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THE THEATRICALIZATION OF ENDGAME...
Clov into actors. Particularly the former is very much aware of the role he
is assigned: "Me... To play," he states several times, while towards the end
getting ready for his last soliloguy.
When Becketts characters do not represent something in some distant
time and place, but simply present themselves as themselves, we find Beckett
applying the same poetics that he appreciates so much in the paintings of
his Dutch friends Bram and Geer van Velde. In his essay La peinture des
van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon published in Cahiers dart (1945/46),
Beckett describes Bram van Velde’s paintings as not referring to anything in
the outside world. They are what they are. Letting go of the classical mimesis
idea, he also breaks up the Saussurean connection between signifier and
signified. In his comments Beckett adheres to a formalist poetics that has no
intention of representing the world outside the painting.
To write a purely visual apperception is to write a sentence without signification.
It speaks for itself. Because every time we want to subject the words to a real act of
transference, every time we want them to express something other than the words,
they organize themselves so they cancel each other.’
It will come as no surprise that Beckett feels at home with the van Velde
brothers in that he recognizes in their art the impossibility to express, which
also marks his own writings. The continuity of trial and failure is at the heart
of Bram van Velde’s poetics too: “I paint the impossibility of painting,” he is
recorded saying.'’ His paintings do not express anything; that is, his art is
liberated from an ideal or a material cause, but the impossibility to express
does not paralyze him. His art, according to Beckett, presents us with the
conditions of non-expression.
A few years later, in Peintres de l’Empéchement (1948), Beckett expands on
his art criticism regarding both brothers’ oeuvre and poetics. Though they
start from the same problem — the issue of the impossibility of representation
itself — they follow two different paths to pursue this question.
Because what is left to represent if the essence of the object is that it withdraws
from any representation?
What is left to represent are the conditions of this withdrawal. They take one or
other of two forms, depending on the subject.
8 Ibid., 92, 140, 151.
° Samuel Beckett: Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, New York,
Grove, 1984, 125; my translation. French original: “Ecrire aperception purement visuelle,
c'est écrire une phrase dénuée de sens. Comme de bien entendu. Car chaque fois qu’on veut
faire faire aux mots un véritable travail de transbordement, chaque fois qu’on veut leur faire
exprimer autre chose que des mots, ils s’alignent de façon à s’anuller mutuellement.”
10 Juliet: Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, 43.
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