Toward a Poetics of Television Technology: Beckett's Nacht und Träume and Quad

Toward a Poetics of Television Technology: Beckett's Nacht und Triiume and Quad ENOCH BRATER Written for and produced by Siiddeutscher Rundfunk in 1982 and transmitted on May 19, 1983, Beckett's Nacht und Triiume creates its unique atmosphere through the collaboration of specific musical and poetic motifs, a combination of the melodic structure of Ghost Trio with the lyrical pattern of ... but the clouds .... In Nacht und Triiume a male voice conveys Schubert's music, the last seven bars of a lied by the same name, while the poetry comes from Schubert's source, the Austrian writer 10sefHeinrich von Collin: "Come again olovely night ... Lovely dreams 0 come again."} The play focuses, as its title makes clear, on night and dreams; it opens with a black-and-white shot ofan old man sitting in still another "chamber" in the series Beckett has made so "familiar," a dark, empty room. Lit "only by evening light from a window set high in back wall," the work dispenses with written dialogue but speaks to us instead through the interplay of its two primary visual images, each one the mirror reflection of the other ("right profile," "left profile").2 The first one we encounter represents the dreamer (A), the second the dream, the dream felt in contrastto the "dreamt self' (B). B, as M1 sometimes does in ... but the clouds ... , appears on the screen to exhibit "the other outline," the dream image set against the waking world, recorded in this medium, inevitably and ironically, as merely another black-and-white illusion broadcast on the screen. Short as it is, thirty scripted directions involving five "elements" (evening light, A, B, "dreamt hands" and the last seven bars of the lied), Nacht und Triiume can nevertheless be divided into three scenes followed by the epilogue oftwo quick dissolves. The initial scene, which corresponds to the first shot we see, displays on the screen's left foreground the right profile ofa man faintly lit ("head bowed, grey hair"), seated alone at a table: "Clearly visible only head and hands and section of table on which they rest." Beckett discreetly refrains from filling up the frame, highlighting his "elements" by encircling them in a somber ring of televised darkness. Silence is broken; we hear a male voice Beckett's Nacht und Traiime and Quad 49 softly humming, followed by the direction, "Fade out evening light." In the diminishing light music changes its mask from "softly hummed" to "softly sung, with words." The melodic line can now be more precisely identified as Schubert's, in this case, the last three bars of the lied, beginning with "Holde Traume ... " (lovely dream). A bows his head further to rest on hands and remains minimally lit ("just visible") as his dream and scene two begin. A curtain ofeven fainter light delivers up A to the "deep sleep" ofFootfalls and of Hamm's story in Endgame: "Deep in sleep.... But deep in what sleep, deep in what sleep already?"3 The dream image, exhibiting the dreamer's left profile "faintly lit by a kinder light," is superimposed "well right of centre" on the upper comer of the screen, one shadow image intruding its uneasy presence on its simulacrum. The action of scene two is about to begin. As if it were a modernist version of some medieval religious painting, a "dreamt hand" appears above B's head from "dark beyond" and rests "gently" on it. B raises his head; then the mysterious hand, identified in the script only as "left" (L), just as mysteriously withdraws and disappears. From "the same dark" another hand, the right one (R) this time, appears with a cup and conveys it "gently" to B's lips: "B drinks, R disappears." R reappears with a cloth, wipes "gently" B's brow, then disappears with the cloth, bleeding out of the picture. B raises his head further to gaze, the script now confirms, at an "invisible face." The next six movements (12-17) outline the plot of the dream self's silent assignation: 12. B raises his right hand, still gazing up, and holds it raised palm upward. 13. R reappears and rests gently on B's right hand...