The Century of Beckett

Page II

The historical value is, of course, in this as a collection of first productions, the productions for which the plays written for radio were composed. The especial historical worth is in the production of Words and Music. The production, created in 1962, had music composed by John Beckett, Beckett’s cousin. Samuel Beckett thought highly of the music, but John was dissatisfied with it and asked that his music be removed from all future recordings.(*) In 1987, the work was revived by Everett C. Frost, and Beckett suggested that the composer Morton Feldman be engaged to provide the music. It is the Feldman version that is more generally available now. (It can be obtained as part of the set The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, which includes later productions of all five plays for radio.) Thus, the inclusion the original production of Words and Music is something of a rarity, and, in the comparison, an indication of Beckett’s own judgment on how his works should be handled in performance.

The principal value in this set is that the five plays written for radio, which are presented chronologically, chart the development of style in Becket’s writing career—they are that career in miniature. For over the course of Beckett’s project, a project from which he never departed, staying with and refining his subject to the end of his efforts—and Cioran wrote about Beckett, “I find him as obstinate as any fanatic. Even if the world crumbled, he would not abandon the work under way, nor would he alter his subject.”—there is a distillation. There is a purification of his vision, a progress toward a purity of vision, and with it a purification of what is seen, of his report—a progress toward a shocking accuracy concerning the truth of things: the truth of our nature and the truth of the world we are in.

The movement to a purity of vision is a movement to a purity of voice. For Beckett, the distillation down to the vision of truth, the stripping away of the meaningless paraphernalia of insignificances, is the reduction down to simple voices. Nothing but voice remains once one dismisses what will not withstand scrutiny, once one leaves behind what fades and vaporizes under examination. Whether he sets the scene with characters wandering or failing to wander in a barren and desolate scenario—as in All That Fall and Embers, or Waiting for Godot and Endgame—or suspends his vocal characters, attributing to them nothing but vocality, wrapping them in nothing—as in Words and Music and Cascando, or Rockaby and The Unnamable—what he gives us is voice that cannot stop and meanders and maunders about the available interlocutory terrain, seeking something to say, something to take up its capabilities, its time, its compulsion to spend time saying. The implicit stipulation, the inevitable doom, is that the voice comes first, that it needs something to which to dedicate itself, that it requires a devotion, that any will do, and that in the end none will do.

It is a proposition that does not change, that is as obstinate as a fanatical obsession, and it makes the radio drama, the drama reduced to simple voices, an ideal mode for Beckett’s vision, for radio is inherently the presentation of voices afloat in vacancy. The radio drama is also the ideal image of Beckett’s progress of purification, for the purification to voice is also the purification of the authorial voice, of Beckett’s voice. As with all thinkers of the first rank, the variety of voices simulated are nothing more than inflections of the author’s writing voice, nothing more than variations on the theme of his chant. Shakespeare, for all the characters he renders, for all the impossibly complex personalities whose simulations distract so many from the poem that Shakespeare is always writing, and always composing in one voice, is always speaking Shakespeare—just as Bach always spoke Bach. Nabokov once called Hamlet “the wild dream of a neurotic scholar,” and that mad pedant is the only simulation Shakespeare created in the play, is nothing other than one more nuance of Shakespeare’s voice, a nuance inundated with nuance, coming from the most fecund imagination we have received—the rest is detail and scaffolding, executions of the demands of the form.

There is a purity there, a voice that no one mistakes coming upon it in performance. Shakespeare’s is one of the most purified voices in art. So, too, with Beckett. One cannot mistake him for another, regardless of the momentary claims concerning characters on a roadside, climbing into and down from a wagon, waiting for nothing, hanging in the nothing, imagining each other. Beckett’s voice became increasingly purified as he progressed, becoming one of the purest and most identifiable modes of expression in the canon. As Beckett left behind scene setting and personality and presumed personal history arranged as characters in a place, his voice became more intensely and precisely his own. It gained in the indispensable artistic quality: the quality of inimitability, the indelible stamp. It carries the conviction of art, the impression that it is a work of art we are seeing, in direct proportion to that purification, that indelibility.

And it compels a question: whether such unswerving, dedicated, obstinate idiosyncrasy, such heightened identifiability, must also be devoted to an appropriate subject, at least a sufficiently serious subject, or whether such impeccable identity of voice automatically and necessarily orients itself to strictly appropriate concerns—whether the purity of voice purifies it of all intellectual dross. Perhaps inimitability causes art to occur, causes artistic effort to come upon the single thought that matters. Perhaps it is merely a necessary precondition, and further correct decisions are required. Either it is a necessary condition or a necessary and sufficient condition. Or perhaps all one needs to create art is a titanic soul, a most comprehensive soul, the rest taking care of itself. Nothing more is needed, and nothing less will do.

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The voice isolated from all circumstance, the voice as the first stipulation, is the purification of consciousness—it is consciousness existing alone, without attribution, without condition or foundation, consciousness per se as the single extant. For Beckett, this stipulation is not a literary device or an image, the free-floating voice does not stand as a metaphor for an impression of predicament or a symbol for a weight of import, for a degree of risk. It is not to be interpreted as a measure of the dire of some other situation—it is not to be interpreted at all. The stipulation is an ontological proposition—a statement by the artist of the nature of the real. Which is to say that Beckett is entirely serious in this. He means precisely what he portrays. We are merely consciousness. Nothing of what supports or attends our awareness, nothing of what we are aware, is real. All of what we know, everything of which we are conscious, is unreal—illusory, evanescent, fleeting, a function of the consciousness that calls it up, that creates it. Our memories, the events we recall, the events we witness, the articles of the world we observe around us, other people—all are the result of the words used by the consciousness one is, each generated as experience by the saying of its name, by the stating of its existence. But to say it is not to make it so, and none of it actually is. All there is, is the awareness, the endless saying, for the saying of something or another is unable to cease. There is nothing but the saying and the awareness of saying, and the awareness of the appearance of what has been said, and the sense of possibly endless space all around—of the void. The void, and a voice that will not stop.

Look you, miss, what counts is not so much the thing, in itself, that would astonish me too. No, it’s the word, the notion.
(Rough for Radio II)

It is all fomented around us, by us, or by something akin to a biological urge, as if a life force were simply driving forward, without purpose, without reason, for that is what a life force, once initiated, does. As if mere chemical reaction, pressing forward what we think of, what we devise unwittingly and experience, as life. Consciousness, the human world, then becomes a stage set of imagined issues of emotional import added to imagined facts—a scenario of ethics and emphases and hopes and despairs and “should’s” compounded upon “is’s,” of poignancies imposed upon data imposed, all imposed upon nothing. It is all a function of need, of want, of the impulse to obtain that which is needed to continue to live, occurring to a creature, or not even a creature, who has become, to its own dismay, conscious of itself. But it is conscious of the mere condition of itself, of the empty shell of thought, aware purely of vacant awareness, and it must be filled to be tolerable, and to serve its function. Amoebae simply move (one may hope). However, we move by inventing reasons for moving whose function is purely to get us to move, or, Hume-like, they merely attend our moving and seem to us to precede and trigger it, occurring presumably for the sake of some function they serve that we are incapable of discovering. We are not minds, for we do not decide—we proceed senselessly and ineluctably. We are not minds; we are the victims of minds, or a mind.

. . . some consummate inner process . . .
(Words and Music)

The biology of the organism, or of whatever it is, is real, and consciousness is real, but personal consciousness is not real, not real as in it is not that which determines—it is determined. The words we hear ourselves using drop the seed that initiates the process whereby we “sprout a head,” grow an ego, like a flower blooming. It occurs of necessity, and then we suffer through the life cycle of the plant we truly are, as if the dandelion had the poor fortune to have woken up, as if it had, through a vagary of evolution, grown an eye and with it a mind, as if an ancillary and superfluous organ were being tested for its survival value, and were doing badly. Odilon Redon once drew The Origin of Vision Begins in the Flower, 1883, in which a monstrous floral growth develops an eye in the center of its bloom; and C. G. Jung once warned us, “We fail to appreciate how plant-like we are.” But the voice is incessant.

Just went on, my body doing its best without me.
(From an Abandoned Work)

Our existence continues insistently, and senselessly. It is not the result of resolve, or even resignation. It is the result of a biological drive, sheer animation, with a thinking self tied to it as if tied to a dying animal.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
(William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”)

It is not the will to go on, but rather the impertinence of the will in itself. The biochemical processes press on, and we are dragged along. We may give up, but the body continues to move, the biological processes continue of their own impulse, until they don’t, which is all that might be hoped for, for there is horror throughout this eventuality. It is the horror of degeneration, for life perceived is in Beckett a continuous degradation, an inexorable movement toward extinction—awareness aware of nothing certain but its own eventual extinguishing—along with the pains, the disappointments, the apparent betrayals of a single circumstance, which requires the devising of what never can withstand the inquiry of thought, the inquiry of that which is driven to devise it. The horror is the continuous dying, and the knowledge of the vacancy within which it is fated—the awareness that, finally, there is nothing to be aware of, that we think futilely as a result of processes that accidentally produced thought, or that we think to a purpose that has nothing to do with the content of thought, that thought is a nullity: the horror of a Pascal alone in the eternal silence of infinite spaces. And somehow, the dying and the silence are the same thing. The horror is not death but dying, the horror is mortality: the horror is Keatsian.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;

(John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”)

As much as The Unnamable is Beckett’s Tempest, the work in which the conjurer calls up his characters—characters of the preceding novels—as his palpable, and for Beckett pointless, puppets, his entire oeuvre is the Keatsian formula: death is the only escape from the terror of mortality—to escape dying, all we can do is die.

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