“Depends on What Creature You Happen to Be”: Humans-Beasts-Machines, Dehumanization in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days Neil Ri
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“Depends on What Creature you Happen to Be”: Humans-Beasts-Machines, Dehumanization in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days 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.