Oldal 41 [41]
OCR
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. + 40 +
