Robert Scanlan
Samuel Beckett died at Christmastime a quarter of a century ago. His work for the theatre remains in constant production throughout the world, and a recent spate of "new" publications (the abandoned short story "Echo's Bones" and a slew of previously uncollected poetry and translations1) has kept him contemporary and current in literary and theatrical circles. Academia continues to feast on Beckett, with new and frequently quite brilliant books of criticism and analysis (Beckett attracts the best minds) and doctoral dissertations endlessly streaming from departments of literary studies and, more rarely, "Performance" studies. But a quarter of a century also has transformed Beckett into a Classic. I am about to argue and exhort the point that Beckett (or his practice in aesthetics) should still be integrated into the most up-to-date of new and innovative technologies—especially in new digital media or multi-media hybrids he could not have known about.
Beckett was notorious in his lifetime for resisting "genre-jumping" experiments (as the late great doyenne of Beckett Studies, Ruby Cohn dubbed them), and he riled many by vigorously opposing open-ended deviations from his meticulous production instructions. But this became an issue only because Beckett's work spontaneously excited and attracted the most radical of avant-gardistes. The stark originality of his literary and stage creations invited experimentation, or so it seemed to those who were young while he came to fame. I was myself drawn into this unstable and disquieting -- but also thrilling and inspiring interface, and I was drawn in by Beckett's own confusing ambivalence. He continued to give furtive individual permissions to "genre-jumpers" while simultaneously declaring that he was against the practice, and should never have let himself be talked into granting such leeway to theatre artists.2 One plain and charming fact is that Beckett had a weakness for fellow artists and great affection for many individuals, among them Fred Neumann and David Warrilow, members of the avant-garde theatre collective Mabou Mines. This avant-garde troupe formed gradually in the 1950s and 60s in Paris at a time when Beckett's early stage works (Waiting for Godot, the two Acts Without Words, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape) were revolutionizing theatre culture and making him famous. Fred Neumann knew Beckett well, and frequently conferred and drank with him. Lee Breuer, Phillip Glass (then a student of Nadia Boulanger's), David Warrilow and Ruth Maleczech worked together while in direct contact with Beckett. As Ruth later told the story, they all "grew tired of performing in English for a tiny expatriot community in Paris," and returned to New York in 1970 to form the company we know still as Mabou Mines. Their seminal acquaintance with Beckett came at a time of galvanizing renewal in Europe, when Beckett was emerging (coincidentally) side by side with an explosion of "Absurdist" playwrights led by Eugene Ionesco. Not everyone was correctly labeled an "Absurdist," (Beckett among the misnamed) but Beckett could not escape the label, once it was applied to him by the German/English critic Martin Esslin. The new playwrights who were correctly grouped under this rubric, included Fernando Arrabal, Arthur Adamov, Jean Tardieu, Jean Genet, Boris Vian and a many others, chiefly imitators, outside of Paris.
When Mabou Mines was formed in New York, an American avant-garde had been developing from French examples for a decade, directly influenced by what had been happening in Paris in the 1950s. New York soon learned of the company's unique association with Beckett, whose recent Nobel Prize (1969) had finally forced Americans to try to take his measure. Now "damned to fame" for real and for good, Beckett grew increasingly disquiet about liberties taken with his compositions, whether his stage plays were wildly distorted by "concept" overlays, or whether his works devised for other media (for instance his prose writings for the page) were willy-nilly put into staged contexts over which he could exert no control. Ironically, Beckett's recalcitrance and alarm masked his real concern: people would miss the point of his inventions in many various media, page, stage, radio, television. Transposing his words from one medium to another abandoned their carefully constructed contexts in the medium for which they were written. Without the context, the action of the words was usually lost entirely. There was a widespread naivety about such formal matters, especially in America, and Beckett cared very much about being understood, about having his real accomplishments respectfully transmitted, without distortion and misrepresentation. He did not (as some have insinuated) fear evaluations or assessments of his work, but he had a horror of being taken for the "author" of hybrid mashups that mangled his considerable formal accomplishments.
My first full immersion in this controversy (after having witnessed Joanne Akalaitis' bizarre but memorable staging of the radio play Cascando and—a far more important accomplishment—Lee Breuer's brilliant staging, with David Warrilow, of the prose vision The Lost Ones) came when Fred Neumann started working, in 1980, on a theatre composition based on the complex autobiographical prose piece Company. Fred started working on this as soon as the text appeared in print, and he asked for my active participation and advice. These early attempts to stage Company led directly to my first meeting with Beckett, in 1981. At that meeting, I gave Beckett my account of Neumann's work-so-far (Beckett referred to him as "Freddy") and we discussed the nature of the text as a prose work. Beckett was adamant that the carefully demarcated pronoun shifts (the first person, I; the second person, you; the third person, he) cannot be rendered on a stage without distortion and the creation of a nonsense. The precise grammatical differentiations of the text (I grew to realize while listening to Beckett) were the exact formal shell of the work as devised for that medium. They were features of the "landscape" of pure prose, as conveyed by language laid out on a page of print, a careful grammatical bookkeeping of what I later learned to call displaced loci of being.
A locus of being is a site on an ontological spectrum. This spectrum deploys, in every Beckett work, an array of "creatures" (his word) represented at differing degrees of being. Thus, in a prose work, the protagonist is named and described. Take "Murphy" in Beckett's first novel. The more his actions are followed and described, the more his "reality" appears to increase. The other "creatures" he meets and interacts with acquire secondary "reality" the more their episodes are elaborated. But Murphy remains "more real" as the novel moves from secondary character to secondary character, episode to episode while never leaving Murphy. This describes the aesthetics of any novel (think Robinson Crusoe, or David Copperfield) and it is mimicked in film, where the camera is the "stalker" who lends much higher degrees of being to those who stay in the picture frame than it accords to those who are left behind after a brief appearance in a single "shot." Characters who never appear, but are talked about, have yet another degree of presence on the ontological spectrum. If someone talks about a "real" person, that differs from talking about a fictional character (say Effi Briest, brought up in Krapp's Last Tape) and a hypothetical character differs yet again, and is even further removed on the ontological spectrum. "Beings" have differing degrees of being. One of my favorite examples of how elusive a locus of being can be, is taken from Beckett's stage play Rough for Theatre II. Our Lady of Succor, on whose feast day the play takes place in 1945, is easy to miss. Her "presence" in the play is so distant and removed as to be almost vestigial. It took me years to notice her in the play. But after many years of acquaintance with the play—staging it, watching other people's productions of it, seeing a film version many times, reading and rereading, I have grown convinced that Rough for Theatre II is "her play," that she is the prime mover of the piece. Her mysterious (divine?) agency prevents the silent protagonist, a man on the verge of suicide, from jumping to his death. No one in the play seems to know this. But Beckett's subtle markers can lead us to discern her. She is heavily veiled, but she is there. The German word Dasein always strikes the exact note for locus of being sightings/citings. That said, who is Our Lady of Succor?
It turns out that "Our Lady of Succor" is not a "real" saint. Even outside the play, "she" calls for a serious ontological footnote. Her place on the ontological spectrum is shifty as hell. "She" is a painting of the Madonna. Some pope or other sanctified the painting because -- as attested to the pope's satisfaction -- the painting answers prayers. What impressed Pope Pius IX was that prayers of intercession prayed to "her" (including his own) have yielded miraculous effects. "She" answers prayers for succor. And further furthermore, she disappeared (when Napoleon's troops stormed through Italy), was sorely missed for many years, then miraculously returned to her place on the wall of her church in Rome. Prayers of intercession started being answered again. Case closed: The painting was granted a canonical coronation along with the added honor of a feast day. Could Beckett have found a more ironic locus of being on which to hinge the "salvation" action of a play?
I can't elaborate this reading of Rough for Theatre II any further here, but everywhere in Beckett's work, creatures with wildly divergent degrees of being are lodged in the fabric of Beckett's chosen media. In fact, the medium determines where Beckett lodges loci of being. His favored trick is to lodge them at the extreme verges of the medium, the outer boundary. The named "being" I just discussed above is "present" in the play only via the accident of the date, as looked up in an almanac by a character onstage. He "reads her into" the play by quoting the almanac out loud. That is perhaps the faintest degree of presence possible, lodged at the fragile limits of "The Theatre's" capacity to represent at all. Much more obviously "present" are the three actors one must hire to play the play. One of those actors brings on a briefcase stuffed with files, each one of which is written testimony by yet more "beings," mothers, wives, casual acquaintances... Clearly they are "more present" (as supposedly "real" and relevant figures in the protagonist's life) than is the elusive Mater de Perpetuo Succursu—to give her the Pope's full official title. And in the play these "more real" witnesses appear via a physical, palpable and visible prop onstage. Our Lady is not "there" in any comparable way. And yet her agency settles the central issue of the play.
One could cite many other examples. These could be chosen from anywhere in the chronological progression of Beckett's entire œuvre. Suffice it here to sketch quickly over Beckett's gradual expansion from exclusively working in poetry and prose, to his mastery of an increasing repertoire of media. The abrupt emergence of Waiting for Godot in 1948, for instance, was Beckett's first deeply significant leap to a different medium. Written in a flash of inspiration between the thick prose impasto of the novels Molloy and Malone Dies and the resumption and completion of his so-called trilogy, Godot was a revelation for Beckett. It afforded him new freedom and clear-cut ontological solutions to the impasses of the prose. Soon after Godot found its way to production, Beckett shifted into the theatrical sub-genre of silent mime, a complete liberation from words (except for the instructions to his actors and directors). Soon thereafter he stumbled onto a new technology in the form of the reel-to-reel tape recorder, and quickly exploited this new tool for innovative time-telescoping of loci of being, bringing past "Selves" into direct interaction with a much older present Self (Krapp's Last Tape). The BBC (and Martin Esslin) then invited Beckett to compose for radio, and this in turn led to his blending of music and words in intricate patterns of interaction (Words and Music and Cascando). Then he briefly tried film (Film) and then abandoned it. But he quickly appropriated instead cathode-ray television, and made major aesthetic contributions there, still, in my opinion, underappreciated. This work was still in progress right at the end, with Nacht und Träume and ...but the clouds, important explorations of that medium.
Of course, every new medium introduces some new formal problem, but studying how Beckett shifts and problem-solves in each new medium (this will be the detailed burden of the book I am currently writing) is the method I propose for extrapolating fertile ideas for exploiting new media. Given the premise that every distinct medium has a characteristic and unique formal boundary, the trick is to discern the exact contours of the medium, and to posit that that is where Beckett would do his most intense and revealing work. He repeatedly lodged his creatures at the edge of possibility, for they are all seeking a minimally sufficient habitation for their elusive "being." The only accurate locus of being, apparently, is at the verge of non-being. Change the medium, and you've likely betrayed Beckett's master plan for lodging "beings," or "creatures." All his clever artifices come unmoored in media he was not consciously using as he composed; words, especially, cut off from their specific media context, grow meaningless and ridiculously "absurd."
These Beckett procedures for devising habitations for the "Self" differ from what is usually (and carelessly) known as minimalism. Subtracting alone does not do the trick or get you where Beckett steers his finished artifacts. Many commentators, for instance, have harped on the impasse Beckett seems to provoke in his confrontations with "conventional" prose fiction. "I can't go on. I'll go on." But few have noticed that his creatures repeatedly reach this impasse by a strange compulsion that locates their best peace (or least suffering) at that verge: they are creatures that naturally and by preference lodge there, at the boundaries of the medium. They are not seeking to get out, but to find a stable habitation.
In an unpublished paper I delivered at Den Haag, at the "Beckett at 90" conference, I disturbed a few decorous academics by comparing the movement of Beckett's typical prose protagonists to that of lice in a garment: their compulsive movement toward the inner seams of one's garments is misinterpreted if understood as an effort to get out. They are seeking instinctually a place where they can live. None in that audience seemed in any way acquainted with lice, and they found my analogy baffling and distasteful.
Full circle, in the case that first brought me into Beckett's presence, the action of Company was at stake if the medium was to be changed. In the course of our discussion of this dilemma, Beckett brought to my attention the upcoming world premiere of Ohio Impromptu, a play and title which at the time of our meeting was known only to those entrusted with unveiling it at an upcoming Beckett conference at Ohio State University. Ohio Impromptu (I later came to realize) details perfectly all that can be (and need be) said or shown of the ontological differentiations that govern the composition and "use" of prose text, as a medium. Reading prose texts is usually done alone and in silence. One reads "to oneself." We shift ontological register when a visible reader reads aloud: we hear a "real" voice enunciate the words, and we understand that they are in essence quoted, the reader is not speaking "in the first person." Reading aloud transposes Prose Text to Performance. It "theatricalizes" the medium. It then necessarily has a different action. A further ontological step is taken when an actor "personates" a text, presents him or herself as the originator of the words. Ohio Impromptu is, in my opinion, the commanding formal masterpiece of the entire Beckett canon. An actor personating a reader (i.e."in character") reads aloud a text he did not compose. He was "sent" to read it "to himself" and another actor, a visually identical stage "self " who does not read but exclusively listens (also "in character" onstage). This stunningly elliptical play captures and enacts all questions and quandaries about the relation between Beckett's principal media: prose text, and theatre.
It is not hard to grasp by extension the analogous relations that apply to all other media, those Beckett knew and used (mime, radio, the reel-to-reel tape recorder, television, and film) and the digital media he did not (holograms, virtual reality, digital animation, bio-feedback, extreme slow motion, new applications of photography, web-based "virtual" simulcasts from multiple locations, and whatever else may yet come). Lodging "creatures" at the interstices and boundaries of new media is one way to "use" and handle creatively any new media Beckett could not have known about. Developing a practical reflex for "spotting" loci of being, the devising ways to "populate" recesses of consciousness that map into representational "locations" in the new media—these are the processes and procedures that serious followers of Beckett have yet to explore. Virtual reality, for instance... does it not sound like a playground for Beckett preoccupations? I reported to Beckett only a year or two before his death on experiments with holography which he semi-authorized (without meaning to). I co-hosted Ruth Maleczech of Mabou Mines (along with MIT's List Visual Galleries and the School of Architecture) and together we worked with technicians at MIT's Media Lab to produce holographic images incorporated in a "staging" of Beckett's prose text Imagination Dead Imagine. Beckett dismissed the outcome of the project (and indeed, it bore no discernible relation to the source text), but he grilled me insistently about holograms, what they looked like, how they were produced, what their capabilities were for motion, etc. His fascination was palpable, and I could sense the wheels whirring: how might he use this medium to demonstrate what he knew about the instability of "Self's" being. I wish we could have pursued a new hologram project with his full participation. Twenty-five years later, holograms are enormously more developed affairs. And so are digital animation, bio-feedback, extreme slow motion, new uses of analog film images, and web-based simulcasts from multiple locations (with no limits on actual physical separation). These are only some of new and seemingly limitless vistas of representation through new media.
I have been strongly influenced, in my recent thinking about such things (and the formulation of new creative projects) by David Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film. In that tantalizing book, a hard look at the physical differences between the image in true film "footage", and the outlandishly different digital re-assembly of a "moving image" opened my eyes to important, constitutive elements of work I had done myself with Beckett's television plays. The literal dying after-image of a fluorescent glow on a glass screen, caused by a rapidly scanning cathode ray is spectacularly "different" from film or from the massive corporeality (Dasein) of live theatre. It is also different from the pixilated ensemble of digital TV. That Beckett knowingly composed Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, Nacht und Träume, ...but the clouds and Quad for the specific cathode-ray technology finally dawned on me. Medium matters. Medium is constitutive. Each technology "lodged" the locus of being in a different literal "place." In the medium of early television, the medium Beckett studied and used, the "habitation" was in the interstices of the fluorescent screen's dying glow...
In this brief space I can't go further into more examples or suggestions than are sketched here. I am in fact, as mentioned above, at work on a book-length study of Beckett's endlessly permuted constructions in at least these eight media: prose-on-page, live theatre, its silent sub-genre mime, reel-to-reel tape recording, radio, music (recorded and live), television, film and hybrids of the above (like Krapp's Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu). I have added music in many of my Beckett productions and followed meticulously his instructions for Cascando and for Words and Music, both of which I have staged, despite the fact that they were written for radio.
Beckett never had the chance to deal with digital media, or the Cloud, but if we pay close attention to how he appropriated and mastered each "new" medium he did come upon, we can deduce and extrapolate an idea of what he might have done, and how we ourselves might proceed if we choose to follow his aesthetic lead. This is an argument that calls for new works, new experiments. It cannot be settled in words, or by discursive reasoning and analysis. Such work still strikes me as the best way to remember him, and pay him the tribute of being still our contemporary.
ROBERT SCANLAN is a theatre director who is President and Artistic Director of The Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught theatre at Harvard since Beckett died, and he served as Literary Director for Robert Brustein's American Repertory Theatre, where he also headed the Dramaturgy Program and the Playwriting Program of the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard. He is a past recipient of the Boston Theatre Award (now the Elliot Norton Award) for Best Director, and has directed both in the United States and in many countries in Europe and Asia. He was Director of the Drama Program at MIT from 1977 to 1989.