Samuel Beckett

and the

Other Interpretations

Krapp’s last tape

Old Krapp has recorded forty-five birthday tapes, but listens to a single one onstage.

The nameless old man listens to three intercut memory-strands, conveyed in the theatre through three separated loudspeakers.

Krapp has basically concluded his life by preserving it on tapes for a long time.

And on his birthday, his sixty-nine, he remembers a point in his life he once spoke of on a tape.

Krapp’s last tape

He is now of the opinion that since then, thirty years ago, his life has not really developed, because he could not resolve back then to stay together with a particular women. (63)

Indeed, he pushed this woman away from him and determined his fate thirty years ago.

It becomes apparent at the beginning that he knows something important occurred back then.

Krapp’s last tape

He looks for a very particular point on the tape, the point with the woman in the boat, her offer and his refusal, and in the end surprises himself by coming to a strongly emotional realization – suddenly and for the first time- that he cannot bear any more. (60, 61, 63)

It is through the tapes that Beckett conveys Krapp’s long life and its repetitive quality – escaping love and enslaved by habit.

Krapp’s last tape

Time

The play marks time visually and verbally.

Visually, we see Krapp’s large silver pocket-watch.

Krapp looks three times at his watch, once at the play’s opening, (55) once after mention of “a girl in a shabby green coat,” (58) and the last time after the second playing of the lyrical boat scene. (61)

Krapp’s last tape

What we know is that sixty-nine-year-old Krapp resembles thirty-nine-year-old Krapp in his consciousness of time.

Thirty-nine-year-old Krapp records that his mother died in late Autumn and that his memorable equinox took place on a March night. (57)

Sixty-nine-year-old Krapp speaks of Summer outings, of reading Effi Briest (a realist novel by Theodor Fontane – 1896), page a day. (62)

Even in ordering himself to conjure memories, Krapp locates them in time – gathering holly on Christmas Eve and listening to Sundy morning church bells. (63)

Krapp’s last tape

Not only is Krapp sensitive to clok and calendar time, but he is also vulnerable to time’s duration.

Thought he marks each year ceremoniously, it is their weight that he perceives at thirty-nine as at sixty-nine, through the repetition of the word “moments”.

On tape he describes the simultaneity of his mother’s death and a dog’s yelping: “Moments. Her moments, my moments. (Pause.) The dog’s moments”. (60)

Moments brush by the boat scene too: “I asked her to look at me and after a few moments – (pause) - after a few moments she did”. (63)

Krapp’s last tape

So the small unit of time enters two shattering experiences –death and love’s end.

“Farewell to love” a last time, Krapp again listen to the repeated “after a few moments.” (57)

Finally, all those moments add up to the years at the end of the last tape.

“Perhaps my best years are gone … No, I wouldn’t want them back”. (63)

Krapp’s last tape

Manicheism in Krapp’s last tape

McMillan and Fehsenfeld have done a peculiar reading of this performance.

They argue that throughout the play we attend to the deployment of the Manichean doctrine (A major religion that was founded by the Iranian Prophet Mani (c. 216–276 AD) in the Sasanian Empire (224 to 651). Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness).

Krapp’s last tape

Krapp’s references to the three major turning points of his apst, which he listen in the tape, are: his mother’s death, his ‘vision’ on the night of the ‘memorable aquinox’, and his ‘farewell to ,ove’ in the lake scene.

Beckett makes clear that these three moments are all incidents from Krapp’s life in which light and dark, spirit and sensuality, are mingled.

Krapp’s last tape

They out line a progression of the three ‘moments’ central to Manichean belief:

1) the past when spirit and matter were separate and matter exclusively contained in a word of feminine darkness: ‘mother at rest at last’, ‘the black ball’, ‘the dark nurse’.

2) The present when light and dark are mingled but the process of redemptive separation is in progress, ‘memorable equinox’.

3) the future when the separation of light and dark is completed, ‘farewell to love’.

Krapp’s last tape

In presenting the ‘memorable equinox’ and ‘boat scene’ Beckett also systematically interspersed the five Manichean ‘emblems’ of light: zephyr, wind, light quickening fire, clear water with the emblems of dark: mist, heat, sirocco, darkness, vapour.

The greatest incorporation of explicit Manichean emblems comes in the boat scene as Krapp bids “farewell to love”.

It is a concentrated presentation of his breech of the three seals:

Krapp’s last tape

My ‘face’ (signaculum oris) in her breasts (signaculum sinus) my hand one her (signaculum manus).

The Manichean elements culminate in Krapp’s new recording as he interrupts his thoughts of the year just past to recall once again the girl in the boat.

This passage, Krapp’s most enduring memory, had been prepared for by including references to the eyes of the other women from Krapp’s past. End

That Time

It belongs to the same family of Not I, Rockaby, A Piece of a Monlogue, Ohio Impromptu, Foot Falls, etc.

It is the theatereality that relates them.

Less fragmentary than the disembodied mouth of Not I, the head of the old man might be a death mask glowing through the dark.

Although the setting is again total blackness (hard to obtain in most theatres), the old man has memories that ramble through many places, while we see only his ancient human head.

That Time

Each of his three memory-streams flows around stone- a hiding place for an imaginative child, a bench for lovers to exchange vows, a support for an old man.

The child’s refuge is once again removed since it is sought in vain by the aged man.

The love scenetakes place at the edge of a wheatfield and a woods, or near a canal, or on a beach.

Finally, dissolves into a lonely setting by a window open to a billowing shroud.

That Time

In old age a derelict seeks momentary she;ter from rain and cold in a portrait gallery, a post office, a public library where the dust speaks before if cinally settles.

Like trhe life scenes of Not I, those of That Time are inchoate memories: they flow from the one image mouth –and toward the other-head- in theatereality.

That Time

Three periods are intercalated in That Time, hovering uncertainty in time and space.

An old man’s head bearly moves; his eyes open firefly when words stop, but they close when we hear the susurrant verbal stream.

The voice converges on the head from three directions in time as well as space.

The firsts recalls a return visit to a childhood refuge, a stone among nettle

That Time

The second depicts two lovers side by side in an outdoor scene, not touching but exchanging vows.

The third paints an old Beckettian derelict sheltering himself from wiknter in public buildings.

Three voices address the old man’s head as “you”.

They ask about time, and they designate ‘that time’ indefinitely.

That Time

The thirty-six paragraphs or verses divide intro three parts, each part faltering to a halt during which the eyes of the head open, the light brightens, and the breath pants heavily.

Scenes are etched incisively from three directions:

The search for a lost childhood paradise, the incredibility pf a perhaps imagined love scene, and the sardonic backward glance over efforts to make a life coherent.

The three voices speak in the same repetitive asyntactical idiom, and through their different directions the words accumulate into a long life lived.

That Time

That Time

That Time

That Time

Rockaby

In Rockaby a woman, dressed in black and “Prematurely old”, sits in a rocking chair alone on a dark stage.

Though her feet do not touch the floor, the chair rocks on its own to the smoothing regular rhythm of tape-recorded lines spoken in the woman’s vooce.

As the play opens she says “More”, and the rocking begins, seemingly in response to her word.

Rockaby

The recorder text, separated by the “Mores”, into four sections, is repetitive, like a litany, and tells of a woman who goes “to and fro”, looking “for another/another like herself until, “in the end/the day came… when she said/to herself/whom else/time she stopped”.

Her first “More” is breathy, forceful, and inflected as a command, leaving an impression of a testy dotard making demands on her child.

The second “More” is slightly impatient and feeble, she is not at all sure that more will come, and in her doubtfulness she blinks a few minutes.

Rockaby

The third, inflected as a question, is much more airy than the previous two, and though it is almost a whisper she thrusts it out from her diaphragm mor forcefully that any other word in both performances.

The fourth is still softer and articulated distinctly as a word, but in a sad, almost tearful tone with a slight wobble of the head.

On some repetition of “time she stopped” the woman speaks along with the tape.

Rockaby

“In the end” she rocked off seemingly towards death; she “was her own other/own other living soul” – “other” asserting itself in the theatre as a rhyme for “mother”.

We are given insufficient evidence to determine either who the stage chacharter is or if she has really died.

The mention of “mother” rocking permits several different responses: se may conflate mother and daughter, viewing the woman as a composite characters who incarnates certain tendencies passed down through all generations.

Rockaby

We may continue to view her as a singular character whose self-objectification has taken the form of identifying with her mother.

We may even speculate that the voice belongs to the true other, perhaps a daughter telling a story to “rock her [mother] off”, or some other alter ego (perhaps language itself).

The phrase “Prematurely old” raises the question, without answering it, of whether the woman is mother or daughter, and so odes the character’s dress.

Rockaby

The high necked evening gown looks like very old, like something that belone to one’s grandmother, yet its sequins and those on the extravagantly trimmed headdress, ever prominent as they reflect the stage lights, suggest youth and newness.

At the end there is no possible interpretation but only a description and questions without answers.

Footfalls

In Footfalls we are presented with a woman, whose name may be May or its anagram Amy, who paces back and forth on a stage board.

He invisible mother speaks to her and about her.

Each woman asks questions about suffering and life from which they may have graduated.

The daughter walks and broods.

The real mother and fictional mother intone the same question: “Will you never have done… revolving it all?”

Footfalls

Even after death the mind circles round and round on suffering, and in a semblance of such circling, the feet walk back and forth.

The four scenes of Footfalls are presented by successively fainter chimes.

The first three scenes show the daughter May pacing back and forth on a narrow strip of board, a different number of steps and a different number of lengths in each scene.

In the fourth scene the board is lit for fifteen seconds; there is “no trace of May”.

Footfalls

Not only is May’s presence impermeable to normal time conventions, they finally seem impertinent to her experience.

It is from pacing, from literal steps in time, that the first three scenes grow, and yet they gradually depart form time.

The first scene is almost definite as to ages; the mother is eighty-nine or ninety, and the daughter is in her forties.

Theirs is a logn relationship, and the mother suffers a long illness.

The mother accepts each alleviation: “Yes, but it is too soon”.

Footfalls

Her own suffering must take its course, but she seeks a terminus for the daughter’s suffering: “Will you never have done… revolving it all… In your poor mind”.

In the second scene the invisible mother recalls the daughter as a girl.

Pacing at home on the carpeting, the daughter May “one night while still little more than a child” expressed her need “to hear the feet, however faint they fall”.

In the third scene the daughter designates the divisions of her course: “Sequel” and “semblance”, the one redolent of time and the other of imitation.

Footfalls

Sequel beings, “A little later, when she was quite forgotten”, but immediately corrected to, “A little later, when as thought she had never been, it never been, she began to walk”.

On the one hand, “she” is gone and forgotten, on the other, she begins the walk that already usurped her girlhood.

No longer in the “old home”, she paces in a locked church “during Vespers. Necessarily”.

Her words evoke evening and a time long past.

Footfalls

To these is added a dying year as the daughter narrates a dialogue between old Mrs Winter and her daughter on an Autumn Sunday evening after vespers.

Together at the dinner table, the fictional mother and daughter inhabit different worlds or times, for mthe daughter says that she was absent from evening prayer, and yet Mrs. Winter asserts that she haerd her “Amen”

This fictional daughter, Amy, resembles the perhaps actual daughter, May, in tha thse is both in and out of the world, in and out pf time.

Footfalls

In Footfalls human time crumbles not to the dust but to the lighted board on which human feet once fell, in theatre fact and fiction.

The fourth scene lights the bare board briefly, before darkness and silence obliterate all human traces.

Beckett’s two women –the mother invisible, the daughter tattered and gray- give radiance to the darkness of eternity.

In this fuge mother-daughter dialogues Beckett dramatizes the transience that has obsessed him for a very long time.

Footfalls

In 1948 he stated:

Where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been.

Time and space, those perpendicular coordinates, emerge dependently but distinctly in Beckett’s dramas.

The way resonant memories or fictions are counterpointed against immediate stage presence is vivid.

Physical specificity is invariant within each of Beckett’s –literally “at this place”, but time can be static, liquid.

Ohio Impromptu

Ohio Impromptu is about twenty minutes long and written in the general style of Rockaby, Not I and Play.

That is, a meticulously sculpted tableau remains nearly motionless the entire time, allowing spectators to meditate on its metaphoric significance while a flow of words emanates from the stage, guiding meditation.

Two identically dressed characters, Reader and Listener, sit at a large table in exactly the same posture while one reads to the other, and a wide-brimmed black hat “sits” at the talbe’s center.

Ohio Impromptu He speaks in a gruff, hoarse voice that occasionally drops into low gutturality;

it sounds like a young like a young man imitting and old man.

This Reader is unquestionably dissembling: he raises his eyes from the book while he reads, glancing about the stage, out at the audience.

We also have the impression that Reader has memorized the book.

Ohio Impromptu

Reader recites story of a man who moves aways from a place where he was “so long alone together” with a companion – probably a lover (“the dear name”), who may or may not have died –to a “single room on the far bank” from whose “single window he coild see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans.”

Subsequently, the man is visited from time to time by a stranger, who may or may not have been “sent” by the lover.

Each time he visits, the stranger spends the night reading a “sad tale” to the man and then leaves at dawn.

Ohio Impromptu

Are the characters onstage the characters in Reader’s story?

Are the to men wholly distinct or really different images of the same character?

Why is there only one hat, and what does that hat’s presence mean about the singularity or duality of the character(s)?

Is Reader the author of the “sad tale” and, if so, what else in the play’s world does he control, and what is his relationship to that other controlling author, Beckett?

Ohio Impromptu

The knock-repeat-knock sequence, which recurs six times in the play, is the only evidence, before the end, of contact or exchange between the characters.

The first knocks are timed so that they fall just slightly before Reader’s next word is expected, as if Listener wee commenting on what has been said, or asking a question, or acting a kind of literary athletic coach who is drilling Reader in the practice of telling tales.

The question is why the knock must come and why the phrase must be repeated is, so to speak, asked anew every time Reader takes his barely audible breath.

Ohio Impromptu The story reaches the point where the man in it reconsiders his decision to move, and decides to stay where he is.

Instead of returning to “page forty”, as the book supposedly instructs, and following the infinite cycle as in Play, he breaks the pattern and brings his da capo to its fine.

At the end, we do not really know if the story is about Reader, but it may be: “In his long black coat…” (286) and “…a worn volume from the pocket of his long black coat…” (287).

At the beginning didascalias we read: “log black coat”. END

Not I