Scratching the surface: The dramaturgical oxymoron in Beckett's silences

Despite — or maybe because of — the insisting preoccupation with silence in Beckett’s work, it is a state that seems hard to reach. Noise is continuously interfering in one way or another. Introducing the notion of the ‘dramaturgical oxymoron’ that opens up a gap between two different modes of narration, this essay will argue that Beckett’s plays demonstrate the impossibility of ultimate silence, which lies outside the symbolic order. In this sense these background noises are similar to other disruptive signs, such as the scratch, which is a recurring motif in Beckett. What may seem a mere detail in Krapp’s Last Tape, a scratch on the girl’s thigh, inflicted by picking gooseberries, serves as a metaphor for the loss of completeness and one’s alienation from the world. In the voice, finally, the character is disembodied, virtualised. Existing of nothing but thin air, in Mouth’s ‘own’ words in Not I, the voice does not seem to belong to the body and gives rise to the alienating effect of what Derrida calls s’entendre parler. Although the French deconstructionist has never written on Beckett, his writings on the primacy of the voice and the opposing stance he distinguishes in Artaud probably say as much about Beckett.