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Beckett's Three Dimensions: Narration, Dialogue, and the Role of the Reader in Play KAREN LAUGHLIN Actors, directors, and theorists alike have long acknowledged the formal subversiveness of Samuel Beckett's dramatic works. His plays deny closure, replace clear narrative development with extreme fragmentation and rigid patterning, and drastically limit the gestures and movement of the actor. Beckett's play Play is no exception; indeed, this work incorporates all of the above features. But perhaps the most significant challenge to the form ofdrama posed by this particular text emerges from Beckett's experimentation with dialogue and his related recourse to narration rather than to the on-stage enactment of many of the play's principal events. Play's opening chorus itself works to undermine a definition ofdrama as "the literary genre rooted in dialogue.,,1 The characters, whose faces "seem almost part of' the "three identical grey urns" in which they are immobilized, speak simultaneously in ''faint, largely unintelligible" voices.' This barrage of disparate comments about darkness, madness, and death then gives way to the first of Play's two main sections. Here, narration takes over as the three characters offer separate, personalized accounts of the adultery of the male figure, M, and the resultant struggle between the two women who are presumably his wife and his mistress. The last part ofthe play follows a similar pattern of simultaneous and then sequential speeches which refer to and briefly continue the story of the love affair while also presenting less clearly narrative comments on the speakers' present condition. This story of the eternal triangle thus introduces what seem to be Play's principal events, and its telling occupies a major portion of the characters' time on stage. Moreover, Beckett's stage directions ask thatthe speeches ofM, WI, and W2 be "provoked by a spotlight projected onfaces alone" (P, p. 45); as each one speaks, the others are left in darkness, seemingly unaware of the presence - much less the words - ofthe speaker. Even when they speak in turn, the characters do not communicate with one another; and, for much ofthe play, 330 KAREN LAUGHLIN narration appears to have replaced dialogue understood as a verbal exchange between on-stage speakers. Additional features of Play's opening section reinforce these initial challenges to conventional dramatic dialogue. According to Jiri Veltrusky, one of the basic characteristics of dialogue is that: unlike monologue, dialogue is always integrated into the extra-linguistic situation. This comprises not only the material situation, that is, the set of things that surround the speakers, but also the speakers themselves, their mentality, intentions, knowledge pertinent to the dialogue. their mutual relations. the tensions between them, and so on in short, what may be called the psychological situation.3 As they recount the story of their romantic adventures in the first part of Play, M, WI, and W2 are peculiarly isolated from the extra-linguistic situation suggested in the play's text. Both the lack of response by the potential listeners and the absence of any specific intention on the part of each speaker isolate the narratives from the so-called psychological situation of dialogue. This effect is all the more striking since the three narrators refer to the others in their stories in the third person, even though these characters are presumably the same figures whose heads protrude from the adjacent urns. Moreover, the absence of references to the speakers' present circumstances suggests little penetration of the narratives by their material situation within the playas a whole. Rather, the stories' stereotyped worlds of bedrooms and morning-rooms contrast sharply with the play's grey, shadowy setting. And the use ofpast tenses (especially the preterite) sets the narrated worlds apart from the "here and now" of discourse temporally as well as spatially, placing them at an unspecified moment in each speaker's imagined or remembered past. In so distancing the characters' narratives from their extra-linguistic situation, Beckett not on1y focuses attention away from the scenic world, but also gives these accounts essentially monological qUalities. How, then, does the playwright shape this apparently non-dialogical material into a work which nevertheless merits its subtitle, "a stage play"? And to what extent does this...

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