Images of Beckett - Index of

woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as loving memory some
old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when.
Stoop mute over the graves of none.’ 104 Language in this text is subject to the
most radical of reappraisals; syntax is fractured; grammar is restructured;
words reform themselves, newly coined, before our very eyes, taking on
unfamiliar shapes – ‘unworsenable’, ‘unmoreable’, ‘unlessenable’,
‘meremost’, ‘dimmost’, ‘unnullable least’. Yet a hard, spare, vibrant, poetic
prose emerges: ‘Where in the narrow vast? Say only vasts apart. In that
narrow void vasts of voids apart’; ‘To last unlessenable least how loath to
leasten’. 105 The alliterative technique is familiar enough. Yet Beckett’s
struggle to resuscitate a language that must inevitably fail – fail to find the
right words to express the chaos of being, the fragility of a brief existence,
or Pascal’s ‘silence of infinite space’ – is bold, even thrilling.
Looking back on the shorter plays of the 1960s, Play could indeed be
described, as it was by Marin Karmitz, as a ‘Feydeau-like sex story, a very
funny story of adultery in which Beckett’s talent consisted of breaking reality
and placing it in abstraction’. 106 Even here, humour itself, as well as brief
glimpses of human feeling, play against both the patterns and the Limbo-like
setting. And in the later short plays, with a few exceptions such as Quad and
What Where, Beckett seems to have recoiled from the temptations of
abstraction to blend concreteness, directness and vibrancy of the image
with fragility and evanescence. What also happened is that, by isolating and
concentrating the image, he managed to create a distillation of feeling:
the inevitable sadness and anticipated death of the three friends meeting
again in Come and Go – and this already in a play from the 1960s; the loss,
absence and distress encapsulated in Footfalls; the sense of isolation and
alienation conveyed by Not I; the resignation found in Rockaby; the resilience
and revolt expressed in Catastrophe. The formal, almost mathematical
patterning that forms an important part of many of these plays, works then
not, as one might suppose it would, away from human feeling but draws one
towards it.
(Left) Billie Whitelaw rehearsing Footfalls, 1976
As someone who (to my acute embarrassment) found himself bursting
into tears at a dress rehearsal of Footfalls, I find the notion of Beckett as an
arid, inhuman formalist extremely difficult to accept. It is, moreover,
precisely this particular blend of reduction, concentration and distillation
with the intricate patterning and repetition of words, gestures and
movements that has made Beckett into such a major influence on modern
painters and on video and installation artists.
IMAGES OF BECKETT 95