In a 1961 interview, Samuel Beckett remarked that “where we have, at one and the same time, darkness and light, we also have the inexplicable.” This dimension of “the inexplicable” appears in various forms throughout Beckett’s work. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s essay “Everyday Speech” (in The Infinite Conversation), which describes the everyday as that which escapes and resists being grasped by knowledge, this paper shows how Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall (1957), portrays the twofold nature of this dimension: light and darkness. The realm of light is inflected by realism, in which the concrete aspects of people’s everyday lives are depicted, while the realm of darkness, where non-being prevails, is never fully sealed off from the former. All That Fall opens an attunement space in which the listener is attuned to this twofoldness at the heart of the everyday and, instead of understanding it intellectually, experiences it as an enigma. Beckett does not deny the world of concrete everyday lives in this play; rather, he reveals it in its twofoldness, in which the concrete world of light is enveloped by a dimension of darkness — or non-being — that has the force to undo it. The listener senses the tension between the countryside landscape and this force, akin to what Blanchot calls the “secret destructive capacity” in play within the everyday, that dissolves it. All this is made possible by the radio medium, through which Beckett thinks the work “coming out of the dark” can be realized.

Authors:
Michiko Tsushima, University of Tsukuba, Japan

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Posted by James Alexander Gordon

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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