BING AND NOTHINGNESS: THE LAST NAMED AGONIST IN ’S FICTION

JEREMY PARROTT University of Szeged

Abstract: Beckett’s late fiction is characterized by concision, sparseness and an absence of names. The mid-1960s text ‘Bing/Ping’ is the last in which it is possible to discern traces of the author’s lifelong impulse to name both a character and himself and, in so doing, to make one final identification of himself with Christ.

Keywords: Christ, Irish literature, onomastics, Samuel Beckett.

1. Introduction

This paper takes the form of a meditation on a word. The word, or mantra, in question is the monosyllable, ‘bing’. The reason for wishing to explore and tease out the resonances of this little nugget of sounds and let- ters is that it was the enigmatic title given by Samuel Beckett to one of his later prose works in French, a micro-novel of less than 1,000 words. The text was published as a limited edition slim volume in France in 1966 and trans- lated into English by the author himself, first appearing in print in the liter- ary periodical Encounter in February 1967, under the English title of Ping. Thus, there are in fact two words in here: ‘bing’ and ‘ping’, and the game of ping-bing in which we are about to engage will necessarily involve both terms, oscillating unstably between one and the other in an effort to catch fleeting glimpses of their ever-deferred meanings. Despite its brevity, Bing/Ping (as I will now call it) was a text on which Beckett expended an extraordinary amount of time and effort. It is possible to trace the genesis of the work through 16 distinct manuscript drafts in French1 and through at least 3 reworkings in English2. What remains in the final versions is a distillate, free of all superfluous matter. In linguistic terms, this can be seen through the sparse articles, prepositions and punctuation marks, the virtual absence of pronouns, conjunctions and finite verbs and the disconnectedness between the word-islands that constitute the text. B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 74

And yet, even though the text is extremely condensed and telegraphic, there is an enormous amount of repetition. The 946 words that constitute the entirety of Bing feature just 122 different words, with the word ‘blanc’ (white) repeated 82 times and ‘bing’ itself 19 times, excluding the title. Critical commentary on this work has tended to take the form of structural- ist analysis, or textual genesis, or else looks at Beckett’s practice as self- translator3. Quite remarkably, however, none of these approaches has cho- sen to focus on the title itself and its ‘translation’ from Bing to Ping.

2. Readings, Interpretations

Before starting to analyse the title, it is first necessary to make some tentative attempt at getting to grips with the highly unusual form/content of the text. The fullest traditional reading of the piece that I have found in print was published by David Lodge in Encounter exactly a year after Ping appeared in the same journal. He offers a composite reading based on his own insights and those of a group of scholars whom he gathered together to discuss the work. Rather than paraphrase his already compressed com- mentary, I will quote part of it verbatim:

I suggest that ‘Ping’ is the rendering of the consciousness of a person confined in a small, bare, white room, a person who is evidently under extreme duress, and probably at the last gasp of life. He has no freedom of movement: his body is ‘fixed,’ the legs are joined together, the heels turning at right angles, the hands hanging palms front; the ‘heart ’ makes ‘no sound’. ‘Only the eyes only just…’ — can we say, move? There are parts of the room he cannot see, and he evidently can’t move his head to see them, though he thinks there is ‘perhaps a way out’ there. The first words of the piece are ‘all known,’ and this phrase recurs. But the ‘all’ that is ‘known’ is severely limited and yields ‘no meaning’ though the narrator is reluctant to admit this: ‘perhaps a meaning’. ‘Ping’ seems to record the struggles of an expiring consciousness to find some meaning in a situation which offers no purchase to the mind or to sensation. The consciousness makes repeated, feeble efforts to assert the possibility of colour, movement, sound, memory, another person’s presence, only to fall back hopelessly into the recognition of colourlessness, paralysis, silence, obliv- ion, solitude. This rhythm of tentative assertion and collapse is marked by the frequently recurring collocation ‘only just about never’. 4

Lodge and his co-readers considered possible meanings of the word ‘ping’, initially treating it as an onomatopoeic word, indicating a certain 75 ACROSS THE ISLES sound: a bullet ricocheting, dripping water, a bicycle bell or a typewriter bell5. None of these interpretations, however, seems to fit in with the tone or imagery of the piece and they serve to detract from rather than enrich any reading of the text as a whole. Lodge himself favoured the view that ‘ping’ was ‘a noise external to the discourse’6, whereas certain unnamed others saw it as ‘a code-word for some concept that cannot be fully and openly entertained, such as God (cf. Godot). Thus, the sentence ‘Ping else- where always there only known not’ becomes almost lucid if you replace Ping with God’7. His reading group also focused on a number of words which, unusually in this piece, occur only once: nails, hair, flesh, torn and scars. Associating these with the oft-repeated phrases, ‘legs joined like sewn’, ‘hands hanging palm front’ and ‘seam like sewn invisible’ they arrived at a tentative reading of the text as representing the dying conscious- ness of Christ in the tomb8. I find this a compelling interpretation, and one which I intend to substantiate through my exploration of the title. In the French text, of the 19 occurrences of the word ‘bing’, 8 are cap- italized; the figures for ‘ping’ are 21 and 13 respectively. The discrepancy between these figures is largely attributable to the fact that ‘ping’ is used as a ‘translation’ of ‘hop’ and well as ‘bing’. The reason for capitalization is that the word sometimes occurs in sentence initial position and, in these texts, Beckett adheres to the orthographic convention of using capital letters after full-stops. However, the occurrence of bing/ping at the start of a sentence (where the subject is usually placed), combined with capitalization (an orthographic characteristic of proper names rather than common nouns), leads me to consider the possibility that bing/ping may be, at least in part, a proper name. Since the text is struggling to formulate or assemble an entity out of disparate and fragmentary body parts (head, hair, ears, nose, eyes, mouth, heart, breath, hands, legs, heels, feet, toes, nails…) it may be that occasionally they coalesce sufficiently for that entity to be named, as in the phrases, ‘Ping murmur perhaps a nature one second’9 and ‘Ping of old only just perhaps a meaning’10. It is my contention that this pair of names, or quasi-names, constitute the last link in the onomastic chain that can be traced right back to the beginnings of Beckett’s fictional oeuvre.

3. Naming practices

Within the scope of this paper I can give no more than the most sum- mary outline of Beckett’s ingenious naming practices, though the full story B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 76 can be found in my book on Beckettian onomastics — Change All the Names. In order to understand the place of Bing as the last avatar in a 35- year long series, a number of factors must be borne in mind: 1. Beckett tended to name fictional works after his male protagonists, e.g. , , and Malone. 2. Beckett had a special affinity for certain letters (in particular B and M), which may be understood as his sigla or personal signs. In the case of B (the initial of his first protagonist, Belacqua), the source is clearly B for Beckett; the M is rather more involved, being a rotation of the Greek Σ (sigma), i.e. S for Samuel. 3. In my view, a major theme running through Beckett’s entire fiction- al output is the search for a name. His own given name, Samuel, has the meaning in Hebrew of ‘name of God’, with Sam meaning simply ‘name’. His given name is, therefore, merely a place-marker, await- ing the true name, which it is his goal as a creative artist to discover and reveal, and in so doing, to reveal the true name of God. 4. Encoded in the names of several of Beckett’s earlier protagonists are references to both himself and to Christ (e.g. Murphy, Watt, Mercier, Camier, Macmann). As Estragon notes in (doubtlessly echoing the author’s own feelings) “All my life I’ve com- pared myself to him”11 — him being Christ. Nor is this link solely based on the author’s name for, as the unnamed narrator of Beckett’s late novel is at pains to point out, ‘You first saw the light of day the day Christ died’12. Indeed, Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, which also happened to be a Friday, 13th. 5. The virtually interchangeable names of the agonist in Beckett’s last extensive fictional work prior to Bing/Ping, , include the remarkably similar variants, Bim and Pim: ‘a few scraps Bim Pim proper names presumably’13. 6. After Bing/Ping, none of the protagonists in any of the fictional works produced by Beckett in the last 22 years of his life bears a name, allow- ing for the possibility of considering Bing/Ping as the last in a series.

4. Famous Bings

So, if Bing may be thought of as a name, the salient questions to ask are: what is the motivation behind its choice and what could the name sig- 77 ACROSS THE ISLES nify within the text? The first point to note is that Bing is well-attested as a family name, being both an English name of uncertain origin (most famous- ly borne by Admiral George Byng, who captured Gibraltar in 1704) and a German Jewish name derived from the town of Bingen in the Rhineland14. The German Bings include two bearers whose existence would doubtless- ly have impinged on Beckett’s consciousness and may have played some small part in the name choice in this text. The first was Siegfried Bing (1838-1905), also known as Samuel Bing, a celebrated art dealer in Paris at the turn of the century. He had his own pavilion at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 which traded under the name of ‘L’Art Nouveau, La Maison Bing’. The other bearer was a celebrated avant-garde photographer called Ilse Bing (1899-1998). She lived and worked in Paris throughout the 1930s before being interned by the Nazis and finally emigrating to the United States. Her work was, of course, in shades of black, white and grey (the predominant colour scheme of Beckett’s Bing) but her most famous images are penetrating self-portraits, including one from 1931 which shows fragments of her image in a number of mirrors beside a head and shoulders image of herself with the Leica camera she used. These German Bings are, however, of only secondary importance in comparison with another bearer of this name, born in Washington State in 1903 to an Irish mother and christened Harry Lillis Crosby, but known to the world as Bing Crosby. Bing was a nickname bestowed on Crosby as a boy, its origin being a feature in a comic paper called the ‘Bingville Bugle’. A neighbour, who shared Crosby’s love of this story, dubbed him ‘Bingo from Bingville’, which quickly got shortened to Bing. The Bing Crosby story is a classic fulfilment of the American Dream — talent, hard work and a good slice of luck enabling a kid from a humble background to become a world- famous multi-millionaire. Indeed, it is hard to over-estimate the success and status achieved by Crosby in his heyday, during the 1940s and 1950s. At the end of the Second World War he was acclaimed by American troops as the individual who had done most to keep up their morale. In 1948, he was voted as the most admired individual alive and it was estimated that roughly half of all record- ed music broadcast on radio in that year featured the voice of Bing Crosby. According to the Wikipedia entry on Crosby, his is the most electronically recorded human voice in history. Crosby was the perfect all-round enter- B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 78 tainer, seeming to sing, dance, act and wise-crack effortlessly and appear- ing to be best friends with the whole world. What better credentials could be sought therefore if we were looking for a modern Messiah? What Samuel Beckett thought of Crosby is not preserved anywhere, but it is inconceivable that Beckett was unaware of the Crosby phenome- non and would have heard his records and seen his films. It is, however, hard to imagine two more dissimilar artists circa 1950: the one celebrated, popular, easy-going; the other unknown, socially awkward and tortured. And yet, that image of a polar opposite may have held some attraction for Beckett as an unattainable other or alter ego. Thus far, the links I have attempted to make between Beckett and Crosby are highly tenuous. The time has come to make the case for seeing the shadow of Bing Crosby behind the ghostly image of Beckett’s Bing.

5. The Crosby Connection

As a movie actor Crosby was most famous for appearing in a series of romantic, comedy adventure films between 1940 and 1962 with co-stars Leslie Townes Hope (1903-2003) (aka Bob Hope) and Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton (1914-1996) (aka Dorothy Lamour). The films were known as the ‘Road to…’ movies, since they were all entitled ‘The Road to…” some- where, the destination always being exotic and glamorous (e.g. Zanzibar, Bali and even Utopia). During the war years and post-war austerity these films offered some much-needed escapism and proved to be huge box- office successes around the world. The road is, of course, a very familiar Beckettian topos — a very bleak and featureless road being the setting for Waiting for Godot — symbolizing the need for movement, a quest, the journey through life, as opposed to the confined locus of the womb-tomb room. Who are the figures on a journey in the Hollywood quest movies? By name they are Crosby, Hope and Lamour. The first of these can be analysed as ‘by the Cross’: through Christ’s death on the cross mankind is saved, as long as we have faith in him. Hope is transparently ‘hope’ whilst Lamour is simply the French for ‘love’. Thus the names of the three travellers along the road can be resolved into the meanings of faith, hope and love, the three theological virtues specifically mentioned by St. Paul in I Corinthians 1, 13 as being the central components of the Christian life. 79 ACROSS THE ISLES

Having now seen in the name Crosby a reference to the cross and Christ, it is as well to remind ourselves that Beckett exhorted his readers to look for meaning, not in what is said but, ‘between the phrases, communi- cated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement’15. Thus Bing points mutely to the implied but unspoken collocation with Crosby and Christ. A still more telling chain of association can be discerned if we look at the song for which Bing Crosby will forever be remembered. In 1942 he recorded a song by Irving Berlin which became the Christmas no. 1 record that year and which, to this day, remains the best-selling single of all-time, as attest- ed by the 2008 edition of The Guinness Book of Records. That song was the sentimental evocation of a perfect, long-lost past entitled ‘White Christmas’. In that title we find not only the endlessly repeat- ed keyword ‘white’ (occurring 91 times in Ping) but even the discarded title to Beckett’s own piece — ‘Blanc’ immediately preceding ‘Bing’ as the work- ing title of Beckett’s final manuscript draft. And as ‘Bing’ leads us to the unspoken ‘Crosby’, so ‘white’ inevitably evokes ‘Christmas’, which not only calls to mind Christ and his birth but links Christ with a mirror image of our author: Christ-mas, Christ-Sam. Two more points link Crosby with the now heavily over-determined signifier ‘bing’ in Beckett’s short work. In the late 1940s, the singer made a substantial investment in a new technology which he was also the first recording artist to master: pre-recording his radio shows on magnetic tape. Indeed, Crosby’s sponsorship of the pioneering firm Ampex contributed in no small measure to the rapid spread of the tape-recorder revolution in the 1950s. Thus Beckett owes a direct artistic debt to Bing Crosby, for without his efforts the author might well not have been able to conceive Krapp’s Last Tape. In 1953 Beckett was living in Paris and beginning to receive his first crit- ical recognition following the early performances of En attendant Godot and the publication of his trilogy of novels. At the very same time, the world’s most successful recording artist released his first long-playing record. Bizarrely, it was recorded entirely in French and entitled ‘Le Bing: Song Hits of Paris’. Once again, Beckett could not have been oblivious of this fact and this synchronicity of crossed destinies may have played some part in his choice of word-name 13 years later. The mantra bing has thus been converted into the man-trap Bing, and it seems a perfectly apposite quasi-name for a half-evoked Christ figure B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 80 through the range of Crosby associations. In addition, and considering the unit morphologically, the B for Beckett is followed by the continuous suffix ‘-ing’, suggesting the continuity of life or ‘be-ing’ until an end is reached with ‘bing silence’ and ‘ping over’. Why then should Beckett choose to change the enormously rich find which is ‘bing’ for the relatively impoverished ‘ping’ in English?

6. Conclusion

I suspect that the answer is in part related to Beckett’s reasons for switching from writing in English to writing principally in French. He claimed that he wanted to be able to write without style, and part of that mysterious thing called style is the wealth of associations which familiar words call to mind. The word-name ‘bing’ was at once too rich and, I believe, to Beckett’s mind, too obvious. In the French text ‘bing’ would clearly stand out as an exonym, alien to the French linguistic system. In English, however, it not only bespeaks its be-ing but inevitably prompts an associative chain with Bing Crosby, leading to a critical disinterment of the author’s hidden motivations. Beckett loved to conceal and to cover his traces and the inversion of little ‘b’ to little ‘p’ effectively hides the source of the word-name from casu- al, monolingual English readers. With the advent of ‘Ping’ new traces are added but, crucially for the self-effacing self-publicist, three voices are con- cealed: the voice of Bing Crosby, the voice of the author and the voice of the sound itself — /b/ being a voiced and /p/ an unvoiced bilabial plosive. Thus, the being of Beckett, multiply linked to the being of Christ via the monosyl- lable ‘bing’, is rotated into an emptily resonant ‘ping’ — perhaps the sound of a round, white golf ball sweetly struck by a Ping golf club up into the blue almost white infinite…?16

Notes

1. Ten manuscript drafts of the text that would become Bing were reproduced in an appendix to Federman and Fletcher’s bibliography of Beckett (1970). In Admussen’s guide to the Beckett manuscripts, however, a further six drafts were revealed, all sixteen having been written between late July and late August 1966. The word ‘bing’ first appears in the seventh draft. No titles are given to any but the final draft, which is entitled ‘BLANC’, crossed out and replaced by “BING’. 81 ACROSS THE ISLES

2. Admussen notes three drafts to Ping prior to the corrected galley proof, but sug- gests that at least one more draft is missing. The first manuscript draft is entitled ‘Pfft’, followed by two untitled, typed versions, before the appearance of ‘PING’ as the title on the galley proof. 3. See, in particular, Fitch’s Beckett and Babel and Segrè’s ‘Style and Structure in Beckett’s “Ping”: That Something Itself.’ 4. Lodge’s essay is reproduced in Graver and Federman (1979), pp. 291-301. 5. Graver and Federman, p. 297. 6. Ibid. p. 298 7. Ibid. 8. Beckett — No’s Knife. p.166. 9. Graver and Federman, p. 298, passim. 10. Ibid. p.167. 11. Beckett. Complete Dramatic Works, p. 51. 12. Beckett. Company, p. 20. 13. Beckett. How It Is, p. 89. 14. Hanks & Hodges, p. 52. 15. Beckett. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p.138. 16. The trade name Ping was first used by Kirsten Solheim, inventor of a radical new putter, in 1959. To him, the name captured the sound made when the putter struck the ball. By the mid-1960s Ping equipment was widely used by profession- als and amateurs and in 1966 the USPGA banned the use of Ping clubs, deeming that they gave players an unfair advantage. Throughout his life Beckett was a keen golfer…

References

Admussen, R. L. 1979. The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: A Study. Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall & Co. Beckett, S. 1964. How It Is. London: Calder. Beckett, S. 1966. Bing. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Beckett, S. 1967. No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1947-1966. London: Calder & Boyars. Beckett, S. 1980. Company. London: Calder. Beckett, S. 1990. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber. Beckett, S. 1993. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. London: Calder. Federman, R. & Fletcher, J. 1970. Samuel Beckett: His Works and Critics. An Essay in Bibliography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fitch, B. T. 1988. Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Graver, L. & Federman, R. 1979. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hanks, P. & Hodges. F. 1996. A Dictionary of Surnames. Oxford: OUP. B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 82

Knowlson, J. & Pilling, J. 1979. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder. Parrott, J. 2004. Change All the Names: A Samuel Beckett Onomasticon. Szeged: Kakapo Press.