Chapter 7
Articulated Arrhythmia: Samuel Beckett’s Shorter Plays

Maria Ristani

The Rhythmic Register of Beckett’s Shorter Plays

When asked about her rehearsal work on Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby (1980), actress Billie Whitelaw stated: ‘I am beating time the whole time. Also, even if at first the script is not fully understood I know that if I get the rhythm and music of it right it works’.¹ Whitelaw’s reference to Beckett’s writing in terms of a particular rhythm and as a music score should come as no surprise in view of the playwright’s striking awareness of and sensitivity to timing, repetition, durational patterns, pulse, tempi and those elements in drama which border on music and which Beckett meticulously specified in his dramatic work, more strikingly so in the minimalist plays written after the early 1960s. Beckett seems to have been intrigued by the ‘ghastly grinning on’ of time,² which he attempted to organize musically and carve out in rhythm, holding time back in repetitive patterns or dragging it on in hurried, animated staccatos. An emancipated rhythmic text thus resounds in his writings, ‘on-beat, off-beat, between-beat, delaying, dragging, precipitating, syncopating’.³

To speak of Beckett’s dramatic writing as ‘rhythmic’ immediately summons questions of order, structuring and control. This is how the rhythmic quality of his work has been read, and quite rightly so, as there is no doubt that shaping and containing in rhythmic pattern stand at the core of Beckett’s oeuvre. Think of the visual ballet in Come and Go (1965), the strictly choreographed movement of May in Footfalls (1975) or the patterned resonance of movement and language in Rockaby. Rhythm is here the faithful guardian of form. Usurping the role traditionally provided by syntactic and punctuation devices or narrative links and chronological chains, it functions as structural agent and cohesive pattern: it binds verbal flow in repeated refrains, arrests bodily motion in choreographed schemas and adds to the aesthetic integrity of Beckett’s mise-en-scène by arranging sonic and visual stimuli in patterned echoes and cross-feedback loops. Critics have emphasized Beckett’s typically modernist emphasis on structure and form, reading this rhythmic register as part of the playwright’s move away from the referential quality of gestural or verbal language (most strikingly felt in his shorter plays) and towards a more formally oriented abstraction.

But is rhythm in Beckett entirely a formal preoccupation? My study takes its cue from this question, examining the way the rhythmic in Beckett seems to propose something more complex and profound than the mere provision of pattern and order. Without refuting the structured and structuring nature of rhythmicity, I aim, however, to unsettle this assumption, proposing a re-definition of rhythm as both structure-producing interruption and inventive motility – rhythm as an interplay of both constraint and release. My main contention is that Beckett found in rhythm an alternative to conventional syntax – an edifice, in other words, on which to negotiate the drying up or dissolution of language – but also a way to transform the representational strategies of his playtexts. Significantly more than an abstract formal shape, rhythmic patterning in Beckett’s writing becomes a dramaturgical operation which activates, as we shall see, alternate modes of expression, embodiment and representation. Examples might be drawn from Beckett’s entire oeuvre. The present analysis will, however, be limited to his shorter plays, where he strips language of ornamental inflections and becomes still more meticulous with the timing of the words and the accompanying gestures, thus allowing the rhythmic quality of his work to surface and dominate.⁴

The Concept of Rhythm

When addressing the concept of rhythm, one is presented with a series of apparent contradictions and problematic dichotomies that cannot be ignored. The word comes into English through Latin from the ancient Greek , the etymological root of which can be traced to the ancient Greek verb (to flow) that brings in the idea of flux, of continuous movement across boundaries (as in a stream), of unrestrained motility. This affinity that the word etymologically holds to flux and flowing is, however, not semantically verified by the actual usage of the term in modern languages or in the vocabulary of ancient Greek thought where it originally appeared. The French structural linguist, Émile Benveniste, thanks to whom the polyvalent topic of rhythm attracted renewed attention in theoretical linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century, undertakes in his article ‘The Notion of “Rhythm” in its Linguistic Expression’ to trace the different inflections and uses of the term in multiple ancient Greek texts (at least up to the Attic period). In his attempted overview Benveniste concludes that, regardless of its etymological inflection, the word ‘rhythm’ almost invariably bore the meaning of ‘“distinctive form, proportioned figure, arrangement, disposition” in conditions of use which are otherwise extremely varied’.⁵ Benveniste traces the first appearance of the word in Archilochus, a Greek poet of the seventh century BCE whose work has survived only in fragments. Archilochus’ use of the term ‘rhythm’ bears almost no relation to our modern understanding of the word. It is still relevant, though, to the idea of pattern and form, denoting in the poet’s lines a distinctive form of temper or character: (learn to know the dispositions which men have).⁶ The same understanding of rhythm as concerned with schema and form is echoed, as Benveniste observes, in the greatest part of ancient theoretical literature. The insistent association of rhythm with metron (measure) and peras (limit) by Greek authors proves in itself the emphasis placed on rhythmicity ‘for its function of “limiting” the possibilities’ and generating what is proportional, finite and precisely measurable.⁷ This framing of rhythm qua order and proportion was, for instance, evident in Plato’s philosophical treatises. Plato consistently emphasized the capacity for rhythmic/harmonic configurations as the basis for a proper education and, above all, as a distinguishing privilege of humanity over disorderly beasts. In his discussion of choric art in Laws, he theorized rhythm as the orderly schemata projected by the body in tune with, and in adherence to, the metrical form of the text. In fact, Plato’s definition of rhythm as an ‘ordering of movement (kiniseos taxis) distinct from the “non-rhythm” of kinetic chaos or kinetic continuum’⁸ is what basically underlies our traditional understanding of the term as metrical constraint and ordering pattern.

Interestingly enough, within the modern conceptual frame of the word ‘rhythm’ (at least with regard to Western thought), there is also very little reference to the notion of flow, stream or gush which the morphological link of the word with implies. For the most part, the abundant existing definitions of the term allude to order, structure and metricity, invariably relating rhythm to issues of ‘recurrence, regularity, pattern, periodicity, or … meter, measure and cadence in poetry and music’.⁹ Both music theory and general discourse have long suppressed the propulsive nature of the rhythmic, referring it, as already shown, to a stable matrix of calculable coordinates. This is at least what a quick overview of standard dictionary entries reveals: rhythm has been identified as ‘an ordered recurrent alternation of strong and weak elements in the flow of sound and silence in speech’,¹⁰ an ‘agreeable succession of rising and falling sounds’ in poetry and prose,¹¹ a pattern of recurrence in environmental and cosmic cycles, a ‘grouping of … sounds, principally by means of duration and stress’ in music¹² or ‘a regularly recurrent quantitative change in a variable biological process’.¹³ The prevalent etymological account of the word has even been revised with new perspectives that dispute rhythm as a nominal derivative of (to flow), and propose the root ry (ery) or w’ry instead (to pull, draw, hold, restrain) as a possible origin. Two prominent classicists, Werner Jaeger and Trasyboulos Georgiades, both favour this alternate derivation of the word which indicates a static nature for rhythmicity and is thus more in tune with its spatial and metric conception as featured in ancient Greek writings or even later. In his Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Jaeger asserts that ‘if rhythm “holds”’ – as translated in passages from Archilochus and Aeschylus – ‘it cannot be a flux … but pause, the steady limitation of movement’.¹⁴

Rhythm: A ‘Fluid Form’

In his treatment of this disputed etymology and its apparent contradiction with semantics, Émile Benveniste, however, does not seek to exorcise this discrepancy. On the contrary, he welcomes the tension between flowing (etymology) and shaping (semantic usage) as constitutive of the actual meaning of the word. According to the French linguist, a closer look at the pre-Platonic use of the term reveals that the word ‘rhythm’ did refer to schema and form, yet a form ‘which does not have organic consistency’ but is ‘assumed by what is moving, mobile and fluid … [and thus is] improvised, momentary, changeable’.¹⁵ Benveniste cites many examples of the (pre-Platonic) use of ‘rhythm’ which suggest the notion of dynamic shape rather than the idea of fixed and immutably structured form that Plato later attached to the semantics of rhythm. It was only really with Plato (for whom, as we have seen, rhythm referred to movement determined by measure and numerical regulations) that this dialectic of containment and flow was suppressed in favour of a more mechanical understanding of the term, one that is still alive both in musical theory and in general discourse.

Speaking of rhythm as fitting a ‘specific modality of the “form” of things’,¹⁶ a fluid form, Benveniste highlights an ambivalence that is by no means restricted to the use of the term in ancient Greek literature. It is actually inherent in the very concept of rhythmicity. Immutably structured yet infinitely renewable, rhythm involves a dialectic between schematic form and flowing movement. In what seems a contradiction, it is both the flow of action in its wave dynamics and energy register and that which holds, confines and shapes this flow. Rhythm is, as it were, a form–force compound: in its Janus-faced quality, it features as a calculated constraint running through potentially incalculable movement. To quote W.B. Yeats from The Symbolism of Poetry, rhythm sounds ‘an alluring monotony’ hushing and comforting us in its reassuring periodicity, ‘while it holds us waking by variety … keep[ing] us in that state of perhaps real trance’.¹⁷ The challenge resides, as we shall see, in finding the vocabulary to address this expressive intensity (‘trance’) which the patterned language of rhythmicity (‘alluring monotony’) activates and which displaces received structures of representation and meaning.

This new understanding of rhythm as dynamic form, fuelled more-or-less by Benveniste’s contribution (Amittai F. Aviram speaks of ‘post-Benveniste theorists’ in his overview of the existing rhythm literature)¹⁸ was particularly resonant during the 1960s and 1970s when Beckett composed his shorter plays. During this same period Julia Kristeva, to whom I shall refer later, drew attention to pre-linguistic rhythms and ‘pulsions’ through her Revolution in Poetic Language of 1974, while a few years later the poet and translator Henri Meschonnic problematized the typical alignment of rhythm and measure in his Critique du rythme (1982). In the 1980s the social theorist Henri Lefebvre wrote his innovative Éléments de rythmanalyse (Elements of Rhythmanalysis),¹⁹ a true ‘manifesto for the centrality of rhythm in analyses of the urban and the everyday’.²⁰ His rhythmanalytical project was intended as an ‘analytic operation that consists in opening and unwrapping’ the polyrhythmic bundle that our living body forms, traversed as it is by physiological, environmental or socio-cultural rhythms.²¹ Though in the process of Lefebvre’s analysis his attention is taken up more by the cultural appropriation and production of ‘natural rhythms’ – a process he calls ‘dressage’ – his starting point is still, the irreducibility of the rhythmic. Rhythm, he argues, ‘appears as regulated time, governed by rational laws, but in contact with what is least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body’.²² It lends itself to objective, mathematical approximations and triggers the reasoning mind in its articulation of measurable, patterned clock-time (what Platonic definition and all concomitant metrical approaches have emphasized) as much as it is intertwined with the flowing temporality of the lived, which is in excess of any regular patterning. This is what Lefebvre reads as the blending of the structured and the lived lying at the heart of rhythmicity, with the law of numbers and the quantifiable metron (metre) meddling with the vital, visceral body or the unpredictably polyrhythmic everyday life.

Beckett’s work shares, as it were, this same understanding of rhythm as an intensive form–force. Testing its possibilities at both edges, Beckett works on the essential ambivalence of rhythm as both regulated form and as that which releases affect and motility. He weaves, as we shall see, sharply angled rhythmic shapes which ultimately transform and mobilize the representational values of his texts, directing us to what Patrice Pavis described in his analysis of rhythm in performance as ‘a rhythmic schema that is very different from that of conventional semantics’.²³ This activates a different language of expression which, as the playwright himself desired, would ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect’.²⁴ This rhythmic form was best described by Beckett himself in a letter to his younger contemporary Harold Pinter (1961): ‘If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I’ll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That’s the only kind of form my work has.’²⁵ Affective energy and force, contained within a palpable schema; this is the form–force that Beckett’s works assume. In the following sections I will examine how this dynamic compound of hold and release is woven through Beckett’s writing and, more particularly, in his later work for the theatre.

Rhythmic Structuring: The Later Plays

Writing and also directing work for the stage after the late 1950s, Beckett was all the more concerned with the tension and dynamics of live performance where the material body and its lived experience become the focus of attention.²⁶ Issues of pouring out, revolving, modulating, relenting, buzzing or freezing and throttling – to note some of the phrases recurrently featuring in his stage directions or actual dramatic text – are now of paramount importance. In his effort to anchor and register in his scripts the energy flow of the performative, Beckett seems to adopt a composer’s tactics and turns to music’s handling of continued energy. Rather than channelling performance flow into an interconnected system of causal logic or a linear arrangement of beginnings and ends, Beckett instead opts for carefully construed, alternating blocks of breaks and spasms (as in Play), of motion and rest (as in Rockaby), of breaks and repeat (as in the knock–repeat–knock sequence of Ohio Impromptu), or of theme and variation (as in the mutually resonant phrases and gestures of the three women in Come and Go). By clearly notating the rests, the repeats and the accents, he works his way through sequences, links, counterpoints, interruptions and pauses, anchoring energy flow in rhythm. Let us look, for example, at the rhythmically patterned text of Play which features Beckett’s first systematic use of rhythm as an integral element of both dramatic structure and meaning. After a ‘largely unintelligible’ opening chorus,²⁷ the first section of the text flows as follows:

W1: I said to him, Give her up. I swore by all I held most sacred –

[Spot from W1 to W2.]

W2: One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window she burst in and flew at me. Give him up, she screamed, he’s mine. Her photographs were kind to her. Seeing her now for the first time full length in the flesh I understood why he preferred me.

[Spot from W2 to M.]

M: We were not long together when she smelled the rat. Give up that whore, she said, or I’ll cut my throat – [Hiccup.] Pardon – so help me God. I knew she could have no proof. So I told her I did not know what she was talking about.

[Spot from M to w2.]

W2: What are you talking about? I said, stitching away. Someone yours? Give up whom? I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch.²⁸

As the usual sequential patterns of dramatic writing are abandoned (such as chronological schemata, interaction patterns, dramatic cohesion or storytelling continuity), the synapses in an otherwise fragmented text are now repetitions, doublings back and variations (‘Give her up’/’Give him up’/’Give up that whore’/’Give up whom?’), insistent interruptions (‘or I’ll cut my throat – [Hiccup.] Pardon –’/‘I swore by all I held most sacred –’), symmetries (‘[Spot from w2 to M.]’/‘[Spot from M to w2.]’), or counterpoint patterns (‘So I told her I did not know what she was talking about’/‘What are you talking about? I said, stitching away’), with the narrative thus progressing along in in-built rhythmic lines. The rhythmic schema that these constraints give rise to is very precise: a flowing movement incessantly interrupted in a violent staccato, all the more so as the tempo to which it beats is frenetic (‘Rapid tempo throughout’²⁹). The lighting spot, which James Knowlson aptly compares to a ‘conductor’s baton’,³⁰ seems to set the repetitively syncopated rhythm of the piece: it flashes on and off each speaker’s face, lets them gasp one sentence and often cuts them off before completion, thus imposing a recurring caesura on both scenic and verbal language. The play comprises short, apparently disjointed energy particles, which Beckett likened to the movement of a lawn mower in rehearsals: ‘a burst of energy followed by a pause, a renewed burst followed by yet another pause’.³¹ In fact, the image of the ‘old hand mower’,³² the sound heard outside W2’s apartment while M is trying to part from her, is central in the play itself: ‘a little rush, then another’.³³ Writing in Play becomes writing in rhythm, as prosodic concerns (utterance tempo, energy and rhythm of the oral delivery) as well as rhythmic constraints (interchange of pauses and sounds) override plot, character or dialogue considerations.

This primary concern with rhythmic structuring is evident in all aspects of Beckett’s work at the time, whether translating his works and revising earlier ones or rehearsing his plays and directing his actors. Before the 1964 production of Play (directed by George Divine), Beckett was now-famously described by Billie Whitelaw as cutting out words, dots and letters for the lines to fit in a tighter rhythmic shape: ‘page 2, speech 4, fifth word. Will you make these three dots, two dots?’, Whitelaw remembers him asking.³⁴ When directing, Beckett would regularly hold rehearsals for tone, pitch and rhythm where the actors ‘worked like machines, beating time with [their] fingers’³⁵ as he spoke aloud the lines for them to hear their pulse or acted out the movements in all their rhythmic specificity – a true conducting ritual, as it has often been described by actors who worked alongside him. Dramaturgical elements such as character or story were clearly less important to him than rhythmic and sonic explorations. As McCarthy remarks, ‘fundamentally, Beckett allow[ed] the actor to organize an energy flow, rather than a flow of emotions’ by tuning into the rhythm required.³⁶ While rehearsing Happy Days with Brenda Bruce in 1962, as James Knowlson relates in his biography of Beckett, 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’.³⁷ Interestingly enough, both Billie Whitelaw and David Warrilow – two of Beckett’s leading actors – have often spoken of themselves as musical instruments set to play out the ‘dynamic rhythms of Beckett’s word-music’.³⁸

Rhythmically patterned, Beckett’s later pieces play out a measured and strictly regulated schema even in the face of a clearly failing verbal language. As Ackerley and Gontarski note in their discussion of Beckett’s late structuring methods, even with texts of seemingly uncontained polyphony, such as That Time (1974), ‘manuscripts testify to the care with which the sequence of voices was devised, an order imperceptible to reader or audience but which forms an underlying grid’.³⁹ Rhythm appears to be the basic structural agent of this grid, functioning, as it were, as linkage and chain. With fragments of language plunging forward, as in the case of Play for example, rhythm arrests the gush of words. The tightly orchestrated lighting of this piece, ‘opening and shutting’⁴⁰ and focused on the three faces, ‘imposes its mechanical rhythm on their utterances’⁴¹ and accentuates the periodically repeated blocks of time which alone punctuate a stream of words.

Similarly, syntactically loose sentences abound in Beckett’s later works, and yet rhythm seems to make up for the loss in syntactic cohesion, establishing acoustic ties in the texts that result from pattern repetition and weave a ‘phonic-instinctual memory’ network.⁴² In A Piece of Monologue (1979), for example, syntactic threads are clearly severed with elided phrases piling up (‘Wick turned low. And now. This night. Up at nightfall. Every nightfall. Faint light in room’⁴³), but acoustic kinship is established with particular phrasal segments steadily repeated through and across the broken syntax (‘he all but said loved ones’⁴⁴). Rhythmic repetition weaves haunting and holding refrains, as Deleuze and Guattari define the term when considering territorialized milieus and forces of chaos: refrains that ‘seek, mark, assemble a territory’⁴⁵ where the part is related to the whole; tentative skips from chaos, sonic bricks – however permeable – in a verbal edifice of crumbling syntax. The concept of the refrain, as outlined by the two philosophers, takes on particular resonance in Beckett’s work where rhythmic motifs and counterpoints ensure a degree of consistency, playing out a palpable form in otherwise disconnected pieces. The previously mentioned refrain ‘he all but said loved ones’ from A Piece of Monologue or the alternation of breaks and voices in Play both map a specific pattern along and within the lines of the plays. This pattern is not, however, dependent on linear causalities or narrative logic, but is emergent and intensive, the effect of the dynamic interrelation of different parts. The organization provided by such rhythmic contours is less related to static form and more to a powerful geometry of movement and emergence. The refrain, Deleuze and Guattari remark, is a holding pattern, albeit far removed from ‘a formalizing, linear, hierarchized, centralized arborescent model’.⁴⁶

Rhythmic Motility

This rhythmic form, which frames, contains and sculpts language in Beckett, is also what eventually removes its symbolic facade and causes it to flow. Rhythmic orchestration allows the playwright to present and at the same time nullify received structures of representation. Julia Kristeva has written extensively on this capacity of the rhythmic to mobilize the structural, semantic and expressive values of the verbal text. Her work holds a significant place in the poststructuralist tradition of the 1970s in that she eschews prioritizing language as semantic register and discourse, directing attention instead to a language-made-body. Kristeva speaks of rhythm as the functioning of bodily drives and ‘pulsions’ rippling through linguistic structures. This falls under the more general distinction she draws between the semantic and semiotic modalities of the signifying process. For Kristeva, the speaking subject is a dynamic unity of semiotic and symbolic dispositions, where the semiotic is associated with ‘a preverbal functional state’⁴⁷ – the realm of the body, the drives, the unconscious – one that precedes the positing of a subject of enunciation and meaning which the symbolic represents (as the realm of language, judgement, the law of the Father).⁴⁸ Prior to the symbolic, the semiotic is still present after the onset of the symbolic, the two remaining in a ‘necessary dialectic … which is constitutive of the subject’.⁴⁹ Rhythm, according to Kristeva, is an activator of this semiotic modality, reintroducing the body into language, creating more ‘throbbing than meaning … [its] stream go[ing] to our breasts, genitals and iridescent skin’.⁵⁰

In literature, Kristeva sees this rhythmic motility of the semiotic breaking free (‘literature as a rhythm made intelligible by syntax’⁵¹). Citing examples in Desire in Language from Philippe Sollers’s H (among many others) and in words that could apply to Beckett’s own idiom,⁵² she highlights this potential of rhythmicity for a heteroglossia – ‘a heterogeneousness to meaning and signification’ as she describes it – which genetically dates back to the ‘first echolalias of infants’⁵³ and which is reactivated in language as prosodic rhythm, bringing uttering into speaking and energy vibration into linguistic information. Kristeva dwells on this capacity of the rhythmic to introduce ‘wandering or fuzziness into language’,⁵⁴ through ‘an organizing function that could go so far as to violate certain grammatical rules of … language and often neglect the importance of an ideatory message’.⁵⁵ Such is the case with Beckett’s rhythmic writing where animated or halting patterns delay the necessary finitude of the sentence by releasing punctuation marks, which imagine the possibility of completion, beyond the limits of the already structured sentence (through a hurried staccato) or by resisting finitude altogether (through a repetitive legato). Take for example the following lines from Rockaby (1980) where the protagonist beats time in a rocking chair to the pattern of a halting, obsessively repetitive speech, one that gives rise to a rhythmic schema of hesitation and retarded movement:

so in the end

close of a long day

in the end went and sat

went back in and sat

at her window

let up the blind and sat

quiet at her window

only window

facing other windows

other only windows⁵⁶

The movement of language here hardly obeys linear narrative development, but sustains, instead, a circular, insistently repetitive rhythm simulating, as it were, the non-progressive, repetitive motion of the rocking chair. In characteristic Beckett fashion, language in Rockaby folds back upon itself in a thwarted but always renewed attempt to move forward: ‘in the end went and sat/went back in and sat/at her window/let up the blind and sat’. Narrative progression is nullified in constant reversal and revision, just as the rocker’s forward inclination is less propulsive motion than the balancing counterpart of the backward pull. The chair’s distinctive ‘movement-in-place’ duplicates itself in language retardation – in the swaying, self-cancelling motion of words. If we look at the piece as a whole, we discover a limited lexicon, one that is endlessly repeated, reshuffled and recombined in ever-aborted attempts at concatenation and release, just as the moving chair is essentially static and only maintains the illusion of motion in its repeated back and forth sway along the arc of its nonetheless static runners. Beating to a rhythm of fits and starts, language swells and leans in damaged cadences, never reaching the ‘integrated (w)hole, it strives so hard to be’.⁵⁷ What resounds is an unrelenting rhythm, holding back, refusing to let go, resisting the sentence as an arbitrary ‘knot of incidental bits’.⁵⁸ Evidently, the effort is to hold the essential ‘go on’ of syntax and let it linger and swell as Krapp does with his favourite utterance, ‘Spooool’.⁵⁹

Rhythmic Uttering

The halting or animated rhythmic patterns woven into Beckett’s late works do not only pelt words with disruptive cadences but also pulverize their sequences. As Kristeva claims, a ‘measured language [is] carried away into rhythm’⁶⁰ and made to bow before its affective realm, before the ‘instinctual breakthrough’⁶¹ it effects. I am using ‘affective’ here as a qualifying term for the overpowering reality realized through rhythm, bearing in mind much recent work on the notion of affect⁶² and, more specifically, Brian Massumi’s mapping of the term in sharp distinction to emotion. If emotion is understood as qualified intensity framed into socio-linguistic function and meaning, as Massumi argues in his Parables for the Virtual – a seminal work on the significance of movement, affect and sensation – affect, on the other hand, is visceral intensity, volatile, infectious and emergent.⁶³ In Beckett, rhythmic orchestration filters off emotion as socially conditioned expressivity, channelled though language and thus arrested in punctuation, organized in syntactic relational patterns and voiced through intonation markers and prosodic features. What is re-inscribed through consistent metrics is a pre-, extra- or para-linguistic tension, ‘more throbbing than meaning’,⁶⁴ organic pulsation, the violence of material language, ‘nothing but emotion’ in the Unnamable’s words, ‘bing, bang, that’s blows, ugh, pooh, what else, oooh, aaah, that’s love’.⁶⁵ Through stuttering, repetitive rhythms or animated staccatos, the characters’ voices reach towards us in all their quick starts, fits, curves, rings and bends, offering themselves as modulating tension rather than as ‘meaningful’ discourse alone. Rhythmic orchestration allows a constant merging of speaking with uttering, of dramatic information with pure energy force. This is the case, for example, with the relentless rhythmic idiom in Play: unfolding as ‘a little rush then another’,⁶⁶ it strains and ignores our intellectual response. The moment we pause to ‘appreciate’ or make sense of what we hear, we are lost. Without refuting semantics altogether, the piece offers, nonetheless, an intensive experience that sweeps the reader/listener off her feet in its immediacy. It urges us to shift from a logic of intellectual exposure to one of visceral encounter. The ‘fundamental sounds’ played out in Beckett’s writing elicit fundamental reactions before shaping into a coherent whole to address our intellect.

This intensive capacity of rhythmically heightened expressivity also casts received notions of expression in a new light. For example, it confounds two basic premises upon which our predominantly Western understanding of expression and the expressing subject has been built: interiority (expression is thought of as the externalization of meaning passed on from sender to receiver) and agency (the wilful act of the singularly bound subject). Instead, in the works I have so far discussed (amongst others by Beckett) the rhythmic dynamism of the expressive body renders it a transmitter and receiver of energy force, extending its regions ‘beyond its organic envelope’ in a predicament of distributed agency.⁶⁷ This contests the received image of the body as a bound organism or as a repository and originator of meaning. Rhythmic uttering implies relatedness, an all-pervasive sharing rather than separation on which the representational logic of language is built. This is what Anna Gibbs in her work on ‘synchrony models’ described as a ‘trajectory in which both [object and subject] are swept up’,⁶⁸ drawing attention instead to ‘the immediacy of what passes between bodies’.⁶⁹ Characters in Beckett are as much speakers of ‘some truth’⁷⁰ as they are vibrating sound boxes or mouthpieces consumed in the violent tension of uttering. The image has been drawn by Beckett, in words uttered by the Unnamable, referring to straining membranes and resonant subjects: ‘perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating. I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.’⁷¹

Beckett’s Not I: Hold and Release

It is perhaps Not I (1972) which best exemplifies this rhythmic language of affective force and articulated form that we find in Beckett’s late plays. The interplay of sucking in (containment) and spilling out (flow) which Not I already suggests through the visually prevalent Mouth cavity that pours out the ceaseless torrent of words is also played out in the rhythmic movement of words themselves. In this relentless short play (it lasts hardly 10 minutes in performance), Beckett traces the frantic surge of a voice that he had already explored previously in The Unnamable: ‘It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me’.⁷² Semantic walls come crumbling down in Not I and the dreaded overflow is now staged in this later work, rendered through the rapid, abrupt and disjointed staccato of Beckett’s lines:

found herself in the dark…and if not exactly…insentient…insentient…for she could still hear the buzzing…so-called…in the ears…and a ray of light came and went…came and went…such as the moon might cast…drifting…in and out of cloud…but so dulled…feeling…feeling so dulled…she did not know…what position she was in…imagine!..what position she was in!..whether standing…or sitting…but the brain–…what?..kneeling?..yes…⁷³

Short terse phrases (‘so dulled’) escaping the fetters of syntactic organization and with no terminal full-stop or restraining comma to arrest their motion; participles awaiting release (‘feeling…feeling so dulled’); dashes halting any potential thread and thus breaking all attempts at concatenation (‘but the brain–’); pressing exclamation marks (‘imagine!’), questions seeking to maintain a rising intonation (‘what?..kneeling?’) and to prevent the sentence from drawing to a close – all of these give rise to a frenetic rhythm. The disconnected form of the staccato allows little space for pauses or links between phrases and words; it is threateningly additive rather than reassuringly divisive, while the breakneck speed that Beckett desired for the delivery of the piece necessarily frustrates all of our attempts at coherence and intelligibility, accentuating instead the sense of a threateningly accumulative energy pressing towards total discharge. Rhythm here arrives as the inscription of a gush. It becomes this gush itself, ‘this stream…steady stream’⁷⁴ along which words freely float, the ‘buzzing’ in the ears which mocks and defies intelligibility. Interestingly enough, the main device for this rhythmic flowing is the ellipsis which is generally ‘the traditional signal for the slowing down of all verbal motion’.⁷⁵ Yet, even this yields in ‘the dynamic rhythms of Beckett’s word music’⁷⁶ and becomes, as Brater notes, a ‘hurried ellipsis mark[ing] … [its] own Olympic race with time’.⁷⁷ A form of caesura in Beckett’s hands, ellipsis in Not I is less a definitive break than a tenuous bridge along which the frenetic rhythm of the text is carried forth, while breathlessness is inscribed to counter the symbolic appropriation of breath as the limit of a thetic sentence. Words in the piece may momentarily hold back in a slight stutter (‘so dulled…feeling…feeling so dulled’) or may conjure ‘safe’, mechanical rhythms (‘a ray of light came and went…came and went…’/‘in and out of cloud…’), but ultimately these yield to the on-moving stream, and simply drip off in a run-on parataxis (that does not turn easily into a ‘meaningful’ syntaxis or into a narrative string) until the entire text is liquefied (‘all that moisture’⁷⁸) and words themselves become confused with tears: ‘suddenly saw it wet…the palm…tears presumably…just the tears…sat and watched them dry’.⁷⁹ One is reminded of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: ‘I confuse them, words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth.’⁸⁰ Even at the end of the piece, this wordshed witnesses no resting period but only a new recharge (‘pick it up–’)⁸¹ with one more dash mocking all possibilities for a proper cadence.

And yet Not I is, at the same time, a piece of rhythmic constraint, featuring numerous halts and breaks that cut across the animated staccato. Beckett’s interest in the holding edges of this run-on piece is clearly revealed in his notes for the 1973 Anthony Page production, where he jotted down meticulously all the pauses and hesitations in the text, all the bar rests of his whirling word-music.⁸² These may not be initially apparent, as the text is written as a stream of continuous prose lacking the broken line format of poetry that Beckett adopted in Rockaby, for example, but they can be easily revealed through a vocalic scanning of the piece. When read aloud, words echo themselves in binding refrains. They stagger across gaps and hesitations, or swell in deliberate prolongations as in the following:

what position she was in!..whether standing…or sitting…but the brain– …what?..kneeling?..yes…whether standing…or sitting…or kneeling…but the brain– …what?..lying?..yes…whether standing…or sitting…or kneeling…or lying…but the brain still…⁸³

As more participles gather (standing, sitting, kneeling, lying) and as the whether–or pattern is opened up to accommodate still more options, the phrase ‘but the brain’ is not concatenated; there is obviously an effort to contain the rushing stream, holding it fast in the enclosure of repetition (‘whether standing…or sitting…’), controlling its surge in ever-attempted reformulations, arresting its frenzy through halting blocks and syncopations (‘but the brain–…what?..’). In a piece which refuses symbolic conventions of control but where the need to accommodate the mess still holds, halting rhythmic patterns (woven by pauses, reformulations, prolongations, hesitations) become forms of arrest and chain in place of the missing normative syntax and standard punctuation. They re-enact more primitive conventions of release and control, offering, as it were, a pressure-reducing valve, which can be opened at intervals as if along a pipe to let off steam (‘what position she was in!..whether standing…or sitting’) and then closed off again (‘but the brain–…what?..kneeling?..yes…’) to avoid immediate and total discharge.

Rhythm also achieves binding and integration through its repetitive patterns in the piece. Through the multiple verbal reiterations (‘what?..who?..no!..she!..’/‘…what?..the buzzing?..yes …’) or the repeated intercepts of shrieking laughter and silence, an almost steady rhythmic pattern is inevitably born, a soothing schema of expectation and fulfilment that fosters anticipation and which, as Steven Connor describes ‘pucker[s] up the agony of unrelieved elapse into something calculable and roughly predictable’,⁸⁴ allowing a momentary pleasure of mastering the flow. Words gather in these rhythmic refrains that weave sonorous threads along the broken text and form a momentary constraint, a hold upon the babbling mouth, a cut to heal the gush. In Beckett’s piece then, the function of rhythm remains clearly ambivalent, as it features both as a freely flowing energy manifest through the brief sharp bursts of its staccato, but also as an associative chain woven through halts and refrains. Through this chained, articulated flow, Beckett is able to weave a ‘meaningful’ babbling.

Articulated Arrhythmia

Chained flow: we are back again at the seeming contradiction spelled out at the beginning of this chapter as inherent in the very notion of rhythm, that is, the dialectics between motion and chain, stream and bank, containment and flow. Moving beyond the formalist label often assigned to Beckett’s writing in existing literature, I have attempted here to read his rhythmic idiom as a double-edged register of simultaneous orchestration and dissolution. Rhythmic structure in Beckett keeps out ‘the mess’, as he famously put it in his interview with Tom Driver, but always simultaneously re-inscribes what it seeks to exorcise; ‘it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else’.⁸⁵ A double agent, rhythm both binds and unhinges: it contains emotion only to have it more forcefully released, it orchestrates language while pulverizing its sequences, it gives shape to bodies and sends them moving along its waves. A master of speeds, intensities and rhythms, Beckett lets us immerse in his tightly patterned, almost order-obsessed rhythmic grids. And we do. Finding ourselves, in Beckett’s own words, ‘at bounds of boundless void’.⁸⁶

¹ Janet Goodridge, Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance: Drama, Dance and Ceremony (London, 1999), p. 56.

² Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London, 2006), p. 265.

³ Goodridge, Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance, p. 57.

⁴ This is often referred to as Beckett’s ‘later drama’; this period begins with Play (1962–3) and includes the dramatic works written thereafter.

⁵ Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL, 1971), p. 285.

⁶ Ibid., p. 284. Benveniste is here using Bergk’s translation of Archilochus. The same passage has been translated differently by Werner Jaeger, who interprets rhythm as holding pattern or containing force, and reads the same lines as: ‘understand the rhythm which holds mankind in its bonds’ (see Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet [New York, 1986], p. 125). Despite the differing interpretations of the lines, it is clear that rhythm is used by Archilochus in the sense of arranging pattern and form. In its original appearance the word had no musical connotations; the first use of the word ‘rhythm’ with musical reference can be traced later to Xenocrates in the fourth century BCE.

⁷ Lewis Rowell, ‘The Subconscious Language of Musical Time’, Music Theory Spectrum 1 (1979): 96–106 (p. 104).

⁸ Goodridge, Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance, p. 43.

⁹ Haili You, ‘Defining Rhythm: Aspects of an Anthropology of Rhythm’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18/3 (1994): 361–38 (p. 362).

¹⁰ Merriam Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Literature (Springfield, MA, 1995), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

¹¹ Philip B. Gove (ed.), Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms (Springfield, MA, 1973), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

¹² The New Grove (London, 1980), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

¹³ Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary (Springfield, MA, 1995), s.v. ‘rhythm’.

¹⁴ Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, p. 126.

¹⁵ Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 285–6.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 286.

¹⁷ William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p. 159.

¹⁸ Amittai F. Aviram, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, in Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch (eds), Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History (London, 2002), pp. 161–70 (pp. 161–2).

¹⁹ Lefebvre turned to the concept of rhythm in his late writings. Éléments de rythmanalyse, part of his series Critique of Everyday Life, was published posthumously in 1992. Rhythmanalysis was also the topic of two shorter pieces, co-written with Catherine Régulier: ‘The Rhythmanalytical Project’ and ‘Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities’. These were all published in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden (New York, 2004).

²⁰ Elizabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (eds), Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture (Oxford, 2008), p. 17.

²¹ Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, p. 9.

²² Ibid.

²³ Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance, and Film, trans. David Williams (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003), p. 146.

²⁴ Stanley E. Gontarski (ed.), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays (New York, 1999), p. xvii.

²⁵ Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London, 1980), p. 560.

²⁶ These are the years when Beckett was directly engaged with practical stage work, turning to directing his own plays, starting with Endspiel (Endgame) at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin in 1967. His acquaintance with and active involvement in the mechanics of performance, with the insights that it necessarily brought to light, had an undeniable effect on his writing. Stanley Gontarski reads the minimalist, pattern-oriented aesthetic of the late plays as directly linked with Beckett’s gradual transformation ‘from playwright to theatre artist’ (see ‘Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre’, Journal of Modern Literature 22/1 [1998]: 131–45).

²⁷ Beckett, Play, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 147.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 148.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 147.

³⁰ James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1997), p. 444.

³¹ Chris Ackerley and Stanley E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (New York, 2004), p. 445.

³² Beckett, Play, p. 150.

³³ Ibid., p. 151.

³⁴ Billie Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw … Who He? (New York, 1996), p. 78.

³⁵ John Haynes and James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge, 2003), p. 109.

³⁶ Gerry McCarthy, ‘Emptying the Theater: On Directing the Plays of Samuel Beckett’, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Directing Beckett (Ann Arbor, MI, 1994), pp. 250–67 (p. 258).

³⁷ Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 447.

³⁸ Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw, p. 78.

³⁹ Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, p. 356.

⁴⁰ Beckett, Play, p. 157.

⁴¹ Bob Mayberry, Theatre of Discord: Dissonance in Beckett, Albee, and Pinter (Rutherford, NJ, 1989), p. 32.

⁴² Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora et al. (New York, 1980), p. 169.

⁴³ Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 265.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, 2004), p. 360.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 361.

⁴⁷ Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984), p. 27.

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 43–5.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 24.

⁵⁰ Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 163.

⁵¹ Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 30.

⁵² Beckett’s work itself has often furnished Kristeva’s writings with examples. Her short essay ‘The Father, Love, and Banishment’ (originally published in 1976; reprinted in Desire in Language) is entirely devoted to Beckett’s work (Not I and First Love), while references to Beckett frame, elucidate and further her thought in many of her writings.

⁵³ Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 133.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 136.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 134.

⁵⁶ Samuel Beckett, Rockaby, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 277.

⁵⁷ Enoch Brater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (New York, 1994), p. 170.

⁵⁸ Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Mystery in Literature’, in Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato (New York, 1971), p. 694.

⁵⁹ Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 56.

⁶⁰ Kristeva, Desire in Literature, p. 179.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 167.

⁶² Discussions of affectivity and emotion have recently taken on new relevance in light of the so-called ‘affective turn’ that has marked the humanities and social studies. Theorists such as Brian Massumi, Patricia Clough, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg have contributed to this shift of emphasis towards the dynamics of affective expression. Even though there has been no definitive mapping of the term ‘affect’ and approaches to its economy have varied considerably, it suffices to say that affect as energy, force or incipiency activates a vocabulary of wave dynamics, relationality, motion and potential. Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari are undoubtedly the philosophical precursors of many of these ideas.

⁶³ Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC, 2002), pp. 26–8.

⁶⁴ Kristeva, Desire in Literature, p. 163.

⁶⁵ Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York, 1991), p. 401.

⁶⁶ Beckett, Play, p. 151.

⁶⁷ Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, 2009), p. 24.

⁶⁸ Anna Gibbs, ‘After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC, 2010), pp. 186–205 (p. 194).

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 193.

⁷⁰ Beckett, Play, p. 157.

⁷¹ Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 376.

⁷² Ibid., p. 301.

⁷³ Samuel Beckett, Not I, in Collected Shorter Plays, p. 217.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 219.

⁷⁵ Brater, The Drama in the Text, p. 168.

⁷⁶ Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw, p. 78.

⁷⁷ Brater, The Drama in the Text, p. 170.

⁷⁸ Beckett, Not I, p. 218.

⁷⁹ Ibid., pp. 220–21.

⁸⁰ Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. Stanley E. Gontarski (New York, 1995), p. 131.

⁸¹ Beckett, Not I, p. 223.

⁸² A facsimile of Beckett’s production notes for Not I at the Royal Court Theatre in London, in 1973, is included in The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. 4: The Shorter Plays, ed. Stanley E. Gontarski (New York, 1999), p. 461.

⁸³ Beckett, Not I, p. 217.

⁸⁴ Steven Connor, ‘Slow Going’, paper presented at ‘Critical Beckett’ conference, School of French Studies, University of Birmingham, 26 Sept. 1998, available at <http://www.stevenconnor.com/slow.htm>.

⁸⁵ Gordon S. Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words (Lewisburg, PA, 1990), p. 56.

⁸⁶ Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London, 1999), pp. 46–7.