Wulf - Oeil Fauve

The ability to think in visual terms is, of course, most important when writing for television. Although television is not a live experience, as is theatre, Beckett came to realize its distinct advantages: for example, his adaptation of the two stage plays What Where and Not I to the screen. Television allowed Beckett to focus on the interrogation as well as on the four heads of Bam, Bem, Bim and Bom, whereas in the stage play a lot of concentration seems to dissipate as the actors alternatingly come and go. In particular, the ending of the play, the simple announcement: "I switch off," is certainly more effectively communicated on television than on stage. As Tom Bishop has astutely commented: "'J'teins.' La encore, la pice fonctionne mieux a la television que sur scene. Bam s'teint littralement; la memoire s'arrete. Aucun clairage de scene ne reussit cette disparition." Similarly, the TV version of Not I in which the camera isolates the mouth in relentless close-up was better suited to capture the intensity of the uninterrupted flow of verbal spate than the theatre.

While this is not the place to discuss the possible advantages or disadvantages of television over theatre, I would like to briefly comment on two further aspects related to Beckett's use of television which, in my view, are essential to Beckett's artistic evolution. First, Beckett's work for and with the medium seems connected to his aesthetics of reduction or condensation, the principles of which he explained in his "German letter" to Axel Kaun: "To bore one hole after another in it [language], until what lurks behind it be it something or nothing begins to seep through...." Here, of course, Beckett's late prose comes to mind but also the above-mentioned refinement of What Where and his weariness of language during the process of making his television play Nacht und Traume in 1983. The quintessence of the aesthetics of reduction has been evoked by Martin Esslin: "Lorsque j'ai rencontr Beckett pour la premire fois, il y a vingt-cinq ans, il me dit, moiti par plaisantrie, qu'il s'efforcait de devenir de plus en plus concis, de plus en plus prcis dans sa faon d'crire:...peut-tre ne produirait-il enfin qu'une page blanche."5

The second aspect is linked to Beckett's revolutionary approach to television. Although other avant-garde artists such as the surrealists or Andy Warhol experimented with different domains, such as painting, filmmaking and writing, Beckett's treatment of television remains an unparalleled example in the history of the medium.6 While television represents, above all, a tool for mainstream entertainment and "escapism," Beckett's particular visual language, such as his self-reflexive treatment of the camera (whence his actual description of the camera as a "savage eye") converts this "wholly domesticated device," as Toby Zinman aptly calls television, into a marginal medium.7 For Beckett's images enveloped in "nuances of grey," whether they use language or are non-verbal, put our conscience as well as consciousness to the test. Beckett's pieces might be painful in that they invoke the loss of love, solitude or old age; yet most importantly they are indicative of the artist's scorn for complacent solutions and ready-made tales.

From this angle, then, Beckett undoubtedly, had the courage to use television as a responsible, and therefore emotionally intrusive, means of communication (in the literal sense of the word) between the artist or filmmaker and the viewer. Rather than quoting one of the favourite passages of many a Beckett scholar: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing from which to express...," it might be helpful to consider another equally powerful statement by Beckett on the Dutch painter Bram van Velde: "The much to express, the little to express, the ability to express much, the ability to express little, merge in the common anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one's ability" [my italics].8 As often, Beckett's remarks on other artists seem to reflect his own aesthetics: his commitment to his vision. This is elucidated by Alan Schneider's description of the efforts which his team undertook to make Beckett's vision happen:

Sometimes we glimpsed that vision clearly. Sometimes we fought it. Sometimes, many times, I'm afraid, we tried to achieve it and failed. Once or twice, we may have transmuted it into something it wasn't; perhaps, as in Sam's generous words afterward, acquiring 'a dimension and validity of its own that are worth far more than any merely efficient translation of intention.' But, in the process, it was exactly that faithful translation of intention we were all after.9