Interpretation
As with many of Beckett’s later works for the stage and television, one definitive interpretation of What Where has proven elusive. A clear totalitarian edge exists which is why many opt for a political reading but, as with Catastrophe before it, there is more going on here. It can also be interpreted as a portrait of a single consciousness engaged in a self-reflective act. When the Voice of Bam wants the action to restart, rather than instruct the two player to “Start again,” it says – significantly – “I start again” suggesting that the words and actions of the two men are being directly controlled, remembered or imagined by the consciousness behind the voice, presumably the Bam as he is in the present.
A political reading cannot be simply dismissed though since Beckett himself “briefly entertained making each character wear a tarboosh, fezlike headgear associated with Armenians.” Even today “orture and ill-treatment in police custody remain widespread in Armenia. Torture usually occurs in pre-trial detention with the aim of coercing a confession or evidence against third parties.”
Beckett is famously reported as saying of What Where: "I don't know what it means. Don't ask me what it means. It's an object." There is clearly a danger in taking this remark at face value. Beckett undoubtedly had something quite specific in mind as can be seen in the way he moulded his vision over the three productions in America, Germany and France detailed below. One significant remark he did make was that the Voice of Bam could be thought as coming from “beyond the grave”.
Beckett, in Proust, calls memory “some miracle of analogy;” he qualifies it in the preceding phrase as “an accident”. The inability to remember, to get at the truth, is a focal point in much of his work. Beckett’s characters (e.g. May in Footfalls, Mouth in Not I) seem doomed to repeat themselves, as much as the accidents or miracles of analogy allow them some momentary insight into their situations. For Beckett, memory is second-hand knowledge. You were not there. Another "you" was. Can you trust what he says he saw and heard?
This would not be the first time Beckett has fragmented an individual for dramatic effect (e.g. That Time or Ohio Impromptu). Beckett believes people to be in a continual state of flux, often finding it hard to relate to earlier versions of their own selves (e.g. Krapp: Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that.). With each passing day “we are other”, Beckett notes in his monograph, “no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” Bam is not wallowing in nostalgia though (like the women in Come and Go), rather he is trying to remember something – an “it”, a “when”, a “where” – that insists on remaining just out of reach.
Those “familiar with his preoccupation, themes, images, figures of speech … may assume that the 'what where' question is a kind of Oedipus' riddle and that the answer to it cannot be found, despite an obligation to ask the question.” Rather than simply “What?” and “Where?” the full questions could easily be: “What is the meaning of life?” and “Where does it all come from?”
If Bam is trying to ascertain the details surrounding a particular crime, the question has to be asked: what crime? James Knowlson believes “that crime appears likely to be Calderón’s ‘original sin of being born’, which Beckett had evoked at the beginning of his career in this essay Proust. Consequently, the overall perpetrator is unlikely ever to be known, let alone apprehended.”
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