Samuel Beckett and Trauma by Mariko Hori Tanaka Yoshiki Tajiri Michiko Tsushima

Author:Mariko Hori Tanaka,Yoshiki Tajiri,Michiko Tsushima
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

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Bodily object voices in Embers

Anna Sigg

In Beckett’s memory plays, such as Krapp’s Last Tape, Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu and Embers, the characters make an almost mechanical effort to rework their traumatic pasts. Although Jonathan Boulter’s articles, such as ‘Does Mourning Require a Subject?’ (2004), and Russell Smith’s article (2007) on Beckett’s Endgame stress the importance of attending to the concept of trauma in Beckett’s plays, critics find it generally difficult to relate Beckett’s minimalist works to trauma theory, because, in his plays, the categories of memory, self and the past, on which the mechanism of trauma is based, have become unknowable. However, as Cathy Caruth points out, the concrete source of the primary trauma can generally rarely be located and grasped. She explains that trauma is based on a temporal delay, suggesting that ‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’ (1996: 4). Although the concrete origin of the trauma is sometimes only located off-stage and thus not always accessible, it haunts the characters from a distance and speaks through their bodies. Beckett’s plays stage the condition of trauma rather than the primary traumatic event itself.

Beckett was adamant that Embers, like his other radio plays, not be performed on stage: it was meant to be broadcast as a onetime event. As a radio play, Embers effectively ‘blinds’ its listener and places him or her in a mental cave, a ghostly place of darkness from which the memories of traumatic loss depicted in the play emerge. Donald McWhinnie points out the ‘intimacy of radio’ (1959: 57), and indeed, the radio play’s intimate, ghostly atmosphere serves to create a close connection between the character and the witnessing listener of the traumatic stories. Agency is located within the lack of distance between listener and character. In a radio play the ‘theatre’, the ‘representation’ or ‘performance’ is much more obviously inside the listener’s head than in regular theatre. Therefore, the protagonist Henry’s commands to listen to his inner voices are most of all directed at the listener off-stage during the moment when he or she is listening to the radio play. When Henry commands: ‘you needn’t speak. Just listen’ (Beckett, 2006a: 209) or repeatedly utters the persistent phrase ‘white world. Not a sound. Listen to it!’ (200), the ‘you’ is also directed at the listener off-stage. The listener takes on an active role as he or she cannot escape into the passive realm of silence.

Embers focuses on the character Henry, who finds himself in a cycle of traumatic repetition. Boulter points out that, for Henry, ‘mourning [becomes] the inevitable continuation of Being’ (2004: 336). Throughout the play, he is tortured by a roaring, internal sea-like sound, a form of ‘tinnitus’ – a ringing in the ears – which reminds him of his dead father and his own mortality. He describes his memories as ‘some old grave [he] cannot tear [him] self away from’ (Beckett, 2006a: 203). Henry re-enacts the stories of his past, but is unable to finish them with the use of words.

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