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THE THEATRICALIZATION OF ENDGAME... play in witnessing a scene. Bram van Velde, just like Hamm, does not mind being blind, or semi-blind, because both paint their inner world. Paraphrasing Hamm, somethings “dripping” in their heads, again a term in the play alluding to painting. They have withdrawn from the outer world that continually shifts and disintegrates due to the interference of other humans. What is left is the cubist painting they have turned themselves into, that is, abstract though it may be, as liable to interpretation as the man-object in the background of the lawnobject in Sartre’s account. If only one has enough patience while looking at a cubist painting, some figures will eventually appear from the ground: “Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.”*' Not coincidentally, Hamm utters this hypothesis right after his question to Clov: “We're not beginning to...to... mean something?”.” Indeed, even amidst their environment of darkness, once the contours and the figures are established in the process (or the fantasy, as Hamm calls it??) of being watched, some signification is likely to come up. Because the ideas behind cubism are very strongly preoccupied with perception, there is an intricate link between seeing and being seen on the one hand and an aesthetics of formalism on the other. In the two-dimensional world of Endgame, both these preoccupations come together in the shifting perspectives of blindness and seeing, darkness and light, background and foreground, making the play a time document that expresses the aesthetics of cubism in its own idiosyncratic, Beckettian way. BIBLIOGRAPHY BECKETT, Samuel: Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, New York, Grove, 1984. BECKETT, Samuel: Dramatic Works: The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. II, New York, Grove, 2006. BECKETT, Samuel: The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956, Vol. 2, eds. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2011. Jay, Martin: Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, University of California, 1993. JULIET, Charles: Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, Leiden, Academic Press Leiden, 1995. KNOWLSON, James: Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London, Bloomsbury, 1996. 31 Beckett: Dramatic Works, 115. 32 Tbid., 115. 33 Ibid., 142. +43»
