Samuel Beckett and the Arts

Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media

Lois Oppenheim, Lois Oppenheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

This book, first published in 1999, addresses Beckett's visual and musical sensibilities, and examines his visionary use of such diverse modes of creative expression as stage, radio, television and film, when his medium was the written word. The first section of the book focuses on music; the second part analyses the visual arts; and the third part examines film, radio and television. This book uncovers aspects of his thinking on, and use of the arts that have been little studied, including the nonfigurative function of music and art in Beckett's work; the 'collaborations' undertaken by composers, painters and choreographers with his texts; the relation of his literary to his visual and musical artistry; and his use of film, radio and television as innovative means and celebration of artistic process.

Part I

Chapter 1

Words and Music: Situating Beckett

Earl Kim

“thither”*

thither

a far cry

for one

so little

fair daffodils

march then

then there

then there

then thence

daffodils

again

march then

again

a far cry

again

for one

so little

Samuel Beckett (1976)

^* “Thither” by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1977 Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

“thither” for soprano and harp is part of a song cycle entitled Now and Then. *

The formal design of the poem is reflected in the focal line of the music which also finds its echo in the harp’s doublings.

The music is notated in vertical columns, rather than horizontally, to reflect the visual design of the poem. Pauses and silences are dictated by the spacing of the lines. Overlappings and repetitions of single words gently insist on images of innocence, vulnerability and the ominous threat of annihilation.

Words, voice and harp all merge into one—each accompany each other.

Figure 1.1. Music for “thither” from NOW AND THEN by Earl Kim. Copyright © 1981 Merion Music, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

^* Now and Then is a cycle of songs for soprano, flute, viola, and harp based on texts by Chekhov, Beckett, and Yeats. It was commissioned by the Department of Music, the University of Chicago, to honor Paul Fromm, an ardent supporter of contemporary music, on his seventy-fifth birthday. The cycle was first performed by soprano Elsa Charlston and the Chicago Contemporary Chamber Ensemble conducted by Ralph Shapey.

Chapter 2

Samuel Beckett and the Arts of Time: Painting, Music, Narrative

H. Porter Abbott

James Knowlson’s new biography brings well into the light what we knew, but never knew quite so well: that if Samuel Beckett had two passions, one was painting and the other was music. “His love of music was rivaled only by his passionate love of painting.”¹ He could stand for an hour in front of a painting, absorbing it, comparing it to others in what Knowlson estimates was a photographic memory. He spent most of six months in Germany just looking at paintings. Similarly, he spent long evenings with friends like Avigdor Arikha just listening to music. And when he was not listening to records, often he was playing the piano. He told André Bernold that if he had not been a writer, he would have spent his life listening to music.²

But he was a writer. His artistic medium was language, which put him professionally one step away from these two lifetime passions. And arguably he was two steps away, since what he wrote was largely narrative. Though he wrote lyrical poetry, which (intuitively at least) is close to music, and took his poetry quite seriously, most of his time and energy were spent developing those two traditional instruments of narrative: prose fiction and drama. This is not to say that narrative (like language itself) has not had a long, intimate association with painting and music. Nor is it to say that Beckett’s own work did not bind in many ways with painting and music. “If we could take X rays of some of Beckett’s later plays,” writes Knowlson, “we would surely be able to detect some of the ghostly images of the Old Masters lurking beneath the surface” (187). We would find Caravaggio’s Decollation of St John the Baptist beneath Not I , and Antonello’s Virgin of the Annunciation beneath Footfalls. Even as early as Godot, Knowlson points out, we can find Bruegel, Bellini, and Caspar David Friedrich guiding Beckett’s hand. As for music, in addition to being richly thematized throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, it plays many parts. Winnie, Krapp, and Wadimir all sing.³ Music is figured into the scripts of All That Fall, Embers, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Träume and itself becomes one of the dramatis personae in the radio plays Words and Music and Cascando. In fact, Beckett’s art is distinguished more than that of most writers by the way it celebrates the historical working relationship of painting, music, and narrative. Yet narrative is a different thing from either painting or music. More to the point, the difference was important for Beckett and, as I will argue, it played a key role in an even more intimate binding of forms.

The difference has to do with time. Narrative, which by most definitions is the telling of a story, both depends upon and supports a particular understanding of time and how we experience it. Painting and music, for all their long association with the telling of stories, depend upon and support ways of experiencing time that are fundamentally different from story time. Time in stories is unidirectional in two senses. The story itself proceeds from a beginning through a middle to an end. And the story is situated in a world like ours in which time is understood to proceed in one direction. A story may, of course, be told over and over, so that the beginning in this sense continually recurs. But such retelling happens outside the world represented within the telling. When it occurs within the world of the telling (the diegesis), it is itself a new event and thus part of the unfolding action. Of course, narrative—which is not the story but the telling of it—is free in many ways from the unidirectionality of the story it tells. It is free in fact to start with the end, proceed by stages backward through the middle, and finally to end with the beginning. Harold Pinter did this in Betrayal, and Martin Amis, with even more fanatical insistence, did it in Time’s Arrow. But regardless of its leaps forward and backward, narrative serves a story which can only go in one direction and which recreates a world in which all events are understood to conform to this order. Without such an understanding of the difference between narrative discourse and stories, there would be no narrative.⁴

Painting can certainly invoke a world in which stories happen and time flows in the direction we expect it to. Much of the energy of representational art comes out of the depiction of actions in progress: hair flying, the sword about to fall. Furthermore, painting has been used to narrate by depicting a sequence of two or more events. A popular renaissance geme represented the various events of biblical stories on one, two, or three canvasses. The literature on painting includes extensive commentary on these and other instances of the narration of stories in painting. But even among those who find similarities between pictorial art and narrative,⁵ there is acknowledgement of painting’s atemporal, spatializing affect on what it narrates. Cartoon strips, or paintings that reserve separate spaces for separate events, ordered (for most viewers in the West) sequentially from left to right, confirm story’s distinct relationship to time, but only by breaking up the spatial wholeness of pictorial art. As for narration on a single canvas, it is deployed almost invariably to tell stories that are already known. This is because, unlike literary narrative which can tell an unknown story from end to beginning if it so wishes, painting employs an impoverished semiotics of time, with little more than sequencing from left to right to indicate the order of events in a story unknown to the viewer. When the story is known, however, then the viewer can perform the narration. In a canvas like Hans Memling’s The Life of Christ, the viewer hunts for events already known, the eye travelling back and forth over a very crowded canvas to find eighteen separate events in the life of Christ.⁶ The effect, moreover, is to give the impression of a life seen all at once, outside of time as we know it, and more in accord with the enormous present of divine perception.

In contrast to the limited compatibility of painting and narrative, the flat incompatibility of music and narrative is almost a commonplace. Jean-Jacques Nattiez asserts that “any description of [music’s] formal structures in terms of narrativity is nothing but superfluous metaphor.” Lawrence Kramer writes that “music can neither be nor perform a narrative.”⁷ Ballads, of course, tell stories in song, but it is the words of the ballad that carry the narrative. Musicals and operas combine music and narrative, and within such narratives the singing of a song can in fact be a narrative event, but the music itself, as music, does not advance the narrative. When the singing or the dancing begin, there is a pause in the narrative. An aria stops the “action,” allowing the characters to move into a kind of extra-narratological space where the forward march of time is arrested and music and emotion enjoy a brief reign. Perhaps this disjunction of music and narrative is at the root of Beckett’s dislike of opera. As for ballet, Beckett claimed that trying to “represent” music in it “degraded” the music, “reducing its value to that of pure anecdote” (Knowlson, 185).

I now want to go back to Beckett and recapitulate something else that we all know about him: that though narrative was his chosen domain, his residency there was not a happy one.

Beckett, Time, and Narrative

We can start with one of Beckett’s many false starts. This one is taken from one of his shorter texts, “From an Abandoned Work,” which was composed in 1954-1955. It comes not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle of the text:

So up then in the grey of dawn, very weak and shaky after an atrocious night little dreaming what lay in store, out and off.... But I was hardly down the stairs and out into the air when the stick fell from my hand and I just sank to my knees to the ground and then forward on my face, a most extraordinary thing, and then after a little over on my back, I could never lie on my face for any length of time, much as I loved it, it made me feel sick, and lay there, half an hour perhaps, with my arms along my sides and the palms of my hands against the pebbles and my eyes wide open straying over the sky.⁸

This is a beginning that goes nowhere. Not even the faint vestige of a middle picks up to fulfill the formulaic promise: “little dreaming what lay in store.” Instead, inexplicably, our narrating character sinks to his knees, “and then forward on my face, a most extraordinary thing.” In this and numerous other ways, Beckett takes his narrative apart by disassembling its components at the molecular level of incident.

By broad agreement among narratologists, “incidents” or “events” comprise the “action” of narrative. They make up half of the beginning, middle, and end of a story—the other half being “existents” or “actants” or, loosely, “characters”: those people, animals or things that are involved in the incidents.⁹ Traditionally in life stories these two elements enjoy a close symbiosis, for it is primarily through the incidents that we know the existents. This is a venerable concept. Late in the last century, Leslie Stephen took Beckett’s Protestant spiritual forebear, John Bunyan, to task for the absence of incident in Grace Abounding. The book was, Stephen wrote, “hardly an autobiography.”¹⁰ England had made the life narrative official with the Dictionary of National Biography in 1881. As its founding editor, Stephen was seeking to preserve the narrative idea of “a life” in the face of an information-gathering technology that had already become overwhelmingly productive. At the opposite extreme from Bunyan, life writers were amassing incident indiscriminately. Stephen, with his passionate belief in a life as something with “a beginning, middle, and end” and a “natural and obvious principle of unity,” urged an austere restraint in selecting incident: finding “the really significant anecdote” out of “a wilderness of the commonplace.”¹¹ The idea of privileged moments in a life was something Stephen inherited from St. Augustine, who marveled toward the end of his Confessions at the way he could “re-collect” the key incidents of his life out of the thousands that had happened to him.

Beckett probably had Augustine’s reflexive wonderment in his mind when his narrator paused midway in “From an Abandoned Work” to reflect on his own winnowing of incident:

Now is there nothing to add to this day with the white horse and the white mother in the window, please read again my descriptions of these, before I go on to some other day at a later time, nothing to add before I move on in time ski...