Beckett and Company: Thomas Mansell Beckett’s Alarm

The London Consortium

Static. Issue 06 – Alarm

http://static.londonconsortium.com/issue06/

Thomas Mansell

Beckett’s Alarm

Sections of this article have appeared in Thomas Mansell, ‘Hard-to-Hear Music

in Endgame’, in Mark Byron (ed.), Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (Amsterdam

and New York, NY: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2007), pp. 1—21. The author

wishes to thank the publisher and editor for permission to reprint them here in

revised form, and also the A.H.R.C. for supporting his research.

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Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

Sounds, signs, and symbols1

Alarms occupy an ambiguous place between sound, sign, and symbol.

Bells can convey a number of quite specific messages to a community, but

the tocsin or alarm signal is the most easily recognised and responded

to. In his history of bells in France, Alain Corbin writes that although

the tocsin was not rung everywhere with precisely the same rhythm,

‘it was defined almost everywhere by hurried, redoubled, and

discontinuous strokes’.

This was an abrupt, irregular peal that was heard

intermittently and was executed, whenever possible, with

a small bell. The alarm bell was hurried. It seemed to urge

on and instill anxiety. It is highly likely that it made

hearts beat a little faster. Its pauses caused listeners to

hold their breath and prick up their ears. By contrast

with the other secular peals, the alarm transcended the

territorial limits of the community.’2

Originally an alarm was a call to arms: the word comes from the Old

French, ‘à l’arme’, ‘to the weapon’. If it no longer has this precise

meaning, it still inevitably provokes the ‘fight or flight’ response. The

word ‘tocsin’ also derives from Old French, ‘touque-sain’: ‘signe’ is

modern French for ‘signal’, and the verb ‘toquer’ means ‘to strike’,

though is closely related to ‘toucher’, ‘to touch’. The ambiguity

‘toquer/toucher’, the juxtaposition of the most delicate with the most

violent physical impact, encapsulates that of the alarm itself, which

functions both as a mediated signifier and as a direct sonic assault on

our nervous system. We set alarms to remind us of various things; but to

be effective the sound itself must by-pass or short-circuit the filter of

reason, causing the hearer themselves to become ‘alarmed’. Corbin’s

description of the tocsin indicates the intimate relationship of the

alarm and the alarmed: the hurried bell urges on whoever hears it; a

symptom of the anxiety it instils is a quickening of the pulse. While

the rapidity of the alarm bell is beyond that of human capability, the

mechanism therefore has a real connection with the natural world

Unlike church-bells, which are rung with physical effort by a ringer

pulling a bell-rope, modern alarms can be activated by a simple

mechanical or electrical switch by a remote or unknown agency, which

adds to their ominous nature. The alarm is relentlessly repetitive,

resounding with an unpleasant hardness, sometimes creating the

illusion of a single, constant tone. One of the reasons it is so difficult to

ignore an alarm is that its second, third, fourth, twentieth stroke is as

loud as its first, unlike, the ‘[f]aint single chime’ of Beckett’s Footfalls

(1975):

Faint single chime. Pause as echoes die.3

Chime a little fainter. Pause for echoes.4

The phrase ‘alarming conviction’ is taken from Samuel Beckett, Murphy [1936, pub.

1938] (London: Calder Publications Ltd, 1993), p. 125.

Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside

[1988], trans. Martin Thom (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd [Papermac], 1999), p.

192 (p. 358 n. 145).

Samuel Beckett, Footfalls [1975], in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and

Faber Limited, 1986, paperback 1990), pp. 399—403: p. 399.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

Chime a little fainter still. Pause for echoes.5

Chime even a little fainter still. Pause for echoes.6

If the echoes did not, like the chimes themselves, get fainter and

eventually die, the result would be an alarm. The moment when the

echoes finally merge with silence is virtually imperceptible; the

entrances and the exits of a modern alarm bell, in contrast, are sudden.

However, sometimes one continues to hear the alarm even after it has

ceased to ring, continuing in the dinning and deafening tinnitus of the

ears. This paper will focus on Beckett’s alarms in two plays: Endgame

(1957) and Happy Days (1961). Before considering them, it is necessary to

sketch the background (noise) of language and music, meaning and

sound.

In Theories of the Symbol (1977), Tzvetan Todorov documents and

contrasts classical and modern accounts of the functioning of language.

Aristotle believed that despite the differences in both written and

spoken languages, they directly symbolized mental experiences, which

were the same for all.7 Linguistic theories of the early eighteenth

century, such as that of Abbé Dubos (1670—1742), had interposed

various junctures in this apparently straightforward process centred

around the arbitrary nature of verbal signs.

Literature would thus be distinguished from the other arts

by its oblique, indirect mode of representation. Sounds

evoke meaning; but the latter in turn becomes a signifier,

whose signified is the world represented. In this sense,

poetry is a secondary semiotic system.8

What at the time seemed to threaten the ontological status of

literature came, in the early twentieth century, to be considered its

most prized quality. In 1919, Roman Jakobson celebrated poetry (i.e.

literature) as the form in which ‘language is perceived in itself and not

as a transparent and transitive mediator of “something else.”’.9 Jean-

Paul Sartre expressed very similar ideas in What Is Literature? (1948):

‘Poets are men who refuse to utilize language…. The poet

has withdrawn from language-instrument in a single

movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic

attitude which considers words as things and not as signs.

For the ambiguity of the sign implies that one can

penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the

thing signified, or turn his gaze toward its reality and

consider it as an object.’10

Beckett, Footfalls, p. 400.

Beckett, Footfalls, p. 402.

Beckett, Footfalls, p. 403.

See Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol [1977], trans. Catherine Porter (Oxford:

Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1982), ch. 1 ‘The Birth of Western Semiotics’, pp. 15—59: p.

16.

Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, ch. 5 ‘Imitation and Motivation’, pp. 129—46: pp.

131—32.

Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, ch. 10 ‘Jakobson’s Poetics’, pp. 271—84: p. 272.

Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? [1948], trans. Bernard Frechtman – as quoted in

Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, ch. 10 ‘Jakobson’s Poetics’, pp. 271—84: p. 273.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

One could also approach this issue using Julia Kristeva’s account of the

‘symbolic’ and the ‘semiotic’ in ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (1974).

The ‘symbolic’ is the primary constituent of language used to articulate

meanings by means of signifiers; whereas the ‘semiotic’ is the ‘space

underlying the written […] rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its

intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgement’.11

‘[S]o-called “natural” language’, Kristeva argues, ‘allows for different

modes of articulation of the semiotic and the symbolic’.12 In most

discourses there is a ‘necessary dialectic between the two modalities of

the signifying process, which is constitutive of the subject’.13

Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no

signifying system he produces can be either ‘exclusively’

semiotic or ‘exclusively’ symbolic, and is instead

necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both.14

Kristeva’s use of the terminology virtually inverts their historic

meanings: what Todorov calls the ‘semiotic’ she calls the ‘symbolic’,

with ‘semiotic’ now taking on a new role, representing the

unrepresentable. Kristeva’s ideas have been extremely influential,

despite their complexity.

‘“Kristeva has thus divided language into two vast

realms, the semiotic – sound, rhythm and movement

anterior to sense and linked closely to impulses [that is,

drives] … – and the symbolic – the semantico-syntactic

function of language necessary to all rational

communication about the world. The latter, the symbolic,

usually ‘takes charge of’ the semiotic and binds it into

syntax and phonemes, but it can only do so on the basis of

the sounds and movements presented to it by the

semiotic.”’15

Indeed, the sense of language’s becoming increasingly like music is one

point where these differing theories converge – albeit from opposing

directions. For Kristeva music is the clearest example of a ‘non-verbal

signifying system […] constructed exclusively on the basis of the

semiotic’;16 and, as Daniel Albright explains in Modernism and Music

(2004),

[t]he linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the

philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein […] tend to cut the

word free from any reference in the physical world; […] as

language becomes a deferentialized, self-enclosed system

of signs – signs that point at other signs, never at concrete

objects – speech becomes more and more like music.17

Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ [1974], trans. Margaret Waller [1984], in

The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986, repr. 1987), pp.

90—137: p. 97.

Kristeva, pp. 92—93.

Kristeva, pp. 93.

‘White, 1977, quoted in Hebdige, 1979, p. 164’ – as quoted in John Shepherd and Peter

Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), p. 77.

Kristeva, pp. 93.

Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago and London:

The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 24—25.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

If music’s ability to incorporate these largely contradictory senses of

language were not already confusing enough, the twentieth century also

saw a transformation of the meaning of music itself. As Albright

ponders,

[i]f the history of music is a story about the continual

expansion of the idea of consonance, at first limited to

fourths and fifths, then granted to thirds and sixths, and

finally to tone clusters of seconds, what is the last

chapter?18

Schoenberg’s serial dodecaphony and Hába’s microtonality were, in

part, attempts to answer this question; but perhaps the most radical

innovators in music of the early twentieth century were those who

embraced noise.

Listen to a locomotive, a steel mill, a circular saw: these

are the highest sorts of musical instruments, if dissonance

is the criterion of excellence. If we want to be

overwhelmed by sound, sound we can feel through our

diaphragms, sound that so fills the mind that there is no

room left for anything else, a boiler room can do more than

Bruckner.19

The clearest statement of this idea is Luigi Russolo’s Futurist Manifesto

‘The Art of Noises’ (1913) and the ‘intonarumori’ or ‘noisemakers’ he

devised.20 Russolo argued that the established dualism between

‘musical sound’ and ‘noise’ was false:

[…] noise is differentiated from musical sound merely in

that the vibrations that produce it are confused and

irregular, both in tempo and in intensity. Every noise has a

note – sometimes even a chord – that predominates in the

ensemble of its irregular vibrations.21

This fact makes it possible to incorporate factory sirens, alarm bells,

and any other noises into the musical fabric – but it is no less disruptive

and destabilising for that. Certain sounds continue to strike us as

‘unmusical’: consider Primo Levi’s experience of the ‘infernal’ music of

the camps, recounted in If This Is A Man (1958):

[…] the reveille catches me in a deep sleep and its ringing

is a return from nothingness. As the bread is distributed one

can hear, far from the windows, in the dark air, the band

beginning to play: the healthy comrades are leaving in

squads for work.

One cannot hear the music well from Ka-Be. The beating of

the big drums and the cymbals reach us continuously and

monotonously, but on this weft the musical phrases weave

a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of

Albright, p. 172.

Albright, pp. 172—73.

See Albright, p. 174.

Luigi Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto’ (1913), trans. Stephen Somervell

– reprinted in Albright, pp. 177—83: p. 181.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

the wind. We all look at each other from our beds, because

we all feel that this music is infernal. 22

The infernal music is ‘the perceptible expression of its geometrical

madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in

order to kill us more slowly afterwards’,23 an effect intensified by the

fact that it is the percussion instruments which can be most clearly and

constantly heard. Furthermore, Levi not only distinguishes between the

different instruments in the band, with the implication that

‘continuous’ and ‘monotonous’ instruments are not properly ‘musical’, but

considers even this mingled yarn as qualitatively distinct from the

mere ‘ringing’ of the reveille.

Other artists, however, were increasingly attracted to the non-musical

aspects of music, even the notoriously noise-sensitive Franz Kafka. As

Deleuze and Guattaricomment in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975),

[i]t is certainly not a systematized music, a musical form,

that interests Kafka (in his letters and in his diary, one

finds nothing more than insignificant anecdotes about a

few musicians). It isn’t a composed and semiotically

shaped music that interests Kafka, but rather a pure

sonorous material. 24

Another writer who arguably produced a ‘minor literature’, albeit

voluntarily, is Samuel Beckett (1906—1989). Despite Beckett’s avowed

love of music, particularly that of the classical and romantic periods,

such music rarely appears in his works, and then only problematically.

Instead, one finds passages such as this, from his early novel Dream of

Fair to Middling Women (1932, published posthumously):

Plane of white music, warpless music expunging the

tempest of emblems, calm womb of dawn whelping no sun,

no lichen of sun-rising on its candid parapets, still flat

white music, alb of timeless light. It is a blade before me,

it is a sail of bleached silk on a shore, impassive

statement of itself drawn across the strata and symbols,

lamina of peace for my eyes and my brain slave of my eyes,

pressing and pouring itself whiteness and music through

blindness into the limp mind. It is the dawn-foil and the

gift of blindness and the mysteries of bulk banished and

the mind swathed in the music and candour of the dawn-

foil, facts of surface. The layers of Damask fused and

drawn to the uttermost layer, silken blade. Blind and my

mind blade of silk, blind and music and whiteness facts in

the fact of my mind. Douceurs…25

In this passage, music, the most overtly formal of all the arts, has

itself become ‘warpless’ – a stage beyond Primo Levi’s later description

of ‘weft’ of percussion on which the ‘music’ of the instruments was only

Primo Levi, If This Is A Man [1958], trans. Stuart Woolf [1969] in If This Is A Man and

The Truce (London: Little, Brown and Company [Abacus], 1987, repr. 2000), pp. 17—

179: p. 56.

Levi, If This Is A Man, p. 57.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [1975], trans. Dana

Polan (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 5.

Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women [1932], ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith

Fournier (London: Calder Publications Ltd, 1996), p. 182.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

intermittently woven. This from a writer who in his pomp would tell

an interviewer, ‘“[t]o find a form that accommodates the mess, that is

the task of the artist now.”’.26 One is minded less of ‘white music’ than

of ‘white noise’ – a concoction of sounds of every frequency within the

range of human hearing, in which all frequencies have an equal

probability of being heard at any moment.

This ‘music’ is valued precisely for ‘expunging the tempest of emblems’

– language that recalls both Beckett’s 1929 essay

‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ and his ‘German Letter’ of 1937 to Axel

Kaun. In the former, commissioned by Joyce for a volume on his Work In

Progress, Beckett summarised Giambattista Vico’s (1668—1744)

‘treatment of the origin of language’:

[…] he rejected the materialistic and transcendental

views; the one declaring that language was nothing but a

polite and conventional symbolism; the other, in

desperation, describing it as a gift from the Gods. As

before, Vico is the rationalist, aware of the natural and

inevitable growth of language. In its first dumb form,

language was gesture. If a man wanted to say ‘sea’, he

pointed to the sea. With the spread of animism, this

gesture was replaced by the word: ‘Neptune’.27

When, on the following page, Beckett writes ‘[t]he root of any word

whatsoever can be traced back to some prelingual symbol’, 28 it is

unclear whether the opinion is Vico’s, Joyce’s, or his own. Certainly

this was the philosophy underpinning what would become Finnegans

Wake (1939), a book which Beckett did much to help prepare and was

one of the first to attempt to translate. As Beckett emerged from Joyce’s

life-changing influence, he eventually took a different path, telling an

interviewer in 1956 that Joyce was ‘“tending toward omniscience and

omnipotence as an artist”’ whereas he was ‘“working with impotence,

ignorance”’.29 The Second World War marked a decisive phase in

Beckett’s development. In 1941, while on the run in Roussillon (and at

around the time that Joyce died in Zürich), Beckett began work on the

weird and wonderful Watt (1945), with its famous final addendum ‘no

symbols where none intended’.30 The apparently simple motto is, of

course, entirely impractical – how is the reader to recognise an

intentional symbol? Presumably the ring of ‘cymbals’ is unintentional –

yet is no less present for that, especially in the context of the

relationship between language and music, signs and sounds. I must be

one of the ‘hard of hearing’ people of whom Beckett complained in his

1937 ‘German Letter’ to Axel Kaun:

Tom F. Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961)

– quoted in J. E. Dearlove, Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1982), p. 12 and in John Fletcher, About Beckett: The Playwright and the

Work (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2003), pp. 66—67.

Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ [1929], in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings

and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., 1983,

repr. 2001), pp. 19—33: p. 24.

Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, in Disjecta, p. 25.

Israel Shenker, ‘Moody Man of Letters’, New York Times, 06 May 1956 – quoted in

James Acheson, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama, and Early

Fiction (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1997). p. 6.

Samuel Beckett, Watt [1945] (London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., 1976, repr. 1998),

p. 255.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

I know there are people, sensitive and intelligent people,

for whom there is no lack of silence. I cannot but assume

that they are hard of hearing. For in the forest of symbols,

which aren’t any, the little birds of interpretation, which

isn’t any, are never silent.31

In the forest of Beckett-interpretation, the ‘symbols’ are as noisy as the

birds. John Hollander hears the complementary echo, ‘the secret tinkle

of “symbols”’, in the phrase ‘“secret cymbals round”’ in Wallace

Stevens’s ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’ (1942).32 Stevens himself

would later comment that ‘ “there has been a change in the nature of

what we mean by music”’:

‘If occasionally the poet touches the triangle or one of the

cymbals, he does it only because he feels like doing it.

Instead of a musician we have orator whose speech

sometimes resembles music. We have an eloquence and it is

that eloquence that we call music every day, without

having much cause to think about it.’33

Charles Krance is just one of many critics who have attempted to define

‘Beckett Music’:

What Beckett ‘listened for’ in the writing and sounding of

his own works was a music that would compel his

reader/perceiver/auditor to a particular form of listening,

a form that could ‘accommodate the mess,’ enabling one to

hear, as if refracted through the process of listening, the

silence within: a purified, residual resonance of the din

without, caught in a fleeting moment of grace, sounding the

harmonic wherein the ‘[ear] of mind’ and the ‘[ear] of flesh’

may be one.34

In Beckett’s works, instead of ‘music’ itself, one more often finds an

intense concentration on sonorous material, both natural and

mechanical. Like Stevens’s Canon in ‘Notes Towards A Supreme

Fiction’, Beckett

[…] chose to include the things

That in each other are included, the whole,

The complicate, the amassing harmony.35

Among the sounds to which Beckett gave voice were footsteps, frogs,

tides, thuds, murmurs, bells – and alarms.

Samuel Beckett to Axel Kaun, 09 July 1937, trans. Martin Esslin, in Disjecta, pp. 170—

173: p. 172.

‘Ich weiss, es gibt Leute, empfindsame und intelligente Leute, für die es an

Stillschweigen gar nicht fehlt. Ich kann nicht umhin anzunehmen, dass sie

schwerhörig sind. Denn im Walde de Symbole, die keine sind, schweigen die Vögeln

der Deutung, die keine ist, nie.’ (Samuel Beckett to Axel Kaun, 09 July 1937, in Disjecta,

pp. 51—54: p. 53).

John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (London and New

Haven, CT: Oxford University Press, 1975, 2nd edn 1985), p. 133.

Wallace Stevens, ‘Effects of Analogy’, in The Necessary Angel (1965) – quoted in

Hollander, p. 8.

Charles Krance, ‘Beckett Music’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 51—65: p. 56.

Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction’ [1942], in The Collected Poems of

Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1945, repr. 1959), pp. 380—408: p.

403.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

Alarm

Many of the above themes are at play when Beckett attends to alarms,

as he does in the stage-plays Endgame (1957) and Happy Days (1961).

Beckett’s relationship with alarms goes right back to his days as a

postgraduate exchange-student at the École Normale Supérieure in

Paris, where he and his colleagues staged a parodic adaptation of

Corneille’s Le Cid called Le Kid. Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson

relates that Beckett played the part of Don Diègue, sporting ‘a long

white beard in imitation of Old Father Time’, and ‘carried an umbrella

instead of a sword and, like Clov, in Beckett’s 1956 play, Endgame, an

alarm clock’.36

It was Beckett’s own idea to bring an alarm clock on stage

with him for Don Diègue’s monologue in the first act: he

knelt down, placed the clock very carefully on the floor

and was midway through his famous ‘Ô rage! ô désespoir!

ô vieillesse ennemie!’ speech when the alarm went off

infuriating him and waking up the man on the ladder.

This, combined with the speeded-up movements of the

hands of the big clock, forced him to go faster and faster

until he built up a wild, crazy momentum, producing a

torrent of sound that has been aptly compared with the

effect of Lucky’s extravagant monologue in Waiting for

Godot.37

This episode also links with the following strange scene during

rehearsals for Happy Days in London in 1962.

Allowed by [George] Devine more or less to take over as

director, he [Beckett] became increasingly unhappy as

Brenda Bruce struggled with a text that she had had far

too little time to learn, let alone fully absorb, and with

lines that Beckett tried to induce her to speak to a

metronomically strict rhythm; at one stage he even

brought a metronome into the theatre and set it down on

the floor, saying ‘This is the rhythm I want’. To the

actress’s astonishment, he then left it ticking relentlessly

away.38

However, these effects owe more to the clock than to the alarm –

whereas the following exchange in Endgame concerns the alarm itself.

‘[H]e was not alarmed, unduly’39: Endgame (1957)

Clov has threatened (not for the first time, we gather) to leave Hamm,

his blind and immobile master. To Hamm’s question how will he know

that Clov has left him, Clov at once answers ‘you simply whistle me

James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury

Publishing plc, 1996), p. 124 (p. 727 n. 21).

Knowlson, pp. 124—25 (p. 727 n. 21).

Knowlson, p. 501 (p. 799 n. 115).

Beckett, Watt, p. 27.

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Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

and if I don’t come running if means I’ve left you’.40 Hamm’s subsequent

question, however, proves a greater challenge: how will he know,

when Clov doesn’t respond to his call, whether Clov has indeed left

him or has instead merely died in the kitchen. After a good deal of

pacing to and fro with his ‘[s]tiff, staggering walk’,41 Clov finally has an

idea.

CLOV: Wait! [He meditates. Not very convinced.] Yes… [Pause.

More convinced.] Yes! [He raises his head.] I have it! I set the

alarm.

[Pause.]

HAMM: This is perhaps not one of my bright days, but

frankly –

CLOV: You whistle me. I don’t come. The alarm rings. I’m

gone. It doesn’t ring. I’m dead.

[Pause.]42

Even in the world of Endgame, where all is ‘corpsed’,43 the alarm

nevertheless continues to accrue potential significations. The scene Clov

conjures is somehow both ruthlessly cruel and yet almost tenderly

imagined: the alarm ringing in the silence would be the last sound

Hamm would ever hear, as he is utterly dependent on Clov. The pause

that follows allows one to imagine the alarm ringing in the silence –

and allows Hamm to come up with possible objections to the plan.

HAMM: Is it working? [Pause. Impatiently.] The alarm, is it

working?

CLOV: Why wouldn’t it be working?

HAMM: Because it’s worked too much.

CLOV: But it’s hardly worked at all.

HAMM: [Angrily.] Then because it’s worked too little! 44

This irritable and irritating conversation is typical of their dialogue

throughout the play. Both men are at once insensitive and over-

sensitive: Clov seems to take offence at Hamm’s doubtful questions,

which themselves seem to be prompted by fear that the alarm – and

the plan – will indeed work.

CLOV: I’ll go and see. [Exit CLOV. <Brief ring of alarm off.>

Enter CLOV with alarm-clock. He holds it against HAMM’s ear

and releases alarm. They listen to it ringing to the end. Pause.]

Samuel Beckett, Endgame [1957 (pub. 1958)], in The Complete Dramatic Works (London:

Faber and Faber Limited, 1986, paperback 1990), pp. 91—134: p. 114. After Samuel

Beckett, Fin de partie [1950—1957] (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957).

Beckett, Endgame, p. 92.

Beckett, Endgame: p. 115. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, p. 66:

CLOV. – Attends. (Il se concentre. Pas très convaincu.) Oui… (Un temps. Plus convaincu.)

Oui. (Il rélève la tête.) Voilà. Je mets le réveil.

Un temps.

HAMM. – Je ne suis peut-être pas dans un de mes bons jours, mais –

CLOV. – Tu me siffles. Je ne viens pas. Le réveil sonne. Je suis loin. Il ne sonne pas. Je

suis mort.

Un temps.

Beckett, Endgame, p. 106. The word in the original is ‘Mortibus’ – a dead language for a

dead world (Beckett, Fin de partie, p. 46).

Beckett, Endgame: p. 115. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 66—67:

HAMM. – Est-ce qu’il marche? (Un temps. Impatient.) Le réveil, est-ce qu’il marche?

CLOV. – Pourquoi ne marcherait-il pas?

HAMM. – D’avoir trop marché.

CLOV. – Mais il n’a presque pas marché.

HAMM (avec colère). – Alors d’avoir trop peu marché!

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

Fit to wake the dead! Did you hear it?

HAMM: Vaguely.

CLOV: The end is terrific!

HAMM: I prefer the middle. [Pause.]45

There is something distinctly incongruous in Clov’s asking Hamm if he

heard this alarm which he has already said is ‘[f]it to wake the

dead’. If Clov’s praise is somewhat exaggerated, it is actually Hamm’s

more measured response which really strikes us as odd – especially

since he would only admit to having heard it ‘vaguely’. Just as in his

tour of the room, Hamm states ‘I prefer the middle’. On one level, this

could be bitterly sardonic, denying Clov’s remark (and attendant

pleasure) what small legitimacy it had. However, Hamm’s comment

suggests that he can distinguish amidst the uniformity and insistence of

the alarm’s hammering some ebb and flow, some variety. The alarm is

the very epitome of a uniform, insistent, hammering, mechanistic

sound, whose effectiveness as a tool relies entirely on its being heard as

a noise rather than listened to as music. Hamm’s perverse attitude

threatens the established categories of noise and music, of sign and

symbol, and even of the tragic and the absurd. As Nell (knell) says,

‘[n]othing is funnier than unhappiness’:46

NELL: Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.

And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But

it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story

we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we

don’t laugh any more. [Pause.]47

Nell’s attitude contrasts with Hamm’s reaction to the alarm: beneath

the multifarious accidents of human unhappiness Nell detects the same

fundamental form, whereas Hamm hears in the relentlessly repetitive

sound of the alarm an implausible variety. These are the poles of

perception: perceiving difference as the same, and difference in the

same. Both, one suspects, is voluntarily adopting a perverse position to

defend themselves from the recognition of deeply uncomfortable truths

– which paradoxically means that both extreme attitudes are true.

The dark humour of the alarm-clock continues to resound throughout

the play even if the alarm itself does not:

[Pause. CLOV starts to move about the room. He is looking for a

place to put down the alarm-clock.]

Beckett, Endgame: p. 115. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, p. 67:

CLOV. – Je vais voir. (Il sort. Jeu de mouchoir. Brève sonnerie du réveil en coulisse. Entre Clov,

le réveil à la main. Il l’approche de l’oreille de Hamm, déclenche la sonnerie. Ils l’écoutent sonner

jusqu’au bout. Un temps.) Digne du jugement dernier! Tu as entendu?

HAMM. – Vaguement.

CLOV. – La fin est inouïe.

HAMM. – Je préfère le milieu. (Un temps.)

(The passage in angled brackets is printed in The Complete Dramatic Works, but was cut

during production.) Ruby Cohn cites this passage as evidence of ‘Clov’s innocence

about the language that Hamm and Nagg can manipulate playfully’: ‘[h]e sees

nothing incongruous in […] designating the sound of the shrill alarm clock as “inouie”

[unheard].’ (Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan

Press, 2001), p. 229).

Beckett, Endgame, p. 101. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, p. 33: ‘Rien n’est plus drôle que le

malheur’.

Beckett, Endgame, p. 101. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 33—34:

NAGG. – Si, si, c’est la chose la plus comique au monde. Et nous en rions, nous en rions,

de bon cœur, les premiers temps. Mais c’est toujours la même chose . Oui, c’est comme

la bonne histoire qu’on nous raconte trop souvent, nous la trouvons toujours bonne,

mais nous n’en rions plus. (Un temps.)

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

HAMM: [Soft.] What’ll I do? [Pause. In a scream.] What’ll I

do?

[CLOV sees the picture, takes it down, stands it on the floor with

its face to wall, hangs up the alarm-clock in its place.]

What are you doing?

CLOV: Winding up.48

Beckett’s translation adds an extra twist to the French original, where

Clov’s answer was ‘Trois petits tours’:49 Clov’s winding-up of the alarm-

clock also signals both the winding-up (and the winding-down) of the

play itself. Incidentally, Conor McPherson was also looking for a place

to put down the alarm-clock when he directed Endgame for the ‘Beckett

on Film’ project in 2001. He settled on the lid of Nell’s urn – resulting in

a continuity error pointed out (unhappily, funnily) by a member of the

audience at the film’s premiere.50

That the episode with the alarm is a key structural moment in Endgame

is indicated by Beckett’s division of the play into sections for rehearsal

purposes: parts 1 to 8 form what Beckett called the ‘exposition’, the

culmination of which is marked by the alarm.51 The alarm also

underlies or illustrates many of Theodor W. Adorno’s main arguments in

his 1958 essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’. For Adorno, Endgame’s

importance lay in its determined acceptance of the lack of meaning in

the modern world.

The less events can be presumed to be inherently

meaningful, the more the idea of aesthetic substance as

the unity of what appears and what was intended becomes

an illusion. Beckett rids himself of this illusion by

coupling the two moments in their disparity.52

All that remains is ‘sensuous immediacy’ (‘sinnliche Unmittelbarkeit’),53

a subject which Heinrich Rickert had considered in his posthumously

published work Immediacy and the Interpretation of Meaning

(‘Unmittlebarkeit und Sinndeutung’ (1939)), from which Adorno later

quotes.54

Beckett, Endgame, p. 127. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 94—95:

Un temps. Clov commence à tourner dans la pièce. Il cherche un endroit où poser le réveil.

HAMM. – Qu’est-ce que je vais faire. (Un temps. Hurlant.) Qu’est-ce que je vais faire?

(Clov avise le tableau, le décroche, l’appuie par terre toujours retourné contre le mur, accroche le

réveil à sa place. Qu’est-ce que tu fais?

CLOV. – Trois petits tours.

Beckett, Fin de partie, p. 95.

Irish Film Centre (now the Irish Film Institute) 2001.

‘8. ‘I’ll leave you.” To “Silence!” (Mother Pegg-Boathook-mad painter-alarm clock).’

(Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as

Practical Playwright and Director, Vol. 1: From Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape

(London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, 1988), ch. 4. Endgame, pp. 163—240: pp. 188

and 189.)

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ [1958], trans. Shierry Weber

Nicholsen, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York, NY: Columbia

University Press, 1991), pp. 241—75: p. 242. (The essay is also reprinted in Jennifer

Birkett and Kate Ince (eds), Samuel Beckett: Longman Critical Readers (Harlow: Pearson

Education Limited, 2000), pp. 39—49.)

Adorno, p. 243.

Adorno, p. 253 (p. 280 n. 7).

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

Understanding it can only mean understanding its

unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning of

the fact that it has no meaning.55

The object of Adorno’s sentence is Endgame– but he could be speaking of

the alarm itself, which represents in microcosm the play as a whole.

Endgame contains rapid-fire [Zug um Zug] monosyllabic

dialogues like the play of question and answer that once

took place between the deluded king and the messenger of

fate. But whereas in Oedipus that served as a medium for a

rising curve of tension, here it is a medium in which the

interlocutors slacken.56

Adorno’s comparison of the different effects such stichomythia can

produce and induce is illuminated by the possibilities of preferring the

end or the middle of a monotonously ringing alarm, and also the

paradoxical synonyms of ‘winding up’ and ‘winding down’. The back-

and-forth banter of Hamm and Clov may be compared to the clapper of

the alarm-clock shuttling from bell to bell to produce its unwanted but

necessary din. When Beckett directed Endspiel in Berlin in 1967, he

instructed his actors,

‘[s]ay it in monotone and rhythmically, please. The words

are blows, dry blows. One hammerstroke is like the next

one.’57

The request was noted by Michael Haerdter in his rehearsal diary, as

were the remarkable results thereby achieved:

It is incredible how many subtle nuances of diction and

action Beckett can work out of a few minutes of dialogue

exchanged by two unmoving heads in monotone. Here

instead of small hammerstrokes of rectification one must

rather speak of a watch-maker’s technique: the precise

adjustment of a miniature movement.58

The ‘two unmoving heads’ correspond to the stationary bells of the

alarm-clock – a parallel Beckett stressed when Clov held up the clock

between his head and Hamm’s. However, Haerdter flinches from the

full force of his own logic: there is no need to speak of ‘a watch-maker’s

technique’ ‘instead of small hammerstrokes of rectification’, since these

are precisely the means by which a watch-maker fashions his

intricate pieces. Beckett’s insistent repetitions raise (or lower) the

audience’s sense-perception to the level of Hamm’s: they too perceive

difference in the same, meaning in the merely material.

Instead of trying to liquidate the discursive element in

language through pure sound, Beckett transforms it into an

instrument of its own absurdity, following the ritual of the

Adorno, p. 243.

Adorno, p. 260 [German pp. 192—93].

Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as

Practical Playwright and Director, Vol. 1: From Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape

(London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, 1988), ch. 4 ‘Endgame’, pp. 163—240: p. 225.

McMillan and Fehsenfeld, p. 211.

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

clown, whose babbling becomes nonsense by being presented

as sense.59

The very structure of Endgame challenges our sense-making capacities.

Of the play’s conclusion, Adorno writes that ‘[a]side from differences

which may be decisive but may also be completely irrelevant, it is

identical with the beginning’, and uses another image that refers to

domestic time-pieces.

No spectator, and no philosopher, would be capable of

saying for sure whether or not the play is starting all over

again. The pendulum of the dialectic has come to a

standstill.60

In Endgame, writes Adorno, ‘[t]houghts are dragged along and distorted,

like the residues of waking life in dreams, homo homini sapienti sat’61 –

much as dreamers are sometimes able to weave the interruption of the

alarm into the fabric of their dream. Adorno quotes Marie Luise

Kaschnitz’s description of Hamm as, ‘“[o]f all Beckett’s bizarre

instruments, […] the one with the most tones, the most surprising sound

[Klang]”’,62 extending her thought to all of the play’s characters.

Subjects thrown completely back upon their own resources,

worldlessness [sic] become flesh, they consist of nothing but

the wretched realities of their world, which has

shrivelled to bare necessity. They are empty personae,

truly mere masks through whom sound merely passes

[hindurchtönt]. Their phoniness is the result of the

disenchantment of spirit as mythology.63

The word/world relationship which necessitates double-checking is

not present in the original German, though the German language has its

own version of this trope in the verbs ‘schein’ and ‘sein’ (the theme of

appearance and reality). The characters’ ‘deadliest fear’ ‘is the fear,

disguised as humor, that they might mean something’:64 in being

reduced to mere vessels of sound, the characters are exposed as truly

‘phony’. Indeed, according to Adorno, the whole of Endgame is

constructed on the basis of its key prop:

There is a constant monitoring to see that things are one

way and not another; an alarm system with a sensitive

bell indicates what fits in with the play’s topography

and what does not.65

It is only fitting, given Beckett’s exacting economy, that Adorno’s

metaphor for the system by which the metaphor of the alarm is

maintained should itself be an alarm.

Adorno, p. 262 [German p. 195].

Adorno, p. 269. [‘Von Unterscheidenabgesehen, die entscheiden mögen oder ganz gleichgültig

sein, ist sie identisch mit dem Anfang. […] Dialecktik pendelt aus.’ [German p. 205].]

Adorno, p. 244.

Adorno, p. 269 (p. 280 n. 17) [German p. 205]. Incidentally, Kaschnitz’s essay is

collected in the volume Zwischen Immer und Nie (‘N/ever’, perhaps?) – a wonderfully

suggestive description of the paradoxical but mundane place of the alarm in time.

Adorno, p. 251.

Adorno, p. 261 [German p. 194].

Adorno, p. 248.

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

Adorno saw in the following rapid-fire exchange ‘a belated

legitimation of Fichte’s free activity for its own sake’66 – albeit in the

form of an ironic reductio ad absurdum.

HAMM: Open the window.

CLOV: What for?

HAMM: I want to hear the sea.

CLOV: You wouldn’t hear it.

HAMM: Even if you opened the window?

CLOV: No.

HAMM: Then it’s not worth while opening it?

CLOV: No.

HAMM: (Violently) Then open it!67

When he writes of ‘the senselessness of an action [having become] the

reason for doing it’,68 Adorno refers both to non-sense and to that of the

eventual removal of even our most basic capacities to perceive ‘sensuous

immediacy’.69 Hamm hears nothing, which leads him to doubt

whether in fact Clov has done as he was asked – a paranoia

exacerbated by his blindness. The stage directions indicate that Clov

has indeed ascended his ladder and opened the window; tThough there

is nothing to indicate that the sea becomes audible even to the

audience. The ensuing discussion of the incredible calmness of the sea

and the lack of navigators has a certain morbid plausibility – but

again, as with the alarm, it is possible that the audience is simply in a

similar sensory situation to Hamm. The theme of sensory deprivation is

developed in the exchange that immediately follows.

HAMM: Father! [Pause. Louder.] Father! [Pause.] Go and see

did he hear me.

[CLOV goes to NAGG’s bin, raises the lid, stoops. Unintelligible

words. CLOV straightens up. ]

CLOV: Yes.

HAMM: Both times?

[CLOV stoops. As before.]

CLOV: Once only.

HAMM: The first time or the second?

[CLOV stoops. As before.]

CLOV: He doesn’t know.

HAMM: It must have been the second.

CLOV: We’ll never know.

[He closes lid.]70

Adorno, p. 265.

Beckett, Endgame, p. 124. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 86—87:

HAMM. – Ouvre la fenêtre.

CLOV. – Pour quoi faire?

HAMM. – Je veux entendre la mer.

CLOV. – Tu ne l’entendrais pas.

HAMM. – Même si tu ouvrais la fenêtre?

CLOV. – Non.

HAMM. – Alors ce n’est pas la peine de l’ouvrir?

CLOV. – Non.

HAMM (avec violence). – Alors ouvre-là!

Adorno, p. 265.

Adorno, p. 243.

Beckett, Endgame, pp. 124—25. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 88—89:

HAMM. – Père! (Un temps. Plus fort.) Père! (Un temps.) Va voir s’il a entendu.

Clov va à la poubelle de Nagg, soulève le couvercie, se penche dessus. Mots confus. Clov se

redredsse.

CLOV. – Oui.

HAMM. – Les deux fois?

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

Even to cite, never mind comment on, such ridiculous exchanges

implicates one in the senseless sense-making described by Adorno. The

above passage receives less attention than the old music-hall joke

which, according to Ruby Cohn, Beckett only added in the final draft:71

NAGG: Can you hear me?

NELL: Yes. And you?

NAGG: Yes. [Pause.] Our hearing hasn’t failed.

NELL: Our what?

NAGG: Our hearing.

NELL: No. [Pause.]72

Echoes of both passages can be heard in Happy Days (written a few

years after Endgame, in 1961), to which we now turn our attention.

‘[M]ore alarm, more pain’:73 Happy Days (1961)

WINNIE: Can you hear me? [Pause.] I beseech you, Willie,

just yes or no, can you hear me, just yes or nothing.

[Pause.]

WILLIE: Yes.

WINNIE: [Turning front, same voice.] And now?

WILLIE: [Irritated.] Yes.

WINNIE: [Less loud.] And now?

WILLIE: [More irritated.] Yes.

WINNIE: [Still less loud.] And now? [A little louder.] And now?

WILLIE: [Violently.] Yes!74

Beckett referred to this passage as the ‘[a]udibility test’.75 It is

followed by a monologue delivered in a ‘[n]ormal voice’, but ‘gabbled’,76

realising a scene imagined by Hamm in Endgame:

HAMM: Breath held and then… [he breathes out.] Then

babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns

[Clov se penche. Mots confus. Clov se redresse.]

CLOV. – Une seule.

HAMM. – La première ou la seconde?

[Clov se penche. Mots confus. Clov se redresse.]

CLOV. – Il ne sait pas.

HAMM. – Ça doit être la seconde.

CLOV. – On ne peut pas savoir

Clov rabat le couvercie.

See Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1980), pp. 183—84.

Beckett, Endgame, p. 99. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 30—31:

NAGG. – Tu m’entends?

NELL. – Oui. Et toi?

NAGG. – Oui. (Un temps.) Notre ouïe n’a pas baissé.

NELL. – Notre quoi?

NAGG. – Notre ouïe.

NELL. – Non. (Un temps.)

Beckett, Watt, p. 157.

Beckett, Happy Days, Act One, pp. 147—48. For reasons of symmetry, Beckett would

later cut the last exchange, leaving ‘three “Yes” answers from Willie’ (Knowlson (ed.),

Happy Days, p. 173 n. 3).

James Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett (London:

Faber and Faber Limited, 1985), Page 41, p. 95.

Beckett, Happy Days, p. 148.

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and

whisper together, in the dark. [Pause.]77

Beckett himself referred to Winnie’s monologue as the ‘Babble’. 78 Like

Lucky’s speech, it can be traced back to his own performance as Don

Diègue in Le Kid, accompanied by alarm clock. In his production

notebook, Beckett wrote, ‘[b]abble: 7 x 16—20 + 50’,79 which he

explained to James Knowlson as follows:

‘The 1st section of babble consists of phrases of roughly

equal length, i.e. from 16 to 20 words each. Followed after

3 single words by an unbroken babble of 50 words (51

actually if I count right).’80

The ‘3 single words’ which puncture the gabbled babble (‘Doubt’,

‘Here’, and ‘Abouts’) act like chimes and are accompanied with an

unusual gesture resembling those of the hands of a clock: ‘[Places index

and second finger on heart area, moves them about, brings them to rest.]’81

When he directed the play at the Schiller-Theater in 1971, ‘Beckett

had stressed that [Winnie’s] awakening should not be played

realistically, but should follow the principle of grace and economy of

movement’.82 ‘Straightens slowly. i.e. hands to mound & bust vertical.

Single movement.’,83 noted Martha Fehsenfeld in her diary. The

smooth, mechanical action recalls Michael Haerdter’s description of

‘the precise adjustment of a miniature movement’84 with which Beckett

directed Endgame. One might have thought that a major difference

between that play and Happy Days is that the alarm-clock in Endgame

is visible and that of Happy Days is not; indeed, at the bottom of his

page of notes on the bell, Beckett wrote ‘Whence? High above stage.’85

– in other words, out of sight of both the play’s characters and its

audience, a mysteriously absent presence. The closest object to an alarm-

clock on stage is Winnie’s wind-up musical box – or is it? Winnie’s

strange gestures and mechanical way of moving suggest a time-piece,

the gently sloping scorched grass in which she is increasingly buried

resemble a sand-timer, Beckett even suggests she has an hourglass

figure.86 If Hamm and Clov sometimes resemble an alarm-clock, Winnie

is perhaps time itself. There is a similar situation in Malone Dies

(French 1948, English 1956).

In the old days I used to count, up to three hundred, four

hundred, and with other things too, the showers, the

bells, the chatter of the sparrows at dawn, or with

Beckett, Endgame, p. 126. Cf. Beckett, Fin de partie, pp. 92—93:

HAMM. – Le souffle qu’on retient et puis… (il expire). Puis parler, vite, des mots,

comme l’enfant solitaire qui se met en plusieurs, deux, trois, pour être ensemble, et

parler ensemble, dans la nuit. (Un temps.)

Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, (Page 41) p. 95.

Samuel Beckett to James Knowlson, 2 December 1983 – quoted in Knowlson (ed.),

Happy Days, (Page 41) pp. 173—74 n. 4.

Beckett, Happy Days, p. 148.

Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, p. 159 n. 2.

Quoted in Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, (Page 36) p. 85.

Michael Haerdter on Endgame – quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, p. 211.

Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, (Page 14) p. 51.

‘Embedded up to above her waist in exact centre of mound, WINNIE. About fifty, well-

preserved, blonde for preference, plump, arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom, pearl

necklace.’ (Beckett, Happy Days, Act One, p. 138.

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

nothing, for no reason, for the sake of counting, and then I

divided, by sixty. That passed the time, I was time, I

devoured the world.87

Dividing by sixty only makes sense if Malone was counting at the rate

of one per second (or less plausibly, per minute), in which case ‘I was

time’ ceases to be hyperbole. Though her life is ruled by the bell,

Winnie has no conception of time. As Beckett wrote in his production

notebook at the Schiller-Theater, ‘“her time experience,

incomprehensible transport from one inextricable present to the next,

those past unremembered, those to come inconceivable”’.88

In Happy Days, there is another ‘Shower’ – the name Winnie gives to an

imaginary spectator:

WINNIE: Shower – Shower – does the name mean anything

– to you, Willie – evoke any reality, I mean – for you,

Willie.89

Winnie is unsure she has the name right and soon suggests an

alternative, seeking confirmation from Willie with an interesting

idiom:

WINNIE: [Turning a little towards WILLIE.] Cooker, Willie,

does Cooker strike a chord? [Pause. Turns a little further.

Louder.] Cooker, Willie, does Cooker ring a bell, the name

Cooker? [Pause.]90

The metaphor of the ringing bell encompasses both a successful act of

intellection and recollection and its opposite: to have one’s bell rung is

to have received such blows as to be unable to make sense of the world.

Winnie’s struggle to remember these unusual names has encouraged

clever critics to hear in them echoes the German verbs schauen and

gucken, which both mean ‘to look [at]’. Apparent arbitrariness is

therefore made to contribute to the sum of meaning, highlighting the

play’s theme of seeing and being seen. However, the punchline of

Winnie’s anecdote undermines such efforts. Winnie imagines Shower

(or Cooker) looking at her and asking rhetorically ‘[w]hat’s it meant to

mean?’;91 and goes on to imagine his wife’s devastating response:

WINNIE: [Stops filing, raises head, gazes front.] And you, she

says, what’s the idea of you, she says, what are you meant

to mean?92

Mrs Shower/Cooker’s retort short-circuits the search for meaning,

triggering a sense of alarming uncertainty. The sonic material Beckett

serves hovers ambiguously between meaningful music and sensuous

immediacy. Just as in Endgame, the issue of sense (perception and

coherence, and the perception of coherence) is explored in Happy Days

by means of an alarm-bell.

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, in Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London:

Calder Publications Ltd., 1994), pp. 177—289: p. 202.

Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, (Page 22) p. 150 n. 1.

Beckett, Happy Days, Act One, p. 156.

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

The most prominent alarm of Happy Days, however, is the ‘piercing’

bell which opens both acts and closes the play, and forms the subject of

so much of Winnie’s thinking-aloud. In his edition of Beckett’s

production notebook for the play, James Knowlson’s ‘Note on the

Design’, 93 the ‘Set’, ‘Lighting’, and ‘Make Up’, but says nothing about

the bell, despite the fact that Beckett devoted the whole of page 14 to

it.94 After a long pause, it is the bell which announces the start of the

action of Happy Days:

Long pause. A bell rings piercingly, say ten seconds, stops. She

[Winnie] does not move. Pause. Bell more piercingly, say five

seconds. She wakes. Bell stops. She raises her head, gazes front.

Long pause.95

In one sense, the audience cannot know that the bell rings ‘piercingly’ –

but in another, the fact is inescapable. It is confirmed later in the play

by Winnie’s description:

WINNIE: The bell. [Pause.] It hurts like a knife. [Pause.] A

gouge. [Pause.] One cannot ignore it. [Pause.]96

Beckett insisted on this point in correspondence with the American

director Alan Schneider, specifying on 17 August 1961 ‘[t]he bell as

shrill and wounding as possible’.97 It is therefore surprising that ‘ignore

it’ is precisely what Winnie manages to do at first: ‘[s]he does not move’.

Of course, one can become inured to anything, no matter how painful.

Nevertheless, when Beckett himself came to direct the play at the

Royal Court in 1979, he made a significant alteration:

After the first bell, contrary to the text, which states, ‘She

does not move’, Beckett introduced a spasmodic twitch of

her right hand, noted as slight start 1st bell – RH [right

hand] (Page 37). 98

Though Beckett tinkered with the duration and volume of the bell,

their variability did not change (so to speak).99 The bell rings ‘more

piercingly’, Winnie wakes up, and the bell stops – a sequence from which

the audience concludes that the bell means ‘wake up, Winnie!’.100 This

inference is supported by what Beckett said in rehearsals, noted by

Martha Fehsenfeld in her diary: ‘“She has three seconds to obey the

Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, pp. 21—22.

See Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, (Page 14) p. 51.

Samuel Beckett, Happy Days [English 1961, French 1963], in The Complete Dramatic

Works (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1986, repr. 1990), pp. 137—68: Act One, p.

138.

Beckett, Happy Days, Act Two, pp. 162—63.

Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 17 August 1961; in Maurice Harmon (ed.), No

Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge,

MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 94.

Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, [Page 36 and 37] p. 159 n. 1. In his summary of ‘Cuts and

Changes’, Knowlson therefore notes ‘[a]dd “except for a slight twitch of her right

hand”’ (Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, p. 189).

‘This duration is considerably shorter than the English and American texts prescribe

(i.e. bell 1, 5 seconds [actually 10]; bell 2, 10 seconds [actually 5]) and shorter than the

modified French text (i.e. bell 1, 5 seconds; bell 2, 3 seconds). It would be unbearably

hard on the ears of the audience to combine the longer ring and the cutting quality

that Beckett wanted.’ (Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, p. 142 n. 3.)

100

One of the most significant ‘Cuts and Changes’ noted by Knowlson is that Winnie

now wakes ‘only after the bell stops.’ (Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, p. 189).

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

bell. If she hasn’t obeyed, it goes again,” stated Beckett.’101 The

audience is relieved that by the opening of Act Two, Winnie has, like a

rat in one of B. F. Skinner’s behaviourist experiments, apparently

learned her lesson:

Bell rings loudly. She opens eyes at once. Bell stops. She gazes

front. Long pause.102

By opening her eyes Winnie is able to put an end to this painful

stimulus. However, it could be that by submitting to this painful

physical prodding Winnie is able to avoid the psychic wounds which

might result from stepping outside the rules of the game. Jean-Paul

Sartre, who was a year senior to Beckett at the École Normale

Supérieure, wrote the following in Being and Nothingness (1943):

[t]he alarm which rings in the morning refers to the

possibility of my going to work, which is my possibility.

But to apprehend the summons of the alarm as a summons

is to get up. Therefore the very act of getting up is

reassuring, for it eludes the question, ‘is work my

possibility?‘103

Nevertheless, however much we may complain and put up a show of

resistance when we hear the alarm, ultimately the routine it

establishes, the implied lack of choice and overriding of the

individual will, is somehow reassuring. This is the reverse of the

situation in Beckett’s late prose-work Stirrings Still (1987), where the

striking clock is ‘in a sense at first a source of reassurance till finally

one of alarm’.104 In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which Beckett

read in the 1930s, Robert Burton included a section on the dangers of

‘overmuch Study’ and ‘the Misery of Scholars’: a circumstance with

which both Burton and Beckett were familiar:

Hoc est cur palles? cur quis non prandeat hoc est? [Is it for

this we have pale faces and do without our breakfasts?]

Do we macerate ourselves for this? Is it for this we rise so

early all the year long, ‘leaping’ (as he saith) ‘out of our

beds, when we hear the bell ring, as if we had heard a

thunderclap?’105

Why does Winnie carry on? She cannot actually ‘get up’, of course, since

she is buried up to the waist (then neck) in the earth. Some find

Winnie’s indefatigability an inspiration; to examples of human

courage in the face of overwhelming futility or pain Beckett was less

likely to respond with an expression of admiration than with ‘a gesture

of helpless compassion’.106 Furthermore, in Beckett’s opinion Winnie

101

Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, [Page 36 and 37] p. 159 n. 1.

102

Beckett, Happy Days, Act One, p. 160.

103

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology [1943],

trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1966, repr. 1969), pp.

75—76.

104

Samuel Beckett, ‘Stirrings Still’ [1987], in The Complete Short Prose 1929—1989, ed. S.E.

Gontarski (New York, NY: Grove Press Grove Atlantic, Inc., 1995), pp. 259—265: p.

262.

105

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1621], ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, NY:

The New York Review of Books, 2001), 1.2.3.15, p. 312. [‘E lecto exsilientes, ad subitum

tintinnabuli plausum quasi fulmine territi.’ (Notes, p. 501).]

106

Samuel Beckett, Not I [1972], in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber

Limited, 1986, paperback 1990), pp. 375—83: p. 375.

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

had not even attained the dubious distinction of a stoic: ‘“[s]he’s not

stoic, she’s unaware,” he commented at rehearsal.’107

The bell of Happy Days is hence both an intrusive, incisive shard of

sound, and a kind of aural envelope marking the limits of Winnie’s

world. The fanciful paradoxes of Dream of Fair to Middling Women have

here been realised: ‘[i]t is a blade before me, it is a sail of bleached silk

on a shore […]’.108 Just as Beckett’s ‘German Letter’ of 1937 had sought a

means to ‘represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through

words’, bells can be used both to bind together a community, and to

slash it in two. Nor is this the only way in which Winnie and the

alarm fulfil some of the aspirations of the ‘German Letter’.

Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the

word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like

for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of

Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole

pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds

suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses

of silence? An answer is requested.109

Critics tend to cite this fascinating letter as early evidence of Beckett’s

later commitment to pauses and silence. However, it is important to

note that these are the means of dissolving or tearing the sound surface;

the word surface can be punctuated just as effectively by sounds and

noises.

Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain

circles it has already come, when language is most

efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused.

As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at

least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its

falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it,

until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing –

begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a

writer today.110

The antithesis of sound is silence; the paradox of language is that it

consists of what is also its antithesis, namely sounds and noises. At this

point it is worth returning to Deleuze and Guatari:

107

James Knowlson, ‘Introduction’, in Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, pp. 11—18: p. 17.

108

Beckett, Dream, p. 182.

109

Samuel Beckett to Axel Kaun, 09 July 1937, trans. Martin Esslin, in Disjecta, pp. 170—

173: p. 172.

‘Steckt etwas lähmend Heiliges in der Unnatur des Wortes, was zu den Elementen der

anderen Künste nicht gehört? Gibt es irgendeinen Grund, warum jene fürchterlich

willkürliche Materilität der Wortfläche nicht aufgelöst werden sollte, wie z.B. die von

grossen schwarzen Pausen gefressene Tonfläche in der siebten Symphonie von

Beethoven, so dass wir sie ganze Seiten durch nicht anders wahrnehmen können als

etwa einen schwindelnden unergründliche Schlünde von Stillschweigen

verknüpfenden Pfad von Lauten? Um Antwort wird gebeten.’ (Samuel Beckett to

Axel Kaun, 09 July 1937, in Disjecta, pp. 51—54: pp. 52—53).

110

Beckett, ‘German Letter’, trans. Martin Esslin, in Disjecta, pp. 171—72.

‘Hoffentlich kommt die Zeit, sie ist ja Gott sei Dank in gewissen Kreisen schon da, wo

die Sprache da am besten gebraucht wird, wo sie am tüchtigsten missbraucht wird. Da

wir sie so mit einem Male nicht ausschalten können, woollen wir wenigstens nichts

versäumen, was zu ihrem Verruf beitragen mag. Ein Loch nach dem andern in ihr zu

bohren, bis das Dahinterkauernde, sie es etwas oder nichts, durchzusickern anfängt –

ich kann mir für den heutigen Schriftsteller kein höheres Ziel vorstellen.’ (Beckett,

‘German Letter’, in Disjecta, p. 52)

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

What interests Kafka is a pure and intense sonorous

material that is always connected to its own abolition – a

deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes

signification, composition, song, words – a sonority that

ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is still

all too signifying.111

In calling the alarm in Happy Days ‘the bell for waking’,112 Winnie (and

the audience) retain the comfortable assumption that sounds have

meaning. However, by naming the same sound ‘the bell for sleep’,113

Winnie drives a wedge in the functioning of language. How can the

same sound have two contradictory meanings? One could instead choose

to render the bell’s signal as ‘if you are asleep, wake up; if you are

awake, sleep!’ – but this would be to attribute agency to the bell, an

equally troubling consequence. While using a piercing bell to say ‘wake

up!’ makes sense both in terms of convention and natural instincts, the

notion that the same sound could be employed to send someone to sleep

creates a distinct ‘dissonance between the means and their use’.114 On

the other hand, it is precisely this potential to interpret sounds

according to arbitrary convention which distinguishes specifically

human language. It is the instinctive, the animal in us that responds to

a lullaby, its rhythms and tones inducing a corresponding relaxation

and slow regularity in our breathing and pulse; whereas only the

human can even attempt to respond to this ‘bell for sleep’, the bell

thereby operating not as sound but sign. In any case, all Winnie’s talk of

a ‘bell for sleep’ is probably just wishful thinking: from what we

observe of her situation, her world consists of unremitting light; and

whenever she closes her eyes, a bell sounds that makes her open them

again: either the ‘bell for sleep’ is wholly ineffectual, or there is no

such thing. To take Winnie at her word is to protect ourselves from the

truth that Winnie is trapped in a world of unforgiving repetition, like

that of Play (1963).115 Winnie mentions the ‘bell for sleep’ far more

frequently than the ‘bell for waking’ – inevitably, one might say, since

her day did not begin until the ‘bell for waking’ had already sounded,

and she spends the entire day anticipating its end. When he came to

direct the play, Beckett cut one of the bells, just after Winnie once

again ‘call[s] to the eye of the mind… Mr Shower – or Cooker’,116 to

place further emphasis on the bell at the end of the play. When it

finally rings, it is indistinguishable from the ‘bell for waking’, both in

sound and meaning. Despite Winnie’s anxieties about singing too early,

or too late, just one pause separates the end of her song from the onset of

the bell:

111

Deleuze and Guattari, p. 6.

112

Beckett, Happy Days, Act One, p. 145.

113

Beckett, Happy Days, Act One, p. 145.

114

Beckett, ‘German Letter’, trans. Martin Esslin, in Disjecta, p. 172.

‘Selbstverständlich muss man sich vorläufig mit Wenigem begnügen. Zuerst kann es

nur darauf ankommen, irgendwie eine Methode zu erinden, um diese höhnische

Haltung dem Worte gegenüber wörtlich darzustellen. In dieser Dissonanz von Mitteln

und Gebrauch wird man schon vielleicht ein Geflüster der Endmusik oder es Allem zu

Grunde liegenden Schweigens spüren können.’ (Beckett, ‘German Letter’, in Disjecta,

p. 53).

115

Samuel Beckett, Play [1963], in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber

Limited, 1986, repr. 1990), pp. 307—20.

116

Beckett, Happy Days, Act Two, pp. 164—65; see Knowlson (ed.), Happy Days, pp. 141—

42 n. 2.

Static 06: Alarm

Thomas Mansell, ‘Beckett’s Alarm’

(Pause. Happy expression off. She closes her eyes. Bell rings

loudly. She opens her eyes.[…)]117

When he was not communicating with her by means of a metronome, one

of the things Beckett actually told Brenda Bruce, who played Winnie

at the Royal Court in 1962, was this:

‘“I thought that the most dreadful thing that could

happen to anybody, would be not to be allowed to sleep so

that just as you’re dropping off there’d be a ‘Dong’ and

you’d have to keep awake; you’re sinking into the ground

alive and it’s full of ants; and the sun is shining endlessly

day and night and there is not a tree… there’d be no shade,

nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all

you’ve got is a little parcel of things to see you through

life.” He was talking about a woman’s life, let’s face it.

Then he said: “And I thought who would cope with that

and go down singing, only a woman.”‘118

‘Dong’? One might render the ‘piercing’, ‘wounding’, ‘gouging’ bell any

number of ways, but ‘Dong’ is not one of them. Has something been lost

in transmission, somewhere along the chain of communication from

Beckett to Bruce to Knowlson, from whom I take this story? The first

entry made by Beckett on the page of his production notebook headed

‘Bell’ is the unnerving ‘[w]rong word.’;119 but Beckett’s attempt to render

in syllabic sound the alarm he heard and saw so acutely is truly

alarming.

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Thomas Mansell Beckett’s Alarm

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