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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 ChuangTzu’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.
