[In the following essay, Brater studies the uniqueness of many of the opening lines from Beckett's plays, explores their portent, and probes the non-linear aspects of the plays.]

I

Although Beckett has often been discussed as a modernist writer of termination, of “reckoning closed and story ended,” his work as a whole displays a remarkable range of beginnings. Even before he took up writing for the stage seriously, he had calculated on the effect of opening a story with a line an early piece of fiction might have called a real “stinger.” Murphy, the novel published in 1938 by Chatto & Windus, opens with a serious and memorable non-starter: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Unlike Shakespeare's Hamlet, which begins so promisingly with a suspenseful “Who's there?,” here the sense of an endgame is nicely embedded in the effort of merely beginning, an action at once lame, impotent, futile—and dazzling, initiating a pattern Beckett will make familiar to us in his writings over the next fifty years: “What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple?” And although it might be argued that in this bold imaginative world the end is already in the beginning—Beckett's speakers have repeatedly made the same argument themselves (“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on”)—it will be the point of this discussion to suggest that for this writer beginnings and endings are never quite the same thing.

In Waiting for Godot, his signature play, Beckett faces the challenge of beginning a play that is going nowhere—in particular. “Nothing to be done”—Estragon has the opener here—is the sort of ambitious “stinger” Beckett had in mind more than a dozen years before when he wrote Dream of Fair to Middling Women. The line all at once introduces us to an un-accomplished stage character and boldly announces what will soon become the theme of Beckett's most famous play. It does more than that, too: for while Estragon utters the line to express his frustration at not being able to remove a boot while struggling with it as he sits on a low mound, Vladimir hears things differently, as he pretentiously states in his opening line: “I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. He broods, musing on the struggle.”

Only then does Vladimir retreat from his metaphysical speculation to take notice of his colleague (though in this case side-kick is probably the more appropriate term): “So there you are again.” Beckett's opening lines in Waiting for Godot therefore offer his audience an object lesson in what we might be tempted to call the hermeneutics of listening: we listen while a character hears but misinterprets something that was just been said. What was the word? What was the word? What is the word? Even in this early Beckettian field of play, comment c'est = comment dire. And as the ear, such the object.

So many resonances are built into that opening line that it will take a full two acts to explore them. Beckett brings on Pozzo and Lucky to open this imagined world to still other perspectives. Lucky, stage craftsman that he is, knows the virtue and economy of beginning with silence, and he exploits them to the hilt, slobber notwithstanding. And when he does speak, ostensibly following Pozzo's command of “Think, pig!,” his success in holding the stage with authority must be measured against the power of silence that precedes his magnificent verbal display. Pozzo exercises no such restraint: his is the big, puffed-up role, the only one this self-conscious actor knows how to play. And so he begins with not one, but at least three opening lines. Driving Lucky by means of a rope passed round his neck and cracking a whip, Pozzo actually recites his first word offstage, the resounding “On!” that echoes onto stage space and then into the auditorium. “Be careful!” he warns Gogo and Didi, referring to his knook. “He's wicked … With strangers.” Only then is Pozzo properly prepared for his formal entry into the dramatic ensemble: “I present myself: Pozzo.” And despite the unacceptable interruptions in the form of running commentaries by Gogo and Didi—or maybe because of them—and worse still, frustrated by the silence that greets the announcement of his name, he continues in what the text calls a truly “terrifying voice.” His is the actor's fear of remaining completely unrecognized, either on or off stage: “I am Pozzo! … Pozzo! … Does that name mean nothing to you? … I say does that name mean nothing to you? … PPPOZZZO!”

In the second act of the play Beckett will work several variations into these multiple motifs. In this act Vladimir has the first word, but his part now calls for song, the well-known Rundgedicht about the-dog-in-a-kitchen-who-stole-a-crust-of-bread that leads nowhere but back to itself. Estragon, now barefoot and with head bowed, has had more than enough of it even before this scene is supposed to begin; his one-liner displays more than a touch of nole-me-tangere annoyance: “Don't touch me!” Pozzo and Lucky return, as the audience expects them to, but now their opening lines, like the rope that binds them, have been shortened and changed. Pozzo's ham-acting is replaced by a trepidation in his voice we have not heard before, the “What is it? Who is it?” that registers both his blindness and the audience's growing unease. His cry in the dark is in this act a baleful shout for “Help! … Help!” only slightly modified by the afterthought, “… I'll pay …” Worse still, Lucky now has no opening line at all. He can no longer sing; he can no longer recite; he can no longer even think. And he has long ago danced his last dance. The blind Pozzo cauterizes us with a line certifying Lucky's cruel stage cuts (” … he is dumb”), all the while preparing us for the big speech that contains the rising action of the play:

VLADIMIR:
Dumb!
POZZO:
Dumb. He can't even groan.
VLADIMIR:
Dumb! Since when?
POZZO:
(Suddenly furious) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominal! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? Calmer. They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more … On!

Waiting for Waiting for Godot, of course, features a fifth actor, the young Boy whose delayed entrance until the end of each act tells us everything we already know, even before he speaks his fateful sentence: Mr. Godot will certainly not come today. Both times his opening lines are virtually the same, but what they really do is move each act toward its “inevitable” closure, the same now heard as different. In this case the Boy's opening lines not only predict but already stage the close of play: the point of departure is all at once a faintly heard terminus ad quem. There's suddenly “Nothing”—and we remember it sombrely this time around—“Nothing to be done.”

Endgame will manage things differently, for this is a staged world in which the catastrophe has already happened. It is therefore appropriate that the play's opening lines are uttered “Tonelessly”: “Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” Stage speech begins parodically, with Clov's revisionist take on Christ's final words on the Cross (John, 19:30). But perhaps these are not really the play's opening lines after all. These might instead be Clov's repeated laughter, the brief and bitter sounds he makes as he peers out of the set's two windows before uncovering the sleeping Hamm, the mysteriously sheeted figure who will soon awake to recite the definitive metatheatrical opening line, “Me—to play.” Like Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, but far more concise, Hamm, the Ham-let who outsizes his own role, is the prototype here for any and every ham actor (even though he can't walk, on stage or off). In his opening line Beckett's Hamm takes great pride in presenting the extravagance of his self-performative self. If it were not for the bleak circumstances defining the severely circumscribed boundaries of this set, we might be even tempted to say that here, for once, is the portrait of the self-indulgent actor really enjoying himself. Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.

Beckett's two other characters in Endgame, Hamm's “accursed progenitors,” will be provided with opening lines that can be similarly self-insinuating and self-incriminating. Nagg, a “guzzle[r]” if there ever was one, has his stage movement restricted to the interior space of a garbage can; undignified though it is, he has long ago stopped being ashamed of begging for elemental nourishment. What remains of his body parts makes him demand, “Me pap! … Me pap! … I want me pap!” And much to our surprise, this play will introduce us to a female character who, despite all odds to the contrary, still remains romantically inclined. When Nagg knocks on the lid of the other bin, then knocks again, Nell slowly emerges from its lower depths, wearing a lace cap and an encouraging smile: “What is it, my pet? Pause. Time for love?” Though in this play, as the dialogue reads, each character has a “speciality,” Nell's opening line is, to put it mildly, wildly inappropriate.

In Beckett's next two stage plays, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, the shape of an opening line is determined by the necessities of showcasing a figure in what is essentially a vehicle for one character, even when other presences threaten to intrude (in the case of one, a voice recorded on tape; in the case of the other, a grounded Willie). Beckett wrote Krapp's Last Tape for his friend, the Irish actor Patrick Magee (indeed, a superscript on an early version reads simply “Magee Monologue”), and the introductory moments of this piece pay ample tribute to the contingencies of what is meant to be solo performance.¹ Here Beckett extends the mime scene with which Endgame had similarly begun, but in this play he will be far more patient about letting nonverbal sounds have their highly theatrical say. Keys jingle, a drawer unlocks, feet shuffle, a ledger is banged onto a table, an uncorked bottle unceremoniously pops. In his original script for this scene, Krapp strokes a banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he bites off the end, turns aside and begins pacing to and fro, meditatively eating the banana. He treads on skin, slips, nearly falls, recovers himself, stoops and peers at skin and finally pushes it, still stooping, with his foot over the edge of the stage into the pit.

Krapp's opening line, when it finally comes, can be by comparison something of an anti-climax, the brisk, drunken revel of:

Ah! … Box three … spool … five … Spool! … Spooool! … Box … thrree … thrree … four … two … nine! Good God! … seven … ah! the little rascal … Box thrree … Spool … five … five … five … ah! the little scoundrel! … Spool five … Box three, spool five … Spooool! … Ah!

This same Krapp, of course, will have in this play additional opportunities “to open,” and the very next one comes through the sound of his voice from the past captured so seamlessly on magnetic recording tape. Beckett is playing with time, and three related time signatures, as he makes us listen to Krapp listening to the highly charged interlude of his romantic encounter with the girl in the punt. The episode is an unusual one for Krapp—and for Beckett—and its exposition is made all the more so by its repeated retrieval into the so-called present tense. Here the sudden intrusion of another opening line is compromised mechanically; for when we initially hear this voice on electronic tape we are literally in medias res, as we learn new things for the first time:

—gooseberries, she said. I said I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.). I asked her to look at me and after a few moments—(pause)—after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, signing, before the stem! (Pause.). I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

Beckett's lyricism is at full stretch here; it makes us wonder how many other hidden treasures lie in wait for us in the texts of Krapp's annual recordings, the testimonials we are fated never to hear. The dusty ledger is in fact a veritable catalogue of opening lines, but this night, as Krapp prepares for his sixty-ninth birthday, it is the haunting melodies of “box three … spool five,” the telling as much as the tale, that push the play forward to its arresting conclusion.

That climax will come soon after Krapp clears his throat and speaks into the microphone to compose what will in fact be the last of his opening lines: “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with anyway.” But Krapp soon senses that this composition, despite its hard-edged, bravura beginning, is really going nowhere: “What's a year now? The sour cud and the iron stool”—a phrase which makes him (and us) celebrate and memorialize the word “Spooool,” a big part of the soundscape with which this scène-a-faire got itself going in the first place. Krapp is drunk (he's been systematically unbottling a few as the play progresses), and his musings reflect his inebriated state in a rich alternation of moods, now bawdy, now cynical, now sentimental, now bitterly irreverent. Though on the tape we have listened to he said he would never sing, he does so now, offering us a bacchic and heavily ironic rendition of the Protestant hymn he sang at Vespers when he “went to sleep and fell off the pew”: “Now the day is over, / Night is drawing nigh-igh, / Shadows—(coughing, then almost inaudible)—of the evening / Steel across the sky.”

In a few moments he will wrench off the “virgin reel,” throw it away, and put on the older one to search for the evocative opening lines he wants, the same tender passage we have already shared with him. Memory speaks with renewed and poignant force. “The eyes she had!”—though in his “last” recorded “fancies” Krapp has momentarily forgotten his well-wrought simile, borrowed some thirty years before from Shakespeare: “… like chrysolite.”² For him there will be no more opening lines. Before long Krapp realizes he is recording nothing but white noise.

In Happy Days the discourse of silence will be made palpable and real before a piercing bell awakens Winnie into her opening line of prayer as another “heavenly” day—and another Beckett play—is about to begin. In this piece Beckett returns to the two-act structure he had used to so much advantage in Waiting for Godot; here it makes possible another sort of contrast and highlights still another rhythm of return. In stunning visual counterpoint, Beckett makes the set “speak.” Winnie is planted up to her waist in the earth as we meet her in Act One, but in Act Two she is up to her neck in it. Her opening line as the second act begins echoes the line with which she began this play, even though Protestant Milton now replaces her hurried tag-ends of devotion form the Christian Bible with which this play began. Beckett, of course, as we have already seen in Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape, hardly needs the division of a drama into separate scenes to provide his actors with the sharp verbal openings that signal their placement on stage or allow them to hold it with authority.

In this play, however, Winnie is always searching for the “wonderful” line, the opening she's been looking for all her life long. As her monologue proceeds by fits and sometimes self-conscious starts, she is desperately trying to talk herself into finding it. “Begin, Winnie … Begin your day, Winnie,” she opens wryly. Along the way she lands upon some remarkable possibilities: toothbrush, parasol, medicine bottle, mirror, Charlie Hunter in the back garden at Borough Green, and the whole business of the bag, which she worries about overdoing. She almost makes it when she comes upon

My first ball! … My second ball! … My first kiss! … A Mr Johnson, or Johnston, or perhaps I should say Johnstone. Very busy mustache, very tawny … Almost ginger! … Within a toolshed, those whose I cannot conceive. We had no toolshed and he most certainly had no toolshed … I see the piles of pots … The tangles of bast … The shadows deepening among the rafters.

Though the subtext here is delicious, especially for the female player with a flair for the naughty and the knack to make it fly, what every Winnie knows is that “words” are bound to “fail”: no “Opening,” alas, “for smart youth” here.

Though he does not say much, Willie's opening lines have an odd way of setting the tone and controlling the mood of this play. In the first act he begins with a sardonic but nonetheless ominous titbit he picks up from the newspaper he's been reading as he crouches, sidelined, behind Winnie's seemingly imperial mound. Unless he's editorializing—and I suspect he is—the press he gets his news from is nothing short of sensational: “His Grace and Most Reverend Father in God Dr Carolus Hunter dead in a tub.” Later Winnie will urge him “to put a bit of jizz into it,” though his laconic style serves him well enough here. The subtext conveyed in this bizarre tale of the tub will become all but life-threatening when, “just audible,” Willie speaks the only word assigned to him in Act Two: “Win.” Eyeing the revolver lying conspicuously to Winnie's right, he emerges from behind the mound at the very end of the play “on all fours, dressed to kill.” Despite the fact that Willie has indeed spoken to his wife, his opening line here seems to indicate that this may not be such a happy day after all.

II

Though small and intimate in scale, and relatively short in running-time, Beckett's plays written in the 1970s and 80s work as many subtle and surprising variations into the construction of their opening lines as we have already seen in the four major stage works that precede them: what these plays give up I breadth they make up in fineness. The same holds true for the problematics of beginning, for the new dramatis personae introduced here come fully equipped with a stage language written in “a grammar for being elsewhere.”³ That something new was being heard in Not I was apparent as early as in 1972, when Jessica Tandy performed the role of Mouth in Alan Schneider's world premiere production at Lincoln Center in New York. The performance begins with Mouth ad-libbing as required before the house lights go up; this is a “text” in the guise of a soundscape rendered “unintelligible” for ten seconds before the curtain is “fully” faintly “up.” Here the shape of an opening line is permanently disfigured and destabilized (though not disorganized), its provenance (almost) impossible to distil. Responding four times to the elongated and shrouded Auditor's “gesture of helpless compassion” on the other side of the stage, Mouth delivers a striking “… what? … who? … no! … she!,” especially in Billie Whitelaw's stunning rendition. But to say, for example, that each interruption is followed by a new opening line would, in the case of this intercalated monologue, be pushing it.

That Time similarly compromises any easy definition of what constitutes a play's opening line, unless we are disposed to find that in Listener's audible breath, slow, hot, and regular. Voices A, B, and C, which are the Listener's own, modulate back and forth without any break in general flow, though on stage they are broadcast from both sides and above. Each begins with the record of a separate index of experience:

A:
that time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child …
C:
when you went in out of the rain always winter then always raining that time in the Portrait Gallery …
B:
on the stone together in the sun on the stone at the edge of the little wood …

Three opening lines tell their story their own way, turn and turn about, as every sequential combination assaults a disembodied head except the logical one, A, B, C.

In Not I and That Time Beckett's plays have become far more suspicious of the conventional need to begin “for to end yet again.” Normalizing patterns begin to deconstruct, then reconstitute themselves in unpredictable ways. Footfalls opens with the sound of feet, “however faint they fall,” before the residuum of a three-act structure auspiciously asserts itself. The play begins with an odd dialogue exchange between the figure of May and the recorded voice-over of her mother, initiated by the daughter's heartfelt summons:

M:
Mother. (Pause. No louder.) Mother.
(Pause)
V:
Yes, May.
M:
Were you asleep?
V:
Deep sleep. (Pause.) I heard you in my deep sleep. (Pause.) There is no sleep so deep I would not hear you there.

Part one is followed by Voice's monologue, shadowed in part three by May's “Sequel.” Chimes separate the three sections, but May's obsessive pacing is constant throughout: “One two three four five six seven wheel one two three four five six seven wheel.” (In the original production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, directed by Beckett himself, the number of beats was changed to nine).⁴Rockaby, by contrast, begins—and then begins again—with a long pause and a seated woman's palpable cry for “More.” As from some other, interior world, her recorded voice now obliges with the broadcast of lyrical variations on “till in the end / the day came” and “so in the end / close of a long day” until she—her-self—is finally “rocked” off: “Fuck life,” expletive not deleted. A Piece of Monologue begins with the otherwise unpromising “Birth was the death of him” as a speaker stands rigid and alone in faint diffuse light; and Ohio Impromptu will open with “Little is left to tell.” In this two-character play Listener says nothing, but, as in Theodore Roethke's poem,⁵ his knock is opened very wide indeed until his simulacrum fatally hymns, “Nothing is left to tell.”

In Catastrophe Beckett surprises his audience by returning to the deceptively simple remnants of what is supposed to be a realistic tableau. This play, however, comes in the shape of a rehearsal for a dramatic simulation of torture that is soon seen to be anything but that. Voyeurism is on trial. Wearing a white overall and with a pencil in her ear, a female assistant is the first to speak. Her question put to the Director about the pathetic Protagonist standing barefoot on a plinth is another of those ultimately metatheatrical opening lines: “Like the look of him?” The audience watching this horrific display is meant to be appalled, and it is. “Terrific!” this tyrannical theatre impresario trumpets in the dark. “He'll have them on their feet. I can hear it from here.”

Abandoning the pretence of stage realism, What Where is similarly concerned with the politics of torture and theatricality, but this play begins with the Voice of Bam speaking as Prologue:

We are the last five.
In the present as were we still.
It is spring.
Time passes.
First without words.
I switch on.

Long before the Voice of Bam switches off at the end of this compressed and highly choreographic display, we know that it is Beckett's audience that has been fatally given “the works”: “Make sense who may. / I switch off.”

III

So much variation and vitality exists in the art of Beckett's dramatic œuvre, especially in the making, unmaking, and remaking of each new opening line—not to mention the opportunities and challenges these lines offer so generously to their players—that it makes it difficult if not impossible for this “Critic” to imagine anything even vaguely resembling a terminus ad quem. Such inventiveness also demands a serious reconsideration of what we may mean when we talk about the specifically theatrical limitations of a Beckettian endgame. Like the old Irish ditty, dancing on top of the grave, “Finnegan / begin again,” this is by contrast an art of constant renewal, innovation, even interrogation, “for to begin,” not always and ever “to end” yet again. The story may be over, then “unover,” said, then “unsaid,” then “ununsaid,” but the energy and re-vision in those opening lines is “living yet.”

“Who's there?” on Beckett's stage? Qui est là? Not life, necessarily, but certainly the life that can be found in the theatre: “… what are those wonderful lines?,” says Winnie in Happy Days, “… something … something … amidst severest woe …”

Notes

1. James Knowlson (ed.), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape (London: Faber, 1992), xiii.

2. Beryl S. and John Fletcher, A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 1985), 130.

3. H. Porter Abbott, “A Grammar for Being Elsewhere,” in Journal of Modern Literature, 6 (February 1977), 39.

4. Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theatre (New York: Oxford, 1987), 72.

5. “Where Knock Is Open Wide,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), 67.