"Unheard footfalls only sound" : the infinite reverberation of Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman's neither and words and music

• Main Author: Han, Kimberly Pei Lin
• Other Authors: Chiang Hui Ling Michelle
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature; Humanities::Drama
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152500
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The difficulty of grasping Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman’s neither — both the source text and operatic rendition of it — is found in how there is no clear indication as to what the space of ‘neither’, in which an unidentified speaker vacillates “to and fro” “two lit refuges”, may be. Where many have thought of the space of ‘neither’ as an exclusionary space due to the language of negation tied to the word ‘neither’, they have only succeeded in telling us what the space of ‘neither’ is not, instead of what it could be. Nonetheless, I believe that Beckett does leave a possible hint as to what it might be through a cryptic reference to sound and the physical sense of hearing — “unheard footfalls only sound”. Here, though we may be unable to pinpoint what exactly the space of ‘neither’ is, we can first begin to imagine this space to be one that is at least filled with “unheard” sound. Drawing from the biological instincts of animals who use echolocation to navigate and visualize spaces, this dissertation thus attempts to feel out and chart the space of ‘neither’ through a process of “unhearing sound”: of first attempting to listen, failing to do so, and then turning to simply hear. Part of this also involves situating the space of ‘neither’ — in other words, identifying the “two lit refuges” that it resides between. To do this, I turn to Beckett and Feldman’s Words and Music, and with it, bring to light our own unyielding reliance on the perceptual act of listening — in tying sounds to their signifying and representative ends of either words or music. Positioned within the intersections of sound studies, aesthetics, and literary criticism, this paper thus undertakes methodologies of sound in its analyses of both neither and Words and Music. It serves as a test of what exactly an approach of sound studies in both literary works can yield and create for us — not only in the literal sound of the performances that we hear, but beyond it as it resonates in our minds and bodies as well. In doing so, I find my own answer to the mystery of the space of ‘neither’, proposing that we may think of it as the ideal reverberation chamber — a site of infinite reverberation, and an inclusive space of becoming that ultimately resonates with our own lived rhythms and experiences.