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where you are. This shift in metaphor from the traditional one of
time as a current to that of an inert substance is crucial in all of
Beckett, but nowhere has it been made more palpable . Winnie is
in
time, the phrase we use so lightly; imprisoned there, she lives with
decreasing mobility, be'ing able at first to move her head and arms
and later only her head. The implication is that were the play to
go on the sands would finally cover her up, like an object in the
desert.
More than this, she lives without past or future, since these
imply continuity, extension. When Beckett directed the play in
Germany in 1971, Ruby Cohn tells us, his
regiebuch
("produc–
tion book") contained a note that the script's broken speech and
action should be rela ted to the discontinuity of time, the fact that
for Winnie time is experienced as "an incomprehens ible transport
from one inextricable present to the next." He al so told the
actress who played Winnie that the bag, from which she takes the
objects -- toothbrush, comb, lipstick, etc. -- tha t are the basis
for almost all of the physical action, was her "friend," while the
bell which sounds at the b,eginning and end of each "day" was her
"enemy."
In his essay on Proust, Beckett wrote that "habit is a com–
promise effected between the individual and his environment, or
between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the
guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning conductor of his
existence." And he went on to quote Proust's remark that "habit
is a second nature," keeping "us in ignorance of the first" and
being "free of its cruelties and enchantments."
It is habit, then, that makes Winnie's existence in the sand
acceptable to her, as it makes life bearable for us all, at the
expense of cruelties and enchantments. This is the human truth of
the play, the burden of its insight. Dramatically, the utter lack of
awareness on Winnie's part that there is anything frightfu l or even
untoward in her situation is exemplary of one of the most pro–
foundly original aspects of Beckett's art. Neither Winnie nor any
of his other characters ever give an indication of being in anything
but the most unremarkable set of circumstances; the effect is to
give the fantastic a "natural" quality, to eliminate the usual
distance between the grotesque and the normal, and so to reveal
