Samuel Beckett: Between melancholia and
misericordia. Photo: John Minihan
In Beckett's late play Rockaby, a prematurely old woman rocks
herself off from one world and into another; passing judgment on her
experience in this one, she says, "rock her off / stop her eyes / fuck
life / stop her eyes / rock her off / rock her off." This unconditional
repudiation of existence may not necessarily reflect Beckett's own
perspective, but it is part and parcel of Beckett's compassion that he
allows her a day in the sun, or at least in the spotlight; it is not
sugar-coated with comedy, but a repudiation precise and spare.
In his recent short biography of the writer, Samuel Beckett, Andrew Gibson makes the
essential attempt to restore to the dramatist and his characters the
difficult and thankless nobility of the compassionate view. Coming nearly
fifteen years after the monumental biographies by Anthony Cronin and James
Knowlson, Gibson's 200-page monograph seeks to offer something of a
corrective to the academic and cultural hagiography of the writer. "It is
impossible to ignore this self-deprecating, reticent, disciplined,
conscientious, diligent, implacably well-mannered, dauntingly
forbearing person, not least because he appears to have been the origin of
the myth of 'Saint Sam' amongst a generation of scholars who made his
acquaintance," Gibson writes (and bearing in mind the emphasis on the
comedy, not the tragedy, that these scholars found in his work: The
subtitle of Ruby Cohn's first book on Beckett was "The Comic Gamut," and
Hugh Kenner included him in a study entitled The Stoic
Comedians). "Look straight at the works themselves," he continues,
"and there is a great deal of material that — even insisting on the
detachment of writer from narrator or character — simply does not
square with the myth at all: the superciliousness and arrogance
perceptible in the early writings, for example; the hysterical rage of the
Trilogy; the extreme and sometimes murderous forms of violence
from Molloy to All That Fall to How It Is and
beyond."
Gibson performs this rescue by balancing Beckett's work between what he
calls melancholia ("the conviction that there is 'nothing to be
done'") and misericordia (which "assumes that one cannot remain
indifferent to the plight of others astray in the labyrinth"). He
emphasises that this corrective is not meant to undermine Beckett's clear
caritas — "goodness to others" — but to establish the
difficulty of maintaining that compassion in a twentieth-century
historical culture which encourages quite the opposite. In the eight
chapters of his biography, Gibson traces this historical culture and
Beckett's response to it in Ireland of the 1920s, Europe of the 1930s
(Gibson is very good on the viciousness of fascist governments in
suppressing and demonizing Modernism), postwar France, and the more
international globalized culture of the Cold War and after. In doing so,
Gibson draws upon recent revisionist histories of Vichy France (in which
Beckett's career with the resistance formed the background to the great
trilogy of novels), Mark Nixon's fine examination of Beckett's German
diaries (which were discovered posthumously) over the past ten years or
so, and the views of Foucault, Badiou and Adorno towards Beckett's work in
an administered society.
In the penultimate chapter of his book, Gibson is at his best in
discussing the late works (especially Stirrings Still) that
until recently hid in the shadows of those like Waiting for Godot
and the trilogy that have gained iconic status in the culture; it is a
status which Beckett himself sought to resist, at least to himself in this
culture of consumption and celebrity. "It is hard to imagine references to
the culture of consumption in Ohio Impromptu," he says,
continuing:
Even as Beckett settles for the world of advanced capital
as where he "happens to be," however minimally, whatever the moments of
collusion, he also holds open another space for thought to those that
characterized the dominant ideologies of his era. ... Beckett is
scrupulous, almost beyond comparison, in his repudiation of suspect
positivities. He is adamantine in his refusal to conspire "with all extant
meanness and finally with the destructive principle" (to quote Adorno). He
therefore chooses a via negativa. If "the task of thinking is to
keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things
as they might otherwise be," then that task is supremely exemplified in
Beckett. ... Beckett will not surrender the idea of another sphere or
possibility of value, however apparently absurd or purely negative its
form. This negative space is the space of art; or rather, Beckett takes
the preservation of the negative space to be integral to art's task.
It is not the place of art to either provide hope or deny its
provision; whether it does one or the other remains a perspective of the
audience member or reader, not the artist, as a litmus test of his or her
own worldview. But, as Gibson insists, it is necessary to refrain from
imposing our own perspective — our own hope or hopelessness —
upon a body of work of such a stringent and deliberately oppositional a
writer as Beckett. In refraining from it, we give both the memory of the
man and the presence of his work the respect it deserves. And in doing so
this approach preserves all three of the qualities — melancholia,
misericordia and caritas — that the work exhibits.
Below, the second half of Billie Whitelaw's performance of
Rockaby, directed by Alan Schneider:
UPDATE: The name of the composer in question is
Albrecht Schrade. More on the composition of the score for
Quadrathere.
A true rarity, recently posted at the indispensible UbuWeb: a video of Quadrat 1 + 2, a piece written and directed especially for
television by Samuel Beckett. The video was premiered on the West
German television network Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) on 8 October
1981.
Additional details are available at the UbuWeb site. More from James
Knowlson's Damned to Fame:
Comic at first, their mobility comes to seem almost manic
because of the speed and repetitiveness of the movements. Whether the
piece reminds the viewer of busy traffic on the place de la Concorde,
rodents in a maze, human beings scurrying frenziedly about their business,
or prisoners exercising desperately in a courtyard, there is something
eminently Dantesque about its imagery, with the figures resembling Gustave
Doré's engravings of Dante and Virgil in Hell. ...
... the most important change came when
[producer Reinhart] Müller-Freienfels took Beckett back home for
dinner after the
completion of the shooting and told him how impressive the piece looked in
black-and-white on the monochrome monitor in the production box.
A friend then proposed that they show the color version first, then the
black-and-white version. Beckett was fascinated by this idea and
asked if they might record another version the next day at a slower speed
and in black-and-white. The fast percussion beats were also
removed, so the only sounds that were heard were the slower, shuffling
steps of the weary figures and, almost inaudible, the tick of a metronome.
Beckett was delighted when he saw this stunning effect, commenting that
the second version (or Quadrat II, as he called it) took place
"ten thousand years later."
The video most uniquely demonstrates the Beckettian theatre's
determination to render through a variety of forms – is this dance,
music, theatre, video? all or none? – a metaphysical construct, quite
sui generis. And still ahead (perhaps ten thousand years ahead)
of its time.
(The music is uncredited; I hope to determine the composer
shortly.)
In regard to my posting of Samuel Beckett's Quadrat
I and II on Sunday, Dr. Ulrika Maude of the University of Durham
and Dr. Gaby Hartel (through the kind offices of Dr. Mark Nixon,
co-director of the Beckett International Foundation) have been
similarly kind enough to provide the following information on the score
for the television play. Their research also provides a glimpse into the
close and precise attention Beckett paid to the soundscapes of his later
work.
Dr. Nixon writes:
My colleagues, Dr. Ulrika Maude at the University of Durham
and Dr.
Gaby Hartel in Berlin, have kindly provided relevant information to your
question. First of all, Beckett's editor at the SWR (now SDR)
[Reinhart] Müller-Freienfels writes that Beckett had written
everything down
beforehand: type of instruments, rhythm, volume. He then set out with his
sound engineer, Konrad Körte, to check the instruments of the
Rundfunkorchester. In the credits of the production, the percussion is
attributed to the four percussionists, Gyula Raez, Hans-Jochen Rubik,
Jõrg Schäfer and Albrecht Schrade, who played two Javanese
gongs, an African wood block and an African talking drum. Of the four
musicians, it was Albrecht Schrade who composed the music, for a fee of
3000DM. This is not attributed in the credits, however.
There is apparently some rehearsal material on tape at SDR
Archive in which they can be seen playing. According to Körte, the
original composition was developed through improvisation etc. In fact,
there is a collection of essays which will be published by Suhrkamp in
Germany later this year, edited by Gaby Hartel, to which Körte has
contributed an account of the way the music was recorded etc.
My gratitude to Drs. Maude, Hartel and Nixon for providing this
information (something, perhaps, of a Beckett "scoop") to me, and now to
you.
