Ohio Impromptu - Interpretation

Interpretation

Critics differ in their interpretations of who or what Reader is. Whether an apparition, Listener’s alter ego or an alternate aspect of his mind the nightly ‘reading’ is clearly an essential part of Listener’s healing process. Beckett theatre specialist, Anna McMullan claims that “n both Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu the speaking of the text becomes a rite of passage which enacts a transformation – from loss to comfort, from life to death and from speech to silence.” In Rockaby the woman has stayed on in the family home after her mother’s death; Listener has elected to run away.

“As with Company, the author again returns to a theme he has portrayed many times, that loneliness and nostalgia are too personal, after a certain age, to be shared with any being other than oneself.” “The image of the river (the Seine) with its two arms flowing into one another after they have divided to flow around the island … is a clue to the meaning of the play. For at its emotional centre lies sadness, loss and solitude, contrasted with a memory of togetherness.” So why does Listener move to the Isle of Swans rather than away? The location may have had a certain meaning for Beckett-the-person but Beckett-the-writer chose it more for its geographical features, the two rivers merging into one and also the fact that a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty stands on the isle representing the literal New World that Ohio is part of and the metaphorical new world that Listener moves to.

The arrangement of figures actually “resembles the figures used in the psychological experiments early century to establish the principle of closure.” The divided self is a common means of approach to Beckettian texts and has been applied to Krapp’s Last Tape, Footfalls, That Time and even Waiting for Godot.

Beckett may have had his own wife in mind when he wrote the play but he goes to some pains never to specify the name or gender of the loved one. This gives the text extra depth. The man could be grieving for a father or, more likely bearing in mind Beckett’s other works, his mother. Also there is nothing to prevent the loved one being a male partner and homoerotic readings of Beckett’s work are not uncommon.

As regards Reader, Gontarski himself has argued that what we are seeing is effectively a dramatisation of “the elemental creative process … suggested in That Time, where the protagonist of narrative A would hide as a youth, ‘making up talk breaking up two or more talking to himself being together that way’.”

Others suggest that Reader is the “shade”, some kind of spectral emissary, despatched by Listener’s dead lover to help him through the grieving process. In an early draft of the play Beckett had focussed “on a ghost returning from the Underworld to speak at …a conference”; the only vestige of that remaining is the pun on “White nights” - Whitenights, Reading is where a great many of his manuscripts are now stored and the address of the Beckett International Foundation.

“The narrative echoes (but does not replicate or anticipate) the stag(ed) image.” “In the text we are told that the figures remain: ‘Buried in who knows what profounds of mind’. On stage, however, they raise their heads to meet each other’s eyes in meaningful contemplation.” It is therefore equally plausible that the two men on stage are not the same as the two men in the story. “Like an author, Listener occasionally calls for the repeat of a phrase, but Reader has his own agency, repeating a phrase unbidden at least once.” One factor that suggests this might not in fact be the case is the fact that there is only one hat between the two of them.

After the story has been read and the book closed Listener knocks once more, the signal to begin again from where Reader had left off. “What do words say when there is nothing left to tell” though? Beckett was obsessed by a desire to create what he called a "literature of the unword", and this, perhaps, represents one of the best examples of this effort.