of his unfinished writings. "There may still

Still Beckett

13

be some more stirrings.' '63 Now hear this from the first of the three Stirrings Still:64 A clock afar struck the hours and half-hours. The same as when among others Darly once died and left him. Strokes now clear as if carried by a wind now faint on the still air. Cries afar now faint now clear. Head on hands half hoping when the hour struck that the half-hour would not and half fearing that it would not. Similarly when the half-hour struck. Similarly when the cries a moment ceased. Or merely wondering. Or merely waiting. Waiting to hear. (p. 117)

That something stirring in Beckett's prose is that something without which a story cannot be: the sound of a human voice. Stories were spoken before anyone ever thought of writing them down. No matter how illmurmured, ill-recited, or ill-said, and no matter how many times "it" may have been ill-told, Beckett's story is the old story, the one story, the simple human drama of a voice that calls out to us from the silence and insists on getting itself heard: "This all new to you. ... Eh Joe?" Still, "No try no fail." "Said nohow on," but still on. Sometimes "wondering," but always "waiting," the voice in Beckett's late fiction is there for us "to hear."65 His last work in prose (though, as I argue in the last chapter of this book, it may just as well be a poem or even a piece of monologue), this time written in French and completed by the start of 1989, is called, not surprisingly, comment dire. A few months before he died he translated the piece into English as what is the word. Comment c'est, how it is, finally became comment dire, a dire comment indeed on the primal nature of this writer's storytelling so near the end of his life. The piece was composed while Beckett was desperately trying to regain speech after suffering a stroke in the winter of 1988-89. Subsequently he said he could not remember having written it. "What are you writing now, Sam?" was a question Beckett had been asked more than once. "Senilities," he told a fellow Irishman in a Paris workers' cafe in the last decade of his life. "But I'll manage something yet."66 His 1984 response to director Rocky Greenberg at the Riverside Studios in London has a more characteristic Beckettian ring: "Another blot on silence."67 Hamm said "it" all long ago, first in French and then in English: "There's something dripping in my head." "Something dripping in my head, ever since the fontanelles."68 Something dripping in my head. . . .

2 Acts of Enunciation

... it was just something he said, and the way he said it, that have haunted me ever since. —All That Fall

Maddy Rooney, nee Dunne, "the big pale blur," exists only as an articulation in sound, more real because so singularly imagined. In the radio play All That Fall,1 Beckett's first work originally conceived as a score for the human voice in fierce competition with other sounds, to be is quite literally to be heard. In this electronic medium, sound makes all the sense there is: voice is presence, presence is voice. "Never thought about a radio technique," Beckett wrote in 1956 in his famous letter to Nancy Cunard, "but in the dead of t'other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something."2 What it led to, of course, is the kind of Beckett that goes "straight into your head," through "the sound of a human voice and its power to evoke an entire world."3 Beckett's score for the human voice in the radio play All That Fall is both a celebration and a discovery of the medium. A symphony of pace, pitch, pause, and projection, the piece creates enormous tension in physical and textual dynamics by juxtaposing movement and stillness, speech and silence, and movement and silence, thus blending kinetic and linguistic properties. As the work shapes a process that erases the distinction between the verbal and the vocable, "this time we hear," as Linda Ben-Zvi has shrewdly observed, just "what going on entails."4 John Morris, who traveled from London in July 1956 to meet with Beckett about a broadcasting project, was impressed by the playwright's "sound idea of the problems of writing for radio." In his letter from Paris to Val Gielgud, head of BBC Drama, Morris wrote, "I expect something pretty good. He says his output is unpredictable. Sometimes he works slowly, at others very fast, but he does not wish to be tied down to any definite date."5 14

Acts of Enunciation

15

The script that arrived at Broadcasting House that September, initially called "Lovely Day for the Races," far exceeded even their lofty expectations. Desmond Briscoe, founder of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop at Maida Vale, remembers that "we were all caught up by the magic." Before synthesizing and multi-tracking were widely in use, All That Fall called for a firm coordination of sophisticated radio technology with what Briscoe later called Beckett's "fantasy element."6 Beckett himself seems to have been aware of the unusual nature of this enterprise. In a brief note accompanying the manuscript of the play, he cautioned John Morris that "the play might very well call for a special quality of bruitage." Donald McWhinnie, then assistant head of BBC Radio Drama and the producer for this project, persuaded Beckett that "in this particular case'' it might be wise "to get away from standard realism.'' According to Martin Esslin, Beckett had originally imagined the animal noises that open the play as similar to those he had heard before on radio— simple recordings of rural sounds. But McWhinnie believed that a script that eventually calls for (among other things) an '' Urgent baa,'' demanded a degree of stylization that could only be achieved by treating animal and later mechanical sounds electronically. The audible realities of a questionable existence might best be achieved by "slowing down, speeding up, adding echo, fragmenting them by cutting them into segments, and putting them together in new ways."7 McWhinnie's sound technician, Desmond Briscoe, working closely with his gramophone operator, Norman Baines, thus gave the world of All That Fall a sound of its own, halfway between everyday life and elsewhere. That elsewhere receives its most satisfying expression as the voice of the actor reaches for variations in the line, drawing the listener further and further into an interior reality. What Beckett called Maddy Rooney's ' 'state of abortive explosiveness"8 is perhaps the most difficult note to achieve, for her voice, the major chord of this play, is measuring her suffering. Hers is the sound of a world filled with desperate souls. False starts and pauses, events we cannot see, allow the actor to communicate the fragile subtext within this soundscape: Minnie! Little Minnie!. . .. (brokenly). In her forties now she'd be, I don't know, fifty, girding up her lovely little loins, getting ready for the change.... (pp. 37, 42) The wind is getting up. (Pause. Wind.) The best of the day is over. (Pause. Wind. Dreamily.) Soon the rain will begin to fall and go on falling, all afternoon. (Mr. Barrett goes.) Then at evening the clouds will part, the

16

THE DRAMA IN THE TEXT

setting sun will shine an instant, then sink, behind the hills. (She realizes Mr. Barrell has gone.) Mr. Barrell! Mr. Barrell! ... I estrange them all. They come towards me, uninvited, bygones, bygones, full of kindness, anxious to help . . . (the voice breaks) . . . genuinely pleased ... to see me again . . . looking so well. . . (Handkerchief.) A few simple words . . . from my heart. . . and I am all alone . . . once more . . . (Handkerchief. Vehemently.) I should not be out at all! I should never leave the grounds! (pp. 53-54)

Dan Rooney's much smaller part calls for a rich vocal range that will be similarly textured: " . . . I dream of other roads, in other lands. Of another home, another—(he hesitates)—another home. (Pause.) What was I trying to say?" In these richly patterned "scores" Beckett's commitment to language achieves its fulfillment in the voice: as we hear its weight and movement, we keep reassessing our attitudes to language, never taking it for granted. The vocal stresses, the bold inflections, and the reliance on sounds give every word a secondary importance. The character of the voice, its vibrato, and the length of words take on a new focus and layer of meaning. It is in fact the voice that loads the sound with meaning, overlapping and finally dominating the words. Here, as elsewhere in Beckett's radio plays and in his late work for the theater, the voice sets up a powerful counterpoint to the printed word, generating new potentials and allusions rather than contradicting the extant text. The actor's challenge is to find the right balance between words and sounds: meaning, of course, as Cicely Berry has argued, must always dictate the sound and not the other way around.9 Through Beckett's words, then, we must find the possibilities of their sound—what Billie Whitelaw meant when she said that in performance she was always "trying to get the right music, the right sound, the right color."10 Sound, the physical nature of language, makes the energy of Beckett's thought, mood, and word coincide. For in a work like All That Fall language lives only at the moment of speech. Words are in this instance the opposite of silence, and as such take a positive stand against the void: MRS. ROONEY What will Dan say when he sees me? MR. SLOCUM Has he then recovered his sight? MRS. ROONEY No, I mean when he knows, what will he say when he feels the hole? (Mr. Slocum presses starter. As before. Silence.) . . . What are you doing, Mr. Slocum?

Acts of Enunciation

17

MR. SLOCUM Gazing straight before me, Mrs. Rooney, through the windscreen, into the void. (pp. 46-47)

In radio, as Beckett quickly learned when he wrote All That Fall, words meet their essentially physical root: they become an active force, filling language with immediacy and purpose. There is, then, much more than grammatical sense here, for the energy of words, their essential impulse, is the need to speak them. Beckett ironizes such earthing of language by creating a speaker as formidable as her speech—one who is, moreover, nothing more and nothing less than the sound of her own words. "Do you find anything. . . bizarre about my way of speaking?" Beckett has Maddy Rooney ask an impressionable Christy, the young pig carter intent on selling her the small load of sty dung she no longer needs. "I do not mean the voice. (Pause.) No, I mean the words. (Pause. More to herself.) I use none but the simplest words, I hope, and yet I sometimes find my way of speaking very. . . bizarre. (Pause.)." Christy's hinny, very familiar and "very fresh in herself to-day," interrupts Maddy's reverie with the force of a quite different imperative. "Mercy!" counters Mrs. Rooney, "What was that?" In All That Fall we hear things the way Maddy Rooney is aware of them and the way her speech makes us aware of them. When the play opens, as Everett Frost has observed, "we perceive through Maddy even before we know whose head we are in."11 The rural sounds, "severally, then together, '' are heard not as they might sound in nature but rather as Maddy quite selectively centers our attention on them. At the beginning of the play Beckett further situates and identifies Maddy with the radio listener, as he has her listen for the faint music coming from "that ruinous old house" by the way—the recorded sound, as it were, within the recorded sound. Establishing such a subjectively organized consciousness is always difficult, though not impossible on radio, as Donald McWhinnie and Everett Frost have shown in their BBC and Voices International recordings.12 Both productions actively respond to the way Beckett equates imaginary time with the space of human consciousness, a perspective even more difficult to arrange in the live theater—and one we traditionally associate there with the complex scenography of Maeterlinck, Strindberg, or the much later Beckett. More interesting, perhaps, is the way this piece has been programmed in advance to display the full instrumentality of the human voice. In All That Fall Beckett conceives of language as a repository of possible pitches, durational divisions, amplitudes, and timbres. The play relies on melodic,

18

THE DRAMA IN THE TEXT

rhythmic, and harmonic relationships that structure the piece by establishing mobile verbal processes. These, in turn, define moods as entities that are related to one another, as the voice makes use of deceptive cadences, length of pattern, and the elision between phrases to give them shape. There is indeed a syntax here, powerfully individualized in rhythm, melody, harmony, instrumentation, register, and tempo, but everywhere tonal rather than grammatical. Let us look, for example, at Maddy's monologue, whose point of departure is in this instance another sound, the savage "welt" Christy inflicts on the unsuspecting and innocent hinny: Harder! (Sound of welt. Pause.) Well! If someone were to do that for me I should not dally. (Pause.) How she gazes at me to be sure, with her great moist cleg-tormented eyes! Perhaps if I were to move on, down the road, out of her field of vision . .. (Sound of welt.) No, no, enough! Take her by the snaffle and pull her eyes away from me. Oh this is awful! (She moves on. Sound of her dragging feet.) What have I done to deserve ail this, what, what? (Dragging feet.) So long ago . . . No! No! (Dragging feet. Quotes.) "Sigh out a something something tale of things. Done long ago and ill done." (She halts.) How can I go on, I cannot. Oh let me just flop down flat on the road like a big fat jelly out of a bowl and never move again! A great big slop thick with grit and dust and flies, they would have to scoop me up with a shovel. (Pause.) Heavens, there is that up mail again, what will become of me! (The dragging steps resume.) Oh I am just a hysterical old hag I know, destroyed with sorrow and pining and gentility and church-going and fat and rheumatism and childlessness. (Pause. Brokenly.) Minnie! Little Minnie! (Pause.) Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horsebutcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection? A peck on the jaw at morning, near the ear, and another at evening, peck, peck, till you grow whiskers on you. There is that lovely laburnum again. (pp. 36-37)

In this long speech, as elsewhere in the text, the relationships between Maddy's moods and affections are processive. She will use different vocal registers, moreover, to make those many moods and affections rise to the dramatic surface. When she laughs in this play (and she does), the actor is called upon to push, as Beckett said, "the laugh button."13 There is another sound, too, for the literary citation she mangles from John Ford's The Lover's Melancholy—' 'Sigh out a something something tale of things, Done long ago and ill done''14—an especially striking intonation that makes her sound a lot like the Winnie we later meet in Happy Days. Modulation in All That Fall is the result of sequential organization; despite Beckett's

Acts of Enunciation

19

celebrated advice of "no color, no color, no emphasis,"15 variation must not be entirely modest if identification and reference are to be preserved. The sequence of voices-within-the-voice allows referential motives to persist, thereby enabling them, as in music, to comment on and characterize the dramatic situation. Such tonal attenuation is not unusual in the structure of dramatic speech, though Beckett does make unusual use of it in his radio play. In Macbeth, for example, the complex directionality of the central figure's dialogue is typically signified by two kinds of asides, the first aimed at himself, the second at his increasingly anxious confidante. Here, too, the actor must summon up a repertory of verbal gestures: MACB.

(Aside.) Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor! The greatest is behind. (To Rosse and Angus.) Thanks for your pains. (Aside to Banquo.) Do you not hope your children shall be kings, When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me Promis'd no less to them? (I.iii.116-20)

In this fateful scene "the mind's construction"16 lies not in Macbeth's face but, as it does in All That Fall, in his different modes of speaking. But unlike Macbeth, Maddy Rooney finds herself isolated in sound, not trapped in theater space; she must make do with voice alone. The tension built into that voice, moreover, must make each leitmotif identifiable in a wide variety of spatial, emotional, and psychological contexts. Rhythm, melody, and texture are the strategies of a highly compressed vocal style that takes the place of embodiment, gestus, and blocking, as will other speech acts like paraphrase, modeling, parataxis, repetition, and borrowing. As the ear, such the object. It should come as no real surprise, then, that what a character fears most in All That Fall is silence, the radiophonic Not-I. "Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive, to all that is going on," Maddy insists as she waits for Dan on the Boghill railway platform. "Do not flatter yourselves for one moment, because I hold aloof, that my sufferings have ceased. No." Here silence is as much a part of the text as words, as much a positive verbal choice as the interplay of sounds, assonance, and alliteration that interrupts it: The entire scene, the hills, the plain, the racecourse with its miles and miles of white rails and three red stands, the pretty little wayside station, even you yourselves, yes, I mean it, and over all the clouding blue, I see it all, I stand here and see it all with eyes .. . (the voice breaks.). . . through

20

THE DRAMA IN THE TEXT

eyes ... oh, if you had my eyes . .. you would understand . . . the things they have seen . . . and not looked away . . . this is nothing . . . nothing . . . what did I do with that handkerchief? Pause.

(p. 61)

Despite Maddy's fears, however, silence in fact quantifies her existence and finally certifies her as the central consciousness of the play. ("Go, Mr. Tyler, go on and leave me, listening to the cooing of the ringdoves. Cooing.)" She lives in, through, and by sound, and as such she depends on silence to articulate and punctuate her being. In All That Fall we hear the speeding up of life that technology induces, the physical experience of speech, the tactile nature of language, the balancing of the colloquial and the formal, and the response to words that must be more than literal. We must therefore allow the piece its artificiality—despite the fact that on its most superficial level it wants to exploit the materiality of its realistic setting. Fourth-wall realism for Beckett, however, is always destined to be four walls too many. ("The rest," he once said, "is Ibsen").17 It is in Maddy's acts of enunciation, rather, that we feel the definite pulse that drives her radio life forward. Muscular, full of oblique imagery, sometimes literary, often spontaneous, her words find their own cadences, which depend on silence for a resonance of meaning. The emotional life of this language, which All That Fall renders as life itself, requires both time and space; these, ironically, can only be experienced in the prefabricated silence that Maddy Rooney makes us hear. How vital the caesura becomes. Without silence there can be no sound. Sounds change, and Maddy's are no exception. What is remarkable about this play is the introduction of some new voices for her just when we thought she was about to exhaust her repertory. All That Fall balances its two parts with Maddy's interlude at the local station, where she encounters the dark Miss Fitt, whose oratorical style rivals her own. Maddy recognizes an accomplished speaker when she hears one, and Miss Fitt will not disappoint her. She will certainly have to invent some new verbal tricks to match this: (shocked). Oh but in church, Mrs. Rooney, in church I am alone with my Maker. Are not you? (Pause.) Why, even the sexton himself, you know, when he takes up the collection, knows it is useless to pause before me. I simply do not see the plate, or bag, whatever it is they use, how could I? (Pause.) Why even when all is over and I go out into the sweet fresh air, why even then for the first furlong or so I stumble in a kind of daze as you might say, oblivious to my coreligionists. And they are very kind, 1 must

Acts of Enunciation

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admit—the vast majority—very kind and understanding. They know me now and take no umbrage. There she goes, they say, there goes the dark Miss Fitt, alone with her Maker, take no notice of her. And they step down off the path to avoid my running into them. (Pause.) Ah yes, I am distray, very distray, even on week-days. Ask Mother, if you do not believe me. Hetty, she says, when I start eating my doily instead of the thin bread and butter, Hetty, how can you be so distray? (Sighs.) I suppose the truth is I am not there, Mrs. Rooney, just not really there at all. I see, hear, smell, and so on, I go through the usual motions, but my heart is not in it, Mrs. Rooney, but heart is in none of it. Left to myself, with no one to check me, I would soon be flown . . . home. (Pause.) So if you think I cut you just now, Mrs. Rooney, you do me an injustice. All I saw was a big pale blur, just another big pale blur. (Pause.) Is anything amiss, Mrs. Rooney, you do not look normal somehow. So bowed and bent. (pp. 54-56)

Mrs. Rooney will not remain cowed for very long, however. She refuses to be upstaged by this bravura piece of monologue, no matter how impressive its delivery. Dan arrives on the spot at just the right moment and brings with him the reinforcement his wife needs to rise to the occasion. And in everything that follows, her verbal audacity amply meets the challenge. The formidable Hetty Fitt recedes into the background noise with her mother and the fresh lemon sole for lunch. She has been a temporary "hitch" at best. For Maddy there is always going to be something to see, something to hear, and above all something to say. On the journey back home with Dan her speech offers us decisive variations we have not listened to before. Has she been drinking again, the simple question her husband puts to her? By her own admission, we remember, she has had no solid food since her "elevenses." Drunk or sober, the entry of a blind husband means her vision, however imperfect, will have to work for both of them; the weight of her voice must now communicate a double jeopardy. Throughout All That Fall we have all the while been "seeing voices.''18 Those we ' 'view'' in this last movement reflect a rhythm of return that contains the play's rising action and prepares us for the vaunting austerity of its closure, followed by an ultimate "Tempest of wind and rain." But before that happens Beckett allows Maddy to add some impressive touches to her rich radiophonic vocabulary. Perhaps the most telling of these are those that capture the minor irritations as well as the cozy domesticity of Irish suburban life, the Saturday roast for lunch, the birthday wishes uttered that morning in a bathroom, the private jokes shared between husband and wife, the titillation of adultery in the Fontane novel they enjoy together

22

THE DRAMA IN THE TEXT

as they sit sheltered from the storm in their dressing gowns. This couple is in some ways Beckett's most "perfect pair." And yet they are, too, "with their faces arsy-versy," like "Dante's damned." ("Our tears," says Dan, "will water our bottoms"). Surface security proves to be merely that. Underneath the predictability of their married life lurks an agonizing despair that none of Maddy's voices will be able to mask. "Christ, what a planet!" There will be, finally, no "helping hand." That Maddy keeps reaching out for one is what makes her a most valiant addition to this Beckettian "gallery of moribunds."19 "Be nice to me, Dan, be nice to me today!" is her simple prayer, a cri de cceur for warmth and human contact that will never really be there for her, have never really been there for her. "Hold me tighter, Dan! (Pause.) Oh yes!" Her voice risks everything, even as she knows that hers is destined to be a cry in the dark. "There is that lovely laburnum again," she notes, once more on the open road. What she doesn't mention, of course, is that its seeds can be lethal. Death lies in wait for every maiden, even Maddy with her "two hundred pounds of unhealthy fat." Voices in this play keep coming back—"something he said, and the way he said it''—and though they fail to provide Maddy with the solace she requires, they are in fact something. This radio play will try to convince us that they are in fact everything. "All is still. No living soul in sight. There is no one to ask. . . We are alone." This voice, however, like all the others in this piece, presupposes a listener—someone to "say it" and someone to "hear it." What words can do, and what Beckett has shown us they can do in All That Fall, is get themselves heard, even (and one might say especially) in the dark. "Devised deviser devising it all for company."20 The telling—and the teller who tells "it"—once more transcends the tale. For the company Beckett keeps in All That Fall is strictly with words—how they sound and resound in a human voice, how they move in and through time, how we hear them anew as they live and live again in memory. Such faith in the vitality of language at this late date may indeed be a "little vein," but it still relies on "A heart, a heart in my head."21 In such acts of listening, as we hear Dan Rooney say, "One has these moments of lucidity"—especially in silence, where the final sound of All That Fall achieves its ideal fulfillment. In Paris Beckett heard only an imperfect version of All That Fall when the BBC Third Programme broadcast it from London on January 13, 1957. Reception across the Channel was poor that day, interrupting and finally undermining the special radiophonic effects McWhinnie's technical staff had worked so hard to build into this production. Beckett wrote Broad-

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23

casting House for a tape of the play, then wrote again for instructions on how to operate a tape recorder. The idea for a new stage play, the Magee Monologue that became Krapp's Last Tape, was born, but not before Beckett reevaluated his understanding of radio's potential for creating what he called "an entire world."22 He later admitted to a friend that in All That Fall he had not fully exploited the possibilities of sound. He realized, according to Alec Reid, "that while sound effects are more instantly evocative than speech, they are not nearly so evocative as the human voice."23 With some sense of trepidation as well as challenge, therefore, Beckett took up the BBC's invitation to write a second play for the Third Programme. Always uneasy about writing anything on consignment, a diffident Beckett promised Barbara Bray, a drama script editor at the BBC in 1959, only "if I can, I will."24 Ebb arrived some months later; its author was unhappy with his title and later changed the play's name to Embers.25 Although this work went on to receive the coveted Prix Italia, the script was by no means greeted at BBC with the same degree of enthusiasm as All That Fall. It was produced, but only because staff members like Barbara Bray and Louis MacNeice stood firm in their commitment to the project, against their colleagues' reservations.26 In Embers Beckett is concerned with the intimate reality of time as an experience in sound, sound as an experience in time, and the fragile human voice that always seeks to mediate between the two. The difficulty of doing this piece on radio must be acknowledged at the outset of any discussion of it, for timing in this case results from a voicing whose most impressive effects are acoustic rather than solely electronic. In this "phonotext"27 Beckett attempts to render past, present, even future as a continuous verbal construct whose performance time is set against the more insistent sound of waves breaking, classically, on some unknown shore. The sea, as it turns out, is not so calm tonight. "On." Beckett's sudden imperative interrupts our own particular silence, as does the recorded sound of the sea, and introduces us to a voice, palpable and this time unmistakably male. "On!" This is a repeat performance, but one we are not likely to have heard on our radio before. The voice, as we eventually learn (but not until it is named by the semblance of another voice that answers to still another name, this one female and Ada), is Henry's; it is his private hell that will be unutterably uttered on the air. That voice will be rich indeed. "Listen to it!" and "Listen to it!" again.28 Beckett makes it initiate a number of unpredictable alliances— past, passing, and (in Henry's vocal circumstances) still unenviably to come.

24

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Although one can read the written text of Embers as a discontinuous monologue, the actor's voice gives it the shape of a continuous soliloquy interrupted by several temporal discontinuities.29 Here, even more than in Maddy Rooney's opening speech in All That Fall, the effect on the listener is that of some private thought,' 'magically overheard.' '30 Henry's thought, voiced, is not without its considerable ironies. "I say that sound you hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand," he announces to the summoned presence of a silent father, but much more practically and directly to us, metatheatricality notwithstanding. "I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was"—a sentence that in this medium sounds very strange indeed, violating as it does one of radio's holiest of holies: never render in words an exposition that has already been established through other sound cues. Beckett's violation is deliberate; it makes his audience conscious and uneasy about the statutes of this peculiar act of listening. For it is sound, not sight, that is everywhere privileged in a radio piece. Sound, therefore, and sound alone, establishes and finally certifies the scene of Henry's strangely verbal encounter with the inexorability of radio time. "Reading voices," we imagine—imagine!—by hearing.31 Only the sound of the sea, and the sound of Henry's words that follows it, tell us where we are, who we are, and, fatally, if we are. How quickly Beckett moves us once again from the physical to the metaphysical. "If you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was" is in this context superbly gratuitous—gratuitous, that is, unless we imagine the line as one more perilous note in a haunting soundscape where hearing is literally seeing, that strange thing itself that must be looked at and listened to.32 "Don't look," says Beckett's Mercier. "The sound is enough," replies Camier. Silence once broken, we remember from The Unnamable, "will never again be whole."33 The sounds breaking the silence in Embers will be heavily loaded with a multiplicity of meanings, for in this radio play sound is an event structured in time that makes us conscious of time. A voice literally comes to one in the dark, Beckett's and in this case Henry's listener, you. This is complex hearing—a hearing, moreover, that triggers complex seeing without the steady manipulation of scenography we associate with Beckett's material stage. A voice on radio draws us into an interior reality with immediacy and spontaneity, expanding and clarifying the range of representation for heightened subjectivity that this writer has explored in other genres. Henry's voice on radio soon makes us hear other voices: his wife Ada, his daughter Addie, the frustrated piano teacher, the encouragingly regimental riding master. "Now Miss! Elbows in Miss! Hands down Miss! (Hooves trotting.) Now Miss! Back straight Miss! Knees

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in Miss! (Hooves cantering.) Now Miss! Tummy in Miss! Chin up Miss! (Hooves galloping.) Now Miss! Eyes front Miss! (ADDIE begins to wail.) Now Miss! Now Miss!" Voices heard "within" never seemed quite so complicated or quite so various before. Even the silence of Henry's father is made to sound palpable and real: Father! (Pause) You wouldn't know me now, you'd be sorry you ever had me, but you were that already, a washout, that's the last I heard from you, a washout. (Pause. Imitating father's voice.) "Are you coming for a dip?" "No." "Come on, come on." "No." Glare, stump to door, turn, glare. "A washout, that's all you are, a washout!" (Violent slam of door. Pause.) Again! (Slam. Pause.) Slam life shut like that! (Pause.) Washout. (Pause.) Wish to Christ she had. (Pause). (pp. 101-2)

So, too, do the voices of Bolton and Holloway, in the story Henry tells, sound their individual alarms: "'Please! PLEASE!'" says the one; " 'My dear Bolton. ... If it's an injection you want, Bolton, let down your trousers and I'll give you one, I have a panhysterectomy at nine,' " says the other, "meaning of course the anaesthetic." The illusion is a trick of the voice experienced as a trick of the ear. As Henry, a live wire on radio if there ever was one, hears a voice from his questionable past, we hear it with him. A voice within the voice is suddenly there to haunt his every listener. "That's what hell will be like," remarks this speaker, characterizing conversation with his wife, "small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead." "Fear death by water"—a voice from our own literary past suddenly speaks, so to speak, not to make too fine a point. That is how phantoms plague us. In this radio play it will be just such human voices that "wake us" before we "drown."34 Henry is thus dead set on drowning out the sound of the sea. He hears it everywhere, all the time, even when he, this seedy Irishman, flees in vain to landlocked Switzerland. "There's something wrong with your brain," intones Ada in her "low, remote" voice—the one voice from the past that can and does speak to him in the present—"you shouldn't be hearing it." "What's wrong with it" anyway, she wonders in her lovely, peaceful, gentle, soothing voice (at least in Billie Whitelaw's sensitive rendition),35 "it's a lovely peaceful gentle soothing sound." Henry, of course, hardly experiences it as such; nor do we, conditioned to the emotional coloring he has assigned to it: "That! I shouldn't be hearing that!" "Thuds," he says, picking up two big stones and dashing them together.

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"I want thuds! Like this!" That "lovely peaceful gentle soothing sound" means trouble for Henry, as it does for all "old men in great trouble." For the sound of the sea is an evocation of voices that makes Henry confront a past he both craves and despises. No "emotion recollected" in "tranquility," this. The romantic mood, as always in Beckett, quickly turns nasty, "less Words worthy."36 Henry begins his seaside monologue with the illusion that he is in full control of voices, memories, language—the entire radiophonic vocabulary itself: Sea scarcely audible. HENRY'S boots on shingle. He halts. Sea a little louder. HENRY On. (Sea. Voice louder.) On! (He moves on. Boots on shingle. As he goes.) Stop. (Boots on shingle. As he goes, louder.) Stop! (He halts. Sea a little louder.) Down. (Sea. Voice louder.) Down! (Slither of shingle as he sits. Sea, still faint, audible throughout what follows whenever pause indicated.) Who is beside me now? (Pause.) An old man, blind and foolish. (Pause.) My father, back from the dead, to be with me. (Pause.) As if he hadn't died. (Pause.) No, simply back from the dead to be with me, in this strange place. (Pause.) Can he hear me? (Pause.) Yes, he must hear me. (Pause.) To answer me? (Pause.) No, he doesn't answer me. (Pause.) Just to be with me. (Pause.) (p. 95) The Yeatsian paradigm, so reminiscent of the opening moments of Purgatory, soon begins to unravel. There will be no tryst after all; Henry's voice reflects a mind in dialogue only with itself. This is a living hell, with nothing purgatorial about it. And as the voices within Henry's voice detail the lineaments of a world that has been anything but "white" and innocent and silent, we listen to the desperate cries of a universe in which the catastrophe has already taken place, like that ominous ''evening bathe" his father "took once too often" on the other side of the bay. It is Henry who remains cauterized by sound. It is his loss of control that the play makes us hear: "Ada! (Pause.) Father! (Pause.) Christ! (Pause.)" His voices will come no more. He wore them out living and in this play he wears them out dead. Ada's remembered voice, the one we hear with Henry in the radiophonic present, delivers a line, rich in dramatic foreshadowing: "The time comes when one cannot speak to you any more. (Pause.) The time will come when no one will speak to you at all, not even complete strangers. (Pause.) You will be quite alone with your voice, there will be no other

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voice in the world but yours.'' Though her voice belongs to the past, Henry makes it live for him in the fleeting and festering present, a present that, ironically, forecasts his doom. As Ada speaks in Henry's imagination, an imagining recorded as both true and real, we see, as in Macbeth, "the future in the instant." This is something quite different from the noise "like leaves" that "all the dead voices" made in Waiting for Godot.37 In "this strange place" past, present, and future speak with one voice in a timespan uniquely their own. This is, in fact, neither time past nor time present, but time made immediate in the moment of getting itself down on magnetic tape. In this play we can literally hold time in our hands. As we do so, Beckett makes us conscious of the extraordinary leaps a voice can make in time once it works in league with sophisticated radio technology: HENRY I thought I might try and get as far as the water's edge. (Pause. With a sigh.) And back. (Pause.) Stretch my old bones. Pause. ADA Well why don't you? (Pause.) Don't stand there thinking about it. (Pause.) Don't stand there staring. (Pause. He goes towards sea. Boots on shingle, say ten steps. He halts at water's edge. Pause. Sea a little louder. Distant.) Don't wet your good boots. Pause. HENRY Don't, don't. . . Sea suddenly rough. ADA (twenty years earlier, imploring). Don't! Don't. HENRY (do., urgent). Darling! ADA (do., more feebly). Don't! HENRY (do., exultantly). Darling! Rough sea. ADA cries out. Cry and sea amplified, cut off. End of evocation. Pause. Sea calm. He goes back up deeply shelving beach. Boots laborious on shingle. He halts. Pause. He moves on. He halts. Pause. Sea calm and faint. ADA Don't sit there gaping. Sit down. (Pause. Shingle as he sits.) On the shawl. (Pause.) Are you afraid we might touch? (Pause.) Henry. (pp. 110-11)

Ada's vocal journey in time proves to be far from soothing, though she did once offer him a shawl. ("You shouldn't be sitting on the cold stones, they're bad for your growths.'') Today, to Henry's way of thinking, she seems ' 'a little cruder than usual.'' Crossing time and space, her litany of "don't"s tells a story of its own, to which the present one is "No comparison, no comparison." "Chilly enough I imagine," she desponds. "I hope you put on your jaegers." In Henry's mental encounter with Ada,

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Beckett uses technology to manipulate the listener's sense of time and place. The perception that the normal boundaries of time have been dissolved is crucial to the impact. The past, in a sense, has been reinvented in the present moment and therefore transcends its "place" in time. The impact is that much greater because the encounter is not written for glorious polyphony but as an oratorio for interior voices that is musically and emotionally complete. Henry turns from his voices to seek a dubious consolation in fiction. "I never finished it," he says. "I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever." Here, too, he is a law unto himself, but one that bears a striking resemblance to some other Beckett fictionalizers we have listened to before. Like Hamm's "prolonged creative effort" in Endgame, Henry's unfinished story is inscribed with the same traces of "autography" that make narrator difficult to separate from narration.38 Bolton and Holloway seem to be Henry's creations, but the latter, "chilled to the medulla" and "toasting his arse," also surfaces in Ada's cautionary note: "There's something wrong with your brain, you ought to see Holloway, he's alive still, isn't he?" And just who is Bolton in that old red dressing gown anyway? Henry? Henry's fiction? Henry's father? This story, like the earth itself, "is full of holes." As Beckett's audience " 'We've had this before,' " says Holloway—says Henry—please " 'don't ask me to go through it again.' " More interesting, perhaps, than the familiar Beckettian topology of the "narrator/narrated"39 in Embers is the use Henry makes of sound and silence in the Bolton-Holloway narrative. His retreat from the world is signaled by his fictional attempt to silence it. The storytelling, what remains from all this misery, reflects his rising tone of desperation. This enterprise is set in a "white world" that promises "no sound," like the frozen image of his father "sitting on the rock that day . . .just the great stillness of the whole body, as if all the breath had left it." "All" is "still": "bright winter's night, snow everywhere, bitter cold, white world, cedar boughs bending under load." But matter, not so easily created, is not so easily destroyed. It insists on getting itself recorded in Henry's ongoing fiction, if only as the echo of a "dog's chain maybe or a bough groaning if you stood there listening long enough." A bell rings at the door, and rings again. Footsteps. Holloway. Conversation. Voices. Despite Henry's plan to write a story about silence, the tale he tells is as rich in aural effects as the radio play that frames it. Story and storyteller share the same noisy fate, "another blot on silence."40 In Embers the sounds that fade prove, surprisingly, to be the most enduring. Chief among them are Henry's embers, the sound of ashes

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stirring in fiction for the last of all times in a solemn dirge for unaccommodated humanity. "That's life!.. . Not this . .. (pause). . . sucking!" The sound of the end, moreover, must be as precise as everything else in this manufactured world: "Santa Cecilia!. . . Eff! Eff!.. . Eff! Eff!. . . Eff! . .. Eff!"41 Strike the wrong note, as the young Addie does, and the illusion is gone. "Hooves!" "Hooves!" Bring them back again, if only as a record in memory, for these, like the "shifting, lapsing, furtive" embers, are the sounds that "mark time." "I'd be talking now no matter where I was," says Henry. His is a line of complete self-revelation, though he hardly recognizes it as such. His fate, like the fate of all dramatic characters on radio, will be to talk forever; ours is to listen, then to hear his voice once again, like the sound of the sea, as we remember it in silence. Little book. (Pause.) This evening . . . (Pause.) Nothing this evening. (Pause.) Tomorrow .. . tomorrow .. . plumber at nine, then nothing. (Pause. Puzzled.) Plumber at nine? (Pause.) Ah yes, the waste. (Pause.) Words. (Pause.) Saturday ... nothing. Sunday ... Sunday ... nothing all day. (Pause). Nothing, all day nothing. (Pause.) All day all night nothing. (Pause.) Not a sound. (p. 121)

This is the radio art of the nonplus. Abstract the speech one step further and it's King Lear: LEAR. COR. LEAR. COR. LEAR.

... Speak. Nothing, my lord. Nothing! Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again. (I.i.88-91)

"Nothing," Lear says later to the Fool, "can be made out of nothing." For Henry in Embers, the faint echo of such mythic negation literally rings true: "Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never."42

Embers relies on such a disarming exactitude in its synchronization of sound and silence that the piece can come to life only in performance. Text is notation, voice is possibility: the meaning hidden in a line is revealed only at the moment of utterance. "Could a horse mark time?" Henry muses. An unexpectedly coquettish, suddenly earthy Ada responds, "The ones I used to fancy all did." The sound of a line, "an old sound I used to hear," soon evokes "another time, in the same place." In this play

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such voicings surpass even the memory of a laugh, a smile, or the "price of margarine fifty years ago." "Every syllable," says Henry, "is a second gained" in the march against time. Asked by Everett Frost if he could remember anything that led him to the composition of Embers, Beckett said all he could remember was the sound of the sea at Killiney Beach near his childhood home at Foxrock. And, yes, he could also remember taking the tram out to the last station on the Hill of Howth, diagonally across Dublin Bay from the strand at Killiney Beach. When Frost made field recordings at this site tailored to his production, he discovered that the shoreline there is steeply raked and composed of pebbles that move continuously in the waves, creating the unusual "sucking" sound described by this play's lonely hero.43 Sound is memory, the ultimate "intent of undoing."44 In Embers we memorialize the sound of Henry, who experiences time, as we do, in the shape of human voices. Finally in Embers there is only the sound of the sea. Human voices drown. But before they do we listen to their wide range of potential and, as in music, to their wide range of contrasts. Though in this radio play these contrasts are not aggressively theatrical, the voice that signals the arrival and departure of each one is dramatic all the same. The composition here is, then, essentially musical, even more so than in All That Fall, where the faint sound of Schubert marks time in stunning counterpoint to everything that voices have been made to say. In Embers sounds come and sounds go, but human voices make of them something that negotiates, interrogates, and transcends time—something to remember. "Don't look," says Mercier. Beckett makes his listener resume the struggle. "The sound"—the sound of the sea, this sound of Embers—"is enough." Hear. Louder, "a little louder," then slow fade on "Sea."

Recognize! What is there to recognize? —Waiting for Godot

Any close reader of Beckett might have predicted that after the radio play Embers his next work in the medium would directly confront the dual realities of words and music. What that reader might not have been able to foresee is the ironic confrontation Beckett gives to his words and someone else's music as they reach separately, then together, for compositional harmony. "My comforts! Be friends!" cries Croak,45 the Prospero-like emcee of Beckett's 1961 "text-music tandem for the BBC."46 The treaty he initiates in Words and Music, unfortunately, has been shaky from the

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start. In this tyrannical art of radio, as Beckett once told Katharine Worth, "music always wins."47 Winning, always a suspect commodity, of course, in Beckett's imaginative world, proves to be so once again in this third play for radio.48 In Words and Music success is measured only by the intrusion of a terminal "Deep sigh." The real energy of the piece depends on the tight line of tension Beckett sustains between the two as he builds an unexpected cult of personality out of seeming abstraction. Naming names, Croak calls Words "Joe"; both in turn refer to Music, who knows no language but his own, familiarly if not always endearingly as "Bob." Such a triangular relationship is bound to run into trouble, and Beckett can be counted on to make it do so as this threesome works hard to make us experience both the pleasure and pain of making radio art happen. As the play begins Joe and Bob are getting ready for a performance. Music gets itself heard as a "Small orchestra softly tuning up," and a temperamental Words is nervously running through his lines against a background noise he wishes he didn't have to hear: "Please! (Tuning. Louder.) Please! (Tuning dies away.) How much longer cooped up here, in the dark? (With loathing.) With you!" Joe and Bob are not only acting, but acting badly, each trying to upstage the other. The distant sound of rapidly shuffling carpet slippers signals the arrival of Croak, who commits the unpardonable sin of arriving late for his own rehearsal. "Listen!" Joe reminds us. "At last! (Shuffling louder. Burst of tuning.) Hsst!'' No director likes to be, as Mr. Tyler says in All That Fall, "doubly late, trebly, quadrupedly late,"49 especially for a previously scheduled run-through. But this time Croak has an excellent excuse, one that will tantalize readers of Yeats and Joyce as well as Beckett: ' 'The f a c e . . . On the stairs. . . Forgive . . . Joe .. . Bob . .. Forgive ... In the tower.. . The face."50 At this point Beckett's radio audience is sure to be very properly disoriented. Just where are we? Gone are the reassuring sounds of a suburban country road or the Irish seaside south of Dublin. Words and Music places us exactly no-where—nowhere, that is, outside the private sound of its own two elements heard against the percussive tones of shuffling feet, sighs, and sometimes violent thumps of a club. Displacement, however, never seemed quite so promising before. Excluding the clatter of a busy world, the play allows us to concentrate on the many subtle moods that can be built into the sound of words and music. This "mode" will be, as always in Beckett, the one in which the mind is finally and most clearly affected—"and indeed in no mode is the mind more affected than in this." Such an ambitious project relies on the vocalization of language to correspond to the scoring of a musical text; the word as spoken, in this

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case by the radiophonic Joe, is the instrument that' 'plays'' Beckett's verbal music.51 Such steady musicalization of language might be noticed elsewhere in the Beckett canon, yet in Words and Music it assumes a technical proficiency that takes full advantage of the electronic medium for which it was designed. The piece is, after all, a collaboration, but one that urges us to redefine the term. For the original BBC production, directed in 1962 by Michael Blakewell and starring Patrick Magee and Felix Felton, John Beckett, the playwright's cousin, created a "sonic decor" for strings, brass, percussion, and electric organ. Played by twelve musicians, John Beckett's composition was supposed to stand in for the "other" signature in the author's text. A completely different arrangement of the piece was designed by Humphrey Searle in the recording produced by Katharine Worth for the University of London Audio-Visual Centre, directed in 1975 by David Clark, in which Patrick Magee offered a second interpretation of the role of Words he had played thirteen years before at the BBC. Morton Feldman, who called himself "a note man" to distinguish himself from that "word man" Beckett, wrote his own score for Everett Frost's 1988 production in the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays. Feldman had earlier and independently turned Beckett's poem "neither" into "a kind of opera." But after completing his work for Words and Music, he said that the best guide to the character of Bob is already indicated in the script for this play: "The poem I read over and over again. The rest is Beckett's instructions for the music." Beckett, he added, "has the sensibility of a musician, but he does not write the music. The words are his music."52 Let us consider for a moment what has traditionally been said about this piece: Croak works hard to bring under control a mercurial Words and an anarchic Music in order to produce a fully integrated, satisfying work of art.53 Although that is true in the most general sense, the play as performed—and especially as heard—contains much wider resonances. Chief among these is the way in which the disciplined condition of music predicts and prefigures the ultimate condition of words. Here Beckett offers a practical solution to the Symbolist dream of language elevated to new and sometimes giddy musical heights. For the verbal repetition in this piece is there as much for the "beat" as for any literal meaning conveyed in Joe's hastily refashioned speechifying. Joe, in fact, is assigned only one speech, a prepackaged monologue that serves equally well for themes-ondemand as various as "sloth" (originally "hope"),54 "Love," or "Age." How that speech is meant to sound is susceptible to a variety of interpretations, and for these Beckett's script provides ample notation: "Rattled off, low"; "orotund"; "Prosaic"; "Very rhetorical"; "faltering";

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"softly"; "cold"; "With sudden gravity"; "Change to poetic tone"; "reverently." At other moments in the play the cryptic dialogue assigned to Joe between the several performances of his pat "speech" is similarly cued: his voice is at various times supposed to be "gently expostulatory," even "imploring." Croaks's "vain protestations," too, his "rending sighs," groans, and anguished "No!"s have been choreographed and musically timed in much the same way. This is something more than what we generally mean by "written" stage direction. In these citations Beckett searches for the verbal "mode" that best corresponds to the musical ''moods'' his text also specifies—' 'fortissimo,'' ' 'Humble muted adsum,'' ' 'very softly,'' ' 'warmly sentimental,'' ' 'Irrepressible burst of spreading and subsiding," or "Triumph and conclusion." In Words and Music Beckett wants his "unheard" melodies heard (even though, as he once remarked to Georges Pelorson about a production of Fin de partie he attended, "It will never be the way I hear it.")55 Those melodies, of course, to borrow the astrological pun from Embers, get progressively "Vega in the Lyre"56—vaguer, that is, each time Joe's voice moves Beckett's words from the prosaic to the poetic and finally to the lyrical. This is the same constellation, after all, that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus observe in the "Ithaca" section of Ulysses at the moment that signifies their spiritual union: What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed? A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Trees of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.57

But as we listen to Beckett's Joe struggling to reach, so to speak, for the stars, his words also become emotionally more complete. In the course of this short play we hear Joe make words imaginatively coherent rather than explicit. His impulse is to move from words vocalized to words made music. Before long we hear him reciting a poem—and a fourteen-line sonnet at that: Age is when to a man Huddled o'er the ingle Shivering for the hag To put the pan in the bed And bring the toddy She comes in the ashes Who loved could not be won Or won not loved

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Or some other trouble Comes in the ashes Like in that old light The face in the ashes That old starlight On the earth again. (P- 28)

Inspired by the "art and craft" of poetic spontaneity, which, as this play illustrates, has not been arrived at spontaneously, Joe soon moves by fits and starts to create still another lyric, one that he strives to sing, as the text tells us, "softly": Then down a little way Through the trash Towards where All dark no begging No giving no words No sense no need Through the scum Down a little way To whence one glimpse Of that wellhead.

(pp. 31-32) Joe's second attempt at lyricism has been given a musical arrangement that is a much more convincing accompaniment to his verbal overture; for Bob, coaxing and encouraging, has by this time become fully supportive of their collaborative efforts. As Joe earlier demonstrated in the very opening moments of Words and Music, spoken language may indeed be recited faster than any musical phrase might be played; but it is not therefore more persuasive, more mysterious, or more inexhaustible. Quite the contrary. If it gets "Vega in the Lyre"—and it does—it also gets "very green," like some Renaissance'' green Thought in a green Shade." (" Vega in the Lyre very green. (Pause.) Vega in the Lyre very green").58 "How nice that would be," wrote Beckett in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, bemoaning the fact that in that early work characters could not be portrayed as a collection of musical sounds played at one time. "How nice that would be, linear, a lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect."59 The quality of Joe's speech is therefore shown to possess the capacity

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for its own metamorphosis. Like the Player-King in Hamlet, Joe "Speak[s] the speech"60 and by speaking it uncovers a full range of interpretative possibilities. Constantly in the business of reconstructing itself, this speech may have a narrow literal focus, yet its reach in performance is unlimited. Moving on from his initial detached tone, Joe expands on the formulaic vocabulary he has been assigned and discovers within his voice a degree of emotionalism that previously had not been there at all. Voice is now at full stretch, marking a decided shift from Joe's earliest approach. Eventually the same voice will give way to a poetic language of allegory and symbol, bringing into presence a present that seems not only mysterious, but haunting: "Down a little way / To whence one glimpse / Of that wellhead." Foregrounding the affective nature of imagery, the new sound to Joe's words conveys the richness of associations we might normally assign to music. So much for Sloth, the banal "theme" for "tonight" with which this droll adventure began. "Disimproving the silence," as Beckett told Lawrence Shainberg, this radio play traces with audible clarity the way in which words can indeed be transformed into music, the "highest art form. It's never condemned to explicitness."61 It is, finally, the effect these words and this music have on the meticulous Croak that might not have been predicted in advance. For this master of ceremonies becomes the unwitting victim of the "plot," whose emotional flow, once initiated, is not so easily contained. Though his groans, his "Oh!," his "No!," and his "Please!" are surprisingly sexual (at least in Alvin Epstein's guttural rendition),62 the satisfaction they promise remains elusive. Under other circumstances, but certainly not within this unstable balance of intimacy and analysis, Words and Music might have indeed emerged as Croak's "balms"; but "tonight," as they improvise, they explore surface and depth in their own way. Neither his "comforts" nor his "friends," they track him down instead; they are his "dogs." He wants to "lord" it over them, but he ends by falling, as most heroes fall, this time by succumbing to the same inscrutable forces he had thought he might be able to control. Deconstruction nothwithstanding, Croak's art has a stubborn autonomy of its own. No matter how hard he tries to stare out at Words and Music, in the end they stare back at him, harder. It may seem surprising to call Words and Music a highly romantic piece. I do not mean the richly sentimental possibilities of the lost "Lily," the dark lady of Croak's sonnet and the "face" whose ghostly reflection detains him on the off-mike stairs before the action of the play unfolds. That "face," of course, evokes a number of other Beckett associations. "The face she had!" remembers Krapp, recycling a rending simile from Othello. "The eyes! Like . . . (hesitates) . . . chrysolite!"63 And just such

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a diaphanous image literally materializes on the T.V. screen in ... but the clouds.... the play that borrows more than a title from Yeats' final lines in "The Tower."64 The true romanticism of Words and Music is, as we might expect from this author, of a much more complex and formalized kind. Croak yearns for what he calls the "manifest unanswerable," not the escapist lyricism of the "arise then and go" that Words borrows so liberally from the late romanticism of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," the same poem memorialized in the first part of Stirrings Still.65 What Croak wants is, in fact, nothing more and nothing less than the unobtainable, the mingling of "soul" and spirit that can only be glimpsed in art and that he struggles so hard to achieve in this work. "Do we mean love, when we say love?" verbalizes Joe prosaically. "Soul, when we say soul?. . . Do we? ... Or don't we?" Words and music, the instruments Croak must rely on to carry him off to such a transcendent moment, tease him with the illusion of fulfilling his desire, even (and especially) when theirs is an exercise as much in "pleasure" as in "pain." "The face," murmurs Croak, holding the note, when they nearly get it right. "The face. (Pause.) The face. (Pause.) The face.'' At the end of this play he will be so moved by their expressive unity that he can bear to hear them no more. "My Lord!" cries Joe in shock, followed by the sound of shuffling slippers and the "club let fall." Prospero has broken his staff. Has Croak realized that Bob and Joe, too, are bound to fail? "Bob . . . Bob!" implores a desperate Joe. "Music . .. Music!. . . Again . . . Again!" The tune, as always in Beckett, is as it always was, "As before or only very slightly varied.'' For a transcendent vision such as this exists in neither words nor music, in neither content nor form, but in silence— what Beckett called near the end of his own life "the rude awakening."66 Still, and still again, words and music, Beckett's Words and Music, is there for us to hear. "Words have been my only loves, not many."67 How better to celebrate them than to make them sing a song of praise—even when that music, "that MINE," is destined to be, "as before," as it surely always was, the old tune, one more praise to the end.68

. . . it's him ... see him ... say him .. . —Cascando

No such romantic sensibility disturbs the surface texture of Cascando,69 the radio play Beckett wrote in French soon after the completion of Words and Music in late 1961. "The idea behind Cascando comes from Beckett himself,'' wrote Marcel Mihalovici in a letter to Clas Zilliacus dated March

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12, 1974. "But the initiative to write a radiophonic piece with my friend was mine. "70 The Romanian-born composer had earlier produced an opera based on Krapp's Last Tape and hoped to interest the playwright in the commission ORTF-Paris had just granted him for a new musical work. Responding, then, to the original text Beckett wrote at his invitation, "Chip" Mihalovici composed a score for flute, clarinets, piano, celesta, harp, first and second violin, and cello. Produced by Paul Ventre, the French Culture Service's interpretation was broadcast on October 13, 1963. Conducted by Manuel Rosenthal, the piece had percussions played by two musicians using cymbals, tam-tam, gong, wood block, tambourine, triangle, xylophone, marimba, and three Chinese blocks, though Mihalovici's instrumentation relied on the discreet use of woodwinds for melodic content. "It was Beckett," reported Mihalovici, "who, from the beginning, supervised all the work at ORTF. He assisted both with all the repetitions and also with all the recordings of my music."71 Beckett veterans Jean Martin and Roger Blin (who also directed the piece) were cast as Voice and Opener. The French Cascando, unfortunately, has not survived. The tape was erased when it was returned to Paris soon after being used for transmission abroad. Though written first in French, the play was quickly published in an unsupervised English translation in the pages of the Evergreen Review for May-June 1963. This publication has caused critics some difficulty in establishing the reliability of an accurate English-language text; it appeared before the BBC production of the play and varies at several points from the typescript used for the BBC broadcast on October 6, 1964. It also differs from the version published in London later in 1964 by Faber, which serves as the basis for all subsequent editions of this difficult work, including Grove's 1984 Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett.''72 Everett Frost, when he met with the playwright in Paris in preparation for the American Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, asked him which text he should use for his "fresh go" on Cascando. "The printed version," Beckett replied when they met in the coffee shop of the PLN Hotel. Probing further, Frost asked, "Which printed version?" Beckett countered with a long, pained silence. "There are differences," he admitted. "Give me the book," he said as his hand reached over very gently to consider the script, which Frost had carried with him from New York in its various printings. "Yes there are," Beckett mused. Referring to Barney Rosset's various publications of Cascando, Frost asked him how far he might rely on Grove. "Not very" was the playwright's prompt but rueful reply.73 Beckett made textual changes in Cascando first for the BBC production, and then, after he had heard what that production sounded like, for

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the "final" (Faber) version. In this respect the Third Programme's typescript represents an intermediate stage between Faber and the Evergreen Review. While it might be attractive to argue that these changes in the English version enrich the lyrical recitative quality of the whole (and to a certain extent I will try to make that point), at least some of them were the result of considerations far less lofty. Donald McWhinnie, who directed the piece at Martin Esslin's suggestion for the BBC, consulted with the playwright several times about the practical problems involved in turning the typescript he had been given into a radiogenic concept that was going to work. Barbara Bray provided a crucial link here; her frequent telexes to Paris pinpoint the line items in the script that might be worth the author's reconsideration. One of the more prominent changes, the original "Good God" crossed out and rendered in the BBC typescript as the Opener's simple "God," was determined by no less prosaic a force than the Postal Service. Because radio broadcast fell under this domain in Britain, a domain that banned blasphemy, "Good God" sounded risky. Beckett's producers at the BBC were reluctant to test the case (and thereby delay broadcast) so soon after the controversy surrounding Endgame at the Royal Court Theatre.74 The actual changes Beckett made in the English-language text of Cascando are worth noting, especially now that the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays has made the work more widely accessible on cassette.75 Opener's voice, first signified in "Cascando" and Other Short Dramatic Pieces as ' 'dry as dust,'' is characterized in The Collected Shorter Plays (U.S. and U.K.) as "Cold"; and his repeated line "Yes, that's right" has been pared down even further to the single word "Correct." A simple declarative becomes not nearly so simple after all: in this new context, "Correct" is also the sort of ambiguous imperative Beckett urges us to imagine in a phrase like "imagination dead imagine."76 Other changes are similarly pointed: "arms," once "joined," are now more tightly "linked"; it no longer is the "end of May" but the more definitive "close." Beckett also amends lines to sharpen narrative clarity, as when axing Voice's triple-gerund "scudding ... rearing . . . plunging" and replacing it with a more graphic account worthy of the closing moments in MaloneDies:77 Woburn, "out. . . driving out. . . rearing . . . plunging," is now struggling in vain to reach a shore in the midst of a fiction that is going, in typical Beckett fashion, nowhere. Woburn is no longer "seeking'' elsewhere, but somehow more nearly there: —at l a s t . . . no more coming ... no more going . . . seeking elsewhere . . . always elsewhere . .. we're there . . . nearly . . .

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has been changed to: —at last. . . we're there ... no further... no more searching ... in the dark . . . elsewhere . .. always elsewhere . . . we're there. . . nearly. . .

Timing, too, has been taken into account, especially as the pitch limitations of a very human Voice must be counted on to transmit such feverishly paced word-music: "it's darkening . . . earth darkening" can be delivered far more instantaneously than the relatively downbeat rhythm of "it's darkening .. . the earth is darkening." Notice, too, the selective upgrading Beckett works into Opener's expository line of self-incrimination: I have lived on i t . . . pretty long. Long enough. I have lived on i t . . . till I'm old. Old enough.

"Do that," Beckett said, urging Everett Frost to follow in this instance the Faber text.78 These textual changes in Cascando do not significantly alter the mood of the piece as a whole, and certainly do not match the kind of massive rewriting Clas Zilliacus has traced in its evolution from the earlier Esquisse radiophonique,79 They do, however, demonstrate Beckett's willingness to rethink certain elements of his text in light of the contingencies of production, including his reconsideration of it after he had heard what it sounded like on the radio. Frost ran into a similar instance of Beckett's responsiveness to the unwritten laws of what is, after all, a mechanical medium, during recording sessions for his 1986 version of All That Fall. Beckett initially refused Frost permission to rearrange some of Jerry's lines, but when Frost explained that Jerry's long silence would mean on radio that the audience would simply forget about him, the playwright saw the point and quickly agreed.80 Cascando, perhaps more than any other Beckett work, presents us with a drama of the almost there. Yet this "image," so reminiscent of the conclusion of The Unnamable, Hamm's "prolonged creative effort" in Endgame, and especially the Henry who "never finished anything" in Embers, is not in reality "like any other."81 It is certainly far removed from the little vignette of village and inn, of "gentle slopes," "borreen," "giant aspens," "wind in the boughs," and "faint sea" that sentimentalizes what we might call Opener's "old style."82 "Done with that," says Voice

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almost parenthetically (but predicting V's speech in Rockaby), for comeand-go stories like this are bound to be one-dimensional—literary and linear. Cascando, by contrast, relies on the split-second coordination of three separate but mutually supportive sound systems, each represented but by no means embodied by one of the three characters we hear in this play. The sound in each case is meant to be unique. Opener, the most personable speaker in this unusual trio, would have us believe that his is the sound of a CEO, the dominant male in charge: "I open. . . . And I close.... I open both. ... Listen." Voice, condemned, like Opener, to words, can never make the absolute statement, though the desire to do so as an approximation keeps him going. No matter how fast he plays his lines (and here he is an obvious precursor of his female counterpart, Mouth in Not I), he seems to suspect even from the tone of his interrupted starting line that he will only get as far as "else—," never "elsewhere." "Come on! Come on!" an impatient Opener demands. "Come on. .. come on—" will be Voice's humiliating, unfinalized closure, the last sounds we hear in this play. The character of Music, on the other hand, represents by its very nature that which is always going to be unobtainable and nonrepresentational. His "moments of privilege" captured on tape are therefore the sine qua non of "sine materia." Here Music, as Beckett argued so aggressively in Proust, "is the Idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena, existing ideally outside the universe, apprehended not in Space but in Time only."83 That liminal quality of existing outside of space and only in time, this radio play's "elsewhere. .. always elsewhere," provides Cascando with an internal dynamic that refers only to itself; this is meta-everything, the story about storytelling, the radio drama about radio drama, the act of listening about the act of listening, and, on an even more basic level, the word about the word and the sound about the sound. Perception in this ' 'case nought" 84 will, moreover, always be based on the retrieval of sound: Opener must therefore be counted quite right when he wryly comments, "They don't see me, they don't see what I do, they don't see what I have." And though Opener can hear Voice and Music on command, first separately, then together, it is unclear whether or not they are aware of each other's existence. They are interactive only inside his head. How different from their very acute line of tension in Words and Music, the play with which Cascando has so often been connected.85 In that play Croak's two elements are mighty opposites, antagonists who clash with one another like titans before coming to rest in a grand musical finale of mutual respect and tentative reconciliation. In Cascando these words and

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this music, "as though they had linked arms," have long passed being in conflict with one another. Imposing a variation on their once contrary movement, Opener has us hear how their separate but continuous eddies momentarily break down into the private duets he hears: "From one world to another, it's as though they drew together. We have not much further to go. Good." Compared to Cascando, then, the world of Words and Music offers us a realistic tableau in the distance, complete with shuffling feet, instrumentalists tuning up, and a highly emotional master of ceremonies who "oohs" and "ahs." In this respect Cascando is a more perfectly determined hermetic sphere. The only character who hears all three agents, separately, then together, is the radio play's listener. And yet, as Beckett has so often shown, there is more than one way of being inside someone else's head: on radio we've been there before with Maddy Rooney and Henry, and in the major prose it's hard to say if we've ever really been anywhere else. And though "this one," however "different," is not necessarily "the right one," it certainly dramatizes a situation in which every action is configured as musical and mental. Let us consider for a moment the way the play begins. As Cascando opens, it is important for us to hear that this Opener (pun intended) is coming to us from nowhere—nowhere, that is, other than the white noise of radio silence. At the end, Opener will beat an abrupt retreat to the same silence, concluding what has been only an "upended"86 rendezvous with Voice and Music. The grand illusion here, of course, is that it all has happened in silence: what we hear in Cascando are only the sounds running riot inside the said Opener's head. "I open. . . . And I close." Such statements can be misleading, for something occurs in between the two, as Ruby Cohn has observed: ' 'There has to be a melody before cascando."87 That silent melody has been richly scored in advance to foreground the refrains that tie what Beckett called the "element soi" to the "element histoire."88 The latter, transmitted by Voice in an ever-rising crescendo, has been only thinly disguised. The pathetic story he tells about the figure he names Woburn is nothing more than a metaphorical rendering of a situation the listener soon recognizes as Opener's very own. Just as Woburn never reaches the island, so this fictionalizer, desperately bound for closure, never hears the conclusion of his story nor his hero's ultimate fate. This is not the metaphor of a magnifico. His hell is something more than Henry's faint "babbling of Lethe": like May's in Footfalls, it is to revolve "it all" in his "poor mind," this time to musical accompaniment.89 So much for Opener's posturing "No resemblance." He is finally implicated in his own story: "It's his own,

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THE DRAMA IN THE TEXT

it's his voice, it's in his head." This "render" is, as in Malone Dies, fatally "rent.'' And as in Embers, ' 'Everything always went on forever.' '90 Though Voice is no Orpheus, the chords he strikes can be, nevertheless, percussive—and surprisingly seductive: " . . . night too bright. . . soon the dunes ... no more stories... no more words . . . " There can be reason as well as rhyme: witness Voice's half-hearted appeal to Plato's shelter in "... acave . . . vague memory .. . in his head . . . of acave . . . " Literary allusion proves to be similarly oblique; though this is no Arabian Nights, tales in this case also number in the "thousands and one." Voice also makes use of the kind of specialized vocabulary Beckett storytellers are famous for: in this nautical tale there are "gunnels" (the upper edge of the side of a boat) as well as "thwarts" (rower's seats). This Voice has been rich enough indeed to sustain a writing life. "It's my life," says Opener with alarming candor, "I live on that"; and then, some moments later, the lines already cited above: "I have lived on i t . . . till I'm old. / Old enough." Unlike the earlier radio plays, which exploit the actor's vocal range to display leaps of an octave, lilting arpeggios, downward chromatic slaloms, and the holding of a note just a moment longer than expected before gliding right back into the prosaic beat, Cascando calls on the monologuist interpreting Voice to play a continuous monotone. The challenge in this instance is to convey a monotone while never sounding monotonous; the challenge, of course, would be that much greater on the live stage, for in a recording studio the actors playing Opener and Voice always have the option of reading from the radio script they hold in their hands. That script calls for long gaps in Voice's speech instead of the dramatic emphasis the actor might be tempted to bring to the line. Opener's intrusive words must therefore be heard as the strategic lacunae in this deceptively Spartan piece. His summary commands for start, stop, and especially volume ("Full strength") add all the nuance, contrast, and variation Voice's part needs, as well as providing the listener with the shock of recognition that firmly establishes the link between the two verbal elements. But it is the task of Music to play the biggest role here. Neither soi nor histoire, Music aspires in Cascando to an autonomy of its own. Relentless and uncompromising, it is never completely cowed by what seem like Opener's arbitrary commandments. Biding its time, Music waits for Opener's frustration with Voice ("Come on! Come on!") to enlarge on its own repertory of tricks. And in what must surely be accounted a climax of sorts, Music asserts its presence by bursting forth with a solo that serves as an exception to the rule. Every other onset of words and music has been introduced verbally by Opener, but Music, breaking the silence, defies both Opener's authority and Voice's ineptitude

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by playing its own tune in its own measured time. "God," says Opener, then "God God." The first statement is made, as the text specifies, "With MUSIC." But Opener makes his second exclamation on his own. Upstaged for the moment, in these simple words he murmurs his sudden defeat; Music has forced his hand, insisting for once that they switch roles. It is now Opener's turn to be the reactive partner. For at this moment in the play Voice cannot be responding, as some critics assume, to any gesture made outside of sound: this radio play authorizes no such thing as physical embodiment.91 To be is to be heard; the vehicle of all communication is sound. And, as elsewhere in Beckett, it's the "saying" that always constitutes the essence of "inventing."92 "It's him" and "see him" are therefore reduced to mere figures of speech; it's the "say him" that certifies the only reality. Music's rebellion into sound suddenly gives the lie to Opener's all-consuming power: it has been a sham, only temporary at best. And as the action resumes, soon moving into the silence that follows cascando, the end point of all such diminution, Music's act of defiance seems to remind us that Opener is likely to be compromised again. What is there about the character of Music that insists on liberating itself from the material conditions imposed by what amounts to Opener's play within the play? The answer, not surprisingly for Beckett, has to do with silence, how we hear a silence after it has been marred by words or interrupted by music. Opener wants to control everything such a silence might be made to do, particularly in its capacity to evoke the past. For Opener's own past is decidedly problematic. The play that on first hearing seems to refer to nothing outside of its own emerging form becomes increasingly complicated with the delineation of a hero whose past is finally catching up with him. The fact that that past is never made explicit only serves to make it that much more compelling. Neither damaged nor distorted by words, the past is summoned in Cascando as pure mood, and it is Music that insists on evoking it. The past has a language of its own, best experienced in silence. "I'm afraid to open. / But I must open. / So I open.'' Such a statement of full confession constitutes "full strength" and has everything to do with sound. For the Opener who says, more than once, "I don't answer any more" is still in dialogue with the voices from his past: What do I open? They say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it's in his head. They don't see me, they don't see what I do, they don't see what I have, and they say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it's in his head.

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I don't protest any more, I don't say any more, There is nothing in my head. I don't answer any more. I open and close. (p. 140) The turn to words and music proves to be, however, only a dubious consolation. For while the embrace of such interior voices allows Opener to put the past, so to speak, on hold, it only introduces him to another kind of hell. The past keeps chiming in, even on radio. For it is Opener, not Woburn, who literally falls, cascando, and lands in the mud, turning his face from the stars. There will be no "other." The Voice is his own. The Music is his very self. Cascando must therefore be experienced as something at once more formidable and obtainable than an academic exercise in aesthetics or a short organum in the hermeneutics of listening. Nor is it merely some strange "meditation for radio," the phrase a somber announcer intoned by way of introduction when the play was first broadcast in England.93 This is Beckett, the realm of the virtual, not the theoretical. For when, at the end of this play, Opener joins "together" with his Voice and his Music, he does so "fervently." "Good!" he cries in earnest, perhaps even in triumph. Such passion is indeed a "reawakening." For language is transformed in this play when it works in harmony with music and the relationship between the score and the verbal elements comes to the fore. Music makes us hear how the text, too, has been based on sound rather than the line, particularly in its fascination with exciting momentum, amplitude, and calculated repetition. The piece expands laterally as each repeated phrase of Voice, Opener, and Music comes to life as part of a pattern larger than any of its individual elements seems to suggest. And as that pattern so deliberately unfolds, we hear how a story doesn't end, even though the tape does. Voice and Music fade, in cascando, but as they do so the sound of this play only becomes progressively more haunting and even more acute. What Beckett makes us hear at "the last moment" is only what there is at the last moment: silence, that open dramatic space where everything the listener has just heard in Cascando has already taken place. Beckett was never completely satisfied with his manuscript for Cascando. In a letter to Herbert Myron dated September 21, 1962, now in the Harvard Theatre Collection, he called the play "an unimportant work" and went on to call it "the best I have to offer. It does I suppose show in a way

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what passes for my mind and what passes for its work."94 Yet Cascando has proved to be, ironically, an attractive vehicle for production in England, Ireland, France, the United States, Israel, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. In addition to the French, British, and American versions already discussed, Cascando was recorded twice in Germany in the translation provided by the late Elmar Tophoven (SDR-Stuttgart, 1963; WDRCologne, 1969). The Mihalovici score, completed as Opus 86 for ORTFParis in December 1962, was used in both German productions, though in separate arrangements supervised by different conductors. The music heard on the BBC in the version starring Patrick Magee and Denys Hawthorne was in fact the same as that used in Stuttgart, especially hired from SDR for the occasion. But a second British production, recorded in 1984 at the University of London Audio-Visual Centre by Katharine Worth and David Clark, with David Warrilow and Sean Bean, featured new music by Humphrey Searle. Still another score was created by the American composer William Kraft for Everett Frost and the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, this one to accompany the voices of Alvin Epstein and Frederick Newmann for the work copyrighted in 1989. And as late as 1992-93 Joseph Chaikin was involved in a different production, in which he played Voice to Ron Faber's Opener, directed by Peter Feldman, who had earlier worked with the Open Theater. The voice-track for this Cascando was completed in 1992, but an original score proved far more difficult to arrange, especially as Chaikin was looking for the simplicity of one or two instruments. Richard Peaslee, the composer who has worked with the choreographer Martha Clarke in her mixed theater-dance pieces, and is also known for his score for Peter Brook's MaratlSade, was working—as this book goes to press—on something "complex and modernistic" for broadcast on WBAI-FM (New York) in the winter of 1994. According to William Coco, Chaikin settled on Cascando because "he wanted to do something for radio." He had earlier declined Morton Feldman's proposal for a live stage version of Embers. With the acting space set up as a radio studio, Feldman had earlier done the same piece in Toronto. But Chaikin found that play far "too disturbing."95 Nor has the life of Cascando been limited to radio: in 1976 the experimental group Mabou Mines, in a cast that included Bill Raymond, Frederick Neumann, and David Warrilow, mounted a not altogether successful stage adaptation at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York. Jo Anne Akalaitis' ambitious concept called for seven actors sitting around a table; the music for cello, played by Arthur Russell, was written by Philip Glass. The "environment," according to the director, was "basi-

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cally a lot of junk.'' Beckett actually saw the set for this unusual Cascando in Berlin, during the company's European tour. "Well, you certainly have adapted it," he told Akalaitis when she showed him the set at the Berlin Museum, where the company performed the piece. "I think he did not like it," the director admitted to Jonathan Kalb. "But I also think at that moment he did not want to make a stink. He's a very polite person. ... I asked him then if he'd write down the permission on a paper napkin for us to do it in Switzerland, because his agent said we didn't have it. I still have the napkin."96 If Beckett had misgivings about his work on Cascando, he was even more uncertain about the viability of the project that has become known as Rough for Radio I. "Unfinished and now unfinishable" is how he characterized this sketch to Everett Frost in the late eighties; he could not recommend that it be included in the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays series.97 Soon after it was published in French as Esquisse radiophonique in the monthly review Minuit for September 1973, Humphrey Searle, who was interested in writing music for the piece, approached the BBC to see if Beckett might be persuaded to complete the sketch and prepare an English translation. The playwright, however, felt he was unable to proceed with it any further. Three years later he also declined Martin Esslin's suggestion for possible production, a treatment that imagined this play's enigmatic Voice as "no more than a faint mumbled murmur."98 For in this piece Beckett's Voice is a character with no discernible text, Music a figment with no score. "When one is alone one is all alone."99 In 1986, however, Beckett granted Israeli radio permission to record all of the radio plays in Hebrew, a permission that included, according to Shimon Levy, the rights to Rough for Radio I. Earlier than that, in 1980, he had allowed the work to be recorded on cassette in English for gallery installation only, not for broadcast in America. But in 1990, after the playwright's death, the executor of the Beckett estate, his nephew Edward Beckett, gave the young Dutch composer Richard Rijnvos permission to prepare a broadcast of the first English-language version. (In the same letter Edward Beckett pointed out that he had only recently discovered that an apparently unauthorized French version of the play had already been broadcast in 1962.) For the Rijnvos production Joan Plowright agreed to play She; Michael Gough took the part of He when Rijnvos' first choice, Derek Jacobi, was unavailable. Their voices were recorded in London on January 25, 1991. Rijnvos' score, building the acoustical qualities of trombone, oboe, and celesta one on top of the other, was played by the Ives Ensemble; the composer served as his own producer, director, and editor. As there are no authorized lines assigned to the part of Voice in this piece,

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another text was used: a transcription of John Cage's voice recorded during a workshop he had previously given in the Netherlands. The Dutch production of the English-language Rough for Radio I was broadcast for the first time on August 3, 1991.100 In Radio I, the title under which Rough for Radio I was first published in English, Beckett introduces us to two signifying pronouns who play in the by-now-familiar repertory with Voice and Music. He and She, revived from Lenormand's Lui and Elle in Les Rates, also resemble the pronominally designated figures Me and Him in the e. e. cummings play Him, as well as the Hie and Ille of Yeats' "Ego Dominus Tuus," the verse speakers Ezra Pound once disparaged as "Hie and Willie."101 Such dramatic personae are both concrete and abstract, specific and nonrepresentational, and, in Beckett's case, simultaneously there and not there. At its best, the result is not so much a clash as a counterpointing of the stylized and the "real."102 For Beckett's He and She exist less to explore the question of gender than to contrast their different qualities of sound— mezzo-soprano and alto as opposed to tenor/baritone or basso profundo. Sound is a signifier of other differences as well. In this play He is the one privileged to hear faint sounds inside his head; She has merely been invited—or so She says—to check them out as they unexplainably make themselves heard on the radio within the radio: SHE: . . . You asked me to come. HE: I ask no one to come here. SHE: You suffered me to come. HE: I meet my debts. (Pause.) SHE: I have come to listen. (p. 107)

This feminine listener enters the masculine domain to hear the "unimaginable," the "unthinkable," and the "inconceivable," the same low sounds we overhear as they broadcast themselves on the mechanically assisted speakers she switches on. SHE: ... Are these the two knobs? HE: Yes. SHE: Just push? (Pause.) Is it live? (Pause.) I ask you is it live. HE: No, you must twist. (Pause.) To the right. (Click.)

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MUSIC:

(Faint.)

(Silence.)

(p. 108)

This sketch, however, is never quite sure about what to do with the complex layering of its own auditory events. On the way out from the site established for this strangely inconsequential tryst, "A little off" and then ' 'A little further off,'' She is momentarily struck by the appearance of a ' 'Turkoman''—it is hard to tell if this means man or Voice or carpet or some portrait hanging on a wall we cannot see. "How troubled you look!" she says, leaving him to his " needs." He reminds her to avoid the garbage. The introduction of an ' 'objective'' character like She into the subjective ambiance of Rough for Radio I makes it difficult for Beckett to situate his audience inside He's head; and the specification of place, a sparsely furnished "house" where characters come and go, "squat" on hassocks, switch radios on and off, and even make doctor's appointments on telephones, removes us even further from the privacy of any exclusively organized consciousness. The sounds of a material world that follow She's departure evoke an abrupt change in mood and refocus our attention in an entirely different direction: Long pause. Sound of curtains violently drawn, first one, then the other, clatter of the heavy rings along the rods. Pause. Faint ping—as sometimes happens—of telephone receiver raised from cradle. Faint sound of dialling. Pause. (p. 109)

We have suddenly moved from Beckett to Cocteau. This voix humaine now dials his doctor, and gets a secretary on the line instead, whereupon he identifies himself as another one of Beckett's M heroes, this one an impatient but sonorously named Mr. Macgillycuddy: " . . . Mac-gillycuddy .. . right. . . he'll know .. . and Miss . . . Miss!.. . urgent.. . yes! .. . (Shrill). . . most urgent!" Beckett insisted that Rough for Radio I was merely "something on the way to Cascando," something that had in fact been "superseded by it."103 The text as it stands reflects its own origins, especially in the lines that resurface in the more polished work. In a piercing voice He, now identified as the Irishman Macgillycuddy, shouts "Come on! Come On!"; with Music, "Faint," he intones "Good God!" She's unacknowledged cry of "Louder!"—directed first to Voice, then to Music (for sound in each case remains exactly the same, "No louder")—in Cascando becomes

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Opener's far more efficacious "Full strength." There is, quite simply, rien a faire, the droll line of homage to Waiting for Godot that Macgillycuddy, now "Very agitated" indeed, shouts in frustration into a cold, unresponsive receiver: "... nothing what? ... to be done? ... I know there's nothing to be done . . . what? . . .no!" The script for Rough for Radio I is nevertheless something more than a trial run for the complete radiophonic vocabulary Beckett has explored elsewhere. The play, of course, serves as an important gloss on Cascando and Rough for Radio II, but it also finds new dramatic roles for electronic voice instruments like a telephone and a radio. In Rough for Radio I Voice and Music, who labor "without cease" at the threshold of silence, neither hear nor see one another; theirs is a muted symphony without "heat" and without "light." Unaware of each other's existence—for "how could they meet?"—they play subliminal solos heard in spontaneous duet: ". . . . gether. . . TOGETHER. .. . like. .. . one. ... the breathing. ..." This sketch also prepares us for the subservient role of the female player we will meet in Rough for Radio II; as the dramatic situation unfolds, the unnamed She and the off-mike secretary play only the secondary part. Yet within this drama-in-the-making the role assigned to She may be far more dynamic than her position as satellite figure initially implies. Not only does She question what she sees and hears ("—you like that?"), but above all else she is the catalyst for everything that fades. This play will end not in a cry but in a whisper: "Tomorrow . . . noon. ..." But as He delivers the closing line, what we hear is the sound of his own "light" dying. Macgillycuddy has been fatally unsettled by the finality of his female visitation: ... they're ending... ENDING ... this morning ... what?... n o ! . . . no question!. . . ENDING I tell you ... it's me ... ME ... what? I tell you they're ending ... ENDING ... I can't stay like that after... who? ... but she's left me ... ah for God's sake. .. haven't they all left m e ? . . . all left me ... (p. 110)

Though "one cannot describe" these sounds, for Macgillycuddy—this play's "what. . . who? ... no ... HE"—they nonetheless represent a "need." "It is a need," He tells She, his temporary listener. "It has become a need." "A need?" She responds. "That a need?" Pause. Click. But Voice and Music, brief and failing, have just about exhausted their repertory of beats. "Together, ending, breaking off together, resuming together more and more feebly,'' they threaten He—and us—with a radio silence that we now hear for the first time—a silence without peace,

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moreover, that truly, and this time mechanically, passeth all human understanding. Long pause. Click. "Last w h a t ? . . . gasps?" Switch on: " " Switch off. "Me get up, me go o n . . . . "104 Beckett's voice-characters in Rough for Radio II will not suffer in silence. "Ah but no, no no. . . . No no." This radio play sustains its dramatic tension by tempting the listener with its own possibilities for allegorization. But unlike Words and Music, Cascando, and, to a certain extent, Rough for Radio I, where it is easy to see the conflict as a rich symbol for the situation of the artist and failing muse, the metaphor now turns more explicitly political, preparing us for the kind of discourse Beckett pursues in late theater pieces like What Where and especially Catastrophe, the play he dedicated to Vaclav Havel in prison. Fox, the vox-personality Beckett once described as "a fodient rodent" (lifting a phrase from his own play),105 is the victim of torture and blind inquisition. ' 'Let me out!" he screams in despair, but punning all the while on the apostle,'' Peter out in the stones!" In Rough for Radio II the suspect quality of mercy will be very much strained indeed. The "human trait," momentarily diverted by an idle tear, displays the "... same deficiencies . . . totally inacceptable . .. outlook quite hopeless. ..." Though Beckett regarded Rough for Radio II as "unfinished, no more than a rough sketch," he allowed Martin Esslin to direct the play in 1976, when it was broadcast on the BBC to coincide with the author's seventieth birthday on April 13. The work was originally written in French in the early sixties, as Pochade radiophonique, but Beckett delayed its publication until November 1975, when it appeared in number 16 of Minuit. Esslin's English-language production starred Billie Whitelaw as the Stenographer, Patrick Magee as Fox, Michael Deacon as the silent Dick, and the playwright Harold Pinter as Animator. Before the BBC production, Beckett referred to the piece as Radio II to distinguish it from Radio I, his original title for the then unproduced Rough for Radio I. But to avoid any confusion that might result from the transmission of a play called Radio II on BBC Radio 3, he promptly retitled the English language versions of both works. He said, however, that the BBC production "had not come off." He put the blame on the script but told Esslin that "the production which made the Animator and his team start briskly and become more weary and discouraged as time went on should already have started on a high degree of weariness and despair."106 In 1989 the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays released its version of the same work on National Public Radio; directed by Everett Frost, the cast included Barry McGovern as Fox, W. Dennis Hunt as Animator, and Charles Potter as the whip-wielding Dick. Amanda

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Plummer brought a carefully nuanced modulation to the texture of her Stenographer's female voice, affording a maximum of dramatic latitude to a line like "We know it by heart and yet the pang is ever new." In contrast to the sound of Whitelaw's pert and well-organized assistant who only occasionally loses her composure, Plummer introduced a note of anguished vulnerability that lingered just beneath the surface of her character's uneasy self-sufficiency. Intimidation kept breaking in. Barry McGovern, who found more strength and resilience in his character's voice than had Magee's continuous, monochromatic, but highly disciplined dirge, said, "ultimately Fox is seeking silence."107 That is what all the voices in this play want; it is the one thing, however, for which they will never be "free." These are characters trapped forever in sound, the rough material of radio. Animator starts "it all" going with his jaunty "Ready, miss?" His is an animation in sound. In the stichomythic lines that follow, her more highly pitched voice plays in counterpoint to his, offering the listener some combinations that are wildly unpredictable. "What is it miss?" he remarks in contretemps as she is set all "aflutter" by the smile of Fox we cannot see. "Vermin in the lingerie?" His naughty speculation is Beckett's update for Duchamps' famous pun on "L.H.O.O.Q." Other permutations in sound can even be singularly mute. Holding the line and allowing the vowel to resonate each time he calls "Dick" on, Animator summons into being a nonspeaking character who must find his vocal authority in the variations he can work into his "swish of bull's pizzle." Dick acquits himself fairly well as his thuds, both on and off flesh, can be in turn "mild," "formidable," and "violent." Rulers and pencils offer other beats when they "strike," "blow," or "thump." A rubberized instrument, useful to writers and other interrogators, is given an especially effective audition: A: ... On! Silence. Dick! Swish and thud of pizzle on flesh. Faint cry from FOX. Off record, miss, remember? s: Drat it! Where's that eraser? A: Erase, miss, erase, we're in trouble enough already. Ruler. On! Silence. Dick!

(p. 117)

But such inanimate sounds will be upstaged by the far more salacious pressure of flesh meeting flesh. Lips, teeth, tongue, and saliva soon play second fiddle to the mad accompaniment of howls and grunts. The body in this instance is the body of sound:

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A: Dick!—no, wait. Kiss him, miss, perhaps that will stir some fibre. s: Where, sir? A: In his heart, in his entrails—or some other part. s: No, I mean kiss him where, sir? A: Angry. Why on his stinker of a mouth, What do you suppose? STENO-GRAPHER kisses FOX. Howl from FOX. Till it bleeds! Kiss it white! Howl from FOX. Suck his gullet! (p. 122)

"Ah," laments this frustrated voyeur. "Perhaps I went too far." "He has fainted away, sir," responds his unwitting female collaborator. Rough for Radio II takes full advantage of the medium's potential to develop characters vocally, not physically. Bodies have different voices; voices make different sounds. Those these characters deliver involve a striking number of repetitions that echo back and forth as the play's soundscape builds an unsuspected momentum of its own. Phrases are transposed into different keys, allowing us to hear the same motif accumulate wide harmonic values. Mouthed by individual voices—first Fox's, then the Stenographer's, and finally Animator's—"Live I did" and "Ah my God my God .. . My God" resonate through the play to form new combinations of pitch, pause, and timbre. The text is always the same, but in each case the discourse is different. And as each character repeats the same words, each shapes unprecedented meanings into the sound of a familiar phrase. Suddenly the text has acquired the potency of a litany. So incremental is the repetition, and so haunting, that one can almost predict Animator's stern reaction to his assistant's sudden slip: A: Sigh. Good. Where he left off. Once more. s: 'Oh but no, no—' A: Ah but no. No? s: You are quite right, sir. 'Ah but no, no—' A: Severely. Have a care, miss. (p. 121)

Yet on this tape every citation, not just an intrusive Oh in place of an original Ah, is destined to be a misquotation; just such a system of stops and false starts drives the larger implications of this play on. Every voice gives a different reading and an unexpected reality to the same line, just as each listener hears it anew. The drama in this play is in the sound; here, once again, sound momentarily stabilizes all the sense there is. As in What Where, "Make sense who may."108 Animator, of course, goes a bit too far when he begins to confuse

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phraseology with phrase-making. In an abrupt departure from previous practice, he deigns to introduce a completely new item into the arrangements we have previously heard. His stenographer is appalled, as she should be, by the violence done to Fox's belabored confession. For Animator is no longer responding to a given text but writing one of his own in its place. Here is the heresy of paraphrase indeed: " '. .. between two kisses. . .'" is the fatuous bon mot he interpolates into what should be the variorum playback. But Animator's motives have already become suspect; his textual emendation has been inspired by another, more earthy imperative. His victim is not the tortured body of Fox, nor even the body of Fox's text, but the far more "staggering" body of the young woman on whom he plans to inscribe a signature of a very different sort. Establishing a subtext in radio drama is always difficult; if the voice can't communicate the subtext, it simply isn't there. The voice therefore demands absolute precision: it has to be graduated. At every second it must be able to modulate the volume of emotion, turn one feeling up a bit, another down a little. To sustain such a tense line of response the range of inflection must be perfectly timed. The opportunity to do so falls to the Stenographer, for it is her extratextual response to the Animator's advances that builds the indirect action of seduction and betrayal into this work. Throughout this drama the Animator hopes to impress her with what he thinks is his verbal wit. "Ah these old spectres from the days of book reviewing," he very much wants her to take note, "they lie in wait for one at every turn." He quotes from "the divine Florentine," but she fends him off by saying she has "merely flipped through the Inferno." "Live I did—'' has jogged his memory and made him think of a line from Dante's Purgatory. There "all sigh, I was, I was"—the more haloed version of Fox's derivative trope. To make matters worse, this Stenographer completely deflates the lyric possibilities of both tale-tellers when she renders the same thought in sober, inelegant prose: " . . . yes, sir, it's a notion crops up now and then. Perhaps not in those precise terms, so far, that I could not say offhand. But allusions to a life, though not common, are not rare." Animator's attempt to interest her in the metaphysical dimension of Dante's grammar falls on similarly deaf ears. When he tells her that in place of Dante's / was "one would rather have expected, I shall be" ("No?"), his strategy elicits only this maudlin response: "The creatures!" And when he next tries to engage her sympathy in "a tear an angel comes to catch as it falls," he draws a blank once more. This "crabbed youth," alas, admits of no familiarity with the problem of erasure in "the works of Sterne": "The Accusing Spirit, which flew up to heaven's chancery

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with the oath, blushed as he gave it in; and the Recording Angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out forever.''109 The Stenographer has all the while been much more taken with the "ravishing" figure of Fox. He smiles at her (" ... so sudden! So radiant! So fleeting!"), and, much to Animator's dismay, this is not "the first time by any chance." Though she omits entering this event in her fresh pad, she does indeed make a mental note of this "play of feature." So does Fox apparently, for the smile works to elicit an appeal on his behalf for "a touch of kindness . .. perhaps just a hint of kindness.'' Animator, who has been trying hard to attract her by other means, refuses to give in to this competitive display of "sentiment.'' This actor has his own ' 'method.'' He reduces the pressure, but then only to increase his rival's pain: "Dick, if you would. . . Careful, miss." Yet to be witty about torture is more than his role as Animator seems to require. His assignment is to be vigilant to the strictures of Fritz Mauthner, the linguistic philosopher who based his inquiry on the same power of language: " 'the least word let fall in solitude and thereby in danger. . . may be if—three words underlined." Animator keeps searching for the words that just might turn this "dear child" around. But even the Pre-Raphaelite ring of "Caress, fount of resipescence!" (though Beckett is drawing on Sir Thomas Browne here) won't do the trick.11; ::%s:SATUe forced, finally, to resort to other, less decorous means of seduction. At the end of the "play" he makes his final move on her. "Don't cry, miss," he says in anticipation of this seedy liaison dangereuse, "dry your pretty eyes and smile at me." We suddenly hear things quite differently: " ' . . . ah but no, no, no ... No no.' " She now quotes in earnest; the unseen tears this time are hers. The daunting rhetoric of Animator's literary history has from the start been designed not to investigate, but to humiliate, torture, intimidate, and condemn. "How can we ever hope to get anywhere if you suppress gems of that magnitude?" is therefore not said in the spirit of free inquiry, but in the service of himself. This Animator will "suppress" exactly what— and whom—he likes; in his hands the uses of language and literature can be terrifying. "Who is this woman. .. what's the name?" The mood of this interrogative implies that this will be no Tennysonian idyll; the Maud who comes into this garden is likely to find herself trapped, seduced, even raped.111 Sexuality in this work is constantly rising to the surface, and no way of speaking, however baroque, can disguise its imperatives. "Ah .. . That frequentative!" The Stenographer strives to hide behind language to evade both her own attraction to the tortured figure of Fox and the series of unwelcome propositions from her boss. Dick, macho man incarnate, is

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reduced to the alarming phallic forays of a leather whip; even his name, like the Peter we hear about earlier, gives the "Dickness of [this] Dick" away.112 Animator, as we might expect, is a more sophisticated predator. This seducer is not above dissembling. "Be reasonable," he feigns in very thin disguise. "It's hard on you, we know. It does not lie entirely with us, we know.'' But Fox outfoxes them all. While all of this seething action of seduction and betrayal has been going on, he has meanwhile "fecundated" Maud. Subtext has invaded the text. Allegory in Rough for Radio II is therefore susceptible to a variety of interpretations as Beckett makes us hear the furtive sense of complexity. From the moment Animator suggests drawing the blinds, we know that his female retainer is in trouble.' 'A world without monsters, just imagine!'' She sheds her overall in a provocative parody of Fox's disturbing state of undress: in his case "hood," "gag," "blind," and "plugs" are summarily removed by an unseen hand. The politics of torture is thus seen to be more various than we might have initially supposed. More than one body is in pain here. And in this play it is the voice of the actor that weighs the situation one way or the other. Here the supremacist fantasies of the critic (and the irony is not lost on this critic) are more than likely to meet their match. For it is no longer an open question of what a text might mean, but rather what it could be made to mean in the practical realm of recitation and the discourse of performance. Radio can be rough indeed. Undermining silence with a crawling menace, authority in this play is vested in the actual voice and in what one hears in that recorded voice, the voice one cannot see, like some text crying "Let me out." Fox therefore has a remarkable instrument at his disposal. He mocks his victimization by mouthing words that have the faint ring of sincerity about them even though their content may be strangely suspect. He knows these tormentors, this "same old team," only too well; they've been working him over for months. And he knows what they want to hear: That for sure, no further, and there gaze, all the way up, all the way down, slow gaze, age upon age, up again, down again, little lichens of my own span, living dead in the stones, and there took to the tunnels. Silence. Ruler. Oceans too, that too, no denying, I drew near down the tunnels, blue above, blue ahead, that for sure, and there too, no further, ways end, all ends and farewell, farewell and fall, farewell seasons, till I fare again. Silence. Ruler. Farewell.

(p. H9)

In contrast to Animator's rather tired literary remainders, Fox's ave atquc vale sounds vital, almost testimonial. "Soaping the mole," he cer-

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tainly sounds "like something out of Beckett."113 Not for him the jargonridden armature of the second-rate. Animator, who can at least remember what good writing sounds like, greets Fox's incantation with enthusiasm, even praise: "Nice! Nicely put! Such summers missed! So sibilant! Don't you agree, miss?" This is, of course, the same listener so taken with the subtle effects of assonance in "micaceous schists," "fauna," and those "fodient rodents." Such literary conceits reduce even this lago to tears. ("You wouldn't have a handkerchief, miss, you could lend me?.") "The tears of the world," this time ironically, area very "constant quantity."114 Fox of course knows that his chances for survival depend on his command of words and the power of his rhetoric to elicit such responsive chords. Language, he has learned to his own immediate peril, can kill. It can also heal; but in Animator's hands it leaves only a scar of horror. Real feeling, unlike language, justifies itself. Fox's mysterious discourse is far more resistant to the pitfalls of allegorization. As his story is told we hear voices within his voice; for what can his Maud be but a voice haunting his own voice? ('' 'Have yourself opened, Maud would say, opened up, it's nothing, I'll give him suck if he's still alive, ah but no, no, no. . . . No no.' ") At the same time we also hear other voices that listen to his voice citing her; one voice, then two, suddenly echo, repeat, and transform her ligne donnee. This is talk radio indeed: notice the double quotes that signal for these characters the intercalated way of speaking one another's lines. Fox's tormentors, moreover, take Maud's line quite literally. And, as they do so, they practice a form of lit crit that is both morally and politically bankrupt. For the ' 'notion brother" is entirely unknown to them. Perhaps Fox would "talk," if they only let him. But then they'd be out of a job. For his part, Animator assumes his role with genuine officiousness. Aestheticizing terror, he looks for the structure of the confession he wants, "someone, anyone, who once saw you ... go by." Any explanation will do, a "father, a mother, a friend, a . . . Beatrice—no, that is asking too much." Form will be more important than content. For a phenomenon like Fox, who refuses any allegory of representation, destabilizes his interrogators by making the bottom fall out of the past, spilling all its security. He "jibs" at just that point when Animator wants the story to go forward to some logical conclusion. "Don't ramble!" he urges Fox on. "Treat the subject, whatever it is!" But time, like this tape, is running out. Fox knows the game is up even as he refuses to play along. He offers these terrorists no "sign," no "set of words," only his own rehearsed way of saying them. "Tomorrow, who knows, we may be free," Animator will be forced to confess in the end. Trapped on radio, these voices,

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dramatic with terror, recycle a destiny that refuses to retreat anywhere but toward silence. Such violent realness disturbs us with the crude intrusion of the actual. Reversing the worked-over image Animator has built from the ruins of Dante, the script's "divine Florentine," this "house" is very much "on fire." And in this inferno "the meanest syllable has, or may have, its importance," especially as the actor's voice uncovers the drama hidden in the text: "Walls no further. ..." For though this "play" leaves "unsaid" the one thing that can give Fox back his "darling solitudes," it has nonetheless invaded our silence and disturbed it, like thoughts. Yet in doing so this pochade, this "hurried" sketch, reminds us—as all Beckett's work in radio has done—that "voice" is not only the first instrument of song, but of everything that can be made to happen in that faint music we call, for want of a better word, storytelling. "Me get up, me go on. ..."

3 The Play of Language In 1981 Alan Schneider traveled to London with Danny Labeille to rehearse Billie Whitelaw in her dual role as Woman and Voice for a new play called Rockaby. He faced an impossible problem: how to make a complete evening of theater out of a technically complex drama whose performance time was to ran slightly less than fifteen minutes. Beckett's other play that dates from the same period, Ohio Impromptu, was clearly not a practical option for the kind of one-woman show the director had in mind. The evocation of this stage image was conceived for two seated male figures and required wigs, costume, makeup, and posture "as alike in appearance as possible."1 That piece had in any case been promised to Stan Gontarski for the international Beckett symposium he was then organizing at the Ohio State University in Columbus. The solution Schneider came upon was ambitious but imperfect: with the playwright's reluctant consent, Whitelaw would offer a staged reading of the short story Enough2 as opener and preview. Then, after a longer than usual intermission allowing the actress sufficient time to get into costume and character, Rockaby might begin. The double bill of Rockaby preceded by Enough had its world premiere at the Center Theatre in Buffalo, New York on April 8, 1981, and was later seen at the National Theatre in London and at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in New York.3 For readers familiar with Beckett's short story, originally written in 1965 as Assez and published in the author's English translation two years later, a staged reading of Enough might not have seemed an inappropriate choice. Several critics commenting on this work assume its narrator to be female, and Schneider certainly needed a script compatible with the possible range of a woman's voice in live performance. Billie Whitelaw's commanding stage presence gave a decidedly feminine perspective to the monologue, but at several points her voice—and especially her body— seemed to be playing against the text: We turn over as one man when he manifests the desire. I can feel him at night pressed against me with all his twisted length. It was less a matter 58

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of sleeping than of lying d o w n . . . . With his upper hand he held and touched me where he wished. Up to a certain point. The other was twined in my hair. He murmured of things that for him were no more and for me could not have been. (p. 144) I did all he desired. I desired it too. For him. When he desired something so did I. He only had to say what thing. When he didn't desire anything neither did I. In this way 1 didn't live without desires. If he had desired something for me I would have desired it too. Happiness for example or fame. I only had the desires he manifested. But he must have manifested them all. All his desires and needs. . . . When he told me to lick his penis I hastened to do so. I drew satisfaction from it. We must have had the same satisfactions. The same needs and the same satisfactions. (p. 139)

Although this narrator, keen on oral sex, verbally realizes Molly Bloom's erotic fantasy ("When he told me to lick his penis I hastened to do so"), this text nowhere localizes femininity until the very last line, when the sudden appearance of "breasts" startles us with its attempted specification of gender—and an oddly ambiguous one at that. 4 The "breasts" here are in any case "old," the same "wrinkled female breasts" readers of Eliot and Apollinaire might be just as likely to associate with woman as with the tantalizing bisexuality in the figure of the blind Tiresias. In this piece ejaculations, "too few for even a cursory survey," are everywhere fated to be simultaneously verbal and phallic. Keats notwithstanding, the "he" in this narrator's suggestive tale "wished everything to be heard including the ejaculations and broken paternosters that he poured out to the flowers at his feet."5 The composer Earl Kim, who wrote what he called a musical "setting" for the same story, was also attracted to the feminization of the narrator's voice, but for quite different reasons. Kim—whose musical adaptation of Beckett texts includes a one-act opera based on Footfalls; a "setting" for the poem "thither" for harp and voice; another for "roundelay" for flute, viola, harp, and soprano; and an interpretation of Krapp's Last Tape for cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, and the soprano voice of Benita Valente—used the voice of Irene Worth to speak the text of Enough in atmospheric counterpoint to two violins and piano. Finding the narrated rhythm impossible to notate, the composer discovered in working on this piece that its rhythmic structure could only be determined by the text itself as the words were spoken aloud. Kim imagined the sound of a female voice; the score he created responded to its potential for contrast with

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stringed instruments, as opposed, for example, to the heavy masculine harmony of woodwinds.6 Confounding all musical and dramatic interpretations of the two figures in this story, as well as all other modes of interpretation (including the literary), is the author's rare statement about this work: "But, of course, they are two men."7 The question of voice in Enough is therefore a question of a uniquely salient ambiguity. Desire in language is one thing; the object, satisfaction, or frustration of that desire is something else again.8 "Man or woman," we have read before in this author, "what does it matter?" Molloy's Ruth, we remember, that woman of "an extraordinary flatness," might well have passed for a man after all, "yet another of them." "But in that case," this storyteller muses, "surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it." In "the comparative silence" of his fictional "last abode" he even speculates that "if she was not a man" she might have been "at least an androgyne." In Watt, the gender assigned to "other voices, singing, crying, stating, murmuring," is even more difficult to specify: "It might have been a high male voice, or it might have been a deep female voice.' '9 Signifiers here, like body parts, are shifty and unstable; pronouns are not what they used to be—if, in fact, they ever were. Though Molloy's sexual orientation, not to mention the exact nature of his biological confusion, may indeed be anyone's guess, his voice, his gender, and his memorable genitalia are more or less easy to identify as male. His experience on a bicycle, testicles "dangling at mid-thigh," would alone seem to clinch the matter once and for all.10 But in Enough, where "anatomy is a whole," wry puns are agonizingly extended. Depending on how the reader hears Beckett's narrator, the voice in this case is either male, female, or both. "It is solely a question of voices, no other image is appropriate." The sound of androgyny, however, this one male on male and simultaneously female on male, can only be imagined; unlike all the other voices, this "species" can only be recorded in silence.11 Reading voices, Beckett's voices, can therefore be a tricky business indeed, especially when they are the special prerogative of a synchronized stillness.12 The short fiction that follows Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable is full of such disjunctive and unsettling propositions, especially when we recognize that the principle of organization for these works is recitation rather than recounting. "Mine were naturally too loose for years," a seemingly innocuous statement about gloves, lifted from the text of Enough, sounds exactly the same as the nonsense phrase "two loose four years."13 Sound always precedes sense, especially when we differ-

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entiate lingua from appropriate Beckett lingo. But without diacritical markings, the commas, ellipses, and that semicolon called so "hideous" in Watt,14 it is difficult to know just how to imagine a puzzling sentence shaped like this:

There are questions you see but don't ask yourself. (p. 139)

Leaving aside, for a moment, the whole question of which questions are not to be asked and which ones are (unspecified), the text offers us no real authority for one reading as opposed to some others. A vibratoless tone, for example, is supposed to play the line straight. But how unexpected the same line becomes in the heavily mediated delivery accomplished by far less compliant voices: There are ... questions, you see; but don't ask yourself. There are questions you see ... but don't ask yourself.

Molloy's mother's room "smelt of ammonia, oh not merely of ammonia, but of ammonia, ammonia.'' Should we forget about that last comma, as John Calder once suggested,15 and read that penultimate "ammonia" as modifier rather than emphatic repetition of the same noun? To do so, of course, transforms more than "midget grammar";16 the deletion of a simple and singular comma deflates the incantatory force of "ammonia! ammonia!" and leaves us with the rather somber adjectival beat of "ammonia ammonia." Musicalization of voice, fortissimo or pianissimo, once again regulates meaning. But what happens to the sound of language and the sense it makes when Beckett has us hear a story told in the palpable oblivion that lies before us in a text, the "voice," so to speak, that once was in your "mouth"?17 The challenge of a story like Enough lies precisely in the way a voice has been written into silence. What we read in this text is a thought overheard, an imaginary audition, a stillness disturbed; this is the something specifically set down on paper to come out of the dark.18 A long speechact has been miraculously salvaged from the void that surrounds "all that goes before forget." The particular voice each listener hears in Enough is therefore a textualizer of considerable authority. Every reader hears it differently, just as each "voice" retextualizes what we hear. The "art and craft'' of this silent monologue therefore affords no ur-sound: for in this "case nought" hearing is inventing. Every interpretation is a simulation,

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"very rightly wrong," like a musical phrase written in one key transposed up or down for another.19 And for this highly subjective phrasing the instrumentalist as well as the instrument keeps changing the pacing: no metronomes where none intended.20 Chords, including vocal cords, are variously major and minor: when we try to concentrate on one sound, the other gets in the way, and vice versa. There is both surface and ground; each depends on how we orchestrate the "said" equation. Although this brings dynamic vitality to the piece and seems to offer us important options in our response, it raises more problems than it solves. The result is not so much a mixture but a rich medley of discourses competing for affirmation in the same text. It is the voice of androgyny, however, that permits those contraries to converge. This is a truly imagined rather than remembered sound, multigeneric and multigendered. For what is experiential in Enough can only be imagined. The affective, sensual nature of language becomes ever more potent in the silence this voice makes us hear: "Enough my old breasts feel his old hand." The master illusion is desire, but this must remain unspoken if the piece is to unfold a drama of its own. For in silence the text crosses and ultimately transcends gender, as it does genre; multiple stories in fact become the one story, the text that we hold in our hands. That text will condense a great deal of stylistic inventory of the sort critics have been telling us isn't supposed to count for much any more.21 Foremost among the devices we might associate with an ecrivain of the old school is the quantification of qualifiers that displays "enough" in a variety of venues: "One pair of gloves was enough," "That was enough for him," "And as if that was not enough, I kept telling myself he was on his last legs," and finally, "Enough my old breasts feel his old hand." "Enough" is even present in its Latin equivalent, satis: "We must have had the same satisfactions. The same needs and the same satisfactions."22 Within the small boundaries of this high modernist style, "enough" achieves star quality when contrasted with the opposing qualities of excessiveness and deficiency: "Too much at a time is too much," "Too much silence is too much," "Or it's my voice too weak at times," "Mine was naturally too loose for years," and "Too few for even a cursory survey." The voice in this text, "brought up short by all I know," claims to have not enough knowledge and not enough time: "Given three or four lives I might have accomplished something." And against the relative measurements of enough, too little, and too much, the same voice tantalizes us with some unspecified something that is imagined to be something more than enough:'' [A]ll I know comes from him,'' "I won't repeat this apropos all my bits of knowledge," "To those engulfed years it seems reasonable

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to impute my education for I don't remember having learnt anything in those I remember," and "It is with this reasoning that I calm myself when brought up short by all I know.'' This text also features a desultory nothing in anything but a supporting role: "Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it." Commenting in 1967 on such verbal histrionics in Enough, even Beckett had to admit, "I don't know what came over me."23 The "comedy of an exhaustive enumeration" will be extended to embrace the unchartered territory of a strange new math with rules and logarithms of its own. "You simplify and dramatise the whole thing," as the Mandarin complains in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, "with your literary mathematics."24 Several critics have been tempted to follow Beckett's lead here—with various results and varying degrees of success.25 No interpreter of this text can fail to hear the incessant beat of the number three, with all its promise of structural if not metaphysical finesse. Though the "talk" reported in this memoir is "seldom of geodesy," the branch of applied mathematics that attempts to learn about the earth's surface by looking at the sky, the very sound of such a specialized term brings three other possibilities economically into the textual scene a faire: Homeric wandering, Ulysses, and Joyce's mythological transformation of workaday Dublin. Reveling in the vigorous high spirits of intertextuality (there will be much more of that sort of thing and more than one system of allusion competing for our attention), the voice we hear likes to package such testimonies in neat packets of three: ... we must have covered several times the equivalent of the terrestrial equator. At an average speed of roughly three miles per day and night. We took flight in arithmetic. What mental calculations bent double hand in hand! Whole ternary numbers we raised in this way to the third power sometimes in downpours of rain. Graving themselves in his memory as best they could the ensuing cubes accumulated. (p. 141)

In Enough the number three in its multiple variations acquires an almost mantralike power: coupling assumes the position of "wedged together bent in three," the younger partner "cannot have been more than six" when he was taken "by the hand," the older man's murmurs "nine times out of ten" did not concern his present lover, and the "sort of mound" this pair encounters is often ' 'some three hundred feet in height.'' "The art of combining," asserts the same talker, "is not my fault. It's a curse from above." Probability and statistics, a special damnation for the

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Beckett hero, fall into similar numerical trios. There are, not surprisingly, nine varieties of "communication" and "redeparture" featured here. The negating statement "I never asked myself the question" appears three times, and the speaker even refers to a fateful "disgrace" on three separate occasions. "What do I know of man's destiny?" this voice intones. "I could tell you more about radishes." Naturally enough, as Susan Brienza deftly concludes, for these are roots, too.26 Close readers of Enough may also be puzzled by the irregularities of this text's Dada mathematics. If the voice offers us more than a way of speaking—if, in fact, the numbers given are to be trusted—the journey is supposed to have taken two longtime companions a little over ten thousand miles, or an average of approximately one thousand miles during each of the ten years "between the two events described." (The last decade "veils those that went before and must have resembled it like blades of grass".) Statistically, however, this estimation is off by almost a hundred miles. The couple actually covers an average of closer to eleven hundred miles per year: 365.25 x 3 = 1,095.75 There may be other inconsistencies, especially concerning the duration of the experience framed by this oddly constructed linguistic event. Several decades seem to be involved here. Besides the crucial ten years "between the two events described," the "latter" decade implies twenty years at the very least, while "our last decade" might in this context seem to suggest a minimum of thirty. Which leads us to still another problem: though the couple has retraced this same journey "several" times, how long does it actually take them to traverse a distance equal to the terrestrial equator? If we assume that we are dealing with our own planet (the earth's equator equals 24,902.45 miles), a matter by no means specified in this story, the numbers work out roughly like this: 24,902.45 / 1,095.75 = 22.725 years Puck's similar journey through space in A Midsummer Night's Dream is both far more efficient and far more appealing: "I'll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes"—a "girdle of the earth" Beckett parodies in How It Is. 27 If it really takes Beckett's languid travellers approximately twenty-three years to cover the same distance, three outings— a total of about sixty-nine years—seems like a reasonable annotation to the line "we must have covered several times the equivalent of the ter-

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restrial equator." In this case, as with all the others, we are merely following directions: "Total milage [sic] divided by average daily mileage. So many days. Divide. . . . Daily average always up to date. Subtract. Divide." Unfortunately for those of us, like Molloy, with a passion for precision, the answer of twenty-three years does not coincide with the next figure suggested by the stubborn text. If the "he" of this story spoke "an average of a hundred words per day and night," albeit "Spaced out," we would surely find something more here than those twenty-three years previously computed: 1,000,000 H- 100 = 10,000 days 10,000 -r- 365.25 = 27.38 years Here the Beckett reader, Joyce's "ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia," can indeed "Lick chops and basta"—enough is quite literally enough. But "all this—," "all this this here—," is merely Beckett "talk": the piece reinscribes itself as a text for the voice.28 None too soon: confronted with the delirium of incorrigible numbers, the weary reader may be out of his—or her—depth. But such passages, pulling the reader by the ear and nimbly shifting tone and accent, play with the active sound of numbers, just as they play with the silent language of "enough," at once "too little" and "too much." Numbers, like words, are stylistic arrangements of experience; numbers, as words, are highly stylized arrangements of experience. Both offer us ways of talking; accent, intonation, and emphasis exploit their rich possibilities as performative speech: Other main examples suggest themselves to the mind. Immediate continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Immediate discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture.

(p. 142)

This is a drama in the sound of language, not necessarily in the intellectual foundation of words: "Meaning—meaning!—meaning. . . . "29 And though the "talk" here sounds more like parler Ubu than Beckett, no actor would be fool "enough" to dismiss such evocative speech as lacking in dramatic appeal or theatrical possibility. Nothing is owed to fact; everything belongs to sound. "Say it"—and "put us out of our pain." Language,

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subject to any number of permutations by a human voice, is never exhausted. "Gab was my salvation," confesses the voluble old man Mercier and Camier meet by chance on a train, "every day a little more, a little better."30 No matter that the numbers don't work out. "Subtract. Divide." Nonsense makes sense.31 The special sound of Enough therefore places the principle of indeterminacy, useful to so many critics in understanding Beckett, in a crucially altered state. For this "play" of language places indeterminacy in sharp conflict with the determination each listener is bound to hear in the ' 'rhythm of a labouring heart."32 Capable of altering and being altered, the voice that always interrupts the silence assumes a character of its own, one that is, in the strictest sense of the word, persona-ble. Assuming the urgency that is presence, the voice is therefore empowered to undertake a series of negotiations between sound and sense. And as it does so it legitimizes any number of previously conflicting possibilities. Without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh, the rhythm of the voice makes manifest a yearning that might be spiritual or romantic or uncategorizable— but that surely serves as an antidote to fading memory. Atmosphere, as in Earl Kim's "setting" for this piece, is more real than incident, even and especially when the voice retraces a highly charged romantic legacy, tongue more or less in cheek. In addition to the Keatsian "flowers at my feet" from "Ode to a Nightingale," this voice also seems to recall Shelley's lyre from "Ode to the West Wind" and Yeats' mythic bird from "Leda and the Swan." Here indeed are the "traces blurs signs" of a longing as sidereal as any romantic's.33 In this "endless equinox," stargazing is the couple's favorite pastime, but the voice assigns to itself the special inheritance of "Aquarius hands": In order from time to time to enjoy the sky he resorted to a little round mirror. Having misted it with his calf he looked in it for the constellations. I have it! he exclaimed referring to the Lyre or the Swan. And often he added that the sky seemed much the same. (p. 142)

Lyra and Cygnus float in space next to one another and appear in the Northern Hemisphere each April as a dual "mansion above." And yet the gaze here is strictly self-referential: Beckett's seedy pathfinders may look to the stars, but what they find there are only constellations sharing a fate as mysteriously linked as their own. "None looks within himself where none can be."34 True to form, the journey in Enough is hardly predicated on the literal.

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Linking memory with the ultimate manifestation of the unknown, the voice evokes meaning and mystery without contradiction. Repetitive patterns of speech, rendered as lines in a text, are matched by uniquely isolated moments that generate dramatic tension as we hear the progression of a voice in different contexts. An exclamation point can signal a vocal crescendo impossible to sustain in some other arrangement of literary ' 'bookkeeping."35 Playfulness comes as a surprise, but it does not diminish the verbal rigor. Spoken language strikes deep chords that words on a page cannot begin to touch. At times distant and melancholy, at others assertive yet luminous, the voice is never maudlin or sentimental: One day he told me to leave him. It's the verb he used. He must have been on his last legs. I don't know if by that he meant me to leave him for good or only to step aside a moment. I never asked myself the question. I never asked myself any questions but his. Whatever it was he meant I made off without looking back. Gone from reach of his voice I was gone from his life. Perhaps it was that he desired. There are questions you see and don't ask. .. . (p. 139)

Romanticism and minimalism replace irony with conflict as a voice now holds all four in precarious balance. There is no act without words: performance makes manifest the indeterminacies of a text at the same time that it introduces new tensions of its own. Because Enough is so minutely observed, it must be looked at closely. Looking means listening: to the telling of a story, to the origin of Beckett's language as an act of heightened speech. This piece that so boldly yet ambiguously announces its theme in its opening line is therefore something more complicated than a piece of reality wrapped up as some Beckettian riddle. The prologue, in the shape of the first paragraph, depends for its life on just where a voice, any voice, places accent and emphasis: "All that goes before forget" or "All that goes before forget" (emphasis mine). Here there are at least two stories, each one searching for its lost one, each one longing to free itself from the tyranny of the text in which it finds itself trapped. "Let me out!" cries Fox-vox, cauterized on the wires and waves of a radio channel, "Peter out in the stones!"36 Speech this palpable is always an event in time—but this is not necessarily the case in Enough. The autonomy of language's own mercurial silence liberates it from temporality. There is no need, like Lot's wife, to look back. Past is present, present is past, only in this sudden and unexpected diatribe the past has suddenly invaded the present with a new and quite unprecedented

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physicality. You can now reach out and touch it in a line that literally embodies closure: "Enough my old breasts feel his old hand." Time, as in the television play Nacht und Traume, has not for one moment stood still. Regulated in Enough not by camera angles but by modulations in the texture of a human voice, "time would have done its work." For time in this piece is always subject to the intonation of voice, not the steady beating of a clock. Enough therefore places its whole monologue in missing quotation marks, something deferring to its listener for completion. "For the rest I would suggest not guilty." The generation of voice in Enough can therefore take pride in its own way with words. The brief can be strictly businesslike, as when voice targets the descriptive opportunities presented by unexpected topic sentences. "Our meeting," "Attitude at rest," or that key word "Night" are narrative openers this expositor will be certain not to miss. But such pro forma selections pale by comparison to the lyrical potential found in the same text. At its best this voice can be both factual and lyrical at one and the same time. In this landscape—much of it below sea level— the "weather is eternally mild"; but in the same breath a simile intrudes: "As if the earth had come to rest in spring." Capitalizing on images captured from the past, the voice can let them "be again"37 by making a specialty of selected poetic tropes: "The wind in the overground stems. The shade and shelter of the forests." Flowers, "stemless and flush with the ground," are as simultaneously real and unreal as Monet's "waterlilies." ("No brightening our buttonholes with these.") Time is rendered as an image with no beginning and no end, "a glint," nothing more, "of blue bloodshot." Such images, the creation of sound, are enough; they hold in balance and finally overwhelm this work's syntax of negation, the not this, the never that, the hardly then. Walking through the countryside in a kind of "half sleep," the same "funambulistic stagger" we remember from Watt or from the irreverent "fumbling" of those Dubliners Mercier and Camier,38 this couple, by no means pseudo, nonetheless goes on: "We advanced side by side hand in hand." There is, as this voice tells it, ' 'Seldom more":' 'Mucous membrane is a different matter.'' What endures is the sound of this language, the studied conversational style whose lyrical lilt might just as well be Billie Whitelaw's, Irene Worth's, or even the not so plain dealing of yet another Dublin corner boy: "If the question were put to me I would say odd hands are ill-fitted for intimacy" and, finally, ' 'If the question were put to me suitably framed I would say yes indeed the end of this long outing was my life." Life was over, and over again, only when "voice was spent." Elegiac, sometimes celebratory, the voice we hear in Enough holds

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together a series of uncertainties and makes them concrete, offering us "lies like truth." "Perhaps," Malone long ago intoned, "I shall put the man and the woman in the same story, there is so little difference between a man and a woman, between mine I mean." Gone, like Shakespeare's Bottom, to "see" a voice "that he heard,"39 the reader, now turned listener, spends time in the presence of a textually androgynous sound whose bite exists gratuitously, somewhere beyond time, in the space of a heavily mediated text: "I belonged to an entirely different generation. It didn't last. Now that I'm entering night I have kinds of gleams in my skull. Stony ground but not entirely." Language, however, is of the earth, earthy, sometimes even downright funny. Puns can hardly keep themselves in check: the inspiration can be biblical, as in "the eve of my disgrace," or wildly fundamental: "They had on the whole a calming action. We were on the whole calm." "So much," this text predicts early on, "for the art and craft." Sounds, too, can foster on their own a vital sense of closure. The text that begins verbally ends musically; taken by surprise, like the seated figure in Beckett's 1975 television play,40 we hear the descending chromatic tremolos of some new ghost trio: "Now I'll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers. Enough my old breasts feel his old hand." Featuring stargazing, mentoring, and many yesterdays, the sound of Enough has suddenly opened up a tiny world that is nonetheless gigantic. Art and craft may have replaced Sturm und Drang, but not before they give gloves, genitals, and arithmetic the finality of an image fixed in the fluidity of some imagined sound in some unfixed textual space. Reconceptualizing Proust, the sound in Beckett's case is enough; volume can speak vision. It can also speak memory. Voice has a richness indeed; it can be in turn suppositional, speculative, conditional, or subjunctive. It can also be, like memory, intensely personal, surprisingly sexual, and imaginatively subjective. Subtle tonal shifts are conveyed by the anatomy of its huge recitational vocabulary, which, ironically, can be best experienced in silence. The seen is essentially the limitless, unspoken said, "said nohow on,"41 where meaning is impossible to divorce from verbal gesture. Mood is relational and subject to the shifting systems of intonation and tonality. The drama here is always in the play of language. Such metonymic adventurism has heretofore been the particular virtue of dialogue spoken in live performance; Beckett brings the drama back into his text. The weighted movement built into the formal complexity of Enough is therefore at once enough and something more than Enough, " . . . imagination dead imagine." What this strange text's generous androgyny offers

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us, finally, is a silent rendezvous with the sudden and quite unpredictable theatricality of a voice inside your head. In the decade following Enough Beckett takes the drama between voice and image to new extremes. In his own cerebral, methodical way, building silent speech word by word and line by line, Beckett forces his reader to shuttle back and forth between an image held in sound and the way that image has been made. Pitting images against extremely difficult syntactical structures that distort their legibility, each piece relies more and more on a deeper level of vocal expression. "Readings" are now heavily modulated and deployed as dramatized monologues with a voice inhabiting them. Expanding decisively and impressively on methods introduced earlier, the prose of this period sustains a new level of tension between image and imagined sound, portrait and process. Beckett has never before pulled things quite so far apart, nor sandwiched quite so many different layers of feeling and perception into the gap. By the summer of 1972 he had completed Still, a short story in the shape of a lonely paragraph. Written in English and published in the Malahat Review in January 1975, the text was also printed in a limited folio edition by M'Arte Edizione of Milan the year before, to accompany three engravings and three preliminary sketches by the English artist Stanley William Hayter.42 Here voice makes language as well as the object it depicts the isolated reality. Words offer no direct appeal to anything outside their own verbal presence; a limited morphology is as frozen into place as the solitary figure it fatally inscribes. Referring to nothing determinate outside of its own monodic structure, Still therefore confronts us with the verbal equivalent of solitude. But as the sound of this paragraph unfolds, demanding from its reader/listener a heightened responsiveness to a minute visual, verbal, and melodic field, the piece shows itself to be a rather convincing demonstration of its own conflict between motion and rest, light and darkness, and language and silence. This is Beckett's "still life" after all. Set not in stone, but as prose on a page, Still makes us hear words interact: the process is a verbal kineticism whose protagonists are verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nouns. The drama is the spectacle and speculum of Beckett's language; the only hero in this play is the uncertain word. A nature morte "impossible to follow let alone describe," Still, ironically, is not still at all. "Trembling all over," the words of this piece quiver into actuality.43 The word still itself, like the hours of a day, is sounded twenty-four times, a verbal journey in disorienting repetition that highlights inversion, opposition, and indeterminacy rather than stasis or immobility.

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Here an adverb, here an adjective, here a noun, but always and ever the same sound, the word as spoken is susceptible to a number of lively permutations: this tenuous morpheme will represent itself with both density and imprecision of meaning. It is sometimes "silent," sometimes "motionless," sometimes "yet," and at other times it can be heard to signify a static photograph, a "still" from a motion picture, or an apparatus for distilling liquids. Even before this author gets his hands on "still" to impose "certain moods" on it through his own strategy of verbal animation, the word itself can never be completely distilled. In Beckett's piece, however, the word assumes its recitational force through a series of rhythmic variations "always quite still," "not still at all," and "so quite still again." The sound of this imaginary "still" therefore orchestrates both "rigor and rigor mortis": here one faint syllable twists "the screaming silence of no's knife" very deftly into "yes's wound."44 Besides "still" and "not still at all," Beckett sounds other yes's and other nay's: "see'/'unseeing," "rise"/"fall," "far/near," "western'V'eastern," "quite"/"notquite," "clampeddown/movable," "right" /"left," "dark"/"light," "open/"closed," "half"/"whole," "more"/ "less," "hillside"/"valley," "sunrise"/"sunset," "standing"/"sitting," "possible"/"impossible," as well as the nice play on "end of rest" and "rest on ends." Geometry presents us with a binary world as difficult to pinpoint as this pattern of verbal antagonism. If "broken" is an adjective modifying "right angles," it is unnecessary; angles are already broken. If it is a verb ("broken [into] right angles at the knee"), that dynamic angularity belies the impression of inanimate line. Such synchronization of "yes" and "no" is incarnated in the sound of another extraordinary word, "quite," which is either "to the greatest extent, entirely, really, truly" or "somewhat, rather, to a degree." Through a subversive transformation of syntactic structures, Beckett achieves a special precision of imprecision when he renders an impossible combination of modifiers for that anagram of "quite" we pronounce "quiet": "all quite quiet apparently." "All" is a totally inclusive word, "quite" can be either totally inclusive or somewhat inclusive, while "apparently" wipes out the potentially opposing dialogue of the first two modifiers and makes the sentence even more hopeless as far as stability is concerned. A mere shift in focus, in this case accomplished by the intrusion of a word into a phrase that undermines what may have already been said in the same phrase, enables the reader to experience any syntax in a variety of ways: something still always appears to tremble into life if you stare at it long enough. The impression of stillness is "quite" overwhelmed by this wholesale experience of motion, as Still ensnares the primacy of perception and surrounds

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it in sound: to record the inescapable absence of stillness, the piece tempers '' still" with " quite," or weakens it with " not quite," or negates it entirely with " not." An anonymous figure, configured as a figure of speech, moves, becomes "quite still," moves again, then becomes "quite still again." No rest for the weary. Stillness is the one thing this voice finds "impossible to follow let alone describe." Difficult to perceive and, like that other absolute, zero, stillness can never be captured in words. But Beckett's language insists on a life of its own: so much to do, as much as to say. The memory that language brings with it, this time Barthes notwithstanding, is by no means secondary, for as Beckett demonstrates, this "character" of his language is always primary.45 "That's not moving," he wrote long ago in the poem '' Whoroscope,'' his very first published piece;' 'that's moving."46 Darkness, too, proves similarly elusive; as the story is told, the time of day merely becomes progressively darker. In this "absolute absence of the Absolute," voice won't let end points sit still: silence, stillness, and darkness are subject to spontaneous erasure the moment we say "it," "not knowing what."47 Human perception, furthermore, cannot always be trusted; for from this limited point of view the opposite of motion is not necessarily rest: a dead person may appear to be still, but closer examination might reveal the extensive movement inside the body—the motion of decomposition. But in Still Beckett is not dealing with death or a dead body; he is dealing with sound. What you hear in Still is what you get: "All quite still." "Make sense who may," place the accent where you may: in the beginning was the beat.48 A voice makes language as alive as the figure it wakes into being. Though no longer kicking against the pricks, "un seul etre"49 sits at a window and watches silently as the sun slowly sets: "Bright at last close of a long day the sun shines out at last and goes down." Singing its aubade to the dusk instead of the dawn, the narrative voice describing this somber scene brings to full circle that other voice we hear in the first line of Murphy: "The sun rose, having no alternative, on the nothing new." And like Miss Carridge's movement in that early novel, this figure, man or woman (as before, "what does it matter?"), is really "never still." "The motion alone," like May's in Footfalls, is, however, "not enough"; frail humanity is subject to the same inversions, oppositions, and tensions characteristic of the runaway grammar the voice uses to describe it.50 As we are surprised by the multiple roles a word has been made to play in a sentence, so we are startled by the intrusive human figuration of instability and rest that such generative language gives rise to. Words offer us the same "faint afterglow" this figure sees as it stares at "the beech in whose shade once"—an aposiopesis without an ellipsis

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that leaves it up to the reader to imagine any number of actions (romantic, sexual, metaphysical, spiritual, "etc."), none of which is given the permeability of sound. For in Still we have nothing more than an alternation between a tremble and a silent wait. Transitionals that would impose symmetry and imply relationships within a sentence have been displaced; articles, prepositions, and conjunctions are limited, more often nonexistent. Clauses lack prepositions; nouns lack the security of articles; other nouns blithely string adjectives at the end of a clause that seem at times to modify a noun or subject that is simply "not there." Nowhere will we find a pronoun, not he, not she, not /. Syntactic impropriety yields merely a series of predicate phrases with (at best) an implied subject.51 Still, hands tremble, joints function, eyes "ope," a head lowers. And though neither the voice nor the figure is assigned a pronoun, the former still equips the latter with eyes, skull, hands, thumb, index, fingers, trunk, knees, and lets. "Anatomy," we recall from Enough, "is a whole."52 The only thing missing from Still is the precise relation between the deconstructed parts. Language, like the body that it is, e mobile. What is ambiguous in the text, however, becomes multivalent when given a voice. Enunciation upstages the static harmonies missing from the text and allows parts to vibrate in instability. Essential to Beckett's anatomy is the way it allows individual pieces of a body and a language to enter the imagination singly, with astonishing immediacy and clarity. Each object, each word, refusing to be colonized, brings with its utterance not an order of rest, but of the motion that is sound. Flexible, constructive, and resilient (as opposed to immobile, Beckett's title for his French translation of this work), Still makes us hear the fascination that can be found in the realm prior to resolution, a world where even the smallest part of speech or the tiniest section of a limb demands the dignity of valuation for its own sake. An adverb is alive with action in a liquid human voice, a thumb is momentarily gigantic, the scientific delineation of a nape has taken a surprising turn toward sensuality. Recitation, not recounting, gives every detail its element of fantasy. Synthesis would be entirely out of joint, logic a reduction. Less is suddenly more.53 When something finally ' 'happens'' in Still, that something takes place in a dimension no close reader will want to miss. The arm in motion is colossal. When the "right hand" leaves the armrest, "taking with it the whole forearm complete with elbow," it turns a "little deasil"—the clockwise movement held auspicious by the Celts—following the apparent course of the sun. Beckett's slow motion with continuous turning to the right, punning on the mechanized combustion of a rapid Diesel engine, makes a diminutive human arc in the shade of a cosmological one. But

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such imitative gestures, as in Ohio Impromptu, prove futile; they hardly merit the clarity of a pronoun. Compared to the elegance and completion of the sun's circularity, its immortal arc from dawn to dusk, "man or woman" is a motley collection of fractured atoms. The only circle of permanence is the elemental path the sun travels across the sky. All other circles or their parts, the deasil of the figure as it journeys indoors between eastern and western windows, "other only windows,"54 the turning of the head, the arc of the hand and the head as they meet, "as if hand's need the greater," the deasil of the hand, the head as seen from the back ("including nape of chairback"), the eye sockets, the eyes, and all other opes are "quite" pathetic by comparison. For in Still the trembling figure, some of whose actions are given as precedented ("normally," "always," and "same"), is not fated to move about endlessly, left to right, east to west: the sun has had this privilege reserved for itself. Busy old fool that it has been, the unruly sun has still another prerogative. Whatever it was that took place under the beech, a memory recorded, if at all, only in silence, the sun is by contrast a constant becoming, forever renewing itself. Moments like the one that took place in the shade of this beech do not recur like sunsets: they are fleeting, impermanent, and, finally, forgotten. The sun shines out at the close of a "dark day," suddenly cruel and beautiful for all it makes us lose—the subject, indeed, as Trigorin says in The Seagull, for a short story.55 Within the narrow room of Still, a retreat as isolated as the cabin we will later hear much more about in /// Seen III Said, this sense of loss is experienced on a number of other levels as well. The figure's position is rendered systematically, in terms more mathematical than human. The turn of the head is measured with exactitude, "ninety degrees to watch the sun," as if frozen. As with so many photographs of an athlete in motion (to paraphrase Rodin's famous statement)—we cannot thaw out this rigidity by multiplying the glimpses.56 Here we see "legs side by side broken right angles" and "arms likewise broken right angles at the elbow." The mechanical description of the seated figure is echoed in the restricted delineation of the head's rescue of the hand by joining it in a final posture of contemplation, reminiscent of Rodin's The Thinker. But now the "need," the active component, is neither a man's nor a woman's, but—as in the dream world of Nacht und Traume—a "hand's": hesitation, inclination, and human trepidation are as decentered and destabilized as everything else in this piece has been. The changing shapes a figure might contain are sketched in outline, not explored for psychological resonance or depth: . . . head in hand namely thumb on outer edge of right socket index ditto left and middle on left cheekbone plus as the hours pass lesser contacts each

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more or less now more now less with the faint stirrings of the various parts as night wears on. (pp. 184-85)

Seeing its way through syntactical complexities, a voice nonetheless confronts us with a striking visual image, but at a cost: the image is at once metallic, dehumanized, and devoid of color. Throughout Still everything has been traced in the impermeable texture of light and its absence. So "faint" is the aftergow of sunset that even this celebrated spectacle appears in shades more gray than gold. Sound is missing too. When we abandon this picture and this voice, we "leave it so all quite still" as the figure sits rapt in the final "still," "head in hand listening for a sound." As darkness slowly falls on the enigma of this day, we hear perhaps for the very first time the raw "still" of silence that frames this and every other Beckett text. All this about a paragraph. Still, any story that interrupts the silence presupposes someone to hear it and someone to tell it. The talker we meet this time around is a skilled performer who knows how to hide behind the sound of someone else's words while taking no responsibility for their authority. What "he" ("what? . . . who? .. . no!. .. she!")57 tells us—and when—can be an oddly mismatched pair. For the choice of a fixed point cannot be assigned. At one instant the figure is "seen from behind," yet that vantage point cannot account for the frontal and profile shots distributed elsewhere. Conjugations of verbs suggest the first person ("turn head now and see it the sun in the southwest sinking," "even get up certain moods and go stand by western window quite still"), but lacking a key sound like "I/ eye'' we can never be certain from one phrase to the next just where this observation point exists, if it can be said to exist at all. Perhaps "this should all be re-written," as Molloy concedes, "in the pluperfect."58 A move to the imperative would help; certainly no one before ever spoke the strange English we hear in Still. And yet the image it evokes has been as precisely arranged as something a film technician (noir for preference) has edited—not necessarily a trailer, but an enticing sampler of stills from a director's rushes. We can even chart the coordinates of motion and fixity in this tiny world: Normally watch night fall however long from this narrow chair or standing by western window quite still either case. Quite still namely staring at some one thing alone such as a tree or bush a detail alone if near if far the whole if far enough till it goes. Or by eastern window certain moods

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staring at some point on the hillside such as that beech in whose shade once quite still till it goes. (p. 184)

Although the frigid northern light that so intrigued Murphy is avoided, the chair' 'at open window'' faces south "over the valley,'' and the western window frames a hillside, exposing "less light when less did not seem possible" and offering still another perspective on this valley of suggestive shadows. Missing from every landscape, as we might expect, is the sympathy of another human figure: "Un seul etre vous manque et tout est depeuple."59 Murphy's rocking chair, like the one in Rockaby, has been replaced by one more stable that for "some reason" never changes its place, though movement in this case is said to be potential: "always same place same position facing south as though clamped down whereas in reality no lighter no more movable imaginable." Humanity, by contrast, appears to be more lucky: its movement can be actual. This figure, subject to "certain moods," has on rare occasions got up to "stand by western window" and has a nodding acquaintance, too, with the hillside landscape the eastern window displays. For whatever other amenities this enclosure may be lacking, it is, of course, a room with a view. Freedom to move, however, is merely another ploy. For in this constricted space the figure is as trapped as the sun itself. Locked into a fiction that moves it only east to west, Beckett's figure can merely retrace the same steps it has already taken before. Like Mercier's scrutiny of "the inscrutable sky," the fallacy of identifying with nature proves to be, then, truly pathetic.60 Earlier I said that Still refuses to forge an alliance with anything outside of its own sound. But the "art and craft" we associate with a piece like Enough has an uncanny way of insinuating its presence even into the most minimalist of prose.61 Before long Still finds itself making a pact with the classics, the "old statue some old god twanged at sunrise and again at sunset," a seated figure in Thebes that has a place in Beckett's iconography as well. It is mesmerizing to watch how the same images move from work to work in a perpetual process of remodeling: . . . even the two feet, flat on the ground demurely side by side, even they are partly hidden by the coat, in spite of the double flexion of the body, first at the base of the trunk, where the thighs form a right angle with the pelvis, and then again at the knees, where the shins resume the perpendicular. For the posture is completely lacking in abandon, and but for the absence of bonds you might think he was bound to the bench, the posture is so stiff

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and set in the sharpness of its planes and angles, like that of the Colossus of Memnon, dearly loved son of Dawn. (Malone Dies, p. 53)

A simile suddenly breaks the boundaries of this text. Its liminal allusion to Malone's auroran statue, whose stones were said to sing at dawn, is just the sort of calculated phrase the "deviser"62 of this paragraph has all the while been searching for. Here indeed is an image of stillness that is at the same time an image of movement, a precedent and a pattern on which this current performance can rely. Sensations make sense, but only when some inner voice sounds the alarm, making the text we hear move back and forth, "trembling all over." Such play of language on a page is never still; all attempts to keep it in check will be quite stillborn. "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine."63 And as it does so, we do so: every tiny fizzle, an "all," a "quite," or a "still," is an elusive sound striving for life on the present stage, performing marvels of invention we may have never heard in exactly—exactly!—the same way before. Repetition and difference are so much a part of every sonic landscape that any play of language would be "impossible to follow let alone describe" without such dramatic motility.64 In a piece like All Strange Away even the title artfully announces the enlivening symmetries of its own assonance: all strange away becomes the "long sonata" of this text's true "a" place— "no, not that again." "A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles. . . . " The line is Rimbaud's, and Beckett cannibalizes it in All Strange Away as "Fancy dead, to which now add for old mind's sake sorrow vented in simple sighing sound of black vowel a. . . "65 Black conventionally prefigures death, but images require light to be seen. "Fancy," used as a synonym for imagination here, supports this correspondence: its root is phaos, "light." That ominous "a," however, is the only vowel sound we hear in the mysterious title All Strange Away, which features two cases of assonance back-to-back, the first syllable of "away" echoing "all," the second shadowing "strange." The elongated sound of "ay" in "away" amplifies the same "black vowel" even further: that is how the phoneme itself must be given a voice.66 There is sound and there is sense and, as in Finnegans Wake, there is suddenly sound-sense, each realm "searching for its lost one"—the "stiff" but evasive "interexclusiveness" any reader seeks between the multiple levels of discourse featured in a complex literary text.67 Pairing sound with color, Rimbaud's "Voyelles" wants to take questions of agency and authorship one step further: in his case the sounds A, E, I, O, and U engender specific images

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that correspond to the color and texture and shape of the poem's every beat. Closure comes with a play on the French, then the English, U: "Ses Yeux," says who?—says you. Language is reduced to a matter of "fundamental sounds (no joke intended)''—see Beckett himself on this point.68 Beckett wrote All Strange Away in English in 1963-64, but he did not release it for publication until a decade later. And when it finally appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in the Faber and Grove editions of 1976 and 1978, it was initially greeted as a companion piece to Imagination Dead Imagine, Beckett's reinvention of a compact French text that dates from 1965. Yet the piece is really much more than that. Written in English, but mediated by the configuration of a much tighter French script, then mediated again by the strange English of a highly condensed Imagination Dead Imagine, the late appearance of All Strange Away allows us to hear the measured cadence of two, no three, separate but equal languages. English/French, French/English, or, as in the present case, English/English, every Beckett text is an adaptation of the silent orality of the subconscious. And each one of these "loopings verbeaux"69 has a sound of its own: " . . . try sound and if no better say quite speechless, imagine sound and not till t h e n . . . . " Acts of translation and revision, a compromise at best, can merely explore the boundaries between practice and literary form, text(s) and recitation, aesthetic control and formal release. Animated by a human voice, all repetitions, all iterations are the same and different. The internal structure of All Strange Away reflects some of these tensions. Scripting the narrative, such as it is, involves us in a series of false starts, a chronicle of suggestion that becomes a catalogue of evisceration quickly followed by erasure. In this piece "There's no lack of void";70 all entries, furthermore, will be subject to renewal and continual emendation ("never see, never find, no end, no matter"). Featuring an appealing absence of any totalizing vision, All Strange Away advocates no absolutist position. All its representations are misrepresentations, simulations that test only false positive, "very rightly wrong."71 The shrewd compositor, "unseeing glaring," has a wide range of ineffectualities at his or her disposal, so "Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!"72 The story, if there ever was one in the first place, keeps evacuating itself, "all gone from mind and all mind gone." This is not a "world without monsters," but a world, simply, without: "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."73 Like the Dr. Johnson Beckett wrote about in 1937 to Joseph Hone, Shakespeare, too, must have suffered from time to time from the same "vision of positive annihilation."74 Steeped in irony and forever casting doubt on its own devices, All Strange Away can be seductive one moment, distancing the next, com-

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pelling, and at the same time very funny. "Soles" burn and "height" wastes, "say a lifetime of standing bowed." Here Beckett reveals himself as a formalist who moves back and forth between abstraction and figuration in ways that have intentionally blurred the distinction. Skeptical but at the same time not self-effacing, the writer shares with his lecteur his obsession with organizing the composition into distinct, almost geometric parts, disclosing a history of changes and adjustments. The discipline of depicting anything—objects, voices, even sounds ("quite expressionless")—adds new "rigor" to the "rigor mortis,"75 one that could be described as abstraction masquerading as whitewashed landscapes and bleak figure studies. In this "dust of words"76 even the dirt is "bleached." "Lava mud" is "white," and "flesh" is "ivory"; all is temporarily "vivid white," then "bonewhite." All Strange Away elevates the process of continual reconsideration into high art, revealing the countless refinements that go into any literary making. Nothing about the writing seems rushed or forced, and one of the many strengths of this effort is its resistance to easy solutions. The prose builds by accumulation, becoming denser with the sound of its own bold activity, refusing all the time to conform to any expectation. Its realities are harsh, even in those instances when its conflicts appear muted. But the dramatic line is without big conventional revelation; rare moments of clarity are, strictly speaking, out of this context. All figurations of a text or a body or a space—first a cube, then a rotunda—are equally inadequate; each becomes fodder for the deviser's irony as the notion of spontaneous, instinctive gesture is thoroughly subverted. With "no way in, none out," an enclosure gets smaller all the time: first "five feet square, six high," then "tighten it round him, three feet square, five high," then "two feet across and at its highest two feet high" (such womb/tomb suggestions would be really hard for many critics to resist). Always announcing to the reader that something in this' 'capsule'' summary is missing or hidden or obliterated or reconstituted, much of the drama in All Strange Away can be, nonetheless, oddly touching, never cynical or pessimistic. Positing strength in the individual effort and the personal response, the piece finally arrives at "a place" that is more affecting for acknowledging its own ambiguity. Such narrative frailty turned into strength is predicated on the simplest of dramatic maneuvers, the intonation of a voice. Supple in ways that theory is not, this language seeks the material world of spoken presence, "where to be lasts but an instant." In this "convulsive space" the voice, "voiceless," still yearns to "throng" (Beckett's verb) its "hiddenness" in a realm anterior to any print culture.77 In the opening statement of the theme, every sentence has its own meter and sometimes every word

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marches to a different drummer. The results are fascinating. The speaker's dynamics are often deliberately reversed: a marked crescendo signals a sudden pulling back. Repeats are taken, but are hardly treated as repeats; here a new line struggles to emerge, but not before the inner voice takes over. Bending lines almost to the breaking point, the voice we hear disrupts every texture with its sudden shifts of coloration. In this subtle study in counterpoint and dissonance, no intonation of voice can be slighted. Treating every sentence as a fellow organism, voiced "chords" give both body and character to every sound we hear. Never in repose, words emerge from this text ornamented with shifting tempo, emphasis, and color. Changing pitches, sliding gradually downward in slow, repeated waves, or rising upward with skittish immediacy ("Draeger Praeger Draeger"), each sentence seems to ring variations on simple melodic and rhythmic motifs. Transformations celebrate an extraordinary ear for timbres and a sensitivity to musical gesture, while at the same time signaling sheer pleasure in the materiality of words, the self-indulgent display, and the naughty aside. ' 'Such then the sound roughly.'' The enterprise may be of precious artifice; but the promise is of fertile reinterpretation. Respecting each sound's place in a tactile silence, All Strange Away makes us participants in a sonic ritual that steadily reinscribes itself. Dramatically presented, All Strange Away attempts to find a tradition within which "it" can work. The composition is shaped in two sections, diagramless and "Diagram," chiseled blocks of crosswords having a different atmosphere and texture. They use similar properties, but each pursues a different rhetorical strategy. Language as speech alters the "unalterable whey of words,"78 now heard to be the same but different. Voice factors every possible intention: "Have him say, no sound, No way in, none out, he's not here." Sentences go off in a variety of directions, as speech frequently does. "He's not here," a desultory answer to some new quern quaeritis trope, might just as well refer to this text's Draeger or Praeger—or the nonrhyming Jolly. Emma (M-A) and Emmo (M-O), this script's inverted alpha and omega, can be just as multivalent, just as playful, depending on what we hear—and when. Serializing Beckett's Mheroes, the sound of "Emma" is full of locutionary potential, especially for those listeners with a literary bent who insist on (1) reading and (2) reading aloud. More Flaubert than Austen, this Emma will be anatomized as follows: "First face alone, lovely beyond words, leave it at that, then deasil breast alone, then thighs and cunt alone, then arse and hole alone, all lovely beyond words." Here spoken language, listing details and taking inventory of the parts, upstages the physicality of any real body existing

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outside of the sound of the present recital. Parodic, even at times unconventionally cubist, all descriptions are metonymic, even the tortured language that fatally inscribes the "faint ripple of sorrow of a lying side by side" and other "Memories of past [F]elicity"—one more Flaubert female, this one the ordinary servant woman of unerring grace and simplicity who becomes a symbol for endurance in "A Simple Heart."79 But perhaps "She's not here" after all. Who's to say? One of the effects of sound in All Strange Away is the unexpected creation of an ars armatoria of the conditional: "Imagine him kissing, caressing, licking, sucking, fucking and buggering all this stuff, no sound." Is this what went on during those "evenings with Emma and the flights by night"—or should we, like this text, abandon such X-rated stimulation for what it is, a fiction, and conclude, simply, "no, not that again"? Highlighting narcissistic realities within a taut structure that nonetheless allows for considerable variation, this speech mimes memory but is not in itself particularly revealing. What is explicit, instead, is the physicality of its language, how one racy gerund gives rise to another, ing-ing it all the way and providing the voice with a big opportunity for display. Desire is not something buried in language, but is alive, palpable and real, in the sound of this language itself, "all lovely beyond words." The object of desire, moreover, Felicity or Emma or perhaps Emmo, hetero- or homo-sexual, Molloy's Edith or "the peaceful name" she might have gone by, Ruth, is never as potent as the shape a text gives it; words do not so much relive the event as become the event they describe.80 The event is in any case speech, Brabantio's "words are words" and Hamlet's, then Didi's, "Words words"; each refashions, on its own, new and unpredictable and previously unheard-of subject/object relationships.81 For words spoken happen in the present tense. What might have actually transpired between this speaker and his Emma or his Emmo, real or imagined, is without substance—unverifiable and finally inconsequential. As in Yeats, "Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or a woman lost?" What the listener hears happening in the rhythm of a text is all that will ever matter, the only fact that endures even as it marches into myth. "Words alone," Yeats said, are the only "certain good." "Words," Beckett says, "have been my only loves, not many."82 In Beckett's auditory imagination "oohs and aahs" therefore "copulate cold." Such ejaculations area "fizzle," the "faint hiss" of a "spraybulb," like Pozzo's onstage vaporizer.83 And among these, "with spirant barely parting lips," one would indeed have to "imagine other murmurs," other "ejaculations":

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Mother mother, Mother in heaven, Mother of God, God in heaven, combinations with Christ and Jesus, other proper names in great numbers say of loved ones for the most part and cherished haunts, imagine as needed, unsupported interjections, ancient Greek philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possible suggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period, completed propositions. . . . (p. 122)

Framed between a pause and a silence, sometimes transcendent, more often sardonic, this same "hiss" nevertheless tries to make an image come to life. "Aha." But the voice stumbles, offering no final enhancement; the image stubbornly resists closure, preferring, instead, its constant state of becoming. Like a writer's block elevated to the very threshold of a story, "demons" become "cacodemons," complicated and literary. This voice, moreover, wants to be a versifier, but like Hamlet in distress it is "ill at numbers."84 It ends up being only a clumsy semiotician, having to resort, finally, to a lifeless diagram: a, b, c, d later amended to "new a," "newc." As it sketches signs rather than things signified, "No real image" emerges: "get all this clear later." Talking and having something to say prove to be, once again, at cross-purposes. This would-be storyteller's simple faith is the Unnamable's, or Mouth's in Not I: if you talk long enough, you just might hit on something in the end. Conclusive events might be unfolding just out of sight, possibly even in the next sentence. "Stands to reason." The strategy proves strategic. This voice is talking as fast as it can. Sonorization thus offers us the best opportunity to experience the performative rather than the representational nature of All Strange Away. "Dire Beckett," as the actor Pierre Chabert observed in 1986, reveals the rich spectacle of the drama in this author's "text."85 The "syntax of weakness" is not so much an undoing as a constant redoing, especially as regards the question of voice. "Saying is inventing"—but so too is hearing.86 "Nothing to be done," the opening line that breaks the silence in Waiting for Godot, is interpreted quite originally by Didi. A frustrated Gogo, of the earth earthy, is referring, of course, to the celebrated stage business of taking off his boots, which, too tight for him, stubbornly refuse to be pulled off. But Didi is a dreamy intellectual who responds to the melody of a quite different chord: "I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle." Soon their roles as speaker/"reader" and hearer/"listener" will be poignantly reversed. "What do you expect," Estragon chides, "you always

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wait till the last moment." But Vladimir, offering us a hermeneutics of listening in miniature, has his ear tuned to metaphysics, not prostates: "The last moment. . .," he elegantly muses, meditating in a pregnant ellipsis. Dramatic language written as dialogue for a play is by its very nature meant to be performable; so, too, is the silent orality each reader hears in a Beckett prose text. "It is solely a question of voices," says the Unnamable (and I use my verb advisedly), "no other image is appropriate." I, too, say "it"—inevitably—as I hear "it."87 The dynamic vocabulary of imagined sound and (imagined?) sense makes of All Strange Away a deconstructionist's nightmare—or fantasy (depending on how each reader relates to what Beckett himself found in Endgame, "the power of the text to claw").88 Destabilization has rarely been quite so unstable before, even for Beckett, whose work is a fertile laboratory for things being not, "I resume" not, what they initially seem to be.89 In this ever-expansive oeuvre the agency of dramatic destabilization is always going to be a silent voice; and that voice, furtive and fleeting, is always going to be difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Who hears what when? Still, the range of imaginative response is processive, not infinite. And within that process certain patterns, like certain repetitions, are bound to emerge. Foremost among them will be the blazon of "Imagination dead imagine" ("Quite audible then"), where imagination is not quite dead after all. These three words, "imagination dead imagine"—an uneasy triumvirate in "a voice without meaning hear that''—form a private litany of discord and accord, turn and turn about. Each repetition is the same and different, as the phrase reaches for integrity by seeking compound verbal alliances: "imagination dead imagine all strange away." "Murmuring, no sound"—the verb is under stress: "imagine" this, "imagine" that, "imagine hands," "imagine eyes burnt ashen blue and lashes gone," "imagine later," "imagine other murmurs." The same imperative even asks us to configure a complete scenography of "light," an appeal it brazenly utters not once but twice: "Imagine light. Imagine light," imagine, later, "what needed" ("Light flows, eyes close"; "Light o n . . . light out"; "light stops at five . . . eight no more"). The subject, however, "falls far from the verb" as the object lands somewhere in the by-now-familiar "void,"90 in this case "all strange away," but not before "sop to mind faint sighing for tremor of sorrow at faint memory of a lying side by side and fancy murmured dead." Something remains, as Krapp says, "of all that misery." The sin of erasure is never quite complete; one is, almost without warning, "Surprised by light."91 In the dramatic tone and narrative drive of this "dying fall of amateur soliloquy," that which is there is simultaneously not there—"imagination

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dead imagine." Expanding and accelerating from the wreck of "tattered syntaxes upended in opposite corners," an image is suddenly "come and gone in no time":92 the warm touch of two naked bodies lying helplessly side by side in the eternal embrace that is memory. Voice sets time free: ' 'All that if not yet quite complete quite clear.'' (Later in the same recitation the amalgam of "all that," "a mere torrent of hope and unhope,'' emerges unadorned, quite simply "quite clear".) But "all that," "one millionth stilled" and "without all this poking and prying about for cracks holes and appendages," may not be so clear after all is said and done. The "fancy" image of two immortalized lovers may be "sop to mind," concrete and ephemeral, but the kineticism of its double jeopardy makes it resistent to clarification, stabilization, and gesture. "Fancy" will not set the emergent image "free"; this is no festive Midsummer Night's Dream.93 And in this liminal context "fancy" itself proves to be one "hell" of a word.94 One yearns for stiletto dialogue, the speech-act that might release the story from its hybrid telling, or at the very least the diagram of a sentence with bite and edge; one gets a bloodless "Diagram" instead. What are we to make, finally, of a pattern that refuses to be-come "a"-part? Confronting us with the phenomenology of its own reception, All Strange Away embodies the art of "making strange" and reduces it to the "meremost minimum."95 The piece is demonstrative, not revelatory, a text that comes to life as performative speech in the theatricality of the moment in which it gets itself said: no time like the present. The act of becoming is its essence; that is the only clarification on offer. There is, strictly speaking, no elsewhere. And despite its encumbrances, which this text shows to be legion, the same and different, "fancy" is still our "only hope." A "folly to be resisted again in vain" and in any case "at long last the murmur too faint for mortal ear," All Strange Away comes to us in the form of a sound-shape we all need to have fulfilled, and not just by that deviser called "Samuel Beckett": "All gone now and never been never stilled never voiced all back whence never sundered unstillable turmoil no sound. . . . " In Imagination Dead Imagine Beckett collapses distinctions between size, scale, and duration. "I am not of the big world," said Murphy. "I am of the little world."96 A nonconformist's and in some ways even a fundamentalist's All Strange Away, the piece is always much better "dead" when read; a voice, voiceless, delivers the long, steady chant of a short story trapped in its own surround-sound, sursum corda. "Light and heat remain linked"; so do sound and meaning. Looking over its shoulder at

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its own "lost one" and constantly invoking its own needs assessment,97 this voice, too, is lost in words and the need to "express" them: No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit.

Beginning with two sentences mediated by sixteen high-voltage stops,98 Imagination Dead Imagine initiates a riot of caesuras that allows a voice to interrupt itself at almost every turn, modifying and modulating each beat in the unfolding action. Here voice inflects language through velocity and disjunction with a reckless speed that is always one step ahead of its silent auditor. Economy is equated with performative energy: disability becomes an asset, a kind of grammatically scored "I can't go on, I'll go on."99 All punctuation is in this case profoundly verbal ("a pause, more or less long, before resuming, or again reversing, and so on"). First minimizing, then maximizing, inflection becomes refraction, then selfreflection. Even a slight hesitation is the occasion for a new and surprising change of intonation that displaces the neat rhythmic divisions of some unknown pattern that refuses to identify itself. The irregularity of an advance followed by a hasty retreat soon sets up certain expectations of its own, however, especially those articulating pitch, pause, tone, and renewed (if frustrated) expectation. Striving all the time to establish an uneasy equation between the verbal and the vocable, Imagination Dead Imagine can be darkly droll in sustaining its tension between departing and arriving at anything at all—"if this notion is maintained." Taking weight and volume out of what was already spare in All Strange Away, the world now looks even more flat and pale, more "white," and more thin. Light, for example, now has "no visible source," though "all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall, vault, bodies, no shadow." Change and omission are fundamental to this procedure. An experiment in scale, a "still-soliciting"100 "eye of prey" is now refocused, restructured, reconstituted, restyled, and reduced. In this world where "all vibrates," words literally re-sound; each resists the "rip word," silence, and none can ever rest in peace.101 A return to the same elements, the essence of revision, results in a dialogue between two separate but intimately regulated voices, one for All Strange Away, one for Imagination Dead Imagine. Each sounds imprecise in relation to its conspicuous other, at once the same and different. This is, for all the world, "a mixed choir." Seeking an authentic sound, we hear variation

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on variation instead; language becomes a contest of wills. "That's what I call a magnifier."102 In these singular studies of a "strangely imperfect whiteness,'' symmetries explore their more richly determined asymmetries. Subject to "absence" and "perfect voids," a story never gets off the ground. No matter how minimalist and abstract, Imagination Dead Imagine is still rooted in intimately observed human behavior. Figures emerge, as inKingLear: "Holdamirror to their lips, it mists."103 But this "passage" is "uncertain"; a voice tempts us to "fancy" a totally white world in which imagination itself is finally dead. Given such an extraordinary situation, anything so baroque as a landscape should be logically impossible for us to ' 'imagine.'' But logic is always false. Patterns, shapes, and forms soon appear to revitalize the empty space. Sound makes us visualize what the mind by itself cannot see, two human beings, "neither fat nor thin, big nor small," in a fetal embrace halfway between organic bodilessness and mechanical functioning. And unlike Gogo at the beginning of act 2 of Waiting for Godot, this couple is not sleeping, though their faces "seem to want nothing essential." Eyes ("left" for preference) "suddenly open wide and gaze in unblinking exposure long beyond what is humanly possible." These are "piercing pale blue" (this voice unexpectedly editorializes by introducing a wild dash of color), and "the effect is striking, in the beginning"—as it certainly would be. The detailed confusion of this intermediate and transitory realm is not only visually striking, but geometrically unmistakable, even though in this "agitated" light, "inspection" is by no means "easy." Had the voice failed to mention that the dome's two inhabitants are lying on their right sides, there would have been two possible arrangements for their ABCD coordinates: A CD B

or A DC B

But within this "plain rotunda" the voice creates a picture of "two white bodies, each in its semicircle" that is singular and, so far as coodinates are concerned, unambiguous. Only the second configuration accurately

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plots the particulars of this stellar but nonetheless "arsy versy"104 arrangement: Still on the ground, bent in three, the head against the wall at B, the arse against the wall at A, the knees against the wall between B and C, the feet against the wall between C and A, merging in the white ground were it not for the long hair of strangely imperfect whiteness, the white body of a woman finally. Similarly inscribed in the other semicircle, against the wall his head at A, his arse at B, his knees between A and D, his feet between D and B, the partner. On their right sides therefore both and back to back head to arse. (P. 147)

Concentrating on an image drawn, abstracted, and then metamorphosed from nature, the voice ironically celebrates an imaginative vision that is concrete and sensual and anything but dead. "Fancy" can be a pretty sexy word after all. Creating through reinterpretation an oddly white world redesigned in some fourth dimension of non-Euclidean geometry, the image confronts us with its own uneasy presentness. Listening, as we must, to a voice with a "point of view" (for at this exclusive moment "there is no other"), we become obsessed with the materialization of such a precise illusion—its menace and its progressive validation. Imaginative vulnerability becomes imaginative power, "combining in countless rhythms." And though language here has no range of application authorizing us to find a subtext in the text we hear, it makes a shocking immediacy out of incompleteness and instability. Central to the composition is consistency. The voice is solely concerned with linking its own qualities, its own sparseness and irony, within the limits of the small boundaries it urges us to "imagine." Its force is, strictly speaking, evocative, making no appeal to anything specific outside itself; it is, instead, a combination of its own visual and verbal economies: Leave them there, sweating and icy, there is better elsewhere. No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing. (p. 147)

This voice, like the image it creates, takes some getting used to, but rhetorical strategies help. For sounds, as Winnie says, are a "boon," despite their inability as words to' 'eff' the ineffable.105 Highlighted among

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the limited number of figurative and lexical elements, "all white in the whiteness," are asides like "in the beginning" and the empirical evidence that comes with a repeated phrase like "experience shows," which has the benefit of history and precedent behind it. Biblical typologies remain ("That is what I find so wonderful"),106 as in the residual "whence the fall began." But this Christian hypothesis is not quite Dante's inferno; "surfaces," while "hot," are not "burning to the touch." Directions grudgingly acknowledge the human need for more expository information: "No way in, go in, measure" prepares us for "Go back o u t . . . go back in, rap, solid throughout." There is also a "you" flagrantly addressed in the first sentence, as well as a concluding (though not conclusive) murmur, "ah, no more"—an emotional outburst that cries out for sympathy from the stark extremities of "the great whiteness unchanging." Thus there is indeed some "convulsive light" within this "absolute stillness," "a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone." The voice we are likely to hear in Imagination Dead Imagine is going to be a much smoother talker than those we may have encountered before, "which may seem strange." In this play of language—and only in this play of language—' 'greys" are "feverish" and "extremes of light and heat oscillate back and forth." "Grey" is everywhere and, oddly enough, adds sparkle to every inch of the canvas. For it is only the passage of this text that traces and memorializes "the passage from white and heat to black and cold, and vice versa." Such "variations of rise and fall," like light and darkness, are similarly "extreme," "ashen or leaden": "pitch black is reached and at the same instant say freezing-point."107 The rest is only silence. What interrupts that white-on-white silence, changes it, marks it, and fatally scars it, is the "infinitesimal shudder" of a human voice. Reinvigorated for the present moment and certainly back from the dead, the voice of Imagination Dead Imagine uses far fewer sound-bites than its more muscular predecessor in All Strange Away. And yet its own play of language keeps an all-discerning, all-desiring "eye of prey" on a changing repertory that lasts forever—' 'what would have seemed, in other times, other places, an eternity." Externally "all is as before," the "world still proof against enduring tumult," but in the beginning, as in the end, a resurrected voice still yearns to re-play "it," the same, now heard as different. One of the principal effects of the monologic structure in Imagination Dead Imagine is its ability to establish its own authority over time. Narrative time is reconceptualized as a unit of dramatic time where everything always takes place in the present tense: this is the activity of heightened speech, theatricalized. In this short piece time is therefore immediate and literally marches to its own beat; duration lasts only as long as the words

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"need" to get themselves heard. Time only is, never was or will be. Even the verbal gestures that refer to seriality and precedent are structured as rhetorical tropes momentarily animated for a single, enduring present. The act of listening, moreover, is what sustains such an impressionable time frame: the listener, listening, must apprehend movement as a function of sound. "That's not moving, that's moving." "Hear, O Israel, the Lord [is] your God, the Lord is one!"108 Beckett creates his own Biblia pauperum out of his own arte povera. All the while his reader "waxes desperate with imagination";109 but his Auditor exercises far more formal control over the text's final destiny: Imagination dead? Imagine! Imagination dead? Imagine? Imagination? Dead? Imagine! Imagination dead. Imagine! Imagination . . . dead . . . imagine.

"Etc."110 "A voice comes to o n e . . . " this time not necessarily in the all-pervasive "black dark" or even in "the great whiteness" unraveling: "Imagination dead imagine."111 The voice, like the drama, is embodied in the writing that is this text. Playing with time, meter, rhyme, metaphor and, above all, diction, Imagination Dead Imagine lets us hear for the first of many times the importance that the sound of words acquires in its tension with unspoken experience.

4 The Performative Voice In Lessness1 Beckett's words would will themselves into being, if they only could find the right sound. Here a replication hysteria, if not a replication catastrophe, is aggressive and systemic, like some deft computer virus suddenly gone mad. Phrases like "I wrote that story" and "I read that book" don't quite sum up the writer-reader relationship so persuasively set in motion. Based on a fidelity to the processive nature of sound and mood and language, "something" is indeed "taking its course."2 Things are simultaneously "over" and "unover" (as in Ping), yet they repeat themselves over and over like letters in a genetic alphabet. Spare but eloquent, neither vague nor overdetermined, sentences are focused and rich in implications. Words hurtle past one another, collide, or try to avoid collision, gently, firmly, warily, or confidently. And consistent with this work's deliberate ambiguity, each confrontation between language and sound resembles a struggle with some unknown force. Lessness features the many lives of a sentence, an image, a word, and a sound. As in Krapp's Last Tape, where the playback rebroadcasts and recontextualizes the rending passages we have heard only moments before, language in this case revisits its own integrative elements, each one rethought and retooled. Every sound has sounded before; every sound will sound again; every echo seeks its double. Every listener hears it differently every time around. "We know it by heart," sighs a sentimental Stenographer in Rough for Radio II, "and yet the pang is ever new."3 There are the -less words, the -ness words, and the -lessness words, but "true refuge" remains always "issueless." Defying explication but not categorization, such language resembles a system of musical notation much more than what we have conventionally thought of as prose fiction; music is so deeply ingrained within this verbal process that it acquires a passionate inevitability of its own: Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face 90

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two pale blue little body heart beating only upright. Blacked out fallen open four walls over backwards true refuge issueless. Scattered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey true refuge. Four square all light sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Never was but grey air timeless no sound figment the passing light. No sound no stir ash grey sky mirrored earth mirrored sky. Never but this changelessness dream the passing hour. (p. 153)

Acquisition and comprehension result from the sheer profusion of sounds, their emotional resonance, and the enormous range of contrasts as words move around the page and, voiced, disappear into thin air. Such synchronization calls for a retrieval system that is always flawed, even as it uncovers a rhythmic unity that can be dazzling and uncanny. The connection between the lines, rarely jagged or fragmentary in themselves, is often compelling in its potential, but more often blurry. And yet what initially appears as abstraction soon becomes clear in both choral patterning and human signification. Beckett wrote to Martin Esslin in mid-1970 that ' 'Lessness proceeds from Ping."4 In the earlier piece, which derives from the French Bing (1966-67), a single white body is at risk of being evicted not by some predatory "other" but by the unregenerate domination of silence: "ping silence ping over."5 For before it can be anything else, ping must be a sound. That simple act of onomatopoeia has been subject to a wide range of interpretation (for example, "Ping" as proper name to the "ping" of a typewriter's carriage returning) not all of which the text can simultaneously or even gracefully support.6 Here the careful reader is searching for the "traces blurs signs" of a material world that once was, the representational encoding of "nails," "hands hanging palms front," and the "long lashes imploring" that try to link this body and this text, "perhaps," to some sacrificial "way out": White scars invisible same white as flesh torn of old given rose only just. Ping image only just almost never one second light time blue and white in the wind. . . . Ping perhaps not alone one second with image always the same time a little less dim eye black and white half closed long lashes imploring that much memory almost never ping silence. . . . (pp. 151-52)

The inconstant stillness in Ping includes a "silence within" the eye, even as blue and "grey" mar this text and this "image" like unwelcome graffiti. Fading with lively imprecision into the imperial "white on white

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invisible," "light blue" and "light grey" are always destined to be both more and less than something else. But colors, more like shades ("without within" and "almost white"), are intrusive, out of place, and only momentarily threaten to deface the "shining white infinite,'' the one continuity "alone unover.'' Threatened with extinction in a landscape fatally bleached almost beyond all recognition, a lone figure appears with aimless bravado; there is now more to invisibility than initially meets the blink of an eye. "Legs joined like sewn heels together right angles invisible," this human figure nonetheless defies invisibility by holding its imagistic "head haught,'' the same suggestive posture Beckett will develop and stage much later in What Where.7 But this, too, is nothing more than an ephemeral pose structured between a final curtain and a silent pause. Ping is moving toward closure, but this text ends ambiguously, with a promise of closure unfulfilled. Although its last gasp wants to end conclusively on the final word "over," the emerging form reinvigorates itself in what Beckett once called a "single process" of "analytical imagination."8 Forming, reforming, and performing texts are the fundamentals of composition, interpretation, and serious play: Ping of old only just perhaps a meaning a nature one second almost never blue and white in the wind that much memory henceforth never. White planes no trace shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not. Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound. Head haught eyes white fixed front old ping last murmur one second perhaps not alone eye unlustrous black and white half closed long lashes imploring ping silence ping over. (p. 151)

The whole sound of Ping, such as it is, is packed into that last sentence, which serves as an uneasy emblem for every line that has come before— and, presumably, for every line that might come after. The voice—meditative, not bleak—carries everything, even something of distress; but the faith is in words being launched in so many directions at once. Reciting prose that it doesn't know how to recite rather than reciting prose that it does know how to recite, the voice in Ping responds to its script by employing the stylistic virtuosity of the "partially purged."9 The sense of interpretive depth is important—the sense that different and sometimes conflicting layers of meaning are taking place at the same time and that they lie beyond simple apprehension and possess unexpected dimensions. The policy of wndisclosure means that the text may renew itself at any moment, as its lines have already been heard to do so. For sentences in

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Ping, like sounds, are always being reformed, though not reformulated: this is indeed a surprisingly energetic "World without end."10 "Over," provocative and inscrutable, finely wrought and sharply articulated, is by no stretch of the imagination the same "old" word it used to be. The text now explores how many resonances a voice can uncover in a sentence, how many resonances a voice can build into a sound: "over," "old," or that enigmatic buzzword "ping." "The end is terrific!" says Clov, liberally sounding the alarm. "I prefer the middle," counters Hamm.11 One of the unexplored dimensions of Ping is its profoundly musical sense of space. As we listen to a voice in Ping, a landscape and a landscape of the body are slowly taking shape in sound: "All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn." Nothing is rushed, each word has its place, and a main theme is deliberately off balance in every way. For the themes buried in this work are not analyzed, expanded, contracted, or transformed; they simply are, like unchanging facts of nature. The listener never doubts their continuity, and in the end, as in the beginning, this peculiar sense of passage locates that listener in a very different place.12 Including layers of sound, without any single texture assuming the foreground, Ping is full of verbal melodies, but there is no sharp differentiation between melody and accompaniment: "Murmur only just almost never one second perhaps not alone." Our attention is allowed to range widely. Sometimes the melodies are so different—they run the gamut from a solicitous "ping" to a struggling "white body"—that they seem unconnected and unrelated. Yet these layers of sound are always shifting positions among themselves, exchanging material. And as the composition progresses, "one" soon hears a continuity between the parts: "Bare white body fixed ping fixed elsewhere." These sonic worlds, however different, are connected, part of a single space. We can even, as we listen, move within that expansive space, turn our ears' gaze from one view to another, give priority to one sound, or be swept up in another. It is a crisp, grand, and compelling sound-space, and one that prepares us for the vast rhythmic dimensions of Lessness. Lessness, Beckett's dynamic translation of the French Sans (1969), was first printed on a single page in the New Statesman on May 1, 1970. There the disarming regularities in the layout of a 120-line "structuralist" poem could be displayed in sharp relief. Each sentence appears exactly twice: 60 in the first part, the same 60 in a different arrangement in the second. "It is composed," Beckett wrote, "of 6 statement groups each containing 10 sentences, i.e. 60 sentences in all.'' Each' 'order'' is assigned a different

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paragraph structure, the whole arranged "in 2 x 12 = 24 paragraphs." Beckett further explained the makeup as follows: Each statement group is formally differentiated and the 10 sentences composing it "signed" by certain elements common to all. Group A—Collapse of refuge—Sign: "true refuge." Group B—Outer world—Sign: "earth—sky" juxtaposed or apart. Group C—body exposed—Sign: "little body." Group D—Refuge forgotten—Sign: "all gone from mind." Group E—Past and future denied—Sign: "never"—except in the one sentence "figment dawn etc." Group F—Past and future affirmed—Sign: future tense.13 Beckett's image-processing, moreover, became subject to an ingenious interaction of chance and choice: after dividing his sixty sentences into six groups, assigning ten units to each of his "families," he allowed the two arrangements to emerge haphazardly. Parodying the method of composition for a Dada readymade, he handwrote each of his sixty sentences on a separate piece of paper, mixed them all in a container, then drew them out in random order twice: the resulting pattern is the sequence in the text we read.14 Several critics—among them Brian Finney, Ruby Cohn, Edith Fournier, John Pilling, P. J. Murphy, and Susan Brienza—have puzzled over the composition of Lessness, and even more so over the methods Beckett said he used to form the sequences.15 The first two critics have studied the pattern of imagery originating with the French Sans, while the last has called into question the likelihood of chance locating a poetic closure that sounds as definitive as this: Little body little block heart beating ash grey only upright. Little body ash grey locked rigid heart beating face to endlessness. Little body little block genitals overrun arse a single block grey crack overrun. Figment dawn dispeller of figments and the other called dusk. (p. 157; emphasis mine)

While mathematically not impossible—every hand dealt in a game of cards, for example, is equally improbable—it certainly looks as though the sequence of Beckett's readymade has been especially assisted in terminal paragraph 24; the sentence that finds itself isolated in privileged position 120 follows a neat trinity of "little body"s and ends perhaps too efficiently on a hard stop at "dusk," the "close of a long day." 16

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This remarkable symmetry between the phonic and lexical elements of Lessness is central, of course, to its coherence, as Martin Esslin discovered when he directed the piece for radio broadcast on the BBC in February 1971.17 In this work words are deployed like notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes on a multioctave scale. Each sentence is conceived as a musical phrase that belongs to a particular movement, corresponding to a paragraph. Though each individual bar is always the same, the movements differ in length, from a minimum of three to a maximum of seven harmonic units. And as in music, time signatures may vary; in the strange case of Lessness, scattered "verbal" measures are constructed like this:

4 + 5 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 6 + 7 + 6 + 7 + 4 + 4 + 6 = 60 3 + 4 + 4 + 6 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 7 + 3 + 6 + 5 + 4 = 60 Beckett had special instructions for how this musical and fundamentally mathematical concept might be made to work on radio: he wanted a cast of six voices to speak the lines of Lessness, each voice to be assigned the ten sentences in one of his six statement groups. Esslin's production carefully followed the author's plan; yet when the production was taped Beckett felt that the six voices were "too strongly differentiated" from each other. He would have preferred them "to sound all like variations of the same voice." He pursued this option five years later in the staging of That Time at the Royal Court Theatre in the London production directed by Donald McWhinnie.18 The performance of Lessness on radio not only makes clear the peculiar structure of this work, but further demonstrates its essence as an evocative sound poem. In this rare distillation of word and music, sentences are precariously logged side by side; as expected, the arrangement seems to invite lively interactions, as if each component had been brought together without knowing exactly why. Magnifying some elements, eliminating others, or adding a few of its own, each evolving sentence shifts tone and emphasis in order to offer an alternative sense of uncertain encounter. Oddly enough, the only certainty comes from the sound of lessness itself; we soon hear the "scattered ruins" of its sibilance forming new verbal scenarios, variously disguised as "changelessness," "timelessness," and "endlessness." Sometimes sound performs even more strenuous tricks: truncating -ness, highlighting -less (or vice versa), and coming up with choice parts like "flatness endless" (emphasis mine). The reader/listener is at full alert: attention to the fragmented body of language offers us an experience with the renewal of fragmentation itself. The drama in the text

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is merely beginning, though this is, reassuringly, still Beckett: "as in the blessed days"—Godot? Endgame? Happy Days?—"unhappinew" can be counted on to "reign again." The choice of lessness as title and organic vocabulary is therefore especially fortuitous; as an adaptation of the French Sans, it affords its author the opportunity to invent a new genealogy of less/ness words. When Beckett was working on the English version of this piece, a number of critics wondered how sans, the single sound of a single lexical element, might be captured in another language and transferred to another sound system. Raymond Federman noted that the compound word without, the most likely substitution, would not only fate Beckett to the use of a nongenerative Anglo-Saxon composite, but would further exclude the English text's participation in the sibilance so integral to the original's French liaison:19 Ciel gris sans nuage pas un bruit rien qui bouge terre sable gris cendre. Petit corps meme gris que la terre le ciel les mines seul debout. Gris cendre a la ronde terre ciel confondus lointains sans fin.

While lessness, a surprising intervention, interprets and shifts the literal meaning of sans from absolute absence to eternal diminution (less is always less of something else), it also certifies that Beckett's compositional priority is language as music. Aesthetic style is not so much gutted of content ("without") as shown to be dependent on it. But in the case of Lessness, as in Sans, the content is inevitably wedded to sound, as it also is in Beckett's suggestion for the German counterpart, Losigkeit.20 Each sentence in each image cluster is a different arrangement of the same words; each paragraph is an album of possibilities and legacies that seeks domination over all other arrangements of the same sounds. Quotation never seems to tire of rendering a (relatively) new form. The sounds we hear in Lessness flirt with meanings that are simultaneously there and not there. Like Job, the "he" in this recitation, "heart beating," will be heard to "curse God again as in the blessed days"; "face to the open sky the passing deluge," what remains of this sentence, might just as likely remind us of Noah. Here an ambitious phrase sounds as though it wants to make a literary allusion, and a Biblical one at that. But the urge for some "other" world is cut off "short." A subsequent statement like "Never but in vanished dream the passing hour'' will feature the Beckett trailer "long short," offering cancellation but not necessarily omission. Such binary oppositions have been diligently tracked by Beck-

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ett's many readers, as have the similarly uncertain allusions to earlier Beckett.21 "Never but silence such that in imagination this wild laughter these cries" sounds like a remake of Winnie's "wonderful line," " . . . laughing wild.. . something something laughing wild amidst severest woe," itself a clumsy remake of Thomas Gray.22 Habit is habit; it can be a habit of thinking, but also a habit of hearing what we think or long to hear. It can also be, as in the present instance, a "great deadener." "No forcing, no forcing," Hamm reminds us in Endgame.23 Like every attempt to penetrate and domesticate this text's vibrant infrastructure, such habits can prove absolutely "fatal."24 Lessness focuses on a deconstructed inventory stripped of situational clues and explanation. As in Marguerite Duras, there is no history, only the progressive distillation of prose and the ongoing defamiliarization of verbal presentness.25 We hear this language word by word; striving to be thematically autonomus, each sentence dictates and each paragraph negotiates its own terms. What matters is the reader's relationship to what's on the page, the listener's ambiguous relationship to what's there to hear. "No sound no stir" is repeated and refuted, "same grey" shadowed by "ash grey," "light of reason all gone from mind." Language is always a migration in solitude, like a lone voice echoing through a dark tunnel leading nowhere—in particular. And yet the same language masks the conversion of sound into imagery, an intensely visual concept "all gone from mind" but not quite. Laying out the landscape and the architecture, the voice we momentarily hear in Lessness presents us with a series of harmonies in need of shock therapy. The same fleeting voice marks certain staccato phrases variously abstract, concrete, or recognizably human, each one reaching out and grasping for our undivided attention ('' two pale blue,'' "blank planes," "all sides," "old love new love"); but every variant of the voice will make different words do the same. -Less and -ness and the dialect of neologisms built into the vocabulary of -lessness are constantly infiltrating the soundscape in an unpredictable transliteration of what is supposed to be silence. Recalling Schonberg without the melancholy, Messiaen without the gigantism, the spare precision of sound in Lessness offers every variant of the voice and each listener a complete orchestra of imagined effects, which begin with this text's "Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of m i n d . . . . " As mellifluous as a violin, as plaintive as a clarinet, occasionally as ominous as a kettledrum, the language of Lessness will nevertheless insist on being heard "new" in the "alone unover," the same empty space where Beckett's "blue celeste of poesy" threatens to assume the terrifying certainty of a final shape.

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A last word about the Purgatories. Dante's is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr. Joyce's is spherical and excludes culmination. ... In the one, absolute progression and a guaranteed consummation: in the other, flux—progression or retrogression, and an apparent consummation. In the one movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a net advance: in the other movement is non-directional—or multidirectional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back. ("Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce," pp. 21-22)

In The Lost Ones, "roughly speaking," a voice finds itself trapped in a short story struggling to be its own sort of novella, but not fitting very well into either category. The nonconformist speaker is trying to locate a safe haven, a quiet space for itself in the void that threatens every formulation of the word with ignominious extinction. "Imagine now the silence of the steps."26 A compendium of styles and effects from earlier works by the same author, this atmospheric and elliptical piece, full of threatening and consuming shadows, once again refashions language as the only reliable mediator between sound and image. But unlike the previously discussed "tetes-mortes" (a term that translates as "dead heads" and is an obvious play on the French textes-morts,),27 the script written for this voice has a distinct and distinctive personality of its own. Offering us the droll sound of visible thoughts in verbal interaction, the voice Beckett constructs in this work is the most highly motivated' 'animator of silence"28 we have met in his fiction since the breakdown of all other narrative elements in Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. "So much roughly speaking ... if this notion is maintained." The Lost Ones borrows its atmosphere from Dante, its climate control from Bruno, its parody of classification systems from Vico, its scale from Swift, and its geometry from Sir Thomas Browne; but the sound is pure Beckett.29 In this "storiette" a voice has us look at "naked bodies"30 and distorted shapes with a cold, marvelling, alien, and ironic eye. Speaking a language that is both descriptive and deceptive, the voice makes us "imagine" an entire world flattened into a cylinder full of oppressively angled walls and shadowy, Kafkaesque cul-de-sacs. Things, such as they are, are slowly winding down—so slowly in fact that the voice as it speaks cannot but help put meat on the bone; we may even hear from time to time a smile in that voice, as with an oft-told joke. Scripting the spectacle, text in this case becomes textus, the garment language wears to make theatrical a voice suddenly "heard in the dark." 31 Imagination in this fiction

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is therefore auditory before it can be visual: The Lost Ones will detail with alarming precision its sources, forms, and functions—"of all kinds" and "of all sorts." Beckett took his title for the French Le Depeupleur from Lamartine's Meditations poetiques: "Un seul etre vous manque et tout est depeuple." But in English "depopulate" shifts its angle of vision to a more somber "loss": part Dante, part Proust, the simple phrase "the lost ones" provides the title, the physical context, and the limits of possible metaphor.32 The piece originally dates from 1966, but Beckett struggled until 1970 with his last paragraph,33 where the story abruptly shifts forward from one generic moment in time "towards the unthinkable end." Like "over" in Ping and ' 'dusk'' in Lessness, the last words in The Lost Ones problematize the entire concept of conclusion and conclusiveness: "So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers one first of whom if a man in some unthinkable past for the first time bowed his head if this notion is maintained." Like everything else in the cylinder, this ending is subject to the single contingency "if this notion is maintained," a subjunctive that can undermine as much as it affirms. The phrase really does much more than that; a cautionary refrain that contains the speaker's chilling monologue like an unwilling litany, it finally becomes this manufactured world's dubious and tentative closure. "Far from being able to imagine" an apocalyptic "last state" when "every body will be still and every eye vacant," this soliloquizer's elaborate but all the while temporal vision will nonetheless end. But before it does, the constantly shifting subject-object interrelationships explore the many forms, as Malone says, "in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness": eyes, once "famished" and "questing," dissolve into mute "calm wastes." Yet everything, as Hamm avers in Endgame, will simultaneously "hesitate to ... to end." "I suppose it's only natural," says Winnie, and with a break in the voice she adds her conclusive word: "Human."34 But the speaker in The Lost Ones is not really concerned with "last" things, or even with the sentimental promise of renewal offered by a Christlike figure who "for the first time bowed his head." The story might just as well stop here as anywhere else; this uncertain ending, compromised even further by the intrusion of still another "if," has at least the valorization of precedent behind it. For the speaker in The Lost Ones is, strictly speaking, a middleman, "if a man" ("as if the sex mattered"):35 this Malone-like mediator wants to tell a story, finish with it, and be gone, even if "all has not been told and never shall be." The voice will finally have to settle for a more telling "abode" in silence, where the sound of this tale discovers the shape of a far more decisive conclusion.

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Before falling into the stillness that is the ultimate fate of this and every lonely composition, the voice will take a noble stab at control, putting a miniature cosmos into what looks "at first aperc,u" like spontaneous and sometimes accelerated motion. Outside of "here," as in Endgame, "it's death":36 "For in the cylinder alone are certitudes to be found and without nothing but mystery." The questions this voice asks, moreover, will be, strictly speaking, rhetorical. This anonymous but finicky auteur wants to people a tiny planet through the sound of its own voice; in this ' 'chronicle'' it is the voice's credibility that is everywhere on the line. "Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one," it begins with clandestine assurance, "Vast enough for search to be in vain." And then the crudest caveat of all: "Narrow enough for flight to be in vain." Within this claustrophobic set piece, even more "corpsed" than Endgame37 this deviser can infiltrate a dehydrated landscape with a surprising symphony of color: "hellish light" turns flesh pink before it fades into an all-consuming "grey"; the tainted atmosphere of sulphur is a slickly red-yellow; and eyes are blue "for preference," as they so often are in the fiction of this period. This locutionary style, however, much to what will become the voice's dismay, places neither the voice nor its strange interventions at the cutting edge, where it would very much like to be. The rules and regulations, the codes and creeds the voice confirms with such self-serving mendacity plant its feet, so to speak, very firmly in this world, even when it turns passive and makes those strictures sound so beguilingly different: "It is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence" (compare Hamm's fascinating spin on the same directive: "Lick your neighbor as yourself!").38 As the speaker shifts attention from the adage to the image, more than sound is required to liberate its imagination from the dead-endedness of a closed-circuit society too often marred by a series of vapid parallels to our own. As in life, for example, the "short queue is not necessarily the most rapid," and as in How It Is, this world is, ironically, "as just as ours but less exquisitely organized."39 And despite the originality of a peculiar syntax, this speaker's quest for an authentic soundscape is similarly compromised by an attachment to traditions of figuration that can be formulaic and appallingly melodramatic: Picturesque detail a woman with white hair still young to judge by her thighs leaning against the wall with eyes closed in abandonment and mechanically clasping to her breast a mite who strains away in an effort to turn its head and look behind. (p. 167)

The uninspired pose of this mannered Madonna and Child sounds like the work of a Renaissance hack who fails once again to make a breakaway

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image in the style of some migliorfabbro. Even the eleventh-hour rewrite— concise, abstracted, and diminished though it is—condemns this wouldbe visionary to a pleasantly familiar illusionism: "The mite still in the white-haired woman's clasp is no more than a shadow in her lap." Worse still, in the penultimate section of The Lost Ones the cliched image of a tired Magna Mater resurfaces as the reference point, in the questionable "guise" of the red-haired North Woman, limber but enigmatic yoga position notwithstanding: There does none the less exist a north in the guise of one of the vanquished or better one of the women vanquished or better still the woman vanquished. She squats against the wall with her head between her knees and her legs in her arms. The left hand clasps the right shinbone and the right the left forearm. The red hair tarnished by the light hangs to the ground. It hides the face and whole front of the body down to the crutch. The left foot is crossed on the right. She is the north. She rather than some other among the vanquished because of her greater fixity. (pp. 175-76) What this speaker says to indict the puny inhabitants of the cylinder therefore makes an even more scathing commentary on its own unexamined assumptions and unexceptional powers of perception: "None looks within himself where none can be." It is, once again in Beckett, the narrator who is being narrated here;40 and in this case it is the narrator, not some imminent "other," who remains this work's recreant depeupleur. The speaker's statement of purpose in The Lost Ones is singularly disturbing in that it gives us the shape of allegory without the necessary sanction of an identifiable mimesis. "Abode," a Godot word that is also part of Molloy's, Malone's, and the Unnamable's vocabulary, is similarly—"mutatis mutandis"—a waiting-place.41 Here, even more than in any of the texts discussed so far, representation (if it exists at all) is teasingly inferred rather than stated, endorsed, or confirmed. 42 ' 'A sedentary searcher stepped on instead of over is capable of such an outburst of fury as to throw the entire cylinder into a ferment." Obsessed with laws, as well as with the codicils that govern their exceptions, this speaker's words can never succeed in clarifying a universe whose every element is fundamentally mysterious, even when those words make liberal use of the discretionary burdens of an essentialized past. In an "instant of fraternity" this story's journeymen (women and children not excepted) build ladders to their zenith in a wild parody of Jacob's dream; and the two creeds held by this insular realm's "semi-sages" make short shrift of those zealous "big" and "little enders" in Gulliver's Travels, a minefield of analogy

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to this Laputan/Lilliputian dance of the "be"s. Depicting this habitat verbally, vertically, horizontally, and emotionally, the voice makes similar use of additional "traces blurs signs." The "lure" of the fifteen niches deregulates the five fixed points of Sir Thomas Browne's perfectly symmetrical quincunxes in The Garden of Cyrus; extreme heat equals extreme cold, as in the illustrative metaphors for identical contraries in Giordano Bruno; and Dante, the one source this speaker acknowledges by name (as well "it" might), could now offer one of his "rare wan smiles" to the cylinder's "non-" and "ex-searchers" in the way he previously looked down on Belacqua. ("If it is by resting that one becomes wise," Dante told his fixed point, "there can be no one wiser than you.") And reversing the "divine" Florentine's upward progression with Virgil on a "Terrestial" cone, "priority" within this overburdened structure is given "at all times to descent over ascent."43 This work also features a specifically Beckettian past recaptured: the very means of "ascent" and "descent," the ladders, this time missing rungs, return from Endgame and Watt, and the niches, "quincuncially arranged," resemble the womblike shelter Willie crawls back into behind the earth mound in Happy Days. And like Winnie in the same play, the speaker in The Lost Ones needs to be assured that "something of all this" is "being heard": it counts on the theatricalization of its own voice to confirm the ineffable power of a tantalizing intertextuality. For no matter how lame, this "amateur of myth" longs to place its own signature and its own intonation on "all the dead voices" that have come before, even if only to make a faint noise "like leaves." "The bodies brush together with a rustle of dry leaves. The mucuous membrane itself is affected." (Later it amends "leaves," that "old abomination," to "a rustling of nettles"; "mucous membrane" is of course entirely "another matter" in Enough).44 This little "drama" is therefore by no means "peculiar to the unfinished tunnel"; not Dante perhaps, nor even Waiting for Godot for that matter, but all that this wistful depeupleur can manage if this notion is maintained: "the ear finally distinguishes a faint stridulence as of insects which is that of the light itself and the one invariable." In advancing toward the unobtainable goal of recounting through reciting this cautionary tale of classic ambitions ("No try no fail" but "Nice dimensions, nice proportions" nonetheless),45 this opportunistic speaker remembers and retraces a literary past only when it is convenient to do so. There are, therefore, extraordinary limits to what his fractured intertextuality is enabled to tell us. Caught up in the vain making of its own rhetorical tropes and avoiding all helpful stops like a contemplative comma, a graphic dash, a correlative parenthesis, or that "hideous" but

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time-sharing semicolon,46 this voice takes perhaps too much pleasure in the sound of its words and too much pride in the doubtful shape imposed on run-on sentences. Though there is the occasional inspiration of a "red-yellow glister," such a play of language can be too narrowly construed; the best this muse can muster is a suave rather than shrewd phrase-making—"the quidam then quits," "the latter having lost his ladder," "to crawl back backwards"—or the crude falling-off into double-barreled retreads (best avoided) like "the tallest the tallest" and an awkwardly deployed "on on." Having run out of things to say, this stylist gets "lost" in an affected way of saying them. That way of saying things should be called into question at almost every turn; speech can be deceptive, and "remarks," as Gertrude Stein remarked, "are not literature."47 In The Lost Ones the voice we hear must be watched closely indeed, especially when it goes to Lucky's extreme of willfully rounding off numbers, "more or less" as the case might perversely be: "light" can be "a word," this time in the enlivening form of a discursive number system, "that not only dims but blurs into the bargain." Though this voice seems to have "logic on its side," and it never wavers in its enticing tone of complete confidence, the "facts" can sometimes speak more eloquently, and certainly more honestly, for themselves. "One body per square metre or two hundred bodies in all round numbers"—this speaker's prepared script—may not have got it exactly right. Inconsistencies, as Nell testifies in Endgame, can be something more agonizing than a mere slip of the tongue. "Can you not be a little accurate, Nagg?" she reprimands her man when he tries to misrepresent sand as sawdust. ("It was sawdust once," is his feeble excuse when she calls him to account.)48 As more than one critic has noticed, in The Lost Ones there are slightly more than 200 people "in all round numbers" packed into the cylinder (205 to be exact); and each has slightly less than the one "square metre" this speaker cavalierly assigns to them.49 (Perhaps this is too fine a point, but in a tight spot, as Maddy Rooney and Mr. Slocum discover, every inch counts). Such a tight division of space occasionally offers "the little people of searchers" close encounters of the worst kind:

But even from this point of view no great harm is done so rare is erection in the cylinder. It does occur none the less followed by more or less happy penetration in the nearest tube. Even man and wife may sometimes be seen in virtue of the law of probabilities to come together again in this way without their knowledge. The spectacle then is one to be remembered

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of frenzies prolonged in pain and hopelessness long beyond what even the most gifted lovers can achieve in camera. (p. 175)

Beckett's bilingual reader might also want to consider the discrepancy in the data cited for the cylinder in the two companion versions of the tale: 50 X 16 in French, 50 X 18 in English. Though the author initially told his English publisher that the latter was a misprint, and that the fault was entirely his own, he let it stand. The actor David Warrilow questioned him further about this textual inconsistency. Wondering which statistics he should cite in the opening lines of performance when the Mabou Mines adaptation was on its European tour, he wanted to be sure to get things right for a film version of the production then under option. Pressed, Beckett finally settled for his original "fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony." "After all," he demurred before disappearing down the Boulevard Saint-Jacques in Paris, "you can't play fast and loose with pi."50 That telltale disingenuousness of pi, ' 'with the help of a little addition or better still division," becomes the perfect instrument of imperfection within the strict boundaries of The Lost Ones. "Cunningly out of line" (always and agonizingly 3.14159265 . . .), it is, nonetheless, what we have come to rely on for the mathematical disposition of circular space, determined as area and circumference. Here the "limits to part's equality with whole" assume ratios that give new life to the principle of indeterminacy.51 One of the great ironies of this piece is the way it replicates such disarming instability on many other levels as well. Displaying the potential of a voice to organize and to advance perception, The Lost Ones presents its reader with a laboratory of sounds and simulations in sound. The transformative power of a voice confers meaning, action, and relationship by establishing a freshly imagined sound for every subsequent configuration of space. We literally hear in silence, as Beckett's one "sssh!" abruptly reminds us in his almost-silent movie, Film.52 Yet what we hear in that imperfectly constructed void, "it goes without saying," is subject to a wide network of negotiations, each one subject in turn to the way each listener responds to new representations of sonic reinvigoration: "This is at first sight strange"; "The truth is"; "That is not quite accurate"; "It is curious to note"; "Impossible to foretell"; "Idle to imagine"; and the "first apercu" of the abode, the "credence," and the climbers' code. Voice writes its own textuality onto what we thought was only physical space; meaning is defined by the sound the voice inhabits. In these words the text is always controlled by the voice; and as we assimilate additional information, we are both outside the text and its image—in silence, the space where Beck-

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ett's reader is forced to go. Within this "mere jumble of mingled flesh," eyes "burn," metaphorically and otherwise, depending on how we say it/ hear it / see it. "Chacun son depeupleur."53 "For skin," under such circumstances, can lose much of its innocent "charm." The Lost Ones makes us profoundly aware of the many sounds of a world that a single voice can contain; such sounds find their shape symbiotically and exist only as long as there are words to speak them into being. The same words' force, constructing the sounds within the general sound, can also make "all" go mysteriously "dead still." "In cold darkness motionless flesh": a tableau—though in the context of The Lost Ones a better word to say might be freeze or still—is suddenly both more and less than vivant. Such lulls can be "unspeakably dramatic to put it mildly.'' But the voice speaks up again, activating and illuminating the poetics of space the way a spot lights the desired part of an empty stage. Lovers ' 'buckle to anew'' and fists ''carry on where they left off.'' This is ' 'indeed strange"—but then, in terms of practical theatricality, "Nothing more natural." Light, sound, movement, and vision are eerily and unerringly connected one with another, an adventure in strangely acoustical dynamics; what a brave new world this is. Offered concretion where it might have been least expected, every listener reconstructs the flattened cylinder anew. Circumference, area, and, above all, depth now come full circle in an "absolute absence of the Absolute," "as though the irrationality of pi were an offense against the deity."54 The drama of the voice in this text is therefore choral and communal; how we hear and imagine this sound makes us all responsible for bringing "it" into being. This voice is remarkable in its triumphant ability to hold an audience, its determination to transfix even as its "precocious postures" deceive. As far as the eye can see—and that is what matters most in terms of practical theatricality—betrayal has always been part of seduction. This voice "dripping" in our head is hellbent this time around on getting itself heard, no matter what the cost, "No matter where / No matter when." Nothing will come of nothing, therefore "speak again."55 Only by performing itself, self-styling its own verbal energies and "making" itself "all up again" as it goes along, can it hope "at last" to find its "place and pose," to form itself into something even vaguely resembling a text, "something" the dust of words finally "said." This is no longer the "eye of prey," but a mainstay of the "eye of flesh." For these words, seeking the harbor of a voice and conscientiously if surreptitiously devising it all for company, know that their only alternative is silence, the "nevoid smile"—and that, for Beckett's "troop of lunatics,"56 his seasoned players and highly vocal performers, could certainly not be "it."

5 Trios and Trilogies Voice Verbatim

What visions in the dark of light! —Company

In Company1 Beckett creates an impassioned biography in place of an imagined story, "by mere sound to plague one in need of silence." A self-conscious and highly self-reflective literary biography such as this, however, no matter how circumspect and molested by time, is fated to be a camouflaged fiction, as the conscientious reader of Proust might be "quick" to acknowledge. As early as 1932 Beckett asserted that the past always appears "in monochrome," poignant in the idealized way of a lost innocence remembered. The construct of memory is its own stylized figment, a fable as deceptive as any other, this one masquerading in lines that sound like truth: "The images it chooses are as arbitrary as those chosen by imagination, and are equally remote from reality."2 And yet those bold and transgressive testimonies we read in Molloy and Enough, and Krapp's "memorable equinox" that cannot be remembered, and that subversive act of confession captured forever on tape in Embers, and those haunting black-and-white frames crafted with televisual precision in Ghost Trio and . .. but the clouds. . ., and even those voices that, with such disarming poignancy, demand to be staged in That Time or Rockaby all like to say they rely on something more substantial than fiction, or worse still, "fancy." In these wholesale and discursive paradigms, mimesis plays strange tricks with illusion, verification, and perception, as it does when it urges us to imagine something that cannot properly be imagined, at least not until we encounter a prose challenge like Imagination Dead Imagine. Recuperating the past, but not necessarily for nostalgic purposes, the adaptation of biography that we call Company also reflects, like so many other Beckett enterprises, the strategies of its own production: 106

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.. . whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? (p. 32) Who exclaims thus? Who asks who exclaims, What visions in the shadeless dark of light and shade! Yet another still? Devising it all for company. What a further addition to company that would be! Yet another still devising it all for company. Quick leave him. (p. 84)

This voice, suggestively and most persuasively "heard in the dark," therefore writes its own story against the conventions of another genre, allowing text to play with countertext. Apprehended "not in Space, but in Time only," memory, like music, becomes "the catalytic element" disturbing the surface texture as well as the syntax of this hybrid piece of monologue.3 And as a twofold pattern deliberately insinuates its presence, such decisive interplay contains the vivid but discontinuous orality that informs the structure, the meaning, and the vitality of this work. Voice now speaks its "mutterings verbatim" in at least two registers, one note and one tempo for the rhythm of memory, quite another tone in quite another beat for the heady imperatives of "reason": the drama in the text now relies on the vigorous counterpoint in the sound of their dialogue as they compete now singly, now as a company, for the listener's undivided attention. Company mobilizes an animated series of conflicts between subject and object, text and countertext, voice and action, and memory and presence, sometimes signaled grammatically by the fluid but not altogether convincing dialectic between second and third person, this text's elusive "he" and this script's ambiguous "you." Such taut lines of tension are developed with alarming control and authority, both within this text and in the stylistic correspondences they forge with the rhetorical complexities of mood and mode dramatized further in /// Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho. And as in the construction of any numerical fraction, the deviser of this tale, "devising it all for company,'' divides, determines, and ultimately seeks some sort of satisfactory reconciliation, if this notion is maintained: "What kind of imagination is this so reason-ridden? A kind of its own." Such stylistic virtuosity will involve—in terms of the continuities and discontinuities of what will become a second trilogy—considerable risk and peril, not to mention occasional (textually acknowledged) "faint uncertainty and embarassment." "A voice comes to one in the dark," as previously "mentioned above." And as it does so, this script's wary listener takes up the call to "Imagine," always mindful, always—as we will soon hear in /// Seen Ill Said—"Careful.'' "Beyond words?''—to use

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the phrase Beckett himself scrawled on an early draft of The Unnamable4— the silent but "still" opening sound of Company introduces a universality of echoes that are heard, oddly enough, only within the confines of the insular world of a private and altogether specialized Beckett vocabulary. This is the same limited but surprisingly expansive space that the reader has learned to inhabit, which by now, despite the shifty signifiers, has become agonizingly familiar: "Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You." That's what I call a magnifier.5 Let us pause and reflect on these "sunderings" that we have heard "elsewhere" before, these "little falls . . . apart" that remain ambiguous in meaning but rich in allusion.6 The soundscape of Endgame is particularly promising, for, like Company, that much earlier "play" of language features Zeno's "grain by grain in the mind" as well as a possible encounter with a dead rat. "What an addition to company that would be!" we hear in the present void as an elemental voice refuels itself. "A rat long dead." Clov, we recall, had long ago lamented, and publicly, "If I don't kill that rat he'll die." Or, to keep what remains of our genres more or less straight,7 we might prefer to begin with Malone Dies, which offers us the additional memory of a narrator/hero/misfit/writer/"Crritic" who suffers a similar decay of lying—in both senses of this verb that is suddenly made flesh. But what precisely does any text signify when it speaks of its protagonist "loosely as lying"? "Which in other words," a voice in Company reasons (and we reason with it), "of all the innumerable ways of lying is likely to prove in the long run the most endearing?" That rich pun on "lying" will crop up again, for this "fable" always resumes (pace Lucky) just "where the act of lying cut it short." Positions, once downright physical, "nought anew" and beguilingly supine, now turn to Watt's "semantic succour": "From time to time with unexpected grace you lie." The sound of language is, once again, a dangerously rhetorical and performative thing. "That is what I find so wonderful," says Winnie, planted but talking forever in her mound of theatrical dirt. "Careful."8 Malone Dies provides the appropriate Beckett' 'talk'' for a variety of other items in Company: it uses the same antinovelistic strategies of inventing names for characters along the way, then quickly dismissing, replacing, or reinventing them, even voicing its anxiety about whether they can rightly be labeled characters at all; it wonders aloud about its own ill-seen/ill-said power and authority (is the figure under a sheet clothed or naked?); and it suggests a number of possible topics that might be mentioned in the interests of a narrative that wants to end but can't or won't, at least not until it takes temporary but "true refuge" in a final paragraph consisting of—what is the word?—the single, Spartan lexicon

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of "Alone." Malone Dies also delivers a prominent "figment" to Company in the guise of memory, for it shares with it the same ' 'cutting retort'' a mother makes to a young boy when he asks if the sky is not in reality much less distant than it appears. Voices establish two competing "sound bites" for the same script, passing with no reliable explanation from one permutation to the next: One day we were walking along the road, up a hill of extraordinary steepness, near home I imagine, my memory is full of steep hills, I get them confused. I said, The sky is further away than you think, is it not, mama? It was without malice, I was simply thinking of all the leagues that separated me from it. She replied, to me her son, It is precisely as far away as it appears to be. She was right. But at the time I was aghast. I can still see the spot, opposite Tyler's gate. (Malone Dies, p. 98) You make ground in silence hand in hand through the warm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some hundred paces the sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up at the blue sky and then at your mother's face you break the silence asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and some hundred paces later look up at her face again and ask her if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is. For some reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten. (Company, pp. 12-13)

Although in Company Beckett suppresses the "true" autobiographical elements of one of the first "loopings of the loop," at the Leopardstown racecourse near his boyhood home in Foxrock, the memory, distilled by time (not the least of which is the mediation of novelistic time), is now recast and meant to linger "on"—and not just for the cunning "deviser" who speaks his part this second time around.9 Reinscribing and reinstating itself, verisimilitude assumes many shapes but refuses to reappear as or even in the same monotone. And within this complex and volatile tympanum that is the arbitrary construct of fictional memory, sound vibrates all the way back to an earlier trilogy, a script this voice dares its listener to remember: "See hearer clearer." Every option is equally palpable as a presence—a profligate "A to Z" or "say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road.'' Would it therefore ' 'be reasonable to imagine the hearer as mentally quite inert?" As with the phrase God is love, "Yes or no?" is followed in this case by a cauterizing "No." Heard in the dark, but not quite in

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the dark after all, the haunting lines of this second "esquisse" soon place the captive listener in the subject position: "Yes I remember." The sounds we hear in Company therefore set in motion a minefield of musical self-quotation. And, like the actress Billie Whitelaw in early rehearsal for her performance in Rockaby, we quickly recognize the tantalizing "bits from other plays"10 in what this text calls "the ideal amplitude for effortless audition" ("Neither offending the ear with loudness nor through converse excess constraining it to strain"). The window looking west and "some movement however small" echo Still, as does the highly unusual ring of "withershins," which, contrary to "deasil" in the earlier piece, means to move in a direction opposite to the apparent course of the sun—that is, counterclockwise and "Celtically" unlucky.11 The computation of distance traveled replays the numerical verbal game of Enough, as we now hear about another figment "with bowed head" on the verge of a Molloy- or Godot-like "ditch." The voice "now from one quarter and now from another" re-creates the staging of That Time, and as the same voice avoids the first person singular it redefines Not I by its placement of words and Auditor in a similarly maddening position, ' 'standing or sitting"—or once again "lying." The voice in Company even cites a line from Mouth's dialogue in Not I ("No trace of love") and, like that same intercalated monologue, mentions Croker's Acres, a real place near Beckett's childhood home. The' 'God save you little master'' in the vignette of the old beggar woman resurrects the whole bloody business of a savior from Waiting for Godot, a work we remember again when a voice said to come from a dramatized past murmurs wistfully, "Listen to the leaves." Beckett, of course, has been listening to Joyce, and in this text we listen with him: "Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have fallen on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves."12 Other items recycle earlier Beckett, extravagantly and sometimes eccentrically. The speculation on crawling, in this case offering us a theologically loaded "repent amble," sounds straight out of How It Is. The "comfort" of mathematics belongs to Dan Rooney ("Not count! One of the few satisfactions in life?"). An unwanted pregnancy and a painful delivery resemble the uneasy story featured in First Love. "[C]onjuring something out of nothing" reformats Watt's lexical predicament. "All you had seen was cloud" reshapes the Yeatsian metaphor of Beckett's diaphanous scenography in ... but the clouds. . . . And the "dissolve" to a father sitting on a bench in a summerhouse highlights a technical option of Beckett's "comic and unreal" Film, as does "of course theeye. Filling the whole field. The hood slowly down. Or up if down to begin. The

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globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again," where each fragmented sentence pulsates to the same rhythmic blink of the reader/listener's devouring "eye of prey." "[F]ootfalls" and the "unnamable" remind us of our previous encounters with a play and a novel, and with this in view, a "Devised deviser devising it all for company" (emphasis mine) decisively echoes the May who addictively revolves the same "it all" as we watch her pace back and forth on her lonely strip of what is fated to become negative stage space. "I must hear the feet," this ghostly female deviser proclaims, she too devising it all for company, "however faint they fall." The pronouns "he" and "you" and "one" in Company share this preoccupation with "the odd sound. What a mercy to have that to turn to. Now and then. In dark and silence to close as if to light the eyes and hear a sound. Some object moving from its place to its last place. Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more." As in Krapp's Last Tape, in Company every echo yearns to "be again" with the unsuspected eloquence of a "lamp left lit above you." Language is ambiguous; Beckett's sound is far less so. A "tiny cycle" suddenly starts all over again—but not before it allows us to memorialize all the misshapen vehicles we have celebrated before in pastures similarly "strewn" with uneaten sheeps' "red placentae." The absurdly detailed position of a head "resting mainly on occipital bump aforesaid. Legs joined at attention. Feet splayed ninety degrees. Hands invisibly manacled crossed on pubis" sounds like a further development of the physiognomic irregularity we have met as recently as Imagination Dead Imagine, or the one we will later see reblocked for maximum theatrical effect on a cold plinth in Catastrophe. "Hodgkin's disease or if you prefer Percival Pott's" is medical "talk" as technical as the "Bright's disease, Grave's disease, strangury and fits" in Murphy, where "conation" is also cited as an option. The ' 'Palest blue against the pale sky'' resounds with two prominent images from the ruins ofLessness, a piece inevitably commemorated by the ' 'bootless crawl and figments comfortless" in the "sunless cloudless brightness" of this "moonless starless night." "The unthinkable last of all" repeats a moment of tentative closure from The Lost Ones, which also brings to the present undertaking a French esquisse in place of an apergu, and makes us consider a similar poetics of space that replaces the eccentric geometry of cylinders and quincunxes with oblongs, rhomboids, and a rather spectacular "rustic hexahedron." "Better a sick heart than none" messes up the same Biblical quotation Winnie mangles in Happy Days, and in much the same tone; an M and a W are here, too; and we should be relieved to hear that the fate of Belacqua is in this tract finally settled. At long last a voice bids the slothful Florentine lute maker a tender and a generous

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farewell, for we suddenly learn the news that, having waited so long in Beckett's fiction to be purged, he is "now perhaps singing praises with some section of the blest at last." (The motif of discarding Belacqua, with his ' 'strong weakness for oxymoron,'' had been predicted as early as DingDong, one of the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks:' 'He was an impossible person in the end. I gave him up in the end because he was not serious.")13 This drama and this text, as with Dante, as with earlier Beckett, has fatefully become our own script. "Yes," we say again as we hear this chapter and this verse in this time and this place, "I remember." Voicings in Company therefore signal locutionary patterns as well as strictly literary tropes. The mere mention of Dante's "first quarter-smile" might make us think, nevertheless, that at least some of the allusive texture in this work is not entirely integral to that "stiff interexclusiveness" characteristic of Beckett's hermetic remaking.14 Yet in this citation, as with so many others, the accent is not so much on Dante Alighieri as on Beckett's previous use of him, the special Dante appropriated all the way back in the lead story in More Pricks Than Kicks—and the figure of Belacqua who walks through Beckett's fiction all the way up to The Lost Ones before bowing out here. Beckett has taken this small piece of The Divine Comedy and made it a part of his listener's intimate repertory. He has done the same with his gleanings from the Bible. "Better a sick heart than none" is Beckett, not the Book of Psalms, and the sound is birdlike Winnie, not patriarchal David.15 Shakespeare is similarly colonized: "labour lost" is the sort of residual allusion that skirts the surface of such earlier works as Footfalls, That Time, Come and Go, and Happy Days, to mention only a few of the most notorious examples.16 In Company "See hearer clearer" propels the same listener into the vital sound of King Lear, heavily mediated by Beckett's earlier homages to the same work. Like Shaw, who said that Lear was the worst play for the stage but the best play for sound, Beckett rewrites Kent's "See better, Lear" to highlight a dramatic moment's strong auditory possibilities.17 The drama is written into Beckett's text: "Lear" beckons with the rhyming imperatives of "hear" and "clearer," which the listener is now enjoined to "see." "[H]alf-blind," "the shadowy light," "dark" that "lightens," and "Died on to dawn and never died" (this last phrase by way of A Piece of Monologue) similarly find a new home for Milton, but only "up to a point": that point being how Beckett has made us hear Milton before. An undaunted Winnie, for example, opens act 2 with a direct quotation from Paradise Lost, yet every note her voice sounds in this stage vehicle is richly and darkly ironized: her "Hail, holy light" strikes, perhaps, not entirely the same locutionary note Milton had

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in mind. 18 Beckett, of course, can be counted on to elevate Joyce to the presence of such distinguished company, and in this text we hear him do precisely that: "Bloom of adulthood. Imagine a whiff of that." Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, Milton, Joyce: the company Beckett makes us keep is by this time fairly predictable. But external allusions in Company are there primarily to remind us of the similar vocal patterns Beckett's relentless speechifiers have already made us listen to. In Company Beckett establishes an altogether new arrangement for the same responsive chords; his silent orator now speaks in a mixture of discourses rarely heard in exactly the same pitch before. Systemically, the discovery of a distinctive sound for the medley of voices in Company relies on a further exploitation of the diction, and sometimes even a complete transformation of the locutions, made so memorable in other lively inscriptions. Strange English, this, but then, as Hamm says, "There's English for you. Ah well. . . . "19 Such exploratory formulations extend to the intrusion of the learned vocabulary we have already heard in the familiar Beckett soundscape: the "hog's setae" of Happy Days, the "Schimmel" of From an Abandoned Work, the "ramdam" of All That Fall, the "tremolo" of The Lost Ones, the "passing rack" of Footfalls, and the ritualized "viduity" of Krapp's Last Tape, which the drunken hero looks up for his audience in a dictionary. The vocal range in Company explores the impact of some highly charged verbal instruments, this time including the lingo of automotive history and the pronunciation of the French language itself, as well as indulging itself in yet another go at the rich word hoard detailing the' 'folly'' of an increasingly compromised human anatomy. Let us begin with the attractive sound of that deluxe De Dion Bouton, the motor car manufactured in Paris circa 1904 and conveniently parked by this voice in the shelter of a family's coach house. The voice makes a sly reference to this setup later in the recitation when, in the subsequent vignette that takes place in a summerhouse, the characters sit "vis-a-vis." The De Dion Bouton was one of the few automobiles that actually allowed for such a possibility. In a four-passenger model called, in fact, the "Visa-Vis," seats faced one another with the steering mechanism placed in the center. "Vis-a-vis" neatly links recherche automotive history with recondite language study. Here Beckett's English speaker has some fun at Gallic expense with the French pronunciation of "Haitch," momentarily assigning this name to its "hearer"—yet another English word, like the he, the him, and the hope of the same paragraph, which also begin with Haitch. The French language, of course, considers two phonemes for h, the h-

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muet and the h-aspire: "Let the hearer be named H. Aspirate. Haitch. You Haitch are on your back in the dark. And let him know his name. No longer any question of his overhearing." For the French speaker, H is, therefore, no name, and no being, at all; "he" cannot be said. "Then let him not be named H." And so this voice will have to contend with a "sedentary searcher"20 for the same imagined sound, "The hearer. Unnamable. You." Vocal anatomy is a hole, one more h-word sometimes redefined by a mute w. Other body parts prove similarly conditional and tricky, as in the sensational "All the way from calcaneum to bump of philoprogenitiveness." Like Krapp, we are sent scurrying once more to the OED: philoprogenitiveness means tending to produce offspring, prolific; of, relating to, or characterized by love of offspring.21 The bump is phallic, yet hardly celebratory: consider the fate of Hamm's "accursed progenitor." "Yes I remember." Abandoning an elusive Haitch, as well as the resistant M and W who have proved so helpful before, the voice in Company makes its appeal, finally, to the "hearer" of the moment, the same listener every Beckett discourse summons for "readier reference": the "You" who holds text in hand. Such an emergency tactic is not without precedent, though in the past other voices have been more discreet about putting forward their private case for immediate and spontaneous reception. The whole motif, in fact, of appealing metatextually in this way to an audience has been a pose that related voices have tried to take advantage of before. The narrator in Murphy, for example, makes a momentary pact with his reader, going so far as to address said person as ' 'gentle skimmer.'' And May in Footfalls calls her audience's attention to an old Mrs. Winter, "whom the reader will remember," though no such "hearer" of the dialogue in Beckett's play, "strange or otherwise," has been able to advance her cause by tracking her down.22 Always "at speech," including "a trace of emotion" and "signs of distress," the voice in Company supersedes the patterns and tropes it inherits from other abandoned works to locate the sound of its own authentic way back "home":23 Malone Dies: "The man has not yet come home. Home." (p. 15)

Not / : " . . . one evening on the way home . . . home!... a little mound in Croker's Acres . . . " (p. 220) Company: "And never once overstepped a radius of one from home. Home!" (p. 85)

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Yet foremost among these revisions in quest of renewed "visions in the dark of light" is the sound of the word/sentence "Imagine," which was, we remember, deployed so effectively in Imagination Dead Imagine and All Strange Away that this not-so-plain dealer urges us to reconceptualize it here. Consider "Imagine" and one sees straightaway the difficulties inherent in any attempt to write a final script for this text. As a single word, capitalized and followed by a period, a reader first takes it as a verb. The subject, however, "dies before it comes to the verb" and lands, characteristically, somewhere in the void.24 Grammatically, the subject is supposed to be understood, but it is also supposed to be suppressed, a pronoun the person and number of which we expect might be conventionally clarified in the context of what may follow. Yet the voice in Company will use convention to confound and expand its domain beyond any easy presupposition that there is any other "there" there. "Imagine," then, functions simultaneously as an imperative, an invocation, and a casual observation addressing both the listener and the voice itself. Once invited in this way to utilize creative faculties to make the drama in this text come to life, the gentle and unsuspecting "skimmer" embarks on a subtle adventure that implicates everything and everyone, past allusions as well as present interpretations—as the title Company so disingenuously suggests.

Always pushing questions of genre further, Beckett gains additional latitude for each subsequent prose work. Saying, as has been said before, is inventing, and in Company Beckett takes a decisive step forward in moving the program of a voice who says "it" from the Platonic to the literal— what that performed Piece of Monologue, cast off from its origin in Company, labels "Lip lipping lip." "I am obliged to speak," says the Unnamable. "I shall never be silent. Never." "I have to speak," the same verbalizer continues, "whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, / have to speak." As late as Closed Space another orator is still struggling to sound itself out of nothingness by advancing its agenda of words one step forward: "There is nothing but what is said. Beyond what is said there is nothing."25 And as in much of the fiction that precedes it, in a work like Company sound can only be partially accounted for by the rudimentary syntactical signs printed in the text. These are normally characterized as grammatical stops predicting speed, suggesting rhythm, and determining rest—the question marks, exclamation points, and periods that serve as caesural pauses in place of the more exact ones of musical annotation:

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Another trait the flat tone. No life. Same flat tone at all times. For its affirmations. For its negations. For its interrogations. For its exclamations. For its imperations. Same flat tone. You were once. You were never. Were you ever? Oh never to have been! Be again. Same flat tone. (p. 26)

Thematically and structurally aiming for a unified sound, the text seems to be struggling with itself; its own tonal signifiers for the adjustments of exclamation (!) and interrogation (?) are no longer entirely congruent with the "same flat tone," however that might get itself said, let alone heard. Capitalization and paragraph division will similarly strive to cue modulation, tempo, and liaison, as will assonance, lexical repetition (including anaphora), and alliteration. And yet in this piece it is only the particular resonance and intonation of a given voice, the sound of sound, that finally instructs meaning. / can only say it as I hear it.26 In this piece voice conscientiously and conclusively asserts itself, as it does when any actor takes the stage to make language decisively take "place." Here it will be the domain of voice to create not only character but body, tessitura, and temperament—the emotional life of a dramatic text that can never be fully programmed in advance. Turning language on its ear for maximum effect, each word assumes much more significance when it has "a place" in the infinite.27 The speech one hears today can be listened to another way tomorrow. The deviser ' 'of the voice and of its hearer and of himself' is therefore constantly rewriting the script, for in Company revised style means renewed substance: "Reinforcements at last!"28 But there are a few firm mandates. At one moment the deviser will characterize the voice problematically— both specifically and vaguely—as follows: "In the course of a single sentence it may change place and tone.'' The next moment the same deviser contaminates the mirage of such "true refuge"29 in a supple act of contradiction: "Another trait the flat tone. No life. Same flat tone at all times." The work is, then, logically impossible, for it wants to be "read," aloud, on different levels all at once, each level enhancing the others without canceling them out. "Drive on, drive on!" this text seems to be saying, along with Henry in Embers. "Why do people always stop in the middle of what they are saying?. . . . Keep it going, Ada, every syllable is a second gained."30 The sound, once heard, can never be forgotten. In Company the there is always changing in relation to the here and the hearer; how is this speech and this speaker supposed to locate the now and the what for the listener? Seductive one moment, lyrical or ironic the next, voice strives to supersede the ambiguities of its own being as recitative

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language by pointing out the arbitrariness of every representation, not excluding its own. "Everything always went on forever"—and every statement has always been "unfinished,"31 the next to the last. If "he is alone on his back in the dark why does the voice not say so?" Talking itself into oblivion, and only occasionally taking advantage of synapsis, this "vice-exister"32 is by no stretch of the imagination an automatic silencer. However ambiguous, then, "the voice alone" is still lively "company," but not, apparently, "enough." Woefully "deploring a fancy so reason-ridden," the highly cerebral adumbrations on the nature of voice—its origin, its person, its number, and its complete atomization-—soon turn in another direction. A vignette suddenly intrudes, providing, "one" suspects, more welcome "company" in the shape of what sound like remembrances of things past. The furtive action of memory, as in Krapp's Last Tape, soon adds a significant and powerful dimension to the discourse, one that will be employed with tantalizing restraint. The unexplained appearance of these digressions from the current dire situation, as suddenly performed by the voice in the dark, comment dire, allows the piece to resound with far greater depth and emotional complexity. This does not depend, however, on some grand message about Life; any message about any life will do. The particularized exploration of a room, a desperate state of affairs, and a generic though gendered body lying flat on his back in the same dark, becomes animated when the voice adopts a different tone registering the probability of a recognizably human history. And this new sound supplies the listener with fragments of a background as well as a psychological texturing that has been richly invested. These scenes are, then, crucial: they expand the terrain the reader and the protagonist traverse in the course of this little drama-in-the-making. They also offer the reader a powerful inducement to consider this work autobiographically or, to use Porter Abbott's suggestive term, "autographically."33 Though allegory here can be nothing more than an afterthought, such artifice will nonetheless present us with elements that sound close to reality, that just might ring true. For the items of memory have about them a highly charged emotional impact, a deeply felt disposition, that appeals to the listener's inclination to identify a heart— "a heart in my head"—behind the poststructuralist mind so often encountered in this repertory of "playing tricks."34 The work suddenly contains something more than itself: You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea. In it your father's upturned face. Upturned to you. You look down to the loved trusted face. He calls to you to jump. He calls, Be a brave boy. The red round

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face. The thick moustache. The greying hair. The swell sways it under and sways it up again. The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place. (pp. 23-24)

But biography is always a trap; the text belies its certainty. Upsetting the void, the voice disdains documentation and sketches, instead, moments from a past containing only faux "creatures," then repositions them as part of the ongoing "fable," the long but inventive dissolution that is every Beckett hero's life. However much this story may conform to the known or suspected details of the author's life35 (the Irish names of roads and stores, the birth on Good Friday, the bow windows of Cooldrinagh, and the suggestion of upper-middle-class affluence in the make of a fancy car), the personal signature imparted by these very moving scenes does not eclipse their imprint in the structured and highly self-conscious mutations and manipulations that are always scripting this text's steady spectacle of words. Autobiography has, therefore, been a pose, a fiction of representation like everything else in this teller's ever-emerging tale. The scenes that seem to be culled from the past bring not memory but an artificial construct, in the guise of memory, to the shape this "upended"36 narrative strives to assume. They also impart a special movement to the text, for unlike the rhythm of reason, constantly backtracking on itself to amend a phrase, repeat it with minor variation, or take up yet another possible cause in a mad search for the irresistible mot juste, the rhythm of memory, even when fabricated by a suspect voice in the dark, is swift, incisive, and direct. It is also earnest, at least as candid as any made-up memory can be; it favors moods, themes, and situations that can be expressed unambiguously only by the spoken voice. Yet this too must be necessarily imagined. Though the "he" of this piece, like Mouth in Not I, "speaks of himself as of another," some of these memories have been given to him secondhand, are things told him by other voices, then passed off— fatalistically and sometimes even opportunistically—as his own: You first saw the light in the room you most likely were conceived in. .. . The midwife was none other than a Dr Hadden or Haddon. Straggling grey moustache and hunted look. It being a public holiday your father left the house soon after his breakfast with a flask and a package of his favourite egg sandwiches for a tramp in the mountains. There was nothing unusual in this. But on that particular morning his love of walking and wild scenery was not the only mover. But he was moved also to take himself off and out of the way by his aversion to the pains and general unpleasantness of labour

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and delivery. Hence the sandwiches which he relished at noon looking out to sea from the lee of a great rock on the first summit scaled. . . . When he returned at nightfall he learned to his dismay from the maid at the back door that labour was still in swing. ... He at once hastened to the coachhouse some twenty yards distant where he housed his De Dion Bouton. He shut the doors behind him and climbed into the driver's seat. . . . Though footsore and weary he was on the point of setting out anew across the fields in the young moonlight when the maid came running to tell him it was over at last. Over! (pp. 15-18)

But the so-said memory of Company is nothing more than an imagination refashioned to reckon time once more in terms of space: events told to the unknown "him" are indistinguishable from those he is imagined to remember on his own. The abundantly detailed moment of birth is quickly followed by a much more circumscribed scene of an infant in a nursery, this one similarly invented but this time conveyed in a cold and almost telegraphic intonation: "A mother's stooping over cradle from behind. She moves aside to let the father look. In his turn he murmurs to the newborn. Flat tone unchanged. No trace of love." To remember in Company is always to imagine, and though not always the same way, still not always in vain. Despite the text's disclaimer of imaging "ill" from time to time, the memories constructed here can be as fluid as Proust's—or as our own. In the vignette of the summerhouse, for example, the voice makes a double journey into the past before returning to the present. Freely moving "to and fro," as in Rockaby, the voice moves from distant past, to more distant past, to less distant past, mixing an encounter with his lover and her pregnancy ("She is late") with a memory of his father reading Punch with yet another memory of the touch of two lovers' bodies on the sheets of a warm bed. Time in this piece is ''the one constant," but in this construct it is all at once set free, as though the voices of A, B, and C in That Time now meet in one.37 Memory can work wonders, especially when it has been so explicitly crafted to do so. The technique of playing off the rapid rhythm of memory against the slow rhythm of reason brings enormous tension and contrast to the whole, setting in motion a dramatic conflict of styles that allows the voice as well as the listener a full range of interpretive possibility, now "faint from afar and now a murmur in his ear." Mind and heart wage a war of words in two competing tempos; we never know for certain just when one chord will intrude with its distinctive sound upon the other. Emotion literally fights with reason, and the as-yet-unidentifiable deviser makes clever use of the latter to recover from the devastating effects of the former, which,

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despite his valiant attempts, he does not appear likely to control: "Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable." What brings a new sound to Company is, then, the risk Beckett now takes with the dualism he has been so careful to balance before. Stretching both his technique and our imagination, in this text heart is likely to win hands down as it "somehow at any price" makes a mad dash for "an end." Despite the impressive, reason-ridden intellect, emotionally charged memories—no matter how reformulated, recast, patched up, and "very rightly wrong"38—shine through in the haunting shape of images that will, quite simply, not go away. The artificial construct of memory becomes the only intelligible text, for the images it creates essentially outlast the text, achieving their full spontaneity in silence, when every word has finally been said. Giving the image an inherent primacy, voice is the shadow or echo that sharply confirms the real. Its successful battle with what Molloy calls "the falsetto of reason" makes it avoid any taint of sloppy sentimentality. All that remains for Krapp, too, is one essential Othello-like image moulded from the materials of an unverifiable past: "The eyes! Like . . . (hesitates). . . chrysolite!" Krapp erases all the facts, and all the days and nights, in between his stage presence and this resurrected event. As we sit in a theater and watch Krapp with our own eyes, all that exists for us as audience is an image, too: an old dry-as-dust figure isolated in stage space is suddenly not alone. Staring into the void, he is actually staring at us. The image offers us an unexpected instance of communion with a private world in the public forum that is theater, naughty French pun on la derniere bande ("the last erection") notwithstanding. In performance time this will always be something more than "the dung litter of laughable memory."39 The alternative music we hear in Company will similarly recontextualize reflection and reminiscence in the shape of images, and even though these represent loss, they provide the listener with powerfully drawn scenes that effectively counter and enrich this text's diminished state. "Now I'll wipe out everything but the flowers," says another voice in Enough, this one fatally near "the promis'd end" of a quite different fictional journey.40 Everything disappears but the words and images that the memory of a voice depends on us to recreate. Consider some of these images: a mother scolds a young boy for no apparent reason after he asks a question, typically, about depth and perception; a small boy teeters on a limb of a tree or contemplates a jump into deep waters and into his loving father's arms; a youth finds a hedgehog and imposes his will on it, ending in death and a loss of innocence; a young man meets his female lover and confronts his culpability in her

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pregnancy, if such is indeed the case; a grown man walks by himself in the fields near his childhood home but still feels the presence of his beloved father's "shade"; an old man finds he moves unsteadily, suddenly conscious of the fact that he has been deserted forever by the warmth of his once youthful vigor—these scenes evoke the arbitrary pattern of loss in one man's existence. Everything "falls" and soon fades away. Any renewed effort of mathematics or science or theory to define or locate the voice that broadcasts these images pales by comparison with the striking quality of such sharp visual stimulation. For the company Beckett keeps is strictly with these words and the sound of a world that they have been made to illuminate. Mouth's monologue from Not I has been effectively rewritten in a stunning present tense: in this text "words [are] coming."41 The voice that sets them in motion will never leave us "alone," for such a deviser constantly returns us to the initial charge of this script, which was, we should remember, to "imagine." For the drama in this text has been asking us all along to imagine with it. ' 'You may imagine his thoughts before and after as he strode through the gorse and heather," this voice pronounces, as a father anxiously awaits his child's birth, an appeal to the listener soon echoed by another as the voice discovers the same man alone in his De Dion Bouton: "You may imagine his thoughts as he sat there in the dark not knowing what to think." So imagination is not quite dead, at least as far as this summons to the listener's collaboration is concerned. Like the sun in Murphy—there's another image—it shines through once again, having no real alternative.42 What the sound of this text makes us imagine becomes, then, the only possibility for company, for it is always full of potentiality. The "effect" is something more, indeed, "than speech in Bantu or in Erse." Time hangs "heavy already on our hands," it is true, but even the movement of two inanimate hands on a watch provides "variations and constants" ripe for vocal exploration. And when this recitation ends, there remain many "matters yet to be imagined," "form and dimensions yet to be devised." The sound of that "fable of one fabling with you in the dark" has, therefore, not left us in the dark after all. The voice who speaks in Company may have set out to exploit the limits and mechanisms of its own repertory, but in the process of its reasoning—which this text "reasons ill"—we soon recognize that the voice we have been hearing has all the while been dripping inside every reader's head, though each consciousness hears it differently. That voice ("Faltering, Minutely," "Tidal," and "At a loss for words") is always "Unfixed in space"; "Whereas hearer fixed." "A heart, a heart in my head," cried out Beckett's Hamm long ago. And the

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present recit seems bent on reassuring us that as long as any voice has the miniaturized tenderness of the sound of these words, the company of a listener can never be entirely in vain. Mixing memory and desire, the voice in Company gives body to words and in so doing offers us "lies like truth." 43 The subject doesn't change, but the style does. And as raw emotion is formally recognized and realized in textual space, the last word this voice speaks is set this time around in a paragraph as solitary as itself: Alone.

But we have heard this richly evocative sound before in other places in this intimate repertory, just as it now presents us with a chilling image we will be forced to counter, if we can, on our own. For we are never really "alone" once we hold the potential of such a script in our own hands. Devised allusions to the past and to past works, to "reckoning closed and story ended,"44 have, therefore, fostered a magnificent new illusion where we may have least expected to hear its song: just who is the speaker and who is the listener really doesn't matter, once the reader's regular guest is Beckett's unnamable voice verbatim, the absolute but inescapable pointlessness of saying, simply but necessarily, "On!" Same flat tone? A Site and a Scene for the Said If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. —Ill Seen III Said

In /// Seen III Said45 that "on" proves to be a highly volatile and effective "counter-poison," full of auditory innuendo. As in Company, the dynamic relationships between voice, emotion, and text provide this work with a content and character that are always interesting and surprising. Here Beckett fully exploits the shared resources of a spoken language, at times cognitive, semantic, lexical, emotional, and attitudinal. The repercussions can be enormous. For the intimacy and texture of III Seen III Said depend on the multicoloration of the text, which can only be apprehended in the

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sound of the text—"slow systole diastole," the shortening of a long syllable or the lengthening of a naturally short one: Who is to blame? Or what? They? The eye? The missing finger? The keeper? The cry? What cry? All five. All six. And the rest. All. All to blame. All. (pp. 32-33)

Here the plasticity, energy, and sheer physicality of speech is released from the text when a paragraph juxtaposes a whole monosyllabic line with a very plosive series of hard consonants. This physicality is now the shared property of speaker and listener alike,46 for such language begs to be heard: "How explain it? And without going so far how say it?" Embedded in this "farrago" of palpable sound and problematic sense, this "farrago of silence and words,"47 is the story of an "old so dying woman'' who derives her fictive license from the text's desire for figuration, some "pure" object that the words long to establish, certify, and sustain, "As had she the misfortune to be still of this world." But this female object is recalcitrant and defies stabilization; it will rest content only as a "figment," and an imperfect one at that, "Anon." Something always "forbids divining her," for "She needs nothing. Nothing utterable." This text's reader plays the legitimizing role in a mystifying game plan. The object is securely here—"Gone without going. Back without returning . . . Pfft occulted. Nothing having stirred"—but only if the imaginative listener insists on localizing a "her" there. The impossibility of relying on the authenticity or permanence of any subject—an object, a vision, or even a phrase that accurately says ("what is the word? What the wrong word?") it—extends this story far beyond the picayune illusionism of an "old so dying woman" in a deserted rustic cabin and buries us in a "sclerotic" atmosphere where not every "question" will be "answered." "Quick. . . . Contemplate that." Narrative complications are not new to Beckett, nor to the reader of Beckett's late fiction, yet in /// Seen III Said the element of mystery in each "word go," in any and every of its many alternatives, is explored, rejected, then surreptitiously if tentatively advanced. Nothing—literally nothing—seems left to chance. This is a carefully plotted art of saying, then "gainsay[ing]," " '. . . ah but no, no n o . . . No no.' "48 The work sustains the mood of a mystery play with the same sort of theological implications, only this time with a small t indeed. "Ovines" are "unshepherded" ("they stray as they list"), though "in defiance of reason the

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nail prevails." There is, as always in Beckett, a "trace" and "a voice murmuring a trace": Absence supreme good and yet. ("A trace, it wants to leave a trace.' '49) This ''void'' is once again agonizingly "incontinent.'' The so-said "puniness" of an old woman, for this text will compel us to configure her as such, is therefore set against a cosmic and cosmological enormity that can be daunting. No humble beginning, this, no matter how rewired and self-correcting: From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails at the source of all life. On. At evening when the skies are clear she savours its star's revenge. (P. 7)

Beckett's heroes have turned to the heavens before, often to find or calculate their way "home" (one need only think of Mercier and Gamier or the voice that speaks so ambiguously in Enough). But the "rigid" posture and passion of this "deepening gloom" seems to spread an ominous shadow over "All," "Sky earth the whole kit and boodle." Time, personal as well as biological, is running out, "Moment upon glutton moment." Venus, the name of the love birds Maddy Rooney apostrophizes in All That Fall and of a celebrated diarist's diminished pencil in Malone Dies,50 further expands the dimensions of this story to include not only the mysteries of the spheres, but the strange rituals that sometimes accompany them.51 Although we do not normally associate Beckett's fiction with Celtic or Druidic monuments, the cromlechs dotting the Irish landscape of his childhood, /// Seen III Said makes some uncanny use of them. Though perhaps the most famous of such stone monuments is Stonehenge in England, Eoin O'Brien reminds us that the young Beckett could have found one much closer to home at Glen Druid, located between Barrington's Tower and the Latin Cross near Tully Graveyard, a mile or so from Cooldrinagh.52 Arsene refers to just such a dolmen in his farewell speech in Watt: . . . and often I turn, tears blinding my eyes, haw! without however pausing in my career (no easy matter), perhaps longing to be turned into a stone pillar or a cromlech in the middle of a field or on the mountain-side for succeeding generations to admire and for cows and horses and sheep and goats to come and scratch themselves against and for men and dogs to make their water against and for learned men to speculate regarding and for disappointed men to inscribe with party slogans and indelicate graffiti and for lovers to scratch their names on, in a heart, with a date, and for now

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and then a lonely man like myself to sit down with his back against and fall asleep, in the sun, if the sun happened to be shining. (p. 49) Cromlechs were, of course, used by the Druids for plotting astronomical events, and such a pre-Christian "zone of stones" was often the site for mysterious ceremonies involving animal and human sacrifice. The language of/// Seen III Said makes several "occulted" references to stars, the moon, the sun, and other "celestial" bodies. The opening line of this story is, for example, soon followed by "she watches for the radiant one" and "she savours its star's revenge." The use of color in this piece may be similarly derivative and inspired. When preparing for battle or sacred rites, the ancient Celts would cover their bodies with wood, a plant substance that made them look vaguely blue. Ward Rutherford notes that the Druids also had an odd custom of treating their hair with lime wash, which not only bleached it but made it stand back from their heads.53 "Save for the white of her hair and faintly bluish white of face and hands," we read of the old woman in /// Seen III Said, "all is black. . . her long white hair stares ... as if shocked still by some ancient horror. Or by its continuance.'' In the "zone of stones" that defines a cromlech, celestial events are always viewed from the vantage point of an altar rock, through spaces between the surrounding stones referred to as "windows." At Stonehenge, for example, fifty-six such windows are framed by chalk stones that serve in this case to mark the cycles of the moon. The ' 'chalkstones'' of Beckett's story are "of striking effect in the light of the moon. Let it be in opposition when the skies are clear. .. quick to the other window to see the other marvel rise.. . How whiter and whiter as it climbs it whitens more and more the stones." Beckett, moreover, measures fictional space as follows: "The two zones form roughly a circular whole . . . Diameter. Careful. Say one furlong." A furlong is 660 feet, "roughly" close to the "diameter" (610-30 feet) frequently cited for a cromlech like Stonehenge. Beckett's story also describes its female figure's passage as she moves so enigmatically from "one tier of a circus to the next," the term "circus" denoting the different levels of stone circles comprising a dolmen. Into the fictional "zone of stones" enter human figures, "come what may. Twelve." Druidic rites require thirteen celebrants, the lone ghostwoman of this story perhaps filling in as best she can: "What then if not her do they ring around?" The buttonhook, "larger than life" and mentioned far too often in this story to be ignored, is a real teaser. Although it serves a practical domestic purpose (holding at one point a greatcoat "like a carcass in a butcher's stall"), its unusual decorative elements—it

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is "silver pisciform" and engraved with scales—might make it the cult object of some mysterious religion. Rutherford notes, too, that when the Druids indulged their tastes in personal adornment, they typically secured their cloaks with intricately woven gold pins, broaches, or silver "buttonhooks" (in quite a different sense, however, from /// Seen III Said's "buttonhook and passim. . . "). Even the cryptic date found on a scrap of paper in this text's "coffer" and later destroyed ("Tu 17. Or Th. Tu or Th 17"), together with the "one April afternoon," suggest a ceremonial event not to be missed. For although the main feast of Beltain is held on the first day of May, the actual festival starts much earlier. I outline the (possible) pre-Christian allusions in /// Seen III Said merely to point out the many levels of mystery that help to enliven the intricate mood of this piece. As already mentioned, this level of ritual is by no means the only or even the primary one this text will exploit and subvert' 'to vary the monotony.'' The early Christian apostles, for example, also number "Twelve," and they, too, uniformly male, were struck dumb by the ' 'novelty'' that took place ' 'one April afternoon'' at another ' 'distant tomb." Their "zone of stones" was no Celtic cromlech, but the Aramaic Golgotha, literally "the place of the skull," the "glorious" site of "Deposition done." Here, too, one might "imagine" a far more personal ritual in a far simpler graveyard: the poignant image of an old May Beckett visiting her husband's final resting place, soon to be her own, at Redford Cemetery, close by her home in the last months of her life at Greystones, County Wicklow. "From the window," Beckett wrote to a friend in 1938, "she can see the cemetery where my father is 'at rest'." A similar rite at "the bone-yard by the sea" (as Beckett calls it in More Pricks Than Kicks) will be evoked even more somberly in WorstwardHo: "Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none."54 But of course the rituals that matter most in /// Seen III Said are the rituals of writing, the complex rites of seeing, saying, and hearing that implicate us in one more act of reading, and that have been at the core of Beckett's fictional enterprise from the beginning. In this work seeing and saying, those ' 'equal liars both,'' are exploited for their double indemnities: we see with the eye and we see with the imagination, we say in speech and we say in prose: Such the confusion now between real and—how say its contrary? No matter. That old tandem. Such now the confusion between them once so twain. And such the farrago from eye to mind. For it to make what sad

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sense of it may. No matter now. Such equal liars both. Real and—how ill say its contrary? The counter-poison. (p. 40)

In /// Seen III Said there are, then, several modes of inscription, each one making its appeal to a different level of consciousness. "On. . .On!" interrupts the need for narrative by repeating the opening sound of Henry's audioscore in Embers55 and provides the single beat that urges us to take the leap from one boundary of experience to the next, just as it exposes us to the multiple levels of allusion that add so much density to the (possible) dimensions of this text. The work as a whole is divided into a series of brief paragraphs, narrative come-and-gones organized almost as discrete units of fictional viability; these track with varying success the borders between the world of the living and the world of the dead, now said to be no longer distinct. The form of the continuity at first seems simple and straightforward but is, in fact, incredibly complex. Chronology comes and goes (" . . . time slows all the while. Suits its speed to hers"). One element of the story suggests another before the first is completed, then loops back to pick up earlier subjects and again becomes sidetracked. Gazing, her eyes on a far horizon as if she yearned for some unseen distant thing, this "old so dying woman" is simultaneously there and not there, but is always wanted dead or alive: "No shock were she already dead. As of course she is. But in the meantime more convenient not." Seen "no matter how and said as seen," she remains, however, "ill seen ill said" in almost every sense of the word. For that suggestive titular phrase, the verbal equivalent of a ghostly apparition, is also the fictional equivalent of dramatic speech, like the simple and direct lines that open Hamlet: "Who's there?" and "Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself." And yet in this story no level of human experience, not even the "mind's eye" that Hamlet recommended to Horatio or that Shakespeare so impressed upon Yeats, accurately mediates between the real and the imagined, the scene and the so-called said.56 In Beckett's late fiction "the mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries." All is— if not quite Endgame's "Corpsed"57—"Dazzling." The "sole certitude" in this "brief paradox" is "haze." It is typical of Beckett to expose the inadequacy of any ' 'pure figment'' ("if only [it] could be pure figment")—visionary, literal, or literary—by drawing so richly and so circumstantially on the best that has been thought and said. We have been through this ritual before. Those "howls of laughter of the damned" we "hear from here" in the unearthly "paradise" of/// Seen III Said sound like something we might have formally assigned to

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Dante; now it's pure Beckett: "The silence merges into music infinitely far and as unbroken as silence. Ceaseless celestial winds in unison." Apollinaire is similarly retrieved by this text's "Panic past pass on." And Beckett's "careful" inversion of "Burnt Norton" is especially "unspeakable" in terms of such dramatic reconstructions; unlike the windy rhetoric of Eliot' s " At the still point of a turning world,'' Beckett locates his cabin and his "guardians" at "the inexistent centre of a formless place."58 /// Seen III Said sets other "wrong" words in motion: "hold it in thrall'' and ' 'death-paler than life'' by way of''La Belle Dame sans Merci'' (Keats); "tears perhaps not for nothing," a prosaic rewrite of "Tears, Idle Tears"; the refrain of "No more!" from the same blank-verse lyric by Tennyson, as well as from Shelley's "A Lament" (also used not quite accurately in Happy Days); and final near-quotations from Ezra Pound and Gerard Manley Hopkins.59 And, as was noted in the first chapter of this study, /// Seen III Said reverberates with the sound of Shakespeare's dramatic voice, the "vile jelly" of King Lear, the simulation of a "rankest weed" from Hamlet, the "chink[s]" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the grim wordplay that reapplies the "done"/"undone" dialogue from Macbeth (as Beckett had earlier done in Ohio Impromptu).60 No Shakespeare play contributes as much to the sound of III Seen III Said as Othello; it offers the present fiction a complete vocabulary of black-and-white imagery, now turned slightly askew: A moor would have better met the case. Were there a case better to meet. There had to be lambs. Rightly or wrongly. A moor would have allowed for them. Lambs for their whiteness. And for other reasons as yet obscure.... That from one moment to the next she may raise her eyes to find them gone. A moor would have allowed of them. In any case too late. And what lambs. No trace of frolic. White splotches in the grass. Aloof from the unheeding ewes. Still. Then a moment straying. Then still again. To think there is still life in this age. (p. 11)

"Even now, now, very now," says lago to Desdemona's distraught father, Brabantio, "an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe."61 "Under the weight of the rime"—pun intended—and out-Winnie-ing the Winnie of Happy Days, such "frolic" has been in Beckett's text everywhere ill-said: What tales had they tongues to tell. The misfired misquotation, referring us to yet another source but never getting it quite right, prepares us for the complete breakdown of any system of synchronization. The "filthy eye of flesh," digesting its "pittance,"

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will come under particular scrutiny, much to its own disadvantage. Recording things that are "hardly there and wholly gone," such mindless seeing is constantly undermined as a "mirage." Even before the "she" of this piece can proceed any further, "she fades and disappears": "She is vanishing. With the rest. The already ill seen bedimmed and ill seen again annulled. . .. True that light distorts. Particularly sunset. That mockery." The "outward and so-called visible" provides this text with nothing more than a "daub," a faint "fringe of black veil" at best: "Quick again to the brim the old nausea and shut again." What this eye sees can be only the outward and merely decorative detail, as when it seizes on the longevity of a sidelined coat-hanger, a mere buttonhook. ("A lifetime of hooking has lessened its curvature.") Such images of reality, "true plaster,"62 not only compromise the legitimacy of representation, but display a "flagrant concern with camouflage." And yet the "eye" cannot help but "return to the scene of its betrayals. On centennial leave from where tears freeze.'' But then Yeats suddenly intrudes with his own "safety in derision": Fifteen apparitions have I seen; The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger. (from "The Apparitions") The eye of the imagination, traditionally promising something like real vision at last, "makes way for unreason." ("Alone the eye has changed. Alone can cause to change.") Ah. And yet, as this text demonstrates, the opposition between the seen and the unseen is not quite so binary as it might once have been said to be. Facing a predictably black curtain, a "stark" and "skeleton" chair "exudes its solitude." (A strongbox's isolation is, similarly, said to be "no lesser.") The power of the imagination soon invades this sense of insolite and inhabits the empty space with "her" familiar gesture, "stockstill" once again in "the rigid Memnon pose." "But quick seize her where she is best to be seized": a sight, unseen, is suddenly seen, "head haught," and more real than "real" because so artificially constructed: "frozen true to her wont she seems turned to stone." The eye that closes in the dark, "as if dazed by what seen behind the lids," succeeds against all odds and momentarily "sees her in the end." Mouthing the words, as in the television play .. . but the clouds. . ., a persuasive imagination makes it possible for us to see how "Alone the face remains." There is something more tangible than "noth-

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ing" for the "staring eye" to see here than "the chair in its solitude": her and her rags of sky and earth. Despite such dramatic effects, the imagination, straining for atmosphere and a scenography of presence, will be downgraded as a privileged site of reliable signification: "Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing." What had been formally celebrated in the Beckett repertory as the "unqualifiable murmur" in "the blue celeste of poesy"63 is now at "wit's end," spreading "its sad wings." "Weary," this too is wearing thin, offering the present text an "inanimate" image "till suddenly it blurs." Like the withered crocuses and the last rays of sun "that once beat down" on this cold winter evening, "little by little her footprints are effaced." Ill-seen in the "gloom"—no—"the semigloom" of half-light, this image has no real staying power. "Everywhere stone is gaining." And yet, as the image of a "zone of stones" confirms in "such vicissitude," we still need metaphors, no matter how mal dit, to say there will be no more metaphors. There is, as in earlier Beckett, always a "choice of images."64 But in this case /// Seen III Said paces its material so skillfully that it never allows pathos to blunt the self-deprecating edge. Ironically, the "viewlessness" of the said—the so-said and the illsaid—will be called on once again to authenticate the dull, "Voidlike calm as always." With "no help from the eye," this task in /// Seen III Said is fraught with "unbearable," even "unspeakable" perils. For in this late work of fiction things are never "white," only "Said white." What announces itself as explicitly verbal frames the visual and draws each of its "figments" closer to something that is supposed to be real, "Safe as the saying is and sound." Here the textual priorities of saying it involve a "quick" reconsideration of some Beckett variations we have witnessed before: the windows, the woman in black, and the "to" and "fro" of Rockaby; the Memnon pose of Still and Malone Dies; the April afternoon and the "always winter" of Not I; the "hutch" and the "close-up of a dial" of Company; the "abode" of The Lost Ones and Waiting for Godot (which yields a more-than-English "calm" to the void this time around); the "ghost of an ancient smile"—"questionable"—that closes That Time by "smiling finally once and for all"; the "ruined mansion," a doublebarreled legacy from All That Fall and Murphy; the ' 'ashes" and' 'embers'' of Endgame and Embers (which also allowed us to hear the sound of the sea); the "head haught" of What Where and Ping; the "moment" and the "widowed eye" that refashion two notes from the audioscript of Krapp's Last Tape; the "tears" of Watt and ("presumably") Mouth; the prayers and "rafters" of Happy Days; the "old deal" furniture of Ohio Impromptu;

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the odd blocking by east and north and west from . . . but the clouds . . .; and the "farrago" of so many other ills ("ill-inspired," "ill-remembered," "ill-rendered," "ill-received," "ill-recorded," "ill-murmured," "illtold," and especially "ill-spoken") from How It Is, which similarly inscribes the massive corruption of another "to be and not to be," one more frantic "labour lost."65 This fiction has said more than "Enough." Even more than to these textual allusions, /// Seen III Said is indebted to the syntactical complexion, grammatical patterning, and rhetorical strategy we have previously assigned to the art of Beckett's extended oeuvre.66 These elemental motifs in language everywhere signal the sound of Beckett, the "death again of deathless day," the "Day without end won and lost," a "Day as sooner risen fallen," the "shadow" and the "company." Such a self-generative system of repetition, reflexivity, and difference, as Steven Connor has argued,67 approximates and counterbalances what has come before, rewriting a formidable literary past by reinventing it in other words, soon dismissed as equally "wrong": See them again side by side. Not quite touching. . . . No more lambs. "No more flowers," for example, not only offers us a handy reduction of Enough ("Now I'll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds"),68 but restructures the sound of the same story through tone and rhythm, as though it were a musical quotation in the orchestration of some quite different score. We have heard all of this before; but the art and craft of saying it in fiction involves hearing "bits and scraps" we have heard many times before as though we are now hearing them for the first time: At this rate it will be black night before she reaches home. Home! (p. 24) How find her way home? Home! Even as the homing bird. (p. 34)

Alone night fallen she makes for home. Home!

(p. 37)

Such steady evaluation of the measured word, the adequate depiction, the appropriate syntax, and the necessary incremental repetition69 are of course writers' questions, but Beckett's texts have been sharing this crisis of representation with their readers at least as early as Malone Dies.70 In /// Seen III Said such "folly," like Lucky's long speech, hardly knows how to "resume": "Resume the—what is the word? What the wrong word?"71 This text must therefore tread lightly, proceeding, as it reminds itself, "gently gently." It must be "Careful" about going "On," especially

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about shapes and colors, fabric and line, dimension and scale—all such "mild shocks," all such "mysteries": White walls. High time. White as new. No wind. Not a breath. Unbeaten on by all that conies beating down. And mystery the sun has spared them. The sun that once beat down. So east and west sides the required clash. South gable no problem. But the other. That door. Careful. Black too? Black too. And the roof. Slates. More. Small slates black too brought from a ruined mansion. What tales had they tongues to tell. Their long tale told. Such the dwelling ill seen ill said. Outwardly. High time. (pp. 42-43)

Such descriptions, admittedly arbitrary, are nevertheless "cunningly contrived." They provide answers to some questions, though not necessarily the ones a given reader might be tempted to ask. ("Promising this concern with camouflage. But beware. Question by the way what wood of all woods? Ebony why not? Ebony boards . . . ") For as long as there are stories to be written down, even when that story is that there are no more stories to be written down, there will always be considerations of text no discourse will be able to "abort": Was it ever over and done with questions?. . . With not being able. With not being able not to want to know. With not being able. No. Never. A dream. Question answered. ... If there may not be no more questions let there at least be no more answers. (pp. 37, 43)

This text therefore constructs for itself its own lethal trap: "Such—such fiasco that folly takes a hand." It self-consciously, at times even satirically, flirts with the concretion of certainty that its own being as a written commodity repeatedly repudiates and denies. What this document needs is the collaboration of a ("more or less") solid script, a said that reveals the interpretation that belongs to the quality of sound in every individual human voice. Saying in the print culture and saying as an act of heightened speech are therefore subject to a variety of negotiations within the sixty-one paragraphs of /// Seen III Said. Such agents of their own separate discourses are not always compatible with one another. Like Joe and Bob in Words and Music, each goes its own way as each strives to be something "other.'' On the one hand fiction, on the other drama, III Seen III Said helps to clarify the distinction between text and script used as a paradigm in the present study.72 The voice of speech and the voice of fiction play here in

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uneasy counterpoint, now a solo, now a symphony, always reminding us that a solo and a symphony are where "you" find "it." I say "it" as I hear "it," but as I set down what I hear as a text, Venus pencil in hand, that temporary inscription soon becomes subject to the laws of a very different genre.73 Unencumbered by an accompanying discussion on the nature and the virtue of recitatio, III Seen III Said, "rhetorical question less the rhetoric,"74 upstages its own vulnerability by performing more lively theatrical tricks of its own. Beckett lets the rhetoric fall where it may, "with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits," and "the vomit."75 One of the great strengths of this presentation is its ability to make us see through the said. ("No bones but say bones.") "Her" face appears only because we hear how words sound it silently into being: "Livid pallor. Not a wrinkle. How serene it seems this ancient mask. Worthy those worn by certain newly dead." In one "treacherous" word, "light" also comes into its "might," once it is spoken into scripted and scriptural terms, as it supposedly was at the very beginning of all recorded time. There is, as always, only "Silence at the eye of the scream," but stories require the sound of words, a speaker and a voice, to make us hear the particulars of that "ancient horror": Silence but for the imaginary murmur of flakes on the roof. And every now and then a real creak. Her company. (p. 34) . . . faster than the stones invade it the other ground upheaves its own. So far in silence. A silence time will break. This great silence evening and night. Then all along the verge the muffled thud of stone on stone. Of those spilling their excess on those emergent. Only now and then at first. Then at ever briefer intervals. Till one continuous din. With none to hear. Decreasing as the levels draw together to silence once again. Evening and night. (pp. 27-28) The silence merges into music infinitely far and as unbroken as silence. Ceaseless celestial winds in unison. (P- 42) Sigh upon sigh till all sighed quite away. (P- 56)

Beckett's potent silence can sometimes speak in a very loud voice indeed: "Quick say it suddenly can and farewell say say farewell."

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Part of the effect of "all this—" speaking in /// Seen III Said requires a listener, for this fiction is a participatory act, this time with words.76 Verbs and nouns are odd souls; they "scrute" and "jake," "a few drops mishaphazard. Then strangury." (To scrute—to scrutinize [obsolete]; to jake—to trifle, delay, dawdle [an earlier form of jauk]; strangury—a slow and painful discharge of urine, drop by drop, also used in Murphy.)77 As the ear, such the object; for, as we hear in this piece, the "eye has changed," along with "its drivelling scribe." A new form of inscription is required: the voice that each listener hears. Look is "too weak a word," "too wrong." There's a world—of words—elsewhere: How explain it? And without going so tar how say it? Far behind the eye the quest begins. What time the event recedes. When suddenly to the rescue it comes again. Forthwith the common noun collapsion. Reinforced a little later if not enfeebled by the infrequent slumberous. A slumberous collapsion. Two. Then far from the still agonizing eye a gleam of hope. By the grace of these modest beginnings.

(p. 55)

111 seen ill said? Not that "slumberous collapsion," which has a sensational and highly original sound of its own, though such words have appeared in other combinations before.78 No longer obsolete, the phrase guarantees the exclusive rights to its own "Remembrance!"79 These words may indeed be the "last sighs" of a "black heart"—"not even"—but the voice that speaks this ritual, this (w)rite, provides the proper site and sound for all that might be heard in the dark: "All that trash . . . the fond trash." Words, Beckett's words, have now come into their own, "For the last time at last for to end yet again"80 (but "slowly dispelled a little very little like the last wisps of day when the curtain closes"). There can now be a palpable and previously unimaginable "Farewell to farewell," a "westering sun" and a positively "eastering earth," and even an unspecified but performative "grace" to "breathe that void," each tactile unit the same and different, each one "drawn" by still another "phantom hand." There is now a full "cast" of voices, as in the "quick" and the so-called dead.81 "Back after many winters," less can even be heard, ironically, as one word more: "Less. Ah the sweet one word. Less. It is less. The same but less." Voice and text and emotion are always writing this script down, always searching for the elusive sound of each new "End begun." "Analogy of the heart? The skull?" The script we hear as we say "it" outlasts the text

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but always returns us to the text for one more "So on," one more "slumberous collapsion,'' one more ' 'First last moment.'' That last, as promised, shall be first—for the final inflection of that most fatal inversion is still to come in the life of every consciousness and "not possible any longer as figment.'' What is the word? What the wrong word? Try Scrapped: Try again. Fail again. Fail better . .. Better again ... No try no fail. 82 Saying "Nohow on" I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. —Endgame Demonstrative as well as declarative, the enlivening sound of "scrapped" relegates a stage persona like "Krapp" to some fateful past tense. That is both the inner colloquy and conundrum of Beckett's histrionic language— and just such a verbal mystery provides the point of departure for a zestful journey worstward ho, "said nohow on." Sound is once again the body and focus that gives each new work breadth, vigor, and unparalleled coherence. Voice plays the signifying part: "said nohow" is a play on the sound of its own robust sound, the specifically "said" know-how and technical skill to make words convey some "Meaning—meaning!—meaning . . .," however ephemeral, "Somewhose somewhere somehow," just when there is supposed to be, at long last, nothing: "Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on." "In the beginning was the pun," we heard long ago in Murphy, "And so on." This is "the unalterable / whey of words."83 Unlike /// Seen III Said, a difficult enterprise that relies on the enigmatic figuration of an old woman and an arbitrary disposition of the spheres to sustain its tension between an ambiguous here and a nebulous there, Worstward Ho84 suppresses the "folly" of external representation to concentrate on the profoundly internal mystery that is deeply embedded in the act of saying anything at all. "On," for example (and in Beckett "there is nothing like examples"85), always yields one more trinity of "unutter[ed]" KH-'S: "Unmoreable wnlessable unworseable evermost almost void." In this lexicon, both flawed and fascinating from a conventional point of view, "you" might as well forget about the slight pause provided midsentence by the intrusion of a comma, a welcome relief; everything in this frenzied display will be equally nonrestrictive, equally parenthetical:

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"Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worse. With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse." Far from being abstract, however, the piece involves nothing less than an "inventory" and a reconsideration of the complete Beckett vocabulary.86 All items previously "said,'' no matter how strenous, no matter how vague, no matter how opportunely poetic, have now become suspect, and are irresistibly disarmed and damned. The nervous energy of "said" is in and of itself a truant, feverishly missaid: "Whenever said said said missaid." Compared to the confessional mode of this dramatic interlude, even a heroic episode like "I can't go on, I'll go on" seems all at once simple and direct—and is here unexpectedly suborned.87 The know-how to make words, even the worst of them, say "nohow on"—despite the fact that the cards are in all ways irredeemably stacked against it—involves nothing less than an obsession with obsession itself. Here the churning repetition of a few motifs, the sense of unease, the eversharpening rhythms and edgier lines, as well as the occasional rotund phrase and the even rarer lyrical excess, is subject to the kind of elaborate patterning associated with an earlier work like Lessness. Authorizing only the dimmest of dim voids, words, blanks, and three insubstantial shades, Beckett initialed a key to seven elements in his text, the "meremost minimum," which Andrew Renton88 effectively characterizes as follows: S(hade) 1 The pained body of bones that rises and kneels. S(hade) 2 The combined image of man and child. S(hade) 3 The perceiving head or skull, "Germ of all." D(im) V(oid) W(ords) B(lanks)

Such a localized grid on an ever-diminishing short list (blanks can be only blanks—but more on that later) allows Beckett the freedom to range widely as he explores the shifting dimensions of a tightly controlled composition, especially those formal tonalities tempering if not quite equating sound with emerging sense. And that's how it is: you will have a little voice it will be barely audible you will whisper in his ear you will have a little life you will whisper it in his ear it will be different

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quite a different music you'll see a little like Pirn a little life music but in your mouth it will be new to you (How It Is, pp. 23-24)

Consider the title. Worstward Ho will be merely a supratext that, in contrast to the "company" and "ill seen ill said" of related prose pieces, refuses to insinuate its energetic presence into the composition it so deftly names. Many allusions are built into the sound of its two strangely defiant words, as though language itself were remembering, like Nell in Endgame, its own yesterdays. Beyond Lessness, beyond Fizzles, beyond even A Piece of Monologue or /// Seen III Said, the title is almost a self-parody, neither backward nor forward but imposing itself in an entirely different dimension of the "time-space relation." "Forward!" we read long ago in The Unnamable. "That's soon said. But where is forward? And why?"89 The direction of "worstward ho" has its eye on a separate course, imagining new words and the attendant new worlds90 that might bring an unprecedented reading to a line from /// Seen III Said like "Pfft occulted. Nothing having stirred." (Compare the fundamental noise Watt hears Mr Knott make in the flower garden: ' 'PLOPF PLOPF Plopf Plopf plopf plopf plop plo pl"—a "fart fraught with meaning" if there ever was one.)91 Although some of this title's overtones are strictly on the level of a crossword puzzle (two across: Beckett's worst word, "Worse words for worser still"), other implications of this worst word go demand to be taken sometimes more seriously, sometimes even more ironically. In addition to the line from King Lear that casts its own shadow over this work ("the worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst' "), the title also memorializes Othello, as John Pilling previously noted: ' 'give thy worst of thoughts / Thy worst of words."92 Like so much else that will happen in this undertaking, Beckett's title begins by making us uncertain and ends by leaving us insecure. "Worstward ho"—significantly without the exclamation point (what is there to exclaim about?)—is, therefore, an immediately obtainable pun; but it also intertextualizes a Renaissance play—Webster and Dekker's Westward Hoe (1607); Viola's bravura "westward-ho" in Twelfth Night; and a Victorian novel set in Elizabethan times, Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855). The title not only makes capital of the darkening leitmotif of riding westward, made famous by another seventeenth-century writer, John Donne, but further prepares us for this work's skillful incorporation of the kind of poetic energy T. S. Eliot so much admired in the dramatic language of the Tudor and Stuart playwrights. The "pox," "ooze," and "gnawing" of Worstward Ho, as well as its archaic "twain" and "vast atween," are a high modernist attempt

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to reinvent a forgotten but still muscular Jacobean theater vocabulary.93 And every Beckett reader will find satisfaction in the recognition that in Worstward Ho, where the Word has become the ultimate dramatis persona, "it" too has a name that falls in with the long line of Ms and Ws marching triumphantly through the repertory, a weak and private but pervasive joke that may in part explain the "ho"—what Arsene calls in Watt "the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please—at that which is unhappy." Ho no.94 The supratext of Worstward Ho, a title with its own entitlement in a genre of its own, alerts us to the kind of performative language that can take center stage in the script that follows, not the least of which will be a resonant "preying" and the ominous "Whence no farther." Like Watt's "witness that cannot be sworn" and Gamier's absent God ("the all unfuckable"),95 this same "farther" achieves its "true" identity only as it is meant to "Be said on." Such language, a "slumberous collapsion" eccentrically compressed into itself,96 depends for what remains of its life on the "said said said"; "it" can be, preying/praying, no/know, farther/ father/Father, if and only when whatever "it" is is heard. In this "shaderidden void" the prologue, the chorus, and the rising action have now, at the tail end of a second trilogy, suddenly become one. "Add? Never." This is making a rather large claim for Worstward Ho, a text that on first "apergu" might appear to begin somewhat tentatively and altogether too parodically with the sound of a mere fourteen words divided into a half-dozen seemingly abandoned lexical units: On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on. (p. 7)

But Beckett's language all through this second trilogy has been threatening to close in on itself. In the opening lines of Worstward Ho just quoted there are no fewer than six on's mediated by as many forceful end-stops, as though some odd variation of a sestina were about to begin. On looms large, larger than it would in the patterns of everyday speech, a note that becomes ever more expansive as its "same flat tone" accumulates a repetitive energy determining the rhythm, tempo, and movement of each beat in the unfolding musical pattern.97 This inward-bound soliloquy (the flip side of Ruby Cohn's phrase to describe Beckett's monologic structure in the theater)98 is contained by a firm stanzaic structure masquerading in the printed text as ninety-five paragraphs of unequal tone, perspective, and length. The piece is, furthermore, divided asymmetrically into two parts,

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two separate but related verbal acts: the sound of stanza 45, ending economically and distinctively on the multiple double entendres of "Scene and seer of all," signals a firm break in the action, such as it is. After the briefest of silent interludes, stanza 46 initiates the text's second movement, efficiently resuming with disturbing echoes of the opening sextet: On. Stare on. Say on. Be on. Somehow on. Anyhow on. (p. 24)

Progressively isolating the word "on" to give dignity to its solitude, Worstward Ho pays scant attention to conventional form and even to previously familiar Beckettian rhythms; it goes "on" its own way. Language here takes a deep breath. But then "it all" resumes: words can be aerobic, and high impact. We watch as the adrenalin begins to flow. Still doggedly determined to remain only in its own service, such language remodels itself and aims to convey no separate narrative: "All gnawing to be naught" but "Never to be naught." Variously pitched toward giddiness, dejection, and an elusive triumph, its moods grow distorted and extreme, in turn lyrical, epic, and indecipherable (as the Unnamable says, "There must be other shifts").99 Recycling such a small repertory of minimal images, rhetorical devices, and syntactical gestures, it soon becomes evocative beyond the normal bounds of more haloed literary tropes. These words want to speak for themselves: Not to know what it is the words it says say. Says? Secretes. Say better worse secretes. What it is the words it secretes say. What the so-said void. The so-said dim. The so-said shades. The so-said seat and germ of all. (p. 30) By exploiting language's various sound textures and always relying on the additive process of a voice, the sonic repertory of Worstward Ho has been vastly increased. The repetition, extension, and alteration of sound expands the limits of the written word and makes the listener discover that such limits are much wider than might have been initially supposed. Each voice will give this text a personality of its own. The text, however, goes a long way to help each voice build a character and sustain a characterization if not standardized, at least complete. For Worstward Ho offers the reader an opportunity in language reduced to its most human and tender form, words meant to be spoken and to be heard. Although "one" is not normally encouraged to write words like "unworsenable worse," something that is supposed to be far worse than the

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worst, one can certainly say them, and with impunity, especially when one hears the voice of a rich dramatic tradition behind them: " . . . Why bastard? Wherefore base? . . . Why brand they us / With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?"100 Here the drama of King Lear captures the vital movement of thought as a character removes his mask and summons his own true self into being. A private moment on stage is shaped into the illusion and the event of spontaneous speech. Edmund speaks in his own "grammar" and in his own "style," free from the constraints of an eviscerated language whose only potential is to be written down, the dogma Beckett disparaged early on. "Grammar and Style!" he wrote to Axel Kaun in 1937, "They appear to me to have become just as obsolete as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask."101 But the recitation, as King Lear can prove in performance, is the best "part" of the text, the one un- that is determined to sound itself into some vibrant "Ununsaid" never heard before. There may be, after all, something to exclaim about: The words too whosesoever. What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity! Say the night is young alas and take heart. Or better worse say still a watch of night alas to come. A rest of last watch to come. And take heart. (p. 21)

A passage from Worstward Ho such as this shows us just how much an exclamation point can do. ("True. True!") Scoring an arrangement for performance ("Joy!. . . Only!"), the device also cues its possibilities for interpretation. It makes deceptive, if not impossible, any colorless delivery in the "same flat tone," unless we imagine these three words as a director's reprimand to a speech that is running away with itself—in which case the missing point of exclamation (Same flat tone!) would have to be, as in "imagination dead imagine," one more silent imperative. In Worstward Ho the sound-sense relation—and what else is the language we speak but that?—is extended to antonyms, homonyms, quantifiers, and qualifiers of the most wrcusual sort, the "uninane," the "unsunk," and the "unutter" with "equal plod still unreceding on." This grammar and this style, "Never more," now frames the mind-body dichotomy in a decidedly awkward position, one that "stands" while it is still "lying," "two too." "Worsening words" soon lead to a predictably "worsening stare." In this "Same thing. Same nothing. Same all but nothing," polarities can remain polarities even when they are poles apart, so-say, un-say, and mis-say: "Far and wide the same. High and low.

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Unchanging." Things have not gone from bad to worse, they are the worst; things are not small, they are the "meremost minimum"; a shade is not but a shade, but "But but a shade"; things are not far, but "far far," sometimes even "far far far"; things are, once again, not simply stated, but "said said said." Even the "dim void" is exponentially articulated, "dim dimmed" and "dimmest dimmed." Words seek their own clarification, their own liberation, their own mighty autonomy; they "long" to modify themselves, adverb piled on adverb, noun self-justifying noun. This is something more than textual inversion or the repetition scanned on a page, for this is also the rhythm of dialogue in the "hieroglyphics" of everyday speech. ("How far is X from Y?" I "Far. . .far"; "Did you hear what she said?" I "Said? . . .Said?"; "Why brand they us I With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?".) Beckett always admired, as he said of more than one of his many visitors from Ireland, "a great talker."102 But certainly no one ever spoke the strange English of Worstward Ho, not even Beckett's Watt, so adept at inverting not only the syntax of a sentence, but even the letters of every word in it—soon dismissed by an impatient narrator as "so much Irish to me." Longing for the right word, the word that can eventually say it "in a word,"103 this script keeps reimagining and reinventing itself—"No try no fail": Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so-rnissaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing. Long vain longing. And longing still. Faintly longing still. Faintly vainly longing still. For fainter still. For faintest. Faintly vainly longing for the least of longing. Unlessenable least of longing. Unstillable vain last of longing still. (pp. 36-37) Lacking all pronouns, Worstward Ho leaves us uncertain us to which inscription confines or is confined by which of its subsequent modifications. Even on the rare occasions when an article introduces a little variety into "the heat of composition," such determination provides only a very distorted close focus: "a child and yet a child"; "a woman's and yet a woman's"; "a man and yet a man," the last said to be "old yet old." Even the staccato phrasing of "vertex vertical" is hard to pin down: eloquent redundancy, antonym for "most mere minimum," or highest of high points for precisely—precisely!—what?104 "Go no" is a pun extended. Double negatives are supposed to yield something positive, but not in this "onceless" work. Just as the movement of Worstward Ho alternates between technical

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know-how and a desperate "nohow"—there is no way to go on, "Throw up for good"—so too this text dramatizes the conflict between the sound of words and the silence that hovers over them. The "blanks for nohow on" are the greatest asset such an imagined silence has at its disposal, for they function as an integral part of the text in the gaps framing each stanza. Intimately scored as rests for the voice, such "blanks" exist literally "for when words gone." And though the words will try to "ooze" their way "back" in to "worsen blanks," their sound will depend on them to achieve their rightful articulation. For the blanks in this text exist to spotlight the words by making us hear the intrusive beat of silence that surrounds them, the particular "nothingness" such words everywhere set about "to enclose." Here "silence falls, with rhetorical intent." And compared to this silence, all other blanks—for instance, the quads at every printer's disposal—will appear only as nothing, "No comparison, no comparison."105 The structure of Worstward Ho allows us to hear the supporting role of silence in other ways as well, as its series of false starts trails off into the "all clear" of "dim void": Where then but there see—

(p. 12)

Where then but see there now— (p. 12)

The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail. Say only— (p. 17) Add a—. (p. 22)

Next try fail better two. The twain. Bad as it is as it is. Bad the no— (P- 22) Next— (p. 23)

The eyes. Time to— (P- 27)

Worst in need of worse. Worse in— The empty too. Away. No hands in the—.

(p. 31)

(p. 33)

Yet not every start proves equally indeterminate and equally false. Sometimes the sound of words will break through the silence and "say"

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something, however "missaid," in spite of itself: "Only nohow on. All not gone and nohow on." For in this attempt to "desophisticate" English, language can be caught off guard by all it claims to "no." Every word is the worst word when every word spoken fills in the blanks and tells a little story of its own.106 An image intrudes, worstward ho: "Clenched eyes. Staring eyes. Clenched staring eyes." Worse still, the image goes so far as to allow us to hear how it gets itself said, from "clenched eyes" to "staring eyes" to what a now-discredited view of language used to call the inevitability of "clenched staring eyes"—"three pins," as this text declares in the penultimate stanza, for "one pinhole." The structure of such a romantic "Beyondless" will reassert itself, as in "Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there." The narration that longs to narrate nothing is finally undone, its own hands defiled in an exclamation now called "crippled." Things are beginning to unravel. And in this drama sly language outsmarts the prepared text: "No future in this. Alas yes." Some thing has inadvertently happened, "a little yes, a little no, enough to exterminate a regiment of dragoons."107 The attempt to make language forget itself, its own history, and its own fretful autonomy is a myth, like the belief in The Lost Ones that there exists a way out. Though "any other would do as ill," the shade of an old woman and the "combined image of man and child," figures no longer "vis-a-vis" but "temple to temple alone," are suddenly said to be there, "Stare clamped to stare." This time anatomy,108 as puzzling as a Louis le Brocquy disembodied head, is literally a hole: "Say better worse now all gone save trunks from now. Nothing from pelves down. From napes up. Topless baseless hindtrunks. Legless plodding on. Left right unreceding on." What remains of the frail and fractured "pained body of bones" wants nothing, asks for nothing, only to get itself said back into words—to be, "Say a body"—before the text comes to rest in silence. For these lonely creatures there is no "nohow," no other "anyhow" on. The worst of words, even this crash course in the "worse" and "worst" neologisms, is the last vestige of a spoken language, the only remnant of what used to be the signifying system of life itself: "it" is what makes us human and defines the real. "What when words gone?" Only shades, dim, void— and that other reality, blanks. This second trilogy, therefore, ends where it began, but with a marked difference: the voice that comes to "one" in the dark is having a harder time getting itself heard and getting itself said. No wonder: "All is," this time around, "Less. Less seen. Less seeing." Trying "harder" to "fail better," the constant risk is in itself riveting. In Worstward Ho the violent

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extremes of dissonance, the tone clusters, the dense poly tonal counterpoint, and the recurring sonorities and leitmotifs display surprising reserves of fastidiousness, avoiding a cumulative effect that could be monotonous. Bringing fluidity to the composition, words are in constant dialogue with themselves, just as the faintly triumphant' 'Said nohow on'' of the climactic closing section trumpets the last wary words of the text's opening remarks. Even in the austerity of extended silences the sensory experience of sound predominates. Here the "inexhaustible" is "inexhaustibly replenished," even when the "acoustics" are "wretched," "the merest scraps, literally."109 Transforming the abstract signs of words into concrete sound and modifying our ideas about what constitutes the pacing of a text, the suddenness of the dynamic outbursts in this piece defies symmetrical predictability. This text even derives a kind of playfulness from its numerous quotations from earlier works. ("Everything oozes," says Gogo, in Waiting/or Godot, too.)110 Original in its pattern, syntax, and undermining of traditional narrative devices, including those used by Beckett before, this piece reaches for an expressiveness, an expansiveness, and a melodic ritualism of its own. If it "fails" in some respects, it works nonetheless on a higher and more abstract level than that on which the others succeed. Worstward Ho is in this context the final interrogative—witness the number of question marks that "far far far" outpace any exclamations the text implies: "Less than? Less worse than?"; "What why of all?" Confusing the direction of what used to be metaphor, nuance, and metonymy, words ricochet "leastward," sometimes requiring even Watt's several modes of inversion for some semblance of definition and ordered disorder.111 Yet such discord can be eloquently hued, halfway between blank verse and an alexandrine: ' 'If more dim less light then better worse more dim." The increasingly intimate and energetic colloquy of words belies language's general inadequacies, for in Worstward Ho all articulations are articulations scripted: a "pox on bad," a "pox on void." The "true" text is therefore somewhere beyond or above or beneath the text we read, in the sound of a voice that still comes to us "in the dark,"112 no matter how faintly murmured, no matter how compromised, no matter how "pending worse still." In this respect the long journey of words in Company, III Seen III Said, and Worstward Ho achieves something like a destination and a final destiny, the last w/rite of all: "no blurs"—the right to "Be said on." For in every articulation of these texts, nothing less than silence itself is muted: "Try again. Fail again. ... Try see. Try say." Imagine!— imagine?—imagine saying, somehow, "all of old," "nothing else ever," Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

6 Posthumous Voices and More Stirrings Still

You needn't speak. Just listen. Not even. Be with me. —Embers

"The writing is over," Beckett said after completing Worstward Ho in 1983. He had simply and quite deliberately reconciled himself to not writing anything again. "Finally," he told Charles Juliet, "one no longer knows who is speaking. The subject disappears completely. That's where the crisis of identity ends."1 But three years later he responded to the predicament of Barney Rosset, whose latest business difficulties in New York had forced him to sell the Grove imprint and all of its stock to Ann Getty and Lord Weidenfeld in 1985.2 Thirteen months after the deal was struck, Rosset was fired, severing his last link to the celebrated avant-garde publishing house with which his name had long been associated. (When he bought the company in 1953, it had a short list of only three books: Melville's The Confidence-Man, Selected Writings of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn, and The Poetry of Richard Crashaw.) Recognizing Rosset's situation, Beckett sent him in early 1987 a two-page typescript, consisting of seven paragraphs, called merely "Fragment." Dated "July 1986," it was dedicated to Rosset, his American publisher; he promised to send another "third" if he could find a way to publish the initial installment separately. By the end of the year Beckett had sent two more modest pieces, the paragraphs that correspond to the second and third parts of what became known as Stirrings Still, a title suggested at the same time by the author himself. In a joint venture with John Calder, Beckett's publisher for his nondramatic work in London, an enterprising Barney Rosset set about to publicize a deluxe, limited edition of 226 copies of Stirrings Still as the inaugural volume for his newly launched company, Blue Moon Books in 145

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New York. Illustrated by the Irish artist Louis le Brocquy, the designer for the Gate Theatre's highly acclaimed Dublin production of Waiting for Godot in 1988,3 the book featured one original image of Samuel Beckett, a lithograph in two tones, and eight original lithographic drawings in black ink. Two hundred copies, numbered by hand and signed by the author, were listed for sale in England for 750 pounds and in the United States for 1500 dollars.4 By the time this expensively prepared project appeared in print, to coincide with the author's eighty-third birthday on April 13, 1989, Stirrings Still had already been published in the Guardian and the Manchester Guardian Weekly, with five printing errors and its three sections not appropriately separated.5 John Calder republished the correct version of Stirrings Still in 1990 as part 4 of As the Story Was Told, a more commercially viable edition of uncollected and late prose that concludes with the first bookbound printing of Beckett's very last piece, what is the word.6 From the outset it was clear that Stirrings Still was something more than a payback—a generous attempt on the author's part to prop up the ailing fortunes of the publisher who had early on become the vehicle for his "getting known" in the United States.7 As the project developed, the piece became increasingly concerned with the formal contingencies and corresponding atonalities of a voice that, to paraphrase Hamm, wants to end, yet hesitates to end. The tension in this case is palpable and real, but whether the principle agent of inscription is a character or only a creative consciousness remains everywhere ambiguous, "now faint now clear." With its origins in Company ("Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unsellable"), the title is nicely and richly suggestive, one of those shrewd Beckettian puns that sounds truly "inexhaustible."8 As far back as Molloy the voice we hear is, like this one, a voice of "a world collapsing endlessly" back into itself: "These things, what things, come from where, made of what? And it says that here nothing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir, except myself, who do not stir either, when I am there, but see and am seen."9 The "faint stirrings" in both fictional enterprises are full of fluidity, gesture, and motion, yet by the time of Stirrings Still all indications of movement, both "rise" and "go," have turned lethal: in French Stirrings Still becomes Soubresauts, "death pangs" or "convulsions."10 Oh all to end. As Beckett's second trilogy proceeds from Company toward Worstward Ho, issues of tempo, duplication, and atmosphere are addressed from a wide range of perspectives; word, sound, and image come more and more to represent, examine, and justify themselves. They continue to do so in Stirrings Still. In these late pieces Beckett's language unsparingly

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confronts itself and, with unflinching self-possession, peers into its own flesh and bone as if in search of its own soul and its own mystery. The tendency to invest the voice with emotional intensity and to reduce the subject to its most stark essential elements culminates in the terse power of a last triptych on "time and grief and self." This is the final trilogy in which self-reflexivity is rendered as vivid self-scrutiny: "One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day." The "start" of the second paragraph revisits the same Spartan scene by introducing an additional complexity that is simultaneously illuminating, taunting, and a diversionary tactic. Without fully compromising the jurisdiction of what has just been said, the new organization of the same textual "facts" reconstitutes, nonetheless, the aural dimension of the emerging fable ("Expand!"" Gogo's word echoes here with renewed trepidation, "Expand!"): One night or day then as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. First rise and stand clinging to the table. Then sit again. Then rise again and stand clinging to the table again. Then go. Start to go. (p. 113)

Like some rhythmic etudes performed for their own sake, here we can explore on the microlevel of variation, inversion, and diminution what happens on the much wider canvas of Company, III Seen III Said, and WorstwardHo. And yet these last songs have a special interior life of their own, as though what has already been accomplished were some sort of significant failure, the back, "for example," of beyond. A thrice-told tale that is both threnody and a reduction of a reduction, Stirrings Still evolves into a study in tone and mood and scale where a term like overdetermination is an understatement. Downscaling and downsizing, the telling of this tale is the perilous miniaturization of the end of the end, three to the minus third. Such equations have been predicted in advance: the end is in the beginning and yet you go—what? where?—on.12 Such dire and aggressive economies of scale result in a series of harmonies that have been everywhere imagined for the dip and cadence of a human voice. The rawness of Worstward Ho has in this case been replaced by an almost lyrical handling; images and sounds seem less gruff, as if they were memories of the earlier ones, those previous lines pursued to their own mad conclusions and "said nohow on." Auditioning a voice and always intensifying by reduction, repetitions in Stirrings Still are what we might call "echo's bones."13 Addressing the mind as the smallest acoustic space that it is, echoes flow through this text as they announce

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themselves in counterpoint, polyphony, and repetition with minor variation. Equating dictio with action, all coloring is necessarily vocal; mutations of the soliloquy become a "meditation" on the sound of a word waiting to discover the dynamics of its own rhythm. Raising questions of proximity and distance that will eventually corrupt every attempt to reach an end, including this one, the intricate pattern of movement, of going to and coming from, fosters in each section three different states of creative consciousness moving toward three separate modes of closure. Such a fractional, seamless approach allows Beckett the opportunity to examine mood, tempo, melody, memory, and emotional intonation while all expression remains, as in music, internally contained. Every ending is another kind of beginning and another kind of failure, with more "stirrings" still to come.14 But seeing failure for the local activity that it is, language in Stirrings Still has become a strange advocate for its own inadequacy. Part of the risk of such posturing toward narrative supremacy in this unusual display concerns the assignment, ad verbum, of a consistent aural soundscape to define the boundaries of all three parts of this mercurial text. For such congruity in sound is not confined to symmetries of syntax, to the deft positioning of assonance and consonance, or even to the steady redistribution of a circumscribed line item that insists on getting itself heard "again" and then "again" again: As when he disappeared only to reappear later at another place. Then disappeared again only to reappear again later at another place again. So again and again disappeared again only to reappear again later at another place again. (p. 115)

In this "miserable splendour"15 such cyclical sonorities—the same place is the same place and yet placed textually in another place again—extend to a compositional imprinting in which every element networks its way to playing its part in an integrated and interdependent but still indeterminate whole. "A form fading among fading forms," as Molloy says, and free for the moment from its representational burden, a word can sound in this rhythmic context truly "... bizarre."16 A missed breath can tell the whole tale, for this vision is essentially an acoustical one that makes its appeal to the aural imagination. Beckett's language is possessed by thought, but these words, firm, elegiac, and haunting, are filled with feeling. The opener, the line that sets the processive nature of this work in motion, recalls another opening line that has been heard somewhere before: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree." Yeats has been similarly daring

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in evoking the repetitive rites of his own words, the sounds that lyricize an interior world far richer than the voices that might be heard at some advanced escape hatch like the lake isle of Innisfree: I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. (from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree")

In this early poem from The Rose Yeats, like Beckett, has taken to heart the sound of some words he has heard somewhere before: "I will arise and go to my father'' in the Christian parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:18). "What is that wonderful line. . . ," sighs Winnie, trailing off, "something something." "What are those exquisite lines?" she wonders again in act 2.17 The stirring of a world that begins with Yeats ends its first movement on a note borrowed from Shakespeare: the "second self" of Sonnet 73, the same source that gives Beckett his title for That Time. By contrast, the opening section of Stirrings Still presents only a mournful reading of "Death's second self," the so-said sleep "that seals up all in rest."18 For in this "black night" all simulations, Shakespeare's rest and Yeats' romantic retreat, prove equally fruitless. Death in this fragment is a far grimmer reaper than in its usual personification as disingenuous poetic metaphor. Notice, too, how in Stirrings Still Beckett can turn his story as well as his technique on a dime; although the first section begins with Yeats and ends on the sound of Shakespeare, the appeal to both literary sources gives a new spin to a loaded phrase like "signifying nothing." Shards of such language offer merely broken echoes: it's far too late in the Beckett canon to look to allusions, hints, or even the small gestures of remembered names to unravel the silence in the sturdy keep of words. Language can be a blunt instrument indeed, as though a writer could with one "stroke" jettison the literary style that had evolved in his culture over the previous four centuries. Mocking all eloquence and condemning tortuous circumlocution to near oblivion, a word from the past is shattered— unless, as Malone says, "unless it goes on beyond the grave," as they say.19 Such goings-on beyond the graveyard of literary history are what give life, oddly, to the strange diversions that take "place" in the "utter confusion" of the fitful composition at hand. For the "strokes" in this piece are, among other things, also the strokes of a "ballpoint at the

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ready,"20 Mai one's resharpened Venus pencil. The seven paragraphs in the first section of Stirrings Still are, "for example," stanzaic and full of the verbal energy one used to call, before the breakdown and deconstruction of all genre, poetic: each movement traces the steady progress of the slow journey that takes place in "the back roads" of language. In this instance a voice is, so to speak, on assignment, for it must compete with and sometimes even compensate for several other sounds that are simultaneously there and not there at all: Dantean "cries," the strokes of a clock from "afar," the stillness of the "faint" air, a note "carried by a wind," the "mere lull" of "waiting for nothing again." Sound measures time and dictates the formality of an arrangement that invites subtext. And as in The Lost Ones, what matters most in the deployment of such sound is the sound of the cessation of all sound, the moment when all goes' 'deathly still" before "the twofold storm resumes" and the silent typanum starts all over again.21 For the faintest way to stir, of course, is always to be actively listening—to adopt the famous Belacqua pose, "merely wondering," "merely waiting." The suspense of "waiting to hear" how this text moves on from one part to the next, from one minimal point to the next, builds more than "enough" tension to accomplish a number of other things as well. As the repeated vocal cadenza becomes no longer Platonic but literal, it introduces us to what Miss Counihan calls in Murphy a delayed but "ineffable counterpoint," one that allows us to hear individual elements turn and turn about. This "mutual comment" finds a related life for itself in the two sections that follow,22 but before it does so such elements of sound must secure for themselves a system of origination based on theme, countertheme, and subtle variation: to be, a "he" or a "one" must first be heard, stirring still, "whithersoever" and "whenceabouts." As the listener is surrounded by the limited lexicon of Stirrings Still, by those restricted articulations sharply scripted, each enunciation can be traced from its first instance to its "unchanging" last. Such a system of surround-sound provides several advantages, including the opportunity to experience greater dynamic range, a clearer separation of elements, and a lower threshold of distortion as an aural pattern begins to assert itself. Avoiding the rampage of any tantalizing, totalizing signifiers—things in this score are both "faint" and "clear"—all harmony is soon encoded as specific and relational: rise versus go, disappear versus reappear, hear versus listen, see versus look, night/day, dark/light, would/would not, toward/from. Furthermore, this piece proceeds by half measures: "half hoping, "half fearing," "half-hours." Even the prospect of renewed vision is rhythmically occluded: the "he" of this piece, retreading Clov's steps in the

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opening moments of Endgame, "would simply stand there high above the earth and see through the clouded pane the cloudless sky."23 Before long the piece has established for itself a complete vocabulary of contingencies, measures in ' 'time'' where one moment is weighed in relation to everything else: "then," "till," "since," "last," "too," "again," "before," "now," "thus," "ever," "never," "sometimes," "after," "past," "later," and "the second" (of two). Measures in time soon find their attendant localizations in the relativity of ambiguous space: "further," "toward," "high," "from," "beneath," "outer," "back roads," "another place," and "there" in relation to some unspecified here. In such a flexible environment, something as definite as an "end" is always "fleeting" and elusive, though such instability can be emotionally linked to the highly intimate outpouring of "time and grief and self." And, like words spoken to the empty air, the "so-called" end can also be personalized: the self unraveling here is now the "second self" that a pronoun has long waited to call "his own." This voice is stirring to be still. Stirring, however, like wondering and waiting, hoping and fearing and clinging, the other gerunds that happen here, exists only in the endless present that shapes one more fiction. Defying all time signatures, such present participles try to give the lie to what Winnie calls ' 'the old style,' '24 what this new soundscape configures as the "light he could remember from the days and nights when day followed hard on night and night on day." Death can be a safe harbor when it is the subject for a short story, no matter how tentative and fragmentary, but not quite the same thing "as when among others Darly once died and left him." The urgency of "time and grief" as the ultimate end-stop, and the unexpected potency of memory, suddenly demand a rude awakening from the insularity of poetic prose, even "after all it did": Another place in the place where he sat at his table head in hands. The same place and table as when Darly for example died and left him. As when others too in their turn before and since. As when others would too in their turn before and since. As when others would too in their turn and leave him till he too in his turn. Head on hands half hoping when he disappeared again that he would not reappear again and half fearing that he would not. Or merely wondering. Or merely waiting. (pp. 115-16)

Just when one would have thought that the fading portraits, the Darlys of some elsewhere in some other world, had vanished almost completely, the strokes and cries are there to summon them again, "des jours et

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nuits."25 "If you see my poor blind Dan," Maddy Rooney tells Mr. Tyler before "the voice breaks" on the soundscape of her own back roads, "tell him I was on my way to meet him when it all came over me again, like a flood. Say to him, Your poor wife, she told me to tell you it all came flooding over her again. . . . " Sound triggers memory; she, in her turn, has been listening to the cooing of the ringdoves. ("Venus birds!" she sighs almost enviously. "Billing in the woods all the long summer long.")26 Such a somber rhythm of return in Stirrings Still, no longer the product of an Irish wit both droll and dry, conveys in its own cruel autonomy the same sense of unmediated loss,' 'The same as ever.'' Exploring the layers of interlocking sounds and rhythms as they move through a highly receptive consciousness, the first section of this work, moreover, reassembles into prose the harmony and thematic development of Beckett's poem "Mortede A.D." In its turn a poignant transformation of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur," the poem was written in memory of his friend Arthur Darley, who died more than forty years before the composition of Stirrings Still.27 But "the dead are only dead," as Beckett writes in Proust, "so far as they continue to exist in the heart of the survivor"28—something simple to understand though not so easy to explain or put into words. The durability of such testimony provides the pitch and timbre and precise notation for the silent and tender and quite spontaneous cry of memory: la coulpe du temps irremissible agrippe au vieux bois temoin des departs temoin des retours. (from "Morte de A.D.")

These rites of mourning know no time; for beginning, middle, and end—like the disturbing ring of Hamm's alarm clock—can only, in any measure of experience, be relative terms. Now it is the listener who must hear the empty "lull again," then "all as before again": the abstraction of silence is well on its way toward becoming the only reality. "Past midnight," Krapp hears on tape. "Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited." "Depeuple." 29 "Perhaps thus the end." But grief is not so easily contained. Fiction is precisely that, a fiction; such the folly/ folie—a French/English sound that will soon loom large in comment dire— "of being comforted."30 Turning against words but not against the need to say them, the first part of Stirrings Still, therefore, finds its "one true end" by literalizing the formal significance of its own last line. The tentativeness of this initial attempt to imagine an end in Stirrings Still predicts the sequential nature of what follows in the second part. Rooted

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in the "same" world of the same sounds, this text finds in its one long paragraph its own excuse to temporize on a finality that has, once again, no real end. (In the original typescript all of the second part fits onto only one side of a single sheet of paper, single-spaced).31 The piece is, however, variation and sequel, more after thought than afterthought, though it does rely on some of the same allusive strategies as its immediate predecessor. If "he is to be said at all," this recit is forever admonishing itself to endorse the serialization and succession of its own narrative apparatus: "Then . ..," "As . . . ," "For. . . ," "So . . . "and its clone "So on . .. ," "It was therefore . . .," "To this end.. . ," and the sharp tonal shift to "Result. . . ," where an exceptional phrase seems to have overestimated the continuity of its own pitch memory. The pronoun in this section is simultaneously subject and object, "self and second self," and makes for a quick exit here by being at once both and neither. A story adapts itself to its listener: the hierarchy of this "he" and this "one" will depend on just how each raisonneur interprets the sound of such a singularly private and provocative "meditation": As one in his right mind when at last out again he knew not how he was not long out again when he began to wonder if he was in his right mind. For could one not in his right mind be reasonably said to wonder if he was in his right mind and bring what is more his remains of reason to bear on this perplexity in the way he must be said to do if he is to be said at all? (pp. 120-21)

Personal, obsessive, and taxonomic, such a well-placed interrogative literally begs the question and becomes the same sort of "palimpsest" Belacqua is forced to consider in Love and Lethe as he inspects a sign that reads merely "TEMPORARILY SANE." Other variants of the same signature are posted by more substantial theatrical figures: CLOV: Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes over and I'm as lucid as before. (Endgame, p. 73) POZZO:

We are all born mad. Some remain so. (Waiting for Godot, p. 51)

Even the incorporeal Unnamable, in his own very different monologic "confinement," is forced to suffer from a similar "moment of hesitation": "For here comes another, to see what has happened to his pal, and get

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him out, and back to his right mind, and back to his kin, with a flow of threats and promises. . .. "32 Murphy's mind (something he is always in a rage to distinguish from his fictional earthly body) provides, perhaps, the best analogy of all: like the one we encounter in this middle section of Stirrings Still, it too "functioned not as an instrument but as a place."33 And in that place monologue becomes a "salivation of words after the banquet."34 But the space of that mind is this time around part dream, part reality, part fantasy, part "folly," and is filled with the same sort of literary "memory" we have had to listen to only moments before. This consciousness is not going anywhere: its Shakespeare consists of the most banal allusion of all, the "other manner of bourne from which to return" lifted from the most famous of Hamlet's soliloquies. Even in this hard and unyielding context, the impish mutation of "To be, or not to be" appears as a set piece, an ironic giveaway that nonetheless speaks to "the very heart" of every stirring to be still. And yet it is in no "sense at first a source of reassurance" nor even "finally one of alarm." (Despite Clov's imprecations to the contrary, this particular "alarm" may not in any case be at all "Fit to wake the dead!".) Another literary echo "again" misfires, as does a far more ornamental reference to Keats: "looking more closely," as into Chapman's Homer. "But to hell with all this fucking scenery," as Malone very indignantly and rightly complains.35 Even the pastoral motif that surrounds these allusions and to a certain extent might be said to give rise to them—the "field of grass which went some way if nothing else to explain his tread" and later "the short green grass he seemed to remember eaten down by flocks and herds"—is similarly circumscribed. Nature, if not entirely forgotten,36 turns nonetheless increasingly stylized, the "hoar" grass "long and light grey in colour verging here and there on white." Like serial paintings in which a figure drawn originally from nature is rendered progressively more oblique, the ' 'remains" of this day— its artificial landscapes and "the prisons of their Arcady"—have been subject to a few chilling words,' 'mishaphazard,''' Tending worse still. "37 This creative imperative is eccentric and bound toward destabilization and discoloration. Though the tension toward closure momentarily relaxes with the intrusion of an "outdoor" scene reminiscent, for example, of Enough, this is quickly undermined by the text's commitment to abstraction. But then this entire interlude may be both in and out of someone else's reality, "stultior stultissimo":38 this mind's shaky "memory of outdoors" may be just as suspect as its self-constructed ' 'memory of indoors.'' Still, ' 'a better view of Venus," as ill-seen ill-said as in /// Seen III Said, may yet be obtained "in the thought of one hastening westward at sundown." When

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all is said and done, and when all else seems to fail—"words words"— one sentence from How It Is proves both fatal and providential: "you may say yes and you may say no it depends on what you hear."39 Such a serious and self-conscious "art of confinement" is always at risk of having its "mute maledictions" determined and derailed but always driven by something else. "Memories are killing."40 As the first part of this stirring to be still has its Darly, an "enlivener o f . . . solitude" drawn from the author's own life, the second part invokes its own proper name, this one reduced, however, to "mere" facsimile and recycled from a previous inventory. Recall the following from The Calmative: "Seeing a stone seat by the kerb I sat down and crossed my legs, like Walther."41 In Stirrings Still we read: To this end for want of a stone on which to sit like Walther and cross his legs the best he could do was stop dead and stand stock still which after a moment of hesitation he did and of course sink his head as one deep in meditation which after another moment of hesitation he did also. (P- 124)

Adrift in the space of human consciousness, language proves resourceful; needing definition, it mints an image. This one, however, is derivative, a Middle High German counterpart to the missing Belacqua bliss—now borrowed from "Ich saz uf eime steine" by Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230?): I sat upon a stone, leg over leg was thrown, upon my knee an elbow rested and in my open hand was nested my chin and half my cheek. My thoughts were dark and bleak: I wondered how a man should live, to this no answer could I give.

Walther's self-description in the opening lines of his song42 inspired the well-known painting of him that appears in the Manesse manuscript of his work. One of the most famous writers and singers of the medieval lyric (and much admired by Beckett, as John Pilling has shown), he is said to be buried in the cathedral at Wurzburg, where Malone remembers having seen "Tiepolo's ceiling" ("what a tourist I must have been, I even remember the diaeresis, if it is one").43 In this second stirring, so full of qualifiers and even more eminent

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disqualifiers, a consciousness is hellbent on self-help through what little "remains of reason." Retrofitted from the past, echoes are nostalgic at their fractured best and provide only "fault" lines in defense of a discredited poesy: "The words too whosesover," we too seem to remember almost sentimentally, "How almost true they sometimes almost ring!" (Or perhaps it is merely "That almost ring!.")44 For the convoluted ways of this composition, its performance and its reception, mark every kind of sound—"these perpetual revictuallings narrations and auditions" as well as "this semi-castrate mutter"—as potentially percussive, harmonious, or otherworldly. Extracting meanings from both what is said and what "remains" unsaid ("nothing has stirred, no one has spoken"),45 the movement of this consciousness is continued by each listener independently. The sounds of this process may be common to all, even in some cases quantifiable, but the pictures and thoughts and associations will be highly individual. The line between the text and the listener is therefore very short and very direct. It is, as Richard Imison has observed regarding the art of radio drama, "a line of pure ideas."46 For even more forcibly than on the stage, language is first revealed here as sound, like Krapp's verbal bacchanal as he revels in the one word "Spooool!" ("Happiest moment of the past half million.)"47 As Rudolf Arnheim notes, such a spoken discourse builds character by its expression, embedded in a world of expressive natural sounds which, so to speak, constitute the scenery. The separation of noise and word occurs only on a higher plane. Fundamentally, purely sensuously, both are first and foremost sounds, and it is just this sensuous unity that makes possible an aural art, by utilizing word and noise simultaneously.48

But in Stirrings Still there is no noise, only sound; "there is not silence . . . there is only utterance." As in Texts for Nothing, "somewhere someone is uttering"—to "eff," as in Watt, the "ineffable."49 And, as the sense of reinvention in this text repeatedly illustrates, every kind of sound is potentially musical, even the illusion of a silence separated into three parts (as in How It Is, "divide into three a single eternity for the sake of clarity"). The text's desire to speak with an intensely personal voice means that its sounds seek to fall into place within the mind where "All mingles, times and tenses," becoming a kind of music as reality invades theory.50 It is just such a cloud of "unknowing"—"So on unknowing and no end in sight"—that the mastermind of the second part tries, unwittingly, to "reason" out. "So all ears." Moving, imaginatively at least, outside of a Proustian room "muffled by. .. four walls," this

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mental traveler seeks "help" by way of the objective verification offered in the fading sun and a field of grass, flocks and herds, even a "barefoot" footfall. Ironically, the appeal to an "outer world," "a new no," for "one enormous second, as in Paradise,"51 moves the text for this consciousness only further inward, interiorizing even the space of a small repertory of visual images and rhetorical devices. "What kind of imagination," then, "is this so reason-ridden?" we recall from Company.52 Result: "A kind of its own." And as in that earlier piece, the motor that drives this section of Stirrings Still toward its uneasy conclusion is forced to suffer a similar declension: (1) So with what reason remains he reasons. (2) So with what reason remains he reasons and reasons ill. (3) So with what reason remains he reasons ill. (Company, pp. 13-15)

Weary of being weary, this section of Stirrings Still reimagines for one last instant the "inner chronology of the Proustian demonstration" as a live portrait of the word reason under constant and renewed aural stress.53 But this perspective, too, like everything else in this piece, is subject to an environment "now faint now clear." As in Molloy, the modulation and control of this sound can only offer its listener "the falsetto of reason."54 For "carried by the wind but not a breath," this paragraph, too, is about to be extinguished. Embedded within the verbal symmetries and calculated self-reflexivity of this midsection of Stirrings Still is " the poisonous ingenuity of Time."55 For here sound tries "in principle" to define itself in measurable time— "six or seven hours by the clock." Sutured to such an impossible fate, a frayed syntax of the intermediate strives to harmonize "those remains" of a fleeting now and an unverifiable then. But the longed-for calculations prove both expansive and restrictive, halftones ambivalent about their own language, their own scale, and their own rhythms, one moment "stop dead" and "stock still," the next stirring still: "looking," "hastening," "suffering," or "vainly delving" only "to increase his trouble." Those "heard times without number" are always on the verge of being something else. Cut short by the "Time cancer," there is no "escape" from these "hours," these "days," and the sound of these sentences, "now faint now clear." Yesterday, like the primacy of today—and like every encounter with this text—reshapes and rehearses and revises its own "calamity."56 For this uneasy consciousness must always "fence" with the "soundless tread" of time. During the waiting for it to happen, whatever

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"it" is has already happened. But not yet willing or able to foreclose on an end—"save that he would have"—this denouement is only temporarily "resigned to not knowing where he was or how he got there or where he was going or how to get back to whence he knew not how he came." Surrounded by words defying any universalizing decoders, this middle ground is by its very placement in the larger text a formal exercise in the "so on unknowing and no end in sight." And yet this extended "meditation" is far from passionless. About to give up the battle, or be undone by it, a nameless "he" can only ' 'wish'' that the strokes and cries would "cease"; these mournful sounds are now quite different from the innocent cries of the corncrakes "dinning their rattles" that Beckett's mental traveler heard long ago in Molloy. 57 Sorrow keeps chiming in, "little .. . sunderings," as Winnie says, "little falls . . . apart":58 I do of course hear cries. (Pause.) But they are in my head surely. (Pause.) Is it possible that. . .(Pause. With finality.) No no, my head was always full of cries. (Pause.) Faint confused cries. (Pause.) They come. (Pause.) Then go. (Pause.) As on a wind. (Happy Days, p. 56)

This "air," too, as Vladimir intones in the climactic moments of Waiting for Godot, "is full of our cries."59 Language works beyond its denotative meanings: the clock in all three cases is about to run out. This is, then, no mean "comedy of substitution."60 A state of creative consciousness is suddenly revealed through more than innuendo as the sound of closure now turns vicious: in Stirrings Still, as in life, "strokes" can be deadly. "So on"—but "only ever fainter." Every sequence of diminuendo is only a structure waiting to be heard in its own performative time. Linking word to word and shaping the line, "waiting for nothing" becomes by the third and last movement of Stirrings Still a more proficient means to the selfsame end. Within the complete text of Stirrings Still the rhythms of time and grief and self have already established their credentials as organic, interdependent, and symmetrical. Now the moment has come to surrender to the manifold of their most terminal properties. In this work's great chain of its own being, "hand" and "mind" are more than ready to surrender to the inevitability of their fate; but at this eleventh hour the autonomy of the work itself—and the "riot of instants" that gives rise to it—somehow hesitates to end. Reinvigorated by the very ambiguity of its two bold imperatives, "stir no more" and the companion "stirrings still," the final

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segment is shocked into recognition by the unexpected drama in its own text—between "the old words" and "the old credentials," the "old reliables" and the "old scraps. "61 Something has gone awfully wrong. For while the repetition of sound is still conceived as the primary harmony, the piece now plays itself out as the defective copy of some original score. Such mutation is accomplished almost subliminally, this time through the careful introduction of a vocal line that is at once transformative and even more complex than the earlier echoes we now hear, strictly speaking, in the distance. This time the xenza fine quality is determined by a complicated syntax that refuses any legitimation other than its own. All reconstructions of the word as stated ("nee tecum ne sine te," as Beckett told Alan Schneider of Hamm and Clov)62 appear as false modifiers in search of a way out. Signaling a move to a state of much greater emotional concentration, the shape this rhythmic structure assumes as it begins its lone paragraph is hardly the same "last soliloquy"63 Hamm, to take another example, has been so conscientiously warming up to. The third part of Stirrings Still begins: So on till stayed when to his ears from deep within oh how and here a word he could not catch it were to end where never till then. Rest then before again from not long to so long that perhaps never again and then again faint from deep within oh how and here that missing word again it were to end where never till then. (p. 126)

Full of "meditation" and "hesitation" though not necessarily resignation, the first two parts of Stirrings Still showcase a highly impressionable consciousness with a rare sense of motility: self-invention is selfexploration, sometimes even improvisation. Reassembling the pieces and restaging the textual space of its own locutions, this frequency oscillator prefers the fluid and exhaustive study in place of any graceful, stable, or consonant whole. In this syntactic territory composition and performance become one and the same thing. Movement, as in slow motion, strangely defies the pervasive atmosphere of steady deterioration and efficiently circumvents the promissory appeal of the verb to end, whose moods are now shown to be various, intolerable, and inconclusive. Relying on allusion and the occasional obtainability and "semantic succour" of image and metaphor, the privacy of such intimately scaled states of consciousness is disrupted by the intrusion of a world of sounds external to itself. Solitude is shown to be relative, all too expansive, something even larger than silence itself. The third part is, by contrast, far more defiantly sui generis.

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Redeeming the genre from which it too has sprung, this last note from the suite in three keys sanitizes its previous incarnations to construct a "hubbub in [the] mind" in which "for to end" betrays the constant undoing of that vile phrase "yet again" by seeking its own way "home to oblivion." A compositor's nightmare, the appropriation that borrows from the "significant detail" of a diversity of Beckett sources seeks, too, its own liberation from "the screaming silence of no's knife in yes's wound."64 Here the unproven assumption of a terminus ad quern, that underachiever, will be helped and tutored by a word-span whose rescored choral declension now sounds like this: ( 1 ) . . . oh how and here a word . . . ( 2 ) . . . oh how and here that missing word again . . . ( 3 ) . . . oh how something and so on ... ( 4 ) . . . oh to end. (5) Oh all to end.

(pp. 126, 128)

Neither outdoors nor indoors, the third part of Stirrings Still abandons all hope of scenic decor. All "confinement" is mental ("as the case might be"), perhaps even self-imposed. The mind, however, "that MINE,"65 has its own rewards, its own memory, and its own landscape—"no danger or hope as the case might be of his ever getting out of it." Gone, too (but still "knowing" the reader's "love of literature"66), is the retooled but run-down literary allusion, unless the listener compensates for its loss by banking on the residual references to Shakespeare: This feather stirs, she lives! If it be so, It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows That ever I have felt. (King Lear, V.iii.266-68)

The song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline masked in this text's "so-called . . . stir no more" may be even more apt than Lear's heartfelt delusion. Irony is always appealing, especially in its more bleak displays, as any Winnie can testify:67 Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

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Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. (Cymbeline, IV.ii.258)

Perhaps at this point such a lofty benediction is, as Hamm suggests, "a little vein"; "a trifle irreverent," and another voice might heartily concur: "How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?"68 "Uniquely self-pervaded'' and ' 'not to be clarified in any other light,'' as Beckett wrote of the work of his friend, the painter Jack B. Yeats,69 the last lines we hear in Stirrings Still turn the piece oddly inward upon itself: Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end. (p. 128) Wedded to the "same" elements common to the soundscape of the first two parts, this coda nonetheless takes them into more exclusive, more dangerous, and far more adventurous territory, a dimension in which "a step forward is, by definition, a step back."70 Tired and true—and by this time agonizingly familiar—the trilogy's need to end now functions as personal signature, an act of last will and next-to-last testament. The selfregimentation and self-regeneration of what is proposed as closure in the line "Oh all to end" is simultaneously resignation, a cry of despair, and a "final" statement of fulfillment as problematic as "stirrings still" itself. The faint urge to "stir no more" in words means that even more belttightening is in order. A grammar in which "not long" is conceived as so long (another kind of ending, as in the colloquialism for farewell) requires a number of adjustments if speech is to remain the text's chief comment on itself. Here auxiliary verbs—those voices of other verbs like have, will, may, can, must, do, shall, and above all be—will be used with disarming, even daring discretion. Phrases like "having shuddered," "having somehow got out," and "then he could somehow get out of it" sound like errant figures in the discourse, odd exceptions to some emerging rule of broken thumb. Other "missing" voices, those grammatical remainders that might form tenses and help activate additional aspects and moods, serve as functional gaps in the text, much like leaving one note out of a tonal chord. Enlisting counterpoint as contretemps, this combination of competing forces makes use of other modes of excision: the

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single question mark—and the full range of this work's interrogative disposition—retain their rhetorical prerogative of remaining fundamentally unanswered. Even a helping "hand" no longer elicits a response, though in the first part "There had been" such "a time. ..." Taking the measure of each word, intellection in this "case" has gone to seed: "those remains" are now inelegantly rhymed and reasoned, "sad or bad," "such and much." For in this highly particular "absolute absence of the Absolute," it is not what little remains of reason, but only Time, "that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation," that can take the full measure of "grief" and the aforementioned "sorrow." In the dubious company of words, "Only a small part of what is said can be verified."71 "That time" in the conclusion of Stirrings Still is, moreover, no longer subject to the beating of a clock. Here, ' 'where there are no days,'' there is no objective time either, no "hours and half-hours," only an impaired duration whose murky point of origin comes from some ominous force ' 'to his ears from deep within.'' What Not I calls the ' 'whole being,'' the "machine," has broken down: those paralyzing "strokes" have this time been somatic and physically disabling. Repeated "pulsations" in the "artery," William Blake notwithstanding,72 catch a consciousness fatally off guard, making it miss the familiar beats it used to take for its "socalled" reality (see Stirrings Still, the first two parts). Oh all to end. Time and grief and self are trapped in the ghastly subjectivity of a final humiliation, "as the case might" indeed "be": no more "cries" in this aphasic state, only "here a word he could not catch . . . that missing word again." Little is left to tell: this is the true syntax of weakness. In the faint imaginary light of such an alleged victimization—one, moreover, from which there will be no "sequel"—how, then, "press on," stirring still?73 The question implies a choice ("there then all this time"), something finite experienced as continuous, as in a "brief" but dense "dream" (in the case of Stirrings Still, "No matter how no matter where"). Other vocal arrangements, however, may be just as arbitrary, just as satisfactory, just as capricious. As in Watt, "Fixity is not the word he would have chosen." Turning slightly off center, the words change; but so, too—"whosesoever"—do the moods and attitudes surrounding them, now imagined— imagine!—to be multiple in their possibility, as in the late poem "Brief Dream" from 1987:74 Go end there One fine day Where never til) then Till as much as to say

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No matter where No matter when

These will be the "last images, end of dream" and, at least in the case of this startling resurrection of "Sailing to Byzantium" from Texts for Nothing, a course "of being past, passing and to be."75 In light of

such lyrical cancelation and remission, Malone's consolation provides only cold comfort: "The loss of consciousness was for me never any great loss."76 But Malone should talk; his novelistic knockout, if indeed it is one, will be followed consequentially by the "rise and go" of his next incarnation in the book known as The Unnamable. Other ghostly echoes may be "no more" edifying: "The end is in the beginning and yet you go on," stirring still, de-composing all the while. (Deconstruction, alas, has rarely been more gruesome—or more literal: this text has all along been deconstructing itself, Derridada. . . . )77 Art is beginning to do what it is no longer supposed to do: imitate life all over again. (" . .. [H]umanity," complains Hamm, "might start from there all over again"— a "humanity regained," perhaps, but this time "less the rosy hue"). Yet the strange way it does so in Stirrings Still, a rueful paradigm for much of Beckett's late fiction, presupposes the active collaboration of a listener, in "his skull the voices whispering their canon" ("somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to hear").78 Preparing all the while for the sound of a final fugue, of one last word struggling to get itself first said, then unsaid, then ununsaid, "etc.," this creative consciousness is waiting for "all to end," this time for the problematic last (?) time. With "you" still alone in the "so-called" dark, a fragment "somehow" oozes itself into being, "every mute micromillisyliable."79 Shaping itself back into a voice, it speaks from "deep within" its own black (w)hole, the "atomistic landscape" where "its dimensions" are, finally and wonderfully forever, "its secrets":80 —Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frere!

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.

7 Dire Comments on comment dire

Of course we do not know, any more than you, what exactly it is we are after, what sign or set of words. —Rough for Radio H

"Call it Dichtungen," Beckett told his German publisher, Siegfried Unseld, who was planning a new edition of his collected works. "No other language has such a word."1 Firm, reliable, intricate, and watertight, the suprageneric title condenses into one German word the complete range of "poeticizations" that might be crafted into any manner of artistic writing. "The forms are many," Malone noted long ago, "in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness." In the actual Dichtungen, however, Beckett was rarely so lucky as to have "Got it in one!"2 Though there is no use "indicting" words per se (they are, as Malone says, "no shoddier than what they peddle"), some of the adjectives used to describe them in Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable might be cause for considerable alarm, if not downright contempt: "wheedling," "little," "furious," "monotonous," "mad," "hasty," "indifferent," or—worse still "in a word"—"blank."3 Even the stirring words in a late trilogy like Stirrings Still might, in retrospect, stand in need of a complete overhaul when the purely imagined is revisited by the real. How vainly words themselves amaze: despite their vigor and athleticism—' 'those sounds slake my thirst for labials"—even the haunting "strokes" of a clock are as nothing compared to the hell of the ultimate soubresaut, that spasm that is "over and yet it goes on, and is there any tense for that?" Words are killers: they speak in "an ancient voice in me not mine," always "a lingering dissolution." Making a career out of facilitating nothing when they should in fact be concerned with the one thing—the end—the faint "jostle of words" always constructs its own unenviable "folly." And yet their "dust," as Maddy Rooney says, "will not settle in our time." Calling attention to its own vibrato, this "labouring whirl"—"I give you my word"—is the 164

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asymptote that approaches but never reaches ground zero. (Consider Molloy's menu, "asymptotically approaching nutritional zero.") "Oh to be in atoms, in atoms!" the voice of another desperate soul cries out on radiophonic tape, " . . .ATOMS!" There is, finally, no simulacrum, no "stroke" of genius, for the power of the "monster silences" that enunciate an end to the end: as in /// Seen III Said, "what is the wrong word" for that?4 Simultaneously prose, poetry, and a piece of monologue (a Dichtung if there ever was one), what is the word is Beckett's English version of comment dire, a piece he completed, as he said, "ruefully," on a single page of typescript dated October 29, 1988.5 It was composed when he was trying to regain speech after suffering a stroke. A few months later he completed an English translation and agreed with Ruby Conn's suggestion that it might be used as a performance vehicle for Joseph Chaikin, who had never fully recovered from a similar battle with aphasia.6 It will probably be difficult for some time to separate this work, written so near the circumstances of his own life, from the end of that life. As Beckett's oeuvre developed, moreover, the life had come more and more to resemble the work, the work more and more to reflect that life. But what is the word, made of extremes and never self-indulgent, is both final fugue and thrilling solo, a work whose tight and combative structure embodies a brilliant ritualism of its own. These words "have their utility" after all; by contrast, "the mud is mute."7 Consisting of 53 short lines in English (52 in French), what is the word synchronizes its 174 verbal units into a Rundgedicht whose last line ends where its title begins. But unlike those in Didi's round-poem that opens act 2 of Waiting for Godot, the number of words here is drastically reduced. In this round-poem, for example, there are actually far fewer than 174 individual words; in point of fact, there are only 24. Reassembled and redesigned, the complete dictionary for what is the word could be printed like this: afar afaint all and away folly for from given

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glimpse here is need over see seeing seem the there this to what where word And yet when read from the printed page ("it starts so sudden comes so faint goes so fast ends so soon"), the continual emendations for the words in this "mini-opus"8 sound like this: follyfolly for to— for to— what is the word— folly from this— all this— folly from all this— given— folly given all this— seeing— folly seeing all this— this— what is the word— Advancing its own cause by the "scissiparous frenzy" 9 of wave upon wave of caesura, the palpable dramatic silence that separates two aural events, the work keeps on composing and rededicating itself. The sharply broken lines accumulate—rapidly. Such instant volatility is all the more surprising in that the depleted inventory of words avails itself of no more than six active verbs: to give, to see, to glimpse, to seem, to need, and to be. These

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are, furthermore, strictly determined in regard to form, mood, and state of being. They appear and reappear only as: (1) (2) (3) (4)

four infinitives one past participle one gerund (see doubles as seeing) a single instance of the present tense (in this case is)

Conceiving words as units of sound rather than elements of traditional or even "midget grammar," the piece replaces the kineticism inherent in the verb with a notational system based on harmony, range, repetition, scale, and key. The resulting action and movement resembles the firm placement of note and emphasis on some idiosyncratic, perhaps even electronic, musical score. Relying on monosyllabic advancement, integration, and entitlement, the piece employs only seven words having two beats; of these, three are further linked by similar construction and mutual assonance (a-far, a-faint, and a-way). The roundelay, then, is continuously repeated; no tags from Shakespeare, "No once in pastless now."10 Both impasse and threshold, simulation and embodiment, absence and presence, ideal and actual, what is the word recycles a minimalist's "wordhoard" (also known as "wordshit") for a scop who has recited far too much Beckett.11 The principle of organization is in this instance both more simple ("I use none but the simplest words, I hope. .. . ")12 and more complex than the regulated features peculiar to this verbal array might initially imply. For while each of the twenty-four words remains a partisan of its own possibilities—always a matter of "fundamental" sounds13—each also struggles to assume cohesion, liaison, finality, and first position. "Folly" is particularly lucky, for in twelve of the lines (1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 17, 19, 26, 30, 45, and 50) it seems to have been successful in its efforts to achieve some of its four dubious goals. And yet the same word comes under considerable fire in its effort to assemble a repertory of verbal tricks into some grand and conclusive design, a textual equivalent for a statement signifying something. Moving all the while toward crescendo ("That's not moving, that's moving"),14 the word experiences a kind of breakthrough with line 50, the longest and most ambitious entry of all those rough drafts whose staccato rhythms have been furiously leading up to it: folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what—

Here fourteen words, including three infinitives, three cases of assonance, "the word go" folly,15 and the problematic word what allow us to trace

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the way the line's very structure has been predicted by the fractious harmonics and fine-tuning of the tentative arrangements we have just been listening to. The line is in this sense the climax of the whole composition, followed not so much by a release and relaxation of tension as by an elevation to a new standard of sound in the previously unreconciled conflict in motion. Notice that the "—" in this text's final re/in/statement has disappeared, as though all punctuation, including an overworked dash, all capitalization, and even a terminal period, were now rendered superfluous and redundant: what— what is the word— what is the word

Paring down the complexities of the earlier lines to the essential, the work focuses attention on creating sequences of intensely contrasted verbal combinations that achieve a balance between spontaneity and logically ordered processes. Mixing various formulations of the same words, from unique phrases to the faintest of echoes from previous Beckett works (i.e., "what where—"),16 the piece as a whole needs to be heard as a work of stark contrasts: verbal actions both opening and closing, stable and mobile continuities, symmetrical and asymmetrical syntaxes, mixed and pure lines, clear and rough articulation. The remarkably rapid interplay of so many strongly opposing factors can be electrifying, until the last four words seem almost to throw the piece off the rails. It is a moment of risk and order and disorder that the final line of closure just manages to contain. The strategy reinforces the musical basis of the entire work. Its twentyfour lexical elements function as a double variation on twelve-tone music, a reduction in scale that is inventive, conceptual, and concrete, both experimental and hugely paradigmatic." Despite the minimalist threshold (or maybe because of it), the compact range of what is the word introduces language to a new enterprise in verbal action and calibrated interaction, defining words as though they had colors as well as instrumental planes, sounds as if they had feelings and gestures. Bob and Joe, not to mention Croak, their go(a)d-like emcee for Words and Music, would be impressed.l8 For this is a magnetic field where poles constantly shift; as they do so, words secure for themselves previously unexamined harmonies, even eloquence. Pushing the listener to the utmost bounds of comprehension, the juxtaposition of apparently irreconcilable elements challenges the hearer to concentrate absolute attention through the lightning shifts of structure

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and sense, atonal harmony and spatial proportions. The expansive verbal actions and their bold affects maintain a highly charged flow, allowing the piece as a whole to expand within its own combination and contrast of moods. The work reminds us that every relationship between word and sound is worth investigating. Each new syntax might just be, perhaps, the "right" one—and so "on." "Vent the pent."19 Liberating the word by abandoning it to its own orchestral devices—letting it happen, so to speak— the language of this piece literally dances with its own pent-up dramatic energy. The separation and amalgamation of elements, as in Joyce—"When the sense is dancing, the words dance. . . . The language is drunk. The very words are tilted and effervescent"20—allows what is the word the opportunity to strive for a pitch and timbre more compatible with its own verbal sonorities. The principal device for this advancement is, of course, the frenzied dash, which should on no account be confused with the silence implied by ellipsis. Although both can be used for the intentional omission of words or letters, or even an abrupt change of thought, lapse of time, or incomplete statement, the question here is really one of tempo, rhythm, speed, and resulting mood. Like much of later Beckett, the text of what is the word urges us to read "this this—," "this this here—," "all this this here—" diacritically, responding to accent and stress "however faint they fall."21 Although every reading will vary with every listener—what you hear "afaint" is to a certain extent what you get "afar"—the similarity and difference between the two stimulative diacritical markings should not go entirely unnoticed. Used in the modern European theater, as in Chekhov or Pinter or Maeterlinck or Strindberg (or for that matter, Beckett), the ellipsis is generally the traditional signal for the slowing down of all verbal motion. Words are shifty and unstable; the mood subtly shifts as dialogue is upstaged by silent action. A dramatic moment is temporarily arrested, and thereby emphasized and examined, before the pacing of spoken sound in the scene suddenly resumes. Beckett's framed silence is especially acute in this regard, as witnessed by the following contretemps during rehearsals with the actress Billie Whitelaw: WHITELAW: BECKETT:

I took a pause. Yes, but there are three dots . . .22

But what is the word does not "work" like that. The dash in this text signals implosion, a bursting inward of speech, a state of maximum alarm— perhaps even the panic of the eighteen minutes the playwright specified for Not /,23 a similarly frenetic script in which a frantic dash and a hurried

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ellipsis mark their own Olympic race with time. "There is much to be done," as Belacqua says, "with a more nervous treatment of the caesura." Like Not I, what is the word has "the dynamic intrusion" to be itself, as Beckett once observed of the paintings of Cezanne;24 but to do so it must rely on an ear sympathetic to the beating of its own internal clock. Let me briefly outline a number of ways in which the text for what is the word suggests the possibilities for its own rhythm and for the "settings" (Earl Kim's term)25 more or less appropriate for its own rendezvous with time—and timing. Analogies may be in order. In what is the word Beckett borrows both his structure and his sound from the traditional ballad and the musical ballade. The former, usually handed down orally in more than one version, is a song or poem that tells a story in short stanzas and simple words, with incremental repetition, pointed refrain, choral recapitulation, et cetera; the latter, adapting some of the same technical requirements to music, especially as composed for the piano, is likewise generally romantic or narrative in nature. But as a verse form, the ballade could not be more tightly organized and precise: three stanzas of eight or ten lines each and an envoi of four or five lines. The last line of each stanza and of the envoi are, moreover, always exactly the same, as in "what is the word," plus or minus, give or take a dash. Beckett adapts and deregulates a number of technical devices from these intricate forms. His Dichtung is a highly idiosyncratic ballade shaped into would-be prose—and at the same time a poem in the guise of a ballad that wears the label very warily indeed. "It"—whatever it is—never gets itself properly started, revised, recited, or even finished, though it does repeat several fragments broken off from the self, the partially integrated (w)hole, it strives so hard to be. Particularly stressful (pun intended) are the seven repetitions of the insistent and transformative one-liner, "what is the word." Perhaps, after all is said and done, these bardic refrains really number only six, with the final rededication working overtime as some sort of climactic envoi. But in this terminal case the postscript seems to lack both a convincing summary as well as any definitive explanation, thus violating the spirit of the convention from which it might be said to originate. The process of listening to pastiche-ballad and irregular ballade leads down many paths, but it also leads back to the "folly" of its own titular beginning, where the answer may be waiting for us all along:' 'what'' is literally equated with "word" and "is," thus asking and answering the question in the same line. ' 'In the beginning was the pun''—there's Murphy all over again—"And so on."26 That question is really two questions—for polyphony now speaks in one voice, "as if wanting mass.'' Relying as it does on a " vocal principle,''

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Beckett's language claims meaning through its greedy spectacle of words, "a slide from the major k e y . . . of assurance into the minor key which betrays its artificiality."27 As the piece continues to announce how to hear the equal power and authority of its several keys, the split personality of its multiple selves, major and minor, flat and sharp, alternate and change position; keyboarding can therefore be various. ("I say it as I hear it," as in How It Is.) Adding the missing but signifying question mark, for example, the interrogative is at first simple and direct, a line richly invested with many previous Beckettian inquisitions: "Perhaps they are somewhere there, the words that count," perhaps live, perhaps and, perhaps invent. Beckett's characters on stage have been similarly baffled. Think, for example, of Pozzo (interrupted here by my intervention): "I don't seem to be able .. . (long hesitation). . . —[what is the word?]—... to depart.'' Or Hamm: "Enough, it's time it ended, in the shelter too.. . . And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to ... —[what is the word?]—... to end." Or Vladimir: "How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time. . . (he searches for the word). . . [what is the word?]. . . appalled. (With emphasis.) APPALLED."28 But, as Malone says, "theory is one thing and reality another." Raise the ante somewhat higher, abstracting from the yes and no directly at hand, and the question "what is the word?" becomes a kind of Mauthner-cwmWittgenstein redux, a philosophical inquiry into the very essence of language itself—and "in the true sense of the words," no doubt: the word hear, the word tell, the word story.29 The drama in the text proceeds from the steady oscillation between the two, just as it lies in two separate but related answers, one of which holds within itself the innocent mood of interrogative surprise at being taken off guard by such an unexpected selfdiscovery: "what is the word?" (emphasis mine). And then the final, definitive roar of the declarative in a line determined to stand apart, finally, from all the rest: what is the word

Yet this resignation—or this assertion—or this acceptance—will have to be taken, if at all, on blind faith; for like so much else of what has already been said, "it" cannot be universally "verified." In the end, "I" can only give "you" my final word.30 The provenance of what is the word extends to the same query "any Irishman," according to Rodney Sharkey, "might be overheard asking himself anywhere on any day on any street in Dublin.' '31 What is the word for this? What is the right word for that? (The English say cawm, the

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French say . . . comment. . . comment. . . comment dire .. . )• "Why do people always stop in the middle of what they are saying?" asks Henry, down-and-out and down at the shore of Killiney Beach, County Wicklow. "Keep it going, Ada, every syllable is a second gained." No matter, Molloy says, we have "no further need of words"—a statement followed, as might be expected, by the further caveat, "for the time being." The "bitter folly" (as The Unnamable sees it) of these highly suspect English words will in any case "soon be quite dead at last in spite of all," just like "our own poor dear Gaelic"—or, as Dan Rooney cantankerously complains, "whatever the expression is."32 what is the word further dramatizes an important problem concerning all those many words collapsing in on themselves in Beckett's late fiction. They have, of course, always been associative in the extreme: one story leads to another, just as, on a microlevel, a word like "afaint" moves so swiftly to transmute into "afar"—or "words to that effect."33 But the origins of such words and "the effect of all this on discourse generally" are likely to remain in continuous dispute.34 In the beginning was the word, as, "for example," in the Christian Bible; as, to take another example, in the opening moments of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:' 'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. ..." Later in the same tale, in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel, Stephen will be impressed by what he calls "a sound like . . . suck. Only louder."35 And yet before any of these words were written down, they were first and foremost inscribed by the "incomparable" sound of a human voice. It is the great irony of Beckett's fiction that his words cry out to be heard only after they have themselves been sacrificed to the distancing effects of a page, a "ruinstrewn land" where "nothing happens, twice"—or . . . thereabouts.36 Logocentrism, however, is fatal. For as such things are written down—"What tenderness in these little words, what savagery"—they always yearn to become something else again. Comment c'est = comment dire: "That's how it is on this bitch of an earth."37 How the "word" is now heard—and precisely what that "word" now is—depends for its life on the personality who delivers "all this this here—." This can only be the sound of a word in the listener's private vocabulary of tone and mood and gesture. Hearing for the first of many times a renewed cry "said nohow on," now faint now clear as if carried by the wind, the "observer infects the observed with his own mobility." Something dripping in my head. . .: and, as the Unnamable says, "there is a vein I must not lose sight of."38 Every actor knows this. "Put a bit of jizz into it," that old trouper

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Winnie heartily recommends. "I'll cheer you on." But that is not to say that the work as it stands in that monument called a Beckett text is not the product of a central organizing consciousness: "My words," your words, are "my tears."39 It is merely to point out how multidimensional that consciousness is: diversity and differance, at least in the' 'case nought'' of this writer's fiction, must come from the life within the text—or not at all.40 It is also to point out what a fertile laboratory the drama in Beckett's text is for the terrifying necessity of writing things down, whatever the word is or whatever that record becomes, "No matter where / No matter when": I wonder what my last words will be, written, the others do not endure, but vanish into thin air. I shall never know.41

In the intensely human drama that becomes this text, a script that in Beckett's hands is forever being reinvented—what is the word?—"what is the word"—the last Act, finally, the best i'th Play,42 somehow, nohow pays for all.

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Notes Chapter 1 1. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (New York, 1955), p. 182. 2. Quoted by Ruby Cohn in Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Branswick, N.J., 1962), p. 95. 3. Samuel Beckett, Proust (London, 1931), p. 1. See also Cohn, The Comic Gamut, p. 95. 4. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin, 1992), p. 64. 5. The details of Beckett's switch from English to French have been noted and collected by a number of his earliest critics. See especially Cohn, The Comic Gamut, p. 95; Israel Shenker, "Moody Man of Letters," New York Times, May 6, 1956, sec. 2., p. 3; and Richard Coe, Samuel Beckett, rev. ed. (New York, 1968), p. 14. See also in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, pp. 48, 64, 118. 6. Quoted from "Samuel Beckett: Silence to Silence," a film documentary produced and directed for Radio Telefis Eireann by Sean O'Mordha (1987). In 1953 Beckett told Loly Rosset that the first part of Molloy "certainly doesn't take kindly to English," but added, "I don't think it stinks too much of translation." 1. Molloy, p. 22. 8. Samuel Beckett, From an Abandoned Work, in Collected Shorter Prose, 1945-1980 (London, 1984), p. 129. 9. See Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md., 1974), pp. 6-8, and Gerard Genette, Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993). 10. Samuel Beckett, "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," in Our Exagmination Round His Factificationforlncamination of Work in Progress (Paris, 1929), p. 14. 11. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York, 1958), p. 157. 12. See Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic (Princeton, N.J., 1970), pp. 348-50; and Cohn, The Comic Gamut, p. 65. 13. For these reactions to Beckett's early prose work published in the thirties, see the unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement, July 26, 1934, p. 526; Edwin Muir, "New Short Stories," The Listener, July 4, 1934, p. 42; and Dylan Thomas, "Recent Novels," New English Weekly 12, March 17, 1938, p. 454.

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Selections from these reviews can be found in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London, 1979), pp. 4244, 46-48, as well as in Cathleen Culotta Andonian, Samuel Beckett: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1989), pp. 2, 3, 258. 14. For the Sunday Times review of Murphy in March 1938, see John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett, rev. ed. (London, 1970), p. 54. 15. See John Montague,' 'The Gloom and the Glory of Beckett,'' The Guardian, December 27, 1989, p. 13; and O'Mordha, "Samuel Beckett." In celebration of the centenary of Joyce's birth (1982) Beckett wrote: "I welcome this occasion to bow once again, before I go, deep down, before his heroic work, heroic being." Quoted by Christopher Ricks, Beckett's Dying Words (Oxford, 1993), p. 59. 16. Beckett's letter to Samuel Putnam can be found in the Rare Books Collection at the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University. 17. For an elaboration on this distinction between "language" and "speech," see Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (La Salle, 111., 1983), pp. 30-31. 18. Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape, in "Krapp's Last Tape" and Other Dramatic Pieces (New York, 1960), p. 20. 19. See Dina Sherzer, "Samuel Beckett, Linguist and Poetician: A View from The Unnamable," SubStance 56 (1988), 87-98. Elizabeth Bregman Segre makes a similar point (but employs a different methodology) in relation to Ping in "Style and Structure in Beckett's 'Ping': That Something Itself," Journal of Modem Literature 6 (February 1977), 127-47. 20. Molloy, p. 41. 21. Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, ed. and trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago, 1988), p. 39. 22. Beckett is here referring to Bram van Velde; quoted and translated by John Pilling in Samuel Beckett (London, 1976), p. 22. 23. See No Symbols Where None Intended: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Material Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collections of the Humanities Research Center, ed. Carlton Lake (Austin, Tex., 1984), p. 57. 24. Mary Lydon first demonstrated the centrality of Beckett's Irish-English to any understanding of his use of language at a symposium held at the University of Texas-Austin in 1981 called "Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett." More recently, John P. Harrington has developed a wider cultural context in The Irish Beckett (Syracuse, N. Y., 1991). For a convincing demonstration of the importance of Beckett's work in the tradition of Irish playwriting, especially with regard to the rhythm of dialect and dialogue, see Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London, 1978). 25. Steven Connor has briefly explored the interactive elements in Beckett's drama and prose, the "threshold between fiction and theatre, the page and the stage, virtual and actual space," in a suggestive article entitled "Between Theatre and Theory: Long Observation of the Ray," in The Ideal Core of the Onion, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading, Eng., 1992), pp. 79-98. 26. Troilus and Cressida, V.ii.144.

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27. Samuel Beckett, Company (London, 1980), p. 7. 28. Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, as reported to Enoch Brater, The Hague, April 1992. 29. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York, 1959), p. 237. 30. Molloy, p. 241. 31. The Unnamable, p. 15. 32. Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York, 1964), pp. 10, 93 (emphasis mine); see also Texts for Nothing V, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 86; and Samuel Beckett, MaloneDies (New York, 1956), p. 4. On "say it," see Othello, I.iii.127. 33. For Beckett's reactions to his situation as a writer following the completion of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, see in particular Peter Lennon's review of the Irish television documentary "Samuel Beckett: Silence to Silence," reprinted from The Listener in Beckett at Eighty: A Celebration, ed. James Knowlson (Reading, Eng., 1986), p. 15. See also Colin Duckworth, "The Making of Godot," in Casebook on "Waitingfor Godot," ed. Ruby Cohn (New York, 1967), p. 89; Alec Reid, All I Can Manage, More Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (Dublin, 1968), p. 65; and Shenker, p. 3. 34. See John Fletcher, p. 196. 35. Beckett expressed his profound uneasiness with Texts for Nothing in two letters written to his American publisher, Barney Rosset (February 11, 1954, and February 11, 1955). 36. Georges Duthuit, "Sam Francis: Animator of Silence," trans. Samuel Beckett, American Art News (1952). I am indebted to James Knowlson for calling my attention to this work. 37. The Unnamable, p. 3. See Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater (New York, 1987). 38. Several books on Beckett's later fiction have explored the complexity and multidimensionality of these highly elliptical prose works. Some of the most trenchant and original arguments in more recent studies may be found in Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford, 1988); Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett's Prose Works After the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia, 1990); Susan Brienza, Samuel Beckett's New Worlds: Style in Metafiction (Norman, Okla., 1987); P. J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett's Fiction (Toronto, 1990); and Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge, 1990). See also John Filling's studies of the late fiction in his book, coauthored with James Knowlson, entitled Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London, 1979), especially the chapter "Ends and Odds in Prose," pp. 132-91. 39. Beckett's remarks on Bram van Velde and Jack B. Yeats are quoted by Gordon S. Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats (Lewisburg, Pa., 1990), pp. 42, 59, 82. 40. Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, N.J., 1973), p. 220. 41. Samuel Beckett, Lessness, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 157. 42. Samuel Beckett, Enough, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 144. 43. Lessness, pp. 155, 156.

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44. Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 159. 45. Samuel Beckett, All Strange Away, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 118. 46. Samuel Beckett, For to End Yet Again, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 179. 47. Elmar Tophoven to Enoch Brater, Paris, April 1986. 48. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in his Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981), p. 261. 49. Charles Krance, "Beckett's Encores: Textual Genesis as Still-Life Performance," in Essays in Theatre 8 (May 1990), 122. See also the same author's Samuel Beckett's "Company"/"Compagnie" and "A Piece of Monologue"! "Solo": A Bilingual Variorum Edition (New York, 1993), p. 194. 50. See Marjorie Perloff, "Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader," in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, ed. Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer (University Park, Pa., 1987), pp. 36-48; andMonique Nagem, "Know Happiness: Irony inlllSeen III Said," in "Make Sense Who May": Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works, ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St. J. Butler (Gerrards Cross, Eng., 1988), pp. 7790. 51. In Samuel Beckett's /// Seen III Said (New York, 1981), a partial list of echoes from Shakespeare's plays would include: Hamlet, p. 8 ("the rankest weed") andp. 57 ("Unspeakable globe" in place of Hamlet's "distracted globe"); Othello, p. 11 ("moor," "ewes," "whiteness," "lambs");Macbeth, p. 35 ("done'V'undone"); Julius Caesar, p. 43 ("regicide"); A Midsummer Night's Dream, p. 48 ("chinks"), p. 38 ("cranny"), p. 12 ("moon"), and p. 16 ("tomb"); King Lear, p. 52 ("vile jelly") and p. 56 ("journey's end" for Kent's "promis'd end"); and Much Ado About Nothing, p. 56 ("No trace of all the ado"). On Beckett's transformation of Samson Agonistes, compare his "All curiosity spent" (p. 55) in ironic contrast to Milton's original line of closure: "Calm of mind, all passion spent" (1. 1758). The title of Lawrence Graver's essay ("Homage to the Dark Lady; /// Seen III Said," in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi [Urbana, 111., 1990], pp. 142-49) seems to imply another parallel to Shakespeare, namely, to the sonnets. The rich pattern of allusion to the Shakespeare repertory has, in any case, been long established in Beckett criticism. See, for example, Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett's Theater (Princeton, N.J., 1980); Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston, 1962); Brater, Beyond Minimalism; James Knowlson, "Beckett's 'Bits of Pipe,' " and Hersh Zeifman, "Come and Go: A Criticule," both in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (Columbus, Ohio, 1983); and Kristin Morrison, Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter (Chicago, 1983). 52. Hamlet, I.ii.67. 53. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York, 1954), p. 34. 54. Edith Fouraier's French translation of Worstward Ho was undertaken for Jerome Lindon after Beckett's death; he published Cap au pire in Paris at Editions

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de Minuit in 1991. Fournier had earlier translated Beckett's Proust into French for Minuit. 55. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (New York, 1983), p. 34. 56. The Unnamable, p. 106. 57. King Lear, IV.i.29-30. On this citation from a notebook now in the collection at the Beckett Archive at Reading University, England, see Geordie Greig, "Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame," The Sunday Times, January 8, 1989, pp. G6-7. 58. The Lost Ones, p. 161. 59. See Brater, Beyond Minimalism, p. 113; Knowlson and Pilling, p. 219. 60. See Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge, 1989), p. 209. 61. Worstward Ho, p. 43. 62. Samuel Beckett to Enoch Brater, Paris, 1985. The idea of Company, III Seen III Said, and Worstward Ho as a second trilogy has been actively supported by Beckett's British publisher John Calder, with respect to his prose writings. Gerry Dukes, as reported to Enoch Brater in Dublin in June 1992, finds a second trilogy elsewhere, situating Stirrings Still instead of Worstward Ho as the last link in the series. 63. Samuel Beckett to Linda Ben-Zvi, Paris, 1987, as reported to Enoch Brater the same year. 64. Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still, in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London, 1990). 65. Samuel Beckett, Eh Joe, in Collected Shorter Plays (London, 1984), p. 206; Worstward Ho, pp. 7, 17, 47; Stirrings Still, p. 117. 66. See Montague, p. 13. 67. Kalb, p. 233. 68. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York, 1958), pp. 18, 50.

Chapter 2 1. Samuel Beckett, All That Fall, in "Krapp's Last Tape" and Other Dramatic Pieces. All subsequent references to this play are to this edition. 2. Quoted by Katharine Worth, "Beckett and the Radio Medium," in British Radio Drama, ed. John Drakakis (Cambridge, 1981), p. 197. 3. In Malcolm Hay, "Happy Birthday Beckett," Plays and Players 393 (June 1986), 5-6, the actor Ronald Pickup calls Beckett "a playwright who should go straight into your head." See also Alan Schneider, Entrances: An American Director's Journey (New York, 1986), p. 269. 4. Wraparound discussion to the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production of All That Fall, directed by Everett Frost and starring Billie Whitelaw as Maddy Rooney and David Warrilow as her husband Dan (with Alvin Epstein as Mr. Slocum); first broadcast in the United States on National Public Radio to coincide with Beckett's eightieth birthday on April 13, 1986. 5. For the details of the original BBC production of All That Fall, directed

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by Donald McWhinnie and first broadcast on January 13, 1957, see Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting (Abo, Finland, 1976), pp. 28-76. In this production Patrick Magee was Mr. Slocum and Jack MacGowran played the part of Tommy. See also Martin Esslin, "Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," in Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 127. 6. Zilliacus, p. 39; wraparound discussion, All That Fall (Beckett Festival of Radio Plays). 7. Esslin, "Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," pp. 127-29; Donald McWhinnie, The Art of Radio (London, 1959), pp. 133-51; Zilliacus, pp. 68-69. 8. Quoted by Everett Frost, wraparound discussion, All That Fall (Beckett Festival of Radio Plays). 9. Cicely Berry, The Actor and His Text (London, 1987), especially pp. 15-22. 10. Billie Whitelaw has made this point a number of times in her many interviews about her work on the late Beckett plays. I am quoting here from my own discussions with her in August 1986 in Stirling, Scotland. See also Mel Gussow, "Billie Whitelaw's Guide to Performing Beckett," The New York Times, February 14, 1981, p. 21; Kalb, pp. 234-42; Nicholas Zurbrugg, "Interviews with David Warrilow, Philip Glass, and Billie Whitelaw,'' The Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (Summer 1987), 108-11; and "Billie Whitelaw," in Women in Beckett, ed. Ben-Zvi, pp. 3-10. 11. Everett Frost, wraparound discussion, All That Fall (Beckett Festival of Radio Plays); see also his observations on the same problem in "Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays," Theatre Journal 43 (October 1991), 367. 12. For useful information about productions of All That Fall in England, Ireland, the United States, France (Tous ceux qui tombent), Belgium (Allen die valleri), the Netherlands (Allen die vallen), and Germany (Alle, die da fallen), see Kees Hessing, Beckett on Tape (Leiden, 1992), pp. 2-3. 13. Billie Whitelaw as quoted by Frost in "Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays," p. 368. 14. See Beryl Fletcher and John Fletcher, A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, rev. ed. (London, 1985), p. 82. 15. Billie Whitelaw to Enoch Brater, August 1986, Stirling, Scotland. 16. Macbeth, I.iv.ll. 17. Quoted by Enoch Brater, Why Beckett (London, 1989), p. 107. 18. See Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (Berkeley, Calif., 1989). 19. Molloy, p. 188. 20. Company, p. 64. 21. Endgame, pp. 18, 20. 22. Schneider, p. 269; for details about the circumstances that led to the writing of Krapp's Last Tape, see Brater, Beyond Minimalism, p. 12. 23. Quoted by Zilliacus, p. 68.

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24. Wraparound discussion to the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production of Embers (1989), directed by Everett Frost. 25. Zilliacus, p. 76. 26. Wraparound discussion, Embers (Beckett Festival of Radio Plays). 27. The term is Garrett Stewart's; see Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley, Calif., 1990). 28. Samuel Beckett, Embers, in "Krapp's Last Tape" and Other Dramatic Pieces, pp. 96, 100, 114, 118. All subsequent references to this play are to this edition. 29. For further discussion of the uses of time in monologue and soliloquy, see Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare's Soliloquies (London, 1987); Ruby Cohn, "Outward Bound Soliloquies," Journal of Modern Literature 6 (February 1977), 17-38; and Andrew K. Kennedy, Dramatic Dialogue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter (Cambridge, 1983). 30. McWhinnie, pp. 134-35. 31. Stewart, pp. 1-3. 32. "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," p. 14. For two perceptive analyses of the dramatic function of listening in Beckett, see Bernard Beckerman, "Beckett and the Act of Listening," and Katharine Worth, "Beckett's Auditors: Not 1 to Ohio Impromptu," both in Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, ed. Enoch Brater (New York, 1986), pp. 149-92. In The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: "Krapp's Last Tape," ed. James Knowlson (London, 1992), pp. 115-17, the playwright distinguishes between two kinds of listening essential to the dramatization of his hero's situation on stage: "motionless listening" and "agitation listening." 33. Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Cornier (London, 1974), p. 11; The Unnamable, p. 110. 34. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," in The Complete Poems and Plays ofT. S. Eliot (London, 1969), pp. 17, 62 (emphasis mine). According to John Fletcher, "The Waste Land" was the one work of Eliot's that impressed Beckett (see Zilliacus, p. 79). 35. Billie Whitelaw played Ada in the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production of Embers; Barry McGovern played Henry. 36. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 185; Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York, 1957), p. 106. 37. Macbeth, I.v.59; Waiting for Godot, p. 40. 38. H. Porter Abbott, "Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories," New Literary History 19 (Spring 1988), p. 597; and "Narratricide: Samuel Beckett as Autographer," Romance Studies 11 (Winter 1987), p. 35. 39. Kenner, The Stoic Comedians, p. 153. 40. Kalb, p. 233. 41. Santa Cecilia is the patron saint of music. 42. See John Russell Brown, "Beckett and the Art of the Nonplus," in

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Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, ed. Brater, pp. 25-45; King Lear, I.iv.145, V.iii.308. 43. Frost, "Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays," p. 376. 44. S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of "Undoing" in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), p. 185. Paraphrasing Beckett's own words, Gontarski writes,' 'Beckett's struggle in composition is to undo the layers of the physical world, to reveal this thing-in-itself, the metaphysical, essential, recurrent form. It is, after all, the shape that matters." 45. Samuel Beckett, Words and Music, in "Cascando" and Other Short Dramatic Pieces (New York, 1969), p. 23. All subsequent references to this play are to this edition. 46. Beckett in a letter to Judith Schmidt of Grove Press, February 12, 1961; quoted by Zilliacus, p. 99. 47. Worth, "Beckett and the Radio Medium," p. 210. 48. Beckett wrote Words and Music in 1961; it was first broadcast by the BBC on November 13, 1962. 49. All That Fall, p. 40. 50. Yeats' poem "The Tower" provides the key phrase as well as the atmosphere for the face that materializes on screen in Beckett's television play, . . . but the clouds. . .; see The Collected Poems ofW. B. Yeats (New York, 1956), p. 197. The "tower" and the "stairs" are, of course, reminiscent of Buck Mulligan's Martello tower in Ulysses. 51. In the documentary accompanying the film of Rockaby (D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus; Pennebaker Associates, Inc., New York, 1982), Billie Whitelaw says that doing Beckett is like "playing the right music." See also her comments to this effect in Gussow, "Billie Whitelaw's Guide to Performing Beckett," p. 21; and in James Knowlson, "Extracts from an Unscripted Interview with Billie Whitelaw," Journal of Beckett Studies 3 (Summer 1978), 89. 52. For information about the various productions of Words and Music, see Zilliacus, pp. 99-116; Esslin, "Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," pp. 135— 36; Worth, "Beckett and the Radio Medium," p. 208. See also the wraparound discussion to the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production of Words and Music. 53. See, for example, Esslin, "Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," p. 136. 54. Zilliacus, p. 107. 55. Beckett to Georges Pelorson (alias Belmont); quoted in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre (London, 1988), p. 163. 56. Embers, p. 99. 57. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1961), p. 703. On "Vega" and "Lyre," see Dream of Fair to Middling Women, pp. 16-17, 70. 58. "The Garden," in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 52. 59. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 10. 60. Hamlet, ffl.ii. 1

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61. Lawrence Shainberg, "Exorcising Beckett," Pushcart (1988-89), 105, 112. (Reprinted from The Paris Review 29 [Fall 1987], 100-136.) 62. Alvin Epstein played Croak to David Warrilow's Joe (Words) in the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production of Words and Music. 63. Krapp's Last Tape, p. 19; Othello, V.ii. 145; see Morrison, pp. 65, 87. 64. See Brater, Beyond Minimalism, 96-102. 65. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, p. 39. Beckett will rely on the same source in the very first line of Stirrings Still: "One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go" (p. 113). Katharine Worth (in The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, p. 259) has suggested that even the title of Words and Music relies on Yeats: Words and Music Perhaps was the name the poet gave to a collection of his late poems. 66. Samuel Beckett to Linda Ben-Zvi, Paris, 1987, as reported to Enoch Brater, San Francisco, December 1987. 67. From an Abandoned Work, p. 135. 68. Samuel Beckett, . . . but the clouds. .., in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 261; Beckett's English adaptation of Robert Pinget's radio play La Manivelle is entitled The Old Tune (see Collected Shorter Plays, pp. 175-89). 69. Samuel Beckett, Cascando, in Collected Shorter Plays. 70. Zilliacus, p. 131; my translation from Mihalovici's French. 71. For further details regarding the original French production of Cascando and its subsequent English version on the BBC, see Zilliacus, pp. 116-46. The Mihalovici score was also used for the 1964 BBC production. For additional information about subsequent productions of the play, see Hessing, pp. 4-5. 72. The Evergreen Review text was reprinted by Grove Press in 1969 under the title "Cascando" and Other Short Dramatic Pieces. 73. Everett Frost to Enoch Brater, telephone conversation, July 1991. 74. For details regarding the circumstances that led to the BBC production of Cascando, see Zilliacus, pp. 116-46; Esslin, "Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," pp. 136-37; and the wraparound discussion to the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production of Cascando. My information regarding possible accusations of blasphemy in the case of Cascando and also in Embers is based on my telephone discussion with Everett Frost in July 1991. For a brief reconstruction of the controversy at the Royal Court Theatre in London concerning the 1958 production of Endgame, see Brater, Why Beckett, p. 80. 75. As of this writing, cassette copies of the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays are available from Pacifica Program Service in North Hollywood, California. 76. Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 145. According to Krance's "Introduction" to Samuel Beckett's "Company"/ "Compagnie" and "A Piece of Monologue" / "Solo," p. xx, "imagine" is problematized even further in Company. Earlier versions of Company render "develop," "belie," and "confute" in place of the same word. 77. Malone Dies, pp. 117-20. 78. Everett Frost to Enoch Brater, telephone conversation, July 1991. 79. Zilliacus, pp. 118-31.

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80. Everett Frost to Enoch Brater, telephone conversation, July 1991. 81. The Unnamable, pp. 178-79; Endgame, p. 61; Embers, p. 97. 82. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (New York, 1961), pp. 22, 24, 42, 44. 83. Proust, pp. 71, 72. 84. ... but the clouds. . . , p. 261. 85. See, for example, Esslin, "Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," pp. 137-38, 142; Cohn, Just Play, 89-91; and Cohn, Back to Beckett, p. 203. Katharine Worth suggests that' 'The emphasis in Words and Music is on the struggle to set in motion the process which leads to a true evocation. There is no such struggle in Cascando." See "Beckett and the Radio Medium," p. 212. 86. All Strange Away, p. 118. 87. Cohn, Back to Beckett, p. 204. 88. For a discussion of the tension line between the "element soi" and the "element histoire," see Zilliacus, pp. 118, 122, 129. 89. Embers, p. 102; Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 243. Opener's "No resemblance" resembles, too, Henry's "No comparison, no comparison" in Embers, p. 104. 90. Malone Dies, p. 115; Embers, p. 97. 91. See, for example, Beryl Fletcher and John Fletcher, p. 176. 92. Molloy, p. 41. 93. Beryl Fletcher and John Fletcher, p. 174. 94. Quoted in Zilliacus, p. 118. 95. For information about the German productions of Cascando, see Zilliacus, pp. 144-45; for the 1984 British production, see Katharine Worth, "Beckett and the Radio Medium," pp. 208-15; for the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production, see Frost, "Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays," p. 363. My information about the Chaikin Cascando is based on interviews with William Coco (dramaturge, organizer, and production assistant for this recording), held in New York in November 1992 and April 1993. 96. Kalb, p. 166. Beckett's note to Akalaitis reads as follows: "OK for Mabou Mines to do Cascando in Switzerland. Sam Beckett.'' See JoAnne Akalaitis, "In Memory: Meeting Beckett," The Drama Review 34 (Fall 1990), 11-12. 97. Everett Frost to Enoch Brater, telephone conversation, July 1991. 98. Martin Esslin, "Beckett's Rough for Radio," Journal of Modern Literature 6 (February 1977), 97. 99. Samuel Beckett, Rough for Radio I, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 108. All subsequent references to this play are to this edition. The English-language version of the play was published previously in Stereo Headphones 1 (Spring 1976). 100. My information about the Dutch and Israeli productions of Rough for Radio I is based on my discussions with Richard Rijnvos, Shimon Levy, and Edward Beckett during the Samuel Beckett International Symposium held in The Hague in April 1992. 101. See Enoch Brater, "W. B. Yeats: The Poet as Critic," Journal of Modern Literature 4 (February 1975), 672.

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102. Donald McWhinnie speaks about the division as it applies to the sound of All That Fall; see McWhinnie, p. 133. 103. Beckett to Everett Frost; as reported to Enoch Brater, telephone conversation, July 1991. 104. Samuel Beckett, Rough for Radio II, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 119. All subsequent references to this work are to this edition. 105. Beckett to Barry McGovern, wraparound discussion to the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays production of Rough for Radio II. 106. For information about the 1976 BBC production of Rough for Radio II, see Esslin, "Beckett's Rough for Radio," pp. 95-103. 107. Wraparound discussion, Rough for Radio II (Beckett Festival of Radio Plays). 108. Samuel Beckett, What Where, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 316. 109. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, book 6, chapter 8. See the Pocket Library edition of this work (New York, 1957), p. 334. Compare the Stenographer's cry of "creatures" to Hamm's in Endgame: "Ah the creatures, the creatures, everything has to be explained to them" (p. 43). 110. Sir Thomas Browne, "Letter to a Friend" (1672), in Sir Thomas Browne, "Religio Medici"; "Letter to a Friend"; and "Christian Morals," ed. W. A. Greenhill (London, 1881), p. 151: "So closely shut within the holds of Vice and Iniquity, as not to find some escape by a Postern of Rescipiscency" (rescipiscence = repentance for misconduct; recognition of errors committed; return to a better mind or opinion). See The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1971), p. 2509. Beckett uses the phrase "posterns of the mind'' in Yellow, one of the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks (London, 1966), p. 173. 111. See Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama (1855), especially part 1, xxii, 1. 850, in Major British Writers, vol. 2, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York, 1959), p. 440. Beckett had relied on Tennyson as early as Dream of Fair to Middling Women, where the title itself is in part a play on the poem "Dream of Fair Women.'' See the same novel, page 149 for "tears idle tears" and page 20 for "croisee tennysonienne." 112. Watt, p. 136. 113. See Gontarski, The Intent of "Undoing" in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts, p. 150. 114. Waiting for Godot, p. 22.

Chapter 3 1. Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 285. 2. All subsequent references to Enough are to Collected Shorter Prose. 3. For background information concerning the world premieres of Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu, see Brater, Beyond Minimalism, pp. 126-28, 165-77. 4. Regarding the question of the narrator's gender in Enough, see Cohn,

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Back to Beckett, pp. 243-47; Murphy, pp. 76-83; Knowlson and Pilling, p. 152; Hill, p. 158; Brienza, pp. 72-73; and Paul Lawley, "Samuel Beckett's 'Art and Craft': A Reading of Enough," Modern Fiction Studies 29 (Spring 1983), 2541. 5. See Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses, pp. 738ff; Apollinaire's play The Breasts of Tiresias, in Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism, ed. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth (New York, 1966), pp. 55-91; "The Waste Land," in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, p. 68; and John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," in Major British Writers, vol. 2, ed. Harrison, p. 344: "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs. ..." Compare, too, other Beckettian "ejaculations" that appear in Texts for Nothing XI: " . . . not in the least pretentious, making no demands, rent with ejaculations, Jesus, Jesus" (p. 108). 6. My information about Earl Kim's work with the Beckett texts is based on my meetings with the composer in The Hague, April 1992. At the Beckett Symposium held there Kim played recordings of his work and discussed the difficult problem of musical interpretation as it applies to what he called the "settings" for the author's work in prose, poetry, and drama. 7. Editor's introduction, Women in Beckett, ed. Ben-Zvi, p. xi. 8. See Julia Kristeva's comprehensive analysis of this question from the perspective of semiotics in her Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1980). 9. Molloy, pp. 75-76; Watt, pp. 29, 148. 10. Molloy, p. 47. 11. The Unnamable, pp. 83, 140; Malone Dies, p. 68. See Watt, p. 85, on the "loss of species"; How It Is, p. 47, on "the losses of the species"; andMercier and Gamier, p. 84, on the "leaving of species to get on as best it could without me." Eric P. Levy comments on this problem in Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction (Totowa, N. J. 1980). 12. On the various possibilities of voice, silence, and sound, see in particular Stewart; Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (London, 1978); and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982). 13. On this point, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Herbert L. and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, 111., 1964), especially pp. 4-19. 14. Watt, p. 158. 15. Molloy, p. 22; John Calder to Enoch Brater, New Orleans, December 1988. 16. Brienza, p. 88. 17. Texts for Nothing XIII, p. 113. 18. See McWhinnie, pp. 134-35; Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); and Reid, p. 68. 19. ... but the clouds . . . , p. 261; Molloy, p. 41. 20. See Watt, p. 254.

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21. On Beckett's position as a modernist writer, see H. Porter Abbott, "Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre," in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, ed. Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), pp. 73-96. 22. See Cohn, Back to Beckett, p. 244. 23. Quoted by John Fletcher, p. 235. 24. Proust, p. 71; Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 101. 25. See, for example, Brienza, p. 82; Elaine M. Scarry, "Six Ways to Kill a Blackbird or Any Other Intentional Object: Samuel Beckett's Method of Meaning," James Joyce Quarterly 8 (Summer 1971), 285-89; and J.E. Dearlove, Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Nonrelational An (Durham, N.C., 1982), pp. 146-49. 26. Brienza, p. 84. 27. See A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i. 175; How It Is, p. 41. 28. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York, 1959), p. 120; /// Seen III Said, p. 59; Samuel Beckett, what is the word, inAs the Story Was Told, pp. 131— 32. 29. Worstward Ho, p. 20. 30. Mercier and Gamier, pp. 39, 43. The fellow traveler Beckett's seedy heroes meet on a train proves to be a walking illustration of his own gift of "gab." The peroration he offers, with its allusions to Homer, "outlying whoreshops and saloons," night school, christenings, vaseline, and the heritage he claims from the loins of a local parish priest ("it was common knowledge"), gives it to them "hot and strong." 31. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 4-19. See also Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadephia, 1981). 32. /// Seen III Said, p. 32. 33. Samuel Beckett, Ping, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 149. 34. The Lost Ones, p. 167. In terms of astrological points of reference, the protagonists in Enough especially resemble Beckett's "bigeminal" stargazers in Mercier and Cornier (see in particular pp. 73, 75, and 121). 35. "Dante. . .Bruno. Vico. Joyce," p. 4. 36. Rough for Radio II, p. 121. 37. Krapp's Last Tape, p. 26. 38. Watt, p. 31. Mercier and Gamier in many ways reads like a blueprint for the much later Enough. The language of the earlier story contains "mucous membrane" (p. 121), "up to a point" (p. 7), "take me by the hand" (p. 33), and the turning over "as one man" (pp. 90, 102), in this case "without preconcertation and in perfect interdependency." "What stink of artifice" (p. 9) is easy to correlate, too, with the narrator's impatience with his/her own "art and craft" in Enough. 39. Macbeth, V.v.43; Malone Dies, p. 3; A Midsummer Night's Dream, III.i.91 and V.i.192. 40. Samuel Beckett, Ghost Trio, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 250.

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41. Worstward Ho, pp. 7, 47. 42. See Dougald McMillan, "Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarassment of Allegory," in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Ruby Conn (New York, 1975), p. 122. On the date of the completion for Still, see Brienza, p. 198, who correctly lists this as June/July 1972. Much of the confusion surrounding the date of composition can be traced to Beckett's reshuffling of the order of his pieces in the collections called Pourfinir encore et autre foirades and Fizzles; see Knowlson and Pilling, p. 132. 43. All subsequent references to Still are to Collected Shorter Prose. 44. The Unnamable, p. 136; Texts for Nothing XIII, p. 115. 45. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York, 1968), p. 16. For a different aspect of the Barthes-Beckett connection, see Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), pp. 84-103. 46. Samuel Beckett, "Whoroscope," in Collected Poems, 1930-1978 (London, 1986), p. 1. 47. "Dante.. . Bruno. Vico. Joyce," p. 22; The Unnamable, p. 3. 48. Samuel Beckett, What Where, p. 316. 49. Beckett based the French title of The Lost Ones (Le Depeupleur) on a line from Lamartine's Meditations poetiques: "Un seul etre vous manque et tout estdepeuple." SeeBrianH. Finney,Since " how it is": A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction (London, 1972), p. 11. 50. Murphy, pp. 1, 69; Molloy, p. 75; Footfalls, p. 241. 51. See Footfalls, p. 243. The notion of an implied subject would in this regard take one step further Wolfgang Iser's argument in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, Md., 1974), especially pp. 164-78, 257-73. See also Scarry, "Six Ways to Kill a Blackbird or Any Other Intentional Subject," pp. 285-89. 52. Enough, p. 140. 53. "Less is more" is Beckett's marginal note to That Time. See Conn, Just Play, p. 172, and Knowlson and Pilling, p. 219. 54. Samuel Beckett, Rockaby, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 277. 55. See The Seagull, in Plays by Anton Chekhov, trans. Elisaveta Fen (New York, 1959), p. 151. 56. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. James M. Edie (Evanston, 111., 1964), p. 185. 57. Samuel Beckett, Not I, in Collected Shorter Plays, pp. 217, 219, 22122. 58. Molloy, p. 20. 59. On Beckett's indebtedness to Lamartine, see Finney, Since "how it is," p. 11. 60. Mercier and Cornier, p. 75. 61. Enough, p. 139. 62. Company, pp. 34, 64.

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63. Company, p. 7. 64. Still, p. 184. For an examination of the question of repetition and difference as it applies to Beckett, see Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, pp. 1-14. 65. Molloy, p. 41; "Voyelles," in Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 53. 66. See Brater, Beyond Minimalism, p. 161, for Beckett's use of "Voyelles" in his play Quoi ou (What Where). The playwright actually wrote "Cf. Rimbaud's sonnet" in the margin of his notebook for the 1985 production, now at the Beckett Archive at Reading University. All subsequent references to All Strange Away are to Collected Shorter Prose. 67. The Lost Ones, p. 159; "Dante. . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce," p. 8. 68. Reid, p. 13, quotes from Beckett's letter to Alan Schneider of August 12, 1957: "My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else." 69. Dream of Fair to Midding Women, p. 20. 70. Waiting for Godot, p. 42. 71. Molloy, p. 41. 72. Waiting for Godot, p. 51. 73. Rough for Radio II, p. 120; As You Like It, Il.vii. 166. Sans is the French title for Enough. 74. Beckett's letter to Joseph Maunsell Hone dated July 3, 1937, quoted by Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York, 1978), p. 254. For information about the notebooks Beckett kept while working on Human Wishes, his play about Dr. Johnson, see Cohn, Just Play, pp. 143-62. 75. The Unnamable, p. 136. 76. The Unnamable, p. 139. 77. See Beckett's English translation of "Que ferais-je. . . " in Collected Poems, p. 61. 78. See Samuel Beckett, "Cascando" in Collected Poems, p. 30. 79. Gustave Flaubert, "A Simple Heart," in Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (London, 1961). 80. See Kristeva, Desire in Language; Molloy, p. 76. 81. Othello, I.iii.218; Hamlet, II.ii.192; Waiting for Godot, p. 33. 82. W. B. Yeats, "The Tower" and "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," in Collected Poems, pp. 7, 195; From an Abandoned Work, p. 135. 83. Fizzles was the name Beckett gave to the English volume of short pieces published in French as Foirades; "fizzle" also appears in The Unnamable, p. 74. For Pozzo's vaporizer see Waiting for Godot, p. 21; for the "ejaculations" see Enough, p. 144. 84. Hamlet, II.ii.120. 85. Pierre Chabert spoke to this point at the Beckett symposium organized by Tom Bishop at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, April 1986. 86. See Harvey, p. 435; Gontarski, The Intent of "Undoing" in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts; Molloy, p. 41.

190

Notes 87. Waiting for Godot, pp. 7-8; The Unnamable, p. 83; How It Is, pp. 10,

93. 88. Beckett to Alan Schneider, quoted by Cohn, Back to Beckett, p. 139. 89. Waiting for Godot, p. 29. 90. Malone Dies, p. 61. 91. Krapp's Last Tape, p. 17. "Surprised by light" is Beckett's wry transformation of Wordsworth's sonnet, " 'Surprized by joy—Impatient as the Wind' "; in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (New York, 1984), p. 334. The title Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York, 1955) is also used by C. S. Lewis. 92. Samuel Beckett, That Time, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 235. 93. A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i. 164. 94. See The Unnamable, p. 130, for "this hell of stories." 95. On the question of "making strange" in Beckett, see H. Porter Abbott, "Reading as Theatre: Understanding Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art," in Modern Drama 34 (March 1991), 5-22. See also Worstward Ho, p. 9. 96. Murphy, p. 178. 97. In The Lost Ones (p. 159) each one of the "lost bodies" roams "searching for its lost one." 98. All subsequent references to Imagination Dead Imagine are to Collected Shorter Prose. 99. The Unnamable, p. 179; see also the role assigned to Beckett's silent Auditor in the stage directions to Not I, p. 216. 100. See Cordelia's speech of self-defense in King Lear, I.i.231. 101. Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 269; see Morrison, p. 104. 102. Endgame, p. 29. On the "mixed choir," see Mercier and Gamier, p. 25; and especially Watt, pp. 33-35. 103. See King Lear, V.iii.262-64. 104. On Beckett's use of "arsy-versy," see All That Fall, p. 75, andMercier and Cornier, p. 11. 105. Happy Days, p. 53; Watt, p. 62. 106. Happy Days, p. 18. 107. Emphasis mine. 108. "Whoroscope," p. 1. In the Judaic conception of God I am quoting from here, the deity makes itself known not through the sensational manifestation of seeing, but through the richer and more purely imaginative (in the Beckettian sense) communication offered by the act of listening. On this "aesthetic of inaudibilities," see Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 141. 109. Hamlet, I.iv.87. Compare the reader/listener's active role in Imagination Dead Imagine to the one Beckett assigns to his silent Auditor in Not I (p. 215), where the participation of this elongated figure in the drama is limited to "a gesture of helpless compassion," albeit repeated four times. 110. Still, p. 184. 111. Company, p. 7. In Beckett's Dying Words, Christopher Ricks suggests

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that the phrase "imagination dead imagine" might even imply the "death of all imagination on the planet" (p. 45).

Chapter 4 1. All subsequent references to Lessness are to Collected Shorter Prose. 2. Endgame, p. 13. 3. Rough for Radio H, p. 115. 4. Quoted by Martin Esslin, "Samuel Beckett—Infinity, Eternity," in Beckett at 801Beckett in Context, ed. Brater, p. 118. 5. All subsequent references to Ping are to Collected Shorter Prose. 6. In addition to the sources already cited for commentary on Beckett's posttrilogy fiction, see in regard to Ping David Lodge, "Some Ping Understood," in Encounter 30 (February 1968), 85-89, reprinted in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays (Ithaca, N.Y. 1971), pp. 172-83; Renee Riese Hubert, "A la trace de 'Bing,' " in Samuel Beckett, ed. Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman (Paris, 1976), pp. 253-58; Segre, pp. 127-47; and, especially on the question of a "spoken narration," Dearlove, pp. 107-9, 112-18. 7. What Where, pp. 311-12, 314. 8. See Beckett's review of The Amaranthers by Jack B. Yeats, reprinted in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London, 1983), p. 89. 9. "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce," p. 22. 10. Happy Days, p. 8. 11. Endgame, p. 48. 12. On this point, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, 1969). Stephen Barker pursues a related idea about passage/passage and Beckett's theme of reading and relating in "Lecture and Lecture: Recitation and Reading in Waiting for Godot,'' in Approaches to Teaching Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot', ed. June Schlueter and Enoch Brater (New York, 1991), pp. 116-25. See also the same author's "Paysage to Passage: Beckett's Poiesis of the World," Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (1992), 15-38. 13. For this citation as well as for details of the radio tape of Lessness, see Esslin, "Samuel Beckett—Infinity, Eternity," pp. 117-20. For an additional discussion of the "structuralist" composition of this work, see Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett's Drama, 1956-1976 (Gerrards Cross, Eng. 1988), pp. 15-26. 14. The relationship of Lessness to certain Dada-surrealist modes of composition has been examined by Susan Brienza and Enoch Brater in "Chance and Choice in Beckett's Lessness," in ELH 43 (Summer 1976), 244-58. For a computer-assisted study of this piece, see J. M. Coetzee, "Samuel Beckett's Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition," in Computers and the Humanities 1 (March 1973), 195-98. 15. Finney, Since "how it is," pp. 22-25; Cohn, Back to Beckett, pp. 262-

192

Notes

67; Edith Fournier, " 'Sans': Cantate et fugue pour un refuge," in Les Lettres nouvelles 3 (September-October, 1970), 149-60; Knowlson and Pilling, 172-76; Murphy, pp. 112-23; and Brienza, pp. 179-96. 16. Rockaby, pp. 275-81. 17. Esslin, "Samuel Beckett—Infinity, Eternity," pp. 117-20. 18. Esslin, "Samuel Beckett—Infinity, Eternity," p. 120. For information about the world premiere production of That Time in London, see Brater, Beyond Minimalism, pp. 37-42. 19. Samuel Beckett, Sans, in Tetes-Mortes (Paris, 1972), p. 70. On the question of the French-English correspondence of Beckett's work, see Raymond Federman, "The Writer as Self-Translator," in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, ed. Friedman, Rossman, and Sherzer, pp. 7-16; and especially Brian T. Fitch, Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work (Toronto, 1988). My comments on the relationship of French "sans" to English "without" and "lessness" are based on my discussions with Raymond Federman during the Beckett symposium held at the University of Texas-Austin in March 1984. 20. The German translation of Lessness as Losigkeit was completed by Elmar Tophoven, as he reports in the appendix to McMillan and Fehsenfeld (p. 318): "Losigkeit, Lessness in English, i[s] his [Beckett's] own title. It is a creation that the German language offers, but one that doesn't actually occur in normal usage. 'Heimatlosigkeit' ('homelessness') yes, but not just Losigkeit by itself." 21. See, for example, Cohn, Back to Beckett, pp. 262-67; and Brienza, pp. 187-93. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women, pp. 27-28, however, the narrator parenthetically expresses his impatience with Belacqua as follows: "he might have spared us that hoary old binary." 22. See Beryl Fletcher and John Fletcher, p. 161. 23. Waiting for Godot, p. 58; Endgame, p. 59. 24. On the question of habit, see Proust, pp. 7-8. 25. See Abbott, "Reading as Theatre," pp. 16-19. On the problematic status of history as an explanation for the present, see Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana, 111., 1987), p. 52. 26. All subsequent references to The Lost Ones are to Collected Shorter Prose. 27. Tetes-Mortes, a title first published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1967, appeared in an expanded edition in 1972 containing D'un ouvrage abandonne, Assez, Imagination morte imaginez, Bing, and Sans. 28. Duthuit, "Sam Francis: Animator of Silence." 29. See "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce," pp. 4-12, 18-22. The diminutive stature of Beckett's "little people of searchers" especially resembles the Lilliputians in the first part of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The "quincunx" is from Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus (1658). See "Urne Buriall" and "The Garden of Cyrus," ed. John Carter (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 73, 90: "The single Quincunx of the Hyades upon the head of Taurus" (iii, 122); and "The legges alone do move Quincuncially by single angles" (iii, 153). See also The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 2, p. 2394. The characters

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stationed in urns in Beckett's Play are, of course, easy to relate to Browne's UrnBurial (1658). 30. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 175; Endgame, p. 12. 31. See Heard in the Dark 1 and Heard in the Dark 2 in Collected Shorter Prose, pp. 203-7. Both these pieces are intimately related to Company. 32. Although the French title of this work finds its origin in Lamartine's Meditations poetiques, the end of the seventh stanza of the thirteen comprising Meditation premiere: L'Isolement (see Finney, Since "how it is," p. 11), the title in English certainly conveys additional overtones. See, for example, "la perduta gente" in canto 3 of The Inferno and "the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest" in the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust's Swann's Way (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 325. For the French prose text's title in MS as Chacun son depeupleur, see Raymond Federman and John Fletcher, eds., Samuel Beckett: His Work and His Critics (Berkeley, Calif.), p. 109. 33. See Cohn, Back to Beckett, pp. 259-60; and A. Alvarez, Samuel Beckett (New York, 1973), p. 127. 34. MaloneDies,p. 21 (emphasis mine); Endgame, p. 3', Happy Days, p. 42. 35. Endgame, p. 52. 36. Endgame, p. 9. 37. Endgame, pp. 30, 58. 38. Endgame, p. 68. 39. How It Is, p. 143. 40. See Ludovic Janvier, "Place of Narration/Narration of Place," trans. Ruby Cohn, in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Cohn, pp. 96-110. 41. See Waiting for Godot, p. 29; Molloy, p. 75; Malone Dies, pp. 8, 61; The Unnamable, pp. 10, 18, 75, 146. On "abode" as a waiting-place, see Brienza, p. 140. 42. See Locatelli, pp. 188-218, for a discussion of how the same crisis of representation functions (and disfunctions) in /// Seen III Said. 43. Ping, p. 149; "Dante. . .Bruno. Vico. Joyce," pp. 6, 22; Rough for Radio II, p. 118. On Belacqua Shuah, see Cohn, The Comic Gamut, p. 18. Beckett's story Sedendo et Quiescendo, not included in More Pricks Than Kicks, was published in transition in 1932, and took its title from the Aristotelian dictum quoted by Belacqua when Dante reproached him for his idleness in The Divine Comedy: "sedendo et quiescendo anima efficitur prudens" (it is by sitting and resting that the soul grows wise). Dante's answer: "If it is by sitting that one becomes wise, there can be no one wiser than you." See John Fletcher, pp. 1517. For Beckett's rendition of the same phrase from Dante, see Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 122. 44. Happy Days, p. 21; Waiting for Godot, p. 40; Enough, p. 140. 45. Worstward Ho, p. 17; Endgame, p. 2. 46. Watt, p. 158. 47. Stein was said to have directed this remark at Ernest Hemingway. See Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1960), p. 219.

194

Notes

48. Endgame, p. 17. 49. On the slightly more than 200 searchers and the slightly less than one square meter allotted each of them, see, for example, Conn, Back to Beckett, pp. 257-58; Brienza, p. 155; and Finney, Since "how it is," p. 12. 50. See David Warrilow's tribute to Beckett in As No Other Dare Fail, ed. John Calder (London, 1986), pp. 87-88. 51. Watt, p. 247. For a thorough examination of the principle of indeterminacy, much discussed by Beckett's critics, see David C. Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (New York, 1992). 52. Samuel Beckett, Film, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 165. 53. See Federman and Fletcher, p. 109, for Chacun son depeupleur. 54. "Dante. . .Bruno. Vico. Joyce," p. 22; "Three Dialogues by Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit," in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), p. 21. 55. Endgame, pp. 18, 50; Samuel Beckett, "Brief Dream," in Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Spring 1992), p. 3; King Lear, I.i.90. 56. See Gontarski, The Intent of "Undoing" in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts, pp. 150-52; That Time, p. 234; Imagination Dead Imagine, p. 147; Footfalls, pp. 240-41, 243; A Piece of Monologue, p. 267; and The Unnamable, p. 27. Chapter 5 1. All subsequent references to Company are to the John Calder edition (London, 1980). 2. Proust, p. 19. 3. Proust, p. 71. For an informed discussion of the question and number of voices in Company, incorporating arguments previously advanced by Angela Moorjani, Judith Dearlove, Edith Kern, and the present author, see Laura Barge, God, the Quest, the Hero: Thematic Structures in Beckett's Fiction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), pp. 299-315. On "the mutterings verbatim," see How It Is, p. 82. 4. See Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett (Boston, 1986), p. 97. 5. Endgame, p. 29.

6. Happy Days, p. 54. For an extended discussion of the echoes in Company from other Beckett works, see Enoch Brater, "The Company Beckett Keeps: The Shape of Memory and One Fablist's Decay of Lying," in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Beja, Gontarski, and Astier, pp. 157-71. 7. Endgame, pp. 1, 68. In a letter to Barney Rosset dated August 27, 1957, Beckett wrote, "If we can't keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down." Quoted in Zilliacus, p. 3. 8. Ill Seen III Said, pp. 8-10; Waiting far Godot, pp. 29, 48; Watt, p. 83; and Happy Days, p. 18. 9. Although Company goes much further than Malone Dies in suppressing the biographical elements and proper names that localize many details in each

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story, the later work sustains a far more rich and convincing autobiographical mood. In The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland (Dublin and London, 1986), Eoin O'Brien uncovers through photography a number of significant landmarks in the Beckettian scenography for each of these works. 10. Whitelaw in the film of Rockaby. 11. Mercier and Gamier, p. 73. 12. Finnegans Wake, p. 619. 13. Samuel Beckett, Ding-Dong, in More Pricks Than Kicks, p. 41. 14. "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce," p. 8. 15. Beckett described Winnie to Martha Fehsenfeld as "a bird with oil on its feathers." See James Knowlson, ed., Happy Days: Samuel Beckett's Production Notebook (New York, 1985), p. 137. 16. On this point, see Zeifman, pp. 137-44; and Cohn, Just Play, pp. 22, 36, 70, 78, 84, 143, and 179. 17. King Lear, I.i.158. Shaw's responsiveness to the musicality of the Shakespeare text (and his caveats about its limited dramatic potential) appear in a variety of sources. See, for example, Stanley Weintraub, ed. Shaw: An Autobiography, 1856-1898, Selected from His Writings (London, 1970), p. 47, where Shakespeare is recommended for the "splendor of sound, magic of romantic illusion, majesty of emphasis, ardor, elation, reverberation of haunting echoes, and every poetic quality" that makes his work "stand above all recorded music. . . .These things cannot be spectated. . .they must be heard. It is not enough to see Richard III [sic]: you should be able to whistle it." For additional comments in the same vein, see the same editor's Shaw: An Autobiography, 1898-1950, Selected from His Writings (London, 1971), especially p. 257, recycled from The Quintessence of Ibsenism: "It is useless to talk about Shakespear's [sic] depth now," said Shaw, "there is nothing left but his music." For Shaw on King Lear, see Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton, N.J., 1963), p. 317n; and especially Stanley Weintraub, "Shaw's 'Lear,' " in Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw, 1914-18 (New York, 1971), p. 342: "Shaw privately thought of Lear what he had written of Othello: 'Tested by the brain, it is ridiculous: tested by the ear, it is sublime.' " On "George Bernard Pygmalion," see Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 79; on "How long oh Lord" from Saint Joan, see the same novel, p. 82. 18. Happy Days, p. 49; Beryl Fletcher and John Fletcher, p. 164. 19. Endgame, p. 51. On the "concert of voices" at work in Joyce, see Philippe Sellers, Vision a New York: Entretiens avec DavidHayman (Paris, 1981), pp. 113-14. 20. The Lost Ones, p. 166. 21. In a letter to Martha Fehsenfeld dated November 18, 1980, Beckett said that "All the way from calcaneum to bump of philogentiveness" (Company, p. 71) is a mistake in the published text that should read "All the way up from calcaneum to bump of philoprogenitiveness." My thanks to Martha Fehsenfeld for calling my attention to this error in the printed text of Company.

196

Notes

22. Murphy, p. 84; Footfalls, pp. 242-43. In Beckett's Theaters: Interpretations for Performance (Lewisburg, Pa., 1984), pp. 242-43, Sidney Homan suggests that the origin of Mrs. Winter in Footfalls can be traced to the presence of Winter in Dante and the Lobster (More Pricks Than Kicks, p. 20). His ambitious argument discovers what he calls a "suggestive confusion" among the house of Belacqua's aunt, the aunt's name, and the season of the visit, but is unlikely to persuade other Beckett readers. 23. Similar verbal formulations will reappear in /// Seen III Said, pp. 24, 34, 37. 24. Texts for Nothing II, p. 76; see also Malone Dies, p. 61. 25. A Piece of Monologue, p. 268; The Unnamable, pp. 4, 36; and Samuel Beckett, Closed Space, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 199. On the relationship of Company to A Piece of Monologue, see Krance, ed., Samuel Beckett's ' 'Company"! "Compagnie" and "A Piece of Monologue" I "Solo." 26. See How It Is, pp. 10, 93. 27. All Strange Away, p. 117. 28. Waiting for Godot, p. 49. 29. Lessness, pp. 153-56. 30. Embers, p. 116. 31. Embers, p. 97; Waiting for Godot, p. 28. 32. The Unnamable, p. 37. 33. See Abbott, "Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories," pp. 597-615. 34. Endgame, p. 18; The Unnamable, p. 176. On the question of "playing tricks" in Beckett, see Angela B. Moorjani, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1982). 35. In The Beckett Country (p. 85) Eoin O'Brien locates this fictional episode at the Forty Foot at Sandycove, the male preserve of nude bathing located just a few yards from the Martello tower that Joyce assigns to Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. One can only "imagine" the effect such a site of an exclusively male ritual must have had on the mind of the sensitive and highly impressionable young boy portrayed in Company. 36. All Strange Away, p. 118. 37. Rockaby, pp. 275-77, 281; See That Time, p. 227. 38. Molloy, p. 41. 39. Molloy, p. 147; Krapp's Last Tape, p. 19 (see also Beryl Fletcher and John Fletcher, p. 130); and For to End Yet Again, p. 180. La Derniere Bande is Beckett's French title for Krapp's Last Tape. 40. Enough, p. 144; King Lear, V.iii.264. 41. Not I, p. 219. 42. Murphy, p. 1. 43. Endgame, p. 18; Macbeth, V.v.43. On the voice "Unfixed in Space. Whereas hearer fixed," see Krance, ed., Samuel Beckett's "Company" I "Compagnie" and "A Piece of Monologue" I "Solo," p. 193. 44. Endgame, p. 83.

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45. All subsequent references to /// Seen III Said are to the Grove edition (New York, 1981). 46. For a discussion of a similar dynamics between speaker and listener in the work of another author, see Marie Boroff, "Sound Symbolism as Drama in the Poetry of Robert Frost," PMLA 107 (January 1992), 131-44. 47. Texts for Nothing VI, p. 91. 48. A Piece of Monologue, p. 209; Rough for Radio II, pp. 119, 121, 124. 49. Texts for Nothing XIII, p. 113. 50. See All That Fall, p. 43; Malone Dies, pp. 34, 48. 51. For further Beckettian stargazing, see Mercier and Gamier, p. 121; Enough, p. 142; and Dream of Fair to Middling Women, pp. 16, 17, 70. 52. See Eoin O'Brien, pp. 27-29. 53. My information about the Druids and the ancient Celts, as well as Stonehenge, is from Ward Rutherford, The Druids (Wellingsborough, Eng., 1983); and J. A. Macculloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts (Edinburgh, 1911). 54. See Eoin O'Brien, pp. 98-102; More Pricks Than Kicks, p. 203; and Worstward Ho, p. 46. 55. Embers, p. 95. 56. Hamlet, Li. 1-2 and I.ii.184. Yeats' debt to this phrase is best known for its appearance in the opening line of At the Hawk's Well: "I call to the eye of the mind"; see The Collected Plays ofW. B. Yeats (New York, 1953), p. 136. For Beckett's own use of "eye of the mind," see Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 205. 57. Endgame, pp. 29-30. 58. For the allusion to Apollinaire, which also surfaces in That Time, see Brater, Beyond Minimalism, p. 46. See also, in The Complete Poems and Plays ofT. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," p. 173, and The Cocktail Party, p. 381. 59. Majorie Perloff has examined many of the literary allusions in /// Seen III Said in "Une voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader," pp. 36-54; see also Nagem, pp. 77-90. For an earlier use of Hopkins' "carrion" in Beckett, see Texts for Nothing I, p. 73. For the citations from Keats and Tennyson, see Modern British Writers, vol. 2, pp. 341-42, 408-9; for Shelley's "A Lament," see English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York, 1967), p. 1056. 60. Ohio Impromptu, p. 286. Beckett alluded to Macbeth as early as Dream of Fair to Middling Women: see his "screwing up our courage, not to the sticking point" (p. 39) from I.vii.60. 61. Othello, I.i.88-89. 62. Compare the "true plaster" of /// Seen III Said with the quite different "plaster" of How It Is, p. 85. 63. Lessness, pp. 155-56; How It Is, p. 144. 64. Malone Dies, p. 20. 65. See Rockaby, pp. 275-77, 281; Still, p. 183; Malone Dies, p. 53; Not I, pp. 220, 222; Company, pp. 39, 82-83; The Lost Ones, p. 159; Waiting for Godot, pp. 11, 29; That Time, p. 235; All That Fall, p. 33; Murphy, p. 167;

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Notes

Endgame, p. 44; What Where, pp. 310-13, 315;Ping, p. 149; Krapp's Last Tape, pp. 18, 20, 25; Watt, p. 208; Happy Days, p. 16; Ofa'o Impromptu, p. 285; . . . to ffc clouds..., p. 258; How It Is, pp. 38, 64, 78, 134-35, 139. 66. See Abbott, "Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre," pp. 73-96. 67. Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, especially pp. 170-201. 68. Enough, p. 144; see Molloy, p. 41, for "Wrong, very rightly wrong." 69. See other reconstructions of this same trope in Malone Dies (p. 15), Not I (p. 220), and Company (p. 85). 70. Although examples of the same narrative device may be observed as early in the Beckett canon as Dream of Fair to Middling Women (pp. 13, 66) and Murphy (p. 84), one of the strongest arguments for its manifestation in /// Seen III Said has been advanced by Locatelli, pp. 188-224. 71. See Waiting for Godot, p. 29. 72. The problem of ascribing meaning as a function of "saying" has been vigorously argued as a prerogative of the actor in the moment of performing any dramatic text. See, in this regard, David Cole, Acting as Reading: The Place of the Reading Process in the Actor's Work (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993); and Hollis Huston, The Actor's Instrument: Body, Theory, Stage (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993). Martin Esslin argues for a more essentialist position in An Anatomy of Drama (New York, 1976), as do to a lesser extent Michael Goldman in The Actor's Freedom (New York, 1975) and Bernard Beckerman in Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York, 1979). The Shakespeare repertory has proved to be a fertile laboratory for the examination of several aspects of the relationship between textual authority and the life of a script in performance. See, in particular, David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton, N.J., 1985); and Berger. 73. On the question of genre consideration raised here, see Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980); and Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," trans. Avital Ronell, in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1981), pp. 51-77, reprinted from Glyph 1 (Spring 1980). See also How It Is, pp. 7, 15; and Malone Dies, pp. 34, 48. 74. See Beckett's review of Denis Devlin's Intercessions, reprinted in Disjecta, ed. Cohn, p. 91. 75. Hill, pp. 102-20, offers a useful discussion of "playing" in Beckett from a strictly poststructuralist point of view. See also Murphy, p. 275. 76. See Samuel Beckett, Act Without Words I and Act Without Words II, in Collected Shorter Plays, pp. 41-51; and what is the word, p. 131. 77. Murphy, p. 75. 78. For previous uses of Beckett's "slumberous," see Paradise Lost: "... the timely dew of sleep / Now falling with soft slumbrous weight inclines / Our eye-lids. .. " (iv, 615), in The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston, 1965), p. 289; and James Macpherson: "Quake not, oh

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Slumbrous heroes." Collapsion, the action of collapsing, literally or figuratively, has appeared in Samuel Daniel, The Collection of the History of England (1621), as follows: "A general collapsion into those softening of vices." More pointedly to its use in /// Seen III Said, the same word has also been used by Henry Power in Experimental Philosophy II, 112 (1664): "After the removal of your finger, and collapsion of the Mercury." See The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 464; and vol. 2, p. 2874. 79. See the Ghost's "remember me" and its repetition, in Hamlet, I.v.91, 95, 97, 111. 80. For a previous incarnation of the same phrase, see the opening sentence of For to End Yet Again, p. 179. 81. On this point see Waiting for Godot, pp. 34, 40. 82. Worstward Ho, pp. 7, 8, 17. 83. Murphy, p. 65; and the poem "Cascando," p. 30 (both emphases mine). Beckett makes another tribute to the pun in Howltls, pp. 127,132: "it all depends on what you hear"; by comparison, "the mud" idly "gibbers." 84. All subsequent references to Worstward Ho are to the Grove edition (New York, 1983). 85. Malone Dies, p. 46 (emphasis mine). 86. Malone is of all Beckett's heroes the one most specifically determined to make a complete inventory of his possessions; see Malone Dies, pp. 3, 4, 6, 34, 77, 79, 83. 87. The Unnamable, p. 179. 88. See Andrew Renton, "Worstward Ho and the End(s) of Representation," in The Ideal Core of the Onion, ed. Pilling and Bryden, p. 102. 89. The Unnamable, p. 113; Watt, p. 21. 90. On the tension in Worstward Ho between "words" and "worlds," between "missaying" and the limits of representation, see Locatelli, pp. 225-70. For a discussion of how Beckett's "midget grammar" (How It Is, p. 76) strives to "style" such "new worlds" into being, see Brienza, pp. 252—57. On how Beckett treats these questions as "modes of language, as positions of enunciation, as points of singularity within discourse," see Hill, pp. 162-63. 91. See /// Seen III Said, p. 20; Watt, p. 147; and How It Is, p. 26 (see also How It Is, p. 76, for a similar "plof down the whole"). 92. King Lear, IV.i.29-30; Othellolll.m. 132-33. See John Pilling, " 'Nohow On' Worstward Ho," in Beckett at Eighty: A Celebration, ed. Knowlson, p. 25. See also Renton, p. 100; Greig, pp. G6-7; and A Piece of Monologue, p. 269. 93. Twelfth Night, III.i.134; John Donne, "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward," in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (Hammondsworth, 1966), p. 86. See also T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1951), pp. 147-233. Words like "pox" and "Jakes" appear in the Beckett repertory as early as Mercier and Gamier, the same work that forecasts the vis-a-vis in Company. See Mercier and Gamier, pp. 18, 40, 47. For a different use of the word "Jakes," see Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 22.

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94. Watt, pp. 48, 59, 116, 168. 95. Watt, p. 9; Mercier and Gamier, p. 26. 96. /// Seen III Said, p. 55. 97. See Brienza, p. 252; and Company, p. 26. 98. See Cohn, "Outward Bound Soliloquies," pp. 17-38. 99. The Unnamable, pp. 3-4; "it all" is from Footfalls, pp. 240-41, 243. 100. King Lear, I.ii.6, 9-10. 101. Quoted by Harvey, p. 434. This letter appears in its entirety, in the original German, in Disjecta, ed. Cohn, pp. 51-54. 102. "Dante... Bruno. Vico. . Joyce," p. 11; Greig, G6—7; Montague, p. 13. See also Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge, 1989); and Goffman, pp. 1-15. 103. Watt, pp. 167-69; Endgame, p. 29. 104. To cross-reference this "vertical," see, How It Is, p. 89. See also Molloy, p. 36, for the "heat of composition." 105. See the Addenda to Watt, p. 247; Texts for Nothing V, p. 86; and Embers, p. 104. 106. See "Dante... Bruno. Vico. . Joyce," p. 15; and Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, pp. 16-17. 107. The Unnamable, p. 20. 108. See The Lost Ones, p. 162; Company, p. 53; and Enough, p. 140. 109. The "inexhaustible inexhaustibly replenished" is quoted by Connor from Beckett's unpublished Long Observation of the Ray in "Between Theatre and Theory: Long Observation of the Ray," p. 85. See also Texts for Nothing VI, p. 89. 110. Waiting for Godot, p. 39. 111. See Watt, pp. 167-69. 112. Company, p. 7. Chapter 6 1. Quoted by Robert Scanlan, Review of Stirrings Still, Harvard Book Review 11-12 (Winter-Spring 1989), pp. 1-2. For Juliet's 1976 conversation with Beckett, see Ricks, p. 182. 2. For information concerning the circumstances of the writing and the publication of Stirrings Still, see Brian Finney, "Still Stirring to Be Still," Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Spring 1992), 129-30; Mel Gussow, "New Beckett Book Makes a Dramatic Entrance," The New York Times, February 4, 1989, p. 14; Helen Dudar, ' 'Samuel Beckett Stands By His Publisher,'' The Wall Street Journal, April24, 1989,p. A12; andReed Whittemore, "Fred Jordan and the Grove Press," Delos 1 (Winter 1988-89), 55. In 1993 the Grove-Weidenfeld imprint was sold to HarperCollins (New York). 3. Walter Asmus directed Waiting for Godot for the Gate Theatre in 1988; Barry McGovern played Estragon to Tom Hickey's Vladimir. The production was

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revived in October 1991 for the Dublin Beckett Festival, this time with Barry McGovern playing Vladimir to Johnny Murphy's Estragon. The company brought the show to the United States in June 1992, when the Gate Theatre visited Chicago. 4. According to Finney ("Still Stirring to Be Still," p. 129), the limited edition later sold for one thousand pounds in England and for two thousand dollars in the United States. 5. Stirrings Still appeared in The Manchester Guardian Weekly on March 19, 1989; see Finney, "Still Stirring to Be Still," p. 130. 6. All subsequent references to Stirrings Still are to As the Story Was Told, Calder's 1990 printing. This printing contains one curious departure from Beckett's typescript: in part 2 Calder includes in the following sentence a parenthesis missing from the original typescript: "So all eyes from bad to worse till in the end he ceased if not to see to look (about him or more closely) and set out to take thought'' (p. 124). 7. Krapp's Last Tape, p. 25. It was Wallace Fowlie who first brought Beckett's work to the attention of the editors of Grove Press; see his "A Return Visit to Paris," Virginia Quarterly Review 51 (Winter 1975), 81. 8. Endgame, p. 3; Company, p. 30; Waiting for Godot, p. 40. 9. Molloy, p. 53. 10. On March 6, 1989, Beckett wrote to Antoni Libera, the Polish translator of his work and the director of his plays in Warsaw, to say that he was working on the French translation of Stirrings Still and that his title might possibly be Sursauts or Soubresauts. Libera said that Beckett's ideas for the French title made it clear that the phrase "stirrings still'' refers to the state of a creative consciousness rather than to any movement of a character. My thanks to Antoni Libera for bringing this matter to my attention. See also Still, p. 185. 11. Waiting for Godot, p. 55. 12. See Endgame, p. 69. 13. Beckett's 30-page volume of poems in English called Echo's Bones was published in Paris by Europa Press in 1935 and is reprinted in Collected Poems, pp. 9-28. 14. Compare Eliot on this point: "In my beginning is my end," the opening line of "East Coker" in Four Quartets; See The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, p. 177. 15. See Frank Kermode, "Miserable Splendour," The Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 19, 1989, p. 29. 16. All That Fall, p. 35. 17. Happy Days, pp. 31, 57; See Finney, "Still Stirring to Be Still," p. 132. 18. See Brater, Beyond Minimalism, pp. 49-50. 19. Macbeth, V.v.28; Malone Dies, p. 63. 20. How his, pp. 74-75, 81. 21. How It Is, pp. 34, 48; ... but the clouds.... p. 262; The Lost Ones, p. 175. 22. Murphy, p. 218. 23. Endgame, p. 1; emphasis mine.

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24. Happy Days, pp. 22, 24, 32, 42, 44. Although "the old style" is a regular routine in Winnie's monologue, this phrase is also a part of the murmurer's vocabulary in How It Is: there, too, another soloist "must keep busy otherwise death" (p. 81). 25. Samuel Beckett, "Morte de A.D.," in Collected Poems, p. 56. 26. All That Fall, pp. 41-43. 27. Arthur Darley, a Dublin physician, was born in 1908, served with Beckett at the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-L6, Normandy, and died there of tuberculosis in 1945. See Harvey, pp. 230-31. 28. Proust, p. 28. 29. Endgame, p. 48; Krapp's Last Tape, p. 28; and Lamartine as quoted by Finney, Since "how it is," p. 11. 30. See "The Folly of Being Comforted," in The Collected Poems ofW. B. Yeats, p. 76. See also the "solo mute words no sound" of "folly" and "folly folly" as used by Beckett in How It Is, pp. 79, 87. 31. My information about the first typescript for Stirrings Still is based on my own copy, sent to me in March 1987 with the author's consent. Ruby Cohn, who by that time already had a copy in her possession, asked Beckett if I might be able to look at it in preparation for this book. Beckett's written reply: "By all means show WHOLES to Brater." 32. The Unnamable, p. 128 (emphasis mine). For the sign that reads "TEMPORARILY SANE," see More Pricks Than Kicks, p. 102. 33. Murphy, p. 178. 34. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 25. 35. Hamlet, III.ii.78-79; Endgame, p. 48; Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," in English Romantic Writers, ed. Perkins, p. 1126; Malone Dies, p. 108. 36. See, for example, Endgame, p. 11. 37. Texts for Nothing IX, p. 102; /// Seen III Said, p. 52; Worstward Ho, p. 22. Maddy Rooney sentimentalizes another kind of Arcady in All That Fall, p. 81. 38. Texts for Nothing I, p. 74. 39. How Ills, p. 123; Waiting for Godot, p. 33; Hamlet, II.ii.192. 40. Samuel Beckett, The Expelled, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 21. See How It Is, p. 126; and Beckett quoted in Bram van Velde (New York, 1962), p. 10. 41. Samuel Beckett, The Calmative, in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 44. 42. See Ian G. Colvin, trans., ' I Saw the World'': Sixty Poems from Walther von der Vogelweide, 1170-1228 (London, 1938), p. 49. 43. Malone Dies, p. 62. See Pilling, Samuel Beckett, pp. 135, 169. For Beckett's use of Walther in his poem "Da tagte es," and his revision of the same piece for inclusion in The Great Book of Ireland, see James E. Robinson, "Beckett and The Great Book of Ireland," The Beckett Circle 15, no. 1 (Spring 1993), 4. 44. Worstward Ho, pp. 21, 32. 45. How It Is, pp. 51, 139; Texts for Nothing III, p. 81.

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46. See Richard Imison, "Radio and the Theater: A British Perspective," Theatre Journal 43 (October 1991), 290. 47. Krapp's Last Tape, pp. 12-13, 25. 48. See Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: An Art a/Sound (London, 1936; rpt. Salem, Mass., 1988), p. 35. 49. Texts for Nothing X, p. 104; Watt, p. 62. 50. How It is, p. 24; Texts for Nothing I, p. 73. 51. Molloy, p. 117; Malone Dies, pp. 39, 47, 64; The Unnamable, p. 144; Texts for Nothing II, p. 75, and XI, p. 109. 52. Company, p. 45. 53. Proust, p. 1. 54. Molloy, p. 147. 55. Proust, p. 4. 56. Proust, pp. 2, 3, 7. 57. See Molloy, p. 20. 58. Happy Days, p. 54. 59. Waiting for Godot, p. 58. 60. Proust, p. 16. 61. Texts for Nothing VII, p. 93; Watt, p. 85; and How It Is, pp. 95, 106, 133 ("old Scraps" [emphasis mine]). 62. Quoted by Reid, p. 33. 63. Endgame, p. 78. 64. Watt, pp. 35, 83, 251; For to End Yet Again, p. 179; Texts for Nothing XIII, p. 115. 65. . . . but the clouds . . ., p. 261. 66. Watt, p. 11. 67. Winnie quotes the same song in Happy Days, p. 26. 68. Endgame, p. 20; Happy Days, p. 31. 69. See Samuel Beckett, "Homage to Jack B. Yeats," in Disjecta, ed. Cohn, p. 149. 70. "Dante. . .Bruno. Vico. . Joyce," p. 22. 71. "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce," p. 22; Proust, p. 1; Company, p. 7. 72. See Milton, plates 28 and 29, in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, 1970), pp. 125-26; Not I, pp. 218-19. 73. Ohio Impromptu, p. 285; Footfalls, p. 242. See also Harvey, p. 435. 74. Watt, p. 199. Beckett's short poem "Brief Dream" had been published in Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili's For Nelson Mandela (New York, 1987) before its appearance in the Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Spring 1992), 3. 75. Beckett's paraphrase of the words that close "Sailing to Byzantium" appears in Texts for Nothing XIII, p. 114 (emphasis mine). Yeats' final stanza ends with "what is past, or passing, or to come" (The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, p. 192). For Beckett's parodic "pern in a gyre," see Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 129. 76. Malone Dies, p. 6. 77. Endgame, p. 69. In Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of

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Literature (Princeton, N. J. 1990), Thomas Tresize does not take this possibility into account in his otherwise theoretically sophisticated (and theoretically driven) discussion of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. 78. Texts for Nothing XIII, p. 113; Watt, p. 232; How It Is, pp. 27, 30; Endgame, p. 33. 79. Texts for Nothing XIE, p. 114; Still, p. 184. 80. Beckett in the mid-1930s on Cezanne, as quoted by James Knowlson in his keynote address entitled "Image and Configuration in Beckett's Theatre" for the international symposium,' 'Beckett in the 1990V' (The Hague, April 11, 1992). For Beckett's use of Baudelaire's "Au Lecteur" in his late plays, see Brater, Beyond Minimalism, pp. 125, 133; see also "A Game of Chess" in The Waste Land, The Complete Poems and Plays ofT. S. Eliot, pp. 65-66.

Chapter 7 1. Siegfried Unseld, in a panel discussion with Beckett's publishers (Barney Rosset and John Calder also participating), international symposium on "Beckett in the 1990s," The Hague, April 1992. Unseld published the first collected edition of Beckett's plays in German in 1963 as Dramatische Dichtungen, vol. 1. 2. Waiting for Godot, p. 53; Malone Dies, p. 21. 3. Malone Dies, pp. 19, 47, 90, 95; Molloy, pp. 60, 102, 112, 115, 128, 144, 149, 189, 208; and The Unnamable, pp. 9, 12, 20, 35, 41, 86, 94, 139, 170. 4. Stirrings Still, pp. 120, 125; Molloy, pp. 47, 72, 109, 204; How It Is, pp. 7, 67, 80, 108; All That Fall, pp. 39, 41, 43; The Unnamable, pp. 133, 161; and /// Seen III Said, p. 59. 5. Beckett inscribed the word "ruefully" on a copy of his typescript for comment dire sent to me in March 1989. The English translation, as what is the word, appeared with John Calder's permission in The Beckett Circle 11 (Spring 1990), 1, and was later published as the final entry in As the Story Was Told, pp. 131-34. All subsequent references to this work are to this edition. 6. Ruby Conn, in a letter to Enoch Brater dated March 26, 1989, initially suggested what is the word as a performance piece for Joseph Chaikin: "I broached the topic to Beckett, but he couldn't remember writing it. I promised to (and did) send him a copy and again urged that he translate it for Joe. On verra." Beckett dutifully translated comment dire that April and dedicated the English version to the American director. Chaikin has had a long history in directing and performing Beckett, including two famous productions of Endgame in the United States; see Eileen Blumenthal, Joseph Chaikin: Exploring at the Boundaries of Theater (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 188-207; Kalb, p. 40; and Brater, Why Beckett, p. 84. In 1980 Chaikin considered doing a reading of excerpts from several Beckett works and sent the author a tape, including a portion of his recitation from How It Is. At the same time he asked Beckett about the possibility of trying to stage Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds . .., two works designed for television. Beckett said he couldn't see how they might be transferred to the stage without "severe loss," but suggested

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that Chaikin might want to pursue Texts for Nothing. Chaikin subsequently discussed his idea for staging Texts for Nothing with Beckett: "image of a man either sitting or standing mostly motionless, with . . . one arm hanging . . . like an arm in water. And sometimes the speaking head would move." Beckett countered with the following: "Seated. Head in hands. Nothing else. Face invisible. Dim spot. Speech hesitant. Mike for audibility. But don't let this thought discourage yours. For you know what authors are." Chaikin acted in his own adaptation (completed with Steven Kent) when the show was first presented at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York in 1981. Directed by Chaikin himself in 1992, the piece was performed by Bill Irwin in a limited run at the same theater from October 20 through November 22. My information about this aspect of the Beckett-Chaikin connection is based on my discussions with Ruby Cohn, William Coco, and Joseph Chaikin. 7. How It Is, p. 37. 8. How It Is, p. 81. Eric Bentley called what is the word a "mini-opus" in a letter to Enoch Brater dated October 17, 1989, written just after Bentley had seen Chaikin's copy of the piece with Beckett's dedication to Chaikin. 9. How It Is, p. 113. For an entirely different mood to Beckett's "ceci" ("all this") in the Mirlitonnades, see Collected Poems, p. 73, and Ricks, p. 48. 10. Worstward Ho, p. 38. On Beckett's "midget grammar," see How It Is, p. 76; and Brienza, pp. 88-119. 11. See P. J. Murphy, "On First Looking Into Beckett's The Voice," in The Ideal Core of the Onion, ed. Pilling and Bryden, p. 68; and Texts for Nothing IX, p. 100. On Beckett's use of "wordhoard," see "The Voice VERBATIM," as reprinted in Samuel Beckett's "Company"/"Compagnie" and "A Piece of Monologue"/"Solo," ed. Krance, p. 192. 12. All That Fall, p. 35. 13. See Reid, p. 33. 14. "Whoroscope," p. 1. 15. A Piece of Monologue, p. 269. 16. See What Where, p. 307. 17. On this point see John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn., 1961). 18. See Words and Music, p. 125. 19. From an Abandoned Work, p. 131. 20. "Dante. . .Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," p. 14. 21. Footfalls, p. 241. 22. Billie Whitelaw to Enoch Brater, Stirling, Scotland, August 1986. "I have a strong weakness," Belacqua confides in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, "for the epic caesura. ... I like to compare i t . . . to the heart of the metre missing a b e a t . . . . " (p. 144). 23. Interview with Jessica Tandy, Philadelphia, October 26, 1973. 24. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 144. James Knowlson quoted Beckett on Cezanne in his lecture entitled "Image and Configuration in Beckett's Theatre," presented at The Hague, April 1992.

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25. Earl Kim's presentation at the international symposium on "Beckett in the 1990s" (The Hague, April 1992) was entitled "Setting Beckett: Translations and Transformations—Words as a Compositional Resource." 26. Murphy, p. 65. 27. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: "Krapp's Last Tape," ed. Knowlson, p. 153. Beckett's pun, "as if wanting mass," appears in /// Seen III Said, p. 24. 28. The Unnamable, p. 115; Malone Dies, p. 18; Waiting for Godot, pp. 8, 31; Endgame, p. 3. On "I say it as I hear it," see How It Is, pp. 7, 10, 15, 20, 22, 28, 31, 34, 42. 29. Malone Dies, p. 18; Texts for Nothing VI, p. 92. On the question of Wittgenstein and especially Mauthner, see Linda Ben-Zvi, "Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language," PMLA 95 (March 1980), 183-200; Allen Thiher, "Wittgenstein, Heidegger, the Unnamable and Some Thoughts on the Status of Voice in Fiction," in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Beja, Gontarski, and Astier, pp. 80-90; Jacqueline Hoefer, "Watt," in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Esslin, pp. 62-76; and Locatelli, pp. 177-78. 30. Company, p. 7; Molloy, pp. 58, 72, 109, 140; The Unnamable, p. 32. See also How It Is, p. 67. 31. Rodney Sharkey to Enoch Brater, Dublin, June 1992. 32. Waiting for Godot, p. 11; Embers, pp. 116-17; Molloy, p. 166; The Unnamable, p. 17; Malone Dies, p. 1; All That Fall, pp. 72, 80. See also Frost, "Fundamental Sounds: Directing Beckett's Radio Plays," p. 376. 33. "Or words to that effect" is the new curtain line David Mamet added to Squirrels for the January 1990 Philadelphia production; the play was first performed fifteen years earlier in Chicago. See Toby Silverman Zinman, "Jewish Aporia: The Rhythm of Talking in Mamet," Theatre Journal 41 (May 1992), 207. 34. Beckett quoted by P. J. Murphy, "On First Looking into Beckett's The Voice," p. 72. See also "The Voice VERBATIM" in Samuel Beckett's "Company"! "Compagnie" and "A Piece of Monologue" I" Solo," ed. Krance, p. 191. 35. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York, 1956), pp. 7, 11. See also Stirrings Still, p. 115. 36. Krapp's Last Tape, p. 19; Samuel Beckett, "Afar a Bird," in Collected Shorter Prose, p. 196 (compare this "ruinstrewn land" with "a ruin land strewn with ruins" in How It Is, p. 85). See Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (New York, 1977), p. xii, for his famous statement about Waiting for Godot, a "play in which nothing happens, twice." 37. Molloy, p. 112; Waiting for Godot, p. 25. 38. See WorstwardHo, pp. 7, 47; Stirrings Still, p. 125; Proust, p. 6; Endgame, pp. 18, 50; and The Unnamable, p. 31. 39. Happy Days, p. 63; Texts for Nothing VIII, p. 96. 40. On this point, see Jacques Derrida, especially Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978) and The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Trans-

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ference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1985). For Beckett's "case nought," see .. . but the clouds ..., p. 261. 41. Malone Dies, p. 77; "Brief Dream," p. 3. For a discussion that might set such Beckettian statements as "last murmurs very last" (How It Is, p. 141) in a wide cultural context, see Karl S. Guthke, Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History (Princeton, N.J., 1992). 42. John Webster, The Devil's Law Case, II.iii.129.

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Selected Bibliography

Abbott, H. Porter. "Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories." New Literary History 19 (Spring 1988), 35-46. . "Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre." In Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. Ed. Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp. 7396. . "Reading as Theatre: Understanding Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art." Modern Drama 34 (March 1991), 5-22. Acheson, James. "Beckett Re-Joycing: Words and Music." In Re: Joyce'n Beckett. Ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992, pp. 50-60. Acheson, James, and Kateryna Arthur, eds. Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company. London: Macmillan, 1986. Akalaitis, JoAnne. "In Memory: Meeting Beckett." The Drama Review 34 (Fall 1990), 11-12. Alpaugh, David. "Embers and the Sea: Beckettian Intimations of Mortality." Modern Drama 16 (December 1973), 317-28. Alvarez, A. Samuel Beckett. New York: Viking, 1973. Amiran, Eyal. Wandering and Home: Beckett's Metaphysical Narrative. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Anzieu, Didier. "Un soi disjoint, une voix liante: L'ecriture narrative de Samuel Beckett." Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 28 (Autumn 1983), 71-85. Armstrong, Gordon S. Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990. Arnheim, Rudolf. Radio: An Art of Sound. London: Faber & Faber, 1936; rpt. Salem, Mass.: Ayer, 1988. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. . "The Problem of Speech Genres." In Speech Genres and Other Late 209

210

Selected Bibliography

Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 60-102. Barge, Laura. " 'Coloured Images' in the 'Black Dark': Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction." PMLA 92 (October 1977), 273-84. . God, the Quest, the Hero: Thematic Structures in Beckett's Fiction. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 230. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Baril, Germaine. "From Characters to Discrete Events: The Evolving Concept of Dramatis Personae in Beckett's Radio Plays." The Review of Contemporary Literature 1 (Summer 1987), 112-19. Barker, Stephen. "Paysage to Passage: Beckett's Poiesis of the World." Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (1992), 15-38. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill & Wang, 1968. . S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. . Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotextfe], 1983. Beja, Morris, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier, eds. Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983. Benveniste, Emile. Problemes de linguistique generate. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Ben-Zvi, Linda. "Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language." PMLA 95 (March 1980), 183-200. . "Fritz Mauthner for Company.'' Journal of Beckett Studies 9 (1984), 6588. . Samuel Beckett. Boston: Twayne, 1986. , ed. Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Berger, Harry, Jr. Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Berry, Cicely. Voice and the Actor. London: Harrap, 1973. . The Actor and His Text. London: Harrap, 1987. Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Blumenthal, Eileen. Joseph Chaikin: Exploring at the Boundaries of Theater. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Brater, Enoch. "W. B. Yeats: The Poet as Critic." Journal of Modern Literature 4 (February 1975), 651-76 . Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. . Why Beckett. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989. , ed. Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Selected Bibliography

211

Brienza, Susan D. Samuel Beckett's New Worlds: Style in Metafiction. Norman; University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention inNarrative. New York: Random House, 1984. Brown, John Russell. Theatre Language. London: Allen Lane, 1972. Burton, Deirdre. Dialogue and Discourse. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Butler, Lance St. John, and Robin J. Davis, eds. Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Calder, John, ed. As No Other Dare Fail. London: John Calder, 1986. Cassidy, David C. Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992. Caws, Mary Ann, and Hermine Riffaterre, eds. The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Chabert, Pierre. "Samuel Beckett as Director." Trans. M. A. Bonney and J. Knowlson. In Theatre Workbook I: Samuel Beckett, "Krapp's Last Tape." Ed. James Knowlson. London: Brutus, 1980, pp. 85-107. Clemen, Wolfgang. Shakespeare's Soliloquies. Trans. Charity Scott Stokes. London: Methuen, 1987. Cleveland, Louise O. "Trials in the Soundscape: The Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett." Modern Drama 11 (December 1968), 267-82. Coe, Richard. Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 1968. Coetzee, J. M. "Samuel Beckett's Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition." Computers in the Humanities 1 (March 1973), 195-98. Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962. . Back to Beckett. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973. . "Outward Bound Soliloquies." Journal of Modern Literature 6 (February 1977), 17-38. . Just Play: Beckett's Theater. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. , ed. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder, 1983. Cole, David. Acting as Reading: The Place of the Reading Process in the Actor's Work. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Dearlove, J. E. Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Nonrelational Art. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982. Delegue, Yves. "La Litterature ventriloque." Poetique: Revue de theorie et a"analyse litteraires 18 (November 1987), 431-42. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference et repetition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968.

212

Selected Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973. . Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. . Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. . The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken, 1985. Driver, Tom. ' 'Beckett by the Madeleine.'' Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961), 2155. Dubois, Jean. "Enonce et enonciation." Langages 13 (1969), 100-110. Duckworth, Colin. "The Making of Godot." In Casebook on "Waiting for Godot." Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove Press, 1967, pp. 89-100. Dudar, Helen. "Samuel Beckett Stands By His Publisher." The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 1989, p. A12. Duthuit, Georges. "Sam Francis: Animator of Silence." Trans. Samuel Beckett. American Art News (1952). Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980. Engelberts, Matthijs. "Quelques theses sur la narration et le theatre chez Beckett." Samuel Beckett Todaylaujourd'hui 1 (1992), 126-37. Esslin, Martin. "Beckett's Rough for Radio." Journal of Modern Literature 6 (February 1977), 95-103. . Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett, and the Media. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. , ed. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher, eds. Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Finney, Brian H. Since "how it is": A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction. London: Co vent Garden, 1972. . "Still Stirring To Be Still." Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (1992), 12935. Fitch, Brian T. Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Fletcher, Beryl, and John Fletcher. A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Rev. ed. London: Faber & Faber, 1985. Fletcher, John. The Novels of Samuel Beckett. Rev. ed. London: Chatto & Windus, 1970. Fournier, Edith. " 'Sans': Cantate et fugue pour un refuge." Les Lettres nouvelles 3 (September-October, 1970), 149-60. Friedman, Alan Warren, Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer, eds. Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987. Frost, Everett C. "Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays." Theatre Journal 43 (October 1991), 361-76.

Selected Bibliography

213

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. . Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. Goldman, Michael. The Actor's Freedom. New York: Viking, 1975. Gontarski, S. E. The Intent of "Undoing" in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. , ed. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: "Endgame." New York: Grove Press, 1992. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Greig, Geordie. "Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame." The Sunday Times, January 8, 1989, pp. G6-7. Gussow, Mel. "Billie Whitelaw's Guide to Performing Beckett." The New York Times, February 14, 1984, p. 21. . "Adapting Beckett's Prose for the Stage." The New York Times, September 21, 1986, sec. 2, pp. 1, 36. . "New Beckett Book Makes a Dramatic Entrance." The New York Times, February 4, 1989, p. 14. Guthke, Karl. Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Hansford, James. "Imagination dead imagine: The Imagination and Its Context." Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Spring 1982), 49-70. Harrington, John P. The Irish Beckett. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Harvey, Lawrence E. Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970. Hay, Malcolm. "Happy Birthday Beckett." Plays and Players 393 (June 1986), 5-6. Helbo, Andre, J. Dines Johansen, Patrice Pavis, and Anne Ubersfeld, eds. Approaching Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Hernadi, Paul. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. Hessing, Kees. Beckett on Tape. Leiden: Academic Press, 1992. Hiebel, Hans H. "John Calder on Samuel Beckett." AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 16, no. 1 (1991), 68-99. Hill, Leslie. Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Homan, Sidney. Beckett's Theaters: Interpretations for Performance. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1984. Hubert, ReneeRiese. "Ala trace de 'Bing.' " In Samuel Beckett. Ed. Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman. Paris: Editions de 1'Herne, 1976.

214

Selected Bibliography

Huston, Hollis. The Actor's Instrument: Body, Theory, Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Imison, Richard. ' 'Radio and the Theater: A British Perspective.'' Theatre Journal 43 (October 1991), 289-92. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction fromBunyan to Beckett. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. . The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jakobson, Roman. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Janvier, Ludovic. "Place of Narration/Narration of Place." Trans. Ruby Cohn. In Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975, pp. 98-110. Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992. Kalb, Jonathan. Beckett in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kawin, Bruce. Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972. Kennedy, Andrew K. Dramatic Dialogue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kenner, Hugh. Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. . Joyce's Voices. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. Kermode, Frank. "Miserable Splendour." The Manchester Guardian Weekly. March 19, 1989, p. 29. Knowlson, James. "Extracts from an Unscripted Interview with Billie Whitelaw." Journal of Beckett Studies 3 (Summer 1978), 85-90. , ed. Happy Days: Samuel Beckett's Production Notebook. New York: Grove Press, 1985. , ed. Beckett at Eighty: A Celebration. Reading, Eng.: The Beckett Archive, 1986. , ed. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: "Krapp's Last Tape." London: Faber & Faber, 1992. Knowlson, James, and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder, 1979. Krance, Charles. "Beckett's Encores: Textual Genesis as Still-Life Performance." Essays in Theatre 8 (May 1990), 121-26. , ed. Samuel Beckett's "Company"/"Compagnie" and "A Piece of Monologue" I "Solo": A Bilingual Variorum Edition. New York: Garland, 1993. , ed. Samuel Beckett's "III Seen III Said"/"Mal Vu Mai Dit": A Bilingual Variorum Edition. New York: Garland, 1994.

Selected Bibliography

215

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Lake, Carlton, ed. No Symbols Where None Intended: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Materials Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collections of the Humanities Research Center. Austin, Tex.: Humanities Research Center, 1984. Lawley, Paul. "Samuel Beckett's 'Art and Craft': A Reading of Enough." Modern Fiction Studies 29 (September 1983), 25-41. Levy, Eric P. Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1980. Locatelli, Carla. Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett's Prose Works After the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Lodge, David. "Some Ping Understood." Encounter 30 (February 1968), pp. 8589; Rpt. in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971, pp. 17283. Martin, Jacqueline. Voice in Modern Theatre. London: Routledge, 1991. McMillan, Dougald. "Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory." In Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975, pp. 121-35. McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theatre. London: John Calder, 1988. McMullan, Anna. Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama. London: Routledge, 1993. McWhinnie, Donald. The Art of Radio. London: Faber & Faber, 1959. Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Trans. James M. Edie. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964. . Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Herbert L. and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Meyer, Leonard B. Style and Music. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. On Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Montague, John. "The Gloom and the Glory of Beckett." The Guardian, December 27, 1989, p. 13. Moorjani, Angela B. Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 219. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Morrison, Kristin. Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

216

Selected Bibliography

Muir, Edwin. "New Short Stories." The Listener 12, July 4, 1934, p. 42. Murphy, P. J. Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett's Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Nagem, Monique. "Know Happiness: Irony in /// Seen III Said." In "Make Sense Who May": Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works. Ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St. J. Butler. Gerrards Cross, Eng.: Colin Smythe, 1988, pp. 77-90. O'Brien, Eoin. The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland. Dublin: Black Cat Press; London: Faber & Faber, 1986. O'Brien, Michael. "A Note on /// Seen III Said and a Note on Criticism." The Review of Contemporary Literature 1 (Summer 1987), 35-39. O'Donnell, Patrick. Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. O'Mordha, Sean. "Samuel Beckett: Silence to Silence." A film documentary produced and directed for Radio Teleffs Eireann, 1987. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Page, Adrian, ed. The Death of the Playwright? Modern British Drama and Literary Theory. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan, 1992. Oppenheim, Lois, ed. Directing Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Pennebaker, D. A., and Chris Hegedus. The film ofRockaby. The State University of New York, Program in the Arts. New York: Pennebaker Associates, Inc., 1982. Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. . "Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry." Critical Inquiry 9 (December 1982), 415-33. Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Pilling, John, and Mary Bryden, eds. The Ideal Core of the Onion. Reading, Eng.: Beckett International Foundation, 1992. Pountney, Rosemary. Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett's Drama, 1956-1976. Gerrards Cross, Eng.: Colin Smythe, 1988. Rabinovitz, Rubin. Innovation in Samuel Beckett's Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Read, David. "Beckett's Search for Unseeable and Unmakeable: Company and /// Seen III Said." Modern Fiction Studies 29 (Spring 1983), 111-25. Reid, Alec. All I Can Manage, More Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Dublin: Dolmen, 1968. Ricks, Christopher. Beckett's Dying Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Riffaterre, Michael. Fictional Truth. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Selected Bibliography

217

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. "The Paradoxical Status of Repetition." Poetics Today 1, no. 4(1980), 151-59. Robinson, James E. "Beckett and The Great Book of Ireland." The Beckett Circle 15, 1 (Spring 1993), 4. Rodenberg, Patsy. The Right to Speak: Working with the Voice. London: Methuen, 1991. . The Need for Words: Voice and the Text. London: Methuen, 1993. Sacks, Oliver. Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, 111.: Open Court Books, 1983. Scanlan, Robert. Review of Stirrings Still. Harvard Book Review 11-12 (WinterSpring 1989), 1-2. Scarry, Elaine M. "Six Ways to Kill a Blackbird or Any Other Intentional Object: Samuel Beckett's Method of Meaning." James Joyce Quarterly 8 (Summer 1971), 278-89. . The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schlueter, June, and Enoch Brater, eds. Approaches to Teaching Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." New York: Modern Language Assoc., 1991. Schneider, Alan. Entrances: An American Director's Journey. New York: Viking, 1986. Scheming, Klaus. "The Contours of Acoustic Art." Trans. Mark E. Cory. Theatre Journal 43 (October 1991), 307-24. Segre, Elizabeth Bregman. "Style and Structure in Beckett's 'Ping': That Something Itself." Journal of Modern Literature 6 (February 1977), 127-47. Serpieri, Alessandro, et al. Come comunica il teatro: dal testo alia scena. Milan: Formichiere, 1978. Shainberg, Lawrence. "Exorcising Beckett." Pushcart (1988—89). Rpt. from The Paris Review 29 (Fall 1987), 100-136. Shenker, Israel. "Moody Man of Letters." The New York Times, May 6, 1956, sec. 2, p. 3. Sherzer, Dina. "Samuel Beckett, Linguist and Poetician: A View from The Unnamable." SubStance 56 (1988), 87-98. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Smith, Joseph H., ed. The World of Samuel Beckett. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Solomon, Philip H. "Purgatory Unpurged: Time, Space, and Language in Lessness." Journal of Beckett Studies 6 (Autumn 1980), 63-72. States, Bert O. "Playing in Lyric Time: Beckett's Voice Plays." Theatre Journal 40 (December 1988), 453-67. Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

218

Selected Bibliography

Tannen, Deborah. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Thomas, Dylan. "Recent Novels." New English Weekly 12, March 17, 1938, p. 454. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. . Genres in Discourse. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Tresize, Thomas. Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Van Laan, Thomas F. "All That Fall as 'A Play for Radio.' " Modern Drama 29 (March 1985), 38-47. Watson, David. Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett's Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1991. Whittemore, Reed. "Fred Jordan and the Grove Press: Interview with Fred Jordan." Delos 1 (Winter 1988-89), 54-72. Wolosky, Shira. "Samuel Beckett's Figural Evasions." In Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 165-86. Worth, Katharine. The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett. London: Athlone Press, 1978. . "Beckett and the Radio Medium." In British Radio Drama. Ed. John Drakakis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 191-217. , ed. Beckett the Shape Changer: A Symposium. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Zilliacus, Clas. Beckett and Broadcasting. Abo, Finland: Acta Academiae Aboensis, ser. A. Humaniora, 51, no. 2, 1976. Zurbrugg, Nicholas. "Interviews with David Warrilow, Philip Glass, and Billie Whitelaw." The Review of Contemporary Literature 1 (Summer 1987), 92-111.

Index

literary, 42, 131, 137, 153-54 multiple levels of, 96-97, 127 self-referential, 55-56, 77, 108 Amplitude, 44, 110. See also Volume Anagram, 71 Analogy, 101-2, 154, 170 Anaphora, 116 Anatomy, 73-74, 80, 84, 113-14, 143. See also Body Andonian, Cathleen Culotta, 176n Androgyny, 60, 62, 69 Annotation, 115 Antonyms, 71, 140-41 Aphasia, 162, 165 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 59, 128, 197n Aposiopesis, 72. See also Ellipses; Pause Arabian Nights, 42 Aristotle, 193n Arnheim, Rudolf, 156 Ars armatoria, 81 Articulation, 14, 93, 144, 150. See also Speech emphasis through, 141-42, 168 Aside, 19, 80, 88 Asmus, Walter, 200n Assonance, 77, 116, 148, 167 radiophonic modes of, 19, 56 Asymmetry, 86, 138, 168. See also Symmetry

Abbott, H. Porter, 117, 187n, 190n Abstraction, 79, 91, 136, 152, 154 images of, 87 language as, 97, 144 writing as, 101, 171 Acoustics, 105, 144, 147-48 Acronymn, 85 Acting, 15-16, 42, 54-55, 57 Actor, 116, 173 Adage, 100 Adaptation, 78, 106, 153, 170, 183n dramatic, 12, 45, 58, 204n musical, 37, 59, 66, 186n translation as, 96 Agency, 77, 146 Akalaitis, JoAnne, 45-46, 184n Alexandrine, 144 All Strange Away, 9, 77-85, 88, 115 All That Fall, 14-23, 30-31, 39, 41, 130 allusions to, 103, 110, 113, 124 Maddy Rooney in, 152, 164-65, 167, 172-73 Allegory, 35, 50, 55-56, 101, 117 Alliteration, 19, 116 Allusion, 63, 112-13, 115, 149, 159. See also Biblical references 219

220 Astrological signs, 33, 66, 125. See also Cosmology Atomization, 117. See also Anatomy Atonality, 146, 169. See also Tonality Aubade, 72, 77 Audience, 120 Audition, 110, 112, 147 Auditor, 85, 89. See also Listener Aural art, 156-57, 166 Austen, Jane, 80 Authorship, 77. See also Agency Autobiographical elements, 30, 124, 126, 155, 165. See also Beckett, May; Biography; Darley, Arthur in Company, 109-10, 117-18, 194n, 196n Automotive history, 113, 118 Autonomy, 141, 143, 152, 158 Bachelard, Gaston, 105, 191n Baines, Norman, 15 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10 Ballad and ballade, 170. See also what is the word Barge, Laura, 194n Barker, Stephen, 191n Barthes, Roland, 72, 188n Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 163, 204n BBC, 17, 32, 37-38, 45-46 production staff at, 14-15 radio broadcasting from, 22-23, 50, 95 Bean, Sean, 45 Beckerman, Bernard, 181n, 198n Beckett, Edward, 46, 184n Beckett, John, 32 Beckett, May, 126 Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, 25, 35-38, 46, 50 availability of, 183n music for, 32, 45

Index Behn, Aphra, 145 Belacqua, 4, 102, 150, 155, 170 critical comments by, 192n, 205n early work and, 111-12, 153 Beltain, 126. See also Celtic lore Bentley, Eric, 205n Ben-Zvi, Linda, 14, 179n, 183n Berger, Harry, Jr., 186n, 198n Berry, Cicely, 16 Bevington, David, 198n Biblical references, 11, 88, 96, 100, 110, 113 Christian, 99, 149, 123-24, 135, 172 Judaic, 67, 69, 89, 101, 190n paraphrase and, 76, 111-12 parody and, 50, 126 Bilingualism, 6-7, 104 Biography, 106, 117-18. See also Autobiographical elements Bisexuality, 59, 81 Blake, William, 162 Blake well, Michael, 32 Blank verse, 144 Blau, Herbert, 4, 188n Blin, Roger, 37 Blue Moon Books, 146 Body, 60, 79, 86, 91-94, 116-17. See also Embodiment female, 53, 58, 80 language as, 73, 81, 95, 122 mind and, 140, 154 parts of, 69, 111, 114, 143 Boroff, Marie, 197n Bowles, Patrick, 4 Bray, Barbara, 23, 38 "Brief Dream," 105, 162-63, 203n Brienza, Susan, 9, 64, 94, 188n, 193n, 199n Briscoe, Desmond, 15 Brown, John Russell, 181n Brook, Peter, 45 Browne, Thomas, 54, 98, 102, 185n, 192n

221

Index Bruno, Giordano, 98, 102 ...but the clouds . .., 106, 129, 131, 204n dialogue from, 61, 160 W. B. Yeats and, 35, 110, 182n Caesura, 20, 85, 166, 170, 205n. See also Pause vocalization and, 115 Cage, John, 47, 205n Calder, John, 61, 145-46, 204n Calmative, The, 155 "Cascando" (poem), 80, 135 Cascando (radio play), 36-46, 4850 Catastrophe, 50, 111 Cazalis, Henri, 7 Celtic lore, 73, 110, 124-26 Censorship, 38 Centre Theatre (Buffalo), 58. See also Rockaby Cezanne, Paul, 170, 204n Chabert, Pierre, 82 Chaikin, Joseph, 45, 165, 204~5n Chance, 3, 94, 123, 191n. See also Lessness Character, 72, 80, 122, 139, 146 dramatic, 140, 171 fictional, 108, 113 Characterization, 116, 139. See also Actor Chekhov, Anton, 74, 169 Choral elements, 85, 91, 138, 160, 170 Chronology, 127, 157 Citation, 52-53. See also Quotation Clark, David, 32, 45 Clarke, Martha, 45 Clemen, Wolfgang, 181n Climax, 144, 168, 170 Close reading, 73 Closed Space, 115 Closure, 56, 69, 148, 158, 168 dramatic, 21, 40-41

poetic, 92, 94, 161 problems of, 99, 111, 154 Coco, William, 45, 184n, 205n Cocteau, Jean, 48 Coda, 161 Coe, Richard, 4 Cohn, Ruby, 9, 41, 138, 165, 202n, 204n ' Cole, David, 198n Collaboration, 32, 34, 52, 132 Colossus of Memnon, 76-77, 129, 130

Come and Go, 112 Company, 10, 12, 106-22, 146, 194n speech in, 22, 130, 157 textual emendations in, 183n, 195n trilogy fiction and, 137, 147 voice in, 7, 77 Computation, 64-65, 103, 110 Configuration, 86, 104 Congruity, 148 Connor, Steven, 9, 131, 176n, 189n, 200n Consonance, 148 Coordinates, 86-87 Cosmology, 73-74, 124, 135, 154 Counterpoint, 51, 80, 133, 148, 150 contrast by, 10, 47, 107 musical, 59, 144, 161 Crashaw, Richard, 145 Crescendo, 80, 167 Cubism, 81 Cues, 24, 33, 116, 140. See also Acting cummings, e. e., 47 Cunard, Nancy, 14 Dada, 64, 94, 163, 191n. See also Chance Daniel, Samuel, 199n Dante, 56-57, 98-99, 102, 113, 127-28. See also Belacqua

222 Dante (continued) early works and, 112, 193n The Inferno, 22, 53, 88, 150 "Dante. . .Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," 5, 98, 105, 161 sound-sense in, 67, 77, 169 Darley, Arthur, 13, 151-52, 155, 202n Deacon, Michael, 50 Dearlove, J. E., 187n, 191n, 194n Declension, 157, 160 Decomposition, 72 Deconstruction, 10, 35, 83, 97, 150, 163 Defamiliarization, 84, 97 Dekker, Thomas, 137 Denouement, 158 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 163, 173, 198n, 203n, 206n. See also Deconstruction Desire, 59, 62, 67, 122 language and, 60, 81, 156 Destabilization, 56, 83, 123, 154 images of, 71, 74, 84 Devlin, Dennis, 198n Diacritical markings, 61, 169. See also Punctuation Dialogue, 71, 83-85, 107, 114, 144 conversation as, 141 dramatic, 7, 33, 69, 110, 169 Shakespearean, 19, 140 Diction, 5, 89, 113, 148. See also Speech Dimension, 132, 136-37, 161 Diminuendo, 158 Diminution, 96, 101, 120, 147 Ding-Dong, 112 Discourse, 11, 78, 114, 132, 161 levels of, 12, 62, 77, 113, 156 narrative, 5, 52, 117, 172 performance as, 55 Displacement, 31, 73 Dissonance, 80, 144

Index Donne, John, 74, 137 Dramatic foreshadowing, 26 Dramatic tradition, 140 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 4, 34, 63 Dublin, 4, 68, 146, 171 Duchamps, Marcel, 51 Duckworth, Colin, 8 Duet, 41, 49 Dukes, Gerry, 179n Duplication, 146 Duras, Marguerite, 97, 192n Duration, 64, 88, 162 Duthuit, Georges, 9, 177n, 192n Ecclesiastes, 11 Echo, 97, 111, 120, 149, 156 allusion as, 108, 110, 159, 163 sound as, 90, 139, 147 Echo's Bones, 147, 201n Eh Joe, 13 Elegy, 148 Eliot, T. S., 25, 59, 137 The Waste Land, 128, 163, 181n Ellipses, 61, 72, 83, 169-70. See also Pause Embers, 23-30, 127, 145 Henry in, 39,41, 116, 172 monologue in, 33, 42, 106, 130 stage adaptation of, 45 Embodiment, 68, 84, 167 Endgame, 33, 83, 100, 114, 146, 159 accuracy in, 103, 113, 135, 171 allusions to, 96, 127, 130, 137 Clovin, 150-51, 153 dialogue from, 90, 93, 108, 172, 163 Hamm in, 28, 39, 97, 99, 161 hearing in, 22, 13, 105, 117, 121-22 productions of, 38, 204n props in, 102, 152, 154

Index Enough, 9, 58-70, 106, 124, 131, 154 artistry in, 76, 110 body in, 102, 143 imagery in, 10, 120 Enunciation, 73, 150, 165. See also Speech Envoi, 170 Epic, 139 Epstein, Alvin, 35, 45, 179n, 183« Erasure, 51, 53, 72, 78, 83 Esslin, Martin, 15, 38, 91, 198n BBC Radio and, 46, 50, 95 Etudes, 147 Exposition, 24, 88 Faber, Ron, 45 Faber and Faber, 37, 39 Fate, 29,41, 100, 157-58 Federman, Raymond, 96, 192n Fehsenfeld, Martha, 195n Feldman, Morton, 32, 45 Feldman, Peter, 45 Felton, Felix, 32 Fiction, 5-12, 98, 106, 131 novella, 98 short story, 98, 151 Figuration, 79, 100, 123, 135, 143. See also Anatomy; Body human, 72-76, 92 Film, 75, 100 Film, 104, 110 Finney, Brian, 94 First Love, 110 Fixity, 75. See also Destabilization Fizzles, 137, 189n Flaubert, Gustave, 80-81 Fontane, Theodor, 21 Footfalls, 41, 59, 72, 105, 111-14, 139 For to End Yet Again, 10 Ford, John, 18 Formalism, 79

223 Fournier, Edith, 11, 94, 178n Fowlie, Wallace, 201n Fragmentation, 95, 111. See also Body Framing devices, 142 From an Abandoned Work, 5, 113 Frost, Everett, 30, 37, 39, 45-46. See also Beckett Festival of Radio Plays radio productions by, 17, 32, 50 Frost, Robert, 197n Fugue, 163, 165 Gaelic (Erse), 121, 141, 172 Gate Theatre (Dublin), 146, 200n Gender, 3, 47, 49, 58-62, 117. See also Androgyny Genette, Gerard, 175n, 198n Genre, 24, 98, 115, 138, 160 laws of, 133, 194n limits of, 12, 107-8 subversion of, 7, 10, 62, 150 Geometry, 10, 71, 98, 102. See also Pi depiction by, 79, 86, 111 Gessner, Nicklaus, 4 Gestus, 19 Getty, Ann, 145 Ghost Trio, 69, 106, 204n Gielgud, Val, 14 Glass, Philip, 45 Goldman, Michael, 198n Gontarski, S. E., 58, 182n Gough, Michael, 46 Grammar, 17, 115, 131, 140. See also Pronoun; Punctuation; Syntax; Verbs metaphysics and, 53, 85 transformations of, 61, 72-73, 161, 167 Graver, Lawrence, 178n Gray, Thomas, 97 Greenberg, Rocky, 13 Grove Press, 37, 145, 201n

224 Happy Days, 18, 96, 99, 102, 112 irony in, 97, 161, 172-73 language of, 130, 148-49, 151 sounds in, 87, 113, 158 Winnie's role in, 108, 111, 128, 160 Harmony, 73, 97, 150, 157, 167 elements of, 52, 147, 152, 159 units of, 30, 95, 156, 168 Havel, Vaclav, 50 Hawthorne, Denys, 45 Hayter, Stanley William, 70 Hermeneutics, 83 Hill, Leslie, 9, 198-99n Homan, Sidney, 196n Homonyms, 140 Hone, Joseph, 78 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 11, 128, 197 n How It Is, 10, 136-37, 155, 204n Comment c'est and, 9, 172 locutions from, 8, 110, 131, 171 parodic elements in, 64, 100, 156 Humanism, 163 Hunt, W. Dennis, 50 Huston, Hollis, 198n Ibsen, Henrik, 70 III Seen III Said, 9-12, 74, 122-35, 165 phrases from, 65, 137, 154 trilogy elements in, 107, 147 Illusion, 87, 106, 122, 140, 156 realistic, 101, 123 Image, 84, 90, 94, 120-21, 146 derivative, 57, 68, 129, 155 genealogy of, 96, 143 mental, 139, 159 placement of, 104, 122 sound and, 70, 82, 98, 147 stage, 12, 58 visual, 75, 100-101, 157 unfixed, 69, 77, 91, 130 Imagery, 20, 35, 76, 97

Index competing sources of, 111, 128, 163 Imagination Dead Imagine, 9, 8389, 105-6, 111 All Strange Away, and, 78, 115 ambiguity in, 24, 38, 69, 144 Imison, Richard, 156 Immobility, 70, 73 Improvisation, 159 Indeterminacy, 66-67, 104, 142, 148, 194n Indirect action, 53 Inflection, 53, 85, 135. See also Speech Inscription, 109, 113, 133, 141, 146 differing modes of, 53, 127, 134 vocal, 70, 80, 144, 172 writing as, 5, 139, 173 Instability, 72-73, 87, 104, 151. See also Destabilization Instrumentation, 62 Intertextuality, 7, 11, 102, 128, 137 Company and, 110-13 Enough and, 63, 66 Intonation, 65, 79, 80, 102, 148. See also Vocalization cues for, 18, 85, 116, 119 problems of, 61, 67, 69 Inversion, 147 Invisibility, 92 Invocation, 115 Ireland, 30, 141, 152, 172, 196w Irish-English, 4, 7, 12, 176n Irony, 78, 87, 104, 130, 134 dramatic, 67, 112, 154 metaphysical, 157, 160, 172 wit and, 79, 98, 100, 116, 137 Irwin, Bill, 205n Iser, Wolfgang, 188n Ives Ensemble, 46. See also Rough for Radio I Jacobi, Derek, 46 Jeremiah, 10

Index Johnson, Samuel, 78, 189n Jokes, 78, 98, 138, 161 Joyce, James, 6-7, 31, 176n, 195n Finnegans Wake, 5, 65, 77, 110 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 172 Ulysses, 33, 59, 63, 113, 182n, 196n Juliet, Charles, 145 Kafka, Franz, 98 Kalb, Jonathan, 46 Kaun, Axel, 140 Keats, John, 11, 33, 59,66, 128, 154 Kennedy, Andrew, 181n Kenner, Hugh, 178n, 186n Kent, Steven, 205n Kermode, Frank, 201n Kern, Edith, 194n Kim, Earl, 59, 66, 170, 186n, 206n Kingsley, Charles, 137 Knowlson, James, 177n, 181n, 2045n Kraft, William, 45 Krance, Charles, 10, 183n, 205n Krapp's Last Tape, 23, 90, 130, 135 action in, 113-14 adaptations of, 37, 59 dialogue in, 83, 111, 152, 156 memory in, 6-7, 106, 117, 120 Labeille, Danny, 58 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 76, 99, 152 Landscape, 77, 93, 97, 100, 160 abstraction and, 79, 86, 92, 154 nature as, 68, 76 Language, 97, 131, 143-48, 168, 171

225

dramatic, 7, 108, 116, 135-38 figurative uses of, 81, 88 limitations of, 103, 111 memory and, 150, 155 music and, 90, 95-96 sound and, 4-13, 98, 113-14, 157 speech as, 10, 80, 122-23 le Brocquy, Louis, 143, 146 Le Peton, Alfred, 6 Legitimation, 159 Lennon, Peter, 8 Lenormand, Henri Rene, 47 Lessness, 90-99, 111, 137, 191-92n imagery in, 9-10, 94 radio broadcast of, 95 Levy, Shimon, 46, 184n Lewis, C. S., 190n Lexicon, 135, 150, 165-66, 168 Liaison, 96, 116, 167 Libera, Antoni, 201n Listener, 17, 44, 52, 107, 163. See also Auditor directions to, 31, 110 interpretation by, 8, 22, 81, 90, 105 reader as, 4-5, 69-70, 112 Listening, 67, 83, 114-24, 150-57, 168-72. See also Reception acts of, 29, 87, 89, 93, 97 hearing and, 12-13, 24, 41, 95, 104 Litany, 83, 99 Locatelli, Carla, 9, 192n, 198-99n Locution, 100, 112-13, 159. See also Speech Logic, 73, 86, 103, 168. See also Reason Logocentrism, 172 Lost Ones, The, 10, 66-67, 98-105, 111-13, 143 words as sounds in, 77, 130, 150 Love and Lethe, 153 Lydon, Mary, 7, 176n

226 Lyricism, 33-34, 136, 139, 147, 149. See also Poetry subversions of, 53, 163 voice and, 68, 116 Mabou Mines, 12, 45-46, 104, 184«. See also Adaptation McGovern, Barry, 50-51, 181n, 200n MacGowran, Jack, 180n MacNeice, Louis, 23 Macpherson, James, 198n McWhinnie, Donald, 15, 17, 22, 38, 95 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 17, 169 Magee, Patrick, 22, 32, 45, 50-51, 180n Mallarme, Stephane, 7 Malone Dies, 7-8, 76-77, 108-9, 124, 130-131 closure in, 38, 42, 163, 173 repetition in, 101, 114, 164 talking in, 69, 99, 149, 154-55 Mamet, David, 206n Mandela, Nelson, 203n Martin, Jean, 37 Marvell, Andrew, 34 Mask, 140 Mathematics, 69, 74, 94-95, 103-4, 121. See also Computation; Geometry; Pi; Pythagoras; Statistics devising by, 63-66, 107, 110 Mauthner, Fritz, 54, 171, 206n Medical terminology, 111, 134 Melodrama, 100 Melody, 82, 93, 144, 148 Melville, Herman, 145 Memory, 66-67, 106-12, 117-22, 148, 151-56 record of, 81, 84, 74, 160 structure of, 10, 22, 29, 69, 147 Mercier, Vivian, 172, 206n

Index Mercier and Gamier, 66, 68, 76, 124, 138 sound in, 24, 30 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 186-88n Messiaen, Olivier, 97 Metadrama, 24, 40 Metaphor, 41, 50, 89, 110. See also Metonymy; Simile limits of, 99, 130, 144, 149 uses of, 102, 105, 159 Metatextuality, 114 Meter, 79, 89. See also Poetry Metonymy, 69, 81, 144 Metronome, 62. See also Pacing Mihalovici, Marcel, 36, 45, 183n Milton, John, 11, 112-13, 178n, 198n Mime, 81 Mimesis, 100, 106. See also Representation Minimalism, 67, 84-85, 139, 150 threshold of, 76, 167-68 Mirlitonnades, 205n Mise en scene, 12 Modernism, 62, 137 Modulation, 116, 157. See also Intonation Molloy, 60-61, 110, 157-58, 16465, 175n locutions in, 75, 120, 148 trilogy elements in, 65, 101, 106 voice in, 3-8, 146, 172 Monet, Claude, 68 Monologue, 58, 61, 99, 153, 165. See also Soliloquy dramatic, 18, 20-21, 26, 32, 70 structure of, 68, 88, 107, 138 Monotone, 109 Monotony, 144 Montague, John, 6 Mood, 90, 107, 118, 147-48, 172 atmosphere and, 123, 126 contrast of, 69, 71, 76

227

Index grammatical use of, 115, 140, 161, 167, 171 instability of, 139, 159, 162, 169 radiophonic use of, 18, 31, 33, 43 Moorjani, Angela, 194n, 196n More Pricks Than Kicks, 5, 112, 126 Morphology, 70-71 Morris, John, 14-15 Morrison, Kristin, 178n "Morte de A.D.," 151-52 Muir, Edwin, 5 Murphy, 5-6, 76, 121, 130, 133-35 narrator in, 72, 84, 114, 154, 170 specialized vocabulary in, 111, 150 Murphy, P. J., 9, 94 Music, 90, 95-96, 107, 156 accompaniment of, 41, 93 arrangement of, 34, 138, 162 dramatis personae of, 40-43, 46, 49 language as, 120, 148, 168, 170 twelve-tone, 168 Musical instruments, 32, 37, 45-46, 59-60, 97 Musical terminology, 9-10, 14-20, 61-62, 80. See also Ballad and ballade; Counterpoint; Crescendo; Diminuendo; Duet; Etudes; Fugue; Harmony; Instrumentation; Notation; Orchestration; Pitch; Scale; Score; Tempo; Transliteration; Vocalization Beckett's use of, 140, 171 description by, 28, 31, 49, 69, 171 vocal, 17-19, 42 Mutation, 159. See also Variation Myron, Herbert, 44

Mystery play, 123 Myth, 10, 81, 102, 143 Nacht und Trdume, 68, 74 Nagem, Monique, 11 Narrative, 78-79, 123, 139, 153, 170. See also Fiction devices of, 68, 78, 98, 108, 144 style of, 83, 118, 127, 143, 148 voice and, 5, 72 Narrator, 60, 101, 114, 141. See also Speaker National Public Radio, 50 National Theatre, Royal (London), 58 Negation, 29, 62, 68, 72, 141-42 "neither," 32 Neologism, 96-97, 143 Newmann, Frederick, 12, 45 Nonrepresentational art, 40, 47. See also Abstraction Nostalgia, 114, 131, 156 Not I, 9, 114, 130, 162, 169-70 Mouth in, 40, 82, 110, 118, 121 stage presence in, 19, 49, 75 Notation, 29, 32-33, 152 musical, 59, 90, 95, 167 O'Brien, Eoin, 124, 195-96n Ohio Impromptu, 58, 74, 128, 130 Ong, Walter J., 186n Onomatopoeia, 91 Open Theater, 45. See also Chaikin, Joseph Opera, 32, 37, 59. See also Adaptation Oral interpretation, 16. See also Vocalization Orality, 78, 83, 107, 170 Orator, 113, 115. See also Speaker Orchestration, 45, 62, 131, 169 ORTF-Paris, 37

228 Origination, 115, 150, 162 Overdetennination, 147 Pacing, 62, 130, 144, 169. See also Tempo Paragraph, 75, 77, 94-97, 99, 157 internal dynamics of, 147, 153 isolation of, 108-9, 122, 159 structureof, 116,127,132,138,150 Paraphrase, 53. See also Quotation Parataxis, 19 Parody, 81, 98, 101, 137-38, 203w Pastiche, 170 Pastoral, 154, 202n Pathetic fallacy, 76. See also Romanticism Pause, 82, 85, 92, 115, 135. See also Ellipses dramatic effect of, 52, 169 Peaslee, Richard, 45 Pelorson, Georges (Belmont), 33 Perception, 104, 106, 120 Performance, 55, 77, 92, 159, 165 actualization in, 29, 69, 83, 105 potential of, 35, 67, 140 Performative elements, 82-85, 108, 134, 138, 158 Perloff, Marjorie, 11 Permutation, 65, 66, 109. See also Variation Persona, 5, 66, 138 Personality, 98, 139, 171-72. See also Characterization Personification, 149 Perspective, 75-76, 138, 146, 157 Phenomenology, 84 Phoneme, 77, 113-14 Phonotext, 23 Photography, 74 Phrase, 53, 118, 153, 160-61, 168 Pi, 104, 105 Pickup, Ronald, 179n A Piece of Monologue, 12, 105, 112, 115, 137

Index Pilling, John, 9, 94, 137, 155 Ping, 9, 90-93, 99, 130 Pinget, Robert, 183n Pinter, Harold, 50, 169 Pitch, 80, 85, 113, 139, 153. See also Vocalization vocal, 52, 152, 169 Plato, 42, 115, 150 Plowright, Joan, 46 Plummer, Amanda, 50-51 Poetry, 13, 33-34, 136, 150-51, 156. See also Ballad and ballade; Prose poem; Rhyme; Roundelay; Round-poem; Scansion; Sestina; Sonnet; Symbolists forms of, 165, 170 Lessness as, 93-97 what is the word as, 13, 165-68 Point of view, 87. See also Perspective Polyphony, 28, 148, 170 Poststructuralism, 117, 198n Potter, Charles, 50 Pound, Ezra, 47, 128 Powell, D., 5 Power, Henry, 199n Predictability, 144, 147 Pre-Raphaelites, 54 Print culture, 132. See also Inscription Probability, 63, 94. See also Chance Prologue, 67, 138 Pronoun, 73-75, 107, 141, 151, 153 assignment of, 60, 111, 115 dramatization of, 47, 88, 110 Pronunciation, 113-14 See also Speech Prose poem, 10 Protagonist, 70, 108, 117. See also Character Proust, 4, 40, 47, 157, 179n subjectivity in, 106, 152, 162, 172

229

Index Proust, Marcel, 69, 99, 119, 156, 193« Punctuation, 67-68, 102-3, 115-16, 137-38. See also Cues intonation and, 85, 168, 171 meaning and, 61, 135, 140, 144, 162 Puns, 11, 79-80, 135-38, 141-46, 158 bilingual, 13, 78 double-entendres and, 87, 139, 156, 161 French language, 9, 98, 120 intentionality and, 41, 73, 75, 108, 119 irreverent use of, 50, 55, 60, 69, 105 wordplay and, 110, 128, 170, 199n, 206n Putnam, Samuel, 6 Pythagoras, 34 "Que ferais je .. .," 79, 189n Quern quaeritis trope, 80 Quotation, 54, 96, 110-11, 128 reinvention through, 52, 56, 131, 144 Radio drama, 14, 57, 156, 165 Lessness as, 95 technology and, 15, 27-28 Raisonneur, 153 Raymond, Bill, 45 Realism, 20, 31, 41,48, 117 Reason, 10, 107-8, 118-19, 121, 156 Reavey, George, 4 Reception, 84, 114, 156. See also Listening Recit, 10, 122, 153 Recitation, 55, 60, 73, 78, 170 cues for, 116, 139 hearing and, 5, 96 recital and, 10, 81, 121, 133

theatricality and, 12, 84, 102 Recorded sound, 15, 17, 55. See also Radio drama Recounting, 5, 12, 60, 73, 102. See also Storytelling Reduction, 147, 165, 168. See also Diminution Reflexivity, 131, 147, 157 Refrain, 99, 170. See also Repetition Reid, Alec, 23 Reinterpretation, 80, 87, 115, 119 Reinvention, 156. See also Revision; Translation Renton, Andrew, 136 Repertory, 88, 121-22, 130, 138 stylistic, 117, 139, 157 verbal, 112, 167 Repetition, 70-71, 77, 141, 147-49, 162 lexical elements in, 88, 116, 136, 138 orality and, 61, 67, 90 patterns of, 80,83, 131, 139, 159 poetic forms of, 167, 170 radiophonic use of, 19, 32, 44, 52 Replication, 90, 104 Resonance, 116 Representation, 24, 82, 91, 101, 104. See also Mimesis burden of, 56, 148 legitimacy of, 78, 129, 131, 135, 146

realism and, 10, 117-18 Revision, 78-79, 114-16, 120-21, 157

instability and, 82, 139, 141, 170 textual, 37-39, 195n, 201n validation by, 85, 101, 124, 147 Rhetoric, 56, 87-88, 107-8, 128 devices of, 139, 162 rhetorical questions and, 100, 157 strategies of, 80, 131, 162, 142

230 Rhyme, 89, 112, 162 Rhythm, 80-81, 136-41, 147-52, 169-70. See also Tempo emotion and, 66, 107, 118-19 unity and, 91, 93, 111 variation and, 71, 85, 87, 115 Ricks, Christopher, 190n, 205n Rijnvos, Richard, 46, 184n. See also Rough for Radio I Rimbaud, Arthur, 7, 77, 189n Ritual, 80, 113, 144, 165, 196n III Seen III Said and, 124-27, 134 Rockaby, 74, 76, 94, 119, 130 Billie Whitelaw in, 58, 110, 182n voice in, 40, 106 Rodin, Auguste, 74 Romanticism, 66-67, 143, 149, 170 radio drama and, 26, 35-36 Rosenthal, Manuel, 37 Rosset, Barney, 37, 145, 177n, 194n, 204n Rosset, Loly, 175n Roundelay, 167 "roundelay," 59 Rough for Radio I, 46-50 Rough for Radio II, 49-57, 67, 78 dialogue from, 90, 123, 164 Round-poem, 165 Royal Court Theatre (London), 95, 183n Rudmose-Brown, Thomas, 6 Russell, Arthur, 45 Rutherford, Ward, 125-26 Sacks, Oliver, 21, 180n Samuel Beckett Theatre (New York), 58 Satire, 132. See also Parody Saussure, Ferdinand de, 6, 176n Scale, 85, 98, 132, 147, 159 musical, 95, 157, 167 Scansion, 10, 141 Scarry, Elaine, 187-88n

Index Scenography, 24, 83, 110. See also Mise en scene Schneider, Alan, 58, 159 Schonberg, Arnold, 97 Schubert, Franz, 22, 30 Science, 121 Score, 31, 85, 131, 142, 159 Script, 109, 115-18, 132-34, 141, 150 dramatization of, 103, 112, 12122, 169 text and, 78, 92, 98, 107, 173 SDR-Stuttgart, 45 Searle, Humphrey, 32, 45-46 Segre, Elizabeth Bregman, 176n Semiotics, 82 Sequel, 153, 162 Sequence, 158, 168 Serialization, 89, 153-54 Sestina, 138 Sextet, 139 Sexuality, 3-4, 54, 58, 60, 119 Shainberg, Lawrence, 35 Shakespeare, William, 12, 113, 149, 167, 178n, 198n As You Like It, 1 Cymbeline, 160-61 Hamlet, 11, 35, 81-82, 89, 12728, 131, 154-55, 199n Julius Caesar, 11 King Lear, 11-12, 29, 85-86, 105, 112, 120, 128, 137, 14041, 160 Love's Labour's Lost, 112, 131 Macbeth, 11, 19, 27, 69, 122, 128, 149, 197n A Midsummer Night's Dream, 11, 64, 69, 84, 128 Much Ado About Nothing, 11 Othello, 11, 35, 56, 81, 120, 128, 137 The Tempest, 30, 36, 105 Troilus and Cressida, 1 Twelfth Night, 137

Index Sharkey, Rodney, 171 Shaw, George Bernard, 112, 195n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 66, 128 Shenker, Israel, 4 Sherzer, Dina, 7 Sibilance, 95, 96 Signification, 130 Silence, 3-20, 60-62, 69, 74-75, 142-44 dramatic use of, 152, 166, 169 radiophonic, 28, 36, 41-44, 4951, 56 sound and, 70, 80, 82, 97 textual image and, 104, 120, 149, 159 voice and, 91, 99, 156 Simile, 77 Simulation, 61, 104, 149, 165, 167 Soliloquy, 24, 99, 138, 148, 154, 159 Solitude, 54, 57, 97, 122, 139 images of, 70, 129, 155, 159 Solo, 42, 49, 133, 165 Sonnet, 33-35, 149 Sonority, 82, 144, 148, 169 SoundScape, 100, 108, 113, 151-52 radiophonic use of, 15, 52 rhythm and, 93, 97, 148, 161 Speaker, 98-103, 116, 122 Spectacle, 98, 118, 1 7 1 . See also Theatricality Speech, 17, 113-16, 126, 132, 138 acts of, 19, 61, 84 dramatic, 67, 127, 140, 161, 169 parts of, 70-71, 73, 141 performance and, 65, 84, 133 Stage, 116, 120, 140, 171. See also Mise en scene; Tableau blocking on, 19, 110-11 directing on, 33, 58, 140 terminology for, 11-12, 50, 105 Stanza, 138-39, 142-43, 150, 170 Statistics, 63, 104 Stein, Gertrude, 103, 193n

231

Sterne, Laurence, 53-54 Stewart, Garrett, 23-24, 60, 18 In, 186n Stichomythia, 51. See also Dialogue Still, 70-77, 110, 130 Stirrings Still, 12, 145-64, 201-2n Stonehenge, 125-26 Storytelling, 60, 67, 82, 118, 143. See also Fiction origins of, 5-7, 13 radio medium and, 28, 42, 57 Strindberg, August, 17, 169 Structuralism, 93, 191n Subject/object relationships, 81, 110, 115, 145 destabilization of, 83, 99, 123, 153 Subtext, 53, 55, 57, 150 Swift, Jonathan, 98, 101-2, 192n Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 11 Symbolists, 7, 32 Symmetry, 86, 102, 144, 157-58. See also Asymmetry syntactical, 94-95, 148, 168 Symphony, 133 Synapsis, 117 Synchronization, 91, 128, 165 Synonyms, 77 Syntax, 4-5, 68-75, 139-41, 148. See also Grammar eccentricity of, 144, 157, 159, 168-69 musical, 18, 115 problematics of, 9-10, 82, 100, 131, 162 Tableau, 105 Talking, 65, 88, 117, 141. See also Speech Tandy, Jessica, 205n Technology, 20 Television, 106 Temperament, 116

232 Tempo, 80, 116, 119, 146, 169. See also Pacing musical, 107, 138 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 54, 128, 152, 185n Tetes-Mortes, 98, 192n Texts for Nothing, 8-9, 156, 163, 204n Textuality, 10, 12, 93, 104. See also Script That Time, 12, 84, 105, 110, 130 allusions in, 112, 149 voices in, 95, 106, 119 Theatricality, 12, 70, 88, 98, 102 staging and, 65, 84, 105 Theme, 93 Theory, 79, 121, 156, 171. See also Deconstruction "thither," 59 Thomas, Dylan, 5 Threnody, 147 Time, 67-69, 133, 157-58, 169-70. See also Duration measures in, 88-89, 124, 151, 162 memory and, 106, 119 shifts in, 23-24, 27, 99 signatures of, 29, 95 space and, 40, 137 Timing, 23, 34, 39, 58, 170. See also Pacing Tiresias, 59 Titles, 137-38, 145-46, 149, 170, 196n ambiguity of, 9, 164-65 changes in, 12, 23, 201n Tonality, 85, 111-12, 136, 161. See also Atonality contrast in, 18-19, 65, 95 development of, 117, 131, 144, 147 mood and, 69, 153 Tophoven, Elmar, 10, 45, 192n

Index Transformation, 104, 144, 152, 159, 170 Translation, 78, 98, 175n. See also Adaptation English-French, 73, 146, 196n, 201n French-English, 4, 13, 46, 58, 93, 165 German, 96 Transliteration, 97 Transposition, 62 Tresize, Thomas, 204n Trilogy fiction, 138, 143, 161, 164, 179n Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable as, 8, 12, 60, 98, 109 stylistic unities in, 107, 146-47, 150 Triptych, 147 Trope, 89, 102, 112, 114, 139 Ubu roi (Jarry), 65 The Unnamable, 7-9, 85, 107-8, 143, 164 Company and, 111, 15 images in, 39, 153-54 silence in, 24, 72 trilogy elements in, 101, 105, 163 voice in, 82-83, 136-37, 139 Unseld, Siegfried, 164, 204n Valente, Benita, 59 Variation, 85-86, 118, 121, 130, 147-50. See also Mutation; Revision musical, 97, 138, 168 prototype and, 153-54 Velde, Bram van, 176-77n Ventre, Paul, 37 Verbs, 79, 108, 115, 134 action and, 75, 161, 166-68

233

Index alliances of, 83, 159 gerund form of, 81, 151 Verification, 106, 157, 171 Verisimilitude, 109. See also Realism Verlaine, Paul, 7 Virgil, 102 Vocalization, 31, 42, 47, 59-60, 67, 121. See also Pitch; Tempo cadence and, 78, 147, 150 tessitura and, 116 timbre and, 52, 80, 152, 169 vibrato and, 16, 61, 164 Voices International, 17 Volume, 42, 69, 85. See also Amplitude Vowels, 77-78. See also Assonance Waiting for Godot, 8, 96, 101-3, 171-72 action in, 86, 165, 206n allusion in, 11, 155 dialogue in, 49, 56, 78, 153, 164 images in, 130, 158 listening in, 81-83, 110 voices in, 27, 108, 131, 144-47 Walther von der Vogelweide, 155, 202n Warrilow, David, 12, 45, 104, 179n, 183n Watt, 68, 102, 124-25, 130, 138 grammar and syntax in, 61, 141, 144 language in, 108, 110, 162 sounds in, 87, 137, 156 voices in, 8, 60 WBAI-FM (New York), 45 WDR-Cologne, 45 Webster, John, 137, 173, 207n

Weidenfeld, Lord Arthur, 145 what is the word, 65, 131, 135, 146, 164-73 comment dire as, 13, 117, 152, 204-5n What Where, 50, 52, 72, 92, 130 Whitelaw, Billie, 16, 58, 110, 169, 182n radio work by, 25, 50-51, 179n, 181n "Whoroscope," 72, 89 Willis, Sharon, 192n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 171, 206n Words and Music, 30-36, 40-41, 50, 132, 168 Wordsworth, William, 26, 190n WorstwardHo, 11, 65, 69, 135-47 autobiographical sources in, 126 trilogy elements in, 10, 12, 107 Worth, Irene, 59, 68 Worth, Katharine, 31-32, 45, 68, 176n, 181n, 183-84n Yeats, JackB., 9, 161 Yeats, William Butler, 47, 66, 127 "The Apparitions," 129 "The Folly of Being Comforted," 152 "Leda and the Swan," 66 Purgatory, 31 "Sailing to Byzantium," 23, 163, 203n "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," 81 "The Tower," 31, 36, 110, 182n Zeifman, Hersh, 178n, 195n Zilliacus, Clas, 36, 39 Zinman, Toby Silverman, 206n