Embers and the Sea: Beckettian Intimations of Mortality

Embers and the Sea: Beckettian Intimations of Mortality DAVID ALPAUGH • DESPITE HUGH KENNER'S INVITING CHARACTERIZATION of Embers as "Beckett's most difficult work" and one which "coheres to perfection,"! this radio play has received remarkably little critical attention. Perhaps the play's emotional tone and unBeckettian "surface realism,,2 pose ironic enigmas for readers who have learned to reach essentially intellectual meanings through the absurd surfaces of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. The failure of communication between Henry and his family; the internal fiction of nameless need and utter isolation that Henry weaves around the old men, Bolton and Holloway; and the sense of emotional washout which closes the drama are all presented with a lyrical simplicity which seems to defy protracted analysis. It is not surprising, then, that most of the play's critics have hesitated to go beyond paraphrase. Several have denied that the play merits critical attention at all. Richard Coe dismisses Embers as "banal and melodramatic"3 and Michael Robinson declares that here "the chaotic pain of life shows through the artisan's attempt to give it coherence.,,4 Are these critics justified in suggesting that Embers is little more than a poignant emotional outburst?5 Does Beckett purchase the play's realism by sacrificing the symbolic dimension which has so fascinated readers of Godot and Endgame? Or have these critics simply overlooked such a dimension? If the play does have a symbolic structure, we will naturally look to embers and the sea for its chief compass points. The embers which furnish the play's title are introduced with almost sacramental emphasis: " ... not a sound, only the fire, no flames now embers. [Pause.] Embers."6 And the stubborn sea-sound is the omnipresent antagonist against which Henry struggles - the stimulus of all his words and thus the raison d'etre of the play_ Embers and the sea: they are the cynosures of Henry's psyche, the perceptual 317 318 DAVID ALPAUGH poles between which his brooding consciousness hovers. As literary symbols embers are common enough and the sea almost ubiquitous. It is surprising, nevertheless, to find the two joined together and functioning analogously in an earlier work. They are, in fact, the key symbols of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode. In the climactic ninth section of that poem, embers and the sea serve as perceptual poles for another brooding consciousness, filling the poet with joy and generating his famous "intimations of immortality." From embers and the sea Beckett's protagonist receives intimations of a strikingly different order. An anti-romantic who numbers lambs and children among his antipathies, Henry is repulsed by the aggressive sound of his sea and betrayed by the dying sound of his embers. Because Wordsworth responds so differently to the same set of stimuli, the Ode offers a convenient reference point for a study of Beckett's anti-romantic symbolism and its relation to Henry's personality.7 Such a study will, I hope, demonstrate that Embers is far richer philosophically and psychologically than the mere melodrama that Coe and Robinson envision. Wordsworth's Ode is a meditational odyssey in which the poet, struggling to regain the lost perceptions of his childhood, achieves a qualified "immortality" by discovering that the child within him has not died but continues to live on in his adult consciousness. Lionel Trilling points out that Wordsworth's view of maturation is similar to Freud's and quotes a pertinent passage from Civilization and its Discontents: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the outside world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. If we may suppose that this primary ego-feeling has been preserved in the minds of many people - to a greater or lesser extent - it would co-exist like a sort of counterpart with the narrower and more sharply outlined ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational content belonging to it would be precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness with the universe - the same feeling as that described by my...