On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not

 

So, if we follow Slavoj Žižek, the most contemporary of our cited philosophers, what we perceive as our self, what Kant called apperception, can only be an empty cipher, an “X,” a nothing, since what we are is separate and doing the perceiving. Transfer such theorizing to the stage, as Beckett often did. That is, Beckett has always been less interested in telling stories with traditional conflicts and resolutions than in exploring problems that involve human existence as the felt experience of life: what appears on stage, for instance, is self­evidently such an appearance as well – and thus not a real something; even as it may appear in the guise of the real, it is empty of significance; at best it is an appearance of the real, so all theatre at least, if not all art, entails a philosophical problem beyond the story it tells or the world it tries to represent – what is real and what is not, is something else, or where do we find the real – outside the artwork, outside the theater, perhaps, or within, inside the characters, inside ourselves. But what if the appearance does not coincide with or denies the story being told, the story not that of the appearance we witness, the story that of another, which, nonetheless, is connected with the teller.

 

Beckett was uncertain about whether or not this piece he conceived for theater was theater at all, whether it was theater or something else. His American director Alan Schneider was equally unsure and puzzled for its world premiere scheduled for the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, New York, 22 November 1972, with Jessica Tandy as Mouth and Henderson Forsythe as Auditor (Hume Cronyn is mistakenly listed as Auditor in the Grove Press edition).

 

American actress Jessica Tandy experienced enormous difficulties in the role. Schneider wrote to Beckett on 3 September 1972: “Because Jessie having great psychological problem with learning lines in Happy Days and Not I at same time, we have been working with small ‘teleprompter,’ which has her Not I lines printed on roller controlled by stage mgr. She’ll be using this until quite sure of lines; this mechanism, of course unseen by audience” (Harmon 1998: 279). Tandy was never quite weaned from the technology and found the experience of following Beckett’s theatrical dictates exasperating. When she complained directly to Beckett that the running time of 23 minutes rendered the work unintelligible to audiences, Beckett telegraphed back his famous (but oft misinterpreted) injunction: “I’m not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I want the piece to work on the nerves of the audience” (cited in Gontarski 1997: 91). The play worked on the nerves of one other actress, Bil-lie Whitelaw: “Not I came through the letter­box. I opened it, read it, and burst into tears, floods of tears. It had a tremendous emotional impact on me. I knew then that it had to go at great speed” (Whitelaw 1978: 86). Her work on Play a decad