-
One Mirror Is "Not Enough" in Beckett's Footfalls and Ohio Impromptu
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 1993
- pp. 368-382
- 10.1353/mdr.1993.0033
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
One Mirror Is "Not Enough" in Beckett's Footfalls and Ohio Impromptu HOON-SUNG HWANG on all that strand at end of day steps sole sound long sole sound until unbidden stay then no sound on all that strand long no sound until unbidden go steps sole sound long sole sound on all that strand at end of day ("Roundelay") At nightfall, the poet hears footsteps on the strand. Then the silence falls and continues until broken by the "unbidden go." The poet hears the sound resume "at end of day." The referential meaning of this short poem composed in 1976 looks very simple and obvious. The reader's attempt to interpret it is, however, stranded on the reef of an echoing structure. Besides the reiteration of a few motif lines, the poem has a verbal and structural echoing: verbally, the reader hears triple resonances of the sound on the strand, the footsteps ("sole sound"), the only sound ("sale sound"), and the implied sound of soul ("soul sound"); structurally, the poem has a ripple structure, which can spread out in circles ever and again. The centre of the rippling is the line, "on all that strand (A)," from which the other lines resound through the poem, as seen in the following diagram: Modern Drama, 36 (1993) 368 One Mirror Is "Not Enough" A (B IC (CI [D (E (A) EI) DI] C) CII A) B In' Beckett's stage world, word echoes word, sentence echoes sentence, scene echoes scene, act echoes act, character doubles character, the embedded text mirrors the enclosing text, the stage scene mirrors the auditorium, and finally the stage action echoes the mise-ell-abyme text. This "echo principle" is mentioned by many Beckett critics: James Knowlson, for example, discusses the parallelism and repetition in Footfalls, in terms of "an echo principle" that "confer[s] shape and strength on a work which inevitably appears lacking in the interest derived from conventional narrative or delineation of character ."] Beckett's dramatic text thus becomes "a musical score" with a set of variations on a few specific motifs (words, phrases, characters, scenes).' Knowlson's insight, when fully developed, points to one of the most crucial aspects of Beckett's aesthetics. Knowlson's discussion of the echo principle is, however, confined to verbal and visual imagery manifested on the level of word, sentence, and character; further, his interpretation is based on a formalistic approach, which does not touch on a philosophical and cultural implication of this phenomenon. Ruby Cohn's view is more comprehensive: she subsumes all types of echoing in Beckett's drama into a felicitous terin, "resonance," not a single but multiple variation of echoing. Beckett's "resonance " culminates in his adoption of "theatereality, in which the dramatic fiction embraces the physical reality of the theater."3 This is an attempt to "theatricalize his [Beckett's] vision of the human situation," which is, according to Cohn, less to be formulated theoretically than to be experienced theatrically.' This paper is a semiotic investigation into the textual phenomena of resonance manifested in Beckett's two late masterpieces - Footfalls and Ohio Impromptu - which point to the auto-referentiality of sign. In other words, the echoing or mirroring sign refers to the preceding sign, failing to have its own referent. More precisely, the echoing sign comes to have a meta-function through highlighting the way the preceding sign represents an object, subsequently attenuating the referentiality of the echoed sign. The text, robbed of its mimetic function, is gradually transformed into a pure play of signifiers; this play in Beckett's late drama is immensely varied, since it involves the whole process of theatre communication. Little wonder that Beckett, fascinated by this "multidimensional semiotic field of the image" in dramatic performance , gradually turned his back on "the linearity of discursive speech" in narrative fiction.5 In order to illuminate the complex nature of Beckett's resonance, I propose a concept, i.e., reflexivity. which subsumes various phenomena such as echoing. mirroring. mise ell abyrne, and theatereality. Reflexivity is a philosophical term for "the mind [or the narrative] turning back on its states and actions,,6 or a linguistic term which refers to '[t]he...