Beckett and Television:

In a Different Context
LINDA BEN-ZVI

Sociologist Manuel Castellss sweeping 1,445-page, three-volume study,

under the general title The Information Age, details the ways in which
the rapid development and proliferation of information technology over
the past two decades has created radically new social paradigms that call
into question traditional societal structures and individuals relations
to communal organizations as well as their personal perceptions of self.
Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition
of the Net and the Self, Castells writes in his introduction to
volume 1. The Net, a term covering the ever-expanding networked
communication media, he defines as fluid and constantly changing, while
the Self is in a constant search for some fixity or certainty, now that the
primary markers of identity sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial are
no longer clearly delineated or self-evident. This bipolarity between Net
and Self has given rise to a condition Castells describes as structural
schizophrenia, in which patterns of social communication become
increasingly under stress (3).
Although Samuel Beckett died in the late 1980s, just at the dawn of the
period Castells surveys, when the information highway was still little
more than a two-lane road, his writing already reflected the bipolarity
and resultant social and personal schizophrenia technological advances
brought in their wake. Becketts earliest fictional narrator, Belacqua
Shuah, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, may call for [t]he facts let
us have facts, facts, plenty of facts (32), but his narrative illustrates that
the more he knows the less he understands and can tell about himself or
the world. Under a deluge of details, the very scaffolding of the fictional
form itself collapses, burying with it Beckett makes clear the
belief that information can clarify. In 1949, two years before Marshall
McLuhan published his first media study, The Mechanical Bride,
Beckett had already written a play that staged the impending
confrontation between the new technology and the individual: Lucky,
Modern Drama, 49:4 (Winter 2006) 469

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in Waiting for Godot, caught in a net, suffering from informational

overload, spewing out facts and regurgitating the words and ideas of
others, his thinking reduced to performance on demand, with accompanying dance steps, ending, finally, in silence. The image, no less than
the play itself, illustrated Becketts awareness of how all fact-based
systems (like the one he had experienced close up in Vichy France) and
like the languages on which they are built, have the potential to entrap
and render mute those caught in their net.
Beckett and Castells seem to be addressing similar concerns about the
estrangement and disorientation caused by modern technologys impact
on social institutions and personal identity. However, whereas Beckett
focuses on the malady, Castells in his massive study makes a case for the
amelioration of the dis-ease. After ranging the globe for examples,
he concludes that the proliferation of information systems allows for the
possibility of new social and political groups to develop and thrive in
the culture of real virtuality technology has created, which facilitates
the human spirit reunit[ing] its dimensions in a new interaction between
the two sides of the brain, machines, and social contexts (1: 328).
Committed as Castells is to a belief in rationality and the chances of
meaningful social action, and transformative politics (1: 4), he sidesteps
any shadow of scepticism that might threaten to destabilize the solid
foundations upon which his data rest.
Beckett also talked of spirit, telling Patrick Bowles in 1955 that
[w]hat counts is the spirit and that people are not in touch with their
spirit; but he defined the condition not as the contemporary malaise
but rather as the malaise of all time (qtd. in Knowlson and Knowlson
110), the artist incapable of reunit[ing] its dimensions through
technology, as Castells posits, able only to point to the chaos or
mess (qtd. in Driver 218). That does not mean that Beckett avoided the
use of technology in his plays. On the contrary, technology became one
of the means by which he attempted to admit the chaos and . . . not try to
say that the chaos is really something else (qtd. in Driver 219). In fact,
his post-Godot stage works are filled with technology: magnetic tapes and
tape recorder in Krapps Last Tape; unseen recording devices in Footfalls,
That Time, Rockaby, Catastrophe, and What Where; light sources used
as stand-ins for absent physical presences in Play and Breath; and
gadgets and objects of all sorts to aid, vex, and perplex his characters.
A considerable number of his thirty-three dramatic works were written
for specific media: six for radio, one for film, and five for television. He
also took a keen interest in all phases of the productions of these plays.
Martin Esslin, whose position with the BBC Radio Drama Department
allowed him to work closely with and observe Beckett, noted his
passionate interest in technologies involved with radio and . . . his brilliant

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use of his technical know-how in controlling the production with the

utmost precision (214). Those who were involved in his film
and television projects made the same observations.1
Becketts plays for technological media are certainly some of his most
experimental works, avant-garde even by todays standards, breaking the
conventions of the designated medium just as his stage plays reshaped
the contours and possibilities of theatre. They have also become the
subject of a small but growing number of studies over the past few years,
facilitated by the increasing availability of copies of original productions
to supplement Becketts highly technical, unreadable scripts,2 by
the general interest in all things technological in contemporary culture,
and by the pressing question those who write about and teach Beckett
confront: how relevant are his plays in our information age? My subject
in this essay is Becketts television work, a topic that has
received particular attention of late, thanks to the research of Gilles
Deleuze, Eckart Voigts-Virchow, Hans H. Hiebel, Graley Herren, and,
particularly, Daniel Albright.3 In his recent book Beckett and Aesthetics,
Albright argues that, while Beckett, like Surrealist artists, is doting
on technique (3), he does so not to show technologys potential and
power but, rather, its muteness, incompetence, non-feasance of
transmission (2), the medium allowed to dwindle before the stress
that Beckett places on it (2). I agree that Beckett uses technology
to indict itself just as he uses language to reveal its paucity creating
a technology of the unworkable just as he committed himself at the
beginning of his career to write a literature of the unword (Beckett,
Letter 173).4 However, I do not believe it necessarily follows, as
Albright claims, that in his theatre of media (2) a term he uses to
include the stage plays as well as those written for radio, film, and
television Beckett intends to eliminate human presence totally. Albright
states that in these plays Beckett reveals his characters to be only flimsy,
jury-rigged theatrical conveniences, all dreck and bricolage (25).
The television play Ghost Trio is just a game with superimposed
rectangles the visual system is detaching itself from every human
meaning (136); Eh Joe, the flimsy pattern of dark and light dots on the
screen (129). Would we really care about Becketts theatre more than
half century after the first production of Waiting for Godot and forty
years after his first television drama, Eh Joe, if all that remained when the
last word was spoken or the last image formed was a world of technique
without purpose, in which people, at least in the plays written for specific
technological media, are reduced to lines, dots, and to use another
Albright description ooze ?
These television plays present Becketts usual decrepits, those whom
Deleuze described in his discussion of Becketts television drama as

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the exhaustive, the dried up, the extenuated and the dissipated
(Exhausted 12) and whom Beckett said seem[ed] to be falling to
bits (qtd. in Shenker 148).5 However, just as these disintegrating,
enervated figures are never completely vanquished or eliminated from his
stage plays, they are never completely obliterated by technological means
in his television works. Beckett saw the potential media afforded him to
explore being the central subject of all his works and he took full
advantage of these new possibilities to say the unsayable, this time with
television technology. He was able to create a syntax of weakness
(Harvey 13536) in which form would not impose itself as a sign of
strength (136) but would allow the dustman (137) his fictive creature,
to still be visible and perceivable, although just barely.
What I am interested in exploring in this essay are the ways in which
Becketts television plays, particularly Ghost Trio, both foreground the
medium for which they were written and at the same time instantiate the
unresolved and for him unresolvable bipolarity Castells describes
between technology and selfhood, and the structural schizophrenia
such struggles produce. As my title indicates, I will place the discussion of
these television works in a different context. Several of Albrights
contentions are similar to those laid out by Marshall McLuhan, one
of the early theoreticians of media, who wrote at precisely the time
Beckett began his own media explorations, when television was in
its infancy and few realized either its potential or its power. McLuhans
comments on Becketts theatre indicate that he understood the direction
Beckett was taking, although he did not sanction or follow it. In addition,
some of McLuhans better known theories on media provide useful ways
of approaching Becketts television work and assessing his praxis. They
also illustrate how well Beckett read the technological environment of his
own time and instinctively understood the world in wait just around the
millennial bend.
MCLUHAN ON BECKETT

Marshall McLuhan is a name that does not appear in Beckett studies: not
in James Knowlsons comprehensive biography, Ruby Cohns A Beckett
Canon, or in contemporary books or articles discussing Becketts use
of technology. Even a Google search turns up nothing. Its not hard
to understand why. If ever there were two men diametrically opposed
in temperament, philosophy, creative output, and just about everything
else, it was the self-contained, publicity-shy, precise, inner-seeking,
minimalist Beckett and the 1960s media guru-cum-pop-icon McLuhan,
a man given to bumper-sticker slogans and metaphoric riffs, whose
penchant for showmanship finally led him to be more embraced on

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473

the Johnny Carson show, in Woody Allens Annie Hall, and in the
pages of Playboy and Mad magazine than in academe. As Castells puts
it, McLuhan was the great visionary who revolutionized thinking in
communications in spite of his unrestrained use of hyperbole (1: 329).
Done in by the near total commodification and cannibalizing of his
theories by the popular culture he championed and by serious critiques
of his works by academics who pointed out inconsistencies and
distortions, he disappeared from critical attention after his death in
1980. However, in the past ten years McLuhan has enjoyed something of
a revival. He is the subject of two recent biographies and of numerous
books reinterpreting his writing, and was the central figure in a 1996 play,
The Medium, directed by Ann Bogart.6 This renewed interest is fuelled
by a growing awareness that many of his messages about the television
medium, seen as excessive or crackbrained (the old style) in the 1960s,
may have, in fact, been correct. Now that the smoke has settled, it
is possible to discern the less celebratory and more cautionary concerns
he raised about media, their development, potential, and impact. Some of
these ideas have relevance to Becketts television work.
Like Castells, McLuhan had a penchant for overarching schema and
grand interlacing patterns, fed by his belief in the potential of the rational
mind and, in part, by his adult conversion to Catholicism.7 Unlike
Castells, he did not use graphs of economic and behavioural data
to bolster his arguments; instead, he based his analyses on the modernist
literary trinity he revered: Pound, Yeats, and most importantly Joyce.
While his student Hugh Kenner8 went on to add Becketts name to that
hallowed list, McLuhan did not. He does refer to Beckett and his writing,
but never with reverence. As his biographer Philip Marchand explains,
It was an unspoken article of faith with McLuhan that all great artists
were really Catholic, either overtly or in their secret sympathies. Those
who could not, by any stretch of imagination or conjecture, be termed
Catholic, like Milton or Samuel Beckett, were hopeless cases (106).
And worse. The Canadian sculptor Sorel Etrog, a close McLuhan friend
and Beckett admirer (he illustrated Becketts Imagination Dead
Imagine for publisher John Calder) once suggested that the two men
might have things in common. McLuhan, who regarded the absolute
godlessness of Becketts work with something approaching horror, grew
so red in the face that one of his veins stood out (Marchand 286).
Despite this antipathy, there are Beckett citations in McLuhans
writing. His name appears in the introduction to the second edition
of McLuhans important, groundbreaking 1964 book, Understanding
Media, in a passage as general, elliptical, and slippery as is most of his
writing: The existential philosophy, as well as the Theater of the Absurd,
represents anti-environments that point to the critical pressures

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of the new electric environment. Jean-Paul Sartre, as much as Samuel

Beckett and Arthur Miller, has declared the futility of blueprints
and classified data and jobs as a way out (xxi). When he writes
of anti-environments, McLuhan is referring to his theory that each
technological innovation creates a new environment growing out of the
one it replaces: talkies supplanting silent films, television built on radio.
Those who live in the present are generally incapable of understanding,
identifying, or analysing such new environments, since they are absorbed
within them and cannot find the necessary position of objective distance
that would allow critique. Environments are invisible. Their ground
rules, pervasive structure and overall pattern elude easy perception,
he argues (Medium 8585). Although the present affords no glimpse
of itself, it does provide a retrospective look at what it replaced, the
nature of the earlier medium now apparent as the content of the new
form. Each new technology creates an environment that is itself
regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its
predecessor into an art form (Understanding Media ix). McLuhan
claims that people look at the present through a rear view mirror, not
in horror, like Walter Benjamins angel of history, but rather in denial,
a mark of some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under
stress and shock conditions (Medium 75; Understanding Media 265).
That is, all but artists. They have, he often repeats, the resources and
temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age
(Media Research 87).
His model for such an artist is James Joyce, on whom McLuhan
patterns his own writing style and whom he continually refers to as the
artist of this century who gave the most careful attention to the impact
on language and art of all technical development in the means
of communication (Media Research 80). He reads Ulysses as an
extended radio flash sent out on 16 June 1904; Finnegans Wake structured
on television as the basic modality of the collective human drama; and
Joyces experiments with language in both works as examples of a new
form for a new electronic age (Understanding Media 81).
In the case of Beckett, McLuhan believes that, instead of engaging
with the environment of his time as Joyce did and trying to use his art to
tease his readers and audiences into some perception of the new media
that affect their lives, he chose, like Sartre and Miller (a strange
bedfellow),9 to focus instead on the negative and alienating effects of
technology rather than its possibilities. This position is close to what
Albright expresses when he writes that [a]loof, eremitical, Beckett wrote
about technology as if it were somebody elses environment (1).
However, McLuhan assumes that Becketts disregard for media and
active positioning of himself and his work against the technology of his

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time were similar to those of many other intellectuals, whereas Albright

argues, and I concur, that Beckett took an active interest in and cleverly
used media for his own purposes.
McLuhan expands his comments on Beckett in a section of
Understanding Media entitled Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane, which
traces interrelated and progressively more complex forms of technology.
Directly borrowing the argument Kenner set forth in his seminal study
Samuel Beckett, published three years earlier, McLuhan writes that
Becketts use of the bicycle is the prime symbol of the Cartesian mind
in its acrobatic relation of mind and body in precarious imbalance,
describing Becketts unsteady cyclist as a clown who mimes the acrobat
in an elaborate drama of incompetence, his bicycle the sign and symbol
of specialist futility in the present electric age, when we must all interact
and react, using all of our faculties at once (166). Extending
his metaphor, McLuhan equates the cyclist/clown with Humpty
Dumpty, who cannot be put back together again because those who try
have no unified vision of the whole, they are helpless (166) this
McLuhan sees as Becketts central message and his failure. In contrast,
he credits Joyce, who, in his a-stone-aging Finnegans Wake, had the
ability of recovering the unity of plastic and iconic space, and is putting
HumptyDumpty back together again (166).
What is interesting in this discussion is how closely McLuhan follows
Becketts own positioning of himself vis-a`-vis Joyce. Beckett, too, called
Joyce a synthesizer, someone who wanted to put everything, the
whole of human culture, into one or two books; himself he described
as an analyser. I take away all the accidentals because I want to come
down to the bedrock of the essentials, the archetypal (qtd. in Knowlson
and Knowlson 4749). McLuhan was also correct about Becketts denial
of any unified vision of the whole and his recognition of human
helplessness and of the impossibility of horses and men or
technology repairing the broken little man on the ground, or returning
him to his wall and the smug certainty that aid will come should he begin
to totter.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

In his other writing, although he does not refer specifically to Beckett,

McLuhan provides some useful theoretical tools to approach Becketts
media work. One example is his most famous and infamous aphorism:
the medium is the message. It was intended to be purposely vague his
usual strategy in order to serve as an attention-getting, wake-up call to
those unaware of the ways media have a greater impact on society than
any messages that they might deliver. Writers such as Rebecca West

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understood him to mean that content was no longer important and

attacked what they took as the tacit approval of emptiness which is
the core of McLuhanism (West 18). McLuhan denied this reductive
interpretation, arguing that societies have always been shaped more by
the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content
of communication and must be made aware of this condition (Medium
8). There need be no blindness in these matters once we have been
notified that there is anything to observe, he claimed (Understanding
Media 57). Even Jonathan Miller, who wrote a scathing attack on
McLuhans language and logic, praised him for his magic trick: making
invisible media suddenly appear and successfully conven[ing] a debate
on a subject that has been neglected too long (123). That is to borrow a
Beckettian phrase McLuhan turned a nothing into a something.
So did Beckett. As Albright points out, Beckett saw much more
clearly than most of his contemporaries that art resists the models
imposed on it; and so, instead of imposing purposes and templates upon
art, he experimented with the notion that an artistic medium itself might
be made to speak, if approached with a sort of intelligent humility (2).
Most early critics of McLuhans writing assumed that what the speaking
medium would tell, in McLuhan terms, would not be its own failures but
its successes, since if McLuhan were known for anything in his period, it
was as a champion of the new technology not its critic, like Baudrillard,
who diverged from McLuhans supposed optimism about the potential of
media. However, in contemporary rethinking of McLuhans writing and
positions, there are those, including Cecelia Tichi, who grant that he may
have been a less vociferous supporter than anxious observer of the media
he described (184), less a cheerleader for technology than an observer and
prognosticator of the technological beast slouching towards Silicon
Valley (or wherever) to be born. As McLuhan himself explained in a
television interview as early as 1966:
Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, youre in
favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is
almost certainly something Im resolutely against. And it seems to me the best
way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the
buttons. (qtd. in Benedetti and DeHart 70)

The idea of a medium whose content would reveal the nature and
limits of that medium was consistent with Becketts approach in his
stage plays, in which he foregrounded the apparatus of theatre itself,
revealing its trappings, conventions, and artifice. He would perform
a similar operation to get to the bare bones of the media for which he
wrote.

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MEDIA COOL AND HOT

Although the medium is the message is a better-known McLuhanism,

his comments on television as a cool medium have far more relevance
to Becketts television plays. Again McLuhans choice of terms
obfuscated his meaning. When he called television a cool, film a hot,
medium many assumed he was saying that television was cold, less
sensory than film, more remote, and that viewers were more passive in
their responses. The opposite was the case. McLuhan took his
terminology primarily from jazz where, as critic Paul Levinson puts it,
cool implies the wispy, tinkly sketches of sound that intrigue and
seduce the psyche, and hot indicates the brassy, big band music that
overpowers and intoxicates the soul (106).10 For McLuhan, cool
and hot media were differentiated mainly by their means of transmission
and the effects they had on viewers. The television image, he noted, was
created by a light through process, similar to that in which light shines
through stained glass, creating mosaic patterns that observers must
reassemble. Film and photographs are light on media, the illumination
bouncing off but not interacting with, or changing, the contours of the
already fixed, predetermined images. Television is also low definition, its
borders imprecise, its images blurry, its means of transmission billions of
dots per second, from which the viewer accepts only a few dozen each
instant, from which to make an image (Understanding Media 273).
Because it required the reassembling of images, McLuhan assumed
television would pull viewers in and that they would become
more absorbed in the medium and thus forge a deeper, more direct
relationship with it. Film, by contrast, is high definition, offering detailed
information, its images clear, crisp, bright, and fixed. Not a process like
television, it is a product, pictures presented in frames not fragments,
unaltered and unalterable by transmission or reception, requiring nothing
of the viewer except to observe what is projected from behind them and
superimposed on a screen in front. Although film may be called moving
pictures, McLuhan described it as static compared to television. The
TV image is not a still shot, he argued; it is a ceaselessly forming
contour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic
contour . . . has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture
(Understanding Media 27273).
In addition, television of the early 1960s, which McLuhan
was describing, was often live, transmitted in real time, not already
canned, like film. The standard format was still black and white,
not colour. With the small size of the screen and the intimacy of the
reception seen in rooms in private houses rather than in public spaces
among strangers television relied heavily on close-ups and thus required

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more intimate, less broad acting styles that focused attention on

re-actions, whereas films staple long and group shots were designed
to transmit action. Finally, television provided audiences with a degree of
control over the image and the sound. They were able to make the picture
brighter or darker, the volume louder or softer; they could turn the
program on or, if it did not please, switch it off, or find another. The film
viewer, by contrast, paid and entered an auditorium at specified times;
could leave but could not start, stop, or alter the transmission. For all
these reasons, television for McLuhan was cool, addictive, ubiquitous,
and powerful.
I have found no record indicating McLuhans awareness of Becketts
plays for media; the only Beckett work he mentions by name is
Waiting for Godot. Perhaps his antipathy to the un-Catholic writer
blocked, or at least muted, his interest. He certainly could have read
of these works in Kenners studies, which, by 1973, included analyses of
all the radio dramas and of the television play Eh Joe. Or he could have
heard of Becketts radio work from Donald McWhinnie Becketts
friend and the director of All That Fall and the British version of Ghost
Trio whom McLuhan quotes in Understanding Media. Had he
read about or seen Becketts plays for radio, film, or television
he might have recognized that, far from denying the possibilities
the electronic age provided, he marshalled media successfully, however
for his own purpose: not, as Joyce did, to show the plasticity of the
whole, but rather to reveal its fractures and fissures. McLuhan might
also have noted that Beckett built his media plays on a few of his own
central tenets:
g

g
g

that a new medium might be delineated by calling attention to the old

medium it supplants
that the medium is the central message conveyed by a media work
that the low-density, blurred images of television can have a heightened
power and involve viewers directly, suggesting levels of exploration beyond
surface reality

BECKETT THROUGH MCLUHAN

The first thing to note about Becketts writing for media is how he
scrupulously pares down the forms he uses just as he limits the elements
in his fiction and stage plays, purposely eliminating anything that might
draw attention to content or story or that might be mistaken for the
typical fare being turned out at the time.11 Radio drama, as Beckett
describes it, is predicated on the whole things coming out of the dark

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(qtd. in Zilliacus frontpiece). However, rather than attempt audio

verisimilitude to allow listeners to lapse imaginatively into the world of
the characters as radio drama tends to do he stylizes the sound effects
in order to keep mimesis at bay, the mechanisms of radio always
apparent. He does the same in his film and television works. Both media
are stripped down as far as possible to let the technological bones show.
Although the technique probably derives from Becketts tendency toward
simplicity, its effect is to reveal the nature of the medium and to show
what it doesnt do: provide clarity and wholeness to the mess of life or
the world of the self.
Film is a good example of a medium itself speaking. It also illustrates
McLuhans notion that a present environment can only be understood by
using the past medium as the content of the present technology, now
reified as art. A talkie, filmed in 1964, Film is set in 1929, the era of
silent films, which it consciously attempts to replicate.12 It is filmed in
35mm black and white, is twenty-two minutes long (the usual length of a
silent film), and is silent, except for one telling Shhh, an auditory joke
to indicate that the film could speak if it wanted to. Even the plot is
borrowed from the past: the Max Sennett Keystone Kops chase films,
rematerialized in Film by the choice of silent film star Buster Keaton. To
displace focus from plot to medium, Beckett eliminates all elements that
might allow the audience to relate directly to specific characters, places,
or situations. The protagonist/Keaton is not given a proper name; in the
script he is identified as O (object), his pursuer as E (Eye). The central
action of this chase film is Os frantic but vain attempts to escape what
Beckett calls the unbearable quality of Es scrutiny (Film 57), the
anguish of perceivedness (Film 11); or, as Deleuze rhetorically asks
when discussing Film, [h]ow can we rid ourselves of ourselves, and
demolish ourselves? (Cinema 1 66). To materialize this psychological
struggle, Beckett manipulates the camera. In the written directions that
form the basis for the project,13 he notes that, as long as E keeps within a
45! angle, the angle of immunity (11), as Beckett calls it, O escapes selfperception; beyond that, he becomes aware of Es invasion of his
selfhood. The central technical problem was how to distinguish between
Os visual field and Es. The solution worked out by the films director
Alan Schneider, cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and Beckett, who flew
to New York City especially to participate in the filming was to have
Os vision appear blurred, an effect created by a gauze over the camera
lens, while Es vision remained clear. Only at the end of the film, in the
investment scene, when O finally faces E, does he recognize that, as
Beckett puts it, the pursuing perceiver is not extraneous, but self (11).
And it is only at this moment that the audience, perceivers of both O and
E, become fully aware of the way that technology has been marshalled to

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embody the theme of the work cinematically: Esse est percipi [to be is to
be perceived] (11).
The completed film demonstrates that Beckett was struggling against
the seduction of modern film, which, as McLuhan describes it, is more
about action than re-action and is fixed, rather than fluid, predicated on
linear, defined narratives, rather than on a series of indistinct images, and
provides a finished product rather than a process that viewers must
complete. Becketts solution was to return to the early, silent form,
thereby allowing him to jettison colour, sound, and that camera work
used to foist a sense of reality on modern film. In so doing, Beckett also
points to the traps and snares of the present technological environment
by offering the prior medium as content. Although the results were
striking, they were not exactly what Beckett had imagined, and he was
forced to make several changes to accommodate the limits of film
technology (Knowlson 523; Schneider). In addition, filmmaking was
expensive and time consuming, with hours spent on one close-up
(Knowlson 524). These problems may have led Beckett to try television,
a much more congenial medium for his intimate explorations of being.
Eh Joe (1965) and Ghost Trio (1975) have their roots in Film (in the
natural technological order that McLuhan pointed out), presenting
progressively more nebulous, blurred images. Thematically, the three are
examples of what Kenner calls the man in the room (1378) motif;
however, in the shift from film to TV, the overt clown elements Kenner
describes as central to such depictions which were part of Keatons
performance fall away, as do those few delineating marks of character
and place still apparent in Film. Although Keaton kept his face turned
away from the camera until the last frame, his trademark porkpie hat was
visible throughout, and, though swathed in a greatcoat, his body and his
special walk were still recognizable. Eh Joe and Ghost Trio, without the
help of gauze-covered lenses, present even more visually indistinct
images, more intimate and moving, typical of the cool TV medium
McLuhan describes. In both, the viewer is carefully drawn into the
emotional struggles of the silent central figures, more so than in Film but
not in the ways typical of television dramas.
Eh Joe,14 written a year after the filming of Film, is far less
technologically complicated than its predecessor. Its setting is no longer
a sparsely furnished room15 but rather an obviously constructed
television set: a contrived space, without depth, truncated to contain
only basic props. Joe traverses this physical space, opening, closing, and
securing window, door, and cupboard, even kneeling down to look under
the bed to make sure no one observes him. His actions are reminiscent of
those of O, but Joe is less active; the focus of the play is on re-action not
action, as befitting the medium. This time, all extraneous eyes are

Beckett and Television: In a Different Context

481

subsumed in the single eye of the television camera. In the opening

sequence, it is positioned one yard from Joe, observing him full-length
from behind as he makes his bedroom check. Once he comes to rest on
the edge of his bed, it moves to face him, still at a one-yard distance,
although, as Becketts directions indicate, Joes eyes are turned inward,
a listening look (qtd. in Harmon 203).
Whereas Film was virtually silent, Eh Joe talks with a vengeance.
V (Womans Voice) is the audible pursuer, speaking in a low, distinct,
remote voice, with little colour (Eh Joe 201). Presumably a spurned
lover, she prods Joe about his betrayals, isolation, and most
dramatically the suicide of the woman who took her place. In her
revenge tale, she is abetted by the camera. In the pauses between sections
of her monologue, it moves closer in nine four-inch increments, until
virtually flush with Joes face, revealing the full extent of his inner
response to her relentless voice and painful recriminations.
As McLuhan argued, the TV medium is best suited for close-ups,
which capture the complex nuances of feeling aroused by emotions, as
well as by outer stimulation. In this play, Joe says nothing; his face says
it all. At the same time, the steady progression of the camera
accomplishes what McLuhan imagined was possible in this cool
medium: it draws the viewer into Joes inner world, from which
a dead voice in his head emanates (qtd. in Harmon 201).16
In television, that peephole art,17 the closer the camera comes, the
more viewers react to the voice and connect with Joe and his inner
struggles. Vs repeated word imagine added by Beckett in a late
typescript18 prods them to recreate in their own minds the suicide scene
she relates in such detail. Daniel Albright assumes that in Eh Joe the
intrusive camera destroys any empathetic relation between character and
viewer, Joes face losing both its corporeality and humanity: Joe has
already surrendered his soul, in the sense that he has passed into
a technological simulacrum of a human being. He is an Adam futur; cut
him open and you find a TV receiver (129). In fact, Beckett went to
considerable lengths to indicate that Joes face does not disintegrate
under the interrogation of the camera. In several letters to Alan Schneider
who was about to direct the play in America with George Rose
Beckett reminds him to include an action at the end of the play that does
not appear in the printed version: Smile at very end when voice stops
(having done it again) (qtd. in Harmon 198). In a subsequent letter,
Beckett repeats the request: I asked in London and Stuttgart for a smile
at the end (oh not a real smile). He wins again. So ignore direction
Image fades, voice as before. Face still fully present till last Eh Joe.
Then smile and slow fade (qtd. in Harmon 202).

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LINDA BEN-ZVI

In terms of the model of the television medium that McLuhan sets out,
the proximity of this final shot, with its blurred, fluid image, does not
preclude the personal involvement of viewers. On the contrary, it
illustrates how television can be employed to create intimacy, by allowing
a man in a room to be seen by others sitting alone in their rooms, seeing
and perhaps feeling what the figure is feeling.19 Rather than the machine
routing Joe, or Joe being reduced to a machine, Beckett makes Joe and
his conscience visually and audibly palpable and communicative, through
the very manipulations of the camera and recorded voice.
In Eh Joe, part of the power of the work is created by Vs monologue,
spoken with plenty of venom (qtd. in Harmon 198), addressed to Joe
but overheard by the television audience, whose probing eyes Joe cannot
vanquish or detect. In Ghost Trio,20 V (Female Voice) is not a spurned
lover in the head but a mechanical voice in the machine itself, some sort
of director, producer, or prompter. And this time, her words are spoken
at least initially not to the televised figure in the play but directly to the
viewers in front of their TVs. V begins, Good evening. Mine is a faint
voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [Pause.] Good evening. Mine is a faint
voice. Kindly tune accordingly. [Pause.] It will not be raised, nor lowered,
whatever happens (248). Her words and delivery parody the opening of
many television programs of the period. However, instead of a
mellifluous, welcoming voice framing the program that is about to be
beamed and whetting the viewers interest by the suggestion that
something, in fact, is going to happen, Vs is a mechanical, monotone
voice, concerned with the transmission of the play, Becketts most direct
foregrounding of medium as message. To point to the technology at
work, he playfully has V repeat the first three brief sentences, suggesting
that some glitch in the mechanical reproduction may have occurred, the
disembodied, recorded voice perhaps stuck, prompting the viewer to want
to check the equipment. However, V quickly forestalls any such
manipulations: Keep that sound down, she demands, ironically
pointing to the television viewers ability to control or even end reception
as against the machines attempt to wield power and punish deviation.
The same struggle is replicated within the play between F (Figure) and
V, who also attempts to control his movements. Both parallel plots, if
they can be called that, hearken back to Castellss description of
technology versus self.
Beckett divides Ghost Trio into three parts, based on production issues
not story development: I Pre-action, II Action, and III Re-action.
At the beginning of Part One, V draws viewers into what she calls the
familiar chamber (248), but the playing space is the least familiar
of any of Becketts man-in-the-room plays. It consists of a series
of rectangles in a small rectangular room floor, wall, and window

Beckett and Television: In a Different Context

483

0.70 m by 1.50 m; door and pallet 0.70 m by 2.0 m; and even smaller
rectangles, including stool (actually a rectangular bench in production),
cassette player, pillow, and mirror. V assigns names to the interchangeable rectangular gray forms she describes and then reinscribes within the
confines of the constructed chamber. Only after going through a detailed
description of the set, making the audience see it as she says it, does she
finally introduce the inhabitant of the space, sole sign of life a seated
figure (249), seen sitting on the stool bent over and presumably listening
to the cassette clutched between his hands. Her sibilants seem to animate
and breathe life into F, frozen until she speaks him into being. Unlike in
Film and Eh Joe, where the men had dimensionality and bodily contours,
in Ghost Trio, as the title indicates, F is spectral, like a moveable
sculpture, his image recalling McLuhans description of the ultimate TV
picture as a resulting plastic contour . . . [that] has the quality of
sculpture and icon, rather than of picture. Dressed in a tight-fitting
black garment that covers all but his neck, face, head, and hands, F is
identified as part of the interior in Part One. In Part Two, at Vs prompts,
he glides with marionette-like movements21 in a counter-clockwise
direction around the already designated stations of his chamber: door,
window, pallet, and stool. And in Part Three he repeats the actions
without Vs direction.
Again the television camera is a palpable presence but is used in more
complex and subtle ways than in Eh Joe. Beckett provides a diagram
indicating that it is to move in a straight line, backward as well as forward
from A, the furthest remove, to B, the middle zone, and C, the nearest
shot of F, stool, and door. In these positions, the camera swirls to follow
him around his room. The text also calls for an additional unlettered
position, a further close-up, focusing on Fs head, hands, and the cassette
he holds. In Part Three, a second camera position is added, establishing
Fs perspective as viewing subject as well as perceived object, showing
what he sees outside the confines of the chamber. Beckett also adds two
other camera angles: one from above looking down on the stool and
cassette and one a close-up of a mirror reflecting nothing. Neither is
taken from the established camera-range positions. The effect of these
numerous camera shots is to destabilize the technological patterning
Beckett initially establishes. In Eh Joe, a decade earlier, he was content to
use advancing close-up; this time he exposes the ways in which the camera
functions, not in a regulated, understandable fashion, but in one
seemingly capricious, illogical, and flawed. This, perhaps, indicates
the inherent instability of all mechanical reproduction or points to the
limited perspectives of those who stand invisible behind the scenes like
V and direct the cameras use, or of those who watch unquestioningly
at home.

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LINDA BEN-ZVI

This same sense of technology run amok is reinforced by Vs failing

attempts to control F. In Part One, it is her voice that brings him to life;
in Part Two, she indicates what his actions will be and he executes them.
However, near the end of this part, after hovering near his pallet, he
looks over his shoulder, making an unscheduled and presumably selfdetermined stop in front of the mirror, a rectangle not identified by V in
Part One. In response, V emits a surprised, Ah! which may give voice
to Fs surprised reaction to his own face, which the viewers do not see, or
indicate her own loss of control over the figure she is animating. If the
latter, her next command, now to door, can be seen as her attempt to
regain mastery, as she did in the opening section of the play in relation to
the viewers. However, F does not follow the prompt, returning instead
to his stool, again a seemingly self-willed transgression of the designated
order. This is followed by Vs words, Stop and then Repeat, the last
audible command she gives before lapsing into silence in Part Three.
Fs independence is left purposely ambiguous in the play. So, too, is the
language of the commands V delivers. Phrases such as he will now think
he hears her are in the indicative mood and are addressed to the viewers;
but they can also be imperative, if addressed to F, who may like many
a Beckett character think of himself in the third person, as someone
who watches himself act, or may be an actual performer in a television
play, performing it as V is saying it, his deviations signs not of human
agency but of human fallibility, of getting the actions wrong.
An even more intriguing manipulation of technology that creates
similar ambiguity and calls attention to the medium concerns the music
used in the work. The play takes its title from the largo movement of
Beethovens Piano Trio op. 70, no. 1, known as the Ghost. The
assumption is that the music heard is an unadulterated recording of
the work, played by the cassette that F holds. However, Catherine Laws
has suggested that Beckett uses the music in the same way as he does
other elements of the play, positing them provisionally only in order to
undermine their stability as their constructedness is revealed (202).
In her close analysis of the excerpts played, she shows Becketts
manipulations of the score for example, beginning with second parts
of sections and his rearrangement of the temporal order of some
extracts (208).22 These alterations, easily missed by one unfamiliar with
the music, raise questions about what the television audience actually
hears. In a draft version of the play, Beckett noted that there is to be
heard and unheard music, indicating that F and the audience do not
hear the full work and pointing once again to technical mistakes inherent
in mechanical reproduction, marks of incompetent editing, or the
constructedness of all musical accompaniment in media, an always
artificial manipulation of its original form (Maier 26778).

Beckett and Television: In a Different Context

485

Not only does Beckett undermine the integrity of the music itself but he
also calls into question its source in the play. His precise written
directions indicate a direct correlation between the level of the sound
and the movement of the camera in relation to the implied object of
transmission, the cassette. At position B, faint music is audible, at
C it rises, and in close-up it is further heightened. However, at A, the
furthest remove from F and the cassette, it is inaudible. But not always.
At the crucial end of Part Two, after F breaks his ambulatory cycle and
returns to his stool rather than to the door as V commands, the directions
indicate Faint music audible for first time at A. It grows louder.
5 seconds (251). Again, Beckett draws attention to the technology and its
function. In radio, film, and television, music is usually ancillary to plot
and action, providing punctuation that determines and directs
the emotional responses of audiences. The source of this music is rarely
shown; nor is a mechanical means of reproduction indicated.23
Ordinarily, if music is successful in doing its job, it is supposed to go
unnoticed. At first, it seems to do just that in Ghost Trio. F hovers over
the cassette listening to the Ghost. However, as the randomness of the
camera positions and audio reproduction become more apparent, viewers
begin to question whether the music is, in fact, emanating from the small,
battery-operated cassette, which F is never shown to turn on or off.
They are also not provided with the usual direct narrative connection
between plot and musical accompaniment. The ostensible story of Ghost
Trio concerns a tryst its earlier title F awaiting the visit of a woman
whose failure to appear is announced by a young boy at the end of Part
Three, a variation of Waiting for Godot reduced to the intimate confines
of the television screen. Or, as Beckett described the play: [a]ll the old
ghosts. Godot and Eh Joe over infinity (qtd. in Knowlson 621). Were
music used in a traditional fashion, it would rise and fall depending
on the vicissitudes of the tryst story. Instead, Beckett uses the music
as one more way of pointing to technological indeterminacy in the play:
introducing the cassette and then casting doubt about its purpose, tying
camera action to audio transmission, although television cameras
are incapable of recording sound without booms or other technology;
and shattering visual and audio patterns that he establishes. In all these
ways, Beckett thus manipulates the medium to become the content of the
play. He also conflates character and viewer, both held under the sway of
a mechanical art that, in practice, proves progressively more fallible.
In Part Three of Ghost Trio, V is silent or silenced and F show signs
of subjectivity, seeing as well as being seen, his face now visible in the
mirror that was previously empty. These changes in the technological
hierarchy fill the content position, eliminating the tryst story, so that
when the boy leaves, the viewer is moved less by the womans failure to

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LINDA BEN-ZVI

appear than by the ways in which F has somehow eluded the imposition
of the medium. Beckett creates this displacement in the final shots of the
play. After the swelling last notes of the largo are heard and the camera
has moves from A to close-up, he has the camera once more move back to
A, where it shows F slowly lifting his head and gazing, face-front for the
first time in the play. Fs hands, which had held the cassette claw-like, are
now crossed, his whole body relaxed and upright, as if at the end of
a performance.24 The last image is of F re-embodied, a faint smile darting
across his face, similar to the one Beckett required at the conclusion of
Eh Joe (and would use seven years later in Catastrophe), perhaps again
indicating that he has won or at least that he has not been vanquished
by the medium that sought to control and objectify him.
Through the intertwining and ghosting of the figure observed and the
observer the man-in-the-room seen by men and women in their own
rooms Beckett calls into question the easy manipulation of the viewer
by the media of which McLuhan warns and provides a corrective similar
to the one McLuhan suggests: the best way to oppose [a medium] is
to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.
However, in Becketts world, it is never that easy. Stilling technology or
outing media cannot put an end to this buzzing confusion of life
(qtd. in Driver 218). That remains. The viral endemic, chronic, alarming
presence of the medium . . . dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of
life into TV (qtd. in Brooker and Brooker 77), which Baudrillard
describes, is not the source or the sickness. What technology can do is to
provide one more way of calling attention to the mess by allowing
chaos into art and not trying to quell or explain it Becketts way of
failing better in the contemporary world.

NOTES

1 For Becketts involvement in the production of Film, see Knowlson 52124;

Schneider 6394; for his work on productions of television plays, see Knowlson
538; Fehsenfeld 36066.
2 Ackerley and Gontarski argue that such works are postliterary or
extraliterary on the page, since they consist mainly of technical details.
3 For earlier discussions of Becketts plays for specific media, see Ben-Zvi,
Media Plays; Gidal; Kalb.
4 For a discussion of Becketts method of using language to critique itself, drawn
from the work of Fritz Mauthner, see Ben-Zvi, Limits of Language.
5 See also Sheehan 176.
6 For a review of The Medium, see Favorini. For recent McLuhan biographies,
see Gordon; Marchand; for critical studies, see Willmott; Neill; Levinson.

Beckett and Television: In a Different Context

487

7 On the impact of McLuhans conversion, see Marchand 5055.

8 Marchand discusses the relationship between Kenner and McLuhan and
quotes the latter as saying, I have fed Kenner too much off my plate (106).
9 See Understanding Media (206) for McLuhans comments on Death of a
Salesman.
10 Many have also assumed that the terms were taken from the youth-culture
vocabulary of the 1960s, where cool meant anything new, with it, or
way out.
11 Voigts-Virchow makes a similar point when he distinguishes between
Becketts television work and later postmodern forms: the latter full of color,
of movement, of variety, Becketts work displaying its visual and aural
paucity (not its perfection), its failures (not its achievements), its
shortcomings (not its fulfillments) (Exhausted Cameras 238); see also
Face Values.
12 For an excellent discussion of Film as a silent film, see Brater 7484.
13 The actual film diverges from this plan because of difficulties with shooting;
see Beckett, Film.
14 The following discussion of Eh Joe is based on the American version,
directed by Alan Schneider and starring George Rose and Rosemary Harris.
Beckett directed a version in German for Suddeutscher Rundfunk, with
Deryk Mendel and Nancy Illig, and Alan Gibson directed the play for
BBC, starring Jack MacGowran, for whom the piece was originally
written, and Sian Phillips.
15 The room used in Film was actually a construction, built to accommodate
Becketts precise descriptions of a Memorable Wall (qtd. in Knowlson 522).
16 Jack MacGowran called Eh Joe, the most grueling 22 minutes I have ever
had in my life, and described the camera as really photographing the mind
(qtd. in Knowlson 538).
17 Becketts description, in conversation with the author, Paris, July 1985.
18 See Ackerley and Gontarski 164.
19 In the recent Atom Egoyan stage production of Eh Joe in Dublin, a giant
screen was used to project the face of Michael Gambon, the actor playing Joe,
who listened to the taped voice of Penelope Wilton as V, sent out to the
audience by two large speakers placed on either side of the proscenium. The
impact was equally strong and may point to the way that, more and more, live
theatre approximates television.
20 The following discussion is based on the British production of Ghost Trio,
directed by Donald McWhinnie, with Donald Pickup as F and Billie Whitelaw as
V. Beckett directed a German version entitled Die Geister Trio for Suddeutscher
Rundfunk in May 1977, with Klaus Herm as F and Irmgard Forst as V.
21 Knowlson indicates that Beckett had Heinrich Kleists essay Uber das
Marionettentheater in mind (63233).
22 See also, Maier, who discusses the use of music in the play.

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LINDA BEN-ZVI

23 The exception is in parodies, such as Mel Brookss Blazing Saddles or

attention-getting television ad campaigns, such as a recent one by British Air,
which featured a symphony orchestra knee-deep in turquoise water playing
soothing music, while a voiceover told of escape to tropical isles.
24 For an interesting discussion of Becketts manipulation of hands in his plays,
see Haynes and Knowlson 7577.

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