[In the following essay, translated from the French version originally published in the October 1957 issue of Etudes Anglaises, Mayoux highlights Beckett's “laying open” the essence of human existence in Waiting for Godot, Endgame, All That Fall, and The Unnamable.]

I. AN OVERALL VIEW

I shall assume, in order to save time and space, that Samuel Beckett is well-known as a fifty-three year old Irishman who, in the last thirty years or so, has written admirably in two languages: poems, essays, fiction. His turning towards the theatre in about 1950 was probably due in part to expediency and perhaps to necessity, for the theatre, through visible but illusory forms, presents us with an unreal reality, a make-believe action. Those who have ceased to believe in reality, readily compare it to a theater, and foremost among them is Epictetus the Stoic.

Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a kind as the author pleases to make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one. If it be his pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned to you; to choose it is another's.

From the beginning to the end of his works, the deliberate derision thus offered haunted Shakespeare, and may even serve as the maxim of his theater: totus mundus agit histrionem. In the same spirit, Beckett's theater turns in upon itself, seeks to coincide with itself in a pure theatrical reality, much as three generations of symbolists sought, successively, a pure poetic reality, a pure pictorial reality, a pure fictional reality—whether by the different paths of a Proust, a Joyce, a Nathalie Sarraute, or a Beckett. This quest for an artistic truth that is both immediate and necessary, that is divorced from all social preoccupation, is the evidence of honest pessimism. When all fabrications of what we call civilization, all collective structures, are rejected as illusory, when all worldly activity is viewed as vain, useless, ridiculous; nothing remains but the consciousness of ourselves, and the forms of expression which we can given to that consciousness.

This kind of theater, turning in upon itself, turns back also to its beginnings in the medieval Christian world: an Everyman in which the stripping bare and final nakedness of man would be relieved neither by reward nor comfort, in which all such alleviation would appear only as a kind of thinking void, and where this awareness would spin round and round in self-declared abjection.

Two plays are complete realizations of this version: Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957). Viewed superficially, the first looks like an allegory: two tramps wait forever near an ominous tree, on a stage at once empty and sealed off, for One Unknown who does not come but from whom illusory messages flow, while there passes again and again a cruel couple of master and slave, joined by whip and halter. No matter how one guards against it, this invites interpretation, both theological and other.

Perhaps Beckett was sensitive to this aspect, and tried to particularize his second play, to blend his distinctive oneiric visions more subtly into a common meaning. The bare room, with windows too high, where three out of four characters are in the process of dying amidst universal anguish—this again may be taken as a sombre image of the human situation. But much less decipherable is the fact that two of the characters are aged legless cripples planted on coarse sand in ashbins, through the efforts of a third character, their son, blinded and paralysed, who “ends” in his armchair after a long bloody perspiration which is described with atrocious intensity of detail. As for the fourth character, since everything he can perceive through his telescope and everything he can imagine beyond that, is in the process of “ending,” in what deathly desert recommended by the inscrutable and gentle Nell (“Desert!”), and twisted to a pun, will he complete that extraordinary gesture of escaping from this room of tyrannical human bonds? It is apparent that, in contrast to Godot and in spite of its effect of desolation, Endgame is not hermetically sealed. But again it takes place between characters and on a stage which, in the manner of Beckett's fiction, are unlocalized and in which only the proper names have local color. The particularity of All That Fall (1957) is far more pronounced.

In the latter play, what we may call interior particularity is blended with clear references to the outer world: a road peopled with noises and presences, a bicycle that breaks down, an old automobile which does not start, then suddenly starts noisily, a chicken that is run over, a small railroad station and its small activities—all together form a framework around the grotesque adventure of the huge old lady who comes to seek her blind husband at the train from which a little girl has fallen, perhaps pushed, perhaps horrified by him. Although All That Fall is a radio sketch, without either the intentions or pretentions of the two plays, I should not be surprised if Beckett in his future work retains some of this particularity, just as an abstract painter may arrive at incorporating the figurative.

II. MAN'S FATE

THE CLOWN AND THE MAN

The subject of Beckett's theater is the same as that of his fictions: man's fate, man. And how in the theater does he convey his feeling about man? First of all, following the great theatrical tradition of the Orient, he uses masks and makeup, so that, when the curtain rises, much of the work is already done; the mere presence of the characters is highly significant and suggestive before any word is spoken.

It is from the Anglo-saxon music-hall tradition—compare the dialogues of Mutt and Jeff as used by Joyce in Finnegans Wake—that Beckett seems to have drawn his couple of tramps, who are not without links to the Mack Sennett movie gang, of whom Chaplin was a member. Dressed in caved-in bowlers, castoff scarecrow rags, free-flowing shirt-tails, and trousers held up by string, they suggest Epictetus' description by the very borrowed strangeness of their impractical but symbolic clothing; they are not tramps, they are men to whom the master has assigned the role of tramps, and their words affirm this, in a language that is at time colloquial and even vulgar, but is more often characterized by an impersonal, poetic dignity, spoken through these personae of Beckett.

This is humanity: a prostatic Vladimir afflicted with a urinary difficulty; a limping Estragon, both stinking, one from his mouth and the other from his feet; Pozzo, flushed in his outfit of country gentleman; Lucky shaken by St. Vitus dance, wearing livery, wounded by his halter, obeying the whip, at once Lucky and lackey, offering to the anguished liberty of Vladimir and Estragon the spectacle of his degradation and alienation. One can convince himself of the power of these presences by merely viewing photographs of the characters; they literally speak. That Lucky becomes dumb after reciting the tirade that shows his education has not been neglected, that Pozzo the tyrant becomes blind and his tyranny impotent—these events are incorporated into the direct expression which Beckett uses easily. Who is not moved by the view of the bloody handkerchief with which Hamm covers his face in order to die? Is it chance if one can see in the handkerchief the features of man stamped in blood, as St. Veronica saw those of Christ, as though to say that each man's life is a Passion? Each article of clothing has its own meaning, but it is above all the bodies that Beckett attacks. These strides broken at the knee, hesitating, ataxic; these blind eyes (three blind people in three plays); these bodies grotesque in their thinness or fatness, paralysed and almost petrified; these senile impotents; these legless obsessions transferred from the Unnamable to Endgame—constitute a cruel humiliating image of man, which echoes that of the nightmare creatures of Bosch and Breughel; this is a Christian, a Puritan vision of man and his body, and in its bitterness is characteristic of the rebellious Christian. The romantics painted human misery on a grandiose scale. Beckett, by reducing it to the worst catalogue of mutilations, infirmities, and “petites misères” that has been seen since Job and St. Lidwin, gives this misery a bitter significance, compounded of the grotesque and the ridiculous.

PARODY

From the opening tableau, the drama unrolls, without plot, almost without episodes, like a vision, but also and more directly like a game; it is the vigor and precision of the game which transmit the vision and make it live: a silence, a suspended reply, an anguished grimace succeed in keeping all the successive movements in place. Music-hall and circus, entrances and dialogues (albeit silent) of clowns, were the decisive influences on Beckett, especially with respect to activity, or the very substance of the drama. Nor should one forget the parodic role, insufficiently noted by the critics, of Shakespeare's clowns; they are the derisive mirror of the actions of “their betters,” and they demonstrate the limit of intellectual audacity for if one took them seriously, nothing would remain of the “important” deeds and gestures—be they evil or glorious—to which honorable characters devote their lives. Beckett gives the clown the most important part; behind his mask he has come to replace the “serious” character; parody cloaks almost every possible act. Consciousness alone, crouching in the heart of being and refusing to rationalize action, escapes and endures. All the rest is mere amusement. Anouilh phrased it well when he described Godot as “a scene from Pascal's Pensées as played by the Fratellini clowns.”

“We could do our exercises,” suggests Vladimir. “Our movements,” says Estragon. They are in their role of clowns, parodists, imitating a man doing his exercises. It is a way of passing the time, of giving content to the time that is the hollow substance of all life. Everything that man does, whether it be called good or evil, is pastime; all is a sad game. For a while, without conviction, Vladimir and Estragon play at Pozzo and Lucky. Then, “Let's abuse each other.” and “Now let's make it up.”

And in Endgame, Clov bursts out from time to time, “I have things to do,” to do in that kitchen where nothing is cooking, where he looks at the wall. All that life has to offer is comparably ridiculous and parodic: “My painkiller,” Hamm demands, “My tonic,” and wants to know whether it is time for his pain-killer or his tonic: “In the morning they brace you up and in the evening they calm you down. Unless it's the other way round.” There is still “creative” activity. Hamm says—as Beckett might—“It's time for my story.” And he seeks an audience, he asks that he be invested with his role, that there be a reader before him so that he may be an author. “My story,” he says and takes the poses of a writer: “There are days like that, one isn't inspired.” This sufferer plays at writing as the slave Lucky plays at thinking. They are both mockeries of man, rather, man as mockery. And the commentary on all this is made with terrifying bitterness by Vladimir: “How time flies when one has fun!”

HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

Beckett's characters come in pairs, usually masculine, again reminding us of traditional clown couples. Their sex practically gone except in occasional ironic reference, these couples can also be vaguely conjugal. Husband and wife or rather wife and husband, and father and son are, beneath the various surfaces, the fundamental human relationships in this theater. Dominator and dominated, sadist and masochist, they are the cruel alternative to the hell of solitude. Sometimes, as in Strindberg's works, we are presented with another hell—that of relatedness—but it is a parodic, a cold hell. Although in the couple one figure may be oppressive, even heinous—a probable throwback to the archetypal father figure—Beckett characterizes his universe as largely futile, and the cruelty is thus running out, an inefficacious and vain aspect of universal futility. Nothing that human beings can do to each other can have much sense in a world where basically nothing makes sense: this was already true in Jarry's work, and one might say that, coming after Kafka, Beckett still remembers Jarry. But there is more. The relationship between Clov and Hamm seems impregnated with a destructive, strindbergian ferocity, a sadistic tyranny comparable to that which unites Lucky and Pozzo by means of halter and whip. Nevertheless, when Clov wonders, “Why I always obey you,” Hamm replies, “Perhaps it's compassion. (Pause) A kind of great compassion.”

Terrible is the awareness that takes possession of man in his solitude—that he exists for nothing—and a veritable horror passes into the words of Hamm as he prophesies the fate of Clov if he leaves him: “Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it.” Whence these efforts against solitude, followed by more frantic efforts to break the infernal chains that one has forged oneself:

HAMM:
Why do you stay with me?
CLOV:
Why do you keep me?
HAMM:
There's no one else.
CLOV:
There's nowhere else.

In life we are prisoners together, without any real choice.

These relationships are much more complex than in Strindberg's work, for they are tinged with conflicting impulses which include a need of tenderness and protection. Perhaps it is in these alternations of feeling that we pass from parody to the naked truth of man. Each motion of one human being towards another is followed by a retraction on the one part, and a rejection on the other. Vladimir and Estragon embrace, but Estragon draws back at once: “You stink of garlic!”

In Beckett's work, as opposed to Strindberg's, there is no pride, and absent are those wounds which inspire destructive frenzies. Pride is the principle of the ego, the basis of personal distinction. For Strindberg A is A, B is B, violently, even if the characters are designated only by what they do, the Student, or the Captain, or the Ghost. In Beckett the characters never completely fit into the skin of their roles, into that temporary castoff clothing donned by chance. If Vladimir and Estragon in their games do not play at being Estragon and Vladimir, it is because there is too little difference between them. Vladimir would acquire those remnants of avidity, of vitality, of cynicism which vaguely characterize Estragon, who in turn would coddle himself less, would seek a little harder to believe, would widen his imagination. But it is a question of individual nuance rather than individuality. Thus human relationships, overstrained in Strindberg, are underplayed to an extreme limit in the parodic drama of Beckett. Life itself, with no outside interference, can disintegrate, destroy, and annual everything.

POZZO AND LUCKY

There is no solitude in the world which can finally accept itself and be content with itself; even the tyrant Pozzo is not lying when he says he is tired of his lonely road, when he declares, “I cannot go for long without the society of my likes.” But who is Pozzo?—he who comes when one is waiting for Godot. “He reigns,” Shelley says of his Jehovah, of his diabolical God, and Blake would say the same, but are they speaking of metaphysical principles or of human modes and forces of human nature? The theological interpretation is so overoffered to the spectator of Godot, that one is reluctant to exaggerate its importance. But there is no reason to deny it. “Godo,” an Irishman pointed out to me, is spoken Irish for “God;” and our noses are virtually rubbed in the white beard (Lucky's discourse, Vladimir's question), Pozzo is taking his slave “to the market of St. Savior.” (French version only) Doesn't the play begin by an evocation of our Savior and the thieves? Doesn't Pozzo say, “I am Pozzo. Does that name mean anything to you? … You are human beings none the less.” Does he not play as with an echo on the double assonance of his name, Godot, Pozzo? But if we want to see in him the symbol of capitalism, and in his relationship to Lucky a fierce caricature of the fierce capital-labor relationship, there is nothing to prevent it, not even what I have just said.

We must always return to the symbolic and parodic nature of the drama which only echoes that of life. It is a matter of types and archetypes, which are limited in number. God, the father, the chief, the king, the boss, on the one hand, and on the other, man, the son, the follower, the serf, the worker; they all come out of the same womb and are more or less interchangeable. The game is played by personae. To dominate, to be dominated, to exploit, to be exploited, to fear, to be feared, to suffer, to cause to suffer, to invent names and essences for forces by which one is moved—this is at the source of the Lucky-Pozzo couple, an eternal couple in spite of mutations in time of the individual Pozzos and Luckys. Nor is it by simple and grotesque fraud that Pozzo complains of Lucky's insistence on slavery when nothing prevents him from freeing himself. Is that not the very basis of the universe? “Old dogs have more dignity,” says Pozzo of the man he has vilified, but who has allowed himself to be vilified. Lucky is treacherous and cowardly as well as miserable. Estragon will not soon forget Lucky's kick.

Without the active and passive degradation of Lucky (Estragon and Vladimir support the latter by accepting it), Pozzo would be nothing. It is Lucky after all who has taught him the beauties of metaphysics. And since all fidelities of this world degenerate, Pozzo says bitterly, “He used to be so kind … so helpful … and entertaining … my good angel.”

Pozzo's remark is conclusive evidence that the question is one of roles played according to the idea of Epictetus, and not of different essences, “Remark that I might just as well have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed otherwise.”

Pozzo is a fool in spite of his fierce egoism, and he is most unsure of himself. He pretends to be important, like an actor, like a busker, spraying his throat before speaking. When he finishes his speech, he anxiously awaits applause, “How did you find me? … I weakened a little towards the end …” Blind in the second act, he is a poor figure of a tyrant, who could be overthrown by a flick of the finger. Beckett passes here from the circus to Punch-and-Judy slapstick where one can see the mutual beatings and the piles of fallen bodies. And I think too that he remembers the first great parodic play of our time, Ubu Roi.

Where shall we situate Lucky thinking, and his extraordinary “philosophical” tirade? Is he the wornout worker, stuffed with clichés out of a schoolboy memory, aping true thought with delirious nonsense? Is he man, any man, believing absurdly in the reality of man's thought? Or rather, is not Beckett being ambiguous as usual, playing on what parody reveals of the nature of reality? We are reminded of the parodies of logical exposition in Finnegans Wake, replete with marginal commentary and learned footnotes. Also of The Lesson of Ionesco. In The Unnamable, too, we find a parodic style occasionally recalling that of Lucky. “I have to speak,” says Beckett in the last of the trilogy, “having nothing to say, nothing but the words of others.” Like Lucky, like us all, Beckett is obsessed by the foreign sound of that voice which we hear when we speak, which is not ours and not us, but by means of which something passes through us. Beckett's theater, like Ionesco's instructs the trial of language.

Lucky, it must be emphasized, exists not only in relationship with his master; he is also, in his abjection, man-spectacle, man-object, the man about whom the others make their comments, and through whom they observe their own situation. Since they accept (with only trivial indignation) Lucky's fate for him, they accept the principle of it for themselves.

GODOT

This humiliated and tortured image of man contrasts with the exalted but invisible image of Godot, and, I believe, with his various avatars as a father-figure. Is it not amazing that in spite of the scorn of Hamm for Nagg and the pleasure he takes in tyrannizing over him until his last breath, he needs him secretly, and Nagg knows it. In his last agony, Hamm calls, “Father, Father,” on two separate occasions. Curiously he sends Clov to ask whether his father has heard him twice. How can we not think of the “Eli, Eli” of that other supreme moment?

Of course, at a certain level, that of an eternal psychological desideratum, Godot is God, a white-bearded God who “loves us dearly with some exceptions” of Lucky's discourse or of Vladimir's questions. But in Endgame, Hamm's household, at his command, tries to pray without success. “The bastard!” cries Hamm, “He doesn't exist.” Whereupon, Clov adds (I have already observed that this play is not sealed off), “Not yet.”

One may feel that the blasphemy dates the play. It is Stephen Dedalus again refusing to pray for his dying mother. In All That Fall, under the shadow of the little girl who falls from the train, Mrs. Rooney announces that the Sunday sermon will have as its text, “The Lord upholdeth all that fall,” and she recalls the solicitude of Providence in several rephrasings of the Shakesperian quotation, “There is a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

The disappearance of God reveals the absolute emptiness of the world, that domain of meaninglessness and of death. Nevertheless Hamm persists in imagining an intelligence enlightened by human conduct “liable to get ideas,” “To think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!”

The absurd was more certainly the victor in Godot, where, in agreement with Christian tradition, human thought is denounced as having introduced death into the world.

VLADIMIR:
What is terrible is to have thought.
ESTRAGON:
But did that ever happen to us?
VLADIMIR:
Where are all these corpses from?
ESTRAGON:
These skeletons.

III. THEATER AND REALITY

TIME

The unreality of the real surrounds us, and it is of time. We are caught like rats in this abominable trap of time; we are engulfed in this thick mud until there is neither trap nor prisoner. As early as 1931, the date of his essay on Proust, Beckett denounced time: “there is no escape from the hours and the days.” The dantesque punishment of being fixed in endless stagnation, alternates in his imagination with stupefaction at being the unexpected and unconsulted plaything of those irrevocable changes leading to degradation and suffering. Thus Vladimir, astounded, learns that the Lucky who overwhelmed him yesterday with his discourse, is dumb today. What is this time that has become the past, and how may we recognize it? Thus Nagg and Nell speak of “Ah yesterday …” Life is a sum of voids which the last term of each series confirms. At length, briefly—both mean the same thing.

Together, the grey time of the North and the grey light of the North form a single indistinct dimension, in which so many characters of Ibsen are also trapped. To Hamm's, “What time is it?” Clov replies, “The same as usual.” And

HAMM:
Is it night already then?
CLOV:
No.
HAMM:
Then what is it?
CLOV:
Grey (… louder.) Grey! (Pause. Still louder.) GRRAY!

Roughly, the temporal color of the two plays corresponds to their titles: all Godot is composed around the waiting, and all Endgame around the end. A fierce joy takes possession of both Hamm and Clov at the idea of universal destruction. The worst horror is to think that all might begin again: “A flea! Are there still fleas? … But humanity might start from there all over again.” Never did the Catharans choose the way to annihilation with more avidity, and this follows upon the greater horror of interminable nullity. A day like the others. All these days that do not arrive. They can bear it no longer, they intone against these days a long complaint. “There's no reason for it to change,” says Hamm. “All my life long, the same questions, the same answers,” sighs Clov. Nell asks gently, “Why this farce day after day?” And Clov, “Why this farce day after day?”

But finally, subtly, in the limbo that is Beckett's Hell, “Something,” says Clov, “is taking its course.” “Something dripping in my head,” says Hamm, giving a dreadful reality to that hemorrhagic flow of life whose “little vein” has for such a long time bloodied his “old stancher.” But time which flows towards death may still represent life, for in waiting one accepts life. En attendant Godot is on one level a dialectic of suicide, for to wait is to live. Suicide thus appears as a rational decision which should have been undertaken after the very first awareness of the absurdity of life. Once caught up in the “waiting,” however, no instant of time can ever be decisive again.

An acceptance of one's death, or at least a conscious apprisal of one's own dying to the extent of being party to it, seems to me to replace in Endgame, and in the character of Hamm, the cruder temptation to suicide, that we find in Godot. Harshness, cruelty, even the threat to kill are constantly on Hamm's lips; however, the “Time enough”s and “No need”s with which he controls his worst impulses seem to me indications of some human quality, frustrated to be sure by infinite suffering, but nevertheless persistent. On the other hand, does Mr. Rooney—that concrete and peculiarly opaque character of All That Fall—actually cross the boundary which separates the death-wish from the murder-wish? We cannot know the answer, for the author has played at giving us deliberately vague hints, of which the first is a dialogue much in the manner of Hamm or Clov.

MR. Rooney:
Did you ever wish to kill a child? (Pause.) Nip some young doom in the bud. (Pause.) Many a time at night, in winter, on the black road home, I nearly attacked the boy.

The last hint of what he may have done to the child is that object round as a ball, but never called a ball because of the ambiguous nature of all reality. Once it may have belonged to the little girl, but finally it arrives in Mr. Rooney's hands.

THE DEGRADATIONS OF THE LIVING BEING

Like Kafka and his characters, Beckett and his characters seem resigned to conform to the world's scornful and condemned image of them. I have shown them embracing their own deaths. They also inflict upon themselves successive descents through increasingly abysmal levels of existence. As in Kafka, Beckett's solitude and suffering seem linked to some ancient and irrevocable condemnation. Molloy sees himself becoming Molloy's ashes; the hero of the Unnamable is a human trunk in a vase, nourished by a practical woman because she uses him both as a menu signpost and a producer of fertilizer. The beckettian man is readily seen as a source of excrement, and he is maintained in contact with his product. Also if legless cripples Nagg and Nell are installed in ashbins, it is surely to clarify and immediatize the idea of trash, of garbage, which should be associated with these characters. There is certainly method in Beckett's artistry.

If this process of successive degradation ends anywhere, and if this aspiration towards nothingness has its brighter aspect, it is clearly in a return to the womb. Beckett is explicit when he describes Estragon trying to sleep: “He resumes his foetal posture, his head between his knees.” Perhaps this is the position at which all Beckett's characters arrive.

CRITICISM OF REALITY

This theater, like the ensemble of Beckett's work, denies the reality of the “real.” Beckett has studied philosophy and puts it to work: we never touch anything; nothing can affirm that we are not the plaything of various illusions. But the uncertainties of time and place pale before those of memory. In “normal” life we have notebooks and schedules, but no certitude ever results from the discussions of Vladimir and Estragon about what has taken place.

Are we not all familiar, upon emerging from certain reveries in certain conditions of light, with sudden oscillations of the coordinates upon which we ordinarily depend? Beckett seeds these limit-states and this uncertainty dialogue with false clues. It was indeed yesterday, it was indeed here, since there are the old shoes that Estragon left. But those shoes were black. These are yellow. And Vladimir wonders, “Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?” Similarly, Hamm: “Do you know what it is? I was never there. Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don't know what's happened.”

In the philosophic sense, one might speak of a critical theater, and this criticism is much more complete than one would believe. Up to a certain point it is a criticism of any withdrawal from active human solidarity, of the egotism of the intellectual. One remark of Clov to Hamm is strange: “When old Mother Pegg asked you for oil for her lamp and you told her to get out to hell, you knew what was happening then, no?”

STAGE AND REALITY

Be that as it may, we are forcibly led back to the theater, about the theater. For this questioning of the reality of appearances or of people confers a compensating and absolute quality upon each appearance of reality; if life is parodic, parody acquires intensity and depth. From this viewpoint, and seemingly in contradiction with all that has been said, Beckett's theater is an extraordinary and paradoxical Dasein, a presence, not an imitation of the real but the real itself. The setting of Godot is, more than that desolate waste opening into an indefinite endlessness, the stage of the Théatre de Babylone¹. I have already indicated that the characters recognize that they are actors. Hamm shouts angrily, “An aside, ape! Did you never hear an aside before? (Pause) I'm warming up for my last soliloquy.”

Beckett takes full advantage of the music-hall tradition which embraces spectators and theater in a common space and a common game. With different techniques than Sartre, he too conveys the smothering atmosphere of No Exit. It is as if there is nothing else. “Outside of here,” says Hamm, “it's death.” In the second act of Godot, when the two men are ringed by presences and seek to escape, Estragon makes a rush towards the back, and Vladimir cries, “Imbecile! There's no way out there.” Beckett's stage presents an image of a closed world, surrounded by a void of time and place, and where everything that happens, does so under the menace of an imminent end.

Beckett is not afraid to play. Not only are the characters never prevented by their grotesque misfortunes from mocking themselves and giving vent to their humor (tending to be sombre), but, in the Anglo-saxon tradition, they comment upon life and the particular action by means of farce and stylized fooling. When Lucky loses his hat, the field is open to three hats for two heads, and the subsequent music-hall number of Vladimir and Estragon is full of mental subtlety as well as manual dexterity. Beckett uses his stage business—the pell-mell heaping of bodies in the second act of Godot, the moving of the steps from one window to the other in Endgame—so as to make of the bodies of these “pain-sufferers” a powerful mimed substratum to their words. Mime is a complementary and immediate dramatic language, which reveals the man of the theater.

LANGUAGE

Beckett's language confirms this. He employs comic words and heart-breaking words, for it is astonishing that this sombre theater is not one of callousness. The dialogue is extremely tight, with a movement and articulation that are absolutely sure, and which compel attention.

However little he has written in verse, Beckett is above all a lyric poet in his two languages. His is a natural, instinctive rhythm; he writes like an André Breton who has appropriated spoken language. The second act of Godot in particular must have been written in a poetic state, imparting to the exchange of replies a distinctive rhythm, which is emphasized by the subtle orchestration of the variations of Vladimir played against the repetitions of Estragon.

Godot and Endgame are plays of Irish imagination and French language. When one reads All That Fall in English, a revelation is obtained of Irish verbal agility, flavor, and density, pounding at reality as if it were a dough of metaphors. We are reminded then of what Kafka and Beckett have in common: the one by choice and the other by necessity expresses himself in a foreign language, and they enjoy it as a bitter privilege. Such a language must not “flow from the source;” it must not spout up; assembled, composed, distant, it must be the language of separation. Spoken through the masks of these personae, it is important that this language should not belong to them, that it should not directly express them or their author, that it should arrive from some vague distant point of humanity. Mrs. Rooney herself does not recognize her own language. She finds it bizarre. But then who does not express himself in a foreign language?

Like Joyce, Beckett is in quest of the absolute; it exasperates him to live in a world of contingency, to be dedicated to contingency even to the creative imagination. The invention of characters, the situating them in stories—why these characters and why those stories—awakens in him a disgust to which he gives free vent in the Unnamable, and again in Endgame by means of the variants of Hamm telling his “story.”

It was an extra-ordinarily bitter day, I remember, zero by the thermometer.

A little later

It was a glorious bright day, I remember, fifty by the heliometer.

And then

It was a howling wild day, I remember, a hundred by the anenometer.

To strip himself of that kind of apparatus and to discover, through some abysmal self-communion, a way of telling the only, unique truth about oneself—this is the direction of Beckett's efforts. It will be, it is already, a very dark truth, but it is an extraordinary victory to have translated it so completely into art; and still another to have presented it on the stage, to have accomplished this great parody—parody of action, parody of theater—and to have accomplished its acceptance by the most diverse spectators. One is compelled to believe that, reluctant as we may be to admit it, it is a human truth.

Note

1. Godot's first stage was that of the small Théatre de Babylone, which no longer exists.