Editing Beckett - editing errors and the changing texts of Samuel Beckett

But should such self-collaboration, Beckett's reading Beckett, particularly in the theater, be treated differently from that of any other reader's or director's readings? Should it be given author-ity and hence priority? As a director then is Beckett only another reader of his work, coming to his text as an Other and so acting as a reader whose insights might have no more validity than any other reader's? They may or may not, but they are at least worth reading and knowing, even if they are allotted no more weight, no more author-ity than any other reasonably intelligent critic's readings. Even the most ardent post-structuralist must concede that not all readings are equally insightful. This is why we read Derrida and other critics and theorists at all. What is clear from Beckett's post-publication revisions of his texts, his Theatrical Notebooks, and finally his stagings of his own plays, is that Beckett is an extraordinarily adept reader of Beckett. His Theatrical Notebooks, for instance, contain a remarkable wealth of information, speculation, and structural outlines of his work, all of which open the text rather than close it.

Despite Beckett's disclaimers to be incapable of writing a critical introduction to his own work, as a director he has come close to doing precisely that. Beckett's Theatrical Notebooks disclosed details of his work heretofore unseen by other critics. His direction is marked by a surprising amount of realistic subtext, for instance. As usual Beckett insisted in his direction of Endspiel on not intellectualizing his text in rehearsals. He noted early on, "I don't want to talk about my play, it has to be taken purely dramatically, to take shape on the stage.... Here the only interest of the play is as dramatic material." Beckett's admonition is not surprising. It is one that many a director has delivered to his actors early in rehearsals. In the theater, one plays action not ideas. What is surprising, however, is that Beckett also suggested a realistic presentation: "The play is to be acted as though there were a fourth wall where the footlights are." While on occasion Beckett would say, "Here it oughtn't to be played logically," more often he would provide "realistic" motivation. For "Have you bled," he told Clov, "you see something in his face, that's why you're asking." Examining the parasite in his trousers provides Clov with the occasion for "What about that pee?" Hamm's "Since it's calling you" should be choked out to trigger Clov's "Is your throat sore?" And Clov's opening speech is motivated by some barely perceptible change that he perceives while inspecting his environment. In the Riverside notebook Beckett writes: "C perplexed. All seemingly in order, yet a change."(13)

Pattern is crucial to Beckett's art, and patterning dominates his theatrical notes and productions: motion is repeated to echo other motion, posture to echo other posture, gestures to echo other gestures, sounds to echo other sounds. The principal of analogy is fundamental, and much of that analogy is detailed in the theatrical notebooks. In the Riverside notebook for Endgame Beckett says, for instance, "analogy N's knocks on lid, H's on wall"; "Analogy Clov-dog when trying to make it stand"; "Analogy voice and attitude [of Hamm during his narration] with N's tailor story" (Theatrical II 216). The action is filled with circles, arcs, and crosses, from Hamm's rounds to Clov's thinking walk. The linguistic analogue to such patterning is the revision of phrases to echo each other. Even when the phrasing is not parallel, Beckett established an echo, as in the Schiller Theater notebook, where he suggests that "Why this farce" should have the "same quality as `Let's stop playing'" (II 105). Beckett's own direction of Endgame seems a fulfillment of the structure he originally outlined for Roger Blin's Fin de partie in 1957. "He had ideas about the play," Thin noted, "that made it a little difficult to act. At first, he looked on his play as a kind of musical score. When a word occurred or was repeated, when Hamm called Clov, Clov should always come in the same way every time, like a musical phrase coming from the same instrument with the same volume." (Gontarski, On Beckett 233). Ten years later Beckett realized this musical conception of the play. "The play is full of echoes," he told his German cast, "they all answer each other."