Krapp's Last Tape and the Proustian Vision

KRAPP'S LAST TAPE AND THE PROUSTIAN VISION Krapp's Last Tape OPENS ON ONE MAN ALONE with his own memories and desires, punctuating a monotonous present by recall of a momentlit past. As a writer and as a man lying "propped up in the dark," Beckett makes Krapp's associations with Proust even more pointedly prominent. The situation of Krapp stocktaking and listening to old stocktakings is dependent upon the catalysts of Time, Habit, and Memory, the trinity considered by Beckett in his 1931 study of Proust. Considerations that Krapp has made and will continue to make of his life-intellectual, physical, spiritual-are rendered rememberable , if not memorable, with the aid of dictionary and tapes. Krapp now is not Krapp past nor Krapp future. Like Proust, Beckett explores the relation of the self, possessed of Memory and by Habit, within Time. What both writers explore is the mental mechanism by which that which is lost is found. Krapp, by being able to summon and shut off mechanically his memories of things past, raises for an audience the question of whether Krapp's Last Tape is a parody of Proust. Certainly parody is involved. It is evident both in the general reduction of Krapp's memory process to mechanization and in the playing of particular segments of the tapes where life is seen as parodic. Also, by means of counterpointing and of juxtaposition with scenes that blatantly involve parody ("Bony old ghost of a whore"), moments that for Krapp were once memorable or incomparable are gently drawn into parody. But if Krapp's spools of tape are meant to serve as parodies of Proust's vases, what has been neglected by critics is that Proust himself , as Beckett has pointed out, saw the parodic nature of certain memory processes, as well as of desire. Memory forms, transforms, and deforms. Joining Eliot in considering the pathos of men "mixing /Memory and desire," Beckett creates in Krapp's Last Tape a play that is not so much a Proustian exercise parodying Proust as an attempt to dramatize (and, hence, support) what is central in the Proustian vision. In Beckett's study of Proust he follows through Proust's sharp distinction between the workings of voluntary and involuntary memory, associating the latter with those miraculous moments of breakthrough that emerge under the breakdown of space and time. What Beckett stressed was the mystic, religious characer of those past 333 334 MODERN DRAMA December moments that involuntary memory happens upon, moments of "revelation " and "annunciation." Akin to Joycean epiphanies, it is these moments of Proustian revelation that provide the structure of Krapp's Last Tape. As Krapp plays back past tapes, he passes from high moment to high moment. With Krapp in control of the switch, these moments resemble a cinematic fade-in, fade-out technique. The girl on the platform, the black ball, the jetty and punt scenes blend and form an extended showing forth of charged experience from Krapp's past. But the mechanization of the mechanism of memory-by making involuntary memory voluntary-commits Krapp to the destruction of moments that refuse reduction to human control: But involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be importuned. It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle. (Proust pp. 20-21) So that no amount of voluntary manipulation can reconstitute in its integrity an impression that the will has-so to speak-buckled into incoherence. But if, by accident, and given favourable circumstances (a relaxation of the subject's habit of thought and a reduction of the radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme discouragement), if by some miracle of analogy the central impression of a past sensation recurs as an immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication (whose integral purity has been retained because it has been forgotten), then the total past sensation, not its echo nor its copy, but the sensation itself, annihilating every spacial and temporal restriction , comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion. (p. 54). Beckett...