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In 1998 the Beckett scholar Lois Oppenheim asked me to write an essay for her forthcoming collection Samuel Beckett and the Arts. This was a tantalizing prospect: both the visual arts and music are central to Beckett’s work. But I chose to explore another arena—the radio plays—to see how they differ from Beckettian theatre. My contribution was a study of Embers. Then in 2003 when Ruben Gallo at Princeton invited me to a conference specifically on radio, I wrote a paper on the more problematic radio piece Words and Music, for which Morton Feldman wrote the score. The essay below brings the two radio studies together. 6 “The Silence that is not Silence” Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays The primary purpose of radio is to convey information from one place to another through the intervening media (i.e., air space, nonconducting materials ) without wires. New Columbia Encyclopedia Thesis: The phonograph emphasizes the self in the lack of subject. This machine bears a paradox: it identi¤es a voice, ¤xes the deceased (or mortal ) person, registers the dead and thus perpetuates his living testimony, but also achieves his automatic reproduction in absentia: my self would live without me—horror of horrors! Charles Grivel, “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth” The Samuel Beckett who began to write radio plays in the mid-¤fties was no stranger to the medium: in Roussillon, where he lived in hiding from 1942 to 1945, the radio transmitter was the crucial information conduit for Resistance groups, and the BBC, which was to commission the radio plays, was its main source.1 Half a century later, as the New Columbia Encyclopedia reminds us, radio is still primarily an information medium, a conductor of messages, whether news ®ashes, announcements of events, weather reports, and today the ubiquitous “sigalerts” that advise the driver about freeway conditions and traf¤c accidents even as they are taking place. All the more reason, then, for the radio artist—and Beckett is surely one of the ¤nest—to turn this information function, this relaying of messages from A to B, inside out. “Communication,” writes Michel Serres, “is only possible between two persons used to the same forms, trained to code and decode a meaning by using the same key.”2 But communication is never without disruption: “in spoken languages: stammerings, mispronunciations, regional accents, dysphonias, and cacophonies. . . . In the technical means of communication: background noise, jamming, static, cut-offs, heteresis, various interruptions. If static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication ” (“Platonic Dialogue” 66). “To communicate orally” is thus “to lose meaning in noise.” Only at the level of mathematical abstraction, when form (e.g., the symbol x or the addition sign +) is distinguished from its empirical realizations, is dialogue entirely “successful.” But “to exclude the empirical is to exclude differentiation, the plurality of others that mask the same” (9), and it is those “others”—the interference and noise that everywhere blocks the straightforward A > B model of transmission—that really matter in the communication paradigms that we actually use. “The transmission of communication,” writes Serres, “is chronic transformation. . . . the empirical is strictly essential and accidental noise” (70). The notion of “noise” as “the empirical portion of the message” is by no means con¤ned to radio, but we see it heightened in this medium where everything depends upon sound, primarily the sound of the human voice as communicator. Martin Esslin, who worked closely with Beckett on his BBC productions and has written extensively on the radio plays, argues that “radio is an intensely visual medium. . . . Information that reaches [the listener ] through other senses is instantly converted into visual terms. And aural experiences, which include the immense richness of language as well as musical and natural sound, are the most effective means of triggering visual images.”3 This may be true of the more mimetic variants of radio drama—Beckett’s ¤rst radio play, All That Fall, is a case in point—but what happens when, as Klaus Schöning points out in a discussion of the new acoustic art, words are combined with “nontextual language, nonverbal articulations , quotation, original sound [i.e., ambient sound], environmental noises, acoustic objets trouvés, musical tones, [and] electronic technology”?4 What do we visualize then? Beckett’s radio experiments did not, of course, go as far as, say, John Cage’s Roaratorio (one of Schöning’s key exhibits) in undermining the conventional linguistic base, but the dramatist was surely aware that...

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