Visual Field in Beckett's Late Plays

Visual Field in Beckett's Late Plays Stanton B. Garner, Jr. Samuel Beckett, we know, is an author deeply interested in the visual arts. A frequenter of museums, "more at home in the company of painters than that of writers," he has revealed this passion through a wealth of textual allusions.1 But Beckett's temperament is more profoundly visual than the study of influence might suggest, his investigation of the visual image more original and direct. To appreciate this directness, we look to the plays, for the theater's dual status as literary and visual medium allows Beckett to counterpoint his exploration of language with a parallel study of vision, as it is actualized within the theatrical mise-en-scène. Few dramatists have assumed such control over the theatrical image, the arrangement of its elements and the articulation of its form. The minimalist stage specifications of Waiting for Godot {"A country road. A tree." [p. 6a])2 relinquish much to the discretion of director and designer, but with Endgame Beckett appropriated a supervision of stage image that he has retained throughout his dramatic career and exercised with a painter's sensitivity to visual composition.3 Framed in tableau, the opening set of this play represents a performance field conceived with pictorial precision: its contours boldly rectangular, with walls, door, symmetrical windows, and reversed picture; its frontal plane laterally weighted by the trash bins and the stationary figure of Clov, both flanking the centric chair covered with an old sheet. Coherent in its spatial conception , the set of Endgame opposes two visual principles: on one hand, a geometric strictness of line and plane, arranged with an almost chessboard regularity of grid; and, on the other hand, the entropie scatteredness of object (toque, rug, toy dog, gaff), the muting grey light, and the bent shapelessness of human STANTON B. GARNER, JR., is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He has published articles on medieval, renaissance, and modern drama, and has recently completed a study entitled The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater. 349 350Comparative Drama form. As Clov and Hamm traverse this stage space in straight lines and right angles, they define themselves within the compositional tensions of their visual world. Beckett's subsequent career as a dramatist has shown a deepening of this attention to the theatrical image and to its specifically visual components and effects. Through Krapp's Last Tape, Play, and Come and Go, Beckett's specifications concerning location, formal arrangement, movement, and lighting become increasingly detailed, fixing the performance image more precisely as compositional entity. But it is in the plays of the 70's and 80's that Beckett's interest in play as image—as structure of visual forces and object of perceptual activity— displays itself most acutely. Language continues to govern the aural and imaginative dimensions of these plays, but these dimensions, and the eddying stream of Beckett's words, are increasingly subordinated to visual modes of address. The late plays as a group are filled with references to eyes and to the shapes and colors of visual appearance, while their verbs often mirror the audience's own attempts to see: look, watch, see, observe, stare, peer, gaze, gape, "all the eyes passing over you." "[TJhere before your eyes," says one of the voices in That Time (p. 229), and his phrase is one of many in late Beckett that call attention to the performance image of something seen, by an actual audience facing an actual stage, within a medium that is, etymologically, a "seeing-place" (theatron). It is telling, in this respect, that the texts of Beckett's late plays abandon the conventional designations of "stage left" and "stage right" for descriptions that specify location "as seen from house" (What Where, p. 310), thereby establishing the theatrical image from the audience's point of view. This article will explore some of the principles governing the organization of visual field in Beckett's eight theater pieces from Not I (1972) through What Where (1983). Rather than considering these plays sequentially (as Enoch Brater has ably done in his recent study Beyond Minimalism) ,4 I will consider the more important...