Words and Music by Samuel Beckett

First published: 1962, in Evergreen Review

First produced: 1962, BBC Third Programme, London

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: Unspecified

Principal Characters:

• Words
• Music
• Croak, their “Lord”

The Play

The plot of Samuel Beckett’s radio play Words and Music is at once dismayingly simple in its minimalist reductiveness and disturbingly complex in the ways in which the play’s basic components are combined. The play opens with only two of its three characters present. While Music (comprising a small orchestra) tunes up, Words breaks in rather peremptorily to rehearse his speech on one of Beckett’s favorite subjects, Sloth. As soon becomes clear, the relationship between Words and Music is antagonistic; each implores, loathes, interrupts, and seeks to gain ascendancy over the other until they hear the sound of Croak, in his bedroom slippers, approaching from the distance. Croak arrives as lord and peacemaker, addressing Words and Music as “my comforts,” “my balms,” and more familiarly, and comically, as Joe and Bob, whom he advises to be “friends.”

After rhetorically begging their forgiveness for his being late and then offering some vague fragments of explanation (“on stairs,” “in tower”), Croak considers their theme for the evening. After some thought, he decides on love. With only one exception, Croak expresses himself elliptically by means of sighs, groans, single words, short (usually two-word) phrases, and by thumping his club. Called on first, Words responds by repeating the same speech he had been rehearsing at the very beginning of the play, substituting “love” for “sloth” wherever necessary. Neither Croak’s sigh nor his thumping dissuades Words from continuing until Croak thumps his club a second time and calls for Bob (Music). Even then Words only falters; he does not stop until Croak summons Music more forcefully: “Bob!” Only then does Words cease, and Music begin, playing “as before.” Croak, perhaps displeased by Words’s incessant protestations and pleadings, demands that Music play more loudly, which Music does, thereby drowning out Words but also losing his own earlier expressiveness.

At this point there is a pause which signals that the play’s first cycle is over and the next about to begin, repeating the first in general outline though not in all particulars. Croak’s gentle summons, “Joe sweet,” evokes more words from Words, which in turn evoke more groans from Croak until Croak stops Words and again calls on Music. (As before, he issues his summons twice, first gently, “Bob dear,” then more insistently and effectively, a simple “Bob!”). Again Music plays, and again Words protests (“no,” “please”), all leading to the inevitable pause. The second cycle differs from the first in two important if not entirely obvious ways. One is that Words’s protestations are less audible than before; the other and more important difference is that Words is not merely repeating the speech he had rehearsed earlier. His speech now is delivered hesitantly; the numerous pauses suggest that the words here are improvised rather than repeated. Neither these changes nor Music’s playing satisfies the still-anguished Croak. Having heard how little “love” has to offer, he changes the subject to “age.”

The ensuing third cycle is much shorter than the previous two. Words now appears to be truly at a loss and as a result quickly gets the thump. Music fares no better, and Croak, displeased and still demanding, orders them to perform “together . . . Together, dogs!” Each improvises and in turn follows the other’s lead as best he can as individually and together they try to please their imperious master. Then, with Words “trying to sing” and Music willing to accompany, they compose a quite passable poem, to which Croak responds with something other than his characteristic groan, repeating the enigmatic phrase “the face” five times. Neither their success nor Croak’s memory lasts, however. Music and Words begin to bicker anew, yet despite his own faltering (evidenced by frequent pauses and ellipses) and despite Croak’s renewed groans, Words perseveres and evokes an even more emotional response from his lordly audience, the name “Lily!” His endeavor nearly comes to an abrupt end when Music interrupts Words’s highly descriptive (but also remarkably vague and hackneyed) narrative with an “irrepressible burst of spreading and subsiding music.”

In keeping with the tenor of the entire play, Beckett makes no attempt to explain why the outburst is “irrepressible.” Is it Music’s own emotionally charged response to Words’s words or his victory over his antagonist? Either way, Music’s “triumph and conclusion” proves short-lived. Words, still persevering (and far more patient than earlier), resumes his tale. Again he falters, but Music quickly picks up the lead, discreetly offering a tune to which Words tentatively adapts his phrases, each growing more confident as they proceed, until finally together they compose a second poem:

Then down a little wayThrough the trashTowards where . . .All dark no beggingNo giving no wordsNo sense no need . . .Through the scumDown a little wayTo whence one glimpseOf that wellhead.

The poem over, Words is “shocked,” though whether by this uncharacteristic harmony of Words and Music or by Croak’s own ambiguous response—letting his club fall, he shuffles haltingly away, presumably back to the tower “whence” he came— remains unclear. More surprising still is Music’s “Brief rude retort” to Words’s imploring (but also Croak-like) “Bob,” followed by Words’s again Croak-like command, “Bob!,” which Music does obediently heed, supplying a reprise of earlier musical phrases which Music then repeats “as before or only very slightly varied.” The play ends with neither Words nor Music but instead with yet another pause, followed by Words’s wordless but yet again Croak-like “Deep sigh.”

Dramatic Devices

Words and Music belongs to the Theater of the Absurd. Its preoccupation with the existentialist theme of the pain and anguish of having to live in an absurd world is reinforced by the manner in which Beckett presents his material: the isolation and cartoonishness of the characters, the antirealism of the setting, the nonrational language and the circular plot. The play’s characters simply “are.” They have no past and no future; they exist in an endlessly repeatable present and solely in terms of the words by which they are designated. The play’s setting is similarly rendered: placeless, timeless, and meaningless—a nonplace or, given Croak’s slippers, a dreamscape, the perfect setting for Beckett’s existential nightmare.

The dialogue is equally barren, a collection of croaks, groans, individual words, and brief verbal and musical phrases (the latter composed by John Beckett, the author’s cousin). The pauses do not so much punctuate or even interrupt the play’s various sounds as call attention to that overwhelming silence or void against and within which Croak, Words, and Music play their parts. This existential silence, figured in the pause, becomes a character in its own right, a palpable and disconcerting presence. Beckett treats words and music in similar fashion: They are not so much allegorized as foregrounded, treated not as the means to meaning but as an object in space, not as tools used by the characters but as characters themselves. Beckett used music in a number of his earlier plays, including the radio plays All That Fall (pr., pb. 1957) and Embers (pr., pb. 1959), but in Words and Music and in his next radio play, Cascando (pr., pb. 1963), music emerges from the background to assume a new status. No longer merely a means for heightening the dramatic effect—as in melodrama—it emerges in dialogue with language, each qualifying as well as clarifying the essential nature of the other.

The fact that Words and Music is a radio play is also significant, for as Martin Esslin has pointed out, “Beckett’s preoccupation with the process of human consciousness as an incessant verbal flow . . . here found its logical culmination, one which only radio could provide.” Writing for radio enabled Beckett to focus more intensively on language than ever before, to equate it with character and to emphasize it as sound, or noise, and to give it its own autonomous existence by freeing it from the need for a physical speaker. Instead of a human character, Beckett offers a disembodied voice, the essence of humanity, which exists solely in the imagination of its audience rather than as a character on a realistic stage. In this way Beckett strips away all that is superfluous—body, social trappings, and so forth—in order to focus on the human figure as at once absurd and tragic, a mere word away from not existing at all.

Critical Context

Although Beckett claims to have written his plays solely as diversions and only when he found himself blocked in the writing of the novels he contends are far more important, his dramatic pieces form an integral rather than subordinate part of his aesthetic achievement. This was already clear to others at least as early as 1969, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for having produced a “body of work that, in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exultation.” The indisputable originality of Beckett’s plays and fictions involves his willingness to explore and perfect the formal means by which the “destitution” that he has placed at the very center of his art can be depicted. As he wrote in his 1931 study of Proust, “The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. . . . And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.” Beckett has progressively narrowed and intensified his focus in a steadily contractive movement toward a static, nonrational discourse, toward a single permuted image, toward a distilled or attenuated form barren of content—thus, the typically Beckettian movement toward brevity, indeed toward the ultimate diminishment that is “nothing” itself. From the relative fullness of his earliest plays, Beckett turned to other, less conventional means, especially radio. All That Fall, his first radio play, is fairly conventional. Embers and Words and Music, on the other hand, show how quickly Beckett began to exploit radio’s possibilities for reducing drama to a question of voice, to making voice the very basis of humankind’s identity, and to making the audience wholly dependent on what the voice says is real. As Henry says in Embers, “I mention it [that the sound that is heard is the sound of the sea] because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn’t see what it was you wouldn’t know what it was,” as indeed the play’s audience does not know because it does not “see”; it hears only, and what it hears are sounds that may not exist at all outside Henry’s solipsistic imagination.

Such sounds generally exist in their most basic or most abstract and attenuated forms, as, for example, the sound of the sea or of dying embers in Embers or words, music, and croaks in Words and Music. This obsessive interest in the purity and ambiguity of the voice results in the brilliantly involuted monologue Company, a prose work published in 1980 and performed on radio the same year. Although Embers, Words and Music, and even Company may be approached in the context of existentialist philosophy and absurdist drama, they also attest Beckett’s emergence as an acknowledged leader of the postmodern movement. His interest in radio and television, fiction and film, mime and music evidences his preoccupation with technique as its own end; it suggests a turning away from the existentialist context in which he has most often been interpreted (and which he always felt confining) and a turning toward a typically postmodern interest in purely verbal, structural, and technical matters.

Sources for Further Study

Abbot, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Alvarez, A. Samuel Beckett. New York: Viking, 1973.

Andonian, Cathleen. The Critical Response to Samuel Beckett. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Ben-Zvi, Linda. Samuel Beckett. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Cohn, Ruby. Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Esslin, Martin. “Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting.” Encounter 45 (September, 1975): 38-46.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3d ed. London: Methuen, 2001.

Gordon, Lois. The World of Samuel Beckett. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.

Gussow, Mel. Conversations with and About Beckett. New York: Grove-Atlantic, 1996.

Homan, Sidney, ed. Beckett’s Theaters: Interpretations for Performance. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1984.

Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

McCarthy, Patrick A., ed. Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.