"DREAMING OF [... ] LOVE": Beckett's Theatre and the Making of the (Post)Modern Subject

Karen L. Laughlin

Samuel Beckett's plays often seem to keep the body and its passions at a dis• tance. Yet for all their austerity, plays like Krapp 's Last Tape and Play revolve around stories of love and desire. Though hidden, fragmented or displaced, these 'love stories' (and the bodies they evoke) are also placed on display. From this tension between hiding and display comes Beckett's version of the (post)modem subject - subjected, as Foucault would suggest, to peculiarly modem forms of power, yet potentially liberated by the vividness and power of the creative imagination itself.

Francis Barker begins his 1984 study of The Tremulous Private Body with an extended quotation from the seventeenth-century diary of Samuel Pepys. The passage records a day of "doing business, and also reading ( ... ] a mighty lewd book", which Pepys felt justified in reading "for information sake" but then burned to spare himself the shame of its dis• covery (Barker, 3). Barker sees this passage as paradigmatic of the mo• ment of the emergence of the modem subject, a moment when shifting historical processes began to penetrate the most intimate details of social life (11 ). Most notably, for Barker, the passage presents a "scene of writing and of reading [that] is, like the grave, a private place", built around a "structure of confessions and denials of desire" (3). Though focused on what may seem a rather distant historical moment, Barker's argument (which is much indebted to the work of Michel Foucault) is strangely relevant to many of Beckett's plays. Like Pepys's diary, these plays often situate their characters in an intensely private, if not always funereal, space - from Krapp's isolated den and the contiguous urns of Play to that other table isolated in a pool of light in Ohio Impromptu. And, as we know, Beckett's settings and costumes often work to hide, fragment or displace the body. Think of the three characters of Play whose heads alone protrude from their funeral urns, the three women of "undeterminable" age in Come and Go, buttoned up in their "Full-length coats", their faces shaded by "Drab nondescript hats"

202 ( 1984, 193, 196), or the floating head of That Time. In so doing, the plays appear to eclipse the body and its passions and desires. Yet these plays also put that body - and those passions - on display, if not visually then through personal narratives that include images of what is often explicitly sexual desire. Indeed, many of Beckett's char• acters seem to turn their private lives into texts. We see this in Krapp's tapes and the confessions of Play, and perhaps also in the fragmented memories of That Time, Ohio Impromptu's enigmatic book, and even the whispered secrets of Come and Go. Given Beckett's reputation for aus• tere stage images featuring isolated, alienated individuals, it is remark• able how many of his plays actually contain or even revolve around sto• ries of love relationships and human desire. Though far from the classic stage realism Barker sees as an out• growth of the documentary impulse that led Pepys to write his diary, both the staging and the stories of these Beckett plays present figures that still approximate what Barker calls the typical "bourgeois man. Riven by guilt, silence and textuality" (9). Seemingly untouched by such external forces as history and politics, the privacy of their dramatic worlds is nevertheless invaded by specifically modern techniques of power. At the same time, the plays' unique 'textuality' - the fragmentation and tempo• ral displacements of the narratives their characters produce - as well as their characteristic tension between hiding and display, may hint at a postmodern resistance to these modalities of power. 1 Krapp 's Last Tape and Play offer contrasting but complementary ways of developing this claim, though many of the other examples I have already mentioned could be used to flesh it out. Perhaps the closest Beckett's plays come to the documentary impulse of Pepys's diary is Krapp 's Last Tape. Krapp's annual birthday recordings imply a sorting of information as they allow him, according to his younger voice, to separate "the grain from the husks" of his experi• ence (57). Though considerably more technologized than their seven• teenth-century counterpart, Krapp's activities also present us with a pri• vate scene of reading (or listening to the tapes) and writing ( or recording). And, in a movement one commentator has associated with Freud's fort/da (Catanzaro, 405), Krapp's appearance and disappearance behind the curtain ·at the back of the stage, as well as his manipulations of the tape recorder, give us several on-stage versions of the mechanism of hiding and display. The disembodied heads of the three characters in Play, too, seemingly enclosed in the private space of the grave, document the sordid

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