Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

IN THIS CHAPTER, I POSE A SIMPLE BUT QUITE PROVOCATIVE question, namely: what happens to our interpretation when we examine the status of disability within a representational system in which the discomfort of disability is not accounted for? “Discomfort,” as I use it here, is a euphemism for a broad range of perturbations that afflict the character with disability, from embarrassment to physical discomfiture to pain, both mental and physical. As we shall see, pain is particularly relevant to a discussion of disability in Beckett because it is the one element that we do not find properly accounted for in his writing. In his work, categories such as emotion and memory, the temporality of past and present, and the vicissitudes of language are placed within a structure of persistent doubt, to the point of making them all elusive and absurd. The one thing that allows us to properly evaluate the significance of this structure of absurdity, however, is pain and its relation to disability. On this point we find a certain stubborn lacuna in Beckett’s texts, a lacuna that is not due to an absolute absence of pain as such, since his characters sometimes talk about it, but one that is linked to the ways pain is shown to be only a shadowy part of their consciousness. However, once we take the status of pain to be equivalent to that of impairment and disability in the texts, it serves to short-circuit the process by which the absurdity is maintained. The not-accounted-for pain of the apparently impaired characters creates a blank space that undoes the dominant discursive modality governing the Beckettian representation. Thus to read Beckett closely in terms of the status of pain within the totality of discursive relations among the elements in his work is to critically review the process by which he might be read as a writer of disability.

The reception of the 2004 London production of Endgame at the Albery Theatre in London suggests the tone for how Beckett is generally perceived.¹ The production, directed by Mathew Warchus with Michael Gambon as Hamm and Lee Evans as Clov, was hailed by critics as “outstanding and astutely judged” (Kate Basset) and as an “apocalyptic vaudeville act” (Michael Billington). Lavish praise was heaped on the actors, with Alistair Macauley writing in the Financial Times that their very dissimilarity enlarged the play and that their keen attention to each other gave it a moment-by-moment immediacy. Susannah Clapp saw Gambon as presiding over the empty stage “like a deposed monarch, or a tramp guarding his favourite park bench”; he was described by her as sometimes looking like the blinded Gloucester—with darkened eyes and bloodied handkerchief—and at other times like an Eastern potentate. Evans, on the other hand, is praised by Billington for accentuating Clov’s gift for “mislaying ladders and telescopes, as if he is at the endless mercy of material objects.”² Even though Hamm’s blindness and immobility and Clov’s difficulty in walking were frequently referred to, the general tenor of the reviews tended to focus on either the production’s literariness and indebtedness to earlier dramatic traditions (such as Shakespeare and/or the Absurdists), to art and painting, and to the tradition of the comedy circuit, Lee Evans himself being a noted British comedian. At no point was it noted that Evans’s Clov was cast as a person with cognitive disability or that the way Gambon’s Hamm declaimed his lines served to fundamentally shift the emphasis away from his impairments. In this the reviews of the play were repeating the overall manner in which Beckett has been understood by literary critics.

The almost subliminal move away from accounting for the reality and discomfort of the impaired body as such by reviewers of the London production is a staple of commentary on Beckett in general. Despite the abundance of figures with physical and mental impairments and mobility difficulties in works as varied as Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Murphy, Play, and Happy Days, among others, what is quite odd in studies of Beckett to date is the degree to which physical disability is assimilated to a variety of philosophical categories in such a way as to obliterate the specificity of the body and to render it a marker of something else. Thus discussions of maimed and disabled characters in Beckett are often conducted around two broad rubrics: existential phenomenology and deconstructive antihumanism.³ Even the very insightful analyses of Pierre Chabert, Jonathan Kalb, Lois Oppenheim, and other directors and critics who have paid attention to the status of Beckett’s stage bodies tend to see these within various modalities of theater performance. A good example of this tendency is in Katherine M. Gray’s essay on the various “emergences” of Beckett’s stage bodies, in which, through a reading of Judith Butler’s work, she persuasively shows that the stage bodies are troubled out of their “presumed conventional unity into a radicalized multiplicity” (1996, 1) and thus cannot be assumed to possess normal referentiality. In her discussion, however, there is no room to consider the Beckettian disabled bodies in their specific phenomenological materiality. For even the word “materiality” in her account is aimed at pointing out the transgressions that bodily fluids and gases perform by breaking the apparently closed surface of the body in performance: “As the material body sweats, salivates, drools, spits, coughs, belches, weeps, sneezes, hiccoughs, tears, urinates, bleeds, suppurates, or has gastric distress, it shows the factic/performative body to be a porous performer’s body” (8). Thus what is ruptured is the representation of the body in its factual and performative dimensions, each of which normally tends to locate the stage body within a predictable dimension of discourse. We need to ask a number of simple questions with regard to Gray’s observations: What about pain? Of the body-inpain? Why, despite the many obvious referents to the body’s deterioration in Beckett do critics fail to talk about the phenomenology of the body’s pain? I shall speculate later on the reason for this persistent assimilation of disability to philosophical categories, tracing it directly to the problematic status of pain in Beckett’s work and how, despite the many descriptions of physical impairment, pain itself is treated quite differently from all other categories in his work. Because of the strong process of the undermining of certainties in Beckett, the vector of pain is easily mistaken as being analogous or equivalent to other philosophical categories, thus allowing it to be missed out as a potential source for understanding the peculiar function of short-circuiting that pain performs in his writing.

Whatever inventory of disabled, maimed, and constrained figures in Beckett we are able to draw up serves in the end to obscure rather than clarify the complexity of Beckett’s attitudes to disability.⁴ For all the inventory serves to do is to bring together an array of different images of corporeality, each of which would, properly speaking, have to be contextualized and related to their inspirations within the author’s aesthetic and philosophical concerns as well as to his life experiences. However, what an inventory also makes quickly evident is the persistence with which images of impairment and constraint feature in his work. Disability has almost the character of an aesthetic repetition compulsion in Beckett, a return to the impaired human body as a means of framing a series of concerns of a creative and philosophical kind. Without attempting to make too strong a link between the details of his own life and that of the characters in his writing, it is interesting to note that Beckett regularly encountered various disabled figures at close quarters in his lifetime. As background research to the writing of the Mercyseat scenes in Murphy, he closely questioned his friend Geoffrey Thompson, who in February 1935 had started working as a senior house physician at the Royal Hospital in Beckenham in Kent, a place for the treatment of mental illness. And from August to December 1945, Beckett worked as a “Quartermaster/Interpreter” for the Normandy Hospital at St.-Lô. Furthermore, Beckett’s aunt, Cissie Sinclair, is acknowledged to have been the model for Hamm. Beckett used to wheel her around in her wheelchair when she was crippled with arthritis; she frequently used to ask him to “straighten up the statue.” She also had a telescope with which she used to spy out the ships in Dublin Bay (Knowlson 1996, 367; Haynes and Knowlson 2003, 52). Furthermore, Endgame was completed shortly after the death of his brother Frank, after a period of cancer that left Beckett devastated. Knowlson (1996, 367) describes Endgame’s “flintlike comedy” as being “sparked out of darkness and pain.” As noted in chapter 1, however, perhaps what is even more pertinent to the discussion of Beckett and disability is that he himself suffered endless illnesses including arrhythmia, night sweats, and cysts. These caused him regular bodily discomfort (Knowlson 1996). It seems then that the deteriorating body had a special attraction for Beckett because his own body reminded him of its pain and mortality in a forceful way. He was thus able to use the disabled, maimed, and decaying body as a multiple referent for a variety of ideas that seem to have been at least partially triggered by encounters with others and by his own personal experience of pain and temporary disability.⁵

There are thus three propositions I would like to pursue in this chapter: first, to suggest that pain has an elusive and problematic status in Beckett, but that it provides a way of short-circuiting the play of absurdity in his work; second, to show the degree to which the configuration of disability representation in his work is largely underpinned by the category of “disability as hermeneutical impasse,” which I introduced in chapter 2; and third, following on from these first two points, to define the nature of aesthetic nervousness we find in his work with reference to the representations of physical and mental impairment and the absenting of pain. While referring to a wide range of texts from his oeuvre, I will focus primarily on Molloy and Endgame for the discussion in this chapter.

Molloy suffers from a variety of ailments, the most significant of which is the stiffness in his leg, which makes him dependent on crutches for mobility. But that is by no means the whole problem. Apart from his stiff short leg (he is not sure which it is, left or right), he is completely toothless (24), has weak eyesight, a weak bladder, and very bad body odor (50, 81); he is also asthmatic, bristles with boils, and suffers from arthritis (79, 81, 90). He describes himself as having a “hideous appearance.” It is not clear whether his various ailments are simply due to old age or have a different genesis. Additionally, there are several other characters with impairments and illnesses that appear in his narrative. Lousse’s dog, which he accidentally runs over on his bicycle, is described as “old, blind, deaf, crippled with rheumatism and perpetually incontinent” (33). The description of the dog uncannily echoes what Molloy says about his own mother: she is as “deaf as a post,” a “deaf blind impotent mad old woman,” and “quite incontinent, both of faeces and water” (19, 17). The old woman to whom he periodically makes love is described as suffering from both rheumatism and lumbago, and dies suddenly while taking a hot bath in her room (56– 57). Yet despite all the references to physical impairments and illnesses, the novel is defined for us not so much by the references to these as by the nature of the eponymous protagonist’s perspectives and recollections. Molloy describes everything so as to insist upon verificatory impasses regarding the reality of the categories in his own mind and how these interact with the natural and social environment around him.

Molloy might be said to be immersed within an elusive plenitude of immediacy. That is to say, he feels impelled to describe in great detail everything that is happening to him, both from within his own mind and from his external environment, and yet everything he describes remains uncertain. The key to an understanding of this elusive plenitude of immediacy is provided by what he says about the relationship between his sense of identity and the namelessness of things: “And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names” (31). This is not to say that things are not named or have no names; on the contrary. They are named, but even as they are named they are placed within a horizon of doubt so as to always raise suspicion about the veracity of their specific identities in space and time. All the things described by Molloy emerge in a series of tactile, visual, and auditory evocations that give them a powerful and almost sensuous quality. At the same time, being relayed in a language that is designed to raise doubt about their identities repeatedly undermines the sensuous quality assigned to each object or thought. This then leads to a sense of the continual dissolution of all the details that he gives to us, whether these emerge from the external environment or as objects from his own memory. Every object within Molloy’s purview, whether an object external to himself or, as is often the case, a figment of his own memory and imagination, is submitted to this rigorous process of unnaming.

There are several effects of this elusive plenitude. First and foremost is the question of fundamental epistemological doubt, since all essential-isms about phenomenal identity are abolished except for one, which is the non-negotiable status of the quest for his mother, a person he describes as absolutely hating. Indeed, it is the desire to go and see his mother that provides a justificatory framework for his peregrinations in the first place, even though the mother-quest is abandoned somewhere along the line as a rationale for the narrative. In that sense, Molloy abolishes all essentialisms except one: the quest for his mother. The quest acts for him like a hypothetical imperative. This hypothetical imperative is itself sometimes felt to recede, leaving him “stranded” (86–87). Much can be made of this particular maternal hypothetical imperative, except that the objective he has for getting to his mother is neither love nor tenderness but the practical necessity of once again extracting money from her. All that is, remains “nameless.”

The second effect of Molloy’s commitment to fully describing everything that happens to him is to fit the external world to his own felt experience rather than privileging what appears on the surface of normality. In the novel, normality appears to be ultimately tyrannical, and is signaled especially by the scheme of surveillance that hovers disturbingly on the edge of Molloy’s consciousness.⁶ This scheme is represented directly in the text by the police sergeant who arrests him and takes him to the station for what is a minor traffic infringement on his bicycle. At the same time, and quite disturbingly, the periphery of his perception, the outer limit of normality, is the source of latent violence. He tells us on being interrogated by the police that he had always “gone in fear all my life, in fear of blows. Insults, abuse, these I can easily bear, but I could never get used to blows” (22). The threat of violence is repeated elsewhere, when the mob that gathers after he runs over the old dog displays every intention of lynching him. His accidental killing of the dog is itself part of this overall trope. Finally, the subterranean violence underpinning the text bursts into the open when Molloy violently kills the charcoal burner encountered in the forest toward the end of his circular quest. Thus we see that normality is edged round by violence and threats of violence, making it even more important for him, as a weak old man with various impairments, to attempt a direct translation of the immediate into forms of sensual and intellectual comprehension that would enable him to navigate what is really a world gone awry. Indeed, the episodic and almost picaresque nature of Molloy’s account serves to underscore this awry dimension of the world around him. For at all times, the sense we get is that there is no knowing what will happen next. Things seem to happen all of a sudden, some pleasant (like being taken into Lousse’s house and cared for) and some potentially violent, the key thing being that he has no control over his environment except for the residues he filters through his own mind.

Third and finally, Molloy’s account raises for us the issue of the skeptical interlocutor integrated into the very system of one’s own thought. Throughout his reflections there is a hint of the presence of an implied interlocutor or addressee. As we shall see in other chapters, but particularly in the ones on Coetzee and on Robben Island, the skeptical interlocutor provides an important horizon against which the disabled character defines him or herself. Molloy’s narrative, however, is essentially a dramatic monologue (emphasis here on dramatic), but one in which there is the endemic anticipation of doubt about what is being expressed. Thus he integrates a skeptical interlocutor into the body of his own thought. And yet this skeptical interlocutor need not be conceived of as someone different from himself. Often, the interlocutor appears to be different parts of Molloy engaged in an attenuated and dubious dialogue. As he himself notes: “For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on” (48). His constant questioning of the categories of his experience are a means toward verifying his identity:

The implied interlocutor that perforce incites the narration is also to be seen again in the Moran section of the novel, where, quite distinctly from what we see in Molloy’s account, the implied interlocutor is the spy chief to whom Moran is obliged to address his report. And yet, in the case of Moran the extreme and unexamined confidence in his various subject positions as father, employer, and indeed spy delays his recognition of his interlocutor as a skeptical one. At the beginning of his section, he assumes that he shares a horizon of assumptions with the spy chief, managing to read between the lines of what Gaber tells him to discern what the spy chief really means by the message Moran has been sent. He is also flattered that he is the one chosen to pursue this particular task. For much of Moran’s narrative he is supremely confident in his own views and interpretations of events, always anticipating the perspectives of others and situating himself in a privileged position vis-à-vis his addressees. It is only toward the end of his narration/report, when he has suffered from the inexplicable impairment in his legs and can barely walk, been abandoned by his long-suffering son, and discovers after a long and labored return journey home that his property has fallen into decrepitude, that his tone changes and he allows a note of uncertainty to enter his voice.

We can already see in this notion of the skeptical interlocutor the seeds of the later and much more explicitly worked out dialogical contexts of works such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Play.⁷ As we shall soon see with specific reference to Endgame, the category of the skeptical interlocutor has multiple articulations along an axis of dialectical oppositions that include those of Invalid/Caregiver, Parent/Child, Master/Slave, and Prospero/Caliban-Ariel.

We are bound to ask, however, whether these features of Molloy’s account do not make of him an instrument of excessive ambiguation rather than a representation of disability, whether physical or otherwise. The main reason why this question arises is due to the absence of a crucial element from his structure of interlocution, namely pain. In fact, this is an absence we will also note in Endgame, where, despite all the characters living in various states of extreme physical disability and discomfort, physical pain is referred to only tangentially in the play. Molloy does refer passingly to the pain in his legs, except that unlike everything else that percolates through his consciousness, pain is the only category that is not subjected to the structure of skeptical interlocution we noted a moment ago. Even though he is clearly in pain, it does not enter into the structure of doubt within which every category he invokes is tested as to its truth value. Everything that comes into his purview is subjected to the same structure of skeptical verification, be it the name of his mother, the quality of the moon, his notions of time, or even his manner of narrating his experiences. The only thing that is never subjected to this structure of interrogation is physical pain. We are thus led to suspect that his disability is a philosophical abstraction of the frailty of the aging body, rather than referring to the phenomenologically impaired body as such.

Merleau-Ponty suggests that the body is not an instrument or a means but rather the conduit by which the deepest affective movements are tied to the external world. He describes the relationship between the individual’s body and the external world in this way:

One implication of these remarks is that the external world, like the mind of man, is riddled with lacunae, thus mirroring in its way the gaps in our own knowledge. At any rate, this is how the external world is bound to appear within man’s limited perception. But with Molloy we have to confront a problem. Since the entire narrative is governed by a scrupulous stream-of-consciousness narrative method, it is impossible to differentiate between what occurs in Molloy’s own mind and what is actually in reality outside of it. And so the lacunae that proliferate seem to have as much to do with the intensities of Molloy’s own perceptions as they do with any breaks on the outside. These perceptions, however, do not accommodate pain as a vector of the understanding, thus implying that his “body” is really a no-body: it seems to be pure mind as opposed to body. What Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion does not take account of and which Molloy forces us to confront is the degree to which different mind/ body dispositions, especially coming together as representational matrices, go to intensify rather than reflect the perceived lacunae of the objective world.⁸ Thus in Molloy’s case his mind may not be reflecting his environment but intensifying and maybe even distorting it. And, dialectically, that intensification and distortion, percolating as it does through his mind, serves to almost dematerialize his body, making of it a transparent template from which pain is abolished. For if pain were admitted into account, the mind/body dichotomy within the interpretation would have to be resolved in favor of body and away from mind. It is this that allows critics to write about Molloy without remembering his physical impairments.

It is clear that despite the fact of Molloy’s many impairments noted earlier, the main way in which we remember him is by way of his internal discourse, the stream-of-consciousness that helps define his sense of self. The attenuation of his physical disabilities as the primary vectors through which Molloy might be interpreted is generated by the text itself. The mixture of close sensory descriptions of his surroundings with specific details of his experience, the overall structure of skeptical self-questioning, and the concomitantly rapid fragmentation of temporal markers make the novel a good example of the representation of disability as a hermeneutical impasse. For at every level that we slice the text we are confronted with a problem of the structure for interpretation. Everything seems labile and elusive, even Molloy’s impairments themselves. As we have noted, the only category that falls outside the circle of hermeneutical delirium is pain. Unlike the many other categories that are refracted through Molloy’s consciousness, pain stands outside the structure of skeptical interlocution that defines his narrative. To come to a fuller evaluation of the status of pain in Molloy and in Beckett’s work more generally, however, we have to take a lengthy digression through Endgame, the subject of our next section.

As is readily to be noticed on encountering the play, the various categories with which the characters attempt to make sense of their existence always seem to be constitutively dependent upon an ineluctable structure of negation. This structure is central to the unfolding of the action at all levels and can be explored in relation to what I want to describe as the process of rapid oscillation between positive assertion and its opposite, that is, problematical negation. This is most strongly to be seen at the level of the dialogue between the characters, in the fact that they seem to be constantly talking at cross-purposes even when they echo each other at different points in the play. The pauses in the dialogue between the characters also tend to obliterate the transition between different thematic referents in their conversation, leading to a series of fragmented conversational tableaux. That is to say, the characters’ language does not mean anything other than what is defined contingently by them at any particular time. Thus even an apparently simple matter such as the existence or otherwise of nature is strictly redefined within the purview of their own immediate exchange:

Clov’s attempt at recontextualization—“In the vicinity”—is what we expect from our knowledge of the background of desolation that lies on the outside of the play. It also smuggles in a small measure of doubt about whether the question can be answered in totality, since the only knowledge he has of nature depends on the immediate vicinity. Yet Hamm goes a step further in suggesting that nature resides within a process of change, both natural (our hair) and ethical (our ideals), thus immediately shifting the meaning of “nature” to a much more subtle level that reflects directly upon the characters’ own ontology of progressive decay (hair) yet incorporates an epistemological dimension as well (ideals). Thus language is not taken as unproblematically naming a referent that lies out there in the real world, but rather as scrupulously contingent upon the specific discursive contexts of the dialogue. Hamm’s “nature” is then a corrective to Clov’s “nature,” even though they are both using the same word, and, on the surface, seem to be referring to the same concept.

A degree of nonidentity between language and contextual referent is furthermore seen in the extent to which the text encourages an allegorical or indeed metaphysical identification with various elements of the action, not so much to assert these identifications as to efface them, while at the same time retaining their allegorical residue. Thus, following the hint provided by the title of the play, it could be interpreted as implying the winding down of the characters’ lives, when everything is coming to an end. It has been variously interpreted also as an allegory of a post-Holocaust world, the inside of a man’s skull, the moves on a chessboard, and a quasi-biblical account of the quest for salvation. One critic has noted that Clov’s “It is finished” early in the play has direct echoes of the bible, but that the play is really the reversal of the biblical creation myth. Hamm has also been likened to Prospero and Clov to Caliban or Ariel, suggesting that their relationship is at once paternalistic and exploitative in the manner of Shakespeare’s play.⁹

However, despite the allegorical allusiveness of various references in Endgame, it is utterly impossible to impose any specific allegorical interpretation on it. Because the play is so obtuse, the effect of the coupling of allegorical allusiveness to the impossibility of allegorical interpretation serves to entice us into interpretation while abrogating our capacity to conduct interpretation as such. We are led toward always reading and interpreting an excess or supplement to what has been displayed before us, while recognizing simultaneously that our capacity for actually gaining any certainty about the status of that supplement is constantly being undermined by the gaps that exist between assertions in the dialogue and their contextual referents. We are not allowed to dwell wholly upon an allegorical interpretation, even though the text seems to encourage this at every turn. Rather we veer from one potential meaning to another, possibly contradictory, potential meaning. The hope of a meaning is kept alive so long as it is thwarted: that is the residue of the allegorical implication. The fragmentary nature of the language and the fact that it is teasingly allegorical means that there is an encouragement to try constantly to assemble and reassemble the pieces of the action in pursuit of meaning. This is not insignificant, as it then serves to mirror the problems with the bodily schema of the impaired characters within the action itself.

The play has many references to corpses and decay, while also representing characters in various attempts to forestall this imminent decay. This is particularly so with the character of Hamm, who regularly asks Clov for his painkillers. But to capture the peculiar struggle between decay and the efforts against it, both at the level of the characters’ own interaction and as part of the governing ethos of the play, it might perhaps be useful to imagine the stage set as smelling of antiseptic, as in a hospital. This would be to take seriously Hamm’s remark that “We stink already. The whole place stinks of corpses” (114). Even though this might go directly counter to Beckett’s own intentions (there is no evidence in any extant production of an invocation of hospital conditions), this would help to counter the critical anaesthetizations that seek to assimilate the impaired and ailing body in Endgame to an abstract philosophical category. By suggesting a different dimension to the action, the smell of antiseptic would forcefully locate the audience and the reader in a place they most likely would not like either to be at or be reminded of, thus situating them in a conceptual domain that directly subtends the condition of immobility and discomfort displayed on stage.

As many commentators have noted, Hamm’s disability complements Clov’s in a variety of ways. He is wheelchair bound,¹⁰ while Clov cannot sit; Hamm is completely blind, while Clov is partially so. But this apparent inextricable interdependency is also consolidated at other levels: Clov needs Hamm for sustenance (the combination to the larder), while acting in practical terms as Hamm’s prosthesis. Hamm’s insistence on knowing what lies outside their desolate room is satisfied by Clov’s spying out the landscape with the telescope, another prosthesis of vision that, significantly, also renders Clov himself dependent to a degree upon a notion of bodily extension. Another counterpoint is that set up between movement and stillness. Whereas Hamm is perforce stationary unless he can get Clov to move him around the stage, Clov is constantly moving about doing things: opening the curtain, adjusting the painting that hangs up close to the window, moving the ladder backward and forward, and reporting movement in the kitchen. The movement in the kitchen is itself metonymically displaced onto the mouse that Clov designs to kill, as if to suggest that that movement has to be stilled. Then there is his repeated threat to leave Hamm, to move away to some place else, as it were. Nothing happens on stage, and yet this nothingness is marked by the almost frantic movement of one of the characters. In this way, as Pierre Chabert (1982) argues, Beckett sets up a constitutive contrast between immobility and movement. Hamm’s immobility serves to accentuate Clov’s labored movements and to intensify his every gesture, while Clov’s movements serve to further highlight the immobility and sometimes even statuesque posture of the other characters. When Clov himself stops moving, it is almost as if he is winding down to the position of immobility of the other characters. The dialectical relationship between mobility and immobility in a play constituted exclusively by characters that carry impairments serves to further accentuate the existential constraint of disability. Every move within this dialectic is constitutively dependent on its opposite, thus suggesting that impairment/disability/immobility and nondisability/ mobility are part of a single continuum.¹¹

And yet the contrast between Clov’s movement on- and off-stage and the immobility that is enjoined for Hamm, Nagg, and Nell is not so much a demarcation of the opposition between mobility and immobility as between different temporalities. For at one level, the counterbalance of movement/nonmovement is that between different rates of action and decay. The differentiated temporalities of movement/immobility are predominantly suggested in the contrast between the current condition of the characters and the stories they tell about their past to assuage their impotence. These stories often serve to demarcate a different world of action to that which we see depicted on stage. More importantly, in the stories of their past, Hamm, Nagg, and Nell were not disabled, but appeared to have had active and interactive lives. Contrastively, nothing seems to happen in the now of the dramatic action. All that is left for the characters is the recollection of past events. Central to Hamm’s characterization, in particular, is his capacity to adopt various narratological positions to invoke the past in order to counteract his sense of present inadequacy. Discussing this feature of Endgame, Jonathan Boulter (1998, 41) notes that acts of narrative in the play function as the momentary liberation from constraint, especially for Hamm. As he points out, “Narrative operates hermeneutically in the sense that it offers the possibility of inscribing an alternative temporality, an alternative way (or time) of being.” Boulter focuses on what he calls an “act of historiography” on the part of the characters that allows them to interpret and rewrite the past. We have to add, however, that the rewriting of the past is not just an act of interpretative predisposition. Rather, involved in the interpretation of the past are struggles about agency. This agency does not mirror the present but displaces it onto an earlier phase of temporality, which earlier phase is more active and carries greater vitality than the one enacted on stage.

The past that the characters have recourse to appears to suffer a certain degree of sterility. This is mainly because there can be no easy agreement about what it means, either in the case of Hamm, for himself, or in the case of Nagg and Nell, in terms of how they view their commonly shared past. The past becomes animated only in the process of recollection. In the case of Nagg and Nell, the stories of the tailor and of their shared experience on Lake Como are mutually interdependent for the meanings that might be implicitly unearthed for establishing their agential dispositions out of that past:

Their disagreement about what it was that made Nell laugh is fundamental to how they interpret that event. But why did she laugh so uncontrollably at the time? She says it was due to happiness, but he insists it was his story of the tailor that did it. From her impassive response to the tailor story when he has finished retelling it to her for what must be the umpteenth time, we suspect that the story is not incredibly funny after all. But what if her impassive response now in the time of the dramatic action is meant to be read back onto the past and to suggest that it is a replica of her response then? More significantly, are we not encouraged to use this contradiction (between laughter/impassiveness) to question the entirety of their lives together through the basic institution of marriage, one of the key ideals of which is “conjugal harmony”? The laughter now becomes the central point of ambiguity: did she really laugh then because the story was funny? Or because she was happy? If it was because it was funny, was she not happy? And if it was because she was happy, was it not funny? And why does she not laugh now? Is it because she does not find the story funny anymore or because she is no longer happy? Focusing still on the status of laugh-ter—whether she laughed because the story was funny or because she was happy—also allows us to fold the laughter/impassiveness back into their current condition of immobility. Might her impassiveness now not be related to the fact that their condition of inertia makes it impossible for her to laugh? In which case, is Nagg’s story recalling the past not really an attempt to recapitulate a different form of temporality to revivify their current condition, even if for one fleeting moment? Thus we find that the stories that they tell have to be related to their current conditions of immobility as well as contrasted to their previous situation.

Also at stake between Nagg and Nell is something well beyond laughter, for their disagreement also implies a contested interpretation of causality and of the relationship between the past and the present. For if from Nell’s uncontrollable laughter there followed the capsizing of the boat, it is important to know what caused them (both the laughter and the consequent capsizing). Nagg’s insistence that it was his story that made her laugh uncontrollably is nothing less than claiming, in the ultimate instance, that it was he who caused the capsizing of the boat. That he was the god of the lake, and not she. But to assert such a privileged claim is not merely about the interpretation of the past; it also serves as an attempt to neutralize the effects of futility within the dramatized present. The contrast between movement and mobility in both the Lake Como and the tailor accounts and their own current condition of incarceration inside the dustbins is significant in that respect. As we have noted, it is the process of recalling the past into the present that revivifies the present and enables contesting claims to be made about both past and present. Thus, the process of recalling the past is at the same time a process of animating what is potentially sterile and inert, that is, dead and only enlivened in memory. On this reading, the story of the tailor is also open to contradictory interpretations. Is it merely the story of an incompetent tailor and an equally gullible customer filled with sexual innuendoes, or is it, as Nagg implies at the end, a parable about God’s own fallibility in creating an imperfect world? Again, what appears sterile is subject to multiple interpretations; the failure of triggering an expected response (laughter) then marks the necessity for interpretation. Is it a funny or sad tale? Is it tragic (if viewed from a theological standpoint) or merely sexual (if viewed from the various references to different parts of the trousers)? Or is it, in the final analysis, just an instance of a bad joke, and in that case revealing the overaggrandized sense of the ego of its teller? Or is it all of these at once?

In the case of Hamm and Clov, their relationship contrasts sharply with Nagg and Nell’s, for whereas Clov is highly mobile and Hamm is not, it is Hamm who controls the narrativization of the past and constantly attempts to return to it in accounting for both past and present. Unlike the case of Nagg and Nell, Clov does not seem to have any clearly shared past from which to challenge Hamm. In their case, mobility and immobility are themselves obverse displacements of the impulse to narrate (countering the immobility of the present) and the fixedness of the position of listener or addressee (canceling out the capacity for action and mobility in the present). The sterility of Hamm’s past derives from a different source from that of Nagg and Nell’s. In his case, the sterility comes from the fact that he is alone in having access to that past but does not interrogate himself in retelling it. Unlike what we saw with regard to Molloy’s narrative of his past, Hamm’s is what might be termed a monological accounting, only partially open to skepticism in the process of the telling. Apart from one instance where Clov refers to some passing kindness that Hamm had shown him in the past, Hamm is almost utterly alone in that past and is the only one who has access to it. It is perhaps this aloneness in the past that makes him so insistent on constituting the other characters as his captive listeners, almost as if to relieve the loneliness of that past by the dialogical contexts of the present.

As a character, Hamm thrives on imagining himself as having the power of dispensing life and death, something that is obviously undermined by his impairments. In all his relationships he attempts to replicate this impossible ideal: keeping the combination to the larder, rationing biscuits for Nagg and Nell, telling the story of the supplicating man begging him for bread for his son. The supplicating man within his story is discursively replicated on stage by the three-legged dog:

Note that in the final analysis, Hamm’s questions about the dog taper off from straightforward questions to a statement disguised as a question—“Or as if he were begging me for a bone”—suggesting his attempt to annul doubt as to the supplicatory pose of the dog even while entertaining a degree of uncertainty about this (after all, he cannot actually see the dog). Significantly, since Clov lies to Hamm when asked whether the dog is standing, Hamm’s surge of self-aggrandizement is immediately placed on chimerical foundations. He is the victim of an illusion of grandeur, pitiable in that he takes it completely seriously. Boulter is right to focus his analysis of the efficacy of the acts of narration predominantly on Hamm, for it is clear that Hamm tries to occupy various narratorial and subject positions over the course of the action. He adopts several “voices” that can be labeled formulaically as Prophetic, Narratorial, Hectoring, and, at the very end, Acting, almost as if self-conscious of his role as an Actor and Playwright on stage. The suggestion here is that Hamm is rapidly taking on and discarding various identities. It is this that his literary hyperconsciousness points to; the fact, as he puts it, that he is “warming up for his soliloquy” (130).

Of the many implied dialectical relationships suggested between Hamm and Clov that we may note, such as Master/Slave, Invalid/Caregiver, and so on, the most significant with respect to the different claims to agency inherent in the dialectic is that within the Prospero/Caliban-Ariel pairing. Clov himself retorts to Hamm, Caliban-like, about the efficacy of the language he has been taught by Hamm to speak:

Hamm-as-Prospero is directly referenced when he states cryptically, after Nagg’s lament on fatherhood, “Our revels now are ended,” and, groping blindly for the dog, initiates a new trajectory for the dialogue with a plaintive complaint: “The dog’s gone” (120). The echo from The Tempest is to IV.i.148, but the significance of this echo lies not so much in what it allows us to see about the Master/Slave relationship between Hamm-Prospero and Clov-Caliban/Ariel as in the desire to control the narrativization of the past. In the many bad-tempered exchanges between Prospero and Caliban, on the one hand, and Prospero and Ariel, on the other, what is repeated without fail is Prospero’s absolute claim to an interpretation of the past. Like Prospero, Hamm’s impulse to narrate is similarly a will to power. In Hamm’s case, even though the will to power remains intact throughout the play, the nature of his dependency on Clov makes it such that he is always undermined in his desire for power and authority. The dependency is no idle one; it gains the force of Necessity (Fate, almost) in that he is ontologically validated at various levels by the presence of Clov. This validation is even true of his role as Narrator:

But “the dialogue” ends up being a metonymic displacement of the interdependent relationship between the speaker and his addressee/interlocutor, establishing, as we saw in the case of Molloy, a skeptical interlocutor that incites narration. Hamm reluctantly implies the question of the necessary interlocutor as part of his own efforts at stemming the tide of self-effacement. In a rare soliloquy when he is briefly alone on stage, he says: “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” (126). As we saw earlier, the structure of interlocution in Endgame is assimilated to certain dialectical oppositions. It could be said, however, that supervening all these oppositions and providing them their ontological ground is that of Speaker and Interlocutor. The Speaker/Interlocutor dialectical binary is different from all other ones within the series that define the complex relationship between Hamm and Clov because it is also foundationally the engine of dramatic action as such. When in the sixth century b.c. Thespis decided to alter the structure of the dithyramb by introducing a speaker to interact with the singers, the structure of interlocution was born for Greek drama and for all subsequent dramatic forms. What Beckett does with what is constitutive to drama is to elevate this aspect of dramatic structure into the status of an ontological necessity. The force of that elevation lies in the fact that its effacement is always being threatened by Clov’s constantly reiterated but frequently deferred decision to leave. His departure would coincide not just with the threatened death of Hamm, but, concomitantly, with the death of the essence of dramatic action as such. For Hamm, the situation is desperate, because Clov is his primary and only caregiver. Being disabled, he requires Clov to keep him alive, literally. His persistent reversions to a narratorial mode, then, can be read as his attempt to maintain the necessary interest of Clov, both so as to allow him to renarrativize his agential positions in the past and also to keep Clov fixed in the function of Caregiver/Interlocutor, both of which are mutually defining and central to the relationship between the two characters.

So far, we have been exploring Endgame at what, following Gerard Genette (1982), we might describe as an “intradiegetic” level, that is, at the level of events inside of the drama itself. However, it is also possible to view the action on stage as balanced carefully between contrasting, if not contradictory, diegetic domains, both internal and external. We have already noted the degree to which the play encourages an allegorical reading while scrupulously undermining it. The relationship between past and present is also part of these intervolved diegetic domains. The intervolved diegeses depend for their effect on a layering of contrastive foregrounds and backgrounds. At the most immediate level is the foreground of the sparse stage against an external background of what has been interpreted by Adorno and others as one of post-Holocaust desolation. This nexus of foreground and background leads to the problematization of the status of the represented disabilities on stage, the genesis of the characters’ impairments never being clarified satisfactorily for us. Even Nagg and Nell’s accident on their tandem bike is not directly related to their present condition as occupants of the bins. (How did they get from their accident to this particular condition, one wonders?) Nor do we get any clear sense of how Hamm became blind and wheelchair bound. From what he darkly prophesizes to Clov—“One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down.… But you won’t get up”—it is almost as if to suggest that, from his own experience, such impairments descend upon one without warning. The connection between past events and the characters’ present condition of impairment is left at the level of an inference rather than stated directly. At the same time, there is a split between the foreground of the action (the characters and their attempts to make sense of their lives) and the reported desolate background off-stage. Thus the environmental background, which we are of course only allowed to “see” through the reports of Clov, insinuates a grand cause for the various impairments we see before us. For how could it be otherwise in a post-Holocaust world? In this way, the foreground of disabilities is connected to a background of world-historical processes, thus enjoining us to read the impairments in their own materiality as well as in the degree of their representativeness as residual but no less tragic effects of a world-historical event. In that sense, the diegesis on stage is part of a larger narrative. Through the device of splitting—that is, a foreground of impairments and maiming without clear causes suggestively but not explicitly tied to a background of post-Holocaust desolation that enacts the grand cause of all impairments and disabilities—Beckett helps to both raise the ethical dimension and to render it nonfoundational as a vector for interpretation. In Endgame, the grand cause suggested by a post-Holocaust world of desolation is itself impaired as a representational and causal template for the various disabilities on stage, since we can only speculate as to its relationship to the foreground of the action. Since the etiology of impairments displayed in the dramatized action is never given to us, and the relationship between foreground and background is only left as an inference, the effect is to fragment the background and force it to be a metaphorical effect rather than a cause of what is displayed before us. In other words, it is almost as if it is the characters that produce and are accountable for the background of desolation, rather than vice versa. This is sharply different from what we see in, say, Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, where Kattrin’s disability is directly interpreted as connected to the Thirty Years War, various aspects of which are dramatized on stage for us. Or indeed in Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists, in which, as we shall see in chapter 5, the Biafran War is taken to be fully responsible for the wretched lives of the disabled mendicants on stage.

As we have already noted, the relationship between Hamm and Clov is a contradictory one. Hamm obviously cannot survive without Clov and yet he also seems to detest his dependence on him. His heartlessness toward Clov is partly an admission of his own frailty. At another level, the interdependency of these two is a sign of the radical contingency that governs the entire play. One significant feature of the relationship between Hamm and Clov, and one which leads us further into the discussion of intra- and extradiegetic domains, is that on the whole Hamm addresses Clov by way of a stream of imperatives. At one point, Clov complains about this, “Do this, do that, and I do it. I never refuse. Why?” (113) and, much later, “There is one thing I’ll never understand. Why I always obey you. Can you explain that to me?” (129). Following the point we made earlier about the dialectic of interlocution, the stream of imperatives might also be interpreted as Hamm’s attempt to convert Clov into a specific function within the action. In other words, it is not just that Hamm is conscious of having a role to play as an Actor warming up for his soliloquy, but that he also wants to exercise the power to assign Clov a role to play. This attempt at assigning a dramatic function to his interlocutor, which emerges directly out of the structure of imperatives, then suggests that one of Hamm’s functions is to transcend that of Actor and to enter into that of Playwright or Director. Commentators have noted that the name Hamm recalls Hamlet, and, as we know, Shakespeare’s character was a pristine Actor as well as Director-of-Action, at least in his instigation of the Mousetrap play to catch the conscience of Claudius. Hamm’s impulses also accord with those of Prospero as a director of the actions of others, something that inspires Peter Greenaway’s interpretation of the character’s role in the film Prospero’s Books (1991), where Prospero generates the entire action of the film along with all the character articulations through the force of his imagination. Hamm’s role as both Player and Playwright helps explain his “directorial” exclamations regarding the placing of the three-legged dog as well as his many directorial intrusions on Nagg’s stories. We also get a flavor of this dual function in his self-conscious corrections of his own voice during the story he tells of the supplicating man. If, however, we push the matter even further and take Hamm’s directorial dimension as deriving directly from the structure of imperatives by which he addresses other people in the action, then it forces us to reinterpret his soliloquy at the end of the play. For at his final soliloquy, several actantial roles are activated that serve to suggest a shifting boundary between different diegetic levels.

At the most basic level, Hamm’s final soliloquy is the delivery of the promise he has regularly made in the course of the play. It also highlights the self-conscious quality of many of the lines of dialogue he has initiated earlier, often prefixing these with the statement “Me to play.” The curious thing about this final soliloquy is that it is itself filled with explicit commands directed at himself: “Discard; raise hat; and put on again; wipe; and put on again; now cry in darkness; speak no more; you… remain” (133). Each imperative is followed by a direct response to the command to perform a particular action. These are interspersed with the adoption of multiple subject positions: “It was the moment I was waiting for. [Pause.] You don’t want to abandon him? You want him to bloom while you are withering? Be there to solace your last million last moments? [Pause.] He doesn’t realize, all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all. But you! You ought to know what the earth is like, nowadays. Oh, but I put him before his responsibilities [Pause. Normal voice]” (133). By this point, it is not clear whether Hamm is still addressing Clov, who has put on his coat preparatory to leaving but is still on stage watching him, or whether Hamm is even conscious of Clov’s presence on stage, even though the early part of the soliloquy was a direct appeal, couched as a command, for Clov to cover him up with the sheet. In terms of the adoption of multiple voices, this part of Hamm’s soliloquy echoes his story about the man who comes to beg for bread for his sick son. In his recounting of that story, Hamm goes through a spectrum of voices, attempting to replicate the man, himself in the past, as well as adopting a critical tone regarding his manner of telling the story. The same multiplicity occurs in his final soliloquy. The point to note, however, is that if in the final soliloquy he is giving instructions to himself as to how to act, his instructions directly subtend the stream of imperatives by which he has conventionally addressed Clov. In that way, his instructions to himself invoke the extradiegetic level of Director or Playwright. We might even venture to say that at this point Hamm is Beckett himself at one remove, ghosted, as it were, by the self-consciousness of his own creation. And yet, at another level, we cannot escape the impression that the self-referential directorial commands are no more than an extension of the imperatives by which Hamm has hitherto attempted to regulate relationships within the intradiegetic domain of the dramatic action itself. What we see then is that in his final soliloquy Hamm is at multidiegetic interstices of the text. This suggests a volatile proximity between inside and outside, detail and allegory, and performance and reality that has governed the play throughout. In this, his farewell, Hamm surreptitiously echoes Prospero again, because, like him, his parting is that of acknowledging the role of Playwright, something that has led Shakespearean scholars to suggest that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s farewell to his dramatic craft. Thus, in bidding farewell, all the roles accorded Hamm are intensified and brought together within the single gesture, that gesture itself serving to collapse various boundaries that have been evident within the play and have governed the play thus far. If, as I have suggested here, Hamm’s final soliloquy helps to collapse those boundaries and binary oppositions, it also produces a mode of transcendence for the disabled character. We are never allowed to forget his disability; the bloodstained handkerchief he uses to cover his face at the end will ensure this, since it takes us back to the opening sequences and the semireligious declaration of “It is finished” we noted earlier. Yet, the rapid oscillation the soliloquy defines among various vectors of performative identity then ensures that Hamm is not limitable to any single one of them, rather eluding them all to suggest the transcendent logic of an intensified consciousness.

As we noted at the start of this chapter, critics have managed to anaesthetize the disabled body in Beckett by assimilating it much too rapidly to abstract philosophical categories. We must now address this problem, and the answer lies in something that seems worryingly absent in the body of Beckett’s work itself. This is the status of pain as a mode of intersubjective recognition and identity. This is not to say that Beckett’s characters do not mention or indeed feel pain. They often do. Clov states at one point that the pain in his legs is unbelievable and that it threatens to stop him from thinking (115). Hamm’s persistent requests to have his painkillers can be interpreted as his attempt to forestall pain. In fact, Hamm asks for his painkillers six times over the course of the action, and in each instance Clov puts him off with a different excuse, until the sixth and final time, when he tells him the painkillers have run out. To which Hamm uncharacteristically loses control:

In The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry suggests that one of the complex things about pain is that it produces epistemological certainty for the pain sufferer but the possibility of doubt for the nonsufferer. The bearer of pain cannot not be in certainty about his or her own pain, whereas the one not in pain may entertain some doubt about the veracity or intensity of what the bearer of the pain claims to be feeling. This conundrum recalls Adriana’s words to Luciana in The Comedy of Errors:

It is, however, to her remarks on the difficulty of epistemological verification of pain by the nonsufferer that we need to turn. For therein arises the implied question of witnessing. The pain sufferer feels his or her knowledge of the truth of pain somewhat validated by the recognition bestowed upon them by the witness to that pain. The shift from a nonsufferer of pain to that of a witness to pain is fundamentally one of empathetic repositioning. Empathy is to be seen not only in interpersonal relations; it is also evidenced in entire public apparatuses of witnessing, such as the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. The witness is one who acknowledges, empathizes, and attempts to alleviate the physical suffering of another, be this through compassion, medicine, or through shared public rituals of acknowledgement, such as those of the TRC. In the particular case of the TRC, the alleviation of pain is tied to the pursuit of forms of restorative justice, something that is central to the process of identity formation in postapartheid South Africa. The point about witnessing to pain is that certainty is epistemologically recuperated for the beholder through the process of witnessing, thus reassuring the sufferer that their pain is not a figment of their imagination but is real in whatever problematic sense this is defined between the sufferer and the witness, or indeed culturally and politically. In other words, witnessing to pain helps to reframe its character by providing it with a different structure of interlocution within which it might be expressed and acknowledged.

In Endgame, and indeed in much of Beckett’s work, what we find is that even though the characters do mention pain from time to time, pain is not part of the overall structure of interlocution within which it would gain coherence as a phenomenological fact linked directly to disability. Beckett’s characters may be alienated from their bodies (Malone and his reflections on his useless limbs, for example), but they rarely reflect on pain as such. This is true of both Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot, as much as it is for people in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in Murphy, many of whom have to be watched carefully so that they don’t attempt to commit suicide. Waiting for Godot gives pain a particularly shifting status between the first and second acts. In the first act, Vladimir often has to rush out to urinate, and his urinating pains are frequently referred to. Indeed he walks on stage with his legs spread wide apart to protect his painful penis from further soreness. However, something strange happens in the second act. Vladimir is desperate for certainty about what happened “yesterday.” No one appears to be certain about anything that took place the day before except for him. Vladimir keeps trying to jog the memory of the other characters about the previous day’s events. On his part, Estragon seems to have forgotten everything that transpired; the only thing that registers residually about the events of the previous day in his mind is the pain on his shin where he was violently kicked by Lucky. Fundamental to Estragon’s characterization are his keen efforts to avoid pain. He has an almost paranoid fear of being beaten up at night. Significantly, it is Vladimir who reminds Estragon of his being kicked by Lucky, thus jogging his memory momentarily. The only memory that allows Estragon to connect residually to the “yesterday” of the first act is the pain that he remembers from being kicked by Lucky. Seeing that Estragon is alive to pain (at least his own), it is then strange that the only detail Vladimir does not recall in trying to moor his sense of yesterday for himself and Estragon is his urinating pains. It is almost as if in the second act there is an annulment of pain, the only thing that might have instituted a link between yesterday and today. By this annulment, then, yesterday ceases to exist because the characters are allowed to “forget” the only thing that would have provided epistemological certainty about that yesterday, namely pain. This is part of the process that helps to define the dramatic action as an allegory of existential meaninglessness and randomization of identity.

In Endgame, on the other hand, even though Hamm is obviously in pain, two factors serve to blur the reality of this in the play. The first, as we have seen, is that Clov does not seem to recognize it, rather behaving in an uncharacteristically sadistic manner in the way in which he announces that the painkillers are finished and in the speed with which he shifts from the issue of painkillers to moving about the room to find a place to put the alarm clock. In that way, Clov suggests that whatever pain the painkillers were meant to alleviate is not as significant as the immediacy of his concern to be relieved of the burden of carrying the alarm clock around the room. Clov does not pause to bear witness to Hamm’s pain. In this, Clov is only replicating the lack of empathy that has been shown him by Hamm when it was his turn to complain about the bitter pain in his legs.

What is even more curious, however, is the speed with which Hamm himself moves away from worrying about pain on being told about the painkillers. He shifts from a primal scream of frustration and pain to asking Clov to look out the window with his telescope in the space of barely three lines, never again to refer either to the painkillers or indeed to his pain for the rest of the play. What happens here is that like every thematic referent that has appeared over the course of the play, pain itself has become a nondescript part of an array of constitutive digressions. There is no privilege given to it whatsoever. But if pain is allowed to become equivalent with the many things that have fleetingly emerged across the relationship between the two men, then might it not be said also that their impairments are themselves only part of the textual apparatus of constant negation and deferral and nothing more? To put it more bluntly, if discomfort and pain are not recognized as pertinent either to their disabled and constrained condition or to the structure of interlocution between them, then to what degree might it be said that their impairments are themselves merely a cipher of the condition of frailty as opposed to the referent of real suffering as such?

A similar problem is pertinent to the status of pain in Molloy. For in Molloy, even though the eponymous protagonist is clearly in pain, pain does not enter into the structure of doubt within which every category he invokes is tested as to its truth claim. In Molloy also we are led to suspect that Molloy’s disability is a philosophical abstraction or cipher about the frailty of the aging body, rather than referring to the phenomenological body as such. Our doubts become more pronounced at the point where he describes riding his bicycle:

Even here we see the structure of skeptical interlocution we noted earlier (no certainty about which leg it was he propped; not sure whether a chainless bicycle did indeed exist or not). But what is of interest is the patent impossibility of riding a bicycle (any bicycle) with crutches tied to the crossbar and with a stiff leg propped up anywhere on the bicycle (never mind the projecting front axle). For one thing, there would be serious problems with steering the bicycle, and, for another, it would be almost impossible to maintain one’s balance with one foot off the pedal and propped up somewhere else (anywhere else) on the contraption.¹³ We might take the benign view that this is just an instance of Molloy’s mental confusion, or that Beckett did not properly visualize the scene before writing it, which is more what I am inclined to believe. Or that Molloy, despite the many descriptions of his impairments and disabilities, was not “disabled” at all. His physical disabilities are not determinant factors of his identity and can thus be set aside quickly once they are mentioned. Like Clov and Hamm, Molloy’s impairments are ciphers of the frailty of the human condition and not to be read as markers of any real disability as such.

The absence of a structure of interlocution for addressing pain in Beckett is what allows his drama in particular to reside uneasily between tragedy and comedy. The dianoetic laughter that often attends plays such as Endgame is possible because the characters’ suffering is not physical or even indeed emotional. They are not perceived to be in pain in any physical sense of the word. In the Albery Theatre production of Endgame, Clov was cast not only as one with difficulties in walking but also as a person with a cognitive disability. Throughout the play, his hands were held in a half-folded way, and he walked around the stage with his back partially bent and with facial gestures suggesting a cognitive disorder. This immediately puts a new inflection on his many moments of forgetfulness in the play. In my view, however, what was most interesting about Clov’s portrayal was that when he first enters, and before he even opens his mouth for the first time, people in the audience break into long laughter. To them, it seems, this is vintage clowning. But looking at the play from a perspective of disability studies, it becomes very difficult not to feel some degree of uneasiness at the response to such a touching portrayal of cognitive disability. Perhaps it was my response that was the wrong one, I thought for a moment, since the entire production history of Endgame does not seem to have prepared for the response that I was bringing to bear on the performance. This was borne out by the many rave reviews about the performance that appeared in its immediate aftermath. Not one noted the implications of Clov’s casting for thinking about cognitive impairments.

But how does a focus on pain help us to reinterpret Beckett? It is the “absenting” of pain in his writing, in part, that serves to place the many impaired bodies in his work on the boundary between comedy and tragedy. For because pain is not a central part of their characterization, the phenomenological specificity of their impairments gets blurred and thus easily assimilable to philosophical categories. Since pain is the one thing that is not submitted to the dominant aesthetic and structural dispositions of his texts, they mark both an external element, an element properly outside of the structure of representation, and a definitive and constitutive element of the inside of those structures. It is precisely because the pain does not feature properly either in the minds of the characters or in the relationships between them that it is possible to read the characters off as philosophical ciphers. In other words, the lacuna produced by the discursive absence of pain is what has allowed Beckett’s characters to historically not be considered as disabled. It is this absence in itself that helps us to understand the peculiar aesthetic nervousness of Beckett’s representation of disability. Disability in Beckett is represented predominantly via the mode of hermeneutical conundrum, not so much so as to raise doubt about what it might mean, but so that the entire apparatus of representation is riddled with gaps and aporia. The primary effect of evacuating the facticity of disability is that its significance then serves to permeate the entire representational nexus while being simultaneously absented from that nexus as a precise site for interpretation. Yet to read Beckett through a framework of disability is to have to forcibly intervene in the signifying chain that allows disability to be so easily assimilated to philosophical categories. Indeed, this would be the central task of a criticism informed by a consciousness of disability studies and its place in the critique of the overall schema of aesthetic representation. As Aldo Tagliaferri (1985, 249–250) puts it:

It is the central terms of Tagliaferri’s account that we have to rely upon to gradually bring to the surface the nature of the aesthetic nervousness that attends the disabled characters in Beckett. For once we take these aporia and lacunae not as transpositions of a philosophical template but as generated by the ambivalent presentation of the disabled characters, we find that our reading of his work is much enriched, and, more significantly, can be used to illuminate a general problem for the aesthetic domain that we see manifested repeatedly in various representations of disability. Since the complicated and multifaceted structures of Beckett’s texts resist any assumptions of mimesis, we are bound to ask whether we can ultimately claim him for disability studies. The elusive status of impairment in his work makes no straightforward answer available. And yet I take a cue from Tagliaferri’s “commitment to continue” in attempting to open up ways by which pain and the impaired body in Beckett are accounted for as a crucial step toward understanding his complex and elusive literary universe.