Scripting the Sublime: Temporality in Beckett's 'Krapp’s Last Tape' and 'That Time'
John Tinnell (University of Florida)
Near the close of Act II in The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s eight-character ensemble, led by Trofimov, pontificates on human nature, particularly the notion of pride. After Lophain voices an indirect rebuttal to Trofimov’s theory-filled monologue, the group suddenly falls silent to Epimovo’s guitar as he passes in the background. Gaev attempts to fill the pause in conversation with a tribute to nature’s enduring omnipotence and indifference. The youngest of the group (Varya, Anya, and Trofimov) beg Gaev to stop his characteristic banter before it becomes too sentimental. Chekhov’s stage directions follow:
All sit plunged in thought. Perfect stillness. The only thing audible is the muttering of FIRS. Suddenly there is a sound in the distance, as if it were from the sky—the sound of a breaking harp-string, mournfully dying away. (56)
What is this sound? The stage directions do not explicate a literal source. For the characters, this sound issues forth without context, no interpretation vested within the sound waves. Inquisitive readers are left to employ figurative or metaphoric faculties to speculate—to create an analogy from the fusion of personal experience with a stressed engagement of the sound’s audible presence. And so Chekhov’s characters speculate: A bird? Fallen bucket from the mine? An owl? These explanations are contrived, incomprehensive, flighty and forgotten as soon as spoken, so much that one begins to question the relevancy of the statements themselves. Gaming of this sort prevails throughout the play’s remaining acts, and in Firs’s dying moment (the play’s last moment), the same elusive noise sounds again. The sound seems highly significant because of its relation to words and events; however, it has no semiotic context from which it gathers meaning. Moreover, the characters’ inability to make sense of it—to make meaning out of it—further amplifies the sound’s insistence that it does mean, while bringing home to the reader or audience the fact that the meaning is elusive. It seems that, through this sound, Chekhov himself is asking, ‘Wherein does meaning lie?’ The temptation to equate this scenario with absurdist theatre—its attention to the failures of reason and futilities of expression—would presumably focus on the hopeless (comedic) nature of humanity’s struggle to identify an unverifiable sound. However, Chekhov’s playscript utilizes elusiveness as a component among other crafted elements. Whereas an absurdist typically depicts elusiveness to expose meaninglessness, elusiveness is here made integral to the process of making meaning(s). Thus, Chekhov’s use of the sound may be more aptly associated with the sublime. When thought of as a literary style, the sublime goes beyond the absurd by not only depicting, but incorporating “the sound” as a dynamic within its dialectical aesthetic.
A philosophical awareness of the sublime, its origins and contemporary developments, should be grasped before further discussing the concept as it operates within Samuel Beckett’s playscripts. The sublime, an ancient and varied term, has been shaped and reshaped by thinkers from Longinus to Kant. While Longinus claimed there was a rhetoric of the sublime (notably awe-inspiring speech which employed inversion of rational or conventional syntax), Kant’s writings treat the term as an adjective to describe an intense, hybrid sensation of pleasure and pain. Kant, like Edmund Burke and Arthur Schopenhauer, delineated the sublime through his analysis of human interaction with nature, specifically occurring in the presence of natural phenomena of vast physical dimension (Lyotard 81). Though none of these theories articulated scrupulous connections to art, it is clear that Jean-François Lyotard draws upon their attributes in his 1980s reworking of the sublime.
In several of his essays, including “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”, Lyotard attempts to import the philosophical term into the contemporary art scene as a means to deepen the critical engagement of works by Barnett Newman. Lyotard locates the sublime in modern painting as “that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart on a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (81). With “a stronger sense of the unpresentable” Lyotard updates Kant’s supposition that the sublime arises in the presence of vast natural surroundings. Here, the sublime refers to the artistic evocation of an “aporia in human reasoning,” vast in that it transcends the psyche. Notice Lyotard’s use of the qualifier “not in order to enjoy them.” This seeks to exclude from the sublime all works that prompt suspicions of self-indulgence. His definition expresses an awareness of the public’s, even the art critic’s, tendency to observe any instances of a work’s divergence from celebrated conventions of the day as regressive or self-absorbed. Art of the sublime, however, does not poke at convention for sheer amusement. Reminiscent of the rhetorical inversion prized in Longinus’s theory, art of the sublime achieves stylistic innovations beyond the tide lines of conventional presentation because it includes such convention, though skeptical if not ironic, primarily as a context for contrast if not disruption. Simon Malpas, a contemporary Lyotard scholar, elucidates the concept’s essential disruptive quality, “In the sublime nothing appears, there is no solution or resolution, but rather an iteration and solicitation of common conceptual understanding” ( 200). In terms of the dramatic literature, what may we define as a mode of “common conceptual understanding”? What means are capable of conditioning a drama of the sublime wherein this conventional mode can be disrupted?
Informed by landmark theorist-practitioners such as Yeats and Artaud, modern dramatic theory expresses strong tendency towards the sublime. Moreover, inclusion of these theorists provides a convenient opportunity to situate the sublime firmly within the theatrical scenario. In his idea of total theatre, Yeats summons to center “all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance” with an imperative “to diminish the power of that daily mood, to cheat or blind its too clear perception” (404). Yeats’s “daily mood” resembles the phrase employed by Malpas: “common conceptual understanding.” Speaking of drama, common conceptual understanding ensues when the mode of presentation revolves around a single referent. In other words, the dramatic sign keeps a tight leash on thematic signification by depicting actions in a too familiar realm, one conditioned upon conventions that train critical reactions towards an intended interpretation. In Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double, the search for sublime navigates towards moments in which Artaud yearns for a revolutionary drama, its appeal more visceral than intellectual:
Our long habit of seeking diversion has made us forget the idea of a serious theatre, which, overturning all our preconceptions, inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutic whose touch can never be forgotten (14).
While the serious overturning of preconceptions and of habits that seek diversion is essential to the mission of the sublime, this affinity breaks when Artaud insists that a theatre of cruelty, of “extreme actions pushed beyond all limits,” is the only way to foster the disruption. Playscripts which evoke the sublime do push against the limits that border conventional notions of intellectual constructs such as time and identity, as we shall in a comparative analysis of Beckett’s two shorter works. Such disruptions occur on an ideological level without ever requiring physical violence or images of savagery.
Ever since Martin Esslin published The Theatre of the Absurd, scholars have customarily linked Samuel Beckett’s dramatic oeuvre with absurdist theatre. As a result, the stylistic achievement (more sublime than absurd) of Beckett’s later script entitled That Time has received little scholarly attention. Harold Clurman typifies the mass of critical treatment as he refers to That Time as a “replay” of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (Lawley 175). Both scripts can be performed within twenty minutes and each features an elderly male character who listens to voices in solitude. In Krapp, the source of the voice is explicitly the man’s (Krapp) own as he has recorded it over the previous years of his life. That Time, on the other hand, scripts three voices without explicating their sources. The situation centralizes the disruptive indeterminacy of the “noise” in The Cherry Orchard. Consequently, a comparative analysis of the two Beckett pieces should show Krapp as fundamentally absurdist because it is “fixed” where That Time retains a sense of indeterminacy characteristic to the sublime. Moreover, Beckett’s scripts extend our inquiry of performance within text into the ideological arena of time/identity/language which acquires polarity as we pass from the earlier script to the latter.
Both scripts display textual conventions, but rather than disrupt these conventions, Krapp resides in detachment. In the context of stage directions which call for an essentially naturalistic set, Beckett describes Krapp as “hard of hearing” and “very near-sided”. Immediately the reader is made aware that the script revolves around a character with a diminished capacity to perceive a conventional domestic setting. Krapp’s relation to convention differs from characters inhabiting scripts forged under the tradition of realism. In realistic drama, actions are to be taken as imitations of similar actions occurring in real life, and thus ideally resemble a “surface of reality” in which the reader comes to empathize with the characters. Such conventional modes of presentation aim to “stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning, to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enables the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly” (Lyotard 74). The main purpose of conventional presentation, according to Lyotard, is to “preserve consciousnesses from doubt,” which echoes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s claim that realism functions when audiences undergo a “willing suspension of disbelief”. The principle of sustained illusion which enables realism to operate on the level of surface reality necessarily confines each dramatic signifier to an indented or “realistic” signified. Krapp, on the other hand, regards language, especially abstract words like realistic, as if it signified nothing. Skimming through his tape recorded statements in chronological order, Krapp fast-forwards the tape the exact instant he hears the three following words: “belief,” “reality,” and “understanding” (31). By fast-forwarding, Krapp shows that these words which he spoke as a thirty-nine year old lack meaning for him at sixty. He lacks a set of beliefs through which he can understand a significant reality. His worldview is, by default, of the absurd. The recorded statement that Krapp wants to hear—the one for which he rewinds the tape to hear again—is “one of lovemaking in a punt on a lake” (Esslin 41). The language of this passage assumes an automatic quality as it relays subtle perceptions of the scene without clouds of self-conscious speculation such that, like his other descriptions, the process of describing is emphasized to the extent of distracting attention from the objects of description. The last line of the lovemaking passage, for example, reads at an intimate proximity to the experience itself rather than the struggle to portray the experience, “We lay there without moving, but under us all moved and moved us gently, up and down, and from side to side” (36).
Ironically, the elderly Krapp gravitates towards passages in which his younger self relinquishes the temptation to indulge in the self-absorbed language characteristic of the skipped-over passages. Perhaps, as Martin Esslin suggests, Krapp can be viewed as “a graphic expression for the problem of ever-changing identity of the self” (41). Despite Krapp’s need to consult a dictionary when his age thirty-nine recording uses the word “vajewity” (and his grey hair), has the identity of Krapp’s self really changed? . By coupling the younger self’s recording with Krapp’s current behavior within the script, the reader can surmise at least eight fundamental constants: 1) he eats an excessive amount of bananas; 2) he celebrates his birthday by drinking alone and making a tape recording of his reflections on the previous year; 3) he listens to the recordings of previous years; 4) he is dissatisfied with his younger self; 5) he cannot sing; 6) he writes; 7) he is nostalgic for an ex-lover; 8) he tries to convince himself that he is stronger for persisting in solitude. Krapp’s “ever-changing identity” is only constructed as such if one begins interpretation, as does Krapp, from the premise that time is an external measure. That time belongs to the world and we are born into a chronological progression which channels our linear development from youth to maturity. If one accepts this construction as a fixed condition inherent to existence, then the reaction to hearing previously recorded statements would follow Krapp’s sense of alienation. Feeding this temporal construction is an expectation that, with a linear progression of time, follows a measurable and cumulative substance of character. Krapp’s obsession with the lovemaking passage reveals his longing to “be again” outside of what he takes as the substance of his character. His is a text which alludes to performance, which alludes to the indeterminacy of the sublime. Still, performance remains submerged under the text because his awareness of time and identity, his use of language even, remains fixed within the spectrum of a single referent, even though the referent issues no meaning. Once ideal structures giving order to human experience, in this script, the conventional fixture of the three textual walls of time/identity/language constitute Krapp’s absurd prison. What Esslin labels “the problem of ever-changing identity” is only gestured towards in Krapp. Through his correspondence with Beckett, Esslin learned that the writer had planned a “long play of three Krapps,” but by the time The Theatre of the Absurd was published he “abandoned this project” (42). Rather than a sequel to Krapp, four years later, Beckett published That Time.
In That Time, Beckett suffuses the text with the sublime, thus encouraging his reader to perform within or against the confining awareness of time/identity/language that exuded detachment in Krapp. Starting at the script’s title, indeterminacy pervades That Time, for even a reader bent on solving every textual puzzle cannot demystify the three monologues, each broken up and interwoven with one another without any context save for the remarkably minimal (intended) stage image of a face suspended among darkness. Furthermore, each monologue is composed wholly without punctuation. Every line of text enlists a syntactical performance by the reader. Embedded within each passage are multiple paths of emphasis, for instance, “when you went in out of the rain always winter then always raining that time in the Portrait Gallery in off the street out of the cold and rain slipped in when no one was looking” (Beckett 388). This indeterminate style increases the opportunity for active investment within the text as it encourages readers to separate the slew of words into coherent phrases. The act of reading necessitates an ascription of meaning, more radically than a carefully punctuated text, because the reader implicates herself, through a performance of spontaneous selection, as a structuring principal of the text.
In this sense, That Time achieves Lyotard’s ideal location of the sublime as summarized by Meaghan Morris, “Not in art but in speculating on art” (Quick 27). This is not to say that art itself is incapable of sublime qualities. Rather, the statement extends the boundaries of art to acknowledge the essential role of the audience, and claims an art of the sublime wherever the artist uses his materials to foster the audience’s participation in their own experience of the sublime. A mission implicit in all art of the sublime is to reactivate the role of the audience by reintroducing doubt and indeterminacy onto the page, canvas, or stage. In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal condemns what he terms “Aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy” for pushing the imperative to “bridle the individual, to adjust him to what pre-exists” (471). Scripts of the sublime seem to offer little in the way of morals designed for the passive reader who expects to exchange two hours of attention, maybe empathy, for entertaining lessons about human nature in given social climate. Perhaps the absence of an encapsulating moral or an appealing one-liner to guide a determinate interpretation—this void intended to foster a more complex engagement—actually leaves many readers and audiences feeling excluded or sometimes bored leading to a popular dismissal of plays by Beckett, Pinter, or Shepard as “weird” or “too abstract” (Heuvel 15). Regardless of the reader’s willingness to participate, _That Time _stakes out the roots of any predetermined textual outlets which lead to the dead-end of “authorial intention” and, by doing so, transforms reading into performance.
Beckett situates his readers at an intimate proximity, inviting them to the ground-zero of authorial intention wherein texts brew and oscillate prior to assuming a fixed, determinate polish. The script presents three stands of time, three identities each expressed through language of an indeterminate syntax. With the single referent divided, all issue forth in polyphonic rhythm that prevents a dominant illusion or system of meaning from establishing itself as text. Language flickers on and off the imagined stage—in and out of the reader’s capacity to project inner images—much like the author’s experience as he sifts through the rough beginnings of a story in his mind. The listening face of the unnamed elder is not the face of a spectator. A genuine reflection of the intended audience, the old man consumes himself with the activity of creation amidst the indeterminate darkness and noise that surrounds. Presumably, his three internal voices perpetually competing against each other—each from different times in his life—their conflict engages the old man in a sort of identity crisis. However, his response to the voices differs from Krapp’s. Rather than trying to control or edit the voices into a singular, the old man in That Time (and ideally the reader) comes to smile at and accept the fragmentary and conflicted ‘selves’ that compose his identity (401).
Returning to the ideological arena of time/identity/language set forth in Krapp, the sublime qualities of That Time disrupt such common conceptual understanding. Keeping with the prison metaphor, Krapp’s three walls (time, identity, and language) are fixed according to his inherited conventions, such that dull colors cannot be changed. Therein rests the absurdity: human inventions of time, identity, and language—meant to enhance life with meaningful color—have decayed to the point of perpetuating, if not causing a colorless life. That Time ushers one past the notion that these decaying conventions are fixed and reveals the prison to be a prism. That the walls are chaotic or trembling—as if the earth beneath them were quaking—may unsettle the reader who fears a collapse of the entire structure. With such vulnerability, though, comes the opportunity for change. Beckett posits the audience in an active role to perform creation amongst decay, to restructure the three walls according to the changes in external light (modernity), so that color returns to life. The script’s style implies a Foucault-like awareness of identity as “form” rather than “substance” combined with a phenomenological treatment of time as a “deployment of consciousness on the basis of its now” (Lyotard 88).
Ultimately, the primary conflict in That Time becomes located within the very experience of the performance, thereby implicating the audience as protagonist. If the audience realizes this, then the play offers no end to engagement. However, when dramatic devices are measured exclusively for consistency, the sublime becomes mistaken for technical weakness, self-indulgence, or recklessness. Audiences who condemn the play for its deviations from traditional conventions demonstrate, through objections like “weird,” evidence of an ability to perceive the sublime. Such is the tragedy of much experimental plays when performed before an audience unwilling to awake from a passive role: pain-staking innovation becomes scornful deviation. Furthermore, it is negligent to approach the plays as if, like realism, the central conflict were essentially contained in the plot (man vs. man) or a single character (man vs. self). These conflicts exist as part of a dialectic and maintain value in the sublime aesthetic in so far as they erect a context to enable disruptions of common conceptual understanding.
More than any medium, theatre holds the capability to confront its audience with an immediate presentation compacted of multifaceted or interdisciplinary moments that impart polyphonic perception. As a theatre audience we can see, hear, think, and imagine all at once. The audience of a dramatic performance is potentially the most active of all audience possibilities—accessible diversity (of prospective meaning) creates maximum room for interpretative freedom and creative engagement. Bert States best articulates the need pulsing from the heart of contemporary avant-garde, “To unite the body of the actor and the soul of the audience in an act of discovery” (States 115). Thus, theatre need not force discoveries, but to prioritize the act of discovery. Such requires, to evoke one of Beckett’s own phrases, “a form that accommodates the mess” by disrupting or loosening dramatic signs from fixed methods of signification.
Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. New York: Grove, 1958.
Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications, 1979.
Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard. Modern Drama. Ed. Walter Levy. New Jersey: Prentice, 1999.
Esslin, Martin.The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Doubleday, 1961.
Lawley, Paul. “That Time and the Dynamics of Being.” Journal of Beckett Studies. Spring 2001. Vol 10 Issue 2, pp. 173-86.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Phenomenology. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.
—-“The Sublime and the Avant-garde”. Art Forum. April 1984. Vol 33 Issue 8, pp. 36-43.
Malpas, Simon. “Sublime Ascesis: Lyotard, Art and the Event”. Angelanki. April 2002. Vol 7 Issue 1, pp. 199-211.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985.
Yeats, William Butler. “The Tragic Theatre”. Theatre/Theory/Theatre. Ed. Daniel Gerould. New York: Applause, 2000.
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