Reading of Samuel Beckett’s 'Krapp’s Last Tape', Luigi Pirandello’s 'Henry IV' and Eugène Ionesco’s 'Rhinoceros'
Catalina Florescu (Rutgers University)
Vitalpoetics, Vol.1 No.2, June 2008
To Mircea, who completes me
The theme of madness is inherent to all grotesque forms, because madness makes men look at the world with different eyes. In the folk grotesque, madness is a gay parody of official reason, of the narrow seriousness of official ‘truth.’ It is a ‘festive’ madness. In Romanticgrotesque, on the other hand, madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation. (Bakhtin, Rabelais 39)
In Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s body of work, terms such as “dialogic,” “heteroglossia,” “utterance,” “volitional tone,” “act” and “context” suggest that we participate in life and thus acquire meaning by interacting with other people. We are born in a language whose malleable substance we constantly and dialogically transform. Although Bakhtin’s theories have been applied almost exclusively to deconstructing and interpreting novels, nevertheless being as generous, flexible, and multi-faced, we can use them to discover the subtleties of other literary genres. Speaking about the “novelization of other genres”(6)
they become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language; [thus,] they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements ofself-parody and finally the novel inserts into these other genres […] a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the open-ended present). (Dialogic 7)
The argument of this essay revolves around the open-ended present quality of our lives, and it is applied to Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV (1922) and Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959). To understand the notion of the open-ended present, first it is useful to borrow one of Bakhtin’s most fascinating concepts, “the chronotope”—usually decoded as “time-space.” As he points out, “Time […] thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope” (Dialogic 84). A chronotope may also unmask the relationship between an author and his readers, actors and their audience, as well as the hyphened spaces of one person’s past-present-future.
For Max Picard, “There is something silent in every word, as an abiding token of the origin of speech. And in every silence there is something of the spoken word, as an abiding token of the power of silence to create speech” (24). Speech and silence coexist together. But what happens when characters are emotionally disentangled from their past or deny their presentness? Becket’s Krapp, Pirandello’s Henry IV and Ionesco’s Bérenger have different reactions and interpretations to this existential crisis, and, surprisingly, they choose isolation and silence as their answer.
To realize the fullness of our becoming, it helps to distinguish between silences and the Silence. The former, in its daily various forms, seems to be a rehearsal of the latter. For Leslie Kane, “silences are the intervals between verbalized responses that indicate separation to overtake the spoken word” (105). Furthermore, the Silence is “the void, the nothingness, the ultimate language of the self that is unattainable” (Kane 105). This unreachable Silence is what gives us the feeling of being incomplete. As long as we lack a recorded End, it would be impossible for us to fully seize the closure of our becoming. Therefore, silence is the blank tape upon which our feelings beat their rhythms.
In the realm of drama, silences are not a product of the modern period. Kane points to Aeschylus’ Cassandra whose “wall of silence contains and is ultimately shattered by her unspeakable apocalyptic vision” (24). Another important development into incorporating silence in the dramatic spectacle was William Shakespeare’s “innovative and extensive use of soliloquy” (Kane 24). The modern silence, however, is employed with a bit of a twist. It starts to speak of one’s feelings of “evanescence and entrapment” (Kane 24).
[II]
My Body Is a Collection of Ineffectual Voices
Belonging to the “Theater of the Absurd,” Beckett’s characters are Sisyphus-like since they know life is nothing but mastering a habit. Or, as Beckett himself says, “Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day” (qtd. in Worton 72). Because there are new and puzzling events that disrupt our fragile continuity, we do not always rely on our habits to structure our lives. To “silence” our habits also means to live “outside” ourselves, in the company of other human beings. These ideas are questioned by Beckett’s character who does not interact with other people. Being alone with his recorded voices, Krapp descends into his own abîme. According to Bakhtin, “every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering it anticipates. […] Such is the situation in any living dialogue” (Dialogic 280). On the contrary, Beckett pushes the art of the dramatic dialogue to the extreme, leaving Krapp alone with his voices.
Over the years, Krapp has created a maddening, compulsive ritual of recording himself. Even if a tape-recorder does not narrate or interpret one’s past, but mechanically reproduces sounds, it still cannot fully help Krapp remembering his past. The play is set on a “late evening in the future” (9). Precisely because of the invention of the
tape-recorder, which delays actual time, we see on stage Krapp the way he will become, and not how we think he is right now, in the present. From the very beginning of the play it is insinuated that a tape-recorder may preserve one’s past. However, we discover that there is a discrepancy between the living, sensing mind and its mechanically tape-recorded copy. Trapped in his body like in a self-erected prison, which resonates dissonantly his past voices, Krapp cannot experience life other than monologically.
Following Beckett’s stage directions, Krapp has a very “white face” (9), with the surreal interpretation of being transported, not really here. Only his nose is purple, like a lowered animal sniffing and flashing his path backwards. Seated in a cone of light, Krapp’s body is like a keyhole which, when peered into, leaves behind the echo of his past voices. Or, as Katherine Hayles remarks, “Krapp’s ear is glued to the tape recorder. The image burns into consciousness the realization that body and voice no longer necessarily go together. Voice can persist through time, outside the body” (78). The voice persists through time, but, the more Krapp listens to his old tapes, the more he gets the feeling he is disembodied and presentless, levitating purposelessly above his own existence.
Throughout his life, Krapp experienced two major traumatic events: the death of his mother and the loss of what could have been the love of his life. Having been denied the warmth of a woman, Krapp is paralyzed in a sense, although not physically. He starts a regression into his being where the only things he hears are voices of past embodiments. By so doing, Krapp is inhabited until total internal contagion by a foreign, alien other, unrecognizable to himself, deteriorated and steeped into an ontological and existential dry abyss.
TAPE. The house on the canal where mother lay a-dying, in the late autumn, after her long viduity (Krapp gives a start), and the … (Krapp switches off, winds tape a little, bends his ear, closer to machine, switches on)—a-dying, after her long viduity, and the … (Krapp switches off. His lips move in the syllables of ‘viduity.’ No sound. He gets up, goes backstage into darkness, comes back with an enormous dictionary, lays it on the table, sits down and looks up the word.
KRAPP. (reading from dictionary) State or condition of being or remaining a widow or widower (pause).(18)
Despite the clarity of his taped voice, there is something lost in Krapp’s present state of mind. What does it mean to look up for a word in a dictionary? In Krapp’s case, it means that he has lost not only access to his past, but also its linguistic value. Bakhtin believes that “Linguistics and the philosophy of language acknowledge only a passive understanding of discourse, and moreover this takes place by and large on the level of common language, that is, it is an understanding of an utterance’s neutral signification and not its actual meaning” (Dialogic 281).
Therefore, when someone forgets the path to familiarity, and denies himself access into his own linguistic realm, then self-destruction and self-alienation corrupt his being. While the meaning of words is contextual, Krapp can check a word’s entry in a dictionary, but cannot have the word’s context anymore. As Bakhtin suggest, “there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms—words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’; […] For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world” (Dialogic 293). Unfortunately, for Krapp words have become neutral. He seems like a little boy lost in “Wonderland” (if he ever experienced that état d’être), looking for any personal meanings in past recorded tapes and explanations in a dictionary.
Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape suggests that when only memories exist, a human being is partly destroyed, self-mutilated. A body that refuses to participate in life and a mind that does not interact with other minds prove existence futile, since life is the ultimate exposure to performance, by adding and subtracting roles to our ontological repertoire. Krapp does not experience real time, but its reeled equivalent, in which his body becomes a mechanical clock permanently, yet pointlessly, winding backward and forward its monological tape-recorded existence. As a result, Krapp’s tapes do not reenact the old theatrical motif of deus ex machina (since there is no god to rescue his soul and mind from self-destruction); instead, Krapp becomes an ego in machina, an “I” that is literally confined in an ordinary tape-recorder machine.
[III]
Say “Good-Bye” to the Flesh!
If Beckett introduces a character whose limited existence revolves around listening to a tape-recorder as a misconstrued way of living, Pirandello’s proposes a different type of problematic character to us. The main set-up of this play occurs at a carnival whose importance is reflected upon later in this essay. For the moment, it is useful to note that “Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. […] Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 7).
In a carnivalesque time frame, one mingles with others, temporarily suspending and/or disregarding one’s social hierarchies. As a consequence, “All distances between people are suspended, and a special category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people” (Bakhtin, Problems 123). In Pirandello’s play the main character has decided to stage his identity, thus creating a separation between himself and others. He has chosen to be someone whose existence has already been recorded by history, in the person of Henry IV. As he argues, “All our life is crushed by the weight of words: the weight of the dead. Look at me here: can you really suppose that Henry IV is still alive? Do you think it is a joke that the dead continue to live?” (190). Through this dramatic character, Pirandello reminds us about the metatheatre’s function that reveals an event that happened, and, once it happened, it can be reenacted through the manifold manifestations of its performative language. Furthermore, the other characters dress in costumes to keep up with the protagonist’s masquerade, but are eventually tired of this charade. As he says, “I tear their ridiculous masks now, just as if it was not I who had made them mask themselves to satisfy this taste of mine for playing the madman” (189).
During a carnival, years and years ago, he fell off the horse and lost his consciousness. Because that day he was wearing Henry’s IV costume, upon awakening, he has started to imagine himself as the German ruler. Speaking in retrospect about that moment, “Henry” admits that “After that day of carnival, how many friends deceived me, how my place was taken by another, and all the rest of it” (202). Deceived by his family and friends, he has chosen to perform a role which is fixed, immutable, yet of an undeniable existence in history. His real personality is consciously altered. He has accepted to say “good-bye to his flesh” (from Latin carne and vale, which is the literal translation of the word “carnival”).
Thus, aware of this unbridgeable gap between himself and his family and friends, he admits that, “You ought to have known how to create a fantasy for yourselves, not to act it for me” (194). When he realizes that there is an insurmountable difference that separates him from others, he stabs Berthold. By so doing, “Henry” wants to be considered mad, irretrievable for a society in which normality is a too difficult to achieve a goal. He prefers to remain in his world, where he could constantly wear the mask of Henry IV. For Alberto de Vivo, Henry’s decision is based on his knowledge that, even if he were to abandon his mask, people would not allow him to live life as it really is: flux, movement, change […] Moreover, only from within this distanced, fixed time can he obtain the freedom to transform determinism into a comic play which amuses him, allowing him to laugh at his own and everyone else’s mask. (45)
However, “Henry’s” desperate act raises one unavoidable question: How can we play our roles in life? Memory, the deep-seated locus of concepts and images, marks the bifurcation between one’s self and the world. Then, what we have accumulated, learned, and experienced throughout our existence seems to be insufficient to satisfy our needs. There are moments when we cannot help dreaming about: What if one day I become a character, unplugged from my own self, released in ecstasy? Would that be a reasonable solution or alternative to what we would like to be? As Pirandello reflects upon one of the possible validations of life,
Life is a continuous flux that we try to stop, to fix and determine forms, both inside and outside of ourselves. The forms in which we try to arrest and fix in ourselves this continual flux are the concepts and ideal by which we wish to preserve, in a coherent manner, all the fictions we create for ourselves. (qtd. in Fairchild 29)
Unfortunately, only “Henry IV” is caught up in this sticky, fictional web that pushes him farther and farther from reality. He cannot let out his true, raw emotions, pains and needs any more. He is a fake creation as long as he does not exactly possess the genuine attributes of the German ruler, or be able to preserve his own.
[IV]
When Politics Turns People into Rhinoceros
If in Pirandello’s play the main character, having been inexplicably deceived by his family and friends, decides to live underneath the mask of Henry IV, Ionesco’s play questions the role of historical events seen as collective, epidemic-like diseases (more specifically, the “Nazification” of Europe during the Second World War). Commenting upon his play, Ionesco writes, “It is certainly an anti-Nazi play, yet it is also and mainly an attack on collective hysteria and the epidemics that lurk beneath the surface of reason and ideas, but are nonetheless serious collective diseases passed off ideologies” (Notes 199).
Bérenger, the main character of Rhinoceros, engages himself in the acts of drinking, eating and the like, but these acts do not resemble at all the “bodily lower strata” as presented in Bakhtin’s book Rabelais and His World. In Ionesco’s play there is not any joie de vivre. As Bérenger admits, “I do not like the taste of alcohol much. And yet if I do not drink, I am done for it. […] I feel out of place in life, among people, and so I take to drink” (17). Unlike Rabelais’ world of joyous encounters and adventures, a world of the carnival filled with the “pathos of change and renewal” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 11), in Ionesco’s, renewal is not possible as long as this world is irrevocably turned à l’envers.
Bérenger feels he does not have a place and an identity of his own any more. He does not feel at home either with himself or others. As he confesses, “Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people” (19). In a totalitarian society, people’s words have altered their signified, floating aimlessly, not being able to accumulate a substantial meaning or to begin a dialogue. The Logician of Ionesco’s play provides one example of the logic turned upside down, if not insane, when he utters the following absurd syllogism: “All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore, Socrates is a cat” (19).
Furthermore, in an oppressed society, people do not feel the need to be in the presence of other people. For example, Jean says, “Yes, I am misanthropic, very misanthropic indeed. […] It is not that I hate people. I am just indifferent to them—or rather, they disgust me” (64). One morning, going out of bed, he discovers a bump on his nose that will morph into a rhinoceros’ horn. His skin, gradually acquiring a greenish hue, itches him so badly, that tearing his pajamas off, we see his transformation from a human being into an animal.
In Ionesco’s play, the “plague”—called la rhinocérite—affects everybody. As James Mills contends, “the setting moves from the public square with its different citizens living under the watchful eye of the beast, to the publishing house” (58). From the beginning of this play, the public square does not resemble its Rablesian prototype where all people participate joyfully in the carnival’s festivities. Instead, Ionesco’s public square discloses the marred skeins of a society dominated by fear, which maddens its citizens and alters their human identity. When la rhinocérite has contaminated the publishing house—a symbol for those people’s collective treasures—the characters realize that the spreading of fear through malignant words and ideologies are not dialogically produced and performed. On the contrary, these ideologies are imposed on them, restricting their freedom.
While all other characters are either transformed into rhinoceros or leave this doomed place behind, Bérenger is the only one who hopes to remain human. As he announces solemnly, “I am staying as I am. I am a human being. […] I am the last man left, and I am staying that way until the end. I am not capitulating!” (106-7). In a society that transforms its citizens radically, what are Berenger’s chances to remain human? Despite his resolute decision to “stay” as he is, without dialogue, could one remain immune to the strictures imposed by a totalitarian regime? As Bakhtin argues, “The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in an out of complex interrelationships” (Dialogic 276). With Bérenger’s involuntary capitulation, once he is contaminated by rigid and inhuman ideologies, the oppressive circle finally closes itself off.
[V]
The ultimate role theater plays is to give us the possibility to experience as many characters as possible, just as there are infinite contextual and volitional tones in one’s person performative understanding of language and, by extension, life. Dionysus is the generous god who lends us the skin of the goat, the madness of the Maenads, the fornication of the satyrs, the sweet, yet tricky taste of wine, and, most importantly, the gift of the sparagmos. Our lives are fragments in which our present time opens itself up like an origami paper, revealing its past path and anticipating its future.
Unfortunately, Beckett’s Krapp, Pirandello’s Henry IV and Ionesco’s Bérenger are dismembered from their lives in an either self-imposed or collective, maddening environment. None of them undergoes any kind of catharsis, however minimal, that could allow them to achieve a temporal release from fear, anxiety and anger; instead, they deteriorate their minds up to a point where they experience a “se_mantic_” disease. They live only marginally, ready at any moment to fall into complete oblivion. The first can live only by listening to his past recorded tapes ad infinitum; the second hides his feelings beneath the mask of a historical ruler; and, finally, the third is surrounded by humans transformed in rhinoceros. By their own choice, or by misfortune, these characters have fallen into a closed trap of ineffectual verbal circular movement. Not having with whom to talk, they could become aphasic. Aphasia is a serious medical condition, and, in the dramatic genre, pantomime may come as close to it as possible. Still, a pantomime is a game, a way of asking us to discover meanings beneath silences and/or gestures. Pantomime communicates through performance.
On the other hand, these characters become a medical case, or a medical condition, if you will. Their handicap is rather emotional than physical, and it is related to their refusal or incapacity to utter coherent phrases. Therefore, just as silence increases in words, so “time increases in silence, as though time had been sown into silence” (Picard 18). We may suggest further that these characters’ chronotope is one of regression and/or involution, where their perception of time and space is exhausted prematurely, and thus they do not witness their necessary emotional development.
This is exactly the opposite effect proposed by Bakhtin’s artistic endeavor. If we do not participate in life, we cease to exist dialogically, that is to say meaningfully. Or, in Bakhtin’s own words, “this world-as-event is not just a world of being, of that which is given: no object, no relation, is given as something simply given […], but is always in conjunction with another given that is connected with those objects and relations, namely, that which is yet-to-be-achieved” (Toward a Philosophy 32). If that which is yet-to-be-achieved is absent from these plays’ plot, then it would not be too far-fetched to propose that these characters create their own version of silence, where words—although heard from now and there—are “stillborn” and not part of something that could-have-been-achieved.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
—-. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
—-. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
—-. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1993.
Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces. New York: Grove Press. Inc., 1957.
Fairchild, Terry. “Varieties of Consciousness in Pirandello’s Henry IV.” SLI. 34.2 (2002): 29-38.
Hayles, Katherine K. “Voices out of Bodies, Bodies out of Voices.” Sound States. Ed. Adalaide Morris. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 74-96.
Kane, Leslie. The Language of Silence. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1984.
Ionesco, Eugène. Notes and Counter Notes. Trans. Donald Watson. London : J. Calder, 1964.
—-. Rhinoceros, and Other Plays. Trans. Derek Prouse. New York, Grove Press, 1960.
Mills, James. “The Dualism of Décor and Direction in Ionesco’s Rhinocéros.” The Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Art, and Letters. 75 (1998): 55-62.
Picard, Max. The World of Silence. Trans. Stanley Godman. Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, Inc., 1961.
Pirandello, Luigi. Naked Masks. New York. Dutton. 1952.
Vivo, Alberto de. “Henry IV and Time.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies. 12.38-9 (1989): 40-50.
Worton, Michael. “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as Text.” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 67-88.
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