Danger zone

sound-visual spectrographies on two Beckett’s television plays

Abstract

This essay ponders how part of the Beckettian dramaturgy can be read like a spectropoetic, that is, conceived as way of working the spectral element in its compositions via specific sound and imagetic procedures. Guided by sound fragmentation, polyphony, as well as vocal and imagetic duplication, Beckett’s television plays would have had as a common feature the emphasis on the sound dimension and on the acoustic universe of the operations characteristic of sound media, which would result in the creation of zones of tension between temporality and spatiality, the sound material used for constructing words and images. This spectropoetics would then be configured as vocal experimentation and listening exercises marked by gapped traces, reduplications, resonance and mirroring that would characterize the indetermination of absence-presence as a privileged formal procedure of this dramaturgy.