OCR Output

ANITA RÁKÓCZY

HAMM The bastard! He doesn’t exist!
CLOV Not yet.”

Despite his devout Protestant upbringing, Samuel Beckett’s fervent
anticlericalism and scepticism in matters of religion are detectable in
his dramatic works. However, instead of denying and therefore omitting
the subject of the divine altogether, Beckett’s plays are interwoven on multiple
levels with religious imagery and his deep knowledge of Scripture. As Mary
Bryden points out, Biblical references in Beckett’s dramas are taken from both
the Old and New Testaments, and in each case, the source is the King James
version. Sometimes they appear as “muted and fully integrated subtextual
scriptural resonances” that do not “detach themselves from the texture of
Beckett’s own writing. At other times they are more self-advertising.”* In this
essay I examine a number of images in Endgame, Film, two early stages of the
genesis of Fin de partie, an untitled fragment in which the main character’s
name is Ernest, and Avant Fin de partie, which fall into the latter category,
conveying Beckett’s anger and rage as examples of his inexhaustible attacks
on his non-existent God.

Beckett’s frequent approach to addressing the divine is blasphemy.
Whenever a religious reference appears in his plays as part of the action,
set, text, or dramaturgy, it is often paired with irony, mockery, grotesque
inappropriateness, or verbatim negation. In Being and Nothingness, in relation
to negation, Sartre explains that “there exist more subtle behaviours [...].
Irony is one of these. In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one
and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms
to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being
other than its nothingness.” Beckett’s ambivalent treatment of the divine as
a playwright is detectable in some of his early Fin de partie-related fragments
and manuscripts; during the act of negation, certain images of God (“verbal
or visual structures which believers have evolved in order to understand and
communicate their perceptions of God”) are exposed at the centre of attention
which either visually or verbally define the spectator’s theatrical experience
through their exaggerated presence and, at the same time, their rejection.

In an unpublished, untitled, undated, and abandoned dialogue fragment,
one of the first antecedents of Fin de partie (to which I henceforth refer as
the “Ernest & Alice Fragment”), the main character, Ernest, spends his days

2 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber, 1990, 119.

3 Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, London, Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998, 102.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, London, Routledge, 2003, 70. I would like to express
my gratitude to Péter Dávidházi and his paper József, Illyés, Jób. Párhuzamos verselemzés
bibliai fenytöresben for drawing my attention to Sartre’s work.

5 Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, 125.

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