SAMUEL BECKETT: A STUDY OF HIS DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE THESIS ^^V~^r.--r^(• SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF ^ % Bottor of ${)tloj6(op|)p IN English IV ; rt- KHALID RIFAT HUSSIEN AL-UDA YU Under the Supervision of IQBAL AHMED DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH (IND»A) 1996 ^^^'^"^'''''•'•^ rj0 T4767 f=yLjediccited to V^^ Vann\%, f&toWitn L Sishn 7:^7^7 tmmm DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY AND AUGARH—202 002 INDIA MODERN eUROPBAN LANGUAGES March 12, 1996 This is certify that Mr. Khalid Rifa't Hussien Al-Udayli's Ph.D. thesis on Samuel Beckett: A Study Of His Dramatic Technique is the outcome of his own research on the subject carried out under my supervision. It is a fairly satisfactory and original effort. A^wvJL/ (HQBAL AHMAD) ACKNOWLEDGMENT I have great pleasure in recording my deep sense of gratitude to Mr Iqbal Ahmed, Reader, Department of English, under whose supervision I completed this thesis on the dramatic technique of five stage-plays of Samuel Beckett. I was fortunate to be associated with him. I heartily thank Professor Maqbool Hasan Khan, Chairman, Department of English, for his invaluable advice and help. Special gratitude is due to Professor Wiqar Hussain for his encouragement when the thesis was in its preliminary stages, and to Professor K.S. Misra for material on Beckett and his able and experien -ed guidance. Particular acknowledgment is made of the readiness with which the British Council Library and its Staff at New Delhi was forthcoming with its reading material on Beckett. Its response to requests for books on Beckett to be sent for study to Aligarh was immediate. But all the while it was my family that indulged me. My parents Mr & Mrs Rifa't Al-udayli and brothers Muhamraed, Umar, and Firas, as well as sisters Mrs Ahmed, Mrs Nabeel, and Miss Kholood, extended full financial and moral support. Friends were persistent backers. Aleem Bhai, Nedal Ashraf, Ayman, Javed, Dr. Asim Siddiqui, and cousin Osama always sustained me. Special thanks are due to Mr Shoaib Ahmad of the M/s Micro Services Centre, Aligarh for the wordprocessing and laser printing of this manuscript , done well in time. (Khalid R.H. Al-Udayli) CONTENTS Page No. Acknowledgement INTRODUCTION ... 1 CHAPTER! WAITING FOR GODOT ... 18 CHAPTER-II ENDGAME ... 97 CHAPTER-III KRAPP'S LAST TAPE ... 188 CHAPTER-IV HAPPY DAYS ... 227 CHAPTER-V PLAY ... 316 CONCLUSION 366 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 377 INTRODUCTION This is a textual analysis of five stage-plays of Samuel Beckett for a study of their respective dramaturgies. The dramas considered are Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days and Play. Each work is read through almost from cover to cover. The effort is to see how does the playwright supply the context of what Leventhal calls a Non-ent or Nothing-is on stage. The idea of a Non-ent, Leventhal takes from Gorgias of Lentini, a Sicilian rhetorician and sophist, who flourished from 483-375 BC. Simplifying the orthodox language of Encyclopedia Britannica in his article, The Beckett Hero, Leventhal restates Britannica's summing up of Gorgias, to propound the Non-ent as follows: 1. Nothing is. 2. If anything is, it cannot be known. 3. If anything is, and cannot be known, it cannot be expressed in speech. 'Nothing is' in the original was 'There is nothing which has any real existence' . Experience of existence was that of an empty, meaningless void. Therefore, art should be bereft of 'occasion', and if there be 'an occasion' at all. It should be 'failure' and not the 'domain of the feasible'. Beckett was relentlessly honest in his commitment to the theme of existence as a Non-ent, both as a void, and, as an inexpressible. Deirdre Bair (whose biography of the playwright, Enoch Brater considered unauthorized in why beckett) writes of 'the cold, hard, exacting look' which Beckett had learnt to take at himself. He was once struck by an entry in Jules Renard's Journal, whose author had 'trained himself to be absolutely honest' about its entries. Bair quotes from the Renard Journal and says that the first time Beckett read the passage, he spent hours repeating the words, over and over, as he sat in his armchair sipping whisky in front of a fire Last night I wanted to get up. Dead weight. A leg hangs outside. Then a trickle runs down my leg. I allow it to reach my heel before I make up my mind. It will dry in the sheets. Ruby Cohn finds the playwright's mind 'compulsively examining' , and that it had 'garnered an impressive fund of knowledge'. Cohn says that Beckett's heroes howl and stutter that their lives are not worth living, nevertheless, they continue to examine experience, 'propounding the old philosophical questions' about the Self, the World, and God. Cohn thinks it paradoxical however, that all Beckett heroes insist upon and rebel against the Cartesean definition of Man as 'a thing that thinks' and, against a knowledge confined to consciousness. Trapped in an irrational existential predicament, even 'to think' was futile. Earlier, Alfred Jarry had coined the word ' Pataphysics to ridicule Man's effort at thought. Again, according to Cohn, Beckett's heroes are haunted by'the Cartesean cleavage between world in re and world in intellectu and therefore bear the scars of this disjunction, like Murphy who was split into two: Mind and Body! Descartes' answer of a 'pineal gland', as the place in the brain where the Mind and Body were one, was found unsatisfactory by the dramatist, who mocked at it as a no man's gland and had puns and obscene jokes for the 'con' of the conarium. Furthermore Cohn treats Mercier as a representative of the Mind, and Camier of the Body; together they formed what the hero of The Unnamable will later call a 'psuedo-couple'. As Mercier and Camier journey through life they grow further apart until they finally bid each other adieu; and 'physical Camier', says Cohn, ends up ' in a hospital with skin ailments', and 'mental Mercier'in an asylum 'to observe the growing shadows'.^ In Waiting for Godot, Gogo and Didi, as nicknames 'summarize the polarity'. In Beckett's trilogy, Cohn finds a mind 'precariously fastened to bodies in successive stages of decay'. Moran begins as a champion walker but towards the end, creeping paralysis puts him on crutches. Molloy started on crutches, but the close has him crawling and rolling. Malone, immobile in bed, has only dim memories of a life spent in walking. Cohn also sees The Unnamable begun with the hero's claim to be seated, but concluded with the hero in 'headless thought', 'mouthless speech', and 'earless listening to words' that may not be his. Yet, all these heroes work themselves 'into frenzies of meditation'.^ But then, Cohn also says that Beckett thought Sartre and Heideggar difficult reading, and said he was no philosopher; infact, the dramatist asserted that he found the world a mess and situated that on stage. Now, it is generally accepted that Belacqua Shua, the hero in More Pricks Than Kicks which is a set of short stories by the playwright, was the genus of the Beckettain world. According to Doherty, Belacqua sought 'absolution from life'.'^ Leventhal argues that Beckett could not rid himself of Belacqua, who persists in the Murphys, Molloys, Morans, Watts, Estragons, Hamms and Pirns. Belacqua's familiar position was the 'embryonal repose', the knee-and-elbow position. The embryo has haunted the dramatist. According to Leventhal, Beckett wants to 'reduce his characters to silence, himself m embryo, back to womb life, back to the foetal image of the unborn'. Belacqua's progress is always slow, and handicaps many; besides'lameness, blindness, general debility reduce the tempo of locomotion'. Therefore, motion ends m a crawl. Such a 'stasis or near stasis' is an outstanding characteristic of Beckett's creations. Leventhal sees them reveal themselves in physical pain. However, they 'do not suffer gladly but inevitably' . They accept 'the ignominious situation', and 'the insult', and turn more and more inwards to 'the haven of their minds', for 'solace'. Doherty is of the opinion that Murphy is 'a non-heroic hero', whose cancer is 'a solipsistic self-communion', and Watt 'depicts painfully the tragic-comedy of a mind breaking down m its pursuit of meaning'. In fact. Watt is 'the fust of a long series of works which confronts squarely the possibility of Man discovering meaning m life and answeis the question 'What' by 'Not'.' About The Trilogy, Doherty says that it is a a hunt for identity by writers through writing. However, m pursuit of meaning through existence, they find themselves m 'progressive states of decay'. But then, more and more it becomes 'the problem of the writer who uses writing to avoid the inevitable task of facing himself. Or is it, thinks Doherty, that Beckett is ^pushing his problems away into Watt'. Esslin considers Sartre's plays written in the traditional cannon, for, they indeed do not escape that mould. In fact, his creations could be 'characters' with ' souls' . •'••'• Further, that 'the philosopher has followed the logic of his position to the point of putting his ideas into the form of his fiction or drama'. •'•^ On the other hand, Beckett's works are more than mere illustrations of existential philosophy; this is 'precisely because they are free of any abstract concepts or general ideas'. That is why they escape from the 'inner contradiction of existentialist statements that are couched in the form of generalizations'. Esslin finds Beckett's work 'certainly superior' to the works of Sartre.