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2023, Ecological Entanglements Affect, Embodiment and Ethics of Care
Handke calls his monologue, Till Day You Do Part, “an echo” of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, where he places two stone sculptures on a platform– Krapp’s figure, with a cardboard nose and tape round his face, emanates deadness, while the lover miraculously assumes life and begins her solo (not solitary) act. Standing opposite to the pausing, stuttering Krapp, the girl from Beckett’s punt continues unstoppably, with a force propelled by earthly elements. On the other hand, Beckett’s Krapp himself imitates the machine recorder and the alcohol he periodically takes, like oil, rejuvenates him. The empty stage with its organized and compressed minimalism resembles the concentrated inside of a recorder, and Krapp, the unraveling spool. The machine and Krapp keep interchanging memory and speech– when the tape speaks, Krapp listens, reflects and gesticulates; when Krapp records, the machine rotates/listens in silence. Krapp parodies an old recorder under the threat of being eventually crushed by a superior one; therefore, the immediate impulse is to transfer the data to the new one. The negative epiphany encountering Krapp is that the onslaught of involuntary memories leaves one paralyzed beyond expression. Krapp is imprisoned between his physicality trying to assert its embodied presence and his mechanized voice overwhelming him with its pastness, and technological presentness. If the subvocal stories that emerge from the silent voice of the vocal folds we tell ourselves erect our subjectivity, then Krapp’s transference of those fictions onto a living machine permanently pushes him in a zone of guilt and habits marked by an obsession with time. If Krapp is haunted by time, Handke’s woman articulates from a space beyond time, through and as stone. Handke’s lover accuses Monsieur Krapp of being preoccupied with material things– his ledger, pocket-watch, tape recorder, and the multiple Krapps which diffuse and refuse the ‘original’ Krapp. The lover is the awakened figure of Krapp’s stony past, frozen in time, while the evidence of her secondary existence is recorded after the event. Krapp anthropomorphizes the machine, and transforms humans into faltering memories and vocal remainders. The posthuman technological other of Krapp exhausts and dissipates the authorial mind itself– the only thing which remains on the darkened stage is the still light of the tape gone silent. On the other hand, the lover as stone is an image of ageless continuance, of the being’s desire to remain non-dead, of the mythological, symbiotic relation between putrefaction and transmutation. The paper seeks to interrogate the different subjectivities that emanate from the technophilic (posthuman), lessening existence of Krapp, and the embodied, relational subjecthood of Handke’s animated woman of stone.
Set against a barren and minimal backdrop, Samuel Beckett’s experimentations with auditory technologies in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) are what take centre-stage. Incorporating the use of a tape recorder, Beckett transforms this mechanical apparatus into a dynamic character whose function becomes indispensable to the play. From the very moment the curtains open, we witness an elderly man named Krapp hunching over a desk filled with rolls of tape. As he loads these canisters into the machine, Krapp is granted access to the voiced anecdotes that he had recorded of himself during his younger days. This act becomes a yearly birthday tradition which allows him to revisit past events and memories with wistful affection. However, through these sonic routines, Krapp’s desire to connect with his past veers into an obsessive and destructive direction. Through the repeated reminders of relationships lost, ambitions aborted, and his tragic failure to live in the present, Krapp becomes increasingly withdrawn and consumed with regret. These revelations are disempowering and entropically reduce the protagonist to a state of speechless terror by the performance’s end. Hence, although sound technology has been exalted for its ability to facilitate connection across spatial and temporal borders, Beckett subversively depicts the tape recorder as an isolating instrument. In doing so, we as audience members are forced to question the utility of said auditory devices that have proliferated in the revolution of the industrial age.
Journal of Beckett Studies (Edinburgh UP), 20.2 (2011): 213-220
Analogue Krapp in a Digital Culture2011 •
In this paper Tom Skipp discusses Samuel Beckett's changing performance style with regard to "Krapp's Last Tape". The paper also focusses on filmed versions of the play in relation to the film version Skipp directed and which was screened in the "Beckett" exhibition, Pompidou Centre, 2007.
Sonologia 2016 – Out of Phase Sao Paulo, Brasil, 22-25 November From 1956 until mid 1980s Samuel Beckett focused on the creation of a small group of works conceived specifically for the electronic medium of radio and television. In 1957/1958 he learnt the mechanics of the open-reel tape recorder and tits dissociative possibilities. This leads him to write Krapp’s Last Tape his first technological epiphany. It was after that piece, and through the sound experimentation with the following radio plays, that Beckett focused his attention on language and velocity on its utterance.
The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
Matters of Memory in Krapp's Last Tape and Not I1997 •
Krapp's Last Tape (1958) embodies memory and the dislocations of time; in Not I (1972) even the "body" disappears—"whole body like gone"—and only a dislocated memory, visualized as a "subjectless" mouth, is left us. Theatrically, we have here the break between a mimetic theatre (however reduced), and postmodern dissolutions. Krapp may be drawn as a metaphor for man as clown or bum—white face, purple nose, short pants, large shoes; but for all the pregnant minimalism he still retains a distinct character, a discernable story, a room, a name. Mouth obviously has none of these; she also has no body or head attached to the red orifice we see, no logical placement on stage—floating as she (it) does eight feet above stage level—no context or frame, beginning or end to the unstoppable monologue we hear her speak. Separated by fourteen years, these related plays both attempt to objectify memory within highly visual—and very different—organs of remembrance. ...
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