Читать книгу Beckett, Lacan and the Voice - Llewellyn Brown - Страница 10

The voice is situated at the heart of Samuel Beckett’s work, both as a motif and as a structuring element. Its importance has already been pointed out: describing its innumerable occurrences and forms, Chris Ackerley and Stanley Gontarski recognise its centrality ([eds.], 607–18). A simple listing of a few examples can allow us to grasp the constancy of this theme in Beckett’s work. As of Mercier et Camier (written in French in 1946), the characters state that they hear voices; the narrator of The Unnamable is traversed by them, to the detriment of any corporeal presence, and that of How It Is claims to content himself with repeating what he hears, regularly punctuating his discourse with ‘I quote’. In the plays, Estragon and Vladimir describe ‘dead voices’ (G, 58), and Winnie declares that ‘those are happy days, when there are sounds’ (HD, 162). As for Krapp, he listens to successive recordings of his own voice, by means of a tape recorder. And yet, it is in the later plays that the striking use Beckett makes of this motif can be appreciated: spectral voices constitute the essential part of the theatrical premise used by That Time and Footfalls. We must not, of course, forget the radio plays—starting with All That Fall (1956)—where the voice is heard in a very pure form, unburdened by any visual components. Turning to the narrative texts where the voice apparently occupies a secondary place—being limited to the status of a simple motif—it can be noted that the voice never ceases to be present in a more subtle form, since it supports the narration in its entirety. This fact is confirmed by the reading or reciting of these texts in public, by actors such as Pierre Chabert or Sami Frey. Ludovic Janvier emphasises the crucial nature of the voice in the composition of the prose works, as he noticed when working on the translation of Watt from English into French:

Each time a passage was accepted, Beckett placed it on a pile and in the end he rewrote it all by hand, in small notebooks, so that it would all pass via the voice. This transposition from the hand to the voice was necessary so that Watt in French would be really intimate for him: the resumption by his gesture and his own vocalisation of the translation in its final state. (1999, 34)

He continues:

Everything passed through the mouth, as for an actor. Vocalisation was for him the guarantee of the writing subject, the anchoring of the text in a physical rhythm which was that of the voice. It is no mere chance if, since Molloy, the theme of the voice has appeared as a priority, as a major part, pervading right through to the last texts that are pure vocalisation, devoid of any support.