The Voice of Absent Love in Krapp's Last Tape and Company

The Voice of Absent Love in Krapp's Last Tape and Company MARY F. CATANZARO Coupling - and its seeming impossibility - are central to the works of Samuel Beckett. That was already apparent in his critical study ofProust in 1931 where we see the full range ofbroken promise in the separateness and otherness which undermine agreement and accord between pairs. Beckett's thinking has always been binary: he speaks of subject and object within the scaffolding of his self-defining term, pseudocouple. In the physical impediments and emotional ruptures of the pseudocouple we find a virtual metaphysics of isolation. Beckett discovered in Proust's work that time, habit, the faulty perceptions of memory, and the illusions of the imagination invariably destroy even the briefest concord between two figures. But more importantly, he found that the most troublesome hindrances are the subjects themselves, for they are "two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation";' hence no more than a succession of always subverted selves. One of the complications arising from memory and time is that the subject becomes aware ofa need for an other whose presence might offer some comfort to the multitude of his changing selves. This impasse, however, is never removed. At the same time, Beckett's notions of partnership have not weakened with the absence or outright disappearance of the other, as Krapp's Last Tape and Company demonstrate, focused as they are on a single figure. In Krapp's Last Tape and Company, Bockett addresses alienation in the realm of voiced memory, where emotional bonds with others may be recalled, but the past experiences cannot be fully articulated. In Krapp's Last Tape, the lonely and alcoholic Krapp manipulates objects, most notably a tape recorder and a reel, which allow him to listen to and to record new material about his past. The information on the tape exposes his past connections with others, particularly women - his mother, the nurse who attended her, his former lovers, even his favorite female fictional heroine. Accordingly, Krapp's communication with others is alive only through his voice on the tape, and that tape thus seems to play the "role" of the absent other. 402 MARY F. CATANZARO Like Krapp's tape machine, the narrator's voiced memory in Company permits him to examine his relations with others in solitude. The oscillation between the ftrst and second person lends a quasi-mechanical quality to the voice, and seems to operate in much the same way as the rewind and fast forward controls on Krapp's tape recorder. The images that his voiced memory recall allow the cinematic reel of his life, as it were, to unfold backwards and again go forward; and his position on his back in the darkness provides the screen on which it is made visible. The darkness and his position also serve as a place of security for him, like the drapes behind which Krapp hides to escape his overly brilliant den, and also, of course, to drink. The voice in both works is used as an instrument that follows its own score going through the detritus of memory. The texture is polyphonic, composed of many voices. The "soul" of Krapp's Last Tale and Company is in a subtle declension oflight and shadow which gives rhythm and structure and allows the voices to live. Here, in both works, is. a knowledge of ardour, now lost, replaced by controlled and patient deliberation, which the unnamed ftgure in Company and Krapp are only capable ofunderstanding in their voices, that is to say, their memories. But this understanding calls for two parties - the self who voices and the self who hears. In one sense, all of Beckett's works, but particularly Krapp's Last Tape and Company, have been based on a series of experiments with sound and new ways of voicing. Company, for example, is marked by the inner voice which controls its own fluctuating masses, colors, densities and intensities of sound. In this work, the internal voice speaking to itself appears to evolve into a separate subject. We may observe this in the repetitive phrase, "Quick leave him"l, which refers to the narrator. This is...