Oldal 39 [39]
LAURENS DE Vos
not mean anything anymore, thereby referring to Shakespeares Caliban in
The Tempest, not only applies to the servant but is — literally — universally
felt by all four characters. Once what J. L. Austin would call the performative
function of language is taken apart, it loses all signification. When the promise
of a sugar-plum to Nagg or a pain-killer to Hamm turns out to be not kept,
in retrospect it will have been nothing more than a non-meaning, a hollow
phrase, as hollow as the walls of the theatrical set on which Hamm knocks.
So is Clov’s threat that he may leave Hamm when it appears that “[t]here’s
nowhere else.”!” Words have become empty signifiers with no connection to
a meaningful reality. Time indicators merely refer back to themselves and as
stimuli trigger at most an automatic, instinctive but equally meaningless effect,
as in Nell’s elegiac sighing for the word “yesterday.” Here too, Beckett’s words
about Bram’s paintings apply all too well to Endgame, a world that has equally
come to a standstill because, as Hamm proclaims near the end of the play,
“time was never and time is over”'®: “space and body, completed, unalterable,
torn from time by the time maker.”’* No wonder then that Hamm’s suggestion
“Perhaps it’s a little vein,” of which Nagg explicitly concludes that “[t]hat means
nothing,””° will later turn out to refer to Hamm’s dark mental world. According
to him, a little vein might be the cause of the dripping in his head."
So if Beckett considers Bram’s art an analysis of the inner world, he
attributes to Geer’s a direction outwards, to light and emptiness. Geer “is
entirely directed towards the outside, towards the chaos of things in light,
towards time.”” Outside is light. Indeed, Hamm and Clov’s shelter does have
two windows, but they do not face a realistic daily (everyday) panorama. While
the right window shows nothing but earth, apparently the left overlooks a
mass of sea. It is under this window that Hamm thinks he feels light shining
on his blind face.
The setting consisting of these two windows is as formalist as the entire play.
Whether the curtains are drawn or not does not make much of a difference.
Earth and sea are the only indications given to us as to what may be seen through
them. Rather than creating a depth, they seem flat and two-dimensional color
areas. Beckett’s second essay on the van Velde brothers’ art was published in
Derriére le Miroir in 1948. A couple of years later, this journal devoted an
issue to Geer van Velde, and as its title page chose a painting that has two
colored squares in it. This painting may have been the inspiration for Beckett
7 Beckett: Dramatic Works, 96.
18 Ibid., 153.
Beckett: Disjecta, 125; my translation. French original: “Espace et corps, achevés, inaltérables,
arrachés au temps par le faiseur de temps”.
20 Beckett: Dramatic Works, 105.
2 Ibid., 127.
Beckett: Disjecta, 128; my translation. French original: “est entièrement tourné vers le
dehors, vers le tohu-bohu des choses dans la lumière, vers le temps”.
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