Embers: A Polyphonic Piece for Radio

• Autores: Jürgen Siess
• Localización: Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett / Laurens De Vos (ed. lit.), Mariko Hori Tanaka (ed. lit.), Nicholas E. Johnson (ed. lit.), 2021, ISBN 978-90-04-46839-9, págs. 56-64
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This contribution starts with ‘polyphony’ as defined by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot. In Ducrot’s view, polyphony is the superposition of several voices (‘enunciators’) as manifested in the utterance, and the staging of these multiple voices by a speaker [locuteur]. The linguist challenges the assumption that the utterance lets us hear a single voice, thus breaking the unity of the subject: the enunciator is not to be confused with the speaker. I want to show that in Beckett’s ‘piece for radio’ polyphony as a well-organised discourse is undermined, that the author complexifies and problematises the polyphonic structure. In his text, multiple voices emerge, and in the soliloquy of the elderly man who is desperately looking for his lost interlocutors, one voice among others appears, although he seems to stage imaginary dialogues with absent addressees. Henry, the principal ‘character’ of Embers, has to deal with several competing speakers, these speakers do not recognise him as their master. At the same time, Henry’s efforts to gain and maintain self-identity prove a failure. What is more, Beckett’s text is supposed to imply the hearer who is confronted with a multiplicity of voices, to involve him in a play the rules of which are all but clear.