ABSTRACT
Beckett is, above all, a master of dramatic speech. In the course of renewing the theatrical experience as a whole, he has restored to the words spoken on a stage — traditionally the dominant element in a theatrical experience — the self-sufficiency, the sculptural quality of poetry. Any modern playwright who wants his plays to be something rather than to be about something must inevitably confront this obstacle: that the words he uses are in common coinage and automatically convey established meanings; meanings, that is to say, which are either straightforward pieces of information without association (`she went out at five o’clock') or whose associations have become stock (`blood is thicker than water’). When Beckett turned to writing in French it was no doubt partly to escape the particularly dense mass of stock association with which the English language is burdened. T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry both made determined attempts to restore ‘poetry’ to the English stage, but they seem to have misunderstood the nature of the difficulty; at any rate they merely heightened and decorated the surface manner in which their characters communicated without achieving any substantial change in what they communicated. Curiously enough, Eliot himself had already done for verse what he failed to do for the theatre and what Beckett must have learnt as much from The Waste Land as from anywhere else. For where Joyce took the more obvious course of jerking the English language to its feet and making it take part in orgies, Eliot, with more subtlety, made it lie down and die. And this was what Beckett had clearly learnt by the time he returned to English with his own translation of Waiting for Godot: that words could be rescued from their subservience to a single meaning — the prosaic flatness of naturalism — or to a stock association — the straitjacket of cliche — if they ceased pretending to be vehicles of communication between the characters.
