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The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama
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The Haptic Aesthetic in
Samuel Beckett’s Drama
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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century
Series Editor: Jennifer M. Jeffers
As the leading literary figure to emerge from post–World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s
texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully appreciated by critics and
scholars. The goal of New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century is to stimulate
new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series
will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect

of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers.
Jennifer M. Jeffers is Professor of English and Associate Dean and Ombudsperson for the
College of Graduate Studies at Cleveland State University. In addition to numerous articles,
she is the author of The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and
Power, Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature, Uncharted Space:
The End of Narrative, the editor of Samuel Beckett, and co-editor of Contextualizing Aesthetics:
From Plato to Lyotard.
Also in the Series:
Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive

edited by Seá n Kennedy and Katherine Weiss
Beckett’s Masculinity
by Jennifer M. Jeffers
Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work

by Paul Stewart
Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas

by Peter Fifield
The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama

by Trish McTighe

The Haptic Aesthetic in

Samuel Beckett’s Drama
Trish McTighe

THE HAPTIC AESTHETIC IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S DRAMA
Copyright © Trish McTighe, 2013
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–27698–8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McTighe, Trish.
The haptic aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s drama / Trish McTighe.
pages cm.—(New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First
Century)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–1–137–27698–8 (alk. paper)
1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989—Dramatic works.
2. Touch in literature. 3. Self in literature. I. Title.
PR6003.E282Z778 2013
842⬘.914—dc23 2012051315
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy 1

Chapter 1 Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy 13
Chapter 2 Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes 35
Chapter 3 Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing 61
Chapter 4 Skin, Space, Place 87
Chapter 5 On the One Hand . . . (The One That
Writes the Body) 113
Chapter 6 On the Other Hand . . . (The One That Refuses to
Touch) 133
Conclusion Departing Bodies: Between Doubting Thomas
and Noli me Tangere 151
Notes 155
Bibliography 179
Index 191

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Series Editor’s Preface

A
s the leading literary figure to emerge from post–World War II
Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacy
have yet to be fully explored by critics and scholars. The purpose of
“New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” is to stimu-
late new approaches and fresh perspectives on Beckett’s texts and legacy. The
series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations
concerning Beckett’s work and/or his influence upon subsequent writers,
artists, and thinkers. Much has been made of James Joyce’s influence on
Beckett (which is limited to the early years of his career), but there has yet
to be a thorough analysis of Beckett’s influence not only on writers (Vaclav
Havel, Edna O’Brien, Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, and James Kelman) but
also on artists (Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, and Avigdor Arikha), musi-
cians (Philip Glass, Heinz Holliger, and Mascual Dusapin), philosophers
(Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault), and cultural and
theoretical critics (Felix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Maurice Blanchot).
Because Beckett’s influence traverses disciplinary boundaries, scholarly pos-
sibilities are virtually without limit. This series will be a forum for new criti-
cal discourses on Beckett and his ongoing interdisciplinary legacy.
“New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century” invites
work that reconnects Beckett with his own cultural and historical situa-
tion. The importance of archival access to unpublished Beckett material,
the impact of the publication of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, and a ges-
tational period since the official biography appeared, all lead to the next
phase of Beckett Studies brimming with exciting possibilities for interpre-
tation and evaluation. Along with recovering from its ahistorical phase,
Beckett criticism is also beginning to open up new avenues of critique across
the four genres in which Beckett wrote (fiction, drama, poetry, and criti-
cal essay). “New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century”
invites scholarly proposals that feature Beckett’s work and/or his influence
or cross-discourse with other creative artists, thinkers, or movements.


Acknowledgments

I
n course of researching and writing this book, I have been privileged to
have had guidance and inspiration from several scholars. I would like
to thank, first and foremost, Professor Anna McMullan (University of
Reading, UK) for her support, guidance, and inspiration throughout all
stages of the preparation of this book. I am grateful also for the insight-
ful commentaries on the text from Dr. Paul Murphy (Queen’s University,
Northern Ireland) and Professor Mary Bryden (University of Reading, UK),
and to Professor Everett Frost for all his advice.
I would also like to thank series editor Professor Jennifer Jeffers for her
help and encouragement with the early draft of this manuscript, and Brigitte
Schull and Naomi Tarlow at Palgrave for their advice and patience.
A large portion of my thanks must go too to my parents, Maura and
Michael McTighe and to Evelyn McLoughlin for all their support, and to
my daughter Moya for being a light in my life. I wish to thank especially
Dr. Kurt Taroff for his discerning eye in reading portions of the manuscript,
his optimism, and his willingness to argue an academic point late into the
night. This book is dedicated both to him and to my family.
Parts of chapters 2 and 5 have been previously published as “Noli me
Tangere: Haptic Certitude in Beckett’s Eh Joe and Nacht und Träume,” in
Modern Drama 55.2 (2012), 215–229. This material has been reprinted with
permission from University of Toronto Press (www.utpjournals.com), © 2012
University of Toronto.


INTRODUCTION

Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy
I
n Beckett’s last television play Nacht und Träume, a pair of hands
emerges from darkness to convey a cup to a dream-figure’s lips and
rest on his head for a moment. No face is revealed behind the hands;
the play is concerned primarily with what is a dreamt act of touch. This
is perhaps the most explicit visualization of the act of touch in Beckett’s
drama, yet it occurs within a dream and within the virtual, light-signal
space of television. The hands are dreamt, imagined out of darkness, thus
presenting many of the tensions surrounding touch that this study explores:
between presence and absence, tangibility and intangibility, the hand that
touches, and the hand that withdraws. Beckett’s work is deeply concerned
with these touches variously remembered, half-remembered, imagined, and,
most importantly, failing to happen at all. The owner of the hands in Nacht
und Träume remains outside the field of vision, existing solely in this act of
touching, however incomplete and virtual that touch may be.
This study focuses on these fleeting, often failing moments of tactile
connection in Beckett’s work, as well as the demands that the dimness of
the imagery, their partialness, and invisibility place upon the sense of sight
for the figure of the drama and the spectator alike. Touch is, as Margrit
Shildrick puts it, “always an embodied gesture that may sustain a reciprocal
sense of solicitude and intimacy that grounded in the mutual instabilities
of our corporeal existence. To touch and be touched speaks to our exposure
to, and immersion in, the world of others, and to the capacity to be moved
beyond reason, in the space of shared vulnerabilities.”1 Paying attention to
touch in Beckett’s work throws up a multiplicity of meanings and connec-
tions, from the shared vulnerabilities of intersubjective touch to the aesthetic
structures that represent it. Such a focus emerges from a tradition of think-
ing though touch in art, its haptic qualities (from the ancient Greek á πτός

2 ● The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama
or apto, pertaining to touch) contained in either its depiction of touching or

in its presentation of texture to the eye of the viewer. This study will situate
Beckett’s work relative to discourses about tactility and art across a range of
media: theater and performance, visual art, cinema and television as well as
considering how such discourses intersect with issues of embodiment and
technology. The Beckettian dramatic corpus, fragmented as it is, comes to
be at the limit point of the strands of aesthetics and philosophy that are

most concerned with the body, and this is revealed most tellingly through
a critical concern for touch. Philosophers of the body in whose work touch
has figured prominently, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc
Nancy, are especially relevant, as is the meeting point that Jacques Derrida
establishes between these two, in relation to their use of touch.2 Important
also are critics who have observed a haptic aesthetic taking shape in visual
art and cinema since the nineteenth century, perceiving how such haptic
aesthetic strategies may disrupt dominant aesthetic conventions, not only
in their rejection of the visual or the demand that the spectator relate to
the artwork in a different manner, but in the way that these strategies reject
coherence of time and space, the imperative of narrative arcs and aesthetic
resolution. Crucially, in Nacht und Träume the image never reveals all its
secrets; it withholds visual and narrative resolution, encouraging the viewer
to think about the many meanings of the act of touch.
In a world in which touchscreen technology is proliferating, bringing
the world to our fingertips quite literally—at least for those who can afford
it—it would seem that we have direct tactile interaction with technology
and therefore with the online worlds it brings. At the same time, we create
virtual online personae for ourselves in the form of social networks such as
Facebook. We maintain contact with people who very often live thousands
of miles away, people who we may never meet, or touch in any material way.
A great global distance has been shrunk through such technology, yet our
haptic or material-tactile lives cannot be lived via this technology—at least
for now. The next few decades may yet see massive improvements in haptic
communications—something that is urgent for those who are visually chal-
lenged and rely on haptic interfaces to use technology, but also has extensive
marketing potential. What I propose here however is not some nostalgia
for touch, for a time when humans could only make face-to-face contact.
Anthropology, theology, philosophy, aesthetics all can show that to some
extent humans have always had a sense of the threshold between the virtual
and material, because of religious belief, imagination, or both, and this is
certainly the case since the dawn of the modern era of communication and
the possibility of intimacy without presence. Rather I attempt to answer the
question: why think about touch? What does it mean to touch? What does it

Introduction ● 3
mean to represent touch aesthetically? What new understanding of ourselves

and our world can emerge when we do just that—engage the haptic. Touch
has always had deep significance in human cultures—religious, ethical rules
and social conventions govern what can be touched and what (and who)
must never be touched. It is a vital and variable element in human interac-
tion and intimacy, from before birth and up to death. Now, with so much
of our lives lived virtually or remotely, the question of touch is more urgent

than ever. I pursue Beckett’s work as operating at the nexus of aesthetics and
philosophy and, via aesthetic strategies that interrupt visual and narrative
logic, asking that we think through the meanings of the act of touch.
Beckett’s Corpus: At the Limits of Aesthetics and Philosophy

Haptic aesthetic strategies emerge in a resistance to visibility and a
self-reflexive exposure of the materiality of the artwork. In their manipula-
tion of stage and televisual space, Beckett’s dramas for stage and screen are
like relief carvings into the theatrical and televisual aesthetic ground. Alois
Riegl, who was among the first to use the term in art criticism, named such
carvings that evoked material tactility and encouraged the eye to traverse
the surface of the image, as haptic.3 While Riegl was discussing ancient
Egyptian art in nineteenth-century Vienna, the application of the term
remains appropriate when discussing an author-dramatist who was con-
cerned for the sculptural quality of his dramatic images and who had, as
Lois Oppenheim puts it, such a close “dialogue” with visual art.4 When
performing Footfalls, Beckett’s favored actress Billie Whitelaw felt that she
“should be pacing up and down the Tate Gallery [ . . . ] because of the way
the thing looks and the way he paints with light is just as important as what
comes out of my mouth.”5 Beckett as sculptural artist carves out his figures
without allowing them to be fully realized—this is particularly so in the
later drama with which this study is primarily concerned. These figures, like
the tattered semblance of May in Footfalls, seem always ready to be absorbed
back into their grounds, or else to disperse into a televisual broadcast signal.
This study will address the haptic qualities of Beckett’s drama in terms of
their attention to materiality, their disruption to the visual and to narrative
logic and to the ways in which the dramas present touch itself, as ghostly or
dreamlike imagining and as aesthetic figure.
Haptics in contemporary thought is often a way of describing an antireal-
ist trajectory in art in general, as well as the turn to sensation in painting.
Gilles Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon is exemplary in this regard. Bacon’s
work, with its meaty, material bodies in “spasm,” paints the sensations that
bodies experience, evoking corporeality, tactility, and the fleshliness of matter.6

Painting emerges from the hand as well as from the eye, and realist art forms
do not seem to be enough to express what it is to have or be a body. Antonin
Artaud might have seen this as evoking cruelty; the rawness of life demand-
ing a different aesthetic for its expression.7 And, although Beckett cannot
be said to portray such fleshly bodies as Bacon has done, the roughness of
sensation remains always as an underlay to the image: May’s feet in Footfalls,
for example, wearing away the carpet after years of ceaseless pacing. Within

contemporary applications of the term haptic, we see not only this concern
for sensation, but also methods for evoking embodiment. It is almost as if,
and this is particularly pertinent to Beckett’s work, speaking or represent-
ing the body from a critical perspective or from the artist’s hand demands
something that the visual often cannot provide. To really see the body, we
must cover our eyes and touch, just as the doubtful Thomas must do in the
Gospel of John. In this way, tactility always implies proximity and presence.
This is nowhere more significant than in the theater, where Beckett, among
other modernist playwrights, toys with the phenomenological immediacy
available through this medium. Yet, as this study will show, Beckett’s work
complicates this immediacy significantly, as S. E. Gontarski sees it, continu-
ally eroding the privileging of theatrical presence.8 If there is any possibility
of maintaining tangibility on the stage, the idea of a tactile proximity and
immediacy seems to be apparently impossible when it comes to recorded
audiovisual media, yet I argue, in line with critics such as Laura Marks,
that we can talk about haptics in relation to film and television (even if
that is to with a loss of touch), and address the demand that representing
embodiment places upon audiovisual media.9 This may not be actual touch,
or even the potential for touch that is possible in the theater. Marks uses
Riegl’s binaric classification to differentiate between the haptic and optic
imagery that demands either haptic or optic visuality: “Optical visuality
depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic
looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than plunge into
illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It
is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze rather than
to gaze.”10 For Deleuze, who draws similarly on Riegl’s work, we can talk
of haptic as “a touching which is specific to the gaze.”11 This study will
therefore be concerned with the opacity and texture of imagery in Beckett’s
work, seeing-touching in a somewhat synesthetic manner the “skin” of the
film, as Marks puts it. This seems to imply some connection to the artwork
operating along different channels than the audiovisual, almost fulfilling
Filippo Marinetti’s proposal in “Manifesto on Tactilism”: a reeducation of
the skin and touch, which is possible because perhaps “there is more thought
in the fingertips [ . . . ] than in the brain that prides itself on observing this

Introduction ● 5
phenomenon.”12 Haptic art or haptic elements within art demand that we

relate to the artwork in a tactile manner. Yet, this may also happen through
the eye.
In this regard, haptic aesthetic strategies can also function as a disruption
to the structure of the artwork. For instance, an image that calls upon the
eye to touch within a sequence of representative images in a film interrupts
the visual flow, arresting, in a similar way to Deleuze’s time-image,13 the

visual logic, and therefore the narrative logic, of the film. Laura Marks sees
this in the intercultural video art that she examines, giving the example of
close-up shots of silken sari folds in Shauna Beharry’s Seeing is Believing
(1991),14 which creates a visual erotics of texture. Such images interrupt the
logical ordering of the visual; it ceases to become representative. Beckett’s
Film provides a significant example of such a strategy of obscuring via tex-
ture and tactility: gauze is placed over the camera lens to make the image
it produces blurred, grainy, and textural. Visual interruptions such as this
present a challenge to dominant aesthetic conventions. Not only do they
demand a different mode of connection from the viewer, a haptic eye, they
also undermine the aesthetic logic of the audiovisual artwork.
As previously stated, performance, with its present bodies sharing space
with their audience, provides an optimal site where touch and the other
senses might be brought into play. As André Lepecki and Sally Banes put
it, performance practices can become the “privileged means to investigate
the process where history and body create unsuspected sensorial-perceptual
realms, alternative modes for life to be lived.”15 The task of analyzing the
senses in performance is also to investigate what they term “critical thresh-
olds,” points of contact where the body as corporeal subject and biological
entity meets history, culture, and the imagination. However, “haptic,” when
applied to performance, need not only refer to the sensory and tactile experi-
ences the theater provides, and the concretion of its embodied presences; the
term can also describe techniques that disrupt the visual and narrative logic
of a performance piece. This disrupts the “fantasy of unity and continuity,”
which characterizes the Aristotelian stage, as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it in
Postdramatic Theatre.16 Certainly there are significant examples in Beckett of
the “postdramatic,” as Lehmann defines it, resisting as his drama does many
of the central devices of theater such as character, narrative, and the unities
of time, place, and action, so described in Aristotle’s Poetics.17 In the shadow
of World War II and the death camps, the desolate stage images of Endgame
and Waiting for Godot are broken ones, created out of and for a broken world.
If there is a “hapticity” to be discovered in theatrical performance, then it
lies here, where time and perspective—literally the horizon of vision—is dis-
rupted. For Lehmann, as Maike Bleeker points out, perspective functions as

a metaphor.18 The vanishing point of a painting constructs a unity; the telos

implied within dramatic logic functions in a similar way to this vanishing
point. This interruption of vision, narrative, and time is exploited by Beckett
throughout his oeuvre, but is most apparent in the later drama and emerges
in closeness-in-separation, a generated noncoincidence, or as Deleuze puts it,
an “inclusive disjunction” between the various aesthetic elements that make
up the drama.19 Sound touches image but touch and the hand itself, as will be

shown in this introduction, are complex figures that do not always guarantee
presence and immediacy.
Philosophies of Touch: Bodies There and Not There

Writings in phenomenology, that branch of philosophy concerned with the
study of the structures of experience and consciousness, often utilize the
image of the hand to describe the experience of being. For phenomenologists
such as Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), viewed as the father of this branch of
philosophical thought, and later, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) the
hand acts as a significant metaphor for the philosopher to describe the fac-
ticity of existence. The concreteness of my hand, touching things, confirms
my existence, connects me with the world of things, phenomena. The act
of touch plays a vital role in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and even
more so the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–). It functions for the former
as the sign of the moment at which bodies and world come into contact,
emerging in his image of the chiasm or intertwining. It functions for the
latter as a conceptual or philosophical figure through which the philosopher
can, as Derrida puts it in his commentary on Nancy, resist any “idealism
or subjectivism, be it transcendental or psychoanalytical.” The insistence
on touch “would drive out this whole tradition.”20 Touch, an act that veri-
fies the materiality of our existence, appears to emphasize the phenomeno-
logical actuality of being and would seem to demonstrate the invalidity of
a metaphysical worldview. Yet Derrida critiques a residual humanism in
Merleau-Ponty’s writings, in spite of his claim to reject this discourse.21 It
is in the use of “the example of the hand,” and the verification of presence
by touch—so prevalent in phenomenological discourses—that this latent
humanism emerges.
On the one hand, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty pro-
claims a nonhierarchical sensory engagement with the world, contained
in the perceptual, intertwining “flesh.” On the other, Derrida suggests
that he asserts (reasserts) the primacy of the hand, with all its associa-
tions with the human, humanism, and anthropocentric understandings of
our place in the world. Because the hand is such a prevalent image in the

Introduction ● 7
phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, he suggests that

perhaps this discipline may be imbued with far more metaphysical assump-
tions that it appears. Although dealing, prima facie, with the material body,
Husserl’s philosophy may in fact be subtly infused with metaphysical and
theological concerns. There is an unacknowledged anthropocentric ten-
dency in phenomenological thinking, one that links the foundationality of
the sense of touch to the hand of man and the hand of God: “A hand and

especially a hand of ‘flesh,’ a hand of man, has always begun to resemble
a man’s hand, and thus a fatherly hand and sometimes, more ‘originarily,’
the hand of the merciful Father, which is to say his Son—the hand that the
Son is, according to the Logos or Word of Incarnation.”22 Derrida identi-
fies the importance of “the example of the hand” in The Visible and the
Invisible.23 This is part of Derrida’s wider project of uncovering metaphysi-
cal assumptions regarding presence within phenomenological (and other)
discourses. Yet at the same time as Derrida unearths this strand of thought
in Merleau-Ponty’s writing, he also finds its counterpoint in the philoso-
pher’s “increasing insistence on self-inadequation, dehiscence, fissions,
incompletions.”24 The example of the hand in this case performs the duty
of undermining its own philosophical significance when Merleau-Ponty
writes of the act of self-touch, one hand touching the other: My left hand is
always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I
never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realiza-
tion. “The moment perception comes my body effaces itself before it and
never does the perception grasp the body in the act of perceiving [ . . . ]
the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly
cease touching my right hand with my left hand.”25 Always imminent,
the circle is never completed (is incompletable); as Stanton Garner puts it,
perceiving this idea emerging in Beckett’s work: “Beckett’s drama explores
the instability between a profound material existence and a correspond-
ing alienation, and it dramatizes the subject’s futile pursuit of any means
for overcoming its own noncoincidence.”26 Like Garner, Ulrika Maude
makes the case for an application of phenomenology to Beckett. She points
out that Merleau-Ponty provides a useful basis for critical readings of
such a body-conscious author, but notes that “where Beckett differs from
Merleau-Ponty, however, is in the avidity which the latter finds in the body
a new locus of meaning.”27 Attending to touch in this philosopher’s work
may draw out then, following Derrida, the awareness of fragmentation
that permeates Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body. Touch, an action
that so often within phenomenological discourses is used as an anchor, a
solid guarantee of the subject’s presence in the world and self-presence, is
for Nancy always a type of failure and this is where, according to Derrida,

Merleau-Ponty’s thought is closest to Nancy’s. Nancy’s conceptualization

of touch does not appear to propose either an unproblematic unity between
toucher and touched or a guarantee of presence. Touch, contact, and prox-
imity are permeated for Nancy by distance and separation.28 He employs
the image of the “syncope,” the interrupted beat, to express this paradoxi-
cal formulation of the notion of touch, as contact-in-separation. This con-
ceptualization of touch informs Nancy’s configuration of the relationship

between sense (discourse) and matter (body). For Nancy the body happens
at the limit point between these two elements: “Bodies don’t take place
in discourse or in matter. They don’t inhabit ‘mind’ or ‘body.’ They take
place at the limit, qua limit: limit—external border, fracture and intersec-
tion of anything foreign in a continuum of sense, a continuum of matter.
An opening, discreteness.”29 He argues that touch is part of Christianity’s
complex obsession with presence30: touching, ingesting the “body” of
Christ, is part of the revitalizing rituals of that faith. Yet these rituals are
predicated on the absence of that body, long ascended, gone. These rituals
are thus failures of touch, forever incomplete; yet the Christian tradition
compels its adherents to enact them. In spite of the fact that Nancy may
be writing, as Derrida puts it, against a “haptocentric tradition,”31 it is dif-
ficult to extricate touch from its religious and metaphysical significances.
In Nancy’s understanding, body is a limit point, a place, where sense and
matter, word and body, touch. The subjectivity of Beckett’s figures, while
taking place deep within the dim recesses of mind-spaces, is also taking
place at the edges of the body. In this way, the later plays may be said to dra-
matize the limit: between the internal and the external, between body and
world, and between self and self. The self “takes place,” in Nancy’s terms, at
the moment of contact and separation, between discourse and matter, word
and body. This partialness, contingency, and disjuncture are key elements of
Beckett’s work. At a formal level, the plays discussed in this study take place
at the limit point between sound and image, between what is seen and what
is heard.32 “Haptic,” in Beckett’s work, does not only indicate contact and
connection, it also describes disruption of space, time, and bodies, imaged
in the formal structures that surround them
An Autopsy of the Corpus

Following Nancy’s definition of the term, I have developed a corpus, a neces-
sarily incomplete compilation33 that avoids creating a totalizing narrative
regarding Beckett’s work. For, in looking at Beckett’s corpus, it is clear that
“body” in Beckett often comes to mean a shattering, a disunity; in Nancy
terms, body is “certitude shattered and blown to bits.”34 I refuse, following

Introduction ● 9
Nancy, to establish a unity among these texts but approach them as dislo-
cated units. There is no such thing as the body of Beckett’s work, but many
bodies, no totality, but corpuses, in fragments. I explore the fragmented body
of Beckett’s work piece by piece. This study will enact a journey across the
corpus, not expecting a totalizing whole, rather examining fragments and
holes, sites of persistent oozing or drying tactility, where the limits of the
body and world, the body and the other as shared vulnerabilities, the body

and the self are contested and recontested. This study of the Beckettian
corpus is something like an autopsy, an exploration of the flesh of the body,
of memory, with the titles of each chapter addressing a different part of the
body, a different organ of sense to be exact.
This “autopsy” of the Beckettian dramatic corpus begins with the eye
or, more accurately, the failure of the eye. I examine Krapp’s Last Tape and
Film, Beckett’s sole foray into the genre that gives the work its title, both of
which contain a carnal, failing eye. Krapp’s vision, both physiological and
artistic, is failing him. The screen in Film is like a skin, and draws the eye
toward its textured surface rather than its content. I have chosen to examine
these works first because they illuminate, on the one hand, how when vision
falters the sense of touch comes to the fore and, on the other hand, how the
sense of touch may be evoked via technologies of mediation—the prosthet-
ics of the tape recorder and video camera.35 “Haptic” here denotes texture,
grain, and a resistance to seeing, as well as the tactile body in touch with
its material surroundings and the carnality of the eye. While the remainder
of the study focuses on the later drama, I have included Krapp’s Last Tape
for its juxtaposition of mechanical voice and material body while remain-
ing aware that the later work sees an increasingly derealized body, particu-
larly the television plays. As well as being conscious of Deleuze’s description
of this aesthetic fracture as “inclusive disjunction,”36 this commentary is
informed by Anna McMullan’s observations of an increasing struggle for
the body both to utter and to appear in Beckett’s later drama,37 and draws
heavily on her considerations of embodiment in Beckett’s drama, as well as
S. E. Gontarski’s articulation of Beckett’s “assault” on theatrical presence.38
Krapp’s Last Tape, from my perspective, demonstrates the beginnings of this
dehiscence effectively. In chapter 2, this dehiscence is mapped onto the act
of listening: with the eardrum, but also with the skin. Listening is figured
here as vibration; an interaction between the filmic skin and the sound that
vibrates upon it. Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Träume, all dramatize an
intensity of listening, where the skin of the image vibrates in response to the
touch of music or voice.
Chapter 3 considers the mouth, the carnal entity where speech and body
touch. Sound in A Piece of Monologue, Not I, and That Time is manifest as

spoken word. This chapter explores how bodies and language touch and
bring each other into being. Language is birthed in A Piece of Monologue
through the contractions of the mouth, yet it forms and reforms the subject
in That Time, as the listener of this play “makes himself up.” In the eruptive
speech of Not I, language is revealed as a gesture, and an automatic one. Not
I ’s torrent of words sees an intrusion onto discourse of an abject and obscene
body. Chapter 4 is concerned with skin and its multiple meanings, as a sur-

face upon which identities are played out, as a container within which iden-
tities are preserved. The apparently flat surface of the skin is ready always
to fold in on itself, a limitless invagination that opens the planar surface of
the skin to depth. The tension between the two- and three-dimensionality
of the skin is manifest in . . . but the clouds . . . as manipulation of television’s
depth-depthlessness and the contrast between the infinitude of space within
televisual imagery and the flatness of its screen or skin. The connection
between touch, space, and gender is examined in relation to this play and
those that center upon female figures. The spaces of these plays are charac-
terized by a surrounding darkness from which voices emerge. In Rockaby,
the figure appears at once threatened with consumption or absorption back
into darkness and cradled by a maternal force. In Footfalls, May names
the voice that emerges from the darkness as “Mother.” There is an explicit
association between woman, darkness, death, and generation. The plays’
aesthetic generativity relies on this productive darkness, or matrix, to use
McMullan’s term.39
There is an observable “mimetic” relationship between the physical, per-
ceptual organ and the aesthetic form that it is presented in; aesthetic forms
may be seen to mirror the organs of sense in significant ways. “Mimesis,”
however, Aristotle’s term for describing the type of imitation that goes on in
drama, is not necessarily appropriate here. The word “mimicry” might be
more so.40 As a term used in biology to describe how insects and animals
mimic the physical characteristics of their environment, it implies less inten-
tionality than the conscious mimetic actions of a performer on stage. The
eye is connected with the camera in Film, the ear with the box room of the
television set in Eh Joe and Ghost Trio. The mouth is also a hole in the greater
hole of the stage space, disrupting the logic of that space in Not I. The televi-
sion screen is manifested as skin in . . . but the clouds . . . , and it becomes part
of the dark, kinetic sculptures of Footfalls and Rockaby. Each chapter will
meditate on the meaning of the organ itself as well as its aesthetic manifes-
tation and how these two elements connect, thus drawing together a corpus
that contains both a collection of fragmented body parts and an assemblage
of fragmented texts and images with connections emerging, however par-
tially, between these.

Introduction ● 11
The hand, finally, is the limit point between all these things; the hand
connects the artist to the work. In the final two chapters of this study, I
examine dramas that meditate on the role of the hand; how, by exposing
the process of creation, the plays expose also the violence and objectification
that this can entail. The process of making is associated in Catastrophe and
What Where with torture and violence and the hierarchy of power between
artist and subject, as well as in the technologies of surveillance in the televi-

sion versions of What Where (Was Wo) and Quad. The plays addressed in the
final chapter, Ohio Impromptu and Nacht und Träume, ask how touch is to
take place in light of this potential violence of the hand, in art and in life.
My discussion of these plays, informed greatly by both Graley Herren and
Mary Bryden’s insightful commentaries on religion in Beckett, considers
how they expose a “tactful” approach to the other, one that is mindful of the
hand’s potential for violence. This tactfulness will be shown to be mimicked
in the play’s aesthetic structure.
Of course, the failure of each organ is evident. The eye in Beckett is often
rendered “fleshly and fallible,” as Maude puts it in her commentary on the
shorter prose piece The End 41; eyes are myopic and blurred in Krapp’s Last
Tape and Film; the ear in Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Träume is full
of relentless echoes, “all the dead voices,” as in Waiting for Godot,42 of the
past. The mouths of Not I and A Piece of Monologue desperately attempt to
frame a life, to tell it all, while in That Time words and image collide and
fall apart. The skin of . . . but the clouds . . . , Footfalls, and Rockaby is revealed
as porous and brittle, ready to crack and let the world in and let the self leak
out. This failure of the organ of sense is mirrored in a failure of representa-
tion, of sense-making via art. Not only, finally, does the hand fail to touch,
that touch is also a failure to represent, to create the image that will capture
an elusive corporeal existence—the whole body.
While the focus of this study is on Beckett’s drama, I recognize the sig-
nificance of the radio work, the prose, poetry, and nonfiction. Beckett’s
exploration of and interest in radio may have played a role in the creation
of the rupture between voice and body that is apparent in the later work.
While I have not drawn upon the poetry specifically, where necessary and
appropriate I have taken examples from the prose in order to illustrate my
argument. However, the main focus is on the texts written for either live or
recorded performances, artworks that have implications for a consideration
of presence and immediacy, as well as the capacity to generate disjuncture or
rupture between their structural elements, in other words sound and image.
Concern for space has meant that I have had to select a representative sample
of the later work, while insuring that I discuss all the television plays and
Film. The television plays have not received the kind of critical attention

that have been paid to the theater works, though recent work by Herren,
McMullan, and Jonathan Bignell has altered this somewhat.43 This study
draws heavily upon their illuminating critiques.
The consideration of touch in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy is
highly relevant to the rupture apparent in Beckett’s drama between sound
and image, voice and body. These structural idioms dramatize at a for-
mal level the ways in which self and body, embodied self and other bod-

ies, touch, and fail to touch. In other words, at many levels Beckett’s plays
image Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, but always with the somewhat pessimistic
awareness of the touching relation as permeated by incompletion and immi-
nence, rather than completion and unity. It must be remembered that while
Nacht und Träume may be somewhat unique among Beckett’s plays for its
visualization of an act of touch, that touch happens only in a dream space;
this may serve to emphasize the failure of touch, relationality, and bodily
wholeness. Ohio Impromptu’s act of touch happens in the materiality of the
stage space, yet as I discuss in this final chapter, this too reveals a ruptured
structure.
While the root of the word autopsy lies in eye-witnessing, this is an alto-
gether different approach. In contrast to the autopsy, under medical lights,
explorers of the Beckettian corpus often find themselves in dark spaces; one
feels one’s way across the fragmented corpus of work. Such an exploration will
not necessarily produce a diagnosis, nor will it establish a unified corpus. It is
necessary, on the contrary, to recognize its partial and temporary nature.
It is a provisional corpus, drawn together for the purpose of an investiga-
tion that is attentive to the porousness and fragility of the dramatic body: a
body realized at the limits of light and sounds, text and space. And attentive
too to the porousness within the body of the aesthetic itself, attuned to the
mimicry and disjuncture between text and image, between body and space,
and between sound and vision. This “autopsy” is not about diagnosis, about
discovering what killed the Beckettian body. I am much more concerned
with what keeps it moving, what animates it, especially as that animation
occurs often only partially, at the limits of perception. This study is about
pressing into the flesh of a corpus, a body of work, attuning to its patholo-
gies, its breakdowns, the dysfunctions that are a part of its somatic whole.
This is the haptic engagement that Beckett’s work demands: feeling our way
in the darkness of the Beckettian corpus, always attuned to the chasm (chi-
asm) between touch and nontouch—the void at the heart of things.

CHAPTER 1

Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy
First Incision: Into the Failing Eye of Krapp’s Last Tape

To embark on a study of haptics in Beckett’s work, it may be necessary to
begin with the eye. Or, more accurately, the failing eye. The protagonists of
the plays examined in this chapter, Film and Krapp’s Last Tape, both suffer
from myopic vision. However, dimming vision affects Beckett’s aesthetic
practice more widely. Figures such as Hamm in Endgame and A in Rough for
Theater I are afflicted with visual failure; for the spectator also, the dim and
shadowy stage and filmic images seem to work against vision; it is no longer
privileged as an epistemological tool for either the figures of the drama or
their spectators. The very notion of theater is undermined. It is not “a view-
ing place” as in the meaning of the original Greek word theatron, but a place
where the eye begins to fail.
Blindness in theater has often been represented as either punishment
for a misdeed or as a sense that must be sacrificed in order for a higher
insight to be gained. Insight itself can be blinding, as Oedipus puts out his
eyes on learning the truth of his origins. The blind seer Tiresias, having
been struck blind by the Gods for impiety, is given the gift of prophecy.
Gloucester’s learning of the truth in King Lear is similarly paralleled by his
loss of vision. In each case, blindness is associated with the discovery of some
truth, with gaining knowledge or insight. Yet the blind bodies of Oedipus
and Gloucester are both fallen bodies. Gloucester falls, literally, in his darkly
comic “suicide” scene, and believes himself dead for a time.1 In Maeterlinck’s
The Blind, the blind protagonists, without the priest to “guide” them, have
lost their way and cannot return to the asylum that shelters them on their
bleak island.2 The blind refer repeatedly to the fact that they do not or

cannot know where they are, to whom they are speaking, or how they are to
return to their asylum. Any sense of individual identity, distance, and time
become erased. Such an epistemological blind spot emerges in Waiting for
Godot too. Like Maeterlinck’s blind, Vladimir and Estragon wait, hearing
footsteps in the dead leaves, “all the dead voices,” “like leaves.”3 The situ-
ation in Waiting for Godot translates as epistemological insecurity, and the
impossibility of action.

Representations of blindness can take on a moral tone, associating sight
with “knowing the way.” The priest of The Blind symbolizes this; he is a
guide, both literally and morally. Without him, the blind lose their way.
The play expresses how humanity has become lost, cast adrift from its moor-
ings in religious rituals and rules; thus blindness is associated with the lost,
godless body. José Saramago’s parabolic novel Blindness4 details a plague of
blindness, which cripples society, deliberately connecting ethics with vision.
With all its citizens’ blinded, civilization falls in a moral as well as literal
sense. It is a thought experiment that seems to echo the spirit of Brueghel
the Elder’s painting The Parable of the Blind (1568). In Brueghel’s painting,
blind men are pictured toppling or about to topple in a heap as each one
follows the blind man before him.5 Saramago’s dystopian vision sees newly
blinded humanity crawling about in its own excrement and murdering each
other for food.
In whatever way blindness is interpreted and made culturally mean-
ingful, it is clear that a certain denigration of the haptic sensorium
occurs. Insight and reason act as compensation for the loss of the carnal
and fallible eye. Blindness is associated with dirt, both moral and literal.
However, enlightenment, both the epistemological tradition as well as
the immediate revelation of insight, is not readily available for Beckett’s
figures. The “old muckball,” to quote Krapp (Collected Shorter Plays, 62),6
is a much more familiar terrain. When sight is diminished the haptic
sensorium must take over, and it is with that thought that this study com-
mences. In Letter on the Blind Denis Diderot asserts the reliance that we
have upon the senses for knowledge; he proposes that if the deaf and blind
philosopher were to construct a man, “after the fashion of Descartes,” he
would put the soul, not somewhere behind the eyes, but at the very limits
of the body, at the fingertips.7 And, in the dim recesses of Krapp’s den, we
proceed with an autopsy in the dark, an inquest into the death of vision.
The irony here is that while in technological terminology “haptic” is used
to describe a device that promotes interaction and access for the blind
to technology, Krapp’s technology, his “haptic interface,” does not func-
tion as a prosthesis, but rather emphasizes its failure. The first incision
into the Beckettian corpus is through the eye, reminiscent of the famous

Eye ● 15
eye-slitting image in Luis Bu ñuel’s Un Chien Andalou , which Beckett’s

Film (discussed later) references heavily. What is revealed in such a cut
is not, tellingly, the seat of the soul, but the rather the viscous and tacky
inner life of the eye.
An Autopsy of a Life

Audiences meet Krapp in his “den,” a “wearish old man” (CSP, 55), who
has chosen to devote himself to a solitary life of artistic production. Krapp’s
habit has been to make tape recordings on each of his birthdays, confession-
als that document the year gone by. During the performance he plays, on a
reel-to-reel tape recorder, fragments of a tape he made aged 39, and in which
he refers to an earlier recording, made 10 or 12 years prior to then. Altogether
then, there are three Krapps, or more appropriately three versions of the same
Krapp. The distinctions among them are made all the more poignant by the
disgust that each one seems to have for his earlier incarnation. Krapp begins
his current retrospective for his sixty-ninth birthday with, “Just been listen-
ing to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe
I was ever as bad as that” (CSP, 62). Alone, loveless, and unsuccessful in his
attempted literary career, Krapp is, as Ruby Cohn puts it, “punished by both
emotional and literary failure.”8 The aural autopsy that Krapp performs cuts
and splices together three moments of his life under an excoriating eye and
ear. But this process will produce no final result, no diagnosis for his current
state of being. The cuts that are made into the fabric of the past—fleshly and
mechanical—do not yield a vision of the whole. Rather, it is these fissures
and fragments that make up the fabric of the play itself.
Squinting myopically, he reads the summary in his ledger for his
thirty-ninth year: we learn that his mother has died. He has experienced a
“slight improvement in bowel condition,” a “memorable equinox,” and also
a “farewell to—[he turns page]—love” (CSP, 57). The desires and appetites
of the body have plagued Krapp, and the aspirations of the youngest Krapp
to quell these passions have not been carried through. Krapp at 39 speaks of
his aspirations to be less subject to the whims of a libidinous body: “plans
for a less [hesitates.] engrossing sexual life” (CSP, 58). Krapp’s now decrepit
body and the tapes he has made throughout the years are all that remain,
and he is haunted by this memory of a sunny day on a lake with a girl, this
farewell to love:
I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she
agreed, without opening her eyes
[. . .]

We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sigh-
ing, before the stem [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her
breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under
us all moved, and moved us gently, up and down and from side to side.
(CSP, 63)
He winds the tape forward to listen to this scene, not bothering with the

other part of that tape, which describes a moment of profound “vision,” his
“memorable equinox”—a momentous occasion at the time for the earlier
Krapp, in which something he had been struggling with became clear at
last: “Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memo-
rable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to
be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This I
fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening” (CSP, 60). The image of
intersubjective harmony on the lake contrast sharply with the dark energy of
the “vision,” and is one of the ways in which touch emerges in this play. This
haptic moment (his hand on her) contrasts with the vision on the pier and
is echoed visually in the closeness of Krapp to his tape machine: “leaning
forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear toward machine, face front ” (CSP,
57) and in certain productions, this posture results in a kind of hunched and
tactile intimacy with the device.
As well as this relationship between body and technology, haptics emerges
in this play in the inscription of sound on the tape recorder, a tactility of
speaking and listening. It also refers to Krapp’s attempt to get in touch with
himself, recording himself each year with harsh criticisms of his past selves.
In thinking through the “haptics” of Krapp’s Last Tape, the following discus-
sion moves from the simple act of touch, to the relationship between technol-
ogy and body to more philosophical questions of self-presence and identity.
It refers to the tissue, film, or skin that separates and connects Krapp with
Krapp. This is of course Krapp’s body, but wedded here to the technology
that Krapp employs to relive his memories. Haptics in Krapp also denotes
an underlying materiality. Krapp’s Last Tape is one of Beckett’s last works to
have a fully formed and identifiably material body on stage and it will be
important to recognize the ways in which the body, in all its obscenity and
compulsions, intrudes onto the playing space and the subject’s conscious-
ness. Haptic here refers to the line or limit between the continuum of sense
(as in sense-making faculties) and the continuum of matter, the place where
“bodies” take place in Nancy’s writing.9 Krapp is continually in touch with
his body. While this may have, as is explored later, autoerotic overtones,
it also reveals the material body’s invasion of consciousness and discourse.
Yet what is ultimately apparent is that while Krapp denies the body and its

Eye ● 17
desires, his corpus, the body of his work is predicated upon it. Nancy sees a
such a disavowal of the body in Christianity, a tradition that has sought to
purify the body, resurrect it, and make it a body of light. He argues that this
tradition is entirely reliant upon the material body for the verification of its
central tenets: “Only a body can be cut down or raised up, because only a
body can touch or not touch. A spirit can do nothing of the sort.”10
The act of remembering in Krapp’s Last Tape is a slow, mechanical, and

laborious process in which little-used neural circuits are trod again. As Krapp
tramps in and out of his cubbyhole, winds back and forward the tapes to the
required places of memory, the image could be read as a metaphor for his
aging neural circuits, ones that must be mechanically activated in much the
same process as Henri Bergson, whom we know Beckett read11 and whose
writings illuminate this, describes: “[The intentional act of remembering or
learning by heart] like every habitual bodily exercise, [ . . . ] is stored up in
a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a
closed system of automatic movements.”12 Krapp’s memory “machine” argu-
ably images Bergson’s conceptualization of the processes of remembering.
Recording upon tape is an act of inscription in itself, as magnets alter the
ferrous oxide coating on the material. Thus, the tape recorder echoes or acts
as a metaphor for Krapp’s memory. Furthermore, the tape machine begins to
take on lifelike characteristics. Making present a past Krapp, it speaks with
the voice of a past body, and, at certain key points in the play, the machine
comes to stand in for the body of the girl with whom Krapp declared it was
“no use going on” (CSP, 61). The stage directions require that Krapp bend
over the machine to assume the listening posture: “leaning forward, elbows
on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front” (CSP, 57).13 Actor
Pierre Chabert talks of the mirroring that occurs between machine and body
in Krapp’s Last Tape, where the drama of listening makes of the body “a kind
of sensitive receptacle upon which the voice engraves itself, a kind of human
tape-recorder.”14 If for a moment we think of the imagery that Bergson uses
to describe those acts of inscribing memory—as he says, to know one’s les-
son by heart is to have it imprinted on one’s memory15 —then, understood in
this way, the act of remembering (and indeed the erasing or unmarking, i.e.,
forgetting) is mirrored in the mechanics of audiovisual recording.
Yet the flesh is not a reliable vessel for memory; the marks made by the
world can fade with time and it is here that Krapp’s tape machine ought to
compensate for his poor memory. He forgets the meaning of the word “vidu-
ity” and must look it up. He has forgotten, ironically, the “memorable equi-
nox,” which the earlier Krapp describes. Furthermore, Krapp’s manipulation
of the machine and tapes produces gaps in his narrative, holes bored into
meaning. Krapp winds forward at the moment we are about to hear of his

“vision.” This winding reduces the tape to a senseless squeal.16 This collapse
of the speech on the tape represents the limits of Krapp’s and, by implica-
tion, the audience’s sensory capacity. Krapp’s joy of words, evidenced in the
lingering vowel extension he gives to “spoool,” and the pleasure he takes
in the erotics of the word in his mouth take precedence for that moment
over the meaning of the word itself. Like the tape, Krapp is winding down.
Aesthetic appreciation and production is gradually being replaced by aist-

hesis, sense without meaning.17 This aisthetic impulse is also played out in
the tension between the two orders of perception that are demarcated in the
play. McMullan links this with Krapp’s sensory conversion from sight to
tactility: “The reduction of the older Krapp’s world to the space of his imme-
diate corporeal environment is foregrounded by his ‘near-sighted’ vision,
‘laborious’ movement and the continual sounds he produces (from shuffling
to grunts).”18 The irony of Krapp’s “memorable equinox” lies not only in the
fact that he appears not to remember it when he reads of it in the ledger, but
also that he chooses not to relisten or relive it. Krapp’s failing memory is
accompanied by a compulsion to never forget nor let go of the past; however,
access to the past is never pure, it is always tainted by the present. As Beckett
remarked in his early critical essay on Proust, the “aspirations of yesterday
were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for today’s”19: vast differences are apparent
between the present Krapp and his “antecedent” on the tape. He begins his
retrospective for the present occasion with a curse: “[J]ust been listening to
that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago” (CSP, 62). Not only
does Krapp at 69 no longer share the aspirations of the earlier Krapp, he is
also extremely critical of him. Indeed Krapp’s audience is invited to share
in the disdain for this rather arrogant and pompous sounding individual.
The self-disgust, however, does not stop him from seeking to relive cer-
tain fragments of his past, mechanically captured and reproduced. Herren
argues that the protagonists of the teleplays seek out the “pure perception”
so described by Bergson. They long to restore unity by mending the rift
between the subject and object, and “lure the lost loved one back out of the
past and into the present”:
These efforts are doomed from the start, however, for precisely those
reasons outlined by Bergson. Memory can never be used to mend the rift
between subject and object because it is the rift ; it cannot be the bridge
because it is already the chasm. There would be no division between
the two in the first place if we could “place ourselves face to face with
immediate reality.”20
The fabrics of the past can never be stitched together, as Krapp’s perfor-
mance reveals.

Eye ● 19
The Grain of the Performance

One of the images that I believe expresses the complexity of haptics in Krapp
is that of the grain and husk. Krapp at 39 talks about his birthday:
[C]elebrated the awful occasion, as in recent years, quietly at the wine-

house. Not a soul. Sat before the fire with closed eyes, separating the

grain from the husks.
[. . .]
The grain, now what I wonder do I mean by that, I mean . . . [hesi-
tates] . . . I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust
has—when all my dust has settled. I close my eyes and try to imagine
them. (CSP, 57–58)
Rosette Lamonte points out that the name Krapp connects these disparate
Krapps; the common denominator between them is fecal filth,21 so that the
body, as the reference point, or connector between those disparate Krapps, is
also just that, “crap,” or garbage to be cast away. When Krapp, at 39, speaks
on the tape of his birthday “celebrations” of that year, in the winehouse, “sep-
arating the grain from the husks,” he immediately questions the meaning of
the phrase. Not only does this inward-glancing self-examination emphasize
Krapp’s narcissism, or in McMullan’s terms, his “constipated vision,”22 but
his reply to his own question is telling in terms of how we are to think of his
attitude to his body, his mortality. The body and all its appetites are dust, to
be put to rest as in the “dust to dust” of Christian burial ceremonies. Krapp’s
image of grain and husk, of settling dust, reveals the dualism of his think-
ing. It metaphorizes Krapp’s attempt to shear away the unnecessary, to distil
some pure artistic vision from the mess of life, yet there is also perhaps, on
Krapp’s part, unintended meanings.
Julie Campbell examines the etymological origins of this text. Crappe in
French means “siftings” and krappe in Dutch means “to pluck off.” She notes
that in Middle English the word “crap” does mean “the husk of grain”; she
writes that “Krapp is like an empty husk at the end of his life, and his sifting
through his recorded past is at variance with the way the younger Krapp
assessed the events he recorded.”23 This image of the grain resonates with
Krapp’s relationship with his body. He attempts to shear away these libidi-
nous whims (bananas, alcohol, and sex) yet instead of mastering the body,
Krapp has revealed its irreducible and inescapable truth. That, although
Krapp has attempted to gain control of his body, to cast all those extra-
neous desires aside, what remains is this meat, this heavy material body,
sutured to its past by technology. In this regard the grain and husk cannot

be separated. Grain has aural connotations also. The grain is the sound of
the body speaking, as Roland Barthes puts it: “The ‘grain’ is the body in
the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.”24 Krapp’s
“cracked voice ” with its “ distinctive intonation” (CSP, 55) reveals his age and
decrepitude—the play was written with the unique voice of actor Patrick
Magee in mind. When the present Krapp speaks, we hear his body with all
of its desire and decay.

So what of this body, this meat that emerges in Krapp’s performance?
There are traces, however spectral, still apparent of Krapp’s bodily desires.
The banana, which Krapp is compelled to eat (onstage, to comic effect) is,
as Lamonte points out, an “ironic symbol of vestigial virility”: “More sim-
ian than human this old wretch has retained of the human species only his
predilection for alcohol: the waltzing bananas are followed by the bottles
polka.”25 Also exemplary is the prostitute’s visit, described as “better than
a kick in the crutch” (CSP, 62). The masculine vigor of the earliest Krapp,
who had made plans for a “less . . . [hesitates] . . . engrossing sexual life” (CSP,
58), is reduced to “couldn’t do much” with the “bony old ghost of a whore”
(CSP, 62), a description that emphasizes the spectral nature of Krapp’s desire.
The title of the play in French is La dernière bande. The word bande means
tape, and is a slang word for an erection. The final tape that Krapp attempts
(and fails) to finish could be viewed as the pun that the French title suggests:
his last erection, and an impotent one at that. No matter how much Krapp
has tried to avoid or control the sensual, he has never succeeded. His appe-
tites have confounded his attempts at mastery of the flesh. Like an erection,
these recordings, made each year on Krapp’s birthday, represent something
of a compulsion, a moment of bald exposure of desire. Instead of creating
his magnum opus, Krapp has succeeded in revealing that control over the
wayward libidinous flesh is not possible. It is clear that Krapp’s final erection
reveals something significant about bodies. These tapes are a revelation of
the “body’s thought,” where an automatic and involuntary corporeal pro-
cess is revealed.26 The confessional mode places the body on the spot; the
“truth” it reveals is really the “truth” of material existence: an awareness
of a body that refuses to be mastered, a grain that cannot be traced. Both
“The Vision” on the pier and physiological vision have failed for Krapp.
Squinting at his ledger, he cuts a tragic figure as a failed artist, who is still,
after all this time, “getting known” (CSP, 62). By stressing the mechanical
process of remembering and the significance of sense knowledge for that
process, Beckett stresses the tactility and materiality of memory, desire, and
language, while also attesting to the failure of the “machine” to maintain
subjective integrity.

Eye ● 21
Krapp’s attempt at mastery over the flesh has resulted in failure. This
separation of the grain from the husk is revealed in the older Krapp as folly.
Grain can also refer to pattern, the lines in wood or in meat, a pattern
formed by organic growth. It is a pattern that is inseparable from the mate-
rial of which it is made. Throughout the play, treads or grains are traced
and retraced. Krapp moves back and forth between his desk and cubby-
hole, he inscribes briefly his thoughts on the new tape, and listens to the

old inscriptions made before. These grains are like the neural circuits, the
well-trod or fading paths of a Bergsonian mechanics of memory: “The affer-
ent nerves bring to the brain a disturbance, which, after having intelligently
chosen its path, transmits itself to motor mechanisms created by repetition.
Thus is ensured the appropriate reaction, the correspondence to the environ-
ment—adaptation, in a word—which is general aim of life.”27 The circuits
of memory are not permanent, but shifting, changeable, adaptable. Krapp
can neither escape these treads (or threads) nor tread them fully again. The
machine is replete with the ghosts of his past life and past bodies. Yasunari
Takahashi’s commentary links this play to the Noh play Kinuta by Zeami.
Similarly to Krapp’s Last Tape, Kinuta expresses memory thus: “Memory is
inscribed on the body, though time is flown and nothing remains.”28 Krapp
has tried to separate the grain from the husk, only to find that the husk is
all there is. The grain is in the husk. The k(c)ra(p)p that he attempts to dis-
card is the stuff of which he is made: not made of dreams but drowned in
them and “burning to be gone” (CSP, 62). As Beckett commented to Martin
Held: “The character is eaten up by dreams. But without sentimentality.
There’s no resignation in him. It’s the end.”29
Tracing the Grain

In spite of the fact that Krapp is among Beckett’s “meatier” theatrical bodies,
as the bodies of much of the later work are radically dematerialized, there is
still a question mark in this play over theatrical presence. The old theater cli-
ché that describes acting as “treading the boards” could also describe Krapp’s
motion on the stage, in and out of the backstage darkness. Habitual in its
nature, Krapp’s visits to his drinking hole are ingrained. The truth of the
performing body, if such can be found, the “grain” of truth perhaps, is the
irreducible, tangible materiality of the body in performance. This was given
stark visualization by Harold Pinter as Krapp (Royal Court Theater, London,
2006), a performance conducted entirely from his motorized wheelchair—a
dramaturgical necessity rather than a choice; one that emphasized the play’s
sense of entrapment and the fragility of the mortal body.

It seems that talking of haptics in performance returns always to this

point: the body and the verifiable presence that its tangibility offers. The
hand and the act of touch are intimately linked with presence, the verifica-
tion of reality, the “truths” (so-called) of material existence and the per-
formance space. Yet that philosophical assumption, a residual humanism
that Derrida’s critiques in phenomenological discourses, may emerge here,
in theater’s answer to “the example of the hand,” and the verification of pres-

ence by touch.30 The materiality of the body on the stage, for all its apparent
tangibility, is subject also to this failure of touch. It reveals the world in all its
tactility, at the same time as it demonstrates our distance from it. The tan-
gibility of the performing body is dismantled through a performance that
carves holes in the possibility of touch. Though Krapp attempts to touch
himself—in all senses of that word, erotic included—and to hold the pieces
of a fragmented identity together in the gaze of an excoriating internal eye,
he remains the failed artist, “getting known” and reserving the harshest crit-
icism for himself. In spite of this self-touch, he does not succeed in closing
the perceptual circle. Coincidence eclipses, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, at the
moment of realization.31 Krapp’s noncoincidence reveals touch—an action
that so often within phenomenological discourses is used as an anchor, a
solid guarantee of the subject’s presence in the world and self-presence—as
rupture and separation.
The place of the tape machine in this incomplete circle of self-touch is
a significant one. This putting of one in touch, of inscribing a life onto
the ferrous oxide of tape material, actually reveals rupture and separation,
and defies and disrupts the act of touch as a verifier of presence. In this
way, Krapp’s Last Tape dramatizes the failure of the haptic interface. Krapp’s
winding forward of the tape interrupts the narrative—we never learn about
the content of the vision on the pier. The recording, which would appear to
promise an explanation of Krapp’s life, is continually interrupted. Instead,
all we ultimately hear is of the image of the girl on the lake. Just as the past
narratives of the multiple Krapps are inscribed on the ferrous oxide of the
tape, the body of the machine is the connecting tissue onto which all the
desires and failures of Krapp’s life have been written. However, this act of
touch reveals a rupture and separation. In this way, Krapp’s Last Tape dra-
matizes the distance between self from self; it is an interface that distances
at the same time as it connects. As Yasunari Takahashi puts it: “Krapp’s
failure of memory looms all the more grotesque because of the tape recorder,
a modern apparatus designed to ensure memory. If he responds to what the
tape narrates, he does so not with a flash of recognition but with a slowness
suggestive of a veil obstructing immediacy.”32 Krapp’s existence is riven by

Eye ● 23
failure. Vision—both as artistic insight and as physiological ability—has

faltered in the decrepit Krapp, as has control over his body.
The tape recorder acts in this play as a technological mediator between
the Krapp on stage and the two past Krapps. On the one hand it is a perfor-
mance device that extends and complicates the dramatic monologue. On the
other it is a meditation on the relationship between embodied selfhood and
technology. The performance of Krapp only comes to be at the limit point

between materiality, text, and machine. Technology here is a device inserted
between self and self, which in principle would seem well-placed to bring
about self-knowledge and understanding—self-touch, which would guaran-
tee self-presence, a gathering together of the details of a life into some sort
of whole. In practice, however, it acts as a materialization of the barrier that
exists between self and self and also between performer and audience, as the
machine interrupts the process of sense-making for the spectator. Krapp uses
the tape machine to get in touch with himself and in a more carnal sense to
touch himself, during this, his last “erection.” Yet this project is revealed as
hopeless—he cannot restore those memories; his solipsistic, autoerotic activ-
ity reveals a gap at the heart of identity, the unclosed segment of the circle
in Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual chiasm. In Krapp, the haptic is not only the
technological screen that emerges within the self, it is also the line of contact
between self and body. The dualism that emerges in Krapp’s Last Tape holds
little hope for transcendence of the body. Bodies, their desires and appetites,
are inescapable. The grain cannot be separated from the husk, yet they do
not rest comfortably together, and this simple fact makes Krapp’s relation to
his body fraught and difficult. Krapp’s self-touching makes visible the divide
between past and present, and between present self and present body.
Beckett, during the 1977 rehearsal in Berlin with the San Quentin Drama
Workshop, acknowledged that Krapp may not have been any happier had he
chosen the girl over art,33 yet it is significant that Krapp continues to return
to this passage on the tape and this image: “I lay down across her with my
face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But
under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to
side” (CSP, 61). With the possibility of choosing love over poetry now long
gone, it may be that he now perceives in this image a harmony more complete
than that provided in the past by the “vision.” This memory is characterized
not by vision, but by touch. While Krapp initially describes asking the girl
to open her eyes, the passage ends with his “face in her breasts and his hand
on her.” In this memory of intersubjective harmony, the eyes are closed and
buried in the body of an other, and for the aging Krapp, who stares into space
as the tape runs on, the grain is the husk and only the end is in sight.

From an embodied perspective, the act of touch is also a sundering apart:

the intangibility of the lost girl on the lake, the impossibility of self-touch
even with prosthetic intervention. But also importantly, in terms of aesthet-
ics, when Krapp cuts into the past, he opens up the fabric of the perfor-
mance space to fracture, dehiscence, and contradiction. Krapp’s Last Tape
complicates the idea of touch as marker of presence. To think through an
aesthetics of touch in the theater and on the screen is to also attune to the

dehiscence within that aesthetic. The remainder of this study, moving across
the porous surfaces of Beckett’s bodies, will attempt to be so attuned.
Grainy Vision: The Haptic Image of Film

Film focuses on two key physical organs of sense, the eye and the hand. The
film opens and closes with a close-up of an eye, belonging to its star, Buster
Keaton. Throughout the film, we see images of Buster Keaton’s hands, rest-
ing on various objects, covering his face. There are two modes of percep-
tion running throughout the work. One is clear, objective, and seemingly
omnipotent: E, the techno-eye of the camera. The other is the limited and
myopic viewpoint of O, Keaton’s character who is being relentlessly pursued
by E. What comes under scrutiny in this short film, made by Beckett in col-
laboration with director Alan Schneider in New York (1963–1964), is vision.
O interrupts the process by which visual representation orders and makes
sense of the world. One of the key strategies involves the challenge laid by
O’s embodied vision to visual representation based on the conventions of
perspective. In the figure of O, Beckett develops what I name a haptic aes-
thetic, an aesthetic that is based more upon the principles of touching than
those of seeing.
O flees from a pursuing camera, E.34 The three locations for this flight are
street, stairwell, room. In the street, Keaton bumps into a man and woman,
reading a newspaper. They look up in disgust, but the man’s reaction is
hushed by his female companion—this “sshh” is to be the only sound heard
in the film. In the stairwell, Keaton avoids an old woman, a flower seller.
Both the couple on the street and this old woman recoil in horror when they
come face to face with the camera/E. The old woman falls to the ground,
and Keaton makes his escape to the room. Once there, O, keeping his back
to E, veils any objects or creatures that might see him; he covers the mirror,
the window, the fishbowl, and birdcage and, in the only scene of the film
that exploits the comic skills of this star of silent film, removes the dog and
cat from the room. As long as the camera stays at a certain angle to the pro-
tagonist, he is not threatened with being seen. This “angle of immunity” is
45 degrees. Significantly, it is not possible to view one’s reflection in a mirror

Eye ● 25
within this angle. Throughout the film, Keaton’s famous face has been kept
invisible by a large hat and high coat collar. In the final scene, Keaton falls
asleep in a rocking chair and E can finally view his face. Here we see Keaton’s
face for the first time, one eye covered with a patch. E is revealed as Keaton,
or Keaton’s double, who regards him intently until Keaton as O covers his
face with his hands, signaling the end of the film.
The work is considered by many, including Beckett himself, to be unsuc-

cessful.35 Due to difficulties in filming, an introductory shot had to be
abandoned:
1. The Street
Dead straight. Not sidestreets or intersections. Period: about 1929. Early
summer morning. Small factory district. Moderate animation of workers
going unhurriedly to work. All going in same direction and all in cou-
ples. No automobiles. Two bicycles ridden by men with girl passengers
(on crossbar). One cab, cantering nag, driver standing brandishing whip.
All persons in opening scene to be shown in some way perceiving—one
another, an object, a shop window, a poster, etc. i.e. all contentedly in
percipere and percipi. (CSP, 164)
Though this scene was shot, these first takes were ruined. As Knowlson
describes it, “[T]here were light problems, traffic problems, actor problems
and camera problems—caused by a wobbling dolly on a rough roadbed.”
The worst problem was caused by an inexperienced Schneider panning
extras up and down the street, unaware that this would cause a strobe effect
in the resulting footage. On viewing the day’s takes, Beckett suggested
immediately abandoning the entire first scene, as budget and time limita-
tions would not permit refilming.36 This opening sequence would have been
an extremely clear indication of the film’s location, both geographical and
temporal. The film is set in 1929, the year that saw the beginnings of the
depression era in America, as well as the introduction of synchronized sound
into cinema. In this regard, this scene is one of the most readily locatable of
Beckett’s later work. That it was never included does not repress entirely this
sense of location: the period costume of the couple and the flower seller, as
well as the amusingly emphasized silence of the film, all work toward this
end. The emphasis on silence, as well as locating the film in a particular
historical era of filmmaking, pushes viewers’ attention toward the visual. In
this regard, the silence of the film facilitates the piece’s attempt to address
the nature of visual perception, and visual representation.
Beckett includes in the general notes of the script the maxim of the
eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley, esse est percipi, “to be

is to be perceived.” Beckett was familiar with the work of Berkeley from

his scholarly days at Trinity College, Dublin.37 This principle forms the
opening gambit in the film’s text, and sets the scene for the investigation
into the relation between perceptions and ontology that is to follow. The
unused opening sequence, with the couples “contentedly in percipere and
percipi,” perceiving and being perceived, contrasts with the unease that
Keaton’s O displays toward perception. Keaton’s goal appears to be the sup-

pression of all perception—particularly visual—including that of self by
self, though this proves to be the most difficult to achieve: “All extraneous
perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self perception maintains in
being. . . . Search for non-being in flight from extraneous perception break-
ing down in inescapability of self-perception” (CSP, 163). Of course, in a
move that affirms his resistance to the “neatness of identifications,”38 the
author immediately asserts that “no truth value attaches to above, regarded
as of merely structural and dramatic convenience” (CSP, 163). Yet in spite
of this disclaimer, ideas surrounding perception characterize this play, at the
levels of both form and content.
The intersubjective, intrasubjective, and embodied nature of perception
is a key factor in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. In The Visible and
the Invisible, he articulates the notion of the chiasm or intertwining of the
subject with the world. To see, for Merleau-Ponty, is to be also available
to sight: “[H]he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed
by it, unless he is of it.”39 The viewer is never an objective observer, but is
always embedded in the world of the visible. Just as there is a crossing over,
a doubling back in the act of touch—to touch is also to be touched back—
the act of seeing reflects back upon the seer. Merleau-Ponty establishes the
body, as an intermediary through which the intertwining of the subject and
the world can take place. However, the body cannot be regarded as a mere
thing, an instrument for perception: “We have to reject the age old assump-
tion that puts the body in the world and the seer in the body or conversely
the world and the body in the seer as in a box.”40
Like the image in The Calmative of the eyes “soon sockets, then quick into
carrion,”41 we are made aware of the carnality of O’s eye. The opening shot
of the film is a close-up of Keaton’s “reptilian” eyelid, opening slowly.42 It is
not until the end of the film that the spectator learns that E, supposedly the
disembodied camera-eye, is in fact O’s double. When O falls asleep on the
rocking chair in the closing moments, E moves in and the viewer is finally
given the countershot that the film has so far denied. We see, from O’s per-
spective, O’s own face, staring down at him. “E,” the camera-eye, is given a
body, doubling that of O’s. If E is the manifestation of the perception of self
by self, then the spectator is inserted in this final scene into the mind-space of

Eye ● 27
OE. However, the spectator does not see the two, O and E, framed together
in a single shot. There is no disembodied, objective view to be had. The film
arguably states that vision, even the prosthetic techno-vision of the camera, is
always and emphatically situated relative to a viewpoint, a body.
In Film, there is no beyond the body or objective viewpoint from which
a voyeuristic spectator can view the scene. According to Merleau-Ponty, we
must “eschew the thinking by planes and perspectives,” which delineates

mind and body into two separate spheres or circles, for there is between the
world and the body a “reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one with the
other.”43 The idea of the objective observer, with its roots in the replacement
of the fallible biological eye with the mechanical eye of the camera obscura,
dissipates in Film, as the viewer is immersed in the subjective viewpoint of
one figure, while the other, ostensibly objective viewpoint, is revealed as
equally situated. Not only this, but the relationship is also one of intersub-
jectivity, reciprocity; the dominance of the rational subject who is capable of
naming and ordering the world about him gives way to relation of interactiv-
ity, contingency.44
At the same time, however, self-awareness means division from self, and
an inability to unite fully the perceiving self with the self perceived. While
Merleau-Ponty writes that there is a circle of the visible and the seeing and
the touched and the touching, self-perception has its limits. Self-touch does
not produce coincidence, as Merleau-Ponty’s image of the hands always on
the verge of touching, but never quite reaching coincidence.45 This gap at
the heart of identity is dramatized in Film; the camera functions to reveal
an inability to suture together self with self. While E may be a double of O,
the two are not collapsed into sameness. The eye contact that they make
separates and affirms difference, rather than producing unity and complete-
ness. Merleau-Ponty proposes that the hiatus between the hand touched
and the hand touching does not produce an “ontological void,” but rather is
“spanned by the total being of my body.”46 Derrida sees this as miscarrying,
and articulating a continual deferral of the welding together of the inner and
outer world.47 The scene where O and E finally come face to face dramatizes
this perceptual miscarriage. The separation of the two camera viewpoints
realizes the internal separation of the subject, as both O and E cannot be
held together in a single shot, but remain perpetually divided in the mind of
the viewer, yet at the same time, in touch.
From Optic to Haptic: Two Scopic Regimes

To expand on the ways in which Film emphasizes the embodied nature of
perception, it is necessary to turn to a more detailed examination of the

central problem faced by Beckett during this project. It is a technical issue,

and the way in which it was solved reveals much about the nature of the
haptic image as it appears in Beckett’s work. The problem was how to dif-
ferentiate between the vision of O and the vision of E. It was solved on set
by placing gauze over the lens of the camera, which would indicate that the
camera was at that moment showing the viewpoint of O. The result is that
O’s vision is blurred, making certain scenes in the film more textured and

grainy. E’s “vision,” by contrast, is clear. Through his lengthy correspon-
dence with Alan Schneider, a lifelong friend and director of many of the
stage plays, it is clear that Beckett was initially disappointed with the results
of the Film project. The letters about Film are not all negative however.
Beckett comments that the attempt to solve some of the technical problems
posed by the text produced some interesting results: “After the first [view-
ing] I was not too happy, after the second I felt it was really something. Not
quite in the way intended but as sheer beauty, power and strangeness of
image.”48 In the same letter he remarks how the attempt to solve the problem
posed by the double vision, that distinction between the points of view of O
and E, lends the film a “plastic value.” The value of the work was to be found
“mainly on the formal and structural level.” In Film, two types of vision are
available to the spectator. One, E, is associated with technology, objectivity,
clarity, and a “visual appetite.” The other, O, is a situated viewpoint, reveal-
ing vision as embodied and, most significantly, fragile and failing.
Not only is there a contrast engineered between the blurred vision of O
and the clear vision of E, there are marked contrasts within the organiza-
tion of the imagery of work. For example, the vistas that E/camera takes in
are architectural. E’s camera gaze follows the lines of the cityscape’s bricks
and rough mortar up and across to frame a patch of sky, then down to view
a scene with windows, half-opened, and a fire escape. Beyond the building
with the windows the top of a tall building is visible, and beyond that the
sky. The lines here are sharp, geometric horizontals and verticals, coupled
with the regular diagonals of the fire escape. This vista contrasts with the
opening shot, a close-up of Keaton’s crinkled “reptilian” eye.49 In this open-
ing sequence, the eye/camera gives us the kind of views that will reoccur
in opposition throughout the work. On the one hand, there is closeness,
an intimacy, as with the eye in the first scene; on the other, distance and
space as the eye/camera lingers for a moment on the distant view before roll-
ing back up and down across the surface of the wall, where it now focuses
on O.
O’s “flight” leads him from the roughly textured rubble of the build-
ing site to a much more orderly street. He turns a corner and, once again,
we are offered a distance shot. The lines, previously rough and cluttered,

Eye ● 29
give way to the geometric forms of windowsills and frames and verticals of
streetlamps. The street, viewed by E from an angle, gives the impression of
depth; the scene continues beyond the frame, into the distance. The lines
of the footpath mirror those of the windowsills and frames, drawing the eye
into the scene, into the street: the lines engineer an impression of depth.
Once O ducks into a building off this street, he pauses in the stairwell. Here
he checks his pulse for the first time. The lines and wrinkles on his hands

mirror those of the eyelid in the first shot, as well as the aged face of the
flower seller who descends the stairs without noticing O. Her face, her dress,
and the flowers in the basket in her hands, all provide soft organic contours.
E offers us a close-up of her hand, as it rests heavily on the banister during
her descent. The creases around her mouth, on her lips, the lines beneath her
eyes, even the wisps of gray hair are all clearly visible in a close-up that lends
the image texture and grain. Following coming face to face with E, she col-
lapses forward to the ground, her head resting on the flowers. E lingers for a
moment, taking in the lines of the fabric of her dress, out of which her hand
emerges and is splayed upon the tiles. It should be noted that this contrast
between sharp geometric patterning and softer, more organic outlines of the
body is one that occurs elsewhere in Beckett’s work, notably the television
play Ghost Trio. This contrast forms a disjuncture within the image itself. It
is a collision of architecture and body that serves to both image the mate-
riality of the figure and, particularly in the later Ghost Trio, with its more
abstract spaces, emphasize the sparse geometry of the room in which the
figure finds himself.
This contrast is played out between the visions of O and E also. For O,
the window in the room he enters is virtually opaque. By contrast, E’s vision
of the window offers us again a distance view: he perceives the sharp geo-
metric outlines of the windows in the building across the street. The glass is
perfectly clear for him. The window that O offers us is grainy and blurred,
with only the barest hint of anything beyond. He passes the window several
times before becoming aware of the threat of exposure. Once he realizes the
possibility of visibility through the glass he draws the tattered remnants of
the blind and curtain over the glass: the blind is dark colored and ripped,
the curtains are made of a gauzy material. O commits a similar act of veiling
upon the mirror. He fetches a blanket from the bed and drapes it over the
frame of the object, at all times making sure to remain within the “angle of
immunity,” thus never perceiving his own reflection.
The contrasts in the room lie between the sharp angles of the window
frames (within and without), those of the angular objects: the mirror frame,
the image of God, the lines of the birdcage all contrast with the gauzy veil
of the curtains, the heavy folds of the material used to swathe the mirror,

the pocked and crumbling plaster of the walls, and of course O’s greatcoat,
which first surrounds his body and then later covers the birdcage and fish-
bowl. O’s activity extends, for most of the work, only as far as veiling, or
making obscure. The tearing of the God-image is echoed by the destruction
of the photographs. O rips each one into four pieces and throws them on
the ground.
This network of contrasts serves both to establish and maintain the dis-

tinction between O and E’s vision, while also asserting a distinction between
the near and far levels of focus in screen imagery. There is a contrast also
between the ways in which geometric patterning characterizes the far views,
while texture and grain are the features of the close-up. Both views are held
together in this work, juxtaposed against one another to such an extent that
the film becomes a study of the possibilities of film imagery. Its title would
seem to suggest its priorities lie here: it is a self-reflexive commentary on this
form of media.
O’s destruction of the photographs is a destruction of the past, particu-
larly a destruction of moments of past percipi, frozen in time by the camera.
The photographs show the protagonist at intervals throughout his life, and
each one involves him being perceived. The mother, pictured in the final
image, regards her young child intently, and the camera in each one has acted
as the ultimate perceiving force. This destruction points also to the fragility
of the image. Barthes’s recognition of the ephemerality of the photograph is
apt here. That the paper upon which it is printed is perishable is one thing;
that the person viewing images of the dead, as Barthes does of his deceased
parents, is also going to disappear is another. Both consign ultimately the
photograph to disappearance and loss.50 O’s tearing of the photographs high-
lights the perishable nature of film—either the printed photograph or the
cinematic film—becoming in these brief moments a testament to its lack of
omnipotence or omniscience. The fact that the film is set in a bygone era of
filmmaking, with filmic techniques, silence, blurring, and graininess, draws
attention to the materiality, and indeed mortality, of the art object. Images
produced by the mechanical eye are subject to failure and decay.
As well as subverting vision, O’s actions also constitute an arresting of
the preeminence of the medium in capturing reality. Barthes, drawing on
the image of Doubting Thomas seeking to touch the resurrected Christ in
order to prove that he is in fact present, suggests that a photograph signi-
fies the desire for similar, haptic certitude. It is a desire to be able to hold in
one’s hand a fragment of that which has passed. The photograph refers to
something that was, and in doing so asserts itself as a kind of presence.51 For
Barthes, a photograph or set of photographs fail to represent: the self never
coincides with the image.52 This seems to be the direction Beckett pushes

Eye ● 31
us toward: the filmed image’s inability to represent the material body that it
pursues. Film works against the power of the camera to see and represent. At
the same time, this short film attempts to convey a differing sensory schema
from the audiovisual one conventional to cinema and photography. It is an
attempt that has significance for Beckett’s aesthetic practice as a whole, as
well as articulating his pessimism about representation and the act of mak-
ing visible.

From Far to Near: The Dissolution of Perspective
O’s vision is grainy and lacking geometric depth. The Beckettian eye is here
conflated, as Alan Ackerman puts it, with a flat universe, resisting both
sight and subjective insight.53 It produces a haptic image, calling upon
the eye to touch, while that clear, perfect vision of E is more purely optic.
Working against the fulfillment of vision, the haptic imagery produced by
O evokes the sense of touch. It asserts the presence of the film, screen, or
skin that exists between perceiver and object. Juxtaposed in this work as
they are, these two scopic systems, haptic and optic, O and E, operate in a
montage-like way, but the result is less a production of some final unity in
the viewer’s mind, than a continuation and perpetuation of perceptual dis-
sonance. The haptic image does not offer its content up easily, but is often
blurred, out of focus, and highly textured. The absence of visual plenitude
means that the viewer is left in a position of uncertainty about both the
content of the image and the nature of the narrative of which it is part. In
Film, the blurred close-ups of Keaton’s hands as they rest for a moment on
whatever they have been touching serve to interrupt the continuity of action
and, seen as they are through the haptic gaze, call upon the spectator’s eye
to touch also, along with O.
The tendency within the haptic or tactile mode of perceiving in Film is
to move away from distance views where the conventions of linear perspec-
tive may apply. Vision is always situated. Maude has noted a similar impulse
in Beckett, which draws out the carnal embodiment of the eye: “Beckett
brings vision closer to the proximity senses, firstly by stressing the material,
embodied nature of sight, and secondly by emphasizing that vision may
not, after all, constitute the space that guarantees the subject’s detachment
from the world, but rather, through the chaos of sensation, makes him part
of that world.”54 The employment of the haptic image does exactly this: by
imbuing vision with touch, Beckett both emphasizes vision’s embodiment
and its situatedness.
The rigid clarity of space constructed out of lines and angles does not
adequately represent how we view the world, from within the world. As

Martin Jay puts it, Merleau-Ponty’s main dispute with the objective per-
ceiver in Cartesian thought regarding visuality was that it was on the world,
rather than in it.55 For Merleau-Ponty the viewer is within the visible, and so
available to vision. He argues that vision is not a mere window on the world;
it is of a far more participatory nature. The journey of E in Film can be read
as a movement away from a particular, optic mode of representation. It is one
that permits the viewer to remain outside the realm of the viewed. E’s path

follows the trajectory of O, who leads him away from the objective view,
and toward the line and contour of the lived body, the perspectiva naturalis
and the partial, unresolved, or haptic view. As Jane Hale argues: “Beckett
is, consciously or unconsciously, turning his back upon a major convention
of linear perspective. Where painting and theatrical décor in perspective
draw the eye to a geographical vanishing point in order to create the impres-
sion of physical distance, Beckett renounces this effect of depth in space in
favour of a descent into the depths of consciousness.”56 Norma Bouchard
argues that Film can be contextualized as part of the Surrealist movement’s
polemic against the eye. Sight and its association with enlightenment ratio-
nality placed it in a position of epistemological dominance. A clear example
of this attack on the hegemony of vision came in Luis Bu ñuel’s Un chien
andalou, in which a woman’s eyeball is slit with a razor. Bouchard points out
that although Beckett’s “anti-ocularcentric discourse never reaches the levels
of violent denigration of Surrealist iconography,” the eye is seen as divisive,
separating the self from the self; therefore the film, as Bouchard suggests,
partakes in the Surrealist polemic.57 There are also certain intertextual cross-
overs between Film and Un chien. The former is set in the same year that the
latter was filmed. The opening and closing scenes of Film contain a close-up
of Keaton’s eye, reminiscent of the eye scene in Un chien. In the final scene,
the pupil of the eye is bisected by the closing title. The attack on vision in
Film resists an epistemology based on vision, and the convention of linear
perspective. Instead, it demonstrates the coarse materiality of the eye.
Haptic imagery is employed in Film to give a sense of the embodiment of
vision; it is also the means by which the inner experience of embodied per-
ception can be held together and represented aesthetically along the with the
outer. The outer reality and the weighty corporeality that was such a feature
of Beckett’s earlier work can be seen in this work to rest parallel to the inner
reality. Film holds both the experience of the external and internal together
in touch. Not harmonized, for there is always a split or gap maintained
between self and self. Technology, in the guise of the camera is inserted
into this gap, and becomes the means by which those inner and outer reali-
ties are maintained in parallel. Yoshiki Tajiri argues that the distinction
made between O’s and E’s vision “can be interpreted with reference to the

Eye ● 33
bifurcation of human vision into the technological and the physical.”58 The
limitless techno-eye contrasts sharply with the limited subjective eye of
O. Yet what is interesting about the use of technology here is its position
between; that is, between self and other, viewer and viewed, and between
self and self. In this way, technology becomes in Film, as it does in many
other of Beckett’s later plays, an interface device. Thus defined, this use of
technology is comparable with its use in Krapp’s Last Tape, where the tape

recorder brings Krapp’s past into the same space as his present, though, it
must be noted, does not unify them. The interface functions as a way of
bringing self and self into contact, viewer with viewed, perceiver with per-
ceived. However, it remains as a film, in the sense of screen or skin: it is the
way in which separation and distance between these entities is articulated.
Self and self remain in touch. O and E are separated, yet inseparable.
They are not unified as one, but merely in contact through the techno-
logical interface that film provides. The contact is a touching that affirms
distance, a special relationship where two separate entities rest together,
however uneasily. As Sylvie Debevec Henning puts it: “A film is also a haze
or mist, or any translucent material like the lens gauze itself, that partially
veils, making a direct view or contact impossible. Confrontation between O
and OE always occurs through a glass darkly, vision and knowledge are only
indirect and partial.”59 The film is the interface between self and self, self
and world. To be in touch with the world is to be in touch with the surface,
flesh, or body that separates self from world and self from other. That this
renders access to and therefore knowledge of the world, other, and even self,
difficult or restricted, is a concept that Beckett’s work consistently grapples
with. It is apparent also from his comments on the “deanthropomorphized”
landscapes of Cézanne, where he perceived a sense of his painting’s incom-
mensurability “with all human expressions whatsoever.”60 In Film, Beckett
exploits the nature of the medium to explore the points at which subjects
come into contact (or fail to come into contact) with the world, the other,
and the self.
The end of the film, where the identity of E is finally revealed, is also
the end of that touching, as it hints at the end of perception, the end of
self-awareness, in other words death. The act of veiling in which O covers
his face with his hands shuts out any possible further incursions of vision and
shows a final image of those hands, desperately gnarled with age, function-
ing to unearth the mortality of this ephemeral, filmic body. Within a couple
of years of making Film, Keaton would be dead from cancer. The hands, the
skin are not only the perceptual screen or film that lies between self and self,
self and world, there are also, in the final moments of O, imaged as a shroud,
or death mask separating life from death.

Both Film and Krapp’s Last Tape feature the failure of sight. Krapp squints
at his spools; the point of view shot in Film reveals O’s myopic sight. Vision
is associated in Film with carnality and embodiment and is therefore subject
to the same decay as the rest of the body. In Film, the attempt to realize a
carnal and embodied vision also realizes a haptic aesthetic. That is, imagery
that works against a visual logic and refuses to conform to certain conven-
tions of image-making, which make objects more visible to the eye. Linear

perspective is a classic example of a visual logic which, drawing as it does the
eye of the viewer into the scene, simultaneously privileges the observer as an
independent eye.
Hale argues that instead of drawing the eye toward a vanishing point
in order to “create the impression of physical distance” Beckett favors the
staging of a descent into the depths of consciousness.61 In Beckett’s work,
“human beings no longer occupy a stable point in space and time, from
which they may visually organise, give meaning to, and institute relation-
ships with other beings and objects.”62 Proximity, tactility, and texture are
features of this aesthetic, which turns away from representational conven-
tions such as linear perspective, which offer the viewer an epistemological
standpoint based on vision. In Beckett, vision, even in the savage techno-eye
of the camera, is embodied and situated, and always open to touch; thus in
this work the organ of sense is mimicked by the technological apparatus
that mediates it. The unity of space, a feature of the imagery produced by
perspective, which treats the canvas as window or mirror, is absent from
the partial, fragmented, and dim imagery of Beckett’s later work. Nowhere,
however, is the refusal of this form of visual representation more evident
than in the imperfect vision of Film. Technology in Film operates in the
between-space, the interface between viewer and viewed, self and self, yet is
not established as an objective mediating device. It is rather a film, a screen,
or skin that lies between the participants in the processes of perception, both
uniting them at the same time as dividing them.

CHAPTER 2

Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes
The Beckettian Ear

Music moves us, both physically and emotionally. It vibrates on the skin
and the ear drum and sets off emotional resonances. Although the eyelid
can close and the hand can withdraw, the body is opened and vulnerable
to sound through the ear. Sound is a phenomenon that transgresses the
boundary between the self and the world with ease and is intimately tied
to human emotion. The subject is vulnerable to sound from without, and
also hears him or herself from within. For Merleau-Ponty we are sonorous
beings. Sound plays a role in that chiasmic relationship between self and self,
and self and world. He writes: “[L]ike crystal, like metal, and many other
substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within;
as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat.”1 In a similar vein, Jean-Luc
Nancy thinks of the body as a “resonance chamber.”2 He compares the lis-
tening body to an instrument, a drum: “Isn’t the space of the listening body,
in turn, just such a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, but also
from which the opening of a mouth can resume and revive resonance.”3 It
is this self-reflexive sonority and the response of the subject through which
sound passes that will set the terms for this exploration of this play. Ghost
Trio is filled with resonating chambers: the chamber in which we find F,
F himself, and the small cassette recorder held on his lap. All the objects,
including F, emerge out of the gray background, but are gray themselves.
Like sound, they do not obey the boundaries of wall, floor, body-skin, but
echo each other, return and diminish in rhythmic patterns.
The act of listening has major significance for the figures that popu-
late Beckett’s novels and plays. In the television plays Eh Joe, Ghost Trio,

and Nacht und Träume, disembodied voices and brief snatches of music are
heard. The presence of these sonic elements offers a window into the figures’
mind-spaces, as these moments of aural contemplation reveal a thread of
emotional color against a gray backdrop. Bryden, writing on the musical
sensibility that permeates Beckett’s writing, notes that “the twin functions
of listening and speaking are in Beckett’s writing often given more weight as
attesters of presence than is the function of seeing.” And, as she continues,

while silence might threaten to come to pass, as speech becomes once and
for all exhausted, the cessation of sound is never complete. The noise of
life continues. Beckett’s figures are often straining to hear.4 The aural con-
templation that the figures engage in reveals also the effect of sound—an
effect that has physiological, psychological, and emotional aspects, convert-
ing an aural experience into a tactile one. The subject resonates, vibrating
in response to what is heard. In the tympanum image of The Unnamable,
Beckett explores the relationship between voice and body:
Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle,
perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the
one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be thin as foil, I’m
neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve
two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrat-
ing, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the
world, I don’t belong to either.5
The tympanum provides the voice with a point of passage into the body.6
This relationship is figured, on the one hand, as sound-based, and, on the
other, as tactile and vibratory. Like the narrator of The Unnamable, the fig-
ures who inhabit Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Träume find themselves
in an intense state of listening. The voiceover, which is heard in Ghost Trio,
demands at the outset that the spectator do the same, as she asks us to “keep
that sound down” (CSP, 248). These short and minimalistic teleplays take
place within the hollow columns, the places of resonance within the listener.
They image the passage of sound through consciousness. The camera in Eh
Joe scrutinizes Joe’s face for the moment it is touched by sound, when the
voice permeates his consciousness. The room of Ghost Trio is an echo cham-
ber, a mind-space, where the music that is heard by the listener provokes the
images produced on the screen. Music has a similar function in Nacht und
Träume, as the experience of listening generates the dream image.
Sound penetrates the body and etches meaning onto the image. Technology
and sound act as mediators of music and the mechanical voice—these are
acoustic elements that indicate the self-awareness of the listener and inscribe

Ear ● 37
meaning onto the image. Sounds, as with Krapp’s Last Tape, are intimately
linked to memory. The act of recording sound onto tape or vinyl is an act
of inscribing, just as memories are inscribed upon the mind. Each of these
plays sees sound inscribed upon the image in varying ways.
“Flint glass”: The Haptic Voice in Eh Joe

When the disembodied voice of this play begins her assault on Joe, remind-
ing him of his past misdemeanors, she operates as a tactile force, an inscrip-
tive machine. Utilizing the themes of guilt, surveillance, and punishment,
Eh Joe explores how sound, manifest as voice, etches meaning onto the sur-
face of the image, and alters the way in which the perceiver interprets that
image. The two facets of the work—sound and image—are held together in
tension. Beckett employs here the radiophonic voice, a device that permits
voices to be detached from bodies.7 Krapp’s Last Tape saw a radical distinc-
tion engineered between the voice that emerges from a visible body, and a
disembodied, mechanical voice. Eh Joe also explores the complex relation-
ship between voice and body, however, considered in relation to its medium
of television this play also meditates on the relation between sound and
image, rooted in the ideas of montage, counterpoint, and asynchronicity.
Having written for radio and for stage, Beckett is now, with Eh Joe, grap-
pling with both media forms together. As Herren points out, Deleuze’s com-
ment about Ghost Trio, that it was as if “a radio play and silent film were
played together: a new form of inclusive disjunction,”8 could apply to Eh Joe.
For Herren, Beckett has combined motifs from silent film with aural motifs
from the radio plays, resulting in a televisual palimpsest whose mechanical
precursors are still traceable.9
Sound and image in Eh Joe have a montage-like relationship. Sergei
Eisenstein defined montage as a “collision” between two images that are
independent of one another: two separate entities that collide and form
a whole in the mind of the perceiver.10 The structural motif of montage
was significant when the advent of sound in cinema brought a new set of
challenges to those filmmakers who had already accustomed themselves to
the language of silent film. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov’s 1928
Statement on Sound advocated an initially contrapuntal relationship: “The
first experiments with sound must aim at a sharp discord with the visual images.
Only such a ‘hammer and tongs’ approach will produce the necessary sensa-
tion that will result consequently in the creation of a new orchestral coun-
terpoint of visual and sound images.”11 This notion of asynchronicity, of the
inclusion of sound in the image that has no obvious source, and the urge for
a contrapuntal balance between sound and image may be useful in reading

the relation between sound and image in Eh Joe. For the camera-moves in
Eh Joe are emphatically separated from the voice: the two do not move as one
entity, but rather collide, with sound altering the way in which the perceiver
views the image.
At the beginning of the play, Joe enacts a dumbshow that has much in
common with O’s actions in Film. He goes to each “orifice” of the room:
the window, the door, and to those spaces within the room that have hidden

depths: the cupboard, under the bed. He opens, closes, and locks the win-
dow, door, and cupboard, and then draws curtains over each one. He finally
checks under the bed, before sitting on it. He is just beginning to relax when
Voice begins her assault (CSP, 201). Just as in Film, there is a similar set of
self-protective gestures: closing, locking, and veiling actions. The integrity
of Joe’s “space,” as we learn, has come under threat in the past. The voices
upon which he commits “mental thuggee” are an imposition, an invasion.
Voice blurs the boundaries that Joe has attempted to establish between the
inner and the outer of the room and, at a metaphorical level, between the
inner and outer aspects of his own self.
In actuality, any narrative could be used to inscribe meaning upon the
face of Joe. As film scholar Michel Chion writes: “Sound has an influence
on perception: through the phenomenon of added value, it interprets the
meaning of the image, and makes us see in the image what we would not
otherwise see, or would see differently. And so we see that sounds are not at
all invested and localised in the same way as the image.”12 Chris Marker’s
experimental Letters from Siberia, in which three different voice-over com-
mentaries are played consecutively against a single piece of footage, exem-
plifies this. The narrative accompanying the film paints each version in a
completely different light. It directs the viewers’ gaze to particular aspects
of the image, and constructs utterly different meanings out of the same set
of images.13 The relationship between sound and image, between voice and
body in Eh Joe is imaged in terms of its tactile force: not only is the venom-
ous voice a forceful entity, penetrating Joe’s consciousness, sound itself is
shown to influence and alter the meaning and reception of the image.
“cut a long story short”: The Haptic Voice

Beckett describes the voice that plagues the protagonist of Eh Joe as “very low
throughout—plenty of venom. Face just listening hard and brain agonizing.
Smile at very end when voice stops (having done it again).”14 The “done it
again” refers to Joe’s supposed suppression of the voice; for the majority of the
play, he listens intently, while at the same time struggling to shut it out. And
this is not the first voice upon which he has committed “mental thuggee.”

Ear ● 39
We learn that the voices of his father and his mother—either ghostly visita-
tions or phantoms produced by Joe’s mind—have already been shut out.
The repression of these voices is an act that the voice describes as “throttling
the dead” in his head.15 The voice that is heard in this play reminds Joe of
his philandering lifestyle, the way he treated women, both her and the other
woman she refers to, known only as the “green one.” Giving the narrative a
near soap-operatic tone, this girl, “spirit made light” (CSP, 205), tragically

killed herself after Joe’s abandonment of her. Returning the word “passion”16
to its etymological root in suffering, this teleplay is an ironic spectacle of
Joe’s passions: his one-time passion for the female body coupled with his
present suffering and somewhat masochistic enjoyment of the process. Joe’s
plight forms a bathetic parallel between the love that drove the green one
to take her own life (her passion for Joe), and the sacrificial body of Christ,
“Joe’s lord.” Voice suggests that He may be the only one left to “start in on”
Joe, when she has finally faded and succumbed to his mental strangulation
(CSP, 204).
This play is Beckett’s first for television and sees a curious blending of
the mechanical and the biological in the figure of Voice. Siân Philips, who
played Voice in the first English production at the BBC in 1965, describes
“metronoming” her way through the text during rehearsal, working with the
author, “like machines” to create a nearly colorless recitation.17 As Katherine
Weiss has suggested, Voice also takes on the role of the film director at cer-
tain points.18 She edits her own text: “cut a long story short doesn’t work,”
and “cut another long story short doesn’t work either” (CSP, 206). “Cut” can
refer to the damage inflicted by a knife and to the editing of a film. Voice’s
“cut” carves meaning out of Joe’s unblinking, tense visage. Both activities
govern the final interpretation of the work, and reveal the haptic force of
sound on the body of the image.
Voice is radiophonic and technological; apart from the image of her
sitting “holding hands” with Joe, she never draws attention to herself as
embodied. Joe’s aged face fills the image, while the body of the “green one,”
imaged as she is through Voice’s narrative, hovers over the work. However,
little in the narrative points to Voice’s own presence; she does not even have
an identity outside her function: to speak. Her only references to herself
involve a description of a clichéd romantic scene, in which Joe once described
her voice: “When we sat watching the ducks . . . holding hands exchanging
vows . . . how you admired my elocution! . . . among other charms . . . voice
like flint glass . . . to borrow your expression . . . ” (CSP, 203). Yet this con-
centration on the aural elements of her presence, coupled with the author’s
stripping away of any means of identifying her, serves to focus attention
onto the sound itself. The image of Joe and the verbally constructed image

of the green one dominate the visual field, while Voice remains pure sound.
The fact that Voice is defined as sound indicates the ways in which this
work divides voice from body, sound from image. This radiophonic voice
contrasts with that of Maddy Rooney’s in All That Fall, who manages to
broadcast a sense of her weighty corporeality purely through sound. The
term acousmatic is apt here. Originally used to describe sound without a
visible source in musique concrète, acousmatic has been applied to film by

Michel Chion, to describe sounds that “belong” to an image but have no
perceivable source in that image, defining the speaker as acousmêtre:
neither inside nor outside the image. It is not inside, because the image of
the voice’s source—the body, the mouth—is not included. Nor is it out-
side, since it is not clearly positioned off-screen in an imaginary “wing,”
like a master of ceremonies or a witness, and it is implicated in the action,
constantly about to be a part of it.19
Chion’s acousmêtre describes sounds and voices that come from machines, or
emerge from hidden places—he offers the fake Wizard of Oz, whose voice
comes from behind a curtain, as an example. For Chion the acousmêtre ’s per-
sona inhabits the image in a different way: by its nature blurs the boundaries
between onscreen and off-screen.” 20 In order to achieve that colorless voice,
Beckett rehearsed with Siân Philips to remove intonation, and to instill a
metronomic rhythm. In the studio, the high and low frequencies of her voice
were filtered out, leaving the voice insistent, toneless. It was Billie Whitelaw,
however, who was to achieve the tonelessness required by the author most
effectively in a 1988 version, directed by Walter Asmus.21 Her performance
focuses on texture and rhythm, with all tonal color drained from it. Siân
Philip’s clipped staccato is a more human voice, whereas Whitelaw man-
ages a truly ghostly, machine-produced sound.22 Such a voice, drained of
human warmth, has the capacity to cut into the flesh of Joe’s image and be
an instrument of Joe’s torture.
The camera in this play does not have the same invasive intent as it does in
Film; the voice intrudes, and, as Clas Zilliacus observes, the camera functions
to observe and record its effects upon Joe’s face.23 The camera zooms toward
Joe’s face a total of nine times so that the play becomes a portrait in process:
“[T]he camera is never dollied forward to the archetypal close-up: an eye or
pair of eyes [ . . . ] Eh Joe is expressly a study not merely of eyes but of a human
face.”24 Because Joe does not seem to register its presence to the same extent
as O, the presence of the camera here is more muted than the camera in Film.
This play does not struggle to present the experience of the inner and outer,
internal subjectivity and awareness of external perception, together. With Eh

Ear ● 41
Joe, the camera is turned inward. Beckett gave advice to Alan Schneider,
who was in the process of doing his own production of Eh Joe in the United
States: “He does not look directly at camera and is not aware of it. He is
aware only of the voice. The eyes are turned inward, a listening look. It is
however effective dramatically if at the very end, with the smile he looks full
at the objective for the first time.”25 Joe’s relationship with the camera is of a
far more ambiguous nature than that of O’s in Film. Yet in both works the

sensation of looking at something private, intimate, prevails. Toby Zinman
places Eh Joe within the tradition of peephole art, drawing a parallel between
it and Duchamp’s Etants Données and arguing that both use an essentially
visual medium and play at withholding the visible. Joe’s dumb-show not only
affirms his desire to remain hidden, but also aids the spectator’s acceptance
of a fundamental convention of realist theater: the invisible fourth wall. For
Zinman this wall is perforated with a peephole, like the one that offers a frag-
mented view of the nude woman in the Duchamp work. This peephole is the
camera lens.26 The spectator is then party to something that would otherwise
remain unseen and the moment of looking becomes an act of transgression.
It is interesting to note how Joe as object of the look subverts the traditional
active male gaze upon the passive female object within a film. It is Joe who
becomes the spectacle while that active/passive heterosexual division of labor
on screen that Laura Mulvey describes, where “the male gaze projects its fan-
tasy onto the female figure,” is disrupted and undermined.27 Voice orches-
trates the work, as she takes Joe point by point through the final hours of the
green one’s life.
Within Joe’s mental space, to which we, as peephole viewers, are party,
there are several differing but equally illuminating interpretations of Voice’s
function. She, in Lamonte’s Jungian analysis, acts as Joe’s anima, a Demeter
figure seeking justice for the lost “Kore.”28 S. E. Gontarski reads Voice as a
manifestation of Joe’s artistic drive and imagination, not only the product of
his guilty conscience. Voice continually entreats Joe to exercise his imagina-
tion, and the “artful and climactic description of the lover’s suicide is devised
by the voice, who in turn is devised by Joe.”29 Herren sums up the ambi-
guity of Voice best when he points out that although Joe “recognises this
Voice from previous experience, the bill of particulars in tonight’s indict-
ment catches him off guard. He may be the source of Voice—her opener
and closer—but he appears to know no more about what she will say than
we do.”30 For Herren, this production of Voice has deeper psychological
implications, to the extent that it functions as a “melancholic commemora-
tion” of a past love, motivated by the desire to narrate a self-elegy. This, in
Herren’s reading, is a “coded suicide note from himself, to himself and to the
attentive spectator as well.”31

These analyses seem to agree that Joe is the producer of the voice, yet its
gender and mechanistic qualities emphasize its difference from its creator.
Voice emerges, not only from “behind the eyes” (CSP, 202), but also, as
Weiss points out, from behind the camera eye: an “unseen machine provok-
ing responses that the camera records.”32 That Joe imagines his torturer in
technological terms fits with a Foucaultian vision of technology as an agent
of surveillance and discipline, working toward the regulation of the body

through the mechanisms of guilt and confession. In the recording process,
sound is transformed into an electromagnetic charge, which alters the fer-
ric oxide coating on tape. In this way, the recording of sound is a process
of touch of, and inscription upon, a surface. In Voice’s aural assault upon
Joe, the process is repeated: she attempts to etch guilt onto his image. The
camera watches this process intently, in order to document moments where
Joe’s guilt may flicker across his face, as Beckett puts it: “face just listening
hard and brain agonising.”33
Voice, Pain, and Torture

For Foucault, public torture was part of a ritual and spectacle of punishment
that necessarily marks the guilty body. Even if its function was to “purge”
crime, torture does not necessarily affect this; rather the crime and criminal-
ity is inscribed upon the flesh.34 One can argue that, within Joe’s psychic
space, Voice performs a similar function. The narrative that Voice inflicts
on Joe forces him to imaginatively engage with the consequences of his
wrongdoing. The piece as whole constitutes a confession of guilt. Not only
this, but the fact that this play is written for television, a medium dedicated
to spectacle, situates this confessional within the history of public spectacles
of guilt and punishment.
Within the spectacle of the torture session or the public punishment,
pain is central. It is the moment when the body’s truth is revealed in ago-
nized cries, and, it is supposed, that the truth of the victim’s confession is
guaranteed. Elaine Scarry describes the moment of confession that arises
out of physical pain as a sign of the disintegration, through pain, of the
world of the victim. Scarry describes pain as “language destroying” and by
implication self-destroying. The confession makes visible this loss to the
torturers:
To assent to words that through the thick agony of the body can be only
dimly heard, or to reach aimlessly for the name of a person or a place that
has barely enough cohesion to hold its shape as a word and none to bond
it to its worldly referent, is a way of saying, yes, all is almost gone now,

Ear ● 43
there is almost nothing left now, even this voice, the sounds I am mak-
ing, no longer form my words but the words of another.35
The voice is a vital element of the theater of torture and punishment, as

accounts of torture will attest. There can be a surprising level of intimacy
in the relationship between torturer and subject of inquisition. In the
recorded scripts of the Spanish inquisitors’ manuals, such as those of Gui

and Eymerich, the subject could not usually see the interrogator, who stood
behind him or her, as Ariel Glucklich observes. However, the voice of the
interrogator was always there, punctuated by expectant silences between
commands and questions. The acousmatic inquisitor was a purely vocal pres-
ence, divorced from, but implicated in, the mechanics of torture: “With
visual feedback eliminated, voice became critical [ . . . ]. Under carefully reg-
ulated torture—pain applied when the inquisitor nodded to the torturer in
response to a note of falseness or obstinacy—the patient spoke. Only words
that did not produce pain were legitimated.”36 Voice and the instruments
of torture formed a single machine, which produced pain and confession
and instilled guilt in its subject. Pain or the threat of pain overwhelms the
subject and he or she internalizes the guilt through this ritual of torture and
interrogation. With torture, multiple and messy openings are made: tor-
ture marks are made on the body. Taken by Voice through the stages of his
“crimes,” reminiscent of the “stages of the cross,” the Christian practice of
reenacting Christ’s walk to Calgary, we can see the mechanics of Joe’s guilt
and regret. Joe has created his own torture-machine, the vaguely mechanical
voice, which acts as a mental self-flagellant.
Yet Voice’s only tools for torture are her words. These, however, may have
a visceral, physical effect. As Merleau-Ponty writes:
If a word is shown to a subject for too short a time for him to be able to
read it, the word “warm,” for example, induces a kind of experience of
warmth [ . . . ] The word “hard” produces a sort of the stiffening of the
back and neck, and only in a secondary way does it project into the visual
or auditory field and assume the appearance of a sign or a word. Before
becoming the indication of a concept it is first of all an event which grips
my body.37
In describing the impact of words in this way, Merleau-Ponty highlights

the sensitivity of the body. Of course, it does not feel actual warmth, but
“prepares itself for heat.”38 The image this gives is of a body that is in open
anticipation of the vibrations, temperatures—sensations with which the
world touches it. He says that “words have a physiognomy because we adopt

towards them, as towards each person, a certain form of behaviour which

makes its complete appearance the moment each word is given.”39 Not only
does the narrative to which Voice subjects Joe affect him deeply but the very
words that Voice uses also impact upon him at a visceral and sensual level.
Voice’s intention is to goad a reaction from Joe. In this sense, Voice is like
an interrogator. Scarry observes that the content and context of torturer’s
questions often make clear that, although the questioning implies that the

answering is significant, this is not always the case. The question, the voice,
in torture has an intimate connection with physical pain, and it is another
instrument in the mechanics of the process. It is not the content of the
answer that matters either, but the fact of answering, either with cries of
pain or with pain-induced speech. All demonstrate the effectiveness of the
regime and its torture methods.40 In this way the confession, as with many
inquisitorial practices, is already written into the script of the interrogator,
ready to be elicited in the course of the ritual of pain and power. As it is Joe
who tortures himself, guilt is assured and internalized. Joe does not need
to speak. The camera thus takes on a similar role to those members of the
Inquisition who painstakingly recorded the torture process. It documents
each stage of Joe’s “passion,” recording the psychological wounds inflicted
by the words.
The Voice demands that Joe say his own name, just as the girl suppos-
edly did in her final moments: “Say it you now, no one’ll hear you . . . Say
‘Joe’ it parts the lips” (CSP, 206). Demonstrating the physicality of speech,
the production of the word alters the orifice, leaves it open and erotically
charged. There is an insistent repetition of the word “stone” in the final few
lines: the green one, having taken a tube of painkillers, lies down at the edge
of the water and “scoops a little cup for her face in the stones” (CSP, 206).
The stones press against her body: her lips, breasts, hands and act as a cold
replacement for the body she has lost. The word “stone” implies something
cold, unyielding, and unloving. Just as the subject to which Merleau-Ponty
refers to feels a stiffening of the spine at the mention of the word “hard,” or
a sense of heat at the suggestion of the word warmth, so too must Joe’s body
anticipate the sensation of cold, loveless stones pressed against the body.
These stones are all that the body is not. They are cold, indifferent, as per-
haps Joe once was toward the women in his life. Voice artfully constructs
the final moments of the girl’s life,41 beginning by establishing Joe’s physical
state, the history of their relationship, Joe’s religiosity, as well as discussing
the source of Joe’s voices: “[Y]ou know that penny farthing hell you call
your mind . . . that’s where you think this is coming from, don’t you?” (CSP,
202). However, she saves the body of the green one for last: it is the most
potent torture method at her disposal.

Ear ● 45
As well as the precognitive effect of words, there is also to be found a

semantic multiplicity in Voice’s descriptions. The following terms dominate
the image of Voice’s “green one”: pale, young, narrow, water, child. There
are also associations with the words “slip,” “strip,” “slit.” She sits on the edge
of the bed on the night in question in her “lavender slip” and “gets up in the
end and slips out as she is.” Following her failed attempt to slit her wrists,
she “tears a strip from the slip and ties it round the scratch” (CSP, 206),

goes back to the house with her wet slip clinging to her legs. While such
associations emphasize her youthfulness and fragility—she is only a slip of
a girl—they also help to affirm the liminality of her presence. The girl has
“pale eyes,” spirit made light, as Joe describes her.
Slip, strip, and slit share etymological links, in cutting, and in the open-
ing of a space between elements. Slip suggests both to escape from, and to
cut. The green one slips out into the night, and slips both out of life and
out of Joe’s grasp. All he is left with is a voice, of another, upon whom he
cannot get a grip, to throttle, stifle. There is a sense of slip also as a cutting,
from a stem or branch, driving the sense that the green one’s body is carved
by voice. Strip describes the removal of an outer layer. The “you’ve laid her”
(CSP, 205), implies the stripping that Joe did of both the green one’s body,
and the value she placed on her own life. She tears a strip from her slip to
surround the slit in her wrist, attempting to heal the opening made there. As
a location a “strip” is a narrow portion of a surface, bounded by two paral-
lel lines. Her body in its final location becomes this strip, a space between
sea and shore, life and death, the tangible and the intangible. Slit can be a
coarse reference to female genitalia, emphasizing Joe’s relationship to her as
both a physical one, he has “had” her, and a controlling, domineering one.
She was open for conquest, a space to be filled, and remade according to his
wishes and desires. Slit can also describe a narrow opening, suggesting the
violence of a cut, between two elements, which turns us back toward strip as
the intangible location that she finally inhabits, her body that is cut by voice
out of the stones, the sea, is one that Joe imaginatively inhabits. However,
not in the way he once did, in an act of mastery. Now his touch is a yielding
to her: he is incapable of actually touching her—she has slipped away from
him—but imaginatively touches the objects and the pieces of the world she
has touched. These are, the big horn buttons, the wet silk slip, the razor with
which she attempts to cut her wrists, the water on her feet, the stones on her
breasts, lips, hands.
Voice has control over the shaping of the narrative and the editing of
film, she cuts into the skin of the image. Joe for the most part is passive.
The body of the green one is carved out of words, transformed into sound.
The place where the body of the green one finally lies is highly significant.

Having taken sleeping pills, she lies face down in the path of the incoming
tide. Such a location is charged with mutability, liminality. Crossing this
zone, the mediated body of the green one exists both in and out of life. Not
only this, she also represents the moment of the opening of Joe’s body to the
venom of voice and of the silent image to the imposition of sound.
The story that Voice recounts is filled with the moments of contact
between the body surface of the green one and the world around her. Her

last moments see her body pressed into stones, but even before this, the
viewer/listener is taken on her journey via the edges of her body. The last
time Joe saw her he was “bundling her into her Avoca sack . . . her fingers
fumbling with the big horn buttons” (CSP, 205). What is significant is that
we do not touch her, rather we touch what she touches, or feel the press of
what touches her. Voice fills the narrative of the green one’s final night with
these sensory details. She lies with her “face in the wash,” which doesn’t
work, goes back to the house and gets sleeping tablets, returns “trailing her
feet in the water like a child” and having taken them all, lies down again in
the tide, hands “clawing at the shingle now” (CSP, 206). It is here that Voice
drops to a whisper, as she describes the body in the stones.
For Margharita Giuletti, the 1988 version of Eh Joe directed by Walter
Asmus with the voice of Billie Whitelaw was one in which the power of
words was given due attention. She writes that “life is given back to the
words as an act of respect for their originality while they create images that
strike the ear physically.”42 Yet while words have their impact on Joe, it
appears that even when virtually inaudible Voice would still function as an
instrument of torture. She threatens Joe with the possibility of remaining a
whisper for as long as he continues to live: “You stop it in the end . . . imag-
ine if you couldn’t . . . Ever think of that? . . . If it went on . . . The whisper in
your head . . . Me whispering in your head . . . things you can’t catch . . . On
and Off . . . Till you join us . . . Eh Joe?” (CSP, 204). Were the venomous voice
to fall to an eternal whisper, suppressed and strangled but not quite extin-
guished by Joe, he would be tormented by a sound without meaning, denied
even the pleasure (however masochistic) he may take in the eroticism of the
narrative. The visceral impact of the voice would remain.
Televised Presence
The voice inscribes meaning onto the image in Eh Joe; sound as voice alters
the way in which the image is perceived and interpreted. Imagined as a tech-
nological entity, this radiophonic presence provides Joe with a level of aware-
ness of his own past and misdeeds, which he both seeks out and loathes.
Voice permits not only Joe’s self-flagellation, she also provides him with a

Ear ● 47
fantasy of the death of the green one, which is for Herren a rehearsal of his
own death: Joe’s “meticulous imagination of the green one’s suicide serves as
a virtual how-to-manual in killing oneself.”43 Voice’s venom, inscribed as it
is on the screen of Joe’s mind permits an imaginative preinhabitation, thus
facilitating a bodily anticipation of bodily disintegration.
Joe’s religious beliefs are given a sardonic treatment by Voice—it is with
irony that the voice draws a parallel between Joe’s suffering and that of

Christ. Within Joe’s Catholic faith system, shared by the “green one,”44 sui-
cides cannot enter heaven. No comfort is available to the believer in this kind
of afterlife; the “green one” is doubly lost to Joe. Yet the religiosity of the play
emerges in other ways also. Throughout the play, it appears as though Joe is
the one shouldering the cross. The stages of the play, marked out by camera
zooms, remind the viewer of the stages of the cross. It is an ironic allusion of
course, as Joe is anything but a shining example of a believer in the faith he
supposedly follows. However, by the end of the play a new image is perhaps
revealed, one that reworks in a radical way the image of the noli me tangere
scene, where Mary Magdalene sees the resurrected Christ, but is not permit-
ted to touch his robe. For the intangible figure of the green one, standing
as she does at the limit point between life and death, body and spirit, is also
deeply reminiscent of this scene.
Nancy’s examination of the representations of this moment throughout
the history of art leads him to the conclusion that the two bodies displayed
at this instant, one of glory, the other of flesh, reveal that “the possibil-
ity of carnal decay is given there, along with the possibility of glory.”45 For
Nancy this indicates the fading of the divine presence from a world that has
no outside. It is the depletion of the very notion of a metaphysical realm
and the notion of soul that lives beyond the body. For in Christianity, even
though the body appears to be denigrated within this tradition, it is in fact
its essential element: “Only a body can be cut down or raised up, because
only a body can touch or be touched. A spirit can do nothing of the sort.”46
The fantasy of the girl’s death is simultaneously a fantasy of her resurrection:
Voice has permitted Joe to resurrect aesthetically his lost “green one.” She
is “spirit made light,” a broadcast from the void. In doing so, she stands as
a limit point between life and death, realized by the cold techno-voice, and
just as untouchable. It is her body, not Joe’s, that is imaged as the sacrificial
one, “spirit made light,” while Joe remains bound to his “stinking old wrap-
per.” A body of clay and a body of light are in touch, but forever separated.
He desires to touch her, but this is impossible. He is boxed in, framed by the
restrictive parameters of the television screen, while she is never visualized,
never made tangible. The only touch that is allowed is through narrative,
through representation—of which voice is the vehicle, the interface. Not

only does sound, manifested as voice, take on a tactile force, it also unearths
and resurrects the body of the lost girl, at the same time as it keeps her
beyond touch.
Echo Chambers: Music in Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume

Beckett and Music
Throughout Beckett’s oeuvre music plays a significant role, whether directly,
as songs sung or hummed, or indirectly, in the rhythm and tone of the actor’s
body and speech. Song is a feature of the isolation of the figures: Winnie sings
to stave off the silence and solitude in Happy Days (1960–1961). Krapp sings a
few bars of an old hymn as he sits in his den, while in Nacht und Träume, the
last three bars of Schubert’s Lied of that name are hummed, then sung, softly.
In the radio drama, music from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet is
heard in All That Fall. Words and Music dramatizes a dialogue between voice
and instrument. Beethoven is played in the television play Ghost Trio, another
work to share the name of the piece of music it cites.
The formal structures that Beckett applies in his work often echo those of
music. Throughout his work are examples of plays structured around musi-
cal patterning. Following the impromptu tradition in theater and in music,
both Ohio Impromptu and Ghost Trio exemplify this. In many other works, a
musical repetition-variation structure is visible. As Schopenhauer observes,
repetition signs including da capo,”
[a]Attest to the richness of content and meaningfulness of the language

of music; these would be intolerable in works written in the language of
words, and yet these signs are entirely to the point and pleasing in music,
because in order to grasp it fully, we must listen to it twice”47
Beckett regularly employs such repetition in his plays, using the music of
the Romantic composers, Beethoven and Schubert in Ghost Trio (1975)
and the later Nacht und Träume (1982), respectively. The emotive depth
of the music in these plays contrasts with the gray sparseness of the visual
imagery.
One of the key aspects of music for Beckett seems to be its ability to
maintain ambiguity, to be nonreferential. Much of the music Beckett draws
upon is from the Romantic era, and David Abrams, commenting on the
Romantic aesthetic, notes how during this era music came to be the art
regarded as the least mimetic and also most “immediately expressive of spirit
and emotion, constituting the very pulse quiddity of passion made public”

Ear ● 49
for the German writers of the 1790s.48 Beckett, a writer who sought always
to reduce the allusive and mimetic capacities of his texts and stage imagery,
exploits this nonmimetic quality of music and in doing introduces a strain
of emotional color into otherwise monochromatic images. However, any
attempt to make music “explain” the content of the play in a linear and real-
ist way is, for this reason, problematic. As Bryden comments:

On the whole, Beckett leaves private and inexplicable the matter of any
emotive relationship between music and listener. This is entirely in keep-
ing with his conception of music, as expressed to Lawrence Shainberg, as
“the highest art form,” since “it’s never condemned to explicitness”.” By
refusing to anatomize or domesticate it, Beckett allows music to retain
for the listener its full force of ambiguity.49
Music, in the context of the Romantic sensibility, had the capacity to do

what rational thought systems could not do. Lydia Goehr comments that,
the “purely musical” served as a general metaphor and symbolized a “reposi-
tory for all that was unknowable by ordinary cognitive or logical means.”50
Thus, music is here characterized as something not only beyond words, but
also beyond the understanding of the rational thought systems of the day.
Goehr goes on to note that analyses like those of Schopenhauer are rooted
in a metaphysical aesthetic of inexpressibility, in which the link among the
church, the museum, and the concert hall—zones of “silent contemplation”
far from worldly concerns—is readily perceivable.51
Music in Beckett seems to strive toward a form of communication that
is beyond words. The music of Beethoven in Ghost Trio and the poetry of
Yeats in . . . but the clouds . . . operate as elements that “exceed the verbal,
rational and technological controls which have been set up to try to ‘know’
the available perceptual world.”52 Ludwig Tieck, one of the founding fathers
of Romanticism, notes the distrust of the Romantic poets for words: “Oh
lovers never forget, when you would entrust a sentiment to words, to ask
yourselves: what, after all, is there that can be said in words!” Music, a stir-
ring and mysterious force seemed alone capable of making the most direct,
affective statement.53
Woven in fragments through these two texts, this emotionally charged
music, while it may enrich the emotional tenor of the pieces, is not perhaps
posited as uncomplicatedly transcendent. Catherine Laws observes this ten-
sion when she writes that
Beckett uses the expressivity and the formal symmetries of the Beethoven
in the same way as he does other elements of the play, posting them

provisionally only in order to undermine their stability as their construct-

edness is revealed. Thus, Beckett specifically draws upon the spirit of
German Romanticism which infuses the music, but does so precisely in
order to deconstruct these ideas and put into question the possibility of
simple solace or absolute redemption.54
The expectancy and quiet longing that suffuses Ghost Trio and Nacht und

Träume is played out relative to the music, though whether or not the music
provides an actual source of comfort is arguable. In both plays, the moment
of resolution when the play returns to its opening keynote is tempered with
shadows and absence.
Rather than take the approach that the music somehow illustrates the
content of the drama, I think it necessary to examine how each play mim-
ics (or deviates from) the form of the music with which it is interwoven. In
doing so I focus on structure, drawing on Michael Maier’s analysis, who
writes that “[t]he close relation between Beckett and Schubert does not only
consist in a preference for a peculiar favourite piece of art, but in an affinity
to the processes Schubert as an artist employed to bring about his work.”55
The formal structures of both Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume echo that
of the music they contain. Not only this, but also evident in Ghost Trio is the
affective and haptic dimension of music: it is a phenomenon that moves one,
acting upon the skin and upon the nerves. Both works are expansions of
an inner sonorous territory that is part memory, part imagination, through
which echo the fragments of beauty, loss, and mortality, all contained in
these Romantic, evocative chords.
Beckett’s Resonant Beings

Consciousness and the body are presented in Ghost Trio as open spaces:
music and sound are phenomena that pass through them, are remembered
and echo back. Music stirs tension, expectation, and anticipation of ending
or release. It puts the listener on edge. Ghost Trio can be read as a medita-
tion on the nature of consciousness and self-reflection. It can also be read
as a study of listening, of what it means for the subject to be a sonorous
echoing chamber who is simultaneously producing and receiving sounds.
These open spaces, or “echo chambers,” are given a visual metaphor in the
cassette player that F holds upon his lap. We are never sure whether or not
the sound we hear emanates from this small box, yet as a piece of technol-
ogy that functions to capture and replay sound, it is an important element
in the visual-aural composition of the play. It is not a simple matter of music
produced by the machine and broadcast to the listener. From the increasing

Ear ● 51
intimacy that we are allowed with F as the work progresses, it is clear that
we are hearing what it is he hears; we are being allowed to access the interior
of his consciousness.
For Nancy, the first cry of the child is a birth in itself, the realization of
reflected sound, a moment of hearing oneself. He describes it as a “sudden
expansion of an echo chamber,” when a person “comes to himself by hear-
ing him self cry.”56 As well as the cassette recorder, the mirror, which F stares

into, and even the chamber itself are all hollow columns of reflected sound
and image. The mirror is a “small grey rectangle (same dimensions as cassette)
against larger rectangle (CSP, 253).” F, his body, his consciousness, is another
point of reflection and mediation. If Ghost Trio is read as monodrama, F is
the chamber through which all these perceptual moments resonate. In this
way, the small gray rectangles of the room mirror the small gray rectangle
that sits in the corner of the viewer’s living room. The television, the medium
through which we access this play, is itself another resonant chamber of
echoes, and the sound vibrates across the skin of the screen.
Laced through this system of sound, echo, and return is silence. It is
silence that permits a momentary definition. That silence is produced by the
female “presence” of the work, with the voice’s silences permitting action
to take place. She does not speak in conjunction with either the camera
movement or the movements of F. In this way, her silences leave space for
action. As Deleuze writes, F’s is a body caught between silences.57 He makes
reference to Beckett’s letter of 1937 to Axel Kaun:58 “All these parts plunge
into the void: the door opening onto an obscure corridor, [ . . . ] the window
looking out onto a rainy night, the pallet so flat as to display its own empti-
ness. So that the passage and succession of one part after another only serves
to connect or link up these unfathomable abysses.”59
Setting the Tone: Music Affecting Images

In mainstream film and television, music tends to follow image, with the
latter taking precedence. The role of music is usually to illustrate the action,
aid in building tension in a scene or sequence of scenes, and/or enhance the
ability of the actor to communicate emotion. Clearly, music’s place in Ghost
Trio and Nacht und Träume is by no means a decorative effect, or a pleasant
add-on, which serves to underscore the semantic content of the work. Music
acts as a force upon the image. It alters not only how it is perceived and
interpreted but also influences the formal arrangement of the image, and
how bodies and other kinetic elements will move through it.
Beckett’s “musical” arrangement of the geometric figures of door, window,
floor mirror that of the variations on a theme that occur in Beethoven’s music

(and music in general). In doing this, Michael Maier writes that “Beckett is
providing a late commentary on a basic aspect of his work, that is, his taste for
permutation.”60 Such deviations in musical pattern and the “surprise” on the
part of the listener have a necessary function within music and are part of the
affective response that a listener has to music. In Nacht und Träume, the rep-
etition with variation, which is an essential element of musical form, is easily
identifiable as the camera zooms in on the dreamt image in the second repeat.

Maier, applying this argument to Nacht und Träume also, notes how the play
is formally constructed out of two parts with only slight differences between
them. Difference is engineered by the camera: “The difference is brought
about by the camera zoom that, in the seconda volta, replaces the juxtaposi-
tion of dreamer and dreamt self by the identity of the dreamer and his inner
self. This zoom is Beckett’s way of combining repetition and modification,
in order to intensify the action and to diminish the distance between action
and onlooker.”61 In both Nacht und Träume and Ghost Trio music becomes,
as Eric Prieto remarks, rather than a vehicle for representation, a vital element
of the representation.62
While the soundscape of Nacht und Träume is relatively simple—only
three bars of the Lied are hummed, then sung—the soundscape of Ghost
Trio is somewhat less minimal. The work is divided into three sections:
Pre-action, Action, and Re-action. In the pre-action section, a disembod-
ied, acousmatic voice introduces us to the “familiar chamber” (CSP, 248).
She lists its attributes: window, door, pallet, floor, wall. Each of these is
represented in close-up by nothing more than a gray rectangle on a gray
background. The room is lit by a faint light for which, just like Voice herself,
there is “no visible source.” It leaches all color from the room; it is “all grey.”
For Maier it is this grayness that provides a background for the music to
emerge “all the more luminously.”63 In both pieces, music appears to break
the frame, to spill out of the image. In Ghost Trio, at first the music seems
to emerge from the tape recorder; only when the camera is near enough
to “hear” it, it ultimately swells to fill the whole room with the sound. In
Nacht und Träume the lips of the dreamer do not seem to move, the voice
that hums has no perceivable origin, and the advent of the music signals the
opening of a new frame, within the old.
The music in these plays is not in the business of semantic enhance-
ment, yet it is clearly a provocative phenomenon; it has emotive affects.
There is an accumulating body of knowledge and ongoing research that
links particular structures in music to human emotion. John Sloboda and
Patrick Juslin point out that there are peaks and troughs in musical pieces,
where test subjects are prone to correlative intensities of emotion. These
can be regarded as objectively observable and are intrinsically related to the

Ear ● 53
structure of music.64 Structures that deviate from the established norms of

tonal music, for example, syncopation, when the emphasis or accent falls
upon an unexpected beat, or appoggiatura, where a nonharmonic tone is
performed on the beat before resolving back into harmony, all create what
Leonard Meyer similarly describes as uncertainty in the music, and in the
mood of listener. This uncertainty is resolved when the music moves back
into harmonic or rhythmic predictability. He observes that “[t]he uncer-

tainty and lack of cognitive control created by intervening instability make
the return to mentally manageable patterns satisfying. In short, it is the
uncertainty-resolution process [ . . . ] not simply of melodic, rhythmic or
tonal pattern, that unifies the succession of emotional states presented in
a piece of music.”65 Whatever the difficulties in determining how and why
music evokes an emotional response in the listener, it is acceptable for the
protoemotions which Meyer examines to be taken as a reasonably predict-
able result of such musical structures, while bearing in mind the cultural
specificity of both music and listener.
In her exposition of all the elements that will come into play in the cham-
ber, V does not list the mirror and, midway through the action section,
when F sees his own reflection, she is surprised, or so the stage directions
tell us (CSP, 251). This suggests that F has violated the steady pattern that
runs from stool to door to window to pallet to mirror and back to stool, thus
deviating from the formal pattern that has been established. Such a devia-
tion is not the first. F’s presence, as “sole sign of life,” constitutes a deviation
from the stream of oblong shapes that emerge, just barely, from their gray
background. Although the gray figure is barely visible against the gray back-
ground, the close-up shots of F reveal an irregular human form, which is out
of step with the abstract forms of the space. His ragged hair in particular
reveals an embodied corporeality, which contrasts with the angular geom-
etry of the room. The irregularity of this body is in itself a deviation from
the formal patterning in the image.
Music in Nacht und Träume calls up the emotional image. It is not
only that the Schubert piece expresses, after the fact, the emotionality of
the play—an expression of longing, loss, and the desire for the comforts
of memory—but is also part of the mechanism that makes that emotion
and its imaging possible. In other words the music that is called upon by
the dreamer ushers in the emotion, and creates the image. The structural
consummation that occurs when a musical piece ends has already happened
in Nacht und Träume. As Deleuze puts it, “[M]usic, the sonorous image,
takes over from the visual image and opens up the emptiness or the silence
of the final end.”66 This later play, written in the last decade of the author’s
life, closer to life’s “structural consummation,” is a sounding out of a life’s

final notes. The structural conflict, which is still being worked through in
Ghost Trio, is no longer as evident here. In Ghost Trio, F listens to the largo
movement from Beethoven’s piano trio, known as the “Ghost.” The music
emanates from the cassette recorder on his lap. At the same time, his body
is tense with the anticipation for any sound of the woman he expects to
approach his chamber. The work was originally entitled Tryst, a title that
reveals the nature of the plot, such as it is, quite clearly—a figure waits for

someone, who never arrives. The work was eventually named Ghost Trio and
the promise of its “tryst” is never fulfilled.67 Nevertheless, its renaming cre-
ated a greater alliance with the musical piece. Music, silence, and the tense
vulnerability of the listening subject are vital elements in Ghost Trio.
The music of Nacht und Träume provides a frame of sorts, through which
an image of comfort appears. The action is minimal: a man sits at a table,
rests his head on his hands, we hear the last three bars of Schubert’s Lied of
the same name, in translation, Night and Dreams. The “evening light” coming
from a window behind the figure fades. The figure rests his head on his hands;
in the upper right-hand corner of this image we see his dreamt self appear.
Disembodied hands emerge out of the surrounding darkness to convey a cup
to the lips of the dreamt self, a cloth to his brow. All action is repeated with a
close-up on the dreamt self. Whether the hummed melody actually calls up
the vision or dream is not made clear, but the two are most definitely linked.
Sound can be considered in Ghost Trio, as in Eh Joe, to be an agent of
touch, provoking emotion. To listen to music is to be in a state of expecta-
tion, to be on the verge always of that consummation: actualized in the
return to the dominant tonic key, a return that is built into the structure of
tonal music. In Nacht und Träume, music precipitates a “touching image,”
manifest in both the emotive content of the music and the pair of hands
that tend to the dreamt self. In both of these plays, music acts as a thread
of emotional color running through an otherwise sparse and monochrome
environment, and reveals music’s haptic qualities.
“he will now think he hears her”: Structural

(Non)Consummation
There are elements in these two plays that do not add up to structural con-
summation, however. Endings are somewhat ambivalent, for example. In
Nacht und Träume music seems to hover at the limits between dreamer and
dreamt image, between fiction and reality, performing the role of harbinger
of the emotional event, while simultaneously resonating with that emotion.
Music, in this play, seems to precipitate a liminal, even virtual experience,
one that evokes also the barrier between life and death. The sense of ending,

Ear ● 55
of ostensible resolution, is emphasized in the play by its return to its domi-

nant key of B major. The song, expressing regret at the return of day, modu-
lates to the key of G major, only returning to its home key at the return
of night and sweet dreams. John Reed observes that the musical keys of B
minor and B major play a particular role in Schubert’s oeuvre. They “stand
at the ambivalent centre of Schubert’s emotional world.” Giving examples of
their use in Schubert’s body of songs, he points out that they represent what

may be called the passion (in every sense of that word) inherent in the human
condition. Physical and mental suffering (Der Leidende, Philoktet), loneli-
ness (Einsamkeit), alienation, and derangement (Der Doppelgänger, Die Liebe
Farbe)—these are all examples of the more commonly used minor mode.
Beckett, in his use of the Lied focuses specifically upon the final bars, where
the melody has returned to its dominant key, and the comfort of night and
dreams is imminent. Reed sees B major as standing for a “romantic obses-
sion with night and with dreams, and death and transfiguration.” Schubert’s
An den Tod and So last michscheinen are both examples of this. Many songs
associated with the idea of death move toward a climax in B major, as in
Grabliedfür die Mutter, Vormeiner Wiege, and An die untergehende, and
although Reed does not refer specifically to Nacht und Träume, the same
analysis could apply.68 Beckett evokes a sense of ending, death, and perhaps
transfiguration, yet, as with much of Beckett’s other work repetition implies
continual ending, rather than finality and death. As Laws argues, the music
has no more stability or status than that of the figure, voice, or action.69
The process of ending in Ghost Trio is interrupted many times. For
Herren, this play is permeated by fragmentation, as the boundaries between
perception from within the subject and perception from without begin to
break down. The camera moves from the objective point A, to the close-ups
and point-of-view shots that draw the viewer into a closer alliance with the
protagonist’s subjective experience.70 At the outset, the work obeys this prin-
ciple: the closer the camera comes to the protagonist, the louder the music
becomes. This is given its fullest effect in section III, where it is not that
the music has come to dominate the soundscape, rather we, as spectators/
auditors have become more attuned to the soundscape. When F opens the
window, we hear the crescendo and decrescendo creaks of the window and
door being opened and closed. We are permitted not only to come into
contact with the protagonist’s points of view, but also his points of audition.
Herren views this process as a struggle for control of the patterns of percep-
tion. Those point-of-view shots indicate that F comes to control what is seen
and heard. However, this argument is based on an assumption of conflict
between Voice and F, which, as I explore here, can be seen as the conflict
within musical structures, rather than dramatic tension.

Conflict in Nacht und Träume, with its almost meditational and quiet-
ist tone, may be found, as will be dealt with in more detail in the final
chapter, in the fissure that is created between reality and representation,
between presence and absence. F in Ghost is less a creative source than a
vague responder, moved by music. Conflict in Ghost Trio comes in the form
of dissonance between formal elements, rather than between dramatic char-
acters. This dissonance is part of how sound functions in the work.

Music, in both Nacht und Träume and Ghost Trio, is linked to absence,
though in differing ways. In the former, music signals the opening of the
dream image, where an unseen face and caring hands emerge from the dark-
ness to bring comfort; in the latter, music precipitates the expectation of
the arrival of the awaited woman. In fact, while in Nacht und Träume, the
music can be seen to drive the dream-image of comfort, thus facilitating
a reenactment of the presence of the absent one, in Ghost the figure must
divide his listening attention between the music and the expected knock of
the woman. Therefore, a distinction is set up in the psychic spaces of the
play between, on the one hand, the potential consolations of art, and, on the
other, echoes of desire for a lost loved one.
In the pre-action section, the voice commands the spectator’s attention;
she asks us to “tune accordingly” (CSP, 248), and rehearses, without any
movement from F, the pattern that he will follow. She shows us the “famil-
iar” objects of the chamber that F will visit: door, window, pallet, and asks us
to look closely at the background out of which these objects and ultimately
F will emerge: floor, wall, and, of course, the “specimen of dust” (CSP, 248–
249). When she introduces the figure seated on the stool, she also introduces
us to what Sloboda would call the stability or resting point: “Most compo-
sitional systems—like the tonal system, provide a set of dimensions that
establish psychological distance from a ‘home’ or ‘stability’ point. Proximity
to this point decreases tension, while departure from it increases tension.”71
F moves from here, because of what he thinks he hears, and returns to here,
in order to listen to the music. For Meyer, deviation from pattern in music
engineers uncertainty and ambiguity.72 However, such ambiguity can be
laced, as happens in music, into the overall structure. As Meyer puts it, often
in an aesthetic context regularity is devised in order that deviation might
occur. In a move that surprises the dispassionate voiceover, F regards him-
self in the mirror for five seconds. Voice emits an “Ah!,” indicating that this
action was not part of the pattern she predicted in her opening sequence.
The mirror, symbolizing self-awareness predicated on vision, as in Lacan’s
theory of the mirror-stage, is somehow misplaced here; subjectivity in this
play appears diminished. F mostly appears to be an automaton, moving
instinctively to a predictable pattern, which corresponds to that found in

Ear ● 57
music. The camera perceives the reflection of F in the mirror, and the voice
gasps. With subjective awareness rooted in the aural rather than the visual,
the moment of reflection, with F positioned between two specular instru-
ments, jars. Following this incident, Voice predicts accurately that F will
return to his opening pose. The familiarity of this pose means that the early
moment of uncertainty is abolished. Just as it functions in music, deviation
from pattern affirms that pattern, and offers the listener the pleasure of

return, resolution. The mirror is absorbed into the pattern in the re-action
section. In this section, actions 24–28 see the camera include the mirror
sequence. Dissonance, the slightly out-of-tune note, once repeated, becomes
a part of the overall structure.
In each moment immediately following his overture to the door and the
window, F is “irresolute.” Structural consummation only happens when he
settles back in his “opening pose,” crouched over his cassette recorder, and it
is at this point that music in the piece becomes audible—four times in all.
For Royal Browne, the anticipation of structural consummation in tonal
music can be utilized in film to create for the viewer expectations of par-
ticular outcomes.73 In this way tonal music can manipulate the predictions
made about narrative outcomes. F’s “irresolute” stance dramatizes the lack
of structural consummation, as if a dominant seventh chord, which pro-
duces in the listener the expectation of the advent of the dominant tonic
chord, is held without moving to the final chord and thereby ending the
phrase. The lack of structural consummation mimics the lack of romantic
consummation. The woman does not arrive and the uncertainty of action
is the same uncertainty that Meyer identifies. This is produced through
deviation from pattern and the resultant thwarting of expectation. The pat-
terning of expectation is most apparent in the sound of approaching feet in
the re-action section: “Faint sound of steps approaching. They stop. Faint
sound of knock on door. 5 seconds. Second knock, no louder. 5 seconds”
(CSP, 253). Such sounds suggest the long-awaited arrival of the woman,
but hopes are again dashed as, in her place, a small boy shakes his head and
returns to the darkness of the corridor. Yet this allows both the play and the
music to end. The instructions for the camera are as follows: “With growing
music move in slowly to close-up of head bowed right down over cassette now
held in arms and invisible. Hold till end of Largo” (CSP, 254). Thus the music
is associated with the nonarrival and absence of the awaited woman.
It cannot be assumed that music provides the protagonist of Ghost Trio
with some remedial comfort. As Bryden puts it, the consolatory aspect of
music is not guaranteed in Beckett’s work: “It is never a rapturous or trans-
formatory force. It may even be a source of suffering or melancholia in itself,
for, in its associative power, it affords a means of reliving a lost moment.”74

It is, in other words, a mechanism by which memory and imagination can

be activated. F’s smile at the end of the work follows the ending of the
Beethoven music. In this moment the shoulders that had been crouched
over the cassette recorder in that repeated pose relax, straighten. F looks
at the camera and smiles. Deleuze suggests that the message from the boy
is not an announcement that the woman will not come but is the “much
longed-for order to stop everything, everything being finally over.”75 In fact,

the figure’s response to the nonarrival of the awaited individual is ambigu-
ous. Perhaps he is relieved that no tryst has taken place, that the “other” is
done interfering with the satisfying return to listening.
The nonarrival allows F to return to the stool, to stillness, and allows
the coda of the music to finish: both give way to stillness and to silence. In
this way, the gaping holes of absence and silence, and the uncertainty they
produce, are written into the fabric of the work. If consolation is available, it
lies in the comfort of return, of an end to uncertainty and ambiguity, an end
that is tied, both here and in Nacht und Träume, to the presence of music.
The music that is heard in each play can be viewed as a revelation of some
inner conscious experience, an exteriorization perhaps of bodily desire. It is a
manifestation of the will, following Schopenhauer, who writes that “music is
a direct copy of the will itself and therefore exhibits itself as the metaphysical
to all that is physical in the world.”76 Christopher Janaway’s commentary on
the philosopher points to the bodily desires that are manifestations of the
will: “Whenever we undergo feelings of fear or desire, attraction or repul-
sion, whenever the body behaves according to the various unconscious func-
tions of nourishment, reproduction or survival, Schopenhauer discerns will
manifesting itself.”77 Thus it is the body itself that is will, more specifically,
it is a manifestation of the will to life. If the content of Schubert’s song can be
said to mirror in any way the content of the Beckett play, it is in the longing
that the song expresses, and which is manifested in the dream-vision of the
caring hands.
In neither play does the music provide an “explanation” of the content,
but is fittingly suffused with longing. For Schopenhauer, music does not
repeat or copy any idea of existence in the world. It is nonmimetic. Yet its
effect on human consciousness is a powerful one. It is a language that for
Schopenhauer expresses the will directly.78 In relation to the Schubert piece,
Reed observes how the romantic preoccupation with night, the unconscious,
mystery, and dreams are celebrated in Schubert’s Nacht und Träume: “[In
the] musical equivalent of the gibbous moons and moon-haunted landscapes
which permeated the imagination of Samuel Palmer and Caspar Friedrich,
the first deeply felt expression in music of that sense of mystery and the
infinite which heilige Nacht conjured up in the breast of every Romantic.”79

Ear ● 59
There is the sense then, of unverbalized, and perhaps unverbalizable content

within the work, an element of the piece that exceeds language.
In both Nacht und Träume and Ghost Trio, the images themselves are
indistinct, abstracted. As windows into the consciousness of the protago-
nists they fail to reveal a great deal. Regarding Nacht und Träume, Christina
Adamou considers the blurring of the dreamt image in the close-up as a
decomposition, something contrary to the conventional intent of the close-up

in film and on television. She comments that the dream, contrary to the
function of the dream in Freudian psychoanalysis, does not in fact offer a
window of interpretation into the play. Instead of accessing a symbolic net-
work by which to understand the hidden desires and anxieties of the subject,
“the dream plunges us into a cycle in which, in sealing one hole another is
opened.”80 For the viewer of Nacht und Träume, the dreamt image, which
appears in the corner of the screen, does not explain the play, nor the psy-
chology of the dreaming figure. It is not a transcendental moment in which
light is shed upon the action. Rather here, music and image operate in very
similar ways. For the dreamt image, even though it is loaded with signifiers,
ones that would impel interpretations, contains no narrative content. The
humming of the Lied and the hands emerging out of the darkness—of the
dreamer’s mind also—are expressions of the sentiment of longing. They do
this in a “language” that is beyond words. The image, like music in general,
is affective. It privileges emotion over plot development.
What both Nacht und Träume and Ghost Trio enact is the moment at
which the music is experienced by its listener. In Nacht und Träume this is
manifest in the dreamt image, in Ghost Trio, in the automatic movements
that station the figure at various points around the room. How music and
consciousness come into contact and how the listener is touched both physi-
ologically and emotionally by music is realized on the skin of the screen. The
screen of the television set in these plays acts as an internal surface, where the
interplay of memory and music is dramatized.
Sound on the Skin of the Film

Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Träume demonstrate the touch of sound,
from the cognitive impact and representational capacity of voice with words,
to the culturally coded response to music, to the visceral, affective response
that sound as resonance produces. These plays image listening; they attempt
to visualize the moment at which sound touches bodies. Some of these
sounds can wound, bringing with them the violence of guilt and memory,
others can bring comfort, at the same time as evoking the intensity of loss
and absence.

Each of these plays reveal the vibrating impact of sound as it passes

through the subject’s consciousness, carrying with it memory, emotion, and
loss. Dramatizing the haptic experience of listening, a phenomenology of
voice and music, these plays dramatize the limit, the line where music and
embodied consciousness come into contact, the place where sound is given
meaning. They image also the experience of sound’s absence, in the silent
figures that hover at the edges of awareness, emphatically, as in the unful-

filled tryst of Ghost Trio, never arriving, and in the voiceless, faceless hands
that offer comfort in Nacht und Träume. In this sense, sound operates as the
skin or film that lies between the self of the present and the self of the past;
its touch activates memory and desire.
As well as imaging the effect of sound on the embodied subject, at a
formal level, these plays also dramatize the effect of sound on the skin of
the screen. Stretched taut like a drum-skin, the image resonates and vibrates
in response to sound: in the tense listening visage of Joe and the crouched
intensity of F, wrapped bodily around his tape recorder. While in Eh Joe
these vibrations etch meaning in the form of narrative onto the image, in
Ghost Trio the kinesis of the image follows the structural pattern of the
music. In Nacht und Träume the hands express something of the music itself,
they touch and bring solace and comfort. In terms of this film’s “skin,” the
music opens a hole in its surface, which permits the dreamt image to come
to be. Read this way, music bores a hole not only in the surface of the screen,
but also by implication in the surface of the mind. Collapsing the physi-
ological and the aesthetic, the screen of the mind vibrates at the touch of
sound.

CHAPTER 3

Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing
Words Making Flesh Making Words

While the preceding chapter examined the importance of listening for
Beckett’s figures, here the focus is on the speech act itself and the orifice that
enables it. This chapter will be attuned to the limit and tension between
inner and outer as imaged in the tacky, productive orifice of the mouth.
Sticky, tacky contortions of this organ produce speech and speech attempts
to make sense of the self, of the body, of the surrounding material world.
The organs of speech are paramount in Not I: the lips, the teeth, the vibrat-
ing folds of the throat, saliva, tongue, and all the contortions, as the mouth
of that play puts it, without which no speech would be possible (CSP, 219).
The hollow internal spaces of Nancy’s resonant subject1 are realized by the
opening of the mouth, which “can resume and revive resonance.”2 The
organs of speech—lips, teeth, tongue, and vocal folds—are tacky: red, wet,
erotic, in contrast to the invisible and impalpable sonorous vibrations it
produces. These vibrations, as Adriana Cavarero puts it, are “as colourless
as the air, com[ing] out of a wet mouth and aris[ing] from the red of the
flesh.3
Discourse meets flesh in this organ, as speech emerges from the vibrat-
ing, fluttering folds of the throat. From Barthes: “[T]he materiality of the
body that springs from the throat” and “the voice, which is the bodily
aspect of speaking, is situated in the articulation of the body and of dis-
course” at the point where they cross over.4 In the mouth, the intangible
and the material are to be found contained in the same breath, as it were.
The mouth is the visible site of contact between this intangible voice and
material body.

In A Piece of Monologue the emergence of words from the mouth is

figured as a “birth,” implying without visualizing the tackiness and flu-
idity of that organ. In the act of birthing words, the body converts, as
Merleau-Ponty puts it, “a certain motor essence into vocal form,”5 at the
same time as revealing anxieties about such automatic and uncontrollable
physical actions, or contortions. The mouth is a site of linkage between the
social/cultural and the biological; the place in which we begin to articulate

ourselves to ourselves and to those around us, to say “I am.” What terror it
produces when this speaking, this self-articulation appears to be no longer
under one’s control: Not I dramatizes this fear. In That Time, a similarly
bodiless head listens as voices, emerging from beyond the limits of the
stage space, layer together the details of his life in a concerto of linguisti-
cally drawn images, while in A Piece of Monologue, a figure speaks from a
nearly bare set, describing actions that read as stage directions. Yet he too
is motionless throughout. Nothing stirs the stage but language. Visually,
kinetically, these plays are sparse, almost static. Yet each of them shares
a structural dialogue between their visual and verbal elements. Exploring
how sound and image, text and performance, and language and the mate-
rial body come into contact, their action occurs along the haptic inter-
face between these elements. The figure of the mouth acts as a metaphor
for this.
Not I is a hole within the frame of the theatrical image; a hole within
a hole, the end of vision, defying perspective. A Piece of Monologue is con-
cerned with lips—the edges of the mouth, the edges of the grave, and the
limits of representation, and, while That Time does not refer specifically
to mouths or lips, it shares with the other two plays a meditation on the
ekphrastic relationship between sound and image that Beckett explores in
much of his work, whereby a static image is rendered fluid via words, spoken
into time. As McMullan puts it, Beckett’s “increasing use of monologue in
the stage drama exploits the power of textually invoked vision to displace or
destabilize the spectator’s perception of the present visual scene and material
body on stage.”6
There are two threads interweaving throughout this chapter. One deals
with the physiology of mouth, its carnality, and embodiment. Yet the mouth
must also be seen as an aesthetic entity, a hole in the image, with lips as a
frame around a productive void. Haptic becomes an issue of limits, edges,
dramatized through the mouth. How does sound touch image, and vice
versa? How do language and the material body come into contact? Haptic
refers, in this context, to the ways in which language and the material body
contaminate each other, or else fail to touch at all. These plays dramatize the

Mouth ● 63
interface between body and language, revealing, via the figure of the mouth,
the limits of the body (at the lips of the grave) and the limits of language (at
the lips of the mouth).
“ . . . into this world . . . ”: Speaking of the body in Not I

In Not I, a lone and disembodied mouth situated eight feet above stage level

disgorges a torrent of words while a djellaba-clad Auditor, “sex indetermi-
nate,” listens. The only actions to accompany this listening are four gestures
of “helpless compassion” (CSP, 215). Through the fragmented narrative,
which tumbles from the mouth, is revealed the story of a woman who may
or may not be the owner of the babbling mouth—it never claims ownership;
a life lived almost mute, on the margins of society. Not I is the mouth of
the darkness itself, the mouth of the stage space. With the actor’s face com-
pletely obscured, only a small spotlight illuminates the mouth; the “godfor-
saken hole” of the void is given a voice. This inverts the idea of the stage as
empty space, where characters’ narratives are “played out”; the space itself is
speaking in this play.
From “tiny little thing” to aged woman, the woman, which Mouth
describes and which may or not be herself, is a waif, flotsam. Born prema-
turely, she is neglected by both parents: “parents unknown . . . unheard of . . . he
having vanished . . . thin air . . . no sooner buttoned up his breeches . . . she
similarly . . . eight months later” (CSP, 216). The fragmented story of this
woman’s life is interwoven with the mouth’s attempt to express the experi-
ence of speaking itself. “Out” is the first audible word that Mouth utters,
and it expresses performatively both the birth of the waif whose life she
narrates and the emergence of the word, of speech from between the lips, as
Brunhilde Boyce puts it, giving birth to herself through speech.7
Any evocation of embodiment in Not I emphasizes fragmentation and
disconnection. Even though it might be assumed that the body of the woman
so described is the body to which Mouth belongs, Mouth still refuses to
take possession of it. When interrupted by an inaudible voice, which seems
to demand corrections to her narrative, she refuses to admit that it is “I”
that she describes. Indeed, at the outset, she refuses even to assign a gender
to the creature she describes, until this information is demanded of her:
“out . . . into this world . . . this world . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time . . . in
a godfor— . . . what? . . . girl?” (CSP, 216). A question mark accompanies this
admission, as if the mouth is unsure.
The body of the woman is described in mechanical terms, establish-
ing an impersonal distance between the speaker and the spoken: “likely

the machine . . . so disconnected . . . never got the message . . . or powerless to

respond . . . like numbed . . . couldn’t make the sound” (CSP, 218). Bryden
has noted the implications of such a disconnection between the body and
the speaking subject. The body is “experienced as if automatically and
inexplicably energised from a controlling source without, of inaccessible
origin.”8 This disconnection reveals a tension, an anxiety about the invol-
untariness of certain bodily functions; the body itself poses a threat to the

autonomy of its “owner.” The muscular contractions of birth are conflated
with the “contortions without which . . . no speech possible” (CSP, 219), and
speech itself is associated with abject bodily fluids: excrement, menstrual
blood. As well as drawing our attention to the tacky materiality of speech
production, Mouth’s acts of speech are ones that articulate both the inse-
curity of an embodied experience, and a disownment of that problematic
body.
Although Not I may be read as an image of a human under the duress
of torture or in the aftermath of torture,9 or having experienced some sort
of physically painful or challenging ordeal, whether it be illness or attack, it
is difficult to assess Mouth’s present experience in terms of such pain. She
appears to be impelled to speak and compelled to correct, yet she informs
us that the “she” of the narrative is not in fact suffering, “indeed could
not remember . . . off-hand . . . when she had suffered less . . . ” (CSP, 217). For
it would appear that the social exclusion caused by her inability to speak
resulted in far greater suffering than the discomfort she is experiencing now.
In fact, the body is presented not as a thing suffering (though such suffer-
ing is certainly implied), but rather as an experience of radical alienation.
For instance, we are given an image of the woman crying: “sitting staring
at her hand . . . there in her lap . . . palm upward . . . suddenly saw it wet . . . the
palm . . . tears presumably . . . hers presumably . . . no one else for miles” (CSP,
220). The disconnection between speaking mouth and spoken body is fur-
ther affirmed by the experience of speaking for the first time in her life.
When words do come “she” is unsure if they are really hers, if this is really
her voice. She tries to convince herself that this unfamiliar phenomenon
belongs to someone else: “till she began trying to . . . delude herself . . . it was
not hers at all . . . not her voice at all” (CSP, 219). She has “no idea what
she was saying . . . imagine!” (CSP, 219). Even though the voice has a visible
source, the source is still not an identifiable person or subject. The possibil-
ity of unity, of identity under the pronominal “I,” is again and again refuted
by Mouth. Anxiety over reproductive processes, muscular contractions over
which no control is possible, means that Not I addresses the question of
where the line is drawn between body and mind or spirit, as well as how
these entities come into touch.

Mouth ● 65
“ . . . into this world . . . ”: Bodily Intrusions

There is uneasiness about where the limits are to be found between the
body and the world; just how much does the world imprint upon and
disrupt the body-subject? Collapsed in a field on a sunny April morn-
ing, the body of the old woman is “like gone”; neither fully there nor
fully gone. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is the very medium for having a

world, and he speaks, in The Visible and the Invisible, of the impossibility
of adequately defining the line that divides body-subject from the world.
He asks, “[W]here are we to put the limit between the body and the world,
since the world is flesh? [ . . . ] There is a reciprocal insertion and intertwin-
ing of one with the other.”10 This in-touchness of the body and world is
one that is revealed, in spite of the apparent lack of body, throughout Not
I. That no body is presented mimetically does not mean that the body is
entirely absent, but is rather constructed discursively and it is possible to
piece together the life-narrative of a woman who has lived, speechless and
rejected, on the margins of society all her life. Yet the description of bodily
experiences that Mouth is currently undergoing are focused mainly on the
act of speaking: “all those contortions without which . . . no speech possible.”
This is imaged as a physical process; speech contorts the muscles of the
mouth, and affects all the surrounding muscle structures: “her lips mov-
ing . . . imagine! . . . her lips moving! . . . as of course till then she had not . . . and
not alone the lips . . . the cheeks . . . the jaws . . . the whole face” (CSP, 219).
Although the “whole body” is not present, it is only almost or “like gone.”
On that April morning in Croker’s Acres, as darkness overtakes “her,” she
finds herself “not entirely insentient.” Her present physical experiences are
intense, visceral. She is in the dark but can still hear buzzing; she can see
a light that ferrets around: “and a ray of light came and went . . . came and
went . . . such as the moon might cast . . . drifting . . . in and out of cloud”
(CSP, 217). Yet she is distanced from the body she describes, and cannot
discern what “position she was in,” whether standing, sitting, or kneeling.
For Gordon Armstrong, “This steady stream of words, vowels, glottal stops,
truncated phrases, and broken syntax that she tries to deny are affirmed
each moment by her sense of her lips and tongue moving. Not I is a reversal
of the Cartesian ethic, not cogito ergo sum but the ‘machine’: ‘I feel there-
fore I am.’”11 Though the body is negated in Not I, the potential that the act
of negation has to engineer its opposite is exploited consistently by Beckett.
Instead of aligning woman with negation or absence, Beckett, Bryden
writes, “imbu[es] his textual/theatrical practice with multi-operational and
multi-zonal negativity,” thus “resisting the notion of gap or nothingness.”
The negation contained in the title, and the refusals and resistances that

pepper the text, demonstrate this effectively. Negation, she writes, has a ten-
dency to assert what it cancels.12
Mouth, contorted in the act of utterance, is a concentrated representation
of the physical point at which materiality and language meet, the site of their
intertwining, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term. The body of Mouth’s narrative
is one that is beset by involuntary reflexes, such as the blinking of the eye-
lids: “the eyelids . . . presumably . . . on and off . . . shut out the light . . . reflex

they call it . . . no feeling of any kind” (CSP, 218). Speech is described in
similar terms. The words describe both the emergence of words as an event
that has happened to this woman, and constitute at the same time a perfor-
mance of that event with all its involuntariness and fragmentation. Aligning
words with the reflexive movement of eyelids, the eruptive, uncontrolled
effusion of bodily liquids, also aligns them with the body, as she realizes
that “words were coming . . . imagine! . . . words were coming . . . a voice she
did not recognize at first so long since it had sounded” (CSP, 219). Even her
voice is a detached thing, something other, something alien and over which
she appears to have little control. Mouth visualizes the unstable site where,
as Judith Butler puts it, “the materiality of language and that of the world
which it seeks to signify are perpetually negotiated.”13
There is something horrific about Mouth’s speech. Refusing as it does to
obey the rules of conventional discourse, it can be viewed as a performance
of something prohibited, something forbidden. It uncovers an uncomfort-
able alliance between speech and excretion. Mouth’s “urge to tell” and
her dash to the nearest lavatory implies a slippage between the mouth and
anus, voice and waste: “sudden urge to . . . tell . . . then rush out stop the first
she saw . . . nearest lavatory . . . start pouring it out . . . steady stream” (CSP,
222). Language here is not necessarily a product of rational thought and
free will. Maude identifies a fascination in Beckett’s writing displays with
motility, which is either forced upon the characters, as in Murphy, or pre-
vented through the maiming of the body, for example, in Molloy. These
involuntary movements cast doubt on philosophical premises of motility
and intentionality, and present the body as inherently deviant, thus put-
ting into question “notions of sovereign subjectivity.”14 Maude raises the
issue of Tourette’s syndrome where, as neuroscientist David Eagleman puts
it, complex and sophisticated actions can occur in the absence of any sign
of free will or rational decision-making.15 The vocal tics associated with
this syndrome have similarities to Mouth’s “coprolalic” discourse that are
quite revealing. Howard Kushner and Kate Brown, in their work on the
poetics of tourettic and involuntary language, articulate the paradox inher-
ent in acts of coprolalia. They write that although Tourettic eruptions seem
automatic, coprolalia as an example of prohibited speech retains a quality

Mouth ● 67
of discrimination or context that is not usually associated with automatic

behaviors.16 The “automatic” eruptions of this nature are always appropri-
ately inappropriate. For instance, researchers have found that coprolalia in
Japanese culture takes on the form of a change in pitch and tone of voice,
which is still considered as obscene and inappropriate as cursing and/or
insults in other cultures. The conclusion the authors draw is that coprolalia
exposes particular cultural norms by breaching them, suggesting that “it is

as if the coprolalic is spoken by cultural prohibition.”17
Such performances of prohibitions expose the extent to which the mate-
rial body is immersed in, and in touch with, its surrounding cultural worlds,
as well as the ways in which emotion, cognition, and corporeal systems for
motor control are intimately tied together. One of the implications of this
is that it is difficult to think of a pure corporeality, beyond the reach of
language—something with which Butler would concur. She writes, “It is
not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in
and of itself, rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a
signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material.”18
The body, for Butler, is not a pure entity, beyond culture; it proves itself to
have both reiterative and disruptive capabilities. Such capabilities are per-
haps visible in the eruptive narrative of Not I. That alignment of the words
with bodily seepage, with all the involuntariness and inappropriateness it
entails, makes Mouth’s performance an affront—to sense, convention, and
taste. The opening word “out” expresses exactly that moment when volition
and the will are overtaken by the demands of the body: birth, excretion, and
now in the same category, speech.
Haptics, Gender, and Aesthetics

The speech of Mouth is spoken in such a frenzy that it operates at the very
limits of meaningfulness, as Beckett told actress Jessica Tandy, “I hope the
piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect.”19 Like
the eruptive maledictions of the tourettic speaker, this speech exposes both
the corporeal source of the word as well as the embeddedness of that corpo-
real source in discourse. The disobedient body is revealed in several ways.
It is visible in both the involuntary reflexes that Mouth describes and the
ways in which the body performs prohibitions. Language and materiality
are thus linked in deeply complex ways. For in Judith Butler’s view of this
relation we cannot talk of a “pure body,” which exists prior to language,
for whenever we speak of a body we engage in further discursive formation
of that body.20 The in-touchness of the body with the world and its con-
stant reformation via language is revealed by Not I ’s out-of-control narrative.

The body in question cannot be thought of as “pure body” nor “mute con-
tainer,” but must be considered in relation to the challenge it poses to those
sense-making faculties that surround it. The brain attempts to make sense,
yet its efforts to piece together this scattered effusion are in vain:
[A]nd the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain . . . beg-
ging the mouth to stop . . . pause a moment . . . if only for a moment . . . and

no response . . . as if it hadn’t heard . . . or couldn’t . . . couldn’t pause a sec-
ond . . . like maddened . . . all that together . . . straining to hear . . . piece it
together . . . and the brain . . . raving away on its own . . . trying to make
sense of it . . . or make it stop. (CSP, 220)
It does seem, however, somewhat contrary to a purely social constructiv-

ist position on the body that there exists in Not I a body beyond reach.
A fundamental disconnection has occurred between body as matter and
brain/mind as sense-making faculty, and the mouth will never be able
to tell “it all.” While Butler might argue that there is no “body” outside
discourse, Beckett’s work does seem to hint constantly at matter that lies
beyond the reach of language and sense. This disconnection is visible
in the scream Mouth emits. Face down in the grass in Croker’s Acres,
Mouth “[Screams.] . . . then listens . . . [Silence.] . . . scream again . . . [Screams
again.] . . . then listen again . . . [Silence.]” (CSP, 218); each time, the sound is
punctuated by a verbal description of her listening to herself. The visceral
scream can also refer to that moment of sonic and resonant self-awareness,
the elementary narcissism of which Mladen Dolar writes.21 Like the child’s
first cry, the immediate effect of the acoustic mirror stage is the spiraling
of the self into permanent decenteredness, the state of alienation of the self,
in which the self becomes the “not I.” As well as affirming the disjunction
between the verbose mouth and the supposedly mute body, Mouth’s scream
also brings to its apotheosis the stress that language has come under through-
out the text. With parallels drawn between this scream, the birth-cry, which
was “just to get her going,” and the reflexive actions such as breathing, the
material source of language is asserted, while at the same time the notion of
language as a product of rational, volitional thought is undermined.
Pointing out the slippage between the orifices of the female—mouth,
vagina, and anus—threatens to devalue femininity as “dirty,” as abject.
However, Auditor, and by implication the audience, performs the role of
waiting ear. Mouth’s “urge to tell” and her dash to the nearest lavatory
implies a similar slippage between the listening ear and a place for ridding
oneself of waste. A parallel is drawn between the listening ear and the toi-
let bowl. For Mouth, the impulse to speech is also an impulse to be heard

Mouth ● 69
and any ear will do. In terms of gender dynamics, the exchange that takes
place between mouth and listener can be viewed to assert the (masculine)
empowerment of the watching/listening audience, as opposed to the flut-
tering, babbling, disempowered mouth. Kathleen O’Gorman identifies the
empowered male gaze as a characteristic of both the auditor and by implica-
tion the audience: “Mouth can do nothing to disperse the gaze of Auditor/
audience fixed on her, and Auditor’s positioning, ‘intent on Mouth’ pre-

cludes any such gesture on Auditor’s part. The structures of vision in Not
I allow only for the masculine gaze; they admit of no dispersal and align
themselves with power.”22 Mouth’s disempowerment is evident; however,
two things are significant here. One is the tendency on the part of critics
to read the auditor as masculine, thereby reiterating preconceived notions
of gendered power relations.23 The other is that there is a parallel drawn in
the play between the lavatory and listening ear. If those who listen are to
be compared with a lavatory, the comparison is hardly complimentary. The
supposedly empowered “masculine” gaze is configured as a passive, recep-
tive orifice, as listening organ and a hole. The toilet is a container for fecal
matter, a mode of sanitizing the excesses of the body, of removing dirt from
within our living spaces. “[S]he’ll be purged” draws direct allusion between
this process of sanitization and the language Mouth produces. Listening is
as much a part of this excremental process as is speech, and could possibly
be read as a parody of a religious rite of purification. It could also be seen as
a parody of the relationship between the analyst and analysand.
Before Mouth’s eruption can be perceived as some cathartic process in
which linguistic constipation is now being relieved, it must be remembered
that this is not a finished process. Mouth began before the curtain went up
and continues after it is lowered. The production that she is engaged in is
by no means finished or resolved; a fact further evinced by the inability of
Mouth, in the fourth section, to find that correct or necessary story, the one
that will make sense of it all. Mouth seems to defy the notion that a single
story will be found to explain her past life or her present circumstances.
Drawing on Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that Western culture
has “inscribed woman’s corporeality as mode of seepage” and a threat to
order. It is in the representations of female corporeality that such inscrip-
tions have taken place. She suggests that while there are little differences
in the solidity of bodies across the genders, women have been represented
as prone to liquidity.24 The unfocused wanderings of the woman arguably
exemplify this. This halting, uncontrolled rhythm of her body is mirrored
in the fragmented rhythm of the spoken text, as she, having internalized this
notion, represents her movements thus: “[A] few steps then stop . . . stare into
space . . . then on . . . a few more . . . stop and stare again . . . so on . . . drifting

around . . . day after day” (CSP, 216). The supposedly uncontrolled liquidity
of the female body is present also in the tears she sheds, and in the words
that come tumbling out of her, apparently without volition.
Perhaps with Not I Beckett reasserts the association of female corpore-
ality with seepage, and waste. Yet it is possible to discover this dissocia-
tion of the body, as something other, which happens to one, in the male
figures of Beckett’s works also. In her discussion of Beckett’s fascination

with the “integrity of the body thought,”25 Marina Warner quotes a letter
the author wrote to Thomas MacGreevy in 1932, in which he writes of his
dislike for the work of Mallarmé: “I’m in mourning for the integrity of a
pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine &
sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the
brain knows of grit in the wind.”26 This fascination then with the invol-
untary activity of the body, operating without the intervention of rational,
conscious decision-making runs right through Beckett’s work and afflicts
both male and female figures. Eagleman calls these physiological and neu-
rological subroutines, “to which we have no access and of which we have no
acquaintance,” “zombie systems.”27 Whether instinctual or present within
us out of habit, they produce in the subject a sense of estrangement from
this body-beyond-consciousness. Beckett exemplifies these “zombie sys-
tems” perhaps most famously in Godot : Vladimir’s suggests that one of the
benefits of he and Estragon hanging themselves would be the resulting erec-
tion.28 The male figures of the earlier works experience the disruption of the
“body’s thought.” For example, Vladimir’s prostate trouble in Waiting for
Godot or Hamm’s need to urinate in Endgame are bodily “facts” that intrude
onto the playing space, emphasizing the corporealities of the figures.
The “wordshit”29 that Mouth produces emphasizes both the disruptive
effects the body, either male or female, can have upon discourse. Mouth
demonstrates the “in-touchness” of the body with the world, here it erupts,
but that eruption does not come from some prediscursive, prelinguistic site.
The body is not a passive ground (and neither is the stage space)—the force
of Mouth’s speech vehemently asserts this.
The eruption of the body into language demonstrates both its embedded-
ness in that discursive order and its reiterative, but potentially generative and
transformative capabilities. For Johanna Oksala, Merleau-Ponty’s lived body
“is not a surface or a site on which psychic meanings are played out. Neither
is it a mute container of subjectivity. The body-subject is constitutive in the
sense of being generative of meanings that are preconscious and precon-
ceptual: subjectivity means embodied capacity to respond to the existing
norms.”30 The lived body then becomes a fundamentally indeterminate and
incomplete entity, which continuously materializes different social norms;

Mouth ● 71
it reiterates them but always through its individual style. It is not a replica
or a carbon copy of a preestablished normativity, but rather materializes an
individual style of being.31 In spite of—or perhaps because of—its disruptive
capacities there are certain forces at work, which would “make sense” of this
body. The inaudible voice, which we can assume interrupts her word-stream
22 times throughout the work, appears intent on maintaining truth, exac-
titude, and certainty. There appears to be an imperative issuing from this

inaudible voice for the life of this woman to be made meaningful—just as
the time she found herself in court, when the judge demands that she “speak
up,” voice herself, explain herself. On the one hand, the performance of Not
I constitutes a reiteration of representations of femininity as seepage, irratio-
nality, and disturbance to order. Yet, on the other hand, the very disruptive-
ness of the work serves as a challenge to thought systems that represent the
body and particularly the female body as a natural, passive ground. Not I
can be viewed to be about the impulse to make matter meaningful, and the
disruptive effect of matter on meaning and language.
The stage image itself defies the conventions of staging and image con-
struction: A tiny mouth flickering in the darkness while a faintly lit Auditor
listens on. The effect is dizzying—for both performer and spectator—as a
tiny mouth emerges from the background, the ground of the image, and
the only visualized figure on stage, the Auditor, remains silent. Hanna
Scolnicov describes it as a “radical experiment” in abolishing theatrical
space; the “complete darkness of the stage stipulated by Beckett for the per-
formance of Not I destroys any perception of space.”32 Perspective, involving
the hierarchal ordering of perception, becomes distorted as the background
of the image dominates the scenic space: it is the background that speaks,
the invisible dark given a voice. Like the later Footfalls and Rockaby, also
written in the 1970s, the dark, invisible flesh becomes a speaking entity; it
can bypass the so-called rational, cognitive faculties that attempt to frame
it, exposing an empty “centre” where the line—the place where the body
meets the world—is bared. One interesting way to consider Not I is through
a connection with ideas on theatrical mimesis. Elin Diamond’s commentary
is apt here, as she thinks through theater’s dual potential for the disrup-
tion or confirmation of limiting social rules in relation to gender, desire,
and otherness. Theater, she writes, can be understood as “drama’s unruly
body, its material other, a site where the performer’s and spectator’s desire
may resignify elements of a constrictive social script,” while it can also be
understood as a space for confirming the normative, presenting representa-
tion as truth.33 Following Diamond’s line of argument, Not I could be con-
nected to Luce Irigaray’s “womb-theater,” in which the feminist philosopher
engages in a deconstructive reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Mouth’s

performance, instead of shadows and lies flickering across the wall of the
cave/stage is a productive, disruptive performance that, in its metatheatrical
intent, defies notions of authenticity, origins, and the possibility of truth. As
Diamond puts it, for Irigarary “representation itself is originary; the womb
opens and delivers . . . fake offspring.”34
When at the outset of this study I discussed the applications of the term
“haptic” in art and cinema, a dominant theme in many critical approaches

was shown to be the way in which the figure-ground relationship is manipu-
lated within specific artistic frameworks. For example, the inversion of the
priority of figure over ground in the bas relief that Riegl describes led him
to name this type of flatness in classical art as haptic, thus offering to the
discipline of aesthetics a key term to describe flatness in an image.35 Laura
Marks perceives the appropriation of flatness and texture as a political strategy
among the video artists whose work she examines.36 Not I flattens theatrical
space in exactly this way, rendering it into a bas relief rather than a perspec-
tival image. The fact that the voice in Not I is feminine is significant and
points to an association between woman and ground/space that will be fur-
ther elucidated in chapter four. That Beckett gives a voice to the (feminized)
darkness of the stage, to the ground of the image, disrupts both the con-
ventional organization of stage space and the gender dynamic that it stands
for—at least historically. As with Film, the hierarchy implied by the rules of
perspective is diminished and we are left with a curious flatness of image: a
haptic aesthetic. It is possible to see how this hapticity can be utilized, on the
one hand, to engage in a feminist reading of the play, and, on the other, to
think through the ways in which multiple sets of binaries are held in tension:
the inner and outer, the ground and the figure, word and flesh, male and
female, in and through the image of the mouth of the stage.
At the Lips of the Image: A Piece of Monologue

Similarly to Not I, A Piece of Monologue emphasizes the material birth of
words. A speaker stands still on stage for the duration of the piece, describ-
ing actions that, for the most part, do not take place, as well as describing
the experience of speaking itself: “stands there staring beyond waiting for the
first word. It gathers in his mouth. Birth” (CSP, 268). This play, written in
the 1970s, addresses the relationship between the material body and the lan-
guage it produces, realized on stage through the separation and intertwin-
ing of text and performance, sound and image, voice and body, and, as in
Not I, the mouth provides a metaphorical backdrop on which these relation-
ships hinge. This play exemplifies Beckett’s exploration of the relationship
between linguistic and visual representation with the mouth functioning as

Mouth ● 73
the meeting point of these two elements. But in this case it is the lips that
feature most strongly. The act of speaking distorts the shape of the mouth,
“Birth. Parts lips and thrusts tongue between them” (CSP, 268), in a way
that is reminiscent of the erotics of vocal production in Eh Joe, where the
voice suggests “say ‘Joe’ it parts the lips . . . ” (CSP, 206). A Piece of Monologue
addresses the ways in which language, as voice, forms and reforms image
and body—literally so in those “contortions” required for speech. In other

words, it explores, as Eh Joe does, the point at which representation, and
specifically language, touches the material body. Replete with static images,
virtually no dramatic action, with fragmented bodies and nonlinear stories,
A Piece goes to the very edge of what is possible dramatically; “reducing
theater,” as McMullan puts it, “to the point where it hardly seems to be tak-
ing place at all.”37 The visual aesthetic is sparse and monochromatic. The
only visible elements—the hair, nightgown, socks, lamp—all glow faintly
beneath the stage lights (CSP, 265). A pallet is also visible, just barely. As in
Not I, this chiaroscuro effect sees the darkness, the invisible, taking on a role
in the work. Inverting the figure-ground dyad, negative space—the space of
silence as much as darkness—becomes, as in a bas relief, a potent site out of
which these details emerge.
At times, the text of A Piece of Monologue seems to be describing the
stage image: “Hair white to take faint light. Foot of pallet just visible edge
of frame” (CSP, 267). However, this hint of a match-up between text and
image serves ultimately to enhance the distance between them, when noth-
ing else the speaker refers to occurs in the image and the tension of the play
lies in this mismatch.38 The speaker of A Piece describes the wall as at one
time covered with pictures of, “he all but said of loved ones. Unframed.
Unglazed. Pinned to wall with drawing pins. All shapes and sizes. Down
one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered. Strewn all over the
floor” (CSP, 266). The static (stage) image comes into contact with the flu-
idity of words. When the speaker appears to be describing the stage space,
we see his descriptions convey a sense of linguistic immediacy in description;
he speaks in the present tense and appears to generate coherence between
word and image: “Still as the lamp by his side. Gown and socks white to
take faint light. Once white. Hair white to take faint light. Foot of pallet
just visible edge of frame. Once white to take faint light. Stands there star-
ing beyond. Nothing. Empty dark” (CSP, 267). In stillness, words come to
rest alongside the image for a few moments, but there is then a shift in the
next line to give the impression that the “action” of the play repeats itself
continually: “Till first word always the same. Night after night the same.
Birth. Then slow fade up of a faint form. Out of the dark” (CSP, 267). At
certain key points, words begin to deviate from the image: “Loose matches

in right-hand pocket. Strikes one on his buttock the way his father taught
him. Takes off milk white globe and sets it down. Match goes out. Strikes a
second as before. Takes off chimney. Smoke-clouded. Holds it in left hand”
(CSP, 266). It is immediate and in the present tense, but fails to match the
stillness of the image. It injects rather a dynamism into the image, almost
making it move and any dramatic tension in the play is generated by this
dehiscence between image and spoken text. The “schism” that occurs in

this play and in That Time (later), between differing aspects of the self,39 is
manifested on stage in the increasing and decreasing gap between sound and
image, text and performance, language and body.
Mouth as Frame: At the Limits of Vision

A Piece of Monologue is replete with frames of one sort or another. We learn
from the stage directions that the speaker is positioned at “edge of light”
(CSP, 268, 267). He describes the scene on stage, “Foot of pallet just vis-
ible edge of frame” (CSP, 267), and the stage imagery is framed by and
through words. This scene creation, this framing, draws the spectator’s gaze,
whether that gaze is the inward gaze of the imagination or not, toward not
only the image, but also the frame itself. Objects seem just about to leave
its encircling aura of perceptual attention: “Dark parts. Grey light. Rain
pelting. Streaming umbrellas. Ditch. Bubbling black mud. Coffin out of
frame. Whose? Fade. Gone. Move on to other matters. Try to move on. To
other matters” (CSP, 268). To frame something is to create limits around
an object, limits that call attention to that object as something different
from the world around it. The frame, as Jacques Aumont writes, acts as an
isolator.40 The effect is intensified in figurative art as the frame “becomes
like an opening which gives access to the imaginary world, to the diegesis
figured by the image.”41 It is through the frame that the image—in this case
the painting—becomes meaningful, readable, interpretable. In this way,
limits produce interpretation. The frame is responsible for generating and
manipulating the perceptual encounter with the art object, as José Ortega
y Gasset writes:
In order to isolate one thing from another, a third thing is needed which
must be neither like the first nor the second—a neutral object. Now, the
frame is not the wall, a merely utilitarian fragment of the real world; but
neither is it quite the enchanted surface of the painting. As the frontier
for both regions, the frame serves to neutralize a brief strip of wall. And
acting as a trampoline, it sends our attention hurtling off to the legendary
dimension of the aesthetic island.42

Mouth ● 75
It appears that while certain events and objects in A Piece, particularly the
recurring image of the funeral, are brought to perceptual attention through
framing, the speaker is also in fact alluding to their disappearance out of the
frame. Thus, he points toward what is potentially unframable, unrepresent-
able. This process of image-making is realized in filmic terms. The shot, as
the coffin goes “on its way” is to last 30 seconds: “Coffin on its way. Loved
one . . . he all but said of loved one on his way. Her way. Thirty seconds. Fade.

Gone. Stands there staring beyond. Into dark whole again” (CSP, 269). This
directs the eye of the spectator’s mind to the frame as a perceptual limit,
invoking the sense of a tactile enclosing darkness, where touch, rather than
vision, acts as an epistemological tool.
The lips of the cradle, grave, and mouth do not frame the “imaginary
world” Aumont describes. Neither do they spring our attention toward some
aesthetic object or experience, thereby neutralizing themselves in the pro-
cess, disappearing the way frames ought to do. For the only thing they reveal
is a dark beyond: the dark recesses of the mouth/mind from which words
emerge, the earthy unknowability of the grave and the equally unfathom-
able female figures: “There mother. That other” (CSP, 266). It is these
frames, and the process by which they direct our attention to the unfram-
able that are being framed. In this way, the destruction of the photographs
that the speaker describes is telling: “Pictures of . . . he all but said of loved
ones. Unframed. Unglazed. Pinned to wall with drawing pins. All shapes
and sizes. Down one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered.
Strewn all over the floor. Not at one sweep. No sudden fit of . . . no word.
Ripped from the wall and torn to shreds one by one” (CSP, 266). It is the
absence of the images on the wall, and their destruction—with a precursor
in Film —that is the image itself.
Drawing on narrative, theatrical, and filmic conventions, the frames that
are employed in both A Piece and That Time play with visuality. They are
created for the stage, yet the action on stage is minimal, taking place mostly
as speech, narrative. They make use of, or at least refer to, the conventions
of film while making very little visible, particularly in A Piece, where the
intertwining of the scenic and verbal in this play operates in a montage-like
manner. We can assume Beckett’s familiarity with this text, as a reader of
transition when it was published in 1930. As both Pudovkin and Eisenstein
were aware, film imagery shares some basic structures with the haiku form.43
As Mariko Hori Tanaka writes, both are concerned with the close-up. Just as
the haiku isolates a detail from its wide sweep, the filmmaker enlarges small
details on his or her screen. Both are also concerned with conflict or colli-
sion of imagery, a “collision of independent shots.” She finds in Beckett’s
work similarly colliding images, whose incongruity becomes united into a

whole so that the unseen is seen or the unheard is heard.44 This making
visible is, however, less a revealing of the hitherto unseen, than a framing of
the unseeable, the invisible. Again, this leads back to that formal subversion
that takes place in each of these works. Although referencing the conven-
tions of the filmic, they fail to perform as filmic pieces; they expose only the
attempt of exposure—the act of framing itself. What lies beyond the frame,
the darkness of the grave, the inner recesses of the mouth and beyond that,

the mind, remains unperceivable. It is rather the activity of framing that is
brought into the frame.
In A Piece of Monologue there are “no other matters,” he is physically
alone, those “loved ones” long gone. He is also alone in metaphysical terms,
in the sense that there is no metaphysical beyond: there is no matter beyond
this matter, this corporeal existence. The lips, acting as a material frame
for words, usher in their brief existence and are present as they fall prey to
death and silence. Necessary for its production, the body is the very site of
the birth of the word, through the mouth, into the world. As Merleau-Ponty
puts it, speech and communication are gestures, bringing the body into
play: “Language [ . . . ]: a contraction of the throat, a sibilant emission of
air between the tongue and teeth, a certain way of bringing the body into
play suddenly allows it to be invested with a figurative significance which
is conveyed outside us.”45 And the spoken word gives birth to the image:
“Night after night the same. Birth. Then slow fade up of a faint form” (CSP,
267), thus revealing the intertwining of the two. Both of these plays rely
upon language for the realization of their imagery, their action. The body,
the flesh, is entirely dependent upon the spoken word for its realization. The
voice brings subjects and images into being performatively. Language forms
and reforms the image, with materiality always subject to signification.46
Language refers to the material, and matter is always subject to significa-
tion or entry into discourse. Yet A Piece of Monologue hints at an unframed
excess that perpetually falls beyond the reach of linguistic expression. While
body-language and word-image are perpetually and inextricably inter-
twined, they are also fundamentally disconnected and mismatched. The
dehiscence between sound and image, between body and word, is where the
action of A Piece takes place and there is always a remainder, elements of the
material body that remain beyond the frame, that escape symbolization, as
in the bodies of the “loved ones” in A Piece of Monologue, visualized at the
lips of a grave. This precipitates the question, of whether one can “get hold of
a body?” Can embodied experience be captured by words? Following Nancy,
this is not to suggest that the body is somehow ineffable, thereby imbuing
it with certain mystical qualities, rather this points to the way in which
body and word remain in touch, while simultaneously failing to touch. The

Mouth ● 77
mouth, in this play and in Not I, operates as both a material manifestation

and symbol of this.
Fixity and Flow: The Ekphrastic Gesture in That Time

In the plays examined in this chapter, the relationship between spoken word
and image is visualized on stage and indeed, in Beckett’s drama in general;

his plays often visualize a tense, inclusive disjunction between these two
aesthetic elements. In my analysis up to now, the mouth has functioned
as a sign of this, marking as it does the hole where words spill out onto the
still frame/canvas of the stage space. While the mouth has offered a way of
thinking about flows between the inner and outer of the body and frames
the point at which word and body meet, some other term is perhaps neces-
sary to think through the relationship that is established between word and
image in That Time. In this play Beckett dramatizes the ekphrastic moment,
paring away extraneous detail to allow close attention on the point/limit/
threshold where language and image touch. There is shift here from think-
ing of how the mouth signals the meeting point of the inner and outer of the
body, immaterial verbosity and the red meat of the mouth-cave, to consider-
ing this bodily organ as aesthetic entity: an image in a tense dialogue with
words; this dialogue might be named usefully as ekphrastic.
The term ekphrasis was used by rhetoricians of ancient Greece to denote
a rhetorical strategy whereby an object was described in close enough detail
as to bring it to life in the mind’s eye of the listener (from ek/ec and phrazein
meaning “to point out”). The term as it is used today refers to a specific
genre of poetry, in which the poet writes in response to a piece of visual art.
It has carried multiple different meanings historically however, and even
contemporary commentators vary in their definitions of the term. James
Heffernan offers a relatively straightforward definition, thinking in terms
of the relationship that is developed in the ekphrastic gesture between art
forms: the verbal representation of visual representation or, using one mode
of representation to represent another.47 Murray Krieger—perhaps most rel-
evantly to Beckett’s work—sees ekphrasis as the most “extreme and telling
instance of the visual and spatial potential of the literary medium,” with the
study of ekphrasis being the most “useful way to put into question the picto-
rial limits of the function of words in poetry.”48 Krieger believes that “as the
Western imagination has seized upon and used the ekphrastic principle, it
has sought—through the two-sidedness of language as a medium of the ver-
bal arts—to comprehend the simultaneity, in the verbal figure, of fixity and
flow, “of an image at once grasped and yet slipping away through the crev-
ices of language.”49 Ekphrasis, in Krieger’s understanding, tests the limits of

language, its capacity to convey the complexity and richness of an image.

It also attends to the way time is communicated within different art forms.
Poetry is a temporal art. Its words unveil their content sequentially in time
as the reader’s eye scans the page, whereas visual art is perceived to be static
and fixed in time. The most famous example of this temporal disconnect is
to be found in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in which the poet observes
how the narrative that is imaged on the urn is forever frozen in time. The

trees will never lose their leaves, the lovers’ kiss will remain unconsummated
and the beauty of the woman will not fade:”She cannot fade, though thou
hast not thy bliss / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” While at the
same time, the extent to which language fails to convey the full vibrancy of
the image is revealed. The urn is a “Sylvan historian, who canst thus express /
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.”50
The philosophical implications of the act of ekphrasis are worth noting.
This is to do with, on the one hand, what it reveals about the relationship
between visual image and language and, on the other, what it reveals about
temporality in art. Krieger notes that one of the impulses toward ekphrasis
is “the romantic quest to realise the nostalgic dream of an original, pre-fallen
language of corporeal presence, though our only means to reach it is the
fallen language around us. And it would be the function of the ekphrastic
poet to work the magical transformation.”51 Both That Time and A Piece
of Monologue set up this relation within the performance—the stage space
is given over to a performance of ekphrasis and is used as a site through
which fixity and flow, being and becoming are brought into touch and held
together. The image—while it remains for the most part fixed—is subject
to the writing and rewriting that has been examined in A Piece of Monologue,
a play that maps this relationship onto the one between word and body.
Ekphrasis makes us see the image anew, as Stephen Cheeke’s analysis
suggests,52 so these plays dramatize the ekphrastic gesture of writing toward
an image, causing word and image to collide, montage-like, in a process of
making, remaking, and unmaking. Thinking of the ekphrastic in Beckett’s
drama invokes the dialogue that has taken place historically between art
and literature.
Oppenheim foregrounds Beckett’s relationship with visual art in The
Painted Word arguing that its unifying force is a preoccupation with the
visual.53 Noting Billie Whitelaw’s comments during Not I rehearsals about
feeling as though she were in a moving painting, being carved out of light,
Oppenheim discusses the pictorial quality of Beckett’s writing:
In the progression from the early to the late work, as reductionism

enhances the visually evocative power of the text, Beckett’s writing not

Mouth ● 79
only becomes analogous to painting. It also brings epistemological limits

of art into play that render the narrative and theatrical picture making an
increasingly tangible study of plasticity. The rudimentary organisational
quality of painting becomes visible, in other words, as a phenomenon
apart from the painterly picture.54
She observes the presence of ekphrasis here, where allusions to visual art

take on a “force far more transformative than comparative or descriptive.”55
These plays, I believe, document that dialogue happening at its most fun-
damental level: stillness of image meeting fluidity of words. What I wish to
focus on here is how these plays reveal not only the relationship between spe-
cific works of art—a relationship that Oppenheim has captured in eloquent
detail, but also as she puts it, the visibility of the “organisational quality of
painting”56 in Beckett’s work. While I have already examined the way in
which certain filmic qualities in A Piece of Monologue point toward the limits
and finitude of the body and the limitations of attempts to represent it, here
I am concerned with developing an analysis of how two aesthetic “systems,”
linguistic and visual, are brought into play. There are aspects of both A Piece
of Monologue and That Time where an ekphrastic gesture is revealed—when
a word touches an image and vice versa. While the mouth as corporeal entity
does not play the same role in That Time that it does in Not I and A Piece
of Monologue, some of the same concerns for the relationship between body
and speech, between selfhood and language, and between word and image
are apparent. Just as the speaker of A Piece tell us that he stands “head almost
touching wall” (CSP, 269) while nothing in the image suggests this, so too
do the words of That Time “almost touch” the image without ever settling
into an easy coherence.
Poetry and Painting

That Time contains a virtually still image. All that is visible is the face of a
“listener,” “about 10 feet above stage level midstage off centre.” This “old white
face ” with “long hair flaring as if seen from above outspread ” (CSP, 228) barely
moves throughout the play. The listener’s eyes open and his breath is audible
at three moments during the play. At all other times, his eyes are closed as
he listens to the three fragments of narrative that emerge from “both sides
and above.” These, we told in the stage directions, “modulate back and forth
without a break in the general flow expect where silence indicated ” (CSP, 229).
It is during these silences that the listener’s actions take place. A deeply
minimalistic piece, That Time stretches dramatic action to its limits, as
most of the “action” in the play lies in the “continually shifting relationship

between textual fragments and between text and stage.”57 The only actions,
apart from the spoken word, are the miniscule movements of the face of the
listener.58
There is a distinction drawn between speech/text and image, generating
a mismatch between the content of the image and the content of the speech.
Yet in spite of this mismatch, these two theatrical elements intertwine.
Materiality is called into being through language, just as language is created

and produced through material means. Similarly to A Piece of Monologue,
where the speaker refers only to a “him,” there is a mismatch in That Time
also in terms of identity. Although the voice-text can be identified with the
figure-body, such identification is neither guaranteed nor unproblematic.
The voices address the listener with the pronominal “you.” Both of these
plays put the identity of the speaker into question, as neither protagonist
refers to an “I.” While text and image circle around one another and inter-
twine, they never settle into a relationship of neat identification.
Like Krapp the failing writer, the figure described by the voices of That
Time holds words in high esteem. From the child in the ruins, having imag-
inary conversations with himself until he was hoarse, to the adult sitting
among the dusty volumes of the library, language has played a vital part in
his creation of himself. Yet, like Krapp, there is anxiety that words may be
faltering: (Voice C) “turning-point that was a great word with you before
they dried up” (CSP, 230). If selfhood, however fragmented, is predicated
on words, then this drying up of them brings the threat of ruin and the end
of selfhood. That Time also leaves open the possibility that this “memory” is
another fabrication. For as voice B tells us: “a whisper so faint she loved you
hard to believe you even/you made up that bit till the time came in the end”
(CSP, 234) throws the accuracy of the whole narrative into question. The
“making it all up,” which Voice A describes, foregrounds the constructed,
often inaccurate practice of remembering and blurs the distinction between
truth and fiction. As McMullan points out, “[T]he only access to history or
memory that Beckett’s characters have is through language [ . . . ] Yet this past
can be seen simply as a function or a construct of the language system.”59
In That Time, the focus is upon the memories and history of the subject
of the narrative, who we assume to be the listener. No embodied sources are
revealed for the voices to which the figure listens; they remain acousmatic
presences. With no body in sight, the spectator can assume that the voices
are different aspects of the listener, describing different stages in his life.
Juxtaposing images from childhood, middle age, and old age, the work is
predicated on the fracture of identity, an identity that is constituted in and
through language. This production of self is not complete, however, nor is it
comprehensive: “making it all up on the doorstep as you went along making

Mouth ● 81
yourself all up again for the millionth time forgetting it all where you were”
(CSP, 234). Words here are part of the attempt to write the self and the
scenes of memory.
Lacking any punctuation, the text of That Time flows from one scene to
the next and from voice to voice, rhythmically and without pause—though
this is difficult for an actor to achieve. During rehearsal for the play in
Germany, it was agreed that Klaus Herm—in pretaping for the voiceover—

would use overlapping words in the recording of section II: “Herm reads
to a certain point, makes a pause, and begins again with the text a few
words before the stop, so that with the first words an acoustic balance has
already been achieved.”60 In performance, the listener would be surrounded
by rhythmic and poetic vocal sound. This “sound envelope”, to use Didier
Anzieu’s term,61 is like the background sound of consciousness, bubbling
up and dimming away, following trains of thought and pursuing memories,
until gradually an image of a life, a person, however fragmented, emerges.
Voice A describes an attempted (and failed) return journey to a familiar
place of childhood; voice B images two lovers on a stone slab (presumably
one is the listener); while voice C tells a tale of vagrancy and rejection from
society as the figure, whom we assume to be the listener, takes shelter from
the seemingly endless rain in various public buildings—the portrait gal-
lery, the post office, and the library. Each voice draws on different times in
the life of the listener, layering together fragments of selfhood and personal
history.
To demonstrate this poetic quality of the writing in this play, Enoch
Brater arranges the words on the page in a lyrical form as follows:
. . . that time
alone on your back in sand
and no vows to break the peace
when was that
an earlier time
before she came
after she went
or both
before she came
after she was gone
and you back in the old scene
wherever it might be.62
It is the author’s poetic language that is transforming the stage space.63

Noting the commonalities between this play and Not I, he remarks that

each “holds in fine balance a tiny cosmos in which private emotions have
apocalyptic consequences.”64 In other words, words and their meaning are
what carry this play, giving it its poignancy and evocativeness: “Language
in That Time therefore offers us a new scenic space. Arranging the place
of secondary scenes, it is language that “not only underlines and follows
the psychological journey of the character, but also precedes and creates it
through an unveiling of the body by the words.””65 What is apparent then is

a meeting point in this play of poetry and of image. The words reveal some-
thing, unearth something from behind the eyes of the listener. They allow
us, in Cheeke’s words, to see the image anew—a process that is continuous
as each wave of words reveals more and more, demonstrating both the power
of words to make it “all” up and the density of image that remains when the
words cease to be. This kinetic portrait emerges, as in A Piece of Monologue,
in the intersection between word and image.
That Time operates at the limit of two aesthetic forms: poetry and paint-
ing, specifically portrait painting. As in ekphrasis so described earlier, there
is a flow between the fluidity of words, temporally unstable, moving in
time, and the comparative stillness of image. There is also a demonstra-
tion of the relationship of words to space. Krieger writes that “words cannot
have capacity, cannot be capacious, because they have, literally, no space.”66
Theater permits words to surpass briefly this limitation. Language, at least
in That Time, is highly spatialized. Beckett, during rehearsals for the Schiller
Theater production of 1976 with Klaus Herm, defines the function of the
three loudspeakers as “supposed to make the transition from one story to
another clear. It is the same voice but the stories are taking place at different
levels of time.”67 This effect is rendered by the fact that each voice emerges
from a different part of the space surrounding the listening head, giving the
sense that they emerge from within the vast spaces of the halls of memory.
The pictorial consciousness of the play emerges in several ways. On the
one hand there are specific reference to paintings and to the experience of
being in a gallery. Voice C, taking shelter from the rain describes: “C: [ . . . ]
that time in the Portrait Gallery in off the street out of the cold and rain
slipped in when no one was looking and through rooms shivering and drip-
ping till you found a seat marble slap and sat down to rest and dry off and
onto hell out of there when was that” (CSP, 228). Looking up he sees before
him a vast oil painting, “C: till you hoisted your head and there before your
eyes when they opened a vast oil black with age and dirt someone famous
in his time some famous man or woman or even child such as a young
prince or princess some young prince or princess of the blood black with
age beyond the glass” (CSP, 229) and describes the sense of the weightiness
of time that being surrounding by such antique objects representing people

Mouth ● 83
long dead brings: “C: [ . . . ] there alone with the portraits of the dead black
with antiquity and the dates on the frames in case you might get the century
wrong” (CSP, 231). The play self-referentially meditates on the experience
of viewing the painting and the act of representing that experience. What
is interesting—and I will return to this issue again later—is the lack of
any identifying description he provides. For now though, it is worth noting
further instances in which the ekphrastic gesture emerge in this play. While

voice C describes a near-vagrant lifestyle, finding shelter from the “endless”
winter’s rain in various institutions, the portrait gallery, the post office, and
library, voice B returns again and again to the same scene: “B: On the stone
together in the sun on the stone at the edge of the little wood and as far
as eye could see the wheat turning yellow vowing every now and then you
loved each other just a murmur not touching or anything of that nature you
one end of the stone she the other” (CSP, 228). As well as the striking avoid-
ance of touch, Voice B seems to observe/remember stillness continuously:
“B: all still just the leaves and ears and you too still on the stone in a daze
no sound not a word only every now and then to vow you loved each other
just a murmur” (CSP, 229). The time “on the stone” is remembered as “stock
still always stock still” (CSP, 232). Even in the towpath scene, the drifting
motion of the dead creature (rat or bird) in the water and the water itself are
the only things “stirring” (CSP, 233). These voices play with the possibil-
ity of fixity and fluidity offered within the media of visual art and writing
when these come together in the kinetic portrait that is That Time. The text
toys continuously with animation versus fixity, as if the listener is attempt-
ing to find some decay-proof method of memorializing his life. In Voice A’s
description, this is the quest to find out if a place of his childhood still exists:
“A: that time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there
where you hid as child when was that [eyes close.]” (CSP, 228). The quest is a
failure; he cannot access this childhood space where he spent hours “talking
to himself who else out loud imaginary conversations there was childhood
for you ten or eleven on a stone among the giant nettles making it up now
one voice now another till you were hoarse” (CSP, 230). We do not learn if
the ruins still stand as there were “no trams” to take him there, but again
there is tension between the apparent permanence and stillness of stone (the
marble slab of the voice C’s portrait gallery and the stone on which the child
once sat) and the fluid, provisional nature of the voice. Words make the sub-
ject up and are infinitely revisable, remaking the self again and again. But
we find them pressed to their limits in the ekphrastic gesture: the stillness of
stone and dynamism of words emerges as a juxtaposition between different
temporalities. It is not that painting is still or that stones are permanent, but
that they move more slowly than these bubbling words, so soon disappeared

once they are out of the mouth. That stillness is equated in voice B with an
absence of touch is interesting. There is
no sight of the face or any other part never turned to her nor she to you
always parallel like on an axle-tree never turned to each other just blurs
on the fringes of the field no touching or anything of that nature always
space between if only an inch no pawing in the manner of flesh and blood

no better than shades no worse if it wasn’t for the vows. (CSP, 231)
While this fits with an overall project of withdrawal from the other in
Beckett’s work, with a precedent in Krapp’s “farewell to love,” this unwill-
ingness to touch has other resonances also. The two figures sit still, staring
at the wheat, not touching and murmuring to each other only now and
then. They are in stillness in one another’s presence without contact. It is
as if the dynamism of this act of perception (or proprioception) will disrupt
the attempt to inject stillness into language, to give language, if only for a
moment, a truly pictorial characteristic, so that it not only works to image,
but is also, briefly, as still as that image. Yet what happens when the achieve-
ment of stillness in language takes precedence over the impulse to make an
image or when the image is of nothing at all?
Throughout this chapter I have discussed words touching images and
bodies, reworking and remaking materiality as they do so. Part of the
challenge of ekphrasis is the way in which the attempt to respond to the
pictorial pushes language to its limits, testing its capacity for representa-
tion. As Oppenheim points out, “Ekphrasis in Beckett takes a distinctly
non-mimetic turn; it dramatizes perception as it points to the unreliability
of representation of the (already unreliable) real.”68 As an example of this,
she references the picture in Endgame, which hangs “face to wall”69 agree-
ing with H. Porter Abbott’s line of thought that Beckett here has “com-
municated concealment.”70 A connection might be drawn then between the
framing of nothing of A Piece and the emptying of image in That Time. The
description of the “vast oil black with age and dirt someone famous” reveals
nothing about the image itself. The speaker does not tell us who is painted
here nor when it was painted. If anything, this gesture is antiekphrastic.
Rather than making us see the image, we see only the blackness of age and
antiquity: the poetic gesture obscures rather than reveals and this play, like
A Piece of Monologue, reveals the limits of language in the face of matter. The
ekphrastic gesture is part the energy of the play generated by the dehiscence
between word and image; while it is a revealing gesture, making us see the
image “anew,” it is also simultaneously a gesture that obscures. Again, we
are drawn into the dark recesses of the image, its mouth-hole: the darkness

Mouth ● 85
of the oil painting in the narrative image, the impenetrable face of the stage
image whose life and thoughts emerge only in fragments.
What Lies Between

Nancy talks of bodies taking place or coming to be, neither fully within
discourse nor in matter. They do not inhabit “mind” or “body.” Rather they

are to be found “at the limit” where these two elements come into contact.71
This way of thinking beyond dualistic models offers a particular perspective
on the aesthetic that is at work in these plays, one that is perhaps summed
up in the figure of the mouth. The radical disconnection apparent in these
plays between subject and body, between image and sound, and between
word and flesh is the place where the plays “take place.” There is a certain
energy generated by this dehiscence and the organ of the mouth acts as sign
of this.
In the case of Not I, certain essentialist notions of gender can be chal-
lenged, while at the same time offering a vision of the ways in which dis-
course and the material body interact. In all three plays, the stage image
is a material surface awaiting the constructive effects of language, with
the energy of these plays deriving from their operating along the fault-line
between these two aesthetic elements. It also at such an intersection that the
performance of these plays lie, for the plays discussed here reveal bodies in
performance as they emerge when matter and discourse, image and sound,
touch. These plays reveal also that the body lies at such an intersection: at
the limits of discourse and matter.
Both That Time and A Piece of Monologue are heavily reliant on language
for their realization, and operate at the very limits of what is possible in the
theater. Not I sees a disruption to language. In her fragmented torrent of
words, she reveals aporetic spaces, “godforsaken holes,” where language fails
to represent. Thus, these plays address the Beckettian conundrum of lan-
guage: in the ekphrastic gestures of A Piece and That Time, it is a poor and
faulty vehicle, but there are few alternatives to its use. It is in its relationship
to corporeality however that language’s failure is most evident. Without any
other tools at her disposal, Mouth speaks her body into being. Operating as
they do between language and the body, sound and image, these plays dem-
onstrate a disconnection between those two worlds, and this is the energy
that drives them.
The preceding chapter was concerned with Beckett’s dramatization of
the point at which sound touches bodies, and the image that is made in,
for example, Ghost Trio of the moment when consciousness becomes aware
of and begins to make sense of sound, as voice, music, or basic noise. The

focus of this chapter has been on how embodied subjects are spoken into
being, how language frames the material body to such an extent that it
seems impossible to speak of a body that is prediscursive or prelinguistic.
Yet, particularly in Not I and A Piece of Monologue, the figure of the mouth
speaking oneself and one’s body into being reveals the material foundation
of language. The lips frame the word and, in line with Merleau-Ponty, the
spoken word is a gesture. Corporeality and language are fundamentally

intertwined; a nontheistic incarnation occurs, as words are made flesh, and
flesh is made into words. This has a parallel in the complex relationship of
word to image; they intertwine and sometimes touch, but just as often this
touching fails, leaving a remainder, aspects of the embodied self that dis-
course cannot or will not admit.

CHAPTER 4

Skin, Space, Place
The Inner Skin

A container for the body, the skin is the largest sensory organ and therefore
the most open to touch. It forms a comparatively vast, haptic boundary
between body and world, putting the body in touch with the world as well
as putting the body in touch with itself: the skin feels and communicates
pain, pleasure, itch, burn, shiver, and a plethora of other sensations. Steven
Connor, drawing on Michel Serres, views skin not merely as a surface, but
as a milieu: a meeting point where “world and body touch, defining their
common border.”1 The skin is both physiological—a sensory apparatus—
and imaginary: a containing border, which demarcates inner and outer, “I”
and “you.” In this way, we have both an inner and an outer skin—an outer
skin of the body and an inner one of the mind, an imaginary container for
selfhood.
Through the skin, the body is open to modulation, as Nancy puts it:
The body-place isn’t full or empty, since it doesn’t have an outside or an

inside.[ . . . ] It’s acephalic and aphallic in every sense, as it were. Yet it
is a skin, variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied, invaginated,
exogastrulated, orificed, evasive, invaded, stretched, relaxed, excited, dis-
tressed, tied, untied. In these and thousands of other ways, the body
makes room for existence ([ . . . ] the transcendental resides in an indefinite
modification and spacious modulation of skin).2
Skin has the capacity to be folded in on itself, to be both space or depth and
surface at the same time. The skin, folded to create the inner recesses of the

body, complicates the boundary between the inner and the outer. It puts us
in touch not only with the world around us, but also, through its folds and
its tears, with the world within us. At the same time as we are contained
and bounded by this somatic envelope, which overlaps and intertwines with
itself, we are also aware of the porousness of our body-selves; porousness
revealed in this autopsy of Beckett’s work: eye, ear, mouth, anus, vagina;
these are holes that lead to physiological inner spaces and inner skins. Skin,

as boundary or milieu, always brings with it an awareness of the inner and
the outer—the inner of the body, body surface, and external world. And
skin exists always relative to space, and to tactility. Humans begin their
existence in the encircling, cradling space of the womb and touch is a vital
part of the infant’s development.
Without formational, physical care from an adult, children can suffer
greatly from emotional and cognitive deficits. For Didier Anzieu, the path
is laid for consciousness in the physiological skin in which, prior even to
birth, perceptual systems are awakened. Tactile stimulation has a lasting
effect upon the infant. The ego, in Freud’s terms, is the mental projection
of a bodily surface.3 Anzieu develops this, seeing a psychophysiological con-
nection forged in the imaginary skin, which then operates as an interface
between the psyche and the body, and between self and other. The skin,
acting as a covering for the whole surface of the body and into which all
the external sense organs are inserted, thus corresponds with the “contain-
ing function of the Skin Ego.”4 The skin ego is “[a] mental image of which
the Ego of the child makes use during the early stages of its development
to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of
the experience of the surface of the body.”5 A maternal presence cradles the
infant, surrounding him or her with a tactile and sound envelope. This cra-
dling functions, for Anzieu, to provide the ground out of which the pro-
jected skin ego will form. In Anzieu’s clinical experience, the absence of this
cradling ground for the infant may produce neuroses in later life.
The formation of the self and the skin ego is founded upon an intimate
connection, this imprinting by the body of the other, linking tactility, con-
tainment, and the formation of the subject to that presence. This formation
arises out of the tactile contact between caregiver and child, but the very
process of birth itself also seems to be formational—in a very literal way. As
Steven Connor recounts:
In mammals, the abrasion experienced by the skin during its passage

through the birth canal in vaginal delivery stimulates the action of breath-
ing. [ . . . ] This process may even begin before birth, since the rippling

Skin, Space, Place ● 89
movements of the womb prior to labour known as Braxton-Hicks con-

tractions appear to stimulate the foetus to inhale and exhale the amniotic
fluid. This uterine massage prepares the skin for the abrasions or writing
of the world which it receives upon its surface.6
Skin is revealed not just as surface but also as depth, place, and space. It is
this complexity of the boundary, its readiness to become, in Nancy’s words,

“invaginated, exogastrulated, orificed,” as well as function as a surface
upon which identities are played out, that informs this chapter’s discussion
of . . . but the clouds . . . , Rockaby, and Footfalls. The origins of Footfalls, dis-
cussed in the following paragraphs, lie in Beckett’s exposure to Jungian and
Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1930s and, through its frayed solitary figure
conversing with maternal darkness, it explores this boundary or skin between
mother and daughter. In 1935 Beckett attended a lecture by Jung in which
was described the case of a young female patient, “who had never really
been born,” as he explained during rehearsal for the 1976 Schiller Theater
production.7 The bodies that carry us, as growing fetuses and as children,
both cradle us and shape us in physiological and psychological ways. We
begin when another body makes room for us within its skin and this experi-
ence enters into the cultural imagination. In Footfalls, the boundary appears
porous and we are left unsure of the limits between mother and daughter,
just as if she was never fully born. In . . . but the clouds . . . , the potential of
the skin to be both inner and outer, deeply folded and completely flat, is
revealed in the medium itself, the television screen as malleable skin. The
costume in Rockaby gives that play’s woman-figure a glittering skin that is
both the condition of her visibility and a sign of her containment.
Skin functions as a metaphor in these plays, one that unveils our haptic
relationship with space and with the other. Some commentary on gender in
Beckett’s work is necessary here, as gender difference is often mapped on to
the experience (and imagination) of skin and spatiality. While the gender of
the person who cares for the child does not matter for the formation of the
skin ego, the place of the woman’s body in this formational touch is obvious.
Biologically, woman provides space for an other within herself and, arising
from this, the cultural imagination has perceived and represented the female
body as space or place.8 The association of woman with nurture (a woman’s
touch), which has historically relegated women to the domestic sphere, arises
from the morphology of her body; addressing space in . . . but the clouds . . . ,
Footfalls, and Rockaby demands commentary on how aesthetic space in these
plays connotes the feminine, and either confirm or transcend the normative
woman-space equation.

A problem must be acknowledged here however. One must be careful

not to separate out the “woman plays” from the rest of Beckett’s oeuvre as
somehow only relevant as dealing with women’s issues and identity. The
problem that arises is that the rest of the dramatic oeuvre (containing male
figures) is suggested, implicitly or otherwise, to be addressing universal
issues; it is only when a woman appears on stage that we can deal with
gender structures, and the specificity of identity. I want to acknowledge the

fact that many of the cultural associations that accompany femininity are
at work more widely. The spaces of darkness in the plays, the inner skins,
are given feminine resonances. The maternity of darkness is most explicit in
Rockaby and Footfalls but is arguably present in the television plays, whether
in the feminine unconscious in Eh Joe, the “inner sanctum” of . . . but the
clouds . . . , or the association of external spaces of the room in Ghost Trio
with child and (absent) woman. It must be acknowledged also however,
that gender configurations in the later work are of a much more erratic and
contingent nature,9 with the notion of the stable self of realist drama “alien”
to this area of Beckett’s corpus.10 Disempowerment or marginalization also
affects the male figures of the oeuvre to an equal degree.11 Furthermore,
while woman-darkness may be seen as a problematic aesthetic cliché, per-
formance spaces in these later plays become productive sites, where the
weighty corporeality of the female in Beckett’s early fiction “dissolves as
she becomes the very space and ground of representation.”12 The dark invis-
ible of the image has a speaking role; its significance is far beyond that of
background. Most of all, the darkness in each of the plays functions as an
almost limitless space, an ever-expanding skin “variously folded, refolded,
unfolded, multiplied” like the body Nancy describes. However, through
patterns of darkness and light, vocalic presences and semitangible bodies,
the plays examined here each explore the shifting boundaries of the inner
and the outer in ways that are specific to their medium: television for . . . but
the clouds . . . , the stage for Rockaby, and Footfalls. The “skin” of these can be
both surface and depth.
Making Space: The Skin of the TV Screen

Taking as its title a line from W. B. Yeats’s “The Tower” (1928), . . . but the
clouds . . . (1976–1977) is a televisual meditation on loss and the potential
failure of memory and imagination. The play echoes certain themes of the
Yeats poem—an awareness of mortality and an end to creativity “the wreck
of body, / slow decay of blood” and the figure of a lost woman, as well as
the withdrawal into the self where Herren sees Yeats’s imagination “burn[s]
brightest.”13 However, Herren points out that none of the comforts that

the poet draws from the transcendent power of the imagination are to be
found in . . . but the clouds . . . . A lone figure attempts to call up the image of
a woman now lost to him, someone whom he “begged when alive to look
at me” (CSP, 260), but his success in this is only partial. His “séance”14 is
overlaid with the possibility of artistic failure, which “troubles the neatness
of consolation” in the Yeats poem.15
A flat screen with seemingly limitless depth, the static object that is the

television set, oblong in the corner of one’s living space, contrasts sharply
with the dynamism of the flickering broadcasts that shear across its surface.
Television is a porous skin—capable of being both surface and depth. By the
1970s, when . . . but the clouds . . . and Ghost Trio were televised, the television
set had become a highly familiar piece of domestic technology. When these
television plays were aired ( . . . but the clouds . . . and Ghost Trio were televised
on the British channel BBC2 in 1977), to say that they defamiliarized what
had by then become a deeply familiar medium would be an understatement.
Bignell observes this disconnect when he points out that Beckett’s television
plays establish mirrors for domestic space, but the unfamiliarity of their ter-
ritories of dim monochromatic, narrativeless imagery only serves to remind
viewers of their separation and distance from that space.16 The door, window,
pallet, and mirror of Ghost Trio are all familiar features of a domestic setting
for a television program, yet they provide none of the narratives of individu-
ality, family, home, and social class with which, as Bignell says, the heritage
of television is bound up.17 The spaces of . . . but the clouds . . . , familiar in
themselves, are made arguably even less recognizable than in Ghost Trio. We
are told of the “little sanctum” and the closet—both familiar and domestic
spaces of living—yet these are never fully visualized. We only see the figure
in his sanctum dimly: “Near shot from behind of man sitting on invisible stool
bowed over invisible table. Light grey robe and skullcap. Dark ground. Same
shot throughout ” (CSP, 257). On space in . . . but the clouds . . . , Bignell writes
that the elliptical circle shown in the center of the screen (m1 shot) draws
attention to three-dimensionality within the image. This is in contrast to
the flat, planar surface of the television screen.18 The idea of a deliberately
generated contrast between surface and depth is an interesting one, for these
two levels of spatiality imply the distinction between haptic and optic visu-
ality/imagery in art. The medium of television, as Bignell rightly points out,
affords Beckett the opportunity to generate tension between planar surface
and three-dimensional depth, or between haptic and optic space, to apply
my terminology.
There are multiple examples of invisibles, or blind spots, in this play.
M is seated “on invisible stool bowed over invisible table,” in a “light grey robe
and skullcap,” “in the dark, where none could see me” (CSP, 257 and 259).

Neither do we see the other spaces that are made out of the dark—the closet
or the external space of the roads. Instead the screened images of this play
tend to frustrate the visible, obfuscating the figure as well as frustrating
his attempts to visualize that desired other—her appearance is never guar-
anteed, and her gaze, when she does appear, is a literalized blind spot on
the two-dimensional surface of the television screen. Visibility in this play
is compromised—paradoxically so, considering television is such a highly

visual medium. Yet the space of the play gives way to darkness, dimness, and
invisibility at every turn. The opening of the planar surface into depth mir-
rors the way that the seemingly coherent surface of the body, the skin, gives
way to dark internal cavities, hollow columns, lined with inner skins. Skin is
capable of folding itself into inner and outer, capable of resisting (as screen)
and, in Nancy’s words, making room for existence, containing the subject
within its limits. Space is manifest as a cradling darkness; there is a slippage
between the inner and outer; the “skin of the film”19 —or more appropriately
the skin of the screen—is made porous, flipped inside out to form a concav-
ity. The externally coherent surface of the screen gives way to an apparently
limitless depth of image, as in Deleuze’s “any-space-whatever.”20
From an aesthetic perspective, darkness can be limitlessly produc-
tive: V (voice) of . . . but the clouds . . . can find and name in it any space he
chooses. Yet the phenomenological experience of darkness is very different
from this, involving a disorientating close-down of perception and, there-
fore, of space. Merleau-Ponty writes of the night as abolishing the world of
clear and articulate objects:
Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all
my senses, stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal
identity. [ . . . ] Even shouts or a distant light people it only vaguely, and
then it comes to life in its entirety; it is pure depth without foreground
or background, without surfaces and without any distance separating it
from me.21
Yet this is not the experience of M/V. The retreat to the sanctum does not
appear to coincide with negative thoughts and the terror of a perceptual vac-
uum: within the inner skin, this space within space of the sanctum, the dark
is a welcome hideaway from percipi, “where none can see me,” and where
the flickering, ghostly image of the woman can be called upon. If there
is a diminishment of selfhood, it is perhaps, as with so many of Beckett’s
figures, a welcome one.
What might be argued is that in Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on space in the
Phenomenology, he is concerned more with the visual perception of space,

though this is not always explicit. While the commentary commences

with the positionality of the body relative to space, the example he takes to
explore this is the case of retinal inversion: “If the subject is made to wear
glasses which correct the retinal images, the whole landscape first appears
unreal and upside down.”22 Gradually, however, the subject becomes accus-
tomed to this and the “body progressively rights itself.” The sense of touch
becomes irreconcilable with the sensory input from the eyes and ultimately,

the “experience of movement guided by sight [ . . . ] teaches the subject to
harmonize the visual and tactile data.”23 What emerges from this commen-
tary is the extent to which sight dominates the bodily experience of space.
It is no surprise that night brings with it such a loss of orientation, as all the
signs for the orientation of one’s body in space (depth, breadth, width, etc.)
have, quite simply, disappeared.
Yet, in much of Beckett’s work, the darkness does not seem to hold
this kind of terror. This is certainly the case in . . . but the clouds . . . and
arguably in Footfalls and Rockaby. Darkness seems to hold some alternative
system of coordination, a different sense of space. While space is intimately
linked to self-awareness, it is not dependent on vision. Examples from the
prose are telling also. Orientation in darkness of the late novel Company
(1981) is rooted in the body. He knows that he is addressing one/himself
“on his back in the dark” and can tell this by “the pressure on his hind
parts” and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when
he opens them again.24 Space is experienced in this example, and in the
plays examined in this chapter, haptically, that is, via the skin. It encloses,
enwraps—to use Merleau-Ponty’s word—but rather than leaving the fig-
ures in a state of helpless anxiety, it seems to provide a necessary erasure
for the Beckettian subject. Blindness, heralding a different set of sensory
modalities, becomes the very condition for a minimum of subjectivity, and
an optimum for creativity.
As with many of the novels and plays . . . but the clouds . . . juxtaposes the
inner and the outer, an internal space of creation as opposed to an external
space of motility. This pattern will be identifiable in Rockaby and Footfalls
also (see later). M’s sanctum contrasts with the roads that he walks daily—
though no such external world is visualized. The figure seems to move easily
between these realms, traversing the spotlight between dark spaces. In a
process of rehearsal and repetition, the boundaries that demarcate the spaces
of . . . but the clouds . . . are carefully negotiated. The figure moves between
light and darkness, naming the areas of darkness as closet, sanctum. Space
in this play is divided into geographical coordinates: West, North, and East,
with the camera positioned at South. While these coordinates are not visual-
ized and remain only as set directions, the objective nature of space arranged

in this way makes the figure seem all the more diminutive. The spaces are
indicated thus in the text:
1. West, roads.
2. North, sanctum
3. East, closet.
4. Standing position.

5. Camera. (CSP, 258)
The abstract quality of this space, evident in the text, is juxtaposed with the
specificity of personal space, the partly visible and vocalized sanctum. The
other spaces are only indicated by the voiceover, which tells us, for example,
that M1 “stood listening. [5 seconds], finally went to closet” (CSP, 259). M1
follows these directions, entering and exiting the darkness at the appropriate
places. Visually, there is only the spotlight, surrounded by formless dark-
ness, into which he disappears and reemerges and the only way the viewer
is to know what the darkness stands for in . . . but the clouds . . . is through
the voiceover. The voiceover constructs the spaces for the viewer. Indeed it
is as though the voice is carving the space, in greater or lesser relief, out of
television’s concavity, creating it all with the familiar tools of the Beckettian
author-figure: voice, light, and darkness. His sanctum is another space
within the space, a new burrowing into the darkness and a welcome one at
that. The stillness, silence, dimness, and avoidance of percipi seem to be the
conditions under which the generation of the image of the woman can take
place, though success in this is not guaranteed.
Lending the play a theatrical air, the spectator/camera is fixed and the
figure emerges from the dark, “the wings” of the set. This theatricality hear-
kens back to the early days of television production, which involved exten-
sive use of longs shots and studio spaces,25 while also introducing a sense
of provisionality, of something coming to be before our eyes, shifting, as
McMullan puts it, the viewer’s focus “from the image on screen to the con-
dition of its emergence and perception.”26 This is evidenced by V’s revising
of himself at the play’s outset:
1. V: When I thought of her it was always night. I came in—

[dissolve to s empty and to M in between]
7. V: No, that is not right. When she appeared it was always night. I
came in—.
[dissolve to s empty and emerging from west with hat and greatcoat on]
(CSP, 259)

V is making something, carving an image for the spectator. It is a rehearsal

that allows the image to come to be, requiring, as Deleuze puts it, “an
obscure spiritual tension,” “a silent evocation that is also an invocation and
even a convocation and revocation, since it raises the thing or the person to
the indefinite state: a woman. . . . .”27 Her appearance is not guaranteed, nor
is it stable. While the ground has been prepared carefully for this image to
appear, she does so only rarely and briefly:

V: then crouching there, in my little sanctum, in the dark, where none
could see me, I began to beg, of her, to appear, to me. Such had long
been my use and wont. No sound, a begging of the mind, to her, to
appear, to me. Deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and
ceased. Or of course until—(CSP, 260)
We learn of three cases in which this begging came to something, three

permutations of the following varieties: one, she appeared and “in the same
breath was gone” (CSP, 260); two, she appeared and lingered; and three, she
appeared and “v: after a moment—” her lips move, inaudibly (CSP, 261).
The rehearsal leads us through all the possible permutations of events
until 41, at which v says: “let us now run though it again” (CSP, 261). We
see what has been rehearsed now played out without the organizing com-
mentary. M1 enters from the west and removes his hat and greatcoat (east),
then enters his sanctum (north). The camera then alternates between the
shot of m and the image of w; it lingers for five seconds on the former, two
on the latter, and then repeats this, before V says: “look at me” (CSP, 261).
The woman’s lips move inaudibly, mouthing the lines of the Yeats poem:
“ . . . clouds . . . but the clouds . . . of the sky . . . ” (CSP, 261). V murmurs, syn-
chronous with the lips until they cease. In this moment, we see the image
screened as M/V calls it up and there is a correspondence between image
and text—the image in these three cases responds to the demands of the
text. Yet this correspondence is problematized by the fact that, as the voice
tells us, this visitation rarely occurs. Most often the figure calls upon the
woman in vain and, in failure has to busy himself in the dead of night
with “something else, more . . . rewarding, such as . . . such as . . . cube roots,
for example, or with nothing, busied myself with the nothing” (CSP, 261).
When the woman does appear V/M has succeeded not only in creating the
image, but also in rendering depth and space flat. In a maneuver that is the
opposite of digging space into the screen, the flattened-out close-up of the
woman’s face “reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth” (CSP, 257)
fills the television screen. Depth of space collapses into the hollow, sightless
image of the woman’s face. The soundless begging of M brings the image

onto the skin of the screen; the depth of space in the interiority of the image
is diminished. It is a projection, without depth or interiority, a haptic, as
opposed to optic, relief.
The idea that this play is exploring depth and space on the televisual
medium connects with William Gruber’s comment regarding space in Ghost
Trio. He writes that denying space in a way that is “unprecedented” for a
dramatist, Beckett is “telling us to think of drama as having the same power

as a photograph or a painting to suspend time and narrativity” (217).28 Not
only are space and depth diminished at this moment of apparition, arrested
too is the flow of time. Unlike A Piece of Monologue, where the still image
is animated by words, the dynamic flow of television’s becoming is slowed
and all that moves in the image are those silent, murmuring lips, repeating
their vocal gesture. The séance in this play, which Minako Okamuro argues
“transmute[s] the everyday medium of television into another medium: a
spiritual one,”29 and the image imprinted on the haptic shroud is untouch-
able and ungovernable, silent and sightless, like a death mask. Out of the
cradling, tactile depths of the darkness, the shallow surface of the wom-
an’s image is produced. It is a séance in which the intangible “spirit made
light” of the woman is raised, as if from out of another cradling space—the
grave. If A Piece of Monologue hovered at the lips of the mouth, image, and
grave, . . . but the clouds . . . enshrouds itself in that final earthy skin, where
the boundaries between inner and outer, here and not here, depth and sur-
face are forever collapsed and where the darkness, registering as feminine or
unconscious, is valorized as the site out of which the image emerges.
Negotiating Space: Skin as Screen in Rockaby

Maternal Space
The woman in Rockaby, known only as W, dressed in a sequined gown and
seated in a rocking chair, rocks under a single spotlight to the sound of a
disembodied voice. The voice, in rhythmic and terse sentences, describes the
search undertaken by a “she,” who may or may not be the figure in the chair,
for “an other” (CSP, 275). The separation of voice from body problematizes
identity—establishing difference between what is seen and what is heard.
The elliptical and repetitive narrative reveals a gradual process of dimming,
until the woman in the rocking chair is “done with that” (CSP, 282). Asleep
or dead, the final image is of her pale face dropping forward, as what little
light illuminated her throughout the performance gradually fades out.
The kinetic image of the play sees W having, through aural and tactile
means, re-created a lost maternal presence, manifest as the space into which

she withdraws, as maternal body and room are collapsed into each other.
As McMullan writes: “The withdrawal into the room is therefore also a
withdrawal into the body (finally revealed as the maternal body, the initial
lost object/other which announces the exile of the subject and his/her essen-
tial incompleteness which is therefore the final resting place and object of
desire.”30 Her “more” (CSP, 275), a demand for the voice to continue speak-
ing, is like that of a child’s desire for soothing words and the combination

of the rhythmic vocals and rocking motion appear to reproduce for W what
Anzieu terms the sound/tactile envelope. In performance, the figure rocks
in and out of the light, giving the impression of being gradually reabsorbed
into that dark space, of being born backward.
W joins in with the voice at the end of each section with the lines “time
she stopped” (sections one and three) and “living soul” (section two). The
inner bleeds into the outer as the figure becomes at the moment of echo,
a resonant echo chamber, to use Nancy’s phrase,31 a space within a space
through which words flow. The body is one space, the stage is another;
both of these echo each other as hollow columns. The words form a sound
envelope, containing the figure in the same way that the darkness and the
arms of chair do, but the echoing of the call reveals division. W has not yet
collapsed into the nondifferentiation that the darkness represents. Voice is
the marker of the announcement of self-awareness, of consciousness divided
from itself, as Dolar puts it, “striking and elementary,” and preceding the
mirror stage.32 However, the voice undergoes a gradual diminution as the
play progresses. The “more” for which W calls at the beginning of each
section becomes gradually hoarser and weaker, while the voice that replies
softens gradually also. Alike in texture and quality but different at the same
time, both voices seem to be readying for the descent into the senseless whis-
per that marks the closeness of the body to death and the acceptance of the
arms of its encroaching darkness.
While a maternal presence is constructed out of aural and kinetic enve-
lopes, there is reference to an actual mother in the text spoken by the voice.
We learn that W’s is the chair “where mother rocked/all the years/all in
black,” until one day “her end came”; she was “off her head they said/gone
off her head/but harmless” (CSP, 280). Any potential threat of the mad
woman is neutralized by an unnamed “they” who dismiss her as harmless;
she is consigned to her room and her rocking chair. The room that contained
the mother now contains the daughter—an echo of space within space and a
conflation of room with womb, and is reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s notion
of the chora, the place where the subject is both generated and negated,
where subjective unity “succumbs before the process of charges and stases”
that have produced it. The chora for Kristeva is “analogous only to vocal and

kinetic rhythms.”33 In developing this idea, Kristeva borrows the term from
Plato’s Timaeus, where the philosopher deems space to be the type of matter
“which is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all
created things.”34 Kristeva observes how this space is given feminine char-
acteristics by Plato; he describes it as nourishing and maternal.35 Like the
choratic space that Kristeva describes, the dark room and rocking chair of
Rockaby have a troubling ambiguity. On the one hand, they provide mater-

nal comfort, “those arms at last,” acting as a reminder of maternal touch and
care— chora as nourishment. On the other, it is presented as a tool of con-
tainment, those encircling arms, as well as the room itself, are a sign of the
consignment of the actual mother to the periphery of social existence and
the imminence of her death— chora as negation. We learn that she passed
away in the rocking chair, in a similar manner to the way in which W will
end: “head fallen/and the rocker rocking/rocking away” (CSP, 280).
Yet the woman emulates the mother; her performance mirrors and reen-
acts her mother’s final moments, allowing W to recognize and reembody
the mother. The first three sections of the work see the voice describe the
end of each phase of questing, which the “she” of the narrative has under-
taken. Each section of the play begins with a call from W for “more,” and
the responding voice commences with the line “till” or “so in the end.”
Section two sees the voice describe how the woman came to sit at her win-
dow. Section three, how the search at the window, her “sitting quiet at the
window,” failed to produce the desired other—all other blinds being down,
“hers alone up” (CSP, 278–279). The fourth and final section describes how
she went down the “steep stair,” to sit in the old rocker. It is here that we pre-
sumably find a conjunction between W and the “she” being described. The
woman present onstage mirrors this old woman and, through the interface
of the rocking chair, the separation and space of loss that lies between them
is narrowed. The chair becomes the tactile, physical object through which a
reconnection with the lost mother is made.
The final section of the play, in which its various elements—voice-image,
mother-daughter, and outer and inner—begin to coalesce is also the sec-
tion where the description of “eye-quest,” as Bryden calls it,36 of the first
sections ends. The narrative is filled with imagery of closing and shutting,
“with closed eyes/closing eyes,” and describes how she “let down the blind
and stopped,” before the final lines of “stop her eyes/fuck life/stop her eyes”
(CSP, 281–282). It appears that there is an emphatic rejection of seeing in
favor of an embrace of the haptic shroud of mother-voice-chair, “those arms
at last,” but also a rejection of the external world. The blinds and the eyelids
come down, and the darkness, ready to close in, is like a cover being drawn,
a container from which no escape is possible, a return to an originary state of

containment. The end of visibility is associated with death and the maternal,
as well as an end to self-division and self-awareness. The haptic here can be
registered as both the lost maternal embrace, and the moment at which the
figure reaches the limits of life, visibility, and representation between the
lips of an imaginary grave.

Haptic Space, Skin Depth
There are two contrasting types of space in Rockaby, rendered vocally and
visually. These refer to outer and inner space, respectively. The outward
movement, of “to and fro” (CSP, 276), which the Voice describes, contrasts
with an inward and downward directionality. The “out” of the search, her
“eye-quest,” is characterized by vision, while touch and sound are features
of the “action” that takes place in the back and forth of the rocking chair.
The figure moves between a dark/light, chiaroscuro patterning, between
visibility and invisibility as she rocks. The coordinates of space in this play
are registered vocally: high and low, in and out, and to and fro, and visu-
ally: the over and back rock of the chair, the vastness of the darkness that
surrounds W.
W has “famished eyes” and seeks another who is like her, in order “to see/
be seen” (CSP, 279). She desires to be visible, to be recognized as a subject,
but this recognition is not forthcoming. In the failure to become visible, to be
recognized, W’s story—if it is indeed her story—mirrors that of her mother.
Both W and the mother are dismissed, rendered invisible by a system that
insists upon and perpetuates that invisibility. The move from the sensory
modality of vision to that of touch and aurality seems to point to what sight
cannot access. The gaze, the “eye-quest,” does not produce an other. It is
only through a tactile epistemology that the other can be re-created.
It is significant that in the fourth and final section, Voice describes how
the eyes, once “famished,” are now closed. The stage directions confirm a
dimuendo movement of the eyelids:
Eyes
Now closed, now open in unblinking gaze. About equal proportions
section 1, increasingly closed section 2 and 3, closed for good halfway
through 4. (CSP, 273)
There is a sensory distinction then between what the voice describes and
the figure presents. The two, voice and image, gradually align, however, like
two lids coming together over an eye. However, the suggestion is not that a
full merger into undifferentiation takes place at this point. Rather, through

the performance these differences are brought into touch in such a way that
neither achieves privilege over the other; they interact in a tense and labile
manner. The woman has chosen a different path to travel. As Bryden writes,
“[W]ith sight sidelined as an informational tool, the woman may travel
willingly within, to more intimate zones of awareness, within the cradling,
tactile embrace of “the rocker/those arms at last.”37 She does not suggest
that the eye-quest is a failure, rather that the woman sets it aside in order to

“embark on a new phase,” marked by the line “time she stopped.” As Bryden
puts it, “[T]he credentials of sight are incrementally jettisoned en route for
an interior space which is immune to the penetrative power of the gaze.”38
As is apparent in Film, Beckett’s aesthetic practice seems always poised to
interrogate vision, pointing toward its failure, and its links to Cartesian con-
ceptions of space—geometric design, seeing, intellect, order, and division of
self from self, self from other.
W’s costume is yet another layer of skin in this play, one that has rel-
evance for the way it foregrounds the performance of gender. This costume,
her sequined “best black,” is the woman’s glittering exoskeleton, an exten-
sion of her skin upon which the cultural markings of gender are played out.
On the one hand, this feminine costume can be read as a symbol of female
narcissism—though she may be fading from the world of female desirability,
she retains pride in her appearance. It is her “best black” after all, no mat-
ter the pathos of an aging woman wearing glamorous clothes that no one
will see. The costume may also situate her as object and mirror of the male
gaze, though the possibility of that gaze is now receding. Diamond, taking
a psychoanalytic perspective, argues that the dress positions W as mirror, a
“support for representation.” She cannot represent herself as I however and
“with ‘famished eyes’ the adult woman seeks to rejoin an imaginary version
of herself.”39 The costume in this regard signifies her disenfranchisement
and exclusion. It is a funereal skin, which, at the same time as it renders her
visible, is the sign of her containment: a glittering cage.
On the other hand, taking a social constructivist approach, Christine
Jones suggests that Beckett’s theater exposes the fundamental construction
of gender as Butler theorizes it,40 by relying on the basic principles of the
nonagency of the actor, and compulsory and compulsive repetition through
the body.41 Indeed the sequined costume, her “best black,” presents a hyper-
bolic femininity, a kind of drag performance, the costume ironically mis-
placed in the sparse set and the darkness of W’s “room.”42 Ironic also is the
collision of grandiose clothing and the pale, prematurely aged body under-
neath it. The costume is both an actual, material costume, designed to evoke
the fading beauty of the figure on “display.” It is also the projection of the
woman’s inner psyche, her skin ego. As well as this skin as prison and cage,

it is a condition of her existing at all, even partially. Gender identity may be

only skin deep, but it is necessary, apparently, for her to be seen at all, an
essential part of her eye-quest.
With its excessive, hyperbolic qualities, this glittering skin is also an aes-
thetic surface, a limit point where the physicality of the body meets with
the limits of art. Aesthetic element mirroring physiological organ, Rockaby,
in a way that is similar to Not I, displays a haptic aesthetic: a relief carving

or portrait of surfaces. She is a glittering kinetic statue in the darkness, a
figure fading in and out of ground, to and fro. Her performance carves
out spaces within the chamber: the depth of the darkness, hinted at each
time she rocks back into it, and the surface of skin, pale and glittering.
As in . . . but the clouds . . . we see an image of the inner psychic skin and its
outer impenetrable, reflective surface, so that inner and outer, container and
contained—both sides of the skin—are held together in tension.
The quest for the return of the gaze, for mutual recognition is a failed
one, as no other is found. No other gaze satisfies her hunger “to see/be
seen.” So “in the end,” the voice tells us, she “went back in” to sit, “quiet
at her window/facing other windows.” The search continues from the win-
dow but again all “other windows” but hers have their “blinds down” (CSP,
278–279). It is through touch, not vision, that the presence of the (m)
other can be recovered and the space in which she rocks is no longer the
objective, geometric space of the optic. She is gradually sinking into haptic
space, a tactile container shaped to the contours of the body: space mim-
icking skin, room mimicking womb. She, at the moment that she gives up
on the eye-quest and takes her place in the rocking chair, becomes “her
own other.” She sinks into its waiting arms, and waits to be enveloped by
death.
There is visible here and in Footfalls a creative performance in which the
mother is drawn from the surrounding darkness, given an identity beyond
that of mere background. The void is given a voice and a meaning, as
mother. The negative association between woman, darkness, and death per-
sists. However, in both of these plays the darkness takes on an agency that
belies the patriarchal conceptions of femininity as passive ground, reflective
substance. The agency of the dark is affirmed further in fact, by the rhyth-
mic movement of mergence and emergence, which W engages in. The sur-
rounding darkness takes on a muscular, fleshly quality as the figure of the
rocking woman seems at each moment of the performance to be absorbed a
little more into its folds.
Each section of this play is punctuated with the refrain “time she
stopped,” a line that W joins the voice in speaking and each “time she
stopped” marks a new level in the spiraling dimuendo pattern at work in

the play. In spite of the perceived failure to return the affirming gaze of
the other, or to achieve a rejoining with the idealized image of the self,
forever lost, this line could be argued to assert the agency of W. Instead of,
as Diamond writes, fulfilling a “traditional” feminine role of affirming/
producing/nurturing/supporting life, the voice says “fuck life” and instead
of “yes,” W says “no.”43 In performance, the body of the actor melds these
two figures: daughter-mother. Not only is the mother reclaimed from her

zone of exclusion, where she has been dismissed as “harmless,” but also the
harm that befell her is recognized, rearticulated upon the present, rock-
ing body of W. W replaces the mother, and in doing so gives voice to that
shared experience of suffering, exclusion, and loss; just as the space comes
to mirror the internal flesh of the rocking figure, so too is this space real-
ized as part of the maternal body. The final lines which the voice speaks
are: “fuck life/stop her eyes/rock her off.” The play is a soft, rhythmic
hymn to death. Throughout, the figure hovers at the limit point, aestheti-
cally realized, between life and death, before the final moment prior to
finally rejecting life and passing away as the light fades.
“I was not there”: Footfalls and the End of Space

Woman as Container
While W of Rockaby demonstrates the turn to a haptic modality as both
ethical and emancipatory, the slightly earlier Footfalls (1975) is the play
that perhaps best exemplifies the complexities of woman’s relationship to
space and tactility. In Footfalls, a ragged figure—May—paces and wheels
along a narrow strip of light. Her presence is a tattered semblance, only par-
tially visible. When asked for an explanation of May by actress Hildegard
Schmal during rehearsals for the 1976 Schiller theater production of the
play, Beckett’s primary explanation is that the walking up and down is the
central image of the play; the text was built around this.44 Schmal however
pressed for more detail and Asmus notes his reply, in what is a rare moment
of explicitness about one of his figures:
Only hesitantly does Beckett take up this challenge to give more detailed
information about the play. In the thirties, he says, CG Jung, the psy-
chologist once gave a lecture in London and told of a female patient who
was being treated by him. Jung said he wasn’t able to help this patient
and for this, according to Beckett, he gave an astonishing explanation.
The girl wasn’t living. She existed but didn’t actually live. According to
Beckett, this story had impressed him very much at the time.45

And later in rehearsals Beckett remarks that the voice does not refer to May
having been born because it never happened: “it began. There is a differ-
ence. She was never born.”46
Taking Anzieu’s psychological perspective, May’s current state could be
put down to a lack of maternal presence. Her psychic and physical boundar-
ies, manifest as skin ego, are malformed: her tattered skin ego is rendered
visually in the costume for the 1976 premier in London. When Jocelyn

Herbert created the costume, she did so by adding bits of lace curtain to an
old grey dress, which she then tore rather than cut at its edges to add to its
ghostliness. Fraying at the edges, both literally and psychologically, May’s
mother did not provide her with the necessary ground to form fully and
May failed to be born. The complexity of their relationship is played out in
the spatial and vocal organization of the stage space.
Space is organized in the performance by light. A narrow strip lights the
path that May takes; it is “dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on
head ” (CSP, 239), creating the sense of May’s existence as centering around
her feet and the sound they make. We learn that May has been pacing up
and down this narrow strip of floor since “girlhood.” She obsessively follows a
rhythmic pattern of nine steps, then wheel, nine back, and so on (CSP, 239).
The mother-figure in this play could be read negatively, as a suffocating pres-
ence surrounding May, exemplifying the overpowering “phallic” mother of
Freudian theory. Indeed the darkness surrounding May, similarly to Rockaby,
appears to be already absorbing her—she is in shadows from the waist up.
Such a reading would fit with Beckett’s earlier images of maternity. In the
early fiction, as Bryden points out, mothers are seen as a “fearsome figures
who straddle both earth and sky” and are “physical agents of life on earth,”
demonstrating a power that is often more threatening than nurturing.47 In
keeping with this, Diamond suggests that May’s pacing and her “inability” to
be born is animage of that engulfing bond that keeps mother and daughter in
paralysis, with the daughter “culturally, socially, linguistically collapsible into
the maternal remains.”48 “Mother” might be seen as a dark space, which never
really let its daughter go and is now slowly reclaiming her, tatter by tatter.
Yet the rhythmic way in which the mother’s voice intertwines with
May’s actions seems to belie this. The play, according to Beckett’s direction,
required tight orchestration. According to Walter Asmus:
The first “May” comes on the fourth step while May is walking from
right to left, the second “May” comes on the eighth step May says her
“Yes, Mother” on the fourth step when she is walking from left to right,
and on the sixth step of the same stretch the Mother beings with, “Will
you never have done?” The sentence ends immediately before the turn.49

The elements of the play—sound, movement—are tightly woven. There is a

rhythmic intertwining of mother/daughter. In the opening lines, the mother
counts herself into May’s rhythm:
V: [Pause. M resumes pacing. Four lengths. After first length, synchronous

with steps] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, wheel.
[Free] Will you not try to catch a little sleep? (CSP, 239)

The lines uttered by May and by the voice mirror each other. For
McMullan, this dialogue structured on mirroring indicates the lack of mas-
tery, authority in the work, “only the repetition of increasing cycles of loss.”50
Like the rhythm of the pacing, into which the voice slips, the dialogue cre-
ates a similar sense of balance and rhythm.
May and her mother are therefore not fully defined and wholly separate
entities. Indeed it is not possible to fully ascertain at all times during a perfor-
mance of the play if the voices whom we hear—May’s included—are in fact
the distinct and separate voices of a mother and a daughter. The text supplies
us with two characters: “May” and “Woman’s voice” (CSP, 239). The voice
is taken to be that of the mother only because May calls her this. However,
both the “mother” and the daughter engage in play and imitation, with “May”
playing out a scene in the final section in which the daughter Amy, an ana-
gram of May, and her mother Mrs Winter converse. With voices and bodies
failing to match up, the evidence of the senses, as William Worthen puts it,
is challenged by the two narratives, “which seem at once to describe and dis-
place the evidence of the stage.”51 The fact that light barely reaches May’s face
calls into question May as a source of her “own” voice, and the role-playing in
which she engages further questions the ability of the viewer/listener to dis-
tinguish between the two female “presences,” and their fictional counterparts,
which May creates. David Pattie notes the displacement of the originary voice
in Beckett’s work: “Footfalls tells the same story three times; but with each
retelling the story is distanced further and further from its original source,
and its status as the unambiguous relation of direct experience is rendered
increasingly problematic.”52 Not only is there is a confusion of identity and an
incommensurability between what is seen and what is heard, but there is also
a muddling of the distinction between fiction and truth; as McMullan puts
it, the “very notion of an origin or original/authorial voice is undermined.”53
It is significant that the voice’s line “My voice is in her mind” (section II) was
deleted in postproduction editions of the play,54 thereby emphasizing the era-
sure of origins that characterize this play. Footfalls is a “dialogue of echoes”55;
May is not fully there. When rehearsing the work with Beckett in 1976, Billie
Whitelaw recounts how she felt herself to be “like a moving, musical, Edvard

Munch painting,” with Beckett having erased the lines of the image until they
were only faintly there.56
Therefore, while May’s mother is associated with places of darkness,
depth, and the unconscious, she is not perhaps an all-engulfing void. May
calls to her at the opening of the play:
M: Mother. [Pause. No louder.] Mother.

V: Yes, May.
M: Were you asleep?
V: Deep asleep. [Pause.] I heard you in my deep sleep. [Pause.] There is no
sleep so deep I would not hear you there. (CSP, 239)
The roles of mother-daughter become reversed, as, in her care for her
mother, May deals with the most intimate processes of life, as a mother with
a child: “Straighten your pillows? [Pause.] Change your drawsheets? [Pause.]
Pass you the bedpan? [Pause.] The warming pan? [Pause.] Dress your sores?
[Pause.] Sponge you down? [Pause.] Moisten your poor lips? [Pause.] Pray
with you? [Pause.] For you?” (CSP, 240). This role reversal and the denial
of an orginary voice muddles also the relationship between the contained
and the container. Instead of being consumed by the mother-figure, she
makes space for her, within her inner skin. She causes the darkness that sur-
rounds her to no longer be the anonymous, unconscious other. May names
it “mother,” and contains her within a space that sees the identities of both
meld and intertwine. The surrounding darkness of the image defines the
(albeit) tattered figure contained within it. May taps out her existence to
the tune of this voice emerging from the void, just as the voice intertwines
rhythmically with her movements.
“I was not there”: Refusing Origins

Perhaps it is that May has been trapped in a relation of care and dependence,
and remains “unborn,” because of her ailing mother. Admittedly, May seems
to be engaged, whether by choice or not, in an economy of care exchange:
the mother has provided, May provides for her in return. However, the
mother expresses her guilt at giving birth to May, and asks for forgiveness: “I
had you late. [Pause.] In life. [Pause.] Forgive me again.” (CSP, 240). And it is
apparent that May’s pacing, her introversion, began early on, long before her
mother’s invalidity. The voice tells us in section II that “she has not been out
since girlhood.” (CSP, 241). May rejected, in favor of her pacing, the things
that “other girls of her age were out at.” The text contains a moment’s hesita-
tion, not an outright pause before the voice cites “Lacrosse” as the example

of what “other girls” do (CSP, 241). There is an emphatic distinction made

here between the places where normal girlish activities are done—“out”
there—and the place where May paces—her “here”; her rejection of the
space outside her strip of light is also a rejection of certain normative aspects
of female life.
Birth, when it comes to the female child, means a perpetuation of the
cycle of reproduction where the female acts as a container for another, who

in turn becomes a container. Irigaray argues, in her critique of Aristotle,
that the child, the man, and the woman herself all compete to be contained
in the place that a woman will provide, with the child of course coming
foremost in importance. The containment of a man is “merely a sort of
perforation aiming toward” the creation and containment of the child. The
containment of the woman by herself and for herself is not permissible: “It
is necessary, Freud writes, for woman to turn away from her mother in order
to enter into desire of and for man. If she remains in empathy with her
mother, she remains in her place. [ . . . ] She interiorises her container-mother
in herself-as-container. Between the two she exists.”57 May’s activity, her
refusal to be “out there,” constitutes a rejection of the terms upon which this
contract(ion) takes place. For it is a contract(ion) that will expel her from her
place—take her place from her and force her to become a place for an other.
Their relationship is marked by an anxiety over reproduction, the becoming
of a place or container for another.
In the second section of the play, May’s “history,” such as it is, is revealed
by the voice. We are given a location for May; she is in the place where she
“began,” with the voice notably avoiding reference to birth. A strong sense
of sterility prevails, as May walks upon a floor that was once carpeted, but is
now bare. Her demand for this barren hallway came while she was still a child.
As the voice recounts: “No mother, the motion alone is not enough, I must
hear the feet however faint they fall.” (CSP, 241). The emergence of sensory
assurance and its affirmation of existence are linked with May’s refusal of an
external life and embrace of sterility. May’s pacing forms a protective barrier,
perhaps from a threatening, engulfing mother-figure, but certainly from an
even more threatening “outside.” In order to be recognized, and identifiable as
a woman, she must relinquish the semblance of personhood in which she has
wrapped herself and become a source. Once out, removed from her place, May
would be required to be a place for another. This she refuses to do.
At the beginning of the play, May asks her mother: “Would you like me
to change your position again?” (CSP, 240). The suggested position-change
occurs at a discursive level later in the play, when May eventually displaces
both herself and her mother-figure into a narrative about “Amy” and “Mrs
Winter.” She demonstrates here a certain control over the processes of

representation—she may have refused to become a reproductive source but,

although signs of this are erased, she is the creative source of the play itself.58
She draws attention to the fictional nature of her performance, through
addressing her “reader”: “Old Mrs Winter, whom the reader will remember”
(CSP, 242). She is also quite possibly the creative source of the voice, of her
mother, though this, like all signs of origination in this play, is ambiguous.
In this regard, she reproduces her mother; in a similar way to the exchange

of care between mother and daughter, she gives her mother a place, contains
her, but discursively, via narrative. The “mother-voice” in turn forms a con-
taining envelop around May. Instead of fulfilling the Freudian prophecy of
maternal repudiation, the two intertwine rhythmically.
May refuses to realize herself under the terms set for her, terms that would
make of her a source, a generative origin for another body, but cannot hold
her own against dissolution forever. The final scene shows the empty strip
of light; this self-realization, which is in reality a negation of self, is familiar
in Beckett’s work; he is an author who finds the semblances of human life,
operating outside the limits of norms and conventions, deeply productive
and aesthetically potent. As McMullan writes:
Rather than reinforcing any normative gender or cultural identity the

play [Footfalls] elicits a considerable effort to see and listen to the silences,
absences, and echoes that haunt the conventional boundaries of the see-
able and the sayable, and what those economies recognise as legitimate
identities or bodies.59
May elides, and perhaps challenges, the categories of identity and gender
that would make her “recognisable.” As she “tries to tell it how it was”
(CSP, 241), we can see in her failure an interrogation of the places she has
been offered for her existence: the mother’s womb, and the “there” that she
refuses to access. She erases the “L” from place, choosing to “pace” rather
than “place.” Her performance constitutes this refusal; it is also a statement:
I am not/was not that place. She paces herself into that discursive space of
her own making—this is the inner skin in which she makes room for her
“mother,” and ultimately writes herself out of. The final part of the work sees
May’s manipulation of identity into Amy, an anagram of her own name, and
a final denial: “I was not there.”
May, Mythology, and Place

Female biological reproduction is played out in mythology, particularly in
creation myths, where the role of woman as container is cemented into the

cultural psyche. May’s performance connects her with a wider framework of

narratives, ones that attempt to make sense of the mysteries of the origins of
life. May’s intertwining of herself with her mother, and of fiction with real-
ity, coupled with the separation of voice from body functions to undermine
the ability of the spectator/reader to “source” her identity, her narrative. Her
refusal of sources can also be connected with the mythology of origins and
the misogyny that often prevails within them.

The link with the Christian mythos is apparent in May’s only “out.” She
recounts walking up and down the transept of the “little church,” the place
where Christ’s “poor arm” would be (CSP, 242). This link to Christ places
May in the context of a greater history of suffering.60 Another link to the
Christ narrative is visible in May’s poignant offer to her mother to “moisten
your poor lips,” a final comfort to the dying, though in the case of Christ,
it was bitter vinegar. Significantly, however, May does not walk up the aisle:
she is not seeking the traces of a “normal” female existence, marriage and
children.
May’s offer to her mother to “change her position” resonates with that
early mythological dislocation, for which woman is to blame. The sin of
Eve was of course what brought about that primary displacement from the
Garden of Eden. In punishment, the Genesis myth sees God give woman
the role of child-bearer: “To the woman He said: ‘I will greatly multiply your
sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your
desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”61 Here woman,
having been construed as the reason behind the expulsion, is offered as the
place for human life to emerge. May’s avoidance of the aisle could be viewed
as an emphatic rejection of the terms of this arrangement. There is a link, in
Freudian terms, between the veil, the hymen, marriage, and the act of weav-
ing. Weaving is the task the woman undertakes, the creation of false skin to
cover herself. She does this in order to cover up her natural “deficiencies.”
Wholeness is restored to her when she wraps herself up. At the same time,
this “wrapping” fetishizes her, thus overvaluing what is deficient, devalued.
Commenting on Freud’s connection between woman and the act of weav-
ing, an act that maintains the invisibility of female sexuality, Irigaray writes:
“Whence the need for weaving to shield the gilded eyes from the possible
incandescence of the standard [ . . . ] A protective, defensive texture. A hymen
whose usefulness needs to be re-evaluated, whether as a ‘member-screen’ or
as ‘marriage.’ [ . . . ] woman weaves to sustain the disavowal of her sex.”62
Marriage exposes her deficiency, while at the same time taking the remedial
action of filling the feminine space, of fertilizing it. Marriage and the fulfill-
ment of the biological imperative is exactly that route to becoming place, a
route that is impossible for May, either through her refusal or her inability

to accommodate it. May’s “skin” is a worn, grey, tattered wrap and she
describes herself as a “[a] tangle of tatters. [Pause.] Watch it pass—[Pause.]—
watch her pass before the candelabrum, how its flames, their light. . . . like
moon through passing wrack” (CSP, 242). If the visible “skin” in Rockaby
is a glittering, reflective carapace of a dress, May’s seems to be falling off
her in shreds, a testament to the idea of skin as container for identity. She
is a “semblance,” and it is only the sound of her feet as she paces that serve

to affirm her presence. Yet the wrap does not conceal either a presence, or
an absence. The figure of May is, in Peter Gidal’s view, a wrap in itself.63
May does not only walk a line, but her very presence is a line, or a limit. She
vibrates between fiction and reality, the visibility and invisibility, in a similar
way to the speaker in The Unnameable who “vibrates” like a tympanum: “on
the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.”64
Her presence is neither fully committed to light nor darkness, fiction
nor reality. Rather, she is the line that vibrates between the two. In walking
the narrow strip of light, hearing her own footfalls, she both describes and
enacts this sense of her own liminality. She is skin: the boundary between
inner and outer, but breaking down; not a fixed boundary, but a fragile
milieu, a place where both inner and outer are held together.
May has not been fully born or even borne, as in carried fully to term.
She has emerged not fully formed. She exists only partially, in fluidity on the
edges between these two worlds. McMullan writes that “[i]f there is no ori-
gin in Footfalls, there is likewise no ending, neither birth not death, but some
in-between state, some womb/tomb space occupied by the unborn and the
undead—shades caught between the definitive contours of form or identity
and the formless infinity of space.”65 The English language has no proper
word for the object that is the result of either a miscarriage or abortion. By
contrast, such terms exist in other languages and cultures, which do not seek
to erase the presence of such material. In Japanese, for example, the material
that results from a miscarriage is known as a mizuko, or water-child. Like
May, the mizuko does not exist fully either in the inner space of the womb
or in the outer of the world. May does not belong to her original territory, a
place that has not carried her, nor does she belong in out there, the norma-
tive external world that would make her a vessel.
As with many creation myths, such as that of ancient Mesopotamia,
solidity and light are privileged over formless (often feminine) substance.
According to this myth, the earth was created by Marduk, who carves it
from the body of his mother, Tiamat. He not only makes the carcass of
Tiamat into the earth, but also fixes a guard so that her “waters” cannot flow
forth to consume the world.66 The solid body is venerated, as is the female
body given over to motherhood, providing a place for her male child. The

child gives the formless vessel a shape, weighs it down. Formlessness, on

other hand, is something to be feared, as Irigarary comments:
Blood, but also milk, sperm, lymph, saliva, spit, tears, humors, gas, waves
airs, fire. . . . light. . . . [ . . . ] flow out of him and into another who cannot
be easily held on to. The “subject” identifies himself with/in an almost
material consistency that finds everything flowing abhorrent. And even

in the mother, it is the cohesion of a “body” (subject) that he seeks, solid
ground, firm foundations. Not those things in the mother that recall the
woman—the flowing things.67
This construction of femininity as both fluid and dangerous—the opposite

of contained—is visible in Footfalls, and May cannot accept the role of act-
ing as solid ground, a source and origin.
It is in light of this unwillingness on the part of May to become a place
that the final “dialogue” of the play can be read. Like water, May is capable
of taking on and miming the shape of any vessel in which she finds her-
self; so while the solidity of her presence is under question, her ability to
perform and play can both recover the mother as lost object,68 as well as
articulate her resistance to emplacement. Rather than containing or being
contained the two flow through one another in a way that defies the dis-
tinction between inner and outer. If Rockaby ’s haptic image sees that binary
held in tension, the “skin” of Footfalls’s image sees that distinction begin to
disappear altogether.
May mimics, for her audience, her “readers,” the roles of Mrs Winter and
her daughter Amy, recounting their conversation about a perceived “strange
event” at Evensong. Mrs Winter asks Amy if she had “observed anything
strange.” Amy’s reply is a denial:
May: Amy: I mean, Mother, that to say I observed nothing. . . . strange is

indeed to put it mildly. For I observed nothing of any kind, strange or
otherwise. I saw nothing, heard nothing, of any kind. I was not there.
(CSP, 243)
As May tells us, Mrs Winter is perplexed by this, being sure that she heard
Amy respond and say “Amen.” Following this, May mimes Mrs Winter
and repeats her mother’s earlier words. She calls Amy, and asks “will you
never have done, . . . revolving it all?”, echoing the mother-voice of section
I (CSP, 240, 243). Though Mrs Winter claims: “I heard you say Amen,”
the play thus far has operated on the principle of the separation of voice
from body; what is heard is not necessarily connected to what is seen. Mrs

Winter’s assumption of presence based on voice has no more weight than the
ghostly presence of May herself, undone as it is by May’s constant denials. As
Knowlson suggests: “We realise, perhaps only after the play has ended, that
we may have been watching a ghost telling a tale of a ghost (herself), who
fails to be observed by someone else (her fictional alter ego) because she in
turn was not really there.”69 “I was not there” counts as not only a statement
regarding her own absence, but also a refusal to take up a place. Through her

performance, May attempts to model a way in which she might be placed,
literally remaking the contract on her own terms. The physical act of speak-
ing becomes another way of performatively unplacing herself. May’s denials
of presence are systematic, culminating in this final erasure, which writes
herself out of narrative, and its connections to myth, and beyond the binary
of inner and out, container and contained.
Beyond Containment
May’s body provides a very succinct example of the Beckettian body in per-
formance that this study is concerned with, and it is an image of embodiment
that fits with Nancy’s conceptualization. The body exists at the limit-point,
between materiality and virtuality, between biological reproduction and
aesthetic production, between text and image. It is, haptically speaking, the
point where these things touch: the body is skin-deep. Skin-ego is part of
the way we imagine the relationship between body and world, at the same
time as we experience it physically. The skin, as tactile interface, between
the external and internal, is also filled with cavities, both physiological and
psychic, through which subjectivity flows like all the other fluids of life.
The skins of the figures in these plays reveal the paradox of embodiment,
its complexity and multivalence. There are multiple skins apparent here:
physiological skin, the psychological inner skin of the mind, clothing as
skin, which reveals inner psychic state and also aesthetic skin, the skin of the
image, the skin of the screen. In these plays, Beckett perforates the skin (of
the body and of the image), ripping holes in the materiality of the surface of
the image, similarly to the way he speaks of, in the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun,
boring holes in the “terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface.”70
This perforation of the image destabilizes the relationship between the inner
and the outer. What we see is the doubleness of skin, its surface and its inner
depths held together in tension, in inclusive disjuncture.
These plays allow us to see both within and without at the same time. The
hollow internal spaces of the body are brought to visibility—albeit briefly,
and only partially. But we are also allowed to see how the inner relates to the
outer and vice versa, how the subject/self comes to be in relation to his or

her containing envelope, how he or she shapes and is in turn shaped by the
spaces they occupy, imaginary or otherwise. They reveal the haptic connec-
tion we have to space—the space within us and the space that surrounds us.
They reveal also how that space is weighty, from the moment of human con-
ception it presses upon us, makes impressions upon us, makes us ready, as
Connor puts it, for the world to write upon us.71 That space is also weighed
down by projections and interpretations: the equation of woman or woman’s

body with place and space. In these later plays in which the protagonists
are female, Beckett’s work can be argued to problematize the figuration of
woman as container, as skin waiting to be filled.

CHAPTER 5

On the One Hand . . . (The One That
Writes the Body)
Writing for the Stage-Body

The stage is an almost unique meeting point for text and matter. While tex-
tual prescriptions or proscriptions abound in human life, from religious tracts
to legal pronouncements to self-help books and so on, the stage provides a
unique space in which the relationship between the static, two-dimensional
page and the kinetic, material world that it is created for is made visible. It is
a truism to remark that barring perhaps the genre of closet drama, which, as
Martin Puchner suggests, attempts to solve the “problem” of the unpredict-
able theater space and the living actor by writing dialogic texts for reading
rather than performance,1 the play text is intended to find its completion
and fulfillment in the physicality of performance. In simple terms, it gov-
erns the words spoken by the actor and offers directions for movement; in
other words, it functions as an organizing entity, arranging speech, move-
ment, and spatiality, all of which will convey emotion, narrative, and so on.
While chapter 2 was concerned with the relationship between language and
body and between the art image and the poetic word, this chapter will be
concerned with how theater offers a meeting point between text and the
materiality of the stage space. This is brought to the fore by an author such
as Beckett who deliberately stages this meeting point through various strate-
gies, such as, for example, the act of writing in Catastrophe and the act of
reading in Ohio Impromptu, Quad and What Where stage also the violence
and restrictiveness that the text holds for the dramatic figure.

The twentieth century has seen multiple examples of performance chal-

lenging the primacy of the text and the authority of the writer. As will be
discussed in the following commentary, Beckett’s work, visualizing the
moment where text and matter touch, reveals the limits and even failures of
the text. From the prescriptively precise nature of the stage directions to the
control Beckett exerted over his work (not to mention the control exercised
by the Beckett Estate since his death), Beckett’s texts appear to function as

exacting blueprints for the stage and seem to suggest that any deviation is
also a deviation from authorial intention. They would seem to suggest that,
as with the intention often behind closet drama, the details of the page are
recreated as closely as possible in the mind of the spectator. As Kurt Taroff
puts it, these details “might not be precisely what the author had in mind,
but at least [they removed] the intermediaries of the manager, designers, and
actors,” thus leaving the spectator free to “stage the play without limits in
his or her own mind.”2
Yet this image of Beckettian strictness elides the ways in which textual
prescriptions function in tension with the performing body.3 While the
stage directions may govern the stage image, the staged text often produces
resistance to those prescriptions. Both Catastrophe and What Where demon-
strate tension between recalcitrant bodies and dominant textual prescrip-
tions. And for Quad II, the monochrome afterthought to Quad I, no text
exists at all. Beckett uses a type of literature—the play text—that is most
concerned with its performative impact on material worlds and bodies and,
by incorporating into performance itself the way writing touches matter,
dramatizes what cannot be written, what is beyond the capacity of the text
to encapsulate. This applies necessarily to all writing, though it is in theater,
in the staging of the text and/or the act of writing, that these tensions can
be made most visible.
It could be argued that in many cases, Beckett’s dramatic texts domi-
nate the stage, demanding an extreme form of subjugation from the actors
that embody them—the images of Billie Whitelaw strapped to a chair and
shrouded in black for Not I, and her descriptions of the mental and physical
torture of the performance, attest to this submission.4 Certainly, it is too
much of a simplification to suggest that it is the strictness of his dramatic
instructions alone that makes visible the tensions between text and perfor-
mance. Yet, in plays that, as Worthen suggests, incorporate or stage the text,
or stage the act of writing, these tensions—the limit points between text and
body—come to the fore. For Worthen the stage directions are not simply
accessories to Beckett’s drama, but are in fact the drama itself.5 In his analy-
sis of the presence of the text on stage in Ohio Impromptu, he argues that the

On the One Hand . . . ● 115
Reader and the Listener of Ohio Impromptu, for example, “stage the friction
between writing and enactment that defines modern drama.”6
There is a strong textual element apparent in other plays, notably That
Time, in which, although no text is visualized, the final voice (C) describes
his time in the library surrounded by dust “sitting at the big round table with
a bevy of old ones poring on the page and not a sound” (CSP, 234). Krapp’s
Last Tape also contains an interesting relationship between text and technol-

ogy. Krapp, a failed writer, must look in his ledger to access his “archive.”
Books or even the idea of the book is an important element in these plays.
In the case of What Where, the torture is verbally described rather than visu-
alized. The torture victims are given “the works” (CSP, 312), which could
be viewed as a pun referencing the canonical texts of the English language.
Beckett stages the text in order to explore its limits; that is, the limits of its
imperatives, its power over the actors’ bodies, and the stage space. In this
way he stages a fundamental relationship between the written word and the
world it attempts to represent or organize and in doing so stages what Nancy
terms “exscription.” This is an idea that will be explored in the course of the
discussion in this chapter.
Making art is a way of touching (or touching on) an other. The artist
offers his/her readership or spectatorship a privileged glimpse into the life
of someone else, yet this is a fraught process, which risks misrepresenta-
tion, the creation of a narrow view in which otherness is subsumed into the
artist’s vision. For Shane Weller there is both a radical skepticism and an
ethical questionability involved in permitting a reader to have the other at
his or her disposal, at least in certain postmodern aesthetic practices.7 He
views the Beckettian impulse toward failure, ignorance, and impotence as
an ethical strategy in this regard, one in which the integrity of the other is
preserved through, on the one hand, the artist’s exposure of the violence
attached to the process of representation, and, on the other, through the
artist’s unwillingness to touch, to manipulate art’s subjects, putting them at
the disposal of art’s consumer. The violence of this process is apparent in the
tensions generated in the following plays between the play text and the stage
image and between the staged text and the material body on stage. What I
intend to do here is not only examine references to textuality or the book or
the relationship between text and image—some work has already been done
in this regard in chapter 3 —but to look at how power, textuality, and the
hand or the artist/author intertwine in the plays. It may be argued that the
violence implied in these plays is intimately linked to their relationship with
the text and the violence of the artist’s hand in the act of creation. In this, I
draw on Deleuze’s commentary on the relationship between eye and hand in

Bacon’s art. He writes that it is not enough to say that the “eye judges and
the hand executes” but that there is a whole range of reversals and exchanges
in this relationship leading to greater and lesser subordination of the hand to
the eye, from the digital as maximum subordination, to the haptic, where the
painter touches with his eye.8 The concern, in relation to the plays examined
here, is how the hand, when in the service of systems of visual representation
and objectification, may have the potential for violence and violation.

The Violence of Making: Catastrophe
Premiered at the Festival d’Avignon as part of “Une nuit pour Vaclav Havel”
(1982) and set, significantly, in a theater, Catastrophe is a meta-theatrical
meditation on the nature of power and the act of artistic creation. A direc-
tor (D), with the aid of his assistant (A), arranges a figure (Protagonist
or P) on a plinth into the finished image of a “catastrophe” (CSP, 300).
The figure raises his head in a gesture that addresses both the fictional
audience-within-the-play and the real audience, and highlights their com-
plicity with the events they have just witnessed.
As with much of Beckett’s work, there is no reference to any specific
historical or political setting; yet, as McMullan puts it, it “reveals the preoc-
cupation with power in its relationship to representation which characterizes
much of Beckett’s work, and its implications extend far beyond any specific
political context.”9 While Catastrophe was written for the political dissident
and future president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, and is a state-
ment of solidarity with a fellow left-leaning artist, it is not an attempt to
dramatize, at any level, Havel’s situation; the play stages, rather, a moment
of resistance against an authoritarian force that could allude to multiple
situations of human dominance and oppression, as well as to a certain vio-
lence inherent in the process of perception and representation, the process
of making art.
Catastrophe’s “Director” remakes the image of the protagonist so that it
coheres with his own vision, thus staging the violence of artistic creation, a
deformation of reality that begins with the artist’s perception and is lived out in
the act of creating art. Violence in the act of perception is, in Merleau-Ponty’s
analysis, to do with knowledge that is produced about that other. Without
intersubjective communication in the form of word and gesture, “I transform
him [the other] into an object and deny him.”10 Jorella Andrews, who links
this to Merleau-Ponty’s writings on art, may provide insight into this process
in Catastrophe: “For Merleau-Ponty, what these practices of committed and
extended looking [in the painting practices of C ézanne, Renoir and Matisse]
do not do is reduplicate already existent realities. Instead, they bring to our

attention, with particular force, the productively violent articulations intrin-

sic to all engaged acts of our perceiving.”11 Cézanne attempts to paint the
primordial act of perception itself, and in so doing makes visible the violence
of this action. “Reality” is always deformed by perception and by the creative
act. The violence of artistic creation is lived out in Catastrophe on the mute
materiality of the protagonist’s body. Theater reveals how these acts of per-
ception and creation have, on the stage, real and material effects, a problem

to which Billie Whitelaw attests after performing Not I.12
This has further implications for the viewer of said act. As Jim Hansen
comments on the power dynamic at work in Catastrophe:
One [figure] has an appropriate vision of the world’s suffering, while the
other is appropriated by that vision. D is a symbol-maker who imag-
ines himself in sympathy with P. P’s body becomes the symbol writ large
on the stage and in front of an audience. Beckett invites us to ask pre-
cisely what psychic and ideological needs are met through this act of
identification.13
The creation that is the making visible of P is simultaneously destructive

of his autonomy and subjectivity. In the process of creating an image, “our
catastrophe” (CSP, 301), the director demands that P’s body be arranged
correctly by his assistant: P must not keep his hands in his pockets, the
“black dressing-gown to ankles” (CSP, 297) that he wears must be removed,
his hands and cranium must be whitened, his toes must be visible from
the front row of the stalls and his face must be lowered. These details are
relayed to the assistant who either enacts them on the spot at the request of
the Director, or takes out her pad and pencil to “make a note.” The process
is one of objectification. Lines of power are clearly drawn as the Protagonist
has no say in the process, literally so:
A: Sure he won’t utter?

D: Not a squeak. (CSP, 299)
At the outset, the Director contemplates the image of P, which is presented

to the spectator thus: “P midstage standing on a black block 18 inches high.
Black wide brimmed hat. Black dressing gown to ankles. Barefoot. Head bowed.
Hands in pockets. Age and physique unimportant ” (CSP, 297). He asks for
explanations of each element from the Assistant. We learn that the “plinth”
is there to “let the stalls see the feet,” according to A. The hat hides the face
and the gown means that he is “all black” (CSP, 297). The explanations
that are given and the subsequent changes that the Director demands are

all clinical decisions. As McMullan puts it, the conversion of the body into
visual object is a process of subjugation, with the body in Catastrophe being
“manipulated by the Director and consumed by the audience.”14 Perception
and the act of creation in the form of writing and image creation deform the
body of P, converting it to the desired spectacle.
D demands also that the image be verbalized by his assistant. His inabil-
ity to remember the details of the protagonist’s image (or to look for himself)

force the assistant to describe them to him, with his dominance over her
adding yet another example of the exercise of power in this play. When he
asks what P wears underneath his gown, it is not enough that A moves to
show him. He demands that she verbalize it: “Say it” he says (CSP, 297), and
she responds:
A: His night attire.

D: Colour?
A: Ash. (CSP, 297)
Yet the image alone is apparently not trustworthy, and it is not enough to see
P or have his image verbalized. He must be fixed textually as well in order to
create the correct effect: the catastrophe. In what amounts also to an inter-
rogation of A, D demands a description of the hands from A:
D: How are they? [A at a loss. Irritably.] The hands, how are

the hands?
A: You’ve seen them.
D: I forget.
A: Crippled. Fibrous degeneration.
D: Clawlike?
A: If you like.
D: Two claws?
A: Unless he clench his fists.
D: He mustn’t. (CSP, 298)
She then converts the changes or proscriptions into text:
A: I make a note [She takes out pad, takes pencil, notes.]

Hands limp.
[She puts back pad and pencil.] (CSP, 298)
Like his crippled, claw-like hands, the figure in Catastrophe is slowly atro-
phied into the desired “image.” At the same time his image is being fixed

textually. It is the Director’s vision imposed on the material stage, its body,
its actors (the assistant can be included in this list also), recorded on the page
and inscribed into the flesh. The assistant is harried to obey commands,
as well as note down the instructions. When the Director calls for “more
nudity,” she goes to “make a note” only for him to urge: “Get going! Get
going!” (CSP, 300). She bares P’s neck and rolls his trousers to uncover his
knees. A final command is to whiten the flesh, which A notes down. While

these interactions uncover the violence of perception and representation,
they also image the theatrical moment where text touches performance.
In this play, not only is the process of creating the image exposed, so
too is the writing of the stage directions—this is part of the performance
of the play. We are given a glimpse into the world that they emerge from
and we see the hand of the artist/writer in action, with all the potential
for violence—perceptual, representative, and actual—that it entails. When
it comes to performance, this violence can spill over into the real, as the
text impacts upon the material world of the stage and the material bod-
ies that operate at its limits. For the most part, the Protagonist is compli-
ant: unmoving, silent. It is only in the final moments of the play that he
slowly raises his head. The “ distant storm of applause ” (CSP, 301), which
the Director predicted, falters and dies as the imagined spectators and the
real spectators are brought eye to eye with the figure, a human in whose
objectification they have had a hand.
Exscription
The image, up to the point at which the figure raises his head, makes sense.
The naming of it as “catastrophe” inserts it into the history of human suffer-
ing and a semiotic mapping of such suffering is possible. The gray pajamas,
the deathly whitened flesh, the ashen skull, all seem to point to the charnel
houses of Auschwitz. Indeed the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, Shoah, is
often translated as “catastrophe.”15 Audiences can be clear: they are being
invited to watch the performance of a universalized moment of human suf-
fering. P is a synecdoche, Christ-like, for the whole array of oppression and
suffering endured by humanity. The look that he delivers at the end, a look
that causes the canned audience applause to falter, affirms his humanity,
and affirms for an audience that, in spite of suffering, people still go on, still
resist. Hansen argues that the play becomes a kind of fantasy projection for
its audience, in which we can imagine ourselves as heroic through having
successfully identified with the victim. This play then images not only the
creative force of the artist, but also “the specular satisfaction of the audi-
ence”, thus enfolding aesthetic pleasure into the dialectic of domination.16

By this analysis, the event of P’s returned gaze means that the comfort of
“heroic” identification is withdrawn.
It is essential to the director that P be fully visible, fully exposed. The
plinth is there, according to A, “to let the stalls see the feet” (CSP, 297).
She makes a note to raise it when D cannot see it from the front row. D
comments that the image “could do with more nudity” (CSP, 300). The
play foregrounds the process of the creation of this image and plays upon

the audiences’ awareness of the body transformed into a sign, into material
to be manipulated, disciplined, and shaped. The body in representation is
reproduced as a conditioned image in accordance with dominant laws.17
Audience complicity also implies audience privilege. Like the voice in Eh
Joe, the gaze has tactile force, and becomes another instrument of torture—
that is, until it is returned by P at the end of the play. It is through this
violence that the figure, the body around which the play circles, begins to
“make sense.” There is violence too in the act of identification, a process
that always runs the risk of erasing difference through misrecognition, or
annihilating it through violence.18
When P raises his head, a chasm is driven between the staged text and
the stage image. While the Assistant suggests toward the end: “What if he
were to . . . were to . . . raise his head . . . an instant . . . show his face . . . just an
instant” (CSP, 300), the Director scoffs at her. No instructions for this act
were decided upon or recorded and this is P’s only action to break through
the textual web generated by the director and his assistant. As Jennifer
Jeffers puts it, Beckett is not telling the story of humanity in all its pain and
suffering but, “[t]he privation of colour and narrative forces us to rethink
and reread the visibilities that Beckett presents. His strategy in the telling
of this catastrophe of the humanist tradition is not to tell the story but to
make visible the catastrophe that cannot be retold.”19 There is a connection
to be made between this (staged) extratextual act and the idea of exscription,
as described by Nancy. In Corpus, Nancy interrogates the difficult relation-
ship between writing and the body. Bodies to some extent are always in
excess of signification and Beckett’s work demonstrates this time and again.
Nancy characterizes the relationship between the body and writing as one
of touch. As he puts it: “[T]ouching upon the body, touching the body,
touching —happens in writing all the time.”20 And he remarks on how one
might think of the act of writing the body as an impossible task—the body
is perhaps “uninscribable.”21 Yet the Nancean view of touching is relevant
here once more: the act of touch is always also a separation, or a revelation of
separateness, the realization of a limit in the attempt to cross that limit. The
body appears at the limits of writing “along the absolute limit separating the
sense of one from the skin and nerves of the other.”22 Nancy uses the term

“exscription” to denote this separation-in-contact of text and of the body

and the material world in general. Or, more appropriately, writing itself is an
act of exscription. In Martta Heikkilä’s words: “Writing stands for exscrip-
tion which describes the relation to exteriority, or separation which is main-
tained between impenetrable matter and bodily sense, and between bodily
sense and linguistic signification.”23
The following comments elucidate further what Nancy means by

exscription:
It is a word which came to me in reaction to this sudden infatuation with

writing, the text, salvation through literature etc. There is a sentence
from Bataille: “Language alone indicates the sovereign moment where it
becomes obsolete.” It is my daily prayer. He means: There is nothing but
language, but language indicates non-language, the things themselves,
the moment where it is rendered obsolete. This reminds me of a meeting
I had with [Paul] Ricoeur a long time ago, at his house, in Châtenay.
He had read my first book on Hegel, and after opening the door to the
garden, he said: “It’s very good, but where is the garden in all that?” I
have never forgotten: the exscribed is the garden. The fact that writing
indicates its own outside, is decanted and shows the things.24
The act of writing continually points to what is outside of writing, “the

things themselves,” as Nancy puts it here, things that writing “touches on”
but from which it remains at a distance.
Catastrophe stages the process by which, in a play text, the body and the
material space of the stage that surrounds it are fixed into a two-dimensional
form: the flat fixity of the page. In this process the stage space appears to
take on the two-dimensionality of the page: space is collapsed and flattened
as P is subjugated and fixed. The ephemeral quality of the theatrical image is
diminished, in line with Puchner’s ideas around closet drama. Yet out of this
flattened space emerges the possibility of an interruption to the dominant
aesthetic ideal as the very process of making (writing, painting) points to its
own limits: the point where “writing indicates its own outside.”
When P finally raises his head, the fixity of the image is disrupted in a
moment of animation. The objectified body on stage has refused to remain
an image, a passive reflection of the Director’s instruction. The carved stone
relief becomes animated and refuses to obey the confines of the aesthetic,
instead breaking its frame. D’s attempt to make P two-dimensional, as both
visual image and textual entity, fails and the subjugation of hand to eye
falters. When Beckett stages the text, and specifically in Catastrophe stages
the act of writing, he is also staging the limits of art and the violence of

perception. P’s gesture at the end reveals the ways in which performance can
uproot, contravene, or ignore its textual “master.” Catastrophe stages exscrip-
tion: where writing and body touch and in that touch remain separate.
What Where and the Violence of Unmaking

What Where, Beckett’s final play, premiered in English in New York in 1983.

It was later filmed in Germany with the author’s involvement and, while
the final part of this chapter (later) will address the implications of the play
as “televisual,” here I am primarily concerned with the play as staged. The
play follows a complex set of permutations in which the interrogators (Bom,
Bim, Bem) are each interrogated after failing to produce the desired con-
fession from the subject of their interrogation. The sequences are orches-
trated by Bam, whose voice (V) we hear throughout, correcting and revising
and demanding that each successive subject admit that his interrogatee
confessed. Doubting the veracity of the results of the interrogations, Bam
orders Bom to interrogate Bim, Bem to interrogate Bom, and finally Bem is
interrogated by Bam. Unmentioned, and perhaps unmentionable, is Bum,
whom we presume to be the initial target. The initial sequence appears as
a rehearsal, giving the sense that the play is an endless repetition of these
variables. Bam’s voice is heard, over the megaphone:
V: We are the last five.

In the present as we were still.
It is spring.
Time passes.
First without words.
I switch on.
[Light on (playing area)
Bam at 3 head haught, Bom at 1 head bowed.
Pause.]
Not good.
I switch off. (CSP, 310)
Bam begins again. In the revised sequence, Bom is not visualized, until he
is introduced by V: “In the end Bom appears” (CSP, 311). Each figure then
goes silently through the motions that the play will follow. At the outset “it
is spring,” but with each successive sequence “time passes” into summer,
autumn, and finally winter, when Bam/V will “switch off” for good; the
seasons offering a formal, symmetrical structure and progression for the play
and driving toward the final “winter/without journey” (CSP, 316).

While there are political overtones to this play, “any parable of terror-
ism, Marxist or otherwise, is delivered in strictly symbolic terms” as Brater
puts it.25 The present tense immediacy of the text belies the fact that this
is a memory play. While V says, “We are the last five / In the present as
we are still” (CSP, 310), the fact that the action is corrected several times
offers a sense of re-presentation; the author pointed out that the action of
the play had happened “long ago.”26 These figures or figments are products

of a single consciousness:
V: I am alone
It is Spring
Time passes
Now with words. (CSP, 312)
This evokes a sense of timelessness. Yet its nonspecificity means that politi-
cal readings addressing the workings of power on bodies are not entirely
irrelevant. The question of the experience of pain, and the inability to recite
from the flesh the details of that pain have political implications when used
by regimes. It is possible to think of What Where as existing somewhere
between the personal (back in Krapp’s den, as Brater suggests of the staged
version27), and the political, referencing the way that power operates upon
the body. Nonspecificity permits both of these readings to be possible at
once, with the inner (personal) and outer (sociopolitical) collapsed. “The
works” and the “what” and the “where” stand in for both a personal narra-
tive of pain and memory and a public history of human violence, however
internalized.
Interrogation and torture are activities in which power and politics find
extension in the hand of the torturer/interrogator and through this conduit
meet the material body. Torture is the most intimate limit between poli-
tics and corporeality, the tactile extension of whatever regime is in power.
Torture is also a deeply scripted affair; interrogator and subject perform their
roles, though the role of the latter is hardly voluntary. For Elaine Scarry,
there is an “uncreating” at the heart of this “performance.” She writes that
physical pain is “language destroying” and, in the context of torture, the
purpose of such pain is not merely to elicit information from the victim, but
to visibly “deconstruct the prisoner’s voice.”28 The demands of the torturer
are not simply that pain will produce a confession but rather, as Scarry says,
they will unmake the world of the victim.
In Catastrophe, we see the material effects of the artist’s vision emerg-
ing before our eyes, and the voice of Bam (v), like the figure in . . . but
the clouds . . . rehearses and enacts the performance, as if reading the play

text aloud: “First without words,” “Time passes,” “Now with words” all
offer a seemingly eternal blueprint for action. The action merges with the
stage directions making the latter into, as in Worthen’s analysis, dramas
in themselves. V is visible onstage as a megaphone, an almost acousmatic
presence directing the scene. With only a few bodies and no narrative,
this is also, in Deleuze’s terms, exhausting the possible, creating in order
that no more creation is possible. This act of creation/uncreation appears

to be intimately linked to the process of pain and suffering however—
something that lends What Where possible political overtones. Linking
this play with Catastrophe is this problem of the human hand: the violence
of the hand as an extension of a political regime and the softer violence of
the artist’s hand. The process of interrogation and senselessness in What
Where is also a step-by-step backward motion from articulacy to sense-
less.29 We learned that the language capacity of each victim is reduced to
weeping, screaming, and begging for mercy. Although we see or hear no
signs of the victims undergoing “the works,” we learn that they suffered
language-destroying pain:
Bam: You gave him the works?

Bim: Yes.
Bam: And he didn’t say where?
Bim: No.
Bam: He wept?
Bim: Yes.
Bam: Screamed?
Bim: Yes.
Bam: Begged for mercy?
Bim: Yes. (CSP, 314)
Bam questions each of his assigned interrogators as to why, after the weeping
and screaming, he stopped. Each reply that their subject had “passed out.”
Bam accuses each of lying:
Bam: And you didn’t revive him?

Bim: I tried.
Bam: Well?
Bim: I couldn’t.
[Pause.]
Bam: It’s a lie. [Pause.] He said where to you. [Pause.] Confess he said
where to you. [Pause.] you’ll be given the works until you confess.
(CSP, 315)

Neither Bom, Bim, nor Bem articulate the nature of the “what” or the
“where.” These are both the goals and the limits of the interrogation.
When Knowlson suggested to Beckett that the repeated “where” in the
text was a misprint, the author’s response was emphatically to the contrary.
Bam, he suggests, wants to know both that the interrogation was success-
ful, that the subject confessed, and the results of the interrogation: the
where or what.30 Bam himself takes the final member of the group, Bem,

to undergo “the works,” though no answers are produced. In the end V
is alone. The final words of the play are also the final words of Beckett’s
oeuvre: “Time passes. / That is all. / Makes sense who may. / I switch
off ” (CSP, 316). The light goes out on the playing space, there is a pause
and the light goes out on V (CSP, 316). It is possible that, as with Scarry,
it is the unmaking itself that is the purpose. A ruthless excoriating inter-
nal process exhausts and destroys all further possible permutations and
arrangements of figures and words; the act of creation (v: “first without
words,” “I start again”) is simultaneously the act of uncreation.
While in Catastrophe it is the “unscripted” embodied gesture that uncov-
ers exscription, here it is the nonspecificity of the text expressing, paradoxi-
cally, what cannot be expressed in the text. The “what” and the “where”
are a way of maintaining absolute openness of interpretation and point to
the limits of language, where bodies and words touch, intertwine, and fall
apart, as language falls short and bodies “pass out.” The primary goal of the
mechanics of torture is to “make sense.” That is, to coerce the body into a
meaningful performance, one that legitimates intrusive power systems. The
ending of What Where reveals exscription. Flesh, in each case of repeated
interrogation, collapses, “passes out” of discourse.
With its formal patterning of bodies, and the evident failure of “the
works,” that is, the instruments of torture, including the voice of the tor-
turer, we are left at the end with an imaginary set of senseless bodies. In
this regard, as Beckett’s final play, the line “make sense who may” is telling.
Metaphorically speaking, each senseless body produced by this process of
torture echoes the many senseless bodies out of which Beckett as author has
attempted, and failed, to wring sense. It is a summing up of a corpus of sense-
less corpses, the text’s failure to capture and contain, perceive and represent
the body made visible.
As much as these two plays trace the workings of power on the body, they
simultaneously track the ways in which those workings or “works” fail. The
returned gaze of P at the end seems to be a prime example of the human
spirit, and indeed the spirit of humanism and the tradition of enlighten-
ment, broken but continuing in spite of all. Yet the human hand, while it
may stand in for a history of human endeavor, creativity, and spirituality

is also imaged here as capable of destruction in equal measure and often

in the same gesture. In spite of the violent manual processes that seek to
objectify, contain, and represent the body, in both Catastrophe and What
Where there are remainders, exscribed leftovers that fail to be fully absorbed
and explained by the discourses dominating the playing space. No mat-
ter the textual coercion that takes place in these two plays, they ultimately
reveal the limits of the text and the ends of textual authority. In Catastrophe,

the subject looks back, out of the shadows of the dehumanizing discourses
that surround and shape him. In the latter however, bodies pass out. The
discourses of power fail in Catastrophe when the object refuses to remain
an object. They fail in What Where because they come up against the lim-
its of the flesh. All that remains is base intractable matter, resistant to the
sense-making faculties of the master-discourse.
“The works,” significantly, have failed, but not only is it a failure of the
text to contain bodies, as examined in Catastrophe, the bodies themselves
are no longer visible. What Where reveals exscription—the limits of the text;
it also reveals the limits of the image. Visual representation of the senseless
body seems impossible, and textual interrogation will be unsuccessful. These
bodies have “passed out” beyond the limits of representation. Similar limits
(or frames) are revealed in A Piece of Monologue (chapter 2), where we learn
of bodies passing into the darkness beyond the lips of the grave. The dark
matter that lies “outside the frame” in What Where is not perhaps the loamy
depths of the grave. It is rather the virtual space that lies outside the playing
space of the theater. When this play was adapted for television, with Beckett’s
supervision, it became the space of the television broadcast, where any ves-
tiges of bodily integrity disintegrated into information signal.
Digital Dreams: Diagram, Image, Television

Quad was written for television, while its “sequel” Quad II (in German
Quadrat I and II ) came about, in a somewhat aleatory fashion, during its
filming. Four players enter the square playing space in sequence and follow a
specific pattern, avoiding each other and the center. The action is accompa-
nied by percussion instruments (CSP, 291–292). The figures of Quad follow
their given courses, avoiding the center and each other. Shrouded in long
hooded robes, they are differentiated only by color and by sound. Each robe
is a different color (white, yellow, blue, red) and the text suggests four types
of percussion (drum, gong, triangle, wood block) (CSP, 292). Lights were
intended to be matched to each figure according to the color of his or her
costume, but this proved impracticable (CSP, 293). The figures move in a
fixed pattern around a square set, its points marked as A, B, C, D with E at

the center, as the supposed “danger zone” (CSP, 293). The figures avoid a
central area, appearing to be driven on their courses by some invisible imper-
ative. Quad II is a monochromatic repeat of this action, at a much slower
pace. Gontarski notes that as Beckett began, during the latter part of his
career from the late 1960s onward, to work more and more directly on stage
and to trust his direct work in theater, he did not always record his insights or
revise his texts accordingly. Quad II is a striking example of this move away

from a purely text-based mode of working and creating.31 What Where was
remade for television as Was Wo at the Suddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany
in 1986 with the author’s direct involvement. These plays both address the
technologies of surveillance, which are associated with power and control, as
well as raising the issue of textual authority. For Worthen, the Quad s are
all directions, and the other plays for film and television are usually
preceded by diagrams specifying the camera’s perspective [ . . . ] Beckett
extends the playwright’s authority from the drama to embrace these
textual signs—the stage directions—and so to govern the texture of
performance.32
In Catastrophe, textuality and the act of writing are features of the power
structures that that play images. In What Where, the text and the idea of
making sense through narrative are significant elements, though the asso-
ciation between sense-making, representation, and violence—the hand of
the artist—were present in a similar way to Catastrophe. In Quad, power is
manifest in the meeting point between the textual and visual: in the dia-
gram. As a facet of the stage directions, the diagram provides clarification,
a visual blueprint for the figures that will inhabit the playing space. The
text and the diagram establish the imperative to movement and the limits of
space for the actors. In Quad, the organizing principle that is the diagram
may be as much a prison-house for these bodies as the assistant’s pen is for
the protagonist, a machine of abstraction. Steven Connor suggests that the
figures of Quad each perform as both “prisoner and jailor”; they seem to be
prisoners of their movement, yet since that movement “describes the space,”
they may be seen to be describing their prison from the outside.33
The diagram lays down tracks for bodies, visual pre- and proscriptions
for space, which reveal power operating on bodies. Quad, by staging the
diagram, manifests the relationship between text, image, and body. The
diagram functions to point out the limits of the text within the text itself
and provide a visual bridge between text and performance. It is the line that
makes body and page touch. Of course touching is, following Nancy, always
a separation. While it would appear that the diagram functions in a similar

way to the camera—fixing and objectifying the figures—it may said that
the diagram also reveals exscription. What Where dramatizes exscription by
exploring the limits of the text—those invisible bodies that pass out of dis-
course. Quad, with its continual gesture to the nonspace at the center of the
image, visualizes it. Yet not only does the diagram form a sort of organizing
principle for the action, it is also the point where visual communication
takes over from textual. A diagram on a page reveals the limits of the text, an

acknowledgment that the text is destined for performance and that that per-
formance cannot be fully encapsulated in textual form. Something happens
in performance, which cannot be expressed in the text: the performance is
matter exscribed. While all dramatic texts share this to a greater or lesser
extent, the inclusion of the diagram makes this point even more succinctly.
In stage directions in general we find the strongest example of physi-
cal imperatives set out by text and in the diagram, especially in the case of
Quad, a prison drawn for bodies. The diagram functions like the disciplin-
ary spaces Foucault examines in Discipline and Punish, divided up “into
as many sections as there are bodies to be distributed.”34 This disciplinary
mechanism produces, like the process Foucault describes, “subjected and
practiced bodies, “docile bodies.”35 In the directions, Beckett has suggested
that while gender does not matter in the selection of actors for the roles,
“some ballet training desirable” (CSP, 293). Such well-trained bodies would
fit more easily perhaps into the disciplinary mechanism of the diagrammatic
space. These figures of discipline enact the diagram performatively, drawing
it with their hooded bodies, as ghostly supplements to the text that the text
cannot quite contain. It is important to think of the invisible imperatives,
made visible in the relation between text and image, as the points where the
artist touches the object, making and unmaking, interrogating, to the limit.
Exscription is not only a revelation of the limits of the text, it is also the
point where text and body meet. While bodies are made intangible in the
television plays, they are visualized as objects or parts of mechanisms being
ordered by various systems of surveillance and control.
The figures of Quad enact the imperative to move and to avoid a particu-
lar area or object and describe that imperative at the same time. Therefore,
this play, and arguably What Where, seems to be staging the distinction
between performativity and performance that Butler carefully delineates in
her later work. As Rebecca Schneider puts it:
If performance, ritual and theatrical, is consciously embodied, perfor-

matives are discursive and somehow unconscious. They are not willed,
but blindly participate in that great stream of repetition by which any
word is both ghosted by a historicity not completely accessible to it and

is uncertain of its future to a degree that is always in excess of any fully

conscious manipulation.36
An actor must be fully conscious of his or her actions in a performance,

yet that performance can come to reveal performativity. Quad seems to
refer continually to the invisible imperative that forces movement from
the figures. They are impelled to move and describe that impulse as they

do it. Quad is a play that creates an image of the workings of force and
power upon bodies. With these bodies stripped of all conventional means
of visual identification—they are genderless, raceless entities—an audi-
ence is similarly stripped of the systems of signs by which their actions can
be interpreted. Unable to read motivation or psychological depth into the
movement, we can at the very least find the tracings of a forceful imperative
upon their bodies. In fact, it may be argued that these figures are simply
partially embodied expressions of the imperative to move. Many of Beckett’s
plays seem to entail this “obligation to express.” Figures, such as Mouth in
Not I, appear to be impelled to speak by some invisible force; the “injunc-
tion to tell,” as Karen Laughlin puts it in her discussion of the earlier Play,
reveals the workings of power and creates the theatrical spectacle.37 This
obligation is to be found also in the imperative to move, and Quad could be
viewed as both reiteration and description of those social and mental power
mechanisms that organize and contain bodies, and become internalized so
that bodies contain and organize themselves, collectively. Therefore, the
reiterative retracing of firmly inscribed pathways in Quad reveals a lack of
autonomy and agency that may be only marginally offset by the possibilities
offered by performance.
Each of these plays offers a searching investigation of the limits between
performance/image and text. In Quad II, the image is apparently freed alto-
gether from the text, yet there remains a ghostly echo of the diagram, which
contains within it seeds of its own invisibility. Quad II “exhausts” space and
the image too, in the way that Deleuze describes: to exhaust is to “extenuate
the potentialities of space” and “dissipate the power of the image.”38 This
is readily apparent in the slow shuffle of the figures, drained of energy and
color, and left beyond the limits of the text.
Filmic Shrouds: The Ethics of Invisibility

Not only does Quad reveal the limits of the text, the material effects employed
in the making of these plays help to withhold the visible and to disrupt nar-
rative. In the filming of Was Wo, a large, distorted death mask replaces the
megaphone producing Bam’s voice—a nod to faciality and visibility, which

has much in common with the disruption of vision in Film. This “filmic
shroud” is achieved in Was Wo through the use of gauze, mirror, and a pane
of glass to distort the face:
{V = mirror reflection of BAM’s face, slightly distorted, faintly lit, enough to

distinguish closed eyes and lips in speech. Four-five times the size of P [play-
ing area] faces. Eyes closed throughout. Motionless until head bowed before

final fade out}39
The hole in the center of the diagrammatic space in Quad is another space
that marks out the limits of bodies, as is the “passing out” of the bodies
recounted in What Where. There is the never-revealed content of the “what”
and “where,” and the unambiguous refusal to “make sense” for the spectator
at the end. The figures in Quad, hidden beneath cowls and robes, are visual
and identificatory blind spots in themselves. Working against visual mastery,
Quad and What Where do not permit the audiovisual medium to function
in a normal way. Bodies in these television plays are drastically decorporeal-
ized and intangible. The bodies in Was Wo are ghostly, as Gontarski puts
it: “appear[ing] as floating faces dissolving in and out.”40 The bodies in the
Quad plays are heavily shrouded, with deep hoods, showing little trace of
physicality. In the black-and-white Quad II, the effect is even more pro-
nounced, as the figures shuffle slowly around the square space.
There are multiple ways then in which these plays interrupt optic space,
working against visibility to create haptic imagery and to convert the body
into intangible light signal. These blind spots expose a failure of the medium;
the television set is a machine that lives with us, intimate in our lives, and
purposes to offer intimacy with the characters it displays, yet here its sup-
posedly all-seeing eye proves less than effective. For all the violence implied
in these plays, the blind spots of Quad and What Where work against such
identifications, and such intimacy. Each of the plays enacts a refusal to give
way to the impulse to narrative, to sense-making. Instead, in their permuta-
tions and repetitions they seem to demand, as Voigts-Virchow has said of
Quad, an aisthetic approach,41 where the meaning, if any is to be found, lies
in the movement.
The only revision of the visual image of What Where was done for the
Stuttgart production at Suddeustscher Rundfunk in 1985.42 In this version,
“V” is a distorted mirror reflection of Bam’s face, replacing the megaphone
in the original. This, from the revised text for this production:
Bodies and movement eliminated

Faces only.

Full face throughout

As alike as possible.
Differentiated by colour.43
This removal of bodies seems to carry on the “passing out” spoken of in the
text. This version also prohibits visual perception to an even greater extent
than its theatrical counterpart: “Dim light, faces blurred” (CSP, 430). What

is interesting about the televised version is that the television screen itself
is transformed into “the field of memory.” The playing area is made up of
a “black ground unbroken,”44 upon which the heads of the figures alone
appear. They are displayed as if in relief against this dark background. Eckart
Voigts-Virchow’s comments regarding Quad are apt here: “We can note that
Beckett increasingly makes use of the options the recording camera offers
to eliminate visual contexts, to disembody, disconnect, concentrate, focus.
This denial of visual context is a device of universalizing abstraction.”45 As
McMullan puts it, the screened work foregrounds the processes of percep-
tion46: the events occurring are occurring also on the screen of the mind.
Yet perceptual capacity and cognitive analysis is severely curtailed by these
plays, transforming as they do depths of space into flattened haptic images.
The Beckettian impulse toward failure, ignorance, and impotence may
indeed be viewed as an ethical strategy; the blind spots in these works reveal
the politics of perception and representation. For Peggy Phelan, the recog-
nition of the blind spot, the unrepresentable, is of ethical import, as she
attempts to “revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not fully
representable.”47 Beckett employs the tools and techniques of visualization,
and especially so in the television work. He puts these tools into play and in
so doing reveals blind spots, areas where knowledge and power begin to fail.
The tools of visualization are here envisaged as tactile effects upon the body.
They range from the hands and instruments of the torturer, to the invisible
political forces that govern bodies and behaviors, all operating in the name
of visibility, recognizability, and in order to make sense of otherness and
flesh. The avoidance of the center may be either creative or simply descrip-
tive; it appears to make something out of nothing, or trace the pattern into
which these figures are locked. It both constructs and describes the limits of
an object or area that is abhorrent to the figures.
Together with Catastrophe these plays point toward the potential the
human hand has to enact violence and coercion, while articulating a percep-
tual ethics based on not seeing. It is an ethics of the blind spot, underscored
by an awareness of the potential violence of the hand when it is coordinated
with systems of visual representation and surveillance. The act of drawing
a veil across the image or uncovering the limits of the text is not sufficient

however to understand the acts of touch that occur in the plays discussed in
the final chapter. At the outset it was suggested that part of the violence of
the hand in art is to do with its subordination to the image or the text. The
hand, functioning as a tool for representation, is perhaps always to be tainted
by this association. The act of making is also an act of unmaking, whether
that making is forging the world into art or purging dissenting voices from
dominant political regimes. The question remains to be answered then: how

is one to touch, if the tools of touching are so tainted? The commentary
in this chapter has shown how Beckett’s work exposes the extent to which
the material body resists these systems of surveillance and representation,
exposing the limits of the text on the one hand, and the limits of vision itself
on the other. The final chapter will be concerned with how touch, neither
violent nor coercive, might take place. It may be that such touch is never
possible and that the only ethical touch possible lies in a tactful withdrawal
of the hand.

CHAPTER 6

On the Other Hand . . . (The One That
Refuses to Touch)
T
here are significant moments of physical touch presented in the two
plays discussed in this final chapter. In Ohio Impromptu (1980),
the listener reaches out to check the reader’s hand, influencing the
course of the narrative he reads. In Nacht und Träume (1982), a caring touch
is dreamt by a sleeping figure as the strains of Schubert’s musical piece by the
same name are heard. While Ohio Impromptu’s staging of the book and the
act of reading indicate that continued attention to the relationship between
text and performance is necessary, the fact that an act of physical touch
happens during the course of the play seems to ask the following question:
under what conditions, ethical and aesthetic, can touch happen in the often
sterile, lonely landscape of the Beckettian stage?
The act of touch across human cultures is a carefully codified and regu-
lated aspect of interpersonal behavior—it must be tactful, else risk offense.
Touch is sanctioned in particular circumstances of course, in medical con-
texts, for example, but otherwise it involves a careful negotiation of the inti-
mate limits between human bodies. As Shildrick puts it in her insightful
essay on proximity and normative corporealities, through touch we come
“face-to-face with the leaks and flows at the boundaries of, and the vulner-
abilities within, our own embodied being.”1 The hand can be violent; it
can also reveal intersubjectivity: “our [ . . . ] immersion [ . . . ] in the world
of others, and [our] capacity to be moved beyond reason, in the space of
shared vulnerabilities.”2 The following discussion of Ohio Impromptu and
Nacht und Träume will be concerned with those “shared vulnerabilities” and

the how of touching. Addressing Ohio Impromptu, the first section will deal
with tactics, examining the formal principles that drive the play and its links
to formal conventions of both theater and music. This links back to the
hand of the artist and its methods of representing otherness and the issue
of exscription. The second section, relating to Nancy’s work, will refer to
tactful touch: ethical questions around touch, in other words. While the
term “tact” has its etymological roots in “tangere,” Latin for “touch,” its

contemporary usage implies a careful or diplomatic touching, one that is
emphatically not a coercion or assault upon the other; such a term arguably
conveys how this play tactfully refuses to subsume otherness or difference
into sameness. This play shows how tactful touch might take place. In other
words, touch that is neither violent nor oppressive. The final section of the
chapter will look at how such ethical touch is interwoven with religious ico-
nography and presence in Nacht und Träume.
Tactics: Impromptus and Disjunctures

The tactics employed in Ohio Impromptu mean that a certain ethics of
touching, a tactfulness, is manifest at a formal level. The play contains two
figures, seated at right angles to one another at a “plain white deal table.” The
third figure, who haunts the play, is an absent “dear face” (CSP, 285–286) for
whose loss the Listener seeks comfort. The Listener faces the audience; the
Reader sits in profile. On the center of the table lies a “black, wide brimmed
hat ” and, before the Reader, a book, open at its final pages (CSP, 285).3
The Listener does not speak, only knocks on the table, to demand either a
continuation of the Reader’s “sad tale” (CSP, 287), or a repeat of a particular
sentence or phrase. The distinction between the read text and the embodied
performance, between sound and image, and between the two figures is
maintained throughout the play, and it is this maintenance of difference, the
refusal to collapse elements of the play into sameness, that constitutes the
tactfulness of Ohio Impromptu. They are held apart, tactfully so.
Ohio Impromptu was written at S. E. Gontarski’s request for a symposium
honoring Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday. It was performed in May 1981
at Ohio State University, directed by Alan Schneider. Although Beckett’s
first response was to assert how unfit he was to write to request, he eventu-
ally produced this short, precise “playlet.”4 Molière’s Versailles Impromptu
features a similar scenario—a “command performance.” This play is also,
significantly, an address to his (Molière’s) critics. Noting the plays linkages
with the theatrical tradition of Impromptus, McMullan writes that “[t]he
work therefore announces itself as a play about creation and the artistic

On the Other Hand . . . ● 135
practice of its author [ . . . ] Beckett sets up a dialogue between the different

levels or languages within the play, in particular between the scenic and the
verbal, so that each comments on the other and together they constitute an
‘auto-critique’ of the author’s work.”5 Ohio Impromptu therefore raises the
issue of artistic creativity—the hand of the artist and the critical response
to the work. As Gontarski suggests, “[T]he play that Beckett finally wrote
is not so much about solace or lost or rejected love as about origination,

creativity.”6 The tradition of the impromptu addresses the nature of cre-
ativity and the difficulty of making the creative source “flow” on com-
mand. Ohio Impromptu addresses the critic, the reader. The play features a
“Reader,” who’s comings and goings, and whose acts of reading, are barely
under the control of the Listener. The Reader, interpreted as the creative
voice emerging from or entering the artist’s mind, is not to be comman-
deered, and whose sounds are apt to, as Beckett puts it in describing his
own mental weariness, become as “dry as an old herring bone.”7 The Reader
symbolizes also the act of reading and interpretation; an act that the artist
has even less control over. Furthermore, Gontarski notes that the Reader
has been created for company, both for the Listener, and for the literary
critics attending the Ohio symposium.8 That Beckett should choose to use
the impromptu form is an ironic comment on the deeply premeditated and
programmed way this work came into being. The impromptu play is often
concerned with the anxieties an author may have both about access to the
creative source—it is not to be commanded—as well as about the reception
and interpretation of the finished artwork. It is a premeditated work, which
admits the unpredictable. The impromptu presents itself as operating inde-
pendent of a fixed text, unmoored from the boundaries of a script or score.
Yet this is only a facade, for the impromptu is as premeditated and bounded
by the text as most performances are. This is true also of Catastrophe, which
stages a gesture that unsettles the text even though that “impromptu” ges-
ture is part of the overall scheme of the text. While the act of writing in that
play is associable with the hand of authority and even violence, authorship
here is imaged, however ironically, as waiting in passivity for a few crumbs
of inspiration.
As well as to a theatrical tradition of impromptus, there are links to the
tradition of the impromptu in the history of musical composition. Schubert,
Chopin, and Liszt each composed a number of impromptus for solo players.
While in contemporary use the term “impromptu” suggests an event, speech,
or performance that is entirely unplanned, the aim of the impromptu in
the context of musical composition was to create the illusion of spontaneity.
Although the term may have originally described an improvised piece, it was

used in the nineteenth century to denote not music that in itself is impro-
vised, but to describe a composition’s somewhat casual origin in the com-
poser’s mind.9 Once written down, music is of course in no way unplanned,
or “rough.” As Alfred Einstein writes: “In Schubert’s Impromptu or moment
musicale there is nothing sketchy. Each must be simple in form, yet with
every detail filled in—the ‘microcosm’ is all important.”10 Impromptus
attempt to give the impression that they are a “free” and unplanned per-

formance, yet they are as bound to a text/score as any other performance.
Beckett toys with this idea in his own impromptu. The apparently random
knocks (on the part of the listener) and pauses (on the part of the reader)
punctuate and organize the flow of the narrative.
Like much of the later drama, Ohio Impromptu is a short, minimalist
piece with detailed stage directions. Yet its terse formality is underpinned by
the possibility of spontaneous variation. An “unbalancing act,” as Gontarski
names it, occurs in Ohio Impromptu. A feature of the later drama, this
decentering is a moment in the work when a deviation occurs; text deviates
from image, or vice versa. In this case, the deviation has a similar flavor to
the deviation in Ghost Trio, where the figure in the room deviates briefly
from the narrative produced by the voiceover.11 It is perhaps comparable
to Catastrophe too if the protagonist’s final gesture is seen as a deviation
from “the script.” Both Ohio Impromptu and Ghost Trio have musical links,
and their deviations disrupt the viewer’s expectations. It is like a deliber-
ately unfinished cadence or a deliberately discordant note: in other words, a
deviation from form, yet one built into the text.
The work is structured around the repetitions induced by the Listener’s
knocks. There are six in all, and twenty pauses. If this piece is considered
in musical terms, as Gontarski does, it is possible to observe a clear strategy
of “movements,” or expositions on a theme, interspersed with recapitula-
tions. Although the piece could be subdivided into movements that occur
between each knock and repetition sequence, for simplicity’s sake the work
can be divided into two clear sections. The first is themed around the flight
and escape of the protagonist from familiar surroundings. The second is
an account of the appearance of the reader in what may be an attempt at a
solution to the emotional turmoil that remained unsolved by the escape.12
The introduction and ending of the piece mirror each other with the former
introducing the beginning of what promises to be a sparse and minimalistic
piece, where:
[Reading] Little is left to tell. In a last—

[L knocks with left hand on table.]
Little is left to tell. (CSP, 285)

The following lines announce the beginning of the end, where words have
finally begun to run dry:
Nothing is left to tell.

[Pause. R makes to close book.
Knock. Book half closed.] please leave as I had it, this is how it appears in
the text

Nothing is left to tell. (CSP, 288)
The wordlessness of the look, when Reader and Listener meet each other’s
gaze, unblinking, in silence, forms a silent coda to the work. The piece as
a whole then, is a rhythmic composition. Flowing sections of text are inter-
spersed with the Reader’s interruptions, knocks that force a repetition of the
preceding phrase or section. The Listener acts like a conductor or director,
demanding corrections and repetitions from the performer—at each knock
the reader must repeat the preceding sentence in full, before continuing on
with the narrative. For example:
I saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words, No need to go to him
again, even were it in your power.
So the sad—
[Knock.]
Saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words. No need to go to him
again, even were it in your power.
[Pause. Knock.]
So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone [ . . . ]
(CSP, 287)
On the one hand, this break-repetition structure confirms the musicality

of the piece, while on the other, it creates the sense that the piece is coming
to existence before our eyes. This echoes Molière’s Versailles Impromptu, a
play about the rehearsal of a play, in which Molière himself is writer and
director.13 The Listener performs a similar function to the repeat sign on a
musical stave, commanding a repeat of a phrase up to a particular point.
There is such rhythm and regularity engendered by the actions of
the two figures that any variation in the pattern is readily apparent. The
Listener’s two gestures—checking the Reader with his hand and the gaze
that occurs between the two in the final moments of the piece—are both
highly visible variations on the predictable action. There is a constant ten-
sion engineered between the scenic and verbal levels in the play,14 between
predictability and supposed impromptu variation, between the rehearsed

performance and the spontaneous action. This is the nature of the “form”
of the impromptu: something that gives the impression of being off-hand,
extemporaneous. In other words, built into the structure of the piece are
elements designed to convince the viewer of its spontaneity. The Listener’s
knock is itself a deviation; it diverts the narrative from its proper course
and induces repetition, like the needle of a gramophone lifted and replaced
a few turns earlier. Pulling an audience back into the material space of the

theater, it engages with the density of the theatrical space and interferes not
only with the temporal progression of the piece, but also with the specta-
tor’s imaginative involvement in the narrative. The gestures bring us back
to the “here and now” of the stage, but the repetition they induce means
that the scenic and the verbal elements of the play never come to rest in an
easy identification. Exscribed matter is held in inclusive disjuncture with
the text that produces it. For Worthen, this play exemplifies the tension in
modern theater between text and performance, with the “Reader and the
Listener merg[ing] into a single, divided image of the theater’s resistance
and captivity to the text, they stage the friction between writing and enact-
ment that defines modern drama.”15 The variability and unpredictability
of live performance come up against and disrupt the fixity of textual rep-
resentation, even as the text operates as a dominating force over the stage
space.
That the play provides a self-reflexive, meta-theatrical commentary on its
own creation is evident at certain key moments in the text. The repetition
of certain sections of text, as demanded by the Listener, also emphasizes
the extent to which the work is “self-aware” and divided from itself. When
the Reader repeats the phrase “then turn and his slow steps retrace” (CSP,
286), he is simultaneously describing the actions of the protagonist of the
narrative and the act of repetition in which he is engaging. Coming after a
pause, in which the Reader looks at the text more closely, the line “Yes, after
so long a lapse that as if never been” (CSP, 286) points both to the content
of narrative in which the protagonist has had a recurrence of an old ner-
vous anxiety, and to the pause itself. The “little is left to tell” and “nothing
is left to tell,” which frame the work, are perhaps the clearest examples of
this meta-theatricality. These are points at which narrative action and stage
image hover in closest communion. The first statement points to the brevity
of the coming piece, the second announces its end. Although the scenic and
verbal levels are apparently disconnected, their coalescence is hinted at in
moments such as these.
The Reader’s “text” describes the final night: “Till the night came at last
when having closed the book and dawn at hand he did not disappear but sat
on without a word” (CSP, 287). The narrative goes on to describe how the

two sit, “as though turned to stone.” Finally, however, the play ends with a
gaze shared between the two figures, following the Reader’s declaration that
“nothing is left to tell” (CSP, 288). The narrative here veers so close to the
stage image that identification between the two becomes possible, and we
are told that “with never a word exchanged” these two, “grew to be as one”
(CSP, 287). Yet the disjuncture remains. The two figures are, we are told in
the stage directions, “as alike in appearance as possible ” (CSP, 285), yet not

the same. Garin Dowd critiques the Beckett on Film version of the work,
starring Jeremy Irons as both Reader and Listener,16 for producing a fac-
ile identification between the two. Dowd regards the impossibility of exact
identity as constitutive of the work,17 an impossibility made possible by film
technology: “In the screen version the play, now deprived of its bodies plural
and dispersed, is given two host bodies which inhere into one. The play is
reconfigured as an allegory of the divine presence of Jeremy Irons.”18 Dowd’s
criticism emphasizes the significance of the maintenance of disjuncture in
this work. It is perhaps in the materiality of the knocking action that this
disidentification is given its most perceivable expression.
After each knock-repeat sequence, the narrative recommences, and the
spectator is caught up in its imagery. There is a continual tension engi-
neered as the perceptual and imaginative faculties of the spectator are pulled
in two directions at once, and the performance of the piece occurs here,
not within the spectator’s mind’s eye, nor in the physical stage space before
them. It occurs rather at the limit-edge between perception and imagina-
tion: between material surroundings and the “profounds of mind” (CSP,
288). Such apparently impromptu deviations function to create the illu-
sion of a performance-event spontaneously being created before an audi-
ence. This knock, as a reference to the here and now of the stage space,
may be an example of what Bert States refers to as the real leaking out of
the illusion.19 Here, the stage space becomes the point of intersection of
discourse and materiality, text and image—the material body of the actor,
an intrusive fleshly hand disruptive to narrative, enters into dialogue with
the rehearsed performance of a prewritten text. In the medium of theater,
where the real and the illusory intertwine with one another, the form of the
impromptu becomes more than a vehicle for commentary on the creative
process. Including as it does the rehearsed deviation, the pretense that what
is constructed and performed is in fact spontaneous action, the impromptu
form acts to expose this, yet another disjuncture, between the real and the
imaginary. As States writes of Molière playing Molière in The Impromptu of
Versailles: “The phenomenal interest lies in the distance between the two
Molières and the going back and forth of the mind’s eye from one to the
other.”20

Yet, however much the knocking of the Listener may return the spectator
to his or her senses, to the materiality, and indeed mortality, of the stage,
the knock becomes reabsorbed back into the structure of the piece. The
Listener manipulates the narrative, becomes inserted bodily into its struc-
ture, yet any authority the Listener may have had over this text is undercut
by the deviations such as the moment when the Reader, about to flick back
through the book to find a reference to the protagonist’s illness, “fearful

symptoms described at length page forty paragraph four,” has his hand
stayed by the Listener: “[Starts to turn back the pages. Checked by L’s left hand.
Resumes relinquished page] ” (CSP, 286). This, and the look that is exchanged
at the end of the piece, are the only moments of tactile contact between the
two figures, the points at which they come closest, and also the points at
which the difference and tactful distance between them is affirmed. Touch
emerges from this “deviation” from the form.
Tactfulness
As well as staging the relationship between text and performance, the play
also points to the relationship between self and other. A disjuncture is played
out also between the bodies of the actors, a contrapuntal tension reminis-
cent of the “inclusive disjunction” that Deleuze perceives in Ghost Trio. The
formal tactics applied in the creation of the stage imagery of the play reflect
its tactful approach to difference and alterity. The formal principle of the
work, the “unbalancing act,” as Gontarski calls it, that occurs in the dis-
juncture between text as read, and image as staged, feeds into a discussion
of relationality in this piece. The scenic and verbal elements of the piece
come into contact, but do not collapse into a cohesive identity. Similarly,
the two figures in the image resemble each other, but in the staged version
are necessarily two distinct bodies. Ohio Impromptu dramatizes the paradox
of touch: in touching the other, we reach the limits of the other and, in
doing so, realize the other’s otherness, and the impossibility of touch. The
tactics at work in this play are a tactful acknowledgment of the ethics and
limits of touch.
For Nancy, touch implies a distance, a spacing. Touch is a “contact in
separation.” In the case of the embodied subject this is a relation of sense
and matter, which does not make present “a consubstantiality of spirit and
body,” but is in fact “a sundering/conjoining of the two.”21 Nancy’s interests
lie in the philosophical, theological, and psychoanalytical conceptualiza-
tions of the body in Western culture. For him, the dualistic binary of mind
and body, or soul and body, is intimately linked with the Christian tradition
of incarnation. Nancy sees this tradition as putting body and soul, matter

and sense “in touch”; yet in the way that Western, Christianized culture
establishes this relation, touch involves a separation. In discussing this, he
invokes a vocabulary of rupture and discontinuity.22 Ian James’s analysis of
Nancy articulates how the figure of touch enables the philosopher to think
beyond the material/ideal binary.23 This has relevance not only for how we
understand embodiment but also for how we think through the relationship
between bodies. In Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, the figure of touch has

ethical significance. Nancy attempts to imagine the possibly of community,
a “we,” which departs from the same-other binary. For Nancy, being rests
neither in unity (singularity), nor in fragmentation (plurality); it rests rather
in the relations between individuals, between groups, and cultures. It is the
relation between that is of greatest significance for Nancy who writes that
“being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another.”24 The “I” does not
precede the “we,” achieving a higher importance, rather the “I” exists in
relation to community.25 Moving away from the self/other binary, Nancy’s
ethical relation is one of contingency and contact-in-separation, for the “law
of touching is separation.” The relation between Listener and Reader, image
and text, and, reality and illusion seem to dramatize such a standpoint.
The closer these elements come to each other, and the more that identifica-
tion seems likely, the more distance and disidentification can be perceived
between them. If Beckett’s ethics are to be uncovered at any point in his
work, it is arguably in those moments, exemplified in Ohio Impromptu’s act
of touch, where there is a refusal to subsume the other into sameness. The
other is approached, tactfully; disjuncture takes on an ethical dimension,
thus permitting difference.
In the first “movement” of Ohio Impromptu, the narrative describes the
daily pacing its protagonist engages in on the Isle of Swans: “At the tip he
would always pause to dwell on the receding stream. How in joyous eddies
its two arms conflowed and flowed united on. Then turn and his slow steps
retrace” (CSP, 286). It is in the second “movement” of the work that the
relationship of the two figures, Reader and Listener, is brought under closer
scrutiny. The distance maintained between the Reader and Listener, this
act of maintaining and recognizing alterity contrasts with the image of the
Seine river, its two streams reunited at the tip of the Isle of Swans. For Peter
Boxall separation, loss, and relationality are configured through these verbal
and scenic images:
As the Isle of Swans divides the Seine, so exile divides the Listener from
his unnamed partner; but the words read by Reader offer an image of con-
fluence. [ . . . ] The performance of the play itself, in its ephemeral brevity,
offers a fleeting possibility of this liquid confluence, this joyously erotic

commingling. But powerful as this collapse of difference into sameness

is, the focus of the play is on the recedence of this possibility.26
What is to be found in the image of confluence is not merely contact,

or commingling, but the fantasy of a place or state where no touch is pos-
sible, where the act of touch has devolved into a melding or disintegration of
the subject. It may be possible to view the touch of the knock as forming a

sharp contrast with the fantasy of total touch, immersion even, in the water
image. The material contact between hand and table is then implicated in
the vision of alterity that is played out in Ohio Impromptu. The two figures
might grow “to be as one,” yet the gaze at the end, the looking, which is also
a touching, affirms their difference. The image of confluence remains in the
realm of fantasy; it is never manifested in the stage image. This distance is in
tune with the distance from the shade: the absent, dear one described in the
narrative. This shade, like many others in Beckett’s work, remains a ghostly
presence, hovering at the edge of the narrative, emphatically untouchable.
Dramatic tension arises in this play, not from the sequential events of
a coherent narrative, with its representative power supported by a cohesive
stage image, but rather from the ever widening and narrowing gap between
the spoken text and staged image. This dissonance reaches its apex in the
final moments of the play, when the two figures raise their heads to gaze at
each other: “Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise their
heads and look at each other. Unblinking. Expressionless” (CSP, 288). A limit
is realized in the last few lines of the spoken text: “What thoughts who
knows. Thoughts no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who
knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can
reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last
time told” (CSP, 288). It is not a dramatic climax, in which a tactless revela-
tion of identity occurs. The eyes meet, with a tactful understanding that
whatever “profounds of mind” the other has been buried in are inacces-
sible. This is a continuing articulation of inclusive disjuncture; the tactful
distance between the figures, between staged image and spoken text, and
between present body and absent shade is the place where the drama occurs.
In those fleeting moments of touch, the meeting of the eyes, the hand of
the listener, otherness, selfhood, and difference are realized and touch is
revealed as nontouch, a tactful withdrawal.
Noli me Tangere and Haptic Certitude

In the teleplay Nacht und Träume, a dreamer dreams of a pair of hands
emerging from the darkness to offer him comfort, conveying a cup to the

lips of his dreamed self and a cloth to his brow and finally allowing him
to rest his head upon them. In the often stark universe of Beckett’s later
work, peopled by solitary individuals haunted by memory and ghosts of
the past, such an act of touch and gentleness is significant, and the playlet
exposes something important about the nature of touch and its relationship
to love, loss, and absence. Yet the contact only happens in a dream that is
dreamed by a lonely figure and, even as they appear, the kind hands with-

draw, and the dream fades. This study’s final exploration is concerned not
only with the ethics of touching, but also with its meaning in culture as a
verifier of presence, human or divine. Touch, while it signifies an attempt to
verify presence (one thinks of Doubting Thomas) also, in Nancy’s thinking,
reveals an anxiety over presence.
Filmed in Germany in the 1980s, the imagery of Beckett’s last TV play,
Nacht und Träume, provides a merging point on the TV screen for the aes-
thetic and the religious. Drawing on the similarities of experience that Jean
Claude Bologne perceives between medieval Christian mystics and certain
modern authors, Bryden suggests that Nacht und Träume may be Beckett’s
most “mystical” play.27 This play, like the paintings of the noli me tangere
scene that Nancy describes28 is organized around a pair of hands. On the
surface, Nacht und Träume is simple, with minimal action: a man sits at a
table, rests his head on his hands, and we hear the last three bars of Schubert’s
Lied of the same name, which is, in translation, “Night and Dreams.” It is
on the cue of Schubert’s music’s being hummed that the “evening light,”
coming from a window behind the figure, fades, and the music sets an emo-
tional tone of quiet contemplation for the play. The figure rests his head on
his hands; in the right-hand upper corner of this image, we see his dreamed
self appear. Disembodied hands emerge out of the surrounding darkness to
convey a cup to the lips of the dreamed self, a cloth to his brow. All action
is then repeated with a close-up on the dreamed self. Such surface simplic-
ity belies the intricacy with which this play and other of the later works
are constructed. Beckett the TV artist is, for Jonathan Kalb, a “painter of
miniatures.”29 While written for an audiovisual medium this play draws
back from overt visualization. Its images are dim, gray shards of the visible,
and the sense that takes over in this occluded space is that of touch. Like
the other television plays such as Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds . . . this play
speaks of the impulse to call up the presence of an other, the urge to touch
again the body of someone now lost. They also dramatize the impossibility
of that touch ever occurring.
Bodies, though they may be the only receptacles available for subjec-
tivity, are, in Beckett’s work, often uncomfortable, subject to decay, pain,
and death. Moreover, while the body is necessary for knowledge of or

connection to the world, this connecting perceptual “flesh of things,” to use

Merleau-Ponty’s term,30 is equally subject to breakdown and diminishment.
A sense of pessimism regarding the place of the human in the world often
pervades Beckett’s drama, and this is manifest in damaged or dysfunctional
perceptual systems. As in the image in Film of the window with its tattered
blind, the human perceives the world through a frayed veil. This sense of
rupture, of incommensurability between the human and his/her surround-

ings, emerges in Beckett’s work in the breakdown and failure of both percep-
tual and epistemological systems. Commenting on art in a letter to lifelong
friend and poet Thomas MacGreevy written in 1934, Beckett expresses the
notion that the chiastic connections between self and world and between
self and self are not guaranteed. He writes, “What a relief [Cézanne’s]
Mont St. Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscape—Van Goyen,
Avercamp, the Ruysdaels, Hobbema . . . Cézanne seems to have been the first
to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incom-
mensurable with all human expressions whatsoever.”31 While this comment
expresses a key modernist sentiment regarding the place of the human in
the world, it also lends itself to an understanding of Beckett’s pessimism
regarding the abilities of the human at both a physical, perceptual level and
a metaphysical or spiritual one. Humanity cannot fully see, know, or touch
the world or the divine.
Haptic Certitude
Jean-Luc Nancy observes an anxiety permeating Christian thought about
presence and truth and, by implication, permeating the way in which
Western culture imagines corporeality. It is an anxiety that is fundamentally
linked to the act of touch. He describes Christianity as being obsessed with
the act of making present. Hoc est enim corpus meum (this is my body), the
phrase that is recited during the Christian ritual as bread is transformed into
the body of Christ, is a continued attempt to insist upon and verify flesh and
blood presence.32 The Christian urge to make present, to touch the body of
Christ, offers reassurance, conferring a measure of solidity upon the sensible
world; yet, as Ian James puts it, Nancy contends that such reassurance is
underpinned by a certain anguish, a fear that the world of appearance is a
world of unsubstantial shadows and reflections.33 For Nancy, this anxiety
over presence reveals an obsession with presence: “The anxiety, the desire
to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to be that body and be nothing but
that, forms the principle of Western (un)reason. That’s why the body, bodily,
never happens, least of all when it’s named and convoked. For us the body is
always sacrificed: eucharist.”34 The body of the risen Jesus must depart (be

beyond touch)—the whole edifice of Christianity rests on this principle.

Absence is required in order for presence to be guaranteed; yet, paradoxi-
cally, this absence continually throws the possibility of true presence into
question. Touch is an important element of religious practice, underpinning
notions of taboo and sacredness—that which cannot be touched, that which
is unclean, and that which is holy. While the act of touch is a key feature of
three of the gospels (Christ healing, absolving, raising from the dead), this

kind of remedial touch is conspicuously absent from John’s gospel. Instead
of touch associated with Christ as healer, touch in that gospel is connected
with presence. There are two key moments in this text referring to touch
(or the refusal of touch): one is, of course, Thomas’s hand in the wound of
Christ’s resurrected body.35 The other is noli me tangere, Christ’s command
to Mary Magdalene to refrain from touching him following his resurrec-
tion.36 On the one hand, there is in this narrative an intimate contact, an
intense, penetrating touch between Christ and Thomas. On the other, there
is the demand for the tactful withdrawal of the noli me tangere scene. In
the Thomas scene, touch, the insertion of the finger in the wound is the
absolute verifier of presence, a moment of haptic certitude. Yet, for Mary
Magdalene, touch is not permitted. Christ is leaving and must be permitted
to do so. In Noli Me Tangere, Nancy’s examination of the representations
of this moment throughout the history of art leads him to the conclusion
that the two bodies—of Christ and Mary—displayed at this instant, one of
glory, the other of flesh, reveal that “the possibility of carnal decay is given
there, along with the possibility of glory.”37 For Nancy, this signifies the reli-
ance of the spiritual upon the material, indicating a depletion of the notion
of a metaphysical realm. For in Christianity, even though the body appears
to be denigrated, it is, in fact, its essential element: “only a body can be cut
down or raised up, because only a body can touch or not touch. A spirit
can do nothing of the sort.”38 Without the material, earthly body of Christ,
there would be no possibility of resurrection.
The religious signifiers that overlay Nacht und Träume do not refer to
guilt or punishment, in the way that Eh Joe does, though the agony of the
body in crucifixion is never far away. This play, like the others of Beckett’s
televisual canon, circulate around an imagined sensory event; it is a quiet
séance, in which the presence of a lost other, perhaps female, is sought
out (Beckett suggested but did not specify gender during filming).39 The
called-upon presence, as proximate as it is, can only be realized through
imagined touch, sight, or audition, but specifically here it is touch. The
face of the other whose hands emerge from the darkness is never visual-
ized. The dreamer dreams and imagines hands alone bringing a cup to his
lips, wiping his brow with a cloth, and finally cradling his head. Herren

points out that the play recalls the narrative of Veronica, the woman who
wiped the face of Christ as he carried his cross, and he explores how it also
responds to the tradition of religious painting, specifically representations of
the Agony in the Garden. The cup, which Herren links to Jesus’s prayer in
the Garden of Gethsemane,40 may also allude to the wine of the last supper.
Nacht und Träume is a play formed at the intersection of music and paint-
ing, religious iconography and romantic sensibility, as well as technology.

As Knowlson points out, “In religious paintings, a vision often appears in a
top corner of the canvas, normally the Virgin Mary, Christ ascended in his
glory, or a ministering angel. The chalice, cloth and comforting hand are
similarly images commonly found in religious paintings.”41 It is not merely
the obvious religious references and iconography that are significant here
but also the ways in which the play privileges touch as a mode of contact.
In addition to these important indicators of a religious heritage operating
within this play, there are two poles or signs of presence at work in these
plays, echoing the differing types of presences of Christ in the Gospel of
John. There is the body of clay, the one that Thomas can touch; and there is
the body of light, the one that Mary Magdalene is not permitted to touch.
The distinction between the material flesh and what might be termed a
virtual body42 is evident here. In Nacht und Träume, the televisual processes
of the play, whereby the dreamer dreams an image of himself, undermine
the materiality in which they are supposedly rooted. The act of touch can be
linked to the absence-presence complex of Christian metaphysics, that para-
dox whereby the truth of God is only available in the retreat of his presence.
There are two pulls producing this paradox: on the one hand, the desire to
affirm presence (to touch); on the other, the need to fall back from presence
because in being verified, it disappears. With this in mind, I turn to a con-
sideration of Nacht und Träume as a play for television in which it is possible
to connect these discourses of theology and phenomenology to aesthetics
and technology, the body incarnate and the mediated body.
It must be noted that, in relation to Beckett and God/religious belief, the
fact that religious iconography is apparent in these plays—or indeed in other
of Beckett’s works—does not suggest that spiritual transcendence is ever
given as a possibility or that faith can offer some comfort. For, as Bryden
points out, when Beckett makes use of religious material, his focus tends
to be on suffering and longing rather than on redemption and resurrec-
tion. This is evident in both Eh Joe and Nacht und Träume. The latter does
not focus upon the transcendent and redemptive facets of the crucifixion
and resurrection but is more concerned with issues of presence, authentic-
ity, originality, and doubt. The former references the crucifixion, tracing a

bathetic parallel with Christ’s passion while also sharing similar concerns
regarding presence and haptic certitude.
The Vera Icon and the Concern for Presence

It is significant that no face is ever revealed behind the hands in Nacht und
Träume. In the script, “B raises his head further to gaze up at invisible face”

(CSP, 306), the hands appear out of darkness, offer comfort, and are gone.
The dream does not include the face of the other but concentrates instead on
the tactile connectedness of the hands. In this way, the hands are deperson-
alized: intimate, yet also distant. The tension between absence and presence,
between the body that Thomas is invited to touch and the body that Mary
Magdalene is not permitted to touch, is played out on the small screen in
Nacht und Träume. For, although the play apparently shifts between the two
levels, actual and produced, real and virtual, the level of the real is exposed
as being as riddled with absence as is the virtual.
Louis Marin writes of a trompe l’oeil effect in what is among the most
sacred of painted images, those that depict the vera icon, the relic of Christ’s
holy veil. He observes how representations of the vera icon in the art of the
cinquecento and seicento defy a key precondition of painted representation:
the hand of the artist. Thus, from the mythology that has emerged out of
the Christian narrative, we understand that the image of Christ had come
to be imprinted on the cloth directly (almost photographically), without
the mediation of a human hand. To create this impression in painting, the
vera icon appears as “pure image without background” (see, e.g., Domenico
Fetti, “The Veil of Veronica” [ca. 1620] or Hans Memling, “Saint Veronica”
[ca. 1470–1475]).43 This defies the materiality of the image. Not only is the
presence of Christ predicated on his absence, but also this paradox finds its
way into the heart of the representation of the Christ-figure in the image of
the vera icon. The image is made sacred, dematerialized—a trick of the eye.
Such a view of the Christ event and its representations is pertinent for an
understanding of religiosity in Nacht und Träume and, indeed, in other of
Beckett’s later work. A question mark is placed over presence, as the mate-
rial body is sacrificed in Beckett’s later plays. Only vestiges of it remain in
Not I and That Time, which have bodies that are “like gone.” The body is a
bare semblance coming out of the dark in Footfalls and A Piece of Monologue
and is abstracted to the point of disappearance in Quad and Ghost Trio. As
McMullan writes, “Beckett produces imperfect, incomplete, body fragments
or body shadows. He focuses on the limits and limitations of perceptual
and conceptual mastery or possession enacted through technologies of the

mediated body”44 and seems to be responding to a central question raised by

this study: how is one to touch the other, as artist, as human?
In this regard, the image that is created in Nacht und Träume not only has
readily apparent religious signifiers in its content but is also indicative of the
absence that lies at the heart of representation. The history of representation,
for Nancy, is torn by this fissure of absence. The Christian cross lies at the
center of this: it is a “representation of the divine representative dying to the

world of representation in order to give it the sense of its original presence,”45
played out also in the absent presence signified by the vera icon. The pes-
simism noted earlier regarding perceptual and, in this case representative,
systems is not as simple here as an awareness of failure. It is also a question
of how one is to approach the object, as an artist, as a perceiver, asking what
the holes in the fabric of perception might reveal. As Boxall puts it so elo-
quently, for the later Beckett, “[t]he veil which hides, which occludes, is also
the surface which offers a fleeting contact between things and nothingness,
between presence and absence.”46
The image is a product of the dreamer’s mind, with his desire for com-
fort. Cued by Schubert’s music, a televised image produces a televised image
and the process repeats in such a way as to suggest—as in many of Beckett’s
dramas—that this process will continue ad infinitum. As Christina
Adamou puts it, “[T]he dream plunges us into a cycle in which, in sealing
one hole another is opened.”47 This sense of an image being created before
the viewer’s eyes is a key theme of Nacht und Träume, one of Beckett’s plays
that “increasingly reduce[s] the body to a series of semblances,” shifting “the
viewer’s focus from the image on screen to the conditions of its emergence
and perception.”48 Presence is exhibited in the tactile contact of the dreamed
image but never made tangible. Such intangible presence recalls the biblical
scene of noli me tangere; presence is revealed, yet apart. This touching image
reveals intimacy at a distance and an image without materiality. In Nacht
und Träume, the act of creating the image is realized as an act of recording.
The artist is imaged as the solitary insomniac, tending the borders between
life and death, the real and the virtual. The creation of the image is the
cultivation of death. It is, at once, the raising of the body to the light (its
recording, immortalization) and the acknowledgment of its fall back into
materiality, as the head falls forward to rest on hands: his own, the other’s.
To paraphrase Eh Joe, it is “matter made light.” Presence cannot be guar-
anteed; the very process by which the vera icon comes to verify presence is
undermined. Such insecurity over truth leads to anxiety over presence and
authenticity, and this connects back to what I term “haptic certitude”—
the assurance that touch brings and the insecurity that the need to touch
reveals. The televising of the body is the transformation of flesh into light,

material body into information signal. It is resurrection predicated on the

absenting of the body.
Televisual Presences
Philip Auslander argues that, in contemporary mediatized culture, we can
no longer think of the categories of the live and mediatized as binary oppo-

sites. Mediatization is “now explicitly and implicitly embedded within the
live experience.”49 There is a sense that, through this proliferation of media-
tizing, something vital has been lost from the live and from presence, “which
can only be compensated for by making the perceptual experience of the
live as much as possible like that of the mediatised.”50 This gives even more
significance to the way in which Nacht und Träume meditates on embodi-
ment and presence—especially when we consider the nature of the medium
for which it was written. In Nacht und Träume, the materiality of the body
resides in its televising. The play moves beyond the binary of live/mediatized
to recognize that mediatization structures our sense of the world and to
reveal that the “live” is perhaps inaccessible. Yet, while it operates within the
space of mediatization, it also meditates on the nature of the sacred image
and the sacrificed body. How, then, is this sense of the sacred to be read in
relation to the medium of television? What does it mean for this epitome of
minimalism to be present on a medium that more and more has come to be
associated with visual plenitude, fast editing, and consumer tastes? Many
of Beckett’s television plays exploit the Chinese box effect, where images
exist within images, and Nacht und Träume is a good example of this. For
the image that is created, the window that is opened in the right-hand cor-
ner of the screen is a dream box. It is a window, albeit an opaque one, onto
the desires and longings of the dreamer. It is also a self-conscious echo of
the small window that sits in the corner of the domestic living room. This
effect is apparent in Eh Joe also, as the close-up narrows the parameters
of Joe’s space, trapping him inside the box that is the television as well as
the box of his mind in a way that emphasizes the meta-filmic quality of
many of Beckett’s television plays. The angularity of the settings for the
other television plays reveal something similar: the space in Ghost Trio is
organized into a boxed-in room, while diagrammatically organized Quad
sees the figures moving around a square, which although two-dimensional,
echoes the limits of the television frame. That said, for Voigts-Virchow, the
real alternative that Beckett provides to the Baudrillardian ceaseless flow of
commodified, obscene images lies, not in the self-reflexiveness of his work,
that self-consciousness of medium that his plays display, “but rather [in]
their overall dramatization of deprivation and absence.” Scopophilia, the

desire to see, encounters, in Nacht und Träume, the “inscrutability of shadow

and austerity of movement” and an aesthetic of failure.51 When Joe sits alone
and is visited by the voice, she brings to him a vision of a body now lost to
him, long since put beyond his reach. That figure, “spirit made light,” mani-
fests like a broadcast from the void, particulates of information registering
on the screen of the mind. In . . . but the clouds . . . , similarly, the woman’s face
appears on the screen as a spectral object who does not return the viewer’s

gaze, “a face without head suspended in the void,” as Deleuze puts it,52 her
existence reduced to the parameters of screen and signal.
Nacht und Träume not only contains religious signifiers, it also refer-
ences the sacred—that which is put beyond touch. Yet, in a counterpoint to
this, the hands that emerge from the darkness actually touch the face of the
dreamer. Such moments, when actual contact between bodies is visualized,
are rare in Beckett; so their implications must be noted. This touching is nei-
ther a violence nor an imposition; rather such fragile and tactful touch dra-
matizes how touch might occur and how the relation with the other might
take place, without violence and without isolation. Finally, and in spite of
the fact that this play seems to circle around an act of touch, its mediated,
dream-like setting suggests the preclusion of that touch, the impossibility
of accessing a true origin for the image of the dreamer. It is here that the
noli me tangere scene meets most evidently with the “sacrifice” of the body
in Beckett’s later work. That sacrifice involves the raising of the material
body to the light, which puts it beyond touch. The body becomes mediated
flesh. This play demonstrates the way in which, in Beckett’s work, subjects
are held together by contradictions. Approaching the play with the sense
of touch in mind acknowledges its connections not only to the Christian
narrative but also to the paradoxes inherent in that narrative, which Nancy
elucidates. Subjects are shown to be caught within a variety of nexuses: pres-
ence and absence, flesh and spirit, matter and culture, the body of clay and
the body of light. In Beckett’s work, bodies sit (are situated), in this way, as
both present and about to depart, always about to be touched, always failing
to touch.

CONCLUSION

Departing Bodies: Between Doubting
Thomas and Noli me Tangere
T
he obsession with ascertaining presence or holiness through touch
is given its most graphic realization in the Doubting Thomas scene
of John’s Gospel.1 Peggy Phelan’s reading of the representation of
this scene in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas points out the porno-
graphic quality of this image. She writes that “[i]n Caravaggio’s painting and
in the spectacular penetrations of the body given to us in photographic porn,
we are made to see that there is an injury, a wound, a hole, that makes all we
see incomplete, partial, painful.”2 Thomas cannot trust his eyes, and instead
must thrust his finger into the wound in order to verify that this is in fact
the risen Christ. It is a form of blindness, driving his need for haptic certi-
tude. The insertion of the finger and the wound itself are both signs of the
limits of vision. As Phelan goes on to suggest, the wound in Christ’s body
opens up an interiority that painting cannot expose, thus underscoring the
limit of the look.3 The skin of the body becomes the skin of the painting and
the wound or tear in its surface reveals the limits of vision. This “blindness”
is associated with the viscous and tacky inner space of the human body. I
use the word tacky here to denote the liquid viscera that the body produces,
and, at a conceptual level, the notion of touch implies an affirmation of the
real, of visceral presence and immediacy—an ideology that is also a fan-
tasy of homogeneity, of assimilation, of reduction, and which Nancy’s warns
against: a touch that turns into a grip.4
Caravaggio’s representation of Christ arguably puts the “body” back into
the resurrection. In the painting, no light surrounds Christ’s head, as it does,
for example, in Rembrandt’s version (painted in 1634), and the bodies pre-
sented are, as is Caravaggio’s style, ordinary, with clothes torn and brows

wrinkled in doubt or curiosity. Despite the imminence of Christ’s ascension,

this body is an earthly one. The image fits with Nancy’s account, where in
spite of Christianity’s disavowal of the body, it is absolutely necessary for the
resurrection to take place. Only a body can be raised, just as only a body can
fall, “a spirit can do nothing of the sort.”5
With their awareness of corporeality, and stark moments of sensory
engagement, Beckett’s dramas are situated here: at the moment when doubt

meets flesh. This touching of the wound discovers not the possibility of tran-
scendence, but the verification of a fleshly body lying beneath discourse,
somewhere that the gaze cannot penetrate. Beckett’s bodies are fallen ones.
In this, they are like the bodies in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Parable of
the Blind” (1568), which are imaged falling one by one to the ground. Such
fallen bodies are graphically represented in the prose, particularly How It Is:
“on my face in the mud and the dark I see me”6 and the figure addressed in
Company “on his back in the dark.”7 The crawling Molloy, the inert body of
Malone Dies, the immersive tactility of The Lost Ones, where touch, as Maude
notes, becomes the only mode of communication and perception in this phe-
nomenologically reduced space,8 all reveal the fallen body of Beckett’s work.
There is a tactile materiality visualized in the earlier drama and hinted at in
the later plays. Bodies like that of Krapp’s in the earlier work are weighty and
decrepit. In the later drama, a tension is generated between the memory of
embodiment and the abstract spaces the figures inhabit. Whole bodies are
“like gone,” but their vestiges remain, produced discursively. In spite of the
near-absence of bodies in the later plays, there are still remnants of graphic
materiality. Mouth’s speech in Not I is a “contortion”; May of Footfalls suffers
from a “shudder of the mind.” Joe’s face is tense and sweating, the camera
zooms in on the matted, unkempt hair of F in Ghost Trio. Like the stare of the
protagonist of Catastrophe, the recalcitrance of bodies continually emerges,
exceeding the representational frames that would contain them. The speaker
of A Piece of Monologue describes where bodies meet clay in the most literal
sense, at the lips of the grave. This is the blind spot of being that, in repre-
sentation, tears a hole in the fabric of the visual, leaving only the touch of the
coffin’s wood on skin and the darkness of the enclosing earth.
While it is important to recognize the ways in which Beckett’s work sus-
tains the visceral tackiness of bodies, as the hand in the wound, there is
a simultaneous pessimism about that touch and the possibility of verify-
ing presence. Derval Tubridy considers how this idea of “incarnation,” of
word made flesh, opens a vista onto the relationship of body to language in
Beckett’s work, where the continued disjuncture between the two is played
out.9 Thinking of Christ as a locus, a site of the intersection of immate-
rial world and material body, Tubridy draws a comparison with the tym-
panum image from The Unnameable.10 The body is never fully incarnated

Conclusion ● 153
in Beckett; word and flesh may touch, yet no more than Merleau-Ponty’s
touching hands, language and body, spirit and matter never become fully
one. The impulse to speak, to “say it,” is never satisfied and, paradoxically,
the goal of speech appears to be silence.11 This is where strands of the noli
me tangere come to the fore in Beckett’s work. In dramatizing these fallen
bodies there is an acknowledgment of the connection to the other, as well
as the enmired quality of embodied being. Self and self, and self and other

are implicated in relation to one another, in a chiastic relation. Yet, as was
noted at the outset of this study, this chiasm does not come full circle. This
is what the autopsy, my own critical version of Thomas’s gesture, has shown.
At the same time as touch is imaged or suggested, for example, in the erotics
of Eh Joe and the “works” of What Where, there is simultaneously a motion
toward withdrawal. The plays may present or hint at a visceral and tacky
corporeality, thus affirming Beckett’s theater as a theater of presence. Yet
dramatized also is a pessimism about the possibility of “getting in touch,”
either with oneself or with the other. Both Film and Krapp’s Last Tape are
realizations of the noncoincidence that lies along the course of the chiasm.
The connection with one’s body and the body of the other is always imbued
with the imminence of separation.
As well as pessimism about the possibility of touch taking place and veri-
fying presence, there is also the tendency toward a tactful withdrawal. The
relationality of the figures in Ohio Impromptu prompts the question: Is there
another way to touch? One that is less tacky, and more tactful with “no paw-
ing in the manner of flesh and blood,” as in That Time (CSP, 231)? Perhaps
it is that, as much as Beckett digs in the viscera and situates his dramatic
images in the “hole,” he simultaneously proposes that this touch is just that:
tacky, and perhaps unnecessary. It verifies little, with bodies promised to
absence regardless. It may even count as violence. With profoundly non-
metaphysical resonances, the opposite of the tackiness of the material body
is not transcendent spirit or sanctified flesh, but the absent body. The ethics
of the haptic lies in letting bodies be, letting bodies go: noli me tangere.
A discourse of haptics is capable of addressing the ways in which one
encounters the senses and the problematics of embodiment in Beckett’s aes-
thetic, as these issues manifest in a limiting of vision within the domains of
audiovisual media. Beckett’s aesthetic of impotence and ignorance invokes a
tactile epistemology as an alternative to the power, mastery, and dominance
associated with sight. Yet aspects of the dramas studied here may suggest
that any privilege that might attach to the alternative mode of engagement
between subject and object, and self and other, is continually diminished,
even as it is being proposed. Rather than accept that the concept of touch is
Beckett’s “answer” to a perceived dominance of visuality in culture, the prob-
lems of the link between the hand and the metaphysics of presence (Derrida)

and the role of the hand in authority, power, and coercion must be taken into
account. As with any “system” that one might attempt to discern in Beckett’s
work, it must be recognized also that no interpretation will be without excep-
tions and deviations. It is this fact that makes further study of Beckett’s work
both possible and exciting. In the context of this study, the plays examined
sit neither fully under the sign of touch (Thomas’s doubt) nor nontouch (noli
me tangere), but are constantly in touch with the two. In this productive and

inclusive disjunction between touch and nontouch, the visible and the invis-
ible, and between presence and absence, bodies are always on the verge of
touching, and simultaneously about to take their leave.
In Western culture and its traditions of representation the act of touch
has theological resonances and is central to ways in which Western civiliza-
tion conceptualizes presence, divinity, and the human body. On the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo famously painted God and Adam. The
image represents the moment before or after God has given Adam life. The
fingers are not touching and the gap between the outstretched hands could
represent the tantalizing distance between God and man. This gap, this
near-touch, lies at the core of human endeavor and human doubt. Touch,
in Nancy’s terms, reveals the Christian obsession with presence; that urge
to have tangible evidence of God’s existence, evidence that would make
human existence finally meaningful.12 The image of human and divine
not touching demonstrates both the imperative to touch and the epistemo-
logical doubt that it signals. Meaningfulness is permanently thrown into
doubt by the intimation that touch never actually takes place. It may never
have happened between the first human and the divine presence. It fails to
happen between self and self—as Merleau-Ponty puts it “my left hand is
always on the verge of touching my right hand.”13 It never really happens
also between people. In the act of touch, perhaps all one ever touches is a
limit, a film, a painted surface, or a skin. Beckett’s aesthetic of failure, this
imaging of the limits of the hand, may be said to express a degree of pes-
simism about human existence and interpersonal communication. Yet, as
can be seen in the structure of the plays that have been examined here, the
continued derailment of the possibility of touch is the source of the artwork
itself. Beckett’s work reveals the productivity of failure. Not only this, but
the impulse to express also reveals something fundamental about humanity.
Humanity continues to attempt the impossible, to touch the other, through
art, through ethical practice. The continued failure of touch and doubt over
its efficacy drives the impulse to reach outward, to discover and demarcate
the limits of the other and the limits of the self.

Notes

Introduction Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy
1. Margrit Shildrick, “Some Speculations on Matters of Touch,” The Journal of
Medicine and Philosophy 26.4 (2001): 402.
2. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
3. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: G.
Bretschneider, 1985), 58–59.
4. This is Oppenheim’s central argument in The Painted Word (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000). She focuses upon Beckett’s “dialogue”
with visual art, and argues for the importance of critical exegesis of the visual
dimension of Beckett’s work, as visuality and visual perception are essential to
his aesthetic.
5. Quoted in Oppenheim’s introduction to Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music,
Visual arts, and Non-print Media (New York: Garland, 1999), xv. This com-
ment is from an interview with Jonathan Kalb in Beckett in Performance (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 235.
6. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum,
2002), 41–2.
7. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London:
Calder, 1993 [1970]).
8. S. E. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater,” Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’ hui 11 (2000): 169–170.
9. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Marks has been influenced in her thinking by a turn in film studies to phe-
nomenology and affect. Of particular note in this regard is the work of Vivian
Sobchack who sets out the case for such an approach in The Address of the Eye:
A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1992) and in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (CA:
University of California Press, 2004). For more on haptics and film, see Antonia
Lant, “The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,”
October 59 (1992): 87–112; and “Haptical Cinema,” October 74 (1995): 45–73.

156 ● Notes
10. Marks is here quoting a conversation with Mike Hoolboom, Skin of the
Film, 162.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London:
Continuum, 2005), 12.
12. Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Nebraska: Nebraska University
Press, 2001), 200.
13. “What has happened is that the sensory-motor schema is no longer in opera-

tion, but at the same time it is not overtaken or overcome. It is shattered from
the inside. That is perceptions and actions ceased to be linked together, and
spaces are now neither coordinated nor filled” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, 39).
14. Marks, The Skin of the Film, 127
15. André Lepecki and Sally Banes, The Senses in Performance (London: Routledge,
2006), 1.
16. Of what is understood as dramatic in Aristotelian theater, Lehmann, in
Postdramatic Theater, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006),
writes: “It is essentially the unity of time that has to support the unity of this
logic that is meant to manage without confusion, digression and rupture”
(160).
17. On narrative, Aristotle writes that the plot of the epic “should be made dra-
matic, as in tragedies, dealing with a single action which is whole and com-
plete and has beginning, middle and end,” Book XXIII, line 15, Poetics, trans.
Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 61.
18. Maike Bleeker, “Look who’s Looking! Perspective and the Paradox of Scientific
Subjectivity,” Theater Research International 29 (2004): 31–32.
19. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallax 3 (1996), 4.
20. Derrida, On Touching, 46.
21. Ibid., 210.
22. Ibid., 182; emphasis in original.
23. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 209–10 and. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible
and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1969), 208.
25. Ibid., 9.
26. Stanton Garner, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary
Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 31.
27. Ulrika Maude, “The Body of Memory: Beckett and Merleau-Ponty,” in Beckett
and Philosophy, ed. Richard Lane (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 120.
28. Ian James, in The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Jean-Luc Nancy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), compares
the language that Nancy uses to that of Merleau-Ponty, suggesting that “rather
than invoking a vocabulary of ‘incarnate sense,’ of intertwining, chiasmus, and
reciprocity as Merleau-Ponty does to describe the way in which the world is
opened up through bodily intentionality, Nancy invokes a vocabulary of rup-
ture and discontinuity” (132). Yet it is possible to discern a similar vocabulary

Notes ● 157
of rupture running through the Merleau-Ponty text, where the completion of

the perceptual circle is always imminent, never actualized.
29. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), 17.
30. Ibid., 5.
32. Anna McMullan’s Theater on Trial (New York and London: Routledge, 1993)

pays particular attention to the fragmentation of the visual image that occurs in
Beckett’s work, noting, e.g., in relation to Ohio Impromptu, how the “two levels
of representation, the scenic and the verbal, are therefore deliberately differenti-
ated to produce a juxtaposition of narrative and visual image” (144).
33. Nancy, Corpus, 53.
34. . Ibid., 5.
35. See Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2007).
36. Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 4.
37. Anna McMullan, “Performing Vision(s): Perspectives on Spectatorship in
Beckett’s Theater,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. by Jennifer Jeffers (NY:
Garland, 1998), 134.
38. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater,” 172.
39. Anna McMullan, “From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis)embodi-
ment in Beckett’s Theater,” in Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship
and Representation, ed. Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 107.
40. Roger Callois (“Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia,” October 31 [1984]),
writing on cross-cultural aspects of play in human behavior, suggests that
the end goal of such mimicry in nature is a merging of the creature into the
background of its environment (16–32). There is a relationality between the
backdrops of Beckett’s dramatic spaces and the objects that fill them, and in
many cases the threat of merger, coupled with a desire to merge; the absorbing
darkness, cradling the figure in Rockaby is a case in point. In other cases the
mimicry is of a formal nature, with camera mirroring eye and so on.
41. Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge
42. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 1965), 62.
43. Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2007); and Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
1 Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy

1. William Shakespeare, King Lear (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983
[1975]), 205.
2. Maurice Maeterlinck, Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, trans. Maya Slater (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997).

158 ● Notes

4. José Saramago, Blindness, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London: Vintage, 2005).
5. For further analysis of this painting and the politics of vision, see David
Forgacs, “Blindness and the Politics of the Gaze,” in Indeterminate Bodies, ed.
Naomi Segal, Roger Cook, and Lib Taylor (UK: Palgrave, 2003).
6. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prose (London: Faber, 1984). Henceforth
referred to in parentheses, in the text, as CSP.

7. Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, ed.
and trans. Margaret Jourdain (New York: Lennox Hill, 1972), 87.
8. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press,
2001), 240.
10. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift,
Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham, 2008), 48.
11. See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame:The Life of Samuel Beckett (London:
Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 124.
12. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (New York: Dover, 2004), 90.
13. In the notes for the 1969 Berlin Schiller Theater production, Beckett comments
on Krapp’s relationship with his machine: “tendency of a solitary person to
enjoy affective relationships with objects, in particular here with tape-recorder.
Smiles, looks, reproaches, caresses, taps, exclamations [ . . . ] A little throughout.
Never forced,” thus emphasizing Krapp’s anthropomorphizing impulse. The
machine is a companion for him. See James Knowlson, ed., The Theatrical
Notebooks of Samuel Beckett Volume III: Krapp’s Last Tape, (London: Faber,
1992), 79.
14. Pierre Chabert, “The Body in Beckett’s Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studies 8
(1982): 27–28.
15. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 89.
16. The three winds forward are two, three, and four seconds, respectively, lead-
ing up to a “crescendo of ejaculation.” See Knowlson, Theatrical Notebooks of
Samuel Beckett, 91.
17. Eckart Voigts-Virchow applies this term in his analysis of Quad (see “Quad
I and Teletubbies: “Aisthetic” Panopticism versus Reading Beckett,” Samuel
Beckett Today/Aujourd’ hui [henceforth referred to as SBTA] 11 [2000]: 211),
though it has perhaps some uses in the context of Krapp’s Last Tape. Indicating
“sensation,” the term was appropriated and reevaluated within postmodern aes-
thetics in order to valorize a more sensual approach to aesthetics. See Karlheinz
Barck et al., eds., Aisthesis (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990); and Wolfgang Welsch,
Aisthesis (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987).
18. “a glint of the old eye to come . . . ways of seeing in Krapp’s Last Tape ” (Anna
McMullan, Paper given at the Beckett working group of the International
Federation for Theater Research annual conference, University of Maryland
June 26–July 1, 2005).

Notes ● 159
19. Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, Proust and Three Dialogues (London:
Calder, 1965[1935]), 13.
Palgrave, 2007), 13.emphasis in original.
21. Rosette Lamonte, “Krapp: Anti-Proust,” in Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape:
A Theater Workbook, edited by James Knowlson (London: Brutus, 1980). 162.
22. McMullan, “a glint of the old eye to come . . . ways of seeing in Krapp’s Last

Tape.”
23. Julie Campbell, “The Semantic Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape,” SBTA 6 (1997): 63.
24. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), 188.
25. Lamonte, “Krapp: Anti-Proust,” 163.
26. In her discussion of the automatic or reflexive body in Beckett’s work, Marina
Warner suggests that Beckett seeks out the integrity of the “body’s thought,”
the visceral immediacy of the hanged man’s emission, or the eyelids coming
down. “Who Can Shave an Egg?: Foreign Tongues and Primal Sounds in
Mallarmé and Beckett,” in Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration, ed.
Anna McMullan and S. E. Wilmer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2009), 60. The context in which Beckett makes this comment is to be found in
a letter to Thomas McGreevy in which Beckett suggests that Mallarmé writes‘
Jesuitical poetry’ and supposes himself a ‘dirty low church P.[Prostetant]’
‘mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen’. This concern for
the intrusion of the body into the aesthetic frame in a way which dismantles
or disrupts representation (irreducible materiality characterized by integrity or
truthfulness) was to becomes a feature of Beckett’s work. See The Letters of
Samuel Beckett 1929-1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More
Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 134-5. This issue is
dealt with in more detail in chapter 3.
27. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 96.
28. Yasunari Takahashi, “Memory Inscribed in the Body: Krapp’s Last Tape and the
Noh play Izutzu,” in The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage,
ed. Enoch Brater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60. This is
the author’s own translation of the line. A complete translation can be found
in Ezra Pound and Ernest Fennellosa, The Classic Noh Theater of Japan (New
York: New Directions, 1959).
29. Martin Held’s words, who played Krapp in Berlin in 1969, in an interview with
Ronald Hayman, in Knowlson ed., Krapp’s Last Tape: A Theater Workbook, 67.
30. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 210.
31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus
(Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 9.
32. Takahashi, “Memory Inscribed in the Body,” 58.
33. In 1977, Beckett aided his longtime friend Rick Cluchey in the direc-
tion of Krapp’s Last Tape in Berlin. Cluchey recounts that, during a break in
rehearsal, “Beckett depicts with a smile the image of an old Krapp who had

160 ● Notes
made the opposite decision: surrounded by an aged wife and many, many chil-
dren . . . ‘Good God!’” It is as if Krapp knows that “whichever decision he might
have taken, he would have failed” (Rick Cluchey and Michael Haerdter, “Krapp’s
Last Tape : Production Report,” in Knowslon ed., Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last
Tape: A Theater Workbook, 128).
34. For Deleuze (Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
[London: Continuum, 1986], 60–61), quoting as it does an earlier tradition

of filmmaking, Film exemplifies what he terms the “movement-image,” the
camera following fluid matter in motion, and is also an “astonishing attempt”
to answer the question of how we can be rid of perception—the perception of
others, and the perception of self by self (69).
35. In 1964, after the filming of Film, Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider saying that
while the piece has been “troubled by a certain failure to communicate fully by
purely visual means the basic intention,” he could see it having value chiefly “on
a formal and structural level” (Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served:
The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider [Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998], 166).
36. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 523.
37. Biographical sources confirm Beckett’s exposure to and continued interest in
Berkeley. His critical interest in the philosopher was not restricted to his stud-
ies as an undergraduate in the early twenties. For example, a letter to Thomas
MacGreevy, penned in 1933, recounts his reading of Berkeley’s Commonplace Book,
written when the philosopher was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. He
remarks that it is “full of profound things, and at the same time of a foul (and false)
intellectual canaillerie, enough to put you against reading any more” (Martha Dow
Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 154).
38. This is from the first line in Beckett’s essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress, which
was to become Finnegan’s Wake. See Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings
and A Dramatic Fragment, ed. by Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 19.
39. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 134–135.
40. Ibid., 138.
41. Samuel Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New
York: Grove Press, 1995), 62–63. Ulrika Maude notes the novella’s emphasis
on vision, “the eye itself is presented not as detached and disembodied, but as
fleshly and vulnerable, subject to damage and decay.” By doing this, “Beckett
brings vision closer to the proximity senses.” He thereby disables the eye as sym-
bolic of detached observation. “‘Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order’: Beckett,
Merleau-Ponty and Perception,” in Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. Ulrika
Maude and Mathew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009), 86 and 89.
42. This is the word Alan Schneider uses to describe the texture of Keaton’s eyelid,
“On Directing Film,” SBTA 4 (1995): 37.
43. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 138.
44. Ibid.

Notes ● 161
45. Ibid., 147.

46. Ibid., 148.
48. Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served, 166.
49. Schneider, “On Directing Film,” 37.
50. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), 94.
51. Ibid., 79–80.

52. Ibid., 102–3.
53. Alan Ackerman, “Samuel Beckett’s Spectres Du Noir : The Being of Painting
and the Flatness of Film,” Contemporary Literature 44.3 (2003): 420.
54. Maude, “‘Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order,’” 89.
55. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1993), 304.
56. Jane Hale, The Broken Window: Beckett’s Dramatic Perspective (Indiana: Purdue
57. Norma Bouchard, “Film in Contexts,” SBTA 7 (1998): 124.
58. Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2007), 122.
59. Sylvie Debevec Henning, “Samuel Beckett’s Film and La Dernière Bande :
Intratextual and Intertextual Doubles,” Symposium 35 (1981): 140.
60. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, eds., Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, 222.
61. Hale, The Broken Window, 82.
62. Ibid., 1.
2 Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes

2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham
3. Ibid., 42.
4. Mary Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence,” in Samuel Beckett and Music,
ed. Mary Bryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 25–27.
5. Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, TheUnnamable
(London: Pan Books, 1979), 352.
6. Derval Tubridy, “‘Words pronouncing me alive’: Beckett and Incarnation,” in
SBTA 9 (2000): 97.
7. For further analysis of the presence of this radiophonic voice in Beckett’s
work, see Everett Frost, “Mediating On: Beckett, Embers and Radio Theory,”
in Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. Lois Oppenheim (New York and London:
Garland, 1999), 311–329.
8. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” ed. and trans. Christian Kerslake in Parallax
3 (1996), 126.

162 ● Notes

Palgrave, 2007), 53.
10. Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works Volume 1: Writings, 1922–34, ed. and trans.
Richard Taylor, 4 vols. (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 163–164.
11. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, “Statement
on Sound,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (UK: British Film
Institute), 80–81; emphasis in original. See also Jean Antoine-Dunne’s influ-

ential article “Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and Contrapuntal Montage.”
SBTA 11 (2000): 315–323.
12. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 34.
13. David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson, Film Art: An Introduction, ed. David
Bordwell and Kristen Thompson (London: McGraw-Hill Hill, 2004), 348–349.
14. Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of
Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 198.
15. Zilliacus notes that “the French version reads ‘serre-kiki mental’ which
unequivocally denotes strangulation.” The earlier versions of the play repre-
sent Beckett’s search for words to convey this strangulation image. Throttle,
muzzle, spike, squeeze, tighten, silence, put to silence, garrotte, finish, mum,
strangle, stamp out, exterminate, still, kill, quench, fix, lay, have choked are all
to be found in the developing drafts of the work, Beckett and Broadcasting: A
Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television (Abo: Abo
Akademie, 1976), 188.
16. Before “passion” became associated with strong or violent emotion, it denoted
suffering or enduring (in Latin passionem).
17. Although the play was directed by Alan Gibson, Beckett was present on set
and involved in the rehearsal process for the piece. Soon after, Beckett was to
direct the play himself, in Germany at Süddeutscher Rundfunk, having, in
Knowlson’s words, “derived enormous confidence” from his work at the BBC
and on Film. See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 538–540.
18. Katharine Weiss, “Modernism and Mechanisation: Technology in the Works
of Samuel Beckett” (PhD diss., University of Reading, 2002), 187.
19. Chion, Audio-Vision, 129.
20. Ibid., 131.
21. As with several of his plays with female roles, Beckett had Whitelaw in mind
when he wrote Eh Joe. She was not free to take the part at the time of the BBC
production (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 538). This 1988 version was done
in association with RTE, Channel Four, and Süddeutscher Rundfunk; Klaus
Herm played the part of Joe.
22. Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 198.
23. Ibid., 186–187.
24. Ibid., 190.

Notes ● 163
26. Beckett himself considered the camera to function as a “peephole.” Zinman’s

article expands on this idea, connecting it with a tradition of “peephole” art
(“Eh Joe and the Peephole Aesthetic,” SBTA 4 [1995]: 59).
27. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminist Film Theory, ed. Sue
Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 58–69 (62).
Originally published in Screen 16 (1975): 6–18.
28. Rosette Lamonte, “Beckett’s Eh Joe : Lending an Ear to the Anima,” in Women

in Beckett: Performance and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana:
Illinois, 1992), 233.
29. S. E. Gontarski, Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 118.
30. Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television, 56.
31. Ibid., 62.
32. Weiss, “Modernism and Mechanisation,” 187.
34. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1999), 34–35.
35. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 35.
36. Ariel Glucklich, “The Tortures of the Inquisition and the Invention of
Modern Guilt,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (Oxford, NY:
Berg, 2005), 127.
37. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smyth
(London: Routledge, 2002), 235; emphasis mine.
38. Ibid., 236.
39. Ibid., 235–236.
40. Scarry, Body in Pain, 29.
41. Such an approach was enabled by Beckett’s changing, during development of the
work, of Voice’s narrative from first to third person. That she describes the last
moments of another woman brings a higher level of complexity to the work and
is counted by Gontarski as the saving grace of a play that otherwise may have
remained a “maudlin account of guilt” (Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, 117).
42. Margharita Giuletti, “Visual and Vocal Ventures in Eh Joe ’s Telerhythms,”
Journal of Beckett Studies 13 (2003): 121–122.
44. Voice’s reference to the announcement of the girl’s death, “in the
Independent . . . ‘On Mary’s beads we plead her needs and in the Holy Mass,’”
indicates her religious orientation (CSP, 205).
46. Ibid., 47–48. This issue is pursued in more depth in relation to presence and
absence in Nacht und Träume in chapter 5.
47. Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, Vol. 1, trans. R. B. Haldane and
J. Kemp (London: Tr übner, 1883), 292.

164 ● Notes
48. David Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 50.
49. “Beckett and the Sound of Silence,” 30–31.
50. Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 18.
51. Ibid., 19.
52. Anna McMullan, “Versions of Embodiment/Visions of the Body in

Beckett’s . . . but the clouds . . . ,” SBTA 6 (1997): 360.
53. Quoted in Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (London: Dent, 1941),
21.
54. Catherine Laws, “Beethoven’s Haunting of Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” Assaph: Studies
in the Theater 17–18 (2003): 202.
55. Michael Maier “Two Versions of Nacht und Träume : What Franz Schubert
Tells Us about a Favourite Song of Beckett,” SBTA 20 (2006): 98.
56. Nancy, Listening, 17–18, emphasis in original.
57. In addition to Bryden’s article referred to earlier, a number of other articles have
dealt in depth with silence as it occurs in the fabric of Beckett’s aesthetic. For
example, Marjorie Perloff discusses the role of silence in the radio play Embers,
in “The Silence that is not Silence: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett Embers,”
in Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media, ed.
Lois Oppenheim (London: Routledge, 1999), 247–268. Helen Baldwin identi-
fies links to mysticism within Beckett’s silences in Samuel Beckett’s Real Silence
(University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1981); and Joseph Roach takes
a political approach to the “liturgical silences” in Waiting for Godot, which
mark the absences and silences in the tragedies of human history in “The Great
Hole of History: ‘Natural’ Catastrophe and Liturgical Silences,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 100 (2001): 307–317.
58. This letter is published in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983),
170–173.
59. Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” 126, emphasis in original
60. Michael Maier, “Geistertrio: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio
(Part II),” SBTA 11 (2000): 315.
61. Maier, “Two Versions of Nacht und Träume,” 97.
62. Eric Prieto, “Caves: Technology and the Total Art Work in Reich’s The Cave
and Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” Mosaic 35 (2002): 208.
63. Maier, “Geistertrio (Part II),” 318.
64. It is also important however to bear in mind that music cannot be taken
out of the cultural context of its listener: “Emotional responses to music are
linked to a particular sequence of events based on conventions and rules that
depend not only on shared understanding and representations, but also a com-
mon background of knowledge and beliefs” (John Sloboda and Patrick Juslin,
“Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” in Music and Emotion, ed.
John Sloboda and Patrick Juslin [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 91).
It would appear, according to Meyer’s thinking, that it is knowing the rules

Notes ● 165
of the game that permit an awareness of when those rules are broken, and this
knowledge is a result of immersion in a particular culture; see Leonard Meyer,
Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956),
46.
65. Leonard Meyer, “Music and Emotion: Distinctions and Uncertainties,” in
Sloboda and Juslin, ed., Music and Emotion, 354.

67. Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, 122.
68. Reed, The Schubert Song Companion (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1985), 492–493.
69. Laws, “Beethoven’s Haunting of Beckett’s Ghost Trio,” 211.
71. Sloboda and Juslin, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,”
92–93.
72. Meyer, “Music and Emotion,” 358, n49–50.
73. Royal Browne, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 92–93.
74. Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence,” 30.
76. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea Vol 1, 340.
77. Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
29.
78. Ibid., 345.
79. John Reed, The Schubert Song Companion (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1985), 339.
80. Christina Adamou, “Screening the Unrepresentable: Samuel Beckett’s Plays for
Television” (PhD diss., University of Reading, 2003), 216.
3 Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing

University Press, 2007), 21–22.
2. Ibid., 42.
3. Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 4.
4. Roland Barthes (in collaboration with Roland Havas), “Ascolto,” in Enciclopedia
Einaudi (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 1: 237. Quoted in ibid., 15.
(London: Routledge, 2002), 181.
6. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (New
York: Routledge, 2010), 112.
7. Boyce draws on the work of J. L. Austin, whose 1960s text, How to do Things
with Words, argued that speech in itself is an act that can bring about other
actions and is thus described as “performative.” See “The Negative Imprint of

166 ● Notes
the Past in Samuel Beckett’s Embers and Not I,” in Recovering Memory: Irish
Representations of Past and Present, ed. Hedda Friberg et al. (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 189.
8. Mary Bryden, Women in Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1993), 124.
9. Kathy Smith suggests, with reference to Elaine Scarry’s work on the body
under torture, that Not I demonstrates the transformation of body into voice,

which is also a translation by power, in the torture chamber, of language into
a scream and confession (“The Body in Pain: Beckett, Orlan and the Politics
of Performance,” Studies in Theater and Performance 25 [2005]: 42). See
also Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), 46.
11. Gordon Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and
Words (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 67.
12. In this, Bryden draws on the writings of Bertrice Bartlett (Women in Samuel
Beckett’s Prose and Drama, 131).
13. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993), 69.
14. Ulrika Maude, “A Stirring beyond Coming and Going: Beckett and Tourette’s,”
Journal of Beckett Studies 17 (2008), 162.
15. David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain (UK: Canongate,
2012), 163.
16. Howard Kushner and Kate Brown, “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction,
and the Poetics of Cursing,” New Literary History 35 (2001): 543.
17. Ibid., 544.
18. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 68. It must be noted that this argument forms part of
Butler’s response to criticisms of her earlier work, Gender Trouble, which seemed
to image the body as passive, blank matter onto which culture is inscribed. The
more recent Bodies that Matter addresses this by talking of the relation between
body and discourse as one of negotiation. The body is here viewed as a more
dynamic partner in the relationship.
19. Quoted in Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 23.
20. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 10.
21. Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed.
Renata Salecl and Slovoj Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1996), 13.
22. Kathleen O’Gorman, “‘but this other awful thought’: Aspects of the Female in
Beckett’s Not I,” Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (1992): 36.
23. The origins of the figure of Auditor are reportedly a djellaba-clad woman leaning
against a wall in Tunisia, where Beckett was on holiday. See James Knowlson,
Damned to Fame (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 588–589. The figure was, Brater

Notes ● 167
writes, in a “position of intense listening,” thus the concept of Not I was initially
sparked by preoccupation with such an isolated listener. See “Dada, Surrealism
and the Genesis of Not I,” in Modern Drama 18 (1975): 50.
24. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994),
203.
25. Marina Warner, “Who Can Shave an Egg?: Foreign Tongues and Primal Sounds
in Mallarmé and Beckett,” in Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration,

ed. Anna McMullan and S. E. Wilmer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2009), 60.
26. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck, eds.,The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929–1940
134–135.
27. Eagleman, Incognito, 131.
29. The line from text IX of Texts for Nothing reads: “That’s right, wordshit bury
me, avalanche, and let there be no more talk of any creature, nor of a world
to reach, in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures, with words, with
misery, misery” (Samuel Beckett, Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. S. E.
Gontarski [New York: Grove, 1997], 137).Jonathan Boulter notes that in Texts
for Nothing there is a transformation of discourse into excrement, its entire
verbal-textual production into a kind of “(t)ex(t)crement” (“‘Wordshit bury
me’: The Waste of Narrative in Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing,” Journal of
Beckett Studies 11 [2002]: 10).
30. Johanna Oksala, “Female Freedom: Can the Lived Body be Emancipated?”
Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail
Weiss (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 224.
31. Ibid., 225.
32. Hanna Scolnicov, Women’s Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 149.
33. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (USA and
UK: Routledge, 1997), iii.
34. Ibid., xii.
35. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: G.
Bretschneider, 1985), 58–59.
36. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000),
136–143.
37. Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (London:
Routledge, 1993), 47.
38. Ibid., 63.
39. As Linda Ben-Zvi suggests of A Piece of Monologue : “Beckett effectively achieves
on stage what he has previously achieved in fiction; to allow the two parts of
the self to exist simultaneously.” Referring to the inner and outer parts of the
ego, she argues that That Time and Not I also demonstrate an inability to merge
contradictory aspects of the self (“The Schismatic Self in A Piece of Monologue,”
Journal of Beckett Studies 7 [1982]: 11).

168 ● Notes
40. Jacques Aumont, The Image, trans. Claire Pajackowska (London: British Film
Institute, 1997), 189.
41. Ibid., 108.
42. Jose Ortega y Gasset, “Meditations on the Frame,” Perspecta 26 (1990): 189.
43. Mariko Hori Tanaka, “Elements of Haiku in Beckett and Eisenstein,” SBTA 11
(2000): 325–326.
44. Ibid., 325–326.

45. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 194.
46. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 68.
47. James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer
to Ashbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3–4.
48. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 6.
49. Ibid., 11.
50. John Keats, Selected Poems (UK: Penguin Classics, 2007), 191.
51. Krieger, Ekphrasis, 10.
52. Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), 35–36.
53. Lois Oppenheim, ed., The Painted Word (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2000), 142.
54. Ibid., 125.
55. Ibid., 138.
56. Ibid., 125.
57. McMullan,Theatre on Trial, 59.
58. Ruby Cohn voices her doubt over the “dramatic value” of That Time, while at the
same time noting the author’s intentions regarding the work, as written in a letter
to Alan Schneider: “The delay in parting with [That Time] is due to misgivings
over disproportion between image (listening face) and speech and much time lost
in trying of amplifying former. I have now come to accept its remoteness and
stillness—apart from certain precise movements of, breath just audible in silences
and final smile—as essential to the piece and dramatically of value” (A Beckett
Canon [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001], 334).
59. McMullan, Theatre on Trial, 50.
60. Walter Asmus, “Practical Aspects of Theater, Radio and Television: Rehearsal
Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s ‘That Time’ and ‘Footfalls’ at
the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin (Directed by Beckett),” trans. Helen
Wantabe, Journal of Beckett Studies 2 (1977): 94.
61. In The Skin Ego (trans. C. Turner [New Haven: Yale, 1989]), Didier Anzieu
writes of how the maternal voice provides a sonic skin for the infant, a bath of
sound that aids the formation of the of the skin ego, an psychic skin without
which the subject is not properly formed (101). Chapter 4 of this study deals
with the question of skin and the limits of subjectivity in more detail.
62. Brater, Beyond Minimalism, 42.
63. Ibid., 43.

Notes ● 169
64. Ibid., 38.

65. Ibid., 41–42.
66. Krieger, Ekphrasis, 10.
67. Asmus, “Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s ‘That time’ and
‘Footfalls,’” 92.
68. Oppenheim, The Painted Word, 141.
69. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1982 [1958]), 11.

70. The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 10. Quoted in Oppenheim, The Painted Word, 141.
4 Skin, Space, Place

1. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (New York: Cornell, 2003), 28–29.
University Press, 2008), 15. emphasis in original.
3. See Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth, 1927).
4. Didier Anzieu, Skin Ego, trans. C. Turner (New Haven: Yale, 1989), 101,
emphasis in original.
5. Ibid., 40.
6. Connor, Book of Skin, 36.
8. “Woman” has been frequently framed, at least until the beginnings of modern
medical knowledge, as a vessel, passively providing a place/space for the child.
Aristotle, in On the Generation of Animals, wrote: “It is clear then from what
has been said that, in those animals that emit seed, the seed does not come from
every part; and that the female does not contribute in the same way as the male
to the generation of the offspring that are constituted, but the male contributes
the source of movement and the female the matter. This why the female does
not generate by itself; for it needs a source and something to provide move-
ment and definition” (J. L. Ackrill, A New Aristotle Reader [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987], 242).
9. Mary Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 7.
10. Ibid., 123.
11. See also Jennifer Jeffers, Beckett’s Masculinity (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
12. Anna McMullan, “From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis)
embodiment in Beckett’s Theater,” in Women in Irish Drama: A Century of
Authorship and Representation, ed. Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave
14. See Minako Okamuro, “ . . . but the clouds . . . and a Yeatsian Phantasmagoria,”
SBTA 19 (2006).

170 ● Notes

16. Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009), 145–146.
17. Ibid., 143.
18. Ibid., 139.
19. See Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
20. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallax 3 (1996):

127.
(London: Routledge, 2002), 283.
22. Ibid., 244.
23. Ibid., 245.
24. Samuel Beckett, Company (London: Calder, 1984), 7.
25. Bignell, Beckett on Screen, 17.
26. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in the Work of Samuel Beckett (New
28. William Gruber, “Empire of Light: Luminosity of Space in Beckett’s Theater,”
in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer Jeffers (New York and London:
Garland, 1998), 217.
29. Okamuro., “ . . . but the clouds . . . and a Yeatsian Phantasmagoria,” 261.
32. Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed.
Renata Salecl and Slovoj Žižek (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1996), 13.
33. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986),
94–95.
34. “Timaeus,” trans. by Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive, http://clas-
sics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html (accessed December 2, 2012).
35. Kristeva, Kristeva Reader, 94.
36. Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama, 189.
37. Ibid., 190.
38. Ibid., 189.
39. Elin Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” in Palgrave Advances in Beckett
Studies, ed. by Lois Oppenheim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 60.
40. Specifically, she notes the extent to which drag performances suggest a “dis-
sonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender
and performance,” thus in “imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imita-
tive [and therefore performative] structure of gender itself–as well as its con-
tingency” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble [New York and London: Routledge,
1991], 187).

Notes ● 171
41. Christine Jones, “Bodily Functions: A Reading of Gender Performativity in

Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer M.
Jeffers (London: Routledge, 1998), 189.
42. Ibid., 193–194.
43. Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” 62.
44. Walter Asmus, “Practical Aspects of Theater, Radio and Television: Rehearsal
Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s ‘That Time’ and ‘Footfalls’ at the

Schiller-TheaterWerkstatt, Berlin (Directed by Beckett),” 83.
45. Ibid., 83–84, emphasis in original.
46. Ibid., 85.
47. Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama, 165.
48. Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” 58–59. See also Diamond’s earlier
article,“Speaking Parisian: Feminist Interpretations of Beckett.” In Women in
Beckett : Performance and Cultural Perspectives, ed. by Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1990), 254.
49. From Asmus, “Rehearsal Notes for the German Première of Beckett’s That
Time and Footfalls,” quoted in Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The
Shorter Plays, ed. S. E. Gontarski (London: Faber, 1992), 283–284.
51. William Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 174.
52. David Pattie, “Space, Time and the Self in Beckett’s Late Theater,” Modern
Drama 43 (2000): 400.
54. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays, 284.
56. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 624–625.
57. Luce Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill
(London: Athlone Press, 1993), 41–42.
58. McMullan points out that, on the one hand, Beckett transforms what Irigaray
terms the sang rouge (red blood) of the reproductive, embodied female into
the sang blanc of male aesthetic reproduction. Yet, on the other hand, the play
emphasizes the “intersubjective production of self and other in which a woman
(both character and actress) determines to author her vocal and embodied per-
formance of selfhood” (“From Matron to Matrix,” 107).
59. Anna McMullan, “Samuel Beckett’s Theater: Liminal Subjects and the Politics
of Perception,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 67 (2006): 445.
61. Genesis 3:16.
62. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 116.
63. Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the
Works of Samuel Beckett (London: Macmillan, 1986), 163, quoted in McMullan,
Theatre on Trial, 101.

172 ● Notes
64. Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
(London: Pan Books, 2006), 352.
66. “He opened the Euphrates and the Tigris from her eyes / closed her nostrils /
He piled up clear-cut mountains from her udder / Bored waterholes to drain
off the catchwater / He laid her tail across / tied it fast as the cosmic bond [ . . . ]
With half of her he made a roof, he fixed the earth / He [ ] the work, made

the insides of Tiamat / surge” (Stephanie Dalley, trans., Myths of Mesopotamia
[Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 257).
67. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 237.
68. McMullan, Theatre on Trial, 99–100.
69. James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and
Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: Calder, 1979), 227.
70. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel
Beckett 1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 518.
71. Connor, The Book of Skin, 36.
5 On the One Hand . . . (The One That Writes the Body)

1. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality and Drama
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 15.
2. Kurt Taroff, “Screens, Closets, and Echo Chambers of the Mind: The Struggle
to Represent the Inner life on Stage,” Forum Modernes Theater 25/2 (2010):
181.
3. This image of Beckett is contradicted also, or at the very least complicated, by
several other factors. For instance, as Herren puts it, the ban on adaptation of his
work from one genre to another was enforced only sporadically and selectively.
He regards Beckett’s collaboration with Marin Karmitz on the adaptation of
Comèdie to film as revealing an author far more open to adaptation than some
of his actions would suggest (“Different Music: Karmitz and Beckett’s Film
Adaptation of Comédie,” Journal of Beckett Studies 18 [2009]: 10–31). While
Beckett had little patience with some projects—notably JoAnne Akalaitis’s
production of Endgame (American Repertory Theater, 1984)—his attitude to
others was quite flexible. For example, David Warrilow, a noted interpreter of
the dramas for whom Beckett wrote A Piece of Monologue, also adapted sev-
eral prose pieces for the stage with Beckett’s approval. For further analysis of
Beckett’s revising and adaptation of his own work from text to performance, see
S. E. Gontarski’s “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s
Theater,” Journal of Modern Literature 22 (Fall 1998): 131–155.
4. For images that demonstrate this, see Cathy Courtney, Jocelyn Herbert: A
Theater Workbook (USA: Applause, 1997), 89.
6. Ibid., 3.

Notes ● 173
7. Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity (Basingstoke: Palgrave
8. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum,
2002), 155.

(London: Routledge, 2002), 360–361.
11. Jorella Andrews, “Vision, Violence and the Other: A Merleau-Pontian Ethic,”
in Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail
Weiss (Pennsylvania Park: Pennsylvania University Press), 171, emphasis in
original.
12. Billie Whitelaw talks of the experience as causing pain and “raging Beckettitis”
in Jocelyn Herbert: A Theater Workbook, 89.
13. Jim Hansen, “Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and the Theater of Pure Means,”
Contemporary Literature 49 (2008): 666.
15. Notable perhaps also is the fact that the word “catastrophe,” in Arabic “nakba,”
is used by Palestinians to refer to the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. The
term, across languages and contexts, has multiple applications.
16. Hansen, “Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and the Theater of Pure Means,” 679.
17. McMullan, Theatre on Trial , 28.
18. Elin Diamond critiques the violence of such identificatory fantasies in “‘The
society of my likes’: Beckett’s Political Imaginary,” SBTA 11 (2000): 382–388.
19. Jennifer Jeffers, Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative (New York: Peter Lang,
2001), 203.
University Press, 2008), 11. emphasis in original.
21. Ibid., 10.
22. Ibid., 11
23. Martta Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-Presence and its
Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Philosophy (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
2008), 255.
24. In an interview with Jean-Baptiste Marongiu, “Le partage, l’infini et le jardin”
Libération, February 17, 2000, http://www.liberation.fr/livres/0101327381-le
-partage-l-infini-et-le-jardin (accessed December 1, 2012), translation by author.
25. Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 158.
26. Quoted in ibid., 162.
27. Ibid., 158.
28. Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 19–20.
29. Ibid., 20.

174 ● Notes
30. S. E. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays
(London: Faber, 1992), 418–419.
31. Gontarski, “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s
Theater,” Journal of Modern Literature 22 (Fall 1998): 142.
32. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, 159.
33. Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text (USA: Davies Group,
2007), 160.

34. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1999), 143.
35. Ibid., 138.
36. Rebecca Schneider, “On Taking the Blind in Hand,” in The Body in Performance,
ed. Patrick Campbell (London: Routledge, 2001), 29.
37. Karen Laughlin, “‘Dreaming of [ . . . ] Love’: The Making of the (Post)Modern
Subject,” SBTA 11 (2000): 206.
38. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallax 3
(1996): 123.
39. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebooks, 409.
40. S. E. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theatre,” Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’ hui 11 (2000): 176.
41. Eckhart Voigts-Virchow, “Quad I and Teletubbies or ‘Aisthetic’ Panopticism
versus Reading Beckett,” SBTA 11 (2000): 211.
42. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebooks, 415.
43. Ibid., 427.
44. Ibid., 431.
45. Voigts-Virchow, “Quad I and Teletubbies,” 213.
46. Anna McMullan, “Virtual Subjects: Performance, Technology and the Body in
Beckett’s Late Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studies 10 (2002): 168.
47. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993), 1.
6 On the Other Hand . . . (The One That

Refuses to Touch)
1. Margrit Shildrick, “Some Speculations on Matters of Touch,” The Journal of
Medicine and Philosophy 26.4 (2001): 392
2. Ibid., 402.
3. The reference to the “Latin quarter hat” and to the Isle of Swans in Paris links
the play to Beckett’s relationship with Joyce. But as with much of Beckett’s
work other biographical references are apparent, such as the apartment he and
his wife Suzanne shared in Paris. While I recognize these potential biographical
markers, which are perhaps clearer in this play than in others, no one “story”
can offer definitive explanations for the play.

Notes ● 175

6. S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 178.
7. Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett
and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 391.
8. Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, 177.

9. Willi Apel, ed., Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. (London: Heinemann,
1970), 404.
10. Alfred Einstein, Schubert, trans. by David Ascoli (London: Caselli, 1951), 330.
11. See Gontarski, Intent of Undoing, 174.
12. Ibid., 175–176.
13. Jean Baptiste Poquelin-Molière, The Dramatic Works of Moliere V2: School for
Husbands; The Bores; School for Wives; School for Wives Criticized; Impromptu of
Versailles; The Forced, trans. Henri van Laun (MO: Kessinger, 2010).
16. Ohio Impromptu, dir. Charles Sturridge (Dublin: RTE, 2001).
17. Garin Dowd, “Karaoke Beckett, or Jeremy Irons, Mimicry and Travesty in
Ohio Impromptu on Film,” SBTA 13 (2003): 178.
18. Ibid., 176.
19. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of
Theater (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 31.
20. Ibid., 35.
21. Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Jean-Luc Nancy (CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 138.
22. Ibid., 132.
23. For James, this entails a collapsing of the “transcendent, the spiritual, or the
idea into the touch in separation of finite sense and impenetrable matter.” In
doing so, “Nancy is elaborating an atheism,” but one that is deeply aware of its
Christian provenance (ibid., 142). There is no metaphysical beyond of the body
or of the world, but only a “single body infinitely altered and exposed both in
its fall as well as in its raising,” Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me Tangere: On the Raising
of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New
York: Fordham, 2008), 48.
24. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne
E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3, emphasis in
original.
25. See also, for further commentary, Christopher Watkin, “A Different Alterity:
Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘Singular Plural,’” Paragraph 30 (2007): 53.
26. Peter Boxall, “Beckett and Homoeroticism,” in Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies,
ed. Lois Oppenheim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 128–129.

176 ● Notes
27. Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
1998), 186–187.
28. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, 32.
29. Jonathan Kalb, “The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays and
Film,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge:

31. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel
Beckett 1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 222.
33. James, Fragmentary Demand , 133–134.
34. Nancy, Corpus, 5; emphases in original.
35. John 20:29.
36. John 20:17.
37. Nancy, Noli me Tangere, 47.
38. Ibid., 48.
39. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 682–683.
40. Graley Herren, “Nacht und Träume : Beckett’s Agony in the Garden.” Journal of
Beckett Studies 11 (2001): 58.
41. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 682.
42. See Anna McMullan, “Virtual Subjects: Performance, Technology and the
Body in Beckett’s Late Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studies 10 (2002), 165–172.
43. Louis Marin, On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (CA: Stanford
44. McMullan, “Virtual Subjects,” 168.
45. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham,
2005), 37.
46. Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism
(London: Continuum, 2011), 60.
47. Christina Adamou, “Screening the Unrepresentable: Samuel Beckett’s Plays for
Television” (PhD diss., 2003), 216.
49. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London:
50. Ibid., 36.
51. Eckart Voigts-Virchow, “Exhausted Cameras: Beckett in the TV Zoo,” in
Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers (London: Routledge, 1998),
237–238.
52. Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallax 3 (1996):
128.

Notes ● 177
Conclusion Departing Bodies:

Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangere
1. John 20: 24–29.
2. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge,
1997), 36.
3. Ibid., 35.
4. See Martin Crowley’s “Bataille’s Tacky Touch,” Modern Language Notes 119

(2004): 778–779.
6. Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 9.
7. Samuel Beckett, Company (London: Calder, 1984), 7.
8. Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 73–74.
9. Derval Tubridy, “‘Words pronouncing me alive’: Beckett and Incarnation,”
SBTA 12 (2000): 94–95.
10. Ibid., 97.
11. Ibid., 103.


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Index

Abbott, H. Porter, 84 Beckett, Samuel, works
Abrams, David, 48 All that Fall, 40, 48
Ackerman, Alan, 31 . . . but the clouds . . ., 10, 11, 49, 89,
Acousmatic, 40, 43, 52, 80, 124 90–6, 123, 150
Acousmêtre, 40 Calmative, The, 26
Adamou, Christina, 59, 148 Catastrophe, 11, 113, 114, 116–22,
Aisthesis, 130 125, 126, 127, 131, 136, 152
Alexandrov, Grigori, 37 Comédie, 172 n3
Allegory of the Cave, The, 71. Company, 93, 152
See also Plato Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and
Andrews, Jorella, 116 A Dramatic Fragment, 160 n38
Antoine-Dunne, Jean, 162 n10 Eh Joe, 9, 10, 11, 35, 36, 37–48, 54,
Anthropocentrism, 6–7 73, 120, 145, 146, 148, 149,
Anzieu, Didier, 81, 88, 97, 103, 168 n61 150, 152, 153
Aporetic, 85 End, The, 11
Appoggiatura, 53 Endgame, 5, 13, 70, 84
Aristotle, 5, 10, 106, 156 n17, 169 n8 Film, 9, 10, 11, 24–34, 41, 72, 75,
Armstrong, Gordon, 65 100, 130, 144, 160 n35
Artaud, Antonin, 4 Footfalls, 4, 10, 11, 71, 89, 93, 101,
Asmus, Walter, 40, 46, 102, 103 102–11, 147, 152
Aumont, Jacques, 74, 75 Ghost Trio, 9, 10, 11, 35, 36, 48–60,
Auslander, Philip, 149 85, 91, 96, 136, 140, 143, 147,
Austin, J. L., 165–6 n7 149, 152
Happy Days, 48
Bacon, Francis, 3–4 How It Is, 152
Baldwin, Helen, 164 n57 Krapp’s Last Tape, 9, 11, 13–24, 33,
Banes, Sally, 5 34, 37, 48, 80, 84, 115, 152,
Barthes, Roland, 20, 30, 61 158 n13 n16
Bataille, Georges, 121 La dernière bande, 20. See also
Baudrillard, Jean, 149 Krapp’s Last Tape

192 ● Index
Beckett, Samuel, works—Continued automaticity of, 10, 17, 20, 59, 62,
Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, 64, 66–7, 70, 159 n26
159 n26, 160 n37 in Christianity, 8, 47–8, 140, 144–7,
Lost Ones, The, 152 151, 152. See also Christianity
Malone Dies, 152 desiring, 16, 17, 19–20, 54, 58
Molloy, 66, 152 experience. See Embodiment
Murphy, 66 gendered, 39, 63–4, 68–72, 97, 99,

Nacht und Träume, 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 101, 107, 109–10, 112
36, 48–60, 133–4, 142–50 and immateriality, 1, 9, 21, 22–4,
Not I, 9–10, 11, 61–72, 73, 77, 78, 27, 46–7, 125, 130, 142, 144,
85, 86, 114, 117, 147, 152, 146–7, 148–9, 150, 152–3.
166–7 n23 See also body, materiality of
Ohio Impromptu, 11, 12, 48, 113, and language, 9–10, 39, 62–4, 66–8,
114, 133–42 71, 73–4, 76, 77–8, 80, 82, 84,
A Piece of Monologue, 9–10, 11, 62, 85–6, 152–3
72–7, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, lived, 32, 70–1
96, 126, 147, 152 materiality of, 4, 7, 9, 16–17, 19,
Proust, 18 21–2, 29, 31–2, 61–2, 66–7,
Quad, 11, 113, 114, 126–32, 147, 149 68, 73, 76–7, 80, 84–5,
Rockaby, 10, 11, 71, 89, 93, 96–102, 110–11, 115, 117, 119, 121,
103, 110 124, 132, 139–40, 141, 145–6,
Rough for Theatre I, 13 148–9, 150, 152–3, 159 n26.
Texts for Nothing, 167 n29 See also body and immateriality
That Time, 9–10, 11, 62, 77–86, 115, as obscenity, 16, 66–71
147, 153 performing, 5, 12, 16, 21, 71, 100–2,
Unnameable, The, 36, 109, 152 111, 114–15, 127–9, 140
Waiting for Godot, 5, 11, 14, 70 philosophy of the, 2, 7–8
What Where, 11, 113, 114, 115, 153 power and the, 42–4, 66, 100,
as theatrical text, 122–26 117–18, 123, 125–6, 127,
as television drama, 126–32 131–2
Words and Music, 48 representations of, 2, 4, 10, 29–31,
Beckett on Film, 139 33, 54, 101, 111, 118, 120–1,
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 48, 51, 54, 58 127, 147, 151–2
Beharry, Shauna, 5. See also Marks, text and the, 114, 120–1
Laura Bologne, Jean Claude, 143
Being Singular Plural, 141 Bouchard, Norma, 32
Ben-Zvi, Linda, 167 n39 Boxall, Peter, 141, 148
Bergson, Henri, 17, 18, 21 Boyce, Brunhilde, 63
Bignell, Jonathan, 91 Brater, Enoch, 81–2, 123, 166–7 n23
Bishop Berkeley, 25, 160 n37 British Broadcasting Corporation
Bleeker, Maike, 5 (BBC), 38, 91, 152 n17
Blind, The, 13–14 Brown, Kate, 66
Blindness, 14 Brown, Royal, 57
Body. See also Exscription Brueghel the Elder, 14, 152

Index ● 193
Bryden, Mary, 11, 36, 49, 64, 65–6, Dolar, Mladen, 68, 97
98, 100, 103, 143, 146 Dowd, Garin, 139
Buñuel, Luis, 32 Duchamp, Marcel, 41
Butler, Judith, 66, 67–8, 100, 166 n18,
170 n40 Eagleman, David, 66, 70
Einstein, Alfred, 136
Callois, Roger, 157 n40 Eisenstein, Sergei, 37, 75

Campbell, Julie, 19 Ekphrasis, 62, 77–9, 82–4, 85
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, Embodiment, 1–4, 6, 9, 12, 26,
151 63–70, 111–12, 143–4, 152.
Cartesian thought, 65, 100 See also Body
Cavarero, Adriana, 61 selfhood and, 12, 16, 21, 23, 86,
Caws, Mary Ann, 156 n10 88–9
Cézanne, Paul, 33, 116–17, 144 vision and, 11, 26–7, 31, 32, 150,
Chabert, Pierre, 17 152–3
Cheeke, Stephen, 78, 82 Étants donnés, 41
Chiasm, 12, 23, 26, 35, 144, 153 Exscription, 115, 119–22, 128, 138
Chion, Michel, 38, 40
Chopin, Frédéric, 135 Forgacs, David, 158 n5
Chora, 97–8. See also Kristeva, Julia Foucault, Michel, 42, 128
Christianity, 6–8, 17, 19, 43, 47, 108, Freud, Sigmund, 88, 89, 106, 108
119, 140, 143–8, 150, 151–2, Friedrich, Caspar David, 58
154, 162 n16. See also haptic Frost, Everett, 160 n7
certitude
Closet drama, 113, 121 Garner, Stanton, 7
Cluchey, Rick, 159–60 n33 Genesis, 108
Cohn, Ruby, 15, 158 n58 Gender, 67, 72, 89–90, 100–1, 105–11
Connor, Steven, 87, 88, 112, 127 Gibson, Alan, 162 n17
Coprolalia, 66 Gidal, Peter, 109
Corpus, 12, 15, 120 Giuletti, Magharita, 46
Glucklich, Ariel, 43
Death and the Maiden, 48 Goehr, Lydia, 49
Debevec Henning, Sylvie, 33 Gontarski, S. E., 4, 9, 41, 127, 130,
Dehiscence, 7, 9, 24, 74, 76, 84, 85. 134, 135, 136, 140, 163 n41
See also Inclusive disjunction Gospel of John, 4, 145–6, 151
Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 37, 51, 53, Grosz, Elizabeth, 69
58, 92, 95, 115–16, 124, 129, Gruber, William, 96
150, 156 n13, 160, n34
Derrida, Jacques, 2, 6–8, 22, 27, 153 Hale, Jane, 32, 34
Descartes, René, 14 Hansen, Jim, 117, 119
Diamond, Elin, 71–2, 100, 102, 103 Haptic
Diderot, Denis, 14 certitude, 30, 142, 144–6, 148, 149,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the 151–2, 154
Prison, 128 cinema, 4, 5, 24, 28, 155 n9

194 ● Index
Haptic—Continued Kalb, Jonathan, 143

discourse, 153 Kaun, Axel, 51, 111
epistemology, 32, 75, 153 Keaton, Buster, 24–5, 26, 28, 31,
image, 4, 24, 27–8, 31, 32, 71–3, 32, 33
110, 130–1 Keats, John, 78
interface, 2, 14, 22–3, 33–4, 62–3, King Lear, 13
88, 98, 111 Kinuta, 21

meanings of, 1–3, 8, 9 Knowlson, James, 25, 111, 125, 146,
and memory, 23 162 n17 n21, 166–7 n23
in performance, 5, 22, 24, 62, 72 Krieger, Murray, 77, 78, 82
relief carving, 3, 72, 96, 101 Kristeva, Julia, 97
sound, 16, 36, 59–60 Kushner, Howard, 66
visual art and, 3, 5, 116
and visual impairment, 2, 12, 13–15, Lacan, Jacques, 56
32, 92–3, 130, 152 Lamonte, Rosette, 19, 20, 41
visuality, 4, 91. See also Optic Lant, Antonia, 155 n9
visuality Laughlin, Karen, 129
voice, 37–9, 45–8 Laws, Catherine, 49–50, 55
Haptocentrism, 6–8. See also Derrida, Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 5, 156 n16
Jacques Lepecki, André, 5
Havel, Vaclav, 116 Letters from Siberia, 38
Heikkilä, Martta, 121 Letter on the Blind, 14
Held, Martin, 21 Linear perspective, 5, 24, 31, 32, 33,
Herbert, Jocelyn, 103 71–2
Herm, Klaus, 81, 82 Liszt, Franz, 135
Herren, Graley, 11, 18, 37, 41, 47, 55, London, 103
90–1, 145–6
Humanism, 6 MacGreevy, Thomas, 70, 144
Husserl, Edmund, 7 Magee, Patrick, 20
Maier, Michael, 50, 52
Inclusive disjunction, 77, 111, 138, 140, Mallarmé, Stéphane, 70
142, 154 “Manifesto on Tactilism,” 4.
Incredulity of Thomas, The, 151 See also Marinetti, Filippo
Intersubjectivity, 23, 27 Marin, Louis, 147
Irigaray, Luce, 69, 71–2, 106, 108 Marinetti, Filippo, 4
Irons, Jeremy, 139 Marker, Chris, 38
Marks, Laura, 4, 5, 72
James, Ian, 144, 156 n28, 175 n23 Maude, Ulrika, 7, 11, 66, 152, 161 n41
Jay, Martin, 32 Mary Magdalene, 145
Jeffers, Jennifer, 120 McMullan, Anna, 9, 10, 18, 19, 73,
Jones, Christine, 100 80, 94, 97, 104, 107, 109, 116,
Joyce, James, 174 n3 118, 131, 134, 147, 157 n32,
Jung, Carl, 89, 102 170 n60
Juslin, Patrick, 52, 164–5 n64 Memory, 17, 20, 21, 59–60, 80–1, 83

Index ● 195
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 6–7, 11, Perloff, Marjorie, 164 n57

23, 26, 27, 32, 35, 43, 44, 62, Phelan, Peggy, 131, 151,
65, 66, 76, 86, 92–3, 116, 144, Phenomenology, 2, 4, 6–8, 9, 22, 26, 60
153, 154 Phenomenology of Perception, The, 92.
Meyer, Leonard, 53, 56, 57 See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Michelangelo di Buonarroti, 154 Philips, Siân, 40
Mimesis, 10, 71 Pinter, Harold, 21

Mizuko, 109 Plato, 71, 98
Molière, (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 134, Poetics, 5, 156 n17. See also Aristotle
137, 139 Postdramatic, 5
Monodrama, 51 Postdramatic Theater, 5
Montage, 37 Prieto, Eric, 52
Mulvey, Laura, 41 Psychoanalysis, 56, 59, 68, 89, 100, 103
Music, 48–60 Puchner, Martin, 113, 121
as haptic, 50, 54, 59–60, 135–7 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 37, 75
Musique concrète, 40
Myth, 109, 172 n66 Reed, John, 55, 58
Rembrandt van Rijn, 151
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 6–8, 11, 15, 35, 47, Riegl, Alois, 3, 4, 72
51, 61, 76, 85, 87–9, 90, 92, 97, Roach, Joseph, 164 n57
111, 115, 120–1, 127, 140–1, Romanticism, 48–50, 55, 58
143–5, 150, 152, 154, 175 n23 Royal Court Theater, 21
Noli me tangere, 47, 145
San Quentin Drama Workshop, 23
Ode on a Grecian Urn, 78 Saramago, José, 14
Oedipus Rex, 13 Scarry, Elaine, 42, 44, 123, 125
O’Gorman, Kathleen, 69 Schmal, Hildegard, 102
Okamuro, Minako, 96 Schiller Theater, Berlin, 82, 89, 102
Oksala, Johanna, 70 Schneider, Alan, 24, 25, 28, 41, 134
Oppenheim, Lois, 3, 78, 84, 155 n4, Schneider, Rebecca, 129
164 n57 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 48, 49, 58
Optic image, 4, 27, 31, 96 Schubert, Franz, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 58,
Optic visuality, 4, 91, 101 133, 135, 143, 148
Scolnicov, Hanna, 71
Painted Word, The, 78 Serres, Michel, 87
Parable of the Blind, The, 14, 152. Shildrick, Margrit, 1, 133
See also Brueghel the Elder Skin ego, 88, 100, 111, 168 n61.
Pattie, David, 104 See also Anzieu, Didier
‘Peephole’ art, 41 Sloboda, John, 52, 56, 164–5 n64
Perception, 7, 12, 18, 25, 26–7, 32, 33, Sobchack, Vivian, 155 n9
34, 38, 40, 55, 62, 71, 84, 92, Smith, Kathy, 166 n9
94, 116–17, 118, 119, 122, 131, States, Bert O., 139
139, 148, 152, 155 n4, 156 n13, Suddeutscher Rundfunk, Germany,
160 n34 127, 130, 162 n17

196 ● Index
Surrealism, 32 Tower, The, 90–1

Syncopation, 53 Tubridy, Derval, 152
Syncope, 8
Un chien andalou, 32. See also Luis
Takahashi, Yasunari, 21, 22 Buñuel
Takiri, Yoshiki, 32
Tanaka, Mariko Hori, 75 Versailles Impromptu, 134, 139

Tandy, Jessica, 67 Visible and the Invisible, The, 6–7, 65.
Taroff, Kurt, 114 See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Television, 9–10, 46–8, 51, 59, 91, 96, Visual impairment, representations of,
126, 148–50 13–15
Technology, 2, 15, 23, 28, 36, 50–1 Voigts-Virchow, Eckart, 130, 149,
Theater, 4, 5, 21–2, 24, 71, 73, 82, 158 n17
100, 114, 117, 138
Tieck, Ludwig, 49 Warner, Marina, 70, 159 n26
Timeaus, 98 Weiss, Katherine, 39, 42
Tourette’s Syndrome, 66–7 Whitelaw, Billie, 3, 40, 46, 78, 104,
Touch 114, 117, 162 n21
ethics of, 83–4, 103, 131–2, 133–4, Worthen, William, 104, 124, 127, 138
141–2, 151, 153
failure to, 1, 11–12, 22–4, 27, 33, Yeats, W. B., 90–1, 95
47–8, 86, 131, 142, 150, 154
violence of, 11, 45, 59, 115–17, Zeami, 21
119, 120, 123–4, 125–6, 127, Zilliacus, Clas, 40, 162 n15
131–2, 150 Zinman, Toby, 41, 163 n26



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The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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Also in the Series:

Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive

Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work

Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas

The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama

10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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Introduction Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy 1

10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

or apto, pertaining to touch) contained in either its depiction of touching or

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

mean to represent touch aesthetically? What new understanding of ourselves

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Beckett’s Corpus: At the Limits of Aesthetics and Philosophy

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

phenomenon.”12 Haptic art or haptic elements within art demand that we

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

a metaphor.18 The vanishing point of a painting constructs a unity; the telos

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Philosophies of Touch: Bodies There and Not There

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phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, he suggests that

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

Merleau-Ponty’s thought is closest to Nancy’s. Nancy’s conceptualization

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An Autopsy of the Corpus

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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First Incision: Into the Failing Eye of Krapp’s Last Tape

10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe

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10.1057/9781137275332 - The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama, Trish McTighe