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Dialogue V - The Comic Side of Pessimism: Rough for Theatre II (late 1950s)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- Anthem Press
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 73-82
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Summary
Janusz Pyda OP: If we interpret Happy Days as a critique, ironic and elegiac in tone, of optimism and the philosophy of consolation, we might view Rough for Theatre II as a satire on pessimism. It is, at any rate, an ironic and grotesque take on the opposite attitude.
But before we start to analyse this one-act play, I have some questions about form. What is ‘rough for theatre’ supposed to signify as a title? Why did Beckett decide on such a formal label instead of an original title for this piece and its twin, Rough for Theatre I? And do these two short compositions have anything in common, apart from the fact that both are brief sketches?
Antoni Libera: Beckett wrote them both in French in the second half of the 1950s, under the working title Fragment de théâtre. In English he called them Roughs for Theatre. We know little of the circumstances of their composition except that they were written after Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape and that they were attempts to re-engage with the world and poetics of Godot. Both have a similar pair of protagonists, like Didi and Gogo. In Rough I these are two vagrants, one of them blind, the other crippled; in Rough II they are two officials, one embittered, sluggish and indifferent, the other enthusiastic, disciplined and full of drive. It's hard to say what Beckett had in mind when he sat down to write these miniature plays: whether they were intended to be one-act plays or something bigger, and whether they can be considered finished works or rough sketches. Judging by the way they both end, one could consider them finished rather than abandoned half-way through, although in both cases their conclusions seem to lack clarity and conviction, and give the impression of having been tacked on. It's possible that that is what they were: that 20 years later, after his Nobel prize, Beckett suddenly decided to go back and finish them. He published them in 1974 and 1976.
So the titles are working titles. They indicate that these were dramatic sketches, rough drafts with no clear character: neither full plays nor classic one-act plays but something in between, ideas partly worked out in draft and sketches to be performed on stage.
Authors’ Note
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp ix-x
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Dialogue IX - Life without a Father: Footfalls (1975)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 28 February 2019, pp 131-146
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Janusz Pyda OP: Footfalls and That Time are generally considered twin plays. Not because they are particularly similar – they're not – but because they were written one after the other and jointly premiered. Beckett wrote them in 1974– 75, for staging on his 70th birthday in May 1976 at the London Royal Court Theatre, with which he had been closely connected for years.
Two plays were planned for the birthday celebrations: a new production of Endgame with Beckett's favourite actor, Patrick Magee (for whom Krapp's Last Tape was written), as Hamm, and a performance of three one-act plays: Play, which had been staged at the Royal Court in 1964, and the two new plays, That Time and Footfalls, in which the main roles were also played by Beckett's favourite actors. The Listener in That Time was played by Patrick Magee, while May – the protagonist of Footfalls – was played by Billie Whitelaw, an actress Beckett had admired for years and who was generally known as his muse. He had worked with her on the British premiere of Not I. Endgame, Play and That Time were directed Beckett's friend Donald McWhinnie, and Footfalls by Beckett himself.
This seems a suitable moment to broach the topic of Beckett's relationships with his actors. We know that he had his favourites, actors he particularly admired, and it's said that they sometimes inspired him to write new plays. Is this true? Did Beckett – like some composers who wrote with particular musicians in mind – write some of his plays for specific actors?
Antoni Libera: It's a bit complicated. Beckett, although a master of theatre and a great innovator, was not your typical theatre personality: he was shy and reticent, spoke little and in general did not really feel at home in the easy and relaxed atmosphere that characterizes theatrical circles. His approach to the task of instructing his actors was highly pedantic, one is almost tempted to say scientific, and he took it extremely seriously. His language on these occasions was very formal, almost technical. No psychologizing and certainly no philosophizing. Actors tend not to like this approach and they were a little afraid of him. He awed them; they felt unsure of themselves.
Frontmatter
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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Dialogue I - Messianism: Pros and Cons: Waiting for Godot (1949)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 28 February 2019, pp 3-14
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Summary
Janusz Pyda OP: Let's start with the fundamental question: Who is Godot? The play's protagonists seem unsure. In fact, they have no idea. Estragon is clueless, while Vladimir, the only character in favour of waiting for Godot, is incapable of describing what he looks like, let alone explaining the circumstances of their meeting or the reason for his conviction that Godot can change their destiny. He nevertheless claims that they have both met Godot once before and that Godot promised to meet them again. In short, Vladimir is not credible and gives one nothing to go on.
When Beckett was asked the same question, he would reply indirectly or by negation: ‘If I knew, I wouldn't have written the play’ was his standard answer. He is also on record as saying, ‘If I knew, I would have said so in the play,’ or again, ‘If by Godot I had meant God, I would have said God and not Godot.’ For me the most interesting of his very few comments on the subject is the following: ‘I do not know who Godot is. I do not even know if he exists. And I do not know if they believe he does, these two who are waiting for him.’ One thing emerges clearly from all this: the author does not place himself above the reader/audience; there is nothing that only he knows and wants to conceal from them. He does not even place himself in a privileged position in relation to his own text. Like the audience/reader, he knows only what can be deduced from the text, nothing more.
So the text is all we have. And the text, full as it is of uncertainties and unknowns, things murky and obliquely hinted at, does seem to tell us one thing with certainty, namely, that whether or not Godot exists, whether or not he really did meet the protagonists somewhere or is merely a figment of their imagination, he is a person. The protagonists are not waiting for an event or a thing, like manna from heaven; they are waiting for a person. Is this really something we can be certain of? And if so, what does it entail?
Antoni Libera: Yes, that is definitely something we can be certain of, and it entails a number of important things.
Contents
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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Dialogue X - Creatures of the Night: …but the clouds… (1976)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 28 February 2019, pp 147-158
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Summary
Janusz Pyda OP: … but the clouds … is a script for a television play. Before it there was the film script Film, written in 1963 and filmed in New York the following year with Buster Keaton. Then, in 1965, there was Eh Joe, a monologue, released almost simultaneously on British and German television. Finally, after a break of about ten years, there was Ghost Trio, shown on BBC in 1976. So … but the clouds … is Beckett's fourth television script. What attracted Beckett to film?
Antoni Libera: Film techniques were had already interested Beckett before the war. In the 1930s he dreamed of working with Eisenstein, the director of The Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible. He even wrote to him. Eisenstein never replied to the letter; possibly it never reached him. This was just as well, for nothing good would have come of their collaboration. For Beckett it might have had dreadful consequences (many Western idealists who went to Russia at that time never came back); at best he would have ended up with a sort of moral hangover, given that at the time of the Ribbentropp-Molotov pact Eisenstein was appointed by Goebbels head of the commission for cultural cooperation between Russia and Germany and put on a lavish production of Wagner's Valkyrie at the Bolshoi. However, I digress.
It's hard to say what attracted Beckett to film in the 1930s; we have no direct testimony about it, and it's hard to deduce anything from his work at the time, which certainly did not have film potential. But his post-war work did.
J. P.: What work are you thinking of?
A. L.: Just the general fact that after the war Beckett concentrated, especially in his prose works, mainly on the subjective sphere – the problem of mind and consciousness. That sphere can be expressed in images as well as in words, and especially well through the techniques of film. I think film techniques were for Beckett an excellent medium for expressing abstract ideas.
The act of filming, like the act of perception, provides rich opportunities for seeing the object-subject relation in a new light; and that relation was, of the fundamental problems of philosophy, the one that interested Beckett most.
Dedication
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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Dialogue VI - Life as Purgatory: Play (1962)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 83-96
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Janusz Pyda OP: Let's start from the title. One word: it should be simple, on the face of it. Not a phrase, not an idiom, just one word. And yet it's different in every translation: Play in English, Comédie in French, Spiel in German (the language in which it was first published and performed in 1963). Translators variously opt for the English/German or the French model. Is there any significance to this difference? Which of the two versions do you think more fundamental?
Antoni Libera: Both are important; they broaden the range of meaning and enrich the play. But the difference is not due to any uncertainty on the part of the author; it arises in each case from certain features of the language of translation.
Beckett basically has two kinds of title. One views the play from outside, as it were, and refers to its subject; this is the case with Waiting for Godot or Krapp's Last Tape. The other takes the form of a key word or phrase from the text. The word can be one that occurs only once, as in Endgame or Catastrophe, or repeatedly, like a leitmotif, as in Eh Joe or That Time. But since these words can have connotations which will vary from language to language (‘Comédie’ and ‘Play’ conjure up different things), and the phrases are sometimes idioms or colloquialisms, with different equivalents in different languages, the criterion is linguistic. For instance, Eh Joe becomes Dis Joe in French, which corresponds exactly to the meaning of ‘Eh Joe’. Similarly with the phrase ‘that time’ which occurs in the play of that title. The French version is cette fois, which corresponds to only one of the English meanings of the phrase; since there is no equally ambiguous phrase in French, a choice had to be made between a phrase referring to a specific occasion in the past and one referring to an undefined period in the past, and this former was clearly the better choice – even though we lose the word ‘time’, which is a pity, since the problem of time and the mechanisms of memory is important in that play.
Similarly, too, in the case of Play. There are only two occurrences of the word itself in the play, close to each other and in the same context, but they are decisive in determining its meaning.
Dialogues on Beckett
- Whatever Happened to God?
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Anthem Press
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‘Dialogues on Beckett’ is a collection of 12 conversations about 12 plays by Samuel Beckett, discussions about the meaning of life and the universe between an agnostic and a Christian, based on a close reading of the text. It is also based on the thesis that Beckett’s main concern in his plays is Christian theology or, more broadly, the religious interpretation of the world. All his plays are an argument with that interpretation; in particular, they question the idea of theodicy and the philosophy of consolation. The aim of ‘Dialogues on Beckett’ is to make the reader aware of this essential theme in the playwright’s work, to interpret it in this light and to show his original approach to the subject. Beckett argues that we live in a post-Christian era. But for him this knowledge is no reason for joy; rather, it is a source of sadness, fear and even despair.
Dialogue IV - Incorrigible Optimism: Happy Days (1961)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 28 February 2019, pp 57-72
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Janusz Pyda OP: Happy Days – if we discount the two Dramatic Fragments, abandoned drafts written at the end of the 1950s and not published until the mid-1970s – is Beckett's first dramatic work after Krapp's Last Tape. Despite obvious differences, I can discern some similarities between the two. First of all, Happy Days was, like Krapp, initially written in English and only later translated by Beckett into French. Secondly, both consist almost exclusively of monologues, although in addition to the main protagonist of Happy Days, Winnie, there is another character, Willie, to whom Winnie mostly addresses herself and who is occasionally given a few lines to say in response. Finally, there are, despite all appearances to the contrary, certain similarities in the stage setting. In both cases we have a stage set that is half realistic, half allegorical. In Krapp we have a man sitting at a table in a room, presumably his study, but at the same time he is in an abstract space, divided into areas of bright light and impenetrable darkness. In Happy Days we have two people in a desert landscape of sand dunes under a bright, sunny sky (as if on a beach), but here, too, the landscape seems not quite natural; there is something artificial about it. Does the dual nature of the world presented on stage indicate that here, too, we will be dealing with two levels of meaning?
Antoni Libera: Certainly. But there's also an important difference. You're right to say that the stage setting in both plays, although ostensibly realistic, is in some measure artificial. But the artificiality in Happy Days goes much deeper. In Krapp it is achieved exclusively through the use of light, which plucks the protagonist from his ordinary surroundings – his ‘den’ in the stage directions – and places him in an abstract space where the only things of significance are the words spoken, the relation between speaker and listener, and the tape recorder, which in addition to its primary function as the source of the voice also functions as an indicator of historical time.
Dialogue VIII - Inventing Oneself: That Time (1974)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 111-130
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Janusz Pyda OP: We began our discussion of Not I by considering Beckett's use of the technique of reduction, and I remarked on the unwavering consistency with which he gradually reduced his characters on the stage: from Winnie, reduced to a torso and then just a head, through the protagonists in Play, who are just faces, to the woman in Not I, who is just a mouth speaking in the dark. You augmented this collection by tossing in the man from the one-act television play Eh Joe, written in 1966 between Play and Not I, and you said that the reduction process was not a purely formal experiment, done for the sake of it, but a technique with a specific end in view, namely to help us identify the limits of humanity and its inalienable and irreducible elements.
Now we turn to That Time, a play written in 1974– 75, immediately after Not I. Here, too, we have just one character and a voice, and one might expect an even further-reaching reduction than in Not I – for instance, just a voice in the dark, or something altogether different, a startlingly new way of distilling a character. But no. True, the source of the voice – or rather, the voices, as there are three – is invisible and shrouded in darkness. But instead of something even smaller than a mouth, we are back to a whole head. This time it is the head of an old man, and it is suspended in the dark about ten feet above stage level – more or less the same height as the Mouth in Not I.
How do you interpret this? Doesn't it destroy the consistency, at least at the level of the stage setting? Isn't it a step backwards, however small? Isn't Beckett repeating himself here?
Antoni Libera: Beckett's work does indeed display an unwavering consistency in its reductionism, and its effect is to impress a certain pattern on our minds and make us think according to it, so that we are aware of an abstract evolution from speech to silence, from light to darkness, from the visible presence of a character to its absence, in short from something to nothing. But we shouldn't give this undue prominence or expect it to be rigidly applied; it isn't an ironclad or absolute rule.
Dialogue XI - The Abyss of the Unconscious: Ohio Impromptu (1981)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 159-170
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Janusz Pyda OP: I'd like to begin our discussion of Ohio Impromptu as we began our conversation about Rough for Theatre: with a question about the title. An impromptu is a short musical piece of any form; a sort of brief improvisation. What is the connection between the play and its title, and why Ohio?
Antoni Libera: Yes, the word impromptu is associated with music; Schubert and Chopin wrote the most famous ones. But the term was already in use by playwrights. Molière was the first to use it, in his miniature play Impromptu de Versailles when his players were performing there. In the twentieth century one example is Giraudoux, who wrote Impromptu de Paris. Another is Ionesco, with his Impromptu de l'Alma and Impromptu de Beaubourg. Most of these little pieces were ironic little commentaries on theatre and drama, and the place names attached to them indicated the place where they were first performed.
This is also the case here. Beckett wrote this little play at the request of Stanley Gontarski, a professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and the main organizer of a literary symposium about Beckett on the occasion of his 75th birthday in 1981; he wanted Beckett to write something specially for the occasion. But there is one difference between Beckett's Impromptu and its predecessors: it is not about theatre.
J. P.: Well, what is it about? What is the problem Beckett is analysing here?
A. L.: We'll get to that step by step, as always. Before labelling and classifying we will first describe what happens on stage and what the characters talk about.
J. P.: In this case it seems a relatively simple task. Two strikingly similar figures – they might be twins – sit at a rectangular table placed parallel to the stage. They are old men with long white hair, dressed in long black coats. One of them sits facing the audience, at the long side of the table; the other sits on the right, at the short end, his left profile to the audience. They sit in identical postures, bent low over the table, head propped on right hand, left hand on the table. On the table, more or less in the middle, is a wide-brimmed black hat; before the man on the right is a book, open at its last pages.
Dialogue III - The Fiasco of Self-Creation: Krapp's Last Tape (1958)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 37-56
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Janusz Pyda OP: Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot and Endgame in French, his adopted language, and only later translated them into English, his native language. With Krapp's Last Tape it was the reverse: he wrote it in English and then translated it into French. What made him choose one rather than the other as the first?
Antoni Libera: When people asked him why, in the mid-1940s, he suddenly began to write in French, a foreign language, he replied, variously, ‘It was a different experience from writing in English. It was more exciting for me, writing in French’ or (a remark made in 1956) ‘Parce qu'en français c'est plus facile d’écrire sans style […]’ (‘Because in French it's easier to write without a style’), or that using his adopted tongue allowed him ‘to escape the habits inherent in the use of native language’ and avoid ‘Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms’. And in Dream of Fair to Middling Women Belacqua says, ‘Perhaps only the French language can do it. Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want.’ These remarks reveal something of his approach to language as the stuff of artistic creation, but they do not explain everything.
The factors which dictated his choice in the case of plays differed slightly from those which predominated in the case of prose works. In the case of plays the deciding factor seems to have been the function of the characters. We have already mentioned, in our discussions of both Godot and Endgame, that the main, if not the only, subject of Beckett's dramatic works was the human being in the broadest sense and that his aim was to bring out the complexity of human nature by giving a separate voice to each of its aspects and parcelling these out among his characters, so that each character expresses (or imagines) a different one. So if he wants to describe something abstract and inapprehensible by the senses, like the relation between the human individual and the species, or the individual human being's dependence on ideas created by historical man, he will choose French, a language from which he is distanced: it is ‘external’ to him and therefore ‘objective’ and emotionally transparent.
Dialogue II - The Tyranny of the Emancipated Mind: Endgame (1956)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 15-36
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Janusz Pyda OP: Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot quickly, in less than four months. Endgame, though less than half the length, took him much longer: about three years (1954– 56). The meandering paths of the creative process are mysterious and usually remain so. But the author's own attitude to the finished work need not be a mystery, and in the case of Endgame it is not. We know that Beckett considered this play, so long in the making, as his best, or at least as coming closest to his ideal of what a play should be. What was that ideal? And what did Beckett mean by an ideal play?
Antoni Libera: Beckett seldom talked about his aesthetic or poetic ideals. The little we know about his views on the subject comes from his essays on other authors, mainly Joyce and Proust, and from his letters and brief remarks or instructions to various directors and actors with whom he worked on the staging of his plays. They are generally terse and moreover tend to be elliptical or metaphorical. Nevertheless, they can, taken together with a careful analysis of this work, give some insight into the basic elements of his artistic credo.
The most important of these, in my view, is what Beckett (in an early essay on Joyce) called ‘direct expression’, by which he had in mind a diverse collection of literary techniques to express meaning through form rather than content alone – in such a way that, in his own words in that very early essay, ‘form and content are inseparable’. The effect is to heighten the immediacy and reinforce the meaning of what is being expressed.
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989): The Last Literary Giant
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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Samuel Beckett was an extraordinary writer; but he was extraordinary in a number of other ways. An Irishman, he was not Catholic like most of his countrymen but Protestant, from a Huguenot family which had come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, fleeing religious persecution. He himself travelled in the opposite direction, leaving Ireland when still quite young, like many famous Irishmen before him, and settling in France.
Beckett wrote most of his work in two languages: his native English and French. He spoke a number of other languages besides these; he was highly educated and had been a good student, but he preferred to keep his distance from the world of academe and rejected the academic career path.
His parents were well off and he had a comfortable childhood in which he lacked for nothing; as an adult he spurned material comforts and led an ascetic life. When his writing brought fame and fortune, he made no use of his money except for necessities, and gave much of it away. He also shunned publicity, refusing interviews, television appearances and readings. He even refused to go in person to collect his Nobel Prize, asking his French publisher to attend the ceremony for him. Throughout his life he fiercely guarded his privacy and independence. But he was an extraordinarily warm person, kind and generous to his friends.
He avoided involvement in politics and never took sides or spoke out in public conflicts of any kind; but during World War II he unhesitatingly joined the Resistance, which nearly cost him his life and later earned him the French Military Cross. The certificate was signed by General de Gaulle. After the war he stood up for victims of persecution in various parts of the world, including those living under communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. This, too, he did quietly and with no publicity. When Poland was under martial law he gave a sizeable chunk of his royalties to ‘Solidarity’, and he dedicated one of his last plays, Catastrophe, to Václav Havel, who at the time was serving a three-year sentence in a communist prison in Czechoslovakia.
Dialogue XII - Catastrophe with No Tragedy: Catastrophe (1982)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 171-182
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Janusz Pyda OP: And so we have reached the last of the twelve plays discussed in this book – a one-act play called Catastrophe. This, too, like Ohio Impromptu, was written for a specific occasion. Perhaps you could start us off by explaining the circumstances.
Antoni Libera: In 1979 the communist authorities in Czechoslovakia arrested the well-known Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel – one of the signatories of Charter 77 and the first president of free Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism – and sentenced him to four years in prison. His arrest was widely reported and evoked protests throughout the world. They had, however, little effect. After about a year, sometime around the end of 1980 or the beginning of 1981, the directors of the Avignon theatre festival decided on a gesture to express their solidarity with the Czech writer: for the next festival, which was to take place in July 1981, they planned a ‘Czech Day’; the evening was to be dedicated to Havel. Various distinguished figures from the world of theatre were invited to ensure maximum resonance and publicity. Beckett was one of them. He wasn't familiar with Havel's work but he had heard of him and had tremendous respect for his political stand and his dignity in the face of persecution. To the astonishment of the organizers, he sent in his contribution to the evening, in the form of this play, quite quickly, and moreover dedicated it to Havel – a rare gesture on his part, usually limited to people he had worked with or had cause to be grateful to. The premiere took place on 21 July 1981.
J. P.: Which is probably why the play was regarded, at least initially, as a political work, even as a political act – an attempt to intervene. This was the near-universal view: here was Beckett, regarded hitherto as an entirely apolitical writer whose work never concerned itself with current affairs of any kind, social or political, or even with the broader topic of human suffering, injustice, persecution and so on, suddenly, in his old age, taking up a cause and writing a play in defence of Václav Havel when he was being persecuted by a communist regime.
Dialogue VII - Darkness and Forms of Speech: Not I (1972)
- Antoni Libera, Janusz Pyda
- Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska
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- Dialogues on Beckett
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- 30 March 2019
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- 28 February 2019, pp 97-110
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Janusz Pyda OP: In Happy Days the main character starts out as a torso, and by the end is only a head. In Play, the characters are from the start only faces that emerge from the darkness when a spotlight falls on them. In Not I we are down to a mouth.
This looks like a deliberate reduction. But why? Is Becket just indulging in minimalism, wanting gradually to reduce what is on stage down to the absolute minimum, or is he making some sort of point, expressing an idea?
Antoni Libera: Before we come to the reduction in Not I, let's briefly recall how it is done in Eh Joe, which was written in 1966, between Play and Not I, and was Beckett's first television play. Here the reduction takes place as we watch, with the aid of the camera. The opening scene is of a man in a room; the camera gradually closes in, so that by the end we only see a close-up of the man's face and at the very end only his eyes. The camera moves in to the sound of a woman's voice – a monologue spoken offstage.
But even without invoking Eh Joe we can see quite soon that the reduction here is not a purely formal experiment – one intended, for example, to test the limits of what can be done with a character on stage – but a technique to express a certain idea. Very broadly, that idea is the essence of the human: the inalienably human. In Beckett's prose that essence was the conscious self, the thinking being who articulates his thoughts in words. This is best seen in his Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. In the plays, where there is no way (except by allegory) to show the human mind and its workings, that essence is shown by concentrating on the head, and especially the mouth, which, as the place from which the voice issues, represents the source of human speech.
In short, the physical reduction of a character is part of the process of getting at the essence of the human being. Beckett, setting aside our various senses, faculties, capacities and predispositions, wants to show that that essence can be reduced to what is in the head and to the mouth and throat, which contain the tongue and vocal cords – the instruments of speech.