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Matters of Memory in Krapp's Last Tape and Not I Jeanette R. Malkin

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Matters of Memory in Krapp's Last Tape and Not I Jeanette R. Malkin Spring 1997 25 Matters of Memory in Krapp's Last Tape and Not I Jeanette R. Malkin Krapp's Last Tape (1958) embodies memory and the dislocations of time; in Not I (1972) even the "body" disappears—"whole body like gone"—and only a dislocated memory, visualized as a "subjectless" mouth, is left us. Theatrically, we have here the break between a mimetic theatre (however reduced), and postmodern dissolutions. Krapp may be drawn as a metaphor for man as clown or bum—white face, purple nose, short pants, large shoes; but for all the pregnant minimalism he still retains a distinct character, a discernable story, a room, a name. Mouth obviously has none of these; she also has no body or head attached to the red orifice we see, no logical placement on stage—floating as she (it) does eight feet above stage level—no context or frame, beginning or end to the unstoppable monologue we hear her speak. Separated by fourteen years, these related plays both attempt to objectify memory within highly visual—and very different—organs of remembrance. It is this difference, and the world-views signified through this difference, that will interest me here. I will claim that Beckett's ever-moving fragment of body, Mouth, recalling a being which slips away and disperses even as it is being evoked, reflects an ontologically different notion of memory and self than does the static memory-machine (the tape- recorder) we find in dialogue with Krapp. Inversely, we might say that this changed perspective governed Beckett's reformed strategy (in Not I) for imaging and theatricalizing memory. There was never a lack of "rememberers" in Beckett's theatre: Hamm's ongoing story of a remembered life, probably his own (Endgame); Winny's struggle to remember bits of her cultural past (Happy Days); the divergent testimonies given by the three complicit figures of Play. But in Krapp's Last Tape, the past remembered is already problematized through Beckett's experiment in physically imaging memory and memory processes on stage. Thus we must negotiate between two tenuously connected versions of self—Krapp, the banana eating body; and Krapp the memory-box. The externalized ontological dualism found in this play is a basic Beckettian motif, here applied specifically to the relation between selfhood and recall. With Not I and Beckett's ensuing set of Jeanette R. Malkin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Theatre Studies Department at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the author of Verbal Violence in Contemporary Drama: From Handke to Shepard (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Her new book Memory Jlieater and Postmodern Drama will be published at the University of Michigan Press next year. 26 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism short plays, scattered between 1972 (Not I) and 1980 (Ohio Impromptu), this dualism is itself problematized and a completely different view of memory, and selfhood, is advanced through a range of dramatic strategies. Beckett grapples in these late plays with formalizing devices, with ways of giving theatrical shape to the process and posture of remembrance; and to the subsequent problems of reception. It is not the memories revealed or the words which suddenly "come" that are of the essence. Rather, it is the complex net of memoried states of being—the interplay of inner voices, the pluralisms of self-perception, the complexity of agency, of volition or its lack, the simultaneity of pasts and present, the multiple modes of repetition and recall, of traces and patterns: which evoke a sense of our own trivial yet inevitable multiplicity, simultaneity, fragmentedness. In a discussion of these late plays, Bernard Beckerman wrote that: "As we concentrate to make sense out of the alternating strands of memory, we face the question . Are we anything other than listeners to our own memories?"1 Through a study of the similarities—but especially of the differences—between Krapp 's Last Tape and Not I (which in a loose sense can be seen to represent some of the common traits of these late plays, especially in terms of memory and selfhood), we can perhaps trace a break between a mimetic, dualistic theatre—and a theatre of dispersal, plurality, and irreducible fragmentation. In Krapp, memory is imaged as a large two-spooled (double-lobed) tape- recorder. This choice of metaphor—a mechanical, material box—presupposes and shapes the way we view the memory function, and thus the "self," in Krapp. It also entails a set of concepts and dramatic moves—mechanistic, dualistic, basically still mimetic—which, I will claim, are no longer relevant in Not L Memory in a box means memory localized, thrillingly present within a concrete, material form. No longer elusive or diffuse, memory seems self-contained, redeemable, depending for its "use" on finding the right reel, twisting the right levers, locating the desired section of tape. The comic ironies wrested by Beckett from Krapp's difficulty in locating the exact memory he seeks (his need to fast forward and rewind), only underscore the dualism of rememberer and memory, where memory is imaged as an objectified "other" which cannot be completely controlled. Krapp, "a wearish old man," sits in his den trying to record his impressions of the past year—as he does every year on his birthday—but is instead drawn to listen, again, to a recording from his past, the memory of "farewell to love." The past that Krapp seeks is elicited from his box at will; it is also ironized and contextualized through Krapp's present behavior: his visual doubling of the traits described in memory (eating bananas, drinking, writing notes on an envelope), his difference from the self in memory (more lonely still, more depleted, and there is also forgetting). This objectification of memory is a brilliant Spring 1997 27 way to theatricalize dual consciousness; it is also a way to give a one-man play—"company. " Krapp presents us not only with the act of remembering a life: it is also a dialogue between living and remembrance, present and past—Man and his Memory. Remembering is, in a sense, an inherently dualistic activity. The one part of the mind REcalls, brings up the past; while the other watches, listens, is reminded, reacts, sometimes refuses the memory brought up and rejects it (Mouth: "try something else . think of something else"2). Memory, writes St. Augustine, is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses . When I use my memory, I ask it to produce whatever it is that I wish to remember. Some things it produces immediately; some are forthcoming only after a delay, as though they were being brought out from some inner hiding place; others come spilling from the memory, thrusting themselves upon us when what we want is something quite different [Mouth: "not that either? . nothing to do with that either?" 22] . These I brush aside from the picture which memory presents to me, allowing my mind to pick what it chooses, until finally that which I wish to see stands out clearly and emerges into sight from its hiding place. and as their place is taken they return to their place of storage, ready to emerge again when I want them.3 For Augustine, the will ("I") is lord, sending messengers into memory to recover neatly stored, sometimes more deeply interred but still redeemable, always res tor able remembrances. Although Krapp, like Augustine, can retrieve his buried past, it is no longer clear which is master: the will or the memory. The easy sway of Augustine's present "I" over stored and malleable memory is no longer the working assumption. Krapp will finally forego the attempt to record his immediate impressions and allow the voice of the past to speak instead. The voice of memory will prove stronger than Krapp's own. Memory seeps into most of Beckett's late plays. In his film-script Eh Joe, Beckett, in an almost paradigmatic demonstration of the hold of the past over the present, has the mocking voice of memory invade Joe's room even after he carefully (and literally) locks all entrances and seals all cracks. For Joe, as for Krapp, memory is still a "material" other, which can hopefully be excluded through lock and key; for Joe, as for Mouth, memory "comes" uncalled in a 28 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism flood of uncontrollable words. Beckett's rememberers, like Augustine's, are often dual beings, split dramatic character—body and mind (memory-box), voice and ear, Reader and Listener, the perceiving subject and the perceived object. But in Beckett, duality (and, as we shall see, shattered multiplicity) suggest a multiplied cast of characters vying and negotiating for a determination of self. This chasm within being—the impossibility of perceiving the self without turning the self into an object—and thus the impossibility of unity, is a basic trope of remembrance. "Because of this disjunction," writes Linda Ben-Zvi, "all of Beckett's people have the continual sense that they are being watched, if only by themselves."4 In Krapp's Last Tape this duality is turned into a refracting dialogue within an externalized self, and thus made dramatically explicit. In Not /, duality is both assumed (Mouth/Auditor) and shown as an insufficient, perhaps a useless model for the dispersed and centerless contemporary consciousness. Augustine in his Confessions, analyzes the function of memory through a simple example that aptly parallels the mechanistic images of Krapp's memory- machine: the recitation of a psalm. When we recite, Augustine writes, the mind "performs three functions, those of expectation, attention, and memory.
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