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RICHARD GILMAN
inwardness and have the capacity to imagine it. At its most formal
level the expression of our inwardness becomes literature, drama,
which, as Ibsen beautifully described it in
The Master Builder,
make up "castles in the air."
What
Endgame
demonstrates is how our self-dramatizing
impulses, our need for building Ibsen's castles, is inseparable from
the content of our experiences, how we do not in' fact know our
experience except in literary or histrionic terms. And this is
independent of whether the experience is solemn or antic, exalted
or base. We give it reality and dignity by expressing it, we validate
it by finding, or rather hopelessly seeking, the "right" words and
forms. This is what is going on in
Endgame
beneath the lugubri–
ousness and anomie: "Something is taking its course," Clov says;
not their lives -- they are actors, they have no "lives" -- but
their filling in of the emptiness with the.ir drama.
"By his stress on the actors as professional men and so on the
playas an occasion in which they operate," as Kenner has written,
Beckett turns the piece from a report, however fantastic, on the
state of the world to an image of the world being dramatized.
In
this performance the actor is not an interpreter or incarnation of
surrogate emotion for the audience but simply the professional
embodiment of an activity we all engage in, at every moment, to
build the wall against silence and nonbeing. "Outside of here it's
death," Hamm says, and what he means is not that death is closing
in but that
inside,
in this stage-as-room and room-as-stage, the play
goes forward to enact the human answer to it, the absurd, futile,
nobly unyielding artifice of our self-expres,sion.
If
the true action and subject of the play are therefore the
enactment of despair rather than despair itself, then the relation–
ships of the characters to one another have to be seen in an
untraditional light. Like Pozzo and Lucky, Hamm and Clov have
been thought of as impotent master and sullenly rebellious servant
(capitalism and the working class? imperialism and emerging
nations?) or, more subtly, as paradigmatic of every human relation
of exploitation and tyranny. But once again this is to take their
connection too literally, at its verbal surface. We ought to remem–
ber that Beckett is not interested in human relations as such but in
human ontology, in the status of the stripped, isolated self
