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Counterpoint, Absence and the Medium in Beckett's Not I PAUL LAWLEY "The medium of drama," asserted Ezra Pound, "is not words but persons moving about on a stage using words."I Pound stated a truism, but one which is sometimes forgotten by critics of Beckett's plays. This omission is perhaps not surprising: after all, "persons moving about on a stage" are few and far between in his plays, especially in the "microscopic" dramas of the 1970's. And are the beings in these plays "persons" anyway? It is all too easy to feel that the static stage picture emancipates the text, licensing the critic to consider the playas a dramatic poem-in-prose. In a holograph note written in 1976 during the composition of That Time (in which we see on the stage only a disembodied head hanging in the air), Beckett himself wrote: "To the objection visual component too small, out of all proportion with aural, answer: make it smaller on the principle that less is more."2 In this essay, I want to concentrate on Not 1 (1972) and to demonstrate that, in this play, much less than the whole body is made to yield more dramatic interest than a whole body ordinarily does. For in Not 1, it is precisely the extraordinary nature of the "visual component" which encourages the fertile interaction between this single disembodied mouth and the text which it pours forth. Beckett conspires with his medium to make less more. There are several interesting individual essays on Not 1,3 but the fullest and most authoritative account is James Knowlson's in Frescoes of the Skull. Knowlson's remarks on the stage image and on the language of the play are thorough and satisfying in themselves, but he only hints at the way visual and aural elements might interact. I take one of those hints as my starting-point. Knowlson writes: "Speaking of the image of Mouth, the drama critic of The Times wrote that 'in isolation it could be any bodily orifice.'4 And certainly Beckett displayed no trace of displeasure as, watching the BBC television version, he realized that Mouth had the appearance of a large, gaping vagina."5 Ifwe consider in detail the opening of the play, we can understand why Beckett should not be displeased by the strong televisual suggestion. 408 PAUL LAWLEY For ten seconds we hear a voice "unintelligible behind curtain," and as the curtain rises we see the "Stage in darkness butfor MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8feet above stage level, faintly litfrom close-up and below.... " The text begins with an account of conception and birth: MOUTH ... out ... into this world ... this world ... tiny little thing '" before its time ... in a godfor- ... what? '" girl? ... yes ... tiny little girl ... into this ... out into this ... before her time ... godforsaken hole called ... called '" no matter ... parents unknown ... unheard of ... he having vanished ... thin air ... no sooner buttoned up his breeches ... she similarly ... eight months later ... almost to the tick ... so no love ... spared that ... no love such as normally vented on the ... speechless infant ... in the home ... no ... nor indeed for that matter any of any kind ... no love of any kind ... at any subsequent stage.... 6 "[I]t is clear," writes Hersh Zeifman, "that the Mouth's monologue is subject to some kind ofcorrective process, internal or external, and it seems to me that the Auditor ['downstage audience left, tall standing figure, sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood, .. , facing diagonally across stage intent on MOUTH ... " p. 13] comes to represent, for the audience, the visual symbol ofthat corrective process - the attempt to make the Mouth admit the truth about herself - as well as being a witness to its failure."7 It is the Auditor's silent quibbling which emphasizes the suggestiveness of the text. We are looking at a mouth, just that. "[O]ut," it says, "into this world." But this world is not just the world, but the world of this particular theatre; and the Mouth is out of its body, a "tiny little thing." We are given time to register the suggestion that the tiny little thing...

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