"Plumber at nine? Ah yes, the waste. Words. Saturday… nothing. Sunday… Sunday… nothing all day. Nothing, all day nothing. All day all night nothing. Not a sound. (sea)" (Beckett 121)
The disjunction between persona- the constructed self- and the performance space of the screen
When words are repeated out of their context, do they have meaning? Does language merely represent the inability to communicate reality-truth 'in-of-itself', and is silence more authentic? Is the solution to the issue of mediation ultimately the embracing of words as essentially debris of an imperfect mind, analogous to bodily waste we excrete?
Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" addresses these issues in the modern context through the character of Krapp. Even though many versions of him exist throughout various temporal moments in the past, the ‘true’ Krapp- the one that matters to the audience, anyway- is the one of the solely material- the figure acting on the “now” space of the stage.
“Krapp’s Last Tape”, thus, speculates about what happens when the multiple selves we construct throughout time are channeled through the medium- analogous to a spiritual medium- of the radio into the present. Multiple diegetic levels co-exist within the play, interacting, interfering and causing numerous problems for the Krapp of the endless coughs and banana fetish. Whereas the Krapp of the present moment is bodily, residing in the "Now!", the 39 year-old Krapp is a product of his times- a thinking creature who mentally evens out everything, reflecting constantly and using unnecessarily poetic words to imbue memory with substance.
The old Krapp looks at the recorded selves from his earlier years and realizes none of it matters- all that is, essentially, is the here and now of the body present on the stage 'crapping' syllables into space, fully in tune with the bodily (im)pulse.
The spool serves as a thread-like structure seemingly reuniting the multiple Krapps and providing a kind of disjointed continuity- on one hand, the spool is a spiral structure, circular and holistic. However, it serves as the medium in which disjointed moments of time can be conjured out at any moment. It thus has a paradoxical existence, both taking apart and putting together.In the context of the play, however, it can be considered as the medium by which Krapp of the Now reconciles with his numerous selves of the past.
Recalled to the present, these selves become phantom voices calling out disembodied from the body of the machine. They have no context, like Krapp's disgruntled readings of his labels "Memorable equinox... Farewell to- love" (13). The spool, in a way, shows us how technology can confuse yet reconstruct the self- once we realize that what it conjures up may not necessarily be useful to us anymore and learn to put the numerous tapes of our past away and reside in the present, on the life imperative. The body, in a way, becomes the resistance against mediation and the route wherein Krapp escapes the spiral of constructed selves the spools conjure into an authentic performance space of the screen.
