Читать книгу Beckett, Lacan and the Voice - Llewellyn Brown - Страница 11

This brief sampling suffices to grasp the crucial importance of the voice for Beckett, to the point where the practice of writing cannot be dissociated from its aural and vocal dimensions. As a young man, Beckett was fundamentally inhabited by listening, a disposition that was not exclusively reserved for his creative activity. Anne Atik records how he gave his interlocutors the remarkable impression of being the object of extremely attentive listening (14, 33). Simple sounds could have a persecuting impact upon him, as his official biographer, James Knowlson, notes:

He was hypersensitive to sounds. His cousins […] recalled him coming to the family home […] for the wake of their mother’s funeral, and sitting with his head down at the kitchen table, their mother’s hanging wall clock ticking noisily away behind him. He seemed dreadfully disturbed, then finally blurted out: ‘Look, I can’t go on another minute with this clock. You’ll have to stop it ticking!’ (1997, 614)

Paradoxically, listening to the most minute sounds also represented an activity in itself for Beckett, as Charles Juliet reports: ‘I asked him if he always remained for hours silent and inactive, listening to and observing what spoke and took place within himself. He repeated that hearing was becoming more and more important compared to the eye’ (Juliet, 42). In his house at Ussy-sur-Marne, in the Île-de-France region, he appreciated the emptiness and the silence of the countryside, responding as follows to a question asked by Charles Juliet: ‘– Mais quand rien ne se passe, que faites-vous? / – Il y a toujours à écouter’ (‘But when nothing happens, what do you do?’ ‘There is always [something] to listen to’, Juliet, 49). Listening thus appears to be inseparable from the background silence that gives form to sounds. James Knowlson observes: ‘Beckett is, after all, the great poet of silence, a silence which allowed him to listen to that internal voice murmuring away relentlessly in his head or which emphasised so dramatically the little sounds that so often pass unperceived. A fly buzzing around his worktable, for instance, was to make a companionable appearance later in his prose text Company[5] […]’ (2010, 19). Far from being impoverished manifestations, sounds seem to contain a whole world, as Beckett observes in the work of Proust:

Withdrawn in his cool dark room at Combray he extracts the total essence of a scorching midday from the scarlet stellar blows of a hammer in the street and the chamber-music of flies in the gloom. Lying in bed at dawn, the exact quality of the weather, temperature and visibility, is transmitted to him in terms of sound, in the chimes and the calls of the hawkers. (Pr, 83)

For Proust, as for the Beckettian character, the existence of the world is not considered as a compact whole that could be explored in its material breadth but, on the contrary, as being dependent on the sounds that communicate its essence: even visibility has no existence outside of the sounds that pass through it. It is thus that Proust resembles numerous Beckettian characters: lying—in the manner of a recumbent statue (Company)—and absorbing the voice that comes to him in the dark.

Other characters echo this practice of listening that Beckett shares with Proust. The narrator of Malone Dies explains:

When I stop, as just now, the noises begin again, strangely loud, those whose turn it is. So that I seem to have again the hearing of my boyhood. Then in my bed, in the dark, on stormy nights, I could tell from one another, in the outcry without, the leaves, the boughs, the groaning trunks, even the grasses and the house that sheltered me. Each tree had its own cry, just as no two whispered alike, when the air was still. I heard afar the iron gates clashing and dragging at their posts and the wind rushing between their bars. There was nothing, not even the sand on the paths, that did not utter its cry. The still nights too, still as the grave, as the saying is, were nights of storm for me, clamourous with countless pantings. These I amused myself with identifying, as I lay there. Yes, I got great amusement, when young, from their so-called silence. (MD, 200)

Silence offers exceptional conditions that reveal the richness of sounds. When the outer husk of existence loses its consistency, an infinity of sounds comes to life. Winnie also appreciates these sounds that help her to fill in her time between waking and sleep: ‘They are a boon, sounds are a boon, they help me… through the day. [Smile.] The old style! [Smile off.] Yes, those are happy days, when there are sounds’ (HD, 162). Or the blind man in Rough for Theatre I: ‘I can stay for hours listening to all the sounds’ (RT I, 233).

The relationship between writing and the voice goes much further than the desire to feel at ease with the materiality of words, as Ludovic Janvier emphasised. Beckett’s relationship to the voice is manifestly far more intimate and—for this reason—fundamental. James Knowlson notes that Beckett was ‘obsessed by the way that he heard the text in his head’ (1997, 502). This preoccupation led him to a concern for exactness that could make his experience of listening more difficult during performances of his plays. Regarding a staging of Endgame, Beckett asserted: ‘It will never be the way I hear it. It’s a cantata for two voices’ (in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, 163). This musical metaphor suggests that the text, in its very essence, is of a vocal nature—it is elevated to the dignity of a piece of music—and for this reason, it possesses a quality that persists in the realm of the author’s intimate experience, so that no punctual recreation can equal it. Beckett’s attention to musicality also enabled him to ascertain the exactness of a text’s rhythm, when it was translated into Hebrew (Atik, 74). His cousin John Beckett also testifies to Beckett sounding a gong for the recording MacGowran Speaking Beckett. He played the instrument ‘with terrific concentration’, producing a sound of ‘a gong in a house’, but heard as if it came from another room (in Tucker, 379).

The idea of the voice is not a figure of speech used to translate the author’s attachment to the sounds of words. Oriented by listening in his practice of writing, Beckett heard voices in the most literal sense of the word, and he gave form to them in his works. Mary Bryden notes, following André Bernold’s testimony, that Beckett declared ‘that he heard all of his texts in advance of writing them’[6] (2010, 364). Indeed, when Beckett objected to Albert Finney playing Krapp in December 1972, he pointed to the crucial question of the voice, declaring: ‘You hear it a certain way in your head […]’ (in Knowlson, 1997, 596). By contrast, according to Deirdre Bair (491), ‘Beckett told Magee that he was astonished when he first heard him speak because Magee’s voice was the one which he heard inside his mind’. Stanley Gontarski remarks, about the composition of That Time: ‘First, the earliest drafts of the memories were recorded in near final form, perhaps because Beckett was recording his own inner voice or unconscious’ (1985, 151). Martin Esslin describes this process more precisely: ‘When I once asked Beckett about his method of work, he replied that, having attained a state of concentration, he merely listened to the voice emerging from the depths, which he then tried to take down; afterward he would apply his critical and shaping intelligence to the material thus obtained’ (379–80). The process described here is not simple, since Esslin reveals three stages, each separated by a gap, by an essential rupture: the original voice emerging spontaneously, followed by the version noted down, then finally, the literary form. This is comparable to a patient in psychoanalysis recounting a dream: whereas the latter represents the ‘utterance’, what is crucial is his enunciation, the subjectivity that enters into play when one recounts and assumes a particular position with regards to this utterance (Lacan, 2013, 166). This ethical position enlarges the question of vocality in Beckett’s work beyond its sonorous quality. Mladen Dolar thus correctly emphasises: ‘Beckett’s literature, written as literature is, is at the same time the literature of the voice as no other, not only by virtue of its being close to the spoken idiom, but also by being sustained merely by pure enunciation which propels it forward […]’ [7] (2010, 58).

Beckett’s listening to what could be called ‘pre-existing’ or ‘proto-texts’—communicated from somewhere beyond prosaic reality—leads to texts where the narrators claim they content themselves with quoting the voices they hear, without assuming their content. Thus, in The Unnamable, the narrator declares: ‘But I don’t say anything, I don’t know anything, these voices are not mine, nor these thoughts, but the voices and the thoughts of the devils who beset me’ (U, 341). In How It Is, we read: ‘then on my elbow I quote I see me prop me up thrust in my arm in the sack’ (HI, 8). These narrators appear to reproduce the attitude of Beckett listening to his inner voices to transpose them in written form.