Impossible Voices: Phenomenologies of Sound in Beckett

Abstract

"Impossible Voices: Phenomenologies of Sound in Beckett" is the first sustained exploration of sound in the prose and drama of Samuel Beckett. Bringing the field of sound studies to bear on Beckett's works, this dissertation argues that Beckett's treatment of inner speech--the sounds and voices in the "mind's ear"--is implicated in an aesthetics not only of failure, but of impossibility. The "impossible voices" of the dissertation's title are the "dead voices" or "human murmurs" of Beckett's purgatorial soundscapes. These sounds, qua manifestations of inner speech, cannot be fully exteriorized. This unbridgeable gap between inner speech and sounded speech within the self finds it analogue in a breakdown of communication between self and other, as shown in the three major plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days. Where conversation in these purgatorial worlds often asserts or provides mere presence, meaning is found by apophatic means such as noise, catachresis, and the ineffable. The organization of the chapters of this dissertation indicates a move from embodied voices--speaker and listener in two separate, functioning bodies--to a dynamic in which a disembodied voice speaks to a body in a "listening posture." The listener's vocal expression, moreover--if it exists--is secondary to that of the voice. This study thus makes a case for the importance of sound in the Beckett canon, using phenomenological readings to show that the impossible in Beckett is bound up with sound.