Footfalls
Encyclopedia
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. It was written in English, between 2 March and December 1975 and was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
as part of the Samuel Beckett Festival, on May 20, 1976 directed by Beckett himself. Billie Whitelaw
Billie Whitelaw
Billie Honor Whitelaw, CBE is an English actress. She worked in close collaboration with Irish playwright Samuel Beckett for 25 years and is regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of his works...
, for whom the piece had been written, played May whilst Rose Hill
Rose Hill (actress)
Rose Lilian Hill was an English actress best known for her role as Madame Fanny La Fan in the British television series Allo 'Allo!. She was a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company....
voiced the mother.
Synopsis
The play is in four parts. Each opens with the sound of a bell. After this the lights fade up to reveal an illuminated strip along which a woman, May, paces back and forth, nine steps within a one metre stretch. In each part, the light will be somewhat darker than in the preceding one. Therefore it is darkest when the strip is lit up without May at the very end. Correspondingly, the bell gets slightly softer each time. Beckett introduced a "Dim spot on face during halts at R [right] and L [left]" so that May's face would be visible during her monologues.The play has a very musical structure and timing is critical. “The walking should be like a metronome
Metronome
A metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks — settable in beats per minute. These ticks represent a fixed, regular aural pulse; some metronomes also include synchronized visual motion...
”, Beckett instructed, “one length must be measured in exactly nine seconds.”
“These ‘life-long stretches of walking,’ he told his German May, Hildegard Schmahl, are ‘the centre of the play; everything else is secondary’.”
To ensure that every step could be heard “sandpaper was attached to the soles of [Billie] Whitelaw’s soft ballet slippers” during the London premiere.
As she covers the nine paces (seven in earlier printed texts) she hugs herself, the arms crossed, with the hands clasping the shoulders in front. ‘When you walk, you slump together, when you speak, you straighten up a bit.’ Schmahl asked Beckett if May’s posture was supposed to express fear? “No, not fear. It expresses that May is there exclusively for herself. She is isolated.”
One of a long line of Beckett protagonists whose name begins with an M, May is a woman in her forties (who should however appear “ageless” according to Beckett). She paces back and forth on a strip of bare landing outside her dying – if not already dead – mother’s room (a vertical ray of light not in the printed text suggests a door barely ajar).
The woman, clearly a shadow of her former self, wears tattered nightwear and has a ghostly pallor. Beckett said: “One could go very far towards making the costume quite unrealistic, unreal. It could, however, also be an old dressing-gown, worked like a cobweb … It is the costume of a ghost
Ghost
In traditional belief and fiction, a ghost is the soul or spirit of a deceased person or animal that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living. Descriptions of the apparition of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to...
.” “You feel cold. The whole time, in the way you hold your body too. Everything is frost and night.” The adjective ‘ghostly’ is used frequently – by Beckett himself and others – to describe various aspects of Footfalls.
The play – significantly – only has a semblance of a plot.
May’s mother is only ever heard. We learn that she is apparently ninety years old and in poor health. The more likely truth is that she is a creation of May’s mind, especially when one examines Beckett’s earlier drafts.
Part I
As she paces, May and her mother carry on a conversation. They go through the daily routine by rote. Both voices are low and slow throughout. May asks her mother if she requires tending in any way. To each request the mother says: “Yes, but it is too soon.” The full list of comforts offered to the suffering mother carry a biblical resonance: dressings, sponge, lip-moistening and prayer. The suffering daughter, on the other hand, paces on the bare floorboards nailed as in a crossCross
A cross is a geometrical figure consisting of two lines or bars perpendicular to each other, dividing one or two of the lines in half. The lines usually run vertically and horizontally; if they run obliquely, the design is technically termed a saltire, although the arms of a saltire need not meet...
; in the church later ‘she’ paces across the arms of the cross.
May asks her mother what age she is. She’s told that she is in her “forties” but only after May has first let her mother know that she is ninety.
The mother asks May: “Will you never have done … revolving it all … In your poor mind?” The pacing back and forth is an externalisation of this inner unresolved issue. “It All” was a title Beckett was considering before he opted for Footfalls though we never discover what “it” might be. May may or may not be a ghost but she is undoubtedly a haunted individual; the umbilical cord
Umbilical cord
In placental mammals, the umbilical cord is the connecting cord from the developing embryo or fetus to the placenta...
has clearly never been severed.
“M (May) and V (Voice) create a dialogue which is simultaneously time present and time past, for, although the mother’s voice is an echo from the past, May is speaking to her in the endless present dramatized before our eyes. Quite literally in Footfalls, the past is in the present.” Simply put: they are ‘living’ in the past.
Part II
In the second part, the mother’s voice addresses the audience directly. She tells us that she too is watching her daughter along with us literally through the corridor wall. We learn that the turning point in May’s life, the “it” happened in girlhood: “when other girls her age were out at … lacrosseLacrosse
Lacrosse is a team sport of Native American origin played using a small rubber ball and a long-handled stick called a crosse or lacrosse stick, mainly played in the United States and Canada. It is a contact sport which requires padding. The head of the lacrosse stick is strung with loose mesh...
” she had already begun her obsessive pacing. From that time on significantly she has not ventured outside.
In the beginning the hall had been carpeted but May had asked her mother to have it taken up. When questioned the child had said because she needed to “hear the feet, however faint they fall”; “the “motion alone is not enough”. The apparition in the story in Part III on the other hand makes “No sound. [Pause] None at least to be heard.”
In an earlier draft the voice tells the audience: “My voice is in her mind” suggestive of the fact that the mother actually is only a figment of May’s imaginings. This is borne out by the fact that voice tells the story of a girl who “called her mother” ,” instead of simply talking about a girl who “called me.” This is the kind of slip May might make if she was narrating the mother’s part herself.
We also learn how May sleeps, “in snatches” with her head bowed against the wall which is reminiscent of Mary in Watt
Watt
The watt is a derived unit of power in the International System of Units , named after the Scottish engineer James Watt . The unit, defined as one joule per second, measures the rate of energy conversion.-Definition:...
.
“Beckett explains [why] the mother interrupts herself in the sentence ‘In the old home, the same where she — (pause)’ and then continues ‘The same where she began. She was going to say: ... the same where she was born. But that is wrong, she hasn’t been born. She just began. It began. There is a difference. She was never born.’ There is the connection with the Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
story [detailed below]. A life, which didn’t begin as a life, but which was just there, as a thing”.
Part III
In Part II the mother speaks of the daughter, in the third part, the daughter of the mother, in a way that is exactly parallel. ‘One must sense the similarities of both narratives,’ explained Beckett, ‘Not so much from the text as from the style, from the way that the text is spoken.’In a manner similar to Mouth in Not I
Not I
Not I is a twenty-minute dramatic monologue written in 1972 by Samuel Beckett, translated as Pas Moi; premiere at the “Samuel Beckett Festival” by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, New York , directed by Alan Schneider, with Jessica Tandy and Henderson Forsythe .-Synopsis:Not I takes place...
, “the shift into third person narrative and the indefinite pronoun
Indefinite pronoun
An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun that refers to one or more unspecified beings, objects, or places.-List of English indefinite pronouns:Note that many of these words can function as other parts of speech too, depending on context...
work both to objectify the text, making it into a separate entity that seems disconnected from personal history. In that sense the recitation becomes a verbal structure repeated in consciousness rather than a sequence of memories in spontaneous association.” This part can be subdivided into four sections.
After each section May halts for a time and then resumes pacing.
Sequel
This part opens with May uttering the word, “SequelSequel
A sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of or expands upon issues presented in some previous work...
” twice, which Beckett asked to be pronounced as “Seek well” – another pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
– since she is seeking for herself.
May begins to tell a story in which an undefined ‘she’, probably herself, has taken to haunting the local Anglican church
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
, which she enters through a locked door; there ‘she’ walks ‘up and down, up and down, his poor arm’” “Literally she is walking along the ‘arms’ of a cross-shaped church.”
The Semblance
The description of the spectre is similar to how the audience sees May: “a tangle of tatters” and her pacing is comparable except that the ghost paces along the crossbeam whereas May paces the length of the stake.A residual haunting is where the entity does not seem to be cognizant of any living beings and performs the same repetitive act. It often is the reenactment of a tragic event, although it may sometimes be a very mundane act that was repeated often in life. It is generally not considered an actual ghost but some form of energy that remains in a particular location. The ghost goes about their business oblivious to the world of the living – what Beckett meant by the expression “being for herself,” Night by night ghosts pace their prescribed path offering no explanation to the viewers as to why they re-enact the same scene over and over. The answers – or at least best guesses – have to come from research done by the living in the real world.
The apparition is “by no means invisible” and can be seen “in a certain light.” It brings to mind the quote Beckett prefaced Film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
with: “Esse est percipi
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
” : a Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
dictum
Dictum
In United States legal terminology, a dictum is a statement of opinion or belief considered authoritative though not binding, because of the authority of the person making it....
meaning "to be is to be perceived."
Additionally, a ghost does not have to be dead; the word can be defined as: “a mere shadow or semblance; a trace: He's a ghost of his former self.”
Amy and Mrs Winter
May makes up a story about a woman, Amy (an anagramAnagram
An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who...
of May) and her mother, a Mrs Winter. Although he knew a Mrs Winter in real life the name would have been chosen to reflect the coldness of “his own ‘winter’s tale
The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare, originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, some modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some critics, among them W. W...
’, just as he changed the ‘south door’ of the church in the manuscript to the ‘north door’ at a late stage for the same reason.”
The name Amy is another pun: “A me.”
Mrs Winter has become aware of something strange “at Evensong
Evening Prayer (Anglican)
Evening Prayer is a liturgy in use in the Anglican Communion and celebrated in the late afternoon or evening...
” and questions her daughter about it while at supper. She asks if Amy had seen anything strange during the service but the daughter insists she did not because she “was not there” a point her mother takes issue with because she is convinced that she heard her distinctly say “Amen.” This is not a dramatisation of the event that traumatised May however as that happened in girlhood and Amy is described in the text as “scarcely a girl any more.”
“‘The daughter only knows the voice of the mother’. One can recognize the similarity between the two from the sentences in their narratives, from the expression. The strange voice of the daughter comes from the mother. The ‘Not enough?’ in the mother’s story must sound just like the ‘Not there?’ of Mrs W in Amy’s story, for example. These parallelisms are extremely important for the understanding of the play … One can suppose that she has written down everything which she has invented up to this, that she will one day find a reader for her story—therefore the address to the reader …‘Words are as food for this poor girl.’ Beckett says. ‘They are her best friends.’ … Above all, it is important that the narrative shouldn’t be too flowing and matter-of-course. It shouldn’t give the impression of something already written down. May is inventing her story while she is speaking. She is creating and seeing it all gradually before her. It is an invention from beginning to end. The picture emerges gradually with hesitation, uncertainty – details are always being added”
May becomes ‘Amy’
Just as the light from Part I to Part III becomes constantly darker, the tone quieter, so the walking gets slower. When she begins to walk, there’s a small hesitation, as though she were unsure if she should walk or not. “Beckett pointed out that on her last walk along the strip of light, her energy runs out after three paces and she has to wait there until enough vitality returns to drag herself to the end of the light.”“As the play ends, Mrs Winter speaks to Amy the very words spoken to May by her mother: ‘Will you never have done … revolving it all?’” Up until this point May has identified who has been speaking, At the end, when ‘Mrs W’ says, “Amy” it is May who answers, “Yes, Mother” – significantly she does not say, “Amy: Yes, Mother.”
Can May be the ghost and be ‘Amy’? Yes, if each reflects a different aspect of who she is.
Part IV
In the final section there is no one on stage. The bell chimes, the lights come up and then fade out.“The final ten seconds with ‘No trace of May’, is a crucial reminder that May was always ‘not there’ or only there as a ‘trace’.” “May, like the Amy of her story, is simply ‘not there.’ ‘Strange or otherwise,’ we hear nothing, we see nothing. Absence is the only presence.” As Beckett told Billie Whitelaw, when she asked him if May was dead, he replied, “Let’s just say you’re not all there.” This has been interpreted by many to mean that May is not dead. But it should be remembered that [a] ghost has a curious relation to finitude, which means it is never entirely unearthly or out of this world. [G]hosts, … are traditionally tied to places, condemned for a certain time to walk the earth.
In an interview with Jonathan Kalb, Billie Whitelaw describes May’s journey: “In Footfalls … [May] 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.”
James Knowlson and John Pilling in Frescoes of the Skull (p 227) come close to summarising the entire play in a single sentence: “We realise, perhaps only after the play has ended, that we may have been watching a ghost telling a tale of a ghost (herself), who fails to be observed by someone else (her fictional alter ego) because she in turn is not really there … even the mother’s voice may simply be a voice in the mind of a ghost.”
Background
Beckett’s mother, also called May, had “difficulty sleeping through the night, and there were often times when she paced the floor of her room or wandered through the darkened house as silently as one of the ghosts which she swore haunted it… She [also] removed the carpets in some areas” so she could hear her feet no matter how faint they fell.Hildegard Schmahl wanted to know how was the figure of May to be understood. “In the thirties”, he said, “C.G. Jung
Jung
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology.Jung may also refer to:* Jung * JUNG, Java Universal Network/Graph Framework-See also:...
, the psychologist, once gave a lecture in London and told of a female patient who was being treated by him. Jung said he wasn’t able to help this patient and for this”, according to Beckett, “he gave an astonishing explanation. This girl wasn’t living. She existed but didn’t actually live.”
Jung does not appear to have explained what he meant by ‘never been properly born', but he must have meant either that the trauma of birth had somehow been bypassed, leaving a gap in the emotional history of the patient or that the person concerned did not really exist in terms of having a full consciousness.
Beckett recognized in this psychological dilemma an example of “his own womb fixation, arguing forcefully that all his behavior, from the simple inclination to stay in bed to his deep-seated need to pay frequent visits to his mother, were all aspects of an improper birth.”
“The implication in Footfalls is that May has remained in the Imaginary, ... womb”
and that that womb is also her tomb is a recurring theme with Beckett.
Among the myths underlying psychic life, Jung favoured that of the hero who has to stand up to a devouring Great Mother
Great Mother
The Great Mother refers to the concept of the mother goddess, including:*Great Mother, in the Mahayana and Vajrayana refers to Prajnaparamita, and the wisdom of the Madhyamaka...
figure threatening to drag him back into symbiotic unconsciousness. His entry into her womb/tomb and successful re-emergence constitutes his own renewal and transformation.
“Only two years before writing Footfalls, [Beckett] had also met the daughter of an old friend, who described to him graphically her own depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
, distress and extreme agoraphobia
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder defined as a morbid fear of having a panic attack or panic-like symptoms in a situation from which it is perceived to be difficult to escape. These situations can include, but are not limited to, wide-open spaces, crowds, or uncontrolled social conditions...
, telling him how, unable to face the world, she used to pace relentlessly up and down in her apartment.” It is not unreasonable to assume there may be an association between the character of May and this girl.
If we viewed May’s pacing from above “we would see the tracing on the stage floor of a tremendously elongated variation of the figures 8 turned on its side … the mathematical symbol for infinity
Infinity
Infinity is a concept in many fields, most predominantly mathematics and physics, that refers to a quantity without bound or end. People have developed various ideas throughout history about the nature of infinity...
.”
Beckett was also indebted to the French psychologist Pierre Janet
Pierre Janet
Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory....
for his conception of hysterical behaviour
Hysteria
Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. People who are "hysterical" often lose self-control due to an overwhelming fear that may be caused by multiple events in one's past that involved some sort of severe conflict; the fear can be centered on a body part, or,...
. In his overview of Janet’s work, Robert Woodworth in his Contemporary Schools of Psychology, a work Beckett read, pays particular attention to Janet’s description of the “hysterical paralysis of one arm”, which Beckett incorporated, into May’s posture. There are a number of analogies between Footfalls and Janet’s work with a patient called Irène: He lists “the deep sleep, the sleep-walking, the hearing of the mother’s voice … the terrifying extreme of Irène’s fabulation
Fabulation
In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th century novels that are in a style similar to magical realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or romance...
, the drama of daily re-enactment, of pathological
Pathology
Pathology is the precise study and diagnosis of disease. The word pathology is from Ancient Greek , pathos, "feeling, suffering"; and , -logia, "the study of". Pathologization, to pathologize, refers to the process of defining a condition or behavior as pathological, e.g. pathological gambling....
memory possessing the body and mind of the traumatised hysteric, … returning again and again each night light a nightmare in a private theatre.”
Much time was spent in pre-production getting May’s posture exactly right. Whitelaw said she felt “like a moving, musical, Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
painting”. In reality her pose creates “a striking parallel with the picture of The Virgin of the Annunciation by Antonello da Messina
Antonello da Messina
Antonello da Messina, properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio was an Italian painter from Messina, Sicily, active during the Italian Renaissance...
” which Beckett had seen forty years earlier in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
.
Beckett too was very familiar with the work of Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
and May’s pose is also reminiscent of Munch’s Madonna. Munch described the work in this way: "Now life and death join hands. The chain is joined that ties the thousands of past generations to the thousands of generations to come" He painted a woman in warm hues, her torso bare and her head tilted back, with long reddish hair flowing around her body. Her eyes are closed, her lips slightly parted in silent rapture. Her face is pale and bony, and crowned with a deep orange halo … The lithograph versions have [a] sperm border, and a foetus with its arms crossed in the corpse position looking up unhappily at the Madonna from the lower left corner. Munch is playing with opposites here: fertility and virginity, lust and chastity, and in his words, life and death.
Related Texts
“Maddy Rooney remembers ‘one of those new mind doctors’ lecturing on a little girl patient: ‘The trouble with her was she had never been really born!’ (All That FallAll That Fall
All That Fall is a one-act radio play by Samuel Beckett produced following a request from the BBC. It was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races...
, Faber and Faber, 36-7); and Malone
Malone Dies
Malone Dies is a novel by Samuel Beckett. It was first published in 1951, in French, as Malone Meurt, and later translated into English by the author....
feels he is ‘far already from the world that parts at last its labia and lets me go.’ ‘Yes,’ he affirms, ‘an old foetus, that’s what I am now, hoar and impotent, mother is done for, I’ve rotted her, she’ll drop me with the help of gangrene, perhaps papa is at the party too, I’ll land head-foremost mewling in the charnel-house, not that I’ll mewl, not worth it.’ ‘The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence’ (Trilogy, Calder Publications 190, 226, 285). The phrase ‘never been properly born’ is buried in the ‘Addenda’ of Watt
Watt
The watt is a derived unit of power in the International System of Units , named after the Scottish engineer James Watt . The unit, defined as one joule per second, measures the rate of energy conversion.-Definition:...
(Calder and Boyars, 248); and the idea is surely present in the climactic image of Godot: ‘Astride of a grave and a difficult birth’ (Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
, Faber and Faber, 90).”
Footfalls [also] anticipates the key ritual
Ritual
A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers....
that five years later will possess the old woman of Ill Seen Ill Said
Ill Seen Ill Said
Ill Seen Ill Said is a short novel by Samuel Beckett. It was first published in French as Mal vu mal dit in 1981, and was then translated in English by the author in 1982....
: the "long pacing to and fro in the gloom" (Ill Seen Ill Said, Faber and Faber, p 47).
