BECKETT AND EISENSTEIN ON LIGHT AND CONTRAPUNTAL MONTAGE J. M. B.

Antoine-Dunne

Becketts interest in film led to his absorption of film forms, in particular those structures Sergei Eisenstein interrogated in his various writings on film montage. Eisenstein believed that film brought to fulfilment the promise of all other art forms and that films capacity to unite time and space in movement enabled it to bridge the gap between subjective and objective reality. This paper analyses Becketts use of light and shows that this unique usage is based on a belief in the ability of film to project directly into the mind of viewer or auditor and to map psychic states.

Becketts use of light as a contouring and defining element is one of the more elusive factors of his work. Light is used both as a protagonist and as an aesthetic principle and appears to be a means of interrogating arts relationship with nature. I intend to examine the genesis of Becketts use of light by relating it to Eisensteins theories of montage and by briefly analysing the audio-visual and film components in early manuscripts and typescripts of Murphy and Watt. In a letter to Mary Manning Howe, written in 1937, Beckett, in a state of depression, wrote that there was now an end to the temptation of light. He was at this time lamenting the impossibility of meaning in art and his sense of the lonesomeness of human endeavour. He speaks of lying on the floor for days, a monad without the conflict, lightless and thankless, and resolves to let in the chaos. The language and concepts used in this letter suggest that Beckett was immersed in Soviet film aesthetics, in particular Sergei Eisensteins experiments with the synchronous projection of audio-visual components through which could be created a tendentious film image. Eisensteins fame as a filmmaker and his ideas on dialectical montage were already well established. Beckett in this letter places the harmonising and ideological tenets of Soviet montage in opposition to his own sense of alienation. The clues are several, beginning with an overt reference to dialectical montage whereby two fragments in juxtaposition move from quantity to quality, a state defined by Eisenstein as

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ecstasy, and which correlates to the act of creativity itself (Eisenstein 1987). Becketts letter to Howe marks an initial stage in the authors attempt to use a process of image-making learned from film montage. In film, Beckett sought the means of resolving the aesthetic dilemma of signifying inner and outer reality without destroying form itself and without loss of artistic integrity. He writes of lying unaccompanied, in a coenaesthesia [?] of mind, a fullness of mental self-aesthesia that is entirely useless. He contrasts Eisensteins capacity to evoke emotion through the interplay of light and dark and plastic shapes or masses in The Battleship Potemkin with his own failures, as he saw it, to find an artistic form to communicate his own ideas and intuitions. One of the primary questions Beckett asks of his art is how to produce an image that is true to the what, who, and how of his own reality, a question set forth at the outset in his writing of Watt (1940-45, notebook 1). Further, he asks, how he can transmit that reality to the mind and imagination of another, when that other appears incapable of recognising him for what he is and sees him only in relation to him/herself. Throughout his artistic career, Beckett sought to resolve this incoercible absence of relation (Beckett 1965, 125) by means of the mechanism of light. Light as used by Beckett is a condensation of a filmic process involving the dialectical interplay of sonic and visual elements. The common denominator that joins these filmic elements is at the core of Eisensteins experiments with film montage and is based in what is at the origin of montage, that is, the innate tendency of the human mind to leap to a conclusion. Montages simulation of this mental process, which Eisenstein in Film Sense relates to the reassembling of memory fragments, results in the minds enthrallment. The power of signification inherent in the synchronisation of sound and sight is initially expressed in Eisensteins early essay An Unexpected Juncture. In this essay of 1928, he speaks of the equivalence of the sensory apprehension of light and sound, i.e., our capacity to hear light and see sounds (1988, 1: 17-18). Eisenstein came to the conclusion that sound and visual perceptions were identical in terms of their effect on the nervous system because they both assail the body through a system of vibrations: But the visual overtone and the sound overtone are constants in a single dimension! Because while a shot is a visual perception and a tone is a sound perception, both visual and sound overtones are totally physiological sensations (1988, 1: 185). This mutual identity of audio-visual components could be used to

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create an affective response, that is, all available means could be carefully calculated by the director so that thought could be channelled directly into the mind of the audience. Eisensteins experiments led to his theory that montage could convey thought through the crafting of an idea-image. This concept evolved through its many stages, from attraction, to the theory of the overtone. The early montage of attractions sought to strike a blow on the psyche through any method that would result in an appropriate effect, whereas in overtonal resonance, accumulative echoes chime and operate in a manner similar to orchestrated music. The idea of a rhythmic reverberation that is evoked by lines in conflict is variously expressed, but summed up most succinctly in the posthumous publications on contrapuntal audio-visual montage. Eisenstein was fond of comparing his system of repetition and difference to a fugue. This dance of conflicting lines he also graphed as a spiral, because of its generative and burgeoning movement. This pathos structure, as he called it, defines a leap to ecstasy, or a leap beyond self, that he graphed in terms of the mathematical concept of the golden mean. One variant of the organic structure thus defined is explained at length under the generic title of the music of landscape (Eisenstein 1987). For Eisenstein, meaning occurs both within the shot and beyond the shot through the clash of different lines of representations bound together by the (tyrannical) hand of the director-artist. Unity is achieved primarily through repetition, also the means of creating a direct line between artist and audience. However, conflict was the base on which everything was founded. Through conflict, the artist could generate what Gilles Deleuze has called, in his Cinema 2: The Time Image, thought through the body (1989, 189-24). Film montage, as a system, creates a mechanism that invades the nervous system by creating what may be called shock waves, to which the body responds by mapping its rhythms, as in the bodily response to the feelings evoked by music. It is fairly well known that Beckett had a passion for film and for the works of Sergei Eisenstein. When Jay Leyda published a 1936 letter from Beckett to Eisenstein (in Leyda, 59), he also explained that Eisenstein did not reply because he was, at that time, fighting for his life under Stalin. I would like to demonstrate from another letter some of the ways in which Soviet film forms and theory influenced the mind of Beckett. In a letter to Arland Ussher, written on 25 March 1936, Beckett comments on the poems of an acquaintance: One in which the rime mouth-drouth occurs repeatedly is most remarkable, like the bull let loose among the cows in

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Eisensteins The General Line []. The interesting feature of this comment is the embryonic development of a system, whereby an idea is put across through the build-up of an ideational line. This achieves its effect by triggering associations that lead to the explosion of an idea. The riming of mouth and drouth is related to the basic structural method of overtonal montage and its application in pathos structure. The notes in the Whoroscope notebook at Reading, in part an early draft of Murphy, demonstrate a more extended concern with the effect of collision and the dynamics of vibration. Beckett was perhaps seeking validation for Eisensteins theory of overtonal montage. Like Eisenstein, he reduced light and sound to their vibratory activity and the two became one in light. The conflict that generates the flash or moment of illumination i.e., the leap into a new dimension or a movement out of self was reduced, as in Eisensteins work and writings, to the synthesising and image-making power of light. Sound and visual, in other words, do not exist in either time or space but exist simultaneously in time and space. A reference in section two of the Whoroscope notebook suggests that Beckett was making note of the formal properties of dynamic energy and that this was linked to his use of light. Note 12 dictates the same variety of technique for the interspaces and relates this to the growth in light and the actualisation of the work that will occur through a partial transformation. The truth to be partially illuminated is that the two X and H are really one. Light seems, at this stage, to be a means of creating a character through whom the divisions within the psyche can be communicated in the most effective manner possible. The first page of the Whoroscope notebook refers to the impetus given by H throughout to X who has no motive, inside or out. Beckett was involved here in two ideas, the first being the importance of kinesis to the creation of a projected image, that is the necessity of movement. Secondly, he was foregrounding the problem of the relationship between inner and outer reality. Becketts concern in Murphy with human interiority and communication is further expressed in a series of film images. The problem of the self locked in its own reality proceeds from the depictions of Murphy and Celia in the rocking chair to that of Mr Endon, in whose eyes Murphy sees himself reduced, obscured, and distorted (Beckett 1973, 140). The solipsistic nature of humanity is depicted both by the oscillating movement of the rocking chair and the screen-like effect of the eyes. The most startling use of film is to be found, however, when, through a process of inversion, Beckett flaunts his technical knowledge of film montage: Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and

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colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool (1973, 141). Lacking a cohesive ideational line and, more persuasively, without the overtonal reverberations of lines formed in conflict within the rhythmic chiming of a repetitive structure, the image is one of break down and nothingness. The form is the truth of the work. In a fragment entitled Lightning Calculation, also an early draft of Murphy, we again find evidence of this concern with energy and calculation. In this piece, Beckett introduces four ideas in relation to his character named Quigley: (1) Quigley could not forget his fathers death and this has become equivalent in his mind to a talking movie in perpetual play. Further, he was the main actor and feature in situations described as ignoble. (2) The pains in Quigleys chest were associated in his mind with the disease that had killed his father and of which it was said that Stalin was also a sufferer. (3) His lack of recollection of the name of Hobbemas celebrated avenue in the Trafalgar Square Collection. (4) He had a corn on his hammertoe that was growing worse. Lightning Calculation demonstrates Becketts use of energy and calculation and his early systemic use of pathos structure in the creation of an image of interior reality. The sequence of the father, memory of his death, Stalin, Hobbema and the hammertoe precedes a series of shots, including a close-up of Quigleys sweetheart. This series exemplifies the process of superimposition and conflictual movement that leads to the projection of an image. It goes like this: the mise en scne of the first shot memory of the fathers death and Quigleys and Stalins mortality contains a play of conflicting lines that lead to a plummet downwards (the opposite of ecstasy), or to low spirits, which is depicted as being comical (sadness is the funniest thing in the world). The effect of this shot is that a unified image is not formed, and this is linked to forgetfulness. Placed beside the close-up of the sweetheart, which also leads to failure of memory, we have an intensification of an idea through a juxtaposition of disparate shots. Movement is then introduced as Quigley proceeds towards the art gallery; movement that causes a pain from his hammer toe to dart up through his body into his brain. He sees pelicans as he goes on but is not refreshed [...] quite the reverse. Then Beckett introduces the spiral, which is the mathematically computed graph of pathos structure, as Quigley turns around, moves away from the gallery and heads towards the Lyons teashop. In other words, Quigleys movement replicates the movement of lines of cinematic montage as these prepare to leap into a new dimension, which is precisely what happens in the next shot as he becomes engrossed in his biscuits and

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is no longer troubled by the depression caused by failure to create an image of recall. The process of calculation leads to a flood of happiness and a bound upward in his self-esteem and a delicious change of mood. The movement of pathos structure is complete. Becketts use of film attractions suggests Eisensteins often repeated claim that cinematography had the potential to fulfil the promise of art through the movement that enables an image to exist at the levels of both objective reality and interior consciousness. This occurs in two ways. In the first instance film, in particular through the use of pars pro toto, can allow a distortion of reality according to psychological priorities, yet maintain its hold on the concreteness of that reality. Secondly, an idea is projected directly into the mind of the viewer/auditor, because a resonance or a series of vibrations is made to occur at the point of intersection between two lines in conflict. This is the more intellectualised version of the earlier montage of attractions. These vibrations constitute an overtonal rhythmic projection which, bypassing the accretions of circumstance and history, sets in motion a specific mode of projection whereby two hitherto distinct truths, that of the subject and that of the object the hard world and the world of spirit could be made immanent. It is in the pursuit of this specific aesthetic effect that, as Becketts work progressed, he became increasingly dependent on the vibratory activity of light as a mechanism and as a symbol of his methodology. In one of his early film scripts entitled MMM recalling the use of the same letters for the asylum in Murphy as well as Murpys music, MUSIC, MUSIC Eisenstein places the players on a chessboard and calculates the limited moves available to the director or maestro (see Ivanov). Eisensteins attempt to depict the dilemma of the film director and to plot out the spatial and temporal lines that would provide a concise image of the complex of human emotion, is replicated by Becketts chess game in Murphy, as he too seeks to graph the tangled web of relationships and the failure of human communication. Other works, such as Play, Quad and Endgame also come readily to mind here in their linear movement and configurations that mimic films complex mise en scne. The orchestrated music of mass, light and sound in Play exemplifies the use of the contrapuntal play of audio-visual lines that in their cumulative effect create an image of the self locked in its own perception, while unable to free itself of the need for recognition and communication. In this stage play written at around the same time as Film, Beckett creates a specific kind of resonance for which light is the operating device. Eisenstein, in his later writings on audio-visual montage, suggested the

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equivalence of light and tonal quality: Pitch, roughly speaking, will obviously correspond to the play of light, while the visual equivalent of key in music is colour tone (1994, 2:335). Light in Play replicates the directorial mind that seeks to unite disparate fragments by creating a tyrannically defined and rhythmic line. Light hollows out the space in which the solipsistic individual exists and sculpts him/her in time; then, by paralleling the interior monologues of each character, and situating each as a mass in space through the mechanism of the close-up, light creates an intense sense of emotional seclusion. This works within a system of reverberations created by the interplay of light and dark and, in particular, the use of the caesura or blackout. This graphic rhythm is further intensified by the contrapuntal movement of fluid sound, both as solo and chorus, and repetition or rhythm of urns triggering a graphic enunciation of both exterior and interior perception. Both forms of perception are subject to doubt; to both we respond emotionally rather than cerebrally. The audio-visual music of this work falls within the schema of vertical montage since the flow of sound and the play of light create a dance of sense images which are virtually in pursuit of each other: light provoking with decreasing certainty its image of human interiority. Play evokes an image that encapsulates the individuals inability to communicate, while simultaneously and radically undermining this communicative breakdown by the very form of the work. In Quad, too, the movement of lines within a restricted space is not simply influenced by literary predecessors, but most directly by audiovisual contrapuntal montage. Deleuzes analysis of Quad in his introductory essay LEpuis is most seductive, not simply because the essay illuminates exhaustion, but because it situates Becketts work within a new conceptual space opened up by film. Despite his positioning of Watt as le grand roman sriel, exhaustive in its pursuit of combinations, Deleuze, however, never quite equates the dynamic and spiralling movement of Watt with the spiral created by films contrapuntal play of lines (1992, 61). Yet, this novel successfully circumvents verbal language by resorting to visual puns and audio-visual montage techniques that are keyed to Laurel and Hardy in the draft notebooks. Montage in reverse nullifies the significance of words while enabling the materialisation of an image. The first chapter of the first notebook contains an extended comic sequence, which is a long drawn-out play of words culminating in the naming of the bush, the hardy laurel. This sequence is placed in the addenda of the published work.

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The manuscripts and typescripts of Watt provide ample proof that film is an important formal constituent of Becketts work. The novel is at a deep level an audio-visual experiment. On page 56 of the first Watt manuscript notebook at Texas there is a drawing of two figures looking at each other, with the caption Tu se lo mio maestro e l mio autore. This quotation from Dantes Inferno (I, 85) is cut into two lines on the manuscript page and is linked thematically to the preceding pages, but I suggest an additional reading in the context of the audio-visual content of many of the notebooks and, in particular, the first two. This drawing is not an illustration of the text as it is emerging from Becketts mind, but rather indicative of the process at work. It must be placed alongside page 40 of notebook 1, where we see the figure of a maestro conducting an orchestra (arrangement) of derelicts, most of whom are only heads or limbs, as in the principle of synecdoche in film (the close-up). The maestro (the term is applicable to circus ringmaster or film director or poet) represents the controlling presence of the authorial mind and hand. He or she carefully arranges fragments of reality and bends them to the psychological will of the artist. For Beckett, as for Eisenstein, films magic lies in its capacity to extract new images through movement, and at a point where space and time become identical, that is at the interstices. Through the process of fragmentation and reconstitution, the mind of viewer/auditor takes a leap into a new dimension, into the realm of the concept. Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel, Lightning Calculation, c. 1934, ms. 2902, Archive of the Beckett International Foundation (BIF), U of Reading. , Whoroscope notebook (mid-thirties), ms. 3000, BIF, Reading. , Letter to Arland Ussher, 25 March 1936, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC), U of Texas, Austin. , Letter to Mary Manning Howe, 30 [Oct.?]1937, HRC, Texas. , Watt, notebooks 1-7, 1940-48, HRC, Texas. , Murphy (London: Picador-Pan, 1973). , The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). , Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1987). , Watt (London: Picador-Pan, 1988). , Quad et autres pices pour la tlvision, suivi de LEpuis par Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Minuit, 1992). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone P, 1989).

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, LEpuis, in Quad et autres pices pour la tlvision, by Samuel Beckett (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 57-106. Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Sense, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (1943) (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). , Nonindifferent Nature, ed. and trans. by Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987). , Eisenstein: Selected Works, 4 vols., ed. by Richard Taylor et al. (London: British Film Institute; Indiana: Indiana UP, 1988-1995). Ivanov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich, Functions and Categories of Film Language, in Film Semiotics, trans. by Ann Shukman (Oxford: RPT, 1981), 4-5. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Leyda, Jay, Eisenstein 2: A Premature Celebration of Eisensteins Centenary, trans. by Alan Y. Upchurch, N. Lary, Zina Voynow, Samuel Brody (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1985).

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