As I was sitting in the audience waiting for No’s Knife to begin and pondering the complexity of Beckett’s work, I wondered about the audience Beckett had in mind when he wrote Texts for Nothing. This is a similar question I had when reading Joyce’s Ulysses. On the Dubliner’s Tour, the guide asked who had read specific texts by Joyce and with regard to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake joked about the small number of readers of those texts. On the literary pub crawl, the actors made similar jokes about Joyce’s work. There’s an inaccessible quality about these texts that prohibits most readers from understanding the message conveyed through these texts by the authors. This also brings to mind questions about the function of literature. If most readers find a text inaccessible or potential readers are turned off by the near universal reputation of a text’s inaccessibility, does inaccessibility become problematic?
Regardless, the opportunity to see Beckett’s work performed by the capable Lisa Dwan at The Abbey was an incredible experience. Her interpretation of Texts for Nothing was different from the way in which I read this text. As the writer and performer, her interpretation was more emotionally wrought, perhaps angrier, than the voice in which I read these stories. The dystopic set design enhanced Dwan’s intense interpretation. However, the sound effects, primarily accomplished by shifting the output of the microphone to different speakers and with different filters, created a schizophrenic rendering of the text that more closely aligns with my interpretation. The auditory rendering of the play reminds me of a Youtube video I listened to many months ago wherein the auditory aspects of schizophrenia are replicated for the listener.
