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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. + 35 +
