‘Rock her off’: The Paradoxical Tension of the Split Voice in Rockaby

• Autores: Teresa Rosell Nicolas
• 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. 143-157
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • References in classic literature associate the rocking chair with an image of tradition such as motherly comfort and hospitality. Also, the movement of rocking creates a fundamental rhythm and a disposition to recall old rhymes, songs, and popular tales. The question that arises in Beckett’s Rockaby is in what way this traditional homely image is reversed into a more perplexing, disturbing one. In this play, the only character, W, a woman in a rocking chair, does not have control of communication as we can only listen to a recorded voice, which is apparently hers. This only character on the stage cannot dominate the rocking movement either, as the power that keeps the chair moving back and forth comes, paradoxically, from outside her. This maternal symbol, related to the lullabies that babies hear in cradles, is used by Beckett as the rhythm of the passing of time — perhaps the woman’s heartbeats until they cease — and to show the strong presence of doubled voices in a play where W cannot control her own representation, being ‘played’ by the chair.What is the relation between the voice that speaks the story of a woman who gradually withdraws from the exterior world and W, who rocks in the chair? According to Anna McMullan, in much of Beckett’s late drama, a ‘struggle emerges through the interaction between the performative subject who repeatedly attempts to articulate his/her experience and the symbolized fragments of his/her existence’ and which focuses on the ‘destabilization of the textual and visual frames used to figure the subject and [his/her] history’ (McMullan, 46); that is, the voice constructs the stage image and a tension between the static image and the narrative voice is created. As Charles Lyons argues, Beckett’s last plays, which mostly depict the image of solitary women, remind us ‘that the objects observed have no existence outside of the language of identifying or describing statements’ (Lyons, 1990, 151). In this sense, McMullan states that the only access to history or memory in Beckett’s characters is through language (McMullan, 50). This chapter will study the importance of the image of the rocking chair from a comparative approach in order to analyse this split subject that is depicted in a compressed, but also subtle, poetic image.