Incinerations: The Polylogue and the Trace

For those who have died but are still wandering about, we have exclamation marks made of ashwood.

Velimir Khlebnikov

The act of consciously leaving a trace is an intrinsically philosophical gesture, highly problematized when the trace left is that of one’s voice; that is, the trace of vibrating breath purposely directed toward a microphone—a channel communicating two monads in space-time. Although the voice-recording device is essentially a machine to produce “traces,” sound traces per se were nearly unthinkable until the historical invention of that technology. From that moment on, the trace of the self was removed from a strictly tactile realm (that of footprints, handwriting, and other marks of physical contact) into one of intangible electromagnetic waves (primarily sound and light). At the same time, this invention revealed that in sound (audible or not) the tactile realm appears at its subtlest. The acting body leaves, or makes, traces without feeling the contact, without in fact there being any contact: for traces are now rather taken almost without one’s permission. Only in some cases is there a clear intention of making oneself known to an uncertain witness in the future.

For the maker of the trace, it is impossible to know who will be at the other the end of that channel, and when and how many times the operation will be repeated. The fate of the material one’s voice is entrusted to—and, inseparably, the fate of the trace—is obscure. The future witness may be oneself, or a surrogate of the self, a stand-in, an analogue ear, but always completely an other, listening to that “stupid bastard” Beckett’s character, Krapp, called his past self. Otherness is the relationship between two moments of the self in space-time. Krapp is the tutelary figure in this problematic: “What’s a year now? The sour cud and the iron stool … Revelled in the word spool.”¹ The word spool contains the potential of the spool to contain the breath of the past self. Krapp’s scene takes place in a dark home office with a desk full of tape reels (spools) and bananas. One can imagine Krapp, a willful and unsuccessful writer, has been there forever, and it doesn’t seem preposterous to assume that Krapp’s office is itself the depth of the spool, a limbo.

According to Beckett’s stage directions—it actually is the first sentence of the play—the scene takes place a late evening in the future. Krapp listens to his own life accounts contained in reels of tape, then proceeds to record himself. That evening in the future may well be seen as the intrinsic time of listening, after all recordings of one’s life have been made. It is the unattainable future where Krapp listens to a reel tape, records his last, and having nothing more to say, we suppose, he dies. It is an abstract future from which life itself can be seen as past. “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The entire earth might be uninhabited.” In a few pages of writing—roughly a half hour of performance—Beckett displays a large repertoire of paradoxical figures of listening, or impossible communications between the (recorded) past self and the (listening) present self:

• • Krapp listens to Tape, then records a new one (“the last”), again becoming Tape;

• • Krapp laughs in unison with Tape as the latter speaks, then laughs on his own;

• • Tape (“that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago”) recounts his experience of listening to an older recording (another Tape), thus repeating Krapp’s estrangement from the past self;

• • Overlapping silences of Tape and Krapp.

Krapp’s recordings are more than messages in bottles. A form of proximity with the future is sought through the freezing of the speaker’s vibrating breath—future being considered not a time after but beyond the speaker’s present time. That future—the tense of transcendence—is an obscurity, a time that exists only insofar as it will be inhabited. Krapp’s impression, spoken from within the depth of the spool, appears then allegorically: “Past...