A catch in the breath: Language and Consciousness in Samuel Beckett's ...but the clouds...

A catch in the breath: Language and Consciousness in Samuel Beckett's ...but the clouds... RICHARD BRUCE KIRKLEY In the latter part of his career, Samuel Beckett was increasingly attracted to television as a medium where he could realize certain dramatic ideas with a control and precision not possible in the theatre. Linda Ben-Zvi sees Beckett's media plays continuing the pattern of minimalism and compression already established in his stage drama: "In his media work, Beckett ... pares down each new piece, simplifying, eliminating extraneous elements, ever working toward some pure coalescence of material and fonn.'" Martin Esslin believes the television plays are a pinnacle in the artist's achievements, since they progressively "fulfill his program of reducing language to the point of zero. In them he has ... broken the terrible materiality of language and has pro- .duced a new kind of poetry - a poetry of moving images.''' Taken as a whole, Beckett's television drama does reveal an increasing concentration on the communicative force of the visual images. Yet in the teleplay, ... but the clouds . . ., the "pure coalescence of material and fonn" is achieved through a delicate and precise interaction between word and image. By alluding to W. B. Yeats's poem "The Tower" in both the verbal and visual levels of the play, Beckett shapes a fleeting moment of unified consciousness, making this play unique in Beckett's drama. .. .but the clouds ... portrays an idea about consciousness. Word and image contrast and conjoin to give a fonn to the deep workings of the inner mind. The relationship between consciousness and being is a central preoccupation in Beckett's work. In his quest to know - to fmd some shred, some fragment of certainty in existence - Beckett was "convinced that our own individual consciousness is the only aspect, the only segment of the world to which we have direct access, which we can ~now." 3 In his mature and late drama, Beckett turns his eye toward the space within, exploring and shaping paradoxes of consciousness and being, deeply probing the "difference, dividedness and decenteredness within - the self Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 607 608 RlCHARD BRUCE KIRKLEY never identical with itself."4 He sees the experience of consciousness as the self always split into two: one part observes, the other is observed; one part speaks, the other listens. Like an endless hall of mirrors, the self sees itself being seen by itself, hears itself being heard by itself, but the two halves never merge. The self never finally knows itself but instead edges ever closer to the point of infinity where consciousness splinters into nothingness and unknowability. The bleak world of Beckett's drama reflects his disturbing sense that there might not be any certainty concerning either the self or the words we use to comprehend self and world. "There is nothing to express," he said in 1949, "nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.'" For Beckett, all that remains to be said is the "unsayable." He felt that language had become "abstracted to death"' : the whole immense enterprise of signification and syntax erecting an edifice of representation that only diverts and disguises a deeper malaise - an uneasy, unsettling awareness of that point of infinity where consciousness edges toward the abyss. Beckett felt that language, thIOugh long usage, had acquired a solidity of its own, creating a veil - or "magic mountain" - of signs and symbols that mirror the world to the mind, giving the impression that the world and existence are knowable and quantifiable, giving the illusion that language, in this sense, completes our experience of the world. Everything is carefully labelled and categorized, neatly indexed, cross-referenced, and arranged into an expanding linguistic system in which endless permutations of syntax and semantics keep the fear at bay: the fear that this Tower of Babel may not be as solid as we think. The fear is generated, in moments of piercing honesty, by the irrepressible sense of a division and contradiction at the core of consciousness where we confront the unknowability of the self - of who we are. Here we confront the nothingness...