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Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Samuel Beckett, Endgame. Elizabeth Barry. Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 . Born in Foxrock , Dublin, Ireland in 1906 to a middle-class Protestant family Attended Portora Boys’ School in Enniskillen (the “cream of Ulster” – Beckett: “yes, rich and thick”)

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Samuel Beckett, Endgame

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  1. Samuel Beckett, Endgame Elizabeth Barry

  2. Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 • Born in Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland in 1906 to a middle-class Protestant family • Attended Portora Boys’ School in Enniskillen (the “cream of Ulster” – Beckett: “yes, rich and thick”) • Studied Modern Languages at Trinity College, Dublin • Went to Paris as a lecteur at the EcoleNormaleSuperieure • Stayed – for the rest of his life, earning money as a translator and then a writer. Wrote most of his key works in French first (En attendant Godot, Fin de partie (Endgame), Molloy. [not Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape or Not I] • Books initially banned in (Catholic) Ireland, but after success of Waiting for Godot he became an acclaimed writer; awarded Nobel prize in 1969

  3. Beckett and religion • Strict Protestant upbringing – recurring memories of his mother surface in his prose fiction (he is, he said, what her “savage loving made me” (cited in Knowlson, ) • William Empson describes Beckett’s position on religion: “We cannot believe in Christianity, and yet without that everything we do is hopelessly bad. […] A child is brought up to believe that he would be wicked and miserable without God; then he stops believing in God; then he behaves like a dog with its back broken by a car, screaming and thrashing on the public road…” (Argufying, p. 539)

  4. Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot (1951) Endgame (1953) Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Happy Days (1961)

  5. Endgame as parable? • Playwright Jean Anouilh on Waiting for Godot (in its opening production in Paris, 5th January 1953): “A music-hall sketch of Pascal’s Pensees as played by Fratellini clowns” • Jan Kott (1963): ‘King Lear, or Endgame’, in Shakespeare, Our Contemporary Beckett’s Endgame (and conversations with Kott) influenced Peter Brook’s King Lear of 1962:Kenneth Tynan review: ‘a mighty philosophic farce in which the leading figures enact their roles on a gradually denuded stage that resembles at the end, a desert graveyard or unpeopled planet. It is an ungoverned world; for the first time in tragedy, a world without gods, with no possibility of hopeful resolution.’ • Theodor Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique (1982), no. 26, 119-150

  6. Clov: Finished, it is finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.

  7. The sin of having been born… • When Clov discovers a flea – Hamm says: “But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!” • James Knowlson in Beckett, Damned to Fame, quotes the ancestors of these characters, Dante’s lost souls in Hell: God and their parents they blasphemed, The human kind, the place, the time, and seed That did engender them and give them birth. (Inferno, Canto 3, H. F. Cary translation) • Hamm to his father Nagg: Accursed progenitor! • Beckett was fond of the verse in the Book of Job, verse 3, chapter 3, ‘Let the day perish in which I was born and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived’ (see Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist) • Cf. lovely line in Beckett’s novel Murphy, when the character Neary curses first the day he was born, “and then, in a bold flashback, the night he was conceived”.

  8. “Instead of following the tradition which demands that a play have an exposition, a climax and a dénouement, Beckett’s plays have a cyclical structure which might indeed be better described as a diminishing spiral. They present images of entropy in which the world and the people in it are slowly but inexorably running down.” (Michael Worton, Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, 69) Hamm: We’re not beginning to… to… mean something? Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah, that’s a good one! (108)

  9. Theatrical ‘accursed progenitors’ Hamm: “Can there be misery – [he yawns] – loftier than mine? No doubt. Formerly. But now?” Oedipus Rex: “Woe, woe is me. Miserable, miserable that I am!” [?!] Phèdre: “Ah, this is one misery I have not yet endured. What fresh torments still lie in wait for me.” King Lear: “As full of grief as age; wretched in both.” (see Fletcher and Spurling, 79)

  10. Endgame and the presentational: […HAMM stirs. He yawns under the handkerchief. He removes the handkerchief from his face.Very red face. Black glasses.] Hamm: Me [he yawns] to play. CLOV: I'll leave you. HAMM: No! CLOV: What is there to keep me here? HAMM: The dialogue.

  11. Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance On Endgame: • a blatant presentationalism that is not even metaphor, since it cannot be understood in other than theatrical terms. • its histrionic movements and gestures are the propulsive force of its action, and not embellishments to it. (40)

  12. Endgame: the world of the play

  13. Sigmund Freud • Fort/da game that he heard his grandson Ernst playing as a very small child: • Saying fort (‘gone’) and da (‘there’) – throwing a toy on a reel of string away from himself and then a while later drawing it back. • Symbolizing his relationship with his mother who would leave him for a few hours but always return.

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