Sunday (Meditations on) Style

In which I foist another old (and luckily, short) paper on you in lieu of writing a new post. Because I can. And because I have lots of them hanging around.

I'm dredging up this one because I've been thinking a lot over the past few days about the ethical implications and possibilities of style. And about the sensuous, intoxicating, dangerous potential of language. Asking myself where my responsibilities lie.

Here's some purely old-fashioned, texual criticism of Samuel Beckett's Endgame that also begins to suggest larger questions about our complicity as pleasure-seeking readers. If I were writing this paper now, instead of in my first semester of graduate school, I'd certainly have thrown in some reference to Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text.

And yes, I know in this essay I'm grouping all readers under the umbrella of an unindividualized, universalizing "we." I'm sure the upcoming weeks of reader-response theory will rid me of any such tendencies. I'm letting the paper stand in all its gaps and inadequacies.

(For the record, I'm also sort of involved in a project of looking back on where my proclivities and inclinations have led me so far in grad school as I attempt to make a big move forward. Trying to return to myself as a thinker, ground myself in a way, as I have a strange feeling that certain doors are soon to be burst wide open.)

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Words and Pleasure in Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Although I am certainly not unique in my approach, there is not an overwhelming amount of commentary on the nature and function of language in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. This perhaps could be attributed to some of the popular critical notions about Beckett's relationship to language. In her essay "Words About Words: Beckett and Language," Dina Sherzer outlines common approaches to the subject, including "that Beckett distrusts language, that he thinks that language is inadequate, and that in his works he demonstrates the bankruptcy and the nullity of language." And indeed, Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, has pointed to this mistrust of language as a defining aesthetic factor for Beckett and his contemporaries: the poetic image which is physicalized on the stage; the intuitive, rather than discursive, vision of reality which the absurdist playwrights attempt to communicate is for Esslin a result of their belief that language can no longer express anything about the human condition. As Sherzer explains, this attitude is indeed partly true for Beckett and she posits a possible influence of the German philosopher Fritz Mauthner, "who repeatedly discussed the vanity of words and the impossibility of knowledge through language."

And if we look within Endgame, we can certainly find an apt example of this viewpoint in Clov's final monologue: "I ask the words that remain -- sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say." Or earlier on: "I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent." It's also significant that Beckett is an Irish, English-speaking author who began to write in French precisely because he perceived that in the French language he had no style. Among other things, this seems to indicate a suspicion of language, as if one's style, the way one wears language, has the potential to obscure or obfuscate the thing that needs to be said.

But, as Sherzer also points out -- and what I think we can find from looking closely at some examples from Endgame -- Beckett's relationship to language is not quite that one-sided. And indeed, when approaching the work of a writer who began -- and continued -- as a novelist, who spent years teaching language and literature, and who was the protégé and friend of no less that James Joyce -- that dizzying inventor of words -- it does seem hard to believe that such a relationship would be very easy to categorize as one thing or another, or so seemingly dismissive as some critics have suggested. Within Endgame itself, there appears a remarkable amount of linguistic play, poetry, and discourse on language. In this paper I propose to touch upon a very small corner of the play's textual landscape, exploring a few landmarks that have emerged abruptly and stunningly in my reading of the play -- expressions and, more specifically, single words that seem to me to rise up from the flatness like plateaus, and from which I think we might gain access to potentially new vistas.

Paul Lawley, in his essay "Symbolic Structure and Creative Obligation in Endgame" describes the textual landscape of the play as "grey." But he finds that when the characters are describing worlds beyond their own, worlds from the past or worlds of a wishful, imaginative elsewhere, they use single words of description (like "Ardennes", "the road to Sedan", "Lake Como" -- or in Hamm's case "Flora! Pomona! Ceres!"), which, like tiny bulbs or candles, light the text with a "mytho-poetic" glow. I propose that a similar effect is taking place in certain instances when Hamm and Clov make reference to their births, or their beginnings (which could also be considered a foreign territory in this land of endings). There is a slight shift we feel in the use of certain words, a strangeness, a very precise and subtle difference in the air, which has some profound effects.

The first instance I'll mention is Hamm's line: "Something dripping in my head, ever since the fontanelles." Hamm is speaking of the duration of the dripping of what he calls the heart (also at one point a vein, or a little artery) in his head, which he has experienced, ostensibly, since he was an infant. There seems to be a Formalist objective to Beckett's use of the word "fontanelles": it's a surprise, a tiny little shock that jolts us slightly. Beckett could very easily have written "ever since I was a baby," "or ever since I was young," and have kept very much in the "style-less" tone of the dialogue. But he uses instead this evocative and strange (and yet, achingly specific) word which appears to come out of nowhere.

Fontanelles, of course, are the fibrous membranes that connect the bones of the skull in a small infant. During childbirth, the fontanelles allow the bones of the head to overlap their edges so it can pass through the birth canal without compressing and damaging the baby's brain. These bones ultimately fuse together once a child reaches between a year and a year and a half of age. Beckett's word choice here is rich and suggestive and avoids the cliché, "ever since I was young," which would barely register to an English-speaking audience, using instead a word from which immediately blooms images of fragility, vulnerability, tenuousness, smallness. Who hasn't been warned as a child, when holding, or playing, with a baby, to be careful of the "soft-spot:" the tiny, pulsing, downy indentation that seems to mark a being not yet fully-formed, a mind not yet sealed and determined and all the more vulnerable for it. It is a word firmly connected to the body, to birth, to growth. My illustrated Oxford English Dictionary includes with the definition of "fontanel" a diagram of a baby's skull, the bones and the membranes labeled; it's a tiny, peaceful-looking, semi-transparent head floating unattached to any body.

(And there are a number of critics who have read Endgame as happening inside a skull, perhaps inside the head of Hamm: the set design, with its two small windows placed up high (two eye sockets), is seen to support this reading. The play thus becomes the internal drama of a man who is dying, ending. "Fontanelles," then, could be read as a time before the skull had closed, before Hamm had become trapped within his own mind.)

Lawley speaks of an "echo principle" in Engame, a concept which he derives from Beckett's own comments on the play: "There are no accidents in Fin de partie. Everything is based on analogy and repetition." Hamm's "ever since the fontanelles" is a kind of echo of a line Clov speaks earlier in the play. In that scene, Hamm tells him "I thought I told you to be off," and Clov responds, "I'm trying." The stage directions indicate that Clov then goes to the door and halts, and says, "Ever since I was whelped."

In this instance, the expected "Ever since I was born" (Clov has been trying to leave Hamm every since he [Clov] was born) is replaced by something stranger, unanticipated, and again, highly evocative. It is dogs that are whelped: tiny, squirming puppies emerging bloody and squealing. When used to describe the birth of a human being, it has highly derogative connotations emphasizing the bestial aspects of procreation. This word prefigures Hamm's "fontanelles" in its specificity and its evocation of a kind of beginning, of birth. And in its specificity, it lies in stark contrast to other lines spoken by Hamm and Clov. For example, Hamm implores Clov "What's happening?" and Clov replies "Something is taking its course." This line is ominous, almost chilling in its vagueness. Or Hamm, struggling to describe to Clov what has gone on for too long: "This…this…thing." The characters thus seem to be able to use words quite pointedly at certain times, to describe specific events; at others, words utterly fail them as they attempt to grasp the mysterious and the immense.

Hamm, I think it is useful to point out, is an author as well as an actor. As he tells his story, and the story of the vassal who comes to him imploring for shelter for himself and his son, Hamm frequently edits. For example: "You prayed -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) You CRIED for night; it comes -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) It FALLS: now cry in darkness." He also takes much pleasure in the well-placed word, the finely-turned phrase: "You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness. (Pause.) Nicely put, that." In a similar way, I'd like to suggest that in the pauses after the phrases "…ever since the fontanelles" or "Ever since I was whelped," in the way Beckett frames them within the text, there is the sense that we can almost hear Beckett's own, reflexive, "Nicely put, that." These words certainly give us a sense of pleasure in their strangeness and aptness, a pleasure of which it is highly doubtful Beckett was unaware, or to which immune.

But there is another side to this pleasure in the well-chosen word. Take the exchange between Hamm and Clov as Hamm searches for the right word to describe the landscape outside:

HAMM: Nothing stirs. All is --
CLOV: Zer--
HAMM: (violently) Wait till you're spoken to!
(Normal voice.)
All is…all is…all is what?
(Violently.)
All is what?
CLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what your want to know? Just a moment.
(He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope turns toward Hamm.)
Corpsed.
(Pause.)
Well? Content?

There is pleasure, contentment, that Clov, perhaps Hamm, and of course, we -- the audience or the reader -- get from this utterly specific, redolent, and strange word. Beckett gives us a full pause so that it can be fully absorbed. It seems to convey everything we know of misery, waste, loss, and decay within the single heart-beat of its one elegant syllable. But should we be taking pleasure in such a finely-wrought description? Are we not acting in the same manner as Hamm, who in telling his pitiful story of cruelty and degradation is above all finding pleasure in the way it is told? Lawley points out in his essay that Hamm's values are "aesthetic rather than ethical." I think we can see Beckett using words within Endgame to subtly challenge us to face our (and perhaps his) complicity with Hamm. What does it mean to enjoy the perfectly-formed description of something wretched and debased? And what does it mean to author it?