to consider sound itself as the raw material for analysis.”^5 One must, for that
matter, listen to radio more intensively than one does in the theater, where
there is always something to look at as well. On the other hand, radio text
also differs appreciably from the print media. When reading, one has the
luxury of stopping to reconsider this or that point on a previous page, or one
skims a given passage and moves ahead. Radio is much more coercively tem-
poral; the sounds succeed one another, and the listener is challenged to take
them in, one by one, and construct their relationships. Even when, as is usu-
ally the case, the radio piece is heard on tape or compact disc, so that one is
free to fast forward and reverse, the listener remains deprived of the visual
stimulus taken for granted by the theater or visual audience.
Even more important: because radio is essentially an information me-
dium with what appears to be a linear structure, the listener feels compelled
to pay close attention with the expectation of “¤nding out” something. But
what does Beckett’s radio audience ¤nd out? Here the theme of disembodi-
ment put forward in my second epigraph becomes important. If radio (or
the phonograph) has the capacity to bring voice into someone else’s public
or private space, the disembodiment of that voice, Beckett was quite aware,
is a signi¤er of absence, of not being there, indeed of “death.” Then, too,
voice alone—or at least voice between puberty and extreme old age or serious
illness—cannot de¤ne its owner’s stage of life or status as can the visual im-
age of a human body.
As a dramatic medium, radio is at its best when it takes this indetermi-
nacy and absence into account. After All That Fall, whose characters are still
represented as “real” people in a “real” Irish country setting, Beckett’s radio
art becomes more abstract and mediumistic, engaging in a dialectic of dis-
closure and obstacle, information and noise, in which the soundscape—
which includes silence—provides con®icting, and hence tantalizing, testi-
mony. In what follows I want to consider how this dialectic works in two
Beckett radio plays—plays thematically related but raising different formal
and technical issues. The ¤rst is Embers, written for the BBC and ¤rst broad-
cast in June 1959; the second, Words and Music, broadcast in November 1962.^6
“No Sound”
Beckett commentators generally speak of Embers as a “skullscape” or “soul-
scape.”^7 “The universe which the radio audience is confronted with,” de-
clared Clas Zilliacus in the ¤rst extended discussion of the piece, “is a totally
subjective one: it is one man’s world. The interplay between Henry and other
104 Chapter 6