Beckett also manipulated the languages of the stage to achieve the effect of characters so cocooned in their interior worlds that each meeting or exchange is a collision. In Play, for example, three characters encased in urns (only their head are visible) are “switched on and off” by the controlling light, their frenzied parallel monologues delivered at breakneck speed and decimated by the light as it swivels from one to the other. These characters exist only in the split-second blinking of the seeing eye of the Other:

W1: Is it something I should do with my face, other than utter? Weep? […]
Bite off my tongue and swallow it? Spit it out? Would that placate you? How the mind works still, to be sure. […]

If only I could think, There is no sense in this… either, none whatsoever. I can’t. […] And that all is falling, all fallen, from the beginning, on empty air. Nothing being asked at all. No one asking me for anything at all.

The characters in Play know that they are making the mistake of “looking for sense where possibly there is none” as they struggle to understand their compulsion — obligation — to say something, to keep talking.

I would suggest that for Beckett, writing was a permanent struggle to force language to realise the poet’s auditory imagination, to represent
a skull assailed by voices…

In both radio and stage plays, what counted above all for Beckett was the sounding of the words in the rhythmical patterns in which he set them in his writing. The proliferation of musical terminology in his stage notebooks is testament to his primary objective: that the actors respect the tempo, the rhythm of his sentences. Hundreds of accounts from actors who worked with him bear witness to his extreme rigour and meticulousness in relation to all apects to staging, but particularly in relation to the echoing and contrasting tones of voices, the pace and rhythms of the language, the duration of the many pauses and silences and the timbre of the voices — which was to be kept as flat as possible, for the most part monotone — as little “expression” as possible in the voice, to allow the musicality of the writing to sound, and not the actor’s interpretation of the narrative. Here it is clear that theatre for Beckett was the occasion for a staging of the voice of writing, the resuscitation of the traces of the self present in the original voice.

Martin Esslin asserts that Beckett strove increasingly throughout his career as a writer to fix visual images in words, noting that his move toward the mechanically recorded media — radio, television, cinema — in the later part of his career was an attempt to ensure that the images realised would be as near his own original vision as possible, and that they would be preserved in that ideal form, thus overriding the impermanence and unpredictability of the stage image. Esslin believed that, for Beckett, writing was a permanent struggle to force language to realise the poet’s visual imagination, to guarantee the realisation of that authentic vision in its integrity.^[1] While it is undeniable that part of Beckett’s project was a formalisation of the stage-space, his later plays stage bodies that resist the effort to convert them into pure sign, to be perceived as whole. I would suggest that for Beckett, writing was a permanent struggle to force language to realise the poet’s auditory imagination, to represent a skull assailed by voices, echoes sounding the movement of a self between body and language, between visual and auditory ways of being. The range of media he used enabled him to locate his liminal texts on a range of different boundary-lines, to test the limits of seeing and hearing in half-way spaces where images and sounds are unpredictable and unfixed, where there is interference and inter-penetration of sensory information. But above all, in setting the voice of writing free from the page, Beckett was capitalising on the opportunity to stage the movement of the voice of his writing, to sound his words in the auditory imaginations of others — actors, auditors, spectators — and to blur the lines between perceptual and imaginary experience. While radio offered perhaps the perfect medium for his poesis of the vocalic body, it was in the physical staging of bodies in various states of disability that he could most fully represent the ambivalent nature of a voice impelled to navigate the in-between of body and word.

And Beckett’s voice? While he seemed willing, almost happy, to be photographed, there are very few traces of his voice. France Culture recently broadcast a recording of the few words he said in acceptance of the 1959 Prix Italia for his radio play Embers — educated Dublin, slightly sibilant. In the absence of his recorded voice, his writing suggests that it is the voice that is the true marker of subjectivity, betraying as it does the hidden selves pressing for a hearing: