Embers
Encyclopedia
Embers is a radio play by Samuel Beckett
. It was written in English
in 1957
and first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme
on 24 June 1959. Donald McWhinnie directed Jack MacGowran
– for whom the play was specially written – as “Henry”, Kathleen Michael as “Ada” and Patrick Magee
as “Riding Master” and “Music Master”. Robert Pinget
translated the work as Cendres and “The first stage production was by the French Graduate Circle of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Festival
, 1977.”
The most recent version of Embers was broadcast in 2006 on BBC Radio 3
and directed by Stephen Rea
. The cast included Michael Gambon
as Henry, Sinéad Cusack
as Ada, Rupert Graves
, Alvaro Lucchesi and Carly Baker. This production was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 16 May 2010 as part of a double bill with a 2006 production of Krapp's Last Tape
.
Opinions vary as to whether the work succeeds. Hugh Kenner
calls it “Beckett’s most difficult work” and yet maintains that the piece “coheres to perfection,” John Pilling disagrees, remarking that Embers “is the first of Beckett’s dramatic works that seems to lack a real centre,” whereas Richard N. Coe considers the play “not only minor, but one of [Beckett’s] very few failures.” Anthony Cronin
records in his biography of Beckett that “Embers met with a mixed reception [but tempers this comment by noting that] the general tone of English critic
ism was somewhat hostile to Beckett” at the time.
The author’s own view was that it was a “rather ragged” text. He said that it was “not very satisfactory, but I think just worth doing … I think it just gets by for radio.”
For all his personal reservations the play won the RAI
prize in the 1959 Prix Italia
contest, not, as has been often reported, “the actual Prix Italia … which went to John Reeve’s play, Beach of Strangers.”
or estuary
”.
Henry starts to talk, a single word, “on,” followed by the sea again, followed by the voice – louder and more insistent this time, repeating the same word, as it will say, then repeat as a command, the words “stop” and “down.” Each time, Henry obediently yet reluctantly does what his voice first says, then tells him to do, he stops and sits down on the shingle. Throughout the play the sea acts like a character in its own right (much as the light in Play
does).
an unconscionable time”. Nothing in the text explicitly says that Henry’s father was suicidal – though this has been inferred from the story of Bolton and Holloway discussed later.
He imagines his father, whom he describes as “old … blind and foolish”, sitting beside him on the beach and addresses the whole opening monologue
to him, apart from a single aside
to the audience, but the father never once responds. His father could never stay away from the sea and it seems neither can his son. “The sea presents an antithetical
image to Henry. He must stay near it, and yet he attempts to distance himself from its sound.” Even when he finally received his inheritance
he only relocated to the other side of the bay; it has been a great many years since he actually swam in it. He tried once going to landlocked Switzerland
but still couldn’t get the sound of the sea out of his head.
To drown out the sound, rather than seek out company, he began making up stories but could never finish any of them. He remembers “ a great one” and starts to tell it:
Henry tells his father that, after a time, his stories were not company enough and he began feeling the need for someone from his past to be with him. He then continues:
Henry suddenly stops his story and jumps to the last time he saw his father alive. His father’s eventual disappearance followed an angry interchange between the two of them. He wanted Henry to go swimming with him but Henry refuses and so the last words his father ends up saying to him are: “A washout, that’s what you are, a washout!” Whether his father was accidentally washed out to sea and drowned or deliberately killed himself is something no one knows for sure. Understandably Henry has punished himself for years over his decision not to go with him.
His relationship with his daughter had not been good either, a clingy child and, as we discover later, not particularly proficient or interested in anything she was required to do; Henry blames the “horrid little creature” for the break-up of his marriage. He re-enacts going for a walk with her and how he ended up reducing the girl to tears when she refuses to let go of his hand.
Henry treats his Addie in much the same way his father appears to have treated him. He remembers: “That was always the way, walk all over the mountains with you talking and talking and then suddenly mum and home in misery and not a word to a soul for a week.” “The consequent judgement that Henry was a ‘sulky little bastard, better off dead’ is consistent with his father’s final verdict of his son as a ‘washout’.”
Out of the blue Henry calls out to his estranged, possibly ex, probably dead wife, Ada.
[s]” involving other characters (each lasts only a few seconds). Each occasion ends in a character crying or crying out and is artificially cut short at that instant.
Before this the two engage in quasi-domestic small talk. Ada wants to know where their daughter, Addie, is. Henry says she is with her music master. She chides him for sitting on the cold stones and offers to put her shawl under him, which he allows. She asks if he’s wearing his long johns but Henry is difficult about answering her. The sound of hooves distracts him. Ada makes a joke about horses and tries to get him to laugh. He then returns to his old preoccupation, the sound of the sea. He wants to go but Ada says they can’t because they’re waiting on Addie. This triggers the first evocation.
Ada suggests that he consult Holloway about his talking. This was a source of some embarrassment to her when they were together. She cites an instance where she has to explain to their daughter why her father was talking to himself in the lavatory. She can’t understand why such “a lovely peaceful gentle soothing sound” should upset him so and refuses to believe that his talking helps drown it out. He tells he that he’s even taken to “walk[ing] about with [a] gramophone
” but forget it this day.
He reminds Ada that it was on this very beach they had sex for the first time. She’d shown great reluctance and they had to wait a long time before the coast was clear. She did not get pregnant
right away however and it was years before they had Addie. He wonders what age the girl is now but – unexpectedly for a mother – Ada says she doesn’t know. He proposes going for a row, “to be with my father”, he tells her but, again, she reminds him that their daughter will be coming soon and would be upset to find him gone.
Henry explains to Ada that his father doesn’t talk with him like she does. She is not surprised and predicts that a day will come when there will be no one left and he will be alone with only his own voice for company. She remembers meeting his family in the midst of having a row, his father, mother and a sister threatening to kill herself. The father storms out slamming the door, as he did the day he disappeared for good (if this is in fact not the same day), but she passes him later sitting staring out to sea (bear in mind Henry said his father was blind) in a posture that reminded her of Henry himself.
“Is this rubbish a help to you, Henry? [she wonders out loud.] “I can try and go on a little if you wish.” He fails to answer though and so she slips out of his consciousness
.
upon her story, attempting to build it into a more complex and extended narrative
but he fails”. What is interesting here is that Henry imagines that Ada, after witnessing his father sitting on the rock, gets on the tram
(possibly horse-driven) to go home, then alights and returns to check on him only to find the beach empty. Was she the last person to see him alive?
Resigning himself to being alone Henry picks up the Bolton story from where he left off:
Henry is like the “writer-protagonists of the novels, using their speech/writing to fill the moments until death.” But he finds he can’t go on. He curses, gets to his feet, walks over to the water’s edge where he takes out and consults a pocket diary. With the exception of an appointment with the “plumber at nine [to attend to] the waste” pipe his future is empty. The play ends with no resolution other than the certainty that the next day and the next day will be the same as the previous ones.
Henry, the central character in this play, cannot find the words to articulate his situation and fills in the blanks with what he can to see if he can make sense of things. In this context the play is its own metaphor
. Words have become redundant but they are all Henry has to explain the unexplainable. If critics get frustrated because there are no answers then they’ve got the point.
ical endeavour to question sound in this radio play is [partly] achieved through the use of grossly made sound effect
s (coconut-like sound of hooves, exaggerated amplifications of Addie’s cries, etc.).”
The sound of the sea dominates the play but it is not an accurate representation and deliberately so. Henry warns us that the sea sound effects are not perfect and this casts doubt as to whether he is even on the beach at all; perhaps everything in the play is taking place within his head.
The pioneering sound engineer
Desmond Briscoe
was responsible for the sound of the sea in the original BBC production. This was his second collaboration with Beckett (he also worked on All That Fall
) only this time he “utilized a more traditionally ‘musical’ approach, moulding the abstract sound of the sea using distinct pitches
.”
“Henry also demands certain sound effects to provide a contrast to the monotony of the sea. He twice asks for the sound of hooves, hoping that the 'ten-ton mammoth
' can be trained to mark time; have it 'stamp all day' and 'tramp the world down'. He similarly asks for a drip, as if the sea could be drained by the sound effect.”
or is this really happening?) Paul Lawley feels the need to qualify this statement however: “The most important point [perhaps], but one to start from rather than conclude with.”
Like many of Beckett’s characters (e.g. Molloy
, May in Footfalls
), Henry is a writer
or at the very least a storyteller
, albeit by his own admission, a poor one never actually finishing anything he starts. Fortunately he doesn’t need to depend on his writing for a living. He may or may not commit what he has written to paper but he performs the core function of a writer, the creation of stories. And as a writer he also needs readers or listeners to hear what he has to say. Like the old woman in Rockaby he only has himself and the voices in his head left to acknowledge his existence however pathetic that existence has become.
Henry is undoubtedly a tormented soul. He interrogates the past rigorously but never gets round to actually verbalising what is really on his mind: How did his father die? Was he, in any way, responsible for that death? Is vital information missing or has he repressed
it? Is this why he can never complete any of his stories because they are all really the same story and are all missing that something? His life is like a sentence (pun
intended) – it reached a comma
with his father’s death and he has been unable to satisfactorily finish it. He has no “professional obligations”, no familial ties and now not even a woman to justify his hanging around this place like, as he puts it, an “old grave I cannot tear myself away from”.
with the sound of the sea. Right at the start he even says, “That sound you hear is the sea … I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was.” “The ‘you’ here can be taken to be the dead father, with whom Henry is sitting on the strand. But if so, it makes little sense since, as we soon learn, the father lived at the sea's edge all his life and presumably would know how the sea sounds. Henry's information thus functions ironically
, or even metalinguistically
: on the one hand, it shows the narrator having a brief moment of power over the father whose death haunts him; on the other, we can read the speech as an aside to the audience,” emphasising that everything they are experiencing is a part of a fiction, even the sea. Jonathan Kalb has even suggested that everything including the sea and the beach are all merely figments of Henry’s imagination.
The images (symbols and metaphors) that spring to mind when people see the sea (another pun Beckett cannot have failed to notice) have become somewhat cliché
d over the years and Beckett takes full advantage of this fact; literature (not forgetting the visual arts) has done much of his groundwork for him.
The sound of the sea continues throughout the play always “moving according to the temporal laws of the tide” suggesting a linear
ality to the time line but the action is grouped by association
rather than presented in a chronological
order. The omnipresent
sea is less of a natural phenomenon
than another mental ghost
haunting him no matter where he goes, even reacting to events (e.g. during the sex scene) by getting louder; it clearly has its own voice or perhaps it is all that remains of his father’s voice since it represents his grave. Either way the sea is a constant reminder of death and Henry’s attempts to drown out its sound “seem to manifest the typical Beckett antithesis
: the desire for death and the desire to keep it at bay by continued speech”.
Beckett’s own father (actually a superb swimmer) died at home, of a heart attack
it has to be said, on June 26, 1933. In October his mother rented “a little house by the sea just beyond Dalkey
Harbour. Beckett accompanied her, laden with his books, manuscripts and typewriter
. But he never settled down there and questioned ‘how people have the nerve to live so near, on the sea. It moans in one’s dreams at night.’” The beach there – “by contract with most Irish beaches – is notoriously composed of shingle and pebble”.
In May 1954 he received a phone call from his sister-in-law to let him know that his brother, Frank, had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer
. Beckett spent several months there up until his brother’s eventual death in September. “Most evenings he walked alone after dinner along the seashore below the house”
“But there is a very good reason for the omission, which is that, unlike the theatre, radio makes it possible to represent characters by means of metonymic
sound images: The ghost of Henry's father is indeed "heard" throughout the play: not only when his son acts the role of medium, imitating such parental exhortations as "Are you coming for a dip?", but also in the recurrent "Please! PLEASE!" that Bolton addresses to Holloway, and, most important, in the voice of the sea itself.”
Henry tells us at the very start of the play that his father is blind and yet when Ada passes him she makes mention that he did not see her. As Henry is not only talking to his father at the start it is also true that he is talking to a “blind” audience too. Is the man actually blind or even figuratively blind? Perhaps Ada was unaware that he was blind though think seems unlikely.
“As their names suggest, Ada and Addie may not be wife and daughter at all, not even imagined wife and daughter, only father-surrogates: Ada is a near anagram
of Dad and Addie a rhyme for Daddie. And Henry himself? Is he perhaps just another of the fictional characters? Ruby Cohn notes that ‘Henry is a name derived from German
Heimrih, meaning head of the family’ he too is a father or father or father-surrogate – his own. Why should the figure of the father loom so large in every element of the play? Because the father, the head of the family, is its creator, and it is creation which is Henry’s obligation.”
A fuller appreciation of the story of Bolton and Holloway helps with an overall understanding of the rest of the play. Needless to say opinions differ. It is reminiscent of the story May tells in Footfalls where aspects of her and her mother are recast as “Amy” and “Mrs Winter”.
of human suffering and divine rejection”:
Lawley’s contention could equally be valid in that “Henry is losing his creative impersonality and is consequently moving inexorably into identity with his fictional creation, Bolton.”
Whereas most scholars take Bolton’s begging to suggest he wants to die, Michael Robinson, in The Long Sonata of the Dead, puts forward a simpler interpretation:
The sad fact is that company is not the real answer. It is still only an anaesthetic, numbing the pain. In the Beckettian universal construct sadly death rarely brings any relief either.
Whether Holloway is a real person or the character in the story even based on a real person is unclear.
who “suggests that Bolton is in fact Henry’s father” because of the use of “your” rather than “his” in the expression, “and the glim shaking in your old fist” assuming of course that Henry has returned to telling his tale to his dead father which seems most likely. Marjorie Perloff
concurs with this reading.
This option offers a simpler explanation of the story. If it is based on his father’s seeking some kind of escape from a life that has become unendurable, with a worthless son, a suicidal daughter and possibly an argumentative wife all symptoms of it, then Holloway could simply be a personification of any means of release. That the story is missing key elements is due to the fact that Henry himself doesn’t have these pieces. As his life has dragged on in its own version of unendurability it is only obvious that he will start to relate more and more to the figure of Bolton. If, at this point, Henry were able to end his story, he would be “going beyond the confines of his own condition, of which his story is, in all essential aspects, a duplicate. The moment the story can be finished, there will be no one there to finish it'”.
Their nature of their dialogue is odd too – quite civilized – considering the comment Henry made just before evoking her presence: “Ada too, conversation with her, that was something, that’s what hell will be like.” Evidently he is remembering better times here. Katharine Worth conjectures that Ada represents a kind of muse
, “a hint stressed in the sound of her voice – ‘low [and] remote throughout’ – and in the curious fact that she has been present in some mysterious way before he spoke her name.” He calls on her because he needs her, his father doesn’t answer and he is struggling with his story on his own.
Roger Blin
, in an interview on 2 March 1975, in Paris
, said: "Beckett absolutely didn't want me to try to do Embers for the theatre because, when you listen, you don't know if Ada exists or not, [or] whether she only exists in the imagination of the character Henry."
Ada is “immensely there”, though, her personality is allowed to shine throughout her conversation with Henry; she doesn’t merely respond, she initiates lines of thought, she nags him like a mother with her list of don’ts, jokes with him, reproves him in a matter-of-fact way and refuses to mollycoddle him. She doesn’t appear to take him very seriously either. Henry is obviously incapable of imagining her any other way than how she was when they were together, further evidence of his declining creative powers. Parts of their conversation, for example, sound as if they are simply reenactments of things said to each other when they were a couple but noticeably not all.
Her advice to Henry that he seeks medical assistance from Holloway, assuming him to be “a figure in the fiction he [has been] weaving”, would add weight to the argument that Ada is both part imagined as well as part remembered.
Having performed her function to the best of her plainly limited abilities she leaves him to it with a down-to-earth, “Is this rubbish a help to you, Henry? … No? Then I think I’ll be getting back?”
dated 6 September 1959, after finally hearing a tape of the BBC production, Beckett wrote: "Good performance and production but doesn't come off. My fault, text too difficult."
Beckett could never be called an “easy” author and one of the reasons for his success is undoubtedly the pleasure that comes from finding hidden meanings in his works even those you thought you were familiar with. So why did Beckett believe this particular text too hard?
The main problem here is the density of the writing. Beckett’s plays never provide all the answers; there are gaps where the audience has to do some digging and some filling in. In Embers there are a few too many plot holes and far too many clues pointing in all directions for such a short piece to bear.
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. It was written in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
in 1957
1957 in literature
The year 1957 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Lawrence Durrell publishes the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet. The final of the four volumes will be published in 1960....
and first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme
BBC Third Programme
The BBC Third Programme was a national radio network broadcast by the BBC. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts...
on 24 June 1959. Donald McWhinnie directed Jack MacGowran
Jack MacGowran
John Joseph "Jack" MacGowran was an Irish character actor, whose last film role was as the alcoholic director Burke Dennings in The Exorcist. He was probably best known for his work with Samuel Beckett.-Stage career:...
– for whom the play was specially written – as “Henry”, Kathleen Michael as “Ada” and Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
as “Riding Master” and “Music Master”. Robert Pinget
Robert Pinget
Robert Pinget was a major avant-garde French writer, born in Switzerland, who wrote several novels and other prose pieces that drew comparison to Beckett and other major Modernist writers...
translated the work as Cendres and “The first stage production was by the French Graduate Circle of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Festival
Edinburgh Festival
The Edinburgh Festival is a collective term for many arts and cultural festivals that take place in Edinburgh, Scotland each summer, mostly in August...
, 1977.”
The most recent version of Embers was broadcast in 2006 on BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
and directed by Stephen Rea
Stephen Rea
Stephen Rea is an Irish film and stage actor. Rea has appeared in high profile films such as V for Vendetta, Michael Collins, Interview with the Vampire and Breakfast on Pluto...
. The cast included Michael Gambon
Michael Gambon
Sir Michael John Gambon, CBE is an Irish actor who has worked in theatre, television and film. A highly respected theatre actor, Gambon is recognised for his roles as Philip Marlowe in the BBC television serial The Singing Detective, as Jules Maigret in the 1990s ITV serial Maigret, and as...
as Henry, Sinéad Cusack
Sinéad Cusack
Sinéad Moira Cusack is an Irish stage, television and film actress. She has received two Tony Award nominations: once for Best Leading Actress in Much Ado About Nothing , and again for Best Featured Actress in Rock 'n' Roll .-Background:...
as Ada, Rupert Graves
Rupert Graves
Rupert Graves is an English film, television and theatre actor. He is best known for his role as DI Lestrade in the critically acclaimed television series Sherlock.-Early life:...
, Alvaro Lucchesi and Carly Baker. This production was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 16 May 2010 as part of a double bill with a 2006 production of Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play, written in English, by Samuel Beckett. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue"...
.
Opinions vary as to whether the work succeeds. Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner
William Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
calls it “Beckett’s most difficult work” and yet maintains that the piece “coheres to perfection,” John Pilling disagrees, remarking that Embers “is the first of Beckett’s dramatic works that seems to lack a real centre,” whereas Richard N. Coe considers the play “not only minor, but one of [Beckett’s] very few failures.” Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
records in his biography of Beckett that “Embers met with a mixed reception [but tempers this comment by noting that] the general tone of English critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
ism was somewhat hostile to Beckett” at the time.
The author’s own view was that it was a “rather ragged” text. He said that it was “not very satisfactory, but I think just worth doing … I think it just gets by for radio.”
For all his personal reservations the play won the RAI
RAI
RAI — Radiotelevisione italiana S.p.A. known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane, is the Italian state owned public service broadcaster controlled by the Ministry of Economic Development. Rai is the biggest television company in Italy...
prize in the 1959 Prix Italia
Prix Italia
The Prix Italia is an international Italian television, radio-broadcasting and Website award. It was established in 1948 by RAI - Radiotelevisione Italiana in Capri...
contest, not, as has been often reported, “the actual Prix Italia … which went to John Reeve’s play, Beach of Strangers.”
Synopsis
The play opens with the sea in the distance and the sound of footsteps on shingle. Henry has been walking along the strand close to where he has lived his whole life, at one time or other on either side of “a bayHeadlands and bays
Headlands and bays are two related features of the coastal environment.- Geology and geography :Headlands and bays are often found on the same coastline. A bay is surrounded by land on three sides, whereas a headland is surrounded by water on three sides. Headlands are characterized by high,...
or estuary
Estuary
An estuary is a partly enclosed coastal body of water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, and with a free connection to the open sea....
”.
Henry starts to talk, a single word, “on,” followed by the sea again, followed by the voice – louder and more insistent this time, repeating the same word, as it will say, then repeat as a command, the words “stop” and “down.” Each time, Henry obediently yet reluctantly does what his voice first says, then tells him to do, he stops and sits down on the shingle. Throughout the play the sea acts like a character in its own right (much as the light in Play
Play (play)
Play is a one-act play by Samuel Beckett. It was written between 1962 and 1963 and first produced in German as Spiel on 14 June 1963 at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany, directed by Deryk Mendel, with Nancy Illig , Sigfrid Pfeiffer and Gerhard Winter...
does).
The first monologue
The sea, it has always been assumed, was the cause of his father’s death: "the evening bathe you took once too often", however the next sentence tells us: "We never found your body, you know, that held up probateProbate
Probate is the legal process of administering the estate of a deceased person by resolving all claims and distributing the deceased person's property under the valid will. A probate court decides the validity of a testator's will...
an unconscionable time”. Nothing in the text explicitly says that Henry’s father was suicidal – though this has been inferred from the story of Bolton and Holloway discussed later.
He imagines his father, whom he describes as “old … blind and foolish”, sitting beside him on the beach and addresses the whole opening monologue
Monologue
In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
to him, apart from a single aside
Aside
An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience. By convention the audience is to realize that the character's speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed to the audience expressly or represent an unspoken thought. An aside is usually a brief...
to the audience, but the father never once responds. His father could never stay away from the sea and it seems neither can his son. “The sea presents an antithetical
Antithesis
Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...
image to Henry. He must stay near it, and yet he attempts to distance himself from its sound.” Even when he finally received his inheritance
Inheritance
Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts, rights and obligations upon the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies...
he only relocated to the other side of the bay; it has been a great many years since he actually swam in it. He tried once going to landlocked Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
but still couldn’t get the sound of the sea out of his head.
To drown out the sound, rather than seek out company, he began making up stories but could never finish any of them. He remembers “ a great one” and starts to tell it:
- He describes a scene before a fire that is about to go out. A man, Bolton, is standing there in his dressing gownRobeA robe is a loose-fitting outer garment. A robe is distinguished from a cape or cloak by the fact that it usually has sleeves. The English word robe derives from Middle English robe , borrowed from Old French robe , itself taken from the Frankish word *rouba , and is related to the word rob...
awaiting the arrival of his doctor, Holloway, who we learn later may be the name of Henry’s own doctor. It is late, past midnight. He hears the doorbell and goes to the window to check; it is winter and the ground is covered with snow. The doctor has arrived, a “fine old chap, six foot, burly” standing there in his macfarlane, a heavy caped overcoat.
- Bolton lets him in. Holloway wants to know why he was called for but he is cut short. Bolton pleads with him, “Please! PLEASE!” and then they stand there in silence, the doctor trying to warm himself by the fire, what is left of it, and his patient staring out the window. Only all is not silent, not entirely, there is the sound of a drip (evocative of the remark Hamm makes in EndgameEndgame (play)Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. It was originally written in French ; as was his custom, Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the...
: “There is something dripping in my head”); this agitates Henry greatly, and he breaks off his story there for a second.
Henry tells his father that, after a time, his stories were not company enough and he began feeling the need for someone from his past to be with him. He then continues:
- Holloway is annoyed. Presumably he understands what he’s being asked for but avoids showing that he does. Instead he complains about the fact that, despite his being dragged out on a night like this, his old friend has not had the common decency to heat and light the room suitably let alone provide a proper welcome and some kind of refreshment. He says he is going to leave, regretting having come in the first place, but doesn’t make any move to go.
Henry suddenly stops his story and jumps to the last time he saw his father alive. His father’s eventual disappearance followed an angry interchange between the two of them. He wanted Henry to go swimming with him but Henry refuses and so the last words his father ends up saying to him are: “A washout, that’s what you are, a washout!” Whether his father was accidentally washed out to sea and drowned or deliberately killed himself is something no one knows for sure. Understandably Henry has punished himself for years over his decision not to go with him.
His relationship with his daughter had not been good either, a clingy child and, as we discover later, not particularly proficient or interested in anything she was required to do; Henry blames the “horrid little creature” for the break-up of his marriage. He re-enacts going for a walk with her and how he ended up reducing the girl to tears when she refuses to let go of his hand.
Henry treats his Addie in much the same way his father appears to have treated him. He remembers: “That was always the way, walk all over the mountains with you talking and talking and then suddenly mum and home in misery and not a word to a soul for a week.” “The consequent judgement that Henry was a ‘sulky little bastard, better off dead’ is consistent with his father’s final verdict of his son as a ‘washout’.”
Out of the blue Henry calls out to his estranged, possibly ex, probably dead wife, Ada.
The dialogue
The central sequence involves a dialogue between Henry and Ada, which provokes three specific memories presented in the form of short “evocationEvocation
Evocation is the act of calling or summoning a spirit, demon, god or other supernatural agent, in the Western mystery tradition. Comparable practices exist in many religions and magical traditions.-Evocation in the Western mystery tradition:...
[s]” involving other characters (each lasts only a few seconds). Each occasion ends in a character crying or crying out and is artificially cut short at that instant.
Before this the two engage in quasi-domestic small talk. Ada wants to know where their daughter, Addie, is. Henry says she is with her music master. She chides him for sitting on the cold stones and offers to put her shawl under him, which he allows. She asks if he’s wearing his long johns but Henry is difficult about answering her. The sound of hooves distracts him. Ada makes a joke about horses and tries to get him to laugh. He then returns to his old preoccupation, the sound of the sea. He wants to go but Ada says they can’t because they’re waiting on Addie. This triggers the first evocation.
- In his first flashbackFlashback (narrative)Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
Henry imagines the couple's daughter, with her overbearing music master. Addie first plays some scalesMusical scaleIn music, a scale is a sequence of musical notes in ascending and descending order. Most commonly, especially in the context of the common practice period, the notes of a scale will belong to a single key, thus providing material for or being used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical...
and then begins a ChopinFrédéric ChopinFrédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....
waltz, number 5 in A-flat major. “In the first chordChord (music)A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...
of bass, barBar (music)In musical notation, a bar is a segment of time defined by a given number of beats of a given duration. Typically, a piece consists of several bars of the same length, and in modern musical notation the number of beats in each bar is specified at the beginning of the score by the top number of a...
5, she plays E instead of F.” The teacher strikes the piano with his cylindrical ruler and Addie stops playing. “Eff! Eff!” he insists and eventually has to show her the note. She starts again, makes the same mistake and has to endure his ranting again only this time he reduces his pupil to tears.
- The second involves Addie again, this time with her riding instructorRiding instructorA riding instructor is a person whose job it is to teach methods of horse riding to beginners and improve the intermediate and advanced rider's style and technique. A riding instructor may also serve as a coach for a rider in competition. Some instructors may work out of their own riding...
: “Now Miss! Elbows in Miss! Hands down Miss! (Hooves trottingTrot (horse gait)The trot is a two-beat diagonal gait of the horse, where the diagonal pairs of legs move forward at the same time. There is a moment of suspension between each beat....
.) Now Miss! Back straight Miss! Knees in Miss! (Hooves canterCanterThe canter is a controlled, three-beat gait performed by a horse. It is a natural gait possessed by all horses, faster than most horses' trot but slower than the gallop, and is used by all riders. The speed of the canter varies between 16-27 km/h , depending on the length of the stride of the horse...
ing.) Now Miss! Tummy in Miss! Chin up Miss! (Hooves galloping.) Now Miss! Eyes front Miss! (ADDIE begins to wail.) Now Miss! Now Miss!”
- The third scene briefly recalls Henry forcing his attentions on Ada, some twenty years earlier. It ends with Ada crying out, the cry merging with the sound of the sea, louder now. As before the scene is unceremoniously truncated.
Ada suggests that he consult Holloway about his talking. This was a source of some embarrassment to her when they were together. She cites an instance where she has to explain to their daughter why her father was talking to himself in the lavatory. She can’t understand why such “a lovely peaceful gentle soothing sound” should upset him so and refuses to believe that his talking helps drown it out. He tells he that he’s even taken to “walk[ing] about with [a] gramophone
Phonograph
The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...
” but forget it this day.
He reminds Ada that it was on this very beach they had sex for the first time. She’d shown great reluctance and they had to wait a long time before the coast was clear. She did not get pregnant
Pregnancy
Pregnancy refers to the fertilization and development of one or more offspring, known as a fetus or embryo, in a woman's uterus. In a pregnancy, there can be multiple gestations, as in the case of twins or triplets...
right away however and it was years before they had Addie. He wonders what age the girl is now but – unexpectedly for a mother – Ada says she doesn’t know. He proposes going for a row, “to be with my father”, he tells her but, again, she reminds him that their daughter will be coming soon and would be upset to find him gone.
Henry explains to Ada that his father doesn’t talk with him like she does. She is not surprised and predicts that a day will come when there will be no one left and he will be alone with only his own voice for company. She remembers meeting his family in the midst of having a row, his father, mother and a sister threatening to kill herself. The father storms out slamming the door, as he did the day he disappeared for good (if this is in fact not the same day), but she passes him later sitting staring out to sea (bear in mind Henry said his father was blind) in a posture that reminded her of Henry himself.
“Is this rubbish a help to you, Henry? [she wonders out loud.] “I can try and go on a little if you wish.” He fails to answer though and so she slips out of his consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
.
The second monologue
He says he’s not ready and begs her to stay even if she won’t speak and “Henry improvisesImprovisation
Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...
upon her story, attempting to build it into a more complex and extended narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
but he fails”. What is interesting here is that Henry imagines that Ada, after witnessing his father sitting on the rock, gets on the tram
Tram
A tram is a passenger rail vehicle which runs on tracks along public urban streets and also sometimes on separate rights of way. It may also run between cities and/or towns , and/or partially grade separated even in the cities...
(possibly horse-driven) to go home, then alights and returns to check on him only to find the beach empty. Was she the last person to see him alive?
Resigning himself to being alone Henry picks up the Bolton story from where he left off:
- The doctor says if Bolton wants an injectionInjection (medicine)An injection is an infusion method of putting fluid into the body, usually with a hollow needle and a syringe which is pierced through the skin to a sufficient depth for the material to be forced into the body...
– “meaning an anaesthetic” – just to let down his trousers and he’ll give him one but Bolton doesn’t reply. Instead he starts playing with the blind, drawing it up and then letting it fall, like an eye blinking. This infuriates Holloway and he insists Bolton stop which he does. Instead he lights a candle and, holding it “above his head, walks over and looks Holloway full in the eye” but still says nothing. This obviously makes the doctor uncomfortable. He again offers to give him an injection but Bolton wants something else, something he has obviously asked for before and the doctor has refused to go through with, possibly to administer a lethal injection rather than merely a jab to dull the pain. “Please, Holloway!” he pleads one final time. There the story peters out with the two men standing eye to eye in silence.
Henry is like the “writer-protagonists of the novels, using their speech/writing to fill the moments until death.” But he finds he can’t go on. He curses, gets to his feet, walks over to the water’s edge where he takes out and consults a pocket diary. With the exception of an appointment with the “plumber at nine [to attend to] the waste” pipe his future is empty. The play ends with no resolution other than the certainty that the next day and the next day will be the same as the previous ones.
Interpretation
Since Embers can be interpreted in a variety of ways it is perhaps worthwhile considering what Beckett said to Jack MacGowran, not specifically about this play, but about all his writing:- “Beckett told me that when I came to a passage with several meanings, the obvious one is the right one. He told me he did not create symbolSymbolA symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
s where they did not exist, only where they are apparent. He kept repeating that line from WattWatt (novel)Watt was Samuel Beckett's second published novel in English, largely written on the run in the south of France during the Second World War and published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in 1953...
– ‘no symbols where none intended’. At the time he was very annoyed with the symbol-hunting scholars who seemed to be breathing down his neck all the time.”
Henry, the central character in this play, cannot find the words to articulate his situation and fills in the blanks with what he can to see if he can make sense of things. In this context the play is its own metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
. Words have become redundant but they are all Henry has to explain the unexplainable. If critics get frustrated because there are no answers then they’ve got the point.
Sound Effects
“Beckett’s paradoxParadox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
ical endeavour to question sound in this radio play is [partly] achieved through the use of grossly made sound effect
Sound effect
For the album by The Jam, see Sound Affects.Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media...
s (coconut-like sound of hooves, exaggerated amplifications of Addie’s cries, etc.).”
The sound of the sea dominates the play but it is not an accurate representation and deliberately so. Henry warns us that the sea sound effects are not perfect and this casts doubt as to whether he is even on the beach at all; perhaps everything in the play is taking place within his head.
The pioneering sound engineer
Audio engineering
An audio engineer, also called audio technician, audio technologist or sound technician, is a specialist in a skilled trade that deals with the use of machinery and equipment for the recording, mixing and reproduction of sounds. The field draws on many artistic and vocational areas, including...
Desmond Briscoe
Desmond Briscoe
Harry Desmond Briscoe was an English composer, sound engineer and studio manager. He was the co-founder and original manager of the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop....
was responsible for the sound of the sea in the original BBC production. This was his second collaboration with Beckett (he also worked on All That Fall
All That Fall
All That Fall is a one-act radio play by Samuel Beckett produced following a request from the BBC. It was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races...
) only this time he “utilized a more traditionally ‘musical’ approach, moulding the abstract sound of the sea using distinct pitches
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
.”
“Henry also demands certain sound effects to provide a contrast to the monotony of the sea. He twice asks for the sound of hooves, hoping that the 'ten-ton mammoth
Mammoth
A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans are members of Elephantidae, the family of elephants and mammoths, and close relatives of modern elephants. They were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair...
' can be trained to mark time; have it 'stamp all day' and 'tramp the world down'. He similarly asks for a drip, as if the sea could be drained by the sound effect.”
Henry
Beckett himself, Zilliacus believes, has made the most important point about Embers: “‘Cendres,’ he remarked in an interview with P.L. Mignon, ‘repose sur une ambiguité: le personage a-t-il une hallucination ou est-il en présence de la réalité?’” (Embers rests on an ambiguity: is the person having an hallucinationHallucination
A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid,...
or is this really happening?) Paul Lawley feels the need to qualify this statement however: “The most important point [perhaps], but one to start from rather than conclude with.”
Like many of Beckett’s characters (e.g. Molloy
Molloy (novel)
Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett. The English translation is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.-Plot introduction:On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name...
, May in Footfalls
Footfalls
Footfalls is a play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English, between 2 March and December 1975 and was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre as part of the Samuel Beckett Festival, on May 20, 1976 directed by Beckett himself. Billie Whitelaw, for whom the piece had been written, played...
), Henry is a writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
or at the very least a storyteller
Storytelling
Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values...
, albeit by his own admission, a poor one never actually finishing anything he starts. Fortunately he doesn’t need to depend on his writing for a living. He may or may not commit what he has written to paper but he performs the core function of a writer, the creation of stories. And as a writer he also needs readers or listeners to hear what he has to say. Like the old woman in Rockaby he only has himself and the voices in his head left to acknowledge his existence however pathetic that existence has become.
Henry is undoubtedly a tormented soul. He interrogates the past rigorously but never gets round to actually verbalising what is really on his mind: How did his father die? Was he, in any way, responsible for that death? Is vital information missing or has he repressed
Psychological repression
Psychological repression, also psychic repression or simply repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one's own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious...
it? Is this why he can never complete any of his stories because they are all really the same story and are all missing that something? His life is like a sentence (pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
intended) – it reached a comma
Comma (punctuation)
The comma is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight but inclined from the vertical, or...
with his father’s death and he has been unable to satisfactorily finish it. He has no “professional obligations”, no familial ties and now not even a woman to justify his hanging around this place like, as he puts it, an “old grave I cannot tear myself away from”.
The Sea
Henry's initial monologue focuses on his fixationFixation (psychology)
Fixation: 'concept originated by Sigmund Freud to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits'. Subsequently '"Fixation" acquired a broader connotation...
with the sound of the sea. Right at the start he even says, “That sound you hear is the sea … I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was.” “The ‘you’ here can be taken to be the dead father, with whom Henry is sitting on the strand. But if so, it makes little sense since, as we soon learn, the father lived at the sea's edge all his life and presumably would know how the sea sounds. Henry's information thus functions ironically
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
, or even metalinguistically
Metalinguistics
Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to culture and society. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. The neologism 'metalinguistics' emerged between 1950 and...
: on the one hand, it shows the narrator having a brief moment of power over the father whose death haunts him; on the other, we can read the speech as an aside to the audience,” emphasising that everything they are experiencing is a part of a fiction, even the sea. Jonathan Kalb has even suggested that everything including the sea and the beach are all merely figments of Henry’s imagination.
The images (symbols and metaphors) that spring to mind when people see the sea (another pun Beckett cannot have failed to notice) have become somewhat cliché
Cliché
A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
d over the years and Beckett takes full advantage of this fact; literature (not forgetting the visual arts) has done much of his groundwork for him.
The sound of the sea continues throughout the play always “moving according to the temporal laws of the tide” suggesting a linear
Linear
In mathematics, a linear map or function f is a function which satisfies the following two properties:* Additivity : f = f + f...
ality to the time line but the action is grouped by association
Association (psychology)
In psychology and marketing, two concepts or stimuli are associated when the experience of one leads to the effects of another, due to repeated pairing. This is sometimes called Pavlovian association for Ivan Pavlov's pioneering of classical conditioning....
rather than presented in a chronological
Chronology
Chronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".Chronology is part of periodization...
order. The omnipresent
Omnipresence
Omnipresence or ubiquity is the property of being present everywhere. According to eastern theism, God is present everywhere. Divine omnipresence is thus one of the divine attributes, although in western theism it has attracted less philosophical attention than such attributes as omnipotence,...
sea is less of a natural phenomenon
Natural phenomenon
A natural phenomenon is a non-artificial event in the physical sense, and therefore not produced by humans, although it may affect humans . Common examples of natural phenomena include volcanic eruptions, weather, decay, gravity and erosion...
than another mental ghost
Ghost
In traditional belief and fiction, a ghost is the soul or spirit of a deceased person or animal that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living. Descriptions of the apparition of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to...
haunting him no matter where he goes, even reacting to events (e.g. during the sex scene) by getting louder; it clearly has its own voice or perhaps it is all that remains of his father’s voice since it represents his grave. Either way the sea is a constant reminder of death and Henry’s attempts to drown out its sound “seem to manifest the typical Beckett antithesis
Antithesis
Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...
: the desire for death and the desire to keep it at bay by continued speech”.
Beckett’s own father (actually a superb swimmer) died at home, of a heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
it has to be said, on June 26, 1933. In October his mother rented “a little house by the sea just beyond Dalkey
Dalkey
Dalkey is suburb of Dublin and seaside resort in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County, Ireland. It was founded as a Viking settlement and became an important port during the Middle Ages. According to John Clyn, it was one of the ports through which the plague entered Ireland in the mid-14th century...
Harbour. Beckett accompanied her, laden with his books, manuscripts and typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
. But he never settled down there and questioned ‘how people have the nerve to live so near, on the sea. It moans in one’s dreams at night.’” The beach there – “by contract with most Irish beaches – is notoriously composed of shingle and pebble”.
In May 1954 he received a phone call from his sister-in-law to let him know that his brother, Frank, had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer
Lung cancer
Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...
. Beckett spent several months there up until his brother’s eventual death in September. “Most evenings he walked alone after dinner along the seashore below the house”
Henry’s Father
“‘To “act” it is to kill it’: ‘radio text,’ Beckett here reminds us, is par excellence an art that depends on sound alone and hence cannot be converted to the stage. Furthermore, the sound in question is not just that of the human voice but includes a complex network of nonverbal elements, musical or otherwise. It makes little sense, then, to complain, as does John Pilling, that Beckett should have included the voice of Henry's father, along with Ada's and Addie's voices, in the play:- ‘The puzzling thing is that Henry's control over voices does not extend to the most crucial figure of all, his father … The failure to incorporate into the physical existence of the play its most important figure is not so much a failure of conceptConceptThe word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...
ion – though it might have served to link Henry's life to his story of Bolton – as of tactTact (psychology)Tact is a term that B.F. Skinner used to describe a verbal operant in which a certain response is evoked by a particular object or event, or property of an object or event. More generally, the tact is verbal contact with the physical world.Chapter five of Skinner's Verbal Behavior discusses the...
. There seems to be no good reason for the omission.’
“But there is a very good reason for the omission, which is that, unlike the theatre, radio makes it possible to represent characters by means of metonymic
Metonymy
Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept...
sound images: The ghost of Henry's father is indeed "heard" throughout the play: not only when his son acts the role of medium, imitating such parental exhortations as "Are you coming for a dip?", but also in the recurrent "Please! PLEASE!" that Bolton addresses to Holloway, and, most important, in the voice of the sea itself.”
Henry tells us at the very start of the play that his father is blind and yet when Ada passes him she makes mention that he did not see her. As Henry is not only talking to his father at the start it is also true that he is talking to a “blind” audience too. Is the man actually blind or even figuratively blind? Perhaps Ada was unaware that he was blind though think seems unlikely.
“As their names suggest, Ada and Addie may not be wife and daughter at all, not even imagined wife and daughter, only father-surrogates: Ada is a near anagram
Anagram
An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who...
of Dad and Addie a rhyme for Daddie. And Henry himself? Is he perhaps just another of the fictional characters? Ruby Cohn notes that ‘Henry is a name derived from German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
Heimrih, meaning head of the family’ he too is a father or father or father-surrogate – his own. Why should the figure of the father loom so large in every element of the play? Because the father, the head of the family, is its creator, and it is creation which is Henry’s obligation.”
Bolton and Holloway
Although the scene where the action takes places is ostensibly a beach, the real action all takes place inside Henry’s head, which is why Beckett commentators generally speak of this kind of Beckettian dramatic setting as a “skullscape” or “soulscape.” Paul “Lawley has suggested that the enigmatic scene with Bolton’s opening and shutting the heavy drapes enacts the blinking of an eye, the room thus becoming a skull,” a skull-within-a-skull in fact.A fuller appreciation of the story of Bolton and Holloway helps with an overall understanding of the rest of the play. Needless to say opinions differ. It is reminiscent of the story May tells in Footfalls where aspects of her and her mother are recast as “Amy” and “Mrs Winter”.
Bolton = Henry
Hersh Zeifman, for whom Embers “dramatizes a quest for salvation, a quest which, as always, ultimately proves fruitless,” sees this scene as “a paradigmParadigm
The word paradigm has been used in science to describe distinct concepts. It comes from Greek "παράδειγμα" , "pattern, example, sample" from the verb "παραδείκνυμι" , "exhibit, represent, expose" and that from "παρά" , "beside, beyond" + "δείκνυμι" , "to show, to point out".The original Greek...
of human suffering and divine rejection”:
- Bolton’s desperate plea to Holloway for help mirrors the confrontation between Henry and his father. Bolton is thus a surrogate for Henry—implicitly identified with ChristJesusJesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
as sufferer. Both his name (Bolton) and the fact that he wears a red dressing gown (the colour is repeated three times in the text) link him with the CrucifixionCrucifixionCrucifixion is an ancient method of painful execution in which the condemned person is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross and left to hang until dead...
(before Christ was nailed to the cross, he was dressed in a scarlet robe). And Holloway, the recipient of Bolton’s supplicationSupplicationSupplication is the most common form of prayer, wherein a person asks God to provide something, either for the person or who is doing the praying or for someone else on whose behalf a prayer. This because of a supplication is being made, also known as intercession.The concept of supplication is...
, is a surrogate for Henry’s father—implicitly identified with Christ as saviour. Like Christ, Holloway is a physicianPhysicianA physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
, a potential healer of men’s souls. But the identification is an ironic one. The Physician of the Gospels exclaimed, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me’ (JohnGospel of JohnThe Gospel According to John , commonly referred to as the Gospel of John or simply John, and often referred to in New Testament scholarship as the Fourth Gospel, is an account of the public ministry of Jesus...
14:6); the physician of Embers is a hollow-way, a way leading nowhere. And whereas Christ’s death on the cross at `the ninth hour’ represents birth into a new life and a promise of salvation, Holloway’s actions, likewise at the ninth hour, result in the death of new life, a universal denial of salvation: `If it’s an injection you want, Bolton, let down your trousers and I’ll give you one, I have a panhysterectomyHysterectomyA hysterectomy is the surgical removal of the uterus, usually performed by a gynecologist. Hysterectomy may be total or partial...
at nine’ (italics added [by Zeifman]).
Lawley’s contention could equally be valid in that “Henry is losing his creative impersonality and is consequently moving inexorably into identity with his fictional creation, Bolton.”
Whereas most scholars take Bolton’s begging to suggest he wants to die, Michael Robinson, in The Long Sonata of the Dead, puts forward a simpler interpretation:
- “Into this tale in which Bolton … calls out his friend and doctor, Holloway, in the middle of an icy winter night, not because he is ill but because he is alone, Henry puts all his own isolation and desire for companionship. He does this with great imaginative sympathy and the ending, where Bolton does not receive the recognition he has longed for throughout the night, is the more painful because it is clearly Henry’s loneliness.”
The sad fact is that company is not the real answer. It is still only an anaesthetic, numbing the pain. In the Beckettian universal construct sadly death rarely brings any relief either.
Whether Holloway is a real person or the character in the story even based on a real person is unclear.
Bolton = Henry’s father
An alternative stance is take by Vivian MercierVivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born in Clara, County Offaly, Ireland and educated first at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, and then at Trinity College, Dublin. He became a Scholar of the College and edited the student magazine T.C.D...
who “suggests that Bolton is in fact Henry’s father” because of the use of “your” rather than “his” in the expression, “and the glim shaking in your old fist” assuming of course that Henry has returned to telling his tale to his dead father which seems most likely. Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
concurs with this reading.
This option offers a simpler explanation of the story. If it is based on his father’s seeking some kind of escape from a life that has become unendurable, with a worthless son, a suicidal daughter and possibly an argumentative wife all symptoms of it, then Holloway could simply be a personification of any means of release. That the story is missing key elements is due to the fact that Henry himself doesn’t have these pieces. As his life has dragged on in its own version of unendurability it is only obvious that he will start to relate more and more to the figure of Bolton. If, at this point, Henry were able to end his story, he would be “going beyond the confines of his own condition, of which his story is, in all essential aspects, a duplicate. The moment the story can be finished, there will be no one there to finish it'”.
Ada
Henry’s conversation with his wife at first “appears to take place in the present, but Ada does not really move into the scene and certain clues show that this dialogue actually took place years before when their marriage was only twenty years old and Addie was still a child.” For one thing Beckett stipulates that she makes “[n]o sound as she sits.” Also beforehand she was aware of “the least feather of smoke on the horizon” but now “she cannot see the beach where Henry is sitting (‘is there anyone about?’) without his words to describe it.”Their nature of their dialogue is odd too – quite civilized – considering the comment Henry made just before evoking her presence: “Ada too, conversation with her, that was something, that’s what hell will be like.” Evidently he is remembering better times here. Katharine Worth conjectures that Ada represents a kind of muse
Muse
The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...
, “a hint stressed in the sound of her voice – ‘low [and] remote throughout’ – and in the curious fact that she has been present in some mysterious way before he spoke her name.” He calls on her because he needs her, his father doesn’t answer and he is struggling with his story on his own.
Roger Blin
Roger Blin
Roger Blin was a French actor and director notable for directing the first production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot....
, in an interview on 2 March 1975, in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, said: "Beckett absolutely didn't want me to try to do Embers for the theatre because, when you listen, you don't know if Ada exists or not, [or] whether she only exists in the imagination of the character Henry."
Ada is “immensely there”, though, her personality is allowed to shine throughout her conversation with Henry; she doesn’t merely respond, she initiates lines of thought, she nags him like a mother with her list of don’ts, jokes with him, reproves him in a matter-of-fact way and refuses to mollycoddle him. She doesn’t appear to take him very seriously either. Henry is obviously incapable of imagining her any other way than how she was when they were together, further evidence of his declining creative powers. Parts of their conversation, for example, sound as if they are simply reenactments of things said to each other when they were a couple but noticeably not all.
Her advice to Henry that he seeks medical assistance from Holloway, assuming him to be “a figure in the fiction he [has been] weaving”, would add weight to the argument that Ada is both part imagined as well as part remembered.
Having performed her function to the best of her plainly limited abilities she leaves him to it with a down-to-earth, “Is this rubbish a help to you, Henry? … No? Then I think I’ll be getting back?”
Conclusion
In a letter to Alan SchneiderAlan Schneider
Alan Schneider was an American theatre director and mentor responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights...
dated 6 September 1959, after finally hearing a tape of the BBC production, Beckett wrote: "Good performance and production but doesn't come off. My fault, text too difficult."
Beckett could never be called an “easy” author and one of the reasons for his success is undoubtedly the pleasure that comes from finding hidden meanings in his works even those you thought you were familiar with. So why did Beckett believe this particular text too hard?
The main problem here is the density of the writing. Beckett’s plays never provide all the answers; there are gaps where the audience has to do some digging and some filling in. In Embers there are a few too many plot holes and far too many clues pointing in all directions for such a short piece to bear.