Capítulo III Consejos insulares
DEL SISTEMA DE PROTECCIÓN DE LA INFANCIA Y LA ADOLESCENCIA Capítulo I
I shall now move on to discuss some theoretical issues concerning European radio art and theory, leading to an analysis of Futurism and Surrealism as helpful aesthetic contexts for Beckett’s radio plays. As is well known, Beckett was deeply immersed in European avant-garde culture in his early years, and I shall examine the biographical evidence of this below. I begin here with Futurist debates about radio, since these were some of the earliest twentieth-century avant-garde responses to the new medium, and I will then move on to the German and French debates, for these were artistic cultures with which the young Beckett had close personal connections.
Futurism—whether Italian or Russian—highlights and celebrates the industrialisation of the modern period; speed, violence, warfare and technology are among its central aesthetic themes. Given this use of technology as an impetus to literary creativity, we might at a push find faint Futurist reverberations in Beckett’s All That Fall, for this play is replete with various means of transport: cart, bicycle, car, limousine, and train. The latter modes in particular articulate a certain celebration of speed linked to what Jane Rye terms the Futurist attention to “metals – their alloys, fusions and combinations; to discover new sources of passion in the dramas of the chemical laboratory or the tragedy of the blast furnaces” in the “mechanical
kingdom.”107 There is, however, also an awareness of the dangers of speed as when Mr. Slocum’s limousine runs over a hen or a child dies after falling from the train.
Critics from Hugh Kenner onward have stressed a strong tendency towards the
107 Jane Rye, Futurism (London: Studio Vista, 1972) 115-16.
mechanisation of the body in Beckett’s work. For Kenner, this takes the form of the
“Cartesian Centaur,” the perfect union of body and machine as incarnated in the Beckett character on his bicycle. In the radio plays, this phenomenon takes on a more appropriate technological form. In Rough for Radio I the anonymous protagonist He switches knobs on and off to play or stop the airborne voices and music, so that when Henry instructs himself “on” in Embers or Fox is brutally told to go “on” in Rough for Radio II, it is as though these characters have themselves, to an extent, become radios that need to be switched on or off to make them physically move forwards (Henry) or to continue with psychological free-associationism (Fox).
A second promising linkage between Futurist radio theory and Beckett’s radio drama lies in the former’s attitudes to language and noise. Timothy C. Campbell has demonstrated the relationship between radio and F. T. Marinetti’s concept of “wireless writing” (immaginazione senzafili). According to Campbell, radio communication without the medium of the telegraph wire is analogous to Futurist wireless writing in that the latter “[removes] words that hinder the easy transmission of sense data into their written analogue” and is thus a mode of free expression or “words in freedom”
(parole in libertà).108 He suggests that actual wireless technology is a direct influence on Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, and that the imaginative mode of wireless writing leads to the Futurist demand for words in freedom. Marinetti states that:
Words in freedom are an absolutely free expression of the universe in which prosody and syntax have no part, a new way of seeing and feeling, a measuring of the universe as a sum of moving forces. These forces
intersect in our conscious and creative self, which records them exactly, using every possible means of expression. . . . In this way, the
108 Timothy C. Campbell, Wireless in the Age of Marconi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006) 91.
free-wordists orchestrate color, noises, sounds, form evocative
combinations out of the material of language and patois, arithmetic and geometric formulas, old words, distorted words and invented words, animal cries and engine noises, etc.109
This new mode of expression shatters the traditional system: language is distorted, transformed, and reassembled in a new formation. This new orthography aims to
“achieve the psychic onomatopoeic chord, sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or a pure thought” that offers direct affective expression, free from grammatical or syntactical bondage.110 This, then, is the Futurist proposition of
“words in freedom” when syntactical structure “is replaced by the emotional
perspective, which is multiform.”111 If the introduction of onomatopoeia can “render all the sounds and all the noises of modern life, even the most cacophonous” as “the raw elements of reality,” then radiophonic art could be considered an example of words in freedom.112 Hence it is that Beckett’s radio art contains Maddy Rooney’s panting and screaming, the clashing of train couplings, the sound of dragging feet, the click of switches, the ringing of telephones, clashing of stones, dripping of water, thumps with rulers and clubs, raps of batons, and so on. Cacophony becomes a positive creative principle for Beckett, as it is for Futurism.113
The German-language debate about radio was particularly lively in the 1920s
109 F. T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R.
Studholme (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002) 86.
110 Marinetti 89.
111 Marinetti 92.
112 Marinetti 88.
113 It is a similar concept to the “radiophonic body” as in Jeff Porter’s article “Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body: Beckett and the BBC,” Modern Drama 53.4 (2010): 431-46. This reflects Beckett’s attack on linguistic expression, which I will address in full in Chapter Four.
and 1930s, and Beckett had close connections with German culture in this period.
Prompted by visits to his beloved uncle “Boss” Sinclair in Kassel, Beckett stayed in Germany for six months between 1936 and 1937. The trip was an inspirational pilgrimage of aesthetic, philosophical and psychological stimulation, particularly in his interactions with local artists. He was, for example, preoccupied with new paintings, with a preference for “stillness and the unsaid” in the work of Willem Grimm and Karl Ballmer.114 So fruitful was this trip for Beckett that Mark Nixon suggests that he “perceived Germany as a potential remedy for emotional troubles, as well as an aesthetic and cultural space that could provide inspiration for his
writing.”115 References to German culture do turn up in the radio plays, though to nineteenth-century rather than to avant-garde works (Schubert and Effi Briest in All That Fall).
The pros and cons of radio as a new medium were vigorously argued out by German-language intellectuals. Bertolt Brecht in his “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” (1932) maintained that radio was flawed and urged mutual
communication with “a vast network of pipes” by means of which one could both transmit and receive.116 In an article on “Radio Play or Literature?” (1929), the Austrian and Jewish playwright Arnolt Bronnen celebrated radio as a positive literary alternative which could “wield the greatest power today in the verbal arts.”117 In contrast, M. M. Gehrke saw radio as an intrusion into the domestic home in a joint
114 Qtd. in Knowlson 239. Original source: Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries (hereinafter SB’s GD), notebook 2, 26 Nov. 1936.
115 Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936-1937 (London: Continuum, 2011) 18.
116 Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 616.
117 Arnolt Bronnen, “Radio Play or Literature?” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 611.
article with radio theorist Rudolf Arnheim entitled “The End of the Private Sphere”
(1930). She argued that collective solidarity is achieved by mass transmission, while accusing radio technology of penetrating households and turning the individual radio listener into “a pirate listener.”118 Although Arnheim agrees about the intrusive effect of radio, he opposes the view of collectivism due to social class. On the other hand, the German and Jewish literary scholar Arno Schirokauer argues in his “Art and Politics in Radio” (1929) that unlike other modes of art that take place in a social venue (such as theatre), the art of radio owes its distinctive characteristics to its
private reception.119 However, we should note here (to anticipate my discussion in the next chapter) that once the Nazi party came to power in 1933 it made its own, very distinctive political use of radio as a means of mass communication.
Probably the most important of these early German radio theorists is Rudolf Arnheim, who examines the specific characteristics and aesthetics of radio in his Radio (1936). He is not only attentive to the musical theory that views word as sound, but also interrogates the ethical relationship between listeners and what they hear.
Gaby Hartel has drawn connections between Beckett’s radio plays and Arnheim’s radio theory by arguing that Beckett in effect materialises Arnheim’s radio theory.
Although “Beckett may have developed his sensitivity for the needs of the medium solely from his experience as a radio listener,” she suggests that it was rather the case that “his own radio pieces . . . materialised Arnheim’s thoughts on the power of sound
118 M. M. Gehrke and Rudolf Arnheim, “The End of the Private Sphere,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 613.
119 Arno Schirokauer, “Art and Politics in Radio,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 609-10.
emerging from the silent void.”120 Her analysis provides a preliminary focus on sound and the non-visual nature of radio as fundamental features on which radio theory must be built. She also points out how Arnheim uses “the material of voices” as
“instruments” and how he hypothesises the possibility of staging “a contest between language and music as a radio play;” without mentioning that the latter suggestion is splendidly achieved in Beckett’s Words and Music and Cascando. I will return to the former issue, of voices as instruments, in Chapter Four.121
The art of radio not only embraces the Futurist ambition to incorporate modern cacophony, but also suggests the potential of using the medium to gain access to the psyche, a project associated with Surrealism. Beckett had a certain biographical
involvement with Surrealism, for he established a social network with Surrealist artists in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. He translated several Surrealist prose pieces and poems, which were published in an issue of This Quarter guest-edited by André Breton in 1932. He also translated many other Surrealist poems such as “The Approximative Man” and “Reminder” by Tristan Tzara and Ernst Moerman’s “Louis Armstrong.”122 More importantly, Beckett’s translation of several poems by two of the Surrealist founders Breton and Paul Eluard, including a section of their cooperative work Simulations from The Immaculate Conception (1930), has been shown to have influenced him significantly. In The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, the editors Seán Lawlor and John Pilling reveal that in a letter to Thomas McGreevy (dated
120 Gaby Hartel, “Emerging Out of a Silent Void: Some Reverberations of Rudolf Arnheim’s Radio Theory in Beckett’s Radio Pieces,” Journal of Beckett Studies 19.2 (2010): 225-26.
121 Hartel 225.
122 See Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, eds. Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, critical ed. (London: Faber, 2012). Original source: The Surrealist Number in This Quarter 5.1 (1932):
72-75, 86-98.
January 18, 1935) Beckett drew a contrast between Lucia Joyce’s psychotic illness and Breton and Eluard’s Surrealist simulations of irrationality.123 Irish poet Denis Devlin wrote in a letter to McGreevy about meeting Beckett: “I was delighted to hear his account of the meeting with Breton and Eluard; Breton impressed [Beckett] and Eluard inspires affection.”124 Although we cannot fully determine how much
Surrealist concerns affect or inspire Beckett’s work, we can at least say that translation from Surrealism was aesthetically rewarding for him, as he reveals in a letter to
McGreevy that “it was always a pleasure to translate Eluard and Breton.”125
Certain critics have already stressed Beckett’s debt to Surrealism. For example, Daniel Albright operates within a Surrealist framework in his Beckett and Aesthetics to probe how Beckett includes different kinds of technology in his art. In his
“Introduction: Beckett and Surrealism,” Albright illuminatingly links such late prose such as Company (1980) or Worstward Ho (1983) to Surrealist paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. My conceptual focus on Surrealism differs from his because I intend to argue the linkage between Surrealist psychological theory and radio aesthetics as a context for Beckett’s own radio drama; I will stress André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism as the theoretical basis, while also paying particular attention to Paul Deharme’s radio theory.
I will start with an examination of Surrealist automatism, which resembles the Futurist words in freedom. André Breton disclosed in the first “Manifesto of
Surrealism” that automatism suggested itself to him when he listened to the ramblings
123 Seán Lawlor and John Pilling eds., The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, by Samuel Beckett, critical ed. (London: Faber, 2012) 362. This letter is not included in Letters of Samuel Beckett.
124 Qtd. in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (hereafter LSB), eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, et al., 4 vols. to date (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009-) 1: 169.
125 Beckett, LSB 1: 135. Letter dated 18 Oct. 1932.
of shellshock victims in a hospital in 1919. He and Philippe Soupault experimented with automatic writing based on their experiences in the hospital, jotting down
whatever came into their minds without restraint, and this work was then published in The Magnetic Fields (Les champs magnétiques) later that year. Breton and Soupault claim in their collaborative work that they have scribbled down the “self-sufficient murmur” from the “voices” in their minds, and they insist that the attempt to retrieve forbidden psychic activity from the unconscious must not be interfered with by the conscious mind.126 This practice of automatic writing explains how Breton came to define Surrealism as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought.”127 This pure state involves “the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern,”so as to gain free access to all notions or images formulated in the unconscious. Breton acknowledges that people have long lived under a repressive social system, fending off irrational thoughts that violate everyday decorum. Surrealist practice is therefore far removed from day-to-day sense-making, whilst coming close to the condition of dreams.
We may invoke the example of Surrealist automatic writing in relation to Beckett’s second radio play Embers. Henry’s compulsive retelling of the story about Bolton and Holloway certainly has features of Surrealist automatic writing. Fox in Rough for Radio II and Voice in Cascando also engage in the free play of thought, with non-identical repetition in Voice’s Woburn story or Fox’s babble of images. The most salient point of connection with Surrealism in Beckett’s radio plays, however, is a pervasive sense of alienation. The aberrant opening sequence of animal sounds in All
126 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1972) 91.
127 Breton 26.
That Fall, for example, is an ideal paradigm of alienated sonority. Strange occurrences of unrealistic sounds can disorientate an apparently stable milieu, which yields a characteristic Surrealist effect. For example in Embers, although Henry reveals to his father that they are by the sea, the sounds of horses’ hooves, the dripping of water, or the slam of a door are inserted according to Henry’s request for them. The acoustic strangeness of such phenomena undermines realist interpretation of the play’s dramatic setting and achieves a surreal impact. With their aberrant soundscapes and the practice of automatic writing in the compulsively repeated stories they contain, I propose that Beckett’s radio drama can be associated with Surrealism.
Futurist wireless writing enhances mechanical expression, whereas Surrealist automatic writing is paradigmatically associated with dreams, not only because Freud’s theory in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) is the theoretical basis of Surrealism, but because dream activity is highlighted from the start as a Surrealist experience. When Breton first coins the term Surrealism in “The Mediums Enter,” it is described as “a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the dream state.”128 Dreams are the most prevalent practice of automatism due to their freedom of expression: in them the association of images, however whimsical or fantastic, follows the principle of automatism. Closely linked to the dream state, the Surrealist presentation of the unconscious psyche, according to Breton, “can only be fairly compared to that of madness.”129 One might then argue that a Surrealist emphasis is suggested in the original script of All That Fall, in which “Beckett wrote supplying the only amendment: in the very first line of dialogue he changed the phrase which
originally ran ‘all alone in that crazy house’ to ‘all alone in that ruinous old house’”
128 Breton 90.
129 Breton 175.
(my emphasis).130 In his formulation of “a Surrealist Aesthetic of Theatre,” David G.
Zinder has stressed that “the Surrealists found almost inexhaustible intellectual, spiritual, and artistic sustenance in the psychological mechanisms of man, particularly dreams and the irrational, and their marvellous or magical intersections with
reality.”131
Breton’s attempt to resolve the demarcation between dream images and reality in the surreal relates to Paul Deharme’s radio theory, which is an effort to access the psyche and its dream-like experiences in radio. A radio theorist during the early experimental stage of the medium, Deharme became better known for incorporating radio art into commercial advertisements during the 1930s in France. In his
“Proposition for a Radiophonic Art” (1928), he points out that the wireless enables listeners to evoke images “analogous to those of dreams.”132 He thus famously links the medium to the unconscious in his most notable and influential formulation of
“radiophonic art.” He suggests the possibility that radio can manipulate audiences when information delivered penetrates the unconscious, and this claim is further elaborated in his Pour un Art Radiophonique in 1930. In the “blind art” of radio, he proposes that the medium achieves direct contact with the unconscious by “avoiding to awake the conscious mind and its disturbing actions.”133 We should note that Deharme’s radiophonic art draws heavily on psychological or psychoanalytic suggestions on how to access the unconscious, based on avant-garde Surrealist
130 Esslin, Mediations 128.
131 David G. Zinder, The Surrealist Connection: An Approach to a Surrealist Aesthetic of Theatre (Ann Arbor [MI]: UMI, 1976) 36.
132 Paul Deharme, “Proposition for a Radiophonic Art,” introd. and trans. Anke Birkenmaier, Modernism/Modernity 16.2 (2009): 406, 410.
133 Deharme 407.
principles. This link between radio and the psyche is a landmark discovery in Deharme’s theory, because images invoked on the radio, in his view, effect a parallelism with dreams.134 Radio techniques can thus strengthen the evocation of dreams, and radio drama allows dreams or the unreal to come to the fore in its use of music, achieving what Deharme sees as a Surrealist effect.
A Surrealist connection is also suggested when Martin Esslin offers his insight into the use of radio in the production of Beckett’s All That Fall: “radio can create a subjective reality halfway between the objective events experienced and their
subjective reflection within the mind of the character who experiences them – halfway between working consciousness and dreamlike states, halfway between fact and fantasy, even hallucination.”135 The stark conflict between dream or fantasy and naturalistic presentation can be harmonized in radio because the audience’s faculty of vision is turned inward when listening is the only faculty involved. Listeners employ their inner vision to form mental pictures according to what they hear on the radio.
subjective reflection within the mind of the character who experiences them – halfway between working consciousness and dreamlike states, halfway between fact and fantasy, even hallucination.”135 The stark conflict between dream or fantasy and naturalistic presentation can be harmonized in radio because the audience’s faculty of vision is turned inward when listening is the only faculty involved. Listeners employ their inner vision to form mental pictures according to what they hear on the radio.