II. Genesis of the Performative Voice
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II. Genesis of the Performative Voice Prose into Drama Just as Beckett worked out his ideas on artistic practice before materi- alising them in his post-war novels and stories, so his prose fiction similarly adumbrated his dramatic works. For example, stage images are described in prose long before they take a visual form. An instance of this is “the image of a vast cretinous mouth, red, blubber and slob- bering, in solitary confinement” (U, 359) in The Unnamable, which bears striking resemblance to the mouth that Beckett was later to stage in Not I. Alternatively, entire plays could be based on earlier, often unfinished, works of fiction. Plays which have resulted from what S. E. Gontarski has referred to as “generic androgyny”1 are Waiting for Godot,2 which drew heavily on the earlier novel Mercier and Camier,3 and Krapp‟s Last Tape, which was developed from the prose text From an Abandoned Work.4 Beckett also tended to experiment with stylistic changes in his prose fiction before he introduced them into a dramatic form. For example, Voice‟s internal monologue in the radio play Cascando is reminiscent of that used in The Unnamable. Like- wise, the visual and poetic images of the minimalist theatre and televi- sion plays from the mid 1970‟s can also be traced back to prose works written in the 1960‟s. For instance, the black, white and grey world of surface described in Lessness5 bears similarities to the later television play Ghost Trio, and the description of a reader and listener within a 1 S. E. Gontarski, “Company for Company: Androgyny and Theatricality in Samuel Beckett‟s Prose”, in James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds.), Beckett‟s Later Fic- tion and Drama: Texts for Company (1987), p. 193. 2 Originally written in French under the title En attendant Godot (1952). 3 Originally written in French in 1946 under the title Mercier et Camier. It remained unfinished and unpublished until 1970, and was subsequently translated into English by Beckett in 1974. 4 Gontarski (1987), p. 193. 5 Originally written in French under the title Sans (1969). 28 Say It dark room in “Horn Came Always”,6 finds a visual parallel in the stage play Ohio Impromptu. Given that Beckett often introduced ideas and techniques into his prose writing before reshaping them in his dramatic works, it seems expedient to briefly consider the way in which voice manifests itself in the pre-dramatic prose fiction7 before examining the performative voice in his plays. Locus of the Voice The characters in the three post-war novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable are plagued by the sound of voices, and their origin, as Molloy tells us, “is in the head” (M, 10). The head is at once the place the voice sounds and where it is heard: “It‟s with your head you hear it, not your ears”, says Molloy (M, 39). The voice reverberates within the skull, and its auditory space is depicted as one of confine- ment, an “ivory dungeon”, as the narrator of Texts for Nothing 2 de- scribes it (106).8 And it is not only the voice that is confined in the head; the listener seems to be trapped there too. In Malone Dies, Ma- lone speaks of being physically encased within a head: You may say it is all in my head, and indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head and that these eight, no six, these six planes that enclose me are of solid bone. (MD, 203) Likewise, the protagonist of The Unnamable seems to be all but en- tombed within a skull. 6 Originally written in French under the title “Horn venait la nuit” (1973). Fizzles is the English title Beckett gave to a group of short prose texts written in French in the 1950‟s and 1960‟s, collectively called Foirades. 7 The prose work referred to dates between 1929 and 1951. The only dramatic works written during this period were Eleutheria, completed in 1947 but neither performed nor published in Beckett‟s lifetime, and En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), completed in 1949 but not performed until 1953. 8 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995). Unless otherwise indicated, line numbers for prose quotations refer to this edition. Texts for Nothing were originally written in French as Textes pour rien. The thirteen short texts were completed in 1951. .