Rewinding Krapp’s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity

Abstract

Written with Irishman Pat Magee’s voice in his head, Beckett composes Krapp’s Last Tape in seven succinct stages in March 1958. In this chapter I will discuss the unfolding of Beckett’s drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape to argue that he embellishes each succeeding version to include more personal details of his Irish Protestant childhood and young adulthood; once again, the return to personal memories shows that Beckett remains possessed by a dispossession of masculine national identity. This play not only focuses on Beckett’s experience of Anglo-Ireland, but also presents in fictionalized form Beckett’s 1945 epiphany to work with loss and disintegration. As Nora suggests, memory is capricious and ever in the present in our lives, so much so that it is impossible to control the memory as it “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects.” With Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett renews his preoccupation with masculinity and his own past with the figure of Krapp who, through subsequent versions of the initial text, slowly turns into a composite of an Irish Protestant male who is contemporaneous with Beckett. While we have noted that Beckett’s work up through the 1950s continually returns to memories and issues of a displaced masculinity, with the character Krapp, Beckett aberrantly creates an overtly masculine and sexually successful male.

Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory … nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection …. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects …. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative.

Pierre Nora¹