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DENIALS OF THE DIVINE
real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.”!? X’s ambiguous relationship with
religion is further emphasized by Beckett’s stage directions: he strokes the
Bible, turns the pages with great care, and then a moment later throws it to the
ground, “as Hamm treats his dog in Fin de partie," as György Kurtág points
out (Kurtág is currently working on his Fin de partie opera). The scathing
irony of the passage is grasped most intensely by the rhetorical paradox
expressed in two symmetrical sentences, separated by a pause. Symmetry,
pause, and rhythm are devices about which Beckett cared a great deal. As he
put it, “it is the shape that matters.”"* The two sentences seemingly contradict
each other, with the vulgar synonyms increasing the sarcastic tone in their
second part, but they even out in the broader context and make perfect sense,
like the 1936 poem “Two Hexameters” by Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef:
“Why should I be honest? I’ll be laid out, anyhow! // Why should I not be
honest! [II be laid out, anyhow.”
The pre-publication genesis of Fin de partie, of which there were over
fifteen preliminary versions and early drafts, was completed with the first
publication of the play by Editions de Minuit in 1957. A year later, Beckett’s
English translation, Endgame, was published by Grove Press and Faber and
Faber. In Endgame, Beckett’s use of visually striking religious imagery recedes
compared to the preceding Fin de partie manuscripts. However, the characters’
fight against God continues more subtly, mainly on the level of dialogue.
Ruby Cohn argues that “as the cross disappears from Beckett’s stage, so does
the physical Bible, but the biblical echoes abound.””* It is in Endgame that Hamm
denies God explicitly, after the collective prayer scene; but at the same time, it is
also in Endgame (in fact one sentence later) that Clov restores the possibility
that the divine might exist in some undetermined time in the future.
The characters of Endgame do not have the intention to live. In other
words, their aim is to achieve non-meaning, non-existence, the end of the
game. Hamm, survivor of an unknown world disaster, of which the twentieth
century produced an array from which to choose, considers his principal task
the extermination of every living creature that has the ability to reproduce,
2 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Deutsch¬
Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, 7 and 10 February 1844 https://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm, accessed on 3 December 2014
Gyorgy Kurtdg’s marginal note on a typescript of my PhD thesis, Towards the Creation of
Endgame, written in black ballpoint pen, July 2014, page 9.
Harold Hobson, Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year, International Theatre Annual 1
(1956), 153.
Attila Jozsef, Two Hexameters, accessed 14 January 2014, http://www.magyarulbabelben.
net/works/hu/J%C3%B3zsef_Attila-1905/K%C3%A9t_hexameter/en/36743-Two_
Hexameters?interfaceLang=en. Translation: Katalin N. Ullrich
16 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 2005, 226.
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