BECKETT’S CHARACTERS IN ENDGAME:HUMAN ABSTRACT AND LIFE

DISTILLED?

Bodhisattwa Khan

This tension and its continual elevation through the play isthe key to enjoying Endgame.

If you are uncomfortable with the tension, and fight againstit, this play will be something

you must grit your teeth and endure. But if you can recognize the tension as part of what

it is “about”, Endgame is a play that will make you think instead of merely shade your

head in despair.”

- Kathe Lemon, Martlet

A romantic man appears to be a normal human being when compared to any of Beckett’s

characters. A man who has increased the wealth will like to play only with the present

and more obviously the future. A man with failing health clings to the memory of the

past rather the past itself. For him future is the only absolute; the certainty for which the

game begins in the immediate present. A man in love of present is hard to find. The

presence of man in immediate present is but for only a fraction of linear time. Hamm’s

relentless effort to collect narratives to build a metanarrative is as impossible as the

collection of sand grains into a heap. A heap is no different from the sand grains in the

heap itself. The postmodern clock certainly plays well:

CLOV (fixed gaze, tonelessly): Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly

finished. (Pause.)

Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there'sa heap, a little

heap, the impossible heap. [1]

Only that Beckett anticipates too well the dissolution of ‘modern’ and also linear time.

Endgame resonates richly with St Augustine’s enquiry into the nature of time.Prefiguring

Hamm’s and Clov’s famous opening soliloquies, St Augustine laments: in my

misery I kept crying ‘How long shall I go on saying ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’? Why not

now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment? [2]

Measuring time becomes extremely complex an endeavour when we realise that the

concept of linear time is unacceptable and incomprehensible to all the four characters in

Endgame. Measurement simultaneously demands the active presence of human

beings.Time for Hamm and Clov is nothing but a collection ofincidents that tends to be

fictionalised more often than not:

A further index is the business in which Clov sets off the alarm clockagainst Hamm’s ear,

“They listen to it ringing to the end,” followedwith the comments “The end is terrific!”

and “I prefer the middle”. The sequence alludes ambiguously to Aristotle’s Poetics13 and

to St Augustine’s illustration of the paradoxes involved in measuring time

by referring to “a noise emitted by some material body”:The sound begins and we

continue to hear it. It goes on until finally it ceases.Thenthere is silence. […] In fact,

what we measure is the interval between a beginning and an end.[3]

Fragmented and dysfunctional if we may like, the observer, the spectator, the watcher ,

either from the centre or from the periphery languishes in black and white ,shades of

grey, and dreams that exorcises itself of any colour that isthe attribute of the

romantic.The object of interest that holds us back,is whether the spectator who is

comfortable in linear time is creating a blackhole of antimeaning ,set against the eternity

of Hamm and Clov’s world and which certainly is an eternal repetition of infinite

microevents set in between:

Book 11 of St Augustine’s Confessions, the focus of Ricoeur’s interest in St Augustine’s

“phenomenology” of time, contains ideas that help Beckett shape the aesthetic world of

Endgame. St Augustine strives to understand God’s creation of the world within mutually

exclusive terms of time and eternity beyond time:You are theMaker of all time. If, then,

there was any time before you made heaven and earth, how cananyone say that you were

idle? You must have made that time, for time could not elapse before you made it.

But if there was no time before heaven and earth were created, how can anyone ask what

you were doing ‘then’? If there was no time, there was no ‘then.’[4]

A normal human being must use logic and rationality to survive or progress in a world

which takes linear time to be the be all and end all of a meaningful human existence. By

creating a world bereft of any ‘time’, Beckett nullifies anywatcher sitting outside his

play. Beckett certainly acts like a skilled watchmaker sitting outside the clock looking at

its endless repetition, over and over again:

Co-opting StAugustine’s thought, Beckett supplies a constant source of irony for his

characters’ narratives and language. Beckett’s parody of St Augustine indicates that the

world of Endgame exists within itself, that what we see is absolutely what we get, so to

speak—except that there exists no we to perceive it. On thisbasis, Beckett closes the

watcher out of the play, according to St Augustine’s model of a world outside which

nothing exists.[5]

A sane man is obviously not a madman and a madman is also not expected to show sanity

even though he does so in bits and pieces, in flashes of memory. A madman is oblivious

of his present; his resources in the past are negligible andfor him the future hardly exists.

Clov’s question,” A madman? When was that?”gives rise to a couple of questions .One,a

madman though not uncommon ( Hamm has ready reference for a mad painter) is rare in

the world of Endgame.A madman obviously cannot preconceive of the moves in a game

of chess. Beckett’s absurd world negates over and over againthe inconsequential vision

of a madman.So Clov’s question may be more of an evoked surprise rather than pointing

to a point or points in linear time. ‘When’ and ‘Yesterday’ can refer to any point in

eternity.

Beckett’s characters have always remained in their existential prisonhouse. Endless

repetition, endless horrors and apprehensions and inability to move comes from lack of

time in Beckett’s theatrical world. Since time has ceased toexist ,the bridge between the

present and the paast has broken down. And the past could ony be had through a myopic

vision aided by an amnesiac memory and fractured sense of existence:

HAMM:This is not much fun. (Pause.)

But that's always the way at the end of the day, isn't it, Clov?

CLOV:Always.

HAMM: It's the end of the day like any other day, isn't it, Clov?

CLOV: Looks like it. [6]

The unspeakable in case of Clov and Hamm in Endgame is meaning:

HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something?

CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something!(Brief laugh.)

Ah that's a good one! [7]

Both express surprise and even uneasiness while apprehendingthe potentially arrresting

capacity of ‘meaning’.To have purgated his characters of any excesses, Beckett reduces

them to bare minimum,in terms of memory,ensemble caricature,action and

movement.Nagg and Nell live in ashbins, the ghetto within a ghetto.Their existence

reminds us over and over again of a tiny little girl,Anne Frank who went into hiding on

6th July,1942, a secret annex. It was a forced hiding withina ghetto prepared in the

country by the Nazis. That death was the only finality, was known to all. But why the

painful existence? Outside the ashbins,outside the skeleton resembling room, there was

vermins perhaps, imminent death,overflowing streets or an incumbent even. The only

aota of happiness is perhaps a sugarplum; the bare minimum with which the characters

must remain happy in Beckett’s world. In Waiting for Godot ,one of the casual tramps

Estragon also has to be satisfied with a carrot. The characters are active, not necessarily

suffering frrom inaction but their hard work is fruitless taking into consideration the law

of physics. Taking for example, the character of Clov does some work when he climbs up

the ladder and looks out of the window. But as soon as he comes down his work is

neutralised. Horizontal movement doesn’t help. It is only the upward ascension, the

vertical movement that remains desirable yet unachieved wholly. But the severe

impression of stasis bears upon the spectators, because of the cyclical nature of the

movement; the endless repetition of the same act. Two stepsforward ,one back-clearly

sets up the relation between the fragmented memory of Clov and his retarding motion.:

There is a clear link in Endgame between the retardation of physical action—two steps

forward, one back—and psychological subjectivity in Clov’s opening business, in which

he appears to lack the power of memory sufficient to accomplish complete, continuous

actions in the service of a dramatic progression. Clov’s periodic return to the ladder––

“He gets down, takes three steps toward window left, goes back for ladder […]” (11)––

gives an impression that his memory is impaired, purely through alternations in the

advancement, interruption and repetition of his physical action. [8]

William Blake’s seminal poem The Human Abstract ,pointed towards ‘the cancerous tree

of mystery… man’s own thinking process. [9] But no one is allowed or for that matter

cannot ‘think’ in Beckett’s plays. Vladimir and Estragon tryand yet they fail in Waiting

for Godot. It is not necessary that thinking has to brringout or attribute a ‘meaning’.But

if Clov and Hamm are suspicious of turning into something meaningful they certainly

were into a process of some kind of ‘thinking.’

If the four characters live in a post-apocalyyptic world inEndgame and know about the

certainty of death outside, or the ‘overflow’ outside,there may be a Biblical allusion in

the play by Beckett , which may ofcourse be a paradoxical one. Critics would like to

point out how the room id symbolic of a Noah’s arc. However Nagg hardly seems a close

resemblance of Noah, though Bible refers to one Ham as the son of Noah. If Noah’s arc

is the symbol of redemption, there is indeed a possibility of redemption.Hamm certainly

creates enough suspicion in the mind that he has seen it all. One of the suvivors in a post-

apocalyptic world :

Hamm: Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the

ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bitof grit in the middle

of the steppe. (Pause.)

Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't

have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and

because there won't be anyone left to have pity on you. [10]

Adorno inspite of other critics’ unwillingness is ready to offer a theory of historical

singularity to the context:

In Endgame, a historical moment unfolds, namely the experience captured in the title of

one of the culture industry’s cheap novels, Kaputt. After the Second World War,

everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realising it;

humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after eventsthat even the survivors

cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own

damaged state useless. (1991, 244) [11]

Death is the only certain and major possibility in Beckett’sworld. Nell is the only

character that possibly achieves redemption.But that too is the only justification for a

character who had understood the world as it was given to her:

NELL (without lowering her voice):Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.

But---

NAGG (shocked): Oh!

NELL: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh,

with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like

the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't

laugh any more. [12]

Beckett’s world is a closed world and hence the unavoidable repetition. It is only the

unmovable gaze of the speectator that opens up the world of Beckett to another

dimension;one that moves with linear time, the measurable world in terms of

length,beauty,wealth and events.The only thing that is worthless perhaps in this linear

time bound world is the music of the piano played on by a musician, the daily household

choirs in her home quite akin to the futile movements of Clov, Vladimir or Estragon!

Hamm is outright honest when he says,

HAMM: I wonder. (Pause.)

Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get

ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. [13]

Or is it not so that Beckett well aware of the spectator’s gaze, manages to distill his

characters? Keeping the naturalistic set, Beckett’s characters are human abstracts, the

summarising of the important qualities of a human existence.Hamm’s concept of a

“rational man” may have something to do with this uniqueness:

HAMM: I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was

a painter---and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see

him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him tothe window.

Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring

fleet! All that loveliness!

(Pause.)

He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had

seen was ashes.

(Pause.)

He alone had been spared.[14]

Clov is the more refined one:

CLOV: You whistle me. I don't come. The alarm rings. I'm gone. It doesn't ring. I'm

dead. [15]

The concept of truth plays with the possibilities, just liketime is being played with

possibilities. Both ‘time’ and ‘truth’ owe to subjective responses and in Beckett’s

world exists like the grain of sand in a sand clock. Over and over again, we are lured into

the possibility of measurement, and we are given an assurance of at least one certainty:

death. In Beckett’s stage , A Ricoeurian mimesis2 is thus possible but not the reflection

of a M.H.Abrams mirror. Just like truth remains a possibility, linear time a

probability,similarly the characters move inside the world that Beckett provides to them

even after the play ends.

In a repetitive world , one can hardly expect something ‘new’ to happen;something new

for change or something new to create a meaningful world:Hence all that is there is

either bare minimum or is slowly coming to one final certainty:

Adorno argues that Endgame’s remainders resist incorporationeven into the thematics of

existentialist absurdism: Instead, the absurd turns into forlorn particulars that mock the

conceptual, a layer composed of minimal utensils, refrigerators, lameness, blindness, and

the distasteful bodily functions. Everything waits to be carted off to the dump. (252) [16]

Repetition wears away the bare minimum,preparing the characters for the inevitable to

happen. Hence the existence is always in the middle as Hamm would like to put it.The

comic aspect of this existence is that there is a gross fear working and enhancing the

possible appearance of the inevitable. Adorno’s demand for asingular historical moment

to be located iin Endgame may actually the possibility of a Beckettian character. The

human abstract dissipates, fizzes out in presence of a measurable world.Multiple

possibilities destroy the human abstract, the distilled chatacter of Beckett, the essence of

life that remains. That is why the madman , the painter is the only one to have been

spared! Indeed! The Beckettian love for William Blake, the ‘progenitor’ of Romantic

poetry is carried on.

Is life being celebrated by Beckett in Endgame? Nagg’s demand for a pap or for that

matter a sugarplum is indeed a celebration that life exists and even Clov is ready to press

close the alarm clock to Hamm’s ears.That it is a noise and not a music is distinguished is

distinguished by the quicker beats of the gong, the n-1 or n+1 which ever is deemed a

melody, n suggesting the normal groupings of the beats.That life continues is also made

clear by the dialogue initiated between Clov and Hamm:

HAMM: Nature has forgotten us.

CLOV: There's no more nature.

HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.

CLOV: In the vicinity.

HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our

ideals!

CLOV: Then she hasn't forgotten us. [17]

In Rime of the Ancient Mariner we find a game of dice being played between Death and

Life-in-death , where the latter wins over the life of the damned sailor and Hamm suffers

the same torment. Both wait for redemption or death while life moves on in a cyclical

path:

‘Day after day, day after day,

We stuck,nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.’ [18]

Clov is ready to go out and face the outside world. In Endgame, the pairs are broken

more than often. Nell dies and breaks her pair with Nagg. Even Clov is leaving Hamm at

the end. Whether he succeeds we shall never know. He is ready to celebrate life. Clov

says that he loves order. Is it not true then that Clov whois part of the endless repetition,

the endless circularity is also part of an ordered, routine life?

HAMM: What are you doing?

CLOV: Putting things in order.

(He straightens up. Fervently.)

I'm going to clear everything away!

(He starts picking up again.)

HAMM: Order!

CLOV (straightening up): I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent

and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust. [19]

Beckett’s world is thus an ordered world, a life more distilled , more refined . more pure

than can be ‘imagined’. On my part I may argue that Beckett creates two simultaneous

rather three worlds at one go. One, from where the unmoving eyes of the spectator gazes

on, the second –the actual Beckettian world where we find human abstracts or the

distilled life and thirdly , the world that gives us certainty- the world of death and

release .

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Notes

1. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame:A Play in One Act. 5th Nov.2006.< http://samuel- beckett.net/endgame.html ( Retrieved on 10th Dec.2010)

2.Byron,S,Mark,ed. Endgame.New York: Rodopi,2007. 80

3. Guest, Michael.“ Paul Ricoeur and Watching Endgame.” Byron,S,Mark.80

4.Ibid.

5.Ibid, p.81.

6.Ibid 1 at 12.

7. Ibid, p.28.

8. Ibid 2 at 91.

9. “Human Abstract”< http://www.free-essays.us/dbase/c7/tmw114.shtml > (Retrieved at 19.23 p.m.on 13th Mar.2011)

10. Ibid 1 at pgs 30-31.

11. Smith,Russell. “Endgame’s Remainders.” Byron,S,Mark 99

12. Ibid1 at 16.

13. Ibid, p.28.

14. Ibid, p.36.

15. Ibid, p.39.

16. Ibid 11 at 100.

17. Ibid 1 at 10.

18. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”< http://www.poetry-online.org/coleridge_rime_of_the_ancient_mariner.htm>

(Retrieved at 19.08 pm.on 14th Mar.2011)

19. Ibid 1 at 47.

ON SAMUEL BECKETT

Samuel Beckett( 13 April 1906- 22December 1989) is considered as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. ‘His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human culture, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour’ [1]

The writing of Samuel Beckett has delighted literary criticsover the years and his readers confused and excited. Originality is not his only forte. To be honest, most eminent writers have always been original, but what forces us to drift towards Beckett is his untiring ability to invent and the way the inventiveness breaks and unmakes of rules and traditions .Clownish acts give us the eerie feeling of looking at the joker in the Batman films the uncertainty behind the mask. His switch from one country toanother, gliding from one language to the other always remind us of his versatility. Not to withhold mention that Beckett shared an uncanny resemblance to his fellow IrishmanJames Joyce in terms of innovativeness and complexity .An unimaginable amount of hard work went into the work of thesemen. Colloquialism did not adversely affect Beckett’s comic style. On the contrary it elevated his dramatic works to another level of perfection. It is as if the breakdown of the language system in his plays performed not only the purgation but also distilled the confounded thoughts of the post 2nd world war era –the world of uncertainty.

In 1929, Beckett his first published work, a critical essay entitled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce" supported Joyce's work which allegedly encouraged obscurity and indefiniteness. In 1930, his poem ‘Whoroscope’ was inspired by the biography of René Descartes .In the same year he briefly served as a lecturer in Trinity College. Beckett’s critical study Proust was published in 1931. His first novel,Dream of Fair to Middling Women , written in 1932, was however posthumously published in 1993.His short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks came in 1933.Murphy was published in 1938 which was translated into French the following year. He fell out with his mother, which

contributed to his decision to settle permanently in Paris (where he settled permanently following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, preferring, in his own words, "France at war to Ireland at peace").[2]

After Germany invaded France in the year of 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance and served as a courier. His hatred for the German narcissism spilled out in some of his greater works to come. Beckett was honoured with the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by France for his engagements in resisting the German invasion.

By 1945 Beckett was able to come out of Joyce’s shadow and according to his own admission , his way was in ‘impoverishment’. The inability to know would highlight mostof his characters in his later plays. Krapp's Last Tape (1958) epitomizes this experiment of Beckett.

‘During the 15 years subsequent to the war, Beckett producedfour major full-length stage plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "Theatreof the Absurd"—deal in a very blackly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers’.[3] The plays presented a world in which to know was an impossible task and in face of despairand anguish there was always the mask to somehow survive – the comic mask of existence.

Waiting for Godot or En attendant Godot was the most popularand the most famous Beckett play. It was subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts". Considered to be one of the most significant plays in English Language,the play points to theabsurdity of the existence of human lives and the relentlesseffort to patiently wait for nothing. The 1950’s saw the best prose of Beckett in form of his three novels Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies)

and L'innommable (1953: The Unnamable). As with the languagein these novels it was filtered to the bare minimum and the essential to be exact. Form or style, language was to lose its gaudiness slowly in all of Beckett’s works. Comment c'est (1961; How It Is) was one of the most radical works in prose written in paragraphs shunning punctuation.A work of non dramatic prose, it marked Beckett’s intense practice and continuous experimentation with the language system so successfully stripped to the bare minimum.

Beckett’s later plays border on something which can be termed minimalist. In 1969 the play Breath lasted for less than a minute(35 seconds). The play Not I (1972) had in words of Beckett, ‘a moving mouth with rest of the stage in darkness’. [4] His late works included Catastrophe(1982) and, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire") which focused on his inability to find words.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".[5] The award ceremony speech read:

Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum, and theresult will be either a paradox or an Irishman. If it is an Irishman, you will get the paradox into the bargain. Even the Nobel Prize in Literature is sometimes divided. Paradoxically, this has happened in 1969, a single award being addressed to one man, two languages and a third nation, itself divided.…the degradation of humanity is a recurrent theme in Beckett's writing and to this extent, his philosophy, simplyaccentuated by elements of the grotesque and of tragic farce, can be described as a negativism that cannot desist from descending to the depths. To the depths it must go because it is only there that pessimistic thought and poetrycan work their miracles….. There are precedents besides the accumulation of abominations in Greek tragedy which led Aristotle to the doctrine of catharsis, purification through

horror…Part of the essence of Beckett's outlook is to be found here - in the difference between an easily-acquired pessimism that rests content with untroubled skepticism, anda pessimism that is dearly bought and which penetrates to mankind's utter destitution. The former commences and concludes with the concept that nothing is really of any value, the latter is based on exactly the opposite outlook. For what is worthless cannot be degraded. [6] 

SOURCES

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett 2. Israel Shenker, "Moody Man of Letters", The New York

Times, 5 May 1956; quoted in Cronin, 310 quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett#cite_note-10

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett#cite_ref-16

4. Quoted in Knowlson (1997) p522 quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett#cite_note-34

5. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1969/

6. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1969/press.html

Bodhisattwa Khan

Assistant Professor of English,

Cluny Women’s College, Kalimpong..