Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: from “things” to “The Thing”

• Main Author: Geneviève Chevallier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2009-03-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/5962
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444

When one thinks of the stage in Beckett’s plays, one tends to see it as empty or in the process of becoming so. Indeed, the things, that is, to start with, the objects which are set up onstage and keep the characters busy, appear as remains, traces of what they could or might have been. They are the last possessions of the characters, now materialized on stage, now merely evoked in speech, almost invoked in the place of the self, as they are all that remains for the self to be able to speak still, to speak of oneself, for something to “take its course”. The most “telling” example of this is to be found in Happy Days, as Winnie keeps enumerating the contents of her bag so as to make sure that she is still alive, still having something to say. Yet the later plays stage a disappearance of objects to the benefit of the voice. The voice—a tape recorder or a loudspeaker, in Krapp’s Last Tape and What Where; an offstage device in Footfalls, That Time or Rockaby—is at once a character and an object. But the tongue which we both see and hear in Not I, as the lips and the words take form in the Mouth, turns the object into a thing, The Thing, Das Ding, as Freud defines it, that which cannot be represented, what the subject longs for and will never find, a lost object, which is the core of the sublimation process that accounts for the work of art.