Splitting Images: Samuel Beckett's Nacht und Träume

Splitting Images: Samuel Beckett's Nacht und Triiume GRALEY HERREN No area of Samuel Beckett's work has received less attention than his television drama, and the least studied of his six teleplays is Nacht und Traume.• Although the premiere broadcast of Nacht und Traume attracted an audience of two million.' the teleplay is rarely seen today except at Beckett festivals and modem drama conferences. Nor should one expect a "Beckett revival" on commercial television any time soon. Envisioning such a revival, Eckart Voigts -Virchow cleverly hypothesizes that the ratings would "rocket through the floor."3 One expects mainstream resistance to works like Nacht und Triiume, which challenge television's fonnulaic conventions and passive viewing habits . What is more puzzling, however, is the slight attention paid this teleplay within Beckett circles. Even among the author's most dePe:ndable champions, Nacht und Traume has been dismissed too easily. Martin Esslin, for instance, concedes that it offers an "extremely powerful" image, but concludes that it is, "for my taste, somewhat too sentimental."4 Beryl and John Fletcher accuse Nacht und Traume of being less visually interesting than Beckett's other teleplays , and they voice doubt as to "whether this script makes for a successful or effective use of the medium."5 Even James Knowlson, who praises the teleplay unconditionally, has a difficult time locating its specific appeal. With Esslin's criticism doubtlessly in mind, Knowlson muses, [t]he play could have been sentimental, even maudlin. The mysterious quality of the action, the beauty of the singing of Schubert's lied, and the speCificity of the repeated, almost ritualistic patterns avoid this. What on the printed page seems a very slight piece acquires on the screen a strange, haunting beauty.6 The space Knowlson allots in the biography to this eleven-minute piece is understandably 1imited, but he points in the right direction with his identification of "almost ritualistic patterns." Beckett's search for "a form that accomModern Drama, 43:2 (Summer 2000) 182 Beckett's Nacht LInd Trallme modates the mess"7 persisted throughout his career. Yet Nacht lind Traume is distinct for its exploitation of religious antecedents for these "almost ritualistic patterns." Beckett approaches Christian ceremony in Nacht LInd Traume, but he does so in a way that interrogates the spectator's relationship to religious and televisual - iconography. At the same time that he dramatizes the ritualistic possibilities of television, Beckett explores the medium 's facility as a site for desire. Nacht und Triiume functions simultaneously as religious ritual and as retreat to the nurturing Mother. The appeal to ritual and the desire for the Mother represent dual avenues toward (re)unification for Beckett's isolated protagonist. In the final analysis, however, Nacht und Traume's formal tensions undennine its superficial harmonies, offering the manipulative powers of art as the only enduring consolation. The teleplay fades up from black to reveal a dimly lit human figure. This figure, the Dreamer, or "A," as he is abbreviated in the script, sits in "Right profile, head bowed, grey hair, hands resting on table." After a few moments, the sound of a male voice humming the last seven bars of Schubert's lied "Nacht lind Trallme" ("Night and Dreams") becomes audible. The music is first hummed, then the final line of the lied is sung: "Holde Traume, kehret wieder" ("Sweet dreams, come back again,,).8The exact source of the voice is not specified in the script, but, in Becken's German version, A does not visibly hum or sing." After the line is sung, A rests his head on his hands and dreams. An image of a man, A's "dreamt seW' (B), fades up in the top right quadrant of the screen. According to the script, "He is seated at a table in the same posture as A dreaming, bowed head resting on hands, but left profile, faintly lit by kinder light than A's" (305). An enigmatic sequence of gestures then ensues. From the top of the screen a hand descends and rests briefly upon B's head; he looks up and a cup is put to his lips to drink; a cloth appears and wipes his brow; he extends his...