Ghostly figures haunt Samuel
Beckett’s later plays for theatre and television. In his television play …but the clouds…, a man called M
used to ‘beg’ of a supposedly deceased woman to appear in his
‘sanctum’, a request that succeeded only once or twice a thousand
times. This ritual could be regarded as a séance. M, like a
television director, is now trying to reproduce the woman’s image. He
might be seen as a medium who will materialize her spirit, using the
modern optical technology. Although that is seemingly his solitary act,
the audience of the television programme would be involved in the
séance as involuntary sitters. It is noteworthy that, in the
1870s, a famous English medium, Florence Cook, materialized the spirit
of Katie King applying the technique similar to camera obscura, which originally
meant ‘dark small room’ in Latin. Camera
obscura is a primitive optical apparatus used to project images
through a pinhole from a dark room. M’s attempt might be a
modernisation of camera obscura,
in that he projects the image of the dead woman through a lens of the
television camera from his dark little sanctum.
Interestingly, the woman in …but the
clouds…quotes from W. B. Yeats poem, “The Tower”: “…clouds…but
the clouds…of the sky…”. Yeats, who actually wrote a séance play
called The Words upon the Window-Pane,
recalls the dead in the poem. “The Tower” is closely related to his
book of occult philosophy, A Vision,
in which he used the word ‘phantasmagoria’ when he discussed the
‘dreaming back’ by the Spirit. Phantasmagoria was originally an
improved version of the magic lantern invented Etienne Gaspard Robert
(later called Robertson). It artificially represented ghosts to attract
the audience’s frightened attention in the dark room. Yeats regarded
the phantasmagoria as a technique for visualising the images of
spirits.
In this paper, I shall argue that …but
the clouds… is Beckett’s television version of Yeats’s
phantasmagoria. Beckett apparently transmuted the most daily medium of
television into another medium: a spiritual one.
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