Images of Beckett - Index of

painting, Sleep, in which an old woman sits by the
window, her head drooping low onto her chest in
sleep or in death.
The sceptic would, of course, say that any
man or woman sitting in an armchair or standing
at a table would look like Hamm, Krapp, the
Reader or Listener, or W in Rockaby. But would
they? And when we know that Beckett was steeped
in the visual imagery of these paintings and that,
over a period of years, he could compare different
paintings by the same artist in some of their most
intricate visual details, the parallels or echoes
become at the very least highly intriguing.
But is the technique of what we might call
‘imaginative blending’, that is, borrowing and
transforming many different elements from
different areas of his experience into a new
creation, one that came naturally to Beckett?
It certainly did in his early days. Let us take one
example by way of illustration from the stories,
More Pricks than Kicks, and the novel, Dream of Fair
to Middling Women, on which some of those stories
were based. Here his methods were far more
transparent. We see that he blended together
(in a highly inventive, even extravagant fashion)
elements in his prose that he had borrowed from
real life, from literature and from art. For his
description of the physique of one of his female
characters – in his novel, Dream of Fair to Middling
Women, she was the Smeraldina Rima and in the
Joan O’Hara in Rockaby, 1999
(Left) Albert Finney in Krapp’s Last Tape, 1973
IMAGES OF BECKETT 71