Storytelling in Beckett's collected shorter plays

Résumé du document

"The exposition of the story and its communication by suitable means of estrangement, constitute the main business of the theatre; everything hangs on the story; it is the heart of the theatrical performance" (Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre). Thus it is observed that, in Beckett's ?Collected Shorter Plays', it seems that the newest convention for expressing psychological inwardness on stage appears to be the so-called technique of storytelling where the narrative suddenly becomes drama. This really marks a break with the former accepted theatrical convention for revealing a character's hidden thoughts: the soliloquy. A soliloquy is a device meant to stop the external action so that internal mind could be expressed. Storytelling is the art of portraying in words, images, and sounds, what has happened in real or imagined events. To Beckett, it represents the human effort to create order out of a random experience. A story can be presented through action, dialogue and narration. It is an interactive experience between a teller and a listener.

Extraits

[...] We will try to analyse this key device of storytelling throughout our scrutiny of some of the most relevant Beckettian Shorter Plays. Our first part will be dedicated to the process of reduction inherent in Beckett's narration, showing up his tendency to annihilate at least, to minimize and fragment- both his story and his storyteller's self. In a second section of our inquiry, we shall deal with the necessity for the Beckettian narrator to tell a story deeply human need indeed. [...]

[...] Apart from this urgent “need for storytelling”, some of the Beckettian narrators, on the contrary, shall refuse to tell theirs. This is in a way what happens to Mouth in Not I. She must tell her story, and yet she cannot. It is a refusal rather than an actual inability, for she is clearly able to attempt communication. What impedes her lies in the relationship between the narrator, Mouth, and the woman in the narration. Mouth is that woman, forced by her moving lips to babble out the story of her life, unable because of her stroke to stop the flow of speech that has been dammed up all her days. [...]

[...] As human beings, they turn to this psychological process to flee the harshness of their lives, when their burden is too heavy to bear for one single self –just as we often do through dreams, as expressed in Nacht une Traüme, or simply through reading such a collection of plays, waking suddenly up to the intricacy of our own existence. Storytelling is an essential part of the Beckettian drama, in his Shorter Plays more than in any of his works. Beckett's storytellers, driven by a strong impetus, tell a story –that of their own life for most of them- in the hope to get away from their incapacity to grasp the meaning of their austere existence, and the very act of narration often leads to the eradication of their inner self. [...]

[...] This notion of the eternity of story-telling is also noticeable in Footfalls. The repetition of the dialogue of the opening sequence between May and her mother (Pause) Yes, Mother. (Pause) Will you never have shows up the never-ending facet of storytelling. The fictional narrative told by May suddenly becomes the present reality, which will have a multitude of “sequels” as we may imagine. May and Mother seem to be one and the same person: an eternal being, getting fainter and fainter toward the end of the play. [...]

[...] In Not Beckett even reduces the human impulse of storytelling to its instrument, the voice, and more precisely, to its physical apparatus, the mouth. This need to tell one's story is even more explicit in Play. More importantly, the need to falsify the story seems to be the key purpose of the three narrators least in the first delivery of the story. Lies mark the triangular relationship between the three storytellers the term connotes another meaning, that of The whole play can be considered as a confession –another way of telling- of those lies –both the basic lie of betrayal and that, more subtle, of self- deception. [...]