Krapp’s Last Track: Beckett on Tracklocross

Many moons ago, I discussed Joyce and, through Ulysses, his impact on the great tradition of tracklocross in literature; today, though, we will look at Beckett. A man who felt he would forever be lost in the shadows that Joyce cast across literature. Eventually, though, Beckett realised, 

I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his skids to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.

Beckett realised here that he had to no longer follow the trails Joyce had laid out and instead start to create his own trails. He had to get on his bike and carve his own track if he was ever to escape the shadowlands of Joyce. His way forward in tracklocross was to build simpler trails, trails that did not rely on Joyce’s knowledge and were instead based on his impoverished ideas. Beckett started to look at his craft as if he was a ‘non-knower’ and as a ‘non-can-er.’

We can see this in Krapp’s Last Tape, initially titled Krapp’s Last Track. As we are now aware, the Big 3 Gear (Campag, Shimano, and SRAM) have been conspiring to remove all knowledge of fixed gear and single speed bikes from classical literature. Krapp was a man seen to be sitting at a desk, poorly lit, and haunched over a laptop typing out a blog entry for a tracklocross bike site, a dying artform even in 1959. The titular character takes childish glee in writing about knobbly tyres. A glee that I hope will never dissipate over time. 

He is reading through his previous blogs and wondering how WordPress overtook Blogger as the platform we should all use. He notes how riding takes him into the light and allows him to experience his essential self. He sits back and laughs at how his younger self was so full of joy, life and hope. All full of idealism and highly unrealistic expectations that the Big 3 Gear would collapse, leaving fixed gear and Microshift as the industry leaders and standards.

He starts to type about his last year, in which he sat at the side of the trail, waiting to hear of his mother’s death. He wonders why his younger self used archaic language to describe his mum at the time, searching online to clarify the meaning of the language. The language shows that the younger Beckett wanted to emulate Joyce’s knowledge and not the simplicity that Beckett now looked for.

He continues scanning the blog and slowly gets frustrated at his younger self. The language used is similar to an onslaught on the beaches of Normandy, leaving you shell-shocked by the language and knowledge of language. It is a brutal attack on the senses. Krapp loads another page and another. All of this should go, he feels. It no longer fits the philosophical view of his writing; it is an older, more archaic form following the trail of Joyce and not the new trails he had carved across Europe, the Schwalbe CX Pro leaving small ruts wherever he went. He is disappointed in his young self and the man he has become, the prototype disgruntled bike shop mechanic.

He starts reading the section about his love again, reads about his bike, remembers the lines he made with that bike, and reads that blog until the end.

The curtain drops.