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RICHARD GILM A N
comic making of speech and gestures in the face of the knowledge.
The materials may vary, like those of an orator on different
occasions, but t hey remain those of a voice engaging in utterance
precisely for its own sake, for the sake, that is, of meeting the
obligation of making human presence known .
Such materials do not add up to a reassembling of the
phenomenal world such as we ordinarily expect from literature
and drama, nor do they constitute a commentary on the present
state of personality or society. "He is not writing about some–
thing, he is writing something," Beckett once said of Joyce, and it
is even truer of himself. What he is writing -- bringing into being
--in
Endgame
is another version of his ur-text on the human self
caught between actuality and desire, the craving fer justification
and its objective absence; at the same time it is a drama to show
the impulse of playing - - by which we fill in the void -- to
show it up.
If
it is more desperate than its predecessor, this isn't
because Beckett has seen the world grow grimmer or has less hope
than before (he had never had any), but because he has pushed the
undertaking of artifice closer to the edge, cut down the number of
possible ways out. There is not even a Godot now to provide by
his felt absence a prospect of a future.
From the opening "tableau," as the stage directions call it,
with Hamm sitting covered with a sheet like a piece of furniture in
storage, Clov standing "motionless by the door, his eyes fixed on
him," and the ash cans adding their silly, mysterious presence, the
play proceeds to unfold as though it were the partly self-mocking
work of a weary company of barnstormers who have set up their
portable stage in some provincial town and laid out their shabby
scenery and props. The text they speak has a "content" of
desolation and end-of-the-world malaise, but it is interspersed with
literary ironies and internal theatrical references and jokes, all of
which go to sustain the thesis, most brilliantly propounded by
Hugh Kenner, that
Endgame
is a play about playing, a per–
formance about performing.
"What is there to keep me here?" Clov asks at one point, to
which Hamm (ham actor? the reading is now a commonplace)
replies, "The dialogue." "What about having a good guffaw the
two of us together?" Hamm says . Clov (after reflection): "I
