Chapter 12
Sara Jane Bailes
(one)
Friendship is not a gift, or a promise; it is not a form of generosity. Rather, this incommensurable relation of one to the other is the outside drawing near to its separateness and inaccessibility. Desire, pure impure desire, is the call to bridge the distance, to die in common through separation.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
On the cover of Samuel Beckett’s short play, Ohio Impromptu, written in English in 1980, is a black and white photograph, a still from the play’s original production at Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1981.1 The image still captivates me, even as I recall it, as it did from the moment I first set eyes on it in the 1989 Grove Press paperback edition where the play is published along with two of Beckett’s other ‘shorts’, Catastrophe (1982) and What Where (1983), the latter the final playtext Beckett wrote. It is both an arresting image and an image of arrest: it captures the imagination for the way in which its subjects seem detained by something they are nevertheless willing to endure, compliant in their resistance. As with many of Beckett’s figures, particularly in the later works, they appear stone-like, fixed, unmovable, unmoving. My recollection of the image is this: two old men, who appear almost identical, are seated at a large, white table. Each wears a black coat. Both have improbably long white hair. Their posture is almost identical: they appear to be one and the same figure; they mirror one another though they are not the same. These two figures possess a quality of reclusiveness, cloistered, as if over time and for many years they have drawn back from the everyday world, receding into a state of diminished existence. One sits at the end of the white table, the other at its side to the right of the first. Their heads are bowed, each propped up by the right hand, the same but different. The position of the hand is remarkable in that one’s attention is drawn to it: it appears to prop up the head and shade the brow and eyes, hiding each figure’s face by casting a downwards shadow that conceals the eyes. The image suggests a profound weariness and a desire to retreat from perception – from perceiving as from being perceived, and to withdraw from the light. They do not look; they listen. The left hand of each figure lies at rest on the table. Yet despite its depiction of a weariness one might associate with prolonged attention to a situation, the image also depicts a mood that is imminent and expectant: the figures are engaged in an activity that is unfinished and it is unclear when it began or how it will end. In front of the man seated at the top end of the table an unusually large book lies open on what appears to be its final pages which are lined with faint print. The figure who sits before the book looks as if he is beginning to read, or perhaps he is approaching an end. Perhaps the other listens. They are united in a state of apprehension. The presence of the book distinguishes them: it sets them apart and brings them together. It provides the bridging of a distance between them. In the foreground of the image a large black, wide-brimmed hat sits on the table.
(two)
++ They take seats, separated by a table, turned not toward one another, but opening, around the table that separates them, an interval large enough that another person might consider himself their true interlocutor, the one for whom they would speak if they addressed themselves to him: ‘Forgive me for having asked you to come to see me. I had something to say to you, but at present I feel so weary that I’m afraid I am unable to express myself.’ – ‘You are feeling very weary?’ – ‘Yes, weary.’ – ‘And this came upon you suddenly?’ – ‘To tell the truth, no, and if I even took the liberty of calling you, it was because of this weariness, because it seemed to me that it would facilitate the conversation. I was even entirely sure of this, and still now I am almost sure of it. Only I had not realized that what weariness makes possible, weariness makes difficult.’2
Many years later, as I began to read the above text which follows the preliminary ‘Note’ in Maurice Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation, a familiar narrative unfolded of two weary men, separate yet bound together by the limits and necessity of a conversation they seem compelled to continue. A strange feeling, in reading Blanchot, of having been here before: the image of two men, aged, weary, conscious of their weariness yet brought to consciousness by virtue of its existence, came back to me. Sat at a table, each propping up his forehead with hand, with long white hair falling upon shoulders, the two figures, Reader (R) and Listener (L), from Beckett’s dramaticule, Ohio Impromptu, now seemed to illustrate Blanchot’s articulation of two weary figures encountering one another. In the act of reading – itself a form of visual ‘listening’ or ingesting conducted through the ocular exchange between eye and text – my encounter with Blanchot’s text returned me to this earlier Beckettian double-act. Reading The Infinite Conversation, which Blanchot wrote in 1969 in French, I experienced a prolonged, ekphrastic moment, albeit inverted, where the image as described above seemed to precede the subject of the text, hovering in my mind’s eye as I now read it. Blanchot’s text ‘appeared’ by way of the recollected image. Weeks later, I was many pages into Blanchot’s discussion of the ontology of writing as the outside of discourse, where literature is understood as that which exists beyond everyday language inventing a reality of its own, a discussion he unravels in prose which transports comprehension to the edges of abstraction. Unable to forget the Beckettian image, I gave in to my own curiosity and retrieved a copy of Ohio Impromptu in order to revisit it by seeing it again and in order to reread the playtext and listen to its reverberation, recovering from it what it wished to tell. In that moment, it was as if I had never ceased reading the play. Here, now, I was simply resuming a conversation.
When Deleuze speaks of the ‘visions’ and ‘auditions’ of language in ‘Literature and Life’, referring to them as the ‘veritable Ideas that the writer sees and hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals’, one is reminded instantly of the musicality of language and image as abstract materials that ‘become’ or come to life through resonance and reverberations that are peculiar to literature. Literature proposes an act of composition in which one is never singular. It is conversant, a mode of transmission that carries us beyond language itself, much as music, when performed, is able to transport the listener far beyond the organization of notes upon a page. There is a sense, too, that such visions and auditions take place not only within the works of one writer but across different texts and literatures, as if one writer calls to another, either blindly or with conscious intent.3 This, then, might be one way to begin thinking about the function of the reader: as a mediator or conductor, as one who steps in like an operator to connect a call. In the company of Blanchot and Beckett, visions and auditions correspond through word, idea and image both through the acts as well as in the depiction of the acts of reading and listening as corresponding states of attentive apprehension. That is, the processes of reading and listening are doubled: performed (by the actual reader/spectator) and performative (performed within the text the reader reads or sees performed). The event of reading becomes central to both writers, this event the very focus of the drama of these two texts.
(three)
What does it mean to say that one reads? That is, when reading a text, what is it we are actually doing or, as Blanchot phrases the demand, ‘what happens to the one who is reading?’4 This gestures towards a number of considerations that motivate the concerns of this chapter: to think about the way that the implicit dialogic structure of reading and listening as dramatized in Ohio Impromptu resembles a musical ‘call’ and ‘response’ that opens up the text to meanings which occur beyond the spoken dialogue between R and L. Ohio Impromptu is scored in such a way that its movement – its motivation – seems to issue from beyond the text that appears central to the drama, that is, the book that is being read aloud by R to L. How does this brief playtext establish a series of open circuits that reveal not only the story to be told, but also the impulse that moves Reader to read and Listener to hear and then to interrupt (in order to hear better) and then to once again continue? In the stark predicament Beckett creates for the play, he calls our attention not to the story itself – a sort of red herring – but to what occurs, that is, what presents itself between Reader and Listener. Yet without the reading of this surrogate text (the story written in the book which R continues to read to L) this other text, an invisible score that exists prior to the reading of the book, would not become apparent. It becomes evident through the interruptions with which Beckett punctuates the text which are indexed by Listener’s knocks upon the table. Interruption operates as rhythmic response, as both a halting mechanism and a permissive beat: L knocks, R pauses, then repeats a sentence, L knocks again, R pauses or continues. Interruption arrives as a form of interlocution and as the intervention of an ‘other’ through a signal (Listener’s ‘knock’) that Reader should cease reading in order that the act of listening may be repeated. The tenuous transportations of language underscore our separateness from each other in the moment in which they become necessary, an idea central to Blanchot’s thinking about the possibilities of literature. This same notion is palpably and physically rendered through Beckett’s plays. Yet it is these same transportations that also remind us of the human desire to memorialize and to remain. Writer and translator Alberto Manguel describes literature as ‘civic action’, for it is preservative, it is ‘memory’. In that sense reading can be understood as our attempts to ‘reclaim[ing] the right to this human immortality’.5 Reading and listening instigate an act of sharing, yet what of the status of those (silent) images that are released by words and which are attendant upon language as ghostlike reverberations around them, articulating literature in that particularly intimate and haunted space that opens up between writer and reader yet which remains private? In the very act of reading there is much at stake that moves beyond the temporally situated act itself which is activated or paused by the opening and the closing of the book. Words are a distraction away from the subject that wishes to be discussed, yet that same interference can lead towards the profounder meanings of a text and its production.
In The Infinite Conversation Blanchot keeps calling the reader to attention as reader, stalling and reminding one, in the offer of the book, of the task taken on to which one might now be committed: the attempt to understand what it is to read. Not that Blanchot makes light of this endeavour. He states: ‘The book is a night that would become a day: a dark star, unilluminable and calmly giving light. Reading transforms into light that which is not of the order of illumination.’6 A darkened tread, then, into the spill of light from a dark star. By considering Blanchot and Beckett’s texts together, I am interested in the way that reading – its fictional representation and the experience of the act itself – can be perceived as an attempt to create continuity at the same time as it performs a kind of interruption that takes place between image or the act of image-making and text; an interruption from Beckett, for example, while I began to read Blanchot, which marked my reading and which, at times, seemed paradoxically to articulate itself as an interruption from Blanchot reminding me that Beckett had never ceased being read. Many the year since I had immersed myself fully in the works of Beckett and here now this strange recall. Call waiting. Beckett on hold. The presence of Beckett’s writing as part of my reading recurs again through the act of writing, here and now. And so on. An infinite conversation or one that is at least without end, even if such conversations are punctuated by suspension or pause. So again I pose the question: What happens to the one who is reading? What does reading ask of us? How might reading and listening constitute an act that approximates the communicative modes of music with its ability to deliver resonant but abstract meaning?
(four)
No answer – no matter how persuasive – will ever have enough strength to resist indefinitely the question that sooner or later will summon it.
Edmond Jabès, Cut of Time
The ‘beginning’ of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation poses a riddle simply in the way that it commences for it does not announce itself as thus but retracts from a clear point of departure. The book begins with a ‘Note’ (by Blanchot) followed by what appears to be an eleven-page exchange printed in italics written in the third person singular. This narrative reports on the events of an encounter between two weary figures, one summoned by the other, who are engaged in a conversation that began ‘long ago’.7 Yet it remains unclear where the book itself begins and what the function of the figures (they are not quite ‘characters’) in this oblique, unannounced drama might be. (The situation parallels that of Ohio Impromptu). That question riddles its way through into the body of the text, beyond the foreword, the translator’s acknowledgments and into Section 1 of the book, ‘Plural Speech: The Speech of Writing’, through Blanchot’s intricate passages that quietly evacuate language, reducing it of its excess and crowded implications and connotations. Meaning constantly evades but returns to the reader as she moves forwards, almost as if it were ancillary, situated at the back of the words, carried by them but not of them. Reading The Infinite Conversation one begins to understand that certain conditions make possible the experience of understanding. The reader becomes aware of the impulse or movement towards communication (of speech, language, idiom or of the will itself) that seems compressed by Blanchot’s writing. An interrogative impetus is always already present in a text, it is insistent and it returns through the reader’s sustained encounter with the text: when does The Infinite Conversation begin? The question is, surely, always already there. (Then why ask it?)
Let me state certain conditions that seem obvious. The reader becomes aware of the presence of the question (when did this text begin?) as an answer upon opening a book: the book is a response. It is already a response. Opening the book-as-object one embarks upon a search – the quest of question – for the book as a book. The book must become a book beyond its material presence as an object in order to be a book. To know the book begins by locating its beginning and then having the sense of following it through to an end. It is to have understood its passage and content, its ‘order that submits to unity’ as Blanchot describes in the ‘Note’. Imagining that we are reading a book we settle and regard it with the eye of a reader, from the position of one who reads books and feels one knows what it is to read a book. This position is predicated on the assumption that we already understand how to read, not just that we are able to read. One assumes that there is something to read, something to be understood. Furthermore, we are aware that this something involves not only the words themselves, but the countless acts of memory provoked by reading that each individual brings to a text. This engagement approximates the act of listening to music, where the music itself may not denote anything literal at all, but the listener assumes that there is something to be understood and discovers this by engaging though listening. Yet the possibility of meanings remain dependent upon the web of extra-textual associations, memories and expectations that accompany each act of listening. Reading is a performative, receptive act but it is also constitutive, as is listening: both activities occur through (silent) doing. The Infinite Conversation challenges the very assumptions and conditions of reading. Turning its pages we may no longer read as we have read. We will be called upon to surrender the need to decipher language in a way that makes us feel in possession of the existence of meaning, to slacken our hold, therefore, as we proceed. Blanchot proposes a different set of relations, a structure of collaboration that beckons the reader into a kind of reciprocity that begins (and proceeds) without knowing and which is founded upon the ability to become present: ‘Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back before by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends.’8 Less an act of domination, it is a sustained and repeatable gesture of surrender through a specific kind of attendance.
Opening a book, one actualizes reading. The turn of each page repeats the act of summoning. We look for signs – headings, subheadings, footnotes, indicators. One reads a book as if it were a map to a country one already holds within. We wonder where and how it will begin, this infinite conversation – has it already begun? – this open journey, how it will launch itself, become familiar, and bring familiarity to what it describes. This is the immensity of the ‘when’ of the question, a spatial and temporal enquiry. Where will the encounter take place? How will Blanchot bring us in? When will the book have begun? When I read Blanchot, where has Beckett ended and Blanchot begun to be read? Reading Blanchot, I hear Beckett. In ‘III: The Absence of the Book (the Neutral, the Fragmentary)’, Blanchot’s final series of episodes in The Infinite Conversation, he turns to criticism and the writing of Sade and Beckett in a brief essay titled ‘Words Must Travel Far’.9 Here he proposes that certain books that are written are unreadable or at least not written to be read. Blanchot suggests, for example, that while Sade may have wished to be read, his books did not. Works such as these, ‘come closer … to the movement of writing and to the movement of reading’. The approach one must adopt to reading such texts is more akin to the auditory: ‘The term hearing would befit this act of approach better than reading. Behind the words that are read, as before the words written, there is a voice already inscribed, not heard, not speaking; and the author, close to this voice, is on an equal footing with the reader – each nearly merged with the other, seeking to recognize it.’10 For Blanchot, all writing is auditory, an act of listening. To a certain extent, a fact made evident by certain texts, writer and reader share in the same circumstance: to seek to recognize.
(five)
Ohio Impromptu begins with the following stage direction: ‘L=Listener. R=Reader. As alike in appearance as possible.’11 Reader and Listener are synchronous, ‘as alike … as possible’, duplicates, nearly identical though ambiguous in their similarity and ultimately separate. This separation necessitates an attempt to commune through the act of reading and listening to a text, and for each to bear witness to the other. As L listens to what the story tells, a tale of loss and mourning, R appears to become engaged by how the story is able to ‘tell’ and how one might prevent its ending (by knocking, by signalling for repetition). He seems to listen not only to the words of the text but to the absences it marks, for example, and the absence (of the reality of the events it remembers) its telling also communicates. The reader of the play (or spectator of its performance) cannot be sure of the identity of the subject of the story being told; whether it is autobiographical or not; whether these two are one and the same or not; or whether the protagonist (referred to as ‘he’) represents L, while the visitor in the story, who comes to L and reads, is R. The way in which the words read aloud by R and listened to by L can be understood is complicated by the formal composition of the play. It remains deliberately ambiguous whether the tale recounts details from L’s or R’s life or whether we should understand them as one. In addition, the conditions that make possible a ‘real’ exchange (of spontaneous dialogue, for example) are denied the protagonists: everything is instead mediated by the presence of the book which sits between the two characters. Yet it is also the book’s presence that enables both the story and their story (in the here-and-now temporality of the play, reading and listening) to go on. The story within the book – possibly fictional, possibly a memoir and intended to allow for both to be assumed – acts as transmitter between the two and, within the structure of the play, as a script within a script. It establishes the text’s metatheatricality while underscoring the tension between absence and presence (of identity) that haunts the play. The terms used to describe the characters – Listener (who we presume listens) and Reader (who we presume reads) – and the promise of something to be told suggested by their reciprocal pairing limits the possibilities. Of what can the characters speak? What manner of meaning will their exchange convey? Will they, rather, bear witness to the emptiness of language, as many Beckett characters do, nevertheless presiding over that void, or will they instead replace impromptu speech with the recitation of an already written text that has (possibly) already been heard? If there is something to read, a tale to tell, who has authored the text? In other words, what is being listened to? Or, what is being listened for?
As a reader or spectator of this play, one arrives upon a set of circumstances that are already established but which nevertheless seem to be stalling or caught up in the attempt to delay any kind of conclusion, a characteristic common in Beckett’s works. The circumstance, or ‘scene’, as described earlier from the image on the cover of the playtext, conveys a specific mood that is weighed down by a sense of attenuated deferral. The figures appear hesitant but resigned. In the staging of the play, the two characters are already present, sat within a pool of light before the artificial lights beyond the interior world of the piece fade up, signalling the beginning of the play where the scene is already underway. L and R are seated at a ‘plain white deal table’.12 R begins by turning a page. Pause. He commences:
R: (Reading): Little is left to tell. In a last –
[L knocks with left hand on table.]
Little is left to tell.
[Pause. Knock.]13
So it begins, and systematically falters in its beginning, a beginning (as all beginnings in Beckett) that describes the beginning of an end. But perhaps this already assumes too much.
Can we surmise from this that Ohio Impromptu is a play that begins? Or is it, rather, that Beckett searches for a way to avoid beginning, just as the play describes the avoidance of an ending? They are there; the book is open; a process continues. The musical rhythm soon established back and forth, between Reader and Listener, of reading aloud punctuated by a knock, pause, repeat, pause, knock, read, listen, proceed and so on, describes not so much even a process of continuation but rather a process of endless interruption as a means of development. As R reads from the book, L interrupts by knocking on the table with his left hand. R responds by stopping and repeating the words ‘Little is left to tell’, a motif that persists throughout, pausing again (in doubt?) before the moment that has provoked L to knock. Each knock calls a change that is registered by the way in which R reads, pausing (withholding) or else repeating lines from the open book. But the question the play poses is more complex than the pattern or musical scoring articulated by what the spectator sees and hears. The series set up by the movement of the text is, in a sense, conducted by L; that is, it both commences and is interrupted by L, repeats and is again interrupted by L paused by R (pre–empting a knock?), then continues and is interrupted yet again by L’s knock and so on. It establishes a series of echoes and repetitions, recurring like motifs throughout the text, that condition the meaning of the play, so that the work itself is underwritten by what Harry White describes with insightful precision as ‘a musical conception of meaning’.14 The status of language itself is, as White notes in his discussion of the significance of musical serialism in Beckett’s later plays, ‘downgraded from that of sole intelligencer to compositional technique’.15 Instead, it is the impetus of the work as well as its interruptedness that drives the meaning of the text rather than the scant details we are given of character, location (we learn, for example, that the Isle of Swans can be seen from the window of the single room where the protagonist of the narrative now lives) and events within the story. Questions turn and are rephrased in the mind of the spectator: one wonders not exactly who is reading but rather who is being read and what reading is for; what does it do here between and for these two figures? Not who listens, but what is being listened for. Reading and listening are the subject of the play. Each interruption registers a switch in direction, alters the tempo, and delivers a new movement or development within the overall composition. As Reader, R possesses a dual function: he both listens to the book and reads it. Reading – a reading that allows or attends – is an act of interpretative understanding.16 The terms ‘Reader’ and ‘Listener’ are less stable than we might assume, and Beckett’s play attempts to dramatize that dissolve. L both hears and dictates the reading. He reads R’s attempts to read just as R listens for how L is reading him.
L’s series of knocks belong to a system that forms part of an unspoken speech act to be negotiated by and between R and L, as well as by the spectator as another who listens. The interruption of the knock causes R to momentarily cease speaking and his response is to repeat a sentence or phrase. At other times the knock signals for R to continue, to move on from a pause as L follows the narrative. The knock (and the repetition it calls for) signals an arrest. Its necessary presence is what constitutes conversation in this situation and enables the spectator (from beyond the performance or the reading of the text) to perceive this exchange between L and R as dialogue, albeit a dialogue in which only R speaks and L is silent. Yet it appears to be the reverse – R is caught in recitation while L is the one who speaks or who at least determines the movement and direction of the text. But what of the interruption that interrupts L, the rupture in what he hears that causes him to knock in the first instance? How does this ‘other’ function in the text as a part of (its) language and compositional structure? In other words, how might we account for, or read, the interruption that causes L to knock? Blanchot considers interruption not only as a call but as a response to ‘the strangeness, to the infinity between us’. This asks us to think of interruption as more than simply a break in or from language, but rather as something altogether more profound: ‘let us understand that the arrest here is not necessarily or simply marked by silence, by a blank or a gap (this would be too crude), but by a change in the form or the structure of language’.17 The interruptions and pauses that structure the exchange between R and L are not merely indicative of intervals or breaks. They announce the division that separates these two, a limit that marks the impossibility of their sameness.
When L interrupts R’s reading it allows L to linger longer over the previously spoken line, as if he now listens for something other than the words themselves so as to hear in them more than can be spoken: to hear, in other words, what is now absent but which prompted the words to be written. Blanchot refers to the origin and otherness present in literature as reverberation, a condition or movement distinct from resonance, which ‘does no more than bring us back sentimentally to our own experience’. Continuing, he articulates the effect of reverberation on the reader/listener thus: ‘This reverberation is not, then, the image that resounds (in me, the reader, and on the basis of my self), it is rather the very space of the image, the animation proper to it, the point of its springing forth where, speaking within, it already speaks entirely on the outside.’18 Let us now return to Beckett’s text, to a later moment in Ohio Impromptu where the knock and consequent repetition of passages of text occur and layer this reading through the light of the distinction Blanchot makes between resonance and reverberation. The play is reaching its end. R continues after a pause:
Finally he said, I have had word from–and here he named
the dear name–that I shall not come again. I saw the dear
face and heard the unspoken words, No need to go to him
again, even were it in your power.
[Pause.]
So the sad–
[Knock.]
Saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words, No need
to go to him again, even were it in your power.
[Pause. Knock.]
So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though
turned to stone.19
Within the play (as in its duration as a performance) R and L are now more advanced in the diminishing progression of the book being read. Several things come to one’s attention considering the tension and movement of Ohio Impromptu in relation to Blanchot’s discussion. First, in repeating the line, ‘Saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words’, R omits the pronoun ‘I’ removing the signifying presence of self-identification from the narrative voice. The knock itself performs a number of things, producing a shorthand to language, a rhythmic code that carries an excess of significance beyond its sound. It signals that L hears something (or someone) else in the words R reads. It announces (firmly, abruptly) the need to hear the words again (or else to continue on from a pause), to turn back in order to rehear their meaning or to hear what they do not say (twice in the text this refrain comes after the phrase ‘heard the unspoken words’) but also for the reverberation around these words which is, in any case, alluded to by the significance of ‘heard the unspoken words’. But also, there is the knock itself – a blunt, hollow sound, a gesture more usually associated with the request to enter through a doorway or threshold – which substitutes speech and interrupts language, indicating the need for repetition or a second hearing. L prolongs the experience of the text in this way, extending its temporal limits. Above all, the repetitive knocking in Ohio Impromptu alerts us to the possibility of meaning or intention outside of speech to which L listens again in order to hear more clearly. Beckett’s play, anything but an impromptu, brings us closer to this other voice, the shudder of the other ushered forth through language, and Blanchot’s writing is equally concerned with bringing our attention to the potentiality of this movement within literature. The exchange between R and L – interrupted and interrupter – is presented as a series of repetitive sequences that deliberate but progress, acknowledging the inevitability of absence and silence that occupy speech. This sense of ‘movement’ comes about through a series of precisely choreographed stanzas, so that, to return to Harry White’s proposition concerning the explicit serialism of Beckett’s late plays, ‘dramatic advancement’ is achieved ‘by means of an unfolding structure’.20 Blanchot reminds us that ‘silence is still only a deferred speech, or else it bears the signification of a difference obstinately maintained’.21 Through its composition, where hearing the words spoken brings more resonance to the text than the significance of the words themselves, Ohio Impromptu advances often by turning back on itself and through the partial repetition of motifs. It seems to articulate silence as part of speech rather than its deferral, a dimension of speech that is usually smothered by language in its never-ending tide of meaningless surrogacies and approximations. Here, instead, silence is articulated through the replay and recitation of language activated by its being read. It advances incrementally as a half-spoken, half-muted dialogue. As the play opens (it has already begun), we are already nearing an end and ‘little is left to tell’. When it begins, the telling (by R) is interrupted (by L), establishing a method whereby speaking is composed as a musical recitation. R and L, each attentive to the other’s silences, listen out for one another’s interruptions which reveal that which drives them to speak but which itself will remain forever concealed. It is the presence of a voice that cannot be spoken that they have come together to articulate. This voice remains within speech yet beyond the reach of language.
In Beckett’s novels and texts for theatre, as in Blanchot’s extensive, ruminative consideration of the ‘work’ of literature, the voice within speech is distinguished as separate from but always in relation to language. Referring to Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable, Simon Critchley describes this narrative voice that speaks to us as one that is driven or being driven, ‘drawn on by a speaking that does not begin and does not finish, that cannot speak and cannot but speak’.22 Or, as Blanchot writes with reference to the same text, ‘when the talking stops, there is still talking; when the language pauses, it perseveres; there is no silence, for within that voice the silence eternally speaks.’23 We find a similar predicament in the disarticulatory flow of the protagonist, Mouth, in Not I, and in the endlessly repeating serialism of the suffering souls, M, W1 and W2 trapped in urns in Play, where in both of these examples the ‘being driven’ is dramatized by the sequencing, precise repetitions and refrains as well as by the stage image itself. Mouth and heads are isolated. Speech overtakes the possibility of physical being or presence; it advances before it and remains after it. Character is all but gone, ‘I’ itself is being extinguished if not already extinct. In Blanchot’s essay, which focuses on Beckett’s trilogy, he refers to the ‘terrible discovery’ that fuels this drive in Beckett’s work, a drive which brings us closer to the origin of speech and speaking and is reflective of the labour to which literature in its different forms commits itself, that is, to articulate the voice of the silence that eternally speaks. We might therefore think of Ohio Impromptu as an attempt to articulate the inevitable silence that exists not for each of us as individuals but rather as that enveloping, collaborative duet of silence made still more prominent by the presence of two, a silence that is, paradoxically, only ever made known through speech. R and L, however, begin to evidence silence as a mode of sharing and cooperation. Is this an attempt to articulate its presence and absence in language, therefore, in order to suggest that in silence there is no such difference? R and L have relinquished (or simply exhausted) the attempt at real speech or the attempt at unscripted, impromptu dialogue as offering the possibility of meaningful exchange. Instead they listen to the telling of a tale that might bring them together: ‘With never a word exchanged they grew to be as one.’24 They read and listen together to the arrival, the sound and the cadences of words, words as the symptom of an impulse and as recitation, without conversing, until the book itself delivers them to an unreachable place, ‘Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told’.25 In the final line of the playtext, R recites that ‘Nothing is left to tell’ and in this moment, as he closes the book, an event already foreshadowed by the reading of the sad tale, there is an uncanny awareness of a beginning as of an ending, of an unending return, and of the vast expanse of the nothing beyond the book that remains to be told. It is the only moment in which the two figures look at each other, a self seeing itself, perceiving itself and being perceived, and hold one another’s gaze, ‘unblinking. Expressionless. Ten seconds. Fade out.’26
(six)
In his essay, The Exhausted, Deleuze ascribes a coded system to Beckett’s oeuvre which he divides into three types of language – language I, II and III. For Deleuze, this charts the ways in which language and words themselves are gradually exhausted of possibility in Beckett’s work from the novels through the theatre works to the lesser known works for television. Applying Deleuze’s theory to Beckett’s work in general, and here specifically to Ohio Impromptu, it is important to remember the critical and tenacious status Deleuze confers upon exhaustion as a trope, equally upon the exhausted person as one who is both ‘sufficiently disinterested’ and ‘sufficiently scrupulous’, a paradox that reminds us of the ghostly appearance of Blanchot’s two figures at the beginning of The Infinite Conversation for whom ‘what weariness makes possible, weariness makes difficult’. Deleuze states: ‘But only an exhausted person can exhaust the possible, because he has renounced all need, preference, goal, or signification.’27 Language III, described as ‘the language of images and spaces’, suggests a way we might think about the function and materiality of language in Ohio Impromptu. Beckett’s incorporation of a prewritten text as speech read from a book, rhetorically mimics the fictional, therefore, while at the same time retaining the resemblance of the (auto-)biographical. Combined with the pauses, silence and repetitions that L’s ‘knock’ gives rise to, this sufficiently distances language from its obligation to represent everyday spontaneous dialogue within the drama, as if this were already a thing of the past, and instead discovers other routes through signification.
In the notion of a language of images, Deleuze distinguishes his appropriation of the term ‘image’ from memory image, describing image as ‘process’. For Deleuze, image is emptied of either the personal or the rational. In the image, language is separated from the transmission of voices and the more tactile, familiar association of objects. Instead, it relates to ‘immanent limits that are ceaselessly displaced – hiatuses, holes, or tears that we would never notice, or attribute to mere tiredness, if they did not suddenly widen in such a way as to receive something from the outside or from elsewhere’.28 His description of what such ruptures potentially reveal is as relevant to Beckett’s text as to Blanchot’s earlier work The Space of Literature and, later, The Infinite Conversation. In Blanchot’s writing, the sense that something is received from the outside pervades cumulatively through his steady, attentive deployment of language, a use of language that aims to liberate itself from the burden of representation and which will eventually reassess the presumption of the narrative ‘I’ in literature, much as Beckett’s plays and novels became increasingly dedicated to such a task. These efforts seem to compress language, as Blanchot persuades it back from false surfaces and limits, in the same way that Beckett also strives to advance language into other submissions and behaviours. Language floats, hovers, waits. It echoes. It reverberates. It sounds. Gradually we become aware that its function is no longer, therefore, only to tell. In Beckett’s writing, this is (also) the work language is made to do, a kind of labour that is closer allied to the potential abstraction of visual engagement or to that auditory ‘language’ that is peculiar and particular to musical notation. Language proposes a rhetorical performance of an outside articulated by characters as they persist, wearily, in the rehearsal of conversation under exhausted and exhaustive circumstances. It is night – the stars shine darkly. The book is to be read. Both Beckett and Blanchot move the reader to consider not only the outside of language but to attend to it in the very act of reading (that is, encountering), to ‘transform into light that which is not of the order of illumination’.29 Ohio Impromptu stages this as a performative duet that operates through a series of interrupted attempts made by L and R to tell and hear told the nothing that is left to tell, as music that is yet to be written but which has already been heard.
1 Ohio Impromptu was written for Stan Gontarski, who wrote to Beckett in February 1980, asking him to write a play for his symposium and festival due to take place in Ohio as part of celebrations that would mark Beckett’s 75th birthday. Beckett responded a month later saying he would do his best and by May of that year was at work on a text. By mid-December he had finished the short play, and, according to Pierre Astier, in his account of its genesis, a typescript of Ohio Impromptu arrived in the mail. The play premiered on 9 May 1981. See Pierre Astier ‘Beckett’s “Ohio Impromptu”: A View from the Isle of Swans’, in Stanley E. Gontarski (ed.), On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (New York, 1986), pp. 394–404 (pp. 395–6).
2 This and all following references to Blanchot’s text are from the following edition: The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xiv.
3 Gilles Deleuze, Essays: Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis, 1997), p. 5.
4 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 321.
5 Alberto Manguel, ‘Power to the Reader’, available at <www.alberto.manguel.com/>.
6 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 318.
7 Ibid., p. xiii.
8 Ibid., p. 320.
9 Ibid., pp. 326–31.
10 Ibid., pp. 328–9.
11 Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1990), p. 445.
12 ‘Deal’ refers to the material the table is made of, a soft wood that can be easily sawn, usually either fir or pine.
13 Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, p. 445.
14 Harry White, ‘“Something is Taking its Course”: Dramatic Exactitude and the Paradigm of Serialism in Samuel Beckett’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), pp. 159–71 (p. 165).
15 Ibid.
16 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, 1983). p. 65. In ‘Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot’, de Man discussed Blanchot’s notion of reading, referring to Heidegger’s formulation of the reader as listener in a footnote.
17 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 77.
18 Ibid., p. 321.
19 Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, p. 447.
20 White, ‘“Something is Taking its Course”’, p. 168.
21 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 76.
22 Simon Critchley, ‘Who Speaks in the Work of Samuel Beckett?’, in Thomas Pepper (ed.), The Place of Maurice Blanchot, Yale French Studies 93 (Connecticut, 1998), pp. 114–30 (p. 126).
23 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Where Now? Who Now?’, in Gontarski (ed.), On Beckett, pp. 141–9 (p. 141). Blanchot discusses the question of ‘who is doing the talking’ in Beckett’s novels.
24 Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, p. 447.
25 Ibid., p. 448.
26 Ibid.
27 Deleuze, Essays, p. 154.
28 Ibid., pp. 158–9.
29 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 318.