"White World. Not a Sound": Beckett's Radioactive Text in Embers

A common starting point when considering Samuel Beckett's radio pieces is the author's 1957 letter to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, urging him to prevent theatrical adaptations of his radio play All That Fall.¹ Critics frequently cite Beckett's insistence that "we . . . keep our genres more or less distinct" and that staging this radio play "will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing's coming out of the dark" (qtd. in Zilliacus, Beckett frontispiece). Lost amidst analysis of these strictures concerning genre has been the fact that Beckett avoids calling All That Fall a play: "All That Fall is a specifically radio play, or rather radio text, for voices, not bodies" (qtd. in Zilliacus, Beckett frontispiece). Why, we might ask, does Beckett back off from the term "radio play," opting instead for "radio text"?

One possible answer is that Beckett's radio works bear less relation to his stage drama than their inclusion within collections and studies of his dramatic works suggests. Hugh Kenner writes that, in the middle of Beckett's experiments with radio writing, in April 1958, "The Unnamable and the Textes Pour Rien had placed him in an impasse where he could not possibly write another novel" (Samuel Beckett 25), implying that during this period of dramatic fecundity Beckett was also contemplating the limits and possibilities of his fiction (and, indeed, he soon resolved his novelistic impasse, though painfully, with Comment C'est, begun eight months later). Kenner does not go as far as to link Beckett's radio pieces with his prose writing, but he hints at a connection when he writes, "Beckett turned to radio drama at a crest of preoccupation with the fact that for him to live was to make stories, creating with words beings not himself, but perfecting his own identity in perfecting their words" (Samuel Beckett 168). "Stories," here, does not necessarily refer to Beckett's prose fiction—those works designed to be read on the page rather than performed theatrically. If we look closely at Beckett's radio pieces, however, we find that texts—in the sense of objects containing writing—play a significant, if sometimes subtle, role in them. Whether or not these texts-within-the-plays warrant a change in classification from "radio plays" to "radio texts," they do suggest that Beckett's wireless writings gave him an opportunity to explore the potential of textual representation and that, therefore, his radio plays may be as relevant to discussions of Beckett's fiction as to those concerning his dramatic canon.

The most significant texts in Beckett's radio pieces appear in Pochade Radiophonique (called Rough for Radio II in its English translation) and Embers, the former written in the early 1960s and the latter in 1957.² These works bracket Beckett's writing of Comment C'est (1958–60), his first novel in roughly a decade, and Krapp's Last Tape (written 1958), a stage play related to Beckett's radio work through its use of sound-recording technology. While this article will focus on Embers, a play with one very short but, I will argue, very significant mention of a text, Rough for Radio II will serve to introduce Beckett's exploration of the characteristics and possibilities of the written word, which he undertook in a purely aural medium that by its nature effaces the visible text.

Rough for Radio II tells the story of a male-female pair, Animator and Stenographer, engaged in the arduous and apparently futile effort of constructing a story by precisely transcribing the words of a captive character named Fox, with the help of their silent, whip-wielding partner, Dick, who "functions" as a goad to keep Fox talking. The scenario of a victim performing under duress is fairly common in Beckett's oeuvre, but Stenographer's old-fashioned pencil-and-paper recording of Fox's words is somewhat surprising, especially in a new-media work written after Krapp's Last Tape had placed a tape recorder in a central role on stage. But while a...