The Anatomy of Beckett's Eh Joe

The Anatomy of Beckett's Eh Joe S.E. GONTARSKI Beckett seems to have moved into television unprodded, uncoaxed by anything save the challenges of the medium, the difficulties of subsuming yet another machine to character, as he did with the tape recorder in Krapp's Last Tape and the motion-picture camera in Film. On his fifty-ninth birthday he began a new work, another monologue. It was familiar if painful matter, a man, also in his late fifties, alone in a room, and a voice in his head haunting him. As he was in Film, the protagonist is again concerned with avoiding perception and its consequence, being, and the opening mime ofEh Joe virtually repeats the early room sequence of Film (in fact, in a preliminary note to himself, a note which precedes even the first holograph version, Beckett had Joe spend the night in a chair as, presumably, 0 did). The plot is as simple as that of Film, which Beckett has described as follows: "one striving to see one striving not to be seen."! OfEh Joe Beckett has said: "It is his passion to kill the voices which he cannot kill."2 Beckett's comment, although simple, is also singular, since it seems to counter (or complete) the thrust of the play itself. In the text Joe has apparently smotheredthe voices ofhis mother and father, and is well on his way to stifling Voice. At least this is the information Voice reports. Beckett, however, seems to deny that possibility. Joe is seemingly safe in his room, but again that suggestion comes from the antagonistic Voice: " ... No one can see you now ... No one can get at you now."3 The very utterance belies the message, however, since the threat to Joe, like the threat to 0 in Film, is internal rather than external: both works explore the naivete of shutting out the world. After all, we hear Voice's reassurance as we are watching Joe, as we saw 0 in Film even within his angle ofimmunity. In the characteristically more explicit earliest holograph draft, Voice tempts Jack (at this point) to shut off the light, "In case there's an eye you've forgotten." Becketthere may still have been thinking through the imagery ofFilm, since Eh Joe is in many respects almost a refinement of Film, Beckett's attempt to S.E. GONTARSKI remedy the excesses of that earlier work by simplifying and reducing the technical role of camera (although maintaining its conspicuous presence), and limiting the action to a room. But Eh Joe also moves beyond Film, or rather returns to that fusion of mime and monologue which Beckett handled so adroitly in Krapp's Last Tape. In fact, Eh Joe bears striking similarities to Krapp's Last Tape in content, form and genesis, even as the protagonists' responses to romantic entanglements differ. Both Krapp and Joe are obsessed with the past in general, but with a girl in green in particular, whom they have deserted: "[t]he green one" (p. 39) inEh Joe and "A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform" (p. 17) in Krapp's Last Tape. They are both haunted by missed po~sibilities, but Krapp chooses to replay that part of his past, an account of a passionate, idyllic encounter, an outing with his lover; Joe is assailed by a vision of which he would, apparently at any rate, like to be rid. Rather than offering us an antagonist who is merely an earlier version of himself, so that the contrast is chronological, progressive as it was in Krapp, Eh Joe gives us a protagonist who represents a variation on Beckett's favorite theme of duality: less the duality of Descartes or Geulincx or the spiritual dualities of the Gnostics or Manichaeans, all of which Beckett has explored in earlier works, than something closerto the Jungian Anima or Shadow. Voice in Eh Joe is not necessarily Joe's dark or evil side, but his opposite: feminine, constant, secure, irreligious and immaterial to Joe's masculine, lecherous, dishonest, religious and material self. It is Voice who suggests that what Joe deserted was something like a model ofgenuine...