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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. + 29 +
