PARTISAN REVIEW
71
beneath social elaboration. It is the requirement of the stage that
there be at least duality, tension demanding otherness, that turns
his plays away from the nearly solipsistic interior monologues of
his novels.
Ye..t something is carried over from the fiction to the drama,
and it is a central clue to Beckett's new dramaturgy.
If
Hamm and
Clov do not represent or incarnate any types discoverable in the
social world, they are not even discrete personalities, except as
they possess a sort of provisional and tactical individuation as a
source of dialogue and therefore of dramatic propulsion. For
many things about the play suggest that there is really only one
consciousness or locus of being in the room, a consciousness akin
to that of the "narrator" of the novels, so that it is more than
plausible to take the room or stage as the chamber of the mind
and the figures in it as the mind's inventions, the cast of characters
of its theater. This is almost irresistably indicated by a passage in
one of Hamm's soliloquies: "Then babble, babble, words, like the
solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to
be together and whisper together, in the dark."
Clov would then be an extension of Hamm, the seated,
reigning, perhaps dreaming figure. Hamm has invented a servant to
be his eyes and agent of mobility, as we speak of our senses and
legs serving us, and he has reinvented his parents, turning them
into his own grotesque children. He is now complete, the play can
be staged, the desparate drama in the dark. And Beckett's play
Endgame
takes on still another implication: that it is an illusion
that there are fellow actors in our dramas; we have to invent them
as
they invent us; we are all children in the dark, solitary, bab–
bling, inconsolable. But we play, in this case the
end game,
the last
phase of an abstract life worked out in the mind.
Since
Endgame
Beckett's plays have become shorter and
emptier of what we think of as dramatic action. But in direct
relation to this they have become technically even more astonish–
ing. Like the fiction, where the superficially diverse and active cast
of characters of
More Pricks than Kicks
dwindles down to the
solitary crawler in the mud of
How It Is,
the plays have followed a
more or less steady course toward the elimination of everything
