“Close your eyes and listen to it”: schizophonia and ventriloquism in Beckett’s plays

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of the recorded voice in Beckett's drama, and more specifically in his second and later theatre, after the mid-fifties. It investigates Beckett's use of recorded voice technologies as a technique to materialise the characters’ split consciousness and schizoid voice. With the advent of sound technology in the mid-fifties, Beckett appears to return to psychoanalytical concepts which had informed his works in the early thirties, now transforming and reinterpreting them from a medial perspective. Notably, the paper argues that Beckett replaces the psychoanalytical approach of the schizoid voice by a concrete illustration, materialized in the form of the “mediated voice”, via the technologies of recording tape and the radio. To do this, the paper focuses on Beckett's shifting interest from schizophrenia to “schizophonia”, a concept coined by R. Murray Schafer to denote the split between the sound and its source. It thus analyses the “ventriloquism” that animates Beckett’s dramatic characters arguing for a growing interest in exteriority and alterity.

Keywords

• mediated voice
• schizophonia
• ventriloquism
• technology
• alterity
• exteriority