Samuel Beckett: Ohio Impromptu: Impromptu Elements in Samuel Becketts Ohio Impromptu

And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And you as you always were. Grace to breathe that void. This is not, however, another case of Scheherazade wanting yet one more night to put off death. The image from Rockaby comes to mind, another unfinal soliloquy on ending.

But the old woman is inexorably another: Rather than privileging the voice, as Rockaby does, Ill Seen Ill Said privileges the eye—both the eyes of the woman as well as, implicitly, the eyes that observe her. In Worstward Ho , similar autobiographical themes and memories can be found, including one that Beckett had often used in his previous writing: To this story, a persistent echo of Beckett recalling himself as a boy with his father, trekking across the countryside of Cooldrinagh and over the Wicklow Hills, Beckett adds a third person, an old woman, some two thirds of the way in.

If his intention was to remove all representations of a reality outside the text, why this persistent imagery? Many of these images seem culled from his own childhood, much more than from his present circumstances. They seem to be parental images, unforgettable figures from his past. Of course other themes persist—the sense of ending, of closure, and the stripping away of the unessential clutter of life to get back to the bare bones of existence and non-existence.

In that process of surrendering increasingly to the interior of a life in his work, Beckett himself was by no means a lonely figure of age. He continued to be sought after by friends and acquaintances, actors, directors, and producers, right up to his last months and weeks in a nursing home.

Perhaps the prospect of his own ending fired his desire once more to explore the next to next to nothing, and this going back enabled him to go forward again to the edge. Perhaps this juxtaposition of two contrasting positions—his rediscovering vitality in old age—may also have played its part. The former stresses corporeality—the bodily aspects of agedness—while the latter emphasizes a more existential coming to an end, an end of mental striving to communicate or to go on.

They appear instead as disembodied elements, unending voices, and repetitive sequences of footsteps, of rocking, as if their agedness had become strangely less corporeal. In his earlier plays Beckett had placed some of his characters in dustbins, buried in sand, or even in urns, but the audience were expected to understand that the body on view was that of a whole person, an embodied person, even if reduced in power, size, and influence.

This erasure of the body is even more evident in the novellas.

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You now on your back in the dark shall not rise again. Was he developing a changed imaginary of old age? When he was awarded the Nobel Prize he was sixty-three, had had a persistent chest infection for some time, and was waiting to recover sufficiently to undergo bilateral cataract surgery. He recovered and had cataracts removed from both eyes, in two separate operations performed during the autumn and winter of Soon after this, he again fell ill with a recurrence of the abscesses on his chest and a skin infection that affected his neck and face.

As he approached pensionable age he was sixty-five in April , he faced the dual embarrassment of his public success coupled with the private discomfort of an increasingly ailing body.

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Then, almost a year after the last operation, he began writing Not I. His eyesight was much improved and his lungs had healed. At last he sorted out the recurring problems with his teeth when he had his remaining teeth extracted and new dentures fitted. The New Year found him refreshed, revitalized, and rehearsing in London with one of his favorite actors, Billie Whitelaw.

The effect of working on this new play re-invigorated him. Despite the deaths of old friends, his creative juices seemed unstoppable; he finished the long overdue task of translating his first French novel, Mercier et Camier, into English and in began work on another play— That Time— which he finished in the summer of The change was noticeable to colleagues.

Officially old, Beckett was in fact renewed. She the character, the actor was both old and yet not old: Beckett continued to pursue his interest in how a body could be made to perform on stage. In Footfalls, for example, he became preoccupied with the sound and image of pacing feet, the balance between pacing and pausing, and the precise sound made by this pacing. Other factors were at work in his developing interest in all aspects of theatrical production. As he grew more experienced working with dance and mime, film and radio, and, of course, television, Beckett had become fascinated by the possibilities of technology.

Since his first venture into TV in with Eh Joe , he had been interested in the scope of the medium to portray what was beyond, or what could not be fully enacted on, the stage. This included the potential for film and TV to disembody, or rather, to transform the body from being a vehicle of the self, embodying a character, to being an image caught between self and non-self, whether through lighting; through mechanical repetition; by contrasting the voice and the body, or life and lifelessness; or by contrasting the body with—or making it akin to—non-living objects, such as chairs, beds, lamps, lights, urns, and so forth.

While aging and old age are as present as ever in his later work, agedness seems to be represented differently, more symbolically than functionally. This can be seen, for example, in the monochromatic contrast of white, grey, and black dress or hair, rather than in the display of somatic impairments or complaints. Only their position, the visualized stance of their body, is detailed alongside the stylized movements of their eyes and eyelids, their hands, mouths, or limbs—slowly or less slow, more in darkness or less.

I do not exist. The fact is well known. The stationmaster, Mr Barrell, asks after Mrs Rooney's health. She confesses that she should really still be in bed. We hear of the demise of Mr Barrell's father, who died shortly after retiring, a tale that reminds Maddy again of her own woes. She notes that the weather has taken a change for the worse; the wind is picking up and rain is due. Miss Fitt, as her name indicates, is a self-righteous misfit.

After some discussion she condescends to help the old woman up the stairs to the platform , primarily because "it is the Protestant thing to do. Unusually the train is late. The noise of the station becomes louder but the eventual is an anticlimax; it is the oft-mentioned up mail. Dan's train comes in moments afterwards. Tightfisted Dan chides her for not cancelling Jerry but still pays his penny fee.

He refuses however to discuss the reason for the train's lateness.

Not without some difficulty — her husband is also not a well man — they descend the stairs and begin the trek home. On her journey to the station Maddy only had to compete with one person at a time, each an old man. Now she is faced with a crowd. Rather than the flat open countryside she has to contend with a mountainous climb; she refers to the stairs as a " cliff ", her husband calls them a "precipice" and Miss Fitt compares them to the " Matterhorn ", a mountain that for years inspired fear in climbers.

Also, the means of transport that are mentioned here, the Titanic , the Lusitania and the train due are modes of mass transport and the level of danger shifts from the inconvenient to the potentially lethal. All the relatives mentioned in this section are now male. The weather is worsening. The thought of getting home spurs them on. Dan imagines sitting by the fire in his dressing gown with his wife reading aloud from Effi Briest. Dan shakes his stick and chases them off. Previously they have pelted the old couple with mud. This makes his comment shortly after about being alone in his compartment — "I made no attempt to restrain myself.

This also focuses attention on his remarks about the pros and cons of retirement: Dan is as laconic as Maddy is loquacious. His refusal to explain why the train was delayed forces her to pester him with questions which he does his best to avoid answering. He prevaricates and digresses, anything to throw her off track. Eventually he maintains that he honestly has no clue what the cause was.

Being blind and on his own he had simply assumed the train had stopped at a station. Something Dan says reminds Maddy of a visit she once made to hear "a lecture by one of these new mind doctors. As they near the house Maddy passed earlier, Schubert's music is still playing. Dan starts to cry. To stop her asking questions he asks about the text of Sunday's sermon. Mr Slocum and Miss Fitt had both passed comment on Maddy's bent posture. Perhaps, this is partly why they laugh: In Happy Days , Winnie asks "How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones".

When she says, "We are alone. There is no one to ask. Jerry catches them up to return something Mr Rooney has dropped. Learning that it is some kind of ball he demands the boy hand it to him. When pressed by his wife all he will say is that: They have no small change so promise to give Jerry a penny on Monday to compensate him for his trouble. Just as the boy starts back Maddy calls him to see if he has learned what delayed the train.

Jerry tells her that it was a child at which point her husband groans. When pushed for details the boy goes on: See his comment to Kay Boyle below however. With that Jerry exits. We hear his steps die away and the couple head off in silence. Maddy must realise the death happened while she was making her way to the station but she is — for once — speechless. All we are left with is the wind and the rain and to wonder what, if anything, Mr Rooney actually had to do with the death of the child. The third section of the play returns Maddy to the relative calm of the walk home.

Her parting words as he could testify, if he is still living, and has not forgotten, coming and going on the earth, letting people in, showing people out, were to the effect that she would settle my hash. This repetitive movement then re-emerges in the second section as the very rhythm of the Light: Like dragging a great roller, on a scorching day.

The strain…to get it moving, momentum coming—Spot off W2. Kill it and strain again. What is represented in the text is placed in the context of the attempt to utter and hear or understand, just as the visual image is placed in the context of its continual appearance and disappearance. The referential value of the verbal text is therefore increasingly undermined, as the speech of the figures becomes materialized as utterance. This materialization is partly due to the deliberate use of dated conventions in the construction of the narrative.

Then I forgave him. To what will love not stoop! I suggested a little jaunt to celebrate, to the Riviera or our darling Grand Canary. This is stressed by the repetition of the entire play, where the narration is repeated verbatim, with only a few minor variations in the order of the text. The text therefore becomes sound without meaning, as the image is increasingly seen as appearance without presence. The rapid tempo of the delivery of the text not only removes the expressivity of the voices, but makes any attempt to understand the representative content of the text even more difficult.

The hell of judgement and the search for meaning becomes a meaningless play or replay. The repetition therefore also questions the nature of the relationship between figures and Light. Light, figures and audience are trapped in a theatrical machine which reproduces its visual and narrative fragments without hope of resolution. The Light therefore appears not only as a paradigm of an author, but as a paradigm of the audience, attempting to perceivethe fragmentary figures and to piece together or interpret thenarratives.

Since the play resistsperception and interpretation, the audience continually fails toperceive the play, and in particular, any meaning the play mighthave. Worthen has pointed out, Beckett not only reducesthe actors to mouthpieces, but reduces the audience to a role,thereby denying the supposedly privileged status of the audience: The proscenium arch draws its frame around the represented tableau, rather than around its medium, the actor. To see the play through to its finish, we must engage the self that we project toward the play as absorbed in the functions of theatre.

The exploitation of the power relations inherent within the structures of theatre becomes the main focus of Catastrophe. It is dedicated to Vaclav Havel, who was a dissident writer incarcerated for his writings at the time Beckett was writing the play. While the apparent hierarchy of power in Play is undermined through repetition, in Catastrophe both the Protagonist and the Assistant are subjected throughout the play to the artistic and political power of the Director.

This cold, exposed space, limited by clearly visible walls, contrasts with the enveloping dark which surrounds the image in most of the later plays and which constitutes a temporary refuge if not a final escape from the relentless repetition of word and gesture. In Catastrophe, however, the space offers neither refuge nor escape.

Forced to keep silent rather than to give testimony, the central spectacle here is the speechless body of the Protagonist. The bare space and the harsh lighting emphasize the contrast between the three figures on stage, highlighting their costume, pose, movement or lack of movement. This series of contrasts or juxtapositions, particularly between the Director and the Protagonist, establishes the central power dynamic of the play. The Director, swathed in furs, is seated in a chair, towards the front of the stage.

His appearance and manner convey affluence and authority. Through the Assistant he controls the stage space and the reference to attending a caucus presents him as a figure of institutional authority. It also underlines his freedom to enter and leave the theatre at will. The Protagonist, by contrast, is restricted to the narrow limits of his plinth, and is forced to remain upright throughout the performance.

His pose, head bowed, hands buried in his pockets, emphasizes his confinement. He is ironically named, as he initiates no action until the closing moments. Although no direct physical torture is inflicted upon the Protagonist, his body is evidently subject to physical restrictions and exploitation.

First of all, the enforced isolation and restriction of bodies in space: Each individual has its own place; and each place its individual…. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed…. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits.

It was a procedure therefore aimed at knowing, mastering, and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space. The Producer and his Assistant subject the Protagonist to their gaze: At this stage, the Protagonist, head bowed, directs no gaze of his own. The gaze of the audience is specifically referred to: To let the stalls see the feet. The body in representation is reproduced as a conditioned image in accordance with the dominant laws, while any attempt on the part of the powerless to speak or gesture is repressed: The imposed-upon body is captured and framed in representation.

Representation is a coded scene, a framing and fetishizing of the body as a whole an image-pose or a part. Placed upon a plinth, he remains virtually motionless throughout most of the play, more statue than human being. Until the closing moments, only his trembling bears witness to his humanity. The role of the text emphasizes the objectification or dehumanization of the Protagonist. Language is here a commodity of the powerful. It is used both to implement the authority of the Director and to deny the subject any means of expression.

It implies the security of class membership. A returns, relights the cigar, stands still. A at a loss. It is progressively exposed and dissected: The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour.

The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. Indeed, the Protagonist not only evokes the pathetic figure of Man, but the figure of Christ, offered up as sacrificial victim, the spectacle of his crucified body presented to the gaze of the multitude. This Creator, however, is not the bearer of grace and mercy, but a figure of judgement, discipline and punishment— authority on a decidedly patriarchal and logocentric model.

At one point, the Director leaves the stage to view the spectacle from the stalls.

He does not, however, enter the physical space of the auditorium, although he announces that he is in the stalls. All we hear is his voice.

The relationship between the fictional and the actual theatres of the play is therefore problematized, but the authority of the Director is also emphasized and located specifically in the voice of the master. At the same time, the figure of the Director carries authority on a more secular level. It underlines the predicament of the artist in an authoritarian regime, forced to be manipulated by the dominant discourse or to be silenced—the Assistant indeed suggests that the Protagonist be gagged. Yet Beckett seems also to be indicating the problematic nature of representation itself.

While language and spectacle may be used to assume and maintain power, there is also a recognition that the dominant laws of rep-resentation inevitably involve relations of power, discipline and control. The aesthetic and the political…merge in the insight that the political will that seeks to constrain human life to an imagined social order, imprisoning or eliminating those uncontrollable elements that threaten that order, is rooted with the aesthetic will that seeks to dominate the human through formal representation.

There is a certain self-referentiality about Catastrophe. In a recent newspaper article, one witness describes the actress preparing for a performance of Not I: She climbed on to the dais and sat in the chair into which she was then locked—her head clamped so that only the organs of speech could move, and an iron bar pinning her into position. I think her wrists were strapped down as well.

The role of the Assistant emphasizes this contrast. If the Producer and Protagonist establish the two poles of the stage space, the Assistant is the mediator who crosses the space between. She also occupies an ambiguous position in relation to the dynamics of power.

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She collaborates with the Producer in her treatment of the Protagonist as an object to be manipulated and displayed, but she seems much more aware than the Director of the possibility that this subjected body might find some form of utterance. She expresses a fear that he might attempt to speak and suggests that he be gagged. She is, moreover, a fellow-victim, also under the power of the Director, forced to obey his every command. However, while the Director leaves the stage to view the image from the auditorium, she is momentarily relieved of his surveillance and instinctively expresses her revulsion and revolt towards the Director as she frantically wipes his chair before collapsing into it.

This sudden expression of revolt prefigures the final gesture of the Protagonist and sets up an awareness of another unseen scene beyond the authority of the Director and whatever figures of power he represents. The final gesture focuses attention on the role of the audience in the play. Fade-out of light on body. Light on head alone. I can hear it from here. This audience are, of course, likely to sympathize with the Protagonist, but, because the play foregrounds the power dynamic inherent in its own production, the audience are made uncomfortably aware of the ambiguity of their role.

The spectatorial gaze takes the bait and stakes its claim to a resting place in the field of vision that beckons it—only to have its gaze fractured, its look stared down by a series of gazes which challenge the place of the look and expose it as in turn defined by the other. His work therefore relentlessly attacks the authoritarian structures and values inherited from post-Enlightenment humanism, but also seeks to keep faith with certain fundamental values invested in the humanist project.

For this adaptation a number of significant changes were made both to the text and to the stage directions. According to Jim Lewis, Beckett showed an uncharacteristic flexibility and openness to experiment during the production period of Was Wo: And that is that his concept was not set. He changed and changed and changed.

The possibilities of control and discipline within the television medium are foregrounded within the verbal and visual text of Ghost Trio and…but the clouds… , yet the plays also draw attention to that which eludes the strict repetitive pattern of the structure.

Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama - PDF Free Download

In the television version of What Where, Beckett uses technology as the agent of control over the bodies of the players, while in the stage version, the emphasis falls more on the physical subjection of each figure to the other. In both cases, the structure of repetition emerges as a cycle of interrogation which continually fails to capture presence and truth in either image or text. There are several levels of repetition and reproduction within the structure of What Where: Simulacra are systems in which different things are related to each other simply by difference itself.

The essential thing is that in such systems there is no preexisting identity, no interior resemblance to be found. There is nothing but difference in the series, and difference of difference in the communication of the series. Scenes are constructed and performed in a number of different stagings.

What the mind brings before itself in imagining is strikingly insubstantial. The re-creation is only of a pure possibility—ie. Being purely possible, what we imagine is characteristically evanescent: Without repetition such content collapses into a mere congeries of fragmented forms. However, the emphasis on the act of repetition as well as the division of voice and figure, and in What Where the division of space, highlights the illusory, tenuous quality of these phantoms of the mind and focuses not primarily on what is imagined, but on the process of imagining and perceiving, the attempt rather than the ability to embody presence, Hence the divorce or difference between perceiver and perceived is both foregrounded and perpetuated.

Beckett therefore replaces the notion of a homogenous space of presence with a shifting, dynamic space or series of spaces created through the play of difference and repetition. In What Where the way in which V. In the initial stage version, V. Crucial to this, as we have seen, are the physical materials necessary for the reproduction of language: These articles are simultaneously the means for preserving language and the means by which meanings in language are decoyed into new contexts.

The dynamic structure of the play, where space and process seem inextricable, is also dependent upon the ambiguity of the relationship between V. In the initial stage directions, the area seems both linked to V. The playing area therefore imitates an external zone, in which the figures physically move, as well as the internal space of memory or imagination.

Indeed, the entrances and exits of the featureless cloaked figures in alternating poses of head bowed and haught suggests a multiplication of space, as a further space is created adjacent to the playing area, where the unseen but central acdion of the players—the interrogation of the figures in turn —takes place. The continual repetition of the movements also creates a time span beyond the individual, a perspective which in its concentrated minimalism seems to re-enact human history as a Nietzschean eternal repetition of cycles of domination and submission.

In the television version of What Where, however, this perspective of history and indeed power is reduced, as the space of the action is related more closely to the internal space of consciousness or memory. At the same time, the artificial nature of the television space emphasizes the illusory, simulated and parodic nature of creation according to Bam. Indeed, the synthetic quality of the television image seems to have fascinated Beckett. It appears to lend itself more easily than the stage to the depiction of an imagined, constructed space.

The flatter space, the smaller dimensions of the screen and the greater technological control over image and text can be used to create an image which is recognizable as a human figure or an interior, yet is also highly stylized and abstracted, as in Ghost Trio, with its geometrical visual patterns, or…but the clouds…where the body of the imaginer is perceived initially as a pattern of shadows. While these strategies introduce distance, television can also be used to interiorize the image, particularly in the use of close-ups, which Beckett particularly exploited in his first television play Eh Joe.

This dual sense of interiority and distance is also due to the presence of the camera which Beckett frequently draws attention to as an active agent of perception. This is reinforced through foregrounding the reciprocal activities of showing and looking. Here, the look is used in order to achieve specular possession of the self, rather than to subdue the other as in Catastrophe.

The images have to be repeated, and indeed draw attention to their own provisionality, their barely disguised screening of lack and absence. Both Ghost Trio and…but the clouds. In…but the clouds…this absence is figured by the shadowy face of a woman, which sometimes appears but more often does not. In Ghost Trio there is a contrast between the visual focus on the room and the figure within it, and the emotional loss presented through the non-visual medium of music.

These elements are central to the television version of What Where. In the notebook Beckett prepared prior to the studio production of the television version of Was Wo the first change that he envisaged was the elimination of the figures, which are replaced by close-ups of the faces of the players: Faces only Full face throughout42 The space therefore becomes much flatter, losing the depth and volume of the stage space. The play also becomes much more static, as the repeated exits and entrances are replaced by fadeups and fade-outs.

The alternation between head bowed and head haught is replaced by the eyes which are either open or closed. Stimm and the players were to be differentiated by the lighting, although not so sharply as on stage: No further need of shadow surrounding P. From being a space poised between an external space of oppression and submission, reminiscent of Catastrophe, and the inner space of consciousness, the space in Was Wo becomes apparently more internalized.

Yet it is this spacing which subverts the notion of a closed or unified internal space. On the contrary, in inserting a sort of spacing into interiority, it no longer allows the inside to close upon itself or be identified with itself. This is particularly true of V. The undermining of the presence or immediacy of V. The stage directions emphasize that the four players should be as alike as possible, conveyed in the stage version through shrouding the figures in long, identical cloaks. We faded the smaller images in and out.

I cut a small hole, an aperture, in a piece of cardboard, and placed each cardboard in front of each camera. He wanted them as alike as possible. Then we did make-up, rounding out the head, getting rid of the hair, the ears, darkening the outline to recede into black, hooded the faces. It looked like a science fiction sort of thing. Beckett had a struggle to achieve the Voice for example, this remote somewhat mechanical effect he wanted. We went through various phases…. Creation and imagination or what is left of imagination seem to be reduced to the re-enactment of an endless masquerade.

We are the last five. In the present as were we still. The scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual action, in a hymen out of which flows Dream tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfilment, perpetration and remembrance: That is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror: The same reappears as different, the present has already occurred and will be infinitely repeated. Thus, creation can be nothing other than memory, presented not as a voluntary faculty but rather as history, the inexorable process of eternal return: The world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away.

It lives on itself; its excrements are its food. Beckett stressed this in the revised text, which removes the several interruptions by V. Beckett noted in the Stuttgart production notebook: Rather he suffers it passively, condemned to the same interminable pattern of repetition as the players, images of his image. The rhythm in What Where seems to emphasize this inexorability. There is very little variation, apart from the regular rise and fall of the interrogation passages.

Indeed, there seems to be no end to imagination, memory or repetition, to the recycling of the same or continually reduced material, even from beyond the grave. Beckett is said to have described the faces during the Stuttgart production as death masks. Derrida distinguishes two forms of mimesis: But in both cases, mimesis is lined up alongside truth: Logos, which is itself imitated by writing, only has value as truth. The dialogue centres on the absence of the text which would both reveal the truth and permit the construction of a narrative: Head bowed throughout Nothing.

You gave him the works? Throughout Beckett's work, the desire for truth is associated with the desire for mastery, involving the mechanisms of the master-slave dialectic. It is this aspect of What Where, most prominent in the initial stage version, which suggests that the play may be read not only as a parody of creation, but of history as a struggle for mastery over knowledge, or over meaning. Nietzsche wondered if the most powerful drive within the human race, capable even of pushing it to selfdestruction, were not the will to truth: You might prattle away to your latest breath and still the one…thing unsaid that can give you back your darling solitudes, we know.

But this much is sure: This is underlined in How It Is, where the text is inscribed or inflicted upon the body of the tortured by the torturer who is then in turn subjected to the text and tortured. Likewise, in What Where the first round of dialogue deals with the unnamed victim's inability or refusal to say what and where the interrogation itself is reported not presented , but the subsequent repetitions place this report in the context of the cycles of torture inflicted upon the torturers who are accused of lying, of having heard the vital information but refusing to disclose it: Of course we do not know, any more than you, what exactly it is we are after, what sign or set of words.

Representation as mimesis or mastery of truth is both framed and parodied: Content is not a stated concept…what is meant is that which makes and breaks meaning, not within but against. This posits neither transcendental nor transcendent possibilities, but the positioning of each moment in the history of its process. The author not only interrogates himself or his own other s as material for his fiction, but the work is interrogated by its readers, critics or, in the case of drama, directors, actors or reviewers. The tyranny inherent in the relationship between author and work, or critic and work, is both exposed by the cycles of interrogation and challenged by the de-hierarchization of the relations of power through the levelling effect of the pattern of repetition.

The play closes there is no suggestion of an end with a denial, not only of the control and authority of authorship, but also of any predetermined meaning which might be forcibly extracted by spectators or critics: Make sense who may. At the same time, the rigidity of the pattern is countered by the spaces opened up by the operation of repetition as difference , which undermines not only the hierarchical opposition between absence and presence, truth and mask, but that between form and space, between the visible and the invisible.

What you see is not there. It is a dramatisation which illustrates nothing, which illustrates the nothing, lights up a space, re-marks a spacing as a nothing, a blank: Both of these plays focus on individual subjectivities and the construction and undermining of identity in and through language. Taking up these masks, revitalizing the buffoonery of history, we adopt an identity whose unreality surpasses that of God, who started the charade. The texts of both plays exploit and subvert the structures of monologue and autobiography which traditionally support the concept of self-hood.

In particular, both plays focus on the destabilization of the textual and visual frames used to figure the subject and [his] history. In That Time and A Piece of Monologue, the excessive rhythm of Not I, where a large proportion of the text is lost through the speed of delivery, is replaced by the intensity of perceiving the fragmented images and scenes of the text itself. Yet, within the text, the focus shifts from the narrative or descriptive content to the process of staging the self before the other self as audience. Here, however, the relation to the other has been lost: In their treatment of Time and identity, these plays both challenge the individual borders of identity and shift between the time perspective of the individual and that of human history.

That Time and A Piece of Monologue reduce theatre to the point where it hardly seems to be taking place at all. Any mobility in the plays lies therefore in the shifting perspectives within the perception of stage and text. The only visual material is the image of the head of the Listener, situated just off centre stage, separated spatially both from the absent body and from the text which is in turn fragmented into three disembodied and recorded voices, issuing from loudspeakers to the left, centre and right of the stage.

Instead of the nonspecular image of the mouth which tends to dominate the dimly lit image of the Auditor in Not I, the spectators are presented with the spotlit head of a whitehaired old man. The only movement of the head, until the end, is the opening and closing of the eyes, which highlights the activity of perception.

The voice is therefore entirely dissociated from the body, yet it dominates the stage space, as it issues from three speakers situated at each side and at the centre of the scenic space. A space which is usually associated with the visual is dominated by the verbal, the mimetic by the diegetic. The two categories of perception, external or physical and internal or imaginative, are thereby juxtaposed. The separation of the head from the three voices external to it emphasizes the ambiguity of the stage space.

The visual image of the head seems to suggest an external view of an old man on his death bed: Yet the haunting quality of the spotlit image, the pale skin and the long white hair, as well as the position of the disembodied head, situated unnaturally three metres above stage level and seen as if from above, has a disorienting effect upon the spectator,10 preventing him or her from perceiving the stage space as a naturalistic death-bed scene.

As the Listener closes his eyes to listen to the voices, he seems to be retreating into an inner world. The impression of internality, even of intimacy, is reinforced through the sound of the breathing which is heard before the voices begin. This tended to transform the space into an internal cavern which threatened to engulf auditorium and stage, conflicting with the external perspective offered by the head. The absence of body, apart from the head, and any other scenic information means that, as in Not I, images or memories of body and world are produced solely through the text. Yet this immense perspective is telescoped into the stage present, as the image of an old man with long white hair referred to in the text parallels the stage image of the Listener.

Since the old Chinese man has just been born while the Listener is on his death-bed, the juxtaposition not only superimposes past and present, but death and birth, in a pattern that is repeated throughout That Time, where the interplay between identity and difference simultaneously posits and demolishes the spatial and temporal categorization of experience.

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4. A Giuseppe Mazzini di Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (Italian Edition);
5. Ohio Impromptu – Wikipedia.

Yet this past can be seen simply as a function or a construct of the language system, preserved in the pages of dusty tomes in public libraries or deployed in the present moment of utterance. History and memory are presented both as a means of restoring the past and as the collected debris of the present, emphasized by one of the images in voice B of a dead rat floating down a river. In Proust, Beckett quotes the author of A la recherche du temps perdu who insists that true possession of the other or of the self is dependent on possession of their entire history, the merging of discrete spatial and temporal moments of a life into a homogeneous whole: We imagine that the object of our desire is a being that can be laid down before us, enclosed within a body.

If we do not possess contact with such a place and with such an hour we do not possess that being. Memory, inscribed in language, therefore produces a myriad of times, spaces and identities, transforming the space of the stage into a space animated and ruptured by temporal differences, while such temporal differences are presented on stage as spatial discontinuity.

The interplay between head and voices and between the various fragments of the text thus prevents the audience from locating any stable, unified centre of subjectivity in the play. Yet the dynamic of the play consists not only in the contrast between these spaces, times and selves, but in the glimpses of identity or continuity. While the voices are spatially fragmented, apart from two short intervals, the verbal flow is itself uninterrupted: The same balancing of continuity and contrast is characteristic of the relationship between the textual fragments.

Moreover, the different times and spaces evoked in the text are not only compared and contrasted amongst themselves, but are contrasted with moments when the divisions of chronology or of geographical location dissolve. The play of difference and identity through juxtaposition and repetition is therefore closely related to the questioning of traditional categories of space internal or external, bounded or unbounded and time past or present, finite or infinite. The first two are narration and description, both of which tend to refer to experiences of the protagonist in the external world.

Narration, however, tends to deal with the succession of events in time, while description is more static, fixing the objects described in space: Narration restores, in the temporal succession of its discourse, the equally temporal succession of events, whereas discourse must modulate, in discursive succession, the representation of objects that are simultaneous and juxtaposed in space. The other two modes both have a certain visual reference, even the narration.

The third, however, deals with the internal activity or functioning of the production of discourse. Whereas the first two describe external events or scenes, the third is concerned with the subject in its relation to language: The stillness of description is interrupted by the impossibility of arresting motion, either that of the body or that of time, while the experience of time is frequently presented in terms of spatial difference.

Beckett therefore exploits these two modes, yet also confuses them, so that if time is spatialized, space is also infused with time. He emphasizes the dominance of exteriority in this literature, the lack of distinction between the private and the public: The square in earlier ancient times itself constituted a state and more—it constituted the entire state apparatus, with all its official organs , it was the highest court, the whole of science, the whole of art, the entire people participated in it….

Everything here, down to the last detail, is entirely public. He was literally drenched in muteness and invisibility. And with them entered loneliness. Once having lost the popular chronotope of the public square, his self-consciousness could not find an equally real, unified and whole chronotope; it therefore broke down and lost its integrity….

The human image became multi-layered, multi-faceted. A core and a shell, an inner and an outer, separated within it. This ambiguity of difference and confusion relates both to a textual or dramatic practice of undermining stable conceptual and perceptual categories, and to a portrayal of subjectivity founded on a dynamic of desire which also defies stable positions of identity.

Indeed, the journey in That Time is also a journey through time, in the attempt to make contact with an earlier space, time and identity: The halting of the journey is underlined by the shift from narration of movement to description, particularly in section II, where the protagonist attempts to reach his destination by rail. The station proves not to be a stage on the way, but a terminus to his journey: Voice B at first offers a striking contrast to the predominant images in the previous scenes. Instead of a town, the setting is the countryside: Moreover, the protagonist is not alone, but with a loved one.

The figures are in harmony with their setting, indeed the universe, as the scene encompasses earth and sky, stretching tranquilly to the horizon: Rather than a snatched moment of respite, all is stillness and calm. This is an image of harmony and complementarity between the two figures and between figures and ground. However, the fact that the image is painted in words means that it has to be repeated constantly, as the words fade as soon as they are uttered and can never achieve the simultaneity of the visual object.

Voice C also contrasts the narrative and description of specific external times and spaces with the dissolution of distinct categories. The setting is again a city, but this time recognizably London, contrasting with the cityscape of Voice A. This voice begins with a scene in the Portrait Gallery: Rather than a contrast between child and mature man, the scene in the Portrait Gallery is juxtaposed with visits to other public places: Different times and visual environments are evoked and yet the descriptions mirror each other, balancing difference and identity.

In each the relentlessness of motion is contrasted with a moment of stasis and snatched respite. These scenes therefore also recall the pattern of movement and stasis in the scenes of Voice A, despite the circumstantial differences of time and place.