adorno on godot and endgame

8/12/2019 Adorno on Godot and Endgame

1/17

CRITIQUE AND FORM: Adorno on "Godot" and "Endgame"Author(s): Chris ContiSource: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 14, After Beckett / D'aprs Beckett (2004),pp. 277-292Published by: Editions Rodopi B.V.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781472.

Accessed: 13/05/2013 17:46

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at.http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Editions Rodopi B.V.is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Samuel Beckett

Today / Aujourd'hui.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 131.179.45.172 on Mon, 13 May 2013 17:46:55 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rodopihttp://www.jstor.org/stable/25781472?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/25781472?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rodopi


2/17

CRITIQUE AND FORM:Adorno onGodot and EndgameChris Conti

The most common criticism ofBeckett's theatre is its supposed obscurity. Early defenders of Godot and Endgame were themselves criticised as formalists for their inability to say what these plays were'about' or 'meant'. Adorno's theory of the modernist artwork explained the historical development of art's opaque content and Beckett's own reluctance to explain his plays, solving an impasse inBeckett criticism with his account of the new historical role of aesthetic

form as critique.

1.A play about nothingThe unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks asimmanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society.

(Adorno,1997,6)The scandal of Waiting for Godot, as everyone knows, is that it is aplay about nothing. Its clownish characters seem in search of a plotand the plot in search of an ending. Accounts of the play usually beginwith a precis, as if the bare particulars of plot were all one could clingtowith any certainty. The most famous remark about Godot, as a play"where nothing happens twice" (Mercier, 144), summarised the frustration of reviewers attempting to grapple with its absence of content.Can a playwithoutcontent(andplot,character,ction) stillbe a play?To take theplay seriouslyseemed a threat omeaning itself, s if itwere an assault on the very categories required tomake sense of it.

Initial receptions of the play as plotless and chaotic were revised when its rigorous use of dramatic forms like dialogue was recognised.Still, theintentionalitymplied y this se of form idnot sit

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


3/17

well with the loss ofmeaning impliedby theplay's absence of content.No other play - with the possible exception of its successor,Endgame - has been so puzzled over as towhat itmeans. Doubt concerning the play's content (or lack of it) ledmany to believe the play ahoax, and like all hoaxes, themore one searched for a meaningfulstructure themore one was taken in by the hoax: "Waitingfor Godotis not a real carrot; it is a patiently painted, painstakingly formed plastic job for the intellectual fruit bowl [...] asking for a thousand readings[it]has none of its wn togive" (Kerr, 0).But thedevastated landscape suggestedby Godofs emptiedstage reawakened traumatic wartime memories, and many audiencesfeltthey ad glimpsed in theplay thecatastrophicutcomeofwesterncivilisation. Articulating this relation to historical reality proved difficult, because while the play seemed to be about occupied France, theholocaust, postwar devastation, the catastrophic fate of civilisation, itdid not refer directly to any of these. The growing conviction in theuniversal importance of the play resisted articulation, as ifGodot haddivested itself f any connectiontohistorybeyond testifyingo itscatastrophic barbarism. But how could a play drained of content relateto the actual social dramas of the day? The absence of this direct relation encouraged the idea of the play as an allegory of the lamentablehuman condition, "a modern morality play, on permanent Christianthemes" (Fraser, 84). Allegory established Godot's universality but atthe risk of imposing redemptive religious meanings. So as well as aplay about nothing, Godot became known as a play about anythingand everything, meaning whatever you wanted it tomean because itssymbols were pliable enough tomeet the needs of theoretical or religious consolation.

Godot's sheer variety of interpretations suddenly seemed suspicious. Indeed themore critics enthused about the profundity of theplay themore hollow it sounded. Uncertainty about themeaning oftheplay gathered around the absent character ofGodot, as if the titularcharacter might justify the dearth of stage action and confer at leastsymbolic nity n thedisorder f the lay.Alain Robbe-Grillet chafedat such attempts to dignify the poverty of Beckett's tramps andblocked thepath to such affirmative riticismby assertingtheplaywas not 'about' anything at all. Itwas about itself; the physical presence of the tramps on stage:278



4/17

Explanations flow in from all quarters, each more pointlessthan the last. Godot is God [...] Godot [...] is the earthlyideal of a better social order [...] Or else Godot is death [...]Godot is silence [...] Godot is the inaccessible self [...] Butthese suggestions are merely attempts to limit the damage,and even themost ridiculous of them cannot efface in anyone's mind thereality f theplay itself, hat artof itwhichis at once most profound and quite superficial, and of whichone can only say: Godot is the person two tramps are waiting for at the side of the road, and who does not come.

(110)This anti-criticism reduced the play to the barest of plot descriptionsand aped Beckett's own refusal to say what the play meant or whoGodot represented: "Those who are perplexed by the play's 'meaning'may draw at least some comfort from the author's assurance that itmeans what it says, neither more nor less" (Fletcher, 68). The sense ofthe laywas tobe found yfeeling it na performance,otbyhuntingdown symbols nthetext: So theplay isnot 'about': it s itself; t saplay" (Kenner, 31). If the play was devoid of content, itwas becausethe form was the content. What thismeant was unclear, because itrestated the problem: while everyone agreed therewas an excessiveuse of form in the play, few agreed as towhat thismeant.If symbolic criticismmade toomuch of theplay this anticriticism made too little, confirming sceptics in their view of the playas a pretentious hoax. But as Robbe-Grillet suggests, Godot seemed toinclude the various perspectives of criticism and deflect each as inadequate to it. That an artwork is not exhausted by its interpretationsis one of its definitions, but Godot offered shelter to grand interpretations precisely to scuttle them, defeating its symbolic accounts because it already contained a critique of the symbol. Theodor Adornounderstood this negative moment as essential to themodernist artworkand itsnew critical function.

279



5/17

2. Difficulty and disintegrationArtworks become nexuses of meaning, even against theirwill, to the extent that they negate meaning.

(Adorno,1997, 154)The difficulty f understanding odot andEndgame is integral oeach of them and not the perverse invention of academics. The confusion regarding the content ormeaning of these plays goes to the heartof both of them: the loss ofmeaning following the destruction of experience inmodernity. The divided reception of Godot as either profoundly significant or a pretentious hoax, as too meaningful or notmeaningful enough, pointed to the antinomies or paradoxes borne bythemodernist artwork.

The modernist artwork burdened aesthetic formwith the task ofabsorbing the self-destructive rationality, or 'logic of disintegration',which was unravelling the social fabric of modern life. For Adorno,Beckett's theatre, particularly Godot and Endgame, is exemplary inthis regard. His defence of the pre-eminence of Beckett's theatreplayed a significant role in its critical reception - Lukacs had arguedthat Beckett's work was the product of a distorted mind, relevant onlyas a symptomf the istortionsroducedby capitalism and is tiedtoan account of the catastrophic fate of civilisation after thewar. Lukacsand Adorno agreed on a diagnosis of the disastrous social effects ofthe capitalist economic system but arrived at diametrically opposedviews as to the consequences for art and critique. Adorno's defence ofBeckett's theatrewas a defence of artistic modernism and its criticalrelation to social reality.

The burden of this defence lay in establishing the greater socialrelevance of the formal concerns of Beckett's theatre,which appearedto many a retreat from the social, over the more obviously socialtheatre of Brecht or Sartre. Adorno puts Lukacs in reverse: the socialrealist portrait of reconciliation was the forgery; themodernist portraitof alienation closer to the real state of affairs. The conditions for therealism Lukacs demanded - a more stable reality susceptible to conventional forms and categories - no longer held. In this sense, the

modernists had in fact inherited the mantle of realism, for itwas notKafka, for example, thatdistorted what reality had become; reality hadbecome Kafkaesque. Blaming the nihilism of the twentieth century on280



6/17

Kafka's and Beckett's unheroic narratives was bad faith. The crisis ofsubjectivity was an objective situation; the categories conferring specious order on social development the real solipsism.The logic of disintegration thus describes the objective conditions ofmodernity and how they affect subjective life. The authorityof narrative recollection to order human experience into integral unities and meaningful wholes has been undermined by the success ofscience as a cognitive paradigm and the success of capital as an socioeconomic one. This undermining of the structure of experience hasprofound consequences for critique and aesthetic form. "The explosion ofmetaphysical meaning" (1992, 242), as Adorno refers toMaxWeber's disenchantment thesis, renders the older aesthetic unitywhich relied on itunavailable. To persist with conventional forms thatimplied the coherence of subjective lifemeant artistic ignorance (existentialistheatre),omplicity nbarbarism culture ndustry)rboth(socialist realism). The integral unity that once characterised art persisted now as a forgery. Only a discordant aesthetic unity was equal tothe extremities of the age: "Beckett's plays are absurd not because ofthe absence of anymeaning, for then theywould simply be irrelevant,but because they utmeaning on trial;they nfold itshistory" 1997,153). This history was the central concern of Adorno's aesthetic theory and, ifwe are to believe Adorno, of Beckett's theatre. The difficulty of understanding Godot and Endgame, Adorno contends, finds acounterpart in the difficulty of understanding the irrationality of contemporary society. The temptation to dispel the darkness of either playwith the clarity of meaning must therefore be resisted (1997, 27).Once again, the onus is reversed: criticism must measure up to theplays, not the plays to criticism; it is not the plays thatmust yield intelligibility in conceptual terms, but conceptual terms thatmust yieldbefore the irrationality of contemporary life. Reconstructing this unintelligibilityrings theplays' content ntoview: thecritiqueof theinstrumentalisation of modern life.The difficultyacingan artistwho accepted that the logic ofdisintegration did not stop at the door of the arts was to incorporatethe fragmentation ofmeaning in forms that enacted the integral unityof meaning. Itwas not enough towrite a play about absurdity (likeSartre's Huis Clos), as ifart could take themeasure of social rationalisationsimplybymaking ita topic.Treatingabsurdity s a themeormaking it a category imparted to it a coherency it did not possess,

281



7/17

thereby escaping the very experience itpurported to treat. The meaning lost from social life is in thisway won back in art, reducing art toconsolation. The integral unity of the pre-modernist artwork articulatedmeanings positivelyand impliedtheunityof the social. Themodernist artwork, alternatively, no longer represents the unity of thesocial because the social no longer constituted a unity (1992, 244).As the experience of the disintegration of experience evaded direct presentation, ithad to find expression at the level of form, in thelogic of thematerial itself and not simply in the content. A new aestheticunitywould bear thewounds inflictedby thehistoricalcrisisofsubjectivity,athering p critiqueinto thedetails of formby givingexpression to the powerlessness of the subject. The materials combined to produce the eviscerated reality of Godot and Endgame therefore carried an implicit critique. Becket's method was able to admit anegativity ofmeaning into the details of form, implicating themeansof presentation in the negativity it sought to express, and in the process revealed the shortcomings of the existentialism with which it isstill often confused. Conventional dramatic categories are not rejectedin this process, they are subjected to the experience of disintegration.The result is not chaos of form, but the search for a new unity capableof bearing this antinomy. A disrupted unity, bearing thewounds of thedestruction of experience, defined a task demanding the same rigourthat defined the integral unity of traditional artworks. For Adorno, thecrisis of subjectivity was not a situation art could avoid; it had rathertobear it, ndwould be judgedon itsabilitytodo so.In Beckett's plainer terms, the taskwas "to find a form that accommodates themess" (Driver, 23). The mess, however, encompassedart as well, recoiling on the forms that sought to present it.Beckettunderstood the artist's implication in this task, this time inmore paradoxical terms that Adorno would have recognised, when 'B.' in"Three Dialogues" speaks of "the expression that there is nothing toexpress, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with theobligationtoexpress" (17). The goal of a new aesthetic nity impliedimmersion in thematerial, for only here could the expression of thesubject deprived of expression occur. Adorno and Beckett reinsert thequestion of commitment into the immanent dialectic of form. CritiqueinGo dot and Endgame proceeds via determinate negation ofmeaning- testing traditional categories against contemporary experience - not282



8/17

its abstract negation. In this process, old and forgotten forms emergeas new possibilities. Music-hall gags and panto, stichomythia, theGreek messenger and medieval angel, the Japanese Noh play make upthematerials of this new unity, just as the conversational games andrituals of the tramps, which seemed so strange to Godot's first audiences, are some of its fruits. This formal experimentation is themeansby which both plays put 'meaning on trial', and is the reason whyAdorno saw in them the retrospective vision of the catastrophe ofhistory thatWalter Benjamin saw inKlee's Angelus Novus.3. Damaged life

Even the jokes of those who have been damaged are damaged.(Adorno,1992,257)

SimonCritchley 157) criticises dorno's lackofhumour s thechieffailing of his 1961 essay on Endgame. Adorno's treatment of Beckett's humour, however, is consistent with his entire approach: he refuses to turn humour into exit from Beckett's negativity. Critchleymutes the play's critique when he restores agency to the charactersthat joke about having lost it.The jokes inboth plays, invariably concerning the absence or destruction ofmeaning, are ultimately on us:

One daren't laugh anymore.Dreadful privation.This is really becoming insignificant.Not enough.

We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?Yes yes, we're magicians. (1956, 11,68, 69)When was that?Ohway back,way back,when youweren't inthe andof theliving.

283



9/17

God bewith the aysDo youbelieve in the ifetocome?Mine was always that.What? Neither gone nor dead?In spirit nly.Which?Both.

(1958, 33,35, 45)InMinima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, Adorno's ownblack jokes carry the same sting, just as the subtitle glosses both plays.The destruction or "withering" of experience refers to:

the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their realfate lies. It is as if the reified, hardened plaster cast of eventstakes the place of events themselves. Men are reduced towalk-on parts in a monster documentary filmwhich has nospectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on screen.(1978, 5)

When reality becomes unreal or "incommensurable with experience",art is forced to conspire with critique in an attack on art itself (1997,30). Adorno saw a critical method in the conventional failure of Beckett's drama, especially in the inability of his characters tomove theplot. If the fate of Beckett's characters cannot be mapped out in advance according to psychology, as in naturalism, this is because thesubjecthas been stripped f itsinterioritynd ispowerless toalter itsfate. The depiction of thismutilated subject was art's loudest protestagainst it,a criterion for a new naturalism yet to be outmoded by current developments inglobal capitalism.There is no false consciousness in this, for the characters are asaware of their ondition s they rebaffledby effortsoalter it.Theconstant play-acting and theatricality in both plays is not just theatrical, inotherwords,but symptomaticf thecrisis insubjectivity. ithevery joke we are reminded of the characters' struggle to cope with asuspended fate. "It is as if the two trampswere on stage without a part284



10/17

to play", said Robbe-Grillet (113). Like the mime Act without Wordsthat followed the firstLondon production of Endgame, the tramps aretrapped in a hellish repetition. As well as the source of comedy andthe reinvention of old forms, then, theword-play and rituals representattempts to cope with the 'withering of experience'. Even the play'sdarker remarks are framed as conversational diversions. Pozzo's peroration, "That's how it is on this bitch of an earth", is delivered with aneyeonhis audience: "How didyou findme? Good? Fair?Middling?"(38). Lucky's fragmented speech, also delivered as an entertainmentfor the other players, is the play's celebrated instance of thewitheringof experience.

Though trapped in a present cut off from the past and future, thetramps constantly take their bearings, arguing over whether or notthey are in the same spot as the day before, whether the tree has growna leaf or two,whether Estragon remembers anything of the day before.Pozzo and Lucky provide a new set of diversions, and later on (intheir bsence) thesubjectof a game (72-73). The prospectof suicideor parting from each other also become games. Indeed anything canand does becomes the subject of a game, because the withering ofexperience encompasses everything. The games are designed to passthe time, and perhaps an entire life, but threaten to fail when neededmost:

VLADIMIR: (inanguish)Say anythingtallESTRAGON: What dowe do now?VLADIMIR: Wait forGodot.ESTRAGON: AhSilence.

VLADIMIR: This isawfulESTRAGON: Sing something.VLADIMIR: No no (He reflects.)We could start ll overagain perhaps.ESTRAGON: That shouldbe easy.VLADIMIR: It's thestart hat's ifficult.ESTRAGON: You can start from anything.VLADIMIR: Yes, butyouhave todecide.ESTRAGON: True.Silence.VLADIMIR: Helpme

285



11/17

ESTRAGON: I'm trying.Silence.(63-64)

The effort to divert themselves is palpable, as is the absurdity of thepredicament that defeats their efforts to do so, but a new word-gamesuggests itself: "That's the idea, let's contradict each other"; and"that's the idea, let's ask each other questions". As another pointlesssilence gapes, a game of hat-swapping ensues. When that game exhausts itself,Vladimir asks "will you not play?" towhich Estragonretorts "play atwhat?" (72).

This is both entertaining and unsettling, as if it can only end insenility. We never forget for long the pathetic motivation for thesegames: to play at living, to pretend meaningful life is still possible.The play's concentration on the present moment is so telescoped as todefeat symbolism, for symbols place "a current perception in the context of collected experience" (Winer, 76), conferring a coherence onevents the tramps struggle to achieve with their ritualised banter. Thatloss ofmemory is an index of decline in the play is clearer in the 'senile dialectic' of Pozzo andLucky (Adorno 1997,250).When askedwhere they are going, Pozzo replies simply "On". The trope of 'onwardness' recurs throughout the play (and Beckett's later prose) in aconsistent parody of Victorian notions of material and moral progress(see Abbot, 32-42). We are left to guess what happened to Pozzo andLucky between Acts I and II, though the 'progress' of the story ismeasured by their deterioration, in Lucky's muteness and Pozzo'sblindness and memory loss.Whether a day ormore has passed is irrelevant to Pozzo, who reacts angrily toVladimir's efforts tomark thepassage of time: "It's abominable When When One day, is that notgood enoughforyou?" (89). Similarexchanges inEndgame likewisesuggest the disintegration of subjective experience into 'one damnthing after another,' or intomoments that do not add up to a life, justas grains ofmillet do not make a heap - the paradox referred to in theplay: "Yesterday What does thatmean? Yesterday " "That meansthatbloody awfulday, longago, before thisbloody awfulday" (32).Hamm's chronicle, though we may wonder who will ever set eyes onit, represents another failed attempt to uncover narrative meaning inrecollection.286



12/17

It is not just the jokes and one-liners that testify to damagedlife; joke-telling itselfbecomes another coping technique, thoughhardly a successful one:ESTRAGON: You know thestory f theEnglishman inthebrothel?VLADIMIR: Yes.ESTRAGON: Tell it tome.VLADIMIR: Ah stopitESTRAGON: An Englishmanhaving drunk a littlemorethan usual goes to a brothel. The bawd asks him ifhe wantsa fair one, a dark one, or a red-haired one. Go on.VLADIMIR: STOP IT (16)

Jokes and joke-telling inEndgame, like the rest of the dialogue, intensifyGodot's sense of being rehearsed to kill the time.Nagg complainsat one point, "I tell this storyworse and worse" (21), as if the effortdisclosed onlyhis senility. he ostensiblefailureof these efforts oconfer narrative coherence is the successful implication of critique inthe constituents of dramatic form. Few would deny, however, that inGodot a certain dignity, even heroism, attaches to this failure. Thepossibility of such Stoic heroism accounts for the affirmative readingsof the play and the greater popularity of Godot over Endgame, for inEndgameBeckett circumvents hepossibility f heroismentirely.4. The memory ofwholeness

An unprotesting depiction of ubiquitous regression is a protest against a state of the world that so accommodates thelaw of regression that itno longer has anything to hold upagainstit(Adorno,1992,248).In the effortoharness theplay's negativity o thepurposesof socialcritique, Adorno risked reducing Endgame to "forlorn particulars thatmock theconceptual" 1992, 252), asRobbe-Grillethad reducedGodot (and theatre) ophysicalpresence.The direction f thiseffortxplains his suggestion thatNagg and Nell's trashcans are "emblems of

287



13/17

the culture built afterAuschwitz" (1992, 267). The peculiar concreteness of Beckett's objects - armchair, gaff, stepladder, bloody handkerchief - possess something of the disenchanted character of modernlife generally that calls for conceptual articulation,even as itevades it.

The task facing criticism is to explore this tension between disenchanted particulars and the concept without releasing it altogether.This means resisting the temptation to construct a philosophy of theremainder out of Beckett's remains - a reduction Adorno risks whenhe reads Endgame as the deconstruction of the subject1 - for themoredifficult task of articulating Beckett's method in connection with theeviscerated reality of postwar life, which unfolds with the logic ofcatastrophe.Godot proved Beckett's method adequate to the destruction ofexperience, the ne plus ultra of which is the inescapable prospect ofnuclear annihilation. Reference to contemporary reality is once againwithheld, giving the play the appearance of "an allegory whose intention has fizzled out" (1992, 269). Endgame is no more 'about' nuclearArmageddon than Godot is 'about' occupied France. A drama aboutnuclear catastrophe would only reveal the inadequacy of its constituents, solelybecause itsplotwould comfortinglyalsify hehistoricalhorror of anonymity by displacing it onto human characters and actions" (1992, 245). The bomb is never referred to - this would renderitmore amenable to the concept and to understanding itself - but thenihilism of technical reason represented by the bomb suffuses thelinguistic and dramaturgical infrastructure of theplay.The absurd dialogue and rehearsed patter, for example, is a response to a collapsed world and not in itself absurd. Vladimir's cajolery, "Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can't you, once in away?" (12),becomes Hamm's shrill command, "Keep going, can't you, keep going " (40). The word games thistimepossess a logic that annotbemistaken for stoic endurance:

HAMM: Open thewindow.CLOV: What for?HAMM: Iwant tohear the sea.CLOV: You wouldn't hear it.HAMM: Even ifyouopened thewindow?CLOV: No.HAMM: Then it'snotworthwhileopening it?288



14/17

CLOV: No.HAMM: [Violently.]hen open it(43)

This invertedogicseeps into heobject-world f theplay:HAMM: The alarm, s itworking?CLOV: Why wouldn't it eworking?HAMM: Because it's worked toomuch.CLOV: But it'shardlyworked atallHAMM: [Angrily.]hen because it'sworked too little

(34)What does the reason for anything matter at this stage? The idea thatthis form of life could "mean something" provokes Clov's strangledlaughter; a "rational being" returning to earth might make sense ofthismockery (27), though ot enoughtoenjoy"a good guffaw" 41).While everything has to be explained to the creatures (32), no explanationcouldpossibly suffice47).This logic is turned gainst life itself, s ifHamm and Clovwere the lastmen and given the task of overseeing the extinction ofthe species. Both take an ironic pleasure executing this duty:

HAMM: A fleaAre there tillfleas?CLOV: On me there's one. [Scratching.] Unless it's a

crablouse.HAMM: [Veryperturbed] But humanitymight startfrom there again Catch him, for the love ofGod

(27)Not even thekitchenratcan escape (37). Clov powdershis groinwithinsecticide aimed at the flea, though the earthwent sterile long beforehe did.The play's drive to sterility,r ironic olidarity ith the technical reason that culminates in lead waves (25) and stinking corpses

289



15/17

(33), justifies Hamm's denial of help to the interlocutor of his chronicle, who wants food for his son ("as if the sexmattered"):HAMM: [...] Bread? But I have no bread [...] Then per

haps a little corn? [Pause. Normal tone.] Thatshould do it. [Narrative tone.] Corn, yes I havecorn [...] But use your head. I give you somecorn [...] and you bring it back to your childand you make him - ifhe's still alive - a nicepot of porridge [...] full of nourishment. Good.The colours come back to his cheeks - perhaps.And then?[Pause.] I lostpatience. [Violently.]Use your head, can't you, use your head, you'reon earth, there's no cure for that (36-37)

The last sentence might be the refrain of the play. When Clov spies aboy through thewindow he prepares to exterminate him as he had theflea:

CLOV: I'll go and see. I'll take thegaff.HAMM: No[CLOV halts.]CLOV: No? A potential rocreator?HAMM: If he exists he'll die there or he'll come here.And ifhe doesn't...[Pause.]CLOV: You don't believe me? You think I'm inventing? (49-50)

The boy, like the flea, the rat, and Hamm's interlocutor, may be invented for the purpose of distraction, especially when Hamm's apparent direction of the action is considered: "It's the end Clov, we'vecome to the end" (50). The interruptions and rehearsed narrative toneofHamm's story suggest not its unreality, however, but the narrativescenery required to relate themoral vacuum at the centre of it. In Godot this ould stillbe done intheslapstick ntics ofVladimir andEstragon's long-winded responses to Pozzo's cries for help, but Endgame's theatricality is a darker reminder of the fafade required to290



16/17

conceal the broken social bond. Hamm and Clov live on, or play outtheir lives, with no wish for self-preservation but only to ensure theend is notmiscarried, lest the agony start all over again. That a design,any design, may be at work in this is a hope that can only be whispered: "Something is taking its course" (17, 26).The missing ends inEndgame aremoral as well as narrative, forcharacters in search of an ending find their counterpart in lives without ethical and meaningful ends. Just as the bomb exceeds all conceivable ends, so Beckett's endlessness is our own.

Note1. Adorno sought confirmation fromBeckett inperson overwhether'Hamlet', and thus the dramatic subject as such, is deliberatelyechoed in 'Hamm'; Beckett rejected the idea (see Knowlson, 428).Adorno dedicated his Endgame essay and his magnum opus AestheticTheory toBeckett.

Works CitedAbbott, H. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in theAutograph(Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996).Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans.Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1997).-, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. J.F.N. Jephcott(London:Verso, 1978).-, "Trying to Understand Endgame", Notes on Literature, vol. 2, trans.

ShierryWeber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 241275.Beckett, Samuel, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1956).-, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1958).-, and Georges Duthuit, "Three Dialogues", inSamuel Beckett: A Collectionof CriticalEssays, ed. Martin Esslin (New Jersey: Prentice Hall,1965), 16-22.Critchley, Simon, Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy andLiterature (London andNew York: Routledge, 1997).Driver, Tom F., "Beckett by theMadeleine", Columbia UniversityForum 4.3(1961), 23.

291



17/17

Fletcher, John,and JohnSpurling, Beckett: A Study ofHis Plays (New York:Hill andWang, 1972).Fraser, G.S., The Times Literary Supplement (10 Feb. 1956), 84.Kenner, Hugh, A Reader's Guide toSamuel Beckett (London: Thames andHudson, 1973).Kerr,Walter, inEric Bentley, New Republic (14 May 1956), 20-21.Knowlson, James,Damned to ame: The Life ofSamuel Beckett (New York:Simon &Schuster, 1996).Mercier, Vivian, "TheMathematical Limit", TheNation 188 (14 Feb. 1959),144-45.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, "Samuel Beckett, or 'Presence' in the Theatre", inMartin Esslin, 108-116.Winer, Robert, "The Whole Story", in The World of Samuel Beckett, ed.Joseph J. Smith (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP,1991), 73-85.

292

adorno on godot and endgame

Documents