Page 38 [38]
OCR
THE THEATRICALIZATION OF ENDGAME... affinities with Brams dark world, enclosed and isolated, bearing no relation whatsoever to a world or reality out there. Charles Juliet recounts Beckett describing Bram as a hermit, or some anxious, shivering dog, living in a studio that might very well resemble Hamm’s shelter where the only decoration is a picture with its face to the wall, unseen for the audience: “It was dreadful, he says, Bram was living in a terrible poverty, all alone in his studio with his paintings, which he was showing to nobody. He had just lost his wife and was so dejected... He let me get a little closer to him. It was a case of finding a way to speak to him to try to get through to him." It is not too difficult to recognize in Hamm’s description of the lunatic the painter and engraver Bram, for whom representative images have no value, since the inner world of everything merely consists of ashes. HAMM: — lonce knewa madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter — and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! [...] He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. [...] He alone had been spared. [...] Forgotten. Clov and Hamm’s dwelling mirrors Bram’s inner world of darkness, where time does not exist to chronicle a life. Should it surprise that when Clov wants to install time by hanging up the alarm clock it is at the expense of the picture, Bram’s very medium? As opposed to the telescope as an instrument for looking out, orientation inwards is also reflected (by lack thereof) in Hamm’s complete and Clov’s partial blindness. Not only did Bram consider himself — and man in general — as unable to see the truth of the world for which his work might be the best possible solace, “Painting is the guide to the blind man that is me," he was also literally strongly myopic, if we are to believe an anecdote by his agent Jacques Putman. Charles Juliet recounts how Bram once found a pair of spectacles in a dustbin and kept them for twenty years. When Putman eventually accompanied him to have his eyes checked, the optician was flabbergasted and asked him what his job was, to which Bram responded: “I paint my inner life." Bram and Hamm’s inner universe is a world in which structuring principles fall flat completely due to lack of a reality that could connect them. Hence, Clov’s complaint that he was taught a language by Hamm that apparently does 13 Juliet: Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, 142; my italics. 4 Beckett: Dramatic Works, 122. 15 Juliet: Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, 98. 1° Tbid., 106. + 37 +
