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

earlier had prepared her for the extraordinary ordeal of Not I. The experience was nerve­wracking. Blindfolded with yet another hood secured over her face, she suf-fered sensory deprivation in performance: “The very first time I did it, I went to piec-es. I felt I had no body; I could not relate to where I was; and, going at that speed, I was becoming very dizzy and felt like an astronaut tumbling into space. I swore to God I was falling” (Whitelaw 1978: 86).

 

Schneider’s ten questions to Beckett in his letter of 3 September suggest yet again how baffled he was by this new (in all senses) play; that is, as was often the case, Schneider was asking the wrong questions: “Hate to be too specific because I know how you are about defining meanings. I think she’s dead, can’t believe it, refuses to believe it, accept it, pushed thought away, can only deal with it in terms of someone else, cannot imagine it for herself” (Harmon 1998: 283–284). In his response on 16 October Beckett reminded Schneider that he was not a traditional or a Realist playwright: “I no more know where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text. ‘She’ is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen.” To one of Schneider’s questions about the play Beckett responded bluntly: “This is complete misunderstanding”; and concluded his letter with a cutting assessment: “The remains of some convention seems to lie between us” (Harmon 1998: 283–284).

 

Part of what puzzled Schneider, Tandy, and most early audiences was the neo­surrealist, metonymic stage image, a pair of spotlit lips some eight feet above stage level (Mouth), all that is left of a body Mouth calls the machine, and a ghostly, shadowy, silent figure who makes four brief movements “of helpless compassion” (Auditor). That is, Mouth has an audience within the play as written, but it is often performed without that representation of an audience whose actions may mimic our own. The audience experiences some 23 minutes not of comprehensible mono-logue but of linguistic ejaculation, logorrhea, language as machine gun, say. Mouth’s speech, Beckett said, is “purely a buccal phenomenon” (Harmon 1998: 283). Mouth is apparently possessed by a voice whose story recounts a loveless childhood and life for some 70 years when inexplicably she blacks out. Conscious and sentient she first thinks she is being punished for her sins, but she is not suffering. In addition to the buzzing she hears in her skull, there is a light, meant to torment, as in Play. She feels no pain, as in life she felt no pleasure, even when she was supposed to. At best she could perform a scream, like Winnie in Happy Days, but the “she” recog-nizes that after years of speechlessness, even in the supermarket or the courtroom, words were now flowing from her. She recognizes the voice as her own by vowel sounds “she had never heard […] elsewhere.” Beckett’s suggestions for pronunci-ation (which he reminded Schneider has nothing to do with an Irish accent) were: baby as “babby,” any as “anny,” either as “eether,” etc. Her reasonable thought is that she must have something to tell but never knows what. In addition to this