PARTISAN REVIEW
75
action has been reduced to
ar
absolute minimum, or rather one in
which such action has underfone another change of definition.
The direction of his theater had been toward decreasing
movement, with Winnie's incarceration the culminating point until
Play .
Here the "characters" are two nameless women and a man,
whose heads protruding from urns are the only parts we see and
whose speech, together with the movements of a spotlight that
shifts in a strictly arranged choreography from one speaker to
another, make up the work's entire scheme of action. They pre·
sumably are dead, which is to say past all possibility of change;
immured in time, now wholly arrested, they can only rehearse
certain events and recognitions of their lives, the central experi·
ence being an adulterous affair which the man had had with one of
the women (the other is his wife), repeating the frozen "drama"
again and again.
"What a curse, mobility!" Winnie exclaims in
Happy Days
and the words are more than simply another of the play's ironies.
For mobility is that which defines creaturely life but it is also the
agency of human illusions, for illusion rests on the capacity to
imagine
something not present
and so implies movement, change.
This is especially true in literature, our formalization of illusion,
for there the freedom to move, from one abstract place or time to
another and so from one condition to a new one, is absolute. All
fiction and drama, no matter what their content may be, supply us
with the illusion, in Beckett's terms, of difference, change through
movement.
And so his perhaps doomed effort has been to make litera–
ture and drama out of as little of such mobility as possible, in
order to force the mind to attend to unchanging -- unmoving -–
realities. From the passivity of Belacqua in his first stories to the
incher through the slime of
How It Is
his fiction has reduced the
area in which his creatures can move, so that it might be seen what
it means to be in the human condition, to know oneself at the
metaphysical -- beyond the corporeal -- heart of things. The
plays have proceeded in much the same way. An impossibility, this
presenting of significances or perceptions detached from our
recognizable days and hours, our progress through sensate life ...
but that is the paradox of his art.
