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OF ABSURDITY Samuel Beckett, Act Without Words I and Catastrophe

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OF ABSURDITY Samuel Beckett, Act Without Words I and Catastrophe Neohelicon XXII/I PETER EGKI THE GENESIS AND RESOLUTION OF ABSURDITY Samuel Beckett, Act Without Words I and Catastrophe Since Vivian Mercier made the witty remark that Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was a play "where nothing happens twice",' Beckett's reputation as a dramatist presenting Existen- tialist nothingness in an absurdly repetitive pattern 2 rendering the human condition has been firmly established. Beckett's relatively longer plays including, besides Godot, Endgame, All That Fail and Happy Days would seem to reinforce that claim. Several of his shorter plays such as Film or Eh Joe follow suit. The tendency of reducing size and stature already lurks in the more "sizable" plays: where nothing happens twice or several times, there traditional character and plot tend to collapse. Ken- neth Tynan's delightful parody Slamm's Last Knock! focusing reduction in Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame, Happy Days, and some other plays by Beckett is very much to the point: Foreground figure a blind and lordly cripple with superficial mannerism.... Sawn-off parents in bins, stage right, and shuffling servant all over the stage.... ' Vivian Mercier,"The Mathematical Limit". The Nation, Vol. 188 (Feb. 14, 1959), pp. 144-145. 2 For Bergson the comic is the sense of the mechanical in the living: "... vous aurez ... I'image ... du m~canique dans du vivant, vous aurez du comique." Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique (Paris: Presses Uni- versitaires de France, 1958), p. 59. On repetitions: ibid., pp. 68-71. Cf. John Orr, Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture: Play and Performancefrom Beckett to Shepard (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991). 0324-4652/95/$5.00 Akad~miai Kiad6 , Budapest Akad6miai Kiad6, Budapest John Benjamins B. E, Amsterdam 88 PETER EGRI Slamm: Is that all the review he's getting? Seck: That's all the play he's written. Slamm: But a genius. Could you do as much? Seck: Not as much. But as little. ~ Yet the loss of length is not necessarily a squandering of qual- ity and a waste of value. Reduction is also accentuation, and emphasis may highlight something different from absurdity as the human condition. On occasion, it may even focus the genesis and resolution of absurdity. A case in point is Beckett's mime for one player Act Without Words I written in French in 1956, first published in Paris in 1957, translated into English by Beckett himself, published in English in 1958, and first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 3 April 1957. Music to accom- pany the mime was composed by John Beckett, the author's cousin. While several of Beckett's scenes seem so desolate that they are like a desert, the scene of Act Without Words I is a desert. The abandonment of a quasi-simile and its replacement by a quasi- metaphor with symbolic overtones are the scenic results of dra- matic reduction and concentration. The physical suggests the metaphysical. The metaphysical is embodied in the physical. The scene immediately raises the spectator's expectation. The dazzling light it is flooded with is as natural as pain on the desic- cated plain, and is as unnatural as hell for those who suffer. For the moment, however, there is no sight of life. The desert is de- populated. The first dramatic event is drastic and violent: a man, or rather the man: the only visible protagonist of the mime, is flung on stage from the right. He is pushed on to the scene forcefully. His defencelessness is emphasized: he flies backwards and falls. We know nothing about his identity. He can be anyone, any man, us, indeed every man. If he is a modem version of Everyman, he could be Heidegger's lonely individual thrown into existence in a hostile world by a malevolent'power. Or is he the French Exis- Kenneth Tynan, Slamm "s Last Knock/The Observer, November 2, 1958, p. 19. .
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