Krapp's Verbal Masturbation

Krapp’s Last Tape is the love of oneself. The love accompanying the hatred of ones existence. A lonely aging cynic struts around his dim lit room eating bananas; up there with pomegranates in pageant for ‘Most Salacious Fruit’. What I will assume, perhaps falsely, is that it was lust summoning the desire to recall past memory. He questions the contents of the ledger. Things like, “memorable equinox” don’t seem to be ringing any bells. Though he is stunned as he finally reads, “Good bye……love.” I would argue that those inclined to lust are as well inclined towards ‘sensational self-pity’ of one sort or another. What I mean by this is, he is a self-hating hedonist. Which pursuits does Krapp seem to be staying alive for? He drinks constantly and maintains a steady diet of victual bananas; has been for thirty+ years knowing full well that he should be doing a lot less of both. These are pleasure drives of the body. Another is sexual desire. Our man is Krapp, full of both.

But a man past his prime, lonely in his bitterness, stays alive only by a romantic egoism. It is epideixis at large. It explains the innumerable tins of tapes of personal narration. He even says on box-3-spool-5 that he was listening to an earlier year before the recording. Reveling in the sultry tenor of his own voice. Now if I can speak from personal experience: there isn’t a thing the self-pitied loves more than the wrenching heartbreak of lost love. Chewing the cud of that memory is enough to keep men alive. For men must have a justification for sadness, and women are the greatest source of sadness and a justification there of. It was the recollection of love lost that sent him towards the tape, not because he felt so deeply for this woman, but because it was a woman and it was over. When you feel nothing, an emotional vacuum, even self directed loath is pleasurable.

It reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s, The Sunset Limited, in which White says,   “If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.” Krapp has nothing left to live for, but he is struggling between a world of illusions and the world for what it is. He fast forwards through the revelation that drove him thirty years prior to make a recording that night. There must be something on there that he does not want to realize he remembers. All he wants to do is remember the love that he lost and how it troubled him, troubles him, aches and burns, rekindling the love of the jaded ego and ever perpetuating the reasonable life. 

John Hurt, in his rendition, is, I believe, groping the tape recorder, as it plays:

 “I said I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes... I asked her to look at me and after a few moments-- after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over to get them in the shadow and they opened... Let me in... We drifted among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem. I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side... Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.”

Endgame

It wasn't until I was able to see the play acted that I lost all meaning ascribed to the drama while reading it. But as we have all come to understand: from one minute to the next, opinions, interpretations, and messages received from a Beckett production are subject to change. It was after I saw the setting and positioning of the characters on the stage that an interesting thought came to mind. Perhaps the room could be understood as a human head (with two windows for eyes), and entities inhabiting it are the different drivers (and baggage) of our minds. Hamm would, under this interpretation, constitute the central processing unit. The one who gives commands, sits about and expects to be pampered, or at the very least, entertained. Clov could be considered a symbol of the body, weak yet able, and always a slave to the mind. Now, the implications of this paradigm are seemingly endless, and I am in no way confident enough to face them, let alone explain them. Such as, if Hamm had found Clov when he was a boy and 'took him in' than that could suggest that the mind is eternal and constantly in search of a vessel. I would highly doubt that Beckett would be comfortable with these implications or even this analysis (No symbols where none intended, naturally). No matter how far from the mark it may be, the interpretation, I do not think, could be exhausted of all its veracity. We are of course invited into some form of a mind in this play, and what better setting for such a exploration than within the mind itself. The wonderful nature of Beckett is his ability to present his audience with something so useless to interpret that it becomes infinitely approachable. Tomorrow I expect to chastise myself for having such an elementary interpretation and proceed to replace it with one as equally feeble.

"Why didn't they do Oklahoma!"

I'm sure someone has stumbled upon this beauty already, but I couldn't take the chance...

Pot of Godot at the end of the rainbow

I don’t seem to be able……… to depart.

Such is life.

If Samuel Beckett wanted to bring Minimalism one more step along, he could cut away all dialogue except the snippet above, and still have produced a play as powerful as “Waiting for Godot”. The prolonged moments of inaction, the sparse and confusing dialogue, and the absurdity of the characters, mimics the qualities of life that are rarely thought to be elements of the theater, and even as such it captivates the audience who know that Godot will never come and hang on until the end in suspended disbelief. Such is life. “Godot” challenges the individual to question what it is that we keep alive in wait for. Where is that pot of gold on the other side of the rainbow, the promise of ‘something’ that we expect to be gold, shiny and satisfying. “Godot” is that gold. The secret that Beckett is enlightening is that there is no gold, there is no “Godot”, there is only every reason for one to believe that there is. Even little messenger boys, innocent and ambiguous, come along when hope of a purpose—like the twilight—grows ever more pale. It is just enough to lend the strength to live a couple more hours, days, weeks, years without pondering life’s meaninglessness. These signs, these suggestions are everywhere in life from the pang of hunger, to the desire to attend college: “If I eat I will keep my strength to find more food, to eat more food, to keep my strength…”; “If I go to college I can get a job, to make more money, to be comforted, to…”. But they always result in a next step and never an end result, and we know this. So in suspended disbelief we go on watching our lives, and waiting, and “[We] don’t seem to be able………. to depart.”

Such is life.