PARTISAN REVIEW
69
couldn't guffaw again today." Hamm (after reflection): "Nor
I."
"Let's stop playing!" Clov pleads near the end; Hamm calls one
remark of his an "aside" and says that he's "warming up for my
last soliloquy"; Clov says of his departure at the end that "this is
what we call making an exit." It is all theatrical, rehearsed, in a
deeply important sense
perfunctory;
the scene is not one of
despair in a darkening world as much as a weary, self-conscious
enactment of what such a scene is supposed to be like, of what it
would be like
in literature.
Endgame's
thoroughgoing artificiality as tragedy, its self–
derision -- in his opening speech Hamm says, "Can there be
misery -- (he
yawns )
--
loftier than mine?" -- point directly
to its imaginative purpose. As in all of Beckett's work what is
being placed on sorrowfully mocking exhibition is not the state of
the world or of inner life as any philosopher or sociologist or
psychiatrist could apprehend it (or as we ourselves could in our
amateur practice of those roles), but the very myths of meaning,
the legends of significance that go into the making of humanistic
culture, providing us with a sense of purpose and validity separ–
ated by the thinnest wall from the terror of the void.
It is not that Beckett doesn't experience this emptiness -–
no living writer feels it more -- but that he is more pertinently
obsessed, as an artist, with the self-dramatizing means we take to
fill
it. The mockery that fills his first plays is a function of his
awareness of this activity, not a repudiation of it; we can't do
otherwise,
Waiting for Godot
and
Endgame
are saying, we fill the
time with our comic or lugubrious or tragic dramas. Still, we have
to know that they are inventions, made up in the midst of
indifferent nature -- stone, tree, river, muskrat, wasp -- all 'that
has no question to ask and no "role" to take on.
Thus the derision does not deny the horror, nor the stress on
artifice annul the real. But palpable actuality isn't Beckett's sub–
ject, which is, as has been said, the relationship between actuality
and our need to express it, to
express ourselves.
Such expression is
always "artificial," always self-conscious (since it is consciousness
of being conscious that we are impelled by) and never directly
"true." "Matter has no inward," Coleridge once wrote, and it is
this truth that we are trapped in, material beings who crave
