These words are spoken by Maddy Dunne Rooney, protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall, first presented by the BBC in 1957.¹ Maddy’s remark may also be heard as a pun: It is suicide to be a broad. The two senses of her comment summarize the aim of this paper, which is to follow Maddy Rooney on her picaresque journey ‘abroad’ from her home to the train station and back, over a rural Irish road through an existential landscape where it is dangerous to be ‘a broad’. She makes the journey in order to meet her blind husband at the station and lead him back home. Within this landscape made visible to us through sound alone and primarily through the voice of the protagonist herself, Maddy is a subject-in-process, in Julia Kristeva’s sense of the term.² She is never a complete presence, but the play’s process of representing is through her subjectivity, to which we are a necessary party, a process that allows us as blind listeners to see her journey. Conversing with herself and characters she meets along the way, she opens our mind’s eye to a scene that is not just a beautiful Irish countryside but also a totalizing design of human existence. This design, which emerges and then recedes, attains an effect of coherence because it is grounded upon a cultural construction of gender that parallels the female with the body, sexuality, procreation, and matter, and the male with the spirit, intellect, annihilation, and form. Interwoven semiotically into these gendered bipolarities are the cycles of nature: light and dark, rising and falling, fecundity and sterility, youth and age, birth and death. The spatio-temporality created through the play also follows a bipolar cyclical pattern traced out by Maddy’s footsteps over the physical and metaphysical topography. I argue, however, that in making her an indominitable picara, Beckett allows her to escape by a materialistic via negativa his own totalizing design. The author himself acknowledged that this design was the gradual annihilation of his characters, yet he always leaves them enough material resources to ‘go on’ even as they say they can’t go on. In their material resistance, Maddy and others are able to negate their own negation.

The topography in All That Fall is distinctly hostile to the females - human or animal - who try to walk through it. Maddy’s comment ‘It is suicide to be a broad’ suggests that her death will be her own fault, namely the fault of being born a woman. The danger of being a/broad in this landscape appears to be due to ‘natural causes’ because Maddy‘s fate is underwritten by the system of nature imagery that Beckett sets up in the play. Her situation, epitomized by the pun ‘Mad Done Ruin’ that Ruby Cohn discovered behind the name Maddy Dunne Rooney two decades ago in Back to Beckett,³ is made an event of nature, on a par with the setting of the sun, the fallen dead leaves in the ditch, and the sound of falling rain. This bleak ‘fall’ as the decline of all that was living, is also signified by the polar imagery of light and darkness: in the course of Maddy’s journey all falls away from the light into darkness and death, and after the human voices ‘fall silent’ the wind and rain is the last sound we hear. The wind becomes ominous because it rises at points where Maddy articulates her sense of isolation. Although Beckett has Maddy ‘body forth’ his play into life, the author also expressed a wish to hurry it on past the dialogue to the final sound of the rain, as actor David Warrilow relates in Jonathan Kalb’s Beckett in Performance:

When I saw Beckett in January, one of the first things he said was: ‘What do you think of All That Fall?’... [Later I asked him the same question.] And he looked down and said, ‘Well, a number of weaknesses’. [I asked:] ‘Do you mean the production?’ He said, ‘No, no, no. The writing.’... ‘What I really was waiting for was the rain at the end.’⁴

Yet Maddy is a character who prevails despite - and paradoxically because of - this design of rain, darkness, and silence waiting to annihilate her. She has often been admired for her strength and life-affirming outlook. Interestingly, Ruby Cohn sees Maddy as the descendent of another strong female figure from literature, the Wife of Bath.⁵ Both characters, Cohn notes, use language with wit and precision, and are penetratingly observant yet forgiving of other human beings. Both are long past childbearing age but still sexually awake, and remain optimistic in the face of loss, loneliness, old age, and death. Indeed, both belong to the tradition of the picara whose time is spent on the road. Like the picaro who is her male counterpart, the picara walks over a physical yet symbolic landscape, and the people she meets along the way constitute a social milieu and a metaphysical universe. Maddy’s journey is conveyed to us only through sound, primarily the sound of her voice, yet it produces a pedestrian’s view of everything through which she passes. Like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Maddy is used as a mouthpiece and embodiment of misogyny, yet undermines it by her vivid material struggle to go on in spite of it. She tries to make the best of what she cannot change, and in voicing the misogynist discourse that would make of her a monster, exposes the discourse itself as monstrous.

It can be said of Maddy as of Grimmelshausen’s picara Courasche, on whom Brecht based Mother Courage, that she is more mobilis than nobilis: more mobile than noble. However, the picara’s mobility allows her not only to speak and embody the values of her patriarchal society but also to illuminate and contradict them. Picaresque characters are typically without privilege or protection, and live by their wits, meeting adventure and danger along the road. However, only the picara is made to represent the ideological or metaphysical system of the patriarchy through her gendered body: that is, she embodies this system because her body is marked as feminine, a feminity reduced to a sign of the sexual and procreative. Her body becomes the matter through which the male author/ity imparts form. She thus becomes both the vehicle and ground of representation. To use Kristeva’s terms, the picara’s body and language register the Law of the Father. She lives in the realm of the semiotic, directly and physically perceiving the symbolic or Law of the Father upon her body, a process that bypasses the mirror stage where individuation and ‘proper’ identification take place.

In many earlier Beckett plays including All That Fall, Happy Days, Embers, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame, the male and female characters are placed at opposite poles, negative and positive respectively. Typically, males are sexually impotent, unwilling to act, obsessed with counting and with death, uncommunicative, withdrawn and pessimistic, desiring to kill the signs of life around them. Females, on the other hand, try to make contact with others, are optimistic and protective of life. The function of female characters, whether erotic or maternal, is to generate signs of life, in defiance of male pessimism and malice. On the road from home to the station Maddy meets a series of females who are as much or more endangered than she, and a series of males who, like her husband Dan, are willing to wield the power of death. Dan Rooney is one of many male characters whose driving force is to annihilate the signs of life. We are even led to suspect that the mail train is delayed because it was he who murdered a female child by throwing her from a train window - in any case, he confesses such a wish to his wife. Moments before the delayed train arrives carrying Dan Rooney, Maddy and the listeners hear the voice of an unnamed mother warning her young daughter to stay clear of the tracks, because ‘one can be sucked under.’(28) As Dan walks home from the station with Maddy, he makes every attempt to keep her from learning about the ch’s death, which caused the train to be stopped. We assume that this cis female because all the other maimed and murdered figures in the play are female: on her way to the station Maddy passes the house of an old woman shut up alone singing Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’. Other unfortunate females include Maddy’s own long-dead daughter Minnie for whom she still grieves, a hen run over and killed in the road by a male motorist, a female donkey beaten by Mr. Christy, Mr. Slocum’s dying mother, Mr. Tyler’s daughter who has had a hysterectomy, and the young girl whom Maddy heard about in a psychologist’s story who ‘died because she was never really born’.

In the later plays Not I and Rockaby, the settings are less concrete, and a woman is the only speaking character on stage. Here the male presence has retreated into complete silence, but remains a powerful and hostile force. The women here are also subjects-in-process, and the minimalist stagings overtly visualize this dynamic of representation. The women are the material ground, the bodies through which the voice of consciousness forcibly expresses itself.

In Not I a woman’s mouth is isolated on stage and from it a voice emanates, claiming the existence of the female subject by using the pronoun SHE but also crossing that subject out by refusing to speak from the position of ‘first person’. The Mouth here functions as a canal delivering the subject into birth and death. Similarly, in Rockaby we see a white-haired old woman in her chair, while a recorded female voice speaks for her, referring to her not as ‘I’ but as ‘she’, using and avoiding the same pronouns as the Mouth in Not I. This is the staging of what Derrida calls a ‘violent hierarchy’ - here it is mind over matter, with the (male) authorial consciousness as mind and the character’s female body as matter. However, this hierarchy is radically unstable and always threatens to reverse its polar values. Such a hierarchy is set up in All That Fall, and rests on what feminist film theorist and semiotician Teresa de Lauretis terms a ‘technology of gender’,⁶ a discursive structural frame that employs the equation of compulsory heterosexuality: the male as acting subject, and the female as passive space.⁷ As Judith Butler explains in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, the human body with its boundaries has long been the favored framework through which bounded ideological systems have been represented, i.e., literally embodied.⁸ Like other female characters in Beckett’s plays, Maddy has what Butler would call an abject body, a post-menopausal woman’s heavy aging body that serves as the outside which gives the patriarchal norm its coherent boundaries, its privileged inside. However, unlike the women in Happy Days, Rockaby, or Not I, Maddy is not represented as immobilized in space but as still on her feet and walking - an emphatic resistance to embodying the misogynist existential universe. And because the auditors perceive this universe through Maddy’s voiced perceptions, we are in a sense thrust inside her abject body, left like the unborn literally in the dark but looking out thanks to the sound of her voice. ‘Normally’, we would be observing her from the spectator’s distance, ourselves the privileged Eye/I gazing upon Her abject body.

This embodiment in All That Fall fits the definition of the mythic text offered by De Lauretis in Technologies of Gender. In mythic texts, she writes, ‘the woman’s body provides the “mythic space” - the boundary, matrix, blank screen, passive matter, womb, space of his movement, the stage upon which Man, the true subject, can carry out the action.’⁹ Thus to pose a woman’s body and a landscape as signs that reflect each other in an infinite mise en abyme is a territorializing move: Maddy is marked as an ideological domain, the natural territory upon which the author draws his map of existence. Beckett begins creating a mythic space in the very first sentence of the play by superimposing a Biblical (though already comic) primal scene upon the Irish countryside: the stage directions call the lower animals to life: ‘Rural sounds. Sheep, bird, cow, cock, severally, then together’. After a silence not Adam but ‘Mrs. Rooney advances’. Later on her way back home from the station with her husband, it is Maddy herself who names the animals, this time in an apparent effort to bring them back to life: ‘All is still. No living soul in sight... The wind - (brief wind) - scarcely stirs the leaves and the birds - (brief chirp) - are tired of singing. The cows - (brief moo) - and sheep (brief baa) - ruminate in silence. The dogs (brief bark) are hushed and the hens (brief cackle) - sprawl torpid in the dusk...’ (43-44) This passage is comical in effect, a parody of the voice of God/the Author on the day of creation. Here is an instance where the hierarchical values are reversed, because Maddy is reviving the living creatures even as she describes them dying out.

As in medieval drama where the cycle of nature concretely embodies cosmic time, All That Fall ‘comes out of the dark’¹⁰ and goes back into it. On Dan Rooney’s birthday a female child dies under the wheels of the train. In the last moments of the play Maddy and Dan meet a young boy who runs away, and the cycle seems to have made a full turn and closed as the sounds of the tempest drown out human speech and footsteps: ‘Silence. Jerry runs off. His steps die away...Tempest of wind and rain. It abates. They move on. Dragging steps, etc. They halt. Tempest of wind and rain’.( (59 Yet in spite of the drowning force of these ‘natural elements’, the picara Maddy does not succumb to the cyclical design because she is not positioned irrevocably within it. The materiality of her journey prevents her from being subsumed into the symmetry of the play’s design: the rise and fall, and the circling from birth, around life, and back to death.

In All That Fall aural signs do all the work of visual and tactile ones, drawing attention to the use of Maddy’s body and perceptions as a producer of signs. She is both the physical frame and the perceptual process by which that frame is physicalized. She loudly drags her feet over the ground, exposing its function which is to support the metaphysical landscape of the play. Dragging her feet with heavy sighs audibly signifies above all her body’s materiality, and militates against its sublimation into a technology of gender. Thus she manages to retain some autonomy as a historical subject-in-process, even as she is relentlessly driven towards completion of the metaphysical design. Maddy acts as valiantly as she imagines her daughter would have if the latter had lived: she imagines Minnie as she would be now, in middle age, ‘girding up her loins to get ready for the change,’ i.e., for menopause and old age. Ironically, in the very next moment Maddy gains her own breath and strength back by unlacing her ‘cursed’ corset.

As a subject-in-process, Maddy Rooney is more than the construct of a male author-subject. She is neither a solidly unified stage presence like the heroine in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, nor a spectral other like the young woman who haunts the aging Krapp’s memories. Even though Maddy speaks Beckett’s text, as the picara she trudges through material signs which she sorts out for the blind spectators as well as her blind husband. Other characters note that she speaks ‘bizarre’ language. This becomes a positive attribute when we consider that the term ‘bizarre’ originates from the old Spanish word bizarro for ‘brave’ as befits the picara. Maddy’s bizarre language is that of the true-real: she becomes a true-real subject by taking a via negativa, brought to life by a lack of spectacle.

In her essay ‘Le Vréel’ (‘The True-Real’)¹¹ Julia Kristeva coins the term ‘vréel’ by joining ‘vrai’ (true) and ‘réel’ (real) to name a language that departs from the discourse of reason. Whereas reasonable discourse operates by way of analogy, true-real language merges unmediated perception (the ‘real’) directly with meaning (the ‘truth’). Kristeva found striking resemblance between the language of her patients suffering from psychosis and the organization of perception in certain modeand postmodern non-realistic plays and films: both the patients and the art works employ the language of the true-real. True-real language proceeds directly from the ‘raw’ signifier to the referent, bypassing the signified, or in other words from the ‘semiotic’ to the ‘symbolic’. To use Lacan’s terms, such signification proceeds from the imaginary stage to the symbolic, without going through the mirror stage. In the mirror stage, the subject perceives that the other in the mirror is separate from him or herself, yet the subject can also identify with that mirror other. Contemporary theater critics such as Jill Dolan in The Feminist Spectator as Critic¹² have theorized that the mirror stage corresponds to the position of the theater spectator vis à vis the spectacle. But in fact, notes Dolan, this view-to-view mirror relation applies only to the naturalistic theater which hides the spectacle’s ideological constructedness.

Kristeva cites Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty as an example of true-real theater that does not place its audience and actors in a mirror relation. For Artaud, theater should not be a secondary reflection or illustration of life at a Platonic remove; instead it should be life’s ‘double’, The Theater of Cruelty seeks to bypass the mirror stage, and thus to avoid being fixed into a proper identity, a proper position within the symbolic-phallic patriarchal order. In proceeding directly from immediate physical perception (the real or semiotic) to the metaphysical (the true or symbolic), Artaud as subject-in-process perceives without mediation the ‘phallic law’ upon his own body as castration, and thus exposes its violence. As painful as this immediacy is, subjects-in-process can retain mobility, because they are outlaws who do not take up a position within the symbolic order of phallic law.

In her essay ‘Theatre Does Not Take (A) Place’, Kristeva argues that Beckett merely repeats degraded mythic narrative ad infinitum.¹³ However, I would argue that his plays also employ the language of the true-real. They draw attention to the material bodies who have to speak and embody his narrative, and he systematically deprives the spectator and actor of the mirror relationship which would naturalize that embodying narrative. Breaking the norm of specular identification, Beckett’s theater not only splits character and actor apart, but drives a wedge between abstract language and concrete expression. Moreover, the characters never cohere into true individuals, i.e. undivided subjects. All too real, their parts never quite come together, which helps account for their melancholy and humor. The limits of the sign itself are tested by Beckett’s shutting down of one or more signifying systems, as semiotician Michael Issacharoff and others have documented.¹⁴ In Act Without Words it is speech that is eliminated, in Film it is sound, and in All That Fall it is sight. Yet in all these plays, this deprivation activates the spectator/auditor’s capacity for perception by detour, sharpening our other senses to the point that we seem to perceive metaphysical truth directly upon our bodies. As listeners to All That Fall we become both spectators and tactile explorers, able to see and touch our way along Maddy’s journey with a physical immediacy we could never attain in the identificatory mirror relationship of naturalistic theater. Although we remain as physically blind as Dan Rooney, we are compensated by more acutely hearing Mrs. Rooney’s ‘bizarre’ language, and in so doing we rescue her through our perception. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, we are struck blind but gain an inner sight - that is, we begin to see from within the dark. As Paul de Man argues in Blindness and Insight,¹⁵ we can see only when looking out from the direction of our own blindness. In All That Fall, we see from the dark; through the ear and the mind’s eye we enter a landscape of the true-real.

Maddy, like the other characters, is in the process of dying, and perhaps it is ‘suicide to be a broad’ because the play is annihilating her. But this is not the same as being nihilistic, since Beckett allows us to perceive her dying as the very process of living, a physical and metaphysical making of sense moment by moment. Again, this is close to Artaud’s idea of theater as the double of life: a theater whose deepest meaning is on the surface. Maddy Rooney is both here and gone, voice and body at once yet not enclosed within one individual character, one sensory dimension, or one performance time and space. She therefore survives as a subject-in-process, expressing herself through the true-real. All That Fall is a ritual performance of sacrifice/sacrament, flaunting reason by both representing and yet immediately presenting the body. As in the Eucharist, All That Fall publicly circulates Maddy’s voice and body as narrative and physical experience. In other words, the road of the picara emerges out of the dark, because it is the via negativa of the listener/spectator’s perception. The text of the Eucharist insists that ‘this bread is Christ’s body here and now’, and not, as the discourse of reason would have it, ‘this bread is like Christ’s body was in the past’, As Bakhtin says of the carnivalesque, the bread represents the body of Christ, and yet it also is eaten as bread.¹⁶ Likewise, Maddy’s bodily journey is broadcast to the listeners, becoming real through reenactment by our senses, and true even while it remains theater.

However, in order for this reenactment to create the sense of a totalized world, Beckett draws upon established cultural codes, including constructions of gender. Many of his plays recirculate the old image of the feminine as hellmouth, the vagina dentata through which man as the universal subject is born, lured into sexual relations, and dies. Not surprisingly, Beckett’s female characters have difficulty being real-ly (in Kristeva’s sense) born, because they have been thrust into the perilous obstacle course that is the patriarchal existential cosmos. Women cannot be born, that is, they cannot be recognized as such by the Law of the Father, because their prescribed role within this Law is to give birth, to embody birth, to be the theater that stages the experience of birth and death, but not the actor, who perforce is man. Nonetheless, mother to daughter, woman to woman, the female characters in All That Fall reach out to and connect with each other in their painful struggle to be born in the patriarchal universe. Maddy Rooney mourns for her daughter Minnie, and we are never sure whether she died in childhood or was stillborn. At the train station, Maddy is at first offended at ‘the distray Miss Fitt’ for not seeing her. But when Maddy learns that Miss Fitt was looking for her mother she forgives her, saying ‘I know what it is.’(28) Maddy is later troubled by the memory of a psychologist’s story of a young girl who was dying because ‘she had never been really born.’( (52 (Biographers trace this line to an actual lecture Beckett heard by Carl Jung.) Mr. Tyler’s daughter has had a hysterectomy, which he describes sardonically as removing her ‘whole bag of tricks’. Indeed, according to Ruby Cohn, the main problem in the play is depopulation, not only because the women fail in their procreative role, but also because the play itself ‘conspires to depopulate the world’ (Cohn: 160).

The play is full of males murdering females. Exhausted by her walk and stinging from her encounters with the men who have insulted her on the road, Maddy castigates herself in a passage that echoes the medieval loathing of the female body as degraded and formless matter, containing and emitting lust. The space of a medieval arena theater is evoked, with Maddy as the female martyr-witch being tortured and reviled, while the male god and his cohorts look down at her from their raised seats, enjoying the spectacle of her degradation:

What have I done to deserveall this, what, what? (Dragging feet )... How can I go on, I cannot. Oh let me just flop down flat on the road like a big fat jelly out of a bowl and never move again! A great big slop thick with grit and dust aflies, they would have to scoop me up with a shovel. (Pause) Heavens, there is that up mail again, what will become of me! (The dragging steps resume.) Oh I am just a hysterical old hag I know, destroyed with sorrow... (Pause. Brokenly.) Minnie! Little Minnie! (Pause.) Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular... (Dragging feet). (5) [emphasis mine]

Even in the midst of this despair, and longing for her daughter, Maddy doesn’t fall into a decaying pile of flesh, but drags her feet onward over the road, talking back to the ’Heavens’ and to that ‘up mail/up male’ which is not only a reference the mail train that she is expecting but also to the erect male sex organ and the males ‘up there’, including the Biblical ‘Lord [who] upholdeth all that fall’ and Beckett himself as the author who will not let her fall just yet even though she is exhausted. She thus resists the impending suicide, and even dares to enjoy her female sexuality, in spite of its being judged animalistic. She keeps talking and walking through the perils of the road, in contrast to her husband who says to her: ‘Once and for all, do not ask me to speak and move at the same time’.(37)

Evidence that the play operates as the true-real is found in other elements besides the dialogue. For the original production broadcast by the BBC in 1957, Beckett at first wanted to have recordings of actual animal sounds to establish the rural setting of the play: ‘sheep, birds, cow, cock, severally, then together’. But he soon decided that authentic ‘farmyard noises’ would be pointless, relates Enoch Brater in Beyond Minimalism. In effect, the sounds of real animals would have allowed them an existence independent of the human consciousness producing the play. Therefore an animal imitator was hired to record the sounds, which were then altered electronically (Brater:12). The result was that both animal and human voices could be recognized, but recognized as coming through several layers of organic and electronic media of representation. In order to emerge ‘out of the dark’, All That Fall is channeled through human speech, sound effects, and radio waves. Vivid pictures appear ‘on the air’. Commenting on this state to Miss Fitt, Maddy also addresses the listener: ‘Am I then invisible, Miss Fitt?’ The latter replies: ‘All I saw was a big pale blur, just another big pale blur,’ to which our heroine responds ruefully: ‘Maddy Rooney, née Dunne, the big pale blur. (Pause ) you have piercing sight, Miss Fitt, if you only knew it, literally piercing’.(ATF: 24)

Maddy’s is the mouth that produces the landscape, the matrix through which creation takes place. She walks, a way of marking time that is juxtaposed with that of the men whom she meets one by one on the way to the train station: they are all riding vehicles that are increasingly large, noisy, modern, and deadly. The vehicles, in order of their appearance, are a dung cart pulled by a female donkey, a bicycle with a flat wheel, a van, an automobile, and finally the train. The men refer to all these vehicles as ‘she’. They and Maddy are indeed the vehicles which males drive in order to convey themselves. Yet Maddy bursts out of her traces as a vehicle, because she so emphatically, laboriously, and noisily walks, pulling her 200-pound, 70-year-old body up from the sickbed and out onto the road. In fact, Maddy accepts a ride with a male motorist who with great difficulty lifts and pushes her up into the seat beside him, then speeds loudly down the road in a cloud of dust, terrifying the animals (it is he who killed the hen on the road, Maddy learns). The conversation of Maddy and the driver during the entire episode is punctuated with grunts, sighs, and heavy breathing, and sounds precisely like a sexual encounter. When the wild ride ends Maddy lowers herself laboriously again to the road, relieved to have survived but exhilarated by the ride.

If, as Enoch Brater asserts, Maddy’s path through the landscape forms the geometric symbol for infinity (Brater:61), she manages to drag her feet all along the way, her weight, pleasure and pain materially resisting this all-enclosing symbol. She tells her listeners: ‘If only you could see what I see’(29), and in fact we do see with her. When she says, ‘It’s obvious that I don’t exist. It’s a fact that I’m not really here’ (16), we can laugh down this reasonable assertion, because we have become a party to Maddy’s negation of her negation, which needs our sensory collaboration in the staging of the true-real. Because we perceive her but also perceive through her, we stage the reality of her physical presence, and at the same time she stages the reality of ours. Together, she and the listener complete the true-real.

Thus Maddy in taking her picaresque journey in a sense escapes the fate of the other women in the play, yet she also remains strongly connected to them. Maddy has escaped her own house but passes by a house where another old woman is shut in, singing ‘Death and the Maiden’. If ‘it is suicide to be a/broad’ it is murder to remain at home. Her walk to the station is, we learn, her first outing after a long illness and ‘confinement to the grounds’. It is a kind of return from the dead, an act of defiance against the law that all must fall. On the road back home, Maddy and Dan remember the line from Psalms, ‘The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down’. It sends them into wild laughter - perhaps because they don’t believe it, or believe it but wish it weren‘t so or, just as probably, because it strikes them as an obscene pun. This is the one moment when they seem to connect with each other. But Maddy appears to have raised herself up in spite of the Lord, willing the day also to hold itself up, listening for the ‘up mail’ and meeting it head on. The road she walks is an obstacle course with echoes and shadows of the cosmic: Dan calls it ‘this hellish road’, ‘the black road home’, and he dreams ‘of other roads, in other lands’. By the end of the play, Maddy will have journeyed over a dusty sunlit road, a hedge, a ditch, a climb into and out of a car, up a steep path, up and down the flight of steps leading to the train station platform, and back over the same road now dark and swept with wind and rain. Exhausted by climbing the steps to the train platform, she calls it ‘this precipice’, ‘the face of this cliff’, and ‘the Matterhorn’. Indeed, the platform is midway through her journey, literally the high point from which she views the whole topography of the play - including ourselves as the audience. She regrets that we cannot see it all, even as she allows us to do so:

The entire scene, the hills, the plain, the racecourse with its miles and miles of white rails and three red stands, the pretty little wayside station, even you yourselves... and over all the clouding blue, I see it all, I stand here and see it all with eyes... (the voice breaks.)... through eyes... oh, if you had my eyes... you would understand... the things they have seen... and not looked away...(29).

All the themes discussed thus far in this article are also revealed in what actors say about performing in Beckett’s plays. Billie Whitelaw, the actress who in the public and critical perception most perfectly ‘embodies’ Beckett’s world, offers two striking examples. In an interview with Jonathan Kalb she describes the women she has played in Rockaby and Footfalls:

[The voice of the woman in Rockaby] gets softer because she’s getting weaker, and the rock of the chair should be lessening, and the light is lessening. In Footfalls the same thing happens; she gets lower and lower and lower until it’s like a little pile of ashes on the floor at the end, and the light comes up and she’s gone. In fact, the woman in Rockaby is actgoing further and further down that steep stair. So with the last ‘More’ she knows she’s on the way out, and as long as that rocker keeps rocking she’s all right. Once it stops she’s gone... I do find it very frightening to do. And I find it desperately lonely to do. I feel very, very lin that chair... (Kalb: 240).

The materiality of the chair and of her rocking are equivalent in function to Maddy Rooney’s walking over the road: once this marking of time and space ceases, darkness will take her. In another interview, Whitelaw explains her relation to the author in terms that strikingly display the traditional role assigned to woman by Western theology: that of embodying man’s mental image, of being the stage where man, the true actor-author, can manifest himself. As she explains to Jonathon Kalb, Whitelaw becomes Beckett’s aural or visual theatrical medium, his ‘musical instrument’ or ‘tube of paint’:

W: And I will turn my self inside out, and I have made myself ill, trying to complete the image he has in his mind’s eye and in his ear.

Beckett blows the notes. I want them to come out of me and create feeling in whoever’s sitting out front. (Kalb: 19)

In Not I, the ‘gender technology’ of using the woman’s body as material instrument to express man’s narrative is even more overtly staged. Notwithstanding all the recent criticism that interprets this play in postmodern, purely linguistic, or deconstructive terms, as the dichotomy between voice and consciousness, the ultimate immaterial speech act, etc., Not I is also a blatant staging of the struggle between man as author and woman as mouth, birth canal, and deadly vagina dentata. In fact, the spatial design as described in Beckett’s stage directions strongly recalls that of the medieval theater with hellmouth (female as mouth, body, birth, lust, decay, and death) at one pole and heaven (male as eye, head, mind, order, spirit, eternal life) at the other. According to Beckett’s stage directions, there are two characters, Mouth, played by a female actor, and Auditor, a ‘tall standing figure, sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood’. But in fact Auditor was and is almost always played by a male actor.¹⁷ According to Enoch Brater in Beyond Minimalism, despite Beckett’s claim that the Auditor’s sex is ‘undeterminable’, the spectators in all the productions he has seen inevitably perceive this silent figure as masculine, a presence that somehow controls Mouth (Brater: 32). Brater sensed an air of struggle between these two, even though the Auditor only raises its arms from time to time ‘in a gesture of helpless compassion’, as Beckett’s stage direction states.

The Mouth seems to tell a woman’s disjointed story of being raped and giving birth, as well as the story of a baby girl born prematurely, perhaps born dead. Mouth is insistent above all that the subject of the story is SHE. In the final moments of the play Mouth speaks for the last time a series of words that She has returned to again and again in the play.

tiny little thing... out before its time...godforsaken hole... keep on... trying... not knowing what... what she was... whole body like gone... just the mouth... what?... who?... no!... she!... SHE!... what she was trying... God is love... tender mercies .... new every morning... back in the field.... April morning... face in the grass... nothing but the larks... pick it up. (Curtain fully down. House dark...) (9 -10)

Beckett notes in his directions that Mouth is engaged until the end with a ‘vehement refusal to relinquish the third person’.( (11 As Brater describes it in one production, the Auditor stands on an invisible podium four feet above stage level drapes that hang down to foot of the platform (Brater:18), while the actress is masked so that only her mouth is visible, and held in place on another platform so that she cannot move her head or body. Jessica Tandy, describing a 1973 New York production in which she played the role of Mouth, relates that her eyes were covered by a black blindfold to prevent them from reflecting the light beam. ‘Any movement would have upset the consistent visual image designed for the audience’. Her teeth were coated with a substance that exaggerated their brightness and then polished to attract the glare. The overall image, says Brater, ‘was of a wordless giant who stood in mute contrast to the... image of a panting orifice’.(31) An ‘isolated, unconnected, gabbling orifice furiously opening and shutting’.(18) Auditor’s four gestures of raising his arms constitute a cruciform.

As for the spectators, ‘We shift our own eyes from Mouth to Auditor and back to Mouth again... for if we concentrate too steadily on the Mouth, we begin to discern in the stage darkness the actress behind the mouth’ (31) [emphasis mine]. This observation of Brater’s clearly reveals the operation of the polarizing gender technology that pits male against female: it prevents us from ‘discerning the woman behind the Mouth’ - and, by the same token, the man behind the giant Auditor. When Jessica Tandy asked Beckett what had really happened to the woman in the field that resulted in her uncontrollable talking, he, like the Auditor, ‘raised his hands in helpless compassion’. Of the play Tandy later said, ‘I don’t enjoy it - I don’t enjoy having so much taken away’(30), and after two seasons and a taping for television Billie Whitelaw for her part declared, ‘What happened to me was a terrible inner scream, like falling backwards into hell... I will never do the play again. If I did, I think I would lose my sanity.’(31)

In the televised version featuring Whitelaw as Mouth, the Auditor was left out. Again Brater’s comments are revealing: ‘On screen the actress’s teeth,... were only accidental stars with a talent for squad drill... The viewer is inevitably drawn in by short gasps inhaled at each momentary ripple of unseen muscles.’ In close-up color Beckett’s protagonist looked more like a vagina than a mouth. So obscene and frightening was the visual image... that the play had to be neutralized by broadcasting it in black and white.’(35) [emphasis mine]

Although this visual effect is usually explained as universal existentialist suffering, the evidence of the text and productions suggests that a male agency has willed that the female character and actor be reduced to this mouth-vagina, this matter-mater. Why, we must ask, does Mouth insist on referring to herself as SHE? Is it because she is forced to take the viewpoint of the Auditor, an interpretation Brater suggests? Indeed so, but it also allows her to be ‘born as a woman’ in the only possible way: by choosing to say ‘she’ and ‘NOT I’, she refuses to be totally subsumed into the representation. In the gendered construction of this cosmos, the ‘I’ is also the Eye of the masculine god and heaven, set in polar opposition to the Mouth of the feminine and of hell. Mouth refers to herself as SHE, and refuses to adopt the ’I’ of the naturalistic theater, which would disguise the true source of the words: the male author. Thus she never becomes subject to his text, but at great and painful cost remains a subject-in-process.

Like these later Beckett characters, Maddy Rooney, in spite of her seeming naturalism, is also a rebellious subject-in-process in Kristeva’s sense, not a unified identity. There is not only a cleft between ‘her’ mind and body, but within our own senses, our mode of perceiving her. However, precisely by meanof this refusal to be unified as a fully present identity, she becomes a historical agent: in spite of all the ‘up males,’ she keeps walking and talking, until her footsteps are out of our hearing and we hear only the rain and wind. By following the true-real Mrs. Rooney through her bizarre language over the landscape created by her voice in our ear and mi’s eye, we may find a way - a via negativa - around a dilemma facing feminist critics today. On the one hand, there is the need to establish agency even for fictional women who serve as the ground of representation for the male author/auditor/spectator. On the other hand, there is our postmodern disbelief in the autonomous individual and distrust of structure as a semiotician’s wishful thinking. This dilemma makes us fear that the female subject in men’s works was never real anyway, but only true - that is, a true and faithful spectre of the male author’s imagination. Maddy Rooney, however, attains a certain independence from the author because she a true-real subject who never takes up a permanent position within the author/Lord/father’s symbolic Law. She does not stay ‘on the grounds’ but walks away, escaping what Bakhtin would call the trap of the monologic. Instead she is dialogic, both done and undone as the true-real subject. Maddy’s voice, like the animal voices in All That Fall, is dialogic and even polylogic, not a monologue within a symbolic totality.

Maddy escapes entrapment in the closing loop of the Law again and again: by the sudden interjection of ‘merde!’ from her store of bizarre language, by the wasps buzzing up out of nowhere and à propos of nothing, by the previously unannounced feather on her hat. Thus Beckett provides routes by which his character escapes the large designs upon her: via feathers, wasps, unlaced corsets, and other flaws in the symmetrical weave of his text, and especially important for the picara, via the materiality of the road traveled.

Notes

1. Maddy Rooney, in Samuel Beckett, All That Fall. New York: Grove Press, 1957; 7.

In her concluding chapter of Gender Trouble Butler asks: ‘If the body is not a “being” but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality,... then what language is left for understanding this corporeal enactment, gender, that constitutes its ‘interior’ signification on its surface?’ (p. 139). Perhaps the answer, as Kristeva has suggested, is the language of the true-real.