The Century of Beckett
by Mark Daniel Cohen
Samuel Beckett: Works for Radio: The Original Broadcasts
British Library Publishing Division
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2007. Copyright © 2007 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
The dark is whence the architectures flow. Whisper drifts in storeyed layers, echoes into tiers on tiers. Partitions planked in vapored lays, in shuttered gloom, and iterating on into the endlessly. Patterns upon patterns; patter upon patter. The night alive in sliding structure. Turbulences infiltrated by the turbulences. Senses drift through senses. Billows ripple countermanded in the breakers throw, and crossings cut through crossings, meshes compromised by their orthogonals and integrally stay, untouched. Networks overlay on networks, waves through waves, and phases down through phases down through phases, as if tears cried in an ocean: “drops of silence through the silence.” Movements laced by motions play, as stretches weave through lines harmonic, everything the metonym in all, and in symphonic flourish.
A field, of forms, forms fallow into forms, all done, undone. The flats dissolving into stages, tower down to tower, melting into melting—the pouring fall of atmosphere to air prepared to fall. The shudder to anticipates the shudder, the chill expectant of the chill. Divisions multiply. The segmentations ramify. The flow in curdle to the flow. And everything is skin between the nowhere and the nowhere, between no where and no where. The nullity in density, dividings in divide, and oscillations of the non compounded into all.
I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.
(The Unnamable)
There is a thought. There is one thought, for the thought never changes. The thought is the heart of the history of thought, and the history of thought is but the hovering of a thought. There is no progress of thought but to the diversions from the thought. It is the recognition we would not register, the realization we would fend away, the blink we wish, the flinching that is the soul of mental life, the time of mental life, the biography of the mind. For the thought is out of time. It is the delicate, light, feather of an inkling that turned to whelms to a tidal surge, the mildest hush that at an eye touch billows and pounces. It is the gentle quiver of a breath that shocks the spirit—a thought sustained and halting in the air, suspended like a tuft in the vacant breezes, a weightless filament floating in the wind, that noticed buds, sprouts a head, and strikes.
These millions of different sounds, always the same, recurring without pause, are all one requires to sprout a head, a bud to begin with, finally huge, its function first to silence, then to extinguish when the eye joins in, and worse than the evil, its treasure-house.
(The Unnamable)
Some know this thought, for some are those who do what must be done—and some of them are artists. There comes a point for some artists, there comes a point for some thinkers (for here it amounts to the same thing) when one wishes to take on not merely subjects that provide the opportunity or the excuse for committing art or subjects for which one feels a particular personal interest (for here it amounts to the same thing), but instead one wishes to take on the subject of the most dire import, the subject that is compelled by its intrinsic imperatives, the subject that puts its stamp upon personal viewpoint, that defines the artist and is not defined by the artist, the subject that forces its place as the central human concern. There comes a point for some at which one does what must be done—one does what one has no choice but to do. Such instances are detectable, even though they are not noted by biographical testimony, for they occupy their inquirers in silence, in isolation, and once they have imposed themselves, there is nothing to be said of oneself, not to friends, not to intimates, for there are no longer any intimates. There are no longer friends. One is thoroughly alone. Such instances are detectable, for we know them when we encounter them—we know them by the work. For some, only work such as this, work of the gravest urgency, qualifies as art. All the rest is playtime, for art is a desperate measure.
Granted, our beginnings matter, but we make the decisive step toward ourselves only when we no longer have an origin, when we offer as little substance for a biography as God.
(E. M. Cioran, “Beckett”)
Of his friend Samuel Beckett, Cioran wrote, “He lives not in time but parallel to it, . . . He is one of those beings who make you realize that history is a dimension man could have done without.” Which is to say that the thought had occasioned Beckett, that he knew. And it is to acknowledge that Beckett was something more than an authentic artist or a major figure of his age. He was an artist in the fullest sense, in a sense in which few ever are—he was an artist not just by practice but by vocation, not by choice but by calling, not by convention but by authority of vision, not by privilege but by burden, by an endowment that cannot be selected and cannot be denied. He was an artist by virtue of possessing and being possessed by the piercing awareness that is art’s only legitimacy—that is the mind’s only legitimacy.
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The year just closed was the centenary year of Beckett, who was born on April 13, 1906, which marks the fact that his life, given its perhaps intrinsically ironic longevity (he died on December 22, 1989), largely coincides with the twentieth century. It is right, for Beckett is more than a child of a century of artistic revolution. And he is more than one of the few artists who continued the advances he adopted, along with the many he engendered, through not only the course of his career but nearly to the close of the century of their own birth, disregarding the retrenchment positions of much of what we continue to refer to, for want of a term, as Postmodern art. Beckett is one of the few artists if not the only artist in any field of artistic endeavor who can be argued the culmination of the artistic movements of which he was both a resident and a source. He is, and very likely is alone in this, the abstract of his time—and of more yet.
The year was laden with moments of observation and obeisance. Grove Press published The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett, a four-volume set of Beckett’s major works in prose, drama, poetry, and criticism. The Samuel Beckett Research Circle of Japan held the Samuel Beckett Festival Tokyo 2006. The Barbican in London conducted its “Beckett Centenary Festival.” Other theatre festivals were held around much of the world, museums produced film series, conferences were attended at universities, lectures were given and events were run in France, Denmark, Turkey, and more countries than one could chase to, and, on Beckett’s birthday, the British Library published Samuel Beckett: Works for Radio: The Original Broadcasts, the project under consideration here.
Samuel Beckett: Works for Radio: The Original Broadcasts is a four-CD set of recordings of the five works Beckett wrote specifically for radio performance: All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music, Cascando and Rough for Radio. It includes as well a recording of The Old Tune, Beckett’s translation of Robert Pinget’s La Manivelle, and a monologue titled From an Abandoned Work. The recordings are of the original BBC broadcasts, done from 1957 to 1976, the performances for which, in the case of the five works written for radio, the works were commissioned. La Manivelle is a work commissioned by the BBC from Pinget—Beckett did the translation for the first production, which is the recording included in this set. From an Abandoned Work also is presented in its first, and perhaps only, broadcast performance.
The worth of this set is both in the quality of the performances and in the historic value of the recordings, although these virtues are not equally shared by all the productions. The strength of these productions rests on the actors, most particularly, on the presence of Patrick Magee, who appears in every work, and who can be considered the quintessential Beckett voice. His vocalizations—gravelly yet tender and vulnerable, broken yet strong, aged, filled with rigor, at times barely human, barely articulate, at times almost unlistenable, and always delicately turned to every emotional nuance—is the tonality not just of Beckett’s perennial characters but of the Beckett aesthetic. His is the very sound of Beckett’s universe. (We know that Beckett felt the same—he wrote Krapp’s Last Tape for Magee to perform.) The alignment of Magee with Beckett is one of the gifts this last century received. Present as well are two of the other actors who helped to define Beckett on stage, who knew him, worked with him, and understood how to forge the message: Jack MacGowran and Billie Whitelaw. Any recording of either of these two doing Beckett is indispensable. (Whitelaw, in particular, for those of us who rushed to see the first English language productions, in New York and so often done with Whitelaw, of Beckett’s short stage works in the 1980s—works many of us consider the height of Beckett’s achievement on stage. It was like watching works belonging to the ages emerging in our time, before our eyes, and Whitelaw was the necessary presence in virtually every one of the productions, achieving what seemed not to have been done before, and never with such stunning force, clarity, and impeccable impact as in Rockaby.)
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