Rockaby and the Art of Inadvertent Interpretation

Rockaby and the Art of Inadvertent Interpretation JONATHAN KALB Eclipsed among the millions of critical words that have been lavished on Samuel Beckett is an uncomfortable and frequently avoided question: on what level can spectators be expected to understand his theater? Some·critics have tried to address this issue by pointing out parallels between the dilemmas of Beckett's characters and those ofhis audiences, with limited success, but I want to shift the field of inquiry by discussing affinities between the actor's process of creating characters in rehearsal and the spectator's process of apprehending plays in performance. I focus predominantly on Rockaby, because Billie Whitelaw's extraordinary performance is well documented and also because there is an important article by Charles Lyons about the process of perceiving this play. I Lyons's essay, which has application to Beckett's other works as well , is to my knowledge unique in its detail concerning perception, yet strangely it does not mention Whitelaw at all despite the fact that her kind of acting figures hugely in the process described. In Rockaby a woman, dressed in black and "Prematurely old," sits in a rocking chair alone on a dark stage.2 Though her feet do not touch the floor, the chair rocks on its own to the soothing regular rhythm of tape-recorded lines spoken in a woman's voice. As the play opens she says "More," and the rocking begins, seemingly in response to her word. During the next fifteen minutes, the play's approximate length, the rocking slows to a stop four times and the woman reacts each time but the last by saying "More," after which the rocking immediately restarts; the final time her head slowly sinks as the taped voice echoes more and more faintly. The recorded text, separated by the "Mores" into four sections, is repetitive, like a litany, and tells of a woman who goes "to and fro," looking "for anotherl another like herself," until "in the endl the day came . . . when she saidl to herselfl whom elsel time she stopped"; on some repetitions of "time she stopped" the woman speaks along with the tape. The voice goes on to describe her going "back in" (presumably she was outside) to Rockaby and the Art of Inadvertent Interpretation 467 sit at her window "facing other windows! other only windows" looking for "another like herself! a little like! another living soul," but finding "all blinds down! never one up." In the final section we hear that she "went down! .. . down the steep stair! ... into the old rocker! mother rocker! where mother sat! all the years! all in black! ... off her head they said! ... and rocked." Thus "in the end," as she rocked "off' seemingly toward death, she "was her own other! own other living soul"! - "other" asserting itself in the theater as a rhyme for "mother," The action is richly ambiguous. We hear a moving, almost sentimental tale but are not sure what the action onstage has to do with it; we are given insufficient evidence to determine either who the stage character is or if she has really died. We hear near the end that she ultimately came to function as "her own other," so we naturally reconsider the preceding story in that light and suspect that its third person point of view is a result of her having become at some point past "her own other"; like the narrator in Company, she "speaks of [her]self as of another." This possible split in the character is suggested to us in very conventional terms, similar to the age-old practice of suddenly unveiling new information about a character's background near the end of a drama, but it is more unsettling than that because it raises the possibility that the voice is lying - in the sense that many Beckett narrators lie (in The Unnamable, Company, Cascando, and many other works), by making up tales that seem somehow connected to their survival while also functioning as pastimes. The mention of "mother" rocking permits several different responses: we may conflate mother and daughter, viewing the woman as a composite character who symbolizes certain tendencies passed down through all generations...