“Depends on What Creature you Happen to Be”: Humans-Beasts-Machines, Dehumanization in Samuel Beckett’s

Neil Richter

In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” Art critic and novelist John Berger describes the modern relationship between man and animal in the following terms: “[The] reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units” (11). With

Happy Days, Samuel Beckett seeks to provide an experience that forces the viewer to observe human interaction as if for the first time. Stripped of its context and meaning, it becomes an anthropological act, devoid of identification and recognition. This refers back to Berger’s statement in that, like Berger, Beckett recognizes man’s dehumanized role in the modern, industrial landscape. Beckett’s world was one in which the technological advancements of war and commerce rendered humans little more than the “castrated male swine reared for slaughter” (47) referred to directly in Beckett’s text. In Happy Days, Beckett creates a controlled environment in which he can study and deconstruct every aspect of human behavior, from language, to gesture, to the nature of the body itself, with all the detached curiosity of a scientist. In this way, he picks apart that which makes his characters ‘human’, turning them into animals, and finally, into machines devoid of recognizable characteristics.

The fragmentation of bodies is perhaps Beckett’s most overt form of dehumanization in

Happy Days. The first act opens with the sight of female lead Winnie, who will become the closest thing to a protagonist in Beckett’s play. She is submerged up to her waist in a mound of dirt, the only recognizable life form in a sterile landscape created with a “Maximum of simplicity and symmetry” (Beckett 7). Beckett’s stage directions emphasize details which 2 accentuate the “visible flesh” that Winnie will refer to throughout the play: “plump, arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom” (7) and so on and so forth. In another theatrical universe one might view Winnie’s body as a bastion of fertility. In this case, however, Beckett simply displays her framed by the lifeless dirt in which she is embedded. The state of her body prevents her from participating in birth or any carnal pursuits. Stripped of fertility, she is presented to us on a blank slate, rendering her unfamiliar. The sight of bare, organic flesh held up against an inorganic landscape alienates the viewer, creating a spectacle that works against the implicit desire to identify with the performer. As a result, the spectator views her from a distanced vantage point, torn between responding to the human desires she exhibits and being objectively fascinated by the sight of her unnatural, vivisected form. Thus, the viewer is forced to consider her body as mere anatomy, while neglecting the human soul within.

Beckett’s fragmentation of language and syntax further dehumanizes the play’s characters. Throughout Happy Days, Winnie’s increasingly scattered and simplified language, as well as her attempts at communicating with her rarely-seen husband Willie, breaks monologue into what critic Ruby Cohn refers to as, “Audible dialogue between characters

[yielding the] initial illusion of communication” (208). In essence, what Beckett has created is a parody of communication, in which the mere exchange of words comes to represent a detached demonstration of how we interact every day. Both characters are conscious of the futility of their efforts, summed up best in Winnie’s statement that “It would ill become me, who cannot move, to blame my Willie because he cannot speak” (36).

Furthermore, Beckett structures the play in such a way that any meaning that could be gleaned from Winnie’s words is gradually diminished. As stated above, Winnie begins Act I buried only to her waist. She is allowed restricted movement; access to her bag of objects, and perhaps most importantly the ability to talk in complete sentences. Language is the one major 3 lifeline that connects the viewer to Winnie. John Berger describes that which separates man from animal as: “…the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves” (7). Though Winnie’s speech is truncated, it nevertheless serves a purpose. Through language, Winnie explores the world around her and gathers information from it, perhaps most notably when she discovers a solitary ant and, with

Willie’s help, figures out that it is carrying an egg within its grasp. Furthermore, she solicits and receives information from Willie when asking him to show her a pornographic postcard or inquiring as to the meaning of “hog’s setae” (19). Thus, though diminished, Beckett still provides the viewer with a meaningful conversation between two individuals.

In the second act however, Beckett devolves this model of communication into increasingly incoherent fragments. Winnie, now buried up to her neck, is denied movement and, to a certain extent, the lucidity of her words. Beckett’s stage pauses begin to overtake

Winnie’s monologue like a malignancy, replacing it with increasingly fractured responses to external observations, occasionally punctuated with flashes of meaning: “My arms. (Pause.)

My breasts. (Pause.) What Arms. (Pause.) What breasts? (Pause.)” ( 51). Her efforts at communication elicit mere fragments that fail to add up to any larger meaning. This applies directly back to Berger’s point. If human language ceases to be a signifier of something other than itself, the human capacity for symbolic thought has been overturned. Man ceases to be man. He is a beast, communicating in mere signals like other creatures. Whereas Winnie’s earlier dialogue with Willie ascribed meaning to concrete things in their environment (the ant/the postcard), it is now marked by an increasing slip into incoherence. Though meaning is occasionally elicited, Beckett’s ever-devolving language works against these attempts at 4 rationality. Thus, through this gradual descent into syntactical chaos, Beckett accomplishes a process of devolution through Winnie.

The repetition of gestures and movement also strip Beckett’s characters of their humanity. To return briefly to the Berger essay, in examining the theories of Descartes, he states that “In dividing absolutely body from soul, he (Descartes) bequeathed the body to the laws of physics and mechanics, and, since animals were soulless, the animal was reduced to the model of a machine” (9). By equating the mechanical with the animal, one sees similarities to

Winnie’s behavior in Happy Days. Her repeated gestures and the ritualized manner in which she treats physical objects in her sphere of control not only form a fragmented image of interaction, but also a distinctly mechanical one. Consider, for instance, the clearly delineated, nearly overpowering stage directions which break Winnie’s monologue into staccato fragments:

“Wipes…wiping mechanically…wiping…wiping… pause, do…pause, do” (12). Not only does Beckett directly use the word mechanical in this particular case, he also infers it through the endless repetition of pauses, eye and hand movements, and even blinks and smiles throughout the play.

Winnie’s use of identical gestures suggest something in opposition to the more spontaneous, reactively free-flowing movements of a human, which carry with them evidence of the working mind behind the motion, whether it be through the altering of a movement toward an external stimuli, or a larger sense of acknowledgment.

Robbed of any meaningful context, Winnie’s repeated movements and gestures come to resemble that of an animal. Indeed, her behavior becomes nearly indistinguishable from the signaling and motions of any other creature, such as the wagging of a tail or the call of a bird.

In those cases however, the creature is using gesture toward a specific, social end. The bird seeks a mate; the dog seeks to communicate with others in its pack. Winnie’s actions, on the other hand, are often undertaken without the benefit of an external stimuli or objective. They 5 become the reflexes of an automaton. This becomes especially clear during the second act of the play, in which Winnie’s pauses, smiles, and eye movements fail to correspond to her ongoing monologue. For example, consider this quotation from Act II: “There always remains something…Of everything…Some remains…If the mind were to go…It won’t of course… Not quite…Not mine (smile.) Not now. (smile broader.)” (54). Here, Winnie’s pauses seem to correspond more to groupings of words than to any kind of narrative continuity, which would in turn suggest a higher thought process. To further illustrate this point, consider the passage in which Winnie attempts to tell the story of a girl named Mildred and her doll, but is continually waylaid by increasingly fragmented verbal digressions, which occur as a result of everything from Willie’s lack of a response to a reference to sadness following sexual intercourse. As a result the story is picked up and discarded by Winnie at varying points in her monologue until the entire enterprise no longer makes any narrative sense. The result is a continuous cycling through of verbal responses on various subjects that, although retaining the outer trappings of that which is recognizably human, carry with them the automatic repetition of a mechanical process.

One important question remains: In what way do Beckett’s methods work toward any theoretical or ideological end? The beginnings of an answer might be found in Sigmund

Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” in which he attempts to explain the many facets of the title emotion: a vague sense of unease. In describing it, he states that: “The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” ( 1). He cites the writings of German author Ernst Jentsch in defining one aspect of the uncanny as when one,

“Doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive” ( 5). In addition to bringing up the example of objects in human form such as dolls and wax sculptures, Freud also attributes the mindless, repeated movements of epileptic fits and insanity to this feeling of ‘the uncanny’, 6 explaining that: “These excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity” (5). One might view

Winnie’s mechanical behavior as being a link between the ‘lifeless’ humanoid doll and the repetitious movements of the insane. For example, in one moment during the second act she cries out: “My neck is hurting me!” (60). Here, Winnie demonstrates one of her only examples of a believably ‘human’ response to being immobilized up to her neck in a mound of earth.

She is upset, confused, and speaks the line with ‘sudden violence’ before promptly lapsing back into her placid and scattered manner of speaking. Mere pages later she recites a song with all the artificial soulnessness of a wind-up music box. Thus, through her behavior we see the mechanical and the human, the organic and the inorganic. In possessing both of these traits simultaneously, Winnie becomes the quintessence of that which is uncanny. The viewer is allowed to view her as a person to a certain extent, but stripped bare of all the artifice that would hide the ‘mechanical’ processes demonstrated through her behavior. In this way, instead of being ‘made’ into something mechanical, the mechanical processes that have been there all along are gradually revealed to us.

However, merely attributing “The Uncanny” to Winnie is not enough. In what way does her behavior arouse the fear of that which is ‘old and long familiar’? Freud offers a possible solution in discussing the relationship between the uncanny and the primitive aspects of the human mind. He states the following:

It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to [the] animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us. (12) 7

I would argue that the estrangement of Winnie’s body from recognizable behavior elicits the uncanny in that it devolves the human form to this primitive, sub-human stage. In doing so, we are made aware of the mere anatomy of our own bodies, as well as the repetitious movements and behaviors that we all perform as a part of day-to-day life. In this way, we are reminded of a deeper cycle of being, a mechanical process beneath the everyday emotions and nuances of ‘civilized’ human behavior. This is a terrifying thought, and one that strips bare the strict constructs and rules that make up our lives, and reveals them to be mechanical processes themselves. If we are to take Beckett’s metaphor literally, we are all submerged just like

Winnie, drowning in the endless pattern of birth and death, which, in turn, spawns all the other constructed patterns that make up daily life. As critic Ann Banfield puts it: “Generation in

Beckett is conceptualized through an extremely simple model: the process of like begets like”

(6). Thus, man’s role in the world is reduced to the enacting of an endless pattern.

In attributing the alienation and uneasiness that Beckett elicits through his writing to a larger social context, a more cogent argument forms. In his essay “Contemporary Drama in the West,” critic Werner Mittenzwei supports a belief that not only Beckett, but all modern writers pursuing themes of alienation support the hypothesis that: “worth and potency become attached to a world of objects and processes outside of man, while man himself becomes impoverished.” As a result, “Relationships between people come to be thought of as products not of people but of things” (LeRoy 93). Mittenzwei argues that even if the texts of Beckett and many of his contemporaries resist such a reading, the formal breakdown of their language is symptomatic of the larger problem expressed above, stating that: “One of the most fatal conclusions derived by the late bourgeois writers from the capitalist estrangement process is that man is unable to comprehend social development…the construction of plot and characters in their works inevitably suffers” (112). This is an interesting reading and one that cannot be 8 dismissed fully. While it is true that the mechanized innovations and horrors of Beckett’s world lend credence to the human-as-object critique of Marxist theory, note how the intimacy of

Winnie’s relationship to the objects in her bag eclipses the nearly nonexistent relationship she has with Willie, the only other human in the play. She interacts with them as if with another person, and even goes so far as to name them, as evidenced by her addressing the pistol as

‘Brownie’. As a result, Beckett provides a working example of man’s relationship to objects replacing man’s relationship to man. Furthermore, in paring down human processes to the point that humans themselves become objects, Happy Days also supports Mittenzwei’s assertion that, in a Capitalist society, “Man stands before man as before a stranger” (111). At the same time though, Mittenzwei’s claim that the written work of Beckett and his ilk suffered as a result of their environment is far more suspect. As an author and playwright, Beckett simply exerted too much control over his work to support the assumption that his syntactical breakdown was in some way the result of an outside intrusion. Indeed, Ruby Cohn goes so far as to, “Link him

[Beckett] to an old tradition of the Artist as Maker, in the image of God” (6). That is to say,

Beckett, while influenced by the world around him, refused to let it dictate his literary world.

As a writer, he exerted absolute control at all times, as evidenced by his concise, simplified prose style which boiled down each sentence and statement to its absolute essence.

In studying Beckett’s personal opinions of the writing process, it becomes clear that he did not support any type of theatre that allied itself with a specific ideological goal or message.

Instead, he viewed art as something much more primal and essential. As Cohen highlights :

“The work of art is neither created nor chosen, but discovered, uncovered, excavated, pre- existing within the artist, a law of his nature” (6). To him, the idea of gearing art toward any specific ‘movement’ was simply crass, an elitist abstraction that distracted one from the real search: the deeper processes that bind humans together. Thus, while the Capitalist industrial 9 landscape that he inhabited created an environment that perhaps better ‘revealed’ that which was essential in man, Beckett’s texts are after a far more implicit process that existed far before man’s relationship to himself was clouded by the artificial processes of commerce and production. Mittenzwei hits on this point when describing the social and political aims of the

Theatre of the Absurd. The Absurdist playwrights, a group which included Beckett, believed that man’s essentially pointless state in the modern world was not merely the result of man- made processes, but an eternal state independent of all the illusory social constructs created by man (Mittenzwei 125). In this way, it was crucial to depict man as alone and pared down to his essential physical parts. If depicted otherwise, questions of society and not man as an individual being would be allowed to cloud the text. At the same time, the Absurdist belief in depicting the endless and fruitless cycle of man’s existence hearkens back to Freud’s horror of

‘The Uncanny’. That which is ‘old and long familiar’ is the endless process of being that exists beneath the illusory constructs that we live and die by every day. Again, Cohn: “The solitary confinement of Beckett’s heroes in chamber, bed, or container is ludicrous in a universe whose particles whirl, explode, and make cataclysmic contact” (3). With the universe ever-expanding and changing, man stands alone, a bastion of stagnating sameness.

It would be all too easy to claim that Beckett’s dehumanized characters were a reflection of his own time. After all, Beckett wrote Happy Days following the mechanized destruction of two World Wars and in a time of encroaching industrialization, events which treated an entire population of people like cattle off to the abattoir, or simply machines suitable for nothing besides the endless cycle of manufacturing, consumption, and death. True as this may be, I believe that Beckett is after something more far-reaching. Beckett’s universe reminds us that, in the end, we are still the same animals that we have always been. To quote Winnie:

“There is so little one can do. One does it all. All one can. Tis only human. Human nature. 10

Human weakness. Natural weakness” (22). Once again, the human and the natural are linked.

We are no better than other animals, our superior intellect signifying only the existence of a fatal flaw that, more than anything, places us below other creatures. If we are to believe

Beckett, this great flaw is that we continue to search for patterns and meaning in a fundamentally chaotic universe. Our desperate desire to transcend fleshly impermanence is doomed to fail. Thus, our repetitious behavior, our endless striving, our words, gestures, and bodies all form an endless cycle that, viewed objectively on Beckett’s stage, form an unmistakable likeness to the soulless machine. 11

Works Cited

Banfield, Ann. “Beckett’s Tattered Syntax” Representations. 84.1 (Autumn 2003) 6-29.

Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. New York: Grove Weidenfield1961.

Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgars U P, 1962.

Freud, Sigmund “The Uncanny.” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Vol. 4. Ed, Joan Riviere. New York: Basic Books, 1959.

Mittenzwei, Werner. “Contemporary Drama in the West” Preserve & Create: Essays in Marxist Literary Criticism. Ed, LeRoy, Gaylord C. New York: Humanities P, 1973.

Works Consulted

Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. Columbia: Uof South Carolina P,1980.

Kearn, Edith. “Structures in Beckett’s Theatre.” Yale French Studies. 46.1 (1971) 17-27.