Page 300 [300]
OCR
ANITA RÁKÓCZY in addition to finishing his Opus Magnum. 1he father is not the only being in the story who owes his death to Hamm; so do rats, fleas, and Mother Pegg, who died of darkness, as Hamm refused to give her oil in her lamp. CLOV (Anguished, scratching himself.) | have a flea! HAMM A flea! Are there still fleas? CLOV On me there’s one. (Scratching.) Unless it’s a crablouse. HAMM (Very perturbed.) But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!" The conflict between Hamm and Clov is intensified by the fact that, whatever the nature of the catastrophe, Hamm appears to have played an important role in it." As Beckett expressed during the rehearsals of Endgame in Berlin, “Clov holds Hamm responsible for everything connected with death.” " Progenitors are not popular either, as they are responsible for the perpetuation of mankind. Hamm blames and curses his parents, Nagg and Nell, too, most pronouncedly the former, for all his miseries, and, in return, Nagg repays his fatherly curse on Hamm. As Stanley Cavell explains in his essay “Ending the Waiting Game,” “the old are also good at heaping curses on their young and at controlling them through guilt, the traditional weapons of the weak and dependent. Nagg uses the most ancient of all parental devices, claiming that something is due him from his son for the mere fact of having begot him.””° However, Hamm is, euphemistically, not a suitable subject for being made grateful for his life: in fact, he cannot wait to call it a day. Jack MacGowran, when interviewed by Richard Toscan after the 1964 Paris production of Endgame, was asked about Beckett’s attitude towards Hamm’s parents in the dustbins. He gave a most interesting reply: I think he feels that’s the way most of us, in later life, treat our own parents—we put them into homes and we give them the minimum kind of treatment to keep them alive for as long as we can. The human race generally does that to an aging parent and this was his conception of how stark it could be—putting them into dustbins and giving them a biscuit or a biscuit and a half a day, anything to keep them going just for a while.?1 17 Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, 95. 18 Alan Astro, Understanding Samuel Beckett, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1992, 134. 5 D. McMillan - M. Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre. London, John Calder Ltd, 1988, 232. 20 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 118. 2 McMillan — Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, 174-175. + 298 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 298 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:25
