Pas de mère: présences fantomatiques dans deux pièces brèves de Samuel Beckett

This article deals with the presence of ghosts in two plays by Samuel Beckett: Embers (Cendres), a piece for radio of 1959, and Footfalls (Pas), a « dramaticule » of 1976. In the first one, a man standing in front of the sea talks to his dead father without any answer except for the sound of the waves, while his wife’s voice addresses to him from a place which does not seem to belong to the real world. But the most important and disquieting ghostly presence in the play is just the one which is not explicitly mentioned: the phantom of the mother. This presence is made recognizable both by some references to Beckett’s biography and by the comparison with the second play, Footfalls. Here the mother ghost explicitly plays a crucial role, although only as a vocal presence coming from the dark: the sole visible image on the stage is the obsessive “come and go” of the daughter, perhaps only a creation of her mother’s fantasy, a spirit conjured up by a spirit.