Beckett and Musicality by Sara Jane Bailes

Author:Sara Jane Bailes [Bailes, Sara Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317175896
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2016-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Articulated Arrhythmia

Chained flow: we are back again at the seeming contradiction spelled out at the beginning of this chapter as inherent in the very notion of rhythm, that is, the dialectics between motion and chain, stream and bank, containment and flow. Moving beyond the formalist label often assigned to Beckett’s writing in existing literature, I have attempted here to read his rhythmic idiom as a double-edged register of simultaneous orchestration and dissolution. Rhythmic structure in Beckett keeps out ‘the mess’, as he famously put it in his interview with Tom Driver, but always simultaneously re-inscribes what it seeks to exorcise; ‘it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else’.85 A double agent, rhythm both binds and unhinges: it contains emotion only to have it more forcefully released, it orchestrates language while pulverizing its sequences, it gives shape to bodies and sends them moving along its waves. A master of speeds, intensities and rhythms, Beckett lets us immerse in his tightly patterned, almost order-obsessed rhythmic grids. And we do. Finding ourselves, in Beckett’s own words, ‘at bounds of boundless void’.86

1 Janet Goodridge, Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance: Drama, Dance and Ceremony (London, 1999), p. 56.

2 Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London, 2006), p. 265.

3 Goodridge, Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance, p. 57.

4 This is often referred to as Beckett’s ‘later drama’; this period begins with Play (1962–3) and includes the dramatic works written thereafter.

5 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL, 1971), p. 285.

6 Ibid., p. 284. Benveniste is here using Bergk’s translation of Archilochus. The same passage has been translated differently by Werner Jaeger, who interprets rhythm as holding pattern or containing force, and reads the same lines as: ‘understand the rhythm which holds mankind in its bonds’ (see Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet [New York, 1986], p. 125). Despite the differing interpretations of the lines, it is clear that rhythm is used by Archilochus in the sense of arranging pattern and form. In its original appearance the word had no musical connotations; the first use of the word ‘rhythm’ with musical reference can be traced later to Xenocrates in the fourth century BCE.

7 Lewis Rowell, ‘The Subconscious Language of Musical Time’, Music Theory Spectrum 1 (1979): 96–106 (p. 104).

8 Goodridge, Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance, p. 43.

9 Haili You, ‘Defining Rhythm: Aspects of an Anthropology of Rhythm’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18/3 (1994): 361–38 (p. 362).

10 Merriam Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Literature (Springfield, MA, 1995), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

11 Philip B. Gove (ed.), Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms (Springfield, MA, 1973), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

12 The New Grove (London, 1980), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

13 Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary (Springfield, MA, 1995), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

14 Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, p. 126.

15 Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 285–6.

16 Ibid., p. 286.

17 William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p.

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