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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. DeutschFranzösische 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. + 297 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 297 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:25
