74
RICHARD GILMAN
the quotidian and commonplace as the unknowing harborers of
realities beyond the actual.
The presence of Willie, the man who has been behind her
mound throughout, has led to various sociological interpretations
of
Happy Days,
the most extreme and vigorously argued being
that of Albert Bermel, who sees the play as a study of a dead
marriage. There is a certain thin plausibility to this but it is
quickly exhausted in the light of Beckett's whole body o f work
and that of the play's internal evidence. Willie and Winnie may
indeed be husband and wife but marriage is scarcely the play 's
subject.
If
it were, why should almost all the dramaturgical energy
be expended on Winnie, and what are we to make of the mound of
sand, the bell, the blazing light? Are they symbols of domestic
routine and marital moribundity? Beckett is hardly the writer to
provide us with such triteness.
Kenneth Tynan made the same kind of reductive error when
he interpreted Ionesco's
The Bald Soprano
as a satire on English
suburban life instead of seeing it as a play about the nature of
language. In the case of
Happy Days
Willie is there to be the
other,
to keep Winnie from solipsism and so keep the play from be–
coming an anecdote of isolation or loneliness, and also to provide
by his marginally greater mobility a perspective on her own
immurement. Neither Tynan nor Bermel can imagine a play with–
out an "objective" subject, a theme transcribable into social or
psychic data. But Beckett has always functioned at a level much
beyond that; his effort has been to reconstitute human life as
dramatic or literary artifact, not to offer an account of it as
though he were simply a gifted savant.
Since
Happy Days,
written in 1961, Beckett has produced
very little for the theater, although he has done a few short pieces
for radio and television and a film script for Buster Keaton called,
simply,
Film.
The most impressive stage work during these years
has been
Play,
which appeared in 1964. These generic titles are
indications of how closely his attention had become fixed on the
natures of the mediums, on the way the forms function beneath
their ostensible contents. A piece that runs no more than seven–
teen or eighteen minutes -- although the script calls for it to be
repeated without a break --
Play
is a work in which dramatic
