Notes To Literature

History is kept outside because it has dried up consciousness’ power to conceive it, the power to remember. Drama becomes mute gesture, freezes in the middle of dialogue. The only part of history that is still apparent is its outcome—decline. What in the existentialists was inflated into the be-all and end-all of existence here contracts to the tip of the historical and breaks off. True to official optimism, Lukács complains that in Beckett human beings are reduced to their animal qualities.2 His complaint tries to ignore the fact that the philosophies of the remainder, that is, those which subtract the temporal and contingent element of life in order to retain only what is true and eternal, have turned into the remains of life, the sum total of the damages. Just as it is ridiculous to impute an abstract subjectivist ontology to Beckett and then put that ontology on some index of degenerate art, as Lukács does, on the basis of its worldlessness and infantilism, so it would be ridiculous to put Beckett on the stand as a star political witness. A work which sees the potential for nuclear catastrophe even in the oldest struggle of all will scarcely arouse us to do battle against nuclear catastrophe. Unlike Brecht, this simplifier of horror resists simplification. Beckett, however, is not so dissimilar to Brecht. His differentiatedness becomes an allergy to subjective differences that have degenerated into the conspicuous consumption of those who can afford individuation. There is a social truth in that. Differentiatedness cannot absolutely and without reflection be entered on the positive side of the ledger. The simplification of the social process which is underway relegates it to the faux frais, the “extras,” in much the same way that the social formalities by means of which the capacity for differentiation was developed are disappearing. Differentiatedness, once the precondition of humanness [Humanität], is gradually becoming ideology. But an unsentimental awareness of this is not regressive. In the act of omission, what is left out survives as something that is avoided, the way consonance survives in atonal harmony. An unprotesting depiction of ubiquitous regression is a protest against a state of the world that so accommodates the law of regression that it no longer has anything to hold up against it. There is a constant monitoring to see that things are one way and not another; an alarm system with a sensitive bell indicates what fits in with the play’s topography and what does not. Out of delicacy, Beckett keeps quiet about the delicate things as well as the brutal. The vanity of the individual who accuses society while his “rights” add to the accumulation of injustices is manifested in embarrassing declamations like Karl Wolfskehl’s Deutschlandsgedicht [Poem on Germany]. There is nothing like that in Beckett. Even the notion that he depicts the negativity of the age in negative form would fit in with the idea that people in the Eastern satellite states, where the revolution was carried out in the form of an administrative act, must now devote themselves cheerfully to reflecting a cheerful era. Playing with elements of reality without any mirroring, taking no stand and finding pleasure in this freedom from prescribed activity, exposes more than would taking a stand with the intent to expose. The name of the catastrophe is to be spoken only in silence. The catastrophe that has befallen the whole is illuminated in the horrors of the last catastrophe; but only in those horrors, not when one looks at its origins. For Beckett, the human being—the name of the species would not fit well in Beckett’s linguistic landscape—is only what he has become. As in utopia, it is its last day that decides on the species. But mourning over this must reflect—in the spirit—the fact that mourning itself is no longer possible. No weeping melts the armor; the only face left is the one whose tears have dried up. This lies at the basis of an artistic method that is denounced as inhuman by those whose humanness has already become an advertisement for the inhuman, even if they are not aware of it. Of the motives for Beckett’s reductions of his characters to bestialized human beings, that is probably the most essential. Part of what is absurd in his writing is that it hides its face.

The catastrophes that inspire Endgame have shattered the individual whose substantiality and absoluteness was the common thread in Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Sartre’s version of existentialism. Sartre even affirmed the freedom of victims of the concentration camps to inwardly accept or reject the tortures inflicted upon them. Endgame destroys such illusions. The individual himself is revealed to be a historical category, both the outcome of the capitalist process of alienation and a defiant protest against it, something transient himself. The individualistic position constitutes the opposite pole to the ontological approach of every kind of existentialism, including that of Being and Time, and as such belongs with it. Beckett’s drama abandons that position like an outmoded bunker. If individual experience in its narrowness and contingency has interpreted itself as a figure of Being, it has received the authority to do so only by asserting itself to be the fundamental characteristic of Being. But that is precisely what is false. The immediacy of individuation was deceptive; the carrier of individual experience is mediated, conditioned. Endgame assumes that the individual’s claim to autonomy and being has lost its credibility. But although the prison of individuation is seen to be both prison and illusion—the stage set is the imago of this kind of insight—art cannot break the spell of a detached subjectivity; it can only give concrete form to solipsism. Here Beckett runs up against the antinomy of contemporary art. Once the position of the absolute subject has been exposed as the manifestation of an overarching whole that produces it, it cannot hold up; expressionism becomes obsolete. Art is denied the transition to a binding universality of material reality which would call a halt to the illusion of individuation. For unlike discursive knowledge of reality, something from which art is not distinguished by degrees but categorically distinct, in art only what has been rendered subjective, what is commensurable with subjectivity, is valid. Art can conceive reconciliation, which is its idea, only as the reconciliation of what has been estranged. Were it to simulate the state of reconciliation by joining the world of mere objects, it would negate itself. What is presented as socialist realism is not, as is claimed, something beyond subjectivism but rather something that lags behind it, and at the same time the pre-artistic complement of subjectivism. The expressionist invocation “O Mensch” [“Oh Man”] is the perfect complement to a social reportage seasoned with ideology. An unreconciled reality tolerates no reconciliation with the object in art. Realism, which does not grasp subjective experience, to say nothing of going beyond it, only mimics reconciliation. Today the dignity of art is measured not according to whether or not it evades this antinomy through luck or skill, but in terms of how it bears it. In this, Endgame is exemplary. It yields both to the impossibility of continuing to represent things in works of art, continuing to work with materials in the manner of the nineteenth century, and to the insight that the subjective modes of response that have replaced representation as mediators of form are not original and absolute but rather a resultant, something objective. The whole content of subjectivity, which is inevitably self-hypostatizing, is a trace and a shadow of the world from which subjectivity withdraws in order to avoid serving the illusion and adaptation the world demands. Beckett responds to this not with a stock of eternal truths but with what the antagonistic tendencies will still—precariously, and subject to revocation—permit. His drama is “fun” the way it might have been fun to hang around the border markers between Baden and Bavaria in old Germany as though they encompassed the realm of freedom. Endgame takes place in a neutral zone between the inner and the outer, between the materials without which no subjectivity could express itself or even exist and an animation which causes the materials to dissolve and blend as though it had breathed on the mirror in which they are seen. So paltry are the materials that aesthetic formalism is, ironically, rescued from its opponents on either side: the materials vendors of Diamat, dialectical materialism, on the one hand, and the cultural spokespersons of authentic expression on the other. The concretism of lemurs, who have lost their horizon in more than one sense, passes directly into the most extreme abstraction. The material stratum itself gives rise to a procedure through which the materials, touched tangentially in passing, come to approximate geometric forms; what is most limited becomes most general. The localization of Endgame in that zone mocks the spectator with the suggestion of something symbolic, something which, like Kafka, it then withholds. Because no subject matter is simply what it is, all subject matter appears to be the sign of an inner sphere, but the inner sphere of which it would be a sign no longer exists, and the signs do not point to anything else. The strict ration of reality and characters which the drama is allotted and with which it makes do, is identical to what remains of subject, spirit, and soul in view of the permanent catastrophe. What is left of spirit, which originated in mimesis, is pitiful imitation; what is left of the soul, which dramatizes itself, is an inhumane sentimentality; and what is left of the subject is its most abstract characteristic: merely existing, and thereby already committing an outrage. Beckett’s characters behave in precisely the primitive, behavioristic manner appropriate to the state of affairs after the catastrophe, after it has mutilated them so that they cannot react any differently; flies twitching after the fly swatter has half-squashed them. The aesthetic principium stilisationis turns human beings into the same thing. Subjects thrown completely back upon their own resources, worldlessness become flesh, they consist of nothing but the wretched realities of their world, which has shriveled to bare necessity. They are empty personae, truly mere masks through whom sound merely passes. Their phoniness is the result of the disenchantment of spirit as mythology. In order to underbid history and thereby perhaps survive it, Endgame takes up a position at the nadir of what the construction of the subject-object laid claim to at the zenith of philosophy: pure identity becomes the identity of what has been annihilated, the identity of subject and object in a state of complete alienation. In Kafka, meanings were decapitated or disheveled; Beckett simply puts a stop to the infinity, in the bad sense, of intentions: their meaning, according to him, is meaninglessness. This is his objective and non-polemical judgment on existential philosophy, which by means of the equivocations in the concept of meaning transfigures meaninglessness itself to meaning under the name of “thrownness,” Geworfenheit, and, later, absurdity. Beckett does not oppose this with a Weltanschauung; instead, he takes it literally. What becomes of the absurd once the characteristic of the meaning of existence have been demolished is not something universal—if it were, the absurd would turn back into an idea. Instead, the absurd turns into forlorn particulars that mock the conceptual, a layer composed of minimal utensils, refrigerators, lameness, blindness, and the distasteful bodily functions. Everything waits to be carted off to the dump. This stratum is not a symbolic one but rather the stratum characteristic of a post-psychological condition such as one finds in old people and in those who have been tortured.

Dragged out of the sphere of inwardness, Heidegger’s Befindlichkeiten [states-of-being] and Jaspers’ situations become materialist. The hypostasis of the individual and that of the situation were in harmony in them. “Situation” was temporal existence as such and the totality of the living individual as the primary certainty. It presupposed the identity of the person. Beckett proves himself to be Proust’s student and Joyce’s friend by returning to the concept of situation its actual content, what the philosophy that exploits it avoids—the dissociation of the unity of consciousness into disparate elements, into non-identity. But once the subject is no longer unquestionably identical with itself, no longer a self-contained complex of meaning, its boundary with what is outside it becomes blurred, and the situations of inwardness become those of physis, of physical reality. The verdict on individuality, which existentialism retained as an idealist core, condemns idealism. Nonidentity is both the historical disintegration of the unity of the subject and the emergence of something that is not itself subject. That changes what the term “situation” can be used to mean. Jaspers defines it as “a reality for an existing subject who has a stake in it.”3 He subordinates the concept of situation to the subject, which is conceived as stable and identical, just as he assumes that the situation acquires meaning through its relationship to this subject. Immediately afterwards he also calls it “not just a reality governed by natural laws. It is a sense-related reality,” which, moreover, remarkably, is for him already conceived as “neither psychological nor physical, but both in one.”⁴ But when, in Beckett’s view, the situation actually becomes both, it loses its existential-ontological constituents: personal identity and meaning. This becomes striking in the concept of the “boundary situation” [Grenzsituation]. That concept too originates with Jaspers:

Situations like the following: that I am always in situations; that I cannot live without struggling and suffering; that I cannot avoid guilt; that I must die—these are what I call boundary situations. They never change, except in appearance; [with regard to our existence, they are final].⁵

The construction of Endgame takes that up with a sardonic “I beg your pardon?” Platitudes like “I cannot live without struggling and suffering;…I cannot avoid guilt;…I must die” lose their blandness when they are retrieved from the a priori and returned to the sphere of phenomena. The qualities of nobility and affirmation disintegrate; these are the qualities with which philosophy—by subsuming the aconceptual under a concept that causes what ontology pompously calls “difference” to magically disappear—adorns an existence Hegel already called “foul.” Beckett picks up existential philosophy, which has been standing on its head, and puts it back on its feet. His play responds to the comedy and ideological distortion in sentences like “Courage in the boundary situation is an attitude that lets me view death as an indefinite opportunity to be myself,”⁶ whether Beckett is familiar with them or not. The poverty of the participants in Endgame is the poverty of philosophy.

The Beckettian situations of which his drama is composed are the photographic negative of a reality referred to meaning. They have as their model the situations of empirical existence, situations which, once isolated and deprived of their instrumental and psychological context through the loss of personal unity, spontaneously assume a specific and compelling expression—that of horror. Such situations were already to be found in the praxis of Expressionism. The horror aroused by Leonhard Frank’s schoolteacher Mager, a horror that occasions his murder, is evident in the description of the elaborate manner in which Herr Mager peels an apple in front of his class. His deliberateness, which looks so innocent, is a figure of sadism: the image of the person who takes his time is like the person who keeps people waiting for a grisly punishment. But Beckett’s treatment of these situations, the frightening and artificial derivatives of the perennial simple-minded situation comedy, helps to articulate something that was already evident in Proust. In a posthumous work, Unmittelbarkeit und Sinndeutung [Immediacy and the Interpretation of Meaning], Heinrich Rickert speculates on the possibility of an objective physiognomy of the spirit, a “soul” in a landscape or a work of art that would not be a mere projection.7 Rickert cites a passage from Ernst Robert Curtius, who considers it “only partially correct…to see in Proust merely or primarily a great psychologist. A Stendhal is accurately characterized by this term. It…places him in the Cartesian tradition of the French spirit. But Proust does not acknowledge the distinction between thinking substance and extended substance. He does not divide the world into the psychic and the physical. To view his work from the perspective of the ‘psychological novel’ is to misunderstand its meaning. In Proust’s books the world of sense objects occupies the same space as that of the psychic.” Or: “If Proust is a psychologist, then he is one in a completely new sense of the word: he is a psychologist in that he immerses everything real, including sense perception, in a psychic fluid.” To show that “the customary notion of the psychic does not fit here,” Rickert cites Curtius again: “But the concept of the psychological has thereby lost its opposite—and because of this it can no longer be used for characterization.”⁸ The physiognomy of objective expression retains its enigmatic character nonetheless. The situations say something—but what? In this regard art itself, the quinessence of situations, converges with that physiognomy. It combines the most extreme specificity with its radical opposite. In Beckett this contradiction is turned inside-out. What normally hides behind a communicative facade is sentenced to appear. Working within a subterranean mystical tradition, Proust continues to cling affirmatively to that physiognomy, as though involuntary memory revealed the secret language of things. In Beckett that becomes the physiognomy of what is no longer human. His situations are the counter-images of the inextinguishable substance conjured up in Proust’s, wrested from the tide of schizophrenia, which a terrified healthiness defends itself against by crying bloody murder. In the realm of schizophrenia, Beckett’s drama retains its self-control. It subjects even schizophrenia to reflection:

HAMM: I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter—and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! (Pause.) He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. (Pause.) He alone had been spared. (Pause.) Forgotten. (Pause.) It appears the case is…was not so…so unusual. (44)

The madman’s perception coincides with that of Clov, who peers out the window on command. Endgame moves away from the nadir only by calling its own name, as one does with a sleepwalker: the negation of negativity. Sticking in Beckett’s memory is something like an apoplectic middle-aged man taking his midday nap with a cloth over his eyes to protect them from light or flies. The cloth makes him unrecognizable. This run-of-the-mill image, hardly unfamiliar even optically, becomes a sign only for the gaze that is aware of the face’s loss of identity, of the possibility that its shrouded state is that of a dead man, of how repulsive the physical suffering is that already places the living man among the corpses by reducing him to his body.9 Beckett stares at such things until the everyday family life from which they are drawn pales into irrelevance: at the beginning is the tableau of Hamm covered with an old sheet; at the end he brings the handkerchief, his last possession, up to his face:

HAMM: Old Stancher! (Pause.) You…remain. (84)

Such situations, emancipated from their context and from the character’s personality, are structured into a second, autonomous context, the way music assembles the intentions and expressive features that become submerged in it until their sequence forms a structure in its own right. A key passage in the play,

If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with—(69)

reveals the principle, perhaps in a reminiscence of the way Shakespeare handled his in the players’ scene in Hamlet.

HAMM: Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark. (Pause.) Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of…(he hesitates) that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life. (70)

In the horror of not being in a hurry, such situations allude to the irrelevance and superfluousness of anything the subject is still able to do. Hamm considers riveting down the covers of the garbage cans in which his parents live, but he revokes that decision in the same words he uses to change his mind about urinating, which requires the torment of the catheter:

HAMM: Time enough. (24)

A slight aversion to medicine bottles, dating back to the moment when one became aware that one’s parents were physically weak, mortal, falling apart, is reflected in the question:

HAMM: Is it not time for my pain-killer? (7)

Speaking to one another has been consistently transformed into Strindbergian nagging:

HAMM: You feel normal?

CLOV (irritably): I tell you I don’t complain. (4)

and at another point:

HAMM: I feel a little too far to the left. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far to the right. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far forward. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Now I feel a little too far back. (Clov moves chair slightly.) Don’t stay there [i.e. behind the chair], you give me the shivers. (Clov returns to his place beside the chair.)

CLOV: If I could kill him I’d die happy. (27)

But the waning of a marriage is the situation in which one scratches onself:

NELL: I am going to leave you.

NAGG: Could you give me a scratch before you go?

NELL: No. (Pause.) Where?

NAGG: In the back.

NELL: No. (Pause.) Rub yourself against the rim.

NAGG: It’s lower down. In the hollow.

NELL: What hollow?

NAGG: The hollow! (Pause.) Could you not? (Pause.) Yesterday you scratched me there.

NELL (elegaic): Ah yesterday!

NAGG: Could you not? (Pause.) Would you like me to scratch you? (Pause.) Are you crying again?

NELL: I was trying. (19–20)

After the former father and preceptor of his parents has told the allegedly metaphysical Jewish joke about the trousers and the world, he himself bursts out laughing over it. The embarrassment that comes over us when someone laughs about his own words becomes existential; life is still a quintessence only as the quintessence of everything one has to be ashamed of. Subjectivity dismays us as domination in a situation where one person whistles and the other comes running.10 But what shame protests against has its social value: in the moments when the bourgeois act like true bourgeois, they sully the notion of humanity that is the basis for their own pretensions. Beckett’s prototypes are also historical in that they hold up as typical of human beings only the deformations inflicted upon them by the form of their society. There is no room left for others. The bad habits and ticks of the normal personality, which Endgame intensifies unimaginably, are the universal form—which has long since put its stamp on all classes and individuals—of a totality that reproduces itself only in and through particularity in the bad sense, the antagonistic interests of individuals. But because there has been no life other than the false life, the catalog of its defects becomes the counterpart of ontology.

In a play that does not forgo the traditional cast of characters, however, this fragmentation into disconnected and non-identical elements is nevertheless tied up with identity. It is only in opposition to identity, and thus falling within its concept, that dissociation as such is possible; otherwise it would be pure, unpolemical, innocent multiplicity. For now, the historical crisis of the individual finds its limit in the individual biological entity which is its arena. Thus the sequence of situations in Beckett, which flows on without opposition from the individuals, ends in the stubborn bodies to which they regress. Judged in terms of this unity, the schizoid situations are comical, like hallucinations. Hence the clowning which one sees immediately in the behavior and the constellations of Beckett’s figures.¹¹ Psychoanalysis explains the clown’s humor as a regression to an extremely early ontogenetic stage, and Beckett’s drama of regression descends to that level. But the laughter it arouses ought to suffocate the ones who laugh. This is what has become of humor now that it has become obsolete as an aesthetic medium and repulsive, without a canon for what should be laughed about, without a place of reconciliation from which one could laugh, and without anything harmless on the face of the earth that would allow itself to be laughed at. An intentionally idiotic double entendre about the weather reads:

CLOV: Things are livening up. (He gets up on ladder, raises the telescope, lets it fall.) It did it on purpose. (He gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.) I see…a multitude…in transports…of joy. (Pause.) That’s what I call a magnifier. (He lowers the telescope, turns toward Hamm.) Well? Don’t we laugh? (29)

Humor itself has become silly, ridiculous—who could still laugh at basic comic texts like Don Quixote or Gargantua?—and Beckett carries out the sentence on it. Even the jokes of those who have been damaged are damaged. They no longer reach anyone; the pun, the degenerate form of which there is a bit in every joke, covers them like a rash. When Clov, the one who looks through the telescope, is asked about the color and frightens Hamm with the word “gray,” he corrects himself with the formulation “light black.” That botches a line from Molière’s Miser, who describes the allegedly stolen cashbox as “grayish red.” Jokes, like colors, have had the marrow sucked out of them. At one point the two non-heroes, one blind and one crippled, the stronger already both and the weaker in the process of becoming both, plot a “trick,” an escape, “some kind of plan” à la The Threepenny Opera, not knowing whether it will only prolong life and agony or put an end to both of them in absolute annihilation:

CLOV: Ah good. (He starts pacing to and fro, his eyes fixed on the ground, his hands behind his back. He halts.) The pains in my legs! It’s unbelievable! Soon I won’t be able to think any more.

HAMM: You won’t be able to leave me. (Clov resumes his pacing.) What are you doing?

CLOV: Having an idea. (He paces.) Ah. (He halts.)

HAMM: What a brain! (Pause.) Well?

CLOV: Wait! (He meditates. Not very convinced.) Yes…(Pause. More convinced.) Yes! (He raises his head.) I have it! I set the alarm! (46–47)

This is probably an association to the (probably also originally Jewish) joke about the Busch Circus in which stupid August, who catches his wife with his friend on the sofa, cannot decide whether to throw out his wife or his friend, because he cares too much about both of them, and hits on the solution of selling the sofa. But even the last trace of silly sophistic rationality is erased. The only thing that is still funny is the fact that humor itself evaporates along with the meaning of the punchline. This is the way someone starts when, having climbed to the top step of a flight of stairs, he keeps going and steps off into empty space. Extreme crudeness carries out the sentence on laughter, which has long been its accomplice. Hamm lets the torsos of his parents, who have turned into babies in the garbage cans, starve to death, the triumph of the son as father. Chatter accompanies this:

NAGG: Me pap!

HAMM: Accursed progenitor!

NAGG: Me pap!

HAMM: The old folks at home! No decency left! Guzzle, guzzle, that’s all they think of. (He whistles. Enter Clov. He halts beside the chair.) Well! I thought you were leaving me.

CLOV: Oh not just yet, not just yet.

NAGG: Me pap!

HAMM: Give him his pap.

CLOV: There’s no more pap.

HAMM (to Nagg): Do you hear that? There’s no more pap. You’ll never get any more pap. (9)

To the irreparable harm the non-hero adds insult, his indignation at the old people who no longer have any decency, the way old people usually wax indignant about immoral youth. In this ambience, what remains of humanity—the fact that the two old people share their last zwieback with one another—becomes repulsive through the contrast with transcendental bestiality, and what remains of love becomes lip-smacking intimacy. To the extent to which they are still human beings, human things still go on:

NELL: What is it, my pet? (Pause.) Time for love?

NAGG: Were you asleep?

NELL: Oh no!

NAGG: Kiss me.

NELL: We can’t.

NAGG: Try. (Their heads strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall apart again.) (14)

Like humor, dramatic categories as a whole are shifted around. All are parodied. But not derided. In its emphatic sense, parody means the use of forms in the era of their impossibility. It demonstrates this impossibility and by doing so alters the forms. The three Aristotelian unities are preserved, but drama itself has to fight for its life. Endgame is the epilogue to subjectivity, and the play loses the hero along with subjectivity. The only aspect of freedom still known to it is the powerless and pitiful reflex action of trivial decisions.12 In this too Beckett’s play isheir to Kafka’s novels. His relationship to Kafka is analogous to that of the serial composers to Schönberg: he provides Kafka with a further self-reflection and turns him upside down by totalizing his principle. Beckett’s critique of the older writer, which points irrefutably the divergence between what is happening and an objectively pure epic language, contains the same difficulty as the relationship between contemporary integral composition and the inherently antagonistic music of Schönberg: what is the raison d’être of forms when the tension between them and something that is not homogeneous to them has been abolished, without that slowing down progress in the artistic mastery of materials? Endgame handles the matter by adopting that question as its own, by making it thematic. The same thing that militates against the dramatization of Kafka’s novels becomes Beckett’s subject matter. The dramatic constituents put in a posthumous appearance. Exposition, complication, plot, peripetia and catastrophe return in decomposed form as participants in an examination of the dramaturgical corpse. Representing the catastrophe, for instance, is the announcement that there are no more painkillers (14). Those constituents have collapsed, along with meaning, to which drama once served as an invitation. Endgame performs a test-tube study on the drama of the age, a drama that no longer tolerates any of its constituents. For example: at the climax of the plot, tragedy had at its disposal as the quintessence of antithesis the technique of stichomythia, an extreme tightening of the dramatic fabric—a dialogue in which a trimeter of one character is followed by a trimeter of another. Dramatic form had relinquished this technique as being too remote from secular society in its stylization and its unconcealed pretentiousness. Beckett makes use of it, as though the detonation had provided access to things that were buried under drama. Endgame contains rapid-fire monosyllabic dialogues like the play of question and answer that once took place between the deluded king and the messenger of fate. But whereas in Oedipus that served as a medium for a rising curve of tension, here it is a medium in which the interlocutors slacken. Short of breath to the point of being mute, they can no longer manage to synthesize linguistic periods, and they stammer in protocol sentences—whether of the positivist or the expressionist variety one does not know. The asymptote toward which Beckett’s drama tends is silence, which was already defined as a rest in the Shakespearian origins of modern tragedy. The fact that Endgame is followed by an Acte sans paroles [act without words], as a kind of epilogue, is Endgame’s own terminus ad quem. The words in Endgame sound like stopgap measures because that state of muteness has not yet been satisfactorily achieved; they are like an accompaniment to the silence they disturb.

What has become of form in Endgame can almost be traced in literary history. In Ibsen’s Wild Duck, Hjalmar Ekdal, a photographer who has gone to seed and is already a potential non-hero, forgets to bring the adolescent Hedwig the promised menu from a sumptuous dinner at old Werle’s house to which, wisely, he has been invited without his family. Psychologically, this is motivated in terms of his careless, egotistical character, but it is also symbolic of Hjalmar, of the course of the action, and of the meaning of the whole: the fruitless sacrifice of the young woman. This anticipates the later Freudian theory of parapraxis, which interprets the “slip” in terms of its relationship both to the person’s past experiences and to his wishes, hence to the unity of the person. Freud’s hypothesis that all our experiences “have a sense”13 translates the traditional dramatic idea into a psychological realism in which Ibsen’s tragicomedy about the wild duck rekindles the spark of form. When symbolism is emancipated from its psychological determinants it becomes reified and turns into something that exists in itself; the symbol becomes symbolist, as in Ibsen’s late work—when, for example, the bookkeeper Foldal in John Gabriel Borkmann is run down by “Youth.” The contradiction between this kind of consistent symbolism and a conservative realism is responsible for the inadequacy of Ibsen’s last plays. But by the same token it becomes a leavening agent for the expressionist Strindberg his symbols tear themselves free of empirical human beings and are woven into a tapestry in which everything and nothing is symbolic because everything can mean everything. Drama has only to recognize the inevitable ridiculousness of this kind of pan-symbolism, which abolishes itself, and make use of it, and Beckettian absurdity has been reached through the immanent dialectic of form. Meaning nothing becomes the only meaning. The deadliest fear of the characters in the drama, if not of the parodied drama itself, is the fear, disguised as humor, that they might mean something.

HAMM: We’re not beginning to…to…mean something?

CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one! (32–33)

With the disappearance of this possibility, which has long since been suppressed by the superior power of an apparatus in which individuals are interchangeable or superfluous, the meaning of language disappears as well. Irritated by the degenerate clumsiness of the impulse of life in his parents’ trashcan conversation and nervous because “it doesn’t end,” Hamm asks, “What do they have to talk about? What does anyone still have to talk about?” (23). The play lives up to that question. It is built on the foundation of a prohibition of language, and it expresses that taboo in its own structure. But it does not escape the aporia of expressionist drama: that even where language tends to reduce itself to pure sound, it cannot divest itself of its semantic element, cannot become purely mimetic14 or gestural, just as forms of painting that are emancipated from objective representation cannot completely free themselves of resemblance to material objects. Once definitively separated from the values of signification, mimetic values become arbitrary and accidental and ultimately turn into a second-order convention. The way Endgame deals with this distinguishes it from Finnegans Wake. Instead of trying to liquidate the discursive element in language through pure sound, Beckett transforms it into an instrument of its own absurdity, following the ritual of the clown, whose babbling becomes nonsense by being presented as sense. The objective decay of language, that bilge of self-alienation, at once stereotyped and defective, which human beings’ words and sentences have swollen up into within their own mouths, penetrates the aesthetic arcanum. The second language of those who have fallen silent, an agglomeration of insolent phrases, pseudo-logical connections, and words galvanized into trademarks, the desolate echo of the world of the advertisement, is revamped to become the language of a literary work that negates language.¹⁵ Here Beckett’s work converges with the drama of Eugène Ionesco. If one of Beckett’s later plays revolves around the imago of the tape recorder, the language of Endgame is reminiscent of the abominable party game in which the nonsense talked at a party is secretly taped and then played back to the guests to humiliate them. The shock, which people scurry away from in embarrassed giggles, is developed in full in Beckett’s work. Just as after an intensive reading of Kafka alert experience thinks it sees situations from his novels everywhere, so Beckett’s language effects a healing disease in the sick person: the person who listens to himself talk starts to worry that he sounds the same way. For a long time now, people leaving the movie theater seem to see the film’s planned contingency continuing in chance events on the street. Gaps open up between the mechanically assembled phrases of everyday speech. When one of Beckett’s two characters asks, with the routine gesture of someone jaded by the inviolable boredom of existence, “What in God’s name could there be on the horizon?” (31), this linguistic shrugging of the shoulders becomes apocalyptic precisely by virtue of its utter familiarity. The slick and aggressive impulse of healthy common sense, “What in God’s name could there be?” is blackmailed into confessing its own nihilism. Somewhat later, Hamm, the master, orders Clov, the soi-disant servant, to fetch the “gaff” for a circus trick, the vain attempt to push the chair back and forth. A short dialogue follows:

CLOV: Do this, do that, and I do it. I never refuse. Why?

HAMM: You’re not able to.

CLOV: Soon I won’t do it any more.

HAMM: You won’t be able to any more. (Exit Clov.) Ah the creatures, the creatures, everything has to be explained to them. (43)

Every day millions of bosses beat the fact that “everything has to be explained to them” into their subordinates. Through the nonsense it is supposed to justify in that passage, however—Hamm’s explanation negates his own command—the line not only casts a harsh light on the craziness of the cliché, which habit obscures, but also expresses what is deceptive about dialogue: the fact that those who are hopelessly estranged from one another can no more reach one another by conversing than the two old cripples in the trashcans. Communication, the universal law of the cliché, proclaims that there is no communication any more. The absurdity of talk does not unfold in opposition to realism but rather develops out of it. For by its very syntactic form—its logicity, its deductive relationships, its fixed concepts—communicative language postulates the law of sufficient cause. But this requirement is scarcely ever satisfied any more: when human beings converse with one another they are motivated in part by their psychology, the prelogical unconscious, and in part they pursue ends which, as ends of mere self-preservation, deviate from the objectivity whose illusory image is reflected in logical form. Nowadays, certainly, one can prove this to them with their tape recorders. As both Freud and Pareto understood it, the ratio of verbal communication is always rationalization as well. But ratio itself sprang from the interest of self-preservation, and hence its compulsive rationalizations demonstrate its own irrationality. The contradiction between rational facade and unalterable irrationality is itself already the absurd. Beckett has only to mark it as such, to use it as a principle of selection, and realism, divested of the semblance of rational stringency, comes to its senses.

Even the syntactic form of question and answer is undermined. It presupposes an openness about what is to be said that, as Huxley had already recognized, no longer exists. The predesignated answer can be heard in the question, and this turns the play of question and answer into empty delusion, a futile effort to conceal the unfreedom of informative language under the linguistic gestures of freedom. Beckett strips away this veil, and the philosophical veil as well. The philosophy that calls everything radically into question by confronting it with the void stops itself from the outset—by means of a pathos derived from theology—from reaching the frightening conclusion whose possibility it suggests. Through the form of the question it infiltrates the answer with precisely the same meaning the question calls into doubt; it is no accident that in fascism and pre-fascism these destructeurs were able to condemn the destructive intellect so heartily. Beckett, however, spells out the lie implicit in the question mark: the question has become a rhetorical one. If the Hell of existentialist philosophy is like a tunnel midway through which one can already see the light from the other end shining, Beckett’s dialogue rips up the tracks of conversation; the train no longer reaches the point where it starts to get light. Wedekind’s old technique of misunderstanding becomes total. The course of the dialogue itself approaches the aleatory principle of the literary production process. The dialogue sounds as though the law of its progression were not the rationality of statement and rejoinder, nor even their psychological interconnection, but rather a process of hearing something out, akin to the process of listening to music that is emancipated from preexisting forms. The drama listens in order to hear what kind of statement will follow the one before. It is only in relation to the initial spontaneity of these questions that the absurdity of the content becomes clear. This too has its infantile prototype in visitors to the zoo who wait to see what the hippopotamus or the chimpanzee will do next.

In its disintegration, language becomes polarized. On the one hand it becomes the Basic English, or French, or German of individual words, commands sputtered out archaically in the jargon of a universal disrespect, the familiarity of irreconcilable antagonists; on the other, it becomes the ensemble of its empty forms, a grammar that has abandoned all relationship to its content and with it its synthetic function. The interjections are accompanied by practice sentences, God knows what for. This too Beckett broadcasts: one of the rules of Endgame is that the asocial partners, and the spectators along with them, are always peeking at one another’s cards. Hamm considers himself an artist. He has chosen Nero’s qualis artifex pereo as the motto for his life. But the stories he projects run aground on syntax:

HAMM: Where was I? (Pause. Gloomily.) It’s finished, we’re finished. (Pause.) Nearly finished. (50)

Logic staggers around among the paradigms. Hamm and Clov are talking in their authoritarian, cutting manner:

HAMM: Open the window.

CLOV: What for?

HAMM: I want to hear the sea.

CLOV: You wouldn’t hear it.

HAMM: Even if you opened the window?

CLOV: No.

HAMM: Then it’s not worthwhile opening it?

CLOV: No.

HAMM (violently): Then open it! (Clov gets up on the ladder, opens the window. Pause.) Have you opened it?

CLOV: Yes. (64–65)

One is almost tempted to see in Hamm’s last “then” the key to the play. Because it is not worthwhile to open the window, because Hamm cannot hear the sea—perhaps it has dried up, perhaps it is no longer moving—he insists that Clov open it: the senselessness of an action becomes the reason for doing it, a belated legitimation of Fichte’s free activity for its own sake. This is how contemporary actions seem, and they arouse the suspicion that it was never much different. The logical figure of the absurd, which presents as stringent the contradictory opposite of stringency, negates all the meaningfulness logic seems to provide in order to convict logic of its own absurdity: to convict it of using subject, predicate, and copula to lay out the non-identical as though it were identical, as though it could be accommodated with forms. It is not as a Weltanschauung that the absurd replaces the worldview of rationality; rather, in the absurd that worldview comes into its own.

The preestablished harmony of despair governs the relationship between the forms and the residual content of the play. The ensemble, melted down, consists of only four characters. Two of them are excessively red, as though their vitality were a skin disease; the old people, in contrast, are excessively white, like potatoes sprouting in the cellar. None of them have properly functioning bodies any more. The old people consist only of torsos—they lost their legs, incidentally, not in the catastrophe but apparently in a private accident with the tandem in the Ardennes, “on the road to Sedan” (16), where one army regularly destroys another; one should not imagine that all that much has changed. But even the memory of their particular misfortune becomes enviable in view of the vagueness of the general disaster, and they laugh as they remember it. In contrast to the Expressionists’ Fathers and Sons, they all have proper names, but all four are one-syllable names, “four letter words” like obscenities. The practical and intimate short forms popular in Anglo-Saxon countries are exposed as mere stumps of names. Only the name of the old mother, Nell, is somewhat familiar, if obsolete; Dickens uses it for the touching figure of the child in The Old Curiosity Shop. The three others are invented, as though for billboards. The old man is called Nagg, by association with nagging, and perhaps also through a German association: the married couple is a couple by virtue of its Nagen, gnawing. They discuss whether the sawdust in their trashcans has been changed, but it is now sand instead of sawdust. Nagg confirms that it was once sawdust, and Nell responds wearily, “Once!” (17), the way a wife scornfully exposes the expressions her husband frozenly repeats. However petty the debate about sawdust or sand may be, the difference between them is crucial for what is left of the plot, the transition from the minimum to nothing at all. Beckett too could claim what Benjamin praised in Baudelaire, the ability to say the most extreme things with the utmost discretion;16 the consoling platitude that things could always be worse becomes a condemnation. In the realm between life and death, where it is no longer possible even to suffer, everything rides on the distinction between sawdust and sand; sawdust, wretched byproduct of the object-world, becomes a scarce commodity, and being deprived of it means an intensification of one’s life-long death penalty. The two make their home in trash cans (an analogous motif appears, incidentally, in Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real, although surely neither of the plays drew on the other): as in Kafka, the colloquial phrase is taken literally. “Today the old people are thrown on the garbage heap,” and it happens. Endgame is true gerontology. By the criterion of socially useful labor, which they are no longer capable of, the old people are superfluous and should be tossed aside; this notion is distilled from the scientific fussing of a welfare system that underlines the very thing it denies. Endgame prepares us for a state of affairs in which everyone who lifts the lid of the nearest trashcan can expect to find his own parents in it. The natural connection between the living has now become organic garbage. The Nazis have irrevocably overthrown the taboo on old age. Beckett’s trashcans are emblems of the culture rebuilt after Auschwitz. This subplot, however, goes farther than too far; it extends all the way to the demise of the two old people. They are refused their baby food, their pap, which is replaced by a biscuit that the toothless old people can no longer chew, and they choke to death because the last human being is too squeamish to spare the lives of the next to last. This is linked to the main plot in that the deaths of the two old people move it forward to that exit from life whose possibility constitutes the dramatic tension. This is a variation on Hamlet: to croak or to croak, that is the question.

Grimly, the name of Beckett’s hero abbreviates Shakespeare’s; the name of the now liquidated dramatic subject, that of the first dramatic subject. There is also an association to one of Noah’s sons and hence to the Flood: the father of the black race, who, in a Freudian negation, stands for the white master-race. Finally, in English, “ham actor” means a hack comedian. Beckett’s Hamm, keeper of the keys and impotent at the same time, plays what he no longer is, as though he had read the recent sociological literature that defines the zoon politikon as a role. Being a “personality” would mean putting on airs as expertly as the impotent Hamm does. Personality may even have been a role from the start, nature behaving like something more than nature. Changing situations in the play provide the occasion for one of Hamm’s roles. From time to time a stage direction makes the drastic recommendation that he speak with the “voice of a rational being” (33). In his long-winded tale he affects the “narrative tone” (50). The remembrance of something that cannot be brought back becomes a fraud. The disintegration retrospectively condemns as fictitious the continuity of life, which makes life what it is. The difference in tone between people who are telling stories and people who are speaking directly passes judgment on the identity principle. The two tones alternate in Hamm’s long speech, which is a sort of interpolated aria without music. He stops at the breaks, with the artificial pauses of a leading man past his prime. Endgame presents the antithesis to existential philosophy’s norm that human beings should be what they are because there is nothing else they can be—the idea that this very self is not the self but a slavish imitation of something that does not exist. Hamm’s duplicity points up the lie involved in saying “I” and thereby ascribing to oneself the substantiality whose opposite is the contents that the ego synthesizes. The enduring, as the quintessence of the ephemeral, is its ideology. But of thought, which used to be the truth content of the subject, only the gestural shell is retained. The two figures act as though they were thinking something over, without in fact thinking anything over:

HAMM: The whole thing is comical, I grant you that. What about having a good guffaw the two of us together?

CLOV (after reflection): I couldn’t guffaw again today.

HAMM (after reflection): Nor I. (60)

Hamm’s foil is what he is even in his name: a twice-mutilated clown the last letter of whose name has been amputated. His name sounds the same as an obsolete expression for the devil’s “cloven” hoof and is like the current word “glove.” He is his master’s devil, who threatens him with the worst possible thing—leaving him—and also his master’s glove, which Hamm uses to make contact with the world of objects to which he no longer has direct access. Not only the figure of Clov but also Clov’s relationship to Hamm is constructed from such associations. On the old piano edition of Stravinsky’s Ragtime for Eleven Instruments, one of the most important pieces in his surrealist phase, was a drawing by Picasso, probably inspired by the “Rag” in the title, which shows two seedy figures, precursors of Vladimir and Estragon, the vagabonds who are waiting for Godot. This virtuoso piece of graphic art consists of a single tortuous line. Endgame’s double sketch is in the same spirit, as are the battered repetitions that Beckett’s whole oeuvre irresistibly drags in. In those repetitions history is annulled. The repetition compulsion is learned by watching the regressive behavior of the prisoner, who tries again and again. Not the least of the ways in which Beckett converges with the most contemporary trends in music is that he, a Western man, amalgamates features of Stravinsky’s radical past, the oppressive stasis of a continuity that has disintegrated, with advanced expressive and constructive techniques from the Schönberg school. The outlines of Hamm and Clov are also drawn with a single line; the process of individuation into properly autonomous monads is denied them. They cannot live without one another. Hamm’s power over Clov seems to rest on the fact that he is the only one who knows how to open the larder, much as only the head of the firm knows the combination of the safe. He would be prepared to tell him the secret if Clov would promise to “finish” him—or “us.” In a phrase thoroughly characteristic of the texture of the play, Clov responds, “I couldn’t finish you,” and as though the play were making fun of anyone who assumes rationality, Hamm says, “Then you won’t finish me” (36). He is dependent on Clov because only Clov can still do the things necessary to keep them both alive. That, however, is of questionable value, because like the captain of the ghost ship both must fear that they will not be able to die. The little thing on which everything hangs is the possibility that something might change. This movement, or its absence, constitutes the plot. To be sure, it is never made more explicit than the reiterated leitmotif “Something is taking its course” (13; cf. 32), as abstract as the pure form of time. The Hegelian dialectic of master and servant, which Günther Anders discussed in relation to Godot, is not “given form” in accordance with the tenets of traditional aesthetics so much as ridiculed. The servant is no longer capable of taking charge and doing away with domination. The mutilated Clov would scarcely be capable of it, and in any case, according to the historico-philosophical sundial of the play it is too late for spontaneous action. There is nothing left for Clov to do but wander off into a world that does not exist for these recluses and take the chance that he will die in the process. For he cannot even rely on his freedom to die. He does manage to decide to leave and comes in as though to say goodbye: “Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag” (82), with the emphatic effect of a musical finale. But we do not see his exit; he “halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on Hamm, till the end” (82). This is an allegory whose intention has fizzled out. Aside from differences which may be decisive but may also be completely irrelevant, it is identical with the beginning. No spectator, and no philosopher, would be capable of saying for sure whether or not the play is starting all over again. The pendulum of the dialectic has come to a standstill.

The action of the play as a whole is composed on two themes, in musical fashion, as double fugues used to be. The first theme is that things should come to an end, a homely version of Schopenhauer’s negation of the will to life. Hamm sets the tone: the characters, who are no longer characters, become the instruments of their situation, as though they had to play chamber music. “Of all Beckett’s bizarre instruments, Hamm, in Endgame, who sits in his wheelchair, blind and immobile, is the one with the most tones, the most surprising sound.”17 Hamm’s nonidentity with himself motivates the course of the action. While he desires the end, as the end of the agony of an existence that is unending in the bad sense, he is as concerned about his life as a man in the fateful “best years of his life.” The minor paraphernalia of health are of excessive importance to him. But he fears not death but rather that death could miscarry—an echo of Kafka’s motif in “The Hunter Gracchus.”¹⁸ Just as important to him as his own bodily necessities is the fact that Clov, appointed lookout, sees no sail and no column of smoke, that there is no rat or insect stirring from which the disaster could begin all over again, not even the child who may have survived, who would represent hope, and for whom he lies in wait like Herod the butcher stalking the agnus dei. Insecticide, which pointed toward the death camps from the very beginning, becomes the end-product of the domination of nature, which now abolishes itself. Life’s sole remaining content is that there shall be nothing living. Everything that exists is to be made identical to a life that is itself death, abstract domination. The second theme is assigned to Clov, the servant. According to an admittedly very obscure story, he came to Hamm looking for a refuge, but he also has much of the son of the enraged, impotent patriarch in him. To put an end to one’s obedience to the powerless is the most difficult thing there is; everything insignificant and outmoded is irresistibly opposed to its own abolition. The counterpoint between the two plots is provided by the fact that Hamm’s will to death is the same as his life principle, whereas Clov’s will to life could well bring about the death of them both; Clov [in the English version, Hamm] says, “Outside of here, it’s death” (9). Nor is the antithesis formed by the two heroes a fixed one. Their impulses intermingle; it is Clov who first speaks of the end. The schema the course of the action follows is that of the endgame in chess, a typical and to some extent norm-governed situation separated by a caesura from the midgame with its combinations. The latter are absent in the play as well. Intrigue and plot are tacitly suspended. Only technical errors or accidents, such as the existence of a living thing somewhere, could give rise to something unforeseen, not the spirit of invention. The field is almost empty, and what happened before can be inferred only with great difficulty from the positions of the few characters. Hamm is the king around whom everything revolves and who can do nothing himself. On the stage, the disproportion between chess as a pastime and the inordinate effort it involves takes the form of the disproportion between the athletic actions of the actors and the insignificance of their actions. Whether the game ends in a stalemate or in an eternal check, or whether Clov wins, is not made clear, as though too much certainty about this would provide too much meaning. And in any case it is probably not so important: everything comes to a standstill in a draw just as it does in a mate. The only other thing that stands out is the fleeting image of the child (78), a very weak reminiscence of Fortinbras or the Child King. It might even be Clov’s own abandoned child. But the oblique light that falls from it into the room is as weak as the impotent helping arms that reach out the window at the end of Kafka’s Trial.

The final history of the subject is made the theme of an intermezzo that can allow itself its symbolism because it reveals its own inadequacy and thereby the inadequacy of its meaning. The hybris of idealism, the enthronement of human meaning as the creator at the center of his creation, has entrenched itself in that “bare interior” like a tyrant in his last days. There, with an imagination reduced to the smallest proportions, Hamm recapitulates what men once wanted to be, a vision of which they were deprived as much by the course of society as by the new cosmology, and which they nevertheless cannot let go of. Clov is his male nurse. Hamm has him push him in his wheelchair to the middle of the room, the room which the world has become and which is at the same time the interior of his own subjectivity:

HAMM: Take me for a little turn. (Clov goes behind the chair and pushes it forward.) Not too fast! (Clov pushes chair.) Right round the world! (Clov pushes chair.) Hug the walls, then back to the center again. (Clov pushes chair.) I was right in the center, wasn’t I?(25)

The loss of a center which that parodies, because that center was already a lie, becomes the pitiful object of a nagging and impotent pedantry:

CLOV: We haven’t done the round.

HAMM: Back to my place. (Clov pushes chair back to center.) Is that my place?

CLOV: I’ll measure it.

HAMM: More or less! More or less!

CLOV (moving chair slightly): There!

HAMM: I’m more or less in the center?

CLOV: I’d say so.

HAMM: You’d say so! Put me right in the center!

CLOV: I’ll go and get the tape.

HAMM: Roughly! Roughly! (Clov moves chair slightly.) Bang in the center! (26–27)

But what is being requited in this stupid ritual is not something the subject has done. Subjectivity itself is at fault; the fact that one exists at all. Heretically, original sin is fused with creation. Being, which existential philosophy trumpets as the meaning of being, becomes its antithesis. Panic fear of the reflex movements of the living not only serves as an incitement to indefatigable domination of nature; it is directed to life itself, as the cause of the catastrophe life has become.