Silence in Beckett
Samuel Beckett famously characterised his work as “a stain upon the silence”. His entire career may be viewed as an attempt, if not to eradicate this stain, then to unrelentingly reduce it to its most essential, brutal components. Beckett was hyperaware of the wealth of meaning, of significance, associated with words, and the impossibility of conveying meaninglessness with tools that are inherently meaningful; as his theatre evolved through limited dialogue to monologue to wordlessness, he was engaged in an attempt to eviscerate words of their communicative power. In The Trilogy, Malone asserts: “It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness”; this is the fundamental goal of all Beckett’s characters, who are all stepping towards silence amid their crippledness and incarceration and heartbreak. Democritus wrote “Nothing is more real than nothing”: silence, emptiness is the only means by which Beckett can adequately realise his conception. Silence is viscerally, audibly present in all of the plays, gradually but insistently wrapping the entire stage; every image, rhythm and structure in the plays eventually degenerates into silence.
Each of the plays is a struggle, a struggle on the part of ‘words’ themselves to resist the steady advancement of the silence and nothingness. As Estragon pleads, “Expand, expand!” - supply new words to fill the void of which both audience and characters have now become aware in the lapse of conversation! All of Beckett’s scripts contain a vast array of pauses, as in the following passage from Krapp’s Last Tape:
Cut ‘em out! [pause] The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. [pause] In a way. [pause] I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to…[hesitates]…me. [pause] Krapp. [pause]
He is only barely able to keep both darkness and silence at bay; the pauses are almost deafening. Later, he ceases to record after realising that he is “recording silence” - an action that is of course futile, yet coming close to mimicry of Beckett’s function as playwright. In many cases, language visibly (or audibly) bends and deshapes under the force of the pauses, as in the following example from Embers:
Please! [pause] Begging. [pause] Of the poor. [pause] Ada! [pause] Father! [pause] Christ! [pause]
As ‘words’ inevitably lose the battle against the dominating silence, they degenerate into anguished, staccato bursts.
This violent interaction between communication and silence is found throughout Beckett’s dramatic work. Cascando features a dialogue between the two, voice and silence, that becomes almost a tug-of-war - there can be only one outcome, and the play ends in silence. In the repeat of Play that immediately succeeds the initial performance, the voices are weaker and the spotlights dimmer; again, any semblance of meaning or structure is gradually overpowered by and dissolved into the all-encasing entropy of silence and darkness. In the final lines of Eh Joe, the voice becomes “almost inaudible” (stage direction): silence and insilence coalesce into unity.
It can in fact be argued that the most successful of Beckett’s plays are the silent ones, in terms of most effectively capturing his artistic vision. Act Without Words I features a protagonist who, alone on the stage, is assailed with a variety of objects from the wings and fly gallery; he attempts to engage with them - to discover their pattern, the basis on which they operate, their significance - fails, attempts to commit suicide, fails, and is left on the stage perplexed: this perhaps represents Beckett’s perspective on existence at least as accurately as any of the spoken plays.
When Beckett does actually use language, it is really one step away from silence. His lines display a marked absence of subjects/objects, and an even greater absence of finite clauses - thus obliterating any indications of context. The language is adrift in a sea of antispecificity, devoid of the linguistic anchors that reveal tense, person, address and viewpoint; by removing these anchors, Beckett devoids language of its communicative capacity, leaving his characters to curse and mumble aimlessly and emptily before they are subsumed into the silence.
It would be quite wrong to suggest that silence in Beckett is mere absence, nothingness, and no more. In his scripts, he meticulously assigns length to his silences, whether five seconds or ten seconds: nothingness cannot possess a quantity, therefore it is not nothingness. Silence, for Beckett, is in fact a mode of juxtaposition: an insistent presence undermining the characters’ attempts to form meaning from their perceptions. Beckett often employed analogies between literature/drama and music, and perhaps one is appropriate here: in music it is the pauses that are sometimes the most powerful - the moment when the accumulated feeling finally solidifies into meaning.
Bram van Velde, a painter who formed a close friendship with Beckett, once remarked: ‘Words, they're just noise. Even little children get taught to make noise.’ Beckett’s artistic goal was to annihilate this noise. Silence in Beckett is impotence, an inability or unwillingness to act, a Hamletian recognition of the profound ludicrosity of action of any kind. It is a refusal to respond - a supreme indifference in the face of the horror of existence. Harold Pinter has spoken of speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence; whereas most of drama as a whole could be viewed as a series of attempts to cover this nakedness through a variety of intricate means, Beckett chooses to simply display it.
Each of the plays is a struggle, a struggle on the part of ‘words’ themselves to resist the steady advancement of the silence and nothingness. As Estragon pleads, “Expand, expand!” - supply new words to fill the void of which both audience and characters have now become aware in the lapse of conversation! All of Beckett’s scripts contain a vast array of pauses, as in the following passage from Krapp’s Last Tape:
Cut ‘em out! [pause] The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. [pause] In a way. [pause] I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to…[hesitates]…me. [pause] Krapp. [pause]
He is only barely able to keep both darkness and silence at bay; the pauses are almost deafening. Later, he ceases to record after realising that he is “recording silence” - an action that is of course futile, yet coming close to mimicry of Beckett’s function as playwright. In many cases, language visibly (or audibly) bends and deshapes under the force of the pauses, as in the following example from Embers:
Please! [pause] Begging. [pause] Of the poor. [pause] Ada! [pause] Father! [pause] Christ! [pause]
As ‘words’ inevitably lose the battle against the dominating silence, they degenerate into anguished, staccato bursts.
This violent interaction between communication and silence is found throughout Beckett’s dramatic work. Cascando features a dialogue between the two, voice and silence, that becomes almost a tug-of-war - there can be only one outcome, and the play ends in silence. In the repeat of Play that immediately succeeds the initial performance, the voices are weaker and the spotlights dimmer; again, any semblance of meaning or structure is gradually overpowered by and dissolved into the all-encasing entropy of silence and darkness. In the final lines of Eh Joe, the voice becomes “almost inaudible” (stage direction): silence and insilence coalesce into unity.
It can in fact be argued that the most successful of Beckett’s plays are the silent ones, in terms of most effectively capturing his artistic vision. Act Without Words I features a protagonist who, alone on the stage, is assailed with a variety of objects from the wings and fly gallery; he attempts to engage with them - to discover their pattern, the basis on which they operate, their significance - fails, attempts to commit suicide, fails, and is left on the stage perplexed: this perhaps represents Beckett’s perspective on existence at least as accurately as any of the spoken plays.
When Beckett does actually use language, it is really one step away from silence. His lines display a marked absence of subjects/objects, and an even greater absence of finite clauses - thus obliterating any indications of context. The language is adrift in a sea of antispecificity, devoid of the linguistic anchors that reveal tense, person, address and viewpoint; by removing these anchors, Beckett devoids language of its communicative capacity, leaving his characters to curse and mumble aimlessly and emptily before they are subsumed into the silence.
It would be quite wrong to suggest that silence in Beckett is mere absence, nothingness, and no more. In his scripts, he meticulously assigns length to his silences, whether five seconds or ten seconds: nothingness cannot possess a quantity, therefore it is not nothingness. Silence, for Beckett, is in fact a mode of juxtaposition: an insistent presence undermining the characters’ attempts to form meaning from their perceptions. Beckett often employed analogies between literature/drama and music, and perhaps one is appropriate here: in music it is the pauses that are sometimes the most powerful - the moment when the accumulated feeling finally solidifies into meaning.
Bram van Velde, a painter who formed a close friendship with Beckett, once remarked: ‘Words, they're just noise. Even little children get taught to make noise.’ Beckett’s artistic goal was to annihilate this noise. Silence in Beckett is impotence, an inability or unwillingness to act, a Hamletian recognition of the profound ludicrosity of action of any kind. It is a refusal to respond - a supreme indifference in the face of the horror of existence. Harold Pinter has spoken of speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence; whereas most of drama as a whole could be viewed as a series of attempts to cover this nakedness through a variety of intricate means, Beckett chooses to simply display it.