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IN SEARCH OF LOST IMAGE
like Marcel. Krapp is the personification of failure, precisely of the same
kind of failure that Marcel felt during all his life, when he frequented the
Guermantes and the snobbish high-class families in Paris, whose names
promised so much. The importance of names as symbolic utterances, like the
pronunciation of the word Guermantes for Marcel, can also be manifested
in Krapp’s joy when uttering the word spool, the vessel which holds the
moment of culmination in his life that turned out to be a failure. While the
superficial, snobbish, fruitless life of Proust’s narrator ends up with a moment
of sublimation, this is not the case in Krapp, the character. After a series of
experiences related to involuntary memory, which have lasted for many years
and are manifested through the senses that have the power to remove the
subject from the flow of time, Proust’s narrator discovers that the time has
come to put something in writing. The first time the narrator has this kind
of experience he is unable to interpret it reasonably, even though he feels
it is crucial; he does not understand the happiness that invades him when
he wipes his lips with a starched napkin. Many years later, when entering
the Guermantes mansion, he steps on an uneven cobblestone and grasps the
essence of those epiphanies that will allow him to write.
When Krapp is listening to the tape, there are two moments that could be
interpreted as those aforementioned life experiences. The first concerns his
mother’s death. However, the memories of “Mother at rest” show the uniformity
of consciousness, and Krapp does not seem to recognize the situation or
even the words that his younger self uses in his flat account; the second is
the long awaited, sublime vision that would represent the quintessential
climatic instant: the vision of himself facing immensity, beyond time and
space, the height of his spiritual aspirations. However, Beckett transforms this
sublime moment, the quintessential representation of the Romantic artist,
into a tragicomic turn: “Krapp: [...] Slight improvement in bowel condition...
Hm... Memorable... what? (He peers closer.) Equinox, memorable equinox.
(He raises his head, stares blankly front. Puzzled.) Memorable equinox?...”“4
Just by chance, he then listens to the scene of the girl in the punt and does not
return compulsively to the last scene of the vision, but to this one in particular.
Something unexpected appears in two flashes of green: “A girl ina shabby green
coat” and eyes of “...chrysolite!”** In this experience of involuntary memory,
Krapp has a deep vision, which makes him feel real for the first time, as he
painfully and fragmentarily reconstructs the image of an instant when Krapp
(the subject) and the girl’s (the object) sights merged beyond time and space
in the punt: “Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.”**
4 Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape, in The Complete Dramatic Works, London, Faber and
Faber, 1990, 217.
15 Ibid., 220.
16 Tbid., 221.
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