Ohio Impromptu

Ohio Impromptu is a short piece ("playlet") by Samuel Beckett . Beckett wrote it in 1980. It was originally supposed to be a favor for Stanley E. Gontarski , who asked Beckett for a piece to be performed at an academic symposium in Columbus, Ohio, to celebrate Beckett's seventy-fifth birthday. Beckett found it uncomfortable to do commissioned work, and he struggled with the piece for nine months before it was finally finished. It premiered on May 9, 1981 at the Drake Union, Stadium 2 Theater in Ohio, directed by Alan Schneider and starring David Warillow as Reader and Rand Mitchell as Listener. Erika and Elmar Tophoven translated the piece into German. This translation is also influenced by the translation of the piece into French, which Beckett himself wrote.

“It is the first Beckett piece that shows a doppelganger on stage, another Beckett couple, but this time in the sense of a mirror image; it comes from Beckett's ghost phase, in which phantoms are shown on stage, echoing the ghostly nature of memory and nostalgia. "

action

Figures and plot

Two old men sit opposite each other at a right-angled table across the corner. They are "as similar in appearance as possible", both wearing long black coats and long white hair. The table and the chairs are white. The listener figure looks towards the audience, but his head is bent down so that his face is hidden. The attitude of the other figure, the reader, is the same except for the fact that he has a book in front of him that is open on the last pages. A single "[s] black, broad-brimmed hat" is on the table. The figures “could be borrowed from Rembrandt ” or from Gerard ter Borch's painting “Four Spanish Monks”, although Beckett himself did not give a specific picture as inspiration. Even Edgar Rubin's focus background experiments are mentioned as a possible source of inspiration.

As soon as the reader begins to read, the listener taps the table with his left hand so that the reader interrupts himself and repeats the last complete sentence to wait for the next tap before starting again. This goes on during the entire reading and is reminiscent of “Krapp's enjoyable handling of selected passages from his tapes” in Beckett's piece The Last Tape . “At one point Hörer prevents readers from turning to a previous page to which the text refers, and at another point the reader pauses at an apparently grammatically incorrect text passage, says 'yes' - his impromptu note in promptu - and reads it again . ”Except for this one word, he speaks exactly the text that is printed in the book.

The listener makes the reader repeat the last sentence of his story and then the book is closed. “There is nothing left to say”. Listener knocks one last time, but there is nothing more to read. The two stare at each other until the light is dimmed.

The story

Written in the past tense, the story is told by a person, perhaps by the listener himself, who goes to Swan Island, where the two had never been together, “on a last attempt to get relief” from the loss of a loved one . In doing so, he disregards the warning that was given to him when "the beloved face" appeared to him in a dream: "Stay where we have been alone for so long, my shadow will comfort you."

He soon realizes that he has made a terrible mistake. “The familiar environment could have soothed and soothed him through its connection with the lost person, but an unfamiliar environment accentuates his total sense of loss. In his grief, everything conspires to remind him of what he has lost. ”It remains unclear why it is impossible for him to go back and undo this mistake. He is haunted by an old fear of the night. The last time he had suffered from it, so long ago, “as if it had never existed”. As a result, he finds that he cannot sleep. One night, however, when he is propped up with his head on his arms and trembling all over, a man appears out of nowhere. He explains that he has been sent by the family member to bring him comfort. He pulls “a well-worn book out of the pocket of his long black coat, [sits] and [reads] until it [dawns]”, after which he disappears without another word. We learn that it is a "sad story", but nothing more. This repeats itself night after night, the man appears “unannounced”, begins to read without a preamble and disappears “wordlessly” at dawn.

Ultimately, the lost person determines that this has lasted long enough. After the man finishes his reading one last time, he stays there and explains that this will be his last appearance; he was told that his consolation was no longer necessary and that he was no longer empowered to return even if he wished. For a while the two, who became "as it were one" through the many nights, sit in silence, "lost in who knows what depths of the spirit [...] how petrified"

David Warrilow recalls Beckett's advice when he took on the role: "Well, the most helpful tip Beckett gave me from the start with the Ohio Impromptu was to treat it like a bedtime story and tell it reassuringly."

Biographical insights

Beckett often took biographical events from his own life and stripped them of all biographical details, leaving a bare minimum of language and subject.

“Beckett worked as an amanuensis for James Joyce for a while ... the two men used to walk together on the Île de Cygnes in the 1930s and ... Joyce wore a Latin Quarter hat [as mentioned in the play will.] "Beckett confirmed these details during a dinner with his biographer James Knowlson . Knowlson mentioned that he had heard people say that the "beloved face" was Joyce's face. Knowlson believed it was really a woman, and Beckett agreed: "It's Suzanne ... I've imagined her so many times after she died. I even imagined myself dragging myself to her grave ”“ When he wrote Ohio Impromptu , [his wife] was eighty years old and nonetheless (although they had been apart for some time) they were a couple for over forty years ” and "to think of the dying Suzanne was unbearable for him".

The character in the story in the play, like Beckett himself, is plagued by night terrors and insomnia . Beckett suffered from nightmares throughout his life. "It is possible that his insomnia was inherited from his mother, who also had the same symptoms." Beckett also began to experience panic attacks in the 1930s . "The worst of these attacks was a feeling of suffocation that often overcame him when he was in his room at nightfall."

The title of the piece requires comment. Ohio Impromptu is an "unadorned descriptive title that denotes occasion and genre - Impromptu in the manner of the metatheatrical, self-reflective kind of etudes by Molière and Giraudoux  - or like the complicated little solo pieces for piano by Schubert , Chopin and Schumann called Impromptu ". “By promising an impromptu - a performance without any preparation - the piece undermines its own promise if it then follows a text that does not allow any unprepared composition or improvisation by the actors”.

interpretation

The reviews differ in their interpretations on who or what the reader is: whether it is an appearance, the listener's alter ego, or some other aspect of his mind. In any case, the nightly reading is an integral part of the listener's healing process. Beckett Specialist Anna McMullan notes that “in both Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu, text becomes a rite of passage that changes from loss to comfort, from life to death and from speaking to silence.” Was in Rockaby the woman remained in the family home after her mother's death; Listener decided to run away.

“As in Company , the author returns to a topic that he has already presented several times: that loneliness and longing after a certain time are too personal to be shared with others.” “The image of the Seine with both of them Poor flowing into one another after parting, as they flow around the island ... is a key to the meaning of the piece. Because in his emotional center lie sadness, loss and loneliness, which are contrasted by a memory of togetherness ”. So why does the man go to the island instead of avoiding it? The place could have had a special meaning for the person Beckett, but the author Beckett probably chose it more because of its geographical appearance: the two arms of the river that flow into each other and the fact that a smaller copy of the Statue of Liberty stands on the island, which the Represent (literally) the New World that Ohio lies in and the new world figuratively that the man is moving into.

The arrangement of the figures resembles "the figures used in the early twentieth century to demonstrate the principles of gestalt psychology ." The divided self is a general approach to interpreting many of Beckett's texts, based on The Last Tape , Kicks , Then and Also was applied to waiting for Godot .

Beckett may have been thinking of his own wife when he wrote the play, but he never specifies the name or gender of the lost loved one. This gives the text an extra depth. The man could also mourn his father, or more likely, given Beckett's other works, his mother. Nothing speaks against the fact that it is a male partner, which is why a homoerotic reading of Beckett's work is widespread.

As for readers, Gontarski has argued that here is a dramatization of the "elementary creative process" is to see that "even in those days it was indicated where the protagonist of the story A hid as a teenager to think up a conversation, not alone to be".

Others suggest that the reader is a shadow sent by the listener's "beloved face," a kind of ghostly messenger designed to help them with the grief work . In a very early draft of the piece, Beckett thought of a "spirit returning from the underworld to speak at a conference". “The narrative predicts the image of the stage without, however, reproducing or anticipating it”. “The text tells that the characters remain 'immersed in who knows what depths of their minds'. On the stage, however, they raise their heads to contemplate each other in meaningful senses. ”Therefore, it is plausible that the two men on stage are not the two men from the story. “Like an author, the listener sometimes requests that a sentence be repeated, but the reader has his own timetable according to which he repeats each sentence at least once, even without being asked.” One circumstance that suggests that this is indeed not the case is the fact that there is only one hat.

After the story has been read and the book is closed, the listener knocks again, the signal to start over from where he started. "What do words say when there is nothing left to say?" Beckett was obsessed with creating what he called "literature of the unword", and this is arguably one of the best examples of it this effort.

Beckett on film

In the Beckett-on-Film project, modern cinematographic techniques made it possible for the reader and listener to be embodied by the same actor, according to Beckett's director's instructions that both characters should be "as similar as possible in appearance". This film adaptation follows the interpretation that both characters are elements of a single personality. In the text, the two of them only look each other in the eye at the very end, but in this film they keep eye contact throughout the entire piece.

Anna McMullan complains that this interpretation of Ohio Impromptu "is once again guided by a psychologizing approach, since Jeremy Irons plays both roles and the 'ghost' fades at dawn".

Web links

• Beckett's dying remains: The Process of Playwriting in the Ohio Impromptu Manuscripts
• Dramatic Texts of Samuel Beckett

Original passages

1. ^ "[A] s alike in appearance as possible", Beckett, S., Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 285
2. ↑ "Listener"
3. ↑ "Reader"
4. ↑ "[b] lack wide-brimmed hat"
5. ↑ “Nothing is left to tell”, p. 288
6. ↑ “last attempt to obtain relief”, p. 285
7. ^ "Stay where we were so long alone together, my shade will comfort you.", P. 286
8. ↑ “as if never been.”, P. 286
9. ↑ “a worn volume from the pocket of his long black coat and [reads from it] till dawn”, p. 286
10. ↑ “sad tale”, p. 287
11. ↑ "unheralded"
12. ↑ "without preamble"
13. ↑ “without a word.” P. 287
14. ↑ "loved one"
15. ↑ “to be as one”, p. 287
16. ↑ “profounds of mind… as though turned to stone.”, P. 288
17. ↑ “dear face” p. 286

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Samuel Beckett: Night and Dreams. Collected short pieces. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​2006), p. 352
2. ↑ Samuel Beckett: Night and Dreams. Collected short pieces. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​2006), p. 353
3. ↑ Calder, J., Review: Three Beckett Plays at the Harold Clurman Theater, New York, 1983 ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 57 kB), Journal of Beckett Studies , Nos 11 and 12, December 1989: “It is the first Beckett play to present a doppelganger on stage, another Beckett pair, but this time seen as mirror images; it belongs to Beckett's ghost period, where phantoms that echo the haunting quality of memory and nostalgia in his work are seen or described on stage. " 
4. ^ Samuel Beckett: Ohio Impromptu . Translated from the English by Erika and Elmar Tophoven. In: this. Night and dreams. Collected short pieces. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​2006), p. 307
5. ↑ p. 307
6. ↑ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett , p. 664: “could have been borrowed from Rembrandt”
7. ↑ Avigdor Arikha claimed that Ter Borch's painting was the origin of the Ohio Impromptu set , "with the hat on the table, giving the impression of entering a meeting on a Flemish painting". In Atik, Anne (2001). How It Was , London: Faber and Faber, 6
8. ^ Acheson, J., "The Absolute Absence of the Absolute": the Theory and Practice of Samuel Beckett's Drama 'in British & Irish Drama since 1960 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1993), p. 14
9. ↑ Laughlin, KL, 'Seeing is Perceiving: Beckett's Later Plays and the Theory of Audience Response' in Davis, RJ and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) 'Make Sense Who May': Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p. 21: " Krapp’s earlier relishing in selected passages from his tapes."
10. ↑ O'Gorman, K., 'The Speech Act in Beckett's Ohio Impromptu ' in Davis, RJ and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) 'Make Sense Who May': Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works (Gerrards Cross : Colin Smythe, 1988), pp. 108, 115: “At one point the Listener stops the Reader from turning back to an earlier page to which the text refers, and at another the Reader pauses at a seemingly ungrammatical structure in the text, says, 'Yes' - his one 'impromptu' remark - and re-reads it. "
11. ↑ p. 310
12. ↑ p. 307
13. ↑ p. 308
14. ↑ p. 308
15. ↑ Brown, V., Yesterday's Deformities: A Discussion of the Role of Memory and Discourse in the Plays of Samuel Beckett ( Memento of the original of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , P. 226: “a terrible mistake. Familiar surroundings could have soothed and 'sedated' him through their long association with his loved one, but unfamiliar surroundings accentuate his total sense of deprivation. In his bereaved state, everything conspires to remind him of what he has lost. "
16. ↑ p. 309
17. ↑ p. 309
18. ↑ p. 309
19. ↑ p. 309
20. ↑ p. 309
21. ↑ p. 309
22. ↑ p. 310
23. ↑ Kalb, J., Beckett in Performance , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 223: “Now, the most useful intention that Beckett gave me early on in the Ohio Impromptu experience was to treat it like a bedtime story and let it be soothing. "
24. ↑ Acheson, J., '“The Absolute Absence of the Absolute”: the Theory and Practice of Samuel Beckett's Drama' in British & Irish Drama since 1960 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1993), p 15: “Beckett served for a time as Joyce's amanuensis… the two men used to walk together on the Isle of Swans during the thirties and… Joyce used to wear a Latin Quarter hat. "
25. ^ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 665
26. ↑ p. 308
27. ↑ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 665
28. ↑ James Knowlson in conversation with Samuel Beckett. Quoted from Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 665: “It's Suzanne… I've imagined her dead so many times. I've even imagined myself trudging out to her grave. "
29. ↑ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 665: “When he wrote Ohio Impromptu [his wife] was eighty years old [and although for some time they lived quite separate lives they] had nonetheless remained a couple for over forty years ”
30. ↑ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 666: “the thought of Suzanne dying was intolerable to him.”
31. ↑ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 17: “His insomnia was probably inherited, from his mother who suffered from the same… complaint.”
32. ↑ Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 130: “Chief among these was a feeling of suffocation, which often came on him in his room as night was falling.”
33. ↑ Gontarski, SE, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 175: “straightforwardly descriptive [title], marking occasion and genre - impromptus à la Molière and Giraudoux (which were metatheatrical or self-reflexive exercises) - or more like the intricate little solo pieces Schubert, Chopin and Schumann called impromptus. "
34. ↑ O'Gorman, K., 'The Speech Act in Beckett's Ohio Impromptu ' in Davis, RJ and Butler, L. St J., (Eds.) 'Make Sense Who May': Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works (Gerrards Cross : Colin Smythe, 1988), p. 119: “In promising an impromptu - a performance without preparation - the title of the play subverts its own promise when followed by a text which allows no extemporaneous composition, no improvisation on the part of the actors . ”
35. ↑ McMullan, A., Theater on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 104: “In both Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu the speaking of the text becomes a rite of passage which enacts a transformation - from loss to comfort, from life to death and from speech to silence. "
36. ↑ Calder, J., Review: Three Beckett Plays at the Harold Clurman Theater, New York, 1983 ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 57 kB), Journal of Beckett Studies , Nos 11 and 12, December 1989: “As with Company , the author again returns to a theme he has portrayed many times, that loneliness and nostalgia are too personal, after a certain age , to be shared with any being other than oneself. " 
37. ↑ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 665: “The image of the river (the Seine ) with its two arms flowing into one another after they have divided to flow around the island ... is a clue to the meaning of the play. For at its emotional center lies sadness, loss and solitude, contrasted with a memory of togetherness. "
38. ↑ Hartmann, GW, Gestalt Psychology (New York, Ronald Press, 1935), p. 184. Quoted from in: Acheson, J., '“The Absolute Absence of the Absolute”: the Theory and Practice of Samuel Beckett's Drama' in British & Irish Drama since 1960 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1993), p. 14: “resembles the figures used in the psychological experiments early [in the 20th] century to establish the principle of closure.”
39. ↑ The process of alienation that occurs frequently in Beckett's work has close similarities with descriptions of schizophrenia . The entire discussion of Ronald David Laing's The Divided Self (Original title: The Divided Self ) contains of Beckett's recurring images and descriptions, such as the false self (chapters 6 and 10), the attraction to a person at the same time fear over grip from her to be treated (Chapters 3, 7 and 10) and the feeling of not being born right. Laing notes that many patients suffer from " ontological insecurity" and that the ordinary circumstances of life pose a constant threat to their existence. He illustrates this with examples such as Franz Kafka , Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon .
40. ^ Gontarski, SE, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 178: “the elemental creative process… suggested in That Time , where the protagonist of narrative A would hide as a youth , 'making up talk breaking up two or more talking to himself being together that way'. "
41. ↑ Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 664: “on a ghost returning from the Underworld to speak at ... a conference”
42. ↑ Ackerley, CJ and Gontarski, SE, (Eds.) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett , (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 418: “The narrative echoes (but does not replicate or anticipate) the stag (ed ) image. "
43. ↑ McMullan, A., 'Irish / Postcolonial Beckett' in Oppenheim, L., (Ed.) Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies (London: Palgrave, 2004), p. 107: “In the text we are told that the figures remain: 'Buried in who knows what profounds of mind'. On stage, however, they raise their heads to meet each other's eyes in meaningful contemplation. "
44. ↑ Ackerley, CJ and Gontarski, SE, (Eds.) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett , (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 418: “Like an author, Listener occasionally calls for the repeat of a phrase, but Reader has his own agency, repeating a phrase unbidden at least once. "
45. ^ Doll, MA, 'Rites of Story: The Old Man at Play' in Burkman, KH, (Ed.) Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London and Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 83 : "What do words say when there is nothing left to tell"
46. ^ Samuel Beckett's 1937 letter to Axel Kaun. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: Calder Publication, [1983] 2001), 173
47. ^ McMullan, A., Studies in the Theater: Samuel Beckett Issue . ASSAPH 17-18 (Tel Aviv: Assaph Publishers, 2003), p. 231: “led once again by a psychologized approach to performance [since] Jeremy Irons plays both parts and the 'ghost' fades away at dawn”.