Oldal 52 [52]
SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE SINIC WORLD
the two Eastern ideal models presented by Giles and Laloy. For instance,
the alliterative “Foley’s Folly,” which was changed from his original choice
“Maguire’s Folly,” indicates an attempt to create a “purely melodic” prose
style like that of a lit-lit.** Krapp is a prime example of a character who has
failed to achieve the idealized Quietism of a pure man. The elder Krapp, for
instance, admits to seeing that “bony old ghost of a whore” to satisfy his sexual
desire, suggesting a failure to lead an ascetic life.* This directly contrasts with
That Time, in which there is “no touching or anything of that nature” between
the purer voice of youth and his lover, “no pawing in the manner of flesh and
blood.”** If the youthful voice represents something closer to Chuang-Tzu’s
pure man, then Krapp is an antithetically impure figure. By choosing to act
with “calculation” through laying “plans for a less... engrossing sexual life,”
the younger Krapp creates his own failure and “misery.”*’ Whilst the younger
Krapp may have succeeded in ablating desire in a sexual sense, his very desire
to be “known” in the literary world is a failure because he is “seeking to secure
results.” Having recorded his failure to be a writer, the futile “getting known,”
the older Krapp revealingly describes himself as “drowned in dreams and
burning to be gone.”** The language and imagery here strongly recalls Chuang¬
Tzu’s description of “pure men.” If Krapp has “drowned,” then he has failed
to “enter water without becoming wet”; his deep “dreams” show the inability
to sleep “without dream”; and his “burning,” along with his exclamation of
“the fire in me now,” demonstrate the impossibility of entering “fire without
feeling hot.”* In That Time, however, the Listener approximates a Quietist, a
pure man who remains motionless whilst he draws deep breaths, who avoids
“pawing in the manner of flesh and blood,” and who acts without calculation.’
His past scenes, in contrast to Krapp, who uses recordings to prompt memory,
“float up” in an involuntary, Proustian way.“
The Taoist idea of pure men “breathing deep breaths [...] from their heels”
resonates throughout the later dramatic works. In That Time, the breath of
the central figure, a pure man of old, is made audible, as the stage directions
specify: “Breath: up with growing light, audible throughout silence & open
eyes, down to inaudible with fading light for resumption.”” Whilst in Breath,
a play in which the only sound is “an instant of recorded vagitus,” light and
34 Samuel Beckett: That Time, MS 1488/2—3, Samuel Beckett Manuscript Collection at the
University of Reading.
Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 222.
36 Beckett: That Time, 391.
Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape, 218-223, my emphasis.
Ibid., 222, my emphasis.
39 Ibid., 223.
40 Beckett, That Time, 391.
1 Ibid., 391.
12 Samuel Beckett: The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New
York, Grove, 1999, 375.