Trials in the Soundscape: The Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett

TRIALS IN THE SOUNDSCAPE: THE RADIO PLAYS OF SAMUEL BECKETT Beckett's Aural Medium I. All That Fall as Repetition in Retrograde II. Embers as Counterpoint Rhythm III. Words and Music and Cascando as "Radiographical" Experiments Thematic Coda DESPITE THEIR FREQUENCY AND AMPLITUDE, studies of Samuel Beckett seldom break the silence surrounding his radio plays. The thematic power of these plays is unquestioned, but their technical virtuosity goes largely unrecognized. Heckett's own concern with sound and listener is evident throughout his work, from his early theoretical essay Proust (1931) to his return to the radio medium in Cascando (1963), yet the importance of the radio plays as experiments in sound has not yet been explored.! The place to begin is with the soundscape itself, which Beckett expands as a theater of perceptual struggles analagous to those in his stage plays or novels. To understand this radio medium, it is useful to examine a misunderstanding shared by that remnant of critics who have broken the silence, the notion that whatever happens in Waiting for Godot occurs in the radio plays in reduced form. Ruby Cohn discusses the radio playas a sequence of actions, roughly similar in content to what occurs in the stage plays, minus our sight of these events.2 (Her remarks on the comic use of sound effects point to Beckett's use of these in his subsequent writing for the stage, especially in Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days.) Her characterization of radio plays as "dramatic contractions"-interesting from the viewpoint of stage technique but misleading as a term for the radio medium-has found its 1 Dates In the text are those of publication (essays and poem) or broadcast (radio plays). Citations, in the language of original publication, are from these editions, chronologically listed: Proust (Grove Press, New York, 1957); Three Dialogues, originally in Transition Fort,1-Nine, no. 5 (1949). reprinted in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1965); Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces, including All That Fall and Embers (Grove Press, New York, 1960); Play, including Words and Music and an English version of Cascando (Faber and Faber, London, 1964); Comedie et actes divers, including the original text of Cascando (Minuit, Paris, 1966). 2 Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, 1962), 243ft 267 268 MODERN DRAMA December way into most critical comments on these plays. Thus, when Donald Davie remarks that Beckett "exploits the medium by parodying it," he apparently means that Beckett parodies the artificiality of sound effects or the ambiguity about what to "visualize" which Davie regards as limitations of the medium.3 Even Raymond Federman, in his excellent study devoted to the early fiction, picks up this metaphor of radio as truncated stage when he comes to describe the radio voice in relation to the prose narrative voice. The radio medium, he says, works by Uabstracting the human body from his dramas by relying only on the use of voices," while "physical reality is suggested by sounds."4 David Alpaugh, in one of the few essays to scrutinize a radio play rather than simply group it with one of the stage plays, even emphasizes this negative definition of radio as the chief "metaphor" of the play, arguing that "because there is nothing there but sound," the listener is "cut off from the ultimate reality of Beckett's fictive world even as man is cut off from the ultimate reality of the universe."5 These views concur in a curious visual bias, speaking as though the sights of a stage medium were more "physical" and less "abstract" than sounds. Consider the inadequacy of Federman's description if applied to All That Fall, that record of an excruciatingly physical journey. Maddy's body is not abstracted from the drama by being rendered invisible. Her concrete existence is a continual embarassment -breathing, shuffling, requiring ministrations of others. The Cartesian division of consciousness from objects is even more striking than in Beckett's stage plays because the auditory medium focuses our attention on the double role of Maddy's words when sounded-their reference to things and their revelation as...