Beckett in Stuttgart, 1977: Memory and the Aesthetics of Disunity in the Late Works

Abstract

This essay argues that Beckett's examination of media forms, rather than being eclipsed by, culminated in the return to prose around 1980, and that Beckett's long-term preoccupation with silence, incoherence and ‘the unword’ manifests in the relational nature of nostalgia in his later texts. Attending to a particular moment of Beckett's work on television and late prose – his directing the teleplay Geistertrio (Ghost Trio) at Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) and his simultaneous composition of the novella Company – compels examination of the reconfiguration of some of Beckett's earlier concerns with form and media in his late aesthetics. The use of separate recording processes for the audio track and visual footage in the production of Geistertrio is reflected in the disunity of visual and aural forms of expression in Company and later works. While Beckett still incorporates antagonistic relations figuratively in Company, the separate positioning of descriptions of sound and sight allows for a prominent tone of longing and affection, if also mixed with subtle irony. In this late phase of Beckett's work, the sense of disunity inherent to Beckett's conceptions of remembering and imagining operates through the combined separation of visual and aural expression. The haunting character of the affective and compositional structure of these late works connects to the function of Beethoven's piano trio ‘Geistertrio’ in Beckett's eponymous teleplay. At this point Beckett takes an interest in silence that occurs through the interplay of instrumental parts in Beethoven's music. Among Beckett's earlier formulations of the tension between form and incoherence, his juxtaposition of form with the chaos and distress of history anticipates the way in which Beckett uses formal disunity to let a path through the past be imagined in Company. The analysis which follows brings together Beckett's recently published letters, recollections from his colleagues of 1976 and 1977 and close textual study.