[In the following essay, Elam illustrates Beckett's repetitive use of aged, disembodied heads and faces in his later short plays to represent death, darkness, the afterlife, and Hell on Earth. Elam makes many comparisons between these short plays and Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio.]

E un ch'avea perduti ambo li orecchi per la freddura, pur col viso in giùe disse ‘Perché cotanto in noi ti specchi?’(1)

Dante, Inferno, Canto xxxii

BECKETT'S ‘DRAMATICULES’: THE DYING AND THE GOING

When, in 1978, the actor David Warrilow asked Samuel Beckett to write him a play about death,² he would appear to have been guilty of a fortunate tautology. Fortunate, because the playwright's generous response to the request was the beautiful miniature A Piece of Monologue (1979), whose opening is surely his most chillingly paradoxical statement of the chosen theme: ‘Birth was the death of him’ (CSPL, [Complete Shorter Plays] 265). But a tautology nonetheless, at least according to the play's protagonist, Speaker, who—as if in reply to the actor—denies that any other topic is even thinkable, or speakable: ‘Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going.’ Or to put it another way, to ask Beckett for a play on death was like asking, say, Petrarch for a sonnet on love: as if he might have written one that was not. All of Beckett's drama, especially his later drama, insofar as it is ‘about’ anything, is essentially ‘about death’.

Despite Speaker's categorical response, however, the request for a play on death is not necessarily ingenuous: it questions, on the contrary, the very possibilities and limits of dramatic representation. In what sense can the drama, dedicated from its beginnings to showing forth action, and thus forms of life, claim to show forth the form of non-life? How can the theatre present or re-present what Speaker himself can define only in terms of absence (‘gone’, ‘the going’)? What, indeed, does it mean to posit a semantics (Speaker's ‘matter’) of that which, in all senses, cancels matter? If, for Beckett's Speaker, death alone is speakable, this does not guarantee that it is in any significant way tellable or showable.

Which is not to say that death has never been successfully put on stage. The history of the drama is full of celebrated deaths and of the famous dead, of ‘the going’ and ‘the gone’. Insofar as ‘the going’, the business of dying, constitutes a decisive if residual form of action, it has always enjoyed a privileged place in drama, from Oedipus' murder of his father onwards. But to show a killing, or even an expiring (the death of Lear), is still to stage an ultimate form of life, and does not really address the problem posed by Warrilow's commission. As for the ‘gone’, the companions of Hamlet's father, they have likewise crossed the boards in great numbers. Almost invariably, however, the dramatic dead have been figured in terms of the living: as ghosts intervening in the affairs of this world (Hamlet), or occupying the space of living memory (Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts), or (Banquo at the banquet) haunting the border between external space (the banqueting hall) and psychic space (Macbeth's feverish imagination). Death appears inevitably to demand embodiment on stage as life, absence as presence.

If it is true that A Piece of Monologue, together with Beckett's other later plays, is indeed dedicated as Speaker claims to the ‘going’ and the ‘gone’—and this remains to be demonstrated—the question arises as to what these plays add to, or subtract from, the traditional dramatic poetics of deathly presence in staging the ‘one matter’.

An immediate answer is that, in quantitative terms, Beckett has subtracted decidedly more than he has added. A Piece of Monologue itself occupies a mere five printed pages in the Collected Shorter Plays, and appears to be, on first reading, more a textual fragment than a drama in any canonical form.³ This is an initial clue to Beckett's later poetics: the relationship between semantic configuration (the ‘matter’) and textual fragmentation is presumably not casual, even if not necessarily causal. That the play's extreme brevity is indeed strategic is strongly suggested by the analogous minuteness of the other late dramatic texts from Come and Go (1965) onwards; none of them takes up more than eight pages of printed text or more than thirty minutes of performance time.

A Piece of Monologue, then, belongs to a group of brief or fragmentary texts that are best defined by a term that Beckett himself first coined in the subtitle to Come and Go: ‘dramaticule’ (literally ‘playlet’).⁴ There is evidence that Beckett conceived the minuscule play as an idiosyncratic genre of its (and of his) own,⁵ which he cultivated to an extraordinary pitch of expressive economy. Taken together, these formidably condensed late ‘textlet's constitute what is surely the most intense and disquieting body of texts conceived for the twentieth-century stage.

THE WOMEN COME AND GO TALKING OF …

Come and Go inaugurates the series of dramaticules by experimenting with various modes or reduction and omission.⁶ The stage, according to Beckett's production notes, is reduced to a small softly lit playing area, empty of set or props and surrounded by darkness. The bodies of the three actresses are hidden by ‘dull’ and ‘nondescript’ costumes, and their faces partially covered by their hats. The characters they represent are given abbreviated names (Flo, Vi, Ru) and use speech that is lexically sparing (the entire dialogue comprises one hundred and twenty-seven words), monosyllabic (‘Ru: How do you find Flo? Vi: She seems much the same’) and semantically elliptical, not to say reticent (‘Ru: Let us not speak [Silence]’; CSPL, 194).

It is undoubtedly this latter form of omission, namely, leaving things unspoken, that most troubles the audience, as it struggles⁷ to make a plot out of the comings and goings of the three dramatic graces (or perhaps witches: ‘Vi: When did we three last meet?’⁸). It is symptomatic of the play's referential reticence that its central speech event is the repeated act of whispering, an action which blatantly excludes the theatrical auditor. At the centre of Come and Go is some unmentionable subject or object, around which the abbreviated women conduct their abbreviated verbal business:

FLO:
What do you think of Vi?
RU:
I see little change (Flo moves to centre seat, whispers in Ru's ear. Appalled.) Oh! (They look at each other. Flo puts her finger to her lips.) Does she not realize?
RU:
God grant not.

The unnamable object of Flo's discourse, foregrounded by her very evasiveness, is, we are left to infer, the imminent death of the third party, the absent Vi. The same pattern of whispered revelation and appalled reaction is repeated twice, with each of the women playing in turn the parts of revealer, listener and doomed third person. By means of these symmetrical variations, Beckett succeeds in creating, in eighteen minimal speaking (or better, non-speaking) turns, a triple dramatic irony worthy of Greek tragedy, whereby each character knows the fate of the other two, but not her own. Death, the ineffable, is Other, or at least Others'.

Come and Go, then, is in the first instance ‘about’ death to the extent that its doomed women talk and walk around the topic, which comes to constitute literally the absent centre of the play; only when each figure in turn leaves centre stage can her impending doom be whispered by one of the others. There is a ritual quality to their movement,⁹ which culminates in their holding hands to form a ring at the end, just as they had at the beginning. ‘I can feel the rings’, says Flo in the closing line (CSPL, 195): a sign, perhaps, that they are all married or engaged, but also a possible pun, as if to say that they have formed analogous and still-remembered rings in the past. This is confirmed by Ru's earlier allusion to ‘Holding hands … that way’, and by Vi's invitation to ‘hold hands in the old way’. There is more than a suggestion, then, that the present situation is itself a repetition of similar past meetings, and indeed that the women's hand-holding has been taking place over a period of years and perhaps decades (‘Flo: Just sit as we used to, in the playground at Miss Wade's’). In this sense ‘ring’ becomes the key term in the dramaticule, standing for the circularity of the grouping on stage, the circularity of their talk around an empty centre, but also the circular or cyclical nature of their progress through time, their habitual ringing of changes on their way towards their shared doom.

The ring thus becomes an emblem of Come and Go's own theatrical and semantic ‘aboutness’, its wilful leading of its audience in an interpretative round dance (‘What is it about?’). The play's annular quality is reinforced by its apparent referential self-closure: not only does the drama turn about itself in space and time, it also speaks about itself, from its title on: ‘come and go’ at once succinctly describes the main stage business and cruelly synthesizes the main dramatic action, stating the irreducible fabula of the women's shadowy lives, from birth (‘come’), through possible copulation (again ‘come’¹⁰) to death (‘go’, which here, as in A Piece of Monologue, becomes synonymous with ‘die’). Birth is the death of them.

What we appear to have, then, is a drama whose unspeakable ‘matter’ is the empty middle of a rigidly closed hermeneutic circle which fatally traps the struggling spectator, since his inevitable question ‘What is it about?’ is precisely what the play is primarily ‘about’, that is the very difficulty of naming its object. If this is so, then the novelty of the audience's experience is that of a strategically frustrating poetics of evasion, a novelty that has more to do with the play's sleight-of-hand adroitness (now we tell you, now we don't) than with any radical reworking of the conventions of dramatic representation. For all its absent and deadly centre, the dramaticule still seems to present a liminal form of life and a marginal mode of presence. The women have come but are not yet gone; each relates the other's death as a potential, not an actual (or as it were on-going) event. We are still, it would appear, within the dramatic tradition whereby death can only be told, or avoided, from the vantage-point of the living.

And yet this may not be the whole dramaturgic story of Come and Go. Audience response to the dramaticule seems to involve a degree of disquiet that is quite beyond the emotional reach of evasive self-reference. This suggests that the ring-like semantics of the play may be less hermetically and hermeneutically sealed than they appear. To discover why, we need to look beyond what is done and (un)said by the women in the drama and consider the very condition of their doing and being on stage. The disturbing seductiveness of the play in performance resides at least partly in the immediate visual image of hidden bodies and truncated faces gliding with choreographic repetitiveness in the half-light, an image that initially creates perceptual, as opposed to conceptual, difficulties: ‘One sees little in this light,’ says Flo, as if on behalf of the spectator. This literally obscure iconography sets off its own semantic resonances, however. The women's semi-visible and semi-corporeal indefiniteness suggests that the crepuscular space they inhabit may not be entirely of this (the audience's) world. Their problems with light recalls the stage play immediately preceding theirs, Play (1963), whose three talking heads are suspended in the dark, outside time and space, in keeping with the iconographic convention that associates darkness with death. Could it be that Flo, Vi and Ru, each of whom believes the others to be going, are in fact all already gone? Has their unspeakable whispered doom already taken place, or is it indeed still taking place in some infinitely suspended now?

Such a reading radically modifies our perspective on the referentiality of the dramaticule. The unspoken ‘matter’, missing centre of the closed circle of verbal reference, is perturbingly shown on stage by means of a different form of absence, namely the absence of light. Death reveals itself through omission, as ‘non-matter’. This reading also radically modifies our perspective on the women's own perspectives. The terrible triple irony of each character's ignorance of her own fate is multiplied exponentially by their being collectively ‘gone’; none of them knows the destiny that awaits her in an imminent future that has already taken place. In this reading, it is the darkness that paradoxically illuminates the play's elusive ‘aboutness’, forcing open the semantic circle. And once opened up, the circle is not easily resealed. Other implications ensue. If the women have met their doom, what kind of space is it that they now inhabit? The darkness, again, irresistibly suggests a Dantean beyond, one of the obscurer zones of the Purgatory, or still more of the Inferno, made iconographically familiar to our own culture above all through the illustrations of Gustave Doré.

The implications of this further referential opening-up are even more wide-ranging, bringing us to re-think, among other things, the play's sparing speech acts. Flo, Vi and Ru's ritualistic and repetitive act of whispering becomes less a futile game of hide-and-speak than the actual purgatorial, or even infernal, punishment to which they are condemned. If so, this is the cruellest irony of all: the women are doomed for eternity to whisper each other's doom, and their very whispering constitutes their damnation.

At this point, the play's key lexical item takes on a new and troubling referential force. In the gloomy perspective of a Dantean and Doréan iconography, the ‘rings’ are no longer merely what Flo, Vi and Ru (possibly) wear, nor the stage configurations that they form, nor even their punitive repetitions in time: the rings are above all the dismal landscape within which they are situated, namely the closed and impenetrable circles of Dante's Hell.¹¹

Where does this quite different, infernal mode of circularity leave us? Apparently at the opposite semantic pole from the poetics of self-reference, that is to say within a transcendental dramatic eschatology in which being ‘gone’ is not simple absence but terrible present-ness, in the form of an eternal and agonizing instant.

GODFORSAKEN HOLE

ANIMATOR:
Have you read the Purgatory, miss, of the divine Florentine?
STENOGRAPHER:
Alas no, sir. I have merely flipped through the Inferno.

Rough for Radio II (CSPL, 118)

Truncation, darkness, repetition, concealment, evasion, circularity: the dramaturgic strategies established in Come and Go are taken to their outer limit in Beckett's second dramaticule, Not I (1972), justly considered one of his finest texts. Truncation in Not I takes the most extreme iconic form imaginable or representable: the half-hidden and dimly lit bodies and faces of Flo, Vi and Ru give way to the faintly illuminated and disembodied mouth of Mouth, suspended eight feet up in the dark air above upstage right. Darkness likewise surrounds the second barely perceptible figure, the black-djellaba-shrouded downstage Auditor. Repetition finds emphatic verbal expression in Mouth's refrain-like discourse fragments (‘tiny little thing …’), and gestural expression in the four slow wing-flap movements of Auditor's arms, punctuating Mouth's oral flow. Concealment from the audience, which in Come and Go has the overt but circumscribed form of whispering, takes over the second dramaticule altogether in the almost total incomprehensibility of Mouth's rapid and disjointed speech. ‘Mouth's voice unintelligible behind curtain’, reads the opening stage direction, signalling the intention to make the spectators' Herculean perceptual and cognitive labours the primary ingredient of their experience of the play.

Evasion is announced in the title of Not I as its principal theme or event. Mouth's chief endeavour throughout the play is, according to Beckett's uncharacteristically explicit note to the text, her ‘vehement refusal to relinquish third person’. Mouth's desperate struggle to avoid saying ‘I’ is marked by four moments of crisis in which her monologue becomes a dialogic question-and-answer with an inner voice inaudible to the theatre audience: ‘what? … who? … no! … she!’. Mouth's emphatic ‘she!’ is an implicit response to and rejection of the first person singular pronoun that threatens to invade her resolute ‘she’-narration and to transform her into a reluctant ‘I’-narrator. In resisting the encroaching ‘I’, Mouth rejects a double subjectivity, both as subject of the énonciation, the act of telling, and as subject of the énoncé, the told events themselves.¹² Which is to say that she refuses identification both with the narrative present and with the narrated past, the wretched life that her fragmented story elliptically relates, beginning from the beginning: ‘… out … into this world … this world … tiny little thing …’ (CSPL, 216). If Flo, Vi and Ru can speak of death only as belonging to others, Mouth can speak of life—‘her’ life—only as lived by another, elsewhere, in the past.¹³

As for circularity in Not I, once again it is in the first instance corporeal: no longer the hand-holding rings formed by the women in Come and go, but the hypnotic, mobile and polymorphous ring of Mouth's narrating mouth. The spasmodic movements of this disconcertingly disembodied organ suspended in the dark re-enact the elementary events referred to in Mouth's narration: her conception (‘no sooner buttoned up his breeches’; 217), her birth (‘out … into this world […] godforsaken hole called …’; 216), an apparently isolated experience of copulation (‘just as the odd time … in her life … when clearly intended to be having pleasure’; 217), defecation (‘nearest lavatory … start pouring it out’; 222), speech (‘… words were coming …’; 219), weeping (‘or that time she cried’; 220), visual perception (‘she fixing with her eye’; 218), auditory perception (‘all the time the buzzing … so-called … in the ears’; 217). Thus the mouth, detached from its bodily context and so from its codified meaning (as ‘mouth’), becomes a corporeal and semantic (black) hole onto or into which the spectator may project any number of literally organic senses: it takes on in turn the roles of vagina, uterus, anus, mouth proper, eye and ear.¹⁴ Mouth refuses life, but her mouth mimes its decisive aspects.

In Not I, then, the ‘godforsaken hole’ on stage shows forth a fractured existence in the very attempt to deny its own pronominal, bodily and ontological bond with that existence. As in Come and go, the poetics of negation here becomes theatrically self-referential; ironically, the more Mouth defends her non-subjectivity, the more she betrays her reluctant self-awareness as stage subject-object, narrating the discovery of her own act of narrating (‘sudden urge to … tell’; 222), the discovery of her own vocalization (‘certain vowel sounds’; 219), the discovery of a light (‘the beam’) that corresponds to the faint spot illuminating her and, above all, the discovery of the spectators' watching eyes, located in an unflattering public space (‘nearest lavatory … […] till she saw the stare she was getting’; compare Estragon's scornful ‘that bog’ with reference to the audience in Godot; WFG [Waiting for Godot], 15). Unwilling subject of the monologue, Mouth finds herself an even more unwilling object of audience perception. Her attempted private evasion of self turns into a cruel public self-exhibition.

What leads us out of this auto-referential circle is once again the sheer potency of Beckett's stage image. The negated and fragmented floating body, reduced literally to its speaking part, evokes not only the psychological experience of splitting (whereby Mouth may be seen as a limit-case schizoid personality) but also the eschatological experience of afterlife torment.

The frame of reference is once again Dantean. If Beckett's narratives, especially the early narratives, are predominantly purgatorial (the figure of Belacqua in More Pricks than Kicks, for example, is taken from the Purgatorio¹⁵), his drama seems to be dominated by the Inferno: first by Upper Hell with its gluttons and adulterers (the adulterous M of Play, condemned to relive forever his banal amorous triangle), but increasingly by the deeper and darker Nether Hell, to which Dan Rooney refers in All That Fall: ‘Like Dante's damned, with their faces arsy-versy. Our tears will water our bottoms’—an allusion to the sorcerers whose tears ‘travelled down the cleft of their backs, wetting their buttocks’ (Canto xx, 21-2).¹⁶ It may be that Beckett's literary and dramatic career represents a gradual descent into the regions of the underworld (the opposite journey from Dante, who passes from Hell through Purgatory to Paradise). Thus of all the circles of the Nether Hell, the one that comes to dominate Beckett's later theatrical imagination is the final and terrible Circle IX, peopled by the lost souls of traitors in the ultimate state of sin. Here, in the extreme gloom of the abyss—‘less than night and less than day, so that I could barely see ahead of me’ (Canto xxxi, 10-11)—Dante encounters the talking heads of the traitors emerging from the frozen lake of Cocytus, their bodies invisible beneath the ice: ‘I heard it say, “watch how you go—take care that your feet do not trample on the heads of the wretched and weary brotherhood”’ (Canto xxxii, 19-24). The bodiless heads, moreover, have suffered further physical loss, causing the poet to stare in shocked fascination: ‘And one who had lost both ears for the cold, still keeping his face down, said: “Why do you stare at us so hard, as if in a mirror?”’ (Canto xxxii, 52-4; cf. my epigraph).

This sight of a floating and earless face, irresistibly captivating to the eye of the spectator, is strikingly close to the reluctant theatrical exhibition offered by Mouth in Not I. The Dantean genealogy of the play is even more precise, however. Moving on, the poet tramples the face of a traitor, and then demands to know his name. The sinner refuses to reveal his identity, provoking Dante to an act of physical violence against the helpless head: ‘At that I seized him by the scruff of the neck, saying “You'd better tell me your name, or you won't have a single hair left here on your head,” to which he replied: “Pluck out all my hair, I will not tell you who I am, nor show you my face, even if the whole weight of your body were to crush my head a thousand times”’ (Canto xxxii, 97-102). At this point the poet learns the traitor's identity, not directly from him but from a neighbouring sinner: ‘I already had his hair twisted in my hand, and I had torn out a tuft or two, as he howled, eyes lowered, when another cried out “What's wrong with you, Bocca? Aren't you content to play music with your jaws, but now have to start howling like a dog? What the devil's come over you?”’ (103-8). The head belongs, then, to Bocca, literally ‘Mouth’, a Florentine traitor of the Ghibellines at the Battle of Montaperti. Dante's Bocca, reduced virtually to a garrulous ‘bocca’, attempts to conceal his own identity, and only the insistence of the pitiless spectatorial poet causes his secret to be discovered.

It seems more than feasible, therefore, that Beckett's Mouth has her genesis in Dante's ‘Mouth’, and that like the traitor Bocca she is doomed to the endless concealment of her identity through logorrhoeic speech. Her damnation lies in her very she-narration, which ends with the self-invitation, or condemnation, to start again—‘pick it up’—as much as to say that she can never escape the eternal return of her telling in the abysmal circle (‘godforsaken hole called …’) in which she is trapped.

Why Mouth should be comparable to a medieval Florentine traitor is another matter. It may be that her very evasion of identity constitutes, as Hélène L. Baldwin suggests, her sin, as it were a form of self-betrayal: ‘On the basis of Not I, it seems that Beckett has presented the drama of the Purgatorio or perhaps even the Inferno pared down to a twelve-minute recital of sin by a single mouth which refuses to admit personal guilt and responsibility.’¹⁷

A more interesting question raised by Mouth's Dantean allegiances involves the position of the theatrical spectator with regard to her infernal pains. Dante's Bocca has two spectator-auditors, the poet himself and his spiritual guide, Virgil. In Doré's celebrated representation of the scene in which the poets observe the damned heads of Cocytus, both are draped in dark robes (see fig. 1). In Not I, the one internal Auditor, present on stage, is similarly robed in black, and is thus iconically comparable either to Virgil or to Dante. The attitude of the Auditor is expressed, in Beckett's own words, through a ‘gesture of helpless compassion’ (prefatory note; CSPL, 215). It might be noted that Dante is severely upbraided for his own compassion towards the sorcerers mentioned by Dan Rooney: ‘If God lets you, oh reader, profit from reading my poem, ask yourself how I could remain dry-eyed when I saw, close up, our human image so distorted […] Yes, I wept, […] until my guide said to me: “Are you too like the other fools? Here pity lives only when it is dead: who is more wicked than he who is moved to compassion at God's punishments?”’ (Canto xx, 19-30¹⁸). Dante learns the Virgilian lesson, so much so that he is able to maltreat Bocca in Canto xxx without any such scruple (‘I already had his hair twisted in my hand […]’; see fig. 2).

If the Auditor shares the early compassion of Dante, there is some suggestion that Beckett attributes the pitilessness of Virgil and of the later Dante to the audience. The second auditor-spectator present, in the playhouse, not only remains immobile before the spectacle, but continues to transfix the sinner with his relentless gaze (‘till she saw the stare she was getting’). It is, indeed, this very stare that provokes Mouth's current suffering, causing her to ‘die of shame’. The invasive presence of the spectatorial eye compels Mouth to ‘die’ again and again, and to make a shameful spectacle of her death.

The equation of the watching eye with infernal or purgatorial torment is already implicit in Play, in the reactions to the spot/eye (‘mere eye’, ‘get off me’). In the earlier play, however, the punishment comes from the stage, from some divine or directorial or authorial watcher who plays with his imprisoned characters. In Not I the responsibility for protracting Mouth's suffering rests decidedly with the external spectator. It is the audience's unforgiving eye/ear that, like the spot in Play, forces Mouth to speak, compelling her to undergo her damnation-narration performance after performance. Mouth's hell is her very condition of having to exhibit herself to us, this being the defining role of a dramatis persona. If she manages to evade the ‘I’, she cannot equally avoid the eye: ‘Not eye’ is an impossible condition for a stage figure to achieve. Indeed, Mouth's own mouth, as we have seen, becomes, among other organic objects, an eye, mirroring back the spectator's cruel gaze. ‘“Why do you stare at us so hard, as if in a mirror?”’ asks the damned head of Cocytus.¹⁹

THE R.I.P. WORD

Of the seven dramaticules published after Not I, six share its dominant ‘infernal’ dramaturgic and iconographic modes.²⁰ First, the dimly perceived tête-morte,²¹ which reappears with obsessive regularity: That Time (1976) presents Listener's ‘old white face, long flaring white hair as if seen from above out-spread’ (CSPL, 228; as if seen, one might ask, by whom ‘from above’?); Footfalls (1976) gives us the analogously ancient head of May with her ‘disshevelled grey hair’ (CSPL, 239); A Piece of Monologue (1979) has the icon of Speaker's ‘White hair, white nightgown, white socks’ (CSPL, 265); W in Rockaby (1981) is described as ‘Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face’ (CSPL, 273); the image is doubled in Ohio Impromptu (1981), where Listener's ‘Bowed head propped on right hand. Face hidden […] Long white hair’ is mirrored in the almost identical appearance of Reader, ‘As like in appearance as possible’ (CSPL, 273); and this multiplication of identical aged heads is extended further in What Where (1983), in which all four players are ‘as alike as possible’, with ‘same long grey gown’ and ‘same long grey hair’ (CSPL, 310). Death, or Hell, cancels difference.²²

Second, the darkness visible in which the dead heads float. The obscuration sequence is as follows: ‘[…] stage in darkness. Fade up to Listener's face’ (That Time); ‘Lighting: dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head’ (Footfalls); ‘Speaker […] barely visible in diffuse light’ (A Piece of Monologue); ‘Light: Subdued on chair. Rest of stage dark. Subdued spot on face constant throughout’ (Rockaby); ‘Light on table midstage. Rest of stage in darkness’ (Ohio impromptu); ‘Playing area […] dimly lit, surrounded by shadow’ (What where). These plays are all haunted, in more senses than one, by shades.

Invariably, moreover, the dim heads are theatrically eccentric. In all of these miniature ‘brothers to Not I,²³ the hellishly look-alike faces are strategically marginalized on stage, and thereby estranged from the customary position of protagonist-subject of the action. They have literally lost their centrality. If Mouth is suspended ‘about 8 feet above stage level’ and relegated ‘upstage audience right’ (CSPL, 216), the face of Listener in That Time is elevated ‘about 10 feet above stage level’ and placed ‘midstage off centre (CSPL, 228), analogously the ‘strip’ along which May walks in Footfalls is situated ‘downstage … a little off centre audience right’ (CSPL, 239); Speaker in A Piece of Monologue is found ‘well off centre downstage audience left’ (CSPL, 265); W's chair in Rockaby rocks ‘facing front downstage slightly off centre audience left’ (CSPL, 275); V in What Where is discovered ‘downstage left’ (CSPL, 310). Each of these dramatis (im)personae is geometrically tangential to his/her own residual existence.

The actions performed by these shadowy no-bodies are almost always manically or mechanically repetitive.²⁴ Rather than moving they are moved. May in Footfalls is forced to pace unhaltingly up and down her strip, forever tracing the same parabolic trajectory; W in Rockaby is rocked with slow regularity, the see-sawing of her rocker being ‘controlled mechanically’ by some external force (CSPL, 275). Even the imperative ‘Pause. Knock’ pattern with which Listener punctuates the reading in Ohio Impromptu seems, in its fixated frequency, to control him as much as it does the interrupted Reader. And so it is with these dramatic residues' self-haunting speech acts, made up of fragmented and ritualistic phrasal refrains, from Speaker's ‘no such thing …’ (CSPL, 265) to W's ‘all eyes/all sides’ (CSPL, 275) to Reader's ‘… left to tell’ (CSPL, 285). Far from governing their own speech, Beckett's late Speakers are fatally bespoke.

Beckett develops, then, a powerfully post-subjective rhetoric specific to the dramaticule as sub-genre, in which a limited repertory of constrictive bodily, scenic and discursive ‘figures’ produces an extraordinary series of combinational variables. A crucial figural constant of this rhetoric is the two-edged strategy of reticence that we encountered in the earlier plays. The ‘ineffability’ strategy, is expressed through the Come and go mode of ellipsis: ‘M: though scarcely a girl any more … [brokenly.] … dreadfully—[…]’ (Footfalls; CSPL, 242); ‘No sudden fit of … no word’ (A Piece of Monologue; CSPL, 266); ‘I have been sent by—and here he named the dear name’ (Ohio Impromptu; CSPL, 287). The ‘negated subjectivity’ strategy operates through the ‘Not I’ evasion of the first-person pronoun; Mouth's desperate ‘she’ reappears less dramatically in Rockaby, and is varied as ‘he’ in A Piece of Monologue and Ohio Impromptu, as an unstable and indeterminate ‘I/you/she/he/it’ in Footfalls: ‘A little later, when as though she had never been, it never been […]’ (CSPL, 242); and as a self-addressed ‘you’ in That Time, where the problem of saying ‘I’ is explicitly lexicalized by C, who asks his alter ego—or rather, later ego—Listener: ‘Did you ever say I to yourself in your life come on now [Eyes close]’ (CSPL, 230). It is the very endeavour never to ‘say I to yourself’ that constitutes the final trace of ‘your life’ in these dramas.

Repetition and (self-)denial converge. Increasingly, the vocabulary of the dramaticules becomes the lexis of reiterated negation. Their dominant lexical items are the unforgiving ‘N’ words, from the melancholy ‘no time gone in no time’ that closes That Time (CSPL, 235), to the anguished ‘Not there? Amy: Not there’ that marks the sense of loss in Footfalls (CSPL, 243), to the emphatic and apparently definitive ending N of Ohio Impromptu: ‘Nothing is left to tell’ (CSPL, 288). The increasing sway exercised over Beckett's lexicon by ‘No's knife’²⁵ is best exemplified by the n^th-power negatives of A Piece of Monologue, which proceeds through a vertiginous logic of progressive self-undoing, and undoing of its own undoing, so that even the N words are negated, as if they were excessively affirmative: ‘None from window. No. Next to none. No such thing as none’ (CSPL, 265).

But for all the ‘Nothing left to tell’ topos, there still remains in most of the dramaticules the absolute necessity to tell. Beckett's biographical relics, or biological relicts, are driven by an ineluctable narration compulsion that keeps them going in spite of everything (which is to say in spite of ‘Nothing’).²⁶ A, B and C, the past voices of Listener in That Time, recount to him in tireless alternation those moments in his past which constituted him as ‘I’-‘you’. May and her offstage Mother both relate the lifelong Lady Macbeth-like pacing of May/Amy (‘you’/‘she’/‘I’) in a narration that appears already written, and indeed already read: ‘… Amy—the daughter's given name, as the reader will remember—‘(CSPL, 243). Speaker summarizes (‘Words are few’) the grotesquely schematic womb/tomb curriculum vitae/curriculum mortis of the absent, or possibly present, ‘him’: ‘Birth was the death of him. Ghastly grinning ever since. Up at the lid to come. In cradle and crib. At suck first fiasco. With the first totters. From mammy to nanny and back. All the way. Bandied back and forth. So ghastly grinning on. From funeral to funeral. To now’ (A Piece of Monologue; CSPL, 265). Reader is obliged by the insistent knocking of Listener to repeat, re-start or cut what he optimistically calls ‘The sad tale a last time told’ (Ohio Impromptu; CSPL, 288). A last time until the next time.

One of the voices in That Time, B, suggests to his listening ‘self’ that his life story, itself a mere fiction, is really only a form of protection against the invading dark: ‘just one of those things you kept making up to keep the void out just another of those old tales to keep the void from pouring in on top of you the shroud’ (CSPL, 230). Life, as Macbeth puts it, is but a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, and the purpose of its telling is, according to B, to keep death at bay. But this is surely—like Reader's ‘last time’—a consolatory illusion, since the tellers' telling turns out once again to be essentially ‘about’ death rather than ‘against’ death. In addition to the frequent references in the narratives to the grave, to the dark, to the night—see for example, Speaker's syntactically ambiguous ‘Born dead of night’ which can be read as ‘Born, dead of night’ or ‘Born dead, of night’ (CSPL, 265); to the closing of the day, to the void, to the winter, to the end, to being ‘deep asleep’ (Footfalls; CSPL, 239), and the explicit invocation of ghosts, those on stage as well as off—‘Ghost light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. Ghost graves. Ghost … he all but said ghost loved ones’ (A Piece of Monologue; CSPL, 269)—the later dramaticules are sown with Beckettian code-language for dying or for death. The most prominent code item is the verb ‘go’ and its derivatives, in the Come and Go sense of the word: ‘A: all gone long ago […] C: come and gone come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time’ (That Time; CSPL, 228, 235); ‘Speaker: All gone so long. Gone. Ripped off and torn to shreds’ (A Piece of Monologue; CSPL, 266); ‘going to and fro’ (Rockaby, passim).

‘Gone. Ripped off’: Kristin Morrison observes that the word ‘rip’ in A Piece of Monologue—(see ‘Ripped from the wall’, ‘Ripped off and torn to shreds’, and in particular the phrase ‘Waiting on the rip word’ [CSPL, 269])—is another key term in the play, expressing the primary meaning of ‘violent slashing’, as in ‘rip-tide’, and thus ‘a break in the surface of the drama which reveals the truth of motives, feelings, themes.²⁷ ‘The rip word in A Piece of Monologue’, claims Morrison, ‘is “begone”, that word by which the speaker dismisses from his life that which he has always really wanted’.²⁸ Thus ‘rip’ becomes a second code word synonymous with the first, ‘go’ and its derivatives, and thus with ‘die’ and its cognates. Indeed, this sense is encoded acronymically in the ‘rip’ word itself, whose referentiality is disclosed in its own graphemic make-up—/R/ /I/ /P/, Requiescat In Pace. The language of Beckett's dramaticules is all a cipher for the R.I.P. word.

TO HELL OUT OF THERE

The fear that their narration compulsion, their enforced telling and retelling of the rip word, may in fact constitute a form of (narration-)damnation, does dawn on Beckett's last stage creatures, albeit occasionally and subliminally. Ohio Impromptu's Reader, describing ‘his’ sinking into his unconscious, the hell of his own mind, evokes the landscape of the lightless and petrifying regions of Circle IX: ‘Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone’ (CSPL, 288), just as V's disenchanted self-description, in What Where, as solitary and immobile object of time in a ‘still’ present, recalls Virgil's explanation of the lost soul's individual rediscovery of its own eternal doom (Canto vi, 98-100):

I am alone.
In the present as were I still.
It is winter.
Without journey.
Time passes.
That is all.

(CSPL, 316)

If these plays are brothers to Not I, their narrating heads are neighbours to the doomed Mouth of Cocytus. Speaker describes the Mouth-like deprivation of body and light that reduces ‘him’ to a ‘dark whole’ (CSPL, 268), or rather to a dark part, a dark hole, since that is ‘No such thing as whole’ (269): ‘Into dark whole again … Hands gone. Light gone. Gone. Again and again. Again and again gone’ (268). And the dark hole delivers the dark word—the rip word that ‘parts the dark’—in an eternal (still)birth that associates mouth with womb with tomb with the dark parts of hell: ‘Waits for first word always the same. It gathers in his mouth. Parts lips and thrusts tongue forward. Birth. Parts the dark […] Gone. Again and again. Again and again gone. Mouth agape. A cry. Stifled by nasal. Dark parts. Grey light’ (268).

The most direct infernal allusions in the later dramaticules, however, are those disseminated in That Time, all three of whose narrative voices refer to hell ambiguously as somewhere either to get to or to get out of: ‘and on to hell out of there when was that’ says C (228), who later describes ‘your’ solitary attempts at self-comforting, again on the way to, or already in, hell: ‘with your arms around you whose else hugging you for a bit of warmth to dry off and on to hell out of there and on to the next not a living soul in the place only yourself’ (229). C's perception of a ‘place’ without ‘a living soul’ is confirmed by B: ‘all still no sign of life not a soul abroad no sound’ (228). And the uncertainty as to whether the addressed ‘you’ is going to, or already in, the desolate ‘place’ is stronger still in the exhortations of A: ‘time to get on the night ferry and out to hell out of there’ (232), and again, ‘only get back on board and away to hell out of it and never come back’ (235). The ferry takes ‘you’ out to hell but also (hopefully) out of there.

A's ‘ferry’ becomes one of the play's most frequently reiterated terms, and thus presumably one of its allusive theme (or ‘rip’) words: ‘straight off the ferry and up with the nightbag’ (228); ‘just the one night in any case off the ferry one morning and back on her the next’ (229); ‘that last time straight off the ferry’ (231). The image of a ferry going busily to and fro cannot but evoke, in the context of an explicitly named ‘hell’, the figure of Charon transporting the damned souls to the underworld. Here again Beckett's iconography is emblematic. In Canto III, Dante first sees the fearful ferryman coming his way from the opposite ‘sad shore’ of the Acheron or Styx: ‘Then, with my eyes lowered for shame, I stopped speaking, lest my talk should vex him [Virgil], and went to the riverside. And lo, towards us in his boat came a white-haired old man […]’ (79-83). Beckett's initial stage direction, it will be recalled, describes Listener's head as comprising an ‘Old white face’ with ‘long flaring white hair’. Listener, the putative ‘you’ of the interwoven narratives, may thus be a ferried lost soul or himself a white-haired Stygian transporter, coming and going but always staying where he is: ‘only get back on board and away to hell out of it’. Or he may be, like Mouth's Auditor, a silent Dantean observer (‘I stopped speaking’) who ‘mirrors’ the object of his perceptions. In any event, A's ‘and never come back’ is surely not a promise of escape (‘out of it’) but a condemnation never to return to this side of the river. ‘“Never hope to see the sky again”’, warns Dante's Charon, ‘“I come to ferry you to the other side, to eternal darkness, fire and ice”’ (84-7).

Being on the ‘other side’ means, above all, being on the stage half of the theatre-audience divide. The identification of the hopeless ‘place’ of the speakers' suffering with the lieu scènique itself is powerfully encoded in several plays. B in That Time describes ‘your’ situation as being ‘alone in the same the same scenes making it up that way to keep it going keep it out on the stone’ (233), and again ‘you back in the old scene wherever it might be might have been the same scene’ (233). B's ‘scene’ bears the semantic traces of the French scène, stage, the same old stage representing the same old scene of sorrow. And to be in a scene, on the scène, means above all to be seen, as C (See?) becomes progressively aware in the course of his narration: ‘look round for once at your fellow bastards thanking God for once bad and all as you were you were not as they till it dawned that for all the loathing you were getting you might as well not have been there at all the eyes passing over you’ (234).

The stare of their fellow bastards, the eyes passing over them, is the acutest source of unease for all the têtes-mortes. There are recurrent references, in several texts, to the act of looking through, or being looked at through, a window, perhaps equivalent to the spatial frame of the stage: ‘From its single window he could see […] Unfamiliar room. Unfamiliar scene’ (Ohio Impromptu; CSPL, 285); ‘facing only windows/other only windows/all eyes/all sides […] at her window/to see/be seen’ (Rockaby; CSPL, 277, 281); ‘As at window. Eyes glued to pane staring out’ (A piece of monologue; CSPL, 268). The implicit accusation directed towards the gaping bastards in the audience is that of indifference to, if not a form of sadistic pleasure in, the speaker's distress: eyes glued to pain staring out.

Altogether, the spectator is not well treated in Beckett's last plays. The Protagonist's brave final act of political dissidence in Catastrophe seems to be a form of rebellion against the tyranny of the Director, but its actual object is the public, whom P dares to stare back at, to the audience's audible disapproval:

[Pause. Distant storm of applause. P raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies. Long pause. Fade-out of light on face.]

Not only is the spectator made to struggle for meaning, but when he thinks he has found it he discovers that it is a finger, or an eye, or perhaps a mirror, pointed towards him.

But even the unflattering reference to it as heartless voyeur of the pains of hell is more than the audience can take home with satisfying certainty. Beckett's otherworldly allusions are in no sense consolatory, even to the extent of offering definite, and thus consoling, condemnation. There is nothing final, still less resolutive, in his dramaturgy of death or in his iconography of hell. As in all his drama, from Godot and Krapp onwards, Beckett plays the game of the transcendental—ontological, theological, eschatological—signified, ensnaring the audience in the absolute illusion of the Absolute, only to undo these revelations by refracting the spectator's enquiring gaze onto himself. Thus the ‘Make sense who may’ gauntlet thrown down explicitly in What Where (CSPL, 316) is not a challenge to try making something out of nothing (there is no such thing as ‘hole’, pure emptiness waiting to be arbitrarily filled), but a sort of caveat spectator, an admonition to take responsibility for one's own hermeneutic reworkings of the dangerously alluring referential traces the dramatist has planted for us. Watcher watch thyself.

In the dramaticules, Beckett's particular dramatic and iconic strategy is continually to invoke an afterworld elsewhere and, as it were, an afterlife elsewhen—‘or was that another place another time’ [That Time; CSPL, 234]—thereby opening up the prospect of a structured Dantean universe, made up, in the best medieval exegetical tradition, of analogical meanings (the iconic ‘similarity’, for example, with the Inferno), anagogical meanings (life as an anticipation of death, death as a re-enacting of life) and allegorical meanings (drama itself as a mode of damnation). Such meanings, though they prove in the end to be a kind of metaphysical trompe-l'œil for the interpretative eye, do not disappear altogether, remaining suspended like dimly perceptible forms in the dark. Beckett's poetics of the ‘one matter’ offers his spectator ignis fatuus glimpses of the fire and ice on the other side, but, unlike the ferryboat on the Acheron, returns him to the hell of his own making on this side of the divide.

Notes

1. ‘And one who had lost both ears for the cold, still keeping his face down, said: “Why do you stare at us so hard, as if in a mirror?”’; all translations from Dante are mine.

2. See Charles Lyons, Samuel Beckett, 169.

3. The writing of A Piece of Monologue actually begun in 1977, prior to Warrilow's ‘commission’, overlaps with the composition of Company; in manuscript the two works have passages in common.

4. Come and Go: A Dramaticule (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967).

5. Beckett collected a number of the later dramatic texts in their French version under the title Catastrophe et autres dramaticules (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986).

6. On the process of reduction in Beckett's composition of the play, see Rosemary Pountney, ‘Less = more’, 11-19.

7. Karen Laughlin analyses the audience's hermeneutical labours with regard to this play in ‘Looking for sense …’, 137-46. Audience response to Beckett's late plays in general is discussed by the same author in ‘Seeing is perceiving: Beckett's later plays and the theory of audience response’, in Robin J. Davis and Lance St J. Butler (eds.), ‘Make sense who may’: essays on Beckett's later works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 20-9.

8. The play's frequent Shakespearean references are examined by Hersh Zeifman, ‘Come and Go: a criticule’, 137-44.

9. On the ritualistic aspects of Beckett's drama, including the late plays, see Katherine H. Burkman's introduction to her 1987 collection.

10. An earlier version of the play contains explicit references to sexuality, and in fact begins with the reading of excerpts from a pornographic narrative. See Pountney ‘Less = more’, and Kristin Morrison, Canters and Chronicles, 114-16.

11. Karen L. Laughlin, ‘Looking for sense …’, 141, reports one audience member's immediate association of the ‘rings’ with Dante's Inferno.

12. For the énoncé/énonciation distinction, see Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings II: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 133; the implications of this distinction for the drama are examined in my The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 144-8.

13. The question of subjectivity in Not I is analysed by Enoch Brater, ‘The “I” in Beckett's Not I’; Hersh Zeifman, ‘Being and non-being’; Lois Oppenheim, ‘Anonymity and individuation’; Mary Catanzaro, ‘Recontextualizing the self’; John H. Lutterbie, ‘“Tender mercies”: subjectivity and subjection in Samuel Beckett's Not I’.

14. For the multiple bodily reference in the play, see my essay on Not I in Brater (ed.), Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context.

15. Michael Robinson rightly affirmed, in 1969, that ‘Beckett's heroes are not in Hell but Purgatory: a Purgatory of waiting on the verge of timelessness’ (The Long Sonata of the Dead, 69-70). On the Beckett-Dante relationship, see also Hélène L. Baldwin, Samuel Beckett's Real Silence; Neal Oxenhandler, ‘Seeing and believing in Dante and Beckett’; Wallace Fowlie, ‘Dante and Beckett’; Martha Fehsenfeld, ‘Beckett's late works: an appraisal’.

16. All quotations and line numbers from La divina commedia refer to the edition edited by Daniele Mattalia (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1988).

17. Hélène L. Baldwin, Samuel Beckett's Real Silence, 142.

18. Virgil goes on to explain to Dante that ‘pity (pietà) lives here only when it is dead’ (28), distinguishing between pietà (pity) towards men (pietas erga homines), and pietà (piety) towards God (pietas erga Deum). Pity is allowed only if compatible with piety. Compare the dialogue between Belacqua and the Ottolenghi at the end of Beckett's short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (MPTK [More Pricks than Kicks], 18). Beckett's friend Thomas MacGreevy uses Dante's line as the epigraph to his poem ‘Fragment’.

19. Compare Beckett's Film, in which the eye is at once persecuting offscreen presence (the camera) and internal object of focalization.

20. The seventh is Catastrophe which, partly because of its political theme, does not altogether conform to the ‘dead heads’ mode of the other late plays.

21. Têtes-mortes (literally ‘dead-heads’) is the title Beckett gave to a collection of his short fictions in French (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967).

22. Enoch Brater (Beyond Minimalism, 134) observes that the similiarity of the faces in these plays is itself a feature of the Dantean Hell: ‘Simile qui con simile è sepolto’ (‘Like to like is buried here’, Inferno, Canto xi, 130).

23. Beckett described That Time as ‘brother to Not I’ (Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the skull, 206).

24. Repetition in the late plays is examined by Steven Connor, in Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (chapter 6: ‘Presence and repetition in Beckett's theatre’, 115-39), and by Carla Locatelli in Unwording the World (chapter 3: ‘Beckett's theater since the 1970s’, 112-53).

25. See the collection of short fictions entitled No's knife (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967). Beckett's ways of ‘undoing’ are explored in depth by Carla Locatelli in Unwording the world, and by S. E. Gontarski in The intent of ‘Undoing’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

26. See Charles Lyons, ‘Beckett's fundamental theatre’, 87: ‘The recitation of the narratives in these plays reveals both the characters' need to speak the text and their desire to be free of that obsession’.

27. Kristin Morrison, ‘The rip word in A Piece of Monologue’, 349.

28. Ibid., 349. The first manuscript version of the play is in fact entitled ‘Gone’.