Dada, Surrealism, and the Genesis of Not I

Dada, Surrealism, and the Genesis ofNof I ENOCH BRATER • WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE INVISIBLE MR. GODOT HIMSELF - who never materializes on the Board where Gogo and Didi steadfastly await his appearance - none of Beckett's creations for the stage is so literally disembodied as the Mouth who speaks unendingly in Not 1.1 The play itself is an irreducible simplicity: we see Mouth, faintly lit from close-up and below, the rest of the face in shadow, limited to a rudimentary function: words. They begin even before the audience has had enough time to settle down - as the house lights dim, Mouth is already speaking, a voice at once unseen and unintelligible. "Suddenly, gradually," t9 quote from Mouth itself, a disturbing image confronts an uneasy audience: we see and hear a disembodied mouth, its words now intelligible but only minimally comprehensible. There is, as well, a tall standing figure, faintly lit, "sex undeterminable," enveloped from head to foot in a loose djellaba. Beckett has accustomed us to severe constrictions of physical mobility on stage: Mouth can move only lips and tongue, shaping words, while Auditor makes four briefmovements consisting in simple sideways raising of the arms from sides and their falling back, in what the script tells us is "a gesture of helpless compassion." The movement lessens with each recurrence and is scarcely perceptible at the third. Not I ends where it began - the house lights go up, the images on stage fade out, Mouth continues unseen, unintelligible, and finally unheard. Mouth itself, as Andre Breton said of Mathilda in Lewis' The Monk, is less a character than a continual temptation.2 "Never relinquishing third person," Mouth, another Beckett "hero" whose name begins suspiciously with an M, is yet another protagonist presenting a story: "something she had to tell, could that be it?" The tale told is now about a silent 49 50 ENOCH BRATER old woman "coming on to seventy," so tight-lipped she barely spoke at all, possibly a word or two per annum, until one day wandering in a field all verbal hell broke loose. She suddenly started talking non-stop and has been going at it, constantly, ever since. Mouth, suffering from a similar crise de bouche, refuses four times to identify herself with this woman (" ... what? ... who? ... no! ... she! ... ," each refusal followed by the Auditor's faint gesture), and hence, the title of the play. Is Mouth the "she" after all? The exposition is delayed indefinitely as Beckett, as usual, spares us the art and craft of denouement. Not I presents us with still another "total object, complete with missing parts."3 Because there is so little external action in Not I, critical attention will most likely focus on the words, images, and verbal patterns iil Mouth's eternal monologue in an attempt to unravel the knot (pun intended) of the play. Yet this approach, virtually inevitable for the critic, diametrically reverses the situation which gave rise to the piece itself. Beckett was .in North Africa when news of the Nobel Prize reached him; he eluded the battalions of international journalists who had come to seek him out in his Tunisian hotel,4 but not before he had come away with an idea for a new work. Sitting in a cafe, Beckett observed a solitary figure, completely covered in a djellaba, leaning against a wall. It seemed to him that the figure was in a position of intense listening - what could that lonely figure be listening to? Only later did Beckett learn that this figure leaning against the wall was an Arab woman waiting there for her child who attended a nearby school. The concept for Not I was, therefore, initially sparked by Beckett's preoccupation with that isolated listener, the unidentified Auditor we encounter on stage.5 The transformation from the relatively easy recognizability of an Arab woman waiting for her child to the grotesque confrontation between Mouth and Auditor makes possible that "disturbing element proper for throwing the spectator into the sought-for uncertainty"6 we have come to appreciate as an essential feature of Beckett's work. In Not I Auditor, like audience, hears; spectators, obviously, also see. But only Mouth...