Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- 1 Beckett's Voice(s)
- 2 From Unabandoned Works: Beckett's Short Prose
- 3 The Conjuring of Something Out of Nothing: Beckett's ‘Closed Space’ Novels
- 4 Beckett's ‘Imbedded’ Poetry and the Critique of Genre
- 5 Art and Commodity: Beckett's Commerce with Grove Press
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- Index
1 - Beckett's Voice(s)
from Theory Matters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- 1 Beckett's Voice(s)
- 2 From Unabandoned Works: Beckett's Short Prose
- 3 The Conjuring of Something Out of Nothing: Beckett's ‘Closed Space’ Novels
- 4 Beckett's ‘Imbedded’ Poetry and the Critique of Genre
- 5 Art and Commodity: Beckett's Commerce with Grove Press
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- Index
Summary
all sound his echo (Watt)
… not of one bird but of many … (Ezra Pound, Canto 75)
it's impossible that I should have a voice […] this voice that is not mine, but can only be mine (The Unnamable)
All that Fall is a specifically radio play, or rather radio text, for voice, not bodies. I have already refused to have it ‘staged’ and I cannot think of it in such terms. A perfectly straight reading before an audience seems to me just barely legitimate, though even on this score I have my doubts. But I am absolutely opposed to any form of adaptation with a view to its conversion into ‘theatre.’ It is no more theatre than End-game [sic] is radio and to act it is to kill it. Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings […] will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing's coming out of the dark. (Beckett to Barney Rosset, 27 August 1957, Letters 3 63)
Voice as disembodied entity, manifest sporadically, often of its own volition, in fragments, perceived piecemeal, echo of being, identity, self or others (even if falsely so), emanating from above or below, from within or without, is the heuristic that drives Samuel Beckett's supreme fictions, then manifests itself powerfully, if obliquely, slantingly, in the theatre that follows, beginning, perhaps, or at least overtly manifest, in 1957 with All That Fall for radio. Its sources are indeterminate, evasive, ghostly, receding, counterfeited, echoed, ventriloquised. It may be, finally – beyond the Belacquas, the Watts and Murphys, beyond the Didis and Gogos, Hamms and Clovs, Winnies and Willies, even beyond the Maddies and Dans – Beckett's most profound literary creation. He inherited a version of it from the early twentieth-century Modernists – most directly from James Joyce, the surrealists, and the Verticalists orbiting Eugene Jolas's transition magazine in Paris – in the form of the interior monologue, which he then stretched, extended and finally disbursed, scattered beyond cohesion, beyond recognition, beyond identity, even self-identity, as the self in conversation with itself is often not self-presence but counterfeit.
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- Beckett MattersEssays on Beckett's Late Modernism, pp. 19 - 39Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017