Arnab Chatterjee
Ex- Associate Professor, Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata. E-mail: arnabserampore2011@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Samuel Beckett’s plays show characters with an inherent inability to alter current modes of living. They might be seen as people for whom their once understood stable, cognitive realms along with various phenomenological and hermeneutical functions are now open to threat. In many ways, they can be interpreted as survivors in a post-apocalyptic, disease-ridden era with little resources to hang to. Thus, the two tramps waiting for an unidentified man near a deserted road with little or no vegetation smacks of many post-apocalyptic, dystopian narratives where characters are left bereft of any hope, tangible resources or memory. This debility is thematically further carried on in Endgame (1957) where a master and a servant cannot do without each other with other characters buried deep in the trash that underscores the idea of bodily surveillance, punishment, disease, and even transhumanist issues. In Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), the aging man is seen recording his thoughts every year despite being unable to recollect events. This paper is thus an attempt to map this trajectory of decay and disability in Beckett’s select plays from the vantage point of dystopian narratives and discourse.
Keywords: Disability, Anti-Utopia, Transhumanist, Discourse.
Disability, both as a thematic strand and a literary trope functions as a powerful indictment of the current world order in writers who have engaged in a criticism of the same. Often, the focus has been on what consequences such disability and debility portend and to what extent the strain of grim humor and satire with which such debility of sorts is portrayed has as a reminder to alter current trajectories of living. This not only encompasses just physical disability but also states from a near-impossibility to induct oneself in the democratic process to situations wherein any coherent idea of a once understood ‘stable’ self has exhausted its relevance in metaphysical and phenomenological terms. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s classic novel Never Let Me Go (2005), this theme of disability is played in physical terms of a group of high-school boys whose vital organs are “harvested” one by one until they “complete” or die to that of the inability to alter current modes of life even when they know what is to befall them in future. These clone children try to locate their “possibles” or real-life copies of themselves but fail miserably with the harsh reality of the news that if any one of them would exhibit human emotions (which they do), then they would be spared of the bodily dismemberment by three years was a myth. This is what the former Principal of the school Hailsham where they once studied tells them at the end of the narrative. This theme of disability thus functions as a powerful literary and thematic strand within the sub-genre of dystopia that the novel is often taken to be.
In a world order where the rise of new forms of governance have often been questioned concerning the possibilities that they can offer for the full development of the human spirit and the novel methods of control mechanisms that they utilize, Beckett’s plays seem to be relevant and are a rallying cry to comprehend the era in which we live. If violence is the order of the day and has even risen to be a “condition” within itself (Mishra 152), many of the Beckettean themes too depict the possibilities of the same—instances range from the use of violence on Lucky in Waiting for Godot(1954) to that of the blood-stained cloth that Hamm uses to cover his face at the end of Endgame(1957). Ever since Michel Foucault advocated his novel ideas about control mechanisms that societies use today that have done away with punishing the body and embracing the human spirit per se, the ideas of human debility, dementia, and that of the dystopian temper have gained new heights. One of the prominent studies in this field has been conducted by M. Keith Booker who in his classic Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide(1994) that opines that any text that offers the possibility of social and political criticism calls out for anti-utopian readings (4). At the other end of the spectrum, theorists and writers as diverse as Krishna Kumar and Eric S. Rabkin trace dystopian possibilities by their select readings of trends in the history of the West and the steady evolution of such an idea through years. Whatever be the orientation, one strand that seems clear is that the twin parameters of dystopia and associated human debility in autocratic regimes as depicted in works may be seen as “an oppositional energy or spirit” (Booker 3) than a genre in itself. In a world order where questions of justice and egalitarianism have been thrown to the four winds, the words of Noam Chomsky seem pertinent, “The world has not renounced war. Quite the contrary. By now, the world’s hegemonic power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ with unstated bounds” (3).
Samuel Beckett’s plays often show characters caught in a whirlpool of conflict and debility within an anti-utopian aura performed within minimalistic stage requirements. This is particularly true of his plays Waiting for Godot(1954), Krapp’s Last Tape(1958), and Endgame(1957). What strikes the spectator in the very beginning is the theme of physical debility and the concomitant idea of the attempts to transcend the same through means at one’s disposal. In the essay “The Cybernetic Organism and the Failure of Transhumanism in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame” Andrew Bell shows how the particular play is mostly concerned with the characters trying to transcend their physicality through the use of the technology available to them:
Arguably, however, it is Endgame that shows the greatest preoccupation with the progress of human physicality and transhumanism. Contemporary with the release of Huxley’s publication and defining the term, Endgame was first performed in 1957 and features a cast of characters that appear to be products of transhumanist preoccupations. Such characters demonstrate a pronounced reliance on various forms of constitution-altering technology, either for their survival or for the enhancement of their natural abilities. As operator of dark glasses, a gaff, a whistle, and even a catheter, Hamm is the most technologically reliant and ultimately at the center of Endgame’s transhumanist investigations. (60)
In plays that show the ruined and smithereened nature of human existence, Beckett’s plays rehearse the human conflict played at the backdrop of a seemingly dystopian background. This is not untenable keeping in fact that his plays carry social and political criticisms that carry the possibility of dystopian readings (Booker 4) and that the prime image of a “fallen” or post-lapsarian existence shows an anti-utopian framework at work (Rabkin4).1 Be it two tramps waiting near a road for an unidentified person, or an old man listening to his recorded thoughts late in life or a master and a slave who cannot do without each other, his plays show the lack of basic necessaries, even that of language and meaning in a world of void and bitter anguish. Writing during the Cold War and after the nuclear annihilation caused by the Second World War, Beckett’s plays also carry within themselves potent social and political criticisms, but the primary among them seems to be that of the inability of human beings to have access to a decent living and be part of a well-ordered social structure that has now become an illusion of sorts and the concomitant notions of absurdity associated with the same. This is what has also been echoed by Albert Camus in his The Myth of Sisyphus (1942):
Here is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel, yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. (1)
In Waiting for Godot, Beckett shows this theme of debility in the figure of the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who are seen waiting for an unidentified man called “Godot” with whom they think they have an appointment. The setting at once gives an inkling of a devastated place with only a single tree with no leaves in the beginning of Act I. This reinforces notions of sterility and post-lapsarianism and recalls man’s Fall after he was expelled from the Garden of Eden. The two tramps register their debility in the words “nothing to be done” repeatedly and nowhere to go in a place with fixed metaphysical and spiritual parameters. The place and setting that Beckett uses in this play repeatedly reminds one of the “blasted heath” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth that may yield nothing but depression and despair. This theme of debility and despair is echoed by the two male characters, with the inclusion of the fact that no female appears on the scene that may have reintroduced an element of regeneration in a seemingly post-apocalyptic era. The note of despair is touching and poignant:
ESTRAGON: [Giving up again]. Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR: [Advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart.] I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable. And I resumed the struggle. [He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to ESTRAGON.] So there you are again.
……………
VLADIMIR: Suppose we repented.
ESTRAGON: Repented what?
VLADIMIR: Oh … [He reflects.] We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
ESTRAGON: Our being born? (Beckett 3, Waiting For Godot; emphases in orig.)
Seen from the vantage point of anti-utopian narratives, the play shows a “fallen” status of mankind that Beckett adroitly presents within a covertly Christian setup—Vladimir and Estragon may loosely present Adam and Eve who are awaiting redemption in a world where redemption may not be available and where God be absent. Barring the religious elements on which commentary is huge and prolific2, the play shows the degradation of the natural environment that smacks of many dystopian texts. There are ample references to such elements—the ditch in which one of the tramps is forced to sleep, the tree with no leaves, slavery in the figure of Lucky with associated notions of human beings found useful due to their capacity for service for a parasite class like Pozzo 3, the element of mock religiosity in which the boy’s brother who minds the goats is spared while one who minds the sheep is beaten and last, but not the least, the turning upside down of the tale of the penitent thief who hurled abuses on Christ. This introduces the tone of mock religiousness that may be taken to be the theme of a classic dystopian narrative like The Brave New World (1932) that depicts a society after the Great War, 632 years after the death of Ford (A.F.), or roughly 2500 A.D. where notions like God or anything of family life are looked down upon and ignored. Thus, the Holy Cross has been clipped on its upper end to look like a “T” and only a special place called the “Reservation” keeps people who still cling to the old ideas. While notions of religion and family have been nearly forgotten, this same strand, albeit in a different manner is carried on in Beckett’s play.
This notion of “dementia” or the act of forgetting that which sustains civilization as a whole is also the central theme of Waiting for Godot. The twin ideas of debility and dementia find their co-relatives in the actions of the central characters in the play. This is the recurrent feature that runs through the actions of the tramps who cannot even figure out if they have some carrots or turnips left. The idea of Godot suddenly comes to their mind, a faint idea that they may have an appointment with him, and that they may have the power to end all of their problems. But the cardinal concerns that the playwright wishes to drive home forth and that lends a uniquely anti-utopian aura to the entire play lies in the fact that the arid landscape in which they act out their roles. With a presumably arid landscape as the backdrop and the sudden appearance of just a single leaf on the tree the next act, the entire play represents a microcosm of the post-World War II condition of man after the use of nuclear warfare and the devastation arising from the same. Though this is quite a known parameter of Beckett’s works in general, the inability of characters to find life-sustaining resources in the play smack of many post-apocalyptic narratives that have this element as a stock theme.
In the play Endgame (1957) the playwright presents the theme of the troubled relation between a master and a servant with the arid, bleak, and depopulated landscape as the backdrop. The selfsame issues of debility and dementia are seen again in the figure of the parents of the blind master Nell and Nagg who live in a dustbin and occasionally shout for help and other assortments. However, the troubled relationship between Hamm, the demanding master, and Clov, the servant who cannot leave the services of his master and yet wants to become the nodal point of analysis. At one point of time, Clov climbs up a ladder and surveys the landscape and sees but a single boy that reinforces the concept of regeneration in a world torn by conflicts and presumable nuclear warfare.4 And yet, as it has been rightly pointed out, “At the end of the play, Clov sees a small boy outside of the refuge; he prepares to leave, armed with a gaff, presumably to kill the child and therefore ensure that the whole sorry mess of human life will not restart itself” (Pattie 77). The relationship between the master and the servant in the play represents a sharp contrast as compared to Waiting for Godot wherein Lucky and Pozzo are in a relationship that is defined by force. In Endgame, this aspect is changed by the inclusion of a situation wherein the servant finds a problem to leave the master and finally prepares to quit but presumably cannot:
(…Enter Clov, dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella bag. He halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on Hamm, till the end.)
Hamm gives up:
Good.
(Pause.)
Discard.
(He throws away the gaff, makes to throw away the dog, thinks better of it.)
Take it easy.
(Pause.)
And now?
…….
(Pause. He covers his face with handkerchief, lowers his arms to armrests, remains motionless.)
(Brief tableau.)
Curtain (Beckett n.p.; “Samuel’s Beckett’s Endgame”)
David Pattie in his The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett again opines regarding the theme of debility as follows:
Many critics, noting that Endgame’s stage set calls for a bare, grey open space with only a few items of stage furniture, with two small windows placed high on the back wall have assumed that Beckett has set the play inside a skull […] The play, though while it might support these and other readings, never confirms any of them; its power resides, at least partly, on the infinitely allusive nature of the setting and the text. For example, Hamm’s story of the ‘painter … and engraver’ might suggest that the play dramatizes a purely personal, psychological holocaust…” (77).
The parents of Hamm, Nell, and Nagg live in a dustbin and they are brought to senses whenever called; they exhibit feeble responses by asking for assorted niceties like biscuits and the like. Yet, Hamm is all to blame for them for having brought him into the world? and the entire play is a human drama of pain and suffering and the “endgame” of relationships played around the backdrop of a sterile and possibly ‘dystopian’ scenario of failed human relations. The general debility and dementia in Endgame are symptomatic of the wide-spread fear of the use of nuclear warfare during the Cold War era.
Electra Georgiades in her Ph.D. thesis “Trauma, Company And Witnessing In Samuel Beckett’s Post-War Drama, 1952-61” points to the fact that the company of people that the characters in Beckett’s plays like Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days et al. crave has to do with the post-Second World War trauma and the distinct traumatic framework that Beckett employs in his plays. To quote her:
A key trope of Beckett’s post-war drama, human company foregrounds the status of the trilogy as a profound artistic and ethical response to the horrors of the Second World War, as the need for the human other as a witness –exposed
both thematically and structurally–opens up the possibility for witnessing and testimony to take place in the aftermath of a historical period which precluded its own witnessing. (3)
As it is clear from the above comments, the issue of trauma as a literary and structural trope in Beckett’s plays seeks to foreground the issue of debility and an anti-utopian temper that this paper seeks to address. The horrors of the Second World War and the fear of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War era impart what may be called a “post-lapsarian” impulse in these plays. In Endgame, Hamm, the master, with his debility to see and stand, and Clov the servant, with his inherent inability to leave his master, reinforces the idea of the virtual imprisonment of the body in a presumably post-apocalyptic era. This is further brought home to us by the introduction of two more characters who are in a similar state of debility—Nell and Nagg.
The anti-utopian/dystopian temper is further highlighted by the near-absence of any tangible resources in the household of Hamm. This is the stock theme of many dystopian narratives, and in a similar vein, Endgame rehearses this idea both thematically and through very concrete images. Clov, the servant keeps on looking for possible survivors outside his window, while Hamm’s desire to go to sleep again and again may be a reminder that sleep and forgetting may be the only tangible way out of this dire shortage of resources. The blood-stained handkerchief, the persistent refrain that Nature has forgotten mankind, with Clov’s assertion that there was no “nature” ever, coupled with the fact that there are no bicycles left point to a post-apocalyptic era wherein bodily surveillance, the degradation of natural resources and even efforts to depopulate are the order of the day. In this connection, these words seem fit to be reproduced:
In ‘Twentieth-Century Apocalypse: Forecasts and Aftermaths”, James Berger talks of the past century as being “thoroughly marked, perhaps even defined, by apocalyptic impulses, fear, representations, and events.” Referring in particular to the two World Wars, the Holocaust and the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, he argues, “this has been a century full of visions we would like to forget, but which we have nevertheless relentlessly recorded, analyzed, and amplified with uneasy pleasure.” Although Berger remarks at how human anxieties regarding the End have calmed today, apocalyptic sensibilities have arguably had a wide influence on modern theory and have become intrinsic to prominent modes of thought. (Banksn.p.)
Similarly, Aaron Pancho in his “The Post-Apocalyptic, The Cyborg, And The Passage Of Time” points out the nihilistic sensibilities in some of the plays of Beckett that border on science fiction:
In Waiting for Godot, nuclear anxieties shed light on the play’s apparent post-apocalyptic landscape and the profound emptiness that permeates the stage. In Molloy, Hugh Kenner uses Centaur imagery to explain the title character’s Cartesian relationship with his bicycle; however, contemporary sensibilities at the time of the novel’s publication suggests a cyborg reading of the Molloy/bicycle hybrid can also be productive. And in Krapp’s Last Tape, the tape recorder serves as a figurative time machine, which allows readers to consider the ways technology continues to allow for the capture of time and subsequent reflection. (v-vi)
In Krapp’s Last Tape(1958), this theme of anti-utopianism and debility if further carried out in the character of the sixty-nine years old senile man Krapp who listens to his recorded voices since he was twenty and responds to his comments all through the years of growing up and the physical, sexual and mental metamorphosis associated with the same. The play is based on a single character and there is an emphasis on the twin ideas of loneliness with the suggestion that the very act of recording one’s speech has echoes of a world that is underscored with elements of depopulation and a landscape that offers little scope for regeneration. This could be one of the reasons why the play was first premiered as a curtain-raiser to Endgame from October to November 1958. The play is thematically related to Endgame when it comes to the themes of depopulation, dementia, and the post-World War II temper of the loss of belief in any scope for regeneration. Krapp has recorded his voice at various parts of his life, but the final tape reels into silence with the presumable idea that he has almost nothing to offer for posterity:
Pause. Krapp’s lips move. No sound.
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.
Puase.
Here I end this reel. Box — (Pause) — three, spool— (Pause)– five.(Pause. Perhaps my best years are gone. … (Beckett n.p, “Krapp’s Last Tape”; emphases in orig.)
In the essay “Krapp’s Last Tape: A New Reading”, Lois Gordon aptly sums up this issue of debility and dementia in the character, who like Sarah Connor in the dystopian and futuristic Terminator series, possibly keeps on recording his voice as “the earth might be uninhabited” already:
Krapp’s Last Tape portrays the extreme loneliness and fragmentation of identity which a man devoid of religious, social, or biological purpose will endure. Sixty-nine year old Krapp, despite obvious intellectual and emotional potential, has never experienced more than a momentary sense of fulfillment or peace of mind. No religious or secular ideals, and no sexual or creative urges, have sufficiently energized or motivated him toward a sustained life goal. (97)
This absence of any life-sustaining impulses that nearly defy any scope of regeneration smacks of an anti-utopian scenario that pervades the life of Krapp. His radio is the only viable means available to him to travel to the past, and analyze his life down memory lane, an experience that does not seem to be too palatable to him. His ways of resorting to the past through an electronic means and not through people who may help him out with this coupled with the fact that he has apparently very little resources or memory to fondly cling to have apparent similarities with dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives wherein such a scenario is often presented. Thus, Ruby Cohn in Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre (1980) adroitly points out that “Other Beckett plays rely on the tradition that one reviews a whole life at the moment of death; the action then becomes a retrospective action. Three television plays and two-stage plays are such death’s threshold dramas”. (50)
Beckett’s plays show the moral and spiritual degeneration of man post-Second World War, but the scenario that his petty, serio-comic characters have to endure in a barren, presumably post-apocalyptic landscape has a distinctly anti-utopian ring to it. It may be deduced that their actions in the play are often a response to degenerative life situations that offer no scope for the renewal of circumstances or alter current modes of living.
Endnotes
- Beckett’s plays often show this post-lapsarian and post-apocalyptic forces at work. For a detailed discussion of the parameters that define a dystopian setting, see Booker’s classic Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (1994: Greenwood P), Eric S. Rabkin et al. eds. No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (1983), and for a more exhaustive study on utopian and dystopian critical commentary, see Kumar.
- Much has been commented on the religious and Christian motifs in Beckett’s plays. See Thomas D. Eisele’s illuminating essay “The Apocalypse of Beckett’s ‘Endgame’”, wherein the author states that the play is definitely about “an end of a world” (p. 11) and especially, The Theology of Samuel Beckett by John Calder.
- the situation of the “clone” children in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) where they are “harvested” as potential organ donors for the privileged few who have presumably lost their normal organ functioning. Lucky’s functions as a mere bearer of heavy weight alone proves his utility as a human being; his existence in the then present metaphysical and moral realms, as depicted in the play, are however shown to be nil.
- Endgame, the title is a pun on both “the end of games” that humans play out to eke a living and the end of the game of master-slave relationship that begins as a motif from Waiting for Godot and ‘ends’ in this play. The appearance of a single boy is a sign that regeneration will soon take over, but the overt absence of any female character nevertheless tends to put this idea to test. This absence of women characters in many of the acclaimed plays by the playwright is a recurring literary trope and may very well reinforce the ideas of sterility and degeneration in a world which is on the verge of becoming ‘dystopian’ or may soon be on the brink of being claimed by post-apocalyptic forces.
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Dr. Arnab Chatterjee is a former faculty of English at the Sister Nivedita University, New Town, Kolkata. He has been associated with Poets Foundation, Kolkata, duly recognized by FOIPA, UNESCO for over a decade and a half, being its Honorary Assistant Secretary for a brief period of time and one of its valued authors that brought out his first books: In Desolate Dwellings, Residence Beneath the Earth and the long narrative poem The Wind in the Abyss, that is part of “The Reflections Trilogy”. His name appears in the prestigious Who’s Who of Indian Writers Writing in English, a nation-wide record compiled by The Sahitya Akademi. His collections of poetry include In Desolate Dwellings (Poets Foundation), The Wind in the Abyss Hardcover (Poets Foundation), The Golden Harvest (WorditCDE), September Songs (Notion Press). He has also completed averse re-telling of the epic The Mahabharata from the point of view of minor characters and incidents.