What is a Birth Astride a Grave?: Ohio Impromptu as Zen Koan

What is a Birth Astride a Grave?: Ohio Impromptu as Zen Koan JOHN L. KUNDERT-GIBBS Seeing into Nothingness - this is the true seeing, the eternal seeing. -Shen-Hui When, after the approximately ten minutes of static, nearly motionless monologue which comprises Ohio Impromptu,' we hear R pronounce "Nothing is left to tell," it is quite apparent that in this, one of Samuel Beckett's last plays, the author has taken yet another step toward the zero point of "Iessness" (to use his own term) to which he had been striving in his late works.' In previous plays like Footfalls, we can see a "winding down" of motion and interaction as May and V begin with dialogue and fairly consistent movement, only to (d)evolve into monologue, then silence and stillness in the final blank tableau. In Ohio Impromptu, however, the playas a totality apparently eliminates nearly aU motion and interaction between characters. Two characters, owning only the titles Land R, simply sit, R reading a story from a "worn volume" of two other, implicitly related characters who eventually sit and read from a "worn volume" themselves. In this quiet, "Noh-like" play,' the only motion and interaction we see for most of the play are L's knocks on the table at which they sit, which cause R to repeat the last sentence from the book he reads. We seem far here from the easier comprehensibility of Beckett's earlier, more physically active and representational plays like Waiting for Godor, yet Ohio Impromptu's internal narrative and physical representation are each remarkably straightforward (akin to the immediate context of, say, Catastrophe ). We hear a story of a man who tries, but fails, to escape the memory of his lost love by moving to what seems fairly obviously to be the right bank of the Seine river in Paris;4 after a time, he is successfully comforted by one sent from his Beloved, who comes to him at night and reads him a narrative from a Modern Droma, 40 (1997) 38 Beckett and Zen 39 "worn volume." We see two men sitting at a "white deal table" with a HBlack wide-brimmed hat" resting at its center, R reading from a book, L apparently listening (285). Why then the frustrating strangeness of the play? Quite simply because of slippage: slippage between what we see on stage and what we hear in R's narrative, slippage between the categories "play" and "fiction," slippage between past and future, and so on. Language, for example, slips between the expected (or read) and unexpected (or spontaneous): once, on reading the odd, quintessentially Beckettian sentence, "After so long a lapse that as if never been," R pauses, and then exclaims, "Yes" (286). As has been noted, this word is almost the only qualitative match to the title word, "impromptu," as it seems the only spontaneous event in R's speech. It is the "sudden appearance of the unanticipated"S which throws the movement of the playoff to a distant point. Moreover, even the static nature of the play itself is disrupted: ... [T]he visual image constitutes a[n apparently] stable point of reference throughout the perfonnance, but its essentially static nalure is undermined, firstly by the gestures, which introduce a dynamic element into the stage image, and which may radically affect, even challenge our interpretation of it, and also by the continual modification or [iterative] fe-view of the scenic image in light of the text.6 Image is effectively destabilized by action, and both are destabilized by the repeated words and images generated by the narrative read. Like the protagonist of the narrative who walks out to the Isle of Swans over and over seeking "some measure of relief" (285), the text replays words and "events," constantly affecting and altering the "reality" we see before us. In Ohio Impromptu, as with other of Beckett's late plays, there is no straightforward way to assign all our sensory information into any single set of complementary referents: Ohio Impromptu is multi-vocal (or, in Mikhail Bakhtin's word, polyvalent); its elements are in continuous flux, combining harmoniously and dissonantly as they rub against one another. The...