Words and Music by Samuel Beckett (1961)

Another work from Samuel Beckett’s ‘radio phase’, when he experimented with the possibilities of radio between about 1956 and 1961. It’s a short text (just eight pages in the Faber Collected Shorter Plays) for voice and music, so it tells you a lot about the contribution of musical interludes and silences, that the fully dramatised piece stretches to over 40 minutes.

Characters

There are three entities or ‘characters, Words (who speaks a lot), Music (whose parts consist entirely of patches of music) and a human character named Croak. Right at the beginning, before Croak arrives, Words makes it plain he detests Music:

Music: How much longer cooped up here, in the dark? (With loathing.) With you!

Word tries to keep himself going by giving himself a topic for discourse, namely Sloth and rattling off a paragraph of bombastic nonsense on the subject, before breaking off because he can hear the ‘Distant sound of rapidly shuffling carpet slippers’.

Croak

Croak arrives. He apologises for arriving late, saying something about a face on the stairs. Croak appears to be a lofty impresario who gives subjects for Words (who he calls Joe and who, in reply, calls him ‘My lord’) and Music (who he calls Bob) to describe or embroider as if in a competition. At moments Croak shouts at them, calling them ‘dogs!’, at other moments calls them ‘my comforts’, ‘my balms’. At the beginning he tells them to be friends, reinforcing the impression given by Words’ opening words, that the two hate each other.

The competition of Words and Music

And then, as if at the start of a familiar routine, Croak gives them their first topic for the evening. First Words has his speeches, then Music makes its noise. Croak signals the change between each with the loud thump of a club, presumably on the floor.

After Words and Music have each had a go (accompanied by Croak’s groans and comments) one section is drawn to an end, and then Croak gives them another topic. The topics are:

  • Sloth (ad libbed by Words)
  • Love
  • Age

Morton Feldman’s music

‘Music’ is meant to produce actual music and various composers have risen to the challenge of writing music to represent the contribution of Music to the dialogue. In the original BBC radio production the music was written by Beckett’s cousin, John Beckett, who wrote the music for a number of Beckett’s productions.

The earliest version I can find is this production which features the music of Morton Feldman, the highly experimental avant-garde American composer. I’ve always liked Feldman’s music, it has a slowly penetrating, atonal, modernist simplicity, and its sparseness seems a perfect accompaniment for Beckett’s sparse words and scenario.

A twentieth century masque

Because I’ve been reading 17th century literature recently, this work strikes me as being a kind of twentieth century masque, in which allegorical Types compete for the favour of a judge or adjudicator, in just the same way that, in the classic 17th century masque, allegorical performances were put on for the enjoyment of the king himself (King James or King Charles), who were sometimes asked to display their wisdom and authority by deciding stylised debates between classical virtues or attributes.

Except that, it being the twentieth century and Beckett a writer of the absurd or of nihilistic futility, the words of Words are a meaningless farrago, a pastiche of Shakespearian eloquence whose booming clichés elicit only groans from his master, Croak.

‘What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?’

It’s like a Shakespeare sonnet which has been put through a blender, grammatically it makes sense but has been deliberately mashed to sound like repetitious nonsense, making the rather obvious, schoolboy point that Shakespearean rhetoric comes from an age convinced of its own values and coherent worldview, whereas in our own oh-dear-so-disillusioned age, that kind of confidence and fluency is no longer possible. Alas and lackaday.

Sex

Sex is surprisingly present in many of Beckett’s works, albeit in deliberately harsh, absurdist and anti-romantic forms. Take the second part of Molloy, where Moran casually tells us about his masturbating, or the hint of BDSM sex in Murphy, the narrator of First Love having sex with Lulu, Sam having sex with every woman in the neighbourhood despite being confined to a wheelchair in Watt, references to gay sex and being ‘sucked off’ in Mercier and Camier, MacMann folding his penis up and trying to stuff it in Moll’s dried-up vagina in Malone Dies. Many of the prose texts go out of their way to use the rudest words possible, starting with bugger and shit and working up to the f word and the c word.

My point is we shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging sexual references or vocabulary just because it’s in Nobel Prize Winner. The opposite, he thoroughly enjoyed ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’ as Leslie Fiedler put it, with rancid descriptions of sex and the crudest sex words.

There’s another element which is the surprising presence of the memory of a love affair in Krapp’s Last Tape. Krapp obsessively repeats the memory of a moment when he lay with an unnamed young woman, his hand on her breast.

I don’t for a minute find it a moving memory. Beckett is anti-sentimental. I find it more interesting to entertain the notion that Beckett refined a rhetoric of paucity and impoverishment, of senility and forgetfulness, of mechanical repetitions, he created some great scenarios (man plays tapes of his younger self, woman buried up to her waits in sand who accepts it as perfectly normal, old man conjures Words and Music to compete with each other) but then doesn’t know what to do next and so resorts to sexual imagery and content.

Exactly as this play’s immediate predecessor, Rough For Radio II, starts out being about two characters supervising the violent torture of another but, about half way through, loses interest or gets distracted from the nominal theme, when the pretty young stenographer is asked to take off her overalls, when the torture supervisor orders her to kiss the torture victim and when the torture victim’s chief memories seem to be of a full, milky breast.

I find most of Beckett’s scenarios powerful and impressive, but am quite regularly disappointed by the lack of subject matter. Or the fact the two men in the bunker and the woman up to her waist in sand and, as here, the allegorical figures of Words and Music have so little to say for themselves. Are incapable of anything but tittle tattle and trivia, as when all Words can think of to describe Age is:

‘Huddled o’er . . . the ingle (Pause. Violent thump. Trying to sing.) Waiting for the hag to put the … pan … in the bed…’

Waiting for a hag to bring a bedpan, is that it? So I’m not surprised that, rather as Krapp’s Last Tape runs out of ideas and is forced to resort to a basically sexual memory of the young man lying with his hand on the woman’s breast, so Words and Music appears, similarly, to run out any ideas for content and resorts to… breasts.

… flare of the black disordered hair as though spread wide on water, the brows knitted in a groove suggesting pain but simply concentration more likely all things considered on some consummate inner process, the eyes of course closed in keeping with this, the lashes . . . (pause) . . . the nose … (pause) … nothing, a little pinched perhaps, the lips….. tight, a gleam of tooth biting on the under, no coral, no swell, whereas normally… the whole so blanched and still that were it not for the great white rise and fall of the breasts, spreading as they mount and then subsiding to their natural… aperture…

As a heterosexual man I am all in favour of heaving bosoms but their appearance in three of Beckett’s plays in a row suggests a pattern, one of the oldest writing strategies in the world… if you run out of inspiration, put boobs in it! Maybe you can dress it up quite considerably more academically than that, but that’s what it appears to boil down to – Beckett doesn’t have much to say, what he does have is either gibberish versions of Romantic rhetoric or pseudo-philosophical speculation, images of decrepitude and decay, or, to keep the thing going a little longer (which is, after all, THE central Beckett theme) sex, the most basic, primeval aspect of human nature. If it is a description of a woman’s young nubile body, then her natural… aperture, is obviously her ****.

Which brings me to my final point. We have heard Words describing the heaving bosom, and Croak cry out ‘Lily!’ as if Words is evoking a memory of a woman called Lily (so similar to the repeated memory of the woman’s breast in Krapp’s Last Tape). The final passages of Words and Music have Words repeating the same idea in the same phrases over and over again:

…the brows uncloud, the nostrils dilate, the lips part and the eyes … (pause) … a little colour comes back into the cheeks and the eyes (reverently) … open. (Pause.) Then down a little way (Pause. Change to poetic tone. Low.)
Then down a little way
Through the trash
To where … towards where…

Then down a little way
Through the trash
Towards where…

All dark no begging
No giving no words
No sense no need…

Then down a little way
Through the trash
Towards where
All dark no begging
No giving no words
No sense no need
Through the scum
Down a little way
To whence one glimpse

A glimpse of what, we wonder?

Through the scum
Down a little way
To where one glimpse
Of that wellhead.

What is a wellhead? ‘Wellhead is a general term used to describe the pressure-containing component at the surface of an oil well’ (Science Direct website). Pictures show it to be rather phallic in shape, and it contains pent-up, high-pressure liquid.

So is Words evoking a memory of a woman named Lily giving Croak a blowjob? Moving down, down, past the tummy fluff and pubic hair (the trash and scum) down to his pressure-containing equipment?

And is that why Croak drops his club, says nothing more, and shuffles off, thus ending the play? Is the memory of such unforced (‘No giving no words/No sense no need’) bliss too much for the old man to bear, just as the memory of young Krapp cupping a young woman’s breast in a field is too much for old Krapp to bear?

Long pauses

Maybe. But maybe the more dominant impression of hearing an actual production of Word and Music like this one is of the immense, yawning silences it contains. Pauses. Gaps. Emptinesses. You have to be in just the right mood, very attentive, totally engaged, in order to let the full tapestry of sounds and silence entrance you. Otherwise, all those silences run the risk of alienating the less engaged listener. And repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Beckett’s main literary technique. Beckett’s main literary technique.

The face. (Pause.) The face. (Pause.) The face. (Pause.) The face.

Credit

Words and Music by Samuel Beckett was written towards the end of 1961 and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 13 November 1962.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on December 9, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 9, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/09/words-and-music-samuel-beckett/

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