óld mén
gréat troúble
whíte wórld
nót a soúndThe effect of these elaborately stylized schema is again to occlude the infor-
mation channel with noise. The message from sender to receiver, which ra-
dio, practically speaking, is designed to foreground, becomes progressively
less well understood.
For what is the Bolton story about, and how does it relate to the death by
suicide of Henry’s father? John Pilling has complained that Embers “has a
structural slackness deriving from the two main topics [the father-son plot
and the Bolton-Holloway plot] failing to blend” (Samuel Beckett 98); Bolton,
Pilling posits, is “simply an image in the imagination” (100), a reading that
accords with Zilliacus’s supposition that Bolton is somehow Henry’s alter
ego,^14 or with Donald Wicher’s that he is “the ¤ctive projection of the self.”^15
But such thematic readings slight the piece’s use of sound and silence, speech
and pause. Just as outside there is no way of “drowning” the sound of the
sea, inside the only sound is the sound of the ¤re and then its embers. How-
ever often Henry tells himself that there is “not a sound,” whether on the
shingle along the beach or in Bolton’s sitting room, in both cases sound is
steady and unstoppable.
The only way of interrupting the continuity of water and ¤re sounds, it
seems, is to introduce another sound, one that is ¤nite (and hence control-
lable) rather than continuous. Thus Henry summons “Hooves!” in the open-
ing sequence, and although the hooves “die rapidly away,” he longs for a regu-
lar metrical rhy thm, a beat that could “mark time.... a ten-ton mammoth
back from the dead, shoe it with steel and have it tramp the world down!
Listen to it!” (Embers 93). The parallel in the Bolton story is the drip:
Holloway, Bolton, Bolton, Holloway, old men, great trouble, white
world, not a sound. [Pause.] Listen to it! [Pause.] Close your eyes and
listen to it, what would you think it was? [Pause. Vehement.] A drip! A
drip! [Sound of drip, rapidly ampli¤ed, suddenly cut off.] Again! [Drip
again. Ampli¤cation begins.] No! [Drip cut off.] Father! [Pause. Agi-
tated.] Stories, stories, years and years of stories.... (95)Again we have the exhortation “Listen to it!” and the auditory image of a
sound that, unlike the sound of the ocean, which is present here again in the
repeated pauses, can be identi¤ed, timed for frequency, and stopped. It is
110 Chapter 6