End of Body, End of Being? The Phenomenology of Nagg and Nell in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame Beckett’s Endgame
This paper offers offers an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame play Endgame (1957) (1957) with the main focus on the characters of Nagg and Nell. Their impact on the audience is the starting point for a reading of Endgame of Endgame with with a phenomenological focus. Theodor Adorno’s “Trying to Understand Endgam Understand Endgame” e” (1961) and Martin Heidegger’s “ Being and Time” Time” (1927) are two of the main sources that this analysis relies on. Whereas Adorno offers a lucid and dense close reading of the text that also draws in socio-philosophical aspects, Heidegger’s ground breaking work predates Beckett’s play and is seen as a possible reference point for an understanding of how “Being” is presented both visually and through language in the play. The challenge of reading and understanding Beckett and offering any form of interpretation is discussed in the opening paragraphs, drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach and on on Adorno’s reading of Beckett. A passage on Endgame on Endgame follows that concentrates on the many signifiers of the text, starting with the world-view seemingly displayed in the play. Following on from this, the stage characters of Nagg and Nell are analysed through their visual and verbal appearance together with a focus on echoing, pairing and cycles. It is argued that Nagg and Nell may be seen less as characters and more as a phenomenon. This phenomenon, identified as deeply disturbing to the audience, leads to a contemplation on the thoughts on “Being” and in Heidegger’s philosophy. In the conclusion, Endgame is analysed as a drama depicting the human condition as one of confinement in both state of mind and interpersonal relationship in a non-specific dystopian scenario of self-destruction. Nagg and Nell are seen as a reification of a reduced
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existence devoid of meaning that indirectly quotes and disputes Heidegger’s views on “Being”.
When a writer through a number of texts subverts, abandons and mangles traditional concepts of storytelling and textual constructs along with descriptions of character, setting and dialogue it is fatal to apply traditional analytical readings to such texts because the critic runs the risk of the text- or his reading of it - ridiculing him or her into a non-connection. Such an approach might turn into an advanced comparison of apples to pears and leave very little connection between text and reader. On the other hand, if this thought thought is applied to the extreme, that there is no right way of approaching texts that abandon traditional pointers such as plot, symbols and character development, one might end up not analyzing such texts at all, but taking their defamiliarization at face value without reaching an interpretation. Beckett makes the basic communication between message and receiver, the decoding, very difficult and any attempt at analysis of Beckett’s writing will meet a lot of resistance from the text itself. However difficult, the task of analysing Endgame analysing Endgame is is a rewarding one due to the play’s complexity, the questions it raises and the emotional impact is has on the audience or reader. Wolfgang Iser speaks of an essential hermeneutic process in the formation of meaning through illusion that is especially true of modern texts. We need the illusion, he says, “that the resistance itself is the consistent pattern underlying the text” (Iser 290). The text provokes certain expectations which in turn we project unto the text in such a way that we reduce the polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation in keeping with the expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning” (ibid.) The reader has a strong need to make sense of the text. This constructive tendency, however, is constantly dismantled by Beckett, through visual aspects of the play and especially through his use of language.
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In a letter written in 1937 to his German friend Axel Kaun, Beckett describes his approach to language and his hope that literature will undergo as radical a transformation as modern art and music: It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most sufficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer. (Beckett 1937, Letters 518)
This rather long quote will be frequently referred back to, as it contains several aspects relevant to Endgame. The first of these to be mentioned is the challenge of reading a play that has drilled a lot of holes into the conventional fabric of the language and style of plays. What “seeps through” the holes in Endgame is the debris of civilization in both language and content. Language seems to fail the speakers, relationships are dysfunctional, the past is seen through irrelevant nostalgia, the present is presented as a prison of repetition and unsolved agitation. Whether there is such a thing as future at all is highly uncertain. The question arises whether it is even possible to apply conventional literary analysis to a text that seems to defy the very reason for the existence of any theoretical framework? Beckett’s writing can be seen as subversive as it does not offer alternative views or theses, but displays fallacies and effectively erodes the very basis of thinking in theoretical patterns and models in the analytical process. Theodor Adorno sees the only possible approach to an understanding of Endgame as a fundamental understanding of its incomprehensibility or 1
“concretely recunstructing its meaning structure – that it has none” . There is a paradox in the
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fact that interpretation is derived at after all, the meaning that so to speak seeps through the holes drilled. Though the frustration lies in never knowing exactly whether this arrived at meaning is not a play with the process of sense-making as such. A brief reference to meaning illustrates this point. Hamm and Clov in a metatextual comment use mock horror as a way of ridiculing the process of seeking for meaning: HAMM. CLOV:
We’re not beginning to…to…mean something? Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh] Ah that’s a good one! (CDW1082)
A phenomenological approach to reading Endgame will soon highlight the process of reading what Iser calls the “gaps” in modern texts that are often so fragmentary that one’s attention is almost exclusively occupied with the search of connections between these fragments; the object of this is not to complicate the “spectrum” of connections, so much as to make us aware of the nature of our own capacity for providing links. (Iser 285)
Reading Beckett, one frequently has the uncanny feeling of the text laughing at the reader who engages in gap-filling and connection-seeking, the very process of interpretation being the punch line of the joke that the reader is the brunt of. The phenomenological approach applied here may seem somewhat eclectic, as it draws both on Iser’s use of the word and on Heidegger’s philosophy. The nature of phenomenology as such however, of putting the phenomenon at the centre of an analysis conducted with an open mind, seems to be an appropriate way of reading Beckett, as it does not claim to speak for the writer, to reach a full understanding of the intended meaning, as it were, but rather investigates how the text affects the reader/audience and of what is the fundamental nature of the phenomenon purveyed.
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While this seems an essentially necessary approach, the focus on finding answers should perhaps in some cases step aside for a focus on identifying the question or pinpointing the provocation of thought. Identifying these may in some cases be as close as we can get to an interpretation. Nagg and Nell are good examples of this. We are continuously both repulsed and drawn to them by feelings of watching their grotesque distortedness and simultaneously experiencing recognition and empathy. The phenomenon is as much the strangeness of the characters and their place in the constellation of the dramatis personae, as it is the reaction that watching (or reading) them creates. One could go a step further and say that the analysis of Nagg and Nell sooner or later becomes an analysis of the recognition, repulsion and attraction that exists between the dramatis personae on-stage and the audience off-stage. The echoing that takes place on the stage between the characters is mirrored in a perhaps more vague but equally persistent echoing between the stage characters and the audience. The audience recognizes and despises at the same time and is therefore having an unsettling and essentially uncanny experience, that of alienation diffused with glimpses of the well known. There are many examples of echoes: verbal ones, like the repetition of the word ”once” by Nell and Clov, conceptual ones like the constant reference to ”end” and “finish” in one or another form, visual ones like the circles of the bins echoed in the reference to bicycle wheels, and intertextual echoes from Beckett’s other writing or texts such as the Bible, by Goethe or by Shakespeare. Sjef Houppermans and Marius Buning describe the intertextuality in Beckett as follows: Between Beckett's text and the textual zones around it the border is essentially transparent: Beckett's language is above all an instrument to dissect all forms of discourse and to examine their inevitable emphasis on man (...) Criticism here is selfreflexive and imitates Beckett's work in various ways. Beckett's work itself never stops measuring its own identity against other texts, both historical and contemporary. (Houppermans and Buning, ix )
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Thus identifying the intertextual references is not a straightforward task. They too seem to seep through the holes drilled into language. Adorno, for example, sees an unintentional reference to Goethe’s “Das alte Wahre, faß es an! “ 3 in this dialogue: HAMM: Do you remember your father. CLOV: [wearily] Same answer. [ Pause] You’ve asked me these questions millions of times. Hamm: I love the old questions. [With fervour ] Ah the old questions, the 4 old answers, there is nothing like them.
According to Adorno 5, Beckett’s lines “pull a face at” Goethe’s depiction of eternal verities that “degenerated into an arch-bourgeois sentiment”. Beckett, he continues “shrugs his shoulders about the possibility of philosophy today, or theory in general” (ibid). Applying a theoretical approach to Beckett’s texts in general is a precarious operation. The very phrases used by Adorno seem very fitting: to shrug and to pull a face are means of ridiculing, of not answering on the same-abstract-philosophical level. This “Fratzenschneiden” is always potentially also directed at the reader or audience. These intertextual and intercultural references are contained in the many examples of echoing in the play. “The play’s dialogue is built on what Beckett later called the “echo principle”. Repetition is thematic in Fin de partie: The old questions and the old answers keep repeating themselves unto death, or at least unto dying. (Cohn 142)
Like an echo, the references are often faint, random allusions or even involuntary and seem only half understood or misunderstood by the protagonists. Hamm’s reference to Richard III in the line “My kingdom for a nightman” (CDW 127) mocks the kingdom and his king-dom, it also mocks the meaning of knight/night through the use of the homophone. Does Hamm wish for something more knightly or indeed for a man who empties privies? Is he deluded to believe himself on a level with a king or is it a remarkably self-deprecating joke. An
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von “Vermächtnis” http://meister.igl.uni-freiburg.de/gedichte/goe_jw09.html. Official translations are somewhat liberal as they use the poetic form. The line could be loosely translated as: “the old verities, grasp them “. 4 CDW, p. 110/ Beckett 1981, 38:31 5 Adorno 1982 p. 121
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intercultural reference to this can be found in the central position of Hamm in this play as a comment on the traditions of world-view. Man has re-gained, it seems, his central preCopernican position in the universe. He has reverted to a pseudo-Ptolemaic world order, in Adorno’s words a “ phantom of the anthropocentrically dominated world”, 6 where everything revolves around him. The unbearable irony lies in the fact that this centre stage position is all there is. Hamm might be king of the universe, but this has shrunk to the size of a stage and he is no longer the ruler of Nature, as he has destroyed it. 7 Jonathan Boulter calls this critique of the idea that the human is in the centre of understanding “Posthumanism”, defined as: that strand of philosophy which radically critiques the idea that the individual subject is the center of all things, the beginning and the end of all knowledge and experience: this is therefore a radical critique of Humanist philosophy which would posit the human’s reason and rationality as being transparently available to the thinking subject (Boulter 14)
Beckett might not have liked to be classified with philosophers of any school, but Boulter’s point is that there are traces of what Posthuman philosophy focuses on in Beckett’s writing8. Also, the reduction of the human body is linked to the fundamental awareness of the limits of the human. The magnitude of the destruction in Endgame is displayed by the inability to name it, the “violence of the unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to mention it” (Adorno 1981, 123). Strangely, in this pathetic depiction of man unable to voice the effects of destruction he has brought about himself, there is a potential connection to the reader, a recognition of weakness and fallacy. It is, however brought to an extreme in the concept of the endless end,
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Adorno 1982, p. 148 Der im Stück gegebene Zustand aber ist kein anderer als der, in dem es »keine Natur mehr gibt«4. Ununterscheidbar die Phase der vollendeten Verdinglichung der Welt, die nichts mehr übrig läßt, was nicht von Menschen gemacht wäre, die permanente Katastrophe, und ein zusätzlich von Menschen eigens bewirkter Katastrophenvorgang, in dem Natur getilgt ward und nach dem nichts mehr wächst: Adorno 1961, GS 11, p. 285-286) 8 Boulter mentions Nietzsche, Freud and Marx 7
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the display of imprisonment: “Ontology arrives home as the pathogenesis of false life. It is depicted as the state of negative eternity.” (Adorno 1982, 124). There is another intertextual reference, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Visible in the name Hamm, the connection, according to Adorno, is a double turning upside down of “to be or not to be “ into “Krepieren oder Krepieren, das ist hier die Frage.
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There is no “or not to” as it is
a matter of dying or dying, not of “being or not being”. Also, the troubled hero of Shakespeare’s play in the famous soliloquies voices his on-going struggles with awareness and achieving insight, whereas Hamm’s monologues display distraction and fragmentation, there is no increase in awareness or depth of perception. Perception as such seems unattainable, even though it was once achieved it is beyond meaning and relevance in this world: The name Hamm also holds associations to one of Noah’s sons and to a hammy actor, 10
as Adorno and Cohn point out. It certainly underlines the dominance of his character over the others through its laden-ness with meaning. Compared to the other protagonists, Hamm seems the least human. The particular sadism he exudes is one of deliberate slowness When Hamm tells his story11, again, it is unbearable to watch or listen to as it is a deliberate display of power over the people on stage and the audience, we cannot escape his perverted sadistic self-mythologizing.12 The irrelevance of bourgeois pretences, the “Biedermeyer bathing suits” mentioned in the Kaun letter seem to have been literally turned into their opposites in Endgame. At first glance, nothing seems further removed from the concept of a gentleman than the characters of Hamm, Clov and Nagg to a point where they may be seen as a set of opposites, as antigentlemen. Yet, through the their outer uncouth appearances leftovers of genteel civilization 9
Adorno 1961: GS 11, p. 312 Cohn 1973, 144 ff. 11 CDW, p. 116 12 Adorno 1961:Das Bedächtige, das so unschuldig aussieht, ist Figur des Sadismus: das Bild dessen, der sich Zeit nimmt, gleicht dem, der auf gräßliche Strafe warten läßt. GS 11, p. 295 10
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seep through, like Hamm’s use of language taken from Shakespeare or the Bible or Nagg’s reminiscing of happier, pre-stubbed days. Often these are misunderstood or perverted, digested and spat out, yet not in a way that suggests that the protagonist have received any insight or wisdom from them. Sometimes the concept itself is being made fun of. An example of this is the use of being “obliged” (CDW 132), Hamm and Clov nearly fight over who is more obliged to the other just before Clov’s intended departure. Obligation as a polite recognition of indebtedness or gratitude on a small scale becomes a fight over who has had most power and inflicted most pain over the other. Endgame in that way seems to be a play that holds up a mirror to bourgeois society and reveals its ugly unseemly sides kept under the surface and ignored. Beckett famously described Hamm in Endgame as “a king in this chess game lost from the start” (Cohn 1973, 152). In the analogy of the chess game, Nagg and Nell- according to Nic van der Toorn- call to mind two pawns, blocked and therefore useless , but 13
unmovable . The chess game is the obvious analogy, given the title. However, it is only one possible way of viewing what goes on on stage and what the close confinement of the stage is a picture of. The stage could be seen as a frame of mind- even a skull - with Nagg and Nell as two peripheral embodiments of bad conscience, bad memories and dysfunctional relations to the main person at centre stage, Hamm. It would not be a Beckett play if there were a straight translatable set of symbols. It can be argued that what Beckett achieves is a visualization of a grotesque version of life that despite its strangeness leaves a haunting imprint on the audience and similarly, though perhaps less strikingly – for lack of the visual attack- on the reader. Nagg and Nell once they have entered the reader’s/audience’s consciousness are fixed there, unmovable and nagging as in the play. This view of Nagg and Nell may be a personal perception, but it opens up the investigation into the impact of the pair, mentioned above. How are they reasonably to be "$ LM844
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described? Dramatis personae? Characters? In the end they are perhaps less that and more of a phenomenon or potentially all of these simultaneously. One of the points of a play is to show rather than to describe and the visual side of the phenomenon is perhaps intended to render language to a certain extent secondary, to let the horror seep through. Some aspect surrounding this phenomenon can be more easily described than a somewhat trickier depiction of meaning or message. There is the pairing and the echoing of the pairing in Hamm and Clov and – outside this play – in Waiting for Godot’s14 Vladimir and Estragon and Lucky and Pozzo- in both cases we even see a pair of pairs. In a chapter on Godot , Jonathan Boulter says that “One of Beckett’s obsession is the notion of the inescapable relationship” (31). This is certainly one of the key elements of Endgame as well as Godot.
In the French version of the play there is the homophone of “faim” and “fin”, underlining the link between the two words. The end (fin) of hunger (faim) signifies the end of the will to live (Nell) or a possible yet eventually unobserved end of life (ex. Hamm/Clov). Houppermans and Buning see Beckett’s “go-ing and fro-ing” between his two languages as a way of fully profiting from the discrepancies between the mother tongue and the adopted language, and of picking up the crumbs of meaning wherever the translation scatters them about. This sort of intertextuality deserves to be made 15 clear before we indulge in speculations which might appear foolish.
The placement of the two dustbins indicates the sign of infinity 16: two circles or a lying down number eight, !, to show the circularity perhaps of life, the inescapable cycle of birth and death without which Hamm would have had no “cursed progenitor” (CDW 96) to swear at. There is very little of the organic or harmonic in Beckett’s depiction of the cycle of life .
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At the beginning of the play, Hamm tells Clov that his eyes have gone all white, 17 making a strange analogy to the other pair of circles, Nagg and Nell’s bins, and to Nagg and Nell’s face colour which according to the stage directions is white in contrast to Hamm and Clov’s red face colouring18. This connection may not be noticed on first viewing and reading because Nagg and Nell appear later, but it underlines the echoing effect and claustrophobia of the scene. The white colour indicate decay in both eyes and parents and renders Nagg and Nell’s lightless existence even more undignified. We are reminded of worms under a stone or plants shooting sprouts, already under the earth but not destined to grow. The cruelty that seeps through images like this is the blend of fear of ending like Nagg and Nell: undignified, cast aside, treated like debris, and the bad conscience of treating our elders this way. Bad conscience seems reified through Nagg and Nell in their bins “ front left, touching each other” (CDW 92) reminiscent of the bad conscience we carry with us in our minds. When Nell dies, she says the final words “So white” and “desert”. White seems to be the absence of life as it is 19
the absence of colour , a finite nothingness.
A similar reference to the double circle appears at the beginning of the play in the reference to the bicycle-wheels they have run out of (CDW 96). There is no explanation of what these wheels are for. The absence underlines the absence of mobility and it echoes Nagg and Nell’s tandem that is mentioned later. The circle also refers to the circle of life, or rather the end of the cyclical process as everything in this play is permanently coming to an end – with the exception of Nell who actually dies. The end of the cycle of life is underlined by the seeds that do not sprout. Visually when Hamm and Clov discuss this, Nagg’s head comes out of the bin and the different stages of the life cycle are presented: the dead seeds in the kitchen,
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the son20, the father and the father’s father. This image of the cycle having been halted and stretched to something unfruitful and linear is visually striking (CDW 98, Beckett 1985 15:15-15:35). The stage directions for Nagg and Nell are very clear: we have the masculine and feminine, mother and father, the couple, the pair, statically together yet not within reach of each other. The circle of the dustbins and their lids seen from above are mirrored in the story of how the amputation happened: a cycling accident, cycle also referring to the cycle of life and the cycle visually present in the infinity sign evoked by seeing the bins from above. Thus infinity is also thematically present - if barely visible – as a contrast to the end, underlined also by the infinite represented through repetition (of e.g. the tailor joke, the movement on stage, the long and arbitrary story told by Hamm). Infinity as a theme may also point outside the play: the themes touched upon in this play refer to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Hamm and Clov echoing Prospero and Ariel) and Shakespeare in turn drew on a variety of classical texts, such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Montaigne’s essay Of the Cannibals. Seen in this light the play deals with the infinite return of topics that are of concern to us: to writers, and readers, in the various cultures. It touches on the question of whether culture as a cyclical phenomenon has come to an end in Endgame.
Nagg and Nell at the end of their days are discarded like waste, having half-bodies and no mobility. They have regressed into old-age infants crying for their “pap” and losing teeth. There is something particularly horrid and undignified in this dependency even though the mere existence of two people in bins as such should far surpass this particular display of indignity. The uncanny, by definition is that much more unsettling because it consists of something recognizable together with something unknown.
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We recognize certain aspects of ageing in the phenomenon we watch on stage- it is only that there is hardly anything redeeming around it, no possibility of children, no proud father-to-son chat but the absence of the first and the hatred displayed of the latter. Adorno speaks of the inhuman aspects, as the shell is not melted by crying, and of the animal-like human, “der vertierte Mensch”
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There are many other aspects of Endgame that make it a very uncomfortable play to watch, and the display of the basic idiocy of human existence is certainly one of them. Seeing the two amputated bodies clutching at some last straws of humanity, like the sharing of a hard biscuit or the futile attempt at sharing a kiss, bring to mind one German word for idiocy: “Stumpfsinn”22. The phenomenon of Nagg and Nell is “Stumpfsinn” personified to a degree that is almost unbearable. It is the completely alienated image of human existence and human interaction with the recognizable seeping through the holes that makes it so.
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“But form”,
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Adorno claims, “absorbs what is expressed and changes it”. The unsettling perception is underlined by this overturning of conventions taking place before our eyes. In Boulter’s reading of Beckett as “posthuman”, he focuses on the famous quote on nothingness25. This is strongly linked to exploring the human condition at its most reduced. The reduction of language and the gradually increasing reduction of the human body over time (ending in beings in an urn in Play or human reduced to a moth in Not I ) are linked:
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“… Beckett eliminates the human at precisely the same time as he eliminates, denatures, and deconstructs, narrative form itself(…) language must be eliminated in order for the truth of the human to be known” (Boulter 14). In Endgame neither language nor the body is eliminated, but we are watching the beginning of this process that Beckett continues, ending with near-total absence in play such as Breath. “Near-total”, however, indicates that the body is always still a concern and always there, no matter how reduced: “Beckett’s characters may be posthuman but they are never postcorporeal” (Boulter 15). We are caught in our bodies that in Beckett’s world are always in decay or failing and the mind cannot conquer this. Thus reduction of the body draws attention to existence, to human interaction, to the self and to human states of mind that we see before us on stage. There is, I agree with Boulter, a “dark compassion in Beckett for the compromised body, for the crippled and the ill: there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only understand herself and her world through the medium of a decaying, painful, body.”
However, there is also the excruciating witnessing of this and the constant reminders that decay is inevitable. Compassion insists on our co-suffering to an extent and does not let us off the hook. As audience we are like Nagg and Nell quite literally immobile and subjected to Hamm’s cruel sadistic rhetoric. What is more, by watching Endgame we are facing our own existence as imprisonment and decay. The stumps of Nagg and Nell are echoed in their name-stumps, and also those of Hamm and Clov. They are reduced even in their name-identity. Nell is the only real name, the others are strange meaning-laden inventions. Nagg incorporates the nagging of his pure existence, the feeling of nagging conscience. Hamm may refer to a hammy actor or to a distortion of the name Hamlet, Clov seems like an amputated version of Clown. As Clov does get most of the action that that has elements of slapstick (for example the alarm clock scene, p. 115) and as his prerogative seems to be irony and sarcasm, the name is fitting, but sticks in
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your throat like a cruel joke. The humour, often abortive, in the play makes the rest of the play seem even bleaker, for example Clov’s line p. 106/ 30:34: “Things are livening up!” In other cases, it seems like Beckett needed to include a joke that the stage characters do not even see as one, but which is Beckett’s comment to us: remember what I do is “Fratzenschneiden” – the praying scene that ends with Hamm exclaiming “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” (CDW 119). To Adorno comedy in Endgame is dead26, in the sense that humour in the play is not the joking type. The humour we witness, as for example Nagg’s joke about the trousers 27, does not provide relief. On the contrary, it is a dead joke at which only Nagg himself laughs. Beholding it is uncomfortable to an extent where it leaves a peculiar sense of overpowering shamefulness with the listener, “life is merely the epitome of everything about which one 28
must be ashamed” . The disintegration of humour is another addition to the painfulness of watching Endgame.
Ruby Cohn identifies another aspect to the name-symbolism that, whether it is in all cases intended or not, is significant for reader (if not so much for the audience): all names, even that of the off-stage mother Pegg (CDW 112, 129) have connotations to nails: Nell puns on English nail as Clov puns on French clou. Nagg abbreviates German Nagel as Hamm abbreviates Latin hamus. The only other person, an offstage Mother Pegg, is also a four-letter word associated with nail.(Cohn, p. 141) Cohn’s conclusion, that “nailhood seems to represent humanity”, however is debatable. The many nails could also be an added unpleasantness on a par with the four-letter word s association with swearing. That “Hamm is also hammer that drives the nails on the stage board” (ibid) seems clear enough and might be extended to the view that this hammering of
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nails is another way for Beckett to drill holes in the fabric of language. In Beckett’s own words, My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no pun intended) made as fully as possible and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have head-aches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin 29
There is always the danger of over-analysis due to the vast amount of signifiers that the reader or audience finds in the text and feels the need to connect and interpret. Part of the phenomenology, then, is to identify the impact on the reader/audience of the complexity of the text and to have in mind the risk of reading into the text that stems from the desire to make sense of signifiers and references. Thus, meaning as such is questioned in the act of reading and trying to understand. Another example of a signifier laden with meaning is the use of “tandem”. According to van der Toorn (2002) it signifies the inseparable couple through its meaning of “double bike” (l’archetype du vélo dédoublé, 287), but also in its derivation from Latin meaning “at last”30. The tandem (bike) led to the accident that rendered the couple legless cripples, yet the few glimpses of hope that the play offers are the care and tenderness displayed between Nagg and Nell. The existence in couples and pairs is seemingly inescapable and fatal, yet also the only hope of a little warmth in human interaction. Opposed to Nagg and Nell the other – dominant – couple on stage are Hamm and Clov, who more clearly exist as two separate – though not independent – individuals.
There is none of the grandeur of classical tragedy in Endgame. Human life is depicted as small, confined, ridiculous and frail and there is no relief in a larger aim or heroic fight. G.F. Lee describes the worldview of Endgame as grotesque: “devoid of absolutes and undercutting even the smallest attempt at meaningful action, differs fundamentally from that #* B2;C200
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of tragedy” (65). Tragedy, fundamentally, is meaning-laden because it exists in a world picture where order has to be re-established from chaos and evil fought even at the ultimate price. Whatever their fates, religious, social, and subversive man operate in a world order and give meaning to themselves through their actions upon that order. But the Endgame -man exists in a void, where the grotesque has reversed the order of creation, where Chaos is victorious, and where meaning is impossible” (Lee, p. 66)
Dramatis personae? Character? Protagonists? At the end of an attempt to interpret Endgame, the term that seems to get closest to describing Nagg and Nell and how they claw their way into the reader/audience’s conscience is Adorno’s term “Urbilder”, archaic images31. Any natural and harmonious perception of the circle of life is turned into a perversion, an unbearable farce It is precisely in the plural form of “image” that the haunting uncanny dimension lies and through which the nature of the pair-the acronym of which is NN and thus potentially anybody- is revealed: Nagg and Nell are aged infants, extremely isolated, yet coexisting, unable to cry, unable to express any real emotion yet emotionally needy, incomplete remains of what was once an organic entity, a circularity of life, thrown away already before dying, caught in a horrid nostalgia in which a incapacitating bicycle accident seems glorious compared to their present existence. Through witnessing this distortion, watching Endgame, unpleasant and oppressive as it is, in a strange way also serves as a compassionate wake-up call to the audience by putting the question out there, which world-view can you live with? How are we being here? What type of Da-sein, there-being do you subscribe to?
Well aware of the danger of not paying respect to the complexity of Heidegger’s philosophy, I may perhaps be permitted to end this paper with a suggestion that Beckett’s Endgame can be
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seen as a – perhaps involuntary- comment on Heidegger’s thoughts on Being, “Dasein” 32. Nagg and Nell are a residue, a destillate of Being gone wrong, a “Daseins-Destillat” that reduces the comforting aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy to near non-existence. It is not a negation of Heidegger, but a “Fratzenschneiden” at Heidegger’s complex concept: Being-in-the-world is always already entangled. The average everydayness of Da-sein can thus be determined as entangled-disclosed, thrown-projecting being-in-the-world which is concerned with its ownmost potentiality in its being together with the “world” and in being-with with the others. 33 (Heidegger, 1993,170)
While this entangledness of existence is certainly presented in Endgame, it projects little hope. Endgame can be seen as a play on Being, in which the finitude of life does not release purpose34 but becomes an endless end. Heidegger sees Being as Being-in-the World and space and time as connected meaningfully 35. In Endgame this essential meaningfulness questioned: time is circular, ending is non-ending, space is confinement. Endgame is a comment on the human condition that exists, as Heidegger points out, only in togetherness, but the togetherness here is destructive and dysfunctional. “The interpretation of Endgame”, Adorno claims, “cannot chase the chimera of expressing its meaning with the help of philosophical mediation” and “the play shows an unmistakable opposition to ontology” (Adorno 1982, 120-1). Yet, in this distancing from conventional drama and traditional philosophy, through the play’s overthrowing and turning around of conventions, it seems that questions concerning existence and the nature of Being are constantly raised. One could also argue that Adorno contradicts himself: his method of reading endgame may not refer to one philosophical school of thought but is still an act of
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philosophy even as it draws strongly on sociology and cultural studies. The boundaries are not all clear. There is a valid concern that a philosophical reading reduces the play that Simon Critchley points out:
The texts continually seem to pull the rug from under the feet of the philosopher by showing themselves to be conscious of the possibility of such interpretations…or, better still, such interpretations seem to lag behind their object by saying too much: something essential to Beckett's language is lost by overshooting the text and ascending into the stratosphere of metalanguage. (Critchley 1997, 141) Indeed, Beckett’s reference to philosophy in the play itself. Hamm’s first speech (CDW 93), for example brings up the issue of time (“grain by grain”) and the end of time through the preceding allusion to the Biblical “It is finished”. It seems to be a comment on the futility of both philosophy and religion as a means to grasp the world. At the same time it puts the question out there, what do we do if religion and philosophy do not help us? Juxtaposing Beckett to philosophy can be fruitful as it may serve to illuminate the phenomenology of both some key thoughts in Beckett’s writing, or more precisely: thoughts provoked by it, and the reading or viewing experience. Even if “Beckett’s work seems to offer itself generously to interpretation only to withdraw this offer by parodically reducing such interpretation to ridicule” (Critchley, 143) it does not mean that it does not provoke the philosophical thought process. 36
The rug is certainly pulled from under Heidegger’s concept of “Geworfenheit” (the Being-thrown-into the World): Nagg and Nell are thrown in a bin, a reversed womb in which
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Geworfenheit nennt Heidegger die Art, wie das ich zu seinem eigenen In-der-Welt-sein gekommen ist. Die Geworfenheit ist nicht die faktische Geburt, sondern die konstitutive Form jedes menschlichen Lebens. Der von Heidegger gewählte Ausdruck deutet an, dass wir ungefragt und ohne persönliche Zustimmung in die Welt gekommen sind. Diese Geworfenheit, dieses ungefragte In-die-Welt-gekommen-sein, ist die Form , die die Faktizität des Daseins in Sein und Zeit annimmt. (Being thrown is what Heiddegger calls the way the “I“ arrives at its being-in-the-world. Being thrown is not actual birth but the constituted form of any human existence. This choice of expression by Heidegger indicates that we arrived in the world without being asked and without agreeing. S167 F26)4 01('=), 012 )'0 87C2& <'( ;'E6)4 6)0' 012 ='(5& 67 012 718-2 0180 012 <8;06;60G '< ?8726) 08C27 6) ,&*+- #+$ /*)& Y:'<
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they regress to quasi infantile states before dying- though in the course of the play this completion is only granted Nell. Heidegger’s Being-thrown-into a life that is always a life with others becomes being thrown away separately. The possibility of company is there, but it is either destructive (as Hamm’s relationship to his parents) or its fruition of compassion and comfort is hindered: Geworfenheit becomes Weggeworfenheit. For Heidegger the self can achieve authenticity by making sense of the finitude of existence. Beckett shows not only beings that do not recognise this capacity but also negates the finitude itself. The horror lies not in the inescapable finitude but in the on-going ending, the lack of closure. The play, it can be argued, is a temporal image, it stops at one particular point and the beings on stage could well be said to reach an end outside the play, as we all must. But the play does not show this and displays the lack of awareness of anything authentic or empowering in the realisation of mortality and of life as living towards death. Heidegger analyses Being as defined by finite temporality, as a given that has decidedly positive aspects: “the human is not confined to the present but always projects toward the future”, in a paraphrase by Simon Critchley (2009) . In Endgame the human is locked in an unbearable repetitious present. “Dasein” becomes “Gefangensein”, imprisonment. Critchley describes Heidegger’s Sein and in-der-Welt-Sein as follows “If the human being is really being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human“. In Endgame the second part of the equasion is lost, seemingly destroyed by humans who have thereby cut themselves off from an essential part of their Dasein and have reduced themselves to mere and barren existence.
In the Kaun-letter, Beckett professes his wish to let “nothing” seep through the holes drilled into language. In his depiction of the weight of nothingness, Beckett seems very close to Heidegger, who says that we are defined by nothingness, existence is prominence (“Hinaus-
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Stehen”), a being held into nothingness (“Hineingehaltensein ins Nichts”) 37. The big difference of course lies in the fact that Beckett aims at drilling holes in the fabric of language to let the experience of nothingness seep through, whereas to Heidegger nothingness serves to understand how our existence is contained. Despite Beckett’s claim to a distance to contemporary philosophy, there is a familiarity that allows for a comparison: What is more true than anything else? To swim is true, and to sink is true. One is not more true than the other. One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. 38
Heidegger’s definition of Being and Time offers a philosophy outside religion that identifies a fundamental meaningfulness to life39. Beckett’s Endgame questions this and by raising the question confronts the audience with meaninglessness. By the experience of simultaneous alienation, contradiction and recognition the reader/audience is encouraged to contemplate the question for themselves. Not in any didactic way, but by depicting meaning, through its negation, through meaninglessness, that just as cultural residues seep through the fabric of language. Based on an understanding that the reader or audience is included, the phenomenon of Nagg and Nell can be seen as a reification of a questioning of the nature of Being.
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Bibliography: Adorno, Theodor W. Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen. Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften Band 11. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961. Adorno, Theodor W. Transl. Michael T. Jones. Trying to Understand Endgame./ Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen. New German Critique No. 26, Critical Theory and Modernity (Spring - Summer, 1982). 119-150. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. Beckett directs Beckett- Endgame. The San Quentin Drama Workshop, 1985. Samuel Beckett (dir.), Rick Cluchey (prod.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsDc8R4rEWY. Film. Beckett, Samuel. Letter to Axel Kaun 9. July 1937. The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1920-49 Eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 512-21. Boulter, Jonathan. Beckett - A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum International Publishing , 2008. Cohn, Ruby. Back to Beckett . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett – Repetition, Theory and Text . Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Connor, Steven “Phenomenologies of the Nothing: Democritus, Heidegger, Beckett.” Beckett and Phenomenology. Eds. M. Feldman and U. Maude P. London: Continuum International Publishing, 2009. 39-55. Conti, Chris. Critique and Form: Adorno on "Godot" and "Endgame". Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 14, After Beckett / D'après Beckett (2004), pp. 277-292. Critchley, Simon. “Being and Time, Part 1-8”. Web blog posts. How to Believe. Simon Critchley, 8 June-27 July 2009. Web. 5.12.2013 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy Critchley, Simon. Very Little - Almost Nothing : Death, Philosophy, Literature Routledge. London, 1997. Cunningham, David Mapp, Nigel Adorno and Literature. Continuum International Publishing. London, 2006. Gendron, Sarah, “A Cogito for the dissolved self”: Writing Presence, and the Subject in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derida, and Gilles Deleuze. Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 28, No. 1, Autobiography and memoir (Autumn, 2004) Indina University Press. Lawley, Paul. Symbolic Structure and Creative Obligation in ‘Endgame’. http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num05/Num5lawley.htm.
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Gontarski, S. E.. The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theatre. Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 11, Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000/ Fin sans Fin an l’an 2000 (2001), pp. 169-177. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit . Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977. http://gesamtausgabe.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/er-ga- 02-sein-und-zeit-1927.pdf.
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