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Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays: Soundings in Theory and Aesthetic

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Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays: Soundings in Theory and Aesthetic Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays: Soundings in Theory and Aesthetic Practice Tzu-Ching Yeh BA, MA This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Lancaster University October 2013 2 DECLARATION This thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. Tzu-Ching Yeh 24 October 2013 3 ACKKNOWLEDGEMENTS The thesis would not have been possible without the help and support of many people. I would like to thank all those who offered advice on earlier drafts of my work at conferences and discussions in the department. Special thanks go to the scholarship awarded from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, without which I would not have been able to pursue my PhD. Thanks too for financial subsidies received from the Department of English and Creative Writing, FASS and William Ritchie Travel Fund at Lancaster University, which enabled my attendance at conferences that have helped my research enormously. I own the deepest thanks to my supervisor Mr. Tony Pinkney throughout my PhD studies, for his guidance has led to the completion of the arduous process of the thesis. I would also like to thank Professor John Schad, my yearly panel reviewer, from whose valuable suggestions and recognition I have greatly benefitted. Thanks always go to my examiners Dr. Michael Greaney and Dr. Yasco Horsman for the effort reviewing my thesis and their positive comments. Special thanks to Professor Lynne Pearce for her moral support and emotional encouragement, particularly in the last stages of my PhD. Thanks especially to Julie Campbell, Everett Frost, and many other Beckett scholars who have imparted valuable insights in Beckett and radio scholarship. Thanks are also due to Professor Hsinya Huang (National Sun Yat-sen University) and Associate Professor Jade Tsui-yu Lee (National Koahsiung Normal University), who taught me during my undergraduate years at NKNU in Taiwan, and whose advice has always been inspirational. The thesis is dedicated to my family, for I could neither have started nor finished the project without their understanding and support in more ways than I can put into words. 4 Tzu-Ching Yeh (BA, MA) Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays: Soundings in Theory and Aesthetic Practice This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Lancaster University, September 2013. ABSTRACT This thesis examines Samuel Beckett’s exploration of the art of radio in his six radio plays from 1957 onwards, from a range of aesthetic approaches and literary-theoretical viewpoints. In doing so, I aim to foreground the literary merits of the radio drama and of Beckett’s distinctive aesthetic use of radio – an aspect of his work which is still relatively neglected. At the same time I move beyond internal literary study of these works to situate both them and the medium of radio itself in their wider cultural and historical contexts, particularly the Second World War. Chapter One evokes three local contexts for the study of Beckett’s radio plays: the development of radio drama at the BBC prior to 1957, early European avant-garde radio theories, particularly those of Futurism and Surrealism, and Beckett’s own early fiction, which is preoccupied with themes of voice, silence and listening which radio explores further. Chapter Two examines psychoanalytic theories of trauma, and trauma studies in the humanities more generally, for what they can reveal to us about both the literary form and psychic content of the radio plays. The particular traumas mapped out in these texts are then related to that general matrix of trauma for Beckett, the Second World War. Chapter Three draws on the work of Michel Foucault, whose concepts of discipline, confinement and panopticon are applied to Rough for Radio II. 5 Chapter Four studies local instances of both silence and music in the radio drama, but also examines the way in which these two Beckettian motifs become a general programme towards minimalism that explains the overall trajectory of the six radio plays. Chapter Five seeks a way beyond the debate about whether Beckett is a modernist or postmodernist by exploring the concept of “late modernism” in relation to his radio drama. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Switching On…….…………………………………………........8 Chapter One Contexts for Beckett’s Radio Drama…..……………..………...28 Chapter Two Beckett, Trauma, War and Radio………………..……………...74 Chapter Three Rough for Radio II and What Where: Towards a Foucauldian Reading……...……………………….129 Chapter Four Towards Minimalism: A Study of Silence and Music in the Radio Drama...................178 Chapter Five Late Modernism in the Radio Plays…………...……................224 Conclusion Switching Off.………………....…….………………………...262 Works Cited ...………………………………………………………………266 7 NOTE ON REFERENCING This thesis follows MLA style throughout, as laid out in Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed. (New York: MLA, 2003). 8 INTRODUCTION Switching On One of the most resonant moments in all of Beckett’s drama occurs in the conversation between He and She in Rough for Radio I. This fragment tells the story of a woman, She, who visits the male protagonist, He, and listens to Voice and Music, which are controlled by two knobs. Switching Voice and Music on and off in this way surely implies turning a radio on and off and tuning in to a programme being broadcast. SHE. And—[Faint stress]—you like that? HE. It is a need. SHE. A need? That a need? HE. It has become a need.1 That darkly enigmatic final sentence reverberates well beyond this dramatic fragment itself. To whom has radio—listening to it, switching it on and off—become a need? To He himself, certainly; but also, one might speculate—since this piece was written in French in 1961—to European culture more generally (at least before the full cultural impact of television), and certainly for Samuel Beckett himself in his short and intense phase of writing for radio in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A need may be energising, as it clearly was for Beckett in his brief period of radio creativity, but the term may also imply elements of compulsion, addiction and dependency. In Rough for Radio I He listens to Voice and Music while locked in his own enclosed melancholic mental world, similar to Voice and Music in their “confinements.”2 The wider cultural “need” 1 Rough for Radio I in Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (hereafter CDW) (London: Faber, 1986) 269. 2 Beckett, CDW 271. 9 that radio engenders may also be ambivalent, in one direction leading positively to an expansion of quality culture through such organisations as the BBC or the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF), but in the other, more depressingly, to an exploitative realm of commercial broadcasting and advertising. In order to make sense of Samuel Beckett’s six radio plays, of the overall aesthetic project that they collectively constitute, I must take my cue from He in Rough for Radio I or from Opener who opens and closes Voice and Music in Cascando, because here I too “open” my thesis and “switch on” the acoustic perception demanded of any full engagement with radio, in the hope of analysing the conceptual “need” or needs articulated in and across these plays.3 This thesis adopts various theoretical and aesthetic approaches to the thematic issues of sonority involved in Beckett’s radio plays. Although his work has been much studied, the radio drama remains relatively underexplored. I seek to remedy its merely peripheral role by foregrounding the relation between the radio plays as texts and the medium of radio itself, and also by opening up discussion from a range of theoretical frameworks and aesthetic practices around the issues of voice, sound and silence (or near-silence). Contrary to existing studies of Beckett’s radio drama that tend to treat textual analysis, the medium of radio and the actual productions of the works as separate matters, or to argue in terms of disembodied voices by overlooking the materialised sound elements issuing from the radio, my thesis investigates these aural features of Beckett’s radio texts and their productions, and of the medium itself, in order to explore their bearing upon such issues as Surrealism, Futurism, trauma theory, panopticism, and minimalism. The overarching questions that I ask of both Beckett’s radio plays and the medium itself are how they articulate the unconscious, cope with 3 For an excellent account of the imaginative meanings of switching on and off in Beckett, see Steven Connor, “I Switch Off: Beckett and the Ordeals of Radio,” Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2009) 274-93. 10 trauma, aspire to the condition of music, and ultimately consolidate a compelling practice of what I shall term “late modernism.” This thesis combines a spectrum of theory, aesthetic debates, and psychoanalytic and sociological constructions of trauma and panopticism; the medium of radio will be explored as a unique forum to stage the sound experiments through which Beckett’s plays reach for new horizons. These heterogeneous theoretical approaches aim at foregrounding the literary merits of Beckett’s radio drama, which has become a less esteemed genre in his oeuvre, partly because radio is now a less culturally privileged medium than the stage and a less popular one than television. The disembodied voice is a central theme in Beckett studies, and its sonority, I intend to argue, can only be properly justified and fully realised in the radio drama, as opposed to in his fiction or stage plays. The focus on disembodied voices and on sound, silence or near-silence—Beckett’s obsessions throughout his oeuvre—is intensified and materialised through the medium of radio.
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