Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger are typically cast in theatre histories as signifying, virtually simultaneously, two new and clashing paradigms in drama.¹ But the contrast between the seemingly apolitical, meaningless world of Beckett and the ostensible social protest mode of Osborne has distorted our understanding of Beckett’s work, relegating the dramatic milieu of his plays to some kind of alien, airless, and moribund world divorced from our own. Beckett scholars have offered many ideas about what kind of “world” Beckett depicts and indeed creates in works like Waiting for Godot with its lunar landscape or Endgame with its “corpsed” setting, but a common assumption is that it is somehow different from our own. This reaches back to the very first scholarship on Beckett, as Linda Ben-Zvi in her introduction to Beckett at 100 points out, quoting Ruby Cohn in 1962 characterizing Beckett’s world as a different “planet” where

Cohn’s was one of the earliest scholarly assessments of Beckett’s work, and it arguably set the tone for the subsequent reception of his works as “other worldly” (yet without the tinge of supernaturalism that term often implies). This approach persists. Downing Cless refers to “the wastelands and voids of Beckett’s settings.”³ Reviewing JoAnne Akalaitis’s production of Beckett shorts in 2007/2008 starring Mikhail Baryshnikov on a sand-strewn stage, Ben Brantley noted how the sand slowed him down: “This grounding of a winged dancer poignantly captures the harsh laws of Beckett’s universe, where Mother Earth never stops pulling people toward the grave.”⁴ Brantley’s phrasing is confusing; how can Beckett’s universe be so different from our own as to have its own “harsh laws” yet at the same time encompass “Mother Earth” and her relentless birth-to-grave march?

Beckett’s dramatic world has been understood in a vast array of contexts spanning existentialism, Friedrich Nietzsche, the cataclysmic impact of two world wars, ancient philosophy, antitheatricality, Irishness, feminism, and so on. Although his interest in science more generally has been acknowledged, the nature and extent of his engagement with evolutionary theory has not been fully explored, particularly in his plays. Evolution has profound relevance to Beckett’s drama and raises significant questions: How might his repeated motif of giving birth astride a grave, or his sense that Godot randomly may or may not come, be understood in the context of a Darwinian world? How do the common critical descriptors of Beckett’s works as about death, endlessness, and meaninglessness relate to characterizations of his vision as “unsentimental” and “harsh,” terms often used to describe the nature of Darwinian evolution by natural selection? What is his theatre saying about the interplay between the organism and its environment?

Waiting for Godot introduced audiences to a playwright whose dramaturgy would be underpinned by the fundamental ideas of evolution, paradoxically foregrounding nature through its seeming absence; a lone tree in a stark and empty landscape can make a greater environmental statement than a rich natural setting. Happy Days is built around the dualism of earth and air.5 Willie crawls around on all fours; likewise, in Waiting for Godot, Estragon echoes the primordial: “All my lousy life I’ve crawled about in the mud! . . . Look at this muckheap! I’ve never stirred from it!”⁶ Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy of John Keats’s “thick soft damp green richness,” presumably finding Keats’s language itself an embodiment of the moss he squats on.⁷ The imagery is palpable, tactile, sensory; it evokes the physical world directly. Indeed, Beckett thought elementally. He told the cast of his production of Waiting for Godot in 1974: “Estragon is on the ground; he belongs to the stone. Vladimir is light; he is oriented toward the sky. He belongs to the tree.”⁸ Beckett thus conceives of this play—and indeed many others—in terms of the irreducible, fundamental qualities of nature, rather along the lines of Empedocles’s four elements. Contemplating their situation, Estragon decides, “We should turn resolutely towards Nature.”⁹

A brief overview of the critical interpretations of Beckett’s depiction of the natural world shows how recent scholarship is beginning to open this line of thought. Chris J. Ackerley finds that although geology is fundamental to Beckett’s work, and though traces of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn on scientific method can be found, an attempt “to saddle Beckett with a scientific temperament, let alone a scientific methodology, runs into an impasse generated by Beckett’s deep distrust of the rational process. His rejection of rationalism entails a rejection of scientific methodology, less the process of uncertainty and fallibility . . . than the capacity of reason and its handmaiden hypothesis to shape a sufficient understanding of the natural world.”¹⁰ Ackerley concludes with a piercing insight about the relationship between Beckett’s characters and their environments: “It is not the universe that is the absurdist structure . . . but rather the agency of the human mind that must accommodate itself to the only possible, the demented particulars of quotidian reality, in rare moments only being able to intuit the deeper laws that frame them.”¹¹

An ecocritical approach to Beckett offers some key insights along similar lines. Paul Davies characterizes Beckett’s preoccupation with climate and weather as generating “a disparity of climates [that] sets the planetary biosphere directly at odds with the environment of the artificial interior,” and he argues that Beckett’s “deeply symbolic penchant” was “to articulate the hell that is caused by abstraction from the biosphere, from the living environment.”12 This hell manifests itself in its harmful, painful effects on the body, from dried-out eyeballs and skin to the feeling of “something dripping in my head” (this obsession with the fontanelles not having fused properly is a recurring theme). Davies also suggests that Beckett deliberately disrupts circadian rhythms as he plays with the natural cycles of light and dark, sleep and wakefulness, dawn and dusk. Why does he, as Davies puts it, continually “tell the condition of human alienation from the biosphere”? It is because “clearing equates to space made.”¹³ Destruction allows rebuilding, reconceptualizing. Along with Ackerley’s conception of something amiss between humans and their frame, we might take Davies’s argument a step further and suggest that perhaps what Beckett’s work is really suggesting is that in fact it is the biosphere that is being alienated from the human. His plays again and again suggest this turn, perhaps most strongly in Happy Days. Worrying over the loss of God seems like misplaced energy when we are actually losing our whole planet. As Cyril Darlington writes in the conclusion to his epic study of the evolution of humankind and society published in 1969, “Every new source from which man has increased his power on the earth has been used to diminish the prospects of his successors. All his progress has been made at the expense of damage to his environment which he cannot repair and could not foresee. Surely this is the most practical of all the lessons of history.”¹⁴ This tale of destruction and environmental alienation, told only a few years earlier by Thornton Wilder in The Skin of Our Teeth and J. B. Priestley in Summer Day’s Dream, is retold by Beckett in shorter, sharper form in Happy Days in particular, as I will show. In short, Beckett’s theatre dramatizes the process of ecocide; there is “no way out of a denuded nature—just an endlessly denatured void, but with a few tiny signs of new or continued growth.”¹⁵

Like Davies, Joseph Roach refers to “topographical alienation” between Beckett’s characters and their environments.16 Roach calls the “natural-historical landscape” of Waiting for Godot “desolate but not empty” since it has a tree with five leaves, a population of five people, and a lot of disembodied voices—“in other words, it is haunted.”¹⁷ What Roach then movingly goes on to show is that Beckett is summoning a specifically Irish context here; it is a landscape haunted by the famine that emptied Ireland of so many of its people through starvation and emigration, rendering whole villages extinct.¹⁸ Roach sees Godot’s country road with a tree at evening as emblematic of that empty landscape, the “profundity and duration of that silence” brought about by the famine: “the sparsely peopled countryside, the wind in the ruins, the rocks scattered like bones under an indifferent sky.”¹⁹

Following Roach’s grounding of Beckett’s work in a specific landscape, I would like to pursue this line of inquiry and extend it to consider the ways in which Beckett’s theatrical work tells an evolutionary story. The earth and its processes are the mainstay of his theatre: Winnie’s “earth ball,” and “earth, you old extinguisher,” Krapp’s “old muckball.”²⁰ And Time is “that old fornicator,” according to Murphy, a word on which Winnie and Willie relish punning.²¹ In these cases, the phrasing is affectionate, not alienated; “old” indicates something familiar, predictable, and oddly intimate even though it is monumental and macrocosmic. This suggests a deep connectedness to the familiar, everyday world we live in, to the random physical processes of the Darwinian universe: birth, death, natural selection, adaptation, deterioration and decrepitude, extinction, mutation, and so on. The world Beckett continually depicts in his plays is our own. He is obsessed with natural phenomena and how people interact with their natural surroundings when both are reduced to their bare minimum.

Cohn notes that with Happy Days, Beckett abandons thick, dark mud for “desiccated earth.”²² But Steven Connor counters the emphasis usually put on earth, “muck,” and mud in Beckett’s work. Although it may be “less well-ventilated than that of almost any other writer,” air and breath are still everywhere in Beckett’s work, as they are essential to sustain life.²³ Connor charts a development from the “searing mistral” of the earlier works, like Dream, to “the almost windless calm of the later works.”²⁴ Beckett took notes on the chemical components and geographical features of the planets, including earth, in his “Whoroscope” notebook, for instance observing that Venus’s makeup is similar to that of the start of life on earth and calling the atmosphere of Mars “tenuous.”²⁵

The “Whoroscope” notebook is just one of many unpublished archival sources (most of them at the University of Reading) that, along with the several volumes of his letters now in print, provide fascinating insights for anyone wanting to trace the sources of Beckett’s thought. They help to ground his works in all kinds of contexts, from the political to the scientific to the philosophical, enabling new interpretations and deeper understandings of Beckett’s works. Yet the wealth of new studies building on such material is sometimes accompanied by attempts to police the boundaries of Beckett studies, to adjudicate which readings are valid and which are not, or as Matthew Feldman puts it, “to quietly negate overarching readings of Beckett that attempt to say what he (or ‘it’) actually means.”26 There is a repeated emphasis on the idea of scholarly responsibility, as if studies of Beckett have crossed some imaginary line; Shane Weller warns that “if one wishes to contribute to the understanding of Beckett’s œuvre, then it is not enough to detect more or less striking resemblances between his works and those of a range of philosophers, theologians and literary figures picked to suit a particular commentator’s intuitions or predilections.”²⁷ Paraphrasing Beckett, Feldman and Weller warn against a “neatness of identifications.”

Feldman himself, however, notes that Beckett avoided “the systematic harnessing of knowledge.”28 As Rita Felski points out in her exuberantly polemical piece “Context Stinks!” finding intertextual (and interartistic) connections is hardly spurious since works of art are autonomous and speak to one another and make connections across periods well beyond the strict boundaries of historical context; this is precisely where the most exciting interpretative possibilities lie.²⁹ The “labour of empirical groundwork”³⁰ is admirable and necessary, but it should not prevent the more speculative work of linking Beckett, Henrik Ibsen, Susan Glaspell or indeed any other author to his or her wider spheres even if those links might not have been intended by the authors or were even dreamed of in their philosophies. “A commitment to the empirical and to responsible literary scholarship does not preclude an adventurousness that is itself perhaps the most effective provocation to other scholars to enter into the task of trying to ‘make sense’ of Beckett.”³¹ So we are supposed to be “adventurous” while also being “responsible,” to sense the difference “between ungrounded speculation and well-evidenced argumentation.”³² While this is indeed a desirable balance, there is an implicit assumption that suggesting influence “where none intended” is out of bounds. Perhaps the term interlocutor best captures the essence of the kind of interaction with Charles Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers that I am exploring here.³³ Rather than a question of direct influence, they act as a springboard for Beckett’s own ideas about geology, evolution, and the natural world generally.

Although there is undoubtedly much to explore in Beckett’s fiction as well as his drama, I focus on the latter because of the link between evolution and performance that has been so compellingly explored by Jane Goodall.³⁴ The actor’s body is central to Beckett’s evolutionary vision and is the main means of exploring it. Much is inscribed into performance that does not register fully enough in written accounts of Beckett that are still focused on how little is said and how much silence there is—not taking into account the rich and complex nonverbal expression that goes on throughout those silences and often destabilizes the apparent meanings of the words.

Ben-Zvi argues that after 1946 Beckett changes his focus to the body, to impotence, decrepitude, and general physical malfunction.³⁵ There is a concomitant celebration in Beckett of the materiality and corporeality of the theatre; the physical, the everyday, the material, and the “gross” are constantly present for the audience through the actor’s body. Beckett is immersed in biological nature, fascinated by physiological processes. This is consistent with the celebration of the natural in all its aspects that one finds in Darwin.

Allusions to Darwin, usually indirect and oblique, can be found throughout Beckett’s writing (perhaps most amusingly in Estragon’s comment in Waiting for Godot that “people are such bloody ignorant apes”).³⁶ One of the first to trace the Darwinian connections was Frederik N. Smith, who found in the “Whoroscope” notebook several quotations from On the Origin of Species and at least one reference to The Voyage of the Beagle.³⁷ Intriguingly, the notebook also contains a possible allusion to The Descent of Man for, as Smith notes, “among the many polysyllabic rarities listed in the notebook, one finds ‘steatopygous’; it is interesting to note that the Oxford English Dictionary gives only a single example of this word, which is derived from the Greek roots meaning ‘fat buttocks,’ and that is from Darwin’s Descent of Man. Could Beckett have discovered this word in that book?”³⁸

Steatopygia was what attracted so many spectators to the Hottentot Venus in the early nineteenth century, as discussed in chapter 1. Why would Beckett jot down this word? The speculation that he might have read, at least in part, The Descent of Man is highly suggestive, for this is the text in which Darwin confronts the issue of human evolution most fully, while also drawing on unusual animals behavior to address topics such as sexual selection. Beckett’s notation of the term also attests at this early stage to his interest in bodily dysfunction, the extremes of the human condition, the full spectrum of human physicality.

Beckett seemed utterly dismissive of Darwin. Of On the Origin of Species, he wrote to his friend MacGreevy that he had “never read such badly written cat lap.”³⁹ This single line has been taken by scholars to mean that Beckett did not think much of Darwin, although he may well be criticizing the prose style rather than the ideas. In fact, the famous “cat lap” dismissal was not all he said about Darwin; further in the same letter, he volunteers: “I only remember one thing: blue-eyed cats are always deaf (correlation of variations).”⁴⁰ This is from an early section of Origin dealing with the “laws regulating variation,” which, as Ernst Mayr points out, Darwin little understood, as he was unaware of Mendel’s discoveries, even though he was fascinated by “the mysterious laws of the correlation of growth.” What Darwin wrote was that “some instances of correlation are quite whimsical: thus cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf; colour and constitutional peculiarities go together.”⁴¹ Further in the Origin, he again refers to the “relation between blue eyes and deafness in cats,” asking, “What can be more singular” than this correlation?⁴²

Two things stand out about this part of Beckett’s only direct pronouncement on evolution. One is that what he remembers comes from the beginning of Origin, suggesting that he perhaps did not read the entire work; Michael Beausang speculates that he read up to chapter 8.43 Another is that he remembers something odd about the natural world that Darwin himself found “whimsical”; a quality of studied whimsicality is certainly a defining feature of Beckett’s theatrical vision.⁴⁴ “Whimsicality” goes directly against teleology, purpose, order, predictability, and progression; in fact, it would jeopardize all of these. Blue eyes recur in Beckett’s works, as in Embers (“the old blue eye” repeated several times). He was not the first writer to be drawn to this detail in Origin; as Valerie Purton notes, there is “one small but telling allusion in both [Tennyson and Darwin to] . . . a certain blue-eyed cat.”⁴⁵ It is perhaps when Darwin is at his most whimsical that Beckett connects with him; it is tempting to think that they share a sense of wonder and enchantment at the natural world more than the harsh, random, and blind force of nature usually associated with both writers (if we speak of nature at all in Beckett’s plays, which are often erroneously read as denatured). But the wonder never becomes sentimental; plays like Act Without Words I show that force as not just whimsical but dark and malignant.

There is actually another direct reference to Darwin in Beckett’s writing, and that is in his interwar notebooks. It is a rich, but perplexing, reference. He writes that in the “ceaseless transformation of all things nothing individual persists, but only the order, in which the exchange between the contrary movements is effected—the law of change, which constitutes the meaning and worth of the whole.”⁴⁶ Life is a process of endless transformation subject to a “law of change,” and the greater “order” supersedes the individual. Beckett’s notes indicate a strong sense of an overarching evolutionary vision that puts the individual human being in his or her place:

Is the ultimate end of evolution paradoxically a “return to primal unity”? This would be a twist on the progressive view of Herbert Spencer, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and others. And, where is the will in this process—is it simply the “arrogant desire” for individual life? Though Beckett’s lifelong interest in Arthur Schopenhauer is well documented,⁴⁸ I would suggest that Beckett’s idea of the will in nature leans more toward Lamarckism precisely because it is continually invoked and framed within a specifically natural context concerned with individuals in relation to an environment that is blind to their needs.

An important indirect route to Darwin was through Fritz Mauthner, on whose work Beckett took extensive notes. Mauthner’s admiration for Darwin “shows even in his writing style,” notes Dirk Van Hulle.49 He was taken with Darwin’s idea of contingency, arguing that “the evolution of our senses is just the work of chance, which implies that the ‘laws’ of nature have the status of a law only because human beings’ senses have developed in more or less the same way.” By the same token, history is equally contingent and nonteleological.⁵⁰ Most significantly, Mauthner condemns the social Darwinists such as Spencer and (in his view) Ernst Haeckel, whose distortion of the term evolution has reinstated exactly the teleological element that Darwin rejects, and insists that evolution can be rescued only if it is liberated from the two main ideas of these so-called Darwinians: purpose and progress.⁵¹ Beckett’s interest in Mauthner thus further aligns him with Darwinian evolution.

Another possible reference to evolution, and another, if tenuous, link with Darwin, can be found in Beckett’s poem “Serena I,” in the line “Our world dead fish adrift” (rendered in Beckett’s notes as “Earth afloat [dead fish]”). Peter Fifield interprets this image not as a fish floating on top of water but as an early geological state (glacier) that left seashells embedded in mountain rocks. Beckett drew on the discussion of the Greek philosopher Thales in the first volume of Friedrich Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy, in which Ueberweg observed, “Aristotle reports that Thales represented the earth as floating on the water. It is possible that geognostic observations (as of sea-shells in mountains) also lay at the bottom of Thales’ doctrine.” This is Beckett’s first direct incorporation of his philosophy notes into his work.⁵² Fifield reads Beckett’s dead fish as actually a seashell, “unmistakably the remains of marine crustaceans found in the mountains due to tectonic movements.”⁵³

In 1838, Darwin made one of the great mistakes of his career when he tried to solve the puzzle of Glen Roy, which had mystified so many geologists at the time. The glen was miles long and had three parallel paths running along its sides, which were really 60-foot-wide slanted shelves tilted at twenty degrees. Standing in the middle of one of these shelves, Darwin saw that it was “the same for the other terraces, 200 feet below and 100 feet above him. These ‘parallel roads’ went right around Glen Roy as far as the eye could see, while behind him, twelve miles away, Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest peak, completed the panorama.” Had there been, as many posited, an ancient lake there that had dropped three times, “each time leaving a shore-line cut into the mountain side?” If so, perhaps the valley “had once been dammed to hold the lake water.” But Darwin had a theory about the earth’s crust as “oscillating,” based in part on what he had observed on his voyage on the Beagle. “He had seen terracing in Chile; there the ‘roads’ were littered in shells—they were obviously old beaches,” so he assumed this was the case with the roads in Glen Roy, even though they lacked shells or barnacles. “Proving the parallel roads to be sea margins would in turn confirm his global geological theory” based on floating land masses.54

One of Darwin’s early ambitions had been to “create a ‘simple’ geology based on the Earth’s crust.”⁵⁵ This desire crowded out the lingering doubts and questions; Darwin published his theory about Glen Roy, and it increasingly came under fire from colleagues like Louis Agassiz and David Milne, who asserted that it was an ancient lake formed by glacial meltwater, and not the sea, that had caused those roads. “But Darwin clung to his seashores, holding tight because of his idée fixe with bobbing landmasses.”⁵⁶ I am not suggesting that Beckett knew of Darwin’s Glen Roy mistake and deliberately alluded to it. The point is that both in their very different domains seem taken with the concept of “earth afloat” in a specific and simple geological vision, a “global geological theory.” Beckett took detailed notes on geology. He made a chart of the key eras from the Precambrian to the present day, and he jotted the emphatic phrase “the geology of conscience—Cambrian experience, Cainozoic judgments” in the “Whoroscope” notebook.⁵⁷ He included many references to geology in his plays. Yet in our haste to read this as “a metaphor for the prehistorical landscape of consciousness . . . suggesting the strata of guilt and repression,” we rush past the fact of the interest in geology in the first place, for its own sake.⁵⁸

In addition to a shared inclination to conceptualizing geological and temporal vastness,59 two further affinities between Beckett and Darwin are particularly worth noting. One is their love of popular forms of performance: Beckett famously draws on Charlie Chaplin’s and Buster Keaton’s silent film work, Darwin preferred entertaining theatrical fare such as the equestrian melodrama he took his young cousins to see. Along with her observation about the link between evolution and acting, Goodall notes that “the experimentalism of minstrel entertainers, actors, acrobats and dancers often mirrors that of natural scientists in its exploration of the limits and modalities of the human body, but it tends to be a burlesque mirroring.”⁶⁰ These shared lowbrow tastes thus relate to important epistemological processes, experiment, and burlesque, each enabling distinct kinds of knowledge. The esoteric and intellectual Beckett, the arcane, inaccessible, and deeply learned side, can overshadow his immersion in the popular culture of his time—vaudeville, cinema, music hall—and the pleasure he took in the mundane and quotidian aspects of life, especially its bodily processes. Even his use of the figure of the tramp connects him to evolutionary theory by the unexpected route of eugenics, a topic I return to in considering Eleuthéria, Beckett’s first full-length theatrical work. Tramps, as William Greenslade notes, potently signified humanity’s refuse, the undesirables whom eugenicists wanted expunged in the early decades of the twentieth century.⁶¹

Finally, on a biographical note, both Beckett and Darwin suffered from chronic physical conditions, the causes of which have never been concretely established. This link is so striking that Goodall even suggests a Beckettian reading of Darwin, “a doubt-ridden and generally troubled occupant of his own mental world” who genuinely doubted the foundations of his own argument and suffered physically from it in ways that parallel Beckett’s experience.⁶² Darwin’s chronic nausea, retching, and vomiting drove him to try water treatments and all kinds of other remedies, without much success, and kept him a recluse. People have posited a range of causes, from a mysterious, tropical bug picked up on his voyage on the Beagle to psychosomatic illness caused by the social and theological implications of his work. Beckett had a succession of similarly crippling gastroenterological problems, from vomiting, diarrhea, and excessive wind to boils under his testicles and in his anus, all described in meticulous detail in his journals.⁶³ These problems arose during his trip to Germany in 1936 as he witnessed firsthand the effect of the Nazis on Jews, artists, and students. “Beckett’s body starts to mimic the disorder he perceives around him,” writes Andrew Gibson, but it is more than a psychosomatic condition; “his symptoms seem more like manifestations of an almost terrifying susceptibility to the world around him.”⁶⁴ This visceral response to the world around him indicates a heightened awareness of the physical processes of nature and their impact on humans that both Beckett and Darwin so deeply felt.

The discourse on Beckett’s plays has arguably made too much of their “cyclical” patterns, assuming that Waiting for Godot and Endgame, for instance, simply recapitulate the main action. This cliché has stuck stubbornly to Beckett studies and prevents us from considering alternatives. There is certainly truth in it: not only the full-length plays but also the shorts, like Play and Come and Go, do emphasize the cyclical format, with its repetition-with-variation structure. The plays are not strictly repetitive or cyclical, though, because they do not come back to the exact place where they began. They progress, usually showing small changes leading to fundamental differences rather than simply repeating the exact same words and actions. In this way, the plays enact the minute changes that constitute biological variation: the tree in Godot changes (in one act there are leaves; in another act there are none); Krapp’s recordings are iterations of his evolving self; Winnie gradually becomes subsumed by the rising earth. This is all part of both the action and the language of evolution, which emphasizes the cycle of life and death, transformation and transmutation, and infinitesimal changes leading to bigger shifts—and, ultimately, extinction for some.

The now-famous pronouncement that in Godot “nothing happens—twice” thus fails to account for the variation within such repetition. A more apt analogy lies in Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, a motif that intrigued Beckett, who was well aware of Haeckel; he mentions him in How It Is and makes the recapitulation motif central to Watt.66 Indeed, the image of Darwin’s caterpillar is often taken as a description of the structure of the novel.⁶⁷ In On the Origin of Species, Darwin observes how remarkable it is that people and animals are such creatures of habit that when interrupted in a song, for instance, or in repeating anything from rote memory, a person

is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought: so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from feeling the benefit of this, it was much embarrassed, and, in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work.⁶⁸

Beausang argues that the caterpillar’s circular behavior is a metaphor for the way in which Western thinkers become prisoners of their own logical constructions. He suggests that Beckett saw in Darwin’s caterpillar a kind of narcissism, the possibility of “metamorphosis against nature.”⁶⁹ The motif also signals an equality between before and after: origins and terminations cannot be identified because they are a continuum. This principle of recurrence then shapes Beckett’s interest in the conflation of birth and death.⁷⁰

With their intense focus on the end of life, it is sometimes easy to miss the emphasis in so many of Beckett’s plays on begetting, origins, and transmission from one generation to the next, which counterbalances the motifs of decay, death, and annihilation. “Progenitor” is a frequent term in Darwin’s works, and it recurs in Beckett. “Accursed progenitor” in Endgame echoes the sense of a single originator of life in chapter 9 of Origin: a “group of forms” all descended from “some one progenitor.” Embryology is key in Darwin’s thinking. Beckett also invokes the fetus—whether born, stillborn, aborted, miscarried—and the womb, often in strange formulations.71 What does Winnie mean when she refers to “the womb, where life used to begin”? Does it not begin there anymore? If not, where does it begin? This is almost as odd as Mrs. Rooney’s comment in All That Fall: “The trouble with her was she had never really been born!”⁷² Mouth in Not I’s refusal to acknowledge her abortion is similarly rendered in a linguistic construction, in a simple shift of pronoun. Already in 1930 in his first published work, Whoroscope, Beckett alluded to Descartes’s ideas about the formation of the fetus as relayed by John P. Mahaffy’s book on the philosopher. Like other animals, humans originate in “the fermentation produced in generation, which causes heat and expansion, so forming the heart, and next producing a motion of the subtler matter there found towards the locus which becomes the base of the brain, with a consequent return of the grosser matter into the places thus vacated.”⁷³ Beckett had a conviction that he remembered being in the womb—a “uterine reminiscence”—that completely goes against scientific evidence.⁷⁴ He was also fascinated by the idea that consciousness begins with conception.

All That Fall centers on reproduction and childlessness: procreation, conception, and the prevention of children through various means, from hysterectomy (Mr. Tyler’s daughter) and menopause (Mrs. Rooney imagines that her lost daughter, Minnie, would be in her forties or perhaps fifty, “getting ready for the change”) to abortion, miscarriage, and death either accidental or intentional. Mr. Rooney asks (presciently), “Did you ever wish to kill a child? Nip some young doom in the bud”—and this links to the many references to miscarriage and abortion, to conception gone wrong, in Beckett’s other plays, such as Not I and Rough for Theatre II (“five or six miscarriages”).75 The dialogue of the radio play All that Fall is set against a soundscape of, on the one hand, animal noises evoking nature and all its irrepressible urges and, on the other, the sounds of vehicles representing, in Katharine Worth’s view, “a whole history of human transport,” from the cart full of manure, to the bicycle Mr. Tyler rides, to the car with its new tires driven by Mr. Slocum, and of course to the train that Mrs. Rooney’s husband is on.⁷⁶ This representation of technological development parallels human evolution, which in Mrs. Rooney’s view seems to be teleological: as she says, we are all going in the same direction.⁷⁷

As noted throughout this book, one of the challenges for playwrights engaging with evolution has always been how to represent vast eons of time and imperceptible change in the brief two-hour traffic of an evening’s theatrical entertainment. Beckett confronts this head on in several ways. One is his sense of time’s elasticity, signified by the tree’s overnight sprouting of four or five leaves in Waiting for Godot (at which the men marvel) and in the play’s metatheatrical acceleration of the diurnal cycle (“In a moment it is night. The moon rises at back, mounts in the sky, stands still,” and then, “The sun sets, the moon rises. As in Act One”).⁷⁸ Another is Beckett’s compression of birth and death, the sense that “the gravedigger puts on the forceps.”⁷⁹ In his study Proust (1930), Beckett notably does not conflate them: “By no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling clothes.” But by the time of Waiting for Godot, humankind is giving birth astride a grave, and this motif permeates his subsequent drama. Krapp’s Last Tape refers to a nurse pushing a black pram, a “most funereal thing.”⁸⁰ And what is life anyway? What does it all amount to? “The same old moans and groans from the cradle to the grave,” says A in Rough for Theatre I.⁸¹ This image is made literal in Breath, which represents a whole life span in seconds: vagic cry, inhale, exhale, silence. In the midst of this arc, the “miscellaneous rubbish” strewn on the stage is significant. It may well be taken as a pessimistic dismissal of what lies between birth and death (life is just so much rubbish). But it may also symbolize not detritus but accumulated experience; not what human life produces, but what the self encounters and accrues in its engagement and struggle with its environment. There is also the sense of waste implied in Thomas Malthus, whose argument that the reproductive excess of nature is necessary for the survival of species deeply influenced Darwin’s thinking, offsetting death, famine, starvation, and other depleting mechanisms. Yet between these extremes an equilibrium does prevail, and perhaps this also is true of Beckett’s theatrical “world” where there is no such waste, in the Malthusian sense. His achievement, especially in the short plays, revolves around a paring down of the inessential: even “story itself is often occluded or subverted and so often secondary.”⁸²

Evolution takes place on a vast scale of geological “deep” time and is subject to the laws of physics—entropy and the second law of thermodynamics—which ultimately project the death of the sun. One can see this paradox in Beckett’s vision: We are evolving, but for what? Only to die out in millions of years? James Harrison, for example, writes that “the overall slide toward stasis and silence” in Beckett’s plays “is almost a staged enactment of entropy.”83 There are indeed moments, as in Rough for Theatre I, that invoke stasis, entropy, and the cooling of the earth: “It seems to me sometimes the earth must have got stuck, one sunless day, in the heart of winter, in the grey of evening.”⁸⁴ John Calder sees both Godot and Endgame as projecting a sense of “the great cooling and the end of all life.”⁸⁵ Happy Days can be seen as entropic. Lucky’s speech in Godot was originally written in a single block, as Cohn notes, “without the three-part division to which the author later called attention—indifferent deity, dwindling humanity, and stone-cold universe.”⁸⁶ From this perspective, Lucky’s speech gives Beckett’s Darwinian view in a nutshell: there is no God; humanity is moving toward extinction; and the universe is succumbing to entropy.

Goodall offers a sharp and subtle reading of Lucky’s speech in terms of entropy. She also briefly considers reading the speech in Darwinian terms, the idea that “he speaks here to bear desperate witness to something that has somehow been registered, ‘beyond all doubt’: that the shrinking and the dwindling happens. It happens before your eyes, in spite of the tennis and all those other activities any good Darwinian would confidently presume to be working toward the selection of improved human specimens.”⁸⁷ Beckett’s plays chart this entropic movement toward shrinking and dwindling, and the theme of extinction haunts them as it does all of humanity.

Extinction hovers over Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days. It is also mentioned in the Nobel Prize speech for Beckett: “In the realms of annihilation, the writing of Samuel Beckett rises like a miserere from all mankind, its muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed and comfort to those in need.”88 Such terms as “complete annihilation” and “a universal winter” abound in the writings of Darwin and his contemporaries, presaging a Beckettian view of the world as obliterated, entropied, with humankind at its last moments before extinction.⁸⁹ Total extinction is, in Roach’s view, the most powerful intellectual contribution of Darwinian modernism to postmodernism.⁹⁰ This helps to explain why Beckett so often deals with extinction and why he gives it a humorous edge, so that his characters see themselves going extinct yet quip and dispense black humor. In fact, it may explain Beckettian humor and the “tragicomedy” with which he is associated, why he would call Breath “a farce in five acts.”

All we have to cling to in the face of this inevitable final demise of life is the body and the natural environment that sustains it. Although the idea still reigns that Beckett is a dramatist of the end of nature, of our great alienation from our natural surroundings, recent work on Beckett and the body has gone some way toward complicating this approach. Herbert Blau says that Beckett depicts the “brutal material world,” while Katharine Worth alludes to Beckett’s “cosmic scenery.”⁹¹ Kathryn White focuses on the central notion of decay, whereby the exterior deterioration mirrors internal decay.⁹² Ben-Zvi has explored how deeply interested Beckett is in the physical and how he grapples with the material world through the body’s experience of it. An obsession with the body and an exploration of stylized alternatives to the natural body is surely one of the hallmarks of theatrical modernism, furthered by Edward Gordon Craig and the metatheatrical bents of Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht, among many others. But with Beckett, whom Joseph Roach calls “this most physical of playwrights,” something new happens.⁹³

After decades of plays that explored and debated single ideas or aspects of evolution, such as maternal instinct, natural selection, adaptation, mutation, and heredity, Beckett returns the theatre to thinking about humans as a species, our place within a natural order, mechanisms of species evolution and whether it occurs on the group or individual level, and the interconnections between us, the animal kingdom, and the environment. Waiting for Godot invokes “the natural order.”94 The nonappearance of the presumed “savior” Godot would seem to indicate that such a being lies outside the natural order, that waiting for some kind of external salvation is a waste of time and energy. “Species” occurs frequently in Beckett’s plays, as in Rough for Theatre I (B wants to “die reconciled, with my species”) and Rough for Theatre II (the subject wished for “the extermination of the species”).⁹⁵ In Waiting for Godot, when Pozzo first sees Didi and Gogo, he pronounces them “of the same species as myself. [He bursts into an enormous laugh.] Of the same species as Pozzo!”⁹⁶ A little further, this seems questionable as Didi and Gogo are horrified at Pozzo’s inhuman treatment of Lucky: “To treat a man . . . like that . . . I think that . . . no . . . a human being . . . no . . . it’s a scandal!” Pozzo admits a few lines later: “I am perhaps not particularly human,” which Estragon’s later comment, “He’s all humanity,” flatly contradicts.⁹⁷ It is significant that only when Pozzo has become abject, blind, and dependent on others can he become “all humanity.”

One of the central speeches of Waiting for Godot passionately foregrounds this question of what defines the human “species,” with Shakespearean echoes:

[VLADIMIR:] Let us not waste time in idle discourse! [Pause. Vehemently.] Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! . . . It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. . . . But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question.⁹⁸

Fundamental to our species is cooperation: not only the capacity to help one another but also the compulsion to do this. This has been the subject of intense debate and experiment across many scientific fields (in addition to its much longer presence within philosophical discourse). Beckett’s writing for the theatre, beginning already with Eleutheria, coincides with this developing discourse on altruism and cooperation as evolutionary mechanisms. “Christ what a planet!” Mrs. Rooney “explodes” violently in All That Fall, triggered by Miss Fitt (“misfit,” echoing the eugenic concerns about the unfit), who has not been quick enough to proffer “your arm! Any arm! A helping hand! For five seconds!”⁹⁹ It is possible to read Waiting for Godot as a sustained meditation on this theme, intensifying in Didi and Gogo’s second encounter with Pozzo and Lucky, which prompts a series of reflections about the extent to which they are “friends” through “helping” one another, an idea on which the central speech quoted previously so eloquently elaborates.¹⁰⁰

The perpetuation of “the species the human” relies on procreation, which centers on the female body. Beckett marks a distinct shift from previous drama not only in his unflinching focus on ailing and decrepit bodies but also more specifically in his sustained exploration without hostility of the female body and its reproductive and sexual functions, whether in the compassionate auditor of Not I; the “vagic cry” of Breath; the continuous talk of birth and “forceps,” childlessness, and barrenness; the powerful presence of women and their physicality. This is all done in a context of a fully Darwinian world that is being embraced and explored in Beckett’s works. The catch is that sex is responsible for life as well as for the inevitable suffering this entails, which leads Beckett to juxtapose, in plays like Happy Days, references to sex and sexuality with sterility or “discreation.”101 For example, Willie is, of course, a child’s word for “penis”; thus, procreation is underscored even while it is shown to be pointless, as Winnie (who is of menopausal age anyway) can hardly have sex while encased in earth from the neck down. Although she is delighted to see new life as symbolized by an ant carrying its egg, Winnie says it is a “blessing” that “nothing grows. . . . Imagine if all this stuff were to start growing.” Likewise, in Endgame the idea that the human species might be regenerated by the flea in Clov’s pants causes panic (“Catch him, for the love of God!”); it does indeed seem to be a “blessing” that things are winding down. This moment in Endgame is also significant because, as Ulrika Maude points out, Beckett “collapses the neat categorical distinction between the lowliest insect imaginable, a parasitic flea, and the highest mammal,” thus questioning “the fault line between the animal and the human.”¹⁰²

Beckett conveys the blindness, randomness, and chance of evolution; the lack of teleology and will: and the fact of death and extinction as just that—facts, not tragedies. Change, chance, and lack of human agency are the drivers of Beckett’s evolutionary vision: “Just chance, I take it, happy chance,” in Happy Days.103 Both chance and change are central to the seemingly static situation Winnie finds herself in: “For however unchanging and apparently endless Winnie’s existence might appear to be, change is present in the shape of decline, degeneration and deceleration. For Winnie and Willie are not so much the last survivors of a giant holocaust, such as a nuclear explosion, or of a sudden and dreadful natural disaster, as the victims of a slow process of running down: dentifrice, universal ‘pick-me-up,’ lipstick and Willie’s vaseline are all depleted and in danger of running out.”¹⁰⁴ This entropic process has even threatened natural laws. “Is gravity what it was, Willie, I fancy not,” says Winnie, wondering if one day the earth will simply crack open and she will float upward.¹⁰⁵ “Ah well,” she says, “natural laws, natural laws, I suppose it’s like everything else, it all depends upon the creature you happen to be.”¹⁰⁶ What depends? Since when are natural “laws” relative? How could they be “laws” if they are not absolute?

Happy Days contains one of Beckett’s most direct evolutionary statements: “That is what I find so wonderful. [pause] The way man adapts himself. [pause] To changing conditions.”¹⁰⁷ Yet, like so many of Beckett’s characters, Winnie simultaneously recognizes the marvel and necessity of adaptation as the key to survival and its tragic elusiveness in the face of a world gone to environmental extremes: the scorching heat that causes her parasol to explode and is literally baking her, the sense that very few humans are left on earth (references to a couple having passed this way, possibly the “last human kind”), her frequent references to past weather conditions, and her alertness to the state of nature (unusually high temperature, level of earth) all give the play a new relevance to climate change. She realizes what will no doubt happen to her: “Shall I myself not melt perhaps in the end, or burn, oh I do not mean necessarily burst into flames, no, just little by little be charred to a black cinder, all this . . . visible flesh.”¹⁰⁸ The question is rhetorical; whether she burns or melts or is swallowed alive by the rising mound of earth, she will die soon. Or, she imagines, she might die of extreme cold; but, whichever it is, it will be some extreme of climate, and it will be horrible. The play is a meditation on our relationship to nature generally and to our specific environment, and while humans’ ability to change and adapt to circumstances is lauded, it is also futile.

For Winnie, the earth/her surroundings are both familiar and “strange.” She used to perspire a lot; now, even in this extreme heat, she hardly sweats at all. How can this be? Another natural law is being broken. The contrast between this lively, persevering character and her probably hopeless condition is heartbreaking. Yet her exclamation “Ah earth you old extinguisher” is closer to affection than bitterness.¹⁰⁹ By the second act, she is asking, “Do you think the earth has lost its atmosphere?”¹¹⁰ And the aforementioned reference to “the womb, where life used to begin” likewise seems to indicate some fundamental shift in the natural order.

It is worth noting here a likely connection with Franz Kafka, another biocentric writer fascinated by the fluid line between animal and human and an author in whom Beckett had a lifelong interest. Willie’s ape-like guise evokes Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy” (1917), which features a chimp named Red Peter giving a talk to an academic audience about how he achieved his accelerated evolutionary ascent.¹¹² In a kind of dramatic monologue, Red Peter explains how he trained himself to become a successful vaudeville performer; he knows how to win an audience, and he foregrounds the performative nature of identity. He is, as Margot Norris puts it, acting as “the successfully adaptive Darwinian organism.”¹¹³ Kafka’s monkey, like Beckett’s characters, sees music hall and vaudeville as his survival strategy; he must learn to perform to survive. We are back to that fundamental link between evolution and “low” forms of theatrical performance.¹¹⁴

Red Peter and Willie stand at opposite ends of the evolutionary spectrum: the chimp made human and the human made chimp, each realizations of “metamorphosis against nature.” Willie represents human regression, or evolution reversed; he hardly speaks, he is living in a hole, he crawls on all fours, and he even, at one point, crawls backward. Winnie tries to guide him back into his hole, warning him, “Keep your tail down, can’t you!”¹¹⁵ Toward the end of the play, he slithers down the mound. Regression, or reversion, was of course an early fear prompted by evolution—the idea that man might degenerate to an earlier state and become an ape again.

Apes clearly fascinated Beckett. In the “Whoroscope” notebook, there is a cutting from a newspaper in 1936 showing four photographs of two chimps playing chess (figure 5). One is a close-up of one of the chimps scratching his head and looking like he is really thinking. The three others are in a sequence showing a chess game in progress. The first shows them each contemplating the board, the next shows them each making a move, and the last shows the chimp on the left comically extending his arm in outrage while the one on the right scratches his head and looks a bit like Laurel when Hardy gets angry at him. This is the only newspaper clipping in the notebook, and it is further evidence not only of Beckett’s fascination with ape–human proximity but also of his particular interest in the comical side of that relationship.

Apes and regression also crop up in Act Without Words I (1956). Interested in gestalt psychology, Beckett in his “interwar notes” had referred to Wolfgang Köhler’s study of apes on Tenerife (published 1917) and their behavior as evidence that, as Beckett concluded, “the brain works in large patterns, closing gaps.” This has had a range of analyses. Feldman notes that twenty years later, “Köhler’s study acts as the setting and events in Act Without Words I,” contrasting Köhler’s apes as “can-ers” with regard to “conceptual learning, and Beckett’s mime as a ‘non-can-er,’ with relief ever beyond reach.”116 Ulrika Maude provides a compelling case for seeing Act Without Words I as a critique of gestalt theory. “Beckett subjects the human animal to a set of experiments,” echoing Köhler’s with the apes on Tenerife but challenging his conclusion that “animals will learn if they are given the full picture.” Neither Köhler’s apes in their laboratory environment nor Beckett’s characters and audience (including readers) are “in a position in which a full Gestalt—a full picture could emerge.” Beckett takes this idea further in his later writing, which is “notoriously and deliberately devoid of contextual definition.”¹¹⁷ Seeing Beckett’s work in the light of such evolutionary discourse is more suggestive and illuminating than the traditional recourse to seeing his “universe” as other worldly, meaningless, and static.

The allusion to apes in Happy Days also stimulates reflection on what it means to be human: “'Tis only human. [pause] Human nature. . . . Human weakness. . . . Natural weakness.”¹¹⁸ What is “only human,” “natural weakness”—is it to do with her relationship with Willie? Why, for instance, does he not dig her out of her mound? And why is there a gun lying nearby? While she delights in the unexpected appearance of the ant carrying its egg, signifying “life of some kind,” she herself is powerless, however much she wants to survive. There is no trace of Lamarckian will directing the course of evolution. If anything, it is the environment that seems to exert a will of its own, to possess some agency. Whether the mound is rising up to swallow her gradually or she is sinking more deeply into it, the outcome seems hopeless as no rescuer appears and there seems to be no way out. The bleakness of this vision of life on earth is enhanced by Winnie’s memories, “giving oblique expression to the fear, violence, and suffering that, in Beckett’s view, seems to be an unavoidable accompaniment to procreation, birth, and being.”¹¹⁹

Beckett’s world is Darwinian and not Spencerian or Lamarckian—a significant departure from the drama and performance I have been charting throughout the foregoing chapters. Beckett is the post–New Synthesis playwright par excellence. Gone is Lamarck: Beckett’s theatrical universe has no room for the inheritance of acquired characters, the notion of progress, the idea that the will could ever enter into species transmutation. Act Without Words I, for example, is a microscopic exploration of how impossible it is for the will to have anything to do with human evolution, for the man is entirely at the mercy of his environment—and the tables have been turned, for it is now the environment that seems to have a will, not the person. Seeing the play in this evolutionary light contextualizes it and seems more productive than the self-limiting reading of it as signifying the “meaningless” human condition.120 So Darwin is inverting the Lamarckian idea, showing how futile the will is and that humans must constantly struggle to adapt to the changing environment or perish.

This affects possible interpretations of the ending of Happy Days. Winnie does all she can to adapt to alarming, and rapidly worsening, environmental change. Depicting as it does the relationship between humans and their dynamic environment, Happy Days takes on new meaning in the context of contemporary concerns about global warming. The earth is suddenly and catastrophically hot, and we do not know what has happened to the rest of its inhabitants. The world around her is still recognizably the “earthball,” though it is entropic: “It has almost dried up in the fierce heat of the sun and, by the second act, might conceivably have lost its atmosphere.”¹²¹ The worsening situation in which she finds herself seems to point toward death, though nothing is certain—there is no third act. Perhaps the mound of earth that gradually swallows Winnie is neither a malignant force (like that of Act Without Words I) nor a benign one, but simply a fact of life. It could thus be something to be reckoned with and altered, rather than inevitably killing her. This makes Winnie’s cheerful insistence on everyday rituals, and her reliance on the objects of normal life despite her increasingly desperate situation, not only endearing and admirable but also necessary. Her resilient refusal to give in to despair resonates with environmentalist debates over the earth’s resilience in the face of.

Likewise, the fundamental differences between prose fiction and theatre may explain why Beckett’s explorations of evolution are so different in both forms: saltationist in his fiction but hewing to a more Darwinian line in his theatre.122 Beckett’s novels feature sudden physical changes in the characters, whereas the plays show gradualism at work everywhere: we watch as Winnie gradually is buried; we wait with Didi and Gogo in surroundings that change minutely. The nature of how time works in the theatre and the coexistence of “real” time with “stage” time allows Beckett to experiment with a different vision of evolution from that of his novels. What is most striking about this is that it directly contradicts what one might expect: that the stage would lend itself more readily to saltationism than to gradualism, as Susan Glaspell’s plays demonstrate. Beckett did a television play, Quadrat, which he then wanted to do again in a way that seems to indicate this gradualist evolutionary perspective: “‘I think I have an idea—Quadrat II—the same action 1000 years later, monotone.’”¹²³

A teleological approach to evolution posits a designer at work organizing chaotic nature into an ordered and progressive system. William Paley, the most famous exponent of the teleological argument, maintained that nature, like an intricate watch, could never have come into being without a creator (the watchmaker) behind it. Paley’s watchmaker analogy is one of the emblematic tropes of the nineteenth-century debates about the transmutation of species.124 There is a moment in Rough for Theatre II (written in French in the late 1950s, around the much-celebrated centenary of the publication of Origin of Species) when Paley’s watch is invoked obliquely to rebut the idea of design. “B” reads in the file that the subject once won in the lottery a “high class watch . . . solid gold, hallmark nineteen carats, marvel of accuracy, showing year, month, date, day, hour, minute and second, super chic, unbreakable hair spring, chrono escapement nineteen rubies, anti-shock, anti-magnetic, airtight, waterproof, stainless, self-winding, centre seconds hand, Swiss parts, de luxe lizard band,” a description that highlights the craftsmanship, sophistication, and complexity of this marvelous instrument. Beckett’s excessively detailed description of the watch (almost a parody of Joyce’s parodic chapter of lists in Ulysses) seems pointless and extraneous—and that is precisely the point. The verbosity itself shows how useless this is. Even as it engages it, the play thus simultaneously invokes and destabilizes the watchmaker analogy.

But Beckett does not leave it at that. Not only is the question of a designer irrelevant, but also the watch was won by lottery—a chance win. “A” notes that the subject was “chancing his luck. I knew he had a spark left in him.”¹²⁵ It then turns out that the chance was all the greater because the lottery ticket that won him the watch was a gift—a random act of kindness, an impulse of sympathy by someone who saw him sitting on a bench, “down and out.” This combines chance with altruism, and it shows Beckett again foregrounding cooperation as an evolutionary mechanism. The idea is also signaled in Rough for Theatre II in its touching allusion to a pair of birds that seem mutually dependent, in stark contrast to the pair of human characters, who show utter disregard for human life as they assess the worth of a third character, C, and come to the conclusion that he should commit suicide. A and B peer through the cage at the two “lovebirds,” and A identifies them as finches:

This brief passage contains several interesting elements. The fact that they are finches127 associates the birds with Darwin, who in his travels on the Beagle noticed that finches from different areas and islands had significant physiological divergences (i.e., in their beak structure and plumage) that could not be explained by existing theories. Darwin’s finches became synonymous with his argument for natural selection as they demonstrated adaptation, or descent through modification. There is also the self-conscious assumption of a “didactic” voice, as if A is a scientist instructing onlookers about the ethology of finches, contrasted with the warm, affectionate voice of the animal lover (“Oh you pretty little pet”). Which voice is the more natural, which one conveys the true nature of human–animal connection? The final lament for the dead bird as “organic waste” may be read as an acknowledgment of the Malthusian excess of nature as well as the inevitability of death, for the female bird has already died; the male, barely alive, is warbling—uselessly—beside her.

The two finches perhaps signify symbiosis, another key motif in his work and his evolutionary vision. Beckett once told an actor that Godot was all about symbiosis, and his plays often feature complementary or interdependent pairs of characters: Didi and Gogo and Lucky and Pozzo in Godot, Endgame’s Hamm and Clov and Nell and Nagg, Winnie and Willie in Happy Days, Krapp’s current and older selves, Mouth and Auditor in Not I, Rough for Theatre I’s B and A, who (though they have only just met) must “join together, and live together, till death ensue” as “we were made for each other.”¹²⁸ There is a clear debt here to the conventions of vaudeville and music hall and to silent film’s comic teams—Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers. Given the innate hostility and resentment underpinning so many of Beckett’s pairings, they also seem to suggest the inevitability of the master–slave paradigm in all human relationships (one of the pair must dominate). If his pairs represent both physical and psychological symbiosis, this would provide an interesting twist on Beckett’s Darwinism by endorsing cooperation, not competition, for resources.

Beckett’s pairs have an almost-biological need for each other, yet usually these pairs are same sex, therefore biologically sterile, and no help to species perpetuation. His plays show this biological underpinning and inspiration—not only this idea of symbiosis in his frequent use of interdependent pairs but also such aspects as his emphasis on anatomy and physiology, animal husbandry/domestication, breeding, and larger environmental processes; his preoccupation with the process of birth; and the idea of play/playful aggression and feigned hostility as an evolutionary “rehearsal” and therefore a strategy for survival in many species. For example, the symbiotic pairing in Endgame is echoed in Théâtre I, first published in French in Minuit 8 (1974) but originally written in English in December 1956—in between the French and English versions of Endgame, which explains their close similarity. Character A is blind and seated on a folding stool playing a violin. Character B is crippled and in a wheelchair, getting about by means of a pole that he pushes. He seems to signify “a point prior to a state of interdependence such as that in which Hamm and Clov are found. In this case, the mutual needs rapidly become clear and the advantages of a symbiotic relationship seem obvious. . . . But when put into practice, however tentatively, the theory conspicuously fails to lead to any satisfactory state of companionship,” as the characters alternate between irritation and altruism, almost randomly—and these seem to cancel each other out.129

Beckett’s plays seem repeatedly concerned with death not only of the individual but also of groups (“loss of species”). I would like to take a closer look at this in the context of the role of extinction in evolutionary theory that I discuss in other chapters in this book as a major preoccupation of dramatists and indicative of their engagement with evolution. Beckett’s interest in early Greek philosophy provides valuable insight into his ideas about extinction. In the notes he took as he was reading Ueberweg’s translation of the Greek philosophers, Beckett wrote: “definite individual existence constitutes an injustice & must be atoned for by extinction,” suggesting a view that extinction “is scripted into existence as a just facet of individual being.”¹³⁰

Happy Days strongly suggests that we are witnessing—as Winnie says several times—“the last human kind.” As I discussed in chapter 2, extinction is an interesting aspect of evolution in terms of how our view of it has changed over time. As Gillian Beer has pointed out, what we regard with alarm and horror Darwin viewed as a natural, everyday occurrence.¹³¹ He scoffs at people’s melodramatic reactions to the idea of extinction, but “because his thinking is extended backward over vast aeons, he is able to invoke the long processes of extinction without qualm. Time dilutes terror.”¹³² The idea of extinction has particularly interested dramatists, from Ibsen, Henry James (Guy Domville), and François de Curel (Les Fossiles) to Wilder (The Skin of Our Teeth) and Beckett right up to contemporary playwrights like Terry Johnson (Cries from the Mammal House) and Steve Waters (The Contingency Plan). They show extinction as a current event, happening in real theatrical time, putting back all the shock that Darwin took out. They can thus focus on the drama (and trauma) of “sudden” extinction, and in fact, they create this counter-evolutionary idea for the stage; in reality, dinosaurs apart, most extinctions happen over time, a slow death.

Repeatedly, Beckett’s plays posit this idea of the “last human kind.” Krapp comments that “the earth might be uninhabited,” so still is the night around him. In Endgame, the world outside is “corpsed.” Endgame is arguably more final than cyclical; even the title suggests there is no repetition here, this is the last set of moves in an extended game.¹³³ Three generations come to an end in the course of one evening’s drama: the binned parents die or disappear; Hamm, their son, is blind and confined to a wheelchair and will die if left by his servant and possible son, Clov; Clov freezes in the midst of deciding whether to go or to stay, but he is dressed in his overcoat and on the way out. James Knowlson and John Pilling point out that in Happy Days, Winnie’s world (here again the idea that her world is somehow different from ours) is full of light, but “the light is just as hellish as Krapp’s darkness had come to be and evokes extinction just as unequivocally.”¹³⁴ In fact, the dualism of light and dark in Krapp’s Last Tape is paralleled in the “elemental contrast of earth and air” in Happy Days.¹³⁵ “Ah earth you old extinguisher,” says Winnie. “The eternal dark . . . night without end.”

In Endgame, Clov announces periodically the death of various things that Hamm mentions: there are no more bicycle wheels, pap, nature, sugarplums, tide, navigators, rugs, painkiller, coffins.136 Soon, if Clov carries through his threat, there will be no more Clov either, and by implication no more humans at all. The characters seem not only to accept but also to be complicit in this sense of dwindling. “In an ending world,” writes Cohn, “generation is an ever-present danger; the human race may evolve from the flea in Clov’s crotch; a rat or a boy may germinate life. Plant life seems to be more acceptable, since Hamm and Clov hope forlornly for seeds to sprout. In sum, we hear about a moribund world outside the refuge.”¹³⁷ Cohn refers to the play’s “anti-creation theme.”¹³⁸ I would suggest that this play in particular stages Beckett’s sense that human beings are at odds with the earth. “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” shouts Hamm. There is also no alternative planet. But for Beckett, the most important line in the play was “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”¹³⁹

There is an often comical mismatch between population and available sustenance that pushes the characters to the edge of existence, flirting with extinction. In Godot, the tree and its barren setting cannot give nourishment to the obviously hungry men; and a carrot, a turnip, and a radish will not last long. The carrot in all its sparseness appears also in Act Without Words II, a metonym for dwindling resources and likely starvation, just as the spindly tree is a metonym for denatured nature. Roach points out the pathetically small size of the carrot in Godot: “Beckett’s personal selection of the properties for his own stagings of Godot is very suggestive in this context [of hunger and famine]: ‘the carrot was usually pitifully small, another example of diminishing resources.’”¹⁴⁰

These “diminishing resources” can be found throughout the play and are set against Pozzo’s abundant chicken and wine picnic, suggesting a political comment on the unequal distribution of material goods. Vladimir’s little song, “A dog came into the kitchen,” “heightens the perception that deprivation, violence, and punishment are the normal expectation for those whose physical needs transgress against the prevailing maldistribution.” It is as if “fighting over the last scrap were a daily ritual” just as the waiting for Godot.¹⁴¹ Pozzo blames the blindness of nature, cruelly indifferent: “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.”

Death is a great leveler. But, far from taking meaning away from life or making living pointless, it reinforces the importance of quite the opposite idea—reveling in meaning and doing so through words. The paradox for Beckett is that language is at a crisis of meaning, yet it is the main thing that separates us from the animals; so, throughout his plays, people talk and talk in the face of possible extinction, as if afraid that if they give up on language they give up on life. There is a possible link here between evolutionary psychology and Beckett’s suggestion of storytelling as serving some kind of biological function. We seem to be hardwired to make ourselves (in Beckett’s words) “mean something,” even in a seemingly meaningless void, and one way we do that is by telling stories about ourselves.142 On the face of it, Beckett’s characters confirm what the literary Darwinists argue: that stories serve an evolutionary role in helping us to survive. Hamm and Winnie are the supreme examples of this; Winnie “survives by talking her way through each day,” and Hamm “hams” it up as self-conscious actor and metatheatrical commentator of events on stage (and the extended joke told by Nagg further exemplifies the need for such storytelling).¹⁴³ But at no point does Beckett evince the hierarchical view implicit in literary Darwinism. For all his characters’ storytelling compulsion, they may well simply die out, subject to environmental pressures beyond the control of language. Animals, earth, the landscape, the elements, indeed time itself all threaten to overtake human existence, which is shown to be expiring.

But while they do live, they can change, and change is the key to ongoing, sustainable, and even meaningful existence. Hamm celebrates the fact that “we breathe! we change! we lose our hair, our teeth, our ideals!” Such loss affirms life. He comments on the odd fact of “something dripping in my head”—a foreboding of death, perhaps, but equally of the earliest days of infancy, when the fontanelles are not yet closed. That fusing of the skull’s plates is an important anatomical milestone signaling a transition from the most vulnerable state of the newborn to its next phase of development. Growth and change are synonymous, and they are “paramount” in Darwin’s “portrait of nature” as well.¹⁴⁴ The key to an organism’s survival is its ability to change.

Yet early in his playwriting career, Beckett shows an interest in human beings “in stasis,” as he puts it in the preliminary note to Eleuthéria, his first play.145 Here, nature is very different from what it becomes in Godot and Happy Days: it is something to be controlled, to manipulate. It is a reminder that just as Ibsen’s engagement with evolution changed over time, there is a significant shift in Beckett’s view of human evolution from his early to his late theatrical work. In this early work, Beckett engages with one form of evolutionary change that was not natural: eugenics. Eleuthéria revolves around procreation and breeding, and its language reflects “the contemporary discourse of race and racial purity” but falls short of embracing it.¹⁴⁶

A key idea in Eleuthéria is to tamper with evolution by medical intervention, as the evil Dr. Piouk (“puke”) explains:

I would ban reproduction. I would perfect the condom and other devices and bring them into general use. I would establish teams of abortionists, controlled by the State. I would apply the death penalty to every woman guilty of giving birth. I would drown all newborn babies. I would militate in favour of homosexuality and would myself set the example. And to speed things up, I would encourage recourse to euthanasia by all possible means, although I would not make it obligatory. Those are the broad outlines.¹⁴⁷

This eugenic program can be achieved by taking a pill. And it is all calculated to go against the natural processes of procreation and death by which nature replenishes itself and humankind goes on; Henri Krap at one point recalls “with some tenderness” his wife’s attempted abortion of their son.¹⁴⁸ So Beckett in his earliest play (written 1947) is thinking about disrupting nature and evolution, in contrast to his later theatrical work which accepts and indeed celebrates the laws of nature as they are, although the central issues of Eleuthéria—the value of life, the morality of euthanasia—also find expression in Embers.

There is of course a strong satirical bent to Piouk’s speech—it echoes Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal and is hardly prescriptive.¹⁴⁹ A possible theatrical precedent, and one that is much closer both temporally and geographically, is Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias, discussed in chapter 6. Both plays deal with birth control, eugenics, and reproduction in grotesque and cartoonish ways, yet few critics have seen a connection here.¹⁵⁰ As mentioned earlier, Mouth in Not I may also echo Apollinaire’s play, which has a reporter whose “face is blank; he has only a mouth.”¹⁵¹

Eleuthéria is the Greek word for “freedom,” and the paradox—the reason why Beckett’s characters again and again reject suicide—is that one can enjoy freedom only by being alive (i.e., having consciousness of the state of freedom)—consciousness being, many argue, not only the key difference between humans and animals but also the elusive “holy grail” of science. As tempting as it is to see Godot as the product of a more mature theatrical mind, chronologically at least this is simply not the case. Seeing Eleutheéria as Beckett’s theatrical intervention in eugenic discourse gives it a new meaning and relevance rather than dismissing it as inferior to Beckett’s other theatrical work. Despite his decades-long suppression of Eleuthéria, the play shows Beckett stretching the way the stage could explore sexual and reproductive issues—much as his American contemporary Edward Albee would do in dramas that include “false” pregnancy, childlessness, abortion, miscarriage, and even cross-species sex.

Beckett’s later work (after the Nobel Prize) has often been seen in the light of compassion and empathy with human suffering. His plays do indeed show not only the need for these qualities but also the extraordinary capacity of human beings, against all the odds, to extend them toward one another. But this emphasis on humanity in Beckett can also help to explain why his evolutionary vision has been relatively little considered, his seeming dismissal of Darwin taken at face value. Beckett’s empathy is “studiedly diverse” and extends well beyond the human, indicating an “abject fascination” with those lowliest of beasts, the flies, hens, and toads of the animal kingdom.152 He depicts not so much the “entangled bank” but a tiny fragment of it, gesturing toward the interconnected life that is teeming somewhere off stage, as when the apparent isolation and desolation of Didi and Gogo are shattered by the sudden appearance of Pozzo and Lucky, laden with good food, signaling abundance elsewhere. Although Beckett embraces the inherent bleakness of Darwin’s vision with its underlying competition, entanglement, ruthlessness, and randomness (rather than determinism), he also recognizes that such bleakness is not all there is to it. Winnie’s attitude of resolute optimism in her dire circumstances chimes with one of the perplexing things about human beings that Darwin tried to figure out—what is the evolutionary purpose of some of our most seemingly useless yet utterly defining characteristics as a species, such as altruism, cheerfulness, humor? These also have a place in Beckett’s drama and in his evolutionary vision.