Marek Kędzierski

THE SPACE OF ABSENCE
Image and Voice in Beckett's Later Plays.

The ever-growing number of studies devoted to Beckett's late drama testifies as much to the fascination these intense visionary pieces exert on viewers as to our awareness that although little is left to tell we have not yet reached the satisfactory level of collective understanding of these enigmatic texts.

In an attempt to work out a general formula that will help understand them, some critics suggest that we are dealing with works which seriously modify our notion of theatricality, if not more: propose an entirely new one. Are we confronted with a phenomenon entirely different from the early and "classical" Beckett, with a new idiom in its own right ? Or is it merely a difference of degree? But here a difference of degree accounts for a change of style. After all, what we find so fascinating and so novel about late Beckett is not themes, motifs, images, metaphors, the familiar words -for it all is familiar- but the unprecedented concentration, difference in intensity (indeed density).

Compared to the early drama, the late plays are purged of all traces of naturalism, free of any character-in-setting pattern, independent of social and historical co-ordinates of time and location. At the same time, they remain agonizingly precise, specific, concrete, and the psychological insights contained in them border on being universally valid [in anthropological terms]. Reduced in size, and more complex, they show more authorial control than anything that Beckett had written before. All seems to be controlled and measured, even the vast area of dispair. With unparallelled lucidity.

Their world is not that of the observed reality (not even in the sense of early Beckett- where abstracted, condensed elements of the observed reality were selected, images of solitude, mortality, transitoriness, of the world forever and irrevocably stained with suffering, injustice, cruel dominance, frightening uprootedness. This observed world of the earlier works, after being de-created, returns re-created by the lonely hero as it appears to him (or her) in the somber vision.

As we are brought before a spectacle of the quiet contemplation of those visions of a universe beyond, or a pre-sentiment thereof, where all is calm, concentrated -serenly morose- our sense of estrangement is so profound that we are reminded of other theatrical forms of similar grandeur -similarly defying mimetism- and tempted to draw analogies with non-Western traditions. Especially the analogy with the Japanese No theatre seems attractive and instructive.

Yet the sources of Beckett's work remained heroically unchanged, and among them his greatest issue: "the issueless predicament of existence" the dilemma of life and death as thought, pictured, remembered, examined by a solitary hero in the introspective act of his/her consciousness turning to itself.

Already in his earliest works Beckett sought to find resent such mental reality. We find it confirmed in numerous passages from Dream of Fair to Middling Women , among them in the familiar paragraphs which begin: "The labour of resting in a strange place is properly extenuating". The microcosm of the artist's mind, the cosa mentale mentioned in his essay on Proust, is conveyed by words in the images of the skull, the mind going womb-tomb, the tunnel, the lids of the mind, the glare of understanding, the umbra of grave and womb. All these words are linked to space. The mind must feed on images taken from the external world. What it finds when it looks into itself has to bear relation to the external reality [the reality without]. It cannot do away with outside objects; it can only limit their number, play with their arrangement, neutralize their action. The picture is flawed by the referential relation to the world. The sparser, purer, less dependent it is, the more it threatens to become empty and blank and to dissipate.

Murphy's sixth chapter is another superb attempt at description of the mind as locum, in spacial terms, all the more so that it appears in the framework of the world external and heterogenous to Murphy's mind - the world big of blooming buzzing confusion.

The French prose of the forties, in this respect, brings about an important change in perspective, for it elevates the conscious-ness of the speaker (whoever he might be) and treats it as the location where only occasionally the distant noise of the big world can be heard amidst the mind's lucid agitation.

Theatre meant for Beckett, in this respect, a step back - for Vladimir, Hamm, Krapp, even Winnie can be taken by the audience as real persons acting onstage (true, only in the most direct perceptions), the stage being reduced to a mimetic space with symbolic overtones.

The fictional world in L'Innommable , even if it evokes objects, can defy notions of causality, referentiality of time and space, and circumvent corporeality - because the language (however inadequate), by the virtue of its indeterminancy, as a match for consciousness, however imperfect, is in this case better than bodies. Mental space can be created in prose texts without their needing to subvert their own principles. But how can the sphere of individual consciousness serve as material on stage? How can something experienced by us in private which our language renders in a variety of space metaphors that denote its interior character (insideness) and stress immaterial-ity be represented in a public spectacle that seems to involve the opposite: externality and material presence. And, above all, how can the fullness of bodily presence be withdrawn from the corporeal entity on stage called the actor without forfeiting the chance to present movement in the mind. The ultra cerebral obscurity which was a feature of Belacqua's mind cannot be filled with the dead and unborn but with living human beings.

All these reservations notwithstanding, Beckett followed his intuition and experience with theatre and wrote a series of plays which, while leaving virtually no possibility of mimetic reception, seemed to have proven that mental space can be attempted in the theatre. When converted to theatrical space, it opens up new possibilities of immediacy and directness that can make the viewer dramatically aware of sharing an introvertive act of mind. This can be done by using material objects in such a way as to indicate relations rather than substance and by stripping the material objects of the certain conventional connotations. Materiality can then be shown as self-erasing. And the works can be instrumentalized, according to a new pattern, to take on an "aspect",an appearance thathas more to do with music than theatre

The status of what the actor represents changed considerably between Waiting for Godot and What Where , with the turning point coming after Krapp's Last Tape , in the early 1960's, the time Beckett wrote Play (Happy Days being the last full-length play and Catastrophe a notable exception). Winnie and perhaps Joe are the last pretexts for verismo. As one critic has put it, "Individual consciousness becomes the arena for action."

What took on stage over a decade was accomplished within a few years in another medium, radio drama, a genre to which Beckett turned rather by accident and which he explored but for a short time In my view, his experience with radio put him on a hitherto not envisioned path. In less than five years he produced a small number of pieces for radio, none of which would be mentioned in the same breath as his most notable achievements. The first one is a quasi-realistic play written for many characters at a supposedly specific location in the Greater Dublin area and in the era of Beckett's childhood. The second one presents the lonely protagonist telling himself stories and evoking voices (roughly, this reminds us of the trilogy) In the third one, somewhat allegorical figures, one of them being music, contribute to the birth of a poem out of the spirit of music. In the latest radio play (or at least the farthest on the path towards the minimal, interiorized and formalized) a kind of performing machine generates a verbal text counter-pointed with music. Milieu and individuality of the actors are at degree zero - the situation it took Beckett a decade longer to achieve on stage.

Radio made Beckett realise that inherent but potential dramatism of consciousness (as we know it from the Trilogy) can be turned into performance, that language can speak , that voices, in all their sensual concreteness and immediacy, yet not bound to a body, appear on stage, can be heard , and finally, that the category of the character can be disposed of in drama. And on top of that, The importance of the radio episode for Beckett's evolution lies also in a whole new dimension which Beckett added to the repository of means - that of an electronic edge - full of repetitions and permutations. Later he will similarly try to manipulate with the visual image.

Beckett's attitude towards the acoustic and towards performing changed. While he had been primarily interested in the musicality of texts in general, rhythm of speech, articulation of words, now his interest took on the form of specific experiments in 3 areas. Firstly, more than before, Beckett became interested in the non-verbal use of music and sounds. Secondly, his concern with the materiality of vocal articulation was expressed in experimenting with specific articulatory processes especially with continuity and discontinuity of the flow of words. Thirdly, on several occasions, he resorted to the use of electronic recording and reproduction as an essential device in stage plays. Its thematic value is obvious: to signal repetitivenss, memory, inner dialogue, and reinforce dialectics of mutually definable notions like: the dead vs the alive, present vs absent, interior vs exterior.

In Beckett's case, the scholastic mind merges with a pragmatic attitude towards technique. As in music, precision balances spontaneity, emotions find their highly formalized expression beyond the mimetic.

The play turns into a spectacle of hearing and seeing, measured by a sequence of visual and aural signals that inter-act, join and split, mirror each other, showing agreement and conflict. The stage is where the voice appears, recorded or live, and where it is posed against another voice, embodied or not, and set against the setting where there is a human body which can obey or challenge the voice and where the possible movements of the body and sound of speech or music are set against changes and modulation of lighting. Contrary to the conventional situation nothing confirms the organic unity of the stage elements but not everything denies it fully.

Most of the late plays develop according to a complicated, laboriously structured pattern and seem to fit -roughly- to one of the two major types, which I will call the listening and the talking type. In the Listening type there is an unembodied voice and we watch how it influences the situation onstage. Plays of the listening type vary from a simple "speech act" performed on the hearer (as in That Time ) to a sequence of the repetitive stage movements dictated by the unseen voice (as in Ghost Trio or What Where ). The spectator can see how the voice influences the figure. The figure can be a body or a part of the body. It is in this type that fragmentation of the bodies occurs.

Other plays, which we may call the talking type, develop without the unseen voice, and the complete body is capable of moving. They are characterised by a less conspicuous -or rather: less arithmetic repetitiveness (as A Piece of Monologue and Ohio Impromtu ). They deny the audience the satisfaction of the simple figuring-it-all-out, for not only are the figures enigmatic to the extreme but what is performed stands in an equivocal relationship to what is said. There is a narrating element, a verbal story-telling which is somewhat related to the situation of the protagonist, but the author frustrates both efforts to dismiss the story as irrelevant to the setting and to identify the verbal narrative with the stage sequence.

Thus the evoked space of the story, or the evoked space where the disembodied voice originates, is counter-pointed with the seen-and-heard space of the situation onstage.

This seen-and-heard space may lead us to a spacial concretisation beyond the stage: to the area off-stage, the dark abode of directors and instructors. Curiously, offstage was often employed in Beckett's earlier drama. Pozzo and Lucky and the boy appear from there, and Vladimir goes there to do his painful business, Clov walks to and from his kitchen, Krapp dives there to drink and get ledgers but it is only from Play on that it virtually enters into a dialogue with the stage proper. It encloses and envelops the front stage threatens with its darkness to intrude on the figures.

Unless we insist on some hypostatized "outer world" whence the word comes, we may see in this dark zone the space of the missing supplement; who knows, perhaps even the space of the transcendent, the unconscious, the holy, the area of significance

So, to define the terms, theatrical space comprises the stage as setting (onstage) as well as what is behind, unseen yet presumed to exist (offstage). The setting, though it accommodates actors' bodies in their whole (transitory) immediacy, does not account for the person long sought after, namely the Beckettian "I", which is being made absent by the action of the actors onstage.

These, the actants or performers, are engaged in activities in which they are tools in the hands of the instance sought for behind. As to the performer, his or her acting never leads to creating a character. True, in most cases the body is there, whole or in part, and the phenomena associated with functions of the body can be observed. And paradoxically, as the body aspires to become an autonomous stage object, it becomes almost lifeless.

By comparison to the bodies of Vladimir, Clov, Krapp, even Winnie that emanate with life -by comparison- (stenching feet and mouth in Godot, very red faces in Eme, Krapp's digestion) even these bodies of late works (not only drama) that can be observed in full - become subdued and shrouded -as it seems, forever- with clothes. The transmutation between Hamm and the woman in Rockaby is as great as the difference between the bodies in the mud of Comment c'est and those in the geometrical space of Imagination mort imaginez .

Body-mind antagonism loses its sharpness as the Beckettian body loses its secretions, its vitality, its carnality, though visual images frequently refer to bodies and parts of them. No blood, sweat and tears can be expected in the late works. The bodies are "thought out" by the dreaming persona behind, virtually becoming mental objects brought to existence by the subject behind, dreamed out, thought out only to appear as such, immediate to the audience, this immediacy being but a mark of absence. The empty presence signals only the absence. A Beckett play conveys a profound sense of immediacy, generated in the act of a highly concentrated MENTAL VISION that evokes bodies.

The Beckettian figure does not stand for an individual human being but rather, the whole stage microcosm stands for it: the setting with scarce "last" things that remained and remain seen in a weak constellation of lights, the figure (body or its parts), the unembodied voices, or music, the possibilty of the supplement associated with the off-stage area.

he Beckettian figure is an icon, a bodily frame to signal human presence , the external form, not a person sustained in drama but an emblem of an assumed person behind, the Beckettian persona , the figure of identity, of the missing "I" conspicuously absent by contrast to the corporeal figure of the actor.

he Space of Absence: Image and Voice in Beckett's Late Plays . Lecture delivered at Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco May 1991. Published in: Beckett and Beyond, Bruce Stewart ed. Colin Smythe /Buckinghamshire/ Oxford University Press/ New York 1999