jueves, 16 de junio de 2016

viernes, 3 de junio de 2016

En El Umbral

    La tarde, cerca del anaranjado aquél

    Sentado, mirando afuera y adentro

    Renunciando a mí, a mi propia fe

    Eso que pasó alrededor a lo largo de

    años,

    Algunos rostros son vacíos que

    quedaron,

    Otros ya no existen.

    La razón poco alcanza

    En el devenir insólito

    De un yo soy.

    El juicio al ajeno es un fantasma

    inventado

    Para una justificación

    De esa ilusión que somos y que      

    siempre seremos

miércoles, 6 de enero de 2016

Las Lagrimas Frente Al Espejo


Las lágrimas fueron espejo,

Como aquel paisaje en lago.

¿Quién podrá decir qué el reflejo

No fue mutuo?

 

En un tiempo para sí de ambos,

caen gotas de rocío en los ocasos,

Que podían ser mañanas

En la confusión qué provoca

El dolor intenso de tu no estar en mí.

 

Siempre estoy despidiendo a ti, con mi palma

Abierta frente a un espejo quebrado

De ausencias.

A ti que no podías ser más yo,

A ti que estabas, sin saber sobre un río,

Que pasaba entre tus piernas.

 

¿Qué es el tiempo

Sino ausencias inexplicables

A sí mismas?

¿Que valía tendría

Explicar o contar o hablar de ti

O de mí?

Imagina un espejo,un espejo quebrado;

alguien entró a esa habitación destruyendo

Al espejo al momento que dejaste atrás

Esa habitación.

 

sábado, 20 de junio de 2015

I recalled You

I don't  know if I was or you

When and where

Anywhere?

me

In front of you

You in front of me  

Without any

When I lost myself?

It was as cause of me?

You owe everything to you

I owe everything to me

The magical disappear of me

Yes

I didn't know at that time

And

I didn't know now

The silent night either.

                                             Rolando Leturia

miércoles, 27 de octubre de 2010

NESTOR KIRCHNER


This Blog will remenber Dr. Nestor Kichner ever. Today He past away. Nació el 25 de febrero de 1950 en Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz Republica Argentina.

lunes, 6 de septiembre de 2010

COOL FJORD


To the fourth thousand Missing people from our Nation

Forewords

This is an attempt to recollect written words and ideas of those thinkers who were forget or prohibited or intentionally not mentioned at all in our sacred institutions of study, that lead, in some way, the current disastrous global situation.

I really don’t know if it would deserve any attention by those blog readers or students. This work only left in my soul a sweet taste and it is my intention. I want to say thanks with my limited English to World Wide Web and Google and the Chinese web sites, where I can download for free the books I read, because the cultural sphere like pharmaceutics is still a business.

Special acknowledgements to: British Petroleum and Mr. Obama for the worst environment disaster in world history.

Thanks to Rothschild Family, and to all rich families all over the world. For the amount of money which they only owned, and have the great intention not to share…

To transnational companies that help us to live in a world each day more warm and less sustainable.

Cool Fiord is a melted brain place where you can find .pdf books and essays for free, linked to external sites like megaupload.

I passing through a mental confusion or better said a blasé spiritual state of Daseing. These states are and bringing by the outside world, that collaborate with these two states of human beings: the alienation and the objectification of totus. I dare said that I never thought to be alive in such catastrophic personal situation, it means: to live with hope, a kind of hope like was perfected enunciated by Siegfried Kracauer in his collected essays The Mass Ornament, especially in the essay “Those Who Wait”, let me tell you that collected essays where brightly translated to English by Thomas Y. Levin in 1995 a thousand years after its first German publication in 1963. There is Spanish translation of the collected essays, but I never trust in the Spanish translator’s catholic status of mind. Harvard took its time to publish this book; I specially recommend this book to its school of business members, to whom we all more or less are indebted for the global economic turmoil that they warmly bring us…

I live alive in South America by choose, I rejected to live in North America, NYC, because the first world, as they call these places, have in the inner core the third one, and you can recreate the first world inside yourself at any place where you choose to live. I like “to live alive” near of revolutionary places, where the economics schools and their acolytes failed to abolish (.i.e. US School of Americas implanted Plan Condor). Specials thanks to IMF and WB for their politics, which only nurtured our revolutionary and socials organizations, and in either way, bring us our President of Argentina Dra. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, to whom we are proud and will protect her.

I was tempted by soul to do a great job, it could be rewrite the scripts by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, or blurts what I thought about what these great writers wrote, but what sense on earth have been the interpretations? What may I say? I only wrote a couple of poems…

Let me confess some, when I read the shampoo novel the lost symbol by Dan Brown in order to escape of my Blasé spiritual attitude, one of the character said to his students “google is not a research synonymous” I refute this asseveration with the external links where you can download the books and essays of this rejected Frankfurt schoolmates (Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin). If you have to access only to biographical data go to .wikipedia.com

And the name of this work indebted its name to the work of Ian MacEwan novel Solar’ fiord episode. You can download it as .pdf format from this blog as 78 humans beings did… J

Just another thing, I can contradict myself here.

From The Mass Ornament essay by Sigfried Kracauer.

“The capitalist epoch is a stage in the process of demystification. The type of thinking that corresponds to the present economic System has, to an unprecedented degree, made possible the domination and use of nature as a self contained entity. What is decisive here, however, is not the fact that this thinking provides a means to exploit nature; if human beings were merely exploiters of nature, then nature would have triumphed over nature. Rather, what is decisive is that this thinking fosters ever greater independence from natural conditions and thereby creates a space for the intervention of reason. It is the rationality of this thinking (which emanates to some extent from the reason of fairy tales) that accounts—though not exclusively—for the bourgeois revolutions of the last one hundred fifty years, the revolutions that settled the score with the natural powers of the church (itself entangled in the affairs of its age), of the monarchy, and of the feudal system. The unstoppable decomposition of these and other mythological ties is reason’s good fortune, since the fairy tale can become reality only on the ruins of the natural unities.

However, the ratio of the capitalist economic system is not reason itself but a murky reason. Once past a certain point it abandons the truth in which it participates. It does not encompass man. The operation of the production process is not regulated according to man’s needs, and man does not serve as the foundation for the structure of the socioeconomic organization.”

Another one…

The current site of capitalist thinking is marked by abstractness. The predominance of this abstractness (1933 year!!) today establishes a spiritual space that encompasses all expression. The objection raised against this abstract mode of thought- that is incapable of grasping the actual substance of life and therefore must give way to concrete observation of phenomena- does indeed identify the limits of abstraction. In other words, the unchecked development of the capitalist system fosters the unchecked growth of abstract thinking (or forces it to become bogged down in a false concreteness). The more abstractness consolidates itself; however, the more man is left behind, ungoverned by reason.

“Viewed from the perspective of reason the mass ornament reveals itself as a mythological cult that is masquerading in the garb of abstraction. Compared to… the concrete immediacy of the other corporeal presentations, the ornament´s conformity to reason is thus an illusion. In reality the ornament is the crass manifestation of inferior nature. The latter can flourish all the more freely, the more decisively capitalist ratio is cut off from reason and bypasses man as it vanishes into the void of the abstract.

Another extract from The Mass Ornament Essay.

“Present Day thinking is confronted with the question as to whether it should open itself up to reason or continue to push on against it without opening up at all. It cannot transgress its self-imposed boundaries without fundamentally changing the economic system that constitutes its infrastructure; the continued existence of the latter entails the continued existence of present-day thinking. In other words, the unchecked growth of abstract thinking (or forces it to become bogged down in a false concreteness). The more abstractedness consolidated itself; however, the more man is left behind, ungoverned by reason.

From the Essay Those Who Wait.

“The alienation from the absolute and the isolation and individuation both leave their mark in a relativism that has been pursued to the extreme. Since these people lack ties and firma ground, their spirit/intellect drifts along without direction, at home everywhere and nowhere. They traverse the infinite variety of spiritual/intellectual phenomena- the world of history, of spiritual events, of religious life-as isolated individuals who no longer stop for anything, equally close to an equally far from all circumstances. Equally close, since they easily submerge themselves in any essentiality, because there is no longer any faith that would bind their spirit/intellect and thereby prevent it from being somehow consumed by and all phenomena. Equally far, since they never consider any insight as the ultimate one-that is, they have never penetrated an essentiality to such an extent that they could enter its depths permanently and, so to speak, never leave it. Their restless wandering is only an indication that they live at the greatest remove from the absolute and that the spell which envelops the self and which renders the essence of things unambiguous has been broken”.

From the same Essay.

Those people conscious of their situation who lingers in the void maybe can run in these directions… (There are two directions that people can choose, eliminated by the author, and in my opinion doesn’t have any sin. Book page 135.

We are left with three kinds of behavior.

The first attitude is that of someone who is skeptic as a matter of principle, a type perhaps best exemplified by Max Weber. This sort of person clearly grasp the uncanny seriousness of the situation but is at the same time convinced that he and those like him are unable to wrest themselves free of that situation. His intellectual conscience rebels against embarking on any of the paths toward supposed redemption that present themselves at every turn, since these appear to him as so many wrong tracks and illicit retreats into the sphere of arbitrary limitation. As a result, he decides out of inner truthfulness to turn his back on the absolute: his inability to believe becomes an unwillingness to believe.

Hatred of the faith swindlers-hatred in which an already forgotten and long-repressed yearning perhaps still resonates-drives him to fight for the “disenchantment of the world,” and his existence runs its course in the bad infinity of empty space. This lonely existence, however, is no longer naïve in any sense; rather, it is born of an unequaled heroism. As such, it is closer to salvation in its self-imposed wretchedness than is the pampered existence of those who are merely just.

domingo, 1 de noviembre de 2009

El Tiempo Aquel (That Time) por Samuel Beckett



Written in English between June 1974 and August 1975. First published by Grove Press, New York, in 1976. First performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 20 May 1976



Notes


Moments of one and the same voice A BC relay one another without solution of continuity-apart from the two 10-second breaks. Yet the switch from on to another must be clearly faintly perceptible. If threefold source and context prove insufficient to produce this effect it should be assisted mechanically e.g. threefold pitch.


Curtain. Stage in darkness. Fade up to LISTENER’S FACE about 10 feet above stage level mid stage off centre.


Old white face, long flaring white hair as if seen from above outspread.


Voices A B C are his own coming to him from both sides and above. They modulate back and forth without any break in general flow except where silence indicated. See note.


Silence 7 seconds. LISTENER’S EYES are open. His breath audible, slow and regular.



A: That time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child when was that {Eyes close.} grey day took the eleven to the end of the line and on from there no no trams then all gone long ago that time you went back to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child that last time not a tram left in the place only the old rails when was that



A: El tiempo aquel cuando tú regresabas, ese último momento, a mirar las ruinas aun allí, donde tú te escondías cuando eras niño, ¿cuando fue eso? [Ojos cerrados] día gris tomando el onceavo hasta el final de la línea y desde allí, no, no mas tranvías entonces todo había desaparecido hace largo tiempo, el tiempo aquel cuando tu regresabas a mirar, ese último momento, las ruinas aun allí, donde tú te escondías cuando eras niño, aquella ultima vez ni un solo tranvía abandonado en el lugar, solo los viejos rieles, ¿cuando fue eso?



C: When you went in out of the rain always winter then always raining 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 the rooms shivering and dripping till you found a seat marble slab and sat down to rest and dry off and on to hell out of there when was that



C: cuando tu ibas dentro, fuera del alcance de la lluvia, siempre invierno, siempre lloviendo, el tiempo aquel en la Portrait Gallery, dentro, fuera de las calles, fuera del frio y de la lluvia, durmiendo dentro, cuando nadie estaba mirando, y por las habitaciones tiritando y empapado hasta que tu encontraras un asiento un escalón de mármol y sentado allí para descansar y secarte e irte corriendo de allí, ¿Cuándo fue eso?



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 long low stone like millstone no looks just there on the stone in the sun with the little wood behind gazing at the wheat or eyes closed all still no sign of life not a soul abroad no sound



B: en la piedra juntos bajo el sol, en la piedra al costado del pequeño bosque, y tan lejos como la vista podría alcanzar el trigo volviéndose amarillo prometiéndose ahora y para siempre amor entre los dos, solo un murmullo, nada enternecedor o nada por el estilo, solo tú en el final de la piedra, ella en otra piedra larga baja, como una piedra de molino (N del T: una cruz, una carga para alguien), sin miradas, solo allí en la piedra bajo el sol, con el pequeño bosque detrás, mirando al trigo o ojos cerrados del todo, ninguna señal de vida aun, ni un alma fuera, ni un sonido



A: straight off the ferry and up with the nightbag to the high street neither right nor left not a course for the old scenes the old names straight up the rise from the wharf to the high street and there not a wire to be seen only the old rails all rust when was that your mother a for God´s sake all gone long ago that time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child someone`s folly



A: de inmediato fuera del ferri y cargando la bolsa de noche hacia la calle principal ni a la derecha ni a la izquierda sin un rumbo para las antiguas escenas los viejos nombres derecho hacia la salida del embarcadero hacia la calle principal y allí ni un telegrama para ser leído, solo los viejos rieles todos herrumbrados ¿Cuándo fue eso? Tu madre ¡a por Dios! Todo término hace tiempo el tiempo aquel cuando tú regresabas por última vez para mirar esas ruinas aun allí donde tú te escondías cuando niño insensateces de juventud



C: was your mother ah for God´s sake all gone long ago all dust the lot you the last huddled up on the slab in the old green greatcoat with your arms round you whose else hugging you for a bit of warmth to dry off and on to hell out of there and on to the next not a living soul in the place only yourself and the odd attendant drowsing around in his felt shufflers not a sound to be heard only every now and then a shuffle of felt drawing near then dying away



C: Fue tu madre ¡a por Dios! Todo termino hace tiempo todo polvo que tu el ultimo montón acurrucado en el escalón dentro del sobretodo verde con tus brazos alrededor tuyo ¿quién mas abrazándote a ti por un poco de calor para secarse? e irte corriendo de allí y en lo próximo ni una alma viva en el lugar solo tú mismo y el raro encargado husmeando cabeceando de sueño en todas las direcciones en sus pantuflas de paño ni un sonido para ser escuchado solo una y otra vez una pantufla de paño deslizándose cerca luego desapareciendo



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 one thing could ever bring tears till they dried up altogether that thought when it came up among the others floated up that scene



B: todo quietud solo las hojas y los oídos y tu del mismo modo inmóvil sobre la piedra aturdido ni un sonido ni una palabra solo prometiéndose ahora y para siempre amor entre los dos solo un susurro una cosa siempre podría traer lagrimas hasta que ellos enmudecieron juntos cuando ese pensamiento apareció entre otros dejando inmóvil esa imagen



A: Foley was it Foley`s Folly bit of a tower still standing all the rubble and nettles where did you sleep no friend all the homes gone was it that kip on the front where you no she was with you then still with you then just the one night in any case off the ferry one morning and back on her the next to look was the ruin still there were none ever came where you hid as a child slip off when no one was looking and hide there all day long on a stone among the nettles with you picture-book



A: Foley(N del T: se refiere a la persona que en una compañía de teatro crea los efectos de sonido para la misma) fue eso un capricho de Foley un pedacito de torre aun de pie entre los escombros y las ortigas donde tu dormías sin amigos todas las casas destruidas ¿fue eso lo que te mantuvo en el frente? No ella estaba aun con vos en ese entonces solo una noche de todas maneras una mañana fuera del ferri y volver a ella la próxima mañana para mirar fueron las ruinas aun allí donde nadie jamás volvió donde tú te escodáis cuando niño recuperándote cuando nadie estaba mirando y te escondías allí durante todo el día sobre la piedra entre las matas con tu libro de cuentos



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 behind the glass where gradually as you peered trying to make it out gradually of all things a face appeared had you swivel on the slab to see who it was there at your elbow



C: hasta que alzabas la cabeza y allí frente a tus ojos cuando ellos se habrían una gran mancha de aceite ennegrecida por el tiempo y la suciedad alguien famoso en su tiempo algún hombre o mujer o incluso un niño como un joven príncipe o princesa algún joven príncipe o princesa de la sangre ennegrecida por el tiempo detrás del vidrio donde mirabas atentamente tratando de entender el rostro que apareció entre todas las cosas ¿te diste vuelta en el escalón a mirar que era eso allí en tu codo?



B: on the stone in the sun gazing at the wheat or the sky or the eyes closed nothing to be seen but the wheat turning yellow and the blue sky vowing every now and then you loved each other just a murmur tears without fail till they dried up altogether suddenly there in whatever thoughts you might be having whatever scenes perhaps way back in childhood or the womb worst of all or that old Chinaman long before Christ born with long white hair



B: en la piedra bajo el sol mirando al trigo o al cielo o los ojos cerrados nada para ver solo el trigo volviéndose amarillo y el cielo azul prometiéndose ahora y para siempre amor entre los dos solo un murmullo lagrimas sin fracaso hasta que ellos enmudecieron juntos allí repentinamente en cualquier pensamiento que estuvieras teniendo quizá de regreso a la infancia o en el peor de los casos al útero o aquel anciano chino mucho antes que Cristo nacido con cabellos blancos y largos



C: never the same after that never quite the same but that was nothing new if it wasn`t this it was that common occurrence something you could never be the same after crawling about year after year sunk in your lifelong mess muttering to yourself who else you`ll never be the same after this you were never the same after that



C: nunca fue lo mismo después de aquello ni siquiera parecido pero no fue nada nuevo si eso no hubiera sido aquello esa ocurrencia común por lo que tú nunca podrías ser el mismo después de arrastrarte mas o menos año tras año acabado en la confusión de toda tu vida diciéndote a ti mismo entre dientes quien más que tú que nunca serás el mismo después de eso tú nunca serás el mismo después de aquello



A: or talking to yourself 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 and they all sounded the same well on into the night some moods in the black dark or moonlight and they all out on the roads looking for you



A: La obra continua en Ingles, con un link externo para descargar la película en formato avi, está en ingles, y puedes leer la obra, mientras escuchas la película si eres estudiante de ingles. La finalizo por razones de tiempo. Si usted quiere la traducción de la obra completa utilice la información de contacto para solicitarla. Esta obra del teatro de Samuel Beckett “no tiene traducción” al español. Si utiliza la obra en español tenga la gentileza de mencionar al blog.


Traducción al Español Rolando Leturia



B: or by the window in the dark harking to the owl not a thought in your head till hard to believe harder and harder to believe you ever told anyone you loved them or anyone you till just one of those things you kept making up to keep the void out just another of those old tales to keep the void from pouring in on top of you the shroud


[Silence 10 seconds. Breath audible. After 3 Seconds eyes open.]



C: never the same but the same as what for God`s sake did you ever say I to yourself in your life come on now [Eyes close.]


Could you ever say I to yourself in your life turning-point that was a great word with you before they dried up altogether always having turning-points and never but the one the first and last that time curled up worn in slime when they lugged you out and wiped you off and straightened you up never another after that never looked back after that was that the time or was that another time



B: muttering that time altogether on the stone in the sun or that time together on the towpath or that time together in the sand that time that time making it up from there as best you could always together somewhere in the sun on the towpath facing downstream into the sun sinking and the bits of flotsam coming from behind and drifting on or caught in the reeds the dead rat it looked like came on you from behind and went drifting on till you could see it no more



A: that time you went back to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child that last time straight off the ferry and up the rise to the high street to catch the eleven neither right nor left only the thought in your head not a curse for the old scenes the old names just head down press on up the rise to the top and there stood waiting with the nightbag till the truth began to dawn



C: when you started not knowing who you were from Adam trying how that would work for a change not knowing who were from Adam no notion who it was saying what you were saying whose skull you were clapper up in whose moan had you the way you were was that the time or was that another time there alone with the portraits of the dead black with dirt and antiquity and the dates on the frames in case you might get the century wrong not believing it could be you till they put you out in the rain at closing-time



B: 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



A: no getting out to it that way so what next no question of asking not another word to the living as long as you lived so foot it up in the end to the station bowed half double get out to it that way all closed down and boarded up Doric terminus of the Great Southern and Eastern all closed down and the colonnade crumbling away so what next



C: the rain and the old rounds trying making it up that way as you went along how it would work that way for a change never having been how never having been would work the old rounds trying to wangle you into it tottering and muttering all over the parish till the words dried up and the head dried up and the legs dried up whosever they were or it gave up whoever it was



B: stock still always stock still like that time on the stone or that time in the sand stretched out parallel in the sand in the sand in the sun gazing up at the blue or eyes closed blue dark blue dark stock still side by side scene float up and there you were wherever it was



A: gave it up gave up and sat down on the steps in the pale morning sun no those steps got no sun somewhere else then gave up and off somewhere else and down on a step in the pale sun a doorstep say someone`s doorstep for it to be time to get on the night ferry and out to hell out of there no need sleep anywhere not a course for the old scenes the old names the passers pausing to gape at you quick gape then pass pass on pass by on the other side



B: stock still side by side in the sun then sink and vanish without your having stirred any more than the two knobs on a dumbbell except the lids and every now and then the lips to vow and all around all still all sides wherever it might be no stir or sound only faintly the leaves in the little wood behind or the ears or the bent or the reeds as the case might be of man no sight of man or beast no sight or sound



C: always winter then always reining always slipping in somewhere when no one would be looking in off the street out of the cold and rain in the old green hole proof coat your father left you places


you hadn’t to pay to get in like the Public Library that was another great thing free culture far from home or the post office that was another another place another time



A: huddled on the doorstep in the old green greatcoat in the pale sun with the nightbag needless on your knees not knowing where you were little by little not knowing where you were or when you were or what for place might have been uninhabited for all you knew like that time on the stone the child on the stone where none ever came


[Silence 10 seconds. Breath audible. After 3 seconds eyes open.]



B: or alone in the same the same scenes making it up that way to keep it going keep it out on the stone [Eyes close.]


Alone on the end of the stone with the wheat and blue or the towpath alone on the towpath with the ghosts of the mules the drowned rat or bird or whatever it was floating off into the sunset till you could see it no more nothing stirring only the water and the sun going down till it went down and you vanished all vanished



A: none ever came but the child on the stone among the giant nettles with the light coming in where the wall had crumbled away poring on his book well on into the night some moods the moonlight and they all out on the roads looking for him or making up talk breaking up two or more talking to himself being together that way where none ever came



C: always winter then endless winter year after year as if it couldn`t end the old year never end like time could go no further that time in the Post Office all bustle Christmas bustle in off the street when no one was looking out of the cold and rain pushed open the door like anyone else and straight for the table neither right nor left with all the forms and the pens on their chains sat down first vacant seat and were taking a look round for a change before drowsing away



B: or that time alone in you back in the sand and no vows to break the peace when was that an earlier time a later 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 might have been the same old scene before as then then as after with the rat or the wheat the yellowing ears or that time in the sand the glider passing over that time you went back soon after long after



A: eleven or twelve in the ruin on the flat stone among the nettles in the dark or moonlight muttering away now one voice now another there was childhood for you till thereon the step in the pale sun you heard yourself at it again not a course for the passers pausing to gape at the scandal huddled there in the sun where it had no warrant clutching the nightbag drooling away out loud eyes closed and the white hair pouring out down from under the hat and so sat on in that pale sun forgetting it all



C: perhaps fear of ejection having clearly no warrant in the place to say nothing of the loathsome appearance so this look round for once at your fellow bastards thanking God for once bad and all as you were not as they till it dawned that for all the loathing you were getting you might as well not have been there at all the eyes passing over you and through you like so much thin air was that the time or was that another time another place another time



B: the glider passing over never any change same blue skies nothing ever changed but she with you there or not on your right hand always the right hand on the fringe of the field and every now and then in the great peace like a whisper so faint she loved you hard to believe you even you made up that bit till the time came in the end



A: making it all up on the doorstep as you went along making yourself all up again for the millionth time forgetting it all where you were and that for Foley’s Folly and the lot the child’s ruin you came to look was it still there to hide in again till it was night and time to go till that time came



C: the Library that was another place another time that time you slipped in off the street out of the cold and rain when no one was looking what was it then you were never the same after never again after something to do with dust something the dust said sitting at the big round table with a bevy of old ones poring on the page and not a sound



B: that time in the end when you tried and couldn’t by the window by the window in the dark and the owl flown to hoot at someone else or back with a shrew to its hollow tree and not another sound hour after hour hour after hour not a sound when you tried and couldn`t any more no words left to keep it out so gave it up gave up there by the window in the dark or moonlight gave up for good and let it in and nothing the worse a great shroud billowing in all over you on top of you and little or nothing the worse little or nothing



A: back down to the wharf with the nightbag and the old green greatcoat your father left you trailing the ground and the white hair pouring out down from under the hat till that time came on down neither right nor left not a course for the old scenes the old names not a thought in your head only wet back on board and away the hell out of it and never come back or was that another time all that another time was there ever any other time but that time away to hell out of it all and never come back



C: not a sound only the old breath and the leaves turning and then suddenly this dust whole place full of dust when you opened your eyes from floor to ceiling nothing only dust and not a sound only what was it it said come and gone come and gone in no time gone in no time



[Silence 10 seconds. Breath audible. After 3 seconds eyes open. After 5 seconds smile, toothless for preference. Hold 5 seconds till fade out and curtain.] The End


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Beckett´s Sacrifice of Archaic Theatre on the Altar of Modernism
By Michael J. Sidnell
Beckett’s career as a dramatist was founded on the discovery that the
theatrical medium could break down artistic impasses that he had confronted
in the writing of fiction and had perceived in painting and
other arts. His theatrical explorations would prove radically transformative
but Beckett did not approach the theatre with a view to
renovating it. That ambition developed after he had discovered theatre's
fecund materiality, its multivocal actuality and the fisionability
that black marks on a page, however inventively set down, cannot
match. In theatre he found not only relief but means of extending the
reach of human expression in ways that he had not, in his fiction, even
conceived of doing.
If it is rather unusual to find theatre in the vanguard of the arts — as
painting, by contrast, has so often seemed to be — the reasons for its
conservatism may be found in its communality, its immediacy and especially
in its historic, humanistic and pre-technological (Benjamin, 1996,
p. 260) attachment to the living human body. But unlike most theatre
artists Beckett was prepared — perhaps eager would be the right word,
considering his professed aims of deconstructing writing and language
(Beckett, 1984a, p. 51-54) — to sacrifice even the most fundamental,
indispensable and precious elements of theatre; and to do so ever more
rigorously as he developed from playwright to director and auteur.
The discussion that follows is divided into 4 parts. The first introduces
Beckett’s confrontation, early in his career, with artistic obstacles of
the kind just alluded to. The remaining three parts concern some of
the devices and practices by means of which Beckett visited upon the
theatre a radically modernist poetics. The first of these is a set of devices
that I call “emanations”, by which I mean interventions from
off-stage, which remotely but obviously control, limit or comment on
what happens on the stage. The second part refers to estrangements
of language but these are so extensive and various that I focus on just
one — bilinguality — and touch lightly on a couple of others. The
third part has to do with the cruelest set of devices in Beckett's theatre:
the immobilisation, the encapsulation and the fragmentation of
the human figure on the stage. Of course, this division into three sets
is only an expository scaffolding adopted for the sake of clarity: frequently
and finally the integration of such devices in Beckett’s work
insists on being recognized.

Introduction
Some of the artistic obstacles that confronted Beckett as he turned to
theatre are all too apparent in his first complete play, Eleuthéria (meaning
“state of freedom”) written in French in 1947. Beckett was eager
for a production and Jean Vilar and Roger Blin showed some interest
in the script but the play was never staged (Knowlton, 1996, p. 365-
366). Later, Beckett firmly rejected it and the full text remained unpublished
in his lifetime.
Towards the end of Eleuthéria, there’s a lot of business with a supposed
audience member who comes onto the stage to voice his
objections to the bizarre proceedings. He consults his program to
discover,
Au fait, qui a fait ce navet? (programme) Beckett (il dit : « Béquet ») Samuel, Béquet,
Béquet, ça doit être un juif groenlandais mâtiné d'Auvergnat. (1995, p. 136)

In this manner Beckett, proposed to introduce himself to a French
theatre-going public. It was the most direct reference to himself that
he would ever make in his plays. Thereafter, he wrote himself almost
out of the picture, acting in the spirit of the Beckettian surrogate in
Eleuthéria, who does the equivalent scenographically. At the end of the
play, as the stage direction tells it,

Il s'assied sur le lit, parallèle maintenant à la rampe. Il se lève après un moment,
va au commutateur, éteint, regarde par la fenêtre, revient s'asseoir sur
le lit, face au public, il regarde le public avec application, l'orchestre, les balcons
(le cas échéant), à droite, à gauche. Puis il se couche, le maigre dos
tourné à l'humanité. (1995, p. 167)

Though the play reeks of autobiography, Victor Krap — as the hero is
called — is not a portrait of the artist as a young misfit, since he’s not
an artist. That role is reserved to the aforementioned “Béquet”. And
the playwright’s final gesture — by contrast with his Victor Krapp’s
— is not a renunciation but an annunciation of sorts — of the vortex
into which the selfhood is sucked. In this respect Beckett’s play is
strongly reminiscent of Out of the Picture, a play written in 1937 for the
Group Theatre (of London) by the poet and fellow-Irishman Louis
MacNeice. At the end of MacNeice’s play, the troubled hero disappears
for good through a wall, a strange ending that may well have
germinated the trope of the immured, immolated or immobilized subject
on which Beckett would later play many ingenious and moving
variations. Beckett was not in London in December 1937 when Out of
the Picture, with music by Benjamin Britten, was unsuccessfully staged
at the Westminster Theatre, but the play had been published several
months earlier (Sidnell, p. 217-223). Indeed, Beckett had turned down
the invitation to review it and had passed that job on to Blanaid
Salkeld, whose interest in theatre and poetic drama were more developed
at the time than his own (Bair, p. 258). Salkeld was disappointed
by the poet’s “prose play”, though she acknowledged that it was “ingeniously
constructed”. And its ingenuity in construction seems to
have been recalled by Beckett, perhaps unconsciously, as he drafted
Eleuthéria ten years later.
Beckett follows MacNeice in trying to turn theatre inside out in
Eleuthéria. This structural ambition is intimated from the beginning in
the arrangement of the stage spaces, one inside the other, and seen
from different perspectives in the three acts. Had he let his play run its
wayward course without such structural ingenuity then it would have
registered as a lyrical cri du coeur attributable to the authorial “Béquet”;
but its theatrical introversion almost makes of Eleuthéria one of those
modernist structures in which, as in Nietzsche’s figure, the artist resembles
“that uncanny image of fairy-tale, which can turn its eyes
around and look at itself... simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator”
But it has to be “almost” because Beckett has split his suffering
hero / artist into two distinct stage figures. This, perhaps, is a
feature of the play’s formal immaturity.
The invasion of the stage from the auditorium in Eleuthéria is often
compared — for lack of another model rather than for any real resemblance
— with Pirandello but it is much more directly reminiscent
of W.H. Auden’s early work for the stage, The Dance of Death. This
political ballet with songs and dances set to music by Herbert Murrill
was first performed in February 1934 at the Westminster Theatre
(Sidnell, p. 62-90). Beckett was in London at the time and could have
seen it then though there is no reason to suppose that he did. But he
probably did see the revival in October 1935 when it was presented in
a double bill with T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes for he wrote to Mac-
Greevy about the Eliot piece, comparing it with the Thomas Otway’s
The Soldier’s Fortune, which had a production at about the same time.

The marxist theme of The Dance of Death Beckett would have found
tedious, in all likelihood, but the formal originality of Auden’s conception,
mixing modern dance, Brechtian didacticism, medieval morality,
and Tudor interlude — in which “spectators” meddle with the on
stage action might have been a theatrical eye-opener for Beckett.

Like MacNeice’s Out of the Picture, the double bill of Sweeney Agonistes and The
Dance of Death was a Group Theatre production. And it is in a third play
written for the Group Theatre that we find an antecedent for Beckett’s
radical and elaborate scenographic device in Eleuthéria of juxtaposed areas
of the stage, hermetically sealed from each other but permeable to vibes of
consciousness. This device had been anticipated by Auden and Christopher
Isherwood in their On the Frontier of 1939 (Sidnell, p. 247).

All of which is to say that Beckett’s first complete play is dramaturgically
continuous with the pre-war experiments of the Group Theatre
working with texts by Eliot and by Beckett’s contemporaries
MacNeice, Auden, Isherwood, and Stephen Spender. But unlike his
poet-playwright precursors, Beckett was not mounting a deliberate
assault on conventional theatre; nor working with a troupe of performers
with their own urgent program for theatrical revolution. Nor
can it be claimed the Eleuthéria experiment was an especially productive
attempt to dislodge feeble theatrical conventions, and to adapt
theatre to Modernism.
In contrast with the Group Theatre collaborators, Beckett took to
Playwrighting rather in isolation. And he found relaxation and sociability
in its ineluctable materiality: “dealing with a given space and with
people in that space”, as he put it (1992, p. xiii). More than a relaxation,
he was able to exploit theatre’s materiality and its multi-mediality
in his response to a characteristic conundrum confronted by modernist
artists. Romantic and nineteenth-century art had largely derived the
coherence of self-expression from some conception of an integral self;
in a most renowned formulation as “a repetition in the finite mind of
the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Coleridge, 1, p. 304).
But Modernism marked selfhood as discontinuous, multivocal and
conflicted (Brown, 1989): it could speak only provisionally and sceptically
of the continuity of the “I”, which was nevertheless, at any
moment, the immediate source of expression. How was such expression
to attain the artistic coherence that its immediate source lacked?

One notable response in the writing of fiction to fragmented selfhood
was to attribute utterances to multiple personae, objectified by their
conditions and circumstances, through which the idioms of the pub,
the hospital, the classroom or bedroom could speak, sometimes accompanied
by a chorus of sheep, cockerels, dogs and such; or the
significant sounds of twanging garters, creaking doors and mattresses;
the annunciations of train whistles, bicycle bells, gravel under shoes —
soundscapes like that of Beckett’s All That Fall.

But even the most rigorous efforts and ingenious devices of prose fail
to suppress the speaking subject, to refine the writer-narrator out of
existence. Indeed, there is a kind of law of inverse effects whereby the
most radical attempts at objectivity became intrusions of the creative
subject heroically striving for it. No amount of estranged idiom, broken
grammar, disrupted narrative, inventive typography and book
design can erase the suffering writer from the materiality and otherness of world from which he is alienated. Beckett’s early fiction is
riven with the vain struggle to escape from the amber of print, to
break into materiality but without adopting supinely the performative
prose style of his modernist master, James Joyce. Beckett’s early work
seems to cry out for multi-media activation to express the pathos of
deprivation, and perhaps compensate for it, to render actual the sensuousness
of sounds, sights, touch and, above all, sentient bodies.

A contrary strategy of preventing the germination of a self-delusory,
overweening “I” at the expense of the work was to actually exploit
this irrepressible subjectivity so ruthlessly that the old romantic ego
was fully exposed in all its incoherence and vacuity almost as an impersonal
object. As a figure of the objectified self, Joyce’s Shem the
Penman takes the biscuit. Shem is a kind of Joycean anti-self, one that
Beckett’s early heros emulate but fall short of. This Shem is a squalid
creature, holed up in his “House of the Haunted Inkbottle” and selfcompelled
to:
[...] produce nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity
of obscene matter... with his double dye, brought to blood heat, gallic
acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery... [this]... first-till-last alshemist
wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own
body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument
slowly unfolded all ... cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting
from his own individual person life unlivable, trans-accidentated through the
slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common
to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away
the squid-self which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned
chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud (Joyce, 1939, p. 185-6).


So, this abject Shem-self is transfixed and objectified, until its unlivable
existence comes to represent all humanity.

Both the objectified persona through whom the world is uttered and
the abject self on whom the world is inscribed are recognizable in
Beckett’s plays but subject to a mediation that gives his work a distinctive
character. This mediation is the “Not-I” materiality of the stage,
radio, TV and Film. Beckett may have taken a hint from the trope of
radio broadcasting in several Group Theatre productions but in con
structing a stage poetics that deployed such devices Beckett was surely
profoundly indebted to Arthur Rimbaud’s modernist epiphany “Je est
un autre” (Rimbaud, p. 345-352). In this Other, Rimbaud had fatefully
encountered the “Not I” which, “by the disturbance of all the senses”,
made its “way towards the unknown”, not as one who thinks but as
one who is thought. The “Not I”, which became the governing principle
of Beckett’s theatre (and writing), gave key poetic functions to
theatre technologies new and old, and also imposed new hardships
upon actors, not least in the constraints on their bodies or body parts.
Nor was this otherness by any means a relief from such torments as
the penman suffered: on the contrary, as Rimbaud declares, “the sufferings
are immense”.

The Rimbaldien “Not I”, or other, the abjected Joycean Shem-self,
and the objectified persona can all be referred to Krapp’s Last Tape.
Here the efforts — such as they are — made to comprehend past
and present manifestations within a coherent individuality lead to
misery and failure; as they have in the past also. What have these
voices from the distant past — as mediated by the tape recorder —
to do with the present listener-cum-recorder? Does it all cohere?
But if the subjecthood of Krapp be a delusion, the sufferings endured
are not. Krapp’s tapes make the delusion clearly perceptible
and the sufferings more acute.

More cheerfully, Beckett himself found some solace as a playwright in
expressing the unspeakable-ineluctable in the “space and persons” of
theatre, rather than in the loneliness of mere writing: writing, which
— however disrupted —; tends to project — however misleadingly; a
single — however divided — subject. Beckett’s theatrical experiments,
leading to figurations of indeterminate but abjected selfhoods mediated
through theatrical materiality, were not so much responses to
specifically dramaturgical issues as attempts to overcome obstacles to
artistic creation. So much so, that Beckett could sacrifice the triad of
devotional objects from which, since antiquity, theatre has taken its
ordonnance and functions — the integral human body (whether
Vitruvian or divine), the voice that issues from that body, and the human
subject that they are supposed to constitute. Needless to say his
sacrificial rituals are inefficacious apart from whatever inheres in their
theatricality. There are no implications of regeneration or transcendence
in the enactments; no suggestions of access to a permanent
symbolic world, or to a golden realm of imagination; no metaphorical
palliatives. But the enactments do offer the emollient of humour.

These secular mysteries of Beckettian theatrical Modernism embody
many ingenious devices to eradicate, so far as possible, the “I” from
the creation that implies it, as the following brief inspection of them
proposes to demonstrate. Confining my remarks almost entirely to
Beckett’s stage plays and to the three main sets of practices and devices
that I have mentioned I turn first to emanations proceeding
from off-stage; secondly to estrangements of speech and language,
focusing on bilinguality; and finally to immobilizations, the encapsulations
and the fragmentations of actor’s bodies on stage. As it happens,
my first two examples of emanations from off-stage are inextricable
from the third category of corporeal subjugation.

Emanations

In both Not I and That Time, two closely-related plays of the early 1970s,
the stage figure is stringently reduced — to an isolated mouth seen at 3
metres above the stage floor in Not I and, in That Time, to a face, set off
by flowing white hair, and also elevated to a height of 3 metres. These
body parts are visited by powerful emanations from off-stage. In Not I,
it is the narrowly-focused spotlight that isolates the mouth of the actor
playing Mouth. The light makes visible what could be read in the program:
that this speaking mouth is not the mouth of some character but
Mouth herself, isolated from any auditor. Such bringing into view is a
new creation of sorts. The spotlight on Mouth is Beckett’s somewhat
like the hand of Michelangelo’s God reaching out to his Adam, except
that the ultimate source of the light remains hidden.

Sound, in That Time, and light in Not I, are emanations in counterpoint
to each other; as listening is in counterpoint to speech in the two plays.
Words are heard on stage in the one but not spoken there; spoken to no
listener in the other. The three separate voices in That Time all belong to
the on-stage “Listener” (or “Souvenant” as Beckett names him in his
French version – and variation). Characteristically, Beckett is insistent
that the three voices must not be differentiated by obvious discontinuities
but that nevertheless “the switch from one to another must be
clearly [but] faintly perceptible.” If “threefold source and context prove
insufficient to produce this [acoustic] effect”, Beckett says, then “it
should be assisted mechanically (for example, with three-fold pitch)”. In
short, the acoustic installation of the recorded voices is work for a
sound artist like Janet Cardiff, or Nancy Tobin, such is its complexity
and fundamental artistic importance. But what is the relation of the
acoustic emanation to Listener, and the emanation of light in relation to
Mouth? And what the origins of the voice and the light? Eventually I
shall propose a crude answer to these questions.

The play called Play, which preceded Not I by about a decade, is a
more complex work with respect to light, which has a tripartite form
comparable with that of the voice in That Time. Here, Becket requires
that the source of light that cues each of the three faces in turn be in
the stage space of “its victims”, as he calls them. So it is not an emanation
in the way the Not I spotlight is; not an off-stage emanation at all,
strictly speaking, though the lamp is sometimes located off-stage, despite
Beckett’s insistence on the point. Beckett is also definitive about
not using three separate instruments, one for each face. There must be
“a single mobile spot”, he says, “expressive of a unique inquisitor”
(1968, p. 62). For this inquisitorial spotlight, other people had their
own nicknames: “instrument of torture” was Billie Wilder’s; “dentist’s
drill” was George Devine’s; Alan Schneider called it “Sam”; “conductor’s
baton” is James Knowlson’s suggestion. What these nicknames
have in common is their recognition of the importance of this light,
the attribution of power to a human agent, and their reference to the
lighting instrument itself. But consider: the lighting instrument is
not the light
: scripture and astrophysics agree that it appeared right at
the beginning and long before Adam, as is implied also in the dialogue
about day and night Beckett’s Rough for Theatre 1 (1976, p. 72). As for
Beckett’s insistence on the “threefoldness” of sound and light in the
instances cited, Coleridge’s (1990, p. 77) names for the parts of the
Trinity — minus theological implications — may account for the in
sistence on three distinct but combined elements as a play, or dialectic,
of “Ipseity, “Alterity”, and “Community”.

In a much earlier pair of plays, Act Without Words I and II Beckett employed
off-stage emanations in simpler ways, using old-fashioned
theatrical machineries allegorically. In the first of these mimes, the
emanations are from the flies, which deliver to the figure on stage —
and then retrieve — the tree, the branch, the rope, the scissors, the
flask of water, and cubes that are calculated, by some malignant
power, to torment the man to death, if only he could that quietus make.
He is cued by the blast of a whistle, which he learns to ignore, refusing
to be further enticed into the frustrating process — somewhat like
Victor turning to face the wall in Eleuthéria. The controlling malignancy
is an outside force of purely theatrical origin, as far as we can
see, but yet it is keyed — whether as cause or effect — to the man’s
thought-processes.

In the second mime the equivalent emanation from off-stage is literally
a goad — a pointed pole on wheels that prods the two characters into
action, motivating the rounds of habit that will, in turn, cue the goad’s
prods. As is usual in the theatre, there is an impediment to perception
where the stage-space and the off-stage space meet but if this veil were
lifted we might comprehend fully the vicious cycle of action-emanationaction-
emanation... and so on, in which theatre plays its part.

My last and most extreme example of emanations from off-stage is
Breath, in which – setting aside the travesty staged by Kenneth Tynan
— no part of a human figure appears. Sound and lighting constitute
almost the entire work, and all there is of life, which emanates entirely
from off-stage; the stage itself being reserved for a scattering of rubbish.
It’s only natural that we should think of sound and lighting, projectors,
cameras, and stage-rigging, along with printing presses, TV and wireless
as technologies at the disposal of human agents — people who know
what they’re doing with them. Marshall McLuhan supposed otherwise,
and investigated ways in which such technologies insinuate themselves
into human consciousness. But McLuhan’s inversions of the common
understanding appear incomplete in the context of Beckett’s theatrical
poetics of self-abjection, objectification and otherness, and its selfconscious
incorporation, in art, of such technologies.

Estrangement of speech and language

Theatre customarily holds language up for inspection, testing it against
speakers and their actions and motives. That has been one of its main
activities. In Hippolytos, for example, Theseus, having been fatefully
deceived and self-deceived by his wife’s words and his son’s, wishes
that we had two languages at our disposal, one for everyday use and
the other for dealing with truth (Euripides, 1973, p. 61). But the audience
can see clearly where Theseus goes wrong; failing, on the one
hand, to read hypocrisy between the lines and, on the other, to discern
the contextual signs of sincerity. From the audience-position, speakers
and their speech can be comprehended as a single identity.

With Beckett, the language problems and the theatrical probing of them
are more basic and inconclusive. If the personages were fully present to
themselves then the right words might come; and if words didn’t slip and
slide all over the place, they might be used to construct identities. But
there are deficiencies on both sides that prevent such a fusion. Perhaps
the deficiencies are inherent in human existence and expression.

From the first, Beckett’s English was marked by its syntactical idiosyncrasy
and erudite diction, its biblical and literary echoes, and its
disruption of linguistic habit; all of which tended to estrange speech
from speakers. Beckett is especially drawn to simple but unfamiliar
words such as the one fixated on by Mrs. Rooney, in All That Fall:
“hinny” (meaning the offspring of a she-ass and a stallion — and thus
the genetic counterpart to a mule, which springs from a jack-ass and a
mare). Among Beckett’s choice words is “rack”, a noun and a verb
with many distinct meanings, among which the relevant one, in Footfalls,
is the sense of “Clouds, or a mass of cloud, driven before the
wind in the upper air”, as OED (“rack n.”) elegantly defines it.
The word “rack” appears in a bookish passage, that carries the aura of
reading aloud; but it is indeterminable whether an invisible text is
read, or is recalled verbatim or — as in ordinary life — is under construction
in the imagination. (Such estranging substitution of reading
aloud for talking occurs in several Beckett plays.) In the early plays,
especially, the audience’s attention is drawn to words worth savouring,
or looking up. The word that Krapp has to look up is “viduity”. He
once used it in a recording session it has since dropped out of his vocabulary.
He remains a connoisseur of verbal strangeness, though,
almost drooling over the lip-puckering diphthong in that onomatopoeic
word, “Spooool!”

The great set-piece of linguistic estrangement in Beckett is doubtless
Lucky’s demonstration of thinking. A less extravagant set-piece (which
actually echoes Lucky) comes from the dossier in Rough for Theatre II. It
provokes from B, who is trying to read it aloud, the outraged demand
“What kind of Chinese is that?... Shit! Where’s the verb!” (1972, p. 92),
before he begins a frantic search for that critical syntactical item. In
the play called Play the language is estranged by its extreme banality,
by da capo repetition repetition and, above all, by its delivery. Beckett
calls elsewhere for flat, toneless speech but here he also wants “rapid
tempo throughout” (Beckett 1968, p. 45) — so rapid, indeed, when
done at the desired pace, it caused a serious quarrel at the National
Theatre in London between the director, backing Beckett, and the
literary manager (Kenneth Tynan) and his supporters, who were enraged
by the violation of intelligibility (Knowlson, p. 516-17).

The speakers in Play are called M (for the man) and W1 and W2 for his
two women. Here, as elsewhere, the algebraic notation keeps selfhood at
bay; as does Beckett’s second main mode of the naming of roles — by
functions such as Listener, Voice, Mouth, Protagonist, Auditor, Animator
and so on. In performance these figures — the term “characters” is inappropriate
— are presented anonymously so the names are discernible
only to the reader. Beckett’s third main recourse in the naming of roles
was to use common nouns or verbs, which register as such more or less
emphatically in performance: Croak, Krapp, May, Hamm, Nagg, Winny,
Fitt, Barrell and so on. The adjectivality of “Lucky” is anomalous.

In this third class of nouns, verbs and one adjective are the names in
Come and Go. Unusually for Beckett, this is a limpidly symbolist play,
in which — as is the way with symbolists — women come as an undividuated
plurality, often, as here, threesome. Beckett’s feminine trio
bears names that are all homophones of both common nouns and
verbs: Vi, Ru, and Flo. Suggestively, these names appear to be expressing
themselves through their biological hosts, using the women’s
relationships for that purpose.

VI < VIOLET
Violet n. plant and flower of viola genus; bluish-purple colour;
feminine proper name.
adj. of the colour of a violet, bluish-purple.
vb. to gather violets, to colour violet .
vie vb. to contend or compete with
n. a challenge
RU < RUBY
Ruby n. precious stone of crimson-red colour; feminine proper
name.
adj. of the colour of a ruby
vb. to dye to the colour ruby
rue vb. to regret or repent of
n. shrub of ruta genus; sorrow, regret, compassion.
FLOFlorence n. a coin, a type of fabric; a wench; English name for the
city of Firenze, Italy; feminine proper name.
Flow n. movement or rate of current or stream; outpouring; incoming
tide; a quicksand.
vb. to glide along, run smoothly like a river; to come or go in
a stream (of people etc.)

The icing on the nominal cake is a similar, though less rich, word play
— on “vie”, “flot”, “rue” (and “ruer”) — in the French version, Va-etvient
(1967). It suggests a fundamental phenomenon of linguistic
commonality for the author to draw on and also, perhaps, bilingual
premeditation on Beckett’s part.

Beckett’s bilinguality — and his audiences’ awareness of it — is a facet
of linguistic estrangement in his work that appears to have become
more evident and formative with time. It has lately been complicated
by vigorous efforts to recuperate for Beckett an Irish Protestant identity
that he took into a supposed self-exile and which he revealed in
his Hiberno-English idioms, his topographical allusions, and even the
theme of life-denial stemming from his historical membership in a
community and class doomed to extinction by the emergence of an
independent, Catholic, Irish state.

The misapprehension that Beckett’s (Hiberno-) English and his
French are in some way aligned with Irish selfhood and Gallic otherness
may be further fostered by the recent publication of Godot in a
bilingual edition. It is not the first such edition of a Beckett work but
it is the most accessible. The editor of this bilingual Godot strenuously
resists the assertion that the play is “unmistakedly [sic] Irish”, and his
rather indignant response to this claim voices a main motive for the
edition. “Viewed in its full multiplicity”, he says, the play “becomes at
least as unmistakedly [sic] French” (Beckett, 2006, p. vi). If this dispute
over the Beckett legacy approximates the ever-more-pervasive genre
of cultural farce, it also attests to an effect of Beckettian bilinguality,
putting the audience on the linguistic “qui vive”.

Beckett’s bilinguality is by no means a clear-cut phenomenon, not
even in outline; nor can it be the same one viewed from French, Irish
and English angles of vision. Beckett himself gave several reasons for
his switch into French, including: the elimination of style; an escape
from linguistic habit; and a discipline of linguistic impoverishment.
The fact that Becket also retained English as a language of composition
has aroused less curiosity, as though that were the natural thing to
do. It was not merely a reversion: a reversal made to re-access style; to
revert to comfortable habits of tongue; to switch back from linguistic
impoverishment to linguistic enrichment — though he did at one time
fear that he was losing his aptitude in English. Nor, indeed, can it
quite be said that after a French linguistic purgation Beckett reverted
to English, as a playwright, though most of the plays which appeared
after Fin de partie were, in fact, first written in English, and a half a
dozen of these were not translated by Beckett himself.

At the moment, my concern is not so much the linguistic processes of
bilingual creation and self-translation, fascinating though these are, but
with the ways in which the fact of bilinguality affects the reception of
Beckett’s work, as it seems to do more and more. We habitually look
for the convergence of origin and utterance in a unitary self-identity
— especially in the theatre — and one of the means that Beckett used
to make such a convergence elusive was bilinguality.

A passage in the late play Ohio Impromptu to illustrate the elusiveness. It goes:

In a last attempt to obtain relief he moved from where they had been so
long together to a single room on the far bank. From its single window he
could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans.
Pause.
Relief he had hoped would flow from unfamiliarity. Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar
scene. Out to where nothing ever shared. Back to where nothing ever
shared. From this he had once half hoped some measure of relief might flow.
Pause.
Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the islet. Hour after hour. In
his long black coat no matter what the weather and an old world Latin
Quarter hat. 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 (Beckett, 1984b, p. 12-13).

What is the original language of this passage? “Obtain relief” verges
on translatorese. But that might well be an attribute of the text from
which the Reader is reading aloud to the unspeaking Listener. The
phrase “nothing ever shared” is unidiomatic enough to require reflection
about whether “shared” is in the passive voice (a participle
lacking its auxiliary verb) and meaning “nothing strong was ever shared” or
the grammatically sufficient use of the active voice, since things, as
well as a persons, may be said to “share”: meaning “nothing ever
shared” anything with anything else. Unambiguously, the French text
uses a participle here, “où jamais rien partagé” (Beckett, 1982, p. 61),
and is therefore in the passive voice without the auxiliary verb; and so
we may assume that the passive voice is intended in English also, despite
the incomplete grammar. That is, “nothing was ever shared.”

The word “Islet” is decidedly literary but again this may be attributed
to the style of the book being read. It refers to the “Isle of Swans”,
earlier mentioned, and therefore conjures up Paris, though without
declaring an originary language. It will also call Joyce and young
Beckett to the minds of those who know something of Beckett’s
quite-well-known life; how, when the two of them walked together,
the Allée des Cygnes was their favourite haunt.

Notice: in the Essay trere are a picture of a big hat with the descriptions of the parts, ejem:"Latin Quarter hat", "un Grand chapeau de rapin,etc...

“Latin Quarter hat” surely sounds like a phrase originating in English;
one that would not, perhaps, translate readily into French. It will certainly
sound English to the quite numerous listeners who recall it from
Joyce’s Ulysses as Buck Mulligan’s designation of the headgear that
Stephen Dedalus (for whom it is his “Hamlet hat”) wears around
Dublin, to show off (Joyce, 1961, p. 17, 47). Beckett’s French version
of the hat is more resonantly “un grand chapeau de rapin” (Beckett,
1984b, p. 61). And this, as it happens, also contrasts with the more
direct equivalent to “Latin Quarter hat” that we find in a Joycesupervised
translation of Ulysses, in which it becomes the comically
simple “couvre-chef du quartier latin” (Joyce, 1968, p. 18). And then
again, Beckett’s stage directions, in two languages, which place the hat
prominently on the table, do so in the even plainer language of “un
grand feutre noir aux larges bords” (Beckett, 1982, p. 60) and a “Black
wide-brimmed hat” (Beckett, 1984b, p. 11).

In summary — and to have done with hattery — whether or not the verbal
hats in Ohio Impromptu be versions of one and the same material object, the
four prose inscriptions of it (or them) — two in each language — refer to
it (or them) quite diversely. This leaves a sense of linguistic strangeness,
which begins with the quest for unfamiliarity undertaken by the unknown
person who wrote the book now being read aloud.
Is this a Parisian scene, perceived through the prism of English; or is it
recalled in the linguistic genius of the place and later subjected to
translation; or is it, after all, Gallo-Irish subjectivity haunted by Joycean
times past? These issues would be more approachable if the
words heard could be attributed to a speaker, but we have no such
figure, merely the one who listens and his likeness who reads. Their
relation with each other is as indeterminate as their relation with that
absent other who sought relief in unfamiliarity and wrote about it.
Turning now from devices of linguistic estrangement, which disrupt
the age-old theatrical association of speech and speakers, voice and
body, I take up, finally and briefly, those having to do with human
figures on Beckett’s stages.

Bodies
In Breath, as has been mentioned, Beckett not only got rid of speakers but
also of words, and not just speakers and words but also of human bodies,
that is to say he got rid of most of what theatre has been — at least, he
thought he’d got rid of human bodies until he learned that, in Breath’s first
staging, Kenneth Tynan had littered the stage with naked actors. Beckett
eventually put an end to the travesty (Knowlson, 1996, p. 566).

In all Beckett’s other stage plays, actors are, by some theatrical means,
constrained, immobilized or — as in Not I and That Time — reduced
to a body fragment — sometimes at the cost of almost intolerable
discomfort for the actor. With these devices he followed in the wake
of a line of playwrights and directors, mostly symbolists of some kind
— Maeterlinck, Craig, Yeats, Meyerhold — who sought to limit or
control the infiltration of nature into the theatrical artwork in the person
of the actor. W.B.Yeats, Beckett’s direct precursor in this respect,
reports one of his fantasies about the training of actors:

I had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in barrels that
they might forget gesture and have their minds free to think of speech for a
while. The barrels, I thought, might be on castors, so that I could shove them
about with a pole when the action required it (Yeats, 1962, p. 86-87).

The pole used to propel the wheelchair in Rough for Theatre I, the castors
on Hamm’s armchair in Endgame, the ashbins in which Hamm’s
parents reside, and the funereal urns in Play, are all fulfillments, of a
sort, of Yeats’s yearnings; and these immobilizations do indeed throw
emphasis on speech, though with effects roughly opposite to those
that Yeats had in mind.

The ashbins that accommodate Nagg and Nell in Endgame evolved
from an on-stage coffin (Gontarski, 1985, p. 50). Perhaps Beckett
found this old Irish trope of the corpse waking up to take part in the
wake (as in Happy as Larry, Donagh MacDonagh’s verse play of 1946)
too hackneyed. He certainly found the coffin distracting, especially
when its denizen was inactive. The ashbins, however, proved convenient
means of bringing a pair of lesser characters on and off stage —
so convenient so that they have inspired additions to the basic scenographic
resources of such theatricalist practitioners as Théâtre de
Complicité. They enable cuing from on-stage, immediate appearances
and extremely quick exits when the lids are raised or lowered; and this
without the nuisance of fictional motivation for their comings and
goings. The dead parents can appear when wanted and disappear
when not. The scenographic convenience of the ashbins derives partly
from their status as scenic objects unencumbered by supernatural baggage.
Nagg and Nell are not real ghosts — which are notoriously
difficult to stage — but stagey embodiments of mental objects.

The really ghostly presences of the later plays are purely or partly mental
figures, called to the mind’s eye by words, as in Ohio Impromptu. In
Play, however, the dead are both physically-embodied and really dead,
reduced to faces, the faces further reduced by their decayed features.
But these descendants of Yorick have nobody to say a kind word
about them: they must speak for themselves. In theatrical effect, these
faces surmounting the urns have little in common with the pop-up
heads of Endgame. The resemblance between ashbins and urns —
which, as Gontarski reports (Gontarski, 1985, p. 92), replaced the
white boxes of an early draft of the play) is superficial.
In Play, the spatial rhythms of the shapes, volumes and placement of
the urns were as key to the work as the orchestration of the voices, the
two coming together in a purgatorial image of acoustic fixity and visual
fixity that nevertheless — and appallingly — has duration; in
which the whole content of the endless present is an episode from the
past. Beckett considered and re-considered the urns and faces from
production to production, trying to get them just right, moving them
closer, tightening the necks. They were not to be jolly and comfortable
but slim and only one metre tall, which meant using traps or having
the actors kneel. Allowing the actors to sit was out of the question.
And the faces, for all their decay, must be faces, says Beckett — not
masks. The actors, that is to say, are subjected to considerable discomforts
in the interests of the reduction and encapsulation of their bodies
and the creation of the theatrical image. Importantly, the spectators
can hardly be unaware of these discomforts and this consciousness is
more than incidental to the reception of the work: it contributes to the
ritualistic effect.

The third means of holding in check the natural body — that chimera
of selfhood — is its immobilization, and this, again, is differently done
in the earlier and later stage plays. The earlier ones impose physical
restraints — Lucky’s rope, Hamm’s armchair, the wheelchair in Rough
for Theatre I. In Happy Days immobilization took what was later seen to
be a form intermediate between confinement and fragmentation:
Winny’s body appeared distinctly unwhole at its first appearance but,
in retrospect, so much of her torso is usable that it belongs with the
physically-constrained category rather than with the corporeal fragments
of Not I or That Time.

In Footfalls, the physical constraint is psychosomatic — or perhaps
theatrically arbitrary: the pacing figure actually mobile but within a
severely limited and repetitive range. In Rough for Theatre II, the potential
suicide is totally immobile, as well as silent; and in Catastrophe,
Protagonist, as the figure is called, is in almost the same condition.
Why do these figures remain transfixed? What constrains them? In
Catastrophe — an extraordinarily political play for Beckett and unusual
in other ways — a kind of answer is given; one that will also serve, I
think, for the questions posed earlier about the origins of light and
sound . It is my final example.

Catastrophe is presented as a rehearsal for the final tableau of a play
about a catastrophe. In the envisaged performance, the play is to leave
the spectators with the affecting image of Protagonist, clad in his torn,
greyish night attire. To achieve this effect, his robe is removed in the
course of this “rehearsal”. This costume adjustment brings the Director
closer to the desired visual image, though it leaves Protagonist
shivering. Further adjustments are made to expose more of Protagonist’s
flesh, sharpening the pathos. In the envisaged performance,
Protagonist will stand on a pedestal which will be high enough —
according to the note dictated by the Director — to make the toes
visible. Protagonist’s flesh and cranium will be whitened, in accordance
with another note taken; and the hands will be as set-up in this
rehearsal, crippled, claw-like and limp. The head will be — as adjusted
in this rehearsal — held low enough to obscure the face but not so
low as to overstate the abjection. At the very end, there is to be a tremendous
lighting effect: a fade-out on Protagonist, a pause, and then a
fade-up that lights the head alone, the bowed head. The Director is
well pleased with his modelling of Protagonist, “He’ll leave them on
their feet”, he says, “I can hear it from here.” (Beckett, 1984b, p. 36)

Protagonist’s body is immobile in the rehearsal, except for the adjustments
made to it by the Assistant — and the shivering, of course —
but at the very end of Catastrophe, the scene shifts to envision, proleptically,
the forthcoming performance. At first, the applause is indeed
enthusiastic, as the Director had foretold, but it falters and dies as
Protagonist “raises his head and fixes the audience”. Beckett’s stage
direction endows Protagonist with a momentary autonomy that fixes
the spectators who are more than spectators for they are participating
in this ritual we call “theatre”. Whatever its claims to noncomplicitous
representation, this ritual is not exempt from the general
catastrophe of human existence. Like every other part of human exis
tence theatre cannot do other than enact that catastrophe.

The figure of the Director in Catastrophe cannot be altogether remote
from self-critique of the meticulous Beckett who made such rigorous
demands on his actors in pursuit of new resources of theatrical — that
is to say human — expression. This immanence of theatre made at
some human cost, may be a reason — though not always sufficient
reason — for Beckett’s attempts (and those of his executors) to retain
control over productions done in his name. His plays are not museum
installations, but the prescribed details of their material presentation
are as fundamental as they are to other plastic arts or, for that matter,
to ritual that encompassed even Modernism.

Works Cited

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BECKETT, Samuel. 1968. Cascando, and other Short Dramatic
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—. 1982. Catastrophe et autres dramaticules. Paris, Éditions de Minuit;
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