Oldal 41 [41]
LAURENS DE Vos
Clov goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk. He looks up at
window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window
right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out,
comes back immediately with a small step-ladder, carries it over and sets it down
under window left, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes six steps
(for example) towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets
it down under window right, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes
three steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it
down under window left, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets
down, takes one step towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and
sets it down under window right, gets up on it, looks out of window.
Later, we find Hamm demanding that Clov push his wheelchair so that he
can hug the walls of his world as if to measure its size before returning to its
very center.
Endgame is structured as a two-dimensional painting consisting of lines
and colored areas. There are other, textual indications in that direction.
The play, after all, both begins and ends with a “[blrief tableau”? Moreover,
all the objects in the room (the ashbins and Hamm) are covered with sheets,
evoking associations with an artist’s studio. And last but not least, Endgame’s
title too draws the link to the cubist program in its reference to chess, a game
played on a flat surface divided in squares in two colors.
The change of perspective and the preoccupation with geometrical
accuracy can also be seen in philosophical reflections of the time. Published
in 1943, Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant contains an anecdote about a stroll he takes
in the park when a man crosses his sight. What is most striking about Sartre’s
phenomenological account here is the way he describes his environment in
both those situations, this is, when being alone as well as in the encounter
with another man. The park is almost geometrically divided into different
areas, the distance between himself or the man and the other “objects” on
the lawn such as the statue and the chestnut tree is calculated as if he were a
surveyor: “the man is there, twenty paces from me, he is turning his back on
me. As such he is again two yards, twenty inches from the lawn, six yards from
the statue; hence the disintegration of my universe is contained within the
limits of this same universe.””° We recognize, in other words, in his report an
indebtedness to the aesthetics inherent in cubism. The world is apportioned
by means of lines and distances against this green surface that is the lawn.
Sartre describes how the emergence of a man in his ocular field disrupts the
24 Beckett: Dramatic Works, 91.
» Ibid., 91, 154.
26 Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, New
York, Philosophical Library, 1956, 255-256.
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