9 - Toying with the Spool: Happiness in Old Age in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape

Summary

From the time of its publication, it has been frequently claimed that the protagonist in Samuel Beckett’s short play Krapp’s Last Tape (originally published in 1958, and later translated by the author into French) is a “pathetic old man” (Knowlson and Pilling 84), “helpless and awkward” (Reinton 92), his life “a string of aimless, inconsequential, and monotonous events” (Brustein 192). Krapp’s habits, it has been pointed out, are stale and tedious, his mind in decline, and he has been seen as a media junkie addicted to his tape machine – his “masturbatory agent,” as Beckett calls it in a note (Theatrical Notebooks 67). In addition, his name suggests “residue and waste” and that “the dregs are all Krapp has left at the end of his life” (Campbell 64). As a sixty-nine-year-old, he is described in the stage directions as “a wearish old man,” “hard of hearing,” “very near-sighted,” with a “cracked voice,” and with a foible for bananas and alcohol. A rather comical figure, his appearance might make us think of Beckett’s well-known quip “nothing is funnier than unhappiness” (Beckett, Dramatic Works 101). This unhappiness is closely connected with his old age.

One of the central tenets of Beckett scholarship is that his works tend to represent processes of worsening and states of worseness, what the French philosopher Alain Badiou has called “empirage.” The way Beckett often describes old people as physically and mentally decrepit makes this age seem an eminent figure of this process. Kathryn White, in her book Beckett and Decay, thus argues that Beckett’s “representation of the aged is a horrific study of the implications of growing old and the undesirability of reaching those twilight years, when all we have to look forward to is bad health, isolation and the overwhelming need to reach the grave” (White 22). Other researchers have, however, been less negative, seeing old age less in terms of biology and death. Elizabeth Barry, who rightly argues that “old age – or at least the tropes associated with it – are everywhere in Beckett,” highlights the relationship between old age and narrative, referring to Beckett’s own statement (in a conversation with Lawrence Shainberg) that “with old age, the more possibilities diminish, the better chance you have” (Barry 206).