Rough for Radio II

"Which is more painful," I asked him, "writing or not writing?"
"They're both painful, but the pain is different."[28]

An old adage says that people hear what they want to hear; they home in on what's relevant to them. Animator is not really listening to Fox any more than a great number of Beckett's audiences over the years haven’t listened to him: Godot sounds like God so he must be God, mustn’t he?[29]

Fox sounds like ‘vox’, the Latin word for ‘voice’, but in this case it is not unreasonable to assume this is intentional on Beckett's part considering his only requirement is to give voice to that certain something that will satisfy his interrogator. It is worth mentioning that in the French original the interrogatee is still named ‘Fox’ rather than ‘Renard’ perhaps because Beckett wanted his audience to make the Fox/Vox connection first. The French for ‘voice’ is ‘voix’.[30]

“Fox’s stream of words presents a series of puzzling images. Should the listener simply consider each of these – the soaping of the mole, his drying by the embers, the mention of a parasitic twin brother growing within him, a mother figure named Maud – as pictograms, which escape interpretation? Fox only speaks under duress. Does he represent the artist figure, forced by habit or vocation to express himself in a series of ever-repeating motifs despite not having a specific purpose or subject? Whether or not he has something revelatory to communicate … he lives up to his name by not divulging it. As a result, his silence gives him power over his captors and even his torturer, Dick.”[31]

Symbols are the method that the unconscious uses to communicate important information and guidance to the conscious mind. Fox's speech from the day before talks about returning a dead mole to his womblike chamber (with food to last it), an image centred on insertion; the first of the new day concentrates on the mole (now miraculously alive – “Live I did…[11]) moving through tunnels seeking the way out (in fact the text shifts to a first-person narrative) whereas the final section focuses on Fox’s awareness of his twin’s hunger driving his desperate need for extraction. “Taken together, Fox’s three utterances can be seen to construct a scenario of a self-birth attempted yet blocked.”[32] Maud says he needs to be “opened up”;[33] as he can’t ‘open up’[34] himself, someone needs to step into that rôle. In Cascando (1962/63) this is what the controller is called, the “Opener”,[35] after his function. His use of the term “passage” to refer to something Fox has said before emphasises that what we are hearing is the “scrabble, scrabble”[33] of his “old twin” trying to find a way out. This culminates in the final cry: “Let me out!”[36]

If Fox embodies the source of raw data available to the creative process, personified by the Animator and his team, what does Fox's twin represent? Most likely his deepest, darkest memories, memories that he has repressed[37] (or at least suppressed). Aware that it may be these that the Animator is trying to reach Fox exercises his power over him by refusing to release them to him (“ah but no, no no”[33]); they look as if they may ‘die’ inside him.

The metaphorical image of an author giving birth to a work of fiction is not new, nor is the picture of the “tortured artist”, nor even the assertion that all fiction is thinly veiled biography; in Beckett's case there are biographical elements[38] embedded throughout all his work and if a writer's task is to get something out of himself onto the page, that something, that part of himself, could quite poetically be referred to as the twin inside him.[39]

"Influential psychoanalysts Didier Anzieu and Bennett Simon as well as a number of Beckett critics hold that Wilfred Bion's 1950 paper on The Imaginary Twin is part of a fictionalised account of his treatment of Beckett some fifteen years earlier … The suspicion that the young Beckett is patient A of The Imaginary Twin is supported by Bion's description of his inventive analysand as a man who was adept at blurring the boundary between real and imaginary events, who made ambiguous statements that were open to multiple interpretations, who felt that he was inhabited by an unborn twin and imagined himself in a womb afraid to be born.”[40] "The notion that Fox articulates – the me inside an I that can never be merged with the I – becomes the most dominant motif in Beckett’s [later] writing.[41]

“A fox is a crafty, reclusive creature, and Fox seems devoted to producing speech that dances away from any sort of devastating apprehension of meaning. On the other hand, Fox, as a 'fodient rodent', does seem to be trying to burrow towards some deep truth. He is remarkable interested in tunnels; not only does he soap a mole, but he also says at one point that he is taking to the tunnels, and the foetal or ghost twin that Fox conceals in his belly is also suggestive of his preoccupation with the interior of things ... As a tireless explorer in the labyrinth of language, as an old mole trying to convey difficult insight to the public, Fox may indeed be speaking words worth scanning for hidden meaning.”[42]

Fox speaks of tunnelling for his goal, ‘age upon age, up again, down again, little lichens of my little span, living dead in the stones’.[43] The artist (or creator) as excavator or burrower is another Beckettian leitmotif. In Proust he speaks of ‘the labours of poetical excavation’[44] and states that ‘the only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent’.[45] He told the actress Elizabeth Bergner that he was ‘not looking for answers: I am only trying to dig a little deeper’;[46] and he spoke to Lawrence E. Harvey ‘of the attempt to find [the] lost self in images of getting down, getting below the surface, concentrating, listening, getting your ear down so you can hear the infinitesimal murmur. There is a grey struggle, a groping in the dark for a shadow’.[47] The decisive comment comes in The Unnamable: ‘Are there other pits, deeper down? To which one accedes by mine? Stupid obsession with depth’[48]

In "Rough for Radio II, Beckett represents the process of his own creativity as writer by an 'animator' and his secretary who takes down the utterances of a little man, who is usually gagged and blindfolded, but taken out each day and asked to speak ... [T]he monologue he utters, which is a stream of consciousness that forms the material of the writer, must be taken down according to strict rules."[49] But the Animator breaks these rules and incorporates an idea of his own into the text. This represents the "slippage between what the artist wants to express and what he is capable of expressing. As Beckett says of Bram van Velde in the three dialogues, he was 'the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail.'"[50] Bearing this in mind the oft quoted lines from Worstward Ho take on a greater significance: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."[51]

“The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.” - Carl Jung (Return to the Simple Life, 1941)

Beckett's interest in all kinds of psychoanalytical writing is well documented. And so, when one sees a name like Anima-tor, an obvious question to ask is: is this character a personification of the character's anima?[52] If that is the case then what we have in Rough for Radio II, like Rough for Radio I, is another of Beckett's “mindscapes”.[53]

Jung viewed the anima process as being one of the sources of creative ability (which would make Fox the wellspring of ideas, experiences and dreams). “A complex consists of two parts; an archetypal core … (Animator) … surrounded by a cluster or shell of images, memories, and feelings … (Fox) … that are the result of childhood experiences with human beings. It is as if the archetypal core acts like a magnet, around which events cluster that belong to that archetype. This core adds energy to the complex.”[54]

The Animator is a sensualist who imposes his grossness on his victims, Fox, an intuitive creature who lives by his senses and also his unfortunate female assistant. There is no doubt that Beckett had a sexual side to his nature though – understandably – little is on record as to how this aspect of him affected his work. His writing, although not primarily sexual, never shies away from it but one could never refer to it as ‘titillating’. That sexual urges might have distracted him from his writing is always a possibility. Anthony Cronin, in his biography, talks about the year when Beckett was struggling to complete Murphy . Some days he would go for long walks “from nine or ten in the morning until six or seven in the evening, scarcely seeing a soul. Telling MacGreevy about this, he said it saved masturbation.”[55]

“The anima … holds in it an expression of a man's complex of feelings about women, gained as experience mostly from his mother[56] – or lack of mother – but also from a synthesis of all his female contacts … A negative side to the anima that is “that of the woman/mother who poisons everything, whose … critical remarks hurt and constantly demean. This may live on in a man as self-criticism. A slight twist on this is the man who considers himself an intellectual, but actually is possessed by an anima that does not allow real creative thought, but expresses opinions and fears as clever words (“Have you read the Purgatory, miss, of the divine Florentine?”[16]) or arguments (“What the devil are you deriding, miss? My hearing? My memory? My good faith?”[20]). This enables the person to feel [they are] always right, and actually avoid any real meeting with other people or life experience. Strangely, such men are often driven to pornography,[57] in a desperate drive to meet denied personal needs.”[58]

Beckett stipulates that the Animator has a “cylindrical ruler”,[59] clearly a phallic image. Dick is in no way a fully-fledged character in his own right, rather an extension of the Animator, a penis substitute[60] (admittedly a Freudian term). The Stenographer only has a small pencil showing her place in the pecking order. (Although represented by a female she is nevertheless an aspect of a male character). There is a subtext of impotence however. The Animator is trying to get something from Fox that's not there; he tries to read into it and, eventually, has to ‘spice up’ the text himself. “In the end it comes down to a question of bending the truth to get relief.”[61]

Ultimately the creative process has not been faithful to the truth but does it have to be? More than most writers, Beckett plumbed the depths of his own life for source material. Some sections are transparently biographical (e.g. the scene in Krapp’s Last Tape where Krapp's mother dies) but exactly how faithful to the truth only Beckett himself would know. But it is a work of fiction, not a psychological treatise and certainly not biography in the strictest sense; the facts are bent to fit the truth of the play.