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UNMAKING

In Endgame, the world the audience witnesses is a post-apocalyptic world in the process of emptying, of running down. Whether it is Beckett’s effort to realistically envision a post-atomic wasteland, as critics and producers have been tempted to think (although the lack of tides [62] seems to mean that the moon is also absent, which implies some catastrophe greater than mere global apocalypse), or a purely imaginative setting is moot. In either case it is a world taking its course, unwinding. There is no more wind, no rain. The light--again suggesting a universal cataclysm--is entirely grey and seems to be dimming, suggesting that all discrete and colored objects have been blended, rendered to ash. The only remaining known creatures are the four occupants of the shelter, perhaps another boy outside, a flea (quickly exterminated) and a half-dead rat (insects and rodents being perhaps the most adaptable creatures). Clov tries to grow some seeds but these have not sprouted. Consequently, food supplies are almost exhausted and unreplenishable. Nature is only present in its absence, in the deterioration of the remaining natural things: as Hamm puts it, nature’s presence is still felt only in that “We lose our hair, our teeth!” (11). Furthermore, this deterioration seems to have been going on for years. If the boy in Hamm’s story is Clov (an uncomfirmable possibility), there has been a shortage of food for the span of years between his being a “little boy” and his present adulthood (52).

The inhabitants of the shelter are then victims of whatever catastrophe has occurred. They are all in marked physical decline: Nagg and Nell are shankless and losing their sight, hearing and strength; Nell can’t manage tears and loses her pulse early in the play. Hamm is blind, immobile and bleeding; Clov’s eyes are “bad” and the pain in his legs makes it hard for him to walk, difficult to think and impossible to sit. Scarry lists among the basic attributes of pain its “obliteration of the contents of consciousness,” an effect she calls “world dissolution” (54). The sheer intensity and bodily presence of pain blocks out or distances the world beyond the self; in this sense, the suffering of each of the characters causes a diminishment of the lived-world corresponding to the material emptying of the world.

Hamm, despite his claims of superior suffering, is a bit better off than his parents and servant. He has control of the larder, as he previously had control of apparently substantial supplies of corn and fuel. His haughtiness with the needy father of his story suggests that his preapocalyptic status was petit--and here definitely petty--bourgeois and that for whatever unknown reason he has been spared, his possessions--unlike Belshazzar’s --persisting into this new deteriorating reality. In a world gradually running out of things--artifacts, food, people, nature, etc--this gives Hamm great power.

From this position of material power, Hamm participates in the “course” of this emptying world. Perhaps to consolidate his power, Hamm, through Clov’s agency, seems to be in the process of aggressively emptying the world of the last vestiges of humanity and of life itself. Hamm orders Clov (who disregards this command) to dispose of his parents--“this muck”--by chucking them in the sea (23). Clov’s “nothing ... nothing ... good ... good” while scanning the earth reveals the pleasure he takes in the world being “corpsed.” Clov exterminates his flea and seems to be torturing a rat to death as if simple extirpation were not sufficient for any remaining creatures. Surprisingly, his first impulse when seeing the boy--the action he anticipates Hamm ordering him to undertake--is to take the gaff out and exterminate the “potential procreator” (78). Hamm appeals to Clov to do him in with the same gaff or the axe. This response is the exact opposite of the stereotypical “last man on earth” scenario, enacted in science fiction and ship-wreck novels, in which characters desperately hang on to life and every remaining sign of it, with the hope of either being rescued, however unexpectedly, or of prolonging or recreating human civilization in its previous form. The important difference is that Hamm and Clov have no reason for hope. From the evidence they have--at least until the “appearance” of the boy--there is no one to rescue them and nothing to sustain life of any kind: “you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” (53).

Apart from this active emptying of the physical world, Hamm has been engaged at least since the unspecified apocalypse in another sort of voiding, also involving the diminishing material objects of their world--one which can be analyzed in the terms developed by Scarry in her discussion of pain and imagining in The Body in Pain. Scarry’s fascinating study focuses on the “sharability” of felt-experience, examining both sides of this issue: on one hand, the imagining and creating of artifacts which communicate our own bodily experience and our desire that others be relieved of the aversive effects of bodiliness; on the other, the consequences for human relations of failing to recognize the human other in artifactual projections of interiority. Pain presents a problem to human interaction because while it is so “incontestably and unnegotiably present” for the sufferer that “having pain” may seem the felt equivalent of “having certainty,” to the onlooker, hearing about pain is so elusive that it could represent what it is to “have doubt” (4).

In order to alleviate pain, “the felt-attributes of pain [must be] lifted into the visible world” (12). As with the sharing of interiority in general, Scarry suggests that this is accomplished through verbal and material artifacts (22). Pain might then be expressed by reference to the object causing the pain (“there’s a rock in my shoe”) or to an object that could be causing the pain (“it feels as if there were a rock in my shoe”); in this way the person in pain communicates a sense of his or her pain to the sympathetic onlooker. But only the sympathetic onlooker: “if the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body, then the sentient fact of the person’s suffering will become knowable to a second person” (12). However, these objectifications of pain can be “attached to a referent other than the human body” (13), as is the case in torture. The essence of torture is in fact the appropriation of “the sheer material factualness” of the body to lend an unstable cultural (political or ideological) construct “realness and certainty” (14). The logic of this effect is that by increasing the prisoner’s pain you diminish his world, with a resulting comparative increase to the torturer’s world (37).

Torture’s world-dissolving powers are redoubled by the use of everyday, mundane artifacts as weapons. In Scarry’s analysis, all such artifacts, as products of a perception of a human need and a concrete realization (created by means of work) of a way to alleviate that pain carry the implicit message, “be well” (292). As such, any artifact represents both the human body and civilization in general (which Scarry defines as acts which transcend the body “in a way consonant with the body’s needs” [57]). Civilization is deconstructed for the victim by unmaking upon his body artifacts which were created with the intent of diminishing pain. His world is thus “annihilated in the very process by which it is being made to annihilate him” (44). The simultaneous distancing and deconstructing of the world of the sufferer is the true agony of torture. Another concomittant effect of torture is that while the sufferer’s own world dissolves, he becomes less present to the torturer. By appropriating the signs of his pain, the torturer in effect makes the victim disappear with his world.

In spite of the trend toward depletion in Endgame’s world, spectators might notice that material objects play a significant role in the staged realization of its world. Given the temporal and spatial nonreferentiality of the play, the number of particular objects displayed or named is remarkable. If we follow Scarry’s insight, each of them can be read as a projection of an aspect of lived bodiliness. Scarry describes three levels of projection. At the most concrete level, a specifiable body part is projected, so that Clov’s glass represents “a projected materialization of the lens of the human eye” (282). To take another of Scarry’s examples, the shelter that makes up the set of the play and the entire present staged reality is

an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body, its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world yet in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move out into the world and allows the world to enter. (38)

The sheets, Hamm’s toque and even the garbage cans are also projections of the skin.

At one step of abstraction, human capacities and needs are projected, so that “creating is undertaken to assist, amplify, or alter the felt-experience of sentience” (283). Most of the artifacts in Endgame’s world function at this level. The whistle is an objectification, dehumanizing though it seems, of the need to communicate. The pap, biscuit, sugar plum desired by Nagg, and also the gaff objectify the need for nourishment; the catheter and sand or sawdust the need for physical evacuation. The absent bicycle and Hamm’s wheeled chair express the basic need for mobility. Finally, at the second level of abstraction, aliveness or “awareness of aliveness” are projected into the material world. As Scarry puts it, because the external world is ignorant of the “hurtability” of the human body we reconceive it by “quite literally ‘making it’ as knowledgable about human pain as if it were itself animate and in pain” (289). The alarm clock which Clov produces as a means of informing Hamm whether he has died or merely left--in other words whether Hamm has been abandoned--is a crude means of making the environment responsive to Hamm’s need to gather information about his world.

Many of these humanly significant artifacts become in Endgame weapons in the hands of a torturer, of one seeking to appropriate the signs of bodied reality in order to reinforce his own fleeting world. As with the torturers described by Scarry, Hamm voids the worlds of the play’s other characters by means of these artifacts. Rather than using them as actual physical weapons, Hamm inflicts physical and psychological torture by withholding the artifactual means by which a need might be satisfied. While he still had the means to satisfy these desires, Hamm denied lamp oil to Mother Pegg and a bicycle to Clov, and presumably only provided the father in his story with corn and work after humiliating him. As Clov implies when he claims that Pegg died “Of darkness” (75), “the lack of acknowledgment and recognition [of one’s pain] becomes a ... form of negation and rejection, the social equivalent of [pain’s] physical aversiveness” (Scarry 56). Additionally, by allowing suffering to continue, Hamm allows the continued diminishment of the lived-world of the sufferer.

Though his supply of artifacts is exhausted in the present of the stage world, Hamm retains the vestiges of his previous power by dangling satisfaction before the eyes of a sufferer before finally denying it. He is still able to appropriate the sign of Nagg’s need--and therefore of Nagg’s bodiliness--by promising a sugar plum; when he informs him that there are no more, the effect is the same: his own world has been propped up at the expense of Nagg’s. By expropriating this sign he makes Nagg “disappear,” makes his lived bodiliness invisible. As Scarry (under)states it: “the derealization of artifacts may assist in taking away another person’s visibility” (22).

Hamm is apparently unable to sense the sentience of another via these projections. His lack of effectual empathy is apparent when he wonders “Can there be misery...loftier than mine?” While he recognizes that others suffer, he diminishes that suffering by making it relative to some quality in the sufferer: “Oh I am willing to believe they suffer as much as such creatures can suffer” (2). When he points out to Clov how much worse his own condition is, it is evident that he has not and indeed could not have taken Clov’s actual suffering into account in the comparison, despite the fact that he has asked and Clov has informed him of his worsening condition (12). This insensitivity to the pain of others is also manifest in his reductive cogito:

Hamm: What’s [Nagg] doing?...
Clov: He’s crying....
Hamm: Than he’s living. (62)

Here Nagg’s pain is absorbed into a proof of existence such that the actual signs of the pain of a particular sufferer and the sufferer himself disappear into Hamm’s ideological construct.

Clov has acted as the agent of Hamm’s torture, becoming a kind of torturer’s apprentice. He “bottles” Nagg and Nell; he half-kills (“You disturbed us” 54) the rat; and when Hamm’s power begins to diminish with the depletion of food and the obvious hopelessness of the condition, Clov begins to play the denier to Hamm’s desirer. He does however continue to grant some of Hamm’s requests. Specifically, he provides Hamm with knowledge, acting as his eyes by surveying the grey world without and checking on Nagg and Nell. He seems, in fact, to willingly act as Hamm’s artifact, as an objectification of his need to see and to know. His provision of the clock to satisfy Hamm’s curiosity is Clov’s final expression of this function. More ingenious than Hamm gives him credit for, it works initially to allay Hamm’s fears; yet, because of its limited sensitivity to Hamm’s situation, it becomes another means of torture: should Clov not respond and the clock not ring, it could, as planned, signify Clov’s death; however, Hamm would have no way of ruling out the other possible causes for the silence, that it was still going to ring, that the mechanism had simply failed or that Clov had betrayed him, leaving without setting the clock.

Clov also undertakes a more active role as Hamm’s torturer, the unmaker of Hamm’s reality in three other ways. First, he makes present a person whom Hamm has absented in order to undo the reality which Hamm created at her expense. Specifically, he reintroduces the particular story of Mother Pegg in answer to Hamm’s general inquiry about what has happened. Hamm did indeed know “what was happening then” for reality was conforming to the shape he was giving it at the expense of Pegg’s reality. He can respond only “feebly” to Clov’s reminder.

Second, he simply refuses to satisfy Hamm’s physical needs. In the last fourteen pages of the play, Hamm makes seven specific request for satisfaction of a physical desire: to be given a rug for warmth (67), a kiss (67), his painkiller (71), the stuffed dog (76), to be put in his coffin (77), to be covered with the sheet (82), to be left the gaff (79). Some of these are beyond Clov’s power to supply (painkiller, rug, coffin), but his power as fetcher of Hamm’s things becomes apparent nevertheless in his denial of the artifacts. Some things are within his power and he denies them (sheet, kiss). He grants Hamm the gaff knowing that it is useless to him, perhaps to make finally apparent to Hamm his utter immobility. Touch he grants only through the mediation of the stuffed dog and any implicit wish for well-being expressed by Clov’s artifact is eliminated when it is used as weapon. So while he will act as Hamm’s animated artifact, he refuses to make himself present as an embodied other to Hamm.

Finally, in satisfying Hamm’s request for an exit speech, Clov names the needs that Hamm has not met, or no longer meets--love, friendship, beauty, order--implying Hamm’s valuelessness to him, his effective absence from Clov’s world. He also (verbally) refuses to participate any further in Hamm’s reality, the ideological construct which sustains Hamm and itself by means of the suffering and imprisonment of others:

I say to myself--sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you--one day. I say to myself--sometimes, Clov, you must be there better than that if you want them to let you go--one day. But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits. Good, it’ll never end, I’ll never go....

I open the door of my cell and go. (81)

In the end, Clov’s acts of torture are motivated by the same desire to reinforce his own reality in a world which is being emptied of material props. Although he pays back Hamm by reviving Pegg and refusing his demands, which may be judged by the audience as a just redress, Clov displays no creative impulse. His is also an effort to unmake, to assure himself of his own continued existence by means of the pain of another. Therefore, Hamm and Clov both unmake the world, voiding it of the felt-presence of others in a move which parallels the course that “something” is taking in this world--the voiding, emptying of material objects and meaning.

MAKING

The staged reality of Endgame, its voided world, creates a compelling theatrical experience for its audience. One of the most basic means for the making of this reality is by means of the props, the same artifacts used by Hamm to unmake the world. The presence of these details which are like objects in our own world suggests the reality of the space which contains them. When mundane objects such as the props in Endgame--flea powder, a small ladder, sheets--are trotted out in front of the audience, we feel like this is just a small and random sample of a much larger pool of objects. So these few props serve a kind of metonymic function, representing an absent whole greater than these few present parts.

Absent props have the same ability: the audience is likely to consider named but unseen things as having the same ontological status as the props brought onstage. The assumption is that they could have been brought onstage had there been any need to display them. In this case, many of the named but absent props are things said no longer to exist in staged world. We assume however that they did exist at one time alongside the characters and other present objects, all of which have persisted from the past into the present of the performance. This remembered presence gives the staged reality a kind of concrete extension into the past. Beckett uses present and absent props to enhance the theatrical experience. Even by drawing the audience’s attention to the many things that do not exist, then, Beckett creates a stable, creditable staged reality--though one which is emptying--which we experience in the fullness of its emptying.

Several critics have pointed out the way in which members of Beckett’s audience are made aware of their bodily presence in his theater. Worthen argues in “Beckett’s Actor” that the constraint Beckett puts upon his actors becomes an essential aspect of the meaning of plays like Play or Not I, which, he argues, “deftly reify the conditions of stage acting” (416), specifically the actor’s dual task of representation (disappearing “from view while he imitates a false, fictional reality”) and interpretation (remaining “personally accessible” as an artistic interpreter) (418). “The actor’s bodily stress dramatizes the presence of both actors and characters on stage and redirects [the audience’s] attention to the text/body dialectic” (419). In Endgame, Nagg and Nell’s garbage cans have an effect on the audience similar to that produced by the adaptation of the “bottling” image in Play. In a recent undergraduate discussion section, two women performed Nagg and Nell’s dialogue while kneeling snuggly packaged in cardboard boxes. During their wonderfully comic and compelling performance, I found myself continually noticing that they must have been uncomfortable kneeling on the hard floor. This expectation was confirmed when the woman playing Nagg uttered “Ouch” immediately upon finishing the performance, as if offering the expression of her own bodily pain as a way marking her transition between the briefly occupied staged reality and the real world of the classroom. Furthermore, both women attested to having an improved understanding of the play after embodying the roles, however briefly.

Chabert argues along similar lines that by inducing a degree of discomfort in his actor, Beckett makes the body come fully to light, and particularly the broken body. It is the negative space in which his character’s exist that give “the body its existence, its dramatic force and its reality as a working material for the stage” (24). He notes how the contrast between the general immobility onstage in Endgame and Clov’s activity invest his smallest gesture with immense significance (25). It does seems to me that if well performed, Clov’s walk alone is so physically jarring in the static on-stage world that it can set up a sympathetic somatic response in the viewer, so that we actually feel the tension of his movement.

Garner makes perhaps the most persuasive and richly realized case for the bodily awareness induced by Beckett. He bases his argument on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of consciousness as “caught up in the ambiguity of corporeality, directed toward a world of which it is inextricably a part” (448). A central notion in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is that subjectivity and objectivity are closely involved with one another, so while the body can “turn back on itself, take itself for its own proper object, and in this way accomplish a kind of reflection, it never succeeds in coinciding with itself” (451; quoting Gary Brent Madison’s Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Ohio UP, 1981, 25). Garner argues that Beckett induces a sense of “phenomenal displacement” in his audience by means of staging techniques that “violate specific norms of visual perception, expectations, that reflect the perceiving subject’s attempt to orient itself toward the perceptual subject” (455–56). For instance, by placing Hamm’s chair noticeably off-center, Beckett denies his spectators “the passive ‘self-forgetting’ of equilibriated vision” (457). Finding themselves “both disembodied toward nonexistant viewing points and uncomfortably embodied within seats which they [like Hamm it should be noted] cannot escape,” they are “unstably re-embodied as they attempt the self-transcendence of unimpeded watching.” This is a persuasive account of the feeling Beckett induces of being stuck in a spectatorial position. This type of response is evoked by the character’s repeated references to how long the current business is taking, which act almost as invitations to feel oneself sitting restlessly watching a difficult play: only a couple minutes in, Hamm is asking if Clov and we have “had enough” (5); a few minutes later he draws attention to the “slow work” going on before us which though fascinating “is not much fun” (12, 13). At about half-time, he again asks if it hasn’t “gone on long enough” (45); at three-quarters, we can’t be blamed for wondering with Clov, “Will it not soon be the end?” (61).

While all these critics are correct in noting the way Beckett brings the body of actor and audience to light, I would like to emphasize that this cuing to the presence of the body enhances the theatrical experience, that rather than breaking the illusion of the staged reality and leaving a disgruntled audience, the viewer’s inability to achieve a self-transcending viewing experience makes him or her try even harder to find this position, remaining focused on the staged reality while also maintaining a continuing sense of bodily presence in the theater.

UNMAKING

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One thing that becomes apparent once this interplay of making and unmaking in Endgame has been recognized is that the audience has participated in the same kind of appropriation of the material signs of the bodiliness of others that has been undertaken in the staged reality as an deconstructing activity. We have expropriated the physicality of the actors and their embodying artifacts to make ourselves invisible, to achieve the “self-transcendence of unimpeded watching” as Garner calls it. We have come to the theater perhaps expecting to watch the unfolding of a staged reality with the unconscious desire that this experience will make our lived reality seem more real. Beckett gives us the kind of compelling world we desire, but then calls our desire for this objectivity into question--or perhaps makes us pay for--by emptying it, while simultaneously and without our notice emptying our lived realities behind our very backs. We only gradually become aware of the effect the play is having on our world outside the theater as the characters become more and more self-referential and metatheatrical at the end of the play. Hamm’s references to asides, soliloquies, underplots, Clov’s comment on his own (untaken) exit, all these begin to make us conscious that the staged world is running out of reality, out of time, and that when it ends, we shall have lost something from our own world. As the play’s artifacts were displayed or named and then expropriated for Hamm and Clov’s own purposes, we did not notice that those things as props, as objects also simultaneously existing in the real world, were also being emptied of significance in the real world, were being deleted from the inventory of meaningfully human artifacts from our own world. Our original power as objective spectators has been gradually taken over by our “victims” as Hamm’s has by Clov, so that like Hamm, we end up stuck in our seats watching our world(s) being unmade around us. We come to recognize, only as Hamm speaks the words, that it is we and only we that remain. The staged world has been disrupted--and nevertheless has ended. The real world has been neatly deconstructed by Beckett while we innocently watched, feeling him do something to our bodies as we sat there but only recognizing the full significance too late. So, we like Hamm no longer want to finish, to end: what will we be left with after the end? We are left with nothing but ourselves: “You remain.” All the props--in both senses--are gone. The audience, as constituted or constructed in the theatrical space is all that remains in the voided world, the world made real at the expenses of being voided, cancelled out.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove, 1958.

Chabert, Pierre. “The Body in Beckett’s Theater.” Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (Autumn 1982): 23–28.

Garner, Stanton B., Jr. “‘Still Living Flesh’: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body.” Theater Journal 45 (1993): 443–60.

McMillan, Douglas and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theater : The Author as Practical Playwright and Director. vol. 1. London: Calder, 1988.

Rabillard, Sheila. “The Body in Beckett: Dénégation and the Critique of a Depoliticized Theater.” Criticism 34.1 (Winter 1992): 99–118.

Scarry, Elaine. Bodies in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley: U California P, 1985.

Worthen, William B. “Beckett’s Actor.” Modern Drama 26.4 (1983): 415–24.

---. Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater. Berkeley: U California P, 1992.