Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape

Samuel Beckett / The Absurd

The Absurd is a particular subset of Modernist writing. 

Absurdist writers, feeling that the world is incapable of being deciphered or comprehended, try to cause in their audience or readers the pointlessness and confusion they believe everyone should feel upon recognizing the absurd nature of existence. 

Since Absurdism is subset of modernism, it’s going to have some of the same features as modernism – in particular, it loves to play games, and it is essentially comic.

Samuel Beckett: (1906-1989): Irish born, English speaking: An alien in every land, since he would have had to go to England to gain recognition for his work. (Ireland was an occupied country during his lifetime.  See The Wind That Shakes the Barley for more detail on this.)

Beckett wrote many of his plays originally in French, interestingly enough, translating them later into English.  He said that he did this in order to “keep style” out of his work.  It may even be true.

Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape:

As with much of Modernist work, this play resists interpretation. (Which does not stop us from attempting to interpret it – this is the nature of the reader/the audience, after all: when confronted with a text, however absurd, we attempt to make meaning.)

Details to note when considering the play from an Absurdist standpoint:

·        The barrenness of the landscape/ stage setting of the play

·        The phatic language, the attempt to mimic actual speech

·        The scattered, incoherent nature of the text – the way the “plot” as such isn’t actually much of a plot

·        The assumption – which isn’t stated, it’s just taken as fact – that life is without intrinsic meaning. Life here has no value, in and of itself.  It has no universal or “real” purpose.  Life has only the value we bring to it.  This is the existential worldview.

·        The word games, puns, the playing with language

·        The idea that language builds our world (what we say isn’t just what we are, it determines what we can be – what we’re allowed to be: this is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

·        The implication that salvation (a teleology, in other words) may be impossible.

·        The use of technology as a plot-point

On first reading or viewing of Beckett’s play (or plays – this will be true generally of any of Beckett’s plays) a reader in general will be left feeling bemused if not befuddled.  What was that about?

A second or third reading and a slow reflection will reveal that something seems to be happening to in the play – although, as I suggest above, it is sometimes hard to determine just what that something is.

But let’s look at some of the features of Krapp’s Last Tape.

First: the Title! 

It’s not an accident.  Scatalogical humor, yes.  His “condition” that he talks about is connected to those bananas, is constipation.  He’s riffing on Freud here.  What’s the joke?

Well, Freud had a theory that artists were artists because their potty training had gone wrong – they’d been potty trained too early and too harshly by their bad, bad mamas – and in reaction they played with clay or paint or words the way they had been denied a chance to play with or hold onto their feces as infants. 

(Freud believed every infant wants to play with its feces and hyper-controlling, hyper-sanitary mothers deny their babies this chance by potty training them too early.  Denied the chance to play with their poop, these kids become artists, and constipated, in a desperate attempt to reclaim the control over their poop which their bad mamas robbed them off. Oh, Freud.)

Thus, Krapp the artist is “making art” the way he wasn’t allowed to control his own bodily functions as an infant.  He eats too many bananas (which give him bowel issues) as a way of asserting control over his body.  Etc.

Then also there is the shape of the banana.  Which I don’t have to tell you what that means.  

But on the other hand, the more we think about the bananas, the less sense they make.  He’s eating these phallic symbols, after all, which then give him – a loss of control over his body? (He wants to crap, and can’t.)

 Wait.  I thought the issue was he wanted control over his body?  Isn’t the point Freud was making about artists was that they became artists in order to take back the control they lost when their mothers imposed the neurosis of potty training on them? 

Yet Krapp seems to be doing many things – drinking, eating bad foods, sleeping around – that strip him of control.  And these things tend to be, indeed, what many artists do.

Then there is the trope of the play: the tape recordings, the spools.  (Which, yes, sounds an awful lot like stools, and that’s no accident: Krapp is collecting and holding onto his spooools in little boxes like Freud’s archetypal artist would do.)

Notice that the use of the tape recorder and the yearly collection and storage of his memories, as well as the yearly playback of his past memories is, in fact, an attempt to assert control: to hold onto his memory, his life, as it were, via the “spools.”  (Notice also that it fails.  He does not, in fact, remember most of the things he says on those tapes he claims he will never forget.)

The other point you want to remember is how much of his life – the important memories, the bits he cares most about – center around women.  Notice how he rushes through that big revelation he had standing on the end of the pier, the vision that revealed to him the “whole” of everything: his great artistic insight, that he cares nothing for. 

The moments that matter are centered around women: the death of his mother, the glimpse of a nursemaid in the park, the girl in the shabby green coat at the railway station, the old woman he’s sleeping with now, and, of course, the woman in the boat, whom he dumped so he would have more time to spend on his writing.

Notice that he writes an outline of his memories down on the back of an envelope before he records his yearly “diary.”  But it’s the yearly recording that counts.  What is he trying to do with the yearly tape?

It’s a way not to lose, obviously.

And this is what art is, also – maybe?  If we can capture life in paintings, in verse, in novels, then life doesn’t die?

Look at why Krapp breaks up with Bianca – because she would take up too much of his time, time he could spend otherwise on his art.  (Look at him at 69.  How well has his artistic career gone?  What point is Beckett making here?)

The technology, by giving Krapp a way to cling to his memories – or by seeming to give him a way to cling to his memories – ironically only gives him an illusion of control. 

Well, same for the art, really.  He kicked Bianca to the curb so that he could use his “fire” to create art.  Without life, though, what art?  Bianca, his love for his mother (where was he when she was dying?) the girl at the railway station – all of that would have been his life. 

Instead he’s stroking a banana and falling asleep at Vespers, sleeping with Fanny (there’s a pun on that name, in British English, though not in American: it’s British slang for the vagina) at 69.

The play ends with Krapp sitting on stage, staring at nothing, his last tape only half made, listening to the tape run out on which his young self is saying he would not want those years back.  What his old self is thinking, we are left to try to decide on our own.