Marek Kędzierski

BECKETT AND THE (UN)CHANGING IMAGE OF THE MIND

It was a friend of mine, active in Amnesty International, who arranged my ticket to an evening of Beckett's short plays at New York 's Harold Clurman Theatre in the spring of 1983. What Where was premiered in a triple bill with Catastrophe and Ohio Impromp­tu . While Ohio Impromptu , in my friend's view, seemed 'typical Beckett', the two other plays might have been the playwright's new beginning: his foray into political theatre. They appeared to be proof of Beckett's involvement in the issue of global freedom.

This opinion seemed to be shared by many commentators. That Catastrophe would provoke allegorical readings claiming that it be a political parable was clear to me, especially that the text bore the author's dedication to the imprisoned Vaclav Havel. What Where might give the impression of a political play as well, resembling a murky vision of some vague machinery of political persecution. The figures on stage, as enigmatic as the anonymous executors of the will of some nasty regime can be, were engaged in the ritual of interrogation and torture, both taking place at the time of performance, both on and offstage. Their aim was to extricate a confession on the subject of the vague 'what' and 'where'. The gloomy chain of torturers and tortured, each inter­rogator becoming in turn suspect and subject to interrogation by the next one, could be a part of a system of total dictatorship where those who carry out inhuman orders are mistrusted and eventually eliminated the way they have eliminated others.

Beckett certainly was in favour of global freedom; however, I was never convinced that political concerns were the prime mover of his works; so I approached the political Catastrophe with scepti­cism. For while Beckett's plays do occasionally apply to politi­cal realities and can be interpreted as exposing politi­cal evil, they do so only insomuch as political evil is a part of universal evil. As to the source of such political evil, Beckett clearly saw it in the existential situation alone. In other words, political evil, itself a part of universal misery, can be derived from the world of individual consciousness reflecting on the nature of life in the mortal world. Only in such perspective can we speak of Beckett as a writer who was never blind to acts of social injustice and political repression.

My friend's remarks, however, made me realize a very essential feature of Beckett's works, at least from the time of Fin de partie . In Fin de partie , the first play which makes the claim that there is nothing beyond the stage, despite the absence of any social context (or perhaps thanks to it) the psychological situations, e.g. dialectics of leaving and staying, are elevated almost to the level of being anthropologically valid. It is not theatre that imitates life. Life in the outer world, its princi­pal rules etc., can be derived from the inner world presented in Beckett's works. Life doubles true theatre. Beckett spent a lot of creative energy giving credence to this Artaud-like task. If something does happen, it happens on stage first; it is concocted in an elaborate process in the course of which meaning is ac­quired through ritual-like enacting on stage: the Beckettian performance. The play is not a look-alike repetition on stage of a specific event believed to have happened 'out there' in the real world. It seems to be the other way around. Events are themselves produced on stage as a result of repetitive theatrical ritual. It is from these events/acts that life outside, with all the essential rules of the macrocosm, can be inferred, abstract­ed, deduced. It is from the situation onstage, which strives to capture the nature of life and death in strikingly hard and elementary metaphors, metaphors of existence (Martin Esslin), that human actions in the macrocosm can be derived and given significance. So one is not surprised to hear, in connection with What Where , of "miniaturized models of psychological victimiza­tion, images in a mental limbo"

My intuition about Beckett's "political plays" was confirmed by the author. When I asked about the political significance of Catastrophe , he raised his arms in a gesture of impatience and made just one remark: It is not more political than Pochade radiophonique . Radio 2 , as the latter is known in English, written about 1960, is also a curiously "realistic" document of the cruel ceremony of interrogation of an unknown protagonist who is kept disabled and is brought to speech by blows of a pizzle. However, his revelations clearly exceed political issues. In fact, they seem to be true Beckett, true to his life-long task of turning literature into an instrument of metaphysical question­ing. The 'what where' questions are more like the Oedipus riddle, i.e. concerning the nature of life, and as such seem unlikely to be sought after by totalitarian oppressors.

Beckett's goal, rather than portraying political nightmares, is to hint at merely the whole thing : the reality of the mind. Beckett weaves an arabesque of visions which refer above all to the mind, arriving at portraits and images of the inner dialogue of the self. For the author, they clearly refer to his own mind, being dramatisations of the creative process where creating is always in service of the existential quest. Repeatedly, they evoke the dilemma of an artist, who is being forced by some mysterious -and cruel- instance, to say it . Catastrophe , What Where and Radio 1 are close in mood to the Kafkaesque situation evoked in the fifth Text For Nothing in which the narrator experiences a vision in the dark chamber of the imaginary:

I'm the clerk, I'm the scribe, at the hearings of what cause I know not [...] To be judge and party, witness and advocate, and he, attentive, indifferent, who sits and notes. It's an image, in my helpless head, where all sleeps, all is dead, not yet born, I don't know, or before my eyes, they see the scene, the lids flicker and it's in. An instant and then they close again, to look inside the head, to try and see inside, to look for me there, in the silence of quite a different justice, in the toils of that obscure assize where to be is to be guilty.

It is the "helpless head" to which all that we see and hear in What Where belongs. The cerebral world, which was revealed -sporadi­cally and within the main third-person narrative- by the eccen­tric heroes of Beckett's early prose (like the "boomerangs of fantasy" released by Belaqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women ) eventually becomes the sole frame of reference. There is a long way between the garrulous remarks on life being but a short interval between "spermarium and crematorium" in Murphy and the actual uniting of the two termini, birth and death, in one brilliant image performed, as in the case of Rockaby , on stage. In his later stage works, the Beckettian formula for presenting the mind crystallised with unparalleled sense of precision, concentration and conciseness. The stage could be compared to a womb where an image born of the matrix of the mind is made visible and audible. It is born and dies before the spectator's eyes, parts the darkness only to return to it shortly after. A particular stage image is firmly anchored in a stage situation which always turns out to be a variant of the existential situa­tion itself, as every stage image turns out to be a variant of the image of the mind .

The theatrical image unwinds in time to make the contemplating hero aware of the irreversibility of the passing of time and of the sense of loss as the principal life experience. But the contemplating hero may not be identified with the figure on stage. It is wiser indeed to avoid applying this term to the figure played by the actor, which on numerous occasions includes only a part of the body, as in Play , Not I or That Time , or one of its aspects, i.e. the voice, as Mother in Footfalls . I prefer to call the corporeal entity on stage an actant, reserving the term hero to denote the consciousness behind the visual and aural stage phenomena. In Beckett's late works, not the stage figure but rather the totality of the theatrical microcosm denotes a consciousness engaged in a self-reflective act. As to the dramat­ic event, the term can only be used with quali­fications (which often require further qualifications), for what we witness on stage resembles rather a ritual which accrues meaning through repetition. And, if it is true, as Charles Lyons observes, that Beckett's "character becomes scenic, a location then by the same token, apart from speaking of 'spacialized character', one might speak of 'personal ­ized space'

The formula for presenting the inner reality at which Beckett arrived in his late drama had not fully crystallised until Happy Days and Play . And the direct impulse was provided by radio. It is hard to imagine Beckett's late theatre without his exploration of the domain of radio. Radio made him realize that the inherent but potential dramatism of consciousness (as we know it from the French prose) can be performed unbound to a body, that voices alone in all their sensuous concreteness and immedia­cy do appear on stage inasmuch as they can be heard, and finally, that the category of the character can be entirely disposed of in drama. The physical stage found its equivalent in the acoustical screen onto which the contents of consciousness were projected. The importance of radio for Beckett's evolution lies also in a whole new dimension which he added to his repository of means: that of an electronic edge, i.e. giving to his traditional fascination with forms of repetitiveness an expression drawing primarily on the technical resources specific for radio and television.

Having freed his work in the domain of the acoustic from the last fetters of the much despised subjugation to mimesis and realism, Beckett's next logical step was to add the withdrawn visual image to the voices and silences, to restore vision which, however, did not include the embodied character. For Beckett did not return to the conventional concept of the actor, corporeally present on stage, as the centre and the unifying factor of all that goes on on stage, where speech and acting before the audience are linked in a conventional, 'organic' way so as to create a character. Instead, the organizing principle seemed now to be the juxtapos­ing of two modes, visual and acoustic, over the shoulders of the actor so to speak, according to an elaborate pattern that has more to do with music and arts then with drama.

The play turns into a spectacle unified by the central image, measured by a sequence of visual and aural signals that are put together in a complex pattern. There is a narrative element which leads to the generating of a text which in some way mirrors the scene, and in another way disagrees with it. There is an element of direct demonstration amidst repetitions that frequently threaten the coherence; there is often fragmentation of the visual bodily image and a pre-recorded voice, divorced from the body in space and time, sometimes made to interact with a live voice.

If the totality of what is presented on stage stands for the mind, the traditional distinction between on and offstage aquires a new connotation. For a realistic playwright, the offstage area is where that which we see and hear onstage meets the outer world, being a sort of extension of both. If in Beckett's early drama there is still a semblance of the realist's offstage, from Play on, offstage and onstage seem to be mutually inseparable in their opposing the outer world. Beckett's offstage can be regard­ed as a space of the missing source , and the supplement. The invisible agency which operates the spotlights in Play and thus controls the intricate sequence of the flow of words (directed toward this agency) belongs offstage. Also the unembodied voice, live or recorded, coming onto the stage can be traced to off­stage. In the physical space of the theatre, it is from offstage that the voice of the unseen comes. This is where the voice is stored and where the sound engineer turns on and off the tape player.

Onstage and offstage together form an image of the mind, the totality of consciousness, the locus of the Beckettian persona. Onstage more obviously suggests the present and the conscious, offstage - the past and the uncon­scious. The incompleteness of the character onstage needs to be supplemented by offstage. It is a very Beckett­ian paradox that a totality serves to show a lack: on and off­stage together indicate the missing 'I'.

There is also an important optical development in Beckett's late performance works that can be linked with off­stage. On the stage proper, the darkness virtually begins to envel­op an island of light where the body of the actor is seen in full or in part. I am tempted to treat it as an encroachment of offstage and a sign of a paradoxical dialogue of offstage and onstage in the course of which the former, overwhelming and encompassing the latter, threatens to devour the figure. In a 1937 letter Beckett wrote of the sound surface torn by enormous paus­es , a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence. This is what happens visually in Beckett's last tele­vision plays: images of the bodies are fragmented and represented as pools of light set against the dark to which they finally surrender. Time is being synchronized in space, on screen.

A fairly frequent view has it that one of the reasons why Beckett turned to television and the media was his desire to exert control on every aspect of production. However, he made it clear time and time again that he had no such claim whatsoev­er. If anything, he would hint at the flaws and limita­tions of his own productions which he seemed to know all to well. I remember him comment, while speaking of one recorded production, that indeed all is fixed forever, including the errors . Like­wise, the ques­tion of the so-called definitive productions and authorial control was of secondary importance to Beckett. He has repeatedly emphasized that his own productions were the result of my work with the play as a director and function of the players at my disposal and that to other directors my choices might not seem desirable.

Beckett's interest in television comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his pragmaticism. There is something familiar about Beckett's curiosity concerning the technical aspects of his work that reminds us more of the way a musician and a visual artist works than many a writer. As in music especially, metaphysical impulses find formal expression beyond the mimetic. It was this curiosity that led him to the domain of radio and television. At the same time, however, we should not forget that his experiments with the electronic media were perfectly in line with the tenor of his life-long search for means of artistic articulation capable of presenting the workings of the mind. For this reason, while examining his TV plays, we are taken directly to the very heart of his aesthetics.

After the radio plays, he wrote several works for television and the script for Film . Despite all the differences in the poetics of film and television plays, compared to prose and drama, both disciplines eliminate live performance and reduce the pres­ence of corporeal bodies to a few purely visual and acoustical aspects. Beckett had been interested in cinema as early as the thirties and his own theatre owes much to film aesthetics. That he never expressed himself in the medium of cinema again ( Film remaining his only foray into the discipline) can at least in part be attributed to his experience from the shooting of Film.

If one may consider the stage production as giving a direct glimpse into the mind, even more obvious, in Beckett's case, seems the function of the television screen as presenting con­sciousness. Electronic (or photographic) reproduction in both film and television is characterized, vis a vis theatre, by the fact that the screen replaces the stage as the locus of the mind's projections. It cannot accomodate the living actor, but only his sound-visual image. The images onstage always involve the presence, even if partial, of a living actor. The images onscreen withdraw the immediacy of the bodily presence. By nature, however, camera-registered images are 'transplanted' from the macrocosm, photographed in a direct way from the phenomenal world. Beckett's images never display fairy-tale qualities but remain the most literal, always hard and tangible. The screen enables Beckett in a more natural way than theatre to present the shifting of the layers of time, the mixing of locations, and, in keeping with the author's intention, is more ambiguous about the outside/inside relation. As to memory, the film tech­nique that juxtaposes the portrait of the protagonist recalling his own past and the images of the thus recalled past has become a cliche in film art. The screen seems a perfect locus for the projection of the representations of the human mind, somewhat more adequate to this aim than the three-dimensional theatre stage.

A dramatist expressing himself or herself in the medium of television has at his or her disposal technical possibilities that are not offered by theatre. He or she can manipulate with colors or choose to renounce color, the latter solution being the one Beckett preferred in most of his plays save Quad 1 . The dramatist may or may not choose to make use of the depth of field, a possibility not discarded by Beckett. Furthermore, the playwright (it should be remembered that Beckett was at one time very interested in Eisenstein's theories), was aware of the possibilities of montage, especially setting the images of the outside against those of the inside (as in Film ), thereby inten­sifying the sense of divorcing the world without from the world within. Finally and probably most importantly, he or she may choose to use movements, position and distance of the camera to create a much more flexible space than that normally allowed in the theatre. Beckett made use of it sparingly but when he did, it was always very essential to the play.

Re-defining and delineating anew the space in the course of the performance is the main technical device in Eh Joe where a complete catalogue of camera shots, from the full shot through the extreme close-up, is employed. The sequence of the camera move­ments corresponds, not accidentally, to what in Proust is said to be the opposite of a false movement of the spirit - from within to withou. Motion towards, accompanied by the decreas­ing field of vision (a cliche procedure; beginning writers often abuse this technique, especially dolling-in), is effected simul­tanuo­usly with the flow of words spoken by an unseen woman in several phases which produces a rhythm of rupture between immo­bility and movement. To what extent this use of camera movements is essential to the message of the play is shown by a fiasco of several attempts at staging Eh Joe ; no stage technique can be as direct and literal.

Of the five Beckett's scripts written specifically for televi­sion, the first three deal directly with memory. Eh Joe , like Krapp's Last Tape demonstrates the impact of the tableaux from the past on the listening hero, and echoes the failed attempt to flee memories and the anguish of perceivedness (also in the sense of being perceived by one's own memories) in Film . Ghost Trio and ...but the clouds... mark an effort to incorpo­rate memories into the imaginary. The two TV pieces from the eighties, Quad and Nacht und Träume , in their scrutinizing of the structure of the imaginary fully dispense with words, and to a corre­sponding degree place importance on the visual and the acoustic. Beckett's last television work, produced in Stutt­gart under the title Was Wo , was the author's own adaptation of the stage What Where . In the course of reworking it for Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1985, Beckett arrived at a version strikingly departing from the original. A comparison of the two versions, for the stage and for the screen, is all the more interesting in that What Where is Beckett's last word, in all genres ( Stirring Still being in my view just a fragment).

One should not be surprised to see What Where interpreted as a portrait of the consciousness engaged in a self-reflective act, and presented in images being generated in the matrix of the mind. Both stage and TV versions well illustrate the introspec­tive nature of Beckett's late work, with its severe reduction of the portrayed reality on the one hand, and almost total lack of the referential link to the world without. Missing such a con­text, a puzzled viewer may refer to Beckett's other works. Familiar with his preoccupation, themes, images, figures of speech, one may assume that the 'what where' question is a kind of Oedipus' riddle and that the answer to it cannot be found, despite an obligation to ask the question. One may conclude that Bam, Bim, Bem and Bom form either a chain of various persons tormenting each other with no end of the process in sight, or a chain of historical egos of one individual (from birth to death), which ultimately comes to one and the same, given the fact that the historical egos are as alienat­ed from the present one as the other human beings are from the contemplating (remembering or imagining) hero. The four 'B' figures in What Where are allusive to Rimbaud's Les Voyelles which once again testifies to the Beckettian entangle­ment in language as the source of failure in the quest for identity. Another interpretation that comes to mind in this connection is the de Saussurean concept of words' mean­ings being a product of the opposition of the distinctive fea­tures, which otherwise, apart from their function to mark the difference within the system, have no existence of their own. This in turn would confirm that Bam, Bem, Bim, and Bom could be seen as distinctive aspects of one personality.

In What Where for the stage, we see in the unchanging theatrical space the four figures present in the corporeal shape of the actors confronted with the voice whose source we may assume is offstage. This localizing is of major importance, for it helps to distinguish between two distinct dramatis personae: the Bam on stage, endowed with body and voice, and the Bam offstage repre­sented only by the voice coming through the speaker. Hence the implica­tion that the former is a historical projection of the latter. In Was Wo for television, Beckett dispenses with the bodies, reduc­ing them to images of faces alone separated from each other by a dark background. Aware that the viewer is unable to differen­tiate between the two voices of Bam (the offscreen voice cannot be localized the way the offstage voice can) the author articu­lates that which in the original play was the offstage quality of the Voice in visual terms . He introduces the visual image of Bam's voice and divorces it from the other visual/sound image of Bam by giving it the privileged scaled-up and fuzzy-in-contour appear­ance, resem­bling a death mask. The unfocused image cannot be achieved in the theatre, as the off­stage voice cannot be achieved in television.

The major difference between the stage What Where and the televi­sion Was Wo results from the use of space. If we maintain that -functionally- the source of the unembodied Voice in the original version was removed from the stage, and thereby assumed as being localized offstage, then the play dramatizes the tension between stage and offstage. In the television version, one cannot local­ize the offstage voice - there is no way to tell whether the sound reverberates onscreen or offscreen. Therefore Beckett decided to make use of the visual equivalent of offstage - this time right on the television screen - thereby in effect forced to show the offcreen. It is shown in the icon of memory localized in space next to its representa­tions, the subject next to the object, taking recourse to size (the relative distance of the camera) and depth of field, and assem­bling all on the painting-like screen.

Nacht und Traume and Was Wo represent an important tour de force in Beckett's experiments with images, sound, space and time, aiming at drama­tising human consciousness. Since the stage is replaced with the television screen, one can expect that the onstage/offstage dynamics be replaced with that of the onscreen/­ offscreen. But there are differences. In a realistic television play or film the onscreen space is generally be­lieved to be included within a wider scenographic space. The invisible off- screen is thus taken to be an extension of the visible onscreen space - as if it were existant but off-frame. In Beckett's case the frame does not communicate with the macrocosm through off­screen. The off­screen, not being an antecham­ber through which what is repre­sented on the screen communicates with the outside world, is projected onto the screen. It ceases to be an unseen supple­ment of the stage, with the result that both onscreen and offscreen radically oppose the exteri­or. Thus outside and the inside are entirely divorced. The screen of the microcosm is opposed to the macro­cosm; only in such an opposition can it claim to apply to the outer reality. The screen is a place of projec­tions of the imaginary, as performed in this spectacle of a creative mind in search of the transcendental, projections sometimes as puzzling to the dreaming mind as they may be to the audience.

For Beckett, the screen is not a window onto the world but into the mind. Offscreen space then, by the same token as in the theatre, would represent the unevoked mental contents and espe­cially the unconscious or the repressed, and since it is there that the projections of the two termina -the anticipation of death and the memories of birth- reside, it is continually in tension with the visible. But since the offstage is primarily suggested through acoustic means, it cannot be mechanically converted to the same offscreen in television. We have already seen in such plays as Footfalls, Rockaby , and especially Not I (the last play possibly being the first to admit offstage, represented by the figure of the Auditor, to the stage) that the onstage area becomes increasingly reduced, by the use of light, to merely a part of the physical stage. Offstage literally envelops -on­stage!- the solitary figure. Television plays such as Nacht und Träume and the Stuttgart Was Wo mark the next step: in effect, the offscreen appears as a part of onscreen.

There is a technical advantage to replacing the stage as the locus of the visions of the mind with the television screen. All is now immaterial, freed from corporeality, the sole spectacle of the sole game of sound and voice, a purely sound-optical situa­tion. The screen can better show the ambiguous: the undecidabili­ty of truth and falsity, of the inside/outside relation, of the relation between the brain and the body, and in general, the in-commensurabilty of the subject and the world. But something important is lost - for in the theatre, this tension between the live and the recorded, the bodily present and the merely audible, is the source of the incredible tension which makes watching Beckett's late theatre plays such an intense and terrifyingly puzzling experience. In my view, this theatrical intensity may in future prove more vital, dramatic, and creative than the images of the mind on the television screen. For, ultimately, perhaps only the live as it is confronted, con­trasted with (and even defined by) the artificial and the mechanical can provide Beckett with the form of mingling, this pulsating equality of inequali­ties, this balance of inbalance which he sees in the world and which moves so deeply those who see his world.

Speaking of the form of mingling, however, we must not forget the fact that the televi­sion screen is the mingling itself - made up of particles of light and darkness. There is no such thing as complete dark­ness on the screen. As long as it glimmers, it lasts - as con­scious­ness does. This is another technical means the very nature of which proves to Beckett the very nature of the life of the mind. Verse, prose, stage, mime, radio, film, television - he has tried it all. As his narrator who in Textes pour Rien de­clares: I'd like to be sure I left no stone unturned before reporting me missing. Beckett and the (Un)Changing Image of the Mind: Beckett's Television Plays , in: The Savage Eye, Catherina Wulf, ed. Rodolphi Publishers 1995

Avant-Garde Theatre 1982-1993 , London 1993, p.429
No's Knife , Collected Shorter Prose , London 1967 p. 91
Samuel Beckett , London and Basingstoke 1983 p.165
Disjecta , ed. Ruby Cohn, London 1983 p.
Paris 15.11.1981. Letter to Marek Kedzierski
ions during the shooting in New York in 1964 see Alan Schneider On Directing 'Film' , in S.Beckett Film , New York 1969
Proust , London 1965 p.65
No's Knife , London 1967, p.103

Murphy , London 1973 p.45
2. 21.11.1981
In Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Beyond Beckett = Before Beckett, to be published in: Beckett and Beyond, ed. by George Sandulescu, Monaco .
The Empty Space , Harmondsworth 1972, p.64
Murphy , quoted edition, p.12.
9.7.1937, printed in: Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by S. Beckett, ed. by Ruby Cohn, London 1983
Robert Scanlan, Mimesis Praxeos in the Works of Samuel Beckett , Journal of Beckett Studies, new series, vol.1, Nos. 1-2 p.7
Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre 1982-1993 , London 1993, p.429
No's Knife , Collected Shorter Prose , London 1967 p. 91
Charles Lyons, Samuel Beckett , London and Basingstoke 1983 p.165
Letter to Axel Kaum, in Disjecta , ed. Ruby Cohn, London 1983 p.
Paris 15.11.1981. Letter to Marek Kedzierski
For an account of Beckett's frustrations during the shooting in New York in 1964 see Alan Schneider On Directing 'Film' , in S.Beckett Film , New York 1969
Proust , London 1965 p.65
In: No's Knife , London 1967, p.103