Krapp's Last Tape as Tragicomedy

Krapp's Last Tape as Tragicomedy BERNARD F. DUKORE • FIRST THINGS FIRST: the title, followed by the subtitle. Virtually every word of both is a pun: Krapp's Last Tape: A Play in One Act. 1 As numerous critics have observed, Krapp is both the man's name and excrement; man is therefore symbolized by and reduced to excrement. As Ruby Cohn points out,2 Tape may refer both to the recording device and to an alcoholic beverage. A Play, a work for the stage, also describes how one records and how one listens to a recording device; and such meanings of the word as amusement, game, or diversionary activity (as distinguished from meaningful employment) are apposite. Perhaps more important in the context of tragicomedy are the remaining words. Last may mean final or it may mean the most recent. Descriptive of the theatre piece, One Act at the same time suggests that all of Krapp's tape recording sessions are ultimately the same, are essentially one act. Thus, Krapp's final and/or his most recent tape is essentially the same as the others. Similarly, old Krapp is himself essentially the same as middle-aged Krapp (whose taped voice he hears), who is essentially the same as young Krapp (unheard by the audience but discussed by middle-aged Krapp). Paradoxically , Krapp's Last Tape is a monodrama for two voices: in alternating strips of monologue, Beckett presents the voice and presence of Old Krapp and the taped voice of middle-aged Krapp, the latter very much (to use the television phrase) "live on tape," both in the sense of vividness of impression and in the sense that he lives still in the old clown he has become. The assertion of Vladimir in Waiting for Godot holds equally for Krapp's Last Tape: "The essential doesn't change."3 Using similar phrases, old Krapp and the voice of Krapp thirty years earlier speak of similar pleasures, similar hopes, similar disappointments. When old Krapp calls middle-aged Krapp a "stupid bastard," one recalls the latter's reference to younger Krapp as a foolish 351 352 BERNARD F. DUKORE "young whelp." As if to underscore their resemblances, old Krapp joins middle-aged Krapp in laughing at young Krapp. As Leonard C. Pronko remarks, "The tragedy of Krapp, and of all men in Beckett's view, is not that we become what we were not, but that we are now and evermore the same.,,4 But, as Pronko recognizes, such a tragedy, and this play in particular, is comic as well. Indeed, this sort of sameness is also a pattern of comedy. The essential may not change, but as in Waiting far Gadat other changes take place. Krapp's memory is failing: he can no longer recall either the black ball or what he once called a "memorable equinox," and he has to look up the meaning of words he used to use. His sexual abilities and his sexual pleasures, moreover, are also diminishing. From Bianca find an "engrossing sexual life" he has dwindled to Fanny, a "Bony old ghost of a whore" with whom old Krapp "Couldn't do much." From the "incomparable" Bianca, whose name suggests virginal purity (it means white in Italian), he has degenerated to Fanny, whose name (slang for behind) reinforces his description of her as a mere piece of ass. All of this is both tragic and comic, for though he has achieved what he said he wanted (middle-aged Krapp, who expressed relief that his affair with Bianca was over, hoped his sexual life would be less absorbing), the result (ignobility and a thwarting of basic desire) is far from what he had hoped. Similarly tragicomic - and similarly simultaneously so - is the coupling of bodily functionings and the intellect. With Krapp, neither crap nor thought moves freely, though mere words do; in both cases, only gas flows. Constipated physically, Krapp is constipated intellectually, for the results of his thought - books - do not circulate. In the past year only seventeen copies of his books have been sold, that is, have been dropped into their intended receptacles. When man's noblest function, or what is generally held to...