PARTISAN REVIEW
67
Humanly, it is dissolution rather than explicit death that seems to
be in the offing. There are no more coffins, we are told; death as a
rite, and therefore as connection to human truth, has been
abrogated.
In
this burnt-out world, which has been compared to that of
Lear at the end of his drama but perhaps more closely resembles
that of Woyzeck, despair is an axiom. When at one point Clov tells
Hamm that his father is weeping down in his ash can, Hamm
replies, "Then he's living." He then asks Clov, "Did you ever have
an
instant of happiness?" to which the response is, "Not to my
knowledge." "You're on earth," Hamm tells him, "there's no cure
for that." Only Clov seems to have any desire or capacity for a
change of circumstances; he grumbles or protests bitterly through–
out at his subjection to Hamm, and in fact seems in the end to
have made good his repeated threats to leave, as though from a
doomed house.
It is tempting to see in all this a parable of man at the end of
his rope, more specifically postatomic man, and the play has
inde~d
been staged along the lines of a vision of the world after
nuclear holocaust, as well as, from a different but equally "con–
temporary" perspective, along Freudian and Marxist ones. But this
is in a peculiar way to take the play too seriously, to give it a
weight of commentary and social earnestness its imaginative
structure continually subverts. We ought to know from Beckett's
entire body of work that of all living writers he is the least
interested in the present, in the changes time effects and in what
we might call local, temporally, or spatially differentiated
existence. His imagination functions almost entirely outside
history: what is, has been, and what has been, will be, so that
writing for him is the struggle to find new means to express this
proposition of stasis.
In
this struggle is one source of the tension
of his work.
Another related source is in the unending dialectic between
what he is "expressing" on an immediate level in the words and
gestures, and his obsession with the literary and dramatic impulses
in
themselves, the human need to say and show. This is his truest
subject: the illusion that our speech and movements make a
difference,
the knowledge that this is an illusion, and the tragi-
