Oldal 302 [302]
ANITA RÁKÓCZY
the coffin was. A high sense of remorse might have led Hamm to perform and
conduct this spiritual exercise, praying, which is unlike him. As Bryden points
out, “when in Fin de partie Clov and Nagg are prompted by Hamm [...] to join
him in the attempted contact with the Deity, the experiment proves futile.
All report blank encounters, and abandon their attitudes of prayer.” Hamm’s
openly blasphemous remark, “the bastard! he doesn’t exist,” is “immediately
rendered provisional, [...] by Clov’s extension of timeframe, ‘not yet’, which
restores God to a position of waiting in the wings.””?
However, the traditional way of reaching out to God does not function
anymore; the prayer in Endgame is conducted in an entirely echoless space,
where God has abandoned mankind. As Andräs Visky points out, “God has
gotten beyond the boundaries of addressability; human language does not
remember the means of approaching the Divine anymore.””* Visky argues that
the sacred announces itself exclusively through blasphemy and is altogether
unrecognizable. His views apply to Beckett’s denials of the divine in particular,
although the search for the sacred in Beckett’s dramatic writing remains to be
examined elsewhere. This paper goes so far as to document his various forms of
negation and, at the same time, his constant attacks and ceaseless textual and
visual representations of the divine, which are expressive of the impossibility
of letting go of God, or the absence of God. As Bryden argues, “this cursing
of God is rarely countervailed in Beckett’s writing by the blessing of God.
Yet, as the Book of Job demonstrates, cursing provides a kind of continuity
of engagement. It represents sparks and interferences in the current, but not
cessation. Beckett’s people seem, despite their resentments and wrestlings,
unable to stamp out the God-hypothesis definitively.”
In Beckett’s Film, written in the spring of 1963 and shot, starring Buster
Keaton, in New York in 1964 under the direction of Alan Schneider,
the main character, O, the Object, takes the necessary precautions to avoid
being observed or seen by anybody, especially by E, the observing Eye,
which follows him everywhere like a shadow. E of course turns out to be
the same person as O. One of O’s main motives throughout the film is to
avoid the encounter with his own self. Beckett built the film around George
Berkeley’s thesis, esse est percipi, to exist is to be perceived. Therefore, O’s
greatest desire is to be entirely unseen, or in other words, to be gone. Arriving
at his mother’s unoccupied flat, O aims to eliminate all external, inquisitive
disturbances; he draws the window-curtains, but the fabric has eye-socket¬
like holes; then he covers the mirror, locks out the dog and the cat, whose
°3° Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, 116.
4 Andras Visky, Art Vital. The Theatre of Prophet Ezekiel, Conference paper delivered on
8 May 2015, Religion and Art Conference, Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church
in Hungary.
5 Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, 131.
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