Ill Seen Ill Said and “Ma”

Masaki Kondo

As W. B. Yeats’ lines from “The Tower” have long lived in Beckett’s memory, Hawk’s Well must also have impressed Beckett’s young imagination with an idea and concept of empty time and space on the stage as well as Synge’s The Well of the Saints. Even if Beckett had had no contact with the concept of “Ma” in Japanese culture, particularly Zen and Noh, it is well conceived that he may have kept it in his mind or have unconsciously been imprinted the sense through W. B. Yeats who was deeply influenced by Japanese Noh play. Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said（ISIS） has a symbolic similarity with Noh play in its pure, silent action suggesting a ghost. The person who is seen or ill seen herself may be a vision. A summer house is an extinguishing point of time and space which are emptiness as well as neant achieved after the extinction and eternity of time at midnight in Mallarmes’s Igiture. ISIS contains a concept of “Ma” in its visionary presentation of a woman’s life past and present, the gap between which is ill seen. Silence and immobility pursued in ISIS are the culminating virtue of play in Noh as instructed by Zeami, Noh master, and the limited and unlimited world of time and space of ISIS like a face of a watch is an image set between visibility and invisibility, which is another “Ma” of perception.

Professor Emeritus Meiji University

Borderless Beckett: International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006 September 29 – October 1