Oldal 31 [31]
TERESA ROSELL NICOLÁS
As Beckett states in Proust: "at once imaginative and empirical, at once an
evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal
without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal.””’”
However, the older Krapp, compulsively and repetitively sunk in that “great
deadener” that is habit, sadly and motionlessly listens to the younger Krapp,
who, having abandoned love, still lives under the same ideal fantasy of success
in his creative process: “Not with the fire in me now.” Dramatically, Krapp
as a character does experience not evolution but regression; tragically, Krapp’s
Last Tape represents the reversal of the Proustian revelation, and instead it
shows the deep truth of an unattainable image.
MUD
In 1958 Beckett wrote Krapp’s Last Tape and also L'image in French. This
monologue in the first person — and without punctuation — can be read
as a reflection on reminiscence that also contravenes Proustian ecstasy, as
Florence Godeau affirms.” The French scholar states that if this reminiscence
in Proust’s narrator comes from recovering the taste of the madeleine, in
L'image it comes from an anonymous character who is lying face down on the
ground, in the mud: “The tongue gets clogged with mud only one remedy then
pull it in and suck it swallow the mud or spit question to know whether it is
nourishing and vistas though not having to drink often I take a mouthful.”
The narrator’s tongue becoming clogged with mud can be interpreted in
different ways. According to Daniela Caselli, the mud carries out “a painfully
detailed exploration of the materiality of speech and in its investigation of how
repetition and reproduction confer the status of reality upon invisibility,” but
“the mud is also the pleasure of the text itself aspiring to become the materiality
of the eroticized body without fissures,” meaning, thus, an artistic creation.
The narrator in L’image seems to be living in the last stage of his life in search
of a lost image: “and the eyes what are the eyes doing closed to be sure no since
suddenly there in the mud I see me.”** The scene that appears from the mud is a
“happy” moment. The narrator sees himself young again, hearty and with acne,
17 Beckett: Proust, 56.
18 Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape, 223.
Godeau: Image premiere, image dernière, 155.
"0 Samuel Beckett: The Image (translated into English by Edith Fournier), in The Complete
Short Prose, 1929--1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York, Grove, 1995, 165. Originally written
in French with the title L'image, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1988.
51 Daniela Caselli: Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, Manchester,
Manchester University, 2005, 156.
52 Caselli: Beckett’s Dantes, 159.
53 Beckett: The Image, 166.
+ 30°