Arts, Faculty of
Theatre and Film, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Lee, Jung Soo
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Though suicide is referred or alluded to in many of Beckett’s works, it has not received much scholarly attention. This paper attempts to trace how the representation of suicide in Beckett’s oeuvre has evolved over the years, and how his teleplays in particular mark the culmination of Beckett’s thoughts regarding suicide. Where modernist literature attempts to show identification with and understanding of suicide, Beckett deviates from this trend by instead focusing on the impossibility to identify or come to terms with it. His early to middle period works reach this conclusion humourously, emphasizing the fact that there is nothing to be done about it. His teleplays, however, make the impossible move to go one step further, all the while acknowledging the impossibility to go any further; in other words, despite the unknowability of the Other, a move towards the Other is made nevertheless. In Beckett’s works, this inevitable failure is not a source of despair, but rather an occasion for a fleeting smile that smiles at the failure. Through this non-commitment, through the refusal to identify and interpret the suicidal mind, Beckett perhaps suggests the most ethical representation of suicide.
(Think of) Suicide and Smile: Imagining Suicide in Samuel Beckett’s TV Plays by Jung Soo Lee B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2019 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Cinema and Media Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2025 © Jung Soo Lee, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: (Think of) Suicide and Smile: Imagining Suicide in Samuel Beckett’s TV Plays submitted by Jung Soo Lee in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Cinema and Media Studies Examining Committee: William Brown, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, UBC Supervisor Adam Frank, Professor, English Language and Literature, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Though suicide is referred or alluded to in many of Beckett’s works, it has not received much scholarly attention. This paper attempts to trace how the representation of suicide in Beckett’s oeuvre has evolved over the years, and how his teleplays in particular mark the culmination of Beckett’s thoughts regarding suicide. Where modernist literature attempts to show identification with and understanding of suicide, Beckett deviates from this trend by instead focusing on the impossibility to identify or come to terms with it. His early to middle period works reach this conclusion humourously, emphasizing the fact that there is nothing to be done about it. His teleplays, however, make the impossible move to go one step further, all the while acknowledging the impossibility to go any further; in other words, despite the unknowability of the Other, a move towards the Other is made nevertheless. In Beckett’s works, this inevitable failure is not a source of despair, but rather an occasion for a fleeting smile that smiles at the failure. Through this non-commitment, through the refusal to identify and interpret the suicidal mind, Beckett perhaps suggests the most ethical representation of suicide. iv Lay Summary This paper will take a look at the representation of suicide in two of Samuel Beckett’s TV plays. Upon tracing his stance towards suicide in three of his early and middle period works, the paper will then conduct a closer investigation on the teleplays to see how the earlier argument is distilled and elaborated upon. What one will find is that where his early argument stops at the conclusion that the suicidal mind is unknowable, his later works will go one little step further and acknowledge this failure as a necessity and also couple it with the need to go on nevertheless. v Preface This thesis is an original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Lee Jung Soo. Uncited lines by Beckett are littered around. Please do have fun playing Where’s Sammy Becky? No Generative AI was used at any point in the composition of this work. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... vii Dedication ................................................................................................................................... viii intro .................................................................................................................................................1 chapter 1 .......................................................................................................................................14 chapter 2 .......................................................................................................................................27 chapter 3 .......................................................................................................................................44 outro ..............................................................................................................................................62 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................................69 vii Acknowledgements I express my sincerest gratitude to the following people: William Brown and Adam Frank for their expertise and guidance, Kim Na Young and Paul Haase for their wisdom, support, and practical assistance, Kim Dan Woo, Dan Kim, Ahn Do Yoon, Do Bae, Darren Peck, Shin Hee Chan, Chui Wen Kong, Park Ryang Jin, Bradley Karstadt, Mikhael Gaster, and Ahniya Ustymenko for keeping me sane during this maddening journey. 그리고 마지막으로 무한한 응원과 무조건적인 사랑을 주신 어머니, 아버지에게 가장 큰 감사의 말씀 올립니다. viii Dedication This piece is dedicated to those who will never read it – Samuel Beckett and my family and friends who could not care less about Beckett. It is my modest wish that he will like what I’ve written about him and that my loved ones will find even just a little bit of an interest to explore the Beckettian universe in which I found much comfort.1 intro Journey to annihilation. Such is the path to which each and every one of us is doomed. All life must come to an end. While on this peregrination towards death, some make the choice to hasten the end. For the living, the decision may appear confounding. Life is good, we are told. Happiness is to be sought after. Why abandon such a blissful gift that is life? Is it not inelegant to forgo the opportunity to drink in all that one can of the kaleidoscopic droplets that ooze from the tree of life? But the truth is, some of those damned droplets of life are bitter to an unbearable end. Not all are sweet and savoury. And when the taste of bitterness lingers on the tongue, it contaminates even the taste of sweetness. And so, in response, it is sometimes said that life is bittersweet. That it naturally gives us both the good and the bad and that all should be welcomed in the name of the sanctity of life is the explanation one commonly encounters. But such an argument does not seem to have much power over those who hasten their end. And the proponents of such an argument renounce the suicide’s decision as cowardly, inelegant, and inconsiderate to the living the suicide leaves behind. Such an argument seems to arise from the Christian tradition that saw suicide as an irredeemable sin. This is no place to meticulously go over the changing attitude towards suicide in the Western tradition, but a very brief sketch may be useful at this point. During Greco-Roman antiquity, attitude towards suicide seems somewhat varied; both toleration and condemnation can be found depending on the region, culture, and school of thought. For instance, “[beliefs] about suicide varied considerably in ancient Greece. The Stoics and Epicureans believed strongly in the individual’s right to choose the means and time of his death. Others were less accepting of the idea. In Thebes and Athens, suicide was not against the law, but those who killed themselves were denied funeral rites and the hand that had been used for the act was severed from the arm” 2 (Jamison 13). Greek philosophers too had varying opinions on the matter. “Although Plato considered suicide a disgrace, he permitted notable exceptions, one of which allowed for self-killing by judicial order, as was the case with his teacher, Socrates” (Critchley 35). For Aristotle, “suicide was ‘an offence against the State’ because, on religious grounds, it polluted the city and, economically, weakened it by destroying a useful citizen. It was an act, that is, of social irresponsibility” (Alvarez 77). The Romans, on the other hand, “looked on suicide neither with fear nor revulsion, but as a carefully considered and chosen validation of the way they had lived and the principles they had lived by” (82). And such an attitude is reflected in their law as well: “There were no revenges, no degradation, no evidence of fear or horror. Instead, the law was the law – practical. According to Justinian’s Digest, suicide of a private citizen was not punishable if it was caused by ‘impatience of pain or sickness, or by another cause’, or by ‘weariness of life… lunacy, or fear of dishonour’” (82). It was, however, “a crime for a slave to kill himself for the simple reason that he represented to his master a certain capital investment” (82). In short, suicide “was an offence neither against morality nor religion, only against the capital investments of the slave-owning class or the treasury of the State” (83). Considering this background, the sudden turn to viewing suicide with contempt that came to dominate most of European history seems strange. Even more strangely, many writers and thinkers have noted that nowhere in the Bible does it say that suicide is prohibited. Most prominently, Arthur Schopenhauer points out in his short essay on suicide that “neither in the Old Testament nor in the New is there to be found any prohibition or even merely a definite condemnation of suicide” (Schopenhauer 291), which is repeated almost verbatim by contemporary writers writing on suicide: Alvarez writes “neither the Old nor New Testament directly prohibits it” (69), while Critchley notes “Scripture nowhere explicitly forbids suicide” 3 (28). Surprisingly, the “idea of suicide as a crime comes late in Christian doctrine and as an afterthought. It was not until the sixth century AD that the Church finally legislated against it, and then the only biblical authority was a special interpretation of the sixth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill’” (Alvarez 69). The change begins with St. Augustine. In order to discourage the flourishing of martyrdom led by the Donatists, “Augustine took over Plato’s and the Pythagoreans’ argument that life is the gift of God and our sufferings, being divinely ordained, are not to be foreshortened by our own actions” (88). It is this notion that came to then dominate future discourse on suicide for most of European history. Critchley also notes: “Following a concept first formulated by Augustine and then refined by Thomas Aquinas, life, for the Christian, is something given – a datum – over which we have the right of use, usus, but not governance, dominion, which can only be the prerogative of God. To kill oneself is to exercise dominion over one’s life and to assume the power that is only possessed by the deity” (36-37). As a result, this new perspective then came to inform the moral and legal framework in Europe regarding suicide, which was explicated with immense severity. “In France, the body of a suicide was dragged through the streets, head downward, and then hanged on a gallows. French criminal law in the late seventeenth century also required that the body thereafter be thrown into a sewer or onto the city dump” (Jamison 16). Across the Strait of Dover, things were not much different. “Writing in 1601, the Elizabethan lawyer Fulbecke says that the suicide ‘is drawn by a horse to the place of the punishment and shame, where he is hanged on a gibbet’… In other words, the suicide was as low as the lowest criminal” (Alvarez 64). The following century yet again upheld this notion. Sir William Blackstone, an English jurist who wrote the canonical treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), saw suicide as one of the most despicable crimes. Simply put, his argument was that “suicide is a double crime: against God and 4 against King… Whoever takes their life is sinning against the eternal power of God and the temporal power of the King. To kill oneself is to usurp the sovereignty of God and King by assuming it for oneself” (Critchley 42-43). As one can easily see, its rhetoric is a repetition of the one espoused by Augustine and Aquinas. Thus, the idea of suicide as a crime lasted more than a millennium in the West. Only in the late 18th century, “a period that sees the gradual emergence of a modern attitude to suicide and its decriminalization” (Maude 118), does a more understanding attitude begin to appear. But “the counter-revolution of science” (Alvarez 91) saw the emergence of medicalization and pathologization of suicide wherein it was seen as resulting from a severe defect in the mental composition. This was, however, not an entirely novel way of viewing the cause of suicide. During the period when suicide was seen as a crime, “the phrase ‘suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed’ was evolved by lawyers as protection against the inanities of the law, since a verdict of felo de se would deprive the dead man of a religious burial and his inheritors of his estate” (66). In opposition to this, the arts stood its ground as representing suicide as an understandable individual choice when life became too bitter to endure. “As George Henry Lewes comments in an 1857 article in the Westminster Review, while ‘the juryman always represents suicide as the act of a madman’ the poet and novelist, by contrast, ‘represent it as either the deliberation, or the despair, of one perfectly sane’” (Maude 117). 1857 was, of course, also the year Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published where the eponymous heroine swallows arsenic out of despair. With the publication of Emile Durkheim’s seminal study Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897), there began a major shift. Durkheim was one of the first figures to acknowledge the social causes behind suicide, instead of merely viewing it as resulting from a personal cause. He 5 moves away from discourses on whether the act is right or wrong, or whether the act results from personal mental illness, and traces the connection between this very individual act and the society that surrounds it; “the question was no longer the morality of the act but the social conditions which produce such despair” (Alvarez 99). After him, the floodgate had opened. “Scientific studies of suicide have multiplied like flies, particularly since the 1920s: clinical investigations, statistical analyses, aspects of this and that, theories of every colour by psycho-analysts, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, sociologists and social workers, statisticians and medical men; even the insurance companies are in on the act” (99-100). Against this backdrop, literature, and in particular, modernist and postmodernist literature, has often reflected varying degrees of interest on the matter as well, and when they do so, their angle appears to be radically different from that of, say, the lawmaker, or the sociologist, or the psychologist. “Suicide, ‘one of the most enigmatic’ of human behaviours, is, according to Baechler, ‘strictly unintelligible’ in the individual case, even while it ‘cries out for interpretation’” (Bennett 3). Indeed, there is so much mystery within a self-inflicted death, one of the simple reasons being that you cannot address questions to the dead. All one can do is assume and presume based on various “facts of life” of the suicide, which may or may not include the suicide note. Against this intense desire to know and interpret that which cannot be known, literature seems particularly adequate to explore this unknowability, for literature is the space where it becomes possible to say the unsayable, to think the unthinkable, to imagine the unimaginable. “As Jacques Derrida puts it in Acts of Literature, warily and with a certain hesitation, literature is the institution that ‘allows one to say everything, in every way’” (Maude 117). In literature, anything goes, so to speak. Thus, literature “allows for an investigation not just of ethical and religious questions of suicide nor simply of its economic, sociological, psychological, medical, and psychiatric causes 6 and legal and social consequences but also, most profoundly, of what the act means for the subject and for his or her survivors – what it is like, what is involved in contemplating or deciding to kill yourself: how it is” (Bennett 4). As aforementioned, beginning with the mid-to-late 19th century, literature began to “more widely reflect the way in which suicide and the thought of suicide – suicidal ideation – come increasingly to be considered a ‘natural’ part of life and not to be discounted or marginalised as undertaken only by the mentally ill or the criminal” (Maude 117). Modernist writing, in particular, not only illustrates the “prominence of representations of suicide… [but also] the evolving ethical stance towards the act” (118). Writers like Ford Madox Ford, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce have all narrativized suicide in ways that not only express “empathy towards individuals who undertake it” (Bennett 20), but also raise “complex questions of responsibility and agency, [demanding] that suicide be not simply dismissed as transgression or felony (against God, nature, and the king) or as madness (‘temporary insanity’)” (21). Modernism, in short, shares a sympathetic attitude towards the suicide, often showing identification with the suicidal character and thoughtfully considering what it is like and how it is to be suicidal, which can also be located in postmodernist writers like David Foster Wallace. And where does Samuel Beckett fit in within the genealogy of representation of suicide in literature? Just as Beckett’s work does not quite fit in with either modernism or postmodernism, his stance on suicide too seems rather difficult to categorize. On the one hand, like other modernist writers, his texts do reflect the idea that suicide is a “‘natural’ part of life and not to be discounted or marginalised as undertaken only by the mentally ill or the criminal” (Maude 117). On the other hand, however, unlike modernist writers like Woolf and Joyce, Beckett presents suicide as “unremarkable and unexceptional, lacking any proper sense of telos, 7 pathos, and gravitas” (133). As Maude perceptively points out, in contrast to Woolf and Joyce who treats the issue of suicide with empathy and compassion, “suicide is neither an event nor an occurrence that is heavy with affect [in Beckett’s works.] It is radically normalized in its unexceptionality” (133). In other words: “For Beckett the act of suicide, this necessarily most meaningful of actions, is often pushed to the limits of meaning itself, denuded, finally of significance. In the near-casual or throw-away representation of suicide, Beckett succeeds in fundamentally challenging the act’s conventional ethical framing, and even in certain ways its ontology – what it is and how it is understood” (133). Furthermore, in portraying suicide as an unexceptional occurrence, Beckett often imbues it with humour. Robbing it of gravitas and instead endowing it with a sense of humour, Beckett stands quite apart from the serious tone with which the modernist and postmodernist writers reflect on suicide. Does this mean that for Beckett suicide is merely a trivial joke? Should his discussion of suicide be brushed away as a flippant commentary on what demands to be reflected in all seriousness? But for someone who supposedly treats the issue of suicide with such nonchalance, “Beckett’s work contains an extraordinary number of references and allusions to suicide, a theme that makes an appearance in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932/1992), ‘Love and Lethe’ (1934), Murphy (1938), Eleutheria (1947), Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1956), Waiting for Godot (1953), Act Without Words I (1957),… Embers (1959), Happy Days (1961), Film (1964), Eh Joe (1966), Rough for Theatre II (1976)” (123), as Maude identifies; in addition, I think she is absolutely justified in including the short story “The End” (1946) to the catalogue, and I would hasten to add How It Is (1964) as well, though by no means is the list exhaustive. In many of the works listed, suicide is indeed seen as a valid option, but rarely do the characters fully commit to 8 the act of suicide, and, as aforementioned, the option is reflected upon humourously and ultimately denied as a solution. There is, however, one work from the list that distinguishes itself from the others in many respects: Eh Joe. Here, a suicide does indeed take place. Here, it is not the characters themselves contemplating the option of suicide, but rather a lone character reflecting upon the suicide of the Other through an intermediary medium. Here, suicide is indeed a remarkable event that haunts the protagonist, and his pained expression bespeaks a man who certainly does not seem to lack telos, pathos, and gravitas within his investment. Here, in other words, suicide is not represented in a near-casual manner. Furthermore, traces of the comic have completely been erased. Not many will find this play particularly funny; at best, it would incite a snort, or a twisted smile filled with bafflement. If you gave out a hearty laugh, I suggest you see a therapist. Then, there is also Ghost Trio (1977). This teleplay is not listed in Maude’s comprehensive list, and indeed I don’t believe many would see this play as alluding to or referencing suicide. Later, I will make a somewhat strained argument that the play does allude to a weakening suicidal ideation, but for now I would simply like to point out that Ghost Trio, like Eh Joe, touches upon suicidal ideation with a certain subdued gravitas instead of considering it in a humourous way. What these two teleplays signify in regards to suicide, then, is that the Other’s suicide or the Other’s suicidal ideation is unknowable, unintelligible, and impenetrable. Of course, this is nothing new. His other works touch upon this idea as well. However, in the teleplays he goes further. Without any dimensions of humour, Beckett acknowledges this foretold failure and still goes on despite the failure. No, he seems to say, we cannot know the Other; the Other remains as the Other, especially when the Other has expressed her ownmost possibility as the Other through her suicide, but one shan’t stop at that. Even in increments, the move towards the Other must be 9 made, even if we know we cannot ever go all the way in, and perhaps we should not want to go all the way in. Nevertheless, there is the obligation to go on, cycling back to the failure, again and again, ceaselessly, despite the failure, despite the exhaustion. Hence, instead of laughter, there is only a faint smile – a smile that smiles at this failure. In Eh Joe, the failure takes the form of imagination – it is about Joe’s failure, and by extension Beckett’s failure, and by yet another extension the artist’s failure to imagine what lies beyond the surface of the suicide. Suicide of the Other simply cannot mean anything to the living perceiver. But “the inability to mean something in Beckett does not mean that we stop talking, but rather that we are unable to stop” (Critchley 178) imagining or creating or even murmuring. “Silence is not, as Nussbaum and so many commentators on Beckett assume, the goal of his work” (178). In a conversation with Charles Juliet, Beckett said: “Writing has led me to silence… However, I have to go on… I am up against a cliff wall yet I have to go forward. It’s impossible, isn’t it? All the same, you can go forward. Advance a few more miserable millimetres…” (Juliet 141). The exhausted artist who is too exhausted to write or speak still cannot help but lend an ear to a voice that arises from nowhere and imagine. The advancement of a few more miserable millimetres occurs through imagination. Thank goodness Beckett’s imagination did not die out. Imagination dead. Imagine that. In Ghost Trio, it is I who is led to imagine my own failure to imagine. In this strange televisual puppetry, Subjectivity at once seem to both announce itself and disintegrate into nothingness. I thought I was getting close to the Figure, but I am denied access. The precise point where I am denied this access is the point where I am led to imagine a suicidal ideation in F. No matter how close I thought I was getting to the Other, the moment I see him as a suicidal individual, the iron gate shuts and the void seeps in. Then, F smiles at my failure. This is perhaps 10 what Critchley means when he sees Beckett’s work as offering “a redemption from redemption” (32). Where the aforementioned modernist writers offer a salvific narrative on suicide, salvaging the wasted image of the suicide from the crutches of sin, crime, and punishment, Beckett offers “a radical de-creation of these salvific narratives” (32), proposing that salvation is not possible, that the suicidal mind cannot be identified, that it ultimately remains meaningless from the position of the living. The recognition of meaninglessness then “leads to a deeper recognition of the profound limitedness of the human condition, of our frailty and separateness from one another” (32-33). And so, the gulf between the Self and the Other is an irreconcilable void. Yet, there is the urgent necessity, the inexplicable obligation to go on, even when one cannot go on. In his staunch refusal to take sides, Beckett may appear apolitical, or even anethical. But “Beckett is more committed than either Sartre or Brecht by being less committed, he is more realistic by being less realistic” (183). In his acknowledgement of the impossibility to identify with the suicide, he perhaps suggests a much more ethical approach to the suicide than any other writer. It is true that what he offers is very little, almost nothing. But in the imaginative exercise of exploring the suicidal mind, perhaps the explorer should offer very little, almost nothing, for what he will find is nothing but the void. Beckett is one of those rare artists who intrepidly confronts the void, stares directly into its horror, and returns us the image of this void precisely as it is. For Beckett, this void is neither absurd nor something to be overcome. To define it so would be to make a value judgment, and that is not possible. As he once said: “But moral values are not accessible and not open to definition. To define them, you would have to make value judgements, and you can’t do that. That’s why I have never agreed with the idea of the theatre of the absurd. Because that implies making value judgements” (Juliet 148-149). By simply staying with the image of the suicide, without interpretation, without pathologization, without 11 judgement, he is perhaps suggesting the most ethical reflection on ethical standards: that it constantly fails, over and over again, coupled with the need to fail yet again. With this piece, I will attempt to trace the evolution of Beckett’s reflection on suicide. In chapter 1, I have chosen three texts as exemplary cases that I think mark important points. His early period work “Love and Lethe” is perhaps the first text wherein suicide is dealt with as a central concern. Here, one can already begin to see Beckett’s central stance – that the suicidal mind cannot be unpacked – albeit pervaded with humour. In Waiting for Godot, suicide appears in the margins, but its possibility is alluded to numerous times, often in humourous ways. Here, its possibility is ultimately brushed away and disregarded, but the central claim remains – can one really understand the logic behind suicidal reflection? Can one really identify with Didi and Gogo’s pain? Rough for Theatre II marks an important transition, since it is one of the rare cases where suicide is the central concern, and the thesis that the suicidal mind remains an enigma is also there, but the effects of humour begin to weaken slightly. But ultimately, what these three works share in common is that Beckett reaches a conclusion – that the Other is unknowable – and remains there. He reaches this conclusion half-heartedly, with humour, without wanting to explicate a profound claim. The succeeding chapters will see how the televisual plays slightly deviate from this stance. There are many holes left in this study. For one, I do not address the medium-specificity of these works. Beckett was someone who was always very careful to note the medium-specific elements whichever medium he was working with. This is why he was often against certain works being adapted to a different medium. This lack is to be blamed on my own apathia, athambia, and aphasia. I felt that there already exists brilliant scholarship that explores this avenue, such as Beckett and Broadcasting. A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in 12 Radio and Television (1976) by Clas Zilliacus, Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television (2007) by Graley Herren, and essays like “Beckett and Television: In a Different Context” by Linda Ben-Zvi, just to name a few, and I felt uneasy about what I could add to the existing discussion in relation to suicide. A future study may perhaps be able to address the medium-specific ways in which the issue of suicide is dealt with in Beckett’s works – how the stage, the radio, the film, and the television have slightly different shades of formal elements that allows them to explore suicide in their unique ways. In addition, this study also does not account for the variations between many of the versions of Eh Joe and Ghost Trio. I only discuss the original BBC2 productions of both plays, which were broadcasted on the 4th of July, 1966, and on the 17th of April, 1977, respectively. I am aware that the disparities between the versions may completely undo my argument here. Again, a more perceptive scholar with better resources, who does not suffer from an awful apathia, may be able to chart the fascinating differences between the versions and how that would affect the perspectives on suicide. And finally, as a perceptive scholar noted upon reading my drafts, I do not quite bring together the puzzles I scatter around and ultimately fail in presenting a satisfactory picture of Beckett. Overall, the whole thing seems somewhat fragmented and dissatisfactory. I take full responsibility for this failure. My humble wish was to have the silence between the phases speak to one another, and let the reader fill in the holes. Or, to borrow Beckett’s words, my ambition was this: “The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist” (Beckett 138). Beckett does this exceptionally well, I think. Not me, I’m afraid. I did not want to fully commit to presenting a flawless argument with no gaps. I wanted to refuse a conclusion, which is why this thesis does not have a conclusion, but an outro that does not really conclude anything. If this be the most 13 unforgivable failure, I accept the condemnation. All I can say is that I will try and fail better – or worse – next time, if there be one. 14 chapter 1 Suicide had always been an abiding topic of interest for Beckett. His fascination possibly began around the late 1920s, when he was familiarizing himself with the Paris literary circles centered around James Joyce. In the French capital at the time, “suicide was very much in the air” (Cronin 98), and the suicide of noted writers such as Hart Crane, Philippe Soupault, Kay Boyle, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Jacques Rigaut were hotly debated. Beckett must have been acutely aware of such an intense debate surrounding what was then seen, and perhaps still seen today, as a taboo subject, and indeed, he himself was known to have avidly discussed the matter with his associates. Those who had encountered Beckett during this time, and during his brief return to Ireland from Paris, remembered that he “spoke most of the time of suicide, [and one] left filled with thoughts of dissolution and gloom” (139). Similarly, Richard Aldington, English writer and poet who was a close friend of Thomas McGreevy, who was a close friend of Beckett, “reductively described Beckett as ‘the splendidly mad Irishman . . . who wanted to commit suicide’” (Maude 123). Despite his interest in a topic that generally tends to fill people with feelings of dissolution and gloom, when Beckett writes of suicide or its ideation it is often permeated with humour, and the characters themselves do not seem to consider the option with much seriousness. And even if they do, the humourous backdrop of the reflections on suicide seems to render the option somewhat futile. Simultaneously, however, he also touches upon serious considerations such as the notion of the impenetrability of the suicidal mind, which he will continue to distill all the way to his venture into television. But first, let us consider the short story “Love and Lethe” included in his short story collection More Pricks Than Kicks. The piece centers around the suicide pact between Belacqua and his love interest Ruby Tough. Ruby, a 15 woman past her prime and suffering from an unidentified illness, willingly joins Belacqua on a drive up to an isolated mountain for a communal felo de se. Perhaps this is good enough reason for one to want to kill oneself. Perhaps not. But why does Belacqua want to kill himself? “How he had formed this resolution to destroy himself we are quite unable to discover” (Beckett 89), the narrator quips. Here, we already begin to see Beckett’s attitude towards the Other’s suicidal ideation that will persist throughout his oeuvre: that its true nature is ultimately unknowable. But unlike his later TV plays, in which he seems to go beyond the notion that when something is unknowable that is all there is to be said, here he remains indifferent: “The simplest course, when the motives of any deed are found subliminal to the point of defying expression, is to call that deed ex nihilo and have done” (89), he writes. Because one cannot know the motives behind suicidal ideation, and because it cannot be put into words even if one could excavate the abysmal depth of a suicidal mind, there is ultimately nothing to be done and nothing to be said. Again, when Ruby asks why Belacqua wants to kill himself, he pulls out various reasons from his catspaw’s mind, listing the “Greek and Roman reasons, Sturm and Drang reasons, reasons metaphysical, aesthetic, erotic, anterotic and chemical, Empedocles of Agrigentum and John of the Cross reason” (90). Ranging from the Stoics, to sorrowful Werther and Schopenhauer, the list is quite comprehensive, alluding to various proponents of suicide throughout Western history. Yet, the narrator adds, “in short, all but the true reasons, which did not exist” (90). Thus, “Belacqua’s quasi-comprehensive account of the European discourses of – and rationalisations for – suicide is also a kind of joke on the futility of having an obsessive, subservient ‘catspaw’ mind that diligently scans the literary and philosophical tradition” (Maude 128). As wide-ranging as they may be, the arguments for suicide fail to aptly account for the suicidal mind, since whatever the true reason behind suicidal ideation may be, it remains in the 16 dark. A catspaw mind may comically grope around as much as it likes, the true substance will slip through his fingers. Aptly so, the narrator dwells no further on the matter and pushes along the cart of his narrative. When they reach the top of the mountain, they allow themselves a moment to enjoy the view. No matter how suicidal, one mustn’t pass on the opportunity to drink in some delectable scenery, I suppose. Then, “like fantoccini controlled by a single wire” (Beckett 95), they head down the western slope. At this point, the narrator notes that “from now on till the end there is something very secco and Punch Judy about their proceedings” (95). What could possibly be the reason behind their movements suddenly imitating that of puppets? Was the mere thought of an impending suicide – the annihilation of Self and therefore consciousness – enough to start eroding at their Subjectivity? Are they already beginning to slowly erase their damnable traces of consciousness? Or perhaps, their movements become comically puppet-like precisely because they are beginning to realize that they were never that serious about their own suicidal ideation. Perhaps they feel awkward and embarrassed as they begin to face the disconcerting truth: that they still share an attachment to life. There is often a tendency in Beckett’s characters to consider the possibility of suicide, but rarely does suicide actually take place, and just as often it is left unclear as to why they do not follow through with their ideation. They merely go on with life. By the end of the story, Belacqua and Ruby too do not go through with their promised suicide. In fact, there are multiple instances where the narrator makes clear that Belacqua still wants to cling onto that which he apparently wants to let go. For instance, when Belacqua reveals to Ruby that he had composed a suicide note for both of them, it is said that the “notice was his own idea and he was quite proud of it” (93). It’s hard to imagine a seriously suicidal mind leaving behind a final farewell message 17 and feeling proud at the work he has just produced. There is yet an attachment to his own intellectual capabilities in Belacqua it seems. Further, he “[keeps] putting off opening the bag” (95) that holds the revolver and some barbiturates, and when the time to open the bag inevitably comes, he “[opens] the bag as little as possible… and [shuts] it quick” (96). Even as he walks towards the scene of his own execution for which he himself is the director, he seems unsure, hesitant, and perhaps even a little unwilling to go through with the scene, like a poor actor that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And when the moment is finally then and there, they go through a comical routine of: You first – Oh no, please, you first. Then, to both of their astonishment, a shot from the revolver goes off. With an accidental bang of the gun, the pact ends in a deflating bathos, while simultaneously revitalizing their lust for life. Naturally, “a great turmoil of life-blood” (99) springs in their hearts, and they fuck. With this story of a suicide attempt gone astray, Beckett seems to be teasing a couple of intriguing ideas in relation to suicide. First, that it can indeed be a source of comedy. From Belacqua’s futile attempt to justify his own suicidal ideation to the couple’s Punch-and-Judy-like movements near the end of the story, many aspects of the story bespeak notions of comedy. John Pilling finds that certain tongue-in-cheek aspects of the story such as the “unattributed Ronsard quotation which equates death and sex… seems to reduce the potential interest (and the ‘strange’-ness) of a suicide pact to a rather trivial joke” (Pilling 39). Yet, despite the seemingly insincere attitude towards suicide, Beckett also includes one of the more thoughtful considerations of the suicidal mind, since it “wittily resists the pathologisation of suicide in Belacqua’s suicide note, which references the practice of diagnosing suicide as ‘temporary insanity’ by declaring the act, instead, to be that of one who is ‘TEMPORARILY SANE’” (Maude 127). Such rejection of pathologization of suicide will continue to be the Beckettian 18 stance that will find its way in the later TV plays as well. But more importantly, Beckett also maintains that the suicidal mind is shrouded in obscurity. Although he considers this conclusion to be a cul-de-sac during the early stage of his career, he will later return to it with a more thoughtful reflection in his TV plays, albeit in an abstract form that seems to undo its own intent to reach deeper meaning, thereby signifying the significance of failure. In doing so, the effects of comedy will have disappeared. Here, the puppet-like movements, in particular, recall Henri Bergson’s theory on laughter where humour “consists in the momentary transformation of the physical into the machinic, when the mechanical encrusts itself onto the living” (Critchley 56). Later in the TV plays, the puppets will no longer signal comedy, but rather the complete lack of self-awareness and the grace of movement that results from it. But for now, let us stay a while longer with Beckett’s early-to-middle period works and their comical attitude towards suicide. One of Beckett’s most famous works Waiting for Godot abounds in references to suicide, most of which are quite humourous, especially in the first act. Not so much in the second. Humour lessens, weakens, and only a faint trace remains, as if reflecting the weakening effects of humour in Beckett’s oeuvre. In the opening moments of the play, Vladimir, setting the precedent for his endless blathering, reflects: “On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties” (Beckett 2). The pronoun “it” here refers to suicide, and Didi is lamenting over the missed opportunity to have thrown themselves from the top of the Eiffel Tower, hand in hand with Estragon. Within Didi’s reflection, there rings Cioran’s refutation of suicide where he argues that “it’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late” (Cioran 32). What would be the point of killing himself now, after so much delay during which there was so much suffering? Suicide certainly would not compensate for all that came before, would it? He indeed 19 should have thought of it a million years ago, perhaps the moment when he was born, when he barely had an inkling of a consciousness. But then how could he have conceived such a notion as a wailing little baby? Ay, there’s the rub; that’s the trouble with being born, I suppose. But the missed opportunity soon presents itself again as the pair contemplates the possibility of hanging themselves while waiting for Godot. That would pass the time indeed; too much time, perhaps. Although they become much excited with the prospect of getting an erection from hanging themselves, and all that follows, of course, where mandrakes will grow, their talk of suicide gets quickly sidetracked by what turns out to be a thoroughly meaningless practical consideration. In trying to determine who should go first, Estragon makes the argument that the heavier one of the two – Didi – should go first, so that they would know for sure whether the branch would hold them both. Had there been a clear disparity between the two men’s weight, it is indeed a fair point. Yet, they cannot even decide which one of them is heavier. In fact, there’s an even chance. Or nearly. So, what was the point of all the bickering? Unable to reach a verdict, they go back to idle waiting, for it is safer. There is an important detail to keep in mind during this scene, and it has to do with the tree. Previously, when discussing the look of tree, Vladimir guesses that it is a willow, while Estragon says that it looks more like a bush. Whichever the case – a bush, a shrub, a willow, no matter – what is certain is that none of the possible contenders have branches that are suitable for hanging two grown men. Review the photos of any production of Waiting for Godot, and one will find that in almost every production, the tree is not adequate for hanging; either the branches are too weak, or the tree is too short. Thus, in Beckett’s words, they exist “in the derisory shade of a tree you could not even hang yourself on” (Beckett 108). For the pair, suicide is not even a viable way out. In fact, there is no way out whatsoever. Merely 20 endless waiting. That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth, and even the tree makes a mockery of their suffering by denying them an exit point. Near the end of the second act, Gogo, in an attempt to measure the sturdiness of his belt for the purpose of hanging themselves, unties his belt and his trousers come loose. Here, the stage direction indicates that the trousers should fall to Gogo’s ankles. When Beckett discovered that in the first French production of Waiting for Godot Estragon’s trousers only fell half way, he immediately wrote to Roger Blin the director on 9th of January, 1953 saying: “It must seem silly to you, but to me it’s vital [that the pants fall right down to the ankles]” (Beckett 351). Clearly, the comical component in the scene was important. Why might that be? The comedy of the scene seems to serve a twofold function. On the one hand, it stages a comical situational irony where the attempt to rid themselves of their body and mind in fact makes them even more self-aware of their presence in the world. The unbuckling of the belt that served the purpose of annihilating the physical body only results in revealing and making more acutely aware the inescapable nakedness of physicality. Consequently, what is exposed is not the psychological suffering that Didi and Gogo are going through in the depth of their minds, which cannot be exposed in the first place, but rather only the shameful nakedness of the body. On the other hand, from the audience’s perspective, it undermines their “serious” contemplation of suicide. What is a tragedy for them is a comedy for us. Who was it that said “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot”? No matter who said it, Didi and Gogo would agree with such a characterization. (And since the theatre audience always views the stage in a “long shot”, perhaps there never was, never is, and never will be a tragedy in theatre at all. Perhaps it’s all just comedy.) For the pair, the scene is a tragedy, seen in close-up, marking the grotesque unveiling of bodily shame and the burgeoning of psychical suffering that is denied the chance to end itself. 21 For the audience, the scene is a comedy, viewed in a long shot, featuring a pair of helpless tramps who, in trying to kill themselves, only end up performing a Chaplinesque mime. Throughout the play, never does the audience get to truly understand the cause behind the pair’s suicidal ideation. One cannot know why Didi regrets not having thrown himself from the top of the Eiffel Tower. One cannot know why Gogo threw himself into the Rhône in the past, with Didi having to fish him out. One cannot know why Didi and Gogo want to hang themselves while waiting for Godot. Similarly, Didi and Gogo too can never quite fully understand or identify with one another’s suffering, despite their intimacy and proximity. This impenetrability of the Other’s suffering is humourously explored in an early scene in Act 1, as Gogo painfully attempts to take off his boots: ESTRAGON: [feebly] Help me! VLADIMIR: It hurts? ESTRAGON: [angrily] Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts! VLADIMIR: [angrily] No one ever suffers but you. I don’t count. I’d like to hear what you’d say if you had what I have. ESTRAGON: It hurts? VLADIMIR: [angrily] Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts! (Beckett 2) Yet again, Beckett points towards each and every person’s incapability to come to terms with another’s pain and to truly identify with the Other’s world of suffering. It is a sad thought perhaps, but through the mirthless laugh, which is “the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs… at that which is unhappy” (Beckett 39), the play seems to bring “elevation and liberation, the lucidity of consolation… We smile and find ourselves ridiculous. Our 22 wretchedness is our greatness” (Critchley 111). Hence, Waiting for Godot is not quite a Tragicomedy, with elements of tragedy and comedy coexisting in a measured balance, but rather a full-on comedy that is tragic – a tragic Comedy. It is, in essence, a comedy, but it makes light of tragedy, thereby sublimating serious subject matters like suicide and the impossibility of understanding a suffering mind into a source of laughter. For, after all, nothing is funnier than unhappiness. In Rough for Theatre II, as in “Love and Lethe”, suicidal ideation is the primary concern. The play evolves around C, who has his back turned against the audience throughout the whole play, and we never get to see C’s face nor hear C’s voice. Then there is the Beckettian pseudo-couple A and B who appear to be conducting a psychiatric assessment of C, debating whether to let him jump out the window or not, while C is completely excluded from their discussion. At times, A and B sound more like Kafkaesque bureaucrats, rather than psychiatrists, adopting an almost cruel, distant, impersonal attitude towards their subject. Leafing through various types of documents, ranging from diaries, case notes, and testimony from others, A and B is quite certain that C should be allowed to jump considering the diversity of C’s source of suffering: “Work, family, third fatherland, cunt, finances, art and nature, heart and conscience, housing conditions, God and man, so many disasters” (Beckett 72). B claims that they “have been to the best sources. All weighed and weighed again, checked and verified” (73). But by the end of the play, Beckett raises what could be seen as a challenge to the validity of such a verdict that is solely based on documents and testimonies. When A goes to inspect C by the window, he is surprised by something he finds there. He pulls out a handkerchief and raises it timidly towards C’s face. It is left unclear what he saw. Was it tears streaming down from C’s face? A snot dangling from the nose? Or sweat oozing out from fear of jumping? It is left unclear. What is clear, however, is that 23 despite all the apparent assiduous administrative work that went into accurately assessing C’s situation, the assessors are nevertheless surprised by what they did not expect to find. This, in turn, raises the question: just how effective is psychiatry in assessing the suicidal mind? Does it really reach the depth it attempts to reach in order to help the suicidal individual? Can it ever really know what it purports to know? Can anybody? Matthew Broome, who interprets the play as staging a psychiatric encounter, sees the play as addressing “the issue of making judgments about another individual based on written records, and the role of speech or the absence of speech in those judgments” (Heron and Broome 173). Indeed, “the use of case records and testimonies parallels some clinical encounters in psychiatry where important judgments are made by doctors, yet the individual about whom those judgments is made is unable or unwilling to take part in the consultation” (173), since C “is not allowed to comment upon any of the texts he has heard, and in a sense his selfhood is reduced to that which he says and does, or by contrast, that which he has said and done in the past” (173). If we keep in mind the belief that the motives behind suicidal ideation are “found subliminal to the point of defying expression” (Beckett 89), then C’s silence throughout the play makes much more sense, while the apparent accuracy of the written documents that explain away the motives of a suicidal mind is brought into question. Thus, the play addresses the issue of making judgments about a silent individual, who does not have the capacity for speech, nor the ability to represent himself in any shape or form, based on written records. Thus, Beckett could indeed be pointing out “the arbitrariness of social and human sciences and related disciplines” (Heron and Broome 175), since the text questions the effectiveness of quantifying that which is inherently unquantifiable, or more precisely, it questions whether that which cannot be easily summed up into coherent, logical expressions can 24 be, or even should be, forced into such expressions. As a wise Irishman once said, “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot.” One such great part of human existence is perhaps the dark corners of a dim mind wayfaring through barren lands of an exhausted psyche, and such an experience, perhaps, absolutely cannot be, and should not be, rendered into our common-sense-use of language. Even the lightly comic gig of the lamp lights switching on and off against the pair’s will seems to testify the kind of faulty light they are attempting to shed on the part of the mind that does not let in any source of light. Perhaps what cannot be lit up should not be lit up. But is that all there is to say? Perhaps not. The unexpected tear near the end, in turn, seems to testify the need to continue to reach into the dark, without necessarily willing to light up the dark, simply stumbling through it, without making judgements, without wanting to be sure of one’s orientation, so that the horror of the dark, the discomfort that results from the lack of understanding could be alleviated. Perhaps that is our one and only responsibility, if it could be said that there is one. Broome and Heron seem to echo this sentiment in their dialogue: “Just as they are arriving at this discovery the desk lamp fails, which perhaps represents our over-reliance on material evidence” (176). Drawing from Wilhelm Windelband’s “distinction between the idiographic and the nomothetic” (177), Broome explains that A and B might be following the nomothetic approach of understanding the human psyche. The distinction is as follows: the idiographic “[sees] the person as an irreducible unique event… [and the nomothetic relies] on general laws to understand them” (177). The idiographic approach may be more necessary “when an affective response is elicited towards the material under consideration. That is, the encounter demonstrates some sort of value of importance to you” (177). Considering the absolute 25 emotional detachment A and B maintains from C, it could be said that the pair completely excludes the idiographic approach and upholds the nomothetic, “looking at case notes and making judgments about causality, in terms of relating life events with the current situation… [They] close themselves down from idiographic understanding of C, as an individual. And part of that is due to the fact of not having appreciated him in terms of his speech or body” (177). Indeed, when a little smile is stamped on C’s face, A cannot even properly identify it, even though he has just been looking at C, and B too can “never make out what he thought he was doing with that smile on his face” (Beckett 79). Further, when something appears on C’s face, possibly yet another bodily manifestation of the presence of affect, A is aghast. At this final moment before the drawing of the curtains, something has clearly “[changed] which suggests that he might not jump, that the judgment is faulty and that his body has given some sort of meaning or new information that could not been known in the records” (Heron and Broome178). Yet, just as the bureaucratic analysts could not make anything out of the enigmatic smile, they cannot make anything out of whatever it is that they see. And we the audience are also implicit in this ignorance. Not only is C’s back turned against us, all the information that we have is relayed from A and B. Thus, Beckett places us as accomplices in ignorance, and the practice of making judgments about an individual only through what can be seen and known suddenly seems utterly inadequate. The three aforementioned examples in Beckett’s oeuvre touch upon the possibility of suicide, but the act itself does not take place in any of them. In fact, it rarely does in Beckett’s works. This might be because, as Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson notes, suicide “represented for [Beckett] an unacceptable kind of surrender” (504). Just as Beckett possessed “a firm personal determination to go on, refusing stubbornly to give in” (505), his characters also 26 reflect this inexplicable resolution to go on: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett 407), says the unnamable as his final words. Beckett’s first venture into television Eh Joe marks a departure from this trend. In one of the very rare cases, a suicide actually does take place. (Or does it?) There are other points of departure that can be located in Eh Joe as well. Most significantly, that it deals with the suicide of the Other. This is also the case in some other works such as Embers and How It Is, but in these works the suicide of the Other haunting the protagonist is not as pronounced as it is in Eh Joe. Usually in Beckett’s works, the characters themselves contemplate the possibility of suicide: such as in “Love and Lethe”, Molloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, and Film, just to name a few. In Eh Joe, the protagonist is at pains to come to terms with another person’s suicide, and this “guilty conscience” seems to take up the centre stage in the play. Or does it? Let us now see how Beckett’s representation, or should I say, imagination, of suicide begins to take on a slightly different shade of meaning in his televisual works. 27 chapter 2 A man sits on his bed. Alone. In the dark. He gets up slowly, rushes over to the window, then to the door, then to the cupboard, opening each and surveying, making sure… of what none can know, and then closing. Finally, he turns to his bed, looks underneath, rises, and sits back on his bed. As he is about to take off his socks, a voice begins to speak to him. A vituperative voice that berates him coldly of his loneliness, unrewarding religiosity, and the pathetic little state of that penny farthing hell he calls his mind. The voice tells him things he does not seem to want to hear. Harsh truths, supposedly. One of them involves a young girl, the man’s past love, the green one, the narrow one, always pale, pale in the eyes, spirit made light. She killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. She laid down by the stone, near the beach, in her lavender slip, and met her death. Alone. In the dark. When the voice trails off, the man’s pained expression softens and slowly breaks into a “triumphant” smile. What’s he smiling about? Is he some kind of sadomasochist who derives pleasure from imagining the suffering of others and from re-living that suffering in himself? Perhaps. One would have to know how he conducts himself in bed with that slut who pays him a visit every Saturday. Penny a hoist, tuppence as long as he likes. Cheap slut that one. (Or is Joe the cheapened one, relying as he does solely on the transaction of love?) Imprimis: first interpretation. Poor old Joe hears voices in his head. This night, the voice is that of an old lover, a sour one, who moved on from Joe to find someone kinder, stronger, more intelligent, better looking, cleaner, truthful, faithful, and… sane. In short, preferable in all respects. Now, she is back from the dead to torment Joe about his past and present. It is unlikely that she personally knew of the green one. But the dead in our minds keep no secrets from one another. So the voice tells Joe of this old lover Joe had presumably abandoned. Joe, supposedly, 28 does not know what really happened; he merely read of the incident in an article from The Independent. The voice gives him the image of the scene. Nothing more. She demands that he imagine. Then, finally, she fucks off. Now, at least for the night, Joe has managed to vanquish this mean voice, and he can rest at ease. Hence, the “victorious” smile. In this reading, the suicide of the green one is something very real that haunts Joe. Perhaps this is what led some critics to see the play as “a maudlin account of guilt” (Gontarski 117). But to limit the narrative of Eh Joe to a mere reflection on guilt would be to remain ignorant of the various other mysterious aspects of the play into which Beckett breathes life. His first venture into television is not just a reflection on guilt, but also a haunting commentary on memory, the presence of the absence of the Other, the impossibility of knowing the Other, and yet the obligation to make the attempt to step closer to the Other despite the foretold failure inherent in the attempt. Along this path, Graley Herren sees Eh Joe, with a string of other TV plays that came afterwards in the succeeding decades, as “memory machines: sites for recollecting and reinventing personal, philosophical, and artistic pasts” (1). Indeed, Herren is right to point out that “memory is in truth a vital concern in most of Beckett’s late work” (3). From the radio play Embers to late stage plays like Not I (1972) and Footfalls (1976), many of his late period works feature a protagonist who cannot help but indulge in remembrance of things past. Likewise, Joe is haunted by the traumatic memory of the green one and her suicide. Pointing out that the “suicide of the green one is unexcavated psychic terrain for Joe”, Herren writes: “Eh Joe dramatizes his creative attempts to deal with this trauma through strategies of internalization, identification, and imagination” (56). Drawing from Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, Herren sees Joe as a melancholic mourner who “refuses to accept the loss and thus refuses to withdraw his attachment. In the absence of the love-object, the melancholic 29 internalizes his resentment over abandonment inward, thus heaping scorn upon himself” (56). Because Joe is a hopeless melancholic, Herren interprets the teleplay as demonstrating “Joe’s suicidal fantasy” (61). Thus, the play is not just concerned with the suicide of the green one, but also anticipates Joe’s own self-annihilation, driven by the vicious attack of melancholia. Indeed, Beckett’s oeuvre is full of mystery and open-ended questions. Because of the stripped-down, bare-boned nature of his works, they invite readings of all kinds that often contradict as well as complement one another. Therefore, contrary to Herren’s reading, I’d like to suggest a different path. The reason why I am somewhat hesitant to read Eh Joe as Joe’s “suicidal fantasy” is that it gives the play an unwarranted sense of finality. The experience of reading Beckett’s plays is that it often gives the feeling that it could go on ad infinitum despite the curtains being drawn down to signify an end. At the end of the second act in Waiting for Godot, the final stage direction [They do not move] implies the very circularity of the play. Didi and Gogo will be there the next day, yet again, to wait for the man who will, yet again, tell them he won’t be coming via the messenger boy. Similarly, I do not see the word “Last” in Krapp’s Last Tape as meaning “final”, but rather “most recent”. What we are witnessing in the play is simply Krapp’s most recent recording, and he will go on to make another one, and another one, and yet another one, until the day he expires, but of course, he never will, no matter how much he desires that end, because, well, because he is a fictional creation who escapes the inescapable mortality of human beings. All literary works must come to an end. They cannot go on forever. They must, in another word, commit suicide. Yet, Beckett’s works have the proclivity to avoid this end. They circle back to the beginning, just like the last sentence of Finnegans Wake circling right back to the book’s opening sentence. Hence, I do not see Eh Joe as “Joe’s Last Videotape” (61), but rather as one of many videotapes that came before and will come after. 30 But why does he make this particular version of the videotape? Why torture himself thus? Is it because he is a melancholic who cannot grapple with the suicide of his past love? Perhaps. But perhaps it is an occasion for, as Herren implies in his argument, imagination. Where Herren argues that “Eh Joe dramatizes his creative attempts to deal with this trauma through strategies of internalization, identification, and imagination” (56), and proceeds to focus on the melancholic aspect of Joe’s psyche, I’d like to focus on the final item on the list – imagination – and consider this to be the paramount act that generates a different take on suicide when compared to the rest of Beckett’s oeuvre. Herren is right to point out that the description of the suicide near the end of the play is “not only secondary but utterly speculative” (57). He writes: “‘The Suicide of the Green One’ is an embedded fiction, a virtual play within the play. By voice’s own admission the suicide was a private and solitary act: no witnesses, no suicide note, no more old lip from her. Vivid and compelling as the account may be, the story of the green one’s suicide must be understood as just that, an imaginative story” (57). In his teleplay, Beckett certainly leaves enough breadcrumbs of psychoanalysis scattered around to be picked up – dead parents being throttled in Joe’s head, suppressed libido, and melancholia for a dead girl, etc. But he simultaneously seems to guide us away from the clutch of psychoanalysis by placing considerable emphasis on the act of imagining and creating. Hence, instead of taking a psychological turn and attempting a psychoanalysis of Joe and interpreting the state of his psyche, I’d like to focus on what it might mean to imagine a scene of suicide. With this thought, I turn to the second interpretation of Eh Joe: Joe is a devised devisor who devises another devisor who devises a scene. In Stan Gontarski’s words, “Beckett devised Joe who devised Voice who devised the girl in green” (118), thus having Joe participate as a segment in a series of forever regressing Matryoshka dolls. Thus, the play becomes a reflection 31 on imagination and artistic creation, ultimately posing the question: what does it mean to create a fictional scene of suicide, both for the one who is devising (artist) and for the one witnessing the devising (audience)? Now, the green one may have been an actual lover from Joe’s past and her suicide may have actually happened, and it was indeed reported in a local newspaper. But no one was there to witness it. Joe himself certainly could not have been there. And so, he simply recreates the moment in his mind, while simultaneously distancing himself from it through the intermediary vehicle of the Voice. He does not pathologize the suicide, nor does he attempt to interpret the precise motivation behind it. Instead, from the outset, he acknowledges the impossibility of doing so, and simply gives life to the scene through an auditory image. What this simple imaginative pictorial re-creation of suicide signifies on the one hand is the staunch refusal to identify and understand the precise motives behind the suicide. As Al Alvarez cogently puts in his study on suicide and literature, “The real motives which impel a man to take his own life… belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight” (123). Similarly, in her book on suicide, Kay Redfield Jamison touches upon the living’s desperate desire to want to understand what was going on in the suicide’s psyche and the inability to do so: “We assign meaning to the logistics of the act… in the hope of entering an inaccessible state of mind” (130). As a result, as Critchley argues, “suicide produces a peculiar inversion of biography, where all of one’s acts are read backwards through the lens of one’s last moment (82). Such a reading “might grant life coherence, but only by robbing it of complexity by viewing it through the instant of one’s death” (82). And so, perhaps to interpret a suicide, or to analyze a suicidal mind, is not only doomed to failure from the outset, for it tries to reach the depth that cannot be reached, but also could be an act bordering on gross simplification, for it 32 assumes that a complex cause culminates in an effect that can be unpacked with simple hermeneutics. This is not to say that an attempt to identify with the suicide in works of art is an unethical act marked by hubris. In her essay, Ulrika Maude gives two poignant instances in literature where the writer makes a sympathetic identification with the suicide and depicts it as an understandable act. In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf “[represents Septimus Smith’s suicide] with compassion, understanding, and most strikingly, identification” (120), through the protavigonist Clarissa, who “felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living” (Woolf 158). Likewise, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses Leopold Bloom continuously obsesses over his father’s death throughout the episodes, exclaiming “Poor Papa” or “Poor man” (Joyce 73, 106, 513). Ultimately, as “Bloom recollects his father’s suicide in the ‘Hades’ episode, the words ‘No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns’ appear (93)” (Maude 122). Again, there is an explicit degree of sympathy and identification with the act, without, of course, giving the reader full account as to why the suicide committed suicide. Though such considerations of suicide appear much more understanding when compared to the religious and juridical attitudes towards the suicide in 17th century Europe, for example, the question still remains: can one truly identify with the suicide? Are the reasons and the motives that lay hidden in the dark corners of a mind really discernible when the lights have gone out? Is it ever possible to locate them, come to terms with them, and relate to them? Beckett’s representation of suicide in this instance, on the other hand, completely lacks the attempt at identification. Instead of the identification, there is merely imagination. And what form does this imagination take? The play consists of one long tracking shot that begins with a 33 survey of the room, following Joe in his own surveillance of his surroundings. Then, the camera approaches Joe sitting on the bed, slowly closing in on his face in 4-inch increments. In his essay on “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, Deleuze, citing Jean-Luc Godard, whether correctly or incorrectly, I cannot tell, asks: “What does Jean-Luc Godard mean when, in the name of cinema, he asserts that between a tracking shot and a panoramic shot there lies a ‘moral problem’?” (Deleuze 83). What exactly does this question mean, and what ramification might it have for the tracking shot that entirely makes up Eh Joe? A panoramic shot is an extreme wide angle shot that is considerably more horizontally elongated compared to other shot scales. In visual media, its distinguishing feature would be its ability to scan an entire geography with a slight pan, turning left and right, surveying all that can be surveyed. Although it excludes as much as it includes, it purports to be an all-inclusive image; it seems to freeze time and space, capturing all that it can in one single casting of the camera eye. Often, it is used as an establishing shot that surveys the larger setting, preparing the audience for the action that will soon take place. A tracking shot, on the other hand, explores the minute spaces within the flow of time. It makes the flowing of time through space palpable, stylistic even, and therefore, it is used as an opportunity for a cinematographer to show off their prowess. Because it explores space with a liberated movement, the tracking shot can focus on details that the panoramic shot cannot. In other words, the panoramic shot relates the macro, whereas the tracking shot can, but not always, relate the micro picture. The micro picture in Eh Joe is, of course, Joe. But, explore as it may, as close as it can, the camera cannot penetrate through Joe’s inner mind. It must inevitably stop when it reaches the impenetrable wall that is Joe’s skull. (I wonder, if he had access to modern CGI, would Beckett have penetrated all the way in, as the camera does in Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, going all the way into Linda’s vagina during coitus? Perhaps he might’ve found it a little 34 too “gimmicky”, and indeed he had expressed his aversion to CGI in the past, but it is a curious thought.) Because, the play is a detailed investigation of one corner of Joe’s mind, it seems only natural that Beckett relied on the tracking shot to achieve this end. But simultaneously, he makes explicit the limit of the tracking shot, clearly demarcating the boundary where the tracking shot’s investigation must come to an end. Hence, the “moral problem” of the tracking shot for Beckett is to be found in its inherent potential as well as its limit – it can provide a much more acute analysis of the subject that the panoramic shot cannot, but it can also only go so far. Where it cannot reach is the inner depth of the human mind. Thus, the way Beckett uses the tracking shot seems to run parallel with Beckett’s notion on the suicidal mind and the suicide: that one cannot ever reach the depth of the mind and know what one wants to know. When it comes to imagining the suicide scene, Beckett takes a slightly different approach. As the camera closes in on Joe’s face, the suicide story that the Voice tells replicates the cinematographic technique of close-ups and montage editing. Consider the final segment of the play and the command that comes just before: “Imagine what in her mind to make her do that… Imagine…” (Beckett 206). Of course, one cannot even imagine what in her mind made her do that, let alone know. One can, however, imagine the scene, where the body lay. Alone. In the dark. In the cold. And what does this imagination look like? All right… You’ve had the best… Now imagine… Before she goes… [Imagine]… Face in the cup… Lips on a stone… [A stone]… Taking Joe with her… Light gone… “Joe Joe.”… No sound… To the stones… [The stones]… Say it you now Joe, no one’ll hear you… Say “Joe” it parts the lips… [The lips]… Imagine the hands… [Imagine]… The solitaire… Against a stone… [A stone]… Imagine the eyes… [The 35 Eyes]… Spiritlight… Month of June… What year of your Lord?... The breasts… In the stones… The hands… Before they go… Imagine the hands… [Imagine]… What are they at?... In the stones… [The stones]… (206-207). First, a brief note on the above citation. The published script by Grove Press in The Collected Shorter Plays differs slightly from the actual monologue used in the 1966 BBC2 production. When Alan Gibson was directing the play, Beckett placed additional repetitions of certain words – imagine, stone, lips, eyes, hands – and the alterations are noted in the square brackets. The rest of the italics are in the original script as well. But notice how the words that are italicized in the original script are the very ones that were added throughout this segment. Clearly, Beckett wanted to give emphasis to the close-ups of the body parts and the word “imagine”. But why? It appears that for Beckett, there lies a moral problem between a tracking shot and a close up. Prior to this moment, the sequence of the green one attempting to push through with the suicide is told in a verbal tracking shot; that is, Voice follows and describes the green one’s movements smoothly, as if in one single take, albeit with verbal cuts in between, at times briefly cutting to the “faint lap of sea through open window” (205) or the “moon going off the shore behind the hill” (206). Consider the way Voice follows the green one’s movement in minute detail: “Warm summer night… Sitting on the edge of her bed in her lavender slip… Gets up in the end and slips out as she is… Down the garden and under the viaduct… Goes on down the edge and lies down with her face in the wash… Gets up in the end sopping wet and back up to the 36 house… Gets out the Gillette… Back down the garden and under the viaduct… Takes the blade from the holder and lies down at the edge on her side… Gets up in the end and back up to the house… Gets the tablets and back down the garden and under the viaduct… Takes a few on the way… Then starts along the edge to a place further down near the Rock… Takes a few more on the way… Lies down in the end with her face a few feet from the tide… Finishes the tube…” (205-206, ellipsis included). This movement, a mere movement of the body, is somewhat imaginable, or in other words, followable through a tracking shot. It is the kind of detail that can be captured and imagined. But when the moment of death nears, Beckett suddenly switches to a verbal montage of close-ups of body parts such as the lips, the hands, the eyes, and the breasts, along with the stones. Why does he suddenly make this switch? All the while, the camera remains in extreme close up on Joe’s face as it frowns and twitches in anguish. Just as the camera cannot push forth into Joe’s inner psyche, implying that we the viewers can only go so far in terms of understanding what is properly going through Joe’s mind, Joe also cannot push forth with his mental tracking shot all the way into the green one’s psyche; he simply cannot imagine what in her mind made her do that. He can only imagine the sheer physicality of her death, the sensations on her body parts as she lies touching the cold stones. And so, all he can do is stay awhile on the surface image itself, imagining the most he can, as close to it as possible. In this respect for the impenetrability of the Other, one could find Levinas’s attitude towards the Other, where only “if the other is thought as absolutely other can an ethics as first philosophy” be possible at all (Weller 4). For Levinas, the concept of responsibility, and more 37 specifically, responsibility for the Other, is important in that it is thought of as a means of alleviating the horror of what he calls the il y a: “Levinas’s entire philosophy will be the attempt to think this departure from the absurd horror of the il y a by way of an ethical relation with the Other, a taking responsibility for the Other, and ultimately a taking responsibility for the death of the Other” (6). And what is this il y a? “With the il y a, Levinas asks us to undertake a thought-experiment, ‘Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness’” (Critchley 66). In this void, where all beings and things are annihilated, there would be the ultimate nothing. But he goes on to claim that “this very nothingness of all existents would itself be experienced as a kind of presence: an impersonal, neutral and indeterminate feeling” (66). This presence of impersonality, neutrality, and indeterminateness is what he calls the il y a. As abstract as it may sound, and as much as I myself have extreme difficulty properly coming to an understanding with it, I feel like I have experienced it during those sleepless nights in my childhood where, after my mother kneeled down next to my bed, praying, then kissing me goodnight, closing the door behind her, I lied down staring into the darkness, thinking what it would be like to be dead. Despite her prayers, I could never quite bring myself to believe in this notion of such a thing called heaven and hell. I imagined my own death, where ‘I’ no longer existed, and yet still somehow managed to feel the immense oppressive void everywhere. Mute, black, void everywhere. No trace of my loved ones, no trace of any living being, no trace of me. Imagine that going on for infinity. Imagination dead. Everything dead. Imagine. There in my bed, the void became palpable, and I felt a heavy weight crushing my heart. That must’ve been the horror of the il y a. For Levinas, our responsibility towards the Other, which is to respect the Other as the absolute Other, is the very means of escape when faced with the absurdity of the il y a, and 38 that is why the ethical relationship with the Other is so important to him. But is this responsibility towards the Other what we find in Beckett? Not quite, it seems. I have difficulty categorizing Beckett as an “existential” writer because what was a problem for the existentialist philosophers of the mid-20th century was not necessarily a problem for Beckett. He is never interested in “arguing about the absurdity of the human condition” (Esslin 25), and posing a “solution”, as Camus does in The Myth of Sisyphus, but rather he “merely presents it in being – that is, in terms of concrete stage images” (25). In other words, “Beckett accepts the postulate of absurdity and hence the meaninglessness of existence as a starting point… [but] unlike existential philosophy, Beckett refuses to transfigure this initial meaninglessness into a meaning for existence” (Critchley 174). Likewise, for Beckett, the “il y a certainly appears to be irreducible and inescapable in a way that it is not for Levinas, blocking the path to the ethical” (Weller 29). Thus, the significant point of departure from Levinas in Beckett would be that he refuses the salvific narrative that is to be discovered through the Other. Instead, the horror of the il y a is to be confronted, not overcome. He was never a man who shied away from looking directly into the eyes of the destitution of humanity. He faced up to it, lived it in himself, and sublimated that horror into beauty on stage and page. The horror of the il y a in Eh Joe I locate in the impasse, the cul de sac, where the camera must come to a stop, and where imagination must come to a stop. As the camera gets right up to Joe’s face, and as we face the limit that is Joe’s face, Joe, in turn, faces the limits of the green one’s physical boundaries in his imagination. Right there, within that incremental space between Joe and the green one, between Joe and us, lies the immense gulf of the il y a, the inexpressible, inexplicable void between the Self and the Other. Yes, Levinas is commendable in one sense; it would be so cool if we could all believe that we are 39 born into this world of responsibility where the responsibility towards the Other should be the first step in not just philosophy, but in all aspects of existence. But because of this immense gulf between the Self and the Other, such responsibility is doomed to failure. The horror of the il y a is inescapable through the Other because it is the very setting that encompasses the encounter between the Self and the Other. The responsibility towards the Other that is to be weaponized in the face of the horror of the il y a can never quite universally materialize, because the irreconcilable void between the Self and the Other is what is, in fact, so universal. And, of course, it is the suicide of the Other that makes this distinction ever so clear. If my own death is, as Critchley says, “my ownmost possibility” (80), my suicide would be the most authentic expression of mine Self. Because it is so, the Other’s suicide, for me, would be the Other’s ownmost possibility of expressing their Otherness. It is the ultimate act by the Other, of the Other, which is at once the most authentic expression of their Otherness. Joe, and by extension, Beckett, seems to have been instinctively compelled by this idea of suicide of the Other as the innermost expression of Otherness. When the Other has expressed her innermost possibility as the Other through her death, this Otherness becomes one with the very essence of the il y a that simply cannot be overcome, or bridged, or escaped, or however you want to express it. And perhaps this is why Beckett was so insistent on distancing the communion between Joe and the green one through the medium of the Voice. Indeed, “Eh Joe leaves little doubt that Voice, and all her vocal predecessors, are internal manifestations, emanating not from without but from within” (Herren 54), despite her own biting remark to Joe: “You know that penny farthing hell you call your mind… That’s where you think this is coming from, don’t you?” (Beckett 203). But because he really cannot ever get close to a common understanding with the green one’s suicide, his imaginative relationship with the 40 green one must absolutely be further displaced through Voice who will naturally belittle him for his lack of knowledge and the failure to imagine. In 1979, when Enzo Maurri from Radiotelevisione Italiana wrote to Beckett requesting “permission to produce Eh Joe with the recorded voice of the actor, rather than the female recorded voice called for by the stage directions”, claiming that “the change would not disturb the meaning of the play, since the voice was, according to him, that of Joe’s conscience” (Craig et al. 505), Beckett’s curt reply was a defiant “No.” Leafing through his volumes of letters, one will find a man so loving and caring to his loved ones, and genuinely respectful and kind to distant associates and curious scholars, producers, and directors. On this particular occasion, his letter lacks the usual cordial valedictions like “Yours sincerely”, “Yours very cordially”, “Best always”. He sounds offended almost by this somewhat understandable, but ultimately disrespectful, request. Again, the Othering of Joe from us, and the Othering of the green one for Joe was, for Beckett, an absolutely imperative matter. It is from this perspective that I would like to discuss the closing image of Eh Joe – the enigmatic smile. When talking about the smile in his letters to producers and directors, Beckett often describes the smile as a “victorious” one, albeit with an ironic quotation mark around the word. In the 7th April, 1966 letter to Alan Schneider, who was to direct the American broadcast of Eh Joe, Beckett writes: “I asked in London and Stuttgart for a smile at the end (oh not a real smile). He ‘wins’ again” (Beckett 23). Later, in 1985, when writing to Rick Cluchey, to whom Beckett had given rare permission to bring Eh Joe to the stage at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, he writes: “The stillness of intent listening belongs also to the silences. Then he does not relax but continues to listen – for the voice to resume or expire, quashed at last. Thus his “victorious” smile at the end (refused by Bennent) should not come 41 too soon after cessation of voice” (665). Indeed, “[no] such smile is visible on the face of Bennent (to Beckett’s great dismay)” (Bishop 169) in the 1979 Süddeutsche Rundfunk (SDR) re-production of Eh Joe. Perhaps this is what made the experience of participating in the 1979 SDR production not particularly pleasant for Beckett: “Work here going reasonably well, though my heart not in it. Heinz Bennent (Joe) not the easiest to get on with” (Beckett 499), he writes in a letter addressed to his friend A.J. Leventhal on the 13th January, 1979. What becomes clear from these letters are: first, that the smile should be there at the end was a capital matter for Beckett, and two, the smile is not to be seen as a literal “victory”. So why include this smile that is not even a real smile? After all, there is nothing to smile about considering what Joe has just gone through. The viewing audience is also not likely to find the final smile very relatable, since the harsh diatribe that has transpired, instead of bringing a smile to the face, is more likely to have brought discomfiture to say the least. Yet, the final enigmatic smile is there, against all expectations. Along the path of Beckett’s investment in failures, in lessness, and in impotence, I read this smile as a smile signifying not a victory, but a defeat, an inevitable failure. In an oft-quoted interview with Israel Shenker writing for the New York Times, Beckett, remarking on his aesthetic divergence from Joyce, said: “The kind of work I do is one in which I am not master of my material… [Joyce’s] tendency is toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance” (Shenker qtd. in Gontarski 6). Similarly, in his conversation with Georges Duthuit, his friend and the editor of the magazine Transition, he characterizes the radical aesthetic of failure thus: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (Beckett 139, emphasis added). Indeed, Beckett’s works from the 42 middle to late period will be all about this impotence, this inevitable failure, coupled with the obligation to express the failure regardless. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Beckett 77), he wrote in one of his last prose pieces Worstward Ho (1983). Does this sound like a final lament of an exhausted artist who has exhausted all possibilities of expression? Hardly. Joe, like others in so many of Beckett’s works, is indeed exhausted, but he will never be done revolving it all in his mind. Revolving what? Throttling the dead? No. He will never be done creating, expressing, failing, failing again, failing better, and failing worse. Perhaps it is true that Beckett’s “teleplays dramatize the failure of love” (Herren 175), that there is “not a meaningful, sustainable, open love connection with another person” (177). But the very fact that there is a cyclical form to this constant failure, the fact that there is always a return to the attempt, despite knowing the failure foretold, could perhaps be seen as a form of love, a failed love, but love nevertheless. Hence, I’d like to follow Oscar Wilde and claim that imagination is also a form of love. He “defines love in De Profundis as giving what one does have and receiving that over which one has no power” (Critchley 46). Does not Joe give all that he can – a space in his mind, the time, the effort to imagine, the return to this effort despite the constant failure – and receive everything that over which he has no power, channeled through the diatribe of the Voice who gives Joe the painful, inexplicable picture of the Other into which Joe can never really penetrate? What we are witnessing is not a sadomasochist indulging in self-torture, but rather an artist in the midst of the painful process of creation that is bound to fail. Hence, the smile at failure – the failure to imagine, coupled with the obligation to imagine, the failure to create, inextricably tied to the need to create – a smile that smiles at the inescapable paradox of a failed expression, a weakening expression. 43 44 chapter 3 After the broadcast of Eh Joe in 1966, Beckett returned to television 10 years later in 1976, and he referred to his new TV play as a “cross between Godot & Eh Joe” (Beckett 419) during the inchoate stages of its composition. Later called Ghost Trio, the play indeed shares the basic premise with its predecessor: a man in a room, sitting, alone, accompanied by a voice. Like Joe, the unnamed Figure surveys the room, opening and closing the door and the window. But this time, the relationship between Figure and Voice is much less direct. There is no vicious tirade, no mockery, and not even a story. The voice, functioning more like a “master of ceremonies” (Brater 87), directs both the viewers’ attention as well as the figure’s movements; in this strange televisual puppetry, all subjectivity seems to have been stripped away from both the man and the voice. Then, later, as in Waiting for Godot, a boy shows up, only to shake his head twice with a faint smile on his face and leave without a word. The play is divided into three parts: Pre-action, Action, and Re-action. As if to reflect this tripartite structure of the play, there are three camera positions from which the segments are shot: Position A, showing general view of the room; Position B, the medium shot of the room; and Position C, the near shot of Figure and various other components of the room. Pre-action begins with Position A, with the voice setting the scene in a faint, colourless voice and bringing the viewers’ attention to each of the elements in the room (not all, however, and this is a point to which we shall return later on) – the floor, the wall, the door, the window, and the pallet. These components, however, like the occupant of the room, have been stripped of all of the functionality and personality that is usually endowed upon various assemblages of a bedroom. Indeed, Enoch Brater, in his book Beyond Minimalism, seems to reinforce this very idea: “Beckett has used studio geometry not so much to temper any sentimentality that might 45 undermine his drama, but rather to evoke an emotional response from the interplay of the geometric pattern itself” (86). Hence, much of the scholarship on Ghost Trio focuses on the utterly de-personalized, de-familiarized, and de-functionalized nature of this strange space. Gilles Deleuze, for instance, argues in “The Exhausted” that “these elements are de-functionalized”, and that “these objects in space are strictly identical to the parts of space” (164-65). This leads him to declare Figure’s room as an example of “any-space-whatever” (165), which he defines in the same essay as “disused, unmodified, even though it is entirely determined geometrically” (160). Elaborating on his definition, he again writes: “The any-space-whatever is populated and well-trodden, it is even that which we ourselves populate and traverse, but it is opposed to all our pseudoqualified extensions” (160). The line Deleuze then quotes from Beckett’s short prose work “Fizzle 8: For to end yet again” serves useful in understanding what Deleuze means here: “neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away” (Beckett 246). This is indeed an apt way to think of F’s room. It looks neither like my room nor yours, nor like anyone else’s room, but it also shares the very basic situation of all of our rooms – populated and geometrically determined (while the elements of the room are stripped off of all personal signification, in the published script Beckett gives very precise dimensions of the Room (6m x 5m) and its components (either 0.70m x 1.50m or 0.70m x 2m)). And Voice, too, directing the viewer’s attention to the floor in a strange close-up, which makes the floor not look like a floor at all but a mere geometric shape, claims that “having seen that specimen of floor you have seen it all” (Beckett 246). Then follows a series of close-ups of rectangles in fragments. In this any-space-whatever, there are only any-floor-whatever, any-wall-whatever, any-door-whatever, any-window-whatever, and any-pallet-whatever. Seeing F’s room as “an any-space-whatever in fragmentation, in close-ups” (Deleuze 46 165), Deleuze cites Robert Bresson: “fragmentation ‘is indispensable if one does not want to fall into representation… Isolate the parts. Make them independent as a way of giving them a new dependence.’ Disconnect them to allow for a new connection” (165). So, the purpose of the de-functionalization of the room and its components Deleuze sees as a means of forging and communicating a new kind of connection between the components, thereby avoiding the usual entrapment of representation and paving a new mode of aesthetic expression. Deleuze, elaborating on the precise meaning of this new connection, further writes: “all these parts plunge into the void, each in its own way, each revealing the emptiness into which they are plunging… So that the passage and the succession from one part to another only serves to connect or link together unfathomable voids” (166). This is perhaps what leads Deleuze to declare that between Eh Joe and Ghost Trio, “a kind of vocal and spatial purification takes place” (166), championing the latter’s move away from language II to language III. For Deleuze, Beckett’s oeuvre can be divided into three stages: language I, language II, and language III. The first is “a language in which enumeration replaces propositions and combinatorial relations replace syntactic relations” (156), or, in short, “a combinatorial imagination ‘sullied by reason’” (158). With language I, “Beckett is engaged in an ars combinatoria whose intention is to exhaust the possible through the elaborate extension of rationality into meaningless absurdity” (Critchley 179). Here, enumeration of the possible “[replaces] semantic propositions” (Gardner 3). As Ronald Bogue points out, “Such a language is that of Watt’s and Molloy’s lists of permutations [for example, Molloy’s sucking stones and the movement of furniture in Watt, but also Murphy’s biscuits], a collection of words severed from their usual networks of linguistic connotations” (Bogue qtd. in Gardner 3). Language II is “no longer a language of names but of voices, a language that no longer operates with 47 combinable atoms but with blendable flows” (Deleuze 156), or, in short, “imagination sullied by memory” (158). Consider the nameless voice that drifts in the void in The Unnamable as well as in How It Is. In these works, the voices “speak against the possibility of speaking, [trying] to be done with words by voicing an almost inaudible murmur” (Critchley 179). Or in radio plays like Embers and the stage play Not I (1972), the characters “exhaust words by speaking through the language of others/the Other, creating a multiplicitous interpenetration and dissolution of usually distinct binary oppositions such as ‘I’ and ‘Not I’, ‘I’ and ‘she’” (Gardner 3). In these works, the source of the voice is unidentifiable, and the voices themselves seem to deny the possibility of coming from a particular source. The distinction between speaking subject and listening subject begins to disintegrate, although there are still traces of personal memory to be found in what the voices relate. Finally, in language III there is “no longer a language of names or voices but a language of images, resounding and coloring images” (Deleuze 159). It is, therefore, pure image, extricated from the mess of all personalized memory, reason, trauma, and so on. Such pure image, of course, works in accordance with the any-space-whatever that also has been stripped off of all personal dimensions. Hence, when Deleuze says that a “purification” has taken place between Eh Joe and Ghost Trio, he perhaps means the abandonment of all Subjectivity. There is no longer a Self in Ghost Trio, but merely voids, fully depotentialized, thereby opening up the potential for new connections between the voids. Similarly, Graley Herren points out that the “opening general view of the ‘familiar chamber’ is followed by a ‘defamiliarizing’ shot-breakdown” (75). The close-up of each of the components in the room, he argues, “effectively removes each item from its context within the room. Isolated on screen, these familiar objects become estranged” (75). He then goes on posit: “The grey rectangles framed on screen look more like Mark Rothko paintings than utilitarian 48 domestic objects” (75-76). While it is a somewhat fitting parallel, I would argue, along the lines of Deleuze’s notion of “purification” and the total absence of the Self, that the grey rectangles framed on screen look more like Malevich’s suprematist rectangles (as in Suprematist Painting: Rectangle and Circle (1915)) than Mark Rothko paintings, since there is too much colour (used in the Beckettian sense of the word, where it signifies “emotion”) in Rothko even when he uses dark monotones. Drawing from Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of “defamiliarization”, where the “technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 219), Herren argues that we are first trained to look at the familiar chamber in Pre-action, only to be “retrained to ‘look closer’ in a new light, from a new perspective” (76). Colin Gardner also points towards this de-personalization of space as well. On Ghost Trio, he writes: “Unlike most filmic space, where setting and scenery act as a form of free indirect discourse, expressing interior and latent character states, Beckett strips the room of any personal psychology, reducing all colour and tone to a uniform grey, completely devoid of shadow and dimensionality” (126). Following Deleuze, he adds later in the essay that the “pragmatic possibilities of the room in Ghost Trio are thus exhausted through a process of defunctionalization, transforming door, wall, window and floor into a succession of homogeneous grey geometric forms as they are successively named and catalogued by Voice” (132). Indeed, the grey emptiness of F’s room certainly invites such analyses. But has it really been stripped off of all subjectivity? Have all links to personal memory been severed? Perhaps not completely. During the Pre-action sequence, a faint fragment from Largo of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Trio in D major (also commonly known as “Ghost Trio”) appears three times. The 49 first two of the three are paired with shots of the door, thereby making perhaps the one and only linkage between the various fragmented elements during the sequence. Why might this be? What to make of this sole connection that blooms in the void? First of all, what is a door? A door, unlike a wall, suggests an opening. It is a feature that implies a sliver of infinite possibilities that could flow into the closed circuit of the any-space-whatever. Anything can come and go through it, a new beginning, a new experience, or even old fears. In relation to the situation of F, that the door and the music are inextricably tied seems to suggest a possibility of the last traces of subjectivity that can be found within F. A woman, a boy, or even something more abstract like inspiration and memory could come through the point that simultaneously divides and connects inside and outside. So perhaps F is precisely the site that marks the potential for new connections to be forged between the voids. F, in other words, is the resulting product of newly formed linkages, the sole figure flowering into existence within the decomposing any-space-whatever: re-composition of Self in de-composition of space. The scholarship surrounding Ghost Trio has the proclivity to snatch up the red herring in the title thrown by Beckett, linking various elements within the play in terms of various trios. Ruby Cohn sums up the potential linkages quite well: along with the three instruments used in Beethoven’s Trio, the piece “calls attention to [Beckett’s] three instruments – Beethoven’s Largo, a woman’s voice, and a camera eye. “Trio” may also embrace the play’s three characters, its three movements, or its three camera positions” (338). From here, the play invites a deluge of analysis regarding identity (Who is Voice? Where is it ensuing from? Who is the Figure? What is his relationship with Voice?) and the power struggle between Music, Voice, and Camera (and Figure’s own status within the power struggle). But perhaps, there is no relationship between the various trios at all. As the Pre-Action sequence suggests, perhaps they are to remain as 50 fragmented bits, nothing more, nothing less. When Antoni Libera, Polish writer and critic who translated many of Beckett’s works into Polish, inquired about Voice in Ghost Trio, Beckett’s response was quintessentially Beckettian: “Between the woman who is speaking and F, no relation that I know of. She is observing and presenting from a distance, rather than manipulating. Her ‘imperatives’ hardly warrant the name, as if she knew what was going to happen and was merely announcing it” (Beckett 464). Once the work was out, Beckett always had the tendency to eschew explaining his works, or the meaning behind a given characters’ actions or thoughts. His commonly used defense was that he did not know himself. If he knew, he would’ve said so in the work. Discussing Ghost Trio with Ruby Cohn, he told her: “I wanted a calm scene which revealed an inner storm as the camera approached, but the figure resisted me, so I resorted to rectangles” (Cohn 339). Yet again, it seems that Beckett considered that the characters, although being his own creations, had a life of their own, their innermost core unbeknownst even to the creator himself, and Beckett resolutely respected their autonomous agency. This is likely one of the reasons behind why his works invite scholarship and interpretations of all kinds. Because Beckett respects each and every character’s Self, because it is so unknown, even to its maker, its mysterious presence calls for exploration and excavations of all kinds. And so, perhaps… the Figure, the Voice, the boy, and even the camera’s eye could all be one and the same, with the Voice representing the habitual (thereby somewhat predictable) side of F, the boy representing F’s past, the camera representing F’s perceiving Self, and F representing the perceived Self. What we are seeing, then, is a nameless Self attempting to forge new connections regarding himself through the fragmented voids in the room. What about then, the music and the mysterious woman who F thinks he hears? Along with Eh Joe, Ghost Trio 51 (and, of course, the third installment in Beckett’s TV adventure, … but the clouds …) could be seen as a meditation on artistic creation, or to be more specific, in the case of Ghost Trio, a meditation on artistic inspiration and its failure to come. The woman F longs for is artistic inspiration personified, and perhaps Beethoven’s music is the ghostly calling, as if in a séance, for this yet another ghostly presence of such a damnable Godot-like thing called inspiration, which, of course, never comes. Thus, F not only embodies the slippery nature of all artistic creations, but also the situation Beckett himself finds in – lost in his habitual pattern, for, as he once wrote, der mensch ist ein gewohnheitstier, and wanting to look into the Self, or back to the past, or into other artistic creations in order to discover inspiration for his own work, and thereby forge a new kind of Selfhood. Hence, the need to connect the door and Beethoven’s Trio: the music calls… inspiration should leap to the door at the calling… but it never comes…just a boy… saying it won’t come… I know you little bitch. So perhaps there is an inkling of a Self to be discovered somewhere in this grey void. What happens in the Action sequence also seems to point towards this formation of the Self. However, this is also the sequence where Voice the puppet master seems to demonstrate “complete” control over Figure. It is, in fact, well-documented that, for the 1977 BBC2 broadcast of the play, “Beckett referred actor Ronald Pickup [who played F] to the essay “On the Marionette Theater” by Beethoven’s German contemporary, Heinrich von Kleist” (Herren 81). In the essay, Kleist relates an anecdote in which he chanced upon his acquaintance Herr C., who was engaged as a leading dancer at a local opera house. Most of the essay consists of Herr C relating his own theories on the natural gracefulness of marionettes. His central claim is that “the innate gracefulness of the puppets… is brought about by harnessing the puppets’ limbs not to separate strings but to a common centre of gravity” (Gardner 137). Since each movement will 52 have a center of gravity, “it would suffice to direct this crucial point to the inside of the figure. The limbs that function as nothing more than a pendulum, swinging freely, will follow the movement in their own fashion without anyone’s aid” (Kleist 22). Herr C. adds that the “line that the center of gravity must describe was… nothing other than the path to the soul of the dancer, and… through this line the puppeteer placed himself in the center of the gravity of the marionette” (23). That is to say, the innate gracefulness of the puppets results from their complete lack of self-consciousness, from their surrendering of all agency to the puppeteer. Thus, the unimpeachable advantage that a puppet has over a living dancer is that the puppet “would never be affected. For affectation appears… when the soul (vis motrix) locates itself at any point other than the center of gravity of the movement. Because the puppeteer absolutely controls the wire or string, he controls and has power over no other point than this one: therefore all other limbs are what they should be – dead, pure pendulums following the simple law of gravity, an outstanding quality that we look for in vain in most dancers” (24). Thus, “the discovery of the self and self-consciousness is seen by Kleist as an irretrievable fall from grace – it separates men and women from the world and from their true Self because they are perpetually perceiving themselves as Other” (Gardner 137). Indeed, it was “this very lack of self-awareness that Beckett strove to obtain in Figure’s movements” (137). Action begins with Voice’s colourless voice announcing that F will now think he hears her. At this instruction, F makes a jolting movement, suddenly raising his head towards the door. When the supposed sound of the woman approaching turns out to be a false alarm, Voice coldly repeats her command: “Again.” And again, F raises his head sharply. From then on, Voice directs F to the door, then to the window, and then to the pallet. During this sequence, Voice seems to be in total control of F’s movements, but when F reaches the pallet, 53 there is suddenly a curious turn of events. F, for the first time, acts out of his own accord: without being directed to do so, he turns from the pallet and looks in the mirror. What is so curious about this scene is that, despite it signifying F the puppet’s first instance of revolt against Voice the puppet master, his movement is, nevertheless, that of a puppet – simple, graceful, and utterly lacking in consciousness, in spite of performing this action in front of, of all things, a mirror. Even Beckett himself, during the rehearsal for the BBC2 production, “stressed that when the man looks up from the pallet to the mirror, it should be in a smooth, unbroken, graceful movement” (Knowlson and Pilling 281), thereby undermining his protagonist’s project of self-discovery. While this is a quintessential Beckettian move where “his texts continually seem to pull the rug from under the feet of the [interpreter] by showing themselves to be conscious of the possibility of such interpretations” (Critchley 165), I think it does have important ramifications regarding the present consideration of de-composition and re-composition of Subjectivity. With this double movement that simultaneously points towards both the eradication and formation of the Self, Beckett seems to be accepting the fact that the situation of the Self naturally stands on tenuous grounds, both in reality and in the fictional realm; it resists knowledge, and yet we constantly seem to be striving towards it. Thus, it is rather apt that he leaves out the mirror when he goes through the itinerary of the room in Pre-action, for it is a hidden device that only subtly confirms the surreptitious process of the formation of Self. Where the door in the any-space-whatever signals the possibility of a new formation of a Subjecthood, the mirror then serves to confirm this signal and affirm the presence of the Subject. In Pre-action, there is merely a possibility. In Action, that possibility is confirmed through the mirror. However, this confirmation is shot from Position A, meaning that we the viewers cannot yet know that the potentiality of the Self has just been confirmed. Only later in Re-action will we be let in on F’s 54 journey to (re)discovery of the Self. But even then, our discovery will ultimately be denied its full pleasure, for Beckett’s ultimate message seems to be that the pathway to the Self/Other remains unknown, and when suddenly the path towards it seems to present itself, it is still shrouded in a sense of mystery – we are surprised by it, unsure of it, and most of all, don’t really know what to do about it. For the fictional being, the path to its own self-knowledge comes as a surprise to its creator – he is surprised by it, and cannot do anything about the blossoming defiance to authorial control. For the real being, perhaps the viewer, this Other who forms its Selfhood essentially remains unknowable, be it fictional or otherwise. Beginning with this first act of defiance, Voice begins to lose her “control” over F. Perhaps we are seeing F breaking out of his habituated pattern and attempting an entry into a more alert and aware mode of being where consciousness gains its power over habit. After all, when one is engaged in habitual behaviour is when one most closely resembles the mode of being of the marionette. Now we are seeing F break out of his habituated shell and establish his Self properly. This leads F to further reject V’s command as in when he moves back towards the stool and picks up his cassette, sits, and settles back into opening pose, with his head bowed over cassette, instead of following V’s instruction to now go to door. With the onslaught of this coup d’état de la conscience, Re-action seems to continue with the apparent project of establishing Selfhood. This final segment begins with a sudden cut to camera position C, which brings us very close to not just F, but to the entire surrounding of the room. Now, Voice is no more, and F goes through his routines alone, and the camera accompanies him in closer proximity, thereby allowing the viewers a little more intimacy with F as well. It is during this segment that the supposed POV shots of F come into play, perhaps indicating the move towards burgeoning 55 Selfhood. But, yet again, there is simultaneously the quintessential Beckettian program that progresses by way of negation. Colin Gardner claims that “apart from the predominant use of ‘Position C’ which places us much closer to the action, we see point-of-view and reverse-angle shots for the first time – essentially the basic visual economy of filmic suture” (130). Filmic Suture, as Norma Bouchard defines it, is “the product of a conscious erasure of multiple, even conflicting points of views. Its purpose [is] to tell a story as smoothly and coherently as possible. As such, it [is] one of realist cinema’s favourite techniques, allowing the spectator to identify with an omniscient eye, a centred and unified subjectivity” (Bouchard qtd. in Gardner 47). Similarly, Graley Herren points out that “the ‘Reaction’ includes three point-of-view (POV) shots, the most intimate shots available in the lexicon of film. The inclusion of POV shots – that is, a shot understood as the subjective viewpoint from a particular character’s perspective – proves conclusively that F’s perspective is now predominant” (Herren 84). The three POV shots Herren refers to are: 1) the POV shot at the door that reveals the dark corridor, 2) the POV shot from the window of the pouring rain that reveals the outside world for the first time, and 3) the POV shot of the boy messenger who mysteriously shakes his head, smiles, and leaves. Herren concludes that “F’s subjective shots are the surest signs that he, not V, now controls the patterns of perception” (85). But strictly speaking, none of these are POV shots. In fact, I would argue that there are no POV shots at all in this play. While the Re-action segment certainly seems to point towards the development of F’s Selfhood, the camera angle does not support this development at all. Let us take a closer look at the three examples Herren mentions. Consider the first shot to which Herren refers. F is looking out the door from the side of the door. If it were to be a POV shot, we would also get a view of the opened door partially covering the view down the corridor. 56 Likewise, a strict POV shot from F at the window would be shot from the side, showing the window opening out as well. Instead, what we get is a full-frontal view of the rain. Again, when the boy comes, we see him looking up and towards his left, where F must be standing. A POV shot proper would meet the boy’s gaze directly. In the published script, Beckett himself never indicates that there are POV shots. For the three scenes Herren cites as examples, Beckett merely states that they are “view of corridor seen from door” (Beckett 250), “view from window” (250), and “near shot of small boy full length in corridor before open door” (251). If he intended for these to be POV shots, he would’ve said so. Instead of being F’s POV shots, these shots are more like POV shots from the perspective of the door and the window. What we are seeing then, perhaps, is “a world of reversed intentionality, where things… regard us, where the Subject dissolves into its objects” (Critchley 68), thereby demolishing the boundaries between the fragmented voids (inside/outside, Subject/Object, Self/Other) and catalyzing a unifying movement between the components. With this sweeping movement, all becomes one big void. Hence, perhaps the POV shots are shots from this void itself, the eye that gazes from nothingness – a perception from a suspended void, signifying nothing. Can a void have a perception, though? Isn’t there still an ‘I’ who sees the void seeing things? If so, who is this ‘I’? Is it you or me, or is it F? Or are we merely describing the horror of the il y a here? Whichever the case, F’s construction of the Self seems to have been undone. Thus, yet again, Beckett undermines his own program, this time it being his own protagonist’s move towards Subjectivity, by throwing F into the all-consuming economy of the Void. The one and only moment where we actually get close to F is not through the POV shots, which are, strictly speaking, not POV shots, but rather through the crucial scene at the mirror. Before this scene, F stands at the pallet, and there are two more examples of the aforementioned 57 “shots from the void” – one of the pallet, and another of the empty mirror. Again, the shot of the pallet is not F’s POV shot, since if it were so, we would be getting a vertical view of the pallet; instead, what we get is a horizontal close-up of the pallet. This is why I do not consider the view of the empty mirror as F’s POV shot as Gardner does. He writes: “After another visit to the pallet, ‘F’ again stares into the mirror but this time we actually see a point-of-view shot, suturing him into the economy of otherness. However, to our great surprise, the mirror is empty” (131). But again, Beckett merely states in the script that his is a “close-up of mirror reflecting nothing” (Beckett 251). Instead, the effect of these “shots from the void” seems to echo the fragmentation process in Pre-action sequence, de-familiarizing, de-functionalizing, and de-constructing the formation of Selfhood that the Action sequence seems to have promised initially, except that, by now, the fragmented void has become unified, and it is the totalizing environment that surrounds all things. This is why when the camera suddenly looks directly into F’s face for the first time, taking the perspective of the mirror, in other words, the mirror’s POV, it has such a crushing effect. We gaze from that void itself, while also being the mirror, reflecting back F. We are the void and thus F is the void too, and that which surrounds us is the void. There is no Self forming here. Only nothingness. Only the horror of the il y a. All the while the close-up of the face is strangely welcoming. This hermetic world we have witnessed thus far was a grey world full of rectangles – the door, the floor, the window, the pallet, the mirror, the cassette, the stool, and even the TV screen for the viewers back then, or in my case, my laptop screen, and even the outlines of the frame on Youtube on which I viewed the play, everything is rectangular, reinforcing an obsessive mise en abyme of reduplicating rectangles after rectangles. Within this proliferating world of rectangles, suddenly a circle appears. What a relief. But simultaneously, the sudden appearance of the circular face is so very 58 alienating. Yet again a strange double movement that pulls on the string from opposing sides. And what is this face saying? It is unreadable. And then there is the strange gesture of the hand. What is his right hand doing there on his cheeks? Is he thinking? If so, then of what? F, at one point, shuts his eyes intensely, only to slowly open them back up, as if trying to wake from the horror of a fever dream. Is it his own thought that has led him to the nightmare from which he wants to wake? Then what is that thought? Shane Weller has pointed out that “to describe the smiles in Beckett’s works as enigmatic would be to understate the case, for not only does the question of what a given smile might mean become very difficult to answer, but even telling whether there is a smile there to be seen can prove no minor feat” (128). Same goes for suicide. In Beckett’s works, it is often difficult to tell whether suicide has taken place at all or whether the characters are referring to suicide. In works like Embers and How It Is, for instance, whether the act has taken place or not remains in the dark. In the radio play Embers, Henry appears to recount certain memories from the past through imaginatively reconstructed dialogues with the people from his past. He plays out the usual pattern of Beckettian characters, writers listening to voices in their head and setting up the scene. One of those scenes involve the death of his father, who may or may not have committed suicide. He may have accidentally fallen into the sea and drowned, or he might have intentionally gone in. It is left unclear. His motives? Also left unclear. Likewise, the protagonist of How It Is, when relating the death of his wife remains vague: “she fell from the window or jumped broken column” (Beckett 55). Perhaps it was an accidental defenestration, perhaps not. Perhaps she screamed DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT one last time and jumped. Hard to tell. At this conjecture, I would like to propose a reading that may seem like a bit of a stretch. For me, I imagine that F’s hand gesture signifies a hand-gun that had, at one point, been pointing directly at F’s own right 59 temple. But now, the hand’s grip on the hand-gun has loosened, along with the suicidal ideation. Perhaps in the past, the horror of the il y a, the inescapable, all-consuming economy of the il y a had been a source of torment. Now, however, F is coming to accept it. The unknowability of it all – it is okay that we should fail one another in knowing one another. Of course, the hand gesture in the close-up of F’s face invites a multitude of readings, for it remains entirely vague. But there could be intriguing implications when one views the hand gesture as a weakening suicidal ideation in relation to the aforementioned discussions of de-composing and re-composing Selfhood. As explored in the previous chapter, suicide is the most autonomous act that accentuates the agency of the Self, which consequently means that from the Self’s perspective, the Other’s suicide is an act that absolutely affirms the Otherness of the Other. Beckett is one of those rare writers who absolutely respects this Otherness. This is why when F refers to his own suicide, it is seen from the void, for we are entering the realm of unknowability and its void. His suicidal ideation is unknowable, and yet others make the desperate attempt to bring it to the realm of knowability. But no matter how deeply we look into his eyes, there is nothing but the void separating our perception of F and F’s perception of us. All we can presume is that the suicidal ideation is perhaps weakening. He can’t go on, but he will go on. Despite the void that surrounds him, F will not abate one jot. But of what? Of the empty heart? Of the empty hands? Of the dark mind stumbling through barren lands? Perhaps. Of his will to go on, one cannot be certain. Beckett seems to be saying that even he, who created F, does not know, cannot know, and perhaps must not know. And yet, there is, of course, our desire to know. This is perhaps why F smiles at the end. The enigmatic smile is, yet again, a smile that smiles at failure – this time our own failure, and Beckett’s failure, to know F and his Selfhood 60 that we initially thought we were getting close to; it is a smile that is “the quiet acknowledgment of one’s limitedness” (Critchley 109). Thus, where Gardner argues that the play follows the structure of Beethoven’s, “that of the tripartite schema of the classical sonata, which is structured as composition, decomposition and recomposition” (Gardner 124), I’d like to suggest that it creates its own tripartite structure consisting of: attempted (incomplete) de-composition of subjectivity, attempted re-composition of subjectivity, and finally failed re-composition of subjectivity / partial de-composition of subjectivity. Pre-action, with the de-familiarizing process, attempts to eradicate all traces of subjecthood, all the while hinting at a personal link that can be traced through the fragments, namely through the door and the music. Action attempts to show the possible development of Selfhood within this void through F’s defiance. But Re-action dismantles his construction of the Self by undoing and de-familiarizing his position of Selfhood. The suicidal ideation scene in front of the mirror is the crucial scene that properly makes us aware of this Selfhood that we absolutely cannot get close to. We thought we were getting somewhere, but no, Beckett says. There is no there there. In spite of it all, Beckett continued to attempt to listen to the voices in his head that struggled to forge a fleeting image of Selfhood. Hence, when Deleuze reads the messenger boy as bringing “the long-awaited order to stop everything, everything being well and truly finished” (168), I must respectfully beg to differ. Nothing comes to an end in Beckett. Nothing in his work warrants such a sense of finality. Despite the exhaustion, the endless exhaustion of endless numbers of possibilities will go on. When Beethoven’s Largo is finally played to its conclusion in the last scene of Ghost Trio, it will probably, though we do not hear it, and never will hear it, go back to, say, bar 64, where F will yet again think he hears her. Then a few more bars of the Largo will play in his head, only to go back, yet again, to, say, bar 19. That this very circularity 61 is what is implied after the smile that acknowledges the limit of knowledge is what distinguishes the teleplays from previous representations of suicide in Beckett. No, the Other is unknowable. No, the Other’s suicide denies access to the process of meaning-making. Yet, we go on. There is no end to this endless coming and going, to-ing and fro-ing. When nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful. But sometimes, an Other comes by to keep us company. The best we can do is to lend an ear, simply listen to it, without giving meaning to it, without desperately trying to interpret it. Then eventually, all will end. But it won’t be the end. For to end is to begin yet again. 62 outro In a short reflection on suicide, Emil Cioran once wrote: “The man who has never imagined his own annihilation, who has not anticipated recourse to the rope, the bullet, poison, or the sea, is a degraded galley slave or a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion” (Cioran 37). A little harsh, I’d say. But I get where he is coming from. Indeed, “[irons] and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and a pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us” (36). That I can end it all whenever I desire, that no one or no thing can rob me of my agency to be done with it all is a great consolation. But some turn this consoling possibility into a reality, for it does not console them. For some, it is better to conclude, and they absolutely commit to this conclusion. Their commitment, their unabating will to death is mysterious. We shan’t ever know what they revolve in their minds. But because it is so enigmatic, it flames our curiosity, our desire to know. If the motives of the suicide were crystal clear, we would be done with it, and move on, as if dealing with an easy math problem with an easy solution. But because it is an impossible problem to address, it incites us to charge at it, to break it down, to render it into sensible language. Suicide thus presents an intricate ethical problem. It forces us to question our own values, our own Weltanschauung, and how careful we must be in applying them in the hermeneutics of the deceased Other. Through his teleplays, Beckett makes palpable this difficult position we find ourselves in when interpreting the suicide. The desire to know absolutely must be coupled with the acknowledgment of the impossibility to know. Perhaps only then can we really commit to this awkward task of interpretation. 63 One might have noticed that this work is littered with the word “perhaps”. One day I counted them. 70 usages out of 22,802 words, or an average of once every 326 words. After all, it’s not excessive. It’s nothing. Not even one “perhaps” every hundred words. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I’ve hardly used it at all, I should never have mentioned it. Oh well. No matter. For a thesis that is supposed to present and elaborate its argument with confidence and certainty, the overuse of such an uncertain expression may perhaps come across as incompetent, diffident, and most crucially, lacking in academic rigour. But this whole essay, its subject matter, and how it is imagined in Beckett’s own works are all, I’m afraid, shrouded in uncertainty. When someone has committed suicide, I think the act demands that we do not fully commit to our own speculations and presumptions regarding the suicide. In an interview with Tom Driver, Beckett revealed that the “key word of [his] work is ‘perhaps’” (Driver 220). A word that expresses possibility with uncertainty, “perhaps” is, as Laura Salisbury notes, “the glimmer of possibility and persistence when there is ‘nothing to be done’” (116). In my study, if one can call it that, I wanted to leave certain doors to possibilities and impossibilities open. In other words, I did not want to fully commit to my own ideas, not necessarily for fear of presenting a weak or far-fetching argument, but because of an inexplicable sort of respect I wanted to maintain for the essence of uncertainty that encloses the subject in discussion. When Charlies Juliet asked Beckett what he thought of all the academic essays and theses about him, he “waved his hand, as if to brush aside some minor annoyance”, and said, “This academic madness…” (Juliet 147). It seems that he often felt baffled about the over-complication that tends to dominate academic discourse, especially surrounding his own works. To him, his own works were of the simplest kind, and he could not understand why scholars 64 would procure unnecessary headaches over what he saw as so simple. Let them procure their own aspirin I suppose. Out of respect for the simplicity of his works, I wanted to keep things simple, out in the open, as clear as possible. I don’t know if I’ve achieved this end successfully. No matter. Success is not the goal here, but rather failure. Perhaps I needed to consider this uncertain topic with uncertainty to channel through my own confusion and inability to know and understand why a couple of my loved ones decided to take their own lives. I did not know then, I still do not know even after having read many books on suicide, and I never will no matter how much research I do. But thanks to Beckett, I was able to come to terms with my own failure to know. The two teleplays that I have discussed are unique not just in Beckett’s bibliography but also in the Western literary tradition in that there is no identification, no sensationalization, no rationalization, no pathologization, no medicalization, and most importantly, no judgement of suicide. There is merely an image of the suicide or the suicidal mind. Nothing more, nothing less. Yet the inescapable facticity of unknowability is coupled with the desire to know. Perhaps it is a time-honoured human proclivity that is reflected here. Meaning of life is unknowable, yet we constantly seek it. The Other remains an absolute Other, yet we constantly seek to understand and relate with the Other. We don’t know what love is, yet we ceaselessly crave it. Well and good. However, Beckett seems to say that in the desire to know, and in the attempt to know the unknowable, one mustn’t corrupt the integrity of the object. The inevitable failure that is foretold must be acknowledged and respected at the outset. All this ballsaching poppycock about life and death, if that is what this is all about, and I suppose it is, has gotten me nowhere. It’s vague, life and death. I must have had my little private idea on the subject when I began, otherwise I would not have begun, I would have held my 65 peace, I would have gone on peacefully being bored to shits, having my little fun and games with Molloy and Malone. But it is gone clean out of my head, my little private idea. No matter. It’ll come back. Or it won’t. No matter. What I am left with at the end is merely an image of a smiling figure. Smiles are all very nice in their own way, very heartening, but at a reasonable distance. Seen in a close-up, it is just a frame in a grotesque tragedy. What is a smile doing in a tragedy, one may ask. This is no place for it. Get thee to a horror film, a lifeless smile stamped on a lifeless face, each end of the lips stretched all the way the ear, fixed in time, fixed in its glare, a horrifying smile. But perhaps this is a smile that smiles at the failure of the tragic hero. Perhaps it is even uncertain about its own failure. Perhaps it does not even know what it is smiling about. No matter. Nothing is certain when Beckett is about. One scholar noted: “I think it a reasonable assertion, however, to suppose that someone who read Beckett’s oeuvre straight through without any pre-conceived ideas would emerge feeling that Beckett’s vision is ultimately one of darkness and negation, alleviated only slightly by the absurdist wit and humour found therein” (White 61). As someone who read Beckett’s oeuvre straight through without any preconceived ideas, without knowing much about him, I could not disagree more. I emerged feeling that Beckett’s vision was one of hope and love as well as darkness. He is, as Jack MacGowran pointed out, one who writes with so much hope and love for humanity. It is not a naïve vision, however, for he also offers an unbearably naked image of human distress, and it is never alleviated, even with the humour that permeates through and through. There is no alleviation, no amelioration, no ascension to salvation. There is rather a distillation of the purest order. He alone succeeds in “revealing the nature of contemporary man” (Juliet 154), while “[abstaining] from affirmation but [proceeding] by way of negation, and then 66 by negation of negation, filtering through the interstices essential understandings which words can never capture” (154). Travelling through Beckett’s 60 years of output, from early to middle to late period, one finds that this is a journey that begins in the ocean, only to sail towards the mouth of the river, headed upstream, through the winding banks and narrowing streams, to reach the zenith of a towering literary mountain. His early period begins in the open ocean – vast and expansive. Its tumultuous waves reflect the rampant, uncontrolled modernist style that he took up after Joyce. Here, out in the open, in the midst of the tempestuous storm called modernism, it’s hard to discern his distinct voice, but one can still hear traces of it. Once a trail is found, it naturally leads to the mouth of River Beckett. Here, where the ocean meets the river, modernism meets postmodernism. In the middle period, the waters are calm. The Brits would say cawm. The body of water narrows, and its movement takes a simpler turn. No need for excessive addition from all kinds of obscure sources. Less is more. Hence, the language of subtraction. At once, Beckett’s voice becomes discernible. It’s not loud or bombastic, but clear and concise without the loss of its original poetic quality. It is certainly the most inviting of the three periods. As the passage upstream continues, the waters get even narrower, quicker, and significantly lessen in volume. The river is now a stream, and with its minimalistic movement, it edges closer to its origin. As it climbs the height of the mountain, it does away with more and more of its composition. No need for a river, it seems to say. A brook will do. It becomes harder and harder to spot this waning brook from a distant bird’s eye view. A closer inspection is required if one is to truly appreciate this seemingly dwindling source of water. One must plough through the thickets of the forest in order to locate it. Yet, do not stomp too loudly in your gait, for you must strain your ears and open your eyes. Then you’ll hear the trickle. Follow that faint sound and it will reveal itself in its 67 full magnificence. Those who undertake this journey will be rewarded with the realization that they’ve just climbed a literary mountain that has the purest of airs at its pinnacle, from which a panoramic view of humanity both in its glorious light and in its wasted shadow can be gleaned, and that the tiny stream that has sprang forth from this mountain still courses through the rivers of our winded civilization. As for myself, I’m enjoying my stay in the calm river. Naturally, it is the most pleasant to swim in: the currents are friendly and the depth and width are just perfect. Oh, and the mud is great too. But eventually, I’d like to find myself in his riveting rivulet. It will be a long, arduous hike, and that which I desperately seek may never reveal itself. But the ascent will be worth it, for the air is pure and the waters clear high up in Mt. Beckett. Regardless of where I am, however, one thing is for certain: that from Beckett, I receive what I could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. I once wrote in a puny little journal entry: “Light of my life, fire of my loins. Sammy Becky. Guide me in my endeavours. Be my noble Virgil and show me the way through the endless circles of hell. Give me strength to go on when I can’t go on. Help me fail better. As I crawl through this mud, show me how I might not abate one jot. Laugh at my unhappiness and swiftly carry me to acceptance. Watch me play my endgame and witness my king fall. I aspire to reach your heights, but I falter and stumble even before the ascent has begun. But as you say: Ever tired. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Bless my failures as I walk backwards like an automaton that has been faultily programmed. But even as I walk backwards, I will still be facing you, stumbling, often striking against trees, and in the tangle of the underwood catch my feet, and fall to the ground, on my back, on my face, on my side, or into a great clump of brambles, or of briars, or of thistles, or of 68 nettles. But ever I’ll pick myself up and go on murmuring silent words of ardent love for a writer I could never be, amid new noise and affection.” With this yet another puny little piece, I feel as though I have failed him and myself. No matter. It was an honour to have failed in his embrace. ∞ Nothing to be done. Born astride of a grave, next to the maggot-filled carrions, a dim light flickers an instant, and then it’s night once more. That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth. But perhaps there is a way. Alone. At last. Along the unfinished 69 Works Cited Alvarez, Al. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. Penguin Books, 1974. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, edited by S.E. Gonstarski, Grove Press, 1997. –––. The Collected Shorter Plays. Grove Press, 2010. –––. Disjecta, edited by Ruby Cohn, Grove Press, 1984. –––. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Arcade Publishing, 1993. –––. How It Is. Grove Press, 1965. –––. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941-1956, edited by George Craig et al., Cambridge University Press, 2011. –––. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: 1966-1989, edited by George Craig et al., Cambridge University Press, 2016. –––. More Pricks Than Kicks. Grove Press, 1972. –––. Nohow On. Grove Press, 2014. –––. Three Novels. Grove Press, 2009. –––. Waiting for Godot. Grove Press, 2011. –––. Watt. Grove Press, 2009. Bennett, Andrew. Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Bishop, Tom. “Beckett Transposing, Beckett Transposed: Plays on Television.” Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, edited by Alan Warren Friedman et al., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987, pp. 167-173. 70 Brater, Enoch. Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater. Oxford University Press, 1987. Cioran, Emil. A Short History of Decay. Translated by Richard Howard. Arcade Publishing, 2012. –––. The Trouble with Being Born. Translated by Richard Howard. Arcade Publishing, 2012. Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2001. Critchley, Simon. On Humour. Routledge, 2002. –––. Notes on Suicide. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015. –––. Very Little… Almost Nothing. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2004. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. Harper Collins, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Danel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Driver, Tom. “Beckett by the Madeleine.” Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, Routledge, 1997, pp. 217-223. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3rd ed., Vintage, 2004. Gardner, Colin. Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gontarski, S. E. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts. Indiana University Press, 1985. Heron, Jonathan, and Matthew Broome. “‘There’s the Record, Closed and Final’: Rough for Theatre II as Psychiatric Encounter.” Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 37, no. 2, June 2016, pp. 171–81. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-015-9376-y. Herren, Graley. Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 71 –––. “Beckett on Television, Beckett on Love: A Response to Badiou.” The Plays of Samuel Beckett by Katherine Weiss, Methuen Drama, 2013 Jamison, Kay Redfield. Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. Vintage, 2000. Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Oxford University Press, 2008. Juliet, Charles. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde. Translated by Janey Tucker. Academic Press Leiden, 1995. Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre.” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 16, no. 3, 1972, pp. 22-26. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Bekcett. Grove Press, 1996. –––. and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. J. Calder, 1979. Maude, Ulrika. Samuel Beckett and Medicine. Cambridge University Press, 2025. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887540. Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett's 'More Pricks than Kicks': In a Strait of Two Wills. Continuum, 2011. Salisbury, Laura. Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing. Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Schklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al., University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 217-221. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On Suicide.” On the Suffering of the World, edited by Eugene Thacker, Repeater, 2020, pp. 291-298. Weller, Shane. Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Oxford University Press, 2009. 72 White, Karl. “Beckett and Suicide: A Thematic Overview.” Beckett Re-Membered: After the Century, edited by James Carney et al., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 61–73.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Cinema and Media Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Brown, William, 1977-
(Think of) suicide and smile : imagining suicide in Samuel Beckett’s TV plays
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