Just as the 'quality of language' in Proust was more important than 'any system of ethics or aesthetics' [according to Beckett], so the quality of an experience in Beckett's theatre becomes more important than any system of 'meaning' that might be extracted from the words of the text or from the 'symbolism' of the sets, characters, and actions. A dramatic art is created that is 'symbolic without symbolism'.

The purpose of this article is to explore further the implications of [his] statement 'form is content, content is form' for Beckett's drama and to show that the allegorical approach, which is misleading when applied to the novels, is even less appropriate as a response to the plays. (p. 12)

For all his obvious familiarity with a wide range of philosophical speculation, Beckett has persistently rejected the philosopher's quest for a systematic statement about the nature of reality…. It is by the operation of habit, he argues in Proust, that man contrives to ignore changes both internal and external, and so imposes a system upon the flux of experience. He insists that 'the creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day', and glosses 'habit' as 'the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The countless selves that constitute 'the individual' no more add up to a fixed, knowable subjective entity than the fleeting impressions we receive from the external world cohere into an objective system. As Malone puts it, he has been 'nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life, without any result.'

Along with his distrust of the intellect and the generalising tendency of language goes a rejection of the 'grotesque fallacy' of realistic art, which subscribes to a conceptual, and hence expressible, view of reality. For the writer, realism is 'the penny-a-line vulgarity of a literature of notations'…. In his earliest works of fiction, More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy, Beckett makes many of the 'concessions required of the literary artist by the shortcomings of the literary convention.' His technique for evading these shortcomings is the simple and clumsy one of occasionally emphasising the essential unreality of what is presented according to the convention as real. (pp. 12-13)

Early on, Beckett made a number of attempts to establish a distinction between conceptual clarity and the immediacy of experience as it happens. This distinction, between the separation of form and content and the complete fusion of form and content, between the 'literature of notations' and the 'revelation of a world', is present in the first paragraph of his first published fiction, the story 'Dante and the Lobster' which opens More Pricks than Kicks. Belacqua is reading Dante. He is 'stuck in the first of the canti of the moon', Canto II of Il Paradiso, where Beatrice is explaining to the poet the nature of the spots on the moon…. The mental processes implied by the words explanation, demonstration, proof both bog Belacqua down and bore him. He wants to finish this passage of conceptual argument, in which Beatrice transforms the simple visual phenomenon of spots on the moon's surface into an elaborate system of heavenly science, and pass on to the Piccarda sequence…. The meeting with Piccarda is a direct encounter, an experience; Beatrice's lecture on the moon resorts to 'analysis and abstraction'. Disembodied meaning is opposed to embodied experience in the two contrasting episodes. The gap between form and content in the Beatrice passage is stressed in the continuation of the paragraph:

Still he pored over the enigma, he would not concede himself conquered, he would understand at least the meanings of the words, the order in which they were spoken and the nature of the satisfaction that they conferred on the misinformed poet….

Belacqua is here struggling with the difficulty of reading Italian, so that the enigma is partly linguistic on a simple level. But it is also partly a difficulty arising from the difference between the language of Metaphysics and the language of Poetry. Later Beckett heroes still feel a sharp distinction between these two kinds of language, but tend more and more to abandon the attempt to 'understand at least the meanings of the words', often preferring to pay attention to their quality as sounds and to 'the order in which they were spoken' and deriving a satisfaction from them which does not depend on a grasp of their conceptual dimension. (pp. 13-14)

In More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy, Beckett is still struggling with 'the shortcomings of the literary convention', still to a large extent using words to talk about the distinction between the conceptual and the experiential apprehension of living, and it is here that [a] view of Beckett as an allegorical novelist might be substantiated. In his third fiction, Watt, he begins to exploit the qualities of words to narrow the gap between form and content, to break down the conceptual element of language and to deflect attention from the desire to interpret to the 'ebb and flow of action' in the process of reading the words themselves.

The crucial episode is that of the visit of the piano-tuners, 'the Galls, father and son', which is offered as a paradigm of 'all the incidents of note proposed to Watt during his stay in Mr Knott's house.' The visit of the Galls resembled the other 'incidents of note':

in the sense that it was not ended, when it was past, but continued to unfold, in Watt's head, from beginning to end, over and over again, the complex connexions of its lights and shadows, the passing from silence to sound and from sound to silence, the stillness before the movement and the stillness after, the quickenings and retardings, the approaches and the separations, all the shifting detail of its march and ordinance, according to the irrevocable caprice of its taking place….

What happens in this passage is that the clear outline and the firm substance of the event disintegrate into the assortment of sense impressions that made it up. In the process of reading this extraordinary prose, which eschews the shaping device of the semi-colon and which rocks us back and forth between opposing forces of sound, sight, and movement, we are absorbed into a rhythmic but directionless experience and share in 'the irrevocable caprice of its taking place'. Form and content fuse; the words begin to vibrate 'at a lower frequency, or a higher, than that of ratiocination.' We enter into the quality of Watt's experience of the visit of the Galls…. [As] Watt's mind—and Beckett's prose—breaks down the significant shape of the sense impressions into an unshaped assembly of lights, sounds, and movements the recognizable incident 'became a mere example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment.' This loss of 'outer meaning' is very disturbing to Watt…. Watt's difficulty is that of the mind which cannot face the possibility that all occurrences in the outer world may be totally random, and that order, meaning, significant and knowable shape may be simply the projection of an inner need which tries to impose its structures on material which does not operate according to the mind's habits…. Watt is an embodiment of the dominant scientific-rationalist view of reality, the inductive method of reasoning which leaves Final Causes—'what they really meant'—on one side, and pursues explanations of physical happenings that can be induced by observation and ingenious ratiocination…. Answers are indicated in Murphy: this pursuit of meaning is the pursuit of a chimaera, and it tends to the idolatry of a false god…. Beckett returns to this distrust of conceptual thinking frequently in the novels…. In The Unnamable Beckett suggests that the need to reduce experience to clear and distinct notions, the need to think that we know, is the inevitable result of our ignorance and isolation…. The clarity with which [Beckett maintains] art has nothing to do is conceptual clarity—'notions clear and distinct'—the clarity demanded by such questions as 'What's it meant to mean?' The clarity that Beckett's art aims at is the clarity of felt experience, of something undergone though not understood. The incident of the Galls is again central: an incident 'that is to say of great formal brilliance and indeterminable purport'…. [Although] the mind cannot impose a shape on the event, and so render it graspable by the intellect, a series of physical phenomena had taken place…. The nearest language, with its curse of philosophical abstraction and generalisation, can get to expressing it is to say that 'nothing had happened'. As Hamm frequently says, 'Something is taking its course'—the 'something' or the 'nothing' cannot be conceptualised, but there is activity which can be suggested by the verbal constructions of Watt or by the combination of words and actions in Endgame. As the narrator, Sam, says later in the novel, having attempted some explanation of how Mr Knott's powers operate: 'But that does not at all agree with my conception of Mr Knott. But what conception have I of Mr Knott? None.'… Many of Beckett's plays, like the episode of the Galls, offer passages of dialogue and sequences of stage activity which have 'the utmost formal distinctness'. They provide the audience with an experience, but it is not possible to extrapolate a meaning from the experience in generalised and abstract terms. An allegorical reading is thwarted. Something takes its course in the spectator as well as on the stage, but like Watt we are unable to say what has happened. (pp. 16-19)

As Beckett has proceeded as a dramatist, he has deprived would-be interpreters of as many of the possibilities for conceptualising his 'stage machines' as he can. Compared with Waiting for Godot, it is much more difficult to suggest esoteric significance of a social, metaphysical, or psychological kind in the characters or their physical situation in Play. (p. 20)

[Various allusions] serve an unusual purpose. Rather than cohering into a satisfying pattern which carries in symbolic fashion the message of the play, they lead the interpreter up a series of blind alleys…. This frustration of the curious intellect is itself part of the experience the play provides, making the audience feel the inadequacy of approaching reality by trying to impose systems upon the minute-by-minute flux of sense impressions. At times, indeed, Beckett plays with the audience's desire to read symbolic meanings into his text. (p. 21)

Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, and Not I … reveal Beckett's continuing exploration of the nature of theatre as a means of avoiding definition and of achieving that union of form and content which has been the constant aim of his art. The kind of progression discernible in all the plays from Waiting for Godot onwards is similar to that followed in the novels from Murphy to How It Is, and was already implicit in Beckett's aesthetic theory at the very start of his career…. The audience is still partly free to hold itself aloof from the deprivation shown and talked about on the stage [in Waiting for Godot and Endgame] and to interpret the 'stage picture' as an image of want and sterility, although the long silences and periods of inactivity begin the process of drawing us into an actual experience of deprivation as an audience. In the later plays Beckett becomes more and more successful at breaking down the distinctions between the objective 'stage picture' of deprivation, the deprivation imposed upon the actors, and the deprivation imposed upon the spectators. (pp. 22-3)

The first play in which light becomes a major ingredient in the overall dramatic effect is Krapp's Last Tape, in which the visible action is confined to a pool of light directed onto a desk. 'Rest of stage in darkness' reads the direction for the set. As an audience we are not permitted to see the whole acting area. Any curiosity we might feel about what lies beyond the circle of light is aggravated when Krapp 'goes with all the speed he can muster backstage into darkness. Ten seconds. Loud pop of cork. Fifteen seconds. He comes back into light carrying an old ledger and sits down at table.' Those two periods of silence, of absence of all happening on the part of the stage that we can see—ten seconds and fifteen seconds are a long time in the theatre—do not have quite the same quality as the silences in Waiting for Godot. Added to our waiting for something to happen is the provocation of frustrated curiosity. What is he doing back there?… We simply want to see, and we are not allowed to.

The central episode of the play is an extension into drama of the pattern of contrasting apprehensions of reality…. First of all there is [on the tape] a moment of insight—the 'vision at last'—when he 'saw the whole thing'. He understood, the taped voice leads us to believe, what the meaning of it all was. But such expressions as 'the belief', 'in reality', and 'the whole thing', which suggest a systematic shaping of experience, should put us on our guard, and indeed Krapp is not interested in listening to the vision achieved by his earlier self. What he suddenly saw, what became clear to him at last, what was revealed to him on that stormy night through the light of the understanding and the fire has no relevance for him now. It was just another hypothesis that has collapsed with the passage of time…. The final comment by the recorded voice reinforces [a] sense of complete isolation from 'extracircum-ferential phenomena'—from the 'big blooming buzzing confusion': 'Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. Pause. Here I end—'. This is the goal of all Beckett's heroes: total blackness, silence, stillness, nothingness—the end—the 'wandering to find home' over…. This quest of the intellect for meaning is relegated to insignificance …. (pp. 23-4)

For the audience in the theatre, the crucial thing is not the possible allegorical equation of tapes and memory processes, but the moment by moment experience of listening to the recorded voice and looking at the figure of Krapp isolated in his pool of light. We hear the passage about the two people in the punt three times, but the striking fact is not that this repetition symbolizes 'the mechanization of the mechanism of memory', but that each time we listen our response is different. On the first occasion, we receive only direct physical impressions…. The second time through, we are given some precise information as to the context…. And more importantly, because this radically influences the way in which we respond to the incident, we learn the narrative context—it is the end of a love affair: 'it was hopeless and no good going on.' The pure experience—almost like Molloy's 'pure sounds, free of all meaning', except that here sounds are replaced by the physical sensations of touch and movement—is being contaminated by more and more information, so that we begin to replace an experience created by words with ideas about that experience. The timeless and spaceless moment is invaded by time and space. We are diverted from feeling to knowing about the incident. This is the exact reverse of the process that took place in the treatment of the visit of the Galls in Watt. There, an apparently definable and knowable event disintegrated into its random sensuous components; here, the pure sensuous components are organized and trapped into a rigidly defined narrative episode. More than one critic has demanded a similar definition for the whole play…. The gradual accretion of descriptive and narrative details which destroy the purity of the experience in the punt is Beckett's dramatization and rejection of the habit of mind—the demand for realism—that lies behind such criticism. (pp. 25-6)

[The third] time Beckett allows us to hear the closing section, from where it was cut off the first time at 'Here I end—':

Here I end this reel. Box—(pause)—three, spool—(pause)—five. (Pause.)…

The mystery that surrounded the words 'Here I end—', seeming to reinforce the imagery of silence and darkness and utter solitude, is drained away by the mundane completing phrase: 'Here I end this reel.' And the whole experience which was so striking and disturbing on first hearing is further reduced by the pigeon-holing precision of 'Box three, spool five.' One is reminded of Clov's remark about putting things in order: 'I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.'… Once things have been put in order, they are dead. Only the experiential moment is alive. Once an experience is past, it is filed away in the tapes of memory or in the words of a book. The tragedy of Krapp lies not in the loss of the fire of vision and certainty, but in the fact that that very fire of the understanding which creates an ordered view of existence precludes the entry into the experience which we have been enabled to share in our first fragmentary hearing of the punt episode. (pp. 26-7)

[In Happy Days] the dramatist has not simply presented the audience with an image of confinement, but has taken us, in the transition from Act One to Act Two, through an experience of being deprived. The range of our response has noticeably deteriorated during the course of the play, but the quality of our response has intensified. In making his actress shrink 'from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena', Beckett has made it possible for the audience to be 'drawn in to the core of the eddy.' A 'stage machine' which is 'excavatory, immersive, a contraction … a descent'—Winnie visibly sinking into the earth—carries a responsive spectator with it into an experience of immersion and contraction. (pp. 28-9)

Happy Days does not simply offer us a representation of frustration; it puts us through an experience of frustration. 'Here form is content, content is form.' We can attempt to divorce one from the other if we must. There is just enough information in the text to make it possible for Alvarez to interpret it as 'a sour view of a cosy marriage', but such an interpretation has very little relevance to the experience of watching the play in performance.

One episode in particular challenges the audience to interpret: the spontaneous combustion of the parasol. Could it mean anything? What could it mean?… It is Watt's problem of trying to discover a system which will account for the facts as he experiences them…. Something has seemed to occur: the audience has seen the sunshade go up in smoke. But that something is only an event in the theatre about which it is pointless to theorize. It has happened because Beckett put it in the script, just as Winnie appears to be trapped in the mound because Beckett's stage directions require it. It might be said of the entire play—of any play—that 'nothing has occurred', although Beckett has contrived that something should appear to have occurred 'with the utmost formal distinctness'. Only the 'grotesque fallacy of realistic art' demands that stage facts should pretend to be facts that belong to the world outside the theatre. When the stage directions call for 'Blazing light' there is no necessity for us to interpret that light as sunlight or as the light of Hell as some critics have done. Just as the rapidly rising 'moon' at the end of each Act of Waiting for Godot demonstrates the nature of theatrical illusion, using electricity to parody the activities of heavenly bodies, so the blazing light of Happy Days is known by the audience to be just as much an artificial non-reality qua sunlight as the spontaneous combustion of the parasol is known to be a piece of technical trickery, dependent not on a changed set of natural laws but on the expertise of the stage technicians. And a parasol will be there again for the next Act, provided by the property department in accordance with the requirements of the playwright. (pp. 29-30)

Beckett has a scrupulous sense of the essential nature of each art form he adopts, and his later stage plays never abandon the three basic requirements of drama (as distinct from radio-play or mime): an audience that both listens and watches; an actor who can be both seen and heard; and some kind of interaction both on the stage and between the figure(s) on the stage and the spectators in the auditorium. In Krapp's Last Tape there is interaction between the Krapp on the stage and the younger Krapps on the tape; and an important part of the play's effect derives, as we saw, from our frustrated desire to see what Krapp is doing at the back of the stage in darkness. Put this on radio and one whole dimension of the experience of performance is lost. In Play, Beckett works with even more meagre resources than he permitted himself in Happy Days, but still produces an essentially theatrical drama. There is no longer, in the visual dimension of the play, even the minimal facial mobility left to Winnie. Her comic and tragic masks and her eye movements are now seen to have been extremely expressive compared with these unmoving faces, 'so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns.' No expression is allowed to the voices, which must adopt a 'toneless' delivery. There is no interaction between the three figures, who are oblivious of each other's proximity. But this does not mean that Beckett has provided no interaction on the stage: it is there in the relationship between the probing spotlight and the faces. He achieves this by reversing the usual theatrical convention that the lighting technician is subordinate to the actors. Instead of the light being there to serve the performer, the performer is in bondage to the light. The actors must take their cue from the moving spotlight, rather than the spotlight follow the lead of the actors. In this way the light becomes a dynamic property and the necessary on-stage tension is achieved. (pp. 30-1)

The story—husband, wife, and other woman—is so hackneyed, and the style is so riddled with the clichés of romantic fiction … that no intellectual effort is required to follow it. But the method of delivery, the toneless gabble of the voices and the unpredictable switching from one face and one version of the story to another, demands concentrated attention of both eye and ear to piece it together. The play's difficulty lies in the mechanics of perception not in the mental acrobatics of interpretation. The situation in the theatre has been pared down to the fundamental confrontation of perceiver and perceived.

The repetition of the entire play is a necessary part of the process. The first time through we still have curiosity: we listen carefully to make out the story, to catch on to the conventions being used. The second time through, we are deprived even of that curiosity. We are forced simply to watch and listen to what we have already watched and listened to, so that there are no surprises, no revelations. We become 'pure spectators', uncontaminated by the need to do anything but look at and listen to meaningless figures who are there to be perceived.

In Not I, the deprivation has gone even further. Now there is one source of words, not three; there is no movement in the light; and there is no face to look at, no eyes with or without expression; there is merely a mouth, spotlit. The need for on-stage interaction is not forgotten, but it is reduced to an absolute minimum: an unspeaking and only dimly seen Auditor, who reacts four times with a gesture of compassion, each one less expansive than the one before, so that the last movement is 'scarcely perceptible'. The dynamic relationship between Mouth and Auditor distracts our attention from the flow of words less each time this movement occurs, so that we participate in a process of the dwindling away of extracircumferential phenomena and are drawn further into the core of the eddy of speech. (pp. 31-2)

Because the audience has nothing else to look at, except for the tiny distractions of the Auditor's movements, it concentrates obsessively on the mouth, the lips, the teeth, the tongue. The extraordinary effect of watching this play is that the mouth seems to grow larger and larger as the performance proceeds, and one becomes aware of the amazingly expressive physical properties of the speech organs themselves. One becomes rivetted by the spectacle of the red tongue moving between the two rows of white teeth, and the pursing and elongating of the lips as different sounds are produced. It is as if we are given a physical, visual accompaniment to the enjoyment of 'pure sounds'; sounds take on almost tactile properties. (p. 32)

'In the ordinary way' we do not notice the actual word-producing machinery, because we are busy interpreting the product of speech, looking for meaning. But speech has now become for us, as we watch as well as listen, a matter of the physical 'contortions' of lips, cheeks, jaws, tongue. A different order of intentness is demanded by this performance. We are drawn—not suddenly, but gradually, as the nature of the experience grows upon us—into 'feeling'. Like Krapp's Last Tape and Play, this drama would lose most of its impact on the radio. We must see it in order to feel it. If we only heard, or read, the text, we would have to conceptualise the references to oral anatomy rather than experience them directly and take part physically in the performance.

Later in the play, Beckett directs attention to the other side of the language machine: the receiver, the ear and what it does with the sounds that come to it…. On the purely mechanical level—in theatrical performance—the ear does not catch all of what is said. It hears a stream of words, which at the start and end of the play are required to be completely 'unintelligible', and it has 'no idea what she's saying'. (p. 33)

Beckett provides for his audience an experience of the formal distinctness of words rising from the buzzing confusion of sound and then subsiding again into unintelligibility. He makes us aware once again that the work of art itself presents us with a 'face' which can be distinct without being open to systematic interpretation in conceptual terms, 'symbolic without symbolism'. (p. 34)

Robert Wilcher, "'What's It Meant to Mean?': An Approach to Beckett's Theatre," in Critical Quarterly, Summer, 1976, pp. 9-37.