The Rip Word in A Piece of Monologue

The Rip Word in A Piece ofMonologue KRISTIN MORRISON In APiece ofMonologue, , Beckett uses the puzzling phrase "Waiting on the rip' word" (p. 4). A number of times throughout this short play he has included unusual words or unusual usages (the archaic term "haught" [po 41, the medical "nevoid" [po 31, the remote "spill" [po 3]), as well as allusions to other literature or to well-known phrases. And often in these various word-plays there lurks a pun. The verbal play around "rip word" gives shape and point to this fluid piece of monologue. "Rip-tide" is an ordinary phrase; "rip word," a surprise that yields its meaning by comparison with the more familiar. The Oxford English Dictionary in its definition of the noun "rip" as "A disturbed state of the sea ..." makes reference to the verb form, which includes after the more immediate meanings of violent slashing or tearing the figurative meanings "To open up, lay bare, disclose, make known ..." and "To open up, rake up, bring up again into notice or discussion (esp. something unpleasant or which is to a person's discredit).'" Thus just as one "waits on the tide" for an appropriate flow , so here the speaker waits on the rip word, that word which will lay bare what is at the critical center of his monologue. The rip word is that disturbance in the flow of language which reveals what is hidden, the unpleasant or discreditable truth which may be disguised or submerged but never completely evaded. The rip word is a break in the surface of the drama which reveals the truth of motives, feelings, themes. The rip word in APiece ofMonologue is "begone" (p. 4), that word by which the speaker dismisses from his life that which he has always really wanted. Now, at eighty-two, the speaker tells a "story" of a man so much like himself that it is clear he is simply speaking of himself in the third person.3 (This old man, like the old woman in Not I, seems unable to face himself, to reckon with the personal nature of what he relates, always taking refuge in "he," never saying "r.") His story summarizes in its opening sentence a theme which 350 KRISTIN MORRISON permeates all of Beckett's previous drama: "Birth was the death ofhim" (p. I). The two poles of his life are funeral and funeral (to use words from an earlier play, "They give birth astride of a grave .....).4 This old man, speaker and subject, appears to be an invalid, confined to his room ifnot always to his bed. He is dressed in a white nightgown and white socks, which he wears night and day; his chief furniture is a bed and a lamp, and his chief vistas are a darkened window and a blank wall. His chief preoccupation is his parents, their absent presence in his life, and their deaths. There are five main anecdotes in the story the speaker tells, four of which involve memories of the past and one of which occurs in the time-present of the narrative. The first past event has to do with the old man's infancy: "At suck first fiasco. With the first totters. From mammy to nanny and back. All the way. Bandied back and forth. So ghastly grinning on" (p. J). The anecdote depicted is that ofan infant's learning to walk, but the phrase "ghastly grinning" suggests a skull, not a baby; this death imagery is appropriate, however, to his sense that "Birth was the death of him" and that his progress - "on" - is from "funeral to funeral" (p. J). This opening section ofthe play establishes a grim infancy with an even grimmer goal: as he lies in his crib he is grinning "Up at the lid to come" (p. I, not at "the life to come" which that phrase echoes). The coffin in his future is already present. The second event from the past involves his tearing up pictures of his family which he had had pinned to the wall: "Down one after another. Gone. Torn to shreds and scattered. Strewn all over the floor. Not at one sweep. No...