Come and go

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Come and go (English original title: Come and Go ; French title: Va et vient ) is a short play by Samuel Beckett , which he dedicated to his publisher John Calder. It was originally written in English in January 1965 , but first published in Beckett's own translation in French and premiered on January 14, 1966 in the German translation by Erika Tophoven and Elmar Tophoven at the Schillertheater . The English premiere followed on February 28, 1966 at the Peacock Theater in Dublin .

Depending on the version, the piece contains 121 or 127 words. Due to its brevity, Coming and Going is seldom performed alone, but mostly together with other works. The piece consists of three almost identical parts, in which two of the three women who act briefly exchange ideas about the third without the latter finding out about it. One interpretation of what happened is that all three are terminally ill without knowing about it. In this sense, coming and going is interpreted as a greatly reduced, condensed form of a drama about the fate of human mortality.

action

Seating arrangements
1 LO MEI SU
2 LO SU
LO SU
3 MEI LO SU
4th MEI SU
MEI SU
5 MEI SU LO
6th MEI LO
MEI LO
7th SU MEI LO

Three similarly dressed women of “unspecified” age, Mei, Su and Lo, sit quietly next to each other on a bench, surrounded by darkness. They have been friends since childhood. Just like now, they were already sitting together in the school yard when they were still attending the class of "Fräulein Weels".

Celtic knot with the topology of the crossed hands in Come and Go

The three figures wear "dark hats of an indefinite shape with rims wide enough to shade their faces" and - unusual for Beckett - are wrapped in colorful, but over time faded coats, so that they look like three withered flowers. After a short time, Mei, sitting in the middle, gets up and leaves the stage. As soon as she is out of earshot, Lo asks Su what she thinks of Mei's appearance. Su replies: "As usual, I mean." Then Lo slides into the middle to whisper a secret to Su, inaudible to the audience. Su utters a shocked "Oh!", Lo demands of her secrecy by putting her finger on her lips. When Mei returns, she takes Los's old place.

The same game - "stiff, slow, puppet-like" - is repeated twice with almost identical dialogues and reactions, "with a choreography that is reminiscent of shell players", until finally Mei sits in the middle again while Su and Lo have swapped seats . In this way, all three women have once occupied the middle seat and all are privy to a (apparently terrifying) secret about each one of the other.

At the end of the piece, the three clasped hands. In this way they form a Celtic knot and Lo closes with the words: “I feel the rings”, although according to the stage directions the characters are explicitly not wearing any rings.

shape

Beckett's handshaking instructions at the end of the game

In coming and going , every scene is reduced to its minimum - the appearances and exits of a character. Last but not least, this extreme brevity (121 words in the original) is characteristic of Beckett's late work, which is primarily characterized by increasing reduction.

The structure of the piece is circular: it is divided into three exactly equal parts of seven lines each, in each of which one figure goes, comes back and takes the place of another. The figures circle around their seats in a ring, their choreography being characterized by repetition and its nuances.

As is typical of Beckett, the stage directions are very detailed. Because of the complicated movements in the play, Beckett included a graph showing the positions of each character as the performance progressed. Also attached is a representation of the above rings and how they are intended to be formed by the actors' hands. On the basis of such precise information, Beckett researcher Ruby Cohn sees the text not as a reading drama, but primarily as an instruction for creating the action on the stage: “Only in the theater can you see the dance play of movement and silence, walking and coming, questions and answers, Understand gestures and melody. "

interpretation

Names

The names of the three "faded" women are interpreted as a reference to the flowers that the mad Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet scattered in front of King Claudius and his court after the death of her father Polonius. Accordingly, "Ru" in English reminds of "rue", the diamond , “Vi” to “violet”, the violet, and “Flo” to “flower”, the flower. This interpretation is supported by the knowledge of different manuscripts, as the further development of which the drama Come and Go came about. In one such preliminary stage, which Beckett dubbed Good Heavens , three women appear with the names Viola (violet or pansy), Rose (rose) and Poppy (poppy flower). The women's flower names are interpreted there as an allusion to Psalm 103: 15-16, often quoted by Beckett , which deals with the transience of human life: “A person is like grass in his life; It blooms like a flower in the field / When the wind blows over it, it is never there and it no longer knows its place. ”In the Hamlet scene, too , rhombus and violets are closely connected with death, because Ophelia says: “There is diamond for you, and here is one for me - you can wear your diamond with a badge. - There is Maßlieb - I wanted to give you a couple of violets, but they all withered because my father died. - They say he had a happy ending. "

The translators Erika and Elmar Tophoven did not include this interpretation in their German translation, but see the names as mere short forms of female English first names: "Flo" for Florence, "Vi" for Violet and "Ru" for Ruby. Because the Tophovens feared that the three syllables in German could lead to ambiguous associations (e.g. to Flo / Flea and Ru / rest ), they chose other short forms: "Lo" for Leonore, "Mei" for Meike and " Su ”for Susanne.

Fate and death

Some interpretations speculate which secrets the characters are whispering in their ears. Every answer (Su about Mei: "Doesn't she know?" Mei about Lo: "Has she been told?" Lo about Su: "Doesn't she suspect anything?") Can be explained by the fact that each individual is unknowingly terminally ill. This interpretation is supported by the observation that Mei's question at the beginning of the play: “When were the three of us last together?” Obviously alludes to the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth , who there with “When will the three of us meet next?” Open up drama. In Macbeth , the three witches function as goddesses of fate by plunging Macbeth into disaster with their self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, Rolf Breuer interprets the three women as "messengers of death".

The three graces. Marble. Roman copy of the imperial era based on a Hellenistic original.

However, the three women have also been interpreted differently: They remember - especially when they shake hands - of the three graces . Beckett researchers Knowlson and Pilling point out that they also resemble the three mothers in Fritz Lang's film M , and point out that Beckett was very fond of this film. Since Beckett's play says little about the three women, the scope for interpretation is filled with many associations: The three women are reminiscent of the three Graces and the three goddesses of fate, as well as the typical fairy tale constellation of three sisters or Chekhov's Three Sisters . Brown compares the women with other characters from Beckett's late dramatic work and emphasizes a peculiarity of the three women in Coming and Going : “Although the shock is painful for them, they comfort one another in order to neutralize one another's sadness. They are made up of a community and therefore do not completely depend on their being thought for calming or healing. Such consolation, however, does not exist in the later short pieces, where alienated beings beg their loved ones night after night to make them feel their presence. "

The viewer cannot hear the whispered messages. This can be interpreted as a means of generalizing the fate of women: “The unspoken nature of damnation in the last version is more powerful [than in Human Wishes ] precisely because it is less explicit. In that the riddle is not resolved, it tends to lead one beyond the illness of a specific woman and to grasp the doom of all humanity. "

Childhood and melancholy

One theme of the play could be the role of childhood and the loss of innocence. Mei longs for the "old days" when there were probably no terrible secrets to tell. But at the same time all three characters know that there is no going back. On the one hand, “there is the feeling of having lost something, the premonition that the women will never regain the familiarity they once had with each other.” On the other hand, the director Brenda Bynum, who staged the play, feels the exact opposite: “Why must it be that they have lost something, why can't it be Beckett's need for intimacy that they have but he doesn't? "The literary scholar Anthony Roche agrees:" Through their mutual relationships they maintain a firmness that this Makes the piece into one of the most perfect theatrical ensembles ever designed. "

The special way of shaking hands works like a symbol of eternal bond. “The ritual gesture of clasped hands allows them to keep their secrets from one another, but the feeling of the rings awakens the cycle of time. Twice turned inside out, the bond of the three women (who are forever bound by their unsolved secrets) is never again what it was, never what it appears to be. Something is the same and everything is different. ”The rings that Lo claims to see“ should be a figurative symbol of the frustrated hopes of youth, of marriages that never came about [or failed] or, as it were, their eternal unity ”, the connected them through their personal tragedies.

Stages of development of the text

Before coming and going, there are some of Beckett's drafts for dramas, which are seen as the forerunners of the play. The development of the various design stages towards the published version of Coming and Going is characterized by increasing reduction. In the fragmentary drama Human Wishes , which began in 1935 and whose title alludes to the poem Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson , three women already appear. A stage direction for the first scene reads:

“When the curtain opens, three women sit on the stage, probably wrapped in the long evening dresses of that time [18th century]. Mrs. William is meditating, Mrs. Desmoulins is knitting, and Miss Carmichael is reading. As the scene progresses, the latter two get up and temporarily leave their seats, but Mrs Williams' actions are limited to hitting the floor with her stick. "

Beckett may have been "inspired by the subject he obviously wanted to continue: Johnson in love," but that's not all he wrote about in the end. The three women look like they have come from a tragedy . Their dialogue - especially Mrs Williams' replicas - is sometimes reminiscent of restoration comedies , but it is based on human mortality with no hope of restoration. Coming and going spiral, more than explicit references to death, filigree about absence and danger. "However, more than death, the 'annoyance caused by decay' pervades the scene, as illustrated by the insignificant bickering and pointed by the recurring silence that threatens to bring the rest of the existing plot to a complete standstill."

In a first manuscript by Beckett, which bears the title Scene 1 , it is also about three women. The revue-like style of Scene 1 bears little resemblance to Coming and Going , but the names of their protagonists Viola, Rose and Poppy (violet or pansy, rose, poppy) evidently form a precursor to the flower-like short names Flo, Vi and Ru in come and go . In the following drafts of Scene 1 , Beckett adds a title, Type of Confidence , which he later changes to Good Heavens . The names also disappear and are replaced by the letters A, B and C. The permutative structure of Come and Go is already included in Good Heavens : “In both texts, two secrets form the focus of the conversation: first, how women manage to create their apparently flawless complexion, and second, that the absent member of the trio Suffering from a deadly disease [...] The difference between what is said openly and what is said behind the backs of those absent reveals both devastating feminine hypocrisy and the irony that the secret is being betrayed by someone by which the respective listener already knows (or will soon find out) that he himself is lost. And the height of the irony: While each woman ponders the fate of the other two, she remains completely unconscious of her own. "The fact that the whispered secret in coming and going relates to life expectancy is " more explicit in Good Heavens , even the date of death of the third friend is mentioned. "

Of comings and goings are two different versions of the text - a feature that results from Beckett's bilingualism: After graduating from the English text and sent to his publisher, he added to the 121 words of this text for translation into French six more lines to four at the beginning and two at the end. Subsequently, all UK editions reproduced the shorter original text, whereas the French and German editions included the full text.

literature

Editions of the primary text

  • English first edition: Samuel Beckett: Come and Go. Dramaticule. London: Calder and Boyars 1967.
  • French first edition: (Translated by the author) Samuel Beckett: Va et vient. In other words: Comédie et Actes diverse. Les Éditions de Minuit 1966, ISBN 2-7073-0225-2
  • German first edition: (translated by Erika and Elmar Tophoven) Samuel Beckett: Coming and going. In: Spectaculum 9. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1966
  • Final hand edition: Samuel Beckett: Come and Go. In: Modern Drama. Vol. 19, September 1976, pp. 257-60

Secondary literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Coming and Going  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Original passages

  1. ↑ “indeterminable” (Samuel Beckett: Come and Go. In Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett . London: Faber and Faber, 1984, p. 193. - All pages of the English text refer to this source)
  2. ↑ in the English original: Vi, Ru, Flo
  3. ↑ "Miss Wade's" ( Come and Go. P. 194)
  4. ↑ "Drab nondescript hats [...] shade [their] faces." ( Come and Go. , P. 196)
  5. ^ "I see little change," ( Come and Go. , P. 194)
  6. ^ "I can feel the rings" ( Come and Go. , P. 195)
  7. ^ William Shakespeare: Hamlet. 4th act, 5th scene : “[…] there's rue / for you; and here's some for me: we may call it / herb-grace o 'Sundays: O you must wear your rue with / a difference. There's / a daisy: I would give you / some violets, but they withered all when my father / died: they say he made a good end, […] ”
  8. ↑ "Does she not realize?"
  9. ↑ "Has she not been told?"
  10. ↑ "Does she not know?"
  11. ↑ "When did we three last meet?" ( Come and Go. , P. 196)
  12. ↑ "the old days" ( Come and Go. , P. 195)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The author himself describes it on the title page as “dramaticule”
  2. ↑ This is the indication of most sources, for example: Ruby Cohn: A Beckett canon. The University of Michigan Press: Michigan 2001, p. 290. Other sources give in part different dates or different locations for the premiere, for example: Gay McAuley: Samuel Beckett's Come and Go In: Educational Theater Journal 1966 : March 7th 1966, Odéon Théâtre de France; Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett. A biography. Simon & Schuster 1991: February 28, 1966, Petite Salle, Odéon Théâtre de France;
  3. ↑ a b James Knowlson, John Pilling: Frescoes of the Skull. The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. John Calder, London 1979, p. 121
  4. ↑ Coming and going. P. 211; Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber & Faber 2006, p. 356
  5. ↑ From the translation by Erika and Elmar Tophoven: Samuel Beckett: Coming and going . In: Samuel Beckett: Night and Dreams. Collected short pieces. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2006, pp. 207–212 - All page numbers in the German text refer to this volume.
  6. ↑ a b Coming and Going. P. 209
  7. ↑ Coming and Going , pp. 211–212
  8. ↑ Beckett demanded in a letter that the piece should be very formal, the sequence "stiff, slow, puppet-like". See Maurice Harmon (ed.): No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and Massachusetts 1998, p. 417: “stiff, slow, puppet-like”
  9. ↑ Lois More Overbeck: “Getting On” Ritual as Façon in Beckett's Plays. In Katherine H. Burkman (ed.): Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, London and Toronto 1987, p. 24: “[w] ith choreography suggestive of the sleight-of-hand artist (button under the thimble) ”
  10. ↑ Coming and going. P. 210
  11. ↑ According to the drawing in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. Faber & Faber 2006, p. 256 redrawn.
  12. ^ Rolf Breuer: The late Beckett . In: Samuel Beckett: An Introduction. Pp. 65-67.
  13. ↑ Lois More Overbeck: “Getting On” Ritual as Façon in Beckett's Plays. In Katherine H. Burkman (ed.): Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, London and Toronto 1987, p. 24
  14. ^ Ruby Cohn: A Beckett Canon. The University of Michigan Press: Michigan 2001, p. 290: "Only in the theater can one appreciate the terpsichorean play of movement and stillness, going and coming, question and answer, gesture and melody of Come and Go ."
  15. ^ Anthony Roche: Samuel Beckett: The Great Plays After Godot. In Samuel Beckett - 100 Years. New Island, Dublin 2006, p. 69: “Their names, especially Ru's, recall the names of the flowers which Ophelia distributes to King Claudius and his court in her mad scene.” ( Hamlet - 4th act, 5th scene)
  16. ↑ Hersh Zeifman: Come and Go. A Criticule. In: Morris Beja, SE Gontarski, Pierre Astier (eds.): Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives. Ohio State University Press 1983, p. 140
  17. ↑ Psalm 103: 15-16 in Martin Luther's Bible translation
  18. ^ William Shakespeare: Hamlet. 4th act, 5th scene, translated by August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck
  19. ↑ Erika and Elmar Tophoven in: Samuel Beckett: Works. Vol. 1, Suhrkamp 1976. P. 390, ISBN 3-518-02106-0
  20. ↑ “When shall we three meet again”, William | Shakespeare: Macbeth , act 1, 1st scene
  21. ↑ See Hersh Zeifman: Come and Go. A Criticule. In: Morris Beja, SE Gontarski, Pierre Astier (eds.): Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives. Ohio State University Press 1983, p. 140
  22. ^ Rolf Breuer: The late Beckett . In: Samuel Beckett: An Introduction. P. 65
  23. ↑ James Knowlson, John Pilling: Frescoes of the Skull. The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. John Calder, London 1979, p. 122
  24. ^ Ruby Cohn: A Beckett Canon. The University of Michigan Press: Michigan 2001, p. 290
  25. ^ Verena June Macdonald Brown: Yesterday's Deformities: A Discussion of the Role of Memory and Discourse in the Plays of Samuel Beckett . Doctoral thesis at the University of South Africa 2005, p. 223: “And painful though the shock to their sensibilities has been, they have the comforting presence of each other to offset their sadness. They comprise a community, and are therefore not wholly reliant on memory to remedy or sedate. No such comfort is available in the later dramaticules, however, where night after night alienated beings implore their loved ones to make their presence felt. "
  26. ↑ James Knowlson, John Pilling: Frescoes of the Skull. The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. John Calder, London 1979, pp. 121-122: “The unspoken nature of the condemnation in the final version is more powerful precisely because it is less explicit. For while it leaves a mystery unresolved, it also tends to lead one beyond the particular illness of an individual woman to embrace the fate of all mankind. "
  27. ↑ Coming and Going , p. 210
  28. ↑ "there is a sense of loss in the play, that the women will never regain the intimacy they once had together"
  29. ↑ Brenda Bynum interviewed by Lois Overbeck in Linda Ben-Zvi (ed.): Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1990, p. 52: "Why does it have to be that they have lost something, why can it not be Beckett's longing for intimacy that they have and he can't?"
  30. ^ Anthony Roche: Samuel Beckett: The Great Plays After Godot. In Samuel Beckett - 100 Years. New Island, Dublin 2006, p. 69: “[T] hey assert a strength through their interdependence which makes this play one of the most perfect theatrical ensembles ever devised.”
  31. ↑ Lois More Overbeck: “Getting On” Ritual as Façon in Beckett's Plays. In Katherine H. Burkman (ed.): Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, London and Toronto 1987, p. 25: “The ritual gesture of clasped hands allows them to keep their secrets from each other, but the feeling of the rings evokes the cycle of time. Twice turned upon itself, the bond of the three women (forever linked in their untold secrets) is never again what it was, never again what it seems to be. Something is the same, and everything is different. "
  32. ^ CJ Ackerley, SE Gontarski (Ed.): The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader's Guide to his Works, Life, and Thought. Faber and Faber, London 2006, p. 104: “may be imagined a symbol of the frustrated hopes of youth, of marriages that never occurred [or failed] or equally their eternal union”
  33. ↑ Beckett allowed a part to be published in Ruby Cohn (Ed.) In 1980: Just Play. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1980. A larger fragment is available in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment , Calder Publications
  34. ^ Ruby Cohn: The Femme Fatale on Beckett's Stage. in Linda Ben-Zvi (Ed.): Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives , p. 163: “When the curtain rises, three women are seated, presumably encircled by the long gowns of the time [18th Century]. Mrs Williams is meditating, Mrs Desmoulins is knitting and Miss Carmichael is reading. During the course of the scene the latter two rise and temporarily leave their seats, but Mrs Williams's actions are confined to striking the floor with her stick. "
  35. ↑ Linda Ben-Zvi: Biographical, Textual and Historical Origins. in Lois Oppenheim (Ed.): Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Palgrave, London 2004, p. 141
  36. ^ Ruby Cohn: The Femme Fatale on Beckett's Stage. in Linda Ben-Zvi (Ed.): Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives , pp. 163-164: “The three women look as though they might have emerged from tragedy. Their dialogue - especially Mrs Williams's lines - occasionally recalls Restoration comedy, but its substratum is human mortality, without hope of restoration. [On the other hand r] ather than […] explicit references to death, Come and Go spirals delicately around absence and threat. "
  37. ↑ Ruby Cohn (Ed.): Human Wishes. in just play. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1980, pp. 295-305: “the peevishness of decay”
  38. ↑ Linda Ben-Zvi: Biographical, Textual and Historical Origins. in Lois Oppenheim (Ed.): Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies. Palgrave, London 2004, p. 145: “However, more than death, it is 'the peevishness of decay' that pervades the scene, illustrated by the petty bickering and punctuated by the repeated silences that threaten to stop what action there is.”
  39. ^ Rosemary Pountney: Less = More: Developing Ambiguity in the Drafts of Come and Go. In Robin J. Davis, Lance St. J. Butler (Eds.): 'Make Sense Who May': Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works. Buckinghamshire, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1988, p. 13: “Beckett began the play clearly with the structure of three confidential gossips clearly in mind […] before going on to draft the play in full […] Good Heavens is almost complete, apart from the final conversation between C and A. In both texts the conversation centers on two secrets: first how each woman manages to achieve her apparently flawless complexion and secondly the fact that the absent member of the trio is suffering from a terminal illness [… ] The difference between what is said face to face and what is said behind the back of the missing person reveals both a devastating feminine hypocrisy and the irony that the secret is told by someone whom the hearer already knows (or soon discovers) to be doomed so. And most ironical of all, while each woman muses upon the fate of the other two, she remains supremely unaware of her own. "
  40. ^ SE Gontarski: Editing Beckett. In: Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 41 (Summer 1995) pp. 190–207 ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ISSN 0041-462X @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.samuel-beckett.net  
  41. ↑ Hersh Zeifman: Come and Go. A Criticule. ( Memento of the original from October 23, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Morris Beja, SE Gontarski, Pierre Astier (eds.): Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives. Ohio State University Press 1983, pp. 137-144  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ohiostatepress.org
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