The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama

P. McTighe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137276988
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275332
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Samuel Beckett's work is deeply concerned with physical contact - remembered, half-remembered, or imagined. Applying the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that feature sensation, this study examines how Beckett's later work dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other.

CHAPTER 1

Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy

First Incision: Into the Failing Eye of Krapp’s Last Tape

To embark on a study of haptics in Beckett’s work, it may be necessary to begin with the eye. Or, more accurately, the failing eye. The protagonists of the plays examined in this chapter, Film and Krapp’s Last Tape, both suffer from myopic vision. However, dimming vision affects Beckett’s aesthetic practice more widely. Figures such as Hamm in Endgame and A in Rough for Theater I are afflicted with visual failure; for the spectator also, the dim and shadowy stage and filmic images seem to work against vision; it is no longer privileged as an epistemological tool for either the figures of the drama or their spectators. The very notion of theater is undermined. It is not “a viewing place” as in the meaning of the original Greek word theatron, but a place where the eye begins to fail.

Blindness in theater has often been represented as either punishment for a misdeed or as a sense that must be sacrificed in order for a higher insight to be gained. Insight itself can be blinding, as Oedipus puts out his eyes on learning the truth of his origins. The blind seer Tiresias, having been struck blind by the Gods for impiety, is given the gift of prophecy. Gloucester’s learning of the truth in King Lear is similarly paralleled by his loss of vision. In each case, blindness is associated with the discovery of some truth, with gaining knowledge or insight. Yet the blind bodies of Oedipus and Gloucester are both fallen bodies. Gloucester falls, literally, in his darkly comic “suicide” scene, and believes himself dead for a time.¹ In Maeterlinck’s The Blind, the blind protagonists, without the priest to “guide” them, have lost their way and cannot return to the asylum that shelters them on their bleak island.² The blind refer repeatedly to the fact that they do not or cannot know where they are, to whom they are speaking, or how they are to return to their asylum. Any sense of individual identity, distance, and time become erased. Such an epistemological blind spot emerges in Waiting for Godot too. Like Maeterlinck’s blind, Vladimir and Estragon wait, hearing footsteps in the dead leaves, “all the dead voices,” “like leaves.”³ The situation in Waiting for Godot translates as epistemological insecurity, and the impossibility of action.

Representations of blindness can take on a moral tone, associating sight with “knowing the way.” The priest of The Blind symbolizes this; he is a guide, both literally and morally. Without him, the blind lose their way. The play expresses how humanity has become lost, cast adrift from its moorings in religious rituals and rules; thus blindness is associated with the lost, godless body. José Saramago’s parabolic novel Blindness⁴ details a plague of blindness, which cripples society, deliberately connecting ethics with vision. With all its citizens’ blinded, civilization falls in a moral as well as literal sense. It is a thought experiment that seems to echo the spirit of Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Parable of the Blind (1568). In Brueghel’s painting, blind men are pictured toppling or about to topple in a heap as each one follows the blind man before him.⁵ Saramago’s dystopian vision sees newly blinded humanity crawling about in its own excrement and murdering each other for food.

In whatever way blindness is interpreted and made culturally meaningful, it is clear that a certain denigration of the haptic sensorium occurs. Insight and reason act as compensation for the loss of the carnal and fallible eye. Blindness is associated with dirt, both moral and literal. However, enlightenment, both the epistemological tradition as well as the immediate revelation of insight, is not readily available for Beckett’s figures. The “old muckball,” to quote Krapp (Collected Shorter Plays, 62),⁶ is a much more familiar terrain. When sight is diminished the haptic sensorium must take over, and it is with that thought that this study commences. In Letter on the Blind Denis Diderot asserts the reliance that we have upon the senses for knowledge; he proposes that if the deaf and blind philosopher were to construct a man, “after the fashion of Descartes,” he would put the soul, not somewhere behind the eyes, but at the very limits of the body, at the fingertips.⁷ And, in the dim recesses of Krapp’s den, we proceed with an autopsy in the dark, an inquest into the death of vision. The irony here is that while in technological terminology “haptic” is used to describe a device that promotes interaction and access for the blind to technology, Krapp’s technology, his “haptic interface,” does not function as a prosthesis, but rather emphasizes its failure. The first incision into the Beckettian corpus is through the eye, reminiscent of the famous eye-slitting image in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, which Beckett’s Film (discussed later) references heavily. What is revealed in such a cut is not, tellingly, the seat of the soul, but the rather the viscous and tacky inner life of the eye.

An Autopsy of a Life

Audiences meet Krapp in his “den,” a “wearish old man” (CSP, 55), who has chosen to devote himself to a solitary life of artistic production. Krapp’s habit has been to make tape recordings on each of his birthdays, confessionals that document the year gone by. During the performance he plays, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, fragments of a tape he made aged 39, and in which he refers to an earlier recording, made 10 or 12 years prior to then. Altogether then, there are three Krapps, or more appropriately three versions of the same Krapp. The distinctions among them are made all the more poignant by the disgust that each one seems to have for his earlier incarnation. Krapp begins his current retrospective for his sixty-ninth birthday with, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that” (CSP, 62). Alone, loveless, and unsuccessful in his attempted literary career, Krapp is, as Ruby Cohn puts it, “punished by both emotional and literary failure.”⁸ The aural autopsy that Krapp performs cuts and splices together three moments of his life under an excoriating eye and ear. But this process will produce no final result, no diagnosis for his current state of being. The cuts that are made into the fabric of the past—fleshly and mechanical—do not yield a vision of the whole. Rather, it is these fissures and fragments that make up the fabric of the play itself.

Squinting myopically, he reads the summary in his ledger for his thirty-ninth year: we learn that his mother has died. He has experienced a “slight improvement in bowel condition,” a “memorable equinox,” and also a “farewell to—[he turns page]—love” (CSP, 57). The desires and appetites of the body have plagued Krapp, and the aspirations of the youngest Krapp to quell these passions have not been carried through. Krapp at 39 speaks of his aspirations to be less subject to the whims of a libidinous body: “plans for a less [hesitates.] engrossing sexual life” (CSP, 58). Krapp’s now decrepit body and the tapes he has made throughout the years are all that remain, and he is haunted by this memory of a sunny day on a lake with a girl, this farewell to love:

I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes

[. . .]

We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us gently, up and down and from side to side. (CSP, 63)

He winds the tape forward to listen to this scene, not bothering with the other part of that tape, which describes a moment of profound “vision,” his “memorable equinox”—a momentous occasion at the time for the earlier Krapp, in which something he had been struggling with became clear at last: “Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening” (CSP, 60). The image of intersubjective harmony on the lake contrast sharply with the dark energy of the “vision,” and is one of the ways in which touch emerges in this play. This haptic moment (his hand on her) contrasts with the vision on the pier and is echoed visually in the closeness of Krapp to his tape machine: “leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear toward machine, face front” (CSP, 57) and in certain productions, this posture results in a kind of hunched and tactile intimacy with the device.

As well as this relationship between body and technology, haptics emerges in this play in the inscription of sound on the tape recorder, a tactility of speaking and listening. It also refers to Krapp’s attempt to get in touch with himself, recording himself each year with harsh criticisms of his past selves. In thinking through the “haptics” of Krapp’s Last Tape, the following discussion moves from the simple act of touch, to the relationship between technology and body to more philosophical questions of self-presence and identity. It refers to the tissue, film, or skin that separates and connects Krapp with Krapp. This is of course Krapp’s body, but wedded here to the technology that Krapp employs to relive his memories. Haptics in Krapp also denotes an underlying materiality. Krapp’s Last Tape is one of Beckett’s last works to have a fully formed and identifiably material body on stage and it will be important to recognize the ways in which the body, in all its obscenity and compulsions, intrudes onto the playing space and the subject’s consciousness. Haptic here refers to the line or limit between the continuum of sense (as in sense-making faculties) and the continuum of matter, the place where “bodies” take place in Nancy’s writing.⁹ Krapp is continually in touch with his body. While this may have, as is explored later, autoerotic overtones, it also reveals the material body’s invasion of consciousness and discourse. Yet what is ultimately apparent is that while Krapp denies the body and its desires, his corpus, the body of his work is predicated upon it. Nancy sees a such a disavowal of the body in Christianity, a tradition that has sought to purify the body, resurrect it, and make it a body of light. He argues that this tradition is entirely reliant upon the material body for the verification of its central tenets: “Only a body can be cut down or raised up, because only a body can touch or not touch. A spirit can do nothing of the sort.”¹⁰

The act of remembering in Krapp’s Last Tape is a slow, mechanical, and laborious process in which little-used neural circuits are trod again. As Krapp tramps in and out of his cubbyhole, winds back and forward the tapes to the required places of memory, the image could be read as a metaphor for his aging neural circuits, ones that must be mechanically activated in much the same process as Henri Bergson, whom we know Beckett read¹¹ and whose writings illuminate this, describes: “[The intentional act of remembering or learning by heart] like every habitual bodily exercise, [ . . . ] is stored up in a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements.”¹² Krapp’s memory “machine” arguably images Bergson’s conceptualization of the processes of remembering. Recording upon tape is an act of inscription in itself, as magnets alter the ferrous oxide coating on the material. Thus, the tape recorder echoes or acts as a metaphor for Krapp’s memory. Furthermore, the tape machine begins to take on lifelike characteristics. Making present a past Krapp, it speaks with the voice of a past body, and, at certain key points in the play, the machine comes to stand in for the body of the girl with whom Krapp declared it was “no use going on” (CSP, 61). The stage directions require that Krapp bend over the machine to assume the listening posture: “leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front” (CSP, 57).¹³ Actor Pierre Chabert talks of the mirroring that occurs between machine and body in Krapp’s Last Tape, where the drama of listening makes of the body “a kind of sensitive receptacle upon which the voice engraves itself, a kind of human tape-recorder.”¹⁴ If for a moment we think of the imagery that Bergson uses to describe those acts of inscribing memory—as he says, to know one’s lesson by heart is to have it imprinted on one’s memory¹⁵—then, understood in this way, the act of remembering (and indeed the erasing or unmarking, i.e., forgetting) is mirrored in the mechanics of audiovisual recording.

Yet the flesh is not a reliable vessel for memory; the marks made by the world can fade with time and it is here that Krapp’s tape machine ought to compensate for his poor memory. He forgets the meaning of the word “viduity” and must look it up. He has forgotten, ironically, the “memorable equinox,” which the earlier Krapp describes. Furthermore, Krapp’s manipulation of the machine and tapes produces gaps in his narrative, holes bored into meaning. Krapp winds forward at the moment we are about to hear of his “vision.” This winding reduces the tape to a senseless squeal.¹⁶ This collapse of the speech on the tape represents the limits of Krapp’s and, by implication, the audience’s sensory capacity. Krapp’s joy of words, evidenced in the lingering vowel extension he gives to “spoool,” and the pleasure he takes in the erotics of the word in his mouth take precedence for that moment over the meaning of the word itself. Like the tape, Krapp is winding down. Aesthetic appreciation and production is gradually being replaced by aisthesis, sense without meaning.¹⁷ This aisthetic impulse is also played out in the tension between the two orders of perception that are demarcated in the play. McMullan links this with Krapp’s sensory conversion from sight to tactility: “The reduction of the older Krapp’s world to the space of his immediate corporeal environment is foregrounded by his ‘near-sighted’ vision, ‘laborious’ movement and the continual sounds he produces (from shuffling to grunts).”¹⁸ The irony of Krapp’s “memorable equinox” lies not only in the fact that he appears not to remember it when he rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Haptics, Aesthetics, Philosophy
• Chapter 1   Eye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy
• Chapter 2   Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes
• Chapter 3   Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing
• Chapter 4   Skin, Space, Place
• Chapter 5   On the One Hand . . . (The One That Writes the Body)
• Chapter 6   On the Other Hand . . . (The One That Refuses to Touch)
• Conclusion   Departing Bodies: Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangere
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index