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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 In an unpublished, untitled, undated, and abandoned dialogue fragment, one of the first antecedents of Fin de partie (to which I henceforth refer as the “Ernest & Alice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. + 29% + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 294 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:25
