Classics Revisited
Dialogues across time
BY RAVI VYAS
The Complete Dramatic Works, Samuel Beckett, Penguin India, £12.99 (Krapp first written in 1958).
Other Works Consulted:
Beckett, A. Alvarez, in Fontana Modern Masters Series.
Beckett, Faber Critical Studies.
Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1948-2005, Harold Pinter.
The farther he goes the more good he does me. I don't want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He's... not selling me anything. I don't want to buy, and he doesn't give a (damn) whether I buy or not, he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll buy his goods, hook, liner and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.
Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett,1954
ON the hundredth birth anniversary of Samuel Beckett, probably one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, the retrospectives cover the usual suspects: "Waiting for Godot", "Endgame" and a few others from the vast corpus of his dramatic works. "Krapp's Last Tape", which is perhaps Beckett's more perfect piece of writing for the theatre where an ageing man plays back the monologues he had taped when young and listens with a cynical ear to the hopes and dreams he once had and which amounted to nothing, will be passed over. No one really wants to know that the future doesn't work.
Memory and the contrast between a lost past and the sour present had become Beckett's only theme probably because the picture of a glowing past and a diminished present is something we all go through. Here is a picture of a man at the end of his tether, a man with only his painkiller to look forward to and his memories to look back on. It is a day like any other, except that the days have accumulated into a life.
The detailed stage instructions and the actions are correspondingly bare: an old man in a funnel of light, sitting on a table listening to a tape of himself talking 30 years ago is more than a touch nostalgic. Here, a single character is doubled, then trebled by the timely mechanical invention, the magnetic tape recorder. This makes possible a dialogue, through pre-recorded tape, between an old man and his middle-aged self, and their shared sarcastic jokes about a young man both once were.
As usual, the action is simple: after the introductory business is over, the old man plays the reel of tape. The tape is a retrospect of the year just past and records the death of his mother, mixed with memories of a beautiful housemaid, a dog and a rubber ball. There is also a moment of revelation at night by the edge of the sea during a storm.
Paths of memory
But the old man is bored by the younger Krapp's youthful pretensions and keeps slipping the tape forward. He is trying to find a scene that he remembers and having found it, summarises the contents of each reel as "Farewell to Love". Having found it, he then records his own latest retrospect of the past year. This is how memory works: the past that he has seen lies all before him; memory moves forward, the future backwards. But the old man's style lacks the fluency and precision of youth.
It is starker, more acidic and dislocated as befits a life falling to bits with age and failure. In place of the young man's vision, he reports a bleaker, deprived reality: Krapp lives a life of total obscurity in every sense of the term: his "magnum opus" has sold just 17 copies and he scarcely leaves his darkened room. His love life is zilch. His only solace is to lie in bed and dream about his infinitely remote childhood: "Lie propped up in the dark... and wander. Be again the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried... And so on. Be again, be again. All that old misery. Once wasn't enough for you."
The play ends with the voice of the younger Krapp: "Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back."
The key to the play
The last sentence of the tape is the key to the play. For the young man who made the recording, it is an affirmation of strength: he has had the vision, the fire is in him, and he knows what he must do. But, for the old man, listening to it motionless in the dark room, it is an echo of his renunciation. In the end, "all that old misery... the suffering of being" is in fact too much for him. So he defends himself against it by drink, bananas and slapstick.
Beckett's earlier works were concerned with depression in its various manifestations; in comparison, "Krapp's Last Tape" is far more human, open and available. Its subject is not depression but grief, and instead of shying away from its causes, it shows, poignantly and with great beauty, precisely what has been lost. Beckett allows Memory its due and how it becomes vulnerable to the malignant disease of Time.
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