An analysis of the inept editing and numerous
publication blunders to which Samuel Beckett's work has been subjected. The
writer argues that textual problems are more easily recognized and ridiculed
than remedied. After surveying the textual history of some of Beckett's work,
he makes the point that, in the climate of poststructuralism, the goal of
retrieving a "definitive" text has been essentially discredited. He
suggests that one solution to postmodern textual multiplicity is evident in the
procedure adopted by Faber and Faber and Grove Press in The Theatrical
Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Instead of offering a definitive text, he
explains, the series presents a processive text: a plurality of texts whose end
point is only Beckett's latest rereading of Beckett.
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It is no small irony that for a writer so
punctilious about his texts--especially their performance--Samuel Beckett's
work has been subject to so much inept editing and so many publication blunders
that he could lament to his "official" biographer, James Knowlson,
"My texts are in a terrible mess." The innumerable printing errors
introduced into early editions of his work--the edition of Watt published
jointly in France by Collection Merlin and Olympia Press (1953) and reprinted
then both by John Calder in Great Britain (1963) and by Grove Press in the
United States (1959) being perhaps the most egregious--have still never been
fully corrected. As recently as August 13, 1992, John Banville, Literary Editor
of the Irish Times, could note in the New York Review of Books, "It is
time now for all of Beckett's works ... to be properly edited and published in
definitive and accurate editions in order that future readers be allowed to see
them for the unique testaments that they are" (20, emphasis added). One
could hardly agree more--but textual purity may simply be a longing for
"paradise lost," since textual problems are more easily recognized
and ridiculed than remedied. A recent spate of letters to the Times Literary
Supplement is a case in point. What should have been a cause for celebration,
the publication of Beckett's long-suppressed first novel of 1932, Dream of Fair
to Middling Women, has instead fueled the textual controversy and led to a
clash of egos. Although Beckett wrote only one Dream of Fair to Middling Women,
currently two separate and competing editions of it, with more than a few
typographical differences between them, are in print. In a letter to the Times
Literary Supplement (16 July 1993), Eoin O'Brien, co-editor of Dream,
dissociated himself from the second edition, although he remains listed as its
editor: "Both the US (Arcade) and UK (Calder) 1993 editions of this work
have been printed without taking into account the necessary corrections I, and
my co-editor, Edith Fournier, made to the proofs of the re-set text. It is of
deep concern that Samuel Beckett's work be treated in this manner. We can be
held accountable," he continues, "only for the first edition
published in 1992 by Black Cat Press in Dublin and can accept no responsibility
for the errors in the US and UK flawed editions" (17). But even that 1992
Dublin edition of Dream is not without flaw and leaves itself open to question about
editorial policy. What justification there was for choosing one of Beckett's
two endings to the exclusion of the other and why some silent editorial changes
(which were not corrections of error) were made to the Dublin text remain
unexplained. Let me cite a single example of the latter. In Beckett's
typescript the narrator discusses the protagonist's (i.e., Belacqua's)
translation of Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre into English as follows: "You
know, of course, don't you, that he did him into the eye into English."
For some reason editors O'Brien and Fournier decided that Beckett's original
image wanted improving, and they published the following sentence as Beckett's:
"You know, of course, don't you, that he did him pat into English."
In the not too distant future I expect that Dream may have to be
re-edited.(FN1).
More recently, Beckett's French and American
publishers, Jerome Lindon of Editions de Minuit and Barney Rosset, formerly of
Grove Press and now of Blue Moon Books, have been at loggerheads over the
publication of Beckett's last major unpublished work, the 1947 three-act play
Eleutheria (the Greek word for freedom). After a series of threatened lawsuits
by Lindon, functioning as literary executor,(FN2) the work has been published
in France by Minuit and in the United States, in a translation by Michael
Brodsky, by Foxrock, Inc., an imprint devised by Rosset and his co-publishers,
John Oakes and Dan Simon of Four Walls Eight Windows. That text is bound to be
embroiled in additional controversy as well, if for no other reason than its
being translated by someone other than Beckett.(FN3).
Much of the frustration surrounding the accuracy of
Beckett's texts is summarized by Gerry Dukes in a letter to the Times Literary
Supplement (7 Jan. 1994) in which he attacks both publisher John Calder, who
along with Richard Seaver apparently edited the second edition of Dream, and
the Beckett estate: "Instead of clean texts, John Calder keeps providing
misreadings, misprisions, misprints and distortions of the canon. The principal
victim of these editorial and publishing eccentricities is the work of Samuel
Beckett. Perhaps the Beckett estate and/or Beckett's literary executor should
take a closer interest in an accurate publication of the work" (13).
The nature of the textual problems with the Calder
editions, of Beckett's short prose especially, is evident in the publishing
history of the very short prose work, "neither," which was originally
published in the Journal of Beckett Studies No. 4 (Spring 1979, vii) with line
breaks suggestive of a poem. During the editing process a word was dropped from
the eighty-seven-word work. The omission was evidently not immediately noticed,
for the correction did not appear until issue No. 6, in the Autumn of 1980,
where, in his "Editorial," John Pilling noted, "It is very much
regretted that the word 'neared was accidentally omitted from the end of the
fourth line of the text neither printed in issue 4 at post page-proof stage
beyond the control of the editors" (6). When John Calder was about to
reprint the work in the Collected Poems 1930-1978, Beckett resisted because he
considered it a piece of prose, a story. As Calder said in a letter to the
Times Literary Supplement (24 Aug. 1990): I had "originally intended to
put it ("neither") in the Collected Poems. We did not do so, because
Beckett at the last moment said that it was not a poem and should not be
there" (895). Subsequently, it was omitted inadvertently from The
Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980, but printed in yet a more corrupt version in
the posthumous As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Later Prose. This version
not only included erroneous information (the story, identified in the Journal
of Beckett Studies as "written by Samuel Beckett in September 1976 to be set
to music by Morton Feldman," is described in As the Story Was Told as
having been "written for composer Morton Feldman, 1962") but, instead
of including the word missing from the Journal of Beckett Studies, reproduced a
copy-editor's query marking the place of the missing word; line six, then,
reads, "doors once? gently close, once turned" instead of "doors
once neared gently close, once turned.".
Beckett's plays fare only slightly better, often
corrupted by the process of commercial publication, and so even the venerable
house of Faber and Faber does not escape blame. In an essay entitled
"Texts and Pre-texts of Samuel Beckett's Footfalls," I argue that,
"Eager to make the play available for opening night, Faber and Faber
secured a typescript from Beckett before he was finally satisfied with it and
set their copy from what in the sequence of typescripts Beckett called Ts.
3" (of four typescripts). (191).
To their credit Faber and Faber went on to correct
their text, incorporating the revisions Beckett made for his 1976 world
premiere production at the Royal Court Theatre into the text published in a
collected edition entitled Ends and Odds, but as I point out, "This
revised text ... remains corrupt and is even inconsistent internally. Faber
indeed changed the number of May's footsteps from seven to nine in the stage
directions, for instance, but left her counting her steps one through seven in
the dialogue" (192). Evidently, neither Faber's in-house editors nor
Beckett himself checked the revised and anthologized text of Footfalls very
closely.
Even Beckett's most famous work, Waiting for Godot,
is not immune from corruption. Godot exists in multiple versions in English
because Faber originally published a bowdlerized version of it in 1956 to
appease the Lord Chamberlain, with the result that the original English and
American editions were not identical. Faber's note to its 1956 edition
announced: "When Waiting for Godot was transferred from the Arts Theatre
to the Criterion Theatre, a small number of textual deletions were made to
satisfy the requirements of the Lord Chamberlain. The text printed here is that
used in the Criterion production." In fact there are hundreds of variants
between the Grove Press Godot of 1954 and Faber's 1956 edition. Faber went on
to "correct" its Godot in 1965, in an edition they called the
"complete and unexpurgated text ... authorized by Mr. Beckett as
definitive," but it still differed substantially from the American
text.(FN4) To celebrate Beckett's eightieth birthday Faber collected all of
Beckett's plays into a single volume, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic
Works, in which, however, they inexplicably reprinted the 1956 bowdlerized text
of Waiting for Godot.
Nor does Beckett's American publisher, Grove Press,
escape blame. When in the midst of producing the American Beckett Festival of
Radio Plays Everett Frost went to Beckett to discuss the project, he asked the
author which text of Cascando he should produce. Beckett responded, "The
printed version." He seemed shocked when Frost asked, "Which printed
version?" After Beckett made a quick check of his texts, Frost asked
"how far he might rely on Grove. 'Not very, was the playwright's prompt
but rueful reply."(FN5).
Such publishing blunders aside, Banville's
apparently simple plea for Beckett's work "to be properly edited and
published in definitive and accurate editions," commendable as it is, is
considerably less simple than it appears, complicated not only by the gremlins
which inhabit the publishing industry but by Beckett's own practice as a
theatrical director and by the critical and theoretical climate of our time,
both of which make references to anything like a "definitive" text as
suspect as references to any single performance as "definitive."
Beckett himself tampered with the "definitive" Godot at least twice
after Faber made its pronouncement. As Beckett's direct work in the theater
increased, he demonstrated a disregard for the sanctity of his plays as
published--at least for his own productions. Beckett in the theater has himself
destabilized Beckett on the page.
Between 1953, when Waiting for Godot was first
staged in Paris, and 1967, Samuel Beckett served a fourteen-year theatrical
apprenticeship, moving from being a consultant in the staging of his dramatic
works to taking full responsibility for their direction. During his twenty-year
directing career, 1967-1986, Beckett staged some seventeen productions of his
work in three languages, English, French, and German. Each time he returned to
his plays--most often to texts already in print--to prepare them for staging,
he was dissatisfied. He found his plays wordy and incompletely conceived for
the stage, and so he set about revising them as he staged them. Of Godot, for
instance, he has said on more than one occasion, "I knew nothing about
theater when I wrote it,"(FN6) and during rehearsals in Berlin in 1967 for
Endspiel (Endgame) he conceded that the play was "not visualized"
(Theatrical II xv).
By 1986 Beckett's own productions of his work
suggested a repudiation of his published texts, even those dubbed by his
publisher as "definitive." Beckett's oeuvre generally exists in
multiple versions because he revised as he translated, so that each
self-translation became a textual transformation. The translation became not a
literary equivalent but essentially a new and parallel text, one which did not
necessarily supersede the original. After his work as a theatrical director,
multiple versions or texts existed even within a single language. Without
access to Beckett's notes and revisions, critics and directors were forced into
a position of building interpretations and mounting productions not so much on
corrupt or incomplete texts, such as almost all British versions of Waiting for
Godot, but on those the author himself found unsatisfactory, unfinished. As
Beckett grew increasingly dissatisfied with his plays as published, he decided
in 1986, after years of suggesting that theatrical directors not stage the
published scripts but follow instead his directorial revisions, to authorize
publication of his theatrical notebooks and what he called "corrected
texts" for his plays, that is, texts which incorporated the revisions he
made as a director, along with the notebooks in which the rationale of those
revisions was worked out. This was an extraordinary decision on Beckett's part,
essentially repudiating his dramatic cannon as published and available to the
public, and offering instead a much more fluid and multiple series of
performing texts.
The execution of that project, recently completed as
the four-volume series called The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, was,
however, fraught with complications, since each volume finally contained a
single, "corrected" text for each of the plays Beckett staged. Such a
solution which bows to the conventions of commerce is somewhat misleading since
it runs counter to Beckett's own practice as a theatrical director and to the
critical climate of our time, much of which Beckett himself embraced. In
another, more tranquil, less skeptical era, one less ideologically charged than
our own, the job of editing or correcting Beckett's works might have been
achievable without a great deal of theoretical soul-searching, a simple matter
of replacing those texts with which Beckett was dissatisfied--those which he
himself revised for production--with the rewritten texts, and then correcting
obvious typographical errors, oversights, and inconsistencies in the remainder
of his work. Within the theoretical discourse of our age, however, an
enterprise of "correcting" literary texts, or, as Stanley Fish calls
them, literary documents, to emphasize that they are the physical objects of
interpretation (or phenomenological intention or performance, which I treat as
a "reading"), is bound to generate theoretical and ideological
debate. Traditional theories of editing threaten to resurrect the specter of a
single "correct" text, for one, and so the authority of the text and
the author over the reader, a position which Beckett himself has both embraced
and repudiated.
The problem of textual authority or validity is
further compounded in the theater by the collaborative nature of the theatrical
enterprise itself and the inconsistent quality of the collaborators, problems
about which Beckett was quite aware and which he took into account in his own
directing. In the theater we may, on the whole, be more willing to accept the
playscript as an incomplete artwork, something less than the final stage of a
work's creation, a document which needs to be real-ized on stage through a set
of intermediaries;(FN7) that admission suggests that theatrical texts are
themselves extra-literary, if by literature we mean at very least a completed
and consistent work of art. In Beckett's case the value of the performance is
enhanced, given authority, by the fact that the author himself has directed his
play. But the relation between performance--even author-ized performance--and
published text remains as problematic with Beckett directing as with any other
director. Quite clearly, as a director approaching his work afresh after at
times a ten-year hiatus, Beckett continued reshaping his work, but many of his
changes were not necessarily evolutionary, that is, necessarily improvements,
but reflected particular circumstances. Beckett's revisions from production to
production were not always consistent, a clear progressus. Two productions of
the same work directed by Beckett--even in the same language--were not
necessarily identical. If they were, there would have been little point doing
the second. Beckett has often designed a text and production for a particular
set of actors playing on a particular playing space under a particular set of
circumstances. In a letter to Polish critic Marek Kedzierski (15 Nov.
1981),(FN8) for example, Beckett has admitted, "Herewith corrected copy of
Fin de partie. The cuts and simplifications are the result of my work on the
play as director and function of the players at my disposal. To another
director they may not seem desirable." Even Beckett's own revised or
"corrected" texts, then, seem something less than stable, absolute,
or definitive, but instead subject to the subsequent intervention of future
directors, that is, future readers. In Beckett's post-publication revision of
Play, the note called "Repeat" ends with the phrase, "and so on
if and as desired" (emphasis added). Presumably the indecision allows for
future directorial flexibility, but whose desire then are we finally staging?
The challenge for the textual editor working in the postmodern textual climate
that Beckett himself has encouraged is to reconcile the traditional demands for
a single final version of a text, one version bound between boards, and the
theory of the incomplete or mutable text; that is, how does one reconcile the
demand for a single text closest to the author's final textual intention and
the postmodern notion of the multiplicity of texts? Such questions of textual
plurality at least foreground much of the current theoretical debate about the
nature of texts, textuality, and finally meaning, particularly in the theater.
Even the phase "corrected" if not
"definitive" texts threatens to revivify the epistemological paradigm
that meaning is somehow contained immutably within and restricted to a text,
impervious to the inconsistencies of language and the vicissitudes of culture,
a notion particularly dubious in the theater. Further, the idea of
"correct" texts suggests a linear, evolutionary model of literary
history where later versions are by definition improvements of or progress
beyond the former and so supersede them. In the case of Beckett's theatrical
texts (and even his translations)--that is, those cases where multiple and
parallel texts exist--such assumptions are dubious.
The problems of textual validity and stability are
further complicated in Beckett's case by his own fundamental authorial and so
textual ambivalence. On the one hand, Beckett has abandoned the author's
traditional role as textual authority, the final arbiter of meaning, by
steadfastly refusing interpretation of his own works. In a letter to his
American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett, for instance, expressed his own
diminished authority soon after the writing of Godot: "had a highly
unsatisfactory interview with SIR Ralph Richardson who wanted the low-down on
Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae, and seemed to make the
forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending
to illustrate the part of Pozzo. Too tired to give satisfaction. I told him
that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would
have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters
which I trust puts an end to that star." To critic Colin Duckworth Beckett
announced, "I produce an object. What people make of it is not my
concern.... I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my
work" (En Attendant xxiv). Asked by his assistant at the rehearsals of
Endspiel (Endgame), "Are you of the opinion that the author should have a
solution for the riddle at hand?" Beckett replied curtly, "Not the
author of this play" (Haerdter). In a letter of 26 October 1957 to his
long-time American director Alan Schneider he admitted, "Sorry I was not
of more help about the play (Endgame) but the less I speak about my work the
better" (185). And in rehearsals for Endgame in London in 1980, Rick
Clutchey, who was playing Hamm under Beckett's direction, asked Beckett
directly if the little boy in Hamm's narrative was actually the young Clov.
"Don't know if the little boy is the young Clov, Rick," Beckett
responded, "simply don't know" (in presence of S.E.G.).
On the other hand, Beckett has exercised so much
authorial control over the production of his plays, even taking legal action against
some forms of textual deviation, most recently posthumously through his estate
against the Fiona Shaw / Deborah Warner production of Footfalls in London's
West End, that he has maintained more authorial control over his work and
performances than any other writer in history--with the possible exception of
James Joyce, who seems to have manipulated the early criticism of Ulysses and
Finnegans Wake fairly directly. Yet despite correcting a variety of proofs for
various editions, Beckett allowed obvious textual inconsistencies to stand,
namely in the text of Come and Go, whose English version has four lines missing
at the opening and two at the closing. With Come and Go the textual variants
were the result of simultaneous translation. Beckett added some six lines to
the 121 words of the English version while translating the work into French and
after sending John Calder a typescript for publication. All British editions
were subsequently based on the incomplete Calder text while the French and
German editions contain the six lines added in translation.(FN9) The American
edition used first the later typescript which included the six lines, but then
for convenience photo-offset the British edition for subsequent publications
and so lost the six lines. Those six lines, incidentally, have been added by
the editor to the text published in Volume IV of the Theatrical Notebooks.
Beckett was still undecided about the final text of Endgame in 1987, forty
years after writing it. Going over the "final" text, for the final
time before its final publication in the Endgame volume of the Theatrical
Notebooks, Beckett was still undecided whether or not, when Clov hits Hamm with
the toy dog, Hamm should retain the dog or let it fall.
In the climate of post-structuralism the goal of
retrieving something like an "original," "definitive," or
"uncorrupted" text has been essentially discredited, since it assumes
that an ideal text exists somewhere outside the process of reading it, or in
the case of theater outside its "real-ization" on the stage. Such a
critical climate has undermined the editor's traditional function of recovering
and presenting something like an "original" "uncorrupted,"
or "corrected" text in its originary, prelapsarian purity.(FN10) This
age of dislocation and plurality of meaning invites a concomitant plurality of
texts, and textual editors may finally have to adjust their aims to embrace
that plurality or multiplicity and settle for the more modest goal of the
"best recoverable text" or set of texts.
On the other hand, the problem of whose words
exactly we are reading, hearing, performing, and finally interpreting, the
historical author's, his scribe's, some typesetter's, an editor's, or an
over-zealous theatrical director's, is a question all too often slighted by
post-structural theorists. On the one hand, if the literary text is created by
the reader, and so differs from reader to reader, why bother with a quest for
the uniquely authorial or "uncorrupted" document? One might simply
suggest fatalistically that textual deviations, alterations, or corruptions are
inevitable, another cultural force at work on any text, and in many cases it is
that same cultural imperative which generated that text through a particular
historical author in the first place. The simple answer to the question
"Why bother?" is, however, that although there are innumerable kinds
of hats, and noses come in an incalculable variety of sizes and shapes, a hat
is not a shoe, and a nose is not a knee. How an author or editor fills the
space on a page is at least as important as how the reader will fill the
"literary space" left by the author; that is, what exactly the reader
will turn into a text in her reading remains of utmost importance. Catherine
Belsey, for one, poses the dichotomy of meaning and textuality as follows:.
While on the one hand meaning is never single,
eternally inscribed in the words on the page, on the other hand readings do not
spring unilaterally out of the subjectivities (or the ideologies) of readers.
The text is not an empty space, filled with meaning from outside itself, any
more than it is the transcription of an authorial intention, filled with
meaning from outside language. As a signifying practice, writing always offers
raw material for the production of meaning, the signified in its plurality, on
the understanding, of course, that the signified is distinct from the intention
of the author (pure concept) or the referent (a world already constituted and
re-presented). (406-07).
Despite such ideological sensitivity and authorial
ambiguity, the question of accurate or even complete texts, those that
represent as much of the author's creative process as possible, remains a
pressing theoretical and practical issue, one given renewed energy (if not
method) by the publication of Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 "synoptic"
edition of Ulysses, the 1986 Vintage "Corrected Text" that followed
from it, John Kidd's assault (more on the methodology than on the ideology) of
the project, and now the proliferation of Ulysses. Gabler's Ulysses (and
calling it that proclaims its difference from, say, Joyce's Ulysses, that is,
from any single edition Joyce ever wrote or read), for all its many faults in
design and execution, has at least refocused attention on these issues, and his
"synoptic text" offers one possible solution to the problems of a
postmodern theory of textuality and textual transmission by acknowledging the
plurality of texts. As Jerome McGann notes:.
By giving priority of importance to the
"synoptic" text over the "reading" text Gabler forces us to
think of Ulysses as something other than a given object of interpretation on
the one hand (which is the traditional New Critical view), or as an invention
of interpretation on the other (which is the common post-structural view). (291).
In Beckett's case, the problems of establishing a
single, final theatrical oeuvre are further compounded because of Beckett's own
associations, however loose they were and however suspicious he was of them,
with creative and critical movements which held the traditional concepts of
textual stability and literary meaning in contempt, the surrealists in
particular, but also their offspring in la nouvelle critique. One version of a
theory of an unstable (because incomplete) text is offered in a brilliant (if
still neglected) work of literary theory, The Space of Literature by Maurice
Blanchot. In it he argues that the work of art can never be absolutely
finished. It is itself an infinity which depends on an Other, and it gains a
semblance of completion only when it is read or performed. That reading (or
performance), however, is only one of a multiplicity of possible readings, and
hence texts.(FN11).
Blanchot's view of texts and textuality is one which
Beckett in many respects shared. The infinite or impossible or perpetual or
incomplete or open text has been characteristic of Beckett's work at least
since Dream of Fair to Middling Women, published only recently, and, among
those works published in Beckett's lifetime, Watt, which celebrates its own
lack of completion. The impossible and interminable, the always incomplete text
is at least a metaphor which Beckett has embraced and folded into what passes
for plot in his ground-breaking trilogy of novels begun in French just after
World War II, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and the fourth volume in
that series, the thirteen texts which followed the novels, called Texts for
Nothing. That metaphor of the infinite, incomplete, perpetually unfolding,
self-reflexive text is as useful a paradigm for reading Samuel Beckett's
creative process as any other. We know from studying the manuscripts of his
work, for instance, that Beckett was a tireless reviser. That observation
might, of course, be made for any number of authors--James Joyce and William
Butler Yeats among them. In Beckett's case the process of revision, and hence
creation, continued--consciously and deliberately--well beyond publication,
which was, therefore, not always the statement of a work's
"completion," a concept which seems alien to Beckett's oeuvre as a
whole. Once Beckett intervened in the process of performance, had become his
own Other in a series of theatrical self-collaborations, and began directing
his own work in 1986, he took those directorial opportunities to reread and so
rewrite apparently completed texts yet again.(FN12) Conceptually for Beckett,
the process of creation, of literary composition, did not end with publication.
Initial publication might then be only an intermediary step in the work's
evolution.
But should such self-collaboration, Beckett's
reading Beckett, particularly in the theater, be treated differently from that
of any other reader's or director's readings? Should it be given author-ity and
hence priority? As a director then is Beckett only another reader of his work,
coming to his text as an Other and so acting as a reader whose insights might
have no more validity than any other reader's? They may or may not, but they
are at least worth reading and knowing, even if they are allotted no more
weight, no more author-ity than any other reasonably intelligent critic's
readings. Even the most ardent post-structuralist must concede that not all
readings are equally insightful. This is why we read Derrida and other critics
and theorists at all. What is clear from Beckett's post-publication revisions
of his texts, his Theatrical Notebooks, and finally his stagings of his own
plays, is that Beckett is an extraordinarily adept reader of Beckett. His
Theatrical Notebooks, for instance, contain a remarkable wealth of information,
speculation, and structural outlines of his work, all of which open the text
rather than close it.
Despite Beckett's disclaimers to be incapable of
writing a critical introduction to his own work, as a director he has come
close to doing precisely that. Beckett's Theatrical Notebooks disclosed details
of his work heretofore unseen by other critics. His direction is marked by a
surprising amount of realistic subtext, for instance. As usual Beckett insisted
in his direction of Endspiel on not intellectualizing his text in rehearsals.
He noted early on, "I don't want to talk about my play, it has to be taken
purely dramatically, to take shape on the stage.... Here the only interest of
the play is as dramatic material." Beckett's admonition is not surprising.
It is one that many a director has delivered to his actors early in rehearsals.
In the theater, one plays action not ideas. What is surprising, however, is
that Beckett also suggested a realistic presentation: "The play is to be
acted as though there were a fourth wall where the footlights are." While
on occasion Beckett would say, "Here it oughtn't to be played
logically," more often he would provide "realistic" motivation.
For "Have you bled," he told Clov, "you see something in his
face, that's why you're asking." Examining the parasite in his trousers
provides Clov with the occasion for "What about that pee?" Hamm's
"Since it's calling you" should be choked out to trigger Clov's
"Is your throat sore?" And Clov's opening speech is motivated by some
barely perceptible change that he perceives while inspecting his environment.
In the Riverside notebook Beckett writes: "C perplexed. All seemingly in
order, yet a change."(FN13).
Pattern is crucial to Beckett's art, and patterning
dominates his theatrical notes and productions: motion is repeated to echo
other motion, posture to echo other posture, gestures to echo other gestures,
sounds to echo other sounds. The principal of analogy is fundamental, and much
of that analogy is detailed in the theatrical notebooks. In the Riverside
notebook for Endgame Beckett says, for instance, "analogy N's knocks on
lid, H's on wall"; "Analogy Clov-dog when trying to make it
stand"; "Analogy voice and attitude (of Hamm during his narration)
with N's tailor story" (Theatrical II 216). The action is filled with
circles, arcs, and crosses, from Hamm's rounds to Clov's thinking walk. The
linguistic analogue to such patterning is the revision of phrases to echo each
other. Even when the phrasing is not parallel, Beckett established an echo, as
in the Schiller Theater notebook, where he suggests that "Why this
farce" should have the "same quality as 'Let's stop playing "
(II 105). Beckett's own direction of Endgame seems a fulfillment of the
structure he originally outlined for Roger Blin's Fin de partie in 1957.
"He had ideas about the play," Blin noted, "that made it a
little difficult to act. At first, he looked on his play as a kind of musical
score. When a word occurred or was repeated, when Hamm called Clov, Clov should
always come in the same way every time, like a musical phrase coming from the
same instrument with the same volume." (Gontarski, On Beckett 233). Ten
years later Beckett realized this musical conception of the play. "The
play is full of echoes," he told his German cast, "they all answer
each other.".
Even though they are written in German, the two
notebooks that Beckett prepared for his 1978 Schiller Theater production of
Spiel (Play) are equally revealing. They demonstrate Beckett's near obsession
with language (German in this case), structure, and formal detail--all three of
which are, of course, inextricably entwined. Beckett's notebooks not only
comprise a motif index to his plays, they constitute as well a remarkably
detailed external record of the artist's internal processes and struggles. They
document Beckett's continued aesthetic and stylistic development. At the head
of a series of notes he prepared for Donald McWhinnie's 1976 Royal Court
production of That Time Beckett wrote what amounts to a one-sentence theatrical
manifesto, the most succinct and explicit statement of his late aesthetics that
we have: "To the objection that visual component too small, out of all
proportion with aural, answer: make it smaller, on the principle that less is
more." As Beckett adapted the aesthetics of architects that "less is
more" (Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe) and that "ornament is a crime"
(Adolf Loos), as he developed what he often called his own "mania for
minimalism," or what he punningly named a "Process of
elimination" in the What Where notebook (Theatrical II 437), he also
seized directorial opportunities to recreate his work according to principles
more in keeping with sculpture, painting, or even architecture than with
traditional drama, and to test the results directly on the stage.
The Eh, Joe notebook which Beckett prepared for the
second of his German productions outlines succinctly the central thematic and
theatrical conflicts of this his first teleplay. While Joe may be "Out of
sight, (and so consequently out of) reach," for example, he would not feel
safe even without the assailing voice because of his "Fear of Dark."
Beckett outlined the ten scenes of the play as follows:.
1.
Out of sight, reach. Fear of dark.
2.
Rupture formula--"Best to come" (1).
3.
Voices in head--behind the eyes. Mental thugee.
4.
Present voice last, then his own to still, then
silence till God's, unstillable.
5.
Clues for voice and hearer. Worse when nearly home.
What if final whisper unstillable?
6.
God to him 1.
7.
Deficient in kindness, strength, intelligence,
looks, cleanliness, normality.
8.
Green one. 'Best to come 2. Duly laid.
9.
Same as 4.
10.
Voice falling to whisper. (Theatrical IV 263).
In the notebook for Tritte (Footfalls) Beckett makes
explicit the relationships among the embedded characters of that play in his
discussion of voices. In the dialogue within the monologues (parts II and III),
for example, the Mother's "What do you mean, May, not enough" of part
II should be echoed by the voice of Mrs. W's in part III, "What do you
mean, Amy, to put it mildly," according to Beckett. "Same style for
both relationships," he notes (IV 337). The Kommen und Gehen (Come and Go)
notebook details Beckett's preoccupation with pattern in theater space. Kommen
und Gehen (finally directed by Walter Asmus, not Beckett) was on the program
with Spiel (Play) at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt in October of 1978. While
Beckett rethought the da capo ending of Spiel, he considered adding a similar
repetition to Kommen und Gehen. Although he outlined the pattern of what would
amount to a second act to the play in his directorial notebook, he finally
dismissed the possibility as "Mathematically desirable (but) logically
impossible" (IV 233).
Not all aesthetic and theatrical and finally textual
issues, however, were resolved during productions. Having worked closely with
Anthony Page on the 1973 Royal Court Theatre production of Not I and having
directed it himself in 1975 at the Theatre d'Orsay, Beckett still remained
ambivalent about the final visual image of the play. The best advice that he
could finally offer directors of Not I was to omit the Auditor. As he wrote to
a pair of directors on 16 November 1986, "I should have written ... to
advise you simply to omit the Auditor. He is very difficult to stage
(light--position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs
him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function
effectively."(FN14) Beckett's final comment presumably includes the
English production he supervised closely, the 1973 Royal Court production with
Billie Whitelaw, directed by Anthony Page. For the 1978 French productions with
Madeleine Renaud, which he directed himself, Beckett omitted the Auditor
altogether, as did the B.B.C. film production of the Billie Whitelaw
performance. To date no script for the play suggests that the elimination of
the Auditor is a directorial option.
One solution then to the problems of postmodern
textual multiplicity is that offered by Beckett's English-language publishers
Faber and Faber and Grove Press in the current series entitled The Theatrical
Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. That series contains the theatrical notebooks
Beckett kept for a particular work, published in facsimile, transcription,
translation (where necessary), and annotations along with the revised texts.
The revised texts which accompany the theatrical notebooks and are often
justified by them are also fully annotated so that each of Beckett's changes
will be at least noted and often discussed. The result is something like a
postmodern performance text, with an emphasis on process and transformation,
which traces and documents Beckett's post-publication creative process. The
Theatrical Notebooks series offers, then, not a definitive or uncorrupted or
static text, the telos of the creative process, but rather a processive text, a
multiplicity or plurality of texts whose endpoint is only Beckett's latest
rereading of Beckett. The revised text may place the original published text
under erasure by superimposing a later stage of creative development over it
but without necessarily obliterating it.
By presenting the textual and production
possibilities of Beckett's texts, then, a postmodern dramatic text emerges, one
which features Beckett's post-publication creative process and one which opens
up reading and performance possibilities. It is admittedly an unstable text,
but the instability exists within set textual limits. As a generic text the
revised texts of Beckett's plays bear similarities not to Hans Gabler's
"reading text," the one finally published as the Vintage
"corrected" Ulysses, but to his "synoptic" text with all
its variants, although in Beckett's case the generic text features
post-publication changes exclusively. For his "ideal" text, Gabler
abandoned the traditional textual goal of retrieving the author's final
intentions and focused on the process of composition, the authorial function.
As Jerome McGann notes, "In fact, all texts are unstable to the extent
that they are all processive and (in Gabler's terms) 'continuous. At the same
time, all are fixed within certain real, determinable limits as they assume
certain specific form" (291). Traditional critics tend to overlook the
former, post-structuralists the latter. Faber and Faber will indeed publish
Beckett's revised and corrected texts separately and without the theatrical
apparatus I have been describing, but that's a business decision, not a
theoretical one. The critically (and theoretically) significant texts are the
"synoptic" versions published in the Theatrical Notebooks series.
NOTES
1.
"The
recent controversies over the publication in 1992 of Beckett's first novel,
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, by Eoin O'Brien's Black Cat Press and
subsequent 'rival editions from John Calder (U.K.) and Arcade (U.S.A.) have led
to speculation that it is time to go back to the original manuscripts for a
definitive complete works of Beckett" (Murphy 10, emphasis added).
2.
See,
for example, Mel Gussow "Plan" and the follow-up story
"Early." See also my Introduction to the play.
3.
Minuit
has also recently published Bande et sarabande (1994), Edith Fournier's
translation of Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks.
4.
For
a full accounting of these variants see Hersh Zeifman.
5.
For
a fuller account of this story see Enoch Brater 37.
6.
Conversations
with the author.
7.
Alec
Reid makes something of the same point in the posthumously published
"Impact and Parable in Beckett." Beckett "will speak of the
first run-through with actors as the 'realization of the play and when it has
been performed publicly, he will say that it has been 'created " (12).
8.
Copy
of letter in possession of S.E.G.
9.
See
the text established by Breon Mitchell and discussion of his textual
corrections.
10.
The
relationship between contemporary critical theory and traditional textual
studies has been receiving increasing scholarly attention of late. See
particularly D. C. Greetham, "Editorial and Critical Theory: From
Modernism to Postmodernism" in George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams,
eds., Palimpsest. In fact all the essays in that volume are apposite, as is
Bornstein's Representing.
11.
This
view of the "open" or "incomplete" text has been gaining
attention in the criticism of Beckett's late work in particular. See, for
example, Carla Locatelli and Enoch Brater.
12.
For
some tentative explorations of these problems see Philip Gaskell and Jerome
McGann. Although Gaskell deals with the idea of a "performance text"
and the "reading text" which follows it, revised on the basis of the
performance in which the author was an active collaborator with his director
(in this case Tom Stoppard and Peter Wood), the situation is not analogous to
Beckett's self-collaborations. In Beckett's case the problem of accurate texts
is complicated by the author's continued revision of even his reading text.
13.
For
a full account of Beckett's Endgame comments and revisions see Beckett
Theatrical Vol. II passim.
14.
S.
B. letter to David Hunsberger and Linda Kendall dated 16 Nov. 1986. Copy in
possession of S.E.G.
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From
http://english.fsu.edu/library/sgontarski/editing_beckett.htm