Images of Beckett - Index of

The cameraman at Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Jim Lewis, a good friend
of Beckett’s, recounted a conversation that he had with him in 1982, in the
course of which Beckett said that every word he used seemed to him to
constitute a lie and that music (in the sense of rhythm) and image were all
that were left for him to create. 9 ‘Words’, he had told Lawrence Harvey in
the 1960s, ‘are a form of complacency’; writing was, he said, as if one were
‘trying to build a snowman with dust’; nothing holds together. 10 But it is
worth stressing again that his attempt to break down traditional forms of
language stemmed from the wish to express ‘being’, which he saw as
essentially formless, chaotic, enigmatic and mysterious. 11
Beckett was probably drawn to the image initially for reasons similar to
those of the English novelist and art historian, Anita Brookner, who said in
a recent interview that ‘Images have a striking power to crystallise certain
moments, certain feelings: a sort of immanence.’ 12 Beckett often spoke of
how the image was more powerful than the word and superior to it in its
greater clarity and precision. ‘Thus the image of a knife is more accurate than
the word knife...“knife” has no meaning, it’s a blurred image. You have to
say “butcher’s knife”, “kitchen knife” “a knife to cut the bread” so that the
word takes some meaning. But when it is shown, you see at once what kind
of knife it is: the image is then stronger than the word.’ 13 Beckett often used
images in a direct, strong, confrontational manner. In its most extreme
form, if an ejaculation was the closest one could get to pure being, as Beckett
suggested to Harvey it was, the scream and the image of the open mouth
waiting to ‘scream again’ in Not I comes closer to expressing one aspect
of ‘being’ than any of the formal structures of language could do. 14
But Beckett’s thinking on the image went beyond the attractions of
crystallisation and immanence. The actor, Stephen Rea, tells a revealing story
of how, while he was rehearsing the part of Clov in Endgame, he asked Beckett
a question: ‘Clov keeps repeating to Hamm: “I’ll leave you, I’ll leave you.” I
pointed to one particular instance of this and said to Beckett, “When he says
it at this point, does that mean he is going to the kitchen or is he going for
(Left) Patrick Magee and Stephen Rea in Endgame, 1976
IMAGES OF BECKETT 49