Oldal 35 [35]
LAURENS DE Vos
a play about Bram and Geer’s work, indeed as a painting itself. Moreover, if
a cubist poetics, as I will show relying on Sartre, underlies both Geer van
Velde’s paintings and Endgame, the shift of perception that accompanies this
aesthetics may account for the play’s preoccupation with blindness.
The characters and situation in Endgame present themselves as purely
formalist elements that only exist in the environment of the theatre for which
they are created. There are hardly any references to an outside world, except
a few vague descriptions by Clov when he looks outside through two small
windows. Neither we nor the characters themselves have any idea where they
are, where the play is situated, in which milieu, which period. Neither do we
get to know much about their backgrounds. Alain Robbe-Grillet attributes
Beckett’s characters with nothing but the Heideggerian quality of being-there,
Dasein: “The condition of man, says Heidegger, is to be there. The theatre
probably reproduces this situation more naturally than any of the other
ways of representing reality. The essential thing about a character in a play
is that he is ‘on the scene”: there”? As Hamm so poignantly states, “Outside of
here it’s death.”* We indeed find in Endgame “the essential theme: presence.
Everything that is, is here; off the stage there is nothing, non-being.”*
In a play such as Play, the poetics of a formalist independence of the text
and the theatrical world without context is contrasted with the presence of
a narrative about adultery; on the basis of the storyline the three characters
do seem to share some extra-textual past. On the other hand, though, their
comments seem to reflect as much their uneasiness with the light alternately
shining on one of them. The beam of light, however, is no instrument
highlighting the character that wishes to speak his or her mind, but seems
more an instrument of torture that forces them to speak. While W1 is cursing
the “hellish half-light,” M is craving for “[s]ilence and darkness.”* In the case
of an existence that is entirely dependent on the theatrical situation and its
spotlights, turning off the light indeed means non-existence and death. This
is why, turning back to Endgame, Mother Pegg has died of darkness. “Esse
est percipi [To be is to be perceived],”° recalling Berkeley’s statement that
also precedes Film. Leaving the stage equals death. Hence, “There’s nowhere
else.”’ If the entire universe is a theatre, this by necessity turns Hamm and
Alain Robbe-Grillet: Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’ in the Theatre, in Martin Esslin (ed.):
Samuel Beckett: A collection of critical essays, New Jersey, Englewood Cliffs, 1965, 108.
Samuel Beckett: Dramatic Works, The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. III, New York, Grove,
2006, 143.
Robbe-Grillet: Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’, 114.
Beckett: Dramatic Works, 365.
Ibid., 371.
Ibid., 96.
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