LIT4934 - Workbook Entry 09: Eh Joe

Eh Joe? What was that Joe? I didn't get that Joe.

With Eh Joe, we've moved from the merely "modernist" strangeness of the first stories and plays to something more avant garde – perhaps a little too avant for my garde.

This text is a teleplay. The majority of the visuals involve a slowly closing closeup of a 50-something man (Joe) sitting on a bed. The audio is a woman's voice speaking -- to the man? a voice in his head? Don't know, Joe. The script makes it clear he's alone. That much I can make out.

But what's going on? Is anything going on? (I'm sure the latter question would amuse Beckett.)

The voice might be a voice of wandering memory. Meanwhile, there are a few points that are clear and echo Beckettian notions – an implied relationship between being seen and existing, between existence and pain, between life and death and the general annoying insistence of a physical body.

The only action I can make out is near the end, a "scene" (I use that term loosely) in which a woman commits suicide. Using a common Beckett motif, it takes her several tries to get it right. (There were similar motifs in Endgame and Waiting for Godot among others.) The text indicates that the woman and Joe knew each other, perhaps were lovers. There are some subtle suggestions that Joe wasn't the nicest guy when dealing with her (recommending a particular razor for her body hair, for example).

It seems this woman was one of many Joe has known, but was perhaps the woman he loved best – or at least came closest to loving. The whole issue of love and what it means to love someone comes up again as it has in other Beckett texts including Endgame and "First Love" and remains equally unresolved.

I also gather that the woman speaking (again, presumably in Joe's head) was not the woman who committed suicide because the voice says, "I found a better," and "But there was one didn't… You know the one I mean, Joe…"before describing the suicide girl. Which makes me wonder who the voice we hear (presumably in Joe's head, but maybe a voice he doesn't hear at all) is that isn't with him now and isn't the woman he loved (if he loved) best but is still talking about him, maybe even to him in his head.

We don't know why the woman who committed suicide actually committed suicide either. We don't know how it really affects Joe. We don't know a lot… Eh Joe? And on the whole, I don't understand a lot of Eh Joe.

But maybe that's Beckett's whole point.