Happy Days

In Happy Days, a woman is slowly buried in hot desert sand. At first the sand reaches only her upper abdomen; later it's her neck. As a result, Winnie can barely move her body. Her only company is a largely unresponsive husband named Willie, who sits out of sight somewhere behind his wife and her mound of sand. The Sun beats down unceasingly.

Winnie's response to this bleak situation is to entrench herself in cheerfulness. She does her makeup and chats cheerfully at her husband, giggling occasionally and repeatedly blessing the "happy" day.

Winnie seems utterly determined to deny reality, but betrays her false behavior with small, panicked outbursts. In one, she recounts a traumatic memory in which a mouse scares a girl, probably Winnie's sister. In telling this story, Winnie seems to lose her self-control, screaming and repeating the same words over again and over again (300). Something in the memory scares Winnie, and confronting that thing makes Winnie too unhappy for her to think about it long.

Life in Happy Days is an absurd struggle to deny the fear of death, to go through the motions of daily routine with a smile on one's face. Often in life, this absurdity is obscured by the comfort of routine and life's myriad distractions. Beckett strips all this familiarity away by situating his characters in an extreme environment, thus leaving the essence of life—existential struggle—completely exposed.

The Tape Player

Like Hamm and Clov in Endgame, Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape needs dialogue. Without it, Krapp has little else to do but "star[e] vacuously before him" with a banana hanging from his mouth (218). To avoid this fate, and because he is alone, Krapp talks to himself. More specifically, Krapp, using a tape recorder, converses with his past and future selves, creating a dialogue that stretches through time.

Krapp's tape recording process works like memory, recording, replaying, and recording again. And while the tape recorder records with machinelike perfection, its operator can choose what to listen to and what to fast forward.

Krapp listens selectively. Some sections of the recordings Krapp rewinds and listens to repeatedly. In one such section, the younger Krapp describes having lain with a woman in a boat in the sun while under them "all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side" (223). Here, the younger Krapp's words, which evoke many senses, deal only with experience. No commentary is given.

But when commentary is given, Krapp quickly skips the tape ahead. In one section of the recording, the younger Krapp seems to approach a significant epiphany: "What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely—," but the older Krapp winds the tape forward (222). When the tape plays again, the younger Krapp says that things are "clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most—." This time, Krapp curses, and then winds the tape forward again. In each instance, the younger Krapp seems to have reached some kind of conclusion or found some kind of meaning. Yet the older Krapp doesn't listen. If he did, the dialogue would end.

People speek because they want to find meaning; as long as meaning is illusory, speech will be made. As long as speech is made, the dialogue continues, because the dialogue is speech responding to speech. So when the younger Krapp threatens Krapp with meaning, Krapp can't listen. If he did, he would find an end to the conversation; the dialogue would cease. And Krapp needs the dialogue. All that's left without it is bananas and vacuous staring.

A Bare Interior

Much of Hamm's behavior in Endgame suggests indifference towards the world. Hamm berates and belittles his cohabitants with terse commands ("Silence!"), rude observations ("You pollute the air!"), and unabashed admissions ("There are no more sugar plums!") (124, 92, 130). His abuse is physical, too: Hamm keeps his parents, Nagg and Nell, "bottled" in human litter boxes and his companion Clov constantly occupied with meaningless tasks. Hamm demonstrates little concern for other people and summarizes his attitude in a response to Clov: "to hell with the universe" (122).

Yet other evidence suggests that this self-centered behavior is the bluff of a scared man that does indeed depend on his external environment. Hamm is incapacitated: he has no sight and cannot move from a chair in the center of a room's "bare interior" (89). The abilities to see and to explore can allow an individual to master an environment; deprived of those abilities, Hamm can only feel isolated and insignificant. Indeed, he likens himself to a "speck in the void, in the dark" (115). Nagg verifies his son's sense of isolation when he tells an anecdote about Hamm, as a "tiny boy," calling for his father because he was "frightened, in the dark" and Nagg was his "only hope" (130). Not only has Hamm always felt alone, he's also always depended on others for comfort. If, as a child in the night, comfort was Hamm's father, as a man in the bare interior, comfort is Clov and conversation.

Hamm and Clov depend on their interactions together to stave off silence, stillness, and isolation. When Clov wonders what keeps him in Hamm's company, Hamm replies, "the dialogue" (132). Hamm and Clov engage in a near-constant dialogue of words and actions. The two men may feign bitterness towards each other, but each seems to benefit from the engagement. This dependency is never clearer than when Hamm imagines Clov's departure:

   
     HAMM: If you leave me how shall I know?
     CLOV: [briskly] Well you simply whistle me and if I don't come running it means I've left you

     HAMM: You won't come and kiss me goodbye?

Hamm's last remark might be disingenuous, but from the length of the discussion (Hamm continues to ponder how he'd know if Clov had left him), it's clear that Hamm fears Clov's absence. Contrary to his indifferent attitude, Hamm depends on the people around him.

Waiting for Godot

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon reminisce, converse, and wonder, because these are the things people do when they wait, and waiting is what Vladimir and Estragon do. 

Like the bed-bound storytellers and devising devisors before them, Vladimir and Estragon must create in order for something to come. That something might not be Godot, but it can be memories, observations, and hopes–all things that don't come until created. 

A dead tree symbolizes the desolation in Godot. Fuel for creativity doesn't abound, so Vladimir and Estragon begin a metacommentary, in essence burning parts of their own ship to keep the dialogue going:

     VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow.

     ESTRAGON: What for?

     VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot.

     ESTRAGON: Ah! [Silence.] He didn't come?

     VLADIMIR: No.

     ESTRAGON: And now it's too late.

     VLADIMIR: Yes, now it's night.

     ESTRAGON: And if we dropped him? [Pause.] If we dropped him?

     VLADIMIR: He'd punish us. [Silence. He looks at the tree.] Everything's dead but the tree. 

     (Vol. III 83)

Death or waiting–these are Vladimir and Estragon's choices. The selection seems to be waiting, but only barely–a plan to hang themselves from the tree is tabled for a later date because of logistics. 

"Try again. Fail again. Fail Better": The (First) Trilogy

I think that Beckett's writing is a search for the irreducible—the stillness, the silence, the nothing left over when everything nonessential has been discarded.

This drive to discard appears in (and increases throughout) Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. First, Beckett abandons narrative structure: plot, setting, and character identities blur or disappear altogether as the novels' perspectives move out of the familiar, external world and into the chaos of the interior mind. Beckett also abandons nonessential elements of language: line breaks, periods, and unnecessary words appear less and less, creating an amorphous stream of words that parallels the thinking mind. The resulting fiction is narrow in scope (limited to a bed, then to a head) and simple in construction (ultimately consisting of a 100+ page block of text).

But narrow in scope and simple in construction as it may be, the writing in Beckett's trilogy is not irreducible, but, rather, closer to the opposite of irreducible. Like the thoughts of a human mind, the writing is discursive, circling ideas, leaving gaps in its progression, forgetting earlier words, and filling volumes. The very act of writing the trilogy engenders the destruction of stillness, silence, and nothingness and the creation of movement, sound, and ever-reducible and critiquable somethingess.

In fact, the harder Beckett tries to boil away narrative order and grammatical conventions, the more spectacularly he fails to attain the irreducible. No longer bound by the limits of literary tradition or grammar, Beckett's writing is free to expand almost infinitely, and it does: by the final book of the trilogy, single paragraphs are ballooning to over 100 pages, and Beckett seems forced to cut the experiment off before he is consumed.

This is the paradox of Beckett's fiction: that capturing the essence of nothing requires something. The narrator of The Unnamable says it himself: "the search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue" (293). Writers try to reach irreducible truths with language, but language becomes the obstacle to irreducible truths. Language is self-perpetuating; it becomes a response to itself, at once both "poison and antidote" (292).

Beckett and the irreducible

The Photograph

Malone, the closest thing in Malone Dies to a narrator, writes about a photograph owned by the probable mental patient Macmann depicting Macmann's caretaker and lover Moll as a girl, who on the day of the picture-taking celebrated her fourteenth birthday outside with a Punch and Judy puppet show.

In old age, Moll has a "dreadful smile" and a penchant for vomiting (273). Her girlhood self was equally charming: posing for the camera near a rose-covered trellis and a chair, Moll "diligently presse[s] her lips together, in order to hide her great buck-teeth" (273).

It comes as no surprise, then, that "what [Macmann] like[s] best in this picture" is not his lover but "the chair, the seat of which seemed to be made of straw" (273).

Still, the photograph seems to resonate with Macmann, who (although this thought may belong to Malone (though it may not matter because Malone may be Macmann)) imagines that "the roses must have been pretty, they must have scented the air" (273). With such imagining, Macmann assimilates Moll's memories, experiencing aspects of a birthday he did not experience.

Or did he?

Traditionally, Punch and Judy shows were held in seaside towns. Macmann's own town is near the sea, and it's mentioned that Macmann eventually "[tears] up this photograph and [throws] the bits in the air, one windy day" (273). Windy day. Where better to find wind than the coast? Perhaps Macmann visited the seashore, saw a rose-covered trellis, and watched a puppet show, and the photograph represents the memory of these experiences. Or perhaps Malone had these experiences and gave them to his character Macmann.

In just one paragraph, a day is depicted in a photograph contemplated by a character devised by a writer named Malone.* A similar chain, or hierarchy, of existences appears in "Company," in which a "cantankerous other" is aware of a voice which is aware of man laying down. In Malone Dies, as in other Beckett works, consciousnesses merge and the fictionalized past becomes inseparable from present reality.

*And of course, there's a being even higher being on this chain: the writer himself, Samuel Beckett.

Moran the Parent: Part Two

Continued from Moran the Parent: Part One

Through the second half of Molloy, Moran transforms into something like a delirious woodsman. From what can be understood of his increasingly incoherent narration, he eats little and camps outside of towns—with names like Turdy, Hole, and Condom—that may not exist. Time passes in days, then weeks, then months, and Moran forgets the very purpose of his trip: "I still did not know what I was to do with Malloy, when I found him" (152).

As the strict order of his previous life erodes, Moran's role as a parent reverses. While once he cast himself as a powerful but unappreciated father ("That was all the thanks I got" he thinks, watching his sick son grimace during a forced meal), now, robbed and abandoned by that same son and finding a paltry 15 shillings left in his possession, he says "my first feeling was of gratitude for his leaving me this little sum... and I saw in this a kind of delicacy!" (155). Moran, who once so frequently congratulated himself on his tough-love parenting, has become dependent on his child. Soon, his hope for a reunion with young Jacques morphs into a desire for a father figure of his own:

I dallied with the hopes that.... my son, his anger spent, would have pity on me and come back to me! Or that Molloy... would come to me... and grow to be a friend, and like a father to me, and would help me do what I had to do, so that Youdi would not be angry with me and would not punish me! (156)

For all the fear he sought to drive into his son, more and more, Moran—not his son—resembles a scared child.

But as Moran spirals lower (to Gaber: "Is [Youdi] angry?... I'm asking you if he is angry, I cried"), the question becomes: Is the change in Moran, or the way in which he is presented (158)?