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RICHARD GILMAN
extraneous. But how is that decided? What is essential? In both
the novels and the plays it is as though Beckett has attempted with
increasingly narrow fervor to make the obligation to express
fun ction with the absolute minimum of support from the tradi–
tional materials of fiction and drama. The result is that he would
seem to have reached the taut, dry, naked spirit of literature and
theater themselves.
In this his later dramatic work is the textural equivalent of, as
well as almost surely one inspiration for, the Polish director
J
erzy
Grotowski's "poor theater," a theater stripped of nearly every
conventional physical means of seduction and allure. In both cases
the ,motive (although much less conscious and deliberate on
Beckett's part) is to purify the stage of its contamination by the
obvious, by "lifelikeness," which leads to surrogate, reflected
experience instead of the new and autonomous.
It
is to make the
theater yield dry, linear gestures rather than expansive ones, to
allow what we might call its metaphysical raison d'etre -- its
purpose as the enactment of presence -- to detach itself from the
banality of the merely sensational.
Happy Days
is Beckett's most savagely ironic play, if one can
speak of so detached a literary principle as irony operating at the
level of intense vision he attains here. A tour de force for an
actress, it is doubtless the most difficult of his theater works to do
well, for no other of them combines such fierce precision of
mise-en-scene, such exactly calibrated movement and speech, with
so full a complement of what we think of homely sentiment -and
even sentimentality. It is in just this relationship of the play's
commonplace emotional substance to the counterweight of its
grotesque physical schema and unrelenting procedures that, as in
similar kinds of antinomies in Beckett, the play's fascination lies.
Winnie, the woman buried up to her waist in sand in the first
act and to her neck in the second, is a victim of time in an even
more explicit and so more theatrically visible way than Beckett's
earlier characters. His obsession with the Greek story of Zeno and
the heap of millet is well known, and from this he no doubt
derived the central physical situation. Once again it is time piling
up around you, not carrying you to a destination but burying you
