Rockaby

Beckett is not always entirely scrutable but after a certain point, his ‘aim’ is so evident that each successive work becomes almost like self-parody. We know that with a Beckett text (how else can we categorise these works, why must we categorise?) we deal with a certain amount of chiaroscuro, with an interrogation of the Cartesian fallacy, with the voice ex nihilo, valorisation of austerity, unexplained confinement—physical, psychological, and existential; ante-natalism, morbid humour; the odd well-timed profanity, echolalia/semantic satiation, itemisation…but even with this, we still manage to avoid cliché; there is a sense synoptic of each repetition of themes being a colouring-in, each time we are a shade closer to the truth of things.

The particulars are important. Particulars of language certainly. No word is accidental; no-one has been as much a martyr of the instance of the word since Gertrude Stein. Each word and each instance of the word (the thing we call repetition) is charged with meaning, and each word is in vain; every utterance is futile, all bears down to the realm of silence. It is Munch’s conceit in ‘The Scream’; Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’; Bacon’s screaming popes. If Joyce was trying to fill the vacuum of existence with words, Beckett widens the vacuum by speaking; his texts peter out, but because by virtue of their mere existence (because expression can never be silence) they cannot expire, they fold in on themselves eternally, thus creating the ellipse, the failure.

There is an austere tyranny to the directorial instructions. This is because this theatre, much like Artaud's, is structured like a language. The communication is not merely verbal. To adjust one material element would be to modify the text.

I have mostly put language ‘at the centre of my enquiry’, as Elizabeth Barry has it. But is it really possibly to read gainfully through neurology or psychology? Is Beckett’s drama really legible as a dramatisation of psychological processes? (as Barry suggests, “Beckett explores and dramatises these psychological processes, the positing of a self-observer being a frequent trope in the fiction and theatre.) We know that Beckett underwent psychoanalysis and that he otherwise well-informed about this and other related subjects; that he had personal experience of aphasia, that he was interested in pathology, etc. But is it necessarily true that ‘any study of language and the mind, she argues, must pay attention to both neuroscience and psychoanalysis, as Beckett himself paid close attention to both the biology and the psychology of the mind in his reading, experience and practice.’

Thus we can read Rockaby perhaps as a dramatization of senility or schizophrenia; of morbid aphasia. The old woman on the chair, all done up in her black attire -- is to some extent ‘off her rocker’, we are to pay no real attention to the words she says; they are only illustrations of her condition. Perhaps I am exaggeration the tone of this kind of reason, but its merely to say that while such ‘informed’ analysis can throw light, ultimately they are besides the point. Beckett’s staging is so bare precisely because he does want us to latch on to errant symbols and then spin interpretations.

Beckett’s art of impoverishment resists ‘the availability of art to a cultural usefulness or domestication’. But much as he couldn’t help but write, we can’t help but read.