Rough for Radio II
Encyclopedia
Rough for Radio II is a radio play
by Samuel Beckett
. It was written in French in 1961 as Pochade radiophonique and published in Minuit
16, November 1975. Beckett translated the work into English shortly before its broadcast on BBC Radio 3
on 13 April 1976. Martin Esslin
directed Harold Pinter
(Animator), Billie Whitelaw
(Stenographer
) and Patrick Magee
(Fox). The English language version was first published in Ends and Odds (Grove, 1976, Faber, 1977) as Radio II.
Esslin tells us that Beckett himself “regard[ed] the work as unfinished, no more than a rough sketch, and felt, having heard the production that it had ‘not come off’.” Beckett "put the blame on the script but he told Esslin that 'the production which made the Animator and his team start briskly and become more weary and discouraged as time went on should already have started on a high degree of weariness and despair.'"
”, a whip
made from a bull's penis. (‘Dick’ is, of course, a euphemism
for penis). It is certainly humorous, though hardly revolutionary, to use a character that is unable to speak in a radio play. What is of interest is that it is his job to encourage Fox to speak.
Dick is instructed to remove a hood
from a fourth figure, Fox, followed by his gag
, blindfold
and earplug
s. The man is kept bound though. As his eyes adjust to the light he recognises “the same old team” – evidently this is not then the first time he has been interrogated
. Unexpectedly he smiles at the woman and this startles her, which prompts a coarse remark from the Animator: “What is it, miss? Vermin
in the lingerie
?” This is not the first time he has smiled; she checks to see if it should be recorded but is told not to.
The Stenographer proceeds to read her report on the results from day before but the Animator has her skip practically all of it apart from the first three “exhortations”. Item #3 expresses particular concern regarding the condition and use of the Fox’s gag. It is imperative he make no utterance that cannot be recorded and scrutinized in case what he says “may be it”. “But no word, says Mauthner
, can have such transcendent
power; however torture
d, words cannot reveal truth
.”
She is stopped just after this and goes on to read Fox’s closing remarks from the day before which refer to him washing and drying a mole
in front of a fire before returning the creature to its “chamber with his weight of grubs.” From the expression, “in that instant his little heart was beating still” it could be construed that the mole was actually dead, perhaps killed by accident when he was a child but more likely frozen to death in the blizzard
he has to endure to return it to the ground.
The Animator wants to know if the glare bothers her. The woman says not and adds that heat doesn’t trouble her either but still asks permission to remove her overall. This – predictably – prompts comment from the Auditor: “Staggering! Ah were I but … forty years younger”, another inappropriate remark underlining his lascivious
nature. The text does not comment on what she is – or is not – wearing underneath but Billie Whitelaw’s observation in a Radio Times
interview is revealing: “I felt that the girl I play, the stenographer, starts out in uniform and ends with nothing on.” Her response is to reread the end of Fox’s last testimony: “Ah my God my God [Blow with pencil] My God,” words that remind one of someone’s cries while in a state of sexual ecstasy but presented in the least erotic of tones. Having worked with him before she is doubtless well aware of the nature of the man she is dealing with – someone who could undress her with his eyes no matter what she was wearing – and his hidden agenda. Her response annoys him. He calls her a “Crabbed youth,” before proceeding.
She recommends “a touch of kindness” be applied to Fox, “perhaps just a hint.” The Animator says he appreciates the sentiment but is obdurate: they stick with his method (despite its obvious lack of results).
After further prompting by Dick, Fox begins his second monologue
describing a life underground (perhaps the mole’s he spoke of before), “living dead in the stones.” He fades away but, when threatened with the whip again, moves onto his third outpouring, where he mentions a brother – the first family member he has spoken of – his twin, actually inside himself and hungry. Someone named “Maud” – the only person he has ever mentioned by name – has proposed a Caesarean section
volunteering to nurse the twin when born. At this point Fox breaks down and starts weeping. The Animator remains undecided as to whether this should be recorded. Up until this point he has been adamant that only Fox’s words are relevant.
A final stoke of Dick’s pizzle brings only one line. Fox – or more likely the mole/twin – cries out: “Let me out! Peter out in the stones!”
In a change of tactic, the Animator quietly tries to make clear to Fox what he really wants: “More variety! … [A]stonish me.”, He even hints to him that he might try being creative with the truth, the very notion of which shocks the Stenographer. It may seem at first look that the bound protagonist is the captive, but by this stage of the play, the audience is beginning to realise that the Stenographer and Animator are the ones who are truly captive. They hang upon every word Fox emits. The Animator even confesses that he doesn’t know precisely what he is looking for other than he’ll know it when he hears it, unlike Bam in What Where
who is after specific details. It is becoming clearer that the Animator is seeking something in Fox that most likely isn’t there.
Since physical violence hasn’t proved successful, nor has gentle persuasion, the Animator modifies his approach once more: “Dick! – no, wait. Kiss him, miss, perhaps that will stir some fibre … on his stinker of a mouth … Till it bleeds! Kiss it white!” Fox howls and faints.
Since nothing more is to be gotten from Fox the two review the evidence, the tear – he had shed a number the previous winter – and Maud’s willingness to act as a wet nurse
. The Stenographer highlights the point that, for Maud to be able to produce milk pointed to the fact she is likely already pregnant. The Animator drools over the image of a milk-engorged breast: “One can almost see it!”
The woman wonders out loud who might be the father. This finally fires Animator’s imagination: “May we have that passage again, miss?” She reads it verbatim but he objects insisting she is omitting the phrase, “between two kisses.” She tries to stand her ground but he gets angry and demands she amend her notes accordingly effectively “insert[ing] the Stenographer (and her kissing of Fox) into Fox’s discourse.” (This is in violation of Item #2 of the “exhortations”). She acquiesces and timidly reads back the text. Finally, something to appeal to his crude tastes.
He is now satisfied and is hopeful that by the next day their work may very well be done. “Don’t cry, miss, dry your pretty eyes and smile at me. Tomorrow, who knows, we may be free.” This reminds us of the ending of Radio I: “Tomorrow … noon.” Everything will be better tomorrow. Beckett brings many of his characters to this brink (e.g. Clov at the end of Endgame
) but for these trapped souls the future only turns out to be an endless succession of today's.
and What Where can also be grouped along with Rough for Theatre II
and Rough for Radio II as ‘procedural’ plays.
Whereas many of Beckett’s work have a circular aspect, these four plays all have a linear core; each can be, or is, stopped when certain conditions are met. In the case of Catastrophe, when the living statue meets the director’s aesthetic criteria; in What Where, when one of the interrogators extracts the required information; in Rough for Theatre II, when a decision is made as to Croker’s future and in Rough for Radio II, if an unknown sign or set of words is provided by Fox. Each play has its own process, procedures that have to be followed. All evoke bureaucracy
even though in What Where there is no physical paperwork per se.
Robert Sandarg has put forward this short possible synopsis of the play:
As regards a ‘true’ interpretation a good starting point is Martin Esslin’s comment that the play is “about the artistic process” itself which Beckett by no means found easy; his output is respectable but he was not exactly prolific. “There are two moments worthwhile in writing,” he summed up to a friend, “the one where you start and the other where you throw it in the waste-paper basket.”
The play interestingly reverses the act of creation of a radio play: “instead of the sequence {text → speech → electromagnetic vibration
}, we have the sequence {twitch of whip → speech → text} –first the slap of the bull’s pizzle on flesh, then Fox’s words, then the stenographer’s transcript.” To produce this article, this author – and by extension those authors quoted – first tuned into a radio broadcast (or put on a recording of one), listened to the words and then converted his understanding of them into text.
"They're both painful, but the pain is different."
An old adage
says that people hear what they want to hear; they home in on what’s relevant to them. Animator is not really listening to Fox any more than a great number of Beckett’s audiences over the years haven’t listened to him: Godot sounds like God so he must be God, mustn’t he?
Fox sounds like ‘vox’, the Latin
word for ‘voice’, but in this case it is not unreasonable to assume this is intentional on Beckett’s part considering his only requirement is to give voice to that certain something that will satisfy his interrogator. It is worth mentioning that in the French original the interrogatee is still named ‘Fox’ rather than ‘Renard’ perhaps because Beckett wanted his audience to make the Fox/Vox connection first. The French for ‘voice’ is ‘voix’.
“Fox’s stream of words presents a series of puzzling images. Should the listener simply consider each of these – the soaping of the mole, his drying by the embers, the mention of a parasitic twin
brother growing within him, a mother figure named Maud – as pictogram
s, which escape interpretation? Fox only speaks under duress. Does he represent the artist figure, forced by habit or vocation to express himself in a series of ever-repeating motifs despite not having a specific purpose or subject? Whether or not he has something revelatory to communicate … he lives up to his name by not divulging it. As a result, his silence gives him power over his captors and even his torturer, Dick.”
Symbol
s are the method that the unconscious
uses to communicate important information and guidance to the conscious mind. Fox’s speech from the day before talks about returning a dead mole to his womblike chamber (with food to last it), an image centred on insertion; the first of the new day concentrates on the mole (now miraculously alive – “Live I did…) moving through tunnels seeking the way out (in fact the text shifts to a first-person narrative
) whereas the final section focuses on Fox’s awareness of his twin’s hunger driving his desperate need for extraction. “Taken together, Fox’s three utterances can be seen to construct a scenario
of a self-birth attempted yet blocked.” Maud says he needs to be “opened up”; as he can’t ‘open up’ himself, someone needs to step into that rôle. In Cascando (1962/63) this is what the controller is called, the “Opener”, after his function. His use of the term “passage” to refer to something Fox has said before emphasises that what we are hearing is the “scrabble, scrabble” of his “old twin” trying to find a way out. This culminates in the final cry: “Let me out!”
If Fox embodies the source of raw data available to the creative process, personified by the Animator and his team, what does Fox’s twin represent? Most likely his deepest, darkest memories, memories that he has repressed
(or at least suppressed). Aware that it may be these that the Animator is trying to reach Fox exercises his power over him by refusing to release them to him (“ah but no, no no”); they look as if they may ‘die’ inside him.
The metaphor
ical image of an author giving birth to a work of fiction is not new, nor is the picture of the “tortured artist
”, nor even the assertion that all fiction is thinly veiled biography; in Beckett’s case there are biographical elements embedded throughout all his work and if a writer’s task is to get something out of himself onto the page, that something, that part of himself, could quite poetically be referred to as the twin inside him.
"Influential psychoanalysts
Didier Anzieu
and Bennett Simon as well as a number of Beckett critics hold that Wilfred Bion
's 1950 paper on The Imaginary Twin is part of a fictionalised account of his treatment of Beckett some fifteen years earlier … The suspicion that the young Beckett is patient A of The Imaginary Twin is supported by Bion's description of his inventive analysand as a man who was adept at blurring the boundary between real and imaginary events, who made ambiguous statements that were open to multiple interpretations, who felt that he was inhabited by an unborn twin and imagined himself in a womb afraid to be born.” "The notion that Fox articulates – the me inside an I that can never be merged with the I – becomes the most dominant motif in Beckett’s [later] writing.
“A fox is a crafty, reclusive creature, and Fox seems devoted to producing speech that dances away from any sort of devastating apprehension of meaning. On the other hand, Fox, as a 'fodient rodent', does seem to be trying to burrow towards some deep truth. He is remarkable interested in tunnels; not only does he soap a mole, but he also says at one point that he is taking to the tunnels, and the fœtal or ghost twin that Fox conceals in his belly is also suggestive of his preoccupation with the interior of things ... As a tireless explorer in the labyrinth of language, as an old mole trying to convey difficult insight to the public, Fox may indeed be speaking words worth scanning for hidden meaning.”
Fox speaks of tunnelling for his goal, ‘age upon age, up again, down again, little lichens of my little span, living dead in the stones’. The artist (or creator) as excavator or burrower is another Beckettian leitmotif
. In Proust he speaks of ‘the labours of poetical excavation’ and states that ‘the only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent’. He told the actress Elizabeth Bergner that he was ‘not looking for answers: I am only trying to dig a little deeper’; and he spoke to Lawrence E. Harvey ‘of the attempt to find [the] lost self in images of getting down, getting below the surface, concentrating, listening, getting your ear down so you can hear the infinitesimal murmur. There is a grey struggle, a groping in the dark for a shadow’. The decisive comment comes in The Unnamable
: ‘Are there other pits, deeper down? To which one accedes by mine? Stupid obsession with depth’
In "Rough for Radio II, Beckett represents the process of his own creativity as writer by an 'animator' and his secretary who takes down the utterances of a little man, who is usually gagged and blindfolded, but taken out each day and asked to speak ... [T]he monologue he utters, which is a stream of consciousness
that forms the material of the writer, must be taken down according to strict rules." But the Animator breaks these rules and incorporates an idea of his own into the text. This represents the "slippage between what the artist wants to express and what he is capable of expressing. As Beckett says of Bram van Velde
in the three dialogues, he was 'the first to admit that to be an artst is to fail.'" Bearing this in mind the oft quoted lines from Worstward Ho
take on a greater significance: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Beckett’s interest in all kinds of psychoanalytical writing is well documented. And so, when one sees a name like Anima-tor, an obvious question to ask is: is this character a personification of the character’s anima
? If that is the case then what we have in Rough for Radio II, like Rough for Radio I, is another of Beckett’s “mindscapes”.
Jung
viewed the anima process as being one of the sources of creative ability (which would make Fox the wellspring of ideas, experiences and dreams). “A complex
consists of two parts; an archetypal core … (Animator) … surrounded by a cluster or shell of images, memories, and feelings … (Fox) … that are the result of childhood experiences with human beings. It is as if the archetypal core acts like a magnet, around which events cluster that belong to that archetype. This core adds energy to the complex.”
The Animator is a sensualist who imposes his grossness on his victims, Fox, an intuitive creature who lives by his senses and also his unfortunate female assistant. There is no doubt that Beckett had a sexual side to his nature though – understandably – little is on record as to how this aspect of him affected his work. His writing, although not primarily sexual, never shies away from it but one could never refer to it as ‘titillating’. That sexual urges might have distracted him from his writing is always a possibility. Anthony Cronin
, in his biography, talks about the year when Beckett was struggling to complete Murphy
. Some days he would go for long walks “from nine or ten in the morning until six or seven in the evening, scarcely seeing a soul. Telling MacGreevy
about this, he said it saved masturbation.”
“The anima … holds in it an expression of a man's complex of feelings about women, gained as experience mostly from his mother – or lack of mother – but also from a synthesis of all his female contacts … A negative side to the anima that is “that of the woman/mother who poisons everything, whose … critical remarks hurt and constantly demean. This may live on in a man as self-criticism. A slight twist on this is the man who considers himself an intellectual, but actually is possessed by an anima that does not allow real creative thought, but expresses opinions and fears as clever words (“Have you read the Purgatory, miss, of the divine Florentine
?”) or arguments (“What the devil are you deriding, miss? My hearing? My memory? My good faith?”). This enables the person to feel [they are] always right, and actually avoid any real meeting with other people or life experience. Strangely, such men are often driven to pornography, in a desperate drive to meet denied personal needs.”
Beckett stipulates that the Animator has a “cylindrical ruler”, clearly a phallic image. Dick is in no way a fully-fledged character in his own right, rather an extension of the Animator, a penis substitute (admittedly a Freudian
term). The Stenographer only has a small pencil showing her place in the pecking order. (Although represented by a female she is nevertheless an aspect of a male character). There is a subtext of impotence however. The Animator is trying to get something from Fox that’s not there; he tries to read into it and, eventually, has to ‘spice up’ the text himself. “In the end it comes down to a question of bending the truth to get relief.”
Ultimately the creative process has not been faithful to the truth but does it have to be? More than most writers, Beckett plumbed the depths of his own life for source material. Some sections are transparently biographical (e.g. the scene in Krapp’s Last Tape
where Krapp’s mother dies) but exactly how faithful to the truth only Beckett himself would know. But it is a work of fiction, not a psychological treatise and certainly not biography in the strictest sense; the facts are bent to fit the truth of the play.
Radio drama
Radio drama is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance, broadcast on radio or published on audio media, such as tape or CD. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story...
by Samuel Beckett
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 French in 1961 as Pochade radiophonique and published in Minuit
Les Éditions de Minuit
Les Éditions de Minuit is a French publishing house which has its origins in the French Resistance of World War II and still publishes books today.-History:...
16, November 1975. Beckett translated the work into English shortly before its broadcast on BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
on 13 April 1976. Martin Esslin
Martin Esslin
Martin Julius Esslin OBE was a Hungarian-born English producer and playwright dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of that name...
directed Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
(Animator), 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...
(Stenographer
Shorthand
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...
) and Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
(Fox). The English language version was first published in Ends and Odds (Grove, 1976, Faber, 1977) as Radio II.
Esslin tells us that Beckett himself “regard[ed] the work as unfinished, no more than a rough sketch, and felt, having heard the production that it had ‘not come off’.” Beckett "put the blame on the script but he told Esslin that 'the production which made the Animator and his team start briskly and become more weary and discouraged as time went on should already have started on a high degree of weariness and despair.'"
Synopsis
A man, who we discover has the title “Animator” makes small talk with his young female stenographer: is she ready to get to work, does she have the tools of her trade? The interchange is light and familiar. He then consults a character called Dick; is he on his toes? The man, a mute, doesn’t answer other than to make a swishing noise to which the Animator exclaims, “Wow! Let’s hear it land.” Dick strikes the desk with, what the text refers to as, a “bull’s pizzlePizzle
Pizzle is an old English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis of a non-human animal, now chiefly used in Australia and New Zealand...
”, a whip
Whip
A whip is a tool traditionally used by humans to exert control over animals or other people, through pain compliance or fear of pain, although in some activities whips can be used without use of pain, such as an additional pressure aid in dressage...
made from a bull's penis. (‘Dick’ is, of course, a euphemism
Euphemism
A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...
for penis). It is certainly humorous, though hardly revolutionary, to use a character that is unable to speak in a radio play. What is of interest is that it is his job to encourage Fox to speak.
Dick is instructed to remove a hood
Hood (headgear)
A hood is a kind of headgear that covers most of the head and neck and sometimes the face. They may be worn for protection from the environment, for fashion, as a form of traditional dress or uniform, to prevent the wearer from seeing or to prevent the wearer from being identified.-History and...
from a fourth figure, Fox, followed by his gag
Gag
A gag is usually a device designed to prevent speech, often as a restraint device to stop the subject from calling for help. This is usually done by blocking the mouth, partially or completely, or attempting to prevent the tongue, lips, or jaw from moving in the normal patterns of speech. They are...
, blindfold
Blindfold
A blindfold is a garment, usually of cloth, tied to one's head to cover the eyes to disable the wearer's sight. It can be worn when the eyes are in a closed state and thus prevents the wearer from opening them...
and earplug
Earplug
An earplug is a device that is meant to be inserted in the ear canal to protect the wearer's ears from loud noises or the intrusion of water, foreign bodies, dust or excessive wind.-Protection from water:...
s. The man is kept bound though. As his eyes adjust to the light he recognises “the same old team” – evidently this is not then the first time he has been interrogated
Interrogation
Interrogation is interviewing as commonly employed by officers of the police, military, and Intelligence agencies with the goal of extracting a confession or obtaining information. Subjects of interrogation are often the suspects, victims, or witnesses of a crime...
. Unexpectedly he smiles at the woman and this startles her, which prompts a coarse remark from the Animator: “What is it, miss? Vermin
Vermin
Vermin is a term applied to various animal species regarded by some as pests or nuisances and especially to those associated with the carrying of disease. Since the term is defined in relation to human activities, which species are included will vary from area to area and even person to person...
in the lingerie
Lingerie
Lingerie are fashionable and possibly alluring undergarments.Lingerie usually incorporates one or more flexible, stretchy materials like Lycra, nylon , polyester, satin, lace, silk and sheer fabric which are not typically used in more functional, basic cotton undergarments.The term in the French...
?” This is not the first time he has smiled; she checks to see if it should be recorded but is told not to.
The Stenographer proceeds to read her report on the results from day before but the Animator has her skip practically all of it apart from the first three “exhortations”. Item #3 expresses particular concern regarding the condition and use of the Fox’s gag. It is imperative he make no utterance that cannot be recorded and scrutinized in case what he says “may be it”. “But no word, says Mauthner
Fritz Mauthner
Fritz Mauthner was a journalist and philosopher from Horschitz, Bohemia.He became editor of the Berliner Tageblatts in 1895, but is best known for his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache , published in three parts in 1901 and 1902...
, can have such transcendent
Transcendence (philosophy)
In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages...
power; however torture
Torture
Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...
d, words cannot reveal truth
Truth
Truth has a variety of meanings, such as the state of being in accord with fact or reality. It can also mean having fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal. In a common usage, it also means constancy or sincerity in action or character...
.”
She is stopped just after this and goes on to read Fox’s closing remarks from the day before which refer to him washing and drying a mole
Mole (animal)
Moles are small cylindrical mammals adapted to a subterranean lifestyle. They have velvety fur; tiny or invisible ears and eyes; and short, powerful limbs with large paws oriented for digging. The term is especially and most properly used for the true moles, those of the Talpidae family in the...
in front of a fire before returning the creature to its “chamber with his weight of grubs.” From the expression, “in that instant his little heart was beating still” it could be construed that the mole was actually dead, perhaps killed by accident when he was a child but more likely frozen to death in the blizzard
Blizzard
A blizzard is a severe snowstorm characterized by strong winds. By definition, the difference between blizzard and a snowstorm is the strength of the wind. To be a blizzard, a snow storm must have winds in excess of with blowing or drifting snow which reduces visibility to 400 meters or ¼ mile or...
he has to endure to return it to the ground.
The Animator wants to know if the glare bothers her. The woman says not and adds that heat doesn’t trouble her either but still asks permission to remove her overall. This – predictably – prompts comment from the Auditor: “Staggering! Ah were I but … forty years younger”, another inappropriate remark underlining his lascivious
Lascivious
"Lascivious" is a word synonymous with lustful or lewd or unruly .- Legal usage :In American legal jargon, lascivious is a semi-technical term indicating immoral sexual thoughts or actions. It is often used in the legal description of criminal acts in which some sort of sexual activity is...
nature. The text does not comment on what she is – or is not – wearing underneath but Billie Whitelaw’s observation in a Radio Times
Radio Times
Radio Times is a UK weekly television and radio programme listings magazine, owned by the BBC. It has been published since 1923 by BBC Magazines, which also provides an on-line listings service under the same title...
interview is revealing: “I felt that the girl I play, the stenographer, starts out in uniform and ends with nothing on.” Her response is to reread the end of Fox’s last testimony: “Ah my God my God [Blow with pencil] My God,” words that remind one of someone’s cries while in a state of sexual ecstasy but presented in the least erotic of tones. Having worked with him before she is doubtless well aware of the nature of the man she is dealing with – someone who could undress her with his eyes no matter what she was wearing – and his hidden agenda. Her response annoys him. He calls her a “Crabbed youth,” before proceeding.
She recommends “a touch of kindness” be applied to Fox, “perhaps just a hint.” The Animator says he appreciates the sentiment but is obdurate: they stick with his method (despite its obvious lack of results).
After further prompting by Dick, Fox begins his second monologue
Monologue
In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
describing a life underground (perhaps the mole’s he spoke of before), “living dead in the stones.” He fades away but, when threatened with the whip again, moves onto his third outpouring, where he mentions a brother – the first family member he has spoken of – his twin, actually inside himself and hungry. Someone named “Maud” – the only person he has ever mentioned by name – has proposed a Caesarean section
Caesarean section
A Caesarean section, is a surgical procedure in which one or more incisions are made through a mother's abdomen and uterus to deliver one or more babies, or, rarely, to remove a dead fetus...
volunteering to nurse the twin when born. At this point Fox breaks down and starts weeping. The Animator remains undecided as to whether this should be recorded. Up until this point he has been adamant that only Fox’s words are relevant.
A final stoke of Dick’s pizzle brings only one line. Fox – or more likely the mole/twin – cries out: “Let me out! Peter out in the stones!”
In a change of tactic, the Animator quietly tries to make clear to Fox what he really wants: “More variety! … [A]stonish me.”, He even hints to him that he might try being creative with the truth, the very notion of which shocks the Stenographer. It may seem at first look that the bound protagonist is the captive, but by this stage of the play, the audience is beginning to realise that the Stenographer and Animator are the ones who are truly captive. They hang upon every word Fox emits. The Animator even confesses that he doesn’t know precisely what he is looking for other than he’ll know it when he hears it, unlike Bam in What Where
What Where
What Where is Samuel Beckett's last play produced following a request for a new work for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. It was written between February and March 1983 initially in French as Quoi où and translated by Beckett himself....
who is after specific details. It is becoming clearer that the Animator is seeking something in Fox that most likely isn’t there.
Since physical violence hasn’t proved successful, nor has gentle persuasion, the Animator modifies his approach once more: “Dick! – no, wait. Kiss him, miss, perhaps that will stir some fibre … on his stinker of a mouth … Till it bleeds! Kiss it white!” Fox howls and faints.
Since nothing more is to be gotten from Fox the two review the evidence, the tear – he had shed a number the previous winter – and Maud’s willingness to act as a wet nurse
Wet nurse
A wet nurse is a woman who is used to breast feed and care for another's child. Wet nurses are used when the mother is unable or chooses not to nurse the child herself. Wet-nursed children may be known as "milk-siblings", and in some cultures the families are linked by a special relationship of...
. The Stenographer highlights the point that, for Maud to be able to produce milk pointed to the fact she is likely already pregnant. The Animator drools over the image of a milk-engorged breast: “One can almost see it!”
The woman wonders out loud who might be the father. This finally fires Animator’s imagination: “May we have that passage again, miss?” She reads it verbatim but he objects insisting she is omitting the phrase, “between two kisses.” She tries to stand her ground but he gets angry and demands she amend her notes accordingly effectively “insert[ing] the Stenographer (and her kissing of Fox) into Fox’s discourse.” (This is in violation of Item #2 of the “exhortations”). She acquiesces and timidly reads back the text. Finally, something to appeal to his crude tastes.
He is now satisfied and is hopeful that by the next day their work may very well be done. “Don’t cry, miss, dry your pretty eyes and smile at me. Tomorrow, who knows, we may be free.” This reminds us of the ending of Radio I: “Tomorrow … noon.” Everything will be better tomorrow. Beckett brings many of his characters to this brink (e.g. Clov at the end of Endgame
Endgame (play)
Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. It was originally written in French ; as was his custom, Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the...
) but for these trapped souls the future only turns out to be an endless succession of today's.
Interpretation
Scholars have demonstrated a fondness for grouping Beckett’s works according to perceived themes: memory plays, political plays, ghost plays and so on. Rough for Radio II can easily sustain a political interpretation (one wonders how much it influenced Pinter’s own One for the Road, for example) but alternative readings can also be made of the other so-called ‘political’ plays. These plays, CatastropheCatastrophe (play)
Catastrophe is a short play by Samuel Beckett, written in French in 1982 at the invitation of A.I.D.A. and “[f]irst produced in the Avignon Festival … Beckett considered it ‘massacred.’” It is one of his few plays to deal with a political theme and, arguably, holds the title of Beckett's most...
and What Where can also be grouped along with Rough for Theatre II
Rough for Theatre II
Rough for Theatre II is a short play by Samuel Beckett. “Although this discarded piece of theatre is dated ‘circa 1960’ in End and Odds, a manuscript from two years earlier exists in Trinity College, Dublin, Library...
and Rough for Radio II as ‘procedural’ plays.
Whereas many of Beckett’s work have a circular aspect, these four plays all have a linear core; each can be, or is, stopped when certain conditions are met. In the case of Catastrophe, when the living statue meets the director’s aesthetic criteria; in What Where, when one of the interrogators extracts the required information; in Rough for Theatre II, when a decision is made as to Croker’s future and in Rough for Radio II, if an unknown sign or set of words is provided by Fox. Each play has its own process, procedures that have to be followed. All evoke bureaucracy
Bureaucracy
A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a governmental or organization who implement the rules, laws, and functions of their institution, and are occasionally characterized by officialism and red tape.-Weberian bureaucracy:...
even though in What Where there is no physical paperwork per se.
Robert Sandarg has put forward this short possible synopsis of the play:
- “Rough for Radio II may concern a criticLiterary criticismLiterary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
torturing an author. The Animator speaks of SterneLaurence SterneLaurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
and DanteDante AlighieriDurante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
, ‘old spectres from the days of book reviewBook reviewA book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and merit. A book review could be a primary source opinion piece, summary review or scholarly review. It is often carried out in periodicals, as school work, or on the internet. Reviews are also often...
ing’, and the twin which Fox carries monstrously within himself could be his book.”
As regards a ‘true’ interpretation a good starting point is Martin Esslin’s comment that the play is “about the artistic process” itself which Beckett by no means found easy; his output is respectable but he was not exactly prolific. “There are two moments worthwhile in writing,” he summed up to a friend, “the one where you start and the other where you throw it in the waste-paper basket.”
The play interestingly reverses the act of creation of a radio play: “instead of the sequence {text → speech → electromagnetic vibration
Radio waves
Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum longer than infrared light. Radio waves have frequencies from 300 GHz to as low as 3 kHz, and corresponding wavelengths from 1 millimeter to 100 kilometers. Like all other electromagnetic waves,...
}, we have the sequence {twitch of whip → speech → text} –first the slap of the bull’s pizzle on flesh, then Fox’s words, then the stenographer’s transcript.” To produce this article, this author – and by extension those authors quoted – first tuned into a radio broadcast (or put on a recording of one), listened to the words and then converted his understanding of them into text.
Fox
"Which is more painful," I asked him, "writing or not writing?""They're both painful, but the pain is different."
An old adage
Adage
An adage is a short but memorable saying which holds some important fact of experience that is considered true by many people, or that has gained some credibility through its long use....
says that people hear what they want to hear; they home in on what’s relevant to them. Animator is not really listening to Fox any more than a great number of Beckett’s audiences over the years haven’t listened to him: Godot sounds like God so he must be God, mustn’t he?
Fox sounds like ‘vox’, the 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...
word for ‘voice’, but in this case it is not unreasonable to assume this is intentional on Beckett’s part considering his only requirement is to give voice to that certain something that will satisfy his interrogator. It is worth mentioning that in the French original the interrogatee is still named ‘Fox’ rather than ‘Renard’ perhaps because Beckett wanted his audience to make the Fox/Vox connection first. The French for ‘voice’ is ‘voix’.
“Fox’s stream of words presents a series of puzzling images. Should the listener simply consider each of these – the soaping of the mole, his drying by the embers, the mention of a parasitic twin
Parasitic twin
A parasitic twin is the result of the processes that produce vanishing twins and conjoined twins, and may represent a continuum between the two...
brother growing within him, a mother figure named Maud – as pictogram
Pictogram
A pictograph, also called pictogram or pictogramme is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance.Pictography is a...
s, which escape interpretation? Fox only speaks under duress. Does he represent the artist figure, forced by habit or vocation to express himself in a series of ever-repeating motifs despite not having a specific purpose or subject? Whether or not he has something revelatory to communicate … he lives up to his name by not divulging it. As a result, his silence gives him power over his captors and even his torturer, Dick.”
Symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
s are the method that the unconscious
Collective unconscious
Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. It is proposed to be a part of the unconscious mind, expressed in humanity and all life forms with nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche autonomously organizes experience...
uses to communicate important information and guidance to the conscious mind. Fox’s speech from the day before talks about returning a dead mole to his womblike chamber (with food to last it), an image centred on insertion; the first of the new day concentrates on the mole (now miraculously alive – “Live I did…) moving through tunnels seeking the way out (in fact the text shifts to a first-person narrative
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
) whereas the final section focuses on Fox’s awareness of his twin’s hunger driving his desperate need for extraction. “Taken together, Fox’s three utterances can be seen to construct a scenario
Scenario
A scenario is a synoptical collage of an event or series of actions and events. In the Commedia dell'arte it was an outline of entrances, exits, and action describing the plot of a play that was literally pinned to the back of the scenery...
of a self-birth attempted yet blocked.” Maud says he needs to be “opened up”; as he can’t ‘open up’ himself, someone needs to step into that rôle. In Cascando (1962/63) this is what the controller is called, the “Opener”, after his function. His use of the term “passage” to refer to something Fox has said before emphasises that what we are hearing is the “scrabble, scrabble” of his “old twin” trying to find a way out. This culminates in the final cry: “Let me out!”
If Fox embodies the source of raw data available to the creative process, personified by the Animator and his team, what does Fox’s twin represent? Most likely his deepest, darkest memories, memories that he has repressed
Memory inhibition
In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information. Memory inhibition is a critical component of an effective memory system. For example, imagine if, when a person tried to remember where he had parked his car, every place he had ever parked his car came to mind;...
(or at least suppressed). Aware that it may be these that the Animator is trying to reach Fox exercises his power over him by refusing to release them to him (“ah but no, no no”); they look as if they may ‘die’ inside him.
The metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
ical image of an author giving birth to a work of fiction is not new, nor is the picture of the “tortured artist
Tortured artist
The tortured artist is a stock character and real-life stereotype who is in constant torment due to frustrations with art and other people. Tortured artists feel alienated and misunderstood due to the perceived ignorance or neglect of others who do not understand them and the things they feel are...
”, nor even the assertion that all fiction is thinly veiled biography; in Beckett’s case there are biographical elements embedded throughout all his work and if a writer’s task is to get something out of himself onto the page, that something, that part of himself, could quite poetically be referred to as the twin inside him.
"Influential psychoanalysts
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
Didier Anzieu
Didier Anzieu
-Life:Anzieu studied philosophy and was a pupil of Daniel Lagache, before undertaking his first psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan. Then, after discovering that Lacan had also treated his mother , he began a second analysis with Georges Favez...
and Bennett Simon as well as a number of Beckett critics hold that Wilfred Bion
Wilfred Bion
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO was an influential British psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965....
's 1950 paper on The Imaginary Twin is part of a fictionalised account of his treatment of Beckett some fifteen years earlier … The suspicion that the young Beckett is patient A of The Imaginary Twin is supported by Bion's description of his inventive analysand as a man who was adept at blurring the boundary between real and imaginary events, who made ambiguous statements that were open to multiple interpretations, who felt that he was inhabited by an unborn twin and imagined himself in a womb afraid to be born.” "The notion that Fox articulates – the me inside an I that can never be merged with the I – becomes the most dominant motif in Beckett’s [later] writing.
“A fox is a crafty, reclusive creature, and Fox seems devoted to producing speech that dances away from any sort of devastating apprehension of meaning. On the other hand, Fox, as a 'fodient rodent', does seem to be trying to burrow towards some deep truth. He is remarkable interested in tunnels; not only does he soap a mole, but he also says at one point that he is taking to the tunnels, and the fœtal or ghost twin that Fox conceals in his belly is also suggestive of his preoccupation with the interior of things ... As a tireless explorer in the labyrinth of language, as an old mole trying to convey difficult insight to the public, Fox may indeed be speaking words worth scanning for hidden meaning.”
Fox speaks of tunnelling for his goal, ‘age upon age, up again, down again, little lichens of my little span, living dead in the stones’. The artist (or creator) as excavator or burrower is another Beckettian leitmotif
Leitmotif
A leitmotif , sometimes written leit-motif, is a musical term , referring to a recurring theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical idea of idée fixe...
. In Proust he speaks of ‘the labours of poetical excavation’ and states that ‘the only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent’. He told the actress Elizabeth Bergner that he was ‘not looking for answers: I am only trying to dig a little deeper’; and he spoke to Lawrence E. Harvey ‘of the attempt to find [the] lost self in images of getting down, getting below the surface, concentrating, listening, getting your ear down so you can hear the infinitesimal murmur. There is a grey struggle, a groping in the dark for a shadow’. The decisive comment comes in The Unnamable
The Unnamable (novel)
The Unnamable is a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett. It is the third and final entry in Beckett's "Trilogy" of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L'Innommable and later adapted by the author into English...
: ‘Are there other pits, deeper down? To which one accedes by mine? Stupid obsession with depth’
In "Rough for Radio II, Beckett represents the process of his own creativity as writer by an 'animator' and his secretary who takes down the utterances of a little man, who is usually gagged and blindfolded, but taken out each day and asked to speak ... [T]he monologue he utters, which is a stream of consciousness
Internal monologue
Internal monologue, also known as inner voice, internal speech, or verbal stream of consciousness is thinking in words. It also refers to the semi-constant internal monologue one has with oneself at a conscious or semi-conscious level....
that forms the material of the writer, must be taken down according to strict rules." But the Animator breaks these rules and incorporates an idea of his own into the text. This represents the "slippage between what the artist wants to express and what he is capable of expressing. As Beckett says of Bram van Velde
Bram van Velde
Bram van Velde was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction...
in the three dialogues, he was 'the first to admit that to be an artst is to fail.'" Bearing this in mind the oft quoted lines from Worstward Ho
Worstward Ho
Worstward Ho is a prose piece by Samuel Beckett the title of which is a parody of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho!. Written in English in 1983, it is the penultimate novella by Beckett....
take on a greater significance: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Animator
“The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.” - Carl Jung (Return to the Simple Life, 1941)Beckett’s interest in all kinds of psychoanalytical writing is well documented. And so, when one sees a name like Anima-tor, an obvious question to ask is: is this character a personification of the character’s anima
Anima (Jung)
The anima and animus, in Carl Jung's school of analytical psychology, are the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind, as opposed to both the theriomorphic and inferior-function of the shadow archetypes, as well as the abstract symbol sets that formulate the archetype of the...
? If that is the case then what we have in Rough for Radio II, like Rough for Radio I, is another of Beckett’s “mindscapes”.
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...
viewed the anima process as being one of the sources of creative ability (which would make Fox the wellspring of ideas, experiences and dreams). “A complex
Complex (psychology)
A complex is a core pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the personal unconscious organized around a common theme, such as power or status...
consists of two parts; an archetypal core … (Animator) … surrounded by a cluster or shell of images, memories, and feelings … (Fox) … that are the result of childhood experiences with human beings. It is as if the archetypal core acts like a magnet, around which events cluster that belong to that archetype. This core adds energy to the complex.”
The Animator is a sensualist who imposes his grossness on his victims, Fox, an intuitive creature who lives by his senses and also his unfortunate female assistant. There is no doubt that Beckett had a sexual side to his nature though – understandably – little is on record as to how this aspect of him affected his work. His writing, although not primarily sexual, never shies away from it but one could never refer to it as ‘titillating’. That sexual urges might have distracted him from his writing is always a possibility. Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
, in his biography, talks about the year when Beckett was struggling to complete Murphy
Murphy (novel)
Murphy, first published in 1938, is a novel as well as the third work of prose fiction by the Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett. The book was Beckett's second published prose work after the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks and his unpublished first novel Dream of Fair to...
. Some days he would go for long walks “from nine or ten in the morning until six or seven in the evening, scarcely seeing a soul. Telling MacGreevy
Thomas MacGreevy
Thomas MacGreevy was a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism. A poet, he was also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and served on the first Irish Arts Council .-Early life:MacGreevy was born in County Kerry, the son of a policeman and a primary...
about this, he said it saved masturbation.”
“The anima … holds in it an expression of a man's complex of feelings about women, gained as experience mostly from his mother – or lack of mother – but also from a synthesis of all his female contacts … A negative side to the anima that is “that of the woman/mother who poisons everything, whose … critical remarks hurt and constantly demean. This may live on in a man as self-criticism. A slight twist on this is the man who considers himself an intellectual, but actually is possessed by an anima that does not allow real creative thought, but expresses opinions and fears as clever words (“Have you read the Purgatory, miss, of the divine Florentine
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
?”) or arguments (“What the devil are you deriding, miss? My hearing? My memory? My good faith?”). This enables the person to feel [they are] always right, and actually avoid any real meeting with other people or life experience. Strangely, such men are often driven to pornography, in a desperate drive to meet denied personal needs.”
Beckett stipulates that the Animator has a “cylindrical ruler”, clearly a phallic image. Dick is in no way a fully-fledged character in his own right, rather an extension of the Animator, a penis substitute (admittedly a Freudian
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
term). The Stenographer only has a small pencil showing her place in the pecking order. (Although represented by a female she is nevertheless an aspect of a male character). There is a subtext of impotence however. The Animator is trying to get something from Fox that’s not there; he tries to read into it and, eventually, has to ‘spice up’ the text himself. “In the end it comes down to a question of bending the truth to get relief.”
Ultimately the creative process has not been faithful to the truth but does it have to be? More than most writers, Beckett plumbed the depths of his own life for source material. Some sections are transparently biographical (e.g. the scene in Krapp’s Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue"...
where Krapp’s mother dies) but exactly how faithful to the truth only Beckett himself would know. But it is a work of fiction, not a psychological treatise and certainly not biography in the strictest sense; the facts are bent to fit the truth of the play.