En attendant Godot was first performed in Paris in 1953, at the Théâtre de Babylone, with Roger Blin as director. Beckett enjoyed his first major success – as a French playwright. But Godot rapidly attracted a wider audience. It established Beckett’s reputation and made him money. It also turned an author who had been first Irish, then French into an international figure. In the early 1950s, those who showed interest in his work or sought to promote it were French or Paris-based. After Godot, the names of non-expatriate Americans begin to loom large in the Beckett story: Barney Rosset of Grove Press in New York, who became Beckett’s major American publisher; Pamela Mitchell, agent for Harold Oram over the American rights to Godot, who became Beckett’s lover; biographer Richard Ellmann, scouring Europe for facts about Joyce; director Alan Schneider. Germans started taking an interest, too. English responses were more mixed. Here, Beckett at first encountered another version of the rejection he had experienced before. The Daily Mail’s loudly proclaimed view of Godot, for example, was that THE LEFT BANK CAN KEEP IT.1 Among intellectuals, directors, actors and actresses, however, Beckett always had his staunch supporters: Harold Hobson, Kenneth Tynan, Donald Albery, Peter Hall, Donald McWhinnie, Barbara Bray (a lover over many years) and, later, Billie Whitelaw, John Calder and Harold Pinter. In a drearily philistine culture deeply distrustful of intellect, they defied both censors and populists alike. They were all the more valuable to Beckett in that, appalled by Irish censorship, for a while, he imposed a ban on all performances of his plays in Ireland.
En attendant Godot, Paris, 1961.
Thus Beckett’s name started featuring in a larger world. It would do so ever more diversely, not least as a result of the emergence of the academic Beckett industry. The explosion of Beckett studies ensured his global currency, if sometimes principally as a distinctively French luminary (an existentialist, nouveau romancier or dramatist of ‘the absurd’). Beckett the man also began to circulate in a larger world. He had always gone back and forth quite regularly between France and Ireland. At the time of the attacks on Godot, in terms reminiscent of Murphy, he had despaired of the ‘shopkeepers’, as he called the English.2 Nonetheless, like many an Irish genius before him, he started to need them. England now became crucial as an outlet for his work in English (or his translations of his own work in French), and he spent increasing amounts of time in London, directing or advising on productions of his plays, not least those he wrote for radio and, later, television.
He also spent more time in Germany, for similar reasons. He went to the United States only once, to help produce Film, where he was snubbed by an American genius, Buster Keaton, the star who played the central role, and came away feeling that ‘this is somehow not the right country for me … the people are too strange’.3 But if Beckett stayed away from America, American scholars increasingly came to him. Indeed, academics from all over the world visited him, sent him books, essays and manuscripts and besieged him with queries and requests for work. Theatrical colleagues from abroad paid frequent visits. Beckett clearly felt a profound kinship with some of them, notably the driven, alcoholic, magnificently expressive Irish actors Jack McGowran and Patrick Magee. Old friends and family members frequently appeared in Paris, as did individuals whom Beckett turned into personal causes, like the ex-San Quentin lifer Rick Cluchey.4
Beckett at a rehearsal of En attendant Godot.
This side of the later life of a man often regarded as one of the great exponents of modern solitude – in the German Diaries, Beckett had evoked ‘[t]he absurd beauty of being alone’5 – can look rather frenetic and even inconsequential. Hectic Beckett seems anomalous. But it is equally odd to assume that the two sides of Beckett’s life were not connected. A weird, symbiotic, late twentieth-century logic insistently closed the gap between him and world. On the one side, contemporary culture was awestruck by someone it took to be so refractory to its order. It idolized the anchorite and busily sought to drag him from his lair. It battened on him in proportion to its reverence for his incorruptibility, and begged him for more of his art whilst making ever larger incursions into the time he needed to produce it. It expressed its devotion in contradictory and almost ruinous forms. His fastidiousness and distaste for publicity were loudly blazoned abroad. On the other side, Beckett’s exquisitely scrupulous disposition allowed the world to sweep him up, not least, into the most extraordinarily painstaking practical work for the theatre, whilst he repeatedly deplored the futility of his absorption. Faute de mieux, he adopted the tactics of the modern double life. The conditions for the ‘siege in the room’ had receded into the past. In order to be able to continue to write, he spent more time in what, since 1953, had been his second home, the little house that he and Suzanne had had built near Ussy-sur-Marne, ‘recuper-at[ing] something in the silence and solitude’.6 He fed off all these complications, but they were also a source of pathos. He produced a great deal of extraordinarily innovative and curious, beautiful work, but his relationship with Suzanne dried up. He allowed the demands of others and his highly developed sense of responsibility towards them to torment and exhaust him, leaving him with ‘dreams of deserts’.7 He was often enervated by much of the activity he engaged in.
‘The anchorite dragged from his lair’: Beckett, 1956.
The later Beckett occasionally reverts to one or other of his former writing selves, conspicuously in the case of the play All That Fall (1957), one of his most Irish works. Remarkably, however, just as, from the late 1930s, Beckett evolved from an Irish into a French writer, so from the mid-1950s, he adapted not only himself but his art to a new historical situation, and evolved into an international one. This development had two main consequences. On the one hand, a truly abstract Beckett finally emerged. The kind of historical residue perceptible in the earlier work tends to fade from the great prose work of the period, How It Is (1964), and the more formal works and ‘cylinder pieces’ of the late 1960s and early ’70s: Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping, Enough, Lessness, The Lost Ones.
At the same time, however, from the mid-1950s onwards, there is a strain in Beckett’s art which seems less abstract than global. The works in question are fraught with the recognition that something has happened to history itself. They clearly respond to a historical condition, that of the Cold War – or at least, to particular phases of it – which seemed all-encompassing as none had been before. The connection between historical context, life and art, however, was by no means as rarefied as it might seem. The focus of the Cold War, after all, was on the European theatre, particularly Berlin. It was notably in Berlin that, from 1945 onwards, West and East confronted each other. Khrushchev called the city ‘the testicles of the West’. ‘Every time I want to make the West scream’, he explained, ‘I just squeeze on Berlin’.8 Beckett no doubt heard the scream. Berlin was a city which he repeatedly visited and grew to know well. If he became a Berliner during the Cold War, however irregularly, it was no accident.
The impact of the Cold War on Beckett produced, above all, the great play Endgame (Fin de partie). Endgame was composed between 1954 and 1956. The years 1953–62 saw a major escalation of the Cold War and the beginning of nuclear crisis. The USA developed and tested its first version of the H-bomb in 1952. The Soviet Union followed suit in 1953. In the words of the Times, ‘the most portentous, and certainly loudest, event of 1954 occurred not in Washington or London or Moscow but on a desolate coral reef in the Pacific, 2000 miles north-east of Australia. The explosion of a hydrogen bomb at Bikini in March … dwarfed the Hiroshima bomb, and physicists were quick to add that there appeared to be no theoretical limit to the size of such bombs’. From now on, man would be haunted by ‘the vague spectre of “universal death”’.9 The test was the first in a series ‘which only served to heighten international anxiety’.10 us Secretary of State John Foster Dulles quickly asserted that the us must rely on nuclear weapons rather than conventional weaponry. By 1954, he was advocating the doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’ to any act of Soviet aggression.11
Fin de partie (the French version of Endgame), Paris, 1957.
Since the Soviet Union was capable of similar retaliation, this logically led to the bleak certainty of MAD, mutual assured destruction. The North Atlantic military alliance, NATO, had come into force in 1949. In response, on 14 May 1955, the Communist states signed the Warsaw Pact Treaty, according to which members pledged to defend each other if attacked. Two vast armed power blocs now eye-balled each other malevolently across the Iron Curtain. The abortive Hungarian revolution of 1956, in which the Hungarians rose up against their Soviet-imposed government only promptly to be suppressed by armed invasion, clearly underlined the division. When, during the Suez crisis of the same year, the us sought to curtail Soviet threats in the Middle East, ‘massive retaliation’ became a practical threat. Dulles introduced the concept of brinkmanship, famously declaring that ‘the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art.’12 Henceforth, it seemed, the world would have to live according to a MAD rationale, in a state of more or less muted terror of the end.
Literature, theatre and the arts were quick to respond imaginatively to this scenario. In Orwell’s 1984 (1949), the condition of Oceania is post-atomic. In J. B. Priestley’s Summer Day’s Dream (1949), a few paltry survivors of a nuclear holocaust succeed in building a better way of life.13 In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a book-burning dystopia is consumed by nuclear war. The boys in William Golding’s Lord of The Flies (1954) flee a nuclear attack. The melancholy of the post-apocalyptic vision reached its peak in 1957, with Nevil Shute’s On the Beach locating the scattered remnants of humanity in Australia, forlornly awaiting death by fallout. In the cinema, Arch Oboler scripted and directed Five, America’s first film about nuclear survivors, in 1951. Other such films followed: Invasion USA (1952), The Day the World Ended (1955) and World Without End (1958). The desolate landscape sporadically indicated in Endgame is intimately related to such settings, seems as comprehensively devastated as many of them do, and shares their shocked, contaminated air. Jack MacGowran recalled that, for the 1964 production at the English Theatre in Paris, Beckett shortened the descriptions of what Clov sees outside the windows because he ‘wanted to leave a doubt’ about any continuance of ‘the existence of human life’.14 Early reviews of Endgame on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were printed on pages surrounded by fearful news of the nuclear arms race.
Of course, by now, it is possible to reflect on the plaintive historicity of the threat of Armageddon, the fugitive experience of the end of the world drawn near, with something akin to astonishment. But the fear of wipe-out was extremely serious, and extremely grim. There was certainly a strain in Beckett’s disposition which was intimate from the start with the Cold War ethos. The thought of prodigious cataclysm is undoubtedly what fuels the appalled hilarity of Endgame. So, too, we get the measure of the integrity and candour of the play if we set it alongside the machinations of the cultural Cold War, which implicated writers as diverse as Koestler, Spender, Malraux, Trilling, Arendt and even Orwell, to name but a few, and ensured, for example, that the extraordinarily successful British literary journal Encounter was bankrolled by secret subsidies from the CIA. In the classic, sobering and highly instructive account of the theme, Frances Stonor Sanders’s Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, there is no mention of Beckett.15
Historicity is nonetheless a crucial matter in Endgame. For it is the historicity and therefore the avoidability of the historical end itself that the play urges upon us, by insisting that we view it from alternative or conflicting perspectives. The play appears to address a general condition. In the world according to Endgame, the ‘farce’ is the same, ‘day after day’ (CDW, p. 106). The time is always ‘the same as usual’ (CDW, p. 94, 109). But equally, when Hamm declares that ‘it’s the end of a day like any other day’ (CDW, p. 98), this cannot strictly be the case at all, since he declares it in a world where there is no longer tide or Turkish delight, where there are no more bicycles or ‘paupers’ to be ‘inspected’ (CDW, p. 96), lights cannot come on in the evening, the survival of rats is implausible and it is not conceivable that anything could be visible ‘on the horizon’ (CDW, p. 107). Indeed, in this particular world, ‘there’s no more nature’ (at least, ‘in the vicinity’, CDW, p. 97); or rather, nature exists only in Clov’s richly ironical sense: other people, like the ‘old doctor’ and Mother Pegg, have ‘naturally’ died. Mother Pegg’s light has ‘naturally’ been extinguished (CDW, p. 104, 112). One thing is clear: ‘outside of here it’s death’ (CDW, p. 96). ‘The whole place stinks of corpses’ (CDW, p. 114). Humanity is apparently doomed to extinction; though alas, says Hamm, in great perturbation, it might start ‘all over again’ from a flea (CDW, p. 108).
Thus Endgame presents us with a paradoxical world in which ‘time was never and time is over’ (CDW, p. 133). Its ‘universals’ seem alternately to exist beyond historical specifics, and to be determined by them. The Cold War scenario appears to disappear, then reappear. This was literally the case with productions of the play. When Beckett himself directed it at the Schiller Theater in Berlin in 1967, the set suggested a fallout shelter or bunker.16 Yet he objected to Douglas Stein’s post-apocalyptic set for Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre production in 1984. So, too, in the play itself, the post-nuclear scenario looms large or recedes according to how far vestiges of other historical contexts make themselves felt. There are moments, for example, when Beckett appears to be thinking once more of the historical endgame of the Anglo-Irish gentry, the last, grey phase of their decline. Beckett’s Theatrical Notebooks suggest that he also had the First World War in mind.17 This is understandable. He wrote Endgame not long after he acquired his ‘little house in the “Marne mud”’.18 Seine-et-Marne, which included Ussy, had been at the centre of the two Battles of the Marne in 1914 and 1918. Ussy was one of seven towns within twelve kilometres to be awarded the French Croix de Guerre 1914–18 for its sangfroid and powers of endurance. It was a Beckettian place. The desolate images that the area called to mind also edge their way into Endgame.
The split between historical markers and ahistorical claims is definitive of Endgame, and one of two cardinal features that appear throughout it. The second is the split between a little world and a big one.19 The play alternately blames one and the other for its characters’ afflictions. This, too, breaks up any impression of a grandly final vision of things. If devastation appears to have swept across the landscape, it is Clov, says Hamm, who ‘pollute[s] the air’ (CDW, p. 93). Since Adorno, critics of the play have emphasized how far it implies and is concerned with a political macrocosm.20 But it also wilfully diminishes the importance of any larger view. The principal representatives of humanity in the play are two oddballs who bicker over matters like the ribbon on a three-legged black toy dog. The historical specificity of the play provokes the very universalizing abstractions it also resists. Weirdly, absurdly, unpredictably, the laughable, mean little staged actuality of Endgame constantly tells us that it is part of a whole, yet obstinately refuses to be absorbed into one. As Hamm and Clov are patently inadequate to their predicament, so, too, one level of the play is inadequate to the other. In a world where equilibrium, strategic thinking, a seemingly boundless hi-tech competence, what Adorno called instrumental reason had all come to spell MAD, Beckett insisted on constructing a profoundly wonky play in which the elements simply don’t hang together. As for human history: strangely, on occasions by a hairsbreadth, at length, in one of its historical phases, humanity was eventually to assert itself, at least, in so far as it determined one particular limit to its inhumanity. In doing so, nearly thirty years after Endgame was first performed, it bore out Beckett’s statement of faith.
By the late 1960s, nuclear armament had got the Soviet Union into economic trouble, and the Vietnam War had thrust America into crisis. The certainty of MAD had become a balance of power. Meanwhile, West Germany had adopted a policy of Ostpolitik, seeking to normalise its relations with the Eastern European nations, including East Germany. The first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) talks took place in June 1972. In 1975, these were followed by the Helsinki Accords on security and co-operation in Europe. Predictably, tensions relaxed. But the mood of détente did not last long. Ronald Reagan became American president in January 1981, and promptly vowed to increase military spending and to oppose Communism across the globe. A new Anglo-American axis (Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) denounced the Soviet Union in the old ideological terms. Thus began what some historians now call the New Cold War (1979–85). Reagan announced his Strategic Defence Initiative or ‘Star Wars’. For its part, the Soviet Union entered the 1980s with the largest thermonuclear arsenal in the world, and a stockpile of medium-range missiles primed to annihilate Europe briskly if necessary.
But there were important differences between the New Cold War and the old one. Reagan and Thatcher’s Cold War manifested itself in a flurry of localized conflicts. In 1983, for example, the US intervened in the civil war in Lebanon and invaded Grenada whilst also involved in counter-revolutionary activities in Nicaragua – all this in a year that Reagan baptized the ‘Year of the Bible’. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was engaged in a war in Afghanistan and increasingly disposed to intervene in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The Communist bloc was also energetically repressing its more awkward and troublesome citizens. In Czechoslovakia, the Charter 77 group struggled with the totalitarian regime for civil rights. The regime responded by arresting and interrogating the Charter signatories, not least writers. In Poland in 1980, the independent trade union Solidarity provoked the government into declaring martial law and curtailing political freedoms. Solidarity remained a beleaguered and clandestine organization until the late 1980s. Meanwhile, the East German government was persecuting, arresting, imprisoning and deporting dissident writers like Wolf Biermann and Rudolf Bahro.
The second major difference between the 1950s and the early 1980s was that, in the West, the dominant forms of thought about the Cold War had changed. This was partly the consequence of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, which had made people much more sceptical about Cold War rhetoric, and often radicalized them. What the Cold War historians call revisionism exemplifies the shift. Historians during and after the Vietnam War were far more likely to raise awkward questions about Western demonizations of Communism than they had been before it; to suspect the us of imperial ambitions, a will to global hegemony and economic domination of Europe; to consider the two sides in the Cold War as mirror-images of each other; and to wonder whether its hidden dividends were not in fact domestic, the control and discipline of mass populations and the dogged maintenance of two inherently unstable ideologies.21
These were precisely the conditions in which Beckett produced his gaunt, off-centre allegories of the early eighties, Quad (1981), Catastrophe (1982) and the last play he wrote, What Where (1983). These plays are precisely connected to their historical context. Beckett had always been concerned about the freedom of writers, a concern that no doubt stemmed initially from his distaste for Irish and English censorship, and later from his experience of the more drastic Nazi and Vichy versions of it. He was drawn to prisoners, an interest that, from time to time, was reciprocated by prisoners or ex-prisoners themselves. He had long been troubled by the idea of incarceration (though it is by no means clear that he separated political incarceration from other forms, as self-evidently in a moral class of its own). From the apartment in the Boulevard Saint-Jacques that he and Suzanne took over in 1960, he could see the Santé prison, and was reputedly in the habit of communicating by mirror with one of the inmates. He took the side of playwright Fernando Arrabal when he was imprisoned by the Franco government, and of opponents of the French use of torture during the Algerian war. He boycotted racist South Africa.
More specifically, Beckett waived royalty payments on productions of his plays in Eastern Europe. He supported an appeal against the proclamation of martial law in Poland. He also supported and encouraged the young Polish writer and translator Antoni Libera. Libera told Beckett about the precursor of Solidarity, the Committee for the Defence of Workers, and Beckett subsequently had his Polish royalties paid to Libera, who used them to support writers and publishers who were at odds with the regime. He even hoped to assist Libera in escaping Poland. In the case of Czechoslovakia, his principal concern was Václav Havel. Havel was a Czech dramatist who had been banned from the theatre since the Prague Spring in 1968. In the terms of the regime, at least, the publication of the Charter 77 manifesto declared him to be a traitor and a renegade. He was placed under surveillance, subjected to house arrest, then thrown into prison. The International Association for the Defence of Artists invited Beckett to write a piece on Havel’s behalf. Beckett agreed. The result was Catastrophe. In Germany, Beckett espoused no particular cause. Yet in West Berlin, he repeatedly directed or contributed to productions of his own plays just a few miles away from the Berlin Wall. It is hardly likely that he was unconscious of the significance of doing so.
Catastrophe at the Barbican Pit, London, 2006.
Catastrophe expresses one of Beckett’s responses to the era of the New Cold War. It reeks of distaste, at once principled and aesthetic, for the crass, indifferent language of power in operation. ‘Step on it, I have a caucus … Get going! Get going!… Good. There’s our catastrophe. In the bag. Once more and I’m off … Now … let ‘em have it’ (CDW, pp. 458–60): whilst the officious and dictatorial D. (the Director) issues his instructions, P. (the Protagonist) remains frozen, immobile, ‘head bowed’, speechless, ‘inert’ (CDW, pp. 457–61). Finally, however, he ‘raises his head’ in defiance (CDW, p. 461). Beckett stated that the point of Catastrophe was clear and precise. When a reviewer said the end of the play was ambiguous, he reacted angrily: ‘There’s no ambiguity there at all … He’s saying, you bastards, you haven’t finished me yet!’.22
No ambiguity, indeed: like its Protagonist, Catastrophe is stubbornly recalcitrant. But it is also ironically devised. What Beckett claims P. is ‘saying’ obviously relates to Havel and the plight of political prisoners in Eastern Europe. But the play itself has nothing directly to do with that plight. P. may or may not be an image of it; but in Catastrophe itself, he is chiefly D.’s victim, and D. speaks the language of the Western boardroom, ministerial office, management suite or military command. Furthermore, D. has another victim, A., his Assistant, an underling and a woman. The substantial concern of the play is power relations in the Western workplace, and crucially includes the exploitation of women. At the same time, the workplace in question is also specific, a theatre; D. is a theatre director; and P. is both a representation of oppression, and oppressed himself. When he ‘fixes the audience’ at the end (CDW, p. 461), P. even invites it to contemplate its own implication in the structures of power that the play has described.
Without its ironical structure, Catastrophe might lead a sceptic to wonder whether, after all, Beckett could not have featured in Who Paid the Piper?, if only fleetingly. From the late 1970s, the us had increasingly focussed on human rights movements as part of its continuing drive to victory over Communism. The CIA had sought to foment dissidence in the Communist bloc, and bankrolled cultural activities that appeared to encourage it. By using theatre to address the human rights issue in Eastern Europe from outside it, albeit innocently, Beckett might appear to coincide with us covert operations. Inconveniently for such an argument, however, Catastrophe seems to be telling the West to look to its own abuses of power. In fact, the play conflates two political criticisms. It is indeed unambiguous, but because it turns in both directions with such rigorously lucid detachment. Beckett was almost constitutionally devoid of self-righteousness. By the same token, he was nothing if not expert in the serpentine ways of complicity. It is one of his great themes, perhaps almost his greatest. Like the revisionist historians who were working in the same period, he understood the logic of the Cold War as that of the Moebius strip. In Catastrophe, he addressed a Communist abuse of power obliquely, through an image of a Western one. In doing so, he also insisted on a principle of reversibility endemic to the Cold War itself.
The Protagonist in Catastrophe raises his head. It is at least a gesture of minimal revolt. In Quad and What Where, the faint kindling of resistance gutters and then dies. Indeed, both Quad and What Where might have been called Catastrophe, with different but increasingly stark implications. In Quad, four figures pace a strictly delimited space in regular rhythm, repeating the same courses and procedures, which require them to avoid each other. The enclosed space calls prison-yards to mind, but also West Berlin, at that time another gaol-space, and one within whose confines Beckett walked a great deal. In Quad, all boundaries and limits are in principle unbreachable. All conditions have been specified from the start. Beckett’s directions insist on lockdown. The area is ‘given … Four possible solos all given. Six possible duos all given … Four possible trios all given … All possible light combinations given … All possible percussion combinations given … All possible costume combinations given’ (CDW, pp. 451–52). The situation in Quad is that of Vladimir and Estragon as specified in one of Beckett’s terse notes on Godot: ‘From outset no help’.23
Quad renders this situation in an abstract, mechano-balletic form.
Quad is about imprisonment, and emerges partly from Beckett’s political concerns at the time. It is also about imprisonment in a structure. The structure at stake is scarily Janus-faced. There are two quads in Quad: the main square and an inner one, marked E in a second diagram in the directions (CDW, p. 453), towards which the figures converge and from which they diverge. E is the locus in which the figures may become entangled, graze each other or collide, where mishap may occur, where the structure may wobble or collapse, the process go wrong. Here Quad allows for a minimal sense of possibility, a hypothetical (but material) point at which an otherwise entirely binding logic may founder. Since the directions specifically tell us that E must be ‘supposed a danger zone’ (ibid.), however, the point at which the structure may break down is also the site of menace and possible disaster. Paradoxically, Quad turns out to be about risk, and even brinkmanship.
In What Where, by contrast, there is not even the slightest hint of an alternative to the closure it depicts. One after another, four men tell of giving others ‘the works’ (CDW, pp. 472–76); of making them scream, weep and beg for mercy; but also of failing to extort a necessary confession from them. Having confessed to failure themselves, they exit, to become one of those ‘worked on’ in their turn. A phantom figure designated simply as V – he tells us he is a fifth personage, though his voice belongs to one of the four – presides over this grisly scenario. V is dramaturge, technician, critic, chief observer, deus ex machina and a discourse inhabiting the others, all at once. The structure of the play is almost ritualistic. As such, it leads towards V’s stony conclusion that, though ‘time passes’, the form of its passing is unrelenting, and unrelentingly reproduces and reinforces the operations of power: ‘In the end I appear. /Reappear’ (CDW, p. 476). By the same token, in the closing lines, the last lines Beckett ever wrote for a theatrical public, as in Catastrophe, he decisively repeated the lessons of the Cold War, in repudiating all ideological justifications of the naked exercise of power without scruple, whatever their partisanship:
Make sense who may.
I switch off. (CDW, p. 476)
Yet one of the nicest ironies in Beckett’s work is that, in his last and perhaps his most disquieting play, by dint of an extremely precise choice of words, if only theoretically and sotto voce, he is able to indicate a connection between abandoning the habit of self-vindication intrinsic to ‘making sense’, and disabling the machines of modern terror.