Marek Kędzierski

Düsseldorf 1993: An Exibit

"He is with the great of our time, Kandinsky and Klee, Ballmer and Bram van Velde, Rouault and Braque, because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predica-ment of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least, a door."

Samuel Beckett on the painter Jack B. Yeats, 1945.

1.Dublin on a rainy October day. Large-letter posters, The Beckett Festival, like the white banner at O'Connell Street , seem almost out of place. One cannot help but be reminded of those headlines in Dublin newspapers in 1938 decrying Beckett as "The Atheist from Paris ". One cannot refrain from evoking Beckett's brilliant-ly vicious, mocking remarks on things Irish, whole passages where he derided, sometimes with biting sarcasm, what he considered Irish idiosyncrasies. Now all his dramatic works were to be staged and shown within a three week period at he Gate Theatre, in "a unique celebration honouring one of the major writers of this century in his native city", as I read in the Air Lingus Magazine during my flight to Dublin .

"L'artiste qui joue son etre est de nulle part. Et il n'a pas des freres", "The artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith", Beckett wrote in the hommage to the painter Jack B. Yeats. And he himself for a greater part of his adult life lived outside of Ireland where most of his works were written and published. He was not forced to leave Ireland , nor was he subject to persecu-tion in his native land; his exile is related to his attitude toward his country only to a certain degree. He never renounced his Irish citizenship and even visited the Irish Embassy in Paris . Regularly, as one might say, to renew his passport.

In May 1991, speaking at the Beckett conference at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco, Ireland's Ambassador to Paris emphasized in his opening address the fact that Beckett had left Ireland not because of Irish provincialism, intolerance, back-wardness but because of an inner urge - his was a self-imposed exile. And with a touch of almost Beckettian humour, he added: "I'm not saying that Ireland was not provincial, intolerant and backward, but that was not the reason why Beckett left it", and then reacting to laughter among the public, he put it diplomat-ically: "I'm not saying that it was provincial, intolerant and backward, but that was not the reason why Beckett left it."

Celebrating Beckett in Dublin in October 1991 meant that in many bookshops "Beckett" was one of the four subdivisions of the Irish Literature section, the other three being Yeats, Joyce and "others". "Before long, we'll see Beckett's monuments all over the place, little Sams out of tin or copper on every corner", observed my interlocutor as we sat down on a bench next to a life-size bronze statue of James Joyce. He had known Beckett since 1929. They were both engaged in a theatre project entitled Le Kid , a parodistic etude which drew from both Pierre Corneile and Charlie Chaplin. Produced in 1931 at Dublin 's Peacock Theatre, it was the first piece Beckett wrote for the stage.

We are walking along the Grand Canal , a narrow stretch of almost still water. To my remark that some of the productions shown at the Gate are so superb precisely because they are Irish, ("we realise what we have missed even in the best productions, and it seems now so obvious that we wonder why we haven't thought of it before", "How can they be so universal if they are so local?") He replies: "Beckett always travelled in time; while writing in Par-is he often was back in Dublin ". But he disagrees when I say, looking at the canal and the bridges, that it's extraordinary how much this landscape had remained the same. "Everything is differ-ent, from my point of view", he says. People. Back then nobody ever locked their houses. Now you see alarm systems everywhere. Even in Cooldrinagh [Beckett's childhood home] an ugly alarm system has been installed.

Yet, coming from a different part of the world, not being able to remember the Dublin of 1930, I maintain that it has certainly re-mained more like "back then" than most other places connected with Beckett: Kassel, Roussillon, London or Paris. We are passing Richmond Street and Portobello Bridge . In the approaching dusk I see people leaving the nearby hospital, most of them young. Nurses, students? The Portobello Nursing Home was just a few pa-ces from the bridge. In 1931, a close female friend of Beckett found there "beautiful haven". One evening, as she lay dying, Beckett left the clinic and, full of anger at suffering and death, walked through the streets of the city. His anger precipitated into a long poem entitled EnuegI . The city landscape partakes in his revulsion towards the world full of dying. Dublin in agony, seen through images of decay and dying, a city like a body afflicted with tuberculosis.

Exeo in spasm tired of my darling's red sputum from the Portobello Private Nursing Home its secret things and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding into a black west trottled with clouds.

Virtually everything in this poem "quotes" the cityscape so as to suggest medical death: clot of anger, ruined feet, livid canal, dying barge, stillborn evening etc. Dublin looked so to Beckett, I was thinking, as I looked at the bridge spanning the narrow canal. "Grand" canal seems certainly an overstatement, as does "steep perilous" bridge. How could a bridge over such a narrow canal be steep or perilous? Just as I was asking myself this que-stion I caught sight of a face beyond. The fact that the bridge was arched and very short accounted for my being able to see,very clearly,a face that stood out lit by a street light against dark-ness around it, while the arch of the bridge caused the rest of the body to be out of sight. It was a very strained face, face that expressed great effort, almost pain, like a woman in labour. One could see facial muscles, curiously frozen in an effort to cope with the unseen burden. One would think she was in mortal danger. It was like looking through a telescope. And it was only after what seemed to be a long while that the whole figure emerg-ed from beyond the arch. The woman was pushing a baby carriage. At that moment I understood the meaning of "the perilous bridge", "toil", "crest", "surge". And how strange to have thought that she was in terror, in mortal danger. A very Beckettian experience indeed, I concluded dwelling on the proximity of death and birth.

And then, of course, I realised that this scene seemed so remarkable to me because of another Beckettian death-birth encounter which happened not a mile away from The Portobello Bridge, which we all know from an autobiographical passage in Krapp's Last Tape. In 1950, in another private nursing home, Beckett's mother lay dying. He saw her pass away from a bench on the Grand Canal . When the blind in her window went down, the narrator looked around at the indifferent people in the park who could not know his "secret thing", nor share the loss with him. "One dark young beauty with a big black hooded perambulator, most funereal thing". We are not surprised to find the last object classified in such a way. Once more death and birth are coupled.

In Beckett's late piece for theatre, Rockaby , birth and death meet even more closely, forged together in the striking stage image of an old woman sitting in a rocking chair, engaged in a haunting verbal exchange with a voice coming from off-stage [probably her own], an image, a situation which, when examined closely, evokes a myriad of associations, being in itself a stage exteriorization of thoughts on subjects of birth/death, life/ death, solitude/company, herself/"another like herself", a struc-ture which reveals a complicated semantic pattern. The piece is about renouncing life and welcoming death, in the last lucid mo-ment, with outstretched arms, so to speak. The woman is sitting with the arms of the chair around her (which is a substitute for the warmth of a human embrace, as we know from another late play, That Time , where one of the three voices speaks of past solitudes metaphorically: "with your arms around you whose else hugging you for a bit of warmth"). This grip of the chair is at the same time reminiscent of birth and anticipation of death. In the place of arms associated with human warmth and solitude, the final "Those arms at last" in Rockaby refers to death, as does rocking (which formerly is associated with mother and birth) in the final lines "stop her eyes/fuck life/rock her off". Life,the repeated rhythm-ical "come and go" is reduced to the memory of the womb and [the] anticipation of the tomb. The title Rockaby is taken from a some-what macabre lullaby ending with a cradle falling from the tree-top, complete with "baby and all". The French title is even more telling. "Berceuse" means, firstly, a text to be sung, meant to help put someone to sleep, to restore to peace and calm (in this case it gives the promise of the final peace); secondly, it is a rocking chair itself, an object which evokes both rhythmical re-petitiveness and movement towards the end; thirdly, it is sug-gestive of birth, by association with "berceau", a common word for the cradle.

It is an extremely cumulative image, as in most of Beckett's late works. These fascinating texts at each new encounter reveal new associations, hitherto unnoticed by us. The process of discover-ing analogies, once set in motion, never seems to be exhausted. Paradoxically or not, as Beckett's texts become more austere and purified, stripped of (most of) external impedimenta so as to be-come almost abstract, when examined closely, they reveal more and more meaning. His work underwent a process of contraction, not reduction; minimal on the surface, they contain enormous "energy" inside.

It is instructive to go back to his early texts while we ponder on what seems very enigmatic in the late texts. We get to know Beckett "piece by piece", through a heuristic circle, becoming more and more competent as we read and see more, and as we compare his early and later texts. One gets used to Beckett's own code of meaning, his specific emotional signification of places, gestures, observations, to his Proustian valorization of the reality without, according to the individual's own symbolic code. An otherwise neutral event thus acquires a substantial weight, becoming as it were a prop of existence.

In his early work, Beckett's uses his talent of observation to describe the world in terms of what he finds horrifying about human existence (horrifying it remains to the end but in a strangely calm manner). It's not a non-partisan observation, characterised by expediency. He reads out of the world that which matters to him. He finds in it what he is looking for in it. He looks at the world with the attentiveness of a gamebird in search of prey. His concerns is "an issueless predicament of existence"; and he is compelled to ask questions about the core of life invariably seen from the point of view of death, no matter how satisfactory the answers. So, while observing the reality without, he reads death out of everything.

To illustrate it, let's take Beckett's sometimes idiosyncratic preoccupation with his hero's attire. From the many detailed de-scriptions of how his figures are dressed we can derive an idea of what connotations clothing can have for him.The attire is tri-partite, and more often than not comprises hat, shoes and long coat covering the rest of the body.It is allusive of birth, life, and death. The head, mostly capped or hatted, brings reminis-cences of the past, and is suggestive of birth ("Murphy never wore a hat, the memories it awoke of the caul, were too poignant, especially when he had to take it off", we read in Murphy , and recall the hat business in En attendant Godot , for example. The shoes, oft too small, or too big, are functional, so to speak, for they make the present, the (walking) life, what it is: painful. The coat, heavy and obscuring the shape of the body can be seen as the anticipation of death (shroud). But these values are by no means fixed and stable. Like with Joyce in Finnegans Wake (where it is the guiding force), the associative process, once started, never stops, and generates the opposite notations. Because of the linkage between womb and grave, the coat is also reminscent of birth (swaddling clothes), and the hat of death.

Another illustration of reading death (i.e. birth and death) out of seemingly neutral scenery provides the narrator of the novella L'Expulse in whose account the expulsion from his family house smacks of expulsion into the world, i.e. birth. The door opens when he is already outside and the hat is being discharged from inside. His description of a coach lets him wonder if it is really a coach. Rightly, we may agree, for it bears a curious resemblance to a coffin.

Or let us take another familiar image: an instant of the sudden bright sun at the end of a rainy day, a motif which Beckett uses repeatedly on numerous occasions, always with vague but unmistak-able reference to "life as such". It is not an uncommon sight in Ireland , and it had accompanied the young Beckett enough times before it assumed this fixed connotation, of having something to do with life and death. Every detail of the surroundings can evoke the life-death dilemma. Every sign of life evokes a pre-monition of death, every simple object can serve as a "memento mori". So the bright sun before it gets dark "means" brevity, or perhaps: a short flash of lucid awareness before the death comes. Or: like Pozzo's "They are giving birth astride a grave". He never says it directly, or uses it as a clear simile, but instead leaves it as a subtle suggestion, subtle but too strong to be ignored. His works are full of such images, as his Dublin life was full of daily occurences and sights, which he interpreted in the (sombre) light of his preoccupations with "the issueless predicament of existence."

"Issueless" as it might be, this predicament is revealed in Beckett's work in the variety and richness, I am tempted to say, of images, motifs, patterns - and these are related to his erudition. Having no talent for happiness and naturally disposed to enhance the somber side of life, he [nonetheless] derived his proccupations in part from his readings and from his contact with art and culture. These images, motifs, patterns he projects onto the observed reality. Dante had perhaps the longest lasting

influence on him (to his dying day, he did not part with his edition of Divina Commedia which he kept along with a very few other books at the nursing home at rue Dumoncel) In some way his late images are of the same stuff as Dante's, high and concrete, and illustrating the thesis that each individual partakes in universal order; the fate of concrete people illustrates the working of the cosmos. The tangibility of images which, transplanted into a different context, signal issues that by far transcend their "secular" meaning also reminds us of Dante. The modus existentiae of the dreamy figures from Beckett's late visionary pieces, both in prose and drama, can be compared to that of Dante, with their celebratory, ritualistic nature, their solemnity, their obsession with a few particular aspects of their worldly existence which they refer to over and over again, revolving it all in their heads.

2. Beckett extricates from the common (sometimes seemingly trivial) the quintessential, its intrinsic trait, which acquires the significance of the universal. This authenticity of detail, and Beckett's relating it to the metaphysical sphere, account for the fascination with Beckett, whose work appeals not only to those capable of going (and willing to do it) through erudite and sometimes obscure allusions (and stratifications of "repressed knowledge"), but to everyone who is ready to make an effort to concentrate on the most solid, most universal, almost anthropologically valid facets of his work.

This is quite obvious with regard to such works as En attendant Godot through Happy Days in drama, and most of his early works through Comment c'est in prose. Texts which came afterwards are much more enigmatic and straightforward. Works like Not I or Ill Seen Ill Said at the same time create the need of a more exten-sive interpretation than their material offers and frustrate it because of their enigmatic character. The viewers or readers are impressed with the directness of their impact and aware of their themes and poetics, but they inevitably end up by facing the un-explainable. While the "classical" works provoke the audience or readers to fill up their "open" enigmas (who is Godot, is Endgame about the last humans on earth?), the polished surface of Bec-kett's late works reflects only the reader's/viewer's curiosity and helplessness.

I cannot help but think at this point about Beckett the man, about the impression he personally made on his interlocutors in his last years. Joe Papp in his obituary describes Beckett as a simple Irishman, admiring cricket, bouts and men's talk. Others, myself included, were struck by his kindness and generosity. As often, both may be right. But I have the suspicion that if you wanted to talk to him about golf, he would talk about golf. He helped people, he gave his money away, and he had surprisingly many rendez-vous even well into the late eighties. The correspondence of this writer of almost total public seclusion whose writing is the apotheosis of solitude amounts to 15,000 pieces! Judging from testimonies following his death, the number of his friends was enormous. Joe Papp was one of them. I'm not trying to disavow their testimonies, because I believe in the enormous role he played in many of their lives. But I'm asking myself to how many of them especially in in his last years he showed the polished mirror in which they could see their own preoccupations and concerns.

His generous help allowed many to understand his work better. To see him at work in the theatre always meant a brief glimpse into the working of his creative mind. Small comments on the practical issues of the stage business were capable of bringing about a revelation.

While directing his early plays in the seventies, he re-examined them in the light of his then recent work. On the other hand, his later work was to a considerable degree shaped by experience he had gained from being involved in the productions of his own plays. The distance between En attendant Godot and What Where seems as great as between Beckett's early prose and Godot . And there is a tremendous difference between what the viewers saw in the little Theatre de Babylone in 1953 and Beckett's own produc-tion of Godot from 1984. Beckett as a director of his own plays created a distinct style which -as his directorial work became known through the numerous testimonies of his collaborators- cannot be ignored by subsequent directors; on the contrary, we recognize in many recent productions clear echoes from Beckett's own stagings. Often, specific directorial solutions are "discre-tely quoted" (not to sa "imitated") by various producers. Accord-ing to my estimate, in two out of three recent productions, the way Pozzo goes about the pipe business, or the way Clov drags the sheets, show striking similarities to Beckett's own productions. It does not have to be copied from the source; Beckett's direc-torial solutions have become a part of intertextuality.

Rather than choosing some particular interpretation, he worked on the material in the manner a musician or a painter does,revealing and enhancing these structural qualities which make it obvious that the work cannot be reduced to some concept, no matter how ingenious the latter may seem. He never had a dogmatic attitude and never spoke from the position of authority about what he expected from other directors. He never considered his own productions "definite." Commenting on Endgame , in a private letter to me, he explicitly stated: "The cuts and simplifications are the result of my work with the play as director and function of the players at my disposal. To another director they may not seem desirable."

Beckett has widened and deepened the range of perceptions experienced by the audience during a theatrical performance, and by doing it with his own work he made us look differently at plays by other playwrights. He has educated us, shown how intense theatre can be, indeed how intense it should be. Since Jan Kott's essay King Lear or Endgame (1962) there have been many confirmations, both in theatre productions and in critical writings, that Beckett has influenced our theatrical reception of the classics so that we will never again see them the same way as before Beckett. "Because of the plays Beckett has written [...] everything in drama has taken on a different look, including the plays written before Beckett. [...]...the most modern of dramatists, one who is shaping and will continue to shape the future of drama, is the dramatist who is forcing us to re-think earlier drama", says Norman Berlin in his moving essay in which he shows examples of how Beckett has provided the special context for our understanding of Western drama in general.

In his own productions, Beckett strengthened structure in order to show his plays as they are -extremely complex under an increasingly simple general pattern. Paradoxically or not, as Beckett's works become more austere and purified, stripped of (most) external impedimenta so as to become almost abstract, they reveal more and more meaning when examined closely. Less is more. His work has undergone a process of contraction, not reduction; minimal on the surface, they contain enormous "energy" inside.

In Beckett's late texts, the little of the context still present in En attendant Godot was withdrawn and is only signalled by the internal "energy" of which we are made aware while pondering why and how the conventional dramatic codes are put out of balance. For most readers and audiences it is much more difficult to find access to these works than to the elusive Godot or Endgame . For the latter allow (however inadequate it is in the final count) for an attempt at an interpretation along the lines of mimetic convention. But as the ironic semblance of realism vanishes from them, it becomes virtually impossible to deal with Beckett in the manner in which the early critics indulged all too willingly.

3. There is something paralysing in the authenticity of the elementary gestures demonstrated in his late works with crystal-clear lucidity. Loneliness, the need to be alone, need for company, need for love, exasperated friendship, striving to leave, impossibility of leaving, the chasmatic character of memory, all this is shown in strikingly pure images. Peter Brook once wrote: "Perhaps the most intense and personal writing of our time comes from Samuel Beckett. Beckett's plays are symbols in an exact sense of the word. A false symbol is soft and vague; a true symbol is hard and clear. When we say 'symbolic' we often mean something drearily obscure: a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take".

Beckett's way of speaking of the human condition is called by Brook an "honest vision". Indeed, his French trilogy, the last work to openly and explicitly address the problem of negativity as the consequence of "honest vision", comes to the limits of honesty. For the narrator of L'Innommable at the end of his quest does not arrive at any of the comforting truths about his human predicament. If nothing is to be reached at the end of the quest, then let it be, he will face it. If in his desperate search for truth, come what might, everything that he gropes for dissipates the moment he is about to reach it, he shows us this dissipation, the intangible, in all its tangibilty, that is, in all the tangibility of the effort. He would insist on the directness of the Unexplained.

The energy underlying seemingly simple words, or stage situations reminds us sometimes of Ingmar Bergman's best moments. On the whole of course, because Beckett strips the situations his figures are in of their realistic context, he demands far more concentration from the audience. The making of the Beckettian form always involves certain operations that have more to do with visual arts and music than the theatrical convention. The standards of precision imposed by his works can only be reached in the field of music and the visual arts.

4. "The visual" has played an enormous role with Beckett. In one sense, his literary perception was very dependent on the visual element to a degree far surpassing the usual average for a literary work. In another sense, always aware of the goal he assigned to literature early in his life, he considered painting and music to be farther along the path towards this goal than literature.

There are biographical facts to support the thesis of the signi-ficance of the visual arts in his oeuvre - among his many artist friends and acquaintances were Jack Yeats, Henri Hayden, Bram and Gerd van Velde,Alberto Giacometti,Avigdor Arikha and many others. His experience as an art viewer is well documented in his work. An index to artists mentioned on the pages of Beckett's books would contain several hundred names and references to specific works. His early prose is virtually incrusted with them, his per-sonages likened to a host of figures from the vast gallery of masterpieces of the visual arts. His lengthy pilgrimage to Nazi Germany was his tribute to the innovative artists labelled decad-ent by the official propaganda and persecuted in the Third Reich.

Less obviously but more importantly, he often employed "a painter's perspective" when describing his fictional world. His emblematic use of posture is not a late invention; it was even more prominent in the earlier works because of its ironic exageration. Some descriptions of Murphy and the positions of his body would be worth a study in iconography and iconology in the guise of Erwin Panofsky. Certain techniques of description of Murphy's body ("set position") or certain passages from Watt sound like a commentary on painting.

Murphy is often represented as a body in landscape: still or moving in a sequence of rapid movements interrupted by stasis. Looking at Murphy, Celia "found [...] the eyes of Murphy still open and upon her. But almost at once they closed, as for a supreme exertion, the jaws clenched, the chin jutted, the knees sagged, the hypogastrium came forward, the mouth opened, the head tilted slowly back." Beckett destratifes and atomizes the movement. Then he creates his own iconography which for the most part echoes the iconography of religious painting. People are presented in curiously chopped sequences of what is called "positions", most often Christ's position on the cross and after being taken down from the cross. Beckett frequently presents movement as a progression of positions between the interstices of stasis and stillness, also with the obvious effort to divorce movement and voice, for example, something which Beckett attempt-ed later on in his own theatre and television productions.

One obvious consequence of Beckett's taking to drama was that what he wrote could be seen on stage. In That Time or Not I , for example, all we see is a stage visual in the form of one part of the body (the head), or a part thereof (mouth), surrounded by darkness which in this way is also made visible. Speaking of Not I , the genesis of the striking image in it is, apart from one street occurence in Tunisia , a painting in the cathedral of Va-letta , Malta : Caravaggio's The Beheading of St.John . What, with regard to Beckett's other works, had been pointed out by numerous critics before, has recently been shown in a lecture by James Knowlson in which he illustrated Beckett's images and art refer-ences with slide projection : that the visual derives directly from art. If one can speak of a strong visual component in Bec-kett's works throughout his entire development, it is especially in his late works that the visual is raised to the rank of the organizing principle. Several late works were conceived as de-scriptions of the place which the dreaming consciousness is ima-gining in the mental vision that evokes bodies. Le Depeupleur constitutes its own microcosm where the lonely anonymous individ-ual has been multiplated by some 205, all of whom are engaged in the task of "each searching for its lost one." They might be looking for "an issue" -which they will not find, though "from time immemorial rumour has it [...] that there exists a way out." For the Beckettian hero in general, looking for an issue is probably the most persistent search. In the case of Le Depeupleu r this search has been given an architectural dimension, that of a cylindrical interior where all seems to be measured and control-led and taken into account, including the failure to find the issue, and where the absolute reason turns into terror. Le Depeupleur has of course the source in Divina Commedia , but parallels have also been suggested with the French 18th century architect Boullee's design of the so-called Newton's Kenotaph , Claude-Nicolas Ledoux' Graveyard, Gustave Dore's and William Blake's drawings and above all Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione . The important thing in the final count is not to trace the vision of Beckett's work to a concrete inspiring source, for that doesn't seem feasible, but rather to show its clearly visual origin.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Beckett's rapports with the arts is his art criticism. A whole body of his writings on con-temporary painting published mostly in the forties is extremely relevant to Beckett's own aesthetics. The concept of Beckett's late works seem to be directly influenced by the conclusions at which he arrived then. It is the fate of the painter that best illustrates the dilemma of the artist facing the existential.

Beckett's liaison with the arts has to do with his strong need to do away with mimesis, something which he found had already been accomplished in the works of his artist-friends where technique was used to defy representation. It was with the help of art and music that Beckett's theatre was trying to find the end of representation. Hence, the analysis of his attitude towards visual arts helps us understand the premises of his art.

The same applies to both music and the acoustic. His early works very explicitly show how important music is for him. In a letter from 1937, after showing his concern should "literature alone [...] remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting" he goes on asking: "Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why this terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony...?"

In some of Beckett's later works for theatre and radio, music, "the most immaterial of all the arts" is directly employed. On the other plane, Beckett was always interested in the materiality of sound, especially the sound of human speech. Compare in this respect all the remarks scattered early on in his prose about the way his heroes spoke, without doubt most of them in a way that was equally idiosyncratic as their manner of walking!

All of Becketts's late theatre seems to me to be an experiment in orchestrating the visual with the acoustic in a way which has nothing to do with the traditional interaction of these two elements in a dramatic work and which invites much more "formalistic" analysis of what actually takes place on stage before we proceed to speak about the ideas. Which other plays have to be dealt with in the manner illustrated by the following excerpt from a commentary on Happy Days : "This sixth pause is the thirteenth thing that happens in the play, and it is the end of the first full completed action "beat". Event number ten was the only verbal utterance so far,the first "line" of the play-text."

Thus the play turnes into a spectacle of hearing and seeing, measured by a sequence of visual and aural signals that interact, join and split, mirror each other, showing harmony and disharmony. 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 expressions of the face, gestures and movements of the body and sound of speech or music are set against changes and modulation of lighting.

The Beckettian figure, actant or performer impersonated by actors onstage, presented in his bodily form (full or in part), is an icon, a bodily frame to signal human presence, not a person sustained in drama but an emblem of an assumed person behind, the figure of identity, of the missing "I"conspicuously absent by contrast to the corporeal figure of the actor.

5. Beckett does not fit into most schemas and into the many discussions of what is called recent theory. It is very hard to point to where he belongs, (to modernism or post-modernism?), whether he advocates construction or deconstruction (probably neither), whether he is letter-oriented or sound- oriented. Even the status of his theatre remains unclear; he cannot be smoothly placed within the performance movement though his plays are strictly written for the theatre and most of them were first printed long after the opening night. On the other hand, he seems out of place among "text-oriented" dramatists, even though one can decidedly apply to him the term King-Text, so scorned by performance artists.

Beckett stages the drama of subjectivity, with the consciousness in a self-reflecting act as its only remaining hero, in structures which openly challenge the codes of mimetism not by dismantling it entirely but by putting classical dramatic codes out of balance. I deem it possible that in these dense, austere plays of the old age, Beckett not only contributed to the development of Western drama but also modified our notion of theatricality, who knows, perhaps even proposed an entirely new one, based on similar "Aufhebung" of the mimetic in the domain of drama as that which took place in modern music and the visual arts and which has not taken place in drama yet. It remains to be seen whether his formula apply only to his writing (which in itself is an enormous contribution) or also to the direction drama will eventually take. In the latter case, one might say that, in order to solve his all-time dilemma of how to present the inner reality, Beckett subverted and deconstructed (systematically, so to speak) the principles and categories of our dramatic convention such as character, dialogue, spacio-temporal referentiality, plot, action, and proposed a kind of "synthetic theatre", where visual and aural images are orchestrated in a highly formalized way reminiscent of the practices of the visual arts and music.

How he has influenced and inspired artists and musicians is a separate issue of its own which still awaits and merits examination. The few exhibits accompanying Beckett's conferences and festivals have whetted our appetites in this regard, made us realise why it is equally important to speak about Beckett's influence on music and the visual arts as on literaure and theatre. We should hope that we will gain more insight once we have seen this exhibit.