Being and Non-Being: Samuel Beckett's Not I

Being and Non-Being: Samuel Beckett's Not I HERSH ZEIFMAN • WHEN THE CURTAIN RISES ON NOT I, Samuel Beckett's most recent work for the stage, the first thing we are aware of is a disembodied human mouth, seemingly suspended eight feet in the air, trapped in the harsh glare of a spotlight amid the surrounding darkness. The long line of partially disembodied characters in Beckett's drama makes its first appearance with Nagg and Nell in Endgame;! having crashed on their tandem in the Ardennes and lost their shanks, the two now inhabit dustbins. Whatever else they may represent, the ashbins (or dustbins) are clearly death images, symbolically apt containers of decaying human flesh, linked with the grave via such traditional Biblical images as "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Genesis 3.19). In Happy Days, the process of disembodiment has gone one step further. At the beginning of Act I, Winnie is discovered interred in a mound of sand up to her waist; ~y the second act, however, the mound has reached her neck, thus obliterating her entire body except for her head. This mound of sand is, once again, a brllliantly conceived icon of death-in-life; figuratively and literally , Winnie has both feet in the grave, and the rest of her must inevitably follow.2 The three characters of Play are likewise imprisoned up to their necks, in vases which Beckett specifically labels "urns," thereby evoking both the ashes of cremation and the tomb. All that remains of their bodies are their faces - "Faces so lost to age and aspect," Beckett directs, "as to seem almost part o/urns." And in Not I, there is no longer even the entire face, but simply a mouth, chattering compulsively. By now we know full well what disembodiment signifies in Beckett's drama; there is no 35 36 HERSH ZEIFMAN longer the need for an implicity coffin-like receptacle. Like so many of Beckett's characters, fictional and dramatic, the Mouth proceeds to tell us a story. And like any good storyteller, she begins at the beginning - with birth. As the torrent of words issuing from the Mouth continues, we gradually realize that we are hearing not fiction but autobiography, that the Mouth is in reality relating the details of her own life, describing to us her own present situation, a fact she tries desperately to disguise by narrating in the third person. And the details of her life are succinctly summed up in approximately a dozen lines: she was born prematurely, into a "godforsaken hole" (the ironic literalness here is a recurrent Beckettian technique); she was abandoned at birth by her parents; she received no love either as a child or "at any subsequent stage." "So typical affair," the Mouth concludes. These are all the facts of her life the Mouth considers noteworthy, until that moment when, coming up to seventy and wandering in a field looking aimlessly for cowslips, she suddenly felt all the early April morning light gradually disappearing, she suddenly found herself becoming insensible. The death images here are subtle and striking. "Coming up to seventy" reminds us of the Biblical life span of three-score years and ten (Psalms 90.10); we may think of the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp, and recall that the tape we hear him making is, ominously, his "last" one. And the image of picking flowers in a field evokes Psalm 103.15-16, a passage Beckett has referred to frequently in his writings. In Endgame, for example , Hamm remarks that the dead Mother Pegg "was bonny once, like a flower of the field"; her fate is thus the Mouth's fate as well, the fate of all mankind, as the Biblical simile implies: "As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more." As the light surrounding the Mouth gradually fades and disappears, so too does sound: "all silent as the grave [ ... ]," the Mouth notes; "all dead still ... sweet silent as the grave." And yet, this is not...