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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. Nn ww +34»
